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You know what [[pain]] feels like.You know what it feels like to have a monster’s claws tearing you open, a knife driven into your stomach or stuck through your hand. You know what it feels like to break a bone. To break several bones. To break your nose. To dislocate a joint. To fall out of a tree and concuss yourself. You know what it feels like to be crushed under rocks in a collapsing mine shaft, to feel your ribs giving way, your organs rupturing inside your [[body]].You know pain. You’ve got a good tolerance for it. And in your opinion, the pain you’re feeling right now is the [[worst you’ve ever felt]].The first time you slip back into consciousness, you’re sure you’ve died and gone to Hell. You’re no longer on the lawn - at least, you don’t think you are. There’s a hard, flat surface supporting your head and back, and fluorescent lights beating down on you as harshly as the sun ever does in Colorado. Your clothes are clinging to your skin, stuck down with sweat. Your arm must still be dislocated, because it feels like it’s on fire, and too loosely tethered to your body to move right. Someone you can’t see is gently wiping the area around your missing eye with a cloth that feels pleasantly cold and wet, the pressure of their fingers firm, but enough to create small [[blossoms of pain]] on your face wherever they massage you.[[You pass out again.|pass out]]The next time you wake up, someone is tipping the rim of a glass against your lips. You [[open your mouth]] obediently, still sure you’re dead.
Water cold enough to hurt your teeth slides into your mouth, nearly gagging you. You feel something harder, something more solid, going down with it all of the sudden, and cough, every movement sending a new wave of aches and pains through your body. The same fingers from before massage your throat, helping you swallow. You can see a figure looming over you, blurry, smiling, their teeth as shiny-white as the [[fluorescent lights]].Whatever’s in the glass can’t be worse than being [[dead|pass out]].You try to hold on to consciousness longer, this time, but you [[can’t]].There’s a sticking pain in your eye, the missing one, the next time you wake up, and the same wet cloth as before on your face. Your bad arm feels better - you’re able to raise it, to try and touch your empty eye socket, without much pain. But someone gently deflects your hand, pushing it back down towards your side.
“Try to stay still for me,” the person above you says, their voice sounding [[miles away]].You try to relax the muscles of your face, hastily drawing connections between your tensed body and the little stabs of pain shooting through your eye socket. The relaxation doesn’t help much, but it does carry you off back into a dark, dreamless [[sleep]].The fourth and final time you wake up, you feel lightheaded, but more alert. The pain in your eye and shoulder are dulled, like you’re feeling them through several layers of insulation. You find yourself still on your back, still staring up at the lights, the looming, grinning figure from before now nowhere in sight. You wonder, again, if you’re [[dead]].
You press your palms into the hard, smooth surface beneath you, and start to [[sit up]].
Would your eye still be missing, if you were dead? Is that how it [[works|sleep]]?
As you do, you find that you know [[exactly]] where you are.[[In fact, you haven’t left your kitchen.|kitchen]]“Hey, hey, woah,” a voice says from behind you - to your right, in your blind spot. You feel a hand on your shoulder, another in the small of your back. “Let’s take it easy. No falling and bouncing your head off the counter, huh? You’re on - well, you’re on the strongest stuff I could find in any of your medicine cabinets, that’s for sure.”
The more the person holding you talks, the more you recognize their voice. But with your head feeling the way it is right now, trying to remember a name is like trying to grasp a wisp of [[cigarette smoke]].
“You lost a lot of blood,” the person holding you up says. The hand in the small of your back releases. “It was touch and go for a while, there, but you should be right as rain in a week or so. Well, except for [[your eye.”|your eye]]
[[God, you could use a smoke.|kitchen]]Abruptly, [[the person]] addressing you emerges fully-formed from the shadow of your blind spot.Unfortunately, [[you recognize him.|recognize]]It would be hard to forget that face, especially so soon after you parted ways. Even if [[Dallas’s]] smile has a peculiar, strained edge to it, and his hair is falling out of the pompadour in stiff locks that curl haphazardly around his face.“You,” you growl.
“Yeah,” he agrees, cheerfully. “Me.”
“[[How?]]” you ask, not feeling particularly up to the mental gymnastics that come with stringing together a question of three words or more.“Oh, I doubled back after you’d all left to go back to the Department. Someone had to make sure that tunnel got sealed up, in case anyone snitched.” Dallas grins wider, wolfishly. Your head is still spinning, but you try and hold on to every word out of his mouth, following as best as you can.
“After that, I just hung around to keep an eye on you. Lucky I did, too.” He pauses. “Touchy subject, though, maybe. What with your brother's...situation.”
As much as you hate to admit that Dallas is right, you really did catch a hell of a lucky break, here. Part of you wants to believe that it’s [[something cosmic]], something beyond coincidence, that placed Dallas in your path right when you were about to suffer a grievous injury. But maybe - just maybe - that's the [[painkillers]] talking.“My eye,” you say, lifting a hand carefully to your face, to feel around your eye socket. There’s a soft, padded bandage covering the whole thing, taped in place. Predictably, it hurts more as you press on it, like a fresh bruise.
“Nothing I could do for it,” Dallas says. “But it came out clean, so your options for prosthetics are pretty open, so long as you get to a hospital sooner than later. There was nothing around here that’d suit you as an orbital implant, so I just disinfected and dressed it for now.”
“Fuck that,” you say. “I’ll get an eye patch. It’s [[all the same]], right?”
Dallas laughs, looking a little taken aback. “[[I guess so.]]”[[And besides, you won’t have to close your other eye to see ghosts clearer any more.|painkillers]]“Why didn’t you just take me to the hospital?” you ask him.
“Well,” he says, “there’s still the matter of what to do about [[him]], isn’t there.”
He casts a meaningful gaze towards the kitchen’s back door.Towards [[Abbott’s headless corpse]], sprawled in the grass.“Oh,” you say. “I guess we should deal with that.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Dallas says.
“How?”
“That depends.” He raises an eyebrow. “How keen are you on [[no one ever finding it]]?”“Why are you helping me?” you ask. Might as well get the big, lingering question out of the way before you get into the nitty-gritty.
Dallas shrugs. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”
You don’t believe him, but it’s better than nothing, and it’s not exactly blatantly untrue. You’ll get the real answer out of him sooner or later.
“But seriously,” he says, “do you want to get rid of him [[the standard way]], or [[the foolproof way]]?”“What’s the standard way?” you ask.
Dallas tilts his head a little, curiously. “Just bury him in the backyard. Of course, you probably can’t dig, not with that shoulder, so I’d have to do it myself. And there’s always the chance that some neighborhood dog will come by and dig up the body, if you don’t [[dig deep enough|no one ever finding it]], or bury some roadkill on top.”“And the foolproof way?”
“Alkaline hydrolysis,” Dallas says. “Mix lye into boiling water, melt the body down in the tub. It leaves behind a bone residue, but you can get creative about how you want to get rid of that. It’s [[basically ashes]], by that point.” “That way sounds...[[best]],” you admit.“Alright,” Dallas says, grinning and practically bouncing in place, like this was the option he wanted you to choose all along. “Let me run to my office and get a few things. I’ll be back in thirty minutes, tops. Try not to pass out again.”
“You’re going all the way back to the Underground?” you ask, but he’s already out the door into the backyard, [[disappearing]] into the shadows.[[And then you’re alone.|alone]]Time feels slower than usual - again, probably the painkillers - and you convince yourself more than once that Dallas probably isn’t coming back. He’s got no reason to care about helping you deal with Abbott’s corpse. Then again, he had no reason to stick around and give you medical attention, but he still did. And if he was watching the whole time, he could have stepped in and stopped you from killing Abbott, or helped Abbott kill you. But he didn’t. Granted, he didn’t help you, either, but you did pretty much hold your own in a fight against [[a literal monster]].You look out the sliding-glass door, just to make sure Abbott is still there. [[He is.|he is]]You hop down off the counter, finally, and make your way over to the door, leaning against the kitchen cabinets and countertops as you slowly find your footing. You step out onto the porch, breathing in deep lungfuls of humid night air. Lowering yourself into a lawn chair, you wince at a pang that shoots through your ribs. You ache all over.
But you [[survived]].In the morning, you’ll see Jacob come home from the hospital. And you’ll call Otter and Landis, and [[tell them]] about the weird, terrible night you had. And you’ll text Walker, something harsh (but not too harsh) about how he wasn’t around to protect you.But will you really tell any of them about [[what you did?]]That you killed Abbott, just kept swinging the axe, over and over, [[until he was dead?]]You’ve killed plenty of monsters before, and sure, you could call Abbott a [[monster]], but he was a man at his core.And how are you going to break the news that Crocell is still out there, in pieces, waiting to burrow into vessels and rewire their brains? You know what that will do to [[Otter]]. To [[Landis]].
They won’t feel safe anymore. After Crocell was gone for good (or so you thought), it was like you could all suddenly breathe again. Like you could learn to live without being afraid that something horrible was lurking just out of sight, [[around every corner]].
You could hear the old fear, the regret, creeping back into Otter’s voice when you asked him earlier about being [[possessed|monster]].And Landis - there’s a reservoir of rage inside of him. Maybe even worse than [[the one inside you|monster]]. You saw it, when he was fighting in the arena in Hell.They’ll feel like you all have to do something about it. To find the fragments, and destroy them. But there’s no way to sniff them out. You couldn’t sense another presence inside of Abbott until Crocell decided to reveal themself. Trying to find the fragments on your own would be like grasping for an invisible needle in a [[burning haystack]].It’s not that you don’t want to hunt down the last remaining bits of Crocell, and utterly destroy them. It’s that you don’t even know [[where to start]].You’re not even sure the one inside Abbott is permanently taken care of, although you didn’t see anything exit his body, even after it changed back to normal. Nothing like the grey shape that came out of Otter, before Crocell was shattered and scattered to the four winds. If you had to guess, you would say that the fragment that was [[in Abbott]] is probably out of commission.There’s a loud [[thump]] as an odd, black shape flies over your neighbor’s fence and lands in your backyard.You startle up and out of the lawn chair, springing to your feet. Adrenaline is flooding your body again, your heart hammering against your ribcage. You eye the axe, lying in the grass, and try to estimate how quickly you can dash for it and pick it up.
Then, something else hops over the fence. A person. [[Dallas.]] You take a breath as he picks up the black shape - what you now realize is a doctor’s bag - and heads over towards you.“Given that you agreed to this,” he says, without even a greeting, “I assume you have a bathtub somewhere?”
“Yeah,” you say. “There’s [[one]] upstairs.”
“Perfect,” Dallas says, and presents you with the doctor’s bag. “Take this, and put a kettle on for me. Or - [[how many kettles do you have?]]”Actually there are two - one in the bathroom across from your room, and one in the bathroom connected to Jacob’s room. But you aren’t even sure you want Jacob to know about any of this, and even if you do tell him, you’re pretty damn certain he wouldn’t like you dissolving a corpse in his [[bathroom|Dallas.]].“No idea.”
“Well, put as many as you have on. Mix a little of the lye in the bag into the water before you start heating it up - just shake some out, and be as generous as you want.”
“And you’re gonna do what, supervise?” you ask. It seems silly for Dallas to be ordering you around while you’re injured, and he clearly knows much more about what the two of you are about to do.
“No,” he says, as though the answer should have been obvious all along, “I’m going to be moving the body. Do you have any plastic wrap?”
“Plastic wrap?”
“To cover his neck with. So it doesn’t [[bleed all over your house]].”“Right.” You try to remember if you saw any plastic wrap, on your hunt for the bread knife. “Probably in the pantry.”
“Aces,” Dallas says, and scoots past you, [[into the kitchen.]]“By the way,” he says, as you’re shaking the powdered lye out into the two tea kettles you managed to dig up. He’s unspooling an almost comedic amount of plastic cling wrap from its roll as he talks, and tears it off once he looks satisfied with the length. “You’re gonna want to wear one of the masks in the bag, once we get started. It’ll smell pretty nasty.”
“You’ve done this before,” you say, trying not to sound too accusatory.
“I have not,” Dallas says. “But I know enough about the human body to know that [[when you melt one down, it’s gonna smell]].”“Right,” you say, and force yourself not to turn around to [[look]] as he walks back outside, to drag Abbott’s body in. You stare at the two kettles, listening to the sound of Dallas’s shoes clicking their way across the kitchen floor, then out into the foyer, then up the stairs. A quick glance at the clock on the stove tells you that it’s been nearly three hours since the fight in the yard. Abbott’s body is probably rigid with rigor mortis by now, which explains why Dallas seems to be walking so slow. [[You don’t envy him the task.|task]]“Can you grab [[the head]]?” Dallas calls down the stairs. Your stomach turns, recalling the luminescent green eyes, the tongue-proboscis snaking out towards [[your face]].“Sure,” you say loudly, and [[step away]] from the stove.Abbott’s head is lying on its side in the grass, cocooned in cling wrap. The plastic near the ragged stump of neck still attached to the head is already soaked with blood, but not leaking. You pick the head up and tuck it [[under your arm]] like a football.The kettles are whistling by the time you walk back into the kitchen, so you grab one in either hand, and [[head upstairs]].“Perfect,” Dallas says as you enter the bathroom. He’s already wearing a mask over his nose and mouth - the sort of respirator spray painters use, not a surgical mask like you imagined - and hands you one of your own. You aren’t sure how he got them out of his bag without you seeing him. “Here. I figured you’d forget to grab it.”
“Thanks.” You set Abbott’s head, and the two kettles, down on the floor next to the [[large bathtub]], and slide the mask onto your [[face]].You notice Dallas has cleared away all of the toiletries around the rim of the tub, shuttling them all over to the counter with the sink across the room. It’s an odd, thoughtful gesture that you might not have expected from anyone else helping you [[disintegrate a body|head upstairs]].“Let’s get this show on the road, huh?” Dallas asks, unwrapping Abbott’s head and letting it drop into the tub with a thunking noise that echoes off the porcelain. The body is already in there, as flat and rigid as it was, lying in the grass. “The water’s gonna get cold.”
[[“Yeah. Okay.”|yeah]]You grab one of the teakettles, and [[douse the body]] with what’s inside.[[Dallas grabs the other, and does likewise.|likewise]]For the next half hour - or so you think, you barely have time to check a clock - you mostly run the kettles up and down the stairs, refilling them with water and lye, boiling them in shifts so that one’s always ready to go. Your body hates the constant motion, but you’ve got painkillers for that, and it’s better than sitting around watching the lye melt through Abbott’s flesh and muscle. Yeah, you’ve seen some shit, but you’d rather avoid seeing [[that]].Dallas doesn’t seem to mind keeping watch over the body, but he doesn’t seem particularly giddy about it, not like he did when he was convincing you to melt Abbott down. If you had to judge, you’d say he looks a shade paler behind the mask than he did before. He doesn’t even seem to be watching the body that much, looking at you like you’re a [[welcome distraction]] every time you come back with a kettle.“You really haven’t done this before,” you say, no longer afraid of sounding accusatory, on your final trip up the stairs.
“Nope,” Dallas says. “Never even [[killed anyone]] before, if you can believe it. But I’ve got some chatty patients in the Underground, and I ask too many questions for my own good.”You chance a peek into the tub. There’s not much left of Abbott - just a pool of brown liquid, and the weak remains of his bones. You pour the kettle in your hands over the rest, washing the liquid down the drain. Some of the bone-dust goes as well. You can probably get the rest just by [[turning the faucet on]] full blast.The adrenaline has started to ebb out of your body, letting fatigue flow in. You sit down on the closed toilet and run your hands through your hair, ducking your head down towards your knees.
“[[Why did you help me?|why]]” you ask Dallas, again, unsure if you’re expecting a different answer this time or not. You still can’t wrap your head around why, exactly, he’s here, or what he wants from you. You never expected to see him again, after leaving the Underground, and here he is saving your life in your own house.
“I owe you,” he says. “For letting me go. Anyone else might’ve raised the alarm as soon as they got back to the Department, or put me in handcuffs as soon as they found me digging my chip out.”
“You were the one who convinced me not to do that,” you say pointedly.
“Right,” he says, “but you didn’t have to [[listen]] to me.”“So, what,” you say, “you followed me all the way here because you [[owe]] me?”Dallas unstraps the respirator from his face, his eyes dark. His hair is completely undone from the pompadour, now, hanging limply in his face.
“I don’t like debts,” he says, and there’s an icy edge to his voice that you haven’t heard before. But then he grins at you, suddenly less cold - or just covering it up. “Besides, I figured you’d need the favor I owed you sooner than later, with Abbott going around stabbing people. I couldn’t have predicted him turning into a monster, of course, but I don’t know that anyone could’ve.”
He turns his back to you, twisting the faucet on and letting the water wash what’s left of Abbott [[down the drain]].“Thanks,” you say, standing up from the toilet. “You don’t really have to [[stick around]].”Dallas laughs. “Well, let me take that hint, and be out of your hair.”
You take your respirator off and hand it to him, coughing a little as you do so. The smell of ammonia is strong in the bathroom, and in the hall, too, as you both step out into it. You’ll have to open a bunch of windows to air out the second floor before Jacob [[comes back]] from the hospital.“I can see myself out,” Dallas says over his shoulder as he trots down the stairs, towards the kitchen. “Just lock up after me. Wouldn’t want any other unexpected visitors tonight.”
He laughs again, and then ducks [[out of sight]]. You make a mental note to talk to Jacob about getting the locks - all of them - changed as soon as possible. And maybe getting one of those automated security systems, with an alarm and a keypad.You sit halfway down the stairs, waiting to hear the noise of the heavy, sliding-glass door shutting before you go back into the kitchen and lock it. The loaf of challah is still on the floor, but you don’t really feel hungry anymore, so you just trash it and head up to [[your room]].The ammonia stench isn’t so bad, once you shut your bedroom door, but you open a window anyway. The sky is a little lighter outside than it was before - not quite sunrise, but verging on it. It occurs to you for the first time that you’re still wearing the dirty, blood and dirt stained clothes that you fought Abbott in, and haven’t showered since the fight, either. You don’t have the energy to shower, so instead you strip out of your clothes and put an old, oversized band t-shirt on before sliding into [[bed]].Almost predictably, the second you’re under the covers, it’s harder than ever to sleep. You curl up into a tight ball, first squeezing your [[eyes]] shut, then desperately staring out the window as the sky gets lighter and lighter. There’s no adrenaline left in your body anymore, but the fatigue is gone as well, leaving you [[empty]].
Well. Your [[eye|bed]].You try to take deep breaths, relax, and start willing yourself to sleep, but instead you breathe in exactly once, [[and start to cry.]]It’s embarrassing, but not for the reasons most people think it’s embarrassing to cry. It’s embarrassing because you should be crying about the fact that you just killed someone in self-defense, but instead you’re crying from frustration at how exhausted you are, and how goddamn hard it is to get to sleep. Your face feels hot, and your arm aches underneath you, and thinking about that makes you cry even harder, your body shaking with the [[force]] of your sobs. “Austin?” a voice nearby asks, almost as soon as you throw the covers up and over your head to block out the sunlight. It would startle you if you didn’t recognize it immediately, if you weren’t used to having to [[recognize it]] without pairing it with a face.“[[Yeah, Dad,]]” you say, and sniffle, hoping it’s not too audible.“I couldn’t find you - I thought you’d still be at the Department, working,” Richard says. He sounds worried. It must be obvious that you’re crying. Dammit.
“I’ve been here [[awhile]].”“[[What happened?]]” he asks, and you feel a cold gust of air as he moves closer to you.[[You consider telling him everything.|everything]]You want to. But you don’t have the [[right words]] for it. You’re too exhausted.“I don’t want to talk about it,” you say, wiping your nose with the back of your hand. “But can - can you just [[stay]], here? For a little bit?”[[“I’ll stay as long as you want,” Richard says, without hesitation.|hesitation]][[“Thanks, Dad.” |thanks dad]]You let out a long, watery sigh, wrapping the bedsheets and duvet tighter around your body. If you close your eye, and concentrate hard enough, it’s almost easy to pretend that Richard is sitting on the bed next to you, a hand squeezing your shoulder. You cling to the feeling as your breathing evens out, and your heartbeat [[slows]].Eventually, everything you're imagining around you blends into [[dreams]]. [[And, though you might not have expected it, you sleep better than you have all summer.|END]]END