"Stabbed Hearts" *Michael Myers X M! Oc

XXIV

I knew he was behind me.

He always was

I didn’t have to turn. My body reacted before my mind didthe subtle tightening in my shoulders, the way the air seemed to thicken, like the room had just remembered something it was trying to forget.
I snapped my head halfway around.
Michael stood in the doorway.
For a split second, my breath caught in my throat.
He was covered in old blood.
Not fresh. Not dripping. Just… there. Darkened stains on his sleeves, on the front of his clothes, caught in the folds of fabric. The mask looked the same as alwaysblank, pale, unchangingbut something about seeing him like that made my skin crawl.

And still
Deep down, somewhere I didn’t want to look too closely at, there was something else.
Not comfort.
Not trust.
But something that leaned toward him instead of away.
I hated that part of myself.
I looked back at the TV, pretending to watch My heart was steady in a way that didn’t make sense. A week ago, I would’ve panicked. I would’ve searched for the nearest door, the nearest excuse to leave.
But I wasn’t leaving.
I couldn’t.
The food was running low. The house felt smaller every day.

He moved.
The floor didn’t creak. It never did under him. He crossed the room and sat beside me on the couch, close enough that I could feel the cold through the fabric of his clothes.
I swallowed.

“i can… wash it later,” I said quietly. My voice sounded too normal for the moment. “If you want.”
For a long second, he didn’t respond.
Then his head tilted slightly.
A pause.
And finallyone slow, minimal nod.
It wasn’t reassurance. It wasn’t agreement the way people meant it. It was more like acknowledgment, as if he had registered the words and decided they didn’t require correction.
He faced the television again.
We sat like that in silence.
The screen flickered with something I didn’t care about some late-night program, voices rising and falling in a rhythm that didn’t touch either of us. I watched without seeing. My thoughts kept drifting back to the asylum.
The white halls. The echoing footsteps
And Michael

'will he ever go back?'

He never spoke to me there either. But sometimes he would sit next to me in the common room, unmoving,  that had decided to keep me company. Back then, I told myself it meant nothing.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
The house had been like this all week.
He would disappear for hours, sometimes a whole day, and I’d sit alone with the ticking clock and the shrinking food supply. I’d tell myself I should leave while I could.
But when he came back, the space would close again. The walls would feel nearer. And I would stay.
Not because he said anything.
Because he didn’t have to.
My eyes started to burn. My body felt hollow, heavy, like I was carrying exhaustion in my bones instead of my muscles. I tried to keep watching the TV, but the edges of the room blurred, the sound becoming distant, like I was underwater.
I didn’t remember deciding to sleep.
I only remember the warmth.
At some point, I felt him move.
Careful.
Handsfirm, not gentle, not rough eitheradjusting my position, guiding me down so I wasn’t slumped awkwardly. My cheek brushed against something solid. A thigh. His.
I should’ve pulled away.
I didn’t.
I was too tired to care, too far gone in the half-world between waking and sleep. The last thing I registered was the strange steadiness beneath me, the way nothing shifted when I rested there.
Like I was something he had decided not to move.
I woke to silence.
Not the comfortable kind. The kind that presses against your ears.
For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. My head was heavy, my thoughts slow. Then the room came back into focusthe couch, the dim light filtering in through the curtains, the television long since turned off.
I was still lying against him.
Michael hadn’t moved.
He sat exactly as he had before, back straight, one arm resting at his side, the other just slightly bent near where my shoulder met his leg. He wasn’t holding me. He wasn’t pushing me away.
He was simply there.
The mask faced forward, unblinking.
My chest tightened with something I didn’t have a name for.
“Michael…” I whispered.
He didn’t respond.
But I felt it the shift in awareness, the way he knew I was awake without needing to look at me.
I slowly sat up, careful not to startle him. My body expected a reaction that never came. No sudden movement. No anger. No restraint.
Just stillness.
I studied him from the side.
The blood on his clothes was still there, dark and cracked into the fabric. I wondered where he went when he left the house. What he did. What kind of world he stepped into before returning here, to me.
I thought about asking.
The words rose up in my throat and died there.
Because what would I really be asking?
Why did you come back?
Why do you keep me here?
Why me?
I wrapped my arms around myself instead.

His head turned slightly toward me.
Not enough to meet my eyes.
Just enough to let me know he had heard.
The silence between us wasn’t empty. It was dense, layered with everything he never said and everything I was too afraid to ask.
I knew he didn’t understand affection. Or fear. Or the strange, tangled thing that lived somewhere between them inside me.
He didn’t protect me because he cared.
He kept me because he decided I was his to keep.
And somehow… that knowledge didn’t push me away.
It scared me.
But it didn’t make me leave.
I leaned back into the couch, staring at the dark screen of the television, feeling his presence beside me like a boundary I couldn’t cross and didn’t