“Fuck you, lady, just give me back my kid!”
Those words rang in his ears as consciousness crept in. Pain came next, a blinding wave of it, followed by the taste and smell of blood.
Had he said that? Who had he been talking to?
Hunter was laying on a wet stone floor, his hands underneath him. He pressed them down, trying to push himself up, but they slipped in some liquid, knocking him back onto the floor and sending another bolt of pain through his skull. Cracking open his eyes, in the faint light he saw that the pool he was laying in was…
Ah. An impressive amount of blood.
“Shit,” he hissed, then spat, “Oh God, fuck, is it in my mouth?”
No, maybe not—from the feel of things, he’d bitten his own tongue, which wasn’t great but was still better than the alternative.
More careful this time, he propped himself up on his elbows, trying to focus through the nauseating pain. He’d woken up in worse situations, hadn’t he? All he needed to do was keep his cool and—
“Fuck!”
He flinched onto his side. Next to him was the corpse of a middle-aged man, its vacant eyes staring back at him.
How the—who the fuck is that? He scrambled sideways like a frightened crab, only stopping when he bumped up against a wooden table leg. Am I on a job? Did I hit my head?
And… what was up with the dead bird?
At least, he thought it was a bird. It was draped across the man’s back like a discarded toy, its black, feathery wings spread at crooked angles. The issue was its ratlike face, and how it was nearly as big as the man—far bigger than any bird he’d ever seen.
It had to be fake, right? It was probably creative taxidermy, or some kind of a haunted house prop. He couldn’t help but think that whoever had made it had done a great job—the way its head was half cut off, revealing bone and gristle inside, looked very realistic.
Unfortunately, he had no time to gawk. The bird might be fake, but he’d seen and smelled enough corpses to know that the man under it definitely wasn’t.
Fuck. I gotta get out of here, he thought to himself. Al will kill me if I get arrested—
Hunter groped around himself, trying to find something to pull himself up with, only to quickly realize there was something wrong with his body. A quick mental check confirmed the correct number of limbs and digits, but for some reason it felt like nothing attached to him was quite the right size or length.
Maybe he’d hit his head harder than he’d thought.
He got a hold of the wooden leg of a chair and began to drag himself to his feet. While he didn’t know where he was, at least he didn’t hear any sirens. Whatever he’d gotten himself into, nobody troublesome had noticed… for now, at least.
…Wait. That’s right, Al!
What had he been thinking? There was no way he could be on a contract! He hadn’t touched that kind of job for almost fifteen years—hell, he’d left that life altogether when he’d taken Al in, so why the fuck was he chilling with a dead guy!?
Clinging to the chair like a shipwrecked rat, he tried to blink the dizziness away so he could get a better look at his surroundings and, oh…
Huh.
He’d… assumed, having woken up next to a dead body, that he’d had something to do with it getting that way. However, based on the scene before him, that didn’t seem to be the case.
The gash across the body’s throat was jagged and deep, a single strike that’d been almost enough to decapitate the man altogether. It looked more like an animal had done it than a human… and even if a human had managed it, Hunter hadn’t made a cut that messy since he was a teenager.
Plus, he generally tried to take care of people in ways that involved a lot less scrubbing of floors and ceilings.
However, what was most striking was that someone had killed the guy on top of some sort of freaky satanic circle thing, and Hunter had definitely never messed with that sort of nonsense.
Frowning, he started putting things together in his head. The strange taxidermy, the spooky magic circle, the dead guy and the fact that the room was only lit with black candles…
Some perverted wackos who thought they could do magic had created a huge fucking mess, and he’d been unlucky enough to stumble onto it. Judging by how his face and his head hurt, he’d gotten injured as well, either because whoever it was had gotten the jump on it or he’d slipped and fallen like an idiot.
Either way, the moment he found out who was behind this, he was going to beat the shit out of them.
“Fucking teenagers,” he muttered, because at fifty-two he’d naturally reached a point in his life where it was just second nature to blame teenagers for basically anything, up to and including surprise satanic rituals.
Except for Al. Al might be a teenager, but he was a good kid.
He felt for his pockets, searching for his keys or a phone. If his car was nearby, he could probably clean this mess up, and he definitely needed to, since there was no way he hadn’t left evidence after napping at the damn crime scene. That, or if he could at least find his phone, he could call in a favor…
Except, what the fuck was he wearing? He couldn’t find a single fucking pocket in this stupid dress...
Now that, that made him pause. Groping down he felt… fabric, lots of it, decorated with frills and lace. Groping back up, he felt… nope. Up was worse. Up was much, much worse.
“Hey, what the fuck—”
Hunter hauled himself to his feet, fighting past the pain and vertigo, and forced himself to look around the dimly lit room. He couldn’t see well, but what he could see looked like something out of Dracula’s castle.
This is her secret workshop, he thought, and then, Wait, whose workshop? How do I know that?
Against a nearby wall was a heavy floor length mirror, so he staggered towards it, catching himself with his bloody hands on the glass. Squinting at it, he saw…
A woman. A young woman—at least twenty years younger than he was, anyway.
“What the fuck is this?” he said, and saw that the woman in the mirror seemed to speak when he spoke.
Was this why his body felt so strange?
“… Okay.”
So.
He was probably on drugs, right?
He pulled on his face, then his hair, confirming that yes, his mind was very convinced that this was his body.
What the hell could he have taken?
Mushrooms, maybe?
That was the only stuff that had given him this kind of ego death before. Last time he’d taken them he’d become convinced he was a caterpillar, and he’d spent weeks afterwards waking up at night rolled in his blankets like a cocoon, fighting the lingering suspicion that he was secretly still a bug.
At least this time he was hallucinating being a human. In a surge of optimism, he decided that counted as an improvement.
“I guess I can work with this,” he muttered, squishing his cheeks and watching as the lady in the mirror did the same.
The only issue was, when would he have taken mushrooms? Why? Was this another accident like the time he’d gone to a PTA bake sale and misinterpreted the wink Carol gave when she handed him a brownie?
Or… had he done this on purpose? Fallen off the wagon somehow?
God, he hoped not. Eating shrooms and thinking he’d changed into a woman would be a lousy fucking way to break a five-year sobriety streak. Maria would kick his ass if she found out.
He closed his eyes, wincing against his migraine. Screw psychedelics, he’d much rather be high instead, at least then this awful headache wouldn’t be so unbearable. He felt like his brain was under a press, being slowly squashed.
But now that he thought about it, it felt like there was something behind that pain. Something big, waiting to burst like a balloon if he poked it. So, that’s exactly what he did—
—Before he’d gotten here he’d been somewhere strange, somewhere endless, and when he tried to recall exactly what that place looked like, he was pretty sure he was remembering it wrong. There’d been a woman there, or something that had wanted him to think it was a woman, and…
He’d cursed at her. A lot.
“WHERE’S MY FUCKIN’ KID!?”
[ DEAD. SHE’S MOVED ON. SHE’S ALREADY BEEN REBORN. ]
“So fucking send me after him!”
[ YOU’RE SURE THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT? ]
“Did I fucking stutter!?”
[ LOOK… THE GOOD NEWS IS, I SORT OF OWE YOU ONE. ]
“The fuck does that mean?”
[ IT’S COMPLICATED. WHEN I CAME FOR YOUR CHILD, THERE WAS A MARGIN OF ERROR, AND YOU FELL INTO IT. ]
“Wait, do you mean you killed us!?”
[ I’M SAYING I WAS ONLY SUPPOSED TO TRANSFER THEM. ]
“YOU FUCKING WHAT!?”
[ I’M KIND OF NEW AT THIS. MY BAD. ]
“The fuck is wrong with you, you piece of shit!? Come down here and face me, you spider-looking son of a bitch! I’ll rip your fucking arms off and beat you with them, you—”
[ OKAY, ENOUGH OF THAT. ]
She snapped one of her many, many fingers, and he briefly lost the ability to speak.
[ LOOK, I’M NOT UNREASONABLE. I’LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU—YOU CAN BE REBORN AS ANYONE YOU WANT TO BE. SOMEONE POWERFUL, HAPPY, IMPORTANT. ]
He glowered at her silently, shaking with rage, obviously uninterested in her offer.
Heaving her impossibly massive body, she sighed.
[ YOU KNOW, VERY FEW PEOPLE GET THIS KIND OF OPPORTUNITY. ]
Then she snapped again, and his ability to speak returned. He was angry, angrier than he’d ever felt before, but he forced himself to reign it in because she wasn’t threatened by him and he was pretty sure she was his only chance to get Al back.
“I don’t want any of that! I just want to find my son and protect him. Is that too much to ask?”
[ HMM… WELL, NO, BUT… YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE HOW YOU HAVE TO DO IT. ]
“I’ll manage!”
[ ALRIGHT. BUT DON’T COME CRYING TO ME WHEN YOU REGRET IT. ]
“Fuck you lady, just give me back my kid!”
And then he’d woken up in a pool of blood.
…
Hey, what the fuck?
He groaned and put his head in his hands. What kind of trip was he on? Had that lady been God? Why was God so freaky-looking? How many eyes did one person need!?
More importantly, why had he believed her when she’d said Al was dead?
His heart hammered at the thought, an icy trickle of fear threading through his veins. Waking up with a corpse was fine, but the idea that something had happened to his kid? That was too much to bear.
He hoped he was hallucinating, he hoped he was just drugged up somewhere making an absolute fool of himself, because if what the spider-chick said was real and something really had happened to Al then—then how was he supposed to deal with that? The things she’d said—‘transfer,’ ‘margin of error’—what did that mean? If they’d died, how had they died and why couldn’t he remember? Fifty-two still seemed too young to die, and Al was only fourteen!
What if… What if Al had been scared? What if it had hurt?
What if it had been Hunter’s fault?
He started to breathe too fast, and he could feel the tips of his fingers beginning to tingle.
“No, absolutely not, get a hold of yourself,” he gritted, clenching and opening his fists and focusing on slowing down his breathing. “You got better shit to do.”
If this was a hallucination, then eventually it would have to end, and everything would go back to normal.
But if it wasn’t…
Then he needed to get his ass in gear and find his kid.
Turning away from the mirror, he took stock of his current problems. He had a strange woman’s body, a room covered in blood, and two corpses. What he wanted to do was run from the room right now and go yell at random people until they told him where Al was. However, years of experience had taught him that leaving a dead body unattended was just asking some schmuck1Yiddish for contemptible idiot to find it later. Usually a Boy Scout or a hiker, those people were like corpse magnets.
Also, he was still covered in blood. People didn’t like talking to other people when they were covered in blood.
Squinting around the dim room, he saw what looked like a huge fireplace on the other side. He recalled that the woman whose body he was in had disposed of bodies before—and ugh, there it was again, that knowledge appearing out of nowhere, like it had been there all along when he knew it hadn’t.
He bent down to grab the bird thing and realized, with a little shiver of horror, that it felt very real. He poked it here and there, feeling for seams or stitching, but he couldn’t seem to find anything to indicate that someone had stuck different bits of animals together, which meant…
Ah. Okay. He seemed to have a bona fide monster on his hands.
Straining to pick up its cold, rigid body, he lugged it towards the fireplace and comforted himself with the knowledge that at least it was already dead.
That just left the corpse.
Grabbing the stiff under its arms, he planted his feet and braced himself, then pulled with all his might and… made a truly pitiful amount of progress. Moving a dead guy was way harder than it looked at the best of times, and the body he was in now was far weaker than his old one. He glowered down at the pale, skinny arms and wondered what this woman’s problem was. Laziness? Too little protein? More importantly, if she had the grip strength of a kitten, why had she decided to murder such a big dude? Surely Simon hadn’t been her only option, she definitely knew tinier people—
—And fuck, apparently recalling that dead dude’s name had unlocked something, because he felt that awful bursting pressure in his head again and another flashback hit him like a semi-truck, only this time, the memory wasn’t from him—
She’d chosen Simon because he was violent, stupid, and greedy. He had no friends, no family, and no stable job, which meant no one would miss him if he disappeared.
She’d instructed him to only meet with her well after closing, and taught him what passages to use to get to her office without being seen. She’d made it clear that as long as he didn’t poke around she’d pay him far more than any other client would, and since her instructions were easy to follow and her payments were on time he was always eager to take on more work.
Or at least he had been, until she’d called him to her office only to strangle him into unconsciousness with her tentacles.
As she pulled him into her secret room, she didn’t feel any guilt, only a vague disappointment that he hadn’t been smarter, because a struggle would have been more entertaining—
—And then he snapped back to himself, and fell down on his ass next to Simon.
He pressed his hands against his skull, wincing and squeezing his eyes shut. The pain in his head, which was already severe, had intensified, and with it came a roiling nausea.
What the hell was happening? Was it possible to hallucinate again while you were already hallucinating? That memory—it felt almost like those weird little bits of knowledge he suddenly had, except much more painful and unpleasant to think of.
No, more to the point—
—Tentacles!? She had tentacles? Was that how she usually carried stuff?
Holy shit, was that's why her arms were so weak!?
But where had they come from?
Oh—just like that, he knew. If he hadn’t already been on the floor, he would have sat down, because out of everything that'd happened so far this definitely felt like the wackiest.
He raised his hand and, from memory, cast a goddamned spell.
Thick dark ropes rose from the floor, coiled around the corpse, and dragged it across the room and into the fireplace.
He lowered his hand, and they vanished.
He couldn’t help it. He giggled.
“Ahaha—holy fuck, you’ve gotta be shitting me!”
He wrapped his arms around his stomach and curled up into a ball, laughing harder despite the pain. Magic! Seriously? He’d just summoned a bunch of spooky-ass tentacles from the floor, easy as flicking on a light switch! Even crazier, he could feel through them like they were normal limbs! It was gross, but also, kind of fascinating.
Panic at his situation momentarily forgotten, he scrambled to his bare feet and ran to the fireplace. Poking around in his memories again, he recalled another spell, raised both of his hands and—
““Kahaha—aahahaha—!”
Fire blossomed from his fingertips, huge gouts of flame that roared towards the bodies piled on the grate and set them alight. In an instant the room was full of almost unbearable heat and light, but that didn’t stop him from laughing because,
“Holy shit, I’m a fucking wizard! Ahahah, fuck yes!”
He wasn’t sure what was real, and he’d probably lost his mind, but all that took a backseat to the discovery that he’d become a living flamethrower.
Oh man, he was absolutely going to abuse the shit out of that.
He expected destroying the corpses to take some time, since it took a lot of energy to burn a body, but the two in the grate turned to ash very quickly. Huh, was the fire more efficient because it was magic fire? How did you even measure that?
Also, where was this skill his whole life!?
Cutting off the spell, he tore off his blood-soaked clothing and tossed that into the remaining flames. Now all he had to do was deal with the blood. Maybe this crazy lady had some bleach somewhere, or maybe—
No! No, there was a spell for that too!
If it wasn’t for literally everything else, this would have been the best fucking day of his life.
“Kehehehe—cough, augh, fuck, cough—” He doubled over, slamming his fist into his chest. Okay, he really had to stop laughing. The fire might have taken care of the bodies, but it’d also made the room a bit smokey.
This time he tried to do things a little more slowly. He thought about the spell he wanted to use, and walked himself through it. While before it’d felt like he was doing everything instantly, it turned out that there was actually a bit of thought behind it—something about correctly visualizing its construction based on some kinda magic circle, then channeling it out through his hands, only he could do it so effortlessly and so quickly that he hadn’t noticed the process before.
Looking intently at his hands, this time he caught sight of the shadowy energy that seemed to burst from his fingertips just as the spell was released. Just like that, the blood on his body and the floor began to disintegrate into nothing.
It was a little weird that this lady just so happened to have a spell for removing blood specifically, but who was he to judge?
“Amazing,” he muttered.
There was no way this place could be his world, right? Between the monster, the magic, and the memories, he was pretty fucking sure he’d ended up somewhere else. That realization should have upset him, but he was too busy marveling at how easy magic made things.
How many hours of his old life had he spent, sweating head-to-toe in protective gear, scrubbing and washing and struggling to clean a room like this one? No plastic wrap, no bleach, no nothing, just a few seconds of concentration and he was done! This new development was so thrilling it almost made up for his terrible headache.
“Okay,” he rubbed his chin, “That’s two problems down. Now I just gotta do something about… ergh.”
Hunter looked down. He was no longer covered in blood, but that just made it more obvious that he was naked, and… yeah, still definitely a woman. He… wasn’t really sure what to do about that? He didn’t like it, but when he thought about it in the hopes he might suddenly remember some helpful spell, nothing came up.
So he’d just… go forth like this, he supposed?
Except with clothes on, preferably.
Luckily, that last thought did bear some fruit.
Being able to use magic meant he could finally turn the damn lights on, so he tapped the wall, shoved some mana into it, and lit the place up. Along the opposite wall was a clothes cabinet, so he opened it up and grabbed a pair of pants and a shirt. Getting the pants on was easy enough, but the shirt was a bit of an issue.
Putting it on didn’t really hide anything, it just draped fabric on top of it, which he found a little disappointing. He’d never had a chest like this before, and while he felt that it’d be fine on someone else, he couldn’t help but feel that on him it was too… there? Anybody who saw him would definitely think he was a woman, and even if he put a bra on, that would only change the shape a little. In fact, just the idea of wearing a bra made him feel twice as uncomfortable.
Without any obvious solution, he shrugged, grabbed a coat, and slipped it on. Taking a quick look in the floor-length mirror, he confirmed that he still didn’t like how he looked, but decided that if anyone bothered him about it he’d just set them on fire with his mind.
He could do that now.
With his immediate problems taken care of, he rubbed at his eyes and let out a sigh.
The longer he was here, the harder it was to convince himself that this was all in his head. There was no dreamy quality to things, just the same old brutal linear passage of time. The pain felt real, the constant small inconveniences felt real, and so too did his confusing memories of that endless place with the scary glowing spider-lady.
Leaning closer to the mirror, he inspected the injuries on his face. There was bruising on his jaw, and just above his hairline was a deep gash, swollen and red and trickling a weak line of fresh blood. He was pretty sure he’d identified the source of his migraine, but how did he get like this?
When he thought about it, the corresponding memories felt fuzzy and incomplete, but he could still remember that she’d been standing when she’d ejected her soul. Her body must have hit the floor after that.
So the sacrifice and the magic circle had all been so she could leave her body… but why? Could souls even live without bodies? Where could she have gone?
Eh, whatever. That was her problem.
Studying himself closer, he decided his new face didn’t look too bad. Arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, lips that were neither thin nor thick—overall it’d be pretty average looking if not for the freaky green veins running down the left side of it. He gave them a poke and found that not only were they slightly raised, but they also felt hard, almost root-like.
The weird part was, those veins, this face… they felt familiar. Where had he seen that sort of thing before? He was pretty sure this skin problem didn’t exist back in his old world.
Her name felt familiar, too. Ianthe… Did he know her, or did he just feel that way because he’d inherited some jumbled memories from her?
The other thing that struck him about his new body was how colorful it was. His hair—and wow, there sure was a lot of it, even tangled in a rat’s nest it seemed to almost reach mid-back—was a bright crimson red. He’d have assumed it came out of a bottle if not for the fact that his eyelashes were the same color. The eyes were rather strange, too. The right was a deep sort of reddish-pink, but as for the left…
The sclera on the left was black, and contrasted against it was a vivid green iris. The color was so bright it looked like it was glowing, which he thought might just be possible here, since magic was a thing. In fact, ‘because magic’ was probably the answer to all the weird shit he’d seen so far.
But as he continued to study that eye he began to feel some doubt. There was something uncomfortable about staring into it, something that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. As though even this was his face, it was not actually his eye. As though, when he looked into that dark pupil, he was looking at something or someone else—
—And it was looking back.
He slapped his hand over that eye and jumped a step away from the mirror.
It was probably just his imagination, right? It wasn’t like he was cursed or something.
…
”You’ve got to be shitting me.”
According to her memories, he actually was.
Great. Wonderful. Apparently curses were also a thing here.
Didn’t he already have enough bullshit to deal with!?
He tried to probe her memories further to see what she knew about that, but found he suddenly had no desire to unpack this new problem just yet. Still, it explained why there were so many eye patches in her clothes cabinet. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to cover that freaky thing up.
He grabbed one of the patches and slipped it on, then looked back at the mirror and finally remembered where he’d seen her before—
—It’d only been a month ago, maybe two? Back then it was almost spring, but the little ranch he and Al shared in Maricopa still had fairy lights and Hanukkah decorations up. Al had been too lazy to take them down himself, and Hunter hadn’t had the heart to do it since Al had worked so hard to put them up in the first place.
They’d gathered together in the living room, which was the only room in the house with a TV. According to Al this was because Hunter was a tyrannical Luddite who hated televisions, but that was only half true. Hunter’s primary motivation was the knowledge that allowing a teenager to squirrel all their electronics in their room meant basically never seeing them again, and thus if Al wished to play his Switch on a big screen he had to do it where his dad could hang out with him.
This was just one of many misconceptions Hunter let Al live under. Another was that Hunter liked video games, but was terrible at them. He’d convinced Al of this by being so fantastically bad at every game Al purchased that the resulting psychic damage drove him to hide the Joy-Cons. However, Hunter just kept buying more, so Al magnanimously took pity on his father and began to play games on the big TV so Hunter could enjoy them without touching them. The only thing this cost Hunter was a bit of pride and a years-long losing streak in Super Smash Bros., since Al insisted on challenging him to a match every time Hunter pissed him off.
The result of Hunter’s scheming was that video games became a relatively safe discussion topic between them. It was something they each desperately needed because, now that Al had become a teenager, even the most innocuous interactions could become a fight. It was as though they’d woken up one morning to find they were each speaking different languages, and the confusion and distress that caused had begun to push them apart.
“Hey, kiddo. Whatcha playin’ today?”
Hunter was sprawled out on the couch, looking over at his son. Al was curled up like a pill bug on the loveseat, his gaze focused on the screen, a Joy-Con in each hand. He was wrapped head to toe in an oversized black hoodie and was absently chewing on a few strands of his long, dark hair. His expression and body language seemed casual, but Hunter was sensitive enough to feel the tension he was radiating.
“Umm… something new. You probably won’t like it…”
It was small, but it was a little push away. Not one to give up so easily, Hunter pulled right back.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m not sure anybody could replace those little squid kids in my heart,” he muttered, feigning distress. “I can’t believe you’re abandoning my fish babies.”
Al snorted before he could stop himself.
“It’s—ahem—it’s called Rabbit Heart,” Al said. The TV in front of them now depicted five college-age kids with colorful hair. Behind them, lurking like a monster with her clawed hands outstretched, was a red-haired woman with an eye patch and green veins on half her face.
“Uhh I guess it’s like—a novel you play through?” Al paused, his hazel eyes refusing to meet Hunter’s green ones. “You like, go through different story lines based on the characters you… befriend… I dunno, someone on Twitter recommended it.”
Hunter’s eyes narrowed, a bit of suspicion growing in his heart. He was far more pop-culture savvy than Al gave him credit for, and he was also very good at reading people, which meant it wasn’t hard for Hunter to detect there was something else Al wasn’t telling him about.
Unable to resist teasing him, Hunter leaned forward, propping his chin on one hand as he shot Al a smug look and said, “There’s smoochin’ in it, isn’t there?”
Al bristled like a startled cat, then shot a glare at his father and said, “Never mind, I think I’ll play this one in my room—”
“No no no! I’m interested!” Hunter held out a hand to stop Al, feeling a little regretful that he’d called him out on it. “I like romance! The more kissing the better!”
Al gave Hunter a look of utter disgust. “Please never say that again.”
“I’m serious! Hey—hey!” Hunter pointed a finger at his son, “You owe me after that Zelder one, with the blonde kids—”
“Do you mean Breath of the Wild?”
“Yeah! That one!” getting fired up, Hunter pounded a fist into his palm and said, “A hundred years she waited for that little twink—”
“DAD!”
“And she doesn’t even get a peck on the cheek at the end!? A forehead kiss!? Nothing!” he threw up his hands, disgusted. “I swear if they don’t date in the sequel we’re going to Japan and I’m gonna track down the writers—no, you know what, I’m gonna send Nintendo another email now, just in case.”
“No, please stop emailing them, you know someone has to read those right?” Al cried out, putting his face in his hands.
“That’s why I’m sending them! What do you think ‘customer service’ is?” Hunter insisted, then took out his phone. “Maybe I should just call them—ah, I’ll have to give them your Nintendo ID though, I don’t remember what mine is—”
“No! No phone calls! No emails!” Al begged, horrified at the idea. “I’ll play it okay!? Just stop trying to contact people!”
Victorious, Hunter stowed his phone away and shamelessly switched gears. “Sooooo, what’s this game, then?”
“You… you fight evil and make friends and stuff at a magic school, okay!?” Al admitted, looking like he wanted to crawl under the couch and die there. “I mean, it’s technically a... a 'romance' game, but there’s more to it than that.”
“Okay, sounds fun,” Hunter interrupted, shrugging.
Glaring at him from out of the corner of his eyes, Al asked, “Really?”
“Yeah—anyway, we both know your taste is better than mine.” He waved his hands in a shooing motion towards Al. “Play it, play it, I promise I’ll keep the Statler and Waldorf shit to a minimum.”
“You’re lying,” Al muttered, hesitating… but he calmed down nevertheless, and before Al turned his face away Hunter caught sight of a small, reluctant smile and a look of relief that made his heart clench.
Every once and a while this sort of thing happened—with the nail polish, with the long hair, and now with this game—Al would show Hunter a piece of himself and there’d be that doubt, that fear that this time Hunter wouldn’t be okay with it. It was happening more and more these days, almost like Al was testing him. Like they were building up to something bigger.
He knew there was something Al was hiding from him, something that he was afraid to bring up. He could sense it, just under the surface between them, and the longer Al hid it the more worried he became…
He remembered that game, even if he couldn’t remember how he died.
He also remembered that, just before he had, things between him and Al had been getting worse and worse…
Now, standing in front of a mirror in a brand new world, he looked at himself and spat, “Coward.”
Why had he let so much go unsaid? He should have told Al that he’d love him no matter what he was hiding, that all he wanted was for Al to be happy and safe, to hell with everyone else.
But he’d been too afraid. Afraid he was wrong, and that he’d offend him and kick off a huge fight. Afraid he was right, and that it’d push Al into a corner, forcing him to reveal something before he was ready. Afraid that things might get too emotional, that he’d freak out because big feelings scared him and he’d say something hurtful by accident.
He’d thought they had time. That he wouldn’t have to say it if he just kept showing Al that it was alright, that eventually he’d come around on his own…
But now he was in another world, possessing the body of some fictional lady and crying at a stupid mirror because his son was gone—
“You fucking loser,” he muttered to himself, pressing his forehead against the cold glass.
Taking a deep breath, he stood up straight and wiped his face with his sleeve. If this new life—this new body—was a second chance, he wasn’t going to waste it.
He was going to find his kid, and he was going to make sure Al knew just how much Hunter cared about him.
And then they were going to have a serious discussion about how the hell they’d ended up in a fucking video game.