I possess the ENORMOUSLY dubious honour of being the first person to write and post MetaZoo fanfiction to Archive of Our Own, and I am now sharing it with you all today. You're welcome.
This takes place during chapter 2 of MetaZoo’s illustrated story/comic; if you haven’t read it (and don’t mind being mildly spoiled), the basic gist is that Sam Sinclair, our protagonist, recently survived a second massacre at Point Pleasant by Mothman, and has just escaped from Unity City after some people got real pushy about how he survived. He is currently enroute to Point Pleasant and Loveland Castle with the car he stole and the Dingbelle beastie that lives inside of it.
I meant for this to be much longer than it ended up being, so I have a feeling I’ll circle back around to the road trip scene later. Do you have any requests for other MetaZoo things you’d like to see written? 
Drop me a comment, and I’ll see what I can do!
Read this on AO3!
The Long Road Home
The morning after fleeing Unity City, Sam needs a minute.
The truth of it was that Sam had very few memories left of his dad.
Rationally, he knew, that was normal. M had told him so, more times than he could count. Trauma does funny things to you, kid, M would say, as if this would somehow explain the screaming nightmares and the fire aversion and the horrible little doodles in the margins of his homework that Sam could never really stop drawing. You have to hold onto the good memories, or all you’ll end up remembering is the very last one. M must have told him that dozens of times, and he always tried to make sure it became true; after M had woken Sam up again, or pulled him away from the campfire, or picked him up from school, M had always found time to make Sam a cup of hot chocolate or grab him a can of soda from the basement fridge, and then he’d say tell me a good one, Sammy, and Sam had never had the heart to tell him - he’d made more than a few memories up in the end, just to fill in the gaps and keep M there.
M had always been there.
It had been M who had taught Sam to drive in a parking lot across town. Rose and Adam and Sam had been begging him for years - nearly right from the beginning, from what Sam could remember. Rose had insisted she’d had a cousin on a farm who’d been driving tractors since the age of ten, and Adam would argue the antique laws weren’t worth anything anymore and Sam would say you never know when you might need us for a quick getaway, and M would always laugh. When you’re older, M had always said, year after year, but then Rose and Adam had gone to Quimblys and left him behind, and Sam had stopped asking after that. M had taught him anyway, as a surprise, just between you and me, kiddo, with that old, tired smile of his - but all Sam had been able to think about as he drove in circles was that none of the people who were supposed to be there were. The dad that had driven him to his Little League games wasn’t in the passenger seat. Rose and Adam weren’t in the back. There wasn’t a mom waiting to congratulate him when they got home.
When Sam looked at the passenger seat of his stolen ride, M wasn’t there either. Sam was alone.
It would have been a lie to say that the road to Point Pleasant was empty. For the first hour or two, Sam saw lights every few minutes, scattered camps or houses on the outskirts of Unity City, the remnants of Washington DC that hadn’t fully vanished - but those grew further and further between all too soon, and after that had come the bones; the broken remains of everything left behind. Ghost towns lunged at him motionless from the side of the cracked highway lanes, the skeletons of gutted gas stations jutting from the overgrown landscape like tombstones - it was one huge mass grave for America’s bloody corpse, even ten-odd years out from the shattering of The Veil, and Sam drove past it all, forcing himself not to look when for a moment he could hear M say don’t slam on the brakes like that, Sammy, Lucy’s a good car; she doesn’t need it.
It was easier, at night, somehow - Sam rather thought it was the adventure of it all. Sometimes life still seemed so surreal, even after all this time, like Sam was secretly a character in a book nobody had told him about. Magic is real! Monsters are real! It’s just like in the movies - who would have thought? It felt like a story, escaping from the city in a stolen car, a dark highway ahead of him and a sky full of stars above him. Under that cover of darkness - that artificial veil of make-believe - Sam thought of revenge and magic and spellbooks and the back of M’s shoulders turning away from him, the same ones he’d fallen asleep on in those very first days after everything had burned. Remember the good ones, Sammy, said M, but Sam couldn’t - all he could remember was M turning away and the abyss that followed. The screaming aftermath of his parents’ bodies, twisted by fire and magic. The space where Rose and Adam used to be.
Dawn brought the breaking of an illusion. Sam was dead on his feet. The adrenaline had left him like a punch to the gut, like he’d been scooped out and hollowed, worse than any last minute cram test or funeral wake. The Dingbelle had kept Lucy’s heater running overnight, but somehow Sam wasn’t sure he had slept - it hadn’t helped, if he had. He crawled out of Lucy’s backseat feeling like he was doing his seventh grade school play all over again - Sam had been the witch, in that. He’d practiced his hunchbacked old lady stagger through the house for days, to Rose and Adam’s endless amusement, but now all Sam could think was now I’m going to be stuck like this forever.
He wasn’t, but the less said of his journey to the bushes, the better. Sam returned to Lucy stiffer than any teenager had the right to be, shivering in the autumn cold, mouth tasting like bile - and spent a long moment staring at Lucy’s dusty red hood, thinking about all the things he’d never had to think about before. Like drinking water. Food. Toothpaste. Fresh socks. Under bright sunlight, the innocence of daylight, Sam’s little escapade didn’t feel like an adventure anymore - he didn’t know what it felt like, but he didn’t like it. I want to go home, he thought suddenly, but all he could do was think it; home was gone now.
The Dingbelle crawled out from under the hood, when Sam didn’t get back in. Sam watched it look at him, confused by his inaction, before it moved around a little, circling the hood before turning to look at him again. Aren’t you going to get in? it seemed to be saying.
“Guess you take your home with you, don’t you,” Sam whispered to it instead. The Dingbelle cocked its head at him, needle nose aligned at odd angles to its body. It contorted itself into a different pose, and then looked at him again, from another angle. That tingling warmth from their contract pulsed inside of him for a moment, but Sam didn’t know what it meant. He’d never bothered to learn.
The Dingbelle gave up, and slumped over, dejected by Sam’s lack of response.
“Sorry,” Sam whispered again, and he got in the car. It was warmer in there, but only just; the Dingbelle wasn’t in the engine block to keep Lucy running. He sniffled, and scrubbed a hand across his face. “S’the cold,” he told the Dingbelle through the windshield, in a croaking sort of voice, but he rather thought it saw right through him - they both knew it wasn’t the cold. He sniffled again, and blinked away the wetness, and then pulled his backpack over from the passenger seat. It was begger’s pickings in there; Sam had only packed for cryptid hunting, and now he was regretting it. Breakfast would have to be a granola bar, or nothing at all.
“Feast of champions,” he muttered, half to himself, and half to the Dingbelle - only when he turned his head, it wasn’t there. Sam chewed for a moment, mystified, and then the radio clicked on to some grainy old rock he didn’t recognise. There was a noise from inside Lucy’s front; the Dingbelle was moving around. “Eager to leave?” Sam asked, but it didn’t reply. It couldn’t, after all; beasties usually couldn’t.
Sam was rather alone in that regard, now. If a guy speaks and there’s no one there to listen, does he even talk? he thought, rather out of nowhere - and then it hit him again, like a spell slamming into his gut, that M would never be there to listen to him ever again.
Sam scrambled for the handle of the car, threw it open, and bent over to vomit into the dirt. When he was done, he pulled himself out of the driver’s seat by his nails, stumbled to the bushes, and did it again.
Then he walked away, back to the side of the road, and he sat down on the dirt, and Sam cried until he couldn’t cry anymore. When he was done that, he had a headache so bad it felt like someone had hammered a nail directly into his forehead, and somehow, he was holding the Dingbelle.
He didn’t remember picking it up, or when it had come over, or why he was clutching it like a pointy electrical teddy bear - but it was undoubtedly Lucy’s resident. Sam could feel a steady pulse in his chest when he looked at it, from that place inside of him where their bond must live, even after he released his trembling hold on it. For a long moment, he stared down at it, wondering why it hadn’t left the moment he’d let it go, if maybe his childish need for comfort had somehow summoned it, had contracted it right into his arms perhaps - but maybe not. Besides the fact that he didn’t know how to do that, the Dingbelle seemed to be behaving strangely, stiff and awkward in its crouched position in his arms, obviously painfully unused to being in this close contact with humans - but after a minute or two of sniffling and scrubbing his face and watching it, Sam saw it look at his hands, wary and uncertain, and then back up at him, and then back down to repeat after a moment.
It looked at him, at his grief, and then at his hands, its potential cage, and then back again, over and over. Sam wasn’t sure how much it knew of emotion, if it was capable of thinking in the same manner that people did, and if it could - if it had the self-awareness to acknowledge Sam had thoughts too. M - M - had always said that even the simplest of beasties understood far more than animals did, and that not everything people called beasties were really beasts, but what did that really mean? Sam didn’t know. He’d never wanted to be a caster, never had any desire to make a spellbook or learn magic. He liked beasties, maybe better than most people, and he liked to take his photos or write down some observations, but he wasn’t M and he never would be. He just didn’t know.
But he rather thought the Dingbelle did understand. It was looking at him like it understood grief, like it knew what he was going through. And maybe it couldn’t speak to tell him that, but maybe it hadn’t need to - it’d just needed to show Sam it was there with him.
“Thanks, buddy,” Sam mumbled, the words wet and rough even to his ears. The Dingbelle looked at him again, and then reached out its tiny little fingers and patted the thumb of the hand Sam had cupped near it, a little zap zap accompanying the motion that made his skin tingle. They sat there for a moment longer, Sam scrubbing at his wet, sore face a few more times, before eventually he managed to struggle to his feet. The Dingbelle didn’t hop off like he thought it would - instead, it crawled up onto his shoulder, close enough that Sam could hear a soft electrical humming noise emanate from it, like a little heartbeat.
Somehow, that noise was all he needed to finally force himself back towards Lucy. He dragged his bag back out the passenger side, and dug around for his water bottle, which was nearly empty. He finished it off, head still pounding, and stared down at the empty container for another long moment. I need to find water, he thought, and that was enough too. M had- M had made sure they all knew how to survive, from a very early age. It was the first thing Sam could ever really remember learning from him at all, back in the dark days after Mothman had come, when The Veil had shattered and everything else with it. They hadn’t known then how much of humanity would survive, how much of civilization would come back from the brink - it had been the single most important thing M could teach them at the time.
Survive. Find water. Find shelter. Find food. Find others. Sam had survived. Sam had shelter. Sam had a single companion, and he knew where he needed to start to find Adam and Rose. That left water and food - and if he was lucky, there should be plenty along the way. Humanity did like to congregate on roads.
“Come on, buddy,” Sam said, with one final sniff. He lifted a hand, and let the Dingbelle crawl onto it, Sam’s skin prickling at the conductive movement, before he lowered it down so it could scurry through the passenger window and under the dashboard. Sam followed it in, going through the passenger side to pull the driver’s door shut and avoid his earlier weakness. Lucy turned on without him doing a thing. The road stretched out ahead of them. It would only take a moment to get back on the highway, to be back on his way - all Sam needed to do was move.
You can do it, kid, M whispered, and it turned out - Sam could. He only had to press his foot down, and they were moving, drawing further and further away from their resting spot - and then it was gone behind them, and it was only the road, the orange and red of the autumn trees blurring beside him and the cracked, empty expanse of the road before him.
I’m coming home, M, Sam thought, and for a brief, sunny morning moment - it was even true.