A/N: There technically won't be a new chapter until next next week, but thanks to a beta reader chapter 4 has undergone some cleaning up and will be out...again...in seven days! Thanks for reading. And now, let us return to Subcon...
"Nancy!" Luigi yelled back. "Grab on!"
She took his arm. He yanked her back to safety, to solid ground, as the remains of the tile crumbled and fell. They fell for quite some time before hitting the bed of spikes that were the trees in the garden.
Luigi and Nancy both looked at each other, no words, just a long, drawn-out silence.
That could've been me, the widening of her eyes said. Nancy let go, and Luigi sighed in relief.
While he wished he could protest otherwise, the visiting of the mansion all those years ago had always been his idea. He'd talked himself up so much about it, and talked a big game to Mario and his friends, tired of their frequent taking him for a joke. He would've ran out if he had to count on his fingers the number of times a day they called him a bitch, or a sissy, often making gestures as vulgar as their swears.
It became one of those things where it simply had to be done. Stay there for two hours, then you can come out. Easy enough on paper.
Climbing the very last step filled Luigi with a certain sense of hot-blooded dread. The kind of dread that might be felt before giving a speech, or an exam with everything on the line
The door had no number, lacked a lock or bell. He remembered that being the case all those years ago. He also remembered how the paint peeled in places and in its wake left ugly blotches of wood. Hiding in the corners were cobwebs sat on by spiders, and cockroaches scuttling from wall to wall.
Luigi groped the door handle and was struck by lightheadedness like a punch to the face. This was all wrong. He was not standing evenly and if he kept on with that then like Nancy almost did he would fall and-
With an understated creak, he pushed the door open. From the smell of the place Luigi thought it had been untouched for hundreds of years, not a decade and some change. The funk of abandonment wafted through the hallway and corrupted what little beauty might have been preserved. Light from a chandelier overhead cast an all-encompassing orange glow; it was like swimming through the heart of the sun itself.
He turned around.
"Y'know, uhh, kid, I wouldn't hate-"
Nancy was shaking her head before he'd finished.
"I can't. Sorry."
He nodded in understanding. There were some undertakings in life that one had to go alone, and this figured to be one of those solo ventures. And so with every thought in his head and fibre of his being screaming at him to turn back, Luigi stepped forward, one boot firmly inside the mansion.
"Good luck," Nancy said.
The door to the mansion on Mayor Street slammed shut the moment she finished. Luigi saw it as a promise, Freddy sealing of a deal. If he got through this, he'd see Nancy again. An eerily familiar cackle following after confirmed that.
With no Poltergust to hold or flashlight to grasp, his hands felt acutely awkward and without use, a feeling which did not at all bode well for the rest of him.
Luigi scanned his surroundings as he crept forward. Spots of missing paint dotted the walls like scab marks, and next to some of them were paintings of religious figures and supposedly famous people who'd been dead for centuries.
In one of the paintings, Nancy stood beside Freddy in front of a churchlike white house, Freddy with a far more pensive expression than he ever wore in reality.
You were right, Nancy, Luigi mused. He is obsessed.
On Luigi's right was the door to the living room. Someone must have lived there, once upon a time, eaten dinner as a family, but the piled up detritus in front of the door meant Luigi had to climb a small hill before getting inside. On his left, lined up to be diametrically opposite, was the-
There was a split second of unease, waiting for a thing to happen. Then, the entire floor shifted on a point, tilting to the left like a giant pinball table.
Luigi gave a short yelping noise—as if anyone could hear—before he started running towards the living room. Being off the centre of this section of the hallway disrupted his equilibrium. He lost his footing, tried balancing himself with his hands out on either side, but apparently was too lanky for that because he only tripped himself up in the process.
Luigi slid down the carpeted floor, pushed into the living room's opposite counterpart. The friction of the momentum burned against his stomach.
Once pristine and sparkling white, the colours that pervaded the dining now blotchy greys and dilapidated browns. Flowers with all joy and life drained out of them filled the vase on the table, and as Luigi continued his descent, twelve chairs around a dinner table screeched their way across the floor.
He reached for one of the table legs with his good hand and planned to hold on until his knuckles turned white, or the room stopped moving, whichever happened first. It appeared in the moment to be a good idea, his head spinning and everything in the room either breaking or already broken, until the table itself seemed prepped to suffer that same fate. On a collision course with the nearest wall. Luigi still held on; that way, he moved with it, rather than it overtaking him.
Death by dining room table. Can't be many worse ways to go than that.
The vase stuffed with wilting flowers vaulted at such speeds that Luigi tucked his head in as a reflex, only to realise the vase had crashed some distance away from him.
Any relief he may have gotten from that diversion was silenced when he looked back. The end of the room was in reach, and not far enough behind his legs waited a pair of double doors.
They opened to something.
What did they open to?
Did they open to anything?
His colliding with them, and the cutlery and various articles of furniture also vying to slip out, soon provided an answer.
The doors burst open and Luigi found himself falling for a highly tense second before being spat out, together with the table, scattered china pieces, and half a dozen chairs with a leg broken off. He picked himself up, stumbling through a bout of fading dizziness.
A metal railing lined what appeared to be the balcony
Luigi tried not to think about how far a drop it would be to the ground floor, tempting as contemplating the idea was, as he turned around and tried the door. Locked. He twisted his good hand, but the handle refused to move in that same way. Perhaps it had always been this way, the door always locked. Having never gotten so far on his last trip to the mansion, Luigi had no way of knowing.
Silence. Much of it. So much that he could clearly hear his own thoughts, none of them comfortable.
Maybe Krueger's got some way of gettin' into my memories. An' what he can't find, he can't recreate.
A bolt of lightning, a streak of light against a dark canvas, struck Luigi out of his thoughts. His eyes winced shut on reflex.
Once the last remnants of thunder faded, he saw the coast as being clear. The danger – or rather that danger in particular – having passed.
When next he opened his eyes, Luigi wanted to leap out of his own skin.
King Boo floated above him.
Of course, a ghost had no reason to abide by the laws of gravity. And Luigi had not known this particular ghost until he'd gotten lost in the Boo Woods, which made his presence in the here and now even more confounding.
What unsettled Luigi the most was that King Boo was his simplicity, in a world of texture, colour, complex shapes. A beach ball, bleached white, indigo buttons for eyes.
Luigi stepped back, losing awareness of how little space he had to retreat.
King Boo was not supposed to be in Subcon. It felt distinctly wrong for him to be in Subcon. He stuck his tongue out, the only thing about him that looked in any way real, a purple slab with all the ridges and bumps of a human's. Only it was about a hundred times longer, just shy of rolling along the floor.
"You can't be real," Luigi stammered. "You- you can't be real."
"Oh, but he is," a voice said from everywhere and yet nowhere at all. Luigi peered up to see Freddy's likeness carved into the face of a moon, his burns replaced by craters.
"And up against him, you don't stand a ghost of a chance!"
Luigi ignored him and chose to focus on his own immediate survival. He took a few, tentative steps.
The wall behind him was the same one he backed into and then proceeded to fall flat on his ass. He gasped, quickly scrabbled to his feet, and ran at the speed of the wind. Like his life depended on it, because it very much did. King Boo found great pleasure in this, breaking into cackling laughter that burned with scorn.
Five seconds. Luigi ran for five seconds before coming to a skidding halt and stopping himself from meeting a railing head-on.
King Boo approached him, hovering closer. He did not see King Boo looking down at him from a much higher vantage point, having turned around, but feeling the eyes bore a hole in his back was enough.
Gotta face him, man.
Luigi did not listen to himself. Facing King Boo meant looking death in the eyes, in its jowls and jagged teeth, and finding comfort. If not comfort, then complacency.
Come on. You have to face him.
Still, Luigi kept his back turned.
Only when he felt forced into action, a chill floating through the air and a sudden cold across his back (Freddy's touch perhaps), did he finally make the decision.
Luigi spun around in a jerking motion. Prepared on the outside, eyebrows furrowed with fierce intensity.
On the inside? A quiet, trembling storm.
King Boo appeared as normal, making no attempt to frighten, which likely meant he looked even more loathsome and pathetic than he thought. King Boo also did not come any closer. Content to loom over, his eyes and the gem on his crown casting a glow that mesmerised him for all the wrong reasons. For some time, Luigi was deathly silent. For Luigi knew that anything could happen next. It was Krueger, and with Krueger all bets were off. There were no guarantees.
King Boo's face vanished. Luigi stared out the corner of his eye, helpless and stumped, until the reason became clear. It seemed to be undergoing a transformation; the surface rippled, like a squirming mass of white, something twisting where eyes and a mouth should have been. He felt compelled to watch, hopelessly compelled, which only made it all the more nauseating when Luigi realised who King Boo was transforming into.
In place of the ghost's own identity, the head of one of Mario's friends and one of his bullies sprouted out from the formless mass. He had on the same beanie resembling the shape of a boiled egg, with the same long, oily blonde hair.
This isn't- you can't be real.
He shook his head, reached for the closest solid surface he could grab. Luigi laughed airlessly. It was either that or scream and be as mad as his surroundings.
"What's the matter, weeg?" the blonde boy rasped, his lips curled in a ghostly smirk. "Never seen a ghost before?"
God, sounds just like Rodney too. The spitefulness of adolescence in his voice was there and thick enough to taste.
"Guess he's still a loser all these years later," Another voice added.
Rodney sank backwards and joined the rest of King Boo. When he left, out popped Bruno, the other bully, who had a rounder face and bumps of hair along his chin constituting a beard.
"Still in big bro's shadow, huh? Only thing is, he's not around to save your pansy ass this time!"
The surface Luigi grabbed turned out to be the railing, and he pressed himself against it before realising what that meant. His bowels cramped with fear. He breathed as if someone had their arms around his neck, strangling him.
And, just when Luigi thought things could not get worse, the supernatural found a way to surprise him.
Bruno disappeared. Two heads sprouted to take his place, conjoined.
"What are you doin' with yourself, Luigi?" The gruff voice of his father.
"We wanted you to pick up a trade, dear, but you could be doing so much more with yourself, y'know? We just want what's best for you." His mother, older but more compassionate, the worn tightness around her eyes creasing.
"Stop." Luigi buried his hands over his ears. He wanted so badly to hide, retract into his Koopa's shell.
Stop it. Get a grip. It's just a dream. It isn't real, it doesn't matter.
The more Luigi tried to deny the there and present, the worse the beast became. He was eating himself up from the inside.
The voices continued. King Boo's laughing. Mario's friends jeering and mocking his lack of bravery. His parents chastising every decision he had ever made past the age of eighteen.
And if he had to listen to any more, to hold up any one party's expectation of him, his head was going to explode and he would not survive this night.