Chapter Text
" 'This must be what a parallel universe is like,' I thought. Everything looked the same, but I suddenly felt like it wasn't. Like everything had been taken apart, brick by brick, flower bed by flower bed, and put together in the wrong order. Just like me."
- Jordanna Fraiberberg.
Click, click, click.
The foot missing the toe ticks across August Hilderbrandt's wooden floor of his bedroom and the boy, commonly nicknamed Auggie by his two closest friends, put his hand over the seal of his pale pink of his lips as he wills the urge not to vomit out what he had previously consumed or to scream at the rotting flesh of the corpse before him as well as the nostrils of his nasal cavity in order to quiet his frequently labored breathes, as he glances away, unable to look at the source of what may be his demise, from under the thin line of his bedframe.
If Auggie had not been so afraid for his own end in those ticking moments, he would become aware of the cold commonly felt beneath his toes on winter mornings pressing into his shirt or the tears that began to fall from his green eyes and the curl of his bottom lip into the beginning edges of a sob that he would not allow to escape in order to hide his location while his heavily beating heart causes his rapidly lifting and lowering chest to impact the floor quicker than it ever has before.
This is what adrenaline feels like, Auggie thinks belatedly, a life of living in isolated safety making him unfamiliar to the sensation and he can't help but think about how Tommy Milner, a local bully, means nothing close to what he is faced with now.
But then the steps stop.
His head swings to look at the gap as he realizes that he no longer hears the pitter-patter of the creature moving around his room nor the heavy, labored breathing or the wheezing 'where's my toe?' chant that the teenage boy believes will be ingrained in his memory forever - no matter how long his forever may be defined as - but when he looks at the space, there is no foot, no toe, nor no body.
That is when he feels the spindly fingers wrapping around the thin limbs of his ankles and he screams, finally able to let out the loud noise but there is no implication of catharsis as he feels his body begin to be dragged back under his bed where there should not be space. His scream would be, if there were parents present in the home or neighbors who had not been aged into ignoring loud children, blood-curdling and the scream of imminent humanity approaching the barriers of death.
It is the scream, if the words had been beneath another fourteen-year-old boy who experienced a great loss by a creature such as this, of a dying man - unmatched in volume, distress, and fear. One that cannot be replicated.
His nails begin to dig into the hardwood of the floor as the lanky body acquired only by a boy early in his teenage years is dragged back, causing the nails to break, splinter and ache, leaving crude lines in the textile that no one could regard without thinking of it as the sight of a terrible tragedy. A terrible loss.
Auggie does not feel this sensation either, even as blood leaks and bone cracks from his fingers in a need to climb out from beneath the bed and he kicks at the creature but he is dragged back regardless.
No mercy for this fighting soul.
The tingle begins to take over his body but Auggie does not notice this, his mind overtaken by the primal need to survive and to run, which on other days, he is quick to discredit the idea that his brain lingers in primal urges as a forefront, believing himself to be a rather intelligent boy but he feels it there, the stress to survive that has only been squandered and matched by ancestors long before August.
His screams, the snapping of his fingernails, the cold in his chest and the panic filling his mind fail to matter when the creature pins his ankle back into the floorboards and drags him back - his broken, gnarled fingers scrabble but fail to find purchase and -
And -
His world goes dark, and August 'Auggie' Hildebrandt does not feel anything.
The sight is visceral, one that turns her stomach and makes Stella sob at the drags of creases down the hardwood and she - she sobs louder than her heart can ever remember having sobbed.
Ramón's arm comes to circle her shoulders and he pulls her into a side-hug that feels so unnatural and awkward that it makes her grimace and sob a bit harder. There is something about the boy where she wants to bury herself into these arms and feel them close around her like the dirt to the coffin they will not be able to bury Auggie in.
Sarah kills these children, she thinks, the voice in her head hysterical with the fact and she thinks about telling Chuck, about telling Auggie's absentee parents and wonders if these parents will even notice his own absence. She wonders if they'll miss him as she already does.
She can already see the broken cracks in Chuck's coffee bean eyes as he tries to process the idea that Auggie is just...gone. Her breath hiccups in her throat - how would she apologize for this?
She took the book - it's her fault.
Right?
You were just a kid, too young to understand the tidal wave of guilt but too old not to feel responsible. No one had ever told you what Survivor's Guilt is, perhaps if they had, you would have known what the sinking, heaving feeling that belongs to your stomach's constant churn had come from and you would have been able to use the word for why you apologize for so much, for why you always feel so responsible for shit that is not your fault -
Chuck Steinberg has half a heart when they wander into the hospital, thinking of Auggie, thinking of his clouded nightmare but he tries to be himself, tries to calm down.
But fear has overtaken his mind and body longer than August has been missing or his sister has been in a mental hospital, longer than Sarah Bellows has even been a name he recognizes. Fear has filled boys like Chuck longer than he's even been alive.
The building is large inside, covered in brick top-to-bottom and it radiates a chill that soaks through the dark maroon, yellow and navy colors of his flannel shirt but he walks the halls anyone, scared and alone with Ramón and Stella no longer being there as they search the record room.
He had not been willing to enter the 'R.E.D' room after weeks of his horrific red room nightmares clouding his mind and even after Stella attempts to pull him along, he remains in the wandering halls of the hospital, scared to get caught but preferring it over the possibility that the...thing would come to haunt him in that room.
He doesn't know -
He doesn't know, and it's almost horrifically funny that he doesn't know.
- Charlie had a dream of a red room -
A security guard had seen him but running across the emerald floor tiles, Chuck is hopeful that he avoided the man until -
Until the lights flare on.
His airways caught in a vice grip as the halls are bathed in the crimson pour of blood from the alarm lights but when he turns the corner, the space is still clogged in a red flare but at the end of the hall, a figure, shrowd in white, stands untouched by the spill of ink across the world as Charles Steinberg knows it.
It should be reassuring, the presence but the figure is too close to the one that haunts his dreams, making his nerves jump and his throat close with every stumbling gasp he allows out of those lines.
She creeps down the corridor and with his one head screaming for release and to run, his body remains still but with an almost hellish sixth sense, Chuck knows that this isn't of his own accord. That something is keeping him here.
The pale woman's gut is swollen and extended - she eats children, a voice murmurs and Chuck doesn't know where that one comes from either - and she has no real shape. No legs, no hips, just the veined mass of hanging flesh on her bones, the navy lines of her nerves lightening up at the tips of her fingers into an almost sapphire blue, creeping up her fingers and disappearing into the scrawny pale grey bones of her arms, creeping up her scraggly dark hair.
The body is horrific but it bears no bearings over her face: a thinly cut smile staring into him intently like someone had taken a knife through the worn yellow-pale of her skin to mock a smile but the deep pits of her black eyes offer no warmth, no smile, no kindness and not for the first time, Chuck finds himself wondering if there are even eyes there.
If he's not just staring into the deep pit of a skull, or perhaps a lack of one.
There are no eyebrows, no features, nothing recognizably human that he feels could comfort him. In fact, where humanity has the chance to be, the woman seems to have a distinct point of not having humanity there as he notes with the dark shade of her nose, human enough at first glance but upon second, instead, reminds him of the Hildebrandt's old dog, Halloran, in its shape and colors.
The woman carries no breasts either - thankfully to his own strange senses there - but with the same sense, he knows it is a mockery of a woman, a woman both so close to Chuck but so far from being anything he could ever desire. Perhaps he could never desire a woman, in general.
She eats bad children like you, Chuck, a voice says, a cadence that of a whisper down the halls of the hospital but he thinks that no one may be able to hear it but him.
Then -
He chokes.
Chuck, Chuck, come here, radiates from the graphs of skin dangling of the horrific woman and the boy barely stifles a sob at the sound of Auggie's voice warping from this monster. (He's missed him, been worried about him, been worried for him - )
With an additional sense of that hellish predisposition, he knows no one else could hear August's voice either. If there had been anyone else in the hallway, he thinks, they wouldn't even notice this, would they?
Does that mean it isn't real?
Just because it is in your mind, does that make it any less real? He remembers Auggie's own ivory digits curling around his wrists, the fingers gentle and caring in a match to his light pear eyes when he had admitted to the taller boy that his mind was often more overdramatic than his sister some days but the memory is bittersweet in the face of this unreal threat looking at him.
He runs, his body finally willing to act at his own control but as he turns down each corridor, there the horrific idea of the woman is, bulky and half-melted in a weird way that makes his stomach drop and his heart race.
He wants to scream so badly but his throat is too dry and his vocal cords refuse to produce the sound, as though helping this creature get to him - maybe if he could just scream and alert Stella, maybe he could get out of here alive.
There is no out of here alive. Her voice echoes in his head and when he turns, she is directly beside him, practically ontop of him and he would scream but his voice refuses the sound again.
When he turns to run, she is there too and he can see that in every corridor - a place he swears he wasn't in the middle of the intersection of - she is there and she and her four versions envelop him in a hug.
Come be with Auggie, the voice in his head says, Come float, Chuck.