Chapter Text
Before his self-preservation kicks in, Richie tackles Ruth to the floor. He barely gets them both out of the way of Grace’s attack. Her axe comes down hard against the classroom door. The blade slides through with ease, splinters spraying into their hair.
“What the hell are you doing?” Steph shouts. “You’re going to get someone killed!”
“That’s the point, Stephie,” Grace hisses.
“You almost hit me,” Ruth cries.
“Then get out of my way.”
Grace unlodges the hatchet and swings again. This time, not aiming for the door, but for Ruth.
Time slows down to a trickle as the axe descends on his best friend’s head. Richie can count each heartbeat in his ears. His breath escapes in a drawn out gasp. Ruth doesn’t run or even scream; she simply freezes.
Richie isn’t as scared to die so much as he is to end up the same amnesic spectre from before. The increasing time gaps, memories blurring into one continuous day, the pain of knowing he’s forgotten something important but unable to remember what. He doesn’t want that again. He’d do pretty much anything to avoid that fate again.
But he just loves Ruth too much.
Without thinking, he throws himself between Ruth and the blade.
Grace buries the axe in the junction between his shoulder and neck. The sick crack of his clavicle fills the air. Pain explodes through him like hot liquid, searing every nerve in his torso until he’s blind with it. No, pain is a weak fucking word for this: he’s in agony. His blood is like magma escaping his veins, hot and wild and explosive.
Richie lets out a choked yelp as the blade gets stuck in his chest. As soon as he catches his breath, he starts to scream. Hysterical, high-pitched, born deep from his gut.
The hatchet in his back causes him to lose his balance; he drops to his knees, hands hovering over the blade sticking out of his chest, stunned by the overwhelming pain. Ruth struggles to catch him as he collapses further. His vision blackens completely.
The axe audibly scrapes the bone of his shoulder blade, sending sharp fireworks of pain up his severed nerves. It lingers in constant and painful pins-and-needles as Grace roughly pulls it out. She slides the axe against his spine. Something inside of him bursts, a nerve bomb going off in his mind, then snaps like a rubber band stretched too thin.
And his legs completely give.
Time catches back up. Everyone erupts in chaos. Pete drops to Richie and Ruth’s side. He covers them with his body, like that’s going to do any good against a crazy axe murderer. Richie already proved that.
With a cherry-cheeked fury Richie’s never seen before, Steph runs towards Grace. Unfazed by what she’s done, Grace swings at the door again. Steph grabs the handle before it lands and wrestles for the axe. They jerk back and forth and back until Steph nails her in the nose with the handle.
The blow stuns Grace just long enough for Steph to get the axe away from her. She smacks the blunt end against Grace's face, and she falls like a stone and throws the axe aside.
After catching her breath, all of her attention is redirected to Richie.
Perhaps in a moment of clarity, Grace looks at Richie with sudden horror, the flush of rage draining from her cheeks. In that moment, he sees a piece of his friend again. Not the monster that’s taken her place, even with all the blood on her face.
“Oh, my…” She crawls forward, hands helplessly reaching for him. An arrow of fear strikes him. “Rich, I’m so sorry, I—”
“Get the fuck away from him!” Ruth shrieks. She grabs Pete’s fallen scalpel and poorly throws it at Grace, barely grazing her leg. She keeps throwing things from Pete’s backpack until Grace starts backing away, dodging pencils and erasers and more scalpels. “Stop! Don’t hurt us!”
“No, wait, I didn’t—I wasn’t aiming at… it was an accident.”
“Leave us alone!”
Ruth pulls Richie’s torso into her lap, his head cradled in her tiny hands. Blood blossoms from his chest in firework bursts, covering his front in red.
“Oh, fuck.” He cranes his neck down. Ruth pulls his head back up, but not before he sees the damage. “That’s not good.”
There is a gap where his shoulder and the rest of his body should meet. It’s difficult to call it a cut, as it feels too small of a word to describe the severity. Richie’s sure if he put his hand through the gap, he could fit it a few inches in without touching either side.
Steph covers her mouth with her hand, her face draining to a pale green. She struggles to get her flannel off and presses it to Richie’s chest. The spraying bleed doesn’t slow much; Richie can feel it leave his body in quick, hot pulses. Ruth just holds him in her arms while whispering things he can’t hear over the ringing, but it’s as much as she can do for him at the moment.
A copper heat fills his mouth, making Richie nauseas. He hiccups and tastes bile.
The pain gives way to this odd throbbing that reminds him of when he warms himself up by a fire after a day out in the snow. It’s cold and all encompassing, and he knows that feeling. Black creeps into the corners of his vision.
He prays they don’t lie to him and say everything's going to be fine. Richie knows what the spray means—Grace hit an artery.
“Oh, fuck me,” Pete says, sweat dripping from his face. He wipes his hands on his chest and starts to roll up his sleeves. “Steph, move your flannel a bit. Rich, this is gonna hurt. Like, a lot.”
Before any of them can ask what exactly is going to hurt, Pete thrusts his hand into the gash in Richie’s chest. Richie lets out a guttural scream, spitting up the blood rising from his throat to give way for air.
Ruth holds him down with a hand on his intact shoulder, her other arm fast around his waist. Steph grabs his legs, but they don’t kick and flail like he wants them to. Not even a twitch.
“What the hell are you doing?” she shouts.
“I took an anatomy class during the summer, remember?” Pete says in a squeaky, scared voice. “If I can pinch the artery, then maybe I can stem the bleeding.”
Richie feels Pete’s skinny fingers searching for the faulty wire inside his body, hitting him in blinding strikes each time he brushes a nerve or cut muscle, sending white sparks through his vision. A simultaneous landing of lightning and thunder makes Pete jump.
“Y’know, I never thought you’d be the first dude inside of me,” Richie says grimly.
“Seriously, Rich?” Pete grits out between his clenched teeth. “Right now?”
The sharp edge in his voice is one of terror and not malice. Richie was hoping to make him laugh, but now’s not the time for humor. Not when he’s bleeding out.
Ruth wipes the stress sweat from Richie’s foreheads. Her eyes… they’re not right. He knows they’re supposed to be brown, or at least hazel in the right light. But not blue. This type of blue doesn’t exist in the world outside of butterfly wings or carcinogenic candy. Bulbous tears bloom in the rims of her eyelids, falling in hot droplets.
Pete finally finds the source of the bleeding and pinches down. The consistent spray weakens to a trickle. His fingers twitch in time with Richie’s slowing heartbeat.
“Okay, I think I got it,” he says. “But the blow, it did a lot of damage. He’s still bleeding more than we can stop. We need to call an ambulance.”
“Is there time?” Steph asks quietly, as if Richie's not right there.
“We can’t just let him die,” Ruth chokes out.
“I know, but… the hospitals yesterday were overrun. Will it even help?”
“We have to try,” Pete says.
Steph gnaws on her lip, looking down at Richie. His blood is spat across her cheeks and neck, her hands and clothes just as red. Richie reaches a weak hand and touches her knee. He hopes she knows they’re friends. He doesn’t remember ever telling her that.
She pulls out her phone and starts dialling.
“Do you think you can stand?” Pete asks Richie. “We need to get you out of here. Maybe to the nurse’s office, just to get something to help with the bleeding.”
Richie summons whatever breath is left in his hacked chest to spit out, “Actually, I can’t… I can’t feel my legs.”
“What do you mean?” Ruth’s hand runs down his back, her fingers ending at the edge of the wound, where the axe just barely hit his vertebrae. “Oh, my god. His back… his spine, Pete.”
He can’t feel where the living nerves end and begin, but the previous lightning-tingle in his feet has faded into numbness. That frightens him more than the pain. Richie would rather feel indescribable pain than nothing at all.
A black shadow falls over the nerds. Richie tries to say “behind you,” but his lips stick together and the bubbles of blood in his throat turn any words into incoherent gurgles. He can’t warn them; he’s barely clinging to consciousness as it is.
But Steph realizes. She turns just as the axe swings down and catches it by the upper half of the handle. The force is too much, though. The edge of the blade nicks her shoulder. Steph lets out this deepthroated yell, like a battle cry from Braveheart, and pushes Grace to the floor.
Blood dribbles from Grace’s broken nose. She wipes it on the back of her hand, grips the axe tighter.
“Look what you did!” Steph shouts, pointing to Richie and he realizes then that she’s crying.
Stephanie Lauter is crying over him.
Grace looks down at Richie, and then she stops. Her head tilts to the side like a dog seeing a squirrel. The wild edge in her eyes vanishes for a moment.
“I didn’t mean to.” Pain flashes across her face, then determination. “But it’s going to be okay. I just need… one more. One more sacrifice, and he’s going to be fine.”
“No, you need to stop! Richie’s going to die because of you.”
She stumbles back, dropping the axe, and holds her head. “What? No. No, no, he’s going to live this time. I made sure of it. Right?”
Grace looks behind her, then back to Richie.
“What do you mean?” she asks the air in front of her, stomping her foot. “I thought you said… but you promised. That was the deal. One for each, and then—but if it’s him, then he can’t come back.”
A croning, high-pitched whisper responds to her. Grace frowns so deep the shadows of her face make her appear skeletal.
“But they’re my friends,” she says pitifully. She shakes her head. “No. If you want him, do it yourself.”
A voice, disembodied and too-familiar, whispers, “then I will.”
An opaque, human-shaped shadow spreads from Grace’s feet out across the already black hallway, wrapping around the axe. It lifts itself off the floor then flies for Steph. The blade burrows into the hole in the classroom door, half of it exposed on the other side. A flash of lightning illuminates the hall, revealing a pair of nuclear green eyes where the face of the shadow should be.
The shadow person reminds Richie of the beast that mauled Max the night before.
“Steph…” Pete looks at the axe, then Grace.
They all know what he means. There’s only one way to stop this. Stop her.
Just as her hands graze the hatchet’s wooden grip, it flies out of the door, and sends Steph across the hall. She hits the other wall with a thud—a squelching, cracking, crunching thud—and then she stays there, never slumping down. Her feet remain inches off the ground.
Another lightning strike exposes the shining axe head buried in the center of her chest, suspending her in the air. Steph’s blue eyes are large and alight with that indescribable kind of pain. Richie understands it. He feels it too. Her hands hover over the axe like she’s still trying to decide if it’s really there.
Subsequent thunder shakes the school, jostling Steph. She lets out a breathy cry, gasping for air like she’s underwater, and looks at Pete.
“Help…”
The hand in Richie’s chest vanishes with a slick pop. He doesn’t feel it. In fact, Richie doesn’t feel much of anything now but the dull echo of pain spreading across his entire body like the first layer of fresh snow.
Pete shouts so loudly it cracks in the air like thunder and runs to Steph’s side. They both wrestle the blade from her broken sternum. When they toss the axe aside, Richie can see through her chest to the wall behind her. Her feet barely touch down on the floor before she folds, collapsing like a stringless puppet, with Pete softening her fall.
He struggles to flip her onto her back, exposing the axe-shaped crevice in between her ribs. A choked yell escapes his mouth as he puts his hands over the hole.
Steph grips Pete’s shirt with both hands. An even pool of red spreads around her and Pete, dark against the night’s touch. “I’m so glad I got to know you, Pete.”
“Me too.” He kisses her hard, blood smearing around his mouth. “I love you.”
Her hands let go of him and drop to her side, head falling limp. She doesn’t move after that.
“Steph?” Pete’s voice is barely above a whimper, tiny and laced with disbelief.
“Is she… is she breathing?” Grace asks, but nobody answers her.
Pete holds her head up, shaking her a bit. “Hey, wait. Don’t—don’t go. I still need you.”
That lifeless dim grows in her blue eyes, staring into the black. Richie feels that same fog start to cloud his own vision, washy but strong. He can’t fight it. Darkness is pushing in on his psyche, and his failing heart kicks up a fearful tempo as he starts to realize he’s dying.
“Ruth,” Richie gurgles out.
It’s not even a word, really. There’s no breath coming in or out, just the rush of blood and loose air bubbles from what remains of his lungs to his lips. He just wants his last words to mean something. They didn’t last time. Richie won’t die pleading for his life this time.
Ruth looks down at him, her eyes red-rimmed and crystal, and pets his face in uneven strokes. The blood on his face and her hands dries in sticky strings.
“No, not you too,” Ruth says, shaking her head. “I can’t lose you again. Once was enough.”
“Please, Steph, I don’t know how to do this without you.”
“Please, Richie. Help’s going to be here any minute, okay?”
He’d been alone the first time around. Even though he was surrounded by people in the football field during the game, he died cold and abandoned in the locker room, and stayed there for days until someone finally found him. Richie never quite shook that pain, nor the fear.
But not this time. There is no such thing as a lonely death when someone loves you. Richie stares up at Ruth, hoping to whatever gods above are real and even to those that aren’t that he’ll never forget her face again.
Eventually, the pain fades, and so does everything else.
And then Richie is standing above his own body.
When she feels the life leave him, Ruth convulses with sobs. She holds Richie’s pale face to hers, their cheeks pressed together. She keeps pleading with him not to die, to hold on just a little longer, but he has no way to tell her he’s already gone.
“Mother fucker.”
He turns and sees Steph looking down at herself and Pete. There is a narrow vertical gap in her chest where the gap had been, letting the stormy light shine through.
Pete grabs her hands, pressing them to his mouth, kissing them over and over as he cries. “Wake up, baby, I need you. I can’t… figure this out alone.”
“I’m sorry, Steph,” Richie says.
Steph spins around, looks down at his body, then back at him with dismay. “Oh, no. Not you too.”
“We all know I wasn’t surviving that one.”
She looks at him with what he first thinks is pity, and pulls him into a hug. Richie stiffens. He hadn’t expected her to feel so… solid. Not warm, not human, but solid. Like a real, still-living person.
Nothing felt real when he was dead. Then again, he was dead and alone.
He finally hugs her back, squeezing her close.
Steph’s hands flex across his hand before she pulls away. “You know, I thought ghosts were supposed to be, like, all grey and transparent.”
“Nah, that was just Max,” Richie says. “You’re taking the whole dead thing better than I did.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of felt it coming. I’ve been having dreams about it for months now. I was scared, but… it was expected, almost.”
“Me too. I just didn’t think it would be Grace.”
She raises a brow. “Really?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I know what she is,” he says. “But before all that, we were friends. She protected me in her own fucked up ways. And I cared about her, even when she was batshit.”
Grace is on the floor several feet away from Richie’s body, tears of disbelief in her eyes. She looks at her hands, wiping them down the front of her priest costume. Her eyes snap shut, hands coming together, and she begins whispering words to herself.
“Hey, Steph,” Richie says. “Promise me if I start losing my mind, to just let me rot. Don’t worry about me. I’ve already lived—ha! Lived. I’ve already existed through this.”
Steph looks at him like he’s gone crazy. “What? No. We’re here together. You’re stuck with me.”
“And what if I start to forget again?” he asks.
“Then I’ll remind you,” she says, as if it’s obvious. “We’re friends, remember?”
He smiles, leans his head on her shoulder. “That’s true. We’re friends. I keep forgetting.”
𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼𓋼𖤣𖥧𓋼𓍊
“O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you and I detest all my sins,” Grace babbles quietly, her voice shaking under the weight of what she’s done, “because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. But most of all because I have offended you, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love.”
It takes Ruth several seconds to register what Grace is saying. She’s fucking praying. After all she’s done, the carnage she’s caused, the people she’s killed, and still she searches for sanctuary in a God that would’ve stopped her months ago if he were real.
“I firmly resolve with the help of your grace, to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life.” With an unsteady inhale, Grace crosses herself. “Amen.”
When she opens her eyes, that violet gleam has returned to them. She stands, bringing the axe with her.
Grace lifts it above her head, posed to take Ruth’s head off. Ruth notices, but she makes no move to avoid the strike. There’s no point.
Confliction crosses Grace’s face. After a moment, she lowers the axe.
“This is why you don’t scowl at God’s gifts,” she says with tears, the grief and remorse gone from her voice. “This could’ve all been avoided if you gave me the girl.”
Ruth finally looks up, glowing blue tears rolling down her cheeks in thick rivelets. There is a darkness in her soul that feels stolen. “I hate you.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” she says. “You killed my best friend. Your shadow just murdered Steph. And not to mention my death was your fault too. This is all your fault.”
“What? No, I—I’m saving us.”
“You’re killing us, is what you’re doing!”
After a moment of shock, Grace begins to laugh, slow and gentle at first. “Ah. I see. How could I be so stupid? You four are just like everyone else. Ungrateful, sinful, foul beasts. This was never going to work out because you refuse to see the good I’m doing.”
Her laughter rises until it’s a witch’s cackle, making her neatly double over. “Oh, you poor fucking souls. I thought I was saving you, when I was meant to purge you this whole time?”
Grace wipes Steph’s blood off the blade with her sleeve and examines it in the lightning. “Y’know, since I do care about you two, and I feel bad for Ruth and Steph, I’ll give you something I didn’t give the others: a head start.”
Pete finally looks up from Steph’s body. “A head start? For what?”
“Ten.”
The blood in her body runs cold, but she doesn’t move. Ruth drags Richie against the wall, fingers cramping around the several layers of clothing she’s gripping. “I’m not leaving him.”
“Ruth…” Pete says gently.
“Nine.”
“It’s shemira.” Ruth sounds insane, she knows that, but she can’t leave him. “Jewish tradition. Someone has to—has to watch the body at all times. Nobody was there for him the first time, and I’m not leaving him alone again. I won’t, Peter, you can’t make me.”
“Eight.”
She presses her back to the wall and cradles Richie’s torso into her lap, ignoring the blood drying and cooling on her clothes. Dawn crawls in through the windows. Richie’s eyes are still open, staring out the window.
When they were younger, Ruth tripped running down a hill and broke her ankle. They’d been playing ultimate frisbee in a park. She was small for her age—still is—and fragile like a grandma’s china collection. But Richie shot up like a tree in middle school. He was weirdly strong from being forced into gymnastics as a kid, and despite quitting pretty young, maintained a lot of that strength as they grew up.
So, when she failed to put pressure on her foot and realized it wasn’t just sprained, Richie tossed her over his shoulder and carried her all the way home. She thought it was hysterical and would pout and moan for weeks for him to carry her around until the cast came off and she had no more excuses.
But even after she could walk just fine, Ruth would ask, and he would pretend to be upset but give her a piggyback ride anyways.
Richie always carried her when he didn’t have to. Now, it’s Ruth’s turn to return the favor.
“Seven.”
“Go, Pete,” she urges. “Go.”
Pete lowers Steph’s body to the floor and closes her eyes.
“Six.”
He rushes to Ruth, kisses her forehead. “I love you.”
She smiles. “I love you too.”
“Five.”
“Now, go.”
Pete slips on all the blood on the floor—so much goddamn blood, it makes her queasy to look—but he finds his footing and sprints down the hall, disappearing into the darkness.
“Four.”
Grace looks at Ruth, as if waiting for her to run, too.
“I’m not leaving,” she repeats. “If you’re going to kill me, you’re doing it right here. Because I’m never leaving him again.”
“Three.”
Ruth smooths Richie’s hair back until it’s as neat as she can get it. “El Maleh Rakhamim, shokhein bamoromim, hamtzei menukhah al kanfei hashekhinah b’ma’alot kedoshim u’tehorim k’zohar harakiyah mazhirim et nishmat Richard Lipschitz shehalakhl’olamo b’gan eden t’hei menuchato.”
“Two.”
“Ana ba’al harakhamim yastireihu b’seiter k’nafav l’olamim vitzror b’tzror hayim et nishmato. Adonai hu nakhalato, v’yanukhu al mishkavo b’shalom. V’nomar amen.”
“One.”
•• ━━━━━ ••𓄃•• ━━━━━ ••
When Pete hears the countdown end and the metal thunk against bone, he trips. His feet disappear from underneath him, and he skids across the tile floor. Tears blind him, no matter how much he scrubs his face. All he tastes is salt and blood.
He hears something hard and wet hit the floor and roll. Pete slaps a hand over his mouth to stop the sob from escaping.
They’re gone. Everyone he loves is gone. It’s as though the last string to hold his body together has been snipped, leaving him just a breath away from collapsing in on himself.
The faraway echo of footsteps drive him to start running again. A giddy, insane laugh gives him another shock of adrenaline.
“Run, you little bitch!” Grace shouts with glee. “I like it when they run.”
Pete is blind in the windowless section of the hall, only barely able to tell where he’s going. He follows the distant lightning, uses four years of muscle memory to search for an exit.
“You ungrateful little shits,” Grace continues yelling from down the hall. “I did this all for you. I saved your lives before, and when we got this second chance, I decided to make it permanent. And this is how you repay me?”
His legs burn, lungs helplessly gulping cool air, but Pete can’t stop. Finally, he rounds a corner and finds the double doors leading to the football field. He throws the doors open, somehow managing to stay on his feet.
Instantly, the cold hits him. Rain pelts him like hundreds of icy needles. He doesn’t stop until he’s in the football field, mud and grass and water making him slip. Pete falls to his knees, gasping.
Distantly, the double doors slam open again. The watery image of Grace approaches Pete slowly. Pete takes off his wet glasses, as if that’ll help him see any better.
Her braids have come undone, her dark hair hanging around her face in wavy tendrils. The color in her cheeks has darkened to a deep red, like the blood has begun to pool in her cheeks. There is a fury in her eyes that reminds Pete of wildfires.
“I invoke his name. Wiggog Y’wrath, A Craving So Deep And True, The Carressing Beast, Master Of The Everdark. I promised you a soul, and I will give you a soul.”
Pete doesn’t even know if begging will make a difference to her. If she’ll even hear him through the voices clouding her already poor judgement.
“You should be on your knees, begging for my mercy. I could smite you in an instant. Because with this…” She readjusts her grip, “I’m basically your God.”
Like they haven’t heard that before.
“Now, pray.”
Grace raises the axe above her head as a bolt of lightning crests the sky, aiming straight for her.