Chapter One: On That Fearful Chase


It was hot - hot enough that it felt like the sun was trying to bake Chicago into some sort of gross, litter strewn urban cake. Casey, sitting in a pocket park near his apartment building, was absolutely bored out of his mind and all but drenched in sweat. The pocket park itself was one of his favorite refuges, a tiny little thing between two buildings that still somehow managed to have a pair of very, very large trees.

He'd been there since the night before, just... sleeping up in one of the trees. With it so hot, he had no reason to leave - and it was safer up there, at night. See, time had passed when he wasn't paying attention, and night had fallen... and under the cover of dark, people were...

Looking for him.

So, he slept in a tree.

He might have worried about being in trouble with his folks, but they weren't even going to be home that week, and he was a damned adult and needed to stop worrying on that anyway. It was tempting to just... not go home, but he knew that wasn't safe and was probably an attention getting tactic.

It probably wasn't healthy to want to disappear so badly. Granted, he didn't always engage in exclusively healthy behavior, but still, this one seemed worrying.

Tiredly, he prodded at one of the scars on his pale arm for a moment, before brushing a few errant strands of hair behind his ear - beautiful, natural red hair. He had wanted to dye it black, but his mother had insisted he was too young to be dying his hair...

That was when he was fourteen, that she said that.

Except, he'd turned eighteen a good damn while ago - but, that was an argument he didn't want to think about. In his head, he tried to frame it as a rare moment of her caring enough to pay attention to him, but that was kind of hard since... well, what was the harm in changing his hair color?

The more he pondered it, the more he realized it was less about caring and more about controlling. They were never around, but wanted a say in his life. It was...

It was sad. It was sad because despite knowing that it was unfair, it was one of the few times she said a damn thing to him since he was a child, and he wanted to listen. Sure, there was the urge to argue, complain that eighteen was hardly young despite how he might appear with his slender, effeminate frame - but she wouldn't want to hear any of it, and it might make her ignore him for months again. Last time, she'd done it even when he spoke to her directly, becuase THAT was a sane thing to do.

And, on top of it all, this argument was imaginary, and would stay that way.

"Ugh, god... just go nova and burn us to death already, this slow murder is inhumane," he muttered, glancing up - and then, he winced and felt a powerful urge to smack himself in the forehead.

That was dumb, what he had just done. Looking at the sun was never a good idea, especially with his glasses on. The heat was clearly baking his brain, and if he kept hanging out there without any shade, he was going to burn to a crisp, even with the SPF 40-something-bajillion he'd applied religiously.

Mostly, he did that because if he didn't, his pale, papery white skin would flash to burnt in zero point zero seconds flat. It seriously never seemed to tan no matter what he tried, only burn, so he kept it covered when he could - but it was still dusted with countless freckles, all down his arms and across the bridge of his small, cute little nose.

With a sigh, he tucked his book back into his bag and slipped down the slide. Was it weird for an eighteen year old to hang out on a kid's play place? Yes, probably. Was he going to apologize? No, because no one cared that he was there. He could pass as younger easily if he had to, and on a week day like that, late in the afternoon in the Hellish heat, no one was there anyway.

Maybe, he reasoned as he headed for the sidewalk, he could find something weird and interesting in a dumpster - other than rotting food or gross trash. He'd found his digital watch in a dumpster! Granted, it hadn't been nearly as hot then, when it was still early spring. It was probably a bad idea, all told.

The dumpsters would be like ovens, the hot garbage would smell like hot garbage... It had rained two days before and pick up hadn't happened yet so a lot of it would be wet and rotting, and breathing that in would be bad for him. On top of that, his goggles were in his room, as were his nitrile surgical gloves...

So instead, he decided he'd go to the fire escape on his building, and climb up to the roof to hide under the trash parasol he'd stashed up there. It would be nice, overlooking a part of the city like that, shaded by a parasol he sometimes played with as if he was some elegant la...

Well, he was never going to admit that to anyone, but that rooftop hide away was comforting and calming to him. He could even snag a new book through the window into his room and do some reading if he finished the one he already had on him.

Yes, it'd be nice. He'd have some quiet time as evening fell.

So, he tugged his light cloth jacket from his bag and shrugged it on, tugging the hood up to hide his shockingly red hair. As always, he made sure that the thick braid that travelled all the way down his back, stopping just past the base of his spine, was tucked beneath the jacket.

Things were more comfortable for Casey if he were invisible. That was a talent he'd picked up over the years - learning to simply be as visually uninteresting as possible. Cover his hair, hide his pale skin, keep his head down, avoid eye contact but not to any extreme degree... his feet made little noise as he walked, even. The quiet walking was another skill he'd picked up instinctively.

The more he avoided people, the easier it got to avoid people - and in turn, the safer he was, after all. It wasn't like the world was evil, he knew. There were good people out there, probably, and he was just in kind of a bad place for it. It was because of how he looked, because he was-

He stopped short of the alley, clenching his fists hard, head down. Bad things were blooming in his mind - dark, vile things, things that stroked the anger in his soul gently and purred that it was better to let it out.

After a moment, however, the boy shuddered. Dark thoughts were bad thoughts, he knew, and thinking like that dredged up relatively recent memories that he really wanted to forget. It had been one time, one person, one-

He needed to get calm. Being out in a public place for so long had him pretty freaked out. It was the first time in a long time that he'd spent the night at the pocket park. Sure, had sure proven that what he'd done to... that bastard... had been effective in keeping him safe, but...

But he was still anxious, so very anxious.

Once calmed enough to safely climb the fire escape, he turned the corner into his alleyway, and stopped short yet again, wondering...

Do people always see the exact moment their life takes a hard left turn? Because he was staring at that exact moment, the world moving slowly, his heart slamming in his chest so hard he could hear his pulse in his ears and see his vision shuddering with it.

Adrenaline. It was instant adrenaline.

It was a drug deal, obviously. There were two men in his alley. One of them looked strung out on god knows what, twitching and scratching at his arm, half hunched over. The other was a dangerous looking white guy with baggy pants that did nothing to hide his gun - mostly because he was fucking holding it already.

Idly, his mind mused that both men looked dangerous. Sure, the guy with the gun and the leather jacket looked like he could kill a few people with ease, but the other guy, pale and hunched he might have been... he was big, well muscled, and looked like he was maybe ex-military from the tattoo on his thick upper arm.

Danger. DANGER. DANGER.

It was hard to care, even though his body reacted. Some tiny, quiet place in his mind wondered if maybe, it'd just be easier to get caught.

Jacket looked to him - that was the man in the leather jacket, obviously. Casey managed to force some words out even as his legs went leaden and his mind locked up, unsure if running would even be effective. When Jacket met his eyes, the boy saw that they were bloodshot, his pupils were hypercontracted. In short, Jacket looked as if he wasn't just selling drugs, he was sampling them.

"I-I won't say anything to anyone!" Casey stammered, shifting his leg on instinct, the lead draining from them. Adrenaline pulsed into his blood stream, and in a fraction of a fraction of a split second, he felt light as air and ready to run.

A lot of things then happened in rapid succession, then. The man buying the drugs lunged for the man with the gun, grabbing at the leather jacket's pockets as if trying to steal the product. The man with the gun, predictably, shoved him back. Unpredictably, he raised his pistol and shot the 'customer' - turned would-be thief - in the FUCKING FACE.

Everything suddenly became different, for Casey. He saw with a kind of perfect, crystalline clarity for the first time in a long time. His brain instantly processed what was happening, sorting analyzing it neatly. He'd seen someone get shot before, a result of his nervous exploration of anything within six hours from his apartment on foot - but he'd never seen it up close. There was blood, a lot of it, and it was all happening so damn fast. His stomach turned. Fear rushed up his spine. Ice spread out in his chest like the vines of some thorned plant.

Brain. Skull. Blood. Bone. Blood. BLOOD. BLOOD. MURDER.

What did it feel like to die? Did he want to find out?

Adrenaline gave him another sharp kick in the mental faculties and he threw himself to the side, near losing his footing as he heard another shocking boom - though, this one was strangely muffled by the terrible ringing in his ears from the first gunshot. Obviously, he was being shot at.

It didn't make sense. It just didn't. His area of the city wasn't precisely safe, but there had never been a drug deal in the alley behind his apartment before - he was sure of it. Granted, he wasn't there all of the time but if it was a place where people regularly did that kind of thing...

He figured he'd have seen it before.

As he ran, he was grateful for his slender form and well muscled legs. Being so small and effeminate (dark thoughts, bad thoughts, not the time, put it in a box, he deserved it) had taught him that if he wasn't going to give in to his ugly urges then he had to be able to run - fast.

He dashed down the street, pushing everything he had into running, trying to form a plan. He'd looked up fully, like a fool, and that wasn't good because it meant that Jacket had seen his face - and for some reason he'd stopped wearing the dull gray-ish beige shemagh over his lower face. But, if he ran around and then into the building, he was up shit creek because the dealer would know that he lived there...

Jacket might hang around, or show back up after the cops did their investigation (poorly) and failed to find him. He might wait for Casey, or hunt him like an animal - well, a glance back showed he was already doing that last part.

The plan had to result in Jacket's apprehension or death. Casey was in no state to fight the man! He wasn't even armed, except for a pocket knife. Why did he leave his fucking Taser alone?

Oh, because of what he did to that guy-

NOT THE TIME!

Options. He needed options.

Adrenaline really was a hell of a drug.

A bullet whizzed past him, striking the cement and sending stinging chips across his calves and thighs - that hurt, but pain was an old friend to the redhead. Why did he wear shorts, though? Ugh, it was the heat.

The heat meant endurance was an issue. He'd drank a lot, but he wasn't sure he had the liquid in him after sweating so much to-

Casey hooked a right. Cops. He needed cops, and he knew exactly where to go. It had to be swift. He had to get there, go inside the damn cafe. It was his only option!

It was about that time, five o'clock, give or take - and it was probably in range for his small, potentially dehydrated ass.

Another glance back showed that Jacket was hot on his tail - in fact, he was gaining. Of course he was, the guy was like six two, with long tall-person legs! And he was on drugs!

Terrified, Casey streaked down the alley and turned left on the street, flitting past a pair of civilians he hoped wouldn't be harmed. Jacket followed, fired a shot, the women screamed - Casey felt a sting. Looking down, he saw that... his hand was...

Bleeding. It was bleeding! He had no time to look closely at the injury but it sure looked like he saw bones and torn meat and maybe he lost fingers and-

FOCUS! The pain had to fuel his motivation, and the higher doses of adrenaline it brought had to fuel his sprint.

Again, he turned sharply. The coffee shop where the cops congregated in the mornings and afternoons wasn't far away. He was almost to relative potential safety - and this man, this Jacket, was clearly too nuts to care about shooting so openly in public. Was it the drugs? Or was it that the universe had finally decided to take a final enormous shit on Casey's life? Did it matter?

Did he matter?

He was in an alleyway. A horrible pain in his shoulder got him to look down again, once he rounded a corner. Blood was running down his arm, dribbling onto the ground with all of the blood from his injured hand. He'd been shot! AGAIN! All he had to do was keep going, and the psycho would-

The world ground to a halt as a scalding pain blossomed on his stomach, as if time frozen - and then, it restarted just as suddenly. Casey turned a corner, and the world went silent. Everything felt wrong. As he'd prepared to turn, it felt like something had hit him in the back - over on the left side.

It wasn't right. Nothing was supposed to happen to him, that day. Ahead of him, there was a fence, a fence that had a gate that was normally open. Of course, the universe hated him, and thusly, it was closed.

His body protested as he threw himself at it, climbed over it, because the gate was locked - and another pain came, but he couldn't feel it after a second or two, so the running continued.

The gate didn't slow jacket down much. He just shot the damned padlock open, shouldered through, and followed the boy. At most, it bought Casey fifteen seconds - maybe that was enough.

The redhead stumbled around the last turn, in the last alley, and skidded to a horrified stop.

There was a new chain link fence with a gate that hadn't been there before, and definitely-

It was probably because of the new electronics store that opened. They needed more security or something because of all the costly things inside. It was, in short, the end of the line - because when he tried to climb, his body just wouldn't respond. He looked down and realized his legs had an awful lot of blood on them, and his stomach hurt and...

And that thing that had hit him in the back when he was climbing, huh? The things that hit his back had been bullets from Jacket's gun. He'd been shot twice in the damned abdomen.

That's where all his organs were, he was pretty sure, so that was bad.

It...

It wasn't fair. Slowly, he stepped back from the fence, waiting for the inevitable final shot - but none came. Something new was wrong, and it wasn't just blood loss. When a harsh wind blew down the alley, paper and things blew with it - but both the wind and the paper seemed to be moving slowly, as if... traveling at one tenth speed or less.

His eyes were drawn to something hovering by the wall of the aforementioned electronics shop, right beside its dumpster and a mess of construction materials that suggested that another fence at the other end of that part of the alley was still to come.

It was as if... as if someone had torn the air itself, or... shattered it, or both at once. In places this rift looked like undulating cloth, in others shards of glass that glinted in colors that weren't there. It was a hole... a hole that...

That wasn't supposed to be there. It was a weird, weird thing, that hole - and all the little fragments of reality floating around it were weird, too. They had to be fragments of reality, Casey reasoned, because... because somehow, that made sense in his head or-

No, it was because the eye told him.

There it was, on the other side of the hole, staring at the redhead with an iris that was every possible color and some impossible colors all at once, with a pupil shaped like a narrow slit and a circle and other shapes - also all at the same time. It was as if this eye was everything, was so complex it was beyond comprehension and yet... it was staring out at Casey from its dark void.

No...

No, the redhead realized. He was staring out. The EYE was staring... IN.

Whatever it was, it was a hole to somewhere else - and the eye assured him in soft whispers in his mind that he would be safe. Even so, there was the problem where it was a cosmic fucking hole with a giant eye in it and despite all the comforting whispers...

The insanity of the situation wasn't lost on the redhead.

He had a choice. Gunshot death, or diving into some random magical hole that might peel him apart at the cellular level just to enjoy his horror as it happened.

Frankly, at least the magical hole would be his fucking choice - so he stumbled to it, and then tumbled through it, closing his eyes tight and waiting for the eye to shred him to bits and pieces.

Except, it didn't. It didn't hurt at all.

He drifted, free from the surly bonds of gravity, everything silent until the whispering pressed back into his mind. It sounded like one voice and millions of voices, like a solo and a chorus, all together. It was the voice of the eye. Things touched him, hundreds of little hands gripping and pinching and feeling him in all sorts of places. These strange hands seemed to be on the ends of weird tentacles.

That was... that was fine. He was just going to have to fucking accept that.

These things slipped inside of him, into his wounds - and he opened his eyes sharply, inhaling in shock at the sudden burst of pain that scorched through him. Again, it vanished almost immediately. When he felt for the holes in his stomach, they were apparently gone.

The groping resumed, however, and he blushed harder. God, it felt... so weirdly good, being felt up by these strange tendrils and... why wasn't he afraid...?

That mighty Eye was staring at him with its bizarre pupil and the strange sclera. Meeting it's seemingly cycloptic gaze was like staring into the mind of a god that MADE other gods, even as something tugged and twisted inside of him - in his mind, or maybe his very soul.

"I-I don't want to die!" he cried, though his voice seemed to die just past his lips, neither echoing nor carrying. The eye widened, blinked a few times, and assured him that he wasn't going to. It even said it was sorry, but since the fingers didn't come through, he couldn't regenerate them.

Casey didn't really know what it meant by that, but he assumed it was talking about his hand injury - but when he tried to lift his hand, the tentacles tugged it back down and intensified their groping and probing. A soft, sweet noise passed his lips as they squirmed into his underwear - he really needed to do some thinking about why that got him so excited.

Well, he knew why the butt... groping and... penetration... got him excited, but that wasn't the point. There were also questions related to why he was just kind of... okay with it. His emotions seemed all out of wack.

There came the implication of motion in the void, then, the disturbingly arousing, gropey hands on tentacles moving him along. Whatever the eye was, it had evaluated him, he realized... and it was telling him he was garbage!

No, wait... no. Not garbage. It was just that he didn't belong in the void. He'd seen a sort of special, ugly truth and sending him back to where he came from was simply not an option for... reasons that went unexplained.

He tried to parse this, tried to ask questions, tried to do anything but moan as a particularly fondly hand got a hold of his most sensitive external bits and explored them - and then he was thrown unceremoniously through a new rift, landing on his back on some fairly solid ground.

All he could do was stare up at the rift as it sealed up, like some tugging a zipper from bottom to top, the eye peering through until there was nothing left to peer through.

Casey went limp, panting hard, fully and officially drenched in sweat and fairly sure he just got blue balled by a literal eldritch deity. After a time spent panting and recovering, he became aware of a strange smell that tickled his nose. It smelled like food - like meat! In a panic, he shot to his feet! The CAFE!

HE HAD TO GET TO THE CAFE! THE POLICE! AND-

But the whispering in his head said... did it say he wasn't going back to where he came from? Did that mean it didn't put him in the alley and he'd temporarily escaped Jacket... or...

The nervous boy was once again distracted from the dealer by a sudden sharp pain on his hand. Opening it, he realized that he'd apparently unintentionally gripped one of the tiny, groping hand tentacles - handtacles obviously - and it had torn off in his grasp. The torn end was just kind of like... paper, or tatters of cloth, but also a bit like wisps of smoke that didn't disperse. It wriggled and squirmed as he stared, like a worm in his palm - until it managed to flip itself over and get its fingers on his skin.

It stood up, middle finger extended like a neck - and then the joint at the palm cracked, letting the finger rise up disturbingly vertical. Obviously, this left this middle finger at a right angle to the palm, and then...

The tip bent, as if forming a kind of head with the end of the digit. The tattered end curled up like the tail of a scorpion. A tiny eye opened on the middle finger-tip, that fingertip shifting to peer at his face. It skittered a little on the rest of the fingers, like a weird spider.

"Oh, fuck that," he gasped - but, when he tried to shake it off, it just stuck to him. There came a pain then, as it wriggled into his flesh and-

Wriggled into his flesh!? IT HAD BITTEN A HOLE IN HIS ARM!

"No! What the FUCK!? NO! STOP THAT!" he cried, trying to get it off of him, scratch it away, tug it from his flesh - but in the end, he could do nothing but observe in numb horror as it forced its way into a growing bulge under the skin of his wrist.

The bulge, very suddenly, flattened out. A black sort of mark spread out from where it had been, extending from his wrist almost to his elbow on his left arm, an irregular streak of darkness like a brushstroke of midnight ink.

"Oh, crap, that can't be good. I better... I should get that... looked at, because I mean, w-what the fuck, uh..." he trailed off, staring at the wound on his wrist, just below the heel of his palm - or rather, the absence of a wound.

That... fucking thing... had bitten him, right? He'd seen it...

It was... healed. It had healed the second the wriggling handtacle had worked its way all the way in, without leaving so much as a scar - which was good, because he had other scars on his arms that he actually liked and it would have disturbed the nice neat patterns. As it stood, he was standing there, his jacket and tank top soaked in blood, his shirt not much better off... and he...

Was standing on interlocking stone tiles and not pavement. The ground itself wasn't right for the alley he'd been in. To his right, the bricks of the electronics store had been replaced with much larger bricks of cut, polished stone in a pale pink hue. The other side's building was more stone bricks of the larger size, but black.

Uncertain, Casey made his way to the end of the alley, stepping out into...

A bustling marketplace. Street vendors haggled, and customers haggled back. The clothing choices were all strange, a lot of it was surprisingly revealing - and not a single person in sight looked even remotely fucking human. Slowly, the redhead stepped back as a woman who looked part fish rode a giant, six legged lizard heavily laden with countless packages past the mouth of his alley - and no one batted an eye because that was just FUCKING NORMAL. It was towing a chain of heavy carts behind it, too.

Standing there, in the shadows of the stone buildings, he made a kind of grim realization - or rather, the truth the Eye had told him finally sank in.

"Oh, shit. Shit fuck. I just got comic book plotline'd. That... this is... so many levels of bad," he mumbled, frowning. He wasn't on Earth anymore. Obviously he wasn't.

That...

He was....

Someplace... Else. Someplace new, and bizarre.

...at least it wasn't nearly as hot, he admitted to himself, desperately trying to find the positive.