2019-08-31 - This Is Not Sarajevo

It's been a long few days for August. First the smells (and it took him a while to realize they were smells), then the increased nightmares and the sounds. And because he was a glutton for punishment he'd gone with Itzhak to the hospital. First time in one in almost twelve years, and it had been almost as bad as he'd expected. Almost; he'd managed to stay in there for an hour, thanks to Ignacio and his valium. That same valium had been a lifesaver for the rest of the afternoon, and he'd taken a nice, long, hot bath and thought about literally anything else for as long as he could.

It's just about bedtime, though, and the valium's long worn off. He's been in town for a few days now, and is weathering that about as well as he can. Cars driving by, people calling out to one another, neighbors mowing lawns, it's all wearing him down. That nervous tension that had driven him to take postings in remote corners of national forests for ten years is back again, with a vengeance.

He's sitting in bed, in a t-shirt and boxers, phone in hand, contemplating texting Itzhak. Should he bother him? He's not sure. He's thinking it over.

Eleanor hums a tune as she works on packing up her bag to go in to work tomorrow, setting out her clothes to wear, and braiding her hair over one shoulder so as not to suffocate or strangle August in his sleep with it. She's wearing August's flannel with boyshorts as she climbs in beside him and wriggles under the covers. "How are you feeling tonight?" she asks with a concerned expression. She knows he wasn't in the best shape after going out with Itzhak to visit the hospital. She was damn proud he did it though. Baby steps, for both of them, facing their fears.

At least it is a small town; much of Gray Harbor, especially on Spruce St., shuts down unofficially a few hours after the sun goes down, and now the sounds of nature are starting to assert themselves - crickets and frogs, and a few night-calling birds here and there. As the day cools off, a dense fog has risen from the ground, and is slowly enfolding the house, turning the view through the windows into a soft, strange world of dark shapes that can't easily be recognized as their familiar, daylight forms. It's rising pretty high for a fog - even second stories are covered in a soft blanket of dark grey.

August sets his phone aside, plugs it in to charge. "A little better." He sighs, shuts off the desk lamp, curls up next to Eleanor. He's soul weary in a way he hasn't been in a long time. 'It just means you're working through things again,' Tara had assured him over the phone. He had to admit, she was probably right.

"Managed to go into a hospital and have a conversation with someone and everything. Going to count it as a win, even if a little valium was involved." His eyes stray to the winodw; he squints at the muted tone of the street lamps through the curtains. It's darker than usual. He strains, listening for the coastal foghorns. They're distant, but just audible when the fog comes into the bay.

Eleanor reaches for a book on the nightstand, the one she borrowed from him a while back, and slides it open to where she's set a tasseled bookmark. It's Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer; sci-fi. When he admits to entering a hospital of his own free, if valium-assisted, will, she blinks and sets the book aside again. "Really? That's amazing August. How long were you there and who did you visit?" In this town, people in the hospital might be there for reasons of weirdness, and her curiosity can't be quenched for information about that.

There is the barely audible sound of the coastal foghorns, to be sure. There's also fog slipping around the edges of the sealed windows. Which...is probably not a thing that should happen? It's definitely not smoke - it doesn't rise, but snakes its way down to the floor and begins to puddle there in serpentine eddies and strange, almost readable shapes. It's a very solid sort of fog. And there's more of it in every moment, although it never seems to rush. Just ooze and seep.

It takes August a second to respond; he's still focused on the curtains. Absently, he says, "Alexander." No...no, he's not imagining it. There is, in fact, something coming into the room. Smoke? He takes in a deep breath. No, not the choking, cloying smell of smoke. It's damp and cold. Chilling. Fog.

He goes perfectly still, save for the shaking breaths he's taking, rigid and focused on the window. "Ellie," he says, voice low. He doesn't look at her, doesn't dare stop looking at that window. He also can't think of a single thing to do, it's like his brain is totally locked up.

Eleanor, in her focus on August's field trip to the hospital, doesn't notice the fog coming in right away. Her hand moves to stroke his beard gently, her eyes glinting with pride as his staring his own fear straight in the ugly eye.

His sudden change in demeanor has her smile fading. His expression sends a chill down her spine and she turns slowly to look over her shoulder at what he is focused on. "What the hell?" she whispers, drawing her legs up closer to her and further from the edge of the bed. "That's not smoke, what is it!?"

It's like the fog notices when it is noticed in turn. It swirls on the floor of the bedroom, gradually surrounding the bed. And rising. Rising. Slow, but inevitable, as Eleanor retreats from it, it follows by winding along the bedposts, crawling up the sheets. And the walls, too - the fog's outer edges have reached the edges of the room, and it is devouring it slowly, bit by bit. When it reaches their bodies, it is cold and clammy, like fear sweat. It begins to devour - or maybe drown - them from the outside in. Waving it away works for a moment, but there's more of it. It slides under arms, caresses faces, explores mouths and eyes and noses. It smells like stone dust and antiseptic. It tastes like old blood and tears.

And eventually, there is so much of it that they can't see anything else.

They hang there, in the fog, for a moment. Or an hour. It's hard to tell. But the fog DOES clear. And they find themselves in Gray Harbor's quaint little downtown area. Or...well, what's left of it. August is in a rough aisle formed by the wreckage of City Hall. Eleanor? He can't see her. She can't see him, but she's not far away, in her own prison of twisted metal and broken masonry. The foghorns can still be heard in the distance, but they've changed. Air raid sirens.

August almost wishes it was smoke, because that could be a mundane thing with a mundane source: a fire, outside the house. Maybe even one they could deal with. But it's not smoke, he knows it in the marrow of his bones, and his mind is scrabbling for purchase of any kind, at all.

He tries to say Eleanor's name again, takes a huge mouthful of fog instead and oh God, that smell. He knows it too well, intimately, and the blinding sensation doesn't help. Every bit of titanium in his bones twinges in response. His heart is going one hundred miles an hour in his chest.

The fog beginning to clear brings his terror level down a notch at a time, until he starts seeing wreckage. And though it's Gray Harbor and City Hall, he's not seeing either. He's seeing another city. But they hadn't had sirens in Sarajevo, and that's something he clings to. There the shells had fallen a few hundred a day, in and out. Sirens would have been pointless. (Sirens didn't protect you from snipers.) So he holds onto those to anchor himself...wherever this is.

"Eleanor!" he shouts, falling on instinct. He has to find her. Also, maybe some shoes.

Eleanor struggles against the invasive fog, her feet flailing at it, arms waving, trying to hang onto August. The clammy cold of it, it's unnatural feel, is revulsive and she makes a whimpering sound in the back of her throat, before she is consumed by it. When it clears, she is wide-eyed and clad in just that flannel and underwear, barefoot, in an apocalyptic landscape. She doesn't even recognize where she is, because her brain can't reform what has been destroyed into what it once was.

"A-August?" she tries to yell, but it's more of a squeaky hiss, her throat tight with fear. She tries to find a way out of the prison she has found herself in, the spaces between rebar and concrete, the remnants of what might have been furnishings, what might have been people, defying her at every turn.

It all floods back to August: the way they used to find people in wreckage, the way they got them out of the line of fire, the way he'd hold off on his powers until he had no other option because using them was so intensely painful, and yet sometimes the only way. One bit of his attention hyper focused on the sound of incoming artillery, ready to find the nearest stable something to duck under; another on where he's going and possible places to expect a sniper nest.

"I can hear you, I'll be right there. Don't try to move if you're pinned," he shouts back, and does as he's said. He tries to avoid anything articularly sharp; his feet might not be soft, but they're not exactly made of leather.

"Do I have to go to bed fully dressed from now on? Fucking Christ," he mutters to himself. It's mostly to take his mind off the fact that he's shaking. What if she's stuck? He can lift about two hundred pounds with his power, so maybe three hundred with his own strength, but a chunk of a wall could be three times that. And she could be caught on something.

Ellie has worked so hard, for so long, to stay out of the Dream. To avoid the hunting grounds of those things from the other side. And here she is, over two decades later, in it again. Not a forest this time, for which she thanks God in a quick quiet prayer. If it was Modr's forest, the Jotunn's, she might just die of fright. She hears August's voice, and her eyes settle on what appears to be a path she might be able to fit through in the maze of twisted rebar.

"I'm over here!" she manages to yell, as she slides a hand through the opening, then more of her arm to the shoulder, and her head, but her other shoulder just won't come through. "No, nonono come on." Well she wasn't pinned, until she did that.

Yep. Eleanor is stuck. Trying to go back isn't going to help; when she looks back, the way she came is actually closed off, and the rebar has a peculiar, grasping quality to it, like it's going to maliciously tear at her if she tries to move forward. Like it's daring her to try.

Meanwhile, August picks his way through the wreckage. He can hear her voice, clearly. Other than the faint sound of the sirens, there's no other sounds of conflict, just the creak and groan of settling masonry, the soft skrrreeeee of metal scraping on metal as precarious balances are broken. He rounds a corner on the path he's following. It might be taking him closer to Eleanor. But sticking out of the wreckage is a human arm, covered with dirt and blood. It flails, weakly.

The sight of the arm brings August to a halt. He just stares at it, stuck for several seconds. The Markale market looms in his mind. It's the only thing he can see. He'd made the mistake of using his powers to find a little girl trapped in a car. They'd found her, she'd survived. But the landscape of that moment is etched in fine detail in his mind, and it's the only thing he can see.

"This is not Sarajevo," he says to the arm. But what if someone else is in here with them?

Well shit, she's gone and gotten herself into a pickle. Eleanor tries to turn her body this way or that, and feels the rebar snagging on the shirt, scraping against her bare skin. Not good. "I'm stuck!" she calls out, hoping August can still hear her. She feels a little tinge of panic at the edges, but she's able to shove it down. She's slightly claustrophobic, but there is space in front of and behind her at the moment, and she's handling it. She goes to a place of Zen, closing her eyes and clearing her mind. She's had enough martial arts training for that. She's studied the weird shit since she was 12. She has to know she can do stuff here, manipulate it.

Green eyes snap open and she focuses on the rebar keeping her from moving forward. She gestures with the hand already through, and bends the bars away, opening the passage up further, enough she can hopefully get through.

The rebar bends - slowly, painfully, like it's fighting her every step of the way, but it does bend - and Eleanor can stagger forward into the narrow path beyond. It's twisty and curls around to the left, so it's hard to tell what's waiting around the next bend. But surely it's fine. And she can't go back anymore, right?

August stares at the arm. Its flailing seems to weaken and just at the edge of his hearing, there's a small, weak voice. "Anyone...out there? Please. It's dark. Please don't leave us..."

It's Eleanor's voice that pulls him back out; he hears her, snaps back to himself. Shoves down Markale and tries to think. "This isn't Sarajevo," he says again, and for the first time it seems to be meaningful somehow. He shouldn't touch that arm, no matter how badly he wants to, on some level needs to.

"I'm gonna go get help, and then we'll come back for you," he says. He looks around, checking for landmarks, for a way to find this path again. He knows that might not happen. But this is what it was like. You saved who you could. That wasn't always everyone. (His stomach twists at that old, bitter knowledge.)

"We'll come back," he says again, and heads towards Eleanor's voice. "Keep talking, I can hear you!" he shouts.

Eleanor wiggles and writhes her way out of the rebar, wincing at every scratch and scrape, and setting her bare feet carefully as she walks down the path beyond. She edges carefully to the bend in the destruction and glances around the corner warily. "I'm over here!" she yells back to August, shivering at the sight of home in such a state.

Hey, there's nothing dangerous around the corner. But, the 'path', if path it is, looks like it actually goes downward. A building has collapsed into an untidy heap, but it's possible to get into the basement. And through the basement, perhaps she can pick her way out somewhere closer to August. Maybe.

August moves away from the hand. "Please, please," the words sound in his ears, breathy, too weak to have any force behind him. And then there's a groan from that part of the wreckage, the sounds of something in there slipping - or a makeshift support giving way. The whole thing settles about six inches lower with a heavy crunch. The hand goes limp. The voice goes silent. His path curves around towards what maybe is in the direction of the park. And the carousel.

On the plus side - that carousel is probably tinder now.

August stops midstep when the building collapses further, finishing what it started. The awful fact of triage in this sort of situation was that some people couldn't be saved. He'd have been maybe a few minutes into shifting things off them when that would have happened. And Eleanor might be hurt or killed in that time frame. (If person was even real. This might be a dream. Or something else. But it wasn't Sarajevo.)

He continues on, careful of where he steps. He frowns at the place where he'd expect to see the much-hated carousel, not because it's gone, but because he's starting to wonder if he's not being given a run around. Is there something Eleanor has with her he can--

The shirt.

White and black and red plaid twill fabric, breezey enough for wear in summer if he rolled up the arms and just had a tank on underneath. A favorite, now someone else's, but he knew it well enough to find it, maybe. And this power wasn't going to hammer him in the head with people's pain and misery. So he focuses on it, and reaches for it. Where are you, shirt...

Great. Go down to go up. Down means... how much stone and metal over her head? It's not an elevator at least. Or a cave. There is an up. Remind yourself of that Eleanor. There is a temptation to use her glimmer to shore up parts of the building she is climbing down into, or under, or through. She's a little afraid to though. She is afraid to draw Their attention. If she's being buried alive? Well then she'll take her chances with using her powers. She keeps calling out, so he knows she's still there. "I'm ok! I'm heading downward I think, it's the only path I have!"

It's hard to describe what it feels to reach out for an inanimate object, the way it sort of aligns to the internal filings. In this case, it's very useful, though, sort of. I mean, now August knows that she is definitely behind THAT wall of twisted metal and brick. The one with the cheerful little handpainted sign where you could buy small knicknacks that were also handmade. It's gone now. Oh, and yes, the shirt is moving, slightly, and it's heading downward. Below street level.

Eleanor can see a way down of course - at this place and time, the light is good. It's not really sunlight - there doesn't seem to be a sun to pinpoint on the other side of the cloud cover, just a diffuse pale radiance. But it provides enough light for her to make her way down. This is a deep basement. It's at least eight, maybe ten feet before she reaches the concrete bottom. It's damp down here, musty and dark.

"There you are," August murmurs, turning towards that wall and staring along its length. He frowns as he senses the shirt going...down. A basement. "I'm here," he calls, not sure if she'll hear him. A basement might be safe, might not. Too easy for them to become death traps, not that the streets were safer in a time like this.

Get back to her. First priority. Then getting the fuck out of here, he reminds himself. He starts looking for a way to access the same basement she's going into, or maybe a way she'll be able to come out the other side of it.

Eleanor picks her way carefully down through the rubble, wincing every time her foot slides against something sharp or overly rough, trying not to count how many cuts and bruises she is likely earning by bracing herself with her body against moving damaged stone or metal. If she can get to August, he can fix it. That's what she keeps telling herself. She reaches the bottom and squints in the damp, musty dark. She doesn't have anything to turn a light on with. She is a bit hesitant to proceed into the darkness. "August? Are you close?" she calls. This has to be horrifying for him. This has to remind him of Bosnia and all he went through. "I'm ok! Doing good!" she adds, with a grimace, as it's a stupid thing to say, though she's trying to reassure him.

Now that Eleanor is down in the basement, her voice is muffled, hard to hear. It only barely makes its way to August's ears as he prowls towards the building, trying to find a way down.

And he does! A piece of the street has fallen in. It's narrow and tight, but he will probably fit. Probably.

Meanwhile, down in the basement, hovering by the light that falls in from above, Eleanor finds it hard to make out any details - but in the distance (curiously far for a regular basement) she can see something that looks like a flickering light. Maybe someone else? Maybe a way out of the basement and back up to the street?

August eyes the collapsed hole in the street. How many of those had they squeezed into, helping people out of sealed off basements, or who'd fallen in when a mortar left a huge, gaping chasm?

This isn't Sarajevo.

"Okay, Roen, focus," he mutters under his breath. He's careful getting through the opening, distinctly aware that some very sensitive spots aren't, shall we say, well protected just now. He might have to start sleeping in sweats, at a minimum. God what a life.

Ellie squints at the light up ahead, how big is this damn basement? Do the laws of physics even apply over here in the Dreamscape? Her brain begins paging through the files of her memory, all of her research and eyewitness accounts of the Dream. It's like a rolodex in there. She finds the card she is looking for, and expands to the cabinet the information is stored, narrowing down to the file, and opening it mentally. What she finds there makes her curse. "Fuck."

She begins moving forward, tentatively, sliding her feet and keeping her arms out ahead of her, swallowing down the fear that she might actually come in contact with something that isn't brick and mortar. "August! If you can hear me, there is a light down here! It could be one of two things, something luring me to hurt me, or a way out. We might have to...to face something and beat it to get out. These Dreams, they're intended to do us harm. They're a test of sorts."

As August makes his way carefully down, he can't help but dislodge certain stones and bits of masonry. They clatter and chase him down, passing him and then bounding away into the darkness beneath the street. It's tricky in a few places, but he manages to get down without damaging any of the bits he's really fond of - a couple of scrapes sting in faint complaint, but they're fine. Everything's fine. And it's dark before him, but he can hear Eleanor's voice bouncing around some large space nearby. Surely she's not far, now.

Eleanor's voice echoes back to her - 'intended to do us harm' seems to echo more than anything else, and some quality of the the echo makes it sound almost gleeful, happy. Like she's just thrilled to be harmed. The light is unmoved by all this nonsense.

August is in a dark space under a building, and it takes him a second of repeating, "Not Sarajevo. Not Sarajevo," to get moving again. He focuses on the tether which is his sense of the shirt. Eleanor's in that shirt. He has to get to her, above all else.

He keeps moving towards her, frowning at the odd quality of her echoing voice. He swallows. No, it's fine, don't panic. Not yet. (Well preferably not at all but definitely not right now.) "I've made it down here," he calls to her, moving along carefully. On the one hand, it would be nice if he could make a light, like Itzhak can. On the other, he wonders if all he'd see is more body parts caught in things, so maybe the darkness isn't a total loss.

Ellie tenses at the echo and it's choice on which words to bounce around. She moves slowly towards the light. "If you see the light, August, move towards it, but not in. Maybe we can see each other closer to it!"

Which way IS Eleanor's voice coming from, down here? It's very difficult to tell - in fact, he'd almost swear that some of those echoes maybe aren't echoes at all, but it's hard to say which one is the...right Eleanor?

Which is a problem Eleanor herself might be dealing with. She's got the light to guide her through the darkness, and it seems like a straight shot. But there's...things out of the corners of her eyes. And as the light gets closer, or she gets closer to it, the light shines on mirrors, and on her own shadowed reflection. But they're not quite reflections, because they're turned to watch her, with tiny lights burning in their eyes.

The echoing makes August cover his left ear pre-emptively. No, no, he's not going to sit here and spend a few minutes waiting for tinnitus to wear off. He's just not. Fortunately it doesn't set in. This has him envisioning chasms all around them, which does wonders for his mental map of where they are (walking precariously along narrow bridges over massive holes leading to Hell, for example). And, well, if he can't rely on calling to her, he has to keep following the shirt. And maybe there's another option.

He stops, takes a handful of careful breaths. He doesn't have to feel everyone else suffering and in pain. He knows that now. He hadn't known it then. And this isn't then. Fuck then.

He reaches out towards her the same way he always has; a river running through a meadow, bright white where it cascades over rocks, tall grass gleaming gold and green in the sun. <<Ellie.>>

Eleanor's steps slow, then stop, when she realizes there are mirrored surfaces ahead of her. "No." She backs up a step. "nononono." Then another and another. The last time she was willingly in the presence of a mirror and looked into it? She was pulled into Modr's forest. Her guts run cold and her saliva feels like freezing water in her mouth. Then she feels the gentle touch of his mind, one which helped her through her fears in his cabin a bit. <<A-August!? There are mirrors. I..I can't. There's mirrors. They are looking at me. Their eyes are...they're not my eyes!>> Panic tinges that tiny whisper that always seems to be her mental voice, as if she's afraid They will overhear in the Glimmer.

This time, the mirrors don't seem to be pulling Eleanor in. Instead, her reflections are stepping out, one by one, their too-bright eyes fixed on her. As they move from reflection to reality, they change - wounds open, gape, dirt and dust settles on them. Some have crushed limbs, others have their bellies opened. None of these things seem to stop them from their careful advance on her. This isn't the slow shamble of a zombie, either - it's the stalking of a pack.

August thinks back to Addington House, and a murderous fucking lamp. <<The light--can you reach it? Douse it or knock it over somehow?>> Can he, for that matter? Is it something like the lamp, something he can knock over or break?

He picks up the thread of that shirt again, picks up the pace. He has to get to her. <<Hang in there.>> And he does one more thing while he's at it--he steels the two of them against whatever's coming next.

<<Oh God, August, they're me but they're all hurt, dead, damaged, and still coming for me. They're out of the mirrors and coming! Help!>> She turns to try and run back through the darkness, away from the pack of ravening things. Tears well up and spill over in her eyes, her fear strangling her breath out of her.

The reflections reach for Eleanor, trying to grab her, stop her, pull her down. Then possibly eat her? They're sort of zombies, after all. However, fear makes Eleanor's wily, and she's able to dodge, bat, or kick every reflection out of the way, and run into the dark. They follow, silently, stalking her with their own eye-lights to guide them.

Bright side: August can definitely track that shirt, and Eleanor is moving closer to him, close enough that he should be able to - ah, there she is, practically running straight for him.

There's the shirt! And Eleanor in it! ...and August collides with her with a grunt, but manages to not fall over in the process, so there's that. He grabs her, wraps his arms around here, which is more to steady himself than her. Her terror is potent and he sets his teeth against it, trying to keep that soothing image in the link between them. River, meadow, blue sky, calling birds, lazy bees.

Her terror also makes him incredibly furious. Not at her, of course, but those things after her. And by now he's run into enough of this garbage to always aim for a potential source. The light, and the mirrors. Mirrors first. He doesn't need to see them to find them; he follows the structure of the darkness, seeking out the solid from the void. There. It's easy to find a good point to hammer on, one strike for each, all at the same time. Fuck off, he thinks, and slams down.

There is a reason Eleanor took all sorts of martial arts and kickboxing after her ordeal as a preteen. It was for just this sort of thing. She wheels as they close on her and a leg snaps out in a roundhouse kick that would level a bear. She rolls across the ground, bare legs be damned, dodging the hands and teeth of the reflections, fists lashing out to snap into their noses, solar plexuses, feet swinging to sweep their legs. She is a fighter dammit. A FUCKING FIGHTER. "AUGUST!" she finds her voice again, looking like a goddamned little red-haired ninja versus herselves.

As she collides with August and he grabs her, she spins around in his arms, using him as leverage as she brings both legs up to kick the nearest zombie in the face with both feet. Look Gus, you're dating a badass, ok?

Mirrors shatter. They all shatter at once, and there are dozens of them - the roar of breaking, splintering glass has an almost unreal quality to it, especially down here where everything echoes. The slivered goes on for what feels like seconds. And as Eleanor smashes her feet into the nearest reflection's face? That shatters, too. So do the other reflections, and the two are peppered with mirrored glass.

And the sound is growing louder, deeper, rather than diminishing. ...maybe those were load bearing mirrors? The ceiling groans. Dust sifts down, and there are ominous, urgent cracks from the darkness around them.

August curls around Eleanor tightly, feeling for larger bits of glass to divert away from them as the entire universe erupts around them. This time, it's too much, and his left ear sets to humming, then ringing, a nice high pitched whine that blocks out almost all other noise. ...it's almost a bonus, considering everything.

<<Well that figures.>> August's voice in Eleanor's mind is a bit more of his usual self, fear finally thawing into annoyed resignation. He keeps his hold on her. <<Let's see if I can stabilize this thing.>>

As August wraps himself protectively around her, Eleanor shields him, with her own personal shield. She maintains it, protecting the man protecting her, as he works to find them a way out before everything comes down on top of them. <<I got you>> comes her mental voice, less whispered, stronger. She faced something tonight. It may be important.

They are showered in debris, in glass. But the Glimmer they offer up is sufficient to divert what harm might come to them down in the dark - it is absorbed (one might almost say devoured) by the use, but it makes the world bend to them. Yield to them. And August can reach out, find the broken remnants of stairs that lead upwards, put them together in some sort sort of order. They go to a door - a door that was broken and buried, and is neither of those things, now. Everything is dark. But he doesn't need the light to feel his working.

<<There. A door.>> August starts to move towards the door, one hand firmly holding Eleanor's. He'd like to be measured and cautious but his mind is filled with memories of this very situation and he can feel his fragile hold on his mental state fraying. Out, out, out, every brain cell in his head is shouting in a chaotic, panic-fueled chorus.

Eleanor moves forward with August, her expression focused now, less terrified. The tears on her cheeks have dried. She is not alone. She is not helpless. All that preparation she did for the last 20+ years meant something. She squeezes his hand, willing him to have her strength.

Together, they manage to climb up the stairs, and grab the door. It pushes open easily; surprisingly easily, considering that the building above them was complete wreckage. But then, that's no longer where they are. Instead the two of them emerge into the light of Eleanor's bedroom, having just come out of the closet together. There is no fog. There are no foghorns.