Chapter Text
What Happens After Doomsday
A Prologue
Part One
∞
“My resentment, big and strong
And all the things that I can't change
They'll buckle me beneath the weight
I will drive myself insane
With all the things that I can't change
I hate all the things that I can't change!”
Loudmouth
AJJ
∞
The world ends in the span of a few days. Ray doesn’t come to remember most of it.
It’s chopped up into fragments, hyper-focused onto mostly unimportant details.
He remembers the sweat sticking to his skin, the burn of his lungs, the hoarseness of his throat. He remembers salty tears dripping into his mouth. He remembers--
He remembers being late.
There was a heavy odour of iron, unmistakably the scent of blood he’d grown used to over the past two years--except so much stronger than ever before, hanging in the air like a curse. Even the image of dozens of bodies strewn across the marble floor was secondary to the smell, at first.
“Good. You both were able to come back safely. But I’m sorry, you were a bit too late.”
There had been a faint, eerie smile on Norman’s pale face. “You didn’t make it in time.”
He doesn’t remember what he and Emma said to him. Doesn’t remember the words which came from the depths of himself.
He remembers an awakening within Norman, alight in his eyes. He remembers a true understanding for the first time in years. Tears. A promise.
The towering behemoth of a demon behind Norman is fuzzy in his recollection. The next part isn’t, burning through his aching skull with each flash of a distinct, terrible instant.
Ray holding out a desperate hand.
Emma screaming.
Cislo stumbling to his feet.
And then--
Something can be said about the destructive power of violence--not only in the physical world, but in the way it brands itself into your mind, tearing through the tissue to get there.
Here is something that reassures Ray, in the most trivial kind of way: Norman’s death must have been painless, because a head removed clean from the body loses consciousness almost instantaneously.
Norman was there, and then he was gone.
The same can’t be said for what was left of him.
∞
He remembers the soreness of limbs, and the heavy weight of a gun in his hands. He remembers a shattering of his very being. He remembers eating, vaguely. He remembers his throat burning and tears rolling down his cheeks. He remembers returning home.
Even with the smell of gunpowder in the air, everything felt far away. Ever-building horror as a fast-hatched plan went awry in the throes of grief.
That’s what lead to this moment:
Emma was lying on the ground. There was a lot of blood. Ray’s hands were stained as they pressed against her quivering chest, trying desperately to keep it all in.
And everything had come to an end.
Ray’s hands were stained beet-red, and he can’t remember most of it.
There was a shaky hand pressing cool metal into his palm. Though they were painfully, horribly stuttered by a girl choking on her own blood, losing definition like a waterlogged photograph, he remembers the next words so clearly they continue to reverberate through his skull like a cataclysmic thunderclap.
“You can still change the world, Ray.”
∞
“Oh, god. Ray? Can you hear me?”
Eyes refocus like a camera lens, though the surroundings are blurry. Ray comes to and sees Gilda’s tear-blotched, agonised face. Her hair has come out of its bun and hangs in messy strands, sticking to her wet cheeks, and he then notices her hands on his shoulders in a grip that should’ve been too tight not to feel.
“Yeah,” is what comes out of his mouth, though it feels like it’s full of sand.
She wraps her arms around him and holds him closer than he’s even been held before, and he throws himself into the embrace.
His head feels fuzzy from the crying. His eyes ache. Nothing is real.
∞
They do a headcount. Only seven made it out.
There is Ray, who is probably alive. And Gilda, who is definitely, thankfully alive, because all she does is cling to him and he finds all he can do is cling back.
Despite their two years of comradery, there is an impassable divide between them and the kids from Goldy Pond. A chasm unable to be crossed. A group of two and a group of four each sticking together as if glued.
Zack’s tall frame envelops all three like he’s trying to protect them from the world. He’s far too late for that. Oliver has an arm around a hunched Paula and an arm around a quivering Violet. There’s something in the set of his shoulders that attempts to evoke their not-even-long-dead father figure. Their huddle is desperately close, even as reddened hands and clothes stain whatever they touch with more blood.
And, apart from each inseparable group, is Ayshe. She would be alone if not for her two red-furred dogs. She crouches and surrounds herself with them as if attempting to form a shield, but that shield is missing a vital piece.
Ray wouldn’t be surprised if she ran off now. Or if she even tried to attack them, after everything that happened.
“There’s only one way for us to exist peacefully as humans, and it’s not in this world. Please come with us, Ayshe. You can live in the human world just as well as us.”
That clear, calm, kind voice burns through every other thought circulating around his skull as efficiently as a wildfire tears through a woodland.
Emma—
Hands pressing over a pierced chest—
“You can still change the world, Ray.”
He has to pull himself away from Gilda to throw up.
∞
Setting up camp. A muscle memory so rote his mind can blissfully turn blank as he performs it.
Dig the fire pit. Yes, the smoke will be dangerous above ground, but Ray is certain none of them care.
Collect dry wood.
Lay out his bed roll. They all have the responsibility to look after their own.
And--
And the last time any of them ate was breakfast.
Ray feels cold as his mind compulsively sends him back to so many meals prior. The mostly-premade food of Grace Field House. The vegetables they grew in the shelter and the lizards and birds they learned to hunt. The herbs and fruit of the forest they foraged. A hot, delicious meal served for them on their first night in ‘paradise’.
Meals are a time for family.
“Ray?”
He looks up. Gilda’s voice is quivering, but she’s not crying anymore, though the dried tear tracks are stark against her pale cheeks. “Come on. You’ve been sitting there for minutes.”
She holds out a hand, and Ray grabs it. She doesn’t ask if he’s okay, since it would be pointless. She pulls him up and into another hug, but this time he just stands there, limp, as she embraces him.
“We don’t have anything to make dinner,” he says compulsively. He doesn’t know why he mentions it when it doesn’t even matter at this point. But Gilda pulls back to look at him, attempting a smile for a few seconds before dropping it.
God. She’s still trying so hard. How is she still trying so hard?
“It’s… It’ll be okay. We still have some preserved meat and vegetables, I think.”
A cold meal. Maybe that’s better, anyway.
Ray isn’t sure when they all end up around a lit fire. But here he is--here they are. Mostly dry faces lit by the too-warm firelight. None of them are eating much, though Ayshe is stoically feeding her dogs.
Ray stares into the fire, as he’s stared into so many fires before. The only thing separating him from those times and now is three days.
He isn’t sure if those three days happened. Maybe he’s in a dream. Maybe he’s dead. Those are the only plausible explanations.
Slight pressure on his right shoulder. Ray jolts, and turns to see Gilda staring at him, eyes hollow yet somehow simultaneously brimming with worry. At least he noticed her touch this time.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you to eat.”
It’s true. Ray’s the one who’s supposed to make them eat, cook up a meal so delicious not even the most tired of them could refuse it. That’s who he’s supposed to be.
He says nothing. He turns away and reaches out to pick up a single strip of preserved meat. He probably prepared it himself. It tastes like nothing, despite the salt he must’ve soaked it in.
There’s nothing to say. The crackle of the fire is a noise that seems insurmountable.
It’s insurmountable, but it can’t be that way forever.
Oliver speaks first.
“We…” he begins, almost failing at the very beginning before his voice gains a new steel edge. “We need to talk. About what’s next.”
Next.
Is there a next?
It’s the principle Ray has spent his entire life on. What comes next? What does he have to do to achieve it? What will happen in the future? Is he prepared? Is he ready?
There was once a time when Ray didn’t have a ‘next’. Once. Until two people gave him one. The same two people who will never have one, ever again.
“We can’t take too long,” Zack says in a hoarse voice. “Who knows what will happen if we do? We take as little time as possible to get prepared, and then we go back for them.”
Oliver’s expression falters, softening for a time that Ray can’t completely discern, and then abruptly goes firm.
“I don’t think we should go back. Not now.”
“What?”
Ray’s world splinters.
∞
Survival.
That’s the only description.
Ray knows how to survive.
∞
Survival part one: cry until your eyes go dry. Cry until you force yourself to stop because you’re distinctly aware of looming dehydration.
Cry into Gilda’s shoulder, until her touch becomes too light, too desperately trying to draw comfort out of you.
Cry alone after that.
∞
Survival part two: argue.
Argue a lot. Argue until your throat is hoarse. Scream at each other, embroiled in depths of emotions you never even had the ability to imagine before.
Feel a deep, bubbling heat inside of you that melts your organs until you can’t breathe, that can only be directed at other people for a dismal relief.
Scream until you’re all too tired, yet no resolution has been reached.
∞
Survival part three: see demons with spears larger than your body hunting for you.
Find Mujika and Sonju’s underground passages to hide in.
Empty.
∞
Survival part four: watch Ayshe leave.
She takes her two dogs, and hardly any supplies.
∞
Survival part five: let everything fade away.
∞
Gilda grips Ray’s sleeves like a child gripping the skirts of her mother. It’s a desperate grip of dependence. He knows the feeling all too well, which only makes him less willing to let her.
“Let me go!”
Ray pulls his sleeve away. She lets go, but the tears don’t stop flowing.
“Why are you doing this? You can’t pull away. You can’t leave me, after everything.”
“You were fine to leave our siblings in the hands of Peter Ratri,” Ray snaps.
“Don’t you fucking dare!”
He pauses. It’s the first time he’s ever heard Gilda swear. It’s enough to make him turn to face her. There’s an inimitable fury across her normally warm features like an all-consuming plague.
“Don’t you dare take our siblings’ deaths and use them against me! Don’t you dare take the fact that we didn’t want to go on a suicide mission and twist it into some sort of great evil. You’re insufferable. Absolutely insufferable.”
Painful heat blazing in his organs. Melting it all away.
“If it’s a suicide mission, so what? I’d rather die trying to save them than live knowing I could have.”
“That’s the thing, Ray! You can’t. We can’t have everything! Sometimes you need to focus on the people who are alive instead of the people who are almost definitely not.”
The vitriolic exchange peters out into a fierce meeting of two pairs of eyes.
“Emma would’ve saved them,” Ray says.
He can’t say he doesn’t deserve the swearing out she gives him for that one.
∞
Survival part six:
Maybe there isn’t a part six.
∞
He finds Ayshe, of all things. She hadn’t even gone far. She’s sitting, leaning against a fallen tree almost as large as the house he was once imprisoned in, eyes closed, two hands gripping two coats of matted fur on either side.
She doesn’t even have her gun out. She looks like she’s waiting for death.
It turns out that Ray is a hypocrite.
It’s the first time he’s ever seen her taken by surprise--when he sits down a few metres away from her with a thump , and her eyes fly open. They’re wide as they stare at his place to the left of her. She grips her dogs’ fur tighter.
She speaks first.
“Why are you here?”
“For the same reason as you, probably.”
She stares.
Ray elaborates. “We both have nothing to live for.”
She turns her head away. “We’re nothing alike. You have Gilda. You have some semblance of a family left. You have the necklace Emma gave you. I have nothing.”
He says, “You have your dogs.”
Ayshe blinks. “Yes, but…”
“We both have things. But apparently nothing to live for. What’s the difference, do you think?”
He isn’t sure why he asks, why the words come spilling out of him as if compelled. Maybe he just needs to get it all out.
“Maybe it’s when what you’ve lost outweighs what you have,” she murmurs, with a gentler tone than he’s ever heard from her.
“That’s just selfish, isn’t it? To abandon your dogs because you don’t think they’re worth enough. To even take them with you,” he says.
She looks back at him, though this time with a glare. “Speak for yourself. How will Gilda feel without you?”
“I never said I wasn’t selfish.”
A chilled breeze comes through, and the both of them shiver in tandem. It’s cold, and uncomfortable, and also strangely thrilling. The sensation like ice on his skin.
“I’m scared,” he says, and he has no clue where it comes from. Maybe death makes it easier to tell the truth. He remembers how easily every feeling came out of him in a verbal barrage when he was telling Emma his true plan.
Ayshe brings up her knees, and buries her face in them. He can barely hear her muffled words. “Me, too.”
For a second, they’re just two scared 13-year-olds. Something breaks within Ray. He stands up, and Ayshe’s gaze follows him as he heads towards her.
“Are your dogs enough for a couple more days?” he asks.
She stares up at him, but only answers after she looks away. “Yes. I think so. But what about after that?”
“I don’t know. But for now, it can be enough.”
He holds out a hand. She grabs it with a shock of no hesitation.
∞
None of them have been eating well. There are a few reasons for it.
It’s been hard to hunt anything, considering they’re being hunted themselves. So far they haven’t had much success, and are only sending one person out of the tunnels at a time to see if they’re able to hunt or forage anything.
Of course, there’s the unspeakable heaviness that hangs over all of them, making it difficult to move. Difficult to do anything at all. Hunting and foraging isn’t something any of them want to be tasked with.
But Ray figures that most of the blame falls upon himself. Of course, all the Goldy Pond kids know how to cook, but none like him. Over the past two years, he’s found an unexpected and indescribable joy in making meals for his family.
He’s failed. Food is everything when you’re living in the wilderness, when you’re hiding out and trying to survive in a few-metres-across tunnel that’s suffocatingly dark. Not only do they all need nutritious meals to keep them strong and energised when faltering could mean death, but Ray knows very well the morale that can be built from a simple hot meal. It wouldn’t be close to enough to make them smile like they used to, but it would be something.
For this moment, Ray has decided to focus on something instead of everything. Now instead of next. He has no close how long it’ll last, how long the things and people around him will be enough for tomorrow. But they’re enough for now.
Even with Ayshe back, having returned with him earlier this afternoon, she keeps herself separate from the rest of the group. He watches the way her head droops, her grip kept in the dogs’ fur.
Gilda is making arrows. Her lips are white from being pressed hard together. He watches as she performs the repetitive motions of whittling down the wood, carving the stone arrowheads, cutting feathers into fletching.
Zack and Paula are together, once again checking and double-checking their supplies. There’s a wide breadth between them and Oliver, who is leaning against the walls, writing in his journal with a nearly-gone pencil. No agreement has been made about their future, about if and when they should go back for the other kids. Ray is just glad for silence instead of shouting.
Violet is carefully placing each painfully-acquired piece of wood into their firepit, getting ready for dinner and warmth.
It means that Ray should get started.
He walks over to Zack and Paula, who have all the food supplies laid out. They don’t look up at him.
The selection is laughably sparse. A single loaf of bread, left over from Minerva’s hideout, which they’ll have to finish soon before it gets mouldy. Four tree nuts, from the most successful outing they’ve had in the past few days. Six pieces of preserved bird meat wrapped up in a piece of cloth, from before. A collection of spices and herbs Ray had been keeping with him--including salt, black pepper, ginger, turmeric, basil, mint, and a thyme-like herb which grows all over the forest. A few dried carrots and green beans. Three onions. Two small potatoes. A small bag of walnuts. One packet of soup mix. A jar of bone broth he’d been saving.
That’s it.
The spices and herbs have been untouched recently. There doesn’t feel like much point to them, but Ray looks over them with new eyes, knowing they could transform a bland meal into a delicious one with the right touch. His gaze lands on the turmeric.
Zack and Paula do glance up when he descends on the ingredients. They watch as he grabs the bread, two pieces of meat, the salt, turmeric, and thyme-like herb, an onion and potato, and the jar of broth, moving them closer to the firepit in preparation for cooking.
“What are you doing?” Zack asks.
“Making dinner.”
Ray thinks it’s pretty obvious, but they both just stare at him. He looks away and focuses his attention on the preparations.
They’ve only cooked once or twice these past few days, and only using the quickly-depleting soup mixes. Otherwise their meals have been cold, which is truthfully not a good idea when the risk of infection is ever-present, but their minds haven’t had much room to spare for thoughts of bacteria.
Ray grabs the large cooking pot, which he’d dutifully washed out after the last time they used it. He mounts it over the firepit and uses his fire starter to set the wood alight, lightly poking at it until the blaze is reasonably strong.
They need to be careful with water. Ray pours half a jar into the pot, since they’ll be able to save some of the stock and didn’t use any water for their dinner yesterday.
He waits until the water is boiling and submerges the knife to disinfect it. Then he pours the bone broth into the pot and chops the onion and potato on the wooden cutting board he keeps. He sets aside half of the onion.
Now done with the vegetables, Ray moves onto the meat. A breast and a neck of a medium-sized bird. He chops the breast into strips and the neck into cubes. He pushes them and the onion and potato into the stew, and begins stirring.
It’s not going to be delicious. At best, it’ll be a welcome reprieve from the sort of thing they’ve been eating lately, but he doesn’t have the resources for a feast right now. He sprinkles in turmeric, the salt, and is about to utilise the thyme-like herb when he feels a hand on his shoulder.
It’s a good thing he doesn’t flinch, considering the knife in his hand. He turns to see Ayshe frowning down at him.
“You don’t cook it.”
“What?”
“You don’t cook vashe ,” she tells him.
He looks back down at the herb. He never considered its name, or how the demons might use it. Ray feels stupid now for not wondering about its traditional uses.
“It’s better fresh,” she elaborates. “Cooking it will ruin the flavour.”
He knows very well there are some herbs which are better fresh. That’s why he hadn’t used the basil or mint for this particular meal--putting them in stews is pointless as they rarely flavour them enough to be worth the expense. However, he’d figured this one would need a herb to balance the turmeric out, and due to its similarities in appearance and taste to thyme he thought the vashe would do.
“Fine,” Ray relents. He can add it in at the end to preserve its flavour.
When he serves up, the usual tense atmosphere that permeates dinner--the time where they all have to sit together, to talk--is broken by the simple novelty of a cooked meal. Each person gets a smaller portion of stew and bread than healthy for their lifestyles, but Ray is a chef, not a miracle worker. He can only do what he does with the ingredients he has.
Dinner is silent today. He doesn’t know if it’s in enjoyment of the meal, an awkward tension due to the change of routine, a melancholy of musing about the past, or all three. Whatever it is, Ray is thankful.
He notices Ayshe purposefully avoids the meat when she serves herself her portion, but nobody comments on it.
He sleeps close to Gilda today because she doesn’t talk. She doesn’t try to comfort him, or hold him close. She just is close.
That’s enough for tonight.
∞
Ayshe refuses to eat the lizard they caught today.
“I don’t have anything else. We’re on rations,” Ray says. “You need to eat or you’ll end up even worse off.”
“It’s wrong,” she responds.
He stares at her. “You’re… a vegetarian? But Gilda said--”
“Of course I’m not. It’s that you didn’t prepare it right. You didn’t give respect.”
Ray has never done a gupna . Emma told him about it after her outing with Sonju, about how it’s a way to respect both the gods and the life of the being you’re about to eat, but he’s stuck with human methods to prepare meat since.
It’s then he realises the depth of its meaning, beyond a mere strange cultural tradition. Ayshe’s eyes are intense as she insists on respect. Even as a human, she believes in what the demons believe. It’s not something he can wrap his head around.
“If you insist on a gupna ,” Ray says, “then tell me why we should do it as humans.”
“It has nothing to do with whether we’re humans or demons,” she says. “It’s about respecting the creature you’re going to eat. That lizard’s life was just as real as yours.”
Ray feels like his own heart has been pierced, because that sounds so much like something Emma would say he could scream.
“Starve if you want,” Ray snaps. “How you prepare a corpse has nothing to do with the creature’s life.”
Ayshe glares, and refuses to eat.
∞
Waking and eating and working and cooking and arguing and sleeping.
Ray doesn’t know what next could be.
He hasn’t seen anyone smile in days. Even with each other’s company, they can’t coax much out of their bonds apart from a vague comfort, and a deep resentment.
This is no way to continue. He wants to crawl back out into the woods and let something kill him, or even finish the job himself if he can muster the strength.
Instead, he thinks of Norman. He thinks of hatred. He thinks of a need for self-sacrifice so awful and paradoxical cold that it leaves only rubble in its wake. He thinks of the brimming of tears in mixed indigo eyes which betray a moment before action, an instant before thought, forever disrupted in a splash of carmine red.
He thinks of Emma. He thinks of smiling teeth which are flecked with blood. He thinks of a girl crying into his shoulder at 12am, desperate to mask her sobs. He thinks of a moment which ended everything, in a cold corridor underneath Grace Field Farm, when the only part of him which hadn’t yet died gave him a stained necklace and told him he could change the world.
If he’s going to kill himself, he might as well follow the path of his betters and save someone while he’s at it.
Gilda has stopped grabbing so tight now that he’s started to cook again. She must see it as a positive sign. As the slightest return to normality. That’s a good thing for him, at least, because they don’t keep watch in the tunnels and even the most tortured of insomniacs have to go to sleep eventually.
It’s late when everyone’s forms are unmoving. He grabs the bag he’d packed when nobody was paying him any mind and leaves.
It’ll be a long walk to Grace Field Farm. When he emerges from the tunnels, his surroundings are inky dark. Some glow-plants ( kitsha , Ayshe calls them) illuminate the forest, but not enough to see more than a few metres into the beyond. Ray hadn’t taken their only lantern, of course, so he picks one and ties it to the end of a stick as a pathetic makeshift measure. It works. That’s the only thing that matters.
Ray reaches into his pocket and brings out a familiar pen. In the dim, icy glow of the kitsha , its grey tones are stark. He twists it open to check his location, the blue letters a new luminance in the dark. B 02-12 . As Grace Field is the center of Minerva’s map at 00-00 , Ray needs to head due southwest.
He moves the light of the kitsha low, so as to blend in with the ground plants, and holds out his right hand to trail the bark of the tall, wide trees. It’s smooth and cool underneath his brushing fingertips. Crouching with tensed limbs, Ray begins to move forward, watching his step and balance, stepping with the ball of his foot before lightly placing down his heel. Just like Yuugo taught him, even if unintentionally.
He forces himself to breathe evenly. The rhythm of movement and the rise and fall of his own chest give him something to focus on. Something simple to get right. His limbs shake with tension, with the adrenaline rushing through his veins and making his heart beat like a frenzied drum. He evens out his breathing further, hoping it’ll help calm down each uncomfortable thump in his chest.
After a few minutes, he takes a chance and looks back. Even if the entrance to the tunnels wasn’t well-hidden with a patch of dead vines, it would be far beyond his sight by now. In the low light in the tones of the kitsha , he can’t make out any colour. Though the forest is dim in the day, the rich umber of the tree bark is visible, unlike the muddy grey he can only see in the present.
The forest is perhaps more quiet than a human forest would be, but it’s not utterly silent. His footsteps make no noise, but there’s the occasional rustle of some animal in the trees or bushes that makes him freeze, or the hoot of an owl archetypical of the woods at night. Then there’s that faint breeze which rustles the far-up leaves, and is just cool enough to bite through his thick overcoat.
It’s an environment in stasis, or at least feels like one. Feels like someone has pressed pause, like someone has captured the silence between breaths, eternally preserved. Ray can’t break the liminal freeze. He has to be a part of the plateau.
Rhythm of his breaths. Each one brings the cold scent of fallen leaves from the umberbark trees. Rhythm of his feet. He makes sure only to step on soft earth, or vines, or limp leaves half decomposed.
Time doesn’t go faster when you find a rhythm. It goes easy, malleable, pliant, but the path through stretches on even when it’s devoid of obstacles. Ray spends it trying to keep his breath from getting caught in his throat, forcing himself not to flinch at every noise that sounds out. At one point, he swears he sees the tall, grotesque figure of a demon, but all that gets him is minutes wasted with his back pressed up against smooth bark before he musters the bravery to look again.
The rhythm continues at an easy slog. His pack weighs down his shoulders, pulling them to the ground, and there’s nothing he can do except adjust the straps and roll his shoulders back every few seconds. It’s mainly the weight of the gun, ash grey and violent. The first time he’d held a gun the weight had shocked him--he’d known they were heavy, but not from experience. Now it’s just a familiar ache.
Even in the throes of the most intense anxieties, normality can be grasped. Ray knows the human mind is capable of great feats of deluding itself, and every moment he realises he doesn’t remember the past ten minutes, or is walking in some sort of haze, a cold spike of fear pierces his heart. The time cycles through mindless lapses and rapid panic that makes his chest so tight he can’t breathe. He wanders over decaying beds of leaves, soft under his thick-soled boots, and focuses on the near-indiscernible sound of his own breathing, the light rise and fall of his chest.
Periodically, he presses two fingers against his carotid artery, checking the steady rate of his pulse. Periodically, he glances at the pen’s projection to make sure he’s on track, twisting it shut just as soon as he’s got it open.
Steady rhythm. Steady anxiety. Rise-and-fall of his chest, the loyal beat of his heart. Eventually the rate at which he checks his location is consistent.
The trees get smaller as he continues his trek, their thick trunks shrinking, though still much larger than what they should normally be. He pauses, glances up, and is able to see the faintest pinpricks of light shining through the now-thinner canopy--the stars watching over him. He cranes his head, trying his best to identify the shapes the constellations make, and…
There. Polaris. The North Star.
It only further confirms that he’s heading in the right direction, but it makes his chest feel tight at the same time. He looks back down with a shake of his head, feeling his stiff-with-grime bangs brushing against his cheek, breathing the crisp air in deep, listening to the faint chirping of insects in the stifling night… Then he moves his heavy feet. Continues on.
The dusty ground begins to slope upward eventually. Ray remembers this--of all things, he remembers the sharp descent into the woods shortly after they escaped the farm. The little kids had found the drop daunting…
He reminds himself to breathe and starts to trek up the hill. The angle is steep, and he occasionally has to grab onto a branch or root to make it, gripping the cold wood with white knuckles as he hoists his heavy body up. Heavy pack. Heavy gun. His limbs burn as he pulls himself over a jutting overhang, but it’s nothing he can’t handle. Despite this, the sweat that sticks to his skin once he gets to the top makes him shiver in the cool night air.
It won’t be much longer. Envisioning his destination in his mind--that horrible, endless drop of a cliff--Ray forces his legs to stride forward faster, harder, despite the strain of his muscles.
He realises he’s making far too much noise, and pauses. Breathes in deep (wheezes, he’s been walking for so long he can taste his own blood), gives his shaking limbs the time to steady, vaguely reminds himself how to move his heavy feet in ways that don’t betray their heaviness. He forces the freezing air into his lungs with the last loud heave of breath he allows himself. Then he continues on, once again creeping near-silent through the dark.
He glances back up at the sky. Dark as ink, dark as the soil beneath his feet. He has time, though he knows there’s no way he could make the return journey before it grows light. That’s a problem for later.
Ray ignores the heaviness of his pack, and limbs, and eyes. He ignores the static burning through his mind. He’s almost made it.
And, indeed, he’s certain he must be minutes away from the cliff to Grace Field when he runs into the fence.
It’s nothing like the fence within Grace Field’s own forest--low and painted in the same white of their clothes, practically begging the more rebellious kids to vault over. This isn’t a fence which aims to maintain an illusion. It’s meant to keep things in . Maybe out, as well.
It’s easily six metres tall--four times his height--and made of stark chainlink. Large metal poles placed two metres apart hold it up, the material slate grey and sturdy. At the tops of them, they fork out into two prongs to hold large loops of vicious barbed wire.
Ray doesn’t have bolt cutters. He doesn’t have any industrial tool that would be useful to get through. He brought his gun, and two knives, and his bow and arrow, but that’s it.
What was my plan anyway? To magically make it across the cliff? To take the bridge? I would never make it.
He doesn’t move, though. He simply stares at the height of the fence, mind whirring as it tackles the issue.
Going over isn’t an option. The risk of being injured by the barbed wire is too high, and he doesn’t want to deal with an open wound. He could try to dig under, but it would take far too long and he’d be prone the whole time. Ray heaves a self-indulgent sigh as quiet as he can manage and begins to walk left along the fence, unconsciously counting his steps.
5, 6, 7, 8
It must be past midnight by now. The chill cuts through his coat as if nothing was protecting his skin.
12, 13, 14, 15
It’s quiet near the fence. Even quieter than the oppressive almost-silence of the rest of the forest.
20, 21, 22, 23
Ray pauses when he sees a dark shape caught up in one of the barbed wire loops. He moves closer, squinting, and elevates the kitsha just enough to see it…
It’s a bird. He can’t tell what kind--the colour and feather pattern indiscernible in the blue-cast shadow--but it’s large enough to be entangled in the wide loop, each wing caught and torn in a barb. It’s long-dead. The rotten scent of decaying meat, pungent and too-familiar, makes him turn and walk 23 steps back.
Ray takes a minute to breathe. He rests a hand on an umberbark tree.
He looks up, at the spanning branches, at the stars peeking between the leaves.
Climbing isn’t a good idea at this time of night, especially with the heaviness of his pack weighing him down. There’s no better option.
First he tucks his makeshift kitsha light into the side of his bag. He grasps the smooth branches as tight as he can and begins to climb, feeling the strain of his tired muscles as he struggles to find each foothold. However, Ray spent his entire childhood climbing, and so makes it up to the top with a sweaty brow and a heaving chest, trembling with exertion and the anxiety that someone heard the rustling of the branches. He stays perched in the tree for five minutes, keeping vigil, before looking ahead to prepare himself for the next stage of the endeavour.
The branches of a tree on the other side of the fence cross paths with the one he’s in, but he can tell from sight that they’re too thin to hold both him and his bag.
It would be dangerous to throw it over. Not only would the impact be loud, but throwing a loaded gun anywhere is a terrible idea.
But there’s nothing fragile in his bag. And, once again, he finds himself bereft of options.
The tight coil of anxiety in his stomach only gets tighter when he grabs his rifle and unloads the cartridges from the magazine. There are 10 overall, about as tall as the width of his palm, and they’re cold and heavy when he puts them in one of his deep pockets. He reassembles the gun and ties it and the kitsha stick back to the bag.
The tree he’s in is much taller than the ones he’d climb when he was a kid. He must be at least thirty metres off the ground. His breath hitches instinctively when he looks down at the gloom below, at a fall that would break some essential part of his inner machinery instantly upon impact--if he was lucky enough not to hit the barbed wire. He’s been in trees this tall before, namely when travelling to Goldy Pond, but here in the dark, alone, he’s met with something he’s tried so hard to ignore for years.
He attempts to avert its gaze from him by moving.
After a heave of his aching arms, the pack lands safely on the other side. No earth-shattering bang of a gun, and the noise of the impact isn’t as bad as he thought due to the soft leaves beneath. Ray lets his instincts take over when climbing to the opposite tree, only consciously making sure he doesn’t look down. His limbs are trembling so hard he’s terrified he’ll slip, but he makes it to the other side and his feet meet soft leaves.
He somehow ends up slumped against the smooth, cool bark, clutching his newly loaded gun to his chest, trying to stop his unyielding shaking.
Ray has successfully imprisoned himself again.
∞
He doesn’t know how it happens, doesn’t know, doesn’t know. The world once again slipped away into an indistinct fog at the most crucial moment, until all that was keeping him rooted to the ground was pain and fear.
Even when he managed to move his still-shaking body, he must not have made it far.
Now Ray is running, as he’s done so many times before. Running is simple for his beleaguered body to comprehend, the rhythm easy, the burn of his limbs at least familiar in the muscles and joints which ache from exertion. The shape of this horror is an old friend.
He doesn’t even know who or what’s pursuing him, just that he needs to run . Just that he’ll die if he lets himself falter, and that it’s a strangely terrifying thought.
The fence appears before him, emerging from the well of ink he’s drowning in. There’s no time to climb a tree, to carefully balance himself on each branch, to precisely calculate his weight against their maximum load.
There’s only one way forward, one chance of survival.
Ray is crying again when he grabs the first link of the chainlink fence. The blurriness of his vision is a curse. Link by link, he climbs, flinching already at the sight of the barbarous loops of twisted metal he’s striving for--the pain he’s about to inflict on his own shaking hands.
At first he tries to be precise in his movements, to grab at the stretches of wire free of barbs, to calculate as he always does. But he’s going too slow, and it seems his mind has done him few favours so far considering the situation he’s in.
The first time he grabs a barb is agony. It pierces his palm and hot blood instantly trickles down, his shot nerves sending a spasm up his arm. He bites back a scream. He moves his hands again, keeps moving them. Another barb, cutting through the fingers on his right hand. He sobs and tries to pull himself over, to make it over, even if he has to fall down the other side. All he gets is his left cheek torn to shreds by barbs already coated in his blood, the fierce sting only worsened when he finally cries out.
He finds some strength, somehow, to pull himself up until his torso is above the loops, until he can see the other side, and he heaves a clear breath--
He falls. Something hit him in the back, something that tears through his body, his mind, his soul, and makes it hot and wet and horrid. He careens over the fence, tearing a leg on the barbed wire on the way, and on stupid instinct he holds out a hand.
Ray feels his arm bone giving way before he’s launched into a new kind of darkness.
∞
Ray isn’t dead.
He knows instantly. I think therefore I am. He’d never liked Descartes.
What? Focus. Focus.
His eyes snap open. All he can see through the blurry is the distinctive luminance of kitsha . He breathes. His lungs work. His heart is beating. Good.
His whole body is on fire, and despite himself tears come to his eyes simply out of the excruciating pain.
There’s a cold hand on his shoulder. He gasps, jerks up before he regrets it. The hand guides him back down to rest and he has no energy or will or reason to protest.
The last thing he hears before drifting off into a less sudden dark is a soft voice murmuring something in a language he doesn’t know.