Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 12

(Author's note: I could not for the life of me find any screen grabs of Thomas' chats with the MC that have been referenced in this chapter. So they are very likely inaccurate as they have been written here. If anyone knows the correct quotes, please let me know! I just couldn't be bothered to play basically the entire game again to get to that chapter [fuuuuuck those minigames], please forgive me.)

Five days.

It had been five days since she had spoken to Jake. A hundred and twenty hours.

She listlessly clicked the button on the side of her phone to activate the screen, staring emptily at the date and time widget that was slowly and agonizingly pushing forth the time, one intolerable second after the next. She could barely read it through the snaking and winding cracks of her shattered phone screen, but she got the jist.

One hundred and twenty-two hours, 41 minutes, 39 seconds.

40 seconds.

41 seconds.

42 seconds.

But she wasn't counting.

She clicked the button again, and watched as the shattered glass plunged into instantaneous darkness.

43 seconds.

44 seconds.

She let the phone come to rest on her chest, letting it rise and fall with each breath, staring up at the ceiling. It had become so deeply familiar to her over the past five days, the ceiling; she was pretty confident that if, for some nonsensical reason, she needed to identify her ceiling in a ceiling line-up, she could point out that featureless motherfucker with her eyes closed.

It was like a way shittier version of staring into a campfire or up at clouds scudding through a pure blue sky - she could see shifting patterns and shapes in the texturized paint that coated it, never being able to hold onto one for very long before it morphed into something completely different. A fitting metaphor for the subjects of her thoughts - Duskwood, and Jake.

The emotional nuclear fallout from the past few weeks was finally beginning to descend; raining down relentlessly through thoughts, dreams, memories, and fear. It coated her like a hyper-fine dust as it fell into every single bombshell crater and shrapnel wound that was the ravaged no-man's-land of the desolation that Richy had caused.

And it wasn't just her, either. The group chats with her friends from Duskwood had fallen completely silent, dwindling into nothing by the third day as each of the participants withdrew into their own personal hells of trying to come to grips with the post-apocalyptic landscape that they now found themselves in.

She could practically see them, in her mind's eye, each huddled in the meagre cover that had been left behind as the onslaught of artillery finally settled, lying in the cold mud of blast craters and abandoned trenches as they waited. Waited for what, though, she could not say. For she lay in her own open hollow, staring up at the sky as the radioactive particulate fell like flour through a sift, knowing that there was no point in trying to find shelter because the artillery had razed every last structure to the ground.

I am not the same anymore, Thomas had written to her, after she had caught him using Hannah's phone while they had been in that house in the forest. She had not been prepared for the heaviness of the burden that had come through with his words, and even though she had understood exactly what he had meant - she wasn't the same anymore, either - she could not allow herself to fall into that particular abyss just yet and so had asked him to explain to bide for time.

There are things in life that change you, he had written. Things that you can't come back from.

And although she had trained her focus on trying to prevent him from falling apart at the seams for the rest of the conversation, the anguish in those words had never left her. Because although they were all laser focused on finding Hannah, she knew that the wraiths and demons that came with those words would eventually come to call, sooner or later. And so they had, for each one of them in turn.