farfromthesea | (no subject)

Theon wakes up behind an ordinary looking house in East Hallow, a slow and painful grind toward consciousness. For one blissfully ignorant moment, he's just confused.

And then he feels the throb in his head, sticky blood on his face, the sudden rush of knowledge-- not much knowledge, not enough to explain why his wrists and ankles are bound with a loop of thing, too strong plastic. Not enough to explain the fucking chain around his neck, attached to the house like it just belongs there.

He's not gagged, and he can't tell if it's just because they knew, whoever the fuck they are, that he knows better to scream, that he's been taught better.

"See there?" says a voice, and if the tone, the accent are wrong, there's something else that's exact in it. "Knew you were smart enough to keep your mouth shut. You keep your ears open too. You're about to be part of something spectacular."

Theon cranes his head to find the man, and he recognizes the hard blue eyes that had watched him move through the marketplace as it became more and more frenetic. Thank fuck, that color doesn't freeze him anymore. Instead, he's thrashing, writhing, shouting, trying to get free, until the man with the blue eyes is a heavy weight on top of him, sitting on Theon's thighs with a blade to his neck.

"I think you're going to shut the fuck up now," his captor says, and Theon stills, gasping careful breaths as he tries to figure his way out of this.

Threaded | Flat

Daryl intended to stay home.

It had been so damn long that anyone'd had a reason to celebrate Halloween, he'd honestly almost forgotten it was even a thing. Before the dead, Daryl had only ever screwed around with his brother, smashing pumpkins and tee-peeing bushes when they were kids, and later, occasionally breaking into empty homes so Merle could steal shit from folks off partying.

The last Halloween he remembered with any clarity at all, he'd spent drunk at home watching shitty slasher movies on an old box TV.

But that evening, something... something didn't feel right. By the time sun set, he'd started to hear rumors, and reluctantly leaving Dog at home, he'd taken off on his bike to find this East Hallow place everybody talked about.

Shouldering his crossbow, he carried a knife and a pistol on his hip. As he walked down the main drag, people shouted and ran past him, warning him to leave.

"These people are fucking crazy!" A young girl shrieked, blood congealing near her hairline. Part of him wanted it all to be an elaborate joke, but he knew better.

Dragging a couple of weirdos off a pair of crying kids, he shouted at them both to get the hell home, his adrenaline pumping hard as he kept an eye out for familiar faces.

When he first came upon the guy hunched over someone in the dirt, he didn't realize it was anyone he knew. Rushing forward with his crossbow raised to the guy's throat, he barked out, "Drop the damn knife."

His eyes fell to the person laying prone beneath the press of that knife, and Daryl's blood ran cold. "I said, drop the fucking knife," he warned again, taking a step forward.