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sapphiretsuki · 4 years

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Road Trip Gone Right? <M>

Keeping my promise to myself here and writing. I am a heathen and start with a goal of like 1.5k max, but somehow I end at 4k. I’ll keep trying. T_T Also, in line with my self challenge I am again writing for a fandom outside my comfort zone. Loosely edited because its 1am and I’m tired :] @channiesmixtape Thank you again for your undying support, ilysm <3

Pairing: Felix x Y/N

Warnings: Uhhhhh, smut, oral, voice kink if you squint, nothing major really. Condoms. (safe sex is good sex too)

cr. to google for the lovely pic

It was the dreaded season of traveling and for whatever reason your school had decided that they weren't going to allow anyone to stay on campus over break. It was your tradition to bask in the quiet whilst all the other students went home and to friends and on trips, but not this year apparently. As if the universe were conspiring against you, your mother had also decided this was going to be the year that all the family, including by extension your best friends family, were all going to gather and celebrate the new year. Whatever. Why people wanted to celebrate that time was passing as it always did was beyond you, but that's how you found yourself in the front seat of your longtime friends car. Felix seemed just as dejected as you about the long drive and the mandatory mingling that was going to occur.

You and Felix had been quite the pair for as long as you could remember. You were about 7 when you met and you had saved him from some punk on the playground who thought being a little shithead was the way to be impressive. You kicked the little fucker in the shin and before you could follow through with a punch he was frantically scooting to run away. When you turned to check on what you thought was an adorable little girl you were met with a starry eyed Felix and he'd been your sidekick from that moment on. As fate would have it, he ended up being your next door neighbor. Gazing at his profile now while he was driving it struck you that at some point he'd grown to be quite masculine and incredibly striking. He always had been beautiful to you, but these days there was something more and you just couldn't put your finger on what it was.

Shaking yourself out of your thoughts, you reached out to turn on the radio. Maybe music would help whatever this feeling was. It was probably just anxiety over the long drive and the anticipation of being subjected to people you didn't get along with very well. You were unique and not quite the cookie cutter image of perfection that the rest of your cousins were and they never wasted an opportunity to let you know. As if sensing your thoughts, Felix's deep voice broke through the thoughts again, "Penny for your thoughts?" he asked. "Huh? Oh. It's nothing really. Just thinking about the cousins and wondering what brand of hell they'll try to subject me to. I haven't seen them since I started college you know."

His laughter rang out through the car and made you feel a bit better. "I'm sure that no matter what they try, you're still far smarter than them and a hell of a lot stronger too. Try not to worry Cheeks." At the mention of your special nickname you couldn't help but smile. A bit precocious growing up, and definitely the most vocal of the children, you'd earned the title of cheeky which had in turn affectionately turned into the nickname Cheeks. As much as you were dreading this visit, it made you feel infinitely better that Felix was going too. Not that he had any choice either. Just as you had become fast friends at a young age, your families had become some sort of hybrid family through strong friendship.

You must have finally relaxed enough to fall asleep at some point because you awoke with a bolt. There was a loud bang and Felix slammed on the breaks. "Shit, what the hell was that?" He put the car in park and turned the hazards on before turning to you and telling you to stay put. He pulled out his cellphone and turned on the flashlight before stepping out of the car. You anxiously watched him walk around the car and disappear as he squatted down. You were praying he hadn't hit some woodland creature because from the looks of it you were in the middle of nowhere and that was a very real possibility. You jumped as he tapped on your window. "Can you pop the trunk for me? We appear to have a flat." You nodded and unbuckled your belt and climbed over to the drivers side to hit the latch for the trunk. As you sunk back into your seat you could hear him digging around in the trunk. A flat wasn't so bad. Sure it wasn't ideal, but at least there would be no dead animals or screwed up undercarriages right?

Just as you were coming to terms with a small hiccup in the journey you heard another bang followed by a few expletives that made you quirk an eyebrow. That was unlike Felix. You were the one with the foul language problem. If he was cursing something must be terribly wrong. Curiosity getting the better of you, you snatched the keys out of the ignition and stepped out from the vehicle. "Whats going on short stack?" you called out as you approached the visibly frustrated man. "The spare has a crack in it. My roadside assistance doesn't have anyone that can help. They'll reimburse me, but we're going to have to call a tow and probably find somewhere to spend the night since I'm sure there isn't a garage open at this hour." Well shit. This was going to be a pain in the ass. "Okay, which part do you want me to start looking up? How about you figure out the tow situation and I'll see if theres a motel or something. Where are we even anyway?" you asked trying to laugh at the circumstance you found yourself in.

Two hours and a ride on the struggle bus with cellular service later you found yourselves in the lobby of a motel that made you feel like the star of a horror film. You were in some backwood town with a population of almost no one and there were nothing but trees for days. The receptionist or owner or whoever she was seemed friendly enough, but she also reminded you of a walking corpse. Her bony hand deposited a key into your palm and with a toothless grin she rasped out your room number. You thanked her and went to collect Felix and your bags and hightail it to somewhere with a lock on the door. This whole evening had made you feel uncomfortable and all you wanted was to sleep so morning could come and you could be back on your way. Funny that there was something that made you feel worse than spending time at home, but here you were.

Juggling your bag and the room key you were having trouble making the key go into the lock. A warm hand stopped yours from shaking and suddenly closer than you remembered him being, Felix silently took the key from you and ran his fingers over the back of your hand before inserting the key into the lock and opening the door. He gestured for you to go in first and continued to hold the door open as you pulled yourself together and stepped into the room. Feeling around on the wall you found the switch and flipped it. As the light flickered on, yes flickered, because your life obviously needed to resemble a horror movie down to the last detail you let out a groan as you looked around. There was only one bed. It was rather small also. You weren't sure it even qualified to be called a full. There was absolutely no way that you were going to have either one of you taking the floor though. You'd definitely indicated two beds at the desk, but something told you this wasn't a problem with a solution. The place was so ancient they still used key locks, and the lady downstairs looked like she came from 1900 directly. You turned to Felix as he was dragging your suitcases in to break the news to him.

"Looks like we're going to be revisiting our childhood tonight shorty. Theres only one bed and like hell either one of us is sleeping on the floor." His head snapped up from what he was doing to shoot you an incredulous look. "Y/n, I'm far from short anymore compared to you and that," he says pointing in the direction of the bed, "is not a bed. That's fit for a large child at best." You wondered what had him so obviously upset, but you chalked it up to the frustration of the situations that seemed to keep arising. "Felix, believe me, I realize this is less than ideal, but it's what we've got. We both have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, you especially, so we're just gonna have to suck it up and do what we gotta." You said placing a hand on your hip and turning your other palm up towards the ceiling in a gesture of both sass and nonchalance. "I'll see if theres a pizza joint or something in this town, why don't you go take a shower first? It'll help take some of the tension off." He nodded and went towards the bathroom while you dove into trying to get a signal to see if you could figure out food.

Miraculously after the fight of the century with your service you were able to locate pizza. Even better was that they delivered. Downside of the size of the town you were in was that the person on the other end of the phone knew exactly who you were, and described you as 'that poor stranded couple'. Well whatever, food was becoming more necessary by the minute since you'd relaxed a marginal amount and your stomach felt like it would eat itself. You were giddy with excitement and digging through your purse for some cash when Felix reappeared. You didn't notice him at first but when you looked up and there he was in nothing but a pair of low slung sweats with a towel hanging around his neck you let out an audible gulp. He quirked an eyebrow at you, but before he could question what your problem was, you snatched up some clothes and stuffed some money in his hand. "I'm amazing and pizza should be here any minute. I'm gonna go shower now. You don't have to wait for me to eat." You said to him as you brushed past and quickly made your way into the safety of the bathroom.

Once you shut the door, you placed a hand on your chest to calm the beating of your heart. What was wrong with you today? Sure it had been a while since you'd seen Felix shirtless. And wet. But it had never affected you like this before ever. It was like you were discovering that he wasn't the person you'd known most of your life. Just when had he gotten so toned? His lithe body was beautiful and always had been, but when had it also been appropriate to describe him as manly? Stepping into the scalding spray of the shower you prayed that you were just hungry and tired and it was making you crazy. Washing with a speed you normally reserved for things you disliked, you scrubbed away the filth of the day. Wrapping a towel around yourself you rubbed some of the fog off the mirror and after toweling your hair out as much as you could, ran a brush through it. You rubbed your skin vigorously and put on your tank top and realized you'd forgotten your panties. Laughing at the luck you'd had today you just shook your head and pulled on your pajama pants.

When you returned to the room the soft light and sounds of the TV accompanied Felix and his pizza. Belatedly you realized there wasn't likely to have been any sort of plates or anything to use and cursed yourself for not asking. Oh well, things still could have been far worse today so you were gonna stuff your face and call it a night before the bad luck that seemed to be following you around could claim any more of your energy. You plopped unceremoniously on to the bed next to Felix and snatched up a piece of pizza. As you took a bite you let out a moan at how delicious it was. "Really y/n, sometimes I think you'd be happiest with food in your hands at all times." Felix said, chest rumbling with laughter. Your face suddenly felt like it was on fire and you were oddly embarrassed even though this exact scenario had played out many times before. "I just love food and am hungry enough to eat a cow right now short stuff." You huffed out indignantly. Still slightly laughing Felix reassured you that it was fine and he was only making an observation. You felt jittery and nervous still even though you'd checked off all the things you thought were the culprits so you decided to initiate bedtime.

"I think we should get some sleep, we have a lot to do tomorrow and we still have a lot of miles to cover." Felix seemed to mull over your statement before he nodded his agreement. He began to box up the remainder of the pizza and you went to brush your teeth. Making your way back to the room you heard Felix's phone chime and picked it up from the dresser it was sitting on to hand it to him. You weren't being nosy but you saw a name that made your blood boil a little bit. It was one of your catty cousins and now you were wondering what the fuck he was doing talking to her of all people. Unable to help yourself you spat out at him, "What are you doing talking to her?" As soon as the words were out you couldn't believe yourself and your hand flew up to cover your mouth in embarrassment. "You know what, I'm tired, never mind, disregard my craziness, I'm just gonna lay down. "As he stared at you with wide eyes, he responded anyway. "They occasionally text me trying to snoop I think. I just stored the name so I'd know to ignore because I made the mistake of answering a message once before." Well now you were feeling a whole lot more awkward. Deciding that there was safety in silence you simply nodded and laid down in the bed.

Getting under the covers you scooted as far to the side as you could. You weren't sure how you were going to handle being that close to Felix's shirtless body with the maelstrom going on inside your head but you were just going to have to try. Sliding under the covers and in turn being closer to you than you thought was explicitly necessary he pulled the blanket up over you both and whispered to you, "Good night Cheeks." His deep voice laced with a tired rasp sent a shiver down your spine and it hit you then like a bolt of lightning. Holy shit, you were in love with your best friend. Your best friend turned you on. Holy shit, what the fuck. Sleep was probably going to be a problem with your heart hammering away in your chest. Staying as still as you could so as to not draw attention to yourself you mentally went over all the signs trying to figure out when the hell this had happened. You thought Felix was asleep and you turned to look at him. His breathing had evened out and his plush lips were slightly parted. The moonlight coming through the window cast a soft light and made the smattering of freckles on his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose look exceptionally gorgeous.

With his eyes still closed he shocked you when he began to speak. It was as if he could sense your restlessness even though you weren't moving at all. "I can feel your eyes y/n," he drawled and you went rigid. "Not to make things weird, or weirder, but I thought about you when I came last night." Now it was your turn to give the wide eyed stare. He cracked one eye and looked at you and slowly started to grin. "Y-you did?" you squeaked out. He turned to face you and it's not like you had anywhere to run, the bed was so tiny. You were close enough to feel his breath ghost over your face as he continued, "I thought I might have been imagining things but it seems you're just as affected by me Cheeks. You were calling me short stack still so I was a little unsure, but if you could have seen how hungry you looked earlier and I'm not talking about food." You should have known it was going to be a short lived secret but you were reeling that within such a short time of you realizing you had feelings and physical attraction he was calling you out on it. Felix had always known you better than you knew yourself sometimes.

What he didn't expect was that you wouldn't put up a fight about it. He was prepared to spell it out for your stubborn ass if need be, but you saved him the effort and planted your lips on his. You kissed him with all the hunger he described moments before and pulled away, chest heaving. "How long? How long have you known that we could have been doing this? How long have you been thinking about me when you cum?" You shoved him so he wasn't on his side anymore and climbed on top of him before he could do a thing about it. Looking at his face you were searching his eyes as if they held the answers. What you found instead was a look of lust so dark you couldn't do anything except seal your lips to his again. He didn't fight back and instead placed his hand on the back of your neck to turn your head slightly. He licked your bottom lip seeking entrance and you obliged. His plump lips felt so soft on yours and as his tongue swirled with yours you unintentionally found yourself grinding your hips into his as you let out a moan.

Felix also let out a groan at the friction and decided he'd had enough. He flipped you so your positions were switched and you found yourself again marveling at how manly was now how you'd describe him. Caged in between his arms he leaned down and nipped on your throat. Practically growling in your ear, his voice sent shivers down your spine. "I'll show you exactly what I was thinking about when I came if you want me to y/n." If you had been wearing underwear they would have been absolutely ruined. His voice was already one of your favorite sounds in the world, but right up in your ear making lewd suggestions had you feeling like you were coming unraveled. He placed open mouthed kisses along the column of your throat and reached to tug on your shirt. He pulled it up and helped you take it off only removing his mouth from your skin long enough to get it over your head. He continued down your chest and down to your hip where he hooked his fingers in the band of your pants. You lifted your hips so he could pull them down. "Well well, Cheeks, I never thought you'd go without panties, but that certainly makes things easier on me. He took a moment to appreciate your beauty and you found yourself feeling shy. He trailed a finger down your stomach and began to lightly tease your pussy until you were squirming with need. Just when you thought you couldn't take the teasing anymore he slid a finger into your slick folds and then into you.

"A-ah, Felix, more," you whined out. You were so turned on it was practically unbearable. He seemed pleased at your request and inserted another finger and started pumping in and out at a slow pace. He curled his fingers upward and began rubbing circles on your clit with his thumb as he picked up the pace. You began to feel the curling heat and tightening up in your stomach and knew you were going to cum. He could feel your walls clenching around his fingers as he brushed past your sweet spot with every pump. Just when you thought you were about to completely lose it he pulled out and immediately attached his lush lips to your clit and sucked on it. Your orgasm washed over you like a waterfall and he held your stuttering hips in place as he worked you through your high. Feeling like the personification of bliss you reached down and ran your fingers through his hair. He kissed his way back up your chest and you pulled his face to yours to taste him.

"We're not done just yet, y/n. I still haven't shown you everything I was thinking about when I came." You had just barely come down from your high but you felt as if you could cum all over again at his suggestion. He reached over to the nightstand and retrieved his wallet and pulled out a condom. As he went to tear the foil you placed a hand on his wrist, "Can I?" You asked. He allowed you to take the packet from him and he pulled off his sweats. As his cock sprang free you were absolutely stunned. He was so much bigger than you thought he'd be and now you were wondering where he hid that and how it was going to fit. You grabbed at his dick and gave it a squeeze before rolling the condom down his shaft. He moved to lay you back down and lined his cock up with your entrance. He slid the head through the slippery remnants of your earlier undoing and every time he brushed your clit you twitched with need. Finally, finally he started to slide his cock into your warmth. Slowly at first, giving you plenty of time to adjust, he inched inside until he was all the way in. Buried to the hilt he stilled so you could get used to his size and then began to pump in and out of you. You wrapped your arms around his neck and he began to pick up the pace.

He set a brutal pace and you gasped and panted. Your erotic voice was making him impossibly more turned on. As he thrust into you your cries of pleasure spurred him on. He shifted slightly and pulled your legs up so they were over his shoulders. The change in position allowed him to go deeper and with every pump he fully dragged across your g-spot and you felt the familiar ache starting to build again. He continued to thrust and reached out to rub one of your nipples. "Ahhh y/n. You look so beautiful. Look and the way your pussy just devours my cock. This is exactly, ah, what i was thinking about while I got myself off." His voice, and the pure filth coming out of his mouth were enough to send you over the edge. Your walls clamped and spasmed around him and you came on a cry of his name. "Ah F-Felix, fuck." His rhythm became sloppy as you rode out your high and soon he was spilling his release with a loud groan.

You were both sweaty, panting messes. As he began to soften up he slipped out of you and removed the condom. Tying it off he tossed it in the direction of the garbage can before returning to you and the bed. He wrapped you up in his arms and kissed you on the forehead. Before you could even get a word out his phone was chiming again. You gave him a look that said he should check it and so he grabbed it. It was your cousin again and you were struck with a brilliant idea. You knew it was probably partly them snooping like he thought, but there was also the knowledge that they were jealous of your relationship with Felix. "Lemme see your phone," you said with a smirk. He shrugged and handed it to you. You opened the camera and snapped a selfie of the two of you. Her message was some ‘what are you doing’ type thing so you sent the picture and then powered his phone off with a satisfied smile. He let out a little laugh at your antics and from your position with your head on his chest it was the best sound in the world.

Waking up much later than you intended, and certainly more sore, you reached to check the time on your phone. You were met with the family group chat notification count being astronomical, and also a notification from your favorite cousin. It read, 'I know that was you bitch'. With a smile you turned the phone towards Felix who was wondering what besides him had you so smiley this morning. You were rewarded with his eye smile and morning voice telling you, "You're something else Cheeks, but damn I love you."

#stray kids smut #lee felix smut #felix smut #skz smut #stray kids one shots #stray kids felix #lee felix #kpop smut #skz felix smut

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bigsnzstanacct · 4 years

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Hayfever Story (sneezing + nose blowing)

I... don’t know what you all will think of this one. This is part one of two, though I’m not entirely certain how part two should go. This one is mostly setup but there’s plenty of sneezing at the top. Honestly it is almost all sneeze talk or description. The sneezer is described as male, but the narrator’s gender is left ambiguous: imagine whatever excites you the most.

This is unedited, obviously, but I may go through and take another pass at it at some point.

—-

I could hear him down the block.

“AAAHHHHCCHHH-HHOOOOOOO!!” The bellow was dimmed somewhat by distance and the walls between us, but I still heard it, clear as day. He’d be winding up for another one now, frozen in place, captive to his big, protruding proboscis. The handkerchief clutched in two hands, spread wide as his head tipped back and back and back until his shoulder got into it, his wide nostrils flaring absurdly as he gasped... and gasped... and gasped... until...

“EEEEEEAAAYYYYYATTCCHHOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” Even louder this time! He would have delivered it right into the handkerchief, so that he could transition, seamlessly, fluidly, almost... professionally into the window rattling roar of his great lawnmower honk of a nose blow, sonorous as a trombone, surely so because of the unusual architecture of his cavernous nostrils, which provided plenty of room for the great crashing blow to echo and resound and build in noise. The first great two-nostril honk taken care of, he’d press one nostril shut and blow his trumpet blast out the other, then switch sides, in a sort of aftershock to the first great blow. I could barely even hear them through the walls. But I knew after that would come the last big blow. First, an enormous lung-swelling long smooth inward gasp of air, his shoulders rising, rib cage expanding to let in more and more and more air. Then, a silent moment of preparation, practically like a prayer, his eyes scrunching shut, face flying into the waiting hankie and then...

The real foghorn, a nasal blast that dwarfed his sneeze in volume. His “big blows” as we called them existed less to expel moisture or whatever else might be lurking in his nasal passages, and more to cleanse the terrible itch with the sheer sound of it, as though by making his whole sinuses vibrate with the sonorous force of the blow, he could chase that twinging tickle into every nook and cranny of his nose, and in doing so scratch the itch into submission.

He’d be walking again now. Would there be another sneeze before he arrived at the door, would he in fact reach the door even as the ragweed and grass pollen and all the terrible floral irritations of spring reignited that desperate desire in him, left the poor exhausted man with no choice but to unleash another:

“HEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHSSHHH-OOOOOOOOO!!!” This was an angry sneeze. The sneeze of a man exhausted by his nose and a nose exhausted by the itch. It was the sort of sneeze he released only when he at last forgot about the noise and disruption his nose could cause—did cause, all throughout hayfever season—and could think only of finally relieving the terrible itch. I swung the door open, and was greeted by the sight, no longer in my imagination but in the flesh, of his reddened, dripping nose, his tired, sagging eyes—oh it was so obvious he was in the grips of an absolutely miserable allergy attack, and I could only reach out to him, press him into a tight embrace, even as, over my shoulder, he spread it out—oh, not a handkerchief at all, but one of those big red bandanas he used when his poor nose wore him out, when even his hankies seemed too small and too fragile to stand up to the ferocity of his allergic response. I barely noticed before he crushed his nose into his hand and, uncontrollably, right next to my ear blasted out a honk that I swear nearly made my go deaf.

Of course, if that were going to happen, it would have long since happened by now.

“Oh hodey...” he said, sniffing, as he straightened up. “Hodey I’b so sorry bud by dose...”

“Shhh, shhh,” I cooed at him, guiding him into the living room and down onto the sofa. “It’s fine, darling, I understand. Your hayfever...”

“Id’s terrible!” He announced, as though every centimeter of his face was not making the announcement for him, from the downturn of his lips to his constantly working, practically buzzing nose. “Wud sec godda blow...”

He said this with banal literalness—he was going to blow his nose. And yet I couldn’t help but think that “gonna blow” seemed accurate for any and everything pertaining to his nose, which resembled nothing so much as his personal Vesuvius, a volcano always on the edge of an eruption.

He held forth with a blow that put the others to shame, or perhaps that was just me being able to appreciate it properly now, neither muffled by walls nor so all-consumingly close that its relative volume was masked. De-stuffed a bit by the blow, he continued: “I had to sneeze so badly all day, darling, you wouldn’t believe it. I hate hayfever!” He said it with conviction, so much so that I couldn’t help but hate it too, even if his hayfever, this particular specimen, also thrilled me. “I don’t know how I got any work done, always having to duck into the bathroom to... t-tuhhh... huuuhhh.... HUUUUUHHHH... HUUUUUAAAAASSSHHHOOOOOOOOO!!!”

“To do that?”

“Mm.” He replied, congested again. Our flow of conversation ebbed for the moment, making way for his great trumpeting blows, always the same pattern: a great two nostril honk, a series of cleansing blows of each nostril individually, alternately, and then a final great tickle-chasing honk. Although this time even that pattern didn’t seem to be enough. “Cad you ged me adother h-hadker... hadker... hehhHH... AAAASSSSHHHOOOOOOOOOO!!”

He didn’t have to tell me twice, though as I heard the thumping on our ceiling from our neighbor above, already fed up with his nasal exuberance, I couldn’t help but hope, for the sake of peace in our little block of apartments if nothing else, that the next cleansing blow managed to clear out some of that infernal pollen and ease his allergies some.

Although, as he heard him snuffling and sniffing, surely hunting for any dry spot left on the great bandana, I didn’t hold out much hope.

—

He’d really had a terrible hayfever day, though it did calm at least somewhat after he’d been home for a while, with our humidifier and air filters all around. He explained that he’d had to sneeze all day at work, constantly ducking into the toilets to let one loose, fighting not to blast one of his rather disruptive and distinctive sneezes in the open office. He’d sworn he wouldn’t be known primarily by his nose, not at this workplace, unlike many of his others. Even then, he hadn’t felt like he could blow his nose, not fully, not properly, even in the toilets. On the bus home, he’d fought not to explode but his hayfever was just unbearable and before he knew it he was belting out sneeze after sneeze, so loud in the enclosed space he was afraid he’d startle the driver or something. The other passengers glaring daggers at him didn’t help. So he’d walked a good deal of the way home, which only succeeded in allowing his big nose to suck up even more allergens, to drive him even crazier with the urge to blow them all out.

By that evening, his nose had largely calmed down, its outbursts coming once or twice an hour rather than every few minutes. I gave him the tea that always helped, wiped his face with a warm cloth, did my best to soothe the allergic beast inside him, the little demon of nasal irritation that took up residence in his nose—a spacious abode—that tormented him and took over him body til his whole body used all its force to exorcize the demon in a blasting sneeze or trumpeting blow. There was something nice about it, the feeling that it was we two in a battle against his hayfever. Sure, it was him on the front lines, cajoling and managing and denying and satiating his itchy nose and its allergic demands. But I was there too, supporting and assisting and fetching bandanas and grabbing things out of his hands when a sudden blinding urge to sneeze robbed him of every other thought. I liked helping him in that way. It was plain to see those great galumphing sneezes took it out of the poor man. And though he always seemed pleased, satisfied after a good strong session of blowing, that too must have required energy. He’d tried to teach me on more than one occasion, when I caught bad colds, how to blow my nose as thoroughly and authoritatively as he did. I’d gotten quite a bit better—no longer the sniffer and snuffler I was when we met—but still, I could never quite manage the sheer ferocity of his nose blowing, let alone the power, let alone the volume. He was in another category for that.

Of course, that presented its problems. And there was another area in which I could help, in which it was I instead of him on the front lines of battle: the neighbors.

Now we’d been lucky enough to escape complaints in many if not most of the places we lived, though surely his nasal exertions were audible through the walls. And to his credit, most of the year, with the exception of lazy afternoons where gave his nose free reign and let his great bellowing sneezes rip as they pleased, he kept his nose to.... well not quite a polite acceptable volume, but at least a dull roar during quieter hours. But this was our second hayfever season in this apartment. And when hayfever season strikes that nose of his, all bets are off. I thought we’d come to blows with at least two of our neighbors by the end of the season, but although we narrowly avoided that, we did have to speak to the apartment management about noise complaints. They couldn’t, of course, kick us out of our apartment over hayfever. But to keep the peace, we agreed to try our very best to keep the noise down late at night, even during hayfever season. His nose had free reign until ten pm. It would be cruel to expect anything else. But his hayfever was too severe to let him sleep sometimes. I’d been awakened, more times than I could count, with a great bellowing sneeze, a desperate, whispered apology and then a trumpeting nose blow. Half-asleep, it never occurred to him to tamp down the violence... all he could think of was chasing away the terrible itch.

So, in those moments where he awoke at night, itchy and sneezy and desperate, it fell to me. Then I took the front lines in the battle against his allergies, or at least the battle to avoid coming to blows with Mr and Mrs Cadwallader upstairs.

I suspected, from the moment I heard him coming down the way to our apartment, that tonight would end up being just such a night. So I’d taken the bandana he normally hid under his pillow and hid it under mine. If he were about to sneeze, even in half-asleep stupor, he’d reach for that, and so it was that I was awakened at 2am, not by his nose, but by his mouth:

“—Quickly!! I n-need to snehhh... sneeze!”

#snz fic #sneeze story #male allergies

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everything-jeronica-blog · 6 years

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Late Night

In which Veronica and Jughead become accidental next-door neighbors at a very haunted bed and breakfast. Cue blow-dryer weaponry, some rather unhelpful supernatural investigators, and misquoted Moby Dick.

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Jughead shrugs his backpack more securely on his shoulders, lugging his small green suitcase behind him. If he's being honest, the bed and breakfast doesn't look that nice from the outside. It isn't awful by any means; flowers adorn the windowsill, a cute welcome mat sits in front of the door. But the paint's chipping and there are cracks in the foundation and mostly it just looks old and worn out, which is how Jughead feels after the bus ride there. Frequent stops and a bus change after the tire burst turned the four hour drive to Riverdale into seven.

With a world-weary sigh, he wheels his suitcase to the front door and tugs it open. The bell above the door jingles. He steps into a small lounge; the wooden walls inside are cracking, too, a water stain on the ceiling above the welcome desk. That's what they get for finding a cheap and mildly suspicious deal online. Too bad he has to deal with it alone, now. He passes a few floral armchairs around a rickety coffee table and stops at the front desk. He's only waiting for a moment before an older man emerges from the office, grinning at him.

"Welcome! You're Room 13, right?"

Jughead nods, removing the crinkled piece of paper he'd printed out the reservation details on. "Yeah, that's me."

"You switched from a double to a single?"

"My friend cancelled last minute."

"Right this way."

He follows the man from the lobby past the dining area, a cozy place with numerous wooden tables and sitting areas. Old paintings hang on the walls (probably to cover more water stains, he thinks bitterly).

As they pass the dining area, the man says, "That's where you'll come for breakfast, served from 8 to 11. If you're late, there's no breakfast."

The common area connected to the dining area is completely empty. "Is the hotel low on visitors today?"

The man clears his throat, glancing away. "Bad weekend for trips. It's supposed to rain."

It's not. Jughead checked the weather three times before coming.

He takes Jughead down a long hallway to a dark wooden door with the small golden plaque labelled "Room 13" on it. He's unlocking it and explaining to Jughead that if he loses the key it's an extra charge when the neighboring door opens and a head pops out. The girl's smiling, the kind of smile that makes Jughead's knees a little weak.

"Could I get an extra towel, please?" she asks.

The owner nods, "Be right there."

Jughead expects the girl to close the door and go back to her business, but she stays hovering there, insufferably pretty smile fixed on Jughead. "Hi, neighbor."

"Hey," Jughead shuffles his feet awkwardly, throwing a wave her way.

A rather loud thump comes from somewhere above them. The girl jumps. "What was that?"

"Huh? Uh, I'll go see," the owner says, opening Jughead's door. "There's Wi-Fi and a TV. Towels and toiletries in the bathroom. Tell me if you need anything." He hands Jughead the key and strides quickly away.

Jughead drags his suitcase inside the room with a half-hearted nod to his neighbor. The room's small, a double bed across a TV stand and a little window with frilly curtains. Outdated floral wallpaper covers the walls, and unsurprisingly, there are more water stains on the ceiling.

At least there's a microwave, tucked onto a table in the corner. With a sigh, he tosses his backpack on the bed. He face-plants after it, sandaled foot knocking into the side table. Something clatters to the floor. Squeezing his eyes shut, he counts to three, takes a deep breath, then sits back up because that clattering very well may have been his cellphone.

A flap of wood hangs loose from the bottom of the table. On the floor lies a jeweled brooch. Jughead glances between the secret compartment and the spider brooch with the disbelief of someone running on far too little sleep and no differentiation between reality and imagination. Once he’s convinced himself this isn’t a sleep-deprived hallucination, he examines the brooch with careful fingers. It is made with rubies and shaped like a spider.

A knock on the door interrupts his interest. He places the brooch on his table and gets up to answer. It's the girl from next door, grinning a little sheepishly, rubbing the back of her head.

"Uh, hi again," she says. Now that Jughead can see her from head-to-toe, he's even more enamored. She’s gorgeous, smooth skin and small figure, legs on display in dress. "This is kind of weird, but do you have any plastic bags? I brought way too much ramen, and I don't want to leave it in my suitcase."

Jughead turns to his own suitcase, unzipping it and removing a store of plastic bags he'd brought just in case.

"Thanks. I'm Veronica, by the way. Here for two nights."

"Jughead," he offers hesitantly.

"Nice to meet you, Jughead. Did you come all alone?"

"My friend bailed. He forgot to do an assignment for university." Archie had called him three days ago in a panic because he realized his end-of-the-year thesis was due and he only had three pages written. They'd reserved the rooms only a week ago after finding a particularly cheap deal online; it was supposed to be a stress-free weekend, which they both needed desperately.

"So did mine. He got sick."

"Your boylfriend?" Jughead blurts without thinking. He has to restrain himself from clapping a hand over his mouth in regret.

The corner of Veronica's mouth turns up in an almost knowing smirk. "Just a friend."

"Right," he clears his throat. "Uh, anyway. Nice meeting you. I'm gonna get to bed." He isn't entirely lying; it's late, and he just spent seven hours on the bus.

"See you at breakfast, Jughead." To his irritation, the smirk doesn't fade as Veronica waves and backs away.

"Yeah." Jughead closes the door between them, face aflame.

This time he really does fling himself onto the bed.

He had entirely intended on sleeping but ends up tucked under the covers with his laptop resting on his stomach, scrolling mindlessly through Twitter. Far too late into the night, a thump comes from the wall behind his head, startling him into nearly jerking his headphones off. It's followed by a low moan. Jughead flushes. The absolute last thing he wants to do is sit around listening to Veronica getting off. He turns his laptop volume up.

Ten minutes later, there's another thump, louder this time.

"What the fuck," Jughead mutters, turning around to glare at the wall separating his room from Veronica's, as if the force of his irritation can travel.

His eyes are drifting shut when the third thump comes, too close for comfort. The phonebook on his side table falls off. He doesn’t bother picking it up, glaring at it for a moment before turning his laptop off and putting it away, burrowing further into the covers. Another moan; it’s so close it might as well have been right by his ear. It doesn’t really sound like a pleasured, getting-off kind of moan. If he’s being honest, it sounds kind of fucking creepy. Jughead puts his pillow over his head.

The sound of long fingernails scraping against the wall between their rooms finally breaks him. He flings his covers aside, marching to the door with a purpose. Cute or not, sunshine smile be damned, Veronica’s about to get her ass whooped.

He bumps right into Veronica coming out of her own room. They pause in the middle of the hall, staring at each other.

“Hey, can you keep it down?” Veronica says, rubbing her cheek. Her hair is a mess, eyes swollen like she was already asleep. “I’m trying to sleep.”

Jughead bristles. “Can I keep it down? You’re the one thumping around.”

“You’re the one moaning.”

“I wasn’t moaning! You were thumping and moaning and scratching the walls—”

“Nope, that was definitely you.” Veronica crosses her arms, jaw set stubbornly.

“I’ve literally been lying in bed on Twitter for, like, the past two hours.”

“I’ve been sleeping.”

They glare at each other for another moment before Jughead finally breaks. “Well, if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, then who the fuck is making all that noise?”

Veronica’s eyes widen perceptibly. “Holy fuck, this place is haunted.”

Jughead snorts. "As if. It's probably one of the rooms above us."

"There's no one else staying here except us. I asked."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Not one person."

Jughead wraps his hoodie tighter around himself, throwing a surreptitious glance about the dark hallway. A few dim lamps sit on mahogany tables down the hall, but other than that, it's just them and dancing shadows. This is what he gets for finding cheap, sketchy deals online. He's going to kill Archie for ditching him. "Whatever. I'm going back to sleep."

He turns around and shuffles back toward his room. One step inside, he realizes Veronica's on his heels, close enough he can feel the heat of her body. "What are you doing?" he mutters, glancing behind him. Veronica is even more ridiculously attractive close up.

"You can't leave me alone if there's a ghost around."

"There's no fucking ghost—"

"Being alone is what gets everyone killed in the horror movies. We gotta stick together."

"This is an invasion of privacy," Jughead complains as Veronica follows him all the way into the room, kicking the door shut behind her.

"It's survival."

"Don't be so damn dramatic." He tucks his sweatshirt sleeves around his fingers. The room has grown colder. A cursory check of the thermostat shows a drastically lowered temperature, even though he can't remember touching it.

Veronica sits in the old armchair in the corner of Jughead's room. She looks nervous, glancing around him every few seconds as if he really does believe in ghosts. "So, uh, how long are you here for?"

It's clear she's just trying to take her mind off the potential "ghost" that might be haunting them. She looks so tense it makes Jughead feel bad, so he sits on the bed across from her and says, "Just the weekend. Where are you from?"

"New York."

"I study in New York, too."

"You know, one of my good friends is from—”

The doorknob of Jughead's bathroom turns, like someone's pulling it with an invisible string, and the door creaks open at an agonizingly slow pace. Jughead freezes, gaping at the now-open bathroom, but Veronica shrieks. In one smooth bound, she leaps from the armchair to the bed, clinging to Jughead's arm.

"I told you it was a fucking ghost."

"Calm down. It was just an accident. This place is old, probably has a faulty foundation that leads to doors opening all the time." But even as he says it, he knows he doesn't quite believe himself.

"But the knob spun, Jug." Veronica's warm, and her breath tickles Jughead's cheek. He looks pointedly at the door, knowing that if he turns back to Veronica their faces will be far too close. Thinking about Veronica’s proximity, however, is a little easier than thinking about a would-be ghost. His parents are terribly superstitious, but Jughead has never really believed in ghosts.

"It's probably loose."

"It's not loose. It turned."

"Listen, there's no such thing as—”

The landscape painting hanging on the wall by the window falls, crashing to the ground with a crack. This time Jughead jumps, too, even if he denies it. Veronica yells, curling closer to his side until Jughead can't help but be vaguely grateful for whatever odd situation they have found themselves in.

"That's a ghost, that's definitely a ghost," Veronica babbles, jumping to her feet and dragging Jughead along behind her.

"Where are you going?" Jughead exclaims, exasperated, but he’s looking around just as nervously.

"I don't know, but we can't stay in this room. In the horror movies they always follow the noises and end up dead."

She stops by the bathroom, digging around in the cabinets. "What are you looking for?"

"A weapon."

"Ghosts are dead. What are you gonna do with a weapon?"

"I dunno, but it's better than not trying." Veronica's head emerges from inside a cabinet holding, rather triumphantly, a battery-operated blow-dryer. Then she pulls Jughead out the door and back into the dark hallway, which is monumentally less appealing than his room. If anyone's going to die at the hands of a vengeful ghost tonight, it'll probably be in a hallway. But Veronica's hands on Jughead's arm are shaking, and if he's being honest, Jughead's kind of fucking creeped out, too.

"Come on. Let's find the manager."

"Okay." Veronica calms a little at the suggestion. This time, she’s the one who follows Jughead down the hall obediently.

They're halfway to his office in the lobby when the lights shut off—every dim lamp, every ceiling light piece, even the glowing blue backlighting for the dining hall counter. Veronica shrieks, louder than before, clutching onto Jughead so tight he loses all feeling in his arm.

"We're gonna die, we're gonna die, we're gonna die—"

"Shh," Jughead hisses.

The voice is muffled, distant, almost distorted. First it's high, floating through the hall, then pitched lower. He can't make out the words. It sounds agonized, like it's singing a sad song or crying out in pain. Veronica's fingers tremble, and this time Jughead's do, too.

"Shh," he says, gentler this time. He feels around for Veronica, running soothing hands over her hair and pulling her close.

The lights come back on. Jughead finds himself mere inches from Veronica's face, her terrified eyes locked on his own.

"We gotta get out of here," Veronica says.

"Where the hell are we supposed to go? Buses aren't running anymore."

"We can walk."

"Walk where? I don't know shit about Riverdale."

"Well, we can't just stay here."

"We have to find the manager and figure out what's going on," Jughead says decidedly, pulling Veronica along after him. It's probably not the best time to be thinking about how Veronica's hand feels in his, slender and smooth. "Maybe it's a prank."

Veronica scoffs, but she doesn't pull away. The manager's bedroom connects to his office off to the side of the lobby. They knock on the office door, first. It creaks open, the room dark and empty, neat desk and empty bookshelves.

"He's not here," Veronica says, tugging on Jughead's hand.

"He's probably sleeping." Jughead steps into the office despite Veronica's whispered protests. Nothing out of the ordinary happens. He knocks on the bedroom door—once, twice, three times, to no answer.

"Out," comes the hissed whisper from behind them. They spin around to a flash of white and red, stringy hair, floating well above the ground.

Veronica shrieks and turns on the blow-dryer, waving it in front of her blindly. She trips in her haste to back away, taking Jughead down with her. They fall in a bundle of limbs and knocking elbows, the blow-dryer still puffing hot air on the ground by Veronica's hand. Whatever was there is now gone. Jughead looks at Veronica, sprawled on her back, gaping, and then at the blow-dryer, small with a flowery logo on the side.

Then he bursts into laughter.

He laughs so hard his sides hurt, smacking the ground with his palm, wheezing for breath. "Did you—fucking—see your face?"

"Did you see the ghost?" Veronica shoots back, but the longer Jughead laughs, the less scared Veronica looks. Jughead can’t tell if it’s one of those hysterical moments where he’s so frightened he can’t do anything but laugh, or if the situation really is as funny as it seems.

"You were really about to use a goddamn blow-dryer to fight off a ghost—”

"At least I wasn't just standing there like your useless ass—”

There's a chuckle from the distance. They both freeze—until Jughead starts laughing again. "Even the ghost’s laughing at you."

Veronica's looking scared again, sitting up and scooting closer to Jughead. "Try the door again."

Jughead knocks one more time, then fiddles with the doorknob. It's not locked. When he opens the door, he finds that the manager's bedroom is empty. The bed is made, the dresser is clean, like no one lives there at all. "He's not here."

"That's fucking weird."

"Maybe he's just taking a round of the place to make sure nothing's wrong."

They stand there, staring at each other. For the millionth time that day, Jughead wonders what kind of mess he's gotten himself into.

"A medium," Veronica says suddenly. "We can call a medium."

"A what?"

"You know. Those ghost experts."

Jughead's still trying to mentally catch up by the time Veronica heads out the door and through the lobby. He hurries to reach her. They’re almost to their rooms when something cold touches Jughead’s back, sending shivers up his spine and his heartbeat racing. He reacts without thinking, grabbing Veronica and pushing her against the wall, pressing close as the brush of cold passes by. When he chances a glance behind him, he sees a flutter of white turn the corner. If possible his heartbeat races even faster, goosebumps erupting on his skin. He’s never believed in ghosts, but there’s nothing he can do to explain this away.

“Holy fuck,” Veronica says.

Jughead turns to her and realizes that he’s got Veronica against the wall with his hands on either side of her, faces inches from each other. He flushes and jumps back. “So, uh, the medium.”

“Right.” Veronica marches back to her room, where she heads straight for her cellphone, tossed carelessly on the bed.

"Aren't those people all fakes, though?” Jughead says rather skeptically, sitting next to her on the bed with a sigh.

Veronica looks scandalized. "Of course not." She's searching something on her phone. “Okay, here’s someone kind of close. SP and Fangs Supernatural Investigators.”

Jughead shrugs. Veronica dials, glancing nervously around her as the phone rings on speaker. The call connects, and what they hear on the other side is not in the slightest bit reassuring. High-pitched shrieking filters through the call, mixed with the sounds of thumping and breaking glass.

“SP and Fangs Supernatural Investigators at your service,” says the surprisingly calm voice on the other end. “Fangs speaking. What can I do for you?”

“We’re staying in a bed and breakfast and there’s a ghost going around and turning lights off and dropping things and the manager’s disappeared—”

Another voice, muffled by distance, shouts, “It’s coming for my dick, it’s coming for my dick—”

Fangs yells back, “Use the goddamn holy water, Sweet Pea!” His shout morphs into the same calm, collected voice as before as he says, “I’ll have to call you back. We’re kind of the middle of something. Thanks!”

He hangs up. They’re left looking at the cellphone in Veronica’s hand, dial tone ringing ominously.

“Call a medium, huh,” Jughead mutters.

“It’s fine. We can just try someone else. Look, there’s another number here. Toni Topaz, the finest medium in all of Riverdale,” she reads from the website with its black background and drippy green font.

“Sounds so promising.”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

Jughead huffs.

Toni Topaz picks up after one ring. “Toni Topaz, how can I help you?”

“We’re spending the night in a bed and breakfast, and there’s a ghost haunting us.”

“A bed and breakfast? The one owned by the Blossom family? Acquired in 1978? On the corner between the convenience store and the meat restaurant?”

“Yeah, that one.”

Toni Topaz hangs up.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Jughead groans, falling back onto the bed. A thump on the ceiling is so loud it sends dust floating into the air. He sits back up, scooting towards Veronica unintentionally.

“Why’d she hang up?” Veronica sounds even more distressed than before. “I’m calling someone else.” She jams the next number in almost frantically.

“Kevin Keller speaking.” This voice, as it should be, comes groggy and tired like he’s just woken up.

“Are you a medium? Can you deal with ghosts?” Veronica asks, clearly trying to be a little subtler this time.

“That’s my job. What kind of haunting are we talking about?”

“We’ve seen the ghost, white dress and red hair. It’s turned the lights off, thumped on walls, moaned, and told us to get out.”

“Classic haunting.” He sighs, sounding slightly less tired than before. “Can you give me your location?”

“The bed and breakfast between—”

“—between the convenience store and the restaurant? Why the hell are you staying there?”

“We got good deals,” Jughead throws in, rather confused. “What do you mean why the hell are we staying here?”

“That place is notorious. No one around here goes within ten feet of it. Everyone knows it’s haunted.”

“We’re not from around here,” Veronica says.

“So can you help us or not?” Jughead snaps.

“Nope. I don’t fuck with that place. But I know a guy who can. He only takes special cases, the real crazy stuff, and he’s the best around. He sets the gold standard for mediums everywhere, honestly.” He rattles off a phone number that Jughead dials into his own phone. “His name’s Dilton. Call him and tell him Kevin sent you.”

“Got it, thanks.” Jughead’s already ringing Dilton by the time Veronica hangs up.

“How’d you get this number?” The first thing Dilton says isn’t exactly promising. Veronica glances at Jughead with an anxious twist to her mouth.

“Kevin sent us?” Jughead says it like a question. This whole thing still seems like something out of a bullshit movie, and he’s not exactly sure how to handle it.

“Oh, okay.” His voice changes to marginally less threatening. “What do you need?”

For the fourth time that day, they explain the details of their night. Dilton is silent long enough that Jughead resigns himself to another rejection. He’s already playing out the rest of the night in his head—Veronica shrieking, fluttering white turning the corner, lights flickering on and off. The tension of it might just kill him before dawn.

Finally, Dilton speaks, his voice trembling with restrained emotion. “I’ve been trying to get rid of that ghost for years.”

“You what?”

“Are you serious?”

A moan sounds through the wall, low and frightening. Veronica squeaks, fumbling her phone.

“I’ve stayed in that bed and breakfast three times, and I’ve failed every time. It’s the only ghost I’ve never managed to defeat. The manager doesn’t let me back anymore. Says I’m wasting his time.”

“Well, the manager is mysteriously missing.”

“That bastard. He probably dipped so you wouldn’t come at him for not warning you about the ghost.”

“So can you help us?”

“Help you? Help you?” Dilton laughs rather maniacally. “I’ll chase that white dress-wearing ghost on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till it spouts black blood and rolls fin out—”

Veronica leans over to Jughead’s ear and mutters, “Is he quoting Moby Dick?”

“—I will have my revenge against that accursed red ghost—”

Another low moan. Jughead shudders. “Dude, are you coming or not?”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Dilton says, then promptly hangs up.

They spend the fifteen minutes clutching each other with vague, distant ghost noises keeping them company. “What if this is how we die?” Veronica whispers at some point.

“We’re not going to die, Ronnie,” Jughead murmurs back. He’s not entirely sure it’s true.

Dilton comes in guns blazing—almost literally. They hear him marching down the hall before they see him, and the purpose in his heavy steps is comforting. They run out to meet him. In both hands he clutches odd machines that look a little like leaf-blowers, one blue and one glowing green. He looks far too young to be a renowned medium. In fact, he looks like he’s barely out of high school.

“Where is it?” he growls. “It’s not getting away from me today.”

“What the hell are those things?” Jughead bursts, eyeing the leaf-blowers with trepidation.

“Anti-ghost siphoning machines,” Dilton says like it’s obvious. “I invented them. That’s why I’m the best.”

“Huh.”

“What have you done so far?”

They stare at him blankly.

“To fight it off. What have you done?”

“I tried blowing it away with a blowdryer,” Veronica supplies.

“Always a good tactic.” Dilton nods very seriously. Jughead wants to sink into a hole. There’s no way this kid is the best medium around. “I’ve gotten rid of plenty of ghosts with vacuums before.”

“So what’s the plan? How are we getting this one?”

“I’ve tried tearing its essence free from this house before, but no luck. The house used to belong to a very wealthy family before they died off and the property was turned into a hotel. I suspect the ghost is a daughter of the family who succumbed to disease when she was a teenager.”

“So it’s a she?”

“Well, the spirit of a dead person is essentially genderless even if it takes the form of a woman in a dress, but I suppose technically since it’s the spirit of a dead female it would be—”

“Hey,” Jughead interrupts. “What if the ghost is attached to an object, not the house?”

They both turn to him, eyes wide.

Jughead shrugs, scuffing his toes against the ground. “I mean, isn’t that what always happens in the horror movies?”

Dilton looks flustered. “An object—I can’t believe—that’s genius. I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that before.”

“But what could the object be? There’s, like, a million objects in this damn place,” Veronica says.

“I found a brooch in this secret drawer in my room earlier today. Maybe it’s hers.”

“Jug!” Veronica exclaims. “You found what?”

Jughead shrugs again. “A brooch. Looked pretty old.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I dunno, didn’t seem that important.”

“Take me to it,” Dilton says immediately, tossing his leaf-blowers aside. “I can use it to summon and talk to the ghost.”

The pretty, jeweled brooch still sits on the side table where he had carelessly left it. Dilton takes it into his hands almost reverently. He holds it for a while, brows furrowed, eyes unfocused. Every now and then, he murmurs something under his breath.

The ghost appears without warning. White dress with transparent, wispy edges, stringy red hair falling down to the waist that looks wet, almost entirely concealing the transparent face. It floats a foot off the ground, hovering in front of them. This time, when Veronica screams, Jughead does, too.

“I face you at last,” Dilton says, waving his arm out dramatically.

“Not you again,” comes a voice, and rather than the frightening out it had hissed before, now the ghost sounds like an irritated teenage girl. Despite the fact that her mouth doesn’t move when she speaks. “Haven’t you given up yet?”

“I will never give up, not until I have rid this world of your evil presence. I will put an end to your tormenting of the innocent living—”

“Tormenting?” If they could see her eyes, Jughead imagines she would probably be rolling them. “I don’t torment anyone.”

“You were tormenting us,” Veronica blurts.

“I was just bored.”

Jughead scoffs. Bored. He could be sleeping right now if a goddamn ghost hadn’t decided to use them as entertainment.

“I have your most prized possession.” Dilton holds up the brooch. That’s a bit of a stretch, considering they don’t even know if she’s attached to it or not, but Dilton looks fairly convinced.

“Give that back. My grandmother gave that to me.” Her edges flutter like she’s going to charge for him, but he shakes the stick in front of him like it’s a shield. She doesn’t move.

“This is what’s keeping you here, right? You’re more attached to this brooch than anything else.”

“It was my last gift from my grandmother before she died.”

“You’re dead, too. Why are you stuck here when you can join her in the afterlife?”

“I died alone. Nobody said my funeral rites.”

“Then you should have become a wandering ghost.”

“I’m stuck here. Because of that.” She raises one arm, concealed entirely within the sleeve of the dress, toward the brooch.

“Then I’ll read your funeral rites over this brooch, and you can finally rest. What do you think?”

“That sounds nice,” she says, full of breathy relief.

He asks for her name, and then he performs the funeral rites, adjusted since they don’t actually have a body. They follow him out the back door of the bed and breakfast to a small garden behind the house. There, he buries the brooch. Veronica and Jughead each toss a handful of dirt. Once the last speck of dirt has fallen, a rush of soft air envelops them, a quiet sigh sounding in their ears. The ghost is gone.

Dilton doesn’t look as relieved as he should, considering how long he has been trying to get rid of the ghost. He looks almost sad, and even though Jughead should be happy that the mess of a night is over, he feels a little sad, too. Something about such close contact with death tends to put a damper on things.

Dilton shakes their hands before leaving.

“Guess you are the best,” Jughead says.

“Guess so,” Dilton grins.

When he’s gone, Veronica drags Jughead straight to her room.

“Time to crash,” she says, bags under her eyes. “I’m exhausted.”

After all they’ve been through, sharing a bed with Veronica should be the least surprising event of the night. Still, when Jughead collapses next to Veronica, the latter’s arm slung around his waist, he feels rather nervous. But Veronica is warm and comforting and the ghost is gone, and just before Jughead falls asleep, he thinks that in the morning he’ll ask Veronica if she wants to find a hotel room with him somewhere else and finish out their vacations together. Somewhere new and crowded and very, very not-haunted.

Three knocks on their door, loud enough that the frame shakes, wake them a few hours later. Jughead sits up, rubbing his eyes, sun filtering in through the curtains. His first thought is that the ghost is back and they’re fucked after all. But then a voice on the other end says, “Open up! We’re here to help.”

“What’s going on?” Veronica mumbles, groggy.

Jughead pats her hair. “Go back to sleep.” He makes it to the door and opens it, yawning. Two guys stand there, one about his height with brown hair, the other one tall and intimidating.

“SP and Fangs Supernatural Investigators,” says the taller one.

“Where’s the ghost?” demands the smaller one.

“You’re late,” Jughead says, and kicks the door shut.

#jeronica #vughead #mine #writing

31 notes · View notes

binicominoru · 6 years

Text

stars on the ceiling

peter parker x reader

summary: y/n didn’t go on the field trip that day, she didn’t get to see peter before he left for the last time.

a/n: MAJOR INFINITY WAR SPOILERS. i’ve had this idea in my head since i saw infinity war so enjoy this i guess. sorry in advance, it’s real sad.

Y/N hadn't gone on the field trip that day. Her mom had already scheduled a doctor's appointment that morning, so Y/N was left standing on scales and being told she hadn't grown at all in the past year (which she already knew, considering she had been complaining about how tall peter had gotten while she stayed the same height). She grumbled about it the whole way there, her mom simply sighing and rolling her eyes.

The TV in the waiting room occupied Y/N's attention as her mom flipped through one of the magazines they had set out, the both of them waiting until they could speak to someone about scheduling her next appointment. It was only a few minutes after they had sat down that the screams started. Y/N's mother was at the window in an instant, trying to find the source of all the chaos, but Y/N's eyes stayed trained on the TV. She felt her blood run cold, every thought running through her brain suddenly occupied by the thought of a boy clad in red and blue that acted on impulse and always ran toward trouble.

They were showing live footage of an alien spaceship descending onto New York City, creating a wind that seemed to literally blow people away. She was frozen, unable to move out of fear and shock. Her mom began to tug on her arm as the rest of the people in the doctor's office went into full panic mode. No one was sure whether staying or leaving would be safer. All Y/N could think about was Peter and Ned on that field trip, hoping with everything in her that Peter had stayed on the damn bus.

It was when the news footage switched to a shot of Spider-Man fighting alongside Iron Man that she finally stood up, breathing heavily. She fumbled for her phone, hands shaking as she went to call Ned. She stopped right before she hit the call button though, wondering if it was even worth it. She didn't want to risk getting distracted by the call and missing anything that happened with Peter in the fight. She waited until the broadcast switched back to a reporter sat behind a desk, announcing that the wind caused by the ship had been stopped but that the situation was still dire, before she finally called Ned. She stepped away from the small crowd of scared people all talking over each other that her mother had joined, hoping for at least a little bit of privacy. He picked up on the second ring.

"Y/N?" His voice was loud and scared. She took a deep breath, feeling the panic settle in.

"Ned, please tell me your alright." She matched his frightened tone, but her voice was so much quieter. Her teachers always got annoyed when she spoke quietly, asking her to repeat herself over and over.

"I'm fine, but Peter - "

She didn't need him to finish. She glanced back at the TV and saw it for herself. The spaceship was gone and Tony Stark was missing - and that meant Peter Parker was, too. Her best friend was somewhere in space, engaged in some sort of fight with aliens.

"Y/N, I have to go. I have to go, but, please, get somewhere safe, or just - I don't know, just - " She hated the way his voice broke off.

"Goodbye, Ned. Try not to panic too much, okay?" She hung up on him before she had to hear his sad voice again, not sure that she could handle it. Her mother came to get her only seconds later, finally leaving the group of frantic nurses and patients. She practically dragged her out of the building and didn't let go of her arm during the entire time it took them to walk the three blocks back to their apartment.

She used to lie awake with Peter at night, the two of them staring up at the glow in the dark stars that were long gone from her ceiling. They used to muse about space and the universe, topics that never failed to excited the two of them. Y/N, as much as she loved to talk and learn about space, had always been terrified by it. Peter, on the other hand, dreamed of perhaps joining NASA one day and seeing space up close and personal. She tried to hold onto the memory of a younger Peter laying on her bedroom floor, gesturing his hands wildly as he explained to her why there was no sound in space. She tried to grasp onto the way the glow in the dark stars casted a soft light on his face, making him look all the more serene. She tried to replicate the things he had told her that night, remembering how much she loved listening to him talk.

Back then, she had wanted nothing more than for Peter to make it up to space and then come back to earth just to tell her all about it. The whole walk home all she could think was how much she wished he would have never left.

When they made it back to their apartment and Y/N was finally allowed to go to her room, away from her mother's prying eyes, she went straight to her closet. She pulled out the shoebox that had been tucked away years ago, still filled with the glow in the dark stars. She stood on her desk chair to put them back on the ceiling, and then she drew the curtains, turned off the lights, and laid down on the floor. The green tinted stars looked exactly the same, but the empty space next to her felt like it was pressing into her side. She tried not to think about it.

It was hours later, after she had already turned her lights back on and been forced to eat something, that she was sitting at the kitchen table listening to both the news playing in the background and her mother and father talking about the events of the day. It was so much harder not to think of Peter when they wouldn't stop talking about the spaceship. She didn't need the reminder.

She wasn't looking when it started to happen. Instead, she was looking at the TV as the spokesperson on screen frantically reported that people were disappearing rapidly, right in front of everyone's eyes. She turned quickly to her parents when she heard her mother cry out. She watched silently, her mouth hanging open, as her father turned to dust.

She sprung out of her seat, stumbling over to where he had been standing, grasping at the air. She looked to her mother with tears in her eyes, gasping as she watched her mom's hand start to slowly blow away.

"No!" She cried out, lunging to get a hold of her as if she could keep her safe if she just wrapped her in her arms. By the time she was there she was hugging air. She was alone in her apartment, unable to breath as sobs slowly began to shake her entire body. She fell to the floor, screaming in agony as she pounded her fists against the hardwood. She tried to take deep breaths, tried to calm herself down, but she couldn't do it. Her phone, sitting on the kitchen table, was vibrating violently. The sound of it was deafening.

There was an abrupt pain in her chest that stopped her breathing all together. Her eyes widened as her hand fell overtop of her heart, tugging at the fabric of her shirt. She didn't need confirmation, didn't need someone to tell her. She knew. Her heart hurt in a way it never had before, her legs unstable as she stood up. Every part of her was in pain, tears still running steadily down her face. She stared at her empty kitchen for a long time, replaying it in her head. She spared a single glance back at her bedroom, catching sight of the stars on the ceiling.

She grabbed her phone and her spare to key to The Parker's apartment on her way out. The apartment building was only a block away from hers, but the walk felt like it took eternities. Her mother's strangled cry echoed in her head with every step she took.

May opened the door after only one knock, like she had been expecting that Y/N would be coming. One look at her and Y/N could tell that she knew, too. They collapsed into each other, both crying. It rang out clearly in their cries, a message that every listening neighbor would understand.

Peter Parker was gone.

She had convinced May to let her go back to her apartment alone, not wanting to be watched as she entered it for the first time since her parents had turned to dust. It had been days since it had happened, and neither May nor Y/N had moved much. They sat together at May's kitchen table almost every day, drinking tea and staring at the marks in the wood silently.

Upon crossing the threshold of her apartment, Y/N could feel her limbs suddenly become much heavier. The kitchen was still empty. She walked right past it, averting her eyes. Her bedroom was almost exactly the same, except the stars had fallen off the ceiling.

She stared at them resting on her carpeted floor, feeling everything inside her break all at once. She had been trying so hard to keep herself together, if only for May's sake, but it hurt so much. She let out a pained cry, the sound so foreign to her own ears that she wouldn't have guessed that it was her voice at all. The air felt still and suffocating. She kept on crying, her lungs burning. She couldn't care less if her screams were overheard as she let her heavy limbs finally drop.

It wasn't fair. Nothing about it was fair. Her parents were good people, they didn't deserve to die. It wasn't fair that she lost both of them at once, forced to watch it again every time she closed her eyes. It wasn't fair that people had just vanished all across the planet. It wasn't fair that when she tried to call Ned he never picked up.

It wasn't fair that Peter Parker died so young. It wasn't fair that he would never have a seventeenth birthday. It wasn't fair, and it wasn't right. There so many days that he would never get to live. There were so many memories he would never be able to make. There were so many things that Y/N never got to do with him, never got to tell him.

The last words she had ever that Peter Parker had ever heard her say were used to call him a dork, laughing as they ended their facetime call where she had helped him get his bag ready for the trip from her own bedroom since her parents didn't want her out late on a weeknight.

The thought came with a sudden gasp that halted her sobs, gaping wide eyed around the room, not even knowing what she was looking for. The thought persisted despite all of her efforts. She held her head in her hands, eyes squeezed shut as if she could will all the memories and the pain and the what-if's away. The thought remained: Y/N Y/L/N would never get to tell Peter Parker how in love she was with him.

She laid on her bedroom floor, surrounded by fallen stars, staring at the Peter-shaped empty space beside her. The world seemed to fall apart right before her eyes.

It took hours for Y/N to make it back to the apartment, carrying only a single duffel bag. May didn't bother to question how long she had been gone, simply wrapped the girl up in her arms as they sat on the couch together, watching a TV that wasn't even turned on.

May and Y/N's mother used to joke about Peter and Y/N ending up together. May had always known the feelings her nephew and his best friend harbored for each other, but instead of speaking up she had always simply smiled at the two of them and looked the other way. It was hard not to think back to the fantastical ideas of her two favorite kids getting married and starting a life together, not when she kept being hit with the realization that Peter would never have the chance to get married and start a life and grow old.

Her hold on Y/N tightened. She had always been part of the family, always promised a place in the Parkers' apartment whenever she wanted it. Both Peter and May added her. Now, May feared she would spend the rest of her life looking at Y/N and seeing all things Peter never got to have staring back at her.

Y/N wore Peter's clothes almost every day, sleeping in his bed at night. She knew, deep down, that it would hurt less if she slept somewhere else. But she couldn't help that his sheets smelled so much like him, or that if she kept to one side of the bed and closed her eyes she could imagine that Peter was sharing the bed with her - and everything was alright for a little bit. Nothing could be wrong if Peter was there.

Her dreams were haunted by him - him and her parents and the sound of Ned,s panicked voice during that last phone call. She screamed in her sleep, calling out for her parents as they died right in front of her, calling out for Peter to come home. May came rushing in every time, holding her and doing her best to provide comfort. They were trying to heal each other, in a way, but it seemed that they were both a little too broken. Eventually, they took to just both sleeping in Peter's room.

It was about a week later when Y/N successfully woke up early and made breakfast in bed for May with some inexplicable energy that had been bestowed upon her. For the first time since it had all happened, they both shared a small smile. Without thinking, Y/N grabbed her phone and made it halfway through the text before the device fell from her grasp and her hand clamped over her mouth.

She had been texting Peter. Without thinking, her first instinct had been to text Peter. But he was gone. He was gone. He was gone. He was gone. He was gone. He was gone.

May found her standing in the middle of a room, staring at her phone on the floor and sobbing. All she could think about were those goddamned stars falling from her ceiling one by one like a sudden storm. All she could think about was Peter Parker turning to dust slowly as the stars dropped.

She couldn't stop crying.

#peter parker x reader #peter parker imagine #spider-man x reader #spider-man imagine #marvel #peter parker #spider-man #marvel imagine #infinity war #infinity war spoilers #avengers : infinity war #avengers #aunt may #may parker #sad #sorry #validate me pls

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undergoingrenovations · 6 years

Text

The Awakening: Part 1

Narrated by: Ankha

From my cold slumber I awaken, stretching my cold and stiff joints. Out of habit, I take a large breath, and sigh as I realize I haven’t died. Then I remember: I’m immortal.

Slowly, I push open the lid of my coffin, straightening the wrinkles in my gauze that’s tightly wrapped around my body. Seeing as it’s a saturday, I won’t change my gauze until monday, or Sunday night after a bath.

The cavernous echo of my feet padding against the floor is replaced by a familiar song that Keaton introduced to me. I’ve grown to love it, and today I shall play it endlessly. I linger for a moment, closing my eyes to savor the thought of K.K. Sonata. The crisp and softness of the piano pleasantly bounces around the high walls of my home, only to be entangled with the intruding vines on the ceiling.

Not needing to eat, I spend my morning outside my imprisoning pyramid, tending to my slumbering neighbors rose gardens. Traditionally, a garden of golden roses is planted around the graves of egyptian royalty, but since me and two others were forgotten inside manmade mountains, the gardens had evolved into lakes. I quickly became lost in the task of dusting off sand from the leaves, and ignoring strange looks from people passing by. After the roses were taken care of, I began to tidy up the insides of the neighboring pyramids, making sure everything were to be in order should one of them wake up.

Having completed my morning chore, I was left to do as I wished throughout the day. Mostly, I would try to catch up on the news, since I’d only awoken from my slumber in the last decade, but Keaton usually liked to do that with me, so I’d save that for later. Instead, I sat down and began to read a book.

The book went on strange twists and turns, and was also in English, which I was still perfecting. As usual, I ended up losing my place while daydreaming of when I was alive. Shortly I returned to the place I’d left off, and resumed my adventures around the world. But the only thing that book had done for me, was made me jealous.

For centuries, I’ve endured a seemingly never-ending coma where I’d relive my previous life thousands of times. For so long I’d been stuck in the same loop, and once I’d woken, I wanted nothing more than to leave. Nobody that I’d once loved or cared for had survived for as long as I, and it was terribly depressing at first to stay in the place where you’d been abandoned. And that was only because any time that you looked at your once most treasured possessions, or the lyrics to your once favorite songs, or glanced in a mirror, it only would remind you of the life that you’d once lived. They were only reminders, painful at that, and they would have nowhere to go that wouldn’t cause trouble. So I put them all in one place, and redecorated my cage.

A bright fire burned in its brick home, surrounded by two towering bookshelves, off to the right of my door. On top of the fireplace, a stack of my favorites were lopsidedly stacked, bookmarks protruding from the pages. Next to these, was a portrait of Keaton, my best friend. In front of the fireplace, there was a plush rug and a comfy chair filled with pillows. On the far wall, a brick countertop held an old phonograph, and next to that there was a box of records. To the left of those, in the north western corner of my cage, my polished tomb was balanced against the wall, resting on another plush rug. Hanging around my tomb were various different stitchings of gauze and wrappings that I wore, and next to my tomb was a small table littered with letters and a writing quill and ink. On the western wall, another brick countertop, but this one contained a globe. To the right of the globe, a map of the world was pinned to the wall, and to the left of the globe, an old painting hung encased by gold. In the south western part of my cage, all of my old favorite things were crammed. My old golden chair, old favorite dress, old crown, and old painting. And on either side of the entrance/doorway, torches were hooked into place. It was much more homey than my old surroundings, which were nonexistent.

Bored once again, I decided to set out for Keaton’s house, and seek out his company. I donned a more casual set of clothes, a white tank top and cargo shorts, and began to peddle down the sandy road on my bike. Since I was living out in the desert and Keaton lived all the way over at the beach, I had quite a ways to go. The hours it took to reach his home were passed by switching bus stops and lugging my bike around, but at long last I reached his driveway.

The board planks that lead up to his front door were sandy from the beach he lived on, and a few feral birds were playing in his fountain. I parked my bike inside of his fence, and hesitated a moment before knocking. Inside I could hear the dimming of music, something cheerful as always, and the clicking of his talons on the floor. I resisted a smile when he opened the door and the scent of breakfast foods washed over my nose. Keaton grinned at me and gestured inside, waiting for me to sit before starting a conversation.

“Ankha, what’s up? Always great when you stop in,” he greeted, his casualty not quite throwing me off guard anymore. I glanced around his quaint little home, jealous of his freedom to choose his own house placement, but then again, an agent probably gave him tips.

“Bored, again.” My gaze came to my own framed portrait on Keaton’s dresser, and I fought the urge to laugh. We were quite the unlikeliest of friends, but yet, we were one of the best pairs out there.

“Wow, that’s got to be a record, man. Usually you’ll last until afternoon,” Keaton teased. I rolled my eyes and smiled as he handed a cup of iced tea to me, keeping one for himself, and ushered me outside. We sat on the shore, my paws bumping against his toes whenever the waves crashed up against our feet. Had anyone seen such a sight, they would’ve thought us to be two romantics, but we were only half of that.

“So, did anyone ever find out what was under those waves?” I wondered, tossing the question up for conversation. I could ask it now without the blank response of silence, to a real person instead of to myself. Keaton took a long sip of his tea before reclining on his elbows.

“Well, not all the way. I guess the scientists kind of ‘scraped the tip of the iceberg,’ or whatever they call it,” he offered, never lifting his gaze from me.

“That’s a horrible explanation. Tell me about them. Do they talk like we do? Civilizations? Technology? Or are they all feral? Left to the mercy of the tide?” The questions had slipped my mind sooner than I could control them, and Keaton laughed.

“Who knows? Although, I’m pretty sure they’re feral. If they weren’t, then I guess we wouldn’t have sushi, huh? As for what they look like, some are giants, as large as half of cruisers, and some are so small you can hardly see them. It’s a whole other world down there, and we land dwellers haven’t even explored it all.” Keaton was gazing out at the waves now, lost in his own words. I joined him and watched contently as the waves swelled, and as the occasional fish leapt out of the water. The horizon was specked with vapor clouds, quickly disappearing in the sun, from water mammals. My trance was broken from Keaton’s voice. “Hey, uh, do you ever think about moving? I mean, it takes so long to get between houses, dude. Don’t you ever feel isolated?” he asked, trying not to seem rude. His voice was soft and I began to think about what he’d said.

“I have, yes. I think about it every day. But, I was meant to be isolated, or I wouldn’t have been sealed away in a cage to be forgotten. If I left, then who would take care of the others? I’ve accepted my role as caretaker, and until they awaken, I must stay. I do wish that I could escape, to move to the forest, the town... Maybe even here, if you’d have me. We might’ve been neighbors...” The bittersweet words fell from my tongue slowly and dreamily, and I could feel Keaton’s gaze on my eyes. I turned to look at him, and he smiled a sad smile.

“We still could be, man. What if you lived here, and there?” His voice was hopeful, and I hated myself for shaking my head.

“I’d have to go there everyday to check, though. To see if they’d woken, to care for the roses. You know how much I hate it, but who else would? What if they did wake up and I wasn’t there? If they were discovered... It would be a disaster,” I rambled, giving him a bittersweet smile. I knew that it was possible to leave the last of my old life behind, but I also still had a heart for those that didn’t have to yet. I would wait for them, and care for them while I did. It was too much to risk them waking up on their own. They could be careless, and I had to know who they were. They could be family, or friends. Although, whoever was friends with the old Ankha was most likely dead...

“We could be neighbors, Ankha. And, if you wanted it too, roommates,” Keaton pleaded, gently edging toward me. I blushed slightly at the last suggestion, then laughed at the thought of us living together. Him, a mortal bird, and me, an immortal cat. What a thought.

“No, Keaton. I have to find out who they are first. Maybe someday, if you’re still alive,” I said softly, patting his wing that had taken my paw. He looked out to the waves again, disappointed. “Sorry.”

“It’s ok,” he mumbled understandingly. I turned my head to the waves, listening to the crashing and distant roaring. “It’s ok.”

#acnl #hhd #happy home designer #animal crossing new leaf #ankha #keaton

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acuaticamber06 · 7 years

Text

Undertone, Chapter Four

Hey, everybody! Thanks for your patience. Last week was brutal, but I kicked my brain into gear and got the next chapter finished.

It's been sweet and fluffy up until this point, but Rin's about to experience some real conflict (Jenna doesn't even hold a candle to this chapter). So, fair warning: things are about to get ugly.

Warnings: Some heavy cursing/verbal abuse, references to drug addiction, light description of (non-sexual) bodily fluids

Obvious Disclaimer: I don't own Undertale or any of the characters in it, just my own characters. This story is for fun. ^_^

***

Undertone, Chapter Four

Grillby's face waited until after he'd kissed Rin to turn bright blue. Thankfully, his Raven didn't seem to notice. He was worried at first that she was going to faint, but when she looked up at him with shy eyes, elation coursed through him.

Part of him was unsure that he'd be able to take their relationship to the next level. He would have settled for being her friend had Rin rejected his advances, of course. She made him happy, just by being in the same room as he was. Stifling his feelings for her would have been difficult, but not impossible. He just wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to get rid of them entirely.

But here he was, holding her in his arms. He pulled her into a hug, hoping that she understood now. He felt her wrap her arms around him and return the gesture. When he leaned back, there was a bit more clarity to her eyes, and her face was turning a deep crimson. She tried to stammer out something, then laughed.

"Sorry. I, uh..." she shook her head. "I've had other kisses, but none of them were like that."

A warm feeling settled at his center and bloomed outward.

Me, too.

He nodded in agreement and touched her cheek fondly before he let go to type.

G *I have to get going. Sleep well tonight.

She smiled. "I will."

He unlocked the door to leave when Rin placed a tentative hand on his arm.

"Grillby?"

He looked over his shoulder at her.

"Will you...text me when you get home?" She was biting the inside of her lip and looking at the floor. "I'd like to know that you made it back safely."

She looked up after a moment to see his response. Her eyes glittered in his firelight. They were so open; so honest. For the first time, Grillby felt like he was seeing all of Rin, without the barrier she put up to keep everyone at arm's length.

And she wants to make sure that I'm safe.

The urge to smother her in kisses tugged at his soul, but he resisted the feeling. Instead, he simply inclined his head, his eyes pulled up in an adoring smile.

Rin squeezed his arm gently, and he walked out, keeping his gaze locked on hers until the door closed and she was out of sight. He stood there for a second, trying to process everything that had just happened.

"Harrumph. Don't you have some other building you could go set fire to?"

A grating voice jarred him back to reality, and he turned to see the neighbor who had been sitting in the hallway when they'd arrived. She was seated on a plastic lawn chair, with one leg folded and resting atop the other's knee. Her stockings had fallen down to her ankles, and her mumu was a faded yellow, strangely matching the color of the hallway.

"It's bad enough to be stuck out here because of a flood. The last thing I need is some idiot on fire loitering in my hallway." She spit into a cup. "Get lost, Brimstone."

Her words stung, but no more than any other insults he'd ever heard. He turned on his heel and left, rushing down the stairs and out the door. When he'd finally gotten out to his car, the old lady faded from his thoughts and was replaced by his mind reliving the last few moments in Rin's apartment.

"I've had other kisses, but none of them were like that."

~~~

Rin carefully disrobed and hung up her dress. She might have whipped it up herself in an evening, but it was still the nicest garment she owned at the moment, and she handled it with great care.

She did, however, slingshot her bra across the room in the general direction of the clothes hamper and fall back onto the bed in her underwear. It was a warm night, and she didn't feel like bothering with pajamas. Besides, she had plenty of heat radiating from inside out.

It hadn't been a lie when she told Grillby that she'd never experienced a kiss like the one she'd shared with him. She reached up and traced her lips lightly at the memory.

It was like...

Well, she was having trouble putting it into words. But Rin felt warm all over, as if she were floating in the center of a fluffy cloud.

Her phone chimed and she opened one eye to look at it.

G *I made it back just fine. I had a great time with you tonight.

R *I'm glad, and I did too! You wore me out, though...I'm starting to fall asleep as we speak.

G *Then you should rest those beautiful eyes of yours. Sweet Dreams, Rin.

R *You, too. :)

She plugged in her phone and rolled back into the middle of her bed. The nagging, negative voice in the back of her head tried to bring her down, but Rin couldn't hear it over the amusement park of feelings her mind had become. After a while, she gave up trying to analyze what had happened between her and Grillby and floated on the feeling, drifting off to sleep with a smile on her face.

~~~

Grillby stood in the middle of the room, looking around. It was meant to be a second bedroom, but he never had guests stay with him overnight except Sans. And when that happened, Sans was usually so drunk that he would pass right out on the couch (if he managed to make it that far...sometimes the floor became his bed). So the only thing Grillby really used the spare room for was storage.

There was a retro floor lamp in the corner, a rug that had been given to him by the Bone brothers as a housewarming gift (it featured a plate of spaghetti and meatballs in pop-art colors that said "Welcome!" in bold letters along the bottom of the plate), and a few boxes of extra plates and glassware for the bar.

He could easily move the boxes to his bedroom closet. There was plenty of space to stack them on one side, so that wouldn't be a problem. He could never get rid of the rug and, frankly, he never wanted to. It had taken Papyrus some time to warm up to Grillby, but once he did, Grillby really liked the guy. Anybody who knew Paps knew how much he loved spaghetti, and on the rare occasions that he came to visit, Grillby featured the rug directly at the bottom of the stairs. He decided he was going to hang it on the stairwell wall.

It's like a tapestry, Papyrus! They were woven works of art, but people would hang them up to preserve them for future generations to enjoy.

Grillby grinned to himself. Papyrus would be thrilled.

That just left the floor lamp. He walked over to it and blew the dust off the shade, turning it on to make sure that it still could. The room had a ceiling fan, but no overhead light source, so the second wall switch was connected to an outlet in the opposite corner from the door. He unplugged it and moved it over.

There. Now it's the main light for the room.

He grabbed two of the boxes, whistling a little tune as he walked. He figured he might as well clean it out now, since he was already thinking about it.

Just in case.

~~~

Rin was getting tired of hearing "We regret to inform you-" and "Good luck with your search!" She was beginning to wonder if her old manager had gotten her blacklisted at every store within a mile radius of her apartment. Heck, she'd even expanded her search another mile out, promising herself that she'd splurge on a bus pass once her new job was established.

Every day was a bittersweet mixture of fear and excitement. The negative voice seemed to be growing with her unease, but her worries were punctuated with the thrill of getting a text from Grillby. He would check in with news of who was hiring on his side of town and what the monsters who ran the business were like. She was grateful that he was trying to help, but without a place to stay nearby, working closer to the base of the mountain was a bit of a pipe dream.

Rin skipped the store on her way back home. She'd walked a total of seven miles throughout the day, give or take a few hundred feet, and she was exhausted. She took the stairs slowly, feeling every muscle in her legs burn.

No one can say I don't get enough exercise, at least.

Finally, she reached her floor. She was glad to see that it was empty of neighbors. But when Rin went to put her key in the door, she stopped cold.

The door was ajar.

For a few heartbeats, she stood there, thinking about what to do. Then the adrenaline kicked in.

She ran down the three flights of stairs as quietly as she could. When she reached the ground floor, she called 911 to tell them about the intruder inside her home. The operator told her that there was an officer close to her location and that she should stay out of the apartment. Rin thanked her and hung up.

After she got off the phone, she went back upstairs and stood by her door, listening. She eased the door open, bit by bit, trying to hear movement inside.

Suddenly, she heard it: the crash of ceramic shattering against the wall. It was muffled, but she could hear someone talking, too.

"Garbage...trash...garbage...trash... Damn it! I can't pawn any of this shit! Why can't she live with some rich friend who has taste?"

An old, deeply-rooted anger bloomed in her gut. Rin opened the door and walked in. It only took her a few steps to get to the bedroom.

She almost couldn't open the door. Every drawer had been emptied, the mattress was pulled off the bed, and everything in her closet was on the floor. The culprit was hunched over something by the bed, throwing things over her shoulder.

Rin's voice was pure ice. "Karin."

The woman stopped. Slowly, she stood and turned to face her. She was taller than Rin, and her black and gray hair was matted to her head into the shape of a ponytail. Her face was gaunt, speckled widely with sores.

She smiled and opened her unnaturally thin arms, as if offering a hug.

"Rin, sweetheart! You know I don't like it when you use that name. You should call me 'Mom'."

~~~

Rin crossed her arms and glared at her mother. "You're not going to find anything worth selling here."

"Sell? Oh no, I'm not looking to sell anything!" Karin absentmindedly picked at the skin on her arm. "I was just trying to find a picture of us so I could show it to a friend."

Rin wasn't buying it. "And you think I would keep family photos underneath my mattress?"

"Well, I couldn't find them anywhere else, so..."

Rin noticed that her mother was sweating rather profusely.

Withdrawal.

She decided to change tactics. She wanted her mother to be caught in the act by the police officer. They would be arriving any minute now.

Time to put on a show.

"Really?" She looked at her mother. "All you want is a picture of us?"

"Of course!" Karin practically sang, taking the bait. "Everyone should see my beautiful daughter!"

Rin begrudgingly relaxed a bit and started thinking out loud.

"Pictures... pictures..." She pondered. "I keep them with my valuables, so there's a couple of places they could be. They might be in the bathroom cabinet, or they could be hidden inside one of the lamps or tucked into the upholstery of the sofa. In a complex like this, I like to spread the important things out, just in case someone breaks in to rob the place."

She looked up and smiled at the woman, though it made her sick to do it. "I'm glad you came by. Would you like to stay for dinner? I could go pick up some Chinese at the place down the street and we could catch up. They should still be open."

Her mother beamed. "That would be wonderful! I'll wait for you here and we'll chat. Just like old times."

Rin forced her expression into one of confusion. "Are you sure? You don't want to come with me?"

Karin shook her head. "I'm not up for a walk right now. I have a headache, and I'd like to lay down for a bit."

Rin nodded. "Okay...if you're sure. I'll go get it and after dinner, I'll help you find a picture of us. Do you still like beef and broccoli?"

Her mother smiled. She was missing more than a few teeth. "You read my mind."

Rin smiled back at her and headed for the door. "Alright. I'll be back in twenty minutes or so. Okay?"

"I'll be right here!" Her mother waved.

Rin closed the door. Stepping to the other side of it, she pretended to look for something in her backpack while she listened. After a minute, the door cracked open away from her position for a second, and Rin heard her mother move to look at the only set of stairs on the floor. Then she closed the door. It wasn't too long before Rin could hear the sound of fabric being ripped apart.

There goes my sofa.

Satisfied, Rin quietly left the building to wait for the police.

~~~

A short while later, a cruiser pulled up and two officers got out to talk to her.

"Are you the woman who called about the break-in?" The officer with the mustache pushed his sunglasses up higher on his nose.

"Yes, sir. No one's come out yet." Rin reported.

The other officer started walking towards the door. "Which apartment is it?"

"Number 33, on the third floor."

The mustached officer moved to join his partner. "Wait here."

Rin nodded and sat down on the little hill next to the steps. She tried to imagine how her place would look once they got up there. The only thing she wouldn't break would be the bed.

At least, I hope she doesn't break the bed.

Shouting shook Rin from her reverie. She could hear male voices yelling short commands. Once they stopped yelling, female screams echoed down through the stairwell.

They brought her mother out in handcuffs, both of them having to hold her by an arm so that she couldn't run away. She was doing everything in her power to bite, kick, or otherwise maim the officers. But when Karin spotted her daughter, all of her rage redirected to Rin.

"I RAISED YOU! I GAVE YOU LIFE, YOU LITTLE BITCH, AND THIS IS HOW YOU TREAT ME?!?" Spit flew from her mouth as she screamed. Her face was red. "YOU SHOULD BE TAKING CARE OF ME! I GAVE YOU EVERYTHING! YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE A BETTER LIFE THAN ME! YOU DON'T DESERVE IT!!!"

~~~

After Rin watched them struggle to put her mother in the back of the cruiser without getting hurt, she explained that Karin was an addict who broke into her home on occasion to steal and pawn things for money. Unfortunately, this wasn't a new song and dance for the officers, and when they had everything they needed, they apologized about the mess and left.

Rin's neighbors had come out to watch the spectacle as soon as the shouting started, and they tried to quiz her as she trudged up the steps to her place. She repeated that she didn't want to talk about it until she was able to go in the apartment and close the door behind her.

The sight that greeted her was truly disastrous. The sofa was flipped over and ripped apart, with stuffing bursting from the tears. The lamps were still plugged in, but shattered on the floor. And by the smell of things, Rin assumed that Karin had tried soiling herself as a way to get the officers to let go. Feces and urine were smeared all over the living room carpet.

Rin took out her phone and snapped pictures of everything in case her landlord tried to raise hell over some damage to the apartment.

She sat down on the mattress that was still on the floor and stared at her phone, not really seeing it.

You don't deserve it.

The voice in the back of her head echoed what her mother had always said. Trying to distract her mind from the voice, Rin found herself opening Grillby's text message and reading it again.

You don't deserve it.

Her fingers seemed to move without a conscious command.

R *Grillby, I need help.

~~~

Grillby was getting Sans a new ketchup bottle from the fridge when his phone chimed that he had a new text message. His heart jumped at the sound.

He'd spent all week agonizing over how much he'd been texting Rin. Was it too much? Did it freak her out? Did she think he was creepy now?

Sans had tried to assure him. "You're overreacting. She answers you, doesn't she? If it was too much, she wouldn't answer. Keep it light and you've got nothing to worry about."

Even if Sans made sense, that didn't stop him from wondering.

And wondering led to worrying.

He picked up his phone and unlocked the screen, eager to read what she'd said. His joy rapidly transformed into fear, however, when he read the text.

G *Whats wrong?

R *Someone broke into my apartment and trashed the place.

G *Are you okay?

R *Yes. No. I guess. The cops have left and it's all over now, but...

Grillby pushed open the kitchen door and walked over to Sans.

"What, no ketch- what's wrong?" His voice had gone from sarcastic to concerned in an instant.

Grillby handed him the phone. Sans read the conversation quickly and looked up at his friend.

"It's midnight. That's close enough to close up for the night. I'll tell everybody that you're locking up while you cash them out."

Grillby nodded and briefly went back to his texts.

G *Are you safe for now?

R *As safe as I can be. I put the chain on the door.

G *Stay there. I'll be there as soon as I can.

R *No, you have a business to run. I guess I just wanted someone to talk to.

G *Stay there. Please, Rin. I'll be there soon.

~~~

Working together, he and Sans had the bar emptied in ten minutes. Grillby threw the money in the safe while Sans locked the door.

He followed Grillby as the bartender took off his vest and tie, hanging them on a coat hook in the kitchen. Sans leaned against the wall while Grillby looked for his keys.

"Do you want me to come with you?"

Grillby thought about it, but shook his head.

"Well, text me if you need another set of hands. Until then, I'm gonna head on home."

Grillby walked back over to him and laid a hand on the skeleton's shoulder, giving it a small squeeze.

"Anytime, Grillbz. Don't sweat it." Sans patted his arm affectionately. "Now go protect your girl. She needs her knight in shining armor."

Grillby got in his car and saw the telltale flash of blue signaling Sans' departure.

Hang on, Rin.

~~~

Ten minutes later, Grillby knocked on door 33 in Rin's apartment building. After a moment, the door opened a crack and a familiar hazel eye appeared. The door shut and he heard the clink of a door chain being unlocked. When it opened again, Rin had already turned away from him to guide him through the apartment.

"Watch your step." Her voice was flat. "The intruder left a big mess on the living room floor."

The stench of that mess hit him in the face and he gagged. Covering his nose, he surveyed the scene through watery eyes.

Grillby couldn't believe what he was seeing. Every piece of furniture in sight was destroyed. Pictures had been thrown against the walls. Human waste formed a trail from the middle of the living room all the way through the kitchen tile.

It was revolting.

He stepped over the biohazard and followed Rin into the bedroom. It was just as trashed as the previous scene. Clothes and blankets and sheets were strewn around the room, and the broken remains of some clay item made dangerous stalagmites in his path.

Rin was sitting on a bare mattress which had been pulled off the bed. One corner rested up on the box springs, turning it into a padded slope. He carefully picked his way over and sat on the mattress next to her.

He looked her over carefully. She was sitting very still, staring straight ahead, but her eyes were unfocused. He typed a message and laid his phone on her knee so she could read it.

*Are you okay?

Rin shrugged. "I guess. I mean, everything I own has been destroyed, but I'm okay."

Grillby was growing increasingly worried about the lack of emotion in her voice. And her eyes looked...empty; dead.

*Do you want to talk about it?

"Not really."

*Do you want to start cleaning?

"I think I'm too tired."

*Do you want to go to sleep?

"No."

He was starting to run out of ideas. How was he supposed to help her if she wouldn't let him?

A humorless chuckled clacked from her throat. "You know, I spent all week imagining what we would do when I invited you over again." Her gaze fell down to her feet. "This wasn't one of the scenarios."

It was clear to Grillby that Rin wasn't herself.

She's in shock.

She wasn't functioning properly. He wanted to keep her safe until she came back to her senses, and he was worried about leaving her alone.

*What do you need for an overnight bag?

"Not too much. Why?"

*Help me choose what you're taking. You're not staying here tonight.

"I'm not?"

*No. At the very least, you will be sleeping on my sofa.

"I'll be okay. Just help me get this-"

Grillby took her hand.

*Its too late to deal with this tonight. Please, come stay at my house. You'll be safe there, and we can get a fresh start on your apartment in the morning.

Rin didn't respond at first. Her eyes still seemed to be looking right through everything, and she didn't bring them up to meet his. But eventually, she nodded, and Grillby helped to pull her to her feet.

She wandered around the room, picking up what clothes she needed along the way. He went and grabbed her backpack so she'd have something to put them in. When he pointed to the bathroom, she nodded again and retrieved her toothbrush, toothpaste, and some hair care supplies.

It didn't take long to pack the bag. Once it was done, Grillby unplugged all of the broken lamps, for safety's sake. Then he lead the still slow-to-respond Rin out of the apartment and down to his car.

~~~

Rin was numb. Her brain was trying to make sense of it all, but it all sounded like nonsense to her. She was vaguely aware of Grillby coming over and seeing the mess her mom had made of the apartment. Distantly, she understood why he wanted to keep her where he could watch her; Rin would be freaked out if Grillby was behaving strangely, too. But that knowledge wasn't enough to break the trance.

You don’t deserve it.

Her mother's voice kept echoing in her mind. It bounced around in her brain, mixing and creating a noise she couldn't hear anything else through.

There was a tiny spark of surprise when he pulled up behind the bar again. It was quickly smothered by the noise, though, and she followed him without question when he opened the door and led her inside.

He turned right as he entered the kitchen, and opened the door on the far wall. Grillby held her hand the whole way, turning on lights as they went down the stairs.

The basement apartment was huge, though she wasn't really taking in the details at the moment. It opened up and seemed to extend the entire length of the building. A kitchen with an island was against the back wall, and it shared the same big room as the living room. There was a long, black leather sofa/chaise combo that faced a flat-screen TV, with a matching recliner nearby.

Grillby put her bag down on the chair and motioned for her to wait. Then his disappeared into one of the adjoining rooms.

Rin was so tired. Her exhaustion was overwhelming everything else now; even the echoing noise couldn't stand up to it. She took a few steps and laid down on the sofa. It wasn't more than three breaths before sleep muted every voice in her head and dragged her into a dreamless void.

~~~

Grillby came back with his charger to find Rin fast asleep on the couch. He sighed, his brows creased deeply with worry.

She’s completely drained.

He was going to offer to cook her something, but he didn't want to wake her. It wasn't worth it.

Grillby sat in the recliner and studied her as he thought. He had expected her to be shaken up, even scared when he arrived at her place. He expected tears and trembling, and was fully prepared to flash some magic over her as soon as he entered the apartment to protect himself from the waterworks. But Rin had been none of that. She was completely detached. Grillby didn't know all the details about the break-in, but complete detachment seemed a little extreme for the non-confrontational destruction. Anger made more sense than detachment.

Whatever it is, there must be more to this situation than meets the eye.

He rocked forward and stretched as he stood. He still had many questions, but the best thing he could do right now was follow Rin's example.

He went into the bedroom and brought out a blanket. He would have carried her to his bed and slept on the couch himself, but he was afraid he'd wake her. He gently draped it over her, then lifted a lock of hair and tucked it behind her ear.

I’ll keep you safe. I promise.

With a final glance at her sleeping face, Grillby turned off the lights and went into his bedroom, closing the door silently behind him.

~~~

Rin was on her way to accept a job. Finally, someone had offered, and all she had to do was go to the office and tell the secretary that she wanted the position. She was so excited that she was running, not paying any attention to the scenery as she passed.

Get there. Get the job. Just get there.

Suddenly, there was a car crash right in front of her. Rin stopped to help and made sure everyone was okay. Once she was sure, she dodged around the cars, ignoring the people calling after her.

Get the job.

Then her limbs started to feel heavy. She was exhausted, and it felt like she was running through molasses. Next to the sidewalk, a campfire appeared. There was a sign next to it that said "Take what you need", and there was a bale of straw to sit on and a pot over the fire. Rin stopped to see what was in the pot, and was delighted to find cheeseburgers. It was difficult to pull herself away, but once she had rested for a bit and as soon as the heavy feeling was gone, she continued running.

Get there.

Rin could see the building. She was only two blocks away. All she had to do was power through the last stretch and all her problems would be solved.

A crash of thunder boomed overhead and she stopped, holding her ears. A crack in the ground snaked across her path and opened, quaking and rumbling until there was a huge chasm between her and the building.

The air around her turned fluorescent green as a huge, multi-eyed medusa monster slowly rose from the chasm. It opened its dripping maw to roar and as it did, buildings shook and collapsed.

Panic gripped her. She could see the office building beyond the chasm begin to shake. The monster followed her line of sight to the building and grinned viciously.

Rin screamed as the monster roared, destroying the building and with it, her future. The ground trembled and she fell to her knees, defeated.

~~~

A light tapping on her face and a good shake to the shoulders woke Rin up with a start. She yelped and sat up, looking around.

It took her a solid three or four seconds to realize where she was. She groaned as the events from the previous day began trickling back into her mind and rubbed her face. Her hands came away wet.

I must have been yelling in my sleep and woke him up.

She peeled her eyes open again and peeked through her fingers at Grillby, who was still kneeling in front of her. The sun was beginning to shine a little bit of color into the sky, but the brightest source of light in the room was still him at the moment. He looked worried, and his eyebrows were drawn up and together as if to ask:

What’s happened?

Rin took a deep breath and let it out, nodding.

"I'm alright. It was a nightmare." He nodded and stood up. He picked up and fluffed the pillow, then put it back on the sofa and patted it invitingly. He was telling her that it was okay to go back to sleep.

"I guess a little more sleep won't hurt..." she yawned.

As she laid back down, he turned to go. She tried to shut her eyes, but the trauma from her apartment and the residual feelings from the nightmare had left her a little jumpy.

"Grillby?"

He turned to look at her.

"Would you mind, uh, sitting with me?" Rin fidgeted with the edge of the blanket. "I don't want to be alone right now."

Grillby held up one finger and disappeared into another room for a moment. He emerged with another blanket and pillow, the latter of which he put the the top of the chaise. He laid down and pulled the blanket over himself, patting the couch next to him.

Rin pushed her pillow up next to his and pulled her own blanket up to her chin. She could feel his warmth against her head and hear the soft whoosh of his breath.

After a moment of quiet, Grillby held up a hand so that she could see it. She didn't see a color change, but she thought she felt something flash over his hand.

Am I able to feel his magic from a distance now?

But before she could explore the idea, the flames on the ends of his fingers began to move and change shape.

~~~

Grillby hesitated for a moment after he got comfortable. He wanted to do something that would help her relax. He wanted to distract her mind somehow, but he couldn't sing lullabies or tell her a story.

But then it suddenly occurred to him that he could tell stories.

Wow. The last time I did this, it was for-

He stopped the thought. He didn't want to think about that right now. But he did hold up his hand and get Rin's attention. He sent a little magic down his arm and began to manipulate the flames into shapes.

He created a happy little lizard on his palm who basked on a rock, just happy to be alive. Then the lizard rolled over and rubbed his empty belly. Hungry, he set off to look for food. First he looked on top of a tall mountain, but there was no food. Then he looked in a dark cave, but there was no food. Desperate, he dug holes in the dirt, but there was no food. Hungry and defeated, the lizard returned to his rock and accidentally rolled it over. Underneath was a pile of grubs! The lizard did a happy dance and ate all the grubs. Then he curled up on his rock and fell asleep.

Rin eagerly participated in the tale. She made disappointed sounds whenever the lizard reached a new destination and said "There's no food here, Mr. Lizard." To which Grillby would make the lizard shake his head sadly.

She laughed and applauded softly when he finished the story and dropped his hand.

Rin rolled over with a light sigh and curled up facing the back of the couch.

"Thank you."

It was barely a whisper, but Grillby heard her. He reached over and lightly rubbed his hand against her back.

You're welcome.

Soon, her breathing evened out and she was fast asleep again. Making sure an alarm was set on his phone in case he overslept, Grillby rolled onto his side to get more comfortable. He could see the top of Rin's head on the pillow right next to his face.

Her hair was so soft. He would have unconsciously reached out and stroked it had he not thought about it first. Grillby didn't want to wake her, but he let himself admire the way it reflected his flames. Black was usually an absorbent color, but her hair always caught his light and sent it back to him, like the still waters of a lake on a night without a moon.

He hoped that she didn't have anymore nightmares. He'd woken up to her strangled cry wondering if someone had broken into his house, and not being entirely sure that he would keep from maiming whatever unlucky creature had chosen to scare his Raven. And if the guy actually hurt Rin? Then, as Sans was so fond of saying, he was "Gonna have a bad time."

But he'd found her only fighting with the blanket, yelling in her sleep, with tears streaked across her face. It hurt his heart to see her in such obvious distress. He wanted to hold her and comfort her, but he settled for being nearby, giving her warmth, light, and hopefully a little bit of peace.

He fought against it, but his eyelids began to droop. Grillby finally drifted off to the sound of distant birdsong, dreaming of lizards and ravens and hunting for something that was missing from deep within his flames.

***

Aaaaand, SCENE! *snaps clapboard shut*

So, thoughts? What do you think about Karin? How about Grillby's party trick? Predictions for the future? And what's up with Grillby's past? Stay tuned next week for Chapter Five!!!

Chapter Three

Chapter Five

#UndertoneFic #undertale #grillby #fanfic

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nic-and-annie-in-france · 5 years

Text

Normandy

(long post warning)

It was a short train ride from Paris to Rouen, but the atmosphere completely changed from one city to another. Instead of the stately Haussmannian apartments and broad, straight boulevards, Rouen had narrow cobblestone streets and rickety-looking half-timbered houses. Our Airbnb studio adhered to Rouen’s dress code: it had exposed beams, exposed brick, and wide windows. It was as cozy as a hobbit hole and perfect for the carryout pizza dinner we ate there on our first night.

We got up early to begin exploring Rouen the next morning. It was sunny but chilly and foggy. Because of our visit to the Monet museum in Paris, we knew that Monet had painted a cathedral in Rouen several times. Within five minutes, we found a church that looked just like the paintings we had seen. We strolled around the quiet courtyard, enjoying the hint of mystery that the fog gave the church. After consulting our map, though, we realized the cathedral that Monet painted was still a half-mile away. We felt silly for the mistake, but still really enjoyed this church (which was actually an abbey), and wondered how the cathedral could be any more awe-inspiring than this place. When we visited the actual cathedral, we didn’t fully appreciate it because we were spending all our attention on avoiding an aggressive panhandler who was accosting each and every person in the square. So, the abbey holds a fonder place in my memory than the cathedral does.

In my preparation for the trip, I learned that Joan of Arc spent some time in Rouen, and that she played a significant role in Rouen’s tourism industry. But apart from the vague memory of a Wishbone episode about her, I knew next to nothing about Joan of Arc before coming to Rouen. We saw a few plaques around the city inscribed with things like “This is where Joan of Arc’s abjuration happened,” and “This is where Joan of Arc was imprisoned,” so little by little we learned more about her story. Then, we went to a museum (for lack of a better word) about her life. The building itself was where part of her trial took place, but that was the only thing about the museum that was authentic to the time period. Her story was told by videos of reenactors, projected so that they looked like they were really moving about the space. The idea was that we were watching Joan of Arc’s posthumous second trial, where witnesses were called and arguments were made to determine whether she was really a heretic or just wrongfully sentenced. I almost always prefer authentic artifacts over copies or reconstructions in history museums. But I thought this “museum” did a great job of compensating for its lack of extant artifacts from Joan of Arc’s life with engaging storytelling. I left the museum wanting to know a lot more about her life. I guess Nicolas did too, because he checked out an ebook about her that same night.

Our second full day in Rouen was dedicated to hiking and enjoying the outdoors. After spending our Christmas break in exclusively big cities, I realized that hiking is one of my very favorite types of sightseeing, and it was something I wanted to try to do more of in this trip. The trouble, though, is transportation. Before the trip, I spent more time and energy than I care to admit poring over maps and timetables to try to find the simplest way to some trailheads near Rouen. Every bit of the preparation was necessary. Two of the four bus stops we used were displaced from their normal spot because of construction going on nearby. Once we were riding the bus, I obsessively switched between Rouen’s public transit app and my hiking app to make absolutely sure that we got off on the right stop. We made it through the whole day with no transportation crises, which felt like a major accomplishment. And the hikes were wonderful! We walked up a hill to see a panoramic view of the city, and as we were going up the path, I realized that it had been quite a while since my feet had walked on grass. On our second hike, we walked through the cutest village, passing a chapel, horse farms, and bed and breakfasts until we entered some nearby woods. We could almost trick ourselves into believing that we were walking through a slightly flatter Kentucky.

Towards the end of our hike, we entered a still-smaller village composed solely of very expensive-looking homes. As we walked by a hedgerow, a prissy little dog bounded through a gap in the hedges to greet us. We said hi to the dog as we passed, and kept walking. But the little dog followed us, all the way to the next house. I thought the dog would eventually return home, but Nicolas was worried that the dog would get lost, or that we would be accused of dog-napping. We decided to turn back and try to quietly coax the dog back into its yard. The dog, smiling stupidly all the time, refused to acquiesce at first, but we finally got the dog to go home.

This dog episode, and the few other times I have interacted with people’s pets in France, always reminds me that I have no clue how to talk to dogs in a foreign language. Surely “Bonjour” is too formal to say to a dog? But then again, if I’ve never met the dog before, is “Salut” or “Coucou” too presumptuous? Of course, a dog can neither speak French nor English, so what difference does it make? But if a French person hears me, will they be weirded out to hear me speaking English to their dog? It’s a conundrum.

After Rouen, our next stop was Le Havre. It was much less charming than Rouen, but then again, it was a beach town in the off season. We stayed in a slightly shabby beach condo, which we especially appreciated for its free washer and dryer. We spent one of our days in Le Havre sightseeing: we visited its impressive modern art museum and its public library, which looks exactly like a giant roll of toilet paper.

The other day we spent taking a daytrip to the nearby town of Étretat, known for its white cliffs immortalized in some Monet paintings. Étretat was quaint and tiny; we saw most of it in a 30-minute walk around town. We brought a picnic to the rocky beach and ate it under the watchful eyes of the seagulls. We spent a lot of time staring up at the sheer white cliffs. Several times now we’ve recognized a building or landscape from a famous painting, and it’s an experience that never gets old for me. I especially enjoy seeing the places depicted in impressionist paintings. So much of impressionism is based in the idea of representing a fleeting moment in time—the weather, the time of day, the effect of the wind and the light—rather than a thing or a place. So in this sense, I still can’t say I’ve seen what Monet or Pissarro saw and painted, because I wasn’t present for that exact moment 100 years ago. Nevertheless, it feels very special to have captured my own fleeting moment in my brain, a moment that still has an element in common with something Monet saw with his own eyes. After lunch, we took the trail up the hill to the top of the cliffs. It was a beautiful, breathtaking walk. And the weather was better than we could ever have asked for. We even felt the need to put on sunscreen!

The last place we stayed was Caen. Nicolas was feeling a little dizzy and nauseous the day we arrived there, and we were both tired of constantly walking around, so we scrapped our itinerary for the day and stayed in our Airbnb. It was a tiny loft under the eaves of an old apartment building in the historic district. We kept hitting our heads on the sloped ceilings, but the views from the skylight windows were amazing. We spent the day relaxing on the pullout couch. Given my overachiever, workaholic tendencies, it pains me sometimes to deviate from the plan, or to not do all the things in a new place. But it felt good to be a little spontaneous and listen to our bodies’ need for rest. Because of this change of plans, I can’t say I know very much about the city of Caen. But when we went out to buy some groceries for dinner that evening, we got to see two abbeys built by William the Conqueror. These religious buildings were a lot different from the ones we had seen elsewhere in France. The stone looked orange in the evening sunlight and the steeples were really, uh, steep. According to the sign in front, William wanted to marry his first cousin, but the Church didn’t like that, so he offered to build the abbeys in exchange for the Church’s approval of the marriage. The marriage happened, and the abbeys survive to this day. I’m sure there’s more to Caen than one-limbed family trees and bribery, but that’s all we got the chance to learn about.

The next day, we set of for the train station early in the morning, and we took a 15-minute train ride to Bayeux, a neighboring small town. There, we saw a medieval tapestry recounting the story of William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings (why does that sound like a Harry Potter spinoff?). From what I had been exposed to at UK, I knew that I wasn’t super interested in medieval studies, but the tapestry (as well as some medieval things we saw in Paris that I didn’t write about) rekindled my interest in that time period. It’s worth mentioning first that the tapestry is less of a tapestry—there’s no weaving involved—and more of an embroidered comic strip. It was displayed in a dimly lit, V-shaped room long enough to display all 230 feet of the embroidery. An audioguide explained what each panel depicted, occasionally drawing our attention to certain details of the construction of the embroidery. At the end, there were more exhibits explaining the context of the “tapestry”: how it was made, how it is preserved today, what else was going on in France in the time period, etc. All in all, it was much cooler than I expected. The embroidery itself is an impressive work of art, and it tells the story of William the Conqueror in a dramatic fashion. The novelty of it was part of the fun, too. No disrespect to altarpieces, but we’ve seen enough of them to last us a long time; a thousand-year-old history text in the form of a proto-comic book, by contrast, was quite the sight to behold.

After lunch in Bayeux, we took a guided tour to the nearby beaches of Normandy. The tour was intended for Americans, as it was conducted in English and went to three main American points of interest: the American cemetery, the Pointe du Hoc, and Omaha Beach. On the tour, we met three women from Tampa who were taking a “girls trip” around Europe. We had been hearing snippets of American tourists’ conversations all around Paris, but it felt good to finally socialize with some of our own for a few hours. Our guide was a Dutch-Indonesian man who told us a little bit about the Battle of Normandy and told us a lot about the moderately successful Dutch hip-hop group he was in during the 80s and 90s. I did learn some new things, though, especially at Pointe du Hoc. It was the site of a German stronghold that American Rangers captured by scaling the seaside cliffs and taking out German heavy artillery stationed there. When we visited, we got to explore an underground German bunker, something I never expected to be able to do in my life. Above ground, the craters left by aerial attacks were still there, but grass and yellow wildflowers had regrown over them, giving the place the sloping, manicured look of a golf course rather than a battlefield. Together with the seaside and the cliffs, the whole place was eerily beautiful. To me it was a physical representation of the axiom that time (maybe with the help of tourism money) heals all wounds.

Our final day of sightseeing was spent at Mont-Saint-Michel, the village that becomes an island at high tide. We took a Flixbus there from Caen. It was hard to see the road from our seats, but based on the amount of times the driver honked at other people on the road, I think our lives may have been in danger a time or two. We arrived safely, however, then walked about 45 minutes from the parking lot to the town itself. We stopped several times as we walked to admire the view: a rocky hill jutting up from the flat floodplain into the sky, the spire of the abbey at the top reaching ever upward. The view was stunning, but the strong winds on the plains carried the even stronger smell of cow patties with them. After a few minutes the smell became overpowering, but at least it reminded us of home.

The commune itself was a quirky place. The narrow streets, lined with quaint-looking but overpriced little restaurants and shops, spiraled upwards to the abbey at the top of the mount. My favorite part was walking around the ramparts, which allowed us a little more room to breathe, and gave us views of the farms on one side and the English Channel on the other. There were seagulls everywhere, and they sometimes flew against the wind so that they hovered in place like a kite. We spent the first little while wandering around and enjoying the atmosphere: whimsical, as if such an impossible place could only exist by magic…and yet, intentionally made to seem that way. I did my best to suspend my disbelief.

Our day at Mont-Saint-Michel was, amazingly, our only rainy day in our two weeks of traveling. We spent as much time as we could indoors as we explored the abbey, but eventually we ran out of inside activities we could do that we were willing to pay for. We decided to head back a little early to the welcome center on the mainland. We took the opportunity to sit somewhere soft, decompress, and use some free wifi (which our Airbnb in Caen lacked). Rivers in the desert.

Our day of travel back to our home in the Alps was supposed to be a long one, but I didn’t mind this because we enjoy reading, writing, or watching Netflix on the trains. I had also planned for us to arrive back in Cluses early enough that we could take a bus back home rather than walking. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. Halfway through our first train ride, we were delayed because of an electrical malfunction at a station further down the line. The conductor came on the loudspeaker several times telling us several different estimations of waiting times. We transferred to trains on parallel tracks four different times as the plan changed. When all was said and done, we arrived in Paris two hours and 46 minutes later than we had anticipated, which meant that we had missed our train going from Paris to the Alps. Our train was not the only one to be delayed, so we waited in many lines to talk to many customer service representatives about getting home. Because it was winter vacation—high season for alpine skiing—our options for returning home weren’t great. Eventually, we decided to wait two hours for the next train, where I would get a seat but Nicolas would have to stand. On this second train, there was yet another delay of about 20 minutes. This put us in danger of missing our connection to our third train. Fortunately, however, the conductor let us know as we approached our stop that the third train was guaranteed to wait at the station for people with connections. This was the last of the difficulty, and we arrived at Cluses safe and sound. Needless to say, we missed the last bus home by a long shot, so we had to walk the two miles to our apartment instead.

This last day of vacation was clearly not my favorite day we’ve spent in France so far. But I was very thankful that this whole ordeal happened towards the end of our time here and not at the beginning. At this point, I have a good understanding of how trains and train stations work here, and I’m more comfortable using my French in complicated situations. Several times throughout the day I tried to imagine my reaction if this had happened on our first day in France while we were lugging around our big suitcases and trying to get to our town for the first time. I probably would have cried, died, and/or gotten on the next plane back home. We had a bad day, but at least it showed me the ways I’ve learned and grown.

#annie #tapif #travel #france

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project-two · 4 years

Text

My own place

The first night, I learned that the recessed lighting was blue and clinical. The toilet wasn’t parallel with the wall. I’d sit on it and find myself facing the corner where the door was attached to its hinges. The toilet paper holder was too small to fit jumbo rolls. And when I woke in the morning, no sunlight streamed in. The apartment – or more accurately, the room – was dim, like November.

2017, the last time I moved to a new city, when the loneliness weighed on me. The time before that had been in 2013, when I moved to Chicago. The winter had been so cold, icy sidewalks frozen over for months, waiting for the bus at 53rd and Dan Ryan, the wind never paused to take a breath, the grating sound of cars on the highway was relentless. The warmth of indoors felt so far away. New York had made me feel something similar, the endlessness of work, and I thought I always loved to work, secretly an ardent capitalist, but now I found myself wishing one of those enraged drivers would just hit me so I could spend a week in the hospital instead of going back there. I woke up one morning with a headache. “I noticed that was there,” my roommate said when she came into my room, pointing to the bottle on the floor by the nightstand, and I laughed about it, but I knew things weren’t right when I began strategically burying items in the recycling.

I struggled to say it out loud. The counselor at school had asked me right off the bat, because an explicit clarification was paramount, Do you have any thoughts of suicide? No, I said, wanting to reassure her. Not in a serious way. She paused. What’s a not serious way? What I’m thinking about, I said, is that, de-de-depression is caused by some error in the brain’s signaling mechanism, but what if it’s not an error? What if things are really so bad, that your reaction is…right? I don’t remember what she said in response.

I called my parents before Thanksgiving of 2014, crying. I said, I feel so bad, because that was as much as I could muster. I couldn’t say the word, because the word made it real. “Do you want us to visit you?” they asked. I think they were just happy that I asked for their help.

My first winter in New York was mild. I wore my time in Chicago like a badge of pride – a Californian who had never owned a pair of boots had spent four years in Chicago! New York winters were nothing in comparison. After bouldering with some friends one evening, we sat at Earl’s uptown. The soreness was already settling into my forearms and my palms burned from gripping the hand holds. I cupped the beer. The cold glass was soothing.

Tame Impala played overhead. “I like this song,” I said. “It’s cute.”

“Is it?” my friend asked. “It’s sad. ‘It’s not now or never. Wait ten years, we’ll be together’ / I said, ‘Better late than never, just don’t make me wait forever.’”

“Yeah, that’s cute.”

“That he’s going to wait ten years for her?”

Now, I’m thinking of a different winter song: “When winter sets in, it has a way of crystalizing the bad times.”

The room reminded me of all that. Its stillness – for I was the only moving piece, and I couldn’t see myself – and its emptiness. To me, it looked like I wasn’t even there. After you go through it, you remember how it feels, and when the feeling begins to creep back, or when you simply think that the feeling is coming back, you get a sense of fear, because now you know what’s coming, you know what to expect, and you know how bad it is. The muscle has been worked before. I don’t know how to get out of it. I mean, how I got out of it. And depression is a thought anyways, so when I’m reminded of it, the thought is analogous to the thing itself, and I don’t know if I’m just thinking about it, or if by thinking about it, I’m once again suffering from it.

It was now summertime. I would step out the front door of the building and the sun would be blazing, searing the concrete, but indoors it felt like nighttime. What would it feel like in the winter? I danced around the subject, talked to friends about the lack of light, but in fact worrying about a different darkness. “Don’t break your lease,” one of my friends told me, “dark can be an aesthetic too.” She said it like a joke, trying to lighten the mood for me. I reread my lease and figured I couldn’t afford to break it anyways.

I didn’t want to cook. The kitchen countertops were plastic masquerading as granite, and I could never tell if they were clean. I used Mrs. Meyers honeysuckle all-purpose cleaner on them, and the rest of the apartment too. The entire place smelled like it. There isn’t much ventilation when you’re living in a room. I used the cleaner again a few days ago, and you know how they say smells will evoke memories, transport you back in time? It took me back to those first few days, and I don’t know if I can use that scent again. Instead of cooking, I ate at the Italian place down the street and ended up spending $30 on risotto and a spritz that tasted like cough syrup. I bought a 2 x 3 machine washable rug to cover the spot on the kitchen floor that I didn’t like to look at. I added to my cart and emptied my cart and bought and returned and bought curtain rods. I hung up gauzy white ones so people couldn’t see into the apartment at night; the windows faced a large courtyard, “Rear Window” style. I cleaned. I went over the same spot on the floor again and again, because passing over it each time seemed to bring up something new. Dust. A bobby pin. Something that looked like a raisin. I tried to banish all thoughts – how long had this raisin been here? Is that actually a raisin, or … – from my mind. I arranged my books on my shelf, and my room started to feel different. I sent a photo of it to a friend. “That shelf looks exactly the same as the one at your old place,” he replied. It did. The room felt different once I put it up.

Two days later, I bought new lightbulbs. I went to the hardware store on my way home from work. “Most recessed lights are like this,” the employee restocking aisle 9 said to me, holding up a bulb with a flat top. “No,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the ones at my apartment were this kind.” I held up an ordinary looking bulb with a rounded end. “Go back home, bring back one of them,” he said to me. “I don’t want you to buy the bulb and then go home and realize it’s the wrong type.” There was something about his not wanting me to waste my money that felt kind. But I still debated buying the rounded ones now. I didn’t want to make another trip, because I had no patience and needed to fix this now. But it turns out lightbulbs are surprisingly expensive. Apparently, my desperation can be bought for $75. So I went home, and against IKEA’s instruction, I stacked a plastic dining chair on top of an armchair in order to reach the ceiling. Such is the life of a woman who lives alone. I unscrewed a lightbulb and returned to the store. I purchased the new bulbs, constructed my makeshift ladder once again, and replaced all six right then and there.

My parents told me to be safe, now that I was living alone. When I told them about my makeshift ladder, my mom simultaneously scolded me and laughed at my ingenuity. My dad reminded to be aware of anyone in the building, and to keep an eye out for any suspicious figures. “Don’t worry,” I told them. “I have three locks on my door.” Meanwhile, I was thinking about the episode of “Sex and the City” when Miranda chokes on a piece of Chinese food and has to Heimlich maneuver herself. She pours a small mountain of kibble out for the cat, lest the cat eat half her face should she choke and die.

I tried to spin it when I told acquaintances. “I have my own place!” I’ll say. I tell the funny stories: how I can hear my upstairs neighbor watching “The Office” every evening, and how they switch to “Parks and Rec” one night. I tell them about the finance bro next door who sings in the shower and the old man with the wide-brimmed hat who likes to read up on the fire escape. “You inspired me with your apartment!” a girl at work tells me. “I’ve been all over Street Easy looking for studios.”

I’ve never said the words to anyone before. The closest I’ve come to it in recent years, and this isn’t saying much, was when I was walking down the street with a friend and a boy she was seeing. She was talking about how hard the past year was, but how she felt much better now, and she turns to me and asks, “You’ve never been depressed before, right?” It’s not like depression is a city in Europe, I wanted to say, and you want to know if I’ve ever been. I didn’t answer, I don’t think she noticed, and we just continued walking.

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combatbootsandwhiskey-blog · 6 years

Text

what's coming to you

Its fairly easy to lose oneself in the troubles of day to day life. From the bus to work, difficult patients, constant annoying neighbors forcing him into pointless conversations about the weather. to him its all so minuscule, so average, but William was an average man. with average problems, in an average apartment, in an average town. He had an opportunity, it'd be 20 years ago now, to have a life he truly desired. after a year of trying for a child, Jessica became pregnant, to him it was a miracle, until it wasn't. seven of the longest months of their life spent waiting on a child they would never see. Jess was in an accident which caused her to lose the pregnancy. things didn't last long after that, she packed up and left in the middle of the night and he never heard from her again. That is the rather tragic highlight of the life of William baker. It is very easy to lose oneself in the troubles of day to day life, but I like to think that William was the kind of man looking to get lost.

8:32pm May 21,2009

his apartment was small. one bedroom one bath. it would be a nice space if it weren't cluttered with piles of old newspapers, and empty beer bottles. Yet, there was one space in the cramped place that remained tidy. His desk sat against the back wall of what could have been a living room, facing an open window that looked out to the river. there William sat, looming over a stack of files. his eyes straining to see what he's looking at as the day fades to a dull twilight. he was looking for something. very intensely. without breaking his focus his left hand extends to the corner of the desk to grab a green beer bottle. it missed and knocked it onto the floor where it clattered and then slowly rolled to the corner of the room

he stared at the bottle. the puddle of beer making its way down the slightly warped floorboards to collect at the base of his shoe. a long sigh escaped his lips as he sat back in his seat rubbing his tired eyes.

"well shit" he mumbled to himself, his voice rough from not speaking for the last couple of hours.

he gets up, grabs a towel from the kitchen, and heads back to clean up the beer, but before he can get to the puddle, he notices something in the corner of the now almost pitch black room a presence he hadn't noticed before, maybe he was too absorbed in his work, maybe it hadn't been there before, but there was definitely something there now. he couldn't see it, but he could feel it watching. he slowly stood up straight, staring intensely into the darkness of the room. he could practically feel the thing breathing the life out of the dark space. a cold chill ran down his spine and dropped his stomach to the floor like a falling elevator. heart racing, his hand quickly moved to the reading lamp and flipped it away from the desk to illuminate the intruder in the corner.

nothing.

William quietly chuckled to himself as his adrenaline faded "guess the booze is getting to me tonight"

he got back to cleaning up the spill and started putting the papers back in their files before heading to bed.

May 22, 2009 3:09am

William was sleeping, if that's what you'd call it. sweating profusely, tossing, angry incoherent grumbles. this wasn't new to William. he's had the same nightmare for the last 20 years almost every night. I would like to leave speculation for what he dreamt about, but for a man like William, there was only one truly horrible thing in his life that could haunt a man like that. He sat up in bed finally free of the all too real hell his mind bestowed upon him, gasping for air.

He was clearly irritated, annoyed. whipping the covers off himself, he swung his legs off the side of the bed, sitting in the dark with his head in his hands. it took him a few minutes to calm himself down.

"god damn it jess...." his voice breaks as he says it. his fists balled and shaking.

the silence in the room was audible up until he spoke. his voice left a feeling of upset in the air. he leaned over to the bedside table to turn on the light. the switch clicked, but the light didn't come on. he clicked it a few more times to no end. he was getting more frustrated now

"are you fucking kidding me... damn electric company shut me off again!"

he gave up on the light and laid back onto his bed staring at the ceiling. he let himself stare for a long while, his eyes somewhere distant.

"William" a sharp whisper in his ear. he felt the hot breath of it.

he shot up out of bed again, looking around the dark room. he cant see a thing.

"w-whos there.." he said with a demanding tone.

no one answered, but he was still on edge. his eyes strained into a squint to try and see through the blackness where he was just able to make out an outline. it looked human but it was too dark to make out. it could have been his coat hung next to the door, or a trick of the eye.

until it moved.

his eyes adjusted more. just enough to get a better look at the dark figures movements. they were unsettling. unnatural. sharp, quick steps followed by long static pauses. inching closer and closer to him. each movement coupled with a jagged twist of its head. the closer it got the more he could make out the long black hair that flowed behind the monster like seaweed caught in a current. it was pacing. like a starving wolf, eagerness beaming from those pale dead eyes. desire physically trembling through it. this thing wanted to kill.

William couldn't move. it was all he could do to just sit and watch it come to him. come for him. his entire body was screaming for him to run. every instinct was yelled danger. yet, something was so familiar about its aura. it reminded him of Jessica.

the woman came closer still until he could hear her joints cracking with every movement, and the rasping unevenness of her breath.

"William, William" the monster moaned "what to do with William"

"what are you?" his voice was shaking now. it lost all the demand and authority it had when he spoke earlier. the beast leaned in inches from his face. eyes burning through him like a cigarette through paper.

now he could see her. every awful detail. every crack in her paper thin skin. every blue vein rooting through her face. he could smell blood on her breath and see her teeth, small and shark like. double rows and molded into a huge grin. the long thin limbs flowing from the emaciated body were double jointed. more like spiders legs than human limbs. even though she was unmoving in front of him her limbs twitched, joints cracking, floorboards creaking under the monsters weight.

"daddy..." she said, raising her massive hand in the air to reveal a set of bladelike fingernails "don't you recognize me daddy?"

he gasped. he knew what she was. who she was.

in that instant. but before the man could even scream she had her claws in him. the monster tore and ripped into his flesh. blood splattering across the room, highlighted by the low moonlight. William shrieked in agony until his lungs filled with too much blood leaving his screams to fade to a bubbling gurgle as his body writhed beneath his killer. his lips silently begging for one last breath. the beast waited, hovering inches from his face and watched as the life left his eyes. then, without a single movement, the woman vanished, like dust or smoke as if shed never been there, leaving William Baker in pieces on the floor of his apartment.

New York Times

May 28, 2009

'Man murdered in apartment ID'd as Wanted Killer'

"The man whos body was found torn to pieces in his apartment has been positively ID'd as 57 year old Carlo Bianchi, a man who has been on the run for the last 20 years for a string of kidnaping, rape, and murder charges. his only living victim Mrs.Jessica Anderson, has been in witness protection after her escape from Bianchi in 1989. Mrs. Anderson was held captive by Bianchi for over a year during which time she became pregnant with his child. though, while she was escaping she had jumped from the building in which he was keeping her resulting in the infants death...."

"...Police say the apartment had multiple signs that Bianchi was still looking for Mrs. Anderson even 20 years later. they are saying its an obvious homicide, however there haven't been any clues to help investigators identify any suspects. The apartment door was locked and showed no signs of forced entry. Mr. Bianchi had been living in his apartment for nearly 2 years working as a janitor at the retirement home 3 blocks from his residence under the name of William Baker..."

"...We have tried to contact Mrs. Anderson to get a statement but she had no comment. if anyone has any information to further this investigation contact detective April Garcia NYPD."

#short story #horror #creepy #writing #horror story #scary story

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sending-the-message · 7 years

Text

Withdrawal by Ilunibi

It wasn’t always just me and Dead Coyote. When not practicing magic, we were usually in the presence of his regulars who, sadly, were the only people aside from me who ever seemed to visit. There was Brian Wilcox, who dressed like a lumberjack and was more interested in what new DVDs Dead Coyote had pirated as opposed to what new drugs had come in. John Boy was the scariest, a wiry and effeminate tweaker with a hidden kill-switch that seemed to go off if you looked at him the wrong way. Turtle was a strange and quiet guy who would sit and talk to me in pill-induced hazes about the secrets of the world, government conspiracies, and how Dead Coyote earned his name by killing the man who smuggled him over the border.

Which is funny because Dead Coyote was born in Maryland.

The most important of these regulars, however, was Cheryl James, a short, kinda pudgy brunette with a pack-a-day habit and a mismatched wardrobe collected from Goodwill donation bins. She never had a lot of money but figured out pretty early on that she could make trades with Dead Coyote, usually in the form of food and pills, to get her weekly fix. At least twice a week, she’d pop on by with pizza and a Marlboro hanging out of her mouth, her and Dead Coyote would sort out their business in the kitchen while I inhaled a couple of slices, and then they’d both come out high as kites, flank me on either side, and we’d just sit and watch trashy television and talk about our lives.

To Cheryl’s credit, she was always very invested in what I had to say. It was kind of empowering to listen to her scream “Bullshit!” every time I told her how unfairly teachers treated me and how Jessica Schneider bullied me. Her tirades about how much people sucked were inspiring.

I wasn’t the only one who liked her. Her and Dead Coyote eventually stopped trading pizza for drugs, opting instead to settle their payments with sex. And dates. And cuddling on the couch. I won’t lie and say a part of me wasn’t jealous--Dead Coyote was my only friend for a long time and, as much as I liked Cheryl, I really disliked the idea of sharing him--but it was good for Dead Coyote. As nonchalant as he came off, he was an extremely lonely person, ditched by his family and all of his worthwhile friends because of the way he lived.

Even occultists want to feel loved, I guess.

Cheryl was also good for him in another way, though what was good for him was the end of her. On October 14, 2012, a “concerned neighbor” reported to the housing project’s office that they hadn’t seen her so much as open her blinds for two days and that her television had been blaring for forty-eight hours straight. The supervisor did a wellness check, and lo and behold, Cheryl was found stiff as a board on her bed with a halo of vomit. The gossip that followed was absolutely brutal, from hypocritical drug-buddies talking about how trashy she was to high-and-mighty single moms sticking up their nose and saying she deserved it. A few people blamed Dead Coyote for it, and the aftermath of that day was the first time I saw the man cry.

He blamed himself. He also decided that enough was enough and was seeking help the next morning.

I was sixteen at this time, and had moved out of my mom’s apartment because I hadn’t really seen any point in staying, not out of a lack of love more than not wanting to use anymore of her resources. I’d also lost my apartment after losing my job once I stupidly admitted to a secret shopper at the corner store that I was too young to be selling cigarettes, let alone alcohol, but was too bullheaded and embarrassed to go crawling back to my mother. Without her knowledge, I spent the remainder of my high school years on Dead Coyote’s couch and had a front row seat to watching a guy who’d become my anchor lose his goddamn mind.

Withdrawal isn’t pretty. I was probably too young to be holding his hair while he puked into his kitchen sink and trying to find ways to calm him down when he was shaking in a corner, trying to pull said hair out. His memory was shit, his temperament was scattershot. I couldn’t really be mad at him for snapping at me, but it seemed like his moods swung from nearly kicking me out one minute to crying in his kitchen floor out of a mixture of pain and guilt the next. He was a puddle of a man, and I had nightmares for months after he locked himself in his bathroom threatening to kill himself because “the methadone ain’t shit” and his belief that he was a murderer. Still, no matter how young I was, I couldn’t even count how many times he’d been there for me through all of my petty bullshit and I was resolute in my decision that giving up on him wasn’t an option.

Unfortunately, withdrawal is also absolutely terrifying when the person withdrawing is a fucking warlock.

It was, suitably enough, Halloween. I had thought of ditching school that morning because I couldn’t get Dead Coyote out of bed even after trying to drag him off of his mattress by his legs, but he’d woken up enough to tell me that he was fine, just queasy, and that his upset stomach wasn’t worth my grades. I was really struggling at the time so I decided to listen for once, lest I ended up redoing my Junior year and having to camp in his living room for an extra twelve months that I probably wasn’t welcome.

But, I spent the whole day worrying anyway, and when the school day ended I bolted for the bus like a bat out of hell. It was all I could do to keep from screaming at the driver to floor it. I sat, nervously trying to drown out my thoughts by thinking every Disney song I could remember as loud as I possibly could, but there was a sinking feeling in my gut the closer I got to home. This burning, aching, empty feeling like my stomach acid was trying to eat its way out.

Dead Coyote was, and is, one of the most important people in my life, and I won’t shy away from saying that I got so fucking attached to him that I damn near had a sixth sense specifically for him. And feeling empty? I had my fears, because none of the reasons I could think of to explain that hollow pain were comforting. The only thing to explain a feeling of absence would be that he was gone in some way, or at least that’s what I told myself over and over again atop my brain’s incorrect rendition of “Be Prepared.”

The bus finally pulled up to my stop. I shoved my way to the front and jumped from the top step dead to the sidewalk, hitting the ground in a sprint that I would have otherwise been unable to keep up. But adrenaline propelled me, like rocket fuel, straight to Dead Coyote’s door. Every muscle in my body shook with nerves as I nearly tore down his stoop light to get the spare key hidden behind the glass, and it was all I could do to get the key in the lock and remember the way the lock was supposed to turn and push the door open because there was something blocking it.

It was the couch, as it turns out, thrown haphazardly in front of it and flipped on its back, but not because he was trying to barricade me out. No, illuminated by candles in the middle of the floor was a shakily drawn Pentacle of Solomon. Beside that, drawn even more haphazardly, were a barrage of Goetic crests and a splash of blood.

The drawings were everywhere, written in everything: blood, sharpie, dry-erase marker, chalk, salt, sand, and (as ashamed as I am to admit it) Roseart crayons. They called upon Marchosias, Buer, Orobas, Eligor, and everyone in between. There were marks for the planets, the stars, and things he’d never taught me. They ran from the walls to the floor to the ceiling, from the kitchen to the downstairs bathroom and through the living room all the way up the stairs. Bloody handprints curled around the edge of every step, the walls thrumming and groaning as I grew closer and closer, creeping up the staircase like a stalking cat.

The floor shook like somebody dropped a weight. I heard glass shatter and, glancing up at the cracked bathroom door at the top of the steps, I saw a glint of light from the scattered remains of the mirror. After that, it took every ounce of my courage to turn the corner to Dead Coyote’s room. The door was pulled closed, a gigantic “X” keyed into the paint, interspersed with vandalistic rambling carved by a shaking hand.

I DON’T WANT TO BE DEAD COYOTE I AM NOT DEAD COYOTE DEAD COYOTE DEAD COYOTE DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DOG DEAD DOG DEAD DOG DEAD DOG NO NO NO NO NO

Seriously, adrenaline gives you superpowers. I was shaking and terrified and could feel my stomach churning, but even though every single ounce of me wanted to run back to my mom’s and call a priest, I found myself grabbing the hot-cold doorknob and throwing his bedroom door open so hard that it punched a hole in the wall. Heat, like hellfire, spilled out of the room and there, sitting in the middle of his mattress on the floor, cross legged and scowling, was Dead Coyote.

His room was pitch black, except for those goddamn candles. Everything the light from the hallway touched was a mess, from shards of the mirror that had been on the back of his door to posters ripped straight from the wall and black-out curtains shredded to ribbons. Still-functional ribbons, I realized, because despite the fact I could see slivers of sunlight behind them, nothing was coming through. My feet crunched against the glass as I took a step in, and a loud pop behind me launched us into further blackness as the lightbulb in the upstairs hall exploded inside the fixture.

“DC?” I called in. He didn’t even twitch.

“DC, it’s me. It’s Seymour. I--”

“Get. Out.”

His voice was low, sinister, and almost growling. Dead Coyote sounded, quite literally, like a coyote. I tried to puff myself up thinking that if I showed that I was unwilling to back down that there was a slight chance he’d lower his guard. Instead, he shifted positions on his bed, twisting his head, climbing up on his toes, and arching his back like a predator ready to pounce. My shaky confidence shattered, but I struggled through the trembling hands and wobbly knees to fake an expression of determination.

“Get out! GET OUT!”

I shook my head and told him that, no, I wasn’t leaving and if he wanted me gone, he’d have to make me leave. It took a lot of nerve to say, and a lot more nerve to stand by it when I heard glass shatter downstairs.

“This is my house, this is my space, and I want you out!”

I dared him to move me. I berated him for acting like a child when he was twelve years older than me. I guess I didn’t fully understand just how deep the drugs had sank their claws into him and I was plain ignorant as to just how fucked up withdrawal made you feel. I just knew that everything in the apartment was broken right down to the paint beginning to peel off the walls, and I was scared. I was terrified. I honestly thought Dead Coyote was on his last legs.

I mean, even if he was physically okay, I couldn’t account for how he was mentally. Or, hell, spiritually. I thought back to all the broken, haphazard sigils scrawled on every inch of the walls and floors and back to his lessons about how precision was key and overdoing it would end badly. He could have ended up possessed or haunted or god only knew what and, of the two of us, he was the refined master of this artform. I didn’t know how to reverse massive fuck-ups. I would have been powerless to help him.

He cursed at me, mostly in Spanish, though he switched to English whenever he wanted me to be perfectly aware of what he was calling me. I told him, again, that I wasn’t leaving. He feinted a lunge at me and I, being a genius, told him to get over himself. That I wasn’t afraid of him, which was a blatant lie.

The air went cold and Dead Coyote stood, perfectly straight and statue-still. His expression became neutral. I twitched, he tilted his head, and then my confidence slipped. He wasn’t calming down. No, there was a maliciousness in his eyes that told me that he was planning something.

So, I ran. I turned and ran down the stairs, with one thought on my mind: Dead Coyote had to have been possessed and I had to get to the kitchen. He kept the holy water under the sink with the Mr. Clean and Fabuloso (because, honestly, what is holy water aside from another cleaning product?), and I knew that was the only way this was going to end in my favor. If it could sear the shit out of Glasyalabolas, then maybe it could burn the crazy out of Dead Coyote.

It took me about three jumps to get down the stairs and I slid on a fallen curtain and knocked the wind out of myself on the couch. Behind me, I heard him galloping down and yelling, so I pulled together all of my strength and clambered over the top. I hopscotched over candles, left shoe prints on sigils, and kicked salt everywhere as I hopped awkwardly across the kitchen.

“Don’t you fucking dare, Seymour! Don’t you--!”

Too late. In a less-than-graceful fashion, I hit the ground in a slide, less like a baseball player running for home and more like an awkward toddler on ice. I ripped open the cabinet, picked up the glass bottle Dead Coyote kept his elixir in, struggled to my feet, and turned to see him standing--seething--in the middle of the kitchen floor. His shirt was torn, though I didn’t know how he had managed that, and somehow his nose was bleeding. Was it whatever was inside of him or did he just run into a wall?

I don’t know and he still won’t tell me.

“Put it down,” he warned. I shook my head.

“Seymour, put it down!”

I shook my head again and huddled down. He stared at me, bewildered, until I ran at him screaming like a goddamned lunatic.

Believe it or not, I was not and am not a small girl. Well, I’m short, but I’m also built with the skeleton of an old Norse god. I’ve always been more than a little self-conscious about it; I’m not that delicate waif or petite cutie that men want to be with and women want to be. I am, essentially, an ox with boobs who could potentially be scary if her hobby wasn’t watching trashy talk shows. In that moment, though, I was downright thankful that I could be a linebacker, because I was more structurally stable and significantly heavier than the raging, magical tweaker who had me cornered in his kitchen.

I knocked him clear off his feet. For all the fights I saw him win, he went down like a bitch. I don’t know if it was because whatever had a grip on him was taken by surprise or if he was actually in there and just didn’t want to hit me, but at the time, I figured I was running on pure luck and had to act fast before he got the upper hand. I sat on his chest, I tilted the bottle, and I poured every last drop on his snarling face.

Silence.

He wasn’t struggling anymore, so I took that as a good sign. Still, I was a deer caught in headlights, sitting there on top of him with an empty bottle in one hand and a fistful of his shirt in the other. He stared back, blinking, soaked and confused. I felt his chest rise and fall in a heavy sigh under my butt.

“DC?” I squeaked.

“Princess, did you just pour all of that out?”

I told him I had.

“What the fuck.”

Not even a question. Just a statement of exasperation.

It took a few moments for me to agree to let him up, but when I did, we just ended up sitting in the floor in silence for a while. He needed a good, long time to gather up his thoughts so he could explain himself, but it boiled down to the fact he was miserable. He was sick. He was in pain. He got carried away. But mostly, he was grieving. I had never even stopped to consider that option.

Honestly, the whole mess started with him trying to contact Cheryl. He just wanted to feel her presence or hear her voice and just have the chance to apologize. But the spell wouldn’t work. He’d never tried to summon the spirit of a specific person before and apparently wasn’t good at it, and so he started appealing to everything he possibly could until he finally ran out of space to write. He called something, alright, judging from the amount of damage done to his apartment, but he kept trying to pass it off as a personal poltergeist born from his own suffering.

Something big, something angry, and something that would die off if he just stopped feeding it, just like I had done to mine.

But I didn’t believe him, and at his core, I don’t think he did either. I had seen Dead Coyote angry before, but the whole experience was so off-the-wall and terrifying and unlike him that I couldn’t believe that it was him. Maybe withdrawal makes you a different person and drugs are a demon in and of themselves, but--more likely in this specific case--withdrawal makes you miserable enough to invite something bigger, scarier, and more murderous because you’re an occultist who isn’t thinking straight.

“I’m still smudging the shit out of this apartment,” I warned him.

“Fair enough,” he conceded.

That night was not a fun night. Neither of us slept. Armed only with what sage he had stuck back in his cabinets, we tried to bless every corner of his home two, three, four times. When we ran out of sage, we used salt to bless it all again. When we ran out of salt and couldn’t scrape anymore off of the floor, I found an ancient cannister of rosemary in the back of a neglected closet and tried my best with that; it’s a weak alternative, but an alternative nonetheless. The sun went down, the sun came up, and we were scrubbing sigils off of the floors and walls and replacing lights and sweeping up shards of glass.

Needless to say, I didn’t go to school on November first. Instead, I spent that afternoon curled up on the couch, too exhausted to move, sweaty and nauseous and shaky and scented like a spice rack. And, as I dozed off with Dead Coyote passed out flat on his back on the floor, snoring like a lumber mill, I wondered if this was really the last of it.

It wasn’t. Heroin is an evil fucking thing and there were relapses and withdrawals and arguments and tears and Cheryl’s name--may she rest in peace--came up more than a few more times in the following years, but at the very least he never magically trashed his apartment again. Though, in the end, we both guessed that it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had.

He definitely wasn’t going to get his deposit back anyway.

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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ronaldmrashid · 7 years

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Millennial Avocado Toast Analysis: Permission To Splurge

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” Tim Gurner, an Australian property mogul told 60 Minutes.

“We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high,” Gruner said. “They want to eat out every day, they want to travel to Europe every year. The people that own homes today worked very, very hard for it, saved every dollar, did everything they could to get up the property investment ladder.”

Tim’s words have ignited a backlash from millennials who are offended someone would attack their eating desires. Eating expensive food is a sacred right! The nerve of this guy. Next thing you know, he’s going to dissuade people from buying $300 designer jeans when they already have a credit card balance.

As fate would have it, I just had a $10 bowl of guacamole the other day at Tacoliscious in the Marina district, after spending time doing some ceiling patch work on my rental house. All around me sat a bunch of young and fabulous looking folks who enjoyed the 78 degree San Francisco sunshine. Oh, how I wish I didn’t have a house to do work on. I could have gone straight to brunch!

Bottom line: If you’re a millennial who wants to spend $25 on the finest breakfast consisting of avocados, bacon and crumbled feta cheese, go for it! You don’t need to save for a house because you’re either living with your parents or your parents will eventually buy you one when they can’t stand you any longer. And if they don’t buy you anything, they’ll at least leave you their house when they die.

Millennial Avocado Analysis

I know some of you think I’m being a bit flippant, but living in NYC and SF over the past 18 years, I’ve seen with my own eyes how so many parents are supporting their adult children. Let me share with you some recent encounters and some statistics as to why it’s OK for the majority of you to spend aggressively while young and not save for my favorite wealth building asset class.

Neighbor One: Brendan is 27 years old and lives in the basement of his parent’s house across the street from me. He’s a nice guy who loves to go snowboarding every chance he can get. He told me he went up for a total of 45 days this winter because Tahoe had the most snow in decades. Right on brother!

Just last week he, his girlfriend and two friends got back from a three hour SF Giants game that started at 1:05pm. I was doing some final staining on my planter boxes when they pulled up. They were so happy to enjoy a great weekday victory while his parents were at work. He has a lot of free time because he bartends part-time. With living expenses close to zero, he doesn’t need to work a lot.

Neighbor Two: Jason, the then 22 year old who was living at home attending community college three years ago when I bought my current house is back to living at home after transferring to and graduating from UC Davis. When I asked his mother what he was doing when she sneakily entered my property to get a closer look at my new landscaping work, she said, “random things,” implying he was still looking for full-time work.

Meanwhile, Jason has invited two of his friends to live with him in his parent’s house. His parents no longer live in the house as they have another house up north. They just check-in every couple of weeks or so.

One of Jason’s housemates just bought a new Harley Davidson for about $10,000. He works at the grocery store down the hill. Jason himself has a racing bike and a sports car. Housemate #2, who works at Chipotle, drives a Ford Flex. Why ride the bus and get a full-time job when living costs are completely subsidized?

Neighbors Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven: All either live for free or inherited their houses. They’re all between 35 – 60 and really nice folks who don’t have full-time jobs. For more details, see: A Massive Generational Wealth Transfer Is Why Everything Will Be OK

House buying competition: “What percentage of first time homebuyers get help from their parents in the form of a downpayment or total payment?” is a question I’ve asked about 25 real estate agents so far this year. Their answers range from 30% – 70%. Every agent said that parental help is extremely common. The media likes to demonize foreign buyers for making real estate more expensive for locals. But it’s really parents helping their children who make the bigger impact.

For example, the winning bid for the house that I had put an all cash offer for in April was from parents buying the house for their son. He graduated from college this year and is starting at Airbnb. I’m guessing the final sales price is $1.82M, or $321K over asking. Next time you go to an open house, ask the listing agent my same question.

Inheritance expectations: Personal Capital surveyed over 100,000 millennials who use their free app and they found the median amount a millennial expects to inherit is over $1,000,000. Although the inheritance may not come until later in life, if you think you have at least $1,000,000 coming to you, you’re not worrying about spending $20 bucks on glorious avocado toast. Instead, you’ll probably want a $12 mimosa to go along with it!

Who can blame a millennial for quitting a job only after a couple years if it’s not the perfect fit? No longer do young adults have to “take it and like it” as we older folks did when paying our dues. If there isn’t constant recognition from management and a clear accelerated career path, then it’s sayonara suckers.

See: No Wonder Why Millennials Don’t Give A Damn About Money!

Low housing expenses: A recent FS survey with over 2,600 respondents showed that 66% of you spend less than 20% of your gross income on housing. That’s fantastic. Meanwhile, a good 4% of you spend 0% of your gross income on housing because you either have financial support or rent out a portion of your house. With 70% of you doing so well, you might as well splurge on a $180 side of beluga caviar to top off your $12 mimosa and $20 toast. Housing cost is clearly not as big of a concern as the mass media makes it out to be.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

See: Housing Expense Guideline For Financial Independence

Live It Up Early Or Late, It’s All The Same

After the age of 34, I started living the millennial dream life because I had left Corporate America. After a little bit of writing in the morning, I’d play tennis for a couple hours and then have a boozy brunch with other unemployed friends. While I didn’t order $20 avocado toast, I did increase my spending on $25 chirashi bowls (assorted sashimi over rice). Afterwards, I’d give in to food coma and take an hour nap on my couch. Life was wonderful!

I got to know many 20-something and early 30-something year old folks who didn’t work full-time, seemed to love life, and lived at home with their parents. From the millennials with full-time jobs who I met while consulting at some of the fintech firms, I know of several who had parental assistance with downpayments on new property. Given that was back in 2013-2014, they’re now much wealthier because property prices have appreciated 20% – 40%.

Millennials are being completely rational by living their ideal lifestyles before they turn 40 because they CAN. With the internet allowing anybody to be untethered from a cubicle, freelance work has taken off and will surpass full-time employment within a decade. With wealthy parental safety nets, millennials are taking more risks by switching careers at the fastest pace in history. They’re also starting companies, taking more time off to travel, and spending more extravagantly.

Some are just plain envious of the millennial lifestyle, especially those who busted their butts to get to a level which millennials are already enjoying. I wish my parents had bought me a condo when I first moved to NYC in 1999. I wish my parents had bought me a house when I moved to San Francisco in 2001. If they did, I’d be so rich I could have turned into one of those Instagram playboys by age 30!

Though I wasn’t gifted any property, today I do have four properties which I can gift my children so they can live lives of leisure. Maybe they’ll even learn some responsibility as property managers and share some of the rental income with mom and dad. Damn, I wish I were my children!

Final point: Some of you might be wondering what about the importance of pride and independence. By giving an adult children everything, we may rob themselves of self-actualization. While yes, it’s extremely gratifying to achieve success on one’s own. Don’t be so sure that millennials aren’t living incredibly satisfying lives.

Here’s one millennial’s response that sums things up perfectly:

“Sam, I didn’t have a choice when I was born or to whom I was born to. There are so many bad people in the world. If I don’t harm others, I feel I’m already way ahead of the game.“

How To Get Your Parents To Pay For Everything As An Adult Child

How To Get Girls If You Live At Home With Mom And Dad

Any millennials out there want to share why they are offended by some random person in Australia who says you shouldn’t spend so much on avocados? Given there’s such a massive wealth transfer underway, isn’t it completely rational to live a life of leisure if you don’t have to work as hard to build your own wealth? Are older people simply jealous of the millennial lifestyle?

from http://www.financialsamurai.com/millennial-avocado-toast-analysis/

#Financial Samurai

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