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sparxwrites · 10 years ago

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(inspired by strife's playthrough of slenderman, which is a thing of beauty you should watch if you haven't, and these beautiful headcanons by catatodrawsblood and blackrain707.)

warnings for peer pressure, bullying, claustrophobia, panic attacks, psychological horror, vomit, and drug mentions.

[ao3]

“It’s only a harmless bit of enchantment, Will,” says Xephos – and Will isn’t sure how he’s so calm about it, about the prospect of Will allowing the upperclassmen to cart him off to the surface of the planet far below the lazy orbit of their college for some twisted initiation ceremony. “No one’s ever died from it or anything, it’s perfectly safe.”

Oddly enough, the comment’s not exactly comforting. “I’m not sure ‘no deaths’ is the definition of safety,” he says, slow and anxious, falling behind the familiarity of technicalities to try and calm himself. “I mean- what if there’s been illnesses, or maimings, or-”

Sips is less gentle in his attempts at persuasion. “Oh come on, Strife, you big babby!” he says, cutting across the other man effortlessly and grinning a troublemaker’s grin. “We’ve all done it, and nothing bad happened to us. Well. Xephos lost a toe, but…” He shrugs.

“I did not!” says Xephos indignantly, flushing luminous sky blue with indignation even as Will goes an unhealthy shade of pale at the mental image of severed body parts. “Honestly, Sips, stop bullying him.”

“You wouldn’t want to be a chicken, would you?” Sips railroads across Xephos effortlessly, doesn’t even look at him – just grins wider and claps Will across the shoulders. “Or… maybe you would.” His face falls, a carefully crafted act that doesn’t quite hide the amusement dancing in his eyes. “Perhaps you wanna be known as Chicken Strife instead. Huh?”

He really, really doesn’t want to be known as Chicken Strife. It’s bad enough that he’s one of the shortest in their year, the only one of his species other than Xephos; already a target for his height and the brilliant green freckles that do their best to cover every inch of skin.

Sips crows his victory, claps Will on the back again and grins delightedly. Xephos sighs, still a little blue across his cheekbones, but he smiles as well, rests a hand on Will’s other shoulder. “You’ll be fine, friend,” he says, quietly. “It’s unpleasant while you’re doing it, but it’s fine. Honestly.”

Will pointedly doesn’t mention that Xephos has slept with the lights on full brightness ever since his own run through the Slender maze.

“C’mon!” says Sips, grabs his shoulder and waves an excited arm at the seniors on the other side of the room. “Hey, guys! The big babby said he’d do it!” The answering wave of cheers and jeers makes Will’s stomach plummet, and something must show on his face because Xephos is suddenly there, warm fingertips brushing briefly against his.

“It’s fine,” says Xephos again, offers him a smile that’s slightly wobbly around the edges and actually not all that comforting. “It doesn’t take too long, you’ll probably be back by midnight. We’ve not got any lectures until- midday? Until midday tomorrow. You’ll be- fine.”

Before midnight isn’t exactly reassuring, and neither is probably. “Okay,” says Will, even though it’s not, lets Sips drag him over to the transporter beam pad by the shoulder and shove him onto it. “Okay. Although I’ll probably be back way before that, I mean, how hard can it be? It’s only collecting eight pages.”

The false bravado doesn’t settle well on his shoulders.

He tries to look unafraid as the tube finally closes around him, and waits for the transporter beam. This is the part he hates the most – the tight claustrophobia of it, the walls closing in on him, the air running out… He swallows down the automatic panic, holds his breath to try and calm himself, waits for the beam.

The transporter beam doesn’t turn on.

Outside the tube, the seniors are laughing, blurry outlines through the curved glass and the slowly-rising panic.

Will’s air runs out and he sucks in a deep breath, and then another, none of it offering any relief to his aching chest. He coughs, tries to ignore the way his mind’s turned fuzzy and dazed, like he’s taken a blow to the head. It’s ridiculous. He’s fine. There’s more than enough air in the tube for him, no reason for him to feel like he’s suffocating. None at all. He’s fine.

He’s absolutely, definitely not claustrophobic in the slightest.

The lie lasts all of thirty seconds before it breaks, and he panics. Pounding against the reinforced glass of the tube, he feels his knees give way enough to send him slumped forward against the glass, forehead pressed against its cold solidity.

He inhales again, chokes when nothing seems to fill his lungs. Through the haze his vision has become, he can see them outside – the seniors still laughing, Sips grinning and giving him two thumbs up, one of the seniors clapping him on the shoulder. Xephos, a little ways from the main group, an anxious sort of smile on his face that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Xephos-” he wheezes, slams a fist against the glass again to try and catch his friend’s attention. He feels dizzy, nauseous, vision darkening at the edges – and it’s not supposed to be like this, he’s sure it’s not supposed to be like this, he can’t breathe. He can’t do this, he doesn’t care if they think he’s a child or a chicken, he needs to get out of here now. “Xephos- get me out of here-”

The last thing he sees before the tube fills with a familiar, brilliantly white light, is the steady blue glow of Xephos’ eyes as they widen in alarm.

When the world materialises around him again up, he’s… somewhere else.

He coughs, sucks in a grateful breath of fresh air, and another, and another. Eventually, he sits up slowly, winces at the way his head pounds at the motion and at the rush of nausea that claws at his throat. Swallowing hard in an attempt not to throw up, he forces his eyes to focus, blinks fuzzily and tries to take in his surroundings.

There’s a torch by his thigh, is the first thing he notices – old fashioned and blocky, a chunk of plastic with a button on the top, the kind of device that looks like it could survived being dropped from low atmospheric orbit. Considering the room he’s in is close to pitch black, lit only by the brilliant glow of his freckles, he’s rather grateful for it.

He blinks.

When he opens his eyes again there are wobbling symbols scratched onto the walls, maybe burned or painted. They dart away when he looks at them, vanish, always on the periphery of his vision, and he feels a little sick. Maybe it’s just the after-effects of the hyperventilation, but somehow he doesn’t think so.

Rubbing his eyes, he opens them again and the symbols are gone, fading afterimages burnt into his retina. Something twists uncomfortably in his stomach, the beginnings of fear crawling up his spine.

He takes another deep breath, wonders why it doesn’t seem to be doing anything for the tightness in his chest, and grabs at the torch with fingers that have started to shake just a little. Pushing himself to his feet, he tries to catch his balance and sways wildly as he fails, grabs at the wall to steady himself. There’s something there past the fear, past the disorientation, something that’s wrapping steadily tightening iron bands around his chest and making his heart race rabbit-fast, and he doesn’t like it. Not at all.

For a faint second, he wonders if he’s been drugged, but then he shakes the thought from his head. Of course he hasn’t been drugged. Xephos would have told him if they were going to do that.

It’s probably just the transporter beam, he tells himself, and the aftermath of his… regrettable lack of self control. He’s never really liked it, suspicious and unreliable technology that it is. It’ll wear off soon.

He’s unsteady on his feet as he stumbles to the door, heart beating too fast in his chest and his breath coming in ragged inhales. It feels a little like the time before finals that he’d drunk four cups of black coffee in half an hour – the same strange, lightheaded nausea, the feeling of pressure against his ribs. The distinctly unpleasant sensation that he’s dying.

“Pull yourself together,” he tells himself firmly, fumbles with the torch. “Pull yourself together.” He doesn’t remember Xephos talking about this, about the inability to walk straight and the almost-painful beat of his heart, and it scares him a little.

What if something’s gone wrong?

He forces the thought from his mind, takes a deep breath – and then another, and another, because it seems to help the nausea a little and because there’s fear creeping in at the edges now. It almost tips over into hyperventilation before he catches himself, slows himself down, and heads out of the door.

His natural luminescence is doing a pretty good job of lighting things up so far - his freckles are firefly pinpricks in the darkness, eyes a wider but dimmer beam of light, and he tries to take comfort in the familiar glow. But there’s darkness that seems to be pressing in on all sides, the sun far below the horizon by now, and he doesn’t much fancy the thought of wandering around in the pitch black.

He still flicks the torch on, though, exhales a little shakily at the wide, comforting beam of off-white light – as if it’ll do anything to keep him safe. Still, it’s better than nothing, and he clutches it close in a white-knuckled grip as he tries to work out what to do now.

Find the papers, they’d said.

“Find the papers,” he repeats to himself, takes another deep breath to try and steady his breathing and fails utterly. “Find the papers. Right. I can do that. How hard can it be?”

There’s more light some distance off, something lighting up the darkness other than himself and his torch in a wide beam of white. He can’t pick out much, even with its help – some trees in a dark cluster, waist-high grass on the ground, the faint shape of hills far in the distance. None of it looks particularly welcoming, if he’s honest, dark and faintly menacing. The shiver than runs down his back has nothing to do with the cold.

Considering a little more light than that provided by the torch would be very welcome, and he’s really got no idea where else he’s supposed to go, Will decides to follow the brightness. It’s not far off, after all, and there’s a faint path leading to it. The tall grass rustles unpleasantly around him in ripples as he moves, too dense and too high, and although he’s reluctant to enter it he doesn’t really have much choice.

He swallows hard, tries not to think about what that grass could be hiding, and carries on moving. The light’s not far away now, maybe another hundred yards, and he can just about make out the object that’s the source of it. There’s a car, apparently the source of the flattened grass on the tracks he’s walking through, headlights on and engine running with a low hum.

On the side of it, pinned to a wing mirror and fluttering slightly in the breeze, is a piece of paper.

Will hesitates for a second, looks around him. Everything’s still, mostly quiet other than the wind murmuring through the trees and the occasional, strangely distant noise of animals. Nothing’s moving in the darkness – nothing he can see lit up by the torch or his own luminescence, anyways. There’s absolutely no reason there should be a car here, let alone one still switched on.

Tentatively, he reaches out and snatches the paper off, tenses up in preparation to run, looks around and braces himself for something to erupt snarling from the grass.

Nothing happens.

Exhaling slowly, a little shakily, he looks down at the note now clutched in his fingers, a little crumpled and torn from the force of his grip. There’s something written on it, in black marker or perhaps ballpoint pen, and he squints through the darkness to make it out.

“Don’t look or it takes you,” he reads out, slowly, wrinkles his nose at the dramatic capital-letter scrawl of it. “Well, that’s kind of cryptic, isn’t it?”After a second’s thought, though, he shoves it in his pocket for safekeeping. Trying and failing to pretend his stomach isn’t twisting unpleasantly at the words, he takes a deep breath, clutches the torch a little closer to him, and looks around.

There’s no obvious place to go from here, no other lights he can see, and if there are any distinctive landmarks then he can’t make them out through the darkness or over the trees. The path continues on past the car though, winding ruts in the grass that head parallel to the forest.

For lack of any better ideas, Will follows it, eyes casting swinging lights across the track as he looks around warily. He faintly remembers Xephos saying something about needing to keep moving, about stopping being a bad idea, and the chill that settles over his shoulders when he realises how long he’d lingered at the car has nothing to do with the cold.

He finds the second piece of paper along the side of the trail – a spindly stick-figure, a hastily scrawled pine tree, and the word follows written down the side in capitals again. It’s pinned to a notice board with some kind of an illegible map on it. After a minute or two spent scrutinising the scarred, ruined surface of it, he gives up. There’s nothing useful on it, anyways, judging by the key, other than the location of a handful of buildings.

It does make him wonder, though, what happened to all the people. If there were once enough tourists that this area needed a map, needed the various conveniences and utilities the intact sections of the maps suggest they did, where did they go? The thought sends a shudder down his spine, doesn’t help with the fearful nausea slowly building in his stomach, and he shakes it off in a motion that sends pinpricks of light rippling through the grass.

He’s just shoved the note into his pocket when he becomes aware he’s not alone.

It’s tiny, a shadow on top of a distant hill that he assumes is a tree; only it’s gone when he looks a second later, vanished as if it were never there. He freezes, swallows against the way his heart’s suddenly hammering in his chest and the nausea building in his stomach, and curls his fingers into fists. “It’s fine, Strife,” he tells himself firmly, is proud of the fact his voice doesn’t shake. “You’ve only got six other pages to collect, it’s fine. You can do this.”

No matter how scared he is, he’s not going to be entertainment for the smug, arrogant seniors no doubt watching all of this with great amusement from far above his head.

He takes a deep breath, swallows hard. Looks down at the piece of paper in his hand and regrets it when he sees the childish scratch-drawings on it, a handful of crude pine trees surrounding a menacingly spindly humanoid shape. “Wonderful,” he mutters, and shoves it in his pocket with the other one, unwilling to admit to himself how much the strange drawings on the notes are getting to him.

There’s not much else to do other than keep moving, so he does, carries on with the torch held out in front of him to light the way.

The third piece of paper is worse. Pinned to the side of what looks like a temporary outdoors toilet that Will pointedly doesn’t open, it’s not too different to the last one. There’s a picture of that same, too-tall, too-thin humanoid shape again, more detailed this time, but that’s not the issue.

The issue is the way every available inch of space around it has been filled with NO, scrawled shaky and frantic in bold capital letters.

Sucking in a breath, he tries to slow his rapidly elevating heart rate. It had seemed easy at first, some dumb game the seniors had set up, and he’d known he wouldn’t be in any actual danger, because surely, surely they wouldn’t run a game that had gotten people killed. But here, in the dark, with the notes burning a hole in his pocket and the knowledge of it being out there, watching him, it’s hard to remember he’s safe.

He doesn’t feel safe.

Looking around suspiciously as he pockets the paper, he half-expects it to turn up, but it doesn’t. He knows it’s nearby – a prickle of paranoia up his spine, the slight fuzz at the corner of his vision, the way his hearing’s gone ever-so-slightly tinny – but he can’t see it anywhere.

Somehow, that makes it worse.

There’s nothing else to do but keep moving, keep walking, try and find the rest of the pages. He’s been around probably half the area by now, by his estimation, found a handful of landmarks and buildings that he’s been using to keep himself oriented. All he can do is keep walking and covering the rest of the ground, in the hope of finding the other five pages.

He’s stumbling through the waist-high corn field – at least he thinks it’s corn, isn’t really sure in the dark and with his mind rather occupied with more important things – and wheezing for breath when he finds the water tower again. At least, he thinks it’s again, but last time there wasn’t a light on it like there is now, and he’s not sure how he could have gotten back to it unless he’s been going in circles.

Last time, there wasn’t a page.

Grabbing wildly at it, he scans the page quickly. Always watches. A jagged, sketchy circle, two black crosses on the edge of it so deep they’ve cut through the paper in places. No eyes.

“Well, that’s fantastic,” he says, swallows hard and pretends his voice hasn’t skipped up several octaves. “Oh, shit.” He sucks in a breath, and another, hopes it will ease the pounding in his head, scrubs at his temples and tries to calm down. It doesn’t work.

Walking seems to help, though, at least slightly, so he starts moving again, brisk strides that makes his calves ache but at least make him feel like he’s not so much of an easy target. It’s a false sense of security, he knows, but it helps.

He’s found the oil tanks already, wandered through them and then quickly wandered out again when the shadows and endless, threatening corners made him feel sick, but he comes across them again. Part of him swears they must have moved position, must have jumped, because he knows he’s not been walking in circles… But that’s impossible. He’s just getting turned around in the dark, most likely.

LEAVE ME ALONE. His eyes skim over the words, over the dark scrawl that might be a figure, might be a tree, might be an ink stain. He can’t tell. “Leave me alone,” he mumbles, barks out something that might have been a laugh if it weren’t tinged with hysteria and fear.

Distracted as he is by the message, he doesn’t recognise the warning signs – the steady increasing in flickering dots and bursts of random noise – until it’s too late. Far, far too late. His vision blurs and his ears scream with static, and suddenly it’s there. A dozen feet or so away, too shrouded in darkness and mist to be anything other than a dark outline, but it’s still there and his heart stops in his chest.

He screams.

It’s not something he’s proud of, but he does it, screams high and thin enough he hears it even over the rasping in his ears. Shoving the page haphazardly into his pocket, he tears his eyes away and runs, sprints in the opposite direction as fast as his legs can manage and the lack of air in his lungs will allow.

He’s not sure how long he runs for, but it can’t be long – a mad sprint through the oil tanks and out into the open grass, and then beyond that into the forest. Even if the trees cast strange and terrifying shadows there, they at least give some illusion of protection. They at least let him pretend he might be able to hide behind one of them, or climb one of them, when it comes for him.

It’s only after he finally stops, clutching at a tree to try and catch his breath, ease the stitch in his side, that he realises he’s dropped the torch.

The knowledge sends cold fear through him, stomach tightening unpleasantly and fingers going numb. His own natural luminescence lights the way a little – eyes practically torches in their own right by this point thanks to the adrenaline running through him, freckles flickering on and off in warning patterns to the rhythm of his heart – but it’s not the same. The green glow is eerie rather than comforting, a low fog around him rather than the focused illumination of the torch.

“No, no, shit,” he mumbles, curls his fingers into fists and resists the urge to punch the tree. Instead, he forces himself to start walking again, legs and lungs protesting the strain of it; but he’s been still for too long already, he needs to get moving.

He could go back for it, he thinks, as he stumbles through the forest and the knee-high grass, ducking branches that loom abruptly out of the darkness at perfect head-height. The tankers aren’t hard to find, he’s stumbled across them at least three times already by sheer accident. But even the thought of going back there, back to where everything closed in and his vision blurred and all he could hear was screaming static, makes him feel sick.

At least the five pieces of paper are still with him, shoved crumpled into his pocket.

They’re probably smudged, torn in places, but he really doesn’t care. They’re there, that’s all that matters – he just has to get the last three, and then he can get out of this godforsaken place and back to his college.

When he looks up, he can see it above him, a glittering blink of light only discernible from the stars by the slightly blueish hue to it, the way it moves faster than the ponderous slide of its fellow pinpricks of light.

“Screw you,” he mutters, draws in a deep breath and shakes his legs out and forces himself to take a step, and another. His legs protest, calves burning, but he’s not really got much of an option but to keep moving. The sooner he gets the next three pieces of paper, the sooner he can get back, get back and pretend none of this ever happened. “I hope you’re all getting a good laugh out of this.”

At least he feels more comfortable in the trees than out in the open, amongst the branches. The trees close in around him a little and, rather than feeling claustrophobic, he feels almost cocooned. It’s enough to make him relax, just a little bit.

Which is why, when the guard tower looms out of the darkness – suddenly, dominating the tiny clearing it’s nestled in – Will jumps a full foot in the air. The strange shadows it casts makes his heart stop for a second, stutter in his chest when he swears he sees loo-long limbs and an unnatural torso, before he forces himself to exhale and blinks away the mirage.

“Shit,” he manages, the word a high-pitched wheeze that strangles in his throat, and sucks in a long breath. He scrubs a hand over his face to try and ground himself, ease the jitteriness, but the realisation of just how badly his hand is shaking when it comes into contact with his skin has the opposite effect.

There’s something pinned to one of the tower’s legs, and his heart leaps at the sight of it. He’s running out of time, now, knows he is from the way the moon’s getting higher in the sky and the way his ears are now more full of hissing and crackling than they are full of ambient noise, but he’s done it. He’s found another note.

Snatching it off the tower, he simply holds it for several long seconds, struggles to catch his breath and fails. His inability to breathe seems to be getting worse, the iron bands around his chest constricting further the faster he tries to get air into his lungs. It’s making him light-headed, dizzy, not helping with the rabbit-beat of his heart, and he has to wait for his vision to clear a little before he can read what the note says.

He looks at the piece of paper in his hand, squints through the glitching and fuzzing that now seems a permanent addition to his peripheral vision – and his stomach sinks, twists uncomfortably and nauseously as he reads the words scrawled across it.

HELP ME.

He barely has time to shove the note into his pocket before he’s stumbling forward, bracing a hand against the wooden fencing of the guard tower’s legs and vomiting into the long grass. It’s bitter on his tongue, luminous green over his lips and chin, and he wipes it off with a hand that shakes.

“No, no, no,” he mumbles to himself, disgusted and ashamed and still utterly terrified. “No, no…” He’s got nothing to rinse his mouth out with, so he spits into the grass, tries to clear the faintly metallic taste from his mouth – though he’s fairly sure vomit isn’t supposed to taste of copper.

Perhaps he bit his tongue. Perhaps he’s dying.

The static’s getting worse, crawling steadily inwards, closing at his vision until it’s covering almost all of it. In front of him, the world’s a jittery mess, his hearing reduced to his own ragged, too-fast breathing and the sound of screeching metal on metal, the noise of a thousand dying creatures.

A flicker in the corner of his vision, something other than just the static, and he whirls around – and it’s there. Standing there in the trees, half hidden behind one of them, spindly limbs and pinstripe suit and that face…

For a long moment, all he can do is stand there and stare, frozen, stupid, hyperventilating.

“No eyes,” he manages, the words strangled in his throat and with an edge of hysteria to them as he stares at the white, expressionless face that seems to almost glow in the darkness. “No fucking eyes. Always watching. Oh my god.”

He runs.

It’s the only thing he can do at this point; run and run and keep running, knees aching and feet blistering and heart racing so fast he’s sure it must burst. Any second, it’s going to give way, going to send him sprawling and dead face-down on the ground, and it will get his corpse.

He’s going to die. He’s sure of it.

A heartbeat, two, then he trips over something in the ground – tiny, a stone – and hits his knees. His vision’s hazing, lungs not working properly, fingers clawing at the ground and heedless of the way the rough dirt and stone of it tears his fingertips. “No,” he moans, tries to push himself to his feet again and fails. “No, please, no-” He tries again, and again, legs buckling beneath him and arms unable to support his weight, sending him sprawling face-first into the dirt.

Desperate, he crawls, scrambling on hands and knees forward through the darkness

It’s behind him. He knows it is.

“Fuck, fuck,” he manages, voice little more than a high, thin whimper. He can see it now, out the corner of his eye, flashes of darkness against the wildly rotating world. “X- Xephos!” The word’s meant to come out a shout, but it strangles in his throat, wheezes out as a terrified breath as he fights to keep breathing. “Stop, stop, stop-”

Everything’s too close, pressing in on him, vision black at the edges because he can’t breathe – or maybe he’s breathing too much, it’s all the same at this point, the world spinning madly around him and something roaring fury and white noise in his ears.

He closes his eyes for a second, tries to stop the swimming and the ringing and the way the world seems to be melting around him.

When he opens them again, it’s there. Right in front of him. Horrible white and black with thin, spindly arms and a featureless face, looming up just inches from his. He flinches with a wordless cry that strangles to silence in his face, scrambles backwards and tips over in his frantic panic. The crack his skull makes against the ground echoes inside his own head.

The roaring in his ears stops, turns to a single, clear note that carries on and on and is a hundred, thousand times worse.

Somewhere, somehow, he finds the breath to scream before he passes out.

He wakes up thrashing against the hands pinning him down, still screaming, throat raw and head a steady drum-beat of pain. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he tries to say, fails, wheezes in a breath and then another – before he stops out of pure shock that he can actually breathe again.

“Easy now,” says a voice above him, so far from the roaring and ringing of earlier that it doesn’t immediately send him into fits of hyperventilation again. He can’t make out a face, not against the blindingly white lights the person is backlit with, not with the way his vision is still blurry and warped and spinning. “Easy. You just passed out. You’re not hurt, but whatever you were drugged with is still wearing off. You’re in the infirmary, back at the college. You just need to stay lying down for a second, just give yourself a minute to adjust.”

The hands move, the weight on his limbs disappearing as he stills. “Excellent, thank you. Well done. Just stay there a moment, we’ll help you up and get you something warm in a minute, okay?”

He’s sure the voice carries on talking, but he tunes it out, a comforting rise and fall off background noise as he focuses on the blissful feeling of oxygen filling his lungs again. The figure moves, comes back again, moves again; he’s not really paying attention, everything hazy and still tinged dark at the edges with oh-so-slowly ebbing panic.

Eventually, they do help him sit up, hands on his shoulders and back that ease him upright oh-so-slowly. He lets them, drags his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them and trembles, barely noticing when a blanket’s draped over his shoulders. Someone presses something warm against his hands, a mug of some sorts, and he takes it without looking down.

His hands are shaking badly enough that he slops more of it over himself than the meagre amount he gets down his throat before having to stop. Stomach still rolling, he doesn’t trust himself not to throw up again.

“Will!”

He recognises that voice, manages to register that much through the continued headache and disorientation, and squints desperately against the blinding lights to try and find its owner. “Will, Will, I’m here, it’s okay, Will-” Xephos scrambles up onto the bed next to him a moment later, gangly and flaring brilliant blue in distress, reassuringly solid when Will grabs for his wrist. “Damn it, this isn’t what’s supposed to happen… You were hyperventilating, you must have- they made you overdose, the idiots, I-”

The noise Will makes is somewhere between a laugh and a sob, eyes squeezing shut for a second before the blackness behind them terrifies him enough to force them open. He tries to form words, can’t, and instead just grips Xephos’ wrist harder with a hand that won’t stop shaking.

Xephos sighs, drags a distressed hand through his own hair and musses it up even more than it already is, and carefully takes the mug from Will’s violently shaking fingers to set it on the side table next to his bed. “This isn’t what’s supposed to happen,” he repeats, scoots closer until he can wrap an arm around Will’s shoulders, shock blanket and all, and let the shorter teen rest his head against him.

“And what exactly is supposed to happen, can I ask?”

The voice is unfamiliar enough that Will flinches, presses closer to Xephos and sucks in a sharp breath as his heart starts racing rabbit-fast again. It’s only when his brain catches up, processes things in a clumsy fumble from the fog still spread through him, that he recognises it. A member of staff, not the head of the college but someone senior.

They’re in so much trouble. So much goddamn trouble.

“Uh.” Xephos’ voice cracks around that single syllable, and he swallows hard, a deer caught in the headlights. “It’s. It’s just a game, ma’am. Just- they said it was a tradition. Hazing.” His body gives him away, freckles pulsing alarm and eyes dim with fear. “It- we’ve all done it, and all the people in the year above, it’s- usually it’s fine. The- they said the plants, there’s a. Some kind of hallu- halla-” He can’t quite remember the word, doesn’t have time to think of it in his rush to explain. “The plants make you see things that aren’t there. It’s- it’s just supposed to be a silly game, to scare people. It’s usually fine.”

It wasn’t fine for him. They’d told him it was usually fine, that the panic attack he’d had afterwards and his continuing inability to sleep with the lights off was him being a baby. Looking at Will, shaking against his side and staring at his hands with unfocused eyes, he thinks they might have been lying.

Judging by the frown on the professor’s face, she’s not exactly convinced by his stuttered explanation any more than he is. “Hmm,” she says, and something inside Xephos curls up small and shrivelled in shame at the doubt and disapproval in her tone.

“I don’t know,” says Xephos, quietly, the muscles in his jaw aching from the way he’s grinding his teeth together. He swallows hard, tries to ignore the way Will’s turned his head to bury it into his neck, is making barely-audible noises of distress against his skin. “I- I don’t know, I just- the seniors told us- I don’t know.”

Will makes a choked, damp sort of noise against Xephos’ neck, and another, poorly strangled sobs that hitch in his chest.

Lifting a hand to card through Will’s hair, Xephos tries a little helplessly to calm his friends. “Ma’am- please- I think it’s upsetting him.” His voice is little more than a whisper, barely able to believe he’s talking back to a member of staff, freckles flaring brighter as with anxiety. “Please.”

Will exhales quiet relief against his neck despite the wet, hitching gasps, squeezes the wrist he’s still got a death-grip around a little harder. It’s enough to steady the wild strobing of Xephos’ freckles, calm him a little – no matter how worried he is, he’s helping Will. That’s the most important thing right now.

The professor hums again, rather more sympathetically this time. “I need to go talk to the nurses,” she says, “but I’m afraid there’s probably going to be an inquiry into this.” “O- oh.” Xephos isn’t quite sure what to say to that; isn’t quite sure what he’s going to say to the seniors when they inevitably found out that he and Will have managed to mess up an apparently decades-old tradition.

He suspects the outcome of this won’t be pretty for any of them, one way or another.

She sighs a little at his expression, at the way Will is trying to literally burrow into his side, and her expression softens a little. “For now, look after your friend,” she says. “He’s had quite a night.”

Xephos nods stiffly, swallows and tries to keep his expression neutral. “Thank you, ma’am,” he says, waits until she’s gone before twisting to pull Will into a hug, both arms around him.

“It’s okay. Will, it’s okay,” he says, as gently as he can. The sobs against his neck don’t slow, and he looks around, wonders where the hell the nurses are. He can’t handle this, doesn’t know how to deal with this.

“This isn’t what’s supposed to happen,” he says, again, as if repeating it will somehow change the reality of it – that this has happened, that Will’s hands won’t stop shaking and he can’t blink for fear of the darkness behind his eyelids, that something in his chest feels newly coiled tight and throttling.

“Maybe not,” says Will, finds the words from somewhere in the back of his raw throat, the first he’s spoken since waking up. He stares out at the darkness now lit white with floodlights, curls trembling fingers into fists and watches his whole hand shake. “But it has.”

#striphos #i guess a lil bit if u squint #yogsfic #blackrain707 #catatosoup #for some reason it wouldn't let me @ you with anything other than catatodrawsblood idk #yogstuff #fic #also hey anon who asked me for this like weeks ago it's finally done!!!!#this is basically an exercise in giving strife a breakdown tbh it's awful poor bb #i'll write fluffy stuff for him next i promise #also the draft title was #in other news torture is cool as long as you call it hazing freshmen #for anyone who's curious

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