The Big Applesauce

Johnny wakes with a start and immediately touches his face. Skin. Hair. Flesh. Human head. No longer a cowskull. Thank fuck.

He sits up and braces against the wall, staring at his room. Yesterday comes back in bittersweet pieces. Being in the TARDIS, seeing Gabe... everything that happened with Seth. He remembers being with Eliot in the dream. That had been nice. He should find Eliot again.

First thing's first, though. He has to check on Seth. He stretches and yawns and rubs at his face for a while, steps out of bed and pads to the kitchen. He didn't even change out of his clothes last night. His face feels dry and crusty from crying. His hands hurt. Muscles sore from the effort of fixing Seth's mess, which was really his mess.

He can't even think about it right now, or feel anything. He stares numbly at the kettle as the water heats, then makes himself some instant coffee and drinks it down as he wanders about the apartment. He changes clothes, cracks a few joints, and picks up the spare key Seth gave him.

He crosses the hall, which is dark and empty and strangely cold. He tries not to focus too closely on the architecture or his surroundings. All of it feels dangerous right now, and he forcibly shuts it all out. He reaches the door, unlocks it, and knocks lightly before letting himself in.

[[ooc: heads up for impending claustrophobia]]


It's dark when Johnny gets back home, the streets choked with pedestrians coming from their various viewings of the fireworks, or heading to bars and parties. Johnny had forgotten it was even a holiday. Ordinarily the noise and press of so many people would set him off, but right now he can't manage any mood but utter contentment. He's worried for Gabe, still, sure—but things are all right now. He can go to see her, actually visit the TARDIS, whenever they want. He doesn't have the poison of the house in him anymore, weighing down his blood and bones. He's new. He's fixed.

There is the creeping doubt (there is always creeping doubt) that he's wrong—he'll never be fixed and in fact he doesn't deserve to be fixed—that everything is going to fuck itself back up somehow. He tries to ignore it, but even in this, his best mood in a long time, it never quite goes away completely. The suspicion that everything good is just a temporary veil over the true underlying wrongness of his life is one that will probably always be with him, no matter what.

Perhaps this is why, when he opens the door of Gabriel's building, he's not altogether surprised by what he sees inside.

Everything is wrong. This isn't like when he woke up that night a month ago with his apartment rearranged, the messy discovery of his rift-given power. This is that on a scale he never wanted to imagine. The staircase has split into multitudes of itself, warped and wrapping around at impossible angles like a sick homage to M.C. Escher. The walls have come over German Expressionist, looking like they've melted and frozen again, glacial, convex bubbles of wood and plaster, interlocked and woven together to create narrow passages almost impossible to move through. Doors and windows tangled around each other, everything stretched and compressed and completely unmoored.

It makes him want to be sick. He does get sick. Bent over, clutching at his stomach, choking in fear. Scout darts back and whimpers softly.

How fucking stupid. Like he could just pass this off to Seth without consequence. Like it was nothing. A fun little superpower. No one believed him, did they? Sure it seems convenient, it's come in handy plenty of times, been used casually without reproach. But that's not what it is. It's not a tool. It's a presence. It lived in his body like a parasite, and now, it's living in Seth.

"Stay here, Scout," he whispers. "Stay out here." He barely has the wherewithal to tie the leash to the rail—the dog looks spooked as hell anyway, no way he's going in there. Animals always know. He remembers The Navidson Record, how the house just rejected the pets, spat them out on the lawn. This is no place for the living, and the living would not go into it. Only humans are that stupid.

Fighting hard against every instinct in his body, he steps across the threshold, into the architectural hellscape, fitting himself precariously through the gaps, knowing that at any moment, it could all come to creaking life and crush him to nothing between shifting walls.

"Seth?" he calls, terrified of what he'll find, that Seth will already be gone, or lost, like Will, so deep that no one can find him. "Seth, are you in there?" It's a question with two meanings, one of which he doesn't take the time to consider.