The Demon in My Fridge: a Welcome to Hell Fanfiction

Chapter 7: Get the Hell out Free Card

[In which Sock is completely inept and Jonathan is equally clueless].

Sock clutched his fists and loosened them, then repeated the process again, until it got Jonathan's attention. For once, he didn't intend to pester him. Sock attempted to coax feeling back into his numb hands. He felt completely disembodied, a word that sounded ironic to him, as he didn't even have a body. He knew this lack of sensation well. It was as if cruel fate bound him to forever have the horrible feeling that he was a ghost, regardless of whether he was dead or alive.

However, it felt especially nagging now. He squeezed his eyes closed and tightened every muscle. He imagined that this is what rigor mortis must be like, every part of him twisted in on himself like a collapsing star.

"Oh no, why is this happening?" Sock said softly.

He blew out a breath, then opened his eyes. Jonathan stood in front of him. He had stood from his seat while Sock's eyes were closed. It didn't even occur to him that the bell rung. The excited laughter of Jonathan's classmates rang in his ears. His eyes adjusted to the overly-bright lights, the white walls, the rows of desks. There they were in the empty classroom. The room was cold and clinical, as always.

The teacher glanced up at Jonathan uncaringly, then shrugged and turned back to the screen of her laptop.

"Sock, what's wrong?" Jonathan whispered.

He made sure to keep his voice down. Half the time he just wrote Sock notes and he wouldn't even have to pass them in class. Sock would lean over the desk and read everything. He would write back to him. He controlled the pencil and directed him to write morbid things. His history teacher had seen some of the things that Sock wrote, and as a result, Jonathan was punished with a week of detention.

He almost got into trouble again on that day, but he didn't care much about that. It was Thursday. By next week everyone will have forgotten about it. He didn't want anyone, not even his English teacher who couldn't care less about him, to think that he had random conversations with himself though. A week had already passed since Jonathan first met Sock. As much trouble as he had caused him, he was the one person that kept his incredibly dull life at least somewhat interesting.

Jonathan wondered if this was what love was like. Yes, things had indeed changed between them in a way that he would never have guessed. He stared down into his green eyes, concerned for the demon. Finally, Sock answered.

"I can't feel my body," Sock said tensely.

His own voice was far away in his ears. He ground his teeth together in a futile attempt to regain some sort of sensation. Jonathan seemed confused. He motioned subtly for him to follow. They walked down the hall, the lockers bent and tilted, the crowd of students equally distorted. It was like he saw everything through the bottom of an empty glass, slightly off a bit, just enough to get a sense of where he walked and more than enough to be unsettling.

His hand touched Jonathan's as he caught the door handle on the way outside. There was no one around but them in the back yard of the school. Jonathan looked at him with a frown, his brows furrowed. He seemed afraid for him, but it was hard for Sock to tell in his current, very unusual state. It was worse than the time he had been altered on the medication that a child psychiatrist recommended his parents to give him.

The pills mitigated his urges to kill for a time, but it also made him into a zombie that could barely function, much less hold a knife. The fog of memory drifted in and out of his mind. His parents, the endless hospital visits, the doctors that treated him like a wild animal that needed to be contained. Perhaps they were right. The experiment with those pills was short-lived, and soon after he had gone back to do what he did best.