wtf is a child doing here? | DOORS

part one - abandonment

Will made a quiet raspy noise, like he'd started to scream and thought better of it. The bookshelf squeezed down against his spine, the wood cutting through his sweater and into his skin. He's pretty sure that his wrist is snapped by the way a hot spiking pain shoots up his arm abruptly, his ribs creaking arduously with the heavy weight pressing into his back.

"He's dead weight, we've gotta go," one of the guests' blubbers, the remark stinging the child's resolve. He makes to pull the girl attempting to lift the shelf off of him away, stumbling the both of them back when the door behind them bangs against the wall vehemently.

A humanoid figure, cloaked in black sweating ooze with a single broad eye stares at them eagerly. There's a call from beyond the wrecked furniture and overturned chairs and tables, and the entity tilts his head up at it.

"Run," the guest from before orders whisperingly. Then, with more urgency in his voice, "Fuck. Run!"

And then the two are sprinting, high on adrenaline, under the crooked couches and past the fallen bookshelves, papers strewn across the wooden floorboards haphazardly.

There's a dead coldness that settles into the room when they're long gone, and Will can't help the shudder that runs through the entirety of his body at the sound of thundering, crunching footsteps making their way to him. They're slow, almost purposefully so, and it's an agonizing wait of Will keeping his gaze locked onto the carpet and not at the— at the thing that's in the room with him.

A growl, low and gravelly, enters his ears. He caves, naturally, bending as much as he possibly could to sink himself deeper under the bookshelf that has him pinned where he is; back aching, ribs on the verge of cracking, and silent tears running down his cheek. A tangent goes off in his head, words harried and half-baked.

imsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorry

Then the weight pushing him down to the floor is lifted suddenly, the bookshelf flying into the wall behind him and falling to the ground with a raucous clatter that makes Will wince at the volume of it.

But the pressure is off and he finally feels like he has the liberty to breathe again, pushing himself up with his elbows to lessen the ache blooming across his stomach. He groans at the way the bones in his wrist crack in an odd way, the mass of his body forcing it into overtime.

He wonders, briefly, whether he could just snap it back into place to pop it back into its socket, but that thought train is soon closed down when he looks up into the terrifying face — was it even a face? It was really just an eye — of Seek.

There's a shriek caught in the back of his throat that doesn't want to come out, so he's stuck there, on the ground, eyes as wide as saucers with the pain radiating from his broken wrist just a distant static in the back of his mind.

A hand, slender and nimble, reaches under his chin, forcing him to stare, point-blank, into the unblinking eye that's pinning him down. Fluid seems to run over the entity's body, Will notices absent-mindedly, and it looks something like oil or ink.

And then the most unexpected thing happens.

The entity croons, head lifting before lowering further down, brushing against the crown of Will's forehead. There's only one word that echoes forth into his own mind; child. And it's so sudden, so foreign, that Will doesn't have any other option but to basically melt into it.

Child.

Child.

Oh, heaven above, what on earth was he doing here, in a hotel such as this?