Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Will stared at the tiny hanger in his hand. Filched from the kids’ section at some store that probably went out of business years ago, probably snuck right under the nose of some underpaid high schooler funding their drug habit, who’d probably ended up getting knocked up and blowing smoke rings behind the gas station as the next generation cashiered inside.

He didn’t know what kind of a shirt the tiny plastic hanger had held in the past, but he knew it was too small for the stretched out neck of the college hoodie he was trying to pull onto it. A college shirt with a logo too faded to read, grabbed from the back of the Goodwill on Hickory and full of holes. University of Enverdore, or something like that.

Will stared at the balled up shirt in one hand and the tiny plastic hanger in the other and was struck like a club to the back of his head how far he was going into nothing and nowhere. How far gone he already was.

He called Ada, in the end, phoning from the landline in his parents’ house to the one at Denny’s downtown. Nearly 1 in the morning, she’d be mooching coffee from the last dregs in the machine and leaning bored over the counter flicking through a plastic menu like it was something worth touching.

“Denny’s?” She asked it like a question, too late of an hour for anyone with a shred of sanity to be calling.

“What’re you doin’ tonight?” The words stuck in his throat.

“I got some weed.” And thank God she didn’t make him ask, ‘cause he would’ve slammed the phone on the hook and slid to the ground in a soup of poison not quite corrosive enough to draw blood, not quite formed enough to draw tears.

She was there before the Denny’s was even meant to close, pulling up with something just short of a screech in her hunk-of-shit car and a cigarette clenched in her teeth. He lifted the dusty case of beer from the basement like a greeting, and she pumped a fist and opened the shotgun door with a kick over the stickshift.

He piled in and leaned back, front seat stuck in a constant state of decline, slammed the door and pressed a can into her callused hand, holding onto the touch a bit too long.

They careened off, impossible to tell how fast with a broken speedometer and wind screaming through the windows, radio blasting but only half comprehensible as Ada swerved through forest roads the two of them knew like the veins slithering up their arms, like the melodies streaming through the air and over their skin, like the beginnings of rain sliding in through the open windows and getting them in the eyes.

They stopped, in the parking lot for a hiking trail no one ever hiked on, a dirt clearing carpeted with leaf mold and soft under tires. The rain dripped onto them from the canopy above, drug sluggish and soft by the leaves.

Ada flicked her lighter at the joint, the same one she’d had since freshman year: on its last legs but still sparking pathetically and setting the joint ablaze. She took the first hit, as was customary, and leaned back into the stained driver’s seat with a groan, eyelashes fluttering shut.

Her makeup was smudged and cakey from a nine-hour shift, lipstick nearly all rubbed off. Will breathed in the taste of weed and sighed. They never needed to talk, the two of them, never needed to mention the secrets shared and lost in these smoke-filled nights, the wispy elephants dancing around the corners of their eyes.

The beer was shit, Will decided as he drained the last of his first can. It always was. Ada sighed contentedly as she drank hers, though. Her fingernails were sage green, but the paint did little to hide the dirt ingrained in the cuticles around them. Nothing ever did. Will remembered her washing her hands over and over, rendering them red and raw, tearing at them with her teeth and leaving tiny strips of blood.

“I’m almost there,” Ada sighed. “I’m so close, Will, I’m so close I can taste it.”

“Yeah?” There was only one thing she talked about, there was only one thing she wanted. “Got the savings?”

“Almost. Just a couple months out, I swear.” She’d been swearing for years, up and down her mother’s grave, nailing horseshoes to her walls and tossing pinches of salt onto the floors she mopped.

“You’re gettin’ there Ada,” he exhaled smoke towards the dashboard. “You’ll be there soon.”

“Hey, come with me.”

“What?”

“To LA, move out with me. I don’t know if I can make it on my own, Will, an’ either way I won’t be comin’ back.”

“Ada, you’re talking crazy-”

“Please, Will.” She took his face in her hands and turned him towards her, eyes hazy. “You’re the one thing from this rotten place I couldn’t bear to lose.”

“You’ll forget me in the morning.”

She kissed him hard and he knew it wasn’t what she wanted, knew it wasn’t what he wanted, but he kissed her back anyway, cupping her soft face in his hand and letting her climb over the glovebox to straddle his lap.

They were nothing and nowhere, lives that, like the rain soaking into the mosses, would be forgotten. Circling the drain of utter nonexistence they clutched each other tight enough to bruise and forced each other to forget.

Will and Monty knew each other since they were born in the church basement during the week-long hurricane batty old Father Marcus claimed was the end times, a few hours apart to childhood friends that found each other again in that musty old basement. Two baby boys that, Will’s mom used to coo, were placed in the same pile of blankets and took each other by the hand.

Will was always looking for something to hold onto. As an infant, clamping onto Monty’s hand in that church basement, as a toddler clutching his mother’s thumb for dear life, Monty again through childhood: a dog on his heels until that ill-fated kiss in sophomore year that left him with a bloody nose and a black eye as the preacher’s son ran off with something in his eyes that looked like hatred but tasted like fear. He’d stopped being loyal, after that. Now he held when he could but pried his numb hands off before he could get too close.

Monty went off, they say. Hopped a train and just… ran. He’d always been running, really. Will remembered how he’d crawled through his bedroom window at seven, eight years old, busted lip and bruised more’n a kid should be. That was the only time he let Will touch him, shushing each other as they fell asleep in a heap on the floor.

Will sometimes thought he’d imagined him, that kid with the crooked teeth and the hair in his eyes. When he was a teen he got mean, most everyone did, growing angles harsh and cutting.

Will was the nostalgic sort, and he’d stare into Ada’s flashing eyes as she laughed at Morella and see the chubby girl with buckteeth and freckles playing dolls with the tiny knock-kneed ginger. Ada dieted herself half to death in high school to match the magazines, more when she started hanging off Monty’s arm and caring what he thought of her more than if she lived or died.

Morella followed her for a while, but eventually, she got sick of being the butt of every joke and left to go on her own. Will admired her for that. She was the one who was going places, after all. Taking classes at community college, bagging groceries at Walmart, looking half-dead but smiling all the while.

All of their class was waiting. Saving up money to go somewhere, to do something, it was a cruel irony that the only one who made it out was the one no one expected to leave.

The weed had burned down to a stub, and Ada took the last hit with a sigh. She took Will by the jaw and exhaled into his mouth, and he took in the shotgun greedily. They’d migrated to the backseat, laying down with Ada entirely on top of him. She was very cuddly after sex, which he found adorable, and her eyes twinkled in the dark of the car.

She stubbed out the joint on the car window, flicking the ashes off and letting the last bits of paper fall to the ground before wiggling around and crawling into the hoodie Will was still wearing, curling into his chest with a contented hum. He stroked her hair, detangling it with gentle fingers. Some of her makeup had rubbed off, and a freckle peeked out from underneath. The rain picked up, pattering down around them, and neither one of them was fit to drive.

“Are you going to the reunion tomorrow?” Ada murmured into his collarbone.

“I forgot about that. Are you?”

“I hear there’s free booze.”

“I’ll go.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled, not looking at him. She didn’t want to go alone. To see the rest of the cheer team, still perfectly skinny and talking shit, wedding rings glinting on their fingers and baby bumps clear under tube tops and turtlenecks.

The cheerleaders married the football players and settled down, that was how it was. And Ada would’ve ended like that too, they both knew it. Her big dreams stamped into dust as she tripped over herself to please… him.

To call Monty a football star would’ve been generous, but he was in that pack. Charming delinquent, average linebacker, preacher’s son, tongue down a cheerleader’s throat, his future was set in stone as far as anyone was concerned. Marry the high school sweetheart, work the gas station and diner for a while until they both mellow out of their childish dreams, inherit the family trade, and go mad raving about the rapture as you deliver babies in the church basement you grew up scared of.

But graduation day, in that blue plastic cap and gown, armful of a diploma he didn’t earn a fraction of, he broke all that grass-stained tradition. Tore the diploma in half and took off into the woods. They say he was headed to the tracks, or maybe straight to hell, but that was the last anyone saw of him.

And he left them, he left both of them, though he and Will hadn’t spoken to each other in a long fucking time. He left Ada without a word, without a note, without so much as a glance, and her social standing had never recovered. Before he left they’d been tumultuous, yeah, one of those on-again-off-again couples that are as mutually assured in their destruction as their infinite tug-of-war.

But him leaving might yet be what saved her, from a life of glassy-eyed settling that would’ve driven her too soon to a vodka-soaked demise. Will hoped she would make it.

Her breathing grew soft and slow and he stared at the ceiling of her car and tried to take in this moment to clutch her tight, to carve her into the walls of his starved and empty heart.

Chapter Text

It’d been three years since Monty left, the school year was young and the crunching frost and fog of fall were pouring over everything. It was gonna be a wet one, and Will wasn’t looking forward to soaking and freezing his socks straight through every time he walked to work the night shift at the gas station. Jumping out of Ada’s car in front of the school he landed square in a mud puddle, splashing filth over the old boots Monty’s parents gave him after their son left. Didn’t like seein’ him around the place.

Trinity High School was a real shithole, the same building where their parents and their parents’ parents had sat behind desks and dreamed. When the factory started up and the babies boomed (back in, what, the 50s?) they built onto the schoolhouse rather than tearing it down, insuch that the building now sprawled with cancerous growths of concrete and shingle coming off faded red brick.

Ada poked at Will’s rumpled hoodie and hair in some attempt to make him look presentable on the walk to the gym. She’d redone her face in record speed: turning drugstore makeup and a cracked rearview mirror into a full face of faux perfection in a matter of minutes.

They were late, obviously, but only a few noses turned up at their less than dramatic entrance into the gym. A corner was decorated in the same drab streamers and such as always, pulled from their basement moldering for another underwhelming show.

A cardboard table proffered a mostly untouched water dispenser and a cardboard case of wine, which Ada immediately beelined for. Morella was standing in a corner talking to a couple old teachers, dark circles more evident than ever and plastic cup of wine in a vice grip.

Lenore, Duke, and Pluto stood around in a corner. They’d stayed closeknit after high school, and you could tell from the set of their brows and the thorn-wrapped magpie skull inked on each of them (neck, back, shoulder) that they would get out of this town or die trying.

The cheer team had congregated in the middle, with their husbands near in their own little clump, fawning over each others’ baby bumps and wedding rings. A wave of giggles lifted from them as Ada walked by, but she ignored them in favor of filling a plastic cup with wine and chugging it. Lenore winked at her and lifted her cup in solidarity.

Will noted Ada’s ruddy face as he walked up next to her and wondered at the fact he’d never seen her flush from booze before. Eulalie came over for some water, leading a drunk Berenice by the hand and grinning.

“Hello! How’ve you been?”

“You saw me last week,” Ada returned bluntly, wiping a small dribble of wine from the corner of her mouth. “Grand Slam and mozz.”

“Right, right, sorry!” She was still smiling, the only person enjoying the day.

“Eula, biscuit, no one *hic* gives a shit about each other here,” Berenice slurred, leaning on the taller girl’s shoulders heavily. Eulalie wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

“Sorry,” she said brightly. “I guess I’m still excited.” She showed off her hand with an excited little twitch. There was a ring on it, silver with an opal and shining in the dingy gym lights. Ada’s jaw physically dropped at it.

“You’re engaged?” she gaped. “To who?”

Eula giggled. “To Berenice, silly, who else?”

“Congrats!” Will blurted, grabbing Ada, who looked about to faint, and starting to make off. “See you!”

Morella was looking over at them with something unreadable in her face, but whipped back around as soon as Ada started looking towards her.

“You okay?” Will muttered.

Ada stared unseeing at Morella’s back. She mumbled something, something too soft, too quickly swallowed by the seemingly electric silence that suddenly fell over the gym. Silence interrupted only by the screech of the door opening and immediately forced closed behind a haggard, filthy man with a scruffy chin, cross necklace, and proper filthy boots, running for them and panting. Montresor Faust stopped short, tore the hat from his straw-colored hair and gasped for breath.

“The fuck’re y’all doin??” He screamed, spit spraying from behind a shining gold tooth. “Run!!”

The old gym doors caved in with an unholy screech and a thick horde of limbs poured into the room.

Everything after that was. Fragmented. Shards of glass shuffled under the feet of a screaming crowd as they run from the rapture.

Monty running for Will, grabbing his arm. The rough pull towards the back door as the limbs spill in. Something vaguely human but thick and soupy and bending backwards and overgrown splitting into the room. Screaming, screaming. So much screaming. Ada’s ponytail whipping through the crowd but when he reached for her Monty yanked him back and he stumbled. Monty saying something, mouth moving mute to the ringing in Will’s ears.

A piercing scream, above all the rest, and Berenice’s hand sticking from the mass. Eulalie shoving people off and running to her, the ring on her finger flashing right in Will’s wide eyes as the limbs grasped at her arm like a starving man to water and she was engulfed in the desiccated horde of half-formed humanity, a spray of blood splattering glinting to the floor and he couldn’t see where it came from but deep in his gut he knew.

And his legs buckled just as theirs did and the burn of fear in his gut was rolling through him up to the back of his throat, and he buckled forward and retched, heaving and throwing up beer and god it almost tasted better regurgitated, he’d get secondhand drunk through his hangover and none of this would be real, none of this was real- but his throat burned and Monty was grabbing him and wrenching his arm half out its socket and everything was a dull mess of screaming past the heartbeat loud as a stampede thudding through his ears.

Monty grabbed him, then, hands grasping at thigh and back and lifting him like a sack of flour and Will stared at the horde behind, a sprawling mass of limbs and melting faces, black mold coating flesh furry and kudzu and pokeberries and hawthorne curling growing through gaping holes in flesh and tangling mangled corpses together to form one mass, one inglorious mass of sinners and they reached their filthy hands and crawled, reached, dragged forward.

Death looked like a congregation rising in song as their voices raised in grotesque harmony, and it was beautiful, wasn’t it? Humanity had unified in a way only fear or religion could do, and precisely because what connected them was neither were they no longer such. Will’s eyes fell and he could almost lie to himself, to pretend this warm pressure against him was another person, another time.

“We’re never going to be free of him.” Warm and heavy on his chest, skin soft and slightly sweaty against his. “Not really.” She didn’t turn to look at him, but Will could see in his mind’s eye Ada’s face, eyes wide and stricken like she’d just realized the hell she was in.

He lifted his hand to continue pulling fingers through her soft hair, taffy in his hands and just as sweet. Breathing in the smell of her, remnants of perfume and hair product overshadowed by the taste of fast food work and sweat. He hummed gentle, glancing at the scar on his palm, faded and darkened in the gloom but a gentle line across his palm from the pact he’d made in the dirty patch behind the church all those years ago, two little boys slashing palms and swearing to protect each other no matter the cost. Taste of copper faint on his tongue all these years later.

“No,” he told her finally. “I think I’ll always be waiting.” Ada’s intake of breath was raw, and he pet her head gently, fingers sifting through soft brown locks.

“I wish I could say…” She trailed off with a gentle hum. “If he came back, I don’t think I could stop myself. No matter how far down I push it it’s just…”

“I know.”

Maybe they were two broken shards in the wake of a great hurricane, maybe they were two abandoned dogs slowly bleeding out. Maybe they couldn’t love anymore, maybe they’d never been able to. But Will kissed the top of her head and whispered a vow to never let her hurt again.

Chapter Text

Will’s eyelids heavy drifting open and closed as the world swam back slowly into hazy focus, and he turned a hand and traced the same pale line across his palm with a shaking thumb. Monty was carrying him through the woods, rough hand secure over his back and gait steady and sure thrumming through his body.

Will swallowed thickly, the ringing in his ears subsiding slightly. He reached for Monty’s back hesitantly, still not convinced this was real, still half-sure he would wake up with Ada curled on his chest and punch-drunk dreaming, or in a puddle of booze on the bathroom floor, fingers fisted in one of Monty’s old shirts and sweaty face sticking to the tiles.

His palm met warm, solid flesh under a thin flannel, but he still couldn’t be sure, this wasn’t real, this couldn’t be real, this was just the toilet bowl again, or it was Ada on one of those nights he accidentally breathed out Monty’s name instead of hers and saw the pity and understanding welling in swampy eyes as she held him close and he bit his tongue into blood.

Will scrabbled at Monty’s back something desperate, still feeling woozy and high as he reached under his shirt and ran disbelieving hands and ragged fingernails over scar tissue ridging a wide, wide back, and there was no way in hell but here he was, scars and skin and spine. And that voice cut through the haze in his head suddenly- “hell Will, s’the matter with you, stop gropin-” and Will was pulled off the shoulder he’d been lying over and dropped to teeter on unsteady ground. His arms pinwheeled for balance and a hand like fire wrapped solid and certain around his wrist to stabilize him.

He looked up slowly, scared to even hope, heart in his throat, but it was him. Undeniable as the summer rain and the canopy over them it was Montresor fuckin’ Faust staring back at him. Black eyes widened with bewilderment under a heavy brow and Will couldn’t stop himself from grabbing Monty’s jaw and turning his head back and forth, eyes roving desperate over every inch of the man he had once known more than his own flesh.

He’d grown into his features, still lanky but the cut of his jaw finally fit him, those shoulders finally solid. His hair was longer, face scruffier, and he was taller, and all of him was just slightly different but so desperately, achingly familiar that Will could hardly abstain from running his hands across the man in front of him, clawing at his flesh and tracing the bump in his nose and the divots in his shoulders to make sure he was alright, that all of his pieces were in place.

Monty chuckled, then, hardly more than a snort but oh Will had forgotten the way his humor lilted, the way his nose crinkled and the corner of his lip tilted up and he wanted to claw the laugh from Monty’s throat and chain it up in his ribcage so he would never, ever forget this again. God it was like coming home, it was like finding the fountain of youth and reliving the bliss of childhood, it was like all the things he’d been cramming down were gushing out and flowing through his bones and out his fingers with a warmth like whiskey dripping through his spine.

“Hell, Will, y’look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Monty snorted as Will tilted his face frenziedly back and forth to look at all of him, jerking his chin up and down to inspect his hair and throat.

“I have,” he whispered. He returned to himself, finally, hands lifting off in a single motion and stilling in the air as though Monty had a gun pointed to him. With those eyes of his it may have been better if he did. Will cleared his throat, awkwardly, and turned to finally notice their surroundings. They were in the woods, on the path they always took to get home from school, before Monty got his old piece-of-shit truck and Will started bussing it alone.

“Where… where’s Ada?” he wondered suddenly, whipping back around to see Monty’s face twisted in a grimace.

“I woulda grabbed her if I could’ve, but when I grabbed ya n’ turned around I couldn’t find her. I- she’s- well, I wouldn’t get yer hopes up of seein’ her again.”

Will didn’t know a lot, but he knew Monty. He knew the shape of every twitch, every nervous tic, every damn breath pattern that man had. And he knew damn well Montresor was lying.

He’d gotten better at it, gold tooth masking the flash of a silver tongue. But Will knew. He always would, knew Monty’s mannerisms deeper than he knew his own. So much of his life spent mirroring, placating, following every flicked wrist and cocked eyebrow until he didn’t know who he was anymore, had lost track of when it first was that he looked in a mirror and saw nothing but a mask of others’ mannerisms stretched over nothing.

“Is she dead?” he asked, not even sure what emotions he was feeling much less which ones he was projecting.

“I don’t know.” Monty hissed breath through his teeth. “But the odds of her livin’ through that are slim.” Will stared into those coal-black eyes and knew two things. First, Monty had grabbed him out of that gym on purpose, and second, leaving Ada behind hadn’t been an accident. Will’s gaze drifted to the mossy earth, and he nodded. Vowed in his head that he would see her again.

“Alright. Where are we goin’?”

Monty blinked, startled, likely expecting Will to get hysterical and melt down, and maybe if this had happened a few years ago he would’ve, fallen to the forest floor and screamed pleas to God to spare him. But Will had no more grief to feel, now. He’d burned up all his favor begging to the clouds and heaving into the toilet as dawn kissed the horizon. He’d rubbed his fingers raw on Hail Marys, prayed and sobbed until his throat gave out and all he could cry was air heaved from shriveled ducts. Will knew grief. And he had none to spare for this ruined world. Not after his had been dead for years.

“Y-your house, I thought- I thought there might be supplies.” It wasn’t like Monty to falter in his words, but then again this whole world was upside-down and it was more than likely the last three years had shaken something loose in him.

“Good idea.” And he started walking and Will couldn’t remember ever being in the lead like this before, but there was something twisted in retracing the steps he’d worn into the forest floor so thoroughly. His bootprints melding with millions, all the kids from his neighborhood, their parents too, generations taking this path through these fucking woods and yet still it was thick with greenery and retaken by the earth because nobody gives a shit about some old path from the school to the shit part of town. Probably full of poison ivy, it was, the path everyone’s parents told them not to take except the ones that didn’t care.

Will’s parents weren’t famous for caring. Monty’s were, but their care wasn’t the kind to write home about even if many did- “how can such nice people deal with such a delinquent” “angels they are, angels” -whispers in church and god, if they only knew. If only they knew how little of Monty was flesh and how much was scar.

Thorns snagged on Will’s hoodie, and as he untangled them he smelled Ada’s perfume in the collar and sniffed again deeper despite himself. She’d be alright. He knew it, knew the rage that simmered just beneath her skin and the scarred and callused knuckles she beat into tree trunks. He remembered sliding fingers over hers over the barrel of a gun and going hunting and fishing and camping together that first year after Monty left, when the pain of the empty space between them was so sharp that all they could do was drive out to the middle of nowhere and then hike even farther, smoking and screaming and rotting under the stars.

Monty shoved past him, then, and Will's hoodie ripped at the elbow and for some damn reason that brought him closer to tears than anything else that day. He untangled the remaining thread and followed like he was always meant to, vowing to patch the hole when they got to his parents’ house.

Chapter Text

The infection, whatever it was, was here too. They encountered a few stragglers on the way back to Will’s parents’ house, strange desiccated husks hardly able to drag themselves across the ground without the support or mass of the hordes. Getting a better look at them, something crawled in Will’s mouth.

They looked inhuman, certainly, but they didn’t truly look dead. Life seemed to be pervading them, thorns and shoots and fungi unfurling from their bodies at unnatural angles, roots curling through veins and leaving the original humanity shriveled and depleted.

What kind of disease did that to a person, he wondered, watching a half-formed person drag itself with reaching claws across the asphalt street with poison ivy trailing behind from their back like some twisted wedding train. But he couldn’t stand and watch, Monty was signaling him and then they were running, around back of the house Will’s family had grown up in even generations back, around to the window in back that led to the basement.

And memory caught in Will’s throat as he watched Monty lift the window and slide in like he’d done so many times before. It was nothing, it was nothing but it was nothing in the same shadow of all the nothings before, all the times his skinny little body had slid in through the window and Will had caught him at the bottom and warmed him some canned beans on a hot plate and pretended he didn’t see him cry.

But things were different now, the squeeze was tighter and Will landed on his own, Monty already off looking for tools, and Will locked the window for the first time he could remember before following dutifully in Monty's dogged footsteps.

He realized where Monty was heading too late, and before he could run to stop him the door of his bedroom was swung open and Monty was standing there in shock.

“Ah- no, don’t-” Will moved to slide past him but Monty stopped him with a firm arm across the chest, and Will winced.

“Will, what the fuck is all this?” Monty asked, and thank the lord he sounded more bewildered than enraged but that could change in the blink of an eye, and Will hung back by the door with practiced hesitance as Monty walked in. As he lifted some of the clothes strewn across the air mattress Will slept on, Will leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed anxiously.

“Sorry it’s messy…”

“Messy? Will, why d’you have all my old shit??” His voice was raising, and Will flinched at the tone change but hid it in a shrug.

“When you left, your parents were gettin’ rid of all your stuff, I- I grabbed as much as I could.” His eyes traced across the floor, avoiding Monty’s gaze as it bored into him. God, the only time anyone ever saw him was with anger. His fingers curled into his hoodie sleeves, preparing for the incumbent shouts.

Monty only scoffed, turning back. “Well, whatever. I’m takin’ apart yer fuckin… nest… thing, alright, some of us actually wear clothes ‘steada jackin’ off to em.”

“I don’t-” Will raised his gaze in indignation, but his mouth froze at the realization that ‘taking apart your nest’ apparently meant changing right fucking there and Will had accepted his infatuation a long, long time ago but this was far too much for him to handle right now so he simply turned right back around and went to look for his mom’s sewing kit.

He grabbed a backpack out of a closet and threw some cans of beans in it numbly, the image of Monty’s muscled, scarred back superimposed on the back of his eyelids like a sunspot. Christ. The tattoo. Will hadn’t gotten a good look but he knew there was at least one, splayed across his tailbone and reaching under his belt.

He filled a couple water bottles while the water still ran clear and downed as much as he could handle to clear his head before grabbing the sewing kit and heading back to Monty. Some juvenile part of him insisted that if he was out of Will’s sight he might vanish again. But no, there he was, in fresh clothes and rolling more into Will’s old school bag.

Will handed him half the water bottles before sitting cross-legged on his mattress and opening the sewing kit, not a clue in hell what he was doing as he pulled the hoodie off and started messing with it.

“Fuck’re you doin?” The bed shifting under him as Monty settled next to him, knee pressed against the side of his thigh and arm supporting weight from behind Will, breath fanning over Will’s hands as he leaned in to inspect his mend. Will flatlined for a solid few seconds.

“Tryna fix this damn hole.” He picked at the threads hanging off the hole, wondering if he should pull them out or cut them off.

Monty guffawed, laughing hard and long and that gold tooth glinted as his lip curled up in that sharp, barking laugh of his. “Jesus, Will, you ain’t got half a clue.” He chuckled, wiping a mirthful tear from his eye before swatting Will’s hand off the hoodie. “Don’t fuckin’ pick on it, dumbass, yer makin’ it worse.”

“Well how would you know any better?” Will huffed. Sure, he didn’t know how to sew, but who did?

“Mama taught me.” Monty’s shit-eating Cheshire grin stretched from ear to ear as he leered up at Will, near close enough to brush noses. Will made a noncommittal grunt and let Monty snatch the sewing and fuss with it. In the meantime, he went about the room to find some shit to bring: some rope and his hunting knives, the couple lighters in his drawer and the folded tarp under his bed. He figured a tent might be too heavy, or at least the one he had would be, but he pulled it out and deposited it next to his sleeping bag on the floor just in case. As for clothes he grabbed his cargo pants, a tank top, a couple extra shirts and boxers, and his dad’s old bulletproof fishing vest, with all the pockets.

He changed into the cargo pants right there, and when he felt a prickle on the back of his neck he turned in his boxers to see Monty unabashedly staring, face unreadable. Will nearly said something but instead just finished changing, lightly ashamed and more than a bit confused.

“Here.” Monty threw the hoodie at his face, and… for once he wasn’t bluffing. To say it was a clean fix would’ve been a lie: the stitches were jagged and obvious, but it was fixed, and Will ran his thumb over it in wonderment.

“Thanks,” he said, looking up to see Monty messing with the sewing kit, seemingly picking and choosing a few tools and putting them in a smaller container. Monty muttered incomprehensibly in response. Will rummaged through his drawer to find a truly pathetic single box of bullets. He tsked at his lack of foresight, shoving the box in the pocket of his vest alongside a coil of wire for snares.

“Are those bullets?” Will turned to see Monty staring at him again. “The hell d’you have those for?” Instead of answering, Will simply crouched in front of his overstuffed closet and pulled out the innocuous cardboard box at the bottom. Opened the top with care and pulled out the 9mm pistol with considerably less. Flicked open the chamber to check it was loaded before stowing it in the holster Monty’d found at the Goodwill when they were in middle school and bought to look cool having on his belt. Another old trinket lost to time, but as Will clipped it to his own belt he figured it was a silver lining, at least, that it was finally being used. He grinned at that.

Turning back to Monty, the man was stunned to silence, for once, mouth hanging open lightly. It was a change, certainly, and Will could hardly keep down his smirk. He busied himself with packing again, and called for Monty to come to the garage with him to get a weapon. Will offered the axe his old man used for firewood, but Monty wrinkled his nose, so Will simply shrugged and started fashioning a strap of rope to attach it to his own back. He wasn’t about to leave such a useful tool.

They wound up sleeping in Will’s room that night, ready to head out in the morning for God knew where and scared shitless. Nothing had gotten into the house while they’d been there and they’d barricaded every possible orifice in the room but the unease gnawed at Will anyway, and he clutched the handle of the axe next to him on the floor. Monty took the bed, of course he did, but Will was fine with that, had slept in worse places and still couldn’t quite believe the other man was anything more than a fever dream.

Only now as he stared at the popcorn ceiling that his parents and his parents’ parents had grown up under did the reality of the situation truly start to seep into his woozy, hungover mind. The world was ending. The world was ending and he was gonna die in the same purgatory he’d always known.

And he’d known that, he’d always known he’d rot and die here, bones offered to the vultures and cooked in asphalt parking lots in the same sweaty summers he’d always known. He’d never wanted anything more, not even on the nights when Ada looped arms around his neck and raved about the sunkissed beaches and starry majesty of Los Angeles did he dare hope for anything more than this rotten mundanity. But now… why now? Why only now, when there were no sketchy buses to board or trains to hop or trucks to hitchhike did he ache in every fiber of his damned being for something different?

But now it ran through him like whiskey, electrifying and terrifying in the way it changed him, yet rather than blurring his inhibitions it sharpened them, zeroed in on his goals and commanded him to get out of here get out of here get OUT. And he swore to Monty’s soft snores it would be more than his corpse.

“-’dyou say sumthin’ Will?” Monty’s voice asked from the quiet, soft and bleary.

“No, sorry,” he lied, fingernails digging into the wood of his axe handle.

“Shut up,” Monty muttered into his pillow. Well. Will turned to look at Monty, curled so small in a pile of blankets on Will's air mattress. He was a blanket hog as always, and Will half smiled at that remembering the last time they’d shared a bed, sleepovers when they were wide-eyed and knock-kneed and ignorant, before Monty learned what a fag was and that he’d rather die than be mistook as one. As kids they were infallible, gap-toothed tussling rapscallions with nothing but energy and mischief to get up to.

Now... now they were so fucking tired. Everyone was so tired, all the time, and Will remembered being a kid, being full of sugar and starlight, being a tween and pinky-swearing that it would never be him. He’d never let the light drain from his eyes and the spring fall from his step, he’d never be the boring gray man behind the register.

Isn’t that what all kids do? Swear up and down they’ll never be their parents but there are patterns inside of all of us, and all it takes is one fuck up. One slip and you’re falling and there’s nowhere to go but the way you know. The way you hate. And before that mistake did you even really have a chance? Because the fact is no matter how good you do you’re fucked regardless.

Sadder, older, greyer people, coming through the gas station with chips and a soda and 20 bucks on pump 4 and leaning on the register as Will tallied their totals and “why’re you in here and not out with friends?” “why, when I was your age-” “you’re in the prime of your life, y’know!” The prime of his life, the prime of his life, the prime of his life and the world was ending. But then, his had been dead for years already. The prime of his life but was it really? Was it ever?

Gray eyes traced the patterns worn into the ceiling and wondered whether the apocalypse really changed anything.

Chapter Text

“C’mon, Monty, we’re burnin’ daylight out here,” Will whisper-yelled, holding the window he’d just climbed out of open with a muddy boot, axe in his hands. Monty muttered in response before clambering out. It was unusually warm, today, and his jacket was tied around his waist leaving him in nothing more than a tank top revealing the tattoo over his arm, a sprawling, snarling wolf curling over his shoulder. It looked like him.

He lifted out the thing he’d been messing with all morning: a wooden baseball bat studded through with nails. He’d gone for the cliché, and remembering all the times they’d stayed up sharing blankets on Will’s ratty couch watching gory action movies about power-trip psychos and boy saviors razing the world anew, of course he went for the most flashy, brutish option. Will was surprised Monty hadn’t told him to hand over the gun yet.

He let the window close gently behind them, not locking it because hell, call him naive but maybe his old shit could help someone. Not like it’d be much use to him anymore anyway.

Downtown they were headed, bags heavy but they’d get used to it, steering clear of the few stragglers they passed. It was rare to see one alone, they seemed to grow together, coagulated hordes connected by vines and roots and stolons looping through gaping holes through stomach, ribcage, skull. Whatever had infected them, making human skin and flesh blacken and rot like frostbitten fruit, was not the plants, but it seemed to spur their growth, allowing them to dig roots through flesh like dirt and siphon nutrients from it like some sick fertilizer.

At first Will wanted to steer as clear of the infected as possible, running as far from each as possible, but Monty grew sick of the caution and cornered a single one and knocked it to the ground with a slam of his bat.

“C’mere, you pussy, it’s fine!” he called, and Will emerged from the treeline with the collar of his shirt over his nose and axe raised.

“It doesn’t look fine, Monty.”

“Hey, we can’t be runnin’ forever, this was the chance to see what makes ‘em tick.”

“Fuckin- fine, alright,” Will seceded.

Poking the creature with a dead stick did nothing, hitting it with the bat did nothing but render it more or less immobile, though it scrambled weakly to get up around its crushed and dysfunctional body. It was pathetic, really, and quite horrifying, leaves curling from its blackened mouth and flesh peeled clean from parts of its skull. Clovers and grasses sprouted from it, branches from some tree unfurling from inside its skull and back, a branch punctured clear through its lung.

“How did it get like this?” Will asked, interrupting Monty’s poking and prodding. “Like… how fast did it rot? Couldn’t’ve been long, the remaining skin’s still pink.”

“I dunno, maybe like a day or two? It moves crazy fast, I think. I don’t know much more’n you, soon’s I figured out what was happenin’ I ran for the train for here.” That was new information, but Will filed it away for later, looking around to make sure the coast was still clear. Getting an idea, he tore a chunk of sod from a nearby lawn, a chunk of grass complete with a cake of dirt, and tossed it on the infected. Immediately, before their eyes the grass began growing, dirt crumbling off as the roots curled into the infected’s chest. Once the roots were in it slowed growth to where they couldn’t see it moving any longer, though it was undoubtedly still accelerated.

“Fuck,” Will breathed. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but that sure as hell wasn’t it.

“Holy shit.” Monty fell back, resting on his haunches.

“So... it rots people and turns us into, like, super-compost?” Will was raving, running a hand through his hair and leaving it standing on end.

“Guess so,” Monty admitted.

“So… how does it spread? Do we just touch it, or do they have to bite us?”

“No clue,” Monty said. He flinched, then, eyes landing on something behind Will. “But I don’t wanna find out.”

Will whipped around to see more infected, two this time, connected via a strawberry plant of all things, flowers draping over their shoulders and fruits adorning their hair heavy like jewels. A man and a woman, probably lovers, hobbling forth as one with rivulets of tiny pink bleeding heart flowers falling from their eyes like tears.

Will would never admit it, but God were they beautiful. Her arm fastened over his shoulder with roots and leaves, skin rotting and merging and flowers blessing their temples like crowns. Forever entwined, until their legs failed beneath them and even then they’d lie entangled in a field as the strawberries overtook them. Someday their bones would be found by some distant archaeologist and maybe it would be one of those stories that persevered, lost and found and told again.

He wished he was worth remembering, even for one generation. Even just a few years past his death.

He grasped Monty’s sleeve with shaking fingers and ran into the woods.

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, two kids ran through woods as equals, chased over tree roots and swung from branches as one. Once upon a time they picked each other up when they fell, treated skinned knees and talked about everything and nothing as they climbed into the dappled light of a canopy.

Once upon a time fairytales were for girls, once upon a time literature was nights in Will’s basement huddled up under a blanket watching all manner of shitty movies about guns and cars and sex on DVD. Once upon a time it was learning how to cuss by tracing words screamed in houses across the street, it was hanging from a tree and hitting anything they could think of with a slingshot, going down to the gas station for slushies and through the woods, through the woods, always through the woods because no one followed the curves of the roads out here, not a sidewalk to speak of, only deer trails and underbrush and trash on the ground. The age of looking for coyotes and finding only stray dogs and deer, the age of skipping rocks as far as they’d go and pulling ticks out of legs with chubby fingers.

The age of nothing to do, nothing to do but so many sunsoaked summers ahead of them. The time of running through the woods and getting filthy and flicking waterlogged lighters at filched cigarettes, of pretending to be grown and watching the older kids smoke around the playground just to imitate them, coughing and hanging by their knees off the rusted monkey bars. The age of wanting nothing more than to grow up already, to grow up so they could go somewhere, go anywhere, do anything. The age that should’ve been over by now but still stabbed fishhooks into Will’s ankles and pulled, tendons ripped out and into bloody earth like earthworms: foreign yet more than welcome.

“Why the hell’d ya take us into the woods, Will? We’ll never get into town now,” Monty groused, walking heavy through the brush with his shoulders hunched, following a considerably quieter Will.

To tell the truth, Will didn’t know why he’d ran to the woods. It’d been some kind of instinct, he guessed, something in him that craved the green closeness of the forest in a moment of panic. But he wasn’t about to tell an already peeved Monty that.

“There’s less people out here, so less infected,” he decided. “Plus, goin’ downtown’s faster this way.”

“You sure?”

He wasn’t. “Yep!”

Will would feel better, if they were tanking it in the woods. Food would be easier and less dangerous to come by, the deer overpopulation would make sure of that, and it did seem that there were fewer infected in here. But he was hesitant to pitch the plan to Monty, who’d been camping only a handful of times as a kid and considered it a horrible punishment.

Instead of agonizing, he hurried it up, leading Monty through the forest in the right-ish direction. Logistically, he had no idea how to set up for long-term survival. It would probably be helpful if they had a bigger group, or occupied some building, since it was going to be winter soon and they were sort of screwed if they had to camp in snow. Even just one other person would be helpful. Not for the first time, Will ached for Ada.

He knew Monty wouldn’t understand: Will and Ada had never gotten along when he was there, always competing, always vying for his attention like children scrapping over a piece of candy. But things changed when he left, Will and Ada left with a vacuum in their lives that they could only try to fill with each other.

And somewhere along the way it stopped being all about using each other and started being a little bit real, and the lines blurred and blurred some more until it was rare to see one without the other, and maybe their faces got a little less sunken and instead of drowning in themselves they started drowning with each other.

There weren’t words to describe what Ada meant to Will, what Will was to Ada. They were friends, sure, but they were so much more than that and so much less at the same time. They kissed but it wasn’t romantic, fucked but took no real pleasure in it, spent all their days together but couldn’t truly say they liked it, hurt each other to stop from hurting themselves. Will would die for her and he wished to die without her. He wished for nothing more than for her to leave this dead-end town and never look back.

And now the world had ended.

Will had to keep reminding himself, keep refreshing it in his head to the point of beating the information in with a club. It didn’t feel real. Nothing did, not since the fog settled over his mind sometime in high school and never lifted. Not since his eyes faded from blue to grey.

He tripped over a root and almost fell down a hill straight into town. Grabbing a tree to steady himself he could hear Monty’s guffawing laughter and gritted his teeth with shame.

“Hah- good t’see you haven’t changed, Will.” A hand clapped onto his shoulder, a tear wiped in mirth, and Will’s shoulders hunching with anger. Every time.

Monty led the way down into Trinity, bat held at the ready and gait slow and careful. Will followed with his axe held at his side, other hand thumbing at his gun. He’d use it only as a last resort, of course, but tracing the ridges of it was calming, like petting a dog on the back of the neck with fingers only an inch away from its throat.

Monty was headed for the general store, it looked like. The plan was to go for lightweight food: stuff like dried fruit, granola, and jerky would be good to keep them vaguely healthy. Will also wanted some salt and wax paper or plastic so he could dry out any excess meat they managed to hunt. But really, the both of them had collectively very little idea what they would actually need. Baby’s first apocalypse, or whatever.

They managed to get to the store without alerting anyone, but it was already kind of ransacked, doors blown wide and largely looted of the non-perishables already.

“Well, shit,” Monty muttered, looking around at the tipped shelves, blood-smeared walls, and smashed jars.

“It’s alright, there’s gotta be something left.”

“It’s pointless. They took all the good shit already.” Monty’s voice was ragged and starting to raise, and Will stepped back a bit in apprehension.

“It’ll be okay, Monty, there’s stuff we can use-”

“Will, it’s not okay, nothing is okay, alright??” Monty was starting to stalk towards him, that dangerous light that was just as familiar as it was terrifying in his eyes again. Will inhaled deeply, mentally searching for a way to handle this. “Everyone’s dead, Will. Everything’s dead, everything’s over. Nothing is okay, nothing will ever be okay again.”

Will counted to three before starting in a gentle voice. “Yeah, but we’re still-”

“Fuckin’ hell, Will, what’s even the point?” He sounded close to tears, but whenever Monty got hopeless he got angry, and when Monty was angry Will needed to tread very carefully.

“Because when we get to hell we’ll have done all we could.” Monty’s back stiffened at the word hell, and alarm bells started going off in Will’s head. He scrambled back, axe half-raised as Monty whipped around, that fire in his eyes that screamed feral, teeth bared and almost snarling as he stalked towards Will, fists balled but for the one clutching the bat in a white-knuckled grip.

“Hell.” He said it so flatly, without an ounce of emotion, and that twisted the knife. “Hell? Hell?? You really wanna go there with me?”

“N-no, I- I mean, you’re not going- it’s alright, Monty, it’s okay-”

Monty slammed his bat into a shelf, knocking it over and making Will flinch. He lifted the axe in a blocking motion on instinct, only realizing at the flash in Monty’s eyes that that was the worst thing he could’ve done.

“What the fuck did I tell you about sayin’ things are okay?” The flat tone was gone, but replacing it was hardly veiled rage. Monty’s voice was going deep, deeper and harsher than Will remembered and that couldn’t mean anything good, Monty was always gettin’ into fights as a kid but who knew where he’s been all these years, how many fights he’d picked and with who.

Monty cocked his head and suddenly he was lunging and swinging the bat hard and fast at Will. He managed to block it with the handle of the axe, but Monty was already swinging another… and so it went, a flurry of wild swings with Monty’s bat, Will narrowly dodging. He landed a counterstrike by cleaving his axe directly into the bat, lodging in and using the momentum to pull the bat from Monty’s hands and toss their weapons away, grasping Monty's bony shoulders and pummeling him to the ground in a rolling heap.

Will’s legs locked around Monty’s like it was second nature, grappling at his hands but Monty twisted before he could pin him properly, instead grappling up at Will’s neck and hissing cusses at him as his thumbs dug into the veins of Will’s throat. Will grabbed Monty’s chin and shoved him, forcing his head back against the ground and slightly relishing the hiss of pain he elicited. Monty grabbed harder at his throat, though, squeezing hard enough to form dark spots in his eyes as Will pressed the back of his forearm into Monty’s throat, crushing his windpipe into one long wheeze of pain.

Monty wouldn’t quit, his pride was too much for that, but what the hell did Will have to live for anyway? He could do this all day. Grey staring into black, blank into fire, a long blinkless stalemate of apathy and anger, two starved dogs bleeding to death yet still circling with hackles raised, no reason to die but caught up in the killing. Ouroboros consuming himself and it couldn't even be said where one pile of limbs and bleeding fire ended and the other began.

Eventually it was Will who let go, not because of any real fear for himself but rather concerned that he was beginning to bruise Monty’s throat with his elbow. He kept his hands along Monty’s collarbones, featherlight, just in case. Monty let go of him reluctantly, and Will leaned back to catch his breath, legs still locking Monty down.

“Fuck, since when’ve you been able to fight?” Monty gasped.

“Since I started havin’ to clean up your messes,” Will returned vaguely, stretching before getting up to fetch the weapons. He tore the axe from the wood and tossed Monty his slightly split bat. “Here, should work fine still.”

“Fuckin… alright.”

Will was right, there was more than enough stuff to go around by sifting through the wreckage. He found his salt and containers, more wire, fishhooks, and even a box of bullets tucked into the cash register for some reason. Monty kept watch, flicking toothpicks around and kicking his feet as Will stalled by a small stand of seed packets.

Maybe it was hopeless, thinking they’d live til spring. Even if they did, it wasn’t like they were patient enough to watch a garden grow. But… something in Will saw the paper packets of tomato and cucumber and carrot seeds and dared to hope. He shoved them into the bottom of his bag, vowing not to tell Monty.

“’reyou finally done with whatever you needed so badly?” Monty grouched, walking up behind Will with hands in his back pockets and toothpick in his teeth.

“Y-yeah, we can go.”

“Finally.”

Chapter Text

They were a few streets down when he heard it, walking cautious through an eerie labyrinth of what they used to know. A soft whine, hardly louder than the wind in the trees but it made Will stop dead in his tracks. Monty bumped into him, cussing before seemingly remembering the situation and looking around, on alert.

“What’d’ya see?”

“I heard something.” He started walking towards the noise, slow and cautious with a hand on his gun and axe at the ready.

“Shouldn’t we be walkin’ away from the noise?? Fuckin hell Will.” His protests faded into the back of Will’s mind as he headed into a collapsed building that might’ve been a pet store, but looked blown up somehow, half the walls laying in leaning, collapsed piles of concrete. The air hung thick with dust, and just when Will was about to listen to reason and turn around he heard it again, a wounded whine coming from the back of the ruined building.

Monty reached out to stop him, but he was already halfway through the building, determined for some odd reason to see what was making this sound. He found it, soon, and Monty ran into him again, standing over the ruins of a small kennel, half-collapsed with a huge, ragged mutt of a dog inside, curled impossibly small to avoid being crushed, a patch of blood on its side.

“...hell,” Monty breathed out, and Will had to agree.

“She musta been here before,” he noted. “I know this place doesn’t have a vet. All they do here is put dogs down. Strays.”

Monty hissed air through his teeth. “Sucks… Well, you gonna put it outta its misery or should I?”

“What??” Will turned to him with horrified eyes. “Why the hell would we do that??”

“It’s obviously suffering, c’mon, it’s the humane thing to do. Better’n lettin’ it go free to starve to death.”

“Isn’t it cruel not to give her a chance? It’s not her fault she’s here, she was prolly feral, or in fights or sumthin, look at her tail.” It was bobbed. She might’ve looked to have some pitbull in her, but all she really looked was scared.

“It’s covered in blood, Will, the second you let it out it’s gonna bite yer face off and we’ll have to kill it anyway. Christ, I knew y’had a bleedin’ heart, but we can’t do this. It’s stupid. It's a stupid way to die.”

“She’s scared, Monty. We can’t just- Look. Look, listen, I’ll prove it to you. Can you go see if there’s any dog treats in this mess?” Monty groaned. “Please? You can say you told me so if I’m wrong.” Will looked up at him with all the hope he could muster, which wasn't a ton but he saw something in this dog, goddammit.

“Stupid… fuckin… bleedin’ heart…” He tromped off grumbling, and Will sank to the ground next to the kennel. He held out a hand for the dog to smell, and narrowly avoided having it bitten off by keeping it outside the dog’s reach. When he stayed still she didn’t bite at him, rather sniffed at him with distrustful eyes.

“Hey girl,” Will murmured softly. “You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?” She sniffed at his hand some more, poking her nose out the bars to get a better sniff. He hesitantly moved his hand closer, and she pressed her snout right into his fingers. He chuckled, hesitantly petting her nose.

Monty came back, mouth open for some witty comeback but at the sight of Will letting the dog lick all over his hand he fell silent. He simply tossed a bag of treats at Will’s head. Will flashed a smile at him in thanks.

“Let’s see… you hungry, girl?” She was sticking as much of her face through the bars as possible to snuffle at the bag, so he guessed so, shaking some treats out onto his hand and presenting them to her. She licked them off and he felt the light scrape of giant teeth against his palm.

“How the hell…” Monty trailed off, watching bewildered as Will unlocked the kennel door and lifted off the debris, and the dog just crawled out and kept snuffling up to him. Will fed her more as he checked her back, noting in relief that the blood seemed to be dried from a series of mostly-healed scrapes.

With the dog licking Will’s hands ravenously to get the last bits of treat, none of them noticed the horde closing in. Will was petting her head when she suddenly stiffened, eyes going wide and sniffing the air before springing up to her feet and tugging at Will’s sleeve insistently with her teeth. Monty and Will stared in shock at the dog’s full size: she was huge, indiscriminately shaggy grey and brown and as tall as their waists, with giant teeth and long legs. She’d be strong, too, as soon as they got some meat on her bones.

It was only when she started barking that they realized what was wrong. Deep booming barks and they swiveled and finally saw it. Could it even be considered a horde anymore? It was more a giant mass of greenery somehow animate, trawling slowly in a mass across the land. The mass that had invaded the school was nothing compared to this, though Will noticed a few familiar faces in the mass (his boss, his regulars, his teachers) and had to choke back vomit at seeing their decay so grotesquely displayed like this. Kudzu wreathed the mass, pokeberries draping across flesh like jewels, oak branches exploding from sinew and thorns arcing from one body to the next like fireworks, draped in messes of mistimed flowers and berries.

The horde didn’t move in unison, rather dragged itself forward in one singular mass, impossible to tell under the explosions of greenery where one “human” started and another ended, the entire mess so alien, so inhuman, that it could hardly compute as more than an impossibly bright cacophony of colors. The fear was there, though. The dog somehow led the way, bounding off into the woods and Will followed, Monty more hesitantly behind. They clutched their weapons but there was no way to use them, not a chance in hell they could stand against the flood of undeath and rebirth. They were fish swimming furiously from a trawling net, ants running from spewing lava: efforts so hilariously infinitesimal a star would cry in mirth.

And yet they ran. Though their pitiful lives stood no chance, doomed from their birth though they were, they ran. And as his lungs swelled and shriveled and heaved and as his legs burned and his chest screamed, as he glanced to the side and saw Monty running alongside him Will grinned and knew he was alive again.

The dog led them to a rocky outcrop and began scrambling up the side. The horde was out of sight, now, so Will leaned against a tree and gasped for breath, seeing Monty doubled over doing the same.

“You alright?” Will asked.

“Whew, yeah,” Monty gasped out, still panting. “Split my side, hell. God damn you can run.”

Will chuckled, still breathless. The dog peeked over the crest of the rocks and yipped at them irritatedly. Monty flipped it off, and Will laughed, and it was so warm, this moment, that he never wanted to leave it.

“Christ, damn dog barks gravelly like a smoker on a megaphone but yaps like a fuckin’ chihuahua?” Monty guffawed, starting the climb. Will pulled himself up next to him, chuckling.

“She’s somethin, isn’t she?”

“Pff, somethin crazy, that’s for sure.”

“Still think I shoulda axed her?” Will got to the top and held out a hand for Monty, grinning.

“She keeps yappin’ at me and I’ll axe her myself,” Monty huffed, taking Will’s hand and dragging himself onto the rocks. The dog barked at him disapprovingly.

“Oh c’mon, you can’t say you’re not a little fond of her,” Will teased. “She did save us.”

“Gettin’ attached’s a bad idea, Will, s’not like we can keep her.” After a minute, Monty turned to Will disbelievingly. “Don’t tell me you wanna keep her.”

“Well…”

“Will, we can hardly feed ourselves, how the hell’re we gonna take care of a dog??”

“She was a stray, I’m sure she can feed herself. Dogs can hunt, y’know. Plus, we could use the extra protection.”

“Ugh,” Monty groaned, kicking at a rock and watching the dog pad along in front of them. “You’re gonna regret it.” They walked in silence for about five minutes before, “What’re you namin’ her?”

“I was thinkin’ Gwendolyn,” Will grinned. He’d always wanted a dog. “That’s what my parents were gonna name me.”

“Corny.”

“I know.”

And joy bloomed in Will’s scrawny chest before he could stop it, and he clapped an arm against Monty’s back and almost didn’t notice the way a flinch buzzed up his companion’s spine. Almost.

Chapter Text

Monty was bad at camping. He couldn’t build a fire or hunt (even with help), and eventually Will just gave up and let Gwendolyn run off chasing squirrels as he started heating some beans over a fire as smokeless as he could manage. They still didn’t know what lured the infected, but Will wasn’t one to take chances.

Monty took the larger share, he always did, he always would, but Will was just glad he was eating. Monty had always been skinny, bony and long-limbed as a horse, and now even with the muscles gently dappling him he was wiry and lean and Will would survive having less, he had always been chubbier. Anyway, it was only fair.

Monty didn’t thank him as he scooped beans into his mouth with the jagged can lid, but Will watched him and couldn’t help the innate joy thrumming up his spine. It hadn’t sunk in yet, really. He was real and he was here.

Gwendolyn brought them the corpse of a mouse, and though Monty looked upon it with curled lip and wrinkled nose Will ruffled her fur and cooed at her for it, pleased with how she looked at him for permission before eating it. She’d train up well, given a bit.

“Hell, Will, that’s disgusting.”

“It’s a good start for trainin’ her, Monty, trust me,” Will explained, gently scratching her behind the ears.

“Since when d’you know anythin’ about trainin’ dogs?” Monty scoffed.

“Did a few gigs walkin’ em. Easier’n kids.” And less easy to get attached to.

“Kids?? Feel like I don’t know shit about you anymore.” Monty leaned backwards with a whistle through his teeth.

“Hah, well what about you? You have tattoos!!”

“Hah, like em? Prettyboy wasn’t half bad, eh?” He showed off the wolf snarling over his shoulder with a flashing grin.

“Wow, yeah, it looks awesome. Is there a meaning?”

“Hah, Will, don’t be a fairy, ‘sjust a tattoo.” Monty laughed, but Will’s gaze traced the wolf’s protective posture, the gore in its teeth, and knew there was more to it than he said.

“Guess you’re right. But hey, how’d you get a gold tooth??”

“Pfft, it ain’t that interesting, just a sucker punch. Knocked the daylights out of me.” He chuckled. “Tooth from a pawnshop, thought it looked fancy. But hey Will, you pierced your ears! If I didn’t see you lickin’ up my sloppy seconds back in the gym I’da kicked the shit outta you and called you a queer, ain’t that right?” Monty guffawed, laughing hard and long and Will gripped onto his sleeve like a vice and stared into the moss.

“Right,” he agreed. Did Monty just… conveniently forget the reason they stopped hanging out alone in high school, the reason Will slumped further into his shadow than ever? Or, more likely it was just that Monty didn’t know shit about him. And he never had. Never needed to, never needed more than a touch of affection and a series of slaps to keep Will lapping at his heels.

Monty didn’t speak again, and Will wasn’t about to tell him just how much of a freak he really was, so he went off to set some snares and find them a proper space to sleep, the top of an outcropping would do for now. Will had decided against bringing the tent, so they’d just have to rough it out under the stars.

They had one sleeping bag and Monty took it, Will sleeping up in a tree and attempting to ignore the cold in his bones, deeply missing Ada’s soft warmth as the bark dug into his shoulder blades and the feeling of bugs crawled repulse over his limbs. He tugged at the black round studs in his ears and remembered the heat of Ada's breath on his cheek as she pressed the sewing needle into each earlobe, much too slow and much too hot but it cauterized the wound and after forcing the earring through she'd kissed the drop of blood from his neck and said he did well.

Monty was back and everything had changed and trickling into the back of his brain unwanted, Will remembered that Monty’s presence wasn’t a gift. Love him as he might Will couldn’t change him, and he was slowly beginning to realize the golden age of childhood was long-dead. But then, wasn’t everything?

The thoughts drifted to the cold air in clouds of breath from Will’s lips and he fell, forgotten, to fitful sleep.

Monty was fire. Monty was fire and it wasn’t an exaggeration, wasn’t a poem, wasn’t anything other than the damned truth, the truth of the cigarette burns peppering Will’s neck and arms and stomach, the truth of the heat that raged under his skin and behind his eyes.

Monty's parents saw the fire early, when it was bright and innocent. Tried to snuff it out, saw it as dangerous before it ever was but whips and verses only ever fanned the flames higher, higher and higher and higher.

Fighting fire with anger never works and no matter how much the fire axe cleaved at the demon’s back it only scarred in it a righteous fear. A safety mechanism trigger switch that freed only the disciplinarian from the roaring once-righteous fire of the punished.

Treating a fire with kindness never worked but Will never stopped hoping: never quit burning his hands on the stones of the hearth, the altar he built to the almighty flame that all others hailed as demon.

There were moments of softness, times when the fire rewarded his worship without catching him alight. Those times were few but they dulled the pain, fed the adulation in the small guttering furnace of Will’s own shriveled empty heart.

Monty was a fire, he took what he wanted and burnt it in his excitement, but Will was a vine, wrapping soft and adoring and green around his betters, twining up their heights and choking the life out of them gently, with flowers floating pretty away on the breeze and leaving him ugly and gnarled but all-encompassing nevertheless.

Monty was a forest fire and Will was flammable, but he’d always loved things that could kill him. Stared at bears and rabid dogs with a cocked head and not a lick of fear, knowing exactly what they could do to him and secretly hoping for it, secretly wishing they would tear him from his emptiness, that their teeth could make him feel something, make him feel anything at all.

Chapter Text

It had been about a week since the end. Well, Will wasn’t counting, but from what he knew about the moon from the back of a tabloid at the gas station counter, it’d gone from a half to full and that was about a week, he figured. He would’ve counted, but the time got away from him.

Monty wasn’t having a good time of it. He’d killed one rabbit, leg caught in Will’s snare and Will placed soft hands over Monty’s callused ones and through him snapped its neck with the familiar satisfying crack. The taller man jumped, flinched and scrambled away and looked at Will with something almost like fear in his eyes.

Will tilted his head, confused, watching Monty’s chest rise and fall in harsh, fast succession as he wiped his hands aggressively on his pants, whole body shaking as though he was trying to scrub the death out. What a thing to see: the king of the hill, menace of the playground, the scariest kid in Trinity, shaking like a leaf at killing a single rabbit.

The rest of the animals killed were credited to Will and Gwendolyn, who was a fast learner. The dog hunted for all of her own food and brought Will some very neatly killed rabbits besides. He gutted them, fed her the innards and gave her the hides and bones to chew on and she lay content over his feet as he prepared food, gutting and slicing and cooking and salting in a lovely rhythm.

Monty never came near him when he was busy with meat, somehow always ran off to get firewood or check the perimeter or something of the sort, but Will was glad for the time without distraction, wiping blood from his knife and boots slowly and methodically and rinsing cloths in the creek.

They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t talk at all. Monty looked almost scared of him, sometimes, and it was so bizarre Will could have laughed. The man that had so long haunted him skulked around doing random tasks until it was time for food, when he always ate more and talked less, taking Gwendolyn with him on scouting trips and even if he hid it Will could see the way his eyes softened when he looked at the dog, petting her head and tossing her scraps of good meat for no reason.

He wanted to tell Monty not to waste food, but the words snagged in his throat whenever he looked at him petting Gwendolyn and letting her rest her head on his lap, eyes soft in a way Will had never seen. So he let him keep feeding her, let him keep puttering around doing nothing.

Other than that they fell almost instantly into their old patterns: Monty in the lead, Will doing whatever he asked of him. It was so easy to bow his head, to lower his eyes in supplication and to submit. It was like they were young again, Will following doggedly as Monty caused trouble, vying for table scraps of attention.

Every day, without fail, they'd fight, scuffles over nothing, over bits of meat and Will let Monty shove him to the ground and beat his face in as he gasped, let him blow off steam as much as he needed. Will never started them, never even said much of anything, just let Monty let out that stewing, burning, boiling fire, let him pour hatred across him from his boundless store. Better him than the dog.

It was after one of these that Will remembered who Monty really was. The realization came when he pressed his bruised forehead into the creek, icy water a balm against the purpling flesh with eyes fluttering closed under pleasant numbness. Monty was all bark to be sure, but there were teeth there, and Will must not’ve fallen back into place fast enough, must’ve still had some edges somehow that needed sanding down.

Montresor Faust the man of balled fists and bruised knuckles and bloody teeth… Will remembered now, why they called him a demon. He remembered all the things he’d so blissfully forgot: the scar on his hand and how Monty’d spit in it, the years of bowed head and black eyes and scrambling after, always following dutiful on his heels. But still, Will had it good, had it easy, as long as he fell in line and did what he was told he was safe. Monty needed him, Monty needed him, and tearing a few people a new one wasn’t much of a price to pay was it? Monty didn’t touch him but to punch and shove, not since those sunsoaked days so long ago that they might’ve been imagined, but now he’d left and come back and he was exactly the same.

Will collapsed bruised on his back, ends of his hair still dipped in the creek and sighed a white cloud into the cold air. He was beginning to learn why Monty came back. The man was a sun and he wanted his moon, wanted his reflection, wanted his softened marionette. And staring blank into the canopy Will remembered that he would never be good for anything else.

The nights fell bitter and cold and by the end of that first week had passed it was far too cold for either to sleep alone. Will didn’t know how it happened but that last night out there Will and Monty were huddled in the same sleeping bag just to avoid freezing to death. Gwendolyn splayed over them like a blanket of heat and yet still they shivered, wrapped so tight in one their breaths melded to one cloud of steam. Will tucked his head under Monty’s and felt his arms tighten around his back and every bit of him was frozen solid except the fire of Montresor, hot-blooded even in the dead of night, fizzing and burning straight through his flesh.

A woolen lamb, life-sized and soft with glass eyes and soft curling wool all the way through. He always thought it a bit odd, to have a lamb formed of wool from probably a multitude of other sheep, a frankensteined creation unable even to blink up at the donors of its parts.

Most kids have a few toys, but Will was always extraordinarily proud of his. It was the nicest thing he ever owned, a hand-me-down from his grandmother still in mint condition, the only thing his parents bothered to gift him.

Even so it was his favorite toy. Will’s lamb was his prized possession. He took fantastic care of it: keeping it spotless white and soft, holding it as tight at night as he yearned to hold a person, pressing his face into the soft wool curls at the top of its head and letting it soak up his salty tears. He carried it everywhere, held in tiny chubby arms and hiding reddened face and salty tears. He brought it to school for a bit, a social suicide of kindergarten until it got stained in the cafeteria and he ruined a patch of the wool trying to wash it out.

Another parent would’ve kept their kid from bringing a family heirloom to public school, but another parent would also have fed their kid properly, or spent their time at home instead of who-knew-where, would’ve had a lick of personhood beyond the trashbag of photo albums and yarn from grandma they kept in the basement like it was embarrassing to even look at.

Will’s parents weren’t famous for caring. But who was? Most everyone who knew his parents were surprised to find they had a kid, most people who knew him had no idea who his parents were, and that was fine. Even in a small town it was easy for the dirt to disappear.

But Will knew Monty, and Monty was known. So he grasped at him like he was the last thing above water and followed wherever he went, did whatever he wanted, and Monty went to Will’s house one time and slept in his bed and saw how he clutched the woollen thing like it was the only thing in his life he loved.

And Monty, burning fire, tearing wind, snarling dog, Monty saw that Will loved something other than him and biked with it all the way to the biggest road just to throw it under the cars. Will knew he only did it to watch him cry, knew he shouldn’t give the demon that satisfaction, but watching the only thing that had ever held him gently, the only thing that ever stayed torn to shreds under the roaring monstrous metal of reality pulled tears like taffy from his eyes and silent down his face.

Once the road was empty Monty picked up the pieces and dragging Will by the hand to the corner of the playground burned them on the metal slide into a charred heap, laughing like some haunting hymn echoing through empty streets when everyone else is in church, like something of God but not quite right, like Amazing Grace with a knife to a throat, like a Hallelujah breathed out by an arsonist in a burning church.

He got bored of Will’s silence, eventually, wandered off whistling and proclaiming Will could join him once he stopped being a pussy. Will stayed, staring and dry and unmoving, eyes fading deep and dry, till the sun grayed out and the bugs came out, and he picked through the ashes, blackened his hands with soot and hatred and as the moon burned in the sky unearthed two black glass eyes, shining pearls in his tiny palm.

Cracking through them gentle with an awl he wore them on a necklace for years, under his shirt and thrumming with his heartbeat, threaded with memory after memory: a bead that fell off Ada’s rosary, a soda tab Monty’d pulled off a beer can for him, a metal chunk of his old lighter, Grandma’s wedding ring, a bullet casing with a hole through it, a few bones and teeth from his childhood hunts. Little things, junk that mattered only about as far as he could throw it, and yet he kept it there over his heart even still, like it meant a single goddamn thing.

Chapter Text

“We need to leave.” Will had been dozing, but his eyes shot open at those words. He pulled himself up alone in the sleeping bag curled with only the remnants of heat to see Monty standing up, shaking hard and shoving things haphazardly into his bag.

“Wh- calm down, what happened?”

“Don’t ask questions, Will,” Monty snapped, and there was sharpness in his eyes as they flashed to Will’s. He looked feral, a cornered animal with lips curled over teeth. Will cocked his head and considered him. He could press the issue, but stepping closer to a cornered dog only serves for a bite, so he backed off and crawled out of the sleeping bag to roll it up.

“Alright. Back to town then?” He calmed, packing with deft fingers and watching Monty intently from the corner of his eye.

“Yep. Shelter’d be- it smells like it’ll rain soon.” He was lying, but that was a mystery for another time. And Monty was right, there was petrichor faint in the air.

“Okay, where to?” Will asked, perfectly neutral as he slung his pack over his back and looked at Monty with practiced emptiness in his face. He wasn’t afraid, rather morbidly curious, and it was all he could do to keep from poking at the wound.

“My house. I know how to lock it.”

“You mean… the church?”

Monty simply grunted in reply, turned away from Will and beginning the trek ahead of him. Will watched him with a cocked head. Never would he have guessed that Monty would want to go back to his prison. There were probably still bloodstains on the walls, shadows in the corners, lost scraps of childhood and remnants of beaten out kindness. But then, maybe there was something familiar in it. Will jogged to catch up, still musing over it. Gwendolyn padded behind, soft on the ground.

Downtown was quiet, eerily so, with chill breezes cutting through their jackets and nipping their noses. It had started snowing, soft and not sticking but swirling through the breeze onto their hair. Gwendolyn bounded off, chasing snowflakes and wagging her tail in precious joy. Will was bundled up in his coat, but Monty was still in just his flannel somehow, baseball bat slung over his shoulder and glancing about with trepidation. Will watched him in his peripheral vision, hand lazy against his gun.

A gunshot, then, sudden and explosive in his ear, and a bullet screamed by an inch from Will’s face. He stumbled back on instinct, feet crunching in the frosty grass as he stumbled back and turned, pulling his gun out and pointing it at where the bullet had come from, but the shooter had leapt forward past him and grabbed Monty, a knife against the man’s throat before Will could so much as click the safety off.

Will trained his gun on the assailant’s face, breathing heavily and squinting through the swirling snow before realizing he knew this person. Black hooded jacket and cargo pants, machine gun strapped to their back, but there was no mistaking her.

“...Morella?” he asked, not wanting to believe it. She looked up, a cloth covering the bottom half of her face and hair in a braid under her hood, but there was no rival to those blue, blue eyes.

“Am I?” Her voice was gravelly somehow, and she sounded like she’d aged a decade since last they’d seen her, and yet it was her as sure as the stubborn drops of blood on his boots that the creek couldn’t scrub off.

“I- it’s me, Will, from school-”

“-fuck’re you doin, ginger, let me go,” Monty grunted at the same time, wriggling in her grip but she twisted his arms behind him and gripped him deftly in place as though it was no effort. Will shot Monty a glare before he could stop himself.

“Oh I know who you are,” Morella muttered, and her voice was low and dangerous. She turned the knife to press the curve of the blade closer to Monty’s jugular, almost lazy in the slow drag of it. Glittering snowflakes drifted onto her head, crowning her in tiny jewels. “None other than Montresor Faust. The boy who disappeared and came back with the end of the world in tow.” The last bit she hissed into his ear, and Monty was gasping shallow breaths, unable to even speak without cutting his throat.

“No- listen, that wasn’t his fault-” Blue eyes flicked to his.

“Shut up, Will.” Morella said it simply, voice empty of all emotion, could even be described as light if not for the circumstance. “I wondered how long it would take, for you to fall back to your old ways. But now, did you ever really leave them? I’d be doing us both a favor, if I slit his throat right here and now.”

“I-” Will stopped short, silence swirling between them with the snow. The wind picked up, pulling cold fingers through hair and trailing over shoulders, featherlight yet cutting as it swirled white between them.

“...what happened to you?” Will almost forgot about Monty, for a moment, more entranced with the woman who’d always been timid, frail, honestly pathetic in how much of a people-pleaser she was, now easily overpowering them both with Monty’s life in her hands as fragile as the first snowdrop of the season. Pinched in fingers careless, but not childlike.

“A lot of things.” Her voice was cruel and deep, but still held her familiar lilt. It was chilling, to hear the same joyful quirk of the girl that bagged his groceries from the woman with a knife to Monty’s throat. “Not the least of which is accredited to your dear, dear idol here.”

“B-but, is the apocalypse really his fault? I mean- it would’ve gotten here anyway.” Will reasoned, blinking snowflakes and confusion from his eyes as one. The snow was picking up, gusts of wind buffeting him but he was frozen to the earth as though he’d grown roots there.

“Maybe so, but don’t pretend that’s the only thing he’s done.” At Will’s confusion, her eyes narrowed and her hand tightened on the handle of her blade. “You know. You saw it closer than anyone. How she starved herself to catch any passing glance, how everyone else fell by the wayside.”

Will’s breath caught in his throat. He did know. And the truth was, it was Monty’s doing. Will had seen it, even through the blind eye he turned in high school it was hard not to notice the way Monty’s hands traced Ada’s waist and pinched her thighs, the way crimson shame rose in her face and she gradually ate less and less and less.

And after Monty left, Will found her shattered, out of habit hardly able to swallow half a meal without upending her stomach into a toilet. He remembered holding her hair out of her face as she retched, rubbing circles into her back and helping her get back into eating real meals, kissing up her stretch marks and telling her over and over and over how pretty she was.

She was far from healed. Even after three years she measured her waist in the mirror and devoured tabloid after tabloid about how to lose weight, and even if it wasn’t Monty anymore Will remembered how she’d cried the first time he saw her body, how she’d hit herself with shaking hands and called herself a cow and a hussy, how she flinched away from his hands on her waist and sobbed and heaved every time he touched her gently.

“Do you know where she is?” The question shocked all three of them, Monty’s eyes widening with something that could’ve been hurt before sharpening into familiar anger, but Will simply didn’t bring himself to give a shit, looking at Morella and Monty alike down the barrel of his gun. Snowflakes melted slow on his knuckles and not for the first time cold was the only thing he could feel.

“….why?” Morella asked. “I know how you two were, always fighting over… this-” She tipped her head to indicate the man whose life she held so carelessly pinched between forefinger and thumb. “You finally got what you wanted, why are you even bothering?”

“I…” He wasn’t sure. But he remembered Ada’s weight on his chest, the smell of her perfume, the taste of her tears, and his chest ached for anything other than frost. “Do you know?” He looked at her and she must have seen something real in there, because the ice of her eyes softened slightly.

“...she’s with Lenore, I saw them going into the autoparts store. I think that’s where their base is.” The information was offered begrudgingly, but relief poured through Will’s body like hot water over dusty chamomile. Ada was alive. Ada was alive. Ada was alive.

“But I don’t want this one near her. Ever again.” The harshness returned to her voice and she restrengthened the grip on her knife handle, corners of her eyes crinkling in something like mirth at the choked little whimper Monty made against the pointed edge.

“Will you let him go?”

“Why should I?” But he saw weakness there, a tiny hesitance, maybe a shred of regret or the last dregs of innocence from before. He latched onto it, barbed teeth sinking deep.

“I can give you supplies! Food, a sleeping bag, whatever you want. You don’t have to be a killer.” Threading a small plea into his voice, praying for her pity with his gun still trained on her face through the tearing gusts of cold.

“Hm.” Bated breath in Will’s throat, the fate of his world at stake but could it really matter less in the end? “I guess he’s worth less. Give me whatever you have.” She acted impassive but there may have been a hint of relief underneath. Will lowered his gun cautiously, quickly unpacked and passed over about half the food in his pack, and she shoved Monty towards him unhurt but for a shallow little scrape across his throat from where he’d breathed a bit too hard against her blade.

“Fuck you, ginger, the fuck d’you think yer doin??” He fell in the mud, slipping in the sheen of snow and scrabbling madly at Will to climb back upright, gasping out half-formed threats with empty lungs, Will tugging at his elbow in caution trying to keep him from doing something stupid, Morella laughing but before Will could stop him Monty screamed out “Killing me won’t make her forgive you.”

Everything stilled. Any camera lens watching would’ve cracked, nothing moved but for Monty’s heaving chest, the swirling snow, and the ice breeze cutting through Will’s jacket. Morella’s face went slack, eyes unreadable and knife limp in her hand next to her, and Will’s fingers froze in Monty’s sleeve.

Ada never talked about Morella. It was a sore subject, an elephant in the room, like Monty except not even being blackout drunk cracked her. Will was used to ignoring things, ignoring people, ignoring matching scars and black eyes and the taste of whiskey-stained lips like asphodel pomegranate, but he’d have to be an idiot not to notice the strangeness in the way Ada looked at the ginger. He held the shape of every expression in a small corner of his mind and tried to fit the tiny shards together when he stared at the ceiling at night.

Pained glances green to fiery red, bible in her car, the dusty knit sweaters in her closet, body count of three but never telling who the third was, Will had thought he half understood but this was new, this was unexpected, and his eyes flashed to Morella to see how she would react, and his heart dropped to his shoes as he saw the thin silver chain she was pulling from under her shirt.

Over one finger, two others curled around it, she lifted two slim silver rings, innocuous but unmistakable hanging over her heart. Purity rings. The ring Ada ‘lost’ about seven years ago. She held them in the air for a moment, looking Monty level and harsh in the eyes and the weak sunlight flashed as they spun, before tucking them back under her shirt. She twirled the knife in her hand.

“Don’t let me see you again. For your sake.” Before Will could think much less react, Morella had leaned back and thrown her knife straight into Monty’s thigh. He screamed in pain, collapsing onto Will and jostling him as he dragged him down, Will attempted to get his gun trained on Morella again but she was running away, just a smirk and a blur of black fabric through mists of harsh white blurring and whipping through the air.

He shot at her ankle in three harsh bangs but she rounded a corner and it was too far to see if it landed- she was gone and Will grimaced and looked at Monty’s wound. It was a small knife, but buried to the hilt in Monty’s inner thigh and even with the medicine in his pack Will was worried but shit there were tendrils of green crawling around the corner and the beginnings of the horde were starting to shamble towards them, not fast but all-consuming.

They were far more decayed than the last time Will had seen them, whole trees growing from spines and black raspberries and pokeberries bejeweling them in strings. Out of season flowers spiraled out of eye sockets and it was pretty, almost, crowned in crystalline snow, but somewhere under the explosion of greenery and color there were blackened husks of flesh shriveled around bone, organs hanging out still fresh and as of yet untouched by the cloying, clawing, crawling roots.

Will whistled for Gwendolyn, frantically pulling his pack on and slinging Monty’s arm over his shoulder to drag him away. Monty groaned at the pain, and Will’s heart rate must’ve spiked through his skull at the sound he made, missing his holster and wasting precious seconds as he fumbled to shove the gun back in. He grabbed Monty by the back of his knees and hoisted him into a bridal carry, ignoring any complaints as Gwendolyn ran up next to him and he started forging in earnest for the church.

To call it a chase may have been a stretch: neither Will nor the horde was fast, Will gasping for breath as he jogged as fast as he could under Monty’s weight. Memory tore at his hair with the icy fingers of the breeze and the snow combing harsh through his hair and he remembered slinging Monty’s scrawny skinny body on his back or over his shoulder as a kid, how Monty hissed and beat at his back with tiny fists and how light he was, lighter than any kid should be.

Well, he certainly wasn’t light anymore, and as inconvenient as that was for running away from a horde of infected, Will’s heart still filled with something soft and sappy because he was finally healthy. And that was probably pathetic, wasn’t it, but he adjusted his hold on Monty’s complaining and redoubled his speed.

“Are you sure about this?” Will gasped out, running past Gwendolyn as she stopped in her tracks to crouch growling at the horde. The snow was thick white in the air and it was hard to see the way, but his feet beat down memory lane as he took the path of every Sunday for eighteen years, town devil child in tow.

“It’s closest, just go,” Monty grunted, looking over Will’s shoulder at Gwendolyn. “Don’t touch em, girl!” He yelled back at her, Will rounding a corner and finally getting to the church doors, putting Monty down as fast as he could without throwing him and jiggling the doorknobs, bruising his shoulder on the heavy wooden doors to no avail before Monty knocked over a planter and grabbed a key from under it, unlocking the doors and Will toppled in, whistling frenzied for Gwendolyn who just barely slipped through before Monty and Will slammed the doors shut.

He latched it but couldn’t take more than a breath’s rest before Monty was stumbling, collapsing onto him and Will almost fell, Gwendolyn circling and sniffing at them but Monty pushed her face away with a groan. Will lifted him up again, not sure where to take him so just rushing him up to the nicest raised surface, only realizing once he’d set the man down that he’d placed him on the altar.

But the blood was thick and congealing and there was no time to find another place to work: the pews were too short and the bed too far, and Gwendolyn whined her concern but Will shooed her off with a soft palm to her snout. He moved Monty’s legs apart gingerly, chewing his lip raw when he noted how the knife had embedded on the inside of his thigh, not especially high up but in a delicate location to be sure. His stalling could be lethal, however, so before he could get too into his head Will reached to undo Monty’s belt, getting the buckle undone before Monty grasped harsh at his wrist.

“Wh-what- the hell’re you doing?” His voice shook, and as he looked up confused Will noticed he was scared. Eyes blown wide as a child, hand vicelike in its grip on his wrist, clutching hard enough to break, Monty was scared. And wasn’t that a sight to see. Will let go, slowly and carefully, edging past a rabid dog in his mind, and Monty let go of his wrist slowly as though he was sad to.

He pulled his knife from his belt, instead, and started cutting the jeans apart gently around the wound, trying his best not to nick Monty, who was making choked noises of pain. The knife in the wound had kept it from bleeding too hard, but every movement would dig the blade in deeper, and there was no healing with it in there. He didn’t want to just pull it out without a plan, and he had a dim memory of there being some kind of artery in a thigh that might be fatal had it been pierced. Morella’s blade was short, he recalled, so it probably wasn’t the deepest it could’ve been. But, as for infection…

Will got up to check the shelves behind the altar, but Monty’s hand grasped his wrist again, harsh and heated and callused.

“Where-?”

“It’s alright, I’ll be right back,” Will soothed. And Monty was bled so dry that his woozy eyes almost softened. Will shook the kicked-puppy look from his head and rifled through the cabinet, coming up aces with several bottles of communion wine. The nectar of his childhood, he reminisced, and as he tore out the cork it felt like coming home.

Monty screamed as he poured the wine over his wound, a sound ripped from the very fiber of his being, thrashing and writhing like a man possessed as the liquid poured over and into his sinful flesh, and as Will wrapped a hand around the handle of the knife and tore it out he couldn’t help but recall the verse of baptism, not sure how he even remembered the words but they rang through his mind and bubbled from his mouth before he could choke them back: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teach them to observe all that I have commanded you;” Blood gushed from the now-open wound but the alcohol poured into and through it, mixing until one couldn’t tell where the flesh ended and the altar began, Will gently cupping the wound closed without touching it to staunch the bleeding. “And lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

He left Monty on the altar gasping and screaming and drenched in wine, rummaged through his bag and came out with needle and thread, pressed them into Monty’s shaking hands and lifted the candle from behind him on the altar and lit it with a slow press of his lighter, lighting all the candles around the pulpit in slow reverence before sliding on top of it behind his lord, resting his chin on Monty’s shoulder, chest curled against his back and feeling his spine ragged against his stomach in every shaking breath. He took Monty’s shaking wrists gently from behind him, small soft hands spread over calluses and puppeting him soft yet strong as he reached with him for the largest candle and guided the needle into the flame. Metal burning red hot as anger and Will forced his puppet to hold it with blistering hands to which the puppeteer gave little care as he threaded it with red.

It was a trancelike state, this string-pulling dance of marionette and master. Will had no earthly clue how to sew a wound but somewhere in him the movements were second nature, fingers probing and pressing and pulling needle and flesh alike through Monty’s hands, and Monty screamed like a prayer when the needle pressed burning hot into his flesh for the first time. Tears pouring sticky and salty from deep black eyes as he sobbed, but Will offered no mercy as he forced the man to continue to sew through his own flesh, bleeding and blistering but at his own hands. Will knew the feeling, all the times Monty had driven him to slice and carve and stab himself, and he took a visceral pleasure in guiding now those tremulous callused hands that so much misery wrought: over and into sinful flesh, a dance of sadism and righteous tears and despite himself Will was humming that familiar haunting tune:

“There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins…” Monty sobbed and it caught in his throat, harsh and phlegmy and raw. Will pressed his hand back towards his thigh. “And sinners plunged beneath that flood, lose all their filthy stains…” He was crooning the tune into Monty’s ear, sandy hair against his face and muscular shoulder against his chin, hands keeping Monty on track as he sobbed and sewed into himself, against himself.

“Why are you doing this?” Monty whimpered, quiet and cowed like a child, but Will shushed him in a gentle breeze, tucking back his hair behind his ear with bloodstained fingers combing through soft flax. Monty’s face was turned away from him, but he could see the glittering black of his eyes and saw tears dripping, sparkling, from his chin and into the wound.

“Shhhhhhhh, don’t worry, you’ll feel better after,” Will soothed, draped over him and thumbing a tear from his cheek. “Don’t feel bad, you know the words… won’t the work go faster? Sing with me.” Montresor did nothing but snivel, so Will did it for him, taking his hand once more grasped hard about his wrist and reverent guiding him to the thread, all the while singing, “Lose all their guilty stains, lose all their guilty stains… and sinners plunged beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains…” Two stitches in, the wine and blood congealing over their hands and forming them in one, and Will marveled at the crimson beauty of it as he lifted the needle once more to flame, humming the familiar melody as he helped him position it for another stitch.

“The dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day,” Will murmured, focused on keeping Monty’s shaking hands still as he pulled the needle once more through flesh. Monty joined him in singing, voice small and warbling: “And there may I, though vile as he, wash all my sins away, wash all my sins away…” Will let Monty finish the refrain, gently checking the wound.

“Look, just a couple more, you’re doing great,” Will hummed, pressing his forehead brief as a blessing against the flesh of his shoulder. Monty’s breaths were ragged and his spine swaying as he finished off the verse, and Will repositioned his shaking hands to pull the thread the rest of the way through. He hummed the tune into the side of Monty’s neck, smelling of sweat and wine and the dirt of the forest floor.

“Dear dying Lamb…” Monty flinched, convulsing in Will’s arms and attempting to jerk away, but Will dug his thumbs into Monty’s wrists to keep him still, forcing his defiant hands slow and steady to line up the next stitch. “Thy precious blood shall never lose its power, Till all the ransomed ones of God Be saved, to sin no more: Be saved to sin no more, Be saved, to sin… no more…” Monty was pulling against Will’s hands, choking raw sounds and aborted screams out of a torn throat and trying desperate to drop the needle, but Will gripped him tight and pressed his teeth into his throat in warning. Monty went still, breath bobbing against Will’s teeth, and right over his vein he pressed lightly into the flesh, relishing the choked whimper.

Monty’s hands stilled, and Will lifted off his throat and returned to his work, softly singing the rest of the verse: “Till all the ransomed ones of God Be saved, to sin no more.” He held the needle into the candle once more, humming into Monty’s shoulder and with no real feeling watching skin blister and bubble and tears drip into the wound.

One more stitch, and as he nudged the needle burning hot once more against flesh he heard a warbling, choking voice forcing out the beginning of the next verse: “E’er since by faith I saw the stream, Thy flowing wounds supply…” With his thumb Will stroked the back of those bloody, blistered knuckles, singing along with him.

“Redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be till I die, and shall be till I die, and shall be till I die. Redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be till I die.” Monty finished the verse with a gasp, as though it bit into him just to say it, and Will swept reverent a thumb across his knuckles and forced the needle into flesh for the last stitch.

And as Monty screamed and cried, Will released his hands and reached to comb bloody fingers through his soft hair, thumbing away tears and crooning softly:

“When this poor lisping, stammering tongue

Lies silent in the grave,

Then in a nobler, sweeter song,

I’ll sing Thy power to save:

I’ll sing Thy power to save,

I’ll sing Thy power to save;

Then in a nobler, sweeter song,

I’ll sing Thy power to save.”

Chapter Text

Monty had fainted, there on the altar, and Will had to tie off the stitches by himself, clumsily as best he could. He cleaned the wound again, using wine and holy water with some excess salt since that was all the church appeared to have. Dressing the wound of a sinning man collapsed on an altar in a circle of melting wax, it felt a bit like sacrifice.

Knelt there wiping clean the wound he cast out with his mind and beseeched in soft murmurs for forgiveness, for blessing, for help. As always he heard nothing for his prayers, and as always he sighed out a breath through his mouth and uttered a soft “Amen.”

Monty woke up when Will was carrying him to the back of the house, where his family had lived. Groaning as his pretty eyes fluttered open and Will looked down with the softest expression he could muster. Monty’s eyes flashed with fear at the sight of him, and his whole body flinched at the touches on him, convulsing and shaking and Will set him gently down and watched as he leaned heavy against a wall and gasped for breath.

“Wh-why-” He turned to Will as though to round on him but something in Will made him stagger back, eyes blown wide and Will’s mind was numb and he simply stood and watched him with a tilted head. Monty gasped out a few more breaths, grasping at his throat and pressing his thumb into the vein Will had held his teeth over.

“Where’s the- where’s the rest of that wine?” He gasped finally, looking up with something primal and posturing and scared in his eyes.

“Under the altar. But we should really clean you up first, you’re filthy,” Will explained with no real feeling in the words, but at the word filthy Monty flinched, harsh movement through his spine.

“I-” He looked to be floundering, eyes darting all over the room, looking at anything except Will. “F-fine, I’ll be in the tub but- bring the wine to me. Bitch.” At the last word his eyes flicked up to Will’s with something almost like trepidation.

“Of course.” Monty scrambled back like a rabbit let loose from a snare, desperate and zigzagging and fleeing desperate in the eyeline of the predator, limping and grasping at walls to keep himself upright and Will traced the curve of his legs with his eyes and thought he was beautiful.

The water was still miraculously running clear, though it was probably just the last thinning dregs from a pump, and when Will entered the bathroom, tiled and floral and beautiful, far more beautiful than anything else in this thrice-damned place, Monty was sprawled in a claw-footed tub, clear water turning red as it poured over him. He’d kept his boxers and cross necklace on, but was naked besides, and Will sat on the tiles next to him and tried not to stare at the scars and ink dappling his body.

Monty grabbed one of the bottles from him and pulled the cork, cocking his head back to drain it. Will sat and watched him, for a bit, eyes lingering on his bobbing throat and bloody hair and the tattoos patterning him.

A bleeding knife on his upper arm, a snarling wolf over his shoulder and down his back, a lamb curling dead and rotting across his hip and bleeding down past his waist to touch his thighs, flesh rotted away from ribs and small flies dotting it. All of them were uniquely grotesque, but beautiful too, and the wolf and lamb stretched towards each other, gore on the wolf’s maw and lamb’s eyes closed and long-lashed, head bent in supplication.

The tattoos were huge, intricate, and likely took a long time to finish. Will wondered as he stared at them what artist had done them, how much money they’d cost. Monty must’ve trusted the artist a lot, he knew, to let them work so long and intricately over his body. And there was a twinge of jealousy in the fact that Will had never been trusted like that. Never would be.

Monty tossed aside a drained bottle with a groan, and Will jolted out of his reverie. He set down the bottles for him and went to find a washcloth and some soap, returning and kneeling behind Monty’s head, asking gently if it was alright to touch him.

“Ohhh, can it,” Monty drawled, throwing his head back and staring up at Will with empty, hollow eyes. “Sss’not like you give a fuck what I want.” Will blinked at him, empty.

“Is it alright?” he simply asked again. Monty pulled himself to sit up, tugging at his necklace like it itched and turning his puffy face away.

“Sure,” he muttered, grasping for another bottle of wine and exposing his back. Will looked sadly at the scars, striping across him like an asterisk, a few cigarette burns dotted across him. Soaping the cloth he began to clean him, soft and slow as he flinched, careful over the back of the wolf and lifting Monty’s hair to get the back of his neck, and as he massaged gently his spine he felt him sigh, unwind a bit maybe. He checked the wound in his thigh, careful in cleaning it for a multitude of reasons and telling Monty in a soft mumble not to pick at or scratch the stitches.

The silence sprawled wide and yawning between them, and Will had to bite his lip into blood to keep from humming more hymns. It was habit, in this building, all the years of choir sewn through his bones, all the years of stifling quiet but for the drone of the preacher and the music of singing children, from his own throat.

He hadn’t sung in years, not really, just drunk screaming to the corroded CDs in Ada’s car and occasional mumbled lullabies when he found himself babysitting as a favor to some family friends (not the worst job, but he could never look a child in the eye lest he grow too attached and never set it down). But now, here, the half-remembered hymns sung so much in his youth that the shape of them remained carved in his throat returned, bubbling up from his lungs and fighting to get out.

Monty leaned back again with his wine, looking up at Will buzzed and empty and Will cleaned his face gently, swiping thumbs under his eyes and dipping his bloody hair in the water, kneading through it gentle with his fingers and so lost in the work he almost missed the contented sigh. Thick eyelashes fanning across tan cheeks as Monty closed his eyes and relaxed, holding loose his bottle as Will kneaded shampoo through his hair.

Will’s thumbs dragged from Monty’s temples to the base of his neck and for a moment the fleeting thought passed through him that he could snap his neck right now. Montresor Faust had lowered his walls and it could be the last thing he ever did. But it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t, he wouldn’t. Will loved Monty, he did, he did, he always had. Without Monty he was nothing, he knew that, he knew that. His hands shook over Monty’s head, posed like a crown over red-stained hair and he reminded himself that he was nothing. He was nothing and Monty was everything and tears dripped numb from wide-open eyes onto a sinner’s forehead. Baptism.