#snitches get stitches elliot

[waheelawhisperer]

What's the worst/best thing doctor waheela has gotten away without kal'tsit being aware of it.

He almost got away with organizing the first Official Rhodes Island Wet T-Shirt Contest (with Zofia's help), but Passenger snitched to Kal'tsit like a little bitch and Kal'tsit put the kibosh on that because she hates fun

[ramrage]

“here we go ‘round the prickly pear”

CH2 Hyacinth

work rating: T

chapter rating: T

characters: John “Soap” MacTavish, Simon “Ghost” Riley

tags: reincarnation AU, punk/suburban au, so many AUs to come, author has a boner for ts elliot, angst, MCD (not this chap)

ao3 link

CH 1

This was how they spent their summers.

Simon would wait for his piece of shit father to fuck off to some concert before leaving out the front door. He never had to worry about waking up his mum—she took pills that had her sleeping like the dead—and his little brother Tommy knew better than to snitch.

“What’s snitching?” he’d asked when Simon first used the term. Tommy was curious by nature and allowed himself to be that way around everyone but their father. He usually supplied cruelty or violence instead of answers, so Tommy learned to keep quiet. He was a bright kid.

Simon didn’t mind explaining shit to him, thought it was good to prepare his little brother for the world. “Snitching is another word for tattling on someone,” he explained.

“Then why not just say that?”

“Little kids say tattling. Snitching is for grown ups,” was the difference Simon offered, and Tommy seemed to understand. Maybe he did.

“Oh. You wouldn’t actually give me stitches, would you?”

“Nah, never.”

“Okay.”

And that was that. Tommy was usually asleep by the time Simon snuck out, anyway, but might as well prepare for the worst. Because when it was the worst, it really fucking sucked. Sucked in the black eyes and bruises sort of way, and things usually sucked in the Riley household.

That was one reason Simon snuck out as much as he did. He also liked to play the rebel, liked how quiet it was at night, how no one was around to ask shit of him or say shit to him, except for Johnny.

Johnny.

If he was being honest, Johnny was the real reason Simon risked his ass to walk across town just to find himself on a rough, shitty shingled roof.

They gave each other something he didn’t know the word for, but maybe one day he’d learn it was called solace.

The word wasn’t there, but the feeling was, and they still spoke it aloud. In their own ways. Usually it sounded like this:

“I fucking hate this town,” Simon groaned. The lit end of his cigarette crawled toward the filter as he inhaled, paused to rest as he exhaled.

“Fucking sucks,” Johnny agreed.

The general understanding was that everything sucked, but quiet, a whisper along the smoke rested “everything but you.” But it was a dumb thing to say, so they didn’t say it.

Simon liked watching Johnny smoke, thought it looked cool.

This town wasn’t cool. Sitting on the roof of his Soap’s house was cool, though, probably because they weren’t supposed to do it. Even though no one was going to catch them in the middle of the night, but they spoke in low voices to be safe.

“I can’t wait to get out of this shithole,” Simon murmured to the night, and eyes on the storm hanging above the horizon of suburbia, he missed Johnny stiffen. Nonchalantly ignorant to the impending doom.

“Still set on that military bullshit?” Johnny said, nonchalantly ignoring the sky fall down on him, but the tension set in the space between them all the same.

Simon shrugged noncommittally, “Yeah, I guess. What else would I do?”

“Fucking anything else? Fuck, I just. Why fucking just, sell yourself to that fucking machine?” Johnny asked, playing the mouthpiece for the ideologies he thought they both bought into. The one that said fuck Queen and crown. Fuck everything. The one they marked into each other’s chests.

Simon can remember it clear as day.

Autumn of last year, the park in the center of town, daylight shuddering violet in a losing fight against the first night of the weekend. Johnny’s body laid out on a picnic table in a halo of empty bottles and sandwich papers.

Simon dips a sewing needle into a bottle cap full of the ink they stole from their school’s art room, it slides ever so slightly between his pinched fingers when he stabs it into the skin of Johnny’s left pectoral.

Johnny asked for a tattoo but left the design choice up to SImon even though they both knew his drawing skills were as awful as his chicken scratch handwriting.

He still looked surprised when he took in the finished product.

“Simon, the hell is that?” he asked, craning his neck to get a better look.

“It’s someone flipping the bird”

“Fuck, I can see it now,” he conceded, still a little disturbed. “Aw fuck, Simon, that’s pure shite.” It really was, but Simon didn’t find himself feeling too bad about it. It was there now whether Johnny liked it or not, and maybe he did, because all his bitching came through a grin. Anyways, getting a pretty tattoo wasn’t the point.

“Alright, alright, do me now.”

Simon shucked off his shirt and took Johnny’s place on the table when it freed up, feeling something like a patient about to get cut open by a surgeon as he waited for Johnny to wipe the blood and ink from his chest.

Johnny was his best friend, but something about being so exposed made him nervous. Not the pain, not the permanence. He wasn’t used to having his bare skin eyed up like that, studied like a word search.

“You ready?” Johnny asked before placing the first mark.

Simon just nodded, not meeting the eyes that watch his face for recoil when the needle drove home. It stung a little, but nothing too bad. Simon hardly winced. “Not bad.”

Johnny huffed a little laugh and got down to business now he had the go-ahead. “It’ll get worse.”

“Grand.”

It did. The individual pinpricks blurred together into a mass of burning, burning like the hand splayed across his chest. Simon couldn’t see much of the tattoo when he glanced down, only saw Johnny’s tongue poking out from between his lips while he worked. Focused, like this was something to take seriously. Simon looked away, looked at the sun fall away behind the trees, looked at the top of Johnny’s mohawked head but only occasionally. Smelled the smell of hyacinth.

He looked and he breathed, then he closed his eyes. Focused on the how the burning began to throb in time with his heartbeat, breathed in time with it, too.

Eventually Johnny patted his chest.

“All done. Check it out.”

It looked better than the bullshit Simon had done—straighter, sharper lines—Johnny was always the artist of the two of them. But apparently he was also an idiot.

“Oh, fuck off,” Simon laughed, and that almost-proud look on Johnny’s face turned into something else.

“What?”

“Ugh, fucking look,” Simon said, lifting Johnny’s shirt to compare. “See any differences?”

Johnny’s eyes darted from one tattoo to the other, groaning when he finally figured it out. “Aw fuck.”

“Aw fuck is right. You gave me someone holding up their ring finger, you fucking minger.”

And Johnny started cracking up and then so did Simon, but Simon pulled him close to box at his head all the same. “Don’t fucking—stop fucking laughing. This is your fault.”

“I can make em all long and switch the thumb and it’ll just be bigger,” Johnny said between breaths, between his own volley of punches.

“No, Johnny, it’s fucked. Let it stay fucked.” In truth, Simon was okay with it, and he let Johnny go so they could both catch their breath. Two idiots with two idiot tattoos, drawn into their idiot skins by idiot hands. A needle stained with both their bloods.

“Heh.”

“what?”

“It’s flipping the brid.”

“Oh, piss off.”

Johnny didn’t say anything, just flipped Simon the brid.

Simon did it back.

Johnny looked rightfully pissed now, a flip the bird not the brid kind of pissed, and Simon didn’t know how to respond. He had no justification. He also didn’t have any other options, not like Johnny did. Simon didn’t have the marks to go to uni, and even if he did, it was too late to apply at this point.

“You can do apprentice work or something, I don’t know,” Johnny offered, but it wasn’t good enough. Simon would still have to be here , and that wasn’t an option. Especially with Johnny heading off to school by the end of the summer. Simon didn’t want to say any of that, didn’t need to. “Yeah, you could find somewhere by me and crash in my dorm,” he added as if it was a viable option.

Simon scoffed, “Yeah, I’m sure your roommate would love that.” He tossed his cigarette butt and watched it roll down the roof’s slope and drop into the gutter. “I’ve made up my mind.”

“So that’s it?” Johnny sneered. He was talking too loud. He was going to wake up his parents. “You’re just going to fuck off and bomb some civilians in the Middle East in the name of some government that doesn’t give a fuck about you? About any of us? Gonna fucking die for them, huh, Simon?”

“Johnny,” Simon warned in a whisper.

Johnny didn’t give a shit. “What about Tommy? When the fuck would you even be able to see him?”

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t. His escape plan was selfish, but in a way, so was Johnny’s. Sure, he’d be closer and his absence would be more predictable, but he’d still be fucking gone. Johnny didn’t seem to fucking get that. He didn’t understand what it was like to be truly desperate.

That’s why Johnny looked disgusted as he rose to his feet, why he pointedly looked the other way as he gathered his shit, shoved it roughly into his backpack. “Whatever, Simon. I hope you have the time of your fucking life,” he muttered without a second glance.

Simon didn’t know what to call this feeling. He watched Johnny ease himself off the roof and his chest burned and his eyes burned and so did his hands and so did everything. Maybe Johnny would come around eventually. Maybe he wouldn’t.

A few moments passed and then Simon heard Johnny’s windows slam shut. Fucking idiot.

He lit another cigarette and savored, numbly, the way it made everything feel worse. The night was over. A lone siren blared in the distance and he hoped that it was his dad finally karking it. Probably not, though. He was never lucky like that.

He was nearly done with his cigarette when his phone buzzed, screen glowing a hazy blue-green. The time read 2:50 and below it, a text from Johnny:

get off my fucking roof

His cigarette end, still lit, landed in Mrs. MacTavish’s hyacinths.

The sky opened up as he walked back, crashing with thunder, but his feet led him forward at the same lazy pace. He didn’t mind the rain and never really did. Simon’s father hadn’t died and was waiting for him when he made it back home. Tommy woke with the sound.

[cybervigilant]

@o188

He’d been very vague about what had happened to the doctor, vague and a terrible liar. No wonder the cops had been called because something just wasn’t right and he was having a hard time. Elliot hadn’t known what to say. Admitting he been assaulted by his dealer would only get him in trouble too. Least that was his thought process. Not to mention snitches got stitches -- or more stitches in his case. Elliot’s neighbor had found him with the door of his apartment ajar and had made him let him take him to the ER. He’d been planning on just laying low and calling his sister to come help him. 

Elliot’s head tilted away with a roll of his eyes as someone other than a nurse pushed apart the hanging curtain to step to his bed. “I told them no cops,” he muttered with a sigh. This guy just looked like a cop. “No offense but please leave.”