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queenoftheworldisdead · 3 years

Text

Help wanted

Summery: Boarding house with the occasional unwanted tenant.

Note: I don’t think Arvin is dark in this, but it might be for other people.

Warning: non-con/dub con, dark theme, choking, slight spanking, cream pie

Grey Arvin Russell x Reader; Dark Lee Bodecker x Reader

🛎

The bell rung on the door of your boarding house. Drying your hands with a dish rag you got yourself ready to meet whoever it was coming through the door. When you crossed through the archway you were shocked still.

He had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, his clothes looked all greased up, the hat that hid a thick tuft of hair peaked out looked like it had seen better days.

His type weren't known for being on this side of town so you figured he was either new to town or looking for someone.

You welcomed him with a soft smile and gave your name.

"How can I help you today sir?"

"Hello Ma'am." He said politely, tipping his hat slightly at you. His thick country twang confirming the former. "I saw the help wanted sign out side. Y'all still hiring?"

"Um..Y-yeah... I need a handy man, job includes free room, and board, but I won't just hire anybody though. There is a washer in the basement, if you fix one of them the jobs yours."

🛎

Waddling to the basement with your Daddy's old toolbox, the heavy rusty thing knocked at your knees each step. He jogged over to you, taking the kit from your grasp and you thank him for it.

"The left one broke down a month ago and the other I'm guessing couldn't handle the over use. Dryers work just fine though."

Before he could reply you heard the door bell ring again. You excused yourself and left him to work.

"I'm coming, just a minute!" You shout down the hall as you hurried.

🛎

"Sorry it took so long."

"Saul right Ma'am" he said rising from the floor. You watched from the door as he twisted a dial. The hum of the machine filled the growing awkward silence.

"Well aren't you something! I guess that means your hired."

He lifted his hat to smooth back stray strands of hair, his shy smile hid as he looked down to the floor.

🛎

"Your room's on the third floor. Has a bed and a little sitting place. It's really small just enough room to lay your head really." The sound of foot-steps coming down the stairs halted you. Your eyes watch their back disappear into the night, until he cleared his throat bringing your attention back.

"That'll do just fine Ma'am." Something about his southern accent made your heart flutter. He picked up his duffel, throwing the strap over his shoulder as you dug out your ledger.

"Just down there is the supper table. I cook breakfast and dinner. You can eat in your room if you like, a lot of them do." You explained as you watch him sign the book. Arvin Russell it read.

He adjusted his strap as you talked, his deep brown eyes made it hard for you to keep his gaze, making you fidget nervously in place. "Most folks are gone during the day so I don't make lunch, but if you like no problem just give me a holler. Bath rooms are at the end of each hall."

Digging in your desk you find the master keys and a list of things that needed to be fixed. His fingers grazed yours lightly in the transfer, Arvin's touch sent a ripple of heat up to your face. He flipped through the wrinkled papers, scanning over the chores with a wrinkled brow.

"S-sorry to put so much on you, but when my daddy got sick things got out of hand and I never been one for fixing things."

"No problem Ma'am."

🛎

During the day you kept busy. Scrubbing windows and mopping the halls of each floor. Arvin crossed paths with you on occasion. Gently brushing past you with his tools as he headed to his next assignment.

The door to Odis', one of the tents, room was left wide open when you walked by. Curious you glanced in, catching sight of Arvin lifting his shirt. Your legs stop moving as you watched him wipe away beads of sweat from his brow with the hem. You couldn't stop yourself from ogling his well toned exposed stomach.

The clanking of the dust pan hitting the floor caught his attention. Your face burn with embarrassment when he found you standing outside the room. Panicked you quickly picked up the pan and rushed off to the ground floor.

🛎

You heard Arvin call your name. "Yeah?" You replied weakly still embarrassed.

*Relax he isn't thinking about you. Probably just thinks your a clumsy dits.

He came halfway down the stairs, looking down at you from the banister. "You got a minute? I need a little help" he asked politely.

"Oh sure... Uh sure" you reply looking up at him. Arvin abandoned his cap, his dark hair sticking to his forehead, curling from sweat. More sweat pooled on his shirt, the dampness helped stick the fabric to his lean figure.

Following him up the stairs he led you to a room on the third floor. In the corner of the room there was a large metal pipe leaning against the wall.

You watched as Arvin lifted the heavy pipe, angling it vertically in position.

"Can you hold this?" he called over his shoulder.

Walking over you grabbed it and Arvin moved to get behind you. He took your hands and placed them along the pipe as you steadied yourself to hold it still while it slightly wobbled.

"OK hold still just like that." He bent over beside you, digging into the tool box that rested on the floor. When he rose, Arvin stayed close behind you. You could feel the heat coming off him, he smelled like sweat and after shave. Your hands felt sweaty as you felt rattled a bit by his closeness.

The pipe shifted a bit, you tried nudging it slightly, but couldn't get it back in place.

"Stay steady" his breath tickled your ear, you gasped making him chuckle lightly. "Just like that" he moved the pipe back into place, pushing into your butt when he stepped closer. "Just hold right... here." He placed a hand on your hip and you tensed. His fingers lightly squeezed your softness. You had to fight hard to bring your mind out of the gutter, he just needed your help, nothing more, the spot between your thighs thought otherwise.

With his arms raised above you, Arvin tightened the nuts to secure the metal tube. You swallowed thickly when you heard him grunt as he forced the wrench to move. Looking over to your right you spied his exposed arms. His muscle flexing as he moved.

"Almost done" he said to you, pushing you almost flush to the steel, bumping you gently with each twist of the wrench. You only nod, unable to conjure words to speak properly. Through the cheap fabric of your dress you felt something hard poke at you through his jeans.

*Stomp it now get your mind out of the gutter.

You don't know what had gotten into you lately. First staring at him like a creeper now thinking about his manhood. Maybe its about time you started going back to church you thought to yourself. Cause right now it felt like the devil was leading you to temptation.

When Arvin stepped back you had to choke down a whimper from the loss of his feel. Pressing your lips together you prayed he aint hear you.

Tapping a hand on your shoulder you turn to look at him. "All done." He smiled at you, your hands release the pipe and you backed away.

"Thanks Ma'am."

"You're welcome Arvin" You smiled shyly then rushed off back to your desk.

🛎

No matter how hard your days were the nights were by far the worst. Lying in bed you felt the mattress dip. The fear of the impending figure behind you prickled your skin.

Your eyes squeezed tightly shut as you tried to force yourself to sleep. Holding your breath in a dumb attempt to force yourself to pass out. The blanket covering you pulled away and you felt water fall from your closed eyes.

🛎

Propping your head on your hands you leaned on your desk. Your eyes drooped as you zoned out, looking into space.

"You alright Ma'am?" Arvin startled you as he walked down the stairs.

"I couldn't sleep." You stand up and stretch, yawning a bit. He walked closer to your desk, dressed in his work pants shirt.

"Try some warm milk. Used to help me." He passed by your desk, walking down the hall with tool kit in had to the washers. The old machines acting up again since last time he fixed them.

"Oh Arvin" you shouted at him before he passed through the door. "Um.. can I add something to your list. No worries if you can't get it done today, but I would much appreciate it if you could."

Placing the box down by the laundry door he walked back over, digging the sheet from his back pocket. You grabbed a pen hopeful it was a task he wouldn't mind sorting right away.

"If you can't fix the lock today no problem. I will just go sleep in the attic." You spoke casually as he slipped you the paper to write on. He read over your assignment and you watched as his lips made a hard line.

"I locked myself out of my room, didn't want to wake you to get the spare, sorry. Now I done made more work for you" you laughed, but their was no humor in it. His features softened and you hoped he wouldn't press the issue.

Pushing the paper back to him, you bid him a due and turn to face away to pretend to make a call. When you heard him walk away you let out a breath.

🛎

Arvin was a saint among men. You don't know where he found the money, but he added a chain lock to your door. You smiled at the shiny gold. Sliding on the chain and the bottom lock you prepared for bed.

Laying in bed the thought of the extra lock helped sooth your nerve as you slipped into sleep.

You felt an uncomfortable lump at your back rousing you awake. Your eyes shot open and a hand covered your mouth before you could scream out.

"You think your smart, putting that chain on that door" the beer on his breath hit your nose. Your tears soaked his hand as he held you.

You shake your head 'no' repeatedly in reply. He was still dressed in his work clothes as he laid next to you. The sound of his belt jingling made the tears fall harder.

"I told your daddy I would look out for you. How am I gonna do that if you lock the door?"

Lee, a local cop, only came around when his wife was either on the mends or she just flat out kicked him out. Your father had offered the man a free bed whenever he needed. His way of thanking him for keeping the neighborhood safe.

Lee pushed up your night gown and tsked when he felt your panties. The hand on your mouth slipped down your neck and you blubbered out your apologizes. He hated panties, too much work he called it. "What I told you about these?" he grumbled, forcing the fabric down.

"I-i'm sorry I thought my monthlies were coming on." You sniffed. You tried hard not to cry, you just hopped he would squeeze hard enough to make you pass out.

You heard him spit in his hand, he bumped into your back as he lubed himself up. You yelped when he smacked your ass hard, the sudden sting of pain loosening your locked legs.

"Yea you said that last week. I aint forget girl." He shoved himself inside after he found your opening. "Fucking bitch. I run the house gawd damn it!" Lee was mad at his wife agin. What ever his spite with her, you were paying for it. "Not gonna tell me what to do. Fucking bitch." He growled, panting heavily as he pumped.

You jolted with each thrust, no matter how many times Lee did it, it never got easier.

"Please." You panted desperately. "Please don't come in me" you choked out, his hand tightening his grip around your throat. You had been lucky so far, but you knew it was only a matter of time before your luck ran out.

Lee didn't like back talk, this was his show and you were just here for the ride. Pushing you completely flat you grip the fabric of the sheets. Lifting your ass as he rose to his knees he fucked into you harder. You cried out unable to adjust to his lengthen. He chuckled darkly at your pain, slamming into you repeatedly with a punishing rhythm.

He cursed your name. Reminded you of your place as he came deep in you. His seed filling your cunt as you pressed your head into the mattress and cried.

He slipped out of the bed. His pants once again jingling as he fixed himself up and headed out the door.

🛎

It was that time of the month again.

Whenever he shouted he spit. It was disgusting. You had given him chance after chance, but he used them all. "I'm sorry Tommy if you don't have the rent by Thursday you are going to have to leave."

"Fuck you bitch you let that boy stay here rent free!" He shouted. Trying to make sure tent knew.

"He works here. He earns he keep."

"Then let me earn mine? or give me another week." He barked. His tone more of a demand than a request.

Sighing you hung your head low. Rubbing your temple with one hand you hugged your stomach with the other. First of the month was the worst. Tents ducked and dodged. Begged and pleaded or straight up demand just to not pay rent.

"Next Friday Tommy... That's the last time you hear me." You try to sound strong, but you knew he didn't give a shit as long as he won. "If you aint got it then, then I'm changing the locks and putting your stuff on the street."

He slammed his door in your face and you turned on your heels headed to the next delinquent.

"You alright Ma'am?" Straight ahead, Arvin poked out from the bathroom. You had to fight yourself from looking down at his lower half. In your peripheral you could see he was just in a towel that hung around his waist.

His wet hair seemed to curl under the towel on his head. Strands sticking to his forehead, his face still damp from the shower.

"Umm yeah. Uh just rents due and folks get a little uppity around this time of the month." You dry chuckle turning your eyes up at the ceiling. Fighting yourself from venturing further.

You couldn't tell if it was the steam that came from the bathroom or you. Whenever he was close, your body would react. The heat would turn up making you sweat.

"Well alright then. You have a good night Ma'am."

🛎

*Bang Bang Bang

"Tommy!" You bang again. "Tommy! I will give you to the count of three. If you don't open this door and pay up. I am coming in and kicking you out!" You huffed tapping a foot.

"Ma'am?"

"Morning Arvin. Sorry did I wake you?"

"No was working down the hall."

"Tommy, skipped out on rent I think." Taking a deep breath you lifted your master key ring and unlocked the door. When you peered inside the room was a mess, no sign of Tommy.

Arvin followed you in side, with a hand on your hip you groaned. The amount of clean up you would have to do to ready it for a new tenant would take all day.

"Arvin can you change the lock on the door. I hate doing this, but I gotta kick him out"

"Sure thing ma'am"

As you turn to leave you over at Arvin who was still assessing the damage to the room. "Oh and can you possibly stay close. If he comes around I might need your help."

Arvin only nodded in response as you took your leave.

🛎

Tommy didn't come back that day or the next. Putting up a sign you thought that you could clean up the room a bit, before the weekend. With the storm you figured not to many people would be coming around anyway.

Taking up a few boxes you get to tossing. One box you would keep in the addict. Somethings were just to hard to throw away sometimes, but a good chunk would go.

Thunder bashed down filling the room with a blinding white light. You yelped loudly bringing the sound of feet rushing down your way.

"You alright Ma'am?" Arvin looked in the room worried.

"Sorry Arvin, it’s just the storm. Lightening makes me a bit skittish sorry." You apologize as you get back to clearing the room.

"Well I am finished with my list for today, would you mind if I trouble you for some company?"

"U-um sure" you tried to fight off the smile.

His lips curled as he walked in the room. The instant he crossed the door frame you heard shouting coming from down stairs. When the voice made itself more clear you frowned.

"Oh uh sorry.. I need to tend to that" you say softly. With your head low you walked past him.

🛎

Lee was wet and agitated. "Fucking bitch had the nerve to accuse me of drinking again." He spat while you sat waiting on the bed. "I aint touch a drop today" he said smugly.

You looked at your feet as he undressed in front of you. The sound of a siren blared loudly from out side, Lee turned and squinted at the sound. "Shit!" He stopped undressing and ran out.

Getting up from the bed you grabbed your robe and peered out the hall. The front door was open and Lee wasn't there. The rain still coming down hard, blew in through the open door so you walked bare foot to close it and see if he had really gone. His car was gone that was for sure and as you looked into the rain it seemed he had disappeared too. You exhaled in relief, backed away and closed the entrance.

"Ma'am?" Arvin called to you out of breath.

"Shit!" You gasped, turning to face him. Your heart bashed in your chest as you stared at him crazily. He was soaked to the bone. "Your gonna catch a cold walking around like that" you scolded tightening your robe.

"Do you have any clean towels?" You asked, but you turn back to look at the door. Hoping that Lee wouldn't suddenly comeback.

"I think so.. I know I need to do laundry, not too good at it so I've been holding it off."

"Well, I don't normally do this, but if you like I can mix yours with mine. I don't have enough clothes to justify using all that water anyway."you shrugged.

"I don't want to put you out" he stepped closer to you. "The way his clothes clung to him you had to try hard not to stare.

"N-no trouble. Um wait here I'll give you a towel just in case." You leave him and head back into your room. Digging in your cabinet for the towels. When you turned around again Arvin stood in your living room, looking around your meager abode. "I know it aint much, but at least I got my own bathroom" you chuckled.

When he stepped closer and you had to hold yourself together. Arvin dragged his teeth over his bottom lip while his eyes fell to the opening in your rope.

"S-sorry" your face felt on fire, embarrassed you looked down to your feet. You held out the towel and closed the robe with the other. Arvin’s hand lifted your chin and your eyes went wild.

His lips felt so soft. You just wanted to kiss them all day. Arvin's arms wrapped around your waist and you wanted to melt into him.

Arvin turned you around and backed you up until you both fell backwards onto the bed. Arvin rested comfortably between your thighs while his manhood pressed on your mound. You didn’t know if it were his jeans or your nature making you go wet, but either way you welcomed it.

You gasped when he sucked on your neck, kissing the spot after pulling off. Arvin ground his hips into you making the warmth between your legs soak with desperation.

Holding himself above you, you forced yourself to finally look back at him without shying away. He smirked down at you as he peeled off his top, the wet garment hit the floor hard. His muscles moved and tightened as he freed his shaft. Biting your bottom lips you hummed when he rubbed the tip hard against your slit then lining himself up. Arvin pressed his weight down as he pushed inside slowly. You moaned his name at his fullness. The bed frame squeaked as he rocked.

Kissing you again swallowing your moans, you wrap your legs around his back urging him deeper. Ever the gentleman he obliged.

🛎

*Bang Bang Bang

The furious jiggling and banging was most definitely Lee. You were surprised he hadn't popped the lock as usual, but it was only a matter of time before he got through.

Arvin must not have noticed so you slapped his chest. Pushing him off, but he wouldn't stop. Instead kissing you again as you tried to speak.

"Arvin please, that's Lee... he's.. cop" you spoke on his lips, but your words meant nothing.

Arvin's eye were darkened with lust. You tried to spin away, but he hooked your legs keeping you there, fucking you with his slow pace. He was splitting your mind in two. You wanted to cum so desperately, but your reason told you that Lee wouldn't take kindly to this.

Arvin continued to rock into you as Lee screamed at the door. Your back arched when Arvin took your nipple in his mouth.

"That's it. That's my girl. Come for me." He mumbled over your nipple. Licking the areola and sucking it again, you came around him, squeezing his cock making him hum with approval.

The banging on your bedroom wall brought your high down fast. "I will shoot through this gawd damn wall if you don't let me in!" Lee threatened. You looked at Arvin with panic in your eye. Arvin kissed you gently again as Lee screamed on. You were terrified, you hoped you could explain Arvin's presence away as a maintenance emergency, but before you could properly forma a though he pulled up his pants as you fixed yourself. Arvin didn't stop or look back as you called out to him. Paying you no mind as he opened the door and walked out.

The sound in the hall was so loud you thought lightening had broke through the roof. You rushed out of your room and found Lee out cold, with a pool growing around his perimeter. You looked at Arvin, the young man unconcerned as he began dragging the cop into your room by his feet.

"Get a bucket and a mop" he commanded, the pistol tucked deep in his pants. Without a word you followed his orders.

🛎

#Dark Lee Bodecker x Reader #Dark themes #dark!arvin x reader #dark!arvin!russell x reader #dark!arvin x black reader #dark!arvin x black!reader #dark arvin x black reader #darkish arvin x black reader #dark arvin x black!reader #dark lee x black reader #dark lee x black!reader #dark!lee x black!reader #black writer

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kylejsugarman · 3 years

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wow i wasn't expecting so much kind feedback from that post :’) below the cut is the fic, “love will not break your heart”. PLEASE remember this was written five years ago and i wasn't expecting to fall back into moral orel but here tf we are ❤️

i. idolatry

"Who does that cloud look like?"

"Umm…" The brunette tilted her head pensively, tracing the arbitrary peaks and valleys of the cloud in question with a critical eye. Her expression of solemn concentration buckled under a luminescent smile as she finally identified the cloud's likeness. "It's Joshua! See the beard?"

"Oh, wow, you're right!" He pointed to an adjacent puff of condensation on the verge of dissipating under the snowy glare of winter sun. "And there's the city of Jericho!"

She giggled in agreement and rolled onto her side; verdant streaks of earth branded her baptism-white cheek. A strand of sandy hair had escaped her new red headband (he had nervously presented it to her and promptly melted at the sight of her grateful beam) and now unfurled down the length of her pearly face. He brushed it back into place, then blushed.

"Uh, sorry."

"It's okay, Orel," she said with an adoring laugh. His timid eyes--coppery pools into which one's best qualities were inevitably reflected--found her own, then flicked downwards in humility. Though she appreciated his respect for her, the reverence with which he treated her was slightly disquieting. There was something to worship in both of them, something she felt she failed to adequately express. "Orel?"

The eyes, lit dreamily by a refulgent sky. "Yes, Christina?"

She touched a hesitant hand to his face and waited for the momentary tension of his form to abate as he recognized the tenderness of the gesture. There was the inexorable flutter of panic in her gut, as if her father were crouched behind one of Inspiration Peak's many bushes waiting to snatch her and drag her back into the study, but she quashed it readily. Her love for Orel was stronger than her fear of her father and with its pristine power she could have demolished that study with a single fiery glance.

But Christina had always favored creation over destruction, so she leaned over and pressed a soft, pink kiss to Orel's mouth. She tried to whisper "Happy Valentine's Day" to establish her motive, but was immediately silenced as he braced himself up on an elbow and shyly reciprocated the kiss. He tasted like candy heart chalk and mint.

"I love you," he said after he had bashfully withdrawn his head.

The world was shiny and new, the clouds morphing cheerfully behind him into benevolent figures who would shelter the tender bloom of their love. And Christina Posabule reached up to frame Orel's face in her gentle hands and said "I love you too" for the first time.

ii. respect

"Ugh. I never did understand the appeal of French toast."

Dottie scrutinized the buffet offerings, her angelically-proportioned visage contorted into a rictus of disgust. Her plate was sparsely garnished with a serving of greens and a mimosa, which she had already taken a drag from. As she eyed the decadent bricks of syrup-drenched toast, Florence calmly forked an omelet onto her own plate and waited for Dottie to make a decision. The Valentine's Day brunch was rarely an extravagant affair, but there were certainly enough dishes to satisfy even Dottie's impossibly high culinary standards.

"I think French toast is wonderful," Florence said. She expected this remark to be met with a haughty sniff or snide comment, but Dottie abstained. She even summoned a mordant grin.

"Well. I suppose the French are the superior culture for a reason." The blonde delicately pronged a lone slice of French toast onto her plate, taking care to select the most lightly-sugared piece on display. "Alright, I'm done. Quick, before I change my mind."

Florence led Dottie back to their booth, which had been denoted by the placement of their respective pocketbooks on the table (Florence's sturdy handbag looking markedly haggard next to Dottie's designer clutch). The two women supped here together after church, a tradition that had been inaugurated shortly after the Reverend's Easter sermon. Dottie had apologized to Florence in a rare fit of humility and promised to stop berating her roommate for her figure; Florence, ever the victim, dutifully accepted her apology. However, Dottie had surprised her by making a noticeable effort to curb her cruel commentary and even started contributing to the community by taking on sewing projects. Her lovely dresses soon filled the closets of every woman in Moralton--including Florence's. The rather flattering candy-pink wrap dress that Florence was wearing now was Dottie's handiwork, a fact the blonde managed to work into every conservation.

"Darling, that dress is absolutely divine on you," Dottie said, lighting a cigarette.

"Yes, thank you." Florence smoothed down the collar and smiled at the sight of her freckled hands. A modest diamonded band adorned her ring finger.

Dottie noticed her admiring of the piece of jewelry; she pursed her polished lips expectantly. "I really think you should've sprung for something bigger."

"Oh, I think this is just lovely the way it is," Florence insisted. She elevated her hand in order to demonstrate the diamond's iridescence. A slant of noon light caught the mineral and fissured apart into chromatic prisms; diamonded specks twinkled across the laminated tabletop. It was a rather appropriate expression of Florence's own appearance, something the ring's buyer had obviously taken into consideration. "Aren't you happy with your ring?"

"Me? Why I'd rather die than have this ring taken off my finger." Dottie inspected the arrangement of jewels gracing her own finger, which were independently lustrous and set into an ingot of platinum. The colors matched the sheen of her blonde curls perfectly.

An inexorable smile pressed dimples into either of Florence's cheeks. "You really like it?"

Dottie flicked her cigarette ash into the table's decorative vase with an insouciant tap of her manicured finger. Her expression was characteristically enigmatic ("you can't let them think you're interested," she had lectured Florence as she practiced looking jaded in the mirror), but the favor with which she regarded the ring was unmistakable. Finally, she said "I love it" in an emphatically decisive voice tempered with genuine affection. An affection that Florence reciprocated with an echoing of the sentiment before cutting into her omelet and watching Dottie slice willingly into a piece of French toast.

iii. requited

"Um, anything else, Steph?"

The tattooed, pierced, and freshly dyed vision of beauty glanced up from her book, eyes lightly glazed from an hour of reading. She had salvaged a rather intriguing volume of essays about evolution from a seedy bookshop in Sinville and was determined to complete the tome before it could be snatched and tossed on the literary pyre. Forghetty's wasn't exactly the ideal location for intellectual pursuits, but Stephanie had abandoned the shop at the mere notion of Karl and Kim Latchkey requesting some disgustingly romantic apparel for the holiday and decided that she deserved some discounted Valentine's vodka for soldiering through the week unscathed.

"Another vodka would be great."

Dolly smiled warmly. "Coming right up."

As the blonde scooped ice into a tumbler, Stephanie became suddenly and acutely aware of the candy-pink heart branding the small of Dolly's neck. Despite having stitched ink into countless arms and sides, she was shocked by the heart's symmetry. It was absolutely flawless.

"One vodka," Dolly said, sliding the glass across the condensation-varnished bar. Her fingers were impossibly long, slender--piano fingers. Stephanie could not fathom why these trivial details fascinated her so, but she was suddenly pressed to learn more about the daisy-pretty bartender who had dutifully refreshed her tumbler for the past hour. Starting with that immaculate tattoo.

"Thanks. Uh, Dolly? Where'd you get that ink on your neck?"

"Ink on my--?" She palpated her neck in befuddlement before remembering the previous night and giggling wanly. "Oh, it-it's just pen. My friends thought it would be funny if I actually got a tattoo, so they had the guy draw it on, but I… I chickened out, I guess."

"Oh."

"It's not that I don't want a tattoo," Dolly quickly amended, tipping Stephanie's colorful arms an appreciative nod. "I'm just kinda chicken about needles."

Stephanie quirked an amused eyebrow. "So you would get a tattoo?"

"Well." She sheepishly wrung a damp cloth out over the bar top and made a concentrated effort to appear occupied by the menial task. "Maybe."

"That heart's pretty cute. I think it would look nice back there."

Roses bloomed in Dolly's porcelain cheeks. Though her friends had never abstained from making passively nasty comments about Stephanie's unusual appearance and proud deviance from Moralton's constrictive status quo, Dolly had always fostered a secret respect for her. There was something alluring about Stephanie, something that begged back story: Dolly longed to read the text that accompanied the illustrations trellising her arms like ivy. "You think so?"

"Definitely. And if you're scared of needles, I've got an assistant who could probably distract you," Stephanie added with a playful smirk. Orel had curbed several customers' needle anxiety with breathless sermons about the incredibleness of Jesus and anecdotes about his occasionally distressing adventures ("and then I died! Three times! It was neat!")

"Would you really give me a tattoo?" Dolly asked, equally hopeful and horrified.

"If you're up for it."

Dolly twisted the cloth in her hands for a moment. The yearning to know Stephanie--to know every corner, every fold--was blossoming urgently in her chest. She wanted more than a tattoo. She wanted to familiarize herself with the inky mysticism enshrouding Stephanie Putty and if that meant romance, if that meant public scorn and disappointment and disgusted looks, so be it. She wanted Stephanie. She wanted all of her.

"Doll?"

"Y-Yes," Dolly sputtered, visibly flustered. Then she grinned cautiously and set down her hands on the bar top, allowing Stephanie to admire their delicate whorls and pearly nails at a closer proximity. "I'd love that."

iv. infatuation

"I know you think I'm stupid, Marionetta."

They had cloistered themselves away in a small clearing that provided some margin of protection from their schoolmates' scorn. A mild sky opened above them, achingly empty, painfully wide. As he stared into its doleful depths--oppressing himself not to betray the shame making dewy his eyes--he recalled the passages he had studied about the atmosphere. His old teachers had refused to teach the subject, citing the lack of a Heaven in the textbook's diagram of the Earth's atmosphere. He imagined it was sandwiched between the mesosphere and thermosphere, an impossible realm illuminated by auroras and burning space debris. But in the absence of substantial evidence that such a place existed, he was content to call the clearing Heaven, as long as Marionetta was there.

The girl smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of her dotted skirt. Even

#syd squeaks #moral orel #me putting dolly and stephanie and florence and dottie together my MIND!!!#thank y'all for all the sweet messages though

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doubletriplepowerbomb · 3 years

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Mr Lonely part 4

Word count: +2600 (its a short one... I know)

Warnings: none

Tags: @jenn0755 @zappyzoodle @disturbthepearls @lost-in-the-stories @lithesxx @racingandreigns @rocketgirl2410 @vebner37 @therianfurry46 @littlelunaticfringe @finnbalorlover21 @winged-time-criminal @mrsnegan25 @xfirespritex @wefunloveruniverse @mrsambroserollinsacklesmgk

Read part 3 here

December 1st. It’s been 3 months since the night we started officially dating. The air was frigid and the trees were bare. Snow covered the ground and the sun started setting at 4 pm. But I wasn’t as grumpy as I would have been, I had him. Things had been going really really well. We haven’t been able to keep our hands off of each other. Sheamus’ large hands hold my hips every time he walks past me and I still feel weak under his touch. When my back is turned to him, he’ll either slap my ass playfully or run a hand through my hair. When his back is turned to mine, I do the same things.

We don’t often make it through dinner. I prefer to dine at home, that way I can crawl onto his lap whenever I want. He prefers to dine out, only so he can tease me under the table and watch me suffer.

He’s been really good about the girls too, there aren’t many that try anymore but sometimes he gets the occasional text. I hate it, I trust him, but I hate it. His number is everywhere in my bar, I’ve tried my best to paint over the pen and marker marks but the carvings remain. The digits dug into my bar taunt me every time I'm working and I hate it. I want him all to myself. This isn’t the first time I’m saying this, he knows how much it bothers me to see his phone number carved into the wooden bar and stall doors. Nothing I can do can get rid of the past.

It was 2 am on Christmas Day.

Sheamus’ phone buzzed silently in his sweatpants pocket. He had worn pants to bed that night, which I found odd, and he never placed his phone on the windowsill near him like he usually did.

I remember waking up to him getting out of bed slowly, I didn’t open my eyes but I rolled towards him and placed a hand on his warm back, he was sitting up. “Go back to bed, love. Ah’m just goin’ to the bathroom.” He whispered. That was enough for me so I removed my hand from his warm skin and rolled back over.

What I didn’t know was that Sheamus was not going to the bathroom. He slipped out of my room and closed the door silently behind him. He had left his laundry folded on my couch, I noticed earlier but didn’t care much. He pulled on a long sleeve shirt and a warm flannel before rummaging through the small pile and grabbing two socks, not turning on any light to see if they matched. He then slipped on his old work boots, reminding himself to get a new pair soon, and his coat before grabbing the keys to his truck and my key to the bar.

I woke up on Christmas Day to Sheamus rolling over in my bed and snuggling up closer to me. It was 10 am. I was excited for today, the bar was not open on Christmas so Sheamus and I would spend the evening with my family. Sheamus’ family is in Ireland, he doesn’t talk much about them. All I managed to know is that he doesn’t have any siblings and he doesn’t get along with his father.

I turned in his arms so that I was facing him. He always looked so peaceful when he slept. He was snoring softly and breathing steadily. I gently ran my finger along the lines of his face, his lips turned upward when fingers brushed through his beard.

Normally, I would get up to make breakfast but I didn’t want to disturb him. He was always so intense, so charismatic, and so alive that it seemed out of character for him to be so at peace. He looked content. I’m sure the holidays weren’t the best times for him in previous years, I figure he spent them alone. Sure, there were women more than willing to spend the nights in his bed but what did he do when they were gone too? I knew he missed home, he had family at home. He definitely missed his mom. He spoke to her on the phone every day and they even sent letters back and forth-- I was at his apartment once, sitting on the couch while he took a shower after a long day of work, and I saw the most recent letter from his mom on the counter. I didn’t want to read it and I didn’t read it, but I couldn't help scanning my eyes over the page. I caught my name written in a random sentence in the middle of the page… he had mentioned me to his mother.

Sheamus woke up, his bright blue eyes met mine and snapped me from my trance. I blinked a few times and, knowing I had been caught staring, felt a blush bloom across my face. Sheamus only smirked his beautiful smirk and pulled me closer to him. He was always so warm. He pressed a kiss to the top of my head before resting his chin in the place he just kissed.

“Ya look like you've been thinkin’ love.” He mumbled. “Ah can still see the smoke common’ from yer ears from all the effort.” Sheamus laughed at his joke and squeezed me against his bare chest, allowing me to get close enough to slap it. Despite the playfulness and gentleness of my slap, my hand left an angry red mark on his skin. I always felt bad after seeing a mark on his skin, they never hurt him but the stark red against the beautiful white always made it seem like a life-threatening injury. He personally liked all the marks I left on his smooth white skin over the months, he would always admire them after sex.

I playfully pushed away after staring at the mark from the slap and sat up on the bed, “ugh, and to think I was gonna make you snowmen shaped pancakes this morning.”

Sheamus rolled dramatically onto his back, my eyes were drawn to the blanket riding low on his hips. My eyes followed the trail of soft red hair leading downwards from his belly button, teasing what was beneath the boxers he was wearing. “Oh no! Whatever will ah do without three normal shaped pancakes that ya line up on a plate and put chocolate chips on fer eyes?!”

I feigned offense to his overly dramatic comment. “Excuse me? They are cute!”

“Yer cute.” He winked and sent me a boyish grin that made my insides clench. I shut my lips and decided to tease instead. I rolled my eyes and stood up before bending over to grab his shirt. I knew he was watching. I was only wearing underwear. He didn’t move, but he was growing hard underneath the fabric of my sheets and his boxers-- he had taken the sweats off after he had gotten back around 4 am. I slipped his shirt on and headed towards the bedroom door, “I'm making you snowmen pancakes.” I said before stopping to turn around. I turned and my eyes met his, “and you better be appreciative or I will put on pants.”

It was the only threat I knew he’d take seriously.

We ate our pancakes in the comfortable silence that I have grown to love over the past couple months. “You don’t have to leave today, do you?” I asked between bites of pancake. My eyes rose from my plate to meet his eyes.

He finished his bite and my eyes moved to his neck as he swallowed. He took a sip of coffee before speaking. “Of course not. It’s Christmas, nobody works on Christmas.” Sheamus shot me a smirk before shoveling the final forkful of pancake in his mouth. “Yer spendin’ the whole day wit’ me, love.” He wiped his mouth and mustache with his napkin before getting up and placing his plate in the sink. “Whether ya like it or not.” I watched his bare torso and arms shamelessly as he rinsed his plate. I could feel heat shooting throughout my body as his muscles rippled with his effortless movements.

“When do you want to do gifts?” I asked, staring at his back as he placed the rinsed dish in the dishwasher.

Sheamus was silent for a moment but spoke after he closed the dishwasher and turned to me. My eyes were on his body as he turned. “We can do gifts whenever ya want. But ya should go first, ya won’t be able to follow my gift to you.”

I shot him a glare and padded to the living room, where a small Christmas tree stood in the corner by the couch. “Sit.” I pointed towards the couch, the pile of laundry from yesterday was still sitting on one of the cushions. Sheamus sat and I walked to the small coat closet that I had and began digging through the clutter. I emerged seconds later with a medium sized box wrapped in shiny green paper with a golden bow. I placed it on his lap with a kiss to his head and sat on the couch beside him.

Sheamus opened the gift with a smile on his face and a shimmer in his eyes, he looked like the little boy in the photo of him I saw for the first time months ago. The paper was peeled off and revealed a neutral box, he looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I nodded once, encouraging him to continue opening. He opened the box carefully and I smiled upon seeing a small gasp escape from his lips. He pulled the left boot out of the box and turned to me. “How’d ya know ah needed new boots? And ya got the brand and the size and everythin’!”

“Well I’m not blind, your boots are falling apart and you always beg me to rub your feet after work,” I scrunched my nose as I told him. “And you’re not the most unpredictable dresser. You wear the same thing everyday. I took one of your boots to the store downtown a few weeks ago, got the same brand, same size, same color. I have the receipt if you wanna go back and try something new.” I told him.

The Irishman smiled and brought his arm around my shoulders to pull me in. “They’re perfect. Thank you, love. Ah really needed these.” He whispered before pressing a kiss to my temple. “But, my gift is still better than yours.” He teased.

I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “Okay, where is it then?” I asked, looking around. I have to admit, I did my fair share of snooping these past couple days-- both at my apartment and his-- while he was at work and I couldn’t find a thing.

“Well, ah don’t have it here…” His voice trailed off but it picked up again before I could speak. “As much as ah hate when ya get dressed, yer gonna have to.” I rolled my eyes and dragged him into my room. I threw on a pair of joggers and a jacket over his shirt.

I turned to look at him, “Is this good? Or are you taking me somewhere public?” Sheamus chuckled and told me I was fine. I pulled my hair up into a half up half down bun before slipping on my boots and following him out to his truck.

Sheamus had started the truck before we had gotten outside so it was warming up quickly as we climbed in. The air was brisk, the wind was blowing, and snow covered the sidewalks. Christmas hits played at a low volume on the radio. Normally, I’d be singing, but I stayed quiet so I could hear Sheamus' deep accented voice sing the lyrics.

He pulled into the parking lot of the bar and I sat in the passenger’s seat, looking extremely confused. “The gift is in here.” He commented, noticing my confusion. I glared at him before climbing out of the truck and following him to the doors. He pulled the key out of his jacket pocket and opened the door, holding it for me to walk in. I clicked on the lights and looked around, nothing seemed out of the ordinary other than the faint smell of paint-- that I didn't notice at the time.

“Is my gift in here?” I teased.

“Yes, it is. Look around, but don’t touch anythin’.” I groaned, my mom always played the hot and cold game with us on Christmas and I was always so impatient. I looked around for a few minutes, finding nothing. Sheamus knew I’d be searching hopelessly, I was looking for a box. “Look on the bar, love.”

I turned to him, “On?” I wanted to make sure I heard him correctly.

He nodded, “Yes, dear, on.”

I turned back to the bar and walked closer, I saw nothing on it. “There’s nothing here.” I spoke, still looking at the blank wood.

“Exactly. There’s nothin’ there…” His voice trailed off, leaving me to solve his riddle.

It took a moment for it to click. When it did, I took off down the bar. The entire surface was smooth, untouched wood. I ran into the bathrooms, the stall doors were also smooth and untouched. I bursted from the spotless bathrooms and circled around to the tables I knew had been carved. “Sheamus!” I squealed as I ran straight towards him. He was still standing right by the door, he hadn’t moved. Once I reached him he held his arms out for me and I jumped into them-- cliché, I know. But you’d do the same thing if the former town whore, who was now your boyfriend, had removed his phone number from every wooden surface in the bar you worked at because you didn’t like it being there.

“How’d you do this?” I asked, still in his arms. “When’d you do this? I was at the bar last night. Granted we closed early but you were with me the entire time.” I was babbling. I knew I was babbling, but I couldn’t help myself.

“When I woke ya up last night and told ya ah was goin’ to the bathroom. Ah snuck out of the apartment and filled in the wood, re-stained it too.”

“Oh my god, Sheamus,” I pulled my head away from the crook of his neck to look into his blue eyes. They still had that shimmer in them, the same one from the photo, the same one he had when he would ask me to check his essays, the same one when we talked that first night in the bar, and the same one from when he opened his new boots. “Thank you.” My voice came out as only a whisper before I pressed my lips to his.

“And that was the moment I knew I was in love with your father.” I said, looking up at my daughter who was furiously typing away on her school-issued laptop. She had approached me earlier asking questions about my relationship with her father for a school project about her family.

3 Christmases after our first together, Sheamus proposed to me in the empty bar. We got married the next fall. That was 20 years ago, we have a son who is 18 and a daughter who is 16. Our son, Andrew, has my hair and my brown eyes. He got my tanner complexion too. Our daughter, Alex, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of the Irishman:" red hair, blue eyes, and beautiful pale skin.

“Wait, dad was… ‘the town whore’?” Alex stifled a laugh as she quoted my words, “How am I supposed to write that into my project?”

I laughed too, “I don’t know, honey. But don’t make fun of dad too much about it, he’ll get embarrassed.” I joked.

My daughter smiled and looked back down at her computer screen. “I’ll just say that you met in high school and met again after college. That’s good enough.”

A/N: chapter 4 was short, but I hope you enjoyed Mr. Lonely! I debated writing the proposal scene so let me know if you want it and I’ll post it as a chapter 4.5!

#sheamus #sheamus fanfiction #sheamus smut #sheamus x reader #wwe

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rosy-cheekx · 3 years

Text

Dragged from the Deep

I will update with an AO3 link, two chapters, but I really wanted to get this out!

This is from @voiceless-terror‘s prompt: “ Been a tough few days. How are you holding up?” with jmart in the safehouse...Not what they expected but I am VERY VERY proud of this!

Martin awoke to the sound of Jon mumbling in his sleep. “I took my hand, and I reached down into the darkness.” Jon’s voice is quiet, reverent. Its barely his own; his voice of the Archive.

Really should have heard from Basira by now, Martin thought, trying to tamp down the frustration rising in his chest.

“Down and down,” Jon continued. “Until my whole arm was inside, up to the shoulder. It was damp and cold, with the rough stone sides scraping my skin, but my hand was stretched as far as I could, and it still gripped nothing but empty air. Then the hole began to close, and all at once the spell was broken.”

“Jon, m’dear?” he half-whispered, stroking Jon’s cheek softly. Jon was a light sleeper, but these times were...tricky. “Hey, Jonathan,” he added, voice at a speaking-volume now. “Wake up, it’s not real.”

“I tried to pull my arm out, to get free, but it held me tight. Not quite crushing me but holding me in place. I screamed and cried for help, looking around for anyone who might be able to hear me, but the only people walking by seemed utterly oblivious to what was happening. Then I felt it, something brushing against my hand from below it in the hole. Teeth. Wet, blunt teeth, which quickly gave way to a rough, slender tongue-”[97]

Martin couldn’t bear to hear any more. He hated witnessing Jon like this, possessed by the statements, by his need to feed. Jon’s voice was like marble, smooth and cold and mesmerizing, but it was heavy and would consume Jon if he allowed it.

Martin would not allow it.

“Jon!” He gave him a shake, firm on his shoulders. “Wake up!”

A drowning man suddenly reunited with his lungs; Jonathan Sims gasped for air. His eyes flashed open (there it was, the cursed glint of green that seemed to glow from within) and he clutched a hand to his chest as he began to cough. Martin pulled him into a sitting position, kneeling next to him and resting a hand on Jon’s lower back as he felt the convulsions double his frame. When his hacking had settled, Martin felt safe enough to breathe again himself, lest he had stolen air from the man beside him.

“H-hi,” Jon murmured, voice shaky, drawing his knees to his chest beneath the comforter. “How-how bad was it this time?”

Martin knew about Jon’s hunger, knew that statements were his fuel more than anything organic. The arrangement with Basira had been working relatively well up until now. Every three to four weeks, Basira would call the mobile they kept stashed in the safehouse for that purpose, only her number programmed in and let them know when she was coming, typically within a day or two. She should have called almost ten days ago. Had she let them go, at last, to fend for themselves? Had something happened to her, to the Institute? Things were getting dire.

At first, a little less than a week ago, Martin thought it was the nightmares; that the mumbling had been Jon apologizing to those so unfortunate enough to have him as a feature player in their nightmares. His words were unintelligible, so Martin had hugged him tightly in the night, in the way they had held each other those first days weeks, whispering affirmations of safety and love.

When he asked the poorly-rested Jon about it the next morning, he had frowned. “Ah, no. I mean, I haven’t slept with anyone—ah, more to say, no one has been in the room while I’ve been asleep to confirm for sure besides you, but I don’t think I usually talk in my sleep.” Martin chalked it up as “Weird, But No Too Weird,” and they agreed to keep an eye on it. Every night since, Martin had repeated that ritual, the words too unintelligible to understand, Martin clutching Jon like a life vest, carrying him safe through the morning.

Jon’s flu-like symptoms had cropped up three days ago. He woke weak, hardly able to move, and couldn’t keep any food down. The tea and water Martin literally spooned him were staying down, at least, which helped combat the dehydration Jon was surely suffering from the 40-degree fever he was running. The fever reducers weren’t helping, and Martin had nearly dragged Jon to A&E before he’d been able to explain to him what was happening. He was breaking down, needed the statements or things would get worse. “And, no, Martin-” cut off by a coughing fit. “I don’t know how much worse. Bad.” Whatever role Martin usually played in Jon’s life: roommate, friend, boyfriend maybe?, it didn’t matter. Or, at least, it came to second to Martin’s new role as nurse. Nurse was a role Martin was good at it. Practically a professional home-care assistant. But caring for a starving eldritch demigod was marginally different than caring for his human mum. At least the vomit cleaned the same way.

The statements had become more distinct the first night of the fevers. Words that had typically barely passed his lips were now being told to the night air with an intensity Martin had sorely wished he would never hear again. If Martin strained his ears, he could typically hear the tired hiss of a tape recorder. He tried to smash it that first night, out of anger and exhausted desperation, but Jon had screamed when he had bashed it with a vase, weeping as if it had been his head smashed and not the spinning dials of that cursed thing. Jon’s migraine had lasted through the night and into the afternoon, with Martin unable to do anything but apologize and stroke his hair, reading to him a novel that just wouldn’t be enough.

“Not too bad,” Martin answered, plastering a soft smile over his tired face. “Just scared me was all, I don’t know if it’s better to wake you or not, but it felt weird not to.” Jon was scratching at old worm scars, skin shiny and taut, and Martin took his hands gently, pressing a kiss to his pulse points in turn. God, he felt so hot against his lips.

“M-I’m sorry,” Jon sighs, eyes already fluttering closed again. His face was pale and his muscles slack; Martin hated how hollow his eyes and cheeks seemed, skeletal in the light of the moon.

“Shh, nothing to apologize for,” Martin assured him, reaching across Jon’s side of the bed to click on the lamp, wincing at the sudden light and the clock. 4:15. Too early, even for a morning person like Martin. “Do-do you want me to read to you some more? I can make some tea, chamomile? Milk and honey? Or we can listen to some music, or a podcast?” He knew it was fruitless. It would all be for naught until he got the damn statements from Basira.

Jon had the comforter drawn to his neck, shivering slightly, eyes closed. He nodded vaguely. “The book,” he managed, voice a broken whisper, so unlike the strong and powerful intonation Martin had just heard. Martin nodded, kissing his forehead, clammy and plastered with baby hairs, and stood, passing the book into Jon’s lap, page marked with a flat-barreled pen, something that had been tucked into a journal in the bedside table. (Jon and Martin had agreed that some things are better left unread.) Martin could see Jon’s hands shaking slightly under the blanket.

The walk to the kitchen was cold and dark, and Martin took a moment to himself, while the electric kettle hummed to life, to press his forehead against the cool plastic of the refrigerator, fingers interlaced behind his neck. God, he was so tired. He loved Jon more than anything, that was true, but he was at such a loss. It hurt to know there was nothing he could do to help, short of kidnapping a random neighbor from the town and begging them to tell Jon their story. He would call Basira this afternoon. He had tried the day the fever started and hasn’t received an answer. She was probably chasing down a lead about Daisy; she was known to go off the grid when hunting after her.

The click of the kettle, and Martin is on task again, portioning out tea and honey, chamomile for Jon, English breakfast for himself; he needs the caffeine. Two travel mugs later, Martin was heading back into the dark hallway, up the stairs, and to the dimly let bedroom.

The task had taken no more than five minutes, eight max. This was apparently, long enough for Jon to rifle in the nightstand drawer, retrieve that little notebook they had found, and to begin scribbling in it furiously. Martin could already see a good quarter of the notebook had been filled already, though what measure of that had been used prior to their arrival was unclear.

“Jon? Writing anything interesting?” Jon’s eyes jerked open and he let his gaze fall on the notebook.

“Oh-ah, no. Just doodling,” the words still weak, but the half-smile on his face lifts Martin’s spirits. See? He told himself. He’s still Jon. Jon closed the notebook and tucked it into his lap, reaching for the spill-proof mug with the hand not holding the pen that had been marking the page number. Martin noticed Jon twiddling the pen between his fingers and elected not to say anything. Whatever helped. And it had seemed to help; Jon seemed a little less gaunt than he had, but maybe that was the consequence of sitting up, letting himself focus on other things than his gnawing hunger. “Page 74,” Jon sighed as Martin resumed his position next to him in bed, tucking his head on Martin’s shoulder. “Second paragraph.”

“Creep,” Martin muttered good-naturedly, before settling into the pages and resuming the book, some sort of cop thriller-mystery (because of course that had been Daisy’s preferred reading material).

Martin had been reading for nearly an hour when, while pausing to sip his tea, the scratching of pen on paper had distracted him from the story. They had been at a rather thrilling part of the chase; the detective had just discovered that his wife, who he thought to be dead, was not actually dead and maybe even a part of the mystery. Martin had felt rather invested in giving Jon a good show, throwing himself into the narration maybe a little more than was necessary for the audience of one (1) ill partner (Boyfriend? Love? Patient? Whatever). Jon had remained quiet, save for a periodic coughing fit, but didn’t seem to be asleep from the way Martin could feel The Eye in the room with him, an inescapable feeling now, consequences of his proximity to The Archivist. With the sound of the pen, however, Martin closed the book, flipping it upside down and open. (Usually, Jon would chastise him for such a horrendous act to a book. Martin wished he would.)

Jon’s eyes were cast on the book, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. He was scribbling furiously, writing continuously in the notebook that had once belonged to Daisy. Jon’s handwriting, difficult in the best of circumstances, was positively chicken scratch as Martin tried to parse out the strings of words on the paper, some he could swear weren’t even English.

“Jon?” Martin asked, placing a hand on the journal gently. “Is everything alright?”

“I-ah, yeah,” Jon capitulated, sighing softly, even as it resulted in a series of weak hacks. “I was trying to remember the dream, the statement I was reading in my sleep. I thought maybe writing it down would help.”

“And? Did it help?”

“I…I don’t know.” Jon frowned and scrubbed his hands over his eyes, blinking wearily. “I need to keep trying.”

Martin frowned internally but tried to keep his face neutral. “D’you think it’s…good? To try?”

“I don’t know, Martin.” Martin is suddenly reminded of a paranoid, frantic Jonathan Sims, angry and scared and not knowing who to trust. “But I have to try something! I can’t just sit here, waiting to wither away and die.”

“O-okay then,” Martin took a deep breath. “It was just a question.”

“A stupid one.” He’s sick, Martin reminds himself. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.

“Well,” Martin closed the book properly this time, surreptitiously dog-earing a page. What Jon doesn’t know won’t hurt him. “I’m out of tea. Need any more?”

Jon shook his head, quiet now as he continued to write, eyes glued to his page. “A-alright then,” Martin slid off the bed and frowned, catching a whiff of himself. Yikes. He had lost track of the last time he bathed, so worried had he been about missing a call from Basira. “Would you be okay if I have a shower?”

More silence, the scratching of the cheap pen the only sound in the room. At least there wasn’t a tape running. “Shout if you need me.”

It felt good to breathe in the steam and smell of lather, to luxuriate in the hot water rolling over him. Martin has always been a bit generous with his showers, especially as a teen. They had been his designated times to be off the hook from his mother, chores, his jobs, anything that was causing him stress. Martin felt a bit guilty remembering these things. His shower wasn’t long because he wants to avoid Jon, not at all. It’s just. Jon is clearly in a bit of a mood, so it would be good to give him some space without making it seem like he’s upset. Which, he’s not upset! Just. a break is good. Yeah. A break is healthy.

Martin turned off the water when he started to feel a bit dizzy from the heat, wrapped himself in a towel and splashed cold water on his face. There. He was feeling better already.

“Jon!” He called, cracking the door and letting steam roll out around him. “I know it’s a bit early, but I thought maybe I could start on breakfast. Maybe you can stomach down some crackers today?”

After a few beats of silence, Martin called out again. The loo, while not an en suite, was pretty close to the master. “Jon?”

Must be asleep. Martin smiled softly to himself and shook his head, ruffling his curls, more white than auburn anymore, and pulled on a fresh pair of sweatpants. Not like they were going anywhere today.

Tinged pink from the hot shower, Martin rounded the corner into the master bedroom and stopped, momentarily confused. “Oh, did you not hear me?”

Jon was awake. He was still writing, bent over the notebook and scribbling furiously, murmuring to himself, too quiet to hear. He didn’t look up. Martin frowned, shivering as a wave of static rolled over his body like a cool wind. “Jon. Jon, a-are you in there? Are you okay?”

The muttering continued, unceasing. Martin edged forward carefully, hands in front of him like he was buffeting back a storm or trying not to scare a wounded animal. Honestly, Martin wasn’t sure which sentiment was more accurate. He crept his way to Jon’s side of the bed, still apparently unnoticed by the Archivist. There was a bloody tape recorder on the bedside table. Martin knew better than to touch it.

He bent down, kneeling on the floor and craning his neck to look up into Jon’s face. His shoulders slumped as he gazed up into an emerald glow as Jon’s own eyes, usually a deep brown, lit the page in front of him like a torch, bathing it in harsh light. Jon’s own form was crackling slightly, seemingly more solid than a usual body should, silhouette a little too crisp against the wall behind him.

Martin could hear him now, too, and his voice was the same low, consistent monologue that Martin had first loved, but had grown to hate in his years working in the Archives.

“As I said, it was one of the last boxes I opened on the second day. It was late, and I had already made my way through most of a bottle of wine. The more I think about it, the more I think that opening that box felt no different to any of the others. No hard feelings, no smells, nothing. It was just a box empty of everything except a single typewritten note and an old hand mirror.

It lay inside, utterly innocuous. If it was a trap, there was no way to tell.” [60]

That one sounded familiar. An old statement, it must be. Something about a mirror and seeing things in a reflection? Punching a camera? he wondered. Martin felt another shiver roll through his body; he turned his attention towards the notebook, towards what he knew would be there. Now that he knew what to look for, he could read the handwriting with little trouble. As the Archivist spoke, he wrote the words in Jon’s handwriting, transcribing the statement.

“Jon,” Martin’s voice was soft. “If you can hear me, I’m going to take away your pen now. I think…I think that will let you rest. I’m going to count to three, okay? One. Two. Three.”

As soon as Martin reached for the pen, he felt himself being thrown backwards, as if by a tidal wave. He felt his body hit the wall, heard his skull hit the wall with a sickening thud.

------Chapter 2------

When Martin woke, he was confused. Last he knew, he had gone to sleep in bed, right? Not on the couch watching telly or drunk in a bathtub. So why was he so stiff—ow. He rolled his neck. And sore. He was on the floor, for one thing, head against the wall and legs splayed in front of him. God his head hurt. Was he hungover? No, he hadn’t drunk anything. Just eaten dinner in bed with Jon, done dishes, read, and fallen asleep.

Oh shit. Jon. It rushed back to Martin in a dizzying spiral; Helen would be proud. The mumbling, the writing, the pen, the eyes. Had Jon pushed him? Not physically, maybe. But hadn’t he heard through the grapevine something about Jon and the delivery man—Breekon? Or maybe Hope? Whichever one hadn’t died in the Unknowing. Something about him shoving him backwards with sheer force of a word? Jon had thought they were exaggerating. But maybe…maybe not.

Martin’s eyes were still closed, he realized. He was afraid to, he realized. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see: maybe a big, unblinking Eye where the body of Jon had been? A torrent of books and pages spinning around Jonathan Sims in a dramatic flourish as he commands them? Hundreds, if not thousands, of tape recorders piling around their bed, drowning them both in magnetic tape and words? Slowly, painfully, Martin opened his eyes.

None of those were there of course. There was just Jon. Sitting in bed, gaunt and frail. Writing and reciting as if nothing happened. That was almost worse, in a way, that he had flung Martin against a wall and continued as if it hadn’t hurt him to do so. The Archivist’s movements were stiff and mechanical as he turned the page and continued to write, voice now in a language Martin couldn’t understand but was probably Chinese.

Stopping the writing was no longer an option, he supposed. But what else could he do? Maybe it could recharge Jon a little, like sucking the marrow from a bone. Only Martin wasn’t sure if the statements or Jon was the bone in that scenario. God, he wished he could Eldritch Google “Eye statement starvation: stages of bad?” Unfortunately, his Eldritch Google was out of service and there was no one else he could ask who wasn’t also trying to actively kill him.

What were his options then? Wait and hope Jon doesn’t die. Call Basira again. Kidnap a stranger and have them read a statement. Well, he wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

Martin sighed, running a hand through his hair and feeling a lump throbbing gently on the back of his head. He checked the rest of his body for injuries and was grateful to find nothing too bad. Probably just a concussion.

Hauling himself to his feet (using the floor and doorknob to a closet as his supports), Martin teetered his way to the kitchen. He threw open the cupboard beneath the sink and grabbed the small black phone with Basira’s number saved.

Dialing, he slid himself into a chair at the kitchen table, resting his forehead against his free palm and closed his eyes again.

“Hello?” The faint voice Basira Hussain rang out into the air.

“Basira? It’s Martin. Any word on the statements? It’s getting a little dire here.” He could hear the exhaustion in his own voice.

“Dire? How do you mean?” Basira was always a little too direct for Martin’s taste; couldn’t she hear how drained he was?

“He won’t stop repeating and writing old statements. I tried to stop him and he—well. It wasn’t on purpose…But he threw me into a wall.”

“Shit.” Basira was quiet for a moment. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he bit back. “I would be better if we had the statements.” There wasn’t time for him to feel guilty about his delivery.

“I know, and I’m sorry. I caught wind of Daisy being in Italy, so I’m there now. If I take the first flight out of Rome, I can be at my flat tomorrow and yours the next. Two days, max. Less if I can. Can he make it that long?”

“Better bloody hope so.” The fight drained from him. “Please, Basira,” he added, sighing. “I don’t know what to do. He was sick and feverish and I could handle that but now he’s just…empty.”

“Maybe it’s like a diet.” He could practically hear her mind spinning through the phone. “You know, how when you starve yourself for too long? You start losing weight and all’s dandy. But the longer you wait, your body starts taking nutrients from your own organs?” Martin hummed an affirmation. “Maybe he’s sucking out every bit he can from himself to survive.”

“So…how do I fix that?”

“I mean, when I get you the statements, we can force-feed him. But until then? I dunno. I’m at a loss too. Keep him safe, I think? But don’t let yourself get hurt either.”

Martin nodded, momentarily forgetting he was on the phone. “Oh, yeah. Um, thank you Basira. I’ll do my best. Call me when you’re at the flat?”

“Of course. Call me if you get lo-bored.”

“Please hurry.”

Martin hung up and dropped his head to the table unceremoniously, wincing as the impact rattled the back of his skull. Now what? He didn’t want to sit in the room while the Archivist worked, but he was afraid to leave him alone. He hated how it felt to be in the room, the low wave static and the feeling of being known permeating every pore. He was afraid what staying in there would do, if Jon would Know him too well after he came back. Looking around, Martin grabbed the egg timer Jon used when he cooked and spun it to an hour. If he checked in every hour, that would be fine, right? He could let the Archivist have the bedroom; he’d stay downstairs, and check in every hour.

The first few hours crept by, but each ding of the egg timer was much too soon for Martin’s liking. He iced his head, wincing again when he realized it was the late morning and he had been unconscious for quite a while. He made himself an unassuming brunch, cheese toasty and curry left over from dinner a few days ago. Made some more tea, obviously, and took some acetaminophen to reduce the swollen goose-egg on his head. Read, watched an old DVD of some American TV show Daisy must have liked. Tried to keep his mind off whatever had taken over his boyfriend in the upstairs bedroom.

Each time the timer went off, Martin would repeat the same process. He would ascend the stairs, knock on the doorframe of the bedroom, tell Jon he was coming over to check on him, and would watch and listen to him for almost a minute. Some of the statements he recognized, some he didn’t. His eyes were always that throbbing, blinding green, staring into nothing, his face hollow and gaunt. Around two in the afternoon, Martin went in to see that Jon had moved from the bed. The notebook lay abandoned, filled to the last page. The Archivist was standing, in baggy sleep boxers, facing the wall, still intoning the fears and terrors of those who had contributed their stories to the Institute. Their stories were stark when written against the robin blue pant. Martin left the room before he could Know he was crying.

Afternoon turned to evening, and Martin continued his ministrations. The egg timer ran his day and he got little done, managing maybe half of a book from the meager shelf downstairs. He wasn’t even sure what it was about; he had to keep rereading the same pages over and over. The writing had grown to cover half the wall in Jon’s slanted script. Martin wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what would happen if he tried to smudge it. Between checking up on The Archivist, he half-heartedly ate scrambled eggs and chugged some wine; he figured he’d earned it. It was weird to feel strangely like an Archival Assistant again; knowing things were bad for the man he desperately wanted to be there but not knowing how to help.

KRRRRRRRRRRG!

Time to check on him again. Martin trudged up the stairs for what felt like the hundredth time that day. The Archivist was in a different position this time. He was kneeling, head bowed. Martin could have sworn he was praying; the monotony of words slipping from his lips as easily as the nuns Martin had seen growing up. Martin paused. It was…almost beautiful, in a way. The slight form of a man paying his service to a god to whom he was so completely indebted. The green light reflecting off the wall, covered in his scripture, casting a glow on his skin and through his curls, mussed from fever.

Would’ve been, anyways, if Martin hadn’t seen the drop of blood snaking its way down Jon’s thigh, creasing where his leg was folded along the calf. All at once, the beauty he had been caught up in was gone and all he saw was a helpless, broken man, compelled to write the words of the desperate, the lost, the broken. Martin shook a pillowcase from the bed, letting the pillow fall unceremoniously, and cautiously moved to the Archivist. As worried as he was, he needed to know what was going on before he could help.

The sight made him slightly sick. Jon was bent over his thigh, holding the pen as if it were a dagger, and was using the ballpoint tip to carve words into the meat of his leg. He hadn’t gotten far, apparently the effort took more out than the body of a weakened Jon could take.

“a fac-” [54]

Confused, Martin looked up to the wall where he had been writing and figured out the problem. The pen had run out of ink. The words got paler and less distinct until they were barely readable. Judging from the smears, the Archivist had tried to use Jon’s blood to write, using the pen as a quill. It clearly hadn’t worked, judging by the thin, weak curves of red and brown. Jon was still mumbling the statement, eyes blank and voice even, but the lines of his face seemed frustrated and dark.

The letters on his skin were weeping dark red now and Martin could see his hands weren’t the only ones shaking. He was afraid to touch him, afraid that trying to press a cloth to his wounds could quite literally be both of their deaths.

The more he stared, trapped in indecision, he watched as the decision was made for him. Jon had been ill, dehydrated and fever-laden, and the assault to his body was more than he could handle. His face, an ashen brown-grey-green from the glow of his eyes, went slack and as the emerald lights went out, Jon slumped, falling into Martin’s lap and shoulder as his body gave up. As soon as their skin touched, Martin’s mind snapped into focus. Fix this. You have to fix this.

Martin was immediately comforted by the fact that Jon was breathing. He hadn’t run out of fuel, not yet. Martin pressed a kiss to his hair (still hot) as he gently laid Jon flat, tearing open the sealed end of the pillowcase clutched in his fist so he could slip it up Jon’s leg and press it down, trying to stem the blood flow. You need something better, he thought, mind racing. It was oozing, not squirting, so Jon hadn’t hit an artery. That was good. Thank god Mum’s hospital soaps were worth something in the end. He needed a thicker fabric; the sheet wasn’t doing any good. Martin scoured the room, looking for any sort of thick fabric.

His towel from his shower. Thank fuck for his laziness. In less than ten steps, he had retrieved the towel from where it was haphazardly abandoned by the dresser and brought it back, folding and pressing it to his thigh, exchanging it for the thin white pillowcase. Sorry, Daisy.

Kneeled beside Jon, Martin lent most of his upper body weight to pressing down on the towel, keeping a cautious eye on Jon’s face and his chest, each shallow breath another blessing. He’s not sure how long he sits there in, that position, whispering platitudes to the pallid-faced man laid in front of him. Maybe an hour? Maybe three? Maybe twenty minutes? Time is blurry, intangible to him.

It’s dark when Martin felt okay to cautiously lift the towel and examine the letters carved in his leg. They’re starting to clot, he nodded to himself, feeling safe enough to leave Jon there on the floor to get the first aid kit from the lav. Carefully, lovingly, Martin pulled the ace bandage tight around the cotton pads on his leg, freshly doused and swabbed with cleansing alcohol. Daisy was nothing if not prepared for injuries.

Satisfied with his care, he gently pulls Jon into his arms and takes him downstairs. He didn’t want Jon to wake up and see the room like this—bloody and covered in the writings of the Archivist. Between the carpet and walls, it would take a while to clean anyways. The couch was certainly big enough to hold the man he held in his arms (and god he was way too light).

One Jon was laid on the couch, Martin made a fresh cup of tea, black tea with as much caffeine as he could stomach and pulled a cold compress from the freezer. Lifting his shoulders carefully, Martin situated himself to act as a headrest for the unconscious Jon, a cold compress acting as a barrier between them to hopefully aid the fever. One hand in Jon’s curls, the other holding a book open (still, no idea what it was about), Martin settled into the evening, saying a prayer to anything that was out there that Basira would hurry the hell up.

Martin read aloud to Jon all night, trying in vain to keep himself awake. Apparently, the book was a romance novel, some trashy erotica about a woman and a werewolf. Martin was just graceful it wasn’t sci-fi and horror. He annotated it as he read, giving Jon his stream of consciousness thoughts. “You know, I haven’t done that,” he chuckled to himself, brushing Jon’s hair from his face. “Especially not with a woman, but I don’t really think it’s anatomically possible.”

His eyes were starting to droop around three or four in the morning, the adrenaline draining out of him. Resting a hand on Jon’s neck, he felt for his pulse point and, after finding it, light and shallow as it was after the coma, let his eyes close, comforted in feeling the life fluttering beneath his fingers.

Martin woke up to a pounding on the door and he snapped awake like the knock had been a gunshot. The care he took to lay Jon’s head back down was deeply contrasted by the way he bolted to the door, unlocking it with haste and resisting the urge to throw his arms around Basira, wincing at the bright daylight that streamed inside.

“Woah—Martin,” Basira took a step back involuntarily. “Is there a reason your hands are covered in blood?”

“What? Oh-yeah, I’ll tell you about it. Things were bad. It’s fine now. It’s-It’s not my blood.” Martin swung the door open, letting Basira in. “What time is it? How did you get here so fast?”

“It’s quarter-three; I may or may not have found a plane that wasn’t on the official flight plans. And there’s more than one way to get in the Institute besides a key.” Martin shook his head and decided it wasn’t worth asking about. He beckoned her to the couch, where Jon lay, limbs limp.

Basira handed him the first statement on the pile and opened one for herself. “Ready?”

“Statements begin.”

Jon’s first thought was how wet his neck felt. His second was why he heard so many words. His brain floated between living dolls and a message in a bottle, washed up on the beaches of Greece. His teeth were chattering and he felt so cold. He grasped his hands out, reaching desperately for the comforter. Martin must have stolen it, he smiled to himself. Oh, that’s Martin. Martin’s voice.

“Hmm…Mm’tin,” he murmured, shifting towards the sound of his voice. Martin’s voice continued, telling him a story about a doll with painted lips and angry eyes. A hand reached out and cupped his face. Jon leant into the touch hungrily, grateful for the heat on his skin. He let Martin’s words carry him away again.

When Jon woke again, he felt more alive than he had in days. If his illness recently had been him submerged, he finally felt like he was breaking through the surface. The Choke released him, and he felt oxygen return to his lungs. But he was not in the Buried, he was on the couch. He was not drowning, he was breathing sweet air and felt it wafting over him in the drafty house that felt like a home when he was with Martin. Martin. God, he could hear his voice and he didn’t think he had heard anything so sweet than Martin speaking and reading to him. He was reading, yes, and Jon knew immediately what it was: the statement of Herbert Conklin, an Irishman who watched his son turn to plastic before his eyes, piece by piece. Jon’s eyes flew open and he craned his neck to find Martin’s face. His eyes were cast down on the statement in his lap, but his hand was folded in Jon’s, running his fingertips over the smaller man’s knuckles gently.

Jon felt paralyzed, unable to move as he let the statement wash over him, hating how good it made him feel to hear the statement, lavishing in the words. He felt a sharp pain in his leg throb to dull ache as the healing words flowed through him. As Martin uttered those forsaken words: “Statement Ends,” he brought his eyes to meet Jon’s, a pale smile ghosting his face before it solidified into something more real, more Martin.

“Hi love. Been a tough few days. How are you holding up?”

Jon was lost for words for a moment, gaping like a fish before he brought Martin’s clasped hand to his lips. Kissing it, he pressed the words into his skin, begging them to impress themselves there forever.

“Better that you’re here.” His memory was a blank, sure, but he knew it must be true and didn’t need to ask the Eye to confirm. Martin was here. All would be well.

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fanfic #jmart #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #cw self harm #spooky #not mental health related tho #cw blood #cw canon typical violence #hurt/comfort #whos the one hurting tho #jk its both #ill post AO3 link in the morning

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bosspigeon · 3 years

Note

Adam versus that most evil of foes...the office printer?

two glass houses, twenty stones

Pairing: M!Detective/Adam du Mortain Word Count: 1711 Summary: Having recently learned that he is the target of a power-hungry vampire who wants to experiment on him because of his “special blood” (oh, yeah, and vampires are real, apparently), Detective Arlo Priestley deals with the aftermath. The aftermath, of course, including one Adam du Mortain and his sparkling personality.

So... I don’t even know what to say anymore. I get completely innocuous prompts and they become something COMPLETELY different than what i had in mind. so, uh, hope you enjoy an Arlo Character Study with a side of Printer Shenanigans! This takes place in Book 1, shortly after the detective finds out about, uh, everything. I had fun playing the unreliable narrator with Arlo! And I have a fun idea for a sequel that’s Adam’s POV! Title is from Type O Negative’s “I Don’t Wanna Be Me.”

“You can, uh, sit down if you’d like,” Arlo offers, picking at the chipped polish on his thumb.

Adam hardly glances at him, keeping his attention on the window that overlooks the rest of the police department. “I am fine standing,” he says shortly. It almost seems like he’s determined to not look directly at the detective at all.

Arlo winces a bit, blowing a loose strand of hair out of his face. “Yeah, sure. That’s fine too,” he mumbles, looking down at his pile of reports. He brushes the accumulated black paint chips he’s shed in his anxious fidgeting aside. He’ll have to paint his nails again soon, they’re looking rather ragged, almost to the point he can bite them again. He’s been trying to stop, he knows it’s sort of gross, but still…

He furrows his brow and starts thumbing through reports, absently flicking through his color-coded tabs that help keep him marginally organized even when his “system” doesn’t really work for anyone but him. He calls it improvisational. Verda calls it “slapdash.”

He frowns, chewing on his lower lip and clicking his tongue when he notes his color system is out of order, and that one of the red tabs is missing. His eyes flicker up when he hears Adam shift slightly, but the vampire still isn’t looking at him, so he focuses back in, counting through reports again. He sighs and rolls his eyes, turning to his computer and pulling up his group chat with Tina and Verda.

big-depeche-mood: Tina, did you take my copy of Mrs. Holt’s police report?

big-depeche-mood: And why did you change my display name again?

BubblegumB!tch: how do u know i did it? why do u always blame me? 😥

big-depeche-mood: Because Verda has no reason to care about Mrs. Holt claiming her ex kidnapped the dog when they separated.

big-depeche-mood: And if you mean the display name, you’re the only one with admin privilege, because you made this chat.

BubblegumB!tch: i am being unfairly targeted 😭😭😭

BubblegumB!tch: im taking this to HR

DoctorDILF: HR has found no evidence to support this claim.

DoctorDILF: Really, Tina?

big-depeche-mood: Just tell me if I need to print another copy, please.

BubblegumB!tch: 👉👈

Arlo rolls his eyes and minimizes the window so he can start the task of going through his backlog to find the digital copy of the original report. Once he’s found it and sent it to the printer, he pushes himself upright, groaning as his spine pops in several places

Adam finally, finally turns to look at him. “Where are you going?” he snaps.

Arlo flinches, clenching his jaw to bite back the nasty retort burning on his tongue like acid. “To the printer,” he grits out, jerking his hand towards the window. “Literally twenty feet away. So unless you plan to go get that report for me, let’s just hope the megalomaniacal vampire that wants to use me as a lab rat doesn’t decide to snatch me from a police station in broad daylight.”

Seems he didn’t bite it back hard enough after all.

Adam recoils, like he always seems to when he realizes he's stepped directly on Arlo's nerves. He feels a little guilty for snapping, but he’s had more than enough of being treated like an unruly toddler. He wants to snidely suggest Adam see about requisitioning a bloody leash for him, but he snatches up a pen and starts furiously clicking it until he can calm himself down instead. Adam’s lip twitches, and Arlo clicks faster.

Adam turns sharply on heel and stalks out the door, slamming it behind him so hard the window rattles. Arlo is just grateful it hasn’t broken.

He sinks back into his chair and rolls his eyes skyward, dragging his hands down his face and wondering what the hell he’s done to deserve this whole situation. It’s bad enough he knows there’s some mad scientist vampire wanting to experiment with his freakish blood, but being shut in the same room as Adam for multiple hours a day when the man won’t even look at him, much less talk to him, makes nerves squirm under his skin and sets his whole body on edge. Unfortunately for the both of them, when Arlo gets nervy, it gets much harder for him to temper what comes out of his mouth.

He melts into his chair a little more, ignoring the pings from his computer that are probably Verda trying to convince Tina to change his display name back, and Tina reacting by changing it to increasingly ridiculous things. He just closes his eyes and focuses on breathing for a bit, trying to remember a single thing from his anger management classes from years ago when his brain is still buzzing with a squirming twist of irritation and guilt, a desperate need to apologize warring with the urge to snap and unload every frustration this whole thing has got knotted up inside him.

It's some sort of cosmic joke that Adam occupies so much of his attention, when Adam seems like he can't wait until he can get as far away from Arlo as possible.

He's just pretty, Arlo tells himself. Remember the last time you let someone pretty get you all stupid? Maybe remember what you learned from that.

He almost falls out of his chair when he opens his eyes to see Adam in the doorway, his shoulders so taut they're making Arlo's hurt just looking at them.

Maybe stop looking at them, idiot.

He forces his eyes up and is confronted with perhaps one of the most bewildering things he's ever seen.

Adam du Mortain, stoic, no-nonsense, terminally brooding Adam du Mortain, is standing just outside Arlo’s office, looking almost... sheepish. Arlo has to blink a few times to make sure he’s not seeing things. He’d almost say he’s imagining things, but at this point he’s so familiar with Adam’s general stone-faced demeanor that any sort of change to it is almost glaringly obvious. The scrunch of his eyebrows, the twist of his mouth, the almost painful stiffness of his posture, as if he’s pointedly trying to look as unaffected as possible and failing spectacularly. Arlo’s a detective, and while he doesn’t consider himself an expert at reading people, he’s still fairly decent at it. Adam, from time to time, can be pretty easy to read, but especially when he’s trying not to be.

Maybe Arlo’s been watching him a bit too closely.

“Uh,” he starts, already cringing internally at himself, “what’s up?”

Adam is silent for a moment, and then he exhales sharply through his nose, as if he is trying to calm himself down. Arlo’s nerves immediately ratchet up a few notches. “There is an issue with your printer,” he says.

Arlo blinks. “Oh. Um, I didn’t think you’d actually—” He bites his tongue when Adam’s brows furrow harder. “Let’s go have a look, shall we?” he offers instead, standing up. He hesitates to approach the door until Adam takes a step back to allow him through unimpeded. He lets Arlo lead the way and Arlo tugs his braid over his shoulder so he can twist it between his hands, because there is something a bit unnerving about Adam behind him, silent but radiating a tension Arlo can almost feel. It’s likely his imagination, considering his annoying awareness of the man, but still.

Arlo sees the problem almost immediately upon arriving at the little alcove that houses the station’s printer. The top cover for the document feeder seems to have been pulled off entirely. He turns to give Adam a bewildered look.

“The paper jammed,” Adam says stiffly.

“Yeah,” Arlo replies, “it does that sometimes.” He lifts the cover and turns it over in his hands, to see that, yes, the little plastic hinges that attach the feeder to the tray are entirely broken off. He frowns a little. Adam is so tense next to him, so still, Arlo wonders if he’s even breathing. “I can just ask Verda if I can send it to his, then see about calling someone for repairs.” He snags a sharpie from Tina’s desk and pops open one of the other trays to pull out a blank sheet of paper so he can write a quick “Out of Order” sign and slap it on top.

Adam still hasn’t moved, staring at the printer as if it has somehow personally offended him.

“It’s fine, Adam,” Arlo insists quietly, stepping a bit closer with his hands raised, though he doesn’t dare to touch. “Really. It’s a shitty old printer. I bet the second I let Tina know, she’ll go pester Doug until he calls his dad about it. We’ll have a shiny new one in no time.” He offers a wry little smile. “Say what you like about nepotism, but it has its perks.”

That doesn’t seem to help in the way Arlo hoped it would, because Adam raises an eyebrow and gives him a sharp look that has him shrinking back. “I am surprised you have that attitude, Detective.” He doesn’t have to say he’s disappointed, Arlo can hear it loud and clear and hates that it bothers him so much.

He steps back and turns away so Adam doesn’t see the look on his face before he can smooth it over. “Well, it’s the reason I’m here, isn’t it?” he can’t help but snark. “And it’s the only reason you’re here too. Explains a lot about your attitude, I suppose.” No wonder Adam’s been so bloody sour about all this. Must be a pain to have to babysit your boss’s kid because she said so. His silence on the subject speaks more than he could hope to.

More than anything Arlo wishes Rebecca could just go back to ignoring him. Things were a lot less complicated then.

Shoulders tight enough to rival Adam’s, Arlo heads towards the stairs to the basement. “I’m going to get that report,” he tosses over his shoulder, trying and failing to sound casual as Adam’s eerily quiet footsteps begin to follow him. “I’ll try not to get kidnapped on the way,” he adds under his breath.

The way Adam’s footsteps falter tell him he wasn’t quiet enough.

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mor-beck-more-problems · 3 years

Text

Flashback Friday || Morgan & Luis

TIMING: Distant past, in the days of yee-haw

LOCATION: The Magick Cauldron, Houston, Texas

PARTIES: @ontheluis & @mor-beck-more-problems

SUMMARY: Luis wanders into a magic shop looking for some herbs, Morgan spies an opportunity, and the cards know more than either of them reckon.

CONTAINS: Mellow yee-haw vibes

“Welcome, traveler, to the Magick Cauldron! Browse at your pleasure and inquire if you have any questions!” Morgan had given the scripted greeting so many times, it came out of her in full customer service cheer every time the shop door opened. She didn’t even look up from the book she had open under the cash register anymore, but flipped another page and let the customers let her know if there was something worth talking about by shouting ‘lady!’ or coming into her peripheral view.

The Magick Cauldron was the only occult shop still standing West Houston after the Y2K stress fads had died away and the first bout of shiny, corporate development had found its way into Montrose and bulldozed a crystal shop, a Greek deli, and one of the few ladies-only gay bars in favor of a mixed use building that so far only housed a nail salon and a Jamba Juice. Ralf, the fine proprietor of the Cauldron as he called himself, said that this space was protected. As the door chimed open again and Morgan made her welcome speech, bright and shiny as the plastic plate armor hanging in the kid’s section, she wondered if he was right. She never seemed to serve more than a dozen or so customers during her shifts, but the lights stayed on, day after sweltering day. If Ralf was right, it might just be the one piece of real magic in the place, not that she could say that to anyone’s face.

The warped outline of a boy rippled over the glass counter and Morgan blinked up from her book. “Is there something I can help you with, weary traveler?” She asked wryly.

“Sorry ma’am,” Luis assured, “didn’t mean to bring the stray in here,”

Evening had fallen outside, heat from the blistering still wafting off the pavement. Telephone poles and streetlights were thin black columns that stood stark against the blazing orange and wane blues of sunset.

“Go on, git!”

At the Magick Cauldron’s threshold was an enormous black dog. Even while quietly sitting on its haunches the shaggy canine was easily as tall as the teenage boy snapped at it. Pupiless red eyes regarded Luis impassively, only an ear twitch showing that the dog wasn’t just a statue.

When the black dog gave no indication of actually entering the store nor stopping its scrutiny of Luis, the young man cut his losses and regarded the woman at the counter again.

“Here,” Luis reached into a pocket of his jeans and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper, smoothing it on the counter. The names of herbs and powders were written in someone else’s prime neat handwriting. “I uh don’t know what any of this is…,” he confessed.

Morgan took the paper carefully between her fingers, trying not to let her discomfort at how damp and sweaty it was show too much. It didn’t take much to figure out she was looking at an herbalist mixture for anxiety and sleeplessness. She looked up and the boy, and down to the list again. “We’ve got everything you need over here,” she said. She lead the boy over to the bulk aisle where the dried herbs and bottled oils were kept and alphabetized. “Did you want these bagged separate or together? Or--you probably don’t know how these work huh? We’ll do separate, so you can use any excess as you wish. But fair warning, we have a purchase minimum of one ounce for each item.” She put a small paper bag on the shelf in the middle of the display and started shovelling the herbs in. As she worked, she glanded sidelong at the kid and the dog that had decided to become instantly fond of him. Someone cared about them, to throw together this recipe, and he looked embarrassed enough for a kid his age to seem like he needed help. Would it be wrong to squeeze a few more dollars out of him if it so happened to brighten his day or give him some direction? Sure, he was scruffy, but not so much as to be desperate. He could afford a few extra bucks, right?

“Hey, you okay there?” Morgan asked him. “You seem a little lost. I’m getting some ‘needs direction’ vibes from you.” She gestured vaguely. “If you’re looking for Niko Niko’s, it’s just further down the street. You’re not supposed to leave your car here while you go over there, but I won’t tell. And if you need something a little less literal, I might be able to help you with that.” She nodded toward the oracle room at the back of the shop, with its hand painted sign hanging crooked from a nail and entryway draped with lavender beads. “I do have sliding scale rates, if it helps you make up your mind.”

The great black dog continued to watch Luis in silent stillness, the Barghest’s posture poised as if waiting for something.

“No offense ma’am but I don’t believe in…,” the teenager half-turned but caught sight of the enormous stray waiting for him in the darkening sunset. Those pupiless red eyes immediately filled Luis with a nameless dread. Cold sweat stained the back of his T-shirt as Luis’ skin went clammy despite the Texan heat. Luis couldn’t process why some random big-ass dog would wig him out so much. He wasn’t even afraid of it biting him or even the dog itself.

So why was his heart pounding in his temples?

“Yeah uh..s-seperate would be great,” Luis reaffirmed to Morgan needlessly. The labels on the tinctures and herbal selections blurred in his vision as Luis tried to get a handle on his thoughts. “Direction like, oh you mean to the interstate,” Luis replied in a misinterpretation of Morgan’s broader meaning. “I’m alright thanks, yeah merging on that triple hairpin by Foster is a pain in the ass but it's chill.”

Luis looked over to the oracle room with the dubiety of someone for whom the occult was just a vague ‘other’ mentioned at Mass or when abuela suggested a Sonora Market cure for whatever new cold was going around. He seemed about to decline again until the creeping skin-crawl of Barghest’s glare boring into his back made Luis amenable to any distraction.

“Yeah uh sure,” he said, taking a step towards the beaded shroud. “I’ll give it a shot.”

Morgan followed the boy’s eyes to the dog. He was looking pretty well fed for a stray, and his eyes--red, alert, sharp with an uncommon intelligence--made her shiver. Definitely supernatural. She didn’t know, how, or what, but it didn’t look good. “And I mean--” How to put this in just the right way? Or at least the more convincing way? “I mean your spirit, your chakras. Believe in your connection to the universe or not, but are you really going to say to my face that you know how you’re going to make your life worthwhile to yourself? That you know how to reach your greatest good?” No one did. Heck, she was a devout wiccan most days out of the year and even she didn’t know what her highest, greatest good looked like. “And if you’ve got the cash, I’ll throw in a cleansing, something to make--” she gestured at him vaguely, “Whatever negative heavy energy this is that’s stuck to you. Seriously, do you ever feel tired out of nowhere?” It was summer and the sun was exhausting; everyone got tired out of nowhere.

Maybe she was laying it on a little thick, but Morgan was tired of ordering off the dollar menu for dinner and she felt like she was taking her life into her own hands when she conjured money from school pens and laundry lint cotton. This kid’s money might get her a pot pie that didn’t come from the freezer, or enough tacos to last her a week, or maybe she’d blow it all on seafood, or a dress that hadn’t been worn by someone else. “I’ll ring you up first, and then we’ll see about getting the rest of you squared away.” Morgan did, and when that part of the transaction was over, she lead him into the oracle room.

In truth, the oracle room was an old storage closet with the door taken out. Morgan breezed through them and went to the antique flea market find armoire, where all the necessary items were kept. Morgan took out a small tray of tarot decks and took the one she liked best, a well loved Raider-Waite with stars on the backs and gold-gilt edges. “I’ll shuffle them myself, but you should tell me when to cut and start again and when to stop. When I’m done, you’ll spread them. You’re the one who needs to connect with the deck, after all.”

Rafael Martininez had given his son that smirking half-smile while Malia had given Luis the pale blue eyes watching Morgan shuffle cards. Sweaty light brown hair clung to his forehead beneath the Dallas Burn hat, stray strands dangling back his eyes. The lanky teenager sat awkwardly across from the cartomancer, doubting not only her veracity but that a term like destiny could even apply to someone like him.

Like many children who’re so profoundly blessed to grow up in a home of unconditional love, Luis had no idea that Rafael and Malia given him a protection rarer than talismans, weirds, or wards. Rafael had come to this country for a better life, and Malia had wanted a home that was safer then the hell she’d left. Together they’d given both dreams to their children, so Luis and his siblings would never have to go through what they had.

The freckled face that lifted to Morgan’s was innocent of hate, abuse, or fear of abandonment. Even in following a strange woman into a shrouded back room, it’d never occurred to Luis to worry about anything more sinister than carnival charlantry.

“So uh...like this ma’am,” Luis asked as he placed some cards face down on the table.

It was this very innocence in Louis that dulled the edge off Morgan’s guilt. It was wrong (if wrong was a real concept) to spoil something pure, but if she was really the worst thing that was going to happen to this kid in his teenage years, he was pretty darn lucky. At least he was getting some introspection out of the deal. Could he have gotten a tarot deck from the discount bookstore two blocks over for a quarter of what she was going to charge him, or thought everything out on his own for free? Yes. But he was also some bushy tailed high school kid; could happen wasn’t the same thing as would happen.

She’d had more instructions to give, some arbitrary waving of hands and maybe some visualization in what one of her co-workers called her ‘yoga voice’, but Louis, in his eagerness, had taken more than the requisite three cards she had planned on, wich just meant she had a ready-made excuse for the forty dollars she was going to take from him. “My, my, aren’t we eager?” She said. “What’s interesting to me already is that you have intuitively drawn out one of the more complex and energy taxing card spreads. Imperfectly, but--” She straightened them out at random until they made more of a geometric pattern. “See? I barely did anything at all. These cards must really like you. I don’t normally do something this involved, but it looks like there’s something here that wants to come out, and I’m not in the business of stifling anyone’s growth or energy.”

Morgan flipped the first card over to reveal The Fool and managed to keep her laughter light and soft. “Well, even if I hadn’t been doing this for so long, this is you, where you are right now. Don’t take the title personally, these are antiquated terms. He’s just young, and at the start of a great journey, not even begun, just on the precipice. He’s got his whole life ahead of him, and the sun, see? It’s shining on him to show that the universe is aligned with his desires. The world wants you to support you, wants to see you succeed.”

The second card. The Tower. Morgan’s eyes widened. Not really vibing with the story she’d been telling, but maybe the one after… Eight of Cups. Morgan flipped over the last ones. Death and The Moon. “Hmm...Fascinating...” Morgan said, stalling for a way to spin this. “The thing about the major arcana is the magnitude of forces. Forces like destiny and fate and the collective consciousness. These forces are bigger than a ten minute fight with your friends or what you want to do after graduation, these are ‘beyond your control’. And you have four. The universe really does have plans for you, that’s kind of exciting, right?” She smiled, hoping to get some confirmation from him, or at least some more of his trust. “What does your intuition tell you about this journey, honey?”

Morgan’s performative coaxing elicited a dubious look, but the striking illustrations of the Tarot drew Luis’ attention regardless. The fool was poised with one foot over the cliff, smiling blissfully as the sun warmed his back. The tower’s blackened crenellations tumbled down the cliffside as the once indomitable edifice was battered into ruins by a storm. A haggard traveler slumped down in relief on a river bank as eight golden chalice stood resplendent over the churning rapids. Death rode on its pale horse, a scythe clutched in one skeletal hand while offering an exquisitely detailed rose. The Moon slept in the sky above a verdant shore. Wolves howled in its light while pelagic creatures breached on the lunar tide.

“Woah that art on these is something else,” admitted Luis as he squinted at the intricate illuminations, clearly sensitive to aesthetics but not the higher esoteric meaning.

Unfortunately intuition is only as good as the experiences which inform it and Luis Martinez had been sheltered from the world’s cruelty. It was a blessing to be sure, but it also made Luis unable to imagine that evil doesn’t need consent to claim you.

“My intuition is uh,” floundered the young man who had about as much affinity for divination as the average block of cedar. “The ranch’ll catch on fire, maybe a relative will die, but we’ll find like eight things that’ll make it better before the next full moon,” Luis posited.

Morgan’s stomach rumbled as the boy ogled the artwork on the cards. She was tempted to commend the kid on his ‘uncanny insight’ into the realm of the divine and take her money and run down the street for a hot stack of tacos. But the kid was so bright eyed and easily awed. She felt like she owed him at least some of her knowledge, even if she thought the tarot was psychological self-talk at best.

“Fortunately for your relatives, nothing here is quite that literal,” she said, laughing warmly. “But this journey you’re on, both within and without, is going to be perilous.” Perilous to the point of being seriously dangerous and traumatic, if this really was his subconscious sensing something on the horizon. But that wasn’t something she was going to say to his face. She wanted money without having to lie to her mother about where it came from later. “Even though your desires are upheld by the earth and stars, there will come a time when it feels as though you’ve been cast out and lost everything. But the key to staying your course is to…” What was a precious uplift-y way to spin this? “Hold fast to your sense of self. Remember the core of who you are and what you want. Because, if you do, then you will survive the upheavals, and you will be able to choose wisely what to keep, what to leave behind, and end up so strong, it’ll feel like you’ve been resurrected and leveled up into a new, better, cooler version of yourself!” She had no idea how to make sense of the moon card in a positive five star customer service rating sort of way, so she moved it underneath the spread, smiling like this had been her master plan all along.

“This card with the moon and the wolves isn’t your endgame, it’s an indicator of the vehicle, the thing that encompases the whole. All this massive change ahead of you isn’t necessarily going to be visible to everyone. It comes from within, sometimes hidden, like how you can only see the stars when it’s dark out and most of the world is asleep, and wolves howl when the world is in shadows. It’s like that. And it’s going to be amazing.”

Morgan checked her watch and slumped back in her chair as if she were exhausted. Not a hard thing to do when it was this hot out. “So, that’s gonna be forty dollars for the energy and the insight. Technically, with how many cards you pulled, it should be a little more, but I can tell you’re taking a risk on something new here and I want to honor that. But we can keep going if you have any more questions!”

“Vehicle huh...not sure dad’s gonna let me spraypaint moons and wolves on the truck,” Luis mused, perhaps taking the ‘vehicle’ thing a bit too literally or not wanting to think too hard about the possibility of his life changing.

Luis looked over the intricately illustrated cards, eyebrows wrinkling as he tried to parse through the profound chicanery Morgan had spouted. A bite of the lower lip hinted that Luis had never really encountered those who could appear to say everything while stating nothing particularly specific.

“Well shiiiii..,” the teenager breathed before glancing up at Morgan and catching himself with a small hssk of inhalation, as if some inner parental voice had scolded him about cursing in front of a lady. “That was pretty cool,” he amended, clearly at a loss before everything he’d been told, too polite to claim he didn’t believe any of it, but also too much a child of modernity to heed the weird feeling in his gut that recognized something...hit different...about this chance prophecy.

Luis grinned bashfully and unknowingly let fate’s final warning pass him by.

“Forty bucks huh, I’ll havta explain that somehow,” the young man noted with the mild consternation of someone blessed enough to just worry about a family member who’d be more peeved about gas money going to “fortuneteller” then the actual cash itself.

The bills slid across the table after some awkward wallet-riffling. “Thank you ma’am.”

Morgan snatched up the bills and shoved them down her shirt before the kid could change his mind. Whatever ominous feelings his subconscious were trying to air out was no concern for her. She had too many problems of her own to bother with anyone else’s. “It takes a long time to read the cards,” she drawled smugly. “And lots of energy, to open oneself and reach beyond the veil.” She waved her fingers as if to say tootles, and went back to fanning herself until he was gone.

She helped a lady find some yarrow and made up a policy about consultation fees to get another $10 in her pocket. She was using her agency to bridge the gap between minimum shop girl wage and living wage, working her will to get the right kind of energy flowing her way. Mostly, the energy of not-starving and not invoking the ire of darkness from using alchemy to get ahead. It didn’t line up with the rest of what she understood, neutral magic forces should be lining up to help her right her cosmic access and be less chronically miserable, but that was a problem to untangle another day.

At the end of her shift, Morgan shuffled the cards once again and lined them up on the cleansing plate the shopkeeper wanted the used decks put on. By chance, or so she told herself, she picked up the topmost card to see what was there for her. But it was just the death card, and Morgan knew the last thing that was gonna happen to her life was a hard reset. She stuck it back in the middle of the deck and slipped away into the long shadows that marked the summer evening.

#flashback friday #wr luis #wr chatzy #wr luis chatzy

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sinfulsachi · 3 years

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hi. if you hv free time, would u consider to make an office romance story for shinran? I dont know if its sounds cliche or not, but maybe our boy as the boss and ran as the sexy and hot secretary? And they always had an 'extra activity' anytime at his office

xoxo

I can guarantee I did the last part of your ask. As for the office romance, maybe if you squint really hard. ShinRan office PWP. Warning: slightly OOC. But still I hope you enjoy~ ;)

Office (ShinRan)

It all started with harmless euphemisms.

(”How do you like your cup of coffee, Kudou-san?” “Steamy and a little sweet.” “Oh? Then we’re no different.”)

Then he noticed her office skirt got shorter day by day, week by week.

She wasn’t doing this on purpose, at least that’s what he thought, until he remarked about how absurdly hot the afternoon was one day and her meek reply was, “I know, Sir, that’s why I want my skirts short and light...”

Huh. To the innocent blue eyes that traveled to his direction after she surreptitiously tugged the hem of her little skirt, his only response was to swallow. Thick.

She was modest and angelic the first two weeks, brave and bold the next month. The first he had met who could do both.

He was quiet and reserved, professional and calm. All the time. Supposedly.

Supposedly.

For when she finally, after shift, in a honeyed tone, asked him if he likes his coffee darker than black, darker than what she’d been consistently making him for a month and a half now, whilst her index and middle finger climbed his resting hand and swirled circles on the bone of his wrist... he could say it was the last straw.

He thought office fantasies like this only existed in media. But he’s frenching his secretary, and said secretary was now slotted between his legs, head bobbing, chest exposed and ass tight in her skimpy skirt, and he’s so hard in her mouth, one that couldn’t be achieved from a mere figment of imagination. Lo and behold, this was a fantasy brought to life.

He’d never admit the experience was a hundred times better because it wasn’t just a random, faceless secretary. It was Mouri Ran.

A month-and-a-half-worth foreplay with his attractive, sophisticated secretary Mouri Ran, the one who possessed all the qualities he liked in a woman.

About damn time this happened.

He lifted her to his desk and pried her silky smooth legs open. She acquiesced ever so willingly. He couldn’t believe it.

Her skirt was hiked up and panties dangling on one ankle when a knock on his locked door threatened to interrupt.

“Kudou-san, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be going ahead,” said the voice on the other side.

“Yeah.” He blew cool air across her wet core. “Sure.” He flattened his tongue on her rosy slit.

In her desperate attempt to clutch on something not his body part, Ran gripped the hard edge of the desk, toppling his pen holder and coffee - oh fuck this mess - in the process.

“...Is everything okay, Kudou-san?”

“Y-yes, yes I just...” He grabbed her wrist and pinned it to his hair, allowing her coffee-tainted fingers to be buried in his scalp. He looked up, casted her tearful face a silent fix. “Something's messing on my desk.”

“Something?” They heard the urgency in the assistant’s voice. “Is there a rat in your office? Do I need to bring you the pest repella-”

“No.” He lapped her clit in circles. Once. Twice. “I can take care of it.” He sucked on her pearl, gentle as not to produce wet sounds. Above him he heard the labored breathing of his secretary. Her other hand clamping her mouth shut and her heels digging his shoulder blades.

“Are you sure-”

“Go home Moriyama,” he half shouted. Stern. Impatient. “Now.”

Stunned, the poor assistant was left with no words, and finally his shadow under the door disappeared.

“Oh thank fuck.” And then he resumed his business with his tongue, and Ran finally released that long, feminine moan she’d been storing so effortfully in her chest. God she sounded so hot.

“K-Kudou-san...y-you really shouldn’t...”

“Shinichi.”

“Wh-...What?”

“Call me Shinichi.” He rose from his chair and loomed over her, pulling her by the waist to the edge of the desk so that her wet entrance met the tip of his erection.

“Shini...hah!” In one toe-curling thrust he was in her, and he kissed her jaw, twirled her locks, drawled in her ear. “Ran.” Fuck, so hot and tight.

It blew his mind how she matched his tempo ever so easily, moving her hips in sync with his, and at first he wanted this rough and fast but their rhythm was too sensual to let pass that he engaged her nice and slow...nice and slow.

But a tantalizing hum of his name sent his heart careening into his ribs, and soon their hips were snapping in frenzied motions and she was digging crescents on his back and he was yanking hard on her hair—

“I’m...pulling out,” he rasped when he felt himself nearing, but to his surprise the legs around him prevented his leave, locking him in place.

“N-no,” she sighed, breathless and hoarse. “I’m on the pill...please, finish inside me.”

“...Fuck!”

He relented easily on her command as spurts after spurts of white filled her. He watched her delirious eyes flutter to a sweet close, chest producing long, broken moans as she milked the last drops out of him.

When he finally slipped out, she drew him close one last time and kissed him tenderly on the lips, and he stuttered from his recurring blush.

Fucking hell. This woman. Mouri Ran. Too much for his supposedly calm heart. Everything he could ever ask for. She’s unbelievable. She’s perfect.

“That was...” she spoke first, shaky and shy, once she’s done buttoning her clothes and hopping down from the desk. “I’m sorry, Kudou-san, I... I even toppled your coffee, that was very impolite of m-”

“I said Shinichi, right?” he reminded softly. Her eyes widened.

“But we’re, um, done with...”

“Not just during that...I meant, outside of work.”

He pursed his lips, reached for the cloth she extended and helped her clean the spilt liquid which had already lined the edge of important and unimportant white papers. He figured he wasn’t in any place to be mad, not after having done what she requested of him earlier without even confirming with her twice. Frankly, not one of his proudest moments.

Still though...

Finishing inside her felt so...damn...good.

“That is, if you'll allow me to call you Ran, too.”

At that she bloomed a new shade of pink, and her hand paused wiping for a long second.

“I... don’t have a problem with that.”

His lips curled up, full contentment welling in his chest.

“Then, Ran, want to grab dinner after?”

#dcmk pairing: shinran #my writing #pwp #<1.1k words #quick(ie) writing request

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blankdblank · 3 years

Text

Hobbit Soulmate Pt 38

‘Mate Rings, new fashion trend? Jaqi Pear, newly named to be added to the King Kong epic directed by Peter Jackson due to be filming soon and star of Beast of Bards in which she is opposite her Mate Richard Armitage, on their latest project a mini series called North and South for BBC have been spotted with matching emerald rings. Myself personally, I love the trend, we should see more of this.’

“Oh my goodness,” you murmured smoothing your hands over your face listening to the gossip news playing through the wardrobe trailer for the Van Helsing film. Behind you the makeup woman was readying your blonde wig for your maid/villager role.

David Wenham however from the doorway said, “Not a clue the lot of them,” the words turning your head with grin creeping out in his crossing the room to give you a hug, “Glad to see you sweetheart, how have you been?”

In his lean back against the makeup counter already in full costume Hugh came in smiling as well, “I want to see this ring,”

Giggling softly your arm extended and he came over taking your hand admiring the ring, “Rich found them in a cabinet we bought he promised to fix up for me.”

David, “You told us about that, that looks crazy expensive.”

“It does, and he won’t tell me what it was appraised at either. So, fifteen bucks for the both of them.”

Hugh chuckled and came in for his own hug, “You are well worth the funds no matter the worth.”

The makeup woman asked, “Is that legal? Keeping them?”

Her bashful smile when you glanced her way was answered with a smile, “He found some receipts in the cabinet and tracked down the family and they signed a paper saying he could have them. Spent the whole day tracking them down and planning a meet up to return them. He thought the same thing and didn’t expect for them to say he could keep them.”

That had her chuckling in relief, “Sorry, parents are contract lawyers, second nature.”

You giggled shaking your head, “Oh no, I get it, my dad insisted I take a course on contract law too so when he found a music box and expensive pens and gloves in there too I was glad to hear he hunted them down, ‘cus those can go for thousands to collectors.”

Hugh, “At least there was a receipt there, had a friend who got taken to jail for trying to have a necklace he found on the beach to be reset to a necklace when it was reported stolen. That can go mad so fast.” He said watching while the woman got to braiding your hair back for the wig cap to go over. “Did you get enough sleep?”

“Ya, off yesterday since we’re switching back to day shifts for me in a few days, you?”

“Yes,” the pair smiled in replying remaining there for your basic makeup to add some exhaustion to layer the role of living in such a dangerous place. Simple wardrobe was added with your things locked up for you to be driven to the right town set. A sharp whispered “Yes,” had David chuckling at the Director stating he wanted you and David to have a steamy kiss after his request to sleep with your character.

Lowly he said, “You are not happy about this when I’m next to Hugh,”

To that you turned to Hugh teasing, “I get to kiss David and you don’t!” Sticking your tongue out leaving the pair chuckling in your split to head to your marks for the start of the scene.

From the inside of the home Van Helsing and Carl acting as Maid to the village scenes fleeing away the most fun of your week did come in the teasing line before the amorous and slightly comical kiss to the post coital scene to follow. Your giggles brightened the mood for those watching after the grueling fleeing and fight scenes filling the day when David exited in a sleeping gown. He came over to fix the couch up to be joined by you in a under shirt and skirt with corset over with a stunning lack of stockings hinting that it was just your under things to be removed in this cold town. Smiles and chuckles filled the talks on the right cuddling position before Carl would leap out of the post coital nest of blankets sending the couch flipping over for you to roll off onto the mat laid out behind it finishing off your blip in the film.

To be honest when all was said and done from the final butterfly inducing station kiss scene Richard milked as long as he could for several ‘options’ to end off the North and South Series and back to the beginning. Back when John and Margaret are just being intermingled through her father’s lessons with him the Mate Ring rumor did seem to be the best angle as you were told by his Agent at least. True it was best to seem available to an extent and to have a bond to his Mate while being presumed available did grant Richard some freedom for his image and even more so for yours. Which once you thought about it only enforced that you both could manage to keep your relationships somewhat private compared to other public couples. Both Jens and Naomi, the latter who just jumped from a relationship with Heath Ledger to Liev especially you could see just blasted across the news back home. True babies would one day give it away but there were always ways of trying to bolster that security by utilizing your camouflaging family if you had to.

On the eve of your arrival back in Canada once in bed you hung up the phone having heard that in your flight out of England Beast of Bards had over its opening weekend in Eastern Europe and Asia broke out $33 million in earnings adding even more to the grand title for the last stretch of it being in theaters. A fact that through Peter had bolstered hopes in his production team for King Kong even more that you could pull off something of this magnitude since the indy film had earned more than ten times the 15 million put in it to shoot it and was still gaining.

Wonderfalls beckoned you back again to set with a weekend pop by to drop in on the X2 premier that Lee would join you at while Richard tried to find a way to slip another trip back out to Canada into his schedule between is next few auditions. Nice and cuddly Richard soaked in all he could as for time with you and his family together eager as ever to have the big day come. Where all the relief came in just asking the question the gaping canyon of possibilities as for what the ceremony might be one day no one could tell, especially should you take hints from the fellow big name actors you had befriended with plans brewing for their own ceremonies. No matter what you had truly wished for deep inside he knew it would be something special between the pair of you without pomp or fanfare for the guests emptying the ceremony’s true meaning. The pair of you didn’t like to be the center of attention outside of character, but for one day who really knows what plans might come up.

Nearly tackled by Tracy in glee at your news the show was off on a roll again with Lee prouder than ever to tug you close to his side soaking up all the time with you he had until his work and your work tugged you in opposite ends of the world again. Easily melting back into the show to get to the more absurd episodes even bringing you into the path of some exotic birds you loved to get a closer look at on the episode you had to pretend one of them attacked you. That had to be one of your favorite ones to lead up to as the zoo that you were to film in gave you all a private tour, and even seeing the same animals a million times there was just something about a zoo that brought out your inner child. Right up there with museums and aquariums and planetariums you frequented on their discount and free days out in New York whenever possible.

Guest stars began to roll in and with the day you were filming a debacle between two women each claiming to have gone over the falls some decades prior a bout of unplanned rain had given you all an early afternoon off. Once changed again your eyes lingered on your ring and Tracy smirked moving closer saying, “Saw that. Admiring it again? It is stunning, if I got a ring like that I’d stare at it for a few days minimum.”

With a chuckle you replied, “Rich said when he got the rings the shop he got our rings cleaned at said I could drop by to pick out a wedding band.”

“Ooh, I smell a shopping trip,” she said with a smile making your creep out, “Come on, we’ll grab Lee and have some fun adoring some shiny things.”

Her arm looped in yours and together with the surprisingly excited Lee you were off to the expensive brand of jewelers. Where Richard had been mistaken as a non-earning slob right away your face had the two suited men perking up, even the woman currently helping another woman choose a necklace. The focus right off triggering your smile reflex on the stroll through the amply lit shop full of cases holding tons of shiny things, all of which you stole glances at along the way. “Miss Pear, welcome, how might we assist you today?”

“Well, some months back by fiancé brought our rings in to be cleaned up and while he was waiting the topic of wedding bands came up. He was told I could drop by to browse a bit on styles.”

Salesman 1 with a buzz cut, “You are welcome to look through any of our selection, any time.”

The Manager crept over asking, “Did you have any hint of what you might be looking for?”

“Yes, my cousin for her wedding band has an eternity band with hearts and I was thinking of one with emeralds, and maybe an onyx one to match his ring a bit.”

In the move of your hand to the top of the case between you the Manager drew in a quick breath recognizing the ring right away and smiled offering his palms upwards to accept your hand, “Yes, I remember this masterpiece.” Smiling wider in tilting it side to side seeing it was still well taken care of, “An eternity band will suit it perfectly.” He released your hand and asked, “Have you had any thoughts to carat size?” gesturing your group to the next row of cases that he walked around his to enter that ring of glass walking right to the section of eternity bands.

With a key ring he opened the case to bring out a row of options, after a quick inhale you replied, “Not really, I’ve never been very, attentive I guess, to jewelry and all that till I met my fiancé. He actually got me my first bracelet that wasn’t made from string, so very new to this.”

The Salesman snuck in asking, “Well this would not be the first time a man wants to bring his love to a better livelihood.”

Lee almost said something until you said, “Not so much that, just most of my money went into my University studies while he’d already graduated when we met.”

The Manager smiled saying, “As it should be, and now you have your name in lights and require something lovely to flash to the cameras. How the world took this as anything but an engagement ring I have no clue.”

Tracy said, “All in all her and her guy outside of characters love their privacy so this way the plans won’t be hounded by cameras.”

Lee grinned as you said, “If anything we could always run off and elope in a horse costume.”

Lee, “Oh we could do better than a horse for you.”

The Manager said, “We do not have any colored heart eternity bands in store however we can order anything you like to custom.” The first row of rings was lifted for you and he said, “We have open designs, or full stones.”

Tracy said, “My mom loves open rings like that.”

Lee in a reach over shifted your hand for his view saying, “Might be a bit big.”

You nodded and said, “Also, I don’t think it would match to have all the metal visible around the stones.”

The Salesman smiled saying, “Very true observation your stones are seamless.”

Luring the Manager to bring over the next row while the Salesman put that one away, alternating directions the hearts on the next ones in sizes from large to small. Beside those came a selection with hearts on bands all upright and a third with them laid sideways. “I really like the sideways ones, my cousin picked the up and down alternating style.” Unlike the alternating hearts these hearts were formed of three stones each, a square and two rounded off squares upping the carat weight but keeping the size from being ridiculous.

Tracy, “I think the small one is a bit too small,”

Lee pointed at the one in the middle, “I think that size would work,”

The Manager lifted the ring out and passed it to you smiling as you did ease it on and the duo around you joined you in eyeing the ring in comparison to your engagement ring. “Doesn’t match,” you muttered to yourself.

The Manager said, “I do believe this one would fit the best myself.” Accepting the ring you took off trading it for the largest one. “A nice one point seven five carat for each heart set to go with your eight and single carat stone ring.”

“I do like this one.”

You said and with nods your friends agreed with Lee asking, “Were you thinking green, white or groups of colors to fit the black?”

On a diagram sheet from the Salesman the Manager showed you a few options while you eased off the band to not forget you were wearing it while the Salesman hurried off with a lift of his finger. Back to you he brought a choice of bracelets of round stones in various combinations of emeralds, onyx and diamonds, “Just for the color schemes.”

Tracy asked, “Were you thinking more emeralds?”

“I think maybe more diamonds and onyx.”

Lee tapped one, “I like this one,” he said tapping the bracelet with three diamonds next to three onyx stones, “Maybe pop an emerald in the middle of the onyx.”

“I like that idea, nice pattern.”

The Manager said, “Very lovely choice. And with this size the pricing will be fitting, four grand for stones will be a fine partner to its $800k engagement ring. Now to choose metals, I will get the samples.” Hurrying off while the Salesman took the bracelets back Lee’s brows furrowed in the drop of his and Tracy’s jaw while you subtly gripped the belt on his side.

Barely above a whisper you asked, “$800k? That’s over my whole check for the show!”

Tracy whispered, “That’s a house, two houses down south.”

“And four cars. You could probably buy a plane for that! I have house, plane and cars on my finger.”

Lee looked you over murmuring, “How do you do that? First Porn Man stash, then you found that cabinet for under twenty bucks.”

Tracy, “You’re taking me furniture shopping after this.”

“It’s not every time.”

Lee cut in as you let go of his belt, “There was two hundred in the cushions on the lounges you picked for me.”

Tracy, “How do you know? Is there like a glow? Because this role for you is seeming perfect if you have a voice telling you to buy this stuff.”

“It’s,” you sighed at her brows arched up curiously, “My uncles call me money bunny.”

Lee, “Why? They refused to explain.”

“I used to be the one to find lost wallets or keys since I was three. No glow or anything, even found a lost watch my gramps lost in the fields gathering the sheep in a storm. Dad’s the same way.”

Tracy, “After this,”

The Manager returned and choosing 24 karat white gold to match the other ring he got to finalizing the order sheet for the now 5.5k ring and the more he filled out the more your heart raced having picked all this out without Richard. He did tell you to browse and see if you could think up what you wanted but you sure hoped he wouldn’t feel left out of the designing process where you might not have felt the weight you were feeling now to have to dip into your savings to pay for this right away. Though the Manager said with a smile, “This ring should take five weeks to complete, if you would give us a number to contact you at when it is complete.” His grin crept wider, “Normally we ask for a deposit but for our elite clientele we waive that restriction and have much better terms for credit when the pieces are ready to be picked up or delivered.”

It all was a bit awkward to simply leave with a receipt slip for the walk to the second hand shop. Through the aisles you wandered until you stopped at a jewelry display. And from the selection between two boxes you pulled open a hanging display case to find a necklace of nine strands of what looked to be jade flat beads secured by a golden clasp you lifted and turned to show Tracy like the bloodhound she and Lee had been treating you like. Seeing you had brought something to show them the pair turned and Tracy lifted the ends of the necklace that parted her lips. After stealing a glance towards the shop owner behind the distant counter she leaned in whispering, “Is this real jade?”

Mid shrug you said, “You said see what I end up picking. It’s something.”

Lee and her shared a glance and he found the price tag saying, “7 bucks, and it’ll pop on you against your skin, for the premier of the show, could be nice.”

She nodded and pointed to you, “I know you, there’s something to this. I’m buying it.” She led the way to the registers, a few feet away your hand reached out for a butterfly shaped decoration out of painted wood you picked up and brought over to set beside the necklace she decided to wear out once the tag was cut off. Food was picked up on the way back to your place where she’d planned to get a taxi to get back in time for a late brunch with her parents that had flown in to visit her. “So are you gonna tell me-,” gripped around the waist she was tugged out of the way by Lee behind you with a loose dog that you turned and ducked to grip the collar of for the massive hockey player chasing the peppy husky. Off to the side her arm swung and open mouthed she gawked at the bag that collided with the brick building behind her while you tried to calm the husky now bounding around and between your legs wiggling for attention from his new friend. “My butterfly,” she murmured as the man came to a stop in front of you.

“I am so sorry about Leap Frog. Just took off out of the car, his first road trip.”

Shaking your head you giggled saying, “No problem, my cousins puppies were all the same way.” You said handing over the leash while he all but paled realizing who you were.

“Thank you,” he murmured again and turned to head back to his car with the dog where his friends were waiting for him.

Inside the bag Tracy peered and open mouthed she eyed the broken pieces of the butterfly then looked at you, “You have got to be kidding me.” You looked from her to the bag she pulled a folded wad of cash out of and you simply shrugged and she shook her head dropping it back into the bag before anyone else could see it. “You got skills. Like able to sway millions of cult followers skills.”

“Oh ya, come on up to my place, I got some kool-aid.” That had her rolling her eyes through your shard giggle, “When we die we get a whole bushel of golden geese and a bunch of mountaintop villas with a one of those terrifying pools that drops into a waterfall with a hele-pad and all the frills as our place as Kings of all the universes and dimensions.”

Teasingly she replied, “I got plans, so I’m gonna have to rain check on the kool-aid.”

“Missing out,” Lee teased while you smirked saying, “Have fun looking into that jade.”

“So how’s your day going?” Richard hummed through the line while soaking in the bath washing off a long muggy day of auditioning for some more ridiculous commercials and a spot on another tv show as yet another stunning adulterer.

“Had to call it early for rain and Lee and Tracy came with me to that jewelry shop you mentioned.”

“You saw what I mean then? Right in the door judging.”

“Oh yes and pushy. Which is what I was getting to,” you said seated while stirring your food up into a jumble waiting for it to cool.

“You picked out what you wanted?”

“Yes, and before I could say I’d come back with you later they wrote up the ring to be made.”

“Just determined for commission aren’t they.”

“And that’s the thing, five and a half grand total and they let me walk out without a deposit, apparently I’m elite clientele now fitting for their credit. Don’t know me from Adam, but it’ll be done in five weeks is what they said.”

“Good, should be there in three.”

“I don’t think it works like that.”

Lowly he chuckled, “I’ll be there in three, Dearest.”

“Oh, oh, you got a ticket back?” You squeaked our happily smiling at your empty apartment and muted tv.

“Yes, just for two and a half weeks but I get to see you before you fly out to New Zealand for Peter. Then when my shows are done I can fly out there with you for the tail end of that maybe take him up on his offer as a doomed extra.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, now, details about this stunner you drafted up, my Dearest Love.”

“Ok,” you smiled repeating the details of the ring warming his heart even more at the symbol of marriage you would be wearing sometime in the future that was coming up to being planned.

“Simply fantastic choice, and don’t worry on the price I have it and the Bard should be out of theaters soon so we can set part of that aside for any possible other nuptial plannings or purchases you feel up to.”

“What else, oh right, a dress and all that.”

Again he chuckled saying, “If need be pick a few options and if funds run thin I’ll pick the most forgiving to wear myself.” That had you laugh through his chuckle and he added, “I’d wear anything to marry you.”

“If I did have spares I’d make my cousins wear them. Go for traditional, confuse those demons after us.” Widening his smile imagining what you might want to wear for the distant big day.

“Any weird roles today?”

“There is one where I’m dancing with limes.”

“Wow,”

“Floor cleaners, odd ones, are you doing well otherwise?”

“Weird dream I saved William Shatner from drowning and then he turned into a llama and hopped into a convertible and drove off with Burt Reynolds.”

“Wow,”

“So weird. Just an odd day, and Tracy had me take her furniture shopping thanks to finding out I have a house, airplane and five cars on my finger.”

“They told you the price?! Oh Love, you deserve it you know that.”

“I, know, just, I’ll handle the price tag when I get over my heart attack of a paycheck for Kong and whatever Bard is going to be with our two percent box office check. Gran called and the managers are thrilled, said that it’s climbed to over $200 million, so whatever that stops at-,”

“I love you, clearly they didn’t expect you to turn a phenom and blow this out of the water like this.”

“As if your brooding didn’t have anything to do with it Mr Blue Eyes.” Making him chuckle again. “You are going to be quite famous ya know when this is on disc and everyone can see your face on movie shelves instead of just at the theaters. Not to mention when they see you as Mr Thornton.”

“I prefer you being the famous one and I just happen to be talented enough to have producers pick me to have your name attached as hey we hired Miss Pear’s Boy Toy.” Again he chuckled through your giggle knowing he was beaming proudly at the still lingering title. “Has your dad talked to you about his plan yet?”

“Plan?”

“About the brownstone the Landlord has out there?”

“I mean, I know about it, but, he has a plan with it? Like an actual plan?”

Again he chuckled lowly, “I love you, you know that. I suppose it was meant to be a surprise then when he dropped by again. Said he wanted to take you out there, Landlord had the wiring, plumbing, water heater and ac updated for it. Plaster should be redone when you get back as well.”

“How, do you feel about that?”

“I think it would be a home for you to own that I could cuddle up to you in. I do like the idea, we stay in mine out here and I want you to have a place where when we’re all there in New York with tons of space. It sounds amazing I know we can make it a home and there’d be tons of space for all your stuff from the apartment there and ours in Canada. Plus, Lee’s been having it rough with rent.”

“Ya,” you chuckled out, “I fronted him some cash on his place here he forgot Will had a card on his account and he ordered some ‘really rad sneakers’.” Making Richard chuckle, “Rules have been set, lesson learned on both ends. He is doing well though his parents are pleased he’s still alive.”

“Have you told him yet about the place?”

“Not really, I mentioned it that Dad had talked to the Landlord about it. He was flipping through our fuzzy channels at the time for something recognizable.”

“I am going to love cuddling with you to that cable, no lies, you will too. Just imagine those romances you love without z shaped heads on the lovers.” Luring a giggle from you.

“Imagine that, all those actors actually having heads.”

Spenser Breslin was the latest famous guest to drop in and on one of your night shoots this week between takes of a dinner between your on screen love interest and the Russian mail order bride who made him and you food the bag you’d tucked in the cupboard of your trailer began to ring. “Oh shit,” you said easing up out of your chair to the Director’s chuckle, “Thought I shut it off.”

You said about your phone and from the bag nestled between his and hers you pulled the phone to silence it only to mutter, “Why is she calling me? She never calls me.”

The Director said glancing at the teen seated on the couch bench you had left reading a book he’d brought, “Go ahead, we have to shift lights for Spence’s entrance.”

Answering the call from your cousin all eyes shot to your phone you pulled from your ear at the loud shrieking sea of obviously more than one of your cousins. “Bell,” You said easing the phone closer to your mouth but not your ear. “Not a dolphin.”

Muffled in a group the group shouted, “UNCLE’S ... NOMINATED!!!”

Their shouts died down and you brought the phone closer to your ear trying to make out the gist of what they all were saying. “I got ‘nominated’ and ‘uncle’, which uncle?”

A collective throat clearing was had and they said, “OUR UNCLE!!”

“Oh, your, my dad got nominated for something? What?”

One apparently chosen cousin said excitedly, “Uncle Joe got a letter today from MTV that he’s been nominated for the Best Villain Award!”

“No! Where is he?”

“We tackled him when he read it, so he’s hiding in the barn.” They all giggled out making your smile creep wider.

“When is it?”

“End of the week out in New York.”

“Least it’s not in LA, he want to go?”

“He has to! And he’s got a plus one!”

“Well I wasn’t gonna send him alone.” You glanced over at the still staring group smiling as you said, “Actually on set, but I’ll call him after I get off and love you guys try not to drive him up a tree.”

Giggles followed and they shouted, “LOVE YOU TOO BUNNY!!” Then promptly hung up making you shake your head and shut off the phone you put away again.

Joining the others with an excited squeak to your voice for a moment you said, “Dad got nominated for best villain from MTV.”

“Oh that’s awesome!” Rippled around while you took your seat again.

“Yes, his first award on acting sure he’s thrilled once my cousins stop swarming him.”

Spencer joked, “Well I’d be scared too if I had dolphins in my family.”

That had you giggle, “They don’t mean to be like that, just happens when they’re excited. “Quads, about your age.” You said bumping Spenser’ arm.

Love interest asked, “Quads?”

“Four babies at once.”

“How-?” He asked with voice trailing off in astonishment.

“I have a lot of cousins, mostly twins or higher.”

The mail order bride asked, “Scared to ask how many siblings you have.”

“Just me, lost mom when I was little. I don’t think her parents could have handled more than one of me. Got a bit of her unruly streak they battled with for years in her till she ran off with dad.”

She said with a smile, “Ooh, sounds whirlwind and like a fairy tale.”

That made your smile grow and you nodded, “Met when they were young and her parents didn’t want her running off with some rancher from Texas, she danced in the Bolshoi Ballet.” Parting their lips, “Which my grandparents have been on the board for since they retired and she chose the guy they said wasn’t good enough and it was a fairy tale for a little while, even had me. Hasn’t been that bad from them since they wanted to get involved, my schooling helped studying abroad they got to drop in and out when it was easiest for them. And Babu gets to try and spoil me with traveling and shopping funds he pretends to be very cross with me when I don’t spend it all.”

Spencer asked, “You went to a school in another country all alone? Why didn’t your dad go with you?”

Catching his eye you smiled answering, “He took a job on an oil rig to help me pay the difference on my tuition after my scholarships.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

That had your smile creep wider, “Absolutely, and I had terrible stage fright. And I was in England and when I got a job waiting tables everyone saw me as the sore thumb for my accent and my eyes. And I just didn’t talk to people past my Professors till I got locked out of my dorm one too many times studying past curfew and some guys let me bunk with them in their flat. They were from Chelsea all the way out alone in Oxford and I found some more sore thumbs to hang out and bunk with, that helped a bit.”

The guy said, “I thought Lee said you went to Julliard with him and Tracy.”

“I did both, Oxford for my Drama and Science degrees, Daddy said I needed a back up plan. Did that for a year then Julliard accepted me so his friend who owns apartment buildings got me a place and kept an eye on me for fall to spring between summers back in Oxford.”

She said, “I don’t like to fly how can you fly so often?”

You shrugged and love interest asked, “So when did your dad start acting?”

“Few years back, he was going to be an extra with me on the Lord of the Rings got put as an Uruk-hai after his rig got hit in a storm and they had to evacuate it. Been helping him to get work on film since so he didn’t have to go back, and I’ve graduated now so he’s just got baby fever waiting for grand babies to watch after while I work. He didn’t dream of being an actor now he’s got an award he must be so excited. I hope he wins.”

Spencer asked, “Which film did he play the villain in that he’s getting the award for?”

“Beast of Bards.”

That had his jaw drop, “The villain was your dad?! That guy was huge!”

Making you giggle, “Well he’s 6 ft 9,” dropping the love interest’s jaw too, “got his hair and eyes but I got my mom’s travel sized stature.”

The Director gave the signal that the lights were ready and Spencer added his book with the others on your shelf in the trailer and wiggled past your lifted legs to go outside to take his own mark while you readied to be the irritated third wheel and storm to the sink where love interest would come cuddle behind you. Right in front of the tiny window where the camera with a hat standing in for Spencer on this shot would see you and grow jealous enough to try and frame love interest for beating him up.

On his way to his car to take him to his hotel Spencer caught a moment at your side again and asked, “Hey Jaqi?” Getting a kind smile in return, “I got a question, you have all that family back home. Why would you want to act if it means you don’t get to be there with them and you have to be alone?”

“Well, my Mate said something to me once when he was switching from musical theater to drama school to act traditionally. If you can picture yourself doing anything else and still being happy you shouldn’t act. But if you can only see yourself content while being an actor and living with the rough times, the dry spells between roles, the rejections and bad reviews but you still couldn’t do anything else then you should stick in there and put in the work. Back in school they tell us it takes ten years on average to be an overnight success. And the way I figure it I could always call, we mail tapes all the time. So ya I miss home and my family but I have all these amazing stories to tell my little cousins, and if you could just see New Zealand, that trip alone could have fed my fire for a decade alone and I get to go back again for King Kong, with my favorite Director and crew that feels like family. Roles are hit and miss, but I wouldn’t be happy behind a microscope in a job to be back home by nightfall. And my Mate acts too along with most of my friends so we all sort of mesh in together on our own adventures. You’re still a kid, you don’t have to iron it all out now, just see where the road takes you.”

Sheepishly he said, “I do like music. But my agent says I don’t have a look for musical films.”

You scoffed at that, “You think the big bands before the 90’s got universal approval on their looks? No, they had a killer voice and a sound no one could touch, and doesn’t matter what you look like if you got a song in you no one has heard yet you go and belt it out. Someone’ll turn their head. Keep working on your music too, hone your craft. Never hurts to have some versatility. Ten years, you got tons of time.” Making his smile creep out in his nodding turn for the car that pulled up with his dad and manager inside talking about his next plans for travel for another role.

Once inside the taxi a crew member had guided you to they called you pulled out your phone calling your dad with a smile. “Hey Daddy, congratulations.”

“They swarmed me.”

You giggled hearing the sounds of the sheep he was clearly still hiding with to pretend he was busy to go back in again. “I heard. We’re all just so proud of you. Can’t wait to go with you, we going fancy or casual?”

“No way we can’t go fancy. Gonna be in front of people. What if I have to give a speech? I don’t know what to say. It’s different with a camera there’s no reaction from a camera but I’ve seen those shows and there’s a crowd.”

“Well a simple thank you might be ok, I mean-,”

“I didn’t even talk that much on film, and it was mainly to you.”

“Well Anthony Hopkins wasn’t all talk in Silence of the Lambs, had his silent intimidation moments. It doesn’t have to be long. Loads of villains are silently intimidating.”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“Uncle Joe!” You heard faint through the line making you smile wider.

“Oh they found me.”

“Love you, Daddy.”

“I’ll get Jim to help me write something. He talks all the time at his job. Love you Pumpkin, see you in New York.”

Pt 39

Hobbit – Soulmate - @evyiione, @deepestfirefun, @rhaenaatargaryen, @anastasialovers

X all Rich. A - @abiwim, @deepestfirefun, @thestorybookmistress

X Lee P - @tigereyesf

All –

@himoverflowers, @theincaprincess, @aspiringtranslator, @thegreyberet, @patanghill17, @jesgisborne, @curvestrology, @alishlieb, @jogregor, @armitageadoration, @fizzyxcustard, @lilith15000, @marvels-ghost, @catthefearless, @imjusthereforthereads, @c-s-stars, @otakumultimuse-hiddlewhore, @mariannetora, @shes-a-killer-kween, @ggbbhehe4455

#Van Helsing Filming #Back to Wonderfalls #Shopping Trip #Elite Clientele Benefits #Ring Design #Second Hand Shop #Money Bunny #Nomination News #Richard Armitage x Reader OC

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theshopislocal · 3 years

Text

corinth rains

New and improved Heaven may well be the Happiest Place (not) on Earth. But Dean, it turns out, is still Dean.

(also on AO3)

chapter two

Heaven is warm, bucolic, and perfect. And it gives Dean the damned heebie-jeebies.

He recalls a memorable night spent with Pamela - well, as memorable as it could be after a fifth of Macallan. Sam had said ‘So get this...’ and then fucked off to the local library, leaving Pam and Dean at the hotel bar. They’d drunk til the lights got fuzzy, and Pam had leaned back against the barstool, arching one dark eyebrow.

She’d had Dean supine across the foot of the squeaky queen, sitting astride him and working some kind of magic. She’d settled his hands on her slim waist, tugged at his hair, bitten his lips; he’d had nary a moment to want something before she gave it - the craving coming on the heels of the having.

Heaven is much the same - perceptive and generous - and it leaves Dean feeling just as he had that night with Pam. Vulnerable, flayed open. Seen.

He assumes it’s heaven’s off-brand kind of ESP that’s landed him here, seated at a teakwood dining table in a house over yonder.

There are soft sounds from the kitchen - cabinets opening, a gurgling coffee maker, a substratum of tuneless humming. Dean hunches over his plate and shovels another forkful of pie into his mouth. It’s sweet and rich, tart and crumbly, and he barely tastes it at all.

“You alright?”

Dean looks up to find Mary seated across from him. She’s a little younger than when he last saw her, but otherwise she’s just as he remembers - her yellow hair falling in waves over her shoulders, her eyes a soft Carolina blue.

She stares at him, calm and unconcerned, the bow of her lips turned up in a tiny smile.

Dean shakes his head and gives a little shrug. “Yeah, ‘course,” he says, gruffer than intended.

She notices, he’s sure, but she only tips her head in a nod. “Okay.”

A quietude stretches between them, peaceful but gravid. Mary tilts her head, face serene and mildly expectant, and she inches a pale hand forward on the table. His fingers clench around the little dessert fork, and he takes another bite.

She’s waiting, he realizes, for him to speak, to get there. Though where ‘there’ is, Dean’s got no damn idea.

“You know,” he says, to fill the silence, “Sammy asked me if I remembered anything,” he swallows, throat dry, and looks down at his plate, “‘bout bein’ a kid.”

Mary’s eyebrows pop up, and she smiles a little wider. “You remembered me,” she offers.

Dean’s eyes alight on hers, and his lips purse. There’s something something fragile in her face, a budding hope that he doesn’t want to crush. You made me sandwiches, he wants to say. You told me bedtime stories.

His stomach clenches. You burned alive, gutted on the ceiling.

Dean looks away, brow furrowed. “‘Course I did,” he grunts out, throat tight.

She gives him a look that goes right through him - compassionate, or maybe pitying. Her mouth turns down like she can hear his thoughts, and he bites his cheek, shamefaced.

“What else do you remember?” she asks, and her voice is mild and curious, lacking the censure Dean expected.

Dean reins in his surprise and dips his head, summoning a wry smile. “Well,” he says and points his fork at the plate of pie crumbs.

She rolls her eyes and nods, smiling once again. “Yes, obviously pie. What else.”

He stares at her for a moment, feeling wrong-footed and a little short-changed, then peers through the open French doors toward the mountainside. He scans his memories, steering clear of the ugly ones that present themselves first, looking for something - anything - to keep her smiling.

...Weedy grass and buzzing bees.

“Our backyard,” he murmurs, and feels his lips quirk up.

Mary’s smile grows soft, warm like the spring air. “Mm,” she hums. “Always overgrown. Your dad never wanted to mow it.”

Dean withholds a wince at the mention of John, and a muscle twitches in his jaw. “I liked it how it was.”

Mary’s eyes dart up to his, and her soft laugh lines deepen. “Yeah, you did.”

Dean’s eyes trace over her face, searching for something, though he’s not sure what. She’s still the girl who made a deal with a yellow-eyed demon. Still the woman who left, and left, and left again. She’s no more perfect now than she ever was, but...

She has laugh lines, and yellow hair, and Carolina blue eyes. And she’s looking at Dean like she’s missed him forever. Damn, if he hasn’t missed her, too.

Something loosens in his chest, and his fists unclench. He smiles, wan but sincere, and leans back in his seat, crossing his ankles under the table. “Coulda done without the bees though.”

She huffs a little laugh and shakes her head. “You loved the bees,” she counters.

Dean raises a doubtful eyebrow. “Did I?”

“Mhm,” she hums, nodding sagely. “You’d chase ‘em around, flapping your arms like little wings.”

Dean squints, searching his scattered memory. He remembers the yard, the foliage, the window into the kitchen. He remembers thunder and lightning and torrential downpour. He doesn’t remember himself.

“Huh,” he says, and folds his arms over his chest.

He stares across the table at Mary. She’s silent but smiling, her eyes far away. It’s a familiar look, one he’s seen on nearly everyone he knows in Heaven. Like they’re lost in a beautiful memory - a moment in their past lives that they didn’t regret.

Dean doesn’t think about his human life. He’d lived it, after all. That was enough.

“You drew me a map once.”

Dean eyes flick up from where they’d settled on his dirty plate, and his brow furrows. “A map?”

She nods, still staring glassy-eyed into the middle distance. “You followed one little bee all day long,” she murmurs. “Counted all the flowers she landed on. Then you,” she swallows, and her eyes go shiny, “you raced inside and scribbled it all out on the back of a—” a startled huff of laughter, “—a takeout menu.”

Dean watches her, the way her eyes flick back and forth, like she’s watching the scene unfold before her. There’s an ache near the center of his chest like a bruise. “I don’t remember that,” he says, voiced pitched low.

Her head tilts up, absent eyes meeting his as she pulls herself from reverie. “You were... three? Maybe four?” She looks down and brings a hand to settle over her heart. “It was beautiful,” she whispers, and tilts her head. “Wish I still had it.”

Dean nods at her, though she’s still looking away, and he feels a hot coil of guilt in his stomach. Mary had adored him, he knows that much, and she’d lost him as surely as he’d lost her. He remembers the expectant way he’d looked at her in the bunker, wanting something she couldn’t remember how to give. Something he barely even remembers himself.

There’s movement behind Mary’s head, and Dean’s eyes snap to it.

Something is... growing on the wall.

Dean’s fists clench up, and he watches with hawk eyes as the thing manifests, forming itself into a vaguely rectangular shape. He feels his lips purse tight and his spine straighten like a rod.

Mary senses his sudden tension and looks up, following his eyes over her shoulder.

“Oh my god,” she whispers in awe.

She unfolds herself from her chair and stands up slowly, as if in a dream. She walks the four paces to the wood-paneled wall, reaching out a cautious hand. Her fingers close around the frame of the thing, and she gives a soft sigh.

Dean stares at her back where the knobs of her spine meet her neck, her shoulder blades distorting the periwinkle plaid of her blouse. She turns around, her eyes fixed on her prize, thumbs smoothing over the simple wood frame.

She comes around the table, sliding into the chair at Dean’s side, and when she finally looks up at him, her eyes are bright and red-rimmed. She takes Dean’s hand in hers, her skin smooth and cool, and slips the little framed drawing into his palm.

He peers down at it and gives a startled bark of laughter.

The drawing is entirely ridiculous - an indecipherable riot of squiggly pen lines and waxy crayon color. There’s a messy bed of green near the bottom, which Dean assumes is grass, and it’s speckled with tiny blobs of vibrant pink and deep red - flowers, Dean thinks. Near the center of the page is a single white daisy with a bright yellow bumblebee hovering over it. A swirling purple line trails behind its black-striped body, making loop-de-loops around every flower. The sky is a strip of electric blue at the top, just above an empty field of white - the landscape drawn as children often do, with the heavens separated from the earth.

His fingers hover over a grease-stained corner, illegible text bleeding through. “Jeez,” he breathes out. “Clearly I missed my calling.”

He hears the broad smile in Mary’s voice. “Coulda been the next Da Vinci,” she says, nudging his shoulder.

Dean huffs and raises an eyebrow. “More like Picasso.”

She laughs at that, as he knew she would, and it sounds like Corinthian bells, chiming in harmony on the breeze.

Dean smiles to himself, eyes roving over his apparent masterpiece before alighting on a strange scribble in the corner.

“What’s this?” he murmurs, pointing a finger at the tiny black and blue squiggle.

“Hm?” Mary leans closer to him, and Dean’s nose twitches with the scent of tart apples clinging to her hair. She looks at the little scribble, frowning for a moment, before her eyebrows pop up. “Oh, wow,” she sighs out, leaning closer. “I forgot about that.”

She reaches out a hand to grasp the side of the frame opposite Dean’s, the small weight of the silly little drawing shared between them. She’s got that look again, like there’s an old Super 8 projection playing in her head. Dean wonders what’s on the reel.

She chews her lip for a moment, then tips her head toward Dean. “You remember what I used to tell you before bed?” she asks, peering up at his face.

Dean frowns. “Brush your teeth or they’ll turn green?”

She gives him a look. “That was Dad.”

Dean tips his head back in a nod. “Right. Uh...” Dean trails off for a moment, unsure. Nearly all of his childhood memories are of Mary, but they’re weathered and vague, filtered through the consciousness of a toddler. He barely remembers the words she said, only the lilting strains of her voice as she calmed him, soothed him, protected him—

An image flits across his mind, and he sucks in a breath: a tiny figurine that sat on the mantel, with fluffy little wings and a crown of white roses.

Dean blinks and shakes his head. “Angels are watching over me,” he intones.

He sees Mary nod in his peripheral vision, and her finger taps on the little scribble near his thumb.

“It’s—” Dean starts and frowns, askance, “...an angel?” he guesses.

“Mhm,” she hums, giving another slow nod. Her finger slides across the two tiny black scrawls, vaguely triangular and joined at the middle. “Wings,” she says, then taps the blue oval just above, “halo.” He sees her smile out of the corner of his eye. “You drew it all the time.”

Dean stares at the squiggle, a frown etching across his forehead. The figurine he remembers was nearly solid white, the only deviations its pink skin and dark eyes. There’s not a speck of white in the little scribble, no cherubic cloud-seeder to be found. Just messy black shapes and a faded blue circle. Black wings, blue halo.

Black wings. Blue halo.

Black wings.

... Blue—

The painting slips from his fingers as Mary takes it back in her hands. She holds it gently, reverently, as she stands and walks around the table. Dean shakes his head to clear it, and watches as she replaces the little picture on the center of the wall. It looks, at once, as if it has always hung there, and like he’d drawn it but a moment ago.

A shiver climbs up the back of Dean's neck. He shrugs it off.

“How’s Dad?” he asks lowly, and regrets it immediately.

Mary turns around, her eyes a little wide, eyebrows climbing toward her hairline. Dean isn’t sure why he asked. He backtraces his train of thought, only to find he hadn’t had one at all; seems he’s done his usual shtick of putting his foot in his mouth the very moment he opens it.

Mary seems to sense his imminent retraction, and she settles her face into a genial smile. “He’s good,” she says mildly and comes back to her seat across from Dean. “Wasn’t sure he’d like it here, at first. But,” she settles into the worn wooden chair, “I think he does.”

Dean represses a scoff at that. “Why wouldn’t he?” he says and picks up his fork, eyes downcast. “He’s got you.” He slides the crumbs around on his plate, shoulders hunching forward. “All he ever wanted.”

Mary is silent for a long moment, and Dean doesn’t look up - he can picture her face well enough. His fork scrapes against white porcelain, the sun a bright glare on the stainless steel tines.

Mary sighs, barely audible. “You ever gonna talk to him?”

Her voice is soft and ambivalent, as if she’s already accepted his answer. It gets Dean’s back up, and he peers up at her through flinty eyes.

She’s staring at him, face guileless and open. There’s a spark of curiosity in her eyes, flavored with a sort of tempered sadness. But there’s no reproof, no expectation, and Dean gets the strange feeling that there isn’t a right answer. Or a wrong one.

Dean’s jaw goes a little slack, and for a moment, he thinks he might simply say, No.

Mary tips her head to the side, eyes going soft as her lips turn up, and the moment passes.

“‘Course, I will,” Dean grumbles, casting his eyes back to his empty plate. He shrugs. “Not avoiding him, just...” he trails off and shakes his head. Best leave it there.

Mary takes a slow breath, and Dean sees the vague shape of her leaning forward in her seat.

“Well,” she starts, lacing her fingers on the tabletop. “I won’t speak for him—”

Dean snorts. “But.”

Mary sighs, amused and resigned. “But... I know he’s got a lot to say. He just...” she pauses for a moment, then shrugs her shoulders. “He doesn’t really know how to say it. He knows he—” she cuts herself off with a quick shake of her head. “Well,” her hands raise in a brief shrug. “It’s his truth to tell.”

Dean nods absently, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He’s known since ‘they live over yonder’ that a reckoning would come for him and his dad. Dean just isn’t quite sure if he’s ready for whatever truth John might tell - or if he’s even inclined to listen to it.

Dean clenches his jaw and drops his fork onto the plate. It clatters loud in the calm of the spring afternoon, and Dean barely restrains a flinch.

Mary leans further forward, hand sliding halfway across the table.

“Dean—”

“Think Sammy’s gonna join the Arch,” Dean says overloud, settling his elbows on the tabletop.

Mary pauses at the abrupt change of subject, but deftly lets it slide. Her eyes flutter a bit, and she pulls her hand back. “Yeah?” she asks, giving a slightly awkward smile.

Dean feels a twinge of guilt in his throat and swallows it down. “Mm,” he nods. “Eileen’s gonna join. And lord knows wherever she goes—”

“Sam goes,” Mary finishes, her smile seeming to widen and soften at once. “He loves her,” she murmurs.

Dean’s stomach clenches taut, even as a smile comes unbidden. He remembers Sam peering over his shoulder as they’d stood on the bridge, his mouth slack and eyes liquid. Dean had known without looking who stood behind him. Sam had gone to her on shaky legs that crumbled beneath him as he reached her. Dean’s vision had gone blurry, and he’d turned away from them, eyes squinting out at the sunlit mountain.

“Yeah,” Dean says, voice a little thick. He clears his throat and nods. “And I get it, ya know. He—” he interrupts himself on a wincing inhale. “He lost her before.” A dry swallow. “Twice.”

Mary makes a little noise in her throat. “Three times,” she whispers.

Dean frowns, confused, and glances up at Mary. Her eyes are shiny, mouth screwed up in a tiny sad smile.

Oh. “She... she went before him?”

Mary’s eyebrows scrunch together, and she sniffs. “She stayed with us. Til he came.”

Dean’s brows rise at that. Offering comfort in a time of need isn’t really his parents’ bag - at least, not that Dean can remember.

Then again, he can’t think of anyone who knows grief better.

“Huh,” he grunts in lieu of a response, and glances up.

Mary is still staring at him, but the melancholy has given way to a sharp sort of consideration. Her eyes dart over his face, slightly squinted, and she looks so much like Sam that Dean turns to stare out at the sun.

Here in Heaven, Sam and Mary are quite alike: happy, whole, and ready for a new life - a new fight.

Dean is just... tired.

“You know,” Mary begins, and Dean’s eyes flick to her hands, still resting on the table. “He’s not going anywhere,” she says, and Dean’s eye twitches in a wince. “You know that, right?”

Dean nods and swallows, looking down at his own hands. “Yeah, I know.” And he does know.

“Even if he joins the Arch,” she continues as if he hadn’t spoken. Her voice is ardent but still gentle, and she leans forward. “He’s not going anywhere. He—” she huffs and tips her head side to side. “He might get a little banged up, maybe, but—”

He knows. “I know.”

“—he...” Mary trails off on a sigh, stretching her arm across the table. Her fingers brush his, and he holds himself still. “No one’s gonna take him away, Dean.” She runs her thumb over the knuckles of his fist. “It’s work,” she acknowledges. “Dirty work, even, but... it’s not life or death,” she murmurs with a tiny smile. “Not here.”

Dean knows this. He knows all of this, but... But that doesn’t stop him from... It’s not the same as...

It doesn’t make him—

“I know,” he intones, giving her a tight smile.

Her eyebrows make a sympathetic shape, and she pulls her hand back. Dean’s shoulders relax, just slightly.

“You know, your dad thought you would join,” she says with a little smile.

Dean huffs out a chuckle, bitter and resigned. “‘Course he did,” he grunts, pressing his thumbs together.

“Dean,” Mary sighs, tone somewhere between chiding and apologetic.

Dean’s lips turn down, and he shakes his head. “Sorry,” he mutters, mostly sincerely.

“It wasn’t an expectation,” Mary says, then gives a little shrug. “He just... I think he figured all the—” she shakes her head, as if searching for the words, “-the soul-searching would...” she sighs. “I dunno... Make your teeth itch,” she finishes with a wry smile.

Dean gives her one back, though he feels a headache coming on. His teeth do itch. Everything itches. Everything chafes.

“Well,” he starts and swallows again. His throat’s gone bone dry. “Still searching, I guess,” he says, and he supposes it might be true, but- “Not sure what for, though.”

Mary reaches her hand out again, and Dean goes tense for a moment. His eyes flit to hers, and he finds them crinkled at the corners. She’s smiling at him as she’d smiled at his little drawing, as she’d smiled when she sat him down, as she’d smiled while he ate his pie. She’s smiling at him now, as she had when he was a boy, as she always has.

Her skin looks like clouds, her eyes like the sky. She laces her fingers with Dean’s, and the tension across his back fades away.

“I think,” Mom murmurs, “you’ll know it when you find it.”

chapter one | chapter three

table of contents

#corinth rains #destiel #deancas #fanfiction #post-canon #slow burn #dean-centric #tw: depression #chapter wc: ~3.4k

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thefoulbeast · 4 years

Text

Monstrum Malum (Evil Monster)

It’s finally october!! U know what that means!! Aoextober!! I’ve been waiting to be able to post this hahhhahahaa… some good ole soft horror in the spirit of the month of scary… I’ll also put it up on ao3 soon…

Characters: Todou Saburota, That demon he had at first, Todou Homare (mentioned). Contents: Violence & gore, monsters, memory manipulation, surrealism (or is it derealisation? basically we got some weird stuff going on), elements of horror. Rating: Teen & up. Word count: 2 888.

__________

It’s all a little fuzzy, this far back in his memories…

According to family tradition, Saburota receives his temptaint at ten years old. It’s scary beyond belief – the sudden grotesque presences that await him at every turn.

There’s a thick black snake on the teacher’s desk that watches him, a cat with two heads and three tails and no skin that doesn’t meow as much as it yells, spidery, shadowy hands that wave at him from dark corners and alleyways, always beckoning closer in silent invitation.

The horrible sounds of screaming and crying at night he can’t drown out no matter what he tries to do.

He doesn’t understand how his father and brothers and – everyone, really- can just ignore it all, can just pretend like it’s all normal and okay.

Though, he supposes it’s not too implausible – their ability to ignore things is quite remarkable. One time they pretended he didn’t exist for a whole week – and honestly, he’d been questioning his existence himself by the end of it.

But the problem is these… demons. These ghosts and spectres that follow him and distract him and terrify him.

Saburota tries to focus on the page in front of him – a test in maths that he’s writing in pencil because his pen is bleeding red blood – an ever-growing puddle over the surface of his desk that never reaches his papers and drips over the edge with quiet plips.

The numbers in the problems tilt and tumble and his hands are tingling. But if he focuses just so- if he can keep them in his mind long enough, he can do this.

Pit-pat… Pit-pat…

The blood drips steadily down onto the floor. No one else notices it.

–

“Oh, come now! You’ll get used to it,” his aunt says when she sees him flinch back from a dark mass that covers the floor like a living carpet, undulating and scintillating and breathing.

She walks right over it, and the black sticks to the heels of her shiny beige pumps like tar – but she doesn’t even seem to notice-

“Come on, Saburota, let’s go,” she pulls him by the arm, stronger than he can dig his heels into the ground. The black thing is unpleasantly soft under his feet. He feels it writhe.

“Don’t be so obstinate, we’ll be late to the opera!” she huffs, exasperated, “Honestly, you’d think a boy your age would have some manners.”

The black clings to the bottom of their soles without end even after they’ve crossed all of it and are out on the street, spreading out from every point of contact their shoes make with the ground, melting together to form a winding, snakelike path.

“What show are we going to see?” he asks cautiously, trying to distract himself.

“Three dead men and the devil, of course” she answers haughtily, “Why, Saburota, it’s as if you’re trying to irritate me on purpose! You’re the one who wanted to go!”

He did?

“Oh, I remember now!” he says, but it’s a lie, it’s his mouth moving on its own, “I hope it’s as good as the reviews promise!” he says again, a giddy edge to the words- but they’re not his words.

“It will be,” his aunt answers with a mysterious sort of smile, her hand tightening around his wrist.

–

Saburota’s hiding under the bed, curled up in the dark. It seems like no matter how much he shrinks down; he still feels watched, still feels threatened. Feels like he’s not alone, like there’s something else inside him.

The door opens and footsteps make their way over to the bed – but they’re sharp, like knocking wood on wood, and so loud.

Saburota holds his breath when hooves come into view right in front of him. Fear is like a bird trapped in his chest, raging desperately against the bars of his ribs.

Whatever it is climbs up on his bed with an ominous sqeak of the springs and a decidedly animal huff.

“Oh, you’re already in bed, honey?” the voice of his mother speaks from the doorway. She all but floats over soundlessly. Her skin is deathly pale and dry beneath the hem of her nightgown.

“I’m scared, mommy,” the thing says in a voice that’s nowhere near Saburota’s own. “I think there’s a monster under my bed.”

“Monsters don’t exist, silly,” she coos, “but I’ll look and make sure for you, alright?”

She gets down on all fours and peers beneath the bed. Her unseeing eyes look straight at and through Saburota. Her face is as pale and bloodless as her feet and hands, a greenish-blueish tinge to her lips and eyelids.

“There’s nothing here, honey,” she says in her beautiful, sonorous voice. Her smile reveals her teeth that look much longer and sharper now that the gums have dried out and shrunk back.

Then she rises again and says, “Now, will you be a good boy and sleep? We have a busy day tomorrow. You need to be ready to do what has to be done.” She kisses the thing sweetly goodnight before leaving, footsteps as soundless as when she entered. The door closes behind her, and so disappears that last bit of illumination the room had.

The darkness left behind feels like it’s eating Saburota whole, encompassing him in a tight and claustrophobic space. He reaches out to prove the feeling wrong, but the darkness is smooth and solid against his hand, pushing up against it with incrementally increasing force.

“You don’t have much time left down there, do you?” the thing up on the bed asks, soft and sleepy. It yawns. “You know, God can’t see you anymore, and neither can most other things.”

The darkness pushes up against his skin, too tight to move, too tight to breathe.

–

They’re in the main hall. A soft record plays in the background, a gentle but somber croon accompanied by a saxophone and a cello.

“You know they don’t exist,” the shadow sitting across from Saburota at the dinner table says, “right?”

It’s gesturing at his family, where they’re chatting amongst themselves as they eat. At the other, farther end of the table – it’s farther than usual. The table is as long as the room as opposed to taking up just the center.

There are so many empty seats. So many set plates, untouched. Like there’s supposed to be a banquet, but no one’s shown up.

Saburota stares down at his plate. The soup is black and thick, and there’s the smooth off-white surface of a bone peeking out from beneath the surface.

He’s not particularly hungry.

“You’re wrong,” he tells the shadow quietly ad he pushes the plate away, and the damn thing laughs in response. It’s fuzzy and translucent, and smears in Saburota’s vision when it moves.

“Oh, my bad!” the shadow chortles and picks up a knife, and twirls it around the fingers of its hand; the gleaming facets of the blade catch red and orange lights from some strange and unknown source, “You’re the one who doesn’t exist, I meant to say. Easy mistake to make.”

Saburota feels goose bumps break out over his body. A cold gust of wind whistles over the edge of his collar, ruffling the back of his hair. He places one of his palms protectively over his nape, feeling unsafe.

The room is colourless now, and his family sounds all muffled - and the shadow is gone. He shivers, then takes a fortifying breath and reaches for the spoon again, hand trembling minutely.

Saburota lifts a spoonful of the simple noodle soup to his mouth hesitantly. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with it, but… he’s just got this nagging worry that something isn’t right.

–

“I see right through you,” the creature says hotly in his ear, “you’re little more than smoke - a miasma leaking through the cracks of the skin you wear.”

Saburota stares at it through the mirror. It’s taller than him, wider than him, has horns like an ibex and hands like eagle claws, poised up in the air, talons glinting menacingly.

“Poor little Saburota,” it hisses, leaning in even closer, snake tongue peeking through its teeth on the ‘s’. “So damaged and twisted that no one could ever like you. You empty little puppet, you pathetic fucking piece of shit.”

Saburota shrugs at its words. They sound about right. It’s what he’s heard all his life, what he’s thought all his life. A truth confirmed over and over.

“You should bite them back for making you,” it says with a beastly leer, talons wrapping around his shoulders and digging in, drawing blood in small beads, “Make them regret your existence. Teach them what it means to hurt. You want to. You need to. I’ll help you. I’ll make you strong, I’ll make you dangerous.”

There’s a certain desperation to the thing’s words.

“Maybe someday,” Saburota murmurs, stepping forwards - out of the creature’s embrace towards the sink, heedless of the shallow wounds left behind by the drag of its talons. He needs to brush his teeth and get to bed.

The bathroom darkens and the walls and floor wobble dangerously, like light broken on the edge of water, like matter passing through the planes of a prism and coming out wrong.

“You’re ready,” the creature wails, upset at his coy evasions of what needs to be done.

“No, I’m-“ he stammers. God, everything here looks so fake it makes him nauseous. He needs to- he needs to set himself straight. Needs to recalibrate.

”I’m not ripe yet,” Saburota says gently, cautiously - looking at the beast without turning, eyes dark like the sky on the night of a new moon.

–

Father’s saying something to him. He looks angry. He’s gesticulating like crazy.

Saburota can’t hear it. The sound’s muted. Pure silence.

No, not pure… there’s something whispering in his ear. It takes a moment for him to understand what it’s saying…

Saburota feels a smile spread out over his face at the promises of violence, bloodshed, nasty ugly retribution-

The world seems sharper somehow. Like it’s come into focus after being blurry and vague for his entire life.

Saburota looks at his hands. He’s got claws – mean, nasty looking things, the kind that maim and rip and rend. When did that happen?

The little whispering voice giggles in his ear. I’ll give you this. I’ll give you this if you just let me-

–

“I’ve been cultivating you for years,” the thing says, looking down at him from its full height. The creature is menacing, attention catching, terrifying. “You’d be nothing without me. You’d be small and powerless and pathetic.”

Its arms wrap around his shoulders covetously, possessively. The talons sink into the flesh of Saburota’s deltoids like a butcher’s knife sinks into a hunk of meat.

“You’re all mine,” the thing whispers, opening its maw to reveal row upon dizzying row of teeth arranged in a beautiful rosette. Saburota touches a tooth and pricks his finger.

Blood red. Drops on the floor. He smears them with the toe of his shoe and suddenly realises.

Oh, what a clever thing. Had him really going for a while.

“No, I’m not,” Saburota says, something in his voice dark but… whistful and dreamy. “You did nice this time, I’ll give you that. Too bad you’re so slow with it all,” he says, and reality shifts.

Well, the not-reality shifts. Saburota’s holding the thing – a squirming little creature with a long leathery tail, smaller than ever and…

And perfect for eating.

–

He’s not afraid anymore. Despite the thing’s attempts – this particular memory remains unchanged, remains his fully. So far.

There’s carnage all around – his family, the house staff – mutilated sacks of meat, strewn about carelessly, all carved up and bled out.

Saburota can taste it – the metallic tang of something raw clinging to his palate, the edges of his teeth.

He knows what he did. He knows how he did it. But… he’d been too excited, too in-the-moment about it. It’s all a red haze in hindsight.

“Well, this was easier than expected,” he says, all light and happy and unburdened.

“You finally did it,” Homare says as she watches him from the top of the stairs, her face a blank mask.

“You’re free now,” Saburota says with a wide grin, “This power could be yours too, Homare.”

It slips off his tongue like a well-oiled phrase. This isn’t the first time he’s said this.

“Why won’t you let me out, Saburota?” she says in someone else’s voice. Shadows cling to her, making her larger and darker than what she is. The beast is here again, messing with his mind and senses. “Why must you deny me so? You can’t hold me down forever. I will claw my way out.”

The house is dark and crawling with black shapes and bugs the size of rats. Saburota feels his mood sour. That’s not right, that’s not what she really said.

Homare’s walking down the stairs towards him, heedless of the gore she steps in, looking at him like she wants him to burst open like an over-tense bulla.

“Kill yourself, Saburota, you worthless fucking heap,” the thing says, even if it’s Homare’s lips that move, “Getting all cocky and full of yourself. You will regret it. I will make you regret it.”

Saburota smiles lazily, “You’re just throwing a tantrum because I’m stronger than you. Tsk-tsk. You’d think that demons had more class than that.”

Saburota flicks open the zippo in his hand, and the smell of buthane hits him above the wet smell of fresh guts. His hands are shaking, his heart is racing. There’s a cacophonous screaming in his head above it all.

“Let me out, Saburota,” the thing says through Homare’s lips, low and thunderous and so angry, “Let me out and let me in for real.”

Saburota flicks the wheel and sparks the flame, looking right into Homare’s eyes where he sees it looking at him.

He drops the zippo carelessly, ignoring the beast’s words. This – all of this is his.

And he’s going to burn it all down.

–

Saburota wakes with a jolt that has the water sloshing against the sides of the tub. He’d dozed off again.

The nightmarish pictures of his dream fizzle out into the subconscious part of his brain. The phantasms are creeping upwards again, seeking to dig their claws into his more recent memories.

He sighs tiredly, rubbing a palm over his face. It had taken him too long to notice. Next time the demon might get him for good. He rests a palm over his stomach where he feels it like a hot, familiar weight in his gut. So small, so stubborn, so bothersome.

Saburota can’t remember his childhood clearly anymore, not the way it really was. His recollections are all twisted and maimed, cut up and pasted together into tid-bit horror stories and fantastical exaggerations, much like the dream had been.

It comes with being a demon eater. There’s a certain cost, a sacrifice he has to make in the form of his memories and occasionally, his personality. One can only hold on to darkness for so long until it grabs back.

Saburota barely ever sleeps anymore. Whenever he dreams, the distortions get worse and feel more real.

Realistically, he knows there wasn’t a dead man lying on the table and singing at Homare’s tenth birthday party… he knows that his mother died in childbirth when she had her last pregnancy, that he’d never heard her voice and had only ever seen her in pictures… but he can remember these delusions so very vividly it’s kind of scary.

“Your brain’s rotting…” He tells himself in a low voice. Then, he chuckles,” Heh, who knows if what’s left is even you anymore…” He pauses, moving his hand through the water, watching it slosh against the sides of the tub.

He’s awake, sure, but he still feels like he’s dreaming, like this isn’t reality. Another chuckle, a little more self-deprecating, “Good thing that won’t matter soon enough.”

Saburota sinks lower into the water so that his nose just above the surface. The water’s lukewarm now, so it doesn’t seep into his bones and muscles the way he wishes it would.

He’ll get out in a minute and get dressed and do things, but for now he just… ruminates. On what he is. On what he’s done.

He doesn’t regret his choices, but… sometimes he wonders what life would be like if he was… more normal. If he’d never clashed with his family the way he had… if he’d just…

Well, whatever. Those thoughts don’t lead anywhere.

He’s made it this far – that’s the only thing that matters. He just needs to pull through and do his part in getting the phoenix for the Illuminati. He’s been planning it for years now, sowing doubt and trust in the right places, and it’s finally so close he can taste it.

That’s his purpose now. That’s what’s important. He has a goal and a purpose, and he is needed. With that much, he’s satisfied.

As long as he does what he needs to do for the Illuminati, for The Commander, what happens to him afterwards doesn’t really matter…

#aoextober #the written words #ao no exorcist #ane #?? how tag??#saburota todo #demons #blue exorcist #listen i just keep writing todou.... i cant stop... these sinning hands...#ane fanfiction #saburouta toudou

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deltastorm101 · 3 years

Text

So, I tried to calculate Control...

... and its Epic Games deal, with the help of my certified smooth brain™ and probably incorrect sources. I started this last night hella tired and with a headache, I have finished it up today hella tired and with a headache, and this is what I produced: bullshit! :D But hey, at least double checked bullshit that’s open for discussion and contribution and expansion. Also, I probably won’t list the sources because a) I’m lazy and b) I didn’t have to dig thaaat deep down to find all this so if you really wanna know you could probably hit google with it as well. Anyhow here we go lol So, the initial thought which got all of this rolling was the 2020-wrap-up-post Remedy linked on their twitter, and Epic’s linked publishing announcement in it: studios Remedy, Playdead and GenDesign will release their next next-gen games with Epic. Now, we all know Remedy are working on some sort of Alan Wake-ish thing as we speak (right? right?? god I hope so), which meanssss our boy will most likely be an Epic exclusive. Which makes me kinda sad because, well. I’m deep in Steam’s ass. Hell, I waited for Control for a full year before I played it because they can pry the Steam version from my cold dead hands. So I asked myself... was it worth it for them? How much money did they throw at Remedy (and 505 Games) to have them play along? Would they have reached more people from the get-go if they had released it on Steam right away? Did the individual programmer, designer, writer, artist, person behind it profit from this at all? (Also, like, about the rights and copyright thing,,,,, you’d think they could have learned from Alan Wake and its IP belonging to Microsoft and so not really being able to do anything more with it because they don’t ‘own’ it and shit) buuut anyway that’s not the point of this post, now it’s time to do some MATH BABEY

Ok, let’s start with some things we know. Facts. Figures. Data. Turns out my initial question, how much money was involved, could be answered by doing one (1) google search: according to Wikipedia, Epic gave Remedy and 505 Games €9.49mio. The total budget for the game was €26.9mio over the course of 3 years of development. We know that as of December 2020, over 2mio copies of the game were sold, with November 2020 being the best-selling month ever since its initial release in August 2019. This is where question 1) comes into play: how many of those 2 million copies were sold in 2019 and how many in 2020? Stay tuned, I think I found out.

We know that Remedy gets to keep 45% of the revenue, which, I assumed, means that 505 keeps the remaining 55% (probably a lot more going on there but shhh). We know that Control’s sales cooked up €17.84mio in 2019 (so months September – December), €17.7mio of those in the first month alone (O.O). Side note: because it came out at the very end of August, I’ll ignore that month and declare September the first sales month.

We know that 60% of sales in 2019 were digital ones (aka Epic Store, mostly), 40% physical ones (consoles PS4 and XB1), while in 2020, only 10% of sales were physical and a whopping 90% digital; which is people on Epic who wanted to get their hands on the first DLC and – you guessed it – the Steam release of the Ultimate Edition in August 2020.

Which begs question 2): what’s bigger, 60% of 2019 sales because ‘ooh shiny new game’, or 90% of 2020 sales because ‘yay steam release’? The answer may look obvious, but you have to take into account the dropping price, which I also researched for your pleasure and enjoyment.

For this I used a German website called idealo.de, which focuses on looking for the best deals for basically anything you can buy on the internet, and it also gives you diagrams that describe at which point in time the product was at which exact price. This is what it gave me: - release price: €60 - December 2019: €41 (PS4)/€44 (XB1) - mid-2020: €30 - Ultimate Edition release: €30 - December 2020: €14 (PS4)/€18 (XB1)/€30 (Ultimate Editions) At this point I was like “lol hold on i need chocolate for this cuz i’ll be here for some time *sweating*”

To continue this mess™, I see more questions: 3) How many employees does Remedy have, which positions do they work in and what are their salaries? 4) How many employees does 505 have, which positions and salaries do they have? 5) What’s the total revenue that Control has generated so far?

And also some more stuff like, are my numbers accurate, am I even grasping these concepts correctly, are there even more people involved or am I just trying to explain complete crap (yes) but let’s just ignore all of that shall we. At that point I went “oh shit what have i gotten myself into, this screen does not get my point across, i need pen and paper” and you know shit is gonna go DOWN when I do math on paper.

My paper math birthed the following calculation:

Following this up, we can calculate the end-of-2019 sales, if we set the price for September and October to €60, for November and December to approx. €45:

Now, you might notice that one of those numbers is big and the other is HUGE. Why might that be? Well...

- Covid19: everyone stayed at home and needed video games to play - More sale months of the year, naturally - dropping price: why get it for €60 when you can get it for 20 - Ultimate Edition: why buy it in June when you get more content in August aaaand... - it comes out on Steam.

With this in mind, let’s see what questions we can answer: 1) 661,110 copies in 2019; 1,338,889 copies in 2020 2) 60% digital sales in 2019 means 396,666 Epic copies; 90% digital sales in 2020 means 1,205,000 copies – most of it from Steam? Some of it? A good chunk? The bigger chunk? There’s no way of really knowing for sure but... you could read this into it. I definitely am. 3) Google told me Remedy had a little over 250 employees at the end of 2019... 4) ... and 505 has less than 100. I found no good sources for this, I think linkedin said 37, someone else said 50. I’ll just use the 50 figure, idk. No idea man. and for 5) I’ll contradict my point that the Steam release is what knocked the sales out of the park and assume that the number of sold copies stayed the same across all 12 months of 2020, which gives us this:

Ok and now we’re getting into the most dangerous of danger zones because I have no idea how companies or capitalism work, so for educated people™, the remaining calculations might read like a toddler wrote them; I apologize profusely and hereby present last night’s brain vomit:

As stated earlier, development took 3 years, but everyone wanted to get paid in 2020 as well so let’s use 4 years to find out the salaries, which is 48 months. Let’s assume the utopian idea that every employee on the line here gets the exact same amount of money (LOL ikr but shhhh, let’s live out our dirtiest equality fantasies for a second ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)). Which would mean...

And now without the Epic Deal™:

Quod erat demonstrandum. Remedy has been selling their souls to Epic for €350 a month since 2017. (I don’t mean this as maliciously as I’m making it sound, don’t worry xD)

OKAY SO, O B V I O U S L Y, I have not the slightest idea what on earth I’m talking about so read this like you’d read a good fanfiction. We don’t know the different salaries across the different positions (and genders HAH), we don’t know if other parties were involved, I’ve completely ignored the sum that Epic themselves get, I have ignored taxes, I don’t know if my numbers are accurate (they’re definitely not I mean 505 must have more employees than 50), if I made mistakes (yes), and also somewhere along the way I forgot to use the €26.9mio budget figure because, uuh, I have no idea where to use it, what it means, where did it come from, where did it go, cotton eye joe - but oh well, I’m not starting over, take it or leave it.

So... I can now officially say I have written hot steamy economics fic xD Man I put waaay too much time into this but damn was it fun. Good three-hour-deep-dive (two of them spent munching on chocolate half-asleep listening to psytrance to keep my brain twitchy). Real-life-theorizing. Fuck capitalism. Don’t do drugs. Pet a cat. Wear your mask. Call your grandparents.

If there’s typos in this I’m sorry but also I’m not, I can’t be bothered to proofread again lol. Goodnight imma catch up on the sleep I lost. Gotta love full moons

#this is the first post in ages in which i used punctuation and capitalization are you proud of me xD #dw it won’t stay like this #control #control remedy #alan wake #ok now go yell at me how stupidly wrong and dumb this is i’m ready #do you think my old math teacher would be proud #i think so #my economics teacher... not so much

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anthropwashere · 4 years

Text

deadfic: welcome the unknown

Another one for @goodintentionswipfest, and the oldest of the lot I’ll be posting by a significant margin! As in written in 2009 old. You’ve been warned.

Gonna put the whole fic under a readmore because JTHM fics have one setting and that’s Upsetting, so have some naval gazing from me first.

2009 was uhhhhh, some kind of year for me. It was the year I graduated high school, and the year I was a little bit homeless, and the year I wished I was a little bit homeless for longer so I could have avoided some bananas shit, and the year I spent waiting on tenterhooks mid-recession before I could run from a ehhh home life off to the military.

18 year old anthrop was working through some shit while writing this thing, is what I'm saying.

This was intended as a prequel to a fic I was working on in high school, while also being kind of a stand alone fic? If you've been with me since my JTHM days (wow) you'll recognize what it might have been for, but otherwise don't worry about it. This is a bit all over the place but there are still a lot of pieces I'm fond of and honestly, it's nice to see where I was as a writer and how far I've come in comparison? Too many of us fandom writers destroy huge swaths of our work out of this terribly sad and unnecessary shame for liking "cringy" things, and to this day I regret doing the same to virtually all the things I wrote for my first few fandoms. Cheesy and heavy-handed as this fic is, it's nice to have around still, you know? I cared about this fic. Working on it kept me sane during an extremely shitty summer. I dearly wish I still had the first draft, which I remember writing in different colored markers on folded sheets of computer paper hunched up in any random little corner I could get some time alone. Alas, like 98% of the rest of my things pre-military, it's gone for good.

Title comes from Robbers on High Street's "The Fatalist," which sure was a song I had on repeat a lot back in 2009.

Everywhere is dirty. Filth and stink and dead particles on everything he touches. He'd fallen asleep, and somebody had broken into his house and poured the offal of a thousand trash cans onto everything and smeared it in deep.

Asshole.

Really though, they are all assholes. Shit-smeared animals groping around on all fours, blind and deaf and desensitized to whatever little good was left in the world around them.

They make so much noise. All they do is scream, and whenever someone manages to gasp out a non sequitur the whole world applauds, casting them into the history books for the next generation to draw penises upon their photographs. It is all a matter of course.

It can't just be him that sees this. One look outside is enough to prove his point. Why else would he board up all the windows? To keep the assholes from looking in, of course.

The assholes are everywhere these days, screaming and fucking. Fucking. They're good at that too. Reproduction. Bucking hips and nails across skin and incredible, terrible intimacy, the exchanging of fluids. Disease of the flesh, fever of the mind. A new generation born in every positive pregnancy test, a new generation dead in every street corner abortion clinic. Babies. Disgusting, germ-ridden things. Oh God, don't let it touch him with its fat little hands shiny with saliva and the green ooze that won't cease dripping from the holes in its face. He doesn't know what'll happen, what he'll do if this thing gets too close, but he has ideas, and none of them are pleasant.

He always has ideas.

He blinks, and the baby and the stinking slut mother cooing at it with too-red lips and salon-styled hair and the bus and the roaring all vanish. He stumbles and knocks an elbow against the dresser.

The smell in here is somehow worse now. Like old vomit in high summer. Is it vomit? Is it his vomit?

He decides it's better not to now, at least not now. He feels a strange mood coming. High tide comes to drown the starfish, already dried by the sun. Perhaps it is a mood he needs, but then again, perhaps it comes too late.

Something cracks, and the edges go soft and drip in a puddle of wax.

He burns his fingers by candlelight.

"Johnny?"

"Bunny?"

His throat burns. It hurts to breathe.

"Oh thank God, you can hear me again. You're back."

"What—" He breaks off, coughing. Blood in his mouth, on his teeth. He licks them clean and swallows. "What are you talking about?"

Bunny sounds small and tired in his ears—

Mind?

—and there was fear, Johnny can hear it licking at the corners of Bunny's—

His?

—voice, but it has faded with time. Johnny suspects he has been asleep for a very long time.

"I've been trying to reach you for… God, I don't even know how long." Bunny trails off.

He looks around, his eyes struggling to see in the pre-dawn light trickling in through a dozen half-circle windows on the floor above wherever he is. More by the smell than anything, he realizes he is surrounded by blood and bodies. A part of him knows he shouldn't be comforted by this, shouldn't find this scene familiar.

And yet.

"I was scared, Nny."

He hiccups, chokes, and spits out three bullets.

The mirror is laughing at him.

He sneers at it. Squints as two left hands do two different things, almost identical but the blur is still visible, still there.

He was wrong, he knows that now. There isn't just one person, one world, one reality on the other side of the mirror. There are dozens, maybe hundreds. Maybe thousands. Not all at once, of course, but there seems to be another pair of eyes staring back, another mouth talking at everyone and no one, each time he looks hard enough, long enough. The edges blur, fingers drag in slow-motion arcs, teeth where teeth shouldn't be, a hundred shades of skin and hair and eyes.

He can't remember the last time he showered.

“You look like shit, Nny,” observes the Burger Boy.

“Yes.”

“You really should do something about it.”

“Yes.”

He drives the pen through the paper and carves something into the wood that later he won't understand.

Greasy. He is so greasy. The others in the mirror bow out of the way to let him see the unwashed, true reflection of himself. He makes a face, drags his cheeks down to his jaw and waggles his tongue, and the reflection follows accordingly. No blur.

Yep, that’s him all over.

Devi screams, her face set in a terrified, furious, how-could-you-you-shithead expression, and smashes his face against the mirror. His nose breaks on impact, glass stabs, digs, and catches, and drags down his cheeks and forehead. Blood everywhere, his blood. A tooth goes flying as his chin hits the dressing table’s pitted surface with a crack that sickens him even as the edges of his sight turn black, and the pain is more than noise can express. Blood on Devi’s knuckles. Fingers ripping out his hair.

No.

Everything pauses, then it all reverses in an instant, and he is left standing before a dirty mirror with too many faces looking back.

That already happened— a long long long long time ago

—and he is better now. Devi is better now too. He hasn’t talked to her in awhile but she is around, she is there, and everything is okay now. There is some blood dried into the floorboards still—was that were the stink is coming from?—but his scars have faded. He has forgiven, and he thought he had forgotten.

He’d gotten a new mirror and everything.

“Hi Nny.”

“Evening.”

Squee leans back on his heels before the underbelly of a machine Johnny has no understanding of and glares. With his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, smears of engine grease on his hands, sweat on his face, and looking like a mix of engineer, mad scientist, and responsible adult, Johnny has no idea how to treat the boy-now-man-next-door.

"How've you been? Whatcha been up to these days?"

There is something unspoken, something furious and accusing underneath the easy drawl of the questions. He can't imagine what Squee could be angry with him about. He is at a loss, also, at how to respond to the heavy questions thrown at him so casually. He struggles under their weight, unable to answer, unable to keep quiet, unable to lie.

Squee chuckles as he stands in one smooth motion centered on his knees and cleans his glasses with a rag from his pocket. "It's okay, shit, calm down. Not like I got a gun to your head or anything."

For some reason, he feels himself flinch. Squee's eyebrows knit and relax in an instant.

"Let's see," Squee muses. "You look like you, I'm pretty sure your car still works, and I'm currently over at Pepito's for some headfuck or another. Okay, I think I know what year this is. Awesome." He puts his glasses on and shares a smile that could cut glass.

"What are you talking about?"

Squee looks surprised, but after a moment laughs a quiet little laugh. "That's right, I forgot. This is the year you do your weird losing-time thing, yeah? Haha, you freaked me out even more all summer. I think I slept on the roof more than I did my own room. Oh God, this is even better!" He laughs again, louder, and claps a hand on the shoulder of the strange machine.

He can't think of any kind of response to this before Squee speaks again. "Fuck, Johnny, you really think seeing me at nine one day and twenty-three the next is normal?"

He thought about it. "Noooot really. No."

"That is exactly—what—How did you even recognize me?" He gestures at himself, and his eyebrows do something halfway between emulating surprise and gut-busting dislike.

"Who else could you be?"

This time his laugh is loud and body shaking, and he thumps the machine as if Johnny has said something incredibly witty. "Wow, okay, if that logic works for you it works for me, you crazy fuck."

He did not just hear that. "What did you call me?"

Squee smiles again, but his eyes remain cold and flinty and full of hate towards something—Johnny suspects—he has done in the future. Goddamnit, future self, way to ruin a good thing. But his hands still clench, his joints lock. How dare Squee? How could he?

But the boy-now-man-next-door acts as if nothing has changed. "So I can't remember how your art or lack thereof is working out in this little slice of time. You paintin' with any other color 'sides red?"

Why was Squee acting like this? "Of course I am."

He isn't.

Squee scratches his neck, scratches at scabs over long, thin lacerations in finger-shaped bruises, and Johnny wonders if what he's feeling now is how the man felt when he had still been a boy, and the scary neighbor man once crawled through the window to tell him a bedtime story.

"You know, somehow I doubt that."

His fingers itch for activity. He hasn't left the house in days, maybe weeks. Does it matter?

He licks his lips and swallows, fighting down familiar urges. He can beat this.

"Do you have a problem with me?"

"Oh god oh god oh god why are you doing this—"

"Excuse me, I asked you a question."

Gently touch the controls, tack the pressure on, oh, just a little more. Just enough to make them scream.

The back of his head itches, and when he scratches his fingers come away red. No pain, just blood. So it isn't his then. But he can't remember killing anyone.

He looks away from his hand and out the window, at the outside world creeping in through the cracks between the boards. Outside there is no sun, no moon, no stars, no anything. His breath hitches.

It's raining.

He exhales.

The door is open though he doesn't remember leaving it so, so he takes the hint and walks outside. He inhales, tasting the hot summer smell of wet concrete and the cloying reek of decomposing bodies in his front yard. The million million light bulbs of the city throw their energy skyward, and the roiling clouds eat the light whole. A weird, orange glow from above casts the city into an otherworldly scene, and, feeling a little silly, he wonders if tonight might be the beginning of the apocalypse, and the idea doesn't sound half bad.

In the driveway, the concrete is slick with oil. He stands there a while, letting the rain wash the human grease out of his hair. It takes him just as long to realize his car is missing.

"That's funny," he says aloud, wiping the rainwater out of his eyes. "I don't remember teleporting home. Unless—was it Tuesday yesterday? I don't think it was, but—"

There is a soft, scared inhale of breath, a backwards scream. He turns, and there on the sidewalk is a gray woman in a bathrobe, faded coffee stains and food crusts all down her front. She is pointing at him, her face wide, frozen in a rictus grin of fear.

"What?" he asks, reality crashing into place with a shatter of glass ripping through his ears.

Her mouth moves, but the sounds that come out are backwards and insulting, and her eyes are fish eyes, wide and lidless and staring.

"What?" he asks again, sharply, his voice ugly and tasting of ashes.

"M-mon—" the woman wheezes.

Her throat is in his hands, and he doesn't recall moving from his empty driveway.

"What are you staring at? What do you want?!" he screams.

She gags and gurgles, her tubes for eating breathing talking standing bleeding; all of it collapsing under his fingers—

which hadn't been so thin a few weeks ago

—and the grin on his face is a mile wide.

"Monster!" she whimpers as something cracks in her neck.

Monster? His hands loosen, cradle her jaw, as his mind tries to grapple with this. Why… Why would anyone call him that?

The pounding of feet, and someone wrenches the woman out of his grasp. "Jesus jump-roping Christ, Johnny!"

Dazed, he stares at the newcomer as if he's looking at everything through the wrong end of a telescope. The reek and the roaring of the public transit system returns with a bang of pneumatic doors, and Squee's mouth moves in angry shapes but the slut-mother's cooing comes out instead.

"You gonna pay or get off my bus?"

He looks at the bus driver, at the thick rolls of fat ballooning out underneath his sweaty, undersized uniform, a sneer pulling back the heavy flesh around pearly white teeth. He imagines jamming the steering wheel through the man's dislocated jaw and feels slightly better.

It's safe to imagine such atrocities. Imagine, but nothing more. He has to remember that.

"Hey kid! I'm talkin' to you!"

"Sorry," he manages through grinding teeth and a throat hot and restricted with anger. He deposits the required fare into the automated tray and darts across the yellow line before he can act upon his ideas.

He always has ideas.

He stumbles into an open seat as the bus jerks forward with a belch of black exhaust he can't see but can taste, heavy and gritty on his tongue. On his right, a plastic mommy bounces her little dolly on her knees. They are dressed in matching summer dresses. Disgusting.

How long has it been summer anyway?

He glances at the pair again and thumbs the volume on his CD player a little higher, fighting to keep his face neutral. He has never been fond of parents who treat their offspring like objects rather than the people they are going to be.

Something tugs on his sleeve and he recoils, crashing into the metal bars on his left. It takes everything he has not to retaliate against the foreign touch. His headphones are knocked askew by the impact, and Mozart's power vanishes, becomes tiny vibrations around his neck.

The baby, the child, the dull-eyed little girl has the ragged end of his sleeve in its shining, soaking wet hand. Through the fabric, he can feel its dampness, its heat. It babbles at him incoherently, green ooze dripping from its squashed little nose into the gaping, grinning mouth below.

"Oh, she likes you!" The mother cries, swooping in for the kill. Her smell washes over him—of heady perfume, hairspray, hysteria. He can see the makeup creases, the scars of plastic surgery, the shadow of a bruise on her shoulder half-hidden by her yellow sleeve. His mind jumps to all sorts of conclusions, and each one of them sickens him more than the last.

"Uh," he manages.

His hands twitch.

He is sick of this life again. All the old signs are there, everything points to one fact, but he can't bear going down that path, not yet. Later, later.

"'Later,' he says!" Crows the delighted Burger Boy. "Yes, perhaps when the scabs from the old shackles grow over the new he'll get off his scrawny ass and attempt to do something about all this!"

"Fuck you."

The Burger Boy looks at him imploringly, its meaty little hands clasped, its fangs retracted, the perfect image of a concerned friend in hideous checkered overalls. "In all seriousness, Johnny-boy, this is not something you can put off any longer. You must act now, or not at all."

"Go die in a hole."

"We both remember how effective that was the last time you tried that. Now, please—"

"Don't make me get the sledgehammer."

At least it had the decency to flinch at that, the little fuck.

The Burger Boy sighs, obviously frustrated. "I don't understand why you find it necessary to fight me so, Nny."

"Maybe it's because, oh, I don't know, you're trying to enslave me to my own kidneys?" He bites on the straw of his cherry Freezy hard enough to tear it. The plastic tastes like artificial fruit and latex gloves. "And don't call me Nny."

The Burger rolled its eyes, which shouldn't have been possible because it was pretending it was still ceramic. "So I'm no longer allowed that special little privilege, am I? Only the ghost of your dead, levitating bunny rabbit is?"

"Leave Nailbunny out of this."

"And those pathetic Doughboys as well? The very ones that conspired against you to 'serve their master', who, in case you've since forgotten, was the very creature you were charged with imprisoning behind a wall of blood and plaster?"

"That was D-Boy. Eff just wanted freedom. And really, can I blame him?" He bites the straw in half and spits it into the bathroom sink. In the mirror, his reflections mimic him, ten thousand mouths a-grinning.

"You're missing the point, though I'm hardly surprised."

A thought strikes him, and it's out of his mouth before he can think twice about it. "You know, if they ever started talking again, I think I'd still let them call me Nny. Sure, they were both exploiting my ever-increasing insanity and all that, but they were mine in the beginning. Unlike you."

It ignored the jab. "If they ever start talking again, it will be far too late."

There wasn't any soap in the bathroom.

"What the hell were you thinking?"

He blinks. "What?"

"Give me one goddamn reason, one very good goddamn reason you had for strangling my mother, or so fucking help me Johnny—!"

Squee is definitely reminding him of himself now. Great. Fantastic. Fuck.

"Um."

The Burger Boy scowls, its face transmogrifying into the fanged, drooling thing it really is. "You remember how terrible it was to toil under the merciless whip of the System! I know you do because I am a part of you, though you refuse to believe as such! And though you hate what I have to offer, you must realize that I am far more preferable as I am now than what I could become unless you tear free of the System's grip now!"

"I AM FREE!"

With a snap of ceramic he breaks it's right arm off, and the two of them scream in pain and hate, in the same voice, in one voice.

"I." He jabs at his chest with the arm, feeling it squirm under his fingers.

"Am." He drops it to the bloodstained linoleum.

"Free." He grinds the arm to dust under the heel of his boot. His reflections are too blurred, too scattered, to see how many follow suit.

Gripping the hole where a limb had been seconds ago, its ugly face twisted further by agony, the Burger Boy pants, "There is no such thing as freedom! No!" It screams, harsh and violent, as he opens his mouth to retort, "Listen to me. Hear me out. Please."

A heartbeat passes. Five. He closes his eyes, suddenly exhausted, and nods. The figurine sighs and leans against the faucet, settling its insect eyes on the spilled Freezy in the tub.

"Let's get one thing straight. I don't want you thinking that the puppet masters are singling you out for sport. God knows you aren't anything special. Everyone is a slave to one thing or another." It pauses to laugh bleakly. "Perhaps even those who fancy themselves the masters of this game of Monopoly must bow their neck to the chopping block one day. Who am I to know? I am but a series of chemical reactions created in the misfiring neurons of a sick man's brain. But never mind that. What I'm trying to say here is that there has been no other way. Ever. There has been no freedom, no choice. It is all preordained. This is the way of all things."

Every part of him rebels against this. No free will? Impossible. His life is his own, now more than ever. Yes, he had been a slave, once. But that had just been the luck of the draw, an accident, like winning the lottery or getting hit by a truck. It was… unpredictable, impossible to preordain. Heat in his chest, his jaw tight and creaking. "They told me—" He begins, his voice ready to rise into a shriek.

"It was only temporary. Even stone must crumble, Johnny."

His legs turn to jelly at a terrible, terrifying thought. He grips the sink, licks his lips and tastes salt and cherries and fear. In a soft, weak voice he barely recognizes as his own he finally asks, "Are they going to make me a flusher again?"

"They already have."

"Mom, can you make it back to the house on your own?" As he speaks, Squee performs a quick once-over on the gasping woman clinging like a burr to his chest. His face betrays him, showing the extent of the damage done even as he keeps his voice upbeat, a stream of happy reassurances pouring out with the rain even as his eyes confirm a far more dire prognosis. "Johnny and I need to, um, talk."

"Who—" Her voice fractures in her collapsed throat, and she chokes and dry heaves until her face is purple with strain.

Squee holds her until she calms. "Johnny's our neighbor, Mom. We've lived next to him since—for as long as I can remember."

"O-oh. He looks ni-ice. I-is he a friend o-of yours?"

Squee makes a face remarkably comparable to the one a particularly vehement guest made once after Johnny had made him swallow a pound of nails. "Just—go inside, Mom. Go see if Dad's awake, okay? See if he'll call 911 for you."

"Okay sweetie." Her voice is wet and crackling, like stiff paper going soft beneath a steady drip of water. He recognizes the sound, and suspects now that he may have squeezed too hard. But she had insulted him, hadn't she? Called him a fucking monster. How could he let that go without proper retaliation?

"And tell Dad I'll be in in a min—oh festering whore tits, your eyes are bleeding."

"Don't swear, honey."

"Sorry. Johnny?"

He can't help but flinch. "Yes?"

Squee swallows, looking almost frightened before setting his jaw and glaring hard at him. "You are going to go in your house, sit your ass down on your couch, and you are going to stay the fu—stay there until I can get Dad to give me the keys so I can get Mom to the ER. See, betcha I gotta do it 'cause Dad is an incompetent, loveless douche with a heart of coal. But I'm gonna do it fast, 'cause you and I? We need to talk."

"I—"

Squee got him off with a sharp gesture. "Uh-uh. Not today. Not gonna play that game. Get in your house."

He got in his house.

"Slavery is inherent in all things, Johnny. It is only a question of to what. Once before you were selected to be a Flusher—"

"And I failed. Miserably, I might add."

The Burger Boy shook its head firmly. "You excelled."

"Clearly we're remembering my experiences in the After Life differently."

"Clearly you forget what kind of monster was imprisoned behind that wall."

"I never saw it. I died before I had the chance."

"It doesn't matter whether you saw it or not! What you had to do to keep it locked up should tell you more than enough."

"I—"

"I think somebody with a say in things liked what you were doing down here. Otherwise, why else tether you to this particular yoke a second time? If your memories of what Satan said to you are correct, you are practically the very antithesis of Flusher material!" It hobbles towards him, it's ungainly waddle exacerbated by its missing arm. Drool spills freely from between jutting fangs that cut at its lips with every overeager exclamation. "Take a good look at me, boy. The very moment the System slapped the manacles back on your wrists it began to take me as well. These changes are the result of your inaction."

His reflections smile bitterly. "You claim to be mine one minute and admit you're not the next. One or the other; it can't be both."

It stares at him with a steady, curious expression. "Can't it? The System is trying to take me from you. That is one truth. Another is that I am fighting it as best I can. Just as your Doughboys did, not so long ago."

He sneers and says nothing.

"I am resisting," the Burger Boy continues, "but I cannot win. The changes done to this form you've assigned me are the result of every foot of ground lost. You must see how much faster the transformation is in me compared to the Doughboys! You must understand that you are no longer a mere Flusher! For the Wall Monster remembers how effective it was to use your own madness against you, and now an eye is upon you, Johnny! The merciless, unflinching eye of the System in its entirety, and the System is more powerful than either of us can possibly comprehend."

He locks his fingers around the lip of the sink to keep from shaking. Slowly, the words trickle out of his mouth, pooling in a pile of warm paranoia in the drain. "Everything you say only goes to prove how much they have already conquered you, taken you from me and twisted you into some… thing. Some monster braying about hope even as it settles its jaws around my neck."

He drops his gaze from the figurine, from the mirror, afraid of the triumph he knows he will find there. "I can't trust you."

The Burger Boy positively beams. "Now you're catching on."

"Nailbunny, what should I do?"

resist

"Who? Who do I fight? Him? The System?"

resist

"Whether I like it or not, he's my only source of information. Even if he's manipulating me, he at least has the decency to forewarn me, unlike his predecessors. If push comes to shove, I think I could beat him. But what—what if he's telling the truth? What if he can help me?"

resist

"Nailbunny?"

resist

re—

"Please! Oh god, this hurts so much! Stop!"

"Shut up. The machine's barely even warmed up."

The sobbing blob tied to one of many torture devices he keeps humming at the ready cringes as his hand floats above the dial. He allows himself a brief smile.

"W-what do you want? Jesus Christ, I just m-met you! What did I even do?!"

He opens his mouth, a speech rife with injustice suffered under the merciless hands of a society dead from the neck up on the tip of his tongue, only to find himself unable to remember who this woman is and why he has her strapped into the Needler.

He laughs, and turns the dial up anyway.

—sist

The baby, the child, the dull-eyed little girl releases its iron grip on his sleeve and forgets him instantly, yet the mother perseveres, eager to speak with another human being. It seems he has no choice but to participate in a conversation with this woman until his stop, as every other seat is taken. And besides, it would be rude to just stand up and walk away.

You could kill her.

He frowns and ignores the voice, but nevertheless finds it unsettling. Meat's all for living and talking and eating and fucking and being an actual human, not murder. This is very out of character. Still pondering over it, he glances at the woman and finds her staring at him, expecting something from him.

"What?" he asks, itching to put his headphones on again. He really likes the piece vibrating against his collarbone.

"Where did you buy your shirt?" the woman asks, as if she's repeating herself. She probably is.

He peels his eyes away from her surgically swollen lips long enough to glance down at himself. Black and gray, with an obnoxious splash of color amid the stripes that makes his head hurt. He doesn't recognize it.

"I, uh, don't remember," he says.

"Oh, that's too bad! My little brother loves that show."

He nods mutely, allowing his thumb to play with the volume of his CD player. The woman keeps talking, and Carl Orff rages at fate in a whispered rise and fall of Latin and violins.

The girl touches his hand again, and he accepts without protest that he will kill these two in their matching summer dresses with an eager blare of trumpets.

"Slavery to a broken machine or slavery to life and all its pains and pleasures." Meat touches his arm with its remaining hand. Through his sleeve, he can feel its dampness, its heat. "Decision time is now or never, Nny."

He laughs. "I am a broken machine."

Sometimes other people appear in the mirrors. Just brief flashes, overlapping the current other-self dominating the rest, and he knows it's foolish, but he can't help but wonder.

What is it like to have friends?

"—and it's being called the worst crime in the tri-county area since the café massacre two years ago. With twenty-seven dead at the scene and another twelve in critical condition, we here at the Channel 4 News Network can't help but agree. What do you think of it, Jeff?"

"It's a real atrocity, Nadine. The man who did this must be a real psycho, a total monster."

"Oh yes. And speaking of the killer, a woman—who has asked to remain anonymous—has stepped forward, claiming to have been at the club when the murders were committed. She also claims to be the one who halted the massacre by shooting the killer three times, despite having already been wounded."

"It is true a thus-far unidentified blood sample was recovered from the scene, as well as the bullets matching the woman's gun, but nothing conclusive has been determined yet. However, the woman has agreed to meet with a sketch artist once she's recovered from the attack, and a drawing of the killer will be sent to all media coverages when available."

"In the meantime, if anyone has any information regarding the killer or his whereabouts, we would appreciate it if you would call the number at the bottom of the screen. Please, don't hesitate—"

The reporter's face freezes for an instant before exploding in a supernova of white noise. Jolted out of a daydream, he instinctively reaches for the remote to mute the atrocious sound, but pauses before letting his hand fall.

The sound is… oddly pleasant.

He leaves it on for three days.

He decides to call it Reverend Meat. It just… seems to fit.

He pauses at the couch only briefly, wondering what happened outside and what kind of reaction he should be having, but his legs give out and once he hits the floor it doesn't seem to matter anymore. Something skitters away, startled by the sound and vibrations of his body striking the wood. A minute passes or maybe five before it skitters back, probing his fingers with inquisitive antennae. His nerves won't respond to the signals his brain sends, to flinch away or crush the insect before it has a chance to grow bolder. He panics briefly, fear and helplessness clawing their way through his chest cavity, but then, as if a switch is flipped inside him, he relaxes.

The insect, whatever it is, takes a cautious nibble at the calloused tip of his ring finger. There is a tiny flash of pain, but no instinctive recoil from the source of the hurt. He is truly unable to move, than. The insect continues to bite, finding the outer layers of his skin tasty enough to merit further excavation. A second insect, crawling out of some unseen hole beyond his limited vision, joins the first, and is quickly followed by a third, a fourth, a dozen, too many to differentiate by feel alone and before he knows it an entire colony of carnivorous insects are biting into him, eating his flesh, burrowing under his clothes, his skin, crawling in his mouth and into his soft, wet insides, and he can't do anything to stop it.

It hurts, God it hurts, and he thinks wildly to himself that if he manages to live through this he will never ever strap a jar of bugs between another guest's teeth, ever again, because this is beyond torture, beyond ironic justice, beyond what words can describe: it just fucking hurts.

But then they reach his spinal cord and, like a city-wide power outage, his pain receptors begin to shut down, and then it's only the sounds of thousands of tiny mouths chewing. Until the insects turn their attention to his face, at least, being eaten alive isn't quite as bad as movies would lead him to believe. It's certainly slower, for one thing, and it lacks the nerve-wracking horror soundtrack, but perhaps that's for the better. The sounds he does hear are far from pleasant: squishing and crunching and gnawing and if he still had a stomach it'd probably be heaving by this point. He can see nothing but the dusty edge of darkness beneath his couch, but it's easy to imagine how gruesome he must look.

He's seen the results of this kind of thing with his own eyes, after all.

By the time they reach his head, they have already chewed through something vital in his chest and nowhere can he feel anything, any ache any pain any sadness any anger any loneliness and God is that an improvement. Consciousness fades to a dull spark somewhere in his increasingly exposed ribcage, perhaps somewhere just behind his collarbone, and he is hollowed out as rapidly as a properly upgraded power tool can scoop the mush out of a pumpkin. He is home to a colony of army ants, or a vast nest of ravenous, newborn spiders. That buzzing he hears could be the many vibrating wings of mating flies, or the first comb of a beehive being constructed among his bones. Certainly this is some species of insect that won't hesitate to swarm over a piece of meat—however stringy—before it has a chance to defend itself. Maybe it's even a school of land-bound piranha. He can imagine all sorts of culprits and has little trouble believing in all of them.

He wonders if honey from a human hive would be any good, but immediately discards the idea, revolted. He's practically thinking cannibalism here! Or, rather, self-cannibalism. Can a person self-cannibalize when they no longer have a digestive system? He'll have to try that sometime.

He wonders.

"Johnny?"

He blinks with magically undevoured eyelids, and is whole.

Sometimes, if he focuses hard enough, long enough, on these days when others flicker by in the mirrors, sometimes these flickers steady, become memorable faces, re-memorable people. And if memory serves, most of these people are dead.

The implications leave him with aching knuckles.

"I am not a monster."

"You just keep telling yourself that. Hey, maybe if you wish hard enough it might even come true one day!" Meat cackles and kicks his toothbrush into the toilet bowl.

"I wasn't always like this. I haven't always lived here. I haven't always been alone."

"How can you be so sure?”

Frustrated. Does he really have to state the obvious?

"No one is born knowing how to speak or read or write, or how to drive a car, or how to use money. Inherent knowledge is limited in humans. I may no longer have the memories of being taught, but the result is still the same. I know how to mix paints because I probably took classes in high school. I know how to use a camera, order dinner at a restaurant, do my own laundry, because someone else was there to teach me. Fuck, someone hated me enough to give me you."

"Who?"

"What?"

"Who gave me to you?" Meat's smile tries to appear kind, yet it is condescending, as if it is speaking to a child. "It's a simple enough question, dear boy."

"I—you said it was a girl—that we—" He swears. "You know I don't remember."

"Who gave you an understanding of the English language? Where is the license that proves you once passed a test at the DMV?"

"I—"

"Can you prove that you did not simply read the directions in some art books, or on the camera's packaging, or in a Laundromat? Perhaps, on the same strange whim that made you steal some Styrofoam Pillsbury Doughboy figurines, you came across my body yourself?"

"You said—"

"I thought you didn't trust me."

His knuckles burn white.

"Well, Johnny?"

"You know I can't prove any of that."

Meat's eyes glitter with delight. "Then, dear Johnny, how can you be so sure?"

At the edge of a stage bright with colored lights, he curls his hands around a microphone and smiles. The audience—

so many eyes watching him, and yet he couldn't be more relaxed

—has hushed; yet their screams still ring in his ears.

He is not alone on this stage.

He doesn't dare turn to see who is playing softly behind him, afraid it'll be people the mirrors have shown him that are alive in some other Johnny's life but dead dead dead in his. His heart pounds, and for once the ache in his throat feels good. This is all so wonderfully terrifying, sickeningly familiar. Has he dreamed this before?

He comes to a stop inches from the audience's reaching hands. Good God, he has them right in the palm of his hand.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he breathes into the microphone, and every spark of life in this vast room is shining its light on him, and it is all so beautiful, so perfect, so alien.

"What we have here is a moral conundrum."

"Bunny, I'm worried."

"I'm glad I'm not the only one. But really, there's so much to worry about. Please, elaborate for me."

"I haven't gone anywhere I might run the chance of killing someone in months. Just drive-thrus and that fully automated shopping center. Until recently, the only other people I've interacted with haven't bothered me or have been out of reach. It's only been these past couple weeks I've attempted anything more. Walking in parks, public transportation. You know."

"I know."

"What I can't figure out is how I ended up in that club at all."

The television is on, too low to be heard. In its pale blue glow, he carefully touches his chest, wincing when his fingers press against three tender circles: one on his sternum, another between his sixth and seventh ribs, and the last just beneath his ribcage. Tiny puckered scars ache in the center of each purple bruise.

"If I remember correctly, you recognized something who went inside and followed after."

"Why would—that doesn't sound like something I'd do."

"You stalked Devi for nearly a year."

He scowls. "Unnecessary, Bunny."

"Is it?"

He thumps his boots onto the coffee table and says nothing. Bunny presses on.

"It was a woman. Short hair, glasses, surprisingly compassionate to your… cause."

"Wait, do you mean that one woman with that shitty boyfriend I Tazered once? When I saw that movie—"

"Yes."

"Wow, really? I figured the Wall Monster got her after reality collapsed." He taps his chin thoughtfully. "What was her name? Did it start with a… a T?"

"Tess."

"Yeah!" He pauses. "She… recognized me first."

"Uh-huh."

"She practically ran into the building. They didn't even card her. She must have been a regular."

"Or she worked there."

"Or she worked there," he agrees. "That anyone could recognize me—" he trails off. A beat passes, and he continues on a different vein. "But what set me off? What caused me to break again, after I'd been doing so well?"

"That shouldn't be your chief concern, Johnny."

He looks at the disembodied rabbit head, little more than a skull now, and tiny and fragile-looking without it's maggot-riddled skin. "Oh?"

"You should be asking why you were sent back again."

Those other people in the mirror, those strangers, those friends, those dead bodies in motion, would sometimes pause beside his reflection. They smile, laugh; get mad and fight back and actually live; attack and be attacked; get scared and fight back and die. Some of it looks fun, some of it looks ridiculous. A lot of it scares him, more than he'd like to admit.

He wishes one of them would notice him.

His fingers touch glass.

#jthm #johnny the homicidal maniac #deadfic #my writing #if you know the comic then you know what kind of violence and fuckery to expect #otherwise good grief i apologize to anyone checking this out who doesn't know the source material and just likes my writing #i also dearly apologize for the lack of contractions #18 year old anthrop didn't know what the fuck she was doing

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ironwoman359 · 5 years

Note

“I can’t believe I finally got you, how incredible is that?” With human!Deceit and tiny!Virgil?

Warnings: Cages, treating a person as a pet, depression

Virgil was quiet as he was roughly transferred from the pen at the back of the pet store to a portable carrier. He didn’t bother shouting or trying to run, he’d tried all that before and it never worked. He stayed silent as he was run up at the register, kept his mouth closed as the woman behind the counter tried to convince his buyer to pick one of the other tinies from the front of the store.

“Really, are you sure about this one? We have this lovely, lively little fellow over here that I think would be just–”

“Thank you, ma’am, but that won’t be necessary,” the man interrupted with a silky smooth voice, holding up a gloved hand to quiet her protests. “I’m sure this one will do just nicely.”

The woman shrugged, before dutifully informing him of their thirty day return policy and handing over his receipt.

Thirty days.

Had Virgil ever even lasted a whole month with a human? No, he was pretty sure his record with a human was about three weeks before he’d been sent back. It was always the same complaint; he was too boring, too lifeless, to depressing. Nobody wanted a pet that would curl up and lie still in the corner of a cage, refusing to engage with its owner.

Whatever.

It didn’t matter to Virgil one way or another. Whether he wasted away in the back of a pet store or wasted away in the corner of some human’s living room, either way he was going to die alone in a cage.

A car door slammed, and Virgil jumped, realizing that his carrier had been set down on the passenger seat of the human’s car. The man fastened a strap over the carrier, buckling it in place before settling into his own seat and starting the car.

Virgil sighed, and leaned back, closing his eyes. Maybe he could catch a quick nap before he had to endure this new human going through the typical poking and prodding stage that every human apparently had to get out of their system when they first bought a tiny.

“Phew!” the man said suddenly, and Virgil winced at the loudness of his voice. Or maybe, sleep had been too much to hope for. “She totally wanted me to take you home, didn’t she?”

Virgil opened his eyes and peered up at the human who had bought him. The man’s eyes were on the road, but when the car came to a stop at a red light, he glanced down at Virgil and smirked. Virgil realized with a start that the man’s eyes were mismatched, one brown, one blue, and he found himself staring despite himself.

The man raised an eyebrow when he saw where Virgil’s attention was, and Virgil quickly looked away, not wanting to anger him.

“It’s called heterochromia.”

“Huh?” Virgil glanced back up, but the human’s eyes were on the road again as he continued.

“When your eyes are two different colors, like mine.”

“Oh.”

“But yeah, sorry about that lady, she sounds like she was a real treat to have as a caretaker.”

The man shook his head, annoyance clear in his voice, and Virgil frowned. Why did this human care so much about how nice the pet store employees were?

“Between that absolute peach of a worker and the fact that it’s way more difficult than you’d think to track down one specific borrower, I can’t believe I finally got you. How incredible is that?”

Virgil snapped his head up, his eyes wide.

“Did…did you say…borrower?” he asked. Distantly, he was aware that that was the longest sentence he’d said to a human since he first had been caught, but he was too distracted by the fact that this human had just called him a borrower. How long had it been since he’d been called what he actually was? It must have been…

“I’m sure you haven’t heard yourself be called that since you were initially captured,” the human continued. “But rest assured, Virgil, where we’re going, you won’t have to worry about being called a ‘tiny’ anymore.”

Virgil hadn’t thought it was possible for him to be anymore surprised after hearing a human call him a borrower, but the instant that his name crossed the human’s lips, he was proven wrong. All the other humans had tried to give him a name, and not ONCE had he ever been asked what he’d like to be called.

“How…how did you know my name?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper, and the man smacked himself on the forehead.

“Dammit, Dee, you’ve done it again,” he muttered, before glancing down at Virgil with a sheepish expression. “Well, I was planning to ease into this topic a little more delicately, but I didn’t pick you out of that pet store randomly, Virgil. I’ve been looking for you in particular, for some time now.”

“I…why?” Virgil asked, bewildered, and the man, Dee, sighed again.

“Well, if I gave you all the reasons, we’d be driving all night, but here’s the short version. My best friend, Thomas, he has a big house out in the country that his Aunt Patty left to him. He discovered a couple of wild-born tinies out there, or borrowers, as we found out you’re actually called. He became friends with them, and they opened his eyes to a lot of the injustice that goes on in the Tiny Industries. He decided he’d put all that space out there to good use, and he built a little sanctuary for borrowers. It’s been running for about three years now, and we have half a dozen or so borrowers living out there that were rescued from the pet trade.”

“Okay…” Virgil said slowly, trying to keep up with what Dee was saying. It made sense, he supposed, though he’d never imagined a human would decide to take a borrower’s side on anything, let alone build an entire habitat for them. “So…what does that have to do with me?”

Dee smiled at him, and raised an eyebrow.

“One of those borrowers is Patton.”

Virgil sat up in an instant, leaning forward with wide eyes.

“You’re serious?” he asked, and Dee chuckled.

“See for yourself,” he said, putting the car into park. “We’re here.”

He got out of his seat, then came around to pull Virgil’s carrier out. Through the wire bars, Virgil could see fields that stretched out into rolling hills in every direction, what looked like fruit trees in the distance, and the reflection of sunlight off a pond.

All of that was just the background though, for the big, three story farmhouse that Dee had parked his car in front of. A human was standing on the front porch, and from what Virgil could see of his face, he was smiling.

“Dee!” the man called, and his voice was bright and full of energy. “Did you find him?”

“Yeah, Thomas,” Dee said with a grin, holding up Virgil’s carrier a little higher. “I found him”

Thomas clapped his hands, then did something that Virgil thought was strange: he held one hand over to his shoulder, palm facing upward. It didn’t make any sense at first…until they got a little closer and Virgil realized with a gasp that a borrower had been perched on Thomas’s shoulder and was now sitting cross-legged on the human’s open palm.

Thomas let the borrower off to stand on the porch railing, and tears sprung to Virgil’s eyes as he recognized his older brother. He hadn’t seen Patton since the two of them had been captured nearly two years ago, and had long since given up hope of ever seeing his brother again.

Dee set the carrier on the porch railing and had barely flipped open the door before Patton was rushing forward, tears in his eyes and arms outstretched. Virgil took the last few steps to meet him, catching his brother in what had to be the best hug he’d ever had in his life.

Patton was crying into his shoulder, gripping Virgil so tightly it almost hurt, but Virgil didn’t mind. His own hold on Patton was just as tight, the fear that this was all some impossible dream hovering at the back of his mind.

If this was a dream, it was one Virgil never wanted to wake up from.

Eventually, Patton pulled himself away, cupping Virgil’s face in his hands and scanning it, eyes wide and shiny with tears.

“You’re here,” he finally whispered, his voice breathless with wonder. “You’re really here.”

He pulled Virgil close again, and Virgil smiled as he buried his face in Patton’s shoulder.

“Yeah, Pat,” he mumbled back. “I’m here.”

Thomas and Dee watched fondly as the two borrowers reunited, then Thomas turned to Dee.

“You might want to visit the family room, Roman kept insisting I tell him when you got back.”

Dee rolled his eyes before shaking his head.

“He probably has a seventeenth draft of that script of his to show me. Alright then, I’ll catch you guys later.”

Thomas waved at him as he headed inside the house, then turned his attention back to the borrowers, who were still locked in an embrace. He smiled, and whispered,

“Welcome to the Sanders Sanctuary for Borrowers, Virgil.”

——–

A/N: Soooo this is an AU now XD I’ve wanted to write about humans who hated how society treated Tinies (borrowers) and established a sanctuary for them for the longest time, and never got around to it, until noooww! If you guys are into it, I’m going to start a sideblog/askblog for this AU, but until then you’re welcome to send me asks about the AU here! I’ll have more info about the other characters and what their roles are, as well as more fics coming soon, but for now, I hope you enjoyed this little ficlet and the introduction into the Sanders Sanctuary for Borrowers/Tinies AU!

Update: the sideblog is @sanders-sanctuary-au, check it out if you’re interested!

-Taylor

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falconxwinter · 5 years

Text

sambucky fanfic rec list

Since I’ve read each and every sambucky fanfic that exists I think it’s time to list the ones I love the most, in no particular order.

there is a sweetness in you by Someone_aka_Me

AU: Your soulmate is the only person who cannot hurt you. Sam gets kicked off a helicarrier — yet he can't help but notice the boot to the chest doesn't hurt like it should.

The Captain's Club for Wayward Veterans by ShannonXL

What's a superhero to do when the Big Bad is finally defeated and the world doesn't need the costumes and capes anymore? Sam and Bucky use their newfound spare time wisely. Looking out for the little guy, seeing more of the world, and flirting as only two wisecracking sweethearts can.

A quick detour and a sudden arrival by iwillnotbecaged

He found Wilson shivering in the snow, left for dead. Sloppy. You couldn’t trust the elements to do your job for you. They were rarely so obliging. A mission gone awry, unexpected help, and close quarters makes for an interesting couple of days.

I Want Statements by chase_acow

“His therapist suggested he work on his ‘I want’ statements,” Steve explained in a stage whisper once he and Sam finally crossed paths in the kitchen. “You don’t have to do whatever, but it’ll help him start to think about his preferences and then practice verbalizing them. Maybe, be nice to him, okay?”

“You know he still has super hearing, right?” Sam pretend whispered back, rolling his eyes as the blush conquered Steve’s face. “Anyway, Sam Wilson does not acquiesce to anything Sam Wilson does not want to acquiesce to.”

“I want to sit in here now,” Bucky said, slouching to the table and aggressively sitting down in the corner. He glared at Steve until the other man ducked his head and shuffled out.

“Damn right, you do,” Sam agreed, handing over the sudoku and flicking a pen at Bucky’s face.

He Can't Cook, But Gosh He's Cute by wickedwitchcraft

Prompt: some Bucky being the most terrible cook ever fluff would be nice

in your black heart (is where you'll find me) by notcaycepollard

“Hey,” he tries, “hey darlin’, can you pass me the milk?”

“Oh sure,” Sam responds after a long pause. “Here you go. Sweetie.”

“Thanks, hon, you’re a real doll,” Bucky drawls, and pours himself another bowl of cereal, tops up his coffee, takes a mouthful of milk straight from the carton just for good measure. Sam narrows his eyes.

“That’s disgusting,” he sighs, and Bucky makes deliberate eye contact, swallows another mouthful. Sam holds his gaze. “Cupcake, come on, I gotta drink that shit, stop putting your mouth all over it.”

“I’ll put my mouth all over wherever I want,” Bucky tells him. “Sweetheart.”

“Will you just,” Sam mutters, and sips his black coffee like he’s totally unruffled, and Bucky is startled to discover that he’s the one who’s blushing. Shit. Maybe this was a tactical error.

i'm a ghost when i walk in (holy spirit when i walk out) by notcaycepollard

Remembering is like nothing.

It’s like nothing and like everything all at once. He’s two people or three or four, crowded in together against the bone of his skull. Tight in the skin of him. Startling as if he’s coming sudden into himself, coalescing like smoke into the shape of a person.

Finding his way back, that's harder.

the grace in monsters series by notcaycepollard

you touch me within and so i (know i could be human once again)

It’s inevitable, the way it goes. He’s my friend, Steve says, and he is, he is, he must be. Sam’s best friend is Steve, and Steve’s best friend is a werewolf, that’s just how Sam’s life works now.

But once he realizes he’s attracted to Bucky and Bucky can tell, everything becomes, like, a thousand percent more difficult to negotiate. Sam’s just trying to live his life, that’s all, and he keeps getting confronted by Bucky Barnes in a soft flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up, hair all soft and shiny. Bucky glances over at him and smirks, and this is really very embarrassing, how Sam can’t hide his attraction even if he keeps a totally straight face.

Hunger for Your Touch by coffeeinallcaps

Of course it’s not the first thought that crosses his mind when he loses the arm, but. Well. He really did like those smooth hard metal fingers a lot, is all. The new arm looks similar but feels different. Lighter. Its nerve sensors and pressure pads are more sensitive, and the surface adapts to his body temperature, which takes some getting used to. The first time he runs one of its fingers down his crack and over his hole, his entire body jerks. “Oh,” he gasps, surprised, and does it again.

This is exactly where I want to be by Kajmere

Sam doesn’t think Bucky and him are quite at the sentimental gift giving stage of their friendship, so he settles on the first Falcon themed merchandise he spots.

Steve laughs in his face and tells him he is going to regret this.

Sam does.

i wanna be the place you call your home by notcaycepollard

Sam is pretty sure he’s gonna die.

He’s been fucking sick with this fucking cold for two fucking weeks now, and he’s reasonably goddamn certain this is how he’s gonna go.

It’s not the cold that’s going to kill him. Bucky’s looked after him so well he’s in no danger of dying on that front. Honestly, Bucky’s the best nurse Sam’s ever had, which is nice and all, of course it’s nice, but he’s still fairly sure he’s gonna die right now, or at least soon, because he is so sexually frustrated he’s just gonna go up in flames.

Progress by ImpishTubist

Sam's getting better at fielding Bucky's more difficult questions.

Your Eyes Are My Sunrise by patchwork_daydreams (orphan_account)

“Can you pass me the last slice?” Bucky says, motioning to the box next to Sam.

He’s not sure what makes him do it – maybe some last ditch attempt to break this weirdness between them – but Sam picks up the remaining slice of pizza and stuffs the whole thing into his mouth.

“What last slice?” he asks thickly, through his mouthful of pizza crust.

A smile breaks onto Bucky’s face, and Sam thinks thank god. He holds his gaze, just a little too long, and is surprised when Bucky responds by glancing very deliberately down, running his eyes down Sam’s body. Holy fuck, what is this?

“Dick,” Bucky mutters after a moment, his eyes flicking back up to Sam’s face, and quirking an eyebrow.

In Our Bed by Unclesteeb

5 times Bucky came into Sam's bed and one time the bed belonged to both of them.

Far Away by misspronounced

5 times Bucky thought he wasn’t good enough for Sam + 1 time Sam told him so.

and i run, further than before by hermionesmydawg

Basically, the 5 times Sam actually found Bucky and the 1 time he tried to hide from him. Don't tell Steve.

just flesh and blood exist by hupsoonheng

honestly i don't know how to summarize this neatly. this is a fic about bucky, and this is a fic about sam, and this is a fic about how neither of them believe they're "ready" to be loved, and how wrong they both are. this is about making zines, and baking tarts, and training falcons. this is not about finding yourself in other people, but in finding understanding in them, and healing. and maybe making out, too.

He says his name is Sam, and you're instantly embarrassed.

Not because of him, exactly, although the way he holds out his hand to shake when the only one you have is occupied holding up the rest of you on a cane, that's pretty awkward in itself. It's more that he's beautiful, clean, smiling—a human that got put together right and keeps himself that way. And you're anything but.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight by prettylittlementirosa

Sam’s too cold to be embarrassed by how quickly he scrambles to get in there. It’s a tight fit, getting two grown men into one regular sized sleeping bag, but they make it work. Bucky shifts this way, Sam slithers that way. Bucky pulls Sam flush against his chest, Sam tries not to dwell on it. Bucky breathes hot air onto Sam’s exposed neck, Sam tucks his ice-cold toes in between Bucky’s legs. Bucky sighs contentedly, Sam wills his dick into submission.

(Or 5 times Sam and Bucky are forced to share a bed + 1 time they choose to.)

do i tell you i love you or not (cause i can't really guess what you want) by notcaycepollard

Shampoo, he thinks. Conditioner.

The kind of hair that’s nice to touch, he hears Sam say again, and reaches for one of the bottles.

It’s different than soap. Smells nice, like fruit and flowers. The shampoo lathers up soft as clouds, washes away easy. Conditioner’s worse; he can’t tell when it’s fucking rinsed out, his hair feels weird. But he grabs the plastic comb - yes, thank you, Wilson, he does know what a goddamn comb is, he’s not a barbarian - and it slides through without catching, like all the knots are just gone. There could be benefits, he’s willing to admit.

Talk to Me by bioloyg

Sam finds himself hurt after a mission. Badly. But, when he gets back it seems he isn't the only one walking around with some bruises.

~ Something small for SamBucky week 'cause I found out that's a thing that was happening.

Ok, this is it for now. Maybe I will come back later for a part 2!

#sambucky #sambucky fic #falcon and the winter soldier #sambucky fic list

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