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and-stir-the-stars · 1 year

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@dire-kumori has an au where Scooped Mike gets time-travelled to before CC and Liz's deaths, and he's filled with such blind rage and self-loathing upon seeing his younger self that he kills young Mike over and over again in a time loop that young Mike barely even understands. Guess who wrote a one-shot for it? (I'm also tagging @serenefig and @cloudwhisper23 bc I feel like you'll be interested in reading)

word count: 3,715

“Have fun with your friends’, brats. Don’t even think about coming back until morning unless you want to spend the night outside, ‘cause I won’t bother unlocking the doors for you.”

Cold lines of metal pressed grooves into Mike’s back as he leaned against the front door threshold and waved his siblings goodbye. His voice resounded in sharp echoes across the tree line; he spoke a bit too loud considering that his little siblings were only a few feet away, but then again, that was the point.

You never knew what things were lurking in the shadows, listening and lying in wait for the moment they could get you alone. Sometimes, however, you could use that to your advantage.

Michael’s gaze roved over the tree line as his siblings turned their backs on him and walked down the driveway. The trees surrounded their entire house in a near-perfect circle; shadows crept beneath the trees’ gnarled, grasping finger-like branches. As the sun slumped further down in the sky, the shadows drew steadily closer and closer to the house like a tidal wave of darkness begging to be held back no longer.

The eldest Afton’s jaw clenched as he dug his teeth into his gum with even more ferocity. Slowly, he pulled his Foxy mask from the top of his head to cover his face.

He didn’t have to be afraid with the wicked smile and sharp teeth covering his face. It was an assurance that Michael could be strong and brave even when– no, especially when he was all on his own, just like the pirate fox he felt so much for.

If a monster wanted to chase him down, then so be it. But as long as Mike had his mask on, the monster wasn't the only dangerous thing around.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Electricity shot through every nerve ending in Michael’s body. The jolt of adrenaline made every hair stand on end, and heat roared through his veins like wildfire as Mike crouched behind the garage wall with his fingers white-knuckled and half-numb against the cool metal of his bright red bat.

Each breath passed his lips at a crawl. Everything around him seemed to blur and fade to gray as Mike focused his entire being on the harsh slam of rubber soles coming closer and closer.

A million ghostly aches, sharp and dull and stabbing and pressing aches of a million undeaths, all sparked to life with increasing intensity as the monster drew closer and closer, but Mike pushed away the memories of aches and pains assaulting his limbs.

He only needed to get one good shot in.

He smelled the bastard long before it got close. It was something like the curdled cup of milk that Mike had found in his room last week, the maggot-infested animal carcasses he and his friends would poke at when they found them on the side of the road, the stank of rotten eggs– all those putrid smells and more clinging to the bastard's skin in an eye-watering stench that made Michael’s stomach churn and his throat burn on principle.

Mike's heart hammered in his chest, almost to the same beat as the footfalls chasing him.

There was a flurry of movement as the sicko ran past Mike where he was crouched out of sight behind the wall.

The reaper's footfalls quickly slowed as though somehow aware that it had been duped, but Mike was already moving.

The decaying monster didn't even have time to turn around before Mike jumped forward and slammed his bat into the back of its head.

His years' worth of practice hitting baseballs did nothing to prepare him for the vibrations that rocketed painfully through his arms and shoulders and all the way down his back, nor for the sickening crack of a human skull shattering under his hands.

The monster went down, but Mike could only stand there even as a voice in the back of his mind screamed at him to run. Vomit burned his throat at the curdled blood and the dark red and purple slimy skin that clung to the metal of his bat before it fell to the ground with a wet plop beside the monster. Thick droplets of the creature’s ice-cold blood dribbled down Michael’s face and smeared against the teen’s lips as he stood there in shock.

Boney claws wrapped around Mike’s ankle. The sharp pain of bone digging underneath his skin jerked Michael’s mind back to awareness, and he brought his bat down on the thing's wrist just before it had time to yank him to the ground.

The fingers didn't let him go even after the impact of Mike’s bat ground the compact bones along the creature’s wrist into fine dust held together only by moldy stretches of tendon and skin.

Michael brought the bat down on the thing's arm again and again and again before its other hand finally snaked around and grabbed hold of the slippery dark red metal.

Michael yanked the bat closer, cursing himself for giving the reaper a chance to rip his weapon away. But the reaper didn’t; instead, it used the momentum of Michael’s action against him.

Mike's vision went red with pain as the handle of his bat flew back at him and slammed into his lips with enough force that Mike heard his plastic mask crack on his face.

Except Michael realized a split second later that it wasn’t just his mask that had cracked. Something sharp and coppery exploded in Mike's mouth and the teen choked on shards of his own teeth as the fractured remnants slid down the back of his throat.

The thing's fingers were still locked around his ankle, and the moldy strands of tendon and skin keeping its bony purple hand attached to the rest of the monster's body snapped apart as Michael stumbled backward with tears in his eyes and dark red blood dribbling down his chin. He was too stunned by pain to react even as the monster peeled itself off the ground with one arm; its other, handless appendage hung limply against its side in a mess of unnatural angles kept together only by thin layers of rotting skin.

Its neck snapped down to look at its obliterated arm, but somehow, the creature looked almost bored as its empty eye sockets focused on the mangled stretch of flesh and shattered bone attached to it. The monster’s remaining fingers latched around its broken arm before ripping the twisted limb from its shoulder with enough force that its entire body jerked at the motion.

The shattered lower part of the arm flopped to the ground in a pile of putrid skin, and the reaper's head snapped back up and its empty eyes focused directly on Michael with its fingers still grasping the remains of its upper arm.

"You're going to regret that,” it whispered in the grinding croak reminiscent of a bag of gravel and forks shoved down a garbage disposal.

"M-Make me."

Michael had wanted to sound stubborn and strong, but the words cracked in the air and passed his lips in nothing but a whimpering stammer as he tried not to gurgle on his own blood.

He should have ran the second he had gotten a hit in on this– this stupid son of a bitch. Things were– Everything was already going so wrong.

The creature lurched at him. Michael didn't have time to run or stumble away; he barely had time to raise his bat.

The reaper still had the upper part of its broken arm in hand, but Michael didn't notice the sharp end of broken bone protruding from the severed arm until the jagged point had already buried itself inside Mike’s shoulder.

Two pinpoints of light sparked to life in the monster’s eyes, and its gaping black eyes looked directly at him as Michael screamed.

The reaper ripped its broken arm out of Michael’s shoulder and aimed for the teen's heart.

Michael just managed to ram the end of his bat into the reaper's neck at the last second.

It was a weak blow. The monster’s close proximity didn’t give the teen enough room to maneuver the long bat and Mike's arms and wobbly legs trembled dangerously, worsening his ability to strike. But by some miracle, it was enough to make the monster stumble a few steps back, though it grabbed onto the teen's bat and ripped it from his hands as it stumbled.

Michael didn’t fight to get the bat back. He turned on his heel and ran.

The teen’s hands clawed at his own shoulder as the monster’s footfalls echoed behind him once more.

Tears stung Michael’s eyes as he remembered that bloody, grimy, disgusting bone piercing into him. God only knew what kind of germs that thing had put into his system– what if the wound got infected?

Not that an infected wound would matter if Mike didn’t keep himself alive and out of the creature’s way.

Michael forced the pain and panicked delirium away. He had to focus; this was the important part.

The reaper was just behind him, following at a pace closer to a walk than a run.

Somehow, that was so, so much worse. The monster didn't have to run to keep up with him, and it knew it. It would always catch him in the end, like a hunter casually strolling after the blood trail of a wounded deer. The creature would never tire nor stop chasing him, and it was just a matter of time before Mike got too tired to go on running from it.

‘No. No, no, no– not this time.’

The monster’s slower pace did make this more difficult, though. Michael couldn't move too fast. He needed to always be just out of the creature's reach, or he would risk the monster getting distracted or frustrated and trying to cut him off by going a different route.

This would have a way better chance of success if Mike could keep the monster right where he wanted it.

Michael dashed into the house from the garage and raced up and down hallways and from room to room. As he ran, he ducked and jumped periodically to avoid tripe wires, avoided stepping on any rugs, and danced around jagged pieces of metal and nails and blades that had been embedded into the hardwood floor.

He really couldn’t afford to mess up this part. Any wrong moves or missteps would have to be avoided at all costs. But with any luck, the monster hunting him wouldn’t be so careful.

As he raced up the steps, he made sure to skip the fifth step down. But as he reached the top, it slowly dawned on him that things had been unusually quiet. As far as Mike was aware, the monster never seemed to react much to pain, but there was a distinct lack of surprised grunts or infuriated yells, or whirring gears and mechanical parts snapping as traps were set off.

Chest heaving as he panted, Michael turned and looked down.

The reaper was standing right there at the bottom of the steps. It looked exactly the same as it had when Michael had fought it in the garage, like it hadn’t set off a single trap during the chaotic chase.

Its head was tilted back, staring at the kitchen knives and heavy hooks used to hang endoskeletons that Michael had stolen and hung from the ceiling over the steps. They were hung high enough that Mike could race up and down with no problem, but the taller monster should have gotten a nasty surprise as it came after him with that single-minded focus it always seemed to have.

Instead, the monster looked up at the trap with an annoyed expression before meeting Michael’s eye.

Keeping its head ducked low, the reaper placed its foot on the first step.

Michael’s heart leaped into his throat and he stumbled down the hallway, struggling to breathe properly through all the panting and the blood still flooding his mouth and throat.

How was that thing still walking?! Mike had set death traps up in every inch of this house; it just wasn’t possible that the reaper could have stumbled through the house without setting a single one off!

The thing on the steps was still way, way too quiet. Had it seen him skip the fifth step down?

Mike turned for a split second to see if the reaper had gotten to the top steps yet.

A sharp pain sliced through Michael’s throat.

That single second of distraction had been enough time to throw several hours of analyzing the layout of every trap he'd set up in this house out the window.

The sharp feeling wrapped around his entire throat as his own momentum forced him further into the trap. The wire tightened, and suddenly Mike’s feet left the floor entirely and he slammed against the ugly red wallpaper.

Hurricane was a small town. One where there wasn't much to do, especially when your father worked at the most interesting place in town and you had to spend nearly every day there for hours on end.

Michael and his friends had explored every nook and cranny and forgotten place there was to find in the town. Including the abandoned railroad tracks in the surrounding woods.

Those tracks were so old that the rusty spikes meant to hold them together could often be found lying on the ground around the tracks, ripe for the taking; even the ones still riveted inside the old tracks could mostly be removed with some determination, and the sharp, rusty, six-and-a-half inch long spikes were attractive prizes to a group of rowdy teens with nothing better to do.

Michael had stored a lot of them away in his closet over time.

Sticking the rivets through a slab of plywood and nailing the plywood plank into the wall upstairs with the sharp ends facing outward had been a lot of effort, just like a lot of the traps he had spent the entire day building, but Michael had deemed it a worthwhile venture because he had been certain those spikes would be able to do some damage.

And Michael had been right.

Michael had put six or seven of those spikes through the plywood, but when Mike slammed into the wall, he only felt one big blast of pain set his back on fire. He didn't even have time to scream before a gush of blood and vomit slid through his throat, staining his shattered teeth and turning his inhuman screech into a quiet gurgle.

The wire stayed wrapped around Mike's throat and cut deeper as his feet–- suspended by the railroad spikes and wire too high for the teen to reach the ground– thrashed wildly in the air.

Michael’s vision went black as the thrashing jostled the spikes, widening the holes in his back and sending the sharp, rusted rivets deeper into his flesh until some of them scraped against his ribcage.

Gasping, Michael sucked in one shaky breath after another and tried to ignore the desperate need to claw himself upward. His throat and lungs were filling with liquid, but he wasn't drowning in water. There was no surface he could rise above to make it all stop.

What a strange sensation it was to drown in your own hallway without a drop of water in sight.

Bloody fingers clawed at the wire around his throat, but he couldn't pull it away any more than he could clear his airway.

Salty tears leaked down Michael’s face in a futile attempt to clear away the blood still staining his chin. Between one blink and the next, the red wallpaper and family picture frames in front of the teen were replaced by two hollow black eyes and putrid purple flesh flecked with varying shades of green mold that peeked out of the crusty white bandages holding its splitting skin together

The monster cocked its head at him, and Michael finally got a good view of the damage he had dealt it earlier. The side of its head had caved in like deflated basketball or a sandcastle under an oncoming tide, and yellowish-white shards of bone jutted out from the jelly-like mixture of blood and decaying muscle dripping from the cracks in its head.

The white pinpoints of its eyes flashed up and down him curiously, watching the blood flow down Michael’s body and drip into an ever-widening pool under his feet. The thing's lips had long ago rotted away, but Michael realized as raspy, cracked laughter spilled between the thing's dried-out, wrinkled gums and bared yellow teeth that the monster was smiling at him.

"You bastard!" More blood dribbled down Michael’s chin and gurgled inside his throat. Mike tried to spit it all out like this was nothing more than his morning mouthwash routine. "You bastard!"

Floorboards moaned under the reaper's feet as it took another step closer. Michael flinched as it did so, and immediately bit back a cry at the white-hot pain of spikes shifting inside his back and scraping against bone and organs.

"That looks like it hurts," the reaper rasped.

Michael’s tears stung as they leaked into cuts on his face from his earlier fight with the monster. He had felt hot and sweaty before from all the running and fighting, but now his fingers were iceblocks against his neck as he struggled with the wire digging into his flesh. A frighteningly cold, bone-deep chill cut into Michael's form, and the child trembled as he struggled to breathe through the blood and the pain.

He couldn't run. Couldn't fight. The monster– the reaper– was going to kill him now.

At least the pain will stop, a voice whispered in the teen's head.

A quiet sob shook the young teen's core. He needed the pain to stop so fucking much, but he didn't want the pain to stop– he wanted to live.

But if he was going to die, at least it would be on his own terms.

"Go ahead," Michael growled. "Jus– Just g-get it over with."

The creature cocked its head at him again, like it had been too distracted watching the blood seeping from Michael's form to bother listening to what he had said.

"Just d-do it!" Michael sobbed. "K-kill me, you– you wrinkly, p-puss-filled ball-sack! Come on! Just– just– get i-it over with and kill me!"

The reaper took another step closer. "No."

Blood-shot eyes locked onto the reaper's gaping eye sockets. "Why?!"

Wasn't that the point?! Wasn't that what this– thing– had set out to do, over and over and over?!

The reaper's hand settled on Michael’s chest. Mike didn't have the energy left to flinch or be wary. He only met the reaper's eye in pained exhaustion.

But then the reaper pushed.

Michael screamed as his prized railroad spikes dug deeper into him until his bloody back was finally pressed flush against the wall.

One of the railroad spikes went all the way through Michael’s chest and stabbed into the reaper's palm, but the monster didn't seem to notice. It ripped its hand away before latching onto one of Michael’s wrists as the teen frantically tried pulling the reaper's arm away from him.

"You want to know why?" Its voice whipped against the air in a wild hiss.

The dull hallway light gleamed off the dark red liquid coating Michael’s skin as the reaper shoved the teen's blood-stained hand in front of his face before it snarled at him. "Because no matter how many ways you try to run or fight it, you will always bring this hell down on yourself with your own hands. You did this, Michael."

'You're insane,' the teen wanted to say, but there was too much blood in Mike's throat for him to talk, or even to breathe. He tried shaking his head at the thing, but the wire was starting to cut frighteningly deep inside his throat. Michael could only stare at the monster in front of him with wide-eyed horror and beg for it to just end this, like the bastard was supposed to do when it caught him.

The reaper released Michael’s wrist, and the teen's arm fell limply down to his side.

He should do something; he should fight. But his energy had been draining away with every second he spent hanging on his own death trap, and there was so little left inside him.

He couldn't even lean away as the reaper lifted its only hand, moved its fingers around the edge of his mask, and traced the curve of his head with an almost gentle touch.

The reaper's broken fingers paused on a string looping behind the teen's head. It latched onto the string and pulled, ripping the Foxy mask off of Michael’s head.

The reaper's teeth ground together as it glared down at the bloody mask before letting the plastic slip from between rotten fingers and fall to the bloody floor with a wet and heavy thunk. And without hesitation, the reaper slammed its foot down on the only thing that had ever made Michael feel strong.

Hearing the sharp crack of plastic as the monster decimated the mask and shattered Foxy's maw into pieces wrenched a hopeless sob out of the teenager's chest.

The reaper stayed still. It didn't move further away, nor did it move any closer.

It only watched as Michael struggled to free himself from the trap one last time before finally giving up.

Michael struggled to gulp down another shaky breath through his sobbing but was rewarded only with more blood in his lungs and pain searing every nerve ending until even the most minuscule movements lit every cell and nerve in his body on fire.

Through it all, the reaper stood back and watched with a smile.

Not wanting to see the monster's smug, rotten face or the blood staining his own body anymore, Michael could do nothing but close his eyes and wait for the moment when the last drop of blood would drip from his body and all the pain would finally end.

(Michael had the sinking feeling that death wouldn’t be that easy of an escape.)