Night is falling by the time they return to the campsite, the desert sky fading to a soft gradient of warm colors and the air cooling rapidly. In the distance, the mountains are purple shadows, the faintest hint of stars twinkling above them, scattered amongst wisps of clouds.

Johnny is huddled in his sleeping bag already, his fifth cup of coffee gently steaming and clutched tightly in his hands. The cheap paperback he'd picked up at the last gas station is open face down on the dirt next to him, two galloping horses on the poorly photoshopped cover. Off to the side, Gyro whistles as he stirs something in the pot above the fire. Diego's stomach growls.

"You finally back from your makeout session in the wastelands?" Johnny asks casually, not taking his gaze off Gyro. Diego bristles, and Hot Pants rolls her eyes.

"Look, I know you have some sort of weird beef with Diego, but leave me out of this. I'm not getting paid enough," she says, shrugging off her dusty backpack and setting it on the ground. Diego follows suit and squats down to rummage through the bags. Hot Pants wanders over to the fire and sits down next to Gyro, switching to rapid Italian to converse with him.

"You think learning Italian is hard?" Johnny asks, squinting at the pair as they burst out laughing. Diego shoots him a dirty look.

"You're pathetic."

"Come on, let's learn Italian together. How hard can it be? You know, I bet it would impress Hot Pants too. That way you guys could have something to do when you go off on long walks in the desert at sunset doing – " he waves his hands vaguely at Diego, "– whatever this is."

"Fuck off. We're just looking for fossils and other old shit," Diego snarls. "You know, for our research project? There's lots of cool stuff out there. Which you'd realize if you could take your eyes off Gyro's ass for five seconds. Here, have this rodent femur." He tosses the bone in question at Johnny, who barely manages to catch it without dropping his coffee.

"That's nasty," Johnny says, wrinkling his nose and chucking the offending item back at Diego.

"You too."

Johnny heaves a dramatic sigh and picks up his book, rifling through a few of the earlier pages to remind himself where he'd left off in the completely forgettable narrative. Diego shrugs and turns his attention back to his scavenged treasures, acknowledging the stalemate for the moment.

Dinner is a simple affair. They share a couple of cans of soup, which Gyro had heated up and added some pasta into at Johnny's insistence. Depending on the person, some combination of slightly stale whole wheat bread, various jams, Nutella, and beef jerky gets put together into sandwiches. Or eaten by themselves. Peanut butter, by Diego and his allergy's request, had been left out. A handful of peanut-free granola bars and dried fruit round out the meal as dessert. Gyro passes around a plastic shopping bag to collect the trash.

Around nine, Gyro is struck like lightning by the brilliant idea of a nice ghost stories session around the fire, which gets what at best could be called a lukewarm reception, but nobody else really has anything better to do. Johnny's eyes are starting to hurt from reading in the dim light, Diego's sorted through the day's collection and thrown out most of it, and Hot Pants is seriously regretting not using up her entire printing budget from last term on a giant stack of papers for the trip.

So Gyro starts. It's honestly not a very good story, something generic about a couple of teenagers breaking into an old house at night, and his hammy storytelling style, though entertaining, detracts from whatever spookiness might've been secretly lurking in the story. Diego doesn't fare much better. In addition to lacking a proper grasp of what's supposed to be "scary," he keeps getting his story mixed up with several other, slightly different versions that have different characters, leaving everyone else – and possibly himself – confused at the end. Johnny boos him, and he throws a punch that would've hit him square in the nose if Hot Pants hadn't bear hugged him from behind.

"I'd like to see you do better," he spits. He twists around in Hot Pants' grasp, and she drops him unceremoniously. Johnny smirks and pats him patronizingly on the head.

"Just keep your ears peeled and try not to pee yourself."

"The saying is 'keep your eyes peeled,' idiot."

"Whatever," Johnny huffs, crossing his arms. The corner of Hot Pants' mouth twitches, and she leans to the right to mutter something in Italian to Gyro, who snickers and whispers something back.

"We're right here, you know," Johnny says, a pout starting to form on his lips.

"Oh, no, it wasn't anything bad," Hot Pants says, the grin still faintly there. "You Americans are funny is all."

"I'm British," Diego interjects.

"Anyway," Gyro says loudly, "Johnny, didn't you say you had a good story? One that would make Diego possibly pee himself?"

"You bet." He scooches forward, the fire throwing wild shadows across his face. Narrowing his eyes conspiratorially, he starts speaking in a low voice, gaze flicking between the three of them.

"A few years ago, there was a young couple that moved into a nice, suburban neighborhood. It was a beautiful house, tastefully decorated in cheery colors, fake flowers, too many pillows on the sofa to sit comfortably, that plastic fruit crap in the bowls on the tables, you know, the whole deal.

Everything was going great; work was good, the neighbors were decent, they were thinking of having a kid or two. Then one day, the wife got sick. It wasn't too bad, just a mild flu, but she was bedridden for a few days.

Now, since she didn't want to get her husband sick too, she moved to the guest bedroom for the time being. The room had this wallpaper, and it was probably the only thing they had disagreed on when they bought the house. It was this mustard color, and she hated it so much. When she was awake, she tried everything she could to take her mind off it, but her husband had insisted she get some good rest, so she didn't have really anything to distract herself, and the wallpaper was always there. She brought it up a couple of times, but he dismissed her, saying she wouldn't be there much longer anyway.

When she got better and was gathering up her stuff to move out of the room, she saw it for the first time.

Something moved in the wallpaper.

She looked closer, but there wasn't anything there, so she thought to herself that it must've just been a trick of the light. But, in the middle of the night, she woke up to the faint sound of scratching. She followed it to the guest bedroom, and as she stepping into the room, she saw it again: the movement in the wallpaper. She tried to see if she could track it, and as the minutes ticked by, she felt a growing sense of unease until she noticed, to her horror, a vague figure in the wallpaper. It was twisted, with limbs that bent like no human limbs should be bent, and she swore when she took her eyes off it, it shifted ever so slightly.

That's how her husband found her the next day, staring at the wallpaper in the room. He asked her what was wrong, and she told him about what she'd seen. Again he dismissed her, attributing it to hysterics and residual illness.

And for a while, it seemed like everything was back to normal. They found, to their great joy, that the wife was pregnant, and they set to work converting the guest bedroom to a nursery. The wife, on her husband's insistence, took time off work to stay home and rest, but she found herself continually drawn to the guest bedroom, to the horrible yellow wallpaper.

One night, the husband woke up, and his wife wasn't in bed. He walked apprehensively through the dark house and found her in the guest bedroom, staring at the wallpaper.

'Honey,' he said slowly, 'what's wrong?' She turned toward him, and he could see her distant stare.

'They're coming,' she whispered, 'from the wallpaper. I have to watch them to stop them.'

'Come back to bed,' he pleaded. 'You're imagining things. It must be the stress. I'll change the wallpaper his weekend.'

'No!' she shouted suddenly, leaping toward him. She grabbed his arm, tighter than he expected. Her eyes widened and her voice dropped back to a hoarse whisper. 'If you take that wallpaper off you'll release them.'

'Come on, don't be silly,' he said, shaking his arm out of her grasp. But she shoved him, hard, and slammed the door shut as he stumbled backward out of the room, the lock clicking into place as he stared in disbelief.

'Open up!' he shouted, pounding on the door.

'No!' She shouted back.

It was too late at night for this shit, so the husband gave up and went back to sleep, making up his mind to deal with this mess in the morning.

Well, morning came, and the door was still locked. He rummaged around in the toolboxes in the garage and found a spare key to the guest bedroom.

'I'm coming in,' he said as he knocked on the door. There was no response. He opened the door and peered around. The room was empty, huge strips of the wallpaper peeled haphazardly from the walls and torn into pieces on the floor.

He stepped inside and the door slammed shut. He whipped his head around, trying to find his wife, when he heard a voice whose precise location he couldn't pinpoint.

'They were coming, they were coming and crawling and reaching, and I realized, they were coming for me, they were coming for me and for you, to free themselves and to free us, and I had to let them out. I let them out, so why don't you join us?'

And he looked around, and there were the figures in the remains of the wallpaper, vague, indistinct, moving and crawling, fading in and out of sight, and among them, crawling and crawling, his wife."

Johnny falls silent, still leaning forward. The campsite is quiet, no noise except the crackling of the fire and the distant movements of animals in the sand. Gyro's eyes are bugged out, his mouth hanging open. Diego's scowling, armed crossed tight and lips pressed together into a thin line. Hot Pants has a thoughtful look, head tilted as if replaying the story in her mind.

"Well…?" Johnny asks expectantly, looking around at their expressions.

"Boo," Diego jeers, uncrossing his arms to flip Johnny off. "It was too long and too boring. I can't believe you made up listen to all that crap. Give me my time back." Johnny gives him the finger back instead.

"Wasn't that just an inaccurate, modernized retelling of Charlotte Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' that kinda missed the entire point of and misportrayed the allegory of the original story?" Hot Pants asks.

Johnny throws his hands up in the air. "You people are impossible to please."

"No we aren't," Diego says. "You just suck at storytelling. Stop blaming us for your shit story."

Johnny rolls his eyes and turns his back on Diego. "Hot Pants, just tell your story already and let's go to sleep," he grumbles. Diego mutters something under his breath that Johnny thinks might be "sour grapes." He ignores him. Hot Pants sighs.

"I don't really like ghost stories," she says. "Let's just go to sleep now."

"Tell a short one," Diego insists. Hot Pants makes a face but acquiesces.

"There was a couple in the neighborhood I used to live in," she starts. "I didn't know them too well even though we went to high school together. We just didn't have much in common, from what I can tell. So this is all stuff I heard from other people, who heard it from others, and I don't remember all the details very well.

Anyway, they went out on a date together one weekend, and as a surprise, uh, let's just call him Billy to protect his identity, drove the two of them a little way out of town, to a reasonably secluded area. They were, I don't know, doing whatever high school couples do in reasonably secluded areas – " here Johnny snickers and waggles his eyebrows at Diego, " – when Billy realized he'd left the headlights on. Of course, he realized this when the car battery died and the headlights went out.

'Oh crap,' Billy said, squinting out into the darkness. 'Can you call your brother and have him drive out with some jumper cables?'

'Can't,' uh, Jenny, I guess we can call her, said. 'We're too far out to get cell service.'

Billy sighed and opened the car door. 'Stay here,' he said. 'I'll walk a bit back toward town and see if I can get service. There's a couple of flares in the trunk; I'll take one, and if anything goes wrong, I can use it to let you know. Same with you. Keep the door locked in case there's anything weird out there.'

So, Jenny was waiting in the car with the doors locked for about twenty minutes or so when she saw a flare go off in the distance on the road back to town. She panicked and tried to make herself as invisible as possible in the car, crouching down into the foot space on the passenger's side and throwing her jacket over herself.

The minutes went by, and despite the adrenaline, she started getting sleepy because it was pretty late. Like it is now. She managed to drift in and out of sleep even in that uncomfortable, cramped space.

Suddenly, there was a noise outside the car. She pulled out her pocketknife, heart pounding, but she didn't say anything. Something scratched at the door handle for a few minutes before everything went quiet again."

Hot Pants goes quiet.

"And…?" Gyro prompts after a few seconds.

"I forgot. Something about a man and the car door with a hand hook on the door. I told you, I don't like ghost stories. Fear isn't a compelling emotion to appeal to."

"Oh my God," Diego groans, burying his face in his hands. "I can't believe exactly zero of us can tell a proper ghost story."

"Fuck you," Johnny shoots back. "My story was pretty good."

As the two of them fall into yet another petty squabble, Gyro looks at Hot Pants with wide eyes.

« So, what really happened at the end? » he asks. « Was it so scary you couldn't tell us because Diego would pee himself? You can tell me. I promise I won't tell him. » Hot Pants looks back at him incredulously.

« It's a story. Nothing happened. »

« But you said they lived in your neighborhood and went to high school with you. Did they go missing? Were they murdered? » At the last word, he lowers his voice and glances around at the desert with suspicion. « Do we need to keep watch tonight for men with hand hooks at our car doors? »

« Gyro, » Hot Pants says in a strained voice, « it's an American urban legend. It's a made up story to discourage teenagers from wandering off by themselves to have sex out in the woods. None of it was real. You can look it up online if you're really that desperate to find out what happens, but it's not really a great story. I got bored of it halfway through and I'm tired, so let's just all call it a night. »

« But you said they went to your high school! »

« It was just a narrative device to make it seem more realistic and "scary." Anyway, I'm going to sleep now, and I'm waking up at six tomorrow, so good night, » she says firmly. She walks over to the car, opens the trunk, and tosses the three sleeping bags still in it onto the ground. By this point Johnny and Diego have sulked off to opposite sides of the fire, so she hauls all the sleeping bags next to it.

"Okay kiddos, it's bedtime for me. I can sleep through pretty much anything, but you should keep your voices down anyway. You never know what's lurking out there in the darkness of the night." She wiggles her fingers for emphasis before unrolling a sleeping bag and zipping herself up in it, turning her back to the light.

The fire crackles in the space between the remaining three of them, tempers cooling in the silence. Insects chirp and buzz, the stubby trees and squat bushes standing as shadowing sentries around them all. The rock formation the campsite is nestled in blocks most of their view of the distant surroundings save a large gap in the wall in the form of a natural arch. Not that much could be seen in the darkness anyway.

"Let's just take it easy then," Gyro says. "I'm driving tomorrow morning, so I should sleep soon anyway." He sets up his sleeping bag across the fire from Hot Pants', which is now gently moving up and down as she breathes. Settling down, he pulls over his backpack and removes a small rectangular case with a flourish.

"How about some music to send the day off?" He opens the case to reveal a slightly beat up but lovingly polished harmonica. Diego raises an eyebrow as he and Johnny drag their sleeping bags to either side of his.

"Harmonica?"

Gyro shrugs. "It's portable," he says. Then he reaches into his pack again and pulls out a battered teddy bear. Its fur is patchy in several places, one of its arms is sewn on with bright red thread, and the eye on the other side of its head is missing. Its sole piece of clothing is a simple purple cape with "Go Go Zeppeli" embroidered clumsily on it.

"Say 'hi' to Johnny and Diego," Gyro says to the bear. He picks up one of its paws and moves it, simulating a wave from the bear to the bemused pair.

"Hi Johnny and Diego," he says in a comically gruff voice. "I'm Mr. Bear. Nice to meet you!" Johnny gives him a giant, goofy grin that Diego files away as material to poke fun at him for later.

"Hi Mr. Bear."

"You named your bear toy 'Mr. Bear,'" Diego comments flatly.

"What about it?" Johnny and Gyro ask simultaneously, the former with a glare and the latter innocently.

"Nothing," Diego answers with his hands held defensively in front of himself. "It's definitely a creative name, for sure."

"And I'll have you know," Gyro continues, "Mr. Bear is more than a 'toy,' as you called him. He's a true companion, a guide on the unknown road of the future, the love of my life." He hugs Mr. Bear tightly. Diego shoots Johnny an unimpressed look while Gyro is distracted.

You really like this guy? he mouths. Johnny shrugs, though his cheeks redden.

Gyro arranges Mr. Bear next to him in a sitting position before taking a deep breath and starting to play the harmonica. It's a melancholy melody, soft and with just the right amount of plaintively drawn-out notes. Diego wriggles into his sleeping bag, folds his hands under his head, and takes in the night sky above him. This far out from the city, the stars are as abundant as students at the first day of lectures. Hanging among them, the moon looks like a fat crescent wedge of cheese, the bright band of the Milky Way in the backdrop.

Diego glances over. Johnny has his knees drawn up to his chest, staring mesmerized at Gyro, who has his eyes closed in concentration. He doesn't remember the last time he saw Johnny like this, vulnerable, enraptured, and carefree. It's nice. Maybe, he thinks, this is the Johnny he could really be friends with, friends that don't argue over every trivial thing, whose competitions never spiral out of hand so quickly.

A small bright light streaks across the corner of the sky. A few seconds later, another. And a third.

He closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep to the gentle strains of the harmonica.

Johnny's mostly asleep, the smell of smoke clearing from his nostrils as the wind shifts and the embers aren't being blown right in his direction anymore, when he feels something nudging his side. He rolls around sloppily, groaning in complaint at being forced to move. His back is already starting to ache from lying on the hard dirt, and he prays they'll be staying in a hotel tomorrow.

"Johnny, hey Johnny," Gyro whispers urgently.

"Toilet paper's in the front pocket of my backpack," he mumbles, turning back away.

"No, I don't need to pee," Gyro says. He pauses. "Unless maybe from fear? Hot Pants' story was really good. Too good. I can't sleep now. What if there's a man with a hand hook out there?"

"Gyro – " Johnny starts to say, but Gyro continues talking.

"And your story! It was so scary! What if my apartment next year has yellow wallpaper? They don't let you change the wallpaper in the school-subsidized housing! I'll have to cover everything up with posters!"

"Gyro," Johnny says again, the small smile on his face unnoticed in the darkness. "All those were just stories we made up to have fun. There's nothing to worry about. And if there's really anything out there, we've all got your back, ok? Go to sleep."

Gyro doesn't say anything for a long while. Johnny thinks Gyro's maybe fallen asleep and the subject is over, but as he fades out of the waking world again he thinks he hears a quiet reply.

"Thanks, Johnny."

A/N: Crossposted from AO3. Man, I forgot that FF doesn't have notes and I have to do this...

Work title "Ways to Go" by Grouplove.

Chapter title "Call Off Your Ghost" by Dessa.

Apparently « » are actually the traditional Italian quotation marks, which is a great coincidence because I wanted to use them to denote when people were speaking Italian anyway.

This was completely self-indulgent in every way possible, I'm literally writing it when morning lectures are too boring and start putting me to asleep, so I apologize for absolutely nothing except horribly butchering "The Yellow Wallpaper."