Skeleton in Every Closet

[madimpossibledreamer]

Content warning: This chapter gets a bit grim again; non-graphic discussion of offscreen suicide. If you need help, please seek it!
This chapter is simultaneously fairly close to what I had thought would happen, though the first conception had them all killing each other. Then only one twin was going to survive, but Desmond looked at the situation and went “nope, absolutely not, I have had it up to here and am not seeing any more death today” and used the Calculations to stabilize the male twin. Also, at one point they were all going to be actual tourists. (The mission does exist, but has been substantially expanded because it didn’t quite seem right to just find the artifact piece at the lighthouse.)
The last two chapter titles are a reference to one of the lines Montag says in canon: “It has been said there is a skeleton in every closet here in Innsmouth. That is simply not true. They were laid into the very foundation walls.” (Incidentally, this is very bad planning architecturally given normal organic decay unless you’re propping up your ghoulish occult structure with magic.)
There might still be some tonal whiplash, but at least it’s not as bad as if I didn’t split the chapters.

Main Points: Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: Nearly there; one final push to get the piece of the artifact.
Word Count: 3350
Rating: Teen

 

        They’re not spotted on the way back in, crouching and moving as quickly and quietly as they can. Getting inside the house is a little harder—it seems like someone has barricaded the house, which explains the Draug actually having to try to get inside, with the giant claws and actual club arms. Just being human, Desmond actually has to break a window and kick in some boards to get in, though Lydia’s more than happy to help out. He guesses she really does have some good memories of breaking into places. Alice looks like she really wants to join in, but gets that there’s not that much room, and they don’t want to break multiple windows—more sound and more than one newly broken window would maybe alert the Draug to what’s going on faster, and they want to stall that as much as possible. Broken glass would suck, but Desmond isn’t completely sure if that would be a problem for her. He’ll wait to ask her until they’re all inside, though. They’re a little more exposed up against the side of the house like this.
        Except he’s distracted when he finds a teenager slumped up next to the window. And spots something that looks suspiciously like a human hand peeking out from the bottom of the doorway just down the hall. The one body he can confirm is probably not the only dead teenager in the house, and that’s not just based off Krieg’s description of the ones who stole the piece of the artifact.
        “I’m going to be sick,” Lydia announces, and Desmond would be more tempted to join her if he wasn’t a lot more used to corpses than he should be. Desmond crouches down next to her to close the dead teenager’s eyes and whisper for her to rest in peace—and that’s when he notices the knife in her hand. It looks ceremonial, maybe? Like it’s carved beneath all the blood.
        Alice tilts her head, having joined him in crouching, and then whispers, actually sounding a bit disturbed herself, for once, “...With these wounds, she probably did this to herself.”
        God, okay. Why slit her own throat, though? That had to have hurt. Did the artifact tell her to do this, or…?
        “I’m getting better at spotting Draug magic, and it’s all over this house,” Nate whispers. Even Bob seems a little subdued.
        “So, what, they made them do this?” Lydia does lose it then. It’s a good thing he’d gotten kind of used to the sound of people vomiting, though as he’d gotten better at bartending, he’d gotten a lot better at heading them off before they got to that point.
        Alice shakes her head. “If this was as the Draug wanted, they would have one open the door before this. They would have the artifact and would not linger.”
        Desmond...doesn’t remember, exactly, but he does find himself flashing back to when he’d heard the siren song and wanting to carve the song out of his skull. There’s that taste of bile again, he thinks helplessly, hand finding the charm again. Rukh leans in to nuzzle him. He shifts a little, trying desperately to stay present. 
        It mostly just leads to darker thoughts. She’s cold to the touch, but that doesn’t help, actually. He’d thought it would. Reassurance that it’s not his fault, that if he’d been just a little bit faster, it wouldn’t have saved her.
        It doesn’t. Because now all he can think about is how long she’d tried to hold out, with help not coming. How she must have been so scared, and how she had to have endured excruciating pain there, before the end, assuming the spell hadn’t twisted that, too. It doesn’t help that he gets it, because while it hadn’t been the same choice, he had decided to sacrifice himself to save his friends so his mind is suddenly a little too helpful at reminding him how that felt, the pain and terror and God he hadn’t wanted to die. He’d been reassured he doesn’t have to die here in this world, but she didn’t have that same reassurance, the same protection.
        “Uhh, Desmond?” Nate nudges him gently, and points, and—huh, yeah, that sure looks like someone trying to write something on the floor in the blood, except the problem is there’s no one there. Not even a visible ghost. Bob is trying to get a better look at what’s going on, and ends up slipping a little in the blood and smearing it across the floor.
        twins the something writes as they all stare.
        Is this more Draug magic, maybe? They had just been trying to lure people in, so maybe they think that only a human can get the piece of the artifact, wherever it (and, probably, the twins) have gone. “How do we know you’re not a trap?” he asks.
        The next thing written is >:(, which is kind of surreal to see in blood but doesn’t particularly answer the question. Rukh nips his ear again, and okay, yeah, stupid question, but work with him here, his brain isn’t super functional at the moment. It’s blue to Eagle Vision.
        “Are you...is that you?” He points at the body, and gets a yes in response.
        “I’m sorry we didn’t arrive in time to save you.” Because he’d been able to survive, and she hadn’t.
        no worry easy haunt. It’s unfortunately a little harder to communicate, like this, but. He has to guess, given that she’s friendly, she means that at least this made it easier for her to become a ghost and haunt the location, so at least she wasn’t completely helpless. It’s kind of messed up that a teenager would be thinking about her body as something to discard, but that also gives him a good idea of who she is.
        These aren’t tourists, are they? And they might not, strictly speaking, be locals, but that doesn’t mean they don’t live here now, given that Carter had mentioned there were dorms and the students lived on campus. “You’re from the Academy, aren’t you?” 
        Another yes.
        “And did all of you…” He should be able to talk about this, but he can’t even finish the sentence.
        myself or others, she elaborates, hand shaking for the first time like she’d been trying to stay positive and not think about what had happened, and that hurts. She didn’t want to hurt her friends, so she’d chosen to at least be useful after death. 
        This isn’t the effects of the siren song. That almost definitely means Draug magic—from the female Draug, maybe; they’d had a much less effective version of the siren song that wasn’t as thorough or as long-lasting, but maybe a little more varied in what it could do, and from a close distance, with a lot of them? They could almost definitely pull something like this off.
        “We’ll find your friends, and the artifact you found, and…” he considers. They probably can’t kill all of the Draug, but they’d gotten a lot of them around this one house, and in any case, leaving it all like this isn’t an option. “We’ll burn it all down. So you can move on.”
        after twins :) she agrees.
        Before he asks for directions, though, he guesses he should probably give her a little more hope. And it suddenly occurs to him what had probably given her this idea of how to still have some effect on the world around her. Fuck, adapting an already kind of messed up kid’s game to escape mind control is really, really messed up. Hell, if they’d been taught teleportation rather than astral projection, they could’ve made a run for it at least. They might’ve had a better chance, even if they couldn’t tap into the Anima Wells. He’s going to have a talk with Montag about the curriculum. Even if the guy won’t see sense, he’s pretty sure Miss Usher will care. “Carter made it, by the way. She’s fine.”
        :D !! Definitely surreal.
        “Okay, show us how to get to the twins,” he tells her, and predictably she draws an arrow, only now there’s more activity—a book on the dresser shaking, creaks on the stairs going up. She’s not the only one lingering here after death, and they’re all joining in, trying to help. He can see vague outlines in Eagle Vision only, but not enough of their sense of self survived to even form the ghost-forms Desmond’s gotten pretty used to fighting. Maybe that’s what causes the sorts of activity John Wolf is used to trying to exorcise. In the moment, though, they’re trying to save the twins, maybe the only two who actually made it. That thought’s even worse, that they’d tried to escape being used against their will, and even death isn’t enough to stop that. Desmond, with help, might be, though. Enough to actually bring them all peace and not just some illusion brought on by a temporary quiet. He stops to close more eyes on the bodies they pass—in the kitchen, at each other’s throats, draped over the base of the stairs—and that’s when the Draug start hammering on the front door again. Instantly some of the ghostly activity stops, moving away. He gets the feeling that some of them are actually going to attempt to use telekinesis or whatever to fight the Draug, and wishes them luck silently, running upstairs, the others close behind.
        The bedroom is in mostly better shape than the rest of the house, in that there’s only a little blood and a couple pieces of broken furniture. It still looks like there was a fight here, though, with clothes strewn all over the floor like someone had been urgently hunting through the suitcase, just abandoned on what remains of the bed, and the laptop is cracked and broken. Desmond spots what they’re looking for pretty quickly, between the poltergeist activity and the Eagle Vision. He might have been able to figure it out from the body slumped in front of the wardrobe, but it also looks so natural that without the context he might have assumed it was just where the teen happened to die, rather than a probable last-ditch attempt to try to protect the twins. Desmond’s the one who moves the body, laying him down on the bed. He’d thought that the Animus was pretty close to reality, but he’s starting to second-guess that assumption, like a lot of the other assumptions he’d had; just because he had a sense of smell in the Animus doesn’t mean it’s perfect. In this case, while he’d gotten used to the smell of death, he’s starting to think it had been muted. Probably mercifully so, honestly.
        Opening the wardrobe once the body is finally out of the way, he finds some sort of rune or sigil or whatever, painted on the inside of the back with blood. It’s starting to dry, gold to Eagle Vision and dull to everything else. Nate consults with Ligeia, who had apparently decided her granddaughter had suffered enough, and between them they work out the spell to get them into what turns out to be a pocket dimension. 
        Stepping inside, it’s more what Desmond would expect an alternate dimension would look like, a black void where every step sparkles and the walls aren’t always visible. It’s not exactly cold, but it is cool, the kind of cool of a cellar, maybe? No air stirs inside, to the point Desmond would question if there even is air if not for the fact that he’s obviously breathing something. The two are practically straight in front of them, but attempting to go that way gets them nowhere, because there’s a wall in their way. More than once they bump into the walls, which feel kind of like a spongy glass, a shimmering ripple traveling outwards from the point of impact, as other walls swirl with shimmering asymmetric waves in no discernible pattern. Desmond’s trying not to think about the fact that the shimmer of their footsteps looks redder than the ones in the walls. He’s not sure if this dimension picks up the blood like that. 
        Desmond tries to look for the correct path using Eagle Vision and panics slightly when it’s just...not there. He’s reaching out with the Calculations before he knows it (that’s becoming a bad habit, honestly, he needs to stop doing that as a reflex, particularly when he’s still trying to recover and might have a fight or something coming up), and to his relief it’s still there, but it feels like it’s...stuck on the other side of the portal, or something. Rukh actually croaks a couple of times loudly, like he’s comfortable voicing his frustration now that he’s fairly sure he won’t be heard. It’s interesting he’s having issues here, too. Nate’s mumbling under his breath trying to remember how to solve mazes, and from what little Desmond can tell there’s something about how to solve it depending on whether the walls connect to the outside or not, but Bob perks up, tentacles tasting the air, and then starts trotting off, actually tugging at the leash a little. Desmond isn’t sure if he has mysterious maze-solving abilities or if he just has some kind of senses that the rest of them don’t, but either way, it’s very helpful.
        The teenage girl looks fine, other than not being awake. Nate assures him that she’d basically just put herself and her brother in a magical stasis in order to keep them both safe hopefully long enough for whatever magic the Draug had used to wear off. To Desmond, that basically just reads as ‘coma’. Like after Roma. Her brother, on the other hand, is barely breathing. At this point, Desmond has seen way too much death here and refuses to let that get worse, so he just kind of...shoves healing magic back into the kid, and doesn’t think about it twice.
        Nate takes the girl, and Desmond hoists the boy into a carry—it’ll be easier to make sure he’s stabilized and heal him more if it’s necessary, this way. It’s harder to shuffle back following Bob, Alice holding the leash, but they manage.
        Unfortunately, he’d been partly right, right in that the Draug chanting outside in what Desmond guesses is Old Norse is blocking them from just teleporting, which conversely means that maybe there’s nothing wrong with the Academy’s lessons after all. Wait, no, that’s probably swinging a bit too far the other direction. Probably a lot of things are wrong, but this isn’t necessarily one of them, though he’ll double check with Miss Usher, maybe. And Carter had said she hadn’t learned something else yet. About blocking mind control or something, right? Moving both those lessons up might be really, really important.
        Fortunately, the instant they come back out, Desmond instantly goes into Eagle Vision, startling him a little but luckily not enough to drop the kid, and from Rukh’s little excited flapping he’s got his back, too. And then they have to improvise.
        “Okay, I think I can spot the Draug keeping us here,” Desmond updates them, glancing carefully out the window. “Nate, help me move the wardrobe in front of the door and you and Alice keep them from getting in here, whatever happens. Lydia, you and I are going to snipe the Draug I point out.”
        “I’m not Lydia, at the moment, but I can certainly do that. You don’t even need to point them out, young man,” her grandmother tells him, voice nothing but the promising crackle prelude to a raging bonfire and yeah, that’s an idea. They get to work.
        Honestly, it’s kind of twisted fun. Sure, there’s a timeline and they’re working against the clock and it’s an issue. But also that panic feels far behind him, now. He doesn’t have to overthink this, can just be good at this, and aside from one shaky moment where their miniature siren song manages to reach him and daze him for a moment, they’re not made for distance fights like this. A normal gun probably couldn’t do this. He’s not sure if it’s a special gun or if he’s just channeling more into it, like Rebecca had said what feels like forever ago, because a headshot or even a couple headshots hasn’t been enough before now. Maybe he’s just getting used to it, like exercising a muscle. Still, it’s a little closer than he would like, because he can hear them tromping up the stairs now.
        He waves Nate back over. His connection to the Anima Wells is going to be really useful again, given that he’s not sure if the twins even could teleport, let alone while neither of them are still conscious. “Get them to help. Ligeia, you too—take Bob with you. Alice and I have a little more to do here.” He keeps shooting, though fortunately the Draug have become wary and are backing off when they’re not edging around the side of the house to come in the side door and join the ones now splintering through the wood.
        “They must be honored,” she agrees fiercely.
        “Stay safe,” Nate tells him. It’d kind of nice to have evidence that Nate cares, because it’s an honest request, not just a platitude.
        “Rukh, you don’t happen to have any more bombs on you, do you?” Rukh clacks his beak, as if saying really, tilts his head, and then pounces, flying back carefully. Desmond vaguely recognizes it as one of those compressed air canisters that Rebecca had been using to try to keep the dust out of her computers. The ones that say ‘danger’ and ‘container may explode if heated’. He grins. Okay, it’s official, his bird is awesome. Two different ways to play it—but getting out is probably the most important part. Alice gets to really indulge her pyromaniac tendencies now. “I’m going to throw this and you’re going to set it on fire midair, okay? Then I jump out the window, and you’re going to follow me, and I’ll catch you. Then, you set the house on fire. Any ghosts still listening, fire’s a thing poltergeists can do, right? Wall sockets, the oven, anything you can get your hands on.”
        The lamp shakes and then turns on, starts glowing, so he figures that’s a yes from the ghosts among them who don’t happen to be writing. It’s only after he finishes saying it that he realizes it might have been insensitive, given that they don’t exactly even have hands anymore, but there’s no real time to worry about that. Alice nods, tucking the knife away carefully.
        It’s not a big distraction, but it’s bright and flashy and it seems like the Draug, being weird lobster-zombie things from the sea, aren’t particularly good with fire, so it works just as well as he’d hoped. A drop from the second floor is easy, and Alice grins at him when he catches her and sets her down. No hesitation, no fear. He turns and starts shooting to keep the Draug at bay. It’s a lot easier when it’s mostly just the melee types left, though it looks like they’ve got reinforcements coming from the sea. Desmond wouldn’t call fighting to the other two houses easy, and he’s definitely going to have to heal himself from a particularly nasty gash on his arm, but honestly, given how it could have gone, he’ll take it. The Draug are getting sloppy, furious at what they’ve managed to accomplish, and he and Ligeia had probably managed to take out a few of their leaders, too, so they’re disorganized. 
        A funeral pyre is kind of old-fashioned, but it’s all they can do at the moment. He’s going to learn their names when he visits the Academy again, at least. “I hope this brings you some peace,” Alice puts her hand in his as they watch as long as he dares before they teleport away to the nearest Anima Well.