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lokilickedme · 3 years

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The Way

I’m writing horror again. I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason. And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly. Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note: I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you. But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed. It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case. We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to. There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did. If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us. We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew. Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care. It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE. There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish. As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me. I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

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This is, regrettably, a true story. Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

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They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway. Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption. Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances. We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks. Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well. You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave? The one who died under mysterious circumstances? That one.

He left the way he always came in. Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking. She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998. I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband. He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live. It wasn’t bad. He’d tell you otherwise. The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it. I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times. But now I know. That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back. It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway. This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

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It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of. The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon. My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other. James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him. Perception bias, he said. Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly. We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe. We meant it. He made people nervous. He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know. It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones. We were the smart ones, in retrospect. I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family. But mostly the congregation. It was always more important than anything else. And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking. Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right? The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition. They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home. Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed. God’s not like that. And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it? I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain. A moral code, yes. But isn’t that what God is, really? Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us. But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result. Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned. And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water. The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow. He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest. So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay. I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that. Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself. It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day. The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that. It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further. Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different. What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person. I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then. You were just weird, or you weren’t. And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking. But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to. He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known. And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now. I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult. There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it. My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later. My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though. He took the easy way. He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

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December 22, 1998. Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us. The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work. We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years. The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires. Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making. He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot. Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time. I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother. He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior. The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong. Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult. It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

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My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation. They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise. I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son. I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy. She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather. Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much. He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders. My grandmother couldn’t swim. We could make another Ruthie, he said. But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice. I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy. I was never close to him. But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me. I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life. But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak. I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear. And I felt bad. I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized. My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying. Granddads are supposed to be fun. Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam. And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him. She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on. She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown. That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next. How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand. It affected her. She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it. And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for. He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad. The homestead. The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived. A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives. James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for. She’d wanted us all to stay. We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said. That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be. We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke. It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me. James was dead, had been for years. Robbie was dead now too. Dad was gone, so was granddad. Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them. We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life. And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts. Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land. And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew. The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it. It was just an old grave. The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground. My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it. He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line. It was a cool jacket. Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era. He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door. To this day I can’t sort it. It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for. It was cold. I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it. And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said. He’s in his house. I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told. He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants. There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do. And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point. He said he didn’t know. He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important. Something tells me it was. Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again. He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow. I’m sorry.

What do we do? I asked him. I’ve never felt more blank. What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother. I remember thinking that was a good idea. Robbie would know what to do. He always did. Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them. He would get on it, whatever needed doing. He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut. I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

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It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it. Someone you saw just yesterday. Someone who was alive. Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow. And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from. The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life. I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him. I never saw him. I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van. I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with. And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that. Some days it helps. And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped. I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

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For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill. Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable. We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm. Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office. There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down. And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice. By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

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No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose. The end report was obtained two months later. It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue. There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death. His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life. There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery. He was a secretive person, intensely private. He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family. He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep. There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box. He simply hadn’t woken up to use it. Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said. He was melted, literally. It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say. He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me. I’ll go with you if you want to go. But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead. I never saw any proof that he was gone. He just wasn’t there anymore. There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

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Dad was different from that day on. He’d always been stoic, terse, strict. My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years. The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him. He was nicer suddenly. Mellow. Kind. After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny. The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before. He and I became friends. I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it. But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again. And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again. He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him? She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished. Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes. I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager. I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well. She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority. She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me. I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down. I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever. It changed me forever. That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either. She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me. It was the first of several disownings over the next few years. I got used to it. We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk. It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

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A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together. It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him. The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there. I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric. James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end. The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it. I don’t know why. It was dry.

He was gone.

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David and I laughed a lot that day. James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted. And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me. He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him. He was unknowable and therefore unbindable. But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub. I’m not sure what it went to. Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on. There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it. Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before. Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved. David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his. I told him to take it. It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something. One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

----------

My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived. After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge. He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another. There had been several more on the floor around the bed. My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone. Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how. Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with. My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing! We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common. Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation? Dad was the only one that spoke to them. They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that. My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

----------

The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it. Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

----------

The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us. There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway. There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret. In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring. We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death. We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me. James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway. The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

----------

We never felt safe on the hill again. Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession. She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice. We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness. But we knew she was evil. We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right. But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself. She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive. The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife. He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails. He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat. One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death. She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming. She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies. Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come. At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized. She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load. She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

----------

We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house. The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would. She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it. The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to. They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out. I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her. She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently. No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face. It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment. That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are. I can’t do that. I won’t let her win that way. I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name. I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away. My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said. He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered. But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

----------

Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking. He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west. The way we were going. And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

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epic-sorcerer · 3 years

Text

Merlin would have been so much more gay if the writers stayed true to Celtic paganism(the historicaly accurate “old religion”)

Trigger warnings:

Main triggers: talk of sex, homophobia, religion, Catholics, colonization, anti Celtic, murder

Mention triggers: rape and sexual assault, creepy men, gore, insest, toxic masculinity

I will mark the sections with quick triggers with 2 red lines. Below the second one is when the trigger is gone.

_____________

I am posting this on December 21st, as today is the Winter Solstice, a Celtic Pagan holiday. It will be posted at 3:33 PM, as 3 is a sacred number among the celts. Because of the special occasion, I will be speaking on a subject that was important to many of them—homosexuality.

Some stuff first for introductions. Yes, yes, I know this may be boring but it helps with context. This religion didn’t have a name other than Celtic pagan or Celtic religion bc it seams everyone there believed it. This was until the Roman Empire concurred what is now the UK. Since Rome had adopted Christianity—more specifically, Roman Catholocism—they only allowed that religion to be practiced.

———(genocide)——

Once England was concurred in 43 A.D, the pagans were killed and their religion was surpressed. Not much is known about the pagans for this reason. However, we do know somethings from what the Romans have written down. Although, it is biased, as they believed the celts to be barbaric and also didn’t wright much about women.

——gore ——

First, we know they preformed human sacrifice on kings when the kingdom suffered along with some other groups.This could be from bad ruling to really bad weather. These kings died horribly, as they seamed to be stabbed multiple times, had thier nipples cut off, and left to die in a bog.

They had thier nipples cut off because the subjects would suck on the kings’ nipples to demonstrate submission, so cutting them off would fully dethrone the king.

—————

Now, background over. Here’s where it gets good.

Nipple sucking between too lovers or ‘special friends’ was seen as a preclemation of love, physical intimacy, and sexual expression. This, like other types of sex, was seen as something beutiful and sacred. Often, male soldiers would have these ‘special friend’ relationships with many fellow soldiers in groups. The Romans even observed that Celtic men seamed to prefer other males for love/sexual interest over women.

Nipple sucking was mostly described was between two men. Although, we must recognize that women may have been left out of written history. I would also like to point out, this may prove that aromantic people existed in that time, as these ‘special friends’ had sex and were not mentioned to be romantically involved.

The celts were known for their sex positivity and even eroticism because they loved it so much.This is one of the reasons why the pagans and the Chatholics clashed so badly.

Before the Romans really took over, Saint Patrick—yes, the Saint Patrick—started to try to convert the celts into Roman catholosim. He was appalled at the wide acceptance of polyamory(women were aloud to marry however many people they wanted) and homosexual relationships/marriages. Not to mention the celts could have sex with any one at any time as long as it is consensual.

——(Tw creepy men)——

That means no waiting til marriage, unless a Celtic chose to do so. Although we should take into consideration a statement made by Diodorus Siculus, an antient Greek historian, that “the young men will offer themselves to strangers and are insulted if the offer is refused.” In his series Bibliotheca historica. This could mean that either creepy men were comman place, or that homosexuality was so comman and done with everyone, it was wierd to be rejected.

————

Getting back to the Roman Catholics, the book Sextus Empiricus is published in the early 3th century and states,

“...amongst the Persians it is the habit to indulge in intercourse with males, but amongst the Romans it is forbidden by law to do so...”

It also goes on to say,

“...amongst us sodomy is regarded as shameful or rather illegal, but by the Germanic they say, it is not looked on as shameful but as a customary thing.”

For clarification, Germany is apart of Celtic society. So what we can infer is a very serious culture shock in terms of Rome and other places. During Emporor Serverus Alexander’s reign, openly homosexuals were deported.

In early 4th century, Emporor Constaine—the first Christian Roman Emperor—destroyed an Egyptian temple populated exclusively by femme, gay, pagan, priests. The Emproror then went on to eradicate all of them. However in 337 A.D., 3 emperors ruled, including Constantius II and Constans I, who where both in mlm relationships.

An odd thing these emporors went on to do was criminalize male bottoming during mlw sex 342 A.D.. 8 years later, Emperors Valentinian II, Theodosius I, and Arcadius ferther punished this act by killing these men by Public burning at the stake.

———(Tw toxic masculinity)———

I believe this was because masculinity was very important and a man acting in a more feminine role was seen as emasculating and humiliating. For the average man, he had to fight and defend his masculinity. Not doing so was seen as a personal failure.

——————

The last ever known peice of European literature containing a positive representation of homosexuality for 1,000 years was a large epic poem by Nonnus of Panopolis. It was titled Dionysiaca and the first part was published in 390 A.D., the last in 405 A.D..

So yeah, The catholics were very selective in terms of sex. One can only imagine how badly the celts and Catholics clashed. Back to 435 A. D., Saint Patrick began to preach Catholism and around that time wrote in his Confessio. He recounted that he found a boat to get out of Ireland and refused to suck on the nipples of those aboard.

“And on the same day that I arrived, the ship was setting out from the place, and I said that I had the wherewithal to sail with them; and the steersman was displeased and replied in anger, sharply: ‘By no means attempt to go with us.’ Hearing this I left them to go to the hut where I was staying, and on the way I began to pray, and before the prayer was finished I heard one of them shouting loudly after me: ‘Come quickly because the men are calling you.’ And immediately I went back to them and they started to say to me: ‘Come, because we are admitting you out of good faith; make friendship with us in any way you wish.’ (And so, on that day, I refused to suck the breasts of these men from fear of God, but nevertheless I had hopes that they would come to faith in Jesus Christ, because they were barbarians.) And for this I continued with them, and forthwith we put to sea.”

—(Tw very mild rape/sex assault mention—

So, as you can see, Celtic and Catholic ways clashed horribly. Something seen as good and sacred to the indigenous tribes was seen as barbaric and sinful to Saint Patrick. Also, don’t worry, the celts did not press the issue ferther, or else this would be a very different story.

—————

This only snowballed into a much bigger issue much later in medival English sexuality. They were VERY picky on what sex was aloud. Missionary was the only aloud position and it has to be the least pleasurable as possible. Making out and masturbation wasn’t aloud either, as that was also seen as a sin. Here’s a low Rez chart to help figure out when sex was okay.

While we are discussing such a queer topic, I would like to bring up the topic of Anam Cara, or Soul Friends in Antient Celtic culture. A Soul Friend was a word used to describe a Philosophy in which one is not completely whole without thier “other half.” This person can be in a platonic, romantic, or familiar kind of love. Really, all it boils down to is that 2 poeple were made to be together since the beginning of time and will be at thier strongest when they become companions.

There is a Celtic legend that seams to depict a mlm Anam Cara relationship. It tells the story of Cuchulainn and Ferdiad, two male worriors who have known and loved each other a long time. But they must kill each other in a duel. Both are vary reluctant, as at least one of them will have to die.

————(Tw insest)———

Before I go on, it is important to mention there is a lot of debate on wether or not this is homosexual. Mainly because they were foster brothers, but since insest wasn’t as much of a taboo, I do not think this would be as much of a set back as it is today.

—————

They had tried to kill each other each day for 3 days, but they ended up hugging each other and kissing 3 times. On the fourth day, however, Cuchulainn killed Ferdiad. The man then holds Ferdiad in his arms and sings peoms for a long time. Here are some:

“We were heart-companions once,

We were comrades in the woods,

We were men that shared a bed

When we slept the heavy sleep

After hard and weary fights.

Into many lands, so strange,

And side by side we sallied forth

And we ranged the woodlands through,When with Scathach we learned arms!”

Heart companions seams to be similar or the same as soul freind, because of how it’s used. Although sleeping in the same bed isn’t inherently sexual, Cuchulainn then goes on to complement Ferdiad’s physical features.

“Dear to me thy noble blush,

Dear thy comely, perfect form;

Dear thine eye, blue-grey and clear,

Dear thy wisdom and thy speech”

Although this is deeply sweet I would also like to caution that Chuhulainn may have simply been commenting on his healthiness, but blush is an odd word considering he is now dead.

Two male lovers, one dead in the other’s arms. Soul friends, maybe. Reminds me of a certain show..I don’t know I just can’t put my finger on it...

I would also like to point out that because Celtics did not pressure others to have sex, and that a soul friend can be any type of love, I do think that an asexual or someone on that spectrum could live without judgment.Unfortunately, I could not find much about intersex, androgynous, or trans people. Perhaps if I find anything in the future and will make a new post.

In conclusion, if Merlin were more historicaly accurate, he definitely would have been queer. Especially because he is said to be magic itself, it would make sense for him to be the personification of Celtic values. That may include homosexuality, because as previously stated, Celtic men really liked other men.

I’m excited to see what will come of this post, seeing as not a lot of people in the fandom seem to know this. More fanfiction? More fanart? It would probably inspire a lot of creators. So, if you do make something because of this post, please notify me in the notes, an ask, an @ or something. Basically anything but a PM. I would be happy to see/read the creation.

Sources:

Sexuality and love in Celtic society:

Same Sex Celts

Druid Thoughts: of Sex and Druids

Anam Cara, what’s a soul mate?

Sexuality in Ancient Ireland

The Celts, Women, and Sex

LGBT history

Sexuality and love in Medival Society:

Getting down and medival: the sex lives of the Middle Ages

Sex in the Middle Ages

Here’s What Sex Was Like In Medieval Times. It’ll Make You Feel Glad You Weren’t Born Back Then!

General Celtic Society:

Who Were the Celts

Celtic Religion and Belieifs

Saint Patrick

17 Things You Probably Didnt know about Saint Patrick

Confession of Saint Patrick

Cuchulainn and Ferdiad

Cuchulainn and Ferdiad, Gay Lovers?

The Combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain

Insest in Antient Celtic Society

Ancient Irish elite practiced incest, new genetic data from Neolithic tomb shows

Homosexuality in the Roman Empire

Timeline of LGBT history

Timeline of LGBT history in the United Kingdom

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heuristicallyinclined · 3 years

Text

Becoming One with the Capri Sun

Lanque Bombyx x Mspa Reader | T | Word Count: 4,426 | tw: blood, mild gore, temporary character death, biting | AO3 Link

Written for @skanque-bombyx

Summary: Set in the Nobody Knows AU, First Guardian Mspa Reader finds an extremely dissatisfied adult Lanque and agrees to get him off of his cloistered planet, Julie d’Aubigny style. Things don’t exactly go as planned.

Note: This doesn’t build off of the main story and you don’t have to have read it or be caught up on it for this to make sense. Somewhat of a oneshot.

The sounds of a tunnel collapsing in on itself, of rock being torn loose and bringing more of the earth down with it, was terrifying enough without the echo of the cave magnifying everything and disorienting you further. You couldn’t even tell how extensive the damage was since every crash seemed to become more than a singular crash, the actual sound of stones falling made indistinguishable from the following echoes layering on top of each other becoming a cacophony of destruction.

But eventually, it stopped. It stopped and you could hear your heart beating again, no longer obscured by the falling debris, seemingly making up for lost time by beating so hard you could feel it in your teeth reminding you it was there and you were alive. The next thing you noticed was the heavy silence. Though maybe after being overwhelmed to the point where your ears were ringing, any amount of quiet felt stark to you.

It didn’t matter, because shakily you got up, you had to stop halfway as you rose to rest your hands on your knees and just breathe for a moment, but eventually, you stood straight and exhaled deeply, holding yourself for a second before looking around. Softly, you called out.

“Lanque?”

And heard no response.

Maybe it was too quiet, the fear of another cave in caused by you yelling probably stifled you from doing more than mouthing his name without any of the sound behind it. You build up your nerve and try again, louder.

“Lanque.”

You wait.

There was no reply.

Your heart had only just started to wane from its frantic beat and you were starting to worry something far worse was about to replace it.

You began to look around, hoping to see some sign of life or, you don’t know, maybe even get a little optimistic at not seeing any signs of death. Your footsteps are slow and deliberate as you move around and occasionally over debris. You have to actively try not to flinch as you do, fearing that the sound of any pebble being kicked was the start of another tremor. That or conceal some movement elsewhere or ideally some faint profanity.

But the only sound you manage to hear is the gravel crunching under your shoes as you continue on. Your vision isn’t doing much to help you either. It wasn’t completely dark. The bioluminescent cave fungus creeping up the walls acted as a source of light and kept you from stumbling too much, but it was cultivated by people made for cave dwelling and much more sensitive to light than you are. Still you keep trying. After a few minutes, something on the ground catches your eye and you squint harder trying to focus on it.

There was a puddle reflecting some of the light.

It just looked like an inky pool from where you were standing. For all you knew it could be water. It’s probably water or something that got knocked down during the chaos. Yeah. You really need it to be that and you keep repeating that to yourself mentally as you approach it like it would manifest into truth.

You stopped saying that when you see a massive broken stalactite was not too far away from it, streaked with jade. Current fear be damned, you now have a bigger one and you race towards it now. You run and remember you are capable of teleporting the moment you reach the exact distance that you would consider it not worth teleporting the rest of the way and keep going.

And see exactly what you feared.

Lanque was face down, his hair soaked enough with blood to lay flat against his head. A jade halo formed around him in a mockery of piety.

You momentarily step back in horror, hand against your mouth, trying to focus your eyes on him, trying to have anything else come into focus, but no. What you saw in the low lighting was correct.

But you’re judging this too quickly. Trolls are tough, adults even moreso.

You kneel down and roll him onto his back, which took a decent amount of effort with how heavy he was and how much you were avoiding looking at the back of his head. You brush some of the blood soaked hair away from his forehead. There was no heat to his blood. You feel for his pulse and then when that fails you feel for his pulse again and again hoping it’s thick troll skin or shakiness stopping you from feeling anything.

But it isn’t. You already knew that.

Lanque Bombyx is dead and died doing something he hated in a place he never wanted to be. You don’t know which of those things nauseates you the most. You feel for his pulse again, fighting against tears pricking at corners of your eyes and the tightness in your throat, when you had a thought, something you had forgotten in your grief and shock.

You knew exactly what you had to do.

Not contemplate the ethics of kissing corpses.

He lies there, motionless. You check his pulse again. Still nothing.

Fuck. You're really going to do this.

Steeling your nerves, you use the edge of your sleeve to wipe blood off of the corners of his mouth while avoiding his lipstick, like that was the part skeeving you out. Not the part that you aren’t getting into. Because even if you were to take a cursory thought at that, which you aren’t, you think you’d rather try it and it not work, because it's not like he is getting any deader. And if it does work, you’ll fess up, and you’re okay with him being so disgusted with you that he never speaks to you again. At least that would mean he was alive enough to be angry about it.

You’ve chosen the consequences you’re okay with and now it just time rip off the band aid and by band aid you mean kiss a corpse which is exponentially worse than the action the metaphor is based on and oh fuck, you're really going to do this. You feel for a pulse again. And again.

You might be stalling. During the time you know nobody else is around to ask you what the fuck you’re doing or see you doing the thing you definitely dont want to get a reputation for. God dammit. Okay. Just going to go for it then.

After some remaining hesitation, your lips make contact with his, cold and motionless. You feel like a goddamn creep and you have no idea how long you're supposed to stay like this. Do you have to stop and repeat until he gets up or something? Fuck. Wait. You're thinking of CPR.

Okay, you know what? You're going to just keep your lips pressed against his and keep count in your head using the only tried and true method you know of.

One Mississippi.

Two Mississippi.

Three Mississippi.

You pull back. He doesn't move. You check his pulse again, hoping eighth time's the charm. No luck. There isn't a single trace of life in him and you're wondering if maybe that was a one time thing or maybe not all jades can become rainbow drinkers but all rainbow drinkers are jade? Like how a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square? But with vampires?

You’ve already kissed him once, so you do it again before a second wave of disgust can hit you just in case this is actually like CPR.

But it isn’t like CPR. All you did was kiss a corpse twice.

Gross.

You wipe your mouth and look at him. Even with most of his face caked in blood, his expression is the most placid you’d ever seen it be in the caverns. The default tension he kept up between his brows was smoothed out and his mouth was no longer drawn down in slight annoyance.

You hate this. You hate that this is the only way he’d find it peaceful here.

The most you saw from him here was when you two were coming up with this plan to bust him off of his cloistered planet, trying to figure out where he would even be able to go. And maybe you shouldn’t have been drinking with him, but between hearing about what cloistered life was like and how the whole planet was a dry one, and but really, who were you to deny a nun? Especially a nun sharing his thoughts on mandatory asceticism.

When he passed you back your flask, you shook it, frowning. It was empty. Bastard drank the whole thing and didn’t even leave you a drop. You looked up at him only to find him dropping the rbf long enough to be smilingly wryly at you, your chagrin had him looking a lot more himself. The bickering after moreso. You were genuinely happy this seemed to be doing something for him, but you would’ve been happier if that didn’t require him being a prick to you to feel alive again.

Not that it matters now you guess. Slowly, you get up and begin to pace as you think. You have no idea what to do next or if there even is much of a point in looking for something to do next. If this was an errant thread in the timeline, well, it wouldn’t stay that way for too long and you could try again and maybe not go off of Lanque’s judgement alone the next go around.

Damn. You might just need to wait this one out. You’d rather not wait it out here if you can help it though, but you don’t actually know where anything here is or if there is much of anything for you in the main cavern.

Some other jades should have heard what happened. Someone would have to notice a whole ass tunnel collapse and you’re now guessing this area was sectioned off for a reason other than giving him somewhere dramatic enough to brood. But if Lanque’s hot and cold bit stayed constant, it might be a while before the length of time he’s been gone becomes concerning and even longer before someone actually decides to look in the sectioned off parts of the caverns for him.

You sigh. It's just you and his corpse now. You glance back at him wearily, and pause, staring hard.

He isn't there.

That is definitely where he was, the blood puddle is still there to prove it. You turned your back for just a second, just to think. You start looking around rapidly.

You feel so stupid. You are so stupid. You know not to turn your back on a body. You’ve heard it so many times. And what did you do? You turned your back on a body. But there is no way that someone could have busted in here and absconded that quickly with him. You would have heard it and from what you can tell the exit got blocked off during the cave in, so how c-.

A bright light suddenly shining in the periphery of your vision stops that thought.

You turn to face it, but it's hard to focus on it with how your eyes have adjusted to the darkness. You squint, straining your eyes. It seems to get brighter. No. Fuck. It’s getting bigger, as it rushes towards you much faster than you could brace yourself or zap away.

A rock jabs into your shoulder as you’re pinned up and against a cave wall. You blink, eyes finally able to focus on what's in front of you.

And you are greeted with the luminous, bloodied face of Lanque Bombyx.

Oh shit. It actually worked.

Lanque was undeniably “a real one” because it definitely wasn't the dark that had you squinting now, not with how brightly he was glowing. And that’s basically the smoking gun of rainbow drinkerhood. Well, that and the blood drinking.

…

Oh. Oh yeah, the blood drinking.

Oh fuck. The blood drinking.

You know, you don’t do particularly well during extended silences and this was not proving to be an exception by any fucking means. The fact that he has been wordlessly staring at you this whole time like you were the last capri sun in the fridge was also not helping.

"Hey Lanque,” you draw slowly, unsure. “How's it going?"

He doesn't respond, instead remaining eerily still.

God that was weak. But you don’t know that saying he looked like he was feeling better was all that great either or do anything about his newly gained staring problem.

You’ve seen the way he looks at people, been on the other end of it too, as he scans a room until he finds something, someone that draws his attention and becomes fixated on his latest little curiosity. You’re sure you could make an extended prey metaphor here or something, but it would be very uncomfortable and heavy handed given where you are right now.

The look he was giving you had all of the same focus without any of the emotion. No malice, no amusement, not even that goddamn smugness that seemed to permeate most of everything he did. It was just a cold, empty scrutiny that had you unnerved like nothing else. Between the intensity of his light and his expression you’re finding it hard to think.

He finally moves, tilting his head to the side. It could be a trick of the light, but his fangs seemed to look sharper and protrude further. His chest rose almost mechanically as he took a breath and his blood felt tacky against you as his head brushed by yours. It's as he brings his mouth down to your neck that the sudden realization that he hadn’t been breathing until just now hits you and you are struck with a newfound panic that snaps you out of your daze.

You try to scramble back against the rock. Climbing up it or down it, you don’t know, you don’t care. Just away from here. But it doesn’t matter. His hands pinning you to the cave wall have you locked firmly in place. Your struggle doesn't seem to register to him at all. He just brings his knee between your legs and one of his hands tangles itself in your hair.

He pulls, exposing more of your neck and his cold breath on your skin sends a shudder down your spine and you flinch when his lips press against your neck. It would be a stretch to call what he was doing a kiss. He was more just applying pressure as he felt around, mouthing your neck as he looked for something. Without warning, a sharp pain let you know he found it, and you ball a hand in the still wet, bloodied fabric of his robe as you cry out.

This isn’t close to the worst pain you’ve been through, but considering you’ve died repeatedly, that isn’t actually saying very much.

At least you know for a fact you can handle it and are going to get through this just fine. You’ve had worse wounds. Easily, the worst part of this experience is the rock you feel jabbing into your shoulder muscle. Otherwise, this is extremely manageable. You try to stop tensing your muscles and relax. It’s only going to hurt more if you don’t. It’s kind of like getting a shot, except the other way around where instead of getting a small amount of something helpful injected into you, you’re having a decent amount of something very crucial extracted from you during what you just generously going to call an improv blood donation. Which you’ve done before. So really no need to get over dramatic about getting bitten by a rainbow drinker.

You start doing your breathing exercises, trying to manifest some chill thoughts in your mind that you can focus on over the swallowing sounds that feel like they’re right next to your goddamn ear. You are not skeeved. You are not rattled in the slightest. No. You’re just staying real fucking zen about alien vampires in general and specifically about the one seemingly taking his sweet time while having his drink for once instead of downing a few shots in rapid succession. Actually, you don’t want to know what the rainbow drinker equivalent of doing a shot is. This is probably the better option. Mostly for you.

God. Tagora is going to be so disappointed when he finds out the incredibly not sexy reality of getting bitten by a rainbow drinker. It could just be the ambiance here though. Better lighting not almost blindingly close to your face would probably improve the experience greatly. The corpse kissing was also kind of a mood killer. This is solidly a two star experience for you.

Which gets knocked down half a star when he pulls his teeth out without warning, a sudden heat replacing the pressure on your neck as you keep bleeding. He doesn’t stop you when you move your arm up. You pull the fabric of your hood forwards and press it down on your wound to stop the bleeding. Probably not super sanitary, but neither was the bite itself. He slowly exhales by the shell of your ear, breath noticeably warmer now. From your blood.

You definitely have antibiotic ointment in your first aid kit.

He doesn’t let go. He keeps breathing deeply and evenly far closer to your person than you felt entirely comfortable with. You’re not sure how long the two of you remained like that since the rock jutting into you was making everything seem to take a lot longer than it did, but its end was very clear. His breathing suddenly picked up and he stiffened, his grip tightening. He pulls away from your neck and looks at you. No longer blankly, but in disconcertment. He drops you on your ass in an unceremonious heap on the ground and staggers back away from you.

“Really?” you groan. “Really Lanque?”

He glances down at you. As disoriented as he looks, he is still cognizant enough to frown, before bewilderedly looking around at the cavern walls and the long shadows creeping up on them. You’re guessing trying to find the source of light. Eventually he looks down at his hands, still brightly glowing. He looks back at you again through wide eyes and softly, with feeling asks,

“What the fuck?”

A fair question.

“I kissed you and you’re a rainbow drinker now,” you say, trying to very casually hit two elephants with one stone as you brush gravel off of yourself and work through your dizziness to sit up.

He blinks.

"How's your headache?"

He touches his head, seeming to notice his hair being out of place more than any kind of pain if his immediate fussing over it was any indication. He starts putting it back into place when he gets to the back of his head and freezes. And slowly brings his hand down. He stares at the jade stains covering it, then looks back at you, much more perturbed.

“What the fuck?" he repeats loudly, with more feeling.

"You lost a fight to a stalagmite an-."

Wait. There’s a rhyme for this. Stalactites hold tight to the ceiling and stalagmites might try to reach them.

"Sorry. Stalactite," you correct, popping the "t."

He doesn't seem to appreciate your commitment to accuracy if his narrowing eyes is anything to go by. You might be his friend, but semantics clearly aren't.

"A stalactite fell on you and you died."

"I died?"

"Only for a little bit."

He pauses as he processes that, and then remembers the first part of your statement, "You said you kissed me?”

You suck in air through your teeth, "yeah."

He eyes you strangely, before his face twists in revulsion.

So he definitely worked out the timeline on that.

"It was to save your life," you add defensively.

"If I died, then you didn't exactly saVe it," he retorts venomously. He almost seems to brighten in anger.

Wow. Looks like semantics aren't your friend either. You know what? Fuck semantics. You and all your homies hate semantics.

"If you're here complaining about it, then you can't be that dead." You press your hand to your forehead before gesturing out. “Look, I don't just go around kissing corpses for fucks sake."

"OVerlooking the fact that that is What you just did,” he spits.

You look at him for a moment. The blood loss has definitely made you very cranky. The fact that you extremely didn’t want to kiss his corpse doesn’t change the fact that you did. Honestly, you would feel pretty violated in his shoes too. You inhale and exhale deeply, and try not to feel too woozy as you stand up.

He gives you a hard look.

"I'm sorry Lanque."

He seems to believe your remorse is genuine based off of his apparent dimmer function.

"Also you fucking bit me so I think we're even."

"I What?"

You pull your hood down a bite revealing your bite mark.

"You fucking bit me."

He eyes your neck longer than you think is strictly necessary as he takes that information in. You think this makes you legally entitled to make every single snack and thirst joke you want from now until the end of eternity.

“So it Would appear.” He states plainly before glancing back up at your face. “HoW did you knoW it Would Work?”

"I didn't actually know if this was going to work or not, or if you were just going to stay permanently dead," you admit. I still don't know if all jades are capable of becoming rainbow drinkers or if only some of them are."

"And you still attempted it?" he asks, raising an eyebrow.

You nod. And understand the following silence as the two of you having a moment as he appears to consider your action and maybe even feel some weight behind it.

Until he laughs at you.

"That's embarrassing.”

Motherfucker.

As his laughter dies down, he shakes his head, the ridiculousness of the situation setting in and his voice takes on a sharper tone.

“So hoW exactly is this supposed to Work?”

“This being?”

“HoW often am I going to haVe to partake in drinking blood?” he clarifies, stressing each word slowly and patronizingly.

“I have no idea. When you get thirsty? Like normal?”

“Like normal?” he repeats, voice now devoid of any humor. He looks down at his hands, appearing to concentrate. "Is there a Way to turn off the gloW?"

"You're already over it?"

He glares at you.

"Yes. There is."

He waits for you to elaborate.

"I don't know how though."

"Fucking incredible.” He gives frustrated huff. "I see your Well of knoWledge has run completely dry."

“Well, it isn’t like your time on rp forums is any better. Like how would you think rainbow drinkers were made? Biting?”

"It Would make more sense," he counters.

"Fucking how? And if that's how it worked, there’d be two incandescent dipshits here. But there aren’t."

“Only a dim one.”

You narrow your eyes at him. The literal pain in your neck is only being exacerbated by the metaphorical pain in your neck that caused it and you seriously don’t have enough blood to play twenty questions.

“So this is probably just going to be a “fuck around and find out” kind of thing. It’s going to suck, no pun intended,” you add when you see how done he looks, “but maybe there’s some kind of information about rainbow drinkers out there. Something that isn’t saucy bullshit.”

“If there is,” he starts, disregarding your thoughts on the genre, “it’s locked up so tight that I doubt that eVen the head jades Would knoW about it, let alone share it.

“Damn.”

You think. It can’t just not exist. Even if it were restricted as shit, there had to be some kind of book or tome or whatever on rainbow drinkers out there. Assuming something like that wasn’t destroyed by the empire, it would either be sealed away deep in the caverns or in some private collection owned by someone getting their jimmies off on knowing more than others and collecting forbidden shit. But where would you eve-.

Oh.

Actually? You know just the place.

That realization must be showing on your face because Lanque side eyes you dubiously before sighing.

“Of course you’re about to tell me you know just the disreputable little shithole for the job.”

“Yes, I-, wait. No.” you sigh deeply. “Why do you think I just somehow know where all the seedy places are?”

“Because I can’t imagine any reputable establishment that Would let you in,” he sneers.

“And I can’t imagine any reputable establishment that wouldn’t kick you out.”

He looks at you unimpressed. You return it.

“If you have a better idea or want to go somewhere else after, we can do that. But right now, you’ve got nothing, and I think we have a pretty decent shot of finding something at a very specific personal jackoff bookhive.”

He crosses his arms. “And if there isn’t?”

“Well. He had a very extensive decorative bar that we can actually put to use.”

He exhales a laugh. “You should haVe led With that.”

“And it’s private so no one’s going to be asking any questions about seeing a jade not being cloistered.”

“Not all jades get cloistered you knoW,” he informs you dryly.

“Really?”

You did not know that actually. Or much about jades outside of the brooding caverns. Since being there seemed like a bit of a sore spot for most of your friends in general, you didn’t really pry. You just kind of assumed they all ended up in the caverns at some point. Now you’re really wishing you had pushed for some elaboration from them.

“What do they even do?”

“I don’t knoW,” he responds knowingly, “Maybe you’ll find a book that can help you find out.”

“Maybe,” you reply, straining slightly, but determined to be the bigger person in the only way you can.

You extend your hand out to him and for a moment, he stares at you, completely unreadable. But then begrudgingly, he uncrosses his arms and takes your hand in one of his.

You zap, realizing something.

You are the First Guardian, and you think you might have just created a bit of a problem for yourself.

#Hiveswap #Lanque Bombyx #Mspa Reader #Mspar #Nobody Knows #My writing

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nikki-writes-stuff · 4 years

Text

Beauty In the Blood - Part Four

Summary: One day your friend convinces you to join a dating website that matches people based on their search histories, and when you match with Loki Odinson, a handsome, intelligent coroner who’s a fan of your murder mysteries, you’re absolutely thrilled. But there’s something off about Loki, and as your relationship progresses, you discover that his dark side is even darker than you could ever have imagined…

Pairing: Serial Killer!Loki x Writer!Reader

Read part three here!

A/N: This story is based off of this post! I hope you guys enjoy; this is my first time writing Loki, and this will probably be the darkest thing I’ve ever written. Please let me know what you think as the story progresses!

A/N: Warning! This chapter contains light smut at the beginning and heavy gore in the middle. If that kind of thing bothers you, then try skipping down to Natasha’s point of view. It’ll summarize what basically happened while sparing the nasty details. (Also, I’ll have you know that a lot of morbid Google searches went into the making of this chapter, lol.) Enjoy!

Your eyes flew open with a gasp, and your fingers twisted and dug into the sheets; a ragged, breathless moan tore itself out of your throat, and for a moment, you couldn’t tell whether or not you were still asleep. You’d just been dreaming a second ago, though you couldn’t remember what about, but now, there was something hot and wet lapping at your already-drenched pussy.

Blearily, you looked down, making out the form of something moving beneath the blankets. Or, rather, someone. The events of the last night came back to you just as another moan escaped from your parted lips, and you threw back the covers to see a familiar head of black hair nestled between your spread thighs.

“L-loki,” you sputtered, voice still rough from sleeping. “Wh-what are you- oh, fuck-!”

His chuckle was muffled as he wrapped his lips around your clit and started sucking, and your back arched up as your hands flew to his hair. You fought to keep your eyes open, wanting to savor the sight of his aquamarine eyes staring up at you while he gently grazed his teeth over your sensitive bud. The sensation sent shockwaves up and down your spine, and your hands moved to his hair as your hips started rolling upwards of their own accord.

You only lasted for an embarrassingly-short amount of time; you had no way of knowing how long Loki had been playing with your cunt while you slept, but within just a few minutes of waking up, you felt your toes curl as your orgasm washed over you. Your eyes never left his, taking in the proud, almost smug, gleam in them as he greedily tasted your cum.

His tongue kept lazily exploring your pussy, grazing over your clit as you jolted from the oversensitivity. Biting your lip, you tugged on his dark tresses, watching as he reluctantly pulled his head up to fully face you.

“Good morning,” he smirked, his lips swollen and slick with your juices.

“I… Good morning,” you stammered. “That was…one hell of a way to wake up.”

Both of you chuckled as he crawled up your body, wrapping an arm around your waist before pulling you into a kiss. You could taste yourself on his tongue, and you couldn’t help the tiny groan that came out of your mouth at the lewdness it.

Loki pulled away, licking his lips as he looked down at you. For a moment, the two of you were silent, taking in the other person as sunlight drifted in from behind your closed blinds. His hair fell in thick, frizzy waves, no doubt rumpled from how you’d been manhandling it both last night and this morning, and his face seemed to be almost…softer than usual. Despite how he’d woken you up, you could see a faint gleam of sleepiness still lingering in his expression, and it made him look younger; with a smile, you traced one of his cheekbones with a finger, trailing it down the line of his jaw and sweeping it across his lower lip.

“You’re beautiful, Loki,” you whispered. You hadn’t meant to speak those words out loud, but there was no denying the truth in them.

A wide, close-lipped smile came to his face, and he pressed one more peck to your cheek before pulling away to sit beside you on the bed.

“I think,” he mused, “that we both need a big breakfast with even bigger cups of coffee after last night.” His voice was just a touch gravelly, but there was no denying the affection in it as he looked down at you, lazily playing with a strand of your hair.

“Don’t tell me I wore you out,” you chuckled, reluctantly pulling yourself to sit up. Loki gave you a tired, almost sheepish smile, before he pulled himself to his feet.

“I must be slowing down in my old age,” he joked, eyes scanning the floor to see where his underwear had ended up.

Propped up on your elbows, you watched the lean muscles of his body contract and bend as he stooped to retrieve them, and you were once more reminded of a statue carved from the purest white marble. The corded muscles of his thighs flexed with every movement as he stalked over to your en suite bathroom, and it was only when he’d closed the door behind him that you decided it was time to get up.

“I was thinking,” you called out, making your way to your closet, “that we could get some breakfast together at a café down the street. My treat.”

You pulled on a nude bra with matching panties, not hearing the bathroom door as it swung open. It was only when you felt cold hands descend upon your waist that you jolted and turned to face Loki again, not missing the way his eyes skimmed over your breasts.

“I’d say that you treated me to more than enough last night,” he purred. “Between your amazing cooking, your beautiful writing, and your absolutely sinful body, well…” His hands trailed up your sides, tickling over your ribs before slipping under the cups of your bra.

“A man can get spoiled quite easily.”

Needless to say, it was a while before either of you got properly dressed.

______________

Loki sipped his black coffee as you consumed the café’s specialty drink of the day, his hand resting over yours as you both finished off your breakfasts. The two of you had been sitting in companionable silence for a while, giving you an opportunity to think of what you would right next in your newest work in progress.

“I can practically see the gears turning in your head, love,” he chuckled after a while, shaking you from your thoughts. “Care to share?”

You smiled, setting down your fork[NL1] .

“Just about the book,” you told him. “I think I’m going to write another killing scene soon.”

Your boyfriend’s eyes leapt up, his interest obviously piqued.

“Oh? How will our coroner do it this time?”

You winced unconsciously, your thoughts turning red for the briefest of moments as you considered whether or not to share your twisted ideas with him.

“I’m…not sure if it’s the right thing to discuss over breakfast,” you admitted weakly. “Wouldn’t want your breakfast to, uh, disagree with you.”

“Love? Need I remind you of what I do for a living?” was his deadpanned response. “I play with corpses for a paycheck; I promise that not only will it not bother me to hear, but that I want to.”

As strange of a response as it was, you couldn’t help but feel warmth bloom in your chest; you’d nearly forgotten that Loki wasn’t like other people. You didn’t have to filter your morbid, macabre thoughts around him. If anything, his dry and sardonic sense of humor encouraged the darker turn your conversations often ended up taking.

“Well… I’m considering having her…” You trailed off, searching for the right word. “Disembowel someone, I suppose. Her victim is one of the rare few she takes to satisfy a personal agenda; typically, she’ll just pick a random innocent, but this time it’s semi-personal. So I was considering a more passionate murder for them.”

Loki’s eyes were shining with a mischievous sort of joy, and you found yourself thinking, not for the first time, that if he wasn’t so directly involved with death on a daily basis, his love of such things would be concerning, to say the least. But you supposed that the same could be said of you, and so you trudged on with your brainstorming.

“I was thinking about having her cut them open and use their intestines to strangle them, but I’m not even sure if that would even work in real life,” you mused, tracing the edge of your coffee cup with a finger. “I imagine that a person would die from being cut open before they could die from asphyxiation.”

He nodded his head solemnly, turning over your words. You were relieved to find no disgust within his features – only mild interest as he pondered.

“Off the top of my head, I can think of a few issues that one would have if they were to attempt such a thing,” he considered. “For one, there’s the bleeding to contend with. And I would think someone could go into shock and lose consciousness if they’re awake and conscious during the ordeal.

“Which, of course, they would have to be. Otherwise, what fun would it be?”

A surprised bark of laughter escaped your lips, and your hand flew up to cover your mouth as Loki’s spread into a wide, toothy grin.

“You’re bad,” you chided, shooting him a look of mock-reproach.

“Oh, I’m well aware. But so are you, darling. It would appear we’re two sides of the same unconventional coin.”

Your smile softened, and you gave his hand a squeeze before tipping your head back and draining the rest of your coffee, not catching the spark in his eyes as watched your throat.

“But I will think about your idea while I’m at work; maybe I’ll come up with a way for our favorite coroner to pull off such an interesting kill.”

“Thank you, love. But I have to say, Olivia is still only my second favorite coroner.”

__________________

Loki hummed to himself, listening to the way the sound echoed throughout the cavernous theater. Typically, he preferred to bring his victims back to his home so as to ensure more privacy, but he was feeling festive this evening; why not celebrate the occasion with a bit of a change in scenery?

And what scenery it was. He’d first discovered the abandoned theater about a year after moving to New York. It was located on the outskirts of Manhattan, tucked away into a quiet, crumbling corner of the city that few ventured into. Not even the homeless dared take up residence in the old building; Loki had already nearly fallen through the worn, creaking hardwood of the stage once, and the ceiling was dotted with holes that hinted at the establishment’s imminent collapse. It was only a matter of time before man or nature razed the theater to concrete and crushed brick, but he doubted such a thing would happen tonight.

He’d always been remarkably lucky, all things considered.

The plastic of his hazmat suit crumbled and squeaked with his every movement, and it was becoming quite muggy and humid with his own sweat, but he’d been doing this for too long to risk getting caught now. He’d been meticulous, making sure that no trace of himself would be left behind – just his work.

His head perked up when he heard movement from behind him, and he glanced sideways at the evening’s entertainment. He hadn’t cared to learn his name; all he knew was that the man currently encased in duct tape and rope had cut him off in traffic, and that had been enough justification for Loki to follow him home. The poor sap hadn’t made it to his front door, though; no, he had a greater purpose to serve.

He turned fully to watch as the man’s eyes blinked open, sluggishly roving about the room as he recovered from the blow Loki had landed to the back of his head. Once their eyes met, though, he watched as realization washed over his countenance, and in the wake of realization, terror. A deep, guttural groan was muffled by duct tape, and the sound bounced along the high-vaulted ceiling and peeling walls.

“Oh, my apologies,” Loki smirked. “Here, let me…”

He crossed to the man and knelt down, ripping the tape off in one quick, harsh movement.

“Please, I have a family-“ the man started to plead, but the coroner only rolled his eyes before standing up once again.

“I was hoping for something more original,” he sighed disappointedly. “If I had a dollar for every time I heard those words, I would probably be able to afford a second home in Malibu.”

He chuckled at his own joke, tuning out the man’s pitiful wailing as he dragged his toolkit closer. Squatting down, he lined up the three syringes he’d brought with him, just in case, before drawing out his beloved pocketknife. Its ebony handle shone in the dim lighting, reflecting a distorted image of the smile he was currently wearing.

“I-I-I can pay you, too,” he heard from behind him. “Anything you want! I work on Wall Street; I can-“

“Let me ask you something,” he interrupted once again. After lovingly setting the knife down next to the syringes, he brought himself up to his feet.

The man was now visibly trembling, trying to squirm his way out of the rope binding his arms and legs. Loki inhaled deeply through his nose; he could swear that he smelled the fear radiating off of his victim, could taste it on his tongue - metallic and salty and intoxicating.

“What is your name?” he inquired, tilting his head.

“Larry. L-Larry Farmer.”

“Larry Farmer?” He tilted his head back, shoulders shaking with laughter. “That… I’m sorry; I’m being terribly rude, laughing at your name like this. It’s just that you look like a Larry Farmer, if I’ve ever seen one.”

Larry seemed to be too frightened to be offended, though he couldn’t care less about what this soon-to-be-corpse thought of his manners. He reserved them only for those who deserved courtesy, after all.

“Well, Larry,” he continued on. “I’m sure you have at least some semblance of an idea as to why I’ve brought you here.”

“Please, don’t- don’t kill me, I-I’ll do anything-“

“If it’s any consolation, your death is, in a way, for posterity’s sake. You’re going to be famous, Larry. Probably in both the news and my lover’s latest masterpiece.”

He crossed the floor to the hook he’d set up earlier that day, hoping that it would work for its intended purpose. The hook was large and rusted, and connected to it was a long length of rope that he’d slung over one of the exposed beams above the stage. He’d tested his own weight on it, satisfied that it was still sturdy despite the state of the rest of the theater, but now he was starting to have his doubts. Mr. Farmer wasn’t as muscular as him, but he was quite rotund. And while Loki typically didn’t judge such a thing, he was worried that the man would either snap the rope or send the roof tumbling down onto them.

With one final tug to make sure the hook was secured, he started marching back towards the sobbing man sprawled out on the floor, delighting in the way his eyes widened and his feet skittered in their bonds, trying to push himself away from the killer as he approached. With a grunt, he grabbed Larry’s suit jacket and dragged him back to the contraption, his breath ragged by the time he managed to attach the hook to the rope twined around the quivering fool’s hands.

“Well, at least I can skip cardio tomorrow,” he grunted to himself through clenched teeth. His shoes clicked as he made his way to the other end of the hook’s rope, but their sound was almost drowned out by Larry’s screams.

“HELP ME,” he was shouting, his body writhing on the ground in a way that reminded Loki of worms once the rain washed them onto a sidewalk. “PLEASE, SOMEONE, HE’S GONNA KILL ME-“

“He sure is.”

Gripping the rope in both hands, Loki planted his feet and pulled, watching Mr. Farmer’s body as first his arms were raised up, followed by his torso, until, after a lot of panting and heaving on Loki’s part, he was suspended in the air. His feet were kicking as much as they could with tape twined around his ankles, trying to make contact with the ground, but he remained hovering just above it by a few inches.

After tying off the rope to a nearby post, Loki sauntered over to the hanging man, hands folded behind his back as he caught his breath from the excursion.

“There, now. Much better.”

His eyes followed the length of rope upwards, pleased that it looked to be holding fast. Finally, everything was ready for his little experiment. Stooping down, he retrieved his knife, admiring it for a moment before turning back to Larry.

“No, no, no, please, please-“

“Hushhhh, no one can hear you,” he purred, coming to stand before the man who was still persisting in begging for his life.

He rested one of his hands on Larry’s shoulder, gripping tight as he plunged the knife into his gut. The blade wasn’t terribly long – maybe four or five inches – but it cut deep enough that, when Loki flicked his wrist to make a long, clean slash along the lower abdomen, the intestines fell out with a wet, satisfying squish. Or, rather, part of them did.

“O-oh my god…”

Larry’s voice was a low moan of pain, and Loki took a second to bask in it as blood dripped steadily to the floor. His screams had morphed into anguished grunts and groans, which were infinitely more pleasing to Loki’s ear. A quick upwards glance showed that his face had gone unnaturally pale, and his eyes were half-lidded as he threatened to pass out.

“Oh, no, not yet-“

Loki stooped down, grabbing one of the syringes and stabbing it into the man’s chest, injecting it with his thumb pushing down on the plunger. Larry’s body jolted, a gasp parting his pale lips as his eyes once more snapped open.

“There, we go,” the killer purred, tucking the syringe into one of Mr. Farmer’s pockets. “A little bit of adrenaline goes a long way, hm? Now.”

He reached down, holding a length of slippery small intestines between his hands.

“Stay with me for just a little longer more, Larry. Then you can go to sleep; I promise.”

With gentle tugs and steady movements, Loki brought the length of the gut up and around Larry’s neck, drinking in the horror on his expression. A series of disbelieving, shocked gurgles escaped the man’s throat as Loki wrapped each hand firmly in the intestines.

“Wh-y,” he wheezed, surprising Loki with his ability to still speak despite the amount of his insides which were, currently, on his outside. “A-a-re y-ou do- doing thi-s-s-s…”

He chuckled in response, his eyebrows jumping up as he met Mr. Farmer’s eyes.

“Why are all the best crimes committed?” he countered as he started to pull on the length of intestine. The man’s eyes bugged out as he began to choke, and a crease formed between Loki’s eyebrows as he focused on not losing his grip on the slippery material.

He brought his face close to the man now struggling for breath, admiring the way his skin had started to turn from pale to purple. His voice was barely above a whisper as he answered his own question, keeping his fingers tight around the gut gripped in them.

“For love.”

Only seconds later, Larry Farmer’s eyes rolled to the back of his head, and all too soon, he went limp.

Later on, once Loki was showered and resting in his bed, he called you, holding the phone to his ear and waiting impatiently for you to pick up.

“…Hello?”

A smile came over his face upon hearing your voice, and he closed his eyes, replaying the look in Larry’s eyes just before he’d succumbed to death.

“Hello, love. I’ve been thinking about what you said over breakfast yesterday; I think I have a few ideas about how Olivia would be able to pull it off…”

_____________________

There wasn’t enough caffeine in the world for days like this, but the large tumbler of iced coffee in Natasha’s hand would have to do. A matching one was in Steve’s as the two detectives marched into the theater, and she couldn’t help but sigh at the small herd of reporters that had already started to form outside the condemned building.

“I don’t know whether to be impressed or annoyed that they always manage to get here before we do,” her partner mused, casting a disapproving glance towards the news vans and flashing cameras.

Detective Romanoff’s eyes flashed as she followed his gaze, and her full lips twisted into a grimace before taking a sip of her drink.

“I’m gonna go with annoyed,” she sighed. “Vultures, the lot of them.”

“You won’t hear me disagree.”

He lifted the line of caution tape barricading the door for her, and she muttered a thank you before ducking under it and walking into the aged, dingey lobby within. The crushed velvet lining the walls had to be filled with decades’ worth of pollen and dust, and she was already fighting down the urge to sneeze. Officers were dotted here and there, trying to lift a print off of any possible surface, but she’d already been informed that they had yet to find anything useful.

“Detective Romanoff, Detective Rogers.”

The two turned to see Officer Coulson walking up to them, his hands hooked into his belt as he approached. Natasha’s lips twitched upwards; Phil was a gifted officer, a kind man, and a good friend, and seeing him managed to slightly lessen the painful headache starting to form behind her eyes.

“Coulson,” she greeted. “Heard you have quite a doozy waiting for us.”

“That’s one way of putting it. Just wanted to give you a heads up before you go in there. Let’s just say that we’ve already had an officer lose his breakfast at the sight of it.”

One of her manicured eyebrows arched up, and she and Steve shared a look before turning towards the doors that led to the auditorium.

“Is it that bad?” Steve asked, a node of trepidation in his voice.

“It ain’t good.”

With that, Coulson turned and walked out the building, bringing his phone out of his pocket to no doubt give Sergeant Fury a call. Natasha didn’t know what she was dreading more – walking into the auditorium, or having her superior breathing down her neck until they caught whoever had left behind the body.

Without further preamble, she squared her shoulders and pushed past the doors, eyes immediately widening as she saw what was waiting for them. A portly, middle-aged man was dangling from the ceiling by his own bound hands, and as she walked closer, she saw that his own intestines were looped around his neck like some kind of morbid scarf. Steve cursed under his breath, and Natasha nodded her head in silent agreement with the sentiment.

Fuck, indeed.

Doctor Banner, a forensic specialist who’d been working with the police since before Natasha had come to America, turned towards them as they climbed the steps to the stage. His salt and pepper curls were messy and wild, and stubble was thick on his cheeks, signifying that he’d probably left home that morning in a hurry.

“Oh, hey,” he greeted them, though his eyes were on Natasha alone. “You made it; we were about to get the party started without you.”

“I don’t see how that’s a party,” she fired back, nodding towards the corpse.

Banner nodded, glancing back at the body as he rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.

“Yeah, I see your point…”

Steve smiled, glancing between the two before clearing his throat.

“What can you tell us about all of this, Dr. Banner?” he asked, drawing the scientist’s attention back to the matter at hand.

“Oh, right. Yeah, so this is Larry Farmer, age 49. Time of death looks to be about 12 hours ago; we’re lucky that we found him at all. If the local kids hadn’t decided to try and practice their graffiti here, who knows when he would’ve been found?”

He pulled a pen out of his breast pocket, using it to point along the length of intestine twined around Mr. Farmer’s neck.

“He lost a lot of blood, but the burst capillaries in his eyes and face suggests that he died from strangulation, not blood loss. Now, we found an empty syringe in his pocket, and we’ll have to do a few tests on it to see-“

“Wait a minute,” Steve interrupted, holding up a hand. “You’re telling me that this guy was strangled with his own-“

“Intestines, yeah,” the doctor finished for him with a wince. “Pretty fucked up, isn’t it?”

“To put it mildly,” Natasha stated, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “Now what was this about a syringe?”

“Right; we don’t know for sure what it is, but I’m willing to bet it was either something to clot the blood or something to keep him awake. We’ll know in a few hours. The medical examiner will be able to test his blood, too, to see if there’s any other kind of chemical in it that shouldn’t be there.”

“Sounds good,” Natasha nodded. “Do we know which hospital he’s gonna be brought to?”

Hours later, she felt her heart sinking as Steve pulled up to Bellevue Hospital, its familiar shape looming over her as she thought about the man who was, most likely, puttering away in the morgue. Something in her chest ached at the idea, and her displeasure must have shown on her face, because Steve turned to her with a sympathetic glance one the care was put into park.

“He might not even be working today,” he offered, fake optimism dripping from his voice. “Besides, he’s not the only medical examiner here. Farmer might have been brought to Dr. Lyons, or Dr. Stewart, or-“

“The universe would never be so kind,” Natasha snarked before stepping out of the police car, pulling her leather jacket on over her sweater as the cold nipped at her skin.

Her breath turned to fog as she and Steve walked in side by side, shoulders brushing every now and then as she unconsciously leaned towards her friend for support. He didn’t know the whole story – no one but her and Dr. Odinson did – but he knew that there was history between the two of them. Everyone who knew of her prickly feelings for Loki assumed that they’d dated at one point in time, and she let them think that, not wanting to look on the past long enough to recall the twisted web of memories waiting there for her.

The morgue was always kept about ten degrees cooler than the rest of the hospital, and an icy finger trailed down her spine as she made her way to the familiar observation room. And, belatedly, the familiar man working inside.

Dr. Odinson was hunched over the body, sewing Larry Farmer shut with a precise, skillful hand; a small, absentminded smile had settled over his lips, and Natasha felt herself shudder at the sight. She would try to rationalize that he must be thinking about something pleasant, but she’d seen that same smile on his face countless of times before, all while he worked on the corpses laid out on his steel observation table.

Loki liked what he did, for reasons that she frankly didn’t care to learn.

“Dr. Odinson,” Steve called out, prompting the doctor’s head to turn promptly towards them.

“Ah. Hello, detectives,” he greeted, straightening up. He delicately placed the suture onto Mr. Farmer’s bare chest before stepping away and shucking off his examination gloves. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.”

“We wanted to pick up the toxicology report on our way back to the station,” Steve explained. “Did you find anything that could be useful?”

“I found a few things that might be useful to you,” he informed them.

His long legs carried him to his desk in powerful, confident strides, and he retrieved a manilla envelope from the stack of neat papers situation on its surface.

“After running some tests, I-“

He was interrupted by the loud, tinny sound of a phone going off, and Steve’s hand flew into his pocket, pulling his device out and glancing at the caller ID.

“It’s Bucky,” he said, glancing up at Natasha. “Is it ok if I…?”

He trailed off, and a spike of anxiety pierced through her at the thought of being left alone with Loki. But she masked her unease with a tight, forced smile before nodding her head.

“Yeah! Yeah, go ahead; I’ll fill you in on whatever you miss.”

Steve nodded his thanks and walked out, accepting the call and bringing the phone up to his ear.

“Hey, babe, what’s up?”

His voice faded as he stepped out of the room, and no other words were discernable as he spoke to his husband in the hallway.

“…As I was saying,” Loki continued on, turning his full attention to Natasha. “After running some tests, I found an unusually large amount of adrenaline in his blood; Dr. Banner mentioned something about finding a syringe in his pocket?”

Natasha nodded, and Loki handed her the envelope, his fingers long and pale against its surface.

“Well, the exact numbers are in the report, but it was enough adrenaline to keep him conscious throughout the process,” he pushed on, a surprising lack of teasing in his voice. “He was, indeed, killed by asphyxiation, though I suspect that, if he hadn’t have been strangled, he would have bled out within a matter of minutes.

“There was a blow to the back of his head, too, that likely wouldn’t have caused any permanent damage, but it’s worth noting.”

“Well, that would confirm that he was knocked out and then taken to the theater,” she mused, biting her lower lip in thought.

“Either that, or he went to the theater with someone who then decided to knock him out. He was, however, fully awake at the time of strangulation.”

Natasha nodded, tucking the envelope under her arm.

“…Thank you, Dr. Odinson,” she finally stated. “I’ll give you a call if I have any questions about your report.”

Aside from the cynical jump in his eyebrows upon hearing her refer to him by this professional title, Loki offered none of his usual sly remarks or glances before turning on his heel and making his way back to the body.

“Any time, Officer Romanoff.”

She grit her teeth in annoyance, glaring at him as he pulled on another set of gloves.

“It’s detective, Loki. And you know it.”

His movements slowed to a stop, and once more his eyes met hers. She forced herself not to look away, staring back at him coolly until he resumed pulling on the gloves.

“My mistake,” he muttered. “Force of habit. Detective Romanoff.”

The redhead nodded, her curls bouncing in her peripheral vision, and hesitated for a second longer before turning back to the doors. Something in her made her stop, though, and she glanced back at the doctor as he picked up the suture once more, his hemostats clicking as he locked them in place.

“…Hey. You doing anything later?”

She hated the tremble in her voice, hated the sick part of her that wanted him to say yes. God knows she didn’t care for the man; his very presence set her teeth on edge.

But she was weak, and he had always been very skilled at relieving the tension she managed to accumulate during the days like this one.

Loki glanced up at her from under his lashes, but his hands didn’t still in their movements as he answered.

“I’m planning on cooking dinner for my girlfriend, actually.”

Silence stretched out between them, and Natasha did nothing to hide the shock on her features. Something cold wrapped around her lungs and squeezed, and she fought down a tide of embarrassment as she thought back to the woman she’d seen Loki talking to several days before.

“…Oh. I’m sorry, I… I didn’t know-“

“It’s quite alright,” he assured her in a, surprisingly, kind tone. “I always did say that conventional relationships weren’t my forte.”

She nodded, recalling the first time he’d said those very same words to her.

“She must be special, then,” Natasha offered, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. “To have changed your mind like that.”

A fond smile came to his lips, very similar to the one he wore when focused on his work, and though she didn’t feel even a shred of jealousy, it was still unnerving to see.

“She’s very special, Detective. Very special indeed.”

On the other side of the doors behind her, Natasha heard Steve say his goodbyes to Bucky, and she turned to walk out before he could join her in the operatory.

Once Loki was left alone in the room, he turned back to Larry Farmer, a bemused smile on his face.

“…It’s complicated,” he said to the corpse, staring down into his cloudy, sightless eyes.

He didn’t expect an answer as he finished sewing up the wound he himself had inflicted, but the smile on his lips didn’t falter.

#loki #Loki Laufeyson #loki odinson #loki x reader #dark!loki x reader #serial killer!loki #serial killer au #gore

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mono-the-hero · 3 years

Text

The Radio Tower Part 2: The Toy Maker and Escape

((Written a little bit differently to be easier to read, this is going to be quite long, enjoy!!!))

((TW: Mild gore, and disturbing imagery, implied death(it’s not Mono don’t worry) Be safe!))

((Side Note: This will probably be the quickest boss fight in the entire rp))

---

Mono climbed the rung ladder carefully, from the looks of it, the place was tall, really tall, and the ladder should almost take him to the top.

Radios decorated the place, hanging from the ceiling by their chords and wrapped around various points in the ladder, vents were closed off because of radios on the other side, but by what he heard on the other side, it was only filled with those doll monsters.

When Mono made it to the top, he was certain he was safe, the whole floor looked cleaner than any place he’d seen, like it was taken care of, and protected.

Mono was quickly proved wrong by the noises coming from the end of the hall, he wasn’t in the clear yet.

“Hey!” Mono quickly whispered, if there was anything ready to pop out he’d rather have it finished with now, luckily nothing moved, so Mono pushed forward, there were sounds of tinkering coming from the door at the end of the hall, like something was being made.

There was a small hope that it was another kid, an alive kid.

Mono slowly peeks through the door frame.

No.

This man was large, tall, not thin, but definitely bigger than Mono, when the monster turned around Mono felt sick.

Wide opened unblinking watching eyes, teeth bared in a creepy grin the mouth opening and closing again, teeth clacking against each other.

The monster had no lips or eyelids.

The monster is working on one of the creatures, mashing together dolls that don’t look at all menacing into worst fears, Mono could only imagine what the monster do if he got his hands on him.

The room didn’t have many hiding places, so he’d have to bolt for his exit, there was a large sign on the door that read: “The Toy Maker” there were plenty of work benches, jars filled with doll limbs and eyes which seemed to watch Mono wherever he went.

Mono took a deep breath, counted down from three, and ran.

The Toy Maker’s mouth opened wide at the sight of Mono, it’s eyes impossibly got wider as well. Mono almost stumbles due to the grotesque creepiness. The Toy Maker reaches for Mono with absolute speed, each time Mono barely slips past the large calloused fingers.

Mono slides into the next vent with a sigh, Toy Maker can’t follow him in here, and with any luck nothing will come after him.

Mono emerges again into a larger room filled with radios.

The room is eerily quiet.

Mono takes out his newer sword, his arms prepare to swing at any given moment, all he needs is a TV and he can get out of here, no big deal, right?

thump thump thump

Mono turns quickly to the noises that sound behind him, those doll creatures greet him, many of them look like they were made quickly, they pile out of the vents.

A radio turns on, then another, and then one after that, Mono puts away his sword hesitantly, looking around with panic in his eyes, he knows that’s happening.

“No, no, I don’t, I don’t want this!” Mono shouts almost, he tries to deny the signal, putting his hands to his ears.

Mono’s head starts to feel clouded with static, he doubles over in pain and turns around trying to get away as quickly as possible, even if it’s a little slow.

The creatures seem to not like the signal waves.

The Toy Maker opens the door behind the creatures, his teeth clack as he laughs reaching for Mono, his laugh sounds like the combined screams of children, and once again Mono feels sick.

Mono takes his hands away from his ears, the signal grows louder and despite the pain Mono runs.

Mono runs, and runs, and runs, and runs, and runs.

Slide under the work bench, slice a creature, over the drawer, all with Toy Maker in his pursuit.

Mono sees the end of his path, the depths call to him, radios around him light up and make noise, they’re static, singing, talking, screaming in pain.

loud, Loud, Loud, LOUD, LOUD

It’s all a blur as Mono spots a TV past the radios, the relief he feels is too much mixed with his panic.

Toy Maker screeches as more and more radios start on, lights of blue and red blink around as noises get louder and signals clearer.

Mono runs again, his legs hurt, he wants to go home.

The TV is closer, within reach, within arms length, within a hairs length, Mono touches the screen, the radios keep the signal hard to reach.

“Work!” Mono shouts with frustration at his power not working the one time he needs them to, and he looks behind him, Toy Maker gets closer, to the point where Mono can hear each labored breath the thing takes.

Mono feels overwhelmed, there’s too much happening, too much ready to kill him at once.

“Stop it!” Mono’s yell is angry, and amplified, his voice echos throughout the tower, and Toy Maker steps back a radio explodes near him whirring with noise even after it’s destruction, Toy maker screeches and steps back again, then again, then again.

Toy Maker trips and his hand grabs onto the ledge.

Mono unsheathes his sword again, static fills his brain, he walks slowly towards the ledge, and stabs one of Toy Maker’s fingers, Toy Maker starts screaming again, only adding to the terrible noise that plagues Mono’s mind.

Mono slices another finger, and with the final one Toy Maker falls, all that is heard is a long agonizing scream, a crack, then silence, the doll creatures fall to the ground, like they were part of a hivemind.

The radios quiet and Mono is left with blissful silence.

Mono falls to his knees, his breathing heavy, and eyes wide, he turns to look at the pile of doll creatures, and spots his butter knife which was surprisingly still lodged in the creature’s head.

Mono walks over and pulls the butter knife out with some force, two swords are better than one he quickly decides.

The TV crackles to life, and Mono sighs, he can feel bruises forming from being dragged through the vents earlier, and he knows he’ll feel bad about this whole deal later, but right now, Six is somewhere out there.

Mono walks over to the TV tiredly placing a hand on it, he grabs for the signal and feels the familiar sensation of blood running down his nose, but he’s too tired to care.

Being pulled through the TV he opens his eyes to water, dark and scary water, his limbs feel like weights and he can’t move them, he still floats to the top however, and water laps around his skin a feeling of weightlessness yet dread washes over him.

And he rests.

#little nightmares #little nightmares 2 #little nightmares mono #little nightmares rp #mono #radio tower || the toy maker #CHAPTER TWO COMPLETE!!#((sorry if the writing seems off. some of it was done at 3 am))#((LMAOOO))

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vaguelyrotten · 3 years

Text

Like a Lily In a Flood

Title: Like a Lily in a Flood Artist: @myulalie Beta: @another-random-stranger Pairings: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood, mentions of Jimon and Reyhill Word Count: 70k Warnings: Mild Gore, Beheading, Nearly being eaten alive and burned at the stake, Discrimination, Sickness Summary: Alec returns home to find his town plagued by a mysterious illness. Unable to find a cure, he ventures into the woods to seek help from an unlikely source. We must not look at goblin men... This fic was created for the Shadowhunters Mini Bang 2021: Presented by the @malecdiscordserver

Chapter One

It was raining.

Then again, it was always raining in Idris when it seemed to matter most.

Alec dipped out of the carriage with a sigh and made a beeline for the manor’s front door, knowing that he was going to get wet regardless.

“Alec,” his mother said coldly as she opened the door. “It was nice of you to take time out of your busy schedule and join us in our time of need.” He sighed, following his mother into the house and stripping off his soaked jacket.

He stood, dripping wet, in the foyer as Maryse looked him over with a hard eye. “It doesn’t look like the city nor the additional training you are supposed to be receiving are doing you any good. Honestly, what was even the point of sending you? You should have stayed here. You could have taken over the household when your father fell ill.”

He knew that his mother meant for her words to hurt him, and there was a time only a few years ago when they would have, but no longer. Getting out from under his parents’ thumb had done wonders for his mental health. He knew who he was now and that he had the ability to choose his own path.

So right now? Standing in the foyer of the house he hadn’t set foot in for two years, soaked to the bone and under his mother’s scrutiny? He felt nothing...and it felt good. “You have Jace,” he replied after a moment, accepting the towel that their butler Hodge was offering him.

She scoffed, crossing her arms in that way which meant an argument was coming. “Jace has his duties and you had yours. You were supposed to be head of this house, and this town, after your father retired.”

He’d first left for the city under the pretense of studying law but he’d fallen out of love with that and discovered that his true passion was architecture. He, of course, hadn’t informed his parents of his decision to switch his field of study. They’d be disappointed and there would be words, and while their opinions no longer mattered to him, he needed to be in the right frame of mind for that conversation. He didn’t foresee himself wanting to take that dive any time soon. “I left for the family’s best interest. We need to get out of here. This town is killing all of us.”

Before his father had fallen ill, he’d meant that metaphorically. Generations of Lightwoods had lived in Idris for nearly two-hundred years and had held the position of mayor for most of that. In that time, his family had grown crueler and colder. Once, they’d been a light in the darkness for the people in this town, rescuing them from disaster and leading them through. Today, the Lightwoods still led… but they definitely no longer did it with Idris’ best interest at heart.

No, it was all about power. Alec hated that and all the politics that came with it. That’s what he had hoped to avoid by moving to the city. One day, he was hoping he could have his siblings join him.

His mother chose to say nothing more. He draped the towel over his shoulders with a sigh. “Let me see him. I’m here now, at least.” Alec had tried to get there sooner but the spring rain made getting across the river treacherous. He had to wait a couple of days for the water to get back to normal levels. His mother started up the stairs and he followed her without further comment.

“I have the house and the town to attend to. Someone has to run this place while Robert is indisposed. I’ll leave you to it but come find me when you’re done, Alec. We have issues to discuss.” She closed the door behind her, leaving Alec alone in the room with his very ill and unconscious father.

Alec had seen his father in a lot of ways — some good, some bad, but he’d never seen him like this. The older man was pale and clammy and yet somehow looked peaceful. This illness was like nothing the town had ever seen before. Their doctors had been completely stumped...the first few symptoms had appeared — loss of appetite, attention, and other cognitive abilities that soon gave way to fever. The fever never broke and eventually, the patient lost consciousness. They were slowly wasting away into nothing.

Except not quite. They’d realized that the first few patients never got worse in that way that they did when their ancestors had the wasting disease caused by bad fruit. Instead, their body almost seemed to be turning to stone. And that was frighteningly new and uncharted waters.

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t come sooner,” he whispered as he touched the back of his hand gently to his father’s head. The fever was still there and his skin felt all too brittle. “But I promise I will do whatever is in my power to find a way to fix this.”

“We’re glad you’re finally here, Alec,” a voice said, pulling him from his reverie to turn to the door. “We tried to do the best that we could but...neither Izzy nor I are you, and Maryse just wants to keep doing that thing where she insists there’s no problem at all and it’s business as usual.” Jace closed the door quietly behind him and pulled his brother into a hug.

“Do you guys know anything? Mom’s letter was…” His voice trailed off as he searched for more polite words.

“Entirely lacking?” Jace supplied for him. “Unfortunately, nothing solid. They all seem to have fallen ill at around the same time. There are eleven total and they were all fairly recently on a patrol of the borders. We’ve hired sorcerers from the city, hedge witches, even a psychic or two, but no one can find anything wrong with them. They’re just...asleep. Asleep but slowly turning to stone it seems. We’ve got people digging through old books in the archives but no one has turned up anything even remotely similar to whatever this is.”

Alec wasn’t a doctor — he was, in fact, the farthest thing from one. Isabelle knew infinitely more than he did when it came to medicine. What he lacked in knowledge, he made up for in stubborn determination and his ability to think around a situation. If he wanted to find a possible cure for whatever was ailing the townspeople, he’d have to think outside of the proverbial box. “I’ll do what I can,” he said after a moment, giving his father’s unconscious form one last look before stepping into the hallway with Jace at his heels. “I’m not a miracle worker.” But he’d be damned sure he’d try to be one.

“I’ve got to get back. I just wanted to see you before you passed out or Maryse got to you first,” Jace replied, squeezing his shoulder and heading down the stairs towards the front door. “Good luck in there — she’s been… particularly Maryse since Robert took ill.” That fact didn’t surprise Alec at all. His mother had never dealt with change very well.

She was waiting for him in his father’s office, exactly where he had expected her to be. “Close the door behind you, Alec. What I’ve got to say need not fall on nosy ears.” He knew she was referring to Isabelle and her endless curiosity. While he didn’t necessarily agree with his mother’s request, he did oblige. “Take a seat.” She gestured towards a chair in front of the desk — one that Alec had distinct memories of sitting in any time he’d gotten in trouble when he’d been younger and had been called in front of his father. Alec chose the farther seat instead, ignoring the judgemental look that he received.

“As no cure has been found nor diagnosis made and your father’s condition is only getting worse, we need to prepare for the worst.” She pushed a yellowed document across the desk and Alec took it, scanning the page quickly before realizing what he was holding in his hand.

“This is his will,” he stated simply, his fingers glossing over the page as he quickly read through it. It didn’t look like it had been written recently. His mother nodded her head in confirmation.

“He’s been preparing for the worst. He’s already a few years older than your grandfather and your great-grandfather were when they died… and there have been stirrings on the borders. He was afraid that the men would be called to war any day now.” Alec frowned at that. He hadn’t heard of anything going on that would signal the start of a war. Sure, Idris wasn’t a big town but if war was truly coming, he assumed someone in his family would have told him.

“Oh, don’t give me that. There hasn’t been anything truly substantial. Some whispers, some unrest, but nothing more than that. Robert has been...unwell for a while now. He’s grown...paranoid. He had his will drawn up shortly after you left.” Her stoic facade had broken now and Alec could count on one hand the number of times that he’d seen his mother look truly lost.

“It was his idea to say yes when you asked to go to college in the city,” she continued, holding out her hand for him to return the will. “He thought getting out of here would keep you safe and if you were safe there would be someone to take over when he was gone. That’s what he really wanted and I’m sorry Alec, I know you’re enjoying your time at The Institute studying law but the family needs you here now.”

He wanted to argue. Angel, how he wanted to argue with her. He had had to fight tooth and claw to get them to even consider letting him into the city to further his studies. The Lightwoods had been here for generations and not a single one of them had ever left. This was home or at least it should be. Alec had always felt more alienated than most for reasons he tried to keep to himself.

So while yes, he knew that he should fight and argue and insist that he deserved to go back to the city because he had fought so damn hard for it in the first place, he knew that right here, right now… his argument would fall flat. The very best thing he could do was study and beg and plead and crawl through whatever hell he needed to to find a cure for this illness. When his father was well again and his father wanted him safe, he’d have a better chance of getting out of here once more. “Of course, mother, anything for the family,” he replied, trying to keep his voice level. “I’ll get to work at once.”

She sighed, obviously expecting more of a fight out of him and now not really sure how the rest of the conversation was going to go. “No, not at once. You’ve only just arrived and I’m sure you are exhausted. Besides, you’re still dripping on the mahogany floors. Go change before you ruin the antique wood, and say hello to your sister. She’s been waiting for you to get here.”

Alec didn’t bother with a response, simply turning on his heel and heading towards the stables — where he knew his sister would inevitably be hiding. The rain was starting to slow but Alec didn’t want to get even wetter if he could avoid it so he jogged across the cobblestones and pushed open the barn door.

Isabelle was, as expected, at the end of the aisle, illuminated by the grey hues of the rainy weather outside. She raised her whip above her head and snapped it towards a lone bottle on the rail with a loud crack. Alec continued to watch in silence for a few more moments as she set the bottle back up and went again. Finally, he let out a slow clap and watched as she tensed, relaxing once again when she realized who had interrupted her practice session.

“Good job,” he said, opening his arms to allow her to dash across the room to give him a hug. “You’re getting better at that. I dare say you might even be an expert.”

She snorted, her face buried in his shoulder as the two continued to hug. “Try telling that to mom. She still thinks it isn’t proper and that I should focus on finding myself a husband from a nice family. ‘Leave the weapons to your brothers, Isabelle. Men don’t want a wife who can beat them in a sword fight,” she mocked in a very good imitation of Maryse Lightwood.

“Ignore her. Any man you find would be lucky to have you. Besides, if you stopped, who would be my competition?” Alec asked, taking a step back so that he could look down into her eyes. “I’d have to practice with Jace and you know how he is...he—”

“Cheats,” she interrupted with a sniffle. “Yeah, I know. He hasn’t gotten any better, either. Still just as cocky, still a bad liar, and still telegraphs his moves.” She put the bottles back on the shelf and began to coil her whip back up. “He missed you, you know. I do too...and Max. It’s just not the same without you here.”

Alec knew that Isabelle knew exactly why he’d needed to leave. He also knew that she didn’t blame him, but the Lightwood siblings had always been close. He missed not being able to see them more than once a year.

“Mom’s been...harder since Dad got sick. She’s worried, we can tell, but she’s trying to continue as if it’s business as usual and you know how she is when she gets stressed,” Isabelle sighed. Alec knew all too well. Maryse tended to meddle in her children’s lives far more than was necessary.

That had, in fact, been the final straw for Alec. His mother had been dealing with some Idris politics and had decided to kill two birds with one stone. She’d set Alec up with a nice young girl from the village to strengthen the Lightwood family name and had given herself something to take her mind off the stress from work.

Alec had nearly ended up married.

Nearly. Luckily, Jace and Isabelle had stepped up to argue about Alec’s choice and happiness. The wedding had descended into chaos and Alec had set out for the city the next day under the guise of studying law.

“Come on,” he said after a moment, throwing his arm around her shoulder and pulling her back in for a quick hug. “Let’s head back inside. I want to change into something dry and I’ve yet to see Max. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see me.”

----------

Dinner was a quieter affair than Alec expected from a Lightwood family dinner. Without Robert there to judge them, his conversation with his siblings was light and easy. Jace and Isabelle caught him up on town gossip. Max tried to add his two cents when he could but the conversation strayed towards more adult topics like who was marrying who and what the Council had recently decreed.

“Mom says she’s going to send me to boarding school in the fall,” Max stated when there was a break in conversation. “I don’t want to go. I’ll have to wear a scratchy uniform and get up early and it’ll be so far away. I want to be like Jace and fight monsters!”

“Max, don’t talk with your mouth full,” Maryse replied with a glare. “The Carstairs Academy is a lovely school. They’ll teach you manners, for one thing. You’ll learn math, science, and history. You’ll be going to a proper school — like Alec. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

The little boy grimaced. “I don’t want to be like Alec...no offense. I want to kill dragons and fight trolls like Jace.”

“It’s less dragons and trolls and more about upset fathers and a fast horse, little man,” Jace replied, getting a smack on the back of the head from Isabelle. “What? It’s true.”

“That’s enough — apparently, none of my children have manners. Max, it’s past your bedtime. It’s time to let the adults talk.” Max looked about to argue but one look from Maryse had him pushing in his chair and shuffling out of the room. Once they heard the door upstairs shut with an audible thud, she turned her attention back towards her other children. “I’ll be leaving before the sun rises. I’m heading to Alicante tomorrow to seek help from the king. I’ll start in town, we’ll leave two days after that. I’ll be gone as long as it takes to make our case.”

Alec’s fork clattered to his plate. “What? You’re just leaving? Dad’s already indisposed and you’re just going to leave the town without any sort of leadership? You’re going to leave us here alone?” He was well aware that his parents had made some stupid decisions in the past but this had to be one of the stupidest that he’d heard.

“The rest of the Council is still in town, Alec, and in case you have forgotten, I brought you back. We’ve tried everything to cure this and nothing is working. We’re losing more people to this cursed disease each day. We’ve got to try something. Pleading our case to the king and hoping for assistance is all we’ve got left.”

Alec picked up his fork and said nothing in response. He was sure the anger was coming off him in visible waves. “I’m not going alone, Alec,” his mother said after a moment, choosing not to start an argument and stating the facts instead. “Two of your father’s men will be going with me. We’ll only be gone a couple of weeks. With luck, we return with a cure.”

----------

Much later that evening, well after dinner had finished and his mother and siblings had gone off to bed and he’d had time to cool off, Alec found himself in the library staring at shelf after shelf of books that his family had collected over the years. His mother was certain that they’d already exhausted every possible option they had for a cure here, but Alec had never been one to give up that easily.

There had to be something in the thousands of books that they had here — even if it was just a footnote in some ancient text.

Angel, where would he even start?

He walked past the first shelf and ran his fingers gently over the spines of the books, taking in the titles as he did.

A Brief History of Idris, Recipes From the Coast, Nursery Rhymes and Other Tales, The Art of Breaking a Horse…

There was no rhyme nor reason to how anything here was shelved and he wished he was back in Alicante where he had a card catalog to reference at the very least. This could be a futile effort… but he had promised that he’d try, so try he shall.

He pulled the first book off the shelf — A Brief History of Idris —- and flipped to the first page. It was written by one of his ancestors; a Lightwood whose name he didn’t recognize. Maybe, with luck, that Lightwood had stumbled across something — anything — all those years ago that could help him now.

He could hope, at least.

Two hours later, he’d scanned quickly through the book and found it to be completely useless. He’d learned exactly nothing. The ‘brief history’ had been exactly what every child in Idris learned in school. He pushed himself off the chair he’d settled in and placed the book on the shelf. He could skip the cookbook — the likelihood of him finding a cure in that wasn’t high — before he moved on to the next one. Nursery Rhymes.

He meant to skip that one too but as his hand hovered over it, he realized that many myths and legends were often based in fact. It couldn’t hurt to give it a try. At the very least it wouldn’t take him long to read.

Most of the rhymes and stories were useless — schoolyard songs or bedtime stories — but tucked away at the end of the book was one that seemed a bit out of place. This was a longer poem with far more complicated words than the rest of the book. He frowned and glanced at the title.

The Goblin Market.

What?

Alec of course knew of the goblins who lived in the woods — all children in Idris were taught about them. The goblins were dangerous and would kidnap and eat children if they strayed too far into the woods. They used to be friendly with the townspeople but a war broke out and that relationship had ended. The goblins had secluded themselves in the woods — keeping their magic to themselves — and the people of Idris stayed in town and imported anything they needed from the neighboring cities.

It wasn’t an ideal situation but it was the one that they’d come up with quickly, and no one had ever seen fit to try and fix it.

The poem followed the story of two sisters who had heard the goblins crying in the middle of the night as they were trying to sell their fruits. One of the sisters tried what they were offering and fell ill when they returned home. She became listless and began to fade away. Her sister tried to save her and returned to the goblin market to obtain another fruit which she brought home and fed to her sister. The sister was cured and both girls lived happily ever after.

Alec frowned. That was similar to what the town was experiencing now… but the poem mentioned nothing about the sister turning to stone. After all the warnings about venturing into the woods that were drilled into them when they were little, surely none of the men who had fallen sick had been stupid enough to go to the goblins to try and trade.

He sighed and glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room to find that three hours had passed since he’d been in here and it was now well after 2 in the morning. He should retire to his room to get a few hours of sleep before he had to wake up but...perhaps he had time for one more book.

Instead of putting the nursery rhyme book back on the shelf, he pushed it off to the corner of the table. Worst case he’d put it back later. There was no harm in leaving it out for now.

He walked back to the shelf and skipped over the book on horse training. The very next one was titled Herbal Remedies of Our Ancestors.

Finally. That was more like it.

----------

When his sister pushed open the door to the library the next morning, Alec jumped. He glanced at the clock and found that nearly five hours had passed since he’d pulled the book of herbal remedies off the shelf and began reading.

A few pages in, he’d pulled a sheet of paper out from the desk and had begun taking notes. One sheet had turned into two, which had quickly turned into far more than that.

There were so many plants that had been used to treat common illnesses when people weren’t so reliant on modern medicine or the magic from the sorcerers found in the cities.

Catnip for recovery from colds. St. John’s Wort for inflammation. Marigold for skin diseases.

It was a start.

Isabelle came up behind him and glanced over his shoulder with a frown. “That’s a lot of plants you’ve written down. I’m sure the hedge witch tried at least some of them. It’s not like we have a stock of these. Where do you expect to find Elderberry without a day’s ride out of Idris and a day’s ride back? We don’t really have that sort of time.”

He hadn’t considered that.

But perhaps there was a solution.

He glanced out of the window and a plan began to form in the back of his mind.

“I’ll have to visit the woods,” he said after a moment, grabbing the two books and his stack of papers and heading back to his room. He needed to prepare if he was venturing into the unknown.

“Alec! You can’t go into the woods. You know that we’ve all been banned from there. It isn’t safe!”

“I know, Izzy. Trust me, I know, but right now this is the only idea we’ve got to try to save our father and the rest of the people who have fallen sick; unless you’ve got a better idea that you’d like to share?” She remained silent and Alec shook his head. “I’ve got to get ready. Tell Jace to find me if he hasn’t left already and can you saddle Flame?”

She looked like she wanted to say more but eventually relented with a shake of her head. Alec watched her go with a sigh. He knew she was right — heading into the woods was a stupid and reckless idea at best...but it was one he had to try.

He quickly got dressed and grabbed a satchel from his closet. He’d leave the books here, just in case, but he needed a way to carry the list of plants he wanted to collect...as well as any plants he may actually find.

What else did he need to take?

He dashed down the stairs and into his father’s office, thanking the small miracle of his mother heading into town early this morning. Map...he probably needed a map. He rifled through the desk and found one tucked away at the back of a drawer. It was old but it would have to do. After all, no one had been in the woods in years. This was probably the most recent map they had.

Alec looked around, trying to figure out if there was anything else in here he’d need as Jace knocked on the door. His brother frowned at Alec’s frantic state. “Isabelle says you're going into the woods to pick some flowers? Come on, Alec, that’s a stupid idea. We can’t risk losing you too.”

“I know, Jace. I’ll be safe and I’ll be back by nightfall. I won’t push myself unnecessarily today but you know that everything that has been tried hasn’t worked. I came back to try and help with finding a cure, and I’m willing to give this a shot.”

Jace sighed, “What can I help with? Izzy said you needed to see me.”

“I need you to stay here… and I need some weapons. Have you seen my bow recently?” He hadn’t taken it with him when he’d moved to Alicante — he only hoped that his siblings had hidden it and that his parents hadn’t done the unthinkable.

“You’re sure about this?” Jace asked as Alec nodded. “Alright...then I’ll get it and meet you outside.”

Isabelle was waiting with Flame’s reins in her hand. The chestnut thoroughbred stamped his feet impatiently, unhappy to be standing still as long as he had been. Jace joined them with Alec’s bow and a small collection of knives a few moments later.

“I still don’t think this is a good idea,” the blond muttered, handing Alec’s weapons to him one by one before holding the horse steady so that Alec could mount. “Reckless is my style, not yours.”

“I’ll stay close to home. I’ll be on my guard. You’ve crossed through the woods a time or two and lived to tell the tail. I may have moved to the city, Jace, but I’m not inept. Remember who taught you.”

“Oh, trust me, you never let me forget it. Just be careful, alright? There are supposed to be some things in those woods that would frighten even me.” Alec tilted his head in response and spurred his horse on towards the woods. He’d stick to the trail as long as he could, but instead of veering left and heading into town, he’d take the worn deer trail through the trees.

He reminded himself that he would take any chance at saving his people and his family — even if it meant venturing into the deep woods and confronting the dangerous creatures that were said to live inside.

When he said he’d try anything — he meant it in every sense of the word. He still didn’t entirely believe the myths and legends of the goblin men that were said to inhabit Edom Forest but the town’s elders seemed to believe they did truly exist and Alec was certain no one had thought to go to the monsters for a solution.

He’d told Jace and Isabelle of his intentions, but instead told his mother that he was heading into town. It wasn’t entirely a lie. He’d had to cross the bridge that would lead him to Idris before he’d reach the path that would take him off the road and into the forest. When the cobblestones ended, he was faced with an overgrown dirt path that seemingly led to nowhere. He pulled Flame to a brief halt and quickly glanced over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being followed before clicking him on and making his way into the woods.

His first impression of Edom Forest was that it wasn’t anything spectacular. He rode for two hours and noticed that the trees were like any other trees, the birds like any other birds, and there were certainly no trace of goblins in sight. He was beginning to think he’d been tricked by children’s tales when a scrap of color flapping in the wind caught his attention. He brought his horse to a halt.

It was a scrap of purple cloth with texture that Alec had never seen before. He’d never seen anyone in the town wearing anything this color either, as purple dyes tended to be expensive. If they were in the city, sure, but not here in Edom Forest. He left it fluttering where it was tied on the branch as he noticed another piece a little further down the path. If he strained his eyes, he could see a third splash of purple past that.

He had no way of knowing who had left these markers here or for what reason, but right now this was his best lead to finding the goblins in the woods. And like he kept telling himself, he was willing to try anything.

He could be met with swords,traps or wild animals. The goblins themselves might make an appearance. His people had no knowledge of what existed this deep into the woods outside of old wives’ tales and cautionary tales for children. Who knew what he would come across?

He took a deep breath and nudged his horse forward. The gelding hesitated for a moment — feeding off Alec’s own growing unease — before taking a few slow steps in the direction he’d been pointed towards, his head high and eyes wide the entire time.

Alec had certainly been expecting to find something after following the trail of purple scraps. What he hadn’t been expecting to find was a stray horse who was calmly grazing under a tall, oddly shaped Ash tree without a human in sight.

The stallion was solid black and soaking wet, like he’d been ridden hard despite the lack of tack or rider around him. Alec gently jumped from his horse’s back and took a few slow steps forward hoping that he didn’t spook the animal. “Whoa, boy. It’s alright.” He held his hand out gently and let the horse take a cautious sniff. “Surely, you aren’t out here alone.”

The horse’s nose touched the back of Alec’s hand gently. Alec took a moment to look him over. He was small...around 14 hands if he had to guess, and not much bigger than Max’s pony. There wasn’t a lick of white on him, and while his mane and tail were wet and slightly tangled, the rest of him was in good condition. The pony didn’t look like he’d been living rough — so he’d either just escaped or had dumped his rider and somehow escaped his tack. “Where’s your person? I can’t leave you out here like this.”

The horse huffed and nosed at Alec’s pockets. “Hey now, that’s enough. I didn’t exactly come out here prepared to take in a stray. I was looking for something else. I don’t suppose you’ve seen any goblins have you?”

“He likes you.” The voice that came from above startled Alec, and he took a step back from the mysterious horse to glance upwards. There was a man sitting on a thick branch about halfway up. With the sun behind him, Alec couldn’t see little more than that. The voice sounded amused though, and Alec had to wonder what the mystery man was doing this deep into the woods.

“How can you tell?” It was a stupid question, he knew that, but he couldn’t stop himself before the words had passed his lips. He should be asking for a name or providing his, not asking why the horse liked him. Not the smartest thing, he thought to himself.

“He hasn’t eaten you yet,” The man jumped gracefully to a lower branch before performing an elaborate flip for a dismount and landing steadily on his feet. “Kelpies have unusually sharp teeth, a taste for flesh and blood, and an attitude that would give even the haughtiest of lords a run for their money.”

Alec instinctively took a step back, which didn’t seem to phase the horse — kelpie, apparently — who continued to search Alec’s pockets for some sort of snack. “He doesn’t look like a kelpie.” As far as he was aware, kelpies weren’t real. Even if they were, the books said they were supposed to have seaweed in their manes and tales, backward hooves, and razor sharp teeth. This looked like a small, lightly built riding pony.

“And how many kelpies have you actually seen? They wouldn’t be very effective hunters if you could see what they are before they strike.” The other man replied, patting the horse on the shoulder affectionately. “I’m Magnus Bane. And who are you, handsome stranger?”

“Alec.” Now that the sun wasn’t casting a silhouette behind him, Alec could get a better look at the man. He was shorter than Alec, though his heeled boots gave him some height. His skin was the color of honey, his hair was dark with a streak of blue through it, and his eyes…

Alec lost himself in Magnus’ eyes. They were golden with slit pupils...quite like the cats that hung around the barn. And they were enough to tell Alec that the man wasn’t human — no human would have eyes like that.

“You’re a goblin,” Alec stuttered. The books hadn’t really said what the goblins looked like. He vaguely recalled something about a cat’s face and a rat’s tail...or was it furry and like a snail? Humans didn’t have cat’s eyes, though. Even if Magnus weren’t a goblin, he was certainly something different; and that was maybe, just maybe, another avenue that Alec could try for a possible cure.

It was only after he had these thoughts that he wondered if he should worry about his own safety. His hand went to the knife on his belt before he’d realized it.

Magnus hummed, watching the realization cross Alec’s face before he laughed. “Not quite. I’m only half. My father is but my mother was a mere human. Nothing goblin about her. In fact, if I had to guess she was from your town. Idris, am I right? Though, this was quite some time ago, well before you were ever around, pup.”

“How did that happen? And my name is Alec, not pup.” As far as Alec was aware, the goblins stayed deep inside the forest and the people of Idris were told to avoid them. They hadn’t actually been seen in years. Many of the younger people thought they were nothing more than a myth. Alec certainly hadn’t believed in them. Until now, that was. It was hard not to believe when reality was staring you in the face with cat’s eyes, a wisp of blue hair, and a sharp look.

“How do you think?” Magnus replied, fishing around in his bag for an apple. “‘We must not look at goblin men, we must not buy their fruits, who knows upon what soil they fed, their hungry thirsty roots.’ That’s how it went...I think. It’s been a while since I’ve read it. Books aren’t exactly easy to come by out here.” He took a bite and held the rest out towards the kelpie.

“I’m sorry, that was a stupid question.” Alec knew which poem Magnus was referencing. He had run across the poem during his research but he’d passed it over as nothing more than a cautionary tale for children. Maybe he should have paid more attention.

“It’s fine, I’m used to it...and you didn’t know any better. How many dashing half-goblins have you ever met in your life?” Magnus winked and Alec felt a blush rise across his face.

“You’d be the first.”

“And what are you doing out in the middle of the woods looking for goblins, my lord? Aren’t you humans warned of the dangers you could find? I’m pretty sure that poem specifically mentioned all the terrible things that could happen to a fair maiden.”

Alec snorted, and continued to rub his hand down the kelpie’s nose. “Well, for one I’m not a fair maiden, nor am I a lord actually, and to answer your question: I was hoping to hunt down a lead on the illness that’s currently plaguing the village.”

“And you think the goblins are to blame?” Magnus’ voice had been playful before, but now his words took a cutting tone.

“No, of course not,” Alec replied hastily, holding up his hands in surrender. “We’ve co-existed, sort of, for a while now. As far as I know, nothing has changed in that regard. I’m just…” he sighed and glanced back towards the direction he knew his parents’ house to be. “I’m hoping for answers, I’m willing to try anything at this point. They’ve called physicians from the city, a psychic or two, a hedge witch...the people who have fallen ill are good people. They don’t deserve what’s befallen them. I found a book in our collection last night. It’s got some herbs in it...so I made a list. I’m no expert but it can’t hurt to try.”

He chose to leave out that some of those people were only mostly good — his father certainly wasn’t the best man, but there was no reason Magnus needed to know that. Not yet.

“I haven’t heard of a disease in the village, but I wouldn’t go looking towards the goblins for a cure. They aren’t the most helpful of people — they’re more liable to cause you harm than anything close to help.” Magnus tapped his finger against his chin in thought. “An illness you say? You humans are susceptible to so many things. There was a plague about a hundred years ago if I recall. What makes you think it isn’t something like that?”

“Well, for one thing no one has actually died,” Alec replied as Magnus circled him slowly, feeling every bit like a deer cornered by a leopard. “It starts with a fever. Eventually, confusion. Finally, they fall into a deep sleep. And…” His voice trailed off. That did make it seem like a normal illness but Alec knew there was more.

“And?” Magnus had stopped circling him to lean against the tree with his arms crossed.

“Their skin gets hard. It feels almost like stone? I know that probably sounds stupid. I just don’t know how else to explain it.”

“It’s not stupid at all,” the half-goblin replied. “Magical illnesses can have all sorts of weird side effects. A friend of mine once turned prickly.” There was a pause as he looked Alec over once more.“You said you had a list?” Magnus asked finally, pulling on a purple tailcoat that had been discarded haphazardly behind the tree. “Can I see?”

Alec pulled it out of his bag and handed it over to him. “You’d help me find these? You think this might be caused by magic?”

“Magic, a curse, anything is possible but if you’ve tried as many cures as you say you have then it’s probably safe to assume that it’s something your people haven’t seen before. Ergo, magic.” Magnus read over the piece of parchment with a frown. “Some of them are out of season and others aren’t in this part of the woods but I can show you where to find the majority.” He glanced around before a smile crossed his face that had Alec’s heart flipping. The half-goblin bent down and plucked a small purple and yellow flower from the ground in front of Alec. “Heartsease. Kiss-Me-Quick. Banewort...also known as a wild pansy. It’s good for skin conditions and colds. I believe that’s on your list.”

Alec felt a blush rise in his cheeks as he took the flower. Why on earth was being handed a single flower by a strange (but beautiful) man he just met affecting him this way? “Thanks,” he managed to stammer after a moment. He gently wrapped the flower in a cloth and placed it in his bag.

Magnus’ eyes twinkled as he grabbed a lock of the kelpie’s mane and hoisted himself on it’s back. “I saw some Meadowsweet earlier this morning. It isn’t far and I wouldn’t mind collecting some myself. It’s good for pain.” He glanced back at Alec with a raised eyebrow. “Are you coming?”

Alec had never mounted a horse faster in his life.

----------

“Do you even know what you plan on doing with these?” Magnus asked as they wove their way through a dense and varied forest.

“The book had some suggestions,” Alec started, frowning as they passed by a group of trees with large, bell-shaped yellow flowers. “Though I’m by no means an expert. I went to school for architecture, not herbalism.” He pulled his horse to a halt and reached out to touch one of the flowers that was now hanging eye-level with him. “I’m sorry — is this Angel’s trumpet? I thought it only grew in the tropics.”

Magnus laughed. “Or Devil’s trumpet, depending on who you ask, and I wouldn’t mess with it. It’s not exactly safe. Well, it’s not necessarily poisonous to touch but I still wouldn’t mess with it. It's hallucinogenic, among other things...and I don't think a bad trip was really what you had in mind when you came out here today.”

“And how’s it growing in the middle of Edom Forest? If it’s that dangerous I would feel much better if it grew far, far away where the weather is much more suited to it?” He nudged Flame until he was level with the kelpie.

Magnus merely laughed. “That’s the beauty of magic, my dear Alexander. There’s no rhyme nor reason to it. Anything can happen.” He raised his hand as blue sparks danced around his fingertips. “Haven’t you ever noticed that it never snows in the woods? You’ll have three feet out there and yet, not a flake falls here. It’s warm and sunny year round.”

As he said that, Alec realized that he hadn't noticed. He’d never paid much attention to the woods since they were forbidden to go there, but it wouldn’t take a genius to see that the weather was entirely different a few feet away.

“Don’t look too distressed,” Magnus chuckled upon seeing the face that Alec was making. “There’s all sorts of spells and old magic around. Spells that grew into the very trees, wards set by goblins past and re-set by goblins present...other magical creatures whose very existence spells safety to those who live around them. You wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t been purposefully trying to look through the magic. The Look-Not spells surrounding the woods are strong.”

Wait, Alec thought as he kicked his horse into a trot to catch up with Magnus and the kelpie. “What other magical creatures? I thought it was just the goblins that lived in the woods? Well, I guess the goblins and the half-goblins.”

“It may have started with the goblins but it certainly didn’t end with them.” Magnus stopped a moment later, sliding off the back of his horse to kneel in front of a grassy plant with yellow flowers. “Toadflax. This was on your list as well, I believe. It’s good for treating rashes and the like. You make it into a compress using milk. I hope the specifics are in your book. This is more my friend’s area of expertise than mine.” He handed the flower to Alec who wrapped it gently in more white cloth and placed it in his bag.

“What’s your area of expertise then? And you still haven’t answered my question. What other creatures?”

“My area of expertise is magic itself, of course. I’m uniquely qualified to be good at magic,” Magnus replied as butterflies made of blue energy danced around them.

“And what makes you qualified?” Alec asked, crossing his arms. “Are all goblins this cryptic?”

Magnus laughed, “I’m not being cryptic, I’m being coy...and I can’t tell you all my secrets on the first date — no matter how pretty you are.”

Alec huffed as another blush rose on his cheeks. “This isn’t a date...but fine, how about you elaborate on the other magical creatures thing then? I don’t like finding out that everything I’ve ever known about a place is false.”

The goblin studied him for a moment before he nodded. “Very well. Once we put the spells and the wards up to stop the needless death that was happening at the time, humans were driven to stay away. It was the only thing that we could do to keep ourselves safe without being driven out of our home. Because we were now safe from humans, the other creatures that were hunted for merely being creatures of magic began to take refuge here as well.”

Magnus chose not to mount back up so Alec slid from his horse’s back as well. They walked in silence for a moment before the half-goblin turned around. “Actually, it’s quite curious that you got through. You should have wanted to turn tail as soon as you got too close.”

“I was uncomfortable,” Alec said after a moment, recalling the sense of dread that had washed over him before he’d guided his horse off the path. “But I’d do anything to help my family...even if that means taking a risk I’m not necessarily meant to take.”

Magnus had stopped again, this time in front of a fluffy, white, flowering weed. “The promised Meadowsweet. It’s typically made into a tea or an elixir. Pick your poison. Well, not poison but I’m sure you catch my meaning.”

Alec collected a few of the flowers as Magnus did the same. “I’m not sure that tea is going to do much good when the patients are unconscious.”

“You’ll have to try one thing at a time. Maybe treat the symptoms first until you have a better idea of the root cause...perhaps you’ll get lucky and by treating one you’ll learn more about another. Medicine, like magic, is a lot of trial and error.”

“Well, I’m certainly willing to try,” Alec said after a moment. He threw his bag over his horse’s withers and pulled himself into the saddle once more. “I seem to be the only one left willing to try. Everyone else seems to have given up. They’re getting ready to petition the king for some kind of miracle.”

Magnus hummed as he pulled himself onto the back of his own horse. “Well then, I suppose we better find a few more for you to try. It sounds like you don’t have any time to lose.”

Alec followed the half-goblin dutifully all afternoon, trying to remember each and every instruction he was given as he was handed plant after plant. Finally, the sun began to duck behind the treetops and Alec grimaced. “I best be getting back. If I don’t return before dark, my brother will send a search party. Trust me, we don’t want the kind of mess he tends to bring with him.”

“Fair enough,” Magnus replied with a smile. “I figured that would be the case. Your trail awaits, my lord.” He swept his arms towards the dirt path that Alec had taken when he’d first entered the woods this morning. He hadn’t even realized that they had circled back.

“Thank you for all your help today. I’m not certain I could have found any of these without you.” He probably wouldn’t have even managed to find one if Magnus hadn’t helped.

“It was no trouble at all — definitely an interesting way to spend an afternoon. The sight sure didn’t hurt either.” Alec blushed and Magnus plucked a single blue flower with a yellow star center off the ground and held it out to him.

“What’s this one supposed to do?” Alec asked as he took the flower and twirled it gently in his fingers.

“Absolutely nothing. I just think it’s pretty. Good luck playing doctor, Alexander.” With that, he turned his horse and trotted back into the woods, leaving Alec standing in the trail alone.

----------

My Dearest Cabbage,

I’ll preface this by saying that yes, I do know exactly what you’re going to say after reading my letter so I will save you the hassle of a fire message in response.

Yes, what I did was incredibly stupid and reckless. Trust me, I’m well aware but you know how I do so love a good enigma.

It seems some sort of mysterious and possibly magical illness is plaguing the citizens of Idris. They’ve apparently tried all sorts of methods to heal their sick to no avail.

No, I haven’t been taking a risky trip into the city. Trust me, I’ve learned my lesson there. One of their people somehow managed to get through the protections and spells in the forest and came looking for plants that could potentially be used to treat the disease.

I have my doubts that any will work for him, but I sent him home with some regardless.

Could our wards be fading? No mere human should be able to pass over the border. We should meet sometime soon to check that the spells still hold strong. They are all that are standing between us and the people of Idris.

I’ll keep you advised if I receive any more information.

Delightfully yours,

M.B.

#shmb2021 #malec #magnus bane #alec lightwood #fanfic #like a lily in a flood

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constancecunningham · 3 years

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A Ghost is a Wish || Constance, Blanche, and Agnes Bachman

TIMING: Current/the Winter Solstice

LOCATION: The Common

PARTIES: @harlowhaunted, @constancecunningham, Agnes Bachman (written by @chloeinbetween)

SUMMARY: Constance and Blanche visit the seasonal lights in town to make their yuletide wishes and find themselves haunted. Constance makes a choice.

CONTAINS: mild gore, violence

Beneath the copse of glowing evergreens in the Common, Constance could almost believe in Christmas. The lights, steadier than flame and enchanted with colors she hadn’t realized could burn, spilled over the ground and painted the faces of spellbound children. Here, icy violet, th see ere pale green and rosy pink; there was no sense to it that she could discern beyond the thrill of beauty itself. “Your world has brought such wondrous magic to the mundane,” she said to Blanche, so close to her ear she could almost imagine the tickle of her hair. “Is it always like this? Such wonderful displays in the open for even the most wretched to see up close?” It was so magnificent with the light so bright in the evening it puddled on the floor in a magic carpet. Constance twirled in it and imagined the ground truly had transformed into the richest, softest fibres, the kind that would send you to sleep in an instant with their comfort. “It seems to me this should be the site of a great commemoration, a pageant or a gift. What would you ask for, Blanche Harlow?”

The colors shown through Constance’s transparent form, illuminating her in a strangely beautiful way that made Blanche happy only she could witness her. She was far happier than she had been in a long time. It was strange how such a simple outing could release the tension and stress built up for weeks and weeks on end. “I didn't believe in magic for the longest time,” she told Constance, jogging a little to catch up with her. “But I always thought the lights in the trees here this time of year was the closest thing to it.” Christmas with the Harlow’s wasn't an extravagant affair unless there was some holiday themed dinner party her parents hosted for work. After Blanche turned eleven, they rarely even bothered to get a tree unless they had to. More than once, Adrien and Blanche had woken up to a cold, empty house with money on the counter to order dinner and two wrapped presents - one for each of them. The Common was the only place where she could really appreciate the spirit - no pun intended. Blanche considered Constance’s question, her face flushing a deeper pink as it had taken to doing whenever she said her full name. “I’ve never been good at remembering what I want when I'm asked,” Blanche smiled ruefully at Constance, and she had the urge to reach out and grab her hand. A pang of sadness hit her when she remembered her hand would just pass through. Blanche looked down at the ground, thinking quietly.

“I also tend to wish for things I can't have.” She kept the bitterness out of her voice with surprising ease, and she seemed to recover almost immediately, looking up at Constance with a warm smile. “And you? Wha - What would you ask for?” Blanche asked.

“Sometimes a dream is the best thing to want,” Constance said. “So long as you know it. A gift you never receive can never disappoint and never betray.” Not for the first time, Constance felt that it would have been a mercy if Agnes’ false kindness had never touched her at all. At least when she was starving for food and kindness at once, her happiness could never grow more dangerous than a fairy tale. What good was learning what love could be if it only lasted for three years before growing teeth? What use had she for hope when it was doomed to be dashed? And yet for the first time, Constance hesitated when Blanche asked her what she would ask for. Naturally, there would be more peace in the world if Morgan Beck was stamped out for good. The distress she caused her friends, the harm she passed with her duplicitous, hypocritical Bachman nature would end, and Constance’s suffering would have been worth something. But if she could have two wishes, if the gifts could be guaranteed, or remain a dream forever… “It would have to be something wonderfully impossible, wouldn’t it?” She said, smiling back at Blanche. “Perhaps…I would like to climb into one of those pictures on your computer, like that lake in Prague, with the flowers falling onto the shimmering water? Perhaps simply to be alive again for a day before it all ends, in a body that touches and feels things like the living do…” There was at least one thing Constance knew she would enjoy touching. Oh, how sweet to dream such safe, impossible dreams…

Constance drifted closer to Blanche, another question on her lips, but she froze, aghast, when she saw a face drifting through the evening crowd. Agnes was much changed, more of a woman than Constance ever had a chance to be, the cruel wretch. But the broad features remained, haunting in their preserved beauty. “What are you doing here?” Constance growled.

Cold fear dropped over her as she watched Constance’s expression change from wondrously thoughtful to the twisted fury Blanche had come to associate with the Bachman family. It took her a moment to understand why, but she soon saw the familiar form of Agnes gliding through the crowd. “No,” Blanche said, her horrified voice barely a whisper. “Go away,” she pleaded, louder this time. It took a moment to shake herself of the ice that gripped her, before she planted herself in front of Constance, looking between them with a mixture of fear and a steely determination that she was unwilling to let go of. The only moment of hesitation was deciding who she was going to speak with first. She turned to Constance. “Please,” Blanche said softly, only for Constance to hear. “We don't have to do this. Not here. Let's go back to the lights.”

She had weighed her options over and over since that first night with Morgan by the poolside. Twice, Agnes had begun the trek back to Texas by herself, before turning back. Her heart tore in two opposing directions. Lights did not flicker and objects did not rattle when she felt things, the tempest of her emotions locked under her corset even in death, but they still twisted inside her until she felt like nothing but her indecision. It threatened to swallow her whole. The more she thought, the more only one solution seemed available to her. An end to her line’s suffering, the protection she hadn’t afforded her children in life, an end to her regret… and some kind of peace for Constance, if she would have it. She had moved through town for days, searching and at once hoping she would not find Constance at all, until she finally spotted her at the Christmas market. Agnes had been surprised to see how young she was, frozen in time decades before Agnes had been. The carefully prepared words fled her mind. All plans fled her mind. She didn’t respond to the living girl beside her, didn’t even consider her as relevant.

“Constance,” Agnes said softly, her face the picture of regret.

Agnes was always going to get more life than Constance had ever had. By design, she had granted her at least three more years before the floodgates opened on her suffering. But she had not imagined this. Agnes had wrinkles around her translucent eyes. She had a manner of dress Constance had never even seen. As far as she knew it was something out of a fashion plate, a grotesque extravagance she didn’t deserve. How worthless had her sacrifice been, that Agnes could gain this in the time between her undoings?

The tree lights flickered and flared, humming faintly.

Agnes’ face was as sad as Constance had ever seen, heavy and bent. How many times had Constance seen her present herself like that? So sorry and sad and wanting Constance’s comfort, her forgiveness. Constance drifted through Blanche to face her. “You have no right,” she declared, her voice rigid with fury. A section of lights sparked behind her and went dim. Control. Concentrate. This would not be her undoing. “Whatever reason you have come for, you have no right! Not like this! Like you’re sorry!”

“Constance please!” the desperation in Blanche’s voice caused her to raise her voice, flinching as Constance phased through her. It was hard not to feel the hot fear as her skin turned to ice, whirling on her heels as she watched Constance’s fury. “Please stop!” Blanche rushed to her side, looking at her. Lights were flickering, and Blanche's shouting caused several families to look over at her in concern. Blanche didn't care, the negative energy in the air sinking into her, resting like broken glass under her skin. She knew this feeling. The last time she had felt it was during the first failed exorcism when Cordelia’s spirit shifted into a poltergeist. Constance was already so close…Panic bubbled in her. “Don’t do this. We can go back - let’s enjoy the lights! Let’s enjoy the stars! Please! Please!” Before she realized what was happening, her voice broke and a large knot was tied in her throat. She couldn't properly breathe and her eyes were wide with unshed tears, and she looked to Agnes. “Go away,” she pleaded with her now too because she could feel the change in Constance’s anger, teetering so close to the point of no return. “Please. You don't know what you’re doing to her. You don't know what you’ll do. Please go away so we can go back. Please.”

Agnes did not shift in response to the flickering lights, nor Constance’s rage. She had always been the summer breeze to Constance’s fiery light, in joy and in grief. “I am sorry,” she said softly, knowing they would still hear. She looked to Blanche, still unsure after their last meeting, but Blanche had been right. She had been cowardly to avoid this before now. “I need to set this right. There must be an end to this suffering, for Constance too,” Agnes said desperately to Blanche, before turning back to the ghost of her ex-lover. She was no stranger to all of Constance’s tempers, some earned and some not in the life they had almost built together. Constance looked like a magnificent storm, too young by half for what she had suffered. “I am sorry, Constance. I want to do better by you in death than I ever did in life. You deserved better.”

“Better?” Constance spat. “Better is if I had used you for the curse! Better that you had never brought me to your home with your worthless—” Constance choked on the word. How pathetic, how cruel that she still could not speak of anything so impossible as love when there was no end to how loud or long she could scream and no point in holding back anything. Still, the word was burned out of her mouth. She felt its ghost in her, a hateful feeling that would fall into Agnes and her soft, quiet tears if she let it.

Constance clenched herself. Behind her, lights cracked and a tree fell to darkness. The decorations of ribbon, plastic, and glass quivered, rattling the branches. A child cried.

“What could you know about better?” Constance hissed. “What do you understand about right? Nothing about you is right, you, your cursed life—-” A horrifying thought struck Constance. It was hiding in the shape of Agnes’ cheeks, the way she frowned. Constance remembered those faces from long nights whispering her room, dreaming their way out of that house. But she also knew it from a crowded classroom, a bedroom window, a picture in the newspaper of Morgan Beck. They weren’t just any Bachman features. They were Agnes’. “Morgan is one of yours, isn’t she?” Not a great niece or a cousin or some other distant branch from the same guilty family, but her direct spawn. “Is that the real reason you’ve come? To stand by your blasted family again?” Of course, of course it couldn’t be for her.

The magic of the night was broken the second lights started exploding. No one was paying her any mind, and Blanche felt like she was going to be sick. Things were spiraling out of control too quickly, and she didn't know what to do. The only thought in her mind that it wasn't supposed to end like this, not this time. Constance would choose right, and her soul would be able to truly be at peace. She would be close to the edge, but never fall. “You don't understand,” Blanche pleaded with Agnes as the weight of Constance’s rage hit her. “You don't understand what you're doing to her. Go away, this won't help. None of this will help!” Blanche once again stepped between the two, trying to create a living barrier that would knock Constance back to how she was before. “Stop! This isn't the place for this. This isn't the - this isn't the - you can’t!” her voice cracked on the last word, and Blanche knew at that moment what she would ask for. There was a scream as glass ornaments started exploding, and the child’s cries grew louder. How could Blanche understand and articulate it in a way to defuse the fury that was raging through the Common? The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees, and she clutched the fabric of her jacket around her, looking between the two helplessly. The betrayal and anger and love wasn't completely foreign to Blanche, but she has never been hurt the way Agnes hurt Constance. People were starting to panic, confused and afraid. “Constance, look at me, please. You don't have to do this. You can't. Let’s leave. Let’s go. Go with me, please.”

In life, every time they argued, it had been a one sided affair. Constance would be angry, Agnes would make herself smaller and offer no resistance, and with no where for her anger bounce against, Constance would be even more annoyed. Those had been minor arguments, forgetting when they had arranged to meet, disagreements about local gossip, the meals which they had packed for their summer picnics. Nothing as grand or as terrible as this. Constance was owed so much more than another spineless moment. “You are right. I cannot change the past, no matter how might I might wish to.” She glanced at Blanche. “I understand better than I have for decades. You helped me understand,” Agnes said truthfully, talking past her to Constance again as the world rattled with Constance’s rage. “No! No, Constance, I came here for the both of you. To do what I didn’t before, to protect you from my family.” And her family from Constance, too.

Control. Concentrate. Control. Behind Constance, glass shattered and children cried. Snow boots pattered on the ground as people backed away or shuffled back to their business. Such cruel noise, such destruction. Blanche was calling, screaming, and pleading at her side.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do!” Constance snapped. She turned her attention for an instant. Blanche’s face was pink and wet with tears. Her eyes, so large and uncomprehending, were that of a wounded animal. Perhaps she didn’t understand, perhaps she couldn’t. If she did, she wouldn’t be trying to stop her. “We shouldn’t have to be the ones who leave,” she snarled. “You know. You know what she did to me! What all of them did! Why would you ask that of me?” Of everyone Constance had met, Blanche had been the one she thought would let her free, would stand with her. Not help her, she was too gentle for that, but to stand, to make it so she did not feel so alone… Constance’s face twisted with hurt. Perhaps she should never have wished for anything at all, impossible or not.

“Protect me,” Constance said bitterly, her voice warbling. She would be crying herself if she had any tears left to give the world. “How would you even know what that word means, when I bent myself broken protecting you!”

The streetlamps around them flashed with panic.

“What is there left to protect me from? What is there left to do to me?” She screamed. She flew to Agnes until their forms nearly blended into one. “What is it? I should be glad to know the truth from you for once! What is it? How do you protect me? How do you do anything for me? You stole my life and even my curse wasn’t enough to keep you from tormenting me! I gave everything to make what you did to me stop hurting! And look at this! What is this! How are you still--” Looking at me, pitying me, haunting me. Constance stared hard into Agnes, pleading for answers she knew would never come. But worse than the ignorance was the helpless pull inside her, still wanting someone, maybe anyone, to love her. But oh, that was never to be in this or any other world. Constance screamed and at last let go.

You helped me understand. The irony wasn’t lost on Blanche as the sting of Constance’s rejection settled like a heavy stone in her chest. She had questioned Constance and her motives time and time again, and Blanche wanted nothing more than to reach out and grab her by the shoulders. She would feel her warm skin and hold her as they cried under the ruined lights and they could move on and heal and all would be well. “You don’t know what you’ve done. What you’ve chosen,” Blanche whispered. Her words to Cordelia echoed in her mind. The only tragedy is a woman who ruined other people’s lives to the point where she ruined herself. Blanche wanted more for Constance, she deserved more than to perish in the ruins of her past. She wouldn't see that though, she would only see what she thought she wanted. With one final scream, Constance was lost, and Blanche’s hope was gone.

She couldn’t focus on the lights exploding or the horrible wind that had picked up around them, scattering residents and tourists alike with ear splitting screams. Blanche could only feel the raw power radiating off Constance. Focus. A small voice hissed through the static that raged in Blanche’s mind. What do you do now? Blanche realized she was crying and she was more than angry. She didn’t quite know what she was. Grief stricken, maybe? Her skin felt like it had been set on fire and her insides had melted and she was so - Focus! The voice snarled, louder this time. It was loud enough to make her stagger backwards, reorienting herself.

She could see and feel the electricity in the air as she finally moved, fumbling from her purse. “Agnes go. I’ll find you later! You need to get out of here, now. Find Morgan.” Blanche blinked tears out of her eyes as her hand gripped the iron rod. She rushed forward, much like she had in Morgan’s classroom, ready to fight. She didn’t want to - god, she didn’t want to. Constance needed more. Deserved more. Why didn’t she just listen? She did everything right, and Constance still -- Focus. There would be time, Blanche realized, for grief later. There would be time to scream and cry and figure out why it felt like someone knocked the wind out of her. She could figure out where to go from here later. Now she had to dissipate Constance before she killed someone. Again. Unable to choke anything out other than something between a battle cry and scream, Blanche swung her iron.

“Your soul. Constance, I know I’m much too late for everything else, I can’t change that, it would have been worse not to-” Agnes shied away from Constance’s rage, even now it could no longer touch her. There was a tiny pulse in the air, no more notable than the click of a necklace chain giving way. She didn’t understand what happened, other than the tears on Blanche’s cheeks and her insistence that she needed to go, but she fell back, still pleading with the face of fury beating down on her. “Constance, we can be better than this. Both of us. We can end this now. I forgive you.” Her eyes widened as Blanche jerked forward, and only now did Agnes actually move away, avoiding the iron so she wouldn’t be forced away.

Constance unspooled on the wind, the threads of her soul, her sad, desperate softness fluttering away like her hair from its ribbon. She heard Agnes speaking, her high little voice like some trained bird. But for once nothing in her reached out to harmonize and rescue her voice from being swallowed by the world. Constance reached out to the world now and the wind roared, drowning out every sound in the common, ripping ribbon off the branches and blowing broken glass.

“Forgive me?” She screamed. “I never betrayed anyone! I never hurt anyone until you! You did this to me, you wretch! I wish I’d done half the things you said I did! I wish I’d murdered all of you and had done with it!” She couldn’t stop Agnes’ heart or dash her to the ground, but she could rip the glass from the streetlights and tear the shards through her form. She saw Blanche coming with the iron and shoved her back. “I would curse you too if I still could!” Blanche’s body flew and crashed into the Christmas trees. “You think I didn’t know you could betray me too? That I hadn’t learned my lesson yet? That I was your precious fool?”

The wind was too loud for Constance to hear anything at all, but around her, humans scuttled for cover like ants. Some fell, silly parcels spilling on the ground. Mouths opened in fright, but they didn’t understand what was unfolding before them, and they did not understand her hurt. But she could make them. She toppled the lamp posts, snapping them in half like they were only twigs and sparked the Christmas lights into flame, torching the branches with flames greater than all the candles in the world. Constance only had to bid them to rise and they flared, engulfing the trees all the way to the top. With a twist of her hand, Constance snapped a web of rainbow lights free and sent them flailing, thrashing, into puddles of melting snow. Power rippled white into the ground. The wind fell and in the quiet, the common drummed with the sound of falling bodies. Constance raised one of the burning trees and hurled it into a gazebo where a thick crowd had thought to take shelter. “I am going to do what I should have months ago, and I will take the blood of anyone who tries to stop me as well, since she doesn’t have any left for me to take!” Constance roared. She pointed an angry finger at Agnes. “This is your fault,” she hissed. “All of this is you! Forgive yourself for it, I dare you!”

Blanche should have known that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it had been in the classroom. She was knocked backward before she was thrown off her feet completely by an invisible force. Her body crashed into the tree. Branches and lights tore into her as her torso slammed into the trunk of the tree before she bounced down to the ground, hitting the frozen earth with a hard thump. In an instant, all the air in her body was gone, and Blanche could only gasp for breath. With no air to respond to Constance’s screams, she could only let out a wheezing objection - Blanche didn’t betray Constance. She was upfront from the beginning since Maxine had died, since Constance had almost killed Nell. Blanche wasn’t about to let her hurt all of these people, no matter the devastation she felt in her heart. If Blanche was truly going to do what she had to, it didn’t matter if it was bad people like Lydia Griffin or August Thompson. And it didn’t matter that Constance Cunningham had been twirling under the Christmas lights, beautiful and good, because she had lost herself.

There was that voice again, as Blanche lay there, barking orders at her as the initial shock from the collision. Focus! Move! Blanche hurled herself out from under the tree as it went up into flames just she realized just how much pain she was actually in. Pain was practically a pastime for Blanche at this point, so she staggered to her feet, eyes blurred from hot tears. Stumbling forward, she saw the flamed tree uprooted from the ground, soaring - soaring - soaring towards the cowering people in a gazebo.

“No!” Her hand flew out. It was too late, she only managed to knock it off course a little, hitting the side of the gazebo instead of head on. There was an eruption of flame. Screams pierced Blanche’s ears and she staggered back. The crowd was scattering, running far away from the electricity crackling off the lamp posts, far away from whatever horror had been thrust upon the common. The energy was going to make her sick and the pain was getting worse.

Focus. Make the next choice. Focus, dear.

With a start, Blanche realized she recognized the voice, and she knew what she needed to do right then. Lunging for her fallen bag, Blanche hissed for Agnes to follow her, before she forced her aching body to sprint as she fumbled for her phone.

She needed help. Now.

#a ghost is a wish #wr blanche #wr chatzy #wr blanche chatzy #wr agnes #wr agnes chatzy

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chibistarlyte · 4 years

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Below the cut is a master list of all the fics I’ve written for Boku no Hero Academia, organized by ship and in order of oldest to newest, all in one convenient spot. Keep checking the original post for more fics as I write and publish them!

tododeku fics

spit the ashes from my mouth rating: g trigger warning(s): childhood trauma, mild blood

He’d thought he’d gotten over it. That he’d moved on, healed, accepted what his mother did to him. What his father caused his mother to do to him.

But trauma has a way of creeping back up on you when you least expect it, rearing its ugly head and trying to drag you back underwater when you feel like you’d finally breached the surface for air.

Shouto is determined not to let it.

these hands could hold the world rating: g trigger warning(s): none

Izuku looked between their joined hands and Todoroki, and even though Izuku was on the bed and Todoroki was on the floor, neither of them speaking, with only their hands touching, this singular moment felt so...intimate that Izuku couldn’t wrap his head around it.

the sound of your name on my lips rating: g trigger warning(s): none

Shouto barely knew how to be someone's friend, let alone someone's boyfriend.

leave a beautiful scar rating: g trigger warning(s): none

Even with this blotch of marred skin, Shouto was still beautiful. Or, perhaps, because of it.

It was a sign he had survived the damage dealt to him.

rattle my bones like an earthquake to glass rating: t trigger warning(s): panic attacks, mild blood and injury

Izuku returns home to find Shouto in the aftermath of a panic attack.

keep holding on rating: g trigger warning(s): none

Izuku didn’t have to worry about trying to hold on with his shaking hands, because Shouto was holding onto him enough for the both of them.

catching kisses rating: g trigger warning(s): none

Izuku is just trying to bandage Shouto up, but Shouto keeps stealing kisses from him.

you’re like coming home rating: g trigger warning(s): none

Five times Shouto steals Izuku's hoodie, and the one time Izuku gives it to him.

Behind the Camera Lens rating: t trigger warning(s): childhood trauma/abuse

Izuku and Shouto are two Youtubers who have been subscribed to each other for ages, but have never actually spoken. That is, until Izuku reaches a million subscribers and Shouto leaves a kind comment on his announcement video. A fast friendship forms from there, and more.

Izuku's crush from afar turns into something much deeper, and Shouto learns how to let love in.

**this fic also has a KiriBaku spinoff fic written by my friend Kat @sunshineijirou:

One New Notification rating: t trigger warning(s): none

Eijirou was nervous as he looked around at the crowd outside the convention center. Ochako, his friend and fellow fitness YouTuber had surprised him with two passes to a convention specifically for fellow streamers and vloggers. She usually went with her girlfriend, Tsuyu, but the large crowds weren’t really her thing. This year she had insisted that Ochako go with someone who really wanted to go. Eijirou had excitedly accepted.

keep it safe rating: t trigger warning(s): mild blood, mild gore, references to child abuse, scars

It's been many years since Shouto carried his heart with him.

After his mother tried to destroy his unsightly half, she had been sent away. Shouto's heart hurt so much, a near-constant burning in his chest that threatened to sear his lungs, the bones of his ribs, the veins and arteries that pumped blood through the vessel…

Well. One day, he decided he didn't want it anymore. So he took it out.

Date the Stars rating: t trigger warning(s): nightmares, repressed memories, trauma

“Shouto?”

“I do not understand…” Shouto said quietly enough that Izuku had to strain to hear him. “Why are these images in my mind? Their presence is illogical.”

“Well, the brain isn’t always logical, despite what Vulcans may have you believe,” Izuku snorted at his own joke, not surprised to find no reaction to it from Shouto.

“Becoming human is exhausting,” Shouto said, sounding completely and thoroughly exasperated, much of the monotony from his voice gone for just that small admission.

Izuku smiled. Small steps, right?

A fic in which Izuku finds an abandoned Borg drone named Shouto and helps him regain his humanity...and maybe falls in love along the way.

multiship fics

D(ouble)D(ate)R rating: t trigger warning(s): canon-typical violence co-author: @sunshineijirou

Kirishima invites Midoriya and Todoroki on a double date with him and Bakugou with the hopes of helping to ease the tensions between his boyfriend and the other couple.

Be The Very Best (Like No Hero Ever Was) rating: t trigger warning(s): to be added

Midoriya Izuku learns that, without a Quirk and with his Pokémon partner by his side, he can become a hero.

kiribaku fics

A Little Mischief rating: g trigger warning(s): none

Bakugou brings a cat in from the rain and has no idea what to do.

face the blame rating: g trigger warning(s): mild injury

Bakugou accidentally hurts Kirishima while Quirk training.

let me love you (without having to say it) rating: g trigger warning(s): none

Kirishima is sick and Bakugou wants to take care of him.

another story rating: t trigger warning(s): mild injury and mild blood

Eijirou did a one-shoulder shrug, careful not to move any other part of his body lest he open up his injury yet again. “It’s not like I don’t have scars all over the damn place,” he said, holding out one of his arms to make his point. Whitened scars littered his tanned skin, some in jagged lines, others in perfectly smooth cuts across his muscled arms. “Besides, it’s just another cool story to tell, y’know?”

todobaku fics

seventh time’s the charm rating: t trigger warning(s): mild injury and blood

Six times Shouto asks Katsuki to marry him, and the one time Katsuki finally says yes.

some days rating: t trigger warning(s): suicidal thoughts/ideation, dissociation, childhood trauma, depression, unintentional self-harm

Most days, Shouto is fine.

But some days...

Some days, Shouto falls apart.

one day rating: t trigger warning(s): references to depression and suicidal thoughts/ideation

He's okay, Katsuki has to remind himself again, almost afraid that Todoroki might slip right through his calloused fingers if he doesn't hold on tight enough.

follow-up to ‘some days’

the day after rating: t trigger warning(s): references to depression, negative self-talk

The tears come unbidden, and Shouto drops his phone in his lap to press the heels of his hands against his eyes. He can already feel frost creeping over his cheek, his tears cooling and hardening as they pass down his skin and over the frozen patches shining translucent white in the daylight.

So many people care for him...and he has no idea why.

part 3 in the 'days' series

tomorrow is another day rating: t trigger warning(s): references to depression, negative self-talk, references to suicidal thoughts and dissociation

“I think you should see someone, Shouto. A professional. They can help you,” Rei says, and Shouto can hear the quiet confidence in her words. Words spoken from experience. Who would know about this kind of thing better than her, after all?

Shouto nods wordlessly, pulling back and finally looking at his mother. She smiles softly down at him, and tucks some of his disheveled hair away from his face. “Is it scary?” he asks, already feeling the trepidation at the possibility of sharing his innermost thoughts and feelings with a complete stranger.

Rei nods slowly, her smile fading somewhat. “Yes. It can be scary, at first. And painful. Your emotions will be all over the place for a while. But…” she pauses, placing both her hands on Shouto’s cheeks to make sure she has his full attention. “Talking about this, working through it with someone who is trained to help people like you and me...it’s an important step to take so you can heal.”

part 4 in the ‘days’ series

a new day (to face your fears) rating: t trigger warning(s): mentions of depression and suicidal thoughts

The halls are emptier than usual for the end of the school day, which makes the journey to the teachers’ office all the more daunting to Shouto. At least if there were white noise around him, his thoughts wouldn’t bounce around so loudly in his skull and echo back at him tenfold.

Next to him, Shouto hears Bakugou take in a breath as if he wants to say something. Shouto holds his own breath, waiting for the other boy to speak.

But no words come, and Shouto exhales, feeling almost...disappointed.

everything the light touches rating: g trigger warning(s): none

"This," Shouto said, sliding the ring onto Katsuki's ring finger, "is my promise to you, Katsuki. My promise that, when I free this land from my father's tyranny and find a suitable ruler to take his place, I will go with you." Like the prince he was, Shouto lifted Katsuki's hand and placed a polite, delicate kiss to his knuckles. Katsuki's felt Shouto's lips move against his roughened skin as he said, "I will follow wherever you lead me."

i don’t dance rating: g trigger warning(s): none

"What?" Todoroki asked, raising a snow white brow. "Don't like to dance?"

"What the fuck would ever give you the goddamn idea that I do?" Katsuki said.

Todoroki just shrugged, finishing off his punch and tossing his cup into a nearby recycling bin. "Well...would you like to?"

Katsuki squinted his eyes at Todoroki. "Like to what?"

"Dance with me."

I Now Pronounce You... rating: m trigger warning(s): alcohol use, sexual humor, implied sexual content

Bakugou sucked in a breath and turned to face Shouto, his crimson eyes serious and determined. “Let’s get married.”

Shouto’s world ground to a screeching halt and he nearly lost his balance in the process. “Come again?” he asked, blinking rapidly a few times. He must be nearing black-out drunk if he was starting to hallucinate Bakugou asking for his hand in marriage. They weren't even dating.

A fic in which Shouto and Katsuki have had a little too much to drink and decide to tie the knot.

it’s okay (to not be okay) rating: t trigger warning(s): hospitals, injury, implied abuse

Todoroki nodded and pursed his lips. His eyebrows furrowed in concentration as his mismatched eyes focused on his own hands as they tried to move in an unfamiliar pattern. If Katsuki were the sappy type, he might have admitted Todoroki looked cute when he was concentrating.

But Katsuki steered himself away from that train of thought, watching Todoroki’s hands sign a very simple, very loaded question.

“Are you okay?”

erasermight fics

shut up and dance with me rating: g trigger warning(s): none

“Do you want to dance with me, Aizawa-kun?” Yagi asked with an almost bashful smile, and Aizawa couldn’t tell if it was the dim, colorful lights or a blush that was turning Yagi’s sharp cheeks pink.

“Alright,” he agreed, pushing himself off the wall and taking Yagi’s hand.

kiritodo fics

hey, beautiful! rating: g trigger warning(s): none

"Hey, beautiful!"

Shouto looked up from his laptop. A smile immediately tugged at his lips when he saw Eijirou standing in the doorway to his office, all geared up in his hero uniform.

"Hey yourself," he replied, standing up from his desk. "Why do you insist on calling me that?"

"Because it's true?"

how many nights does it take to count the stars? rating: g trigger warning(s): brief mentions of war and trauma

The two of them sat together in silence, neither of them quite knowing what to say.

But...what do you even really say after a war?

shouldering the pain rating: t trigger warning(s): minor description of bruises

The polite thing to do was let Shouto take his shower, then ask him again about what was wrong afterward. But Eijirou was never good at sitting around and waiting.

So, he determinedly headed to the bathroom and cracked open the door.

And what he saw made his breath catch in his chest.

Written for TodoKiri Week 2021

gen fics

Children of Bad Fire Dads Club rating: g trigger warning(s): mentions of endeavor’s bad parenting

Shouto drags Izuku with him to hang out with Natsuo.

like night and day rating: t trigger warning(s): talk about suicide, references to depression

Katsuki watches his phone screen, waiting for a message back from Deku. But instead of receiving a text, his phone starts vibrating and screen changes to that of an incoming call.

From Deku.

"Fucking hell," Katsuki breathes out, clicking the little green button with the phone icon on it to answer the call. "What," he growls out, his voice gravelly as he tries to keep quiet enough to not wake Todoroki.

And lord help him, he can already hear Deku sobbing on the other end of the line. The other boy is speaking, but all the crying makes it impossible for Katsuki to make any sense of what he's saying.

missing scene between 'one day' and 'the day after'

#tododeku #kiribaku #todobaku #bnha fic #fic masterlist

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oswildin · 4 years

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O & K {Part 2} ~ Dhawan!Master x Reader

Summary: O & K weren’t prepared for the day they would have.

Warnings: Bit graphic, talks about a dead body

You wandered into work the next day, head aching somewhat after the multiple drinks you had consumed the night before. It wasn’t like you’d drank so much you were absolutely wasted, but it was enough for you to be tipsy and have a mild headache. You peered over at O’s desk seeing him with his head in a file as you waltzed to your own desk, sighing as you dumped your bad on top of your own files. You dreaded what the day was going to bring.

The images of the day before were still fresh in your mind. The creature you had seen. Well, you say creature. That’s what O thought it was. Or alien even. But you weren’t exactly one for believing that. You furrowed your brows as you noticed a new file on your desk. You quickly picked it up, seeing it had ‘CLASSIFIED’ written in red on the front. You looked around, seeing if anyone was looking at you. But everyone was busy. You bit your lip, unsure whether it had been meant for your eyes. Sitting at your desk, you slowly opened the file, coming face to face with the contents.

‘TORCHWOOD’

You narrowed your eyes in confusion. This was what O had been telling you about. An undercover agency that dealt with extraordinary cases. You flipped through the pages, your eyes landing on a handsome looking man in a long war style coat, under the name ‘Captain Jack Harkness’. You continued to look through, seeing multiple more faces and names as your eyes scanned the pages.

“You found my gift then.”

You jumped at the voice, closing the file instinctively. You looked up, seeing it was in fact O, looking over your desk. You sighed in relief as you furrowed your brows at him.

“Where did you get this?” You whisper shouted as he smirked, shrugging.

“I have my ways.” He told you simply as you looked at him suspiciously.

“Is this some kind of practical joke?” You asked, gesturing to the file in question. He raised a brow.

“No.” He folded his arms. “Just wanted to prove my point.”

“Which is?” You asked.

“That aliens are real.” He said as a matter of fact as you rolled your eyes at him.

“A random file isn’t going to change my opinion.” You argued. “You’ll have to do better than that.” You scoffed as he sighed in some defeat. “Nice try though.” You gave him a tight smile as you held out the file for him to take back. “A for effort.” He exasperatedly took back the file as he held it under his arm.

“Have you ever considered you may just be being a bit naive?” He questioned as you laughed lightly at his words.

“Rather that than gullible.” You fired back. “Look, I know that it’s something you’re clearly passionate about, and outside of work you can talk to me about it as much as you like.” You told him. “But in work, we need to keep our minds clear and heads down.” He nodded slightly at you. “Anyway, I got news back from the analysts, and they reckon this is our guy.” You reaches into another file that was laying on your desk, opening it to reveal a photo and name of a man in his late 20’s. “Works in a bank, isn’t married, no kids, in debt to multiple companies.”

“So what? He’s doing this all for money?” O asked as you raised a brow.

“Well, there’s no evidence of that so far. All we know is he went missing about a week ago.” You said. “But why the suit? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Still hellbent on it being some sort of disguise then?” He raised a brow.

“Well, yes. God knows why or how, but people do strange things.” You shrugged as he laughed lightly.

“Oh come on, you don’t really believe that do you?” He argued.

“Look, people can do all sorts of things. They’re capable if they have the brains or the capacity. I mean look at a few years ago, we had a Prime Minister who turned out to be a fraud, a whole life faked!” O kept his hard gaze. “What if this guy is doing something similar? But next level?”

“Hmmm. I quite liked that Saxon.” He commented, as you rolled your eyes.

“Of course you did.” You commented. “Everyone I knew did. But something was off about him.” You shuddered slightly. “If I didn’t know any different I would’ve believed he had brainwashed everyone.” You scoffed as O tightly smiled. “Anyway, we have this guys address. We should check it out.”

You and O arrived at the mans address. A ‘Mr James Pooley’. You marched up to the door, O beside you as you knocked. A few moments passed, as there was no movement or sound from inside. You knocked again, sending O a glance before coming to the conclusion no one was home. You gestured for O to follow you as you went round the side of the house, heading to the back gate. You tried opening it, but it was locked from the other side.

“Give us a hand.” You told him as he looked confused for a second. “Help me up.” You elaborated as he swallowed for a second before placing his hands gently on your hips, lifting you up a few feet, helping you to grab the top of the gate, being able to pull yourself up and over. You quickly unlocked the gate, opening it as O entered the garden. “Good to know you have some arm muscle.” You joked as he gave a small smile. As you entered further into the garden, you noticed the back fence was knocked down, as if something ran at it and knocked it in the direction it was leaving.

Peering round, you noticed the patio doors had been destroyed. Glass was everywhere on the grass as you carefully treaded through it.

“Someone was in a rush to leave.” You noted, glancing down at how the glass had fallen on the outside.

“Or something.” O muttered as you ignored him, walking into the house through the broken door. The place was a wreck. Things were everywhere, and things were broken, leading to you believing there was a struggle.

“Perhaps Mr Pooley had some undisclosed debts as well.” You commented. However, you didn’t notice that O had spotted something on the corner of a smashed table.

“K.” He called as you turned, seeing him knelt down beside the table. You walked over to see what he was looking at. You saw what appeared to be some sort of green material. You narrowed your eyes. It appeared almost skin like in texture. O opened his bag, grabbed a glove and clear evidence bag to collect the material.

“That doesn’t look like any type of clothing material I’ve ever seen.” You muttered as he hummed in agreement.

“It doesn’t look like clothing.” He added. “I would say it was almost skin-like.” He carefully placed it back in his bag, ensuring it was safe.

“I’m going to look upstairs. You look in the kitchen.” You told him, grabbing your gun incase as he nodded, continuing to look around him. You carefully began walking up the stairs, as things were still destroyed. You paused, seeing a green substance on the wall, along with some red... Blood. You took a breath, quickly headed up the stairs, keeping your gun up and senses alert. Suddenly a smell hit you, as you almost gagged, covering your nose with your arm as you followed the trail of blood that was on the wall. Eventually you came to the end of the hallway, where a closed door was. You prepared yourself, hesitantly pushing it open, as the smell intensified. You weren’t prepared for what you were about to see.

There in front of you was what appeared to be a body... But it had no skin. You gagged, falling back slightly. You’d seen a lot of dead bodies. But this was something else. You quickly exited, stumbling out as O obviously heard your reaction as he raced up the stairs. He saw your shocked, disgusted expression as he looked at you for answers. You couldn’t form the words, as he decided to take a look for himself.

This investigation had just taken a dark turn.

Taglist: @drapetxmaniia @dannighost @imagine-whatever @yourlocalspacebisexual @the-sweet-space-bi @blamerogertaylor @koschei-taylor @koschei-studies @lostshadow12 @hannahlilyyx @wonders-of-the-multiverse @ettorah @nikey-no-likey @imthedoctorlove @twentysomethingloser92 @sometimes-i-feel-like-falling @hellothedoctorisreal @tragic-and-tried @kind-sober-fullydressed @chiswicknoble @sherly-not-obsessed @astudyoftimeywimeystuff @psychobitchtess

#dhawan!master #the master x reader #dhawan!master x reader #master x reader #fanfic #sacha dhawan #doctor x reader #doctor who #doctor who imagine #dhawan master x reader #reader insert #dr who #agent o #agent o x reader #the master

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braincoins · 3 years

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Unusual Halloween Movies

Tired of Jason, Freddy, and Michael? Want something new this year? Boy, do I have some treats lined up for you! I’ve used JustWatch to list the streaming options (though these are US streaming options; I maaaaay be up for some streaming fun on Halloween...). I’ll tell you right now, this list can almost perfectly be broken into three categories: Horror-Comedy, Sci-Fi Horror, or International Horror.

American Mary - A medical student drowning under tuition debt finds a lucrative practice when she enters the world of body modification. ngl, I remember liking this movie but it’s been a bit since I saw it, so for the CONTENT WARNINGS I’m going to straight up rip the MPAA here: Rated R for strong aberrant violent content including disturbing images, torture, a rape, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug use

Ava’s Possessions - Ever wonder what life is like once all your demons have been exorcised - literally? Now that Ava is free of the demon that once possessed her, she’s out of a job, down a few friends, and facing charges for the acts of violence her demon did. The only way to get out of trouble is to go to the demon-equivalent of AA. CONTENT WARNINGS: mostly blood and bad language; some mild sexual content

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon - A journalism grad student interviews a young man in training to be the next slasher killer, ala Jason/Freddy/Michael. An absolute treat of a movie for anyone who loves slasher films; it’s about 3/4 mockumentary, 1/4 actual horror film when she realizes that, no, really, he’s going to go kill all those co-eds. CONTENT WARNINGS: Blood, gore, naked boobs (”Ugh. Is that REALLY necessary?” “Now, Taylor, who’s telling this story?”), sex, occasional panty shots (because, again, slasher films).

Bubba Ho-Tep - OH MAN another one I had to go back and add in ‘cause REALLY NOW. Elvis is in a nursing home (at least, he says he’s the real Elvis) and he and JFK (who is played by Ossie Davis - who you will note is NOT white) have to fight off a resurrected mummy who sucks the souls of the living out of their assholes. Bruce Campbell stars. HOW IS THAT NOT AWESOME ENOUGH FOR YOU?! CONTENT WARNING: Um... look, I think you kinda already know what sort of content to expect given what I just told you about the story.

Bulbbul (Netflix Original) - (Hindi Language) During the 19th century Bengali Presidency, something - or someone? - is haunting the woods around a lord’s estate, killing men in gruesome ways. The lord has left his estate in charge of his young wife, while his younger brother, who’d been away studying in London, returns to hunt down whatever is causing these mysterious deaths. CONTENT WARNINGS: child bride, blood, and what Netflix calls “sexual violence”, meaning a rape scene so graphic (despite not showing any nudity or genitalia) that it is GUARANTEED to make you uncomfortable. The movie was written and directed by a woman, so there is nothing intended to be “sexy” about this at all. If you can make it through that scene, though, there is a definite payoff for it. (Or should I say “payback”?)

Eli (Netflix Original) - A young, incredibly sick boy with a fragile immune system is brought by his parents to a clinic for an experimental treatment that may be their last hope. But all is not as it seems within the walls of this place... perhaps literally. CONTENT WARNINGS: mostly just language, a few mild jump scares. People get set on fire at one point. No biggie.

Errementari: the Blacksmith and the Devil (Netflix Original) - (Basque Language) Based on a Basque folk tale. Eight years after the First Carlist War, a government official comes to a small, impoverished Basque town asking after the blacksmith. Everyone tries to warn him away; the blacksmith is an evil, evil man. But he is on the trail of some Carlist gold that might be in the smithy, and the prospect of the gold wins him some helpers. And while everyone is distracted by that, a young orphan girl manages to get onto the blacksmith’s property. And what she finds there, no one could have expected... CONTENT WARNINGS: I took a screenshot of Netflix’s list of warnings just because it amuses me:

[sings “One of these things is not like the others...”]

Europa Report - Look, I really can’t recommend this enough for fans of found-footage features and people who can stand slower-paced, constantly-building terror. An international mission is sent to investigate Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. (Those of you who are fans of real-world space exploration know that Europa is considered a prime target for extraterrestrial life within our solar system.) Contact was lost with the mission for a long time, until the data streams came flooding into Earth all at once. And what they showed... CONTENT WARNINGS: Like I said: slower pace than most horror/thriller movies. It builds slow and steady. There’s really not much in the way of blood and gore, though; an excellent example of terror without resorting to buckets of red corn syrup.

Event Horizon - Hellraiser in Space? Hellraiser in Space. Except the Lamentation Configuration is a fucking SPACE SHIP. Also, props for genre-savvy cast. CONTENT WARNINGS: EYE SCREAM. Blood, gore, and, no really, THE EYE THING. Did I mention the gore and the blood? Oh, and language. And blink-and-you-miss it nudity & sex.

Grabbers - Strange creatures are attacking a small Irish coastal town and the only way to protect yourself is... to be drunk? CONTENT WARNINGS: I mean, it’s Irish and everyone’s drunk, so bad language (by American standards) is a given. That’s... really about it, unless you have a tentacle phobia.

Green Room - An up-and-coming punk band show up to play a gig and realize too late that they’re playing at a Neo-Nazi club. And when they happen to see something they... really shouldn’t have, it becomes an all-out fight for survival. Same director as Murder Party, though this movie was made later with a much better budget. CONTENT WARNINGS: Violence, blood, gore, and yes, some dogs die because they were trained to be vicious attack dogs by Neo-Nazis. :( Also, the most important content warning of all? PATRICK STEWART PLAYS A NEO-NAZI. (You think I’m joking, but for someone who grew up with him as Jean-Luc Picard, it is downright unsettling to see, okay?)

Life - Think Alien meets Europa Report (above). The six-member crew of the International Space Station are given a sample from Mars that might contain actual extraterrestrial life. CONTENT WARNINGS: Blood. No, let me say that again: BLOOD. Sounds of bones breaking. Alien creature entering someone’s mouth and killing them from the inside (probably through a combination of choking them/asphyxiating them on their own blood/devouring their blood? It’s not clear, it’s just UNSETTLING).

Murder Party - This is what happens when snobby art school brats try to kill someone. (Read: it doesn’t go well.) Fuckin’ bop of a Halloween song over the end credits, too. Also, at least two characters are canonically bisexual. Same director as Green Room, though this movie was made first (with a much lower budget). CONTENT WARNINGS: bad language, blood, gore, nudity, mild sexual content (the nudity is supposed to be “artistic”). The dog probably DOES die, given the circumstances, but it doesn’t happen on screen, at least? And the dog gets some pretty decent comeuppance first... Also, 1000000% accurate cat representation.

The Perfection (Netflix Original) - A former cello virtuoso (virtuosa?) gets in touch with her former teacher and meets his new star pupil. An instant connection is formed between the two women... or is it? (Yes, there are lesbians!) CONTENT WARNINGS: oh chaos, where do I start? Bugs under the skin, hacking off body parts, blood, gore, mild sexual content, sexual abuse, and the movie itself is complete and utter MINDFUCKERY. Did you like “Tales from the Crypt” as a kid? You’ll probably dig this.

Ravenous - With apologies to all Native Americans, but at least they did get actual Native American actors for those parts (George is played by a Pueblo actor; his sister Martha is played by an actress of Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee descent). A soldier who won a questionable victory during the Mexican-American war is given a hero’s status and then an exile to a remote fort in the Sierra Nevadas. Not long after he arrives, a would-be settler arrives with a harrowing tale, calling for help for what few survivors there are of his wagon train. The two friendly Native Americans at the fort issue warnings that go unheeded, of course. CONTENT WARNINGS: Blood, gore, cannibalism, PTSD.

Slither - James Gunn’s 2006 Feature Movie Directorial Debut! He wrote it, too. An homage to B-movie gore flicks like you’d see at the drive-in. I am just copying and pasting the IMDB summary ‘cause I love this movie too much to be concise about it: A small town is taken over by an alien plague, turning residents into zombies and all forms of mutant monsters. (Oh, but don’t forget the nasty, slithery blood worm things!) CONTENT WARNINGS: Nasty, slithery blood worm things. GORE, BLOOD, GORE, GORE. A very uncomfortable sex scene. Michael Rooker.

They’re Watching - An American TV crew filming what is essentially “House Hunters: Eastern Europe” stumble into superstitions, folklore, and... TERROR!! MWAHAHAHAHA. No, seriously, I LOVE how it’s basically “What if some HGTV crew wound up waaaaaaaay in over their heads, in a horrible and bloody way?” CONTENT WARNINGS: Blood, gore, and NO WI-FI.

#Halloween Movies #added Event Horizon because Pengy convinced me that not enough people know it

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imaginaryelle · 4 years

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Chapter 3: Memento, Mori ~2.5k Rating: Teen (may change in later segments) Warnings: temporary character death, blood, injury, suicide mention, imprisonment, violence, minor character death, mild gore Tags: MDZS, Wangxian, Role Reversal AU, Soulmates AU, Canon Divergence, Very AU okay, I’m warning you, soulmates + WWX living changes things. Note: This chapter was written for the @wangxianweek 2020 day three prompts "mementos" and "rebirth." Many thanks to @miyuki4s and @morphia-writes for awesome brainstorming and feedback! Summary: The clan elders made sure Lan Wangji would not be present for the siege of the Mass Graves, but even the discipline whip can’t cut a soul bond, and pain can’t dim Lan Wangji’s determination, even if his efforts consume him.

Wei Wuxian lives. The siege fails.

Thirteen years later, Lan Wangji wakes in a body that is not his own.

on tumblr: part one | part two

Dawn seeps into his awareness with slow light painted over his eyelids and the bright notes of birdsong outside. For a moment Lan Wangji can’t remember where he is—not the Jingshi—but the smell of rotting blood soon brings his surroundings back to mind.

Physically, the cell looks no better in daylight. When he again extends his senses he finds no change; no new beings have joined him in this prison under the shroud of night.

The body he found himself occupying is still weaker than he is used to, still hungry and thirsty, but he feels steadier for the sleep. All but one of the wounds on his arms have scabbed over, and that one remaining sends a shock through his fingertips when he touches it.

A curse, most likely. Perhaps related to the ritual that called him here.

It’s worrying, but not his most pressing problem; if he doesn’t find a source of water soon, he will lose what mental clarity he still retains. The demands of this body, so much less disciplined than his own, batter at his mind. The itch of blood and sweat on his skin is ever-present, but the single set of yi and trousers he wears is not cleaner than anything else in the room; even the sash is bloodstained. He resumes his meditations, sinking deeper than the night before.

His spiritual power is still reduced, but not quite so low; meditation does seem to help it coalesce into a more workable form as well.

So. He has a small amount of spiritual power, the clothes on his back, a forehead ribbon, a very weak spirit lure and a sharp shard of porcelain. He is barred from escape by a door which opens outwards, a lock, and a seal.

He takes a moment to tie the ribbon in place for whatever comfort that can offer and examines the door again, probing the seal cautiously. Perhaps he can negate it, or overpower it. It will be tricky without the ability to see or physically touch the talisman itself, but it’s theoretically possible. Alternatively, he could write a new talisman, in blood on torn cloth.

Of the two, attempting to remove the seal is more appealing; the spirit lure does not inspire confidence in future talisman creation attempts. He’s determining the exact positioning of the seal talisman when voices suddenly cut through the small morning noises of birds and wind over leaves, apparently partway through a conversation.

“—said only you should take the food,” says one voice.

“Is he here, that you need to quote him so faithfully?” asks another, the tone strident and irritated. “Was he cleaning up pieces of teacup yesterday because his ‘guest’ threw a fit?”

That explains the shard still in the room. Lan Wangji listens with more than his ears to confirm—there are two new presences inside the bright circling of space he can sense, but only two. In less promising developments, the abruptness of their presence implies that that circle is indeed restrained by a ward, and anything could be on its other side.

Outside the cell door, the conversation continues, the voices growing louder as they draw closer.

“I think you can handle one weakened, failed cultivator. He doesn’t even have a golden core,” says the first voice, still reluctant.

“I don’t care what he has,” voice two insists. “I want him incapacitated when that door opens.”

There are footsteps now, careless and too-heavy on raised wooden floorboards. One pair, the one lagging behind, favors the right side. Perhaps an injury, or something carried on that side. This close, Lan Wangji can also hear a soft rattle of wood against wood, perhaps the mentioned food. He moves to the side from which the door will open and considers his options. He has no chance against a spiritual weapon of any caliber, but if he moves quickly enough—

“If we use the talisman too much it could kill him,” says voice one.

“So then we say he killed himself,” says voice two, very close now. There is the scrape of a bar being removed. “We can’t be blamed if he’s dead when we open the door, right? He’s been locked in a room on his own.”

Two assailants who barely care whether he lives or dies. Who are willing to kill him, so long as such an act does not draw the ire of a superior. Lan Wangji holds his shard of porcelain carefully in his right hand, nearest the door, and raises his left hand to his face, two fingers pointing to Heaven. He may, just, have the spiritual strength to shield from a talisman, depending on the skill of both maker and caster.

He doesn’t have time to make another plan; iron turns against iron, and the seal dissipates. The door is opening.

“Ugh, that stink,” says the bearer of voice two as Lan Wangji begins to move. “Look at the blood—”

Lan Wangji clears the doorway and slashes a clean line across the speaker’s throat. A talisman flies toward his face but he catches it against his fist and—stumbles back, blood filling his throat and streaming from his nose. He staggers and coughs, fighting to breathe, to see.

The first of his targets is slumped on the floor. The second is reaching for his sword. Lan Wangji rushes him, aiming for that heavier right side and slamming him into the wall. He struggles again with the shard in his fist until the blood that coats his hand is not only his own and this assailant, too, falls.

For a moment Lan Wangji only stands in a sun-warmed hallway and shakes, and breathes.

Blood drips down his chin; he wipes it away with his sleeve. Once again, his spiritual power is a guttering vagueness near his center. His right hand stings, fingers and palm both lacerated, but he cannot let go of the shard until he is certain. He drops to his knees to check for breath, but the second man is well and truly dead, his eyes open but unseeing and his throat a ragged mess. The first man is also still and lifeless.

The outer ward is still in place. No new presence has arrived.

He has a few moments, at least. Perhaps longer. He tucks the shard into his sash with fingers that tremble no matter how he tries to control them, and examines his situation once more.

The door is open, and this hallway, at least, appears unguarded. His assailants wear outer robes of rough, dark blue linen that he doesn’t recognize as belonging to a known Sect, but their inner robes are finer, pale cotton and silk with delicate stitching, so the outer garments are likely a deception rather than daily wear. They each bear spiritual swords that will do Lan Wangji no good at this body’s current level, and the second one also carried a pipa, the neck and frets of which snapped in the struggle. The weapons carry gold detailing, but no peony. Nothing that points definitively to Jin Guangyao or the Jin Sect, or any Sect he knows. Nor does the iron key for the door’s lock bear any identifying stamp.

His hands are still shaking.

The tray of food was upset in the struggle, but some small amount of rice still remains in the dish and a wax-sealed gourd proves to hold water. He drinks half of it, then tears a strip from the cleanest of the dead mens’ sashes, wets it, and wipes carefully at his face and wounds. Aside from the curse mark, the cuts in his right hand are now the most worrying, one lancing long and deep at an angle across his palm. He wraps it carefully, tightening the knot with his teeth when all other attempts fail. Even careful rinsing cannot wash the taste of blood from his tongue.

He needs to keep moving. This progress is only progress so long as he can hold onto it. If there is a way to delay pursuit, he must take it.

He drags both men into the cell and removes their outer robes and sashes. Stained and rough as they are, they will still provide a moment’s doubt to his identity, and he will not surrender to the shame of approaching another being in only his blood-soaked underlayers if he can avoid it.

He’s going to have to approach someone, eventually.

He knows who he wants it to be.

Later, he can think about that later. He eats the rice and cleans up as much of the spill of food and blood as he can. Then he moves the dishes and the men’s weapons into the cell as well.

The array is too obvious a clue to leave it undamaged—even if he cannot decipher it, that doesn’t mean whoever arranged this prison will not recognize it.

He starts at the edges, breaking the circle carefully in case of residual backlash. The blood is dried and flaking, and he uses another torn rag to smudge it into more of a smear than any sort of defined, focused shape. Then he positions one of the dead men over the space, face down to perhaps prevent questions about additional blood, and moves the other out of sight from the door. In their sleeves he finds a jade pendant that tingles against his fingers, a sachet of medicinal herbs, a sachet of chrysanthemum tea, five talismans and a qiankun pouch holding another gourd of water, a comb, and a pair of leaf-wrapped zongzi.

Just the smell of the zongzi makes his mouth water, but escape is more pressing. He puts everything but the water gourds and the pendant in the pouch, along with three of the pipa’s four silk strings and the polished wooden rice bowl. The remaining string he tucks beside the porcelain shard.

Neither of his assailants’ boots fit well, but they will serve far better than bare feet. He wraps one sash around his left arm, covering the curse mark, layers one outer robe over the other despite the gore that coats their collars and promises himself he will wash as soon as an opportunity presents itself.

He leaves the cell, closes the door, and locks and bars it.

He can sense no new presence inside the ward. There are other rooms along the hall, and an opening onto a courtyard beyond it.

None of the other rooms are cells, or locked. Most are empty of all but the faint smell of dust. One holds a small writing desk with a brush, ink stick and stone, paper, and a sheaf of notes he can’t read. He wraps the brush and ink stick carefully and folds all of it into the qiankun pouch. He does it again with the mobile contents of the next room: paper twists of tea, a small cloth bag of rice, a small earthenware bowl and two small bottles—one of soy sauce, one of vinegar. A horsetail whisk he tucks into his sash; this one was clearly designed for shooing insects rather than combat, but better than the makeshift weapons he’s accumulated so far.

The ward burns against his awareness as he nears the courtyard, and he stops in the shadow of the hall to watch that brightly sunlit space carefully.

Birds flit across the space. Insects buzz. Between two buildings he can see trees swaying gently in the light summer breeze, a promise of shadowed shelter beyond this place.

It would be easy to stop here. To meditate until he no longer feels as though his muscles will betray him at any moment.

The longer he stays still, the more likely someone is to come investigate why his assailants haven’t returned.

He closes his eyes and allows himself ten slow, steadying breaths. The ward hums at him. The jade pendant in his sleeve vibrates in response. Like the wards of Cloud Recesses, and the jade pass token he wore for nearly half his life.

If he’s wrong, the ward could rebound on him, and in his present state that would likely knock him unconscious. But this ward is a much stronger, more permanent working than the array he woke to, or any of the talismans he’s encountered thus far. If he’s wrong, he has no way to move outside it anyway. If he’s right …

He steps into the courtyard and walks to the very edge of the carved stone that marks the boundary. Nothing impedes his hand, reaching in front of him. Neither ward nor token shift in resonance.

He steps over the ward.

It hums merrily behind him.

He runs for the trees and doesn’t stop until he hears moving water. It’s only a small stream, but it’s enough to clean himself, and his clothing, and he removes only his boots and the contents of his sash and sleeves before he wades in eagerly. The water is cold, but not nearly as cold as Gusu’s Cold Spring, and the sun is warm on his back as he soaks, and scrubs, and then lays all but the inner trousers out to dry as he re-binds his wounds and combs his hair.

It’s only when he catches sight of his reflected face that he remembers: this body is not his body, for all that he is bound to it, and feels its pain and hunger and weariness.

He examines the face more closely and finds it familiar, but only vaguely so. A face he has not seen in many years, and rarely before, but one that did live within the walls of Cloud Recesses in his memory. A disciple who left the Sect for—family reasons, he thinks. After the Sunshot war. His brother had been disappointed about it. Lan Wangji cannot remember the man’s name. He must have kept the forehead ribbon as a memento.

It’s disconcerting, that this man, this cultivator, knew Lan Wangji’s name well enough to summon him from death but left no strong impression on him during life.

He shakes the thought away and finishes combing and tying up his hair, and then busies himself refilling the water gourds. He trickles a pinch of the chrysanthemum tea into one and sets in the sun to brew. Then he eats one of the sticky, red-bean-stuffed zongzi, and turns his mind to the question of where to go next.

It occurs to him that he may be able to reach his spiritual senses further now, outside the prison’s ward, and so when he has finished his paltry meal he meditates, sinking as deeply as he can. His range is still not as far as he’s accustomed to, but the flow of energy is much clearer. To the north he can feel a collection of power, a static array, strong but far off. To the south another, further away and indistinct.

South, the small tug he associates with the soul bond informs him, and the relief he feels that that connection remains threatens to overwhelm the sensation itself. He should go south.

South, to Wei Ying.

on to part four

#wangxian #lan wangji #wangxianweek2020 #mo dao zu shi #mdzs fic #cw: suicide #cw: blood #cw: imprisonment #cw: violence #cw: character death #cw: mild gore #alex writes

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ghostgothgeek · 4 years

Text

Exposed.

Holiday truce 2019 gift for @pigte! I tried to incorporate all three of your topics in some form, I hope you enjoy it and have a great holiday!! :)

Rating: T for swearing, mild gore

Vlad Masters was having a rough day, to say the least. He spilled coffee all over his favorite dress shirt, Maddie had blatantly ignored him at the grocery store, another one of his clone experiments had failed, Maddie (the cat) threw up on his lap, he had to fight off Daniel for a short period of time...and now…

Now he was getting beaten and bruised and, for lack of better terms, having his ass handed to him by the Red Huntress, the ghost hunter hellbent on revenge. He had been grooming her to go after Daniel as Phantom, not himself as Plasmius! Using a man’s own weapons on him was some sort of cruel joke this terrible day had been playing on him. Especially when said huntress is a fourteen year old girl who didn’t have ghost powers. Now that just hurt a man’s ego.

“Come back here, ghost scum.” Valerie growled, kicking off her hoverboard and following hot on Plasmius’s trail.

Valerie Gray, on the other hand, was having a great day. She had a run in with Phantom, where, much to her dismay, they agreed to a temporary truce. She had caught two ghosts already, she got an A on her Spanish test (she would know what Paulina was really saying about her now), and she was already maiming Vlad Plasmius, third most annoying ghost on her list (one and two are Phantom).

Plasimus took a glance over his shoulder to see the teenager rapidly catching up to him. He grimaced and went invisible, keeping on his path.

Valerie pressed a button on her wrist cuff, activating a new screen inside her helmet. “Time to take this baby for a test drive.” She smirked as her thermal imaging sensors went on. She easily spotted a very cold entity flying just in front of her where the ghost she was chasing just was. “Pfft. Amateurs.” She snorted and held out her gun, aiming directly for Plasmius’s back, and fired, hitting him directly. She smiled in satisfaction.

“Ahh!” His invisibility flickered in and out as he grabbed his searing shoulder. “What the-” It felt like something was digging into his skin. His eyes widened as he saw the teen once again coming full speed at him, a look of pure rage and vengeance on her face. He quickly took off again, flying lower to the ground. “I didn’t buy her that!”

Plasmius quickly landed behind a tree and transformed back to human. He rolled his shoulders back a couple of times, still feeling the burn from her gun underneath his suit. No matter, he was decent enough to make it home from here.

As he called for a car, Valerie swooped down to look for Plasmius. She growled when there was no sign of him, although she did see Mayor Masters getting into his car. “Stupid ghosts,” she muttered as she started typing things into one of her gadgets. “Good thing that blast didn’t just burn you.” She looked at the GPS in her helmet and smiled when something popped up on the radar. “Yes! Mrs. Fenton’s ghost tracking system worked!”

Valerie took a small moment to celebrate and reminded herself to thank Mrs. Fenton for letting her test some new inventions. Danny had been reluctant to let her talk about ghosts with his mother, but Valerie had eventually worn her friend down.

She took off, following the little dot on her screen. “Weird, it looks like the ghost is trailing Mayor Masters’ car…oh no, he’s after the mayor!” She had followed the car back to the mayor’s mansion, surveilling the outside once she saw he was safely inside his home.

Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she double checked her radar to see that the ghost was indeed here at the mayor’s mansion. “What are you up to…” She pushed a button dismantling her hoverboard and storing it back in her boots and looked around for an open window. For the mayor’s safety. She quietly climbed in and scoped the place out. “Mr. Masters?” She whisper-yelled and started checking out rooms in the mansion.

Why did the mayor’s mansion suddenly have an eerie feeling to it? She had been here dozens of times, but for some reason, today the atmosphere was more sinister. She had only been in a few rooms of the large estate before. Perhaps it was because she was charting unknown territory. She slowed her breathing down so she could be quieter, and continued tip-toeing down a seemingly never ending hallway.

She had heard some faint beeping coming from nearby. Glancing in one of the rooms, she saw a picture frame with an otherworldly glow behind it. Bingo.

Valerie scanned her surroundings before entering the room and glanced up at the painting of the mayor. She rolled her eyes. The mayor was nice and all, but after losing everything on Phantom’s accord several months ago, she was realizing how insignificant most superfluous things, such as a twelve-foot tall headshot of yourself, were. Men and their egos.

She tried lifting the painting unsuccessfully. It was worth a shot. She double checked her surroundings for a button or a switch, and started playing around in the dark with items until she found the switch beneath the fireplace mantel across the room. She quickly maneuvered her way into a lab. “What’s this?”

It looked similar to the chemistry labs at school; there were all sorts of glass beakers filled with miscellaneous liquids, notebooks laying askew, and she recognized a Bunsen burner. She walked over to a chalkboard with formulas written all over it. She had never been a mayor before, but she was pretty certain a mayor didn’t need all of this. This looked vaguely like the Fentons lab, though she had only seen it in brief one time, but this lab was more...creepy.

Valerie quietly looked around at all the machinery, looking for any sign of Plasmius or Mr. Masters. Could he be held hostage in his own home? None of this was adding up.

Alert, she jumped at a small thump behind her. She stiffened, turned, and had her gun pointed and ready to fire at whatever the source was. “What the…” She lowered her weapon and removed her helmet, carefully approaching the...whatever that was.

It looked vaguely human, but she was certain it was most definitely not human.

“H-hello.” She jumped back when the...thing…spoke. It was somewhat shaped like a human; it had limbs, eyes (though one of them was slowly dripping down its face) and a mouth, obviously. The rest of it was glowy green goo. It looked like a person had been half melted in a nuclear power plant mixed with Frankenstein’s monster that had gotten run over by a truck, exploded, and then was put back together to resemble a human. Definitely some nightmarish hybrid that could have only been cooked up by an insane scientist.

“Uh, hi?” She looked at the thing suspiciously, quickly glancing around to see if there were any other current threats. Heart pounding in her chest, she took a deep breath and tried to steady her voice. She needed answers. “What...what are you?” She raised an eyebrow, keeping her gun at standby just in case.

The creature pointed to a computer screen behind her. Keeping an eye on the monster, she glanced at the screen.

Clone Experiment #360: Failed

Notes: Less ectoplasm; need to strengthen ghost powers; human aspects making progress

She looked back at the thing. “You’re a clone? Of what?” Valerie searched for a mouse beside the computer and...was that a picture of Mrs. Fenton?! She grimaced and clicked on the computer, showing a new screen.

Clone Experiment #361: In Progress

Notes: Still developing, but most promising; switched genders and adding another human’s DNA helped stabilize; shows most sign of life; need more Phantom DNA

Valerie’s eyes widened. “You’re a clone of Phantom?!” She raised the gun back up at the monstrosity. It nodded and took a step closer. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

“P-please…”

She tilted her head in surprise. The thing wanted her to shoot it?

“Please shoot. End pain.” She stared into its somewhat familiar eyes and she saw suffering and despair as it moved one of its eyeballs back into place.

“You...you can feel all of that?” She looked at the deformities once again and cringed when it nodded. “Who did this to you?” She demanded.

“Master,” raising a goopy limb, it pointed to a painting of the mayor on the wall similar to the one she came in through. Odd. It paused before pleading again, “P-please...shoot. End me.”

Valerie gulped and weighed her options. The thing was kind of a ghost, which she is set to destroy, but it still seemed vaguely human. It clearly had a soul, a tortured one at that, which meant she was ending a life and she didn’t think she could live with that. However, the thing was clearly suffering and she would be giving it a mercy kill. “I...c-can’t.” It started advancing towards her so she raised her gun again, arm shaking. “Don’t come any closer! Please!”

“Can’t do more experiments. End pain.” It continued to move towards her. “Please.” She looked at its pleading eyes before shutting hers, turning her head away, and pulling the trigger. She flinched when she felt warm goo hit the side of her face, hearing it splatter all over the wall behind her as well. She opened her eyes and looked at the glowing ectoplasm splattered across the lab. She was still trembling.

“What was that noise?” Valerie barely made out a voice that sounded similar to Plasmius’s. Shit. No time to process the murder she just committed. She forgot why she was there in the first place: to protect the mayor and catch a ghost. She quickly found a spot to hide while she charged up her weapons, preparing for battle and hostage negotiation.

“...incompetent children and their lack of discipline.” She heard him muttering as he flew into view. “What?! What happened here?!” He flew over towards where Valerie had been standing before, looking at all the gunk covering his equipment. He pressed a button and a hidden wall suddenly came into view.

Valerie gulped. More experiments. Just like the one she just destroyed. Some looking more like Phantom, some looking more like goo in a jar. One seemed to resemble a little girl, “Dani Phantom #361” written below the tank she was floating in. There were at least eight clones there, some hanging from chains. She could hear some of them whimpering.

Plasmius scanned the wall and saw the empty spot. “Hmm...must have been more unstable than I thought. It appears #360 combusted and broke free of its bonds.” He typed a few things into the computer. “Now to get this painful contraption off of me!” Plasmius transformed back to his human half, his hand clawing at the silver device embedded in his shoulder. Masters stood where Plasmius once was. He grabbed some forceps and starting prying at the tracking device, not stopping or even wincing as blood oozed out around it. He set the forceps down and wrapped his fingers around the device. With a brief glow of his fingers, the device was zapped off his shoulder.

Valerie could smell the burnt circuits along with the stench of the clone ectoplasm in the room. She could feel her stomach churning, but she was strong. She held her breath as she watched Vlad Masters glance at his watch.

“Oh fudge! I’ve got to meet Ed at seven for D&D!” He slapped a piece of gauze on his wound and looked for some medical tape, continuing to mutter to himself. “Last week I was late from Spectra’s book club running long, and if I’m late again I’ll miss Harriet’s spinach puffs! Better fly there.” After tending to his wound, two dark rings surrounded the man and flash of light filled the room, Masters becoming Plasmius once again.

Valerie’s eyes widened and she covered her mouth to mute her gasp. She couldn’t believe what she just saw. Plasmius/Masters quickly flew off. She blinked rapidly as she gathered her thoughts, making sure what she just saw is what she think she just saw. The mayor was trying to clone Phantom? Is that how he had ghost powers himself? The mayor was a ghost?! And not just any ghost, a ghost who had harmed her and who she had been hunting for months on end, despite Vlad Masters’s insistence to focus on Phantom instead of Plasmius. Of course.

And Phantom. Phantom had tried talking to her when they formed their temporary truce earlier this morning, ironically setting aside their differences over the man whose house she was standing in; the man who wasn’t really a man at all. Phantom’s warning about Mayor Masters echoed in her head.

“You can’t trust him, he’s not who you think he is.”

He was right. She didn’t completely trust Phantom’s word, of course, but considering the new information she unraveled over the past ten minutes, Phantom…was telling the truth? Maybe she had to reevaluate her stance on Phantom.

No. Just because he isn’t as malevolent doesn’t mean he wouldn’t destroy her if he had the choice. He’s still a ghost. Just like Vlad.

Vlad Masters.

Valerie felt so stupid. Here she was, top ten in her class, and she didn’t make the connection between Vlad Plasmius and Vlad Masters. They talked similarly, behaved similarly for the most part, tended to show up one after the other...they even had the same first name for crying out loud! She should have just ignored her grudge and listened to Phantom. He never hurt her like Plasmius did, after all. No, Danny Phantom was pretty civil towards her, she supposed.

Wait.

Phantom.

Danny Phantom.

Danny Fenton.

“Oh shit.”

#these characters and genres are definitely not what I usually write so this was a challenge but I hope I was able to do justice #I know how admired Valerie is I was so anxious about this #still hope you like it pigte!!#christmas truce 2019 #christmas truce #holiday truce #holiday truce 2019 #danny phantom #valerie gray #vlad masters #vlad plasmius #stephanie writes sometimes #ps there is also a little easter egg pointing towards Nick's fic that he wrote for the truce this year!#pls don't totally hate me for botching this

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