Chapter Text
Finn remembers the day he realised for the first time that the spirit of his best friend, Robin Arellano, is stuck behind the mirrors around him. He doesn’t remember it very well, but he remembers it.
He remembers the sting of blood in his nostrils as he staggers out of that damn basement and that damn house, the numbers of Griffin’s bicycle lock still reverberating in his head, over and over and refusing to quit. He remembers Gwen’s scent accompanying that sting, her tiny arms clutching him, her head leaning against his shoulder as they sat on the step of the ambulance, the distant sounds of shouting and orders and demands echoing around them. He remembers looking at the guilt and sorrow in his father’s eyes and not knowing what to do with it, glancing up to see the bodies being carried out of the house across the road and feeling too worn out to count them.
He remembers the hospital, being placed in an individual room, Gwen’s hand so tight around his fingers they begin to lose circulation as a harried doctor rattles off the long list of ailments plaguing Finn to his father, both of them standing just outside the door. He remembers the snatches of conversation from the nurses bustling around him, the whispers of in a coma, and poor boy, and medical miracle, how did he survive that long, and practically brain dead if anything.
He remembers asking Gwen and her saddened stare right back as she explains it to him.
Robin hadn’t been buried. Robin had been left to die, for an entire week, stacked on top of the other boys’ buried bodies, his wounds sluggishly bleeding. And for an entire week he’d somehow hung on, defeating the odds, helpless and alone and lost. As it was, he had been hanging on by a thread that had been a second from snapping, had Gwen’s vision not found him in time.
He’d spoken in that phone call like he was already gone. Slipped from the planet of the living, life cruelly cut into pieces like the strings of a puppet. This is our last call, Finn. The echoes of his words ring in Finn’s ears and he remembers clenching his fists in the blanket, fighting down a rising wave of bile.
“They don’t think he’ll wake,” Gwen says softly, trying to cushion the blow and failing. Finn feels it like a kick in the chest, a last punch in the throat from the Grabber in the afterlife. Even from beyond, his spectre haunts him. Refuses to leave. “It’s already a miracle he lived that long.”
“I need to see him,” Finn says hoarsely. “Gwen, please- my best friend- I need to-”
“You need to rest,” Gwen says in that firm tone she’d gotten from their mother. There’s no one else she could have gotten it from. “Sleep, Finn. You look like you’re already dead.”
Finn remembers thinking momentarily of arguing back. Thinks of snapping, of saying I’m already dead, of ripping the IV out and storming out of the door, Gwen be damned. But then the medicine must have kicked in, because he blinks and the next thing he remembers is waking up in a cold and lonely hospital room, visiting hours very obviously over and the lights turned off.
He really needs to use the toilet so he rips the IV out, idly making plans to sneak out to wherever the comatose body of his best friend is, and clambers out of bed. The medicine’s made him feel drowsy and ill and he staggers over the cold linoleum floor in a way he hadn’t done once while actually held captive in the basement, dragging his feet and feeling his way around for support. He flicks the bathroom light on, does his business, and hobbles over to the sink, looking in the mirror to see-
To see Robin’s face. Over his shoulder. Bloody tank top, washed-out skin, ghostly eyes staring at him.
The reaction is automatic. Finn’s nerves are already frayed at that point and he’s swaying on his feet like a strong breeze could knock him out cold. The bathroom’s so freezing cold it makes him feel as if he’s stepped into an icebox, and his dead best friend is standing in the mirror looking at him. He screams on instinct, the shriek tearing its way out of his throat, and Robin’s shaking his head in the mirror frantically, running forward until he has both palms flat against the surface. He looks terrified and desperate, bottom lip trembling and fingers shaking, and all Finn can do is feel the rising wave of anxiety and terror bubble up within him, threatening to crest over.
“No, no- Finn, buddy, it’s me. It’s me,” he begs, as Finn shuts his mouth and claps his hand over his trembling lips, feeling a sob attempt to work its way out. “Don’t go, please, please, please, please-”
It would be too much for a grown man to handle, let alone a thirteen-year-old. Finn falls to his knees and starts sobbing, screaming, gasping and crying- no no no please please please
-just as the nurse rushes in, helping him up from the floor and back to bed, tutting worriedly at the state of him and telling him that everything is going to be okay.
He remembers feeling Robin’s eyes on his back the whole way, his pleas echoing in Finn’s ears like a sonorous drum.
*
Finn’s discharged after three days.
He doesn’t visit Robin once. He avoids mirrors too, for an entire week.
Being in school feels like a fever dream. They’ve hung up a banner with the dead kids’ faces on it- as if a hideously painted piece of art, drawn like an afterthought, like something they’d pencilled in after a long list of duties, can bring Bruce or Vance or Griffin or Billy back. His teachers treat him like a charity case, and it feels nice for only about two classes before he actively starts wishing for the opposite. His bullies give him a wide berth for once, following him around with wary, slightly fearful eyes, and no homophobic slurs echo in the space around him because he’s above that now, obviously. Since he killed the Grabber.
Instead, the whispers that dog his heels take a more malicious turn.
“I heard he hacked the Grabber to pieces.”
“He must be a psycho.”
“There’s something wrong with him, I always knew it.”
When lunch rolls around, he heads for a thicket of trees behind the school- right by the fence. No street in sight, no vehicles, just the trees and the sky and his sad lunch tray of extras the cafeteria lady gave him with tears glittering in her eyes. Finn dumps the mashed up potatoes out onto the grass, eats half of the sandwich before his stomach cramps, and tries not to think about whispers or basements or rolled-up mats or a trailing cable wire or mirrors or- or Robin.
He does a lot of purposeful not-thinking about Robin that whole week. Not thinking about his shadowy, desperate stare over Finn’s shoulder in the mirror, the blood staining his tank top, his bandana slightly skewed to the left. Not thinking about his pleas ringing in Finn’s ears, the way his palms looked as they pressed against the mirror, his fear leaking into the air of the bathroom and turning it stale. Not thinking about his large brown eyes, still pretty in their distressed state. Not thinking about the nurses who had whispered about him like he was already a statistic.
Gwen doesn’t get the hint, because on one of their walks home, she turns to him and says determinedly, “You need to visit him.”
Finn twists his hands in the straps of his backpack and kicks at the rocks by his feet. “I don’t-”
“Stop being a pussy,” Gwen says flatly. She’s the only person who refuses to treat Finn like a ticking time-bomb about to explode, or a shivering Victorian-era child laid up with the plague. Finn appreciates it most times, but not right now. “I’m telling Dad. He’ll bring us.”
“If he’s not buried in a bottle by the time we get home,” Finn mutters- rather unfairly, because their father’s now seven days sober and counting- and then wilts at the look Gwen gives him. “Fine, fine. Fuck. Why are you so…”
He trails off, but Gwen seems to understand what he’s getting at either way. To her credit, she doesn’t get offended or cuss him out like she’d do anyone else in Finn’s position- instead, her mouth twists as if trying to hide a smile. “Because no one else is,” she says, and he grins reluctantly in response.
True to her words, all it takes is one soft query over dinner- gently, hesitantly asked, because Finn cannot and will not bring himself to trust his father’s apparent change in personality- and the senior Blake agrees to bring them to the hospital during the weekend. “I need to bring you for your sessions, anyway,” he says, and the non-sequitur is so mystifying it takes a second to register.
But register it does, and Finn’s pushing back from the table and shaking his head in a way that would have gotten him the belt if his father had been his inebriated self. “No,” he says, continuing to vigorously his head and ignoring Gwen’s wide eyes, her silent request for him to shut the fuck up immediately. “No, Dad, I’m not- I don’t want to see a fucking shrink!”
“It’s not up for debate,” his father snaps, his voice so sharp that Finn quietens down instantly, his mouth closing shut with an audible click. But then his voice cracks and the effect’s diminished a little. He rubs his hand over his face, down the exhausted lines marring his skin, and exhales, the noise blowing out of his mouth in a loud puff of air. “Finney, please-”
“No,” Finn says, but he can tell it’s no use- it’s like his father’s not even listening, Finn’s protests going in one ear and out the next. All he does is stand up and clear the plates quietly, running a careful hand over Finn’s head in a touch that’s alien to everybody in the room. Finn has to go up to his own room after that, closing the door and guarding himself against his father’s self-deprecation and his baby sister’s judgement- leaving it ajar with a tiny gap, because he can’t handle locked doors. Not yet.
They go after school one day. The session is awful because Finn makes it awful- he’s never been the sort of kid to sit insolently and disobediently in front of a trusted adult, blatantly refusing to follow instructions. But that was Finney, the one who got kidnapped by a serial killer dressed up as a magician, held captive in a basement for a horrifying, terror-soaked week, successfully escaping by conversing with the dead. Finn’s the one who made it out, this abomination of a shade who can’t find in himself the energy or respect to abide by the words of the adults who failed him. Who failed his best friend.
Each question is met with monosyllables. Single words, yes, no, I don’t know. Finn keeps his gaze fixed on the far wall and doesn’t flinch when the therapist tells him she hopes to see a more trusting and forthcoming version of him next week.
His father takes him to see Robin afterwards. Finn doesn’t have the appropriate amount of time to prepare himself- in the lift going up, his father asks him how the session went and he answers in monosyllables again; fine. It was okay. Terrence Blake’s face twists in regret and sorrow as if he’d expected to hear something different from the shadow of a son he got back from the Grabber, and Finn looks away before he says something he will regret, something completely unfair on the man before him who does seem like he’s trying. Something like go back to caring like how you did before- not at all.
So he doesn’t prepare himself adequately enough, and gets shocked to the core, when he enters the room to see a version of Robin he’s never seen before.
This alien, foreign version of Robin has no bandana holding the soft strands of his hair back from his forehead and is hooked up to a billion machines, tiny in the bed in a way he hadn’t been when he was awake and breathing, beating up bullies for Finn with a smirk on his face, looking infuriatingly beautiful all the while. His skin is washed out, waxy-pale and white, oxygen mask fogging over from time to time, lashes casting shadows over the skin beneath his eyes.
Finn’s legs start shaking so much his dad gets a good grip on his arm and helps him walk over. His brother is slumped over in the chair next to Robin’s pillow, asleep- the last time Finn had seen Ernesto had been before he was taken himself, frantically handing out flyers to anybody who’d bother and averting his eyes furiously when they’d throw it in the dumpster. His mother’s seated in the chair, ever-vigilant and pale, and when Finn approaches she stands up immediately to wrap him in a warm embrace.
“Oh, sweet boy,” she whispers. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine,” Finn whispers back, before he’s led to sit in the chair Mrs Arellano had recently vacated.
Seated in the chair, he watches Robin breathe, chest moving up and down slightly, calm and small in a way that unnerves him. He places his hand near Robin’s, the space between them feeling like an impenetrable gulf, and idly eavesdrops on Mrs Arellano’s quiet conversation with his father, registering only small patches of words-
“…nightmares, don’t know what to do…”
“…will help, maybe…”
“…been here everyday…”
-and he looks at Robin in comatose sleep, refusing to wake up to the world around him. Robin doesn’t curl his fingers around his hand when he dares to breach the gulf and hold him, still and quiet with his eyes closed and his breaths steady. The tears don’t register until Mrs Arellano’s rushing over to wipe his face and say helplessly, “Oh, Finney, it’s going to be okay. Don’t cry, baby.”
“I miss him,” Finn tells Mrs Arellano’s shoulder, as Robin sleeps on, the beeping of the machines infernal and aggravating in a way the phone’s ringing had been. He thinks of Robin’s voice- crackling but firm over the speaker, telling him to fight. He thinks of the mirror, of Robin’s bone-white face pleading with him to stay. He thinks of all the times the energy between them had crackled with something more, something unsaid, how that has been irreversibly perverted by what was done to them in the basement.
“I do, too,” Mrs Arellano says gently, with the cadence of a woman comforting her comatose son’s guilt-stricken best friend, completely unaware of said friend glimpsing her son in mirrors.
*
It’s after a bad nightmare in the middle of the same night he went to see Robin that Finn finally sees his best friend in the mirror again.
He doesn’t even remember what the nightmare had been about- he rarely does. All he remembers is snatches of hands roaming over places where they shouldn’t be, badly done eggs rotting in his mouth, hot breath over his neck and the sensation of being trapped until he’s dying from it. Finn wakes up with hot bile in his throat and he has five seconds to run to the bathroom before he’s upchucking his dinner violently, bits of undigested food that sat uncomfortably in his stomach now sinking into the toilet.
He somehow uses the toilet bowl for leverage to heft himself back up, stumbling across the freezing floor to the sink. He splashes cold water on his face, rinses his mouth until he can no longer taste the Grabber’s eggs, and looks up.
Robin stares back at him from the mirror over the sink, forlorn and sorrowful.
“Hey,” he says softly, voice gentle. “That was fucking nasty, dude.”
For a second, Finn takes him in- the washed out shade of his skin, almost skeletal in the way it’s contrasted against the monochrome colours of the bathroom, the blood on his tank top and that bandana around his head lightly speckled with blood. He still looks- he still looks like the same boy who makes Finn’s cheeks grow hot with want, heart flip-flopping on itself.
Robin’s also missing his belt, and the realisation makes something hot and sour curdle in Finn’s stomach. “How,” he croaks. “You said- you said that was our last call.”
“I didn’t know,” Robin says simply. He sounds just the same as he did back in the basement. Confident, matter-of-fact, determined to get Finn out; but it’s now at odds with the exhaustion and sorrow in his eyes, the way his hands shake before he stuffs them in the pockets of his jeans. “Swear down. One moment I was with the boys, next I’m here. In this- this room, all by myself, looking at this-”
“Mirror,” Finn says softly. “I saw you in the mirror of the hospital bathroom, and now you’re here in my house.” He makes himself comfortable- drags a chair in the corner to the front of the sink and curls up on it, tucks his legs beneath him. Robin sits down too, ducking out of frame briefly to drag what looks like the same chair in Finn’s bathroom, before sitting on it, pressing his palm flat against the surface of Finn’s mirror.
“You’re in a coma,” Finn adds, and he runs a hand over his face, scratching at a cut on his chin. “And you’re here in my mirror. Any mirror I look into.”
“Switched one hell for another,” Robin jokes, but the joke falls flat. His face almost crumples before he rearranges it again- makes a mask settle over it, that weird calmness and confidence settling on his skin. Finn’s throat is sore, a lump blocking his airways as he thinks of confident Robin, self-assured Robin, his Robin- stuck in this room with nothing but a mirror for company. Only visible to Finn and no one else.
They talk for the rest of the night. Small nothings- Robin asks how his family is doing, how his mother is coping, if Gwen is doing okay. He even asks about Donna, and Finn tells him to not be an idiot. “We’re just lab partners,” he says, and Robin scoffs like he doesn’t believe it, his lips tightening in this grimace unfamiliar to Finn.
He asks about the bullies. Finn tells him about the grudging looks of respect they wore when he’d walked into the school for the first time after the kidnapping, how they’re avoiding him for now, because no one in their right mind fucks with a kid who broke the neck of a fully grown man, never mind a man who killed four kids and did his best to kill two more. Robin nods firmly at that, as if he’d been about to give them a piece of his mind if their reactions had been any different. There’s even a little bit of pride in the softness of his eyes as he gazes at Finn with the type of gaze he’d never give anyone else. Finn basks in it, drinking in the warmth that he enjoys by being in the center of Robin’s single-minded attention.
The conversation begins petering off in the early hours of the morning when Finn starts punctuating his words with jaw-cracking yawns. Robin tells him to go and get some rest, even if Finn doesn’t particularly want to, a desperation in his chest telling him to cling to Robin. “You’re gonna fall over,” Robin says pointedly. “I’m not going anywhere, Finn. I’m stuck here.”
The realisation sobers Finn up. He walks over and presses his hand against the mirror, meets the aged sorrow in Robin’s dark, haunting eyes. “I’ll get you out,” he says, feeling the promise sink into his bones, true and solid. “I promise.”
“Careful,” Robin says, and this time, he cracks the first grin of the night. “Don’t go making promises you can’t keep.”
*
Unfortunately, Robin’s more right than Finn wants to admit. On the way to school, he tries to come up with a plan to save his best friend- and ends up with absolutely nothing. He’s wandering into this blind and without help, nothing to go by except for the knowledge that Robin’s spirit is apparently stuck in a realm with a mirror looking into the real world, a mirror only Finn can peer into. There’s no book he can consult, no expert he can contact, no call he can make.
It’s no surprise that his mind is fully blank.
“Hey,” Gwen says sharply. She’s a lot more attentive to him these days, in a way she hadn’t been before- before. She hasn’t been to Susie’s for a sleepover since he’d left the basement and solidly refuses to take a monosyllabic answer as the truth whenever she asks him a question about anything. That morning, she’d watched him with hawk-like eyes over breakfast as he’d picked through toast and left his glass of milk half-drunk.
Finn knows that she’d found him with the help of her dreams- knows that his kidnapping has left her with scars, too. Maybe lighter than his, but scars all the same.
“Talk to me,” Gwen continues, hopping over a crack in the pavement. “Why are you quiet?”
Finn ponders whether it would be worth it to pick her brain, then decides to throw caution to the wind. “Do you… hypothetically, uh. Know how to get spirits out of mirrors?”
Gwen stops in her tracks, and turns fully on her heels to stare at him.
He winces. That had sounded just as insane as it did inside his head. “Comatose people, specifically,” he clarifies, digging the hole even deeper.
They decide to skip their respective first periods, sitting in the bleachers as Finn spells it out explicitly for Gwen. The mirrors, the conversation with Robin, Finn’s not-promise. By the end of it, Gwen looks thunderstruck, as if she’s been hit on the head with a truck. Finn can sympathise- not every day your recently kidnapped brother asks you for help to save the spirit of his comatose best friend from being trapped inside a mirror.
“And you’re sure it’s him?” Gwen asks for what must be the tenth time, twisting her fingers together anxiously. “It is him, trapped?”
“Positive,” Finn says heavily, looking down at his shoes. They’re a new pair that his father bought him the other day- another poorly disguised attempt at making up for the past. Finn doesn’t know whether to tell him to knock it off or ride the new wave of faux kindness for however long it will last. “So- you got any ideas? On how to help him?”
Gwen bites her lip, looking mystified. “I don’t know,” she says helplessly, and Finn’s heart crashes into a pit somewhere miles below his ribcage, splattering into pieces. “Oh, Finney-”
“It’s Finn,” he says, and pretends not to see her look of pity.
“I haven’t had any dreams, but I can pray for some,” Gwen says, and curls her hand over his elbow in a grip that’s meant to be comforting. Maybe before, it would have been. The Finn of the present finds little comfort in anything these days.
“Thank you,” he says anyway, and tries to smile in gratitude. He’s not sure if he pulls it off- smiling feels foreign on his face, like pulling at taut, breakable strings on a janky, broken-down machine.
“We’ll find a way,” she says resolutely, and bites her lip. “I wonder…”
Her voice trails off and after a few seconds of waiting for her to continue, Finn clears his throat. “Wonder what?”
“Well, sometimes- I read that sometimes, patients in a coma don’t wake up because of something mental,” Gwen explains, turning fully to fix him with a dour, serious expression in her eyes. Her mouth is pressed into a thin line, severe. “Like, they’ve trapped themselves into not waking up. That’s why they encourage the family and friends of comatose patients to talk, you know. Because it’s encouragement.”
It sounds like a big pile of baloney to Finn and he says so, ignoring her scowl. “Robin would never trap himself,” he adds, thinking of the blood on his tank top, the clammy white of his skin, his palm pressed against the mirror. Most damning of all, the desperation in his eyes, the way they only went soft when they looked at him. “If it was up to him, he’d be awake by now.”
“I don’t know,” Gwen says carefully, cautiously, like she’s speaking to a spooked animal. That’s another thing everyone around Finn does right now, whether he wants it or not- they treat him with the softest of kid gloves, handling him like he’s about to shatter at any moment. Gwen doesn’t do it often, which is why it hurts even more when she does do it. “He suffered in that basement, and then he was left to die slowly. That’s bound to leave a mark.”
Her words are haunting, each of them hitting its mark. Finn swallows and clenches his hands around his knees, thinking of the phone call in the basement. Thinking of the way Robin had looked when he’d told Finn not to make promises he can’t keep. Thinking of the sorrow in his best friend’s eyes as they avoided the elephant in the room, the Grabber’s cruelty hanging over them like Damocles’ sword.
Robin can’t possibly be doing it to himself, Finn thinks. Because in the real world, he has his family, he has his brother and mother and uncle- and most importantly, he has Finn. Finn, who would kill for him, who would die for him, who would give anything to have him in his arms again.
But how sure can he be of that, of Robin not doing it to himself? Living in the real world post-Grabber, after all, is not as easy as it sounds. It’s nightmares and blood terrorising each night, throwing up at the slightest smell of eggs, ducking out of convenience stores at the sight of a green soda bottle and collapsing to his knees at the first glimpse of a black vehicle speeding past and-
Finn should know.
“Think about it, at least,” Gwen says gently, hand on his elbow like a soothing balm papering over the cracks.
*
Finn lands himself in detention one day.
To his credit, he can’t exactly recall how it happens- and he’s well aware that at some point, he’s going to have to deal with the fact that his memory has become incredibly patchy since the basement.
One minute he’s in line at the cafeteria and he can hear Matty’s gang at a table a few steps across, whispering snidely while looking at him. He can’t hear it all, but with his fingers clenched around the edges of his tray, and his eyes staring dead across, he catches a few stray words- Robin and too weak and can’t be that bad if he got out and pathetic.
He’s good at ignoring cruel words, is the thing. Honed that skill when these same bullies lobbed words like knives at his back, day after day after day, slapping the label of slurs on him and making them stick for the rest of the school. So he does that- he lets the words wash over him and pretends he’s somewhere else.
He’s not so good at ignoring what comes after, the unforgivably hateful bite of yeah, Robin Arellano’s probably gonna fucking die. Who’d miss that beaner?
A peculiar, red haze settles over his eyes. His fingers ache right before he throws the tray down onto the floor of the cafeteria, and he barely registers the loud clang of it, everyone around him turning to look at him, before the haze envelopes him completely. He blinks and he’s on the floor straddling Matty, hands aching and knuckles covered in blood, Matty covering his face and whimpering for him to stop. His useless fucking friends are all around him and they’re either on the floor or cowering away.
The crowd’s gathered around him too and all the kids around him, kids who usually looked away when he’d turn up with bruises courtesy of the bullies he’s now beating into submission, are cheering him on, because they’re always there for a spectacle. Finn looks around at their gleeful grins, at their fists pumping the air, at the shouts of give it to him, Finney! and hit him harder, hit him harder and swallows so roughly he feels knives scrape the sides of his throat.
The more blood the better, Robin says in Finn’s head, self-confident smirk audible in his voice, because it isn’t enough that he speaks to him in mirrors. Finn stares down at Matty’s shattered nose and the tear tracks on his cheeks, and something in him breaks cleanly in two.
He steps away just as the teachers rush in, and says, “Mention Robin’s name again, and I break your fucking neck.”
Matty cowers and nods pathetically. Finn can’t even find it in himself to feel victorious at that, making a bully bend under his heel- he just feels curiously hollow.
The teachers don’t want to punish a recently kidnapped kid but they need to set an example anyway. He’s given detention- which he has to tell an incredibly unimpressed Gwen, encouraging her to go home early.
“Is this how you plan to help Robin?” Gwen asks acerbically, because she’s never learned to let some battles go. “By landing yourself in detention?”
“I was defending him,” Finn mutters, and turns away before she has any other retort that’s going to get under his skin.
Detention is boring. He’s given a math worksheet and he finishes that in ten minutes. So he twirls his pen for about an hour, thinking of everything and nothing- of the fight, of the red haze and how he doesn’t remember breaking Matty’s nose, of how his classmates had looked at him in the crowd with that savage glee on their faces, of Robin and his blood-stained tank top and the way his hair curls at the ends of it, dusting his shoulders, fragile and lovely.
His thoughts drift. He thinks of what it would be like to trace the lines of Robin’s face with his fingers, to kiss Robin, and to hold him in his arms properly. And then he stamps the thought down, beating it into submission just like he’d beaten Matty.
At some point, Finn folds his arms on his table and decides to take a nap, because the thoughts in his head are spinning in circles and he wants to stop them before they reach the basement.
He opens his eyes some time later, and he’s all alone in the room. The substitute teacher is gone, the clock on the wall is frozen in time and there is an eerie silence that would make a pencil dropping sound like a bomb blast. He looks to his left and it’s-
Vance Hopper. Dead, very dead Vance Hopper, hair matted with blood, shirt torn and bloodstained, a sneer distorting his features.
“Look at you, asshole,” he says, drumming his fingers on the desk, one leg over the other. His voice is purposefully light, but there’s a slight edge to it. Like he’s barely holding himself back from punching Finn in the face. “Can’t believe you’re the one who got out.”
Finn doesn’t respond to the jab, focusing on the very obvious elephant in the room. “Why are you here?” he asks, frowning. “You’re dead.”
“Yeah, thanks for the reminder, shithead,” Vance retorts, rolling his eyes. “But this is a dream. Didn’t you realise?”
At his words, Finn looks around. The clock is a dead giveaway, as is the creepy emptiness of the room, the complete lack of sounds from students milling about outside. His worksheet from before is gone- so is his bag and weirdly enough, his shoes. It’s definitely a dream.
So why is he seeing Vance Hopper in his dream?
“Gee, asshole, I don’t wanna see you either,” Vance snaps, and Finn realises he’s said it out loud. He refuses to apologise- the last time he had a one-on-one conversation with the other boy, he’d nearly been deafened. He should be excused for being less than enthused at the prospect of seeing him again. “Believe it or not, I was very happy to be where I was. But I was told to deliver a message so unfortunately, dickhead, I’m here in your dream.” He pauses for dramatic effect, and says, “You have to help him. You have to help Robin.”
All this for something Finn already knows? He feels like storming out of the room, away from Vance and this dreamlike setting he’s grown to hate within the short time he’s been stuck here. “Didn’t know that,” he spits back, irritable. “Thanks for the advice.”
“That’s not all, cocksucker,” Vance snaps, and leans forward so suddenly Finn automatically flinches. The sharp movement makes a nasty smile spread across the other boy’s face and he says, with no small amount of malicious relish, “You’re running out of time. You’re about to lose him.”
Everything in Finn runs cold. It’s so abrupt that he thinks he might freeze over, his blood solidifying to ice, making him lose his fingers and toes to frostbite, each limb falling off one by one. “What?” he breathes, shell-shocked.
At the obvious dismay on his face, Vance leans back and something in his expression softens. “The window is going to remain open for only so long, Blake. Sooner or later, he’s gonna leave. And you’ll lose him forever if you don’t act.”
Finn doesn’t bother questioning any part of the, quite frankly, mystifying sentence, and hones in on the most important part of Vance’s words. “Act- what do you mean, act? I don’t know what to do! I don’t know how to help him!”
Vance looks at him- serenely, for once. None of the aggression in his eyes, none of the rage showing up. For a second, Finn almost believes the other boy’s pitying him. And why wouldn’t he? Vance Hopper died cruelly at the hands of a psychopathic monster, but he’s moved on from it, moved to a realm where things are better for him, things are easier. Finn suffered cruelly at the hands of the same psychopathic monster and worst of all, he’s still alive, still suffering in a realm hell-bent on torturing the last bit of sanity he has out of him.
And Robin is torn between the two, for some reason Finn can’t even begin to fathom at.
“Act fast, Finney Blake,” Vance says, and this time his voice seems to reverberate around Finn, echoing and bouncing off the walls. “Time’s running out.”
He leans forward, flicking Finn on the forehead- and Finn opens his eyes to the slightly alarmed stare of the substitute teacher who’d been overseeing his detention. He has his hand on Finn’s shoulder, and has apparently been shaking him awake for the past few minutes.
“See the nurse on your way home,” the man suggests when Finn hands over his worksheet, refusing to meet his eyes out of a combination of shame, guilt, frustration and a million other things. “Your temperature- you feel like ice.”
*
Every night that week repeats itself like how it did that first night. Finn wakes up trapped in the throes of a nightmare he only vaguely remembers and staggers to the bathroom to throw up. Once he’s done, he sits in front of the mirror, and he and Robin talk.
They steer clear of the basement. They steer clear of the cruelty Robin went through, of the horrors Finn went through. They steer clear of the Grabber and the gigantic elephant in the room, the question of how the hell Robin can return to the land of the living. The one time Finn brings up visiting him in the hospital, Robin quickly changes the subject, skin around his eyes tightening with tension, and Finn gets the hint. Not yet.
One day, Finn asks Robin what the room he’s in looks like.
“What does it look like to you?” Robin asks- not sarcastic, but curious.
Finn picks at a scratch on his arm. He’d skipped school that day, taken an afternoon nap and woken up after a night terror to find himself scratching at his arm until it bled. When his father had come home, he hadn’t questioned the scratches- only stared at them with a heavy look full of things unsaid. Finn doesn’t know if he appreciates the silence or hates it.
“It looks like you’re in my bathroom,” he says easily. “You’re sitting in a corner on a chair. Behind you’s our medicine cabinet.”
Robin twists his mouth. “Alright,” he says, running a hand through his hair, and Finn thinks he’s about to let the topic go.
But then he continues, and the next words that come out of his mouth make Finn wish he hadn’t spoken at all.
“It looks like the basement all over again,” Robin says, matter-of-fact and sure, and Finn’s heart plummets towards the ground, crashing somewhere below the soles of his feet. “I mean, the bathroom works, there’s chairs and stuff- but the mattress from the basement is here. And there’s a window in the far corner. And the walls look the exact same.” He runs a hand over his face, and exhales noisily, his shoulders tensing up even further. “I hate it. I hate being stuck here.”
“You’re not in the basement,” Finn says, almost stumbling over his words in his haste to get them out. “You’re not- you’re here. You’re at the fucking hospital.”
“I know that, dude,” Robin snaps sharply, uncharacteristically so- in all the time Finn’s known him, he’s never snapped at him. At the expression on Finn’s face, Robin softens and leans forward until his forehead leans against the mirror. “But it looks like the basement. I don’t know, Finn. I don’t think I’m back there, but my eyes aren’t deceiving me.”
Finn swallows harshly, feeling bile rise up his throat again. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he ever blinked his eyes and found himself back at that hellhole of a place, the walls of the basement caging him in, the black phone in the corner connecting him to the dead and the nearly-dead as his only source of hope. He’d certainly deal with it a lot less calmly and graciously than Robin has. Of the two of them, his best friend has always been the stronger one, the braver one, the one more likely to stand his ground and fight- regardless of Finn’s newly-minted reputation as a murderer of serial killers.
“You know, at the back- there’s this door,” Robin says suddenly, and Finn jerks, looking up. “It calls to me. But I’m-” he swallows noisily, and suddenly looks even more unnerved than he has been this entire conversation, cheeks paling as he scratches viciously at a spot on his neck, leaving behind red marks. Finn, with a certainty that comes with knowing his best friend’s tics and tricks, abruptly knows that he doesn’t want to hear what Robin has to say next.
And he’s right. Robin shakes his head, huffs out a little scoff, and says in a tiny, vulnerable voice, “I’m scared. I’m so scared of the door, Finn. I’m scared of what’s behind it.”
Silence descends upon them, solid and unshakeable. Robin closes his eyes, his tan skin pale against the backdrop of Finn’s bathroom. His lashes cast the same dark shadows across the skin beneath his eyes just like it did at the hospital, and he still looks like the loveliest mirage Finn has ever set his eyes on. It makes something in his chest squeeze painfully, hurtling towards a destination he refuses to put a name to.
Finn rubs his fingers roughly over the scratches on his arm, relishing in the pain that comes from tearing one open and causing it to bleed. Tiny rivulets of stark-red blood that run down the skin of his arm, staining it in a facsimile of a grotesque map.
It’s this- mauling himself, viciously and unforgivingly- or confront the violent, sickening urge he has to break through the mirror, tug Robin close, hug him, contort his body around him and tuck his face into the crook between his shoulder and neck. Press his lips to his skin, drink in the fact that he’s here and solid and real. The thought itself is ridiculous- because Robin’s not here. He’s somewhere Finn can’t reach.
“We have to get you out,” Finn says softly, and Robin opens his eyes. Finn can’t help but think he’s beautiful in his sorrow. “Time’s running out. We have to get you out.”
“You can try,” Robin sighs, and swipes the back of his wrist across his eyes. It comes away wet. “Not sure it’s gonna make much of a difference.”
*
The morning after is spent in a haze. It’s been three weeks now since the basement- three weeks of Robin in a coma, wasting away with every passing day, his lifeline shortening with each passing second. Three weeks of speaking to him through a mirror, three weeks of night terrors and fights on the school ground because kids in middle school are demons descended from hell, three weeks of being unable to speak to his father and his father being unable to speak to him with their past hanging between them like a sharp-edged dagger. Vance Hopper’s coldly-delivered warning rings in his head and he’s unable to stomach his cereal, staring at the bits of cornflakes floating in the milk, until Gwen shakes his shoulder gently and tells him it’s time to leave.
“Spit it out,” Gwen says firmly, no room for hesitation, when they’re five minutes away from reaching school. “You’ve been in a mood all morning.”
Finn twists his sleeve between his fingers. All morning, he’s turned the events of the past three weeks over and over in his head. The shortening timeline of getting Robin back to him safely has been weighing on him, the pressure crushing his heart between its thick palms. And above it all is Robin’s voice, heavy from sorrow and heavy from pain- you can try. Not sure it’s gonna make much of a difference.
Robin’s been through so much- he’s been kidnapped, tortured, assaulted, trapped, left to die, and now trapped again. If it was Finn, he would have given up by now. The fear that Robin would- it clings to his veins like ice, freezing cold and unforgiving.
He needs all the help he can get to save Robin. So he spills everything about the dream and what Robin said after, watching as Gwen takes it all in with sharp eyes, no pity or sorrow or disbelief on her face. That’s the good thing about his sister- she leaps into action immediately, no time to waste on dithering about or hesitating.
“So what do you want to do?” Gwen asks, and Finn hesitates, biting his lip.
He’s known, for all of today, what he needs to do. Had tried to deny it at first, staring into his cereal and then trudging after Gwen down the dirt road that leads to their school. But he has to do something. And the something- and the something is horrible, but he’d do anything if it means saving Robin from the hell he’s trapped in.
“You might hate me for this,” he says softly, and winces as Gwen’s eyes turn a tad bit sharper.