#oct 11 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

alumbianchronicler · 1 year ago

Text

EctoberHaunt - Oct. 11 Magic - Calm

[Ao3]

Summary:

Amity Park is still. Calm. A layer of icy Fear envelops it, Burying all within. It's finally silent, and the Phantom of a boy can finally rest.

Until the Fear-Buried town attracts the attention of Gertrude and Gerry, Head Archivist and her sole assistant.

Warnings: Suicidal ideation (In a sense of "I'm already dead, let me actually die"). Major Character Death.

Crossover: DP x Magnus Archives

Note: It's past midnight and I'm not bothering to review/edit this tonight, so you're getting it as it is until I go back and revise it. I apologize for any typos/inconsistencies.

The world hadn't heard from Amity Park for months.

There were plenty of residents who had family outside the small city, but none of those outside the city had heard from their relatives since mid-February, just over three months ago.

Some wrote the silence off, figuring things were either busy or uneventful, and that their loved ones would contact them in due time.

Others were becoming worried.

Attempts to call their loved ones failed to go through, phones either ringing without being answered, or simply going straight to voicemail.

The city had been a nexus of ghostly activity for as long as the Hunters questioned could remember, though reported activity had skyrocketed in recent years. With the enactment of the Anti-Ecto Acts within the state, normal Hunters had been discouraged from interfering or risk becoming Hunted by the government, themselves.

Of course, when even the local Ghost Investigation Ward sent by the state disappeared, certain people took notice.

Not that anyone was keen on rushing into the town.

It was one of those places known for swallowing Hunters whole even before the AEA. A place where the populous knew exactly what was happening but had lived with it for so long that it had become mundane, even if deadly to those who entered from outside the community.

Gertrude and Gerry sat on the hood of a rental car just outside the city, staring in. The entire town was shrouded in a miasma of Fear, but even Gerry couldn’t penetrate it clearly enough to determine just which Entity was responsible here. It was heavy and still, as if waiting for something to come along and stir it into action. Honestly, it could be one of half a dozen of the fourteen.

“Think we have enough lighter fluid?” he asked, half joking.

The Archivist scowled. They most certainly did not have enough for the entire town, but if it really was the site for a Ritual that it felt to be, then they needed to come up with something.

She stood and returned to the car, Gerry tossing aside his cigarette, stomping it out, and following her.

They were silent as they drove into the city. It was cold, their breath forming mist even inside the car, despite the heat turned up as far as it would go.

Under Gerry’s gaze, the town seemed frozen, everything coated in a thin layer of green-tinged ice. His first guess was Lonely, but that didn’t seem quite right. This wasn’t a Lonely chill. It was more… enveloping.

Neither was it Desolation. It preserved too much, kept it close and still and calm and unmoving…

“Buried,” he finally said as the Archivist drove through the empty streets. No one was outside. Nothing was moving. Everything was covered in the same layer of icy Fear, invisible to everyone but those with the Eye to see.

Gertrude made a sound of agreement, stopping at an intersection for several long moments. She eyed each direction as if it had personally offended her. Gerry remained silent, watching her. She was nearly Hunt-like herself, when she got on a trail, and he knew she was seeking out the source of this Fear. The Predator waiting at the bottom of the pit, burying everything around it alive.

Finally, she turned the car to the right and drove on.

They ended up in front of a house that looked like someone had tried to build a space station on the top. An odd choice for the Buried, but sometimes superficial appearances were deceiving.

The cold was deeper here, settling into their bones and making Gerry’s head ache with the sharpness of an icepick. It was oppressive, trying to hold them down beneath the desire to sleep and hide and don’t let them see, don’t let them know, don’t let them uncover your secret.

He could feel the Eye stir with the knowledge, seeking it out, pushing him to chip off the ice and bear the heart of the being at the core of this lair. He paused, forcibly closing his eyes and taking a steadying breath. He could feel the Archivist’s gaze on him, but she didn’t say anything until he opened his eyes, his headache worsening.

“Gerard?”

“I’m fine. It’s here?”

“It is.”

“Let’s go, then.”

He turned to grab a duffelbag from the back seat, leaving the car and following the old woman inside.

They didn’t even have to break into the house, though it did take a few kicks to loosen the door from the very real ice that had sealed it shut.

The interior was even more frigid; an icy tomb created from layer upon layer of carefully placed Fear, cocooning its inhabitant deep inside.

If they had the supplies, perhaps they would have simply set the building itself on fire from the outside, but as it was, they would both bet money that the Avatar was in the basement, safely Buried away from whatever Desolation would do on the surface.

Which left their only choice being to seek it within its own den, and root it out.

There was someone on the couch in the living room.

At first, Gerry was prepared to fight, but Gertrude barely reacted, simply sweeping her sharp gaze over the red-haired young woman. “She’s frozen,” the Archivist said, and continued inside.

The old woman led them unerringly to what was, indeed, the door to the basement.

Below, an eerie green light illuminated the stairwell, becoming brighter as they descended, the weight of the Buried settling on their shoulders like heavy snowfall.

Gerry’s boots crunched the ice beneath him as he stepped off the final step onto the cement basement floor.

The basement itself appeared to be a laboratory of some kind. Two people stood in the center of the room, frozen beneath thick layers of the strange green ice, impossibly still despite the Eye revealing to him they still lived. They were dressed in brightly-colored jumpsuits, and had several Marks between them. The Stranger, the Desolation, the Spiral.

Neither of them were the conduit of the Buried in this place.

The Archivist continued past them.

On the far side of the basement, a gaping hole yawned wide in the wall, leading back and down, down, down from the laboratory. In front of it laid… a teenager, curled on his side on the floor.

His hair was white, and though he didn’t appear to be breathing, a slight mist condensed before him every few seconds. He was nearly peaceful in his stillness, despite the miasma of Fear that blanketed him. This was their Avatar.

The Archivist set down her bag and pulled out a tape recorder, her eyes glowing in the dim icy-green light of the basement.

Gerry moved to stand beside her as she leaned down and shook the child awake.

He moved slowly, looking up at them with eyes clouded with ice and despair. “Who are you?”

The Archivist Spoke. “I am Gertrude Robinson, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute. Please tell me what has happened here.” Despite the politeness of her words, there was the sharpness of Compelling beneath them, the Watcher bleeding through its vessel.

The boy blinked, flinching even as he seemed to become more animated. Around them, the ice cracked audibly.

“I… just wanted the pressure to stop. Ever since my parents made the tunnel, ever since I entered it, I had been changed. There was something down there. I can’t say what, but it was as if I had been… swallowed, consumed, changed. It stayed with me when I left, settling on my shoulders with a weight that left me unable to breathe.”

“I think I died.”

He frowned. “Everyone expected things of me, but I couldn’t respond properly. It all seemed to weigh so heavily. I… couldn’t pull myself up out of their expectations. It was better down here. Heavier, but it was a calm weight, like… a crypt or a grave.”

“I came to think of myself as… some sort of Phantom. Some fascimile of a living being, trying to hold up to what living beings did, like Atlas holding up the sky, until inevitably it pressed down and crushed me, and I…”

He looked past the Archivist to the frozen pair in the center of the room. “My parents loved me, I know, but they never knew I went into the tunnel. They didn’t realize I had died. They didn’t know how much the pressure weighed on me.”

“I just… I want everything to be calm. I want to enter my grave and not return, to have the ice freeze me and envelope me and never let me go and…” he started crying, the tears freezing halfway down his face.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt people.”

Gerry couldn’t see the old woman’s gaze from where he stood, but he knew it hadn’t softened. The Watcher drank in the boy’s story, relishing the flavor of despair and self-loathing, even as it didn’t understand why having so much pushed upon oneself could be so crushing.

“Gerard,” Gertrude said after several long moments of heavy silence. “Go back to the car, and get the bag of explosives from the trunk.”

He raised a brow at the old woman but complied.

When he returned, the kid had stood, though he held himself as if he could barely hold himself up against gravity.

Gertrude turned to noted Gerry’s return and nodded. “Set them up at the opening of the tunnel,” she said, then turned back to the young Avatar in front of them.

“You desire to go to the Buried and not return?” she asked him.

The boy nodded.

“Then I want you to go into the tunnel and continue walking. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Let the Buried have you.”

It wasn’t quite the same counter-strategy they usually used. There was no neutralizing one Entity with another Opposing it here. There was simply… laying a restless spirit to rest.

Gerry met the teen’s eyes as he walked past, and for a moment they regarded each-other, before Phantom continued into the tunnel, eventually disappearing into the depths beyond.

They lit the explosives, retreating for the explosion then returning to make sure the tunnel was sealed. The eerie green light had vanished from the ice, and what was left of the ice itself was quickly melting, leaving only the bodies of the boy’s family behind.

For good measure, they burned the house down, and the occupants within it.

There were a few other cars on the road as they left the town, neither of them speaking to each other until they had passed the sign heading away.

“How’s your head feeling?” Gertrude asked, as if she didn’t know.

“It’s fine,” Gerry replied, lying, the weight of the truth heavy on his shoulders.

#ectoberhaunt23 #Oct 11 #EH magic #Calm #Danny Phantom #The Magnus Archives #gerry keay #gertrude robinson

11 notes · View notes