#annie has been gutting rabbits for as long as she can remember

[austerulous-a]

I love thinking about the woods and their significance to Annie, about how she considers them her home.

As a girl, she would have grown accustomed to the eerie sound of branches scraping against the windows of her father’s cabin, to hearing all manner of bestial, unidentifiable sounds in the dead of night (the scream of a vixen is positively haunting), to finding smatterings of scattered feathers, the carcasses of small animals, little bundles of bleached bones.

There is brutality, mystery and danger in the woods – to outsiders, it can be a deeply frightening and unsettling place – but for Annie it is somewhere familiar, somewhere comforting. Not necessarily safe mind you, given her childhood memories are deeply stained by her father’s cruelty.

Having been raised in isolation, she craves the quiet, and finds populated, urbanised areas overwhelming and exhausting. The eyes of the world can’t find her among the trees. There she can feel hidden. For a short time, at least.

#voyd and lani both got me thinking about this recently #annie really do want to be seen and invisible at the same time #or noticed by those that are dear to her at least #she can carry on not existing for everyone else #gabe leonhardt is by no means a hunter or gatherer #but I imagine he knew how to set basic snares #and that he recognised common edible berries / herbs / mushrooms #annie has been gutting rabbits for as long as she can remember #and even though the forests of paradis are grander and greener than the little stretch of woodland she grew up in #she still finds a certain comfort in them #anyway if you've come this far thanks for reading my inconsequential ramblings #my son had croup last night so i only got 3 hours sleep 🙃 #i'm hoping to post ic today / catch up with dms but we'll see how things pan out #anyway happy weekend! #i hope you all have a great saturday ♡ #✧ ooc: puffin speaks — ❛ oh you pretty things ❜ #✧ headcanon — ❛ go waist deep in mist / to break the light ice ❜

[ernmark]

an ugly idea: juno's mother found out about him being a werewolf and, in an effort to use it against him, she accidentally put ben in the way

This one’s been sitting half-finished in my drafts for a while. It’s a challenge, partly because I didn’t have a very clear image of what kind of person Juno’s mother was, and partly because it’s a hella dark situation compared to the surprisingly fluffy rest of the series.

Blood and child abuse ahoy, so… yeah.

Juno Steel, Werewolf |Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

When Sasha and Mick find him, he’s quiet. The blood and snot and tears have all dried; he’s even stopped shaking. All he does is stare straight ahead. The only sign he can see them at all is the way that he flinches when they approach. He doesn’t answer when Mick demands to know if somebody hurt him. He doesn’t resist when Sasha searches him for injuries.

She’s the one who figures it out first. “Juno–”

He can sense the question she’s going to ask, and he curls into himself like he can hide from the answer. She grabs him by the shoulders and forces him to face her.

“Juno, whose blood is this?”

It takes him a long time to form the words. In the end, only one of them makes it out.

“Ben.” He looks like he might cry again, if there was anything left in him. His voice is faint and raw. “He’s dead, Sasha. I killed him.”

It’s Mick who sits with him for the next several hours while Sasha collects herself. It’s too soon after what happened to Annie, her nerves are too raw, it hurts too much.

In the end, though, that’s why she comes back: because she still doesn’t know exactly what happened to Annie. And goddammit, she can’t go the rest of her life not knowing what happened to Ben.

There’s no crime scene, no line of police tape to cross. Juno carried his brother’s body to the hospital long after it had gone cold, but it’s too soon for the cops to have found the right place– and that’s assuming they’d even look. After all, people die in Oldtown all the time. Some of them are kids. And when they’re already past saving…

She swallows back bile.

It happened at an abandoned house not too far from Juno’s place, one with heavy chains over the boarded up windows and doors. During Juno’s cycle, one of the sets of chains is held together with an old-school combination lock, so she and Mick can sleep without having to worry about anyone getting in there while Juno’s feral… at least, that was the idea. But the chains over the side door hang limp, and the lock lies in the dust beside them.

It was Ben’s lock, from back when he was in his retro tech phase. He would have known the combination to open it.

The irony hits her like a punch in the gut. She has to take a minute to steady herself.

She can do this. She has to do this. For Juno’s sake. For Ben’s. For Annie’s.

She takes a deep breath and pulls open the door.

This is one of the old buildings, back when they were made to last, with plaster over concrete walls. It looks like Juno found that out the hard way: the rotting carpet and imitation hardwood is ripped to shreds, and the walls are scored with clawmarks from months of frantic digging. Every flat surface is covered by several months’ worth of thick red dust, interrupted only last night.

There are multiple sets of tracks here, but it’s not hard to pick out Ben’s from Juno’s human footsteps. His feet are– were– too big for him, so much that he skipped right past wearing Juno’s hand-me-down shoes and started having to wear their mothers’. Sasha follows the footsteps carefully.

He was running, that much is clear. The tracks turn sharply to the left, and then zag to the right, toward the basement door.

The doorknob is free from dust where it was recently grabbed.

The moment she opens the door, the smell hits her, coppery and thick enough to make her stomach turn. 

She runs away. It’s a secret that she’ll take to her grave, but she’s out the door and vomiting in the alley before she knows what happened. She stays there until she stops crying, until her heart stops trying to ram its way out of her ribcage, until she can actually breathe again.

And then she spits out the taste of acid and marches back into the house.

Because it’s awful– it will never stop being awful– but she has to know. Juno has to know. And if this gives her even more nightmares… well, the old ones could use some company.

And so she marches down the hall and into the basement.

It’s strange. There’s so much blood– and so little. There should be more– or there shouldn’t be any at all, but if the universe has to take someone like Ben out of this world, then at least it should have the decency to give him the kind of sendoff he would have gotten excited about. Instead it’s just there, a single pool, cracking and curling as it dries, interrupted by a few smears and a handful of bloody paw prints. 

She feels queasy again, but there’s nothing left in her to throw up, and so she looks harder. Once she gets over the initial wrongness, a new kind of wrongness sets in.

Because she remembers what happened to that poor rabbit that ran into Juno in the sewer. She found traces of blood everywhere– on the walls, on the ceiling. This is too clean. Even if Ben had died in one bite, it would still be too clean.

She turns on the flashlight of her comms and looks again, and this time she spots what she missed before: the dust on the stairs looks strange, wiped away in patterns that are too unsteady to be deliberate. On the edge of one step, two thirds of the way down, there’s a small splash of blood.

And the puzzle pieces click into place.

Ben running, going through the door– maybe he didn’t even realize it led to a flight of stairs– and then he fell. He hit his– with all that blood, it must have been his head. That’s where he landed. That’s where Juno circled him once, as a wolf, and then… laid down next to him?

God, Juno.

The human footprints leading up the stairs are incomplete, the blood clinging to the soles already half-dried.

But that can’t be right. Because Ben was obviously running from something, and so fast that he didn’t bother to look where he was going. What, though?

She climbs the stairs again, looking more closely at the footprints. There’s her trail, going to the basement and back and back again. There’s Juno, with the holes in his sole where he used his shoes to climb over razor wire. There’s Juno’s paw prints. And there’s Ben, running to the stairs and doubling back before–

No. Wait.

The footprints are the same size, the same brand, but they’re different. One of them has the tread mostly worn off the sole, while the other looks fairly new.

The worn shoes only go one way. The newer ones make it as far as the basement, then back up to the wall and go back the way they came.

Ben was chased.

And Sasha knows who did it.

Sasha climbs in through Juno’s window, her feet bare to avoid making a sound on the cheap linoleum. There’s no need to be so careful, though. Sarah Steel is passed out over the kitchen table, an overturned bottle of scotch in her hand, her dust-stained shoes still on her feet.

She leaves her there.

The important part is letting Juno know what really happened. It’s up to him to decide what to do with her.

#ingridlake #the penumbra podcast #writing prompts #fanfiction #in which I demonstrate why Dark Matters snapped up Sasha at the first opportunity