It All Falls Apart In The Shadows Of The Past

[Gundham]

The nursery. This used to be her room, right next to Mom and Dad’s. But now she has to sleep across the hall.

Misha looks down at the crib. There’s a thing in there. Her brother, that’s what Mom and Dad say. She’s a big sister now. She’s going to help take care of him.

The thing in the crib doesn’t look anything like her. It’s got a bulbous head and its skin is pale and white. It balls up tiny fists and shrieks, so loudly that she has to plug her ears.

“I don’t like that thing,” she tells Mom and Dad. They frown at her. Then their expressions soften, and Dad pats her on the head. He tells Mom that Misha will get over it eventually. Siblings are always like this.

Misha won’t get over it, she tells herself. She’s going to have to share her toys and her house and her parents with this little blobby thing. It’s not fair. She glares balefully at the crib.

That white thing came out of nowhere and ruined everything.

=-=-=

The living room. Dora the Explorer is on. Misha likes Dora, but she never answers her questions because she figured out a long time ago that Dora would just keep right on truckin’ whether Misha said anything or not. Misha’s not paying attention to Dora right now, because her Dad has just come home and proudly announced that they’ll be getting a new car to replace their current one.

“I like our car, though,” Misha says, pouting. “It’s still good! It’s not even crashed or anything.” One of the kids in her class had had to get a new car after their father had been in a major fender bender. This is, in Misha’s view, the natural and proper way for cars to die.

“Well, sweetie, that’s just how it is sometimes. Sometimes something is good for a little while, but then you want something different. That’s just a part of life.”

Misha doesn’t like the sound of that. She likes the little Nissan Stanza that they drive. She’s used to seeing it in the driveway, looking out for it when Mom or Dad comes to pick her up from school. She imagines it sitting alone in the junkyard, with tears streaming from its headlights, wondering why their family doesn’t love it anymore. Her lower lip trembles. “I… I don’t want a new car!”

Dad reaches over and tousles Misha’s hair. “Hey, hey… Don’t worry, kiddo. The new one will be much better.”

Misha doubts this, and is about to say so. But Donovan drops his toy and begins to cry. Mom and Mom both turn and rush over to soothe him. They always do that.

The next day, Misha watches from the window as a grouchy-looking old man pulls up in a tow truck. The hook sways ominously. It’s vicious and curved, and dark red rust coats it like blood. The little Nissan is strung up in a trice. It looks unnatural at that angle, like a hooked fish. Its tires dangle helplessly. The tow truck man doesn’t look nice. He looks mean and scary, and he uses swear words as he jockeys the Nissan into position. He’s not going to be nice to the car, she thinks. He’s going to hurt it. The poor, poor car. It didn’t do anything wrong. Then the man slams the door of his truck and lights a cigarette before driving off. Misha waves a slow goodbye to the Nissan as it’s dragged away, doing her best not to cry.

Dad pulls up a few hours later, in a brand-new scarlet Ford Expedition. He jumps out, smiling ear to ear, and gets Mom to bring Misha and Donovan out to have a look.

“American made,” Dad says, patting the hood as though he’d assembled the vehicle himself. “Can’t beat that.”

Misha sticks her head in, and takes a whiff. It smells like rubber and chemicals, and the seats feel hard and tacky. The smell is terrible, and it makes her stomach hurt.

Her stomach hurts really bad.

=-=-=

In the hospital. Her laptop is on Donovan’s beside table. The Yeager siblings are watching My Hero Academia on Crunchyroll. Mom is off somewhere, getting a coffee or something. She does that sometimes. She gets a black coffee, and dumps in a ton of cream and sugar herself because she doesn’t trust the cafeteria workers to get it right. Then she wanders the hospital hallways like a zombie, sipping and worrying. She doesn’t want Donovan to see her like that, but he knows. Mom’s not good at masking her fear.

Time moves differently here. Hospital rooms are like that, when you’re in for a long stay. The minutes and hours creep by slowly, long yawning intervals of time occasionally interrupted by nurses bringing bland meals or running painful tests, and after a while it’s hard to say which is worse.

Crunchyroll makes the wait a bit more bearable, but Misha still swears that they can watch five episodes of MHA and only half an hour will have passed.

They’re watching the third season, the forest training camp arc. Momo’s in the hospital, after getting attacked by the Chainsaw Nomu. She sits up, with bandages around her head.

“Hey, she kinda looks like you,” Misha says. It’s just an innocent joke, something to fill the silence with.

A few seconds pass by.

“You know, Momo really reminds me of you,” Donovan replies.

Misha is flattered. This is the nicest thing that Donovan has ever said to her. Momo is a total badass, she’s super smart, and she’s really creative with her quirks. And she’s pretty hot. Not that Misha’s actually been, you know, looking, or anything. In fact, Misha’s never told anybody this, but her new dreadlocked hairstyle was partially done as an imitation of Momo. She’s Misha’s favorite anime character.

But then Donovan keeps talking. “Except she’s smart, and she’s got boobs.”

“WHAT?” Misha goes as red as Creati’s leotard.

Donovan points. “Yeah, she’s a genius. And she’s super stacked.” Then he points at Misha. “You’ve got no boobs at all.”

What the fuck? Where did that come from!? The words “Fuck you” bubble up, and Misha gnashes her teeth to stop from blurting it out. She wants to slap his stupid face.

He notices her anger. “What? It’s true. All the guys at school say it. That’s why Corey dumped you.”

This time she doesn’t catch herself fast enough. “Fuck you!” She stands up and slaps the laptop closed, hard enough that she’s afraid she might have cracked the screen. “I dumped HIM, for your information!” she yells.

“Misha!”

Her mother is standing in the doorway. Misha has no idea how long she’s been there, how much she’s heard. Doesn’t care, because it’s not like she’ll listen anyway. She’ll take his side, she always takes his fucking side. Her throat catches and she blurts, “Get out of the way,” before pushing past and storming down the hallway with the laptop tucked under her arm.

Some time later, Mom finds her in the cafeteria, surrounded by a crescent of wadded-up tear-stained napkins.

“Oh, sweetie…”

Mom hugs her. The embrace is soft and warm and comforting. It’s everything she wants. Everything she’s wanted for a long time.

But then her mother starts to talk. “He didn’t mean it,” her mother says, on the verge of tears. “It’s not him, saying those things. He’s just… he’s sick. That’s all.”

Of course. It wasn’t Donovan, saying those things. It was the tumor. A big blob of dead cells, pushing and pulling on his brain, and making him into something else. She’s not allowed to be mad at him, because it’s not his fault. Misha just leans into the hug and says nothing. But there’s a lot she wants to say.

It’s not fair. It’s not her fault that this is happening. She doesn’t deserve this.

=-=-=

A ceiling. Those old spongy ceiling tiles with the holes in, with water stains on some of them. Dark, because the curtains are drawn. Misha’s flat on her back, her head sinking into the pillow as she gasps for breath. Her boyfriend, Kyle, has just rolled off of her, and he’s breathing heavily too.

“That was…” she says, and then blanks. Her mind is still white hot. “...Awesome.”

“Yeah,” he says, grinning. Then he gets kind of a sneaky look on his face. It makes Misha suspicious. He knows better than to say what he says next, but he says it anyway. Because that’s the kind of guy Kyle is. He says the words that will cause a fight, and that lead to an angry, shouting breakup.

“I’ve always wanted to do it with an Asian chick.”

…Wait, was it Kyle that this happened with? Or was Kyle the one she broke up with because he told her that she wasn’t ‘allowed’ to like video games the same way guys did? Or the one who thought she was half Jamaican because of her dreadlocks? Maybe this one was Corey. Truth be told, there have been a fair few guys during this time in Misha’s life. They all kind of blend together. They don’t mean anything, individually. But they mean something collectively, because Misha is lonely. She just needs someone, anyone, to validate her. A series of meaningless anyones, one after the other, is the best she can manage.

That stupid comment of Donovan’s, the one that made her rip Momo off of the sticker on her laptop, lives rent-free in her head. It shouldn’t, but it does. Every time she does this, she proves him wrong. Because it means that someone wants her. And she is wanted, at least by a certain class of guy. The kind of guy who feeds on that kind of desperation, the kind of guy who senses that there’s something in her that they can prey on. But it hurts her more than it helps. She should have learned after the first one, but she can’t see it right away. It takes a while for her to sense the pattern. Too long. Way too many of those guys.

It took way too long for her to come to her senses.

=-=-=

After the funeral. The awkward part, when everybody has lunch and commiserates over stale cucumber sandwiches. Misha’s looking down at her knees, the fabric of her black dress.

She’s supposed to go socialize with everybody else, but she doesn’t. Because she already knows what they’ll say. They’ll say Donovan was a great kid, that he was so full of life, that he was brave right up until the end. They’ll say how many lives he touched, how inspiring he was. The kind of things people say when they’ve watched too many Hallmark movies.

People are talking behind her, at another table. Someone says that this was a mercy, if you think about it. It’s good that his suffering is finally done.

Misha knows that this is a lie. She knows that Donovan wasn’t ready to die. He hated being in the hospital, he hated the food, and the tests, and the endless, monotonous waiting. He didn’t want to keep on living the way he was living, but that didn’t mean that he wanted to stop. He wanted to go back to how things used to be, back when he was healthy and his whole world consisted of more than a starchy hospital bed and a pallid curtain. But as much as Donovan hated that hospital room, Misha knows that he would still be there if he had the choice. He’d still live every miserable day, watch every episode of My Hero Academia until he could rattle the entire series off by memory, if it meant that he could stay alive.

She knows this because the last time she saw him, before he really started to spiral and she refused to go back and see him like that, she’d seen it in his face. He wasn’t lucid, a lot of the time. But Mom had been out getting coffee again, and he’d woken up. He’d looked at her like she was a stranger, and then he’d begged her, pleaded with her, to take him home. She’d seen the fear in his eyes, the sheer desperation behind that soft, fragile plea. When Mom came back, Misha left. She’d never gone back after that.

So she sits at the funeral and she stares at her thighs and she doesn’t eat any of the cucumber sandwiches. All around her, people talk about Donovan and about how bravely he’d stared down Death.

But it wasn’t like that.

=-=-=

The bathroom in her dorm. Looking at her medication bottle. Not wanting to take the pills. Not wanting to get better. Because it was hard to be sick, but it was harder to be healthy. Because when you were sick, it was easy for other people to be charitable. When you were healthy, then you had no excuses. You didn’t fail because you were sick, you failed because you were weak, or because you were dumb, or because you just didn’t have what it took.

It was hard to want to get better, because life was better when she was sick. She mattered when she was sick. Getting better took away all of her excuses and all of her sympathy, it took away everything that made her special. She was like a beach when the tide was going out. The medicine would wash up and flood everything inside of her, and then it’d withdraw, taking away the sickness and the pain with it. But it’d take other things, too. And when the tide was gone and everything was laid bare, she didn’t know what would be left. Because… what was the disease, and was her? Which were the real feelings, the real emotions, and what was just the Graves in her head, fucking her up from inside? How was she supposed to deal with that?

Donovan, she thinks, doesn’t have to deal with any of that. He can say whatever he wants, be whoever he wants, and he has an infinite supply of excuses, a tide that’ll never run dry. And she’s so fucking jealous of him. She’s jealous of a kid with a brain tumor, because she can’t handle the weight of being responsible for her own behavior, because she’d rather stare down death than stare down life. How are you supposed to deal with the fact that you’re that shitty as a person?

No, wait, this is wrong. Donovan is dead and buried by this point. She won’t have gotten the diagnosis, much less the medication, until after he dies. He’s dead. Was dead. Has been dead for a long time. So why is she thinking about him in the present tense?

She didn’t want to think about the present.

=-=-=

In bed, at night. She’s drunk - it’s still a new thing for her, now that the Graves is gone, and she hasn’t figured out how to shut off the oversharing yet - so she types out a long, rambling text message to Tess. Tells her about the Graves, about her body’s autoimmune system going haywire and trying to kill itself. She thinks it’s funny, in the moment. Hysterical, that her body hates itself so much that it wants to die. Tess types and deletes and types and deletes, and eventually responds, “Ur looking at it wrong.”

Tess follows it up with a long, rambling text full of typos and incorrect punctuation. Misha’s body, Tess tells her, wasn’t trying to kill itself. It was fighting, with everything it had, to stay alive. Her body desperately wanted to live, and it was struggling so hard that it panicked, and it couldn’t stop fighting because it refused to give up.

No, that last line wasn’t Tess. That was one that Misha made up, when she was drawing this up as a comic. Tess’ texts hadn’t been quite that elegant, so she’d had to make edits, make the whole thing sound more profound. What had she written again? It was something like, her body was like a warrior in the heat of battle, hacking and slashing at so many enemies that it couldn’t stop, couldn’t snap out of the bloodlust long enough to realize that the people she was cutting down were her friends and allies trying to tell her that the enemies were dead and the fight was over. Her body didn’t want to die. It wanted to live, and that desire burned so brightly that it was destroying her. Yeah, that was it.

She wants to live.

=-=-=

Sitting at her desk. Night time. Misha’s listening to a comedy album while drawing her comics. It helps her focus, makes her funnier. At least, she hopes it does. Mitch Hedberg, great comedian. He’s saying that alcoholism is a disease, but it’s the only disease that people will yell at you for having. People will say “Dammit, Otto, you’re an alcoholic!” but they won’t say “Dammit, Otto, you have lupus!” Mitch isn’t wrong. Mitch also isn’t alive, because of drugs and alcohol, which suggests that maybe he should have listened to the people who were yelling at him. He died young, with so much ahead of him. Misha should probably take note of that, especially given that there are two empty beer bottles on the desk next to her mouse hand. But she doesn’t. Misha likes drinking, no matter what people say.

People yell at her sometimes, the way they yelled at Mitch. They tell her she needs to stop this, that she’s only hurting herself. But it’s hard to quit a bad habit, and the worse the habit is, the harder it is to quit. Everybody tells you that you’ll die if you keep on doing what you’re doing, so you need to stop. But it hurts to stop. When you stop, you feel sick and you feel that longing and that temptation and it’s on your mind every single day. It feels like probing a cavity with your tongue, and feeling all the painful contours of that hollow space, but it’s not just a tooth, it’s your entire body. And your reward for depriving yourself is that you get to live until tomorrow, and you can deprive yourself again. Then you do it again, and again, and again. Every painful today is rewarded with a painful tomorrow, and it just stretches out like that forever, until eventually something else kills you. You can feel good for a little while or you can feel bad for a long time, and it’s hard to imagine that the second option is the better one. That’s why the programs tell you to take it one day at a time, because if you look at the big picture you’ll never, ever quit.

Misha has already looked at the big picture. Donovan’s death flung that particular curtain wide and peeled back her eyelids, forced her to look whether she wanted to or not. She thinks, at this point in her life, that she knows the big secret. Knows that death is really, truly coming for everybody. It’ll happen sooner or later, so you might as well enjoy the here and now. Misha, like everybody else, thinks that she’ll be a “later,” not a “sooner.” Mitch Hedberg probably thought that, too. But the overdose hit him out of nowhere, like a freight train.

It happened so fast. No one could have seen it coming.

=-=-=

Her birthday. Sparkly red wrapping paper in tatters on the floor.

“It’s… wonderful,” Misha says into the phone. Tess’ facial reaction says exactly what she thinks about Misha’s lying skills. But her parents make excited noises, so it was enough to fool them.

Tess got her a Steam card, so Misha could buy any games that she wanted. Tess is thoughtful like that. She doesn’t presume to know what Misha wants, so she lets Misha decide. Misha likes that about Tess. It’s one of the reasons they’re still together.

Her parents are a different story. They’ve never been good at this, and they’re in top form again this year. Misha looks at the large box on the coffee table, still partially covered in red wrapping paper. She really has no idea why her parents have bought her this. It’s a large portable DVD player with its own screen. It’s huge. The screen is the size of a laptop. It’s a device the size of a laptop, that can do about one one-hundredth of the things that a laptop can do. Her laptop has a DVD drive. This thing is totally redundant.

She asked her parents for a tablet, so that she could try drawing things by hand instead of having to do vector art in Inkscape. And somehow they misinterpreted that to mean this. This archaic, completely outdated machine. This is what they have gotten her for her birthday. She’ll use it once or twice, so she can text photographic proof to her parents that this was a fantastic gift. Then she’ll put it away and never use it again.

She doesn’t want the present. But it’s there all the same.

=-=-=

At Barrett’s, drinking. Elizabeth is there, looking beautiful, at the seat beside her. They aren’t talking yet. Not flirting. This is the night they met, but they haven’t done so yet. Misha is thinking and drinking, and thinking about drinking. Misha doesn’t think of herself as an alcoholic. Not like Mitch Hedberg. She thinks of herself as a social drinker who drinks alone. An antisocial drinker, if you will. She says that to Elizabeth, after they get talking. Elizabeth laughs until a little bit of beer comes out of her nose. It’s adorable.

No, wait. Elizabeth wasn’t there for this. They watched baseball that one time, and Misha hadn’t been nearly that clever. She’d been awkward and guilty, because flirting with other girls hadn’t come naturally to her. Who had she said that antisocial drinker line to? It was… someone. Same bar, but someone else. Someone she was too drunk to remember, so she’s pasted Elizabeth into the memory. Misha liked Elizabeth. Liked her a lot. It’s a shame that they never got beyond the occasional flirty text, never anything other than a reminder that there was something else out there if their relationships got too hard to handle. That’s why she’s been pasted into this memory, because Misha wishes that Elizabeth had been something more. At least, she thinks she does. It’s fuzzy, hard to remember what is and what was.

Everything is full of holes.

=-=-=

On the observation deck of the ship, looking at the ocean. In the evening sunlight, the waves turn a deep purple, then red. Misha’s thinking about that last call with her parents.

They wanted her to come home for Thanksgiving and see everybody. There are people who haven’t seen her since the funeral, they’d said, and people want to know how she’s doing, how she likes school, and all that. She made excuses about how tired they’d be from the trip, how much studying there’d be when she got back. Didn’t say no, but prefaced it hard enough to make it clear that there was nothing but no on the horizon.

There’s a really awful coda to tragedy, and it’s what it does to acquaintances - the people who are important enough to show up for the funeral, but don’t feature in the day-to-day afterwards. When you run into those people at the next wedding or reunion or bump into them on the street, the relationship hasn’t gone anywhere since the tragedy, and now that’s the only context they have for you. It’s awkward, because they know it, and you know it, and nobody wants to say anything about it, so it just looms and it hurts, and it drags you right back to that dark place, no matter how long it’s been.

That’s how it feels every time she sees her parents. That’s how it feels every time she even thinks about going home. That’s why she ran away to Cascadia, took up scholarship somewhere nobody would know her. That’s why she ran to Tess, who her parents hate. That’s why she’s still running away now, running halfway across the world, in hopes that it’ll finally be enough distance to leave behind all the things she doesn’t want to think about.

She tried to run away. But she hadn’t run fast enough.

=-=-=

It’s now. Sunlight, a blank sky overhead, fringed by treetops. Snow. Pain. So much pain.

Misha gasps. It’s hard to breathe. Nothing feels right.

Her stomach hurts really bad. She looks down. It’s all red and ragged down there. She can’t tell which of the torn bits are her coat and which are her insides.

That white thing came out of nowhere and ruined everything. They were just walking. Looking for Tess. Not hurting anybody. Not doing anything wrong. And that thing, that white thing, that nightmare, it just burst up out of the snow and… fuck…

She tried to run away. But she hadn’t run fast enough. As soon as she’d spotted it, she’d ditched Adam, run the opposite direction as fast as she could, internally screaming “Not me! Him! Take him! Take him!” while she fumbled with the lighter, trying to run and flick at the same time, the liquid sloshing angrily, and she’d barely managed to light it, and she turned back and it hadn’t gone after him, it’d chosen her, it wanted her, and…

It happened so fast. No one could have seen it coming. It was all fangs and claws and those horrible beady black eyes. She’d thrown her Molotov at it, but it just kept coming. She has no idea whether she’d even hit it or not. Not that it matters now.

It took way too long for her to come to her senses. She passed out, from the pain and the blood loss. It’s surprising that she woke up at all. Her body and her mind are crashing, all of the alarm bells are going off. Emergency! Emergency!

She wants to live. She wants to get up and run away, but her body isn’t working. She tries to find the strength, summon every last little spark of energy inside her to just get up off the ground. She just needs to get up, to go find Tess, and then they can… they can find someplace safe. They can hunker down together. They can figure it out. And if worst comes to worst… at least they’ll be together when they go. That’s how it should end. Not like this. This isn’t how it’s supposed to end.

It’s not fair. It’s not her fault that this is happening. She doesn’t deserve this. She isn’t a bad person, not really. She’s just… messed up, that’s all. She’s screwed up and broken, and she doesn’t know how to put the pieces of herself back together. She’s never been a good sister or a good daughter, never been a good girlfriend or a good student, or even a good person. She wanted to be, God knows, she wanted to be. But she always thought she’d have time to get there in the future, time to sort herself out and get it right. But time is running out. There’s no more future left.

She doesn’t want to think about the present. Her life is flashing before her eyes, just like they always say it does. All the memories, all these things that she thought she’d forgotten, coming back for one last encore. Like the last episode of a long-running TV series, where everybody comes back for the finale. The memories are speeding up now, blending into one another, the past hurtling towards the present at breakneck speed.

She doesn’t want the present. But it’s there all the same. The present, the right here and now, is her, in the blood-soaked snow, choking and sobbing and dying a thousand miles away from her parents and never getting to say goodbye. She wants the memories to last a little while longer, because she’s not ready to go. She thought for a long time that she was ready, that if she died it’d be like coming home, that it’d be a release.

But it’s not like that. It’s scary and it hurts and the tide is going out and it’s taking her away, she’s slipping into the deep and the dark, and little by little the snow is leeching the life out of her, and it’s so, so lonely. Oh god, she’s never going to see Tess again. She’s never going to see Tess or her family or anybody else. She’s finally succeeded in running away from everyone and everything, just like she’s been trying to do her whole life, and this is her reward. Even the white has run off somewhere. It’s just her. Dying alone.

Everything is full of holes. Her coat, her body, her organs, they’re all shredded, everything is leaking and spilling out. It’s all a big black hole, swallowing everything. The holes stretch and meld together, and they expand and it’s all just black and dark, and she falls in and she falls and she falls and she falls…

=-=-=

She’s in Mom’s arms again, in that split second before anybody said anything, when it was nice. Dad is there, and he joins the hug. Tess is there, and Elizabeth. They envelop her, holding her tight, surrounding her with their love. Donovan is there, and he looks healthy, and he, too, hugs her. Her birth mother and father, people she’s never seen or known, are there too. She feels their spirits, joining the circle. And it’s not cold anymore. It’s warm, and happy, and safe.

She loves all of them. She loves them so much that her heart could burst. She’s never known how to love them, not the way they deserved. She’s been so wrapped up in fear and loneliness, and she never knew how to take hold of the lifelines they’d been handing her. But in this moment, she feels it. She finally feels it. She feels their love and their support, and all the good things they wanted for her. Tears stream down her face.

She doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to leave them. She just wants to stay here, in this moment.

But it’s time.

[Gundham]

S009 - Misha Yeager: DECEASED
23 Students Remain

[Help_U]

To them it might have been darkness. The cold, blinding.

It had no such weaknesses. It could see, and it was beginning to understand them. Only the contusion from its previous encounter gave it pause. They possessed understanding it did not. Capabilities it didn't fully comprehend.

But it was starting to know what it was to comprehend.

It waited, until the rift between the two had grown. Until they lost each other in the darkness.

When they were far enough apart that it could strike without fear of another surprise attack. Another powerful blast, another painful contusion. Perhaps worse. No. It would not be caught off guard now.

This island was its domain. It must adapt.

It made short work of the smaller one. That was enough to satiate its needs. More than that, it could not carry.

Grabbing her by the nape, it scooped the body up with its forelimbs and carried it away, leaving only footprints and bloody snow behind.

[Cactus]

What the actual fuck.

One nostril, in and out. That was it — that was literally all he could muster. His lungs ached, the lump in the centre of his throat felt like it was closing all of the breath from out of him. The ground felt cold, by this point, his ass was numb. Adam stayed perfectly still; he hadn't moved a muscle. Not for some time now. His heart felt like it was pounding out of his chest.

The wind whistled around him.

He glanced down at his Fibit. The slight motion of his wrist triggered the screen; his heart rate was 104.

All he could hear was the wind and his damned heart, thundering away.

Terror? Yeah, no shit.

((ADAM SHACKLAND CONTINUED FROM Send Up a Signal))

Everything had happened so quickly; he'd barely had any time to react. Misha hadn't talked a lot; it was fine with him. Normally a talkative guy, there wasn't exactly a whole lot of happy chatter to be had while they were trying to reconcile their own mortality. It stood to reason that Adam would have zoned out a little bit. That could have been a really fatal mistake, were something to happen upon them.

Something had.

It should have been a fatal mistake. Misha had seen it first — whatever it was, and had taken off running. Tired and not expecting his erstwhile companion to take off running, he had simply done what his fight-or-flight response had trained him to do through years of interactive horror escape rooms and paying just a little-too-much attention during horror movies: he'd run and flung himself towards the nearest shelter: the remnants of an old creek. There hadn't been any water remaining in it, thank goodness, and Adam had braced himself, tense and ready for the very painful death that was quickly approaching him.

So here he lay, braced on the ground in a small creek, looking up at the direction that he'd come and waiting. Wondering. He hadn't had to wonder very long.

It had gone after Misha, for some reason. Adam wasn't sure why, but the sounds of the ripping and tearing that he'd heard were enough to choke what little breath could come from his chest.

And after that?

Nothing.

Adam glanced down at his Fitbit again. It had been fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. If this thing was waiting for him, it was patient as hell. He'd barely seen it, but it resembled the horror that they'd watched rip their chaperones apart. Ordinarily, he'd say fuck it, and get up. Sitting around wouldn't achieve anything. But this wasn't an ordinary situation — this was life and death, and you only got one chance.

Adam's heart continued to pound.

Instinctively, he exhaled.

Shit.

[Cactus]

Nothing happened.

Silence.

Adam's heart continued to thunder in his chest; still, he persisted.

[Cactus]

Enough time had passed that Adam knew lifting his head up out of the creek was going to leave him in one of two spots. He would either see nothing worth fearing and feel silly, or he would see unspeakable horror and likely not have to worry about it for long. To have been sitting here for long enough felt ridiculous in and of itself, but caution had kept him alive at this point.

He still couldn't believe that Misha had run off on him, left him as bait.

Granted - that likely hadn't worked out so well for her, had it?

Slowly, Adam raised his head from the creek bed. His hands shivered as he glanced around, looking for any potentially lethal adversary or monstrosity that might be lurking.

He found nothing.

Staying here wasn't going to do him much good, and considering that he knew for a fact that the horror had passed him by, going elsewhere seemed like a good idea for now.

Adam tried not to look at the bloody stain on the ground that led off towards the village as he purposely walked in the opposite direction. It took all of the fortitude that he could muster to try not to feel as though he were making a terrible mistake.

((Adam Shackland continued elsewhere))