Dawn Chorus (Proxies x Reader)

The little house is a little house, quiet and dead in the cold winter alley. It's magnetism and haunting silence have been swept away into mundanity.

A monster lives inside. A monster waits outside.

Exhaustion has taken its toll on me. The bags under my eyes are puffier than normal and my extremities feel near dead. I feel how Tim and Toby look, perpetual sleep-deprived and barely holding on. Bruises cling to my skin and my arm, though my shoulder has been returned to its socket, rests in a sling. Another non-healing slump has settled on my body. Normal healing? I huff, the remains of a laugh, at how spoiled I've become to see normal paced healing as wrong.

Winter's grey has darkened overhead with offer of snow. Toby has spent the last three days hunched over a small fire, nose red and lips blue, as a deeper cold crawled in. He wouldn't go to any shops or restaurants to warm his bones because I would not leave our tarp fort. I worried about hypothermia. "W-we're on a jo-j-job," was all he responded. The plastic sky and plastic walls remind me of a child's toy house, holding the real world at bay. For my mind, that shelter was enough to keep me warm and my brain mostly placated. Toby did not trust enough that I would stay that way in his absence. Neither of us slept, neither of us ate. We sat in the rustle of the plastic and waited. I waited for Tim and Hoodie, but I think Toby may have been waiting for me. When the call came, Toby finally agreed to go somewhere warm, where he could get food. I wouldn't leave until there was a pane of glass growing foggy between us.

Mew mew, keow, keow, keow. A herring gull calls from the roof, slowly arching its head as the repetitive, shrill sound grows ever higher. I jolt from my slight gaze to peer up at the agitated bird. While herring gulls are standardly white and grey with a yellow beak, this little guy must only be a second year, dusted in a spattering of browns and with a still black beak now pointing high to the sky. Despite the distress in the long call, the bird sits entirely alone and unmoving on the roof. The bright pink of its wide-open mouth is a shock against the grey, and those yellow eyes fixated on me are almost unsettling. At the same time, the gull's distress call, restarting again with a mew as the bird hunches forward reminds me of the chickadees.

I shake the stiffness out of my legs before walking up to the door. The open invitation of a store has run out as much as the pressure of the supernatural presence has. Good and bad, the house has sunk in on itself. No warning to go. No invite to stay. Spite pushes the door open for me and carries me across the threshold. Dust hangs thick in the air, swallowing up the little bit of light present in the room. The shelves are covered in shattered and rusted debris, thick with spiderless cobwebs, and the rug beneath my feet has gone grey and threadbare.

"I hope you like what I've done with the place, dear," Ambrosia says from somewhere within the clutter. "It takes a lot of effort to effect so much change. I haven't been able to pull off something of this scale since I was a little older than a chick."

I follow her voice through the maze of shelves. The deeper I get, the more furniture is toppled and wood broken. Eventually, I have to start climbing over rickety piles of ruin to keep progressing. It jostles my arm, and the pain digs away at my limited energy. My head stays on swivel, taking in every dark corner and sudden turn. The air starts to thicken, like crawling through jello again, except each breath tastes sharp and sour on my tongue. A sickening, weighty smell of rotten egg and ash floats through the air.

"I'll admit, I'm far less pleased to see you this second time," Ambrosia says.

I am nearly so stupid as to turn towards the sound of her voice. I only think better of it enough to slow my action, barely catching the shift of her feathers in the dark shadows to my left. I reorient, slowly, carefully to face the harpy. Her beak has grown larger, lined in a dull sort of pink on the bottom of the top half. The milky haze to her eyes has condensed to shade over her pupil, exposing dull yellow irises similar to the gull on her roof.