#baukbear | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mortemoppetere · 24 days

Text

TIMING: current LOCATION: underneath wicked's rest PARTIES: @loftylockjaw & @mortemoppetere SUMMARY: emilio catches wyatt having a midday snack. before he can do anything about it, they become snacks together. CONTENT: suicidal ideation, brief mentions of child death

Wicked’s Rest kept Axis Investigations fairly busy. It was rare for Emilio to go a week without one new case or another landing on his desk, rarer still for those new cases to be the kind he thought normal P.I.s spent a lot of time dealing with. This particular case looked an awful lot like many he’d worked before. There was a woman, and her husband was missing. He’d vanished in the woods, and the police didn’t want to help her. They said he’d run off somewhere, claimed he’d just had enough of her, but she swore it wasn’t true. Given his experience, Emilio thought he might agree with her. There were a lot of things in the woods of Wicked’s Rest that might make a man disappear.

None of them were good.

So, he headed out. On his own, with Nora preoccupied, though he probably wouldn’t have involved her in this case, anyway. He’d rather let her work cases that might have happy endings, and he knew this one wouldn’t. He knew he was probably looking for a corpse instead of a man here, knew there probably wouldn’t be a joyous reunion. But it was better to know. He believed that, even now. It was better to know the truth, even when it hurt.

The woods were damp, but at least the weather was warming up a little. Emilio still wore his jacket, pockets stuffed full of blades and stakes, but he tended to keep that on year round. He trudged through the underbrush, bad leg snatching away any capability of moving silently. When he heard the smacking of large jaws ahead, he paused. This, he thought, could be exactly what he was looking for. Readying his knife, he moved forward towards the sound.

—

The ranger had been tailing him, pardon the pun. For a couple days now, he'd kept seeing the same woman out and about. First at the Pit, where he won in a fight against a baukbear. Later that same night, out on the street. A coincidence, he thought, not worth confronting her over. She couldn't know he was Lockjaw, anyway. He kept his human identity pretty fuckin’ secret. But then he saw her the next day at the store. And the next, outside a bar. She was tailing him, waiting to get home alone. She knew.

So he let her get him alone. Let her follow him into the woods, let her stalk him like he didn't know she was there. Let her think she had the upper hand.

The fight was brief. She'd seen Wyatt in the Pit, but that still didn't prepare her to face the lamia's brute strength herself. By herself. Stupid. He'd grabbed her in his jaws and whipped her against a tree, rumbling happily as her limp body fell to the wet forest floor. Time for a snack, he supposed. No use letting it go to waste. And hey! This was a fresh brain for Caleb! He'd love that, probably. Maybe. Maybe only if Wyatt didn't say how he got it. Hm. The head had been severed from the body in earnest, and now the massive alligator creature was tearing what remained of the corpse into smaller, bite-sized pieces, gobbling them down.

Until someone else happened upon the scene, and he lifted his head from the carnage to squint his yellow eyes in the direction of the sound. The heat signature of a human was coming in his direction and he huffed, preparing himself for yet another altercation.

—

Whatever was out here would likely hear him coming. The uneven terrain would have been easy enough to navigate in his older days, before the massacre and the injury to his leg, but now? The limb practically dragged behind him, barely serving to support his weight at all, much less do so in silence. But whatever it was was having a hell of a meal from the sound of things, and Emilio had to trust that that would distract it enough to keep it from acting before he could assess the situation. He was out here to solve a case. If this thing wasn’t related to that, and if it wasn’t bothering anyone, Emilio saw no reason not to leave it be for now.

Of course, that plan of action changed pretty swiftly when he saw the situation at hand. A giant reptilian creature eating what appeared to be the remains of a human corpse wasn’t the strangest thing Emilio had seen in this town, but it was the kind of problem he figured he ought to take care of. It was impossible to say, at this point, if the alligator creature had actually killed the woman it was currently making a meal of, but it was better to be sure a threat was eliminated, wasn’t it? And besides that, his client’s missing husband might very well be in the thing’s stomach. He’d need to cut it open to be sure.

He kind of wished he’d brought a bigger knife.

Silently daydreaming about the scythe in Teddy’s basement that he couldn’t carry around with him everywhere no matter how much he wished he could, he gripped the knife he had brought as he approached. “All right,” he said lowly. “We’ll do it quick. Make sure you can’t hurt anybody, make sure nobody finds you.” What Emilio would do to the thing would still be kinder than what someone else might, if they came across it first. A quick death was far less cruel than what most people were capable of.

—

Inner eyelids blinked first, followed by the outer ones as Wyatt sized the man up. Had a limp. Was ill equipped to deal with something as large and tough as he was, he thought as his gaze flicked down toward the knife in the stranger’s hand. Wouldn’t be much trouble, really. Still, there was something in his tone that set him apart from the ranger that had started this whole mess. He sounded almost like he didn’t want to do this, but felt obligated… on account of the dead human, and all. That was understandable.

Perhaps this could be solved without a fight. If not, though, another brain wouldn’t be a bad thing to get his claws on.

Wyatt bobbed his head quickly to send the arm that’d been dangling from his jaws to the back of his throat, swallowing it — sleeve and all — and straightening up, rising to his full height and staring down at the man as he let out a low, threatening rumble. “Like fuckin’ hell we’re gonna do anything quick,” he responded, figuring the hunter probably didn’t expect him to speak. Most didn’t when they saw him like this. “She came for me. You wanna end up like her, you keep comin’, mon cher. Won’t take me but one good snap.”

—

The thing swallowed the arm it had been chewing on and, if Emilio had been a man with a weaker stomach, he might have felt a bit nauseous at the sight. As it stood, however, it was easy enough to stomach. He’d seen far more gruesome things than this, even if this did land pretty high on the list. (Nothing, he thought, could top walking into an abandoned factory to find his brother tied to a post with his leg a few feet away from his body.) Still, it wasn’t exactly a welcome sight, and Emilio spared a moment of sympathy towards the owner of that arm.

A moment was all the time he had, though. Because the creature stood on its hind legs, raising to a height that towered above Emilio’s perfectly reasonable five foot and eleven inches. That was strange enough. More unexpected still, however, was the way the creature spoke. Maybe he should have seen that coming; in a town like this one, stranger things had happened. Still, the slayer took an uncertain step back, bad leg threatening to crumble under the weight he put onto it without thinking. “¡Qué mierda!” He cursed, the creature’s words likely having the opposite of their intended effect as they made him tighten his grip on the knife in his hand. If this thing was something sentient and the owner of that arm it had swallowed had ‘come for it’ the way it claimed, did that make the dead woman a hunter? A bundle of complicated emotions burrowed into his chest. “Can’t imagine why she’d do that, with the threats and all. You want me to feel bad for you?” He was out of his element here. He didn’t even know what this was, much less how to kill it. But Emilio was full of nothing if not false bravado; most days, it was the most reliable weapon he carried. “Don’t think I’d go down easy. Better take a step back, pendejo.”

—

At the suggestion that the stranger maybe ought to feel sorry for the beast, Wyatt gave a noncommittal shrug. It would certainly help his case if the man did. Then came the bravado, and the lamia snorted out a bestial laugh. “Okay, Cujo, better untwist those panties before you say somethin’ you'll regret.” He glanced down at the mangled corpse of the human woman, deciding that he wasn't going to let this uppity citizen interrupt a fine meal. “I was mindin’ my own business when this girly came along. Been stalkin’ me for days. Let her live that long, but she kept pressin'. Pressed me right into a damn corner. I don't like corners, friend.” That said, the gator bit at her torso, jerking his head roughly to get it deeper down his gullet. With the motion came a lovely spray of blood, one that decorated the stranger’s front like the flick of a full paint roller.

Wyatt paused, mouth full and preventing his laugh from coming out as anything other than a growl. He couldn't rightly speak so he just kept eating, sinking down into a squat. It wasn't like he was going to apologize, anyway. He wasn't the one being rude right now.

—

This conflict in his chest was a new thing. There’d been a period, once, where a hunter being killed by a thing they’d been hunting was an easy situation, something Emilio knew what to do with without question. You finished the job the dead hunter started, and that was that. Sometimes it was vengeance, other times it was pest control. For Emilio, it tended to be both. But… that was before. These days, things felt more complicated. He remembered the hunter Andy killed, the way he helped her bury the body, the way he told her she’d done the right thing and meant it. He thought of Parker and how angry he’d been when the warden went after Teddy, the way he’d wanted nothing more than to make the man pay. He thought of freeing Ariadne from that van, of his various spats with Owen, of every time he’d butted heads with a hunter in this stupid, confusing town. Things weren’t as black and white as they used to be.

That didn’t mean he particularly enjoyed the spray of blood in his face, though.

Taking a step back, Emilio grit his teeth. The metallic taste was a familiar one, though it was usually his own blood that got into his mouth. He spit it onto the ground, scowling. Enough of this shit. He wasn’t sure he wanted to kill this guy, but he was sure that he didn’t want to keep having this conversation. “I’ve got shit to do, then. I hear about you killing anybody else, I won’t be so nice.” He took a step forward, moving to shove past the creature (and maybe offer a petty kick in the process), but…

His foot was caught on something. He yanked, and sharp pain went through his ankle as whatever it was dug in deeper. Turning back, he saw that he’d somehow managed to get his foot tangled in some thorns. So much for the dramatic exit. Now he’d have to cut himself free. Grumbling, he turned around, knife still in hand. As he got close to the thorns to cut them away, though… something happened. The vines shot out, wrapping themselves around his arm up to the shoulder and climbing up his leg, slicing all the way up. Out of the corner of his eye, Emilio could see the same vines moving towards the sharp-toothed, hunter-eating stranger, too.

—

At first, all the man got in response to the warning was an eye roll, teeth crunching down through bone and cartilage. As he went to storm off, though, he suddenly stopped. Wyatt snorted, figuring this was another intimidation tactic that was falling flat. “‘M shakin’ in my fuckin’ boots,” he said around the remains in his maw, gulping them down. The man ignored him, instead bending down to… oh. Oh. He was stuck. That was hilarious.

And fortunate, actually. The threat came to the forefront of his mind and Wyatt abandoned what was left of the woman to turn his focus on the living one instead, deciding that he should kill this one as well. It was preventative! And it meant more brains for Caleb.

Not that he was sentimental, or whatever.

Before the gator could rush the guy, something else was rushing his way. He gave an alarmed growl, rising up onto two legs and trying to backpedal away from whatever was snaking through the ferns toward him with alarming speed. He glanced over to the stranger only to see him wrapped in thorny vines, and let out a fearsome roar. This was going to be annoying, wasn't it?

The vines caught up to him and coiled around his legs, pulling him easily to the ground. He thrashed and snapped at them, safe from the razor sharp thorns everywhere but the inside of his mouth, which he realized with an angry snarl. Even though the thorns couldn't pierce his hide, the vines they were a part of were doing a great job of dragging him over the ground, pulling him right into the stranger and the both of them toward… toward… what was that? That hole hadn't been there before, had it? He surely would have noticed such a thing.

—

As he tried to saw through the vines, he caught sight of the reptilian creature moving towards him out of the corner of his eye and steeled himself for the possibility of having to fight the thing while tangled in thorny brambles. It wasn’t exactly an ideal scenario. Even without the disadvantage of the vines, Emilio could admit that he was a little outmatched here. But the vines, whatever they were, didn’t seem interested in disadvantaging Emilio alone. He watched them wrap themselves around the gator, too, tangling him up so completely that there was no hope of him thrashing his way free.

It didn’t feel like much of a victory, though. Even with just one arm and one leg taken out of commission, Emilio couldn’t do much to prevent the vines from pulling him backwards. And, unlike the shifter, the slayer didn’t have a tough hide saving him from those thorns breaking skin. His pant leg and sleeve were wet with blood now, and struggling only seemed to make the brambles dig deeper. But as Emilio was yanked backwards towards a hole in the ground, he couldn’t stop himself from thrashing. There was no way that led anywhere good. “Oh fuck off,” he mumbled, yanking at his leg uselessly.

It was all he really had time to say before the bottom dropped out from under him and he was falling. The ground beneath rose up to meet him, knocking the air from his lungs as he just barely managed to maneuver to land in a way that saved him from a concussion on top of everything else. He wheezed, trying to determine if any ribs were broken in the fall. If they were, it would be the least of his problems. A glance up towards the rapidly fleeting light above them told him that the hole they’d fallen through had closed behind them. If not for the slayer-enhanced night vision, he’d be flying blind right about now. He wondered how well the gator could see, wondered if it would work more in his favor for him to be blind or capable. He didn’t think the two of them were on their way to friends, but they might have to settle for allies down here.

Forcing himself to still his movements and prevent any further damage from the vines, Emilio let out a breath. He glanced over to the shape of the gator in the darkness, eyeing him carefully. “Are you dead? If you’re not, and you agree not to eat me, maybe I help get you out of this. But I’m not going to help you if you’re going to try to take a bite out of me. Or if you’re dead.”

—

He’d cracked his head against a rock on the way down, sending him into a brief lapse of consciousness. Would have been far worse if he hadn’t been shifted, of course, but he was stirring again within the minute, hearing the man talking to him. Offering him help. Pushing himself up from the earth with a groan, Wyatt shook off the dirt as best he could with the vines still clinging uselessly to his hide. “Looks to me like you need my help,” the gator rebutted, for no purpose other than being a snarky asshole. “Wasn’t hungry, anyway. Just wanted your head.” He looked around them, long jaws cutting through the dark as he blinked a few times to adjust. His eyes reflected red just like any other gator from the minimal moonlight forcing its way through the brambles overhead, giving him an eerie presence as he stood there in the shadows.

Now that the panic had subsided (they were just in a tunnel in the ground, after all), Wyatt was able to calmly free himself from the brambles, watching them slump uselessly to the dirt. What even was the point here? To pull them underground? Why? It didn’t make sense.

He crouched down onto all fours, regarding the thorns that held the stranger in place, and the long plants they sprouted from. “You should pull those out,” he noted unhelpfully, suddenly deciding to be charitable. With a huff, the lamia picked a spot on the vines that had less thorns and closed his teeth around it, grinding it down to a paste to help free the stranger. It was with the bad-tasting plants in his mouth that he noticed thin, tendril-like roots crawling their way very, very slowly. Spitting out the vine mush, the gator let out a warning growl. Okay, so maybe there was more to this than just being dumped in a hole. “Watch out for those,” he grumbled, moving away from them to chew on a different spot on the man’s opposite side, hissing angrily as a few thorns stuck him in his tongue and on the roof of his mouth.

—

For a second, he really did think the gator was dead. He wasn’t moving, and with the thorns all around him, it was difficult to tell if he was breathing. There was a strange mix of relief and dread in the thought — relief, because he was pretty sure the pendejo had been about to eat him, but dread because if the shifter was dead, Emilio was alone here. Alone, in a small tunnel beneath the ground, unable to move… It didn’t do particularly well for a man who struggled with a deep-seated fear of enclosed spaces, even if it wasn’t a fear he’d admit to. But then, the gator shifted, and the relief turned to dread while the dread turned to relief. The two seemed to swap places, and Emilio sighed. Even in his head, things were rarely simple. Maybe especially in his head.

“I’m doing great, actually.” It wasn’t true. It was never really true, but Emilio liked to say it, anyway. He offered the gator a blank stare at the ‘reassurance,’ blinking slowly. “Yeah,” he said flatly, “well, I’m using it.” He wondered, with an idle horror, if the gator collected heads, if he had some room in his house with them lined up and decomposing. The thought wasn’t a particularly comforting one but, given the fact that the gator hadn’t seemed interested in eating the head of the hunter he’d killed topside and claimed to want Emilio’s despite a lack of appetite, it would make an unfortunate amount of sense.

The shifter made quick work of the brambles holding him down, and Emilio felt a flush of envy as he began the slower process of freeing himself. His dominant right arm was still gripped in the thorns, so he shifted his left into his pocket to pull out a knife and begin working on it. The thorns seemed to protest their own removal, digging in deeper as he sawed through them with the blade. The way he tensed as the shifter approached didn’t help matters much; he felt the thorns sink in a little deeper with the motion, grimaced as they did so. “Wow, never would have thought of that. You’re real helpful,” he said dryly. Then, those massive jaws were right next to him, and Emilio was pretty sure his mouth had finally gotten him killed, when…

The shifter’s jaws sliced through some of the vines, and he could move his arm more freely. Some of the tension bled out of him (along with a healthy amount of actual blood from the thorns), and he offered his temporary ally a curt nod. “Get my leg loose,” he said, nodding down to it. “I’ll work on the arm.” He didn’t particularly want those jaws anywhere near his arm, even if they did seem to be on his side for the moment. His leg was shit, anyway. Short of chomping it off entirely, he didn’t think the shifter could make it much worse. Warily, he followed the gator’s eyes to the roots that seemed to be coming their way. He could imagine what they were after; he didn’t think it was anything he’d like. “Let’s do it quick, then. Probably going to have to walk around to find an exit. The one we came through closed up while you were napping.”

—

“Napping. Right,” Wyatt grumbled around the vines in his mouth. Once they were chewed down and the rest was left to the human, he straightened up and lifted his head to look at the ceiling of brambles over their heads. “Don’t be a dick, mon frère. I can still leave you here… or swallow you in one bite. Either works for me. And you don’t need your head for neither option.” He lowered his gaze again, not loving the idea of trying to climb through those vines, but knowing that he could if he had to. This guy, though… well. He’d probably bleed out before he made it topside. Which was seeming like it wouldn't be any great loss, but it probably wasn't worth the effort of getting through that insidious tangle of plantlife.

“Since when is the forest a threat?” Wyatt wondered aloud, sounding put out by the whole thing. “This place… swear I ain't met more nefarious critters like I've met here.” He was speaking to himself mostly, dropping onto all fours again and lumbering down the tunnel slowly, tail swinging dangerously behind him, whipping the sides of the underground structure and, unbeknownst to Wyatt, making it quite easy for the roots of the Miner's Ruin that grew throughout these tunnels to follow them. The human could follow him or not, it didn't make much difference to him. He did however swing his head to the side to regard the man with one eye once he heard him trailing behind, giving an impatient huff. “What you like to be called, man? Also, and more importantly, you a hunter? I don't like hunters.”

—

With most of the vines sliced away with the gator’s sharp teeth, it was easy for Emilio to cut through the rest with his blade. Getting to his feet was a little less easy, of course. He didn’t like the amount of blood soaking the ground where he’d been laying, scowled at the puddle like it might soak itself back into his veins if he only looked at it sharply enough. Of course, this did very little to actually help the lightheadedness that came with standing, so Emilio figured he was better off using that energy to focus on staying upright. “Ah, I’m always a dick,” he replied, glancing back to his reluctant companion. “And if you do that, you’ll be on your own down here. Might not want that.” There was no telling what they’d run into down here, and while the talking gator probably stood a better chance than Emilio against most things, Emilio did have the benefit of knowledge on his side. It was just about all he had to offer in this state, though he wouldn’t admit to that.

He snorted at the gator’s question, staggering to follow as he walked down the tunnel. He didn’t really want to walk with a guy who’d threatened to eat him more than once now, but there wasn’t any other place to go. And Emilio had no desire to stay in the small opening with the vines that seemed capable of attacking him. “Forest is always a threat. You’ve just been lucky until now.” He had to walk close to the wall to avoid being hit by the gator’s tail, though he didn’t voice this inconvenience. If he did, he had a feeling the guy would only make things worse for him. And, still bleeding sluggishly and concentrating harder than he’d like to admit on keeping his balance, Emilio wasn’t sure he could afford for things to be much worse. “Emilio,” he replied flatly. “And you don’t like me either way, so I don’t think that matters.” He could lie, say he wasn’t a hunter, but he didn’t see much point in it. He had all the telltale signs of being one, from the weapons lining his jacket to the way he carried himself. He figured if he told the truth now, the gator might decide not to eat him. If he lied and the truth came out later, he was as good as digested.

—

All that Wyatt gave in response to the claim concerning his luck was an uninterested snort. No, he wasn’t lucky. He’d been the most fearsome thing in the swamp back home, and as far as he was concerned, he was the most fearsome thing around here, too. The vines had just been unexpected. And clearly not intelligent enough to know when they’d bagged a meal as inedible as Wyatt. Stupid plants. Nefarious critters were certainly abundant here, but the lamia feared none of them so far. Well… none but the birds. But that was neither here nor there.

Hm. He wasn’t wrong, certainly. Wyatt had no positive feelings for this man, which was curious considering he’d decided to chew him free of the vines. He hoped he wouldn’t live to regret that decision: there was no doubt in his mind that he could dispatch this hunter if the need arose, but he didn’t feel like expending the energy. He’d just eaten, after all, and he was tired. More tired than he always was, these days, thanks to his shitty dreams and even shittier sleep. Something that he was reminded of as they wandered through the dark and he listened for sounds. There wasn’t much, save the occasional tumble of rocks and dirt, usually a result of him brushing against the side of the tunnel. The air was quiet and still with not a single draught to be felt. That didn’t bode well.

The tunnel curved this way and that, but for now, it was a singular path. Wyatt was about to comment on how fortunate that was when they came upon a split and the gator halted his march, looking down one tunnel, then the other. He let out a frustrated growl, angling his head again to look at Emilio.

“Do you feel anything?” he asked grumpily. “My hide isn’t exactly the most sensitive…”

—

The shifter didn’t seem particularly interested in talking and, in all honesty, there was relief to be found in that. Emilio was far too petty to allow the gator to have the last word in any given conversation, but he was spending an awful lot of his focus on staying upright now. He had no doubt that if he passed out due to blood loss, the shifter would leave him behind. Or eat him before he regained consciousness. In a place like this, with the vines that dragged them here still hanging off the walls, both options were death sentences.

So Emilio focused on holding on to his consciousness, dragging his leg behind him like it was dead weight rather than a functioning limb. At the moment, it was very much true. The added sharp pain left by the thorny vines only seemed to make the constant ache the limb suffered feel all the more apparent. He wasn’t sure how much more walking he had in him, wasn’t sure he’d make it to the light at the end of the very literal tunnel. He grit his teeth with each step, determined to at least avoid making any sound to showcase his discomfort.

He was so focused on walking that he didn’t notice the shifter ahead of him had stopped until he nearly rammed into the guy. Blinking the spots out of his vision as best he could, he looked at the path ahead of them. Or… the two paths. His slayer abilities granted him enough vision to see pretty far into the tunnels, though neither seemed more enticing than the other. “If there’s anything undead in them, it’s a way’s away,” he replied, not thinking about the fact that he’d just given up the fact that he was a slayer. The shifter had already deduced that he was a hunter; what did it matter what kind he was? “Can’t see anything that makes one look better than the other, either. At least…” He tilted his head, taking a closer look and humming. “One on the left has less vines. I like the sound of that.”

—

The air was stagnant and strangely hot, and while it came as a comfort to the cold-blooded creature, it also was making him very, very sleepy. “But there is something undead around here, is what you’re saying?” A slayer. Great. One more person to worry about. Owen had been a special case, he told himself. Strictly interested in vampires, and as far as he was aware, Wyatt didn’t know any vampires. “Whatever. Less vines sounds good. Let’s go.” His head was hanging low as he plodded along, and he was so out of it that he barely noticed Emilio struggling to match pace. But eventually he did, despite the man’s best attempts to hide it, and grumbled. “What, you low on blood or something?” He knew the answer, he was just being a shit about it. “I’m not giving you a ride if you collapse. I don’t have to be fast, just faster than you.”

As if something had heard them discussing their current shortcomings, a low, muffled sound came from deeper down the tunnel. It sounded like something being dragged over the dirt and rock, or something… slithering? Hard to say. Whatever it was, it had Wyatt stopping again as he peered into the darkness. “What was that,” he stage whispered, as if Emilio would know any better than he. Well… maybe he would, he was like a Van Helsing type or whatever.

—

Emilio shrugged, grimacing as the motion pulled at the number of small cuts and slices left behind by the vines. If he sat still long enough, he’d probably heal up pretty quick. Slayers were good at that kind of thing. But in this particular situation, it was something of a double-edged sword. If he sat still, the shifter would leave him behind to fend for himself against the vines and whatever else was down here. Emilio had little choice but to keep moving, to trail along behind the shifter as he trudged on into the tunnel Emilio had indicated. “I’m fine,” he snapped, gritting his teeth against the sting of both the wounds and the harsh reminder that he wasn’t exactly among friends here. “I know you’re not doing me any favors. You’ve been pretty clear about that.” It wasn’t hard to be faster than Emilio, even without his current state being factored in, but he didn’t comment on that, either.

He tilted his head a little, straining to hear the sound coming from deep within the tunnel. It was hard to pinpoint which direction it was even coming from, much less what the source of it might have been. Emilio looked out into the darkness, staring as far as he could see, but there was a bend just ahead that made it impossible to see too far ahead. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He glanced back behind them… only to find that the way they’d come from was now overgrown with the same vines that had dragged them here. He hadn’t realized how fast they moved before. “Shit,” he muttered. “We have to keep going. Whatever it is, we’ll just have to… Deal with it, I guess.”

Shoving past the gator, he shuffled forward, looking more like a zombie than a man who killed them. He stumbled a little, approaching the bend and turning the corner. There were… roots. Roots that were strewn over a body that looked unfortunately similar to the photo Emilio’s client had given him. “Goddamn it,” the detective cursed. “Fuck.”

—

The hunter was cursing, and Wyatt rose up into a hunkered stand to see over his head. “What? It’s a dead guy.” Covered in roots. So those roots were bad news. “Kinda looks like they turned him to jerky. Weird.” The roots took notice of their presence, receding from the body to crawl their way instead. Wyatt hissed, taking a step back. The vines were still behind them, advancing. They were trapped. The only option was to try and jump over the roots, which was definitely not something the human here was going to be able to do, given the distance and his leg. Wyatt groaned, realizing that he didn’t really have the heart to leave the poor bastard behind, helpless as he was.

“Fuck me,” he grumbled, lowering himself onto all fours again and shoving his snout against the backs of Emilio’s thighs to knock him off his feet. He was draped momentarily on the lamia’s head, who growled out a reluctant “Hold on,” before taking as many more steps backward as he could, preparing to bolt forward and leap over the dangerous terrain. The grinding sound grew louder now, but Wyatt paid it no mind as he sprinted toward the danger, bounding through the air and hoping that Emilio had managed to secure his grip well enough to not fall off.

Something in the distance made an angry noise as Wyatt landed safely on the other side of the tangle of roots. He lowered his head to the dirt so Emilio could dismount, gaze fixed down the dark tunnel. Something was moving. A heat signature was getting warmer as it got closer, and he felt the crawling tingle of the anticipation of a fight crawling up his spine. “We got company.”

—

“Yeah,” Emilio ground out, immeasurably angry without quite understanding why. “It’s a dead guy. Just… His wife was looking for him.” There was a hint of bitter defeat to his tone, the words feeling clunky against his tongue. Probably the blood loss, he figured. Plenty of his cases went bad; it never tended to bother him much. But lately… Every misstep felt apocalyptic, like he was failing in a thousand different ways. Another failure, another stone landing atop the mountain on his shoulders… it felt monumental, and it shouldn’t have. It was stupid. It was just the blood loss, he decided. That was the only thing that was wrong.

He took a deep breath, tried to steady himself. He needed to get the body. He needed to at least bring that back, needed to give the guy’s wife something she could bury. Ignoring the shifter’s grumbling, Emilio prepared to begin the process of untangling the corpse from the roots with his blade only to be interrupted by the shifter knocking him off his feet. “What the fuck are you —” Instinct tightened his grip against the gator’s scales, keeping him on the shifter’s back as he leaped over the roots. Emilio hadn’t even registered the danger, really; that must have been the blood loss, too. This was why he preferred broken bones. They were so much less annoying.

The movement jostled him, and Emilio grunted as they landed. Something was moving, was coming towards them, but his eyes were still on the corpse. “We have to get him,” he said firmly, taking a step towards the body. “We’ve gotta bring him, too. He’s — His wife is looking for him. She’s — She needs a body to bury. She at least needs that.” There was a desperate edge to his tone, and he kept repeating reassurances in his mind. It was the blood loss. It was just the blood loss. That was all it was. He was still him, he wasn’t broken, there was just too much blood on the ground. “We get him, and we run. We’ll find another way out, but we gotta bring him with us.”

—

Wyatt would have frowned if his anatomy had allowed it, but there was enough disdain in his tone to convey the emotion regardless. “I am not draggin’ a fuckin’ stanky ass corpse outta here,” he argued. Because it would be him, they both knew that. Emilio was in no shape to be hauling a body around—he could barely haul himself around. The desperation in his tone didn't sit right with Wyatt, who felt like he needed to justify himself further. So much so that he was willing to give up information he'd rather not share with a hunter, but… “Listen. I just ate. I ain't full yet but I'm damn near close. What I need is a nap in the sun, mon frére. Not to be carrying two useless humans outta a hole in the ground while some fuckin’ devil is chasin’ us.” He was certainly more sluggish than he would've been otherwise, and his body was complaining about all the movement. He needed to be still to digest without making himself sick, but this whole fucking situation was not lending itself to that. “Leave it. His wife can bury his favorite sweaty ballcap or somethin’.” The thing down the tunnel in front of them was getting closer, and Wyatt felt his spine tingle with nervousness. He wasn't fit to fight right now. “Come on, man! Leave it!”

—

“I’ll carry him,” Emilio insisted, though they both knew it was a lie. Emilio would be lucky if he managed to get himself out of this situation without the shifter carrying him — and he still wasn’t sure the stranger would even submit to that much. Odds were, Emilio was going to die down here, anyway. The shifter would pat himself on the back about there being one less hunter in the world, and Emilio’s client would never know what happened to her husband. (Would Teddy know what had happened to Emilio? They’d probably be able to guess, but he doubted they’d ever accept it without a body. Probably not even with one.)

He let out a sound of frustration, though it sounded a little more like a whine. His wedding band felt heavy on his finger, like a cinderblock tied to his ankle determined to carry him to the bottom of a river to rot. “It’s not just — You bury them, and there’s closure. It lets it feel finished. It’s not — She’ll never be finished if we leave him here. She deserves to be finished.” Did he? It hadn’t exactly been his choice not to stick around and bury bodies when the massacre had still been raging as a backdrop to his escape, but he’d never gone back after the fact and maybe he could have. Maybe he could have seen the graves Rhett dug for Juliana and Flora. Maybe he could have dug some for Rosa and Edgar, too. For Jaime. Victor had no grave. Rhett, wherever he’d wound up, probably wouldn’t get one, either. Maybe Emilio should let the shifter leave him here to carry on the family tradition, to fall and die and decay and never let the world see a stone with his name carved into it and his body beneath it. His client would never be finished. Neither would Emilio.

He deflated like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Whatever was coming was drawing ever nearer. The corpse was covered in roots, and he couldn’t get back to it without the shifter’s help. What was he, then, if not a collection of failures bunched together in the form of a man? Unable to save his family, unable to protect Nora or Wynne, unable to convince his brother to relinquish a decades-old grudge for the sake of a daughter who loved him. He couldn’t even manage to get a corpse out of a hole. What was the fucking point of him, he wondered? What was he good for?

“His wife was looking for him,” he said again, defeated. “She was looking. She asked me to look.”

His eyes burned. His face felt wet. He blamed it on the blood loss.

—

Jesus christ, this dude looked miserable. Wyatt groaned and rolled his slitted eyes, squinting them shut as he cursed softly beneath his breath. “Fine! Fine. Fuck. But you are gonna owe me after this,” the lamia grumbled, turning around again in the narrow tunnel to face the relatively fresh(ish) corpse trapped in the roots. Had he died of starvation, or…? Wyatt began to guess the cause as he pushed his clawed hands into the mess of vegetation, craning his neck and stretching out as far as could, and the roots quickly slithered over his scales and made him feel… sleepy… fuck. Fuck. Wyatt gave a grunt and opened his maw, grabbing the body by its shirt with his front teeth and pulling backward. His muscles grew tired with alarming speed as the roots tried to gain purchase on him, finding it hard thanks to his natural armor. He backed up as quickly as he could, dragging the body free from the roots and down the tunnel far enough to give them a moment’s peace. There he collapsed, exhausted. “Do not touch that stuff,” he warned Emilio. “Just… need a sec. Ugh.” There wasn’t going to be a good way to get the body out of here unless it went in his mouth (ew), or if Emilio held it in place on his back… not feeling thrilled about the idea of carrying a corpse on his tongue, the lamia gave Emilio an annoyed look.

“You’re gonna have to ride up top with that thi— guy,” he explained, glancing over his own shoulder at his back. “Keep… him secure while I figure out how to get outta here. Can you manage that?”

—

He wasn’t expecting the shifter to relent. If anything, Emilio figured the gator would leave him in the tunnels with the corpse to die. And that was the kinder outcome Emilio had predicted. He still wasn’t entirely sure the guy wasn’t planning on eating him, after all. But… instead of doing any of that, the gator went back to the body. He pulled at the roots, he yanked it free. The gratefulness Emilio felt was an overwhelming thing, enough to nearly knock him over. (Which… wasn’t saying much right now, was it? He was pretty sure a burst of strong wind could have handled that particular job.)

He hovered a little as the shifter freed the corpse and pulled it away from the roots, following on unsteady feet. When the shifter collapsed, Emilio eyed him warily, wondering the cause. He glanced back to the roots, some part of him immediately filled with a destructive desire to reach out and brush against them the moment he was told not to, but he resisted the urge. “Any idea what it is?” Maybe Emilio would have known if not for the clouds in his mind and the way it was taking most of his concentration to remain upright, or maybe he wouldn’t have. It was difficult to say for sure.

The shifter was speaking, and Emilio forced himself to follow along. Sit up top? Up top on what? There was nothing… Oh. Right. His eyes flickered to the shifter’s back, jaw set. He wanted to argue a little, but… even if he wouldn’t have to drag the corpse along with him, he would have had trouble walking out of here. This solution was probably the only one that saw even a chance at Emilio making it topside, and he knew it. “I can do that,” he replied, leaning down to grab the corpse and nearly toppling over in the process. He steadied himself, taking a deep breath. Carefully, he grabbed the body under the arms and hoisted him up, dragging him over the gator’s back. The motion served to reopen wounds that his healing factor had already closed, but it also allowed him a moment of independence, and that made it well worth it. He paused for a moment, swaying on his feet and heaving a sigh. “Thanks,” he said quietly. “For… It’ll be good. It’ll be good for his wife to have something to bury. It’s hard to… move on without that.”

(He tried not to think of Rhett, but it was an impossible task.)

—

“If I did, I wouldn’t have rightly touched it,” Wyatt argued with a huff, forcing a small dust and dirt cloud into the air from where his head sat useless on the ground. He watched carefully as Emilio parsed out what it was he was saying, struggling with the body but eventually getting it slung over the shifter’s back. “Don’t thank me yet, mon frère… we still gotta get outta here.” He couldn’t disagree more with what the hunter was saying about the body, but figured it didn’t much matter at this point. Arguing wasn’t going to help their situation.

Waiting until Emilio was straddling his spine, Wyatt heaved another breath and pushed himself up onto all fours, keeping his head and shoulders a little lower than was comfortable to keep the two humans from sliding off of his back and down his tail. The slithering sound was growing louder, and Wyatt’s heartbeat grew faster. Even with the adrenaline spike, all he wanted to do was sleep. Fighting something, especially something as big as whatever this was, sounded fucking exhausting.

Yellow eyes peered into the blackness that yawned wide before them as the tunnel opened up into a cavern. The air was damp, the drips of moisture filling what would have otherwise been an eerie silence. Eerie, because they were not alone. Down the craggy stone slope dotted with a curious red moss, curled defensively in the center of the cave floor, was a massive beast. The heat signature was cool, nearly blending in with the surroundings. A snake. A huge fucking snake, with fur that ran along its spine like a mohawk. Wyatt’s interest piqued, wondering if this was another lamia. But god it was massive… way bigger than any he’d ever seen before.

Wait. He’d heard about something like this before, hadn’t he? He was recalling the stories his father would tell of lamia that had spontaneously mutated after their fiftieth birthday—it was a fate that hung over him like a cloud in his youth, a scary bedtime story that inspired him to do better, to be better… even though his moral standing would have no actual bearing on whether or not he’d end up like this poor creature.

“Fuck,” he whispered, knowing the bolla was awake, and that that was bad. “Fuck, the poor thing—we need to go. It’s awake. It shouldn’t be awake.” The odds were astronomically against that this happened to be a period of activity for the beast that would easily hibernate for a dozen years at a time. Wyatt moved carefully along the ledge, brushing against the red moss as he went, feeling the rust colored water drip down onto his snout from the stalactites overhead. “Hey, cover yourself. Don’t touch the plants or the water,” he warned Emilio. It didn’t bother him, thankfully — in fact, it was making him feel much better than he had in a while, even before the roots had sapped away his energy.

The bolla shifted, body writhing and coiling in its defensive pile, eyes locked on the gator and his passengers. Gargantuan jaws parted and the creature let out a hiss, long and loud. Wyatt froze, his whole body tensed and ready to fling itself from the ledge to get away from the bolla. There was a soft breeze and pinprick of light coming from the other side of the cavern… their way out. But the bolla had something else in mind, and started to raise itself up to strike.

“Dump the body!” Wyatt bellowed, scrabbling backward and out of the way as the bolla snapped at them, snout crashing into the wall of the cavern. It began to unfurl, and he knew what came next—they’d get wrapped up in those strong coils of muscle and be crushed to death. “Give it somethin’ to attack besides us!”

—

“Right,” Emilio mumbled, too tired to argue. People touched shit all the time when they knew it was dangerous, after all… but insinuating that he thought the shifter was probably an idiot when said shifter was also his only real hope of making it out of this mess mostly alive wasn’t really something that seemed like the best course of action right now. Bloodied and aching as he was, Emilio didn’t have it in him to be his usual levels of difficult. It took most of his energy just to get the corpse onto the shifters back, drained what remained of the reserves to climb up next to it. He held the body against the gator’s spine, tapping his shoulder lightly as if to give him a go-ahead to move.

Even though it was expected, the jolt of his ride moving forward still sent a nauseating wave of pain over the fresh wounds dealt out by the brambles. Emilio closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of the lessons his mother had drilled into him as a kid. Pain is a signal. Signals can be ignored. If you pushed deep enough, you could convince yourself something didn’t hurt. Emilio got good at it, after a while. It was hard to do after one blow, but easier after four. Dull pain was simpler to push down, sharp pain was more complex. Something like this took a lot of trying, but you could do it if you tried. Blend it all together, stuff it down deep. You couldn’t keep it up forever, but you could do it long enough to pull yourself out of a hole.

He lost himself in it, in the ignoring of the signal. It took a lot of concentration, and what little he wasn’t using on that was being spent holding on to the shifter’s back and keeping the body in place. When the shifter spoke, voice rumbling across his scales, Emilio allowed himself to believe, momentarily, that it might be good news. A way out, an exit. He really should have known better. Emilio Cortez had never been blessed with that kind of luck, after all.

He opened his eyes, letting out a sigh at the sight of some reptilian creature ahead of them. He sounded more resigned than anything else, like he’d always known this would happen. Already, his mind was writing the end of this story. The shifter would dump him here and leave him behind, and his body would never be found. Nora and Wynne and Teddy would look for him until the day they died, unwilling to accept an uncertain end. He found himself hoping the shifter would take his client’s husband to the surface in spite of everything, give her some kind of closure. It felt unlikely.

More words trembled across scales. It took Emilio a moment to grasp them, to pull them in and translate them into something understandable. There was desperation in the tone. It was a little surprising. Didn’t the shifter know he could dump the dead weight?

Except… That was exactly what he was telling Emilio to do. It just wasn’t in the way the slayer had expected it to be.

Something gripped his throat tightly, his heart thrumming against his chest. “No,” he choked out, but he knew they were out of options. They could get everyone still living out of this mess, or…

(Was Emilio’s life worth more than a corpse? Would it be worth it, to deny his client closure but to tell her to her face rather than hope a stranger would deliver a battered corpse to repay a man to whom he owed nothing? There was only one answer here with any certainty. Emilio just didn’t like it.)

“I — I don’t —” He wanted to give her something, wanted to allow her a grave to visit that wasn’t empty or an urn full of ashes that used to be something. But even if the shifter dumped him here, it would be difficult to get the body to the surface without Emilio holding it in place. He knew the best solution. He’d known it since the moment his mind caught up to the situation.

Closing his eyes for a moment, he nodded. He looked down at the corpse, slipped the ring off its finger and tucked it into his pocket. He patted it down and found a wallet, took that, too. A chain around its neck attached to dog tags that lined up with his client’s detail that her husband was a military man. Emilio pulled those off as well. “I’m sorry,” he murmured to the body. “I’m sorry. I wanted to do more, I —” Wasn’t that the story of his life? A thousand mistakes coated in his good intentions. He closed his eyes, shoving the body off with all his might and leaning down to grip the shifter’s scales. “Go.”

—

Wyatt didn’t need to be told twice. He launched himself forward the moment Emilio gave him the all clear, hearing the bolla turn its attention on the corpse they’d dumped as it hissed again and started to circle around the body, gathering it up for a good squeeze. Well, at least the guy was already dead. Crushed wasn’t a great way to go.

Scrabbling over rocks and dirt, the lamia made it to the opposite side of the cavern as quickly as he could, toward the light. Slipping into the tunnel and realizing it was far too narrow for the like of this form, he groaned. He was still half-full from his meal, and carrying Emilio out of here was going to be a lot harder when they were roughly the same fuckin’ size. “Pleeaaase widen,” he begged the tunnel, scraping along on his belly and nosing large, loose rocks out of the way. The light was getting closer but the tunnel was getting smaller, like it was one the bolla had made some time ago that was caving in on itself. Wyatt stopped, huffing and puffing and wanting absolutely nothing more than to take a nap. Nightmares be damned. “We’re almost there. Almost…” He was speaking mostly to himself, trying to psych himself up for the partial shift and the discomfort that was going to come with that. “Okay.” Fuck.

The lamia started to shrink beneath Emilio, taking on a more human appearance, though he remained covered in scales. He got to his feet, gathering the hunter up in his arms and ignoring any protest that he could do it on his own, because that would just take longer and Wyatt did not want to start retching up bits of human right now. His shortened muzzle parted as he let out an unfortunate gag, hurrying along through the horribly narrow passage. The light brightened, the breeze kicked up, and the tunnel finally grew wide again as it sloped gently toward the surface. Wyatt set Emilio down and gagged again, shifting back to his natural form and shaking away the feeling of sick that was crawling up his spine. He wanted out of here, like yesterday, and so he didn’t even ask this time as he scooped the man up into his jaws (gently) and loped the last few hundred yards out of the hole in the ground and to the forest that waited for them.

—

The shifter jolted forward so quickly that Emilio nearly tumbled off his back, gripping him tighter as he rode out the wave of pain that washed over his body. He’d heal as soon as he let himself sit still enough to do it, but the multitude of small cuts those brambles had left him with had opened and reopened about a thousand times since the start of this ordeal, and it was starting to get to him just a little. He buried his face in the shifter’s scales, biting his tongue to keep from letting out any noise.

Behind him, he heard the creature — whatever it was — moving towards the corpse they’d dropped. His hearing had been a little worse since that banshee screamed at him in the graveyard but, somehow, he swore he could hear every second of the thing wrapping itself around the body, could hear each individual snap of the dead bones long after they should have been out of earshot. Was it better this way? Kinder, somehow? Emilio thought of his client, waiting for answers. He thought of his wife, and the way he couldn’t imagine her now without seeing her pale and bloodless on the living room floor. He thought of Rhett, and the answers he’d probably never get. He didn’t think there was any kind way to lose someone.

It took him longer than it should have to realize that the shape beneath him was shifting, and his brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of the situation. There was a tunnel. It was small. Okay. They’d have to walk through that, then. That was okay. Emilio was pretty sure his brain still worked well enough to send the signals through to his legs, even if one of those legs was fucking —

The shifted picked him up. It hadn’t felt quite so humiliating when he was a giant alligator, but now that he was mostly human, Emilio took offense. “Hey, I can walk just fine, estúp-” The passage narrowed, and Emilio’s mouth snapped shut. The walls were closing in, everything was getting smaller, and the air was a little too thin. They were going to die here, anyway, weren’t they? They got away from the creature in the tunnels just to suffocate. His throat felt tight. He wondered if he’d bleed to death before they ran out of air, wondered if there was any hope he’d go quickly instead of slowly.

Light broke through as they exited the tunnel, but Emilio remained checked out even as the shifter set him down and jostled the various injuries he’d collected. He was still imagining a slow suffocation, offering no protest as the shifter scooped him up into his mouth. They were out of the tunnel. They were in the forest. Emilio still thought he might suffocate.

“Gonna eat me now?” He mumbled, trying to ground himself in the moment. Not a tunnel. Not a shed. Not a factory.

—

Wyatt sank to the forest floor, resting his jaw in the ferns and rocking his head to the side to gently dump Emilio out of his mouth. “God, no. I feel like blowin’ chunks,” he retorted, squeezing his eyes shut and dragging his clawed hands over the top of his maw. Ugh. Ugh, he always felt like shit when he shifted too soon after eating. “Do what you will, but I ain't movin’ from this spot for a while.” He could have asked if Emilio was okay, but he felt he already knew the answer to that—the guy seemed miles away. Besides, he didn't care, right? This was just another hunter.

All that being the case… a hunter still had body heat to be absorbed. Body heat that would help Wyatt feel better sooner. With a huff, the shifter swung his head to the side and butted it up against Emilio while the rest of him curled inward without explanation, creating a semi-circle around him. The man could get up and leave if he was offended, but the state he was in had Wyatt figuring he wasn't quite ready, either. “Not a word,” he growled. He wasn't about to listen to a bunch of bitching over the situation.

—

Was he relieved to hear that he wouldn’t be eaten? Some distant part of him thought he probably ought to be. It wouldn’t have been great to escape this whole ordeal just to be swallowed at the end of it, but Emilio was finding it hard to grasp onto much of anything right now. He buried fingers in the grass and dirt he was laying in, tried to ground himself in the most literal sense of the word, but it seemed so far away. All he could manage was a quiet hum as the shifter claimed he wasn’t moving for a while. That meant Emilio should be the one to move, didn’t it? He should get up, should drag himself back to Teddy’s, should see if there was enough duct tape to take care of the worst of his injuries here. Most of it was superficial — there was just a lot of superficial to worry about. Death by a thousand cuts was about as much fun as it sounded, apparently.

He was lost in some version of thought, laying on his back with his fingers in the dirt and staring up at the sky when the shifter moved again. Emilio tensed a little, but… the jaw didn’t unhinge. The teeth didn’t find his skin. Instead, the shifter pressed against him for reasons he couldn’t quite understand. Emilio lay stiller than he was normally capable for a moment before his usual small movements returned — the twitching fingers, the shaking legs. He hummed again, trying to think of something witty to say. “Your breath,” he said slowly, as if he was testing each individual word on his tongue, “smells terrible.”

—

“Yeah, well, you ain't winnin’ any flower-smellin’ contests, neither,” Wyatt grumbled. “Just shut up n’ be still. You're warm.” That was all the explanation he was willing to give, snorting with irritation and settling in. For now, his exhaustion outweighed the desire to stay awake, and he felt the quiet hush of sleep start to envelop him after only a few seconds of silence, and decided not to fight it. Except there was one more thing… “Hey, great mouse detective… I'm gonna be hittin’ you up for a cut of the pay for findin’ that body. That damn thing almost cost me my life. Twice.”

—

“I smell great,” Emilio argued, still feeling far away from himself. Had he made it out of those tunnels? Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he was there now, being crushed alongside that corpse. The thought was almost funny, but he couldn’t muster up a laugh. The shifter settled against him, and Emilio forced himself to be as still as he was able. As soon as his wounds healed enough for him to move without bleeding, he thought, he’d be fine. Until then, he could handle being a space heater for an alligator. He snorted at the shifter’s demand, rolling his eyes. Somehow, even that hurt. “I’ll give you twenty bucks,” he retorted. “Twenty-five if you agree not to eat me later.”

—

“Twenty-five it is,” Wyatt agreed. “Now be quiet. I’m nappin’.” And if he had a nightmare? Eh… that was a bridge he’d cross when he came to it, even if it meant mutilating this sad sack of a man. (He hoped he wouldn’t. But he wasn’t gonna admit that.) The sun was warm overhead, filtered through the little spring leaves of the trees and bathing them in a smattering of gold splotches of light. The forest was quiet save for the chirping of birds and the steady, slow hiss of Wyatt’s breath as he left himself be overcome by his tiredness.

It was no wood stove in his cozy little cabin, but it would do.

#loftylockjaw #wyatt: it's a deal #wickedswriting

7 notes · View notes

lauriescages · 3 months

Text

That Kind of Night || Self-Writing

Location: Grit Pit Content Warning: References to violence

Laurie cussed quietly to himself as he listened to the baukbear scream as the lamina held it down under the light. As dingy as this place could be sometimes, Laurie knew they’d only had it on to try and make it a fair fight. But he’d only just gotten the lighting to his liking around the baukbear cage. What? Was he just supposed to go out and find another one? Not fucking likely. If his bosses wanted a new one when that one had died so quickly, they could send somebody else.

Turning away from the fight, Laurie grabbed a rag to wipe his hands with before heading down toward the cages. That fight had been shorter than anticipated, so they’d probably try to squeeze in another. He needed to check the feeding schedule and figure out what would be smart to send. Technically that wasn’t his job either, but Laurie liked to be ready for the occasions where he did get asked.

“Hedge hound versus hellhound?” he got asked as he was flipping through his paperwork.

Laurie didn’t even look up. “Come on, Jack. Would anyone even bet on the hedge hound in that?” he asked. “No way the hedge hound can strangle fast enough to avoid being burned?”

“Well, maybe that’s the angle,” Jack mused. “Can the hedge hound kill the hellhound before it’s forced to regenerate? We make the odds stay with no, give ‘em a chance to bet on the longshot. Make a little money on a last minute fight.” He shrugged and patted Laurie on the back. “Good thinking. Get them ready.”

Laurie grumbled to himself as he headed toward the hedge hound cage. He kept grumbling as a few others stepped in to help get the beasts upstairs and into cages on either side of the pit ring. Once the bell rang and the cages were opened, Laurie leaned against the wall, barely caring enough to watch. As predicted, the hellhound burned hot and ended things rather quickly. But at least that meant both were going back to the cages. One less thing he’d have to hear about later.

The action continued in the ring, but since it was two part-timers against each other, neither was anything Laurie needed to care about. He went about his nightly routine, heading down the hall over and over with buckets of fresh meat, rotting meat, specialty plants, and anything else needed in the night’s food schedule. He had his beasts’ cage locations memorized by this point, and Laurie could let his mind wander some while working. He occasionally risked putting in earbuds, but not being able to hear the beasts always put him on edge.

“Easy night?” Jack asked, leaning against the wall in Laurie’s resource room as things upstairs must have wrapped up.

“Go fuck yourself,” Laurie responded without any heat. “Explain to me why that light was close enough to sunshine to actually kill my baukbear?”

“Your baukbear?” Jack repeated instead of answering the question.

Laurie rolled his eyes and filled another bucket of grains to finish out tonight’s feed list. “I’m the one who had to do all that work to get ready for it, so yeah. Mine. All this work to keep these beasts alive, and what thanks do I get? Certainly none from them, and then you let your prize fighter kill something that should be hard to kill in this setting.”

Jack shrugged. “Not my prize fighter any more than your baukbear. Neither of us gets paid enough for those claims.”

Laurie snorted and raised the bucket in a sort of toast. “All right, fine. I’ll give you that.”

#wr writing #self-writing

4 notes · View notes

eldritchaccident · 1 year

Text

Timing: Late tonight/Early tomorrow morning Location: Harborside Alleyways Feat: @mortemoppetere & @eldritchaccident Warnings: (Supernatural) animal death, head trauma, sibling death (mentioned), parental death (mentioned) Summary: Messes are made and cleaned up. But it all goes pretty sideways.

It was a bad idea, and he knew it. It had only been a few days since he was nearly torn into pretty literal pieces by a qutrub, since a ranger saved his life while he complained about it, but Emilio had never been particularly good at ‘resting.’ He didn’t know how to sit still and let himself heal; if he had, maybe his leg wouldn’t be as bad as it was. But he hadn’t given himself a rest then, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to do it now.

Besides… this one was at least partially his mess to clean up, anyways.

He maintained that it was mostly Teddy’s — if they hadn’t been so damn cryptic, Emilio wouldn’t have reacted the way he had — but he could own up to his part in it, too. Not to Teddy directly, of course, but to himself. The creatures running around Harborside needed to be contained sooner rather than later, and Emilio doubted anyone else was going to do it. So who gave a shit if he still felt half dead? Somebody had to fix this shit.

He just wished it was a little easier.

The baukbear was hiding in a damn alley, manipulating the shadows around it in a way that would have been damn effective if the man chasing it hadn’t been a slayer. “Come on,” Emilio groaned, taking a step towards it. “Don’t you want to go back into the woods, mullido? More to eat out there. We’ll find you a nice cave, ¿sí?”

Yeah. He felt like a fucking idiot.

—

Turns out, there were more than one flavor of idiot in town. Or rather, two of the same kind. Teddy was also not exactly ready to be back out there. Barely having shifted back, bones still ‘settling’ as they liked to call it. At least that night was an all over ache. One they could tamp down with a quick drink or something whenever they got back home. Everything at least seemed to be working even if it wasn’t working well. Teddy had gone out to wrangle in some of the beasts that had gotten away, from what was shaping up to be one of their most annoying disasters yet.

A crumpled up piece of paper listed all the animals (by nickname not species) that had been released. And each one they managed to get back in (as close to) its natural habitat was crossed off and signed with a heart. So that left… like five? Honestly not too bad. The night was cool, which was why Spring was always so lovely. Not too warm, still a bit of variety, and definitely not too cold. The sea monster may not have been cold blooded but sometimes they really thought they were.

And then they heard it.

The same voice that called, not necessarily the one who started the mess. But the one that certainly made it all go off the rails. Teddy was curious. Emilio was out here, doing who knows what, but chasing the same creature as them. The demon perched atop a neighboring roof, watching the scene below as the detective… made an attempt. Didn’t seem like he was outright trying to hurt it, so Teddy didn’t intervene. Yet.

They had half a mind to call out, remind him that Fluffy was the karkascuttle, not the baukbear. Who was affectionately called Cheeto because of how much the beastie loved those puffy crunchy orange… things. What was a Cheeto exactly? A chip? A crisp? Didn’t matter too much. Only that they had a bag of them in their pack, and a smirk on their face as they watched their own personal show.

—

If he were in better shape, Emilio would have been aware of the presence on the roof. His slayer heritage might not give him the ability to sense anything with an actual heartbeat, but his paranoia did. That permanent shiver down his spine, that thing that made his heart beat faster than it ought to even when he was doing nothing but sitting at home with the damn dog, that pit that had lived in his stomach since the day of the massacre… It was half superpower, half fatal flaw. It had saved his life more times than he could count, and it was probably going to be the thing that killed him. Right now, it was quieter than it usually was. Too much of his energy was focused on the all-over ache the qutrub had left him with, every inch of him concerned with not letting that weakness show.

As if the damn baukbear would give a shit that his ribs were still busted or the bandages on his mangled arm had started to feel sticky in a way they really shouldn’t be. Mostly, he figured, the baukbear was concerned with what it could find in the dumpster. And maybe with whether or not it could drag Emilio back to its den for supper, though he was a little less concerned about that than he ought to be. He might even let it do it if it meant the thing would actually go back to its fucking cave. He could probably still get away before he got any more bites taken out of him. It wasn’t his top plan, but he decided to put it in the running.

“Ay, come on,” he called into the shadows, snapping his finger and clicking his tongue the way he might if it were Perro in the damn alley. The baukbear, unsurprisingly, made no move towards him. Emilio groaned, staggering over to the wall and pressing his back against it, sliding carefully into a seated position. How the fuck had Joy wrangled all this shit? A fucking run-of-the-mill human, with nothing extra to help her out? Sighing, Emilio shrugged out of his jacket to inspect the bandage on his arm, shaking his head at what he found. As expected, the damn thing was already soaked through with blood again. A natural consequence of his insistence to take care of his own wounds, he figured; duct tape could really only do so much.

Something shifted in the alley. Emilio glanced up, figuring the baukbear was fucking with the dumpster again. “Not going to find anything you want in there. Show me where your den is, I’ll bring you some meat. You like vampires? Probably taste a little ashy, but maybe we give it a try, hm? Long as you’re not eating the innocent kind of people, you’re all right in my book. Just need to get you back to the woods, yes? You ready to go now?” He climbed to his feet, clenching his teeth and letting out a quiet, pained grunt at the movement. Ah, well. No one around to hear it but the damn bear.

But then —

— The distinct scent of sulfur. Not the baukbear, but something else. Emilio’s mind provided him with an answer he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted, considering his last encounter with a wolf-like creature had nearly killed him and the ranger who’d stepped in to save his ass, but there was no denying it. Fucking hellhound. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

—

Oh well that just wasn’t fair. Emilio was being cute with the thing. Gentle. In all the ways he hadn’t been with Teddy. Understandable given the… everything about that whole interaction. They weren’t too prideful of a demon to know when they had messed some things up, even if the biggest bit of blame still resided in the one who opened all the damn cages at once. Ugh. What had Joy told Emilio? How did she lie to him to keep her innocence? For her to have let the creatures be released, that seemed uncharacteristic too. Or maybe she had learned something. Don’t fuck with the creatures of Wicked’s Rest. Ted wasn’t sure they’d ever find out if the baukbear had its way with Emilio.

Emilo, who seemed to sense something. Another tick in the probably not human category. Or at least not just OG human, maybe like human plus. A hunter? Though hunters probably wouldn’t show this much mercy to a creature like any of these. They rarely showed mercy to anything. Not families. Not fathers trying to protect their kin. Not children who happened to be anything other than human. A sigh escaped the demon as they ran a hand over their scars. A heavy and permanent reminder of what people who dedicated their life to the murder of other beings were like.

The detective spoke though. And for a second, Teddy thought they had been caught. Only it wasn’t directed at them. Fuck. Carolina. Short for Carolina Reaper. She was the spiciest of all the beasts in Joy’s cages. One that Teddy hadn’t had a chance to figure out what she liked or how to properly deal with her. Weren’t Hellhounds and demons supposed to be like, best buds? It honestly wasn’t fair.

As the man turned, Ted slipped down from their perch, landing with a soft thud behind him and facing the baukbear. A crinkly bag cracked open and the beast immediately perked up. Though it was obvious the other presence in the space was starting to spook it. Cheeto was fairly gentle, as baukbears go. Even let Teddy pet him once or twice so long as he was being bribed with his namesake. If they wanted to avoid an even bigger mess, they had to split up these animals. And maybe get the stinky guy out of there too. Whatever. He was interesting. And Teddy had plenty they still wanted to dissect about him.

Unfortunately, it was a dead end. And Teds wasn’t sure how well Cheeto’s claws would work on brick. “You know they don’t really like it when you corner them.” Finally letting their presence be known. Teddy grimaced and reached for the bear with the bag of food. The hellhound was getting closer, the smell getting stronger. The window for getting Cheeto into a relative area of safety was getting a lot smaller. “C’mon baby boy, got your favorite snack.” To his credit, the bear did seem to perk up. The shadows lifting as its lumbering form came forth, pushing its whole head into the family sized bag that was still not big enough.

—

He heard them long before he saw them. Even distracted by the hellhound’s presence, even half-focused on the still-there baukbear, even with the pain radiating from his injured arm, his ears picked up on it. The soft thud of feet hitting the ground, the crinkle of a bag. Emilio wasn’t alone in the alley, and it wasn’t just because of the animals. For a moment, he was caught between dread that someone else might get hurt by all this and relief that he might not be stuck taking on this task all by himself.

But then the other presence spoke, and irritation won the grand prize. Just when he thought this shit couldn’t get any worse.

He narrowed his eyes at the new presence in the alley, suspicion leaving an acidic taste on his tongue. That was Teddy, all right. Upright and annoying in a way they really shouldn’t have been considering the way their last encounter with Emilio had ended. He’d spoken to them online, of course, but… It was difficult to puzzle out their physical state from that. You could type online replies from a hospital bed, or take a phone off a corpse and pretend to be its original owner. But this? You couldn’t fake this. Teddy was definitely alive, and a lot less injured than they ought to be. And Emilio wasn’t sure he liked that.

He hadn’t meant to hurt them, of course. He hadn’t wanted them to fall off that roof, hadn’t even really wanted the knife to land the way it had. He’d be lying if he said there was no sense of relief at the fact that they weren’t dead… but that didn’t mean there was no suspicion, either. A normal human wouldn’t have survived that. They weren’t undead, and Emilio wasn’t sure any shifters could heal at that rate. Fae, maybe? He thought he remembered Rhett mentioning that some nymphs were pretty durable, though he tuned the warden out so often that it was difficult to be sure.

It probably wasn’t important right now, anyway. Finding out what the fuck Teddy was would only matter if Emilio wasn’t eaten by a hellhound first. And, now that Teddy was around to witness it, he’d decided he wouldn’t be. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of watching him die.

“I wasn’t cornering it. I was trying to get it back to the woods.” He narrowed his eyes as the other pulled out a bag of some unnaturally orange something and offered it to the baukbear. “That can’t be good for it.” As if Emilio, who often survived off coffee and cigarettes alone, had any business commenting on someone else’s eating habits. “Look, I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here, but —” He took a step forward, and the hellhound let out a low growl, circling the slayer, the bear, and the idiot like it was trying to decide which course of the meal it wanted to eat first. Emilio faltered a little. “Get the fucking bear and fuck off, then. I’ll take care of this one.”

—

“By approaching it from the front of a dead end alley where it had nowhere else to go?” Teddy snorted and ruffled the baukbear’s fur behind its ear. Grumbling in response, the thing seemed to be following along with the demon’s plan. “Cheeto likes these, and they’re fine as a treat.” There was very little a big baukbear like that could eat that would actually mess with it. Even one as timid as Cheeto was. Made Ted wonder just where the thing had been before. Was it always part of a private collection? Were there more Joy Cavendishes out there? Tiger Kinging their lives with supernatural creatures because the regular deadly ones just weren’t enough?

Something to look into when they weren’t potentially going to be maimed.

“You hurt Carolina and I’ll make sure you’re the one falling off a roof next time. She’s sweet she just–” As if offended by the notion of being referred to as anything other than fearsome and wrathful, the hellhound leapt. Teddy braced for impact but it never came. Which was kind of a good thing as they weren’t so sure their joints would hold up to a full force attack. But that meant– “fuck.”

The demon’s heart began to race. “No no no-” Carolina had pinned Cheeto. Deciding apparently the two scrawny humanoids weren’t enough of a meal. Against their better judgment, Teddy leapt right back at the thing. Using every ounce of enhanced strength they possessed to try and pry it off of Cheeto’s hide. The bear was tough but now it was frightened and swatting at anything and everything. Messing with the shadows and generally causing a ruckus. It managed to smack both the demon and the hound off to the side, and thankfully Teddy managed to keep a hold of the gnashing maw while being tossed aside.

“Change of plans, you take Cheeto out of here, I’ll hold her down.” They were able to pull the creatures apart, just barely, but now the hellhound had a gullet full of bear meat, Cheeto was bleeding pretty heavily, and Teddy didn’t know how much longer they could hold onto the screaming, gas-leaking, flammable beast. She might not outright attack Ted because of their somewhat shared heritage, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t defend herself and her meal.

That and Teddy’s joints were screaming. Begging them either to transform or run away. They couldn’t transform, not here in the city. Not in front of this man. Though they weren’t sure how good they’d be at running right then, either. Not with the way their hip had just twisted. Giving out for a second before popping back in as they wrestled with the hellhound’s head. Riding it like some messed up mix of a jockey and a bullfighter.

“C’mon, GO!”

—

“There’s only one way into the alley. I’m not going to climb down from the fucking roof.” Teddy might be able to hop down from places like that with no issue, but Emilio’s knee gave him enough trouble without that shit. Not to mention the current state of his ribs and arm. Coming at the alley from the front was the only option available to him, and even it felt a little strange. Not long ago, he would have just killed the damn bear and been done with it. This whole thing felt a little stupid, even now, but… The idea of killing something just for being lost left a sour taste in his mouth in a way it hadn’t used to. His mother had probably been right — he was too soft for this life. (And somehow, he was still the only one of her children still living it. It felt like an incredibly cruel joke.)

The hellhound was a little different, though. While the baukbear seemed unnaturally timid and tame, the hellhound was every bit as hellish as its name implied. It was circling, it was watching, it was hungry. And just about everything in this alley except the chips in Teddy’s hands was on the menu. “Caro —- you named it? This thing is going to fucking —”

It was as if the hellhound was trying to prove his point, the way it leaped. Like Teddy, Emilio braced for impact, but he wasn’t the intended target. Neither was Teddy. It was the bear that had captured the hellhound’s attention here. Emilio had half a mind to duck out, to let nature take its course, but the pit in his stomach deepened at the impulse and even if it hadn’t, leaving now wouldn’t solve the problem. There would still be a hungry hellhound loose in Harborside. And as much as Teddy irritated him, he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave them to get eaten by a hellhound just yet. Maybe in a week or two, when the guilt of accidentally letting them fall off that roof subsided.

“Jesus, you’re going to get yourself fucking killed,” he griped, moving forward instinctively to try to help. Teddy got the two beasts apart with impressive strength that only added to Emilio’s theory that they weren’t entirely human, but the chaos was a hard thing to escape. Teddy was doing a decent enough job of holding the hellhound back but the baukbear, now injured and frightened, wasn’t quite as docile as it had been before. It was roaring in an anguished kind of way, clearly unhappy with its bloodied flank.

He wasn’t thinking clearly. That’s what he’d say later, if anyone asked. His arm was already bleeding again, the injury from the qutrub reopened now, and his head was spinning with paranoia about Teddy, about Joy, about everything. He wasn’t thinking clearly, and the alley was a mess of chaotic noise that was going to draw onlookers in a heartbeat, and someone was going to get hurt and it was going to be his fault, because he shouldn’t have let it get this bad. It was going to be a fucking massacre, there’d be blood in the streets, people were going to die. Somebody’s mother would have her limbs ripped off, somebody’s sister would be dragged back to the baukbear’s cave, somebody’s wife would bleed out in an alley, somebody’s daughter would…

It felt like the world was closing in on him. He got like this, sometimes. He wasn’t aware enough to understand why, had no kind of knowledge about any sort of mental health resources that would explain the way the alley flickered into the living room of his house in Mexico. He didn’t know how to combat it any better than he knew how to fight anything that you couldn’t take down with a knife. He knew it made him sloppy. He knew it made him stupid. What happened next was proof enough of that.

Emilio shot forward like a bullet, ducking in between the hellhound and the baukbear. The bear, still a terrified frenzy of motion, saw a new challenger enter the ring and reacted accordingly, batting him out of the way with a massive paw. And Emilio, only half-present as his mind continued to bend time and reality into something it wasn’t, something only he could see, went flying. He smacked against the brick wall of the alley with a thud, damaged ribs screaming at the sudden contact and head hitting the concrete hard enough to further daze him. Half-conscious, he fell to the ground in a heap, arm bleeding in earnest now. All he could think, in that moment, was that if he survived this mess, he was going to need a hell of a lot more duct tape.

—

Even as a demon themself, the sulfurous gas ebbing out of the hellhound was still nauseating. Would’ve been much worse all around if they were anything else. And for that, Teddy said a silent prayer of thank you to their benefactor, their father, and the only person to stick around for more than a month in their life. Levi. It had done a lot to teach the kid all its ways. But one thing it couldn’t ever do was rid the human of that petty little thing called compassion. With the baukbear in a frenzy, and the detective injured worse than they had been before, (Duct tape? Really? What was this guy doing out and about? Where did he get those injuries?) the hellhound’s rage and attention were rapidly switching gears.

A beserk bear had become a bit of a bothersome target. Something that would be more easily taken down with a pack. Between that and something much more simply attained, well Carolina was going to go for the quick meal. Obviously. She seemed to sense the discomfort that Teddy’s body radiated. The grinding of their bones against one another, maybe? The clever girl rocked and jostled its rider, bashing Ted into a wall of their own before taking off after the detective.

“No!” It should have come out like a dog owner scolding a pup. But something else erupted with the scream. Teddy didn’t want the thing to hurt Emilio any more than they wanted Emilio to hurt the hound. Surely because they wanted to be the one to do it themselves. Right? Instinct gave way, leaving logic and safety behind. The demon’s arm shuddered, bristling and flexing as blue scales began to take over. A dark gradient from the tips of their fingers up just past their elbow. Bright blue talons broke through the human fingernails on fingers that twisted and malformed to resemble something closer to their demonic form.

Hopefully Emilio just wouldn’t see. Even their magical glasses couldn’t fully charm this away. Though maybe they’d do enough to make them harder to look at. Ted hadn’t exactly tested this theory. But there was too much going on, too much noise, too much danger for them to do nothing. And human wasn’t cutting it. The arm shot forward, now just slightly mismatched in proportion to the rest of their being. Yanking the beast by the tail and dragging it back. But not quick enough.

The baukbear got a strike on her, and she retaliated in kind. Tearing into another chunk and forcing the much larger beast into a howling submission. Frantically Teddy pulled, trying to pry them apart again but it only served to make things worse. The hellhound had serrated teeth, meant to ripping and tearing. Teddy might not have been the one underneath the bite, but they felt their muscles burn all the same. It was too soon. Too soon to be shifting again. Too soon to be out and about fighting battles that never should have happened in the first place.

Air and bile heaved up in Teddy’s chest as they watched the creature gnawing on the other. Their eyes darted between the great bear and the slumped form against the wall just to its left. With each moment passing more of their aches and pains blossomed to the forefront. Making themselves well known and threatening to send them into an even deeper spiral if they tried anything else. There was no way they’d be able to fight the beast off in this condition. Shaken, distraught, and entirely unfamiliar with the swarm of emotions welling up inside, Ted realized they had a decision to make.

Try and save the bear.

Or try and save the man.

They didn’t have long to choose, either. The hellhound was still tearing into whatever she could get her maw around. Another retch and Teddy realized they had to act right then. Or no one would be getting out of this alley.

So they did it.

Tears silently streaked Teddy’s face as they tried in vain to convince themself they were saving Emilio because the bear stood a chance. Because out of the two of them, the detective was more fragile and Teddy had to save someone right? But the sounds that echoed from the street behind them as they ran with the semi-conscious man wilted in their arms said otherwise. They ran until they couldn’t anymore. Ran until their breath became as ragged as the steps they had been taking. Then they continued to walk anyway. Ignoring the pain because the dumb fucking detective needed actual medical care.

Emilio was set on Teddy’s bed. Amongst a host of cozy plushies and soft blankets. And Ted barely cared that he was getting blood all over them. Dredging up the very last of their energy reserves to cleanse, stitch, and properly dress each of the more open wounds. Not saying a word, not having anything left in the tank to do so. Even when they finished all they did was faceplant next to the man. Though whether they were actually passed out or just being dramatic, who’s to say?

—

There was a strange haze over everything, though Emilio couldn’t say if it was because of the way his head had smacked against the concrete or the way his mind was still bouncing back and forth between past and present. He was only vaguely aware of the hellhound setting its sights on him, felt a strange sense of calm wash over him as it did. All right, he thought absently, this is it after all, then. A shame it’d happen in front of Teddy, who’d probably enjoy the whole thing just a little too much, but what could he do? He couldn’t fight the hellhound off in this dazed state, and running was an even less viable option than it had been before. If he had a few minutes to gather himself, to shake off the pain, it would have been different. He would have stood a chance. But the hellhound didn’t seem willing to give him a time out.

And then… something happened. It was hard to understand what. An inhuman arm shot out and grabbed the hellhound, and Emilio could have sworn it came from Teddy. Twisted and taloned and not something that matched the rest of their body at all. It occurred to Emilio that he must have hit his head harder than he thought, or must have been bleeding more than he’d realized. He was seeing things now, inventing some strange nonsensical scenario to go out to. It was funny, in a way. He’d been a lot closer to death than this, physically speaking, and his mind had never invented colorful limbs for anyone’s body before. Maybe the overwhelming scent of sulfur that had his stomach twisting and his head pounding had something to do with it. Or maybe he was just fucking losing it. Both options seemed fairly likely.

Somehow, though, that strange, mismatched limb shooting out from Teddy’s body made more sense than what happened next. Because Teddy, who had really only seemed to give a shit about rescuing the deadly animals in the alley before now, shoved by the bear and the hellhound to come to Emilio’s side. He scrambled back against the wall, swatting at them as they approached, worried that they were about to toss him to the (pretty literal) wolves in order to save the bear, but there was little he could do to stop them. And maybe that was a good thing, in the end. Because Teddy didn’t use Emilio as surly, angry bait. Instead, they dragged him out of the alley.

And Emilio didn’t understand why.

He could hear the echoes of the battle still waging behind them. The hellhound’s snarls, the baukbear’s cries. It was clear who was winning the fight, and it was clear who was losing it. Teddy was unnervingly silent as they ran, Emilio half fighting their grip as his addled mind continued to try to make sense of the situation. Was this a kidnapping? Was he being kidnapped? They definitely didn’t seem to be heading anywhere near Worm Row, even though Teddy had to know he lived there. They had sent that suspicious package for Perro, after all. Maybe this was Teddy’s attempt to prove Emilio’s jab about their kidnapping skills wrong, though it hardly seemed a fair comparison. Kidnapping somebody after a bear did all the hard work of incapacitating them for you was too easy.

It occurred to him that his thoughts might be taking somewhat of a hysterical turn now. Maybe there was a concussion involved. He’d never quite gotten the hang of concussions.

He blinked, and then he was in a bed. Not his bed, which wasn’t entirely rare these days — he spent plenty of nights in other people’s beds, it was fine — but not a bed he particularly wanted to be in, either. Assuming this was Teddy’s bed, which seemed like a fair assumption. It smelled like them, anyway, and the obscene number of pillows seemed like the kind of thing they’d go for. Beyond a few mumbled protests, Emilio was unnaturally docile as Teddy tended to his wounds, eyes darting around the room and heart beating a little too fast the way it always did when he wasn’t quite there. Dying in the alley had seemed fine when it was unavoidable, but he didn’t really want Teddy to kill him. They’d enjoy it too much, and it would be annoying. But he couldn’t quite muster up the motivation to shove them away, either.

It was only when the bed dipped next to him with Teddy’s dramatic faceplant that Emilio came back to himself enough to twist around and look at them, eyes narrowed. He lifted a hand — which seemed to weigh about a million pounds, somehow — and let it drop limply onto Teddy’s head. “¿Estás muerto? Are you dead?” Did he care if they were? He could get himself home easily enough after he shoved their corpse off him, couldn’t he?

He squinted at their form, lifting his hand again to poke experimentally at their shoulder. Their arm was… an arm, now. Proportional to the rest of their body, and containing exactly zero talons. A pretty standard arm, really. A couple of odd scars, but Emilio’s upbringing tended to see him finding unscarred skin much more foreign than the alternative, anyway. As his arm fell next to Teddy’s, his attention was drawn to it, and he lifted it again to inspect it. The duct tape he’d used to patch himself up had been removed, and in its place was… stitches? “What the hell did you do to me?”

—

If the demon had been slinging a soliloquy into those pillows, no one would the wiser. Even with a hunter’s hearing all the sounds that came forth were a mix of mumbles and groans. Teddy felt their arm be lifted, poked, prodded. Their living status was questioned, and so was their handiwork. But all they could manage was a little shaky thumbs up.

Why had they done that?

Why in the hell did they do that? Emilio could have made a perfect snack, and they and the bear could have gotten away. Instead, one of the sweeter (and more dangerous) animals that Ted had ever met was basically dog chow. All for what? An angry asshole who was probably just going to yell at them more. Tell them what a fuckup they’d been. How all of this was their fault and probably add something about how ‘He had it handled’ or some bullshit. They lacked the energy to reply in earnest, but used what little was left there to at least roll over. Not wanting to be so close to the man anymore.

Him and his awful cigarette, whiskey, and cheap bar soap scent. The stupid crinkle of his dumb leather jacket that did fuck-all to protect the wearer from the injuries he got. God the detective couldn’t have been much more of an idiot, could he? Teddy had done research into the creatures. Had figured out their personalities while they figured out where they needed to go. Some were a bit more amiable to it than others, but– fuck. This was a mess.

“Stitched.” Breathing out the word was like running another marathon. “No dying today.” Teddy hadn’t even noticed their glasses begin to slip from their face. “Yaaay.” As monotone as a car horn, but with a fraction of the effort and volume.

—

All right, so Teddy wasn’t dead. Emilio couldn’t figure out why he felt the barest hint of relief at the realization. Teddy was a fucking asshole. What did it matter if they got themself killed dragging Emilio out of a fate they probably should have just left him to? They were probably only going to be insufferable about it all anyway now that they’d kept him alive and snatched away any upper hand he might have had in the process. This was nothing more than something new for them to hold over his head, something they could add into the (false, he might add) claim that he’d stabbed them and intentionally pushed them off a building. They’d use this to make themself look better and to make Emilio look worse. He knew it.

But they weren’t bragging now. No, they didn’t seem to be in much better shape than Emilio himself, and he had to wonder how much they’d actually healed from that accidental fall off the roof of that warehouse. They probably shouldn’t have been in that alley to begin with, much less dragging a full grown man away from it. Had they reopened some unseen injury? Sustained a worse one darting between the baukbear and the hellhound to pull Emilio out?

The hunter forced himself to shake away unwanted the ebb of concern. It wasn’t like he cared if Teddy was hurt. Teddy was the reason they were in this mess to begin with, anyway. If they hadn’t kidnapped Joy, if they hadn’t locked her in a cage and done a godawful job at explaining why, Emilio wouldn’t have trusted her to ‘help’ him release the animals. She’d claimed it was an accident when she’d flipped the switch to open all the cages at once, but he figured that probably wasn’t true now. Pride prevented him from saying as much, of course. Let Teddy think he’d done it on purpose. He didn’t care if they thought he was an asshole. He thought the same of them.

“I could have patched myself up just fine,” he snapped, angry without knowing why. That was how it always went, wasn’t it? Emilio had all these things swirling around in his head, all these feelings he didn’t know what to do with. It was so much easier to let them all blend together into this targetless rage. This was better than what he’d felt in that alley, that strange mishmash of emotion that had nearly strangled him. Anger, at least, gave you something to do, even if it was nothing productive. “And I could have taken care of myself in that alley, too, if you hadn’t come around to distract me. You and your stupid pinche…” He trailed off as the glasses slipped from Teddy’s eyes, squinting. Definitely not human. Definitely not anything close.

—

With a grunt of effort the demon had rolled over again, this time to face and stare at Emilio. A burning heat creeping up their neck and flame broiling their ears like hellfire itself. A ringing tone quickly consumed any background sound they could hear. Anger so rarely bubbled up in them. It was pretty fucking hard to actually piss off Teddy Jones. Pretty much no one had managed to pull this side out of them in years. Since they were a moody teenager going through demon puberty. And yet. Still they could not get themself to wish the man any actual harm.

“You– Are the most INFURIATING person in the entire world!” Summoning a thrall of energy that Teddy didn’t even realize they still had, they steadied themself against the shaking and the sway. Had they been more in their right mind, they might have realized they were looking at Emilio literally without their rose tinted glasses. At least, mostly. The pair sat on the brim of their nose, not quite on, not quite off. Enough that a shimmery splatter of their truer self sat between their mouth and forehead. Blue tinted skin, Dark black eyes with bright teal pupils, and still that splotchy pink scar just above their eyebrow and kissing their cheek.

“Would it actually kill you to be happy? For once?” Teddy certainly was starting to think that might be the case. “To maybe be, I don’t know, a little bit relieved, or hell even grateful?” A righteous streak boiling over in them was sure to make their healing process even longer. “A-a-a little, Hey Teddy I know we have our differences but thank you for getting us out of there, maybe?” The normally aloof and scratchy voice had taken on a rushed and ragged tone. Still barely above the same volume as normal, but they didn’t need that now did they? Now with how each new breath drew them in closer and closer to the detective. Each surge of anger driving them onward. Almost butting heads. Close enough that they could feel the heat bouncing off the man’s face.

“Look at you. You would have died. A-and who would you be saving then?! Your fucking arm was stuck together with tape! ” It wasn’t until Teddy’s gaze flicked to the newly dressed wounds that they realized just how close they had gotten. An inch or two away. Maybe less. Breath bouncing back. Rage subsiding slowly as the flush washed away.

Quick as they could, they stepped back. Stumbling off the bed and clumsily landing on the couch instead. Nice thing about small living spaces is everything was usually right next to each other. Unfortunately now that meant either staying in close proximity to Captain Dunderhead or finding a way for one of them to be well enough to walk.

“Just. Whatever.” Teddy pinched the bridge of their nose. Closed their eyes and tried their best to pretend like he wasn’t there. Like none of it happened. “Lets just fucking drop it. Never talk about it ever again. Or maybe just never talk to each other ever again! I fucked up, you fucked up, we all fucking suck okay? The world is awful and nothing is ever even a little good and blah, blah, blah-di-blah.”

—

They were angry, that much was clear. They were angry, and it was a fucking relief, in its way. Anger was familiar the same way a warm blanket on a hot summer night might be. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was still hard to sleep without it. Teddy was sitting up, was yelling, was full of a fiery rage that was almost too bright to fucking look at, but it was so much better this way. At least anger was a thing Emilio knew what to do with. It was something he could rationalize, something he could hold in his hands, something that made sense. Emilio shoved himself into an upright position as best he could, his own rage warming his chest. This was better, he told himself. This was so much better.

“Considering you’re in the fucking world, I’m gonna have to give myself second place on this one, sweetheart,” he sneered, his entire body trembling with something that might have been fury and might have been exertion. Or, hell, maybe it was both. At least the adrenaline of the fight did away with the pain radiating through him. That was another benefit of rage. When everything was on fire, nothing really hurt. It was only when the flames died down that you really felt the extent of the burns they left behind.

Of course, rage wasn’t always a benefit. Without it, he would have been better able to process the changes to Teddy’s appearance. The skin, the eyes. It registered distantly, second place to the words being flung back and forth. Emilio wanted the last word with a desperate fury, as if it would fix anything at all. As if it would fix him, somehow. He let out a laugh, sharp and bitter, throwing his arms up in the air in a way that would have sent a wave of pain washing over him if that fire weren’t still burning. “Grateful? I didn’t ask you to do that. I didn’t ask for any of it. Why should I thank you for something I didn’t want?” He leaned in unconsciously, without thinking. There was barely an inch of space between them, both of them radiating the same furious heat.

“So what if I had? What would it fucking matter? ‘Who would I be saving then?’ Who the fuck am I saving now?” No one who mattered, not really. He saved a man’s daughter, and she was a monster. She was the thing that other people might need to be saved from, someday. She was… like Emilio. Only the worst people survived. The good ones always died screaming, cut down in the living room floor before they’d had a chance to live at all. He’d saved someone else’s daughter, and she hadn’t deserved it. He hadn’t saved his own, and she’d deserved so much more. Where was the justice in that? How was it fair that Emilio had lived, that Emilio kept living? How was it right?

The fight drained out of him all at once, his valiant attempts to sit up falling flat as he slumped over again, hitting the mattress almost in synchronization with Teddy hitting the couch. There was a weight on his chest that he didn’t know how to breathe around, but it had been there for years now. His lungs still managed to inflate. The worst people always survived. Emilio was proof of it.

He looked up, really looked at Teddy as the fire died down. Blueish skin. Black eyes. Pink scar. Definitely not human. Definitely not undead. The glasses seemed to control the change, somehow. A glamour, maybe, some kind of nymph after all. Emilio was too tired to try to puzzle it out, the world too heavy for it to feel like something that mattered right now. That would change later, of course, when he thought back on it with that old paranoia and Rhett’s warnings running through his head. If Teddy let him live after seeing this, it was definitely the kind of thing that would eat at him. He’d never been good at not having all the answers. But right now? Everything hurt a little too much for him to properly pursue them.

“I should go,” he said lowly, even if moving felt like a herculean task. “You look like shit. You don’t want me here. I don’t want me here. So I should go, and we can be done with this. I can be done with you, you can be done with me. I think we both want that now.”

—

“Not…not to me. Grateful to Cheeto. He’s the one who gave his life so I could get you out of there. He died– For our mistakes.”

Whatever fight was left in Teddy had vanished the moment they sank into the plush cushions of the couch. Falling deeper into numbness as a wave of lethargy overwhelmed them. Numb was good. Numb was workable. Their heart was the only thing that hadn’t gotten the memo. Still drumming out a cacophony, beating hard against the inside of their chest. Simmering down as each breath brought them deeper and deeper into the old loveseat, their legs too long and gangly to curl up even if they could bend properly right now.

They understood. They really did. Teddy ached with it. Feeling like they’d ruined something else, just by being there. Clearly, there was much more to the story than the demon realized. Some undercurrent of guilt in there that fed the rage inside the man.

“One failure isn’t the end of the world. Even if it feels like it is. Especially when it feels like it is.” If it was, the apocalypse would have come and gone a trillion times by now. Teddy sighed, brows stitched close together now. Eyes unfocused and hazily gazing off in a random direction. It wasn’t super clear if they were trying to impart this lesson onto the other man, or if they were trying to convince themself.“There’s still people to save. Still work to be done. You just gotta– Do the next right thing. Better tomorrow than you were today. I don’t know.” For all their bravado, Teddy never claimed to know everything. There was far, far, far too much out there in the world for them to ever begin to believe they were done learning. Leviathan predated time itself and it was still learning new things. Teds had barely walked the earth for three decades. Yeah, they still had a long way to go.

It wasn’t like one sentence was going to magically fix everything. It wasn’t like Teddy wanting Emilio to be rational was going to make him be. They didn’t know him. And while they were still insatiably curious; it was pretty fucking clear that he wanted nothing to do with them.

“Hah!” A croaked out laugh escaped with a wince. “You’re one to talk. If you go out there right now you’re gonna be spawn bait.” The night was still fairly young, and going from the docks all the way to Worm Row was a long and dark walk. Teddy had no idea if Emilio knew what spawn were (or the fact that he was extremely well versed in taking care of them) but if the man didn’t balk at seeing a baukbear, hellhound, and whatever the hell else was around that first night, it wasn’t like he was blind to the stranger side of things.

“I’ll– sleep in the dingy. Just–” Teddy cast their unwilling bunkmate a sidelong glance while they fished around with their foot, grabbing for one of the canes they kept hidden around. “--ugh just fucking don’t open up your stitches again.” With the added support of the steel stick, the demon hobbled toward the door. “Gonna be a mess cleaning up all that blood.”

—

Cheeto. It took a moment for Emilio to realize what Teddy meant, to remember that bag of bright orange junk and the words stretched over it. So they’d named the baukbear after the chips they fed it? More importantly, they’d named the baukbear? Every time he thought he’d wrangled some kind of understanding towards Teddy, the other suffocated it with a single sentence. (Or a pair of glasses gone slightly askew. He wondered if Teddy knew their mask had fallen.)

“Don’t think… Cheeto did any of that on purpose.” The ‘name’ felt strange on his tongue, and while he tried to disguise its unfamiliarity, the way his accent couldn’t wrap around it quite right proved just how strange it felt in his mouth. Unsurprisingly, Elena Cortez had never seen fit to give her children junk food. Luckily, moving to a new country meant that Emilio could attempt to pass most of his quirks off as the misunderstandings of an immigrant. Teddy didn’t strike him as the sort of ignorant person who’d assume Mexico was a different planet, but they probably wouldn’t question a few slips.

Leaning back against the too-soft mattress and the too-many pillows, Emilio let out another laugh. This one was less bitter, more broken. “One failure,” he repeated, shaking his head. “There have been many more than this.” His whole fucking life was just a series of them. He failed to be what his mother wanted him to be, failed to be what his wife needed him to be. He’d failed as a brother, as an uncle, as a father, as a friend. He’d failed so much more often than he’d succeeded and, for whatever reason, he was still the one who survived it. Everyone else died, and Emilio didn’t. His mother, his siblings, his wife, his child. The damn bear. His whole goddamn life had been a series of other people dying for his mistakes. At a certain point, there was more than anyone could make up for. And he’d passed that point a long, long time ago.

“I can take a few spawn,” he said, offended in spite of the fact that he knew Teddy was right. He could take a few spawn, but probably not like this. And he knew how these things always went, for him. If he left now, something would come at him, and someone else would try to help. They’d pay the price for it, and Emilio would survive. And, Christ, he couldn’t take that tonight. He really couldn’t.

So… he’d have to sit in this shitty, too-soft bed until morning. Relenting, he laid back and threw the arm that wasn’t stitched like a damn pillow across his face, grumbling quietly to himself in Spanish. “Cold water and el peróxido de hidrógeno,” he muttered, just loud enough for Teddy to hear. “I’ll be gone in the morning.”

#wickedswriting #mortemoppetere #eldritchaccident

10 notes · View notes

lauriescage · 3 months

Text

That Kind of Night || Self-Writing

Location: Grit Pit

Content warning: References to violence

“Hedge hound versus hellhound?” he got asked as he was flipping through his paperwork.

Laurie didn’t even look up. “Come on, Jack. Would anyone even bet on the hedge hound in that?” he asked. “No way the hedge hound can strangle fast enough to avoid being burned?”

“Easy night?” Jack asked, leaning against the wall in Laurie’s resource room as things upstairs must have wrapped up.

“Go fuck yourself,” Laurie responded without any heat. “Explain to me why that light was close enough to sunshine to actually kill my baukbear?”

“Your baukbear?” Jack repeated instead of answering the question.

Jack shrugged. “Not my prize fighter any more than your baukbear. Neither of us gets paid enough for those claims.”

Laurie snorted and raised the bucket in a sort of toast. “All right, fine. I’ll give you that.”

#wr writing #self-writing

0 notes

eldritchaccident · 1 year

Text

Timing: a few weeks back Location: The Party Thrifter Feat: @amonstrousdream & @eldritchaccident Warnings: None! Summary: Now that's what I call a clothing malfunction!

Teddy had been in the dressing room for a while.

Usually, Leila wouldn’t notice. Teddy typically had anywhere from a small mountain to a whole dragon’s hoard hanging from the hooks on the walls or draped across the chairs she had set out in each of the curtained off rooms. She prided herself on the changing areas of The Party Thrifter and how they were the right amount of classy and fantastical, spooky and serious. But usually, there was a lot of chatter coming from Teddy as they changed. Even when she had other customers, she’d grown used to Teddy’s commentary on the things they liked.

Today, however, there was silence. And that alone was disturbing.

Leila paced a little, uncertain as to whether or not she should say something. If everything was fine, then perhaps Teddy would be annoyed that she seemed so concerned. But it was Teddy. She had grown rather fond of them, going so far as to consider the patron a friend. A good friend at that. Leila didn’t have an awful lot of those, and so the ones she had were treated with extra care.

She quietly rounded the corner that led to the dressing rooms and lightly rapped against the wall. “Teddy? Hon, you doin’ okay? Do you need a hand with anything?”

“Yeah! No! It’s just– Yeah no, I’m– I’m fine-” If the half spun phrases and rising tone with which their voice failed to finish them in weren’t enough of an indicator– No. Teddy Jones was in fact, not fine. They stood amidst the disarray. Frantic eyes pouring over every bit of clothing they had touched, and some they hadn’t yet. Careful to pick up everything and shake it out looking for– “I just– I can’t find my glasses?” A normal enough statement. Though if anyone guessed they wore those round rose colored shades for help with sight they would probably be the first. Especially when they appeared not to need them. Half the time running around without the glasses entirely, but today… Well, today they were important.

Still reeling from all the mess with the baukbear, hellhound, and the royal asshole. That and falling off a roof and being sliced like deli meat. Even if it “was” “unintentional” it still sucked. Still left them a lot more tired and groggy than they’d like to be. Still had Teddy leaning on the glasses like a crutch. You see, they weren’t just charming pieces of fashion that the demon liked to wear. When they weren't wearing them, (nor wearing their human disguise) the demon looked well… Like a demon.

Not the grandiose and resplendent form Leviathan took on when the pair went out to sea. Not even the similar (but smaller) shape Ted adopted to swim alongside. This was what they called their ‘base’ state. The one they returned to, that took no effort to don. It’d changed over the years. Gone from blank slate canadian child to adult world traveler, who just happened to be… different than the world they traveled.

Blue tinted skin, rough patches of armor-like scale plating wherever they’d been grievously injured before. (Including a brand new spot of them along their stomach where Emilio’s blade had “accidentally” added to the collection) Their eyes were dark, blacker than ink, with bright glowing teal pupils at their center. Fangs, the start of some gnarly horns, claws. Enough to make every nun in the next nine miles blush. (Or attempt murder, again, who knows?) And certainly enough to drive away one of the few people Teddy liked to be around more than just in passing.

“No, yeah. Leila, no worries. Not a thing. No wrong here!” Maybe one of the biggest tip offs that something was wrong was the surprising lack of nicknames. They weren’t making much sense, sure, but neither did the fact that the glasses were gone. People would have noticed something if they hadn’t come in with them. And by all accounts, they were nowhere amongst the (admittedly larger than normal) piles of old clothes inside the changing room.

Even if Leila hadn’t heard the rising tension in Teddy’s voice, even if she had believed for a moment that her friend who she could hear rummaging about the dressing room for their glasses was ‘just fine’, there was one thing that would always tip her off. Since the mare had met and befriended one Teddy Jones, they had used her full first name exactly once. Maybe twice if she thought about it too long. They almost always called her by some nickname, varying depending on their mood and the conversation at hand. At the sound of her name- her real name, the one she had been given over two centuries ago- her stomach dropped.

“Do you want me to come in and help you look?” Maybe their glasses got tangled up in some fabric and were refusing to come out. It was entirely possible! If Leila had to count the number of times where she had lost something to a sleeve or a pocket or some scrap of fabric that was just determined to conceal whatever it was she needed from her, she would very quickly lose count. “Or did you take them off before you went in and put them somewhere- I don’t remember seeing you without them, but still…” She did a little once-over in the hall outside the dressing room, even going so far as to look to see if maybe the curtain that closed off the room might have gobbled up the glasses.

Wherever the glasses were, they couldn’t have gone too far. She heard another customer clear their throat out by the counter. “I’ll be there in just a minute!” The mare shouted in as cheery a tune as she could manage.

“No!” They responded, far too quickly. “N-no I’m good. Like I said. Everything is under control.They have to be in here–” Teddy bumped against one of the sturdier walls of the changing room in an attempt to stay away from the curtain. The last thing they needed was to accidentally swing the cloth open, and ruin another friendship. Was it even fair to call it a friendship? Maybe Teddy was just another customer, another face that came in and probably spent too much money but– Ahh now they were just coming up with excuses. Plans for the inevitable fall. When Leila found out and it was too much and they were politely asked to never come by again.

No they’d– They’d figure this out. Just had to shift back to normal. Just had to look human enough to pass inspection. Teddy’s hands trembled as they gripped tightly to the stool in the center of the changing room. Picturing what they were supposed to look like in their mind. Sweat ran rivulets down their back like a rising fever was overtaking them. Each shuddered breath probably sounded more like they were having a heart attack than looking for a lost accessory. Patches of their skin began to fade and smooth out into a normal tan, and normal texture. Good. Maybe they had the energy to do this. The big mirror in front of them though, that told a different story.

“You go take care of the customer–” it was strained, through teeth that couldn’t decide between straight and sharpened. Coming off a tongue that was just as indecisive. Oscillating between the human-ish pink-y red and a deep purple with a glowing teal vein running down the center. Teddy wrapped their arms around their stomach, as if the pressure would force the scales back into their skin. As if the spikes and bioluminescent bits just needed a bit of a push to retreat. As if they had any control over the state of their body after having shifted back to human far too soon after almost dying again.

“It’s okay Leila. I’m fine hun. Go–” A gurgling retch stopped them mid sentence, their rib had popped from its resting place. Oh no. That wasn’t good. Suddenly the panic Teddy felt shifted immediately from a vague worry about losing a friend, to a major fucking terror about accidentally crushing Lei and her store if their body decided it was safer and better to go back to being a full on kaiju right then and there. As if that wouldn’t be the worst possible thing it could do. As if that wouldn’t mean they’d have to move again. Uproot everything, the life they’d begun to build, the business their dad had going… if they were caught, outed for what they really were… even a town like Wicked’s Rest wouldn’t harbor them. No, the only choice was to get this under control.

The quick, wavering response did the opposite of convincing Leila that Teddy was alright. She felt a pit in her stomach growing larger and larger as she listened to them from the other side of the velvet curtain. It didn’t sound like looking for glasses in there, it sounded as if they were about to collapse to the ground and have a panic attack. And that worried her. Teddy was her friend- or she liked to think that they were. People were funny about that word. It got used so flippantly, as if to be a friend had grown to mean ‘someone you know generally’. Meanwhile, Leila adopted friend after friend and meant it as a person she cared for. For all she knew, Teddy might have only seen her as someone they tolerated for the sake of good discounts. But she would argue that the donuts and conversations leaned more in the friendship category.

And then there was a retch. Oh, god, were they feeling sick? Was that the problem? She almost pulled back the curtain immediately to help Teddy get to the bathroom or at least to get them some water. But they had been so insistent that she stay out… She felt torn. Leila scurried off as quick as she could in order to find a bucket of some sort in the back room and a bottle of water, dashing past the counter as she went. “Sorry- I’ve got a customer who isn’t feeling very-” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something very very familiar. A pair of glasses. A pair of very distinctive glasses that she had seen a number of times on the bridge of Teddy’s nose, covering up their eyes. Aha… “- well… I’ll be with you in a moment.”

She made a dash back to the dressing rooms and quickly slid the bucket and water bottle under the crimson fabric. “Ted, honey? I found your glasses. I think you might’ve dropped them and someone else scooped them up- I’m gonna go get them for you, okay? You take a breath and I’ll get them back to you. The water is cold, try resting the bottle on the back of your neck if you aren’t feeling very well…” God, Leila swore she sounded like a mother cooing at her child. “I promise it’s going to be okay.”

“You are a goddamn lifesaver. A fuckin’ saint, Sweets.” Just knowing the glasses were found was enough, it seemed. Relief flooded through Teddy like a tidal wave. Far more destructive than comfort aught to be. It was like all their muscles released at once, and their whole frame just collapsed, sliding against the mirror and down to the floor. She found them. Leila found the glasses and Teddy didn’t have to force a shift back to human.

Tears, for the love of all things unholy, fucking tears streamed down Teddy’s cheeks. Not because they were sad, but— maybe they were still a bit overwhelmed. By the potential. By the chaos they almost just unleashed on all of this and just because–

Because Teddy didn’t want to lose Leila as a friend. Funny how something as simple as the prospect of actually staying in one place for a while actually made you care about such things. How the weight and magnitude of them multiplied when you had roots. How relationships hung from the branches of your life like fruit, ripening, and becoming sweeter and sweeter as they grew. They didn’t know how to sit with that. Not exactly. It was a foreign sensation that was starting to become a habit.

Caring about people past their first interaction. Past the point where they usually grew bored with the demon or life split them apart despite anything that lingered. Teddy hadn’t even realized how many walls they’d constructed over the years. Telling themself it was okay, that all they’d ever need was their family. The real one, their real father. Leviathan was the one who was there. Leviathan was the one who cared. And that should be enough, it should always have been enough.

The water bottle was welcome. The bucket seemed… silly. At least to Teddy. Lei must have thought he was going to hurl, but that’s fair considering there was no way she’d have been prepared for the only use of that bucket to be cleaning up the viscera that was always left after a big… monstery moment. Making a demon a new body wasn’t exactly a tidy affair.

The customer was growing rather impatient. The counter girl had walked past him exactly three times before disappearing towards the dressing rooms, and only one of those times had she even deemed them worthy of acknowledgement. It was ridiculous. All he wanted was to purchase the glasses and leave. Honestly, it was as if she didn’t even want his money. He would have to leave a bad review… or speak to the manager.

He cleared his throat once more, more loudly than the last. “Excuse me-”

Even if Teddy wasn’t having what seemed like a panic attack in the dressing room, even if the man at the counter wasn’t holding Teddy’s glasses in his hand as if he already owned them, Leila could not stand when customers were rude. It was the one thing she hadn’t quite considered when she opened the store. People could be entitled and selfish and at two hundred twenty five years old, the mare did not have time for entitled, selfish, rude people.

“Yes, sir, I heard you the first time.” Her usual chipper tone had been cut to something far blunter. “But I have another customer-” Friend really, but people like that didn’t usually care if it was your friend or your family or a stranger who needed help. “-who is currently having an emergency in my dressing room. Because they cannot find their glasses. These glasses.” Leila went to pick the glasses up off the counter when the man’s hand shot out and snagged Teddy’s glasses back up.

“I found these on the rack.” He sneered. God, he was really going to be a pain wasn’t he. Leila tried to make herself seem taller and more foreboding. “No. No you didn’t. Because those are my friend Teddy’s. Teddy comes in here all the time, did you know? So I would know those glasses anywhere.” Her words grew slower, as if she were explaining to a child- no… as if she were lulling him to sleep.. All the while she reached out and took the man’s hand, unwinding his now-tired fingers from around the glasses. “And- oh, sir, you’re not looking to good yourself… you look so tired.” She watched the man’s eyelids flutter, his mind starting to whirl about with the smell of dreams. But she wasn’t there to feed. Not then. “You should go.” She finally clipped, snatching the glasses back to her chest.

The man yawned, mumbled something to himself that slowly grew unintelligible, grumbled about a review, and stumbled towards the door.

Things were settling. Slowly but surely, everything that had riled up within the demon began to put itself back in place. Sharper nails retreated, fangs meant for ripping and tearing flattened until they were the regular amount of pointy. Everything back to basic. Something was going on out in the main room of the thrift shop, and now Teddy had the presence of mind to listen.

The way Leila twisted the words, carefully crafting them as if they were a spell brought a smile to Ted’s face. Mare. For sure. Teddy wouldn’t ever call her on it, of course. It’d be pretty fucking hypocritical to out someone like that. What with the idea of being known having nearly destroyed this little changing room and maybe the store with it. That… suddenly had the demon feeling a big sheepish. A rare emotion they really didn’t know what they were supposed to do with. For now, they supposed, it would have to be enough to thank Leila. Get her an even bigger box of donuts or maybe even make her something special.

She was a special treat after all. And Teddy couldn’t be happier to know her and be able to call her their friend.

#wickedswriting #amonstrousdream #eldritchaccident

7 notes · View notes

mortemoppetere · 1 year

Text

TIMING: april 14th (vida's birthday) LOCATION: axis investigations PARTIES: @madredelavida & @mortemoppetere SUMMARY: after leaving her birthday party early, vida goes to find the one person who didn't attend. she also finds his liquor cabinet. CONTENT WARNINGS: alcoholism, sibling death (mentioned), parental death (mentioned), suicide ideation

He was tired. The bone-deep kind of tired, the kind that made every inch of you ache. After his misadventure with Teddy in the early hours of the morning, with the stupid chain of events that left him furiously stewing in their bed, all Emilio really wanted was to go home and drink everything in his goddamn cabinet until he forgot about the qutrub and the hellhound and the baukbear and all of it.

But maybe life had other ideas.

The door was slightly ajar. He noticed it right away. It did that sometimes, if the last person who’d entered didn’t know the ‘trick’ to it. The damn thing didn’t sit on its hinges quite right, always creaked open after you’d shut it unless you lifted it as you pulled it shut and slammed it just a little. When Emilio was the one entering and exiting, it was never a problem. Javier had learned the trick easy enough, too. But for most people? The door would remain slightly open no matter how many times they shut it.

Just like it was now. Which meant there was someone in his apartment, someone who wasn’t Javi. Immediately, Emilio tensed. He approached the door, palming a knife in one hand. No shiver up his spine to indicate that whoever was inside was undead, but that only served as the slightest comfort. Clenching his jaw, he slammed the door open…

…and dropped the knife, closing his eyes for a moment at what he saw. Christ. He almost wished it was something trying to kill him.

“Why are you in my apartment, Vida?”

“You didn’t wish me a happy birthday.” She said simply, raising the half empty bottle in his direction. Vida wasn’t quite slurring her words yet, but it was clear that she was going down that direction. “You’ve never forgotten it. Even when I was in Austin and this year, I’m here and I’m 35 and you can’t seem to remember shit,” she scoffed, blinking one too many times so that she had to shake her head to clear her vision.

“I should be asking you why you aren’t in my apartment. You’re a goddamn PI. You’ve found me by now. You just won’t come see me and you’ll barely talk to me.” Vida wasn’t one to jump like this. Usually she stewed in her anger, taking her time to plan her next move. However, not this time. Emotions took over and all she could do was follow them straight to the lion’s den.

Vida stayed cross legged on the low sofa, hugging the bottle to her chest. “Y’know this particular drink of choice gets you…well maybe not you. But me. Of course it gets me.”

She’d left her birthday for this. Something had been missing. Someone had been missing. Here he stood. Right in front of her, ready to send her away. “I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna tell me to leave. You’re gonna tell me you’re not worth it, but today I don’t feel like listening because since when have I given up in you?”

“I didn’t forget it.” Of course he hadn’t. Her birthday was etched into some inescapable corner of his brain with all the others; with Rosa’s, with Jaime’s, with Edgar’s, with Julaiana’s and Flora’s. With Victor’s, even if Victor had been gone longer than he’d been alive now. There was a graveyard in his mind, dates carved in granite crowding it to the point that he could hardly breathe around all the tombstones. But Vida wasn’t buried like the rest of them — she was here, was sitting on his couch and drinking his whiskey and looking furious with him because that was all they had between them these days. Anger and grief and the ghost of something.

He moved the rest of the way into the apartment, the door hanging open behind him. His injured arm curled up close to his chest, he made his way into the kitchen and yanked open one of the cabinets. Of course she’d grabbed the only unopened bottle of whiskey he had; the rest were half empty.

Pulling one down anyway, he winced as he yanked it open, the action pulling at the stitches Teddy had put in his arm. He was almost grateful for the asshole now; this would be a harder conversation to have if he were still bleeding. “I’ll barely talk to you because I’ve said what I needed to say,” he replied, facing away from her. If he looked at her, he knew it would all come out. He’d never been good at keeping things from Vida.

He brought the bottle to his lips, gulping down a few swigs and pretending it did anything to numb that feeling in his chest. “If you know what I’m going to say, why are you here? You have friends, Vi. People in this stupid town who are smart enough to want to hang around you. So why aren’t you with them? Why are you chasing ghosts? Getting drunk on my couch, waiting for me to come home… That’s not you. You’re acting like…” He trailed off, the words sticking in his throat. You’re acting like me. And she was better than that. Vida had always been so much better than Emilio, since the very fucking beginning. It was why he liked her so much.

“Sure,” she replied, the single world dripping with sarcasm. Vida was never cruel, never disrespectful. She was always polite as could be. Always full of love and grace, but those who knew how to work her, could. Emilio was doing it. He was driving her to the brink of madness because she couldn’t fix the situation and that filled her with indescribable disappointment and sadness.

He was pushing her away and that left her scathed. Where was her friend? Where was her goddamn brother? She was staring at him, but he was so far gone that she was ever so slightly worried that if she kept chasing, she’d get lost herself.

Why are you here?

Why was she? She owed it to herself. She owed it to everyone in that town that had last screamed into the void of nothingness for their last action of life. She owed it to her kids, to his, to his wife.

“Like what? What am I acting like? Why am I chasing ghosts? Why am I chasing you?” Vida stood up and it felt like everything hit her all at once: the alcohol, the sadness, the pain. Everything. She stumbled over to him and snatched the bottle away so that she held two in her hands. “Because I promised you I would. I promised you I would always be there. I promised him. I promised them.” She didn’t have to say names for him to know she was talking about Gabriel, Flora, and Juliana. She’d loved them too. She was broken too. “I have never broken a promise. You know that.”

The wails came, the whiskey spilled, and he still couldn’t look at her.

One of the first things he’d learned as a hunter was that there were people you couldn’t save. He still remembered the first day he’d learned it as clearly as if it had only just happened, even if he’d been painfully young at the time. His uncle barging into his mother’s house, another hunter’s arm slung over his shoulder. He’d placed the hunter down on top of a dinner table that Emilio hadn’t yet been tall enough to see over without help, bleeding and moaning, and he’d told Emilio to sit with him. Stay here, he’d said, while I go get someone. And Emilio had. He’d sat at that table, he’d held that clammy hand, he’d waited for Lucio to come back with someone who could fix things. Instead, he’d returned with a priest. Last rites over a bleeding man, with no attempt made to save him because you couldn’t, sometimes.

There were people you couldn’t save, and Emilio was one of them. That, too, was a lesson he’d learned early. And he didn’t understand why Vida couldn’t see it, didn’t know why she couldn’t accept it. Hunters were only ever born to die, and Emilio had already lived past his expiration date. What was the point of him now? Even if there was something left to save, it wouldn’t be a thing worth saving. Didn’t she know that? He’d failed so many people already, watched people who should have outlived him die choking on their own blood. He was just as useless now as he had been at that table, with that clammy hand in his. She was so much better off without him. She had to know that.

Or maybe it was up to him to convince her. He heaved an irritated sigh as she stood, yanking the bottle from his hand. His bruised ribs ached, but so did everything. He wasn’t even sure, at this point, how much of the ache he was feeling was down to his injuries and how much of it was down to this. He’d never understood a pain that came from a place of emotion rather than physical injury; he didn’t think he ever would.

She spoke of promises made to ghosts, and he rolled his eyes in a way that might have been cruel if everything around it didn’t feel so heavy. “They’re gone, Vi.” As if she could forget that. As if either of them could. “And so am I. You’re not breaking any promises by letting the dead stay buried.”

“You aren’t dead.” She insisted, waving the bottles around. The liquor spilled on the floor as she flailed, but she couldn’ seem to remember where to put them or what to do next. “A part of you is. A part of me is dead too. I won’t lie. I couldn’t lie to you…I promised when I met you that we’d be friends and I would never lie to you and what you’re doing…how you’re leaving me and losing me…you’re hurting me Milio.”

Vida stumbled forward, scaring herself into dropping a bottle and causing it to shatter at her bare feet. She stepped back, but the liquid was everywhere as was glass. Everything was all over the place.

“Mierda!” She yelled, angry tears streaming down her face as she crouched down and set the second bottle down, sifting through the glass to pick out the bigger chunks to set in a pile in an attempt to clean up. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m just…” she sat back on the floor, away from the glass, her wet hands cradling her head. “You’re part of what I have left and I just thought…you’d care enough to want me back around because you lived.”

Vida was hurting much more than she let on to most people. It haunted her every day. She was confused, twisted, and upset. Everything was a mess inside the plethora of thoughts in her mind. Silly her for thinking he’d ever come around, she guessed.

You aren’t dead, she insisted, and Emilio wanted to argue because wasn’t he? It wasn’t just a part of him that had died in that living room with blood on the floor, wasn’t just a part of him that Rhett had gone back to bury. It was everything good about him. His heart was somewhere in the ground in Etla, decaying and rotting into dust, and how could he be alive without it? How could anyone look at this husk that he was and mistake him for anything living?

He was hurting her, she said, and he knew that. He knew that, because it was all he’d ever done, all he knew how to do. He was hurting her the same way he’d hurt Juliana, the same way he’d hurt Flora, the same way he’d hurt his mother and his siblings and his nephew. Emilio was good for nothing but pain. Feeling it, causing it, becoming it. It was the only thing left of him now.

The bottle fell to the ground, sending glass and whiskey in every which direction, and he flinched at the sound. She shouted, and he was silent. It felt like a funhouse mirror version of childhood, where Emilio had often been the one screaming curses that Vida hadn’t yet learned. How had those kid ended up here? How was this where they were now?

Swallowing, he knelt down in the floor beside her, ignoring the pain that flared up in his leg, his arm, his ribs. He was no longer physically held together by duct tape — Teddy had seen to that, even if Emilio hadn’t asked them to — but emotionally speaking? Tape would be kinder than whatever fragile force was working overtime to keep him in one piece. “Yo me encargo,” he murmured, shooing her hands away as he gathered up the glass. His hands trembled. They didn’t used to.

He didn’t look at her as he picked up the pieces, refused to lift his head and catch her eye. If he did that, he knew, Vida would see him. She always had, no matter how well he thought he was hiding. No one in this town believed that he was thriving, he knew that. But Vida was the only one who could tell, just by looking at him, just how much he was really struggling.

“I didn’t,” he said hoarsely, still not looking at her. “I didn’t live. I know it… I know my heart beats. I know there’s blood in my veins, I know I’m breathing. But I didn’t live. I don’t know how else to tell you this. What I do, what I am, it’s not living. And I don’t — Vida, I don’t want it to be. I care about you. I love you. It’s why I don’t want you here. It’s why you shouldn’t be around me. I’m going to take out everyone who’s to blame for what happened in Mexico, Vi. Everyone. And me, too. That’s why I don’t want you near me. I came here to die, and you’ve lost enough, but I can’t — I can’t change it. What I want, what I need. It’s going to happen. The ending is already written down. So just… Pretend you’ve already read it. Mourn me now, and you won’t have to do it later.”

I love you.

She loved him too. She loved all of him. Every flaw, every sin, everything good too…she loved each part of him. In every verse she loved him, she knew that. That toothy grin she’d given him at age twelve had been selective. Not everyone got into Vida’s head, but god, she’d picked a pair when she let Gabriel and Emilio in.

“You know that isn’t gonna happen.” Vida sniffled, taking a break from her sobs to wipe her cheeks, rubbing her hands on her thighs to rid the palms of their wetness. “You know for as long as you are physically here, I won’t let go.”

If she was one thing it was stubborn. God, she’d proven that when she’d been told to stay away from hunters and a year later she had a daughter with one. She was good at listening, as long as it was what she wanted. Vida had promised till death do us part to not only Gabriel, but she lived by those words with all who she loved. A secret vow with her loved ones. The vow.

Quietly, she removed the glass from his hands, knelt by him, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, her head resting against his. “I have mourned enough. I am not adding you to my list this time. Not yet. Not while there’s still time. I love you too, te amo Milio. You are not the only one looking for those responsible. I’m not letting you at it alone. As long as you’re here, however you want to believe you are, I will be too. You aren’t changing my mind.”

Vida had never pictured their reunion like this. Shit, she hadn’t pictured their reunion at all. But apparently the dead didn’t stay dead. Not here. And that was okay, because it was him. That was more than okay.

“I’m asking you to,” he said quietly, afraid to speak too loud, afraid his voice would break. “I’m begging you, Vi.” He couldn’t go back to being a man with something to lose. Because if history had taught him anything at all, it was that he’d keep on losing as long as that remained the case. All his life, for as long as he could remember, Emilio had never once been given anything to keep. Why would Vida be any different?

She shifted towards him and the glass was gone from his hands, her arms were around his shoulders. The ache wasn’t just a physical one, and maybe it never had been. There was a time where this would have helped him. There was a time where talking to Vida when he felt down would at least leave him feeling less alone, less anguished. He thought the time might have passed now. Her arms were around him, and he still felt like he was drowning. It didn’t feel like a liferaft anymore; it felt like another person he was dragging down with him. And that wasn’t what he wanted. That had never been what he wanted.

He didn’t push her away because, as much as he might have pretended to be, Emilio wasn’t cruel. But he was stiff in her embrace, stiller than he should have been. He didn’t know how to do this anymore. How to be her brother, how to be her friend. How to be anyone at all that someone still loved.

“Please,” he said again. “Please, I’m sorry. I don’t — I want to be alone. I have to be.” He deserved it, certainly, but it hurt so much less. Loneliness hadn’t bothered him in years now. Alone was comfortable. It was moments like this that left him floundering and uncertain. “Do it for you, or for your kids, or for me. Do it for whoever you do it for. But I’m asking you to let me go.”

The tiny shards of glass poked Vida’s knees and all she could do was hold onto him even tighter. “I am doing this for you. I’m doing this for my girls. I’m doing this for all of them. They wouldn’t want you alone, I don’t want you alone. And yes I’m going to be selfish and not listen to you this time because for my sake and for my sanity I’m not losing you again so any ideas of being alone se pueden ir al diablo.”

Vida let her hands gently slide down his shoulders and trail into one of them finding his hand, the other one finding his chin so that he would finally look at her. Even if he looked away again. Even if he ran again. She’d try, good god, she’d try. “I’m not good at listening when I don’t want to and frankly I don’t want to at the moment.”

“I am here. Even if you hate that I am. I am here. I will never let you go, I promise. I promise with all that I am. We’re going to have to find some sort of compromise because I am not leaving your side again.”

They wouldn’t want you to be alone. It hurt, hearing her say it. It hurt because thinking of the people he’d lost always hurt, but it also hurt because he wasn’t sure it was true. He thought of Juliana, of how angry she’d been with him in the end. He thought of her body in the living room floor, of how her eyes could be both devoid of life and full of rage at the same time, somehow. He thought of his mother, who had always counted him among her least favorite children, who had so often scolded him for his softness, who had tried so hard to beat it out of him any way she could. He thought of his siblings, who had deserved to live so much more than he had, who were better hunters and better people. If they could see him now, would they really say he deserved more than this? Would they really believe that he’d earned the right to company? Or would they be angry that it was him who’d survived the onslaught, that the only person left carrying their name was one who’d never really deserved it in the first place?

Maybe it was a projection of his own guilt, but Emilio couldn’t imagine any of them insisting that he deserved anything better than what he had now. He couldn’t picture a single one of them genuinely believing that he ought to have more than he did, that anyone should love him. If anything, they’d probably think he deserved less. The apartment he lived in was shit, the few friends he’d made since moving to town knew next to nothing about him that was real, the dog he’d picked up was so angry it forgot how to eat sometimes, and it was still so much more than he deserved. If everyone got what was coming to them in life, Emilio would have been rotting in a ditch years ago. He knew that.

But somehow, Vida didn’t. Vida still didn’t, even after all this time. She was here, and she was holding him, and it hurt. Her touch hurt. Like his nerve endings were on fire and her embrace was gasoline building it up, like every inch of his skin was an open wound and she was dousing him in alcohol. When you spent enough time getting your ass kicked, even the kindest touch left you searching for a bruise.

Her hand found his chin, tilted it up to make him look at her, and he flinched without meaning to. It was hard, seeing her. It had been easier with Rhett, just after the massacre, because Rhett was built for this. He was a hunter, too, understood what Emilio needed even if he hadn’t been able to bring himself to stick around and let him have it. But Vida? Vida was different. Vida was human. She wasn’t supposed to go through this shit. His mother always scolded him for this friendship, always told him that he was setting them both up for a tragedy. Hunters protect humans, she’d said, but we shouldn’t mingle with them like this. It’ll ruin you. And maybe it had. Maybe he was already ruined beyond repair.

He ducked his head to get out of her grip, scooting away from her on the floor and getting to his feet. His bad knee ached more than it had in months now, making it hard just to stand, and he practically dragged the leg behind him as he carried the glass he’d gathered in his hands to the garbage can. There were little nicks in his hands from where he’d gripped it, but he couldn’t feel them even if the blood was there. “I want you to go,” he said hoarsely. “I love you, and I want you to go. Vida, I can’t — You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it feels like, for me. I know you lost things, too. I know that. I’m not trying to — to discount that. You lost things. You lost so much. But you lost those things because of me. Because of my family, because we were friends. And there’s — There’s more to it, too. But I can’t — I don’t want to talk about that. I just want you to leave. Please. If you love me, please. Love me enough to go.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks again and she didn’t wipe them. Here he was, her best friend, and he was pleading with her to go. It hurt more than she could admit. But she would give him what he wanted. It was the least she could do for him. He was suffering and she wanted to stop the pain, but how could she if he couldn’t even look at her? He couldn’t face her. He wasn’t ready to, and how was she? She wanted him back and on her terms. It took her really looking at him to realize that. She was being selfish, Vida was, and she needed to admit that to herself.

“Okay.” She said quietly, rising from her place on the floor. She brushed off her knees and looked at him one more time. “If that’s what you really want.” Vida croaked, her voice quivering once more. It sucked, giving him what he wanted. There was a day when she had had all of him, she had known every bit of him to his core and that had been it. Today there was nothing. He couldn’t even lay eyes on her for more than a couple seconds. She scared him, haunted him, and she felt so much self loathing. It was her birthday, but all she wanted was for this godforsaken night to be over.

“I love you too,” The woman made her way over to him one more time, stood on her toes, and planted a firm kiss on his temple. “Take care, I’m never far.” Vida could feel the anger and pain building up in her throat, tears spilling once again. She felt embarrassed, ashamed that she thought could be hope for someone so lost in grief. But that’s what she was in her own way. Buried and ashamed in grief. That’s all she was and would be for the time being.

#madredelavida #vida: not how you hoped #wickedswriting #alcoholism tw #parental death tw #sibling death tw #suicide ideation tw #s1 writing #season 1

6 notes · View notes