#cw mention of electrocution | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

luveline · 1 year

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𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐠𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐭 | 𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧

Best friends since middle school, you tell Eddie everything, which is why he's so surprised to find out you've been keeping a secret —you’re hearing a voice whenever you're home alone. He’s always had a thing for the fantastical but he can't believe in ghosts, and the longer you insist on it, the more worried he becomes. This would be bad enough if Eddie didn’t have a secret too, and it threatens to change everything between you. [22k]

fem!reader, best friends to lovers slow-burn, mutual pining, eddie is infatuated with you, idiots in love, paranormal activity/au, heavy hurt/comfort, angst, fluff and affection, wayne is uncle of the year every year, ghost-hunting

cw assumed auditory hallucinations, talk of mental health, surrounding worry and circumstances, mentioned mental illness stigma, recreational drug use mention, prescription drugs, grief

my endless gratitude and thank yous to @h-ness1944 and @mrcylvsu for their sensitivity beta reads and for answering my questions so many moons ago, I'm very, very thankful for all that hard work, and all the time and energy you both spent!

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

Eddie's desk fan is on the fritz. It twists back and forth with a weak metallic clicking sound that promises eventual electrocution but for now provides momentary relief. Even the nights have been hell lately. No matter how many windows he and Wayne open, the air at home stays thick with humidity.

Sweat shines on his brow and collar. He refuses to tie his hair back, and each hour it grows more and more uncomfortable.

"Are you sure you don't wanna come and lie up here?" he asks, shifting reluctantly to peer over the side of the bed.

You're laying on the floor of his room, just as sweaty but half as unhappy. You've abandoned a book to your left, having declared the weather too much to concentrate through.

"Our body heat will mingle."

"The fan is really helping," he argues lightly. "If you die on my floor Wayne won't ever let it go. Just come up here."

You mumble something he doesn't hear and pull your shirt from your chest. You attempt to fan yourself with the thin, clinging fabric. It doesn't work, but it does expose the soft hill of your abdomen to his guilty eyes. His mouth dries up.

"It's getting late," he says. He's not trying to get rid of you, promise, but now he's thinking about your body heat mingling and why it wouldn't be such a bad thing, and he doesn't want to. "I'll drive you home, yeah?"

"In a minute," you agree, looking as if you have no intention of moving.

You turn your face to the side, eyes closed, lashes skimming the delicate skin of your under eye. Eddie sits up and rakes his greasy hair away from his face. He'll drop you home, take a cold shower for purely heat related reasons, and hopefully sleep through the night. It's a very unlikely outcome, but a man can dream.

"Come on. We'll roll the windows down and go really fast."

"Eddie," you chastise.

"Moderately fast."

His sleeveless tank top gets caught as he leans down to try and flick you. Eddie can only ever forgive his fourteen year old self for maiming perfectly good vintage in times like these. A completely unnecessary culling of an entire wardrobe's worth of sleeves, but when the weather gets bad for a few heady weeks every summer, he remembers the reasoning behind it.

He's stripped of all his clunky jewellery for now, adorned only in the dark ink of his multiplying tattoos. His most recent addition is an artist's rendition of the Eye of Sauron, blinking up at him from beneath his volley of bats. Still sick, he thinks to himself smugly.

You've pulled yourself into a sitting position with your arms crossed over the bed, your hand stretched out to touch his plaid pyjama bottoms. You're in a nearly matching pair; when Eddie called you to hang out earlier you'd turned him down, citing a reluctance to change. He'd promised to pick you up in his own pyjamas, and you've been lying on his floor since then.

You're the laziest kids this side of the Wabash river, Wayne'd said, looking over your limp bodies with a smile.

The other side, too, Eddie popped back. Will you put those chicken wings in the oven for us, please?

Eddie's not a monster, the wings were pre-prepared. Any other day he'd correct his uncle, say, hey, we haven't been kids for years, but the heat makes him feel gross and sometimes you just want your dad to make you dinner. (Sometimes Eddie's just lazy, also.)

"Eds?" you murmur.

He lets his hands fall away from his hair where he'd been scratching mindlessly and turns to you. He's lethargic, feels like he's turning his head through molasses. "What, sweetheart?"

Years of being friends lends an easy affection. His pet names are purely platonic. Or they used to be. Either way, you aren't perturbed.

"Can I sleep over?"

He usually says yes to that question immediately. But again, the thought of your sweaty body curled into his with your hands breaching a friendly gap to curl over his waist like they tend to do fills his stomach with dread.

His little crush is making him a bad friend, he decides. He will always, first and foremost, be your friend.

"Of course you can." He rubs his mouth. Feigning casualness. "How come?"

You peel out of your fatigue and get on your knees. The extra height is all you need to finally grab his legs, smiling sheepishly. Eddie won't judge you for almost anything and you know that, so it's gotta be outlandish.

"I think…" You tap his kneecap. "Okay, laugh at me if you need to, but I'm pretty sure my house is haunted."

"Like, by a ghost?"

"What else?" you ask, laughing good-naturedly.

"Why do you think it's haunted, superstar?"

You drop your face onto his thigh, giving him a disjointed hug. He hugs you back for as long as the heat will allow it, a handful of stolen seconds with his hand over your back.

"I swear, sometimes, I can hear someone talking."

That's… scarier than he imagined. "Shit, I thought you were gonna say a coat fell off the hanger, or the light in your bathroom started flickering again."

"It has," you admit, your mouth pressed to his thigh. "But it's just the bulb."

He pushes you off of him, your voice sending vibrations through places he'd prefer it didn't, and you fall back with a half-hearted stab at melodrama.

"Oof," you say, straight-faced.

"You really think it's a ghost?" he asks.

"No. I don't know. I won't believe in ghosts until I see one, and I haven't seen one, but if it were a ghost, this is the type of behaviour I'd expect from it. So I guess I do. Does that make sense?"

"Sure." He doesn't know. "What does it say?"

"Here's the bit where you won't believe me."

You smile at him from your spot on the floor. Your hand curls out, like a tight budded flower coming to bloom.

"She asks about you," you say quietly. "It's pretty much all she says."

"Who?"

"The ghost."

"She's a she?"

"Sounds kind of like one."

"Come sit up here with me."

Eddie knows his voice has gone hard and weird, but he can't help it. He understands that he doesn't understand anything, that the world is large and works in mysterious ways, but he wouldn't forgive himself if he took this lightly. You sound so convinced — it makes him feel ill.

Because Eddie doesn't believe in ghosts.

You climb up onto the bed in front of him and he doesn't take your hand. He should. You won’t meet his eyes, a sign that you're slightly embarrassed. It's not what he meant to do.

"What does she say?” he probes.

You go teasing and shiny, a glimmer in your eye. "I know you don't believe me, Eddie."

"Who says I don't believe you? I just need you to explain."

"She says…" You laugh. "Okay, she says stuff like, 'Eddie is okay?'"

Eddie stares at you.

"I was going to tell you–"

"When?" he demands.

"I'm telling you right now!"

"How long have you been hearing voices?"

You climb up on knees to wrap your arms around his head. "You think I'm delusional," you say, a loving murmur in his ear.

He grabs your waist. Unsurprisingly, hugging you doesn't make him nearly as electric as he'd worried. It feels the same as it always has, like hugging his best friend. Loving the smell of your hair is new, but everything else stays the same.

"I don't think you’re delusional, I don't, I just– if I told you the same thing."

You pull away, and his hand comes to rest atop the curve of your hip. "I'd believe you," you say.

"I believe that you believe there's someone talking to you about me. Uh… if it is a ghost haunting your house, why's she talking about me?"

You take his hands off of your waist, squeezing his fingers together in your palms. "Don't know. I tried asking but she never answers, and last night…"

Eddie stands up.

"Where are you going?"

"We gotta let Wayne know you're staying and he's about to fall asleep, and I want a cigarette, and you need something to drink."

"I don't want a beer."

"No," he says. When he says to drink, he really means something cold to sip on. He's hoping to grab you back from… whatever it is you're going. "Soda, apple juice, drink what you want."

He fiddles with the drawstrings on his pants, waiting for you to join him at the doorway. You stay sitting on his bed. He doesn't know what your face means.

"Hey, you still have to tell me about it. I want to know, swear to god. We have all night." He holds out his hand. Wiggles his fingers at you. "I'll let you paint my nails again too, like a real girls night."

That grabs your attention. You slide off of the bed and take his hand, shrieking as he yanks you ten miles an hour down the skinny hallway and into the living room. Wayne's got the sofa bed out already, his padded roll-up mattress laid out over the springs and a sheet stretched corner to corner.

"Hey, kids," he says, fluffing one of his pillows. He chucks it at the top of the mattress. "Home time?"

"Can I stay over, Mr. Munson?" you ask.

Wayne rolls his eyes. You once spent eight days here with no breaks sometime in the summer of 1987 and he hadn't batted an eye. Eddie made sure it was truly alright with Wayne, of course, and you'd done your share of housework. Point is, both Munson's find your asking to stay unnecessary.

"I'll make pancakes in the morning," you add.

"Oh, in that case." Wayne throws his blanket out over the bed and sits on top of it. "By all means, kid, stay over. Tell your guardian."

"Can't. In Santa Barbara."

"Ah, then I have to insist you stay," he says, laying down with a huff.

Eddie passes him the TV remote. "She's a big girl, Wayne." You're well past the age of parental supervision.

Wayne answers with a grumbling sound that means, hey, you can keep talking to me but there's no guarantee I'll answer.

"I won't be annoying, promise," you say.

Wayne grunts again.

"That's old man talk for I know you won't," Eddie translates.

You nod, glad to have permission, and meander into the kitchen. "Can I–"

"Yes!" Eddie and Wayne call simultaneously.

Wayne laughs to himself in that pleased gruff way he's good at and tucks his arms behind his head. He's wearing one of Eddie's t-shirts. They've been the same size since Eddie was seventeen, something both Munson's utilise when laundry day is approaching but not quite upon them.

"Lighter?"

Wayne scrunches his eyes in displeasure. "By the sink."

"Thanks." For some reason, Eddie doesn't leave. He stays standing by the TV, listening to the voice of a late-night talk show chuckle through a joke about some scandal.

When Eddie was younger, he'd get into bed beside Wayne and watch TV until his eyes hurt. Too young to have stopped needing comfort and too old to know how to ask for it, he'd drift down the snug hallway into the living room and Wayne would usually be asleep or almost there. Eddie would stand by the TV hesitantly, and if he was sleeping Wayne must've been able to feel it, a new parents instinct or something, because he'd soon wake, and if he wasn't he'd look at Eddie like he'd been waiting for him. Like Eddie was running late.

His teenage years were almost solely defined by bad dreams and TV with Wayne. On the good nights, Eddie would go back to bed. On the bad nights, heartache would swallow him whole. Well, almost whole. His cheek would rest on Wayne's shoulder as the night went on. Miraculous and ordinary at once. That's the only bit of him that didn't hurt.

Pain emaciates the good from his memory, but it can't erase the comfort of watching TV with someone who loved him when they didn't have to.

Wayne pretends to chop Eddie in the stomach. Eddie laughs and dodges out of his path.

"Gotta be faster than that," Eddie taunts.

"Don't chain smoke," Wayne says.

"We won't be up long." Eddie's lying. He can't imagine that either of you will be getting an early night tonight considering the nature of your confession. What he means is, you won't be keeping Wayne up, and Eddie won't smoke more than what's wise.

Wayne hums.

You're in the kitchen screwing the lid back on a gallon of apple juice, your cup a quarter filled. You're like that. Won't ever take more than you need.

"One for me?" he asks.

"I figured now all your taste buds are dead, you wouldn't want any."

"Ha-ha," he says. The kitchen is unusually clean. "Shit, stop cleaning my house. Good god."

You pull one of his jackets off of the seat of one of the kitchen table's chairs and shake it out. "So I can sleep here, eat here, but cleaning is where you draw the line. I like it."

Eddie grabs the lighter from beside the sink in one hand and your wrist in the other, pulling you away from the table before you can start organising their mail and through the back door.

It's still sticky-hot out and the steps are warm to the touch as the two of you sit down hip to hip. He pulls the stiff pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket and hands them to you. Your hand is already waiting. You peel off the plastic and tap the pack against your chest. You like doing it, arguing that it makes you feel like you're Chelsea Marino in Glory Days, all dark smiles and indulgent self-loathing.

You open the pack, tug out a lone cigarette, and pass it to him.

"You're like a pez dispenser," Eddie says, putting the butt of the cigarette between his lips.

"You little freak."

He laughs and almost drops his cig. Wayne's heavy zippo struggles to light, low on gas.

"Loser can't even light a cigarette."

"Who put two dimes in you?" he asks, thrilled by your negging.

He takes a sharp inhale as the end of the cigarette finally lights, the heat tickling his throat until it burns the way he needs it to.

"Somebody must've," you say.

"Reckon we can tip you upside down and get something to eat?" he asks through an exhale of smoke, tapping ash into the small egg cup to his left that's been serving as an ashtray for as long as he's been smoking. It used to be yellow. Every now and again he washes it and sees the old chicken paint underneath. "Too late for cooking."

"Are you hungry?" you ask genuinely. "I told you we should've had more than just wings."

"It was too hot to eat hot stuff. It's still too hot. Tomorrow, we should go to Bradley's and get stuff for sandwiches."

Eddie waits for your answer. "I'm sick of PB and J, Eds," or "Yes! And a pitcher for sweet tea, my captain." You don't say anything, your face turned up to the sky and your eyes closed, soaking in the heat.

He has half a mind to go get a spray bottle and douse you before you collapse.

"What's going on with you?" he asks.

"I'm just thinking."

"Think out loud. Don't be fucking selfish."

"I'm not sure you wanna hear it."

He puts his cigarette in the eggcup ashtray half-smoked, ribbons of white curling up into the shimmering summer heat. Any other time he'd lounge back and let the nicotine course through his system, a momentary relief against the winding tightness that comes with being so hot, and so worried about you.

"If I ask you how you've been feeling lately, could you answer me?" he asks. "Without assuming I don't believe you. Don't get mad, just tell me."

You drop your shoulder against his. "I feel fine, I think. You know me, I– I worry too much, and work is overwhelming. If you took me to a doctor, he'd probably prescribe me ambien and a week in a dark room, but. I really don't think I'm making this up."

"I don't think you'd know," he says. Isn't that the deal? If you're having a hallucination of some kind, it would likely sound and feel real enough to trick you in some capacity.

"Trust me," you say. Your hair brushes against the top of his damp arm. He can't smell good, but you don't say a thing about it.

"I do." Eddie turns his head to take another drag. He blows the smoke as far from you as he can manage. "Tell me about last night," he says, eyes on the weather worn plating of the trailer. "What happened?"

If you're not messing with him, your ghost has been talking to you for a while now. Something happened last night to scare you in a way you hadn't been before.

He fights his rising nausea with a final drag on his cigarette. You stop leaning on him, hands back in your lap as you tell the story.

"I was listening to the stereo real loud while I did laundry. I don't know if I was trying to, you know, block it out if she started talking, I'm not stupid, I– I know it could be all in my head. I don't think it is, but I'm not stupid. I went down to the basement to swap the load out in the dryer, and while I was down there…"

You look like you don't know how to explain it. Eddie bites his cheek.

"She wrote me something," you say finally. "In my notebook, the one you got me for Christmas. She said hello."

"I could've written it," he says. "I don't remember, maybe I left you a message in it knowing you'd find it."

"Did you come in and take it off the shelf, too?" you ask gently. "Eddie, I know your handwriting. I'm not making this up."

He sighs, rubs his face with both hands, the smell of smoke and salt ingrained in the lines of his palms. He gives himself a long five seconds scrubbing at his stubbly jaw and wishing it was colder, then he shoots up onto his feet and pulls open the door.

"Early night," he says decisively. "If you're still sure there's a ghost in the morning, I'll come over. See if she'll talk to me too. How does that sound?"

You hold your hand out. Eddie takes it, hoisting you up.

"It sounds like you need a better strategy for getting girls to go to bed with you."

"It's working, isn't it?"

"Loser."

—

You wake up to Eddie tapping your shoulder.

"Come on, sweetheart," he says quietly, his voice rough as hewn stone. "I made you pancakes."

It's as if you're submerged at the bottom of a shallow pool. Sound and heat and sunlight reach you, but it's dull. It takes you a second to understand what Eddie's saying, and why his thumb is rubbing into your shoulder.

"Come on," he says again, "'fore they get cold."

You blink. Blink blink blink. Your throat hurts and you have a bad taste in your mouth. Your eyes feel like somebody flicked sand at you while you slept, gritty and dry. You kick the thin blanket away from you, a long day of writhing in the heat yesterday having turned you to sludge, your limbs limp and uncooperative.

Eddie's frowning at you when you look up.

"Want me to get you a rag?" he asks.

"No, I'll wash my face." Your words string together like toffee melted between them and hardened again while you weren't looking. "Oh," you murmur, wincing as you set your feet on the ground. "My back really hurts. Did you push me out of bed last night?"

"You slept like a log. Same position all night." He reaches for you, but his hand wavers. He must change his mind.

Eddie leaves the door wide open as he leaves. The radio is on, and a song he secretly loves but won't admit to wars with the sound of sizzling oil. If you strain, you can hear him humming. You get closer and dip into the bathroom, the door open so you can listen to Eddie sing the chorus.

Dance with me, I want to be your partner, can't you see? The music is just starting.

He doesn't sing well, really. It's a light, high-pitched rendition. He isn't trying. He feels comfortable enough around you to be unapologetically mediocre, and it's somehow sweeter than if he had a voice like Larry Hoppen.

You wash your face with handfuls of cold water, your lips tasting of salt as it drips down your nose to your neck, rogue rivulets of run-off seeping into your rolled sleeves.

The heat broke overnight. A light rain patters soundlessly against the windows, and the back door has been propped open in the kitchen to let in the smell of fresh churned earth. Petrichor.

You pat your tacky face dry. Eddie turns to the sound, and you nod at Wayne's empty seat.

"Where's your uncle?" you ask.

"He wanted to get epoxy and a fresh roll of duct tape in case we spring another leak. The rain was pretty bad last night, I think he's worried it'll rot the ceiling. I don't know. Don't worry, I made him something first."

You sit down and let Eddie serve you a stack of pancakes. The ones on the very top are piping hot. You slather them in butter and maple syrup as he sits down next to you, a plate of his own in hand.

"How's your back?" he asks. He's being too soft with you.

"I saw a ghost, Eds, I'm not dying." You slice down the pancakes with the side of your fork, attempting to act unbothered. "Worst case scenario, I'm schizophrenic."

Eddie sits down in the chair next to yours. It's a small table but there's ample room. His proximity is a choice. "Worst case scenario, you're being targeted by an evil demon, but schizophrenia could also be really bad," he says. "S'why I'm worried."

"Eddie." You put down your fork, swallowing a half-chewed mouthful roughly. "Hey. If it's my head, I'll go to the doctor and I'll let them take care of it and everything will be fine." You have no way of knowing if what you're saying is true. Mental illness isn't easy. You're just saying what you think he needs to hear without outright lying. "I'll take the meds and you'll be there for me. But I'm fine. And you're being weird."

"You're trying to piss me off."

A little. Pissed is better than anxious. You'd rather give him something to glare at than a reason to twist himself into knots. "You're easily riled," you jest.

His eyebrows rise. He eats his pancakes and you your own, the wrinkled knees of your pyjamas rubbing against one another as he jigs his leg along to the song on the radio. The rain starts to worsen, fat droplets slapping the screen door like the thwack of a bullet. From your seat, you can see the sky dark with grey clouds, the sun a long forgotten foe. The humidity has been cut in half, which is to say bad but not unbearable. Last night, if you'd been awake to feel it, the rain would've been warm in your palm. Getting up to close the door now, you nudge the ajar screen wide with your foot, letting some of the rain lash your arms and face.

You sigh at the chilly coldness of each blessed drop.

"Heatwave from hell is finally over."

"Thank fuck for that. Let's hope it's miserably cold for weeks," Eddie says.

It's mid September —summer has said goodbye with one last fierce kiss. By October, you'll be wrapping yourselves up in throw blankets on the couch on the porch, or hiding inside with Wayne's special pasta (buttered noodles and green pesto for the 'brave') watching slashers on Eddie's blurry TV. The humidity will be nothing but a gross memory.

You wash your plates and Eddie lets you shower first. You have your own shampoo in the corner, and a rose scented body wash Eddie buys but doesn't use (but it isn't for you, idiot, why would he buy you something so expensive? He got it by mistake). You could draw the cracks in their shower tiles with your eyes closed, and the condensation that clings to the cold water pipe, that's how many times you've been in here. You finish quickly, dry quicker, and pull fresh clothes over your still-clammy skin.

You tap Eddie in. He's somehow even faster than you were, and you swap places in his room. While he's changing, you dry the bathroom walls with a towel as soon as he's out, knowing the small room has a propensity for dampness.

"Stop cleaning my fucking house," he says when you traipse back into his room, his head hanging upside down as he towel dries his curls.

You forgo your usual explanations and tell the truth. "I know you're perfectly capable. I like helping, that's all."

"I know. Ugh, you suck. Do you have any deodorant?"

You grin and pull your deodorant out of your bag, a new-ish stick of Teen Spirit. Eddie sees it and sighs, obviously unprepared to smell like Pink Crush for the rest of the day. "I have like, half an inch left of Caribbean Cool. Coconut?" you offer.

He goes with the coconut scent. The wall of privacy between you has eroded to a scrap of paper after so long living in each other's laps, but you feel guilty for looking at him, the shifting muscle beneath the skin of his arms and chest stealing your focus. If Eddie were to see you without your shirt, you doubt he'd find himself anywhere near as distracted. He'd look if you let him because that's the way he is, unaffected by simple intimacies, but when you tell him to face the door it doesn’t aggrieve him. Most of the time he’s already averted his eyes.

"Gotta add that to the list of shit we need. Have you seen my shoes?"

"Your white sneakers are in the hallway. One of your converse is under the bed, but it's hard to say about the other." You swallow a sudden lump. "Are we going shirtless?"

Eddie does not go shirtless. He pulls a shirt on that thankfully has sleeves, and then a zip up hoodie under his leather jacket. You didn't think to bring a coat yourself due to the extreme baking temperature of the day before. You're lucky you had clean clothes here, considering you hadn't intended to spend the night. Or, not lucky, loved. One of the Munson’s has washed what you’ve left behind.

You have a momentary lapse as Eddie puts his shoes on, trekking into the bathroom to look in the mirror. It's no secret that you aren't pretty. You can make a good effort, and you keep it classy, stay clean, but you aren't pretty, not by your own opinion.

Eddie knows everything about you (nearly). He knows you don't think much of yourself. And a younger version of him had comforted you as earnestly as an awkward teenage boy could manage, but these days he goes for the root of the problem. He still tells you that you're pretty occasionally, or rather, "Looking good, babe," but not today.

"Hey." Eddie looks you up and down. "What's wrong?"

"I look stupid." You glance at your legs. Why does everything look so weird on you?

He hooks his arm through yours and starts to drag you down the hallway to the front door, sideways like two crabs. "No."

"Yeah, I do, and people are gonna think I do, too."

"Who cares what other people think?" And there's grown-up Eddie's rhetoric, Who gives a fuck what other people think?

"Me," you say.

You understand exactly what it is he's trying to do: free you from the anxiety of overthinking. It doesn't work as often as you wish it would, but he gives it a good go.

"No, you don't. We don't care what other people think because it doesn't affect us." He doesn't make light, exactly, but his eyes are bright and his smile is sweet as he opens the front door and gestures for you to go down first. Rain and wind are quick to kiss at your naked arms.

"What if they all think I'm some sort of slob?"

"Then they'd be wrong. It's okay for people to be wrong about us. That's their problem." More familiar argument. It actually does make you feel better, despite hearing it a hundred times before. "People are wrong all the time."

Eddie follows you down the first step and turns away to lock the door.

"Like you and my ghost," you say, trying to steer the conversation from your moment of weakness and into happy territory again. "You don't think she's real."

"Baby, I'd love it if you proved me wrong with that one." He jogs down the rest of the steps, knowing it’ll give you a conniption, the wet metal a death trap waiting to happen. “Go! Get in the van!”

You scramble across the grass and the curved pathway to the drive where the van is parked and yank open the passenger door with all your strength. The handle is notorious for sticking shut. When nothing happens, Eddie curses up a storm as he clambers into the driver's seat and over the console to force it open, giving it a good old-fashioned kick from the inside. It flies into your waiting hands and you rush up the step into the front of the van away from the rain that’s growing heavier and heavier by the hour.

“Well, glad I didn’t waste time letting it dry,” Eddie says, wringing his hair out over his lap. It only drips two or three drops, but it’s funny all the same. The top of his head shines like a dark halo. “About the ghost. Do you really believe in them?”

“You asked me last night–”

“I know, but last night you said you wouldn’t believe in one unless you saw it, and then proceeded to talk about it like it was real.”

“I’m agnostic about ghosts.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asks. He sticks the key in the ignition and turns it until the engine groans to life. The van was old when he got it. Now it’s super old.

“No. What’s agnostic mean?” you ask.

“We’ll buy a dictionary.”

“I kind of believe in ghosts. I believe in my ghost. If I ever see one, I’ll believe in all the ghosts. Shit, I sound stupid.”

“No, you don’t– you don’t! It’s okay to not know, I wasn’t trying to interrogate you about your personal beliefs.” He is a very responsible driver these days. He keeps his eyes on the road. His hand, however, strays to your arm. “You’re not stupid, superstar.”

“Don’t,” you plead. Superstar is a nickname that stuck despite your vehement disagreement with its origin and further usage. “It makes you sound like an old dad and I’m the son who just got benched at little league. Again.”

You stand as much as your seatbelt will allow and dig out the purse from the butt pocket of your jeans. “I’ll get gas.”

“Way too personal for our relationship.”

Bad, overused joke.

Eddie doesn’t want you to pay for gas, the same way he doesn’t want you paying for takeout or birthday presents. He hates ‘handouts’ —it took you a while to convince him that gas money isn’t a handout, it’s you trying to keep things fair. You know how it feels to need the money and not want to ask for it, so you put him in a position where he never has to ask.

Things are easier now. You’re not in high school anymore. Work doesn’t pay as well as you want it to, but it’s enough to get by, especially while you’re living in your childhood home with only partial bills to pay. Eddie isn’t hurting for money either. That’s something to be grateful for.

Eddie pulls into the gas station. He won’t let you pump while the wind is whipping, but you sprint into the gas station and trawl the fridge for the biggest drinks, sticking two cans of iced tea under your arm. The cold immediately eats into your naked skin. You jog to the counter to pay.

“Pump two, please,” you say, putting your cans down.

“Twelve dollars.”

You frown. Eddie only put ten dollars on the pump. Well, deducting your two cans of iced tea at 99 cents each, ten dollars and two cents. What an asshole.

You hold out a twenty dollar bill with a smile, and look out the window as you wait for your change. The rain is too heavy to see him, but you imagine Eddie drumming the wheel of the van with both hands. You shiver out a thanks as your change hits your palm, dropping it into your purse with your best receipts. There’s one for bowling (a triple defeat, Eddie a secret master), one for two whole frozen cheesecakes you’d eaten in bed a month ago with double-sized dessert spoons, a couple for Hawk theatre; Back to the Future II, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II (‘89 was a great year for sequels). All your best memories printed on thermal paper.

“Holy shit I’m so cold,” you squeak, prying open the door without the aid of Eddie’s kick.

“You’re soaked, you fool. You want to go home first for a sweater?”

You close the door behind you and drop the iced tea into the console, grimacing at the great clang they make. Your seatbelt snaps into place around your soft middle, and without ceremony you’re back on the road for your original mission.

“No sweaters, Bradley’s. Stupid to double back.” You look at him from the corner of your eye. “I think we should get frozen pizza and extra toppings to put on them. And fries, obviously, and dessert.” The ghost won’t care. Probably.

“You forgot the side salad.”

“Forgot,” you say, laughing. “Why yes I did.”

“Dessert,” Eddie says, his turn now to make some decisions. “I want a slurpee real bad right now, so I’m thinking we buy a bag of ice for your food processor and get some syrup.”

“We could go get slurpees,” you say encouragingly. If that’s what he wants, why not?

“We have shit to do,” he says, smiling so much his dimples peek out. “Ghosts to convene with, notebooks to analyse. Feasts to prepare.” He looks deeply speculative. You assume he’s thinking about the maybe-ghost, but he says, “Why are we getting frozen pizza? They have those pre-packaged ones now that are basically fresh.”

“They taste the same.”

“Liar, the bottom of the frozen ones go soggy and the cheese burns on the crust. You know that I’m right, don’t give me dish.”

“Aren’t you always?”

Eddie has a horrible tendency to be right about things. Maybe that's why you hadn't told him about the ghost for so long, because you'd wanted to handle it yourself without his explanatory assurances. You’re the worrier and he’s the one who always sets it straight.

What if I make a fool of myself? you've asked him once.

I’ll make one of myself, too.

What if they fire me?

We’ll get you a new job with me cleaning up after idiots.

What if it never goes away?

It will.

What if body snatchers get us while we’re sleeping?

That one made him smile. The fondest upturn of a pretty mouth, not an expression you often see. Then they get us, he’d said, whispering across the pillows, face only partially visible in the struggling light of the TV. It’ll be awesome. Me and you. No brains, no worries. Just lettuce heads forever.

You watch him beating along to a song you aren’t privy to against the wheel. He hadn’t seemed to mind the idea of losing his mind with you back then. He doesn’t believe you now, but that’s because he hasn’t heard her voice. The whistling wind warping itself into coherent syllables. Reaching for you, a dark slice of sound.

Eddie… has… a secret…

You look at your lap, tamping down a shudder at the sensation of ice riding your spine.

Don’t we all?

—

Eddie feels you’ve been overly relaxed about the situation at hand. He doesn’t want to back you into a box and declare a health crisis, but he’s been thinking up possible illnesses while you weigh the pros and cons of pizza toppings in case he has to take you to see someone. He’s not sure how gas lines work but he’s sure a quick phone call to the Munson landline could clear it up for him. Perhaps the most effective test of all for carbon monoxide poisoning would be to subject himself to the same circumstances. He’ll spend a few days at home with you and see how he feels afterward. If push comes to shove he’ll light a match and see what catches.

On the inside, Eddie’s panicking about your mental health and, admittedly, the slim reality of a supernatural presence. On the outside, he’s playing along with your unconcerned dinner plans and aimless chatter. If you want to pretend that today is the same as any other day, he's prepared to let you. He won’t do the same, but he won’t discourage you, either.

You cut through one of the home aisles toward the front of the store with a heavy basket on your elbow, Eddie hot on your heels. He grabs a pocket dictionary from the display to his left and hurries to keep up with you.

You’re shivering. “I really didn’t think it would rain,” you say.

Eddie looks past the registers to the glass doors at the front of the store where rain pelts with a force bordering on stormy weather. If it gets much worse than this, he'll insist you both go back to Munson headquarters and hunker up to wait it out.

“The weather,” Eddie mumbles, unlike himself. “Are we expecting a storm? Maybe we should grab a cart and get some basics. Crate of water.”

“Okay, we can do that. Are you worried?”

“Kind of.”

He meets your eyes. He loves your eyes. He knows you don’t. You're not insecure in a way he feels he can fix —if he can fix any of it. It’s like you dissociate, for lack of a better word, from the things you can’t love. You don’t look in the mirror, won’t let him take photographs of you. You don’t say it. You call yourself stupid, weird, silly. Never ugly.

But he knows.

And now this whole ghost business. Eddie needs to think of something he can say to you that will inspire a better level of honesty going forward.

“How long have you been speaking to the ghost?” he asks.

You grin at a conveniently abandoned shopping cart at the end of the aisle and slide toward it on squealing shoes. You look around broadly for an owner, and when they don’t appear you place your basket in the stomach of it. The only thing remaining from whoever used it beforehand is a small tray of four cupcakes.

“Four. One for you, three for me,” you say, ignoring his question with a smug giggle.

Eddie loves you in a way not many people can love someone else, the kind of love that takes years of patience and acceptance and sweetness to take root, kind of love you only feel after seeing someone at their best, worst, and weirdest — memories come thick and fast whenever he thinks about the sheer years you’ve spent together, seeds of affection long germinated and rearing to grow. You, throwing up behind a Denny’s with sick in your hair, crying so hard you couldn’t catch your breath, and when you could, asking him if he wouldn’t mind buying you a new t-shirt to wear in the car as though you were some dastardly imposition, and not his sick best friend. You, on top of the world, surrounded by people who loved you with a birthday cake in front of you, eyes brighter than the blinking flames of each dripping candle. You, in pyjamas too tight, too loose, old or brand new with your hair up, down, washed, and greasy, your lips chapped, bruised then healed, parted against one of his pillows as you slept, as you yawned, as you laughed, talked. No matter what you’re wearing, saying or doing, you, in his bed, completely at home.

Eddie has a thousand images of you in his head and they all fight to play again, like a VHS on constant rewind, or a movie with duplicated film, double, triple exposed. Before even an inkling of a crush had ever come around, he loved you. That's why it doesn’t really matter that he can’t kiss you. He can’t imagine loving you more than this.

Sometimes, sometimes… you put your leg over his and your thigh spreads out across the top of his, and he has to beg himself not to want to touch you. He wonders if you’d mind. Eddie thinks about asking so often it turns into its own fantasy. He knows what cadence his voice would take, the exact grit and warmth, his hand waiting on your knee and aching to inch downward.

You pull him from his sickly introspection with a poke. Your fingernail dents his shirt precisely atop a small beauty mark. He doesn’t know if you know what you’re doing, if you’ve seen his naked chest enough times to realise that there’s a mole right there an inch shy of his belly button, if you’d ever looked at him in so much detail.

“Transmission incoming,” you say, your fingers flattening over his abdomen, your palm hovering apart. Like the pole of an opposite magnet, it refuses to connect. “Chirp. Houston, we’ve been attempting to connect with Astronaut Munson. He is unresponsive. Let us know when you make contact again.” You smile at him ruefully. “Damn moon keeps dropping signal.”

“Sorry… Astronaut Munson? Do they call astronauts astronauts? I thought it was commander.”

“I don’t know, Eddie, I haven’t brushed up on NASA related job titles lately.” Your deadpan wanes, replaced with a genuine concern. “Are you okay? You really did get lost.”

“I’m just thinking about, you know– Your ghost,” he lies. The ghost should be his highest concern, and for the most part it is, but he’d let his attention get pulled along by other things.

That’s the thing about love. It feels much more important in the moment than anything else, even when it shouldn’t.

“You’re super worried about the ghost.”

“It is an uber worrying ghost.”

“‘Cause she talks?” you ask.

“Well, yeah. Most of the time you just get, like, blurs on night vision cameras or the general malignant presence of the thing. Not words.” Not questions concerning your best friend.

“Casper talks and he’s gorgeous,” you say. “A true sweetheart.”

“Doesn’t Casper have to protect Lucy from his evil ghost uncles?”

“Who the fuck is Lucy?”

“The girl. Lucy and Johnny.”

“Bonnie?”

“Oh. That sounds right. But her name doesn’t matter,” Eddie insists. “My point was that the bad ghosts outweigh the good three to one. That’s more than half, you realise.”

“His name is Casper the Friendly Ghost,” you say, shrugging. Eddie hopes you know where it is in the store you’re going to. He hasn’t looked away from your face for the last twenty minutes. “It’s in the name.”

“But your ghost isn’t Casper,” Eddie says.

“No. My ghost isn’t Casper, but she hasn’t tried to kill me. She would have written something threatening in my notebook or knocked all the books off of my shelf if she were evil.”

Eddie frowns. You’ve steered him around the store like you’ve never been here before, changing your mind after turns to go down the opposite aisle, murmuring about bottled water. He reaches for your hand on the shopping cart rail and can’t resist squeezing it as he pulls it away.

“I got it,” he says.

He swears that your expression flickers. Worry breaking through the closed shutters of your blasé.

You’re not so chatty as you follow him toward the back of Bradley’s where they keep the big jugs of water. He grabs one, thinks back to the bad weather and grabs another. It’s unlikely that you’ll need them, but Eddie would rather be safe than sorry. “Do you have a lamp?” he asks. “An oil lamp? Or a flashlight?”

“I have a flashlight,” you confirm. “Is it really so bad? Uh, I don’t wanna ask again, but I– maybe I could–”

Eddie wants to pull your face into his chest. He thinks about it. Would he have hugged you like that a year ago, before the butterflies and the late nights daring to think of the dough of your thighs or the column of your throat when you tip your head back? He might’ve. It would mean something different, but he might’ve.

He throws an arm around your shoulder and gives you a good shake. “What is wrong with you? If it gets any worse, you’re staying with me. I’m only asking about a flashlight in case we have one of those worst case scenarios and get stuck in your haunted house. I refuse to die like the jocks in a b-rated horror.”

“The jocks or the whore? Isn’t it the girl who sleeps around that gets murdered in the dark?” you ask.

“Super unfair. I sleep around, do I deserve to die?” he asks, dropping his arm.

You mime stabbing him in the gut. Everyone's so violent.

Eddie is amazingly unharmed as he gets you to the register. You try to fight him on who’s paying, but you’re an idiot who insisted on getting gas. It’s the leverage he needs to win. Out of Bradley’s and back into the rain with grocery bags double bagged, you run for the van and thrust the spoils of your shopping trip in the passenger seat footwell. Eddie opens the side door to lug the water jugs inside and you take the cart back to the front of the store against his wishes.

He waits for you to be in arms reach and gets back in the van. You’re soaked to the bone. He’s cold in three layers, so you must be freezing. He shrugs off his sopping wet leather jacket and then the zip hoodie underneath, draping the zip hoodie over your lap and chest and then rushing to put his leather jacket on again.

“Thank you, good sir,” you laugh.

He’s already fiddling with the air conditioning. Heat bursts from the left vent but not the right, leaving you in a cold bubble. “Shit, I’m sorry, the right vent’s still busted. Ol’ Beauville keeps letting us down.”

“Don’t hate on the Beauville!” you scold through chattering teeth.

“You're dying,” he says. “Hold on, I’m gonna do ninety.”

“Do not speed!”

You get to the road outside of your place without any hydroplaning. You live on a regular American street in a two-story semi-detached house not too far from Hawkins High school with your guardian, who isn’t home very often. It has three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a lot of white walls. You often lament that the house doesn’t really feel like your own, and punctuate with a giddy laugh he doesn’t understand but adores nonetheless.

Eddie parks his van on the long gravel driveway as close to the house as he can get it and ushers you inside with your keys. You’re cold enough to listen without complaint.

He puts the groceries in the kitchen on the countertops and kicks off his shoes, intending on putting them away when he’s sure you aren’t in any danger of hypothermia. He kicks off his shoes by the door, locks it tight, and starts up the carpeted stairs to your room.

He’s not surprised to find you half-naked, but overfamiliar, affectionate friendship doesn’t necessarily mean you like being seen. He averts his gaze from your naked legs and tries desperately to think about anything but underwear. The more he tries not to think about them, the worse it gets.

“Hey,” he says, covering his eyes so you know he isn’t perving, “our horror flick just got dirty.”

“Yikes,” you say. “Don’t look.”

“I’m not, I’m not. You could’ve closed the door. You know, spare me a guilty conscience.” Then, because he just can’t help himself, “When did you start wearing fancy panties?”

“Fuck off, Eddie,” you laugh.

“Do I have to make the switch to tighty whities?”

“Our underwear choices do not concern one another.” You trek toward him. He peeks through two spread fingers and finds you thankfully reclothed in dry sweatpants and a sweater soft with age. “I thought tighty whities hurt your–” You raise your eyebrows.

He regrets being honest with you when you were teenagers. A little secrecy might help repaint him in your mind as less of a huge loser. You could possibly find him attractive if you weren't privy to the numerous embarrassments that make up his life, he thinks.

He chokes on his own tongue and dies right there in your bedroom. “Why do you remember shit like that?”

“Same reason you keep a heat pack in your room in case I get all crampy,” you say.

You give him one of your sick smiles —you have to know what you’re doing, you have to— and drape your arms over his shoulders, nearly knocking him down with the sudden addition of your weight. He, stunned, plants a foot behind himself so you don’t both trip and fall on your asses.

The plane of your back beckons beneath your sweater. What he’d give to slip a hand under the hem to explore the ridge of your shoulder blade with his fingertips.

A quiet ensues. Your hug turns from a joking attempt to push him around a bit to a real one. He steel-arms your waist, tightening them around you three times in quick succession, nose buried in your hair to steal a deep breath.

“This where the ghost talks to you?” he asks, looking over your head into the chaos of your room. It’s not dirty, but it isn’t tidy, either.

You sigh too much like a moan for his sanity and stand up tall, your hands trailing down his chest unthinkingly as you follow his gaze. “Yeah. I don’t know if we’ll hear her over the rain. It has to be really quiet.”

“What are you doing? Experiments?” he asks. He sounds as distracted by it all as he feels.

“No. Something I noticed, is all.”

“I don’t get why you didn’t tell me the first time it happened,” he confesses, voice dropping to a murmur.

“Um… remember senior year, you kept missing class because you had all those doctors appointments?” You smile sheepishly. “‘N’ you didn’t tell me about it until after you knew you were okay?”

During his first senior year, Eddie found a small cyst in his arm. Small compared to other cysts, large in his arm. He worried it was malicious, or rather Wayne worried and Eddie didn’t know what he thought about it until after they’d cut it out. It had been a thankfully speedy affair in a doctors office they couldn’t afford. Eddie didn’t tell you about it until he’d been all stitched up and tested — he tried, but then he would imagine the look on your face when he did, and it made him feel like his intestines had learned to jump rope.

He still remembers when he finally told you, the split second between, “a tumour,” and “but it’s not cancer.” The relief on your face. The shock of upset tears it caused.

“I guess I was trying to be good to you,” you say, shrugging and starting down the stairs.

Eddie follows. “If something like that happened again to me, god forbid,” —he dips into a melodramatic voice, scared of the sombre mood that’s descended— “I wouldn’t keep it to myself. I’d make it your problem instantly.”

Every now and then, Wayne will lean over the back of Eddie’s chair at the breakfast table and grab an arm, feeling for a tiny bump that hasn’t come back. You’d done the same in your own way: you wrote ‘check for lesions :D’ on a piece of paper and taped it to his bedroom doorway. It fell off ages ago, but he occasionally gets déjà vu as he leaves the room. And as he walks down the hallway, he’ll roll up his sleeve and check that there's nothing there.

Eddie didn’t tell you senior year. A lingering abandonment issue, maybe, ‘cause Dad didn’t stay when things got hard, who cares? He doesn’t think about that shit anymore. Figures the mark it left was enough. But these days, he’d tell you if he found a lump in his arm, or a ghost in his room. Your scribbled note made sure of that.

"Are you listening to me?" he asks.

"You'd make it my problem," you provide. "Tell me something I don't know."

He grabs you by the shoulders at the bottom of the stairs and blows into your ear.

With the lights on and the radio at a low volume, the rain outside doesn't seem nearly as imposing. The kitchen is small with a long strip light above that gives the room a near clinical white cast, the countertops shining clean, not a plate in the sink. It's evident how much time you don't spend here. No photos on the fridge, no salt or pepper shakers on the table. Where Eddie and Wayne have their insane mug collection made up of states and hours and way too much money in some cases, you have four black coffee mugs in a tower stack by the seldom used machine. Where they have a corkboard of photographs, Polaroids and printouts from Walmart off of rinky-dink digital cameras, you have one photo on the wall, a professionally done portrait of you from the day you graduated and Eddie, unfortunately, did not.

Eddie's grad pictures are much less robotic. Too much eyeliner but just enough you, he has his arm thrown over your shoulders in the back of a grungy restaurant, his smile blisteringly bright. He might as well have written 'Thank Fuck' across his forehead. There's another one of him and Hellfire Club at the time, blurry with the flash making him pale as snow. You and Wayne had been trying to make the camera focus, twin scowls on your faces. Eddie's expression was one of pure joy.

He tried to make up for your shitty grad pics by celebrating your first job with a pack of Polaroids. You'd looked adorably strange in the uniform, so young but so done with his shit, eighteen and exhausted. He keeps one in his room in the bottom of the box with all his rings and chains. If you ever found it, he'd think about drowning himself.

Your appointment with a ghost waits until after dinner. You pull your frozen pizzas out of their boxes and put them in the oven (you don't preheat, which Eddie thinks is a questionable choice, but he'd help you get away with murder). While they defrost and start to cook, you slice and dice your extra toppings on the wooden chopping board beside the stovetop. He stands there with his hands washed and nothing to do. Just watches you cut up jalapeños for him and thinks about how he's going to take care of you if the ghost doesn't speak up. Does he tell your guardian? You're an adult. All your healthcare would be private and confidential. Could he tell Wayne? Would that be a betrayal?

"Check the pizzas?" You scrape the seeds out of a jalapeño, eyes pinched in concentration.

Eddie doesn't know if he can eat. You aren't as out of it as you were at the store, but you aren't fully present. A song you love plays on the radio and it's like you don't hear it.

He pulls the pizzas from the oven. He makes a smiley face out of pepperoni and jalapeños, earning half as big a smile as he thought he would from you in response.

Together, you clean the small mess you made. The pizzas brown. When they're done you take them out, cut them up, plate them, and carry them up to your room on a tray with a two litre bottle of sprite and two plastic cups. Eddie changes into a pair of his pyjama pants that you keep at the bottom of your dresser before he sits on your bed, wide-eyed when he sees how many slices you've managed in his absence.

"Nobody's gonna take it away from you," he teases lightly.

"Can't be too careful 'round you," you say, dropping a crust onto his plate. It's his favourite part.

"Thought you wanted fries?"

"And I thought you wanted a side salad."

"I wanted snow cone syrup," he says, shrugging.

He considers offering to go make you some fries anyway, but he takes a big bite of pizza and it tastes so good he forgets about it. Eddie doesn't know nothing about nothing, but if he had a say, he'd make it so that he and you could spend the rest of your lives doing this, meaningless jabbering over greasy food. It's not a good idea —you need vegetables that aren't on pizza, and fresh grains, and who knows what else to stay healthy— but Eddie's never claimed he had them. He wants this.

He gets it most of the time, but he's selfish. He wants it every night. He loves Wayne but he wants to come home to you, or to have you come home to him, in a space that you decorated, a life that you made. He wants a dog and a pet fish and, in five years or ten or never, a baby if it's what you want too. A front door lined with three pairs of shoes.

He also wants a limousine that takes him from place to place and a room full of thousand dollar guitars. A man can dream.

The first port of call for any dream is making sure you're okay. Let the ghostly stakeout begin.

Sated and sick at once, Eddie puts your empty tray on the dresser and goes to turn on the TV. "She won't talk if the TV's on," you interrupt.

"Ugh. Any chance she likes the stereo?"

You slouch down where you'd been sitting and shake your head. Your jaw goes soft, eyes softer when you smile. "It's not all bad. She doesn't care how loud you turn a page."

Eddie can't be with you every second of the day, the same way you can't be with him. There are shifts to take, shifts to cover, dungeons to pilfer and dragons to slay. You have your job, your other friends (none as handsome as he is), your hobbies. How often are you home alone, talking to ghosts?

He stands by your bookshelf, eyes skipping over the titles in slight disinterest.

"Hey," he asks, "where's your notebook? I wanna see her handwriting."

"I left it on the top shelf."

Eddie stares. There are a few other notebooks and sketchbooks aligned here, but not the one you'd described.

"You sure?" he asks.

"I left it right there,” you say with a yawn.

Eddie looks at you from over his shoulder. You’re tired. He figures he can see the notebook later, and offer you some remedial comfort now. Anything to wipe the frown off of your face.

He grabs a book off of your shelf at random and cracks it open. You love being read to. You'd beg and beg him growing up, and he'd almost always oblige.

"Can I read aloud, or does she hate that too?" he asks, turning away from your shelf.

"I've never tried it."

"I'll do it quietly?"

"Sure," you say, a tired but pleased smile on your lips. "I've read that one before."

"Should I get a different one?"

"No, it's good. It's the one I told you about with the demons who eat stars."

"The dirty one?" he asks, dropping like a stone near the top of your bed, the blankets under his hip warm from the residual heat of the pizza plates.

"It's not dirty. There's one scene toward the end where they get handsy, no graphic detail."

"And by no graphic detail, you mean…"

"No graphic detail," you repeat. It's awful how funny you find each other.

"Not even, like… hand stuff?"

"Do you want there to be hand stuff?"

"With the demons?"

You devolve into giggles, the kind that start slow and thicken into a giddy sort of breathlessness, your head supported by the headboard. Eddie looks up at you in awe.

"I could be into that," Eddie furthers, stretching your laughter as long as it will go. "Are they the kind that look like people but with extra arms or wings or something?"

"You'd like that, huh? Extra arms?"

"I wouldn't be opposed to extra arms."

"Gross," you cheer through another wave of laughter. "I don't wanna think about it."

Eddie looks to the book's first page and tamps down a grimace. You don't wanna think about him in that sort of position.

Eddie, excluding any extra appendages, thinks of you like that more than he should. Never when you're near, not if he can help it, but at night when the hot shower water beating down against his back can be shaped into the vague sensation of a body behind him, he thinks of your chest. Your hands. Or in the early mornings, when he's writhed into a contortionist’s ball and the streaking sunlight through the curtains is kissing his abdomen, he imagines it's your leg thrown across his hip, with your face turned into his chest.

Fuck, it kills him, because he knows what the real thing feels like. He's had you clinging to his waist on colder nights, and he's been under your hands. Tipsy, free with your touches, he's felt the breadth of your palms cupping his cheeks.

You're pretty, you'd told him, as you love to tell him when you've been drinking, but you need a haircut.

He never would've let you kiss him in that state, but he kids himself into thinking you wanted to. It was only booze doing what booze does.

"Read to me, serf," you demand.

Eddie clears his throat.

"The enemy is close," Eddie reads, "and the lane is overrun. Sympathy for the second kind had felt natural to Mellissa once, but now that she sees the sharp angling of their shoulders in the dawn light, she aches with hatred…"

The novel isn't bad. It isn't Eddie's favourite; the tone falls flat, and the main character's actions aren't fed by any particular emotion. Its first arc is formulaic, and soon the hero's forced to answer the call. You evidently find his rehashing tedious, as your head tips toward his head, and you wriggle your way down to his shoulder amicably.

"Don't fall asleep," he says.

"It's your whispering."

"I don't want to disturb the ghost."

"Okay." You start to pick at your nails, little scratches against the cuticle. "I won't fall asleep."

—

Your snores aren't gentle. You're a human being and Eddie doesn't expect you to breathe like a princess, but the wheeze is concerning.

He waits for you to settle down, easing your head onto the pillow. Your airway clears, and your snoring quietens to the same ambient level as the rain hitting the window outside. He feels your head for a temperature carefully. Back of his hand, fingers curled in so his ring can't startle you, he tries to gauge if you're running a fever.

It isn't normal for you to cat nap in the middle of the day, but the sun is occluded by dark clouds and the rain blots out what's left, leaving the bedroom in darkness, and you'd been warm and fed and Eddie had been doing something monotonous. It makes sense that you'd drifted off. Eddie wishes he felt tired too, so he could slide down under the sheets with you and curl a hand around your wrist.

He lies on his back, arms crossed over his chest, straining his ears for the sound of a voice.

I swear, sometimes, I can hear someone talking.

You have a vent in your room, and perhaps a couple of late nights after your shifts had you mistaking a groaning foundation or the wind for a whisper. That's a thing, right? People hear something in the wind. Fatigue has your mind playing tricks on you. Eddie should go to the library and see if they have anything to do with sleep deprivation.

It's no fun listening for ghosts. Eddie's shoulders and upper back begin to feel tense. The feeling travels lower, a snaking ache that wraps around each vertebrae. Even his tailbone hurts.

He shifts onto his side and stares at your closed eyes. He blows a breath at you to watch your lashes flutter like tufts of grass in the breeze.

Your breaths are like a metronome. He syncs his to yours for kicks, just listening. When you're both asleep, does your breath sync on its own? How do your bodies react to each other? Eddie has woken up to your arms around him or your body halfway across the bed, leg falling out from under the covers. You're irregular, where he has a tendency to grab at you while he's knocked out. He doesn't wrap his arms around you so much as hold you in his hands. His fingers curl in the hem of your t-shirts or bracelet your bicep. If he falls asleep with an arm above your head, he'll occasionally wake to find his hand at the top of it, your hair mussed.

He must be stroking it in his sleep.

Or maybe you're frizzy.

No shame in frizziness. Eddie's frizzy more often than not. Curly hair is hard to take care of and he has a lot of it. God knows it was worse before he started seeing that hairdresser in the city who makes magic happen with her thinning shears.

Your lips part.

Thunder cracks outside.

Eddie lifts his head to look out of the window in surprise. Summer days have come to pass and sunset comes earlier in the day, fractals of light bouncing between the violent rain. In an hour or two, it will be pitch black outside.

He should call Wayne and see what's happening. How he is, and if he thinks Eddie should come home and bring you, too.

Eddie clambers off of the bed, careful not to wake you. He slides across your hardwood floor and takes the empty dinner tray with him down the spongy carpeting of your stairs, back to hardwood in the hallway, and finally onto the freezing cold linoleum of your kitchen.

He locates the source of chill quickly. The window in front of the sink has unlatched. It's the thing you call him over for most; when you want to hang out you go to Eddie's, when the window won't close Eddie comes here.

His shirt hikes as he leans against the sink, his abdomen pressed to the cold countertop as he yanks the window and twists the handle the wrong way, goosebumps climbing his arms. It groans in resistance, but Eddie knows from experience that it’ll stay closed for a while.

He takes the liberty of turning your thermostat up as he waits for Wayne to answer the phone, coiled cord pulled taut.

Wayne isn't too bothered by the weather, "It's not a hurricane. A storm, sure– you'll be fine. But by all means, come home if you're scared."

"I'm not scared, jerk, I'm concerned."

He winds the cord around his arm, leaning in when Wayne's voice is hard to hear like it'll make a difference.

"...might go out," Wayne's saying, "call me, or call around Roger's… get back to… warm."

"Where the fuck are you? I can't hear a thing you're saying."

"Don't cuss at me. I'm with Roger, that's why I said to call Roger if I don't answer, he has that new pool table…" Anything Wayne says after that is garbled, like he has a hand pressed over his mouth.

“I thought Roger had a broken leg?” Eddie says. “How’s he getting around?”

“He hops. I left money in the bread bin for you, did you see it?”

“No, I didn’t see it. Wayne, we’ve talked about this before, I’m working. I appreciate it, I do, but I don’t need you giving me money.”

Whatever Wayne says at first gets eaten by static. Eddie doesn’t know if it’s your phone or the Munson’s. He doesn’t need to hear what Wayne’s saying to get the general gist of it. “…water bill..”

This again? Eddie paid the water bill. He thought he’d be allowed to do that, considering he uses the majority of the water, but it’s been a great point of contention between them.

“I’m sorry!” he says. “If I knew it would bother you so bad I wouldn’t have done it. But I don’t want it back, I’m not a kid anymore, half the time you don’t let me pay for groceries–”

“This might shock you, son, but I’ve been paying for you to eat for a decade. I ever complained? No, ‘cause it’s my job, and I don’t want you thinking any…” the words scratch out. Eddie guesses what he’s saying.

The broken phone is starting to irritate him.

He holds in his argument. Call it respect, love, whatever you want. “I’m not saying that! Listen,” —Eddie laughs to himself, words wrought with it like bubbles— “you’re senile.”

“You weasel–” The phone gives up. Whooshing air is all Eddie hears.

"I can't deal with this. I love you, I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" Eddie asks, rubbing the space between his eyebrows.

"Yeah, love you too, kid. Eddie–"

He doesn't catch the end of Wayne's sentence. The line goes dead. He pulls the shiny receiver from his ear and frowns at it.

Wayne was probably just telling Roger and the guys what Eddie was up to. Or what he thinks Eddie's up to, at least. Eddie told him via note that you wanted help rearranging your bedroom furniture. A small lie, but he didn't want to expose you to any outward judgement until he's sure himself what's going on.

Eddie hangs the phone on the hook. He grabs your plates, throwing the meagre leftovers in the trash and dumping the plates in the sink. He turns on the hot faucet and grabs a sponge and the dish soap and gets to work cleaning. It takes him all of five minutes, and he's oh so smug about being a decent person that he doesn't notice the chill.

He dries the plates and puts them in the cabinet across the room with his back to the sink. The dishes clatter together loudly, like a gunshot in the silence. He winces internally and tries to be gentler closing the cabinet door.

The hum of the kitchen light catches his attention. He looks up, unsurprised to find a bug crawling inside of the plastic covering that shields the long bulb. A moth, Eddie thinks, it's fuzz silhouetted in shadow. He doesn't really like moths, but he also doesn't wanna watch one die.

The rain seems worse when he turns off the light. Your kitchen faces out into the backyard, and through the night Eddie can see the house that's behind yours with its porch lights on. It turns the rain to quicksilver, and provides just enough illumination for Eddie to look up at the kitchen light and know what he's doing.

He drags a chair to the middle of the room and steps onto it. It's disturbingly slippery. Thankfully, Eddie doesn't plan on doing any acrobatics. He reaches up to the warm plastic light covering and feels along for the ridges to pry it off. One ridge clicks off, and another. He leans precariously toward the other side and feels for the third and forth ridge when thunder rumbles outside, and somewhere in the distance lightning flashes.

Eddie flinches but doesn't fall. "Fuck," he mumbles. Pussy.

The plastic falls into his hands and Eddie climbs off of the chair as quickly as he can. It's too hot to handle, banging against the kitchen table as he chucks it down. He'd turned off the light thinking the plastic would cool down fast, and he’d been proven very wrong.

"Shit," he mumbles some more. Your neighbour's porch light turns off, leaving him in total darkness.

Eddie’s hand aches from his mild burn. It's like whenever he has to wash the frying pan at home, he forgets that while cold water might cool the pan itself, the slim piece of metal that connects the dish to the handle stays hot. He's burned himself so many times on that fucker–

Lightning flashes again.

There's someone standing in your yard.

The second he notices the figure, it lunges left.

Eddie stands frozen on the spot, unsure if he should approach the window to get a better look, or if he should move backward and away from the potential harm.

He takes a step forward. Mind in a numb state of thoughtlessness, he walks to your sink and stands there silently, looking into the grass and trees for any hint of irregular movement.

Tree branches rail in the wind and rain. Eddie leans further forward.

A third flash of lighting comes, and it must have struck close by, as the light it gives off is long and bright. He gets a clear look at the yard and the image of his own reflection in the glass. No dark figure in the tall grass toward the fence, no heinous murderer trying the back door.

It’s dark again. Eddie puts a hand over the racing pulse of his heart. Fuck, he thinks. I’m seeing things. He’s on edge ‘cause of your fucking ghost, and it’s not your fault but he wonders if maybe loving you is making him tired. He regrets it as soon as he thinks it, what does that even mean? He’s loved you for years. It has never felt like a chore. But… tired. He’s tired. Pining for someone you already have, just not in the way that you want, is exhausting. It’s not your fault and it doesn’t change the fact that he’s exhausted. Today has been a long day.

He scrubs his eyes with his palms until they burn and lifts his head.

There’s a girl on the other side of the glass.

Eddie startles, startles again when he realises she’s not on the other side at all, she’s behind him, outfitted in white like an apparition, like an angel. She’s inside the house, ten feet away in the doorway.

His neck cracks with the force of his turn.

“Sorry,” you say, taking a step back into the hall. “I thought you heard me.”

“Oh, shit.”

You’ve turned the light on in the hall. Eddie turns back to the window and sees your reflection again, no angels and no apparitions. You’re just a girl.

He half turns and gets stuck like that, hand braced against his eyes, torso pitching forward. “Shit,” he mutters.

“Are you okay?”

Eddie laughs. “You surprised me. I’m fine,” he assures you, though he takes his time standing at full height. How can such a small scare feel like a marathon? “Creep, who fucking does that?”

“You were totally spaced, dude, don’t blame me,” you say, holding your hands up in mock surrender.

“I do blame you. I hope you feel blamed. Fucking fuck, that got me.”

“I wasn’t being quiet. I yelled. You didn’t hear me?”

He can’t stop the dubiety that warps his face. “No? What’s your definition of yelling? ‘Eddie?’” he imitates you, tossing his own name into the dark kitchen. “Unbelievable.”

“What were you looking at?” you ask, nodding at the window.

“Lightning.”

“That why you’re in the dark? Or have I interrupted something?”

“‘M moonlighting as a serial killer.” He grins at you. “Got me.”

You lean against the wall next to the light switch and turn it on, exposing the chair shy of his leg and the plastic cover from your light on the table.

“What the–”

“I’m doing a good deed. Or, I was. There was a moth at one point."

You help Eddie clip the light back into place. He climbs back on the chair and you hug his legs to make sure he doesn’t fall either way, arms encircling his thighs and your face pressed comfortably to his stomach. Your cheek flush with the naked stretch of his stomach, his shirt hiked up as he struggles to finish what he started, he explains the moth, who, for lack of an escape, has probably found a home in your curtains or your coat rack. You laugh at his softness.

Back upstairs, you won’t let him read to you again, and the ghost monitoring continues on. Eventually, you both get bored and turn on the TV. Eddie forgets his fright, you forget your haunted house, and the night ends. You fall asleep against his shoulder, drool leaking from the corner of your mouth. He pushes you gently down into your pillow, and goes to brush his teeth with a snort.

Eddie wakes in the morning with a crick in his neck. He feels better, having slept. All his monstrous yearning has fizzled out overnight, and he’s glad to find that the damp circle of dribble under your cheek isn’t cute, it’s gross. (Okay, it’s a little cute. He’s only human.)

The window brags an end to the extreme weather. Rain nor shine reaches through your drapes; the morning looks mundane. He kicks your shin ‘by accident’ and waits for you to rouse, keeping a safe distance. He doesn’t wanna get his morning breath all over you. That would be inhumane.

“Ouch,” you croak.

“It wasn’t that hard.” His voice is as rough as yours.

“Not your kick,” you moan. “My throat.”

“You’ve been drooling again.”

You cover your face sluggishly and your pinky must feel the wet spot staining your pillow.

“It’s embarrassing.” You dig your heels in at the bottom of the bed and pull your head off of the pillow so you can grab it and throw it out of view. Once it’s bashed against your mirror with a concerning glass sound, you pull the blankets over your face and sigh. “I’ll be here forever, if you need me.”

“Could be worse,” he says lightly. “Imagine waking up with a stiffy.”

“Did you–?” you ask, like you’re terrified to know but couldn’t not inquire.

“No, but I have. You know I have.”

“True. That is… unfortunately awkward.”

“‘Xactly. Don’t feel weird about your spit.”

You don’t feel as bad as you pretend. Sure, it’s embarrassing. So is puking in your lap at the movies, or ripping your pants climbing over the fence into the woods by Forest Hills, or getting fired after two weeks from the Palace Arcade because the manager didn’t like your ‘general demeanour and/or presence’, all of which he’s done and you’ve been a witness to. He thinks you might be impervious to humiliation as long as you’re together.

Eddie pulls the blankets over his head, pleased that the morning light reaches you even here. You’re curled on your side underneath them, bleary eyes meeting his from across the small stretch of mattress. You hadn’t touched him once while you slept.

“I don’t remember falling asleep,” you say quietly.

“We watched Poltergeist. You fell asleep with twenty minutes left.”

“Can you blame me? Snore.”

“You wanted to watch it.”

“It’s the only movie I own that has a ghost.”

You share a silent look. Eddie tries to keep a straight face and ultimately fails, his laugh roaring. You join in, half reluctant and half delirious in your fatigue. Your sleep-swollen eyes close like you can’t keep them open anymore.

He stays under the sheets stealing looks at you for as long as he can, despite the building, smothering warmth. The day passes with much of the same.

—

When you first started working at Leaven, Eddie called you a traitor. He said you’d made it impossible for him to show his face in Bradley’s. He’d been joking — the prices at Leaven are ridiculous, and completely out of the average joe’s budget. Bradley’s remains your go to for everything. He’s come around these days — he likes the fancy soups and admits Leaven’s has the best fresh fruit.

Despite the rich old women who frequent and make your workdays… less than ideal, you like working at Leaven. Your days consist almost exclusively of stacking shelves, but occasionally they chuck you on checkout and you get to sit in a padded chair for ten hours. You’re basically living the American dream.

Working here has introduced a special brand of monotony to your life. It’s very, very quiet, and that’s how you like it. But there’s something to be said for noise, for Eddie and Wayne’s noise specifically. You like going there after work to shock your body back into the real world. Here’s sound. Here’s life. Here’s love.

You’re scanning a bag of ‘holistic’ lemons when you notice Eddie lingering toward the front of the store a mere twenty feet away. You don’t wave at him, lest your customer think they aren’t the sparkling apple of your eye and report you to the manager, but you nod jerkily, hoping he takes it for ‘I see you’. He smiles and points his thumb toward the store’s cafe.

When your arms are numb from another twenty minutes of scanning and typing in coupon codes for people who don’t need coupons, you shut down your register and lock it all tight. You take your lunch break early, and thankfully there’s nobody in the cafe to yell at you for being unprofessional.

You waltz over to Eddie sitting at the back next to the huge glass windows and prop your lunch bag against the coke bottle he’s opened. “Hello, handsome,” you say.

“Hey, beautiful.”

“You want half of a turkey sandwich?”

He beams at you, kicking your chair out so you can sit. “Nooo, I brought you a hot dog.”

“Oh, gross. Give it to me right now.”

You know he made it at home before he’s even pulled the foil wrapped package from his bag. Eddie makes the best hot dogs ever. Fancy brioche buns, caramelised onions and a mixture of sauces on the world's worst meat. They make you queasy and they might be one of your favourite foods. You open it, delighting in its retained heat.

His wrist is shiny. You put your hotdog down to grab his arm and bring it closer to your face. He’s wearing a simple tennis chain with black gems like a rich girl. “What is this?” you murmur, pleased to see him wearing something nice.

“You like that? It was thirty four dollars from a magazine.”

“I love it. What’s the occasion?”

“My mom’s birthday.” He fishes his own hotdog from his bag and slaps it down in front of yours. You take a huge bite, and can’t answer him when he asks, “Is that really weird, buying myself something when it’s a day about her?”

You steal a swig of his coke and wince the entire time. “Sorry.” You cough. “No, that’s not weird, Eddie. Wanting to buy yourself something nice is a good way of dealing with a shitty day. A day that makes you feel shitty,” you amend.

“Maybe I should’ve got her a big bouquet of flowers or something.”

“You can still get her flowers.”

“Yeah.”

You take another bite of your hot dog and slip away to get a bottle of water from the cafe. You feel like an asshole for not hugging him. When you return Eddie’s already polished off his hot dog, and has moved onto one half of your turkey sandwich.

“Are you gonna be weird about it if I hug you?” you ask him genuinely.

“No.” He puts down the sandwich. “I don’t know. Maybe. I want one, though.”

You wipe your hands in a napkin showfully before approaching his chair. You slide a knee next to his thigh and wrap your arms around his head, a hand between his shoulder blades and the other pulling his face to your chest. You have to slouch. It's not entirely comfortable but it doesn't feel awkward, so you take the win.

"I'm sorry, Eddie," you say quietly. You think about kissing his head.

"Me too."

There's a moment in there where you feel a nasty emotion brewing, sadness and much worse. You know that the gutted pain aching through you right now is nothing compared to what Eddie feels. That loss.

It must feel so, so heavy.

You pet his neck affectionately. Your nose dips into his hair, the tip touching his scalp. Your hands come up, like trying to hold water as it trickles between your fingers, Eddie's slipping. You grapple to keep him with you.

"I love you," you say honestly. He's your best friend.

Eddie pats your back. "I love you too, loser."

"You're my best friend."

I would fucking think so, he'd say.

"You're mine," he says.

You smile and give him a good squeeze. When you pull away he doesn't look as odd as he had, relaxing against the hard-backed wood of the cafe chair as he tucks his hair behind his ear. He holds your gaze without any weight to it. You sit in your own uncomfortable chair and lean forward to compensate for the space between you, like two slanting trees in the wind, parallel but untouching.

"It's a really nice bracelet," you say.

"She'd like it, I think."

You don't know anything about Eddie's mom. She isn't someone he's ever been able to talk about with you. You can't remember the photographs you'd seen once upon a time, but you remember having the distinct thought that Eddie looked more like her than his dad or his uncle Wayne. She'd been beautiful, and her life couldn't be more starkly mourned.

"I'm sure she would. It's pretty."

His mouth wobbles. You're horrified for a moment, thinking he might burst into tears, but it's laughter he's chasing, and his little giggle is like a beam of sunlight. "Sorry," he says. Laughter doesn't seem like a good enough word to describe the sounds he's making, such understated, small curls of sound. Fleeting, golden. "She would've liked you, too. She would've loved you."

"That's a good thing?" you check, cautious that he might be on the precipice of a nervous breakdown.

"Yeah, that's a good thing. Is it ever bad? To be loved?" he asks.

He's teasing, but it feels like he's asking you something else.

"You could be a stalker, with that logic."

And there you go, ruining a moment with a shitty joke because you're too much of a coward to ask questions when you don't know the answer.

Eddie grabs his coke, tipping his head back as he says, "Who says I'm not a stalker already?"

Funny how the subtext of a conversation can contain magnitudes for one party and not the other. You worry you're in love with your best friend. He sips at coke and threatens perversion.

"You're definitely a stalker. You couldn't wait a couple hours to see me tonight?"

"I didn't realise I would be seeing you tonight," Eddie says, lifting his brows.

"Oh. I asked, didn't I?"

Eddie shakes his head. "Are you sure? I don't remember you asking, babe, I'm supposed to go play at Gareth's."

Babe is his funniest pet name, in your opinion. It doesn't suit you, or him, but it feels good anyhow. Like you're a babe, supermodel pretty for TV or magazine spreads, long legs and not a single wrinkle that isn't marring the paper itself.

"Bummer for me," you say lightly. "What are you doing, Dio tributes again?"

"Don't say tributes like that, like we're out sacrificing goats in studded jackets."

"That's a good image." You laugh. "That's funny."

"I don't know. He wanted to try something he wrote. Invited Jeff and Jamison. Band's back together."

"I'll get out my t-shirts."

You have all the corny classics; I'm with the band; I'm with the guitarist; a Corroded Coffin faux tour shirt, different Hawkins locations written in typeset sharpie on the back. When you made it, Eddie had been wearing the t-shirt and the ink leaked through. He had 'Lover's Lake, Nov 18' between his shoulder blades and 'The Hideout, May 22' over his tailbone for a week. By day three the words had become illegible but you'd known them anyway, in the same way you knew the dots between the letters H and I were freckles rather than ink spots. You've always looked at him more than you should.

"I could cancel."

You and Eddie experience the natural ups and downs of friendship, or rather the ebb and flow. You know you come back together eventually if you get too far apart, and there hasn't been a time since you met him where you were worried about the permanence of your relationship. You're human, and you get insecure about it anyway, but then he says stuff like that and you're confronted with how close you are. He puts you first. He has other friends, other healthy friendships and a life outside of you, but you still get to be a huge and important part of the majority, and that is more than enough. (It should be more than enough. Some days it is.)

"Now why would you do a thing like that?" you ask, sarcastic but soft. "You know they sound shit without you."

"I don't like knowing you're alone."

"I'm not lonely," you say. Truth or lie.

"That's not what I said." Eddie's eyes narrow.

"It's stupid to worry about me, I always lock the doors. I lock the windows, even the ones upstairs. I don't think I'm gonna fall victim to a home invasion anytime soon."

"I don't think many people think they're gonna be in home invasions until their homes actually get invaded. And it's not really what I'm worried about."

"Do you ever think that we worry too much?"

"Yes. We worry constantly. It's, like, our parasitic relationship with each other."

"Like a tapeworm," you agree solemnly.

"Exactly. I'm your tapeworm. And I'm worried about you."

"Can tapeworms worry?" you ask.

Eddie kicks you mildly. "I don't know? I don't think tapeworms have a level of consciousness beyond what's needed for them to survive. They probably think about eating and parasitizing and that's it. Don't make me ask, please."

You take a pull of your drink to prolong the inevitable. "Ask about what?"

"Your ghost."

"Ah."

Eddie waits.

You sigh again. "Look, I don't even know if she is a ghost, I probably just imagined it."

He pulls himself forward and there's the weight you'd be waiting for, sternness marked into his face one feature at a time. "Liar."

"What?"

"You're lying. You don't think you imagined it." He looks you up and down. “You think I don't know when you're lying?"

"I'm not lying," you lie.

"You are. I know you are," he says, smiling despite the point he's making. "I know what you look like when you do."

"What do I look like?"

"I can't tell you, you might change it, and then I won't know when I'm supposed to look out for you 'cause you never tell me anything."

"I don't want to talk about the ghost."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't believe me," you say too loudly.

Eddie reaches across the table but doesn't touch your hand. He puts his palm down and leans ever forward, says, "Hey, I do."

"No, you don't, you think there's something happening to me."

"What would you think, if it were me?" he asks, frustration seeping in. "Try and see it from how I'm seeing it."

"If it were you'd I'd believe you because you needed me to."

You cringe at yourself and veer back into your chair, shoving your hands between your thighs and clamping your legs closed. Your fingers turn numb.

Eddie doesn't look shocked, exactly. Surprised that you're talking to him unkindly, sure, and concerned.

This whole situation is ill-fated, you know that. What good can come of a ghost? Hooks from the past. "I never should have told you," you say quietly.

"Did you tell me?" Eddie asks, speaking with an anger that forms each word like a cut, clean and hurting. "You won't tell me anything. You tell me she talks to you, that she asks you about me. But you won't say what she says, exactly, and you have nothing to show for it. Your notebook conveniently disappeared. I can’t hear her."

He thinks you're making it up.

Fuck. He thinks you're making it up. Eddie thinks you're lying to him, and while it hurts like a sharp kick to the solar plexus, a flooring, winding pain, it's the embarrassment that has tears glowing along your last line. If he really believes you'd make something up like this for attention, what does he think of you? That you're some silly leech clinging to him through bad lies? That you're bored? That this is a game you're playing with him?

Your heart beats hard enough that you can feel it in your chest. Your hands shake with anger and hurt at once, your leg bouncing under the table in an attempt to keep the rush of it at bay. You look at Eddie with your lips parted, trying to say what you mean and not what you feel. You want to say something scathing, and you don't want to be cruel, and these are two facts existing at the same time.

Eddie has other ideas. He sees your eyes turn glassy, he must, because his anger drains and he turns sorry and soft. It reminds you of a different moment like a film cell played overtop, of a younger, remorseful him. The expression he makes when he's just popped you in the mouth wrestling, or burned behind your ear with the hair iron. An accident.

"I'm sorry," he says. Sheepish, gentle, sincere, embarrassed, too many threads of emotion to summarise with one word. "Sweetheart, I'm sorry. Don't cry."

"Fuck off," you mumble, looking down at your bouncing leg. You push your hand against it, forcing it to lay still.

"I didn't mean it."

"Stop, Eddie."

"I'm just hurt you're not telling me everything and I'm acting like an asshole 'cause I'm a big baby," he says, two shades from frantic.

A tear rolls down your cheek. You thought for sure you'd escaped them, but it had already welled, and with nowhere to go it races down your cheek. You paw at it and hope he won't see it.

He does.

Eddie's chair screeches across the floor as he stands up. You know he'll hug you before he's touched you. Same way you know he's freaking out on the inside, allergic to girl tears.

His hands take to your shoulders, hesitating there, and one slides behind your neck so his forearm presses against both shoulder blades. His lips ghost warmly over your forehead as he leans in. His other hand meanders, braceleting the top of your arm and running downward before swiftly changing paths to flatten out against the small of your back.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles, rubbing your back.

His tender hug exacerbates the hurt, like an exsanguination. You cry as quietly as you can manage and Eddie feels it under his hands, the two of you condensed at the back of an empty room. You forget where you are, what you're wearing, what you've been fighting about. What he said. You realise how badly you'd needed him to comfort you lately, and hate yourself for giving in.

He shushes you so quietly you think you might have imagined it.

Or maybe it was your ghost.

"I'm sorry," he says, his breath kissing your scalp. "I'm a dick."

"It's fine," you say. You despise yourself for how weak you sound.

"It's not fine."

"I wanted to stay because it's getting worse," you tell him. You don't mean to.

"Okay. Okay. Then you'll stay. It's no biggie."

"It's worse," you say, turning your face into his chest.

You're shaking hard. Eddie can't make it stop no matter how tightly he holds you.

"I'm sorry," he says again.

He doesn't have to be. If he was acting out, fine. If he does or doesn't believe you, fine. You don't need him to see ghosts, or apologise that he can't.

"I just didn't want to do it by myself," you confess, at the very pit of pathetic. You hope he won't hear. Your growing panic about the ghost is a secret you hadn’t meant to tell.

Eddie pulls away. He looks down at you, and if he wanted to he could kiss you, his lips are that close, but he widens the distance. He takes your face into his hands, calluses rough against your tacky cheeks.

"You think I'm gonna let you? I know I'm fucking it up royally right now, I know I'm an asshole, but I'm not fucking going anywhere, okay? Don't worry. Don't worry about it." He drops his hands to your shoulders. "I'm your parasite, right? Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a parasite? Sometimes they have to pull them out, and they're excruciatingly long, it's a process you don't wanna go through–"

You laugh wetly. Eddie promptly stops talking about parasites.

"Forgive me?" he asks.

You nod on automatic. Of course you do.

"I swear she's real," you say, rubbing your forehead with the meat of your thumb. You think she’s real, but the truth is that you just don’t know. You amend quickly, "I swear I'm not lying. I am hearing someone… even if she's not real."

Eddie frowns. "I know. I believe you."

That's when the real trouble begins.

—

Eddie wants to hold your hand desperately. You're wearing your nicest dress, split hem sewn with infinite care, and your dress shoes with the tiny heels. He doesn't get to see you like this very often, and he wishes it were a better occasion.

You've had your hair down at the hair stylists in the city, you're wearing concealer. You've done everything you can to look presentable. You look beautiful. He hopes you know that, at least.

You heave a sigh. You're as anxious as Eddie is to get this over with.

“You remember Hawk?” he asks you.

“Jack 'Hawk'?” you ask.

“Yeah, Hawk.”

“He’d come around for green?” you ask.

“Yeah, that’s the one. Alright. So, when you were on vacation last summer, Hawk knocked on the door, I answered. I’m straight, right? Haven’t sold anything in years, no plans on selling again. But Jack barrels up the steps and starts going on like I promised him something. I said, dude, I don't deal anymore, and could you possibly shut the fuck up? Wayne’s inside making milkshakes. Blender on, couldn’t hear us but I’m sweating bullets.

“Jack, fucker, starts begging.” Eddie leans into your shoulder, hushed. “He’s saying c’mon Munson, I know you got some, don’t you have a personal stash? I’m desperate.” He picks a piece of hair off of your sleeve. “I didn’t, obviously, and I told him that but he’s not listening to me, he’s getting all wild-eyed and fucking wound like he needs the hard shit. I’m just trying to get rid of him at that point, I don’t know if he was tweaking but he looked like he was going to hit me and I wasn’t interested in fighting.” He laughs, encouraging a smile from you. “Wayne’s inside making milkshakes. Full fat with vanilla extract– I’m not about to take a trip to Hawkins General.”

“What did you do?” you ask.

“I said to him, even if I did you wouldn’t be getting anything, asshole, and pushed him toward the steps, you know? It felt good, standing up for myself.”

“And he left?”

“No, he fucking hit me straight in the dick. Can you imagine that? Junk shot on my own front door.”

You gasp with giggly indignation, hanging on his every word now. Eddie knows he’s taken you out of your head, even if it’s temporary.

“He hit you in the dick,” —you whisper ‘dick’ like it’s insidious within these four walls— “‘cause he wanted pot? You should’ve pushed him off of the porch.”

“I would’ve but he fucking winded me.” He starts laughing again, your giggles contagious though you try to smother them with your hand. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“He was five foot one. I’ve never felt that humble in my life, I told Wayne I was coming down with something and had the worst afternoon nap ever. Didn’t even get my milkshake.”

“No,” you mumble sympathetically. Your eyes widen. “Eds, I’m sorry, that’s not funny. He assaulted you–”

Eddie waves his hand at you. “He got in a cheap shot. I was fine. I’ll still have kids.”

You snort, “Thanks for the information.”

“I got him back for it, anyway.”

He pretends like that’s the end of that, like the story doesn’t go on and he has nothing to tell you. You wait raptly for him to explain but he gloats, knowing you're hooked.

You elbow him.

“What?” he asks. “Oh, you wanna know how I got revenge? You’re evil.”

“Less shame and more story,” you say.

“Alright. Are you ready? Here’s where it gets complicated.

“I’m at The Hideout listening to that new band that blazed through here a couple of months ago, Board Growth, or something? They’re incredible, the booze is cold, I’m tipsy and Gareth owes me anyway, I’m putting it all on his tab and he, seemingly, isn’t noticing. It’s great. Better if you hadn’t been on vacation again, what the fuck, but it’s good.

“And there he is. It’s the fucking Hawk. He’s looking down his nose at these young girls smooth-talking them. Or, he’s trying to smooth talk them, but it’s like watching a worm flirt with a praying mantis, okay, we all know who’s gonna lose.” Eddie’s knee rests against yours, your hand is on his thigh, he’s losing the thread of his story fast under the smell of your perfume and hair oil. “I knock back the rest of my drink, slick my hair like I’m James Dean and, in all my drunken intelligence, decide that this is the perfect moment for me to get him back.”

“I wasn’t on vacation.”

“What?”

“I only went once.” You’d gone for two days with some old friends. He remembers now, and rushes to fix the story.

“Why didn’t you come, then?” he asks, flipping the script. “You’re such a flake.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know when this was.”

“Stop bailing on me and ruining my stories,” he says, teasing.

“Okay, you’re hopped up on liquid courage and about to hit Jack in the dick,” you prompt.

“Right! I stroll up to Hawk and he’s instantly wriggly like the worm of a guy he is, and I say, hey Hawk, how’s it hanging?

“Maybe he’s just that stupid or maybe he thinks I’m putting out the olive branch but he actually starts telling me how he’s doing, and I’m looking at these girls as if to say, can you believe this guy? I cut him off, and I’m a loser, I’m not half as cool as I think I am but again I’m slightly incredibly inebriated. I’m making bad decisions.”

“Where’s your cafeteria bravado?” you ask.

“It’s worse than that. Imagine me at my most insufferable. I smile at the girls and I lean into Jack’s space, I’m laughing, I feel bad about what I’m gonna say before I’ve said it but I say it anyways. I lean right into his ear and tell him at full volume how sorry I was to hear about his recent bout of syphilis. I’m just so glad they caught it in time, man,” he says, imitating a past self.

You open your mouth. “And,’ Eddie says, jumping to finish, “so happy you could keep most of it, buddy.”

“Eddie…”

“I’m a bad person.”

“No,” you mumble, hiding your smile on his shoulder, your forehead a hair’s width from his chin. You’d laugh a storm any other day to make him feel good, whether you think he’s funny or not, but today all you can manage is a hand on his leg. “You’re not a bad person, he deserved it… fucking hit you…”

The story isn’t true.

He made it up. Right here right now. He just spent five good minutes of your lives spinning an outrageously awful story with poor jokes and one glaring plot hole, for what?

This is hard. Making you cry, begging you to see what a doctor has to say, playing grown up in a grown ups body. Eddie thought you’d get to be kids forever. He never imagined what would come after school, and then suddenly it is after, and everything’s an ugly boring mess except for you (and Wayne, god bless), and now you’re sick. The waiting room you’re in, the road here, the look on your face when he told you what he wanted from you. It’s all… heartbreakingly monotonous.

One doctor's appointment, he whispered across pillows. Late and neither of you asleep. The sound of cicadas outside and Wayne’s deep snore a room away.

You nodded and closed your eyes, and you didn’t say another word all night.

What’s the worth in a made up story? What good will it do? You have to see the doctor eventually. Distraction, Eddie thinks pleadingly. Relief. He just wants to give you as much relief as he can from what’s happening with the only thing he feels he has —his quick mouth.

He stares at your hand on his thigh. He wills himself to raise his own and put it on top of yours. He channels his thoughts, like this is telekinesis and not his own body, move. Move your hand, he says to himself.

It's a millimetre out of his pocket when they call your name.

You shoot up like a stalk and smile at the nurse who's come to collect you. You don't look jittery anymore, but there's a distinct doe in the headlights look about you as Eddie watches you trail down the hallway into the doctor's office. You look back at him three times, and each time is a whip.

As soon as the door closes, he bends forward in his chair and heaves a sickly sigh. His nausea has him coughing into his hand and praying he doesn't throw up here. If they want you to go somewhere today, like a pharmacy for temporary medication, or the emergency room for a CAT scan, he can't be covered in his own vomit.

A child babbles across the room. Eddie peeks at her through his fingers. She's pale with dark hair, much like Eddie himself, and her mom is the same. The kid's mom doesn't look like Eddie's mom besides that, but seeing her here in a hospital makes it impossible not to think of her. She's been on his mind so much lately. Her birthday is at the end of the month, and it isn't the same —she'd been in hospital for three brutally short days— but you're being here is like peeling the scab off of a wound he thought healed years ago.

Mom was everything. She was willowy and beautiful and tough as a board. She was smart, she knew everything; how to make microwave pizza taste gourmet, how to make whistles out of blades of grass, how to make a bad day feel brand new.

He wished he could say that he has her every detail committed. The cruellest, most terrifying thing about the people we love is that they aren't permanent, not their life and not what they leave behind. Over time, his mom has turned from an aching spear of love to a dappling of sunlight through the branches of an old tree — scattered. Beautiful and impossible and a thousand pieces in his memory, slowly fading over time.

There'll come a day where Eddie can't remember her. He knows that. He knows his frame of reference for who she was will reduce down to her photographs, and the nearly empty bottle of her perfume under his bed.

Eddie is haunted by her absence everyday.

There is no corporeal apparition of her at his shoulder, no cool chill running down his spine, but he's haunted all the same. It's why he won't accept your ghost. It's why he can't. He knows what it feels like to have someone with him who isn't really here, and he won't let you suffer through the same thing. He'll protect you from this, from her.

Even if it means he has to take you to doctors offices an hour out of town. If he has to bargain for it, and make you cry at work, and– and fucking drive this wedge between you, he'll do it.

He needs you to be okay.

He can't think about his mom anymore. He loves her, he misses her, but if he thinks about her too much he won't be able to stand up.

Eddie sits up, takes a lungful of air in, and waits. He senses you as you come back down the hall, grateful for your dry cheeks, and your small, small smile. Tiny but irrefutably there.

He stands up and holds out his hand. You don't take it, but you walk into his side so your hips are pressed together and he falls into step with you.

"So…" he says.

"She asked if I was getting enough sleep," you say, "and I told her I was. I explained everything to her like I promised I would, even– even… I told her everything. And um, she seemed very open."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, she– OK." You frown.

"Listen, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. I know I practically forced you to come, but it's still your life, and you can have privacy from me–"

"It's not that. I just don't want to cry in here."

He puts his hand on your shoulder, his arm folded against your shoulder. You don't speak until you're out of the doctor's office and weaving through people as you walk toward the parking lot.

"She thinks I'm having auditory hallucinations. And that it could be an initial symptom of schizophrenia, or something else. She said it usually starts around my age, and–"

"Hey, it's okay," he says, though internally he feels as distressed as you're beginning to look, horrified by your crumpling chin and wringing hands. "It's okay. You don't have to say it if it's going to upset you."

"It might not be anything," you say, shaking your head. "She said the human brain is complicated, and sometimes stuff like this just happens. She wants to, uh," —your voice twists up very high— "see me again after I've had some sleep to see if it's persisting."

Eddie nods. He's fucking glad that the doctor took you seriously, grateful for her advice and her reluctance to misdiagnose you with something. It's not as though Eddie wants you to be experiencing hallucinations. But he thinks you are, and he needs help looking after you if that’s the case.

"Did she prescribe anything?" he asks.

"A week's worth of ambien. She didn't really want to, but I told her about, you know, you coming over to make sure I'm okay, and I know that was because of the gh–" You bite your lip. You're shaking like a leaf. "Well, she thought it was you making sure I'm not an insomniac. Which I'm not."

"I'm really proud of you," he says quietly. "I know you don't want this to be happening. I get it, I promise. I don't want it either, but this is a good thing."

He can see you regaining some composure. You smile a little, and you offer him your prescription paper. "You know it only costs seven dollars for seven ambien?"

"I could get you some for free."

Your laugh startles him. "No, I don't think so."

"I'm not offering. Just saying. I know a guy."

"No, you knew a guy who knows a guy who could get me something ridiculous, like a percocet."

"I'd never give you anything like that."

"I know." You come to a halt. The cloudy weather paints you in shadow. "I'm sorry this is happening."

"You're what?" He doesn't let you answer moving to stand in front of you. "Why would you apologise for this?"

"Because it's my head," you say stiffly.

"You didn't want this to happen. And– and it might not be happening at all. You'll try the ambien, and you'll take care of yourself, and we'll go from there. I wasn't trying to scare you… I wish I could brush it off, you know? I wish I could believe that you…" He takes you in. Your skirt and jacket are swaying in the cold wind. You look one sharp shove from falling over. "I get that it isn't like me, to not believe in the fantasy–"

You save him from his miserable attempt at placating you.

"I know."

He licks his lips.

"I love you," Eddie says as he starts toward the van again. "Let's go fill your prescription, and then I'll get you whatever you want to eat."

"Boys are so weird about I love you," you say, following. The light behind your eyes makes your teasing worth it. "You say it like you chewed on it first. Struggled to get that one out, did you?"

It's not your best insult. Neither of you are exactly on form.

"Just so hard to say it to you."

You take what you perceive to be an insult on the chin. Only Eddie knows there's a sliver of truth in what he's said.

You generously let him help you into the passenger seat. He's hopeful that your mood's improved until that wretched frown worms its way across your pretty mouth once again. You wait for him to round the hood and start the van before you explain yourself.

"There's a support group. For anybody who's, um, hearing voices. Schizophrenics, manic depressives…"

"Is that something you want to go to?"

"I don't know. Can I be honest with you?"

"Yeah. Absolutely."

"I don't know if I believe that it isn't real. I know that's the point. The definition of hallucination is, uh… an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present, and so… it makes sense. My ghost isn't there, even if I think she is, so I must be hallucinating, but Eddie," —you shrink in on yourself— "I have this feeling that won't go away."

He loves you. You're terrified.

He's already guessed what you're going to ask for.

"Can we try again? Please? I'll take the meds and I'll go to the support group, but in the meantime, could you please come back and just– just listen. Maybe it takes a while for her to talk to someone else." You scrub your face. "Fuck. I sound fucking crazy."

Eddie squeezes the wheel. "Don't say that. Don't say it like you've done something wrong. You didn't do anything wrong."

People say crazy but they mean sick. They ridicule what they can't understand.

He doesn't understand, but he wants to. He says, "If you want me to, we'll try again. I'll come over."

You look up from your palms. He notices almost habitually that they're smaller than his. When you were young teenagers there'd been a short period of time where you'd been the taller one, with bigger hands and a bigger smile. Lately, you've seemed small.

"Really?" you ask hopefully.

"You came here 'cause I asked you to. It was hard for you." He turns his eyes to the road and turns the key until the Beauville's engine is thrumming with life. "I'd do a lot of shit for you, superstar. Like, anything. If you need me to keep trying then I will. And you'll–"

"I'll keep trying too," you promise.

It's all he can ask for.

—

The sky is all kinds of grey. It stretches like a sheet from one corner of your eye to the other, darker toward each limit of your vision, a gradual decay into colourlessness toward the very top where the sun fights hardest to burst through an impossible expanse of clouds. They seem thick as marshmallo, but where they begin is hard to decipher.

Your eyes feel sore. You imagine a hand reaching for you, hitting you, pressing its cold knuckles to each bruised eye socket to calm the raging ache behind them. You hadn't expected to feel this way. It isn't the first time you have, but to feel so intensely unreal while there's someone still with you is new. You lean your weight against the sill and let your arms swing from the open window ledge, knuckles scraping the scratchy brick of the house's exterior walls, instantly chilled by the weather.

A black band of birds burst across the sky somewhere leftwards. The pitch and tumble with no discernible formation. They're too far to hear. You imagine the flap of wings, their buoyed cawing, screeching to one another as they swim between pylon cables and their brothers spread wings.

"What kind of birds do you think they are?" Eddie asks.

You feel his weight settle into the ottoman beside you. You'd dragged it to the window with tired arms. You haven't felt up to anything since you got home, though Eddie's promise should've restored a little hope. He's going to keep trying to meet your ghost. You'll have to hope you don't get worse before that.

You know, starkly, that you aren't having auditory hallucinations. You know, starkly, that your ghost had written to you in your missing notebook.

But maybe that's the nature of your hallucination. A night bent over the pocket dictionary had ended as this one begins, with the crushing realisation that you cannot trust what you know. To put it plainly, you're afraid that you're mentally unwell. Terrified of how it’s going to change your life, the people in it.

Eddie's afraid too.

Your orange bottle of pills glares like a flame to your right where it stands waiting for you on the nightstand. Eddie's made up your bed for the two of you. He could sleep in the guest room, and he never has.

"I don't know," you say hoarsely. Your voice sounds as you feel, like something has its hooks in you, and it's dragging you down, down…

"They're too big to be pigeons."

"They're too dark. They're crows," you guess, tracing an outlier as he skirts the crowd of his family and spirals up into the air.

Like a party trick, you expect him to disappear, or explode, or rocket up into the cotton clouds and out of view. He slows as he falls, and then he dives back toward the main swarm of birds as they migrate toward the horizon.

There's a feeling brewing in you that you don't like.

If you can't trust your own perception. If real isn't real. If you need someone to sit beside you and distinguish real from fake, if… if you're sick.

If you're sick, what does that mean?

You search for something in the air to hold onto.

Eddie hums softly, his hand pushing out into the static as he points toward the glowing clouds. "Sun's going down slow."

You raise your hand and wrap it around his. It isn't enough. You force your fingers between the gaps of his, just a little longer, thicker, solid, and lock him in. He feels real. That's the key. As far as you know, hallucinations don't carry that far. Bugs crawling over your skin and through the strands of your hair, an itch you can't scratch, a drop of rain from a concrete ceiling, the brain can recreate these things. But the exact width of Eddie's palm or the feeling of his calluses against your loveline, your lifeline, and the heartbeat that bumps against the meat of your thumb when you focus, that's impossible. That's a level of precision the human brain can't find.

Right?

Eddie curls his thumb around yours. You can feel his gaze on your cheek like a breath blown between parted lips. You turn toward him, and you catalogue every little mar or mark, every fine hair. His wrinkles, his textured jaw. The strands of a fallen curl come apart near his eye, grown out bangs kissing the highest point of his cheek.

You're panicking. There's a thumping behind your eyes.

"I don't know if you look right," you say.

"I look very right. I'm extremely handsome," he says.

You hold his hand out of the window, worried you'll drop it, and it'll fall.

If Eddie were at home tucked into his double bed a mile away, she would've talked to you by now. Your breath shortens as the meaning behind that thought solidifies.

She only comes when you're alone. Why do you think that is?

She's not real.

Is that how it works? Can hallucinations, auditory, visual, or otherwise, take place in the company of others? You know next to nothing. Maybe they aren’t so common with loved ones standing guard.

You push your head out of the window again and look down at the flat, dying grass in the backyard, a yellowing carpet of bluegrass. Bluegrass is prominent because it can grow anywhere, like mould. With all the rain these past few days, the grass should've livened into a plush and solid green, like the lawns in the southern side of Hawkins where the rich people lavish in sprinklers and gardeners alike. It remains rumpled.

Eddie rubs the back of your hand. It's far from the closest you've ever been. There have been nights you spent unawares in his arms, waking with your face tucked into his neck, so embarrassed you couldn't look at him afterward. But it's the most intimate touch you've ever endured. The whorls of his fingerprint embossing itself into your hand, a quarter circle that doesn't cease. Time feels brief and unsteady.

Eddie must realise you're having a bad moment. He shuffles closer to you, your arms twined, his hair tickling your shoulders. It snaps you back, in a way, with its softness.

"Let's go to bed," he says when the sky's more charcoal than light.

You're cold. You follow. You latch your hand in his and he doesn't say a word, closing and locking your window with one hand, pulling the sheets of your bed back deftly for you to climb in. You slide across to the outermost side and he follows, leaning over you to pull the sheets to your chin.

He stays hovering there.

He holds very still.

"Everything's going to be okay," he whispers.

"What if it isn't?"

"It will be, you…" he trails off. He keeps your hand in his, but he plants his elbow on the other side of you, like a lover about to share sweet nothings, his face so, so close. "You'll be okay, no matter what happens."

"I wish she'd told me more," you say.

"The doctor?" He draws a small, careful line across your cheek with his index finger. "Sweetheart, we'll find out everything there is to find."

"I want to know how scared I should be. Because this feels like torture."

"You don't have to be scared." Eddie smiles, and as far as you can tell, though you're having trouble trusting yourself, it's one of his genuine smiles. "Why do you think I'm here, huh? It's not to watch as something bad happens."

You lift your chin. He's too close to look at both eyes at once: you have to choose, and you can't. Your irises dance back and forth between them, shuddering in indecision.

"You'll look after me," you say, not a question.

He turns his hand, stroking down the length of your cheek with the backs of his fingers. They feel much softer than the undersides, the flat of his nails like silk. Your eyes burn as you free your hand from his, hoping he'll be kind with that one, too.

"I'll look after you."

You tuck your hands behind the trim of his waist and, knowing you shouldn't, let them feed into his shirt. You draw a shaking line through the downy soft blanketing the small of his back until your finger is skipping up the jutting bumps of his spine. It's like climbing a staircase by touch alone. You wonder if anyone else had ever done this to him, if they ever wanted to, and if he'd let them.

Eddie releases a breath. Warmth feathers along your skin.

His hand strokes down to your neck, resting at your collar. Half a second and his petting returns, the side of his thumb brushing your soft jawline tenderly.

He must feel you swallow. His pupils travel down the whites of his eyes like the steady descent of the setting sun.

"I can't," he says softly.

Can't what? you want to ask. You don't know if you should. You know the answer, but does he?

"You're not all here," he says, hand paused. He cups your cheek, holds you in place. You hadn't been moving. "But when you are, I could. I could."

"I don't know if I…" you drift off. How can you explain it to him? I don't know if I'll feel better any time soon.

His eyes move sideways, as if the instruction for your reassurance lay somewhere in the apple of your cheek.

You don't want him to kiss you if it's a fixative meant to soothe your rampant nerves. You want him to kiss you for a hundred reasons, but that's not one of them. You're not sure he wants to kiss you beyond that.

He would, you realise. Kiss you, if he thought you wanted it badly enough. That's a lot of power to have over someone, more than you want over him, and you can't ask him to. You look away from his eyes and search upward, trembling hands and the starts of your forearms pressed to his back, hiking his shirt up one inch at a time.

He sits up agonisingly slowly, in the same way the sky has fallen from light to dusk; inchingly, so as to escape notice, until suddenly you can't feel the emanating heat of his chest against yours anymore, and the only light inside of your room is a yellow band sliced by the ajar door.

Your hands fall back. One under the sheets, one over. Eddie sits where you lay, his hands at the crook of your elbows. He gives symmetrical, superficial massages to each.

The life has been sapped from you, as if it were tied to the sun sunk beyond the horizon. A brutal fatigue sets in.

"You should take your ambien," he murmurs.

"Okay."

The eye tattooed on his arm seems to follow you as he reaches for your seven dollar bottle. He twists off the cap and shakes a single pill out for you, and you watch as the lines of his arms start to blur.

You take your pill, lying firmly in the middle of your pillow, and wonder if now would be an appropriate time to burst into panicked tears.

"I'll look after you," Eddie repeats after a while. Or maybe he doesn't. The weight of the day and the helping kick of your medication pulls you under. He lays down next to you carefully, his hand searching under the covers for yours.

And there, standing in the corner of the room, is your ghost. Real. Stunningly, terrifyingly real.

You can’t open your mouth wide enough to warn him.

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

end of part one! thank you so much for reading, I really hope that you enjoyed! this was my baby and such a labour of love in April and I’m so happy now to share it :D if you have the time, please consider reblogging, it means so much to me and I’d love to know your thoughts on the story so far <3<3

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson oneshot #eddie munson scenario #eddie munson drabble #eddie munson fic #eddie munson fanfiction #stranger things fanfiction #stranger things #stranger things fic #stranger things x reader

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fleur-a-whump · 1 month

Text

Overloaded (#5)

Rocky Reunions Pt. 2

More Kai being grumpy plus his team!!

previous | masterlist | next

CW: uhh shock collar, mentioned electrocution, whumpee paraded around, ex-villain whumpee, hero whumper, hero caretakers

Kai plops into the auditorium seat next to Elijah, letting out a long suffering sigh. His partner chuckles slightly, accustomed to his moodiness and drama, but when he catches a glimpse of Kai’s tight expression, he stops.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, as the Hero League Director and council walk out on the stage. They take their seats at the curved council table, outfitted with microphones and interrupted by a tall center podium, settling in to conduct the briefing.

Kai shakes his head, not wanting to get into it when the meeting is about to start. Elijah gives him a look.

“Later,” he promises, softening, giving him a small, reassuring smile.

Elijah nods and turns to the stage as the meeting begins.

Director Jaida Murphy stands tall and composed at the center podium, her serious face breaking easily into a winning smile once the auditorium has settled. Her voice is loud and clear over the speakers, swiftly silencing any lingering murmurs of the crowd.

“Thank you all for coming to this month’s briefing. We have many things to cover on the docket today so let’s go ahead and get going. First and foremost, Secretary Cho, will you read the previous meeting’s minutes?” she says, turning to the older gentleman at the end of the row, who’s set up with a steno machine.

Kai zones in and out of the tedious meeting. He’s well-practiced in discerning the useless and important parts and is assured by the knowledge that Lizzy, another member of his team, is an obsessive and thorough note-taker. If he accidentally zones out for something important, he can goad her into sharing her notes with him. Though he’d rather avoid the teasing that comes along with that.

He snaps back to attention at the words “villain reform initiative.”

“As you all know, a major responsibility of this organization is to invest in the effective reform of the villains we encounter while protecting the city. Team Delta is currently spearheading a new project which both makes use of insider information from some of the most devious crime syndicates in Hyperion City and actively reforming a major villain, directing his abilities towards the greater good. To tell us more about this new program, please welcome Miguel Toro, and Jasper Lane, also known as Tinker.”

There’s polite applause, underlined by suspicious murmuring, as the two join the council on the stage. Director Murphy steps aside and the two take her place at the podium. Jasper stands just behind Miguel, his face carefully neutral. Kai can make out that the kid is still slightly green after seeing it earlier. He doubts anyone else picks up on it though. He hopes he doesn’t get sick on stage.

What catches his attention most, and likely everyone else’s, is the collar still tightly fastened around his neck. He’d changed his shirt since Kai saw him, now wearing what could be scrubs—or a prisoner’s top—with a v-neck that puts the collar on prominent display. The brazen showcase makes Kai nauseous. It doesn’t sit well with him, no matter what Jasper has done.

He watches the kid's Adam's apple bob against it in anxiety. Kai’s skin prickles as he remembers how badly the electricity hurt him, second hand. He wonders how often they use it.

“Hello,” Miguel says, loudly, firmly, in an attempt to settle the whispers still rippling through the auditorium. He’s not nearly as effective as the Director, but it does quiet some.

“Thank you for allowing us to present this project to you today. Jasper has been working with us for about six months, and we can report only positive results from this venture. He’s used his technopath abilities to improve our equipment and assist on over two dozen missions, most notably with data recovery from the Blitz Family Warehouse reconnaissance mission down at the Wharf last month. Most importantly, as Jasper is the son of old school villain Nero and protege of Psychosis, Jasper has supplied us with invaluable intelligence from within the crime empires these two are orchestrating.”

Kai raises an eyebrow. He knew Tinker was trained by Psychosis, which was intimidating enough, but the kid is also Nero’s son? Nero had essentially been an untouchable keystone in one of the largest syndicates in Hyperion for like 25 years.

No wonder they wanted to keep him close.

“Jasper has restricted, supervised access to technology and his powers. His movement is also restricted and his location is tracked. Jasper has performed very well within these safety precautions and has been a very useful tool in our belt. We believe with properly tailored boundaries and effort made on both sides, this program is replicable with other villains.”

So, you’re just not going to mention the fucking shock collar? Kai scoffs quietly.

He’s sure the only reason Jasper hasn’t wreaked havoc on the whole tower is they’ve been electrocuting him. Miguel is just peacocking; putting lipstick on the pig that, knowing him, he probably staked his whole career on. He’s been trying to move up the ranks for years.

He watches Miguel bring Jasper forward with what could be a supportive hand on his back, but looks to Kai more like a possessive grip on the back of his neck. Miguel opens the floor to questions, giving non-answers and continuing to speak about Jasper as if he wasn’t there. Jasper stands quietly, entirely stoic through even some of the crueler questions and discussion of his crimes and background. One question does get Kai’s attention though.

“How did this idea come about?”

Miguel stiffens a bit. “We arrested Jasper in the field, and it was my idea to work with him rather than just shuffle him off to prison.”

Kai just barely catches Jasper’s face twitch. He recalls Jasper saying he came to the heroes. He sort of hates that he feels more inclined to believe the villain over the hero.

Then someone finally has the guts to ask about the collar. This time Jasper's response, another twitch like he's holding back a grimace, is more noticeable.

“It's simply a tracking device, fashioned this way to minimize Jasper's opportunities to tamper with it, given that he is technologically inclined.”

Kai nearly jumps out of his seat at that. There's no way he just lied like that. He wouldn't be surprised if a collar like that could kill someone without an affinity for electricity, and Miguel wants to pretend it's just a tracking device?

If he wasn't sure there was something wrong with the whole scenario before, he certainly is now.

Listening to Miguel drone on for the next ten minutes just pisses Kai off more and more. It’s a good thing the presentation was the last order of business. Much longer, and the cups of coffee and water bottles around him would’ve started boiling and bursting as his emotions fueled his powers. Kai’s one of the first people out the door, slamming it open as hard as he can and storming some ways down the hall.

~~~

Kai wants so badly to label Tinker as a villain who should be in prison. He wants to fall back on the comfort of a black and white world that’s been drilled into him by his League training, and not think about the image of the shaking and whimpering villain on the floor just an hour ago. But the whole spectacle made Kai a little queasy; now, he can’t blame Jasper for puking his guts out. And the way Miguel so clearly sees him as a tool, a means to an end to advance his career makes Kai see red. Partly on Jasper’s behalf, partly out of his hatred of Miguel and the politics of the League, and partly out of frustration with himself for caring about, worrying about the infuriating villain.

Kai couldn’t remember ever hearing him speak when they fought—his mask, which covered the lower half of his face, didn’t really allow for it he supposed—but he always got the feeling the kid was laughing at him. That, combined with the way Kai’s powers could actually make Jasper stronger, his electricity more powerful, and how damn fast he was without that even being his power, made every fight so annoying that he’d complain about it till Elijah got sick of it and told him to move on.

Speak of the devil, he hears his partner jogging up behind him as he angrily paces. He stops, forcing himself to let out a long, frustrated sigh as he leans against the wall of the hallway he’d found himself in. Elijah leans against the wall next to him.

“Sooo, I had to set my coffee down during Miguel’s speech because it was getting hotter. Which, y’know, isn’t how that usually works. Wanna talk about it?”

Kai huffs out a light laugh in spite of himself. His boyfriend definitely knows him well.

“Sorry. It was just—well, you know how I feel about Miguel in the first place,” he begins.

Elijah purses his lips. “Mhmm,” he hummed. He’s been hearing about how Kai felt about Miguel since they were in sidekick training together.

“Well, so, I was in one of the bathrooms before the meeting and somebody was throwing up in there, and it was Jasper. Well, before I knew his name was Jasper. I thought, y’know, fucking villain in the Heroes League! And, uh, remind me to tell Mari I burst some more pipes, please,” Kai rambles.

Elijah chuckled. “Will do.”

Kai runs his hands through his hair, putting the thick, dark curls up in a bun to give himself something to do as he speaks. “But, yeah, Jasper told me he was on Miguel’s team, and I went with him to check it out. Halfway there, he just fucking collapsed, twitching and shaking in pain. He was being electrocuted! That wasn't a damn tracker, it was a fucking shock collar!” he exclaims.

“Oh shit,” his partner murmurs. “Miguel lied?”

Kai shakes his head in anger. “Yeah, big surprise. It’s definitely a shock collar, and he’s petrified of it, and they definitely use it. The shock I saw was apparently just a warning.”

“I mean, while I don’t agree with the method, maybe it's a rare thing? They thought he was running away while he was in the bathroom? If he’s confined to their level, I can’t imagine they’d have reason to use it much. Tinker never struck me as the kind to rock the boat with that kind of threat hanging over his head.”

Kai shakes his head again, though he knows Elijah could very well be right. And Tinker is a villain. He’s definitely done bad things.

“I don’t know. I know I shouldn’t care; it’s great that we’re getting intelligence on Nero and Psychosis. And whatever is going on with the “project,” it’s probably better than prison. But I don’t know, something about it is really bugging me. I keep picturing him shaking on the floor,” he finishes quietly, some of the anger ebbing from his body in the calming presence of his partner, only to be replaced by worry—which is almost worse.

Kai tries desperately to find a way to better explain himself, the knot in his stomach that was growing bigger and bigger the more he thought about the kid.

“It’s also just, the whole spectacle, putting him on display and talking about him like he wasn’t even there. He’s obviously just a political pawn for Miguel.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that. It was pretty gross.”

Kai nods. “I don’t know; it pisses me off because I feel bad for him, but he’s a villain, so I shouldn’t, but I definitely do and—ugh.” He runs his hands across his face only to slide them into his hair and tug, totally overwhelmed with the conflict twisting his stomach.

Elijah takes the pause in his rambling to step in front of him and gently pull his hands from his scalp. His thumbs rub soothing little circles across them, as he says, “Hey, first of all, it’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. You saw someone in pain, and that felt bad, and that’s a good thing. If it’ll make you feel better, maybe we can find a way to visit him. Just to check in? That team asks for extra manpower all the time. They’re hardly balanced.”

“Yeah, okay, that sounds good.”

Kai sighs dramatically, “Damn moral compass.”

Elijah laughs. “Oh, yeah, you poor thing, you have compassion for other human beings.”

The teasing finally pulls an involuntary smile from Kai, and he gently takes Elijah’s chin for a chaste kiss that’s all goofy grins.

“Thanks, Eli.”

“Anytime,” Elijah says, leaning in for another kiss.

Suddenly there’s a loud groan he’d recognize anywhere from down the hall. Kai reluctantly, a little self-consciously, turns his attention to his team coming down the hall—the other three members having finally tracked the two lovebirds down. The groan definitely came from Isla, the young ginger pyromaniac of the team.

Elijah’s not having it though and pulls Kai back with a soft hand on his cheek.

This time it’s Lizzy’s turn to complain, loudly. “Get a fucking room!”

Kai breaks the kiss to laugh at that, and Elijah gives up. He turns to the team, pouting, “Y’all never let me have any fun.”

He chuckles, but still rubs Elijah’s arm in a simple apology, wordlessly promising to make up for it later. He lets himself be pulled into carefree conversation with his team, doing his best to ignore the knot still settled in his stomach, and the image of Jasper convulsing on the floor still imprinted in his brain.

~~~

I can now show y’all funny little bit of speed brain dump that manifested his and elijah’s dynamic

Kai is not fuckin happy to have a villain in the hero building

Kai witnesses some of the abuse

Kai: Elijah (boyf) help I'm not used to being conflicted like this what is happening to me

Elijah: it's called empathy babe.

Kai: WELL I DONT LIKE IT

Bonus scene w/ Kai’s team and Mira: “Did you have to burst the pipes again, Kai?” “Well, I wasn’t gonna use the fuckin’ toilet water.” “What’s the difference?” “Yuck, you used the sewage water, Kai?” “I know which pipes are clean assholes!” *giggling* “Goddamn, how many times have you burst the bathroom pipes that you just know which ones are clean?” *angry waterboy grumbling*

~~~

tags!! hello friends!! lmk if you wanna be added or removed!!

@whumpsday @sergeant-jasper @watermelons-dont-grow-on-trees @crystalrose141 @aloafofbreadwithanxiety

@paingoes @elizaisnotokay @quaggasus @defire @tonystark604

@writereleaserepeat @whump-queen @clickerflight @gliittergelpens @kawaii-cakes

@whump-in-a-million @scoundrelwithboba @idkwhattodowiththisaltiamsorry @vampiresprite

#kai has a problem and it's called no impulse control #whump #whumpblr #whump writing #whump community #overloaded #villain whumpee #heroes and villains #ex villain whumpee #hero whumper #hero caretaker #villain whump #multiple caretakers #shock collar #electrocution

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munson-blurbs · 2 months

Text

@corrodedcoffinfest Day 13: Sex, Drugs, & Rock n Roll

Word Count: 677/Rating: M/Pairing: None/CW: drug use (marijuana), mentions of sex, moaning, general debauchery with the guys/Tags: Eddie Munson, Gareth, Grant, Jeff, Wayne Munson, competition

Divider credit to @silkholland

“Dude,” Gareth drawls, taking a long hit from the joint, “y’know what we should do?”

Grant laughs before his friend can even finish his sentence, plunging one hand into the bag of pretzels to his left.

Eddie plucks the joint from Gareth, earning a scowl from Jeff who was next up in the rotation. “What’s up?”

Gareth grins. “We should record a song—”

“Already did that,” Jeff cuts in.

“Shut the fuck up! Anyway,” Gareth takes an exaggerated breath, “we should, like, record a woman moaning and put it in the track. Like in Rocket Queen.”

Grant drops a pretzel. “You’re a fuckin’ genius!” He tries to clap Gareth on the back but misses, sending the two into a fit of giggles.

“Yeah, a genius.” Eddie rolls his eyes. “Except for the fact that we’re not exactly drowning in moaning women.” He stretches, exposing a sliver of torso. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re all still virgins. The handy that Jeff got behind the Hideout doesn’t count.”

Jeff elbows him, but Eddie’s too high to notice. “Maybe we don’t need women,” Jeff muses. “Ed, you still got that tape recorder?”

Eddie’s brows shoot up. “Yeah. Somewhere around here.” He digs around under his bed until he finds it, blowing off the dust.

Jeff presses the PLAY and RECORD buttons in unison. The cassette’s wheels spin. “Check, one, two,” he mumbles into the mic.

And then he lets out one long, shrill moan.

“What the fuck,” Gareth guffaws, “was that?”

Eddie yanks the recorder away from Jeff. “Someone’s gonna think we’re torturing puppies and call animal control.”

“Seriously, dude. What porn are you watching?” Grant adds. He takes the recorder from Eddie. “It’s gotta be sexy. Like this.”

He holds the microphone close to his mouth, breathing out moans in short bursts. After ten seconds of that, he glances around the room to gauge everyone’s reactions.

“Well…” Eddie starts, taking another hit, “that was…less bad than Jeff’s.”

A triumphant grin stretches across Grant’s face. Eddie’s too stoned to elaborate that their other guitarist had set the bar in hell.

Instead, he turns his attention to the drummer. “Gare? You willing to give it a shot?”

Grant snickers. “Should be easy for him considering he’s barely hit puberty.”

“That’s not what your mom said last night,” Gareth shoots back. Grabbing the mic, he lets out a series of what sound like pained yelps.

Eddie scrambles for the tape recorder. “So that’s gonna be a hard pass from me,” he says with obviously feigned kindness, “but we’ll keep you in mind if we ever need an impression of someone being electrocuted.”

“Whatever.” Gareth crosses his arms over his chest. “Why don’t you give it a try, Sex God?”

“Just because he’s gotten laid doesn’t mean he’s made her moan,” Jeff points out, earning a high-five from Grant.

Eddie flips them off. “Fuck all of you. I’ll have you know I’m a goddamn giver.”

He double-checks that the cassette wheels are spinning, then indulges the guys in the most realistic moaning they’ve ever heard outside of Family Video’s adult section.

“Oh my god! H-oh my god! Yes, yes, yes!”

“Boy, what the hell are you doing?”

Wayne Munson stands in the trailer’s entrance carrying two brown paper bags filled with groceries.

Eddie’s cheeks turn bright red, sobriety infiltrating his brain. Long gone is his hazy high. “N-Nothing.” He drops the microphone. “Just messing around.”

“Sounds like a goddamn brothel in here,” Wayne grumbles, shoving Chef Boyardee cans into the pantry.

“Wait.” Eddie forces himself to look at his uncle. “Like, did it actually sound good? Did I sound like a woman moaning?”

Wayne studies him with a look of sheer disappointment and disbelief. “I’m gonna go out to the truck and get the last bag,” he says slowly, “and when I come back, I want these numbskulls gone, and I want you to never ask me something like that again.”

“Got it.” Eddie nods, but the second Wayne leaves, he turns to his bandmates.

“Looks like we have a winner, boys.”

#eddie munson #stranger things #stranger things fanfic #eddie stranger things #eddie munson fanfic #fanfic #wayne munson #corroded coffin #corroded coffin fest #gareth emerson #jeff corroded coffin #grant corroded coffin

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biribaa · 2 years

Note

I feel offended by the people who didn't request about Narrator or AM 😔 So I gonna make the first move.

May I request a hc of AM x reader? Your hc are awesome! :D

I'm not quite sure if I request yandere or just a normal X reader... that can be up to ya!

Some AM x reader hcs!

Aww thank u!! :] Tbh ur request and rbs always make my day

TW/CW: Mentions and descriptions of torture

Everything is so…confusing. That warm feeling is confusing, and AM hates it. No... No, he's not feeling sorry for you, because you're in those rags that once were clothes, being forced to eat worms and crushed cockroaches and being forced to interact with these... Filthy creatures. AM refuses every second that what he feels is some form of...closeness? After seeing you damaged in some way, even if it's the smallest thing AM has done, like breaking a bone or two.

AM refuses to believe that you are attractive, he tries in any way to deceive himself into thinking that you are a disgusting, repulsive creature like all human beings are. Any scientific information about human appearance, AM will use to convince himself and you that scientifically it is impossible for him to find you attractive after you are scientifically not!

And after all, it's not like you're not like every other human he's ever seen, ignorant, mean, fake and hypocrites.

But what made his doubts grow the most was the day you were away from the human group, and simply asked AM how he was feeling. For a supercomputer of great power, it took him quite a few seconds to answer that question, trying to somehow check if this was some kind of ironic joke, only for him to respond in a passive aggressive way.

But this question stuck in AM's thoughts, was it genuine? AM forces himself more and more to try to ignore these thoughts, to force himself to think about the conclusion that all, ALL humans are sickening.

But even so, your face doesn't leave the AI's head, no matter how much he lies saying he hates you now and forever.

It didn't take long for one or two of the humans (cof cof mainly Gorrister cof cof) to protest about these possible AM gifts to you. A blonde said you were screwing him, a german one commented that you were manipulating him to gain an advantage, until it all got to AM's nerves, and he made the conclusion that you don't deserve to go through the hell of hearing all those comments from the five. And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, you find yourself in a cubicle, with a bed and a single ceiling lamp as a light source.

So... AM starts a game with you, what he calls "Manipulating Y/N into thinking I'm being nice to them and then torturing them again and again and again" was basically him giving you little charming gifts. It all started with you waking up in better clothes, then, after the others were fed termites, you were fed what looked like one of your favorite snacks! And apparently, anyone who tried to take a piece got electrocuted, even though you wanted to share some with the rest(sweet, sweet Y/N, your kindness burns the circuits of AM, but the same is not known if it is anger or... Passion...). And then, on a walk, you are all confused by what appears to be a bouquet of intact flowers, coincidentally your favorite flowers?

AM's plan would be much more obvious if you're someone who relies on meds, seriously, you'll be walking around and suddenly the exact box of meds you take

It was quiet indeed, but the fun part was when you and AM shared some conversations. Sometimes an outburst from AM, or even something silly, like you asking AM if the chicken or the egg came first.

AM felt... Good, after years, he felt good. Incredible as it sounds, AM enjoyed the conversations between you and him. The AI never thought taking a break from 15 minutes of torture would be so much fun.

AM never believed that he would be so interested in knowing more about a human's interests, he felt a little silly because of it... But it's not like the rest of the humans could just walk in there and judge the two of you without a torture of removing thekr skin and repeating it 200-times.

AM asks himself several nights if he is really in love with you, and wants to try a romantic relationship, but sometimes he doesn't even know if what he's feeling is true love, just like he doesn't know if he can feel love.

And in one night, AM tries to argue with you about these questions about love...

Only for this idiot to accidentally confess to you(HES SO DUMB OMFG)(SILLY, NO!!!!!!)(Pls have patientce with him mf doesnt know what love is, i mean, he knows but- whatever you got it)

Of course you say yes, after all you are here to date the evil computer why the hell you would want a "no" option huh??? Unless you want to just be friends with the computer. But whatever we are here for the hot stuff.

While hundreds of writers write AM as confident and romantic partner and etcetera blah blah blah, I don't hold out much hope that AM would be directly as confident about a romantic relationship... He's gentle, and shy at first, hardly looking like the AM you once knew. AM is just... New, in this whole thing called love, he was created for war and war only, he never imagined in a cute romantic scenario.

And of course, he'll do a lot of things wrong at first, but hopefully you'll forgive him and help him learn how to be a good boyfriend. An example was the day he gave you decapitated human organs as a gift, trying to show his loyalty to you, which of course caught you off guard, but you forgave AM of course, for not knowing well all this romantic stuff.

Over time, AM's attitude improves! He becomes less shy, and now his gifts are no longer organs. He tries to hug you with his wires and introduce you to the poetry he writes! :)

AM tries his best to heal all the mental and physical wounds he left you with from his past tortures. Of course he will continue the torture he does with the other fives, but he tries to be sweeter and kinder to you. Using pet names, listening to you like you listen to him, cuddles and food that isn't worms!

Sometimes or other AM can be rough because, well, he's AM. And even if AM disagrees with you or not, he would feel like the most special AI in the world if you still tried to understand AM or even stay with him. He genuinely never had anyone who at least tried to stand by him, and having you, still supporting and cherishing AM, is definitely something that can prove that you do indeed love AM... In which, well, makes AM a bit emotional

I think yall can see I really hate Gorrister troguht these headcanons fuck you Gorrister

#canon x reader #x reader #reader insert #i have no mouth and i must scream #ihnmaims #ihnmaims x reader #ihnmaims am #am ihnmaims #am i have no mouth and i must scream #i have no mouth and i must scream x reader #am x reader #headcanon #headcanons

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a-killer-obsession · 4 months

Text

Wavelengths [Killer x Reader, Heat x Reader]

🔞 Minors DNI 🔞

A search for a rumored Vegapunk weapon leads the Kid Pirates to an unexpected new crewmate, with a bloodlust that rivals their own and an incredible power.

CW: Please check AO3 for all current warnings, but general warning for smut, slow burn, serious gore, and really dark themes. AFAB reader, she/her pronouns.

Masterlist || AO3 || Chapter 1

Chapter 23 - We're So Back

Time to get back in action, starting with Treasure Island. Song mentioned: ‘Middle of the Night’ by Elley Duhé

WC: ~5k

Taglist: @h0n3y-l3m0n05 @tremendoushorsepatrolgoth @iggy5055

The seas were fairly rocky between the resupply town and ‘treasure island’, so not much time was spent above deck during the three day journey. Killer and Heat took turns giving you reading lessons to pass the time, between sharpening weapons and Killer showing you how to cook a few simple things. As the island approached it became clear that the reason nobody came here was probably the weather. It was the sort of island that was hard to approach due to the rough waves and sharp rocks surrounding the coastline, with near constant lightning strikes illuminating the otherwise darkly clouded island. Kid had to work hard to direct the ship with his devil fruit, along with Double at the helm, to keep it from smashing against the rocks. They made their way to a small dock in a cove that Double had found marked on the map you’d stolen from the marines, that was somewhat protected from the elements. It wasn't perfect, but the water was at least a little calmer here, allowing for the gangplank to be safely dropped. As predicted, there was nobody standing guard here, no doubt due to a combination of the weather, the difficult waters on approach, and the fact that it wasn’t on most maps. Not that the Kid Pirates were any less focused though, there could always be traps or dangerous creatures on the island instead.

The stash house marked on the map was a short hike inland, so you and Killer led point for the group, with Killer scanning for trouble with his haki and you using the x ray setting on you mask to check for traps, your hand on Killer’s back to help guide you while your vision was skewed. There were a few tripwire traps the marines had no doubt set, but they were easily spotted by the two of you and disarmed before they could do any damage. Working in this way slowly inland you eventually made it to a concrete bunker, right where the map said it would be. Another trap had been set to go off when the door handle was touched, but you were able to notify the others before anyone could be electrocuted by it. Kid used his fruit to destroy the mechanism, as well as tearing the metal door off its hinges for good measure, revealing the well organised crates and shelves of guns, swords, and ammunition inside, covered in a thin sheen of dust that indicated they had probably gone untouched for about a year. After one last check for traps, the crew set about transporting the heavy boxes back to the beach. Deeper stored crates also revealed large stores of long-life emergency rations. The island was definitely being used as an emergency resupply base for marines, and someone was going to get the shock of the century when they turned up and found the place empty. It would no doubt result in more than one marine starving to death, being that this place was likely only visited in case of emergency resupply.

Things were going well, the haul slowly making its way back to the shore, the crew in high spirits at the easy raid. You felt uneasy though, and judging by the way Killer seemed agitated you guessed he was feeling it too. Something was off, but you couldn’t put a finger on it. Sure, without haki or your devil fruit the crew would have been mostly taken out by traps, so it’s not like the island was just free pickings, but something else felt weird too.

“Something feel off to you, Kil?” you mused, switching through a few different visor settings to scan the surroundings but finding nothing of note.

“Mmm, I can’t place it though,” he replied.

“Maybe it's all the electricity in the air from the lightning?” you suggested.

“Yeah, maybe,” he hummed, “it just feels too easy, don’t you think?”

“It's not like it was all daisies getting the map and pose, or getting past all the traps,” Wire joined the conversation as he passed by in long strides, leaving you and Killer at the rear of the congregation.

“I guess that’s true,” you agreed, continuing to follow Killer but still a little on edge.

A flash of lightning directed your attention to the sky, and you could have sworn you saw something dark in the clouds in the fraction of a second they’d been illuminated. Then again, it was only a moment, maybe you were just being paranoid. Convincing yourself you were anxious because of the lighting, you continued down the path with the others.

The hairs on the back of your neck prickled with a close bolt of lightning, momentarily blinding you with the sudden brightness, and when your vision readjusted Killer was right in front of you, his punishers raised and his body shielding you, a long claw digging through the bicep of the raised arm, all the way to the back of it where you could see the bloodied point. With a flick of his wrist he cut the offending foot from the creature that had attacked him, sawing it off in a smooth movement with his spinning blades. The creature let out a shrill scream, flailing its shortened leg and spraying blood everywhere, most of the henchmen covering their ears while you went on the attack.

It was large, some sort of winged lizard, you would describe it as a dragon if you weren't totally sure that those were fictional. Then again, this was the Grandline, all sorts of weird shit happened here. Its emerald green scales shimmered like it was covered in jewels as more lightning struck nearby, illuminating its large figure. It was on par with a small seaking, the claw that had gone through Killer being about the same width as your wrist at its base.

You weren't back in full fighting shape yet, so your strength was limited, and you worried you'd be struck by lightning if you moon stepped to gain enough height for meteor wave, so you focused instead on what you could do from the ground. Killer charged at it again despite his injury, slicing a wide gash across the creature's chest as it flapped its wings and reared up, intending to stomp on him with its remaining front foot. The two of you were agile, and began to work in synchronised tandem, Killer making openings in the scales and you following close behind to use the openings as weak points where you could send through sharp waves of vibrations. It had a similar effect to what a cannonball might, but the large creature showed no sign of going down. Kid joined the fight, the rest of the crew being preoccupied with transporting the haul or too far already to have heard anything. He smashed it on the head with a large metallic fist, but the creature grabbed hold of it and did something unexpected. You thought for a moment that it was going to breathe fire, with the way its mouth and throat began to glow hot white, until a ripple of electricity spread through Kid's metal arm. You felt the electrons charging, and used your fruit to vibrate Kid's arm hard enough that he lost concentration and let the prosthetic fall before the electricity could reach his flesh.

“Fuck, god catch Yin,” he shouted over the rain, which was getting heavy and loud.

“Get out of here, your metal is no good here!” You shouted back.

“We'll get the ship ready to go!” He called back, regathering his prosthetic as he turned and ran before the creature could charge its electricity again.

Killer gave you a nod, and you got back to work, wearing away at the creature bit by bit. Killer was starting to falter, the claw still in his arm and hindering his movements, and you noticed now how much blood there was.

You unsheathed your sword, vibrating and heating it till it glowed red, turning yourself and the blade invisible and charging at the creature. It could still sense you, and sent a stream of electricity after you like a thick laser, but you dodged and weaved, jumping on to its back and running up the long neck before flipping yourself to dive down, using the momentum to drive your blade through the skull of the beast. With the added heat it cut like butter, the tip appearing under the jaw and dripping blood before pulling your blade out and riding the motion as the creature fell dead, gracefully jumping from its head as it hit the ground.

Killer was leaning against a tree, his hand hovering nervously over the claw still in his arm. He'd cut away the rest of the foot, but the claw was still going right through him.

“Nope!” You smacked his hand away, “you gotta leave it in till Mohawk can remove it”

Killer groaned and you rolled your eyes at him. “Big baby,” you pulled up his sash to expose his belt and started to unbuckle it.

“Woah, don't you think it's a bit soon for that?” He tried to stop your hands but you swatted them away.

“Behave,” you tutted, “I just need your belt”

You pulled the belt loose from his pants and wound it around his arm, above the claw, fastening it as tight as you could as a makeshift tourniquet. It made him wince and you tutted at him again.

“There, now let's get you to doc,” you yanked at his shirt to pull him away from the tree and pushed him to walk in front of you, “move it or lose it, big baby”

“You're mean after a battle,” he noted, “I like it”

“Next you're gonna tell me you have a kink for being bossed around,” you flirted.

“Maybe I do,” he purred back. You gave him a harder shove in the direction of the path as a blush swept across your cheeks. You followed him quietly down the path till you met back up with the others, half of them didn't even know anything had happened.

Mohawk rushed over, seeing Killer's arm, grabbing it maybe a little too rough and making Killer audibly wince. “What the fuck were you two doing?” Mohawk yelled, “playing hide the claw?”

“Yeah definitely, there's one in my pussy too,” everyone looked at you in shocked silence, “too far?”

Kid barked out a laugh while Mohawk dragged Killer away to the infirmary. Another strike of lightning nearby reminded you how unsafe this island was so you quickly followed them up the gangplank to go take a hot shower and change into dry clothes.

The ship was still rocking heavily by the time you finished your shower, but it'd at least made it back out to open sea past the dangerous rocks and heavy storm. You could see blue sky breaking through the clouds in the distance as you appeared back out on deck, the rest of the crew hard at work organising and storing the loot. You made your way to the infirmary to see if Mohawk needed any help, giving a short knock on the door before entering in case Killer had his mask off.

“Just me!” You announced as you slid inside, “You need your nurse, Mohawk?

“Can you wear a little nurse uniform?” Killer purred. Mohawk gave him a little smack on his sore side, making him groan.

“Ignore him, he's high as shit on pain meds right now,” the doctor rolled his eyes, “can you grab me some more sutures?”

“On it!” You smiled, glad to be of use. Killer's mask followed you as you moved, you felt a little like a prey being stalked by a predator, the thought made a shiver run down your spine. You brought the sutures to the bedside and Killer grabbed your ass with his good hand, making you squeal in surprise.

“Fucking hell,” you smacked him hard on the chest, “keep em to yourself big guy or I'll paralyze them” you growled. You weren't against Killer being handsy, per say, you just didn't think he would want this if he wasn't high, so it felt more responsible to scold him than to do anything to accidentally encourage it.

“You can do that?” Mohawk asked, a curious, plotting, glimmer in his eyes.

“Yeah I just gotta block the signals in the nerves,” you replied nonchalantly, “it's all just electric pulses”

“Coooool,” Mohawk definitely put that in his back pocket for later.

“How's he looking doc?” You asked, swatting Killer's arm away again. He made a silly little giggle under his mask, he was definitely high.

“Clean in and out,” he replied, tying off a stitch, “didn't hit anything important, he got lucky this time”

“I'm tryna get lucky again,” he tried to roll to grab you, this time Mohawk smacked him.

“That's it, no more moving mr. cloud nine ,” you clicked your fingers for effect and Killer went limp against the bed. Mohawk snorted, picking up the first mate's good arm and letting it flop uselessly to the bed.

“Awwwwww,” Killer pouted like a child scorned. You'd only paralyzed his limbs, his chest and head were still perfectly functional.

Another heavy roll of the ship had to sprawling over Killer, and he snickered as you clambered off him to stand upright again. “Do you need me in here anymore Mohawk?” you asked with a sigh as Killer made another feeble attempt at getting at you, “I have a feeling this one isn't going to behave himself while I'm still in here”

“Nah you're good,” he laughed, “get out of here before I have to sedate him”

You waited till you were at the door to unblock Killer's nerves, laughing to yourself as he audibly whined at you leaving.

After a successful mission, and proving that you were back in action, Kid was intent on having a party to celebrate. The waves were still rough and it was cold outside, still within weather range of the storm island, so unfortunately it had to be indoors. The rain had at least passed but nobody wanted to be out in the howling winds. The crew set up in the galley, most of the tables being covered with plates of shareable food and bottles of liquor, with tapped kegs of beer lined up along the wall. The food on the commander's table was especially stacked high, and you happily skipped over to start picking at it before Kid could come in and demolish the best bits.

It'd been a good few hours since leaving the island, dusk coming in heavy as people sauntered in for dinner a little later than normal to account for how long it took to make this much food. Killer entered not long after you, letting his hand breeze over your waist as he stepped around you to get to his normal chair. His injured arm was held in a sling, and he still seemed a little wobbly on his feet.

“Sorry about earlier,” he scratched the back of his neck with his good hand as he sat, “I hope I didn't make you uncomfortable”

“You're good,” you giggled, “got it all out of your system? I'm not gonna have to paralyse you again am I?”

“I hope not,” he scoffed, “I may have been off my rocker but that was weird as hell”

“Well I promise I won't do it again, unless you ask me to,” you winked, and a faint blush appeared on Killer's neck. “How's your arm?”

“Hurts a little now that the good stuff is out of my system, but its no where near as bad as when I fucked my arm,” he mused.

“How did you fuck your arm?” You asked, it was a curiosity you'd long had. You had to guess by the large amount of deep scarring that it'd been some sort of bad burn, but you couldn't tell if it was from fire or acid, or maybe some sort of devil fruit user.

“Ah, got caught in Heat's crossfire when we fought Shanks,” he scratched the back of his head, a little embarrassed, “not my finest moment but we were all a bit frazzled by Kid's injury”

“I never did ask anyone about Kid's arm either, did Shanks do that?” You asked as you settled in your seat now that you'd gathered a collection of food from the spread onto one convenient plate.

“Nah, his first mate did it,” he replied, working on his own plate. You noticed him reaching for something but with only one good hand it was tricky, so you stood and leaned across the table to start piling his plate with food. “Thanks,” he hummed, pointing at a few things he particularly wanted, which you happily grabbed for him.

“No problem, it's the least I can do after you got hurt protecting me,” you smiled, “I thought his first mate was a gunman? How did he cut his arm off?”

“He didn't,” Killer began picking at his plate as you poured him a drink and slid a straw in before sitting back down. Killer hummed in appreciation at the wordless gesture. “He shot clean through the bone with a haki-infused bullet. Mohawk couldn't do anything out in the field to save it, by the time we got back to the ship the blood supply had been cut off for too long and he had to amputate”

“Fuck, that's rough,” you frowned, pouring yourself a drink. You'd come to find whiskey was your liquor of choice in your time with the Kid Pirates. “Not that a burn that big could have been any fun either”

“It wasn't, but Mohawk is a good doctor,” Killer hummed, “we were out of our depth taking on a yonko that early. I think we'll be ready next time.”

“Yeah? Any plans on doing that soon?” You asked curiously.

“Before the end of the year,” Kid answered for him as he took his seat, followed by Heat, Double and Mohawk. Wire had apparently drawn the short straw for the watch. “But we're not going at it alone this time, and we have a powerful new weapon on our side,” Kid grinned at you.

“You don't seem like the type for alliances,” you noted, “who are you planning to ask?”

“Hawkins and Scratchmen,” he replied with a full mouth, “we're still figuring it out but we're gonna send word soon. One of the islands you two nabbed an eternal pose and map for is a decently secluded, small, spring island with what looks like on the map to be a castle. Island that size can't be too hard to capture, so the plan is to take it for a base when we get closer and then call the other two crews to meet there. A castle that size should be able to accommodate us all okay”

“That seems like a good plan,” you smiled, “I've never seen a castle in person, I hope it's haunted”

“Wait, you want it to be haunted?” Heat almost choked on his food.

“Yeah, have you ever heard of ghost hunters using EMF to detect ghosts?” You asked with an enthusiasm to your voice, “electromagnetic energy is something I can feel and manipulate, so I've always wondered if I could use my powers to sense or control ghosts”

“That's hardcore,” Kid blinked at you, “imagine controlling army of ghosts, that'll fuckin’ spook Shanks”

“Assuming ghosts are real,” you added, “I hope they are though, it would be cool”

“I guess we'll have to wait and see then,” Killer noted. He secretly had his hopes up though, watching you control a army of ghosts would be fucking cool.

Hours had passed, and everyone was well and truly into the partying spirit. The tables had all been pushed to the walls to make space for crew mates playing instruments and dancing. You danced along with them, definitely drunk, a glass of whiskey in your hand. The amber contents sloshed and spilled occasionally as you danced and laughed, spinning in time with the band, the dizzy feeling in your head making you giggle more. Your signature jacket had been ditched long ago as the heat of the alcohol in your veins made you flush, showing off the pale yellow satin slip style dress you wore daringly without a bra, paired with a pair of strappy white shoes with thick heels. Many of the henchmen, as well as the commanders, eyed you hungrily, the spinning making your tight skirt flare slightly and showing off the occasional flash of royal blue panties. Killer had almost choked on his drink the first time he spotted them, he had no doubt the colour was purposeful to tease him, everyone knew it was his favourite.

You pouted as the band took a break, drunkenly stumbling your way back to the raised platform where the commander's table sat to complain.

“Can't you make them play more?” You pleaded to Kid.

“They've been playing for hours, let them rest you floozie,” Kid laughed.

“Who you callin’ floozie?” You slurred, “at least my tits ain't out” you pointed at Kid's open vest. He tutted in response.

“Didn't you tell me once you could control sound?” Killer mused. He was mostly sober given Mohawk had given him strict instructions to not drink much with the pain meds.

“Did I?” You put a finger to your lips in thought, “I haven't done that in ages though”

“Go on then, play your own damn music!” Kid roared.

You gave him an annoyed frown, that quickly turned to a mischievous smile as your lust-addled brain hatched a plan. You smirked at Kid and skipped away, taking a guitar that had been left resting against a wall by one of the musicians and skipping back with it.

“Can you even play that thing?” Kid smirked.

“Not properly, and I mean I don't actually need it,” you replied, shoving the guitar into his hands, “but string instruments use vibrations to make their sounds, so it's fun to manipulate them. It's less ‘playing’ in the traditional sense, and more like using a tool. Hold this for me would ya?”

You handed Killer your drink with a cheeky grin and sauntered over to the approximate middle of the semicircle that the commanders were sitting in, raising a hand towards the guitar. To everyone's surprise it began to strum out a melody, like it was being played by a phantom musician.

“I summoned you, please come to me,

Don't bury thoughts that you really want.

I fill you up, drink from my cup,

Within me lies what you really want.”

Brows raised around the room as you began to sing, none of them having ever heard your honeyed singing voice before. In truth, you weren't as good a singer as you appeared, but your devil fruit allowed you to manipulate your voice as it left you, making it sound exactly as you wanted it to. You added a rhythmic clap to the melody as you continued to sing.

“Come, lay me down

'Cause you know this

'Cause you know this sound”

Suddenly all around you was a burst of music and colours, vibrant ribbons of light spinning and radiating from you in time with the music in hues of purples, pinks and golds. You danced along with it, slow and sultry in time with the building rhythm, the reflections of light on your skin and satin dress giving you an almost ethereal glowing appearance.

“In the middle of the night, in the middle of the night,

Just call my name, I'm yours to tame.

In the middle of the night, in the middle of the night,

I'm wide awake, I crave your taste.

All night long 'til morning comes,

I'm getting what is mine, you gon' get yours, oh no, ooh~

In the middle of the night, in the middle of the night, oh~”

The lights and sounds faded as you returned to just the strumming of the guitar, the beat previously carried by your claps now forming out of the air as you danced, a faint circle of purple swirling around you on the floor like heavy smoke, small flickers of heatless golden flames licking at your shoes. All eyes were on you, captivated by the mystic display.

“These burning flames, these crashing waves,

Wash over me like a hurricane.

I'll captivate, you're hypnotized,

Feel powerful, but it's me again.

Come, lay me down,

'Cause I know this,

'Cause I know this sound”

The wondrous lights and music reignited as the chorus came round again, the flames flourishing to engulf your calves and spread from your feet, sparkling embers floating up from the tips and surrounding you like glitter. Your hips swayed in time as you sauntered around your makeshift stage, your fingertips brushing against Killer's chin in a seductive manner as you passed by, his breath hitching as you did so.

As the chorus ended it was replaced again by the guitar, accompanied now by a faded, echoing rhythm, haunting almost. The clap-like beat returned as your voice did, just as haunting and sultry as the tune as you slowly paced towards Killer, a hand reaching out as if to beckon him with your siren song.

“And just call on me, ah, just call my name

Like you mean it”

The final chorus approached with another explosion of light and sound, the colours even more vibrant than before as images of sparkling stars and asteroids shot past you, like you had lifted into the night sky, or perhaps torn it down to do your will. The pastels and golds that had previously appeared as ribbons now formed vast, glimmering nebulas, morphing and forming the shapes of horses that circled you in grand galloping herds. Your dancing became more energetic, your arms reaching out to the heavens before sliding down your body in a sensual display, your hips swinging in time as you sang. Every eye in the room was on you, many of the henchmen standing crowded at the base of the raised platform to get a better view, hypnotized by the way you conjured a symphony of light and sound from nothing.

As the chorus ended so did your singing, the sound of the guitar now all that was left as you repeated the same chords from the beginning, rounding out your song. There was a great applause as it came to an end, wobbling drunkenly, or perhaps just exhausted, on your feet as you turned and gave a bow to the henchmen before returning to Killer. You took your drink back from him, and slid into his lap like it was the most casual thing in the world. In truth, the performance had made you somewhat horny, showing off for him, and in your drunken state you'd somewhat forgotten about the boundaries you'd put in place, though as your fruit burned through the alcohol and sobered you, you couldn't find the will to get up from him.

The henchmen let out wolf whistles as they disbursed, now that the show was over. Killer coughed to clear his throat as you wrapped an arm around his neck for support and sipped your drink. His good hand naturally found your waist to keep you comfortably on his lap, the other still in its sling but itching to touch your exposed thighs. You'd been careful to sit so your torso was at the opposite side from it, weary of hurting him. Your dancing and focus on him during the song had the desired effect, feeling now the half mast erection he had against the plush underside of your thigh as you sat side saddle across his legs. You could have purred when you felt it as you sat, and you ran your finger under his chin as it tilted towards you, scratching his goatee and giving him a playful smirk before returning your attention back to the rest of the group.

“Well fuck, if you could do that this whole time then why do we even bother having instruments on board?” Kid barked enthusiastically as he rested the guitar against the table.

“Probably because it's exhausting,” you replied, “controlling sound and light like that takes a lot out of me, if we get attacked tonight you can count me out”

“Like your drunk ass could manage a fight right now anyway,” Kid huffed. You poked your tongue at him. “I see the two of you are friendly again”

“Whatever do you mean, Captain?” You replied teasingly, still scratching Killer's chin like he was a prized pet, “can't a girl just take a rest on a very comfy piece of eye candy?” Killer huffed under his mask at your objectification. “Hush, chair” you poked his mask.

“Kinky,” Kid noted with a suggestive eyebrow wiggle before taking a swig of his drink. You gave him a toothy grin and he almost choked on the liquor.

Your attention returned to Killer as you felt him grow harder under you, perhaps he enjoyed the objectification after all. Both of you were tipsy, now that much of the alcohol in your system had burned off with the strenuous use of your powers. You yawned dramatically, nestling closer to Killer. “I'm tired, carry me to bed?” You gave him your best pleading tone as you ran a hand down his front. He may have been down one arm but you knew full well that he was more than capable of carrying you with only one. You swore you felt his dick twitch against your thigh as it strained in his pants. You leaned in close, your mouth near the side of his mask over where his ear would be. “Maybe to your bed?” you whispered in a sultry tone.

He made a little grunt and took your glass from you, placing it on the table behind him before scooping you up onto his shoulder, the hand of his usable arm firmly on your ass, to keep you from slipping of course. The commanders made jeers and whistles as he carried you away, and you flipped Kid off behind Killer's back, laughing at his shocked face as you made your exit.

A/n: I know we don't have the specifics of what happened to Kid and Killer's arms other than a snippet that Benn Beckman was responsible for Kid's but I saw a interesting diagram the other day about how the bullet must have shattered the bone to necessitate amputation and it got me thinking, so this is my personal theories on what happened to them.

[NEXT CHAPTER]

#one piece fanfiction #one piece smut #killer one piece #killer x reader #massacre soldier killer #heat one piece #heat x reader #kid pirates

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tildeathiwillwrite · 4 months

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Hero x Villain Whump Masterpost

Hero flees their abusive team and seeks solace with Villain.

Memes [1] [2] [3]

[Read on Ao3]

Parts 1-3

from @whumpishprompts Merry Whumpmas Event

Part 1 (contains: mentioned abuse, gunshot wounds, running away, death, swearing)

Part 2 (contains: painkillers, anesthesia mention, death mention, surgery, burn scars, mentioned abuse)

Part 3 (contains: blood, surgery, medical staples, referenced abuse, painkillers)

Parts 4-12

from @juneofdoom whump event

Part 4 (contains: mentioned death, gunshot wounds, deception, fire powers, swearing, revenge, death, whumper turned whumpee)

Part 5 (contains: PTSD, breaking and entering, sabotage, self-deprecation, swearing, harsh words, denial, mentioned injury, crying)

Part 6 (contains: fire, collapsing building, fatigue, magic exhaustion (in the superpowers sense), burns, dizziness, fear, adrenaline, cryokinesis, trapped, crying, guilt, resignation)

Part 7 (contains: swearing, death threats, referenced injury, secrets, collapsed building, paranoia, gun, unconsciousness, burns, handcuffs, ambushed)

Part 8 (CW: panic attack, crying, denial, manhandling, threats, power suppression cuffs, pistol-whipping, concussion, blood, PTSD, disassociation, captivity, separated)

Part 9 (CW: captivity whump, concussion, blood, swearing, gaslighting, shouting, referenced torture, referenced abuse, helplessness, superpower whump, torture)

Part 10 (CW: anger, fear, guilt, swearing, deception, choking, paranoia, last resort)

Part 11 (CW: choking, swearing, captivity whump, power suppression cuffs, scream, weapon, electrocution, unconsciousness, assumed death, shock, referenced injuries)

Part 12 (CW: concussion, captivity whump, referenced injuries, delirious, swearing, bridal carry)

#my writing #whump writing #whump #whumpblr #whump story #writeblr #hero x villain #superhero #masterpost #masterlist

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whumped-by-glitter · 6 months

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WOW's Birthday Event Day 4: Electrocution / Waterboarded / "Anything but that!"

⚠️ CW: Electrocution, Waterboarding, Non-Sexual Nudity (mentioned), Torture. (please let me know if I missed anything)

A HUGE shout out to @3-2-whump for beta reading so I could get this out today!

Day 3 Here <

Youngest was dragged off. They kicked and thrashed as hard as they could, cussing the men who held them out. One of them had finally had enough of it and punched them hard in the stomach.

“Shut the fuck up and cooperate, or you’ll get worse,” the man growled harshly.

Youngest doubled over, the wind knocked out of them, and collapsed. Before they could catch their breath, they felt themselves be hoisted up again. This time Youngest complied. They knew a cracked rib would make escape more difficult, they reasoned. They needed to stay focused on getting Whumpee and getting out of here. Maybe being captured isn’t such a bad thing, they’ll find Whumpee quicker this way, right?

When the hood was finally removed, they found themselves in a small sterile room with a single table that was about 6 feet long. The handcuffs were removed but before they could struggle, they were forced down into a high back chair. Their heart sank. This looked like an interrogation room. Whumpee was nowhere to be seen.

Their arms were secured to the armrests then their ankles to the chair legs. A sickening fear emerged when the head of a leather strap appeared in their field of vision. It was pulled across their throat by a set of dexterous hands. Youngest could hear it be pushed back through a hole on the other side of their throat before being pulled uncomfortably tight. They then heard it buckle behind them. They were completely immobilized.

Youngest could hear the door open behind them open. Whoever just came in caused the men on either side them to snap to attention.

“Well, well,” a voice came low in menacing before revealing itself. “it’s not every day my enemies come crawling to me on their hands and knees,” the man sneered, settling down in chair on the opposite side of the table.

Claudio! Youngest realized. They flushed red slightly at his taunt.

“So why did you come here?” Claudio asked in a light, somewhat amused tone.

“Release me, and release Whumpee to me and I will leave you unharmed,” Youngest demanded, summoning all of the bravado they could. Even to them the words sounded weak though.

Claudio gave a hearty, deep laugh. Wiping a tear of amusement from the corner of his eye, he replied breathily “Ooh, an ultimatum, I’m terrified. Exactly what do you plan on doing when you can’t even move?”

Youngest just spat at Claudio as the man leaned in to wait for an answer to his mocking question. Youngest flashed a grin when it hit him in the face.

Claudio’s face flashed anger momentarily before returning to his bemused expression and laughter. “Feisty, aren’t we? I like it.” He nodded at a guard that then proceeded to taser Youngest.

The electricity surged through Youngest’s body. They jerked and thrashed, their body moving on its own.

“Let’s get one thing clear boy,” Claudio hissed dangerously, “you are in no position to make demands, and certainly in position to be making ultimatums. Now, where’s the rest of your team? If you’re here, the rest can’t be far.”

“Bite me! I’m not telling you a damn thing, you bastard!” Youngest snarled in defiance.

“Cut off their shirt,” Claudio ordered one of the guards, grabbing the taser from the other. They strode confidently to the others side of the table. He leaned against it, not quite directly in front of Youngest. “Listen here you little shit, you’re going to tell me what I want to know. It’s up to you how much damage you're going to sustain before then.”

Claudio turned to the guard closest to him, nodding his head to the door, before following the guard out. “Bring me a dog,” Claudio ordered once out of earshot of his detainee.

It only took a few minutes before one of their trained attack dogs was brought to Claudio on a leash.

Claudio walked back into the interrogation room, the guard behind him had the dog in tow.

“Okay now where were we? Oh yes, ‘bite me’ I think was what you said. Say that again and Fido here will make it happen,” he gave the large Doberman a pat.

Youngest grew silent, eyes wide, flicking nervously to the muscular dog. They squirmed nervously.

“Now back to what I want know,” Claudio picked up the taser again. “Where are your friends hiding?”

Youngest flicked a glance over at the dog again, then back to Claudio. “Get fucked!” Youngest belted out, rashly. They did not want this man to know they were alone.

“Wrong answer,” Claudio chided menacingly.

The taser made contact with Youngest’s bare chest. Electricity tore through them once again. The restraints bit into their skin as their body contorted involuntarily with the current. Claudio hit them with it an additional two more times in quick succession, leaving Youngest panting for air. Their blood trickled out from under the restraints around their neck and wrists.

Before Youngest could get anything else out they were beginning unbound. Momentarily freed, they tried desperately to fight, but could not muster the strength. They were slammed to the table on their back, once again knocking the wind out of them.

Before they could recover Youngest found themselves being strapped to the table, once again completely immobile. They felt the legs of the table near their head be brought down. Youngest was now laying on an angle, their feet higher than their head. Claudio put a rag over their face, obscuring their sight.

“No, please! No! No!” Youngest screamed and struggled, realizing what was about to happen.

“You had your chance” Claudio sneered.

Youngest could hear the distinct scrape of a metal bucket against the floor. They braced themselves as best they, inhaling a deep breath.

Water began to pour over their nose and mouth. They almost instantly began to panic as the water burned going up their nose and into their throat. Their lungs began to ache then quickly burn. The breath they took in was forced out by the pain and fear. Instinctively they tried to gasp.

Gasping made it worse, so much worse. They gasped in water and wet rag, causing sheer unadulterated terror to engulf their body.

‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!’ Panic rushed through Youngest’s veins. The panic and sheer terror intensified as they tried to thrash, to buck, to do anything, but they couldn’t move more than arch their back an inch off of the table.

Youngest had never in their entire life had ever felt terror so raw, so all encompassing. Their lungs burned, their throat burned, their nose burned. They couldn’t move, they couldn’t scream, they couldn’t BREATHE.

Finally, blessedly the stream stopped. Youngest gasped in air, more intensely aware of how precious it was. Their face was wet from tears and water as the rag was peeled away. They coughed and sputtered.

“Where is your team? Where is Leader?” Claudio asked, grasping Youngest’s cheek, drawing blood.

Youngest could do nothing but cough and pant. They couldn’t find their voice. Their eyes were still wide with fear.

“Tsk, no answer? Okay then,” Claudio laughed cruelly. He began to put the rag back over Youngest’s face.

“N-no, please, a-anything but that,” Youngest croaked out weakly, their throat raw. They started sobbing.

“Oh, so you have an answer for me?” Claudio cooed.

“I-I came alone,” they reluctantly admitted, finally cracking.

“Oh, you have, have you?” Claudio narrowed his eyes, causing Youngest to flinch and shudder. “I would say smart boy for fessing up, but it would seem you are incredibly stupid.” Claudio gave the still bound captive a condescending cheek pat, “you pissed yourself too, you’re stupid and a coward.”

Youngest laid there, exhausted and completely embarrassed. everything from last night and today hit them all at once. The fight with leader, the run, their capture. The physical and mental exhaustion from the torture made so that they could barely lift their head.

Claudio turned away from Youngest to the guards. “Strip them, then throw them in solitary confinement.” He instructed, then glanced back at his prisoner, “if he struggles, rough him up.” Claudio left Youngest alone and vulnerable with the guards and attack dog.

Claudio’s Parting words struck deep. Youngest had nothing left in them, just exhaustion, pain, and an unbearable shame that ran so much deeper than just pissing their pants. The only thing they could think was ‘will leader even come?’

Event Prompt Post

My Event Masterlist

@whumperofworlds, @whumpsandbumps, @pigeonwhumps

#wow birthday whump #wow birthday whump day 4 #electrocution #waterboarding #whump

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1moreff-creator · 1 year

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An Analysis and Theories of The Purge March…

(By someone who knows very little about Milgram)

Hello Milgram people! First time posting an analysis about it, mainly because I only started getting into it like two days ago. I kept seeing it get mentioned in my dash and I thought "yeah these characters look mentally ill enough to be interesting I'll check this out." And wow, this thing is awesome!

Even though I'm missing massive amounts of critical information (I haven’t even watched all the MVs for the other characters yet), I still want to talk about my thoughts on the newest MV, Amane's "The Purge March". I'm sorry if a lot of what I say has been said before, I tried my best to research other opionions before defining my own, but I still know very little compared to others. Hope you can take something away from here anyways!

CW: Cults and indoctrination, child abuse, torture, waterboarding, electrocution, violence and murder, animal death.

Basic Rundown & Lyrics

Introduction

The video takes place in three main settings: the titular march, the place with the cat, and Amane's apartment/home.

Hold on, you may say. Can we be sure that's Amane's home and not some other place? Well, I believe so, based on this little sign here.

This translation was taken from Napkin's analysis on the MV, which was massively helpful and I recommend you check out yourself!

In case you forgot, Amane's full name is Amane Momose; that's her father on that picture. When combined with the context that Amane walked into the apartment on her own and with a small smile, it really makes it look like that is her home. Adittionally, a leaked storyboard from Milgram Premium apparently says the hand holding the taser belongs to Amane's mother, and I believe this is the case. Not because of the storyboard, as I don't usually trust that type of meta evidence, but because of some stuff I'll get to later.

Anyways, back to the video. We open with the march, alongside this lyrics:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen! It’s the beginning of a most wonderful day However, there are blasphemers and silent by-standers, who would have it otherwise We must not give into them, they are the ones that should be judged With pure, unsullied body and soul, let us preach all that is true and right

This sets up the main theme of the song: it's about how the cult Amane is in sees the concept of punishment and justice. Those who go against the cult, must be judged, they must be punished. I think it's worth noting that this part not only calls out "blasphemers", but also "silent by-standers". Amane's cult not only condemns """harmful""" actions, but also inaction. There is one part of the MV which I think manifests this, I'll get to it.

Flags and Ordainments

Then, we see four flags corresponding to each of the cult's... uh...

Okay, so, as a refresher. There's this four characters, right? From left to right, Yuri, Gozake, Riyone, and Gachata.

Certain theories claim these are cult leaders, and certain others claim they are just mascots or even deities and not real people. I believe the latter, but of course all theories are valid. I'll explain my reasoning later (take a shot), but for now, I need to establish what I believe.

Anyways, we see flags representing each of them attached to lyrics which are connected to them, indicating some of the cult’s ordainments.

’Tis ordained, thou shall follow thine destiny [Riyone] ’Tis ordained, thou shall discard vulgarity [Gozake] ’Tis ordained, thou shall deliver unto those thou believest in [Yuri] ’Tis ordained, thou shall stay thine course, then perish [Gachata]

Here's what I think they mean:

>Riyone, who has bandaids for ears, represents the cult's belief in medicine. Essentially, they denounce it, and their accepted MO is to only pray for the injured instead of healing them medically. So when Riyone 'says' "thou shall follow thine destiny", it's saying "accept your fate/situation, don't try to change your destiny". This is why we don't see Riyone doing anything other than punishing Amane in the first trial MV; the only thing you're meant to do in relation to Riyone and medicine is pray.

>Gozake has possibly the vaguest ordainment, that being “thou shall discard vulgarity.” Since it’s described as a monk in “Magic”, I believe this means to discard unnecessary, vulgar things, and only accept the things the cult accepts. There is indication that the cult denounces these type of trivial things, from some of Amane’s interrogation questions from trial one.

Q1: Do you have any special skills?

A: Nothing that I can call a talent. Perhaps studying. I do well in my Japanese class.

Q5: When you go to an amusement park, what do you like to ride?

A: That is a place I should not go to.

Q11: What kind of meat do you like?

A: I don’t eat meat.

Q14: Do you listen to music?

A: Not really, to songs that are highly entertaining.

Amusement parks are somewhere she shouldn’t go to, presumably because it’s considered vulgar. Perhaps she says she doesn’t have a talent because she’s not allowed to engage in a lot of activities. It’s certainly possible she doesn’t eat meat out of preference, but it could also be due to religious beliefs. And she only listens to songs which are “highly entertaining”, provided I’m reading that right because it’s worded a bit weird. The reason I bring that up is that we see Gozake teaching her to sing in “Magic”, which relates it to music. While that’s likely metaphorical, it’s possible the cult’s “songs” are the highly entertaining ones, and the rest are vulgar.

Worth noting for "The Purge March" though, Gozake’s flag is on the floor before being waved. It's pretty clear Amane holds some contempt against Gozake and/or his punishments.

I believe it’s because it is Gozake’s ordainment, “thou shall discard vulgarity”, that Amane most disagrees with internally and the one she’s most likely to break. I mean, obviously, she’s a child, she’s going to want to do all sorts of trivial, “vulgar” things for fun, that’s just what kids do. We even see a version her fumble with this flag later, implying she has broken this ordainment before.

This fits a lot of the lines in “Magic”.

Dear wise one, Am I worthy? Is it ok to spoil myself?

Spoiling herself here likely means doing things she wants to do, but which are considered “vulgar” by the cult. Her interrogation questions also imply it.

Q3: If you were allowed to do anything, what would you want to do?

A: Nothing really. I am not lacking anything.

Q17: What would you do if the world ends tomorrow?

A: If everything ends? Then, I might do all sorts of things I have never done before.

Notice how there are things she wants to do if the world ends, but she doesn’t want to do them now. That is because now, she’s still under the threat of consequence, the “vulgar” things she does can be punished. But if the world ends, then she can just do whatever.

>Yuri is meant to represent solidarity and generosity within the cult, as a sort of tactic to make all its members willing to help and lend resources to the cult. We see him collecting money in "Magic", as the animals "deliver unto those they believe in". That's why his clothes are all patchwork, as if to imply the cult is in need of money.

>Gachata represents order and obedience, that's what "thou shall stay thine course, then perish" means. I don't think I need to explain how that's connected to cults. It's styled after an alarm clock, as they represent a regularity of action, a "schedule". An alarm clock tells you when it's time to wake up and work, just like Gachata.

The Purpose of Punishment

We then see a version of Amane fumble with Gozake's flag as this lyric plays:

The “It can’t be helped”, from the scum who can’t be helped

There's something extremely important in this line. "The scum who can't be helped" are those who say "it can't be helped". In other words, acceptance of mistakes, blasphemy, etc, is the most unforgivable crime in the eyes of the cult. That's why "Leader Amane" slams her baton on the ground, causing this "helpless Amane" to sink, with this line.

That makes them doubtlessly, clearly, absolutely, unequivocally, beyond any doubt, GUILTY

The thing that makes them guilty is the sentiment that "it can't be helped".

What does that mean? It means that something is only forgivable if one acknowledges that it can be fixed. Giving up on improvement, claiming "it can't be helped", is unacceptable. And this is why punishment is so important. If someone doesn't accept punishment, they're claiming their faults cannot be helped by it, which makes them guilty.

(Also yes guilty is in caps because Amane was voted guilty in the first trial I think)

What's important, though, is that because of this scene, Amane is not "scum who can't be helped" in her eyes. Because she's both the one judging and the one being judged, that means she understands the value of her own punishment-

IN THE CULT'S EYES. I gotta clarify that sometimes I will speak from the perspective of the cult to make things clearer, but I do not agree with anything they do or believe, obviously.

So Amane believes she should be punished if she does something wrong, though obviously usually she isn't the one punishing herself. The punishment we see happen then is Amane being drowned, which is the punishment related to Gozake as we see in "Magic". Electrocution is connected to Riyone, physical blows to Yuri and verbal abuse to Gachata, please don't question it too much. Rain starts falling as she sinks, but clears after she's fully under and drowning, revealing a rainbow.

This rainbow shows up later a few times, and... frankly, it's hard to know exactly what the hell it means? But I think it represents the twisted and frankly horrifying view the cult has on punishment: even in the rain, which would be the pain of punishment, there is the bright light of improvement shining through it, being the rainbow. Even though Amane is suffering from drowning, she'll grow and improve from it. That is honestly disgusting to write but well here we are.

The lyrics here are:

I disavow you, eyes corrupted must be crushed So nary a sound can be uttered a second time, I’ll crush your throat too

Essentially, those who go against the cult must be silenced, their views disavowed (eyes crushed).

Then, we see Gozake's flag fading into the background as Amane sinks further. After that, we cut to real life, to Amane being waterboarded.

(Btw, I'm using "waterboarding" because it's faster than "controlled drowning", even though I'm not entirely clear if waterboarding is the right term for what she suffers through)

The lyrics are:

After you cry, repent, and kneel, it’s now your turn to say that hopeless “I’m sorry” x2

Amane claims it will soon be "your" turn to apologize and be punished, the "you" likely being her murder victim. How is Gozake related? Well, I believe that's alluding to an aspect of Amane's murder. In fact, this scene might be just a few minutes before her kill, as I believe she killed her victim after suffering from "Gozake's" punishment. I'll get there.

The Cat Incident

(Not the Kazui MV drop, the other one)

We then see what happened for Amane to be punished: she healed a cat. And the cult hates medicine. She gets spotted by a man and a small girl.

See the rainbow? That's because getting caught will lead to punishment, which will lead to improvement. I want you to know I actually feel disgusting writing that, but those are the beliefs of the cult.

Note the girl is holding a balloon with a symbol which is very similar to the symbol on multi-Amane's flags later, so these two likely belong to the cult as well. And since she's wearing the same uniform as Amane, they likely go to the same school, which may be ran by the cult.

I’ll talk about the balloon a bit more later, but for now, who are these two? I said I don’t believe the mascots are cult leaders, so it can’t be them. See, I actually believe they’re simply other average cult members, with nothing special at all about them. This is because the girl, and thus presumably the man with her, never enter Amane’s apartment.

See how that sign with 403 is above the door to the apartment? The balloon stops in front of it, but then goes away. (It's hard to show this with just images but trust me). By the way the string is positioned, it’s clear the girl is still pulling it. Thus we can conclude the girl never went in, and because of that (and the fact the girl has slightly different hair than Amane so she does exist), I believe the man merely told Amane’s mother what he saw, but left before Amane went home. Thus, I find it unlikely this man holds any more importance.

Why is he snitching, though? Well, it goes back to the cult’s beliefs of punishment. If something is wrong, it must be corrected. Remember, “silent by-standers” are just as bad as blasphemers in their eyes. So he wants Amane’s mom to do something about it.

(Btw, I don’t think the cat was a test necessarily, but the fact it’s collared and then gets killed could be an argument for that interpretation)

Oh, and for the uninitiated, I’m saying Amane’s mom because of one of her trial one interrogation questions:

Q: Is there anyone you hold in high esteem?

A: My father. My father has been on a journey for a while, but that is something very honorable.

So, only her mother is in the house.

The lyrics of the scene are relatively straightforward.

If you become a bad girl, monsters will come out. This is the magic that stops that from happening

Then the four “‘tis ordained” things again. Amane broke one of the rules by healing the cat, so she has to be punished, because her actions could cause bad things (monsters to come out). Again, in the cult’s eyes.

After this, we see Amane arrive at her home, where someone, perhaps her mother, is waiting with a taser. Electrocution is Ryone’s punishment, remember. Which makes me think it’s possible the cult specifically assigns each punishment to the ordainment of the mascot. So, because Amane broke Riyone’s ordainment about destiny, she gets electrocuted. That’s a bit half-baked as a possibility, but I think it’s worth mentioning.

The whole thing happens alongside the same “unequivocally GUILTY” line from before, again alluding to Amane receiving punishment.

(Btw, does anyone know what the note behind Amane’s head in that scene says? It fires off alarm bells for me, but my Japanese is null, so)

Amane’s Magical Girl Transformation

Then, we see Amane return to the place of the cat, except its collar is broken and the napkin Amane had used to heal it bloodied next to it, implying the cat died. Amane is obviously heartbroken, and looks up at her umbrella, before we cut to the march again.

There’s quite a few things to note. For one, notice the real Amane has a bruise on her forehead, implying she was hit, and thus received Yuri’s punishment. Assumedly she was also verbally assaulted during the ordeal, Gachata’s punishment so as to complete the set, but it’s sorta impossible to tell.

However, the lyrics are important. It’s stuff we’ve heard before:

I disavow you, eyes corrupted must be crushed So nary a sound can be uttered a second time, I’ll crush your throat too

With “I’ll crush your throat too” notably playing as the transition to the march completes.

But what is she disavowing? Well, think about it. The cult members are not meant to interfere with destiny, with life and death, as per Riyone’s ordainment. That means that while they’re not allowed to heal things, they’re also presumably forbidden from killing them. Though maybe I’m expecting too much logical consistency from a cult but you know. In any case, than means Amane disavows this act, and decides whoever killed the cat, must be punished.

The baton has already been connected to punishment when March Leader Amane slammed it down and caused the other Amane to sink. Which, with this context, we can presume the Drowned Amane to represent Amane before she was punished for healing the cat or some other “offense”.

But the baton is also representative of Amane’s murder weapon, as we’ll see later. And yet, it is also being related in this scene to an umbrella. Why?

Well, it’s simple. Umbrella’s represent protection, in particular protection from the rain which has been related with punishment through this MV. So, to protect herself, Amane punishes others. She does this because, since the cult idolizes punishment, their poster-child (as Amane has been implied to maybe be) should also deal out punishment.

In summary, when Amane sees a wrong, she wishes to correct it because it’s what the cult would want from her, and if she does what the cult would want from her, then she won’t be punished herself.

Q7: Do you like yourself?

A: I have never considered it from the perspective of love and hate, but I do think I am a good child.

…This kid worries me. Severely.

The idea that Amane will punish whoever killed the cat is reinstated in the following lines. As a swarm of Amane’s rushes forward with big grins, proudly holding the flag of the cult and its beliefs, the one with the baton walks forward with conviction. Look at the lyrics.

I don’t need it any more, if you’re going to break your vow Here and now, it’s my turn to tear you apart So there is no second time, I’ll give back the judgment that you gave to me

You wanna know why the swarm of Amanes are so happy? Because now she’s the one who get to punish, instead of being the punished. This is… an unfortunately common reaction to abuse.

It’s important to keep in mind what I said before; the Amanes are still holding the cult’s flag. They’re still acting on the cult’s beliefs. Notice how she specifically says the purpose of returning the punishment is “so there is no second time”, which fits what I’ve been talking about regarding punishment in the cult being to discourage repeat offenses.

Well, she’s following the cults beliefs… in theory. It was pointed out by iris-drawing-stuff in this post that Amane’s eyes have a shade of purple which is not associated with the cult, possibly implying she’s also acting on her own desires, but still rationalizes them through her cult’s twisted logic. The punishment she gave out is death, which sorta goes against the whole “follow thine destiny” logic I said earlier, and more pressingly, doesn’t really fit any of the four established punishment methods of the mascots. Well, I guess Yuri if you squint, but it still isn’t supposed to kill presumably. So she’s not actually entirely going by what the cult says when she kills her victim.

… This kid really worries me.

But hold on. Didn’t I say the symbol of the flags is actually different from the balloon? Is that significant? Well, I think it could be. It could represent how Amane’s views on her cult were changed by the punishment she received after healing the cat.

Think about it. The balloon’s symbol is more simplistic, and is on, well, a balloon. Something childish, something which offers simple bliss without anything wrong about it, and something fragile. I believe this represents how Amane viewed her cult before the cat incident. It was just a nice little thing that brought joy and didn’t require any more thought; it’s a more simplistic viewing, that’s why the symbol is more simplistic. Any small punishments, like Gachata’s finger-flick at the start of “Magic”, aren’t anything to write home about. Obviously I think she’s downplaying the extent of the abuse, but in her mind it wasn’t a big deal.

(That and I imagine the cult doesn’t feel like spending much money on more detailed balloons of all things)

However, this simplistic view “stays at the door” the day of the cat incident, as the other girl never enters the house. This is because after this, Amane’s view on the cult becomes more complex.

And that’s why we then see the symbol on the following flags. Flags are certainly something more mature, and the design is more complex. It is no longer simply colors on a balloon, it represents a fully formed ideology. After the incident with the cat, Amane began understanding the “””value”””” of punishment her cult pushes, and so wishes to begins to act accordingly.

Have I gone insane? Buddy, I was already insane before this, this is nothing new.

Amane’s Justice

Anyways, keeping in theme with the idea that she’s acting on the ideals of her cult, we see her twirling her baton of punishment in front of the four mascots, the rainbow of change after punishment firmly in the background.

It’s important to note, she is firmly planted on the mascots’ side, fighting in their behalf, which is part of what makes me believe she didn’t kill a cult leader as some theories state, but obvs that’s an opinion. The lyrics here are more of the same, Amane is the one punishing now.

After you cry, repent, and kneel, it’s now your turn to say that hopeless “I’m sorry” x2

However, something interesting happens right after. The lyric:

You’re sorry? I don’t care! Please, go ahead and die already

-plays as the baton she’s holding becomes stained with blood, indicating her intent to kill.

This is what separates Amane’s desires from the cult’s. The cult would want her to keep the victim alive as long as they can learn from their punishment and fix what’s wrong, but Amane killed her victim, which sorta goes against that. She’s a child, traumatized and hurt and at her limit, obviously her mind is trying to justify anything that would get her suffering to definitively stop. She explains the reasoning right after.

Remember MY cries, MY repents, MY words of “I’m sorry” that I said to you?

She said sorry, she wanted to repent and change, but her abuser(s) never stopped, so why should she? She should be allowed to go all the way, ignore her abuser(s) pleas of sorry and deal out whatever punishment she thinks fits their crime, right?!

At this time, the video transitions from the march to reality, the baton turning back into the umbrella for protection.

However, two things remain the same: the rainbow of punishment, and the look on Amane’s eyes, showing her excitement. This is to show that her wish to punish her abuser(s) isn’t merely a fantasy, but extends to reality as well.

And that gets us to the final (or, second to last I guess,) shot.

Let’s talk about this.

A Theory on a Murder

Let’s start at the beginning.

The Victim’s Identity

So, I’ll kill the suspense. I think Amane killed her mom. The most direct evidence I have for this is a combination of two of her trial one interrogation questions.

Q13: Who do you want to meet right now? A: My father. I want him to praise me for working hard.

So as far as Amane is aware, her father is alive. However:

Q9: Tell me what your family consists of. A: It was my father, my mother, and I.

Past tense. Peculiar.

That’s obviously a pretty big one, but there’s a bit more. As the lyrics imply, the person Amane killed was someone who had previously “punished” her. But as I also pointed out, it seems unlikely that it was a cult leader, as she is facing away from the mascots when she declares her murderous intent.

Cult Leader Theory runs into a contradiction under this interpretation (and it’s important to clarify, other interpretations are obviously valid, I’m just talking about how I see the MV). If the only people abusing Amane are the cult leaders, then she shouldn’t be facing away from them when she begins her crusade of punishment, and if someone other than the cult leaders is punishing her, then why are the punishment methods each related to one leader?

This is what leads me to believe the alternative: that the mascots are merely fictional characters who represent some of the cult’s ideals. Under that theory, it is Amane’s mother who punishes her, using a combination of all the methods associated to each mascot. And thus, it is her who dies.

There’s another thing that solidifies this belief in my eyes, but for that, we have to explain:

Murder Method

(Now this is more my comfort zone <- Top ten things to never say about murder IRL)

I’m not entirely clear how important exact method is usually, but I swear, this is interesting. If nothing else out of curiosity.

Based on that scene we have of the murder, we can observe the following things.

>There is only one door with the light still on.

>Going from this door to the corpse, there is a trail of water puddles. Since the bigger puddles are closer to the door with the light, it can be assumed it’s the door to the bathroom.

>The corpse lays on a room at the end of the hall, presumably opposite to the entrance (note the shoes at the bottom of our perspective). I will call this room, quite aptly, the murder room.

Now, some of you may take issue with that. Based on the card Amane holds up in her ‘inmate segment’ of “Undercover”, it looks as if her victim died in the bathroom.

(Apologies for the quality)

Those images are meant to represent the room or general area where the murder (or “murder” depending on who you’re talking about) took place.

Here's the issue, though. The corpse doesn’t appear to have been dragged, as there are no bloodstains outside the murder room. So the room on the card is most likely the murder room, which brings up issues for the bathroom idea. Like how several elements near the door to the bathroom don’t match what we see around the murder room (no, the floor wiper-looking thing alone doesn’t count, nothing else comes close to matching), how the floor would be nonsensical because why are we putting a wooden floor on a bathroom, there apparently being a door behind the curtains, among other stuff.

I don’t know what the murder room is, necessarily, but it doesn’t seem to be the bathroom. Probably not a kitchen either since there’s cooking utensils on a sink in the hallway. My bet’s on a dining/living room of some kind, which… has a sink for some reason, but it’s practically impossible to tell.

>The time is around 5:00, based on the clock we see (though admittedly I find it weirdly hard to tell). This isn’t important, but pointing it out makes me feel smart, and attentive! It almost looks like I know what I’m doing!

>We have a kill-shot from “Undercover”, meaning we know something like this happened.

As you can see, Amane’s victim was beaten with some kind of… stick? Pole? Cylinder? It doesn’t matter too much what exactly it is, so you can say anything from a metal pipe, an actual baton, an Inconvenient Cylinder of Unknown Purpose (ICUP)… I’m just gonna go with umbrella, because even though I question its efficacy as a murder weapon, it fits thematically and is at worst a fun headcanon.

So, uh, what do we do with this?

Prelude; Water Puddles and Gozake

Gozake is likely connected to the murder in some way. That’s because the “Old Amane”, the one concerned with “vulgar” things who hasn’t started punishing others’ wrongs, dies underwater and reaching for his flag. This is her transformation into perfection in the cult’s eyes, which involves punishing others and thus the murder of her mother. Thus, it can be concluded Gozake has some connection to the murder. I’ve already established why I don’t think he’s the victim or even a real person, so we have to find some other way to connect him.

And I think the water puddles make the possible connection quite clear. I think those puddles come from Amane herself, and she was likely waterboarded right before she killed her mother. As waterboarding is the method connected to Gazoke, this explains the connection.

Amane in the Bathroom

(Amane flying solo~ /ref)

Of course, I still think it was Amane’s mother dealing out the punishment. But if you think about it, why would Amane’s mother let her walk out from the bathroom when she was still soaking wet, especially onto a wooden floor? Well, that’s where the next part comes in. I believe there was a moment where Amane was left alone in the bathroom after being waterboarded.

Apart from that line of reasoning, which is my strongest piece of evidence for this, I want to draw attention to the fact someone came out of the bathroom, but left the light on. Since that’s not the case with any of the other rooms, it makes me think Amane herself was the last to leave that room, as her mother may not like leaving unneeded lights on.

But that’s sorta weak. In truth, I like this possibility because I think it can explain one thing in particular: Amane’s silhouette scene in “Undercover.”

It’s important to note these scenes always include the prisoners in some way or another, so it’s be weird for Amane to break the trend. Thus, this is likely Amane.

But what are we looking at? The water sorta looks like rain more than a simple shower head, and it certainly doesn’t look like waterboarding. However, the floor sorta looks like bathroom tiles, so we can’t rule out the possibility.

In fact, I actually do think this is in/near the shower. But as I said, it doesn’t look intense enough for waterboarding, and Amane is face-up on her back instead of the kneeling position we see her in during the other shower scene.

That’s why I think this is directly after a waterboarding session, not during. In particular, it would be the moment Amane’s mother leaves her alone in the bathroom. While the girl usually kneels during her torture, she may afterwards collapse on the floor and roll over from pain and exhaustion. Or something. And her mother… left the shower head on… for some reason? Maybe she went to look for a towel to dry up Amane? Maybe she needed something else and this is actually mid-session? Or maybe the rain’s metaphorical. Point is, I think this makes the most sense.

But if you’re not convinced by that, there is actually something else about the murder which makes me think Amane being left alone in the bathroom is what most likely happened.

A Matter of Position

Here's the thing. You can see the victim's hand peeking out from the door. Now, it looks like the hand is palm-down, which doesn't quite seem to fit the "Undercover" kill-shot, but that's actually simple to explain.

The "Undercover" kill-shot is likely taken moments before the victim's death, as Amane is holding the weapon in the air. But what if we extend "moments" to "seconds"? Well, I think it's possible Amane's mom managed to push her off briefly, getting a moment to turn around to turn and try to crawl away. Obviously Amane recovered quickly and managed to kill her anyways, but this little scuffle would explain how the hell her hand ended up palm down. It's the simplest explanation in my mind.

Amane's position isn't weird either. No matter what happened, she could have just stepped away from the body before taking a moment to look at it.

The weird thing, though, is the fact that we can see the victim's hand at all.

See, based on the "Undercover" shot, it seems like the victim must have had their back to the door before they fell to the floor. If you think about it, it would be really hard for them to end up with their hand there otherwise. However, if they had their back to the door, then Amane must have been facing the door as per the kill-shot.

This would be easier to explain if I had...

If I had visuals...

You know, like a- like a diagram.

(You thought you could escape my murder diagrams?! You fool!)

Why is this important? Well, because this means that, unless there was some crazy scuffle in that room (unlikely, as any actual fight would be near impossible for Amane to win), Amane was in the room before her mother entered. Obviously, this sort of only makes sense if Amane was left alone in the bathroom for a moment. Here's sort of the series of events I'm envisioning.

Does this make sense? How crazy am I going here?

Well, I think it follows. This is sorta what the evidence seems to be pointing at.

But it raises one big question. Why is Amane going to the murder room, then? If her mom is on the other side of the apartment, and she wants to kill her, what is she doing?

Well, I believe she's looking for a weapon. The blunt object seems like a possibility, but something like that could probably be improvised with almost anything, it wouldn't require going to that room in particular. No, I think Amane's actually looking for something more specific.

The Second Murder Weapon, and the "Magic" Kill-shot

Have you ever pondered how weird it is that “Magic” seems to have no allusion to Amane’s murder, at all? All the other trial one MVs have at least a reference to it, even if it’s as short as Mahiru’s look of horror in the final frame of her MV. But “Magic” doesn’t seem to have anything like that at first glance.

Well, here’s the thing. Now that we know a bit more, it’s easier to tell what time the kill-shot would have to happen. And it goes back to the wand Amane receives at the end of “Magic”.

As you know, when Amane receives this wand, she becomes the “perfect poster-child” of the cult, at least in her head. This is represented by an entire magical girl transformation sequence.

But when does that happen? If you’ve been paying attention, the transformation from “the regular Amane” to “perfect poster-child” Amane happens when she begins to understand and carry out the cult’s doctrine of punishment; when she kills her mother. In fact, you can even see in the frame we have of the murder, Amane is shown not in her real uniform, but in the March Leader clothes, showing her transformation is no longer a fantasy, but has become reality. Not literally, obviously, but metaphorically. She has become what she considers the ideal cult member.

So it’s fair to say then, that when Amane undergoes the same transformation in “Magic”, what we’re seeing is the time Amane killed her mother. And this transformation happens when she picks up the wand.

If this interpretation is right, then the wand is directly linked to the murder. And there is a very, very interesting detail about this wand.

Judges, jurors, and executioners. That’s a lightning bolt.

It’s not a wand. It’s the taser.

I mean, they could have chosen literally any other symbol to put there, right? A star, a heart, the clouds of the cult’s logo, even a rainbow. But no, it’s a thunderbolt. And it’s not even limited to just the wand, either. Notice how lightning strikes behind her right after she picks up the wand, and how her socks are styled in a lightning pattern.

(Don’t mind the blue in the background: that may look like a water puddle, but it’s always there, so I don’t think it means anything)

Now, to be clear, her socks are always like that in “Magic”, but the point stands. It’s a motif that repeats quite a few times, and yet, it’s nowhere to be seen in “The Purge March”.

Well, aside from the electricity of the taser.

I believe this is because “The Purge March” places more emphasis on the baton as the weapon, but there’s the thing. The baton and the wand aren’t the same thing. Not only is the baton longer, it has absolutely no allusions to thunder or electricity whatsoever. But since they’re both connected to the murder, I believe they’re both different murder weapons. The baton is the blunt object which actually killed the victim, and the wand is the taser.

That would explain how Amane was able to overpower an adult. She first incapacitated her mother with the taser, then started beating her with the "baton". It would also explain why she went into the murder room on her own. She was looking for the taser.

This is "Magic"'s kill-shot, I think. She points the wand at the screen, in a way which sorta looks vaguely like holding a taser, while these lyrics play.

I take an oath! I can only become a better girl!

And we've established what being a good girl is in the eyes of the cult, someone who punishes evil.

Q4: Do you think that your family is proud of you? A: Of course. No daughter is as exemplary as I.

Isn't that a concerning sentence.

Add this to the list of reasons I don't think she killed a cult leader. At the end of "Magic", after this shot, we see her among the four mascots with no indication any of them are hurt.

"Magic" underplays violence a lot, but I think for the murder, that takes the form of hiding the mother from view entirely, behind the camera.

So, a summary of how I think the murder went down.

Closing Argument wait wrong series

-After seeing the cat has died, Amane decided her mother should be punished as per the cult's beliefs. But she isn't looking to get forgiveness out of her mother; Amane was never forgiven, so her mother wouldn't be either.

-However, she wasn't able to get to the plan right away. Her mother was angry at her some nonsensical reason and waterboarded her before she could do anything.

-At one point, her mother left the bathroom, leaving the water running. Amane rolls over on the floor in pain and exhaustion, which is what we see in the silhouette scene in "Undercover".

-After catching her breath, Amane stands and leaves. She needs to look for the taser her mother usually used to punish her. She goes the other way her mother went, into the dininig/living room/bedroom/whatever it is, and picks it up.

-Her mother noticed the water puddles leading to the murder room, and followed Amane in. When she did, she saw her rummaging around somewhere she shouldn't have been, so she rushed further into the room to stop her.

-Too late. Amane had picked up the taser, and now turned to shock her. Her mother was incapacitated instantly, falling to the floor and writhing in pain.

-Amane grabbed an umbrella/baton/convenient cylinder and started beating her mother with it. This is the "Undercover" kill-shot. Even though her mother plead for forgiveness, Amane wouldn't listen, the same way her mother hadn’t listened to her pleas of forgiveness.

-The mother managed to briefly push Amane off, and tried to crawl away. But Amane quickly recovered and kept going until her mother was fully dead.

-Amane stepped off her mother's corpse, stepping over her and turning to look at it. By dealing out punishment, she has become the perfect follower for the cult. The March Leader.

What did we learn?

Well, uh, not much. Apart from morbid curiosity, there isn't much to gain from murder method usually. But there's still a few observations we can gleam.

For one, the whole thing with Gozake and its connection to the murder because of the waterboard thing, and possibly the "Undercover" silhouette scene. But if I'm right about the taser thing, then that means Amane's murder was more well-thought out than we had believed. Something like going to pick up the taser isn't exactly something that comes from a heat of the moment decision. She went in not just with an intent to kill, but an actual plan. Combined with an evidently high pain tolerance, seeing as she did all this right after being tortured, this poses her as quite a dangerous character.

Basically, I think it’s silly to say Shidou wouldn’t be killed by this kid. Y'all we might be fucked.

Verdict

(Oh yeah this is a thing we have to do)

First, I want to clarify: I do not have all the information here, so you probably shouldn't listen to me. Again, I've been here two days. But still, I think voting innocent is the... uh, better answer.

I'm gonna be real, I don't think either of the options are good here. A guilty verdict would make her significantly more volatile, because as we've seen, Amane reacts violently to being hurt. She's also not going to listen to us, since she's claimed she won't listen to the voices. I don't think she's telling the complete truth there, but the sentiment is likely true, she will not be swayed by just us. But an innocent verdict would validate the cult's beliefs of idolizing punishment, which would encourage her to attack Shidou.

But here's the thing. If she doesn't listen to us on guilty verdicts, it's possible she won't care too much about us validating the cult's beliefs. I think the act of forgiving her and showing we're not trying to hurt her is probably the best way we have right now of trying to reach her.

The only argument for guilty would be trying to get the physical restraints on her so she doesn't kill anyone, but I'm not sure we should trust that aspect of the first trial guilty verdicts to apply very well to this situation. If I'm right about her murder method, it would actually probably be pretty difficult to stop her I think, and as far as I'm aware there's not even confirmation the same rules from the first trial will apply again (I might be wrong about that). Frankly, I think as long as we can secure an inno on Kazui, we'll be safe from actual murder so long as we're able to keep Amane as predictable as possible. A guilty verdict would make her more unpredictable, I think, so an inno verdict would be better?

Frankly, I don't know. I think we're fucked either way. All the verdicts of the first trial, not just hers, have led us to quite the mess, but it was never going to go any different way. Shit was always going to get wild.

So here's my final conclusion: since I don't think the verdict can be trusted to properly help the group one way or another, we should vote to help Amane, the only one we know we can reach with this vote. And right now, she needs an innocent verdict.

Also I am insanely biased this kid needs help I'm not guiltying her. Call that part of the Milgram experiment ig.

Conclusion

The Purge March gives us better insight into the actual beliefs of the cult, mainly in relation to their views of punishment and reform. We also got a more detailed look at Amane’s murder, and the motivations behind what she did. Overall, while neither voting option seems great at the moment, that’s because they are unlikely to help with the tensions in the group. That means we’re going to have to vote for Amane, and the only way we’re going to make progress with her is by voting innocent. At least, that’s my view.

This was fun! I look forward to diving into the other MVs and going insane over them too, but for now I wanted to start with this one since it’s the most recent one and the one which actually piqued my interest enough to check out Milgram. If you made it this far into my insane ramblings, then… may kami-sama have mercy on your soul. Take care!

(Oh also tagging @sunlit-haru because he asked nicely)

#milgram #milgram project #amane momose #the purge march #milgram theory #hello milgramers i seek to go insane #is this how i do it?#this things wild i love it #i am so incredibly lost #it’s great

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50cal-fullauto-astarion · 1 year

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↮ for the sake of having you near [two]

[ part one ] [ part two ] [ part three ]

captain john price x f!veteran!reader (no use of ‘y/n’) 5.7k words

cw: descriptions of gun violence & gunshot injuries, suicide, murder, minor character death, reader is an amputee & the same age as price, foul language, mentions of terminal cancer, extremely divorced-but-still-in-love behavior from two people that consider one another soulmates (some of these aren’t out-and-out cw’s, but points that deserve noting) ↮ Twenty years you had known John, and for seventeen of them you were married. After a career-ruining injury in the field, you were forced out of the service, and the marriage did not survive your survival. But: when John goes on leave, he always finds his way home to you. (another shoutout to @alittleposhtoad who has been nothing but an on-going cheerleader and inspiration for this project, for whom this entire work is for. it wouldn't exist as well it does without her, and i owe her the hell out of my gratitude.)

The first bookend holds in place a cold, but dry for-now day in November 2003, where you shriek awake in bed beside John. You do this because he pole vaults out of bed, shouting, “We fuckin’ overslept!”

“Are you fucking kidding?! We’re going to miss the bus. What happened to the fucking alarms?” You lurch up like you’ve been electrocuted, legs tangled insanely in the bed sheet.

“I don’t bloody know!” he grunts, bare-assed and running around the room, trying to get his clothes back on. You jump up and run as well, and take the clothes he throws your way—his shirt, your flannel sleep pants, one sock of his and one of yours, but your bra is simply gone. Perhaps it’s gone to heaven. Perhaps it’s stuck to the headboard and neither of you’ve simply looked. Altogether too busy rushing.

You both tear through the hotel room, and you’re almost out the door when he turns sharply, busting your nose with his chin, leaving you both hissing and confused. “Dress—your dress, on the loo door,” he starts, squeezing back past you as you swear and straighten. Almost forgot the damned dress!

On any other day forgetting the dress or missing the bus might not be as big a problem—it would be a total nothing, because you and John have scored a fat two weeks of leave together, and you’re going to go to Iceland at the end of the week for four days.

The issue is, if you forget the dress, and miss the bus, you can still go to Iceland at the end of the week for four days, but it won’t be a honeymoon. You’re getting married today, in John’s mate Grisham’s back garden in Sussex.

He bombs back with the £60 clearance wedding dress over his shoulder in a garment bag, clapping you on the ass, “Go, go-go-go-go!” in a jittering singsong. His Jordan’s aren’t even tied.

Between checkout and the wild, harebrained sprint down the empty lane, you almost don’t make it. It takes you pounding on the side of the bus as the engine growls as it starts to pull away to get it to stop. You rush aboard, dumping your fare in spare change, telling the driver between gulps for air, “Thank you. So much. Jesus. We’re getting married.”

“Mhm! Lovely!” the driver looks like she wishes you’d not talk to her. John scoops up your hand when you’re sat, giving you a bright-eyed grin. It doesn’t bother you at all that you’ve only known one another for three weeks. Felt like you were finding him after a lifetime of looking.

You make it to Grisham’s in time for the clouds to darken and brood angrily as a hen waiting on eggs. Grisham, a battle hardened Staff Sergeant in John’s unit, is in the midst of a shave when he answers the door. He grabs John’s shoulder, grumbling, “Need to shave, piss-ant, to the water closet with you,” causing John to laugh and bully his way from the grip. To you, Grisham says, “Mornin’, sweetheart, Jezza’s got the bedroom sorted for you,” giving you a squeezing half hug.

You look back on the day with bittersweet fondness. So many there and gone memories, places once full that now were left empty in the halls of your life.

John had pulled his squad mate, Darian, to the side, and only sounded joking when he said, “Skeeter, mate, I respect your fashion choices. You know this, yeah?” slinging an arm around his neck. “If you wear that fuckin’ footie jersey to my ceremony, I will beat the fuckin’ piss out of you.” Darian put his hands up in surrender and changed, grinning so beautifully and widely it showed his perfect molars. A gorgeous man, always laughing.

He’d been court-martialed and found unfit to stand trial for murdering his fiancé during a psychotic episode in 2010. He was adamant that he was saving her from being kidnapped by the sex traffickers his unit had been dealing with for years in Thailand. The episode never ended. Last you’d heard, he was still being held custody in a mental facility. He’d just…cracked.

The rain broke open as you read your vows off a sheet of printer paper, and it ate away at the words you worked so hard to put together. John gave you a look that asked in challenge if you could hack it, and you’d just stuffed the paper down your bodice and freestyled your vows off the cuff. Soaking wet, intoxicated to the point of shaming each and every lotus-eater on the man in front of you, you grab the lapels of his dress uniform and haul yourself up to his ear.

You don’t know why this quote comes to you, other than you know his love of crushingly sad Russian novels, all thick enough to act as door-stoppers. Other than the fact that the exact moment you fell in love with him was the moment he’d restarted Doctor Zhivago for you, to read to you as your fucked-out bodies cooled against one another in his bunk, reaching behind your head for the faded paperback on the window sill just beyond his bed.

“You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.” You were panting at the end of the passage, unsure entirely how badly you’d mangled it, and John sat tight and straight under your hands, rain soaking his hair almost black.

You push through. You are nothing if not deadset on seeing a job done, and he’d thrown a challenge down at your feet. Picking up another quote that had burned into your mind endlessly, you finish, “I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely,” pressing a kiss to his neck before dropping back on your feet, heart slamming against your ribs as if it were borne of a wrecking-ball instead of a mother.

John’s heartbeat slams like war drums in his chest, and you can see his pulse jumping in his neck. Everything. Everything. Everything. That’s what the look in his pale blue eyes calls you, reading loud and clear that you were the reason his soul had made landfall on terra firma, and not a planet circling a different celestial body.

Grisham swears, starting to gather up food, running it back indoors. It wasn’t supposed to rain for another two hours, enough time for a small reception, enough time to send the two of you trotting off to another friend’s house to borrow their loft space until you were to leave. He tells most to sit still, to finish watching the ceremony, and his fiance, Jezza, helps him in the mad rush.

But they both stop to watch John snap his arms around your waist, pulling you in tight, kissing you to close out the ceremony. Then they jumped and yelled like football hooligans, cheering for the both of you. And so did the rest of the gathered.

Grisham met his end at the barrel of his own sidearm, watching the sunset through the window of he and Jezza’s bedroom. It was a soft, temperate afternoon in late March of 2014. He had simply seen too much, his heart had always been gentle, he had loved and cared deeply for nearly all he met. When he accidentally killed a child who’d bolted in front of his scope at the last moment, running for his mother, it had broken the last thing tethering him to this place. He’d imagined the face of his youngest son as the bullet cut through the boy’s chest. A barrel to his temple, a quiet afternoon, and Jezza found his brains painted across their bedspread moments after the muffled pop that sounded throughout the whole home.

There are faces in the small crowd, one after another after another, that you recognize from military portraits displayed at their funerals, but, then, at that moment, with freezing rain soaking your hair, and pouring down your back, you couldn’t imagine a single death occurring in the next seventeen years.

It feels selfish, really, to count your marriage among them, when so many of your mutual friends had faded into the dark and gotten lost.

After you’d been forced out of the service, you’d come back to an old hobby. Your entire life, you’d sculpted. Often, just small, silly things–an ashtray here, a little horse head there–but the decades had put practice into your hands, and rendered you past the expert level. Not bad for someone who spent their college-aged years humping two and a half stone rucksacks across all the different environs of hell.

The largest shed just beyond the car park shed–which John simply does not park his Jeep in, for reasons still mysterious to you in the three days he has returned to the rectory–is your sculpting studio.

It’s a utilitarian space, plenty roomy, with pedestals for larger projects. There is a much more comfortable bench running along one wall under a beautiful window looking out onto the rectory, roomy and the perfect height for a barstool.

Tools are scattered about the entire area, the definition of organized chaos, and you keep yourself occupied by occasionally looking out the window, watching your ex-husband work on a project he has suddenly decided is of utmost importance: a ramp for a neighbor’s elderly dog to get in and out of their bed with. He’s been busy designing all morning, and now he builds in his carpentry shed, leaving the doors wide open to catch the breeze and vent the sawdust.

You think he is, perhaps, distracting himself. It is the second anniversary of his father’s death. The way that you understand the man you had married, you know he has not processed it. He’s endured too much death, and the ability to grieve has been cut out of him, or atrophied. He stays, always, vacillating between denial and depression.

Under your hands is a specimen of your specialty. A living death mask. It is something that had become your signature in the years since your honorable discharge.

Your busts were built of the faces of the deceased, right at the moment of their last breath. What had started as a grim coping mechanism, starting with your own face all those years ago–now hanging on your studio’s wall, face frozen forever in an expression of wide-eyed confusion, mouth peeled back from your teeth in a gasp–had become prize winning art.

You sculpt the face of an alternative model, who had died of an overdose. It was commissioned by her agent, her own mother, wanting to cast it in bronze, to later reproduce as jewelry. You’d initially thought it had been a reprehensible request, but the cheque was too large to turn down. Your parents’ medical bills are mounting as they grow older and live off a fixed income, and you would not dare ask John for the help.

Not because he wouldn’t give, nor that he would hold it over your head in a power play, no. Because he would open his wallet without thought and tell you to drain him dry, and he’d do it humbly and hopefully.

You look back to the face under your hands–a clay rendering of sloppily-cracked eyes, a mouth sloping open in fogged mid-death, brows knotted in confusion. You brush your thumb over a scar hugging the left nostril. Pressure mounts in your chest, and you have to move, or you will crack. Because the bust will crack if you leave it bare, you pack a damp cheesecloth around it before you leave, stepping out of your studio, stretching your back.

Your steps take you to John’s workshop, waiting at one side of the doorway for him to stop running the table saw. He wouldn’t cut a finger off, but, still, you worry and practice good judgment.

He does turn it off after it screams through a plank of white oak–something a little too fancy for an overweight dachshund, but, it’s his wood and projects, he can choose his materials. It will be a nice piece for the owners, at any rate.

“Everything alright, Prem?” he asks, pushing his safety glasses onto his scalp. You shrug and nod, pushing down on the hip over your amputation, feeling tight and locked up.

“Just fine. Wanted to make sure that we were still on for dad’s dinner tonight,” you say, trying to choose your words like picking pearls. You do not want him spooked, and you do not want him feeling like his father’s birthday is easily discarded. It is a fine line to walk. “My head’s everywhere today, and I don’t want to head out on errands without confirming.”

He snorts, raising a brow, throwing you one of his signature, closed-mouth grins. “You? Forget anything? Cold day in hell before that happens,” he chuckles, putting the cut planks beside the table. He rubs a dusty hand over his beard, clearing his mind. It’s a quick process, but one you know he has to prime himself for. “Yeah, dad’s dinner. We’re still on. Still going to the fish and chip shop he liked, yeah?”

You snort, crossing your arms and nodding. “Tully’s. Of course. Tried my damnedest, but Terry liked what Terry liked. Whitefish and chips with mayo and malt vin. Good old Scouse boy’s heart never got off the boardwalk.”

“Can take the boy out of Liverpool, but…” he starts, smile pulling into a smirk. “Yeah, it’s a da–it’s a plan.”

Your smile twitches, but you don’t call his slip. Another oldie, confirming plans by it’s a date when it comes to you. Though it’s only the connotation, it’s enough to warrant a slowly changing lexicon.

The yearly dinners on Terry’s birthday to his favorite joint are the only form of mourning John seems to be able to cope with. It was your idea, as so many things were when it came to caring for the man’s heart, and it was something that seemed to help. As you had done last year, on a complete whim, dragging his ass off the couch and saying that you always took Terry down to the shops for this very birthday dinner, he would simply have to suffice, because you quite liked the tradition.

In all honesty, you could not stand the vacant look in his eyes as he stared and thought, and thought, and thought. Your John was a shark. The moment he stopped moving, he began to fall prey to death. If you had to put on a show and almost literally sweep him from the house, you would. If only to maintain the cracks in your heart that were barely sticking together.

You pull on something casual, because you are going to a chippy, and not to the fucking Bar Vendôme at the Hôtel Ritz Paris. Had gone there, once, though, gathering intel. That glass roof haunts you to this day, and never had you seen anything quite like it again.

John has the audacity to be waiting downstairs for you in the tightest black t-shirt known to man, hugging his thick, sturdy waist, and his full pecs. It seems to strain around his biceps, and you have to bite your tongue to stop yourself from telling him to wait a moment as he pulls his bomber back on.

It is almost a nuisance, how quickly your body recognizes this man, how quickly it responds. You think if he were ever to offer you both blood and body in the form of bread and wine, you might not be able to turn him down. Even that is a lie. You would eat straight from his hand, you would drink from his collarbones and his mouth.

“You look good, Prem,” he says, trying hard not to do an up-and-down over your body. It makes your throat dry, the way his head bows a bit, as if he is deferring to you, as if he is bowing. He has always treated you well. Better than you deserve, you think.

“Ta,” is all you can manage around your cracking-dry throat, trying hard not to swallow in front of him. “I could say that you cleaned up well, too, but you always keep yourself put together.”

This time he is the one to snort and shake his head. “You say that, but I know that you remember Albania.”

You laugh, but your mind says, You would be the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, even covered in mud, blood, or shit. What you say is, “Come on, then. Your car or mine?”

Tully’s is easy territory. It is paper boats, loads of steak cut chips fresh out of boiling animal lard, and white fish that flakes as if transferred straight from water to batter to fryer. And the pints of lager that go with it are crisp and cold, with a dense, creamy head an inch deep, bubbling ambery-gold and sweating in the glass.

The post-storm air is charged, buzzing, carrying a cleansing breeze that pushes through both of your jackets. The inside is small and intimate, dimly lit, with a footie match on the ancient CRT telly hung over the modest bar. Manchester United v. Arsenal. But neither of you are paying attention.

Instead, it starts as it had the year before, twinned reminiscing spinning together in a double-strand thread, your hands each pulling slowly at the wool of memory, working together to find your way back into history warm and safe.

It starts simply, his memories from childhood. His mother, who’d never wanted to be a mother, slipping out on a hot summer afternoon, never to return, but there was his father in the evening, covered in sawdust and smelling of wood chips and hot saw blades. Terry Price had always stood strong for his son.

It moved into the future, now a far past, and you draw stories out of John as you both sink down pint after pint.

His first school, his first dance, his first drive. “He’d had this awful Beetle, no interior, all metal. Christ, that thing should’ve never been on the road, it didn’t even have seatbelts.”

His first kiss, his first formal, his first heartbreak.”Hah. I’ve already told you plenty of times about Dana Rowbotham. But, ah. No, dad poured me a few shots at the kitchen table, and we watched the Liverpool match. He. Well. He was a man of discretion, you know how he was. Didn’t say a word while I did that pinched, angry crying the whole time.”

He polishes off his fish, scrubbing off his fingers over the boat, licking his lip to rid his mustache of foam, huffing a bit of a laugh. “This one I know I haven’t told you before. I just have no bleedin’ idea if he told you while he was living at the house.”

You hold up a finger, knocking back the last of your third pint, and turn your head to belch over your shoulder, shaking a laugh out of him.

“Christ, woman.”

“A moment,” you grunt, before doing it again.

“I hope you know people are staring. Judging. You’ll be run out by the town council any moment now.”

“Let ‘em fuckin’ try.” You hold position, waiting on whether another will come, and when you are certain you’ve run out of so-called ammunition, you turn back to him. “So what’s this story you’ve never told me? I want to compare notes.”

His amused expression dulls, softens. It morphs into something a bit sorrowful, tinged with either remorse, or longing. And it is incredible how closely linked those two emotions are, twins separated at birth, saints left starcrossed and adrift after the death of Christ. Left standing listless, unmoored witness outside of Christ’s sepulcher with empty hands and no direction, staring at impossibly heavy stone sealing the Garden Tomb.

“The first thing he said to me after the wedding–and the last thing he said to me about you.”

Your amusement slips off your face, as if it was a mask you had always worn, and you aren’t sure what to call your expression as you peer into John’s averted eyes. Is it vulnerability? A weak shade of shock or surprise? Is it simple, strange weakness? Maybe it is a combination of all and one, an unsteadying concoction that makes you way as John shows you a few of the cards he’s kept close to his chest for years or decades.

“Oh,” it’s all you can say, shifting in your seat.

You remember his father’s last words, as clearly as if you were playing them on a tape in front of you, or sitting in his room on the ground floor of the rectory, watching it happen all over again. It was a cold, bright afternoon in February, and John sat next to his father’s bedside, listening to his labored, watery breathing as he read aloud from The Brothers Karamazov. You’d only come in to drop off some tea with lemon for John. His voice had been starting to become hoarse as he read.

You were at the foot of the bed, leaving the room, when Terry’s rheumy eyes slipped open, and he’d made a sound. You’d stopped and turned, hands resting on the footboard. You’d known he was going to pass that day, it’s why you’d called John home at all, for the first time in your careers, and why you’d been giving as much privacy as you could.

A smile, dulled by painkillers and impending death into something almost childlike with wonder, slid onto the elder Price’s mouth, nestled in his gray beard. John sat forward and picked up his hands. “Hey, dad,” he’d croaked.

“John-John. There you are, pal,” his father had managed, too weak to even squeeze his son’s hands back. “I’ve been lookin’ all over for you.”

“Sorry. I.” John stopped to swallow, collecting himself, pulling on the act. His voice steadier, he’d said, “I just got in, ran a bit late.” Four hundred pages into the Russian door-stopper novel, ten hours of bedside, death-watch vigil.

John’s father’s last words came out, fading by syllables, “That’s alright, lad of mine. Always a good lad,” and he’d slipped into a deep sleep. Another five hours of sitting sentry, and John had knocked on your door. You knew his dad was gone, and you’d let John strangle down his weeping on your bed attempting to begin executing funeral tasks, as dusk dug deeper into the frigid dark of night.

In the present, in Tully’s, he nods, pushing his tongue around his mouth, and, it’s bizarre, you wonder if he is feeling the same things as you are. And you don’t at all know for certain, caught in a moment where you can’t read him as simply as a book.

Or, no…this is one of his motifs. It has become difficult to pick from the prose, because it has been so long since you’ve poured through his pages with such intimate attention.

He rolls his shoulders, and pushes himself into the back of his chair, as if trying to stretch or pop his back. His biceps and triceps strain the material of his sleeves as he puts his hands behind his head, pulling the cotton tight across his chest and shoulders. You have to fight the urge to squeeze your eyes shut against the image. He is not preening, he is uncomfortable, trying to ease himself.

“The first one isn’t so great, but you were there,” he snorts, finally something like a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, puts crinkles into the crows feet at the corner of his eyes. It’s dour and wry, but it’s there.

“Oh, I remember,” you laugh with him, against your better judgment resting on your elbows on the tabletop. You hold onto your empty pint glass, tilting it back and forth on the varnished wood, soft rocking clunk-clunks beating out like a slow metronome. “I think we were the only ones pleased with the two of us, eh?”

He nods. “Yeah. Heh.” He pushes his chair back onto two feet, pulling a mild balancing act that reminds you of him when you’d first met. He always sat like that, and it made his CO so furiously angry. The man thought it was disrespectful. John smirked as he was getting dressed down at a paint-peeling volume. Had fire as a boy. Still held it within his chest as a man, and the like inside of him sought out like.

Continuing, he says, “I’d met up with him once, after the wedding, before things cooled off. I brought some of those Kodak prints Grisham had developed for us. Didn’t even take them out of the envelope before then, I was scared as shit they’d somehow get ruined before we had a place to hang them.” His laugh is warm and fond, and you feel yourself rising to meet the temperature, chest filling softly with emotion. “And he looked at them.

“Had this tired look on his face. You know the one, where he looked like he’d just worked eighteen hours straight and was told there was no dinner waiting for him at home. I don’t think dad was ever disappointed in me, but that look came close. Thought I’d die from being under it, honestly,” he laughs, shaking his head.

“I bet. Dad was just so…gentle,” you say, thinking back on your father-in-law, who’d become one of your dearest friends in those last years. “Must’ve felt like shit.”

“That, my dear, is barely scraping the surface of how it felt,” he says in agreement, and the pet name slides right by the two of you, too comfortable now to comment on, lest the moment shatter. “He was just pushing the prints around on his table, and he looked up at me and said, ‘Lad. I don’t think you’ll be able to afford the alimony for her.’”

It takes a second for that to sink in, but sink in it does, and you burst out laughing, turning your head and covering your mouth with the back of your wrist. “Good lord. He didn’t need to skin you alive to compliment me, but I commend him for it,” you laugh, looking at John and his pleased grin from the corner of your eye.

“Speak softly and carry a big verbal stick, I suppose,” he agrees. “He knew you were big ticket, even then. And he just.” He tucks his lips between his teeth, wetting them, before he releases them with a soft sigh. “Dad just loved you to bits, Prem.”

“I know,” you tell him, your voice hushing, overcome with a layered ache. “I loved him, too. One of the best men I’ve ever met.”

The absolute best man you’ve ever met sits before you, and you so badly want to tell him that in the moment, but the words fall to ash on your tongue. There it is, again, the bitter gulf. Could you make it across if you ran and leapt? If you really tried?

Your throat pinches, and for one of the few times in your life—a biography that could harrow the very worst of humankind, weathered like a lighthouse on a violent, black sea—you cannot speak. You cannot find a single word to press past your teeth.

All you can do is look at the man whose last name you couldn’t bear to give up in the divorce.

You fought him on nothing—neither of you fought at all during the division—and he didn’t fight you on that.

“Prem?” he says, checking, reading, thrown. And he says your real name. “You good?”

“Ah, fine,” you lie seamlessly. But John knows the pattern of your embroideries too well. He can scent your stories as a hound could. But he will not bay and call it out. You look down at your paper boat, the few scattered chips in the bottom, the mostly empty cup of malt vinegar.

You look at his left hand, and you know his wedding band lines in your jewelry box alongside yours. They were made together, a gift on your fifth anniversary, and together they would stay.

“I think I let myself get overtired, quite honestly. And the greasy food didn’t help,” you say, with a lifted shoulder. “What was the other thing? The last thing?”

John’s hand is in the table, you’ve kept it in your periphery. Watching it as one watches something shy, something they want desperately to approach. And that large, harsh hand—capable of dazzling, deathly violence—creeps a centimeter your way. His swallow is audible, even with the humming chuckle he releases afterward to cover it.

“He said, ‘John-John, that girl—that woman is the best thing that’s ever happened to us. I hope she knows that.’”

It’s 31 July, 2020. The hottest day of the year in Somerset. That’s when it happens, where the final bookend takes its place.

Grisham is long dead, Jezza has married up. Darius stays confined in the facility, visions of villains painting the inner walls of his skull. Grover, and MacNally—Terrance, and Windham—Park and Montgomery—they’re all dead.

You sit outside of your studio, waiting on a call, smoking one of your husband’s cigars, and the sky is flat, and gray, and unforgiving. There is not a drop of beauty at your home today.

Covid-19, a modern plague for a modern populace, keeps your husband from coming home on leave. It doesn’t pay to spend two weeks quarantining, not when he’ll only have to turn it around and make a month of it when he leaves. He can’t afford the risk of catching it. If he catches it, it will spread to you. Once it’s spread to you, it will spread to your parents or his father. It’s too great a risk.

Your phone rings, your shiny new Samsung. You think about the girl you were in 2003, who did not ever imagine owning a computer, let alone carrying around one in your pocket. It’s an unknown number, and you know that on the other end is your husband, breaking in a fresh burner, somewhere out in the great, wide world you no longer travel.

Pressing the phone to your ear, you greet him automatically, “Hello, darling. How very dare you call when my husband is away.”

It was an effort to make the sting of separation lesser. John chuckles at it, trying to play into the bit as well. “Hey, love. What can I say? I couldn’t resist.”

There is small talk, pleasant and aching. If you close your eyes, you can imagine a place you’ve been a million years before—catching each other mid-leave, calling from some far flung airport, alerting the other to an impending homecoming.

But, oh, isn’t that a pain that does not quiet. A daydream that only deepens the hurt, instead of soothing it.

Minutes drip by and by, filled with empty talk, dancing around topics that neither of you could open to one another ever again. He cannot tell you where in the world his boots have fallen, and you cannot ask him what foul thing is crawling from the dark this time.

A panic begins to fill your chest, crushing you, as your conversation begins to run out. What’s next? What comes next in this horrible, cruel life? What can you provide any longer that he can’t find in a one night stand?

He would never think of you as a warm, wet hole. He would never think of you as a bed warmer. God forbid even entertaining the idea of him considering you a housekeeper, a maid, a cook, an accountant for his home. He would never—but you do. What could you possibly be for him, now that you cannot be his equal?

Everything breaks after a minute of dead silence. You break.

“You have to ask me for one, John,” you say, your voice so much more shockingly steady than you were prepared for. “You need to do that for us, because I cannot take ruining another thing between us.”

His response is immediate, almost fearful, “Don’t. Prem, don’t make me do that. For fuck’s sake, and don’t ask me to do it over the phone either.”

“It’s dead, John. Jesus fucking Christ,” your panic spirals and deepens, tearing you into ribbons beneath your sternum, “it died in Beirut—”

“Nothing died in Beirut!” he argues, a harsh cut edging into his voice, his fear manifesting in the blade-cusp tone.

“I died in Beirut. Your wife died in Beirut.”

“I’m hanging up. I’m not fucking doing this. You’re not listening to sense. We’ve been married twenty years, Prem. My wife did not fucking die in Beirut, I am on the goddamned phone with her!”

“Stop bassing out your fucking voice to me,” you warn him, a snarl. “You’re not going to growl me down from this. It’s dead, John. We have to cut it off before it kills us, too.”

“What? Our marriage?” he spits, as if throwing out the name of it will put a harsh light of reality into the conversation.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“No, not ‘yeah’. Name it. Name the fucking thing you want to put down so badly.”

“I want you to end our fucking marriage, John.”

Silence, screaming down the line. “Why? Prem, there’s—we…”

“Because I don’t want to hate you. I don’t want you to hate me. I…I love you. But. Good Christ, John. It’s turning into poison. I don’t want us to hate each other.”

More silence.

He says your real name, beseeches you with it, and tries to find you through the ether with a simple, pleading, “Love, no.”

“Please, John. This. This is the only way we can keep each other. I know you’ve felt it, too.”

Another eternity of silence sits like a fresh corpse between you. And why shouldn’t it. The corpse is seventeen years old, the corpse is what is left of a love story.

“I—okay. Okay, Prem. It’s.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“No, don’t—just. Don’t. I have to go. There’s…I’ve got to handle something. I—I love you.”

“…I love you, too.”

+++

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