Chapter Text
Nov 6 1983
Ambrose Frey was not the smartest man on his research team, or the most well-liked. That was probably why he was volun-told to go down and reset the rift alarm.
The damned thing is always malfunctioning, he tried to comfort himself as he headed down the long flickering hall. It wasn't particularly cold in here, but gooseflesh puckered his skin all along the front side of his body as if his hair were straining to get away from something.
The shrill beep of the key panel almost blotted out the rattling noise that drew his eye to a thing that did not belong in a lab. Well not this sort of lab anyway. They skipped animal testing at Frey Biotics and went straight to kids, he chuckled to himself as he knelt in front of the little blue-eyed bunny that was so cutely wiggling his nose toward Ambros. "Here bunny, bunny," he said, thinking of the delight in his little Amy's eyes when he brought this fuzzy little guy home.
The bunny hopped over to him making that rattling noise again. "That's strange, " Ambros said. As proof of stranger things, the bunny's face split at it's quivering nose into five more or less equal portions that were studded inside with icicle-like spikes. That was the last thing Ambros saw.
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Deep blue eyes the color of a stormy sea peered over a DM’s screen. They shifted to pin each party member in turn. Bran the Wise was nervous but excited. He could tell that something big was coming, but it was the Cleric’s job to mitigate damage and protect the party. Bran the boy built his character well, as had his friends. They were ready for whatever Gendry threw at them, though it seemed Bran was alone in this assessment.
"We're doomed if is the Demogorgon, " bemoaned Hot Pie through his lisp.
Gendry mastered his own smile of triumph silently, but not before Bran saw it.
"Shhhhhhhhhh don't give him ideas, " Lommy scolded. The table bumped as the dark-skinned boy's ill-aimed kick hit a wooden leg instead of a fleshy one.
“An army of troglodytes charge into the chamber,” their adventuresmith said too casually as he scattered some mini’s on the hashed board expertly so that each base fit perfectly within it’s square.
“Troglodytes,” Hot Pie confirmed his voice now filled with Bardic confidence. A few more titters of relief escaped several throats as Lommy rubbed his hands together in anticipation of the battle to come.
Once silence had fallen, Gendry cocked his mop of dark, curly hair to one side. “Did you hear that?” He cocked his head to the other side and squinted one eye while the other corner of his mouth twisted up. “That booming sound was definitely not made by troglodytes. It is a…” he slammed the mini down on the table so that all the others jumped. Gendry had just gone through a rather dramatic growth spurt and was still learning his own strength “Demogorgon!” The table erupted in cries of despair. “Bran, what’s your action?”
“I don’t know,” Bran dithered. Much advice came his way. “Fireball!” “Sanctuary!” He knew what he wanted to do, but the odds were not with him. Caution had been drilled into him in recent years, it was hard for him to make a move in such circumstances.
“The Demogorgon tires of your petty human bickering,” Gendry intoned in his “scary” voice, deep and raspy. “He stalks forward, intent on your demise. What do you do?”
Bran locked eyes with Gendry. The faintest flicker of an encouraging grin skimmed Gendry's lips. Bran shook his dice for luck and cast them across the table, crowing, “Fire Ball!” The dice raced across the table, the colorful cubic six-siders stopped indicating a decent amount of damage, but the 20 shot right off the edge. Everyone leaped from their chairs, hoping for a successful casting.
It was into this hotbed of mayhem that Mrs. Margeary Wheeler appeared at the top of the stairs brown curls and stylish figure silhouetted in the kitchen light pouring down the unfinished basement stairs. “What in the Seven are you boys doing down here?” she demanded sweetly.
“Mom, we’re in the middle of a campaign,” Gendry informed her, with less politeness than was his habit when speaking to his mother.
“I think you mean the end,” Mrs. Wheeler corrected calmly with an edge to her cordial tone. Bran had long learned the vibe in each of his friends’ homes. Mrs. Wheeler was a queen here. She never raised her voice or failed to smile, but she could and did exact meaningful punishments on her children when they didn’t behave to her specifications, which were not precisely strict, but centered heavily around manners and social presentation. Gendry was not far from being able to look his mother in the eye, but his dad was a rough man named Bronn Wheeler, who did whatever Mrs. Wheeler told him to. Gendry made a shooshing gesture by patting the air behind him as he tromped up the stairs to plead their case to his mom while the search for Bran's die continued.
Thinking of Mr. Wheeler led Bran's thoughts to swirl around his own father as he crawled face first along carpet peering under the couch for the errant die. Joff (Bran couldn’t even bring himself to think of him as dad) didn’t like him much. The tall blond man was always trying to change Bran, specifically make him less nerdy. Joff would have preferred him to be out tossing the football with his friends rather than playing at Dungeons and Dragons. Bran sometimes wondered if Joff would have stayed with his mother if he’d been more of the son that Joff wanted. Bran couldn’t quite bring himself to wish that he could be different even if meant that Joff had never left. Further introspection was derailed by a 20-sider winking a 19 at him from just behind the blocky leg of Gendry's wagon wheel couch. “I found it,” Bran announced sadly to bring down some of the chaos in the room.
“What was it?” Hot Pie demanded.
“Too much,” Bran exhaled forlornly. "The spell didn't go off, but I didn't knock myself out."
“It doesn’t count if Gendry’s not here,” Lommy assured him. Just then Gendry reappeared at the top of the stairs shaking his head sullenly as he clomped down to start clearing away the game. “Roll again next week,” Lommy whispered folding Bran’s fingers around his die.
The boys packed up in a funk and Gendry walked them out to where their bikes were parked. Hot Pie and Lommy took off immediately, but Bran hung back. “I rolled a 19. The Demogorgon got me,” he said to Gendry before mounting his bike and riding into the darkness.
As Bran road along he became aware of a burning sensation low on his leg. He looked down as he passed beneath one of the last street lights on his ride to see a thin red trickle beneath a tear in his pants. His mom would not be happy. She worried so much about his clothes, thinking they were the main reason he was bullied so much at school. Bran knew that she felt guilty for not having the money to buy him nice things. He’d tried to tell her on several occasions that he was just weird and that kids would tease him no matter what, but she was still sad.
As Bran rode further from the lights of town, the houses got shabbier and further from the main road. His family had not always been poor. Bran dimly remembered Sevenmases far away in a big bright house with roaring fires by a sparkling Sea. There were so many presents that the shiny papered boxes eclipsed the weir wood branch though it was lighted and laden with expensive glass baubles from across the Narrow Sea. And there was always more food and sweets than any of them could eat brought and arranged by tiptoeing servants. That was with Joff’s family.
If he was being honest with himself, Bran preferred the dingy, ramshackle house way out by the Wolfswood. He could be himself there, with just his mother and bruncle (brother/uncle) for company. Bran turned off the King’s Road onto a narrow two-lane road that his party had nicknamed the Demon Road after an old road that was said to have connected Old Volantis to Mereen way back before the Doom. That old road was said to have been plagued by pirates and worse, and the boys liked to pretend the same of this stretch of winding gravel, riding their bikes as fast as the shadows birthed by the encroaching trees allowed. Tonight was a particularly dark night, but Bran had made this journey hundreds of times. The road was predominantly lined with pines, but here and there the pale trunk of a weir wood could be glimpsed further back in the Wolfs Wood. There was even one with a face carved in it near the turn-off for home. The red sap seeping from the slashes made the face on this and most others that bore faces gruesome. Bran always waved at the face even though his friends laughed at the old superstition. Sometimes it was good to have something you knew was gruesome standing in the dark between you and what didn't know was out there.
As Bran approached the familiar spot, all he heard were shoosing pines without the comforting rustling of the red leaves of his woody old friend. He was so intent on looking for the pale trunk with its weeping face that he almost ran into crimson tipped branches that sprayed darkly across the road. Bran skidded to a halt, an inexplicable sense of loss clutching at his chest.
Gripped by a burning need to know what had happened to the tree, he walked his bike alongside the trunk toward the place where wood met earth. Bran’s mind swirled with possibilities. Was it a freak lightning bolt? Had a car crashed into it? Maybe someone needs help. Could someone have cut it down deliberately? No amount of questioning could have prepared him for what he found at the base of the trunk.
Before Bran was able to fully process what he’d seen, he was knocked off his feet and sent hurtling into the branches that lay splayed on the forest floor in a snapped and twisted tangle. Bran’s world narrowed to white limbs and still red leaves as his chest heaved with pained pants. He lay winded and dazed for a moment, until the pain in his leg demanded his attention. What had been a small cut on his ankle from the grip of his bike pedal was now a freely bleeding gash. Whatever hit me, must have done something else to me too, Bran thought frantically.
There was a rattling sound not entirely different from the rustling leaves of an upright weir wood tree. The leaves all around Bran were limp and still though. "rrrrttttt" His head whipped around to follow the noise. To his immediate left the leaves were parting to reveal something that Bran truly did not want to see. He rolled and as he did a limb sprang up to slap wetly at something. Bran harnessed the momentum of his roll into a stumbling run. He did not look back they way they did in horror movies. Bran wanted to live way more than he wanted to see what was chasing him. He did hear some familiar rustling as if something was being held in a cage lined in weirwood leaves. Just as he crossed onto his own sparse lawn, Bran made out a splintering scream that followed him into his house as he slid the lock chain across its little track.
He felt the empty house around him huddle way from what was outside. It was late, but both Jon and his mom must be at work. Bran all but slapped the cheerful yellow headset off the wall and began frantically dialing the number to his mom's work. Over the beeps of the number pad, a low, ominous grating intruded. Will looked up to see the chain sliding, apparently unaided, across its little metal channel.
Bran gaped for a moment then dropped the phone to bounce lamely against the wall and bolted for the back door. He played in a world were magic was a thing and so spent no time trying to deny what his eyes were showing him. The last thing he heard before slamming yet another door was his mother's voice intoning the greeting for Torrhen’s Square pharmacy. Bran dashed tears of desperation and longing from his eyes as he sprinted for the shed as fast as his spindly, though bully trained legs could take him.
Once he reached the sturdy old outbuilding, he wasted no time trying to bar the door but instead yanked the string on the bare bulb illuminating the dusty, cobwebbed interior. Will went straight for a box of shells and the gun. With shaking hands, he jammed bullets into the chamber, all the while listening for the deadly rattle.
Will took a deep, steadying breath, as Jon had taught him, and aimed at the door. Nothing happened. There was no sound, but Will felt something behind him and so turned. The light intensified to incandescence; then everything went dark.