Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Take a trip without Trivago
No one likes to talk about it, but Outcasts (And what a silly name for them. What a silly name for creatures that never should have been.) aren’t normal. By their very nature, they are other than the masses. Separate. For good reason.
Supernatural is not just another name you take on without being unnatural. People don’t just get claws that can tear through aluminum like it’s made of paper, they don’t just have a voice that can compel anyone to do anything , snakes that whirl and stare and petrify on the head, and people die when they are killed not just to rise up and become human kool-aid addicts with a newfound appreciation for gothic aesthetics and a terminal hatred of Italians.
People don’t. It makes you wonder, where they came from then, if they are so obviously not people .
But some things are best left buried, even if they scream .
Have you heard of this tale? A little story back when medicine was little more than a handful of leeches given to people so they'd stop being annoying and loud; and why do you have to be in pain so loudly, huh?
The ability to judge if people died or were just having the worst best sleep of their lives left something to be desired. That is to say, in normal people speak (no need to thank Enid) people had no clue if people were really dead or just in a coma. So say sometimes they buried someone not quite dead. And say the gravekeeper being very, very lucky may find them banging their coffins hoarse, and their restful earth bloody. Smartly they added a little apparatus to make the task of hearing someone’s rude awakening in their own grave a mite easier. Usually some sort of pipe, copper make, that’d extend to a trumpet’s head out of the dirt like a polished metal flower.
Funny if in a depressing miserable kind of way, suits the period doesn’t it?
But listen very closely, after someone ‘dies’ and you might find them not at all dead.
Call it resurrection but not even Jesus stayed desiccating longer than three days. After that… well.
Then whatever was screaming under the ground was something very different to what was buried.
It isn’t that Enid wakes up, it’s more that there’s a slight change in the darkness. A shift that’s hardly noticeable, but you’d be blind to not feel. The waiting dark does not fill her with determination. Her hands knock against something, elbows bunching up and pushing against knotted and hollow above her. Enid’s breath fans out over the rest of her face in unpleasant humidity.
It’s a dark place. But not a quiet one.
All she can hear echoes around her, things and waves that bounce back and forth across her in repeating ripples, repeating and repeating until they become just noise. Enid can hear her own blood racing, blood in great tides swallowing her ears. She feels at once and the need to vomit out this sound until everything quiets, and somewhere, impossibly, the urge to scream until her ears bleed. The friction between those two builds and builds in her chest. Enid has to at some points pant like a dog just to cool down. It doesn’t help the humidity fogging her skin into something hot and feverish.
She didn’t hear it before, but there is a melody above her. Rustling fabrics and the weight of an edge gliding through air. What must be miniscule bells ring sweetly pitched in their high tones. They ring in multitudes timed with the swish and sway of heavy fabric. It almost sounds like Christmas chimes. No one speaks, not even Enid, but there’s something impossibly gentle about the noise. Like a mother fussing over a crying babe.
It's the only thing stopping her from having a panic attack. The weight on her chest grows.
Suddenly the wind rushes as if something utterly massive, something that dwarfs Enid many times over has fallen over-surrounding whatever cage Enid’s in, physically replacing a great volume of air and great claws whistle through it’s current. Endi can almost feel their weight, the sheer size of whatever sharp thing, many-thing that hides underneath the cloth and sweet bells. She pushes her breath back in and grips it there in her chest.
Beyond her, beyond the motherly weight above her, a mechanical shifting breaks the silence- industrial, heavy, durable, dangerous .
The snap follows with slow clicks, the vibration rattles in Enid’s bones . Someone walking on your grave is never pleasant, but the wait, the tension, the anticipation of immediate and indescribable violence is worse.
It has to be violence. It can only be violence. That’s always how this ends. Unbearable pressure, and then the sudden snap . It’s a horror. It’s cinema.
Enid hates, loathes , horror movies. No matter how hard they try, no matter how hard they fight, scheme, trick their way. They always lose.
The monster always dies at the end.
So she does what she always does, she closes her ears and tries to pretend the cacophony of savagery above her is nothing.
She’s good-the best at that, lying to herself.
Sometimes, sometimes the thing that is under the ground does not scream. The horror movie monster does not knock on the door. For what is beyond is infinitely more terrifying than itself.
…
“Woken up with something o-of a nightmare, have you?” Enid’s not sure if she’s woken up from the nightmare honestly. She has a feeling she might’ve but also the disconcerting feeling she only woke up deeper. They’re dumb. Feelings are dumb. They’re dumb feelings.
Is this Inception? Is she three layers deep or gone all the way round to being awake? Did she climb out of her coffin?
Or did something pull her from the grave ?
The stranger in stranger clothes takes her hand, helps her out of bed, and onto her feet. She wouldn't say he’s nervous exactly, more that the words tumbles out of his mouth before he can quite recognize them as his own. It’s like… he’s forgotten all manner of conversation. “A foul, murky story?”
He’s said he’s a minister, but Enid doesn’t remember priests wearing the kind of loose clothing that seems to make up more of him than well, actually him. The ancient Victorian style, the thin raggedy quality of them and the way some of it hangs limply and torn on him, as if a great gust of wind had taken off with big chunks. The raspy wavering, nervous way he speaks to her suggests that gust of wind took more than just scraps of clothing.
“Something like that,” she eventually says. Stories aren’t really her thing.
He jerks his head up and down. The top hat doesn't move. Enid stares a hole into it. “Thought so. Quite beyond my own reckoning, this new world of yours. This ah, Nevermore and scholarly schools for all manner of people. A-mer-ica, what a palace it must be!”
“Place,” Enid corrects, snaps. Something hurtful and raw presses behind her voice. “It's a country. Big enough to hold California, and New York and Florida and somehow not tear itself apart.”
But not too big that’d you live in it and not know its name, whispers the part of her brain that hates her.
The minister looks sharply at her, or tries to at least. The gauzy bandages under lank hair impede that. “Oh, oh. I wouldn’t speak of that— oh I truly would not.”
He licks his teeth. Enid tries not to notice how they all seem to be incisors, even the ones that gleam in the back of his mouth for but a second. What small sharp teeth you have, says the big bad wolf to the little hooded man. “ She doesn’t take too well to foreigners. Not too well at all. Heh, heh, heheh… still. Wouldn't that be a fine story to tell the grandkids? Am-eri-ca. The palace beyond even the Crown’s long shadow, with it’s towers of New Y-ork, Cali-fornia, and the Flori-da!”
Oh so it's the grandparent then. The room spins with the smell of heavy, medicinal alcohol. Antiseptics, and woodrot and of course, the blood. So sweet she can taste it thickening on her tongue. She waits. Maybe because she just woke up, but passing out doesn’t feel so close. Or… you can’t really fall unconscious in a dream can you? But you can wake up into one?
She waits for him to elaborate, waits a bit longer. Fails at waiting. “...I’m guessing you’re not feeling up to telling who this ‘she’ is?” What the Crown is supposed to represent, basically anything ?
He see-saws an empty cloudy syringe in pendulum fashion. “Oh, but I’ve nothing more to tell. I just show the way.” He angles one covered eye under his hat to find her unerringly. “You’re a bit late, I’m afraid. The way’s been shown, taken — you’re left out in the mud now.”
Enid thins her lips. “Really appreciate you making a habit of being cryptic and creepy. I really do. Because being perfectly honest? That made no sense and I live with the personification of a gothic cryptid.”
“It’ll come to you in time.” He says pleasantly.
“Or you can explain.” Enid says just as pleasantly. Sweetly saccharine.
They stare at each other.
But you can’t win a staring contest with a blind man.
...
Something must have leaked into her brain. Infection through juxtaposition.
It has to be the proximity, all of it must have leaked like ink bleeding into cheap paper, spilling into her brain until the stray pigment suffocates the wrong neuron. Or maybe there's something growing on her brain, in the cavity between her skull and grey matter. A mold flowering in brainfluid.
Did Wednesday live in some creepy wonderland for goths? Enid should probably ask. For… her blog. With big red warnings to not sleep in close proximity.
Not even the lovely English darling at the barred window-sill can prevent Enid’s slow fall into what must be her third panic attack of the night. She plays with the flower left besides the window as his voice tinnies out from it. Some sort of pale sunflower smelling faintly of unreality yet familiar. “Another outsider?”
The sound of Gilbert sniffing is weird, but maybe it’s the custom. The glass is so opaque and smudged only the reddish glow from lantern oil filters out against his silhouette. Enid can’t imagine he can smell much besides incense anyways.“Oh dear. You don’t seem a Hunter .” The word is said like a curse, a prayer. A title.
It, Hunter , capitalizes itself in Enid’s brain as Important.
Her brain is probably broken.
“Yeah. I’m Enid.” Says the so-named girl lamely. And tacks on. “Totally not a foreigner.”
“Heh, haha… Enid of ‘ totally’ Yharnam, out on a night like this? You,” Coughs wrack the silhouette of the man in the window. Loud, painful coughs force the man over until Enid’s not sure if he falls over or he’s stopped breathing altogether.
She quickly scans for an entrance, but the buildings are so tightly interlocked and weaving together in wrought iron fence and sun-stained stonework, that she can’t even tell where it begins and where it ends. If it ends. So she settles for, “You ok?”
“I don’t suppose saying I am, will fool you?”
“I can say yes if it’ll make you feel better.” Enid offers.
“Say yes then. Ahhh… Yharnam’s a fine way of introducing herself, doesn’t she?” Yes, she’s met the townsfolk. Or met the ones lying on the street facedown at least. Their pitchforks and muskets tell her all she needs to know. Enid’s smart enough to not look further. “But I suppose the most ardent have reason to come…. and they do come .”
He sounds wistful. Resigned.
“... Did they turn you away? For being an,” what did he call it? Oh yeah, “Outsider?” Outsider, Outcast. Kin recognizes kin.
Apparently her brain’s so soaked in discrimination even in a horrible dream, it exists. Or, Enid thinks darkly, her brain just hates herself.
Enid swears — she doesn’t know what she swears, but she swears it anyway. She’ll find those upjumped ignorant bastards and she’ll make them help, or she’ll make them .
That’ll teach her subconscious. Sure.
“Nothing so vulgar. It's just that… not even a miracle can stave off a curse. Aah, I should have known from the very first night. If their own miracle isn't enough for the Hunts, then what hope did I have?”
“You’re dying.” Enid doesn’t know what to say. So what comes out is everything she doesn’t want to say.
“How did you ever so guess? I jest. Pay no heed to me, there’s no need to trouble yourself for me much longer.”
This kind of senselessness, this unblameable cruelty. It’s impossible. It shouldn’t be, and Enid doesn’t understand.
Gilbert pauses. And continues, with a brighter, happier cadence. “It's too late for me, but perhaps not for you. The state of things…” He tsks, tsks. “The Hunt may yet be the longest one in my memory. Has the sun gone down yet? No, I can still see the light… Good, still time to scurry to safety. The more monstrous things tarry until the Hunter’s are out in their true number.”
Enid winces, carefully doesn't turn around. The fading red light against her back casts her shadow long and wavering. Bright enough to stain everything feverishly scarlet. Bright enough to mistake it as the setting sun.
“The sun is already down.” There’s no mistaking her dead tone as a joke. It’s fact. It’s the only that has to make sense in the world.
“What did you say…? if the sun is down, then that light must be… light on a night like this? “
Yharnam is burning and it is silent.
That’s alright, Enid can hear the screams ringing in her skull.
“...Dear gods.”