Chapter Text
Mrs. Sanderson is dead. Kenneth just got the news. At eight-fucking-AM, or, in laymen's terms, too early for Travis to be awake. There’s going to be a funeral at the church. Kenneth will make sure of it (to Travis’ dismay), even though Mrs. Sanderson hasn’t gone since before Travis was born. Travis’s mom will be invited. She won’t attend because Kenneth will be there, he’ll make sure she knows that, and she’ll look like the asshole. Kenneth will make sure of it.
Travis doesn’t care. He barely knew the lady; the conversations they had were in passing when Kenneth dragged him down to Addison Apartments to go ‘save souls’ (aka; guilt trip people into donating tithes and offerings). When they actually did have conversations they were along the lines of, how's school? Straight C’s? That’s great, I’m gonna leave now because I don’t actually care and am actually really uncomfortable right now.
He’s actually a bit pissed off; he was planning on avoiding Kenneth this weekend. Hanging out at the graveyard or walking around or doing something to avoid being at home. He has two more years of school until he skips town, and he is trying to nope out of as much of his dads bullshit as possible. Now he has to attend the funeral of someone he barely knows because his dad wants to save face.
Fucking ridiculous.
Kenneth screams like he’s the one who was murdered; “Travis Phelps get your ass down here!”
Travis replies in the same fashion; “Coming.” He makes sure to make the g extra long, dragging it out as he drags himself back out of bed. He’s exhausted. He just finished the summer homework last night (because God forbid he does anything other than pray the gay away in broad daylight) which kept him up until 3am. This is one thing he doesn’t fucking need.
“What?” He calls out as soon as his feet hit the first floor. Kenneth is drowning his sorrows, (though Travis doesn’t know what he has to be sorrowful about considering he’s usually barely coherent enough to feel whatever sorrows he has) on the recliner in the living room. They have a nice house. Kenneth makes sure Travis knows it, knows how much he ‘sacrifices’ for it. Preaching to a bunch of receptive, elderly, and stuck in their ways assholes, apparently, qualifies as the biggest sacrifice of all damn time.
“There you are. Hell took you so long?” Kenneth's voice is gruff, like that of a smoker, from the twenty years he smoked a pack a day, and his breath is so rank Travis can smell it from a foot away, from the Forty a day he exchanged the cigarettes for. Most people start eating candy to quit. Not Kenneth. He just jumped into a brand new, more socially acceptable addiction. Lucky Travis.
“Well, I ain’t Jesus so I can’t just float down here, now can I?” Travis responds dryly.
“Boy, I ‘oughta,” Kenneth grumbles.
Travis has half the mind to say, “‘Oughta what?” He doesn’t. He likes his bone structure arranged exactly the way it is, and doesn’t want his dad to give him plastic surgery with his fist.
“Any damn way, you need to go down to Addison Apartments.” Kenneth slurs out after grumbling about what a sorry excuse of a child Travis is.
Great. Someone just got murdered there and now Kenneth wants Travis to go down there when nobody even knows who the killer is? The blood is probably still in the air. The killer is definitely still on the loose. “Why?” Travis wants to ask why the hell he would do that, but, again, he enjoys the benefits of having a face arranged the way it was when he woke up this morning.
“‘Cause I damn said so. And ‘cause some new boy moved in over there. He’s around your age and you need to make some damn friends.” His country accent, the heavy one that only comes out when he hasn’t been sober in over a day, slurs his words together making them sound less harsh than they are.
Travis doesn’t need friends. In two years he won’t be so much as a whisper in the wind of Nockfell. He doesn’t need anybody that he’ll have to leave behind. He has plans and friends make them complicated. He doesn't know why his father, who is a slip of word away from being a friendless, town hated deadbeat, has anything to say about his social life. “Can’t,” he reasons dryly. If he’s right, his dad isn’t drunk enough to believe anything, but he isn’t sober enough to tell a lie from the truth. “I need more hair dye, and I gotta go all the way down to the convenient store to get it and-”
“And if you don’t quit making excuses I’ll give your sissy ass something to whine about. Get your ass to Addison Apartments and if I so much as think that you're somewhere else than you’ll be makin’ an excuse for a black eye.” Travis wants to take the empty, glass beer bottle sitting next to Kenneth's leg and use it to give him a brain tumor. He doesn’t. He has learned what his father can’t; the art of self control. Instead he nods and pretends. He pretends like he gives a fuck, and pretends to have an iota of respect for Kenneth. Pretends to listen as the old drunkard rambles on about sparing the rod and spoiling the child and listens, actually listens, for the poor kid's room number. Right beside Mrs. Sanderson, apparently.
Begrudgingly, he makes his way to Addison Apartments, because it's just two more years. Two more short, sweet years of bullshit until he’s gone from Nockfell, forever, and he’ll never have to turn back around. For a little while, right after his mom left, Kenneth pulled Travis out of school to teach him the Bible. He never did get his multiplication tables down, and he still doesn’t know how to write his name in cursive, but he can recite the whole of the old testament by heart…In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth… He does it without thinking, sometimes to clear his mind. He’s doing it now.
He no longer believes in the Bible, or God. He used to believe it. He ate up every word. Until he discovered common sense, and actually read the Bible. The Bible made him hate himself for so fucking long, common sense made him not give a fuck, and the internet taught him how to love the parts of himself God couldn’t. He’s greeted at the door of Addison Apartment's by a detective; tall black guy, maybe 6 '0, bald head, terrible posture (not that Travis can judge), bent over a notepad in a black suit. “Why are you here, young man?” His tone is damn near accusatory. You would’ve guessed Travis killed Mrs. Sanderson with his bare hands by the way this guy was talking to him. “My dad wants me to come visit this kid who just moved in.” Was the kids’ name Fish? He had been dissociating half that conversation. The detective nods and scribbles on his notepad. He steps over after a moment and lets Travis by. He is happy enough to thank God, perhaps for the first time in years.
The entire place seems to be grieving. Not even just the people; the building seems to miss Mrs. Sanderson. His footsteps sound hollow, almost eerie in an oddly disembodied way. The walls seem gloomier than the last time he was here, and he could have sworn the walls had taken on an odd sort of dinge. He knows the moment he walks down the horror movie worthy hallway that this place will be forever changed. The walls seem to sink in on themselves as though full of sorrow, and Travis can’t tell if it’s his imagination getting the best of him or if the entire place simply wasn’t built level. He’s inclined to believe the latter; there are no inexplicable occurrences, nothing so out of the ordinary it can’t be scientifically explained. Ghosts don’t exist and walls can’t change because they’re 'sad'.
The silence of the elevator, once he gets there, is painfully loud. There is stale noise - a noise that feels old, and intangible, if that even makes sense. The fourth floor looks more like a morgue than an apartment complex. The air conditioning is on full blast, icy air tickling a chill up Travis’ spine as he steps out of the elevator, a grimace pinning down the corners of his mouth.
Just knock on the door, greet the kid, and get the fuck out. That’s the plan.
Except, the minute Travis raises his fist to knock on the door it opens to reveal a kid, probably his age, with electric blue pigtails in their hair and a beat up, taped together mask hiding their face.
“Whoah,” he says, stepping back, “My bad.”
Silence. Awkward, stifling silence.
“I, uh,” Travis mumbles out, and, for fucks sake get it together. “I’m Travis Phelps, my dad runs and preaches at the church down the road. He wanted me to come make you feel welcome with the Lord's grace,” or something like that.
Still silence.
“I - I ain’t actually religious. But, y’know, dad, preacher. You do what you gotta do.” A shrug.
More silence before a nasally, deepish voice responds, “Sal Fisher, but my friends call me Sally Face.”
“Are we friends?” It was out of his mouth before Travis realized how impolite it was.
Sal doesn’t seem too affected though. In fact he chuckles, and shakes his head a little. “Do you want to be?”
Travis, to this day, doesn’t know if it was the fact that the entire atmosphere changed when the kid talked, or if he it was that special way he chuckled, or the fact that he was sleep deprived and not really in his right mind, or, perhaps because the personification of a beautiful mystery was standing in front of him, but he says, “Yeah, yeah, I think I do.”