mini fic for the pq. nick learns a few things about his new friends. slade and reese play tag with a witch.
***
Reese suddenly stops short. Slade notices immediately and comes to a stop right on their heels, causing Nick to stumble into the other man.
“Hey, what the fuck?” he asks, blinking and craning his neck around Slade’s much larger frame.
“Witch,” Reese says softly. Their head is cocked at an angle as they listen. Slade reaches behind him and pulls the shotgun from his back, wordlessly swapping it out for the pistol Reese is passing to him. Reese sticks the end of their flashlight in their mouth, freeing up their hands to double check the readiness of the gun.
They know the weapon is hot; Slade wouldn’t have given it to them if it wasn’t. They also know if they don’t check anyway they won’t hear the end of it for three days and they’ll be subjected to never-ending weapons safety drills.
At this point, they could do them in their sleep.
“Lights,” Slade says, voice short and gruff. Nick frowns.
“I don’t hear anything,” he says.
“Lights,” Slade says again, turning his head to cut a glance in Nick’s direction. Nick scoffs.
“What, we’re trusting the guy that has auditory hallucinations to listen for witches now?” he asks. Slade steps towards him, reaching out and thumping Nick in the chest with the side of his fist and hitting the switch for the flashlight strapped to the front of his shirt in the process.
“I’ve never hallucinated in the field,” Reese says softly, eyes not looking up from the gun in their hands. Satisfied they’ve inspected it enough to avoid getting a lecture later, they pluck the light out of their mouth and turn it off before slipping it through a belt loop. “It’s a lack of sensory input that causes me to hallucinate, not an overabundance of it.”
“Oh,” Nick says sarcastically, “well, in that case.” Despite the dark he can feel Slade’s gaze burning a hole in him. He reminds himself to put more effort into keeping his mouth shut, before the man shuts it for him.
Reese takes the lead as the group moves again, Slade flanking on their right and Nick a few paces behind on their left. He’s not sure how he always ends up covering the rear lately, but far be it from him to question the great Death\\stroke about group formations when wandering through a zombie filled shopping center.
Reese grinds to a halt once again, letting out a sharp hissing noise and nodding their head towards the northeast end of the courtyard. Nick, at least, keeps himself from colliding into Slade again. He considers that the best victory he’s going to get today.
“Eyes on,” Slade murmurs. He holds up a hand, signaling to stay put as he glances over his shoulder at Nick. Nick rolls his eyes, still suffering from the feeling that Slade can see every move he makes even in the low light. Satisfied Nick isn’t going anywhere, Slade taps Reese on the shoulder, pointing to his right with a thumb. Reese nods, and just like that the two of them split up, melting into the shadows.
The last six weeks since meeting Slade and Reese has had Nick and his group getting crash courses on things they’d never considered needing. It doesn’t help that the two of them have their own languages, both verbal and non-verbal, that they can’t seem to fully translate to anyone else. A weird mix of military hand signals and modified ASL that’s completely incomprehensible at the best of times.
Nick is used to keeping tabs on his fellow survivors by, well, yelling for them. They come up with plans by talking about it, they coordinate by arguing at times. In short, his group is fairly loud. They know when to step lightly, such as now, with a witch lurking, but for the most part, they’re all pretty chatty.
Slade and Reese are the exact opposite. Even in a safehouse, the two of them don’t mince words that often. When things die down, and everyone is locked up tight, they prefer to find as secluded a corner they can and set about busying themselves with cleaning weapons and taking inventory of gear. When they go out, Nick’s watched them function and work through a horde without so much as a single word passing between the two of them.
He can’t figure out if it’s a sweet show of how connected they are as a couple, or just really fucking creepy. Considering how co-dependent Reese seems to be on Slade, he’s leaning towards the latter.
He sighs, slinging the strap for his gun over his shoulder and crossing his arms. He dares to peek around the corner, eyes adjusting to the dark enough that he can make out shapes. He can hear the witch now, her eerie cries echoing through the building. He’s squinting as hard as he can without closing his eyes, trying to find where the little bitch is hiding when a flashlight clicks on.
Nick sucks in a breath as the witch turns, shrieking a warning and rising ever so slightly.
The light clicks off.
A few seconds pass and right as the witch starts settling down, the light clicks on again. It’s a few feet from where it was the first time, and Nick takes a few quiet steps forward. He balances on his toes, rather than the heel of the dress shoe he’s still wearing.
The witch rises more, attention focused on the light as she begins to scream.
“Gotcha,” Reese says amiably. Nick’s eyes dart away from the witch, catching a brief sight of them to the witch’s left before the light clicks out again.
If the report from the 12 gauge is deafening, it’s nothing compared to the noise coming from the witch. Nick reflexively reaches up to cover his ears just before the gun goes off again.
Nothing moves, and time seems to slow down for several agonizing seconds. The sudden silence leaves a ringing in his ears. He blinks in the light as Reese and Slade turn their flashlights back on. They saunter out from their spaces in the corners, meeting in the middle to observe their handiwork.
Slade casually pumps two rounds from Reese’s pistol into the witch’s body, which really seems like overkill from Nick’s perspective, considering she doesn’t have much of a head left at this point.
“Can’t be too sure,” Slade says, holding the gun out. Reese shrugs and passes the shotgun back.
“They fall for it every time,” they say.
“I can’t believe that worked,” Nick says. Slade and Reese turn their attention towards him.
“Why wouldn’t it?” Slade asks. Nick gapes, opening and closing his mouth as he tries to answer the question, only to fumble over the words.
“Well, shit,” he says, scratching the back of his neck. “Good point.”
“Wait,” Reese says, “how do you guys normally deal with them?”
“There’s generally a lot more running and screaming,” Nick says.
“Right,” Slade says, managing to sound amused and disinterested at the same time. “Let’s go, this is turning into a lot of work for a simple pharmacy run.” Reese nods, falling into step next to him as he starts across the atrium. Nick pauses to look at the dead witch still slowly bleeding out on the floor before moving to catch up.
“You know,” he says, “I think I’m starting to like you guys.”
warnings: discussions of trauma, mild mentions of drug use
ship: masks & menace
summary: what DO you get for the man who has everything? ah, yes. nightmares!
I don't know why these monsters
Are trapped in my head
I keep trying to put them to bed
********
Bob’s eyes go wide as he raises his gaze back to Norman, all blue eyes and blonde hair and picture-perfect hero. “Y…you’re sure?” he asks. “It’s really okay?”
Norman laughs, claps him casually on the shoulder as if the man is not both God and God-Killer. “Yes, it’s really okay,” he says. “Really. It’s okay because I say it is, and from this day on, Bob, what I say goes.”
“Thank you,” says Bob.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, because when you peel back the gold and turn off the lights he is but a man with an addiction, and Norman is but a dealer in a ten thousand dollar suit.
He puts an arm around the other man’s shoulders, steers him down the hall in the direction he wants them to go and it is the first time he aims his shiny new weapon, but not the last. Would, that it were, of course.
God.
God-Killer.
The scent of ash and metal and entrails burnt into his memory. The taste of it tainting his food and wine, forever.
“I didn’t know,” he will say later.
He didn’t know, he didn’t know, he didn’t know.
A lie, of course. He knew.
He knew it in his gut, in his marrow, but the burden of proof lies not with him and he knew it, too. Always deny, always have plausibility in the denial. The world is not about what is or isn’t; the world is about what you say it is or isn’t.
He knew that he was playing with things he couldn’t truly control, not forever, but it was his ego that insisted otherwise. The tale as old as time, isn’t it? Wax wings and hubris, a prelude to the inevitable descent into the dark. In his case the darkest and most forgotten hole they could find on The Raft, nothing around him but form and void and the unshakable reminder that he was as mortal as the rest of them, after all.
And the void, oh, the void. That’s where it all started, isn’t it? That’s where it began and, he realizes as he stares into the dark, that is where he will end.
The Void.
Immortal.
God.
The voice comes from nowhere and everywhere and he stares straight ahead because like most monsters, it runs on a monsters logic, and as long as you don’t give them attention then it isn’t really there.
Right?
“It is, and it isn’t,” says the shadow. “Oh, Norman. Don’t look so surprised, you knew this was coming, didn’t you? You’re not stupid enough to think otherwise, not in earnest.”
He says nothing. He thinks back to what feels like yesterday, when he stood atop the world and bet he could piss off the side of it and convince everyone else it was rain. Untouchable, as he was, by the rest of the mortals he forgot that he too was still one of them.
Immortal.
Mortal.
“Don’t worry,” the room sighs. The darkness creeps in at the edge of his vision, a vise settling on his rib cage and giving a slow crank. “You said there is no Void, and so…there isn’t.”
The illusion of light winks out and the vise makes a rapid clicking noise, the slow squeeze turning into a sharp, bone-crushing pressure and as his blood pounds in his ears there is laughter among it.
It is his.
It is not.
And yet it is, because what else do you do? What else, when faced with nothing else? He knew, yes, he knew the Void would be where he ended because he knew the Void was not dead. The Void was not dead because you can’t kill-
You can-
-NOT KILL WHAT DOES NOT CHOOSE TO DIE, NORMAN-
His eyes snap open halfway through his name, and before Reese can get the second syllable formed he comes up fist first. They realize in the moment before impact that they, too, frequently reside in the same camp as others of forgetting just what the serum has done to him.
The reflexes. The strength.
Well fuck- they think, knowing that even if they weren’t currently half tangled in a mess of bed sheets and pillows, they’d be too slow to avoid it.
Norman blinks and the world takes form, without void, and his senses reconnect to the rest of his brain. He finds himself not down in the dark and under the crushing weight of all he’s done, but in his bed in his softly lit bedroom.
The sense of taste follows sight, and with it the distinct flavor of blood coats his mouth. He purses his lips as he runs his tongue, gently, across his teeth and feels the edge on them that should not be. It explains the blood even as it makes his heart skip a beat.
How long was he down there in the dark? At the mercy of the monster? Long enough that the stress of it caused the serum in his blood to activate, picking up on elevated cortisol and adrenaline and beginning to alter his state of being in an attempt to save his life.
It’s not the serum’s fault that getting faster and stronger is not going to save him, not from this, anyway.
The sound of groaning filters in through his still too-distant mind, and he sucks in a breath. “Reese,” he hisses, scrambling over the side of the bed.
They’re sprawled on the floor, one leg propped up against the side of the mattress. They’re holding a hand over their face and blood trickles from between their fingers.
“Reese,” Norman says again. He untangles them from the sheet, letting their leg drop, and slips an arm around their shoulders to pull them into a sitting position. “Let me see.” He pulls their hand away from their face, watches fresh blood bloom from their nostrils, and grabs a fistful of sheet to press against it. They groan as he tilts their head back, his other hand braced against the nape of their neck.
Nightmares are not a new experience for him, but if they’re getting bad enough that he’s startling awake in such a manner, perhaps it should be addressed.
Although what good a therapist and medication would do for this particular wrinkle in his mental health, he truly has no idea.
Yes hello, I have nightmares from the trauma of watching the God-Killer I manipulated quite literally rip my husband in half. Why did he do that? Well, because I told him too! Can I get some more Prozac or perhaps Hydroxyzine to help with it?
Reese mumbles something that pulls him out of his downward spiral, words muffled by the damage to their nose and the wad of material over their face.
“What?” he asks, pulling the sheet back.
“You good?” they ask.
Norman blinks. “I…” he stammers, “I should be asking you that.”
Reese levels their gaze at him as best they can with their head still tipped back, and gives a shrug of their shoulders.
“Can you stand?” he asks. They nod, and he has them take over holding the sheet to their face to help them to their feet.
The two of them cross into the bathroom and Norman hits the switch before picking Reese up to plop them on the counter top. Reese continues to hold the sheet to their face as Norman digs around the bathroom for the first aid kit. Producing it, he drops the sheet from their face and pops the lid open. He replaces the sheet with a couple of gauze pads, and gently prods around their nose with his fingers.
He has done far worse things with his hands throughout his life; been elbow deep in a living man’s chest cavity while scraping samples from his rib cage, to say nothing of havoc wreaked upon his own son, but it’s this broken nose that is giving birth to deeply rooted guilt.
“Let’s get the bleeding stopped and get dressed,” he says, “we’ll go into the ER.”
Reese grunts in annoyance, brows furrowing. “No,” they say.
“Don’t argue,” he says.
“Fuck sake, Norman,” they snap, words slurred around the injury. “you can set a broken fucking nose.”
He blinks.
“Well,” he stutters, “yes, but-”
“So do it.”
He wants to say no. Both out of guilt, and well, habit. He is still Norman Osborn, after all, and if he tells you you’re going to do something you do not get to say no. You do it.
You do it, or he’ll make you do it.
He has learned, or at least started to, that sometimes there is no forcing Reese to bend to his will. This isn’t the first time he’s relented just to make something easier, but it is the first time he’s done so without at least attempting to argue about it first.
Fifteen minutes later, their nose is set. Face cleaned up and bandaged, and Norman is dumping three hydrocodone into their hand. Reese doesn’t bother to ask where he got them, or what they were originally for.
They also don’t bother to mention that at 15mg they’d likely be perfectly fine with just one.
The pills leave a bitter, chalky aftertaste on their tongue that they haven’t tasted in a while, and they glance at the clock. It’s going to be interesting to see if their tolerance still exists.
Norman bundles the bloodied sheet into a ball and tosses it into the hamper before retrieving a fresh top sheet from the closet. Tilting their head, Reese notices from their perch in the armchair there’s still an abnormal pallor to his face.
“You good?” they ask again.
He looks over at them and appears to mean to force a smile and a dismissal. The expression vanishes, and he sits heavily on the edge of the bed.
“I don’t know,” he says, running a hand down his face. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs and reaching to massage his temples. “I honestly just…don’t know.”
“I kicked Tony in the throat, once,” says Reese casually, moving to sit next to him.
He looks over at them, raising his head and an eyebrow. Reese shrugs.
“It was back when I thought being black out drunk would fix everything,” they say.
Norman is silent for a moment. “Reese,” he says, “you still think that, you just don’t do it anymore.”
“Not the point?” they respond, before continuing. “I don’t know what I was dreaming about, but I was laid out on the couch and when he woke me up I wasn’t entirely with it. Reflexively kicked my leg and caught him right in the trachea.”
“Eh,” says Norman, “he’s had far worse, I’m sure anything that doesn’t require a full body cast isn’t something he remembers.”
“The man barely remembers anything, to be fair,” says Reese.
“That’s true,” agrees Norman.
“And also,” says Reese, making a show of stretching and laying back on the bed. “You’re deflecting from the question.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I answered the question when I said ‘I don’t know’,” he shoots back.
“Yes, but also, no,” says Reese. “You know something, even if you don’t know that it’s relevant. You never don’t know entirely.”
“It’s just some bad dreams,” he says.
“Bad dreams are what you get when you take melatonin,” says Reese, “dreams that make you come out swinging are a little more than just dreams.”
He turns to look at them over his shoulder. “Melatonin does that to you, too?” he asks. “I always thought it was just me.”
“Deflecting,” sing-songs Reese, holding up a finger and wagging it at him.
“It’s Asgard,” he says finally, as if that’s all the explanation needed.
“Like…” Reese trails off. “Sorry, have they done something I missed?”
“My invasion of it,” he says. “Or, attempted invasion, I suppose. Failed invasion, more accurately.”
“Oh, right,” says Reese. “All I know about it is that it was a mess, apparently.”
“That’s a word for it,” he says, leaning back to lay next to them. “Treason is another.”
“Weren’t you trying to like, accuse them of treason, though?” they ask.
“Indeed I was,” he says. “I may not have been… fully in my right mind, at the time.”
“I mean are you ever?” they ask. He turns to glower at them. Reese shrugs. “In the sense that, are any of us? Really?”
“Now who’s trying to deflect?” he asks.
“So, you’re having nightmares about Asgard,” says Reese. “Why?”
Norman says nothing, staring up at the slowly rotating ceiling fan as the smell of burnt stone and ash creeps back into his senses. He can still hear Ares bellowing from across the battlefield.
“I told you what would happen! Armor and all!”
In the present he asks, “do you know what it takes to murder someone?”
Biting down another joke, or an obvious answer, Reese instead says nothing and waits for him to continue.
“Sometimes, all it takes is two words,” he continues.
“Bob. Go.”
Unsure of how to follow that, Reese remains silent on the chance he’s going to elaborate more.
He doesn’t.
They roll over, propping themself up with one arm. Norman’s still on his back, staring up at the fan with a distant look in his eyes. Wherever he is at the moment, it’s not here.
They open their mouth to speak, blinking as they do and in the same second the first traces of the painkillers slip into their head. A tingling around their temples as the pain input that never seems to leave their head and neck, made worse by getting socked in the face by a startled and over-powered goblin, begins to melt away and loosen the muscles as it goes.
They settle for flopping down closer to him, resting against his shoulder and laying an arm over him. He lets out a soft hum, mirroring their motion as he wraps an arm around their waist.
“You can tell me, you know,” they say, their own voice beginning to sound distant to their ears. “Or don’t, if you don’t wanna.”
“You know…” he says, “I know that logically you’re probably… the only person in a very long time that doesn’t judge me based on things that happened so long ago. But sometimes I think your choice to not form an opinion of me based on what others have written is going to eventually bite us both in the ass. Like one day I’m going to mention something that you’re not aware of, and it’s going to flip everything on end and I won’t be able to do anything to stop it.”
“Well,” says Reese. After a few moments, they haven’t followed it up with anything.
Norman finally looks at them. “Well…?” he prompts.
“I was getting to it,” they say, “eventually. I think.”
He quirks an eyebrow, and reaches over to cup their chin with his other hand, lifting their head a little. “Are you high?”
“Not as much as I’d like, but I’m sure it’s getting there,” they say matter-of-factly.
“I only gave you three painkillers,” he says, voice colored with mild amusement. “At five milligrams you shouldn’t be remotely high. Losing your edge now that you spend most of your time responsibly?”
“They were fif-teeens,” Reese drawls.
“…no they weren’t,” Norman says.
“Fives are round, fifteens are oval,” says Reese. “You gave me the oval ones.”
“Oh, god damn it,” says Norman, “I have got to start reading the fucking labels on the bottles.”
“No, no, don’t start on my account,” they say. “As long as I fall back asleep before the itching starts, we’re Gucci.”
“I catch you trying to get into the lab morphine again because of this, we’re going to have a serious talk,” says Norman.
“I think we should be having some serious talks regardless,” they say, managing to be and sound serious in spite of the high steadily peaking.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “probably.”
By the time he finishes mulling things over and feels like his thoughts are in an order that could be understood, he discovers Reese is sound asleep against him.
“Of course, maybe not tonight,” he says. He extricates himself from them and turns the lights out, retreating back to the bed with the TV remote and settling against the pillows. He flips through several channels before finding something that at least holds a small amount of his interest, and before the first commercial break Reese manages to retake their previous position against him without waking. The talks will come later, he’s sure. For now, there’s only one thing in the dark he’s concerned about, and at least this time, it isn’t a God-Killer.
**********
The talks don’t come the next day.
Or the day after.
It is only on the third day, when Reese corners him in the living room by pointing out they’re aware of the fact he simply hasn’t slept since punching them that he concedes defeat about it. He sinks into an easy chair with a glass of scotch, and bides precious more time out of regarding the fire burning in the fireplace for several minutes. Reese fills the time by pulling a frosted glass out of the mini fridge under the bar and dropping a couple ice cubes into it before drowning them in Jameson.
They plant themself in the chair next to him, crossing their legs under them and eyeing him over the rim of their glass.
“It doesn’t have to be everything,” they say.
“I know,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. “But, I just… I keep thinking that you don’t get to be… traumatized over a situation you created. Like it’s some previously undiscovered level of selfishness that only I would be the one to trip into.”
“Norman Osborn being self centered and mildly narcissistic isn’t a new situation,” says Reese mildly. There isn’t, contrary to their choice of words, a drop of condemnation in their tone. They raise their glass to their lips again, adding, “try again.”
If it were any other time, and they were anyone else, they’d have just dove headlong into dangerous waters. As it is, they receive an annoyed glare and a clicking of his tongue.
“You’re making me feel better already,” he says, unable to keep all of the spite out of his voice.
“I didn’t say I wanted to make you feel better,” they say, “I said I wanted you to talk to me about it. As it is, I can’t try to make you feel better if I don’t know what the fuck it is making you have nightmares that make you wake up swinging.”
Goddamn.
Even after the length of this relationship, he still hates it when they’re right and get him pinned over a barrel about it.
“I was responsible for lots of death in Asgard,” he says, swirling his scotch and watching the reflection of the flames dance across the liquid. “I was responsible for lots of death before Asgard. Lots of it after, too. In the moment, I didn’t concern myself with it. I suppose I never have.
“The ends justify the means, or so I always convinced myself. I always had some end or another that I deemed important enough for it all to even out after. It rarely did, but I got very good at picking the few scraps of gold out of the muck and insisting it was worth it.”
He drains the scotch, and leans froward to drop the empty glass on the table. “I played with things I didn’t fully understand,” he says, adding, “no, that’s not right. I didn’t want to understand. Refused to, even. They say that the Void is gone, but I can’t bring myself to believe it. I think all I did was prime a golden noose for myself, and one day, it’s going to pull taut.”
Reese is frowning when he looks back up at them. “There’s too many gaps for me to work out what all of that means together,” they say, a note of frustration in their voice.
Norman sighs as he stands, picking up his empty glass and holding out a hand for theirs. They pass it to him and he crosses to the bar.
“I suppose I should pick a starting point and just go from there,” he says, dropping ice into both glasses. “The reasons I invaded Asgard are… numerous…”
And so, he tells them. All of the blanks Reese was adamant about not wanting filled by anyone with an agenda, the things they refused to read about or listen to anyone else speak of are finally explained by the only source, ironically, they trust to hear it from.
It comes from Norman himself.
They know him well enough to be able to see through his bluster and grandstanding. They don’t know other people well enough to be able to gauge what kind of slant they may be giving to the same events. Heroes and villains often have wildly contradictory versions of the same events.
They don’t know if it’s because he once convinced himself he was now the former and had never been the latter, or if because he finally accepted he was always the latter and could never be the former that his retelling feels as close to the truth as they’re like to get.
Or maybe he’s just too tired from not sleeping to add any spin to it.
It might be the truth, but what they’re unaware of is that it is not entirely the whole truth. Even now, when the whole point is to lay everything on the table, he’s still keeping a couple of things close to the vest.
He tells them what Asgard was really like, what it was like to have Bob finally lose it. He tells them about how, even in his madness at the time, there was a part of him relieved deep down when Loki turned on him.
“No one would have been able to stop him otherwise,” he says.
“Y’know,” says Reese, “I can’t say I ever had a real fear of the dark, but I’m understanding your thing with leaving the lights on sometimes, now.”
Norman gives them a bitter smile. “It… wasn’t his fault,” he says. “Not really. Bob never wanted any of that. It didn’t matter if was me or Stark holding the end of his leash, all the man wanted was to feel safe. I saw that as a weakness and exploited it as much as I could.”
“It does kind of sound like he was a ticking time bomb either way,” they say, unsure of what else to say.
“Unfortunate for all of us I’m as good at making bombs go off as I am then,” says Norman. “Now you see why I said I feel like you don’t get to be traumatized by a situation you started yourself.”
“The brain doesn’t know that, though,” they say. “But I know that you do. I think you’re just trying to find another way to, I don’t know, punish yourself. If you’re punishing yourself, then it means you don’t have to start working through any of it. It’s easier to just point at the mirror and say ‘nah, this is just what happens, get over it’, but you won’t get over it unless you let yourself feel it.”
“Now you’re sounding like a therapist,” he says.
“Yeah, lots of my own brain shrinking over the years,” they say. “Not that it fixed anything, but sometimes I think that’s the point. Not everything can be fixed. You just learn to live with it.”
Norman hums, leaning back in the chair and looking back at the fire. “Well, I suppose I’ve got a lot to learn, in that case.”
short thing i did for the au for a meme going around in like 2020. paging @peacemakers-wife
****
Slade hasn’t heard their voice in so long that for a moment, it doesn’t register. When it does he doesn’t have the ability to stop the momentum of the knife, only to change its course. Instead of eviscerating Dwight in the abdomen it collides into the cement floor, snapping the blade in half.
Dwight pushes away from Slade, scrambling to his feet and backing up as the tension leaves Reese’s body and they sigh. They lean forward, resting their hands on their thighs.
“Oh jesus christ,” they say.
“Someone wanna tell me what the fuck is going on here?” asks Negan. He frowns, glowering at the three of them. Lucille is resting against his shoulder, and Slade’s sword is pointing towards the ground in his other hand. That alone is the only thing capable of tearing Slade’s eye from Reese.
“Well I almost got stabbed by a crazy naked guy,” Dwight offers.
“Of course you did, it’s Tuesday,” says Negan. “We all know it’s Dwight Stabbing Day on fucking Tuesdays! Especially when he’s letting my prisoners loose. You might not be outta the woods yet, Dwighty-boy!”
“I already told you he’s not a prisoner,” Reese says. “And that he let himself get caught.” Slade quirks an eyebrow and gives an amenable shrug.
It’s true, they know him well. As soon as he found out it was likely they were here, he stashed most of his gear and put the least amount of effort into raiding anyone that he ever has in his life.
They took him down in five minutes.
“He’s a prisoner until I fucking say he isn’t,” Negan says lowly. The tone of his voice causes Slade to pick the broken knife from the floor and stand. He pulls for Reese, bringing them closer to him. He is expecting to feel any sort of fear, or tension in them, and is surprised to find nothing but annoyance.
“Can you please not with the dick swinging right now?” they ask sharply, adding in a quieter tone, “He wins, anyway.”
Again, Slade shrugs.
Whatever is going on here, he’s seen enough over the last four days to know that like all things, the truth is falling somewhere in the middle. Rick’s people aren’t wrong that there’s clearly something incredibly fucking untoward happening at the Sanctuary, and that Negan is behind it.
But Reese wouldn’t be standing six feet from the man and cracking jokes if it was entirely as sinister as he was led to believe.
“I told you he wasn’t dead,” they say. The annoyance is still tainting their voice, but there’s a heaviness with it that Slade is far too exhausted, and far too hungry to try and parse at the moment. Just because he’d intended to get captured does not mean he’d intended to be in a dark cell and stripped and starved and stuck in the cold for four days.
Even he has his limits.
“Hey,” he says, his voice hoarse. Reese turns, and breaks out into a smile as they look up at him. His hair’s grown out, and his goatee has sprouted into a full beard.
“Hey,” they say back. He brushes his thumb against their cheek and leans down to kiss them for the first time in two years. They slip their arms around his waist and lean into him, relishing in the feeling of him here and alive and-
“Fucking hell can we get this guy some fucking pants?” Negan asks as he ruins the entire moment.
“I am going to kill you in your fucking sleep!” Reese yells. “And I told you to stop fucking with the sword, the coating causes cancer in normal people!”
The sound of Reese and Negan arguing with each other begins to muffle in Slade’s ears, and he does not have the time to inform them he’s about to pass out before the floor is swiftly greeting his face.
“Ouch,” says Dwight. Reese and Negan blink a few times.
“All in all, not very impressed with him,” he says.
this is supposed to be one of those "from the blog of..." posts but i. i fucking. forgor what i named my blog for the au. rifp. anyway. you should click that au tag at the bottom. <- tag is scattered lore posts and shitposts, will not make anything make more sense, sadly.
Every now and then we get someone that asks us what the worst thing we saw in The Rising was. The only real annoying or upsetting thing about the question is that they think we're stupid enough to give them a ratings boost by answering it honestly. Isaac likes to say "nothing". We didn't see anything abnormal during The Rising, actually! Everything was sunshine and puppies and all those state mandated therapists after the fact was just a silly joke by social workers! He usually goes on long enough that it makes everyone thoroughly uncomfortable until they find a reason to get as far away from us as possible.
The truth of the matter is that it's not a question that can be answered because it all kind of just runs together. The Rising went on and on, day after day; run from this camp to that camp, avoid this group or that group, until day it didn't anymore, and we were brought back into polite society and expected to be normal again. The other answer is also that the worst thing we saw wasn't even during The Rising.
It was after.
Early in our journalism careers, not long after we finally got our all clear to really be in the field, we picked a bad spot. It was also you could say, the inciting incident that led to Sam deciding to do it with us and leading to all of us making this something more professional instead of Isaac and I just fucking around for pocket change.
You see, the thing about what we do is that it's basically UrbEx, yeah? We go into hazard zones, places that have been left to rot for twenty some odd years, and we try to find zombies to poke with sticks and get good footage of it to upload to the internet for the rest of you to ogle. A lot of prep for that is location scouting. You have to find the right hazard zone that matches your license, and then you have to find the right spots within the zone that lead to the best footage. One of our first forays was supposed to be simple. Follow the formula: find spot, find zombies, kill zombies, show footage.
What we didn't know was that the area we were in wasn't empty of people, alive people. And usually when you surprise alive people who don't know you're coming, they don't take to that too well.
If you're taking a break from reading this to try and trawl the archive for said footage by the way, you won't find it. It ended up being evidence in an actual police investigation and we were never allowed to post it. Maybe when one of us dies we can get around the court order by saying it was in the black box for our Wall postings, but until then, it sits in a locked box in a closet somewhere.
Three hours into the day we stumbled on this underground bunker. That wasn't unusual, you throw a rock in this area of the country and hit the entrance to one. What was unusual was that it clearly looked lived in, and sprawled like some sort of maze. I think the person behind it took a lot of time to connect the first bunker to at least two others, and how they managed to do it without anyone noticing still mystifies me. Hazard zones are abandoned, sure, but they're not totally ignored, and you can't put an extension on an underground bunker without massive amounts of equipment.
It was set up like some sort of hick-ass lab. Not the kind of lab you'd find at the CDC, or even an off-the-books lab from the types of people the CDC warns you to stay away from. This looked to be a couple steps above a meth lab, and at first we thought it was a meth lab.
Then we found the bodies. Dead and not moving, dead and moving, and eventually we found completely uninfected people locked up in cells. "Leave and call it in to the local authorities" was in fact, Isaac's first idea, but I was so perplexed I needed to understand what was going on first. I knew if we backed out now and climbed up to get a cell signal again, we may never find any explanations.
This is also a good example of why he's the Action News and I tend to favor Factual News; he's stupid until stupid will get you dead and then he's smart enough to throw in the towel. Meanwhile I'm smart to start with, until being too smart will just get us both dead because I refuse to acknowledge the towel is there if the mystery is enthralling enough.
It turned out this wannabe Wa/lter White wasn't making meth, he was batshit crazy and convinced he was going to cure Kellis-Amberlee all by himself in his torture dungeon. He was convinced the virus doesn't erode our brains, doesn't fully turn them off from being alive and human and back on again as mindless husks piloted by a virus. He thought the virus just causes symptoms, and if we could manage, mitigate, or even cure the symptoms then we could cure the virus without having to, you know, deal with the problem of the virus being an innate thing that lives inside all of us. KA is our own ever present traveling companion. It's in us now from the moment we're born until the moment we die, even if we're lucky enough to die in bed at 80 in our sleep without the virus ever waking up before then.
But this guy wasn't having it.
"Zombies can dream," he said. Said it meant that they were still people inside there, and that really, every time you put down a zombie you're just committing murder the same as if you shoot a non-amplified person on a street corner. The more he tried to explain his great plan and his suffering genius, the more erratic he became.
He explained how he needed zombie corpses for autopsies, and fresh zombies for baseline data. Then he needed two types of living subjects: those that he would eventually force into amplification to test his cure attempts and theories on, and those he used as a source for non-amplified samples.
How lucky for him we came in a pair, he said.
In the end, Isaac put a round in his throat to put him down and a second in his brain to keep him there and made me leave without trying to free the alive people he had in cells first. We called the local cops, which immediately pinged both the CDC and the goddamn national guard, and within a couple hours, Sam.
It's the only time we've ever been investigated to make sure the shooting was, as they used to say before 2014, "justified". The man in the bunker wasn't a zombie when Isaac put him down, which does make it murder. But murder remains hard to prove in this day and age, except Isaac also shot him a second time before he could rise again, so there was proof that he wasn't amplified. As I understand it, since I was just a kid when things fell apart, self-defense was tricky enough to prove before you threw zombies and mad scientists into the mix.
Once the investigation was under way, it did become clear it was self defense. It took over a year for everything to get sorted out on account of cases like this just not existing anymore. New detectives, even on a state level, don't really know how to clear a crime scene beyond "firebomb it and bleach the ashes" these days.
Eventually we got cleared of any wrongdoing. They couldn't even give us a slap on the wrist for anything since we were legally allowed to be there and doing what we were doing, and Insane Bunker Man was decidedly not. Not to mention his other crimes of kidnapping and holding people against their will. His victims were largely poor runaways, to no one's surprise, and we never found out what happened to the people in the cells. It was one of the last big stories to make the Old News, but they had even less information than we did.
Kinda fucked up, in hindsight. Biggest story of that decade maybe, and we weren't even allowed to get the credit for breaking it!
So, anyway, all of that to say: the next time you want to ask a journalist "what's the worst thing you've ever seen?" make sure you're ready for the answer.
old stream of consciousness thing i did back in the day. ptsd type shit.
****
slade and i discover pretty quickly after the move to vermont that simply packing my shit and taking care of any lingering obligations in florida i was tied too is not, in fact, the entire solution to my problems.
which of course ties into the larger theme of our whole relationship at this point in that we’re both just constantly attempting to run away from our problems, our pasts, our trauma all while scolding each other and saying it doesn’t work like that.
he finds i don’t get settled right away. or even within a few weeks or months. the vermont house, for all purposes, for the longest of time, is not my house. it is not my home. i quickly default back into the same mindset i have had my entire life, drilled and beaten into me since i was a child that if someone else has paid for it, if someone else has bought it, if someone else has acquired it and is allowing me to use it,
it is not mine. it is theirs.
which of course, that’s not the mindset that slade is coming from. he picked the vermont house because it made the most sense logistically. it was already there, sitting and waiting. filled with belongings he could never fit in elsewhere, filled with dust, filled with ghosts of memories past.
it made sense to use it.
so when we finally arrive, both regretting the initial idea of turning the move into a road trip, my things are waiting in storage containers. two large ones, sitting in the driveway and blocking access to the detached garage.
the house smells of pine and wood and must, having been shuttered up for so long. he comments that he can’t exactly remember the last time he was here, and he opens windows and adjusts the thermostat as he moves through.
everything is decorated in warm colors and wood, brown furniture and carpeting, and old linoleum in the kitchen that has seen better days. it’s distinctly him, and his presence coats everything i touch, as if his absence has meant nothing.
which it probably hasn’t. after all, a house is four walls and a roof and completely unconcerned with the on-goings inside it.
my things get moved in at an easy pace, boxes stacked out of the way in the basement while we try to figure out placement.
slade jokes we’re both going to have to pick and choose on the books; my amount added to his exceeding the capacity. he comments something about adding more bookcases in his study, and he trails off when he mentions something about adeline always wanting that done years ago.
there’s pictures of her in his study. her, and grant, and joey. more pictures of the three of them alone or together than there are of slade with them all. one in particular, that i find by accident stuffed behind a novel about Achilles, specifically has slade’s face cut out of it. i don’t ask. i don’t have to.
over the next few weeks my presence adds to his.
we have a fake argument about the two batman statues i have, me putting them on shelves in the living room only to find them in absurd places the next day. he puts one in the freezer, another in a garbage can.
my small collection of novelty mugs makes it’s way into the kitchen, along of course, with my shot glasses. we decide to donate my coffee maker, as slade’s is bigger and still functional.
at first we come to what seems like the logical conclusion that my bedroom items will go in his room; in the master bedroom. we put my bedframe in the basement, wrap the mattress for now and leave it leaning next to it. my sheet sets go in the closet, i add my pillows to his bed.
my shampoo and my facial cleansers sit next to his in the bathroom, our toothbrushes resting in the holder. my cologne next to his. my clippers in the box under the cabinet, next to a tiered container holding make up. my nail polish nestles next to his beard trimmer.
as the weeks go by, little by little i try to claim the offered spaces as my own.
i wake up one day to find he’s changed the living room furniture, i’m not sure why, and he seems oddly evasive about it. he jokes something about one of the kids throwing a party once, someone leaving nasty stains. he always meant to replace it.
he always meant to do a lot of things, he says.
i realize we’re both being crushed by our own innate guilt, whether rational or not, and that all we’ve done is try to run away from it again.
and of course, it hasn’t worked. it doesn’t work, it will never work, because you cannot run from these things. they are a train, and you cannot outrun a train.
i find myself wide awake one night, the sound of him breathing softly and measured next to me, and i’m staring up in the dark at a still unfamiliar ceiling and i realize that nothing is right,
none of this is right, none of this fits.
i am not, yet, accustomed to this new space. im unused to the noises of the house settling, the noises inside and out of it, and i lay there in the blinding dark desperately searching for something familiar to latch onto before i sink to the bottom
and i find nothing.
even his warm, solid form right next to me isn’t enough to tether me to the present and once again i’m overcome with the unalienable need to run.
he finds me on the back porch hours later, having apparently rolled over and noticed my absence, half a pack of cigarettes butted in the ash tray next to me, another one trailing smoke into the sky from my hand. i am still not calm enough to speak, and knowing that i will have to feels like a vise on my chest.
my mind races to prepare answers, the raging urge of self-preservation steering towards the right answers, and the correct answers, and the answers the other party wants to hear, and it is a habit i never foresee myself breaking.
the entire time i am screaming at myself to stop because it’s not necessary and it is not appropriate. and logically, i know this. my brain acknowledges the commands yet tells me so sorry there’s nothing we can do to stop this, it’s a train after all.
he picks out a cigarette of his own, gently pulling the lighter from between the fingers on my other hand. he sits down on the edge of my seat, to my right of course, always to my right and the side he can see from. he exhales a lungful of smoke and for a few moments, the questions don’t come.
my brain stops misfiring, the synapses all seeming to come to a stop as they compare now to then and finally decide, yes
yes we can stop now.
yes, you were right, now is not the same as then.
a semblance of control returns to my body as he reaches behind me to lean on the back of the chair.
“where’d you go?” he asks, casually, simply. as if that’s the most logical question to ask, as if that makes perfect sense, and i almost want to scream
because it absolutely is.
and yet, even still, “what?” is all i can choke out, and i know my attempt to cover it with a cough from the cigarette is as see through as glass, but i do it anyway.
“you went somewhere,” he says, tapping ash. his fingers trail up my back, coming to rest at the nape of my neck, his thumb rubbing circles against my hairline.
“i…i don’t know,” i say, and i want to cry all over again because of how far away and how small i sound.
“hm,” is all he responds with. he nudges me with a knee, and i slide over and allow him to sit fully. i stub out my cigarette and immediately reach for another one, and he flicks the lighter and doesn’t comment on the chain smoking and for several minutes we say nothing.
i know he’s waiting on me to invite him in. to give a cue, a sign that yes i’m fine now and yes i will be fine and yes i will give you a new list of all my problems and you can find out how to fix them, because that’s what you constantly try to do, because that’s all you know how to do, even to the point of creating problems just so you can solve them.
and i cannot give him that because i know deep, deep within the most choked off parts of myself that there are just things that cannot, will not be fixed.
and they cannot be run from, either.
but they can accommodated. they can be unearthed and they can be tended to and they can be allowed to breathe and perhaps if i stop trying to strangle myself into the submission of others, i could get a foothold in my own mind.
“could you maybe…move my bed and some of my stuff in the basement to one of your spare bedrooms?” i ask, and i hope that the fearfulness i’m feeling at daring to ask for something to be done for my comfort isn’t drowning my words.
he lets out a smoky sigh, tilting his head back and looking up at the stars as he brushes his fingers against my steaming cheek.
“i forgot how much you need a space of your own,” he says. my brain, still partially controlled by ghosts pulling on the strings of trauma, searches desperately for anything in his voice to justify the panic. for the annoyance, the exasperation, the condemnation,
and yet there is nothing to find.
“of course,” he says, “we can clear out one of the spare bedrooms and we can move as much of your stuff into it as you need.”
he stresses all the right words in all the right ways so that it doesn’t come across as sarcastic or demeaning in response to my obvious needs and for a moment i could swear i black out as everything that i’ve fought for so long to snuff out explodes into sparks.
i drop my cigarette at one point, completely unaware i’ve done it as i lean forward and press my head into his chest, fingers coiling into his shirt and he slips an arm around my waist and tugs me closer, leaning me against his hip in what feels like a practiced motion that he’s done hundreds of times.
“i’m sorry,” i say, breathing the words into him.
“that’s fine,” he says. “you’re fine.”
“i know,” i say.
we fall into silence for a while, interrupted only when i hear him sniffing, and for a moment i think is he crying too, now? did i start this? then suddenly he’s swearing, jumping out of the chair and nearly knocking me to the porch, and i’m so startled all i can do is blink like a confused animal as i register the smell of smoldering wood.
“your cigarette is burning a hole in the porch,” he says, stepping away to turn the light on.
and as i watch him go to reflexively grind the cigarette out with his foot, stopping when he realizes he’s not wearing shoes to turn and grab one of my boots from our shoe stand just outside the door, i can’t stop the laughter that bubbles up from my core.
i hear a train whistle in the distance, and i can’t make out if it is a real whistle, or my auditory wiring misfiring, and i don’t care. i’ll ask him tomorrow, if there’s train tracks somewhere nearby, because it settles in the back of my mind that there will be a tomorrow, and a day after, and a day after that, and it wraps around me like a fuzzy jacket.
he offers a hand and i take it, and it slips down to my waist as he leads me back inside.
“you know, you don’t have to try to burn our house down to get my attention,” he says as the door slides shut behind us, and there’s the faintest hint of a smile on his lips as he speaks. i catch sight of the moonlight streaming in behind him, and it imposes on my eyes the sight from what feels like so long ago,
the sun light beaming down on him in a florida parking lot as he looks down to grab for the dog’s leash, a stranger in my home saving my only friend from running head first into traffic while hunting a lone lizard
just realized a bunch of y'all don't know bout my slade/me/rust polyship au.
copied from the old blog
slade being in the area for whatever the reason, loosely tied to waller again, and super fucking pissed about it. he hates it when she’s in his business, he doubly hates it when she manages to corner him into having to work with her. not for her, mind you, just with. he keeps telling her he’s going to find a way out of this, and of course she doesn’t believe him.
she also doesn’t realize he’s intentionally being a bit sloppy with his work. not enough to ring any of the alarms she would have on her level, of course. but the Louisiana state CID is certainly noticing. they have no idea what they’re really dealing with, they never do.
bust rust is like a starving dog with a bone. he never chases the easy answers because the easy ones are never the correct ones.
it takes months, but he gets his man, and as he watches slade from the other side of the mirror, it still doesn’t seem like the right answer.
“wasn’t it, uh, you that said you ain’t never been in a room with a guy more than five minutes and not known if he done it or not?” asks marty as he blows into his coffee. there’s still friction between the two of them, he still revels in every answer rust gets wrong.
“i did,” says rust, “and he did it. but it still ain’t right.”
slade’s too cool, too calm, too collected. he’s too unbothered by the whole situation and as soon as rust sits across from him and starts pulling the file apart, he knows why.
there’s nothing to pull from this man. there’s no deep seated fear or regret, there’s no gazing into the abyss of a life behind bars and a last hope for redemption.
there’s just a smooth admission and a light smirk as he leans back in his chair.
“looks like an easy closer for you, detective,” he says. rust glances down at his file once more. the information he could find that wasn’t redacted, the information that he wasn’t told repeatedly he didn’t have the clearance for.
“looks that way,” he agrees. “but somethin’ tells me it isn’t. there’s more.”
“there’s always more, detective.”
rust chews on it for a minute, and then stands. he cuts the audio feed to the room, locks the door, ignores marty’s aggressive knocking on the window.
slade tells him the rest, and an hour later they’ve reached an agreement:
state CID will continue with their case, and their charges. they will get pushback from amanda waller, and they will have government suits swarming the building and claiming jurisdiction.
and slade will tell them too bad, and he will tell them to tell waller that he can easily blow the lid off task force x, and all the other dirty laundry and disclose the locations of all the skeletons in her closet. he will back her into a corner and she will have no choice but to relent.
slade of course will slip away from the CID when they move to transport him to angola, and rust will pretend he didn’t see that coming and offer a shrug and a ‘oh well’, and everything will just fade into the next news cycle and the next murder and the next case.
his job ends once the case is closed, and technically, it was.
and a few weeks after that rust comes back to his half empty house and finds his lone living room lawn chair occupied and slade with his feet on his lock box and his stashed jack daniels in his hand.
“just thought i’d stop by and say thanks, detective,” he says.
“oh yeah, what for, colonel?” asks rust. he tosses his suit jacket on the counter, makes a show of loosening his tie.
“i dislike being used by people,” says slade. “i usually keep a wide berth of amanda, but she’s always interested in snagging me into the fold. had you not been so determined to close your case, who knows how long i would have been stuck dealing with her.”
“something tells me you woulda worked it out eventually,” says rust. he takes the jack daniels, leans against the counter. slade gives a snort of agreement.
“always nice to make friends in low places, though.”
rust raises an eyebrow, passes the bottle back.
“is that what we are?”
“maybe acquaintances,” says slade. he takes a swallow of whiskey, then gestures behind rust towards the door. “you’re popular tonight.”
rust frowns, and does not turn immediately, as his first thought is what misdirection slade is playing at. and then he hears the front door open, and a set of keys jingling down the hall.
“hey crash,” calls a familiar voice, “heard you were in town.”
and when rust turns, softly whispering shit, he is unaware as yet that slade has heard him. just as he has not yet realized slade heard the motorcycle engine when it was half a block away, and waited until it died in his driveway to mention the owner.
at this time and on this night, there is still so much undiscovered between the three people now occupying the same building. so much time that has not played out, and so many miles on the circle left to go.
my post about it got two likes, say no more.
Summary: Three months ago, Slade died. Four days ago, he seemingly returned to life. Reese quickly finds that something is amiss, and that strangers can wear familiar faces.
Ship: wilson and wilson at large
Warnings: Mentions of death, suicide, drug use, mentions of/allusions to sex (not direct smut), canon typical violence
Note: tumblr fucked up my formatting on this back in the day and i could never fix it. i did not re-proof or re-edit this beyond copying/pasting. this was circa 2020, i believe. i condensed the entire thing into one piece, instead of multiple posts.
please read it though it's my drama filled baby i love it. some of you have long rides to work don't you want a book, come back where are you going-
GDOCS LINK BECAUSE TUMBLR SHIT ITSELF WHEN I TRIED TO POST IT LOL.
found it! my silly lil crossover horror-comedy au. no rewrite, just reposting! this is also old, from about 2020 so. be niceys!
summary: reese gets a tip from a friend about some nefarious business dealings. slade has a bad feeling and goes with them. neither knew what to expect.
ship: wilson & wilson at large
au: outlast
warnings: descriptions of game canon gore.
notes: i’ve just had this idea floating around for a while, why not have peak indulgence? i’m not replaying the game rn to get all the details right, and some things i’m changing intentionally. i’m not going to focus as much on jump scares as the game does bc well, it doesn’t translate as well.
**********
“I don’t like this,” Slade says.
“Noted, and ignored,” replies Reese. They’ve already found an open gate and are making their way across the darkening courtyard. Slade frowns and breaks into a half jog to catch up with them.
“Why did your friend send this to you, again?” he asks.
“Miles got a tip about this place but he’s still overseas doing a piece in the sandbox,” they say, pausing to take a few wide angle pictures of the front of the asylum. “He knew we lived close and thought I’d be interested.”
“And so you figured you had absolutely nothing better to do than come bother the mega corporation running the local insane asylum,” Slade drones. “Fantastic.”
“No one invited you,” says Reese, frowning at him.
“No, but-” Slade trails off mid sentence. There’s four unmarked humvees parked in front of the building’s entrance. He gives them a wide berth as he inspects them for insignias before stepping up to place a hand on one their hoods.
Cold.
They’ve been parked for a while.
“Is that…national guard?” asks Reese. Their camera shutter clicks again.
“I don’t know,” says Slade. His jaw twitches as the feeling in his gut that neither of them, but particularly Reese, should be here increases and slinks up the back of his throat. “I do know that we need to leave. Something is blocking cell service in this area, I noticed it when the music cut out on the way up. We get past the dampener and call in an anonymous tip to the state PD, let them figure it out. I’m curious, but no one’s paying me to be curious enough to find out myself.”
Slade turns as he finishes speaking, and finds that Reese has wandered off around the corner. He lets out an annoyed growl and rounds the end of the building in time to watch them wriggle under a fence into a separate courtyard.
“Reese,” he hisses. “Child, are you out of your fucking mind right now?”
“There’s an open window up there,” they call over their shoulder. Slade’s eye flicks up to the second story and back down again. Reese begins to scale a ladder propped against scaffolding that leads up to the window. Slade scales the fence in two motions and crosses the courtyard quick enough to be on their heels up the ladder, and slow enough to be unable to pull them back down without them getting hurt.
Reese slips in through the window, catches sight of a door across the room they land in, and books for it without a second glance of their surroundings. Slade enters behind them and hears the fuse on the light bulb overhead blow a millisecond before the room goes dark. Reese’s boots squeak on the wood floor as they careen to a stop, and Slade feels them jump as he grabs them around the waist.
“Stop,” he says sharply. He shuffles them towards the sliver of light coming in through the door, and takes stock of the hallway beyond. Satisfied it’s clear, he pulls them out into the light.
“Don’t you think this is weird?” they ask. Slade grinds his teeth.
“I think this building smells like a slaughterhouse and that unmarked, heavily armored vehicles camped out are never a good sign,” he says, his voice tight. A clap of thunder booms overheard, and from outside the open window Slade hears what sounds like the wind knocking over the ladder. He takes in a slow breath and counts to five to keep him temper in check. As he pinches the bridge of his nose, he says, “I also think if you’re not going to let this go then we’re not going to barrel in any further without taking stock of everything.”
“Kay,” says Reese amiably. Slade shrugs the bag off his shoulder and they are wholly unsurprised when he pulls his gun belt from it. He kneels down as he sorts through the bag.
“Sit rep,” he says. They roll their eyes and don’t answer him. Slade’s hands pause as he fastens his gun in place and he looks up at them with a raised eyebrow.
“There was no one at the security shed, but the outside gate closed behind us,” they say monotonously. “We’ve got unmarked military on scene, which could either mean a private security force with a lot of money or legitimate mercenaries with a lot of money and training. There’s some type of blast shield blocking the front entrance, and from that bang it sounds like our way in just just got fucked up by the storm. Anything else?”
There’s a soft click as Slade slides a fresh mag into his gun before holstering it. He unzips the top of his hoodie, letting it fall around his waist to reveal the Ikon suit underneath it. “Something’s blocking cell and radio signals,” he says. He gestures for Reese to pass him their bag, and they watch him consolidate their wallet and backup camera equipment into his own. He pulls out a mess of wires from one of the side pockets and begins to untangle them. “If we’re gonna do this, I want it done right.”
He stands back up and begins affixing one of the cords to the front of Reese’s jacket. They blink.
“Body cams?”
“Waterproof, shock proof, and heat proof,” Slade says. “Three day battery life with continuous recording.” He plucks their DSLR from their hand and sets it in the bag before closing it up and slinging it over his chest. The cord makes a zipping noise as he pulls it taut and secures it farther in place by closing his hoodie back over it. He sets up his own camera, and gestures to a button on the top of it. “They’ve got flashlights, but that’ll drain the battery, so use it sparingly.”
“Kay,” Reese says again. They turn to head down the hallway and are stopped when Slade grabs their wrist.
“The other thing,” he says, “is arm’s length.”
“What?”
He steps back and gestures, extending his arm until there’s space between the two of them, but little enough that he can still reach their arm. “Arm’s length,” he repeats.
For a moment, Reese stares at their interlocked wrists as they process what he’s saying with what they’re seeing. When they’ve digested it, they nod.
“All right,” he says, “let’s go find out where the smell’s coming from.”
********
The hallways of the asylum look like a tornado has blown through them. Reese makes sure to inspect every room, every drawer, every dark corner. They find some loose batteries, and numerous files laying around. The two of them are currently in a small corner office thumbing through various unorganized notes. Reese takes pictures of them with their DSLR and comments that neither they nor Slade have enough room on them to keep every scrap of paper they find. He hums his agreement as he opens the top drawer of the desk before letting out a low whistle.
“Well, hello,” he says.
Reese looks up from the papers in their hand. “What is it?”
Slade holds up an unopened packet of peanut butter crackers. “Someone likes snacks,” he says.
Reese frowns. “Is someone in this scenario you?”
“Maybe,” answers Slade around a mouthful of cracker.
“Jesus christ,” Reese mutters. They toss a piece of paper aside and flip to the next one. A crease forms in their eyebrows as they read. Slade cocks his head and looks over their shoulder.
“’Self lucid dream states’?” he asks. He pops the last cracker into his mouth and discards the wrapper. “What the hell are they talking about?”
“I…don’t know,” says Reese. They lay the file flat and take a couple pictures. “Something about this kids mom suing this place. That could lead to something.”
“Maybe,” Slade says softly. The word comes out more as a hum, and he tugs on Reese’s sleeve to indicate it’s time to move on. The farther the two of them go into the building, and he would guess it is not even that far, the more his own curiosity about the situation begins to drown out the gut feelings that they are treading dangerous, and unknown waters.
The first real sign indicating where the pervasive smell has come from is found in a break room. Slade surveys the vending machine and is surprised when it actually dispenses an ice cold Pepsi. He cracks the tab, and stops with the can halfway to his mouth as his eye lands on the counter next to the machine.
Placed almost neatly on a cutting board is a single piece of intestine.
“You don’t see that every day,” he says.
“Well, that’s disgusting,” says Reese. He turns and finds them gesturing to the soda in his hand. “I thought we had a rule about that?”
Slade blinks.
“There’s intestines on this counter and you’re disgusted by Pepsi?”
Reese blinks.
“There’s what on the counter?!”
Wordlessly, Slade reaches out to grip the top of their head and turn it towards the counter. Reese grimaces, but takes a photo anyway. “Is that… you think that’s human?”
Slade takes a swallow of Pepsi and regards the piece of viscera as the sugar seeps into his gums and makes his teeth tingle. “There’s really no way to tell just by looking,” he says finally. “But I know we sure as shit didn’t pass any farms on the way up here.”
“Well all righty then,” says Reese. They give the break room a curious last sweep before moving for the door. Slade swallows half of the can of Pepsi before leaving it on the table and following them.
Halfway up the hall, with the two of them discussing the things they’ve already found in hushed whispers, a door slams shut. They both stop. The bang that echoes makes Reese jump. Reflexively, they grab a hold of Slade’s sleeve.
He brushes a hand against their shoulder blades and moves forward, the other unholstering his magnum. He pauses outside the door. On the other side, someone is speaking to themselves. He can’t quite make out what they’re saying, and when he tries the knob to find the door locked, the voice stops.
“Let’s just keep moving,” he says softly. He motions for Reese to follow as he backs away from the door, leading them farther down the hallway until a barricaded door stops them both. He shoves his weight against it and when it doesn’t budge he can’t figure out if he’s annoyed or unsurprised. Behind the frosted glass that frames the wood he can see the foyer to the building, and he’d bet good money somewhere down there is more information about what happened here, along with their way out.
They don’t need to get all of the answers tonight, just enough to get people to listen. He’s not usually one to put much stock in local, or even state level PD, but he can already think of a few people to call to make sure Mount Massive gets investigated properly.
“I don’t think we’re getting through,” he says. He throws his weight against the door one more time, just to be sure.
“There’s a vent in here,” says Reese. The muffled sound of their voice makes him realize they’ve slipped beyond the arm’s length agreement. Annoyed, he follows them into a room a few feet away.
“What did I tell you about– the fuck,” Slade’s initial scolding melds into a surprised exclamation. Reese is standing in the middle of the room, looking up at an air vent. The flash on their camera goes off as they hit the shutter button, despite their eyes being nowhere near the viewfinder.
There’s blood dripping from the vent. It pools down onto a broken table top beneath it. Thinner parts of it have begun to dry and turn black, but the center remains wet and red.
“What are the odds this vent comes out onto the other side of that door?” Reese tears their eyes away from the mess as they ask the question. Their voice is tired and heavy with the conclusion that their guess is most likely correct.
If they and Slade want to get to the rest of the building, they’re gonna have to crawl through the wet, stinking vent.
“Me first,” says Slade.
“What about our mystery friend?” asks Reese. Slade pokes his head out into the hallway.
“I don’t hear anything,” he says. It is his first lie of the night. He can still faintly hear the unseen persons ramblings. He makes the executive decision that for now, what can’t be seen can’t be a threat, and shuts the door. “We know what’s behind us, mostly. I have no idea what’s in front.”
“All right, you first,” Reese agrees.
“And if what’s in front reduces me to hamburger meat, you’re going to be doing, what, exactly?” he asks.
“Barricading this door with this soggy wood, hoping it holds, and camping out til someone else shows up,” says Reese flatly. “We have no cell signal but I have a 1400 page ebook I can fire up at a moments notice, I’ll be fine.”
“Oh, well, then,” says Slade as he lifts himself into the vent, “I’m glad you’re learning to think ahead. Never too late to start.”
“Hilarious,” says Reese. They keep an eye on the door the whole time, and the seconds of silence begin to stretch out with more weight.
Soft thumping from above draws their attention from the door.
“It’s clear,” calls Slade.
More silence.
“I said clear,” he repeats.
“Yeah, I can’t fucking reach,” snaps Reese.
“For the love of…” more thumping, and when he speaks next his voice is closer. “Take a running jump.”
“A running- what, a fuckin’ six foot vertical leap over here? With my knees?”
“Reese,” is the only response.
Reese sighs, detecting the ‘serious, now’ in his tone, and backs away from the board. The room isn’t big enough for a real run, but they get a few steps in and jump when a foot hits the board. They slam into the vent, barely having time to register the impact before Slade’s hands close around their arms and haul them into the opening.
“This is why I keep harping about your cardio,” he says, shifting to take point.
They roll their eyes, following behind him, and stopping when an air intake peers down into a room below. Another break room, more blood, and the rambler from earlier.
Did he lock himself in there? They wonder, brows furrowing.
“Reese, let’s go,” calls Slade.
Looking up, they realize he’s exited the end of the vent, and they hurry to follow. He catches them when they jump out, setting them down on the carpet and gesturing with his chin.
“Vent led to the other side of the door,” he says.
“And our way out,” they add, approaching the glass encasing the foyer below. “Hop down a level, say hi to security, and call it a day.”
“Don’t brag until it’s done,” says Slade.
“Killjoy,” they mutter.
Their annoyance fades when the door leading to the lower level turns out to be barricaded.
“You were saying?” he asks, quirking a brow.
“C’mon, am I supposed to believe you’re incapable of busting down every shut door we come across?” they ask.
“Main entrance isn’t the only thing with a blast seal,” he says, indicating the metal bracers around the frame. “Question remains why, though.”
“I know it’s a mental hospital,” says Reese, “but it’s not like it’s Arkham. Public records show this place wasn’t even used much until it got bought out by Murkoff a while back.”
“Yeah, and your tip mentioned experimentation and abuses of the patients,” says Slade. “They repurpose an old public health facility, so they’re clearly not making money on the front end. Use the guise of healthcare to lure in the most vulnerable, get them trapped and unable to say no, test whatever your mad scientists are cooking up, make the money from it on the back end.”
“Oh,” says Reese, “so it is like Arkham.”
Slade snorts, gestures towards the end of the hall. “Looks like we can cut through the library, come out on the other side.”
“Something still feels off,” says Reese, falling in step next to him. “The security, that is. Makes sense when you consider there’s likely an inordinate amount of money moving around behind the scenes but…”
“But what?” Slade pauses, hand on the doorknob for the library.
“This feels less like keeping prying eyes out and more like… keeping something in.”
He says nothing in response. They’re not wrong, but agreeing feels too much like admitting that there’s something to fear. Instead he turns the knob, pushing the library door open.
Reese lets out a startled squeak, and a wet thump lands at his feet. He looks down at the body of a security guard, notes the angle of the neck being twisted, and uses one foot to push the body out of the way. No sense stopping for one corpse.
“I think we found the source of the smell,” says Reese, face twisting as the odor inside the library wafts into the hall.
“One of ‘em,” says Slade. He hooks a hand around their wrist and pulls them through the doorway.
They both stop a few feet in.
Scattered around the room, nestled between book displays are multiple human heads.
“Jesus,” Reese mutters.
Slade says nothing, but keeps his magnum positioned in his free hand. At least they’re no longer ignoring his arms length rule.
He rounds the end of the aisle, and stops again, this time suddenly enough that Reese bumps into his back. They hear a pained gasp from in front of him and even as they step to the side to see, they’re very much thinking that they don’t want to see.
“What in the Cannibal fucking Holocaust is this?” they ask, voice barely above a whisper.
A man in riot armor sits in the middle of the room, impaled on a spike with the tip of it protruding through his Kevlar vest just below the collarbone.
The man gasps again, reaching ineffectively for the spike.
“Y…you shouldn’t be here,” he gurgles. “The variants, they escaped, and…and…” coherence trails off into something between a sob and a moan as his fingertips brush against the spike. He attempts to grasp at it in a futile and mad bid to get any kind of relief, voice raising in volume as the reality of his situation gives way to fresh terror.
The report of Slade’s magnum firing makes Reese slap their hands over their ears. The man on the spike goes limp.
“We’re leaving,” says Slade, retaking their wrist and yanking them with renewed force to the library exit. “Now."
"Was that fucking necessary?” snaps Reese once the two of them are back into the hall.
“That man was already dead,” Slade snaps back. “Prolonging his suffering-"
"I’m not talking about the mercy kill, I’m talking about the fucking noise,” says Reese.
Slade pauses. “Oh."
"Whatever fucking did that to him knows someone else is here now,” they say.
“Shit,” says Slade. “All the more reason to go.”
“You really didn’t think of that?” they ask, exasperated.
“I was thinking of doing a dying man a kindness,” he says, somewhat bitterly.
The hallway is blocked again, this time by a pile of bookcases and benches nearing the ceiling.
“It’s like a fucking maze in here,” says Reese.
“I think we can squeeze through this hole in the center,” says Slade, gesturing as he holsters his gun. “You first.”
Reese freezes. “Woah, what? Me first? What happened to you first?”
“Me first is when I don’t know what’s ahead,” says Slade, “you first is when I’m looking at what’s ahead and it’s clear. Get in the fucking hole.”
“Fine, I’ll get in the goddamn hole, Jesus,” they grumble. It’s almost a tight fit, even for them, and as they reach the halfway point they crane their neck to ask him how he thinks he’s fitting through the same space.
The words never get a chance to form.
There’s a massive brute of a man standing directly behind Slade, seemingly appearing from fucking nowhere, and everything happens all at once. On reflex Reese scrambles to the other side of the blockage as fast as possible, falling to the floor in time to hear Slade yelp in surprise, followed by his weapon firing a single time. They stay low, crawling out of sight and backing against the wall.
They look up at the sound of glass shattering, and through the gaps in the bookcases can make out something going through the window into the atrium below.
Something else remains on the other side of the blockade, panting heavily, and watching the lower level.
And it’s not Slade.
They remain frozen to the spot, their heart hammering in their ears, and begin to wait.
