#WOOHOOO | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

8-dermestid · 24 days

Note

Hello, I hope you are well! Recently I read a fanfic of yours on Ao3 about Ticci Toby and I fell in love with your writing!! I loved the way you develop the characters and their feelings!! 🤧💕✨

I would like to know if you write for Creepypasta X Virus, it is one of my favorites but there is almost no content online about it 🥹👉🏻👈🏻

Anyway, I saw your requests are open! If the idea pleases you, I would like to ask for headcanons of X Virus and Toby (or just Toby) with a reader who practices magic and has somewhat "dark" tastes (interest in poisonous animals/plants and the supernatural as a whole, in short, just a scary and adorable nerd at the same time!)

Thanks!! 💚

ahh! hello-hello!! i read x-virus' story and took notes for these, i really enjoyed writing Cody, so thank you very much for the request :-]

i rlly liked this request, and this is actually the first time i've ever done headcanon-ish things, i hope you enjoy these (bc i enjoyed writing them a lot)

x-virus & ticci toby: reader with macabre interests

relationships: ticci toby x reader, x-virus x reader

word count: 1.5k

links: available on ao3

x-virus warnings: animal death (off-screen, animal body shown) animal dissection, taxidermy, canon-typical violence

ticci toby warnings: canon-typical violence

☣︎ X-Virus | Cody _____ ☣︎

You let it slip one day that you wanted to try taxidermy, an embarrassing guilty pleasure you were confident you could keep under wraps, but Cody’s just been so nice about your eccentricities and you couldn’t help yourself.

“They use bugs in the process, lots of museums have them to clean the bones because they’re better than the best person with the best tools—” You pace back and forth as Cody watches you from your bed, “—Because that’s all they do, all they do is eat rotting flesh off the bone. The bones last much longer when cleaned by any Dermes—”

You stop yourself from mentioning the insects by their scientific name, embarrassed that you let your ramblings slip away like that.

Cody leaves the next day and you’re left alone with your thoughts. Maybe there’s another mansion full of serial killers so you can start fresh, your ears burn recalling how excited you got talking about flesh-eating bugs.

A few days later, Cody returns to the mansion with a limp raccoon and some things it stole from the local morgue.

You spend the entire night together trying to preserve this creature’s hide, you take it apart with precise motions, expertly moving the scalpel along the skin and parting flesh and sinew. You soak the skin in salts, rubbing it into the bloody underside until you smell like copper and the salt mines.

The whole room smells like formaldehyde, too.

✸ ☣︎ ✸

Cody is so excited to share its books with you, all of them. You spend long evenings together curled over a battery-powered lantern and ten-pound textbooks, occasionally mentioning an interesting tidbit when you come across one. Your books are filled with flattened foliage from the surrounding woods, poisonous plants and flowers, plastic baggies filled with poison ivy leaves, and hand-drawn diagrams of each plant’s internal structures in a ballpoint pen. It flips through each page carefully, examining each specimen, complimenting each note and observation.

“You should open a museum,” It says, running a finger over a pressed Conium maculatum. That snaps you out of your science headspace.

You should, but you can’t. “Besides, who would enjoy a museum like that?” You argue.

“Think about the Mütter Museum,” It quips back, “If people frequent a museum full of pickled people-guts and spines, I’m sure people would go to yours. People like flowers.”

In another universe where violence wasn’t at the forefront of your mind, maybe you’d be the curator of a weird little museum full of oddities.

✸ ☣︎ ✸

“Toby comes here all the time to burn CDs, don’t worry, the cameras stopped working years ago and they never bothered to fix them,” Cody pushes open a window and climbs into the air-conditioned computer lab of the local library, “Just don’t knock anything over, I guess.” It jokes.

You drop through the window and feel goosebumps form on your arms, you haven’t felt air conditioning in years.

Cody unlocks the door leading to the rest of the facility, you walk side-by-side, dragging your fingers over the spines of dozens of books.

“You know the Dewey Decimal System, right?” Cody asks, there’s a thrill with breaking in, especially for pleasure (rather than worrying about killing every occupant in a house, you both can focus on finding a specific edition of a book you were dying to read).

“By heart.” You joke, guiding it to the 500s: Natural Sciences.

You spend five hours squished up together reading from the same book. It points to a diagram and you explain every minute detail, Cody listens eagerly to your explanations, wanting to ingrain every word that comes out of your brilliant, perfect brain, and memorize the way you describe the venom sacs of the Hydrophis schistosus.

The way it rolls off your tongue—Hydrophis schistosus—Cody wants that to be the last sound it ever hears, the sound echoing forever in its brain until the heat death of the universe.

You creep down to the 200s and find a few textbooks about niche religious practices. You tell Cody about the rarity of cannibalistic religious practices, and the prevalence of cannibalism in some movies ticks you off.

“Cannibalism isn’t that common,” You scoff, “It’s more than socially taboo, it’s biologically taboo. Ever heard of Kuru?”

“Tell me.” It begs.

✸ ☣︎ ✸

⦻ Ticci Toby | Tobias Erin Rogers ⦻

Every word that comes out of you flies over his head. Even though he doesn't know a thing about what you’re telling him about, he’s completely and utterly enamored. Toby never graduated high school, and—for the most part—he’s glad he didn’t have to spend any more time around high-school people.

He misses learning. Sometimes Toby thinks he’s stupid, Tim and Brian went to university, and they have high school diplomas with their names on them somewhere, Toby has nothing except an honor roll card from the eighth grade. You’re so brilliant, maybe part of him thinks he’s weighing you down by stopping your ramblings to ask for clarification. He’s so deep in thought he hasn't been paying attention to your talks about the Ghent Altarpiece’s connection to ancient practices of animal sacrifice.

“Does it bother you when I do that—when I don’t know things a-and you gotta explain it to me?”

You’re sitting on the porch together looking out over the rolling fog, he sucks in a breath, the tip of a Marlboro lighting up orange-hot.

“I like it, actually.” You say matter-of-factly

Toby’s diaphragm sputters as smoke spills from his nose, and he coughs hard into his elbow. “...Doesn’t it—But I’m interrupting you because I’m too stupid to get it the first time—”

That word gives you pause, and Toby tosses away the cigarette butt and curls into himself, shame burning hot on his face.

“I don’t think—”

“E-Everyone does,” He cries, “I-I can’t help it, I couldn’t even finish high school. Tim and Brian made it to college, at least.”

You push yourself into his personal space, knocking your knee into his as you lean over to share a secret.

“I can teach you if you’d like.”

Toby’s red-hot shame melts into a giddy flush as your warm breath lands on his ear.

✸ ⦻ ✸

The next victim that comes Toby’s way—a family of three with a prying-eyed teenager getting too close to discovering the mansion—grants you both access to the internet for a time.

You start with Wikipedia, it’s good practice to get bare-bones information that starts the deep dive. Marine Biology is the starting topic because the random article Wikipedia spat out at you was about the bigfin squid.

Toby mumbles aloud as he scrolls through the article, the picture on the right left the hairs on his arms standing on end. Little is known about it because it dwells so deep, and scientists aren’t entirely sure why its distinct long arms are there.

“Nobody knows how it feeds?”

“We know more about space than our oceans,” You say, “We have pictures of the Big Bang.”

Toby rolls back on the wheeled chair and pushes the keyboard to you.

You open a new tab and open the search bar.

COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND.

He pulls back in, opening the third link that pops up. You sit quietly as he devours an entire article explaining the picture’s existence, he’s vibrating in his chair. Toby continues the search without your input, googling words and finding plenty of pictures of smattered space dust orbiting tiny, dense stars.

The pictures of the black hole shake him to his core, nebulae give him chills, beautiful planets and star systems and moons and—

Alpha Centauri grabs a hold of Toby’s body and keeps him there. He pushes the monitor towards you and you read along with him, he’s shaking with excitement, free hand flapping excitedly as he scrolls through the academic journal.

He prints out a few pictures before the police show up, the cosmic microwave background bathing the room in greens and blues and smatterings of yellows and reds.

✸ ⦻ ✸

He starts stealing books from the library, as do you. You take turns showing and telling. He shows you astronomy books and you show him textbooks about the history of taxonomy; you spend hours sitting across from each other on the floor exchanging knowledge.

“I’m—I’m glad we did this. Thanks for doing all of—of that.”

You peek over an academic journal you’ve read at least seven times, smiling softly as Toby puts his new collection of literature into a box and pushes it into the closet. He piles a few flannels and shirts over the box to camouflage it amongst his dirt laundry.

“Why’re you doing that?”

Toby turns to you and turns away meekly, “...It’s our special thing, you get it? I don’t want anyone getting into our business. This is our thing. Our special thing.”

A warmth creeps up your neck as Toby holds your gaze. You close your journals.

“Babies have more bones than adults.” You whisper, your hand splayed over his shoulder blades, “About three hundred.”

Toby’s breath hitches as your hands warm the spot where his cervical vertebrae end and the thoracic meet.

“H-How many are—” He covers his mouth to cover a shaky breath, “—i-in the spine?”

“There are thirty-three vertebrae. Seven cervical,” You and trails down his back, “Twelve thoracic,” you creep further, “Five lumbar,” Lower and lower you go, “Five sacral,” You’re getting bold now, “...And four coccygeals.”

You hold your hands there, Toby enjoys the warmth radiating from your fingers, he wants to melt into you like watered-down clay (you would call it slip since you know everything). He wants to read books with you for the rest of his life and not do anything else.

He wants you to count every rib, every tooth in his mouth, every bone in his hands and feet—counting and counting and counting until he's dizzy.

✸ ⦻ ✸

53 notes · View notes