𝑊𝐴𝑁𝑇 𝑇𝐻𝐼𝑆 (locke and key gabe)

11 rewritten

an; switching up to first person this time w some avery pov and later some of gabes, lmk in the comments if you prefer first or third person!

It didn't feel real.

I felt like my body wasn't my own, like my mind was somewhere else entirely. 

The memory was still playing over. Over and over and over as I tried to take it in, tried to process what I'd just seen, tried to make sense of it. Nothing was fitting. Nothing was right. It felt like a nightmare my body refused to let me wake from.

I wanted to deny it, wanted to convince myself that what I was looking at was simply a strange dream of Eden's, rather than a memory that could turn my whole world upside-down. I shouldn't have come into her head. I shouldn't have pried. I shouldn't have looked.

With shaking hands, I set the quartz bottle back on the ledge, never once taking my gaze of it. I watched his face shift again and again. From Gabe to Dodge and back to Gabe again, I couldn't look away, no matter how desperately I wanted to. 

He was... he felt like my match, too perfect, too much like me. Too good to be true. I should have seen that. He had been like a dream, everything I had wanted- but dreams could just as easily become nightmares. I knew that much. But Gabe, kind, sweet, compassionate Gabe; the first boy to really make me laugh or smile or blush, I refused to accept that he wasn't real.

Something creaked in the dark corner of the room. 

My head snapped up, away from the perfume bottle as I reached for my back pocket on instinct. I needed the lighter. I needed my Key. For some feeble protection, and strangely enough, to feel closer to my dad.

I looked back to the shadows, but nothing was there. 

I still found myself expecting darkness to spring to life, wherever I went, living in constant fear that Dodge would be back, that she'd haunt me from the shadows. But Dodge... she'd never been real. It had been Gabe all along. Gabe who had haunted my nightmares and hurt my family, Gabe who had used and manipulated my younger brother. 

And then he had consoled me for the suffering that he had caused. For the pain that he had inflicted upon my family.

The scar across my ribcage prickled as I thought back to Dodge's shadows. To them pinning me to the ground and clawing at my skin. I remembered Bode's screams. I remembered the spots of blood on the carpet. The way Kinsey thrashed. The way Tyler tried to fight back. I thought of how helpless I was, how weak. Of how Gabe had consoled me mere hours later. I was a mix of anger and betrayal and... grief. I was grieving someone who still lived, but someone who had never been real, an illusion, a ruse. The Gabe I had fallen for didn't even exist.

That noise again. That scuffling in the shadows. I couldn't ponder over Gabe for too long. Something was there.

I squeezed my lighter, feeling its reassuring weight in my palm.]

Something shifted in the darkness, and for a moment I was afraid it may have been one of Dodge's shadow soldiers. But no. It was pale and glossy and moved almost robotically. 

It stamped into the light on twisting limbs, and I soon realised it was a... mannequin?  No not one, no, at least three dozen. Dread coiled in my stomach, fear prickling my skin. I backed away, my breathing rugged, a soft wheeze in the eerily quiet room. Their footsteps were silent, the creak of their plastic limbs muted. The only sound was my shaky breaths, my wobbly footsteps as I drew back. I had to get out of there.