Chapter Text
For most of the morning, I avoided looking at HABIT and kept close to Vinnie, drinking coffee with him, doing research, plotting a little bit. There wasn't much to plot; I was on a deadline and he was losing time with each passing hour. I heard him chuckle a little while we were sitting across from each other on his bed, staring into our computer screens.
“What?” I asked, smiling over the screen.
“Do you remember when Alex tried to get Evan to drink Ipecac that one time?” He pressed his spacebar a little forcefully.
“What made you think of that?”
“I'm reading through the eulogies for him.”
“There weren't any eulogies.”
“We wrote them, even though there wasn't a formal service.”
“I do remember,” I say, shifting on the bed to get more comfortable. “It was after the Final Destination 2 premiere, right?”
“Yeah!” We both laughed, and then trailed off, both coming to a realization. “Although, I guess that maybe didn't ever happen.”
I was reminded that our lives were just mass hallucinations. There was nothing outside this house for us. Just lots of screwed-up lives that didn't matter, and a tall man that wouldn't leave us alone.
When I came downstairs to get a drink, HABIT was making a sandwich in the kitchen. I opened the fridge and reached in; I felt his hand on my shoulder. He pulled me up to look at me. I shivered, and he clutched my wrists in his hands to observe the wounds, which weren't covered anymore.
“Not bad enough to scar, I guess,” he muttered.
“Why?” I asked him angrily, yanking my wrists from his grip. We had never talked about what had happened, but I had not forgotten.
“I got angry.”
“Like hell, you got angry.” I set my drink on the counter. “You forced me out of the one place I thought I would stay for the rest of all this. I could have stayed there as long as I wanted. But I woke up screaming and had to be rushed to the hospital. I scared them, and so they kicked me out.”
“So, no one wants you.” It wasn't a question. He was telling me a logical statement.
“No,” I returned, “No one wants me. I don't exist.”
“In more than one sense?” Now he was just toying with me. Trying to get me to fall prey to his manipulation. I leaned causally against the counter and opened my drink.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Why don't you run?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, taking a sip.
“You're not half as jumpy as Vinnie is, and you've only been in this for a few months.” He paused for a moment, cutting his sandwich into fourths. “You remind me of Jeff that way.”
“Don't you dare talk about Jeff-”
“Oh, like you knew him all that well,” he interrupted. “You're on the outside of this whole thing. He didn't remember you. You wouldn't have mattered.”
I just stood there with my drink while HABIT walked to the table in the entryway. I thought for a moment about standing up to him, but I'd been doing that for too long with no results. It wasn't going to help anything keep arguing with a stagnant personality. So I walked past him and made a remark that made his nose wrinkle:
“Maybe I'm not as jumpy as Vinnie because he's actually afraid of you.”
Two days had passed, and all I'd achieved were four sent emails to the address [email protected]. The door had been locked for several hours now, and I had let no one enter. I hadn't slept or eaten, and I only left to use the bathroom. The yellow walls contrasted in mood with my bloodshot eyes; the scent of death rolled under the door like a mist, and permeated the air until the oasis I had built turned to nothing but what it was before. I opened the window eventually, and I must have stood there for half an hour. I relished the chilled breeze curling around my face, the scent of eminent springtime filling nose. I let it clear out the stench of my room. The sky was turning a sort of navy color; it was around 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning.
May the 5th.
And Shaun was still crying.
I must have made a sound louder than I intended at some point, because he started crying for help and banging on the walls; I found it sort of admirable, since he must have been kept in restraints. But he cried constantly. Never relenting the pain. Never denying it. Just... soaking it in. He said his brother's name once or twice. And then HABIT would laugh. And keep laughing. He was in the most pleasant mood of his life, lately.
Or maybe it was finally getting to him.
Along with all his hysterical laughter, his sniffs would become growls. From the sounds outside my door, his breathing had become tri-tone; his glee fully audible. Occasionally, he'd mutter to himself. He was an animal, in short. Even more than what he had been.
I still wasn't scared, even after all of this. And when I finally realized that, I walked out of my room and downstairs.
“What's for breakfast?”
His back was turned, and the aroma made it obvious; bacon. Of what variety, I didn't care to ask.
“Bacon.” Something inside of me turned over as he said it. You could hear it, even in such a simple word. The fury, the manifestation of decades; centuries of hate and insanity. I braced the threshold of the door and nodded.
“Sounds... nice,” I muttered. He could hear me, I knew. He would always hear me.
“Have you done anything about your fee?” It was business-like. The sizzle of grease filled the silence that I chose to be as my response.
“Well?”
“I've tried contacting people.” Which I hadn't. No one of use. Only for my own motivations.
“I don't believe you, really.” He flipped a piece over and covered it with tin foil. He turned to face me and I saw what two days could do to him. Honestly, there wasn't much of a change. But his eyes... you could see the difference there. Dark under the strangely black pupils, the blood seeping in from the corners and redness all around. They were determined and sad at the same time. It was ethereal, in a sense. “I don't believe you at all.”
I took a deep breath, and then, “I know you don't.”
His chest heaved under the hoodie that had been used for more than four years now, and he turned back to his food.
“I thought you'd say that.”
I waited for him to say something else, but there were only the pops and cracks on the pan echoing through the kitchen, and my heartbeat in my throat.
It became apparent then that I wasn't so sure that he cared anymore.