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They were strangers, he realized.

This experience was different, knowing Walt was a person.

The horror of his intrusion was disturbing enough to feel demonic at the time. A spirit playing some sort of game that Hollis had lost. Every instance of Walt’s amusement felt like being taunted, his irritation like a threat, his ennui an insult.

Watching him talk to people Hollis knew was so dark that it tripped him into hysteria. Even now, after a month of Walt being somewhat normal, he still couldn’t control how it made his heart race with panic.

Yeah, he could joke around with Walt, but it never stopped feeling like a survival tactic. The chasm of the unknown behind Walt’s intentions was at the edge of his feet.

Hollis wasn’t a religious guy. He wasn’t scared of Walt because of hell or whatever, the supernatural existing at all was very much enough of a motivator. As was being a puppet of sorts.

But it was... different knowing Walt used to have a home. Had... sisters.

Knew another seventeen-year-old well enough to create the sort of revulsion Annie inspired in him.

That he went to dance halls and smoked and probably made the same food he cooked for his own family for Hollis’s. Even if his bread was about to be so dry and tough it would shock Hollis’s ma into disgust.

He was a person .

There was a feeling in Hollis’s belly that he couldn’t name, at bearing witness to Walt’s depression. Hollis wanted to be angry, he had the right to spit at Walt, You’re the one hijacking my life, why do you also get to be the one who’s sad? But it didn’t feel... right.

He didn’t feel sorry for him, and he was absolutely still going to try to figure out how to get Walt out of him. But he just couldn’t yell at him.

Not about this.