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needleanddead · 3 months

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cycle - lucas (yandere oc) x reader (4.3k)

it all comes back. again and again and again.

as before: if you would like a primer on lucas, reading this is probably the best thing to do!

cw: yandere, cannibalism, kidnapped reader, descriptions of gore, non-explicit mentions of past dub-con/non-con, physical violence against reader. reader is fem, referred to as 'good girl' and is implied to be chubby.

this was a commissioned work.

You have gotten good at pretending.

It is far easier for everyone if you pretend you have always lived here; that Lucas’s cabin, and the woods surrounding it, the chickens outside and the old dining table and the cosy decor are all you have ever known.

When you had first come here, in those first few weeks, you had tried desperately to hold onto all of the vestiges of your old life. You had squeezed your eyes shut in the shower and tried to recall the scents of your own shower gels and shampoos and not the mixture of half-empty bottles that sat on shelves in Lucas’s bathroom. You had crawled beneath blankets and pillows and hugged yourself and tried to remember the feel of your own mattress and your own threadbare teddy bear. You had been terrified that they would slip away, and you would find yourself forgetting all of the things that made you yourself--

Now, you think it would be easier if they had.

If you had been granted a blank slate, you wouldn’t have to worry about the things you’ve been given and the things that adorn the cabin and their provenance. When you pulled a blanket over yourself on the sofa, or laid the table with a new embroidered tablecloth, or looked through the shelf of curling old paperbacks, you wouldn’t need to think about how many other hands that they have passed through.

So you pretend that you have it instead.

Things are just things, after all; merely objects, not people, not memories themselves. Who is to say that when Lucas goes into town, he doesn’t take an hour or two to wander into thrift stores? That he doesn’t have a weakness for things that have already passed through many hands before his own? Out here, in such a solitary existence, perhaps he even enjoys the reminder that there are other people in the world--

Well. From what you’ve seen of Lucas, and heard him mutter beneath his breath on days where his eyes go dark and angry and his face sets into a scowl . . . from what you remember in flashes of the night that you and he crossed paths. . . You don’t think that’s it.

But it’s still a comforting lie to whisper to yourself when you find a pair of initials stitched into the napkin you delicately wipe your mouth with.

Lucas himself is more than happy to help you lie to yourself, even if he doesn’t realise he’s doing it. He’s a man of few words already, but even fewer of those words ever seem to concern anyone aside from the two of you. To listen to him sometimes, you would think this cabin was the last place standing on earth - that you and he were the only two human beings who lived.

He mentions, once or twice and only off-handed, a childhood. He says something about milking cows on the farm growing up; he mentions his mother’s apple pie when you make an attempt to bake one after finding a recipe in an old cookbook.

(You do not mention the careful handwriting that occasionally interrupts the recipe; the crossed-out ‘half a tablespoon’ of cinnamon into ‘a tablespoon and a half’. The note to the writer, for future reference, that the oven is finicky and to give the pie crust an extra ten minutes. You convince yourself that those, too, are simply the echo of some secondhand store that Lucas picked the recipe book up in).

So you know at least that he did not spring into being fully-formed, though the thought of this huge hulking man as anything other than scarred and gruff seems almost laughable, when you see him going out in the middle of the night with an axe swung over his shoulder.

(“Go t’bed, angel,” Lucas had said, without even turning around to see your form silhouetted in the doorway. “It’s late. I’m just checkin’ on things.” He had said it like a man who had said the exact same thing a hundred times before, though as far as you could remember this is the first time that it had happened to you.

Waking up in the bed and not feeling the solid, warm form of Lucas himself beside you had made you nervous; made you felt as if there was something missing. And, of course, there was a horrible kind of sickness in that feeling too; that you have become so comfortable with your kidnapper that you are more perturbed to find him not there.

No. Easier to forget that. To whisper over and over to yourself that Lucas is not your kidnapper, he is simply your . . . Your lover? Your boyfriend? Your husband? You don’t let the thought get that far. He is simply Lucas.)

He does not seem to think much of nostalgia. A practical man through and through - though he smiles, a few months in, as one of the little plants outside of the windows sprouts into bloom.

“Daffodils,” he says. “Your dress had them on, that first night.”

You amend the mental note. He has nostalgia only for things that concern you--

You try not to think of it, but the thought floats to your mind unbidden anyway like a blight on a field of flowers. If Lucas has had others who he has professed his love to . . . has he remembered those things, too? One day, will you fade into the rest of them and Lucas will not be able to remember if you were daffodils on a dress, or larkspur behind an ear, or a daisy chain around a neck?

You turn away from the flowers and force yourself to smile at him; to let him wrap his arm around your waist and pull you against him and press his mouth against yours in a motion that you convince yourself is fine.

Time passes. Lucas trusts you more; lets you wander about the cabin at will. Lets you into the kitchen without him despite the sharp knives - and, in return, trusts you to give in to him whenever he wants you. You let him kiss you and hold you and murmur sweet nothings and take you to bed, as you continue to chant to yourself that this is right, this is fine, this is how it is supposed to be--

There are no ghosts hovering above your heads.

As it turns out, the ghost is hovering in the spare room, inside the drawer of a desk with an old typewriter sitting on it.

Lucas has gone into town for supplies; you’re running out of milk, and you had gone to him, flushed and awkward, and asked if maybe he could try and pick up some body wash in your favourite scent; you had said ‘please’ and looked at him hopefully and Lucas had barely even needed you to finish before he’d been smiling at you and kissing the top of your head and adoringly telling you that he’d get you anything you wanted, so take a think about it for ten minutes and bring him back a list.

(You hadn’t pushed your luck too far, but you’d made a modest little list anyway - a fantasy book, if he could, because so many of his books were crimes and thrillers. A bar of chocolate or two. The aforementioned shower gel. Lucas had even smiled at you and told you what a sweetheart you were, how he’d keep an eye out for a surprise--)

But you were allowed in here, now, so you hadn’t felt bad about looking for something to do. You can only bake so many pies and cakes; Lucas had mentioned that there was probably stuff in here for drawing, if you wanted, or even sewing or embroidery, a jigsaw puzzle or two . . . You’d picked up a few options and discarded them (neatly) before you’d even gone near the desk. If you hadn’t - if you’d decided, actually, you would sit and do this cross-stitch kit of ‘home sweet home’ instead - perhaps things would have turned out differently.

But you don’t. You open the first drawer and disregard safety pins and discarded post-it notes (one of them has ‘help’ scrawled over it in black ink, over and over and over - you definitely disregard that one). You rifle vaguely through stubs of pencils and a manual for a sewing machine before you open the second.

The second drawer contains only one medium sized sketchbook; the spiral-bound kind with a wooden kraft cover that people like to draw straight onto. This cover, though, is totally free of any stickers or drawings or even a name - so you assume that it’s empty and fish it out of the drawer, wondering if maybe taking up drawing to pass the time might help (you see plenty of wildlife and fauna through the windows, after all). You even sit down at the desk before you open it and get one of those stubby little pencils, just to draw some circles and exercise the wrist before you become unavoidably disillusioned by your inability to draw even the simplest blob of a bird or flower.

And then you open it, and you feel your heart plummet directly into your stomach.

It is so much easier when the ghosts that haunt the cabin are faceless; when you can pretend. But whoever had this book before you and floated about this cabin before you and had your side of Lucas’s bed . . . they were using it like a scrapbook, and you’re faced with a Polaroid picture smiling directly up at you, the backdrop very obviously the sofa of the cabin.

(Lucas holding the camera, then).

You shouldn’t look at her. You should close the book and forget this ever happened and go back to pretending - but some kind of roiling fear in your stomach means you cannot do that. You stare, instead, directly into her eyes - and you’re struck by how much she looks like you. How even her body language is similar to yours. She has the same shade hair, the same figure-with-a-little-too-much on it.

(Lucas has a type, then).

She has a name, written there plain as day. You read that too, and wish you hadn’t.

Once you have opened the flood-gates, you can’t stop yourself. You flip to the next page - it’s some kind of scrapbook-come-diary, and the date (six years, three months earlier) is written neatly in the corner. A drawing of a robin, in a shaky but careful hand - a pressed flower that the note says Lucas picked for her, with a smiling face. You can’t breathe.

The next page details a day spent baking. The next one, excitement that Lucas had let her go with him to see if the chickens had laid. The days aren’t one after another, but they’re close together - and they’re sickeningly similar to the days you spend with him, trying to fill the stretches of time without going mad. There are even direct references to things that you’ve seen and touched and handled - the sewing machine was bought for her, it was her hand that embroidered the napkins, the half-empty bottle of the rose scent perfume that you hadn’t liked had once been hers.

There’s a pause in days. A few empty pages, where she’s half-heartedly tried to draw a chicken pecking at her feed, a snowy landscape.

The ninth of September.

“It would have been my dad’s birthday today. I wonder if he’s thinking about me? I wonder if he’s looking for me. I tried to ask Lucas if I could at least send a card.”

She does not bother recording Lucas’s answer.

The twenty first of September.

“It’s like being a dog on a leash. I asked him if I could go for a walk into the woods; I promised him I’d come back, but he broke the glass he was holding and I didn’t ask again.”

He’d have the same reaction to you asking, you know it. Your stomach writhes, bile rising in your throat. There are no more drawings on the pages now; weeks between entries, her handwriting getting looser and wider, like she’s writing in a rush afraid of being caught.

There’s frustration and anger and sorrow bubbling in her words. She talks about being trapped. She mentions the blood on his clothes, the sharpness of his axe, that she knows exactly what it is she’s eating when he brings her meat from his freezer.

The eighth of November.

“I think he’s getting tired of me. I think I pushed him too far. I think I’ve been bad; I think I’m not what he wants. He still says he loves me but . . . maybe he loved the others too.”

She mentions the pyjamas in the drawers; the different sizes. She asks the notebook who else has lived in these walls and who else has wanted to run. It makes your heart ache.

The twenty-seventh of November.

“i want to go home i want to go home i want to go home i want to go home’

Here, you recognise the handwriting and you know that it was her hand that had scrawled ‘help’ so many times, and you can no longer disregard it like you wanted to.

The eighteenth of December.

“He’s going into town. Before he gets back . . . I’m going to do it. It’s snowing. It will cover my tracks. I’m going to do it. I’m going to go home.”

There are no other entries.

It gets harder to pretend.

Snippets from that scrapbook float to the front of your mind unbidden, at the most inopportune of times. Lucas notices you’re shivering and insists he’ll make you a steaming hot cup of tea, and as you raise it to your lips you can’t help wondering if she drank from this cup. How many other mouths have lingered on this rim, how many other hands have cradled this porcelain?

Lucas tells you that he loves you, his eyes tender and the smallest smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, and you wonder how many others have heard the same three words; the same inflections, stood in the same place?

He brings a present out, the week after his trip into town, that he tells you he was saving for you - another book. Ordinarily, you’d be thrilled to have something to fill the time - but instead, as he passes it to you and smiles and waits for you to thank him, you can’t stop thinking about all of the other things that he’s bought as presents for people who are not you, that still sit here unused in this graveyard of a home.

He never even mentions them.

Maybe if he did, that would be better.

But Lucas treats you like the two have you always coexisted; like neither of you had too much of a life before this. Oh, he doesn’t mind hearing about your far-off childhood - but you have the distinct impression that if you mentioned your job (the one you have not returned to for months), the man you were having the briefest flirtation with, the wedding of your cousin that you missed because you were kidnapped by a murderer in the woods . . . that would not go down so well.

The thoughts won’t stop coming; the reminder that Lucas is, for all of his gentle kisses and low voice when he speaks to you and his careful touches so he doesn’t hurt you, more monster than he is man. That you are eating people, when you take a bite from the end of a fork that has surely been in other hands.

(How long does human meat last, you wonder. The ones who did not make him happy . . . do they end up in the freezer? Are you eating someone who once laid their head upon your pillows?)

And if he has done it before . . .

Who is to say that he won’t grow tired of you, too? That one day you will say the wrong thing, and the cycle will begin anew? You have never thought of yourself as ‘special’ before - you have always been secure in the knowledge and comfort of your own ordinary existence. So what is it that Lucas sees in you, that makes you any better than the rest of them?

(The thought of other people wearing the things Lucas has picked out for you, of someone else rifling through your fantasy paperbacks or lathering their hair up in your shampoo haunts you at night).

You think about asking Lucas.

He never misses a chance to compliment you; he tells you how beautiful you are, how much he adores you, how he would kill for you and protect you with his last breath. So perhaps, if you worded it well enough, he would explain to you why you have not yet found yourself sizzling in a frying pan or bleeding out in the woods--

No. You can’t.

You are walking a fragile tightrope already. Your spine stiffens whenever you say something to Lucas, in case you say the wrong thing - you lie awake in bed next to him, his arms wrapped around you as tight as a vice. You stumble over yourself to please him, just in case--

You feel the way that you’re running yourself ragged. The ache in your bones, in your head - the dark circles beneath your eyes, the way your hair dulls as you begin to forget what any other setting other than ‘stressed’ feels like. You hope that Lucas doesn’t notice.

Your hopes are dashed.

It’s before bed, one night. Lucas has pulled you into his arms and peppered your face with kisses, has insisted that you let him brush your hair (the monogram on the brush shines in the light of the bedside lamp; it is not your initial). And he says to you, turning you to face him, his voice very soft and cajoling and just a little awkward;

“Darlin’? Y’mind if I ask you a question?”

Your heart races; hammers against your chest, tries to crawl into your throat.

“N-no,” you manage to squeak out. “Of course not.”

“I ain’t trying to offend you,” he says to you, his voice still awkwardly gruff. “But . . . sweetheart, you ain’t been looking well recently.”

“I--”

You grasp wildly for a way to respond.

“If you need anythin’ . . . You ain’t been sleepin very well, have you? You need a hot water bottle? Some . . . pillow mist, or somethin’? Onea those fancy drinks you have before bed to get you to sleep? You name it, sweetheart, I’ll get it from somewhere--”

He sounds so concerned.

Had he sounded like that to all of the other people? Had he noticed that their nerves were fraying and tried to soothe them, like he actually cared? How much of the concern that leaks into that warm Southern grit is real; how much of it is an attempt to hide that he’s mad at you, that he’s getting sick of you, that he’s already wondering what you’d taste like?

It tumbles out of your mouth before you can stop it; a bitter little bite of a question.

“How many others have there been?”

You regret it before you’ve finished the last syllable.

The air changes between you; a charged fizz that tells you just how dangerous the ground you’re treading on is. Lucas’s eyes narrow; his mouth sets.

“Others?” He asks you, and you know that you can’t get out of this now. Sometimes, when you’ve said something that has set his senses on high alert, you’ve managed to apologise and backtrack enough that he’s calmed. But now, his eyes are like keen green searchlights, and there is no way to avoid the question.

You swallow.

“How many other . . . people?” You say, lamely, not sure how to word it. “How many other people have lived here?”

His own voice is clipped, too. He doesn’t like this subject.

“Why does it matter, sweetheart?”

There’s a barb to the pet name that makes you feel sick, but now you’ve opened the floodgates of your own paranoia.

“How many others have you loved?”

There’s a barely perceptible twitch of his mouth. His words are infuriatingly even. Usually, his temper flares at the smallest things; you don’t understand how he isn’t hacking you into pieces.

“None of ‘em who deserved it, except you.”

Your breath begins to shorten; you can hear that you’re panting, when you next speak. Your chest is heaving.

“A-and what if you decide I don’t deserve it any more? What are you going to do to me?”

“Angel--”

“I’m not - there’s nothing special about me! What if you decide that you’re sick of me and you . . . you killed them, didn’t you? What if one day you kill me? What if you--”

“Darlin’.”

This one is more forceful; it’s clearly intended to stop your panicking diatribe where it’s already going off the rails. But you are too far gone to be stopped now. Your voice just keeps going, the words like a flood, your entire vision blurring at the corners with the tears that you hadn’t even realised you were crying.

“What if you kill me and eat me and you get someone else and they live here and wonder about me--”

If nothing else makes him kill you, it will be this; outright telling him that you know what the meat is, and what it is he’s doing when he goes out in the evenings with an axe glinting in both his hand and his eye.

He reaches out for you and you try to slap his hand away, your movements erratic and awkward. You’re flailing and more nonsense is falling out of your mouth, the world around you a blur. Lucas is reaching out still, undeterred by the way you’re trying to push him away as you helplessly wriggle and struggle.

“You’re gonna hurt yourself,” he says, and there’s a note of panic in his voice. His brow pinches. “Poor baby, angel, you’re cryin’ - shit, you’re gonna make yourself ill carrying on like this--”

There’s that fake comfort. You are so far gone that you forget the thing that makes Lucas feel softest at all; you, helpless. You forget that he likes the crying and the sniffling, that he likes to protect and coddle and care - because all you can think about is what it would feel like for an axe to slam through your ribcage so your innards are strewn out on the floor.

“Please, calm down-- breathe, sweetheart, don’t hurt yourself--” He’s still talking to you all soft and sweet, and you’re still utterly lost in your own sleep-addled anxiety induced spiral as he tries to restrain you; he reaches for your arms, to pin you down so that your thrashing doesn’t impact you--

One of your flailing arms catches him, right across the face.

There’s a sickening noise; the slap of flesh on flesh, the hard noise of a bone meeting another bone. You don’t think it’s hard enough to really hurt him, but it’s like a trigger has been pulled in Lucas’s mind and the air changes again. The fizz deadens where it was hovering; and instead, a heaviness settles over you.

You stop thrashing. You stop jabbering out nonsense. Lucas has you on the bed, pinned beneath him, and his face when he looks down at you is like thunder. You think it must be the same face that his victims see, before they die.

You’re about to be added to their number, you think. You wish you’d left something as tangible as that scrapbook behind. A guide to survival, perhaps. Advice on how to try and break the cycle.

“Oh,” Lucas says, and that one syllable practically quakes. “Darlin’. You shouldn’t have done that.”

Lucas tells you, afterwards, that you’re lucky he didn’t lose his temper.

He’d been infuriatingly calm, even though every movement blistered with unspoken anger, as he’d dragged you up and off the bed and you had trembled and quaked and waited for death. He’d been infuriatingly calm as his work-roughened, calloused palms had slid over your bare forearm, the soft inner flesh of your elbow, to grip your upper arm with both hands.

“You can scream,” he’d said, with that terrifying flat-and-angry-and-calm all at once tone again. “It’s goin’ to hurt. It’ll be clean. I know what I’m doin’. But it’s gonna hurt anyway.”

And he’d twisted his wrists and he’d snapped.

Your humerus, he’d told you, afterwards. A break that won’t need surgery; that you’ll be able to recover from in the cabin. A sling and someone to take care of you is all that you’ll need, he’d said, and then he’d said;

“It’s for your own good, angel. It’s a warnin’.”

He tells you that he’ll cut up your food for you, carry on brushing your hair, and help you in the shower. He lists off all of these things calmly - all of the things you’d once earned the ability to do for yourself, because you’d been so good and he’d loved you so much and wanted you to be happy.

You fucked that up, didn’t you?

“It’ll hurt for the rest of your life,” he tells you. “It’ll remind you.”

You wonder just how long ‘the rest of your life’ is.

“Hey,” Lucas tells you, after you’ve stopped sobbing and whimpering and screaming. “C’mere, sweetheart. Let me see that pretty face.”

Your eyes are puffed up and swollen; your nose is dripping, your throat feels raw. But Lucas still looks at you like you’re unbelievably beautiful. Like he’d kill for you. There’s a steel in his eye that hasn’t been there for some time, but . . . He gives you a small smile.

“Ain’t you beautiful.” He wipes an errant tear from your cheek with his thumb. “Be a good girl for me now, okay? You’re lucky I didn’t lose my temper.”

It’s almost bizarre enough to frighten a laugh out of you.

You wonder how many others were given this kind of warning; broken ankles? Broken wrists? Broken fingers? Is it possible that you’re an echo of them down to Lucas’s violence?

If this is him not losing his temper . . .

You dread to think what will happen - what has already happened - when he really loses control.

#for you anon who said they missed lucas... here is aforementioned lucas comm from the writing blog #🦇 pip writes #lucas tag

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needleanddead · 6 months

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protection - lucas (yandere oc) x reader (5.3k)

halloween has always been your favourite holiday. with your captor, though . . . perhaps not so much.

a/n: if i cannot be self-indulgent and write a fic about my cannibal murderer yandere oc for halloween when he is such a horror pastiche of a man, when can i? if you would like a primer on lucas, reading this is probably the best thing to do!

cw: yandere, cannibalism, kidnapped reader, descriptions of gore, non-explicit mentions of past dub-con/non-con.

Lucas has one of those perpetual calendars upon his mantelpiece.

You’ve never had much cause to look at it before. It’s another of those mix-and-match décor pieces that are so prevalent in the cabin; a boring block of wood and blocky white font that you suppose someone might describe as ‘minimalist’. It’s certainly not something you’d choose for yourself – and from what you’ve seen of Lucas’s own choices, his clothing, the items he gravitates towards in his little slice of home, it’s not something he’d have chosen either. Had it not, perhaps, been chosen by someone else.

You ignore the way your gorge rises when you consider that it’s one more piece of somebody who must be long dead by now. Lucas’s cabin is full of those reminders; embroidered tablecloths (your own hands are not so steady), handmade blankets (the wool used makes you itchy), clothes in the wardrobe three sizes too small and two sizes too big. A bookshelf of tattered paperbacks; crime novels and romance novels and horror novels, an eclectic mix you can’t imagine belonging to the same person.

That’s not important.

What is important is the morning after breakfast, when Lucas and you have gone out to collect eggs already and he’s held onto your waist while you carefully fried them along with the something-that-might-be-bacon that you’re growing more and more accustomed to cooking.

(It doesn’t even make you throw up any more).

He’s casual as he walks over to it; you’ve never really paid much attention to it before. It’s simply one of those rituals that he does; he likes the domesticity of a daily routine, and though you’ve always been rather more spontaneous . . . You’re hardly in a position to argue about it.

He moves the cube around and you glance vaguely towards it and you see the month and date, clear and bright as if illuminated by a shaft of sunlight.

The thirtieth of October.

You stop breathing, just for a moment. It’s been three months, then – time had lost meaning for you somewhat, after you’d realised you had no choice but to play along if you wanted to keep yourself away from the sharp end of an axe. But . . . three months. Three months of smiling nicely and forcing your mouth around the name ‘darling’ and letting his weapon-calloused hands curl about your waist, slide over bare skin. Three months of making yourself smile, of showering with a stranger in the bathroom (three months and he is still a stranger, though you suppose you know him intimately; three months, though, and you still do not know his surname), of sleeping beside him at night--

“I love Halloween.”

You don’t realise you’ve said it until it comes out of your mouth like the dry squeak of a frightened mouse.

Lucas looks up in surprise. You don’t often volunteer information readily; you answer his questions, but otherwise you’re a quiet obedient little home-maker for him, the way you think he likes you. That’s not to say you think he’d mind, but . . . you still keep some of yourself held close to your chest. You share hearth and home and body with Lucas; you think you’ve earnt the right to not have to share everything.

“S’that so?” He rumbles, after a moment. He doesn’t smile, the way he does when you tell him that you like the present he’s brought you back from town or when you let slip once that the western film he’d been watching on VHS reminded you of your childhood. “I’ve never been all too fond of it myself.”

His green gaze stays steady on you. He lets the moment stretch, waiting for your answer. You are walking a tightrope, as always; there is a right answer, you think, and a wrong answer. Which one are you supposed to pick? You’ve seen Lucas angry – that smouldering, teeth-grit explosion when he’d caught you, early on, trying to open a window.

(You’d sobbed and promised, sworn on everything you loved, that you just wanted some fresh air – that the August air was stuffy and pressing. Enough tears, and Lucas had repented, finally, drawn back his blistering anger. Calloused thumb wiping your tears away and a gruff apology, followed by; “Aww, darlin’, don’t cry like that. C’mon now.”

Followed by kissing your eyelids. Followed by the press of his body upon yours. Followed by hands on your hips, thumbs digging into your thighs to part them. Followed by him murmuring for you to cry for a different reason.

He likes the tears. It’s a good lesson to learn so early on in your life with him).

You shrug helplessly.

“I like the atmosphere?” You give him, your voice quavering at the end. “All of those kids in cute costumes, jack-o’-lanterns, cuddling up warm and cosy on the couch with a scary film on--”

His shoulders relax minutely, and he lets out a breathy chuckle.

“Yeah,” he says to you. “I s’pose those things ain’t so bad. I’m not a scary movie guy – there’re enough things to be frightened of out there in the real world, y’know?” He walks towards you, joins you on the couch. His arm wraps around your shoulder and you let yourself be drawn into his embrace, because you risk upsetting the balance again if you shy away. With a sigh of pleasure, he drops a kiss onto the top of your head. “Gets real busy up here around this time. Trespassers. I prob’ly won’t even be around mosta the night; gotta patrol the area. Think we can rustle you up a pumpkin and a coupla’ videos though, huh?”

You swallow. You know what he means by ‘patrol the area’ – you think of teenagers in local towns, daring each other to spend the night in the woods. You think about twenty-somethings with their tents and their camping and coolers full of beer, telling spooky stories about huge cannibals who live in the woods--

You think of Lucas’s weapons, the axe shining bright mounted on the wall, and the sound it had made as it had thwacked into the ground beside your head as Lucas had realised you were trembling and whimpering and sobbing and merely lost, not some ne’er-do-well out here for any other reason.

How much fuller will his freezer be, come the first of November?

He’s true to his word, as he so often is. Despite everything, he looks at you hopefully when he presents to you the things he brings back from his little foray into town; his head cocked, an echo of the earnest young man he might once have been beneath the scars and the greying.

He presents to you: one large pumpkin, three VHS tapes of movies you haven’t heard of that look like schlocky 90s B-movies, a multi-pack of sweet treats obviously intended to be poured into a bowl for trick or treaters, and a bean-filled plush of a fat black cat.

“I thought we could carve the pumpkin together,” he says, which you think is just an excuse not to leave you unsupervised with sharp implements. He trusts you to cook, now – but he still likes to be in the room, even if he’s not guiding your hand with his fingers entwined around your own over the knife.

“That would be nice,” you cautiously reply, and he smiles at you all soft and gooey-eyed. Your spine still feels like a rod has been shoved in it; being around Lucas can so often seem like a balancing act, and normally he does not come back from town in anything resembling a good mood. But giving you presents and the pleasure that had sparked in your eyes and the truth tinging your thanks have clearly set him well for the evening; he’s whistling as he rattles around in the kitchen to find the implements.

“C’mon here then, angel,” he calls, and you tuck the fat little black cat into the corner of the couch - it will be nice, you suppose, to have something to hold when you are alone later. You doubt the movies will provide much in the way of stone-cold terror, but the knowledge that Lucas is out there stalking the night and it would not take all that much for him to turn his rage on you certainly does.

It will be nice, too, to have something to hold that is yours and is not haunted by the echo of ghosts of Lucas’s past. Once, you had been uncomfortable in bed, rolling and writhing and whimpering through a nightmare – and Lucas had gently shaken you awake and placed a bear into your arms you had never seen before.

You might not have ever seen the bear before, but it had clearly once been loved; visible stitches re-attaching an ear, the velvet flocking rubbed off on its nose, the fur compacted from many nights of cuddling.

You try not to think about someone else, after you, having the little cat placed delicately in their arms.

When you enter the kitchen, you see that Lucas has spread newspaper out all over the floor, placing the pumpkin carefully in the middle with an array of carving implements and pens laid out for you. There’s a waiting candle and a box of matches on the table, waiting for the final touch.

The newspapers are all nearly twenty years old. The matches have packaging you’ve never seen before, the kind of retro artwork you’d see hipsters hang ironically on their apartment walls.

You crouch to get onto the paper he’s laid out, but Lucas clicks his tongue in annoyance at you.

“C’mon, sweetheart,” he says, and he pats his knee where he’s knelt with them spread apart. “Come sit between my legs and let’s do it together.”

It takes you a moment to gather the courage to do it – touching him voluntarily is always harder than when he makes the first move – but you see that shimmer of frustration in the air, the imperceptible twitch of his jaw, and you clumsily climb over to situate yourself between them. You feel him let out a satisfied exhale as one of his arms wraps around your waist possessively.

“There,” he murmurs, directly into your ear. “Ain’t that better? More . . . cosy?”

You can feel every hair on the back of your neck, the thrum of your heartbeat, as Lucas’s hand fastens over yours and works at removing the top of the pumpkin. His chest is solid behind you, a barrel of muscle and scar – and when he shifts, and his crotch in his fatigues snugly presses against the curve of your spine, it takes all of your grace not to whimper at the feel of him hot and wanting.

Domesticity always seems to stoke something in him – and you suppose this would, under other circumstances, be a perfectly lovely Halloween evening. If Lucas were somebody you loved, and not a madman who kidnapped you from the middle of the woods. If that were so, Lucas’s breath against your ear wouldn’t make your head pound – his calloused fingers over yours wouldn’t make you wonder how he got all of those scars. The sight of a sharp instrument in his hand wouldn’t make you wonder how many have met their maker at Lucas’s behest.

There is none of the joy you would normally find in this activity, doing it with Lucas’s arm around you and his body bearing down over yours. There’s instead, the knowledge that he could break your bones if he wanted to – and a desire beating at your ribcage to get this over with as quickly as possible without alerting him to how much you hate it. Lucas hums softly under his breath as he helps you scoop out the insides of the pumpkin--

You feel your gorge rise at the sight of his hands scooping out the insides alongside your own, at the sensation of the stringy sticky pulp and seeds as they coat your fingers. The viscera of the pumpkin, laid out on the newspaper, as if some grisly crime has occurred right here in Lucas’s cosy cabin kitchen.

(He doesn’t like a mess inside the house. You know about the storeroom that you’re not allowed in, having peeked in it once when he’d left the door ajar to go and pick some meat up for breakfast whilst you stood in the kitchen with the chickens pecking around your feet. When he’d come out and seen you there, you’d stammered something about Dolly the silkie having wandered off – and though there’d been mistrust in his gaze, you’d kept your eyes wide and hidden trembling hands behind your back and eventually he seemed to have believed you).

The flash of a sharp knife in his hand makes you start against your will, your back pressing against him, your rear pushing into him. He lets out a noise that’s half a strangled huff and half a breathy chuckle.

“What’re you scared of, angel?” He murmurs, and you are stiff and frozen as he gently, gently, presses the flat of the blade against the palm of your other hand. “I won’t ever hurt you. Not less you give me a reason to. And you aren’t gonna, are you?” You’re glad he can’t see the deer-in-headlights look on your face, even as you give him a jerky shake of your head, and to your immense relief returns the knife to carving. “Good. Hurts my feelings thinkin’ you’re afraid of me.”

You don’t know how to respond to that.

“I—I’m not?” You guess, stammering it out, trying to weigh out all of the options in your mind. If he was threatening you – one of those late night murmurs of “I’d break you into pieces if you ever tried to leave me, darlin’,” - then perhaps you wouldn’t have said it. But right now, he is pretending the two of you are a perfectly ordinary couple doing a perfectly ordinary thing, and so--

He laughs again, good-naturedly pressing a kiss to the top of your head. The pumpkin has taken shape now; a classic jack-o’-lantern face, jagged triangular eyes and teeth.

“You’re so cute,” he says into your hair. “Here. Look at that. Ain’t that adorable?”

Shakily, you nod. It’s not your best work – in your own kitchen, at home, you’d mastered the art of silhouetting elaborate scenes in your pumpkins. You’d used your favourite horror stills as inspiration (you force yourself not to think of last year’s pumpkin, of spending so much time carefully carving that iconic scene from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre into the orange flesh, Leatherface holding his chainsaw aloft – it’s better not to dwell too much on fictional monsters when there’s a very real one sitting behind you, holding you close, pressing a kiss to your cheek and resting his chin on your shoulder as he admires your handiwork).

This pumpkin is a little lop-sided; one eye bigger than the other, the cuts jagged and messy. But Lucas is smiling at it, and you force yourself to smile too.

“Where shall we put it?” He asks you, as he pulls himself up and offers you a hand to help you too. He’s a little too rough with it; pulling you against him with a throaty chuckle as you stumble, off-balance. Little reminders of your own fragility, your clumsiness and all of the things you struggle with always seem to put him in a good mood. “Windowsill?”

You swallow.

“C-can we put it outside?” You whisper, softly. “I know we won’t get any trick-or-treaters, or anything, but . . .”

You trail off; he’s looking at you again, the green in his gaze impossible to understand. He might be thinking about exploding into anger, he might be thinking about kissing you – but as you feel your knees threaten to knock together, he smiles instead.

It’s another smile that, on someone else, you would read as utter infatuation. Love, in all of its gooey, saccharine sweetness. On Lucas, though--

“Of course, darlin’,” he says. “Come put it out with me.”

You reach for the box of matches, but Lucas’s palm comes down over your hand before you can get a hold on them.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that,” he says, as he picks it up himself, and strikes a match against the striker strip. You flinch at the sudden light, and Lucas makes a soft noise of satisfaction. “You'daa just hurt yourself. Leave this kinda thing to me, sweetheart.”

He lights the candle and places it in the lantern himself, before he turns to you and gives you an indulgent smile again.

“D’you think you can carry it?” He asks you, voice soaked in honey. “Don’t drop it, now.”

You nod shyly as you take it, hating yourself for playing along with him. If he wants a sweet, naive little thing who can barely take care of themselves and needs the big strong hunter in the woods to do it for them . . . well, you suppose your dignity isn’t so bad a price to pay for staying alive.

You are allowed out of the cabin, supervised. You’d earnt that right by being sweet and soft and obedient, by doing what Lucas asks and doing it the way he likes. You go out to collect eggs in the morning and you’re allowed to help him in the garden, planting vegetables and tending to those he already has. But still, every time you open the front door it feels like a treat – a thrill running through you at the reminder that there is a world beyond the four walls of home that have become your prison.

Lucas takes in a hissing sigh through clenched teeth as he opens the door.

“It’s getting’ later than I thought,” he says, to himself more than you. “I’m gonna have to get goin’ soon, sweetheart.”

You nod, and carefully place the pumpkin by the front door, where the candle inside flickers and wavers in the light breeze. You find yourself wishing that it would somehow escape its own cell of pumpkin flesh and set the cabin afire – wondering if it would really be so bad, to perish like that.

(How many more Halloweens will you spend with Lucas? Is it worse if the number is small or large?)

“Do you have to go?” You ask him, voice tremulous.

You don’t know if you want him to go. You don’t want to be with him; he terrifies you, leaves you feeling rattled and confused and conquered all at once, his presence looming over everything you do. But at the same time – you can’t in good conscience want him to go out there, to cut down Halloween revellers who merely thought the woods would be a good place for a spooky experience. Are you far enough away from wherever he might go that you won’t hear the screams?

You wouldn’t be able to pretend even if you don’t hear them. You’ll meet them later on, at the end of your fork.

“Awww darlin’,” Lucas simpers at you, grasping your chin in a hold like iron. “Don’t worry your pretty head about it, I told you. I ain’t gonna let a single thing near this cabin; you ain’t gonna be in a jot of danger. I promise.”

Your face must betray your anxiety, because Lucas tugs almost painfully on it.

“Don’t you trust me, angel?”

Sickly sweet and bladed like ice, you mutely twitch your head in a meek nod.

“Of course I do . . .” You whisper, and Lucas smiles in satisfaction.

“Stay here at the door for a bit while I get ready, okay? Fresh air’ll make you feel better.”

Unspoken goes the ‘don’t you dare try and run’. You can’t see yourself doing it tonight of all nights, either – though Lucas has been sweet throughout the pumpkin carving, you can already see that as he considers the blanket of night out beyond the cabin he is shifting into a predator. So you stand there, breathing in deep, slow, controlled breaths. Trying to think about how pretty the stars are and the candy that Lucas has brought you to eat in front of his crackling old television. Trying not to hear the thud of Lucas’s boots and the sound of him getting down the axe from the wall, the swish of the displacement of air as he gives it a few practise swings.

“There we go,” Lucas says, as he comes back. His axe is slung over one shoulder, and he’s smiling at you. He hasn’t made a single allowance for the cold; he wears the same shirt in a shade of forest green, straining tight over his shoulders and biceps. The silvery skin of his scars shine in the moonlight. “Don’t stay up for me, okay? Get yourself to bed. I’ll try not to wake you up.”

(Will you wake up, hearing him drag a corpse into the store-room? It doesn’t matter – you know you won’t get much sleep tonight).

He stands there in front of you for a long moment. Anxiety sends a bead of sweat rolling down the nape of your neck. He’s waiting for something – he wants something, and you don’t know what it is, and he’s going to be angry at you for being a bad beloved and he’s going to lodge that axe in your skull--

“Don’t I get a kiss goodbye?”

His tone is teasing, but laced with simmering anger. Grateful he has thrown you a lifeline, you practically trip over your tongue as you reply in the affirmative.

One slow, lingering kiss – possessive. You’re shivering as he pulls away, and he smiles as he wipes his thumb over the corner of your mouth with something that might be fondness and might be triumph, like a hunter who has his prey cornered.

“See you later,” he says. “Don’t scare yourself silly, now.”

You stand at the door-frame, waiting for Lucas’s hulking figure to disappear into the darkness of the trees. His axe is swung over his broad shoulders. The jack-o’-lantern beside you flickers and gutters in the breeze, your only companion out here. Lucas turns and waves one hand at you, and then makes a very firm ‘shoo’ gesture that you interpret to mean ‘that’s enough, now. Get back in the house before I make you’.

You close the door behind you and turn the key as he disappears fully from your view. You’ve always felt awkward being alone in the cabin – about three weeks after your arrival here, he had given you heavy warnings and set out to the nearest town for the kind of supplies he couldn’t make himself – but tonight, it feels all the worse.

You jump at shadows and feel like you hear screams with every footstep, your brain already playing out thoughts of Lucas in the woods surrounded by corpses, bloodied and grinning and feral-bright. You have to try twice to get the video into the player, and your hands are trembling as you attempt to open a packet of M&Ms and spill them all over the sofa. You pull the curtains closed for full immersion and almost give yourself a heart attack when you see light flickering outside, until you remember the jack-o’-lantern.

Eventually, though, you do relax into the movie.

It helps that it’s a movie about a werewolf stalking a suburban town; you don’t know if your nerves would hold out if Lucas had brought you some kind of killer in the woods movie. Even he, though, seems to have realised that – a quick glance at the other movies show you that one is about giant bugs attacking and the other is set in a hospital.

It’s not a good movie. In a different lifetime, you’d watch this with friends and laugh and joke over the cheesy special effects and the over-acting. On your own, though, you at least feel somewhat comforted by the familiarity of the horror recipe. The coquettish blonde in the hot pink outfit will die first; the outcast girl in her too-big denim jacket will survive to the denouement and will perhaps kill the werewolf herself.

There’s a sound from outside.

You’re half-asleep in front of the sagging middle act of the movie, but the crunch of leaves under feet has you bolt upright. Lucas can’t be home already, can he?

Time stands still. There’s a muffled giggle, and then a low voice murmuring something. You slowly, slowly, pull yourself up from the couch. You’re grateful to have pulled the curtains closed. At least they can’t tell you’re in here.

A hundred scenarios run through your head, none of them ending well. You think of every home invasion movie in a holiday home in the middle of nowhere you’ve ever seen. You could laugh at the absurdity of dying like that, when you’re literally the prisoner of some cannibal psychopath already . . . all of that, and some other horror trope catches up with you instead?

Three knocks on the door, and a voice jokingly calls;

“Trick or Treat!”

Oh, saying all of that stuff to Lucas about trick or treating was so stupid. Wanting a pumpkin out there so you could pretend to have one little bit of normalcy left in your life.

A rumble of conversation floats through the walls; something about a dead phone battery, needing to find somewhere with a landline, a map that didn’t seem to have any of the landmarks they’d seen marked on it.

(You can sympathise with that; the map you’d been using, once upon a time, hadn’t made a single lick of sense after you’d gotten into the heart of the woods, like some nature spirit was messing with you).

But that could just be a way to make your defenses fall, you think. You’ve seen that in movies time and time again – I need the bathroom, I need to use your phone, I’m sorry I fell over and I’m injured can I rest here--

One of them has the nerve to try the door; the key jingles traitorously in the lock.

You’re shaking as you approach. You can hear conversation now; a male voice and a female voice, arguing. They sound about your age.

“There’s a fucking jack-o’-lantern burning, and there’s a key in the front door, of course someone’s in--”

“Look, this is some horror movie bullshit, I don’t like it--”

“Do you think anyone keeping fuckin’ . . . those fluffy-ass chickens is gonna be a murderer? C’mon. It’s probably some old couple with their hearing going. I’m gonna knock again--”

Three raps on the door and you find yourself collapsed against the cabin wall, your knees trembling. You know you should answer the door and you should tell them what’s going on here. You should beg them to run and take you with them.

But now you’re faced with it, you don’t know what to do.

“Hello?” The girl’s voice is louder now. “Is anyone home?”

Oh, she shouldn’t be shouting. Lucas can hear when you drop a fork doing the washing up from halfway across the yard, and always comes hurrying to make sure you haven’t hurt yourself.

“Look,” the boy, “We just need to use your phone, we’re lost—”

Another voice cuts across the squabbling – one deeper and darker and grittier. A thick Southern accent.

“You sure as hell are,” it says, and there’s outright hate in it. “What the fuck do you think you’re doin’ on my property?”

The girl screams. You can’t blame her; at six foot four and bound in scars and muscle, Lucas is a frightening prospect at the best of times. But when he’s appeared from nowhere, holding his axe, like a horror movie villain . . .

“Shit!” The boy is swearing. “Look, man, I’m sorry, I didn’t--”

You do not see the axe come down – how could you, from the hallway, behind the door? But you hear two screams, this time – both his and hers – and you hear the wet sound of something sharp meeting something soft. Blade striking bone – the slick noise of an axe blade being pulled out of a body and then swung back in. The sound of someone choking on blood, of someone sobbing--

You don’t know how long it goes on for. Your knees give out long before the girl gives up on screaming, as you sink onto the floor and hug yourself tight and squeeze your eyes shut against the noises.

It could last forever. You try and think of something else; somewhere happier. What would you be doing right now, if you were at home? How different would your October have been?

But the slosh of blood and the hacking noise of blade and flesh worm into your consciousness, the very real massacre going on outside the front door seeping into every memory you try and recall. Your pumpkins smashed to pieces, accusing staring eyes of the corpses of your friends at last year’s Halloween party as a man with an axe mows them down in your living room--

The noises have stopped. There’s not even heavy breathing, now.

“Darlin’?” Lucas calls out, from behind the door. “C’mon. I know you’re there. You can open the door now. You’re safe.”

You can’t disobey him, you remember, as you shakily climb back to your feet, using the wall as leverage. If you don’t do as he says, then you will also meet the business end of his weapon – and he’s already said, in those jealousy-fuelled threats that he whispers into your hair at the most intimate of moments, that for your betrayal, he’d make it hurt.

You turn the key with a trembling hand, and have to force your fingers to close around the door handle. Slowly, slowly, you pull it open--

The front porch is a mess of blood and flesh and organs and other things you carefully do not look at. These people have been butchered for more than just meat – but you look up at Lucas’s eyes instead and ignore them. You can’t think too hard on it.

There are splashes of blood all over his face, flecks of red in his stubble. His clothes are ruined.

“You’re safe now,” he murmurs, and he steps forward and the tang of blood invades your mouth and your nostrils and gets on your clothes as he pulls you into a tight embrace. “Don’t worry. I told ya’, I won’t let nothin’ happen to you. Not tonight, not ever.”

He says it like this poor lost couple were a threat, and not just unfortunates who happened upon the wrong woods at the wrong time. The wrong house.

(If you hadn’t put that pumpkin out, they wouldn’t have thought that there was anyone here. It’s your fault.)

His grip around you is tight. You squeeze your eyes shut and bury your face in his chest for a moment, and try to pretend nothing has happened.

It can’t last. Lucas pulls back, takes hold of your shoulders.

“Well?” He says – and bile rises in your throat as you realise you have to say it. You have to do it. If you want to stay on his good side--

“Thank you,” you breathe out, hating yourself for every syllable. “Thank you for taking care of me.”

And as you stretch onto your tiptoes and Lucas bends down to meet your lips for a thank you kiss, you pretend that there aren’t two corpses outside of the front door.

You carved a pumpkin. You ate candy. You watched a shitty horror movie. It’s like every Halloween before it--

He pulls back; a hand ruffling through your hair, a smile on his face.

“Happy Halloween, darlin’. You get back inside while I clean this up, okay? Night ain’t over yet.”

#back from the dead to reblog a fic i wrote on my writing blog #i swear if i Art again i'll be back here but until then....#lucas tag

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