I try to write funny, it ends up angsty in the end. I try to write angsty, and it ends up a weird combo of angst and humor…

So, this was originally supposed to be a one-shot called Monsters After Dark. Now, that's the name of the first chapter AND the fic and there are going to be three more chapters to come. Oops? Well, now you know why this took so long.

Claws raked across his left shoulder, sending him to the ground with no chance to smother his cry of pain. He gritted his teeth, rolling onto his back as he gripped the hilt of his machete.

Too late.

The Wendigo was on him, pressing him harshly into the scratchy, broken wood of the floor. The creature's hot, rancid breath filled his lungs as its sharp and rotting teeth hovered over his throat.

Josh didn't try to stop the whimper that left his mouth, fear paralyzing him to the point he couldn't close his eyes.

"Josh!"

Sam. Somehow, even with the Wendigo in his face, he could see her perfectly. Like the camera in a movie, switching from character to character. He could see every detail about her: the gashes on her neck, the smear of dirt on her cheek, the scarlet scratches streaking her forearms, and her kind green eyes tight with concern.

She had to live – no matter what. "Just go, Sammy! Hit the switch!"

She hesitated, but only for a moment, and then her face steeled. She ran for the door.

But she was too far away. The second Wendigo leaped in front of her, cutting her off.

No. No, no, no, no!

The monster grabbed her throat, its elongated, bony fingers closing around her face.

"Sam!" Josh screamed, bucking and flailing around in an attempt to get to her. No use. The Wendigo on top of him kept him pressed to the floor.

The Wendigo that had Sam drove its other hand straight through her stomach. An agonized scream ripped from her mouth, blood pouring out over her lips. A few weak, strangled gasps lingered in Josh's ears as her eyes flickered around, searching in vain for an escape before they stilled, the spark of life leaving them.

The Wendigo pulled its arm back, dropping her body onto the carpet with a sickening, muted thud.

Josh was howling. He wasn't even sure what he was saying, but kept bellowing all the same, violently thrashing against the Wendigo's hold until one of its claws finally released him, only to draw back for its killing strike.

All Josh could see in his final moments was the way Sam's blood was splattered over her cheerfully manicured nails, and then the claws descended–

"Josh! Josh, it's not real! Come on, wake up!"

The Wendigo's claws melted away into shadows and white moonlight. Shadows. He hated shadows. Everything that haunted him skulked and plotted in shadows – waiting to prey on his fear.

His throat was clogged with a familiar, grinding pain. He was screaming. Screaming and thrashing around, trying to find something to lock onto other than the darkness and terror of what he'd just seen. Sam's lifeless eyes were seared into his mind.

"Sam! Sam!"

"Josh! Josh, it's okay – I'm here!"

Josh honed in on the source of the voice, his screams dissolving into sobs. "Sammy?"

Sam – safe, alive Sam – was leaning over his hospital bed, her hands on his shoulders. "Yes, it's me. I'm here, okay?"

Josh wriggled out from beneath her hands and threw his arms around her, pulling her as tightly to his chest as he could with his trembling limbs. "You're okay… you're okay… you're okay…"

"Shhh…" Sam hugged him back, running a hand through the back of his unbrushed hair. "I'm safe. We're all safe. It's all over."

Josh sucked in several shaky breaths, his nose tingling at the lavender-like sent on Sam's skin. It was unfamiliar and not-Sam– Sam had always loved that peachy-vanilla soap Hannah had given her as part of a Christmas present one year, not lavender. Hotel soap. Gross.

Josh buried his head in her shoulder all the same, focusing on the strong pulse of her still-beating heart.

The door of the room creaked. "Everything all right in here?"

Josh didn't recognize the voice. Probably the night nurse.

Sam gently pulled away from his embrace, but kept a hand on his arm. "Yeah, we're fine. Could you just get the light, maybe?"

Josh scrunched his eyes shut at the assault that set his retinas ablaze, but the darkness just reminded him of that eternal night, and he quickly opened them again. The blur that was the nurse turned the knob on the lights, lowering them to a less offensive level.

"Thank you," Sam said.

"Sure thing, sweetheart. Would you like me to check and see if he can have anything to help him sleep?"

"No!" Josh snapped before toning down his harshness. None of this was the poor nurse's fault. "No… thank you. I… I'm not going back to sleep any time soon…"

The nurse gave a sympathetic nod and ducked back into the hallway, closing the door softly behind her.

Josh flopped back against his pillow, his heart rate still elevated, but not slamming against his ribcage like it had when he'd first woken up. He lay his hand over the one Sam had on his arm and gave a light squeeze. "Thanks."

Sam gave a soft 'hmm' as she searched his face for… something. "I've been having nightmares too. Probably gotten about six hours of sleep total in the last three nights."

For the first time, he noticed just how pale she was compared to normal. His tongue felt like a lump of metal encased in cotton. "How many of them were about me?"

Sam didn't seem fazed. "Well… a Wendigo did attack me in the bathroom once, but you didn't make any actual appearances. Guess you just aren't as terrifying as flesh-eating monsters. Sorry to burst your bubble."

Humor defense. Ha. Sorry, Sammy, but I know that one all too well. "Why are you still here this late?" Josh glanced at the clock above the door. 2:28? Geez. How long had Sam been in here while he was asleep? Last he remembered, she and Dr. Hill were having some discussion about healthy dietary habits. No wonder he'd passed out.

Sam shrugged. "No point in Dr. Hill staying on a couch in here when I was already going to be up most of the night. I convinced him to go back to his hotel until morning."

Josh had a sneaking suspicion that Dr. Hill had an ulterior motive in mind that had nothing to do with sleep when he agreed to that. He'd always been big on social support networks, and he knew Sam had helped Josh more than anything else in the past year. Not that Josh was complaining. There were a lot of people he'd like being left alone with much less. But… "You've been on that awful couch all night?"

"Not sure I'd consider two in the morning as 'all night,' but yeah. It's really not that bad."

"Hm." Josh's eyelids were heavy with the need for more rest, but he stubbornly kept them open.

"You sure you don't want to try and get some more sleep?"

Josh gave her deadpan glare. "Do you?"

"No." She shook her head, her unfixed bangs dangling in her face. He wondered how vivid her dreams were – how vivid the nightmares of normal people were in general. They must have been pretty bad because Sam looked about five times worse than she had earlier.

Earlier. Ha. Just a few hours ago, they'd all been having fun. Funny how things changed in such a short amount of time. Josh couldn't help but wonder if last night was the last time he'd ever really be hanging out with his friends. Yeah, they'd talked about getting together and having a Star Trek marathon, but would any of them actually want to? How different would everyone feel when they were back home?

"Stop it," Sam scolded.

"Stop what?" He wasn't even doing anything.

"Thinking such miserable thoughts."

"How do you know what I'm thinking?" Despite what it seemed like sometimes, Josh knew Sam could not read minds – if she could, somehow he doubted his prank would have gotten past the early planning stages, so there was his proof.

"Because. You get this sweet little wrinkle here whenever you're wallowing in worry." She prodded his forehead with her pointer finger.

He scowled, probably causing the exact wrinkle she was talking about to deepen. "Sweet?"

"Well." She tilted her head. "I'd be willing to stretch as far as cute, maybe."

"Oh, I'm cute, am I?" It was so easy to fall back into their old routine of playful banter.

"Ehhh, sometimes. Have to look from very select angles to see it."

Josh let a chuckle slip out. Yeah, Sam was probably just doing this to lull him back into some sense of normality, but at the moment, he didn't care. It was nice to pretend for a bit. "Aw, thank you, Sammy. Did you know, in this lighting, you're almost pretty?" Liar. Almost pretty. As if. Yeah, maybe he was a little biased, but Sam was easily the prettiest girl he knew.

"Ooh, you know just how to compliment a girl, Washington!" Sam slapped her hand over her heart. "Consider me charmed!"

Before tonight, he probably could have spouted what he really thought about her a thousand times, but now the words he wanted to say sounded like a sappy holiday card to his own ears, so he stuck with sarcasm. Real compliments weren't his thing. Sincerity in general wasn't really his thing. Even before he'd donned his carefully crafted psycho persona, he was always wearing a mask. Before Beth and Hannah went missing, it was the 'I'm just like everybody else' mask. After, it was the 'I'm okay' mask. Now he was just… peering through the fragments of a mask that had so many cracks he didn't even know what it was supposed to be anymore. He wasn't really sure what to make of it. Not sure what to feel. Raw, he supposed. That was the first word that came to mind. Raw and exposed, like when the Wendigo had pinned him to the ground and held its teeth over his neck. Only, instead of teeth about to tear into him, it was friends – hovering, waiting for the best time to strike.

No… they wouldn't do that, would they? They'd all been… surprisingly supportive. But that was what scared him – they were being too understanding after everything that had happened. They should have been yelling at him.

"You're doing it again." She poked his forehead a second time.

Josh swatted her hand away halfheartedly. "Kinda hard to be optimistic right now, Sammy." He licked his lips – still torn and chapped despite his constant IV companion. "I… I can't get her out of my head, Sam. What she must have suffered through." His breath hitched. "Down in that hell, all alone. For a whole damn month." Isolated. In the dark. No end in sight. Her only hope a rescue that never came. Beth had been the lucky one.

Tears slipped slowly down his cheeks, and he couldn't find the energy or will to wipe them away.

"I know." Sam's choked-up speech drew his attention to the fact she was tearing up too. "It's been pretty much all I've been able to think about. All that time wondering what happened to them…" She bit her lip, giving it a tug as she blinked rapidly. "I thought… I kept thinking things would be better if we just knew what had happened." She shook her head. "It just made things worse."

This all felt so familiar… Just him and Sam, leaning on each other – more him on her than the other way around, if he was honest. So much like last year, only without his rage to keep him going. Nowhere to channel his pain.

Sam grabbed his hand tightly. "But they wouldn't have wanted us to give up, Josh. The last thing they'd want is for us to be in pain because of them."

It wasn't the first time she'd said something along those lines, but he'd been too consumed by grief and anger to listen before. What would Hannah and Beth have wanted? Josh had lost track of what his sisters really would have wanted a long time ago. Their wants had been distorted by his mind's twisted projection of them. They were cruel and cold, so unlike the inseparable bodies of light he'd grown up with.

"I can't push away that pain," Josh rolled his head back so he was staring at the ceiling. "I miss them so much…"

"I know. I do too."

Silence fell between them for a few moments, and then Sam's weight shifted on the bed. Josh startled as Sam laid her head on his chest, but then his arms instinctively wrapped around her smaller form. He tucked his chin down press his nose into her hair. She had a different shampoo than usual too, but now that he was close enough, her natural scent was bleeding through and she still smelled distinctly Sam-like.

"What are we going to do, Sammy?" he murmured.

"I don't know," Sam sighed, sounding sleepy. "But we will figure it out."

When he finally fell back asleep, he didn't have any nightmares.

Next up:

More Vegan Psycho and a visit from Jessica.

ALSO. GUESS WHAT GUYS. I'M IN THE TOP 15 OF THE WRITING COMPETITION I ENTERED WITH MY ORIGINAL WORK. THEY'RE COUNTING DOWN THE TOP 10 OVER THE NEXT TEN DAYS. I'LL LET YOU KNOW WHERE I END UP. :D

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...If anyone wants to read or help me get the Reader's Choice award, I won't protest... (Third one from the top is mine.)

shortfictionbreak (.c) om / 2016 /0 1 /3 1/t he - becoming - writer -con tes t-w inn er s/

...The lead character IS partially inspired by Josh, if that helps. ;)