doublesixed:
He’s thought that when he got out, everyone who fell to Its power would fade with the fog. Never trail after him, locked away in a realm that is neither between or without. It was a safer idea he had, that nothing could touch him anymore. But that was with the dream that he’d escape back home, wake up in that shitty motel like time hadn’t passed, with the note and the plan and the— The Ark is far more different. Who knows. Maybe the others are out, and they’re just not landing where he is. Maybe—maybe Amanda’s just one of the few who got thrown out here. She did always seem like a person under there. A monster in a mask. Then again, Myers was the same.
Ace doesn’t unfold himself. He watches Amanda hunched and hiding, and only a part of him can really think about how he must look, a gangling old man cowering from a woman significantly smaller than him. A tragically familiar fear crawls inside of him and sinks its hands into him deep, the way the blades and hatchets and claws all did. Amanda watches him like she can’t believe it, but it lacks sinister rage, devious plans. The others probably wouldn’t look at him like this. Maybe this is luck. Maybe he’s lucked out and God wants him to face one of the monsters who had the best chance of coming back.
“‘Manda,” he says, all improper, cut on the last of his shaking breath. “You… you’re the one David met.”
David was… obsessed. David threw himself into something that got him killed. Ace has believed David didn’t expect the girl pulled free from the bear traps to be the one putting him and others back into them. David shared his suspicions, that she was a Jigsaw trick all that time, but looking at her now, Ace thinks that was just rationalization. He doesn’t blame David for being confused. Frustrated. Scared.
“You seen anyone from back there?” He doesn’t know why he’s asking her. Maybe It gave her eyes far greater than a human’s. Let her see who wandered free, and who she should trail after. Oh god. Maybe she’s hunting him down. Ace takes a few steps towards the woods, the thick trees that lead far from Tranquility’s civilization, like he’s about to run across the Estate to get away from her. He keeps his voice steady, and his thought clear. “David? Is David here?”
She thinks, briefly, maddeningly, that she should leap at him. Claw at his face and tear at his throat and pluck out his eyeballs with her teeth. Maybe that’s what he’s expecting her to do. Maybe that’s what he wants her to do. Amanda’s breath feels like lead in her chest. She doesn’t want to. God, she doesn’t want to--
The killers in the fog were all a distant sort. They each kept to themselves, for the most part, rarely speaking to each other-- if they even spoke at all. But she could tell, from their eyes or their mannerisms or the way they carried themselves, that they had all killed before. Not just orchestrating elaborate half-suicides, but really killed-- gotten up close and personal with blood in their hair and fire on their breath.
She thinks of the only time she has ever killed somebody in person. Adam. She remembers the cellophane taut around his head, and the way he’d thrashed, and how she went home and heaved stomach acid into the sink and didn’t eat for days.
Against her will, she begins crying, quiet and without fanfare. She wipes her tears with the heel of a palm, and repeats, “...David?” like it’s a name she’s never heard before. There was a David, in the fog, but he was no one she’d ever seen before appearing there-- oh.
He means-- he means Tapp.
“Yeah, um.” She crosses her arms, eyes darting, looking anywhere but Ace. “He... interviewed me. Before. After I, uh.” She swallows. How had John put it? “Survived, the first time.”
She heaves suddenly, at the thought of having to face him again, and says: “no. At least... at least I haven’t seen him.”
