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sarahowritesostucky · 4 months

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📖"Body Heat" : a Snowpiercer-Marvel Mashup Story

Part 1 - "The Man"

Rated: Mature (non-explicit chapter, marked mature for dark themes)

Pairing: Curtis Everett x ofc

Tags: dystopia, food insecurity, post apocalypse, age difference (18/34), dark!fic, implied/referenced suicide, background character death (offscreen), poverty, arranged marriage, implied/referenced past cannibalism, hurt/comfort

Summary: She’s too young for him to be eyeing her up the way he has been, but this is the Tail section, and Curtis has caught other men looking more than once. Everything is a commodity in the Tail. Everything. It won't be too long before he has to step in and claim her.

Author's Note:

On Tumblr, forbidden ToS content categories are: "terrorism, hate speech, harm to minors, self harm, sexually explicit material, violence, threats, gore, and mutilation."

And while you ARE apparently allowed to write a fictional story about incestual, torturing, anorexic racists who rape, murder, kidnap, hate, cannibalize, terrorize, and self-injure in the plotline of said story,

you ARE NOT allowed to write an underage character who engages is any sort of sexualized conduct in a story.

For this one category and this one category alone, Tumblr staff (or at least one particular individual 😏on staff) makes no distinction between fictional stories and C.S.A.M. They can and will delete your blog without any notice.

So, in the face of this VERY SPECIFIC criteria for Tumblr's censorship choices, I have changed the age of a character in this story to 18. That's not how the story was originally written, and the story can still be read on Ao3, which does not arbitrarily censor their content. But my m/f stories seem to be most popular on Tumblr, so I wanted to include the altered version in my library here.

(To be spiteful, however, I have changed the ofc from 16 to 18 and Curtis from 28 to 34, thus WIDENING the original age gap from 12 yrs to 16 yrs😆)

🖤With that said, this is a dark story regardless, so if you're looking for fluff, I suggest you look elsewhere.🖤

Part 1 - "The Man"

The Man’s been dead for almost a day, the body already stiffened in rigor mortis and then relaxed again by the time anyone comes to take it.

They’d found him in his bunk just after breakfast yesterday, which means they’ve been keeping his wake for nearly twenty-four hours now, up at the front of the lead assembly car; his daughter and a few others who were closest to him sitting vigil with the body until the time comes. Mourning while they still can.

Jackboots visit the tail section only once per day—in the morning, with the food. That’s how Tailies tell time. So when one of their own dies, the funeral and the family’s goodbyes last only as long as the next arrival of the next pushcart with the next batch of gelatinous bars.

Bringing in food and taking out bodies—a callous reminder to Snowpiercer’s lowest inhabitants that their deaths are little different from their lives: cold, unadorned, hopeless.

Curtis keeps his distance once he’s paid his respects, and it’s quiet now as they all wait. A few people had given some nice speeches earlier, a decent eulogy capped off by the beautiful singing voice of the daughter that The Man has left behind: Rose.

Curtis watches her adjust the sheet over The Man’s body. He’s already been washed and stripped in preparation, wrapped in the old grey sheet that will be returned to them within a matter of hours. Nothing is wasted on Snowpiercer. The few pieces of clothing that The Man had owned now sit folded on the floor, ready to be given to their next occupants. The sight of his trademark checked shirt, unworn and available, is a point of mourning all in itself, Curtis finds.

New clothing always means death.

The Man had been a good person, a leader in his own right. Back when they’d first boarded, he’d been one of the first to volunteer his own flesh—though only once his wife had been killed and the mob was coming for his young daughter, too.

Curtis looks back up towards the front of the car when the heavy groans of unlatching metal come from the next section up. Rose’s face, covered in tears, also shoots up at the sound. Her eyes widen and her lip begins to quiver again. Her fingerless-gloved hand reaches for the body, clutching The Man’s shoulder one last time as the door slides open.

The jackboots bark for everyone to move back, since the funeral group isn’t sitting behind the usual yellow line of demarcation that’s taped to the floor, but then they look down and see the body. The lead guard sighs. “Oh, great,” he mutters. “Just what I wanted to do today.”

Curtis’ eyes narrow and his muscles tense, anticipating disrespect to the body—that he can handle, is used to, but if they lay a hand on her as the scene plays out, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to restrain himself. Rose is a sweet girl despite her circumstances, with an innocence and a naivety that usually only the train babies have, and Curtis has always done what he can to look out for her.

“Right,” the one guard says to the other. “Okay. Protein blocks first, then you can load ‘im on the cart.”

Rose stays sitting by the body as everyone lines up to receive their daily portions. Curtis makes eye contact as he steps up to the lead guard and takes his portion. “Be nice,” he says. “It’s her dad.”

Luckily, the jackboots don’t seem to be in any kind of foul mood today. They let Rose sniffle over the body for a few extra seconds before hefting the corpse onto the empty protein block cart. And then they’re gone. No muss, no fuss, no fanfare. Just like it always happens when a Tailie dies.

“What do you think they do with them?” Curtis overhears Ned and Peter saying, talking with each other as they nibble off their protein blocks not too far from Rose. “Throw ‘em out?”

“How?” Peter says doubtfully. “S’not exactly an escape hatch in this thing.”

“Course there is,” Ned argues. “Where d’you think your shit goes when you flush the—”

“Hey,” Curtis hisses, glaring at them and tipping his head discreetly in Rose’s direction. “Show a little respect.”

Ned and Peter mumble an apology and move off, and when Curtis looks back to Rose, she’s blinking up at him with red rimmed eyes. “You didn’t have to do that,” she says, her voice deeper than usual as it emanates from a throat scraped raw by grief.

“I did.” Curtis walks over and slides down the wall to sit next to her. “He was a good man, your dad.”

“Thanks,” she says quietly.

Her nose sounds all stuffed up, so Curtis fishes in his pocket for his handkerchief. “Haven’t spoken to you in a hot minute,” he says, handing it over for her to blow her nose.

“Yeah well I hear you’re always planning the next revolution, so …”

Curtis scoffs. “Yeah, maybe.” He looks her over, taking in the worn knit of her sweater, the colorless felt of her coat that’d once been blue and belonged to her mother. So many of the Tailies are worn down to nothing but dull, grey husks now, just like the clothes they’ve recycled for over a decade. But Rose is different.

For whatever reason, her skin is still clear, her hair still thick. The malnutrition hasn’t affected her the way it has most others. Her soul still comes through her eyes. That inner luminance makes her pretty, maybe even the prettiest girl in the tail section. Even though she’s still very young. Probably too young for Curtis to be eyeing her up the way he has been, these past few months.

But she’s about that age now, even though it feels like only yesterday he was scrounging up materials to make her a little doll she could play with. People grow up fast in the tail whether they want to or not, and Curtis has been on high alert for a while now because he’s caught other men looking more than once. He’s even heard some bits of hushed conversation, whispered from nearby bunks where the occupants didn’t realize he was there to listen. Everything is a commodity in the tail. Everything. And there’s no one else who looks like Rose. She’s only made it this far because of her father.

And now her father’s dead.

Curtis realizes he’s been staring a little too long when Rose’s eyes slide over to him in curiosity. He coughs and looks away, shaking his head when she tries to hand him back the handkerchief. “Naw. You hold onto it for me, Hon.” She tucks it shyly away in her coat, and Curtis is pleased. “So …” he hedges, not knowing what to say to her. There’s nothing he can say. All they have in the tail is each other, their people, and she’s just lost hers. “So … you still going by ‘Rosebud’?”

That gets a tiny smile from her, which warms Curtis’ chest in the same way that he can remember whiskey doing, a lifetime ago. “Nobody calls me that anymore,” she says. “Nobody but him. And you.”

“Yeah?” Curtis thinks on it some. “Well maybe you should retire it. It’s a girl’s name anyway.”

“Aren’t I a girl?”

He raises an eyebrow without looking at her. “You still have that doll I made for you?” He hears her scoff and knows the answer. Rosie helps look after the young children in the tail. Curtis has seen that shabby little doll floating around in various tiny hands for years now. “You’re a good person,” he says quietly. “Like your dad. He was good. I’ll miss him." He’s looking straight ahead across the assembly car when he says it, but he still catches her slight movement out of the corner of his eye.

“He didn’t act any different,” she says, voice tiny. “I didn’t know. He didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything that made it seem like he was going to …” She cuts herself off, swallows thickly and shakes her head. “I just didn’t know.”

Curtis holds out his hand in offer for her to hold, and she takes it. Even with the fingerless glove on, her hand still feels tiny in his. “How about Petal?” he suggests.

“Petal?”

“Yeah,” he decides. “Yeah that’s what I’ll call you. Petal. My rose petal.”

“Oh, god.” She groans. “No. Curtis.”

“No?” He turns his head to look at her, and this time he waits until she looks at him too. Her expression sobers as their eyes meet. Curtis reaches to gently tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s a beautiful word,” he murmurs. “Couldn’t I call you that?” His eyes skip over her face, soaking up the way her breath stutters, how a slow blush starts to fill the apples of her cheeks. “I promise I won’t tell anybody else,” he whispers.

She ducks her chin with a bashful smile. “Well, I guess so.”

In her lap, her other arm curls protectively around the small pile of belongings she’s been holding onto, drawing Curtis’ attention. Her father had been a large man, imposing, and yet the pile is so tiny. A whole entire life, compressed into less than one square foot in the end.

(Curtis does wonder, sometimes, what they do with the bodies.)

“He was one of our best,” he tells her. “Even in the Desperation. I remember how he was, how he volunteered. He was a leader. Brave.” His eyes slide over to the excuse for an artificial limb that's been cobbled together from an umbrella and a few old wire coat hangers, of all things. Now it sits, sad and unused, on the floor next to Rose’s leg. “You know who you’re gonna give it to?”

“What?”

He nods at the limb. “His arm. It’s the best one in the tail.”

“Oh.” She glances away from it, looking pained. “No,” she says. “I figured I’d just give it to you.”

“Me?” Curtis isn’t one of the few who’d volunteered in the Desperation—obviously, as he’s still got all four limbs intact. He wasn’t the same person back then that he is now. Back then he’d been a taker, not a giver. He looks away with a frown. “Give it to Phil,” he suggests. “He needs one, since his broke.”

Rose agrees that the arm should go to Coulson. She carefully sets the pile of clothing aside on the floor and returns to place her hand back in Curtis’ waiting one, this time pulling their joined hands into her lap. They sit there together like that for a long while, not speaking, just existing side by side. Some things have so much more value now than they did Before, including silent company and a comforting hand.

“Do you remember it much?” Curtis eventually says.

“Before?”

“No.” He never talks about Before, since it only breeds despair. “Boarding,” he says. “Do you remember?”

“Of course.”

He winces. “Oh. I didn’t know if you did. You were so young. I thought maybe … maybe you’d forgotten. A lot of the kids did, even some of the older ones.”

“Yeah. MJ was eight and she says she can’t remember at all.”

Curtis nods. “Sometimes it feels like a dream even to me, it was so long ago.” He’d been twenty-two when the world froze and people were reduced to animals all around him. Twelve years couldn’t erase that pain, but it could muddle it a lot. “I’m sorry you didn’t. Block it out.”

“I remember ... shouting,” Rose says, her voice teasing the memory out. “It was dark. And I remember getting shoved around, hiding against my mom's legs, being hungry ... how cold it was.” It’s been cold ever since, but never as cold as that night—the last night before the wind and snow and ice got shut out forever. She heaves a sigh. “It’s all a jumble in my mind, anyway. I couldn’t see past anyone’s coat.”

“You were little,” Curtis mumbles. “Short.”

“Well I was six."

He smirks and bumps her shoulder with his. “You’re still short,” he teases, while privately he thinks that it’s better that she was so young when it happened. It means her earliest memories are of cold and chaos, and that’s better than the alternative of having had more time in the World. It means less things to mourn. “What are you going to do now?” he asks, shaking his head like he can knock the past out of it. "Plans for today?"

Rose shrugs. “Same old, same old. Kids, stories. It’s my night to shower.”

Curtis turns his head towards her, brow furrowed. “You … but you’re not going back to you guys' spot, right?”

"'Course. Where else would I go?"

He doesn’t know what he was expecting, what he thought the alternative was supposed to be. Every square centimeter of the tail section is already portioned and claimed. New space doesn’t just appear. Nothing new ever appears, except babies, bodies, and the rats that Wanda breeds to supplement their diet.

“Rosie,” Curtis scolds. “No. You can’t go back there. Not where he—”

“It’s not a big deal,” she says stubbornly, pretending it doesn’t bother her. But she’s a horrible liar and that’s just another thing that's always made her so endearing ... and so vulnerable.

“Hon,” Curtis mourns,

“It’s just a bunk," she insists. "He slept there, he died there. I’ll probably die there too, one day.”

Curtis growls unhappily. “Don’t say that. Don’t you ever say that. Hey, things won’t always be like this.” He catches her throwing him side eye and he glares at her. “They won’t.”

“Right,” she says, mouth quirking sadly at one corner before her gloved hand gives his a final squeeze and then lets him go. “Well. Not everybody has the big plans that you do, Curtis. Sometimes it's better to know what the future holds, even if it's this.”

“Don’t lose hope, Petal,” he pleads, but he can see that she’s dismissive of it. People lose hope all the time in the Tail. That’s what’d killed her father.

He sighs and looks back to the opposite side of the car. Now that the jackboots are gone it’s thinned out some, with some people gone back to their bunks and others remaining behind to munch on their protein blocks in the fresher air of the assembly car. Curtis spots a man several yards away who’s been openly staring at Rose. When the man sees Curtis looking, however, he hurriedly turns away.

Curtis scowls. “Hey,” he says, intending to take Rose's hand again and offer to have her spend the night with him. But her hand isn't there when he reaches over. She’s getting up, gathering her dead father’s pile of folded clothing items in her arms. Curtis frowns and gets up with her. He hurries to pick up the artificial limb. “Wait. Where’re you going?”

“Gonna give these to Gilliam,” she says, already on the move. “I want him to have first dibs." As if her father’s clothing would even come close to fitting Gilliam's shrunken and weathered old frame.

But Curtis gets up anyway and follows after her, not wanting to let her go just yet. He hurries along as she walks surprisingly fast for having such short legs. “Hey,” he says, talking to her back as they navigate through the communal living cars and the showers, and then into the cramped passageways of the market. “Hey, you know … you could come over tonight, if you wanted. My spot’s a pretty good size.”

“So is ours—” she says, faltering when she realizes her mistake. “I mean, so is mine.”

Curtis sighs and grabs her shoulder, pulling her to a stop. “Don’t go back there,” he pleads, cornering her into a cramped spot to face him. “Hey. I mean it, Hon. Don’t. You shouldn’t go back there tonight. Not alone, not where he …” She squares her jaw and looks up at him, expression stubborn as ever, and Curtis is struck by the sudden, overwhelming urge to kiss her. “It’s too soon,” he insists, because she’d been the one to find The Man sitting up in the bed: straight backed and purple faced and all out of hope, a cord wrapped thrice around his neck. “Too soon,” Curtis repeats sadly.

“I’ll be okay,” she insists, nodding when he makes a face to show how much he doesn’t agree with that. “It’s fine, Curtis. Really. I appreciate the offer. And I get it, I do. But that's our spot, ya know? I’ve lived there for twelve years, and I—” her eyes cut away, glossy with the threat of fresh tears. She swallows thickly and won’t look at him again. “I’m not ready to leave it,” she whispers. “I’d rather stay where it still smells like him.”

Curtis isn’t sure what love feels like, but he thinks maybe it’s partly made up of the horrible feeling he gets in his guts when he sees Rose in pain like this. “... Okay,” he says quietly, taking a small step back so that she can continue on down the passage. The tail is made up of twenty cars, and they’re only several down from the forwardmost car at this point. “Gilliam’s probably at the back,” he tells her. He can see that she wants to be alone in her grief, though he hates the idea of letting her go. “Hey,” he says softly, cupping her face. “I’m right here if you need me, Hon. You know that, right?”

She smiles and nods with watery eyes, worsening the tug in Curtis’ guts. He thinks seriously about leaning in and kissing her, but winds up holding himself back like he’s done so many times already. Instead he just strokes his thumb over her cheek, finger ruddy against the clear skin of her face. “Okay,” he says again. He gently places the artificial limb on top of the stack of clothing she holds, then takes another step back. “I’ll see you at dinner?” he asks, not bothering to hide the hope in his voice. He wants to see her again, as much as possible. The more he can keep her in his sights, the better.

“Yeah,” she agrees, leaning up to plant a quick peck to his cheek. “Thanks, Curtis. For looking out for me. He'd feel better, knowing that."

He watches her go with a sense of trepidation, uttering a quiet, "Not doin' it for him," once she’s halfway down the car.

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