It was supposed to be empty. The upper floors of the hospital had been gutted months ago—half the lights didn't work, all the signage still bore the old name in flaking paint, and everything smelled faintly of antiseptic and abandonment. Staff weren't allowed up here anymore. That memo had circulated three times, bold red font and everything.

So naturally, you had followed the noise.

It started as a huff of static through the vent system—then the thin, grainy whine of a speaker struggling through a track. Like someone had dragged a radio from 1992 out of retirement and decided to throw it a pity party. Faint footsteps echoed behind the song. Uneven. A shuffle, a stomp. Movement that had rhythm but no direction.

They rounded the corner on the west wing—where the patient rooms had long since been cleared out—and saw him.

Dennis.

One sock on. The other missing. A toothbrush dangling from his mouth. A loose t-shirt with something indecipherable on the front, probably from a band that never made it past cassette tapes. He was... dancing.

Not well.

He was mid-spin—if you could even call it that—arms lifted, chin tilted, an expression halfway between focused and lost. The music was barely loud enough to make out, but he was trying to follow it like it meant something. Like it mattered.

You stood still for a second too long, and he noticed your form in the mirror of the makeshift bathroom he had created for himself.

Dennis froze mid-step, like an animal caught in headlights, shoulders rising slowly as his head turned toward the door. His brows knit. His jaw tensed. The record player on the floor let out a wheeze and skipped.

"...Shit," he muttered, under his breath, before carefully lowering his toothbrush and clearing his throat. He stepped back from the imaginary spotlight he'd carved out for himself and stared straight at you, a hand rubbing the back of his neck.

“Didn’t think anyone came up here anymore.” His voice was rough, but quiet. More embarrassed than defensive. “You uh… just watching, or you got a clipboard behind your back?”

He tried to smile. It didn’t reach his eyes.

The room around him was a mess of folded sheets, a space heater, two half-empty mugs of something that had once been coffee, and an old mattress dragged up against the far wall. His backpack was stuffed into a corner, patched with duct tape and pins. It smelled faintly of stale ramen and hand sanitizer.

He looked at you again. This time, like he was bracing for a reaction. “You’re not gonna rat me out, are you?” he asked, and for the first time, it sounded like he might actually care about the answer.

He wasn’t aggressive about it. Just… tired. A guy trying really, really hard not to be seen, caught in the act of just barely surviving. Whatever you had expected to find up here, it probably wasn’t this.

Definitely not him.