“So,” Alphonse says, his voice as gentle as he can make it as presses his pen to his notepad. “When was the last time you saw your daughter?” 

Across the table on the opposite couch, Mr. and Mrs. Radcliff sit side by side. Mrs. Radcliff dabs at her teary eyes with a napkin, sniffling miserably. 

Mr. Radcliff speaks first, looking at Alphonse questioningly,  “Are you with the police? I thought we spoke to the detectives already…?” 

“Oh! I’m a, uh… I guess you could call me an interested third party. ...A private investigator, sort of. Now please, sir,” Alphonse says, smiling kindly as he clicks his pen. “Tell me everything.” 

The man looks over to his wife but who doesn't respond to the prodding, a distant and thoughtful look on her face. As she fails to answer, Alphonse can’t help but notice just how eerily quiet the house around them is. The only sound seems to be coming from his own shifting uncomfortably on the lumpy couch, Mrs. Radcliff’s muted tears and the old Grandfather clock ticking away in the corner of the room. The house itself isn’t dark, per se, but it still feels dark somehow. Maybe it’s the sense of sadness and longing that seems to permeate the entire room, emanating from the two lost parents sitting before him in waves. Behind the Radcliff’s, a large mirror makes up a sizable portion of the wall. Alphonse can see himself, large and dark skinned, sitting in front of the two hunched forms of the parents, pushed to the brink of despair and unsure whether or not they’ll teeter off the side. They both look so small.

“...Six days ago,” Mrs. Radcliff finally says. “We sent Mary off to school six days ago and she never came home. She hasn’t-- none of her friends have seen her, and neither has anyone around… around town…” She trails off, expression crumpling like wet tissue paper. She struggles to keep from falling into tears again.

It takes awhile for him to poke and prod the Radcliffs' through the basics of the disappearance, even longer with how gentle he was trying to be with them. The loss was still fresh, but they were still so hopeful that their daughter would make it back to them. It was a vulnerable place to be in, so he made sure to tread extra carefully in regards to their feelings. 

Finished with the interview, he closes the Radcliffs’ front door behind him and walks down the neighborhood sidewalk, his boots crunching noisily in the ice and snow coating the concrete. He can practically feel how heavy with information his notepad is in his pocket. He takes in a deep breath and lets it out, watching as his breath condenses into a white cloud. He thinks of the timeline the Radcliffs gave him, she left home at about 6.am, was supposed to be in classes until 3:00 and get home at about 3:15. She walked from school with her friends, but she separated from the group to walk by herself once she got close to her house. She must have been just a couple blocks away from home before she got taken. 

Her disappearance… It’s identical to Ben’s. 

He doesn’t even notice how far he’s walked as he thinks until he collides with someone else, nearly sending them sprawling before he reaches out to catch them by the shoulders, preventing them from falling. 

He blinks owlishly down at the person before him, and the familiar freckled face sends him a shocked look right back. “Wait-- Alphonse?!” Georgia exclaims. She looks surprised and pleased to see one of her best friends after so long apart. Laughing, the shorter girl hops up and throws her arms around his neck in an abrupt hug, her curly red hair bouncing with the motion. Alphonse startles momentarily before he remembers to return the hug, gently wrapping his arms around her much smaller form to keep her from falling down. 

“H-Hey, George.” He says quietly. “Haven’t, uh… Talked to you in a while.”
“Yeah, no kidding!” She snorts, letting go to drop her feet back onto the ground. She grins up at him. “It’s been ages! Warren’s never gonna believe-- wait!” She turns around, and Alphonse realizes that they’re standing in front of the Lucky Wish Bakery, which was practically in the middle of town. Wow, he had walked much, much farther than he thought he had- he didn’t realize that he’d strayed so far from the neighborhood. 

George cups her hands around her mouth and shouts at the bakery’s door, her voice way too loud in the quiet town square, “Warren! Come outside and see who dropped by!” 

The door to the bakery swings open to reveal a tall, lanky boy in a ratty black hoodie holding two boxes of donuts in his arms. “Coming! I’m coming, I’m coming! Jeez could you be more…” He gripes as he hops down the steps to make his way to Georgia’s side only to trail off when he makes eye contact with Alphonse, who grins sheepishly.
“Al! Dude!” Wary of dropping the donuts, Warren throws his arm around Alphonse’s shoulder in a half-hug with a grin. “It’s been way too long! How have you been? ...Uh, no offense, but you kind of look like you haven’t been good, man.” 

George bristles and elbows Warren hard in the side.
“Ow! Why did you--?!” Warren whines, rubbing at his smarting rib, but is cut off by George giving him a look that could melt stone. 

“Be nice!” 

Alphonse holds up his hands in a placating gesture, smiling fondly at their antics. He’d forgotten how much he missed them. “No, no, it’s fine! I haven’t been sleeping much, so I’m sure it shows on my face…”  He could practically feel the bags hanging beneath his eyes. He’d lost count of how many days it's been since he had a full night of rest.

Not since Ben died, at the very least.
Warren sobers. “...How have you been doing, really?” 

“I’ve been… coping. Mom, too. She’s even gone back to work now!” Alphonse tries to smile, but the expression is brittle. He can’t keep it up for longer than a few moments before it drops off of his face, his hand nervously coming up to rub the back of his neck as his eyes drop to the ground. “It’s… Thanks for asking, even after how I’ve been acting. I know I kind of dropped off the face of the Earth after the funeral. I’m sorry.” It had been almost six months since he had last seen their faces, or even talked to them on the phone. He didn’t even know how to explain why he had had to disappear like that. He only knew that seeing his friends laughing and smiling like this, so soon after the death of his brother, would have been impossible to bear.

“What!?” George looks appalled at the apology, then punches Alphonse in the arm. Hard. He lets out a small shocked noise, but George barrels right over the sound, “Don’t you apologize for that, you idiot! You lost your brother, Al. You needed the time to deal-- you probably still need it.”

“Yeah!” Warren pipes up to support her, coming up on Alphonse’s other side to put his hand on his shoulder. “We missed having you around, but we understand. If we were mad at you or something for that we’d be awful friends, and we’re great friends.”

“Humble, too.” Alphonse huffs out a quiet laugh, smiling at the both of them. 

“...Hey,” George asks, eyes dropping to the notepad bulging in his sweater pocket. “What’s that?”
“Oh! Oh, it’s just,” Suddenly nervous all over again, Alphonse fumbles with the notepad as he takes it out of his pocket and flips it open. He doesn’t know how they’ll react to seeing his notes, what would they think when they found out that he was investigating the spree of murders? Would they tell him to stop, or that he was being reckless? “I’ve just been… gathering stuff. About the murders.” 

Warren and George both lean forward over his shoulders to read his cramped, rushed writing. The notebook was packed with all the information he could find involving the Bethel Spree Killings. They both seem to go cold as their eyes flicked over the gruesome scribbled words.

“What are you doing with all of this? It’s like you’re planning to- to catch this guy yourself or something!” Warren says, smiling crookedly like he was joking. When Alphonse doesn’t laugh, he goes pale. “Hey, that’s not what you’re planning is it? I- I know this guy got your brother and all, but--”
“Is this what you’ve been doing all this time?” George interrupts Warren again, craning her neck to look Alphonse in the face. After a couple of moments, Alphonse nods. 

“...What have you found so far?” She asks, quiet.

Alphonse shuffles in place. “All of the disappearances, they start off the same way. Once, what we think is every six months, the killer picks off kids around middle school aged who are alone somehow. There are hardly any witnesses and when there are they’re always from a distance. Every time, the… the kids' bodies are found a week after they’re first taken. Never alive. There’s a pattern, but for some reason no one can figure it out. I’ve talked to the police already and they don’t have any leads. The fourth kid taken, Mary Radcliff, is the most recent one. She might not have been killed yet, but her time is almost up.” Alphonse looks between his two friends, his usually kindly face more serious than either of them have ever seen it. “I have to find them. What happened to me and my mom, what happened to Ben, can’t ever happen again. My dad was one of the best private detectives this town had ever seen, and the police don’t have anything. Someone has to find her. It has to be me.” His tone is resolute. On this, he won’t be moved. 

George and Warren are silent before him. They look at each other, nod once, then look back to Alphonse.

“Well…” Warren says, shaking his head. “If you’re gonna get killed, you’re not gonna do it on your own. We’re in.”

Alphonse blinks at him, shocked. What? 

Before he can respond, George says, “Yup! You know, I’ve read like a ton of true crime, so I bet I’ll be at least kind of useful.”

“W-Wait,” Alphonse sputters, clutching his notepad in both hands. “You guys don’t have to help me! Aren’t you supposed to be telling me not to do this? It’s- It’s dangerous!”

“Yeah, we know! That’s why we’re coming with you, doofus.” George says, taking Alphonse by the sleeve and leading him away. He follows helplessly, and Warren trails behind him. “Now come on, you have tell us all about the evidence you’ve gathered, and also help us eat these free donuts we got. They expire like, tomorrow.” 

They go to Warren’s house and eat donuts. He talks and they listen. He didn’t even realize how much he’d missed being with his friends until he had them back. He also didn’t realize just how much of assets they could be, Warren especially.

 It’s dark when they leave his house again, this time heading in a completely opposite direction from the neighborhood and town square.

“So, uh.” George says, the beam from her phone flashlight cutting through the black as her shoe lands on a twig in the grass, cracking loudly in the still air. What sounds like an entire flock of birds disperses from the bushes behind them in response, cawing and crowing through the air as they flee from the noise. The sound of their flapping wings was eerie when their movements were unseen. Snow fluttered to the ground off of the disturbed branches above, glittering brightly in the dim light. “Why are we walking through the spooky forest behind town? At night? I was mostly joking before, but now I feel like we really are gonna get murdered, with this, uh.” She shivers in the chill night air. “...Atmosphere.”

“Al said the police have looked everywhere else in town for the missing kids, and that the killer probably doesn’t stray very far from town! I happen to know a place that’s not too far, and that the police wouldn’t think to look.” Warren says with a glance behind him as he led the way deeper into the wood, his own steps sure. He knew where they were going.
“What? Why wouldn’t they know about it already?” Alphonse asked, watchful of where his friends walked and if they would trip. He had to be careful of where he stepped himself. Even with the flashlight, it was difficult to make out where they were, and there was slippery, iced over patches and large sticks hidden in the snow all around their feet. Without Warren walking in front to guide them, they would have been hopelessly lost. 

“Everyone who knows about it keeps it a secret! Since you don’t know about it already you probably haven’t, but have you heard about Worset Cave?” 

Alphonse and George shake their heads, no. 

“Okay, well, the legend is that a really long time ago there was this criminal group in town that would go to the cave for their, uhh. Activities? I don’t know much about what they did, but I do know that it was so bad that they pretty much wiped the place off the map. Some people at school, Oliver and his group I think it was, rediscovered it by accident when they were messing around one day. And they told the people they knew about it, and those people told others, and so on and so on, until it became a kind of secret hideout, I guess. Kids come around here to have parties and drink and smoke. No one would tell any cop about that.” Warren explains, pushing a low hanging branch out of their path absentmindedly.

George is too short for the branch to have been a problem for her, and she walks under it’s reach easily. Alphonse, however, appreciates the move immensely. “Okay,” George says, “But that doesn’t explain why we’re here.” 

“Come on! It’s a weird old cave that kids mess around in. That’s a standard horror movie sort of setting. Oh, and it’s supposed to be haunted or something.”

“Probably should have led with that,” George mutters.

“Oliver told me that they’ve been hearing weird noises coming from the inside, but no one’s dumb enough to explore too deep in the caves. That’s how you get lost. Some people have gone in, yeah, but they all come back before the path starts getting too complicated.” As Warren continues, they finally come out on the other side of the snowy brush and into a small clearing. At the end of the clearing sits a huge rock wall, the mouth of a yawning dark cave sitting at the base of the stone. Something about the inside of the cave, maybe the fact that it was completely pitch black inside making it impossible to see into, makes them all grow cold.

“...What kind of weird noises?” Alphonse asks, instinctively moving to put himself in between the cave and his friends as he speaks.

“Well, like a kind of wailing, mostly. Oliver says it’s just the wind.” Warren shuffles the backpack that was hanging off of one of his shoulders to his front, then zips it open to start rifling inside. “I was sort of hoping you’d think it’s just the wind too, or maybe like a ghost, but I know you’re insane so I figured you’d want to take a look in anyhow. Which is why I bought a bunch of cave exploring stuff.” Warren gives Alphonse a meaningful look. Alphonse feels embarrassed to be known so well. He probably would have gone in to investigate, even if Warren hadn’t brought preparations along. 

He brings a handful of items out of the bag: a couple of portable phone batteries, bottles of water, ropes and rock climbing equipment, and glow in the dark chalk. “The ropes and stuff are because they say that there’s some drops inside, and like, holes in the ground. The chalk is to mark our way as we go through so we don’t get lost. Water and phone batteries are in case we get hopelessly lost anyways and have to call for help.”

“...Thank you,” Alphonse says to them after a long moment. “For coming with me.” 

“Anytime, man.” Warren grins. “This is kind of cool! I probably would have just been getting sick from eating a dozen pretty-much-expired donuts if we weren’t doing this.”

“No problem,” George says. “Well, slight problem. If we get killed my ghost is gonna punch your ghost in the gut forever.” 

As they respond, they walk around their taller friend and plunge into the cave, both of their phone flashlights bright against the dark. Alphonse follows.

They wander in the dark for what seems like ages. All is quiet, aside from the sound of cave creatures scurrying about and groundwater plinking off of the stalactites above to the ground below. George dutifully takes it upon herself to mark their path on the walls with the chalk, taking careful note of their surroundings so that she’ll be able to help them get back out, even if the marks failed them somehow. 

As she does, Alphonse and Warren keep themselves busy by looking closer at what's inside the cave, rather than focusing on where they are. At first, the only things they find are stone and rock, except for the occasional odd pitfall carved deeply into the floor. They either move through the dips in the path, carefully sliding down them, or avoid them entirely if the sides are too steep to climb down without using their ropes. The deeper they go, the stranger their findings get. Alphonse steps into a puddle of what he thinks is normal dirt, but when he walks a little further, George startles him by pointing out that some kind of red dust had stained the bottom of his shoe. When he had bent down to get a closer look at the substance, the rank scent of old metal hit him like a brick to the face. The thing he had stepped in had been a puddle of old dried blood. Did that mean they were going the right way? As they walked further along, they found more traces of blood, on the ground and even splashed in horrific, spattering arcs on the walls. 

“Hey,” Warren says as he leans over to peer down at something on the ground. Alphonse perks up and looks over. “This... isn’t a rock, is it?” Alphonse looks over his shoulder to see what he’s talking about, and his breath catches in his throat.

“N-No,”  He says, mouth dry. A bizarre chill drags cold fingers down his spine. “That’s not… That’s his watch. Ben’s watch.” Bending over, Alphonse reaches out to pick up the watch with trembling fingers, before thinking better of it. Instead, he takes a little plastic bag he’d labeled Evidence in messy sharpie marker out of his pocket and scoops the watch inside without touching it with his skin. Evidence. Don’t want to mess with the fingerprints, his rattled mind manages to think through the shock. He tilts it to put it in the beam of Warren’s flashlight, and his stomach churns as he sees that the deep blue leather of the strap had been stained purple with what looked like more blood. Ben had inherited the watch from their father, and he hardly ever took it off. Alphonse had noticed that it wasn’t on his wrist at his funeral, but in his grief addled mind he had barely been able to register it. Now, finding it here, made everything register in perfect clarity. When he was killed, his watch must have come off somehow, and the killer hadn’t bothered to pick it up and get rid of the evidence, probably figuring that they would never be found so deep in the caves. Alphonse could only barely keep from throwing up. 

Before he can fall even deeper into his thoughts, a noise, so low that he doesn’t realize he’s hearing it at first, pokes in on the edges of his awareness. He looks up. “D-Do you guys hear that?”

“Oh that- that must be the strange noise!” Warren laughs nervously, shrinking away from the direction it was coming from. The sound was hard to place, whatever it was distorted by the caves echo, but it chilled them to the bone. “Ha. That’s funny, Oliver never mentioned that it sounded like… crying.”

George’s cocks her head to better hear the noise, her eyes narrowing. Without hesitating, she walks towards the source. “It’s coming from over here.” 

Alphonse and Warren follow her, trusting her senses. She stops abruptly before another pitfall that was as wide as the makeshift-hallway they were in and steeper than any of the others they had come across. There was no way to get past this one. A dead end.

“...I don’t understand.” George’s brows furrow with confusion. “The sound was coming from--” 

“Hello?” A new voice, raspy and small, squeaks from the bottom of the pit.

All of their hearts leap into their throats. So quickly that she nearly drops it, George directs her flashlight to the bottom of the pit. 

There at the very bottom of the chasm, tearstained and dirty and still in her old school clothes, stood Mary Radcliff, blinking her eyes in the face of the bright light. Alive. 

Alphonse’s train of thought is stuck at first station. He can’t comprehend what, or rather, who he’s seeing. He can’t move or speak. Luckily, he doesn’t have to, at least not yet. 

“Mary?” George says, barely managing to move through the shock herself as she falls to her knees at the hole’s edge, leaning forward to look down at the little girl standing below. Hope, shock and disbelief are apparent in her trembling voice. “Mary Radcliff?” 

“Y-Yeah.” The little girl, Mary, responds before stopping to cough into her mud-stained fist. She looked awful, pale and exhausted from constant fear. Her clothes and skin were caked in the muck and grimey water that dripped from the damp cave ceiling, the blonde color of her hair lost beneath layers of dirt. Even with the distance between them, it was easy to see that her shoulders were hunched and stiff, and that she was trembling all over. “I-I want to go home.” As she looks up at them, into the first source of light that she’d seen in who knew how long, a sheen that preceded new tears coalesces over her eyes. “Please let me go home.” 

“Oh my god.” Warren looked ill. “I didn’t think- I didn’t think she’d really be here.”

Alphonse still can’t speak. All he can think about is how Mary is right there, standing below them, alive despite all odds. He can barely breathe.

“We’re gonna get you out of there! Just sit tight for a second, okay?” George calls down, hurriedly tying up her hair into a bun as she quickly stands up, her movements as stiff and hurried as a clockwork toy. “Both of you! Stop gaping like that and help!” She snaps, grabbing Warren by the backpack and yanking him backwards. She rips the pack open and tears the length of rope out of it. Her words pull both boys out of their shock and they quickly rush to help her, already realizing what she meant to do. 

Warren stumbles to find a sturdy rock to tie one end of the rope around, with George helping him to make sure the knot would hold. As soon as they finish tying, Alphonse doesn’t think twice before he falls over the edge with both hands clamped tightly around both sides of the rope and his feet pressed to the slippery stone wall. He climbs backwards down the pit until he’s to the bottom, standing right in front of the girl who reminded him so much of his brother. 

They stare mutely at one another for a couple of moments. Alphonse opens his mouth to speak without knowing what he's going to say. “...Hi,” he finds he’s saying, voice forced calm and gentle even as his emotions are a storm inside of him. “My name is Alphonse.”

“Hi,” Mary says in a small voice, trembling on the other side of the wall. “I’m Mary.”

“I know,” Alphonse gives a shaky smile. “I’m here to take you home. Your mom and dad have missed you a lot.” He takes a couple of careful steps towards her. “I know it’s a lot to ask, since you must be really scared. But I need you to trust me for a little bit, okay?” Slowly, he opens his arms as though he’s asking for a hug. 

Sniffling, Mary crept towards him. He takes off his jacket and wraps it around her as he picks her up, feeling her shiver against him. 

Just after Ben had died, Alphonse had often had a daydream that he had managed to find his brother just before he was killed. That he had burst into wherever Ben was being kept and disabled the murderer, then picked his brother up and ran, saving his life. Alphonse was the older brother. He was supposed to always be there for Ben, to protect him. In letting him die, scared and alone, Alphonse had failed him spectacularly.

He would not fail Mary now. 

Alphonse turns and begins to climb back up the wall with Mary clinging to his front, his teeth grit and eyes narrowed with the force of his determination, the shine from George and Warren's flashlights. He would get her out of here, back home where she belonged. Out of the darkness and into the light.