#monster ff

“Eliot!” she said, her voice unnervingly calm for the crazed look on her face. A loud ringing sounded around them and the lights behind the bar made a horrendous  pop pop pop  sound as they burst against the mirror on the wall.

The woman, the guard, furrowed her brow, but pressed closer, “Eliot I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she said. There was a chilling innocence to her voice that even Nigel recognized as dangerous, he could feel the fear in the memory. He took a step back, ducking when the ringing resumed and a light fell from the ceiling. “Jesus fuck!” he’d shouted. He knew he didn’t have the accent that came out of his mouth in that memory.

“Hmmm,” the guard considered him carefully, holding him in place when he tried to move back again. She moved her face uncomfortably close to his, looking into his eyes and shaking her head after blinking a few times. “Well, this just won’t do. I need you to be Eliot.”

He remembered a blinding pop of pain that traveled from the base of his skull down his spine, freezing him in an unnaturally stiff position, and then, the unraveling of Eliot in his mind, battling with whoever Nigel had been until he half-disappeared. There were pieces of Nigel still floating around inside his mind, he felt like he could almost reach out and touch them, but the shroud that had separated Nigel from Eliot lifted, and the look of utter glee on the guard’s face as recognition lit his own was enough to make him wish he was Nigel again.

“Good, now let’s go find Quentin.”

Quentin.  It was Eliot‘s last thought before blackness, and now this.

He watched as he moved for the door when he heard the voice of  his - er, no, Nigel’s - friend as they scrambled up, “Bloody hell, Nigel, what was that?”

He tried to speak, but nothing came out. He couldn’t even move his fucking vocal cords. Eliot had seen magic do some fucked up shit in his time, some of which he’d caused, but he’d never seen anything like this. Briefly, he wondered if Quentin felt anything like this in the Scarlotti’s Web his first year. The thought pained him.

“I am not Nigel,” he heard his voice - his real one, not the accented one - say. He saw his hand rise, saw the swift flick of his own nimble fingers and watched the blood spurt and spatter the wall behind Nigel’s friend. Something dropped in his stomach, feeling sick and wrong and tainted as it forced him to watch Nigel’s friend bleeding out on the floor of the pub, the bartender scrambling into the back as fast as he could.

“So messy, humans,” his voice echoed into the space around them as he stepped over broken glass and through pools of blood like it was nothing. He watched himself leave his favorite pub in London - why was he in London? - and walk down the street in a way that he would never walk if he could just get control of his goddamned legs, half-skipping, leaving blood-soaked footprints in his wake. He watched his body turn into an alley and then disappear. When he reappeared, he was in Brooklyn, approaching a coffee shop as a familiar figure stepped outside, balancing a to-go cup on a stack of books.

Quentin. No. Quentin, run!  He was screaming and nothing came out.

A heavy, suffocating pressure weighed down on him, making it impossible to think, let alone talk. Reduced to the role of witness, he watched Quentin, who believed he was someone else entirely, back away, scrambling, scared. It hurt, even with the unexpected knowledge he had, or the thing that had taken him had, that it wasn’t Quentin on the surface, to see the panic in his eyes as he tried to escape.

“This is gonna be so fun,” he heard his voice say, with a childish thrill, “I think anything is more fun when you do it with a friend.”