#goddamn. these people are so important to you as buddies that you’re physically bound together by the universe

[purplecatghostposts]

The potential of combining Marble Hornets and Soulmate AUs drives me up the WALL with thoughts like:

- MH Soulmate AU where you can feel when your Soulmate is near. Tim has a sinking feeling as to why he keeps getting that same feeling around the Hooded Guy but he’s scared to admit it to Jay. He’s not even sure he can believe it himself— surely that’s not Brian?

- MH Soulmate AU where you get symbols on your skin representing your Soulmates. Alex can’t see Brian’s Sunflower, Amy’s Needle And Thread, or any of the other’s Soul Marks anymore. A big circle with an X through it now covers each and every one of them, and he knows in more ways than one, he’s tied to this creature who haunts him.

- MH Soulmate AU where the name of your enemy and your lover are written on each of your wrists, but you don’t know which is which. Brian jokes with Alex about how funny it is that the two most impactful people in his life have the same name. He now knows, years after the fact, that they are one and the same.

- MH Soulmate AU where you get the ability to see color only after you fall in love but it goes back to grayscale when that person dies. Tim, who has been enjoying his life of color ever since he fell in love with Jay while hotel hopping, hears a gunshot from inside Benedict Hall and watches the color bleed away and goes back to being gray.

- MH Soulmate AU where the symbols representing your Soulmates on your skin become scarred over when your Soulmates die. Jay one day wakes up sometime after the Summer of 2006 and realizes that two of his Soulmates marks have been scarred over and desperately tries to get back in contact with everyone because he doesn’t know who to grieve.

- MH Soulmate AU where tattoos of flowers representing your Soulmates bloom on your skin after you meet them and stay forever. Tim gets a compliment on the beautiful tattoos covering his body from an old lady who remarks how lucky he is that he not only has so many Soulmates, but has met them all at such a young age. Tim smiles as earnestly as he can, and doesn’t tell her that none of them are alive anymore.

- MH Soulmate AU where marks appear on your skin only after you meet your Soulmate. The cast gets together one day and shows theirs off, happy that they’ve found Soulmates, whether they be romantic or platonic, in each other. There’s one Tim has that he doesn’t like to talk about however— an O with an X through it. They don’t pry— not all Soulmates are good ones after all, just impactful. But in the coming weeks, one by one, they’ll all wake up with identical marks on their skin but without the slightest idea of who they came into contact with to make it appear.

One day, Alex will see it up close, and shudder at the sight of the Operator’s faceless head and colorless skin with a complete lack of marks. The Operator has no Soul Marks and will never have any, as it only takes and marks others as it’s own.

- MH Soulmate AU where your Soulmate’s scars appear on your own body. Jessica doesn’t know why Tim wears a scarf all the time until she catches a glimpse of a jagged scarred-over cut on his throat. She doesn’t ask of course, but she wonders, and sometimes wishes she could bring it up and finally have someone who understands her. Because there’s a scar over where her heart would be that she instinctively knows it’s Amy’s and knows it’s the reason why she’ll never see her again, and she thinks Tim would understand that better than anyone.

- MH Soulmate AU where the names of your Soulmates are written on your wrist but are crossed out when they die. Brian, in his shack in the woods, gently traces over the crossed out names of Sarah Reid and Seth Wilson and vows, no more. And yet, it is easier said than done, because the name ‘Alex Kralie’ is written in mocking, looping letters on his skin but it is the reason he hesitates, even when he has a gun pressed against Alex’s head, because thinking about even Alex’s name being crossed off too makes him feel more sick than he’d like to admit.

- MH Soulmate AU where Soulmates feel each others pain, and when Alex brings a block of cement down on the Masked Man’s leg, Jay cries out in agony right alongside him.

There’s just. SO much potential there for tragedy, canon divergence, Hurt/Comfort, fluff, and horror alike. They’re all so inter-connected and having a physical representation of that is so GOOD, y’know?

[ashintheairlikesnow]

okay what do we need to do to get that Chris on campus with Jake thing to happen because we will do it

Okay it’s not the whole thing or anything (I can work on that actually if you want) but here’s like six oh whoops it turned into a bunch of paragraphs of cute off the top of my head:

CW: VERY vaguely referenced past noncon/exploitation/abuse, recovering pet whumpee, conditioned responses, referenced/implied that character is potentially underaged

“Why can’t I-… I want to wear my, my, um, my my sweatshirt today, why can’t I wear that?” Chris stares longingly, almost pleadingly, as Jake tosses the balled-up dirty thing in the washing machine, smiles to himself. Two-pointer, he thinks. Not that he’s played sports since junior year of high school or anything, but he didn’t exactly suck at basketball.

“It’s too warm for sweatshirts and you’ve been wearing it for four days straight, Chris,” Jake says, pulling some clothes out of the neatly folded piles of clean shirts and pants that stay on a series of shelves in the laundry room for the rescues to pick from. Most rescues take a couple of weeks to start choosing things to keep in their rooms - Chris has been here for three and all he wants to wear is Jake’s sweatshirt and basketball shorts they’d found in the back of one of the closets, something a past rescue had left behind when they moved out to start fresh. “This is nothing. Look, you’ll still be covered up, I promise.”

“I, I will? Do you promise?” Chris hugged himself, all wiry limbs with the same forced sense of lithe gracefulness all the Romantics ended up with after training. “I don’t like um, like my skin showing I don’t like there to be too much, too much skin, Jake.”

Or any skin, Jake thinks. If it was up to Chris, they’d never see anything but his eyes. He had a feeling whoever Sir was had had a thing for Chris’s hair, too, in the past three days Chris had started to talk about dyeing it black or redder or just another color entirely. He’d seen Jake looking at a photo of a girl with pierced ears and mentioned he might want earrings, too.

That was all going to be big steps - Jake figures he’ll talk about it for a few months before he can do anything on his own. 

“Yeah, I promise. You know the rules here, Chris, you don’t show a single inch of skin to anybody ever unless you feel comfortable.”

“I, I, I would feel comfortable showing to-… to you, Jake,” Chris says, a little shyly. If he turns around, he knows, Chris’s face will be red, just at the cheekbones, and he’ll be doing that thing they all do where they tilt their head just the right way, just a little to the side, biting down on their lower lips to show they’re interested.

It’s probably pretty fucking seductive, if you’re a piece of shit pervert who orders one of them. When you’ve seen six of them do it, nearly robotically, falling back into motions trained into their muscle memory deeper than thought, it’s just creepy as shit.

“I know you would, buddy,” Jake says, keeping his eyes on the clothing. “But remember, we have rules about that, here.”

“Yeah, I, I know, I like the, um, the, the rules. I like them.” Chris sounds relieved, as though he’d said the words worrying that Jake would take him up on it or something. And probably he was worried about it - Nat seemed to think he was testing them, without even knowing.

Jake checks over the smaller sizes and pulls out a pair of straight-leg jeans, nothing special but they won’t cling, they’ll sit loose on Chris’s hips and won’t say anything about the shape of his legs. He tosses them over along with a random pair of boxers, and the rescued Box Boy quickly sheds his pajama pants and switches over to the new things while Jake has his back turned looking for shirts. 

“Is, um, are, are are are people going to, to look at me a lot today? Or not? Are they going to look? Is, um, because what if my Sir sees a picture, if if he, if he-”

Your ‘Sir’ knows where you are. You were a dirty little secret and that motherfucker isn’t going to say a fucking thing.

Jake doesn’t say it. Instead, he just turns with the shirts in hand and gives Chris a comforting, reassuring smile. “No, man. Look, remember what we talked about?”

Chris nods, his eyes going wide and solemn, very serious about the things he’d been asked to memorize. “My name is Christopher Garner and I, I, um, I’m your father’s brother’s oldest son and I, I, I’m visiting from Michigan and that’s the name of a, um, of a state in the United States of America and that is where we live.”

“Great. Just… don’t start telling everybody everything all at once, okay? But it’s good that you remember all of it. First things first, let’s cover up your number okay?”

He hands Chris a long-sleeved shirt and the boy pulls it on over his head, the strawberry-blond pushing through the spot for the neck and fluffing out around his head, mussed up and standing on end. He looks fucking adorable, like a little kid.

Because he probably still IS one, and if anyone would tell me who that fucking Sir is I’d rip his throat out with my goddamn teeth like that lady in the third Honor Bound movie did. 

That was a movie series he couldn’t watch with the rescues. Too… close, in some ways, to shit some of them had already seen. But Jake had his own DVD copies he watched sometimes while studying or doing homework. 

Chris is frowning at the cuffs on the ends of his sleeves, examining them up close. His green eyes have gone slightly crossed. “Why’s there a hole?”

“For your thumbs. Let me show you.” Jake steps forward and carefully shifts the cloth around, slipping Chris’s thumb through the purposefully cut hole just below the cuff. “See? Now you don’t have to worry about it riding up and showing your barcode. Plus, it’s kind of a thing a lot of people are doing on campus, so you’ll fit in.”

“I’ll fit in?” Chris looks up at him - up and up and up, the kid is so short - and Jake smiles back down. “Will I? I’ll, um, I’ll fit in?”

“Well… mostly. You’ll fit right in as my cousin, right?” Jake grins down, rubbing lightly at his shoulders, and Chris smiles back with an expression of such absolute trust that it physically hurts to look at him.

Everything they went through made them all so fucking trusting, so naïve and so ready to accept any hint of goodness that came their way as genuine. It was like… like trying to teach a dog to be a person.

“Right,” Chris says firmly. “Cousin. Christopher Garner, who comes from, from, from Minnesota-”

“Michigan.”

“Right. Michigan.” Chris’s face fell, just a little. “I’m, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to to to um, to get it wrong-”

“You’re fine, Chris. We’ll practice on the bus on the way. Now, throw this one, too.” He hands him  thin zip-up hoodie, and Chris looks finally perfectly comfortable once he’s pulled the hood up and over his head. Every bit of skin he could reasonably cover is covered. Only his bangs stick out to show he had blond hair at all.

“It’s a long day for me, so we’re going to be on campus for a long time. I’ve got money for food and stuff, and listen-… Chris, this is important, very, very important that you remember this.”

Chris swallows, hard, and nods. He fixes his eyes on Jake with total focus. “Yes, Jake.”

“If you get hungry, or thirsty, or you have to use the bathroom, you absolutely have to tell me. Do you understand?”

Chris frowns, eyebrows furrowing. They’re the same pale copper as his hair, and sometimes in dim light it’s hard to tell he has any. “But we don’t decide if we’re hungry-”

“Yes, you do, Chris. Now, you do. With me, you get to decide when you eat food, okay? I don’t care if it’s ‘lunchtime’, or whatever. You just tell me you need something and I’ll take care of you, okay?”

Chris looks doubtful, but nods, slowly. “Okay, Jake. I can, um, I can do that, but you don’t have to feed me I’m used to not, to not eating, it doesn’t bother me I don’t even um feel, I don’t, don’t feel hungry much I don’t.”

“I know, buddy. But we’re going to try and concentrate on feeling hungry more. I’m going to buy you a coffee and a scone before my first class-”

“Are you, um, are you getting-”

“Yeah, I’ll get one too.” Chris relaxes, going nearly boneless in relief. Jake reaches out to take his hands - long, thin fingers not roughened or reddened by housework. They’re a little cold, but warm quickly to his touch, and Chris tightens his grip immediately, looking up at Jake, eyes wide and almost adoring. “You can do this, Chris, okay? I trust you. I believe in you.”

Chris’s fingers start to tremble in Jake’s grip, and his lips press together. His eyes tear up, just a little. “D-do you really, Jake? Am I good, to be trusted? Am I, um, am I am I am I-”

“You’re very good, Chris,” Jake says, softly. “And you’re going to do great. Okay, one more time. Who are you?”

“Christopher Garner but I like to be called Chris,” Chris says, each word dropped with importance, with gravity. For once, he thinks it all carefully through before he speaks. “I’m from Michigan, the part shaped like a mitten, and Michigan is a state in the United States of America, which is a country, and it’s our country where we live. I’m your cousin because your dad is my dad’s brother. I’m staying with you because my parents are on a cruise and I’m too young to stay home alone because I’m not eighteen.” 

“Perfect, buddy.”

Chris hesitates, looking guilty. “Jake?”

“Yeah?”

“I, um. I am eighteen.”

I’ll bet my left goddamn testicle you’re not. Doing this to you should count as a fucking justifiable homicide when I find that son of a bitch and gut him-

“I know, man.“ Jake’s voice stays soft and soothing. “But it’s just for the story.”

“… okay, okay, it’s just, um, just just for the story, I can do that. I can.” Chris nods quickly, giving Jake’s hands a tight squeeze with his own. 

Jake smiles, pulling back to ruffle the coppery hair. Chris glows at the attention, the affection, tilting his head into it like a cat. 

“Okay, bud. I think we’re ready. Let’s go catch the bus. If we get the 6:45 instead of the 7:15 we’ll have time to drink our coffee before my first class.”

He leads Chris out, the young rescue repeating his story quietly to himself, hands buried in the pockets of his zipup, his barcode and number safely hidden underneath his shirt, determined to make Jake proud and pretend to be just another free person like everyone else.