ENTITLED. Unreliable Narrator
FANDOM. Until Dawn
LENGTH. 4,900
SETTING. From about a year pre-game, to about a year afterwards.
DISCLAIMER. I'm just a gross fan! Give me a break.
NOTES. The number of times I wrote 'Claire' instead of 'Sam' basically proved that imprinting is real.
SUMMARY. People become beautiful when you know you can hurt them. – Josh, Sam

The gas mask—hurts. The plastic ridge digs against the bridge of her nose a little when it's forced against her face, but then the pressure lessens, just enough to stay in place—and the arm that's slung across her collar—is gentle, almost careful.

Sam wonders what the smell of poison is. Her head spins—this stuff is unbelievably fast, and she's so stupid, how could she have been stupid enough to gasp when he'd caught her when she knew—she knew he'd been carrying that gas canister around with him? Because of course she'd known, she'd only had about five minutes to run circles around him

Her knees stutter, stop. The hands she'd raised to try to claw him away droop limply, and eventually, her body simply folds. Perhaps adrenaline and her furiously beating heart have killed her faster. She doesn't want to die. This thought presses, pure and uncomplicated, against the closing door of consciousness. She doesn't want to die.

She feels him catch her, and lift her. The feeling of being carried. Nobody has carried her like this since she was very, very young…

Her head rocks with his pace. Before she stops thinking, she forgets to be afraid.

Step One: Establish Your Storyteller! Ranging from God to some made-up, non-person.

Josh raises his hand. "I don't get it. What's the difference?"

The class titters. The lecturer decides to move on. This is basic stuff, someone who'd ever even picked up a book could work out. The storyteller is always their own character, even when they are never named or otherwise interacted with. The storyteller has power, because they determine who presents the narrative. They can lie.

"So, he's not real." Josh is a shitty guy to watch movies with. He always talks. Not even the normal kind of stuff either, because he studies film, so when Sam's sniffing over some kid's dead dog, Josh is there next to her, mumbling, "Sepia? Are we on a deadline to turn over some history book covers?"

"Who's not real?" Sam asks. Sam is patient. She has learned how patient she is in the face of loosing her best friends in the world, and then enduring the suffocating, eager voyeurism of those close to her. She is sick of her own restrained, brave grief.

"Oh," Josh sips his coke. "Right. Well, the main character is nuts. Obviously."

"Why is he obviously nuts—?"

"I mean, every time we cut between scenes, the guy shows up with another black eye or split lip or—or—something. We're losing time, along with him. He's doing stuff we don't know about, but it's never addressed. Since our main character is also the narrator, he has a duty to explain things to us. So either he's omitting things, or he's not aware that three days have just passed."

Sam nods slowly. She watches the movie. It isn't really her thing. She'd been going out of her way to watch comedies, ever since Hannah and Beth disappeared. But Josh wanted psychological horror? Okay. She could do two hours of some dumb pseudo-macho screen party.

"Did they talk a lot about that sort of stuff at film school?" Sam asks, after a while. On screen, a bullet flies through a man's well-muscled chest, and yet he doesn't bleed.

Josh doesn't answer her. He doesn't like to talk about his life, she's beginning to realize. Instead he points to the screen, and looks at her, his eyes shining in the dark. "See?" he drawls, "I told you he wasn't real."

"It's a movie," Sam sighs. "None of them are real."

Josh blinks. "Right," he says slowly. His eyes narrow, and some of the light goes out of him—or something happens, something that makes Sam uneasy, perhaps because she's so unsure of what it is. But she can't think of anything to say—and it feels like this always happens, they're always stuck together like this. Together, but not quite touching.

"If you think about it, nothing's real," Josh says. Sam braces herself. "I mean," he keeps talking, "The world as I know it is really just what I've forcibly bent into place, based on the limits of my own perception. I can't know how you see things. I could be totally wrong, about—about everything."

"It's just a movie." Sam repeats. It's mean, she's mean. Not being nice takes surprisingly little energy, and the rush of endorphins that follow make her eyes droop.

Neither of them speak. Sam grits her teeth, and bites her cuticle. She doesn't feel good anymore. "Sometimes I used to imagine what it was like, being inside the television," she says finally. "I guess all kids do. It looks better than here."

"Yeah," Josh laughs. They don't say anything else.

He takes his time with Sam.

Hers was the part he'd left most open, most up to chance. With Chris and Ashley, there'd been locked doors, and violence, and silly props jumping out at them to guide them down Inevitability Boulevard. Save Josh, kill Ashley? No. Nope, it is with complete confidence that Josh would die, every time. Josh knows he's not the most important person in Chris' life anymore. What were the real options, right? Some mopey wreck of a dropout or a cute, interested young woman? Right. There was no choice. Stupid Chris.

They're damn frustrating too, even as he watches them blunder around as the stars of their own ghost story. They should name their first child Josh. Nobody else in the world would be this patient a wingman, though even as he watches them he wants to swear—would you get to the fucking good part?

But Sam is all good part. So good. Beautiful young woman, wrapped in her towel, shivering as she creeps down the stairs. Her way is lit with candles and balloons, a gross parody of romance—another thing he has learned in school, the word unheimlich. Meaning, the uncanny, the acute repulsion or fear caused by the slight distortion of what is familiar and known.

It's cinematic. Rich with overtones, undertones, a symphony of soft violence. He used all the best cameras for her, high-definition, zoomed in to see the water droplets crawling down her shoulders, her wet footprints shining on the floor.

Best Picture.

People become beautiful when you know you can hurt them.

So, he goes slow. There are many kinds of fear, or maybe there are stages, like grief, and he doesn't want to just be some cheap thrill. He wants her to know. He wants her to run, to struggle, to show everyone else the things he had already known about her. He wants to give her that time, those moments of reflection and realization. She should know, no matter what she did, he'd catch her.

He wants to remember. The way her face, shattered by terror, had scrambled to pull on its grim mask of pragmatism. How she, the athlete, had thrown that vase at him with loose, flinging elbows, because her good arm was still holding on to that towel, still refusing to be naked.

How she'd appeared for him, inch by inch, as he dragged her out from under the bed. Like a present. Her ankles are skinny. He holds one almost tenderly, and in that moment her foot lashes out, hard enough to connect with his shoulder and throw him back—

"Don't you think it's strange?" Dr. Hill poses. "You ignore the people you should hate, and torture whomever you love. Perhaps you have difficulty in admitting your darkness. But there's no need for that. Once a liar is caught, he can only be pathetic."

The doctor stands. He is enormous, a towering god of a portly, slump-shouldered figure. His teeth are monstrously long, the buckle-teeth of a rabbit. They would be good for gnashing meat. His hands land on the desk with the bang of a gavel. He seems to grow larger. "You are," Dr. Hill whispers, "Pathetic. Cowardly. Punishment? You don't have the guts for punishment. No. No, no, no, hatred takes too much out of you, doesn't it? And besides, would you even know who to hate?"

The desk trembles, and caves, and the jars of spiders—god, not spiders—go rolling towards the floor. Their caps simply fall open. A long, delicate leg dips into the air, like some animate needle. Fucking spiders.

Revulsion.

"Or perhaps I should have asked, who do you become, when you face that hatred?"

Josh isn't really athletic. He's stronger than Sam, by virtue of being a young man with a bigger frame, but he's never understood that specific sort of masochism a good athlete needs.

He watches her run endless laps around the track. It's one of the only times he'll leave the house that month. He was supposed to have left her hours ago. They'd just been meeting for coffee.

He makes her uneasy. She's too kind to admit it. He doesn't blame her. He can't even be in the same house as his parents anymore. There isn't enough space for multiple force fields of sadness.

She staggers, and then falls.

Josh gets up before she does. He trots to her, his mind clear, a polished emptiness. It's almost a relief that she's hurt, because suddenly, he knows exactly how to take care of her. "Hey, Sammy. Can you get up?"

"Yeah," she says after a second. He crouches next to her. She'd fallen on the near side of the track, and he can see even in the gloomy evening light that her legs are shaking. It feels as though she looks straight through him. "Just a bang and a scrap." She smiles.

He just barely touches the skin around the edge of her scrape. Her legs are cold. "Does it hurt?" he asks. He doesn't recognize himself. He's ten years in the past, and Hannah's fallen off her bike. He couldn't protect her from everything—even then.

"It hurts," Sam says after a second. She takes a slow breath, and gets her feet under her. He helps her stand, and she looks him in the eye as he pulls her up. "But you know, I don't hate pain."

He freezes. His hand is still latched around hers. He tries to swallow the ice down his throat, and he becomes aware, all at once, that his neck is damp with sweat. "Wow," he slips, and then hastens to add, "That's like, the sexiest thing I've ever heard." He means it. This time, honesty is easy.

Sam rolls her eyes, and drops his hand. She flounces a cautious distance away. He wants to ask her—he wants to know—how much pain, exactly, does she think she could take?

"I suppose you think you're a pretty complicated person," Dr. Hill sneers. "You're not. No, there's nothing very interesting about you, actually. In fact, most of the things you do are completely obvious. I don't know why everyone else is having so much trouble. Chris, for one, will never understand. You know that. Oh, he may forgive you, but only because he hates dragging out conflict. And after all, the two of you have been friends for ten years! But can he understand you? No. Most people would have agreed to observe certain rules society likes to play by. You are supposed to be kind to the people you love, and ruthless to the ones you hate."

How can anyone even think like that? How can they not get tangled in so many straight lines? How can they not see the burden—the shallow hypocrisy of such edicts! Does the hero win in all their stories too? To make someone love you, do you only need to love them first?

There is the sound of gunfire, a torrential smash. The black sky beyond the window stews, and flashes with muffled light. The Doctor's lip curls. "Don't rationalize, you lying child. Admit what you've done."

Nothing, or only what was necessary. Don't hate pain. Pain is often necessary.

"That excited you, didn't it? But you didn't understand why. And now you've gone and started running around, pretending not to see yourself for the sick fuck that you are, you psycho. Just admit it."

Chris, watching as he sentenced his best friend to death. That anguish. Appreciated, but as expected as the choice, as wearisome, worn out, exhausting, people were so damn—

Sam, limp and beautiful and captured in his arms. Defenseless.

Dr. Hill licks his lips, with deliberate slowness. Obscene. Hateful. Almost comically perverse. "You wanted to take off the towel."

Yes.

"You wanted to hurt her."

No. No, not like that—he'd been careful. He'd told her about the shitty steps. He'd left out a flashlight so she wouldn't fall in the dark. He'd practically given her a tour of the arena.

"You wanted to hurt her."

No, it had just been—!

The window panes explode, and a thousand shards of wet glass blow through the room, hitting and tearing through everything with equal violence, from the Doctor's face, to the heavy oak desk. What an utterly sarcastic surprise. Everything in this room is, in fact, fashioned from flesh.

The psychiatrist does not even notice that there is a finger-long shard of glass protruding from his mangled left eye. He roars, so that flecks of pink spittle are flung from his mouth. "Liar! You want to hurt her right now! You can't stop thinking about it, can you? Sick freak! Disgusting. I cannot abide a monster who will not even look at itself."

No, but she would—she would like it in the end! She had said that she didn't hate pain, she had said it, and Sam wasn't a liar.

"Ah, so you admit it. So you know what you did to her, after all! Since we're at it, why not keep going? Why not admit, you knew that she wouldn't like it, but you did it anyway. Admit that you did it, without wanting to punish her. So tell me, if not punishment, then what is the reason?"

"Who are you?" Sam asks, when she wakes up. Her mouth and mind are thick from the gas. She can't seem to do the things she wants to do. Her chin rolls from side to side. Her jaw sags.

"Rise and shine before your time, Samantha," the psycho says. Her wrists and ankles are bound, but she isn't even really tied to the chair. She takes in this information, and then just as immediately forgets it. She can't think. She stares at what must be the vague shape of a man under his coarse, baggy costume. He sits with his back to her, hunched over something she can't see.

"Who?" she stammers again. "Knows my…my name."

"You should still be unconscious."

"I'm…I'm really good at drinking," she slurs, and even feels a short flare of pride. It's true. Her size has regularly deceived people.

The psycho doesn't look at her. She thinks he says something like, "But I'm not," only it's hard to tell. The psycho. The Psycho. He's The Psycho now, like a private joke, now that he isn't moving quickly or slinking out of the shadows at her. Now that she's still not dead, and half her brain is still shut off. "I must…I must know…" Sam trails off. She swallows. "You."

Now he looks at her, behind his plastic eyes. He's familiar. She can't see his face or the shape of his body, can't really tell anything about him at all except that he's probably a man. "If you knew me, it must not be very well," he says. And then he just watches her.

Sam frowns, feeling somehow admonished. It was true she was bad with names—people were always telling her she seemed aloof, hard to approach at first—but she wasn't—it wasn't like she didn't care about people…like, maybe it's hard to care all the time, but seriously, she's an introvert, what the hell do th ey waaan t

fr om

h e r….

She falls asleep, and forgets.

"Punishment," Josh whispers, at nothing and no one, without stimulus. He's blank. Sick-looking. Sam can't decide if she should think of him as hollowed out, not with that storm inside him.

"What's happened to him?" she whispers. She's embarrassed, immediately. She wasn't supposed to talk. The doctors had told her not to talk—she'd had to sign all sorts of paperwork just to be allowed in for this visit. But it wasn't like—it wasn't like she couldn't come. Chris had been in every weekend, loyal as a dog, even after everything. She wasn't—it wasn't like she was scared. Scared of Josh. He was her friend, he was hurt. She knew that.

(He had been strong. Weirdly strong. Crazy-man strong. Carried her like it was nothing. Drugged and dragged, her body like a prop in another stupid movie.)

Sam fought the urge to crouch, as though she were approaching a small child. Dr. Hill stood soberly beside her. When he spoke, it was very softly, almost monotone, a mere grumble of background noise. "As I'm sure you have managed to observe, Joshua has suffered from an acute psychotic break. Based on the testimony we collected from you and your friends, as well as his previous medical history, we've begun to piece together a probably diagnosis, which should be able to help us treat him—"

"Treat him?" Sam interrupts. She clamps her mouth shut, hot anger rising to her face. Stupid. The second she had opened her mouth, she'd hated herself. This wasn't who she was. She was understanding, she was—she was loyal. A good friend.

"Just die," Josh hisses. His face is slack with grief. His voice cracks. He looks at a distant horizon and begs, "Please, just die. Just go, just leave me. Just leave!"

She trembles. Her teeth rattle. "But he doesn't want to be treated. Even if—even if you give him drugs for schizophrenia or dissociative disorder or depression, or—or—I don't know," Sam rambles off. The doctor lays a warning hand on her shoulder; he pushes her towards the door. She's disturbing his patient. She's upsettingly loud. "He wants—he wants—" she protests, but doesn't know what she's saying.

"Samantha," Josh drawls, psycho-voice. Not that he knows she's there.

"This is so fucked up," Chris moans. "This is so—fuck!" He hits the nearest tree, because fuck that tree and fuck his crazy-ass best friend for getting WAY TOO CRAZY.

"Hey!" Ashley is immediately on comforting duty. "Hey, oh my gosh. Hey. It's going to be okay, you know? We'll find him." She takes his hand. It hurts. He should not have punched that tree. Ashley smiles up at him, her brown eyes tentative and searching for assurance even as she reassured. "How big can this stupid mountain be, right?"

Big enough for two girls to get lost and die and never be found. Chris grinds his teeth. "I'm so—ugh, Ash, I just hate this! Like what the fuck even is a—a what, a wenhigo? Whatever. I just—I mean, sometimes he'd call, and, you know, I knew he was sad, like he never said anything and I always thought I should have, I don't know, I should have pushed—"

"Oh my god, Chris," Ashley moans. She sniffles. "No. No, stop, this isn't your fault, okay? I don't know what's going on with Josh either, but it's obviously not something you could have handled, even if he had told you." She winces a little, even as she says this, and tries to soften things with an even more sympathetic look. Shit.

"You don't think," Chris licks his lips, "You don't think he's like, in some sort of weird—weird occult thing, do you?"

"Josh?" Ashley echoes, her voice ringing with disbelief. "Are you kidding me?" Then she remembers that Josh had knocked her unconscious, strapped her to a wall, and made her believe that she was going to be sawed in half. Ashley falls silent. Where the hell had he gotten all those pigs from, anyway?

"But all that stuff he was saying, about there being a sanitarium and some creepy mines and—what, some Native American legends? I don't know, it just sounded so—so planned. Like a conspiracy theory."

"Maybe he heard it from the crazy hobo," Ashley widened her eyes expressively. "Come on, the kid has watched like a billion slashers. He just went off his pills or something. Either way, it doesn't matter. If we don't find him, he's going t—Christ!"

She screams and flies back into Chris' arms, launching herself with such force and panic that Chris stumbles, and falls over. They thrash around in the snow, their already destroyed nerves fizzling out. Chris almost wrenches his neck in his haste to find what had scared Ashley.

First, he sees the bones. The long, elegant antlers that rise cold and statuesque in the moonlight. Chris fumbles for the flashlight, squinting, and out of the darkness, finds Josh—his best friend.

Josh has cut and skinned the head of an elk, and wears it over his oven face, his human breath steaming through slack, dead mouth. The blood is impossible, vulgar, gratuitous.

Nobody moves. Chris can feel Ashley trembling against him. Josh, by contrast, is frozen. A statue. He is horribly beautiful.

"Fuck, man," Chris whispers. He begins to cry.

Months pass before she's allowed to see him again, but then, nobody has seen Josh. His mother had called to leave a long, sobbing message on Sam's voicemail once, clearly drunk. They're rebuilding him, piece by piece. The doctors call Sam, personally, letting her know that they—everyone—would appreciate it if she would come in. She's the last one. They've done interviews with everyone, individually, as a part of Josh's rehabilitation.

"Why was I the last?" Sam asks. Her voice catches. She's surprised she can still feel hurt.

"I'll explain more once you get here," Dr. Hill assures her, and hangs up. Numb, Sam drops the phone. Arrogant bastard. Assuming everything—like she didn't have her own life, her own shit to deal with—hell, probably her own therapy, seriously…

"You came?" Dr. Hill says, when she walks into the clinic, and his voice rises just enough for her to realize that perhaps he hadn't assumed her total cooperation. Sam purses her lips. She isn't going to be nice and polite. She isn't going to let things just blow over. She waits.

"We've made substantial progress since your last visit," Dr. Hill says. He approaches her. She can't help but want to back away from him, for some reason. He seems like a perfectly nice man—something about the teeth, maybe, something a little too…

"Substantial progress?" Sam echoes. She's shaking his hand. Damn it.

"Yes. He's quite heavily sedated by his current dosage of medication—we're working on scaling that back—but the medicine, combined with heavy therapy, have mostly grounded him in reality. He should be fine to start taking short daytrips soon, as long as he's supervised by an adult he trusts."

As thought Josh were a child. Sam nods. She follows Dr. Hill down a short, well-lit hallway, happening upon a group of gossiping orderlies who all look guilty as they're passed. Sam clears her throat. "So, what was wrong with him?"

"I'm afraid that I'm not allowed to discuss my patient's medical details without his express consent—"

"Why am I here?" Sam asks. Her voice pitches with aggression. "Why was I called, and why did everyone else go first?"

They stop. This is Josh's door. She can already tell. She can feel him. And she doesn't like the way this psychiatrist is eyeing her, sizing her up, trying to figure out what angle to take, so she smiles—somehow, her whole life is about smiling—and waves a breezy hand. "Oh, never mind. I'll just ask him myself."

And then she opens the door.

And there's Josh.

She lets the automatic springs do their work. The door closes quietly behind her.

He's asleep.

She just stands there for a moment, watching him. His room is better, anyway, less obviously for a crazy person. He has a bed, a desk, other normal-person things. She wanders quietly to the desk. He's been drawing diagrams of something crazy again. This time, she means crazy in a good way.

"Hey," Sam says. "You make me come all this way just to see you, and then you're asleep? This is almost as rude as the time you chased me around like an axe murderer."

After a second, he rolls over. She sits at his desk. They look at each other. Her heart is about to throw up.

"Please be Josh," she says.

"Do you know something?" he says, "I actually thought that if I pretended to be asleep, you might do something really cute to me."

She isn't going to cry.

"You stupid jerk," she mumbles, "What the hell is wrong with you?" She stares at his light bulb, and tries to blot away her tears while preserving her eyeliner.

"That's easy," Josh answers. He keeps himself tightly curled on the bed. "I'm a bag of mixed nuts."

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Sam snaps. She's angry. She's relieved. "That's not funny. I hate you. I don't. I hate you sometimes."

He looks afraid to answer her. Does his voice sound different? She hasn't heard him in—in ages. Maybe it's only based off what the doctor had told her, about him being sedated. It occurs to her that she maybe doesn't even know who the normal Josh is. "I thought you wouldn't come," Josh says. After a minute he shifts, moves himself up on one elbow, and bangs his head against the bed frame. "Ow."

She laughs at him. He manages to smile. Maybe she should just be happy. Maybe if she cared less, she could be.

"What did I do?" Sam asks. "I came because I wanted to know. I've thought about it so much. I've accepted the fact that what happened that night—was very different for you, than it was for me. Maybe I can't understand what you were going through but I tried my best to just…just accept. But I thought that before everything that happened—I thought we were friends. Like, more than everyone else." She stops. Everything else she could say on this topic sounds cheap, and weak.

Josh laughs awkwardly. His feet touch the floor. He looks like, at any moment, he'll be at her side. A part of her still can't imagine him as threatening because the man, the monster who had run her down—he hadn't looked like Josh. "You didn't do anything wrong, Sammy." He smiles, and then blinks, hard. His face contorts. "Shit—I—"

It takes a second for her to understand he's having an episode. "Oh, should I—should I get someone?"

"No. No, I've got a minute." He sees her face, and grins, "Oh, don't worry. I'm like a bear. They'll just like, stick me with a dart or something. The worst part about being sane again is going to be all the drug with drawls."

"Oh."

"Actually, I—" he's fading. He lies back on the bed. His words stagger, the rhythm of his sentences staccato with interruption. "I was…in some crazy way, I thought it was a good thing?" he laughs, "I know. But then I got—I mean, I am—I have these other parts of me. So you said something to me, one time, something about how you were okay with pain, or something, and maybe like, the normal me would have thought a little about some, you know, some embarrassing kinky shit. Except then, I—I started to obsess—and I had so many thoughts, oh my god, my head is—it's like a three dimensional maze sometimes, like once I just free-wrote my way through an episode? I started off with camels and ended up on German porn, via spiders and this really beautiful love song I heard in French…this one time…anyway."

He blows a long, soft sigh upwards, his lips puckered. She stands. He can't hurt her. He won't hurt her. "It doesn't make any sense," he says slowly. "I know I wanted to hurt you, but I didn't want it to be…real. It was supposed to be a gift. It was supposed to be…for us. I thought that if I scared you, if I caught you, if I made you helpless—I thought you would understand something. There was no other way for me to show you."

"What?" Sam asks.

"That I love you, I guess." His hand fidgets. She can't tell if he's afraid. He must be afraid. His storm is coming.

She wants to touch him. She won't. She doesn't know anything about storms. She won't, she won't. She takes his hand. He has crazy-man strength. "Is it less frightening, this way?" she asks. "If you become the monster?"

"I told you to get the tranquilizer," he hisses. "I bite."

"Yeah." Sam sighs. "But I don't hate pain."