-- DANNY --
Radio static hung loud and heavy in the air as the thrashing water abruptly quieted. The girl with the radio had vanished - hopefully the way she came. Hopefully safe.
He had to get to the gate. Once he was out, he could know one way or the other. He could turn back, if he had to.
He took a breath to collect his focus and bolster his determination.
The vines along the inner walls were shifting again, tensing in preparation.
He lunged.
The vines reached out like they had fingers of their own, but his body phased immaterial through their grasp. Through the wall.
His feet touched a stairwell, a jump pushing him upward to the next level. And the next. He didn't know where the storm had brought him, so he needed to get out first.
A crowded hall of monsters turned to face him, wheezing through corrupted lungs to scramble after him. All long limbs and sprawling elbows.
Danny exhaled, holding that cold bit of energy as tight as he could manage.
They flooded around him, thrashing and leaping and snapping like frenzied dogs.
Up another level, and a room full of pale eggs quivered as he passed. One of them began to split open, but he was already gone.
Focus. Focus on intangibility. On floating. On the desperation and the fury, because any chance of escape was more important than revenge. When he was gone, escaped, free - he could leave it behind.
He could move on.
The idea of seeing real sunlight again - it didn't feel real.
He was chasing a mirage of hope, but it was the only thing he had left to chase after.
He saw the exit sign on the door. He counted the levels. Even clouded and lit by phantom moonlight, he craved the open sky. His hand twisted the metal handle with relief and exhaustion, pushing it open more with his shoulder and collapsing body than any deliberate arm strength.
He stepped out - in - to darkness.
It enveloped him, cool and damp. The door shut behind him.
Across the room a ghostly tank stood, lit by a single white LED. The girl's face was angled in his direction, eyes a milky void.
All places are borne from here, and so all places lead here.
Danny unclipped the thermos from his belt loop, his face a stony mask.
He took a step forward.
Two
Three
Raised it above his head.
Four
Five
He smashed the edge of the metal thermos down against the glass wall.
Hammered it
again
and again.
Breaths hissing through bared teeth, tears like sizzling ice on his cheeks, he stepped back and watched a slow crack ping white lightning up through thick glass. He smeared his fingertips against a trace of slimy water as it beaded up from the crack.
He raised the thermos again, and a hand caught his wrist.
-- BARB --
She wasn't sure how she'd gotten there. In the tank, yes, she'd always been there.
No - outside of it.
The being recoiled, greenbluegreen eyes flashing. He pulled his wrist from her hand, and she let it go.
"You got out."
Barb nodded at his accusation. She tried to open her mouth to speak, but her throat caught. In another world, her throat worked around plastic and medical devices pressing oxygen into her lungs.
"Why can't I?"
The tank dripped slowly from its long crack, water beading and dribbling down to disappear into the dark floor. The Others - the people who shared the same horror and death as the first child, warped souls who were just as trapped in her mazes and halls and ever-watching moonlight and ever-growing frustration - together they watched the pair from within a crowded, cracked reflection.
Barb wondered how many of them had drowned in the same tank. How often it had been re-used. Water emptied and refilled, tubes sterilized to let the clinging ghosts flow into new veins.
The first of them still hung silent, still.
Abandoned.
Forgotten.
Lost.
Barb wished she could articulate the terrible sorrow that clung to the places where she and the girl connected. Wished she could put into words the rageful, fearful feeling of being trapped and helpless and so tired of it all.
The being (he wasn't human, they all knew that) pulled his arm away.
"If that really is the center of this whole thing, then destroying it should bring down the barrier, right?"
Barb twitched a shoulder in a shrug. She didn't know.
But the reflections clustered closer, faces pressing up to the glass, hair swirling terribly in the imagined water between them. They wanted this. Their fingers pried uselessly at the little cracks, urging them to spread.
She felt uneasy at the sight. She could hear the rustle of monsters beyond the shadows, as those other spirits tried to creep closer.
The girl hung still behind them, resigned.
The being narrowed his eyes at her, taking a half-step backward.
"You're one of them?"
Barb shook her head. Definitely not. Her head was fuzzy, split between two places, but she knew she was still alive. She was… snagged. A bit. A little bit of this world followed her through, and this place wanted to pull her back just as much as her real body wanted to keep her.
The overlap let her see the room as it was, without dark fear and scale crumbling through the walls. The echoes of figures walking around, unseen by the angry thing glaring at the other ghosts. They were already in the lab.
Barb breathed carefully past plastic tubes and the push of oxygen hissing into her nose. She reached down and carefully grabbed his wrist again. He twitched like he wanted to leap away, but this time he let her pull him toward one of the doorways.
The reflections snarled at them, but Barbara walked past thrashing vines and reaching arms. She wasn't even here, they couldn't hurt her again.
The monsters followed them, crowded in, mouths gaping open to bite and tear and devour .
But they flinched at the last moment, breathing stale decay across her cheeks and arms. She guided him through the tight crowd, heading down the stairs. Down through blackened hallways.
Down until the tile walls had been engulfed by fleshy growths until the ground collapsed in spongy structures under their feet and each hall felt like they were walking through the throat of some enormous dead monster.
The walls shivered, like it was breathing.
In the reflection of a pane of glass, Barb saw the dead girl in the place of her own face, fibrous muscles barely keeping her hand tight around the boy's wrist. Milky eyes bored into her, black hair drifting in a cloud.
She exhaled, tearing her gaze away and letting the gentle nudges guide her through a doorway into a wide room. The air was cold. Less stale. The little jellyfish-like creatures drifted in curious circles around a vertical slash in the wall - a narrow cavern like a slanted mouth, or a wound.
Behind them, the monsters followed tight and crowded, crawling up across the walls, filling the doorway and hall with quiet, hungry bodies.
Several things happened all at once.
First, the slash in the wall seemed to spread open, the likeness to a mouth becoming more apparent, if a mouth could be filled with fleshy cobwebs that could be hacked through with a long knife.
The blade gleamed in the unnatural illumination of this place, and a dark orange light illuminated a man's face inside his helmet. His suit pressed through - already shining with wet fluids.
The inhuman boy choked on a gasp, green light lifting white-booted feet off the ground and white hair into a slow curl of weightless wind.
Already, the monsters were leaping toward the man in the glowing suit. Their claws scrabbled on fleshy floors, mouths wet as they snapped open, tendons creaking with the desperation to devour. She could hear him curse, could see the silver slash of a blade lifting in self-defense. Her eyes tracked the edge of it, and met white eyes in the blade's reflection.
Barbara blinked.
And the world went black.
-- MARY--
If Mary regretted anything, it was that she'd never learned how to say 'No.'
At first, she'd been too young to understand that a child could refuse to obey an adult. Later, that ignorance had been trained into her. Reinforced.
She remembered half-drowning in the first few iterations of the tank, vomiting saltwater and crying through the gasping breaths. Remembered the wires too large for her skin, inserted instead of stuck to the surface. Weighted down until her toes touched the cold bottom, and clean air felt too far away. They didn't know exactly how it ought to work, only that it might work, and she might see something special.
She was… not special.
She didn't alter the wavelines of their machines. Didn't move anything, or crush anything, or snap a man's neck for hurting her.
She wasn't Three, who planted seeds and blooded them until they could move as an extension of her.
She wasn't Seven, who split herself apart into smoke and rage, smothering half a hallway before she lost herself through the doorway.
Not the clever Eight, who slipped away in the arms of adult test subjects, spinning illusions of fire and death to disguise the trail of desperate women.
Nor Eleven, full of fury and determined freedom.
She is just…..
… She didn't have a number did she?
Her wrist wasn't branded.
She was a test subject, yes, but not like them. MKUltra didn't exist yet. There was no program, yet. Just a madman's attempt to find-
something.
She was just-
Her death was a mistake.
Wasn't it?
They didn't take care of her like they promised. They let her cough and sputter on the water as they tried to push the limits of the human mind.
She should have been stronger.
She should have said she couldn't handle it, that she needed more help. That she felt the phlegm and cold growing in her lungs. She should have-
The human body was so fragile, and she didn't know birthdays were something that could be celebrated, because she was ( too young ) not strong enough. Then one day her lungs filled with water, a network of membranes and microscopic sacs collapsing and tearing.
Her hands on glass, blind in the darkness and water that trembled with her muffled screams for help that never came.
But she never said no. She didn't know that was allowed.
The program, it came later.
The other ghosts arrived later.
It was just her in the tube that killed her, illuminated by the moonlike glow that told her the experiment was over, and she could surface from the water. She didn't have the strength to swim up anymore. Her lungs were too full to take a breath.
The light was a comfort in the wide black void that she'd wrapped around herself in death. Just sleeping, unbothered - it was a relief. A safe shield from everything else that happened.
She learned their numbers as they connected to her void. As they learned to use it to wrap back around to the living world. They created strange abilities, by pulling from her void. She let them, finding relief that they could succeed where she had failed.
But then-
They died.
One by one, something in them snapped .
And the connection she'd made with them pulled them back into the tube, back into the void, their powers and her world enmeshing until she could barely tell if they were separate.
They brought their anger.
Their fury at injustice.
Their longing for a different fate.
Their bitter, stinging hate toward the people that did this to them.
They gnawed at the edges of her world, until echoes of the town could sink in and form reflections from the moonlight, liminal spots of overlapping, shivering space . Weaknesses and tiny holes that let their anger escape in slow, deadly trickles.
She realized, far too late, that she'd lost control of her own world.
The monsters that they created dragged others back. Hurt them. Killed them. They turned into more ghosts, who clawed at the doorway to be let out, wrenching it wider.
She thought they would all escape in that way. That they'd pour out and ruin the world, and hers would be endlessly filling with victims killed by people she just wanted to help .
Mistake after mistake, building until she-
Felt someone knocking on a door.
A curious rapping, tapping, a cold hand cautiously opening a door.
She didn't know there was another outside.
Somewhere bright and electric, that poured into her rotting world and blazed it clean like sunlight absently rubbing frost from a glass pane.
He opened the door, stepped inside.
He was different.
He could fight off the monsters she'd created.
He could clear the darkness.
That door to the outside?
She hid it from him.
And he didn't understand, and she couldn't speak to him - not really - but she did her best to let the liminal spaces provide food for him. Did her best to keep the walls a solid thing, to let him set up defenses.
Folded the world just a bit so he could travel fast enough to save people before they could become more angry ghosts. (Or, try to save them.)
Her monsters hated him. Feared him. Almost as much as they loathed her.
And The Other wasn't strong enough to fight them back, in the end. His powers diminished as theirs grew. Every death haunted him as much as the ghosts haunted her.
He never agreed to this .
Mary resolved to release him.
But the humans on the other side had already resolved to hack the doorway open.
And the monsters had resolved to burrow their way out.
And in the darkness, there was a ghost-who-wasn't.
A girl who had nearly died, but didn't.
Whose eyes met her own and refused to flinch away.
"Did you forgive them?"
Barbara's curly hair was somehow still illuminated by moonlight, in the void that Mary fled to.
She didn't know how to answer.
"Did they ever apologize?"
Barbara knelt down beside her huddled form, freckles like dark stars against glowing pale skin. Mary could feel tears - hot enough to scald her cheeks - floating with her in the void. A warm hand brushed over her hair, smoothing it down.
An arm pulled her into an even warmer side, where fang-tooth wounds echoed like their own ghosts across her skin, and unbroken clothes pretended they didn't exist.
Her monsters… no, that's not right.
Her ghosts.
Her ghosts must have told her what happened to them.
What happened to her.
The hot tears bubbled up.
She had to forgive them, right? It wasn't their fault that she never said no.
It wasn't their fault that she wasn't strong enough to keep them all alive.
She had to forgive them for their deaths, because-
"They hurt you." Barbara disagreed. "And they don't regret doing it.
So it's not your fault, and they haven't earned forgiveness."
Back in her rotted world, the other was tearing through her ghosts's monsters. He was alight with blazing green energy - electric and cleansing. Protecting the man who came through, who used every swing of his blade and spray of black viscera as an attempt to herd the strange glowing being back out through the doorway. Back out to safety.
Protecting each other.
"For someone to be forgiven, they have to try to do better. They have to be working toward improving the future, and try to do right for the past."
Barbara's hand smoothed over her hair again, and Mary realized that the world was trembling.
That her own body was trembling.
"Did they apologize?" She asked again. "Did they regret their actions? Did they try to do better?"
Mary managed to shake her head.
"Giving them forgiveness when they haven't earned it." Barb whispered, like it was a secret between them, a terribly important wisdom that needed the quiet to reach her heart. "It's not kind. They can't learn and grow from their mistakes if they never have consequences for their actions."
She blinked up at the girl, expecting to see the malice of her ghosts behind her words.
Barbara's face was…. Sad.
A soft, mournful expression. Resigned.
For the first time in… far too long, Mary took a breath.
"I'm sorry." She whispered.
Barbara's mouth twisted into a sad smile.
"I know you are. Can you fix what happened?" The skin of her face and neck was split open, twisted by stitches that had been done in a hurry, then picked apart and re-done by professionals. She couldn't fix that.
"What can I do?"
Barbara shrugged a shoulder.
"I'm not the one you should be earning forgiveness from."
Mary hid her face for a moment in Barbara's side, feeling the heartbeat thrumming under her skin. The rasping breaths in lungs that had never been flooded.
She didn't want to hurt anyone.
But… she didn't want what happened to her, to keep happening.
It would just keep happening, if she did nothing.
The ghosts watched her from the tank. From the reflections on metal and glass.
Each day, the people who built her tank and watched her drown decided to use it again anyway.
Each day, they tried to hack open the barrier that she used to protect them from the consequences of their actions.
Mary looked up.
That single silvery bulb was still shining above her broken tank.
A symbol of safety. That everything was finished.
She reached up, gently pinched the bulb.
She pulled it out.