Halloween Fic: Swan Song
Title: Swan Song
Genre: Horror
Rating: M
Word count: 7,500
Summary: If you fight hard enough, you will get that happy ending.
Finn’s shoes stick to the dirty cement. Stick stick stick as his toes brush back and forth, as he hangs limp and painful. He can’t feel his hands, high as they are over his head. Can’t feel his arms, just the burning of his shoulders, a stripe of pain down his ribs, the ache ache ache at the top of his neck. His clothes are dirty. The room is dirty. Everything is dirty and tacky to touch, sticking to his skin.
The dirt is coming from him.
*
Finn wakes up back in Lima, Ohio. He doesn’t know the town well, just from passing through a few years ago. He’d thought at the time that it would be a nice place to live, so different from the big ugly city he grew up in. A small town with houses and fences, and a hotel ingeniously called ‘Hotel’.
Finn wakes up in Lima, where he’s lived his whole life. Where he probably always will live. A small, comfortable town. Every now and then a little voice inside will tell him to get out, to get the hell out and away and somewhere saf- but he presses it down.
Why would he want to leave?
*
He goes to school at William McKinley High, which he thinks is odd, because that had been his nickname back when he was- no, it was the name of the school. And they joked about it being a failure of a school like he was a failure of a president, even though none of them knew what the guy did.
He has a beautiful girlfriend, the kind that never gave him any notice. He has a best friend. He wouldn’t have recognised the kid (they’re the same age) for what he was if it weren’t for the punch to the arm and the questions about what was on tv last night.
“Grounded, man. That shit is fucked up, am I right?”
“Yeah,” Finn replies, struggling to settle into this role. “Totally.”
“Not that you’d know man,” Puck says, throwing him this grin that’s all cocky and teasing and warm. “Not like you’d ever let yourself get strung out.”
(His shoulders hurt, oh god they hurt his arms are going to fucking tear off.)
“Course,” Finn replies. “Not me.”
He likes Puck, though he’s not sure how they go together. He’d had the same punk-ass haircut back when-
Back-
He’s not sure how they go together. They’ve just always been like that.
*
Finn’s shoulders are a long thick line of pain. His neck hurts. He’d alternated, for a while, his head hanging back and then flopping forward. But he just doesn’t have the energy. There’s a wound, and it burns in him. It’s infected, he can feel it. This deep dark poisonous hole in the soft flesh between neck and shoulder blade, a hole with the muscle torn underneath and the blood congealing too slowly. Wet and sticky all down his back. All over the room. Gluing blank postcards in place.
Cold and dirty and the toes of his shoes keep going stick stick stick against the concrete floor.
*
Finn wakes up in Lima. Wakes up to burnt toast, and clothes in a basket to be ironed, and his mom yelling up the stairs for him to move his keister.
His mom.
She looks completely unlike the last time he saw her.
“Hey there, sleepyhead,” she says, trying to scrape the black off her morning toast. “You don’t have practice today?”
“Practice?” And then he’s at the field, standing with his jaw slack while the guys around him bounce in place to warm up.
“Hey dude,” Puck yells, throwing a ball hard at him. Finn catches mainly on reflex, his mind still a little caught in tangles, trying to catch up. “Are you still asleep or something? Get with it.”
And Finn does. He does the warm ups, he runs the laps, he goes through the motions. He even enjoys it, being on a field with a bunch of sweaty guys at get-fucked o’clock in the morning. He’d never been allowed to play sports, never been any good, and now he is the fucking quarterback. Finn laughs a little, he can’t help it, even as a pretty blonde smirks at him.
“You’re happy today,” she says.
“Yeah,” Finn replies, wrapping his arm around her shoulders (such a slight body, but he’s not at all afraid that she’ll break). “I’m always happy to see you.”
Puck yells something at him, something about getting back with the program, but Finn doesn’t really hear it.
Doesn’t pay attention.
*
He sees Schuester in the halls before class. Mr Schuester, with Miss Pillsbury, though no one is sure why she kept her name. They hold hands, she says something to make him laugh (Finn can count the number of times…). She wears periwinkle blue with the softest yellow blouse, and his tie matches the blue perfectly. His shirt is neat and pressed and almost glows white it’s so clean (and when has Schuester ever looked like he felt clean?). The bell rings, and Finn watches as Mr Schuester raises Miss Pillsbury’s left hand to his lips, kissing her wedding ring. It’s such a fluidly sweet moment (so alien) and Finn is a little caught up in seeing it. He jumps when Quinn slams the door of his locker shut.
“Save the thinking for class,” she says.
He hears something fall down in his locker, something small and stiff like a postcard. How long since he had sent one? But her eyes are glaring at him, and so much more important.
“Right,” he replies. “Sorry.” And he wraps his arm around the shoulders of his perfect girlfriend, and lets her lead him through the moment.
*
Finn knows that he’s passing out for longer periods of time. It’s just such a fight to stay conscious, fight against the rolling desire to block out the pain. He can’t remember the last time he ate. Fresh air was so long ago that he can’t even taste the staleness in his mouth anymore, though he knows it’s there.
He knows there’s something rotting in this room. He won’t be able to look around and see until the sun comes up.
He doesn’t know if he’ll last that long.
*
Quinn is a little amazing. He knows that objectively. She’s smart, and gorgeous like girls always were in movies back in the nineties. She’s with it in a way that he isn’t even now.
But she’s cold.
It’s fine so long as they don’t touch, so long as they walk beside each other in the halls, and she cheers in her uniform while he struts in his. Picture perfect kisses in front of grandstands of cheering people, and oh god it’s crazy and amazing and leaves him with this giddy rush.
But she is cold (to the touch).
She doesn’t like his hands on her, not too much (because she’s dead).
Doesn’t like being anything that would rumple her perfect image (he’d fucked up).
(He’d fucked up, and she had died. And he was never going to be able to get that image out of his mind, of her head with one side crushed in, claw marks so deep that she lay perfectly still, even though they were fresh. Her words pouring into his head and ending up as scribbles on a postcard.)
He hadn’t even known her name.
“You’re an idiot,” she tells him. “My big sister babysat you. You’ve known me since you were eight.”
And she’s right. It has always been that way, and so Finn ignores that tight feeling in his chest when he looks at her, because he sure as hell can’t explain it.
*
Brittany and Santana smile at him in the halls. Santana’s eyes are sharp and angry, while Brittany’s are glazed. A memory tries to stir within him, but can’t find the energy. He sees Schuester, Mr Schue in the hall, smiling with Miss Pillsbury and looking like he’s in a happy little ball all of his own. The guys he plays football with are the kind of (men) boys who grow up to run garages and stores, who marry young and have a few kids, and live dumb happy lives.
They’re all familiar to him. Of course they are, he grew up with them. If pressed, he can remember their names. After a blank period of uncertainty, the details will fill themselves in, little personal histories nice and neat and uncomplicated.
“Fuck man,” Puck says, clapping him on the shoulder, “you’re so dopey all of a sudden. You need to get your head out of the clouds.”
A long, searching look, and Finn shifts under the weight of it.
*
There’s a body, maybe. Something in the room with him. Something dead and rotting. How did he get here? He doesn’t even know where ‘here’ is anymore. He shouldn’t have gone in alone. He should have fucking waited.
His feet feel cold. They’re going numb. Why are they going numb? What’s wrong with him?
Everything hurts. It hurts so fucking much.
*
“You don’t pay me enough attention,” Quinn says. “I deserve better than this.” I deserve to be worshipped.
“I’m sorry,” Finn says, and tries to focus on her. Tries to make her outline un-blur.
“You’re always a million miles away, and that’s just not good enough.”
She’s right. He needs to focus more. Spend more time with her.
“Sorry.”
Quinn gives him a long, hard look. “I don’t give people second chances,” she says. “Not usually.”
She’s not going to leave him. He’s not going to be left stranded. It would hurt too much without her, he knows that somehow.
(He’s so fucking sick of being alone. Anything is...)
“Thank you,” he says, and he pulls her close, and they both ignore the way she feels in his arms. “Thank you.”
*
When Finn goes home, and goes to bed, he doesn’t really fall asleep. It’s more like hours pass without him noticing. It’s ten at night and then it’s seven in the morning, and he has a whole new day to himself.
The view from his bedroom window is a mid-Western town, bathed in sunlight. Greetings from sunny Lima!
Why is he thinking about postcards?
*
When Finn had been a kid, he had this massive crush on Raquel Welch from watching reruns of those old movies on TV, because his mom had been sick in ways that people didn’t talk about. And because he was such a dumbass from a hick family, he’d somehow skipped some of the letters of her name whenever he read it, and he always called her ‘Rachel Wells’.
Not that Lima was exactly Hicksville. Not that his mom had ever been sick. Fuck.
Rachel Berry is nothing like Raquel Welch. Not in looks, not in personality, not in demeanour. And if sometimes, when he looks at her, when her face is at a certain angle and she has that afraid/determined expression set firmly on her features and it reminds him...
Sometimes she makes him think of dinosaurs, and he has no idea why. It’s because he’s sixteen, and a little dopey. Because he hasn’t been sleeping or something.
Rachel stares at him in the halls, and he can never decide if she looks familiar or not.
*
He’d hated high school. He’d hated everything. Those jocks and those smart kids and those people who got to have lives. People who never heard all of those... And now he is one. It’s crazy to him, sometimes he has to sit back and just stare at everything laid out before him. His three wishes.
Wait...
And then Rachel smiles at him in the hall, and Puck is saying something that Finn can’t quite hear, and there’s Schuester, standing in this wide bright beam of light and laughing, laughing like he never has done. His hair is thick curls, and Finn hadn’t known that it would be curly. There are no scars. None.
Wait...
And then he blinks, and his life is football games and being strong and being popular, and girls who had been afraid of him are glaring at each other in the corridors, ready to fight.
And it has always been that way.
*
It’s getting harder to breathe. It’s the way the muscles are being pulled around his ribs. He’s going to suffocate, eventually. How does this thing survive then? It doesn’t make sense. He can feel things twitching against his flesh, maggots eating at the rot in his back. Something stretching, moving inside, making him gag.
*
Rachel is all hopes and dreams and confidence. Rachel is big personality and bigger talent and a smile so bright it burns.
(She’s every brunette with big eyes on the side of a milk carton. She’s every moment they never got.)
“I’m too good for Lima,” is the first thing she says to him. Synonymous with, I’m too good for you. She follows that up immediately with, “You’re quite handsome, you know.”
Finn didn’t know. Finn was stooped shoulders and bunched muscles and hands torn from... from... he was too tall, and clumsy.
“Can you sing?” she asks him.
(Finn used to sing all the time, behind the wheel of a Ford that was older than he was, and not in a good way. Singing along with the radio to drown out the noises his mom made. Singing to kill the silence until someone told him to shut the hell up already.)
Mr Schue walks past them in the hallway, snapping Finn out of his... bringing him back.
She leans against him, and looks up at him from under long lashes, coy and demure in the anxious way of teenaged girls who were trying to be grown up.
“I think we should make music together.”
At the end of the corridor, Puck and Quinn are standing shoulder to shoulder, watching them. Puck’s face is a scowl that twists as Rachel loops her arm through Finn’s, and leads him away.
*
When Finn falls asleep, he dreams of a long road. Long and empty. There are towns along it, but he never stops. There are noises around him. Ahead and behind. And he can’t tell if he’s driving towards one sound, or driving away from the other.
He forgets the dream as soon as he wakes up.
*
“What is it with you and women these days?” Puck asks, straddling a chair backwards and looking at Finn with dark, familiar eyes. They both have brown eyes.
Finn looks up from his school work, whatever it is. “What do you mean?”
They’re in Mr Schue’s class, and around them students are chanting along with the words on the board.
“Ergo draco maledicte, et omnis legio diabolica adjuramus te...”
“You’re always off, off somewhere else, you know? I’m telling you man, never trust a chick that keeps you on a tight leash.”
“I don’t know what you-” Finn looks back down, and trails off. There are no books in front of him. Just blank postcards.
Puck snorts at him. “Forget it, man. But one of these days you just gotta wake up and take a sniff.”
(Meat. Rotting meat and the smell of it is heavy and coats his tongue, becoming a stale choking taste that makes him gag. Makes him dizzy and makes his shoulders burn with a numb blistering pain and oh god oh god.)
“Finn?”
Finn looks up, and sees Mr Schue giving him a worried look.
“You okay?”
“...Cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque aeternae Perditionis venenum propinare.”
“Yeah,” Finn says, and he can’t remember what had upset him, or even what they’d been talking about. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
*
It’s all roles to play. Finn dreams of walking into a dark building, and as soon as he steps through a door his clothes change. Every room, a new outfit, and new person to be. Until he’s running, trying to find the door out, trying to find the door back... back... but there are bodies. Bodies and he needs to get away from them.
Running in circles, trying to get out and stay in all at once.
*
Rachel teaches him things. He hadn’t known that he could learn like that. Hadn’t known that he could find new things. New songs, new artists. A radio station is playing somewhere, and every sound is Rachel Berry.
“You know a lot about this stuff, huh?”
She smiles at him, all white teeth and pretty eyes. “I’ve been around the block,” she admits. Her teeth are sharp, and he thinks of dinosaurs.
His body moves as she makes him dance, structured and choreographed and while his feet are clumsy (sticking to something) his body just feels so good.
He feels strong. He feels healthy.
There’s no pain.
He could spend all day listening to her voice. Because it’s the only voice.
When Rachel kisses him her mouth is softer than a mouth has ever been. She tastes like fresh air, and sunshine, and her body is so warm. He presses against her and her mouth opens in this perfect little gasp.
She’s so small against his body. Small, and hot, and willing. Long hair twisting in his fingers and she whispers his name.
“Finn. Finn. I need you to want this, Finn,” she says. And with her eyes that wide and her lips that plump Finn couldn’t possibly want anything else. “It has to be me, Finn. You have to want me. Never want to leave me.”
Finn kisses down her jaw, nuzzling at warm skin and hair and everything reminds him of milk and honey, a wealth of tight, healthy skin.
“If we’re together,” she says, “we have to be together forever. Do you understand that, Finn?”
Forever, that’s such an easy concept, if only because it’s flawed. Nothing lasts forever.
“We will,” she says, and her hands are gripping his shoulders, her legs around his waist (his shoulders hurt, why do they hurt?). “It’ll just be you and me, Finn, forever and ever. I’ll be everything you’ll ever need. You won’t ever think of anyone else.”
None of those girls. None of the dead girls. Wait.
“You and me, Finn. Don’t you want to be happy? Don’t you want me?”
The dead girls...
“Yes,” Finn says, and he kisses her because he just needs a moment to think.
*
Finn collapses into bed. He dreams of the car, again. Of driving it over that long road. Except, instead of passing towns, he passes posters for missing persons. Faces caught in those half-aware expressions of someone just noticing a camera, a variety of genders and ages, a variety of years and locations. And for some reason, he’s following the trail. Following those missing people, all of them dead.
*
“We have a future together,” Rachel tells him, her arms around his neck, his hand on her waist. “You and me. Can’t you feel it?”
At the same time Puck is pulling at his elbow, trying to tear his arms away, trying to catch his attention.
“Finn, come on man, you and me. We were going to hang out, go to the old factories.”
There’s a factory.
“You promised, man. You and me, and the girls.”
The dead girls.
“Finn, I need you to commit to me. I need to know you feel the same.”
There’s a bulletin board next to them, covered in posters and signup sheets. There’s a small rectangle, the size of a postcard in the middle. Finn knows there’s something written on the back.
“We’re going to set the fire alarm off, and start running when we hear the sirens.”
Sirens. Wait...
“Finn, you know that I love you, right?”
Sirens.
“Schuester doesn’t have to know, just come to the factory.”
Sirens.
Wait, no.
“Finn, I love you.”
“Come on, man. Let’s go.”
Psirens.
“Finn? Don’t you love me too?”
Rachel’s fingers dig sharply into his shoulders, and they blossom with pain. He can feel dried blood down his back, can feel his shirt rotting over his flesh. Then the pain is gone. Puck is gone. Just her in his arms, staring up at him with those movie-star eyes.
“Of course,” he says
*
That night all he dreams is running. His lungs burning and his body on fire. There’s something on his back, clawing and gouging and it’s tearing him open and throwing his insides away. He keeps stumbling and tripping, and when he looks down he sees that he’s running on a sea of bodies, of all of the people who went before him, all of those wanted posters.
He trips and falls, and those cold dead hands are grabbing at him, pulling him down and stretching him out, and somewhere he can hear a voice. A voice saying “Fucking idiot, you always do this.”
And then he wakes up.
*
Wakes up sitting at the kitchen table, his mom heaping eggs and bacon onto his plate.
“You’re a growing boy,” she says. “You need to eat up.”
He spent a childhood eating soup cold from the can. Tucking the congealed chunks into his cheeks, sucking them through his teeth.
He’s so fucking hungry.
His mom always makes him breakfast like this.
“Eat up,” she says. “You need to be strong.”
There’s a long sound in the distance, unbroken. Rising and falling.
He can’t remember the word for it.
“I love you,” she says, and kisses him on the top of his head. She smells like a mom should, cooking and soap and (burning sage) floral perfume.
Of course she loves him.
*
Rachel holds his hand too tight. He feels his skin crawl. His head hurts. He doesn’t understand what’s happening. Is he going crazy? He’s only... he’s sixteen. He’s sixteen. When Rachel talks to him, the buzz in his ears gets louder. Puck stands behind her shoulder, like an angel (like Atheed, who records the ill-deeds of a person throughout their life, a long strip of paper unfurling down and down and tearing away).
Sometimes when he closes his eyes, he can feel the ache in his arms of dying flesh, the spikes of pain as nerves die from starvation. He’s so hungry his stomach is a hole. His body is full of holes, like cheese. And nothing to fill them up.
Rachel’s eyes on him are angry, they make him hurt. “Why are you always fighting against me? Don’t you want this?”
Finn has had a headache for days, beating on his skull, aching down his spine. The air is thick around him (he can’t taste it, can’t taste anything), and it feels all the time like people are shouting at him. Even when no one is speaking they’re all looking at him with those dead doll eyes, wanting things from him.
Wanting him to say yes, to stay here. And he... and he’s always been here, right? He doesn’t... he’s never...
Why does he hurt?
“Finn?”
There’s a voice, clear and soft and it’s like falling into a bed at the end of the day. It’s Schuester, it’s Mr Schue.
“I knew you’d find me,” Finn says, and the world around him spins.
“Finn?”
He’s so empty.
*
For some reason, he’s always surprised by the colour of Mr Schue’s eyes. He remembers them differently. Not the dark, murky mix of brown and green, so natural and easy to get lost in.
He remembers them as hard and flat. The colour of peridot, a stare as cold and blank as it could be. A face all angles and lines. Angry, always angry.
Which is stupid, he knows.
Because Mr Schue (“Will, call me Will,” and how long has Finn been waiting for that invitation?) has never been like that.
He’s always looked out for Finn. Always wanted what was best for him.
*
Finn goes to Lima central, which looks like a strip of shops and businesses identical to any other large town in the US. And Finn has been through them all. He walks through the newsagency, and slips out with a fist full of postcards that he didn’t pay for.
He finds a bench, and digs a marker out of his bag. He sits, hand poised, and for once there are no words to write.
No voices in his head.
And then he blinks, and wonders what the fuck he’s doing. Missing practice and shoplifting and what will his mother think? Mr Schue?
He shoves the postcards deep into his bag, and forgets about them.
*
“I just,” Finn says, fidgeting in the comfortable chair in the comfortable office (how did he get there? What day is it?). “I have these dreams, this feeling. Like I need to get out of Lima.”
Will laughs at him, easy and happy. “Well that’s not going to be hard,” he says through a smile that lights up his face. “What with the scholarship and all.”
Finn blinks at him. “I have a scholarship?”
“Of course you do,” Will replies. “You’re the quarterback, the captain of the basketball team. The perfect candidate.”
Finn tries to think back to the games he’s played. “I thought we sucked,” is all he can think of saying, because he honestly can’t remember a lot, and that worries him.
Will leans forward, his elbows resting on the edge of his neat desk, strewn about with tiny personal artefacts. “Someone clearly saw something worthwhile in you,” he says.
Finn is struck. “… Really?”
Will nods, and looks at Finn with fondness. “You’re a great guy, Finn. You have so much going for you, such a bright future. You just need to hang in here a little longer.”
Finn feels a dull pain burn down the sides of his ribs, blossom distantly somewhere in the back of his shoulder, and he shifts in his seat, uncomfortable.
Will looks at him with large green eyes, and an open face. When he smiles he’s smiling at Finn, like he’s proud of him, like Finn is something amazing.
“You can hang on for just a little longer, can’t you Finn?”
“Yeah,” Finn replies, smiling back. “Of course.”
*
Things are finally making sense. Finn wakes up in the morning, from dreams that he can’t remember, and has breakfast with his mom (who is healthy, and happy, and so normal). He goes to school, and goes to classes. He had friends. People smile at him. He’s somebody important.
He doesn’t think about things too much.
Doesn’t think about the faces that stare at him.
The kid in the wheelchair (died in a fire).
The Asian chick who choked on stutters (she’d been torn open by the time he found her, choking on something else).
Santana’s angry look (he’d been too late).
Brittany’s vacant stare (glassy, like a doll’s eyes, she’d still been-).
And there was Will, laced and weaving throughout his days. A clap on the shoulder, a word of encouragement. Sometimes just catching his eye in a crowded hall and grinning. He kept Finn grounded.
“I feel like I’m forgetting something,” Finn says to him at one point.
“Don’t worry,” Will replies, clam and smiling, and everything’s okay. “You have plenty of time to remember it. All the time in the world.”
(But nothing lasts forev-)
*
Puck is yelling at him. Finn has no idea how he got there, or even where there is. There are trees, maybe. Background filling in only when he shifts his focus.
“What the fuck man, do I have to go all ‘Fight Club’ on you?”
“What? I don’t-”
“You can’t pull this shit,” Puck says, all large pleading eyes and his body crushing with desperation. “Come on, Misty Marie, you know how this story ends.”
Quinn and Rachel have Puck by the arms, pulling him away, dragging him.
Finn has no idea what he’s talking about.
*
Finn wakes up, goes to school, comes home. He’s sixteen. It’s what he’s always done.
He doesn’t dream.
He doesn’t.
The phantom pains. The fear that strikes him.
He can’t remember it.
(Coach Sylvester stalks down the hall, tall and furious. “What’s wrong with you?” she’s saying. “You’re meant to be stronger than this.”)
(Sue is standing there in the hall, her hands gripping Miss Pillsbury’s arms. “What’s wrong with you?” she’s saying.)
Coach Sylvester slinks in the background, trading barbs with Schuester but somehow they both smile through it. It’s a game. It’s just a game to them.
He starts carrying a knife in his bag, silver-plated, stolen from his mom’s good cutlery set. He doesn’t know why.
He doesn’t dream.
*
“Finn,” Will says to him. They’re close, in a room with a clear floor and a piano in one corner. Has Finn been here before? Of course he has. And then Will leans in closer, staring up at Finn with those soft, organic eyes, that open expression. “Finn,” he says, and his voice is thick, and heavy, and soft.
Will puts his hand on Finn’s chest, over his heart, and Finn can feel his pulse thudding throughout his body (he can feel his whole body). A lifetime of touches that had never been quite right because this, this is what he needed.
And Will smiles, a small chuckle. “You’re so tricky to figure out,” he murmurs. “Even you don’t know what you want.”
Finn has always just done what was needed, gone where he was told. A trail of postcards...
“No,” Finn says, and it’s an odd agreement.
“This could have been so much easier,” Will murmurs, and his face is close now, tilted up, his eyelids lowering. Their bodies are pressed together, and Will is warm in a way that Finn hasn’t felt for sixteen years. For longer.
“Your wife,” Finn tries, pulling away from the heat of Will’s breath on his neck, even though it’s the hardest thing that he’s ever had to do.
Will looks up, gives Finn this adorable look that’s a little confused and a little amused. “I’m not married,” he says, a crinkle between his eyebrows.
Finn grasps at Will’s left hand, grabs it hard, and there’s no hardness of metal on that finger, no band and bond. Which makes perfect sense, because of course Will was never married to Miss Pillsbury. It had been completely different.
“Terri,” Finn murmurs as Will kisses the corner of his mouth, kisses small little closed-mouth kisses along his jaw.
“Who’s Terri?” Will asks, his lips brushing against Finn’s ear.
Finn has no idea. He lifts his fingers to Will’s cheek, guiding his face back. When they kiss, it is completely perfect. The alignment of their faces, the way their lips press together, the way his head bows down and Will arches up. Will tastes like nothing, like Finn’s own mouth.
He grips Will’s shoulders, hard enough to bruise, suddenly scared that this will end.
Will leans against him, and makes a happy, contented noise.
*
The air smells sweet, blossoms and cut grass. It’s summer. It’s always been summer. Will smells like sweat, and clean linen, and apples, the sour green kind. His mouth is warm, and inviting, and Finn is addicted to it.
Can’t live without curling his fingers in Will’s hair (it had been so short, once, cropped right down to his skull, making his eyes look wide and his nose look too big for his face, doing nothing to hide that scar that started just below his hairline). Can’t live without the press of body against body.
Will makes him feel alive.
He sings, all the time. Humming softly and tapping his fingers. Sometimes he will look up and catch Finn staring at him, and he’ll grin, singing a line or two, leaning close, singing those words right into Finn’s mouth.
Of course he sings. Of course Finn’s addicted to the music. Swallows it up like fucking mother’s milk.
He goes to college, though he can’t remember graduating. “You wore your football jersey under your gown,” Will tells him.
“I was so proud of you. You read me your acceptance letter, in my office.” And Finn remembers the smell of dust and chalk and books.
“You asked me to come with you.” Of course Finn did. He wanted to be with Will forever.
“You’re so special, Finn. We’ve worked so hard to get here.”
(Sometimes Finn’s limbs will ache. Sometimes he’ll feel sick and dizzy and unable to move. Will lays Finn down, rubs those hot-warm hands over Finn’s skin, chasing away the pain. He’ll roll Finn over, rubbing at the burning muscles of his shoulders, down the slick dirty rotting skin of his back, mouthing at that wound, the deep bite into the flesh between his shoulder blades, cleaning that deep rotting hole with long licks of his tongue.
“You taste so good,” he murmurs, and Finn can’t move, can’t even breathe. “You’re so good for me.”)
Will is going to make him strong again.
*
He can’t remember his classes once they’re over. Just the hours he spends with hands tangling and bodies touching and life being breathed back into him.
“You’re studying economics,” Will tells him. “You play football, and you’re going to have a desk job. We’re buying a house, remember?”
“Of course,” Finn replies, pulling Will close and capturing his mouth. He pulls back and whispers against warm skin, a desperate affirmation. “Of course I remember.”
“That’s it,” Will whispers as Finn presses him back against a bench, and he grabs Will and hauls him closer. “That’s it, I need you strong.”
And Finn has always done what he was told, but this is the first time he’s been needed.
“God, Finn,” that hot, slick mouth, opening up and drugging Finn up and filling him up with something, anything. “You don’t know how much I need you. I need you like this, Finn. Us, together.”
Finn has his hand under Will’s shirt, stroking that hot soft skin over hard muscle. There’s not a single fucking scar on either of them, which was crazy since they were both so broken.
Which made perfect sense, because they were just two normal people.
Which made it so easy for Finn to memorise the planes of Will’s skin, the lines and curves. The way he tasted (like stale air, like something bitter, like that sour feeling on the back of your tongue when you’re hungry, so hungry).
The knife in his bag keeps going missing. Will whispers soothing nothings in his ear, sings snatches of old songs in languages that Finn can’t speak. Languages that are dead.
(“I’ve been around the-”)
It’s all too good to be true, and Finn squashes that thought as hard as he can.
“I need you so much Finn,” Will murmurs, arching at his touch. “God, Finn.”
*
Finn is walking across campus, laughing with his friends, a loud group of them.
(Died in a fire. Looked like a suicide. Organs missing. Found in a ditch. Not found at all. Missing persons. A concrete floor.)
A gaggle of voices rising and falling, and for once none of them were saying a single thing. No messages. No instructions. Finn passes a rack of free postcards, and while his fingers trail over the cardboard he doesn’t grab thick handfuls like had once been a habit. His fingers stutter over an image of a sulking teen with brown eyes and a Mohawk.
(The same stupid haircut he’d had back-)
Finn doesn’t mean to, he knows it’ll make Will angry (he never wants to make Will angry), but he grabs them all, and shoves them deep into his backpack. Shoves them right down to the bottom.
His feet stick to the concrete when he tries to walk again, and a wave of nausea rushes over him.
Bad things happen, sometimes. He does stupid things and then he hurts, and he’s sorry, so very sorry already.
(“See, Finn? This is why you need me to take care of you. Just relax, okay? I’ll take care of you.” Warm hands moving over his back, a wet, hungry mouth. “I promise I will.”)
The voices of his friends are so loud that his head aches, making him clutch at his ears.
A long, unbroken sound, rising and falling in pitch.
What was it called?
*
“Finn?” Will’s hands on his jaw, holding his head up. Finn is all loose limbs and weak joints. If he doesn’t pay attention he’s weak and tired, too little of him left, a scrap of butter at the bottom of the tub.
“Finn, this is important.” Finn’s clumsy hands reach out and find Will’s skin, resting at the bone of his elbow, fingers reaching up the muscle of his bicep.
“I love you, Finn. You know that, right?”
Of course Finn does. Finn loves Will too, doesn’t love anything like he loves Will. He needs Will. Will is perfect.
“I need you, Finn. Need you so much.” Will’s perfect lips pressing kisses over his face, soft and damp and dragging against skin, making Finn sigh.
“I want to be a part of you, Finn. You want that, don’t you? You want us to be together?” Will’s arms sliding under Finn’s back, pulling him upright, pulling him close.
(His shoulders hurt. He can’t breathe. His arms. Why can’t he feel his arms?)
“Want,” Finn sighs, one word and that’s all he can hang on to, all he can know with any certainty as Will strips Finn’s shirt off. As Will tugs at the buckle of Finn’s jeans.
(Their sex is always blurry around the edges. Gentle hands and open mouths and a soft, slow shift of focus, a fade to white with sharp gasps and gentle sighs. A relationship just like the ones in those movies that had babysat him while his mom babbled and burned. Exactly fucking like them.)
“Want you,” Finn manages as Will rolls him over, as Will presses open-mouthed kisses against the back of his shoulders.
(They hurt so much. He can’t feel his arms. Can’t feel...)
Finn tries to reach out, tries to grasp at the frame of the bed, flails to grasp the alarm clock on the bedside table.
(The sunlight through their window tells him it's afternoon. It’s always late afternoon. He can’t make sense of the numbers. Sometimes he can’t read at all.)
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” Will asks, sliding into place between Finn’s legs, murmuring against the skin of Finn’s back.
Finn’s hands touch a corner of cardboard on the bedside table. Fingers scrabble as he struggles to get his fingernails under the edges, to pick them up.
“God, Finn. I can’t live without you.” Kisses down his spine and fingers working at his tired, tired muscles (so tired, tired of fighting this).
Finn’s face is half pressed into the pillow, one eye closed against it, the other lazy and unwilling to focus. He knows he’s drooling.
It’s those postcards that he’d picked up from the university, years ago now.
“Do you love me, Finn?” Will asks, the tongue licking long, lazy stripes up Finn’s spine, like a big cat grooming him, trying to make him purr.
“Of course,” Finn replies. He fights to focus. He’d been so young. He is so young. He’s still (he thinks) sixteen. Been sixteen for years.
“God, Will,” he says, his words slurred and muffled. “Don’t want anything but you.”
Finn manages to flip the stack of cards over, to read the backs of them. He’s used to other people’s words pouring out of his hands, messages and pleas and begging.
Find me.
Find me.
Put me to rest.
I’m sorry.
Kill it.
Put me to rest.
“Finn. I need you now, Finn. Need you so bad.” Will licks at the wound on his back, his tongue probing and familiar, and Finn can feel something deep inside curl around his spine, wrap itself around his core and tickle up into his skull.
The handwriting on the cards is his. The words are his. For once. Oh god, for once there are no voices.
“You’re not going to leave me,” Will says, grinding against Finn, the warm comforting press of body against body, and Will fucks into Finn with his tongue, licks away the sweat and the grime and the ache. “Not now, not after everything.”
The first card says, ‘You found it.’
“We’re so close, Finn. Can’t you feel it?”
The second card says, ‘It’s inside you.’
“You just need to open up to me, Finn. Can you do that? Can you do that for me?”
The third card says, ‘This isn’t real.’
“Please, Finn.” Lips on his neck, fingers running through his hair, a hand trailing down his side. “Oh god, Finn. We’re so close. Please, just please. I need you. I need you to want this.”
The fourth card says, ‘You’re dying.’
“Finn?”
It takes so much effort, a herculean feat of strength, but Finn manages to curl his fingers into a fist, crushing those cards, grinding the words together. And when he lets go, the crumpled mess rolls away and falls to the floor.
He feels a lurch. He’s lying on a cold floor, sticking to it, the smell of rot and decay and tin crawling up his nose and strangling his brain. He whimpers, suddenly afraid. His fingers tingle painfully.
“Will?”
“I’m here, Finn.” Finn can hear music, a long hum. Long and unbroken, and it’s a comfort, makes him loose and sleepy. Makes him warm and pliant. “It’ll be okay.”
“Will,” Finn says. “I want this. I want you, Will. I don’t want anything else. Please, oh Jesus, please.”
Will’s mouth is on his back, his hands pulling Finn tight, their bodies pressed together. And then there’s a hot stabbing pain, right down his spine, and Finn screams.
Screams as it all disappears.
*
He’s on a concrete floor. There’s a body in the room. Blonde, and her vacant eyes stare at him, glassy, like a doll. His eyes are scrunched up, he can’t feel his arms, can’t feel anything but the wreck of pain that is his back.
One of his shoulders is dislocated.
Someone is on top of him. Cutting him open. Gutting him from behind.
Finn screams. It’s weak, and hoarse, and it’s so pitiful and he’s choking on the sounds. Choking on the smell as his face is pressed into tacky blood that’s thick with rot and flies. Choking because he’d be crying if only his body would obey.
He’s so weak. He was meant to be strong.
He can feel hands under his skin, and all his stomach roils but there’s nothing for him to throw up. He can feel hands wrapping around the leech, the grub along his spine.
He tries to say no, but there’s no air in his lungs.
He tries to say stop, but his throat won’t work.
He tries to beg, to plea, but his mouth. His stupid mouth is hanging open, drool and blood and he can’t remember the taste of anything else.
It’s ripped out of him, slapped down on the filthy concrete, and it looks like a bloated root, like it belongs in the ocean, pale flesh and cephalopod tangles. He can see tears, probing projectiles and some were more stubborn than others.
Some of them are still inside him, and relief washes over him. He can hear singing. He can hear Will. This isn’t over, not yet.
And then there’s a flash of something bright, an arc of silver slamming down, and slicing the grub in two, and everything shatters. Everything goes silent, except for Schuester’s controlled pants, and Finn’s uneven croaking sobs. Soft noises of reality as Schuester tears open a packet, presses something soft and clean against the butchering, tapes it down to stop the bleeding.
There’s already so much blood.
Schuester grunts, slinging one of Finn’s arms around his shoulders, and Finn can’t help but whimper at the sudden feeling of reality, at the blood and the cold and the pain, pain everywhere and in everything.
“Fuck you’re heavy.” Schuester takes a moment to haul Finn more tightly against his side, forcing Finn to balance on his own feet, shoes back on the ground and the feeling makes Finn sick.
And Finn can’t walk, can’t do anything but stumble and scrape as Will - no, not Will, never his Will - as Schuester pulls him towards the door, pulls him through it. Finn tries to raise his free hand, tries to grasp at the frame, but it’s numb and bruised and blue.
“No,” he croaks as Schuester pulls him out of that room - their feet going stick stick stick on the floor, and that’s all Finn wants to do, stick and stay - pulls him away from everything. “Please.”
But Schuester doesn’t listen. Doesn’t stop.
And Finn feels the last tendrils of happiness die inside him, withering and decaying along his spine.
Notes: When I first posted this fic, I mentioned that there were three texts that I drew on in creating this story.
First and foremost is the Supernatural episode "What is and what should never be" (2x20). Before writing this fic, I had only seen that episode once, but it really stuck with me. I rewatched it a few weeks after posting this fic and, yeah, it stuck with me better than I thought, lol.
Secondly is The X Files episode "Roadrunners" (8x04). Again, it's another episode that I've only seen once but has really stuck with me. How I view the Psiren and how it works with it's prey all come from this episode.
Finally, I shamelessly stole from a Supernatural ficlet arc written by poisontaster, Books of the Living, Books of the Dead. All of the stuff with Finn hearing voices and writing on postcards? Stolen from this series. So you should definitely check it (and everything else in the masterpost) out.
One last text that only really occurred to me after posting is "Better Than Life" by Grant Naylor. It's the second Red Dwarf novel, and if you haven't seen the tv series you should, and whether you've seen it or not, you should check out the novels - they have a dark streak significantly thicker than the show, and the sci-fi gets a bit more room to stretch.
Genre: Horror
Rating: M
Word count: 7,500
Summary: If you fight hard enough, you will get that happy ending.
Finn’s shoes stick to the dirty cement. Stick stick stick as his toes brush back and forth, as he hangs limp and painful. He can’t feel his hands, high as they are over his head. Can’t feel his arms, just the burning of his shoulders, a stripe of pain down his ribs, the ache ache ache at the top of his neck. His clothes are dirty. The room is dirty. Everything is dirty and tacky to touch, sticking to his skin.
The dirt is coming from him.
*
Finn wakes up back in Lima, Ohio. He doesn’t know the town well, just from passing through a few years ago. He’d thought at the time that it would be a nice place to live, so different from the big ugly city he grew up in. A small town with houses and fences, and a hotel ingeniously called ‘Hotel’.
Finn wakes up in Lima, where he’s lived his whole life. Where he probably always will live. A small, comfortable town. Every now and then a little voice inside will tell him to get out, to get the hell out and away and somewhere saf- but he presses it down.
Why would he want to leave?
*
He goes to school at William McKinley High, which he thinks is odd, because that had been his nickname back when he was- no, it was the name of the school. And they joked about it being a failure of a school like he was a failure of a president, even though none of them knew what the guy did.
He has a beautiful girlfriend, the kind that never gave him any notice. He has a best friend. He wouldn’t have recognised the kid (they’re the same age) for what he was if it weren’t for the punch to the arm and the questions about what was on tv last night.
“Grounded, man. That shit is fucked up, am I right?”
“Yeah,” Finn replies, struggling to settle into this role. “Totally.”
“Not that you’d know man,” Puck says, throwing him this grin that’s all cocky and teasing and warm. “Not like you’d ever let yourself get strung out.”
(His shoulders hurt, oh god they hurt his arms are going to fucking tear off.)
“Course,” Finn replies. “Not me.”
He likes Puck, though he’s not sure how they go together. He’d had the same punk-ass haircut back when-
Back-
He’s not sure how they go together. They’ve just always been like that.
*
Finn’s shoulders are a long thick line of pain. His neck hurts. He’d alternated, for a while, his head hanging back and then flopping forward. But he just doesn’t have the energy. There’s a wound, and it burns in him. It’s infected, he can feel it. This deep dark poisonous hole in the soft flesh between neck and shoulder blade, a hole with the muscle torn underneath and the blood congealing too slowly. Wet and sticky all down his back. All over the room. Gluing blank postcards in place.
Cold and dirty and the toes of his shoes keep going stick stick stick against the concrete floor.
*
Finn wakes up in Lima. Wakes up to burnt toast, and clothes in a basket to be ironed, and his mom yelling up the stairs for him to move his keister.
His mom.
She looks completely unlike the last time he saw her.
“Hey there, sleepyhead,” she says, trying to scrape the black off her morning toast. “You don’t have practice today?”
“Practice?” And then he’s at the field, standing with his jaw slack while the guys around him bounce in place to warm up.
“Hey dude,” Puck yells, throwing a ball hard at him. Finn catches mainly on reflex, his mind still a little caught in tangles, trying to catch up. “Are you still asleep or something? Get with it.”
And Finn does. He does the warm ups, he runs the laps, he goes through the motions. He even enjoys it, being on a field with a bunch of sweaty guys at get-fucked o’clock in the morning. He’d never been allowed to play sports, never been any good, and now he is the fucking quarterback. Finn laughs a little, he can’t help it, even as a pretty blonde smirks at him.
“You’re happy today,” she says.
“Yeah,” Finn replies, wrapping his arm around her shoulders (such a slight body, but he’s not at all afraid that she’ll break). “I’m always happy to see you.”
Puck yells something at him, something about getting back with the program, but Finn doesn’t really hear it.
Doesn’t pay attention.
*
He sees Schuester in the halls before class. Mr Schuester, with Miss Pillsbury, though no one is sure why she kept her name. They hold hands, she says something to make him laugh (Finn can count the number of times…). She wears periwinkle blue with the softest yellow blouse, and his tie matches the blue perfectly. His shirt is neat and pressed and almost glows white it’s so clean (and when has Schuester ever looked like he felt clean?). The bell rings, and Finn watches as Mr Schuester raises Miss Pillsbury’s left hand to his lips, kissing her wedding ring. It’s such a fluidly sweet moment (so alien) and Finn is a little caught up in seeing it. He jumps when Quinn slams the door of his locker shut.
“Save the thinking for class,” she says.
He hears something fall down in his locker, something small and stiff like a postcard. How long since he had sent one? But her eyes are glaring at him, and so much more important.
“Right,” he replies. “Sorry.” And he wraps his arm around the shoulders of his perfect girlfriend, and lets her lead him through the moment.
*
Finn knows that he’s passing out for longer periods of time. It’s just such a fight to stay conscious, fight against the rolling desire to block out the pain. He can’t remember the last time he ate. Fresh air was so long ago that he can’t even taste the staleness in his mouth anymore, though he knows it’s there.
He knows there’s something rotting in this room. He won’t be able to look around and see until the sun comes up.
He doesn’t know if he’ll last that long.
*
Quinn is a little amazing. He knows that objectively. She’s smart, and gorgeous like girls always were in movies back in the nineties. She’s with it in a way that he isn’t even now.
But she’s cold.
It’s fine so long as they don’t touch, so long as they walk beside each other in the halls, and she cheers in her uniform while he struts in his. Picture perfect kisses in front of grandstands of cheering people, and oh god it’s crazy and amazing and leaves him with this giddy rush.
But she is cold (to the touch).
She doesn’t like his hands on her, not too much (because she’s dead).
Doesn’t like being anything that would rumple her perfect image (he’d fucked up).
(He’d fucked up, and she had died. And he was never going to be able to get that image out of his mind, of her head with one side crushed in, claw marks so deep that she lay perfectly still, even though they were fresh. Her words pouring into his head and ending up as scribbles on a postcard.)
He hadn’t even known her name.
“You’re an idiot,” she tells him. “My big sister babysat you. You’ve known me since you were eight.”
And she’s right. It has always been that way, and so Finn ignores that tight feeling in his chest when he looks at her, because he sure as hell can’t explain it.
*
Brittany and Santana smile at him in the halls. Santana’s eyes are sharp and angry, while Brittany’s are glazed. A memory tries to stir within him, but can’t find the energy. He sees Schuester, Mr Schue in the hall, smiling with Miss Pillsbury and looking like he’s in a happy little ball all of his own. The guys he plays football with are the kind of (men) boys who grow up to run garages and stores, who marry young and have a few kids, and live dumb happy lives.
They’re all familiar to him. Of course they are, he grew up with them. If pressed, he can remember their names. After a blank period of uncertainty, the details will fill themselves in, little personal histories nice and neat and uncomplicated.
“Fuck man,” Puck says, clapping him on the shoulder, “you’re so dopey all of a sudden. You need to get your head out of the clouds.”
A long, searching look, and Finn shifts under the weight of it.
*
There’s a body, maybe. Something in the room with him. Something dead and rotting. How did he get here? He doesn’t even know where ‘here’ is anymore. He shouldn’t have gone in alone. He should have fucking waited.
His feet feel cold. They’re going numb. Why are they going numb? What’s wrong with him?
Everything hurts. It hurts so fucking much.
*
“You don’t pay me enough attention,” Quinn says. “I deserve better than this.” I deserve to be worshipped.
“I’m sorry,” Finn says, and tries to focus on her. Tries to make her outline un-blur.
“You’re always a million miles away, and that’s just not good enough.”
She’s right. He needs to focus more. Spend more time with her.
“Sorry.”
Quinn gives him a long, hard look. “I don’t give people second chances,” she says. “Not usually.”
She’s not going to leave him. He’s not going to be left stranded. It would hurt too much without her, he knows that somehow.
(He’s so fucking sick of being alone. Anything is...)
“Thank you,” he says, and he pulls her close, and they both ignore the way she feels in his arms. “Thank you.”
*
When Finn goes home, and goes to bed, he doesn’t really fall asleep. It’s more like hours pass without him noticing. It’s ten at night and then it’s seven in the morning, and he has a whole new day to himself.
The view from his bedroom window is a mid-Western town, bathed in sunlight. Greetings from sunny Lima!
Why is he thinking about postcards?
*
When Finn had been a kid, he had this massive crush on Raquel Welch from watching reruns of those old movies on TV, because his mom had been sick in ways that people didn’t talk about. And because he was such a dumbass from a hick family, he’d somehow skipped some of the letters of her name whenever he read it, and he always called her ‘Rachel Wells’.
Not that Lima was exactly Hicksville. Not that his mom had ever been sick. Fuck.
Rachel Berry is nothing like Raquel Welch. Not in looks, not in personality, not in demeanour. And if sometimes, when he looks at her, when her face is at a certain angle and she has that afraid/determined expression set firmly on her features and it reminds him...
Sometimes she makes him think of dinosaurs, and he has no idea why. It’s because he’s sixteen, and a little dopey. Because he hasn’t been sleeping or something.
Rachel stares at him in the halls, and he can never decide if she looks familiar or not.
*
He’d hated high school. He’d hated everything. Those jocks and those smart kids and those people who got to have lives. People who never heard all of those... And now he is one. It’s crazy to him, sometimes he has to sit back and just stare at everything laid out before him. His three wishes.
Wait...
And then Rachel smiles at him in the hall, and Puck is saying something that Finn can’t quite hear, and there’s Schuester, standing in this wide bright beam of light and laughing, laughing like he never has done. His hair is thick curls, and Finn hadn’t known that it would be curly. There are no scars. None.
Wait...
And then he blinks, and his life is football games and being strong and being popular, and girls who had been afraid of him are glaring at each other in the corridors, ready to fight.
And it has always been that way.
*
It’s getting harder to breathe. It’s the way the muscles are being pulled around his ribs. He’s going to suffocate, eventually. How does this thing survive then? It doesn’t make sense. He can feel things twitching against his flesh, maggots eating at the rot in his back. Something stretching, moving inside, making him gag.
*
Rachel is all hopes and dreams and confidence. Rachel is big personality and bigger talent and a smile so bright it burns.
(She’s every brunette with big eyes on the side of a milk carton. She’s every moment they never got.)
“I’m too good for Lima,” is the first thing she says to him. Synonymous with, I’m too good for you. She follows that up immediately with, “You’re quite handsome, you know.”
Finn didn’t know. Finn was stooped shoulders and bunched muscles and hands torn from... from... he was too tall, and clumsy.
“Can you sing?” she asks him.
(Finn used to sing all the time, behind the wheel of a Ford that was older than he was, and not in a good way. Singing along with the radio to drown out the noises his mom made. Singing to kill the silence until someone told him to shut the hell up already.)
Mr Schue walks past them in the hallway, snapping Finn out of his... bringing him back.
She leans against him, and looks up at him from under long lashes, coy and demure in the anxious way of teenaged girls who were trying to be grown up.
“I think we should make music together.”
At the end of the corridor, Puck and Quinn are standing shoulder to shoulder, watching them. Puck’s face is a scowl that twists as Rachel loops her arm through Finn’s, and leads him away.
*
When Finn falls asleep, he dreams of a long road. Long and empty. There are towns along it, but he never stops. There are noises around him. Ahead and behind. And he can’t tell if he’s driving towards one sound, or driving away from the other.
He forgets the dream as soon as he wakes up.
*
“What is it with you and women these days?” Puck asks, straddling a chair backwards and looking at Finn with dark, familiar eyes. They both have brown eyes.
Finn looks up from his school work, whatever it is. “What do you mean?”
They’re in Mr Schue’s class, and around them students are chanting along with the words on the board.
“Ergo draco maledicte, et omnis legio diabolica adjuramus te...”
“You’re always off, off somewhere else, you know? I’m telling you man, never trust a chick that keeps you on a tight leash.”
“I don’t know what you-” Finn looks back down, and trails off. There are no books in front of him. Just blank postcards.
Puck snorts at him. “Forget it, man. But one of these days you just gotta wake up and take a sniff.”
(Meat. Rotting meat and the smell of it is heavy and coats his tongue, becoming a stale choking taste that makes him gag. Makes him dizzy and makes his shoulders burn with a numb blistering pain and oh god oh god.)
“Finn?”
Finn looks up, and sees Mr Schue giving him a worried look.
“You okay?”
“...Cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque aeternae Perditionis venenum propinare.”
“Yeah,” Finn says, and he can’t remember what had upset him, or even what they’d been talking about. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
*
It’s all roles to play. Finn dreams of walking into a dark building, and as soon as he steps through a door his clothes change. Every room, a new outfit, and new person to be. Until he’s running, trying to find the door out, trying to find the door back... back... but there are bodies. Bodies and he needs to get away from them.
Running in circles, trying to get out and stay in all at once.
*
Rachel teaches him things. He hadn’t known that he could learn like that. Hadn’t known that he could find new things. New songs, new artists. A radio station is playing somewhere, and every sound is Rachel Berry.
“You know a lot about this stuff, huh?”
She smiles at him, all white teeth and pretty eyes. “I’ve been around the block,” she admits. Her teeth are sharp, and he thinks of dinosaurs.
His body moves as she makes him dance, structured and choreographed and while his feet are clumsy (sticking to something) his body just feels so good.
He feels strong. He feels healthy.
There’s no pain.
He could spend all day listening to her voice. Because it’s the only voice.
When Rachel kisses him her mouth is softer than a mouth has ever been. She tastes like fresh air, and sunshine, and her body is so warm. He presses against her and her mouth opens in this perfect little gasp.
She’s so small against his body. Small, and hot, and willing. Long hair twisting in his fingers and she whispers his name.
“Finn. Finn. I need you to want this, Finn,” she says. And with her eyes that wide and her lips that plump Finn couldn’t possibly want anything else. “It has to be me, Finn. You have to want me. Never want to leave me.”
Finn kisses down her jaw, nuzzling at warm skin and hair and everything reminds him of milk and honey, a wealth of tight, healthy skin.
“If we’re together,” she says, “we have to be together forever. Do you understand that, Finn?”
Forever, that’s such an easy concept, if only because it’s flawed. Nothing lasts forever.
“We will,” she says, and her hands are gripping his shoulders, her legs around his waist (his shoulders hurt, why do they hurt?). “It’ll just be you and me, Finn, forever and ever. I’ll be everything you’ll ever need. You won’t ever think of anyone else.”
None of those girls. None of the dead girls. Wait.
“You and me, Finn. Don’t you want to be happy? Don’t you want me?”
The dead girls...
“Yes,” Finn says, and he kisses her because he just needs a moment to think.
*
Finn collapses into bed. He dreams of the car, again. Of driving it over that long road. Except, instead of passing towns, he passes posters for missing persons. Faces caught in those half-aware expressions of someone just noticing a camera, a variety of genders and ages, a variety of years and locations. And for some reason, he’s following the trail. Following those missing people, all of them dead.
*
“We have a future together,” Rachel tells him, her arms around his neck, his hand on her waist. “You and me. Can’t you feel it?”
At the same time Puck is pulling at his elbow, trying to tear his arms away, trying to catch his attention.
“Finn, come on man, you and me. We were going to hang out, go to the old factories.”
There’s a factory.
“You promised, man. You and me, and the girls.”
The dead girls.
“Finn, I need you to commit to me. I need to know you feel the same.”
There’s a bulletin board next to them, covered in posters and signup sheets. There’s a small rectangle, the size of a postcard in the middle. Finn knows there’s something written on the back.
“We’re going to set the fire alarm off, and start running when we hear the sirens.”
Sirens. Wait...
“Finn, you know that I love you, right?”
Sirens.
“Schuester doesn’t have to know, just come to the factory.”
Sirens.
Wait, no.
“Finn, I love you.”
“Come on, man. Let’s go.”
Psirens.
“Finn? Don’t you love me too?”
Rachel’s fingers dig sharply into his shoulders, and they blossom with pain. He can feel dried blood down his back, can feel his shirt rotting over his flesh. Then the pain is gone. Puck is gone. Just her in his arms, staring up at him with those movie-star eyes.
“Of course,” he says
*
That night all he dreams is running. His lungs burning and his body on fire. There’s something on his back, clawing and gouging and it’s tearing him open and throwing his insides away. He keeps stumbling and tripping, and when he looks down he sees that he’s running on a sea of bodies, of all of the people who went before him, all of those wanted posters.
He trips and falls, and those cold dead hands are grabbing at him, pulling him down and stretching him out, and somewhere he can hear a voice. A voice saying “Fucking idiot, you always do this.”
And then he wakes up.
*
Wakes up sitting at the kitchen table, his mom heaping eggs and bacon onto his plate.
“You’re a growing boy,” she says. “You need to eat up.”
He spent a childhood eating soup cold from the can. Tucking the congealed chunks into his cheeks, sucking them through his teeth.
He’s so fucking hungry.
His mom always makes him breakfast like this.
“Eat up,” she says. “You need to be strong.”
There’s a long sound in the distance, unbroken. Rising and falling.
He can’t remember the word for it.
“I love you,” she says, and kisses him on the top of his head. She smells like a mom should, cooking and soap and (burning sage) floral perfume.
Of course she loves him.
*
Rachel holds his hand too tight. He feels his skin crawl. His head hurts. He doesn’t understand what’s happening. Is he going crazy? He’s only... he’s sixteen. He’s sixteen. When Rachel talks to him, the buzz in his ears gets louder. Puck stands behind her shoulder, like an angel (like Atheed, who records the ill-deeds of a person throughout their life, a long strip of paper unfurling down and down and tearing away).
Sometimes when he closes his eyes, he can feel the ache in his arms of dying flesh, the spikes of pain as nerves die from starvation. He’s so hungry his stomach is a hole. His body is full of holes, like cheese. And nothing to fill them up.
Rachel’s eyes on him are angry, they make him hurt. “Why are you always fighting against me? Don’t you want this?”
Finn has had a headache for days, beating on his skull, aching down his spine. The air is thick around him (he can’t taste it, can’t taste anything), and it feels all the time like people are shouting at him. Even when no one is speaking they’re all looking at him with those dead doll eyes, wanting things from him.
Wanting him to say yes, to stay here. And he... and he’s always been here, right? He doesn’t... he’s never...
Why does he hurt?
“Finn?”
There’s a voice, clear and soft and it’s like falling into a bed at the end of the day. It’s Schuester, it’s Mr Schue.
“I knew you’d find me,” Finn says, and the world around him spins.
“Finn?”
He’s so empty.
*
For some reason, he’s always surprised by the colour of Mr Schue’s eyes. He remembers them differently. Not the dark, murky mix of brown and green, so natural and easy to get lost in.
He remembers them as hard and flat. The colour of peridot, a stare as cold and blank as it could be. A face all angles and lines. Angry, always angry.
Which is stupid, he knows.
Because Mr Schue (“Will, call me Will,” and how long has Finn been waiting for that invitation?) has never been like that.
He’s always looked out for Finn. Always wanted what was best for him.
*
Finn goes to Lima central, which looks like a strip of shops and businesses identical to any other large town in the US. And Finn has been through them all. He walks through the newsagency, and slips out with a fist full of postcards that he didn’t pay for.
He finds a bench, and digs a marker out of his bag. He sits, hand poised, and for once there are no words to write.
No voices in his head.
And then he blinks, and wonders what the fuck he’s doing. Missing practice and shoplifting and what will his mother think? Mr Schue?
He shoves the postcards deep into his bag, and forgets about them.
*
“I just,” Finn says, fidgeting in the comfortable chair in the comfortable office (how did he get there? What day is it?). “I have these dreams, this feeling. Like I need to get out of Lima.”
Will laughs at him, easy and happy. “Well that’s not going to be hard,” he says through a smile that lights up his face. “What with the scholarship and all.”
Finn blinks at him. “I have a scholarship?”
“Of course you do,” Will replies. “You’re the quarterback, the captain of the basketball team. The perfect candidate.”
Finn tries to think back to the games he’s played. “I thought we sucked,” is all he can think of saying, because he honestly can’t remember a lot, and that worries him.
Will leans forward, his elbows resting on the edge of his neat desk, strewn about with tiny personal artefacts. “Someone clearly saw something worthwhile in you,” he says.
Finn is struck. “… Really?”
Will nods, and looks at Finn with fondness. “You’re a great guy, Finn. You have so much going for you, such a bright future. You just need to hang in here a little longer.”
Finn feels a dull pain burn down the sides of his ribs, blossom distantly somewhere in the back of his shoulder, and he shifts in his seat, uncomfortable.
Will looks at him with large green eyes, and an open face. When he smiles he’s smiling at Finn, like he’s proud of him, like Finn is something amazing.
“You can hang on for just a little longer, can’t you Finn?”
“Yeah,” Finn replies, smiling back. “Of course.”
*
Things are finally making sense. Finn wakes up in the morning, from dreams that he can’t remember, and has breakfast with his mom (who is healthy, and happy, and so normal). He goes to school, and goes to classes. He had friends. People smile at him. He’s somebody important.
He doesn’t think about things too much.
Doesn’t think about the faces that stare at him.
The kid in the wheelchair (died in a fire).
The Asian chick who choked on stutters (she’d been torn open by the time he found her, choking on something else).
Santana’s angry look (he’d been too late).
Brittany’s vacant stare (glassy, like a doll’s eyes, she’d still been-).
And there was Will, laced and weaving throughout his days. A clap on the shoulder, a word of encouragement. Sometimes just catching his eye in a crowded hall and grinning. He kept Finn grounded.
“I feel like I’m forgetting something,” Finn says to him at one point.
“Don’t worry,” Will replies, clam and smiling, and everything’s okay. “You have plenty of time to remember it. All the time in the world.”
(But nothing lasts forev-)
*
Puck is yelling at him. Finn has no idea how he got there, or even where there is. There are trees, maybe. Background filling in only when he shifts his focus.
“What the fuck man, do I have to go all ‘Fight Club’ on you?”
“What? I don’t-”
“You can’t pull this shit,” Puck says, all large pleading eyes and his body crushing with desperation. “Come on, Misty Marie, you know how this story ends.”
Quinn and Rachel have Puck by the arms, pulling him away, dragging him.
Finn has no idea what he’s talking about.
*
Finn wakes up, goes to school, comes home. He’s sixteen. It’s what he’s always done.
He doesn’t dream.
He doesn’t.
The phantom pains. The fear that strikes him.
He can’t remember it.
(Coach Sylvester stalks down the hall, tall and furious. “What’s wrong with you?” she’s saying. “You’re meant to be stronger than this.”)
(Sue is standing there in the hall, her hands gripping Miss Pillsbury’s arms. “What’s wrong with you?” she’s saying.)
Coach Sylvester slinks in the background, trading barbs with Schuester but somehow they both smile through it. It’s a game. It’s just a game to them.
He starts carrying a knife in his bag, silver-plated, stolen from his mom’s good cutlery set. He doesn’t know why.
He doesn’t dream.
*
“Finn,” Will says to him. They’re close, in a room with a clear floor and a piano in one corner. Has Finn been here before? Of course he has. And then Will leans in closer, staring up at Finn with those soft, organic eyes, that open expression. “Finn,” he says, and his voice is thick, and heavy, and soft.
Will puts his hand on Finn’s chest, over his heart, and Finn can feel his pulse thudding throughout his body (he can feel his whole body). A lifetime of touches that had never been quite right because this, this is what he needed.
And Will smiles, a small chuckle. “You’re so tricky to figure out,” he murmurs. “Even you don’t know what you want.”
Finn has always just done what was needed, gone where he was told. A trail of postcards...
“No,” Finn says, and it’s an odd agreement.
“This could have been so much easier,” Will murmurs, and his face is close now, tilted up, his eyelids lowering. Their bodies are pressed together, and Will is warm in a way that Finn hasn’t felt for sixteen years. For longer.
“Your wife,” Finn tries, pulling away from the heat of Will’s breath on his neck, even though it’s the hardest thing that he’s ever had to do.
Will looks up, gives Finn this adorable look that’s a little confused and a little amused. “I’m not married,” he says, a crinkle between his eyebrows.
Finn grasps at Will’s left hand, grabs it hard, and there’s no hardness of metal on that finger, no band and bond. Which makes perfect sense, because of course Will was never married to Miss Pillsbury. It had been completely different.
“Terri,” Finn murmurs as Will kisses the corner of his mouth, kisses small little closed-mouth kisses along his jaw.
“Who’s Terri?” Will asks, his lips brushing against Finn’s ear.
Finn has no idea. He lifts his fingers to Will’s cheek, guiding his face back. When they kiss, it is completely perfect. The alignment of their faces, the way their lips press together, the way his head bows down and Will arches up. Will tastes like nothing, like Finn’s own mouth.
He grips Will’s shoulders, hard enough to bruise, suddenly scared that this will end.
Will leans against him, and makes a happy, contented noise.
*
The air smells sweet, blossoms and cut grass. It’s summer. It’s always been summer. Will smells like sweat, and clean linen, and apples, the sour green kind. His mouth is warm, and inviting, and Finn is addicted to it.
Can’t live without curling his fingers in Will’s hair (it had been so short, once, cropped right down to his skull, making his eyes look wide and his nose look too big for his face, doing nothing to hide that scar that started just below his hairline). Can’t live without the press of body against body.
Will makes him feel alive.
He sings, all the time. Humming softly and tapping his fingers. Sometimes he will look up and catch Finn staring at him, and he’ll grin, singing a line or two, leaning close, singing those words right into Finn’s mouth.
Of course he sings. Of course Finn’s addicted to the music. Swallows it up like fucking mother’s milk.
He goes to college, though he can’t remember graduating. “You wore your football jersey under your gown,” Will tells him.
“I was so proud of you. You read me your acceptance letter, in my office.” And Finn remembers the smell of dust and chalk and books.
“You asked me to come with you.” Of course Finn did. He wanted to be with Will forever.
“You’re so special, Finn. We’ve worked so hard to get here.”
(Sometimes Finn’s limbs will ache. Sometimes he’ll feel sick and dizzy and unable to move. Will lays Finn down, rubs those hot-warm hands over Finn’s skin, chasing away the pain. He’ll roll Finn over, rubbing at the burning muscles of his shoulders, down the slick dirty rotting skin of his back, mouthing at that wound, the deep bite into the flesh between his shoulder blades, cleaning that deep rotting hole with long licks of his tongue.
“You taste so good,” he murmurs, and Finn can’t move, can’t even breathe. “You’re so good for me.”)
Will is going to make him strong again.
*
He can’t remember his classes once they’re over. Just the hours he spends with hands tangling and bodies touching and life being breathed back into him.
“You’re studying economics,” Will tells him. “You play football, and you’re going to have a desk job. We’re buying a house, remember?”
“Of course,” Finn replies, pulling Will close and capturing his mouth. He pulls back and whispers against warm skin, a desperate affirmation. “Of course I remember.”
“That’s it,” Will whispers as Finn presses him back against a bench, and he grabs Will and hauls him closer. “That’s it, I need you strong.”
And Finn has always done what he was told, but this is the first time he’s been needed.
“God, Finn,” that hot, slick mouth, opening up and drugging Finn up and filling him up with something, anything. “You don’t know how much I need you. I need you like this, Finn. Us, together.”
Finn has his hand under Will’s shirt, stroking that hot soft skin over hard muscle. There’s not a single fucking scar on either of them, which was crazy since they were both so broken.
Which made perfect sense, because they were just two normal people.
Which made it so easy for Finn to memorise the planes of Will’s skin, the lines and curves. The way he tasted (like stale air, like something bitter, like that sour feeling on the back of your tongue when you’re hungry, so hungry).
The knife in his bag keeps going missing. Will whispers soothing nothings in his ear, sings snatches of old songs in languages that Finn can’t speak. Languages that are dead.
(“I’ve been around the-”)
It’s all too good to be true, and Finn squashes that thought as hard as he can.
“I need you so much Finn,” Will murmurs, arching at his touch. “God, Finn.”
*
Finn is walking across campus, laughing with his friends, a loud group of them.
(Died in a fire. Looked like a suicide. Organs missing. Found in a ditch. Not found at all. Missing persons. A concrete floor.)
A gaggle of voices rising and falling, and for once none of them were saying a single thing. No messages. No instructions. Finn passes a rack of free postcards, and while his fingers trail over the cardboard he doesn’t grab thick handfuls like had once been a habit. His fingers stutter over an image of a sulking teen with brown eyes and a Mohawk.
(The same stupid haircut he’d had back-)
Finn doesn’t mean to, he knows it’ll make Will angry (he never wants to make Will angry), but he grabs them all, and shoves them deep into his backpack. Shoves them right down to the bottom.
His feet stick to the concrete when he tries to walk again, and a wave of nausea rushes over him.
Bad things happen, sometimes. He does stupid things and then he hurts, and he’s sorry, so very sorry already.
(“See, Finn? This is why you need me to take care of you. Just relax, okay? I’ll take care of you.” Warm hands moving over his back, a wet, hungry mouth. “I promise I will.”)
The voices of his friends are so loud that his head aches, making him clutch at his ears.
A long, unbroken sound, rising and falling in pitch.
What was it called?
*
“Finn?” Will’s hands on his jaw, holding his head up. Finn is all loose limbs and weak joints. If he doesn’t pay attention he’s weak and tired, too little of him left, a scrap of butter at the bottom of the tub.
“Finn, this is important.” Finn’s clumsy hands reach out and find Will’s skin, resting at the bone of his elbow, fingers reaching up the muscle of his bicep.
“I love you, Finn. You know that, right?”
Of course Finn does. Finn loves Will too, doesn’t love anything like he loves Will. He needs Will. Will is perfect.
“I need you, Finn. Need you so much.” Will’s perfect lips pressing kisses over his face, soft and damp and dragging against skin, making Finn sigh.
“I want to be a part of you, Finn. You want that, don’t you? You want us to be together?” Will’s arms sliding under Finn’s back, pulling him upright, pulling him close.
(His shoulders hurt. He can’t breathe. His arms. Why can’t he feel his arms?)
“Want,” Finn sighs, one word and that’s all he can hang on to, all he can know with any certainty as Will strips Finn’s shirt off. As Will tugs at the buckle of Finn’s jeans.
(Their sex is always blurry around the edges. Gentle hands and open mouths and a soft, slow shift of focus, a fade to white with sharp gasps and gentle sighs. A relationship just like the ones in those movies that had babysat him while his mom babbled and burned. Exactly fucking like them.)
“Want you,” Finn manages as Will rolls him over, as Will presses open-mouthed kisses against the back of his shoulders.
(They hurt so much. He can’t feel his arms. Can’t feel...)
Finn tries to reach out, tries to grasp at the frame of the bed, flails to grasp the alarm clock on the bedside table.
(The sunlight through their window tells him it's afternoon. It’s always late afternoon. He can’t make sense of the numbers. Sometimes he can’t read at all.)
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” Will asks, sliding into place between Finn’s legs, murmuring against the skin of Finn’s back.
Finn’s hands touch a corner of cardboard on the bedside table. Fingers scrabble as he struggles to get his fingernails under the edges, to pick them up.
“God, Finn. I can’t live without you.” Kisses down his spine and fingers working at his tired, tired muscles (so tired, tired of fighting this).
Finn’s face is half pressed into the pillow, one eye closed against it, the other lazy and unwilling to focus. He knows he’s drooling.
It’s those postcards that he’d picked up from the university, years ago now.
“Do you love me, Finn?” Will asks, the tongue licking long, lazy stripes up Finn’s spine, like a big cat grooming him, trying to make him purr.
“Of course,” Finn replies. He fights to focus. He’d been so young. He is so young. He’s still (he thinks) sixteen. Been sixteen for years.
“God, Will,” he says, his words slurred and muffled. “Don’t want anything but you.”
Finn manages to flip the stack of cards over, to read the backs of them. He’s used to other people’s words pouring out of his hands, messages and pleas and begging.
Find me.
Find me.
Put me to rest.
I’m sorry.
Kill it.
Put me to rest.
“Finn. I need you now, Finn. Need you so bad.” Will licks at the wound on his back, his tongue probing and familiar, and Finn can feel something deep inside curl around his spine, wrap itself around his core and tickle up into his skull.
The handwriting on the cards is his. The words are his. For once. Oh god, for once there are no voices.
“You’re not going to leave me,” Will says, grinding against Finn, the warm comforting press of body against body, and Will fucks into Finn with his tongue, licks away the sweat and the grime and the ache. “Not now, not after everything.”
The first card says, ‘You found it.’
“We’re so close, Finn. Can’t you feel it?”
The second card says, ‘It’s inside you.’
“You just need to open up to me, Finn. Can you do that? Can you do that for me?”
The third card says, ‘This isn’t real.’
“Please, Finn.” Lips on his neck, fingers running through his hair, a hand trailing down his side. “Oh god, Finn. We’re so close. Please, just please. I need you. I need you to want this.”
The fourth card says, ‘You’re dying.’
“Finn?”
It takes so much effort, a herculean feat of strength, but Finn manages to curl his fingers into a fist, crushing those cards, grinding the words together. And when he lets go, the crumpled mess rolls away and falls to the floor.
He feels a lurch. He’s lying on a cold floor, sticking to it, the smell of rot and decay and tin crawling up his nose and strangling his brain. He whimpers, suddenly afraid. His fingers tingle painfully.
“Will?”
“I’m here, Finn.” Finn can hear music, a long hum. Long and unbroken, and it’s a comfort, makes him loose and sleepy. Makes him warm and pliant. “It’ll be okay.”
“Will,” Finn says. “I want this. I want you, Will. I don’t want anything else. Please, oh Jesus, please.”
Will’s mouth is on his back, his hands pulling Finn tight, their bodies pressed together. And then there’s a hot stabbing pain, right down his spine, and Finn screams.
Screams as it all disappears.
*
He’s on a concrete floor. There’s a body in the room. Blonde, and her vacant eyes stare at him, glassy, like a doll. His eyes are scrunched up, he can’t feel his arms, can’t feel anything but the wreck of pain that is his back.
One of his shoulders is dislocated.
Someone is on top of him. Cutting him open. Gutting him from behind.
Finn screams. It’s weak, and hoarse, and it’s so pitiful and he’s choking on the sounds. Choking on the smell as his face is pressed into tacky blood that’s thick with rot and flies. Choking because he’d be crying if only his body would obey.
He’s so weak. He was meant to be strong.
He can feel hands under his skin, and all his stomach roils but there’s nothing for him to throw up. He can feel hands wrapping around the leech, the grub along his spine.
He tries to say no, but there’s no air in his lungs.
He tries to say stop, but his throat won’t work.
He tries to beg, to plea, but his mouth. His stupid mouth is hanging open, drool and blood and he can’t remember the taste of anything else.
It’s ripped out of him, slapped down on the filthy concrete, and it looks like a bloated root, like it belongs in the ocean, pale flesh and cephalopod tangles. He can see tears, probing projectiles and some were more stubborn than others.
Some of them are still inside him, and relief washes over him. He can hear singing. He can hear Will. This isn’t over, not yet.
And then there’s a flash of something bright, an arc of silver slamming down, and slicing the grub in two, and everything shatters. Everything goes silent, except for Schuester’s controlled pants, and Finn’s uneven croaking sobs. Soft noises of reality as Schuester tears open a packet, presses something soft and clean against the butchering, tapes it down to stop the bleeding.
There’s already so much blood.
Schuester grunts, slinging one of Finn’s arms around his shoulders, and Finn can’t help but whimper at the sudden feeling of reality, at the blood and the cold and the pain, pain everywhere and in everything.
“Fuck you’re heavy.” Schuester takes a moment to haul Finn more tightly against his side, forcing Finn to balance on his own feet, shoes back on the ground and the feeling makes Finn sick.
And Finn can’t walk, can’t do anything but stumble and scrape as Will - no, not Will, never his Will - as Schuester pulls him towards the door, pulls him through it. Finn tries to raise his free hand, tries to grasp at the frame, but it’s numb and bruised and blue.
“No,” he croaks as Schuester pulls him out of that room - their feet going stick stick stick on the floor, and that’s all Finn wants to do, stick and stay - pulls him away from everything. “Please.”
But Schuester doesn’t listen. Doesn’t stop.
And Finn feels the last tendrils of happiness die inside him, withering and decaying along his spine.
Notes: When I first posted this fic, I mentioned that there were three texts that I drew on in creating this story.
First and foremost is the Supernatural episode "What is and what should never be" (2x20). Before writing this fic, I had only seen that episode once, but it really stuck with me. I rewatched it a few weeks after posting this fic and, yeah, it stuck with me better than I thought, lol.
Secondly is The X Files episode "Roadrunners" (8x04). Again, it's another episode that I've only seen once but has really stuck with me. How I view the Psiren and how it works with it's prey all come from this episode.
Finally, I shamelessly stole from a Supernatural ficlet arc written by poisontaster, Books of the Living, Books of the Dead. All of the stuff with Finn hearing voices and writing on postcards? Stolen from this series. So you should definitely check it (and everything else in the masterpost) out.
One last text that only really occurred to me after posting is "Better Than Life" by Grant Naylor. It's the second Red Dwarf novel, and if you haven't seen the tv series you should, and whether you've seen it or not, you should check out the novels - they have a dark streak significantly thicker than the show, and the sci-fi gets a bit more room to stretch.