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nightmareslug · 2 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.

#👁️👁️#damn hello. another banger

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