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Everything feels strange, darker - like night is falling, casting its breath out like some all-encompassing net (the stars woven in as bright lures though the treetops block out their shine), but he knows it's barely past noon - and Horace reaches a hand out to steady himself, jerking it back as his palm touches bark. He curls his fingers in on themselves, feeling as though bugs crawled across his palm. It's like nails on a chalkboard, or biting down on a washcloth and feeling it squeak between his teeth: this uneasy feeling of bark on his hands. It's just a side effect, Horace tells himself. Breathe, Horace tells himself, and he does, sucking in great, gasping breaths that won't help. It's all tainted. In these dizzying moments, when he tries to regain some measure of himself, and he knows he can make it, he thinks the trees have mouths and maybe they do - the gnarled knots in dark, weather-roughened bark gape open: mealy-mouthed, toothless holes, deep enough to get lost in. The wind finds a home there, a cage, perhaps, formed by words and wood-grain. The trees sigh, expand and swell outward, breath hissing between splinters. Horace tugs the hem of his shirt free from where it snagged on a branch.

"We never forgot you," they whisper, the sound as soft as falling leaves, gentle, insidious. "We never forgot you, never forgot-," as soft as decaying leaves shriveling, decomposing, turning into soft loam that oozes unpleasantly between his toes - wet, clinging. It reminds him of early springs spent at the edge of the forest, staring into those trees, both afraid and horribly curious, and he holds his head, dizzy with the weight of summer. The sudden dappled sunlight is disorienting. But this isn't how it began, or how it was supposed to go. This is how it is, and his shoulders creak from it.

"No, no, no," he says, the words circling around his head the same way the world spins. "This story is ended; it's done. I d-don't-" He doesn't what? Horace pauses, choking on his unsaid words. Doesn't think like that, doesn't want things he shouldn't want, doesn't feel bitter and used and like a circus where the tickets only sell because it's cheap entertainment. Doesn't dream. It's lies, but Jan always sees through them, somehow - possessed of some innate knowledge even though Horace finds him charmingly naive sometimes. (How can he find someone like that charming? And it's a question he neglects to answer because no one really cares enough to listen; they ask to hear a rebuttal, a hastily stuttered 'of course I don't', not to hear a why.) He tries to swallow, tongue thick in his mouth.

The subtle glow of his SPECTRE watch keeps him grounded, the steady electronic light in a sea of rustling leaves and light that moves with organic purpose. Still, he summons, waiting, nausea twisting in his belly. He's not supposed to engage, but he's dealt with this kind of weird miasma before and surely he can shake it off. Horace is not as weak as they think he is.

"Run, my fox, my darling. But think - what are you running back to?" The necklace lays heavy in his pocket, a reminder that he hasn't quite been able to throw it away, that he clings to it and the good memories - there were good memories, right? Yes, the smell of his hair, the feel of absent-minded fingers trailing across skin. Questions that were answered, and gave some window into the soul or lack thereof. There were still... parts. There are things he cannot hate. He wraps them around himself briefly, before remembering he can't; Horace has lost the right to. He hears movement and resists the urge to whirl, instead focusing on moving even as the world continues to tilt and spin around him. "You meant nothing. You meant nothing; you mean nothing, Horace." Going back isn't an option, is it? Something is coming closer and he know it will touch him with a well-known hand. He is too weak.

"Deus ex Machina," he pants, pendant cool in his hand, acknowledging that he is nothing, that he is - as always- giving up.

Nothing happens.

"We never forgot you, never forgot you, never forgot what you did, Horace." And Darren's smile is exactly as he remembers - bright and shining like sunlight. Horace had thought it could chase out the shadows that lived in his head. Darren's hand reaches out, and even though Horace doesn't love him anymore (does he love anyone, has he ever loved? all he remembers is pain), he allows that familiar caress against his cheek. He'd forgotten how calloused these football-player hands were and he frowns for a second, thinking there were better hands, crueler hands. As if he could hear Horace's thoughts, Darren draws back that hand (warm, warm, Horace always liked the ones who burned brightly, like the sun) and he strikes Horace across the face, loud enough that it echoes and his head snaps to the side. The forest is silent, just for this moment.

"You told, you dirty f*****t, you told." His voice is harsh and it burns and it's just like Horace remembers. He breathes deeply, feeling his head spin, waiting. He hadn't told; he'd kept their secret to the field, to behind Darren's father's barn, told no one but the wind and even that only in whispers quickly lost. But by his very existence, he had hurt Darren. "You don't know what i went through, how I had to hurt you to protect us both." Horace's cheekbone aches - hard enough to bruise. Darren walks his fingers along Horace's collarbone, each tip pressing into the circular burns there.

He opens his mouth; Horace wants to say it wasn't him, he didn't tell, he was sorry, so sorry, but ash fills his mouth, sneaks under his tongue and down into his lungs. Cigarette ash, cloves, and he chokes on anything he could've said. His cry is muffled as a sharp pain sears through his collarbone, a burning, like that of a cigarette ground out against his skin. Horace tries to swallow against it, because he's been told to accept - to turn the other cheek, to give second chances and thirds and seventh chances and maybe even fifteenth chances. He coughs. "It's too late anyway." And Darren sounds just like the voice in his head.

"You disgust me," he repeats, and Horace remembers how it felt to have his head slammed into a wall of lockers, the horrible echo, the broken glasses, the black eye. If he did not deserve things they would not happen to him, right? The god his grandmother prays to is unforgiving and she likes that. That god only gives what a person can bear, his grandmother says, her voice aged like into hoarseness. The sounds of soap operas echo from the next room over. He closes his eyes, like he always does, a metaphorical neck-baring, submission.

The hours crawl by like ants: small, insignificant, but with a surety Horace never feels. He's stopped, eaten, moved on in the space of time he's been in this green, plant-ridden sea. He catalogs strange rocks or oddly shaped trees as potential landmarks. He even debates whistling, before he calls himself stupid. If there are things in the forest, and somehow, he's beginning to doubt, then they would be alerted by his whistling more than any strange crack of a twig underneath his foot. Something hisses up around him, cloying, muddling, stealing the breath from his lungs.

His vision blurs, blacks, and he passes out.

There's a chorus, a litany, a listing off of words he's heard. Each voice belonging to someone he knows, or trusts, or doesn't. Horace runs like a dog, mouth open as he pants. The edges of the pendant dig into the skin of his palm - thick skin, calloused from practice, even though he hasn't been fighting for quite a year yet.

"Monsters who appear to be monsters cannot survive among humans. They scarcely last very long out of hiding."
"Aren't we already dead?"
"I don't particularly want to hurt you again; you have hit a point where you are more trouble than you are worth."
"The damage's already done."
"I found you, Horace. I was the one who found you and I can put you back there, Horace."
"You did this. You failed."

Dr. Morris, Melvin, Jan, Taym, America. It goes on and on and on. Chest heaving and vision blurring dangerously, he runs. Horace slams into a tree with his shoulder, then another with a hip. He is all clumsiness and escape. Suddenly, the dappled, confused sunlight clears and he falls forward, into some idyllic clearing. His teeth clip forward, slicing into his lip and that burst of pain makes him heave again. "Stay with us; there's nothing for you," he hears from behind him, soft and insidious. Horace wants to escape not because he wants to leave, but because he wants to stay. Desperate, he crawls forward and chokes out the words between his teeth for the twentieth time.