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The overhead light flickers on and off. It’s irritating, but not the worst thing in the world.
The reconstruction of the mansion—now aptly referred to as “MePad Mansion”—was a rough one. They’d all gotten so used to MePhone’s instant generation, having to build something from the ground up was… difficult, to say the least. Knife knows she’s no architect, but he’s certain that the project would not have gone as swiftly as it had without Test Tube’s expertise.
It’s by no means nearly as large as what it used to be—not to mention that it hadn’t even been fully finished yet. The top spire had yet to be finished, as the former contestants had determined it would better suit the group to start the reconstruction of what is now “Hotel Hoot” rather than finishing the damn mansion. That’s fine. It makes sense. Knife is just glad that the entire cast of Inanimate Insanity was no longer cooped up in MePad Mansion back when it was the only building around.
Being in such close quarters with others just about drove Marshmallow mad—he gets the feeling entirely. They’re gone now, at the very least, and now Knife is left all alone. Pure unfettered silence—is what it WOULD be, if not for—
“So, like,” the unfortunate secondary occupant of the room pipes up, phasing through the wall suddenly and without warning, “how’s ghost-hood treating you? I literally haven’t seen you in like DAYS.”
Knife, spending an unusual amount of time hovering with no purpose in particular, is snapped out of his thoughts by Bow’s grating vocal fry. Her sudden unwanted presence makes him flinch, and a scowl quickly crosses his face not soon after.
“What—What is your PROBLEM!!” He growls, fists balled.
This isn’t the first time Bow has done this. He can’t imagine how bored she must be, having to… exist in such a state for so long. He’d be lying if he said the horror of his situation hadn’t started to freak him out lately just a little. Rebuilding the mansion really was the final nail in his quite literal coffin. At least he was only a shout away from familiarity before Mepad Mansion came about. Now, he’d be lucky if he got a glimpse of anything within Hotel Hoot from the mansion window.
Bringing himself back to the present moment, he now realizes that Bow has inched closer than before. He shoos her away, floating back a fair bit in the process. She has an amused grin on her face—she’s started to be like that ever since he’s been stuck in this damn mansion. It makes him feel a special kind of anger.
“You’re literally so boring,” she retorts, arms crossed. “Ever since the mansion finally got rebuilt you like, started hiding!!! You know, Mango or whatever plays hide and seek here all the time—but you’re too good. Spill.”
Knife, fists still balled at his sides, sighs somewhat after Bow admits this. He wants nothing more than to leave, and he figures he’s made this as clear as he possibly could.
“Why can’t you just leave me be,” Knife argues, brows still downturned into a scowl. Out of everyone here, Bow is certainly the most unpleasant. “OBVIOUSLY I have no interest in talking to you…”
“No, because literally—you’re the most interesting thing here right now, like seriously,” Bow continues, examining her nonexistent nails before continuing. “Like, the only other ghost that’s even around is my brother who’s not my brother!” She swirls around Knife’s ghostly form before deciding the nearby bed to be her ultimate resting place, where she pats the empty seat next to her.
“Think about it—you have like, nothing else better to do, anyways,” she replies, and Knife gives her an incredulous look. She’s right and he hates it. The alternative option would be to disassociate, and Knife figures he’s done enough of that. Bow simply blinks her eyelashes, knowing she’s won once Knife groans.
He slowly and reluctantly approaches, simply hovering above the bed rather than dramatically splaying himself out on it like Bow had—to which she gives him an amused look in return. Knife crosses his arms, meets her gaze, before exclaiming “...What?! I don’t—I don’t KNOW how to do ghost stuff like that! Don’t look at me like I’m an idiot—I don’t get it! Argh!!”
Knife huffs. Bow opens her mouth as if she was about to speak, but is abruptly cut off by the once again blinking overhead light. The two of them look up to it as it flickers, and Knife puts his head in his hands.
“So like,” Bow continues after a bout of silence, her head propped up against her ghostly hand, “for real—I haven’t seen you at all period after like, they brought Purgatory Mansion back. What is it with this room, anyway? You literally haven’t even like, decorated it or ANYTHING. It’s soooo boring.” As she talks, Knife looks to the window. He hears her, but he’s not focusing on anything she’s saying. He can make something out happening in the Hotel from afar, but it’s hard to tell from here. It makes his chest feel a weird sort of way that he can’t quite explain, but it makes him sick to his stomach.
“Um, like, HELLO? EARTH TO KNIFE??” Bow snaps, once again bringing Knife out of whatever stupor he’d gotten himself in. He looks back to her, a now somewhat irritated look on her face. Knife averts her gaze, arms now at his sides again.
“...........I really don’t want to be here,” he utters—so softly that it surprises Bow. “I don’t want to be here! I hate it!”
Bow pauses for a moment, but then continues as if Knife hadn’t said anything. “Well obviously you don’t like it here, duh! Like, that’s so obvious, you literally shut yourself in this room and haven’t left in like—”
“Is this how it’s going to be?” Knife continues on, a hand on the side of his head. “For the rest of my life? You—None of you people even like me! Marshmallow hates me—it’s not like the whole big ‘act of kindness’ that I did fixed anything else between us! The only other people who are in the same boat as me are you and Dough and—you’re so—so—annoying sometimes! Every other person who I’m even remotely close to isn’t even here!”
The other ghost shows a little intrigue at this. She hadn’t known Knife for very long, but from what she’s heard of him from Marsh this guy is a cold-blooded killer—at least, until very recently. Obviously quite the reserved type. She finds it fascinating that he’d be willing to admit something like this to her of all people.
“What, like Suitcase?” She eggs him on, to which Knife gets even more frustrated in response.
“Suitcase, Pickle, Mic—all of them! Of course they visit—of course they’ve checked in—but I can’t leave and I feel like I’m losing my damn mind! I’m—I’m so tired of it.” Knife has his head fully in his hands now, and he’s sunk partially into the bed he was initially hovering above. Bow clicks her tongue in response, and mimics rolling over on the bed so she can look at the ceiling.
“Welllll,” she says after a long pause, “it honestly hasn’t even been that long since this place got rebuilt,” Bow muses, looking to Knife for a response. “It took me like, way longer than that to come to terms with my own mortality.”
“You’re not helping,” he replies gruffly in response, his hands remaining stationary over his face, “I don’t even know why I’m still talking to you.”
“No but like, I so get it, though,” she quickly interjects, arms now splayed out above her head as she truly relaxes ‘on’ the bed. “Being on house arrest sucks. It like, takes a while to get used to, I guess.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” Knife responds decidedly, “It’s all just… too much! We find out we’re not even real people, I die, Cobs dies, MePhone leaves, and—”
The light flickers once more.
“—AND THIS STUPID LIGHT WON’T STOP FLICKERING!!! How am I supposed to just—SHUT UP AND DEAL WITH THAT?!” Knife shouts, pulling himself out from half-hovering through the bed and flinging his arms around as if he wanted to punch something in the moment. Bow, unbothered by his hijinks due to her ghostly nature, sits up to talk to him more properly.
“Listen,” she starts, mocking the motion of shifting her weight onto her right arm as she sits, “girl, I get it. If I like, couldn’t see Marsh or Kumquat every day I’d literally die again. And you KNOW that would be crazy because I’m literally, like, already a ghost!” This comment garners an unamused look from Knife, but Bow continues regardless.
“Honestly? Get mad about it. Cuz like, if you keep hiding away from everyone for the rest of time, you’ll turn into a bitter antisocial weirdo. Even though the mansion isn’t like, finished being rebuilt or whatever, there’s still things to do. We just got our TV back!! How else would we be able to watch horror movie style-static without it? You like, wouldn’t be able to do that while still alive. It’s just not the same—it’s not as, like, spooky. The vibes would be so off,” as Bow continues on, Knife’s initial anger seems to dull somewhat.
“You’re so bizarre,” Knife comments, simmering down compared to just a moment ago. To which Bow replies: “Yeah, duh!! I would like, be bored out of my mind if I was normal!”
He averts his gaze with crossed arms at this comment, eyes narrowed. A tense silence follows Bow’s comment, alongside a moment in which she eyes him expectantly—when nothing comes of it, she purses her lips and materializes a phone from seemingly nowhere—and begins typing away incessantly in a way that Knife feels almost too tired to point out is incredibly annoying. The chirps and ticks from her phone continue, and it’s almost worse than that damn flickering light. His eye twitches involuntarily, and only after this awkward silence does he choose to follow up with a question:
“...How have you not gone crazy already?” He asks, cutting through the one-sided tension like a, well, you know. Bow’s gaze rises from her phone screen, and Knife meets it. “Given your track record, I figured you would’ve, I dunno, killed someone by now, or something.”
“Ouch, Knife,” she comments, the back of her hand on her forehead, “really hitting it where it hurts, huh? LOL.” Her phone, now mysteriously gone through some ghost bullshittery Knife hasn’t even BEGUN to comprehend, Bow puts an inquisitive finger to her bottom lip.
“It’s like, what I was telling you earlier—DUH! Obviously, it was soooo boring when it was just me in here. But now there’s, like, Marsh and Kumquat! And that crazy weirdo who thinks he’s my brother! Like yeah—being on haunted house arrest obviously limits all of the fun stuff you can do. All of the selfies I’ve been taking have the same backgrounds—it’s actually horrible. But like,” she rolls over on her side as she speaks, propping her head up with her hand, “it’s ten times less boring when there’s other people to talk to and do stuff with.”
Knife takes it all in, and a feeling he can’t even begin to describe settles in his stomach. It feels almost as if it’s weighing him down—dread? Is he really going to be stuck with these people for the rest of his afterlife? An irritating “girly girl” who he has nothing in common with, an idiot who hasn’t a damn care in the world, Dough, and someone he used to murder oh-so frequently in season one?
He might have preferred that short period of nonexistence to whatever this is. The light flickers again.
How is this supposed to be a happy ending for him? It’s barely a happy ending for Suitcase—sure, she defeated Cobs and won Season Two—but what were they even competing for? There was no prize. Knife is still dead. Suitcase’s hallucinations are still present. Everything they’ve ever known wasn’t real in the first place—though Suitcase is probably one of the more real people Knife has met. He’ll give her that. The two of them alone scraped by with a sizable amount of baggage, Knife can only imagine how much of a basket case everyone else at the Hotel was, figuring out they weren’t real and having to start anew. Lucky bastards. Their lives have just begun. As selfish as it makes him feel, he envies that.
Everyone else can live their new lives mainly unimpeded. His ended the moment he jumped that line.
“Wow,” Bow’s voice rudely interjects his thoughts, “you’ve like, got it really bad, huh.”
For the second time in this conversation, Knife finds himself pulled from a rabbit hole of negative thoughts. Days of solitude really did not do him much justice, he figures. He hadn’t even realized that during his mini spiral, he’d brought his head down to his hands and fixed his eyes on the floor. Bow must’ve clearly noticed something was wrong. Shit. He has to fix this. He’s never been… vulnerable with anyone before—only very rarely from Suitcase, and even then his thoughts wouldn’t spiral like this. It was… usually the other way around. He can’t make this a habit—let alone with BOW of all people.
“...This whole thing is stupid. Everything… MePhone, Cobs, I just… It’s too much, man.”
Bow looks at him as if he just grew a second head. Knife wishes he could die again.
“Knife,” she says, “...like, I don’t even really know you that well. To be so honest with you, I like, totally suck at this whole comforting people thing. If that’s what you’re setting me up to do, or something.” At this, Knife opens his mouth to quickly reply, but Bow continues anyway.
“But I am really good at talking shit. And gossiping. That’s like, another thing that keeps me from going crazy. Literally—you’d be surprised at how much junk Marsh comes back with to tell me about when she goes to visit. It’s actually crazy,” Bow rolls her eyes playfully, now grinning at Knife.
The other quirks a brow, clearly not expecting a reply like that. His eyes drift back to the window—like before, he can’t find anything notable to fixate on. A sigh escapes his lips, weary and jaded. “Is that so,” Knife says, only continuing to humor her because he’s dug himself into too deep of a hole to escape.
“Of course!” She says in turn, ghost tail curling around Knife as she twirls around in the air. She’s suspended above Knife now, leisurely dangling upside down with lips curled into a devious grin.
“I heard Paper and OJ are totally gay,” Bow offers, flipping around to gauge Knife’s reaction of lukewarm indifference.
“Yeah. What else is new,” Knife scoffs in turn, his arms crossed loosely. “Those two were like that ever since season one.”
“No—like, together together.” Bow sticks her tongue out. “Like, it’s actually disgusting how sappy they get. They can’t even take their hands off each other—like?? Ew! Barf,” she says while fake gagging to exaggerate her disapproval.
Despite his mood and mindset, the topic shift gets a smirk out of Knife. He can practically envision how gratuitous their public displays of affection might be. While not nearly as overdramatic as her, it’s a rare moment in which he agrees with Bow.
“I can only imagine how fun that must be for everyone else,” he remarks, and Bow makes a sound of agreement. “Right? And like—from what I’ve heard, OJ is totally unbearable to be around. Your boyfriend is easily killable, we know! So are like—half of the other people here!”
“Haha… welcome to my life, I guess. Doesn’t get much better than this,” Knife adds on, gesturing to himself and his newly found… ghostness. The pleasant beat of silence following his reply reminds him of the absurdity of this whole situation—here he is, talking to Bow of all people. Not that there’s many options to begin with, but… this is the first real time he’s found himself not entirely hating the presence of someone else since he’s died.
Bow continues on, rattling on about petty drama between the living contestants she’s heard through Marshmallow and Apple’s testimonies. Surprisingly enough, Knife finds himself more invested than he thought he would be. Suitcase did suggest for him to pick up a hobby shortly after the mansion’s partial reconstruction—while he hasn’t been able to fully figure out the extension of his ghostly capabilities, this is certainly a start.
The light flickers again amidst their conversation. Knife doesn’t acknowledge it.
Maybe things will turn out alright for him.