09:00, Tuesday, October 4th, 2005
Danvers State Hospital
Danvers Massachusetts
October 4th, 2005 was an unseasonably warm autumn day. The leaves had only just begun to turn crimson and gold, a few of the more ambitious trees having gotten an early start coloring the hills. The first volleys of leaves fell with the blustery winds, warm air blowing like a last breath of summer over drying grass that was clinging hard to the last of its green.
Danvers State Hospital did not loom or darken the landscape around it. The old building stretched and sprawled its red brick wings like a massive bird coming to roost in the hills surrounding it, but the sun shone just as brightly, and the autumn air was just as clear as anywhere else.
The spire at the front and center of the building gave the appearance of a church rather than the darkest chapter in psychiatric medicine. As Armitage Hux, redheaded founder of First Order Paranormal Investigations, took the day's first photographs of the building's exterior, he could imagine at any moment cars pulling up to its doors, old ladies being let out for Sunday service. Instead, the lots fronting the building remained empty of cars. Old leaves were the only things that skittered across cracked pavement, and inside the halls stretched on, empty and abandoned since 1992.
"Well, Kylo, what do you think? You're the medium here," Hux said. He raised the camera to take another photo, focusing tightly on the windows that surprisingly still had much of their glass intact.
Kylo Ren was his partner in all ways the word applied. He was tall, though no taller than Hux, and dressed head to toe in all black: black jeans, black boots, black turtleneck, and a black peacoat despite the warm day. His hair was loose around his face, rustled by the breeze, and Hux wondered if he ought to catch photos of Kylo while the latter was distracted. The only thing breaking up the monochrome of his outfit was the red crystal pendulum dangling on a chain around Kylo's neck, glinting as it caught the autumn light.
Kylo finally spoke, his voice a deep rumble. "I think you're thinking about something besides the hunt tonight. You're not very impressed with the building."
Hux realized he had been smiling at his husband of six months only when he scowled at him intentionally. "I think there are better uses for your skills than reading my mind," he replied in a clipped tone, turning back to the building to capture a few more shots.
"I don't need to read your mind to know."
"Oh, so just falling back on cold reading?" Hux asked dryly, intentionally being grating just for the sake of ruffling Ren's feathers.
Kylo's voice was mulish. "You can't cold read a building."
Hux knew he'd won, smiling behind his camera for a moment. "No, but you can read your husband. Now, what do you think about the building? Maybe that'll get me more excited than the exterior has so far."
"It feels like it's sleeping." Kylo stepped closer to Hux and put his arm around his husband's narrow waist.
"Sleeping?" Hux pressed, lowering the camera. In their nearly ten years of ghost hunting, he'd rarely heard Kylo refer to buildings as 'sleeping'. That pronouncement usually made for a bad investigation. Though he hoped that wasn't the case. Dead-end investigations were a waste of time. This was one of the largest hunts they had ever done in terms of scale and man power at their disposal, and the building itself spanned acres of land and had half a dozen wings to its name. It was a massive undertaking. If it were to fail... "Do you think we ought to pick another day? After it's had its nap?"
"No... I mean..." Kylo leaned into Hux's side, his hulking mass dwarfing Hux though they were nearly of a height. Kylo rested his chin on Hux's shoulder. "...it doesn't have anything to feed on. You'd sleep too if you were hungry."
In that way that only Kylo could manage, goosebumps rose across Hux's arms. Something about what Kylo had said struck Hux as premonition, one of those rare insights Kylo got from time to time that always turned out to be right. When they had been young, barely eighteen, Hux had scoffed and doubted Kylo's ability with such things, leading to innumerable fights. But now, after ten years of watching Kylo's cryptic musings play out, Hux knew better.
He turned to kiss Kylo's nose before sliding his arm around his husband, looking up at the building and taking it in. It seemed to stare back, windows glinting.
"Well, I guess we had better get set up and feed the beast."
14:00 October 5th, 2005
"Mitaka, I want a full map drawn up of all camera locations and their range of view before sundown. I don't want to find any missed points of interest and have to go chasing down cameras after the sun sets," Hux called into the radio. He paced the lobby alongside their newly-erected command center. A static-riddled 'Yessir' came back over the radio, and Hux made a mark on his mental checklist before calling the next in line. "Thannison, is your team in place in the nurse's apartments?"
Hux stalked the room as he waited for a reply, eying their setup and the people working on it. He still had to check in wing by wing with the crew of nearly twenty people who had all signed up to operate and run the surveillance and investigation of seventy-seven acre site. It was a hive of activity now, crews from the city in to inspect for structural stability, interns rushed about securing lighting and cameras, security called to lead teams through the buildings before they would be dismissed for the night.
But the sun shone bright through the windows still, and Hux had only just finished calling across the radio before it crackled back to him from across the property. "Nearly set up sir, be done and ready well before sundown."
"Thank you, Thannison," Hux said.
Another intern scurried into the lobby. He was followed by a small crew of men in hard hats, workers sent by the owners of the site to ensure the safety of the areas under investigation. At Hux's own expense, of course.
"Mr Hux? We just got through with the tunnels beneath the morgue." One of the men pulled off his respirator mask, looking uncomfortable with the whole operation. "The current mapped areas of the tunnels have been cleared, though we encourage the use of respirators in any area below the ground level. We've got signs of mold."
Hux nodded at the assessment, accepting a rolled up layout of the tunnels beneath the facility from another worker, aware it represented less than a quarter of the alleged tunnels that existed. "Understood. I'll alert my team. We still need an assessment of the top floor, however. Will there be time to check the staff lounge areas?"
Hux felt a tension headache building. He always got one hours before an investigation, but the cool dark of abandoned buildings and the rush of coffee would see him through. The running of the crew and the set up was Hux's dominion. After dark, Kylo took the lead. Remembering that suddenly reminded Hux he hadn't seen Kylo in nearly two hours. He sighed and added yet another item to his mental list.
15:25 October 5th, 2005
Hux slipped out of the empty doorway onto the cracked, weed-choked cement, in search of his errant husband. An intern had spotted Kylo out in the small cemetery, so that's where Hux headed. Typical of Kylo, brooding somewhere dramatic like a teenager. It felt like there were a hundred and one tasks to complete, but they were actually ahead of schedule, so Kylo vanishing hadn't really thrown them off. He actually picked a convenient time to disappear. If there could be a convenient time to disappear.
Hux was glad for the unseasonably warm autumn day. The interior of the building is still chilly and the air stagnant, but outside the sun warms his skin as he hurries across the overgrown lawn, the knee-high grass becoming denser the further he gets from the main building. The fresh air is a welcome relief too after the decaying mildew scent of the building's interior.
It didn't take long to reach the top of the hill, and even in the shade of the unkempt oak trees Kylo was an easy shadow to spot, dressed all in black and sitting in the grass like an overgrown crow. Hux expected a greeting or an annoyed dismissal, but he got neither. It was unusual Kylo hadn't noticed him yet. He wasn't moving; perhaps he was meditating.
"Ren?"
Hux hurried up the rise of the hill, feeling a bit like a schoolboy again back at Catholic school, skipping between headstones lest a nun catch him stepping on a grave. He called again, as he crossed the rest of the field, leaves crunching under foot. "Ren?"
He stopped in front of Kylo, a bit out of breath and frowning at the tired bags under Kylo's eyes. He wondered why he hadn't noticed those earlier. Kylo hadn't slept well the night before, he never did in hotel rooms, but Hux had apparently been too busy to take any serious note. Worried, he crouched down and said again, gently. "Ren?"
Kylo's eyes fluttered open at last. There was a sharp intake of breath and a startled look before Kylo came back to himself, recognition lighting his brown eyes. "Hux?"
Hux sighed in relief. He settled himself on the grass and reached out to touch his husband's forehead. Kylo was flushed, but when he leaned into Hux's touch, his skin was cool. Puzzled, Hux let the matter go, content enough that Kylo isn't coming down with something. It wasn't like they could afford to take a raincheck on this investigation anyway. "Are you with me? You looked.. lost."
Kylo shifted his gaze, looking past Hux at something else. "I was lost, Hux. That's how it's designed..."
Hux twisted to glance over his shoulder at the old building, the hair raising on the back of his arms as it had earlier. He hated when Kylo got like this, cryptic and nonsensical. It came with the territory, though. There was nothing to do but remember his patience and put on a good face.
"Yes, a labyrinth of hallways and tunnels. Well, lucky us, we have a map." He took Kylo's hand and squeezed it reassuringly. "You're probably hungry. Let's get you something to eat, love."
19:00 October 5th, 2005, Sundown
Hux was doing his best not to acknowledge Kylo as the latter scarfed down McDonald's cheeseburgers like they were his last meal. Hux would have been offended at his husband's manners, but six months of marriage, five years of living together and ten years of working these hunts had made Hux mostly blind to the fact he had chosen to share his bed with a wild animal.
The prep work was done, the stations set up. Everyone knew their place and their job, and now, with the sun hanging low and the sky orange and gold, it was the traditional pre-hunt dinner. Sacks and sacks of McDonald's had been brought in, and the entire team gathered together, laughing and joking before the investigation began.
"Kylo, anything to note for Mitaka's wing?" Hux asked, turning to Kylo midway through a discussion he and Mitaka had been having about the male nurses' building. Three floors of rooms, and not so much as an accidental death in the showers could be found on record, yet the entire building had been marked as a hotspot by the locals. Particularly some of the former nurses.
Kylo looked up at him from shoveling more fries into his mouth and grabbed a soda to wash it down before responding.
Hux cut in with a dry, "Charming."
"The spirits draw on me for energy, Hux, so I need energy," Kylo replied, and Hux didn't miss him rolling his eyes before taking another sip of his Coke. "Mitaka... nurses' building?"
Mitaka was nodding and looked at Kylo with that mix of fear and idolization, and Hux was painfully aware of how young Mitaka was as he answered."Yes, the male nurses' dormitory, built in 1927. It's been reported that people have been scratched in there?"
Thannison heard that, and drawled out lazily, "Are you sure you're not confusing it with the women's building? I don't know how many male nurses are growing out their nails."
"None of that, Thannison, or I'm switching you and Mitaka," Hux said, hoping that would be enough to put an end to any 'cattiness', all the while dipping a chicken nugget primly in some sauce. It wasn't his favorite meal, but everyone else insisted it was tradition so he suffered.
Kylo wadded up his burger wrapper and tossed it over Mitaka's head at the trash can, just missing it and seeming not to care. "No. It was one of the first buildings we checked. The building wasn't active at that point." Kylo said, and Hux remembered the boring early morning walk through of some of the outer buildings. Kylo had seemed bored then, but he could tell Kylo was eager to begin and crackling with energy.
"What do you mean active? Like do ghosts have a curfew?" Another intern, Lenton, spoke up around a mouthful of fries, his manners nearly as bad as Kylo's. It was his first time working with First Order investigations. He came well reviewed, but in his own team was something of a skeptic, a quality Hux tended to like, but he was the kind of skeptic he knew Kylo hated.
"No, but without any input you can't expect output," Kylo grumbled testily.
"So, how do you propose 'input'?" Lenton asked, his voice bored, tinged with a California accent.
"You being there is input," Kylo responded and then scooting closer to him, and Hux in turn scooted to put himself closer to Kylo also. Their thighs nearly touched, and Hux was very aware of their proximity, though no comments were made on the subject.
"What Kylo is saying, and this will go for the entire team, is the paranormal fields in this building are sensitive to energy," Hux explained, deciding at last to step in. "A normal person offers energy, some more than others, as our tests have shown. For most of us who aren't Kylo, the easiest way is to use a broad spectrum energy emitter, or in some investigations, even leaving equipment out can be an energy source. It's where the phenomenon of equipment sometimes dying right before or during anomalies comes from. What the broad emitters do is try to put out free energy across a wide spectrum, which leaves the most potential for an anomaly to happen."
"And hopefully keep our equipment from being drained?" Mitaka asked.
"And that as well. Nothing makes us look sloppier than batteries running dead just before a major anomaly," Hux agreed. His phone buzzed, indicating it was nearly time. The shadows were growing longer, too. "I assume everyone here is familiar with the equipment and their task?"
A chorus of yeses and the shuffling began, last bits of food grabbed for the night, teams pairing up, radio checks run. Hux stayed beside Kylo, and together they watched the team work. There was a satisfaction in seeing a well-groomed team operate, and even Kylo must have felt it.
Hux turned to Kylo with a smile. "Are you ready darling?" he asked, his voice quiet. It was rare he used an endearment in public, but this was their moment, and when Kylo leaned in to steal a quick kiss Hux accepted despite the very public setting.
Short and brief, a stolen moment before their work called them to action.
07:20 October 5th 2005, Sunrise
Hux watched as the sun rose above the trees, painting the sky a brilliant golden hue that put even the early autumn leaves to shame. The light was milky pale where it reached the brick building, too weak to pierce through the flashing red and blue lights that had in the darkness seemed blindingly bright. They'd seemed as beacons calling lost ships to shore, but now in the morning sun, Hux felt completely unmoored. Wrapped in a shock blanket, he watched as more vehicles arrived, the barking of dogs filling the air as search teams spread out.
They would be disappointed. There was nothing left to find.