#i am nearly delirious from exhaustion and for some reason that is always The Best Time To Write (real) (not lying)

[glimmeringtwilight]

Misfortunate

Short Scaramouche piece so I get this short angry lad out of my system (if any of you make a "that's what she said" joke I'm smiting you). Technically proofread but does it really count if I only worked on this at 1am. I'll tweak the formatting tomorrow. Put below a cut for the length, not for the content (SFW).

CW: mild violence, Scaramouche (he's his own warning. He's a prick), mild dehumanization, yandere themes, mild description of injury.

Word Count: ~1.8k

Trouble follows you. 

It’s like your shadow, tailing after you wherever you go. People call you unlucky. Clear skies turn to pouring rain, rockslides narrowly miss you in tight passes, avalanches on snowy mountain peaks, you name it. It was like the world was trying to bury you beneath it, but by some small miracle you’ve always barely managed to get out of whatever new misfortune that befell you.  

You’re beginning to think “cursed” might be a more accurate term. That’s the only thing that comes to mind as you clutch your bleeding arm to your chest, stumbling through dark corridors as voices ring out around you. 

“Find them!” To your left. You go right, moving as quietly as you can manage. 

The air here is thick. Suffocating. You don’t know what the purple fog dancing along the floors is, but you’re sure you’re bound to find out, cloth bandana completely useless at blocking it out. You taste metal. 

The hallways here seem to wind on forever. By design, probably, if you had to guess. You can’t be doing… whatever nefarious shit the fatui gets up to, in a regular building, no. And apparently nothing screams “nefarious” more than identical rooms and long, disorienting hallways. 

At least it seems to be affecting your pursuers as much as it is you, their voices still distant as they search for you. But you’re sure that the poor design of this place won’t save you for long. 

You step into a side room after a quick check to be sure it’s empty, stopping to catch your breath.

Think. You just need to… think. Catch your breath, stop the bleeding– you’re sure you’ve left a trail of blood in your wake, but it’s so damn dark in here you doubt they’ll even see it– and try to-

“So this is the rat my men have been chasing for the past half-hour.”

Haha, fuck. 

You freeze in place, holding your breath (as if that’ll do anything). Steeling your resolve, you turn your head stiffly and glance over your shoulder to see who it is that found you.

“Well? Are you deaf or just stupid? Or do you have nothing to say?” 

There’s a quiet jingling sound, metal against metal, and you strain to make out the figure in the darkness as he steps closer. You can definitely make out the big, gaudy hat he wears, the brim dipped too low to let you see much more than his mouth. 

You realize he’s still waiting for you to say something when he tsks, hand twitching by his side, and fear jumpstarts your mouth before it jumpstarts your brain, blurting the first thing that comes to mind. 

“You should invest in better structural engineers. And fire whoever designed this place.” Brilliant. Now instead of just killing you, maybe he’ll spit on your corpse too. 

He says nothing, the silence dragging on following your response, interrupted by the occasional distant shout and the steady drip, drip, drip of your blood hitting the floor. Why isn’t he calling the others over? Why didn’t he just kill you outright?

Come to think of it, you remember him mentioning “his men”... Fuck. Is he running this operation?

You don’t have the chance to dwell on it, snapping back to the present when a dry laugh cuts through the silence. It’s short, devoid of any real humor, and the back of your neck prickles with unease. 

“Stupid, then.” The hat tips up, just slightly. “How did you get in?”

“I fell in.”

“You fell in.” He sounds unconvinced, and more than just a little annoyed. 

“I was just… exploring-” The stranger’s mouth twists into a scowl at the vagueness of your reply, and you rush to elaborate before he decides to stop stalling murdering you- “fine! I- Onikabuto. I was looking for- for onikabuto, and the ground caved in under my feet. I didn’t even know this was down here, I swear, so-”

“Quiet.” Your mouth snaps shut. He stalks forward, snapping at you to “stay put” when you stagger back half a step in response, and you freeze. Maybe if you play nice, you can still talk your way out of this…

He stops a few feet away from you, crossing his arms, and you watch the hat dip with the movement of his head. Maybe you could catch him by surprise and-

A hand seizes your face in a bruising grip, thin fingers indenting the clammy skin of your cheeks so hard your teeth painfully dig into the sides of it. When you instinctively try to pull out of his grasp, the fingers of his other hand hook underneath your bandana, yanking it off your face so it hangs loosely around your neck and fisting the fabric to hold you in place.

His hand reclaims its place, gripping your jaw just as tightly as he holds you still by the bandana around your neck with the other. 

Indigo eyes meet your own, and the stranger jerks your head to the side, appraising you like one would a show dog.

“Wha- Hey-” Your head is jerked the other way, the movement less harsh than the first as you consciously turn your head with the movement the second time, anticipating the rough handling. 

“You’re making a mess.” He notes after a beat, eyes narrowing at the large gash on your arm that continues to drip blood. 

“I’m… sorry?” You mumble, words slurring with the way his grip on your face tightens. You’re not really sure how to respond to that. What, does he expect you to just stop bleeding because it’s pissing him off?

He tsks, letting go of you, and you rub the sore skin to soothe the ache left behind from his unnecessary roughness. You’re starting to think it’d be better if one of his lackeys found you first. They’d have killed you by now, sure, but it would have at least been quick. 

“Are you going to kill me?” No point in beating around the bush, you suppose. What’s he gonna do, say “yes” and then stab you? 

… Well. He could. But you hope not. 

“I haven’t decided yet.” Is his vague response, turning on a heel and walking away from you like he didn’t just finish manhandling you. 

You stare at his retreating figure, wondering whether or not that was the end of it. Is he just… letting you go? Is he trying to bait you into getting your hopes up, so he can crush them under his heel and laugh as he kills you?

“Well?” He stops, turning to look back at you when you continue to stare blankly at his retreating form. “Come. Or I’ll leave you here for my men.” 

While you don’t like the idea of following him anywhere, there’s not much other option, and he doesn’t seem keen on killing you yet, at least.

You follow him out of the room and into the corridor, listening to the tinkling of the metal ornaments on his hat and his deceptively heavy footsteps. Is he… making his footsteps heavier on purpose? 

You didn’t hear him earlier, when he snuck up on you (you know he wasn’t in the room when you entered, that big, gaudy hat of his would have given him away). So does he… stomp around most of the time? On purpose? Why? To sound like he’s bigger than he is? Or is he just always pissed?

The image of this man stomping around this shady hideout to make himself sound bigger and more intimidating almost rips a hysterical giggle out of you, but you focus instead on keeping the veil from smacking you in the face as you walk behind him. 

You could technically walk further back, but you don’t want to test his patience by giving him the impression you’re sneaking away, and you get the distinct sense that he’d take great offense to you walking side-by-side with him. 

“What’s your name?” He asks after a few minutes of walking. 

Well. Not like he’ll kill you for your name, right? And maybe knowing that, he’ll hesitate when it comes down to that… If. If it comes down to that.

You tell him your name, and he says nothing, not even acknowledging he heard you. …Whatever. You’re not repeating yourself. 

He doesn’t supply his own name, so you decide to ask. “And yours?”

“Scaramouche.” 

Then it’s silence once more. You realize that the men who were chasing you have stopped shouting, and you can’t hear their frantic search for you anymore. Did they give up? Do they know Scaramouche found you first?

He leads you into a room you recognize as the same one you fell into, sunlight illuminating the sparsely-decorated space. You also recognize the pyro agent who slashed your arm, already kneeling by the time your eyes adjust to the bright light. 

“Lord Scaramouche-”

“Save it. Get this hole fixed, and check the rest of the base for any other structural weaknesses. If we have any more surprise visitors,” Scaramouche gestures sharply towards you, “You’ll be joining them at the bottom of the ocean.” 

“...Yes sir.” The agent’s voice trembles, just slightly. 

You’re really starting to think it would have been better if anyone else had found you first, not missing the strained reediness in the agent’s voice that wasn’t there when he was trying to kill you. Another’s hands are shaking, barely visible from where you stand. Why are they so scared of him…?

“You.” Scaramouche turns to another one of his lackeys, not batting an eye at the way they visibly flinch, “Find me a first-aid kit. Bring it to my office.”

“Yessir.”

Your stomach sinks when Scaramouche starts walking again, not even sparing you a glance, just the silent expectation to “follow” as he sets off down the halls. 

The agent who attacked you mutters a quiet “poor thing” under his breath, and you pretend not to hear. Pretend not to feel the weight of their eyes watching the two of you leave. 

Once you’re out of earshot, Scaramouche stops, glancing over his shoulder at you, then at the bandana dangling loosely around your neck. “I think I’ll get you a collar, to replace that ugly thing.”

His eyes flit back up from your neck, and he laughs cruelly at your expression. “What? You should be thanking me. I’ve decided to let you live.”

Scaramouche doesn’t seem to be interested in any actual thanks from you, though, already turning back around and continuing to walk. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” 

Maybe trouble doesn’t follow you after all, you think, as you trail stiffly behind him. Maybe you’ve been following trouble all along.

[dervngedgf]

no thoughts just choso being a lap dog :333

yummy yummy….

cw: Choso x Fem!Reader , pretty much fluff, sum suggestiveness towards the end. i love my bby.

wc: 588

no smut but minors still need to leave teehee

ty 2 my perfect beta reader @cyphercheol & the loml @loverboyko for convincing me to actually post it

you tried your best to focus on the paperwork that was assigned to you to work at once you got home, some kind of destruction of a building during a curse attack. but it was nearly impossible with choso draped over you.

"baby i need to get this done." you grumbled, attempting to shrug him off again. "it’s important, nanami will kill me if it’s late."

choso whined petulantly and tightened his grip around your shoulders. his breath tickled the back of your neck as he nuzzled his face deeper into the crook of your neck.

"angel, i haven't seen you all day," he protested in a whiny tone he knew you had a weakness for. "i’ve missed you so much."

with a roll of your eyes and an exasperated huff, you finally abandoned the paperwork and turned to face your brooding boyfriend. choso's eyes were wide and imploring, his lips stuck out in an exaggerated pout. like this, he looked more fragile than the strong-willed ‘family man’ he usually put off.

"we live in the same house and wake up to each other every day, big baby." you chided, pressing your finger to the tip of his nose. he scrunched it, and shook his head. "you went off on some mission, and left me here. you ran away from me." you pointed out with a small giggle, watching your boyfriends face contort while trying to think of a reply.

"does it really matter who had to leave?!" choso lamented, moving to fully place his whole body on your lap now. you huffed at the new weight as he wrapped his arms around your waist, pulling you against his frame.

you tried (failed) to suppress a small smile as choso placed sloppy kisses along your jawline. while his clinginess could be a bit overwhelming at times, you had to admit there was something charming about the way he seemed so whipped for any attention from you.

"you’re ridiculous, y’know that?" you huffed, combing your fingers through his black hair that was still damp from a previous shower. he hummed, nuzzling into your touch.

"sorry, just missed you." he murmured against your neck. his breath fanned against your skin as he spoke. "always thinkin’ about you, stuck in my head no matter what."

his words were punctuated by a light graze of teeth. despite his stand-offish demeanor, choso occasionally would switch on that intense clingy personality.

"i will never be able to get enough of you," he growled, shifting so he was straddling your hips effectively pinning you against the couch. His deft fingers moved along the edge of your shirt while he leaned in to steal a searing kiss. "i crave you, like a dying man craves water when lost in the desert. you’re my oasis, angel. one of my few reasons for living."

"well aren’t you a sweet-talker," you managed to breathe out. as he broke away, you attempted to chase his mouth for another heated kiss.

choso huffed out a soft chuckle, eyes sparkling mischievously. "let me show you just how deliriously devoted i am to you."

the time that the paperwork was meant to be turned had passed. a few missed calls and texts from nanami chimed into an empty livingroom. papers had been scattered across the floor where choso has wrestled you out of the livingroom and into the shared bedroom. yeah, his needy infatuation could be a bit much, and even exhausting at times.

but you wouldn’t have your boyfriend any other way.

ask/requests: OPEN

[icewindandboringhorror]

I’m trying to be better about responding to things, so another small ask response post! I feel like the answers are short enough to not actually require putting a ‘read more’ but I ended up doing it anyway just because I have no idea what the standards for length are and I don’t want people to get mad or something lol.. (responses under read more) 

------------

 (note: I’m not going to write the questions completely as they were asked/shown in images above, just type summaries of them since that’s faster, so this is why the text varies)

-

1. “do you have any goals for the coming new year?”

gHHgg, mostly the same goals as last year since of course I didn’t get everything done lol. Mainly I want to: finish my game, finish the information on the Avirre’thel and a few other worldbuilding posts, make more sculptures (5 this year), and do at least like... 10 costumes this year (since I’ve kind of been ignoring that stuff to focus on other projects, but I still enjoy it and have ideas!). Some of my goals in therapy are to leave the house at least once every 2 weeks without panicking and find friends in my area to play board-games with/do creative things with/etc. in person, but those are kind of less in my control (me being able to go places is somewhat dependent on the schedules of those around me, finding friends is a matter of luck and coming across the right people at the right time, etc.). 

Mostly I just really want to get the gourddamned game and worldbuilding stuff done since those have been longer projects, and I’m always getting new ideas for stuff I COULD work on before I’m even done with older things lol. In my head I’m already planning the elven religion and things happening far in other corners of Nanyevimi and it’s like “we’re not even DONE with the vampires yet!!!", as well as already having like 2 new games I could make (one of which I really like the idea of and have already nearly completely planned against my will, like my brain just keeps shooting information at me while I’m trying to focus on other stuff ghgh), some animations and a bunch of other things and it’s like oghHH... blease.. Finish Something for once before mentally checking out and moving onto the next hundred ideas you fool 

(also I told myself I can’t play any games until I finish my own (aside from like, sims builds on occasion) so I especially want to get it done soon since I always feel sick in the summer (no matter how much water I drink or how cool I try to stay, I’m just really heat sensitive and don’t live in a place with air conditioning)  and sitting around and playing games while I’m deliriously exhausted / nauseous / have constant heat headaches is a prime summer activity lol)

-

2. “do you know where to get a witch hat?”

Unfortunately I have no idea where to get a witch hat lol, aside from maybe the costume aisle of stores around halloween?? (and even then, usually they only come in black). I’ve made sloppy ones myself by like, hot-gluing stuff to a regular hat, but I’ve never actually bought one. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to list them in the replies or something so maybe anon can find where to get one lol

-

3. “can i use your costumes as inspiration for drawings/what social media should I credit you with?”

 It’s fine to use my costumes and etc. as inspirations for art/etc! If you’re posting it on instagram it could be easier to just link my instagram since that’s on the same platform, but really it doesn’t matter to me. As I evolve into more of a hermit wizard I lose social media literacy and don’t understand which accounts are best to link people to or what social media is currently most popular lol 

-

4. “do you watch Worldbuilding Notes on youtube?”

I actually hadn’t before (basically all I watch on youtube are like... video game/fantasy media lore analysis/information videos, general educational channels/documentaries/lectures, leftist video essays, and like.. the occasional let’s plays of games I can’t afford (if I can manage to find gaming youtubers who aren’t insufferable ggh). But weirdly I haven’t really looked into much worldbuilding content?? despite that being something I focus on so much (and also that I watch conlanging and linguistics stuff, which often seems to intersect with writing/worldbuilding youtube)), but thanks for recommending them! The concepts presented seem very interesting!

 I always really really wish I could condense information and make clear concise videos like that (audience wise, probably way preferable to just writing long text posts), but I just have such an inherent inability to make brief points (aka why no matter how good I was at a subject in school, I’d still fail/barely pass any essay/long form answer assignments.. I just.. can NOT organize my thoughts for the life of me for some reason). The best I could do is a more rambling podcast style lore explanation thing where I just speak naturally about stuff, but that seems like that’d still be nearly just as weird as long text posts, since I tend to ramble and be very silly when I speak lol, so currently I just don’t know of a more concise and accessible way to present my world information. :V   But anyway, thanks for suggesting it! The videos seem really cool, I like the ideas I’ve seen so far, and mostly am just in awe of their sheer power and expert ability to like... present detailed information in such a neat/clean/cohesive way aaaaAA (like.. the exact opposite of me but in a good way lol)

-

And that’s all for this short group of replies lol! I still have other things in my inbox and etc. to reply to so sorry if I haven’t got to yours yet, I just wanted to get a few quick ones out of the way!!

[that-buckley-gal]

Delirious #7 | Peas In a Pod

One Week Ago

Christian was Rooster’s roommate but excused himself as soon as Rooster and I entered. While Rooster went straight to his dresser to get a gym bag together, I demanded to know what it was I did wrong because he seemed to be fine all day when the parents were here and now that the day was nearly over, he decided to turn into a dick.

“Jesus Christ, Gemma! I just need to relax after today. Don’t you? I’m fucking tired as shit,” he said meanly as he stuffed clothes into the bag.

“Yet you still want to go the gym and ‘exhaust yourself some more’, huh?”

“Don’t start,” he breathed, walking past me to the bathroom.

I didn’t say anything else until he came back out. I knew he’d have to go by me again to get to the door in the first place.

I grabbed his arm when he walked by and he stopped. He didn’t pull his arm away until I let it go, which was strange for me as this isn’t how I thought that would go, especially with his reputation.

“Can you at least tell me what I did wrong?” I ask. “You were fine when I came here this morning and amazing when my parents and Teddy were here, but now that everyone’s gone? I get that you’re probably tired out from all that entertaining we had to do…”

“What’s your point?” Rooster asked, staring at the door rather than looking at me.

“We had plans, remember? We were just going to go back to my place and order a pizza and watch a movie…or two. Then you just decide to go to the gym with Zook and McQuaid?”

“I don’t treat your friends like shit,” Rooster stated simply before walking out of the room. It took me a moment to think of when I ever treated one of his friends ‘like shit’ before I remember my lack of communication with Christian earlier today as well as the not-communicating spiel we’ve had going on since the party. When I lost my respect for him because of his actions.

“THAT IS DIFFERENT!” I screamed, suddenly pissed at Rooster. “JAMES TATRO, GET YOUR SORRY ASS BACK HERE RIGHT NOW SO WE CAN TALK THIS SHIT OUT!”

I step out of the room and Rooster is still on the upper level, debating on whether or not he should stay or leave. The other open doorways in the hall slammed shut and Rooster sighed before letting his bag hit the floor.

“Well?” He asked in a bored tone.

“Well what?” I asked back.

“Aren’t you going to apologize?”

“What do I have to apologize for? For not talking to somebody? As far as I’m concerned, normal people don’t consider that as treating someone like shit.”

“What is your problem with him anyway, huh? Did he do anything to you?” Rooster asked back in a heated tone of voice. “Did he do anything to personally hurt you?”

I step back slightly. “Well, no. But – ”

“Then why the hell are you acting like a bitch?”

I stay quiet.

“I get that your last relationship was fucked. I was there! Remember? But that doesn’t automatically give you the right to judge everyone in a similar situation.”

“Jimmy.”

“You don’t even fucking know what happened between them, Gem. You heard Penny’s story and that’s all right? Did you even want to hear Christian’s?”

“Please, I – ”

“What about, uh, what’s her name? Jasmine? She barely scratched the surface of her story before you shoved her to the curb in order to go jump on Penny’s lap, but I guess that’s what you do, right? First Brooke, then Jasmine.”

“Where is this coming from? Christ, okay! I am sorry for not wanting to hear Christian’s side of the story and I will apologize to him for that!”

“Oh, don’t do me any favors now, Gem.”

“Shut the fuck up!” I yell at him. “You know the reason why I don’t want to talk to him, Rooster?”

“No! I know the reason why!”

“No you don’t!”

“Then tell me why!”

“Because it…” I swallow the lump in my throat and blink back tears that threaten to fall. “I don’t want to talk to Christian because it is too damn hard for me, Jim. Okay? Every time I see his face I just think of Pete and how he didn’t give a damn about me after two shots! Call me crazy but I just…

“You’ve never been cheated on, Rooster,” I sigh and close my eyes, feeling tears fall from both eyes. I open them again and look at Rooster, who looks ready to give up and apologize but I hold up my hand to stop him. “Just…you don’t understand, okay? And I don’t want to sit here and try to explain it because it doesn’t make sense, and I know that that’s probably hard to get, so… Go to the gym. With Brad and Zook. We can talk when you come back.”

I step back into his room and close the door. I only lock it when I hear footsteps approaching the door.

The knob jiggled and then there was knocking on the door.

“Gemma, open the door please,” Rooster said.

“No,” I said. “I need to calm down right now, please leave.”

Rooster knocked again and I sighed. I rested my forehead on the door with my hand on the handle, resisting the insane want to open the door.

“James,” I said. My voice was cracked as silent tears made their way down my face. “I need to be alone for a little while. We can talk when you come back from the gym so just go already.”

“I’m not going to leave you here while you’re upset,” he said. “Please open the door.”

I turned and sank to the floor and I could hear Rooster do the same on the other side.

-

I must’ve fallen asleep.

I stand up slowly and unlock the door, opening it slowly to see Rooster sprawled out in front of the door, a few cans of pop lying around him. I close the door again and debate on what I should do.

Take a break.

I take off the necklace that houses Rooster’s Greek letters and let it rest on his pillow before moving over to the window and step out onto the roof. I shuffle over a few rooms down to Zook’s room and sneak in through the window; grateful that he and McQuaid were heavy sleepers and didn’t hear my feet padding around.

Once I’m in the still-lit hallway, I peer over to Rooster’s room again seeing he’d rolled onto his back. I smile sadly at the sight and make my way down the stairs as quiet as I can. I see Christian asleep on the couch and ponder Rooster’ words from before.

Just because Pete was a douche doesn’t mean Christian was one. Brooke had the hots for Pete only because he was her boyfriend’s best friend and her Little’s boyfriend. Penny and Christian didn’t make their relationship known until after the news broke of Jasmine and Christian. Maybe the whole thing really was a misunderstanding.

A misunderstanding I would need to figure out later.

I step out of the frat house and sit on the porch swing, only then questioning the time as the sky was starting to lighten up already.

I pull out my phone to see it was 5:34 A.M. and I wonder if my parents were already up and awake in order to head back down South. I call my mom and when she answers, she sounds like she’s been awake for a while.

“Mom? Can you come get me please?”

“Of course I can. Is everything all right?” She asked.

“Yeah, yeah. I just really need to take a break right now; yesterday just really made me realize it.”

“Are you with Zook?”

“Yeah, I’m at his house.”

“Okay, I’ll send the car to come pick you up before it picks us up.”

“Thanks.”

Bonus bit: Jimmy's P.O.V.

Jimmy woke up the next morning on the floor in front of his room. It was early from what he could tell from the light coming in from the window at the end of the hall. He stood up and stretched slowly and went to the bathroom.

He checked the time on his phone to see that it was 7:13 A.M. and sighed. He approached his bedroom door with caution and knocked softly. There was silence from the other side and Jimmy thought that Gemma might still be asleep. He was about to go downstairs but instead opted to try the knob. The door was unlocked and he let out a breath, feeling relieved.

That relief was short-lived as he took in the empty room. Confused, he circled the room wondering when, and how, Gemma got out. Jimmy circled the room again before his eyes landed on the necklace resting on his pillow.

“What? No,” he mumbled to himself. “No, please.” He grabbed the silver necklace and fingered the charms with the Greek letters.

Giving Gemma his Greek letters was something he didn’t have to think about. He knew there would be repercussions from his frat brothers but he knew it would be worth it to have everyone on campus know that Gemma was his.

Some time passed before Zook tentatively poked his head in, wondering if everything was ok only to see Jimmy lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

“She’s gone,” Jimmy said.

Now

Zook’s been keeping me up to date about the lessons I’m missing; he told the instructors and my housemates that I got sick suddenly and was staying at his dorm.

He always locked himself in his room, without Brad, before calling me in order to keep our conversations private and my location hidden from Rooster although he’s already guessed my whereabouts.

I’ve turned the send receipts off on my phone so Rooster can’t tell that I’m reading his messages.

He also sent the necklace I left back to me. The metal felt cool on my skin even now.

Since my homework was all done, I was sat on my bed watching Mean Girls eating Fruit Loops straight from the box while a can of diet soda sat on my table.

“…with rainbows and sprinkles,” I quoted along with the movie before there was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” I say expecting to see Teddy or one of my parents. I flick a Fruit Loop at the screen and quote Damien: “She doesn’t even go here!”

The sound of a breath exhale from the nose makes me look at my guest, surprisingly unsurprised by the sight of my red-hawked beau.

“Took you long enough,” I say and scoot over on my bed, making room for him to sit. Jimmy gives me a surprised look before he shuts the door and comes and sits by me. We watch the movie in an awkward silence.

I pause the movie and sigh. “I’m sorry…for sticking my nose into someone else’s relationship. And for ignoring your friend. And for yelling at you. And leaving without saying anything. Ok? I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Jimmy said. “I’m sorry for yelling at you, and calling you names. And for not understanding your reasons for being upset. And for not coming here sooner. I thought you would’ve kicked me out.”

“I still can,” I smile briefly. We look at each other, and Rooster leans in. I turn away from him and instead he fingers the Greek letter charms on my necklace.

“You really are an idiot, you know that?”

“What?” I turn to him.

“Leaving this on my pillow and then leaving without saying anything to anyone? Jeez, you made me think we were done!”

“Well you are a nimrod, nimrod!”

“How?”

“Please, let me in,” I mock him. “You could’ve broke down the door or tried to get in through the window.”

“We wouldn’t get our security deposit back if I broke the door. As for the window, well… I thought – you said you wanted space!”

We fell into a tense silence.

“Can we just pretend that the fight never happened?” He asked.

“No because it did,” I said. “But we can try to work on issues that were brought up during it and move past it.”

He grabbed my chin and made me look at him. Our eyes were boring into each other’s and I leaned in and kissed him. He kissed me back instantly, his arms pulling me into him.

“You have no idea how much I love you, Jimmy Tatro” I said.

“You can bet that I love you more than that, Gemma Haythe,” he said.

[wigglywormy]

fair victory [bakugou/deku, 1.7k]

ahhhh i know i haven’t psoted anything in 10 thousand years, for which im sorry lol, but anyways! this is my squealing santa fic for @heartsywritesthethings !!!

their bnha prompt was ‘bakugou getting wrecked by another classmate’, and since i haven’t written any bakudeku for this blog yet, i went with deku as the ler 8)

merry christmas! i hope to open up prompts again soon so i can start posting more consistently on this blog again xoxo

--

Bakugou admits that UA has a really damn nice gym, and he intends to get a good use out of it before he graduates in the next few months. As a third year, he doesn’t have as much time to train and exercise like he used to, because his current internship and all of his finals before graduation really keep him occupied.

He finds that working out at night tends to be the only time he gets to utilize the gym, so it becomes a sort of routine for him. Wake up, go to class for half a day, take a bus over to the city to patrol and help Best Jeanist with paperwork (and occasionally - more often than not, now that he’s a third year - go on investigations and actually partake in beating the shit out of some local villains), then he comes back to the dorms, has dinner, maybe hangs out begrudgingly with his friends for a bit, then treks down to the gym below the first floor of the dorms for an intense work out.

It’s an exhausting schedule, but he doesn’t mind it too much.

What he isn’t expecting is for Deku to weasel his way into his routine, almost like he belongs there.

Their patrol routes cross streets, and after the first couple times of nodding amicably, that start actually chatting (because Bakugou’s fucking eighteen now, he has no reason to be a petty bitch to Deku anymore. Some might even say they’re friends now, though Bakugou still cringes at that word.)

Then, Deku starts hanging out with him when Uraraka or Iida were busy. And eventually, he starts following Bakugou to the gym for his nightly workout.

“I’ll spot you!” Deku says as he bounds after Bakugou, gym bag slung over his shoulder. “And then you can spot me? It’s unsafe to lift weights alone, y’know.”

“I haven’t hurt myself yet,” Bakugou grumbles, but holds open the door so Deku and his over sized gym bag can clamber in.

“Yeah, yet,” Deku rolls his eyes, and damn, the kid’s gotten fucking sassy after their second year. Bakugou’s reasonably impressed, to be frank. He blames it on all the time he hangs out with fucking Todoroki.

“Watch your mouth, you shit,” Bakugou snorts, arching his back and doing a few warm up stretches.

“Or what?” Deku shoots back, tossing his bag onto the floor and pulling an arm across his chest as he follows suit in stretching.

“I’ll kick your ass, that’s what,” Bakugou narrows his eyes, and when his gaze locks with Deku’s, he doesn’t spot any fear, not like there used to be. Now he merely sees an inviting glint of… excitement? Of a fucking challenge?

“Bet I could kick your ass now, Kacchan,” Deku says breezily, and he not-so-subtly flexes a bicep. Bakugou’s eyes zap to the defined muscle, and he desperately tries to ignore the way his stomach tightens up at the site. The fuckin’ nerd is right - he has gotten buff as hell the past three years. It’s impressive, and sickeningly attractive, and all sorts of other things that Bakugou does not want to address now, or any time in the future thank you very fucking much.

“Wanna eat those words, you fuck?” Bakugou hisses as a distraction to himself, mostly.

“Alright,” Deku rolls his eyes, walking to the center of the gym area where a large padded mat is laid on the ground. He gets into a fighting stance, and he smiles at Bakugou. “Wanna spar?”

“Do you actually have a deathwish?”

“No quirks,” Deku says, tapping his foot impatiently.

“Fuck,” Bakugou sighs, because he knows this new-and-improved Deku will just provoke him further if he says no. And yeah, sure, the excuse to kick someone’s ass always gets his blood boiling, but being in such close proximity as Deku - after realizing some things last year - isn’t exactly what he wants to do right now.

He sucks it up though, because refusal will cause even more questions than answers, so he sheds his shirt, leaving his tank on, and cracks his neck as he charges without a countdown. What? Deku’s the fucking one who started this, he doesn’t deserve a warning.

Unfortunately, Deku seems to have predicted this, and he quickly grabs one of Bakugou’s forearms and wrenches him forward, attempting to unbalance him with raw force.

Bakugou growls, because these are all moves that he knows for a fact Deku has learned from watching him fight. He manages to get a good shove in, his palm flat against Deku’s broad chest, but the next thing he knows, Deku’s on the ground, sliding behind him and elbowing the back of his knees until he buckles and falls.

“That was a dirty fuckin’ move,” Bakugou manages, impressed, as he rolls away, but Deku grabs his ankle and tugs him back, getting him face down on the mat with his wrists pinned against his lower back behind him.

“Shit,” Bakugou hisses, thrashing and trying to dislodge Deku, who’s now straddling him as he uses his weight to pin Bakugou down. “Get - off.”

“Do you surrender?” Deku says, and Bakugou can hear the smug grin in his voice.

“Fuck no.”

“Kacchan, c’mon,” Deku laughs, tightening his hold on Bakugou’s wrists. He leans down a bit, and Bakugou turns his head so his cheek is squished against the mat, his legs kicking behind him as he tries to escape. “Just give up.”

His palms crackle, and Deku tsk’s. “No quirks, remember? Just admit defeat, and then I’ll let you go!”

Bakugou feels his cheeks burn, trying to ignore the heavy weight of Deku on top of him, holding him down, his strong, scarred hands squeezing bruises into his wrists. He doesn’t respond, opting instead to growl and buck like a wild animal because the rest of his body is heating up now too and this is not good.

He hears Deku sigh, a quiet murmur of, “you asked for this,” before Bakugou feels determined fingers pressing into his ribs, right over his tank top.

Bakugou jerks as if he’s been electrocuted, a strangled noise escaping his lips, and his eyes widen when Deku starts tickling him.

Simultaneously, having Deku’s hands on him is something he’s fantasized about for months now, but not like this, holy shit. Bakugou’s biting his lip so hard it nearly bleeds, and he’s already pinned down, already practically defeated, he’s not going to give Deku the satisfaction of -

Deku slips his hand underneath Bakugou’s tank, fluttering his nails up until he can scratch right below Bakugou’s ribs, and Bakugou shrieks.

“F-Fuckin’ Deku, you sh-shihihit, get the fuck off!”

“You’re still super ticklish, huh?” Deku giggles - giggles at him, like this is funny, that fucker - before drilling his thumb into Bakugou’s ribs, causing the blonde to choke on a laugh, kicking his legs and panting.

“I’m not!”

“You aren’t?” Deku says, the teasy little fuck. “Are you sure?”

He releases Bakugou’s arms, but before Bakugou has half a mind to flip himself over and roll away, Deku grabs his wrists and pins them above his head, stretching Bakugou out taut. He slips his free hand underneath Bakugou’s tank again, this time tickling up his spine until he can scratch his nails along his shoulder blades, and Bakugou hates himself for how hard he giggles, shoving his face into his arm to try and muffle himself.

“Aww, Kacchan,” Deku coos, leaning down so his breath fans across Bakugou’s nape. “Do you give up?”

“F-Fuck you - ah - aha shit!” Bakugou gasps when Deku tickles under his arm, fingers deft and sure as Bakugou writhes underneath him. “Get off!”

Finally, Deku fully releases Bakugou’s wrists in order to bring both hands down to attack Bakugou’s waist, fingers slipping underneath him for a brief moment to pinch his hips and prod into his stomach. Unfortunately for Bakugou, he’s already pretty worn out, and steadily getting even more exhausted because every time he tries not to laugh, Deku just tickles him harder until he’s forced to wheeze out these pathetic giggles that Deku keeps cooing at god fucking damnit.

“Kacchan, you’re so cute,” Deku laughs, and when Bakugou manages to roll onto his side, Deku claws at his belly until Bakugou snorts.

Cute, Bakugou thinks deliriously, his body tingling and warm as Deku tortures him. What the fuck -

“Stop!” Bakugou laughs, rolling onto his back and pushing weakly at Deku’s chest. “Fuck - st-stop, Deku you piece of shihihit!”

“That doesn’t sound like a surrender,” Deku whispers, reaching a hand up to scratch under Bakugou’s neck. His hands seem to be darting everywhere, and Bakugou’s brain feels fuzzy, desperate for some sort of mercy but too prideful to speak it. Besides, though the tickling is fucking awful, Deku’s so warm on top of him, and his hands are like honey against his sweaty skin.

Once Deku wedges both of his hands underneath Bakugou’s arms though, Bakugou arches his back so hard it pops, his head thrown back against the mat, and god, he can’t - he can’t take it anymore, fuck.

“Deku - Deku, I’m - ” Bakugou squeezes his eyes shut, giggling wildly. “I’m gonna f-fucking d-die - ”

“You’re so dramatic,” Dekiu laughs, “you’re not gonna die, I promise.”

“Yes I fuckin’ am,” Bakugou wheezes, finally peeking open his eyes, damp with tears as he sees the fond, endeared look on Deku’s face as the sadistic fuck keeps fucking tickling him. “Fine - shit, f-fine, okay, stop, you win, you fu-fuhuhcking win, get off - !”

“Wow,” Deku says, slowing his touches but not stopping completely. He trails his hands down, tracing over Bakugou’s protruding ribs gently until Bakugou squeaks breathlessly. “It only took you nearly passing out to finally admit you lost. So stubborn, Kacchan.”

He sounds… incredibly happy about this fact, and Bakugou finds himself flushing deeper, panting as he catches his breath. Deku’s still on top of him, and Bakugou trembles when those scarred hands trail over his waist. It’s electric and terrifying, how much Bakugou doesn’t really want him to stop.

Fucking…. Shit. Stupid fucking feelings.

“So,” Deku says after letting Bakugou calm down, though his hands are still touching him, almost absentmindedly. “Wanna go again?”

“I’m gonna murder you,” Bakugou wheezes pathetically, but there’s a grin on his face, and when Deku smiles back, Bakugou knows that he’s officially completely fucking whipped. Any other person, and he would’ve blown their hands off for pulling a stunt like this, but Deku just looks at him so earnestly, and Bakugou begrudgingly admits to himself that maybe… maybe it wasn’t all that torturous.

Though, next time, Bakugou’s not above a little bit (or a lot) of revenge. He guarantees that Deku is just as ticklish as he was when they were kids, and Bakugou intends to find out very soon just how true that fact is.

[maychorian]

Weekly Voltron Fic Recs #58

Rules: You can find past weekly rec lists here, and non-list recs in my general fic rec tag. Also follow @maychorianrecs for individually tagged posts, the easier to search and reblog. This is stuff I like, and I have a huge bias toward Lance, hurt/comfort, and general fluff, in that order. Gen unless otherwise noted. Please comment on the fics if you read and enjoy them!

A Crack in the Foundation by Emerald_Ashes Words: 3,553 Author’s Summary: A rescue goes wrong. It ends up leaving Hunk and Lance stranded, severely injured, and with no means of escape. My Comments: Based on a prompt I gave the author a while ago, but I totally forgot about it and I would have read this fic anyway, haha. Love this scenario, obviously, and it’s written very well. Hunk is such a sweet guy, even when Lance is rambling and near-delirious from a concussion.

Reflections by hollo Words: 2,246 Author’s Summary: ~ originally printed in Starboy: A Lance Zine ~ …Nostalgia filled him, a distinct and deep sadness that was becoming like a close friend. It came now and then, sometimes falling on him swiftly and sometimes creeping up, silent and nearly unforeseeable, like a thief in the dark. He’d thought he’d get used to it eventually, used to the distance and the lack and how everything and everyone he knew and loved was so, so far away. Sometimes he thought he had - but maybe he’d just gotten used to putting it aside, ignoring it during the day and during the missions so he wouldn’t be distracted from whatever Voltron was being faced with at the time. And they were faced with so much, an entire universe of unknown that they had to face down and deal with, day after day after day… My Comments: Lovely and bittersweet interlude with Lance and the blue lion.

Compromised by gringle for StandinShadow Words: 3,117 Author’s Summary: Keith ignored the rolling sensation of pain radiating from his stomach. “I’m uh… I’ve been injured. I can make it-” probably. Keith was never a betting man in the sense that he’d think in terms of probabilities. He just worked toward a goal, and he either succeeded or failed, and he can’t fail this. “-I just need more time.” “That information is invaluable in overcoming this sector of Empire Control. You have five minutes, or until we’re compromised ourselves,” Kolivan stated, grim and final. Another click, and Kolivan’s voice went silent. My Comments: Great hurt!Keith and concerned Kolivan, with an especially amusing ending. I would love to see a part two, though.

Unrelenting by BossToaster (ChaoticReactions) Words: 6,195 Author’s Summary: Hufflepuffs are loyal. They’re just. They’re hardworking.Not everyone sees it that way. Hunk does, but it’s not always easy. For Hunk’s Birthday My Comments: Part of a previously recced series, and you should totally read the whole thing. I love this view of Hunk, all the different aspects of him through the years. It’s very realistic and really reminded me of adolescence, that kind of awkwardness and uncertainty that eventually gives way to understanding and pride, or at least acceptance of self. Great stuff.

Keepsake by fandomtrashpanda Words: 2,277 Author’s Summary: Hunk never takes off his headband because it’s the last piece of Samoa he has. *set before and during the events of the show* My Comments: Wonderful little moment with Hunk. I love the idea of the headband being a memento from someone important to him, and there was some nice stuff with Hunk and Lance, too.

Missed Scenes (and Misunderstandings) by LitDragonWagon Words: 6,224 Author’s Summary: Lance isn’t sure why Shiro hates him, but he wishes he could figure it out and fix it. Featuring the worst of misunderstandings, Lance’s inferiority complex, Shiro the most awkward bean, Keith the accidental relationship therapist (who solves problems with violence), Hunk n’ Pidge as the brains, and far too many italics. Gen fic. My Comments: Sequel to a previously recced fic. So, so sweet. I adore Lance and Shiro getting closer, platonically, and all the hugging and cuddling is wonderful.

Black Paladin Week by kitsune13tamlin Words: 7,846 Author’s Summary: I am slow at updates but over on tumblr there was a Shiro-week (check the tag blackpaladinweek for all kinds of Shiro goodness) a while back that I participated in and this is the collection of those short stories. Each day had a different subject and each chapter is the story for the new subject. Chapter title is the day’s subject of choice. Seven short Shiro stories simultaneously! My Comments: Wonderful collection of ficlets, some angstier than others. Very well-written and lyrical prose, a pleasure to read.

The Sparkle in Her Eye by heroami Words: 3,002 Author’s Summary: When was the last time Allura left the Castle for a non-mission reason? The Balmera? That was forever ago. No wonder she was so disappointed. And to think, all she wanted was something sparkly. Lance paused as an idea began to form in his head. It was high risk, but could lead to high reward. My Comments: So sweet and adorable. I absolutely believe that Lance would do this, and Allura’s reaction was so cute.

A Name By Any Other by IcyPanther Words: 3,558 Author’s Summary: To avoid another one of Shiro’s exhausting training scenarios, the Paladins settle on a bonding activity and opt to talk about their names. What they thought would be a light-hearted topic turns deeply personal when they realize that no name is as simple as it appears. For behind every name there is a story just waiting to be told. —– “Names?” Shiro repeated, raising an eyebrow. Pidge nodded vigorously. “Yes. Like, how we all got our names. Other than Keith none of us are using our actual ones, right?” “Excuse me?” Lance protested. “Lance is my real name!” “You’re from Cuba,” she said pointedly. “And we’ve all heard you go on about your siblings. They have Hispanic names. You do not. Therefore, Lance is not your real name.” My Comments: Fluffy and sweet with just a touch of angst and some lovely bonding. Great read.

these old bones by achievingelysium Words: 4,937 Author’s Summary: He’s always been fascinated with dinosaurs. Keith isn’t entirely sure why—maybe it’s because their footprints are still here, even after so long. Maybe he’s hearing the echoes of history calling for him. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because he sees himself in those old bones. A Keith character study told in three parts. Originally written for the Aphelion zine. My Comments: Lovely language and prose in this character study and backstory for Keith. All of images and emotions were vivid and striking.

oh my god, he’s in quarantine by prettyshiroic (AnalystProductions) Words: 9,532 Author’s Summary: Whilst with the blade of Marmora, Keith gets sick and is put in quarantine. It’s not at all what Matt expects. - There are some talks to be had. And Matt’s attempts bring karma to the yard. He is such a fool to have not foreseen any of this. My Comments: I absolutely adore this characterization Matt, goofy and nerdy and caring and big-brotherly, especially since Keith needs a whole lot of big-brothering. A real pleasure to read.

The Real MacGyver by A_Zap Words: 4,864 Author’s Summary: Some people talk about how someone can be the genuine article, the real McCoy. In that case, Hunk is the real MacGyver, capable of making whatever the team needs from what he has on hand. 5 times that Hunk used his engineering skills to help out the Team/the cause, and one times he used his skills for fun. My Comments: Adorable and heartwarming and amazing, with just a touch of angst. Hunk is so very much the best, and it’s great to see him getting some proper appreciation. The end was fun and funny, too.

Make My Messes Matter by BossToaster (ChaoticReactions) Words: 4,937 Author’s Summary: After a nightmare about the Galra ship, Ryou tries to sneak out of the castle to deal. On the way out, he’s spotted by Keith My Comments: Part of a previously recced series. I love Ryou connecting with the Voltron team and making relationships on his own terms, and this was particularly nice for the resolution of some conflict earlier in the series between he and Keith. Yellow was a wonderful additional presence in the fic, too.

Together We’ll Be by hanbunnotsuki Words: 4,570 Author’s Summary: At the end of a mission, Team Voltron find a lost space-puppy, separated from its pack. While they try to get the little one back to its family, the team adopts it as one of their own. Even the briefest and littlest encounter can leave its mark on one’s heart. My Comments: Absolutely heartwarming, and so adorable. It was lovely to watch all of the members of Team Voltron bond with a furry little friend, though it couldn’t last forever.

blue by FeyduBois Words: 2,089 Author’s Summary: Lance is stranded on an alien planet while the paladins regroup. He was just going to chill for a bit, he didn’t expect to fall prey to a predatory hallucinogenic jungle, and he certainly didn’t expect to meet the Blue Lion’s last paladin. My Comments: Very fun and interesting read. The descriptions were entrancing, and the previous Blue Paladin was very cool. I like what canon gave us for Lance’s predecessor, but this alternate vision is wonderful too.

Previously Recced Fics That Updated:

Why it sucks to be a snake in space (73848 words) As Color Fades Away (268320 words) The Purity of Sin (91236 words) Shadows of Stars (155620 words)

[unsettlingshortstories]

A Collapse of Horses

Brian Evenson (2016)

I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own. But in their case they did not recover, but perished. You are not one of them, you cannot be, for if you were you would be dead. Why you choose to pretend to be, and what you hope to gain from it: this is what interests me.

✖

Now it is your turn to listen to me, to listen to my proofs, though I know you will not be convinced. Imagine this: walking through the countryside one day you come across a paddock. Lying there on their sides, in the dust, unnaturally still, are four horses. All four are prone, with no horses standing. They do not breathe and do not, as far as you can see, move. They are, to all appearances, dead. And yet, on the edge of the paddock, not twenty yards distant, a man fills their trough with water. Are the horses alive and appearances deceptive? Has the man simply not yet turned to see that the horses are dead? Or has he been so shaken by what he has seen that he doesn’t know what to do but proceed as if nothing has happened?

If you turn and walk hurriedly on, leaving before anything decisive happens, what do the horses become for you? They remain both alive and dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead.

And what, in turn, carrying that paradoxical knowledge in your head, does that make you?

✖

I do not think of myself as special, as anything but ordinary. I completed a degree at a third-tier university housed in the town where I grew up. I graduated safely ensconced in the middle of my class. I found passable employment in the same town. I met a woman, married her, had children with her—three or perhaps four, there is some disagreement on that score—and then the two of us fell gradually and gently out of love.

Then came an incident at work, an accident, a so-called freak one. It left me with a broken skull and, for a short time, a certain amount of confusion. I awoke in an unfamiliar place to find myself strapped down. It seemed to me—I will admit this too—it seemed for some time, hours at least, perhaps even days, that I was not in a hospital at all, but in a mental facility.

But my wife, faithful and everpresent, slowly soothed me into a different understanding of my circumstances. My limbs, she insisted, were restrained simply because I had been delirious. Now that I no longer was, the straps could be loosened. Not quite yet, but soon. There was nothing to worry about. I just had to calm down. Soon, everything would return to normal.

✖

In some ways, I suppose everything did. Or at least tried to. After the accident, I received some minor compensation from my employer, and was sent out to pasture. Such was the situation. Myself, my wife, my children, at the beginning of a hot and sweltering summer, crammed in the house together with nowhere to go.

I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before. A door was in the wrong place, a window had stretched a few inches longer than it had been when I had gone to bed the night before, the light switch, I was certain, had been forced half an inch to the right. Always just a small thing, almost nothing at all, just enough for me to notice.

In the beginning, I tried to point these changes out to my wife. She seemed puzzled at first, and then she became somewhat evasive in her responses. For a time, part of me believed her responsible: perhaps she had developed some deft technique for quickly changing and modifying the house. But another part of me felt certain, or nearly so, that this was impossible. And as time went on, my wife’s evasiveness took on a certain wariness, even fear. This convinced me that not only was she not changing the house, but that daily her mind simply adjusted to the changed world and dubbed it the same. She literally could not see the differences I saw.

Just as she could not see that sometimes we had three children and sometimes four. No, she could only ever see three. Or perhaps four. To be honest, I don’t remember how many she saw. But the point was, as long as we were in the house there were sometimes three children and sometimes four. But that was due to the idiosyncrasies of the house as well. I would not know how many children there would be until I went from room to room. Sometimes the room at the end of the hall was narrow and had one bed in it, other times it had grown large in the night and had two. I would count the number of beds each morning when I woke up and sometimes there would be three, sometimes four. From there, I could extrapolate how many children I had, and I found this a more reliable method than trying to count the children themselves. I would never know how much of a father I was until I counted beds.

I could not discuss this with my wife. When I tried to lay out my proofs for her, she thought I was joking. Quickly, however, she decided it was an indication of a troubled mental state, and insisted I seek treatment—which under duress I did. To little avail. The only thing the treatment convinced me of was that there were certain things that one shouldn’t say even to one’s spouse, things that they are just not ready—and may never be ready—to hear.

My children were not ready for it either. The few times I tried to fulfill my duties as a father and sit them down to tell them the sobering truth, that sometimes one of them didn’t exist, unless it was that sometimes one of them existed twice, I got nowhere. Or less than nowhere: confusion, tears, panic. And, after they reported back to my wife, more threats of treatment.

✖

What, then, was the truth of the situation? Why was I the only one who could see the house changing? What were my obligations to my family in terms of helping them see and understand? How was I to help them if they did not desire to be helped?

Being a sensible man, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if what I was experiencing had any relation to reality at all. Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps, I tried to believe, the accident had changed me. I did try my level best, or nearly so, to see things their way. I tried to ignore the lurch reality took each morning, the way the house was not exactly the house it had been the night before, as if someone had moved us to a similar but not quite identical house as we slept. Perhaps they had. I tried to believe that I had three, not four, children. And when that did not work, that I had four, not three, children. And when that didn’t work, that there was no correlation between children and beds, to turn a blind eye to that room at the end of the hall and the way it kept expanding out or collapsing in like a lung. But nothing seemed to work. I could not believe.

✖

Perhaps if we moved, things would be different. Perhaps the house was, in some manner or other, alive. Or haunted maybe. Or just wrong. But when I raised the idea of moving with my wife, she coughed out a strange barking laugh before enumerating all the reasons this was a bad idea. There was no money and little prospect of any coming in now that I’d had my accident and lost my job. We’d bought the house recently enough that we would take a substantial loss if we sold it. We simply could not afford to move. And besides, what was wrong with the house? It was a perfectly good house.

How could I argue with this? From her perspective of course she was right, there was no reason to leave. For her there was nothing wrong with the house—how could there be? Houses don’t change on their own, she told me indignantly: this was not something that reason could allow.

But for me that was exactly the problem. The house, for reasons I didn’t understand, wasn’t acting like a house.

✖

I spent days thinking, mulling over what to do. To get away from the house, I wandered alone in the countryside. If I walked long enough, I could return home sufficiently exhausted to sleep rather than spending much of the night on watch, trying to capture the moment when parts of the house changed. For a long time I thought that might be enough. That if I spent as little time in the house as possible and returned only when exhausted, I could bring myself not to think about how unsound the house was. That I would wake up sufficiently hazy to no longer care what was where and how it differed from before.

That might have gone on for a long time—even forever or the equivalent. But then in my walks I stumbled upon, or perhaps was led to, something. It was a paddock. I saw horses lying in the dirt, seemingly dead. They couldn’t be dead, could they? I looked to see if I could tell if they were breathing and found I could not. I could not say honestly if they were dead or alive, and I still cannot say. I noticed a man on the far side of the paddock filling their trough with water, facing away from them, and wondered if he had seen the horses behind him, and if not, when he turned, whether he would be as unsettled as I. Would he approach them and determine they were dead, or would his approach startle them to life? Or had he seen them dead already and had his mind been unable to take it in?

For a moment I waited. But at the time, in the moment, there seemed something more terrible to me about the idea of knowing for certain that the horses were dead than there was about not knowing whether they were dead or alive. And so I hastily left, not realizing that to escape a moment of potential discomfort I was leaving them forever in my head as not quite dead but, in another sense, nearly alive. That to leave as I had was to assume the place of the man beside the trough, but without ever being able to turn and learn the truth.

✖

In the days that followed, that image haunted me. I turned it over, scrutinized it, peered at every facet of it, trying to see if there was something I had missed, if there was a clue that would sway me toward believing the horses were alive or believing they were dead. If there was a clue to reveal to me that the man beside the trough knew more than I had believed. To no avail. The problem remained insolubly balanced. If I went back, I couldn’t help asking myself, would anything have changed? Would the horses still, even now, be lying there? If they were, would they have begun to decay in a way that would prove them dead? Or would they be exactly as I had last seen them, including the man still filling the trough? What a terrifying thought.

Since I’d stumbled upon the paddock, I didn’t know exactly where it was. Every walk I went on, even every step I took away from the house, I risked stumbling onto it again. I began walking slower, stopping frequently, scrutinizing my surroundings and shying away from any area that might remotely harbor a paddock. But after a while I deemed even that insufficiently safe, and I found myself hardly able to leave the house.

And yet with the house always changing, I couldn’t remain there either. There was, I gradually realized, a simple choice: either I would have to steel myself and return and confront the horses or I would have to confront the house.

Either horse or house, either house or horse—but what sort of choice was that really? The words were hardly different, pronounced more or less the same, with one letter only having accidentally been dialed up too high or too low in the alphabet. No, I came to feel, by going out to avoid the house and finding the horses I had, in a manner of speaking, simply found again the house. It was, it must be, that the prone horses were there for me, to teach a lesson to me, that they were meant to tell me something about their near namesake, the house.

The devastation of that scene, the collapse of the horses, gnawed on me. It was telling me something. Something I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.

✖

At first, part of me resisted the idea. No, I told myself, it was too extreme a step. Lives were at stake. The lives of my wife and of at least three children. The risks were too great.

But what was I to do? In my mind I kept seeing the collapsed horses and I felt my thoughts again churn over their state. Were they alive or were they dead? I kept imagining myself there at the trough, paralyzed, unable to turn and look, and it came to seem to me my perpetual condition. In my worst moments, it seemed the state not only of me but of the whole world, with all of us on the verge of turning around and finding the dead behind us. And from there, I slipped back to the house—which, like the horses, seemed in a sort of suspended state: I knew it was changing, that something strange was happening, I was sure of that at least, but I didn’t know how or what the changes meant, and I couldn’t make anyone else see them. When it came to the house, I tried to convince myself, I could see what others could not, but the rest of the world was like the man filling the horse trough, unable to see the fallen horses.

Thinking this naturally led me away from the idea of the house and back instead to the horses. What I should have done, I told myself, was to have thrown a rock. I should have stooped and scraped the dirt until my fingers closed around a stone, and then shied it at one of the horses, waiting either for the meaty thud of dead flesh or the shudder and annoyed whicker of a struck living horse. Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment. No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an explicably dead family, it must be faced.

And so I turned away from the house and went back to look for the paddock, steeling myself for whatever I would find. I was ready, rock in hand. I would find out the truth about the horses, and I would accept it, no matter what it was.

Or at least I would have. But no matter how hard I looked, no matter how long I walked, I could not find the paddock. I walked for miles, days even. I took every road, known and unknown, but it simply wasn’t there.

Was something wrong with me? Had the paddock existed at all? I wondered.

Was it simply something my mind had invented to cope with the problem of the house?

House, horse—horse, house: almost the same word. For all intents and purposes, in this case, it was the same word. I would still throw a rock, so to speak, I told myself, but I would throw that so-called rock not at a horse, but at a house.

✖

But still I hesitated, thinking, planning. Night after night I sat imagining coils of smoke writhing around me and then the rising of flames. In my head, I watched myself waiting patiently, calmly, until the flames were at just the right height, and then I began to call out to my family, awakening them, urging them to leave the house. In my head we unfurled sheets through windows and shimmied nimbly to safety. We reached safety every time. I saw our escape so many times in my head, rendered in just the same way, that I realized it would take the smallest effort on my part to jostle it out of the realm of imagination and into the real world. Then the house would be gone and could do me no more damage, and both myself and my family would be safe.

✖

I had had enough unpleasant interaction with those who desired to give me treatment since my accident, however, that I knew to take steps to protect myself. I would have to make the fire look like an accident. For this purpose, I took up smoking.

I planned carefully. I smoked for a few weeks, just long enough to accustom my wife and children to the idea. They didn’t care for it, but did not try to stop me. Since my accident, they had been shy of me, and rarely tried to stop me from doing anything.

Seemingly as a concession to my wife, I agreed not to smoke in the bedroom. I promised to smoke only outside the house. With the proviso that, if it was too cold to smoke outside I might do so downstairs, near an open window.

During the third, or perhaps fourth, week after I took up smoking, with my wife and children asleep, it was indeed too cold—or at least I judged that I could argue it to have been such if confronted after the fact. So I cracked open the window near the couch and prepared the images in my mind. I would, I told myself, allow my arm to droop, the tip of my cigarette to nudge against the fabric of the couch. And then I would allow first the couch and then the drapes to begin to smoke and catch fire. I would wait until the moment when, in my fantasies, I was myself standing and calling for my wife and children, and then I would do just that and all would be as I had envisioned. Soon my family and I would be safe, and the house would be destroyed.

Once that was done, I thought, perhaps I would find the paddock again as well, with the horses standing this time and clearly alive.

✖

And yet, the fabric of the couch did not catch fire, instead only smoldering and stinking, and soon I pressed the cigarette in too deeply and it died. I found and lit another, and when the result was the same I gave up on both the couch and the cigarette.

I turned instead to matches and used them to ignite the drapes. As it turned out, these burned much better, going up all at once and lighting my hair and clothing along with them.

By the time I’d flailed about enough to extinguish my body, the whole room was aflame. Still, I continued with my plan. I tried to call to my wife and children but when I took a breath to do so, my lungs filled with smoke and, choking, I collapsed.

✖

I do not know how I lived through the fire. Perhaps my wife dragged me out and then went back for the children and perished only then. When I awoke, I was here, unsure of how I had arrived. My face and body were badly burned, and the pain was excruciating. I asked about my family but the nurse dodged the question, shushed me and only told me I should sleep. This was how I knew my family was dead, that they had been lost in the fire, and that the nurse didn’t know how to tell me. My only consolation was that the house, too, the source of all our problems, had burnt to the ground.

For a time I was kept alone, drugged. How long, I cannot say. Perhaps days, perhaps weeks. Long enough in any case for my burns to slough and heal, for the skin grafts that I must surely have needed to take effect, for my hair to grow fully back. The doctors must have worked very hard on me, for I must admit that except to the most meticulous eye I look exactly as I had before the fire.

✖

So, you see, I have the truth straight in my mind and it will not be easy to change. There is little point in you coming to me with these stories, little point in pretending once again that my house remains standing and was never touched by flame. Little point coming here pretending to be my wife, claiming that there was no fire, that you found me lying on the floor in the middle of our living room with my eyes staring fixedly into the air, seemingly unharmed.

No, I have accepted that I am the victim of a tragedy, one of my own design. I know that my family is gone, and though I do not yet understand why you would want to convince me that you are my wife, what you hope to gain, eventually I will. You will let something slip and the game will be over. At worst, you are deliberately trying to deceive me so as to gain something from me. But what? At best, someone has decided this might lessen the blow, that if I can be made to believe my family is not dead, or even just mostly dead and not quite alive, I might be convinced not to surrender to despair.

Trust me, whether you wish me good or ill, I do hope you succeed. I would like to be convinced, I truly would. I would love to open my eyes and suddenly see my family surrounding me, safe and sound. I would even tolerate the fact that the house is still standing, that unfinished business remains between it and myself, that somewhere horses still lie collapsed and waiting to be either alive or dead, that we will all in some senses remain like the man at the trough with our backs turned. I understand what I might have to gain from it, but you, I still do not understand.

✖

But do your worst: disrupt my certainty, try to fool me, make me believe. Get me to believe there is nothing dead behind me. If you can make that happen, I think we both agree, then anything is possible.

[monsta-sextories]

Poolside - 7

Son Hyunwoo

word count: 2247

🎧 ocean eyes- Billie Eilish

“What are you thinking about?” you ask as you break away from Hyunwoo’s kiss. Tonight you both end up in the small guest house that he’s been occupying. You’re pleased to notice it’s still clean, but that’s about all you notice before you find yourself laying in Hyunwoo’s bed unwilling to leave for the night. 

“Always so quiet, but I know you’re thinking about something,” you continue with a smile, “I can see it in your eyes.” It’s hard to tell if he’s still dazed from the current situation or if the look he’s giving you means something else. Something specially for you.

His body goes a little still before he pulls his gaze away, just for a moment, and then he looks back at you with the same serious look he seems to wear often.

You’re both wrapped loosely in towels, the thick cotton the only thing separating bare skin- recently dried from the swimming pool. Neither of you have made any action to remove the layers, but with each gentle touch or subtle trace you can feel them disappearing, as the fabric slips looser around your bodies.

One of his hands is curled around your hip and you feel it falter for just a second.  

“What’s wrong?” you ask. There’s something unsure for a moment. His weight doesn’t seem as heavy, and it’s the closest thing to pulling away without pulling away.

“I don’t know what to do,” he finally says. He seems the slightest bit shy about the words, but not quite embarrassed. 

“What you did the other night was fine,” you say with a playful smile. He quirks a half smile for just a second and then refocuses again.

“I mean… what is this?” he says looking at you with furrowed eyebrows. The question is a little too blunt, and honestly, answering in such a position makes you panic. 

“It can just be this,” you say too quickly. There’s nothing truthful about it. Nothing that tells him what you want, or asks him what he wants, but after a moments pause the words just seem to slip out of you.

“It doesn’t have to be anything,” you say without much thought, and you can feel yourself regret the words immediately, because it’s already something. 

He doesn’t say anything, but he seems to accept it for what it is and slowly presses your lips together. It would be hard to not think about what just happened, and what you just said, if he hadn’t resumed so easily. 

It doesn’t take long until the towels are gone and you have the amazing view of Hyunwoo’s perfect torso hovering just above you. His arms on either side of you support him at just the right angle.

He slides into you carefully and it’s incredible that a man can seem so controlled in his movements, yet seem as though he’s trying to hold himself together just as bad as you. He fucks you for awhile tonight. There aren’t any words this time passed through his heavy breath or your soft cries. 

You come twice, but he doesn’t stop until you tell him to. When he does, it’s as if he’s relieved to finally let go as he collapses on top of you. His body nearly convulses and his toned physique allows you to see each contraction of muscle as they rippled through him. For some reason you find yourself thinking about weakness, and how this moment you feel completely open, unguarded… you wonder if Hyunwoo feels that too. If he’s ever felt it, what it means to be completely vulnerable for someone else. It makes your heart ache. 

His calloused hands find rest on your body here and there and eventually you both fall asleep wrapped around each other… it’s definitely something.

…

“This is relaxing,” you say as you smooth the soil around the stem of a newly planted fern. Your free hand lazily pats the mounds of dirt with the top of a trowel while Hyunwoo holds the other one in his hands.

“Mm,” he replies as he finishes wrapping the new bandage around your cut finger. It was a sweet, wordless gesture that made your heart warm at the sight but you didn’t want to bring too much attention to it. 

He releases your hand when he’s satisfied and immediately takes back his gardening tool. You’ve been helping him for the past few hours, mostly because you’ve realized it’s the only way you can really spend time with him during the day. 

He gives you simple tasks that you can’t really mess up, and he allows you to talk to him as much as you want. As long as he keeps moving, he probably wouldn’t even care if you just sat there and watched.

“Am I slowing you down?” you ask as he tunes back into his work. He looks over at you, and then turns around as if to see if anyone’s watching. He gives you a small smile and then shrugs.

“Are you trying to?” he asks with a raised brow. 

You shake your head and smile back. “I just like spending time with you.”

You notice the way Hyunwoo’s eyes almost disappear when he smiles even bigger now. There’s something about this man that makes you want to do anything for him. Fly him to another country, dress him up in something, eat expensive meals, and never leave the bedroom for days. But on top of that, you want to know what goes on in that head of his. You want to one day talk for hours and learn everything you can about him…

“Can we make another deal?” you finally ask. The question throws him off guard but he looks at you and nods. 

“What kind of deal?”

“If I help you get all your work done for today and tomorrow, you take tomorrow off.”

His face turns skeptical.

“You want to split two days work, in half the time?”

“I know you’re already ahead. And if there’s two of us…”

“You want to help me, so that I don’t have to work tomorrow. Why?”

“Well, obviously I expect something in return.”

He looks at you waiting for the catch. His stare alone makes you crumble just a bit, and regaining that composure is hard as always.

“You and I. Go out for brunch… and spend the day. Away from this house.” 

It’s much harder to sound confident with your request when you see his brows lower just a bit, and his expression twists into something of confusion. 

“What if you can’t keep up?” he asks, which isn’t the first question you were expecting but it sparks something like hope almost immediately.

“I’ll keep up,” you answer firmly because all that really matters is the fact he didn’t say no. He seems to ponder for a second before his face finally breaks into a quirked smile.

“Then it’s a deal.”

…

The rest of the day picks up rather quickly. He shows you what needs to be done and sends you on your way. You do the best you can, picking your tools mostly going off of memory from what you’ve seen Hyunwoo use. Some things don’t look nearly as good as what you imagine Hyunwoo would be capable of, but they get done. It doesn’t take long for the blisters on your hand to appear and the sweat to start running down your face, but you tell yourself to just keep moving. You think about the questions you’ll finally have the chance to ask when you finally sit down at a table and just… talk.

You don’t bother to check the time not even once, so you’re a bit surprised when you see Betsy starring at you bug-eyed from the back porch. You can see the smile twitching at her lips as she tries not to burst out laughing or make a comment. Perhaps you’d laugh too if you saw yourself, covered in dirt and sweat, still wearing a sundress trying to move as fast as possible. But you don’t have time to laugh, so instead you stick up a gloved middle finger and send it her way. She laughs and calls out a goodbye, which catches you off guard because it can’t be that late, can it? 

It’s been a good couple hours and you haven’t seen Hyunwoo. You do see the sky though, and the sun is starting to set. Unfortunately, you’re not done with the work. You straighten your back for the first time since you started working and you nearly hiss in pain at the stretch. Your knees are sore, you’re covered in filth, and the bandage that had been wrapped around your finger from earlier has disappeared. You sit back just a little, but your body seems to be acting on its own accord as you fall further back to lay flat on the ground. 

You’re running out of time… 

Before you get too comfortable though, you notice the figure making its way towards you. It’s Hyunwoo and you realize he’s moving much faster than you thought. Before you can make out what’s happening, he’s kneeling over you with concern.

“Are you okay?” he asks shaking you just a little.

“Im fine!” you say as you jerk yourself up. Wide eyes stare back at each other until Hyunwoo relaxes first.

“I thought you fainted,” he says finally sitting down next to you. You can tell by the way his body sinks that this is probably the only break he’s taken since he started. He wipes the sweat off his forehead and you almost want to smile at the way he rushed over here.

“oh,” is all you can think to say. Your momentary happiness washes away when you take in the work you’ve just done. Unfinished. And you still didn’t get to the third flower bed…

“Wow, these look great,” Hyunwoo says as he looks over what you’ve done. He seems genuinely impressed. You try your bets to smile back, feeling almost delirious from the exhaustion. He looks down at the stains on your dress, and you try to brush some of it off feeling self-conscious. 

You didn’t finish. You couldn’t keep up. And you can’t even bring yourself to say it just yet. 

He looks around and then takes your hand in his. He gently pulls off the gloves and sets them on the ground between you.

“A deal is a deal,” he finally says as he lightly presses his thumbs into your palms. Its just enough to sooth the horrible cramping.

“I didn’t finfish,” you say almost embarrassed. The odd heaviness of guilt apparent. He quirks a smile, something knowing hidden in it. 

“don’t worry about it,” he says as he places a really fast kiss to your cheek. “You did great,” he adds and quickly gives your dress a quick brush to get rid of some dirt. Part of you feels relieved because you can barely think about working on another part of the yard, much less actually moving. 

“You even put the stone in nicely,” he says as he pulls himself off the ground.

You stare up at his figure towering over you, and the happiness creasing his features. You’re exhausted, but even through your body screaming in pain, you’d follow Hyunwoo to the ends of the earth. You try to untangle your legs and pull yourself up as well, but you limbs feel as though they’re on fire. 

Hyunwoo bends just enough to offer you his hand and pull you up himself. 

“I’ve been watching you since spring,” you nearly croak out as your body adjusts to supporting your weight. He blushes slightly, but his hold on you doesn’t falter as he wraps an arm around your back to make sure you don’t topple over. 

“I don’t know how you do it every day.”

You both walk slowly alongside each other to make your way to the patio. As you do, you nearly double-take. The third flower bed you hadn’t finished… well, its finished. So many things run through your head at that moment but all you can do is stare. The perfection of each placement that is so Hyunwoo, but then again who else would it be.

“How did you…” you trail off, but you feel the reassuring presence of his arm around you as it pulls you closer. His smile is just tucked away, as he keeps his gaze on the ground.

“You’re incredible,” you say simply, trying not to let the small bubbles of guilt and humiliation break through the sweetness of Hyunwoo’s action. You could kiss him right now. And you should…

“I’ve never been invited to brunch before,” he says with a hint of humor. His hand finds yours as you make your way to the first patio step. He squeezes it tenderly, but it hits you like a wave of emotion.

To feel so vulnerable for another person…

“Uh, I don’t know if I have clothes to wear for-”

“It doesn’t matter,” you interrupt with finality. “That doesn’t matter.”

He looks at you the slightest bit surprised, but with a soft smile that you could stare at forever. 

“Get some rest,” he says before releasing your hand. He leaves you there at the edge of the patio before turning to leave. But your hand still tingles from where it was just joined to his, and your heart thrums at the thought of tomorrow.

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[purkinje-effect]

An Equation Heaven Sent, 2: Hungry Work

Table of Contents

Everything pounded inside him. Melancholy awoke on his stomach, but he couldn't move much. He opened his eyes and looked around. Rot, liquor, and blood tainted the air in the small shanty. Various bottles, jars, and hurricane dishes littered the shelves scattered around the room, but his glasses weren't on his face, and he could discern neither where they were more what was in the containers without them. The light coming in from around the edges of the leather curtains did not exactly suggest the time of day, either. Then, he noticed the weight at his lower half shift, and understood someone knelt atop him. The full body ache had disguised the figure's grip on his arms drawn behind his back.

A sharp sensation, then a tight one. Sharp, then tight. Every so often, the figure stopped, but sure enough would start again. 'Choly looked out ahead of him again, assessing that he was on a low table. Mere yards away he recognized the wad of fabric as having been his clothing, and his eyes shot wide in desperate cognition that the kidnapper had slashed open his binding by the fan laces rather than unbuckle the surgical straps. There was no way he was getting home in one piece without them.

"Oh, good. You're awake. I like when they're awake."

Wachusett.

Whatever the goliath was doing behind 'Choly, the dreg couldn't see or discern, but he kept at it diligently, even as he spoke.

"I'm really hoping that's liquor I smell, because I do not do well with being sober at any time of day."

"Mmh. Forgive me if I'm disinclined to share my wine, for the time being. What kind of Stimpacks have you been using? I've never seen anything quite like this."

"I don't understand the question. There's more than one kind? Hey, hey --ow stop. Ow. Ow. Ow. What the fuck, Father. ...Pardon the French."

"Is it that you have so much skin... or is it simply this elastic? I can't wait to find out what quality of leather you'll make. But tell me, really. If it wasn't Stimpacks, then what has made you this way? Forgive my admission you briefly disappointed me, when I figured out your prostheses weren't simply corsetry. I'm rapt with fascination over this." He punctuated the admiration with another sharp sensation.

"--Ow! It wasn't Stimpacks-- hey. Hey! What do you want with my skin. I'll. I'll give you some. But you can't have all of it. I'm still using it." He had an idea what the man of very large cloth wanted, but he knew presumptions had probably gotten him into this position and wasn't about to add to them.

"Waste not, want not. Use the whole thing. Communion is commonly described as the Body and the Blood, but I'm a little more... holistic." Wachusett grunted as he shifted slightly to move up 'Choly's arms, and for a moment 'Choly questioned whether this were a yao guai atop him and not a man at all. "Your chest is all scarred up. Do you still have all your organs? Or was your surgical binding to stay your skin?"

"It's a long story," he replied, astounded that he'd asked about it despite likely having seen him completely naked. "I'm sure you're more interesting a subject than I am. What did Maddox want with the bloodworms anyway?"

"Also a long story. He's a talented chemist. Most raiders go to the bars, restaurants, and theaters to drink. But you were there at the market instead. You must have some interest in chems, if you care to hold company with Maddox instead of the other raiders."

"They... I'm new. It's like transferring to a new school, and being the new kid trying to find a table in the cafeteria that'll let him sit with them. But, you're not wrong. I've got all kinds of unorthodox chem talent. ...Wait, where's Angel? Please tell me you didn't leave him in Nuka Town."

"Your machine? Hmph, no, it followed me home. Once I brought you inside, I turned it off. It was irritating me. I might take it apart for salvage later." Wachusett ran his fingers along the soft, pliant flesh of 'Choly's arms. "You... don't seem too ruffled, to know the position you're in. Perhaps you understand, where others haven't."

"...Yeah, I figured you'd be killing me. I welcome it." 'Choly went limp on the cool wooden surface. "God knows what's in the other side, if there even is one. But it's gotta be better than this. Was The Great War the Rapture? Kingdom come... If this is Heaven, I probably deserve Hell."

"You certainly don't speak like the others. The things you're saying, you know things. You're familiar with The Faith, although it doesn't seem you're especially faithful. Where do you hail from?"

Suddenly the utility of playing Scheherazade manifested clearly for him. Wachusett swung around behind 'Choly on the low table, now facing his feet. A dry grin crossed his exhausted face, and he resigned to the understanding that the goliath was diligently stitching his prize together so it wouldn't move. Like some demented spider. 'Choly made himself an easy medium to work with, now that he knew the desired effect.

"I'm from about two hundred ten years ago, Father."

"...Where, not when?"

"Concord. The Lexington one. My house was in a little suburb Northeast of there when the bombs fell. You know what a vault is?"

"My. Mmh, yes I know of them. The Hinter doesn't have many. The only one I've heard speak of by name is Vault 140 in the ruins of Manchester. I'm sure there are others in the Great North, but I don't speak Keb. Are you suggesting they might be time machines?"

"Mine was, so to speak. Everyone who sought shelter in mine got frozen. I only last year thawed out. It's just speculation since I'm a unique case, being the only survivor of Vault 111, but I'm pretty sure the chemicals they used for cryogenesis permeated my skin. A prewar ghoul in Boston told me once in admiration that it sounded like the backstory for some great hero. He's very into comic books. It's how he grounds himself in the aftermath of the end of the world, I guess. Anyway, pardon me for reciprocating the nosiness, Father, but... I'm not the only mutant in this room, am I? I saw your teeth before. They're impressive."

"I'm losing my taste for precision, with you being so complacent to the rite." Wachusett laid down next to him and held his head closer to his own with one hand, and sniffed deeply of his hair. He then guided 'Choly to face him, and up close he presented his teeth. Not quite perfect, but incredibly well aligned despite how they looked like they shouldn't have reasonably all fit in his mouth. "I'm not mutated. I'm transfigured." He ran his pointed tongue along his fangs for emphasis, quietly prideful. "Perhaps you, too, are transfigured in this way. You describe to me that you were reborn into this transfigured world. You did not have this skin before you were frozen? It's... truly remarkable."

'Choly narrowly caught himself from the impulse of closing the inches between them to kiss that monstrously appetent mouth.

"Are you from that Vault 140 you mentioned?"

"Mm, no. I was born here in the Hinter. Raised by a caravan family that used to frequent Nuka World."

"So you've... always been so tall?" He had to keep his damn faculties about him, not to tack on and handsome.

"The Faith has given me all I have. My wealth is in my body. The raiders of Nuka can have all the money in the world. Caps can't buy the solace of a spirit at one with its vessel."

"You sure are the oddest fundamentalist Christian I've ever met, Father. What denomination do you say you are?" A very beautiful one.

Wachusett simply thought a moment, then laughed and stood to resume his ritualistic mannerisms. 'Choly could tell he'd removed his shirt, wearing thick, broad bracers to keep his pants aloft. If he'd had on his glasses, he'd have been able to tell they were once an armor harness. He watched as best he could, strangely tickled that this house barely had ceiling clearance for such a deliriously tall creature. Wachusett had to be nearly seven feet tall, though his mere presence certainly made him feel even bigger still.

"The way you call me that, you really must think my name is Father Wachusett."

"I'm sorry. The way the slaves talk about you, they make it sound like it's your name. Would you prefer something else, Father?"

"I'm not a pastor, though I do share the Faith with those who will listen willingly." The giant returned and sat beside him with a lap of glass equipment. 'Choly dared not budge trying to look. God, he really was going to kill him, wasn't he? "Mmh, Wachusett suits me fine. I'm not the same man my parents named."

"Coming to terms with a new name for yourself, huh? I rela--" Melancholy cut off, hissing as he got stuck in the soft fold behind his knee. He nearly bucked his feet, but the way they were stitched together prevented him from bending his legs. "What ARE you doing?"

"Following the path of transubstantiation, of course." A long breath escaped Wachusett as he admired the equipment do its work. "You're small, so I won't get all too many Stimpacks from you. Not near as many as a Gatorclaw, or a CaRADbou. But something tells me your skin isn't the only special thing about you."

"Are you trying to tell me you make Stimpacks from Deathclaw blood!? No wonder you're a redwood. Holy shit, Father. ...Pardon."

"The only sin in my eyes is resisting the changes this transfigured world provides us. She has given us the responsibility of becoming more. The constant state of self-improvement is crucial to the Faith. To express vanity is to express zeal for Her boon."

"You... you believe God a woman?" 'Choly was slipping into dizziness, the pounding in his head louder but slower. Suddenly, terming the Father a fundamentalist seemed a bubble off.

"Only a woman could set in motion the birth of a perpetually new and ever-changing world. The Rapture freed us from the shackles of entropy. The before times were a void of potential, but She brought salvation to humanity in a chance to grow. Do you agree?"

If I say yes, will he let me go? ...Do I want him to let me go? He was certain he wouldn't be missed.

"I do. I've... I've been in a long journey of self-reinvention ever since I stepped foot out of cryogenesis. I've undergone lots of chemical and surgical treatment to make my body more like how I mentally and emotionally feel about myself. I've my whole life, though, subscribed to the slogan 'Better Living Through Chems.' I was a military chemist before the war. So I guess you could say I've believed in something quite similar to what you're describing... nearly 250 years now." Melancholy laughed lugubriously, his throat viscous. "Are you going to eat me, Father?"

"You'll stay a part of me in this way. I'm grateful for our chat. I typically revel in butchering the raiders, but it somehow means a great deal more, to know my latest Communion was of like spirit." After a long silence, the implement came out of 'Choly's knee, and he felt Wachusett lean over him. A repetitive snipping sound could be heard, and soon Melancholy could tell Wachusett was popping the stitches he'd doted. "...Of course, there are many forms Communion might take."

"You must get lonely up here, all by yourself. I wouldn't happen to be so lucky as to discover... that Communion might include other expressions of the flesh."

A short laugh came out of the goliath.

"You're so small, yet brazen enough to extend such an offer. Perhaps you do value your life more than you let on, if you're trying to barter for it."

"It's selfishness before anything. I... I was enthralled by the creatures in horror and science fiction books before the war. Now that I've awoken in this... transfigured landscape... I've found that the world has given birth to some that are even more beautiful than those of fiction. I've always told myself, if I was ever going to die, that I wanted to go out banging, to put it coarsely." He knew Wachusett had told him he wasn't a priest, but 'Choly simply couldn't shake the sentiment of polite company with this deferential monstrosity.

"Mmh, I have a better offer. I'm surprised you haven't realized by now I didn't drain you in entirety. How does an exchange sound to you? It's... not every day I meet someone so much like myself. The more you talk, the more grateful I am that you spoke before I quartered you."

"Serendipity," 'Choly murmured dumbly, barely holding onto consciousness at this point. "What kind of exchange?"

"I can make Stimpacks of myself, and administer them to you. Then, when I use those I make of you, you'll be in my veins... and I'll be in yours." Something akin to a blush crossed the Father's face.

"A blood pact," Melancholy deduced. It was so singular, to observe Wachusett found greater intimacy in such a thing than he did carnal satisfaction. "Perpetuating continued flourishing in a partnership of two of us, rather than one consuming the other to become a single greater thing. I could only dream to become anything like you, Father."

"It takes many years and much diligence to become so transfigured. Perhaps if you'll make a regular pilgrimage here, you'd begin to observe the difference the Faith can make in your life?"

"I do think you're the first person who's ever actually told me they wanted to see me again, when it wasn't because I owed them money." 'Choly rolled over on his side and seethed, looking up at the Father, who sat in the floor beside him, cross-legged. He couldn't tell if it was his imagination, but the tougher parts of his skin looked to have taken on a hide-like appearance, darker, irregularly segmented, and slightly glossy.

"So this pleases you?"

"The way you describe a blood transfusion turns my crank like you'd never imagine,” ‘Choly replied, “and I don't think I'd in my life say anything remotely along those lines. You're a damn self-professed vampire, aren't you?"

"I'm not sure what that is, but you seem as certain I define it as those in the Nuka World are certain I'm a 'Father Wachusett.' I trust your assessment." He reached across the room from his seat to retrieve Melancholy's glasses, and offered them, and the pipsqueak took them gladly, though he didn't have the energy to sit up yet.

With the room in focus, he observed the glass vessels in the shelves around him were filled with various pieces of creatures. Some of them were bone, like the hurricane glass of cleaned teeth, while others were preserved in liquid. One jar looked at first glance to be filled with eyes, and he slumped his exhausted head back onto the wooden table top and squinted his eyes shut. Somehow he couldn't decide whether he was grateful to have regained his eyesight.

"It will take some hours for me to prepare the Stimpacks." Wachusett had gone from the room while Melancholy lazed. "I'll be in the next room. You're free to look around, but I'd rather you didn't touch anything without asking. How is your appetite? I made a bloodworm aspic this morning, and I'm quite proud how it turned out."

"...I think I'll pass for now."

[spicycreativity]

Soft-Shoe Shuffle - Ch 9

Chapter: 9/12 Additional Notes: See Ch 1 for more information. Read on AO3 under "WizardGlick." Any formatting/italics errors are holdovers from AO3 that I was too lazy to fix. Chapter Content Warnings: N/A; ask to tag Excerpt: "You don't think he's in love with you, do you?" Roman asked in a strained tone. Silence. "Do you?" Roman demanded. "Oh my god," Virgil said through gritted teeth. Janus could practically hear his jaw creaking. "Virgil!" Roman whisper-shouted.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it

That's my life and all that I've got

Call me a liar, call me a writer

Believe me or not, believe me or not

The sound of a door open and closing startled Janus out of his dreams so violently that he jerked and gasped before falling still again.

Silence followed, but he kept his eyes closed and tried to orient himself. He felt like Remus had used him as a training dummy and remembered very little of the reason why .

Roman's voice broke the silence. "It's not your shift yet, Smoke on the Water."

"I thought you could use the company," Virgil said. "And maybe I missed you."

"Oh, don't lie." Roman sighed and his breath ghosted over Janus' cheek. He was close, then. "That's his job."

Virgil scoffed. "Not anymore, apparently."

Janus focused on keeping his breathing even. It wouldn't do to get caught now of all times.

"You don't buy it?" Roman asked.

"I don't know!" Virgil exclaimed, loud enough to make Janus flinch. In a softer voice, he continued, "I guess people can change. I mean, I did. But it was gradual, and this seems… It seems awfully sudden for a change of heart, especially for someone as stubborn as him."

"You don't think he's in love with you, do you?" Roman asked in a strained tone.

Silence.

"Do you?" Roman demanded.

"Oh my god," Virgil said through gritted teeth. Janus could practically hear his jaw creaking.

"Virgil!" Roman whisper-shouted.

"Have you noticed Patton calling him 'honey'?" Virgil whispered back.

"Wait… You don't think--"

"I don't know!"

"But Patton wouldn't--" Roman tripped over the end of his sentence. "Not him-- "

"You don't just fall in love overnight. What if this some… some campaign for Patton's love?"

"Like a quest?" Roman asked.

Janus nearly laughed. Leave it to Virgil to land three steps to the left of the correct conclusion. And leave it to Roman to spur him on.

Despite the ache in his joints and desperate dryness of his mouth, Janus could feel his mind sliding back toward sleep. There would be no fighting it unless he moved, and he couldn't move without giving up the game.

Oh, well.

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" Virgil asked. "Janus doesn't apologize. Janus doesn't do anything unless it serves some sort of end."

"And where does collapsing in my room factor into this master plan?"

"I don't know," Virgil said. "Maybe this part was just bad luck." He sighed and pulled the covers higher up Janus' chest. "It's weird seeing him like this?"

"...Asleep?"

"No, genius. Vulnerable. He doesn't show weakness either."

"Ah, Virgil," Roman said delicately, after a moment's silence. "Not that I'm the best at math, mind you, but something isn't adding up."

"What do you mean?"

"According to Logan, Janus knew he was sick when he came to visit me. Nearly fainted in the kitchen, from what he said. If he's so averse to showing weakness, as you say, why wouldn't he just, you know, wait?"

"...Huh."

"And why would he apologize to me in private? If he wanted to look good in front of Patton, surely he would have found some way to confront me in front of Patton. Janus is still a part of Thomas; he likes an audience. "

Virgil let out a short puff of air through his nose and said nothing for a few moments. "Well… Maybe I shouldn't jump to conclusions like that."

"It's good that you want to be careful," Roman said with undisguised fondness in his voice. Janus almost frowned. Roman and Virgil, really?

"I guess I'll have to wait and see. I really want to know why he keeps calling my name. Rem-- Uh. Okay. Remus said he did it a bunch yesterday."

"He's not Voldemort; you can say his name around me."

"I don't want to make you upset, that's all."

Virgil's words spun lazy circles in Janus' mind, and whatever Roman replied was lost in the rolling fog.

He had expected Virgil to be mistrustful of him; he had every right to be. Janus had expected him to make conspiracies out of nothing and it didn't hurt his feelings.

It also didn't make him happy, not at all, that Roman had defended him with nothing to gain from it.

Sleep came languid and slow, and for once not accompanied by tongues of fire.

--

Maybe it was luck or maybe it was Virgil's sense of duty, but the next time Janus opened his eyes, it was Virgil that he saw.

Virgil's eyes widened almost comically and he froze.

For a moment, they just stared at each other. Then Janus regained his wits and said, in a tone like they were coworkers who had just passed each other in the hall, "Good morning, Virgil."

Virgil opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "It's afternoon."

"Well. Forgive me for not counting the hours when I was unconscious," Janus said with venom. Because he was scared.

Virgil scowled at him. "Whatever. Glad you're not dead. I'll go get Patton now."

"No, wait." Janus tried to sit up, hating how his arms shook. He brought out another set to assist, as Virgil seemed disinclined to help, or do anything other than just stare at him. "Force of habit."

"Yeah," Virgil said. "I heard you were on an honesty campaign." The disdain in his voice was almost painful. "Let me guess: You're so sorry for how you treated me in the past. You were jealous because I got what you always wanted and you didn't know how to handle it so you lashed out like the snake you are. And then you couldn't apologize because you were trapped in the image you'd created for yourself, only now, now it's falling down around you and you don't even have your precious pride to stand on, and now there's only one thing left to do." Virgil broke off, a little out of breath. "So you come crawling on your belly to me. The last item on your little 'good person' checklist."

Janus shook , and no amount of blankets could melt the ice that crawled down his veins. Virgil's image blurred, cold tears threatening to spill over. And really, what did Janus have left to lose? Hadn't he earned this? At the end of the day, he was the architect of his own demise.

"For what's it's worth, Virgil," he said, his voice so cracked and rasping he barely even recognized it, "I am sorry. I was jealous. And… I tied my own hands. I see that now."

"So you're saying…" Virgil straightened a little. "You were wrong?"

"Yes, Virgil. I was wrong."

Virgil laughed.

He doubled over, shoulders spasming, and laughed until his face turned red and tears ran down his cheeks. "I can't-- I can't believe this…"

"Um, Virgil?" Janus' humiliation gave way to concern as Virgil's breaths became more and more erratic.

"You have no idea how long I've been waiting to hear you say," Virgil said. "I had so many ideas for how I was going to throw it back in your stupid, smug snake face." He wiped his eyes even as more tears fell.

Janus just stared at him.

"Here's what's funny," Virgil continued. "Now… Now that it finally happened and I have you right where I want you, I don't want to do it ."

"You--" Janus' heart leapt. "You believe me?"

"I believe you." Virgil looked at him, eyes still shining. "But only because you look so sweet holding that teddy bear."

"What?" Janus looked down and realized with a jolt that he did indeed have a stuffed bear tucked under his arm. It was pale brown with white felt on the paws and ears, and was wearing a little T-shirt with 'get well beary soon!' printed on it. "Patton."

"Patton," Virgil said with a nod.

Janus looked around properly for the first time and he realized that Patton was not the only one who had left a gift.

A magnificent bouquet of white roses dominated his nightstand, nearly overshadowing a smaller bouquet of baby's breath and hydrangeas in a Mason jar. Behind the vases stood a 6-pack of blue Gatorade, and balanced on the lids was a small, handmade book.

Virgil noticed him staring and passed over one of the Gatorades, breaking the seal on the lid so Janus wouldn't have to struggle with it.

"Um, Virgil," Janus said, taking a shaky sip and realizing he wasn't wearing his gloves. He grit his teeth and tried not to mind. "I do understand if you don't want to be around me right away."

Virgil shook his head. "I'm done being mad."

"...Just like that?"

"I…" Virgil bit down hard on his lip. "I'm making the choice to forgive you. And maybe I'm being naïve and maybe you'll sink your fangs into my neck the second my guard is down, but… Well, you know, maybe for once the best-case scenario will happen and we'll all be best friends and Thomas will never have problems again."

Janus smiled. "You've changed, Virgil. A lot."

"Yeah, well." Virgil shrugged. "So have you, I think."

Janus raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

Virgil leaned in, his grin wolfish and wide. "You're still holding the teddy bear."

Janus' face burned, but he for once made no effort to hide it. "It was a gift, Virgil, it would be rude to--"

"Stop snuggling it and put it with your other gifts?"

Janus closed his eyes and let his head rest against his headboard. "Yes."

"Airtight argument," Virgil said, but the laughter was gone from his voice. "I should get Logan. And you should finish your Gatorade. You probably feel pretty shitty, huh?"

"No, Virgil, I feel fantastic."

"I'm gonna let that slide because you're half-dead."

"Mm." Janus slid further down, gently aware of the Gatorade bottle tipping in his hand.

"Okay." Virgil grabbed the bottle. "No spilling. I'm gonna leave this here with a straw in it. You'd better drink some."

"Okay," Janus said, though he had no intention of doing so. Exhaustion washed over him, a rising tide promising to drag him under.

"You know, once word gets out that you're… not, like, delirious anymore, everybody's going to come running."

"Then don't tell," Janus mumbled, rolling over and pulling the covers up over his head.

"Are you really going back to sleep? You just woke up!"

"Just readjusting."

"Sure."

Janus sighed and wriggled so just his face was poking out from underneath the covers. "Happy?"

"I just don't think you should go back to sleep without drinking something. And no, one tiny sip of Gatorade doesn't count."

"You want to talk to me." Janus was too tired to properly revel in his information, so he settled for a smirk. It was difficult to do with half his face smushed into the mattress, but he was well-practiced.

"Keep pushing and I'm gonna start reading to you from Remus' book of dirty limericks. He hand-wrote that for you, by the way."

"What?" Janus fought to keep the nervous edge out of his voice.

"He said it was an inside joke."

With a concentrated effort, Janus sent the booklet to the top shelf of his closet. He doubted even Remus was reckless enough to expose Janus'... total lack of romantic feelings for Patton in such a careless manner, but still. Better safe than sorry. "Virgil?"

"Hm?"

"What did you get me? I assume the roses are from Roman and the Gatorade is from Logan."

"And the blue flowers are from Patton also."

"Surely they guilt-tripped you into livening up my deathbed as well?"

"My gift was more... abstract."

"Not smothering me to death with Patton's teddy bear does not count as a gift."

"Oh, no." Virgil smirked. "I told Patton how you really take your coffee."

The uncomfortable feeling of being not only seen, but known made Janus hide his face under the comforter again. "You didn't."

"Oh, I did. He knows all about your whipped cream addiction."

" Virgil."

"You're welcome, honey."

Janus went completely still. Half-formed memories of Roman and Virgil conversing in his room swam around his head and oh. Virgil had guessed it. Part of it, anyway. Janus had thought he'd let it go with the rest of his little conspiracy theory, but… And now he'd just completely missed his chance to bluff. He tried anyway. "If this is your way of calling me sweet--"

"Busted," Virgil interrupted.

"Go back to being scared of me," Janus muttered into the blankets.

"Look," Virgil said, voice deadly serious. "I can't tell you what to do, but I swear to all things dark and stormy, if you break Patton's heart, I'll break you ."

"I don't--" Janus tried. "I-- We're not…" He made an exaggerated, high-pitched coughing sound. "I'm going to tell Logan that you antagonized me while I was trying to sleep."

"Oh, please."

"And Patton and I aren't-- He doesn't-- He doesn't feel that way about me."

"That fever must have evaporated some of your brain cells," Virgil said.

Janus was inclined to agree, although for different reasons-- He couldn't think of a single way to change the subject. He settled for a long, drawn-out hiss.

"Just talk to him, okay?" Virgil said. "Or don't. Actually, don't."

"I don't need your permission to start dating Patton," Janus spat, forgetting himself.

"So you do want to date him."

"...No."

"I believe you."

"I'm going back to sleep now."

"Gatorade first." Virgil drew the covers back and held the bottle up to Janus. There was a straw in it now, a purple bendy straw that poked Janus in the lip. He fixed Virgil with a death glare and was privately relieved to see Virgil shrink back under its intensity. Like a river changing course, the parts of Janus that made him who he was were still there, even if his direction had altered.

That was good enough for him.

But he still wasn't going to let Virgil nurse him like he was some kind of helpless baby animal.

Careful not to drop the teddy bear, Janus sat up and took the bottle from Virgil. He drank half of it before his shaking hands gave up on him.

"Go to sleep," Virgil said, setting the bottle on the nightstand. "I'll tell the others not to crowd you." He turned to leave.

Janus almost let him. "Thank you, Virgil. And…" He'd had quite enough of showing his belly, and yet…. "I really am sorry. For everything."

"I know, Janus. Get some rest."

[andya-j]

I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own. But in their case they did not recover, but perished. You are not one of them, you cannot be, for if you were you would be dead. Why you choose to pretend to be, and what you hope to gain from it: this is what interests me. ✖ Now it is your turn to listen to me, to listen to my proofs, though I know you will not be convinced. Imagine this: walking through the countryside one day you come across a paddock. Lying there on their sides, in the dust, unnaturally still, are four horses. All four are prone, with no horses standing. They do not breathe and do not, as far as you can see, move. They are, to all appearances, dead. And yet, on the edge of the paddock, not twenty yards distant, a man fills their trough with water. Are the horses alive and appearances deceptive? Has the man simply not yet turned to see that the horses are dead? Or has he been so shaken by what he has seen that he doesn’t know what to do but proceed as if nothing has happened? If you turn and walk hurriedly on, leaving before anything decisive happens, what do the horses become for you? They remain both alive and dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead. And what, in turn, carrying that paradoxical knowledge in your head, does that make you? ✖ I do not think of myself as special, as anything but ordinary. I completed a degree at a third-tier university housed in the town where I grew up. I graduated safely ensconced in the middle of my class. I found passable employment in the same town. I met a woman, married her, had children with her—three or perhaps four, there is some disagreement on that score—and then the two of us fell gradually and gently out of love. Then came an incident at work, an accident, a so-called freak one. It left me with a broken skull and, for a short time, a certain amount of confusion. I awoke in an unfamiliar place to find myself strapped down. It seemed to me—I will admit this too—it seemed for some time, hours at least, perhaps even days, that I was not in a hospital at all, but in a mental facility. But my wife, faithful and everpresent, slowly soothed me into a different understanding of my circumstances. My limbs, she insisted, were restrained simply because I had been delirious. Now that I no longer was, the straps could be loosened. Not quite yet, but soon. There was nothing to worry about. I just had to calm down. Soon, everything would return to normal. ✖ In some ways, I suppose everything did. Or at least tried to. After the accident, I received some minor compensation from my employer, and was sent out to pasture. Such was the situation. Myself, my wife, my children, at the beginning of a hot and sweltering summer, crammed in the house together with nowhere to go. I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before. A door was in the wrong place, a window had stretched a few inches longer than it had been when I had gone to bed the night before, the light switch, I was certain, had been forced half an inch to the right. Always just a small thing, almost nothing at all, just enough for me to notice. In the beginning, I tried to point these changes out to my wife. She seemed puzzled at first, and then she became somewhat evasive in her responses. For a time, part of me believed her responsible: perhaps she had developed some deft technique for quickly changing and modifying the house. But another part of me felt certain, or nearly so, that this was impossible. And as time went on, my wife’s evasiveness took on a certain wariness, even fear. This convinced me that not only was she not changing the house, but that daily her mind simply adjusted to the changed world and dubbed it the same. She literally could not see the differences I saw. Just as she could not see that sometimes we had three children and sometimes four. No, she could only ever see three. Or perhaps four. To be honest, I don’t remember how many she saw. But the point was, as long as we were in the house there were sometimes three children and sometimes four. But that was due to the idiosyncrasies of the house as well. I would not know how many children there would be until I went from room to room. Sometimes the room at the end of the hall was narrow and had one bed in it, other times it had grown large in the night and had two. I would count the number of beds each morning when I woke up and sometimes there would be three, sometimes four. From there, I could extrapolate how many children I had, and I found this a more reliable method than trying to count the children themselves. I would never know how much of a father I was until I counted beds. I could not discuss this with my wife. When I tried to lay out my proofs for her, she thought I was joking. Quickly, however, she decided it was an indication of a troubled mental state, and insisted I seek treatment—which under duress I did. To little avail. The only thing the treatment convinced me of was that there were certain things that one shouldn’t say even to one’s spouse, things that they are just not ready—and may never be ready—to hear. My children were not ready for it either. The few times I tried to fulfill my duties as a father and sit them down to tell them the sobering truth, that sometimes one of them didn’t exist, unless it was that sometimes one of them existed twice, I got nowhere. Or less than nowhere: confusion, tears, panic. And, after they reported back to my wife, more threats of treatment. ✖ What, then, was the truth of the situation? Why was I the only one who could see the house changing? What were my obligations to my family in terms of helping them see and understand? How was I to help them if they did not desire to be helped? Being a sensible man, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if what I was experiencing had any relation to reality at all. Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps, I tried to believe, the accident had changed me. I did try my level best, or nearly so, to see things their way. I tried to ignore the lurch reality took each morning, the way the house was not exactly the house it had been the night before, as if someone had moved us to a similar but not quite identical house as we slept. Perhaps they had. I tried to believe that I had three, not four, children. And when that did not work, that I had four, not three, children. And when that didn’t work, that there was no correlation between children and beds, to turn a blind eye to that room at the end of the hall and the way it kept expanding out or collapsing in like a lung. But nothing seemed to work. I could not believe. ✖ Perhaps if we moved, things would be different. Perhaps the house was, in some manner or other, alive. Or haunted maybe. Or just wrong. But when I raised the idea of moving with my wife, she coughed out a strange barking laugh before enumerating all the reasons this was a bad idea. There was no money and little prospect of any coming in now that I’d had my accident and lost my job. We’d bought the house recently enough that we would take a substantial loss if we sold it. We simply could not afford to move. And besides, what was wrong with the house? It was a perfectly good house. How could I argue with this? From her perspective of course she was right, there was no reason to leave. For her there was nothing wrong with the house—how could there be? Houses don’t change on their own, she told me indignantly: this was not something that reason could allow. But for me that was exactly the problem. The house, for reasons I didn’t understand, wasn’t acting like a house. ✖ I spent days thinking, mulling over what to do. To get away from the house, I wandered alone in the countryside. If I walked long enough, I could return home sufficiently exhausted to sleep rather than spending much of the night on watch, trying to capture the moment when parts of the house changed. For a long time I thought that might be enough. That if I spent as little time in the house as possible and returned only when exhausted, I could bring myself not to think about how unsound the house was. That I would wake up sufficiently hazy to no longer care what was where and how it differed from before. That might have gone on for a long time—even forever or the equivalent. But then in my walks I stumbled upon, or perhaps was led to, something. It was a paddock. I saw horses lying in the dirt, seemingly dead. They couldn’t be dead, could they? I looked to see if I could tell if they were breathing and found I could not. I could not say honestly if they were dead or alive, and I still cannot say. I noticed a man on the far side of the paddock filling their trough with water, facing away from them, and wondered if he had seen the horses behind him, and if not, when he turned, whether he would be as unsettled as I. Would he approach them and determine they were dead, or would his approach startle them to life? Or had he seen them dead already and had his mind been unable to take it in? For a moment I waited. But at the time, in the moment, there seemed something more terrible to me about the idea of knowing for certain that the horses were dead than there was about not knowing whether they were dead or alive. And so I hastily left, not realizing that to escape a moment of potential discomfort I was leaving them forever in my head as not quite dead but, in another sense, nearly alive. That to leave as I had was to assume the place of the man beside the trough, but without ever being able to turn and learn the truth. ✖ In the days that followed, that image haunted me. I turned it over, scrutinized it, peered at every facet of it, trying to see if there was something I had missed, if there was a clue that would sway me toward believing the horses were alive or believing they were dead. If there was a clue to reveal to me that the man beside the trough knew more than I had believed. To no avail. The problem remained insolubly balanced. If I went back, I couldn’t help asking myself, would anything have changed? Would the horses still, even now, be lying there? If they were, would they have begun to decay in a way that would prove them dead? Or would they be exactly as I had last seen them, including the man still filling the trough? What a terrifying thought. Since I’d stumbled upon the paddock, I didn’t know exactly where it was. Every walk I went on, even every step I took away from the house, I risked stumbling onto it again. I began walking slower, stopping frequently, scrutinizing my surroundings and shying away from any area that might remotely harbor a paddock. But after a while I deemed even that insufficiently safe, and I found myself hardly able to leave the house. And yet with the house always changing, I couldn’t remain there either. There was, I gradually realized, a simple choice: either I would have to steel myself and return and confront the horses or I would have to confront the house. Either horse or house, either house or horse—but what sort of choice was that really? The words were hardly different, pronounced more or less the same, with one letter only having accidentally been dialed up too high or too low in the alphabet. No, I came to feel, by going out to avoid the house and finding the horses I had, in a manner of speaking, simply found again the house. It was, it must be, that the prone horses were there for me, to teach a lesson to me, that they were meant to tell me something about their near namesake, the house. The devastation of that scene, the collapse of the horses, gnawed on me. It was telling me something. Something I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. ✖ At first, part of me resisted the idea. No, I told myself, it was too extreme a step. Lives were at stake. The lives of my wife and of at least three children. The risks were too great. But what was I to do? In my mind I kept seeing the collapsed horses and I felt my thoughts again churn over their state. Were they alive or were they dead? I kept imagining myself there at the trough, paralyzed, unable to turn and look, and it came to seem to me my perpetual condition. In my worst moments, it seemed the state not only of me but of the whole world, with all of us on the verge of turning around and finding the dead behind us. And from there, I slipped back to the house—which, like the horses, seemed in a sort of suspended state: I knew it was changing, that something strange was happening, I was sure of that at least, but I didn’t know how or what the changes meant, and I couldn’t make anyone else see them. When it came to the house, I tried to convince myself, I could see what others could not, but the rest of the world was like the man filling the horse trough, unable to see the fallen horses. Thinking this naturally led me away from the idea of the house and back instead to the horses. What I should have done, I told myself, was to have thrown a rock. I should have stooped and scraped the dirt until my fingers closed around a stone, and then shied it at one of the horses, waiting either for the meaty thud of dead flesh or the shudder and annoyed whicker of a struck living horse. Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment. No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an explicably dead family, it must be faced. And so I turned away from the house and went back to look for the paddock, steeling myself for whatever I would find. I was ready, rock in hand. I would find out the truth about the horses, and I would accept it, no matter what it was. Or at least I would have. But no matter how hard I looked, no matter how long I walked, I could not find the paddock. I walked for miles, days even. I took every road, known and unknown, but it simply wasn’t there. Was something wrong with me? Had the paddock existed at all? I wondered. Was it simply something my mind had invented to cope with the problem of the house? House, horse—horse, house: almost the same word. For all intents and purposes, in this case, it was the same word. I would still throw a rock, so to speak, I told myself, but I would throw that so-called rock not at a horse, but at a house. ✖ But still I hesitated, thinking, planning. Night after night I sat imagining coils of smoke writhing around me and then the rising of flames. In my head, I watched myself waiting patiently, calmly, until the flames were at just the right height, and then I began to call out to my family, awakening them, urging them to leave the house. In my head we unfurled sheets through windows and shimmied nimbly to safety. We reached safety every time. I saw our escape so many times in my head, rendered in just the same way, that I realized it would take the smallest effort on my part to jostle it out of the realm of imagination and into the real world. Then the house would be gone and could do me no more damage, and both myself and my family would be safe. ✖ I had had enough unpleasant interaction with those who desired to give me treatment since my accident, however, that I knew to take steps to protect myself. I would have to make the fire look like an accident. For this purpose, I took up smoking. I planned carefully. I smoked for a few weeks, just long enough to accustom my wife and children to the idea. They didn’t care for it, but did not try to stop me. Since my accident, they had been shy of me, and rarely tried to stop me from doing anything. Seemingly as a concession to my wife, I agreed not to smoke in the bedroom. I promised to smoke only outside the house. With the proviso that, if it was too cold to smoke outside I might do so downstairs, near an open window. During the third, or perhaps fourth, week after I took up smoking, with my wife and children asleep, it was indeed too cold—or at least I judged that I could argue it to have been such if confronted after the fact. So I cracked open the window near the couch and prepared the images in my mind. I would, I told myself, allow my arm to droop, the tip of my cigarette to nudge against the fabric of the couch. And then I would allow first the couch and then the drapes to begin to smoke and catch fire. I would wait until the moment when, in my fantasies, I was myself standing and calling for my wife and children, and then I would do just that and all would be as I had envisioned. Soon my family and I would be safe, and the house would be destroyed. Once that was done, I thought, perhaps I would find the paddock again as well, with the horses standing this time and clearly alive. ✖ And yet, the fabric of the couch did not catch fire, instead only smoldering and stinking, and soon I pressed the cigarette in too deeply and it died. I found and lit another, and when the result was the same I gave up on both the couch and the cigarette. I turned instead to matches and used them to ignite the drapes. As it turned out, these burned much better, going up all at once and lighting my hair and clothing along with them. By the time I’d flailed about enough to extinguish my body, the whole room was aflame. Still, I continued with my plan. I tried to call to my wife and children but when I took a breath to do so, my lungs filled with smoke and, choking, I collapsed. ✖ I do not know how I lived through the fire. Perhaps my wife dragged me out and then went back for the children and perished only then. When I awoke, I was here, unsure of how I had arrived. My face and body were badly burned, and the pain was excruciating. I asked about my family but the nurse dodged the question, shushed me and only told me I should sleep. This was how I knew my family was dead, that they had been lost in the fire, and that the nurse didn’t know how to tell me. My only consolation was that the house, too, the source of all our problems, had burnt to the ground. For a time I was kept alone, drugged. How long, I cannot say. Perhaps days, perhaps weeks. Long enough in any case for my burns to slough and heal, for the skin grafts that I must surely have needed to take effect, for my hair to grow fully back. The doctors must have worked very hard on me, for I must admit that except to the most meticulous eye I look exactly as I had before the fire. ✖ So, you see, I have the truth straight in my mind and it will not be easy to change. There is little point in you coming to me with these stories, little point in pretending once again that my house remains standing and was never touched by flame. Little point coming here pretending to be my wife, claiming that there was no fire, that you found me lying on the floor in the middle of our living room with my eyes staring fixedly into the air, seemingly unharmed. No, I have accepted that I am the victim of a tragedy, one of my own design. I know that my family is gone, and though I do not yet understand why you would want to convince me that you are my wife, what you hope to gain, eventually I will. You will let something slip and the game will be over. At worst, you are deliberately trying to deceive me so as to gain something from me. But what? At best, someone has decided this might lessen the blow, that if I can be made to believe my family is not dead, or even just mostly dead and not quite alive, I might be convinced not to surrender to despair. Trust me, whether you wish me good or ill, I do hope you succeed. I would like to be convinced, I truly would. I would love to open my eyes and suddenly see my family surrounding me, safe and sound. I would even tolerate the fact that the house is still standing, that unfinished business remains between it and myself, that somewhere horses still lie collapsed and waiting to be either alive or dead, that we will all in some senses remain like the man at the trough with our backs turned. I understand what I might have to gain from it, but you, I still do not understand. ✖ But do your worst: disrupt my certainty, try to fool me, make me believe. Get me to believe there is nothing dead behind me. If you can make that happen, I think we both agree, then anything is possible.

I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own. But in their case they did not recover, but perished. You are not one of them, you cannot be, for if you were you would be dead. Why you choose to pretend to be, and what you hope to gain from it: this is what interests me. ✖ Now it is your turn to listen to me, to listen to my proofs, though I know you will not be convinced. Imagine this: walking through the countryside one day you come across a paddock. Lying there on their sides, in the dust, unnaturally still, are four horses. All four are prone, with no horses standing. They do not breathe and do not, as far as you can see, move. They are, to all appearances, dead. And yet, on the edge of the paddock, not twenty yards distant, a man fills their trough with water. Are the horses alive and appearances deceptive? Has the man simply not yet turned to see that the horses are dead? Or has he been so shaken by what he has seen that he doesn’t know what to do but proceed as if nothing has happened? If you turn and walk hurriedly on, leaving before anything decisive happens, what do the horses become for you? They remain both alive and dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead. And what, in turn, carrying that paradoxical knowledge in your head, does that make you? ✖ I do not think of myself as special, as anything but ordinary. I completed a degree at a third-tier university housed in the town where I grew up. I graduated safely ensconced in the middle of my class. I found passable employment in the same town. I met a woman, married her, had children with her—three or perhaps four, there is some disagreement on that score—and then the two of us fell gradually and gently out of love. Then came an incident at work, an accident, a so-called freak one. It left me with a broken skull and, for a short time, a certain amount of confusion. I awoke in an unfamiliar place to find myself strapped down. It seemed to me—I will admit this too—it seemed for some time, hours at least, perhaps even days, that I was not in a hospital at all, but in a mental facility. But my wife, faithful and everpresent, slowly soothed me into a different understanding of my circumstances. My limbs, she insisted, were restrained simply because I had been delirious. Now that I no longer was, the straps could be loosened. Not quite yet, but soon. There was nothing to worry about. I just had to calm down. Soon, everything would return to normal. ✖ In some ways, I suppose everything did. Or at least tried to. After the accident, I received some minor compensation from my employer, and was sent out to pasture. Such was the situation. Myself, my wife, my children, at the beginning of a hot and sweltering summer, crammed in the house together with nowhere to go. I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before. A door was in the wrong place, a window had stretched a few inches longer than it had been when I had gone to bed the night before, the light switch, I was certain, had been forced half an inch to the right. Always just a small thing, almost nothing at all, just enough for me to notice. In the beginning, I tried to point these changes out to my wife. She seemed puzzled at first, and then she became somewhat evasive in her responses. For a time, part of me believed her responsible: perhaps she had developed some deft technique for quickly changing and modifying the house. But another part of me felt certain, or nearly so, that this was impossible. And as time went on, my wife’s evasiveness took on a certain wariness, even fear. This convinced me that not only was she not changing the house, but that daily her mind simply adjusted to the changed world and dubbed it the same. She literally could not see the differences I saw. Just as she could not see that sometimes we had three children and sometimes four. No, she could only ever see three. Or perhaps four. To be honest, I don’t remember how many she saw. But the point was, as long as we were in the house there were sometimes three children and sometimes four. But that was due to the idiosyncrasies of the house as well. I would not know how many children there would be until I went from room to room. Sometimes the room at the end of the hall was narrow and had one bed in it, other times it had grown large in the night and had two. I would count the number of beds each morning when I woke up and sometimes there would be three, sometimes four. From there, I could extrapolate how many children I had, and I found this a more reliable method than trying to count the children themselves. I would never know how much of a father I was until I counted beds. I could not discuss this with my wife. When I tried to lay out my proofs for her, she thought I was joking. Quickly, however, she decided it was an indication of a troubled mental state, and insisted I seek treatment—which under duress I did. To little avail. The only thing the treatment convinced me of was that there were certain things that one shouldn’t say even to one’s spouse, things that they are just not ready—and may never be ready—to hear. My children were not ready for it either. The few times I tried to fulfill my duties as a father and sit them down to tell them the sobering truth, that sometimes one of them didn’t exist, unless it was that sometimes one of them existed twice, I got nowhere. Or less than nowhere: confusion, tears, panic. And, after they reported back to my wife, more threats of treatment. ✖ What, then, was the truth of the situation? Why was I the only one who could see the house changing? What were my obligations to my family in terms of helping them see and understand? How was I to help them if they did not desire to be helped? Being a sensible man, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if what I was experiencing had any relation to reality at all. Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps, I tried to believe, the accident had changed me. I did try my level best, or nearly so, to see things their way. I tried to ignore the lurch reality took each morning, the way the house was not exactly the house it had been the night before, as if someone had moved us to a similar but not quite identical house as we slept. Perhaps they had. I tried to believe that I had three, not four, children. And when that did not work, that I had four, not three, children. And when that didn’t work, that there was no correlation between children and beds, to turn a blind eye to that room at the end of the hall and the way it kept expanding out or collapsing in like a lung. But nothing seemed to work. I could not believe. ✖ Perhaps if we moved, things would be different. Perhaps the house was, in some manner or other, alive. Or haunted maybe. Or just wrong. But when I raised the idea of moving with my wife, she coughed out a strange barking laugh before enumerating all the reasons this was a bad idea. There was no money and little prospect of any coming in now that I’d had my accident and lost my job. We’d bought the house recently enough that we would take a substantial loss if we sold it. We simply could not afford to move. And besides, what was wrong with the house? It was a perfectly good house. How could I argue with this? From her perspective of course she was right, there was no reason to leave. For her there was nothing wrong with the house—how could there be? Houses don’t change on their own, she told me indignantly: this was not something that reason could allow. But for me that was exactly the problem. The house, for reasons I didn’t understand, wasn’t acting like a house. ✖ I spent days thinking, mulling over what to do. To get away from the house, I wandered alone in the countryside. If I walked long enough, I could return home sufficiently exhausted to sleep rather than spending much of the night on watch, trying to capture the moment when parts of the house changed. For a long time I thought that might be enough. That if I spent as little time in the house as possible and returned only when exhausted, I could bring myself not to think about how unsound the house was. That I would wake up sufficiently hazy to no longer care what was where and how it differed from before. That might have gone on for a long time—even forever or the equivalent. But then in my walks I stumbled upon, or perhaps was led to, something. It was a paddock. I saw horses lying in the dirt, seemingly dead. They couldn’t be dead, could they? I looked to see if I could tell if they were breathing and found I could not. I could not say honestly if they were dead or alive, and I still cannot say. I noticed a man on the far side of the paddock filling their trough with water, facing away from them, and wondered if he had seen the horses behind him, and if not, when he turned, whether he would be as unsettled as I. Would he approach them and determine they were dead, or would his approach startle them to life? Or had he seen them dead already and had his mind been unable to take it in? For a moment I waited. But at the time, in the moment, there seemed something more terrible to me about the idea of knowing for certain that the horses were dead than there was about not knowing whether they were dead or alive. And so I hastily left, not realizing that to escape a moment of potential discomfort I was leaving them forever in my head as not quite dead but, in another sense, nearly alive. That to leave as I had was to assume the place of the man beside the trough, but without ever being able to turn and learn the truth. ✖ In the days that followed, that image haunted me. I turned it over, scrutinized it, peered at every facet of it, trying to see if there was something I had missed, if there was a clue that would sway me toward believing the horses were alive or believing they were dead. If there was a clue to reveal to me that the man beside the trough knew more than I had believed. To no avail. The problem remained insolubly balanced. If I went back, I couldn’t help asking myself, would anything have changed? Would the horses still, even now, be lying there? If they were, would they have begun to decay in a way that would prove them dead? Or would they be exactly as I had last seen them, including the man still filling the trough? What a terrifying thought. Since I’d stumbled upon the paddock, I didn’t know exactly where it was. Every walk I went on, even every step I took away from the house, I risked stumbling onto it again. I began walking slower, stopping frequently, scrutinizing my surroundings and shying away from any area that might remotely harbor a paddock. But after a while I deemed even that insufficiently safe, and I found myself hardly able to leave the house. And yet with the house always changing, I couldn’t remain there either. There was, I gradually realized, a simple choice: either I would have to steel myself and return and confront the horses or I would have to confront the house. Either horse or house, either house or horse—but what sort of choice was that really? The words were hardly different, pronounced more or less the same, with one letter only having accidentally been dialed up too high or too low in the alphabet. No, I came to feel, by going out to avoid the house and finding the horses I had, in a manner of speaking, simply found again the house. It was, it must be, that the prone horses were there for me, to teach a lesson to me, that they were meant to tell me something about their near namesake, the house. The devastation of that scene, the collapse of the horses, gnawed on me. It was telling me something. Something I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. ✖ At first, part of me resisted the idea. No, I told myself, it was too extreme a step. Lives were at stake. The lives of my wife and of at least three children. The risks were too great. But what was I to do? In my mind I kept seeing the collapsed horses and I felt my thoughts again churn over their state. Were they alive or were they dead? I kept imagining myself there at the trough, paralyzed, unable to turn and look, and it came to seem to me my perpetual condition. In my worst moments, it seemed the state not only of me but of the whole world, with all of us on the verge of turning around and finding the dead behind us. And from there, I slipped back to the house—which, like the horses, seemed in a sort of suspended state: I knew it was changing, that something strange was happening, I was sure of that at least, but I didn’t know how or what the changes meant, and I couldn’t make anyone else see them. When it came to the house, I tried to convince myself, I could see what others could not, but the rest of the world was like the man filling the horse trough, unable to see the fallen horses. Thinking this naturally led me away from the idea of the house and back instead to the horses. What I should have done, I told myself, was to have thrown a rock. I should have stooped and scraped the dirt until my fingers closed around a stone, and then shied it at one of the horses, waiting either for the meaty thud of dead flesh or the shudder and annoyed whicker of a struck living horse. Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment. No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an explicably dead family, it must be faced. And so I turned away from the house and went back to look for the paddock, steeling myself for whatever I would find. I was ready, rock in hand. I would find out the truth about the horses, and I would accept it, no matter what it was. Or at least I would have. But no matter how hard I looked, no matter how long I walked, I could not find the paddock. I walked for miles, days even. I took every road, known and unknown, but it simply wasn’t there. Was something wrong with me? Had the paddock existed at all? I wondered. Was it simply something my mind had invented to cope with the problem of the house? House, horse—horse, house: almost the same word. For all intents and purposes, in this case, it was the same word. I would still throw a rock, so to speak, I told myself, but I would throw that so-called rock not at a horse, but at a house. ✖ But still I hesitated, thinking, planning. Night after night I sat imagining coils of smoke writhing around me and then the rising of flames. In my head, I watched myself waiting patiently, calmly, until the flames were at just the right height, and then I began to call out to my family, awakening them, urging them to leave the house. In my head we unfurled sheets through windows and shimmied nimbly to safety. We reached safety every time. I saw our escape so many times in my head, rendered in just the same way, that I realized it would take the smallest effort on my part to jostle it out of the realm of imagination and into the real world. Then the house would be gone and could do me no more damage, and both myself and my family would be safe. ✖ I had had enough unpleasant interaction with those who desired to give me treatment since my accident, however, that I knew to take steps to protect myself. I would have to make the fire look like an accident. For this purpose, I took up smoking. I planned carefully. I smoked for a few weeks, just long enough to accustom my wife and children to the idea. They didn’t care for it, but did not try to stop me. Since my accident, they had been shy of me, and rarely tried to stop me from doing anything. Seemingly as a concession to my wife, I agreed not to smoke in the bedroom. I promised to smoke only outside the house. With the proviso that, if it was too cold to smoke outside I might do so downstairs, near an open window. During the third, or perhaps fourth, week after I took up smoking, with my wife and children asleep, it was indeed too cold—or at least I judged that I could argue it to have been such if confronted after the fact. So I cracked open the window near the couch and prepared the images in my mind. I would, I told myself, allow my arm to droop, the tip of my cigarette to nudge against the fabric of the couch. And then I would allow first the couch and then the drapes to begin to smoke and catch fire. I would wait until the moment when, in my fantasies, I was myself standing and calling for my wife and children, and then I would do just that and all would be as I had envisioned. Soon my family and I would be safe, and the house would be destroyed. Once that was done, I thought, perhaps I would find the paddock again as well, with the horses standing this time and clearly alive. ✖ And yet, the fabric of the couch did not catch fire, instead only smoldering and stinking, and soon I pressed the cigarette in too deeply and it died. I found and lit another, and when the result was the same I gave up on both the couch and the cigarette. I turned instead to matches and used them to ignite the drapes. As it turned out, these burned much better, going up all at once and lighting my hair and clothing along with them. By the time I’d flailed about enough to extinguish my body, the whole room was aflame. Still, I continued with my plan. I tried to call to my wife and children but when I took a breath to do so, my lungs filled with smoke and, choking, I collapsed. ✖ I do not know how I lived through the fire. Perhaps my wife dragged me out and then went back for the children and perished only then. When I awoke, I was here, unsure of how I had arrived. My face and body were badly burned, and the pain was excruciating. I asked about my family but the nurse dodged the question, shushed me and only told me I should sleep. This was how I knew my family was dead, that they had been lost in the fire, and that the nurse didn’t know how to tell me. My only consolation was that the house, too, the source of all our problems, had burnt to the ground. For a time I was kept alone, drugged. How long, I cannot say. Perhaps days, perhaps weeks. Long enough in any case for my burns to slough and heal, for the skin grafts that I must surely have needed to take effect, for my hair to grow fully back. The doctors must have worked very hard on me, for I must admit that except to the most meticulous eye I look exactly as I had before the fire. ✖ So, you see, I have the truth straight in my mind and it will not be easy to change. There is little point in you coming to me with these stories, little point in pretending once again that my house remains standing and was never touched by flame. Little point coming here pretending to be my wife, claiming that there was no fire, that you found me lying on the floor in the middle of our living room with my eyes staring fixedly into the air, seemingly unharmed. No, I have accepted that I am the victim of a tragedy, one of my own design. I know that my family is gone, and though I do not yet understand why you would want to convince me that you are my wife, what you hope to gain, eventually I will. You will let something slip and the game will be over. At worst, you are deliberately trying to deceive me so as to gain something from me. But what? At best, someone has decided this might lessen the blow, that if I can be made to believe my family is not dead, or even just mostly dead and not quite alive, I might be convinced not to surrender to despair. Trust me, whether you wish me good or ill, I do hope you succeed. I would like to be convinced, I truly would. I would love to open my eyes and suddenly see my family surrounding me, safe and sound. I would even tolerate the fact that the house is still standing, that unfinished business remains between it and myself, that somewhere horses still lie collapsed and waiting to be either alive or dead, that we will all in some senses remain like the man at the trough with our backs turned. I understand what I might have to gain from it, but you, I still do not understand. ✖ But do your worst: disrupt my certainty, try to fool me, make me believe. Get me to believe there is nothing dead behind me. If you can make that happen, I think we both agree, then anything is possible.

From Horror photos & videos July 02, 2018 at 08:00PM

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79) Losing it in Morocco.

How many Moroccan policemen does it take to change a lightbulb? A fuck of a lot  judging by the number of Moroccan policemen it took to record the loss of my i-phone.

In  the final act of this mind numbing saga -  a kind of slow, grinding trench warfare on the will to live -  there were  four of them, one guy   bashing away at ‘l’ordinateur’ one key at a  time, three more chipping in with helpful suggestions, mainly  speaking in Arabic, sometimes in French, one or other  occasionally glancing up at me  to demonstrate  his command of English  - ‘Mon-shas-taire - ‘Why-eene Rrrroo-nee’ - and in doing so, revealing that Britain is not the only country where dentistry  is not as popular as it possibly should be.

The timeline was basically this. At around 7.30pm, and having arrived back at my hotel, I exited a blue taxi. (Blue taxis being some sort of officially authorised taxi  service in Rabat, which is the capital of Morocco if you didn’t know,  which you probably didn’t but now do, a  bit of otherwise useless info to be carefully stored away for your next pub quiz.).  As I stepped on to what passed for a pavement, and the driver  floored the accelerator and disappeared into the night, I was struck by the horrific realisation that I had somehow contrived to leave my phone behind in ‘le taxi bleu’. (As you see, my French is faultless.)

Help! Stop! Thief! Well, no, not a thief, but stop anyway!

Panicked, I took off in hot pursuit, pointlessly running about half a mile and bashing on the windows of various taxis along the way, eliciting lively but not, if I am being strictly truthful, entirely friendly responses from the drivers, all of whom looked very much  like my guy but not very much enough.

Knackered and defeated I turned back towards the hotel to be met by Sherri, my travelling companion, who offered a few consoling words - “Don’t worry, could have happened to anyone”, but who was clearly thinking, and not unjustifiably, “What a careless twat!” -  and then I got back to the hotel, where Hadif, the manager, confounded my snotty, European expectations of the locals by being astonishingly  solicitous and helpful.

He deputed a local chap, who seemed to be hanging about outside in the hope of picking up such assignments, to accompany me to the police  station where we met the first of the night’s PC Al Ploddis. (Casually sporting  an Uzi or similar.) After about an hour’s Arabic banter with my minder who spoke neither English nor French  and consequent calls back to Hadif so I could get a translation, it emerged that the King of Jordan was in town for a pow wow with his mate, the King of Morocco - “What ho your majesty!”,“What ho your majesty!”, “Not half bad this absolute ruler lark, eh what?” “Absolutely spiffing!”. Consequently, all police personnel were engaged in his protection and unavailable to investigate the vital matter of my missing i-phone. “Pliss to return later.”

When in trouble, eat.

So back we trudged to the hotel where Hadif suggested to Sherri and me that we should have some dinner before going back to the police station. (Just to be clear: I did not imagine that a Moroccan SWAT team was about to hit the streets of Rabat in pursuit of my i-phone but I needed the official report of it’s loss for my insurance claim, and I was leaving Rabat first thing in the morning.) Dinner seemed like a good idea, Sherri very generously offering to pick up the tab in order to help me recover from my devastating loss - ‘MY I-PHONE! No internet! No Facebook! No news of Trump’s latest bit of barmy Trumpiness! MY LIFE IS OVER!!!’  

We repaired to a place to which she had been recommended, called ‘Le Dhow’ which was indeed on a boat, and I had a very decent risotto. (Not a typical Moroccan dish as foodies amongst you may be aware, but after nearly a week in Morocco  I was totally Tagined out.)

Anyway to cut an excruciatingly long and tedious story not very short,  we allowed plenty of time for the two Kings to swap notes about kinging before  I and my minder (still hanging about outside the hotel) went back to the police station a bit before midnight, there to be directed from pillar to post and back again and enduring more endless chats with more Uzi toting members of Rabat’s finest before eventually ending up in a room with the aforementioned Famous Four.

Later. (Much later.)

Just after two in the morning, one of them triumphantly pulled something from the printer and brought it over to me to sign. It was entirely in Arabic, and  for all I knew could have been a confession that I was hatching a plot to commit double regicide, but by that time I wouldn’t have given a fuck - clever chaps, these Moroccan policemen, waterboarding who needs it! - and I willingly signed. And signed again. And again. And again. And again. For this form was in quintuplicate. Yes, for some reason - I’m sure there was a good one had I asked and had about three weeks to spare to hear the answer - the Moroccan authorities needed  five separate hard copies of the record of my lost of i-phone. (To whom  would they go? Where would they be filed? How many policemen would  it take to file them? Allah alone knows.)

Not unreasonably - I thought -  I asked which copy “Je peux prendre” only to be met by four simultaneous expressions d’horreur. “No, monsieur, these are not for you, you must return tomorrow at midday for your form. That, Monsieur, is a different form.”

A grown man cries.

I fell to my knees, a jibbering wreck. “Yes, yes, it was me” I whimpered, “I confess, I confess. I did it! I did them all! I am single handedly responsible for all the crimes in Morocco since I’ve been here. And the ones before that too if you like. Well, not quite single handedly because Sherri  was in on them too, of course. You’ve got the name of our hotel - you’ll find her holed up in room 503. She’ll probably come quietly, but if she doesn’t, well, do what you have to do. Before you go and give her a good Uzi-ing though, give me a pen and I faithfully promise I will write a complete  confession to everything  - only please, please, PLEASE  don’t make me come back tomorrow for another bout of Moroccan fucking form filling.”

Let no man or woman say that a Moroccan policeman  has no heart. It was clearly unprecedented in all of the annals of Moroccan policing, and flew slap, bang in the face of Moroccan police protocol, but what were rules for, if not to be broken? Perhaps it was something about seeing a grown man weep, or an Englishman grovel, who can say, but, for some inexplicable reason, against their better judgement - maybe it was some sort of double royal pardon -  they weakened and  agreed to fill in my form that very night. (Or, rather morning, which by now of course, it (un)comfortably was.)

And credit where credit is due. They positively whizzed through this form and were printing  it out in no more than another forty five minutes. And then came the crowning moment - the glorious climax to their night’s (and morning’s) extraordinary work - one of them had the privilege of reaching into a  drawer to  pull out a rubber stamp. (Though the other three seemed to be smiling, I am not at all convinced their happiness was genuine. It was a bit like one player insisting on taking the penalties. The others pretend to support him but  do they really like him grabbing the glory? And had these guys not been dreaming of such moments since when, at four or five,  they first experienced the thrill of using a rubber stamp - eyes-narrowed, ever so deliberately squeezing down into the pad until the ink squelched up, and then the slow raising of the hand, waiting, waiting, poised for the kill, until smashing  down - bam, bam, bam! Isn’t that the  very meaning of the stamp of authority? What policeman could watch another do that without the dagger of envy plunging into his soul?)

With one bound….

And then it was done. The imprimatur of la police de Maroc  without which my life would forever be blighted, had finally been applied.  For a seemingly interminable moment the piece of paper hung tantalisingly  there in the fetid police station air before I grabbed it from the lucky stamper’s hand and blubbed like a baby. “Merci, merci, merci, merci” I babbled to each of my torturers in turn. Talk about the Stockholm syndrome. We were best buddies for life from now on, bonded together by an experience none of us would surely ever be able to forget. Sure as hell, I wouldn’t.

Shortly before three, I crawled back into the hotel, exhausted but elated.  My goodwill to all men knew no bounds - I actually gave the nice hotel man, Hadif, a tip of 200 dirhams, about £17, so I was very probably clinically delirious. When I reached the room, the door had not been blasted off it’s hinges,  and Sherri appeared not to have been peppered by Uzi bullets.

Bonnie had been spared and now Clyde could begin the insurance claim.

And now, a quick trip around the rest of Morocco:

Casablanca. Not much to write home about in the brief stay we had there. Like all tourists we had to try Rick’s Place - there is a place by that name  - and in one room it has the film running on a loop.  Other gin-joints in other places probably preferable.

Tangier. Stayed in the medina (the ancient walled part of the town) as we did almost everywhere. Olde-worlde, down with the people authenticity essential for the likes of us - always providing the Riad (local for hotel I believe) is tastefully designed, the en suite bathroom is spotless, the orange juice is freshly squeezed and none of ‘the people’ come within a million miles of us - except to squeeze the orange juice. Quite liked Tangier.

Chef Chouen. Where all the buildings are painted blue. Two nights more than enough. (When you’ve seen a thousand and one blue buildings you’ve seen the lot.)

Fes. Another day, another riad. Had a cooking lesson there at the Clock Café which is owned by the ex-mâitre d’ of the Wolseley. (Or so he claims. He wasn’t there for me to test his story with some fiendishly cunning Hercule Poirot type cunning.

“Ah monsieur, many is the time I have walked out of Green Park tuber stashon, past the Savoy Hotel and into the Wolseley.”

“Ah yes, the Savoy” wistfully  reminisces  the so-called former mâitre d’, blundering into the trap I have set for him.

“No Monsieur” I cry, “I tricked you. It is not the Savoy. it is the Ritz!”

“Sacre bleu! I am undone!”)

Enjoyed the cooking lesson. Made a chicken tagine with a chicken bought in the souk and whose throat was cut by the butcher in front of us. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, you would have been so proud.

Rabat. The capital. Located on the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the river Bou Regreg. (Catchy name.) Ranked at second place by CNN in its "Top Travel Destinations of 2013". Medina of Rabat is listed as a World Heritage Site. At least that’s what it says on Wikipedia. I didn’t see anything much apart from the inside of a police station.

Marrakesh. Yet another riad in yet in another medina. This medina is pretty vast, a gigantic rabbit warren of tiny claustrophobic streets in which you get hopelessly lost every two minutes. Then some dodgy local appears at your shoulder whispering, “Ingleesh?” and then, whether you like it or not - and you invariably don’t - leads you off, ever deeper into the warren in search for the place you are looking for, having to stop frequently to ask for directions himself. Being hassled and importuned every 20 seconds by moustachioed, dentally challenged  shopkeepers in the souk (where the souk begins and the rest of the medina begins I never worked out) or by youths hanging around street corners, is the lot of every tourist in Marrakesh, and indeed everywhere else in Morocco. Be sure to carry plenty of change. Marrakesh teems with life and is genuinely exciting. But, at times, also quite unnerving.

Atlas mountains. Went on a group excursion to the edge of the desert - didn’t have time to go all the way in - and this involved mini-bussing  over the mountains via a million hair-pin bends. Those prone to motion sickness should think twice before they go.  Snow capped in the distance, stunningly verdant panoramas on the way through, scenery to blow the mind without aid of ‘kief’ as they call Marajuana in the local argot. (A misspelling of Keef in whose honour they have named it perhaps?) I am embarrassed to say I was not once approached to buy any. I am way too much of a nervous nellie to make a purchase from street drug dealers and I haven’t smoked any for years, but it would have been nice not to look so decrepit and uncool that they didn’t even bother to ask.

Assorted (a mixed bag of) other impressions:

Beetroot or avocado and fresh orange juice smoothies a speciality and much, much better than they sound.  Alcohol not available in most hostelries but can be winkled out. Local food good if a bit samey after a while but very decent and inventive restaurants not hard to find. Lack of decent French a definite hindrance. People sometimes helpful and friendly way, way beyond the call of duty, sometimes unpleasant and even downright menacing.

Some interesting bits and bobs to buy - carpets and silver jewellery and bottles of  argon oil, exquisite pastries and sweety knick knacks. Endless tedious bargaining de rigeur of course. They will start eye poppingly high so you have go in derisorily low. Also a colossal amount of tat for sale. Electric plastic Ninja on a skateboard anyone? Tat, tat and more tat.  Marrakesh might  be well be the tat capital of the world.

Trains sometimes good, even luxurious,  if not always that punctual. Railway stations beautifully kept - they put ours to shame.  Civic buildings and architecture highly impressive, the new as well as the old. All in all a strange and potentially intoxicating mixture of the medieval - the souks and the golems - and the surprisingly affluent - the wide, sweeping roads and modern cities outside the medinas.

Morocco made quite a deep impression on me but, in truth, I felt - for no particular reason - quite glad to escape in one piece. Although light years apart, it was a bit like I used to feel about New York in the seventies. Would I go back? The jury is out.