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“Ray!” Says Norman, running out of the corridor. He sounds out of breath even though the dining hall’s a mere five meters away, and he doesn’t even stop to talk to Ray; just body-checks him into the wall, running as fast as he can.
“Check where you’re going!” Calls out Ray after him, but doesn’t even bother catching up to him. Chances are he’s going with Emma somewhere, and Ray loves them, but sometimes he just can’t keep up with them.
Plus he’s got things to do, books to read, toys to disassemble, siblings to keep in check. By his calculations Cassie’s going soon, she’s not smart enough to make it to eight, which means he and Norman and Emma will be somewhere around fifth-oldest.
And then next month fourth, and then Cecily should make it to twelve, maybe, if making it to twelve’s even possible. She’s so smart though. He thinks maybe-
She just always helps everyone study, is all. And she’s so smart. And she’s never asleep when Ray’s awake, and she sneaks into the kitchen even though she could get in trouble, and she’s almost ten and a half.
Ray’s just six, but in a month he’ll be fifth-oldest, because Lily will be the only one that’s seven once Cassie’s gone. Then Ava and Philipp are twins and fourth-soon-to-be-third oldest, and Jamie and Lizzie and Alice are dead already, but all together they would’ve been eight.
And Alastair got to be eight, because he was smarter than Vivian, and smarter than Rory, and Alexander too, and Rita and Millie and Lucas-
And Charlie’s almost nine now, he’s the oldest boy.
Point is in a month Alastair will be dead, so Ray’s going to be fourth eldest, so he’s gonna have to pull his weight. And if Cecily doesn’t make it, which she won’t, then he’s going to be third oldest, and the twins are probably going to make it to nine and a half and then that’s it, and Lily will get to be eight for two months maybe, ‘cause she keeps failing calculus.
Point is there needs to be someone to keep things on track once the older ones have been murdered. And it sure won’t be Norman who picks up the slack!
He looks down to where Norman collided with him. There’s a growing bloodstain, spreading and spreading on his white uniform, hungrily devouring the fabric. He almost shouts, almost screams- then looks down to see a body on the ground, to see the corridor crimson and sticky, to smell rot and metal.
It sure won’t be Norman, because he’s dead.
oOo
“Emma,” says Ray, when she shakes him awake from the nightmare. She’s already hugging him and her name fell from his lips just after Norman. “Emma. Emma, Emma, wait, wait, you have to know, Emma, Emma.”
He can feel her tears on his shirt, but she’s keeping it quiet because they’re in the forest, just the two of them on a reconnaissance mission, and he can’t keep babbling. She shushes him and holds him tighter, but he’s not real and he’s not alive anyway, so he just trashes, says, “Emma, Emma, Norman, wait- you have to know-”
She holds down his arms with her own, a hold that has the advantage of being a hug.
“I know,” she says, voice harsh and rough. “Shhhhh, Ray, it’s over, shhhhh, it’s not real, it’s not-”
Her voice breaks. She buries her head into the crook of his neck and he can feel her shuddering breath next to his wild pulse.
So he gets it together. Inhale, as quietly as you can, exhale , as long as you can. Again and again while Emma cries into his neck, clutching at his back, because they’re thirteen and Norman will forever be almost eleven, and Cecily too, and Charlie and Philipp nine, and Alastair and Ava eight, Lily just seven-
Ray chokes on a breath. The problem is you’re alive until you aren’t. The problem is they’re alive in his dreams, like that’s easier.
The problem is Phil didn’t cry when Ava went early, didn’t even throw a tantrum. Just said I’ll find you, we’ll be so happy!
How do you stomach it, when your family’s more dead than alive? Ray chokes on a breath, bites his lips until it bleeds, stops himself from screaming out in raw grief. Ray wishes he had a knife to stick into his thigh, a house to set on fire, a one-way ticket to oblivion; but he just has Emma crying in his arms when they should’ve been Norman’s, and she doesn’t even hate him.
So he chokes on his breath then he gets it together, because when he was seven and a half Cecily was awake before she went, and she kissed his forehead.
She said, “Happy birthday, Ray! I’ll visit you after I’m gone!” And he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know if she knew, he doesn’t know why she was crying.
But he gets it together, because after his big sister got taken away the only thing he could stomach for weeks was her favorite food, and he gets it together, because he still remembers Lucy-that-was-their-age-but-not-as-smart, and he gets it together , because if they get found out by demons in the forest because they were crying too loudly every single part of his siblings is dead.
So he inhales and he exhales, relaxes his shoulders, grips Emma back. Whispers, voice as low as he can make it, “I’m sorry. We need to move. I’m sorry.”
By chance, it’s her good ear towards his mouth. She sniffles in his shoulder, wet and disgusting. He shivers a little and she huffs out a laugh at him.
“It’s okay,” she whispers back, face screwed up in a delicate mix of sorrow and determination that’s uniquely hers. She presses her forehead against the crook of his neck, and he can feel the teardrops clinging to her eyelashes on his collarbone.
They should move because they’re not safe.
They should move because some of their family is still alive and Ray’s the most strategic out of them. They should move because they promised to come back. They should move because Norman died so they could survive, and Ray doesn’t have the luxury of wishing he had not anymore.
They should move but he doesn’t want to let her go, and he doesn’t want to be let go of.
Emma extricates herself out of the embrace first. She crouches low on the tree branch they’d set up on for the night, squinting into the distance, balanced over an abyss. Ray’s overactive mind fills it with spikes, landmines, corpses, monsters, his own figure beckoning her towards an obscured doorway, his mother’s figure.
He shakes his head hard and goes to crouch by her. As he goes to nudge her, her eyes, red-rimmed, flick above the both of them.
His hand drops to his weapon.
A bird takes flight, and they both tense up.
The waiting is far from the worst part, especially once you know how to kill your enemy. The worst part, actually, is always experiencing it for the first time; all the nightmares Ray had for years upon years of Norman getting taken away were nothing compared to the morning he woke up, sat up in bed, looked to the one at his right, and saw it empty.
It’s something he knows from experience, how helplessness sits in your throat, the proverbial stone in your stomach. He experienced it every time the deadline passed. He experiences it still today, every time someone else goes to hunt, every instance sickness tears its way through their home, every birthday he doesn’t ask if Emma remembers.
The bird lands. He and Emma exchange glances but not a single word, poised to fight or flee.
Ray’s gun has 6 bullets left. Firing it would only attract more demons. His bow is strung over Emma’s back next to hers, he realizes with a jolt.
It’s too late to get it back now, so he just sits with the stones in his stomach and tries to tread water.
Then: a growl, in the distance. Thump, a shriek from some kind of animal, a fawn or a deer maybe- they’d been tracking some. Ray holds his breath as if that’s going to make any kind of difference in whether or not they get found out. Then he remembers he caught it not too long ago, forces himself to inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale- you get the gist of it, kid.
The growling stops, interrupted by a larger, longer shriek- demonic this ones, the kind of sounds deformed vocal cords make, half-pain half-misery. Emma sighs a little, a barely there exhale of air. She leans into his shoulder.
“Probably got distracted,” she murmurs. She smiles at him, the brightness of it barely dimmed by the redness of her eyes and her eyelashes still damp. “Lucky!”
Ray doesn’t feel lucky. The adrenaline leaves him in a rush, he feels winded; he wavers on the tree branch, for a single second.
He rights himself, but Emma catches it. “Ray…”
“I’m sorry,” he says before he can help himself.
She shakes her head, frowning at him worriedly. “We should get back to the others at sunrise. I think the deers all got eaten anyway.”
“Emma-”
She grabs his hand. Squeezes it. The exhaustion must be hitting him, because he wants to cry. The grief must be catching up to him, because he wants to cry.
“It’s not your fault,” she says. It’s what she always says, but she doesn’t know.
His shoulders hurt. They're raised too high, permanently up. He never used to shoulder the weight of hope for himself and he still doesn't know how, not quite. When he tries to imagine a better end he screws up, erases himself out of the daydream out of habit.
He believes in Emma like he believes in the sun rising the next day, unthinkingly, wholly. He loves her the way one loves a lifeline, he thinks, the way one loves an equal. He's cried more in the past two years than in the rest of his life, and she's been there every step of the way.
He doesn't know how to tell her, I picked you because you were so smart, I picked you because you were going to survive, sometimes I think if you'd been a little less you I'd have set the house on fire and killed us all, the infants with it, it would've been kinder than watching them grow up to send them to death.
He doesn't know how to speak past the grief in his throat, the horror that's permanently lodged there. He doesn't know how to ask, can you shoulder a bit more grief, I don't know how to put it down but I think it's killing me. He thinks of the way she'd cry if he told her and some part of him hurts but every day he wants to break open more, let her help with what to set down and what to keep.
He keeps dreaming of Cecily in a jar.
He keeps dreaming of Norman's fingers rigid with rigor mortis, covered with onions and diced mushrooms.
"Ray!" Shouts Emma, which is when he realizes he's crying again.
He shakes his head no frantically. Says, "I can't- I can't-" and he means to say, I can't do it, and also, I can't stop seeing them, and also I can't be doing this, I'll kill you.
Instead he gasps out and slaps a hand across his mouth, tries to muffle the sobs. Emma reaches towards him and he curls back in instinctively.
She doesn't look hurt, she doesn't even seem to register it. He wants his mother, but his mother killed them all. He wants Norman, but Norman's dead. He wants Cecily, but she was too old, and he wants Lucy, but he decided she wasn't smart enough, he never befriended her quite, he left her to die.
He wants, quite acutely and wholly unfairly, to die.
Instead Emma hugs him again.
oOo
He never asked and she never told, but he couldn't stop imagining it.
Anything chemical had seemed unlikely; couldn't contaminate the food you were going to be eating, not after going the extra mile to keep it happy and healthy. So anesthetic had been out of the question, he'd figured, a gentle sleeping gas impossible.
Thus his dreams had been filled with meat hooks, long syringes poking through eyes, scalpels or even buzzsaws. Red and bloody like he'd imagined the meat plants must have been. He'd woken up from them paralyzed, this enormous weight on his chest, the terror and disgust impossible to face.
He'd never vomited. He'd never cried. He hadn't even dug his perfectly trimmed nails into his palms.
Those would have just gotten him there sooner.
When he'd been younger, waking up drenched in a cold sweat, he'd snuck into the library, and Cecily would be there, hollow-eyed too. When she'd been gone, he'd gone there regardless.
Norman would come find him hours later, sleep-warm and sharp with worry, to say, "Haven't you read that one before?" And when Ray hadn't had the words to answer, couldn't force them past it all in his throat, he'd sighed and said, "I'll get Mom."
But by the time he'd gotten to the door, Ray would be fine.
oOo
"Ray," says Emma. The tunnels around them are silent and full of tepid air, musky from dried-out plants. "Ray."
Ray doesn't dig his nails into his palms. The book Minerva left said it was an unhealthy coping method, and Emma would be even more alarmed. She would be less alarmed if he could stop hollowly sobbing.
But he can't, so.
"I'm sorry," he gasps out, "I'm sorry, I-"
She's hugging him. She led them both through the tunnels and now she's hugging him. He needs to be a little more real and a little less haunted, and he needs to go back to sleep, and he needs, desperately, Norman to wander in and offer to call their butcher, a wake-up call colder than anything else.
Instead he's gasping in Emma's arms, and she's holding him like she held him when his rope snapped and he almost fell to his death: painfully and without a hint of letting go.
He feels dizzy. The guilt seeps through every pore of him, he's been treading water for years now, it was never sustainable. It wasn't his fault but he sent them to their deaths, or even death, singular, the same fucking thing every time.
"Ray, what happened?" Asks Emma, and he can't explain that nothing did, that he just can't take it anymore, not because he thinks she wouldn't understand but because saying it out loud would shatter him beyond any hope of recognition.
He wants to say, do you remember Lucy, I cried the day she left, her birthday was in November and she didn't even make it to seven-
And instead he says, "Why didn't I save them all?"
It comes out whimpering. He wants to believe it doesn’t shake Emma but the tell-tale freeze of her breath for a second betrays her.
“You-” she starts to say, but he shakes her off and tightens his fists. She stumbles back from him into the open air, wide-eyed, boots spotted with dried blood and mud.
He paces in the middle of the tunnel, feels his eyes burn, feels his fevered mind run out of the neatly pre-planned tracks. There are some thoughts that are not safe, for him, some thoughts that glow alight with the same light Snow White’s apple must have. In the original she never wakes; in his dreams, he never dies. There are some thoughts he cannot entertain, some escapes he cannot allow himself, the glow of a knife in the night, who ever let him handle a shotgun?
He doesn’t hate himself because he’s too practical to be able to. He doesn’t hate himself, what a waste of energy; he doesn’t hate himself but he doesn’t think about himself at all except as someone’s tool.
The animal part of him would scream at that, but it’s forever frozen in fear. He used to stare at the shadows in the mess hall of Grace Fields, cutting the raw meat, wondering, will it be a syringe? A meat hook? Will it hurt?
Will it hurt?
It hurts when he gasps in air, a weight in his throat he’s intimately familiar with. He bites his tongue to make it stop, but the pain stopped shocking him into quiet long ago. Emma frowns at him like he’s a complicated problem to solve, or like he’s a member of her family that’s hurting, or like he’s Ray and she’s Emma and he could kill her and she’d still try to comfort him.
His legs ache from running through the night. His backpack is too heavy, and it feels too constricting around his shoulder, like a corpse he’s carrying. But it’s not, he tries to tell himself, and fails.
His intellectual distance left him the way a rotten bridge does in the wake of a flood: with a great shriek, taking half of the riverbanks with it. He’s out of patience with himself, with the boy he was two years ago, the one who couldn’t see past the instinctual need to hide . The grief laps at his nose, covered his mouth ages ago, the only thing he can think about is the way he didn’t care enough to try and save them.
“You wanted to save them all,” he interrupts. His sorrow morphs into anger, unleashed and uncontrollable. He’s incapable of directing it in a better direction: there’s a reason his solution was to set himself on fire. “You wanted to save them all and I would’ve just left them all there, if we could do it then why couldn’t I do it earlier? If I’d tried? If I’d tried?”
Emma frowns. “But the materials, you spent years- the trackers-”
The truth is he could’ve had the trackers disabled years ago, the truth is they could’ve just cut the part of flesh off, stole some medicine, prevented the infection. The truth is the horror and the guilt have mixed together to create something awful, some kind of vicious despair, some kind of abrasive anger, some kind of disgust at himself. The truth is he maybe could’ve saved them and-
“I just hid ,” he says. “I let them go, I could’ve tried, even if I’d failed- why didn’t I just try? ”
Emma reaches towards him. “You would’ve died,” she argues, “you would’ve died and we would’ve all too, without you to warn us. Ray, you know this.”
But when he tells it to the ghosts it never seems like enough. But he loved them, he kept imagining their corpse, and now that he knows- now that he’s seen-
The first time that they saw a market Don had to vomit.
He chokes on a sob. Emma says, “It must’ve been so hard, Ray, I’m so sorry.”
“I picked you to be my friend because you were so smart, I knew you’d survive, I picked you as a project -” He babbles. It’s a wildfire, he can smell the smoke from here, he can see the exit signs lit up in flashing greens; it’s all burning to the ground, his memories and the ice, the frozen-beyond-saving part of him.
“Ray,” says Emma pityingly, “I know. I know. You just wanted friends that wouldn’t leave. You were five. Ray , you were five.”
“But you did it,” he says, crying completely, destroyed. “You saved them all! If I’d just told you- If I’d told anyone- If I hadn’t been so convinced it was destined to fail anyway, maybe we would've escaped earlier, maybe Ava- Nelly- maybe Cassian, or, or-”
“It’s not your fault that you were scared,” says Emma fiercely. She shakes her head hard and he sees her bad ear through her hair flying. Her eyes are shimmering with tears. He misses Norman so bad it hurts.
“It must’ve been so hard,” repeats Emma, gentler. He wants to choke. “I’m so sorry. I would’ve gotten us killed in a second if I was the one that knew, I wouldn’t have even believed you. Ray, you did so well.”
But he hid for eleven years, and he can’t even imagine himself alive in the next two years. But he couldn’t even save Norman.
“Ray,” she says, and tugs at his hands. “Ray, you have to believe me. You did what you had to. You- six years, I don’t know how you didn’t give up.”
He gasps in a breath, heaving. “Cecily, you remember-”
Emma tilts her head at the subject change. “When we were six?”
“I think she knew,” he confesses. “I think- I can’t- I think she knew, I think she stayed for us, I think- I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t walk to them, I couldn’t-”
She wished him a happy birthday because she had the same as him, she was his big sister and she was invincible until she wasn’t.
“Oh, no,” says Emma.
“If she wouldn’t- I thought, if she couldn’t- Mom used to say we were so much alike, and if she couldn’t- but I didn’t want to die, ” he wails, five again and inconsolable.
Emma’s crying again. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Ray, I’m so glad you’re here- it’s not bad that you didn’t want to die- it’s not bad- Ray, I’m so glad you’re here. ”
And he is, too, in the frozen-beyond-saving part of him, the five-year-old that stood in the library in the middle of the night and said, I’m scared, and she would answer, I know, me too.
What do you do when your family is more dead than alive? What do you do when you’ve been frozen in place for years, standing there, watching your siblings close the door, shouting shouting shouting, don’t go, please don’t go?
“I miss Norman,” he chokes out, and collapses into Emma’s arms again. “I miss him, he was supposed to make it out- we’re thirteen now-”
She holds him. He shakes apart completely, or it feels like, and she holds him steadfastly, crying into his shoulder too, babbling words he can’t make out. They’re thirteen now.
They’re thirteen now.
oOo
The second the door closes behind Norman, Ray methodically locks it all up, all of the terror and all of the hope and all of the guilt.
And he thinks, alright, then.
I’m actually setting this fucking house on fire.