A Slenderella Story (Slenderman x reader)

Chapter 2

You were brought back to the land of the living by the repeated croaking of a particularly loud and obnoxious frog. You swore that it was trying to out-compete everything in the forest from how much the sound was making your head swim. You groaned and rolled onto your back over the protests of your bruised and possibly broken limbs. Gingerly, you opened your eyes, taking in your surroundings. For a moment, you couldn't remember why you were currently lying on the bare earth with only the burnt remains of an evening dress for a blanket. Then you remembered the events of last night – or maybe still tonight, since you couldn't tell how much time had passed, other than it had been more than a few minutes. Dirk must have fallen asleep too. You tilted your head to look for him, and found his body lying next to yours, sleeping like the dead. You raised an arm to wake him, gently shaking his head – it was the only part of his body you could reach without incurring more pain from your own. "Dirk, it's time to wake up," you said as loudly as you could. It came out as a hoarse whisper.

To your horror, as soon as you placed your hand on Dirk's prone head, it rolled away from his body. His head had been sliced clean through, so that bits of vertebrae still poked through the opening of his neck. The blood had long since dried, which meant that whoever had done this was now long gone. You tried to scream, but through your dried throat the only thing that passed was a large exhale of air. Your eyed widened in fear as you stared at the remains of what had once been your might-be lover, revulsion and the urge to vomit overwhelming you so that you retched, sending the contents of last night's dinner onto the ground underneath your still prone figure. You were too scared and horrified to even care that your once beautiful hair and dress were now completely ruined.

Still weak from fatigue and pain, you pushed yourself to your knees and scrambled away to the other side of the clearing before collapsing into a sitting position. You kept yourself propped up on locked elbows, unable to tear your face away from the scene that was straight out of a horror movie. "Dear merciful God have mercy on us all," you mouthed, although you were not a terribly religious person. Now was looking like a very good time to start praying. You didn't understand why you had been spared – the two of you were carrying nothing valuable and had been right next to each other, easy prey if it had truly been a murderer. Nothing made sense anymore. First the fire, then the explosion, then your escape, and now this. Your brain in its fuzzy state couldn't put the pieces together, couldn't figure out how to act or what to do next. A small voice in the back of your head was urging you to get away, leave this place and get away from whatever might still be around. No wild animal could make a cut that clean.

You felt bad leaving Dirk's decapitated remains lying on the forest floor without a burial, but you decided to listen to that voice of self-preservation. You pushed yourself painfully to your feet, finding a length of branch to use as a hobble-stick while you traversed the forest. You couldn't see the moon to determine which direction you were facing and which way was out of the forest and towards safety, so you picked a direction at random and trekked slowly on. Your mangled dress fluttered pitifully behind your dirty and bloody body, and your heels had long since been lost during your initial flight from the burning mansion. You probably looked like a pitfiend from hell with your dirt-smeared, soot-encrusted face and makeup smeared over the whole ensemble.

The leaves rustled as you ventured farther along your chosen path, creating an eerie sense of tranquility to the whole situation. You were too tense to be able to take in the beautiful night sounds, focused as you were on reaching your goal. The forest's paths were winding and troublesomely narrow, so you had been forced to turn away from your immediate objective in favor of avoiding fallen logs and marshy parts choked with weeds. Honestly, you didn't even know if you were going the same direction anymore – you could have completely turned yourself around and be walking in circles. There were no distinguishable landmarks to navigate by and all the trails looked the same to your tired and blurry vision. All you could feel was the insidious cold and the constant feeling of an unknown fear that kept the hairs on the back of your neck raised and adrenaline pumping through your veins.