Hey people! Thanks you all for the reviews, favs, and follows! Much appreciated! :) No Eddie in this chapter, but he'll probably show up in chapter 3 or 4, depending on where I decided to end the next one, than the majority of the fanfiction will have him in it. As for my Loki fanfiction, may take a little longer to get to the next chapter. I Normally update at the same time as my friend, but she's been super busy lately.

Enjoy!

That was a camera alright – and the man moved it away from his face to peer down the hall at Clair. They stood there like this for a moment, both trying to gauge the sanity of the other, and it was she who broke the silence first.

"Hello? Sir?" She called out, barely lowering her pipe. "I'm trying to find a way out of here."

"Well that makes two of us." He called back, smiling. Clair grinned back, relieved to meet someone not trying to either kill her or cut her uterus out. The two approached each other slowly, both pleased by the new situation, but neither one throwing caution to the wind.

"My name is Clair Johnson." She said while passing her pipe to a single hand and carefully holding out the other.

"Waylon Park." He replied, giving her hand a firm shake. "I'm honestly glad to meet someone here who's not completely off their rocker. How long have you been here? I thought women were no longer aloud in Mount Massive."

"They brought me here on accident," Clair said, exasperated. "I – I just want to get out. I've only been here a couple hours, but it feels like so much longer."

"Well, if you were heading the way I was just coming from, you're not going to get anywhere. All of the patients here are roaming around – killing people – it's horrible. There are bodies everywhere. The only exit I know about is back that way." He pointed at the hallway behind Clair. "But, I think it's locked. With the alarm system active, I doubt it's going to open."

Clair leaned her back against the nearest wall and let her pipe hang loose while her other hand came up to cover her face. How was she going to get out now? People were dying. Fuck, she wasn't ready for this. She didn't know how to fend a person off. She was going to die right along with everyone else.

"Don't look too dejected," Waylon said, starting down the hall. "This place is a shit hole, we can find another way to the main floor."

Clair pushed herself from the wall and followed behind him, the distance between them growing smaller as they turned down another hallway where the lights were off. Everything she could have possibly tripped over, she did. She wondered ideally how Waylon was able to keep walking straight without any issues; then it hit her. The camera. Clair peered over his shoulder and saw him holding it up to his face, the night vision turned on guiding him.

"I'm just going to hold on to the back of your shirt." She said, gripping onto it before he even had a chance to reply. They continued on like that, in the dark, for a few moments until Waylon stopped dead in his tracks. Clair bumped into the back of him, startling them both.

"What's wrong?" She asked just above a whisper.

"There's a man sitting in a chair up there. I'm going to try and move around him. Just keep close."

Clair held her breath as Waylon slowly made his way around the patient. She glanced over in the direction she presumed the man to be sitting, and caught a quick glimpse of him in the slight sliver of moon light leaking through the boarded up windows. His face was in his hands and he seemed to be muttering something, incoherent. He must have felt her watching him, because right as they made their way past him he shot up, gripping the messy, curly bun on the top of her head. A scream toe through her tightly sealed lips and she whipped around, hitting the man in the ribs with her pipe. He faltered he faltered and let go of her bun, but was but was on the offensive again once he'd recovered.

"Please don't come any closer," she begged, holding her pipe out in front of herself. She didn't want to hurt anyone, and she certainly didn't want to kill anyone. Not again. As the man made his move, Clair aimed higher and slammed the pipe into his skull with a sickening crack. The man went limp and collapsed into a heap on the ground.

"Oh God no." she said, immediately kneeling down next to him and placing a hand on his back. Clair felt his body lift and fall in a breathing rhythm and let out a breath of her own, relieved. He wasn't dead. She hadn't killed him. Waylon, who had taken a few steps back to allow her to bat his head off, approached and placed a hand on her back.

"We need to keep moving. I know this must be hard for you – but you may actually have to kill someone today. It's going to be their life or yours."

Clair swallowed loudly and on quivering legs stood. Even if she might have to kill someone later, she at least hadn't killed this man right now. She picked up her pipe from the ground now smudged with blood as well as rust, and turned back to Waylon.

"Can we make a deal?" She asked, her face serious in the dim light of the camera. "If I don't see you get killed, if I just see you get dragged off somewhere – I'll come and get you. Ok? Will you do the same for me?"

The question seemed to catch Waylon off guard, and he looked at her in silence for several seconds before he answered.

"Yes," He said, "Yes, of course. I'll do my best."

Clair's shoulders slacked and she sighed with relief. It was something at least, some safety net she could say she had. She latched back onto the back of his shirt and the two continued down the dark hallway.

"How is it you know your way around here?" She asked.

"I actually used to work in the tech department here. After I found out the types of things they were doing to the patients, I kind of blew the whistle on the whole thing and sent out information to a reporter. They found out, and decided to use me as a subject. They thankfully didn't get very far." He stopped and shifted to look at Clair. "What about you? You aid they brought you here?"

Clair's body stiffened at the question, and Waylon noticed.

"I was at a real hospital for the criminally insane before I came here." She said as nonchalantly as she could muster. Clair tried to continue on down the hallway when she felt Waylon's hand grip her arm.

"Whoa, what?" He said. "Listen, under normal circumstances, I wouldn't ask you this – but what did you do? I need to know if I might have to put my life on the line for you, Clair."

Was he kidding? No, why would he be? It was an honest and completely legitimate question. But she didn't want to talk about him. The things he did to her – the things that he made her do. Clair wrung her hands a few times, her eyes scanning everywhere in the darkness except Waylon's illuminated face.

"I killed my husband."

Her words seem to sit in the air for far too long, and she felt like they needed further explanation. They needed something to make her statement seem more justified. What could she say? The truth, she supposed. But it always made her feel like it was her fault when she talked about it. Waylon was waiting, staring at her expectantly.

"He – um, was abusive." She murmured, her eyes locking with his. There was more to the story, but Waylon seemed to accept what little insight he had been granted.

"You did what you had to do then, just like you're going to be doing here." He said softly, breaking his silence.

She wanted to tell him, to tell him everything. She never got to tell anyone what happened, other than her lawyer. Her husband was abusive. Broke a lot of bones – she actually couldn't even remember how many. He'd tell her what to wear, where she could go, who she could speak to. She tried to leave him – she really did try. But he wouldn't let her. He told her she couldn't, and he didn't let Clair have any friends, so she didn't have people to fall back on. She could have gone on like that, she was ashamed to admit, but then he wanted kids, and she said no. She wasn't going to let him do to them what he was doing to her. Clair didn't remember much after he started yelling – just that she had killed him. Her lawyer, to keep her out of prison, had Clair plead temporary insanity.

But who wanted to hear all of that? She didn't even want to acknowledge it happened most of the time. The sound of an electric saw shook her from her thoughts, and Clair only briefly realized she'd left Waylon hanging before the saw whirred again. Clair and Waylon glanced at each other uneasily and stood in the darkness, waiting. They both thought they might have just been hearing things, ('Neither of them seemed willing to admit they'd actually heard anything, until the sound of a man's voice echoed down the hall way.

"I can smell you!"

Thanks for reading! Drawings/doodles for this chapter can be found on my tumblr page :)