Creeps Never Die

When did he take his clothes off? And why?

From what you could tell, he is, at the very least, still wearing his boxers. But there’s no mistaking the feeling of his bare thighs brushing against yours, and his chest is very obviously lacking a shirt.

The one thing he’s still wearing, besides the boxers, is his mouthguard.

You nearly huff at the sight.

Did he really never take it off?

Curiosity tempts you into sneaking a peak, but you quickly dismiss the urge. You don’t want to break his trust after he agreed to stay with you.

Instead, you content yourself by absorbing the other details of his body, as though who he is and what he’s done might be mapped out between the freckles of his skin.

Countless scars litter his form, all of them varying in shape, size and colour. Some look deeper than others, and some look like they’ve never fully healed, as though the slightest injury might slash the skin open once more.

You wonder again about everything that must’ve happened to bring him where he is now. You wonder about what he must’ve lost, the things he must’ve sacrificed—if he had a family, a career, a partner…

Before you know it, you’re reaching up to trace feather-light touches over his scars, as though you could know their stories based on touch alone.

There’s one on his neck, slashing right across his collarbone, the colour a baby pink embedded between blemishes. You brush over it, feeling the subtle shifts in texture of the damaged tissue, and then your touch wanders further beyond it.

You trace over his collarbone, gently feeling the curves and dips of his body all the way to his shoulder. Absent-minded, your path has you tracing empty patterns all the way down his chest.

You’re about to reach deeper, about to dip beneath the covers to feel more of his skin, when he gently stirs awake.

“(Y/n)…”

Your face flushes.

He caught you.

You want to tell him that it’s a misunderstanding, that you weren’t doing anything—you just got distracted.

But before you can explain yourself, he sighs, like he isn’t fully awake yet, and you nearly deflate with relief.

You sit up, the embarrassment lingering, but your movement snaps him fully awake.

His long lashes flutter as he blinks once, then twice, squinting at the wisps of morning light filtering through the dirty window. He sighs out a groan, stretches, and then those dark brown eyes lock with yours.

“You’re awake,” he murmurs, and the sleep lacing his voice has him sounding huskier than usual.

You try not to think about the way your body responds so naturally to the sound.

“Mmh,” is all you say, with a tentative nod.

He groans with another stretch, shifting in place, and as he does, you feel something rub against your thigh.

You don’t think twice about the contact.

That is, not until he freezes in place, mid-stretch, and his eyes go wide.

“S-shit—I-I’m sorry!”

He recoils abruptly as he apologizes, his face and especially his ears turning beat red.

You honestly don’t know what he’s apologizing for. It only clicks when you notice that he’s covering his hands between his legs, and he can’t hold eye contact like he’s ashamed.

“I’m—I’m so sorry—I didn’t mean to. I—I didn’t—“

“T-Toby, it’s fine—“

“N-no, I swear, I—I’m not—I wasn’t trying anything, I—“

“Toby—“

“I wasn’t—“

You roll your eyes, throw a leg over his waist to straddle him, then yank his hands away from between his legs and pin them up either side of his head.

“Toby,” you state firmly, “It’s fine.”

He looks up at you, wide-eyed and deathly still, deathly silent—a deer in headlights.

You almost consider it a victory; you got him to calm down. But then you realize what you’ve done and what position you’ve inadvertently ended up in.

And you can feel his morning wood pressing against your inner thigh.

You freeze on top of him.

For a second, neither of you move.

He’s warm beneath you, his chest heaving slightly as he pants his stress out.

You should get off of him.

You weren’t thinking when you got on top of him. You just wanted him to relax.

The right thing to do, you internally reason, would be to apologize and somehow explain this whole thing’s just a big mistake; a spur-of-the-moment, split-second, poorly-thought-out decision.

But there’s a lump in your throat and you just can’t seem to find the right words to explain yourself.

“(Y-y/n)…”

When you don’t move or speak, he hesitantly murmurs your name.

He flexes his wrists beneath your grasp, and it occurs to you that, time and time again, he’s proven how much faster and stronger he is than you. If he wanted to get out of your hold, he‘d already be out by now.

“…Are you scared of me?”

His question, uttered in a low hum above his breath, catches you off guard.

“What? What… what do you mean?”

“Do I scare you?” he asks again, shifting slightly beneath you. And although the movement is faint, you don’t miss the way it has him unintentionally rubbing against your inner thigh.

The entire lower half of your body clenches in delight at the contact. Something tight and unbearably hot coils in the pit of your stomach, and your thoughts get the slightest bit hazier.

“Sometimes,” you admit quietly.

His eyes flicker to your lips, lost in thought. He seems to mull something over in his head, and then he returns to meet your gaze.

“But not all the time?”

“Not all the time,” you affirm with a slight nod. And then, considering your own answer, you ask, “…Is that stupid?”

He purses his lips. “Maybe. Probably.”

You swallow thickly.

Get off of him. Get off of him. Get. Off. Of. Him.

A voice nags at you to move, to leave and pretend none of this ever happened.

But his eyes drop back down to your lips, and then over the curve of your neck and along your collarbone, and something about the way he looks at you is entirely too reminiscent of the way you’d traced those absent-minded patterns over his skin.

You repress a shiver, and when it causes your hips to shift slightly over him, again, you feel him stir against your thigh.

“You think I should be scared of you?” you ask quietly, as though speaking could distract from the way you shift again—a subtle attempt to feel his covered length drag along your skin.

His breathing grows deeper, more ragged, and he inclines his own hips up to meet yours.

“I think so,” he answers huskily, “probably.”

You exhale shakily, partly because of his answer, and partly because his cock twitches against you as you roll your hips over him again.

And again.

And again.

“Are you going to hurt me?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t—I don’t know. Not on—n-not on purpose.”

It’s a shoddy answer at best, but it’s somehow just enough to convince you not to stop.

You ground your pelvis against his, and he hisses out a breath as he feels the warmth of your cunt through the shorts you’d slipped into halfway through the night.

His back arches up, wrists flexing against yours, and you finally relent your hold on him in favour of bracing against his chest.

Your fingers fan out over freckled skin, and his own hands, warm and strong and steady, find purchase around your hips. He indulges in gripping two handfuls of your supple flesh, and with his newfound leverage, he coaxes you to keep grinding back and forth above him.

Your head falls back to release a breathy sound, back arching, pushing your chest up, and all you can suddenly think about is that you want him to touch you.

You reach over his hands, tug them away from your hips and almost painfully slowly start to move them up, up, up along your form.

His calloused fingertips brush over the skin of your waist, bundling up the fabric of your shirt as you lead his touch up over your ribs.

His breath hitches in his throat as you pause, ever briefly, right beneath the supple flesh of your tits. Deep brown eyes flicker from your chest to your eyes, like he isn’t sure where to look for approval but he wants to feel you.

And then finally, you guide his hands beneath your shirt to cup over your tits.

He groans, brows furrowing as he arches his hips further up into you. You return the favour by grinding deeper against him, rolling your hips in circles, and when you squeeze your hands over his, he takes the hint by kneading at your tits.

Your body’s a live wire, buzzing with need and adrenaline. Your head’s fuzzy, clouded by the incessant throbbing in your core, and you can’t seem to stop your hips from grinding and humping his length pressing through his boxers.

You can barely distinguish whether the wet circle on his underwear is because of your slick rubbing off on him, or if it’s from the precum dribbling from his tip. Either way, you don’t care. You just want him inside of you.

The thought spurs you on to impatiently bounce on top of him, so that every time your hips meet, his cock nudges right against your clit.

You throw your head back, moaning out another breathy sound, and he answers with his own whimper.

“(Y-y/n), I don’t know—I-I—I don’t know if—“

His cock twitches as your thighs clench around his hips. Something of a shiver races down your spine, coiling that knot of heat and slick even tighter in your abdomen. And whatever he was about to say is quickly forgotten as you whine and beg him to play with your tits.

The look of desperation on his face is beyond blissful.

You can feel the tension in his body. The muscles in his chest tighten, as do his fingers to squeeze and tug and pinch at your nipples and fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck—how long has it been?

You want him to ruin your insides.

“(Y/n), I—I can’t—“ he stutters out another half-coherent sentence before you snap your hips back down onto him. And whatever he was about to say quickly dies on his tongue as his back arches and his head falls back.

You watch, mesmerized, by the way his throat moves when he moans for you.

“Toby, I need it—“

His whole body stiffens beneath you, his muscles tenses as he curses out a strained, “H-haaah—fuck!”

And then with a whole other slew of curses, his hands move back down to your hips, yank you down as hard as possible onto his dick, and then a shuddering tremor’s passing through him as his cock throbs and pulses uncontrollably.

You only realize what just happened when you feel a specific kind of warmth pooling between your thighs. When you look down, surely enough, his underwear’s wet; the previously damp patch a now prominent dark circle.

He came from only dry humping.

You’re flattered you have such an effect on him. But Toby, it seems, is beyond mortified.

He presses his palm to his head, covering his face with a groan.

“F-fuck—fuck! I’m sorry, I—I swear that never happens, I—I just—“

“Toby—“

You can’t help but snicker quietly despite yourself. And you don’t know just when, exactly, you got so comfortable around him, but you suppose grinding on someone until they cum might have that effect.

“It’s fine,” you reassure, and then you let your hands wander down his chest, scratching faint lines into his skin until he’s shivering and buckling up into you.

“S’not fine,” he grumbles.

And then, suddenly looking up at you, he gives a squeeze to your hips.

That unbearable heat, still gnawing at your core, throbs impatiently, hungrily.

And then you don’t know if it was his plan all along, or if he just recognized that look of need on your face, but with one sharp thrust of his hips, he throws you off balance and pins you down, reversing your positions.

You gasp his name, and the sound has something devious flickering in his dark eyes.

He presses a chaste kiss to your collarbone through his mouthguard, the hard material of it biting into your skin, then moves lower to plant one at the hem of the top of your shirt, right above your chest. His fingers bundle up the fabric of your clothes, dragging it up to reveal your stomach, and there, he plants another bitingly rigid kiss at your ribs.

Truthfully, don't exactly know just how you feel about him. You're worried you don't resent him as much as you should. You’re worried you don’t resent him at all, actually. And, maybe most of all, you’re worried there’s a reason you have a tendency to stick by his side, one that you don’t want to admit even to yourself.

As if you need more things to worry about.

The one thing that lightens your conscience, ironically enough, is the idea that he's not doing any of this of his own volition. Selfish as it may be, you feel better imagining him as a puppet on some strings, rather than a free person.

Duty, obligation, blackmail—whatever the strings may be, all you'd need to do is cut them, sever the ties to the puppet master, and he'd be free.

You sigh, and turn to the side, facing away from the window.

You try not to think too much about everything Toby must've endured to reach the point where he is now.

And then you don’t know when, exactly, you pass out, but when you reopen your eyes, the room is draped in darkness. You blink wearily, that familiar migraine pounding in your head again.

You try to cough out some of the tightness in your chest, and then with bleary eyes, you glance out the window. The trees are motionless, the air hanging dead in the woods. Yet despite the uncanny stillness of the forest, every now and then, you swear you see brief blurs of motion darting through your peripheral, emphasized by the faint swaying of the branches.

You’re thirsty.

If it were up to you, you’d ignore your thirst and let sleep claim you once more. But you know your migraine will only worsen in the morning if you don’t deal with it now.

So, begrudgingly, you stand.

You could’ve sworn you’d closed the door yesterday, but as you stumble through your room, you notice it’s wide open.

You dismiss it.

Through the hallway, you make your way to the kitchen in the dark.

You don’t know what time it is, but it feels late enough to be surprising when you hear the low murmur of people talking.

You stop in your tracks, holding your breath. And when you recognize the voices, you quietly creep closer to the source; the kitchen.

“…spiders?” you hear the end of Masky’s sentence as you press near the wall. “She arachnophobic or something?”

There’s a brief half-second pause before, who you assume to be Hoodie, snickers and answers, “She’s about to be.”

Toby clicks his tongue—the pitch and intonation all too easy to recognize.

“Can’t we push it off by, like—like-l-like—a day or two? She just…”

It sounds like Hoodie answers Toby, but his response is too muffled to make out, which has you daring to inch closer. You press your ear to the knotted wood of the door and listen, trying your best to be as silent as possible.

“…have time for that,” Masky says. “He’s already not too pleased that we lost the lead on the journal.”

Toby’s quick to retaliate. “Yeah, but he’s—he’s happy we have her in—in-i—“ he interrupts himself with a verbal tic before finishing, “—have her in exchange. It more than makes up for it.”

Hoodie snorts. “You’re happy we have her in exchange. I’m sure he’d rather have the notebook instead.”

“That’s not true!” Toby’s frustration mounts. “You guys still don’t get the role she plays in this. You—you won’t listen.”

“Yeah, yeah—“ you can almost imagine Masky waving his hand as he brushes Toby off. “We get it, we get the role you want her to play. It’s not every day you find someone who isn’t completely put off by you.”

There’s a pause, and then you hear what sounds like him putting a glass down after taking a drink.

“Who knows,” he continues, “if you keep sticking your neck out for her, maybe eventually, she will feel indebted enough to blow you—“

He barely finishes his sentence before there’s a loud crash of a chair getting knocked over. The impact of someone falling resonates beneath your feet, and then there’s grunting and swearing like another fight's broken out.

You stumble back, shocked and scared and confused, and then you bump into something or someone behind you.

You don’t know who the fuck else is in the cabin if all three men are in the kitchen.

But as you spin around to face whatever the hell's behind you, a loud burst of static fills your mind.

It’s accompanied by a barrage of colours—so many colours. Too many. Flashes of dark and light overwhelm your vision until they’re all you can see. Dreams or memories resurface, mixing and melting together into one nauseating blur.

Glimpses of a forest flash behind your eyes. The green of leaves shudders in the wind, slowly at first, between cacophanies of strange sounds and jarring images that disorient you beyond recognition. With every flash of interruption, the wind picks up, and the leaves jerk and shake and darken before something sharp and jet black, like a spider’s tendrils, slashes through them.

The tendrils crackle through your vision, a mirror breaking, and then the cracks erupt into thick black smoke before bright vapors of red and orange eclipse the darkness.

It all happens within a split second, and then, faster than your mind can process it, more and more visions flash before you.

You see your neighbour’s face, laughing, and then sparks of red flood your sight until you realize she's bleeding. Skin flays from flesh, revealing the deep red and pinks of her inside, all while she laughs hysterically. Her face is mutilated and contorted into something beyond recognition with every heaved breath of laughter.

Pages of a worn journal flutter open to reveal insects—handfuls upon handfuls of maggots, worms, beetles, black flies—all writhing and squirming about. More visions of things you can't fully decipher cloud your vision until it’s like you're swimming upside-down in black, murky water and you can’t see the end of it.

A spider’s leg, as impossibly long and sharp as the last, tears through fabric, and then you're falling.

All around you, you hear your neighbor's laugh. You see her between jolts of colours, her face melting, eyes rolling back as some long, thin line splits a perfect cut across her forehead.

Like some kind of parasite, a black, squirming worm erupts from the cut. More insects crawl out of the fissure, and then something round and blindingly white amongst the sea of writhing insects appears; an eye.

It rolls back, then suddenly snaps its full attention on you. And as it does, your neighbor's jaw drops open and she screams that same fucking scream.

You're in hell.

You feel it; feel some other plane of existence beyond the edges of your reality. Waves of pain and agony, sorrow and regret, hatred and bitter-hot rage roil just inches from the precipice of your mind.

And then you hear choking. It's wet and guttural, and sounds absolutely awful.

You see your neighbor's throat cut open in a thin line, identical to the one that'd appeared on her forehead. And as she chokes on the blood filling her throat, she reaches a crooked hand out to you.

You want to recoil. But you're frozen in place.

Something black and pointed protrudes from her neck, the skin around it expanding like a bubble about to pop. And then that same spider's leg crawls out from the wound. And everything goes dark.

A black veil washes over you, bringing with it an impossibly cold front. The chill stings you down to your bones, washing over you like the guiding touch of death. And then there’s… nothing.

There’s no noise, no colours, no visions, nothing.

After everything you've just seen and heard, the emptiness is nothing short of blissful.

But then you feel it; you're not alone. Something else is with you in the darkness.

And then you hear Toby calling out to you.

***

You've been asleep for what feels like way too long.

Everything's stiff and sore, and that same fucking migraine is pounding in your head like an old, resentful friend.

The first thing you see when you open your eyes is Toby.

He isn’t wearing his goggles. It's the first thing you notice; the full, unobstructed view of his eyes. Honey brown eyes, with flakes of green and gold visible even in the darkness of the room, are framed by long, dark lashes.

The second thing you notice is that he looks concerned. His brows are furrowed, worry creasing his otherwise soft, freckled skin visible over his mouthguard. Even worried, something about him looks so sweet, so gentle. It always takes you a moment to remember they're the eyes of a killer, and even after, it takes you another moment to believe it.

“(Y/n)…”

He speaks your name quietly, like he’s afraid of startling you.

You realize you're on the floor, and he's cradling you in his arms, propping you up to keep your head lifted. You must've fallen.

“What… what happened?”

Something of a nightmare dissipates behind your eyelids.

You sit up, or, at least, you try to, but a wave of dizziness has you crumpling back into Toby's warmth.

“Easy, easy,” he murmurs.

With the delicacy of an angel, he helps sit you up, and when the nausea rises from your stomach to your throat, he lets you lean against his chest for support.

You recognize his smell; something warm and familiar in its woodsy-ness, and after a few seconds of breathing him in and out, the fog clouding your mind clears somewhat.

When you finally have the capacity to look around, you realize you're in the living room, right between the hallway and the kitchen, and Hoodie and Masky are also there, staring down at you.

Masky has his burly arms folded over his chest, and for the life of you, you can't read him. Especially not with his mask on. You can't tell if he's frustrated or annoyed or intrigued, and you don't exactly know which one you'd prefer, in all honesty.

Hoodie, on the other hand, is leaning against the back of the couch. And even with his mask on, he seems calm and relaxed, unlike the other two. He tilts his head to the side when you glance over him, though you can't tell if it's out of amusement or curiosity.

Not caring to find out which it is, you return your attention to Toby.

“What… what happened?” you ask.

Your voice escapes you in a low, weary croak, like you've either been sleeping or screaming for a long, long time.

“You..." Toby flinches, cracking his neck. "W-well, you, y-you—“

“You had a seizure,” Masky interrupts Toby’s stuttering with a flat, matter-of-fact kind of tone.

A seizure?

Bouts of flashing visions pound in your mind, leaving behind a throbbing blur of pain. You groan.

“How… how do you feel?” Toby asks, and you don’t think you’ve ever heard him sound so cautious, so tentative.

“Bad.”

“You see anything?”

“Mh?”

You look up at Masky, who’d asked the question.

The last few remnants of those images, as brief and fleeting as ever, evaporate behind your eyelids. Like they’re withdrawing from your grasp, and try as you might to catch them on your fingertips, you just can't recall them.

But something's changed. You can't tell what, exactly, is different, and whether it's just inside your head, but you feel it. Like something isn't what it used to be. Something isn’t right.

And then you notice what’s wrong.

You're not alone with the three men. There's... something else in the room with you.

A presence lingers in the dark edges of the room. You can feel it waiting, watching. It sits heavily, weighing down like it's on your shoulders, inside your mind—like it's everywhere.

You don't know what it is, or if it's always been there and you've only now noticed it. But even though it doesn't have eyes, you're almost certain of one thing; it's staring right at you.

“I said you see anything?”

Masky repeats the question, which thankfully snaps your attention away from the unnerving presence.

You purse your lips, shake your head no, but your lie isn't very convincing, even to yourself.

“Well,” Hoodie clicks his tongue, the sound slicing through some of the tension as he pushes off the couch, “better get used to it.”

He tosses something at you, but before you can even flinch, Toby catches it mid-air, saving you from the hit. He shoots Hoodie a hard glare.

If Hoodie notices or even cares, he certainly doesn't show it. He merely turns and walks away, like he has better things to do.

You expect Masky to leave as well, but he doesn't. He stays behind, keeping his arms firmly folded over his chest, as he carefully surveys you.

You push down the instinct to nestle into Toby, to hide into his hoody as though he might be the only thing that could protect you.

And after what feels like a small eternity, Masky huffs, and turns to leave as well.

You don’t miss the way Toby hisses the word “pricks” under his breath as Masky leaves. And, again, if Masky hears or even cares, he doesn't show it as he walks out.

And then you’re all alone with Toby.

Despite being pressed up so closely into him, you wish you were closer.

You feel the heat of his body, the warmth of his skin, the scent of everything safe and familiar and comforting, and you have to resist the urge to lean in and bask in it, bask into him.

You mentally try to shake the instinct away.

You're about to ask him something—just what, exactly, you don't really know. But then he opens his palm and reveals what Hoodie had thrown at you; a bottle of pills.

You stiffen.

The orange-tinted bottle is half empty, with only a few pills still rattling about. But there's no mistaking it; it's the same prescription you saw on the table. It's the exact same bottles you've seen littered around the cabin, even around the forest.

What the hell have you gotten yourself into?

At the sight of your reaction, Toby closes his hand around the bottle and looks away.

“You should… you should keep these on you,” he murmurs. “Even if you’d rather not take them—take them now, you should at least keep ‘em—k-keep ‘em close.”

He hands them to you, and against your better judgement, you accept them.

“Just… just in case something like that happens again.”

You don’t press him for more information like you usually would’ve. As much as it scares you, you think you might be starting to understand more of what's going on. And you're definitely starting to understand that the less you know, the better.

"C'mon," he hums, "I'll help you back into bed."

Before you can protest, he pulls you closer into him, hooks an arm beneath your thighs, and then he's lifting you up like it's nothing.

You still don't feel fully stable, certainly not enough to walk, so you don't argue as he brings you back to your room.

He sets you down on the bed, and as soon as he pulls away, you immediately miss his warmth.

"W-wait..." you reach out to him, fingers tentatively grasping onto his clothes before he can leave.

He pauses at your command, his deep brown eyes flickering curiously over the nervous look on your face.

"Don't..." you hesitate, "Don't leave me. Please. Stay with me."

You feel like an idiot asking this of him, but you’d rather feel like an idiot than be alone right now. So when he seems uncertain about your request, you nervously explain.

“I… I don’t want to be alone. I’m—I’m scared, Toby. I don’t feel safe without you. Please don’t leave me alone.”

Something in his eyes softens, something like a tension you didn’t realize he’d been holding. And, with a nod, he accepts.

He slips into the bed next to you, pulling the covers up so that you’re both tucked in. There’s a clumsy kind of awkwardness about his movements, like he’s not exactly sure how to go about this whole thing, and he keeps twitching and jerking and muttering things under his breath like he can’t get his tics under control.

When you both eventually settle, there’s a gap between your bodies, but he’s just close enough for you to still feel safe.