━━━━༻ ♣ ༺━━━━ gateway 01101101 ━━━━༻ ♣ ༺━━━━

Reese was beginning to think they forgot him down here. He curled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them before he began rolling around on the floor. One could only do so much to entertain themselves stuck in a room 24/7. At least he could keep up proper hygiene. But he wasn't allowed to have any sharp tools so he wasn't able to cut his hair. In the two or three weeks he's been here—he's long lost count—his hair had almost grown to his feet. It always did grow fast.

I'd rather be the Little Mermaid than Rapunzel, the redhead scowled as he spun in circles. Imagine having a grown a** dude climbing up your hair. That sh*t's gotta hurt, man.

None out of the ordinary had happened these past few days, even though just earlier he did hear a bunch of strange bangings. Maybe a raccoon snuck down here? That sounded nice. He preferred those trash pandas over ghosts.

He shuddered. Ghosts. Phantoms and Reese Grayson did not mix well.

The male uncurled himself and retrieved a metal spoon he'd hid under his bed. He used it to saw at the bars as he's done continuously for a week now, but he soon found out that the people in all those action films who escaped jail with a spoon had lied to him.

It didn't work. It didn't even scratch the metal.

He threw the spoon against the opposite wall. Goddammit, he scowled. I knew anime was always better. But so many shows and my favorite YouTubers are getting canceled this year...why can't we have any nice things?

Speaking of nice things. He picked up his now empty bottle of shampoo from the floor. When is the prez going to get me a new one? I need my Redken Beach Envy shampoo or my roots are going to dry out.

Well, whatever. He retrieved the spoon he'd thrown and glared at it. Back to digging.

FORTUNA:INSTITUTE ━━━━━༻ ❀ ༺━━━━━ єαяℓιєя

"Uh, what are we doing here?"

Jaehyun had taken her back to the school building, the very place where everything had started to go terribly wrong. Even though she's been a student of Fortuna for two years now, the short weeks she'd spent in the Tempus Dormitory away from the building made the school building feel foreign. It was like she'd taken some long vacation and was only coming back down, only to have lost the sense of nostalgia within those lackluster walls.

"I want to show you something," was his unusually calm reply as he tugged her through the hallways. The cheerful air had evaporated from his tone and in its place was the serenity he typically used towards others. In other words, the people who weren't (Y/n).

The school hallways were not littered with blood and corpses as she had imagined. Instead, everything looked like the Game had never even happened. Or maybe it hadn't. Maybe it had all been her imagination. As if, she thought darkly.

The only traces remaining of the Game was that some things were missing or out of place. Even though the classrooms and corridors were cleaned up, they were missing a few details here and there. Decorative objects, for example. A missing vase here and there. Portraits and frames that should be on the walls but weren't. Glass display cases that had been replaced altogether after being destroyed. And (Y/n) could still smell the lingering stench of bleach in the air.

Other than that, Fortuna Institute looked like a ghost school, so devoid of life. Soon the mandatory "break" would be over and the living students would come back, many of them oblivious to the massacre that had gone on days before.

Jaehyun took her through a series of passageways and corridors to one (Y/n) had never noticed before. To be fair, she's rarely been out of Autumn Hall to begin with. They stopped in front of a grandfather clock the (h/c)-haired girl remembered passing countless times on her way to class.

She gave him a puzzled look that he smiled at and inclined his head towards the clock. "Watch."

And she did just that. She watched him walk closer to the timepiece and reach for it. He's not going to make me climb inside, is he? Instead, he swung his fist back and punched straight into the clock's glass covering, smashing it instantly.

"Jay, what are you—"

He waved her concern off, completely unfazed by the glass fragments stuck in his fist and the blood trickling down his skin. He reached once again for the clock, this time for its hands. He arranged them carefully and when he was done, they could hear the whirring of clockwork as something began to move. (Y/n) took a step back as the wall next to the clock began to shift before opening, revealing a passageway that had been cleverly hidden.

Jaehyun went in first, angling his body towards the girl and holding out his hand. "Come on," he said encouragingly. "Let's go."

He better not be taking me to a torture chamber or something. Oddly enough, (Y/n) didn't feel that alarmed by the situation. Surprised, yes, but not scared. She glanced at the clock as she passed; the blond had changed its hands to read 8:15.

As soon as they were inside, Jaehyun pressed a button on the wall and the open panel began to slide back in place and he began descending further into the corridor. (Y/n) followed him, inspecting her surroundings with wide-eyed curiosity. The hallway had looked just like the one they had just been in earlier. That is, until they stepped through their first doorway. Then everything took a turn for the outlandish.

The walls were lined with countless framed images depicting the otherworldly, works she could now tell were made by Jaehyun's hand. He caught her observing them and slowed down his pace.

"The headmaster made me draw those," he explained. "That's part of the whole reason why I live in Tempus Dorm with the others. I didn't think much of it at first. It was just ghosts and stuff"—he gestured towards an oil painting of a wendigo—"But it became a pain to make those every year for that superstitious fool. So I stopped."

"And the headmaster was okay with that?" She tore her eyes away from a painting of, you guessed it, Satan. The demon goat was grinning down at the human-doll crossovers that were strung to his fingers like puppets, and he was the puppetmaster. Even if the subject of the artworks were questionable, she could still admire the blond's talent.

But she still wanted to stab a pencil through his eye.

"Not really," Jaehyun admitted. "But it doesn't matter. He has no control over me. There are plenty of artists; he can get one of those greedy pigs to be his personal pet instead."

They entered a large room not unlike the archives. A fine layer of dust coated every surface she could see in the room. Books filled every shelf in the library. She took one out of curiosity and flipped through it. She arched an eyebrow at the contents. It was a book on the supernatural. She was beginning to think that the psycho gene ran in the Knight family. If Tristan had issues, his father had bigger ones.

Jaehyun came up to her side and peeked over her shoulder to see what she was looking at. "Oh yeah, those! The headmasters used to use those to quote-unquote 'ward off the spirits.' But honestly, if you ask me, I don't think the current headmaster's the superstitious fool he makes himself out to be."

He tapped his finger on the worn page and drew away, folding his hands behind his back. "I bet he's just using the 'ghosts' to justify the killings to the school board, who are the real idiots. It's just a convenient excuse for him to kill the sons and daughters of his business rivals. A real dirty move, don't you think?"

"Either way it doesn't change the fact he's a bloody madman," she muttered, returning the book to its proper place. Then she changed her mind and chucked it over her shoulder.

"Or maybe the whole family's not as superstitious as you think," Jaehyun continued in a sing-song. "Tristan says he's not superstitious and that's why his father hates him...but isn't it more believable if it was because he knew his father's secrets?"

"That would hardly be a surprise. That prick has a fetish for spying on people."

Jaehyun sided up to her with a wicked grin on his face. "You wanna know what that secret is?" He pressed his finger to his lips, his eyes gleaming mischievously. "But you can't tell anyone I told you~ I'm already walking on a thin line with him. He's going to get real mad at me if he finds out."

She stared at him blankly for a few moments before sighing. "Fine. I'll bite. What is it?"

"Wellll," the blond twirled around on the heel of his foot. "You probably wouldn't care much but you know how this all started two centuries ago?"

"Yeah. What about it?"

"It wasn't the work of the ghosts or the Nazis." He made a face. "That sounds stupid anyway. It was actually an accident. The son of the headmaster of the time accidentally screwed things up and the fire ended up killing a bunch of people. The headmaster was pissed but since he was his son and stuff, he covered it up."

They keep getting worse and worse, she thought.

"I guess you could say this means the Knight line was never superstitious," Jaehyun said wistfully with a faraway look in his eyes. "They're atheists after all. How else do you think they got so influential that not even the chairman dares to cross them?"

"Honestly, I'm not even mad or surprised." She sent a kick into the bookshelf. The books rattled and a layer of dust rained down, narrowing missing the two. "But why are you telling me this?"

A dark scowl morphed on the blond's delicate features. "Because Tristan's always going around leaking our secrets. It's not fair if I don't share a few of his. You can get reallyyy annoyed with the guy after living for him for half a decade, you know?"

She did know. She's only lived with him for a couple of weeks and she already wanted to yeet herself out the window.

TEMPUS:DORM ━━━━━༻ ❀ ༺━━━━━ вєfσяє

It sounded like a pop at first. There was the muffled sound of rattling and squeaking of metal crashing down and cabling snapping as Leon retreated to his room. He didn't think much of it at first; probably just one of the others breaking something again. But when he called out for his brother and he wasn't there...concern started to set in.

He remembered leaving Conan in the pillow fort on the first floor the moments before his anger had blinded him. He went there immediately but as he hit the first step downstairs towards the living room, he detected the faint stench of smoke. Confused and worried, he practically ran down the steps to discover smoke pouring out from between the closed elevator doors.

What the f*ck? Alarm bells began going off in his head as he tore away and dashed for the living room, practically tearing the still standing pillow fort apart, only to discover his brother wasn't there.

His heart began to sink and fear, genuine fear, started to wrap its inky claws around his neck. He ran back to the elevator even as his chest felt like it was about to tear open. What if his brother had been in the elevator when it collapsed? What if he was hurt now?

And what if...he was dead?

The thought speared through his mind like an arrow, snapping him out of his horrified state and into full-blown panic mode. Leon wasted no time in practically destroying the elevator doors in his attempt to get it open. The metal held under his first flew kicks but soon enough, it began to dent. His heart began to beat harder and faster as adrenaline ignited his blood like lightning. He felt cold but hot at the same time; his insides were rapidly burning away to ashes even as he felt frozen over.

Terror crawled over his skin like spiders, each one spinning a web over him that no matter how much he thrashed, he could not get rid of.

Come on, come on, come on! His brain screamed, the synapses firing like a machine gun. He threw himself at the metal doors, aiming every fist and kick at the slender slit between the doors. The doors were starting to bend and break under the pressure, but far too slowly than he wanted.

"Open the f*ck up, you sh*tty thing!" Leon roared. His efforts probably woke up everyone in the manor but he couldn't care less. If anything happened to his brother, his only blood relation left in this world...

In the grip of a loud and furious panic, an injection of adrenaline gave his worn muscles the final shot they needed to finally break through the metal. And it wasn't cheap metal either; the dormitory only had the best of the best, a state-of-the-art elevator that was programmed never to break.

At least, not by accident.

Finally, the damage grew too much for the metal to hold and one of the twin doors got dislodged, giving Leon enough space to slip through. He shoved himself through the opening and looked down into the darkness. There it was, the elevator. The cabling had snapped and the sparks had long died down but it was still smoking. And his brother was very likely trapped in there.

Leon jumped down onto the lift without hesitating and began prying the top off. He succeeded in doing so with one solid rip, exposing and opening into the metal chamber. And there he was, Conan. Lying in a crumpled heap amidst the rubble and debris on top and around him.

"Connie!" Leon dropped into the elevator and quickly dug his brother's limp body out of the destruction. His breathing hitched and his pupils dilated when the boy didn't respond to his calls. No, no, no—

He pressed his ear to the little boy's chest. And fortunately, he was alive, even though he looked anything but fine. Blood trickled freely from a cut on the boy's head, spilling over his pale skin and matting his dark hair. His body looked fine; nothing looked broken as far as Leon saw, and he knew how a broken bone looked like. It was not pretty.

But he was breathing. He was alive. That was all that mattered, at least for now. Leon ripped off a section of his shirt and wrapped it around his brother's head to stop the blood flow. Then he forced himself to remain calm as he held the unconscious boy with one arm, using the other to pull the two of them back up and out of the elevator. He carefully slid Conan's body out through the gap in the doors first before following suit.

He fumbled through his pockets for a phone as he held his brother on the ground in front of the ruined elevator and quickly dialed the emergency number, 112. As long as he lives...as long as he lives...

The moments following the call were a blur. Leon took his brother out of the dormitory since outsiders were technically not allowed on Fortuna campus grounds, and to the front gate where he met the ambulance. Then he found himself in the nearest hospital where his brother was rushed to the ER and he was told to stay in the waiting room. He tried to fight back, not wanting to leave his brother's side, but the nurses and doctors didn't let him. It took an entire security team to finally get him to settle down.

They almost had to pull out a bear tranquilizer but we don't talk about that part.

Leon paced the pristine white hallways impatiently, the murderous look on his face enough to scare other patients and staff away. He ran a hand through his hair, not caring how he looked like to others even if his fist was still bloodied. A nurse came up to him fearfully and tried to tend to his wounds, but a harsh glare from the male sent her running.

What felt like hours went by when the doctor finally came out of Conan's room. Leon was on his feet in a flash and stalking towards the poor doctor, seizing him by his collar.

"How's my brother?" He demanded. "I swear if anything went wrong—"

To his credit, the doctor was unfazed. Half because he was used to dealing with the rowdy families of patients and rich people, and half because he may or may not have been a medical student who'd learned his techniques straight from Professor Kim himself.

"Please release me, young man," the doctor said monotonously. His tone reminded Leon of Tristan which only made him angrier. "I can assure you our best doctors have tended to your brother and he's in a stable condition. However..."

Leon loosened his grip enough for the male to pull away and smooth down his coat with an annoyed look. "However?" Leon repeated slowly. His hands clenched into fists as his heartbeat began to pick up again. "However what?" When the doctor didn't say anything at first, he lunged for him and began shaking the man. "F*cking spit it out! What's wrong with my brother?!"

The doctor hacked, gasping for breath. "Let me go, you brute! If you don't, how am I going to tell you that your brother is in a coma?!"

Your brother is in a coma.

Six words. That was all it took to extinguish the flames from Leon's wild eyes immediately. His grip slackened and the doctor hurried away, not before sending the now silent black-haired male a dirty look.

Coma. Leon looked down at his hands, at all his calluses and little scars. Connie's...in a coma?

The pain from his torn knuckles and opened calluses flooded back to him all at once. The numbness and fear were gone and all he had left now was pain. Endless pain. Images of his once happily smiling brother wearing a cowboy hat fading into one of his brother now lying lifeless on a hospital bed, a breathing mask strapped to his face and various tubes and needles stuck into his skin. Images of Conan's rosy cheeks replaced by pale, ghostly skin. Of his smile faded into an emotionless mask that would no longer laugh or cry anymore.

He was alive. Conan was alive. But he was in a comatose. Was that any better than being dead?

Leon stumbled after the doctor but the man was gone. So instead, he turned to the nearest nurse who had also come out of the room. "My brother," he began, his voice a hoarse whisper. "W-when will he wake up?"

"We're not sure," the nurse admitted. "It could be a month at the least and years at the most. These things are unpredictable. I'm sorry, sir."

Months. Years...?

The thought of his brother no longer running around energetically as he used to, now reduced to a living corpse lying on the bed made him stumble back into the seats. The concerned shouts of the nurse next to him faded away as all Leon could see and feel was darkness. Memories began rising up from the inky waters all at once; memories of him coming home from school only to find his mother hanging by her neck. Memories of his mother rushed to the hospital only to be proclaimed dead.

His father left because Leon wasn't a good enough son. His little sister was kidnapped because Leon hadn't been a good enough brother. His mother died because Leon hadn't been vigilant enough.

Now his little brother was about to meet the same fate as the rest of his family. And it was no one's fault but Leon's. He wasn't good enough.

Leon had given his all in trying to protect his brother; his education, future, money—anything and everything he could think of. But what if this whole time he hadn't been giving but instead taking? He was the curse on the Matthews family that doomed them to their dark fates. He was the one who condemned them all to death.

Maybe if he hadn't been born Conan would never have been in this situation. He might've had a better brother, one who could actually take care of him. One who wasn't a failure like Leon was.

But he didn't. He was unlucky enough to get Leon.

There was no amount of punishment Leon could give himself that could fix his mistakes.

He only had (Y/n) now.

Once the nurse was gone and all the forms were filled out did Leon finally get the peace and solitude he needed to collect his thoughts. He rested his elbows on his knees and tugged at his hair, his teeth digging into his lower lip as he swallowed a choked sob. How did it become this way? Connie...how did he—the elevator never malfunctions so why the f*ck would it now...?

His blood chilled as he thought of one possibility. There were cameras all over the first floor; the only floor the P4 agreed on having cameras. It meant they could track their visitors. There was also one in the elevator. None of them bothered to use them; they had other means of locating each other. But Tristan definitely did. And Tristan had the motives to potentially harm his brother once he has no more use for Leon.

Even as insufferable and annoying as Kieran was, and as spastic and unstable as Jaehyun was, neither of the two would bother to lay their hands on the little boy. Kieran saw him as a mini Leon he could poke fun at and Jaehyun couldn't care less. That only left Tristan.

Would the blue-haired male really be so cruel as to orchestrate his brother's accident? Leon's seen Tristan do some terrible things and ask dark favors for him, but he's never turned his hand on a child. Grown men and women? Sure, he didn't discriminate with genders or social positions. But children? Leon doubted he was that cruel. Tristan could be cold and wouldn't bat an eye even as someone was dying in front of him, but he still retained his humanity.

Grown-up Tristan, however, was another story. Leon was glad they met (Y/n) before they were adults. Things would've been way worse.

He leaned back in his seat and rested his head on the wall, tilting his face towards the ceiling. For some reason, he didn't feel as furious as he should've been. At least, not as furious towards Tristan as he had been when it came to (Y/n). Instead, his anger was directed towards himself and the feeling was quickly dwindling. It was replaced by a bottomless self-hatred, an invisible knife he drove into his gut over and over again.

How he wished he could take Conan's place. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. Leon should be the one on that hospital bed. With all the sh*t Leon gets himself into, it was a miracle he hasn't had a hit ordered on him. And Conan should be happily playing in school right now and creating a future of his own, especially with their bastard father out of the picture.

All of a sudden, a dam burst inside of him and tears trickled through his closed eyes. He buried his face in his hands, quietly sitting in the brightly-lit corridors of the hospital. If anyone saw him, they would've passed him without a second glance, missing the tears that filled up his silvery eyes and turned them from dull, angry gray to explosions of white-gold novas. The only other visible sign of his breakdown was the slight trembling of his shoulders.

Tonight he'd stay by his brother's side. Tomorrow he'd get answers and see if he needed to spill some more blood.

━━━━━༻ ❀ ༺━━━━━

A/N: I'm sorry I saw this late zzCistheNamezz but holy dust bunnies, it's so good (≧∇≦)



Here are cookies for y'all who automatically assumed my baby zebra was dead 🍪