Work Text:
~'Well I saw the thing comin' out of the sky'~
Angel's eyes flutter open slowly to find a brilliant blue sky above him, dotted with a few straggling fluffy white clouds. It’s a cheerier scene than he thinks he should be greeted with, and he can’t even say why. There’s just this nagging, ominous feeling in the back of his mind that he can’t seem to put his finger on. He just knows the beauty of the scene before him is deceiving some how.
That dark feeling begins to creep forward as he notes the taste of blood and dirt in his mouth and feels the grittiness of dust in his eyes with each blink.
Somethings wrong. Something happened…. Why can’t he place it?
~'It had the one long horn, and one big eye'~
Why is that stupid song stuck in his head?
Angel finally decides to sit up, after laying on the ground for what feels like ages. It’s then that he notices his current state, wrapped up in a blue tarp, tangled in barbed wire. He’s bloody and covered from head to toe in sandy dirt. His eyes trail the filth and damage that plagues his body, not quite able to grasp the cause of it when suddenly the source of that ominous presence makes its self known in a haunting but now familiar deep clicking sound. It sounds almost like a purr, like a predator preparing to pounce on its prey.
~'I commenced to shakin' and I said ‘Ooh-eee’ '~
And suddenly, Angel remembers there is a predator he should very much be worried about because he is its prey.
~'It looks like a purple people eater to me'~
Without another thought, he’s scrambling, trying to get up. He can’t quite seem to get his feet under him though, and he’s left dragging himself along the ground on his belly. He reaches out for something, anything in a desperate attempt to remain firmly on the earth. The dust and rocks around him begin to swirl, adding to the grit in his eyes. He blinks harshly as his fingers claw instinctively at the ground. The fingers of his right hand snag something and he grips it and holds on to it like it’s his lifeline, and it my very well be. He stares dumbly at it for a moment until he realizes it’s a shoe.
“It’s gonna be ok Angel.”
That low voice strikes a chord of familiarity in Angel’s mind. It’s deep. He thinks it reminds him of Sam Elliot. He half expects to actually see the iconic actor standing over him, only briefly considering how ridiculous that would be, but is equally relieved and disappointed to see Antlers Holst in front of him when he finally manages to look up.
“We don’t deserve the impossible.”
Angel can’t do anything but blink at him. A strong sense of déjà vu washes over him accompanied with the uncanny realization that while Holst is standing in vortex with him, he seems to be completely unaffected by the power of it all.
Holst holds his hand powered camera pointed at the monstrosity above them.
“Em was right, this is the shot of a lifetime.”
The cameraman mumbles just loud enough for Angel to hear. His eyes turn downward to look at the younger man at his feet and uncharacteristically winks at him.
“Say hi, Angel. They’re watching.”
He redirects the camera to the man on the ground with a slight smile on his lips.
Angel instinctively throws up a hand in an effort to avoid the gaze of the camera, and suddenly feels himself being lifted into the vortex created by Jean Jacket. Before he knows it, he’s flying many feet in the air, spinning, tumbling, and blind. He hears the screams of its prior victims, a terrifying cacophony of the dying. It’s all so disorienting he wants to cry and scream but he’s barely able to even cough for the amount of dust he’s taking in. He chokes and gasps, desperate for clean air and overwhelmed by the pressure in his torso from the barbed wire tightening its hold on him.
“Angel”
Not only is the dust choking him, but he’s being mercilessly pelted with it. It’s all so overwhelming with the screams, the dust, the pain…. at this point he just wants it all to be over.
“Angel!”
He swears he hears his name being called amongst the screams, and he remembers Em and OJ and he’s suddenly terrified that they had met the same fate.
“Angel!”
He focuses hard on a voice that is... sounding more and more familiar. It’s beckoning him and he latches onto it, letting it anchor his mind the way the barbed wire has anchored his body.
“Wake up man…”
He’s trying to scream, from the pain or just a need to be heard, he’s not sure. It doesn’t matter though, because no matter how hard he tries he can’t seem to even take in a deep enough breath to manage a scream. Instead he whimpers and even to him, it’s a pitiful sound.
“Hey, it’s ok...”
His left hand reaches for the hand on his right shoulder and….
There’s a hand on his shoulder?
Something clicks into place in his mind.
_________
Angel’s eyes fly open, blinking rapidly at the harsh florescent lights assaulting his sensitive eyes and a white tile ceiling. There’s the distinct smell of antiseptic in the air and a steady but fast beep somewhere nearby.
A hospital.
The pressure in his abdomen is gone but a residual pain is still there. He’s breathing hard still but his hear rate is beginning to even out despite a throbbing ache in his chest. He again registers the a hand on his shoulder and realizes he’s gripping it with all the strength he can muster. He loosens his grip as his gaze moves to the milk chocolate brown hand that was previously encased in his own and then to the person who it belongs to.
For a moment, he’s confused. He doesn’t immediately recognize the face staring back at him, looking concerned yet curious. All he can think is…
“Where’s Becca?” Angel asks dumbly.
His visitor’s brows scrunch and she looks as confused as Angel feels, then mildly offended.
“What….that bitch that dumped you?”
“Em!”
A man hisses from his other side and Angel’s head jerks toward the voice, only to regret the sudden movement as it triggers a deep, throbbing pain in his skull. His eyes screw shut and he’s pretty sure he blacks out for a moment, but when he manages to pry his own eyes open again, the room is dimmer. There’s a dark skinned man standing to his left, hands in the pockets of his jeans and eyes cast down.
--
'You don’t look at it unless you want it’s attention.'
It's an animal.
Horse.
Haywoods.
OJ... Ottis Junior.
Em.... Emerald
Jean Jacket.
UAP
~'Well he came down to earth and he laid in a tree.'~
--
It all comes rushing back to him, washing over him like a waterfall and threatens to carry his mind away.
~'I said mister purple people eater, don’t eat me.'~
“Shit…”
He starts to bring his right hand up to his face in a feeble attempt to stave off his increasingly pounding headache, but doesn’t get far as Emerald gently grabs his wrist.
“Nuh uh, babe. Nope. You’re just gonna hurt yourself….” Her eyes flick through the length of his body, “More.”
"You good man? Should I call the nurse?”
OJ asks in a low voice beside him and Angel’s not even sure how to answer that, so he just let’s the question hang in the air for a beat before settling with…
“No?”
He’s not sure if it’s no to being ‘good’ or no to the nurse, but he feels it could very well apply to both. He’s not sure he’ll ever be ‘good’ again, and he’s certainly not up for another body in the room right now.
Emerald and OJ exchange a look that Angel can’t decipher, and Em just shrugs. She let’s go of his wrist after gently lowering it back on his bed and takes a seat in a chair next to him. Of coarse, she’s the first to start speaking again.
“You remember what happened?”
Angel resists the urge to rub his face again and just closes his eyes for a moment. Damn, his whole body aches and throbs.
“It’s patchy.” He breathes out an audible sigh. “… but yeah.”
And his voice sounds wrecked. Likely from all the screaming, in addition to being unconscious for god knows how long. Which makes him wonder.
“How long’ve I been out?”
Em’s eyes roll up like she’s thinking, before landing back on him with a bit of that concern again.
“Something like 24 hours. Well, sorta. You’ve been in and out I guess. This is the first time you seem actually awake… as far as I know.”
Angel properly opens his eyes this time and scans Em, or what he can see of her, noticing the splotches of bruises and scrapes littering her arms and a couple on her face. He turns to OJ, who looks a bit less bruised, but notices for the first time he’s on crutches. Angel tries to sit up a little, grimaces, and settles back down when he realizes moving at all is a bad idea.
“Shit, are you guys OK? What happened to you guys?”
OJ starts to open his mouth but his sister beats him to it.
“Apparently what you did really pissed off ‘ol Jean Jacket. The motherfucker got big. And I mean, huge as fuck, like…” She swings her arms out for emphasis, “Crazy alien sky jellyfish lookin’… fuck, I don’t even know. But anyway, I think you fucked it up, like with that barbed wire ‘n shit. It came after OJ and me. OJ got back on Lucky and tried to distract it tryna be all hero ‘n shit because of coarse, and I thought for sure that…”
Emerald’s voice cracks at the end she takes a moment to clear her throat and breathe in an effort to compose herself. Angel shouldn’t be surprised he isn’t the only so affected by the experience. The Haywoods, even as short of a time as he’s known them, always seemed so much more composed than him. But at the end of the day, they had a lot more to lose than he did. Their home, their livelihood, and most importantly each other.
After a short moment, Emerald continues, a little stronger.
“Anyway. I wasn’t about to let everything we went through go in vain you know. Setting up all those sky dancer things, what happened to the house, the horses, Jupe, all those people....Holst….”
She fiddles the hospital bracelet in her wrist.
“You.” She looks back at him in the eye this time.
“But I didn’t have time to think about it all you know. It was all just happening, one thing after another. All so fuckin’ fast. As far as I knew, I was the last one standing and I wasn’t about to let that bitch ass take everything without at least getting the one fuckin’ thing we were tryna get the whole goddamn time.”
She abruptly goes quiet, looks at OJ with a slight smile, then back to Angel. There’s a look on her face suddenly that looks a lot like pride.
Maybe it’s the head injury he apparently has, or whatever drugs they might have him on, but Angel feels a little slow because he can’t think of why she would look so prideful after everything they’d been through. He’s still hung up on the whole everything very much going to hell after Holst left to climb up the mountain alone with his camera.
Feeling a little hesitant and stupid, he asks…
“What?”
Emerald’s face falls.
“What do you mean what?”
“What did you get?”
She looks confused for a brief moment before realization dawns on her.
“Oh shit, right. My bad. I forgot you’re concussed. We talked about this, you know… nevermind. The Oprah shot, Angel, THE shot. A Picture of a real life U-F-motherfuckin’-O.”
“UAP…” OJ mumbles.
“Shut up” the words tumble out of her mouth on reflex.
“We got it, and more! Because you and Holst got it too, baby. We got the film and everything. It’s all good. It’s all over, we won. It’s OVER!”
She deflates and falls back into her chair with that last declaration.
The three are silent for a while after that. Just simply being in the moment, still processing it all. He’s not sure how much time the Haywood siblings have actually had to think it all over and work through it, and what all happened while he was out of it, but Angel knows he sure as hell doesn’t feel like it’s over. He’s not even sure what that means. Yeah, sure, Jean Jacket exploded and is seemingly gone, but he still feels a looming threat there.
What if there’s more ‘Jean Jackets’?
Maybe not, but even so, he’s pretty sure he’ll never stop hearing those screams. He’ll never stop hearing Antlers Holst’s last words, or his creepy rendition of the Purple People eater song playing on a loop in his head. He’ll never stop smelling the rot of death and the coppery scent of blood coming from Jean Jacket’s mouth. He’ll never look at the sky or clouds the same, or enjoy the sound of thunderstorms.
And when the media finds out the truth, if they haven’t already, whether they try to forget or not, they’ll have to revisit the whole experience again… over and over.
But this is what they wanted, right? Even Angel. Proof. He didn’t even know these people a little over a week ago, and yet he still gave a shit when he first called Emerald… completely unwarranted, yes… when that stupid praying mantis blocked the view of the camera and he heard Em scream at OJ to run. He had no business showing back up at their house, but he did the next day. Because he cared? Because he was curious? He wanted to be apart of it, as scared shitless as he was, he wanted to play his part. And they did it. Here they are. And they survived. They got their solid proof.
So why does he feel so goddamn shitty?
Angel looks back to Emerald, who looks content staring off into space and still leaning back in her chair lazily. He turns to OJ, who’s maybe not so content, still standing awkwardly on his crutches next to Angel’s bed and completely unreadable as always.
“Is it though?” Angel asks, soundimg much smaller than he'd like.
He’s still looking at OJ, for some reason feeling like he has all the answers he needs. The older Haywood looks back at him, but doesn’t answer immediately.
“Is it what? Over?”
Emerald asks from his other side and Angel can hear her shift in her chair.
“Yeah.”
He continues to hold OJ’s gaze, as uncomfortable as his silence is making him.
“What do you mean?” Em asks.
This is getting more awkward with only her responding while Angel is looking to her brother, so he finally turns back to her.
“I just feel like…” He doesn’t even know how to put into words what he’s feeling, and damn it if there isn’t a first time for everything. “Shit I don’t know.”
Angel sighs in frustration and looks up at the ceiling instead.
After a beat, Oj finally speaks up.
“Jean Jacket is gone. That’s for sure. But no, it ain’t over. We still got work to do.”
Of coarse he would say that.
Angel squeezes his eyes shut wondering if OJ really gets it or not, but he doesn’t like the answer regardless, as right as he knows he is. His eyes still shut, he hears the older man step closer on his crutches and almost startles at the feeling of his hand resting gently on his left shoulder. Angel opens his eyes to look back at him, much closer now.
“But if we can survive all the shit we just did…” OJ continues steadily, “I think we’re all gonna be just fine. We got this.”
How he says it… we…. it implies that none of them alone. Of coarse, the siblings have each other. But it didn’t occur to Angel until now that one of the things that was bothering him the most was how lonely he had felt with all these feelings, having experienced something that literally no one else has (that survived)…. Except the Haywoods. So to hear that ‘we’, coming from OJ, made him feel a little less like his whole world was falling apart.
~'I heard him say in a voice so gruff.'~
Angel’s almost embarrassed to feel tears escape his eyes, but he manages a simple, “Ok.” In response.
Because he has to believe it. Because OJ said it. Because it’s better than the alternative.
~'I wouldn’t eat you ‘cause you’re too tough '~