serai

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It's past midnight, so I'm posting this now, that our friends across the pond might read it while it's still Halloween.

So here's a chilling little tale from my Z/C 'verse. This one's for

aliensouldream, with a great big hug to

twothreefour, who helped me with a mad last-minute rewrite. Blessed Samhain to all!

Written off the prompt: Not all scars show and not all wounds heal.

Monster
by Serai

The Monster comes to him late at night. The feeling is always the same: a sense of reaching, of clutching, of desperate hands about to take hold of him and drag him down into an unseen, watery nothingness. To drag him back.

Zeke never talks about the Monster. He hasn't mentioned it since he was a kid and his mother got that furtive, frightened look on her face when he described it - a sound like something small and soft and wet moving under his bed, a distant wailing that sounded lost, that feeling that it wanted him. He thought it wanted to eat him, and it scared him when it looked like his mom might think that, too. She smiled then, a smile that looked wrong, and said it just reminded her of a dream she'd had at his age, that was all. But he didn't believe that. At least, he didn't then. Now he's not sure.

The Monster made it hard to live alone at first. Zeke left lights on almost every night the first year he spent in his mother's family home. Brian pitched a fit about the bills, but Wanda held him off. She visited a lot that first year, saying she wanted to be sure he'd settled in, but Zeke wasn't fooled. Even though she never mentioned it, he knew she understood. The kids at school think he's lucky - after all, they don't know about the Monster. But what does she know?

He stays away from the indoor pool at school, and doesn't much care for the lake near the house, either. He hates this vague, jittery fear, but sees no way to deal with it better than simply avoiding the things that wake it up. He knows there's no hungry, begging thing in the water, no creature waiting to pull him down into an unending liquid embrace. It's a nightmare, a phantasm, a fantasy. It's also not something he's going to tempt.

The Monster doesn't appear every night. Zeke is never even sure if it's there until it makes itself known. Makes itself heard, felt, sometimes even seen. One night he startles awake -

- and sees himself, sitting at the edge of the bed, a gentle smile on his lips. He does nothing, just sits there, but Zeke can feel it, that pulling, begging sensation, and a scream wants to fill his head. Then the Monster reaches out a hand to touch his face, still smiling that gentle smile, and Zeke is frozen, unable to move. He just has time to see the light glittering wetly off the ring on its finger, its hands are wet, the Monster is soaking wet, warm salt water, fluid ocean -

- and he wakes again with a scream, alone, as he's been all along. The Monster is not there.

When Casey is with him, the Monster retreats. Zeke doesn't know why. It's not the presence of someone else in his bed - he's brought girls home and that never stopped it. Something about Casey himself seems to calm the Monster down, keep it quiet. When Casey's arms are wound around him, when their bodies fit together and the world is far away, that feeling of eternal sadness and irrational, insane longing fades out of the air. The Monster no longer reaches for him, but watches quietly, or maybe it doesn't and simply sleeps. Zeke just knows that when Casey is there, the Monster doesn't cry. It waits.

One day his mother comes to see him. She's pale and shaking as she finally tells Zeke the meaning of his nightmares. He listens coldly, his fury growing with every word as she describes how the pain and grief nearly killed her, how he was the only thing that saved her in those first days, when she wanted to die. The birth had been hard, so much harder than anyone expected, she tells him. Brian did everything he could, but was helpless in the face of her sorrow. Only Zeke's eyes, his face, his lost and lonely crying, kept her moored to the world. He needed her. Of the two of them, he had survived. The Monster had not.

His mother's house burns, and the fire glows through Zeke's fingers as he lights a cigarette and watches from behind the wheel. The corpses inside crackle like roasts while the unthinking rage twists his mind, making him glad at the thought. All those years not knowing, tormented by it, by the hole in the world, the lack at the heart of everything. The feeling of not-there, the sense of love torn away, all his life. Restless, cold, abandoned. All those years, and she knew why. He laughs, a mad, climbing laugh, any semblance of sanity burning along with his mother's flesh - and his own.

Fuck her, he thinks, she deserved it, and his spectral hand tosses the pack of cigarettes across the seat. His twin brother catches it, and grins. Zeke turns the shimmering key as his brother calls flame from the air to light his own smoke. The GTO's ghostly engine sparks into undead life.

Reunited at last, the Monsters roar off into the darkness.

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