Something Amiss (Hoodie x Reader)

Five: So Close, Yet So Far

Trigger Warning: brief description of a panic attack.

Your mind screeched at you like nails on a chalkboard, begging you to hit the brakes and not open the email. Did you listen to yourself? No, of course not. You looked over your shoulder at the other students around you, talking amongst themselves or typing furiously. Someone behind you was playing flash games, from the looks of their screen. You were safe, this was probably just a professor emailing you about an assignment. That was a scary thought in and of itself, but not panic inducing in quite the same way as an email from a certain someone would be right now.

Inhaling, you clicked on the unopened email. There was no text, only a paperclip icon. Two attachments. You held your breath as your cursor hovered over the icon. Just a spam email. Just a spam email. It was probably another student sending memes around or something. Maybe some cheap and meaningless copy-paster chainmail.

Click. Two windows opened, two dark thumbnails. Dear God, not this bullshit again. Anything but this. You shook your head at your own stupidity as you clicked the first window. You pulled your earphones out of your pocket, plugging them into the computer. You shouldn't do it, you knew. It was a horrible idea, but you pressed play anyway. You had to know what contents were.

There was no audio. The first video was of nothing but a door. Your door. Not the one leading to your bedroom, but the main door leading to rest of the apartment complex - you recognised the colour and the number. Why was he filming your front door? Was he just salty that you had locked him out? Did he think that just standing there with his camera out would scare you? Please, this was way less of a feat than scaling the fire escape. You scrunched your face up, an expression of so what, pussy?

You quickly realised what when you clicked play on the second thumbnail. This video was horribly corrupted, and you slammed your finger on the volume down button as your ears were met with a horrible, electrical buzzing noise. Stray pixels waltzed around the screen, a discoloured array of red, fuchsia and yellow. It was difficult, but you could discern the dark outline of a bed. Your eyes widened. Holy fuck.

Harry. God, no! You watched, unable to look away as the footage continued to play out before you. The camera was set up on your brother's dresser, a clear view of his bed. He was sleeping peacefully. You had sharp eyes, taking in every detail of the frame that you could discern through the corruption. The alarm clock on his end table read 3:15. This must have been taken this morning, you realised, with a mixture of horror and relief.

A figure walked into the frame. The masked man. His yellow hoodie looked a sad shade of mustard in the dark, the only light filtering in from the open door - coming from the hallway that you were fucking asleep in. The masked man, back to the camera, walked over to the opposite side of the bed from Harry. You stared in disbelief as he sat down on the bed and leant his lanky torso against the IKEA bedframe. Bold. His heavy boots swung idly, hanging off the edge of Harry's bed. He brought his leather clad hands up to rest on his stomach, fingers drumming on the fabric of his hoodie. The red eyes of his mask, now a disturbingly familiar sight, bore into yours through the screen. Always with the fucking staring contest.

It only took a few seconds for you to notice the numbers. They appeared in random places around the screen, so small and fleeting that you'd miss them if you blinked. As the footage came to an end with a glitchy splat of pixels, accompanied by an unpleasant earrape of static, you dragged the red time bar back to the beginning. You watched the terrifying footage once more. You hadn't been imagining it, there were certainly numbers popping up around the screen. Little 0s and 1s, to be exact. You weren't an idiot, you recognised this code - you had taken IT 101 in tenth grade. For the first and probably only time in your life, the trivial knowledge of what binary was seemed to be coming in handy.