Part Nine of The Stitched AU
A JSE Fanfic
[This is part of a completed fanfic series of mine with 24 total chapters. I started this October of 2018 and finished it May of 2021. Chase has to adjust to some new...changes since he's come back.]
.............................................................................................

Chase was in the bathroom. The bathroom of Jack’s apartment, to be exact. Sitting in the empty bathtub, to be even more exact. Jack and JJ thought it would be best if they all stayed together, and, well, Chase agreed. He didn’t want to go back to a big, empty home. He didn’t want to be alone. But he didn’t exactly want to see the others right now, not after they’d caught him up on everything he’d missed while he was…away.

He scowled. “Away.” That was the word Jack used. He was hesitant to use a stronger one. Honestly, what word would even fit? Kidnapped? Evil? Being used? Something that meant all of those at once? Chase pulled his knees up to his chest and looked down. An instinctive position. Curling up like this protected the face and the most sensitive body parts. He stayed like that, thinking back on the events earlier that day, after they’d all managed to get back to the apartment.

JJ had made dinner. Apparently he’d gotten familiar with the layout of the kitchen in the month he’d been alone. But even that, even something as simple as eating dinner had proven to be a challenge for the three of them. Jack had immediately scarfed it down, but he hadn’t been able to eat much before he started to feel nauseous. He’d excused himself, practically rushing to the bathroom. That just left Chase, picking at his food, with JJ.

“Hey, uh…” Chase didn’t look directly at JJ, but he did look in his general direction. “How did you get around the, um…” He gestured to JJ’s mask. “I mean, with the doc…well, I don’t know exactly what’s up with him now, but…he’s not doin’ his job at the hospital, I know that much. So how…?”

In answer, Jameson had stood up, walked over to one of the kitchen cabinets, opened it and taken out what looked like a fat syringe. He waved it at Chase, then put it back and sat back down inside.

“Oh,” Chase said, surprised. “I thought…I mean, you have to get those from the hospital, and you…need good reason. Did you…make something up to tell them?”

Jameson shook his head, folding his arms in an uncomfortable manner. At that moment, Jack walked back into the room. “Hey, I heard that last part,” he said. “And, uh, well, Hen’s ID wasn’t deactivated, since they think he’s just on vacation, so…it still works to open the doors and stuff.”

“You’re STEALING the shots from the hospital?” Chase asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I mean, what else are we supposed to do? We can’t let JJ starve to death because of what that fucking demon did.” Jack took his seat at the table again. “And speaking of starving to death, I thought…I thought you said you were hungry. You haven’t touched your food yet.”

“I’ve been touching it.” Chase stabbed his fork into the chicken, as if to prove this point.

“That doesn’t mean you’ve been eating it.”

Chase looked away. “I mean…I think what just happened to you is proof that…I dunno, hard to adjust again.”

“Chase.” The tone in Jack’s voice was enough to make Chase look back at him again. The new, brighter blue eye gave his stare an almost lopsided appearance. “You’re gonna have to at least try. You look like hell, and I can tell you’ve lost a lot of weight. You’re not gonna get better again if you don’t eat.”

He tried, really he did, but he just…”Can you…tell me that I can?”

“You don’t need permiss—” Chase didn’t say anything, just gave stared at him with a pleading expression. Jack’s eyes widened, and he leaned back slightly. “Yeah…yeah, you can eat.” Chase’s shoulders immediately slumped in relief, and he didn’t have any trouble from that point on.

What happened after they ate, though, was tough to get through. Chase demanded to see Schneep. He wasn’t sure what state he was in now, and he needed to know. Jack and JJ had exchange a worried glance at his demands, but they still showed him to the guest room where Schneep was…staying.

He didn’t know what he expected. But it wasn’t this. This still, limp body, with eyes blocked out by static that overflowed into tears. He’d been hooked up to an IV and a heart monitor, also presumably stolen from the hospital. And he was still wearing the same clothes he’d been that day. Chase sat down hard in the chair the others had placed next to the bed. This was somehow worse than all the scenarios he’d been imagining. No change at all hurt more than seeing things get worse.

“Hey, doc,” he whispered, reaching out and grabbing his hand. It was warm, which surprised him. “I’m sorry about all this.” He turned back towards Jack and JJ, who were hovering in the doorway. “Has it…has it been like this the whole time?”

Jack nodded. “A few months. Bit over three, to be exact. We…don’t know how to fix it, or what happened, or what’s wrong with him.”

“Why don’t you ask me?” Chase asked dryly.

Jack blinked. “What do you—?”

“I was THERE, Jack. I was part of this, this is—” He stopped himself from saying this was his fault. He knew that it wasn’t. But…god, how could it not be? If he’d just been a little bit stronger, if he hadn’t fallen for Anti’s tricks in the first place, this never would have happened. He swallowed through the lump in his throat. “I saw what happened. He told me what this is.”

Jack walked over to stand next to Chase, and put a hand on his shoulder. Chase immediately shrugged off the too-heavy weight. A flash of hurt crossed Jack’s face, but he covered it immediately. “Well…anything would help,” he said softly.

“…right. Yeah.” Chase looked back at Schneep and his blank eyes. “What happened…I was supposed to get him away, to the place he’d set up for this…this purpose. And…” Chase shuddered. “Anti…he can’t affect someone unless they’re in a mentally weak place. He can force inside, that’s what he calls puppeteering, it’s what happened to you on Halloween. But…to really mess with them…”

“You don’t have to go into details if you don’t want to,” Jack hurried to say.

“I—alright. Alright.” Chase took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment before opening them slowly. “But he…he…what he said happened to Schneep is that…his soul was separated from his body.”

“What?!” Jack glanced at JJ. “Is that possible?”

JJ furrowed his brows, confused, then shook his head, making a strange gesture with both hands. “That’s ‘die,’” Jack translated. “You’d die without a soul?” JJ nodded.

“Well, if the soul was just left there,” Chase said. “But…he put it somewhere. I—I don’t know where, but it was something to do with TV screens. Or maybe that’s just how he accessed the place.” Chase remembered walking the empty halls of that underground maze. Sometimes there was a TV screen in the eye-ridden walls. He’d walk past it and hear…something that almost sounded like a person…“ ̴ ̢ ͠ ͝ ̷̢ ̕͠ ̡͢ ̡ ̛͢ ̢ ̕ ̵̛͢!̸̕ ̡̧ ̨ ̛͠ ͡ ̕͠ ̵̕͟ ͏͞ ̧͠ ͟ ͏͏ ̷͟ ̨̕ ̨ ̢͢ ̷͢ ͠͏ ̷̴ ͠!”

“Can we…can we undo it?” Jack sounded afraid of the answer.

Chase shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Silence for a moment. And then, “Well, we know more than we did before. That counts as progress!” Jack said, forcing a note of cheerfulness. “Now we have good ol’ knowledge, we have those books that could maybe help us, we can meet him on his own level.” JJ straightened, nodding optimistically.

“I guess it’s better than where we were before.” Chase let go of Schneep’s hand—why was that so easy, he should’ve wanted to hold on longer—and stood up. “Maybe…we have a chance…” he said reluctantly.

Jack smiled. “That’s the spirit!” He pulled Chase into a one-armed hug. Chase squeaked, and wiggled out of it, backing back toward the door. Jack gaped at him. “Chase, what—what’s wrong? You’ve never…I mean…”

“I-I’m going to the bathroom,” Chase said, stepping past Jameson, who was giving him the most peculiar look, and into the hallway. “I’ll-I’ll be back.”

And that was how he ended up here, in a ball in the tub, wondering what the fuck was wrong with him. It wasn’t enough that he’d helped put one of his best friends in a coma, he had to be repulsed by his other best friend just trying to comfort him.

He tried to tell himself that wasn’t what was happening. But he couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. When Jack had tried to hug him, it felt like his skin was about to crawl off his body. The weight of his arms had been stifling, suffocating. And the feeling of being pressed against another person made his breathing stop and his brain go crazy with the need to just get away.

Chase curled up tighter. It wasn’t always that way. He used to love hugs. What happened?

'You don’t hate me, Chase. I’m your fr̨i͟͏e͝n̛d̵.'

Chase shuddered. Anti. Anti was what happened. For a demon, he’d been awfully touchy-feely while Chase was with him. If he wasn’t off doing…whatever it was demons did, or making Chase…he didn’t want to think about what Anti made him do. But if neither of those more pressing engagements were underway, Anti would show up. He’d wrap his arms around him, tightly, and wouldn’t let go. His favorite thing to do was touch the stitches on his neck, gently stroke them. Chase had thought it felt…nice…at the time. Now he shuddered, remembering it.

He uncurled from his position, climbing out of the tub and walking over to the counter with its mirror. He leaned over the sink, staring at his own reflection. Jack was right. He did look like hell. In fact, he almost didn’t recognize the thin, pale face with dark circles under its eyes and brittle hair tangled and faded at the ends. But there were two things that affirmed it was actually himself he was looking at. The dirty cap that he still wore, mostly out of habit now, and the green stitches wrapped around his neck. Contrary to the rest of his appearance, they looked as clean and pristine as the day he gave them to him.

Chase gritted his teeth. He could feel them. They were itching, grabbing at his skin. Around his wrists, too. He held up his hands, examining the stitching there. There was a small, loose end dangling from his left wrist, half an inch long. Before he could stop to wonder if this was a good idea, he snatched the end, and started pulling. And kept pulling. The sensation of thread rubbing against his skin, being pulled from somewhere INSIDE, made him want to scream. But he kept at it, until the string was about the length of his forearm. And then it stopped. He tugged, and no more string came out. It just felt like something was pulling his wrist along.

There was another loose end on his right wrist. Chase repeated the process, and got the same result. He whimpered. There had to be something else he could do. There had to be, he couldn’t just be stuck with this, stuck with him, forever.

He looked back up, catching the fearful eye of his reflection in the mirror. He watched his reflection’s hand reach up, feeling the stitches on the neck, causing his reflection to shake at the sensation of fingers on its stitching. The reflected hand made its way around the back of the reflected neck and back to the front again, where its fingers brushed against a dangling string. The fingers seized the string, and slowly, steadily, a length of green thread unreeled. Simple as pulling out a vein. Until it stopped, and all Chase could feel was that—that TUG.

'You’re being d̶͞i͟͟ffi͞c̷ul̛̕͢t on purpose, Chase. Come on, be good for your fr̴̢i̴͠en̨d̴ or I’ll have to dr̶a̶g̛̕͞ you b̢͠e͢h͞ind̴̕ ̡͟me̵.'

Someone was knocking on the door. He heard it, but he didn’t listen to it. He was too busy clawing at the stitches, nails catching on thread as he tried desperately to get them off, get them off, get them off. If he could just get under them, if he could only get them away from him, everything would be okay. He wouldn’t have been so weak, Anti wouldn’t have used him, his friends wouldn’t have been hurt by him, he wouldn’t be such a fucked human being—

The door must’ve opened at one point, because now someone was trying to pull his arms away. He resisted, naturally. That was what you do, you resist the pull during those moments when you’re aware enough to realize you’re being yanked along down empty red halls. There was blood on his neck and under his nails, and the stitches weren’t coming out. He wasn’t breathing. Or if he was, it was so shallow that it didn’t register. And the stitches weren’t coming out.

His hands were finally taken away from his throat, warm hands wrapped around his fingers so they couldn’t wiggle back. He stopped trying at that point and just stood there, gasping. Chase realized there were tears in his eyes only when he had to squint through them to see who it was who’d stopped him. Dark blue eyes, a darker blue mask. Jameson.

“I—I can’t, I c-can’t,” Chase gulped. His cheeks were wet. “I c-can’t, I just—I j-j-just want—”

Jameson didn’t say anything, obviously. But Chase realized his eyes were watery with unshed tears. After a moment, during which Chase tried his best to recover his breath, Jameson let go of Chase’s hands and reached over to the mirror, swinging it open to reveal the medicine cabinet behind it. He plucked out a box of Band-Aids and held them out to Chase.

Chase took the box, giving Jameson a confused look. JJ responded by tapping his own neck. After a moment, Chase opened the box and took out a Band-Aid, carefully removing the paper covering. He took a moment to steel his nerves, then put the Band-Aid on his neck, over one of the spots that was bleeding. JJ nodded encouragingly. Chase stared at him for a moment more, then sat down on the toilet seat, steadily making his way through the box as he used up Band-Aids fixing the bleeding. After he was sure every spot was covered, he looked up at JJ.

JJ’s eyes squinted in a way that meant he was smiling underneath the mask. He held his hand out toward Chase. Chase instinctively shrank away, holding his wrists closer to himself, but when the hand didn’t come any closer he slowly relaxed, and took the offering. JJ pulled Chase to his feet, and gently led him out of the bathroom and into the apartment’s second bedroom. Normally that was where Jack slept, but Jack had been gone for a month, and it looked unused when JJ flipped on the light.

Chase looked around. “I thought…you would’ve been sleeping here. While you worked on getting Jack back.”

JJ shook his head. He walked over to the room’s dresser, pulling open the bottom drawer. After a moment of rummaging around, he started pulling out what looked like loose cloth until he had a pile of it, which he gathered up and dumped onto the bed. He beckoned for Chase to come see. Chase slowly crept over.

It wasn’t just a bunch of loose cloth. It was…scarves. And bandannas. A variety of styles and colors. Chase gave JJ a wide-eyed look. “What’re…?”

JJ tapped his mask, right over where his mouth was. It clicked for Chase then. Of course JJ would know something about the stitches. Of course he would understand why Chase was trying so frantically to pull them out, to no avail. He’d been living with them for longer than Chase had. And his had caused quite a bit of inconvenience, too.

Chase sat down on the bed and began sorting through the pile. “Heh. Why does Jack have so many?” he muttered. He pulled out a piece of purple. The color was quite nice. And it was a bandanna, no loose dangling ends. He tied it around his neck, fully hiding the stitches from view. Then, he noticed his wrists, and held them up for Jameson to see. He gave him an inquiring look.

JJ folded his arms, thinking, then walked right back over to the dresser and opened a box on top of it that looked like it had never been opened before, at least not regularly. He pulled out a yellow headband, threw it away, then showed Chase what else was in the box: two matching wristbands. Chase nodded, and JJ tossed them over. Chase caught them easily and quickly pulled them on, tucking the loose string inside. “I…I think I like this,” he said quietly. “Thanks, JJ.”

JJ smiled again, then jerked his head toward the bedroom door as if to ask, Are you ready to leave? “Not…yet,” Chase said. “I want to change clothes. These are kinda a mess. Do you mind?” JJ nodded, and left.

A few moments later, Chase reemerged from the bedroom. JJ, who’d been waiting outside the door, gave him a thumbs up. Chase returned that with a small smile. He felt at least a little better now. Not back to normal, but not…like it was with him.

The two of them walked down the hall and came out into the living room. Jack was curled up on the couch, also in a new set of clothes, staring at nothing. The moment they walked in, his head snapped toward him. He did something strange: he closed his left eye, the normal one, for just a moment. He smiled, and opened it again. “Hey, dude,” he said, his tone falling somewhere between gentle and casual. “Are you…okay now?”

Chase leaned against the nearest wall. “No. But…I’m not as bad.”

“That’s okay. It’s…gonna take a while. For all of us.” Jack took a deep breath. “Look, I’m…I’m sorry about what happened back there. The, uh, hug thing.”

“What?” Chase blinked, surprised. “No, you don’t have to be sorry. I shouldn’t’ve freaked out on you.”

Jack shook his head. “No, I made you uncomfortable, and that sucks. I’m the one at fault here. I didn’t know it would make you upset, but the fact of the matter is that even if I didn’t know, I still need to apologize. It may have been an accident, but it…it hurt you. And I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Chase stared at him. He could feel the tears coming again, just a different kind now. “Thanks, man.” He took a deep breath, then crossed over to the couch and sat down. He was on the other side, and he wasn’t at all eager to get closer to Jack, but…he didn’t want to be alone right now. JJ followed him into the room, taking his place leaning against the wall. He made some gestures that Chase didn’t understand.

“What is…?”

“He’s wondering what to do next,” Jack translated. “It’s sign language. We, uh, only came up with it after…he took you. And, uh, Chase.” Jack made eye contact with him. “It wasn’t your fault. None of it was. It was all him.”

Chase felt the urge to explain. “I mean…if I hadn’t been taken, then Doc wouldn’t be—”

“He probably would,” Jack said. “Remember December last year? JJ and I think maybe Anti was trying to get him in this same sort of…coma, whatever, but wasn’t quite strong enough. He’s been trying for a long time, Chase, and if he hadn’t been able to use you, he still would’ve found another way. Chase, you’re not the bad guy here. You’re the victim. And you need to stop taking blame that isn’t yours to take.”

Chase made a strange sound, part whimper, part squeak, part sigh of relief. He…he needed that. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I’m not the bad guy. I’m the—I’m the victim.” He flinched automatically, saying that, expecting retaliation for saying he was hurt. Of course, it didn’t come. And…it felt good to be able to say it. “But…JJ’s right, what are we going to do next?”

Jack glanced at JJ. “Well, we need to figure out what could be happening to Henrik’s soul. And then we need to see if there’s a way back. And then, if there is, we need to get it back so he’ll wake up.”

“That’s only three things,” Chase muttered. “Not too hard when you say it that way.”

JJ laughed a bit at that, a muffled sound. He held out his hand, and a blue circle flared into existence, spinning on the fingertips briefly before fading away. He looked at the other two, then flexed his fingers again as if to say, we have this.

“Yeah, that could help,” Jack said, picking up on the unspoken message. “I know you don’t know what it is, but you know how it works?”

JJ nodded.

“Didn’t you guys say you had some magic books?” Chase asked. “I think I remem…shit!” He bolted upright. “JJ, I stabbed you! Fuck, I’m sorry about that, I-I know it wasn’t me, but I still feel like to need an apology—”

JJ held up a hand to still the flow of words. He nodded in understanding, and Chase practically wilted with relief.

“Yeah, we have some magic books,” Jack said. “Four, wasn’t it?” JJ nodded. “Maybe something could help us in those.”

“I guess the next step is researching, huh?”

“No, the next step is bedtime.” Jack pointed at the digital clock hanging on the wall. “I dunno about you, but I’m gonna sleep for the entire next day.”

With the mention of sleep, Chase was suddenly aware of how exhausted he was. How exhausted he’d been for a long long while. The adrenaline must’ve been wearing off finally. “I…I don’t think I can be alone,” he whispered.

“Then we can all sleep in my room,” Jack said. “I know I have a ton of spare blankets and pillows. We can make a nest on the floor, or two people can sleep on the bed together.”

“Dibs on the nest,” Chase said. “Do you…mind if I’m by myself?”

“Of course not, Chase,” Jack said gently. “JJ and I can take the bed. That’s okay with you, JJ?” JJ laughed, then gave a thumbs-up. “Then it’s settled.”

Night fell. The city continued on its business outside. And for the first time in months, the three of them slept soundly.