He woke up again and it was hard to breathe.
The Presence was back, and planted squarely on his goddamn face.
A panicked flail, the first time, a hard shove the second and third, simply rolling over had all worked in the past, but he was no closer to determining the source of the phenomenon. Some mornings it felt like a weight on his chest, but just as often it was a weight across his face, a spreading, soft, but suffocating warmth that caught him off guard and stopped his intake of air. Ian had considered congestive problems, the possibility of some kind of massive sleep apnea, or goddamned night terrors, until one morning he woke up and shoved the thing off his face (why would that help a congestive problem? how the fuck would that work?) and the sensation of claws raked across his face. He heard something thump on the ground for the first time as he hissed in pain, but when he sat up to look nothing was there, no sign of disturbance among the piles of clothes fallen by the wayside of his bed.
Clearly, he was going nuts.
Clearly, he was not going nuts, as he examined the small neat stripes of red across his cheekbone in the foggy bathroom mirror. The shower had cleared his head, but his new morning ritual of not-fucking-breathing felt no less real, and it’s hard to imagine how he could have Crazy™ed his way into putting claw marks on his face in his sleep.
The new apartment had felt a little creepy, but no more so than any new, untested space was. He’d felt watched, but it wasn’t until the breathing problem he’d given any credence to the primal voice in the back of his head shouting at him that he wasn’t alone.
He felt like an idiot, staring out from the safe warm alcove of his bathroom, in only a towel, unshaved, as he surveyed his bedroom for potential supernatural threats.
He was definitely an idiot. Ian’s shoulders slumped as he scrubbed his hand through damp hair, turned to shuffle back into the wet warmth and deal with his scruff, and dove face first towards the side of the tub as something ankle high neatly tripped him on its way out the door. He scrabbled and barely caught himself, inches from breaking teeth and nose and neck on the faded enamel, panting and swearing as he slumped to the floor to let the warning lights of panic die down in his brain a little bit. Or ramp up. He was living with some kind of goddamned malevolent spirit. Fuck. It had just tried to kill him. It had been attempting to smother him for days. Fuck. What the fuck was he going to do?
Hastily tugged on shorts and a jacket later and Ian was fleeing out the doorway with his phone in his still damp hand as he called his hippy cousin for instructions on how to prevent being fucking murdered by an apparently weak but determined ghost.
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