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faunahudson · 4 years

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settle | self para

Who: Fauna Flanagan and Percy Flanagan with mentions of Rory Flanagan, Conor Flanagan and Sawyer Hudson Where: Belfast When: Feburary 2020 What: Fauna and Percy discuss his opinions on her future Warnings: emotional abuse, derogatory language, Percy Flanagan

It’s pouring with rain the night in February that her father comes to collect her from uni. It was an odd thing that in her adult life she’d begun to rely on lifts, since her and Rory had almost never been collected from school beyond primary. This had partially been because Percy had accused Mary of coddling them by doing so, but mostly because they liked the independence of walking or getting the bus. Fauna had always enjoyed the opportunity to read one of the many paperbacks that she kept crammed in the bottom of her bag. While Rory claimed to like the social aspect of the bus referring to him and Dobsy accusing Tired Pete in the year below of having a gay love affair with the bus driver because he always got off with an under twelves fare way into his teens. It also made people suspect them less of being Tories because their parents didn’t drive them, made them seem more normal. Fauna had liked it that way less reason for people to look at them, and with her headphones in she could ignore the commentary on her sex life that had always followed her back then.

It had been funny, appearing at uni in Belfast. Despite being the new girl things actually weren’t all that weird, she wasn’t ostracised the last way she had been during high school, everything was different in her new classes. In the weeks leading up to her first day there had been the bubble of fear that it would be like it had been in Dublin, that the videos would be found and the rumours would start up all over again. But instead she had been greeted warmly. After classes there were invites to pubs and cups of tea offered, everyone wanted to get to know Sawyer. A few people had even asked about Alexis, which they laughed about over their daily FaceTimes. How funny it was that people liked her when she didn’t really need them to anymore. This new warmth from people had meant that she seldom needed to walk or to take the bus because there was always someone’s car she could cram into, but on this particularly rainy Tuesday she’s been at the clinic later than she expected and there’s no bus for an hour. She knows Sawyer will be working, so she calls her home phone hoping to catch Maurie or her Ma to beg a lift and maybe some dinner. The phone rings twice, when it picks up she goes to talk immediately the way she usually would but she’s halted by.

“Fauna.” Her father says obviously having recognised her number, his tone not annoyed or accusatory for once which makes her immediately wonder if he’s drunk.

“Hey Da, is Maurie there?” She asks, hoping that if he is truly good and drunk he’ll just pass the phone over and she won’t have to prolong their interaction.

“No, her and your Ma went over to your grandparents.” He isn’t drunk, she can tell that by now. If he was drunk he would have put the phone down after delivering that message. “What did you need them for?” If he’d been any other person in the entire world she would have told him it was nothing and then tried to rummage around in her bag for enough change for a cab into town. But she knew if she told him that it was nothing then it would start a fight where he’d demand to know what she was hiding from him, and her feet ached too much for that.

“Oh I was just gonna try and beg a lift from the clinic, scran something from Ma. You know how I am.” She says, though it’s not true. He barely knows her at all. There’s a pause, which lasts longer in her head than it probably did in real life because she’s so fucking cold.

“I’ll pick you up, we’ll go for a pint.” Those were the last words that she expected to come out of his mouth, and she blinks in surprise.

“Why?” She asks before she stop herself, it’s always a terrible idea to question Percy and her heart sinks as soon as she says it. That’s always the problem with living with someone who you can completely be herself with, she forgets that she has to put her guard back up with other people.

“Because you need a fucking lift and I’m the only one in, god it’s not complicated Fauna Eloise.. sometimes I wonder what they teach you up there because it’s not bloody common sense.” Percy snaps.

“Sorry Da.. you’ve just never picked me up before.” Fauna responds, trying to mollify him. “Thanks though.” She adds, he’s not actually punished her since that time at parents week but she doesn’t really want to go through it again.

“Text me the address.” He says, and honestly even though she’s sure she’ll probably live to regret it right now she’s just grateful to think about getting out of the cold. A pint, is a pint after all. Though Percy hadn’t done anything particularly heinous since Sawyer punched Harold at new years, so she supposed she was about due for him to do something to remind her why she hated him so much.

Percy has brought his favourite Porsche coupe and it arrives a lot sooner than Fauna thought it would. She’d almost expected he’d keep her waiting, to punish her for questioning his motives. She dashes through the rain and slips into the front seat, to find Percy listening to the rugby. “Thanks for the lift Da, it’s vile outside.” The weather is usually a pretty safe topic, Percy hates the rain. There’s a brief conversation about the state of the roads, and what she was doing at the clinic before he looks at her and says.

“You can drive can’t you? Why don’t you have a car?” Fauna has to bite her lip hard to keep from laughing at this question. God he really didn’t have any idea what life was like did he? As if her and Sawyer could think about running a car when all they had to live on was the few shifts that she could take at the ER, his barely minimum wage earnings at the pub and what was left of her savings. They could barely afford groceries some weeks, and she’d been shoving the council tax bills underneath the freezer until Maurie had insisted that they take an envelope of ‘Christmas money’ to get rid of them.

“Yeah I can drive, you gave me a lesson once remember?” She reminds him. That was probably the last time that he’d volunteered to spend time with her that wasn’t to give her a bollocking. The lesson hadn’t been terrible to be honest, mostly because Percy liked feeling in control and like he was the smarter one of the two and Fauna didn’t mind learning when she thought the skill was useful. “Canne afford a car though, don’t really need one anyway I only really go to uni and to the pub. Sawyer borrows Glens car sometimes.. if we’re gonna go visit Nana or something.”

He grunts in recognition of the lesson. “You’d have more than enough money if you lived at home.” That’s the second time that evening that he’s stunned her to silence, and so she just stares at him like a fish. Was he really suggesting that she should move home?

“I mean.. I guess. But me and Sawyer are happy where we are I think. It’s nice to have a place of our own, weren’t really supposed to live together at school. ” She responds eventually, she wants to ask him why she would ever want to move home when he’d all but shoved them out of the door when they’d lived there for the month after Ohio. “Besides my single is a bit small for both of us. Sawyers a big lad.”

“Hm.” Is all her father replies it’s not like she expected him to laugh, she doesn’t think he’s ever laughed at one of her jokes but she does have to wonder where he’s going with all this. Her hands fidget in her lap as she waits for the penny to drop but he doesn’t press her on the topic. After a brief silence they pull up to one of the fancy country restaurants that Percy loves where the prices make her teeth hurt. She’s been uncomfortable with this kind of thing since she was a little girl who wore her wellie boots to church. As a kid she used to say she wasn’t hungry anymore and she didn’t want to go inside, which would usually cause him to call her ungrateful and all but yank her from the car while Rory wailed that he wanted Mcdonalds. Even now as an adult she wants to tell him that she’s not dressed for this kind of pint, and that she still stinks of the clinic. But again she knows that it’s not worth fighting over so she pulls the hood of her coat up and trudges with him inside.

Percy knows the girl on the door, and he speaks to her in an odd charming voice that Fauna knew he had but had never experienced first-hand. She thinks about this version of her father occasionally though, when she’s wondering how Maurie or her Ma ever ended up with him. It’s this charming Dominant they thought they were getting claimed by, not the bad-tempered man who can never be wrong, that ended up raising their kids. They’re shown to a table, and handed expensive looking leather bound menus. Fauna almost doesn’t want to open the thing, but her stomach is growling so she scans the print for the cheapest thing on the menu.

“It’s on me.” Percy says as if reading her mind. It’s early in the dinner for him to declare this, one of his favourite games when he brought her and Sawyer out was always to order and then ask them to pay at the end of the meal. Watching them try to scrap around for enough money to cover the extortionate tab, before the waitress told them that Mr Flanagan had already paid. It was the kind of humiliating mind game that Percy specialised in, always reminding them that they relied on him, that they needed him. Fauna considers asking him whether or not he’s sure he wants to pay but that’s another question so instead she says.

“Thank you very much Da, you didn’t have to bring me out here. I’d have taken a half eaten bag of crisps.” She jokes, her stomach rumbling as her eyes scan over the options. While she’s not a fan of fancy places, she is looking forward to eating something that she didn’t make in that one pot that never seemed to have quite lost the burned crust that she’d created when Sawyer had distracted her while she was trying to make red wine gravy.

“I know, you’ve always been willing to eat any old shit.. Take shit from everyone. You shouldn’t settle though, not about food and not in your life Fauna.” Percy says, and Fauna is starting to wonder if this is all about Sawyer somehow. Percy had been awfully nice to Sawyer since the incident at new years and she now had a creeping suspicion that he’d just been biding his time, lulling them into a false sense of security.

“I mean I actually do just really like cheap food to be honest with you Da, I really enjoyed the American preoccupation with junk food while I was there. As for everything else, I don’t really think I’m settling. I thought I was doing pretty well to be honest, I left a school that I didn’t think was gonna give me a fair shot, I’m studying to be a doctor at the best school around and I’ve got an amazing boyfriend.. what more could I want?”

“You live in a pokey one bedroom flat and you can’t afford a car, you and Sawyer should be thinking about a house of your own.” Percy declares, and honestly Fauna is just glad that Sawyer was included in whatever weird fucking conversation they were about to have.

“I mean once I’m qualified Da.. we’ll work on a claim and then we can start to think about getting a house and stuff. But I’m in med school right now, that’s you know.. expensive.” She wants to mention her trust fund, because it would solve every single problem that he keeps talking about. But she’d rather try to work out where he’s going with all this first.

The waitress arrives at that point, and Fauna hasn’t even really thought about what she wants though she decides to use this to her advantage. “Can you order for me Da? You know what’s good here better than me” Percy actually almost cracks a surprised smile at this, letting a Dominant order for you is good manners in his book. Fauna has never been opposed to this kind of power exchange when it’s consensual, though usually not with her father. But she knows that he thinks she’s a terrible submissive, that she’s not willing to follow any kind of rules so little gestures like this can occasionally help with keeping him in a good mood. He orders her something with goats cheese that Maurie apparently likes and a regular pint.

“I know you think I’m some kind of monster, because I won’t just let you and your brother waste your lives. And you act like I’m a cunt because Ive always tried to stop you from parading yourself around like a whore and acting like a nasty little brat.” Percy says, and Fauna takes a long drink of the pint that’s just been put in front of her. Vodka would have been better. Just when she was thinking this was going well. “But I push you because I know you can have more, and because I always wanted you to find a decent claim. Unlike your moron of a twin, I always knew you had potential. You’re decent looking like your mother, and nobody would ever shut up about how clever you were even when you were a kid. Though it was always like pulling teeth getting you to show it. Obviously there was no chance of you going into the business because you’ve always been submissive and overly emotional.. but I pushed you to do what you were good at.” Fauna wants to say that yelling abuse and emotional manipulation go a little further than ‘pushing’ and that if he really wanted to push her he could have offered to help with medical school but she holds her tongue. “I’ve always been trying to teach you not to be a chump and to be able to stand on your own two feet like I had to. Nobody gave me a hand out.”

In a world where Percy wasn’t the worst person on the planet , Fauna might have spoken about him with pride. He was self made after all, his friends were always clapping him on the back and talking about his clever investments outside of the business. But he’d soured every page of his biography with his actions, and left her uninterested in knowing how he made the money that he so loved to hold over her and Rorys heads. The money that he used to manipulate her mother and Maurie into submission, and literally the only thing that made him any difference from the drunks that he sneered at on a Saturday night.

“You’ve been making improvements though I’ve noticed, since our talk in Ohio. You’ve been more like a submissive should be, less crass, not dragging yourself out of bars like a tramp. Minding your manners.” Percy says, and Fauna raises an eyebrow. “And New Year reminded me something.. that I’ve been too hard on you particularly in a way. I always lump you and Rory in together because everyone else does. Which was never good for you, you don’t want people thinking you're a layabout junkie like him. I gave you the same treatment because I thought you needed the same push to succeed. But you’re a submissive and so I shouldn’t expect you to be able to do things for yourself. You’re supposed to be weak, you should be obedient.” In her mind Fauna punches him square in the jaw, and she stays visualising that as the waitress puts something that smells delicious in front of her. “But when the Yank fucking battered Harold, I realised that getting you under control was about finding you the right Dominant and shaping him. At first I thought the Hudson boy was a total waste of fucking air since he’s a skint drifter, with no decent family to speak of, American and he seemed like a pansy. But then I realised he’s got balls, and he seems to have enough of a grip on you that you’re no longer spreading your legs for anything that breathes.”

There’s a part of Fauna that feels some sort of twisted pride that her father is starting to approve of Sawyer, the words that are coming out of his mouth in many ways disgust her. But that stupid little girl who just wouldn’t give up hope that her Dad would someday be proud of her was jumping up and down that her Dad thought Sawyer could be a good match for her.

“I am committed to Sawyer.” She confirms for the millionth time, always feeling a little sick when he brought up the idea that she might have sex with anyone else. “And he’s a really, really good Dominant.”

“Hm.” Percy responds as he tucks into his steak. “It’s his future I’m interested in, like I said you two can’t spend your life in that dirty little flat. You need to be looking ahead, and I mean to help with that. You need to keep focusing on uni obviously, and on being a decent submissive. But I can help give him a push in the right direction.”

Fauna has no idea how to respond to this decision making process, because on one hand she wants to try and shield Sawyer from everything that comes along with having Percys attention. But if Percy warming up to Sawyer meant that he might relax on his one strike and you're out policy, then it would help them both sleep a little easier at night. So she doesn’t really say anything for the rest of dinner, he makes a cruel remark about her being greedy when she wants to order dessert, and takes several very underhanded digs at how much Rorys rehab costs which she can’t ignore and has to bite back on. But it’s probably the longest they’ve ever been alone in a very long time.

When he drops her off back at her apartment he reaches into his wallet, and pulls out a wad of twenties. “Buy yourself a bottle of decent booze.” He instructs. “You should be able to serve something that’s not shite when you have people over.” She has no intention of using the money for that, but she thanks him all the same and gets out of the car without feeling totally like shit for once. Which in turn makes her feel guilty, like she was betraying herself and Rory somehow for not totally hating every second that she spent with Percy. For letting him get away with at least half of what he’d said, Rory would never have sat there passively while he insulted the flat that her and Sawyer worked hard to afford and Sawyers parents who were good hard working people. Yet despite all that he’d said, Fauna considered the meeting to have gone well, and she just didn’t know if that made her a bad person or not.

Glancing up at the apartment building she could see a light on, and that familiar relief of knowing that she could talk to Sawyer about what was worrying her spread over her body. So without agonising further, she punched in the key code and disappeared out of the rain. Leaving what she could of her guilt and unease behind her.

#(( the past is talking now ))

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