hellhouse | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

WHO: Carrie White & Peter Parker
WHAT: Arrival
WHERE: First floor dining room
WHEN: July 10
WARNING: TBD

The last thing that Carrie expects after the house caved in is to wake up, in her prom dress, no less, somehow miraculously clean of all the pig's blood and dry as though nothing bad had happened to begin with. At first, when she sees the boy with his head down across the table from her, Carrie thinks maybe it's just Tommy and they'd tired themselves out and fallen asleep at the table; maybe everything was just a real bad dream and none of it really happened.

It only takes a second to realize that there's no music and this isn't the gym. He's smaller than Tommy; he's not actually Tommy. And, maybe most damning, Carrie's back is still aching sharply where Momma had stabbed her.

This is real. She's dead. She got Sue out of the house safe and Carrie died in the rubble and now it's just a matter of time before Satan comes for her. Carrie was born a child of God, but she's pretty sure God doesn't love abominations. She's pretty sure God doesn't love mass murderers. Carrie is both of these things. She's not going to Heaven after everything she did. This is Hell, it's got to be.

Carrie pushes herself to her feet and looks down at the unsoiled dress. It makes her chin quiver and she wants to cry. Why did they have to be so mean? She hadn't even wanted to go to the stupid prom. She should've trusted her instincts and just stuck to her guns and said no; kept sayin' no. Tommy didn't wanna be there with her, why would he have? Momma had been right all along. They'd just wanted to laugh at her. They had always wanted to laugh at her.

Well, now they were havin' the last laugh. God probably took all of them into Heaven for being victims of her wrath and she's been banished like Lucifer. Being in this dress, a dress that she worked so hard to make perfect and beautiful only for it to be completely ruined on what should've been the happiest night of her life, is a good start to making her feel tortured. It's just a reminder of everything she'll never be, ever. She'll never be pretty. She'll never be loved. She'll never be normal.

Ignoring the boy entirely, assuming he's perhaps just a figment of her imagination or a manifestion of yet another temptation — one which Carrie is not going to give into this time, not even in Hell — she moves to a corner and kneels on the floor facing the wall, head bowed in prayer. Maybe that's not allowed here or maybe God won't hear her, but she has to try. Hurried whispers of prayer escape her until she startles at the sound of something moving and she whirls around to face the rest of the room again, shaking with the fear that only dying and going to Hell, she supposes, can instill in a person like her.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He comes to slowly, the world a mass of colors and blurred shapes until his senses can finally tune themselves to his surroundings. He lifts his head from a table, feeling disoriented and odd. He'd been catching up with May after getting back from Europe and then had crawled back into his own bed for the first time in weeks.

Now he was somewhere he didn't recognize at all, dressed in his suit from the dance last year. "What?" He says to himself as he scoots his chair back, letting the wood scrape against the floor. He hears the sound of whispering and turns towards it, just as a girl in a pretty pink dress whirls towards him. She looks terrified and his first instinct is to look behind him to see what she's so wide eyed about.

There's nothing there. At least he knows it's not his tingle failing again. He turns back to her, taking a step closer before he realizes that she's staring at him. He raises his eyebrows in surprise. He presses his lips together and tries to give her a small smile. "Hi," he says before his mind goes blank. He tries again. "Hey, sorry if I scared you. I just..." He looks around the room again. "Where are we?"

He doesn't give her much time to respond before he's asking another question. If he's here, where's May? Mysterio was gone, wasn't he? Or was this another trick? Or had his defeat been the actual trick? He looks at the girl again. She isn't anyone he knows. "Who are you?" He pauses, his forehead furrowing. "Are you real?"

Because of course she'd tell him if she wasn't, right? That was the law for holograms. They had to tell you if they were fake or not.

Edited 2019-07-26 05:32 (UTC)

She hadn't actually expected for there to be any interaction to be had between herself and the boy slumped over the table. He'd been a temptation, she'd resisted with an ease that made her proud of herself in spite of the fact that there's little left to be proud of, and she'd turned to prayer even in her darkest hour. Perhaps that wasn't the temptation. He's really cute, she realizes, and he's not intimidating. He's shorter than Tommy Ross. He isn't as self-assured, she can see that right off the bat. He looks more approachable, even if he is really cute. He's apologizing to her, and it doesn't matter what for; nobody has ever really apologized to Carrie and sounded like they mean it.

But it isn't lost on her that he's taken a step toward her and she tries to take a step back only to feel her back connect with the wall and a hiss of discomfort escapes her along with the grimace she doesn't have time to hide. It's gone again as quickly as it cropped up and Carrie curls into herself a little, hugging herself, ducking her head the way she always had. She shakes her head at his question of where they are. If he doesn't know, then she doesn't want to be the one to tell him that he's gone to Hell. Surely, if he's sinned bad enough to be here with her, he knows what he did, but that doesn't mean he has a relationship with Jesus and it doesn't mean that he knows Heaven and Hell are to come after he dies and is judged by God.

But then he asks her a question that she can't just shake her head or nod at and Carrie peeks up, her head still bowed slightly to try to make herself invisible. "Carrie White," she says and it practically comes out a whisper, so she tries again, just a little bit louder so that he can actually hear her. "I'm Carrie White." What he means when he asks if she's real, though, Carrie's not really sure and it shows on her expression.

She's dead. He's dead. They're in Hell. How real are either of them, really?

Carrie swallows thickly and opens her mouth to speak only to be cut off by the sound of a record player in the adjacent corner. Her head snaps in that direction and she closes her eyes, tilting her head down again with acceptance when she hears directly the words Hell House. Why there's a house involved is beyond her, but if nothing else...

She wants to give the boy some comforting words about how Jesus saves, but if they're here, then Jesus has turned his back and Carrie, at least, deserves that. Maybe the boy isn't real at all and all this is is a test. Can she be kind? Will she feel the craving of human flesh? Does Carrie feel the itch to hurt him just to keep herself safe?

"What's your name...?" she asks, mindful that maybe the fact that there's no fire and brimstone means that she is, in fact, being tested and maybe she can work her way back into the Kingdom if she's nice to him. As long as she doesn't have to trust him, this should be fine.

She backs away from him and he realizes that she's acting like he's cornering her. He stops moving forward, especially when she grimaces as if at the realization that she has no escape from him. He's careful to keep his distance, though he takes her in as much as he can without being creepy about it. Her dress is nice. Formal. She's pretty, though obviously extremely scared. Of him.

He swallows and takes a deep breath. He supposes he maybe should be scared of her as well, considering they've woken up in this strange place with no explanation, but he has his abilities on his side. "Carrie," he says, softly. "I'm not going to hurt you. I just want to figure out how we got here."

The recording goes off and his expression shifts from one of bewilderment to confusion. Hell house? None of this makes any sense. He looks back at her and he's surprised to find that she doesn't seem all that surprised by the message. "Peter Parker," he says. He'd hold out his hand, but she looks like the last thing she wants is to be touched.

"Carrie," he says slowly. "I think we should find a way out of here. Whatever this place is, it's not good."

Her eyes narrow a little as she looks back at the boy, because he doesn't seem to realize that he's dead like she does. That seems strange. She wants to know what the heck he thinks is going on if he doesn't know he's dead. His voice is soft and his words are gentle. That makes her flinch, too, because sometimes the most gentle words come before a knife in the back.

It isn't until after he's introduced himself and suggested that they find their way out that Carrie's fear shifts into something more pitying when she looks back at him. "We can't get out," she says softly. "When it's your time, it's your time."

She winces and hisses again, feeling the sting at her back and finally stepping away from the wall, even though that means moving closer to Peter. She has to take the pressure off the wound. That, and moving again, Carrie can't help noticing the thing embedded in her arm, glowing blue-white light and she gasps, staring down at it, all but forgetting Peter entirely for a moment.

"I don't...this...wh—" she stammers uncertainly, blinking rapidly with surprise and turning around so that she can look at the record player where the sound had come from, as though maybe it will hold answers for her. Doing that will expose her back — and the stab wound — to him, she realizes belatedly as she moves toward the record player with the hope that she can play back the message and see if she'd just...missed something in it that would explain this thing in her arm. Oh well. They're dead. It can't look that bad anymore, can it? It's probably just phantom pain, she tells herself.

"Time for what?" He thinks he has a pretty good idea, but he's not okay that this being that. He didn't die. Not even when sometimes he wished it had been him instead of Ben or Tony. Not when someone threw a building on top of him, tried to snap him out of existence or hit him full force with a speeding train. If he had died, he would've remembered it. He would know it.

He follows her gaze to her wrist and then realizes belatedly that he also has one of the devices embedded in his arm. He's definitely not okay with that but when he looks back up at her he spots the bleeding wound in her back. "Oh my god, you're bleeding," he says, moving towards her and picking up an unused napkin on the table on the way much more quickly that he has any right to. "What happened?"

Carrie whirls back to face him, gasping. "Nothing," she says quickly. "I'm fine. It's fine."

How is she still bleeding? Do dead people bleed?

She doesn't want him to come closer, really, but at the same time, a part of her does. A part of her wants someone to take care of her because nobody ever has, but if this place is what she thinks it is, then this is a trick and he's just going to hurt her.

Now that he's brought attention to the wound, though, Carrie realizes that it's been hurting this whole time; it's just...sort of a dull throb at this point. Momma must've missed anything important when she'd been trying to kill Carrie. It feels like a spine-deep, nasty bruise that someone's poking with a curious finger. Now that he's mentioned it, she's even more aware of it. It makes her feel a little dizzy and she reaches for the wall to steady herself. "It doesn't matter, anymore."

"It's not fine," he says, wrinkling his forehead. As he continues to advance on her, though he slows his steps as he gets closer. It had actually looked pretty bad from what he could see. Or at least the blood surrounding it had.

She reaches for the wall and he stops within touching distance. "You should really put something on it to stop the bleeding." He holds up the napkin as a kind of peace offering. "Can I take a look?"

He meets her eyes and holds them. He doesn't know what happened, but he knows she's been hurt. So he asks again, because it matters to him. "What happened?"

Being contradicted is nothing new to Carrie, but this boy is doing it with compassion instead of ridicule and that is different. Therefore, she's terrified to trust it. He's almost literally backed her into the corner and there's nowhere she can go without physically brushing past him, so Carrie stays incredibly still, watching him warily as he lifts the napkin.

It isn't until he asks her again what happened that she finally feels like she has to respond to something. Rather than answering the question she doesn't want to answer verbally — the one she has a feeling he'll keep asking — she looks back at him, a little pained and a lot conflicted before finally turning to face the corner again so that she can answer the first question. Yes, he can take a look.

She wants to defend Momma and lie and say it was an accident, but what kind of accident causes a wound like that? He wouldn't believe her and he shouldn't. Maybe she should just leave it vague. He's going to keep asking; they're persistent when they want something, she learned that when Tommy asked her to prom. "Someone stabbed me," she says, barely audible except for the silence in the rest of the room. She isn't going to say who, she can't let herself say who. It shouldn't matter anyway.

Carrie hisses suddenly and physically startles at the white hot wave of pain that washes over her the second he touches her to try to ebb the flow of blood. Tears spring to her eyes and she's incredibly grateful that he can't see her face scrunched in agony and upset like it is right now.

She turns and he sucks in a breath at the wound that he can see more clearly now that he's closer. It looks like it hurts and if the spreading circle of blood around it is anything to judge by, it's deep.

"Who?" he asks, as he reaches out to press the napkin against her shoulder. He hears her hiss and can feel her tense up under his touch.

"Sorry," he says quickly, holding the napkin in place. He'd move away from her, but he knows she can't hold it there herself because of the angle. "Was it the person who brought us here?"

Her grimace becomes more pronounced when he presses against the wound with a bit more pressure. Carrie knew he'd have to, but she hadn't really anticipated how much it would hurt when he did.

Carrie braces herself with one hand against the wall as if pushing back on it. "No," she replies without any specification. "Please be careful," she adds because whether he's pressing harder or not, it feels like he is and it's less a warning to him that he's hurting her and more of a pathetic pleading for him to be mindful of it in the hopes that he won't take it as a gleeful reason to double down. This is Hell, after all.

"Nobody brought us here, Peter, we're just here because this is what's next," she whispers only because she can't quite find her voice without the fear that it'll become a scream of agony.

"This is pretty deep," he says, feeling the wetness of her blood soaking through the napkin and warming his fingers. He glances around the creepy room. "We need to get out of here and get you to a doctor."

He swallows at her words, looking back at her. Her face is turned away from him, but he can see the rigidness of her shoulders. Her voice is quiet and eerie as it bounces off the wall she's facing.

"Carrie, we're not dead," Peter says, reaching out lightly to touch her shoulder in an attempt to get her to turn towards him. "And we're not going to die here. Whoever attacked you may still be here, but I'll find a way to get us out, okay?" He swallows. "I need to get another napkin."

He pulls away, dropping the napkin on the nearby table before reaching for another place setting. This time he doubles up and folds it into a square. As he does so, he glances around, looking for something he can use as a weapon. Without his webshooters or his advanced suit, he's at more of a disadvantage than normal.

If it'll make Peter feel better, Carrie is willing to indulge him enough to try to find a way out of Hell to stitch up her wound. It's not going to happen; they're waiting for judgment. She knows this. If it'll give him something to do other than pushing against her sore back, though, she's willing to let him try.

"She's not here," she says a little more snappishly than she means to. She looks horrified almost instantly at her tone and Carrie ducks her head to hide behind her still-damp hair. "If we're not dead, why are we here?" she asks, in spite of herself. What could possibly be the reason they could be here if this isn't what she thinks it is? She honestly can't conceive of any other possible reason.

"I know you don't like it, Peter, but it is what it is. I died. I know I did and I know where I belong after everything. I can't speak for you," she says, her voice lowering until the last words she adds are a whisper again, "God knows where I belong."

He reaches for grabbing up the knives and forks available, confident that he can throw them pretty hard if he needs go. He looks over at Carrie. "Who's not here?"

He hadn't expected it to be a woman who had attacked Carrie. That doesn't really change their predicament, but it seems unusual. He shakes his head. "I don't know," he answers honestly when she asks why they're there. He knows why he may be there, but not why Carrie might.

He moves back towards her, picking up the new napkin bandage and approaches her cautiously. At least now he can see her face more clearly, though it's clear from the look on it that she's convinced.

It's pretty clear that no one would think this is heaven. "Let's get out of here," he says softly, not wanting to push her too hard. He's half afraid if he does she'll resign herself to whatever this is, thinking it's hell.

Carrie ignores his question because Peter doesn't press it. He's more interested in getting her out of this place and if the attempt is what will make him feel better and give him something else to focus on so that she doesn't have to implicate her own mother in her death, then that's just as well and she'll let him.

"I gotta move slow," she warns, frowning. The more her adrenaline wears off, the more pain she's feeling not just from the stab wound, but from exerting herself so much in the gym — her head is throbbing — and from the house caving in right after she forced Sue Snell out.

With that warning out in the atmosphere, Carrie moves slowly to follow him toward the door. If it opens, she'll be surprised to learn that there's more to Hell than a poorly designed waiting room.

He slides the silverware into his pocket and moves to the door. It's locked, but he moves back and slams into it with his super strength. It creaks and he can feel it shift. He runs into it again and this time the door pops open.

He turns back towards Carrie, moving to help her. He reaches for her elbow to help steady her and maybe take some pressure off her shoulder. "I'm going to apply pressure again," he says, giving her a concerned glance. "We can go as slow as you need to."

At least until they ran into trouble.

Carrie watches, wincing a little when he throws himself against the locked door, because she's sure it won't open and he'll just hurt himself. It genuinely surprises her when he manages to get it to pop open. She stiffens a little by reflex when he comes to help her move because it still feels weird to trust him.

The sudden realization that he's been nothing but kind to her so far and that she's still afraid to believe that he's doing it out of the goodness of his heart even though she can't think of any possible ulterior motive enrages her. Not at him, but at Momma. At her classmates. At the world for giving her so many reasons not to trust that she's not even sure she can remember how.

But she nods when he tells her that he's going to apply pressure again and she lets him take her elbow and lets him lead her and actually even lets herself enjoy the fact that someone is showing her compassion in a way that actually feels real. She knows that this really must be Hell because no matter how hard she tries, she can't believe that it's sincere.

Once they're in the hall, Carrie looks behind them and realizes that she can't actually see the other end of the hall because it's so dark. That's alarming, but nowhere near as alarming as the fact that, when she turns to look forward again, she can't help noticing that the door they'd just come through...is gone. All she can see is solid wall. Carrie gasps. "Peter..." she says quietly to get his attention before looking back at the wall again. "...the door..."

He follows her gaze and blinks at the doorless wall that they just came through. Suddenly his conviction that they're not in Hell is shaken. Was this another trick? Another illusion? Was Carrie even real?

Maybe she was just meant to keep him busy. But he could feel her apprehension, her blood. If this was just an illusion given by drones than he wouldn't be able to trust his other senses.

He looks at her and then around them at the dark hallway. He can't see any other doors in immediate sight. Which forces them either up the stairs or down the hallway. He leads her down the hallway. They'll have to run into another door eventually. Plus, he's not sure how much exertion Carrie can take. "This way."

Her heart is racing. Is this the part where things start to look like Hell and feel like Hell? He doesn't see the door, either. Their options are to walk further down the hall and hope for the best or to head up a flight of stairs and somehow, Carrie thinks that the way out isn't going to be up or downstairs, but rather right on the ground floor. Then again, maybe this isn't the ground floor.

"I don't like this," she confesses quietly to him. It sounds childish in her own ears and she can't help hating herself a little when she hears it. She sounds like a scared little girl; like she had when she'd gotten out of the bathtub after the prom. She closed her eyes and shook her head as if to push away the thought. "What if we can't find the way out because something like that happens?" she asks.

Carrie still isn't convinced that there actually will be a way out, but even if there is, who's to say it'll show itself? They've been out of the dining room for a minute and they've barely moved, yet they've still lost the door leading into it.

"I don't either," he admits as they keep moving. He swallows as the hallway ends and forces them to choose left or right. "Sometimes aren't always what they seem." He reaches out to touch the wall and it's solid. He starts feeling across it like a blind person would. It's not an illusion.

He turns to look at Carrie. "We're going to have to keep going. There has to be a way out of here." He pauses and nods towards her shoulder. "Are you doing okay?"

Swallowing thickly, Carrie watches him as he reaches out to touch the wall, like maybe he's worried it isn't real and it's just another trick like the door. But his hand presses against something solid and she looks up through her eyelashes when he turns back to her, only because her head is dipped slightly downward out of reflex. Carrie has always found it incredibly difficult to look other people in the eye.

To his question, she nods, even though it's not true. Her back is aching with a dull throb punctuated with white-hot sharpness every few steps. She isn't going to tell him that. "But what if there's not and they're tricking us?" she presses, looking more crestfallen than concerned.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only