Work Text:
‘A preemptive grief, waiting, stalking a prey it will not kill; dutifully, as a moon that haunts its sun.’
-
It wasn’t supposed to go this way. There was never supposed to be anything that Roman couldn’t fix with money, or a few extra seconds of eye contact, or even his bare fucking hands. This should never have been a possibility at all.
The cloudless night offers no relief from the stark glow of the full moon, which casts a harsh spotlight over the edge of the woods in Hemlock Grove. Roman stands tall beneath the shadow of a tree, and there is a dead body at his feet. He can’t move, stuck staring at the pale face reflecting the glow from the sky. The corpse’s brown hair fans out around the head like a halo, blending in with the dead fallen leaves surrounding it.
Roman exhales a quiet breath that turns into a puff of smoke in the frigid air, and suddenly he isn’t in the forest anymore. No, he’s back in high school, standing beneath the arched doorway at the back of the rarely-used storage room. There were no operational cameras in that part of the building because students weren’t supposed to know how to get to that room, which is why Roman went there to smoke.
He’s there again now, busy lighting both of the cigarettes between his lips, half-listening to Peter rant about how much he despises their history teacher. In between words, Peter reaches up and takes one of the cigarettes directly from Roman’s mouth, barely pausing to take a drag before he continues on about the school’s unfair grading system. The smoke trickles out from his mouth as Roman watches, and then he’s back in the present moment, seeing his own foggy breath dissipate into the night air.
In the woods, everything is silent. No rustle of animals, no whoosh of wind past his ears. Roman’s hand is shockingly steady where his fingers are clenched around the handle of a shovel. The blood staining the corpse’s neck appears black in the moonlight, like an infection, like rot, though it is difficult to tell the difference between blood and the dirt covering most of the body. Roman has yet to bury the head. He still stares, unblinking, at the face illuminated in the pale glow. There is an icy numbness in every fiber of his being, but he knows that he should do something.
Anything at all.
Scream, maybe- wail and cry and beat his fists into the ground beneath him, sob with such force that his vocal chords shred until he coughs up pieces of raw tissue. The still air reeks of death and blood, guts and gore, sticking in his brain and circling like vultures and suddenly he is blinded by light. Peter’s wolf stands in front of him, dark fur gleaming in the sun, thick strings of saliva dripping from its open mouth. Roman is tossing bits of raw meat into the air for the wolf to catch, a private game for just the two of them, feeling giddy as he watches the flash of sharp teeth. The spell is broken with the sound of a shovel biting through dirt, when he can no longer pretend that it’s just the click of an animal jaw snapping shut.
Darkness falls over the face on the forest floor, bit by bit, as it’s reclaimed by the earth. Roman is a spectator to this horrific event, feeling like he’s outside of his body, clinging desperately to the memory of the wolf that is quickly fading out of reach.
His own traitorous hands smooth down the dirt at the top of the shallow grave, his own traitorous legs begin to walk his body away.
Once he is out of the cover of the trees, the moonlight reaches him and it highlights every gruesome detail that he was dutifully ignoring. Roman’s own blood still trickling through the shoulder of his jacket reminds him that he has, in fact, been shot. As if on cue, a burning flash of pain radiates down his arm and across his chest, and everything suddenly feels overwhelmingly real. There is dried blood on his hands, he can taste the metal of it on his lips, and it isn’t his own.
He takes two more steps before he’s forced to stop, doubling over and dry heaving, his body trying to throw up despite his stomach being empty. Somehow, he still makes it to his car.
-
In the dream, Roman stands in front of Nadia’s crib. Her room looks the same as it did after the people in the white masks attacked- smears of blood on the floor, furniture reduced to piles of broken wood, shards of glass from the broken window. The crib, untouched by the carnage, is empty. There is a feeling twisting in Roman’s chest, a heavy ache that he can’t quite put a name to, but there is nothing else for him to do except stand there and wait. So he does.
Nothing happens for a long, long time.
Until the heavy tread of boots can be heard from the hallway, coming closer to this room, and Roman knows that it’s Peter the same way that you know anything in a dream. Peter stops in the open doorway and everything falls silent again. Roman tries to say something, but his voice gets trapped in his throat, and the twisting feeling in his chest grows and spreads until it hurts, constricting his lungs, igniting his body down to the cellular level with the pain of suffocation. He suddenly burns with a different feeling, the knowing that Peter is the one causing this to happen- the same way you know anything in a dream.
Roman fights to turn around, but nothing happens, his limbs won’t cooperate, not even his eyes will stop staring into the empty crib. He can’t look at Peter, can only listen to the sound of his slow steps coming ever closer, the hollow rasp of his voice when he speaks:
“How else did you think this would end?”
-
Roman wakes to his ceiling, heart too loud, and skin too hot. He digs his nails into the mattress, taking big gulps of air, trying to fight off the pressure building up in his chest. The first rays of dawn shine through the bedroom windows, and the sunlight upon his skin burns like an admonishment. He feels sweaty and panicked, and he sits up quickly, shoving the blankets off of his legs to cool down from the heat of the nightmare.
With a huff, he scrubs at his eyes, trying to force himself to feel more awake, but the sensation of something gritty scraping against his skin makes him pause. He’s standing in front of his mirror before he’s even realized that he moved. The sunlight allows nothing to hide- the dark circles beneath his eyes, the terrified expression on his face, his lips shaping words.
“No, no, no…” Roman whispers. There is dried blood on his hands, on his chin, he can see his stained clothes in a heap on the floor behind him. The red glow of the numbers on his bedside clock reads 7:24 AM.
It’s been four hours since he buried Peter.