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the-hidden-writer · 4 months ago

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A Piece of True Fiction: Chapter 19

An Alan Wake 2 fic. Spoilers for Alan Wake 2!

Summary: Aleksi Kesä manages to slip out of the spiral and film he was trapped in.

Saga Anderson, caught in the middle of Wake's horror story, finds a man that looks identical to her partner in the middle of the woods. He's lost, confused, and only seems to speak Finnish. Saga has to try and uncover the truth as well as trying to save her family. Where did he come from? How did he get here?

And where's her Casey?

Chapter Summary: Saga runs into a familiar voice. Words: 2,832 AO3 Link: [Here!] [First part] [Previous part]

A Piece of True Fiction

Chapter 19: Backstage

Old-fashioned beige wallpaper, numerous yellow lamps and mahogany doors, a worn red carpet- a hallway stretches out in front of her. It isn't inviting. In fact, it feels bathed in an unwelcoming blanket of darkness and dread, but Saga steps out into it nonetheless.

She takes a careful glance behind her and is met with a blank wall. The door she stepped through is gone. The spike of panic she feels quickly settles when she realizes that she can still feel her Mind Place’s presence within her as normal, neatly tucked away in a pocket of her psyche. It’s there, but she’d rather stay out of it for a while to not risk getting stuck again.

Saga takes note of all the large numbers on each door and the individual locks of each room. It reminds her of some sort of vintage hotel. This isn't at all what she was expecting from the Dark Place. If anything, she’d been expecting the streets of New York like Wake had described.

She is certain that she's in the Dark Place though. There’s something about the air here. It feels thick and polluted, with a musty quality to it that doesn’t feel as though it’s entirely due to the hotel environment. None of the air she draws into her lungs feels as though it’s actually providing her with any oxygen, making the very act of breathing superficial. It's the only thing that gives any indication that she could be in or under a lake.

The large humanoid shadow figures lingering in the space are also definitely abnormal.

Saga takes slow, cautious steps down the hallway, keeping both her eyes and ears on the lookout for anything that could help her escape while taking care to avoid the shadows. She's met with silence until she catches the muffled sound of a floorboard creaking.

A sound that did not align with her own footsteps.

She stops in her tracks and listens out even more intently for something other than the shadows’ incessant whispering. Is there someone else here?

She calls out into the intimidating stretch of corridor before her.

“Hello?”

A minute of nothing. Then another small but distinct wooden creak, adding evidence to the idea that someone is definitely there.

And then, suddenly, a chain of footsteps scurrying in the opposite direction.

“Hey- wait!”

Saga chases after the source of the sound, sprinting as fast as she can while also taking care to weave between the standing shadows. They try to grab at her as she passes, their hands like shadowy hooks trying to reel her in, but she uses the reserves of her energy to avoid them. She turns a corner just in time to catch a glimpse of a tall figure ducking into a stairwell and rushing upwards.

“Stop!” Saga tries to command, with no luck.

She follows the figure’s trail into the stairwell and up a spiraling staircase until she reaches the level she’s pretty certain the mystery individual fled to. She chases the sound of footsteps and the flashes of someone in front of her to another long corridor filled with rooms, turns another corner, and sees a door slam shut. Believing she has the person cornered, Saga jogs to reach the door and knocks loudly.

“Hello?” She calls, out of breath. “Sorry if I scared you, I just want to talk.”

Saga waits patiently by the door for a reply. There is none. Minutes pass and it's as if the room is empty. But Saga persists and after an approximation of an entire six minutes, she knocks and tries again.

“Please, I need to get out of here. If you're stuck too, maybe we could help each other?”

Almost another minute of silence, and then:

“Well we could have, except someone had to go and fuck up the ritual!”

And oh, Saga knows that voice.

As if he’d read her mind, the fake Wake speaks up again.

“Hey there, agent. We really need to stop meeting like this.”

In a burst of rage, Saga tries the handle. When it’s locked, she indignantly raps on the door harder.

“It's you!”

“It's me!”

“Let me in!”

“Eh, I’ll pass.”

“Open this door by order of the FBI!”

“You got a warrant?” The voice drawls smugly. “Didn’t think so. Yeah, I’m not sure anyone has jurisdiction here. Sorry.”

On one hand, Saga really wants to go in and confront the man face to face for misleading her. On the other, she realizes that she doesn't actually know who or what he could be. He might have lied about everything, even about being trapped here. For all she knows, he might even be some sort of agent of the Dark Place trying to use reverse psychology to lure her into his domain.

She decides to cut her losses and stay outside the room. There’s no point taking unnecessary risks when this isn't her main objective.

“You lied to me!”

The stranger’s calm, suave mask cracks and begins to reveal thinly veiled frustration.

“Did I? Guess we'll never know since you didn't complete the ritual!”

There's a sudden, sharp bang on the door from the other side, startling Saga and making her stagger back from the looming door.

She recognizes that level of aggression. It’s exactly what had been happening with the door in her Mind Place in Coffee World. The source of that headache that had prevented her from being of any real use during the attempt.

And it was his fault, not hers.

“And whose fault is that?” Saga says, anger seeping into her own voice.

“Oh yeah? Well, if someone didn't bring in the fucking FB-whatever then things would have gone more smoothly! Or just lending a hand up would have been nice!”

She hears a sigh from the other side.

“It was a long shot anyway. Tried going with the flow except the flow really fucking hates me.”

Saga has no idea how to respond to that so she decides to return to her main objective. “Is Casey in there?”

The stranger laughs. “Oh yeah! He fucked it up too! Man, this whole thing was really doomed from the start. I should have just tried harder to get him back in the first place. But it was something new! Something interesting!”

Saga slams the door with her fist.

“Answer my question! Where is he?!”

“Okay, okay! Goddamn! Fine. He’s in the hotel basement. I repurposed it when you said you’d try the ritual… that didn't work out. He was acting weird so I came back up here.”

There’s a sense of relief at his words, at finally being given a location. She can find Casey and they can get out of here together. But there’s also apprehension. This might be another well-spun lie, sending her on a pointless goose chase. And what did he mean by ‘acting weird’?

She decides to voice her concern (though not without a hint of accusation). “Acting weird?”

“Hey- it isn’t my fault! If you want to point fingers that badly then aim them at your writer friend. He fucked up my plans too.”

Saga bites her lip to stop herself from blurting out a rebuttal about her and Wake definitely not being friends.

“Go to the basement and see for yourself. It’s easier than trying to explain. You can take the elevator!” The voice becomes jovial again.

Elevator? Even though she was distracted with dodging shadows, Saga doesn’t remember passing any elevators on the way to this room. She’s about to say as much , except when she turns to double check she sees elevator doors sliding open almost directly behind her. It sends a chill down her spine.

“Thanks…”

“Don’t mention it. Everything’s fucked, so us smart people gotta look out for each other. Hey, if you do find your way out of here, can you send Aleksi back? I wasn’t lying about the whole balance thing and I miss my shining star actor.”

That raises two questions. One, Saga had been beginning to suspect that this trickster had been the one to switch Casey and Kesä, but wanting him back would imply otherwise. Secondly, what does he mean by ‘actor’? Who is Kesä? She feels like kicking herself over not using Ahti to ask more questions when she had the chance.

“Alright,” she answers, with no intention of following through. “Before I go, I just have one more question.”

“Sure!” She can hear the grin in his voice. “Go for it. You’re fun company like this, we should do this again sometime.”

She brushes aside the comment and focuses on the big question lingering in her mind for this entire conversation.

“You’re not Alan Wake, are you?”

He can’t be. The different voice should have informed her of this from the very start. Her question is a tactical way of trying to get him to reveal his identity without sounding too accusatory.

So it surprises her when she receives a hesitant squeak of an answer. “Pass..?”

“Then who are you?” is her stern follow-up question.

“Oh, many things.” The audible smile returns. “But I wouldn’t want to bore you with all that. For now, let’s just go with an ac-tor.”

The last word is spoken dramatically, either as an attempt to prove his point or as an exaggeration of the profession.

She should leave it alone, but Saga’s natural curiosity won't let her. “An actor like Kesä?”

“Not exactly, but sure, let’s go with that. Funny thing about this place is that you can use fiction to shape it as you want. It leaves actors in a… peculiar position. If you know what you’re doing, you can use the idea of a role to your advantage. What I forgot was… well. Doesn’t matter now. Be seeing you, mysterious nameless detective.”

He's trying to brush her off. Saga’s mental instincts scream at her that there’s much more to his words, an implication beneath the word ‘advantage’, and that she should spend time trying to pick it all apart. If she was under different circumstances, she may have done just that. Except her partner is possibly somewhere below her at this very moment and she feels like she’s wasted enough time as it is, and the mysterious nameless actor has given her an out. She hesitantly chooses to take it.

Just before she turns to leave however, she administers a warning.

“If this is a trick, I’ll come back and break down this door.”

It's a threat. She won't stand for any more of his bullshit.

“Ha! Good luck trying.”

It's also a threat. The tone is as friendly as ever but now Saga is able to hear the danger in it too. A fox, grinning safely behind the bars of its cage, playing with its prey.

She quenches the flicker of anger that arises from his tone and forces herself away from the door before heading to the elevator. She presses the button indicating the basement and lets out a long sigh as the doors slide shut. She sincerely hopes the trickster didn’t lie this time, otherwise…

Otherwise she’ll have no idea what to do. She’ll be stuck, figuratively and literally.

The ride down to the basement is suspiciously long. She even did the math to distract herself. If she'd started on Level 6 and the basement was Level -1, and the elevator seemed to move at a speed fast enough to make her stomach churn slightly, then the ride should have taken a quarter of the time it did for the doors to slowly slide open again, revealing a forest.

Saga blinks. Blinks again. Checks she’s on the right level.

She is. She’s reached the basement, and in front of her is what looks to be a forest.

Over a dozen relatively small bare-branched trees on mossy ground, with various stumps and stones scattered around, all dimly illuminated by a brighter source of light somewhere behind it.

With a soft exhale of awe, Saga steps out of the elevator and onto the mossy forest floor. She briefly pauses to make sure the elevator is still behind her (which it is, thankfully) before continuing forward toward the nearest tree.

Stunned by the impossible, Saga gently places a hand on the bark. It feels cold, smooth, and- most importantly- artificial. This isn’t a real tree. Neither is the adjacent one. She lowers a knee to the ground and runs a hand against the ‘forest’ floor, and discovers only a thin layer of soil and moss with a hard surface underneath.

There is a fake forest in a hotel basement. Despite everything that’s happened over the last few days, Saga still manages to find some surprise left inside her.

That’s when she remembers she has a flashlight.

The beam immediately pierces through the darkened forest, revealing that the space it actually takes up is very limited. Aiming the light at the trees reveals black walls further behind, simply providing an illusion of endless trees. Along those black walls are a number of tripod cameras. Far above her and the trees that do not stretch limitlessly, large spotlights loom. Cameras, spotlights… Could this be some sort of set?

And not just any set, she realizes in horror when she runs the light over the ground and spots a familiar well in a small clearing between the trees. A closer inspection reveals it’s identical to the one she’d been thrown into.

Fake Wake said he’d ‘repurposed’ it, and that he was an actor. If this set was supposed to be an abstract replica of the one in Coffee World, does that mean he’d been trying somehow to re-enter reality via his acting? Trying to turn fiction into reality? If that was the case, then surely a director would be a more appropriate label. And who was he playing?

Saga is about to ponder upon the idea when another question settles uncomfortably in her gut.

If Aleksi is also an actor, working with Fake Wake, then who was he playing?

She decides to abandon the entire train of thought. It only leads her back to thinking of Casey and his existence and his relation to the books and whether he was ever real- and she knows he was. He is. She refuses to think on it lest she thinks of something that could change her mind. Casey is Casey and Casey is real. She will leave it at that.

Pulled away from the wonder of the forest set around her, Saga realigns herself to search for Casey. He doesn’t seem to be within the phony forest, and another skim of the area with her flashlight confirms that.

Still, just in case:

“Casey? You in here?”

There’s no response but the silence of the set and a very low buzzing sound somewhere ahead of her. She’s just about to turn on her heel and storm back upstairs to confront the liar when-

A thud. Muffled and distant, but still, a thud.

Saga almost doesn’t dare to hope. After everything, after all of this pain and fear and betrayal, has she finally found him?

“Casey?!” she shouts louder, her heart thundering in anticipation. No verbal response, but more thuds from somewhere beyond her current position, directed more toward that source of bright light ahead. Three thuds with a noticeable pause between them, then three much shorter and sharper, then another three with the pause. S.O.S.. It has to be him.

“I’m on my way!”

Saga breaks out into a run. She makes a beeline straight through the trees and toward the light, which (once her eyes adjust) she observes to be a small room containing what she assumes to be props. Boxes containing jackets, cloaks, and deer masks, even a costume rail pressed against the right wall. Pressed against the left wall is a cleaning cart, where an overturned bucket has spilled its contents into a large puddle on the floor.

And the room has no back wall, leading into a separate area beyond the light.

Directly ahead of her, not part of the well-lit zone, is another array of tripod cameras all pointed to another set that is entirely cordoned off by glass, like a museum exhibit. This set is far smaller than the relatively immense forest and has only three walls, as well as an artificial sloped ceiling. The walls and floor look entirely composed of wooden planks. The only furniture inside is a desk in front of two large, circular windows and a chair, placed in the center of the ‘room’. The only props are a typewriter and a lamp placed upon the desk. But to Saga, the details of the set are inconsequential in comparison to the man standing with his hands pressed against the other side of the glass and an expression on his face that betrays nothing but hope.

Saga stomach flips. She darts forward and involuntarily lets out a small sound of relief.

“Casey!”

Inspired by the Yötön Yö BTS pics. Thanks for reading! Only a couple of chapters left to go.

#alan wake 2 #alan wake #alan wake 2 spoilers #fanfic #fic #saga anderson #thomas zane #thomas seine #alex casey #aleksi kesä #oceanview hotel #a piece of true fiction

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