#you’ll rip my reproductive rights out of my cold dead hands

[yourdeepestfathoms]

what did the chickadee and phoenix say to the hybrid?

this was supposed to be a short snippet,,,,,,, anyway, Lydia meets the Maitlands but make it the ~wing au~

----------------------------------------

  “Greeting ghosts,” Said the strange little fledging that entered the attic. “I am Lydia Deetz. Do not be afraid.”

  “Why aren’t you afraid of us?” Barbara asked.

  “Because you aren’t scary,” Lydia said. “I mean, look at me in comparison.” She spread her sagging wings (did she ever lift them?), and Barbara realized there were four of them. “I’m probably the freakiest thing to ever walk among the avians. You got competition.”

Realization dawned on Barbara, but Adam got to it first.

  “You’re a hybrid!” Her husband yelled, nearly flinging his sheet right off of him when he pointed to Lydia.

  “Adam!” Barbara scolded.

  “No, it’s okay,” Lydia said. “I prefer the term ‘hybrid’ over ‘mutant’ and ‘monster.’”

  “I was gonna say it’s rude to point,” Barbara said, pushing Adam’s hand down.

  “Ah,” Lydia nodded. “But yes. I am a hybrid. In the blood. Unfortunately.”

She spread her wings in a mock bow to them, and Barbara could see veins of white riddling the insides of the upper pair. She then winced, fangs flashing in the dim attic light when she grimaced in obvious pain, and let her wings go limp. They landed in a heap on the ground, strewn out like scraps of ruined cloth.

  “Are you alright?” Barbara asked worriedly, feeling a flash of maternal instincts zip through her like lightning.

  “Fine,” Lydia answered before the question could completely leave Barbara’s mouth, as if it were normal for her to brush off her discomfort when around other people. She shuffled her feet and tilted her head at Barbara and Adam. “Why are you in sheets?”

  “We were trying to scare you,” Adam told her.

  “You’re not doing a very good job,” Lydia said. “What do you look like under there? Are you horribly disfigured?” Her shoulders lifted, but her big bat ears remained completely drooped. “Are you like me? May I see?”

Barbara and Adam took off their sheets. Lydia’s expression dimmed.

  “Oh,” Lydia seemed disappointed. “You’re pureblooded.” She sniffed. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Adam said. “I’m Adam, this is Barbara.”

  “Oh, woah,” Lydia’s eyes dilated hugely, like a cat that just saw its owner’s foot move under the blankets. “You’re so shiny.”

Barbara blinked, then realized Lydia was talking about her. Even in death, her feathers continued to glow like fire. She extended one of her wings to Lydia.

  “You can touch them, if you’d like.”

Lydia looked up at her in shock. “Really? You’re not afraid of me, like, contaminating you?”

  “No...”

  “Or infecting you with my ‘dirty blood’?”

  “No.”

  “Or ripping your wings out of your back like I’m a feral WingEater because I’m jealous of how pretty and normal you are and want to ruin all purebreds in an envious rage?”

  “No! Do people really say that stuff to you?!”

Lydia actually laughed. “Wow, you really haven’t met a hybrid before.” She shuffled her feet. “But-- I can really touch them?”

Barbara smiled warmly at her. “Of course, sweetheart.” She nudged her wing closer. “Go on. I promise I don’t have Drop Feather Fever.”

  “Even if you did, I don’t have feathers!” Lydia said, then reached out and brushed Barbara’s wing. Her touch was light and gentle, as if she were worried she may hurt her new friend, and her short, stubby claws tickled against the skin beneath the feathers. “Wow... They’re so soft! And warm!”

  “Yup!” Adam strode over, looking proud. “You, little bat-moth, are looking at a real Phoenix Avem! WAIT--”

Lydia leapt backwards and the mane of yellow-orange flannel moth fur around her neck and chest bristled like a startled cat.

  “YOU CAN SEE US?!” Adam yelled.

It was only then that Barbara realized that Lydia shouldn’t have been able to see her or Adam. She had been so distracted by the adorable fledgling that it hadn’t dawned on her at all.

  “Uhh,” Lydia’s fur settled. “Yeah?”

  “But we were told that the living ignore the strange and usual,” Adam said.

  “Well, perhaps it’s because I, myself, am strange and unusual,” Lydia said. “Also all of my internal organs are purple and I can’t have a period due to a ‘compromised reproductive system caused by faulty genetics,’ so I’m not exactly very far from the boat you’re rocking in.”

  “Trust me, sweetie, the no period thing is a blessing,” Barbara said.

  “Everything else is a curse, though,” Lydia said with a sad smile.

Barbara frowned at that, but before she could press on what she meant, Adam stepped in.

  “Okay, well, since you can see us, do you mind leaving and never coming back?”

  “Adam!” Barbara flared. She thought of not seeing this little girl again, and it made a cold pit open up inside of her and she couldn’t really explain why.

  “Not her,” Adam said quickly. “Her family!”

Lydia scoffed. “We’re not a family.” She sounded a touch offended. “We’re father, daughter, and Delia.”

Furrowing her eyebrows, Barbara inquired, “Your mother, she...?”

Just when Barbara thought Lydia’s ears couldn’t droop any further, they somehow got even lower.

  “She... She’s dead...”

Adam grimaced. Barbara’s wings tensed against her back for bringing such a traumatic experience up.

The good news, though, was that the role of mother was up for the taking. And since Lydia clearly felt anything but a parental bond with that Delia woman, Barbara knew it was at good as hers.

She could feel the mammary feathers and nesting season hormones coming in already! Literally. She imprinted on Lydia when she touched her wing. That was her chick now.

  “Oh, honey,” Barbara murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

Lydia shook her head, making her ears slap around her face. She gazed around the attic with sparkling eyes, as if she were holding back tears.

  “She would have loved this place,” Lydia said. “She was Vesper! Which, you know, explains,” She gestured to herself. “She would call me her ‘weird little moon,’ but it was never in a mean way. And we used to have our own little full moon festivals so I would grow up with proper Vesper traditions and culture! We would hang up all the blankets in the house on the trees and make these forts that we would burrow in and watch the moon from. She taught me how to properly pray to Valtiel and everything! And we would do the moon dances on the ground because I can’t fly, but she made the effort to learn how to for me. We couldn’t actually go to the festivals, though, because,” She gestured again. “She worried about me all the time and didn’t let me do a lot of things, but what we did do was amazing.” She then blinked out of her daze and shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bore you talking about my mom.”

  “No, it’s okay!” Barbara assured her. “We don’t mind!”

  “Really?” Lydia tilted her head and her ears flopped over with the movement. “‘Cause my dad never wants me to talk about her. It’s basically against the law in the house. Among many things.” She raised her wings slightly and did a voice that was apparently supposed to be her cicada Cimex father, “‘Lydia, no talking about your mom! Lydia, no eating bugs, it’s weird and basically cannibalism! Lydia, no coming around me because even though I say I’m trying to change my views of you I still see you as an unrepentant monster who I fear will eat my throat out while I’m sleeping and it makes me guilty not because the way I think of you but because I fear of what you’ll do to society and I was the one who brought you into the world to wreak suck destruction on civilization!’”

Barbara and Adam stared at her in shock.

  “Dads, am I right?”

  “That’s…very concerning,” Adam said.

Lydia shrugged nonchalantly. “Everything about my existence is concerning, so…” Her face then scrunched up and she pressed her floppy ears against the sides of her head like she was trying to keep out a noise that Barbara and Adam’s Avem ears couldn’t pick up. “Oh, ow. Stop worrying so loudly! I’m okay! I’m, like, basically immune to it at this point!”

Barbara and Adam both blinked in confusion, but then Barbara understood.

  “You’re a mind reader.”

Lydia pulled her hands away and smiled slightly. “In the flesh.”

Barbara wondered what that was like--

  “It’s pretty cool, actually.”

--to hear everyone’s thoughts, all the different ways they thought about you and judged you, possibly pretending they liked you when really they hated your guts.

  “When you put it like that…”

  “You surprise me more and more, Lydia,” Adam said.

  “Better than scaring you,” Lydia said. “You guys are really cool. I like you. You’re probably the best thing about this stupid house.”

  “This house is not stupid!” Adam blustered. He grabbed Lydia by the shoulders, making them lurch and the moth fur bristle, and spun her around to him so he could scold her. “It’s a classic Victiorian-- OWW!!!”

Adam ripped away from Lydia as if he had touched fire, while Lydia shrunk away, instinctively wrapping her wings around herself. Adam shook his hands in the air while flapping his wings in obvious distress. 

  “Ow! Ow! Ow! What HAPPENED?” Adam yelped.

  “Sorry,” Lydia whispered. 

  “Are you okay?” Barbara asked her husband. He splayed his hands open for her, and she winced when she saw angry red blisters starting to form all across his palms. “Oh.”

  “It isn’t lethal!” Lydia said, and she sounded very meek compared to the snarky girl that had been talking a few seconds before. “Well, I don’t think it is… But you’re dead, so it’s okay! The pain will go away within a few hours!”

  “HOURS?!” Adam squawked, as if he were a parrot and not a chickadee. He made a woeful noise. “Just cut my hands off!”

Lydia’s ears drooped even lower. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Maitland. I should have told you.”

  “That your really soft fur is EVIL?” Adam said, and Barbara knew he was playing with Lydia, now. However, the little fledgling didn’t seem to realize because she still looked anxious.

  “It’s-- I take after the moth my Cimex side is from. A southern flannel. The worms have venomous hairs, so…” Lydia fluffed her collar of fur. “I do, too. And they sting pretty badly. But not all the time! Only when I bristle them. Thank the goddesses.” She shuffled her feet. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s alright,” Adam assured her. “A little blistering never hurt anyone. Oh, look, boils! Wonderful!” He laughed. “It builds character!”

Lydia cracked a small smile at that. When her nervousness didn’t recede, Barbara opened one wing to her, beckoning her to come closer. After a moment of shock and delight, gauging if it were a trap, Lydia skittered over and burrowed herself into Barbara’s feathers.

She fit perfectly. 

#wing au #i feel like i wrote lydia wrong?? #like i made her too meek during the end? #idk #go easy on me this is my first fic for this fandom #and it wasn't even supposed to be a fic lol #i just got carried away #beetlejuice #beetlejuice the musical #beetlejuice the broadway musical #beetlejuice the movie #lydia deetz #barbara maitland #adam maitland #beetlejuice au #beetlejuice fic #beetlejuice fanfiction

[anthropwashere]

deadfic: welcome the unknown

Another one for @goodintentionswipfest, and the oldest of the lot I’ll be posting by a significant margin! As in written in 2009 old. You’ve been warned.

Gonna put the whole fic under a readmore because JTHM fics have one setting and that’s Upsetting, so have some naval gazing from me first.

2009 was uhhhhh, some kind of year for me. It was the year I graduated high school, and the year I was a little bit homeless, and the year I wished I was a little bit homeless for longer so I could have avoided some bananas shit, and the year I spent waiting on tenterhooks mid-recession before I could run from a ehhh home life off to the military.

18 year old anthrop was working through some shit while writing this thing, is what I'm saying.

This was intended as a prequel to a fic I was working on in high school, while also being kind of a stand alone fic? If you've been with me since my JTHM days (wow) you'll recognize what it might have been for, but otherwise don't worry about it. This is a bit all over the place but there are still a lot of pieces I'm fond of and honestly, it's nice to see where I was as a writer and how far I've come in comparison? Too many of us fandom writers destroy huge swaths of our work out of this terribly sad and unnecessary shame for liking "cringy" things, and to this day I regret doing the same to virtually all the things I wrote for my first few fandoms. Cheesy and heavy-handed as this fic is, it's nice to have around still, you know? I cared about this fic. Working on it kept me sane during an extremely shitty summer. I dearly wish I still had the first draft, which I remember writing in different colored markers on folded sheets of computer paper hunched up in any random little corner I could get some time alone. Alas, like 98% of the rest of my things pre-military, it's gone for good.

Title comes from Robbers on High Street's "The Fatalist," which sure was a song I had on repeat a lot back in 2009.

=

Everywhere is dirty. Filth and stink and dead particles on everything he touches. He'd fallen asleep, and somebody had broken into his house and poured the offal of a thousand trash cans onto everything and smeared it in deep. 

Asshole. 

Really though, they are all assholes. Shit-smeared animals groping around on all fours, blind and deaf and desensitized to whatever little good was left in the world around them. 

They make so much noise. All they do is scream, and whenever someone manages to gasp out a non sequitur the whole world applauds, casting them into the history books for the next generation to draw penises upon their photographs. It is all a matter of course.

It can't just be him that sees this. One look outside is enough to prove his point. Why else would he board up all the windows? To keep the assholes from looking in, of course.

The assholes are everywhere these days, screaming and fucking. Fucking. They're good at that too. Reproduction. Bucking hips and nails across skin and incredible, terrible intimacy, the exchanging of fluids. Disease of the flesh, fever of the mind. A new generation born in every positive pregnancy test, a new generation dead in every street corner abortion clinic. Babies. Disgusting, germ-ridden things. Oh God, don't let it touch him with its fat little hands shiny with saliva and the green ooze that won't cease dripping from the holes in its face. He doesn't know what'll happen, what he'll do if this thing gets too close, but he has ideas, and none of them are pleasant.

He always has ideas.

He blinks, and the baby and the stinking slut mother cooing at it with too-red lips and salon-styled hair and the bus and the roaring all vanish. He stumbles and knocks an elbow against the dresser.

The smell in here is somehow worse now. Like old vomit in high summer. Is it vomit? Is it his vomit?

He decides it's better not to now, at least not now. He feels a strange mood coming. High tide comes to drown the starfish, already dried by the sun. Perhaps it is a mood he needs, but then again, perhaps it comes too late.

Something cracks, and the edges go soft and drip in a puddle of wax.

He burns his fingers by candlelight.

=

"Johnny?"

"Bunny?"

His throat burns. It hurts to breathe.

"Oh thank God, you can hear me again. You're back."

"What—" He breaks off, coughing. Blood in his mouth, on his teeth. He licks them clean and swallows. "What are you talking about?"

Bunny sounds small and tired in his ears—

Mind?

—and there was fear, Johnny can hear it licking at the corners of Bunny's— 

His?

—voice, but it has faded with time. Johnny suspects he has been asleep for a very long time.

 "I've been trying to reach you for… God, I don't even know how long." Bunny trails off.

He looks around, his eyes struggling to see in the pre-dawn light trickling in through a dozen half-circle windows on the floor above wherever he is. More by the smell than anything, he realizes he is surrounded by blood and bodies. A part of him knows he shouldn't be comforted by this, shouldn't find this scene familiar.

And yet.

"I was scared, Nny."

He hiccups, chokes, and spits out three bullets.

=

The mirror is laughing at him.

He sneers at it. Squints as two left hands do two different things, almost identical but the blur is still visible, still there.

He was wrong, he knows that now. There isn't just one person, one world, one reality on the other side of the mirror. There are dozens, maybe hundreds. Maybe thousands. Not all at once, of course, but there seems to be another pair of eyes staring back, another mouth talking at everyone and no one, each time he looks hard enough, long enough. The edges blur, fingers drag in slow-motion arcs, teeth where teeth shouldn't be, a hundred shades of skin and hair and eyes.

He can't remember the last time he showered.

=

“You look like shit, Nny,” observes the Burger Boy.

“Yes.”

“You really should do something about it.”

“Yes.”

He drives the pen through the paper and carves something into the wood that later he won't understand.

=

Greasy. He is so greasy. The others in the mirror bow out of the way to let him see the unwashed, true reflection of himself. He makes a face, drags his cheeks down to his jaw and waggles his tongue, and the reflection follows accordingly. No blur. 

Yep, that’s him all over.

Devi screams, her face set in a terrified, furious, how-could-you-you-shithead expression, and smashes his face against the mirror. His nose breaks on impact, glass stabs, digs, and catches, and drags down his cheeks and forehead. Blood everywhere, his blood. A tooth goes flying as his chin hits the dressing table’s pitted surface with a crack that sickens him even as the edges of his sight turn black, and the pain is more than noise can express. Blood on Devi’s knuckles. Fingers ripping out his hair.

No.

Everything pauses, then it all reverses in an instant, and he is left standing before a dirty mirror with too many faces looking back.

That already happened— a long long long long time ago

—and he is better now. Devi is better now too. He hasn’t talked to her in awhile but she is around, she is there, and everything is okay now. There is some blood dried into the floorboards still—was that were the stink is coming from?—but his scars have faded. He has forgiven, and he thought he had forgotten.

He’d gotten a new mirror and everything.

=

“Hi Nny.”

“Evening.”

Squee leans back on his heels before the underbelly of a machine Johnny has no understanding of and glares. With his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, smears of engine grease on his hands, sweat on his face, and looking like a mix of engineer, mad scientist, and responsible adult, Johnny has no idea how to treat the boy-now-man-next-door.

"How've you been? Whatcha been up to these days?"

There is something unspoken, something furious and accusing underneath the easy drawl of the questions. He can't imagine what Squee could be angry with him about. He is at a loss, also, at how to respond to the heavy questions thrown at him so casually. He struggles under their weight, unable to answer, unable to keep quiet, unable to lie.

Squee chuckles as he stands in one smooth motion centered on his knees and cleans his glasses with a rag from his pocket. "It's okay, shit, calm down. Not like I got a gun to your head or anything."

For some reason, he feels himself flinch. Squee's eyebrows knit and relax in an instant.

"Let's see," Squee muses. "You look like you, I'm pretty sure your car still works, and I'm currently over at Pepito's for some headfuck or another. Okay, I think I know what year this is. Awesome." He puts his glasses on and shares a smile that could cut glass.

"What are you talking about?"

Squee looks surprised, but after a moment laughs a quiet little laugh. "That's right, I forgot. This is the year you do your weird losing-time thing, yeah? Haha, you freaked me out even more all summer. I think I slept on the roof more than I did my own room. Oh God, this is even better!" He laughs again, louder, and claps a hand on the shoulder of the strange machine.

He can't think of any kind of response to this before Squee speaks again. "Fuck, Johnny, you really think seeing me at nine one day and twenty-three the next is normal?"

He thought about it. "Noooot really. No."

"That is exactly—what—How did you even recognize me?" He gestures at himself, and his eyebrows do something halfway between emulating surprise and gut-busting dislike.

"Who else could you be?"

This time his laugh is loud and body shaking, and he thumps the machine as if Johnny has said something incredibly witty. "Wow, okay, if that logic works for you it works for me, you crazy fuck."

He did not just hear that. "What did you call me?"

Squee smiles again, but his eyes remain cold and flinty and full of hate towards something—Johnny suspects—he has done in the future. Goddamnit, future self, way to ruin a good thing. But his hands still clench, his joints lock. How dare Squee? How could he?

But the boy-now-man-next-door acts as if nothing has changed. "So I can't remember how your art or lack thereof is working out in this little slice of time. You paintin' with any other color 'sides red?"

Why was Squee acting like this? "Of course I am."

He isn't.

Squee scratches his neck, scratches at scabs over long, thin lacerations in finger-shaped bruises, and Johnny wonders if what he's feeling now is how the man felt when he had still been a boy, and the scary neighbor man once crawled through the window to tell him a bedtime story. 

"You know, somehow I doubt that."

=

His fingers itch for activity. He hasn't left the house in days, maybe weeks. Does it matter?

He licks his lips and swallows, fighting down familiar urges. He can beat this.

=

"Do you have a problem with me?"

"Oh god oh god oh god why are you doing this—"

"Excuse me, I asked you a question."

Gently touch the controls, tack the pressure on, oh, just a little more. Just enough to make them scream.

=

The back of his head itches, and when he scratches his fingers come away red. No pain, just blood. So it isn't his then. But he can't remember killing anyone.

He looks away from his hand and out the window, at the outside world creeping in through the cracks between the boards. Outside there is no sun, no moon, no stars, no anything. His breath hitches.

It's raining.

He exhales.

The door is open though he doesn't remember leaving it so, so he takes the hint and walks outside. He inhales, tasting the hot summer smell of wet concrete and the cloying reek of decomposing bodies in his front yard. The million million light bulbs of the city throw their energy skyward, and the roiling clouds eat the light whole. A weird, orange glow from above casts the city into an otherworldly scene, and, feeling a little silly, he wonders if tonight might be the beginning of the apocalypse, and the idea doesn't sound half bad.

In the driveway, the concrete is slick with oil. He stands there a while, letting the rain wash the human grease out of his hair. It takes him just as long to realize his car is missing.

"That's funny," he says aloud, wiping the rainwater out of his eyes. "I don't remember teleporting home. Unless—was it Tuesday yesterday? I don't think it was, but—"

There is a soft, scared inhale of breath, a backwards scream. He turns, and there on the sidewalk is a gray woman in a bathrobe, faded coffee stains and food crusts all down her front. She is pointing at him, her face wide, frozen in a rictus grin of fear.

"What?" he asks, reality crashing into place with a shatter of glass ripping through his ears.

Her mouth moves, but the sounds that come out are backwards and insulting, and her eyes are fish eyes, wide and lidless and staring.

"What?" he asks again, sharply, his voice ugly and tasting of ashes.

"M-mon—" the woman wheezes.

Her throat is in his hands, and he doesn't recall moving from his empty driveway.

"What are you staring at? What do you want?!" he screams.

She gags and gurgles, her tubes for eating breathing talking standing bleeding; all of it collapsing under his fingers—

which hadn't been so thin a few weeks ago

—and the grin on his face is a mile wide. 

"Monster!" she whimpers as something cracks in her neck.

Monster? His hands loosen, cradle her jaw, as his mind tries to grapple with this. Why… Why would anyone call him that?

The pounding of feet, and someone wrenches the woman out of his grasp. "Jesus jump-roping Christ, Johnny!"

Dazed, he stares at the newcomer as if he's looking at everything through the wrong end of a telescope. The reek and the roaring of the public transit system returns with a bang of pneumatic doors, and Squee's mouth moves in angry shapes but the slut-mother's cooing comes out instead.

=

"You gonna pay or get off my bus?"

He looks at the bus driver, at the thick rolls of fat ballooning out underneath his sweaty, undersized uniform, a sneer pulling back the heavy flesh around pearly white teeth. He imagines jamming the steering wheel through the man's dislocated jaw and feels slightly better.

It's safe to imagine such atrocities. Imagine, but nothing more. He has to remember that.

"Hey kid! I'm talkin' to you!"

"Sorry," he manages through grinding teeth and a throat hot and restricted with anger. He deposits the required fare into the automated tray and darts across the yellow line before he can act upon his ideas.

He always has ideas.

He stumbles into an open seat as the bus jerks forward with a belch of black exhaust he can't see but can taste, heavy and gritty on his tongue. On his right, a plastic mommy bounces her little dolly on her knees. They are dressed in matching summer dresses. Disgusting.

How long has it been summer anyway?

He glances at the pair again and thumbs the volume on his CD player a little higher, fighting to keep his face neutral. He has never been fond of parents who treat their offspring like objects rather than the people they are going to be.

Something tugs on his sleeve and he recoils, crashing into the metal bars on his left. It takes everything he has not to retaliate against the foreign touch. His headphones are knocked askew by the impact, and Mozart's power vanishes, becomes tiny vibrations around his neck.

The baby, the child, the dull-eyed little girl has the ragged end of his sleeve in its shining, soaking wet hand. Through the fabric, he can feel its dampness, its heat. It babbles at him incoherently, green ooze dripping from its squashed little nose into the gaping, grinning mouth below.

"Oh, she likes you!" The mother cries, swooping in for the kill. Her smell washes over him—of heady perfume, hairspray, hysteria. He can see the makeup creases, the scars of plastic surgery, the shadow of a bruise on her shoulder half-hidden by her yellow sleeve. His mind jumps to all sorts of conclusions, and each one of them sickens him more than the last.

"Uh," he manages.

His hands twitch.

=

He is sick of this life again. All the old signs are there, everything points to one fact, but he can't bear going down that path, not yet. Later, later.

"'Later,' he says!" Crows the delighted Burger Boy. "Yes, perhaps when the scabs from the old shackles grow over the new he'll get off his scrawny ass and attempt to do something about all this!"

"Fuck you."

The Burger Boy looks at him imploringly, its meaty little hands clasped, its fangs retracted, the perfect image of a concerned friend in hideous checkered overalls. "In all seriousness, Johnny-boy, this is not something you can put off any longer. You must act now, or not at all."

"Go die in a hole."

"We both remember how effective that was the last time you tried that. Now, please—"

"Don't make me get the sledgehammer."

At least it had the decency to flinch at that, the little fuck.

The Burger Boy sighs, obviously frustrated. "I don't understand why you find it necessary to fight me so, Nny."

"Maybe it's because, oh, I don't know, you're trying to enslave me to my own kidneys?" He bites on the straw of his cherry Freezy hard enough to tear it. The plastic tastes like artificial fruit and latex gloves. "And don't call me Nny."

The Burger rolled its eyes, which shouldn't have been possible because it was pretending it was still ceramic. "So I'm no longer allowed that special little privilege, am I? Only the ghost of your dead, levitating bunny rabbit is?"

"Leave Nailbunny out of this."

"And those pathetic Doughboys as well? The very ones that conspired against you to 'serve their master', who, in case you've since forgotten, was the very creature you were charged with imprisoning behind a wall of blood and plaster?"

"That was D-Boy. Eff just wanted freedom. And really, can I blame him?" He bites the straw in half and spits it into the bathroom sink. In the mirror, his reflections mimic him, ten thousand mouths a-grinning.

"You're missing the point, though I'm hardly surprised."

A thought strikes him, and it's out of his mouth before he can think twice about it. "You know, if they ever started talking again, I think I'd still let them call me Nny. Sure, they were both exploiting my ever-increasing insanity and all that, but they were mine in the beginning. Unlike you."

It ignored the jab. "If they ever start talking again, it will be far too late."

=

There wasn't any soap in the bathroom.

=

"What the hell were you thinking?"

He blinks. "What?"

"Give me one goddamn reason, one very good goddamn reason you had for strangling my mother, or so fucking help me Johnny—!"

Squee is definitely reminding him of himself now. Great. Fantastic. Fuck.

"Um."

=

The Burger Boy scowls, its face transmogrifying into the fanged, drooling thing it really is. "You remember how terrible it was to toil under the merciless whip of the System! I know you do because I am a part of you, though you refuse to believe as such! And though you hate what I have to offer, you must realize that I am far more preferable as I am now than what I could become unless you tear free of the System's grip now!"

"I AM FREE!"

With a snap of ceramic he breaks it's right arm off, and the two of them scream in pain and hate, in the same voice, in one voice.

"I." He jabs at his chest with the arm, feeling it squirm under his fingers.

"Am." He drops it to the bloodstained linoleum.

"Free." He grinds the arm to dust under the heel of his boot. His reflections are too blurred, too scattered, to see how many follow suit.

Gripping the hole where a limb had been seconds ago, its ugly face twisted further by agony, the Burger Boy pants, "There is no such thing as freedom! No!" It screams, harsh and violent, as he opens his mouth to retort, "Listen to me. Hear me out. Please."

A heartbeat passes. Five. He closes his eyes, suddenly exhausted, and nods. The figurine sighs and leans against the faucet, settling its insect eyes on the spilled Freezy in the tub.

"Let's get one thing straight. I don't want you thinking that the puppet masters are singling you out for sport. God knows you aren't anything special. Everyone is a slave to one thing or another." It pauses to laugh bleakly. "Perhaps even those who fancy themselves the masters of this game of Monopoly must bow their neck to the chopping block one day. Who am I to know? I am but a series of chemical reactions created in the misfiring neurons of a sick man's brain. But never mind that. What I'm trying to say here is that there has been no other way. Ever. There has been no freedom, no choice. It is all preordained. This is the way of all things."

Every part of him rebels against this. No free will? Impossible. His life is his own, now more than ever. Yes, he had been a slave, once. But that had just been the luck of the draw, an accident, like winning the lottery or getting hit by a truck. It was… unpredictable, impossible to preordain. Heat in his chest, his jaw tight and creaking. "They told me—" He begins, his voice ready to rise into a shriek.

"It was only temporary. Even stone must crumble, Johnny."

His legs turn to jelly at a terrible, terrifying thought. He grips the sink, licks his lips and tastes salt and cherries and fear. In a soft, weak voice he barely recognizes as his own he finally asks, "Are they going to make me a flusher again?"

"They already have."

=

"Mom, can you make it back to the house on your own?" As he speaks, Squee performs a quick once-over on the gasping woman clinging like a burr to his chest. His face betrays him, showing the extent of the damage done even as he keeps his voice upbeat, a stream of happy reassurances pouring out with the rain even as his eyes confirm a far more dire prognosis. "Johnny and I need to, um, talk."

"Who—" Her voice fractures in her collapsed throat, and she chokes and dry heaves until her face is purple with strain. 

Squee holds her until she calms. "Johnny's our neighbor, Mom. We've lived next to him since—for as long as I can remember."

"O-oh. He looks ni-ice. I-is he a friend o-of yours?"

Squee makes a face remarkably comparable to the one a particularly vehement guest made once after Johnny had made him swallow a pound of nails. "Just—go inside, Mom. Go see if Dad's awake, okay? See if he'll call 911 for you."

"Okay sweetie." Her voice is wet and crackling, like stiff paper going soft beneath a steady drip of water. He recognizes the sound, and suspects now that he may have squeezed too hard. But she had insulted him, hadn't she? Called him a fucking monster. How could he let that go without proper retaliation?

"And tell Dad I'll be in in a min—oh festering whore tits, your eyes are bleeding."

"Don't swear, honey." 

"Sorry. Johnny?"

He can't help but flinch. "Yes?"

Squee swallows, looking almost frightened before setting his jaw and glaring hard at him. "You are going to go in your house, sit your ass down on your couch, and you are going to stay the fu—stay there until I can get Dad to give me the keys so I can get Mom to the ER. See, betcha I gotta do it 'cause Dad is an incompetent, loveless douche with a heart of coal. But I'm gonna do it fast, 'cause you and I? We need to talk."

"I—" 

Squee got him off with a sharp gesture. "Uh-uh. Not today. Not gonna play that game. Get in your house."

He got in his house.

=

"Slavery is inherent in all things, Johnny. It is only a question of to what. Once before you were selected to be a Flusher—"

"And I failed. Miserably, I might add."

The Burger Boy shook its head firmly. "You excelled."

"Clearly we're remembering my experiences in the After Life differently."

"Clearly you forget what kind of monster was imprisoned behind that wall."

"I never saw it. I died before I had the chance."

"It doesn't matter whether you saw it or not! What you had to do to keep it locked up should tell you more than enough."

"I—"

"I think somebody with a say in things liked what you were doing down here. Otherwise, why else tether you to this particular yoke a second time? If your memories of what Satan said to you are correct, you are practically the very antithesis of Flusher material!" It hobbles towards him, it's ungainly waddle exacerbated by its missing arm. Drool spills freely from between jutting fangs that cut at its lips with every overeager exclamation. "Take a good look at me, boy. The very moment the System slapped the manacles back on your wrists it began to take me as well. These changes are the result of your inaction."

His reflections smile bitterly. "You claim to be mine one minute and admit you're not the next. One or the other; it can't be both."

It stares at him with a steady, curious expression. "Can't it? The System is trying to take me from you. That is one truth. Another is that I am fighting it as best I can. Just as your Doughboys did, not so long ago."

He sneers and says nothing.

"I am resisting," the Burger Boy continues, "but I cannot win. The changes done to this form you've assigned me are the result of every foot of ground lost. You must see how much faster the transformation is in me compared to the Doughboys! You must understand that you are no longer a mere Flusher! For the Wall Monster remembers how effective it was to use your own madness against you, and now an eye is upon you, Johnny! The merciless, unflinching eye of the System in its entirety, and the System is more powerful than either of us can possibly comprehend."

He locks his fingers around the lip of the sink to keep from shaking. Slowly, the words trickle out of his mouth, pooling in a pile of warm paranoia in the drain. "Everything you say only goes to prove how much they have already conquered you, taken you from me and twisted you into some… thing. Some monster braying about hope even as it settles its jaws around my neck." 

He drops his gaze from the figurine, from the mirror, afraid of the triumph he knows he will find there. "I can't trust you."

The Burger Boy positively beams. "Now you're catching on."

=

"Nailbunny, what should I do?"

resist

"Who? Who do I fight? Him? The System?"

resist

"Whether I like it or not, he's my only source of information. Even if he's manipulating me, he at least has the decency to forewarn me, unlike his predecessors. If push comes to shove, I think I could beat him. But what—what if he's telling the truth? What if he can help me?"

resist

resist

"Nailbunny?"

resist

resist

resist

resist

resist

re—

=

"Please! Oh god, this hurts so much! Stop!"

"Shut up. The machine's barely even warmed up."

The sobbing blob tied to one of many torture devices he keeps humming at the ready cringes as his hand floats above the dial. He allows himself a brief smile.

"W-what do you want? Jesus Christ, I just m-met you! What did I even do?!"

He opens his mouth, a speech rife with injustice suffered under the merciless hands of a society dead from the neck up on the tip of his tongue, only to find himself unable to remember who this woman is and why he has her strapped into the Needler.

He laughs, and turns the dial up anyway.

=

—sist

=

The baby, the child, the dull-eyed little girl releases its iron grip on his sleeve and forgets him instantly, yet the mother perseveres, eager to speak with another human being. It seems he has no choice but to participate in a conversation with this woman until his stop, as every other seat is taken. And besides, it would be rude to just stand up and walk away.

You could kill her.

He frowns and ignores the voice, but nevertheless finds it unsettling. Meat's all for living and talking and eating and fucking and being an actual human, not murder. This is very out of character. Still pondering over it, he glances at the woman and finds her staring at him, expecting something from him.

"What?" he asks, itching to put his headphones on again. He really likes the piece vibrating against his collarbone. 

"Where did you buy your shirt?" the woman asks, as if she's repeating herself. She probably is.

He peels his eyes away from her surgically swollen lips long enough to glance down at himself. Black and gray, with an obnoxious splash of color amid the stripes that makes his head hurt. He doesn't recognize it.

"I, uh, don't remember," he says.

"Oh, that's too bad! My little brother loves that show."

He nods mutely, allowing his thumb to play with the volume of his CD player. The woman keeps talking, and Carl Orff rages at fate in a whispered rise and fall of Latin and violins.

The girl touches his hand again, and he accepts without protest that he will kill these two in their matching summer dresses with an eager blare of trumpets.

=

"Slavery to a broken machine or slavery to life and all its pains and pleasures." Meat touches his arm with its remaining hand. Through his sleeve, he can feel its dampness, its heat. "Decision time is now or never, Nny."

He laughs. "I am a broken machine."

=

Sometimes other people appear in the mirrors. Just brief flashes, overlapping the current other-self dominating the rest, and he knows it's foolish, but he can't help but wonder.

What is it like to have friends?

=

"—and it's being called the worst crime in the tri-county area since the café massacre two years ago. With twenty-seven dead at the scene and another twelve in critical condition, we here at the Channel 4 News Network can't help but agree. What do you think of it, Jeff?"

"It's a real atrocity, Nadine. The man who did this must be a real psycho, a total monster."

"Oh yes. And speaking of the killer, a woman—who has asked to remain anonymous—has stepped forward, claiming to have been at the club when the murders were committed. She also claims to be the one who halted the massacre by shooting the killer three times, despite having already been wounded."

"It is true a thus-far unidentified blood sample was recovered from the scene, as well as the bullets matching the woman's gun, but nothing conclusive has been determined yet. However, the woman has agreed to meet with a sketch artist once she's recovered from the attack, and a drawing of the killer will be sent to all media coverages when available."

"In the meantime, if anyone has any information regarding the killer or his whereabouts, we would appreciate it if you would call the number at the bottom of the screen. Please, don't hesitate—"

The reporter's face freezes for an instant before exploding in a supernova of white noise. Jolted out of a daydream, he instinctively reaches for the remote to mute the atrocious sound, but pauses before letting his hand fall. 

The sound is… oddly pleasant.

He leaves it on for three days.

=

He decides to call it Reverend Meat. It just… seems to fit.

=

He pauses at the couch only briefly, wondering what happened outside and what kind of reaction he should be having, but his legs give out and once he hits the floor it doesn't seem to matter anymore. Something skitters away, startled by the sound and vibrations of his body striking the wood. A minute passes or maybe five before it skitters back, probing his fingers with inquisitive antennae. His nerves won't respond to the signals his brain sends, to flinch away or crush the insect before it has a chance to grow bolder. He panics briefly, fear and helplessness clawing their way through his chest cavity, but then, as if a switch is flipped inside him, he relaxes.

The insect, whatever it is, takes a cautious nibble at the calloused tip of his ring finger. There is a tiny flash of pain, but no instinctive recoil from the source of the hurt. He is truly unable to move, than. The insect continues to bite, finding the outer layers of his skin tasty enough to merit further excavation. A second insect, crawling out of some unseen hole beyond his limited vision, joins the first, and is quickly followed by a third, a fourth, a dozen, too many to differentiate by feel alone and before he knows it an entire colony of carnivorous insects are biting into him, eating his flesh, burrowing under his clothes, his skin, crawling in his mouth and into his soft, wet insides, and he can't do anything to stop it.

It hurts, God it hurts, and he thinks wildly to himself that if he manages to live through this he will never ever strap a jar of bugs between another guest's teeth, ever again, because this is beyond torture, beyond ironic justice, beyond what words can describe: it just fucking hurts.

But then they reach his spinal cord and, like a city-wide power outage, his pain receptors begin to shut down, and then it's only the sounds of thousands of tiny mouths chewing. Until the insects turn their attention to his face, at least, being eaten alive isn't quite as bad as movies would lead him to believe. It's certainly slower, for one thing, and it lacks the nerve-wracking horror soundtrack, but perhaps that's for the better. The sounds he does hear are far from pleasant: squishing and crunching and gnawing and if he still had a stomach it'd probably be heaving by this point. He can see nothing but the dusty edge of darkness beneath his couch, but it's easy to imagine how gruesome he must look.

He's seen the results of this kind of thing with his own eyes, after all.

By the time they reach his head, they have already chewed through something vital in his chest and nowhere can he feel anything, any ache any pain any sadness any anger any loneliness and God is that an improvement. Consciousness fades to a dull spark somewhere in his increasingly exposed ribcage, perhaps somewhere just behind his collarbone, and he is hollowed out as rapidly as a properly upgraded power tool can scoop the mush out of a pumpkin. He is home to a colony of army ants, or a vast nest of ravenous, newborn spiders. That buzzing he hears could be the many vibrating wings of mating flies, or the first comb of a beehive being constructed among his bones. Certainly this is some species of insect that won't hesitate to swarm over a piece of meat—however stringy—before it has a chance to defend itself. Maybe it's even a school of land-bound piranha. He can imagine all sorts of culprits and has little trouble believing in all of them.

He wonders if honey from a human hive would be any good, but immediately discards the idea, revolted. He's practically thinking cannibalism here! Or, rather, self-cannibalism. Can a person self-cannibalize when they no longer have a digestive system? He'll have to try that sometime.

He wonders.

"Johnny?"

He blinks with magically undevoured eyelids, and is whole.

=

Sometimes, if he focuses hard enough, long enough, on these days when others flicker by in the mirrors, sometimes these flickers steady, become memorable faces, re-memorable people. And if memory serves, most of these people are dead.

The implications leave him with aching knuckles.

=

"I am not a monster."

"You just keep telling yourself that. Hey, maybe if you wish hard enough it might even come true one day!" Meat cackles and kicks his toothbrush into the toilet bowl.

"I wasn't always like this. I haven't always lived here. I haven't always been alone."

"How can you be so sure?”

Frustrated. Does he really have to state the obvious?

"No one is born knowing how to speak or read or write, or how to drive a car, or how to use money. Inherent knowledge is limited in humans. I may no longer have the memories of being taught, but the result is still the same. I know how to mix paints because I probably took classes in high school. I know how to use a camera, order dinner at a restaurant, do my own laundry, because someone else was there to teach me. Fuck, someone hated me enough to give me you."

"Who?"

"What?"

"Who gave me to you?" Meat's smile tries to appear kind, yet it is condescending, as if it is speaking to a child. "It's a simple enough question, dear boy."

"I—you said it was a girl—that we—" He swears. "You know I don't remember."

"Who gave you an understanding of the English language? Where is the license that proves you once passed a test at the DMV?"

"I—"

"Can you prove that you did not simply read the directions in some art books, or on the camera's packaging, or in a Laundromat? Perhaps, on the same strange whim that made you steal some Styrofoam Pillsbury Doughboy figurines, you came across my body yourself?"

"You said—"

"I thought you didn't trust me."

His knuckles burn white.

"Well, Johnny?"

"You know I can't prove any of that."

Meat's eyes glitter with delight. "Then, dear Johnny, how can you be so sure?"

=

At the edge of a stage bright with colored lights, he curls his hands around a microphone and smiles. The audience—

so many eyes watching him, and yet he couldn't be more relaxed

—has hushed; yet their screams still ring in his ears. 

He is not alone on this stage.

He doesn't dare turn to see who is playing softly behind him, afraid it'll be people the mirrors have shown him that are alive in some other Johnny's life but dead dead dead in his. His heart pounds, and for once the ache in his throat feels good. This is all so wonderfully terrifying, sickeningly familiar. Has he dreamed this before?

He comes to a stop inches from the audience's reaching hands. Good God, he has them right in the palm of his hand.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he breathes into the microphone, and every spark of life in this vast room is shining its light on him, and it is all so beautiful, so perfect, so alien. 

"What we have here is a moral conundrum."

=

"Bunny, I'm worried."

"I'm glad I'm not the only one. But really, there's so much to worry about. Please, elaborate for me."

"I haven't gone anywhere I might run the chance of killing someone in months. Just drive-thrus and that fully automated shopping center. Until recently, the only other people I've interacted with haven't bothered me or have been out of reach. It's only been these past couple weeks I've attempted anything more. Walking in parks, public transportation. You know."

"I know."

"What I can't figure out is how I ended up in that club at all."

The television is on, too low to be heard. In its pale blue glow, he carefully touches his chest, wincing when his fingers press against three tender circles: one on his sternum, another between his sixth and seventh ribs, and the last just beneath his ribcage. Tiny puckered scars ache in the center of each purple bruise.

"If I remember correctly, you recognized something who went inside and followed after."

"Why would—that doesn't sound like something I'd do."

"You stalked Devi for nearly a year."

He scowls. "Unnecessary, Bunny."

"Is it?"

He thumps his boots onto the coffee table and says nothing. Bunny presses on.

"It was a woman. Short hair, glasses, surprisingly compassionate to your… cause."

"Wait, do you mean that one woman with that shitty boyfriend I Tazered once? When I saw that movie—"

"Yes."

"Wow, really? I figured the Wall Monster got her after reality collapsed." He taps his chin thoughtfully. "What was her name? Did it start with a… a T?"

"Tess."

"Yeah!" He pauses. "She… recognized me first."

"Uh-huh."

"She practically ran into the building. They didn't even card her. She must have been a regular."

"Or she worked there."

"Or she worked there," he agrees. "That anyone could recognize me—" he trails off. A beat passes, and he continues on a different vein. "But what set me off? What caused me to break again, after I'd been doing so well?"

"That shouldn't be your chief concern, Johnny."

He looks at the disembodied rabbit head, little more than a skull now, and tiny and fragile-looking without it's maggot-riddled skin. "Oh?"

"You should be asking why you were sent back again."

=

Those other people in the mirror, those strangers, those friends, those dead bodies in motion, would sometimes pause beside his reflection. They smile, laugh; get mad and fight back and actually live; attack and be attacked; get scared and fight back and die. Some of it looks fun, some of it looks ridiculous. A lot of it scares him, more than he'd like to admit.

He wishes one of them would notice him.

His fingers touch glass.

#jthm #johnny the homicidal maniac #deadfic #my writing #if you know the comic then you know what kind of violence and fuckery to expect #otherwise good grief i apologize to anyone checking this out who doesn't know the source material and just likes my writing #i also dearly apologize for the lack of contractions #18 year old anthrop didn't know what the fuck she was doing