A/N: So as much as I love TBoI AUs that have the playable characters all be separate kids on their own little adventures, I really wanted to do something with the fact they're "all" Isaac - this started as just headcanon rambling about Isaac and where his "imaginary friends" come from, but it kind of spiraled out of control as you can tell by the word count, haha.
This contains a lot of heavy content - canon-typical child death, suicide, gore, abuse, discussions of pet death, and overall nastiness, basically anything awful you'd expect to see in TBoI - as well as spoilers for Repentance. Take care!
The thought does not ever fully settle in Isaac's mind what other adults must think of him - after Mom pulled him from school, she became all he had. He isn't dumb, no matter what Mom has grown fond of saying lately, thinking himself inquisitive and observational for his age - after all, he knows about more things than other kids, he remembers fondly the gross-out medical tales Dad told him before Mom deemed them too inappropriate, the kind of nasty stuff that can really happen to a person, to remind him that maybe his own life isn't as horrible as it could be. After all, he has two eyes, arms, legs, and a working heart, which is more than can be said for the poor unfortunate case studies Dad's told him about.
It's one of many points of contention between Isaac's parents - the kinds of stories Dad tells him, how on Earth a five year old boy should know what a poll-ee-seff-uh-liss or a fiss-chuh-luh is, how his mind was being corrupted by sin when he played so often with a deadbeat alcoholic who stole his wife's money, things Isaac has found himself replaying in his mind over and over when he can't sleep, no matter how many prayers he repeats to clear his head. The things his parents say about him, about eachother - things he has no room to doubt as he's no longer in school, the door to the outside world effectively locked until he's old enough to try himself.
His Mom bans action figures in the house at a point, and stuffed animals too - she gives many reasons for this, all of which hurt his sore heart, but the one that sticks to Isaac most is that they show he is materialistic, just like his father. He is selfish and sinful to want more than what he has - to want more than Mom, and even when his small mind knows this isn't true, there is little to do with it.
It leaves him alone with his thoughts for a long time, dulling him into a boredom he had never felt when Dad was around - the distinct lack of toys in a chest stripped bare with only a coating of dust inside, posters torn from his bedroom walls, the T-shirts with cartoons printed on them Dad helped him pick out pulled from the closet and balled into trash bags, even the snacks of potato chips and small donuts from the pantry deemed too indulgent for Isaac and thrown out.
Cartoons and movies no longer play on the living room TV - not even the grown-up soap operas Dad would tease Mom for watching remain: only the prayer service broadcasts she invites Isaac to join her in, or shows of priests onstage yelling out to crowds, and Mom makes a grab for the remote every time it ends, frantic in nature as if terrified of exposing herself to anything that wasn't her special shows for even a second - the same strict set of odd rules she's given her son, rituals and schedules she can't stray from, or she'll… something. Isaac doesn't know, and Dad didn't, and maybe even Mom doesn't.
With no Dad, and no toys, and no TV, Isaac finds other ways to keep himself entertained - Mom and Dad always talked about his imagination, and pens and paper were one of the only things Mom didn't throw out in her harsh veer into madness: so long as Isaac kept his drawings out of view. Mom wouldn't be happy to see him still creating such fantastical things, much less the darker ones of pentagrams and demons, Mom's warning him against "evil" things like that only making them seem all the cooler to him.
One day she finally finds those drawings, and though Isaac initially thought little of them - the scribbled in devils drawn simply out of childish rebellion, and because they looked cool, right? - they tip Mom over the edge. Her eyes widen and her face goes pale, flabby arms wobbling in fear as she clutches a demon on the back of an old receipt. It's grinning at her with two fangs sticking out its mouth, a laser firing next to it as its stick hands are outstretched in a manic glee. She'd caught it before Isaac could finish drawing one of the horns, and she rips it up into tiny bits and scatters it into the trash, yelling words Isaac has long since forgotten in his fear.
When she's done, after she drags him into the living room to watch a taped episode from one of her special shows with him, depicting a stern-looking man with a heavy accent talking about Jesus and sin and witchcraft and how Satan gets into the minds of little ones with video games and TV. Drawings appear on screen, sent in from concerned parents, that look strikingly like his own - and when usually he would dismiss or at most simply lament over these things, something about having Mom's exact misgivings confirmed by another adult strikes a fear into Isaac's heart.
Is Satan in me?
His hands shake in prayer, and he unclasps them for a moment, looking for telltale signs of any claws, and feeling his mouth for fangs when Mom isn't looking. His breathing quickens as he asks himself, why did I draw that thing? When it's over, he rushes back to the waste bin in the kitchen, and there the pieces of Azazel are, laughing at him - he thought it was just innocent fun, but… was it really? He doesn't touch the trash - it's too gross, and instead piles in paper plates from the pantry to cover it up.
Isaac knows there's an evil and sinful part of him - the parts that tell him to disrespect his Mom, the parts that daydream during his evening prayers, the parts that dug up those old cardboard toys Dad made him to play with… the parts that continue to draw Azazel - no, himself. He catches himself whenever he begins to draw the demon, fearing not only what Mom would say but what it meant for him at all, but continues on regardless - this is who he is, he realizes. Bad. Evil. The Devil. Was it that hard to just listen to what Mom said and forget about Dad, forget about the path he'd surely go on if he kept drawing such horrible things?
Azazel kills his family with his big laser made of fire and blood. Azazel flies outside and eats the neighborhood cats. Azazel lays out spikes on the ground and laughs when people step in them. Azazel drinks the blood of the good babies Mom wished she had.
Azazel doesn't listen when Mom says to pray. Azazel keeps drawing poop and boogers and ugly tumor monsters on whatever paper he can get his hands on. Azazel eats from the trash because he's mad at Mom and doesn't want her dinner. Azazel throws up on the closet floor afterwards and uses it to draw more devils on the wall.
Azazel is boiled in the fires of Hell afterwards for his disgusting crime… which is to say Azazel's Mom makes him take a hot bath as she scrubs off the puke from the closet wall, and he can hear her crying in dismay from behind the door. Isaac starts crying, too, as he sits in the bath - why did he do that? Why did he scare his Mom like that? Why doesn't he ever think before he does anything - what did Mom do to deserve such a selfish, evil little brat of a son?
After one too many crimes, the demon is caught and thrown into a pillory. Azazel gets his wings torn from his body like a butterfly in the hand of a misbehaving child. His other horn is hacked off with a butcher's knife. The onlookers point and scream and laugh to see the beast that tormented them all has been defeated. All shock and awe in this horrible little devil child is gone - he can no longer even fire his brimstone laser, and can only pitifully sneeze up blood. And they only dread to think what the devil boy's devil parents will do to him when he returns to Hell!
When he gets out of the bath and puts clothes on, Isaac finds all the pens in the house and stacks of papers and old receipts are gone. There's another prayer broadcast Isaac's Mom wants to watch with him when she's done cleaning up the closet, and he curls up against her and listens - stewing in his sins he knows this simple show won't help, but his Mom holds him and he thinks for once that the demons are gone. Isaac's pencils and papers have been taken away, as have Azazel's horns and wings.
Rebellion, Isaac finds, only makes him feel bad. Were he older, he would realize this as a good thing, that means he's truly good at heart, unable to commit to such evil things and be the demonic Azazel he views himself as - but he is young, and this bad feeling only rests atop mountains upon mountains of other bad feelings. No good comes of it - it only leaves a twisting feeling in his stomach, no matter what he does.
He finds a deep, inadequate misery towards himself at everything he does, too young to fully process these emotions, and Mom not the kind to address them. They would fade eventually, if he had ample distraction - toys, TV, other children, real school, but he has none of those things, and so the feelings could only fester: at a point, all he can do to cope is attempt to compartmentalize them, use his imagination like Dad taught him to escape the troubles of the real world.
Azazel is not the only embodiment of Isaac's sin. The odd, twisted comfort he gets from the morbid stories and pictures Dad showed him, the awe to see the things Mom called sinful, the childish glee at his nasty imagination, shunned so by his mother, also gets a name: Judas, the evillest name Isaac knows, and the kind of Satanic, witchcraft-obsessed, demented little child that Mom's special shows feared he would become.
It's Judas, he tries to think, not me. Judas is the one who likes dark magic and blood and guts, and scaring Mom with the gross stories Dad told him. All of his darkest habits, Isaac gives to Judas, and locks him away into a chest in the back of his head - with the warning that if he kept drawing those horrible things and thinking those horrible things without repentance, he'd end up a bad child like him.
There's an old, old drawing of Azazel that Isaac finds in a drawer by his nightstand, and the memory of his violent scolding makes his blood run cold when he sees swears he can hear Mom's stomping down the hallway at first, until his breathing slows. He didn't draw it, he tries to tell his pounding heart, Judas did, but it's harder to brush it away with only that than Isaac initially thinks. Under the fear, he remembers having fun with that drawing, even though Mom called it evil, a sign he would surely end up like Judas. It was the kind of thing he and Dad would do together…
For a second, Isaac wonders if that's what Mom really cared about, and he doesn't know how to answer that question.
Guilt in his heart, he hides the Azazel drawing under his pillow. He can use the paper for another drawing later, maybe. He doesn't like to lie to Mom, and for all their trickery, neither do Azazel and Judas. Despite the feeling of sin in his chest, there's also a small sense of accomplishment to have kept something from under his Mom's watchful eye for this long. He doesn't have to really give up those things that make him happy - just do them away from her!
From there breeds Cain - where Isaac deems himself a sly and artful rogue, hiding his drawings under his bed and digging up old Bum-bo cardboard cutouts and ripped stuffed animals from the trash bin outside, though his hands get horribly dirty in the process. Despite what the preachers on TV say, about a disrespectful and deceitful child being the worst kind, it brings him the excitement his life has lacked for so long.
To any outsider, these behaviors - Azazel's tantrums, Judas' fixation on all things icky, Cain's sly lying to authorities - would all be great causes for concern, especially coming from a boy Isaac's age. He is not evil and sinful, one could tell that much by taking a single look at him, and instead this disruption and self-loathing and fear of his mother… oh, Isaac's old pre-school teachers would faint to see what's become of the poor boy. The signs of childhood trauma wouldn't go unnoticed, but there is no one to notice them until it is too late - least of all Isaac himself.
Cain helps Isaac play with his old toys when Mom isn't looking. He finds pens and pencils to draw on the wall when paper runs dry. It's not as good as paper, and Isaac uses his spit to scrub it off when he can't risk grabbing a wet towel from the bathroom.
Of course, a small child is never as smart as he thinks. Tiny, grubby handprints on doorknobs don't go unnoticed, and neither does the disappearance of Mom's red pen when Isaac wants to draw Judas and color in his little hat, or the sudden reappearance of Bum-bo and his small cardboard coin.
Mom scolds him for clinging to his father, scooping up the cardboard playthings in her arms as she chides Isaac through his crying. He fumbles pitifully as he begs her not to throw them away again, to little avail. But Cain is sneaky still, undeterred by Isaac's sobbing, and sneaks one Mom dropped on the floor back into his drawer.
Though he takes his name from the first murderer, and Isaac imagines him donning an eyepatch like a bad guy he saw in a movie once, Cain's stealing is hardly malicious - child's play at worst, but Isaac sees disrespecting Mom as the greatest evil imaginable. He is long detached from humanity, only able to rationalize these thoughts and compulsions as his imaginary demons - what would accepting them as his own mean for him? Would he be sent away to a camp like he hears happens to bad kids in Mom's shows…?
Regardless, Isaac's inquisitive, ever-creative nature - combined with Mom's lack of knowledge on childproofing - lets 'Cain' continue to act. He steals pills from Mom's purse once, but he can't open them, and elects to stick with drawing utensils and old toys instead. Cain helps him keep drawing, though most of the pieces end up lost behind cushions and bed frames - only found when Mom will tear his room apart in grief months from now.
In an incident Isaac completely blocks from his memory until his death, Mom catches him drawing a crude monster covered in warts and boils with big, outstretched rotting arms, and begins screaming at him, asking if this is how he sees her - as a monster?
In the first show of physical force she's ever given against him, she kicks him into the closet and slams the door, leaving him to curl up and cry, hyperventilating through the pain of her heel against his stomach and the overwhelming feeling that he was a horrible, horrible person, that he's hurt the one person left in his life so badly.
The closet door is locked, and he can hear her sobbing through a prayer from another room. He didn't mean it - what he drew. Maybe he did at first, but now he certainly didn't. He feels nauseous in the throes of sobs wracking his little body, and doesn't know how long he spends just crying there, eyes shut tight and wetting his shirt in tears and snot.
God must've hated him, for all the horrible things he's drawn, the ways he's disobeyed his mother - he remembers hearing on one of Mom's shows how God will take the most sinful children to Hell young, as a twisted form of mercy, as He knows they will only grow up to be worse, and in turn suffer even worse punishments in Hell. As Isaac cries on the floor, he feels like he can't breathe, like maybe he'll even die if Mom doesn't come back to open the door, and wonders if that's God deciding to call him early.
When he finally opens his eyes to take in a deep breath he's convinced will be his last, his vision blurs and ripples with tears. The back of his hand is slick with snot when he goes to wipe his face, and he can only let out a pitiful groan as he sits himself up.
His shadow looks funny, decorated with coat hangers and looming old T-shirts, in the grayscale of a small, pitch-black room. The old moving boxes behind him look like wings, if he tilts his head and unfocuses his eyes a little.
Was this one of God's angels coming for him? Isaac sniffs. An angel of the apocalypse, like the ones some of the priests on TV yelled about. It's all he has in this closet with him, and in his miserable delirium, he reaches a hand out to touch it.
All he feels is the hard, smooth wall. The angel's form seems to morph and shift with moving shadows, whenever Isaac's head brushes against an old coat or two. It's so dark that the shadows seem to absorb everything in its path - swallowed up by the void. That seemed like the kind of scary power an angel of destruction would have.
A cold, stone-faced angel that can assimilate anything into its swirling, dark void - bad kids included, here to punish the ones they call sinners. "The destroyer" - but looking at it now, it still assumes Isaac's shadow. It's still a five year old kid, like him. What was it doing here in the closet, then? Did its parents shove it in here, too? Wouldn't that make it a fallen angel?
Isaac feels another tear slide down his cheek. It slides down Apollyon's, too. When everything has forsaken him, all Isaac has for comfort is this imaginary fallen angel, punished by its own family - it cries with him, its wings too small to even lift itself off the ground, the locusts of death and destruction a mere fly buzzing around Isaac's head in the dark, dank closet.
No memory of this incident remains by the next day - Apollyon vanishes when Isaac closes the closet door behind him, when Mom gently pulls it open to call him out for dinner. Her eyes are still red, but Isaac hardly remembers that - he hardly remembers what she made him for dinner that night, much less why he was in that closet to begin with. Even when it's fresh, his small mind buries it deep, rendering it a can of icky and wriggly worms he can't stand to open.
He wakes up in his bed the next morning, and Mom says nothing of it, only folding him his clothes and cooking him his scrambled eggs as usual. She still looks dejected, oddly tense and saying nothing, but no moreso than her usual 'moods'. By now Isaac has nearly completely forgotten the spat from last night, and so when Mom brings him out shopping with her that afternoon, where his head is held low and his mind can hardly process the amount of people in one building, and she asks him to pick out a stuffed animal - any, just for him - he doesn't register it as an apology as much as a mere… suspicious act of kindness.
There's one on the shelf that looks like Guppy… kind of. A stuffed black and white cat with beady little eyes and pudgy limbs - whereas Guppy had bright orange eyes and was always pretty thin, especially in his last days - but that makes Isaac too sad to think about, so instead he just points the stuffie out to Mom and smiles as he takes it home.
Guppy's death, months after Dad leaving, is what Isaac will consider one of the earliest dominoes tipped against him in his life. Dad knew how to take care of him more than Mom did, and one night the cat simply fell asleep and didn't wake up, cold and hard and unmoving, his bed now teeming with flies - a sight that hasn't left Isaac since. He remembers Mom swearing under her breath about how irresponsible Dad was to leave Guppy alone - and looking back, Isaac feels she was talking about more than just the cat - before they bury him outside together. Mom calls Dad to visit and offer Isaac condolences - and she never receives a call back.
Isaac remembers bawling his eyes out for a day straight after losing Guppy - one of his earliest experiences with tragedy, and his first with death. He remembers Mom holding him after the fact, fighting back her own tears for reasons Isaac now suspects are more related to the phone call than to Guppy, as she assures him Guppy is in Heaven now with the Lord and a new family in the clouds, and he's happy - in a better place, she says.
Isaac imagines that new family in the clouds - Guppy being held by angels, as they pass him over carefully in their arms, as he purred that incessant way he did, to a little boy in Heaven with freckles and red hair. The same way Dad passed Guppy to Isaac when he was little - something Isaac was too young to remember at the time.
It's long before Isaac's mind has been broken - riddled through and through with demons and blood and guts - but even in that moment, when death is but a vague concept to him, he thinks about how he wants to go to Heaven, too, if it's truly a 'better place'.
That concept lingers in the back of his head often. Dying and going to Heaven would mean Mom wouldn't yell at him anymore, right? Like all feelings, he gives it a name, a face, and the childish hope that the boundaries between life and death are as easily crossed as he thinks - that if Heaven wasn't all it was cracked up to be, he could come back home and it'd all be fine: Lazarus, who's up there between life and death, petting Isaac's cat up in the sky as we speak.
The stuffed Guppy is one of the few real toys in Isaac's room now, with barren wood floors, planks from the attic on the windows, and faded spots where posters and pictures once hung. Mom doesn't play with him like Dad does - even before he left, it was more of Dad's thing. Isaac sits crisscrossed on the rug, screwing up his face to try and use his imagination like Dad always says as he bops the stuffed cat's legs up and down.
Isaac thinks about the other parts of him - they're like imaginary friends, or characters… he laughs to think that maybe one day there'll be a movie about them or something. Would they like to play, too?
…he imagines Azazel sniffling and sneezing blood on the rug, and Mom would get mad and make him clean it up. And Judas is too involved in his scary dark magic to want to play games - his idea of a game had to be cutting off goats' heads or something… Lazarus is too shy to play with, and Cain is probably a cool big kid who hangs out instead of playing. (And Apollyon doesn't leave the closet…)
Isaac idly thumps his hands on the floor in thought, hearing the little beans inside the toy cat rattle about as he smacks it around. They're his imagination, Isaac knows, they can play with him if he wants, but… he can't picture not being alone, at this point.
He needs new friends. The thought makes him sad - he always envied kids back in pre-school who had siblings (as every only child probably did, now that he thinks about it), and he can't help but realize how many of his problems would be fixed if he had another kid his age around. To play with, to know how to be a good kid from… so it wasn't just him and Mom.
It doesn't quite click to Isaac yet that he hasn't made any of these pretend playmates happy and why that may be, beyond the vague thought to make someone who'd actually be fun to be around this time. He thinks about the toy Guppy, and then the real Guppy and how happy he was to get them… a kid who felt that happiness every day, with an infectious smile…
Trying to remember the high-pitched laughter of a classmate he had when he was in preschool, Isaac attempts to attach it to a face. Curly hair cut too short to fall past the neck, instead poofing out in every direction. Loud and energetic, making silly voices to make his playmates laugh… like Dad did!
And a twin brother trails behind, with the same hair, but clings to his sibling's sleeve out of shyness. Two is better than one, Isaac thinks. He remembers one of the monsters Dad came up with was an identical twin with no skin who mirrored all your movements… like an evil twin, but Isaac could pay homage and make this twin nicer.
Jacob and Esau: identical in every way - same hair and face… except Esau had no skin and bled from his eyes. The mental image makes Isaac giggle madly - it's the kind of joke Dad would make, and Jacob and Esau must hear it every day, but they laugh with Isaac all the same.
They make good playmates. Isaac likes to think about them playing tag around the house as he watches TV with Mom - and it's better than real tag, because they can't break anything, and Esau can't get his bloody footprints everywhere. When Isaac's busy reading school books, and the only thing he can hear is the whirr of the fan, he thinks about Jacob's howling laughter and Esau's subdued whining as they play a game in another room. It makes the day a little brighter - finding fun even when he can't have toys around.
The toy Guppy makes him happy to have, and he brings it everywhere - Azazel tempts him into bringing it to the dinner table against Mom's wishes, but Isaac doesn't want to mess up and lose it like he'd lost so many other drawings and old toys by invoking Mom's wrath. He pulls out chairs for Jacob and Esau sometimes, to pretend, but stops when Mom chides him for getting up without pushing them back in.
One morning, Isaac's greatest fear comes true - he wakes up and the stuffie is nowhere to be seen, and he thinks miserably that Mom must have gotten mad and taken it away, too. Was he playing with it too much? Was he getting too spoiled? He sits sadly on his bed, not wanting to cry over something like this - Mom's anger, both real and imagined, is enough to stun him into place, though he's not as responsive during dinner and evening prayers as he should be.
Jacob and Esau become sour to think about. Isaac becomes frustrated with his own creations, unable to direct those feelings of grief and confusion anywhere else. Thinking of the two of them playing so happily while he'd lost his only toy, a remnant of his dead cat, makes his stomach churn… He grows to resent his imaginary friend's high-pitched laughter and never ending playtime - now it's settled in for him, the belief that a happy family like Jacob and Esau's just isn't possible for him anymore, not after Dad left for good.
They function as Isaac's inner child - the part of him who knew he was still a little boy, that desired to run and play without repercussions, but the fear in Isaac's heart overpowers it. Why do they get to be happy? If Isaac really had a brother, he wouldn't be happy! That brother would hate him for wishing him into the world - for inflicting that pain and loss and abuse on another innocent child!
What begins as Isaac's last ditch effort to hold onto the last of the creative, playful little boy that still exists in him, is twisted into yet another representation of his self-loathing - his eternal fear of punishment, of being too loud and acting out, poisoning even his imagination. Azazel is a horned demon with red eyes, and Judas has an evil book in his hands, but for once, the demons in Isaac's mind don't present themselves as such - what right does Jacob have to laugh in this house…?!
Isaac decides that, like his parents, a wedge has been driven between Jacob and Esau. Childishly inconsiderate Jacob, unaware of the gravity of the world and the angry priests on TV and the purses with missing money and the Dads who drank and gambled and the four dead pets buried in the backyard, dragging his brother everywhere he goes, and Esau too placid and quiet to protest… when Isaac sits in the dining room to eat lunch and looks out the window, he imagines the two twins running out into the street to play, whereafter only one returns.
Jacob should have listened to his Mom, Isaac thinks. If he did, this wouldn't have happened. Cruel as it is, Isaac thinks of the twins as people to put himself above - Jacob and Esau are not Isaac in the way Azazel and Judas and Cain are Isaac. Jacob and Esau are closer to a cautionary story he hears on TV, the kind of thing Mom drills into his head about how playing outside is dangerous… and to seep into his subconscious in such a way, it must have worked.
With his curly hair now messy and missing in patches, his eyes swollen and half-lidded, trembling little hands forever picking at the tears streaming down his face, Jacob is a missing half of a pair, and now Isaac sees himself in him - a broken little kid with far too much on his shoulders, who sniffs and cries too much and just needs a friend, the childish optimism beaten out of him - but he imagines Esau died hating him, that all of Jacob's pain is deserved karma, knocking him down a peg to teach him consideration, and Isaac's imagination bends to that miserable whim. Tough love like brass knuckles knocking out a tooth - hardly love at all, but Jacob is not real, and has no place to argue.
"Isaac, who are you talking to…?" Mom asks one afternoon, the raised eyebrows and pudgy hands on her hips audible in her voice. Isaac knows better than to confess to playing with a box set of pillowcases he was pretending was Jacob, and simply mumbles "no one, Mama."
Mom doesn't take Isaac's creative hobbies well - even the innocent ones that don't involve the people living in his head, or the gruesome medical stories, or silly poop and tumor monsters - and he's made a habit of hiding them from her, unable to predict if an odd drawing will send her into hysterics. It's not happened as many times as he thinks, but the fear has poisoned him into becoming an even more withdrawn child than Mom had intended.
She accepts that answer, but Isaac hears her murmuring something about the devil after dinnertime. He can't argue with that.
He wishes he could play with someone that isn't himself - talk to anyone who isn't himself… even his genuine attempts at finding ways to keep himself happy always crumble after a period. He is too young to consider his future, how he would live as an adult under Mom's thumb, but his present isn't much happier. He's long since decided Mom won't understand him - both in her religious lunacy and uptight nature, and in the fears Isaac has projected onto her. She's never shown signs of wanting to commit such a grave sin, but Isaac still finds himself freezing when he sees her pull knives from the block in the kitchen for dinner - and grows to see there are no ups for him. Only downs.
In another life, far from now, on a different plane, Isaac thinks from Heaven with his parents how things would have gone if he endured it all - wondering if this was the only way out for him. There's no way to answer that question - nobody wants to put the blame for the death of a five year old boy on the shoulders of any one person in that house, and what God would bring that family into the world for the sake of an unwinnable game - a story doomed to end in tragedy? Was it a mere unfortunate act of the universe's entropy that tore those lives apart? Was her son's death what Mom deserved for the crime of being taken advantage of by the priests on television?
That's not the question the Isaac of this life has to answer, though it will come to him in due time. Those questions are far too large and winding for him now, and his life is far too small and cramped to even consider such things. His life is his bedroom, the dining room, the hallway, and the living room, in that small house on a hill. His life is prayer, breakfast, learning, prayer, lunch, learning, playtime, prayer, dinner, special shows, prayer, bedtime - the store with toy Guppy is Isaac's last memory of going outside to face anyone who isn't Mom, or the people in his head whose faces are vague melds of ones that haven't left his mind, though they grow closer to Mom's every day.
Parts of him are constantly at war - a child's innate need for parental comfort, and a trauma victim's innate need to keep it from happening again. A small part of him thinks, what if it's not as bad as I think it is? What if Mom is just worried because I don't talk to her? She'll hug me and I'll feel better, as the other thinks, no, she'll kick you into the closet again. The glimpses he catches of the broadcasts she plays on TV only send shivers up his spine - he hears the preachers on the stages yelling about sin, and knows they're talking about him.
He fears Mom, yes, but in his mind, the blame lies solely on him - his irrational actions, his penchant for disobedience, his crying and whining and inability to just let his past go, the devil inside him that compels him to keep drawing those things the preachers on Mom's shows would no doubt lock him up for… his life would be perfect if he was a better child, he thinks, if he was able to selflessly work alongside his Mom instead of being such a problem child.
She hits him more than once, and Isaac would rather think of himself as some devil child deserving an exorcism than even begin to think of Mom as anything but the strong, infallible parent he remembers her being. These anxieties take form, too - the sinful kids he hears about on TV, the ones Mom comes home ranting about after a spat with a neighborhood teenage girl over her wearing a too-provocative outfit in her lawn, how she holds her temple in frustration when seeing the world outside of her confined bubble on a hill - Isaac thinks about them, and wonders if he'll grow up to be like them, despite her best efforts.
What is a sinner? Isaac tries to picture the teenagers he hears about, and even the ones he sees on TV - loud-mouthed, promiscuous and vulgar, in dire need of fixing but refusing to accept it. Heavily greased hair, dark clothing, sour dispositions… the image that comes to his mind is a devil-worshipping teenage girl in heavy makeup, with blood running down her legs and countless slashes on her wrists, long hair overgrown over one eye with morbid accoutrements perched in it. Mom and the preachers on TV will say she'll live to regret her sinful lifestyle and covenant with the devil when the horns she hides beneath her hair come cracking out of her skull and turning her head to mush - a horrible, horrible curse, how unfortunate, but at least it'll teach other children that she is not to be followed…
Is that the path Isaac is heading towards? He thinks about this girl - Eve - and Judas and Azazel… why would he linger on these things so much, if not for his subconscious trying to warn him of his fate? The ways Eve destroys her body, with razors and makeup, and her hair stiff with dye and gel and whatever else… Oh, God, what's wrong with him? Does he really want to live like her? Is that what's going to happen to him - getting a horrible curse like her?
His heart pounds fast, and he starts having trouble sleeping over the next few days as he desperately attempts to avoid the eye on the back of Mom's head. It's only a matter of time before she deems him unfixable and drags him onto one of those shows, or to a nuthouse, or takes a knife and sends him down to Hell herself…!
No wonder she's hurt him so much, right? She can sense the sin in Isaac's heart, she can smell the fire and brimstone in the air when he thinks about Azazel, she knows he's made a covenant with the devil in the twisted ways he acts out in his fear. And in fear they may be, Isaac thinks that is no excuse, that there is something fundamentally, horribly wrong with him - he needs to be cleansed somehow, he needs to be a good kid, even when it seems like nothing he does for Mom is ever enough, there's always something that'll upset her and he doesn't know what, and, and…
Sky darkening through slivers of the window, it can't be later than 5 o' clock, but Isaac's bedroom is painted in a murky blue-gray as his hands get clammy, he can feel his eyes bulging in his skull, and he can't breathe quite right. He hasn't eaten all day, and the twisting in his empty stomach only heightens his anxiety. His mind is too frantic and addled to even imagine anyone but himself being in this room - no, no, Azazel is not real, and can't laser Mom away if she comes, Judas' book of demonic spells is nowhere in this house - and Isaac can't do anything but shake and quiver at the terrifying thought.
"Isaac?"
A raised voice booms across the house - an angry one, and Isaac's eyes quiver and his heart hammers in his chest like he's just taken a handful of caffeine pills. That single use of his name makes him feel like wetting himself as his mind scrambles to a million different horrible possibilities: she sounds mad, what did I do, how much longer do I have, what's she going to do to me - an inexplicable, unexplainable yet plain-to-see terror seizes the boy, as the realization strikes that this is the solar plexus of every horrible thing that has happened to him: the horrible orchestra swells into a loud, ear-bleeding symphony. Isaac and his mother.
Her footsteps that he can't fully piece together fall closer and closer to his bedroom door - it has a lock, but he is too young to know that's what the small nub on the knob is for, and he's painfully aware of the crack in the doorframe and the slit underneath, how maybe she can see his feet, or see him moving about - she's here to kill him, an irrational thought that springs out of nowhere, but that spontaneity only convinces Isaac it's a hard gut feeling: word on the wind, an angel whispering in his ear, his heart knowing what's wrong before his mind can catch up, anything more than the horrific downward spiral of any frightened child in the dark.
Thud!
A sudden pain hits Isaac's leg as he practically leaps onto all fours to scramble around his room for an exit - his knee struck the wooden floor just right, only making his heart bump faster - he can't breathe, he can't breathe, what is he scared of? He begs for someone to come save him - Dad, an angel, Azazel or Judas or Cain or Lazarus or Jacob or Eve, any God that's up there, but the only sign of life in his bedroom is the hot, humiliating flow of tears and snot down his face. The planks on the window are nailed in hard, and rip at his fingers to try and pull off.
If I have a guardian angel, he thinks, only half-seriously as he frantically slaps his hands against the closet walls in an effort to find anything to help him hide, now would be a really, really good time for them to show up… but he doesn't deserve anything like that. Mom is his angel of destruction, like Apollyon, here to deliver this household from evil, exorcise this demon child from her life…
Who is he to resist her? Doesn't he love her? He shuts his eyes and quakes as his mind hits another horrible pillar on its downward spiral, shaking his head as he balls his fists, losing his balance and landing butt-first onto the carpet, sobbing and not even entirely sure why. Was it selfish to not want to die by his Mom's hand - to not be stomped to death by her into a jelly paste on the floor, crushed in her fist like a tube of toothpaste, or scored through with the biggest knife from the kitchen?
"Isaac!"
There's a click. Isaac can't tell if it's the doorknob turning, or the sound of him unlatching his toy chest. He attempts to cough out the dust that flies into his face, but he can hardly regulate his breathing, and all that comes out is a heaving gasp. He can just barely fit inside his toybox, and awkwardly crams himself in back-first, scared for a moment he'll break his neck against its tight wooden walls in the process.
Closing the lid over himself like a casket, what little light was in the room vanishes. For a moment, he's unsure if his eyes are even open anymore, as he twists his body to lay on his side in the fetal position, pulling in his little limbs closer to himself as Mom's stomps shake the house. The dust stings his eyes, the way his body parts are crammed into their positions is hardly natural, like a crumpled piece of paper being squeezed in through a tiny hole in the wall.
Seconds pass, blood racing through his veins in time, making him feel like his arteries might pop if he doesn't calm down.
The chest is too tight to comfortably move in, much less breathe - he doesn't want to stay here any longer than he has to, but he swears, he swears, he swears on God's name he can hear the faintest "Isaac!" again, and that's enough to keep him still. He'll wait for as long as it takes.
More seconds pass, and Isaac isn't even sure if Mom is out there anymore.
He can't hear much of anything except his pounding heart and the faint ringing in his ears, as his vision grows spotty and it feels like none of the air he's breathing is reaching his lungs. Why can't he calm down?! He's out of danger, isn't he - then why can't he breathe? Why can't he hear anything? Didn't Mom stopping calling his name mean he could be calm now?!
It feels like someone is sitting on his side, crushing his ribs - he shuts his eyes tight, trying desperately to calm down before he suffocates to death. Who would be sitting on him right now - do they want him to die?
He imagines the girl putting all her weight on the top of the chest that feels like it's crushing him like a press innocently kicking her feet as she does, maybe reading the kids' Bible on his shelf as she waits for him to stop struggling. He doesn't think there's any malice in what this girl is doing - after all, suffocating to death in a toy chest is only something a demented, sinful, irresponsible child like him could ever think of. What would she think if she knew he was in there? Maybe she'd be a good kid and keep quiet about it - smile through it, even. Grinning through the pain instead of crying like he did… would any of this be happening if he'd tried to do that for once…?
Is it so hard to just accept the cards you're given in life - the roll of a red D6 determining your fate forever? There isn't anything you can do past that - why cry over it…? What was he wasting his life doing, crying over things he could change if he could just be a little more resilient…
The girl sitting on him, the child Isaac could be if he wasn't tempted by the devil in his heart, thumps her feet against the sides of the chest. The Lord sacrifices himself for his fellow man, if someone is evil to you, turn your cheek and let them hit you again… how does that saying go? Why doesn't he know? Why can't he be like this girl and know the sayings, give up her life in peace just as Jesus did, setting yourself on fire to keep others warm instead of kicking and struggling all the way? Would his parents have fought if they had an agreeable little girl like her?
He can't see her, but he can, so vividly - neat brown pigtails like a girl Isaac was classmates with, with a Mom who Isaac's Mom went to church with - and her blue clothes are neat and modest, not covered in spit and tear and snot… Jesus loves you, can't you see, Bethany begins to hum, and Isaac hardly has the oxygen to join her in turn, but it'll calm him down - lullabies always do, even when he might be too old for them… He loves you, and He loves me…
Jesus loves you, can't you see… You don't have to cry and panic, it's okay, Bethany's unspoken reassurance hangs in the air, but what does she know? Surely she's never had to lock herself in a chest to hide from her deranged mother before… Jesus loves you, and you'll be okay in His arms. Okay?
She wants him to die, doesn't he…? Is that the only way he can ever really be forgiven? Regardless, there is no room to ask, as Isaac feels her presence fading, the pressure on his chest lightening as the panic leaves his body. Maybe that was a real guardian angel, he thinks for a moment, before dismissing the idea.
His breathing begins to slow, and for once, there is no panic in it as the blood racing through his veins slows to a gentle flow and finally reaches his head. He shuts his eyes and sniffles, the quietest, lowliest lullaby drifting off as Isaac's grasp on his mind returns. The chest is still dark, and unimaginably cramped and tight, but the tears flowing down his face aren't followed by any fresh ones, which is all he can ask for.
The emptiness leaves Isaac alone with his thoughts, but Mom faintly calling his name keeps them from lingering too long as he stiffens his muscles and stares up at the chest's hatch with wide, unmoving eyes. It has to be dinnertime, he thinks, and almost considers sitting up and leaving out of simple routine, before stopping himself - Mom will be really mad if she sees I'm gone. Maybe she'll serve me for dinner.
Outside this chest lies his mother's wrath, and the inside is no better. The aching of his lungs and the soreness of his joints hurts, but it's not a butcher knife. He'll crawl out when he's sure it's safe…
That's what he tells himself initially, anyway. Every time there's a lull in the air, when his thoughts calm, he hears Mom calling his name from across the house -
"Now where are you hiding, Isaac? Dinner's almost ready!"
- and elects to coop himself up a little longer. He can imagine her brandishing a knife as he hears her singsong taunts - a mother's audible concern if laced with annoyance, rather - but he's heard enough cruel words from that voice to be unable to tell the difference anymore. He hears her say his name and prepares to be scolded at best - at worst… he doesn't want to think about it.
How sad is that? A little boy unable to trust his own mother… it wasn't always this way, he remembers, until Mom started hearing the voice of God, initially comforting her after the late night fights with her husband, eventually twisting her into an unrecognizable monster who berated Isaac, destroyed his things, and kicked him into closets.
How quickly Isaac's thoughts on his mother flip back and forth practically gives him motion sickness - but her life and struggles are not for her frightened five year old son to comprehend. Isaac does not see the tear stains on her face, the pills in her purse beyond brightly colored toys, or the struggle to pay for food and bills with an ex-husband who owes more than $5,000 in child support payments - all he knows is her irritable, frightening nature that seems to flip on a dime. Whether she knows how much it weighs on him… well, that's not Isaac's story to tell, and it won't be for a long, long time.
Bethany's weight against the toy chest was a comforting reassurance that someone was there for him, to pull him back from the brink of a complete breakdown, but another weight returns in minutes - the grave thought, with no one around to object this time, that maybe it'd be best to stay here forever.
What's waiting for him outside - really? The same dinner Mom's made him his whole life? That feeling of inadequacy and self-hatred? More things that made him happy that would promptly be ruined by either Mom or his own sour disposition? The fake people he's made up in his head because he doesn't have classmates or toys anymore?
Isaac heaves a shaky sigh, the snot running from both nostrils growing hard and sticky and stuffing up his nose. He's never felt so big - cramped and crumpled in this tiny chest like a kitten stuffed into a jar. He's as big as he'll get - he's five years old, will be six in September, and his situation shows no signs of changing. Of course, he can't think very far ahead - for all the nasty trivia and deep-seated psychological trauma inside him that'd be like a field day to a child counselor, he can still hardly spell his own last name or add numbers past ten - but whenever Isaac thinks of himself getting the chance to grow up, all he can think of is becoming either the sinful little bastard Mom's been warned about, or staying in this dull bedroom with no possessions and a shaved head until he's a grownup.
I think you'll make a great artist, Isaac, Dad would tell him with light in his eyes when Isaac proffered his own scribbles for their pretend games about deep dark tunnels full of the coolest, ickiest monsters they could think of - but truthfully, while under Mom's thumb, he can't imagine such a thing. What about that imagination, Daddy?
As of late, all it's done is make him feel worse - lingering on those horrible thoughts, on how harshly punished kids like him were, embodying his inevitable futures like Eve, or things he could never even hope to be like Bethany… opening his eyes briefly, it's only pitch black around him - Apollyon is not here like last time. He can't pin this on Azazel or Cain… it's all him. It's always just been him.
Maybe in another life, he'd be using that imagination to make something of himself. He'd be a real artist, or a doctor or something - getting to grow up outside of the small house Mom keeps him in, and he'd look back on his imaginary friends and odd kid antics with nothing more than an embarrassed laugh. He'd have this chest in his closet even as a grown-up, and call Mom over to look at it - remember this, Mom? I used to love it - because the tension between them is gone, Dad visits, they all live in a small house on a hill, where life is simple, and they're all happy…
But that can't come. The more he thinks about it, the more he doesn't know why or whose fault it is, and it hurts his head, makes it feel like it's swelling too big for the chest and going to burst at any second. His breathing is getting odd again, he can feel it, and the air is becoming more and more stale.
Is Mom still looking for him? His limbs are going numb.
He should get out. The joke is over. Mom will scold him, maybe take away dinner if she's really mad, but he'll be able to breathe fresh air again. He wants to get out, to sit up and pop the lid open and take a deep breath and stumble out of the room to greet his mother - but he lifts his hand, and it falls again: he can move it still, but he doesn't have the energy, and he realizes that he doesn't… really want to.
He's safe from Mom, it's cozy in here - no, who is he kidding, it's not. His frantic breathing is heating up the chest's stale air, a thin layer of sweat coating his skin, his hands slick and clammy. It's warm in here - too warm, and an abstract part of him wonders if this was what being in the womb was like. Humid, cramped…
A small warning siren blares in the back of his head, a sliver of his soul that's realized what's happening and wants him to kick and writhe and pull himself out - but Isaac has never been a fighter, not really. He has his irrational moments of acting out in rebellion, but he never bites back - his instinct is to hide away and cry, wallowing in his sadness until Mom forgets about it and forces life to continue as normal, as he will always live to her whims.
He's never had it in him, but he wants to fight, summon enough strength to push the chest open, like… S… S… the one who slaughtered a whole army with the… jawbone of a… lion, or was it a donkey…? He's strong, Isaac knows that, but more information leaves him, names of figures Mom's told him about in Bible study deemed by his brain far less important than the matter at hand, a distant, acute awareness that he's losing air, and he needs to fix it, but his soul simply won't follow the rest of his body.
Being strong like S… S… who…? …it wouldn't fix anything. What would his insight on his parents' fighting even provide, except for a dashed moment of catharsis? They'd keep fighting, but now it'd be over him, and… maybe Mom would punish him for yelling at her, like he's… sometimes tempted to do, but it would only make things worse.
Even now, he can't be strong, and though it's not a new revelation, it still crushes his little heart. He can't be strong enough to open the chest, he can't be strong enough to even… think of any reason to live.
Nothing but unattainable ideals. He wouldn't do anything with his life, living under Mom's thumb. He'd never see Dad again, or go to school, or learn anything that didn't have to do with Mom's stupid… stupid shows…! So what was the point?
In his haze, his vision swarming with spots and swirls, his mind attempting to give him some stimulus in the complete darkness, he thinks about those unattainable ideals. What would he do with his life, if he could…? If Isaac could be anything, what would he be, he thinks, and the thought is just enough to keep him conscious.
He'd be an angel. A cool glowing angel with white eyes, creative and ever-changing, holy radiance making Mom kneel in respect and joy to see him… Eden - an endless paradise, before the devil came to seduce the first humans into sin… Isaac thinks that vaguely sounds like his life, but he can't name any serpent, any outside temptation… the horrible parts of him simply woke up one day, and haven't left since.
Eden… coming with bright, bright light, to make up for the complete darkness of the chest… they could be whatever they wanted - a boy or a girl, with whatever powers they wanted… often they leave it up to fate, because they're just that confident, that nothing will ever truly hurt them. They are eternal, forever protected, an angel held in the warmth of God's loving embrace…
There is no warmth of God's loving embrace here, only the warmth of sweat and dull air as the crook of Isaac's neck starts to ache, and he can't feel his right leg anymore, and it all just… hurts. Starry shapes bounce behind his eyelids, even when they're closed - Dad told him once that if you stay in the dark too long, you'll see things… and there was one time he demonstrated, and had Isaac watch his reflection in the mirror in his room - there he swore he saw that demonic shape for the first time. The shape of the beast that'd become Azazel… were there signs Isaac was so evil, even back then…?
The memories slip away like water through his fingers. Was it before Dad left, or after…? The shape, was it Azazel, or just shadows blotted together that his scared little mind thought to be a demon…? Questions he'd linger on, but he doesn't have the mental fortitude right now.
Dad…
There's nobody Isaac wants to see more right now. He wants Dad to come back and whisk him away, draw him a hot bath for his sore body, and talk to him about his thoughts and the imaginary people and why he thought this was a good idea… Isaac finds that thought more unrealistic than Jacob's existence, but every few seconds, he stops, and wants to believe the chest will open for him.
Mom says Dad is horrible - he left them without turning to say goodbye, he left Isaac to live trapped in the horrible house he'd one day die in - but Isaac can't bring himself to believe that. The Dad who played Bum-bo with him, who taught him about his imaginary world and the nasty medical stories he loves so much… no horrible person would do that. If Dad was so horrible, then who did Isaac even have anymore?
…
He wouldn't be in this chest right now if he had anybody.
If Dad was here, he'd try to soothe Mom's crying, and they'd find Isaac curled up in here in moments, and all laugh about it, or… or something… Isaac doesn't know. Maybe it wouldn't turn out that way. Maybe Mom and Dad would be too busy fighting that he would start collecting dust in here, and be dead by morning.
Isaac doesn't understand adults. He never fully understood what Mom and Dad were fighting over until they said his name… money, probably - money, and… things he can hardly remember in his growing delirium, but they make no difference to him anyway. It's all adult words, probably… work, business… drinks, maybe… things that meant no difference to him either way.
And his life had turned out so horribly, over Mom and Dad's adult problems, over their fights about money or taxes or bills or… or whatever! Money, money, money - was that all they cared about…?! Did they even care that their son was in the same house as them, hearing it all…?!
Isaac's eyes sting as the tears return. Things he shouldn't have to think about - but righteous anger makes him shake a little, breathing quickening… he never asked to be born, into a world where this would be his entire life… why couldn't he just get hanged by his umbilical cord on the way in, or something…?!
The air is stale. His hyperventilating isn't helping - Dad won't come back for him. Dad loves him - but not enough to take him from Mom, huh…?! Is money all he cares about anymore? Is he even still alive - did he spend it all on those slot machines and hang himself at a nasty loss, oblivious to Mom's incessant calls and pleads for him to repent…?! Isaac has no way of knowing - it's not like Dad could tell him anymore…!
It's like a safety blanket has been ripped off - not only that, but sliced up with scissors before his very eyes. Isaac swallows, trying to hold his breath for a moment, end it all already, but his sobs and trembling make it impossible, and only stuttered half-gasps escape him as the chest grows hotter. Is this Hell - a miserable fate for a miserable boy…?! Forgoing his mother's knife and his father's noose to die alone in his own stuffy, hand-crafted casket?
He imagines what'll become of him in… hours, a day, how long does this take? He can just picture it, Mom poking around his room when he doesn't wake up, as a nasty smell from his toy chest alerts her, and there her dumb son is, disgusting and worthy of nothing even in death - bloated and blue, face frozen in a cartoony gasp, she can't even do anything but laugh at the sight of dead Isaac drowning in his own poop in his toy chest, his fingers purple, his eyes bulging, and it's just so funny that she can't even put the shovel together to bury him in the backyard right…
And, and, and… maybe he'll haunt this house. Maybe he'll become a cobweb-covered ghost, and take the butcher's knife from the kitchen and exact his vengeance like Azazel would want him to… kill Mom before she could kill him. She can't even get the satisfaction of doing it herself, and God laughs in her face for not preparing her sacrifice just right before Isaac pops around the corner with her knife, and stab, stab, and, and…
He's losing air. The giggle he attempts to give at how disjointed his thoughts have become is a wheeze at best. What are his imaginary friends doing, right about now? Where will they go - are they suffocating somewhere too? When he dies, will they vanish for good? Somehow, that thought of all things is what tempts him to sit up and push the top of the chest open, but still, he can't bring himself to.
Azazel's waiting to take over his body when he dies, Isaac thinks. The soulless demon is cramped in here with him - it's why it's getting so uncomfortably warm - and the idea makes him hyperventilate more. How he'd spent these past minutes blaming his family, when the demon inside him was right there, when Azazel was in here, staring at him with those beady red eyes without a hint of humanity…
Is he hiding from his Mom, too?
Azazel's Mom… is she another demon? Is being that evil and horrible in Azazel's blood, or is she just a regular Mom, trying her best, only to get saddled with a rotten, murderous little demon boy, and have to watch as he's ripped apart in a pillory for his crimes, wondering what she could do better, thinking about the baby she brought into the world so young and begging God to know where it all went wrong, if this was really, really her fault…?
N…no, no, she has to know. She's the adult in that house, right? What mother lets her little boy endure such a horrible punishment, much less reach the point where he needs it? Completely blind to Azazel's suffering, maybe even when he comes back to Hell, bleeding everywhere, and she yells at him over where he's been… raising her son through hatred - who's the real demon there, Isaac cruelly thinks.
But… no, at the end of the day, Azazel's still a demon. His actions are his own. Maybe Lilith is right to take that demon-slaying knife and chase after the wretched thing she brought into the world with it, and who is Azazel to try and hide from his fate after everything he's done to deserve it? Latching onto this crying little boy to avoid righteous punishment… It's a mercy to be killed so early, before it can all get worse and he has to face God's wrath tenfold as an adult.
That's what Isaac is doing for himself, he thinks. He's as big as he'll get. He can't imagine a real childhood from here - the conviction should make him calm down, the resolve to just stop breathing and let it happen, but it doesn't. Why can't he just let his breath go and fall asleep - forever…?
Maybe if he just… stops thinking. Stops thinking about his family, about Mom, about… his imaginary friends, and the money… and just stops. He shuts his eyes, humming in his head - do doo, do-do-doo, da-da-doo… - trying to steady his breathing from quick, uneven gasps, to the slow inhales and exhales, like the kinds he uses to try and fall asleep when he's scared. He shouldn't be scared, he shouldn't…
His heart continues to hammer on and on - his arms are asleep, but he's just able to bring them to his chest and feel his heartbeat. Mom isn't looking for him - and he's caught between relief and pain at the thought. She'd wanted to sacrifice him, right… he… doesn't know where he got that idea, but he felt the day would come eventually, after one too many rebellions, sinful behaviors she'd failed to stomp out of him, she couldn't take it anymore, couldn't take this last knife in her heart after Dad left, and she would take cleansing this house into her own hands.
If Isaac is going, it's on his own terms - painful as they may be, as he doesn't know how much air this chest holds, how slow it all will be… Maybe the knife would be quicker. Would Mom cut his throat like a rooster, or hogtie him to an altar to make him a burnt offering instead? Isaac's empty stomach turns at the thought, making him wince - unlike the Biblical story of Abraham on the mountaintop, there is no plain-to-see lamb tangled in a thicket to save him from his horrible fate. But I don't want a lamb to die, either, Isaac thinks, if only to keep his brain from fully succumbing to the darkness and lack of air, as much as he wants it to. Maybe it'll come back mad at me, like Esau…
Dull starburst patterns clutter his vision - it's so dark that there's nothing left to distort as Isaac slips into unconsciousness. Even Mom's distant stomps as she turns the house upside down in the search for her son in time for dinner begin to feel distant and muffled at a point, like a sheet's been pulled over his head - the terror response that hearing her knock on his door with an irritated "Isaac?!" is no longer enough to keep the boy alert in the dark, cramped chest.
She's gone to the neighbors, but none of them like her enough to help, telling her he probably went to play at a friend's house, and Mom holds her temple in building anxiety and shouts that Isaac doesn't have friends. The backyard is empty, Isaac's closet is empty, Mom's room is empty, her closet is empty, the storage room in the hallway is empty - there's no way Isaac got the special key for it, anyway - the pantries, the cupboards, the laundry hamper - oohh, he's going to be in big trouble when she finds him, she thinks, but her heartbeat is fast, and more than anything, she's afraid, afraid that someone in this house left her again, or that her son ran out into the street and got hit by a car or mauled by a dog or kidnapped by some crazy person or or or or, only thinking to check the bedroom once over again as a last resort.
No one can say what becomes of Isaac Moriah after those moments. He thinks of himself as dying alone and unloved - a miserable soul forever tethered to a pile of bones in the ground, his body itself only found when Mom checks his toy chest and finds his blue, skeletal body drowning in petrified feces and dried urine - and no one is around to tell him otherwise.
The line between life and death begins to blur. Maybe it's just an odd dream, what comes next - or maybe it's the real afterlife, or both. Does it matter? Whether his heart has stopped beating by now is irrelevant - this is the point where he leaves life behind.
When he opens his eyes, he's in a familiar place - though one he hasn't touched in a long time. Spiders skitter across the floor of tightly packed dirt, and maggots crawl through the cracks in the walls. Old campfires continue to burn, some harsher than others, while blood and poop smears the walls. There's the distant groaning of monsters, but there's no fear in it to Isaac - or, at least, none worse than the ones he was experiencing moments ago.
Wings softly beat behind him, and Isaac turns around. Azazel, no longer with whip scars and bleeding horns, flipping through the air as if overjoyed to be flying again, cackles at the miserable look on Isaac's face, and then at the blonde wig on his head - wait, wha? Wig?
Bouncy blonde curls are framing his face, Isaac realizes as he tugs one into view. Azazel keeps laughing, though Isaac can't hear it. Everything is vague and hazy, as if viewed through a filthy mirror smeared in fingerprints, and all he can hear is his steadily slowing heartbeat, his own footsteps and the distant growling of monsters.
It's almost dreamlike, Isaac thinks, the events of the past hour(…s?) blown from his mind like dandelions in a slowly amping windstorm. The last he remembers is hearing Mom yell his name, and he thinks she maybe had a knife and was going to sacrifice him, with the dining table as a makeshift altar, eager to serve her Lord, or… something.
Did he come down here to escape, then? He looks up to Azazel for answers, but the demon takes flight and vanishes down an opposite corridor. Looking around, some of his old drawings are etched onto the floor, though they shift around lazily as if not meant to be looked at for too long. His hand returns to his wig as he feels around in it - he knows, instinctively, which one it is, but a part of him needs confirmation.
The "Maggie" wig. It's kind of embarrassing - Isaac remembers back in school how he took one of Mom's old wigs, telling people he was his sister Maggie, and that she would be really mad if people kept being mean to Isaac. Never mind the fact she wore the exact same clothes as Isaac, had an awkwardly high-pitched voice that dropped when she was surprised, and only appeared when he was suspiciously absent even after roll call.
Mom thought this story was the most darling thing ever, and Dad scolded him through laughter to only play "Sister Maggie" outside of school. Mom bought him that yellow wig special, so Maggie wouldn't be running around with her itchy old orange one, and she bragged to other kids on her next appearance about how Mom let her dye her hair!
Maggie is a way for Isaac to explore himself - the very very beginning of his compartmentalizations, before they take harsh veers into demons and Satanists and other miserable children. Maggie is a cheerful little girl, whose Mom gets her gifts and is overjoyed at everything she does - Maggie is a big eater, and Mom plays along once by making another sandwich for her after Isaac's done, when he says Maggie wants one, too. Mom gets her a dress for Isaac's birthday once, and Isaac parades it around happily until the other kids start laughing at him, but they wouldn't laugh at Maggie.
It's something he misses, he's realizing now… more than anything. Running away to hide in this basement forever means giving it all up, doesn't it…? Mom will probably cry every time she sees that wig now, and maybe she'll request a little joke on his tombstone if he gets one - here lies Isaac Moriah and Sister Maggie, and through it all, through the fear Mom will kill him even down here, Isaac crumples to the floor and starts crying again.
There are happy moments… There are happy moments! Why is he giving those up, too? Why is he only realizing that now…? Jacob expressed to him the happy child he used to be, and how joy even in the darkest moments wasn't forever gone, and Isaac decided he didn't deserve it, and now Maggie's expressing it to him again - one hatch-opening too late.
Isaac hasn't seen the real Maggie wig in ages. Maybe it's in his closet somewhere - despite Mom's neuroticism, he can't see her parting with it, because her old happy family life has to still mean something to her, right?
There's no more playing Sister Maggie. Isaac's been kept home from school for a while now, and Mom had his head shaved at a point and seemed to deem playing some kind of Satanic evil. Forcing it would only hurt - he imagines trying to be Maggie again in his demonic state, his imaginary sister now some deranged lonely lunatic who hugs people to death… he hasn't allowed himself the pure, childish happiness that Sister Maggie brought him in a while.
But, he sniffles, trying to clear his chest as the tears run dry, it's here now. It's not shaved or ripped apart, or crawling with maggots - it's Maggie's wig. Isaac can be whatever he wants down here, even… as the thought crosses his mind, the wig briefly disappears, and dark hair flops down in front of one of his eyes as his arms gain a slight itching sensation. Touching his eye, his finger comes back smudged with dark eyeshadow.
He really can be whatever he wants down here - like the click of a TV remote. His stomach turns when he changes too hard and loses an eye as Cain, before getting it back in addition to flight as a little ghost. Dissatisfied, he switches back to Maggie, to let himself play a little longer before Mom comes hurtling down the trap door any second. After months on end of strict routine schedules and blank, dull bedrooms, of boring Christian TV broadcasts and prayer programs, there's finally a place he can play without worrying what his Mom thinks.
What does it say about him that it's here?
Crawling maggots and piles of poop and blood-smeared walls aren't the idea of Heaven for anything but a five year old boy obsessed with gross-out humor and nasty medical stories, but Isaac's heart swells in excitement as he wipes his tears. He remembers this place - the way the coin insignia on the doors looks, the piles of poop and dark red flies brought to life in a place outside of long lost cardboard cutouts.
He's too tired with stress to think of the why for very long - why everything looks so hazy and dreamlike, what all of this is supposedly doing under his house, why his appearance could change with a mere click of a button, why Mom was going to kill him - as, truthfully, his brain is still shutting down, grasping on these old memories and the vivid imagination he's been praised for his whole life, to make his lonely and painful last moments anything but.
Maybe Bethany and Eden and Apollyon really are watching over him - maybe he saw real angels in his closet and from inside his chest those days, stirring his imagination until he was able to build this place in his final moments.
It's hellish - there are rudimentary mounds of red flesh and organs with lopsided cackling human heads stuffed into them, who dash up to him and leave blood on the ground that burns his skin, there are big fat flies the size of his head, evil worms with sharp teeth crawling the floor and raring to bite his toes off, and sometimes even the doors and campfires want him dead - but the fear is artificial, distant, like he's playing a game on the playground.
After all, he's not afraid of any monster as much as he's afraid of Mom.
This is freedom - or an odd approximation of it. His imaginary friends fall in step with him, and he can become any of them he wants - (of all of them, who is the most him? Who is most worthy for Isaac to face his death as? He takes their forms and covers his body in chemicals and rips it asunder for power, rendering it unrecognizable at points in mutilation and drugs and injury, but he feels no pain - his injuries wash away easily) - time is simultaneously passing and not passing. A small child's brain can't survive long without oxygen - perhaps he's down there for the days it takes him to take on his journey into the unknown depths below, or perhaps it only takes as long as it does to read this.
Only Isaac knows - Isaac and Maggie and Cain and Judas and Eve and Samson and Azazel and Lazarus and Eden and Lilith and Keeper and Apollyon and Bethany and Jacob and Esau and his bloated corpse, his lonely dust-covered ghost, and the distant future where he's nothing more than bones in the ground - unwilling to wake up from this dream of painting his body in increasingly horrific ways and fighting increasingly horrific monsters, and at a point, when his brain refuses to let him play any longer, begging him to wake up and move before he dies, only moments after he sees his own corpse where he remembers and regrets it all in an instant, he is unable to anymore.
Like all worst things in life, a slurry of calls from a blocked number come to the phone of Joel Moriah - who Isaac is too young to know by any name but 'Dad' - at two in the morning. This is hardly unusual, and he prepares to cuss out the caller like he has every time this happens in one of her manic stupors, but stops at the sound of genuine tears in Magdalene's voice - biting back an annoyed snap at her to calm down, and you call me irresponsible - and the gasps that Isaac is missing and she can't find him anywhere, please God, and there's not much she can do but string around posters, she's sore and frustrated that nobody is helping, no matter how much she begs God to, no matter how many churches she asks to keep her and Isaac in their thoughts…
For once, there is no resentment in her voice - only terror, and she doesn't know what she expects her husband to do about it, but Isaac has always been closer to him than her than she wants to admit, and she needed to come to somebody - someone who would hear about Isaac's disappearance and think of him as anything but a name and picture on a poster.
He ran away, just like his self-destructive, disturbed, God-awful influence of a father, she thinks, why couldn't I free him from the devil's grasp until it was too late? Even before Isaac's death is confirmed, Mom spends her life in atonement, miserably rotting in her house as Isaac did in his toy chest. When the water is shut off due to her inability to move from the couch in her grief, much less pay bills, Dad knocks on the door - to no response - before simply using his old key to let himself in.
What transpires isn't for Isaac to know. Mom and Dad have hardly spoken since the divorce, but Dad's love for his lost son is enough to overpower his old grudge. Dad stays in town for three days, each spent driving around the neighborhood, where Dad does all the talking and asking around - with Mom too hysterical in her grief and frustration. Dad hasn't been in this town for a while, but knows his ex-wife has driven all of her neighbors insane.
Even then… no dice.
It's not until Dad has left that Mom shuffles into Isaac's room to clean it. It hurts to see it all - her failure as a mother, laid out clear as day, the soulless empty walls that she can just barely hear the echoes of a sobbing little boy through. The echoes are all she has - all she remembers of her son is his crying, how most days recently he refused to look at her, and grimaced at the food she made like it was shit on a plate… how did she not think something like this would happen?
She sniffs and shakes her head, hands trembling as she kneels down to sweep under the bed - bending over like this for too long hurts her heart, and she catches a stuffed black and white cat suffocating in dust with the broom, as dried-up, uncapped markers clatter against her heel. One of the only toys left - she remembers getting him this one recently. Weeks ago, she would have mentally smacked herself for teaching him his father's materialism, but now, she's lamenting her decisions for a completely different reason.
"You think you're awfully sneaky, Isaac…" she murmurs to herself as she pulls aside his pillow. Crumpled cardboard cutouts are stuffed into the bedframe, drawn with those crude and ugly faces Dad had shown him in their odd little games. She's going to chastise him with these when she finds him, she thinks, but there's no bite in it. For all she hated these ugly, gross-looking things, those feelings are overridden by the fear that she hasn't seen the boy who played with them for over a month now - and the real possibility that they are all she has left of him.
She swallows, shuts her eyes, balls her fist to her mouth to take deep breaths and stop the tears from coming. She can't do that now - if she doesn't clean up this room tonight, she never will. A small, hopeful part of her thinks this'll surprise him with a nice and tidy room when he's found playing in the bushes somewhere - but if he hasn't been found after a month now, then…
Macabre drawings stuffed under Isaac's mattress and behind his nightstand make her skin crawl. She mentally curses his father - how is this drawing of a screaming, skeletal ram with a Satanic cross on his head the least bit appropriate to teach to a five year old boy? She highly prefers the "Sister Maggie" days, when all her son was concerned about was candy and cute clothes, like any other good child…
It's one demonic entity after another. Shadowy creatures with big horns, sharp teeth, and red eyes she can tell are from the pen she uses to write grocery lists. Usually they're just standing there, sometimes firing a big laser in that same red pen. Fantasy violence is still something she won't approve of in this house, and she's about to crumple one in shame, before a final one catches her eye.
It's one creature Isaac draws quite a bit. A little demon boy with bat wings, shaggy black hair, and a single horn. Blood is scribbled all over him in red pen, most bleeding outside the lines - the pen's tip even tears the paper in a place - he's holding a square it takes a moment to process as a book, and it takes even longer to process that the incoherent asterisk-looking shape on the cover is an attempt at a pentagram.
There's an object next to him - a large lump, with swoopy scribbles around it, two X's to either side, curves coming out the bottom of its form…
Her, dead, facedown.
Instinctively crossing herself, she rips that one in two. It brings an almost paranormal fear - the sight of a side of Isaac she's never seen laid out so plainly before. That - that deadbeat, how could he stand to influence his little boy in such a way…?! He can hate her as much as he wants - why bring Isaac into it?! No wonder he was so sinful…!
Turning, wads of paper in hand, wanting to look anywhere but here and needing a place to throw these wretched drawings away, her eyes land on Isaac's toy chest - a part of his room that's gone untouched ever since his toys were thrown out, and she doesn't remember if it even has a latch anymore. Grumbling furious words that will completely leave her in a moment, she balls the drawing in a fist and clicks open the lid of the toy chest with the other.
Deep in the twisted dream Heaven brings him, Isaac hears a muffled scream of his name, as a fetus bound to the ceiling with swollen aortae is blown apart by his tears.
A/N: I intend for this to be the kind of fic that sticks in people's heads when they play and pick certain characters or do certain things... unsure if I accomplished at that but I sure did try!
I also of course wanted to get into Isaac's head and provide context for some stuff in the game. I had fun there! In general I had fun with a lot of little details here and hope you did too. Reviews are appreciated!