Trapped (A Ticci Toby Story)

Chapter 19- Open Waters

They give me space, but they are never to far away.
I fall behind with each step I take,
But they don't rush me.
They stop every now and again and wait for me to catch up to them.
I wonder if they would've just left me behind if the situation was different.
Scolded me,
Pushed me with impatient words.
But for now, I go at my own pace.
They've given me a chance to cope with this new reality.
One where I will never see the 'others' again.
Just of the thought of it makes me knees want to give out from under me.
I don't know if I can handle this.
Not with Tom still out there somewhere.
Not when there is no way to know if they are safe or what's happening to them.
I don't trust anyone else to keep them safe.
I don't trust anyone anymore.
Their families, They've failed before and almost costed their lives.
So how can I live knowing that?
I hear hoodie say my name, but I don't bother looking up.
I know he isn't talking to me.
His voice is too low for me to make out his words, but I can hear his concern.
I try to straighten as if the weight of the world wasn't crushing me.
A pointless attempt to ease his concern, but
It doesn't change anything.
He doesn't look.
He and Masky are coercing in their own little space that I'm not apart of.
That I was never apart of.
I can't stop the grim thoughts from eating me from the back of my mind.
Nothing has changed.
I shouldn't have come back.
I wished to be back in that cellar.
Starving, dehydrated, and dying,
But at least then I wouldn't feel so empty.
So alone.
I want them back.
Masky has stopped and I see him watching me before I realized that I've stopped walking as well.
I open my mouth to apologize when he says;
"We'll take a break."
My mouth snaps shut.
A break wasn't something I knew was in his vocabulary, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
I turn and sit down against a tree and lay my cheek against it's rough, frozen, bark.
Hoodie smiles at that, but doesn't say anything.
Masky kneels over me and instructs me to lift my shirt.
I do so and I can see that the bandages wrapped around my torso are still clean.
I know that's a good sign...
but I feel disappointed.
And shocked after the split second it took for me to register what I had felt.
Disappointed because I wasn't going to die.
I didn't know why.
I don't understand, but the logical part of me is scared by this realization.
Terrified.
I want to die?
Masky looks at me, eyebrows pulled together in concern.
"Are you okay?" He asks.
And I hesitate.
Why do I want something like that? It doesn't make sense.
In the end I decide not to share this information. I didn't think he would understand something so uncanny.
"Fine." I say.
I know he knows this was a lie.
Lying wasn't something I've mastered on my own.
But he doesn't push.
He feels around the wound without his gloves and I could only guess he was feeling for the heat of infection.
Hoodie stands next to me, watching with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets.
"The cold is doing more for your fever than we could in this situation. I hate to say this, but I'm glad you decided to get snatched now. Any later and you would be a goner." His eyes search me a moment longer. "You almost look normal... Almost."
I shrug miserably, feeling subconscious about the colorful bruises on my face.
"You don't think the bruises make me look tough?" I play along halfheartedly.
I get a lopsided smile from him, but something dark in his eyes causes him to not respond.
It wasn't the friendly banter I was hoping for.
So instead I take a different approach.
One I've been wondering about since that faithful night.
"When did you find out I was gone?"
I wasn't asking this to a particular person, but Masky's expression hardens to compressed anger and hoodie is left to be the one who answers.
His tone is one of practiced benign.
"Quickly." He says, eyes shifting uncomfortably as if this topic was a hard subject for him. "Almost immediately in fact. Whenever you left, Jeff called and told us that you were coming after us. We turned around so we could meet you halfway, and find you before you could get yourself into trouble."
What good that did.
"When we made it back and still didn't find you... Things changed."
Masky finished checking my infection and stood up, not bothering to hold back the irritation in his voice.
"It didn't help that you were intoxicated."
I flinch at that.
I had hoped they wouldn't find out about that.
Masky smacks me on the back of the head.
"Ow!" I say instinctively.
"What were you thinking?" He scolds.
"I wasn't!"
"Clearly." Hoodie puts in.
"I know I screwed up! You've yelled at me about this since you got here! I thought we were past this!"
"Not even close." He hisses. "When this is all over, I will never let you out of my sight again, do you understand me?"
"What was going through your mind when you thought leaving crossfaded was a good idea? Couldn't you have waited until we got back to act so reckless? Christ! We were worried sick!"
"I don't even know what that means!"
"Of course you don't! Your still a child!" Masky cuts back in. "There are reasons we keep these things from you!"
"I--" my throat felt dry. "It tasted horrible anyways! I don't even want to do it again! It wasn't even fun like Jeff said it would be and i-it made me sick." I admitted.
That must have been the right thing to say because they seemed to relax instantly.
Their demeanor completely changing to one of humor.
Hoodie laughs and Masky covers his face, smiling behind his hand.
This makes my heart skip a beat in my chest.
"What?" I ask.
"Your an anomaly, Toby." Hoodie says between laughs. "I forget to consider that with you, but you're such a light weight." He laughs some more. "I don't think that has anything to do with your state of mind. Your just so scrawny."
That finally breaks a laugh from Masky's too.
This rare occasion where they are both laughing at something I said, and I couldn't even be in on the joke.
I look down at myself.
I had lost an alarming amount of weight now, but even before all of this I know I wasn't as tall of strong as them.
But I was still lean and only a few inches shorter. I made up for my lack of mass in different ways.
There wasn't anything funny about my weight.
"I remember experimenting when I was your age, but four shots, Toby." Hoodie says. He hardly finishes his sentence before throwing another fit of laughter. "You've must've been wasted." He mocks.
Oh right. They are just being dicks.
I wait for them to stop laughing, but I was quickly growing frustrated.
"Alright." I say over them. "You can just kill me now."
This sobers them up a little bit.
"Right" masky says apologetically. " It's just, this whole time we thought you were doing this out of spite, not that you were actually--"
They laugh again and I let them.
They probably needed this more than I would know. It was good to actually see some life in them for once.
When they sobered enough I say;
"Jeff said you guys were too stuck up to drink."
That completely sobers Masky and I could already sense the tension between him and Jeff.
"We were teenagers once too." He says,"we just can't afford to sit around drinking all day while our lives are constantly on someone else's whim. I'm sure you're aware what it does to your mind."
"Besides." Hoodie adds in, shoving his hands back into his jacket pockets. "When we do drink, it isn't usually a good thing."
I remember the bottle of liquor they keep in the bag for emergency pain management and I'm glad I've never seen one of them hurt bad enough to have to use it.
"Yeah." I agree absently.
My mind has gone to all the possibilities of something happening to one of them..
Even both. The world is a dangerous place and I'm terrified to allow myself to imagine a world where one of them was hurt.. or worse.
It's then when I realize how close they are standing over me.
They were hovering.
"Uh..." I say.
And they exchange a look, seemingly realizing this too.
They take a step back before masky turns and walks across the clearing to the back he'd left on the ground.
"Sorry." Hoodie smiles apologetically and turns to follow his friend.
I don't watch them rummage through their supplies for the nutrition bars and water we were about to eat.
Instead I'm staring at the deep footprints they left in the snow in front of me.
Just the fact that they were hovering made me feel small.
Had I worried them that much? Or was it instinctual protectiveness to something unforseen?
Why do I feel so exposed?
I had just stood and crossed my arms over my stomach to ease the ache my anxiety had given me when hoodie says;
"Toby--TOBY!"
and something large hits my body with a force that causes white to flash behind my eyes and I am falling from the cliff side I resided by.
Whoever had knocked me down was torn away from me as we tumble through frozen brush and stone.
Everything was moving to fast to be recognized.
I tried to grab things that wielded by me.
Rocks, grass, snow,
Until I caught myself on a jagged ledge with the trunk of a flimsy young tree.
I didn't have a second to catch my breath until my attacker, Tom, climbed from a sideways tree and stumbled clumsily onto the ledge.
My heart was in my throat.
My hands fumbled in the snow for something to protect myself with, my fingernails digging at the stone for a lose rock, but he was already on top of me.
Shoving my back against the ground with his weight.
His hands were once again around my throat, squeezing the life out of me.
Frost bitten nose, bared brown teeth, and saliva took over my vision as I tried to pry his hands from my throat.
His eyes were wild, unreasonable.
Insane.
In the hight of his deranged revenge, he lets go of my throat to force my head back against the stone by my hair,
and bites into me.
His dull and dirty teeth breaking the skin on my neck in his need to hurt me as much as he could with what little he had.
He was primal.
I cry out in sheer terror as he pulls his head back, trying to rip away my skin.
I could hear the proxies calling for me.
I couldn't see them, but I know they were trying desperately to make it to me.
But they weren't going to make it in time.
They weren't going to get a clear shot without the risk of shooting me in the process.
I was alone.
I claw at his face, I dug at his eyes--anything to make him let go of me.
But I am weak and nothing I was doing was working.
He pulls his head back and I could see my blood on his face, in his teeth, and steaming down his neck.
My head spinning, I look down from the ledge to the large frozen lake underneath.
I couldn't swim, but in that moment, it didn't matter.
In a moment decision,
I grab onto him and with everything I had, I throw us off the ledge.
I hear him cry out as we fall and break the ice on impact.
Billions of bubbles engulf us as I try to figure out witch way was up through the spinning in my head.
The water around my vision clouds with the dark hue of blood and my lungs faulted to quickly in the frozen water.
I desperately try to follow the bubbles to escaped my lungs, but Tom pulls me deeper in his attempt to use me to break the surface.
I cling to his shirt and use it to climb him upwards to the broken ice overhead.
I arch my back and reach for the edge of the shattered ice, but the ice breaks apart with every attempt to grab ahold of it.
Tom grabs my arm and I pull free before he has another chance to pull me down again.
I reach and my hand catches onto a stable piece of ice and I pull myself above the water long enough to gasp before I am pulled back under, taking in a mouth full of water in the process.
He pulls me down and shoves me deeper into the darkness, away from the single glow of the opening.
I fight to cling to his clothing, but my good hand wasn't moving the way it should.
My fingers too stiff and frozen to move.
My hand never closed around the cloth that clung to his body.
But I could feel Tom's movement slow as mine. Each time he tried the pull himself above the water, the ice would break under his hold.
And... everything begins happening in slow motion.
I can no longer hold my breath and I unwillingly breathe in the bloody water.
I can feel the liquid fill my upper body, heavier than air, and I am vaguely aware that we are sinking.
I watch the only light source move further and further away from me.
Small beams of light dance under the surface.
They are disturbed when someone else plunges into the ice only a short distance away.
I watch the beams of light dance and flick more rapidly until I can no longer see them anymore.

"Toby, breathe. Open your eyes. Toby--" I hear Masky say. He is nudging me...no he's shaking me.... He's... Pressing on my chest violently. "Common, Toby. Don't do this. Just breathe. Your going to be fine, you just need to breathe."
I hear hoodie speak now too.
"Don't take him, Please."
I don't know who he's talking too.
I am confused.
No one is taking me. I'm right here.
I'm right here--
"Don't--"
I cough, expelling murky liquid onto the distressed snow.
And once I start I can't stop.
I hear them sigh and they help me roll onto my side where I vomit the rest of the water out of my lungs.
"Your okay." I hear hoodie sooth while I cough, but I wasn't entirely sure if he was something me or himself. "Your alright."
I gasp in between coughs until I am breathing more than chocking and roll back onto my back. I see the proxies on both sides of me.
Masky is soaked and his lips are a pale shade of blue and hoodie looks shaken.
I open my mouth to ask if they were okay, but my vision quickly begins to fade as I slip back into unconsciousness.
Before everything goes dark,
I see slender's pale face lean into view.
And then I am gone.