#oh god that’d be horrifying
Text
OKAY STRAIGHT UP THIS FEELS TOO SOON, WATCHING TWO IN A DAY FEELS LIKE SO MUCH WITH THIS BUT HEY LETS KEEP ON SCHEDULE AND MAKE UP FOR MISSING LAST WEEK TO MYSELF
TIME FOR LMK SES 4 EP 7
First of all last ep was whack still trying to analyze what the heck was going on with Mk being crafted from Monkey Kings stone or something, like did I MENTION THE WONDERING IF SOMEONE MADE HIM AS A BACKUP IN CASE SWK GOES WHACK AGAIN? BECAUSE?? HECK MAN THAT’D BE CRAZY I’M JUST SITTING HERE LETS GO
okay iNHALES
here we go
THE DUNNNNNNNNNNNNN THAT HAPPENS IMMEDEATELYGBDFMSDF
PITIFUL CREATURES
OKAY
HELLO SMILEY INK MK HOWS IT BOPPIN
WHATS THE MATTER GUY
HELPGNSDFKMAOIEFM
“y… yeah actually that’s exactly what i want! :D “
;-;
well heck then ig
no more monster of the week adventures ;-;
“You’re not my friend, YOU’RE NOT ME”
HECK I’M HAVING A MOMENT OVER THIS IG
OH THE STAFF YESSSS
BEST FRIEND? HELP???GHL;SDFSD
OH THIS IS FUN
WHERE YOU GOING GUY?
UP ALL INSIDE OF MY HEAD
HORRIFYING THIS IS GREAT
I’M LOVING THIS
THIS IS AWESOME ACTUALLY SO SORRY YOU’RE GOING THROUGH THIS MK BUT THIS IS GREAT
I’M JUST MK, NOODLE DILIVERY GUY, WITH THE- POWERS FO THE MONKEY NO BIGGIE GBSDLFJASDFJ
OKAY INK MK BEATING UP REGULAR MK WOW THAT WAS A PUNCH
DANG
WILDIN
okay like at this point iv’e stopped having thoughts and am Just kinda watching heck HGSALK;JFASDF
AH YES BACK TO THE CREW
WHATS UP MY BELOVEDS
MEI’S ON A MISSION HERE HGSLDKFJSDF
I miss Ao lei ;-;
TANGEY GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME
GRAVE DIGGING
HELP
MA’AM
TANG?????
BUDDY????
OH TANG BUDDY
AW
SANDY
HECK
THIS IS GOOD
SANDY IS SUCH A MISSING PUZZLE PIECE CALIMMING EVERYBOYD DOWN
AIR
MONKEY KING
MISS YOU
ma’am i love yo you’re great
MONKEY KING???
DO WE GET??
oh bruh
that
HECK?? A CRACK IN THE SKY???
HECK??
OH MK INK FIGHT FIGHT FIHGT FIGHT
STUFF MK DOESN’T WANT OT THINK ABOUT HUH THAT’S FAIR
OFC I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT IT
MAYBE
PLS WHY
YEAH
HECK
JUST WANTS TO BE MK
HECK MAN I’M JUST SITTING HERE
OH THE LBD VOICE MOMENT
THIS INK THING SNATCHING THE STAFF
OH WOW FIRE PUNCH THERE
WE HELP PEOPLE, I MEAN I HELP PEOPLE
OH THE SCROLL FR SLAPPIN
THIS IS GONNA HAUTN MY NIGHTMARESNGLSMKFMWEOMF
OH WHAT A MIS-MATCH OF ALL THE STUFF MK’S FOUGHT AND THEN INK MONKEY HEAD THIS IS
I LITERALLY JUST GOTTA SIT HERE AND LISTEN TO THEM TALK IT/FIGHT IT OUT HECKGN;SLFKS
WHOAH HEY
HEY I SAW THAT
MONKEY FR
RIGHT THERE
OH THAT’S NEAT
SO WE’RE ACTUALLY GOING TO SEE MONKEY MK IN THIS HUH
aw man is he yellow? :T LOOK IT LOOKS WEIRD OKAY WHERE’S THE MONKEY NOSEG;LKSMFWF
i can’t believe i get a single glimpse of the design and I’m nitpicking it SORRY I’M JUST GOING HTROUGH IT AND AND GRASPING AT STRAWS TO FEEL NORMALGL;DSMDS
SCREAMS
I JUST SAT THROUGH ALL OF THAT MONKEY KING SIR MATE MAN WE SAW HIM FOR A SECOND I DIDN’T THINK WE WOULD HECK OKAY MONKEY MK FR I FEEL LIKE I NEEED TO GBAC K AND TO THROUGH ALL THAT FRAME BY FRAME HANG ON
THE STOP
HECK
CRACKS IN IT
WILDIN LIKE WHAT IS GOING ON
YEAH BOIIIII THAT’S WHAT I’M TLAINGABOTU JHECKIGN
KID
MONKEEEYYYY
HECK
THERE HE IS
I DIDN’T THINK HE’D SHOW UP OH MY GOSH ITS HIM
MONKEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYY
HECK WHATS HAPPENIGN
HOW’D WUKONG GET OUT OF THE CURSE TO KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON
OH WOW THAT’ S A LOT OF PWOER
BUT ITS FINE
HECKIN
I AM
HECK MAN MK JUST SO RELIEVED TO SEE HIM
WOW THAT’S A GIANT
HECKING
THINK MONSTER
YEAHAHHHH
CREW BACK
WB WB
WELCOME BACK
I LIKE THE ENERGY
HELPGNL;SDKFMDS
CURSE GIANT
OH BOY WUKONG LIKE WDYM THIS GUY HEY BRING THE MONKEYS BACK
AW
OH WOW
CIRCLET
SHUT UP BACK OFF
CIRCLET
MONKEY KING GO BRRRRRR
DARN RIGHT
OH THIS IS GREAT
HECK
HOW’S THIS GOING TO END I’M SCREAMIGN
I’M SO AFRAID OF THAT CIRCLET RIGHT THERE
NO
THIS CURSE THING FR PULLING ABSOLUTELY NO PUNCHES
THE FLASHES OF THE CIRCLET DUDE HECK
A H ???
OH MY GODS???
I’M GONNA CRY????
THE AO LEI??
WALKING PAST??
HAND ON HIS SHOULDER??
AND THEN IT’S MEI
TALKIGN
YEAH
HECK
OH MY GODS THIS FR
YEAH
YEAH I’MA CRY FR
FAKING IT TILL WE MAKING IT SO YOU BETTER BE TAKIN IT S O N
TH
HECK
HECK DUDE
THIS IS KILLING ME
THE
LOOK
L O O K
ITS THE CREW
IN THEIR NEXT LIFE
AND THE HANDS ON MONKEY KINGS SHOUDLERS
THIS IS KILLING ME FR
GET EM BOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
OH MAN COLOURFUL MOMENT
OH B R U H
HARBENGOR OF CHAOS??
HELLO??
STOP TALKIGN
SO TRUE
GET EM
WELP THERE HE IS
THERE HE ISSSSSSSSSS
MONKEEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
OH THAT’S BEAUTIFUL
THEN PROVE US WRONG
THAT
Y’KNOW
WHAT
THAT DOLOGUE IS SO GOOD
AND PIGSY “TAHT’S MY BOY!”
THIS IS GREAT
OH BOY
NO
KILL HIM
BITES
GRRGGRGGRR SUS MAN
GET EM
GET RID OF HIM
SUS LION
EAT THIS SUCKAH
HE’S JUST STANDING THERE I PAUSED IT I WANT HIM GONE PLEASE DONT’ BE EVIL I THINK YOU’RE AT LEAST GONNA CALL MK A MONSTER OR OSMETHING HECK
YEAH STANIDNG PROTECTIVELY
ME
SNAP
HECK BACK OFF
NOOOOO
MONKEEEYYYYYY
MONKEY KING
DID HE JUST SNATCH MONKEY KING
HE JUST SNATCHED HECKING MNKEY KING
YEAH HEY JERKFACE BRING THE MONKEY BACKJ
HECK YOU GUYS I DIDNT’ THINK WE’D GET ANY MONKEY KING CLIPS BUT WE DID
HECK JUST
THE WAY HE APPROACHED MK WITH THE LIEK “YOU SEEM TO BE DOING FINE RIGHT?” JUST
HECK
DUDE
WORRIED BUT NERVOUS FEARFUL LAUGHIGN YOU’RE FINE RIGHT?
THAT JSUT
HECK MAN
HECK
DUDE
WHAT THE CRAP
AND THIS IS ONLY EP 7???
THIS FEELS LIKE AN EP TEN
OH MY HECK HECKGLFSDFM
OKAY THAT WAS A LOT
I LIKED THE DIOLOGUE BETWEEN MK AND INK MK
HECK
THE
A LOT OF THAT WOULD BE HIS THOGUHTS
AND THEN THE INK MK BEING OKAY AND JUST “then prove us wrong” BECAUSE MK
HECK
EHCK I’M HAVING THOUGHTS ABOTU THAT EBING MK’S INTERNAL DIOLOGUE TO HIMSELF ITS FINE
THE WHOLE JTTW CREW MAKING AN APPERANCE, THE AO LEI BIT REALLY GOT ME HE’S SO WONDERFUL AND SWISHY AND LIVES IN MEI PROBABLY HECKIGN REINCARNATION STUFF AND I’M IN PIECES AND I ADORE HIM AND HER AND THEM AND EVERYONE AND JUST HECK THIS REALLY DOES MAKE THE SAMADHI FIRE BIT HIT JUST AS HARD AS I THOUGHT IT DID WITH WUKONG LOOKING UP AND MEI YELLING AND FEELING LIKE THAT’S AO LEI YELLIGN CAUSE THEIR DRAGONS LOOK SIMIALR AND THAT’S TENCICALLY HIM IN THE NEXT LIFE AND ALL THIS HECKING STUFF I’M FINE Y’ALL I’M ALL GOOD THERE WSA SO MUCH THAT HAPPENED IN THIS ONE
THE CIRCLET BIT
YOU GUYS THE CIRCLET THAT BETTER NOT SHOW UP AGAIN I SWEAR
THEY FR WENT THROUGH ALL THAT TO GET THEIR FRIENDS AND MONKEY KIGN OUT AND THEN HE JUST GETS SUCKED RIGHT BACK INTO IT BY HECKIGN AZUE PIECE OF CRAP SQUARE UP YOU BRAIDED JADED LOSER I’LL FIGHT YOU MYSELF
THE FACT DESTINY CONTINUES TO BE A THING THROUGHOUT ALL THIS AND THE LIKE DEFYING DESTINY AND THE ECHOS OF LBD AND THE FEARS OF HSI FRIENDS THINKING HE’S A MONSTER AND WILL TURN ON HIM AND SEEING THE FRIENS SQUARE OF AGAINST INK HIM WOULD MAKE IMAGING THAT SO MUCH EASIER AND THE FLICKING INBETWEEN HIMSELF AND MONKEY HIMSELF AND WUKONG STAYING CLOSE TO MK AND SHEILDING HIM AND HTE MONKEY MK (heck I’m gonna make a couple monkey edits right away to at least give him an one his face looks so empty hgslk;fjsadf) AND THE SLOW MO BIT WHEN HE’S DIVING AND HOW HECKING BEAUTIFUL THAT LOOKS I DESPERATELY NEED TIO USE THIS IN AN AMV OF SOME KIND HECK AND HTEN HE’S BACK TO FLICKERING THEN HECKING AZURE *STABS HIM STABS HIM STABS HIM STABS HIM* WUKONG IMMEDEATLEY SHEILDING MK AND THE CREW FROM THIS GUY, THE LIP CURLED DISGUISTED LOOK ON AZURES FACE SHUT UP DUDE SHOVE UR FACE IN THE DIRT, WUKONG LOOKING BACK PANCKED I AM NOT OKAY, MK FLICKERING AND THEN MEI TAKING MONKEY KINGS PLACE SHEILDING MK IMMEDEATELY BECAUSE THEY ALL KNOW THIS DUDE’S SKETCHY AS HECK BUT MK STILL DOESN’T KNOW WHATS GOING ON AND HECK HECK EHCKE HECK ARE THEY OUT OF THE SCROLL NOW? IT LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE OUT OF THE SCROLL, MONKEY KINGS STILL IN THERE THE BRUH WANTS TO KEEP HIM TRAPPED AND TAKE HIM SOMEWHERE OR SOMETHING DOESN’T HE AAAAAAA STABS HIM STABS HIM STABS HIM, SQUARE UP LION FACE, FACE MY WRATH YOU BLUE GUMBALL- OKAY
OKAY
WE’RE GOOD WE’RE FINEEEEEEE I’M GONNA LOSE MY MIND NEXT WEEK HUH, THIS IS EP 7 THERE’S THREE MORE LEFT HECK, OKAY OKAY, WATCHING IT WITH MY BROS AND LOSING IT WITH THEM IG, I’M HAVING A MOMENT WE COOL WE CHILL TTYL KNOX OUT
35 notes
·
View notes
Text
WIP Wednesday!!!
week #3
okay, so i find the fact that both klaus and lexi consider themselves stefan’s best friends of all time hilarious. what would be even more hilarious is if lexi had lived long enough for the two of them to butt heads about it. therefore, i give you tug of war.:
Stefan casts a horrified look towards the guy on the counter, and then he’s grabbing his friend by the upper arm and hauling her out of the shop.
“You can’t be here. You have to leave.”
“What? Stef, what the hell—”
“You have to leave, before he sees you, Lex, quickly—”
“What? Who? Stefan, you’re not making any sense. Who are you talking about?”
“I do believe that’d be me, sweetheart,” comes Klaus’s accented voice and Stefan sees him at the mouth of the alley, twirling the wooden cross hanging from the rosary around his neck between his thumb and forefinger. “And who would you be?”
Lexi straightens—and a defiance that will get her killed enters her eyes, God no—
“I’m his best friend.”
Klaus pushes off the wall. His expression, in the flash that is all Stefan manages to see of it, is terrifying, but then it smooths over and makes way for his usual cruel amusement. “Are you now?” he drawls, though there’s a rough edge to his voice. “How … quaint.”
It doesn’t set the alarm bells in Lexi’s head ringing as it does in his.
“Alexia Branson.” Her name doesn’t have the notoriety that Stefan’s, Katherine’s, Klaus’s do. It is not a name that would drive fear into anyone’s heart. “And you are?” she asks impatiently when he doesn’t say anything more. “You know, when someone introduces themself, it’s customary to reciprocate.”
“So I’ve heard,” Klaus mutters, probably only to be difficult. “Very well, love, you asked for it. I am Klaus.”
Lexi laughs. Then she notices Stefan isn’t doing the same, so she stops.
“Wait what?” she blurts out. “No! That’s crazy. Klaus isn’t real. Stefan, where’d you pick up this lunatic?”
But Stefan’s not looking at her—he’s looking at Klaus, whose eyes are gleaming gold.
“Well,” he drawls, cutting off Lexi’s tirade. “Stefan and I really must be off. Lots to do, after all.”
“Yeah, no one is leaving until I get an explanation that makes sense,” she growls. “And until then, I’m not letting Stefan go anywhere with you.”
“I’m amazed you think you have a choice in the matter, sweetheart. Regardless, we’ll be off now. Stefan!” To heel goes unspoken.
Stefan grits his teeth together. For Elena.
This is all for Elena. For Damon.
“Fine,” Lexi exclaims, and then she’s pushing past. “Then I think I’ll be hanging around for the foreseeable time, if you don’t mind, Mister Klaus.”
“I do, as a matter of fact,” he hisses out, smooth and all the deadlier for it. “Stefan—”
“Don’t,” Stefan pleads. “I owe you, remember? I’m not going back on my word. Lex, you gotta go.”
“You owe him? Stefan, what is this bullshit?” She crosses her arms over her chest. “I don’t know who you are, but Stef doesn’t owe you shit. So—”
“Lexi …” Stefan swallows. “It’s not so simple, okay? I can’t—I have to—I owe him, okay? He saved Damon’s life.”
“Damon? Since when does Damon matter?”
“Oh, sweetheart, clearly you haven’t been paying attention,” Klaus says, condescending. “I mean, I agree that Damon is a waste of air and Katerina Petrova’s blood, but he and dear Stefan appear to have mended their bond somewhat. So when Damon had an unfortunate run-in with a werewolf’s set of teeth on the night of the full moon …”
Lexi’s brow contorts. “What?”
“He saved Damon,” Stefan says tiredly. “And in exchange I accepted to be his lackey for ten years.”
“You make it sound so boring,” Klaus protests. “We’re gonna have so much fun, you and I.”
“I’m not gonna let this happen!”
“As already established, sweetheart, you don’t get a choice.” His smile is bright and handsome and all the more terrible for it.
“You can’t stop me.”
“I can rip your head off. That’ll stop you just fine.”
13 notes
·
View notes
Text
OH MY GOD THE STREAMERS ARE EVEN STREAMING CONTROLLED BY SHOWFALL…
Does this mean that, in the universe of Generation Loss, the streamers careers were all manufactured by Showfall? Were they always streaming in here, all of them? How long has Showfall had them under control, then? That’d imply several of them have been under Showfall’s command for over a decade. And if they’re doing it in between shows… how many horrifying things have they all been through?
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
//:TOH spoilers ahead://
Decided to make this a lil tradition for after a big episode of TOH airs so without further ado here’s some things I wanna see in For the Future!
Lilith and Hunter 1 on 1 convo about their time together under Belos. For the first time her seeing who hunter truly is, an intelligent and brave young kid rather than the haughty know-it-all she assumed he was for so long. I can imagine her apologizing and saying something like “I misjudged you, Hunter.” (Basically I just really really want cool Aunty Lilith and hunter Clawthorne is that too much to ask?!)
Hunter mourning flapjack, like truly mourning him. And I want to see the hexsquad there for him every step of the way, supporting him through his journey of loss and grief.
On a slightly lighter note, hunter discovering that flapjacks sacrifice actually gave him some sort of magic. Bonus points if it’s him, like, teleporting on complete accident or something and everyone around him plus himself just being at a complete loss for words
LUZ’S PALISMAN!!! I’m still holding out for team bat but I also think a snake would be cute too! Like a little snake coiled around the actual staff, I think that’d be really cute!
Hunter carving a new palisman, and unpopular opinion I don’t want it to just be a remade flapjack because I feel like that’ll really take away from the impact of his sacrifice and loss. I’m hoping for another bird of some sort because as I’ve established I am nothing if not a hunter Clawthorne truther
Camilla and Eda meeting while Eda is in harpy form and Camilla assuming she’s some sort of malevolent monster so she just gets so ready to throw down to protect her kids and is shocked and slightly horrified as Luz just bursts into tears and launches herself at Eda.
The return of the C.A.T.T’s. Them re-establishing their base as a safe haven from the collector and giving Camilla and the kids a safe place to hide out while they all plan how to get king back (this will also allow the crew to change everyone’s designs back to normal bc even though I think it’d be hysterical for all of them to throw down in cosplay I don’t think it’s very practical or easy to animate)
Eda, Lilith, the coven heads, Camilla, AND the kids all throwing down against Belos. All the kids took him on twice and were able to hold their own pretty well, but were ultimately defeated by him but with them PLUS all of the adults I think they’re strong enough to take him down. Plus that battle scene will be the most badass thing on the planet
Hunter getting the final hit on Belos, because I think he deserve it
Luz’s reaction to Edas lost arm as well as the apparent death of Raine. She’d be so heartbroken and sad, especially once she finds out Raine did it to keep their promise to her (ok wait that sounds really sad maybe I don’t wanna see that)
CAMILLA AND EDA MOM DUO oh my god I just wanna see them meet and interact so freaking bad! They’d definitly bond over how proud they are of Luz and what it’s like accidentally finding yourself to be a parent of way to many kids
Adding onto that I’ve always wanted to see Luz accidentally call Eda “mom” but now I think I’d rather see Luz call out “mom” is some sort of stressful situation and having both Camilla AND Eda respond to it
Luz giving hunter and her mom a crash course in glyphs! I can imagine her telling her mom to learn them as a form of protection and Camilla eventually telling her that she prefers the bat but hunter is TOTALLY into it and actually catches on really fast
Also something I wanted from this episode but unfortunately didn’t get was luz and the others showing down against belos and him cornering Luz and taunting her about her lack of magic in the human realm and her in response just absolutely decking him across the face
19 notes
·
View notes
Text
*the following is a transcript of a conversation held at the bride and groom’s table.*
Did… did you see the way that priest was looking at me?
Eh? Was he looking at you? I was too busy looking at him… and you! The both of ya, but not at the same time, I guess…
Yes… I think that might’ve been the same priest from last time.
HUH?!? Last time?!? From your wedding with…
Yes~
Noooooo fucking way-! Oh my god I was so sCARED ABOUT THAT! I knew he looked kinda familiar… kinda-
Ugh, god, I’m so glad nobody brought that up while we were filing the papers though. That scared me too!
Well, I guess it wasn’t that official-
It wasn’t? Oh thank GOD-
…Shiiiiiiiiit man, do you think that he thought y’all got like, divorced or something?
I-… That’d make sense.
…well now I’m kinda horrified-
Me too… me too…
…
God, he must’ve been so pissed then, haha!
…Eh, oh well! We’ve got bigger things to worry about, I guess!
Heh~ You could say that~
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
Heres the Ralph shit I wrote you sick bastards /lovingly (forgive me for how godawful this is writing has never been my strong suit) also i looked this over only once so if theres any majour horrible mistakes then i apologize in full
There was a horrible screaming. It woke everyone up unfortunately.
It sounded like the scream of a final girl, being tortured by a killer, insanity and pain at its peak.
But it wasn’t. It was Ralph.
All he could do was scream as pain coursed through every inch of his body. It felt like he was burning alive, being torn and ripped apart, like being dissolved in acid. He should’ve looked terrible if he was going through this pain- he should’ve been bloodied, mangled- Hell, he should’ve been skinned and strung up on hooks while muttering a faint ‘Jesus wept…’ but no. He looked like he always did, except for the horrified look of pain on his face and the stiffness of his whole body.
He didn’t expect that when he’d become conscious again that he would be in immeasurable, full body pain. It was only a year after his assassination attempt on Jimmy Carter had failed and he’d blown himself (and two cops) to bits in a random Floridian town, and now it was like he was experiencing it all again.
Except he wasn’t dead after ten seconds, it was never ending. It kept going and going and going. It was 6 in the morning when it started, when he’d woken up and immediately felt the deep, burning pain, and only ten minutes later he stopped being able to scream. It hurt his throat too much. All he could do was lay on his mattress, yell a bit, and sob through the pain. He still couldn’t bring himself to move, it hurt too much and he figured that ‘maybe if I don’t move then it won’t be so bad’.
He was wrong. No matter if he moved, stayed still, walked, sat- whatever he did, the pain remained the same and he didn’t know WHY it was happening. He tried to think but he only thought ‘damn this hurts- fuck I’m thirsty- goddamn I’m hungry- why does it all hurt so much= Is this what becomin’ a zombie is like?-Oh God please don’t let me be a ghoul please!’ and he still couldn’t get out of bed. He laid there for an hour, hoping deeply that nobody would check on him because that’d be too damn embarrassing, it wasn’t like he’d been stabbed or shot, he just couldn’t move. Nobody needs to deal with a grown man who’s wracked with pain and can’t move, especially in a place like this.
He just laid there, sobbed, and eventually tried to writhe around a little in a faint hope to escape the pain. The writhing did fuck-all, but he kept at it to try and give himself a distraction. He tried to remain that way, tried to think of other things, then remembered he had painkillers- of course he had painkillers, why would you prepare for the apocalypse without any kind of cheap medical supplies? Exactly. Now all he needed to do was get to the crate they were in- the only problem was that he still couldn’t get up. He tried it, he tried hard, but he couldn’t make himself get up. He just couldn’t push through it, but he did keep on trying at least. It hurt to try, but he tried.
Another hour passed. The fires in his cells still burned painfully. Ralph took a breath, a deep and shaky breath, and pushed himself up, screaming again as he did it and the pain shot through all of his bones and all of his flesh.
He was up. Dammit, he was up.
He breathed again, but the pain didn’t go away. Once he was up it was a race to find the crate he kept the medicine in. He couldn’t keep himself standing, so he just crawled and lunged around the room until he found the crate, dug through the contents of it, and found the painkillers. Never the type to read labels on things, and thinking he had a decent grasp on the world of medicine, he judged that more was better. So, he dry-swallowed almost the entire bottle of pills until he was hit with a pain that was worse than what he’d felt that morning. His abdomen hurt real fucking bad, like he’d been stabbed and was still getting stabbed, and he toppled back and coughed up some of the pills, the rest spilled on the floor. He started sobbing again, another hour passed and the pills did nothing. Another hour passed and he managed to drag himself to the mattress but he couldn’t get on top of it, he just laid his head on the end and tried to ignore it all as more stabbing pain hit his stomach and it felt like there was a fucking hole where his gut should be. He stayed like that as the sun went down, sobbing, shaking, vomiting, and occasionally choking out a string of curses or prayers. He’d never prayed before, he’d never thought of doing it, but in this kind of moment it seemed appropriate.
Eventually, he tired out and, despite the pain still remaining abundant, he passed out.
The next day he woke up with a jump, feeling way better and ready to face the day. Ralph wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, maybe he’d ask the Curator or one of the others if anything bad happened to them yesterday. He put on his hat and headed up for some food, he was starving.
#i havent written in so long fuck#this is best i can muster#hes suffering again#sorry to all the ralph fans out there#ray content#ralph content
7 notes
·
View notes
Note
Oh, God, I just had a horrifying thought! What if this year’s anniversary is Charizard-centric because this is the sixth anniversary and Charizard is number 0006 in National Dex order?!? They can make it work, too! Classic Lance and Zard X, Sygna Chase and Zard Y, Sygna Kiawe and his grandfather’s Charizard with a Z-move, and Sygna Sycamore could even get Zard Y instead of Chase if they don’t wanna double up on Kanto! God, that’d be an absolute nightmare!
The only flaw in that reasoning is that there’s not a female character. Whole anniversary events tend to be male dominated but they do many sure to have exactly one girl each time.
1 note
·
View note
Text
Starlight Dream - Chapter 31
“Is everything alright?” Hope asked. “You seem edgy.”
“I’m alright. Just too much has happened.” It had been quite a shock when Jin appeared from nowhere at her safe house, begging to save Takako’s life. While reluctant, Ume had relented. Against Starlight Dream, they needed allies. And then Seina had appeared after their battle with Haruko, explaining how she’d survived an encounter with the most frightening Devil Princess.
“What the hell kinda luck does that girl have?” Ume said. As they spoke, she snacked on her Pocky sticks. “If you could call having Reiko Yoshida after your head, luck.”
Despite this, Hope had a good feeling about their current situation. “It might be destiny putting us together!”
“Destiny,” Ume replied and snorted. “Ever the optimist.”
“Always! I have to cheer you up, Ume!”
This earned a smile from Ume before she frowned. “But the girl’s a total amateur.”
She still hadn’t forgotten how Seina had refused to kill Emiyo, despite the task’s necessity. It’d take considerable effort to forge her into a proper magical girl. While regrettable, Seina needed to lose her kind heart to survive in their battle against Starlight Dream. Ume told her partner as much.
“Hmm, I seem to recall a certain magical girl also being like that,” Hope said, flopping onto a nearby couch. “I could get used to this! So much of an improvement on that dank, abandoned house! Seina has a nice place!”
Ume joined her friend, enjoying the luxurious couch after roughing it for so long. “That girl died a long time ago. She died when Hinata did.” Her mood darkened, the pain still raw after so many years. Her partner didn’t reply, only giving Ume’s hand a comforting squeeze.
Seina’s so-called bodyguard entered the room, scrounging around in the kitchenette. He withdrew a bowl of grapes and a block of cheese from the fridge. With deft hands, he cut the cheese into bite size pieces. This piqued Ume’s curiosity, watching as he arranged the grapes and cheese into a cute puppy face, using crackers for its ears, on a plate.
“Do you want some, too?” Kiyojiro asked.
“No, thanks. Is that a late-night snack for Seina?” Ume wondered why Seina couldn’t just get it herself. Did she enjoy having servants doing every petty whim?
“It’s her favorite,” Kiyojiro said, inclining his head. “Colten has a particular love for crackers.”
Ume surrendered to her curiosity, asking a burning question that’d been bothering her. “Why are you here? Seina’s a magical girl. Even untransformed, she would break you with ease.”
The bodyguard only shrugged in response, unruffled by her uncharitable reading of his situation. “Someone needs to watch over her and make sure she brushes her teeth at night and eats well-rounded meals.”
“What is she, ten?” Ume replied, baffled. Was Seina that childish? She bit into another Pocky stick.
“Yes, yes, she is.” Instead of taking her question as a joke, he responded in deadly seriousness. Much to Ume’s horror, she realized the bodyguard wasn’t kidding. Her Pocky stick dropped to the floor as the full implication of his words struck her.
“Seina’s actually ten years old?�� While she’d known Seina was a novice magical girl, Ume hadn’t realized the girl was that young.
“Yes.” The bodyguard gave her an icy stare, making Ume’s blood run cold.
Oh my god, I tried to kill a ten-year-old! Shame filled Ume as that statement’s full implication struck home.
Oddities about Seina’s behavior finally became crystal clear with this revelation. Little wonder the girl had been so adamant against killing Emiyo. What a total idiot she’d been. Kiyojiro continued his hard stare, adding to her guilt. Hope looked down shamefaced, equally horrified.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” Her apology sounded lame to her own ears, but Kiyojiro accepted it with a nod.
“Now you understand Seina’s situation better.” He left with Seina’s midnight treat without another word.
“We really screwed up!” Hope said.
“Yeah.” Ume leaned back, despondent. Poor Seina. No wonder she always seemed so overwhelmed. A young girl her age shouldn’t have to deal with nightmares like the Devil Princesses. At least Takako and Himari understood what they’d signed up for.
“I know what we must do!” Ume said, her heart hardening with resolve.
“Oh?” Hope asked, curious.
“We’re going to protect her, even if it costs our lives!” It seemed the least they could do. Ume would make amends for her terrible attitude towards the girl.
“Great plan!” An idea struck her fairy partner. “We could train her! We knew a few tricks.”
Ume nodded her agreement. While Seina still sucked at controlling magic, she had some ideas to turn that to the girl’s advantage. She hadn’t been a magical girl for centuries for nothing.
What was this strange hope filling her all of a sudden? It was like clouds had parted, revealing the bright sun above.
Then she got it. After years of battling against the monsters, it was nice finally fighting to protect someone. While Ume had defended people from evil, she’d left without a word afterward. Ume had focused more on fighting Starlight Dream than on helping others. If she could minimize Seina’s exposure to the horrors and tragedies she’d experience, then it’d be worth it.
---
“Uh, you want to train me?” Seina asked, baffled.
“I’m your senior, after all. There’s much you could learn from me,” Ume replied, nodding her head.
“I already tried that with Takako, and it didn’t go so hot.”
“To be fair, I’m not the greatest teacher.” Takako piped in.
“But I actually have experience fighting against magical girls. I have a few tricks you might find useful.” Ume said with the utmost confidence.
“I suppose.” However, Seina had difficulty understanding where this sudden kindness was coming from. Why the change of heart? The other magical girl had been nothing but cold towards her. While Takako remained just as skeptical, she allowed the rebel to speak her peace.
“I say you should agree,” Mr. Kiyojiro said. For some particular reason, he seemed pleased with himself.
“Me too,” Masato said, clasping an enormous hand around Seina’s shoulder. “I hate to say it, but you’ve surpassed me. Now you require a better training partner to grow stronger.”
“She surpassed you even before you started training together,” Colten said, his tone snide.
“Okay, fine.” While still not pleased, Seina went along with it. “But I’m not training to kill! Understand!” She glared to make her point crystal clear.
Much to her surprise, Ume nodded in agreement. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want.”
“Did Ume hit her head last night?” Seina whispered to her partner.
“Beats me.” Colten only shrugged at this uncharacteristic behavior.
“I guess we should start, I suppose?” Seina said, somewhat lost for words. She found this whole situation beyond bizarre.
“The trick is learning to maximize the effectiveness of your magic,” Ume said as she stood across from Seina on the training field. Himari and Takako watched from the sidelines, curious about what lessons Ume might teach. “It’s saved my behind many times. While our power might seem limitless, it’s wise to conserve every bit of magic, making no unnecessary moves.”
“So Mr. Kiyojiro always tells me, but I’m terrible at controlling my magic,” Seina replied. “It never listens to me.”
“That’s alright. Your talents aren’t in that area.” Ume said, sensing her student’s unspoken self-recrimination. “Instead, we should focus on your strengths.”
“My only strength is being strong!”
Much to Seina’s surprise, Ume gave her a sympathetic smile. “You undersell yourself. You’re tough and determined. That matters more in my book than convoluted magical abilities. You’re a conqueror, Seina!”
“If you say so.”
“In my battles, I’ve learned ways to disrupt a magical girl’s healing factor. It’s allowed me to defeat opponents much stronger than myself.”
“You mean like Emiyo’s sickle?” Seina recalled how difficult it was to heal after getting sliced by it.
Ume nodded. “Magical girls have an aura that regulates their magical flow. Disrupting it makes healing more difficult. I’ll teach you how to do it.”
“Okay,” Seina said, unconvinced. Her mind returned to her unsuccessful experiment with Himari when they got trapped in that kitchen dimension. But Seina would give her best, despite her doubts.
“It’s best if I show you.” Ume got into a fighting position. “Stand still. This shouldn’t hurt too bad.”
Seina nodded, standing stock still. The others watched in curiosity as Ume readied her attack. Vanishing into nothing, Ume appeared from nowhere and struck Seina in the stomach. Bones bent as the hit connected, making Seina stagger back.
“Ouch.” Seina rubbed the wound, flinching as she touched sensitive flesh. As Ume explained, the blow struggled to heal, creating an unpleasant weight in her stomach. “You didn’t need to hit me that hard!”
“Remarkable, you are tough. I hit you with everything I had, and it mostly only bruised you.” Ume gave a self-deprecating smile. “Still, do you understand what I did?”
“Well.” Seina paused, thinking, before shaking her head. “Not really.”
“I put disruptive magic into my blow,” Ume said. “And your natural magic fluttered when struck against it.”
“And I suppose Emiyo’s blade sliced through a magical girl’s aura, making it harder to heal. Something like that, right?” Takako said. “But can it be defended against?”
“It’s possible,” Himari said, nodding. “I’ve had it pounded into me, literally, that only with strong mental discipline can a magical girl gain their true potential. Perhaps a firm iron will can soften the impact.”
“Oh! So Mr. Kiyojiro’s martial art lessons have been useful all along!” Seina said, amazed. She’d always thought them a hassle.
Her bodyguard sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Obviously.”
“We can focus on that topic later,” Ume said.
“So, I just need to disrupt their magic,” Seina said. “Doesn’t sound too difficult. Let’s do this.”
“Right.” Ume flinched, realizing what it meant to train Seina in this ability.
“I’ll go easy on you,” Seina said, rubbing the back of her neck.
But this proved more difficult than expected. While Seina could hit like a train, it couldn’t cause any long-term disruption of a magical girl’s defenses. However, despite her best efforts, it failed to work. Much to Seina’s irritation, the others proved much more adaptable than her. Takako, in particular, could make herself very troublesome with her ribbon of doom. She’d made a cut on Seina that’d taken over an hour to heal.
“Of course.” Seina hung her head, defeated by her failure. Was the universe conspiring against her to make her look ridiculous? This shouldn’t be so hard.
“Hey, don’t beat yourself up,” Ume said. “While you didn’t quite get the lesson I intended, you learned a different skill, which might be even more important.”
“Really?” Seina said, her tone doubtful.
“You’re better at shattering a magical girl’s defenses outright,” Ume said. “You pulverize it to pieces. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Only for them to heal from it anyway,” Seina replied.
“Uh, not when you’ve broken them into pieces first.” Takako gave her friend’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. “It’s hard to heal when you’ve reduced them to a pretzel.”
“I suppose,” Seina said, considering.
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve gotten better at hurting magical girls. That’s not nothing. You can focus on hurting them while the others attack their healing.” Mr. Kiyojiro’s smile was nasty. “They won’t know what hit them.”
Seina nodded, knowing she was being ridiculous, as usual. It was just hard to accept how unsophisticated she appeared compared to her friends. It made her look stupid and brutish, only useful for breaking things. Hardly surprising, considering Seina was only an ordinary girl thrust into a war of the heavens she never asked for.
Still, inwardly, Seina prayed her terrible luck with magic wouldn’t cost them dearly in the future. She feared her brutish nature might work against them when they needed a cleverer solution. Too much was on the line.
As if reading his charge’s downward spiral in mood, Mr. Kiyojiro piped up. “How about we have a snack? It’s about time for a break.”
Himari glanced at a nearby clock. “Aren’t we meant to train till three?”
“No, we’ve done good work today. Better than I’d hoped, actually.” Ume said. “Though, don’t think you’re off the hook. We’re training until you’ve each mastered this. We’ll need every edge when we face the Devil Princesses.”
“Okay,” Seina said, with little enthusiasm.
“I thought you did super well, Seina!” Colten said as they headed towards the sitting area. Mr. Kiyojiro was preparing her favorite snack while they waited.
While they sat, a sound from a far window caught Seina’s attention. But when she looked outside, she saw nothing but the busy streets of Osaka. It must have been a bird, Seina chastising herself for jumping at shadows. She already had enough problems.
---
“Ah, so that’s how that works,” Emiyo said, nodding to herself. She’d already understood the principle, but Ume had mastered it. Despite being a total weakling, the rebel had some nasty tricks up her sleeve. It made her an exceptional assassin. Now, however, she’d unwittingly created her own demise. Her genius allowed her to understand the trick just from watching it.
She whistled as she jumped from her hiding spot amongst the tree’s branches, satisfied with her reconnaissance mission. Though, Emiyo was sore after sitting in a tree for hours upon end. Ume had insisted on training long into the day, the moon was already rising high into the night sky by the time they finished.
While learning much, Emiyo wouldn’t make a move until she was ready. Seina surrounded herself with powerful and dangerous allies. Worse, they were getting stronger. Even Himari, of all magical girls, was becoming a dangerous threat.
If only I could call for backup. But Nyx had vanished into the ether, with no sign or word of her yet. If her fairy partner had left for Starlight Dream, why hadn’t she returned with help?
These mysteries chafed at her sensibilities, making Emiyo nervous. She shivered as a chilly wind struck, huddling up to keep warm. Without her magical girl form, nothing protected her from the elements. But it was necessary to remain undetected by her enemies.
After checking the coast was clear, Emiyo slipped into an abandoned building through a broken crack in the wall. With some effort, she blocked the entrance with some old wooden boards. The sheer untidiness of her new home gulled her. Emiyo feared she might have gotten fleas from the unsanitary environment, but reminded herself it was necessary to remain out of sight.
She sighed, plopping herself into the cardboard box she used as a bed. Some old, worn blankets were her only comfort. But both barely kept her warm on these cooling days as winter fast approached.
Much to her misfortune, this world had few amenities available while it recovered from the vampire’s cruel reign of terror. Only a select few, like Seina, lived in luxury. Others were left to manage with what they had available. And Emiyo’s lack of money hardly helped her situation.
Emiyo blushed as her stomach growled, reminding her she still hadn’t eaten since she’d stolen those few loaves of bread. She sighed when she realized her meager food supply had already been eaten. Emiyo would need to find food in the morning.
Bundling up to her coarse blanket, Emiyo tried getting some shuteye. Her mind wandered as sleep refused to come easy, her stomach demanding subsistence.
Was this Seina’s life before she became a magical girl? The squallier, fleas, and hunger?
Wait. Am I feeling bad for the girl? Never! As an elite, heartless magical girl, Emiyo was beyond such petty emotions. Still, facing the other side of suffering hurt. Her thoughts betrayed her as she contemplated if others suffered like this because of magical girls.
No, it doesn’t matter! I’m beyond simple, petty concerns. Crushing loneliness threatened to bring her to tears, as she led there. She wanted the familiar warmth of Nyx curled up beside her, a habit she had long since enjoyed. They’d never been apart this long before, the worry eating Emiyo alive.
Nyx, please return soon! Please!
#slice of life#stories#satire#anime#magical girl#anime stories#humor#starlight dream#fantasy#fiction#parody#starlightdream#action#longrunning
0 notes
Text
Yandere RE8: TRP Part 4
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Check out my MASTERLIST for more!
"Uhh... hello?"
You looked at the woman standing in the stairs. She was wearing a dark veil that matched the rest of her outfit- oh shit, that's a funeral outfit.
I really did pick a bad time to come here, didn't I? She's in mourning, she sees an intruder, and her day went from bad to worst. Yep, she's gonna kill me.
You took one look at the woman and then at all the possible exits: the doors- no, they'd be too heavy to move and what if they're locked? The window- but I'd have to jump out and just because it looks cool in movies to jump through glass, doesn't mean it'll work, Y/n.
So, the only option was to eliminate the threat. Or maybe... defuse it.
"This is your doll, right?" You asked, pointing at the doll, judging by the lace designs on both of their dresses. The woman didn't reply. "It looks like its been... used a lot. To be honest, she's very different than most dolls I've seen, definitely a lot more spookier." You nervously giggled, hoping she didn't mind. "But... she looks like she's been loved. A lot. Despite being broken from a lot of places, someone still took their time to fix her." You smiled sadly, remembering your own doll that Mia had ripped. "Wish I had someone like that. To sew up the wounds and fix them."You mumbled, not really sure if you were talking about your doll or yourself.
"Your doll, she's- she's very pretty. My sister would've liked her." You began. "Which is why I'm here. My family, we were in an accident- I know it was wrong of me to come here without permission, but I need to find my sister, Rose and my father, Ethan." You took a step closer. "They both of have blonde hair. Rose, my sister, she's just 6 months old. She was dressed in a baby pink onesie, bundled up in a blanket. My father, Ethan, he's about this tall and has big blue eyes. I think he was wearing a jacket, with blue denim jeans. H-have you seen them?" You asked, eyes full of hope and voice laced with eagerness.
Please, please let her have seen them. God, please.
Unsurprisingly, the woman didn't reply, but she did turn her head towards the left window. You didn't know whether she was telling you to get out of her house or signalling that they are out there, but you knew you had to leave.
Nodding, you slowly walked towards the window, your heart beating faster as you prayed that this wasn't some sort of trap, hoping she wouldn't attack you from behind because that would be like... really shitty.
But you left the house unharmed, and without looking back at the window because you didn't want to jinx it, you walked towards the forrest once again, thankful that the sun had finally came out.
Where are you guys?
You had been walking for a couple of hours now, the sun had been a bit warmer today, which was good since you hated the snow that surrounded you now. You looked at the map, tracing the path to your new destination. The Salvatore reservoir. It seemed like it would take you a day's journey to get there, and you sure as hell weren't seeing any lake in sight.
God, when will this nightmare end?
You decided to sit on a stone and take some much needed rest. Your feet ached from all the walking, and your calves were cramping. You rolled your head, popping it from the side, before taking off the rifle that had been weighing down, stretching out your arms. Digging through the little back pack you bought from Duke, you pulled out a thermos of coffee and twinkie. You don't know how or where he got it, but Duke had filled your bag with a couple of snacks; saying its for his loyal customer.
So, here you sat, in the middle of the snowy woods, eating a twinkie and drinking a lukewarm coffee. Both didn't taste good, but they're gonna keep you alive so, no complaining.
After drinking the coffee, you rested your head against a tree, recalling last nights events as you waited for the caffeine to kick in.
You tried to make sense of what happened when you got... locked in the basement. You thought you had forgotten about her, Angel. Guess not.
Wait- didn't that lady lock me in the basement? Maybe, she didn't look very hostile, her creepy doll looked scarier than she did.
You laughed at the irony. You always made fun of the horror movies where the family would become so attached to the most horrifying doll, and you'd scream at their stupidity, And yet here you were, falling for the cliche as you found comfort in that creepy doll.
Man, I'm really losing it here.
You sighed, closing your eyes as you tried to come up with the next plan. But the warm coffee had lulled you right to sleep, which was dangerous but you were too tired to care.
Just for a couple of minutes...
You woke up to the sound of growling and heavy steps. And as soon as you opened your eyes, you knew you had definitely slept for far longer than a few minutes. But that was not of concern at the moment. No, it was the source of the growling that had woken you up.
Just about 40 feet away from you were lycans. Plural. Not one, not two, but 5 lycans, and one of them was a really big one.
You held your breath as you watched them wander around; they hadn't spotted you yet, and if you stayed quiet, you hoped they would just go away.
Stilling yourself as much as you could, you watched them with wide eyes. One of them started to walk in your direction, it wasn't looking at you, which meant that it hadn't seen you, but he would if he kept on walking this way.
God, I know we haven't been on good terms, but like c'mon, you gotta give me a break. Please, I love you? Come on, you know this is not how I want to go.
You sent a silent prayer, and perhaps it worked, since the lycan suddenly turned the other way, joining its pack as they started walking deeper into the woods.
Slowly, you began to gather up your things, silently shoving them in your bag, one eye on the lycans and the other one making sure that you don't accidentally drop something that'd cause noise.
Fortunately, you didn't. You swung the bag over your shoulder, and took a step forward, careful not to step on any twigs.
Maybe God did love me. All that time in church-
THWACK!
You jumped back as a huge sheet of snow fell from the trees in front of you. You whipped your head towards the monsters and they all had stopped dead in their tracks. Slowly, one of them turned and if they hadn't heard the snow fall, they'd definitely heard the way your heart was about to burst out of your chest. Then, it growled.
Motherfucker.
You pulled out your gun just as the two of them began running your way. With a quick jump to the side, you dodged them and shot them two times each. Hearing your gun fire, the other two began running your way too, while the larger one stayed behind as it watched. This time, as you shot one of them, the other managed to kick you in the chest hard, throwing you against the rock. Luckily, you didn't hit your head, as you rolled and shot it dead.
Spitting out the blood, you looked back at the last lycan who had already started running your way. You began loading up your gun with trembling hands, but just as you aimed, the lycan took a giant leap and knocked the gun out of your hand.
Fuck.
The giant grabbed you by your neck, lifting you up high before throwing you across the ground. You wheezed, scrambling up to your feet as you began running away from it, its heavy steps following you. It roared angrily behind you, and that only made you ignore the burning pain in your chest as you ran faster.
But of course, God had decided to make you live a cliche horror movie, because you tripped over a fucking branch, making you fall on your stomach. You flipped over instantly, and saw your nightmare come true as the lycan jumped on you.
On pure reflex, you punched it square in the face, which you doubted hurt it more than it hurt you, if anything, the monster was momentarily perplexed, but that was enough for you to slip from under it.
But you were only able to take a few steps away when it suddenly grabbed you by your neck and lifted you up again, snarling as it began opening its mouth, revealing its razor-sharp teeth at you.
God, if you're hearing this, I'm converting to atheism because I did not need this today.
Looking at the horrifying lycan, you prayed one last time before you were eaten by it. Surprisingly, your life did not flash before your eyes, which you were kinda grateful for because you did not need to relive that before your death.
But that moment didn't came. No, what came were familiar moans of pain, and then the sound of a drill, followed by blood splattering on your face as the lycan was sliced vertically from the head to the toe by the aforementioned drill.
The lycan fell to the ground, revealing the pair of soldats that killed them and behind them a smirking Heisenberg, who rested against a tree, tipping his hat at you.
You were far too shocked to say anything, and after a few seconds, the man walked over to you, blocking the view of his monstrous creations just mutilating the lycans.
"So... that was a bit traumatising." He started, chuckling at your stunned face. "You okay, kid?"
What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck-
"Yeah." You took his hand, and he helped you up. You groaned at the pain, touching the tender side around the chest where the lycan had hit you. Yeah, you probably broke a rib.
Heisenberg helped you sit down on a tree stump. "Hmm, that bastard kicked you hard didn't it." Wait- "But that was a phenomenal punch you threw at it. Nearly made me burst out laughing."
"You were watching? Why the fuck didn't you come in before!"
He shrugged. "I just wanted to see if you could really handle yourself- which you were pretty good at, but then you lost your gun and it was kinda an unfair match from there on." He pulled out some pills from his coat. "i was just passing by when I saw those lycans moving away. Thats when I pushed the tree which made snow sheet fall and you know the rest from there on."
Your eyes went wide. "You did that on purpose? What the shit, Heisenberg-?! Fuck." You doubled over in pain, clutching your ribs, heaving.
"Shh, stay still, kid. Here, take these. They'll help with the pain." You eyed the bottle before popping two in your mouth. Hey, if he wanted me dead, he wouldn't have saved me from the lycan. "I just wanted to see if you were worth the trouble, and as it turns out, you are."
"You didn't have to almost kill me to see that. And now I've lost my gun. And I don't have any money to buy a new one. I doubt Duke gives freebies." You huffed out.
Heisenberg rolled his eyes. "God, you sure do whine a lot. Here-" He dropped a tiny pouch in your lap. "There's some coins in there. That should be enough to buy you a new gun. And for fucks sake, get a gun with more rounds! You don't have time to be loading a gun mid battle." He huffed. "So, where are you going now?"
You rolled your head from side to side. "Well, I went to the Beneviento house. Didn't find Ethan or Rose there. Now, I'm going to the lake."
"The lake? Huh, well if you survived Donna, then Moreau should be a piece of cake. You got the map? Let me show you the short cut, it's not far from here." You gave him the map and he showed you the directions.
"Where are you going then?"
"Mother Miranda called. Don't worry, I'll keep our meeting a secret." He then nodded at you. "Alright, I'm off now."
"Wait!" Your voice stopped him. "I don't know when I'll see Duke again. And I don't have gun, so what if another pack of lycans come?"
Heisenberg slumped his shoulders as he let out an annoyed sigh. "Fine. I gotta do everything by myself." He dog whistled and one of the soldats stopped maiming the lycan and ran to Heisenberg. "From now on, you're gonna listen to her."The soldat looked at you and nodded. "If she tells you to kill, you kill. If she tells you to die, you die. Follow her around and keep her safe." The soldat nodded. Then Heisenberg turned to you. "He's already dead, so don't worry about throwing him in danger. Oh and also, just take him into the sun every once in a while so that his engine can recharge. You'll know when he needs the sun."
You were baffled. "Wait, Heisenberg- how the- what the hell am I supposed to do with him?"
"Figure it out, kid. Think of him as a guard dog."
You looked at the soldat then at Heisenberg's retreating form, then back at the soldat.
"So..." The soldat stared at you. "You got a name?"
"Handsome." You nodded to yourself as you trudged, using the soldat's arm to support yourself. "That's what I'm gonna call you. Handsome. What do you think?"
The soldat was wearing a metal contraption over its eyes, so you couldn't really tell what it was feeling.
"Well, you don't seem to have any complaints, so from now on, you'll respond to the name "Handsome". Do you understand?"
The soldat nodded.
You laughed. God, the pain meds were either making me stupid or everything else funnier.
You looked at the map again. Just a couple of more minutes and then a right turn. And then you should see the lake- god, this map was confusing as hell.
"So..." you wondered what you should ask the cyborg. Oh right. "You seen Ethan? Blonde man, crazy big eyes. Or a baby, Rose?" The man shook his head no.
Sigh. What else could I ask him? What about how did he die? No, what if that's triggering? I can't handle a Terminator right now. And I don't think I should ask him about his past or anything that'll cause him to have a existential crisis. Ah! I've got it!
"Hey, how do you see?"
The soldat looks down at you for a few seconds then points at his metal contraption.
Wait- is that sarcasm?
You scoff. "Of course, you see with your eyes! I meant, with the whole metal thingy covering them, how do you- oh, there's this vision specs in them."
You smiled. "Hey, you're kinda like Cyclops, yknow-" you were cut off as Handsome suddenly pushed you to the ground, turning on his drill.
"Wait, shit- you don't have to be Cyclops! We can talk this out-" but Handsome was focusing on something else, and that's when you saw it. Two lycans.
Handsome ran and easily maimed them to pieces, I mean, you had to look away from the horrific scene midway.
The soldat returned five minutes later, covered in blood. He extended his hand and you reluctantly took it, letting him support you as you began walking again, your heart still beating like crazy.
But you calmed down when you finally reached the lake, the setting sun gave serene feel to the entire reservoir. You inhaled deeply before looking at Handsome. "Lets go down there." You pointed at the lake.
You were both sitting at the wooden broadwalk, your legs hanging off the ledge. You looked at the water, it wasn't crystal clear, but you could see some fishes swimming around, so at least it wasn't dangerous to life. You looked at Handsome, then at his drill and you realised he was still covered in blood. "Lets get you cleaned up, hm?" You said, pulling out a rag from your bag and dipping it in the cold water below. You began with cleaning up his drill, then dipping the rag back in cold water and cleaning his chest and his other arm.
"Good job back there, Handsome."You smiled as Handsome nodded. "Heisenberg was right, you are kinda like a dog. Hmm, I wonder if..." You tested your theory as you petted him on the head. "Good job, Handsome!" But the soldat only tilted its head in confusion.
"Hmm, perhaps not." You cupped the cold water in your hands and washed your own face, You looked at your reflection in the water. "You wanna go for a swim? I don't mind." Handsome shook his head. "Yeah, I'm not a fan of swimming either."
Handsome stared at you. You scoffed. "Oh so you pretend you don't understand what I say, but you want to hear the story? Fine, but I'm only telling you because it might be important later."
You both stared at the water as you began your story. "Well, when I was 15, I had snuck out of the house to go to a party. It was at this rich girl's house and I knew she didn't like me, but I was surprised when she had invited me to her place. Yes, a red flag I should've seen from miles ago, but I was young and dumb and desperate to climb the highschool social hierarchy." You chuckled. "Anyways, long story short, one of the guys there pushed me into the pool because I don't know if they thought it was funny to see me drown? By some luck, I managed to grab onto the pool ledge and pull myself up. I immediately left the party, embarrassed and cold and on the verge of breaking down. Then on the way back home, there was this car following me and then some weirdo catcalled me and tried to get me in his car. Now, scared for my life because I watched a lot of Criminal Minds, I ran all the way home, praying that he leaves me alone. I think he stopped when he saw a Range Rover following him, but I don't know. I just rushed back home." You sighed. "You know what happened next? I bursted through the front door, slamming it shut and I turn around to see my dad in the living room, looking surprised to see me. He stood up and looked me up and down and then said, "Y/n? You're drenched completely. And you're messing up the floor. You know what? Mia's in the bathroom right now, why don't you go upstairs and I'll clean up here. You know how she gets when there's water on the wood." And I was just so shocked, that I didn't say anything and went back upstairs. Once I was in the shower, that's when I broke down crying. I almost drowned, almost got kidnapped and my father was worried about me messing up the wooden floor? Hell, he didn't even ask me why I was coming home at midnight." Your tears fell into the lake, making small ripples. You chuckled, "God, I always wondered how tired he must've been from work that day to ignore all these visible signs of distress. I always hated his job, you know? They made him work way too much." You looked at Handsome who was looking at the lake. "Anywho, now you know I can't swim so, save me if I fall into this lake, okay?" He nodded.
You guys sat in comfortable silence for a few more minutes before a question popped up in your mind. "Handsome?" He turned his head towards you, only to see a mischievous smile on your face. "Are you seeing someone?" The man turned his back to the lake, making you laugh. "Ahh, so you like someone. Tell me, is it someone from the village?" The man further turned his head away from you in embarrassment. "Oh come on, tell me! Is it a girl?" He nodded reluctantly, making you punch his arm. "You dog! Does she know?" Handsome shook his head, making you smile. "Tell you what? As a payback for saving me back there, I'll help you get her. I'll be your wingman, Handsome, hm?" He nodded a bit enthusiastically.
"We all deserve good things, Handsome. No matter how we look, or what we are, these things don't really define one's self worth. Its our intentions, you know?" Handsome didn't know, but he nodded anyways.
"Good. Now, lets go check out this place. Keep an eye out for Ethan and Rose, okay?" You told him, not knowing someone was already watching the two of you.
So... thought?
What did you guys think about Handsome? I'm gonna post a pic of him soon if you guys want.
Part 5 is here.
#yandere donna#yandere donna beneviento#yandere RE8: TRP#yandere ethan winters#yandere heisenberg#yandere karl heisenberg#karl heisenburg x reader#karl heisenberg#re8 karl heisenberg#ethan winters#yandere resident evil#yandere lady alcina#yandere lady dimitrescu#lady dimitrescu#lady alcina#lady alcina dimitrescu#alcina x reader#lady alcina x reader#donna beneviento#resident evil village#resident evil8#resident evil#resident evil 8#re8 alcina dimitrescu#re8 heisenberg#re8#re8 moreau#yandere moreau#moreau
1K notes
·
View notes
Text
“coffee!”
kuroo looks up to sudden call of the barista, eyes following the cup placed on the counter, and he’s sure that it’s his, almost certain of it, so he makes his way to take it, start the day right before heading to school.
but then someone beats him to it — another hand grabbing the cup from its place on the countertop, and to his surprise, his awful, horrifying surprise, that hand belonged to you.
you bring it up to your lips, taking a swig as if you’re confident it’s yours (it’s not) and he blinks, trying his best to make sense of the situation.
you. it’s actually you. the one person he’s been crushing on since the first year — totally stealing his cup of coffee.
“oh god.” you set the cup down, a look of disgust making through your face, and your nose scrunch, “that’s horrible coffee.”
he watches you say this, scoffing as he does, the corners of his lips turning upwards as he watches you try to flush out the taste, and kuroo almost feels offended.
“that’s actually my coffee order.” he tells you, walking up to where you stood, and he points to the cup in your hands; the obvious ‘kt’ written on the side of it.
you grimace, still tasting the bitter coffee in your mouth, “you really shouldn’t be proud of that.” you tell him, joking.
he feels like scoffing again, but a grin breaks out on his face instead, like he couldn’t help it when he’s around you.
“wait — you’re the guy from school.” you say, your tone sounding as if you solved a puzzle.
and he tilts his head, amused, “the guy from school?” he grins, flushing back the thought that you actually, sort of, kind of, knew of him.
“you don’t know me?” you ask, eyebrows quirking, and a grin playing by your lips.
oh, but kuroo does know you - he knows you well. he’s been classmates with you since freshman year at nekoma, and whilst the two of you never had any reason to interact, that didn’t really stop him from getting to know you as much as he possibly could.
he knows you’ve been reading the same jane austen novel for the past week now, he knows your favorite seat in the bleachers is the one on the far right corner by the clearing, and he knows a million other little details about you that’d probably be enough to earn him a restraining order if you’d found it more creepy and less charming.
call him observant, sure - but kenma’s called it a crush, and he feels that was way more accurate.
kuroo gives you a look, “and you know me?”
“yeah.” you nod, “you’re the guy from school.”
“you’re funny.” he tells you, crossing his arms, and he tries to act insulted, but there’s a sharp grin on his face that he can’t brush off, and that’s enough for you to know that he’s enjoying this conversation more than he’s letting on.
it’s funny; he’s sat five seats away from you for a whole year now and the two of you haven’t really had a conversation except for this one, and yet it just felt so comfortable talking to you, so natural that it stings even more that he’s never tried to do it before.
“flirting with me doesn’t change the fact that you don’t know how to order good coffee.” you tell him, shoulders rising as you smile.
and he tilts his head, his words mixing with a nervous swirl of laughter, “i was not flirting.”
not like he could anyways — this whole thing right now; him talking to you, is highly coincidental. if you hadn’t taken his coffee, if he hadn’t picked this cafe today, he’d probably still never worked up the courage to actually talk to you.
kuroo’d still be stuck, staring at you from five seats away, trying to figure out what novel you were trying to read or where you sat in the bleachers just so he can steal a glimpse of you every now and then when he plays.
if you hadn’t been here today, taking his coffee (and mocking him for it) he’d probably never get to talk to you at all.
“you weren’t flirting?” you ask him, crossing your arms, and the look on your face almost made him believe it was genuine.
kuroo shrugs, as honest as he could be, “i wasn’t.” (but he thinks, i would if i could.)
and you give him a nod, fixing your coat as you prepare to leave the café, your nose still a bit red from the cold, and kuroo’s only a little bit disappointed that the conversation ended almost as soon as it happened.
you give him a smile, “i kinda wish you were.”
(you leave the café. it takes him two minutes before running after you.)
#AT A LINE AT DUNKIN ORDERING COFFEE RN#HERES SOMETHING QUICK BC I GOT INSPIRED#x reader#fluff#haikyuu#angst#haikyuu x reader#imagines#haikyuu imagines#haikyuu scenarios#hq!!#haikyuu headcanons#haikyuu icons#haikyuu layouts#haikyuu soft hours#haikyuu drabbles#haikyuu blurbs#haikyuu songfics#kuroo tetsurou#kuroo#kuroo tetsuro#kuroo x reader#kuroo tetsuro x reader#kuroo tetsurou x reader#haikyuu timestamps#haikyuu oneshots#haikyuu fanfiction#kuroo x you#kuroo drabbles#haikyuu!!
545 notes
·
View notes
Text
Bob & B(l)ob| FNF x Reader
A/N: Just a thing I wanted to write bc I got Bob and Bob/Bosip brainrot on the mind :) Also I did my best to clarify which Bob is speaking/being described so apologies if it's still confusing for some.
Also, although Bob Takeover week is an alternate timeline I tried fitting this into the canon timeline where they battle BF after the whole takeover ordeal.
Summary: Reader is a good friend of Bob (Onslaught), Amor, Bob, and Bosip. They can travel between the real world and FNF universe. But after learning of the trouble the blob caused in the Takeover week of the VS Bob & Bosip mod, they enter the game once more to sort things out and clear up some misunderstandings.
......
"Oh give me a break.."
"What's wrong? Are Bob and Bosip okay?"
Amor stopped clicking around the laptop screen as he sighed and leaned back in his chair, looking to you. "I dunno, I can't find them anywhere in this mod. One moment Bob was rap-battling some blob character also called Bob. Then the next moment it crashes during the cutscene and they like..completely vanished. Bosip's not responding to any of my messages about the game, either."
When he mentioned the blob character, your eyes lit up. "Oh! I know that other Bob."
"You do?"
"Yeah, I met him in his original mod. He's broken the game before so...I suspect he's the reason those two are missing."
"...now I feel really bad for sticking them in this game without their knowledge. They thought they were going to Minecraft." He sweatdropped, nervously smiling as he booted up the game again. "Well if you can go in and see what's up, that'd be great. Sorry you gotta fix my mistake because...I honestly have no clue what happened to them."
"It's all good." You chuckled. "He can be unpredictable but I know him best. I'll get your boys back."
"Thanks, [y/n].
..........
Once you entered the game, it took you a while to find your blob-shaped friend in the park. You asked around with no apparent luck, and you began to worry that Bob somehow moved on from this mod.
It was unusual for Ron not to be here either, though you did see a red stain on the road-
"Yo."
You turned around upon hearing the voice and saw Bob in front of you, wearing a disguise of the missing Bob, complete with a blue wig that barely fit over his head. And instead of a blue B on his sweater, there was the word "gloopie".
As amused as you were upon seeing this, you just folded your arms over your chest, looking down at him with a frown. "Alright, fess up."
"Wut?"
"Don't play dumb. Where's the other Bob and Bosip? Amor's worried sick about what happened to them and I suspect you're involved."
He frowned back at you. "That cube-looking bitch beat me in a rap battle."
"And that's a reason to kidnap them both and pretend to be him?"
"....yes?"
"No." You sighed, before looking around. "Where's Ron, by the way?"
"Dead but "in a cool way"," he mocked the folderhead. "He got ran over. Man you should've seen his guts all over the road-"
"I'd rather not. Just...tell me where you took them or I'm getting Opheebop."
Your threat made Bob's eyes widen in horror. While he was scary on his own, nothing terrified him more than invoking the wrath of his girlfriend. So he finally gave in, his disguise dissolving into black goop that was reabsorbed into his body.
And he disgruntledly teleported you both into a dark building, which had a single dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. It took you a minute to adjust to the darkness, but eventually you heard muffled cries of confusion and panic nearby.
"Mmmh?!!!"
"Mmmhff!!!!"
Looking to the source, you were horrified to see Bob and Bosip were on the floor, their hands tied by rope with tape across their mouths. "What the--oh god hang on, guys." You ran over and knelt down to untie them, ripping the tape off as well.
And here you were, afraid that they've been killed. Amor definitely would've been upset if that were the case. There were a lot of dangers in the games they traveled in, and unfortunately nothing warned them of the blob's evil powers.
The moment you freed them, Bob saw the blob-Bob and screamed, clinging to you tightly. "K-Keep that thing away from me!!" He cried. "I don't know what it wants or why it kidnapped us but--!!"
"Bob..it's alright. We're safe now thanks to you." Bosip smiled at you, before looking back at the blob with discomfort. "But uh..do you know this guy by any chance? Seems it brought you here willingly."
"Oh he's a friend of mine from the mod Bob's Onslaught. His name is also..Bob and...uh--Bob? Bob, please calm down." You had a hard time explaining with the blue-haired male babbling nonsense in your ear. But you just sighed. "I'm really ashamed of you."
Suddenly he shut up and looked at you with teary eyes. "Wh-What?"
"No, no. I didn't mean you. I meant him." You pointed at the blob who was standing there awkwardly. "He's got a penchant for killing people who insult him or beat him in rap battles. He takes shit way too personally."
"No I don't."
"Ah, so he speaks." Bosip mused. "But in our defense, he challenged us first without knowing what we were capable of."
"Yeah!" Blue-haired Bob spoke up, still hugging you but with a less constricting grip now. "I take pride in my amazing vocals and I wasn't about to let some silly knockoff Dre-"
You immediately slapped a hand over his mouth to silence him, giving him a stern glare. "Don't ever call him that unless you want absolute death."
His eyes widened with fear, but he nodded in understanding and you removed your hand. Then he let go of you. "A-Alright. Thanks for saving us. Now can we go? This place gives me the creeps."
Nodding, you looked to the blob Bob. He sighed and willingly teleported everyone out of the building, putting you all back in the middle of the park.
In that same moment, Bosip's phone blew up with frantic texts from Amor, and he reassured his creator they were alright. Then he talked about how, according to those texts, they had to beat a guy named Boyfriend in a rap-battle to escape the game.
While Bob pondered over who would name their own kid "Boyfriend", you and the other Bob decided to take your leave, bidding farewell to the Geometry Dash duo.
"[Y/n]?"
"Yeah?"
"...you like that Bob more?"
You stopped in your tracks and looked down at him, shaking your head. "Nonsense. I've known you since forever. No other Bob in this universe will take your place as my best friend."
Even so, he was still pouting. "Seems you like hugging him more.."
"Oh..is that what this is all about? If you wanted a hug you could've just said so." Kneeling down, you hugged the blob and picked him up, grinning. "You know, your cosplay of him was neat. But...maybe try not to kidnap people you wanna cosplay next time, alright?"
"Fine." He grumbled, though he felt a little better knowing he was your favorite Bob.
Not that he'll ever admit it, but his jealousy was a major reason he decided to kidnap them in the first place.
#fnf x reader#friday night funkin x reader#fnf bob x reader#bob x reader#fnf bosip x reader#bosip x reader
53 notes
·
View notes
Text
Ash and Dust Part 2- Rude Awakening
18+ Dabi x fem!reader (MINORS DNI)
Summary: You first meet Dabi on the worst night of your life after unwittingly walking into the very bar the League of Villains made infamous. That should probably be the end of the story. You stumble on the remnants of one of the most infamous terrorist groups in the history of Japan, get viciously murdered or call the cops and get them arrested, the end. Except that’s not the end of the story. It’s only the beginning.
Masterlist Help Lulu <3
Your head is throbbing when you wake up, mouth tasting like cheap booze and regret. You’d managed to get into your bed but forgone pajamas, instead finding yourself in just your bra and underwear this morning as you fumble for your phone to shut off your alarm. You blink at the screen blearily only for your eyes to widen in panic when you notice the time. What on earth had possessed you to drink so heavily on a weeknight? You stumble out of bed, rushing to get ready so you can avoid being late. In record time you’ve brushed your teeth and thrown on the first matching blouse and slacks you could find. You wrench your bedroom door open and are mid-sprint to the door when a deep, slightly raspy voice stops you in your tracks.
“Don’t bother, you quit last night.”
You turn around slowly only for your heart to stop when your eyes meet piercing blue ones. Suddenly memories from the previous night come rushing back. Realizing you’d been cheated on, breaking up with your now ex, stumbling on the bar, choosing to have a drink and then another and another and then the memories just stop with no explanation as to why the fuck or how the fuck the most wanted man in Japan is sitting in your kitchen.
“I’m going to be late,” you find yourself mumbling in disbelief.
“I already told you, you quit.”“You’re lying.”
Dabi looks far too amused for your liking as he withdraws his phone and taps around on it before showing you the screen. It’s a video, you realize, apparently from last night and mortification slowly sinks in as Dabi hits play and the sound of you, drunk and slurring all your words, echoes in your tiny apartment. “Y’know wha- I fuckin’ hate ma stupid job and ma stupid boss who passes me up for promotions and promo’es fuckinnnn Kimiko instead, that bitch.” Your past self seems to pause, thinking for a moment, before amending “actually Kimiko’s really nice I didn’t mean that but like she’s been working at this stupid company half as long as I have. Why’d she get promo’ed n’stead of me?” There’s another drunken pause and then on Dabi’s suggestion you’re dialing your boss to very insistently inform him of your resignation.
If the world could suddenly open up and swallow you whole that’d be great.
“Why on earth would you let me do that?” you ask horrified.
“It was hilarious,” Dabi smirks.
You groan.
“How the fuck did you even get into my apartment?”
“You gave me the address Doll. Someone had to get your drunk ass home.”
Your mind suddenly flashes back to waking up half naked beneath your sheets and your face heats up. “Oh my god did we-“ you start but you’re cut off by Dabi’s cruel laughter. God how had you ever thought he was nice?
“Don’t flatter yourself, you puked all over your clothes on the way here and stripped the minute you got back to your room.”
And the hits just keep coming.
“Look I don’t know what you want but my friends-“
“Another lie. I’m starting to wonder what kind of person you are (y/n).”
“I didn’t even finish my sentence!”
“You told me last night you ditched all your friends for your now ex boyfriend ‘cause they hated him and thought he was a, what’s the word you used? Sleazebag? But oops! Turns out they were right huh?”
“Whatever, how do you even know my name?”
Dabi rolls his eyes and leans back in the chair he’s occupying, raising one eyebrow. “You’re a slow one aren’t you? You told me Doll. Told me every little detail about your sad little life last night while you were black out drunk.”
“Why the fuck are you here if my life is so fucking sad, huh?” you finally huff.
“It’s simple sweetheart,” he grins, “I’m bored.”
“You’re kidding me…”
“I’m not. I thought Psycho Barbie would be down for a good time but she’s a little…. testy right now. You’d think prison would’ve calmed her down but alas, kid’s out the joint all of five seconds and already threatening me.”
You stare at the man in front of you incredulously. Part of you desperately hopes all of this is just a very real, very creative nightmare but you know that’s not the case. So you decide to do the only thing you really can do at this point:
Run away and pray the problem fixes itself.
“I, uh, I’m going for a walk,” you tell your uninvited guest dazedly. He laughs at your obvious distress and you once again ask yourself how you could ever have thought the man in front of you is nice. “Yea, you do that doll. It ain’t gonna get you re-employed but you go do that,” he grins. You feel Dabi’s smug stare even after you’ve left and closed the door behind you.
You let your feet carry you, far less worried about getting lost in your own neck of the woods, and you aren’t entirely surprised when they end up leading you to the warehouse district where your little makeshift art studio resides. You navigate your way through storage units until you reach your own, quickly punching in the code to the door and stepping inside. The concrete floors and walls and the tin roof should make the place feel cold but stepping inside makes you feel warm and cozy in a way few other things do. You let your eyes flutter shut and take a deep breath in, the smell of paint and canvas filling your lungs. As you exhale, the tension in your body starts to ease and continues to do so as you make your way over to your easel to see your most recent work in progress.
It’s been ages since you’ve been here. As much as you love it, your art had been put on hold in order to grind harder at your job in hopes of getting a promotion. The same promotion you’d been passed up for and drunkenly ranted about to Dabi. You shake your head as if doing so will physically dispel the thoughts. You’ll have to face your boss and coworkers eventually so you can pick up your things but that’s a problem for future you. You’d forgotten entirely what you’d even been working on in the first place as you step in front of the easel and then smile as your eyes trace over it.
You remember now. You had wanted to do a study in anatomy and people in motion and who better to illustrate that then up-and-coming pro hero Deku. You’d done some of the sketching already, but there was more to be done before you could start painting. It sounds like the perfect way to get out some of your stress, so you go to your now dusty supply drawer and yank open the top drawer to reveal the paints you’d blown an irresponsible amount of your paycheck on a few months back. You grab out all the colors you’ll need before scrolling back through your phone’s photos to find the picture you’d been using for reference. Then, your supplies all gathered, you settle into your seat and lose yourself in the work.
By the time you find a good stopping point, the sketching now completely finished and about a quarter of the piece painted, your back aches from being in the same position for so long. Still a lot of your stress has faded away so you’re more than satisfied with your impromptu art day. You stand with a stretch, your spine popping as you do so, and resolve to come back soon. As you step outside you realize the sun must have long since set, the moon high and bright in the sky. Your entire day gone but you can’t find it in you to regret it as you make your way back to your apartment. You’re ready to collapse into bed by the time you finally get home, relief flooding through you when you don’t find Dabi still kicked back in the chair you’d left him in.
Imagine your surprise when you find him in your bedroom instead.
Dabi is starfished out on his stomach, blankets and sheets pooling around his waist to reveal his bare back as he snores away. Your eyes rake over the planes of muscle, pale skin littered in scars intermingled with charred flesh. You shake your head to snap yourself out of it. The asshole is taking up your entire bed! For a brief moment you consider waking him up to kick him out but then your mind flashes to the news coverage you’ve seen of him and you immediately swallow the impulse. Instead you sigh and head to your closet, grabbing the spare blankets and pillow you keep there and heading back out to the living room. As you make yourself as comfortable as you can on your beat up old couch, you tell yourself you just need to get through the night.
Your last thought before drifting to sleep is a desperate prayer that Dabi will be gone by the time you wake.
A/N: Slowly but surely we’re getting into this! Dabi is a menace. A very bored menace. Which is not a great combination for reader
Taglist: @thechroniclesofawriter @simpsfortodoroki @ahtsuwu @oliviasslut @larkspyrr @oikawaandkuroostan @tina-98
66 notes
·
View notes
Text
RANDOM SHIT ARIANNA HAS SAID 🍓
“A bunch of people last year in my grade made my art teacher cry”
“I think I just had the best nap of my entire life”
“HOW MUCH OF YOU ARE CANADIANS??????”
“I swear to god I’m at this corn burning thing for Christians because my grandparents are, and I’m literally atheist”
“Boring museum”
“Secret sibling?”
“affection. yes.”
“not nice”
“I swear to fuck”
“stop mentioning you’re stupid Donald trump x hopper smut fic, that was horrifying times and I’m not ready to relive that”
“wow my mom didn’t even come into my room to tell me food was here? fucking starving”
“Here I am, trying to be sad and angsty on tik tok but all I’m seeing is that stupid ahegao sex face trend-”
“Right before firework day”
“Oh no- it’s actually just a picture of my baby cousin-”
“WAIT THAT WAS YOU???”
“NOW IF THAT ISNT ME”
“I HAVE A MATH TEST”
“wow, stan your mom”
“then don’t be a dumb bitch”
“Get better soon bestie”
“I am mike wheeler”
“party rockers in the house tonight”
“ FUCK FUCK FUCK DUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK”
“LAUGH”
“THE PHOTOGRAPHY ADDITION?!?!”
“WERE TINY”
“Get squeaky clean 🧼”
“Really said peace out like Chester”
“I think I just had the best nap of my entire life”
“What do people normally do when they hit 100”
“I’m sorry but WHO THE FUCK likes salt and vinegar chips?!?!??!?!??!!?!!!!!??!”
“I want so badly to make out with one of my mutuals. truth”
“YOUR OPINIONS ARE WEIRD”
“LOOK AT THIS”
“My initials are AMS so if my parents gave me a middles name that started with an S my initials would be ass :D”
“FUCK SOMEONE ALREADY TOOK IT WHAT THE FUCK”
“I love your dad”
“you’re still sexy”
“HATE KIDS”
“BAHAHHA IT FITS THO”
“just- why is will’s ass so packing?? What’s the reason?”
“Noah. no”
“FUN”
“This is odd”
“Get em’ tiger”
“deez nuts”
“What the fuck is going on”
“✨Cat boy will✨”
“monopoly… but worse”
“WHATS WRONG WITH MASHED POTATOES??”
“🪦- in loving memory strangerbug08”
“IT ALMOST AUTOCORRECTED TO BRA JDKSJXJ”
“I WAS TOO BUSY FANGIRLING OVER PHOTOGRAPHY”
“Hope the bed bugs don’t bite”
“Sloppy”
“Slap her”
“WE’RE ON A PROFIT”
“Smiled?!?!”
“NO”
“YES”
“LORD GIVE ME PEACE”
“HE SAID HI TO ME?!?!”
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO”
“What the hell??”
“WHAT IS THIS??”
“WHY ME??”
“IM ABOUT TO PISS MYSELF”
“WHAT IS THAT??”
“69”
“M*LEVEN TW”
“🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅”
“Emo gang”
“IM SO ENTHUSIASTIC”
“AN ONION”
“THEY DON’T HAVE MAC AND CHEESE IN BRAZIL??”
“THE POINT”
“JUST IMAGINE”
“Give me a kiss PLEASE”
“🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅”
“POINTY”
“i DON’T do photography BEA”
“fae FAE FAE FAE”
“ANYWAYS”
“TOPIC CHANGE”
“the tide pod challenge. HAH”
“coco-cola is a red flag. NO QUESTIONS”
“I will get a flight to brazil AND SLAP YOU”
“THAT LOOKS LIKE A BURRITO”
“PHOTOGRAPHY”
“STOP SENDING ME PORN SITES”
“IT JUST RANDOMLY TURNED TO PINK. I DON’T KNOW”
“don’t make me squeal”
“101 actually BUT STILL”
“SHUSH”
“You think they make like. Smarties pop tarts? That’d be wack”
“Don’t call your mom a bitch. Bitch”
“Time travel is real. No questions”
“BOP IT, TWIST IT , PULL IT YURRR”
“That is actually so ironic because I’m actually allergic”
“Fuck thanksgiving. What is thanksgiving gonna do? FEED YOU??”
“STOP SENDING ME PORN SITES”
22 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Cold is Her Savior
A Wanda version was requested of “50% Ice, 50% Fire, 100% Smitten” so you ask and you shall receive!
Requested by @capmarvelq
Summary: Y/N has a crush on Wanda, and Wanda has a crush on her. Y/N doesn’t like using her ice powers because she hates the cold, but she’s forced to when Wanda is in danger, and feelings are revealed.
“Y/N, Wanda,” Steve said as he entered the Avengers Tower living room. The team had been sitting there, all chatting and watching the T.V. Y/N had been talking with Natasha and Wanda with Clint, but both women looked up when they heard their names.
The Captain smiled, pausing before continuing. “I have a mission for you two.”
Y/N’s eyebrows raised and her eyes lit up with interest - it wasn’t so common that you’d go on a mission with not all of the team, but that wasn’t it. Y/N was going on a mission with her crush, and she was beyond excited.
Little did she know that Wanda had returned her feelings, and she had gasped and grasped onto Clint’s arm in her surprise, nearly breaking it.
Immediately, the two scrambled up to follow Steve to the conference room. The rest of the team poorly concealed their chuckles, seeing them both so energetic. Everyone was aware of their crushes on each other, except them.
“I think Rogers paired them up on purpose,” Natasha whispered to Clint with a smirk.
-------------------------------------------------------
“Okay,” Steve began, closing the conference door and turning to the two Avengers. “We need you to gather intel on this private organization. We got a tip that they’re planning something against the Avengers and important information regarding it is stored inside one of the old members’ house. His family, who seem to be unaware of what he is doing, is hosting a gala and we expect some of the members of this organization to be there. You need to find the information before they do and, if possible, take the guys back to S.H.I.E.L.D. Banner will be coming for medical, just in case, and Barton will be coming to act from the van. We need you two out there because we think the guys have powers - Inhumans, maybe.”
Y/N and Wanda nodded.
“When do we leave?” Wanda asked.
“Right after you get your disguises,” Steve answered.
Y/N grinned.
-------------------------------------------------------
“See anyone suspicious?”
“Clint, we literally just set foot into the place,” Y/N said quietly into her headpiece, rolling her eyes at the archer who couldn’t see her. Wanda caught that and flashed her a smile, obviously amused.
Y/N nearly fainted. ‘Mission, Y/N. You and Wanda have a mission,’ she reminded herself sternly.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’m gonna get cracking on seeing if I can identify our enemies,” Clint said, and they heard some shuffling.
“You do that,” Wanda said, Y/N having joined the witch by her side so it wouldn’t look like Wanda was just talking to herself. “Y/N and I will dance.”
Y/N stopped in her tracks, fear flooding her. She stared dumbly at the redhead for a moment. “W-what?” She spluttered, confused.
“Dance, Y/N! We need to blend in,” Wanda said with a giggle.
Oh, boy, did that giggle make Y/N’s heart flutter.
“Okay,” she agreed quietly and nervously, and barely contained her excitement when Wanda led her onto the dance floor, as more classical music started playing.
“You know the waltz?” Wanda asked, teasingly.
As they danced, Y/N was sure that this was what heaven was. Wanda danced so gracefully, and Y/N’s cheeks burned, imagining how clumsy she was. She nearly stepped on her friend’s toes! Occasionally, the redhead would twirl her around, and Y/N couldn’t ignore the chill that’d go down her spine, nor could she deny how she felt so special and so loved.
“I’ve identified them and found out where the information is,” Clint broke in, effectively ruining Y/N’s great dream. She found herself feeling a little out of sorts. While dancing she almost forgot that they were doing something important.
“The two guys by the bar, the one dancing with the women in the white dress to your right, and the two guys by the food table are them. I think whatever information is stored on a computer on the second floor, third room to the left,” Clint continued.
Wanda twirled Y/N around once more before responding to him. “I can go find the information, and I’ll turn off comms to secure the cover. Y/N, you wanna keep them occupied?” She asked.
Y/N nodded, but didn’t like the idea of Wanda turning her comms off.
Together, the two thought up a tale and then managed to get to the two men by the bar.
“You gentleman wouldn’t happen to know where the bathroom is?” Wanda asked.
The men shared a glance. “Second floor, fourth door to your right,” the guy on the left answered.
Wanda nodded, thanking him, before leaving.
Y/N put on a smile as another song came on. She gasped. “Would one of you care to dance with me whilst I wait for my friend?” She asked.
“Uhh, sure,” the guy on the right answered, and he stepped forward to take Y/N’s hands.
“I’ll get drinks,” the other guy said.
Y/N and the man danced for a couple minutes and his friend handed them drinks. Y/N sipped hers and continued to dance, while also casting glances on the room, keeping her eyes on all of their enemies.
However, she started to feel a bit odd . . . It was probably nothing, however Y/N excused herself from her dancing partner for a moment to alert Clint. The dress she was wearing was actually her superhero suit (it could change its appearance quickly). The suit had a cool feature where it could analyze a liquid or food that seemed abnormal, in case of poison or knock-out gas.
It only took a couple of moments for Clint to get back to her. “Y/N, Bruce looked it over. It’s slowly blocking your powers so eventually you won’t be able to use them until the liquid is out of your system. It only detects and works if it’s ingested by someone with powers,” he said quickly.
“Shit,” Y/N whispered, because at the same time she saw two of the guys disappearing the same way Wanda had gone.
She had to follow them, and she had to be quick.
-------------------------------------------------------
Y/N took off frantically, but not that frantically to cause too much suspicion. As she walked to the stairs she saw the men get to the second floor, and when she got there herself, she heard a scream.
Y/N ran forward, unable to comprehend what Clint was telling her, and burst into the room.
Her amazing Wanda had her arms over her head, stumbling around in pain, as she stood in front of the computer. The men were on either side of her using their powers on her.
Y/N went to use her ice power to send a fireball their way, so powerful that it’d make them both crash into the wall but would otherwise do no damage. However, nothing was happening. Whatever was in her drink must have deactivated her heating powers already.
She had to use her cold powers, which she hated, or else both of them, plus the mission, were screwed.
Y/N took a deep breath and with a wave of her hands, she made the floor underneath the two men pure ice. Then, thrusting her hands down and breaking her concentration, the ice cracked and both men fell through the floor to the first floor.
Seconds later, though, Y/N screamed as she felt some sort of immense pain hit her. She stumbled, and the last thing she saw before collapsing and passing out was Wanda angrily using her powers on someone.
-------------------------------------------------------
“Please, Y/N, wake up, okay? I really, really need you too! Oh, god, I should have told you earlier, and now that Bruce says you might slip into a coma . . . I-I love you, Y/N! And . . . I need you to be awake so that I can actually tell you, cause I’ve had a crush on you for the longest time.”
Y/N didn’t open her eyes, but she was able to make out what this person - Wanda, was it? - was saying. Before she could respond, though, she drifted back into unconsciousness.
-------------------------------------------------------
When Y/N came to, she found herself lying in the Avengers Tower medical bay, hooked up to an I.V and other machines. She tried to recall what happened . . . Wanda was in danger . . . She used her ice powers . . . The rest was blank. Looking around the room, she spotted the very women in question sitting in a chair.
“Y/N!” Wanda said, scrambling to get up and leaping to her side.
“Hey . . .” Y/N said, finding that her voice was croaking. “What happened?”
“Right after you saved me, one of the guys used his powers on you. Caused you a lot of pain, even more so because your powers were deactivating, and it overwhelmed you. You nearly slipped into a coma . . . but it’s been a day since the mission,” Wanda answered.
Y/N nodded slowly, although her eyebrows furrowed in confusion as she remembered something else . . .
“Did you, uh, happen to confess your love to me?” She asked sheepishly.
Wanda’s eyes went wide. “You heard that?” She asked, horrified.
Y/N nodded again. “Yeah . . . For the record, I love you, too.” She smiled.
#wanda maximoff#wanda maximoff x reader#wanda maximoff x you#wanda maximoff x y/n#reader insert#avengers x reader#avengers x you#avengers x y/n#mcu fic#mcu avengers#avengers imagine#wanda maximoff imagine#scarlet witch#scarlet witch x reader#mcu#marvel cinematic universe#marvel#mcu x you#mcu x reader#mcu x y/n#marvel x y/n#marvel x reader#marvel x you#avengers reader insert#marvel requests#requests open#asks open#send me requests#send me asks#send in requests
288 notes
·
View notes
Text
In Search of Lost Screws (RQBB '21)
Here at last is my entry for the 2021 Rusty Quill Big Bang!
Fandom: The Magnus Archives
Rating: T
Word count: ~30k
Warnings: Chronic Illness, Mild Body Horror, Internalized Ableism, Canon-Typical Spiders, Mention of Canon-Typical Suicidal Ideation, Alcohol
Other tags: Cane-user Jon, EDS Jon, Canon-compliant, Season 5, Set in 180-181 (Upton Safehouse period)
Characters: Jon Sims, Martin Blackwood, Mikaele Salesa (secondary), Annabelle Cane (secondary)
Relationships: Jon/Martin
Summary: While staying at Upton House, Jon and Martin accidentally break their bedroom’s doorknob, and can’t get back into the room until they fix it. Meanwhile Jon tries not to break into literal pieces without the Eye, and also to pretend he’s having a good time as he and Martin lunch with Annabelle, parry gifts from Salesa, and quarrel about whether Jon’s okay or not. He's fine! It's just that the apocalypse runs on dream logic, and chronic pain feels worse when you're awake.
Excerpt:
“Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.”
“Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?”
Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice.
“Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him.
“Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.”
“Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.”
Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?
Huge thanks to @pilesofnonsense for hosting this event; to @connanro for beta-reading; and to @silmapeli for their amazing illustration, whose own post you can find here.
If you prefer, you can read this fic instead on Ao3. I won't link it directly, since Tumblr has trouble with external links, but if you google the title and add "echinoderms" (my Ao3 handle), it should come up!
Crunch. “Oh god. Shit! Oh god, oh no—”
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
A clatter, then a noise like a small rock scraping a large one. Jon’s heart plunged; halfway through his question he knew the answer.
“I—I broke it? Look, see, the whole thing just—take this.” Martin tore his hand out of Jon’s and dropped the severed doorknob in it instead. Then he dropped to the floor, diving head- and hands-first for the crack between it and the door as if that crack were a portal between dimensions. Jon closed his eyes and shook this image away, hoping when he opened them again he could focus on what was real.
He should have known this would happen from the moment they left for breakfast. Every time he’d opened that door its knob felt a little looser. Why hadn’t he warned Martin? Well, alright, he didn’t need powers to know that one. He just hadn’t thought of it. Been a bit preoccupied, after all. And even if he had thought of it, that was exactly the kind of conversation he’d been shying away from all week. Watch out for that doorknob; it’s a little loose, he would say, and yeah, probably Martin would answer, Oh, thanks. But there was a chance Martin would say instead, Why didn’t you tell me?—and all week Jon had obeyed an instinct to avoid prompting that question. All week he had made sure to enter and exit their room a few steps ahead of Martin, and hold the door open for him. Martin probably just saw it as Jon’s way of apologizing for their first few months in the Archives together, and once that thought occurred to him Jon had started to look at it that way himself. Maybe that’s why he’d forgot this time.
“Nooo-oooo, come on come on!”
“I don’t think you’ll fit,” Jon said, when he looked again and found Martin trying to wedge his fingers under the door.
(Martin used to leave Jon’s office door open behind him—perhaps absentmindedly, but more likely as a gesture of friendship and openness, which the Jon of that time would not suffer. Sasha and Tim, n.b., only left his door open on their way into his office, when they didn’t intend to stay long; Martin would leave it gaping even if he didn’t mean to come back. Every time Jon had sighed, pulled himself to his feet, and closed the door behind Martin, drawing out the click of its tongue in the latch. And a few times he’d closed the door in front of him, so as to exclude him from a conversation between Jon and Tim or Sasha that he, Martin, had tried to weigh in on from outside Jon’s office.)
“What are you looking for?”
“The—the screw, I saw it roll under there. It fell down on our side. Oh, my god, it was so close—if I’d reacted just half a second earlier, I could’ve?—shit.”
“Oh.” Jon huffed out a cynical laugh.
“I can’t believe it. I broke Salesa’s door! He welcomes us in to an oasis, and I break the door. Oh, god—I’ve broken an irreplaceable door, in a stately historic mansion!”
A few more demonstrative huffs of laughter. “No you didn’t.”
Martin paused. He didn’t get up, but did turn his head to look at Jon. “Yes I did. It’s right there in your hand, Jon—”
“I should’ve known. Check for cobwebs, Martin.”
“Oh come on.”
“This can’t be your fault—it’s far too neat. This is all part of Annabelle’s plan.”
“Do you know that?”
“W-well, no. I can’t, not here. I just—”
“Yeah, I don’t think so, Jon. Pretty sure it’s just an old doorknob.”
“Did you check for cobwebs?”
“Of course there are no cobwebs. A spider wouldn’t even have time to finish building the web before somebody wrecked it opening the door!”
“Then what’s that?” With the tip of his cane Jon tapped the floor in front of a clot of gray fluff in the seam between two walls next to the door, making sure not to let it touch the clot itself.
Martin rolled over to see where he was pointing, and almost stuck his elbow in it. “Ah. Gross. Gross, is what that is.”
“Christ, I should’ve known this would happen. I did know this would happen,” Jon reminded himself—“just ignored the warning signs because I can’t think straight here.”
“It doesn’t mean anything, Jon. It’s a corner. Spiders love corners. I mean, unless you can prove the corner of our doorway has more spiderwebs than anywhere else in the house—”
“Well, of course not. You forget she’s got her own corner somewhere, which we still haven’t found by the way—”
“So, what, you think Annabelle Cane lassoed the screw with a strand of cobweb.”
“Not literally? She could be sitting on the other side of the door with a magnet for all we know!”
Martin peered under the door again with an exasperated sigh. “She’s not.”
“Not now she’s heard us talking about her.”
God, what a delicate web that would be, if all he had to do to avoid the spider’s clutches was reach a door before Martin did. Perhaps if he’d knocked first that’d have saved him. Maybe Martin was right. How could Annabelle know him well enough to foresee this mistake? Most of the time he hated people opening doors for him, after all.
Why do people see someone with a cane and think, Only one free hand? How ever will he open the door!? They don’t do that for people with shopping bags—not ones his age, at least. Letting another person open a door for him felt to Jon like… defeat, somehow. Like admitting the dolce et decorum estness of this version of reality all nondisabled people seemed to live in where he couldn’t open doors. And that version of reality horrified him. Not so much the idea of being too weak to open them—that sounded merely annoying. Like knocking the sides of jar lids on tables and swearing, only with doors. He had beat his fists against enough Pull doors in his time to figure he could live with that. It was more the idea of becoming that way. Letting his door-opening muscles atrophy ‘til it became the truth.
But sometimes you just let a thing happen, and forget to hate it. That was the thing about pride. Sometimes your convictions and your habits stop fitting together—you believe Fuck this job with all your heart, but still tuck in your shirt when you come to the office. And then you fly back from America in borrowed clothes, and pop in at the Institute like that on your way to Gertrude’s storage unit, and that’s what changes your habits. Not the knowledge you can’t be fired; not your now-boyfriend’s plot to put your then-boss behind bars. A thirdhand t-shirt with a slogan on it about how to outrun bears.
On his way out this morning the doorknob had felt so loose in Jon’s hand he almost had told Martin about it. But Martin had been full of let’s-go-on-an-adventure-together-style chatter—like when they’d left Daisy’s safehouse, only, get this, without the dread of entering an apocalyptic wasteland—and listening to him put the door out of Jon’s mind before he’d had time to interject.
Their first day here—or at least, the first they spent awake—Jon had inadvertently taught Martin not to accept invitations from Salesa. The latter had bounded up after Martin’s lunch in linen shirt and whooshy shorts and was, to Martin’s then-unseasoned heart, impossible to deny. So Jon had spent thirty minutes on a creaky folding chair, lunging out of his seat on occasion to collect a ball one of the other two had hit wrong, and trying to keep Salesa’s too-bright white socks out of sight. He’d pretended he preferred to sit out, knowing Martin would worry if he tried to play. But he hadn’t done as good a job hiding his boredom as he thought. “Thanks for putting up with that. Sorry it went on so long,” Martin had said as they re-entered their bedroom. “I just couldn’t say no to him, you know? For such a cynical old man he’s got impressive puppy eyes.”
“It’s fine? You know me, I don’t mind… watching.”
“I just mean, I’m sorry you couldn’t play. How’s your leg, by the way? Er—both your legs, I guess.”
“It’s fine. They’re both fine. I didn’t want to play anyway, remember? I don’t know how.”
“Sure you don’t,” Martin replied, words tripping over a fond laugh.
“I don’t!”
“Come on, Jon. Everyone knows how to play ping-pong.”
Martin had turned down Salesa when he showed up the next day in khaki shorts and a pith helmet with three butterfly nets, without Jon’s having to say a word. More emphatically still did he turn him down when Salesa mentioned the house had an indoor pool, and offered to lend them both antique bathing suits like the one he had on, “Free of charge! A debtor is an enemy, after all, and in this new world I have no wish to make an enemy of” (sarcastic whisper, fingers wiggling) “the Ceaseless Watcher who rules it. I have nothing to hide from you,” he’d alleged, for the… third time that day, maybe? Each morning Jon resolved to count such references; he rarely missed one, as far as he knew, but kept forgetting how many he’d counted.
But Salesa was a salesman, and over time his efforts had grown more subtle. He stopped showing up already dressed for the activity he had in mind, and instead would drop hints at meals about all the fun things they could do if only they would let him show them. Martin loved how the winter sunlight caught, every afternoon around four, in the branches of a tree visible outside the window of their bedroom. “Ah, yes,” Salesa had agreed when he remarked on it one morning. “Turning it periwinkle and the golden green of champagne.” (He poured sparkling wine—the cheap stuff, he said, not real champagne—into an empty juice glass still lined with orange pulp. Over and over, without once overflowing. The oranges weren’t ripe enough to drink their juice plain yet, he said. But they’d still run out of juice first.) “If you think that’s beautiful”—he paused to swallow bubbles come up from his throat, waved his hand, shook his head. “No. On one tree, yes, it is beautiful. But on a whole orchard of bare trees in winter”—he nodded in the direction of Upton’s orchards—“the afternoon sun is sublime. You can see how the twigs shrink and shiver under its gaze; the grass rustles with a hitch in its breath as if it fears to be seen, but with each undulation a new blade flashes gold like a coin,” &c., &c.
“Wow. Sounds like you really got lucky, finding such a nice place to, uh. Sssset up camp?”
Jon knew Martin well enough to hear the judgment in his voice; if Salesa recognized it then he was an expert at pretending not to. “And it's only a two-minute walk away,” he’d said, instead of taking Martin’s bait. “It would be such a shame for my guests not to see it.”
“Oh, well. Maybe in a few days? It’s just, we’ve been outside nonstop for ages. It’s nice to be between four walls again. Besides, we don’t know the grounds as well as you do—and the border isn’t all that stable, you said? Right?”
“It is if you know how to follow it! I could accompany you—show you all the best sights, with no risk of wandering back out into the hellscape by mistake.”
“We’re just not really ready for that, I don’t think. Right, Jon?”
“Mm.”
“Are you sure? If it were me, a foray into a beautiful natural oasis would be just what I needed to convince myself that my peace—my sanctuary—is real.”
“If it is real,” Jon couldn’t stop himself from muttering.
Salesa remained impervious. “You would be surprised how difficult it is to feel fear in a place like that. I don’t think that is just the camera.”
“We‘ll think about it,” Martin conceded.
“Yes—you should both think about it. I am at your disposal whenever you change your mind.”
And so on that morning they had narrowly escaped. Would they had fared so well today. The problem was, on these early occasions Jon had interpreted Martin’s No thankses as being, well, Martin’s. But after a few more of Salesa’s sales pitches Jon began to second-guess that.
“Is it warm enough in here for you both?” Salesa had asked them last night at dinner. “I worry too much, perhaps. I only wish the place took less time to warm up in the morning. At breakfast time, in sunny weather like we've been having, I’ll bet you anything you like it’s warmer out there than in here.”
“It’s alright; we’re not too cold in the mornings either. Right, Jon?”
“Hm? Oh—no.”
“Perhaps we three could take breakfast out there, before the weather changes.”
“Ha—that’s right,” Martin had laughed. “I forgot you still had that out here. Weather changes. Brave new world, I guess.”
Salesa smirked and shrugged. “Well, braver than the rest of it.”
“R…ight. ‘We three,’ you said—so not Annabelle?”
“Mmmmno, probably not her. I have tried taking spiders outside before; they never seem to like it much.”
Nearly every day, here, Jon found a spider in their bathtub. The first time Martin had been with him. Martin had picked the thing up with his fingers and tried to coax it to leave out the window, but by the time he got there it’d crawled up his sleeve.
“Excuse me.”
Martin pulled back his own chair too and frowned up at him. “You okay?”
“Just needed the toilet.” He tried to arrange his mouth into a gentle smile. “Think I can do that on my own.”
The other two resumed their conversation the moment Jon left the dining room. Before the intervening walls muffled their voices Jon heard:
“I suppose that does sound pretty nice.”
“Pretty nice, you suppose? Martin, Martin—it’s a beautiful oasis! What a shame it will be if you leave this place having done no more than suppose about it.”
“It is a bit of a waste, I guess.”
“You wouldn’t need to sit on the ground, if that’s what concerns you. There are benches everywhere.”
He’d been just about to cross through a doorway and out of earshot when he froze, hearing his name:
“Oh, ha—not me, but, Jon might find that nice to know,” Martin said. “Thanks for.” And then silence.
Was that the whole reason he kept declining invitations to explore the grounds? To keep grass stains out of Jon’s trousers? Martin was the one who’d sat down on that godforsaken Extinction couch; why did he think—?
Not the point, Jon told himself as he sat on the toilet and set his forehead on the heels of his palms. He tried to watch the floor for spiders, but his eyes kept crossing. The point was that if—? If Martin was lying about wanting to stay inside—or, more charitably, if he was telling the truth but wanted that only because he thought Jon would have as dismal a time out in the garden as he had at ping-pong—then…?
He imagined holding hands with Martin while surrounded by green. Gravel crunching under their feet. Martin smiling, with sunlight caught in the strands of his hair that a slight breeze had blown upright.
“And if you get too warm,” he heard Salesa tell Martin, as he headed back into the dining room, “we can move into the shade of the pines! You know, they don’t just grow year-round? They also shed year-round. The floor under them is always carpeted in needles, so you need never get mud on your shoes.”
“Huh,” Martin laughed. “Never thought of it that way.”
“But of course there are benches there too,” Salesa added, his eyes flickering up to Jon.
As Jon hauled himself into his seat he asked, in a voice he hoped the strain made sound distracted ergo casual, “So, what, like a picnic, you mean.”
Not a fun picnic. Not very romantic, since their third wheel was the first to invite himself. Salesa neglected to mention how much wet grass they would have to trek through to get to his favorite spot; that there were benches everywhere didn’t matter since they couldn’t all three fit on one, so they ended up sat in the dirt after all—and n.b. it required a second trek to find a patch of dirt dry enough to sit on at this time of morning. Jon was so sick with fatigue by the time they sat down he could barely eat a thing, though he did dispatch most of Martin’s thermos of tea. His hands shook and buzzed, and felt clumsy, like they’d fallen asleep; he ended up getting more jam in the dirt than on Salesa’s soggy, pre-buttered toast. He felt as though the rest of his flesh had melted three feet to the left of his eyes, bones and mind. Eventually he elected to blame his dizziness on the sun. When his forehead and upper lip started to prickle, threatening sweat, he stood up and announced, “It’s too hot here.”
Or tried to stand, anyway. One leg had oozed just far enough out of its joint that it buckled when he tried to stand; indigo and fuchsia blotches overtook his sight. He pitched forward, free arm pinwheeling—might have fallen into the boiled eggs if Martin hadn’t caught him. “Jon! Are you okay?”
God, why was Martin so surprised? This must have been the fifth or sixth time he had asked him that question since they left the house. One time Jon had bent down to brush dirt off his leg and Martin had thought he was scratching his bandages. So he asked him were they itchy, had they started to peel, did they need changing again, were they cutting off his circulation (no, not yet, not yet, and no). How could someone be so attentive to imaginary ills and yet miss the real ones? At another point, an enormous blue dragonfly had buzzed past, and instead of Did you see that? Martin had turned around to ask Are you okay. Now, on this fifth or sixth occasion, for a few seconds of pure, nonsensical rage he wondered how Martin dared stoop to such emotional blackmail. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Jon thought; aloud he snorted, as in malicious laughter. His throat felt thick, like he might cry.
“Fine, I’m just—sick of it here.” He pulled his arm free of Martin’s and overbalanced. Didn’t fall, just. Staggered a little.
“Should we move to the shade? We could try to find those famous pines, I guess.”
Jon sank back to the ground. “What about Salesa? Do we just leave him here?”
“Oh. Right,” said Martin. Salesa had eaten most of Jon’s share, and drunk both Jon’s and Martin’s shares of wine. Now he lay asleep in the dirt, head pillowed on one elbow, the other hand’s fingers curled round the stem of a glass still half full. “I guess, yeah? I mean he seems to know the place pretty well, so. It’s not like he’ll get lost out here.”
“We might, though.”
Martin sighed. “True. Should we just head back to our room, then? Maybe get you a snack.”
“Not hungry.”
“A statement, I meant.”
“Oh. Alright, sure,” Jon made himself say. “That sounds like—sure.”
So then they’d headed back, and only Martin had a free hand, and Jon was too tired by that point to distinguish his mind’s vague warning not to let Martin open the door from his usual pride on that subject—and that kind of pride never does seem as important when it’s your boyfriend offering. So he’d dismissed the warning and, well, look what happened.
When he got up from his knees and turned round Martin frowned at Jon. “Are you alright? You’re sat on the floor.”
Jon frowned, too—at the seam between the floor and the hallway’s opposite wall. “I was tired.”
“You hate sitting on the floor.”
“I sat on the ground out there,” Jon said, with a shrug that morphed into a nod in the direction they’d come from.
“Yeah, under duress,” Martin scoffed. “In the Extinction domain you wouldn’t even sit on the couch.”
There was something odd in Martin’s bringing that up now; somewhere, in the back of his mind, Jon could hear a pillar of thought crumbling. But he lacked the energy to find out which of his mind’s structures now stood crooked. “I think this floor is a lot cleaner than that couch,” he said instead, with an incredulous laugh.
“Even with the cobwebs?” Martin didn’t wait for Jon’s answering nod. “Fair enough,” he said, one hand on the back of his neck as he twisted it back and forth. He dropped the hand, sighed, cracked his knuckles. Looked at Jon again. “Yeah, okay. Guess we don’t have to deal with this right now. Let’s find you another bedroom first.”
“Maybe that’s just what Annabelle wants,” Jon muttered, deadpanning so he wouldn’t have to decide whether this was a joke.
Martin snorted. “I’ll risk it.”
Find was a generous way to put it; in fact there was another bedroom only two doors down. By the time Jon got his legs unfolded he could hear the squeak of a door swinging open down the hall. When he looked up, Martin said as their eyes met, “Nope—bed’s too small. You good there ‘til I find one that’ll work?”
“Seems that way.” Jon tried to smile, relief warring with his usual If you want something done right urge. In the quiet moment after Martin neglected to close that door and before he swung open the next one, Jon made himself add, “Thank you.”
“Of course. Oh wow,” Martin said of the next room, in whose doorway he’d stopped. “This one’s a lot nicer than ours. It’s got a balcony. Wallpaper’s pretty loud though. D’you think that’ll keep you awake?” Laughingly, “I know you don’t close your eyes to sleep anymore, so.”
“How loud is ‘pretty loud’?”
“Sort of a… dark, orangey red, with flowers?”
Jon shrugged. “I won’t see it at night.”
“Oh, god. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Should we do this one, then?” Instead of closing the door, Martin swung it the rest of the way open, then strode back to Jon’s side of the corridor, arm already outstretched. Jon managed to stand before Martin could reach him, but, as it had done outside, his vision went dark for a few seconds. He felt Martin’s hand on his shoulder before he could see his frown.
“You alright?” Martin asked yet again.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“It’s just—you don’t usually blink anymore, except for effect.”
“Oh.”
Out there, none of the watchers blinked. At first, soon after the change, Martin had asked Jon to try, “Because it just feels so weird. Like I’m under constant scrutiny. Literally constant, Jon. You get why that feels weird, right?” (Jon had agreed—sincerely, though he wondered why Martin needed to ask that question in a world whose central conceit was that being watched felt weird. He’d also chosen not to point out that his scrutiny, like that of Jonah Magnus, was not, technically, constant, since he did sometimes look at other things. But he still rehearsed this retort in his mind every time he remembered that conversation.) Turned out it was hard to time your blinks properly when your eyeballs didn’t need the moisture. He’d forget about it for who knew how long, then remember and overcompensate by blinking so often Martin at first thought he was exaggerating it on purpose as a joke. It got old fast, in Jon’s opinion, but even after he learnt Jon didn’t intend it as a joke Martin still found it funny. “You’re doing it again,” he’d say every time, shoulders wiggling. Eventually Jon had asked him,
“You know you don’t blink anymore either, right?”
“Oh god, don’t I?” When Jon shook his head, with a smile whose teeth he tried to keep covered, Martin squeezed his own eyes shut and pushed their lids back and forth with his fingers. “Ugh—gross!” And for the next half hour he’d done the whole forget-to-blink-for-five-minutes-then-do-it-ten-times-in-as-many-seconds routine, too. After that they had both agreed to pretend not to notice the lack of blinking. Jon figured he couldn’t hold it against Martin that he’d broken this rule though, since Jon himself had broken it first, on their first morning here:
“You blinked,” he had informed Martin as he watched him stir sugar into his tea. Martin, who had not only blinked but broken eye contact to make sure he dropped the sugar cube in the right place, replied with a scoff,
“Didn’t know it was a staring contest.”
“No, I mean—”
“Oh! I blinked!”
“…Right,” Jon said now. “I’m—it’s nothing.”
Martin sighed. He closed his eyes, but probably rolled them under their lids. Jon used the inspection of their new room as an excuse to look away, but took in nothing other than the presence of a large bed and the flowered wallpaper Martin had warned him about.
“‘Kay. If you’re sure.”
Taking a seat at the foot of the bed, Jon looked down at his grass-stained knees and prepared himself to ask, Look, does it matter? I’m about to lie down anyway, so, functionally speaking, yes, I am fine.
“So, you’ll be okay here for a bit while I go figure out what to do about the door?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’ll come check on you as soon as I know anything, yeah?”
“Of course.”
“Although—if you’re asleep, should I wake you up?”
“Yes,” Jon replied before Martin had even got the last word out. He heard a short, emphatic exhale, presumably of laughter. “Wait—how would you know, anyway?”
“Oh. Yeah, good point.”
Jon looked down at his shoes. His fingers throbbed in anticipation, but he figured he should spare Martin the horror of getting grass stains on a second bedroom’s counterpane. The first shoe he pulled off without untying, since he could step on its heel with the other one. But he had to bend over to reach the second one’s incongruously bright white laces, biting his lip when he felt his right femur poke past the bounds of its socket as between a cage’s bars. On his way back up his vision quivered like a heat mirage, but didn’t go dark. He scooched himself up to the head of the bed. Made sure to face the ceiling rather than the red wallpaper.
A few months into his tenure in the Archives, Jon had discovered that if you close your eyes at your desk, even just for a minute, you can trick your whole body into thinking you’ve been gentle with it. But that trick didn’t work anymore. Out there, this made sense; interposing his eyelids between himself and the world’s new horrors couldn’t push them out of his consciousness, any more than it had helped to close the curtains at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin’s sentimental attachment to sleep had baffled him, as had his insistence on closing his eyes even though they’d pop back open as soon as his body went limp. Here, though, Jon sympathized with Martin’s wish. He too missed that magic link between closed eyes and sleep. Probably he should just be grateful for this rest from knowing other people’s suffering? The thing he had wished to close his eyes against was gone here. But now that most of his bodily wants had synced up with his actions again, it felt… wrong, like a tangible loss, that he couldn’t assert It’s time for rest now by closing his eyelids. That it took effort to keep them joined. Jon even found himself missing the crust that used to stick them together on mornings after long sleep.
That should have been his first sensation on waking, their first morning here. After seventy-one hours his eyelids should’ve been practically super-glued together. Instead, they’d apparently stayed open the entire time. It wasn’t uncomfortable—he hadn’t woken up with them smarting or anything. Hadn’t noticed one way or the other; after all, when not forced awake by an alarm, one rarely notices the moment one opens one’s eyes in the morning. He just didn’t like knowing that he looked the same waking and sleeping. It didn’t make sense. The dreams hadn’t followed him here, so what was he watching? He could see nothing but the ceiling.
He rolled over, hoping to look out the window. Doors, technically. Between gauzy curtains he could make out only wrought-iron bars and the tops of a few trees. A nice view, he could tell; when he got his second wind he was sure he’d find it pretty. For now he wondered how much more energy debt he had put himself in by rolling over.
Drowning in debt? We can help!
How had he not foreseen how horrible it would be inside the Buried? The inability to move or speak without pain and loss of breath—“Just imagine,” he muttered sarcastically to the empty air, as though addressing his past self. “What might that be like.” He’d lived for years with the weight of exhaustion on his back—heavier at that time than it’d ever been before. And he knew how it felt to risk injury with every movement. What an odd frame of mind he must have lived in then, to think his magic healing wouldn’t let him get scratched up down there. Had he thought it would protect him from fear? I must save my friend from this horrible place! But also, If I get stuck there forever, no big deal; I deserve it, after all. There seemed something so arrogant about that now, that idea that deserving pain could somehow mitigate it. That because monsterhood made him less innocent, it would make him less of a victim. How could he have thought that, when he’d known pulling her out of there didn’t mean he forgave her? He should apologize to Daisy for—
Right. Nope, never mind.
He began to regret rolling over. If he planned to stay on his side like this for long, he shouldn’t leave his shoulder and hip dangling. He could already feel their joints beginning to slide apart. But his body had started to drift to that faraway place from which no grievance ever seemed urgent enough to recall it—neither pain now nor the threat of greater pain later. Nor the three cups of tea he’d drunk.
After he and Martin had fallen asleep on Salesa’s doorstep, Jon had vague memories of being led up the stairs to their bedroom, though he remembered neither being shaken awake nor getting into bed. Just a seventy-odd-hour blank spot, followed by pain of a kind he had thought he’d left behind.
It wasn’t that watchers couldn’t feel pain, after the change. They could, but it was like how real-world pain felt through the veil of a dream. Your actions didn’t affect it as directly as they should. In the Necropolis Martin had asked him, “How exactly does a leg wound make you faster?” If he’d had the courage to answer, at the time he would have said something about his own wounds not seeming important now that he had to tune out those of the whole world. That wasn’t it though, he knew now. Pain just worked differently out there. When Daisy attacked him, it had hurt—but the wound she left him hadn’t protested movement. Not until he and Martin entered the grounds of Upton House. You could bear weight on an injured leg just fine out there, because it wouldn’t hurt more when you stood on it than otherwise.
Sometimes, when his joints slid apart while he slept, he could still feel it in his dreams. Up until 13th January 2016 (for months after which date he dreamt Naomi Herne’s graveyard and nothing else), his sleeping mind used to craft scenarios to explain its own pain and panic to itself. Running from an exploding grenade, staying awake through surgery, that sort of thing. But over the years, as the sensation grew familiar, his dreams about it became less urgent, their anxieties more mundane. He’d shout for help from passing cars, then feel like he’d lied to the stranger who opened their door to him when it turned out running to get in the car hurt no more than standing still.
Even before the change, it’d been ages since he’d had to worry about that. Since the coma, Beholding had fixed all these accidents, the way it’d fixed the finger he tried to chop off. They wouldn’t reset with a clunk, the way they had when he used to fix them by hand. It was more like his body reverted to a version the Eye had saved before the moment of injury. When he tried to pull open a Push door he’d hear the first clunk, followed by about half a second of pain, then after a gentle burst of static—nothing. Just a door handle between his fingers that needed pushing. If he tripped on uneven pavement he might still go down, but his ankle wouldn’t hurt when he stood back up, and the scrapes on his hands would heal before he could inspect them. Here, though, in this place the Eye couldn’t see, Jon lacked such protections. He didn’t have the dreams either? And that was more than worth it as a tradeoff, he was sure. But it still smarted to remember that pain had been his first sensation waking up in an oasis. Not birdsong, not sunshine striped across linen, not the warm weight of another person next to him. He knew he’d come back to a place ruled by physics rather than fear because he’d woken up with gaps between his bones.
“Jon? Are you awake?”
“Hm? Oh. Yes.”
“Cool.” Martin sat down on what felt like the corner of bed nearest the door. “I think I know how to do this now.”
“How to put the doorknob back on?”
“Yeah. God, I still can’t believe it twisted clean off in my hand like that. With no warning—like, zero to sixty in less than a second. I mean, can you believe our luck? The thing’s perfectly functional, and then suddenly it just—comes off!”
“Er…”
“Oh, god, sorry—I didn’t mean—”
“What? Oh—hrkgh”—Jon rolled around to face Martin, hoping the little yelp he let out when his leg slopped back into joint would sound like a noise of exasperation rather than pain. He found Martin sat looking down at the severed doorknob which poked up from between his knees. “No, Martin, of course not, I know—”
“Still, I’m sorry about—”
“No, it’s—it’s fine?”
On that first morning, Jon had managed to get his limbs screwed back on properly without making enough noise to wake up Martin. He’d limped out of their room and down the hall, pushing doors open until he’d found a toilet, whereupon he sat to pee and marveled that the flush and sink still worked. It was bright enough inside that he hadn’t thought to try the light switch on his way in—too busy contorting his neck to look for the sun out the window. On his way out, though, he flicked it on, then off. Then on again and off again. How could it work, when there was no power grid the house could connect to? Automatically Jon tried to search his mind’s Eye for a domain based in a power plant or something. Right, no, of course—that power did not work here.
When he got back to their room he found Martin awake. “Oh—morning,” Jon told him with a shy laugh.
“It—it is morning, isn’t it,” Martin marveled. Then he asked if Jon could hand him the map sticking out of his backpack’s side pocket. (What good are maps when the very Earth logic no longer applied here, after all. But Martin was rubbish at geography, so Jon still had to provide the You Are Here sign with his finger for him.) Jon grabbed the map on his way back to bed, and was about to tell him about the miracles of plumbing and electricity he’d just witnessed—not to mention the bathtub he’d admired on the long trek from toilet to sink—when Martin frowned and asked, “Why are you limping?”
“Am I?” Jon had shrugged, then cleared his throat when the motion made his shoulder audibly click. “Daisy, must be.”
“No, Jon. That’s the wrong leg.”
He slid both legs out of sight under the blankets and handed Martin the map. “It’s nothing. It just… came off a bit. Last night."
Before Jon could add It’s fixed now though, Martin said, “I’m sorry, what?”
Jon had assumed Martin understood the kind of thing he meant, but that he’d misled him as to its degree—i.e., that Martin objected to his talking about a full hip dislocation like it mattered less than what happened with Daisy. So he’d said,
“No, sorry, not all the way off—”
And Martin just laughed. “What, and you taped it back up like—like an old computer cable?”
“Sort of, yeah? It—it does still work, more or less.”
“Right, of course. No need to get a new one, yet; you can just limp along with this one. No big deal! Just make sure you don’t pull too hard on it.”
“I mean.” By now he could sense Martin’s sarcasm, his bitterness; that didn’t mean he knew what to do with them. So he'd said with a huff of laughter, “I can’t just send for a new one. That’s—that’s not how bodies work. You have to….” Wait for it to sort itself out was the natural end to that sentence. But he hadn’t been sure he could say that without opening a can of worms.
“Wait so… what actually happened? Are you okay?”
Only at this point had Jon recognized Martin’s response as one of incomprehension. What happened exactly? he had asked, too, when Jon told him the ice-cream anecdote. Did no one ever listen when you told them about these things?
“Nothing. Never mind. It’s fine.”
“Oh come on.”
“It’s. Fine! It’s not important.”
And then for days Martin kept alluding to it. Like some kind of reminder to Jon that he hadn’t opened up, disguised as a joke. Every time something came out or fell down he’d mutter, “So it came off, you might say.” Eventually they’d fallen out over it, and now neither one could come near the phrase without this song and dance.
“Don’t worry about it, Martin,” Jon assured him now; “I’m over it.”
“…Uh huh. Well, putting that to one side for the moment—I think I can fix this?”
“Oh? Great!—”
“—Yeah! It should be simple, actually. I think I just need to replace the screw that fell out? I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything actually broken, just, you know,” with an awkward laugh, “the screw lives on the wrong side of the door now. But if we can just put a new one in the door should be fine.” He looked to Jon as if for help plotting their next steps.
“I—I don’t, um. Think we have one.”
Martin’s shoulders dropped; the corners of his mouth tightened. “Yeah, I know we don’t have one, Jon. I just mean, we need to find out where Salesa keeps them.”
“Oh!” Jon replied, in a brighter tone. Then he registered what this meant. “Oh. Right.”
“Y…eah.”
“Any idea where to look?”
They checked what seemed to Martin the most obvious place first. Salesa used one of the ground-floor drawing rooms as a sort of repository for everything he’d left as yet unpacked—all the practical items he hadn’t been able to repurpose as toys, plus some antiques he’d been too fond of or too nervous to part with. Two nights ago, Salesa had noticed the state of Jon’s and Martin’s shoelaces, and insisted they let him replace them with some from this little warehouse. “Please, come with me; I’ve nothing to hide. You can have a look around, see if I have anything that might help you on your journey….” As he said this he’d counted to two on his fingers, as though listing off attractions they should be sure not to miss.
Jon watched Martin perk right up at this. All week Salesa had kept pleading with them to tell him about any luxuries they had wanted while touring the apocalypse, so he could try to find something to fulfill those wants. “Well, I—I don’t know about luxuries,” Martin had ventured the third time this came up. “But I do think we might run out of bandages soon, so. If you’ve any extra?”
“Of course, of course, yes, how prudent of you, always with one eye on the future. Must be the Beholding in you.” (Neither Jon nor Martin knew what to say to that.) “But there will be plenty of time for that. I meant something for now, while you are here, while you don’t need to think of things like that.” And sure enough, each time Salesa had come to them with presents from his little warehouse (booze, butterfly nets, more booze, antique bathing suits, &c.), he’d forgot about Martin’s homely request for gauze and tape. Martin insisted they change the dressing on Jon’s leg every day; by now they’d run through the bandages he brought from Daisy’s safehouse. So when Salesa suggested they accompany him to his repository, Martin said,
“Sure, yeah! That sounds really helpful.” (Salesa clutched his heart as though he’d waited all his life to hear such praise.) “Er. The things in your warehouse, though. They’re not L—um.” Leitners, Martin had almost called them. “You don’t think they’ll develop any… strange properties, when we leave here, do you?”
“Of course not,” Salesa had answered, stopping and turning all the way around in the corridor to face Martin with a frown. “Martin, I promise, only my antiques are cursed—and even then, not all of them.” He’d resumed the walk toward his little warehouse, but turned around again and held up a hand, as if to preempt a question. “There are, indeed, yes, some items out there, touched by the Corruption, which can pass their infection on to other things they come in contact with. But, no,” he went on, his voice fighting off a joyous laugh, “no, the only item I have like that does almost the opposite.”
“Oh.”
Salesa nodded, but did not turn around this time. “Strange little thing. It’s an antique syringe that, so long as you keep it near you, repels the Crawling Rot. I like to think it helped dispatch that insect thing Annabelle chased away. But if you try to get rid of it,” he added in a darker tone, “all the sickness, the bugs, the smells, even stains on your clothes—everything disgusting that it’s kept away—they remember who you are, and they hunger for you more than anyone else. The man who sold it to me….” He shook his head ruefully, hand now resting on the door.
“Was eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Jon muttered.
“Something like that, yes,” said Salesa, as he jerked open the door.
Jon hated the way his and Martin’s shoes looked now. He hadn’t had to put new laces on a pair of old, dirty shoes since he was a kid, and the contrast looked wrong—the same way starched collars and slicked-back hair on kids look wrong. Jon’s trainers were gray, their laces a slightly darker gray, so these white ones wouldn’t have looked quite right even without the dirt. Martin’s had once been white, but their original laces were broad and flat, while these were narrow and more rounded. The replacements’ thin, clinical white lines looked something between depressing and menacing. Too much like spider web; too much like the stitching on Nikola’s minions. When they came undone on this morning’s walk, Jon had made sure to tread on them in the mud a few times before tying them back up. Poor Dr. Thompson’s syringe must have retained some of its power here, though, because they still looked pristine. Jon wondered if it had no effect on spiders, or if without it this whole place would have been draped in cobwebs.
Martin seemed pleased with their haul, though. Despite Salesa’s amnesia on the subject, his little warehouse held more plasters, gauze, medical tape, antibacterial ointment, alcohol wipes—the list went on—than one man could ever use. In a strange, raw moment Jon liked to pretend he hadn’t seen, Salesa had wrung his hands as his eyes passed over this hoard. His lip had quivered. He’d practically begged Martin to take the whole lot away with them. “What harm will come to me here? And if it does come, what good will it do, protecting one lonely old man from skinned knees and paper cuts? The two of you—where you are going—the gravity of your mission!” At this point he’d seized one of each their hands. “Everything I have that even might help, you must take it. Please.”
“I—yeah,” Martin stuttered. “This is—really helpful, yeah. We’ll take as much as we can fit in our bags.”
Salesa had let go their hands by this point, and crossed his arms. “Right, yes, bags, of course, the bags. Are you sure you don’t want my truck?”
“Oh, well, thanks, but I don’t think either of us knows how to—”
“To drive a truck?” Salesa uncrossed his arms and began to reach for Martin’s shoulder. “I could teach you—”
“It won’t work without the camera anyway,” pointed out Jon. “We have to walk.”
Martin sighed. ”That too. ‘The journey will be the journey,’ as Jon keeps saying.”
“I said that once,” Jon protested.
No such success on this return visit. They found a small pile of miscellaneous screws, one of which Martin said would work (though it was the wrong color, he alleged, and had clearly been meant for some other purpose), but the screwdriver they needed remained elusive. “I mean, I can’t be sure they’re not in here—the place is as bad as Gertrude’s storage unit. We could spend all day here and still not be sure—”
“Let’s not do that,” said Jon, pushing an always-warm candlestick with a pool of always-melted wax out of Martin’s way with his sleeve for what felt like the hundredth time.
“No arguments here.”
“Where to next?”
“I guess it makes sense that they’re not here. This room’s all stuff Salesa brought, and why would he bring home-repair stuff when he didn’t even know where he’d wind up.”
“Except for the screws.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t look like he keeps screws here, remember? There’s just a couple random ones lying around, like he forgot to put them away or something.”
Jon peered between the clouds in his mind, trying to catch sight of Martin’s thought train. “So you’re saying the screwdriver should be…?”
“Somewhere less… frequented, I guess? They’ll probably still be wherever they were when Salesa found the place.”
“Not somewhere that was open to the public, then.”
Martin sighed. ”I mean yeah, probably. Not that that narrows it down much.”
“Somewhere… banal, less posh.”
“Not sure how much less posh you can get than this place. But yeah, I guess. Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. Odd that his eyes weren’t immune to dust, when leaving them open for seventy straight hours hadn’t bothered them. And why didn’t the syringe keep dust away? In Dr. Snow’s day (not far removed from Smirke’s, n.b.), Jon seemed to recall that dust had been used as a euphemism for all waste, including the human kind Dr. Snow had found in the cholera water. It was like how people today use filth—hence the word dustbin. And hadn’t Elias once called the Corruption Filth? Jon opened his eyes and watched Martin swirl back to full color. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here,” he concluded.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.”
“Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?”
Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice.
“Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him.
“Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.”
“Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.”
Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?
“Oh—I know,” Martin said, clicking his fingers and pointing them at Jon like a gun. “We passed a shed this morning, remember?”
Jon squinted. “Not even remotely.”
“No yeah—on our walk with Salesa. I tried to ask him what it was for, but he kept droning on and on. By the time he stopped talking I’d forgot about it.”
“Huh,” said Jon, to show he was listening.
“That seems like a good place to keep screws and all, right? If it’s so nondescript you can’t even remember it.”
“Sure.”
“Great! Are you ready now, or d’you need to sit for a bit longer?”
“I’m ready.” This time he accepted Martin’s hand, not keen to trip on something cursed.
“Anyway, if we don’t find them and Salesa’s still out there, we can ask him on the way back.”
Jon’s heart shrunk before the prospect of inviting Salesa to be the hero of their story. Please, Mr. Salesa, save us from our screwdriver-less hell! They would never hear the end of it. It would inevitably remind the old man of the countless times in his youth when he’d been the only man in the antiques trade who knew where to find some priceless treasure. Let Salesa open their stuck door and they’d find Pandora’s bloody box of stories behind it. He winced and let out a grunt as of pain before he could stop himself. “Let’s not tell him, if we can help it.”
“Of course we should tell him,” Martin protested. “We can’t just leave it broken like this.”
“But if we can fix it without his help—?”
“What? No! Even then, he’s our host. We have to tell him. It’s his door, he deserves to know its—I don’t know, history?” Martin sighed, shoving one hand in his hair and holding out the other. “If he’s got a doorknob whose screw comes loose a lot, he should know that, so he can tighten it next time before it gets out of hand. I mean, we’re lucky it only chipped the paint when it—when it fell off, you know?” (Jon, for his part, hadn’t even noticed this chip of paint Martin referred to.) “And—and suppose he’s only got this one screw left,” tapping the one in his pocket, “and the next time it happens his last screw rolls under the door like this one did.”
“And what is he supposed to do to prevent that scenario? There aren’t exactly any hardware stores in the apocalypse.”
Big sigh. “Yeah, fair enough. I still think we should tell him. It just feels wrong to hide secrets from him about his own house, you know?”
“Fine,” sighed Jon in turn. ”Should we tell him about the scorch marks on the window sill as well?”
“No?” Martin turned to him with an incredulous look. “Tell me you’re joking.”
“I mean—I was, but—”
“Please tell me you get how that’s different.”
“Enlighten me,” Jon said wearily.
“Seriously? Of course you don’t tell him about the?—those were already there! If we’d put them there, then yeah, of course we’d need to tell him.”
“So it’s about confessing your guilt, then. Not about what Salesa makes of the information.”
“I mean, I guess?” Martin looked perplexed, lips drawn into his mouth. “Actually, no. Because those are just scorch marks, they don’t—you can still get into a room with scorch marks on the windowsill, Jon.”
“And yet if you’d left them you’d tell him about it?”
“Well yeah but if I told him about it now it’d just be like I was—leaving him a bad review, or something. It’d just be rude. ‘Lovely place you have, Salesa. So kind of you to share your limited provisions with us refugees from the apocalypse. Too bad you gave us a room whose windowsill could use repainting!’”
Jon laughed. “Yes, alright, I get it.”
Martin’s sigh of relief seemed only a little exaggerated. If he hadn’t wiped pretend sweat from his brow Jon might have bought it. “Okay, that’s good, ‘cause”—when Jon kept laughing, Martin cut himself off. “Hang on, were you joking this whole time?”
“Sort of?”
“Were you just playing devil’s advocate or something?”
“I mean—not exactly? For the first seventy or eighty percent of it I was completely serious.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. It was just—fun. It felt nice to take a definite sta—aaaa-a-aa.” Something in Jon’s lower back went wrong somehow. An SI joint, probably? The pain caught him so much by surprise that when he stepped with that side’s leg he stumbled forward.
“Whoa!” Martin’s hand closed around his upper arm. Jon yelped again, from panic more than hurt this time, as his shoulder thunked in its socket. “Jon! Are you okay?”
“Don’t do that,” Jon hissed, trying lamely to shake his arm out of Martin’s grip. It didn’t work. The attempt just made his own arm ache, and produce more ominous clunking sounds.
“I—what?”
“It was fine. I don’t need you to catch me.”
Martin let his arm go. “You were about to fall on your face, Jon.”
“I’d already caught myself—just fine—with this.” He gestured to his cane, stirring its handle like a joystick.
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“I don’t know, look?”
“It’s not—?” Martin scoffed. “Look when? It’s not like a rational calculation. I can’t just go ‘Beep. Beep. See human trip. Will human fall on face? If yes, press A to catch! If not, press B to’— what, stand there and do nothing? It’s just human nature; when you see someone falling that’s just what you do. I’m not going to apologize for not calculating the risk properly.”
“Fine! Yes, okay, you’re right. Forget I said anything.” Throwing up his free hand in defeat, Jon set off again—tried to stride, but it was hard to do that with a limp. Even with his cane, he couldn’t step evenly enough to achieve a decisive gait.
It was fine, Jon reminded himself. He’d had this injury (if you could call it that) a thousand times before. When it came on suddenly like this it never stuck around long. Sure, yeah, for now every step hurt like an urgent crisis. But any second it would right itself as quickly as it had come undone.
“No, no, I understand! Point taken! Note to future Martin,” the latter shouted from behind Jon, voice troubled by hurried steps; “next time let him fall and break his bloody nose.”
Trusting Martin to shout directions if he went the wrong way, Jon pressed on, rehearsing comebacks in his mind. Is this not a boundary I’m allowed to set? You don’t let me read statements in front of you. Isn’t that part of human—isn’t that my nature, too?
Oh, yes, human nature, that must be it. You didn’t lunge after Salesa at ping-pong the other day, did you? I saw you opening doors for Melanie when she got back from India. You stopped for a while, did you know that? You all did, everyone in the Archives. And then—it’s the strangest thing!—you all started up again after Delano. Maybe you lot don’t see the common factor here; people always do seem to think it’s more polite not to notice.
So what if I had broken my nose? You nearly broke my shoulder, catching me like that. Does that not matter because you can’t see it? Because it wouldn’t scar?
They were all too petty to say aloud. Too incongruous with the quiet. He could hear his own footsteps, and Martin’s, and the clank of his cane’s metal segments each time it hit the ground, and a few crows exclaiming about something exciting they’d found on his right. Nothing else.
“Looks like Salesa went inside,” Martin shouted from behind him.
Jon stopped walking and turned around. “What?”
“Left a couple things out here, but yeah.” Martin jogged to catch up with him, from a greater distance than Jon would have expected given how much limping slowed him down. He must have veered off course to inspect the clearing Salesa had vacated. In one hand he carried an empty wine glass by its stem, which he lifted to show Jon.
“Huh.”
“Yeah.” When he caught up with Jon, Martin stood still and panted. “Guess it won’t be as easy to ask him about it as we thought. If we don’t find what we need in there,” he added, glancing demonstratively to something behind Jon.
Following Martin’s eyes, Jon finally saw the shed. Nondescript boards, worn black and white by the elements. Surrounded by hedges three months overgrown.
Turned out it wasn’t a shed anymore, though—Salesa had converted it to a chicken coop. “Explains the boiled eggs,” shrugged Jon.
“God, they’re adorable. Do you think it’s okay to pet one?” Martin crouched in front of a black hen with a puffball of feathers on top of her head. (Martin called her a hen, anyway, and Jon trusted his authority on animals other than cats). “I don’t really know, er, ch—hicken etiquette,” he mused, voice shot through with nervous laughter.
The black hen sat alone in a little box, and didn't seem to want attention. A little red one they’d found strutting around the coop, however, ventured right up to Martin and cocked her head, like she expected him to give her a present. While Martin cooed over her and the other chickens, Jon went outside and laid flat on his back in the grass under a tree. “Take your time,” he shouted. “I’m happy here.”
Sure enough, when Martin emerged from the coop and helped him stand back up, whatever cog in Jon’s pelvis or spine he had jammed earlier was turning again. And by the time they got back to the house, Martin had talked himself into the idea that maybe all the house’s doorknobs that looked like theirs came loose a lot, and Salesa had taken to keeping the screwdriver to fix them in, say, the hall closet, or in their toilet’s under-sink cabinet.
“I think we’re gonna have to find Salesa and ask him about it,” concluded Martin, when these locations turned up nothing they wanted either.
“If you’re sure.”
Jon sat down on the closed toilet seat. Hadn’t that been what he said just before the last time he sat down on the lid of a toilet before Martin? He’d dutifully turned away, that time, as Martin undressed, wanting to make sure he knew he’d still let him have some privacy. But then, of course: “Where should I put these, do you think? —Er, my clothes I mean.”
“Oh. Um.” Jon had turned his head to look at the stain on Daisy’s ceiling, for what must have been the tenth time already. “I can hold onto them if you like.” Which then meant Martin had to get them back on before Jon could undress for his own shower and hand him his clothes. As he’d piled his trousers into Martin’s hands a tape recorder fell out of one pocket and crashed to the floor, ejecting the tape with Peter’s statement on it. “Shit,” Jon had hissed and ducked to the floor to pick it up, trusting the slit in his towel to reveal nothing worse than thigh.
“Shit,” Martin echoed. “I hope that wasn’t your phone.”
“No—just the recorder.” Still on the floor, Jon clicked its little door shut and pressed play. Sound of waves, static, footsteps. He switched it off. “Seems alright.” Thank god, he stopped himself from adding. Jon didn’t want to lose this one, this record of how he’d found Martin, in case he lost him again. But he didn’t want Martin to hear the sounds of the Lonely again so soon, either. That was why he’d stayed with Martin while he showered, rather than waiting in the safehouse living room. He wouldn’t have insisted on it, of course. He didn’t exactly believe Martin would disappear again? But long showers were such a cliché of lonely people, and steam looked so much like the mist on Peter’s beach, and when Jon asked how he felt about it, Martin said that thought hadn’t occurred to him,
“But as soon as you started to say that, I.” He’d stood with his teeth bared, half smiling half grimacing, and bringing the tips of his fingers together and apart over and over. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Heh—it scares me too now, if I’m honest. That’s… a good sign, I guess, right?”
They had come a long way since then, Jon told himself. They were more comfortable with each other now. On their first morning here, they’d showered separately, but after (Martin’s) breakfast Jon’s irritation had faded and he had resolved to pretend along with Martin that this was a holiday. So they’d got to use the enormous bathtub after all— the one at whose soap dish Jon now found himself staring as he sat on the lid of the toilet. When the heat made him dizzier, as he’d known it would, he had relished getting to rest his cheek on Martin’s arm along the rim of the tub, where it had grown cool and soft in the few minutes he’d kept it above the water.
“Let’s have lunch first,” Martin said now; “you’re getting all….” While he looked for the right word he dropped his shoulders and jaw, and mimicked a thousand-yard stare. “Abstract, again. Distant. People food should help a little, yeah? Tie you back down to this plane a bit?”
“Probably,” Jon agreed, smiling at Martin’s tact.
But to get to the kitchen they had to pass through the dining room—where they found Salesa snoring in a chair at the head of the table. “Let’s just ask him now before he gets up and moves again,” maintained Martin. Jon shrugged his acquiescence and leant in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. Why hadn’t he used the toilet before letting Martin lead him here?
”Um, Mikaele?” Martin inched a few steps toward him, but a distance of several feet still gaped between them. “We have something to ask you, if that’s—hello? Mikaele?”
A likely-sounding gap between snores—but nope. Still sound asleep. Salesa sighed, licked his lips, then began to snore again.
“Mikaele Salesa,” called out Jon from his post at the door, rather less gently. “Mikaele Salesa!” He turned to Martin, meaning to suggest that they eat now and trust the smell of food to wake Salesa, but stopped himself when he saw Martin creeping timidly toward Salesa with his hand outstretched.
“Sorry to disturbyouMikaele,” Martin squeaked out, so quickly that the words blended together. He gave Salesa’s shoulder the lightest possible tap with one fingertip, then snatched his hand back with a grimace of regret as Salesa’s own hand reached up, belatedly, as if to swat Martin’s away. “Oh, good, you’re—”
Salesa interrupted with a snore. Martin sighed and turned to Jon. “What d’you think? Should I shake him?”
Jon pulled out a neighboring chair and sat on it. “No need for anything so drastic. Try poking him a few more times first.”
“Right.”
Once he’d tired of rolling his cane between his palms Jon bent down to set it on the floor. He’d learnt his lesson about trying to hang it on the back of these chairs, though in this fog it had taken several incidents to stick. Every time it ended up crashing to the floor, when he scooched his chair back or when Martin tried to reach an arm around him. Then again—he conjectured, bent halfway to the floor with the cane still in his hand—if he did drop it, that might wake Salesa.
Two nights ago Jon had got up to use the toilet, and knocked his cane down from the wall on his way back to bed in the dark. It crashed to the floor; Jon swore and hopped on one foot back from it, imagining the other foot’s poor toenail smashed to jagged pieces as it thumped to life with pain. Meanwhile he heard rustling from the bed, and Martin’s voice, querulous with sleep. “Jon? Jon, what’s—happened, what—are you.”
“Nothing it’s fine go back to”—he’d hissed as his knee decided it had enough of hopping—“don’t get up, just. I’m gonna turn on the light, if that’s alright.”
“What fell? Are you okay?”
“The cane. I knocked it over in the dark.”
“Oh.”
He got no verbal response about the light, but guessed Martin had nodded.
From a distance his toe looked alright—no blood, anyway, so he could walk on it without risking the carpet. Jon picked his cane up from the floor and steered himself to the foot of the bed, where he sat down. His toenail had chipped, it looked like—only a little, but in that way that leaves a long crack. If he tried to pick it straight he’d tear out a big chunk and it would bleed. But if he left it like this it would snag on the sheets, on his socks, until some loose thread tore the chunk of nail off for him. What could he do for this kind of thing here? At home he’d file the nail down around the chip, then cover it in clear nail polish, and just hope that’d hold out until the crack grew out and he could clip it without bleeding. But here? A plaster would have to do, he guessed. They had plenty of those now.
Jon hated bandaging, ever since Prentiss—in much the same way that Martin hated sleeping in his pants. He’d had time to learn all its discomforts. How sweaty they got, the way they stuck to your hairs, the way lint collected in the adhesive residue they left. Didn’t help he associated them with that time of paranoia. They didn’t make him act paranoid, understand; he just habitually thought of bandage-wearing as what paranoid people do. It made an echo of his contempt for that time’s Jon cling to his perceptions of current Jon. On his first morning here, when the ones on his shin where Daisy’d bit him peeled off in the shower, he hadn’t bothered to replace them. After all, the bite only hurt when something pulled on it or poked or scraped against it, so he figured his trousers would provide enough protective barrier.
“That healed fast,” Martin had remarked, when he noticed the undressed wound in the bath—and then, when he looked again, “Yyyyeah I dunno, I think you might still want to bandage that. We don’t want dirt getting in there.”
“Do I have to?”
“Humor me.”
When they got back to their room he’d let Martin dress it himself. Martin had sucked air through his teeth. “This is days old—it shouldn’t be all hot and red like this.” According to him these were early signs of infection, which would get worse if they didn’t take better care of it—i.e., keep the wound freshly bandaged and ointmented. Jon refrained from pointing out that when the cut on his throat had got like that he’d left it uncovered and been fine. But he did ask what worse meant. “Really bad,” testified Martin. “I had a cut on my finger get infected once. Really disgusting. You don’t want to know.”
Jon smiled at him, raised his eyebrows. “After Jared’s mortal garden I think I can handle it.”
Martin smiled too, but wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “There was pus involved.”
“Oh, god! How could you tell me that!” gasped Jon, hand to his chest.
“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it also hurt? A lot? And it can make you ill. So we should try to avoid it, yeah?”
He’d tried to disavow the disappointment in his sigh by exaggerating it. “Yes, alright.”
“Don’t know why you’d want to leave it exposed anyway. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Well, sure, when you do that,” Jon had muttered, flinching away. As he asked the question Martin had lightly tapped the skin around the gash through its new bandage. A second or two later Jon added, “Less than when I got it? It’s hard to tell; it’s… different here.”
With a sigh that caught on phlegm and irritation, Martin asked, “Different how?”
He hadn’t been able to answer then, but he knew now, of course. It hurt the way things do when you’re awake. Not with the constant smart and throb it had when he’d first got it, but, it snagged on things now. Had opinions on how he moved. When he bent his knee more than ninety degrees, that stretched the skin around it painfully. Also if he knelt, since then the floor would press against it through his trousers. And stepping with that foot felt odd. Didn’t hurt, exactly, but sort of… rattled? Like a bad bruise would. This all seemed so small, compared to the moment of terror for his life that he’d felt when Daisy bit into him—that gaping wound in his new self-conception, which his healing powers had sewn up so quickly. The ritual of bandaging it every evening seemed so otiose, so laughably superstitious. He despised the thought of adding another step to it.
While Jon went on examining his toe, Martin asked, “What was the... thumping. It sounded like.”
“Oh—no—I didn’t fall; it’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“No—yes—stop, it’s nothing, don’t get up. I just forgot I left it on the—leaning against the doorwall” (he hadn’t decided in time whether to say doorway or wall and ended up with half of each) “so I walked into it, er, toe first.”
“Oh,” Martin said again. Jon could hear him subsiding against the pillows behind him. “It came down?”
Big sigh. Jon’s fingernails met his palms. He set his foot back on the floor, and when his hip whined in its socket he clenched his teeth and kept them that way. In his mind he heard days’ worth of similar jokes. When he couldn’t get a jammed jar open: So you’re saying it wouldn’t… come off? When they got back their clean laundry: Can you believe all those grass stains came out?—oh, sorry: that they came off, I meant. Always with an innocent laugh, like Jon’s original phrasing had been just, what, like a Freudian slip, rather than something perfectly comprehensible that Martin had refused to engage with, taken from him, and rendered meaningless on purpose. “No it did not,” he snapped, “and I would appreciate it if you’d quit throwing that back in my face.”
“Whoa, uh. O…kay. What’s… going on here exactly?”
“You—?”
His heart plummeted; his face stung with embarrassment. Came down, Martin had said—not came off. He’d just been confirming that Jon’s cane had fallen down.
“Oh, god—nothing, never mind. You did nothing.”
“Well that’s obviously not true.”
“I just—I thought you’d said ‘came off.’ I thought you meant, had my toe ‘come off.’”
“Oh,” said Martin, yet again. When Jon turned to look he found him still blinking and squinting against the light. “Do you… need me to not say that anymore?”
“Not when I—?” Not when I’ve hurt myself, Jon meant. But Martin hadn’t done that, so this grievance didn’t actually mean anything. He’d been seeing patterns where there were none, and now that he’d seen through the illusion Jon knew again that Martin never would say it like that. “No, it’s fine. Do whatever you want.���
Martin turned the tail end of his yawn into a huff of false laughter. “Nope. Still don’t believe you.”
“Everything you’ve said makes perfect sense with the information you have. It’s all just—me. Being cryptic again.”
“Okay, uh. Are you waiting for me to disagree? ‘Cause, uh. Yup—you’re still being cryptic. No arguments there.”
Jon just sighed, really scraping the back of his throat with it. Almost a scoff.
“Sooo do you wanna fill me in, or.”
“No?” With an incredulous laugh. “Well, yes, just.”
He hadn’t known how to start from there, while so tightly wound and defensive. It seemed cruel to raise such a sensitive subject when Martin sounded so eager to go back to sleep. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear Martin whimper apologies. Didn’t want to deal with how fake they would sound. They wouldn’t be fake; he knew that. But they would sound fake, which meant it would take an effort of will, a deliberate exercise of empathy, to accept them as real. He wasn’t in the mood to hear yet another person say I’m sorry, I didn’t know; much less to respond with the requisite It’s okay; you didn’t know. It would take a strength of conviction he didn’t have right now.
“Y—you don’t have to explain it tonight? I’ll just, I’ll just not use that phrase anymore, and maybe in the morning you’ll be less in the mood to lash out at me for things that don’t make sense.”
And what was there to say to that? It had taken Jon three tries to force out, “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“Good night, Jon.”
“Good night. I still need the light, for.”
“That’s fine. Just turn it off when you come back to bed.”
“You won’t wake him up,” a new voice interjected.
Annabelle. Jon couldn’t see her, but he had learnt by now to recognize that voice, with its insufferable upbeat teasing inflection like every sentence she said was a riddle. He caught a glimpse of movement, then heard the click of her shoes on the floor. She must have poked her head round the doorway at the far end of the table while she spoke, then scuttled off again. At last he got a good look at her, as she put her blonde-and-gray head through the closer door.
“He’s a very heavy sleeper,” she informed them, with a smile and a shrug. “You can shake him all you want; it’s not going to work.”
Martin cleared his throat—trying to catch Jon’s attention, presumably. But Jon feared Annabelle would vanish again if he took his eyes off her. Not that he wanted her here, either, but?—he at least wanted to know which direction she went when she disappeared.
“What are you doing here, Annabelle.”
She shrugged two of her shoulders. “Just offering you some advice.” Then she used the momentum from the shrug to push herself backward, out of the doorway back into the corridor. Before the last of her hands disappeared off to the right, she waved to both of them.
“Well, how about some ‘advice’ about this, then—”
“She’s already gone, Martin.”
“Seriously? God—which way did she go?” Jon pointed; Martin bolted down the hallway after her. “Oi! Annabelle!”
“Shhh!”
“Annabelle! Do you know where Salesa keeps the—”
Jon did his best to follow him, praying all his limbs would go on straight this time. “Don’t!”
“What? Why not?” he heard, from the other side of the wall. Thankfully he could no longer hear Martin’s pounding footsteps. He overtook him in the hallway, just about able to make out his face around the dark swirls in his vision. “She’s as likely to know as Salesa, right?” Martin continued. “And it’s not like she’d lie about it. I mean, what would be the point?”
“I just don’t think we should give her any kind of advantage over us,” Jon snarled. The attempt to keep his voice down made the words come out sounding nastier than he intended.
Martin scoffed. “You don’t think maybe this is a bit more important than your stupid principle about not accepting help from her?”
“Is it?” Jon took hold of Martin’s sleeve, having just now caught up to him. “The new room’s fine. It’s even nicer than the old one, right? We could just stay there.”
“I already told you, Jon. I’m not just gonna leave it like this.”
“’Til Salesa sobers up, I meant.”
“If we have to, yeah, but—? All our stuff’s in that room. The statements’re in there.”
“I just don’t think we should show her that kind of vulnerability,” Jon hissed, shifting from foot to foot in his eagerness either to sit down or go somewhere else. “I don’t want to give Annabelle something she can use over us.”
“How does this make us more vulnerable than we are eating her food?”
“It doesn’t, alright? That doesn’t mean we should add more to the pile!” He watched Martin shrug and open his mouth, but cut him off in advance: “Last time we had this argument you were the one maintaining she was dangerous.”
It was on their first night here—their first awake here, anyway. They’d been heading back to their room, Martin lamenting that he’d not packed anything to sleep in when they left Daisy’s safehouse. “Won’t make much difference to me,” Jon had shrugged at first.
Martin had shaken his head, grimaced at something in his imagination. “I hate sleeping in my pants. It’s just gross. Dunno why anyone would choose to do it.”
“How is it gross?” Jon had laughed. He’d expected to hear some weird thing about its being unsanitary for that much leg to touch sheets that only got washed every two weeks, and to argue back that in that case shouldn’t he sleep in his socks. Disdain for the body seemed damn near universal, and yet manifested so differently in each person whose habits Jon had got to know up close. Georgie had heard that underarm hair helped wick away the smell of sweat—so she let that hair grow out, but shaved the ones on her stomach for fear they’d smell like navel lint. And Daisy, a woman who used to sniff her used-up plasters before throwing them in the bin, would spray cologne in the toilet every time she left it. Jon had enjoyed getting to know which of bodily self-contempt’s myriad forms Martin subscribed to.
But this turned out not to be one of them. Instead Martin explained, “It’s so sweaty. Like sitting on a leather couch in shorts, except the leather’s your other leg? Ugh. I hate waking up slippery.”
“That’s why I put a pillow between mine,” laughed Jon. “Suppose I will miss Trevor’s t-shirt, though. Now that I don’t have to worry about showing up in people’s dreams like that.”
“Oh, god, right—what is it? ‘You don’t have to be faster than the bear’—?”
“‘You just have to be faster than your friends,'” Jon completed, in the most sinister Ceaseless-Watcher voice he could muster. Martin snorted with laughter.
And then they’d opened the door to discover Annabelle had done them a fucking turndown service. Quilt folded back, mints on the pillows, and a pile of old-timey striped pajamas at the foot of the bed. “Huh. Cree…py, but convenient, I guess. Least they’re not black and white, right?” Martin unfolded the green-striped shirt on top, then handed it with its matching trousers to Jon. “These ones must be yours.”
“Mm.” Jon let Martin hand him the pajamas, then tossed them onto the chair in the opposite corner of the room (from which chair they promptly fell to the floor). The mint from his side of the bed he deposited in the bin under the bedside table.
“So who’s our good fairy, d’you think? Salesa, or.”
“Annabelle,” Jon hissed. “Salesa was with us all through dinner.”
Martin nodded and sighed. “Yeah.” He sat down on the bed, still regarding the other set of garments—these ones striped yellow and blue—with a puzzled frown. “God, I’ll look like a clown in these. You sure I won’t give you nightmares about the Unknowing?”
But Jon said nothing, still hoping he could avoid weighing in on Martin’s choice whether or not to accept Annabelle’s… gifts.
“It’s probably Salesa’s stuff, at least. Not Annabelle’s. I mean,” Martin mused with a brave laugh, “he’s got a lot of weird outfits on hand apparently.”
“Unless she wove them out of cobwebs.”
“That’s not a thing,” Martin groaned, making himself laugh too. “Spider webs aren’t strong enough to use as thread.”
“Not natural ones, maybe,” Jon said with a shrug and a careful half smile. With no less care, he turned the sheets and counterpane back up on his side of the bed, restoring the way it’d looked when he and Martin made up the bed that morning. Stacked the frontmost pillow back upright against the one behind it. Punched it a little, more as a way to break the silence than because it looked too fluffy. Then sat down in front of them and put his shoe up on the bedside table so he could untie it—glancing first at Martin to make sure he didn’t disapprove.
“I mean, I guess,” Martin mused meanwhile. “Not sure why she’d bother, though. Maybe it’s”—with a gasp and a smile Jon could hear in his voice—“maybe she’s put poison in the threads, and that’s why yours and mine are different. Mine’s got—I dunno, some kind of self-esteem poison, like, a reverse SSRI, to make me feel like you don’t need me, so when she kidnaps you I won’t try to save you. And yours….”
As Jon pulled off his now-untied shoe one of the bones in his hip jabbed against some bit of soft tissue it wasn’t supposed to touch. He gasped and dropped his shoe. It thudded on the floor.
“You alright?”
“Fine. Some kind of dex drain, probably.”
“Ha.”
After a silence, Martin spoke again: “Are you sure you’re okay staying here for a bit? Sorry—I kinda bulldozed over your objections earlier.”
Jon finished untying his other shoe, then paused to think while he shook the cramp out of his hand. “No,” he decided. “You didn’t bulldoze, you just…questioned. And you were right to.”
“Still, I mean. It might not be a great idea to stick around here with the spider lady who’s had it in for us since day one. Have you re-listened to the tapes from the day Prentiss attacked, by the way, since you got them back from the Not-Sasha thing?”
“Right—the spider, yes.”
“Yeah, exactly! You wouldn’t even have broke through that wall if it hadn’t been for the spider there!”
Jon nodded and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to muster the energy to match Martin’s tone. This was an important conversation to have, he knew. And a part of him shuddered with recognition to hear Martin talk about those tapes. He had re-listened to them—first at Georgie’s, one night in the small hours as he cleaned her kitchen, thinking clearly for the first time in months and trying to pinpoint the exact moment his thoughts had been clouded with paranoia, so that he might know what signs to look for if something else tried to infect his mind like that. And then again after Basira found the jar of ashes. That time he’d just wanted to suck all the marrow he could from the memory of Martin with his sensible corkscrew and his first answer to Why are you here, even if it did mean having to hear himself ask if Martin was a ghost. A few weeks later, however, after Hilltop Road, he’d done a fair bit of obsessing over the spider thing with Prentiss, yeah. He just wished he could remember what conclusion he’d come to.
All he could remember was going for those tapes yet again only to find them missing from his drawer. But he’d been chasing phantoms all day; it was late at night by then, and when he’d dashed out to tell Basira his fear Annabelle had stolen them, stolen his memories from him just like the Not-Them had, he’d stood there over her and Daisy’s frankenbag for what felt like an hour, mouth open, unable to utter a sound. It felt too much like going to wake up his grandmother after a dream. So he’d told himself to sleep on it—that he’d probably left the tapes in some other obvious place, and would find them in the morning. And when he remembered his panic, the next day at lunch, and checked his drawer again, the tapes were back, right where he expected them. He’d dismissed it as a dream after all. But no—Martin must have borrowed them. He must’ve been worried about the Web, too.
“It’s… it should be okay. I don’t think it’ll be like that here.”
Martin sighed. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“That thing where you just—decide how something is without even telling me why you think so. I mean it’s one thing out there, when you ‘know everything’” (this in a false deep voice) “and can’t possibly share it all, but here? When you’re just guessing, like everyone else? Why don’t you think it’ll be like that here? And what does ‘like that’ even mean?”
“I'm sorry—you’re right—I just mean, I don’t think she has her powers here. Based on what Salesa said about the camera, and on what happens when I try to use my powers….”
“Salesa just said the Eye can’t see this place, though. What about that insect thing he said found its way in?”
“I mean.” Jon shrugged. “We managed to find our way here without the Eye’s help.”
“Yeah, but if the Web has no power here then how could she have called me on a payphone? She had to have known where I was to do that, yeah? And she couldn’t know that from here unless the Web told her to do it, right?”
“Maybe? We don’t even know if the Web works like that.”
“Told her to do it, made her want to do it, gave her the tools to do it, whatever. You know what I mean. Look—we know the Eye’s not totally blind here, since it can still feed on statements. Right?”
Jon wondered now how either one of them could have been so sure of that. “Apparently,” he liked to think he had said—but more likely he’d replied simply, “Right.”
“So then by that logic the Web still probably likes it when she—I don’t know, when she manipulates people here. It probably still gets, like, live tweets from her about it. How do we know it can’t use that information to weave more plots around us?”
“If that’s even how it works,” Jon had replied again. “The other fears don’t work like that—they don’t plan, they just.” He tried to sort his intuition into Martin’s live tweet metaphor. “The fears just like their agents’ tweets, they don’t… comment on them, o-or build new opinions on what they’ve read. It boosts the avatar's… popularity, I guess? Their influence?” Jon hadn’t even logged into Twitter since before the Archives. “But unless the Web is different from all the other fears, it doesn’t—it’s not her boss. It doesn’t come up with the schemes, it just.”
“Isn’t it literally called the ‘Spinner of Schemes’, though? The ‘Mother of Puppets’?”
And Jon couldn’t remember what he’d said to brush off that one.
“Of course she’s dangerous,” Martin said now. “I just don’t see what sinister plot of hers we could possibly be enabling by asking her where to find screwdrivers.”
Jon scoffed. “She’s with the Web, Martin! The ‘Mother of Puppets,’ the ‘Spinner of Schemes’? You’re not supposed to be able to see how the threads connect. Anything we ask her gives her another opening to sink her hooks into.”
“So what, you just don’t want to owe her a favor?”
“Yes?” Jon blinked—on purpose, needless to say. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I mean—why do you think she’s here, Martin, ingratiating herself with us?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the one place on Earth that hasn’t been turned into a hell dimension?”
Jon snarled and set his head in his free hand. The dizziness was coming back. “In her statement Annabelle said the trick to manipulating people was to make sure they always either over or underestimate you.”
“Okay,” granted Martin, as though prompting Jon to explain how this was relevant.
“She’s trying to humanize herself,” he maintained, scratching an imaginary itch behind his glasses. “We shouldn’t let her.”
“I mean, she is physically more human here.”
“Is she? She doesn’t seem to be withdrawing from the Web; she’s not—like this.” Jon turned his wrist in a circle next to his head.
“Yeah but she’s been here for months, right? Maybe she’s passed through that stage.”
A bitter huff of laughter. “So you’re saying she’s reformed.”
“No. I’m saying the fact she’s not all—loopy here doesn’t necessarily mean she still has any power.”
“She’s got four arms and six eyes, Martin!”
“And you sleep with your eyes open and summon tape recorders, Jon!”
“Well,” mused Jon with a wry smile, “not on purpose.”
“That’s my point! You’ve only got—vestiges here, yeah? I’m not saying we should trust her; I don’t wanna be friends or anything. I’m just saying I don’t think the actual concrete danger she poses here is what’s making you hate the idea of asking her for directions.”
“What about that insect thing Salesa said she chased off. Does that not sound spidery to you?”
“We don’t know that! Maybe she waved his syringe at it.”
Jon took a deep, shaky breath through his nose. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to bring up this next part; he feared it might make Martin too afraid to stay here any longer. “I think she’s plotting against us.”
Blink. “Well, yeah. Of course she is. She’s been plotting against us for—”
“Here, I mean. I mean, I think that’s why she’s here. She’s been hiding from the Eye on purpose so she could lure us into her trap with her spindly little”—Jon thought of the earrings that dangled from Annabelle’s ears like flies, swinging with her every sudden movement. Unconsciously he struck out with his hand as if to catch one, closing his fist around empty air. “Without my being able to see either her or the trap. At best, she’s here gathering information about us so she can report it back to her master.” He pictured the thousand spiders he’d seen birthed during Francis’s nightmare crawling back and forth with messages between here and the nearest Web domain—
“I thought you said the fears didn’t work that way,” pursued Martin—
“And every little thing we tell her is one more thread she can use to pull on us.”
“Okay, but, even if you’re right, ‘Hey Annabelle, our doorknob’s busted, can you help us find the tools to fix it’ isn’t actually a fact about us.”
“But that’s just the best-case scenario, Martin! The worst-case scenario is that she predicted we’d get locked out of our room, or even loosened the screw herself—”
“Not this again—”
“—because she knew we’d have to ask her for help, and wherever she tells us to look for the screwdriver is where she’s laid her trap! Think about it—this couldn’t happen outside the range of the camera, right? It would only work in a place where I can’t just know where to find something. That’s the only scenario where we’d ever ask her for directions.” Martin sighed, crossed his arms, rolled his eyes. Jon looked right at him, hoping to catch them on their way back down. “What if her plan is to trap us here forever so we can’t go stop Elias? What if by trusting her with this, we give her the tools to keep the world like this forever?”
Again Martin sighed. He bit his lip, at last seeming not to have an argument lined up already.
“I can’t actually stop you from going after her”—Jon heard Martin scoff, but pressed on—“but I can’t take part in this.”
“You sort of already did stop me, Jon.” He lifted his arm, pointing vaguely in the direction she’d gone. “We can’t catch up with her now.”
That wasn’t quite true, Jon knew; Martin had chosen to stop and listen to him. Instead of pointing this out in words Jon smiled, meekly, and reached for Martin’s hand. “Guess that’s true. Are you, er, ready for lunch now?”
His answering scoff sounded fond, indulgent, rather than incredulous. “Yeah, alright.”
With Martin’s hand still in his, Jon turned around—an awkward business, while holding hands in such a narrow passage—and began to walk back towards the dining room. At the end of the corridor stood a tall, thin, many-limbed figure, holding a water carafe, a stack of glasses, and four steaming plates of food.
“You boys getting hungry?” As she stepped toward them her shoes clacked against the floor. How had they not heard her approach? And what was she doing back at that end of the corridor?
“How did you—?”
“I have my ways. I’ve brought lunch for you both, if you’re amenable.”
“Oh—well, thanks, you’re, you’re just in time, actually.” Jon didn’t dare look away from Annabelle Cane long enough to confirm this, but suspected Martin had directed that last bit at him as much as her. “Can I help you with those?”
Annabelle managed to shrug without dislodging anything from the four plates in her hands. “You can take the napkins if you want,” she said, extending toward Martin the forearm from which they hung.
Jon sat back down in the chair he’d left at a haphazard angle—though it felt weird, since he usually sat on the table’s other side. He thanked Martin when he handed him a napkin, and allowed Annabelle to set an empty glass and a plate of food in front of him. It was a pasta dish, with clams—from a can, he reminded himself. A can and a jar of pasta sauce. Couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes to put together.
“Salesa’s still out of it,” observed Martin. “Don’t think he’ll make too much of his.”
“A shame,” Annabelle agreed. She set a plate down in front of the sleeping Salesa anyway. “Maybe the smell of food’ll wake him up.”
“Are you going to eat with us?” Martin asked, as he and Jon both watched her deposit a fourth plate across the table from them.
“I may as well. We do still have to eat to live here, don’t we?” Jon could tell she meant this comment as an invitation for him to join their conversation, but he didn’t intend to take her bait. “Besides,” Annabelle went on, “this way you’ll know I’ve not saved the best for myself.” With one hand she picked up her own plate again; another of her long, thin arms reached out to take Jon’s plate.
He dragged it to the side, out of her reach. “No, thank you.”
“Alright. Martin,” she said, looking over at him with a patient, patronizing smile. “Will you switch plates with me?”
“Oh, my god,” Martin groaned into his hand. “Sure, why not.”
Something small and gray skittered across the table toward her. For half a second Annabelle took her eyes from Martin. Her nostrils flared; one of her eyes twitched; Jon heard a stifled squawk from behind her closed lips as she swept the skittery thing over her edge of the table. He made no such effort to hide his scoff. Did she think she could play nice, by declining to hold little spider conversations in front of them? That they’d think she was on their side as long as they couldn’t see her chatting to her little spies?
“Thank you,” Annabelle sing-songed meanwhile, returning her gaze to Martin. “You’re sweet.”
On their first morning here, after showering and then shuddering back into their filthy clothes, Jon and Martin had barely left their room before Annabelle dangled herself in their path, with cups of tea (Jon refused his) and an offer to show them to the pantry. From this tour Jon had concluded that all food in this place was tainted by her influence. And he didn’t actually feel hungry at that point? He remembered Martin remarking on his hunger before they’d both fallen asleep, but Jon had felt only tired. Surely that meant he still didn’t need food here, right? It’d been like that before the change, after the coma—he’d needed sleep and statements to keep up his strength, but could function just fine without… people food. So he’d resolved to accept nothing offered him here—or at least, nothing Salesa and Annabelle hadn’t already given him and Martin without their consent. No tea, none of Salesa’s booze, no use of the huge industrial washing machines, no food.
That resolution lasted about nine hours. He knew because on that first day time still felt like such a novelty he and Martin had counted every one. Once he’d tried and failed to compel Salesa—once he’d heard him give a statement and managed to space out for half of it, rather than transcending himself in the ecstasy of vicarious fear—Jon started to grow conscious of his hunger. After two hours he felt shaky; after four he started picking quarrels, first just with Annabelle when she showed up with snacks, then with Salesa, and then even with Martin; after six he felt first hot, then cold. Finally around the eight-hour mark he was hiding tears over an untied shoelace, and figured it was worth finding out how much of this torment people food could solve. He sat through dinner, flaunting his empty plate—then stole to the pantry for something he could make himself. Settled for dry toast and raisins. “Couldn’t you find the jam?” Martin had asked him.
“Didn’t think of it,” Jon lied, once he’d got his throat round a lump of under-chewed toast.
“You want me to get some for you? That looks pretty depressing without it,” Martin said, with his eyebrows and the line of his mouth both raised in a pitying smile.
“Better make it one of the sealed jars.”
“What, so Annabelle can’t have got to it?” Jon nodded, chewing so as to have neither to smile back nor decide not to. “You know she made the bread, right.”
Of course she had. Jon dropped his head onto his fists. “Fuck.”
“What did you think?” mused Martin with a laugh. “That Salesa just popped down to the supermarket?”
“I don’t know—that they’d taken it from the freezer, maybe?”
“I mean, that’s possible,” Martin granted with a shrug. “Should I get you that jam?”
Big sigh. “Fine.”
In reality he’d stared up at the row of jam jars in Salesa’s pantry for a full ten seconds before deciding not to have any. He feared spiders would spill out of the jar onto his hand as soon as he got it open. But he also feared he might not be able to open it at all—only hurt himself trying. Way back in their first year in the Archives together, Martin had once seen him struggling to get open the jar where he kept paperclips. Jon hadn’t realized he was being watched—or, that is, that Martin was watching him. In the Archives the sense of someone watching was so omnipresent one soon lost the ability to distinguish Elias’s evil Eye from other, more mundane eyes. Anyway, after three minutes’ effort and nothing to show for it but a misplaced MCP joint in his thumb, Jon had given up on paper-clipping the photos Tim had pilfered for him to their relevant statement and begun hunting through his desk drawers for a stapler instead. And then a high-pitched pop above his head made him startle so badly he gasped, choked on his own spit, and flung the picture in his hand across the room like a paper airplane.
Around the sound of his own cough he could hear Martin shouting Sorry, and Tim and Sasha laughing on the other side of the wall. Martin’s laugh soon joined theirs, though it sounded desperate, sheepish. He dove after the photo Jon had dropped, and then, when he came back with it, explained, “Got the paperclips for you.”
Jon frowned. “This is a photograph, Martin.”
“No, I mean—?” His laugh came out like a whimper; he picked the unlidded jar up an inch off the table, then set it back down. “Here.”
Okay, so, not exactly an auspicious start, but, it still became a thing? Martin opening his paperclip jar. At first he’d wished he could just remember not to seal it so tightly; he could get it just fine when he stopped turning it earlier. At least when the weather hadn’t changed since the last time he opened it. But then when they all started leaving the Archives less often, and the break-room fridge filled up with condiments that all seemed to have twist-off lids… he’d kind of liked that? Martin would hand him the peanut-butter jar, with its lid off and pinned to its side with one finger, before Jon had even finished asking for it. This seemed to be the pattern behind all his early positive impressions of Martin: the jar lids, the corkscrew, the way he managed to make mealtimes at the Institute feel like proper breaks. Martin had seemed like such an oaf to him at first—clumsy, absent-minded, always seeming to think that if he professed enough good will with his smiles and cups of tea and I know you won’t like this, but, then no one would notice his impertinent comments and all the doors he left wide open. All the dogs and worms and spiders he let in. He’d seemed to Jon the human embodiment of a fly left undone—more so than ever after the morning he’d walked in on him wearing naught but frog-print boxer shorts. But he had this easy grace with things that needed twisting off. Banana peels, bottle caps, wine corks, worms.
And then when he came back after the Unknowing Martin was never around. Jon and Basira and Melanie all lived in the Archives, like Martin had two years before, but by that point he wasn’t on Could you open this for me? terms with any of them. But he hadn’t needed people food anymore, and if he subluxed a joint it would heal instantly anyway. So he’d just struggled and sworn, feeling stupid for shrinking from the pain even after having chopped off his own finger. And it got easier with practice. By the time he and Martin reunited, he’d got so used to it that sometimes he’d hand jars to Martin already unlidded. Martin hadn’t seemed to notice. Finally, one evening a day or two after that row they had over the ice-cream thing, Jon had opened a jar of pasta sauce (he’d taken up people food again at Daisy’s safehouse, if only to make their time there feel more like a regular holiday), and reached out to hand it to Martin—then paused and retracted the hand that gripped the jar, remembering his promise to be more open about.
“This is, um.” He’d glanced up at Martin, then back to the floor as the latter said,
“Huh?”
“This is one of those things that’s got better since the coma. Since I became an avatar. I can, um. I can open jars now? Without.” He’d almost said Without hurting myself, then remembered that wasn’t technically true. Deep breath. “Without lasting harm. It—it hurts for a second? But the Eye heals it instantly. That's why I’ve been.”
“Oh,” Martin said, seeming to stall for time as he absorbed this information. He accepted the jar which Jon again held out to him, and turned it around in his hands, eyes on its label. “Yeah, I—I noticed, you’re really good at opening jars now,” he went on with a laugh. Again he paused, and blew a sigh out of his mouth. “Right. Okay. Thank you for telling me?”
“I’ll try and be better about….”
Martin nodded, turning back to the stove and beginning to stir sauce into the pasta. “Yeah. I, uh—I didn’t know that was why you used to need me to open them for you?” Since the other night’s argument, Jon had gathered as much. He nodded too. “I thought you were just, heh, you know. Weaker than me.”
“I mean, I am—”
“Well yeah but you know what I mean.”
“I do. I should’ve told you.”
“No, I—actually I think you’re in the clear on that one, if I’m honest. I just—it’s just weird? I thought I was done having to” (another blown-out sigh punctuated his speech) “having to reframe stuff I thought was normal around some unseen horror. Sorry,” he added when he’d finished beating sauce off Daisy’s wooden spoon; “that’s probably not a great way to.”
“No—it’s fine?”
“Suppose it sounds like an exaggeration, now, after all we’ve.”
Mechanically, Jon nodded, without deciding whether he agreed or not. Around an awkward laugh, he confessed, “‘Unseen horror’ might be the nicest way I’ve ever heard anyone describe it.”
“Er. Yikes? That sounds like you might need some better friends, Jon.”
“Maybe,” he conceded, laughing again. “I—I just mean, it’s nice to hear something other than?” Jon paused and pushed his little fingers back the hundred or so degrees they each would go. First the left, then the right. Other than what? Well, doubt, for a start. Though most of the doubt he heard from outside himself was implicit. Careful silence from people he told about it; requests people made of him seemingly just so he’d have to tell them he couldn’t do that; impatience, bafflement, suspicion from strangers. Why are you out of breath, the woman behind the Immigration desk had asked him at O’Hare, as if breathlessness incriminated him somehow. But that wasn’t the response he’d subconsciously measured Martin’s phrase against. What he had in mind now was more like… bland support. Hurried support. Assurances quick and dutiful, yet so vague he could tell the people who gave them were thinking only of the mistakes they might make, if they dared to acknowledge what he’d said with any more than half a sentence. The I’m sorry you’re in pain equivalents of Right away, Mr. Sims.
That was it—unseen horror was an original thought. Martin had put it in his own words, rather than either borrowing Jon’s or using none at all. “Other than a platitude.”
So at Salesa’s when Martin came back with the jam jar he handed it to Jon. Jon made a show of trying to open it, but could feel his middle finger threatening to leave its top half behind. It frightened him, in a way he’d forgot was even possible. For such a long time now, pain had just been pain? He’d grown so unused to the threat it held for normal people. The threat of actual danger, of injury. He’d set down the jar on the table in front of him, and crossed his arms in front of it.
“Can’t get it, huh?” Martin asked; Jon shook his head.
How much danger, though, he wondered. Earlier that day, after he and Martin got out of the bath, his left index finger had popped out while he was buttoning his shirt. It still ached when he used the finger, or thought about the cracking sound it had made—but didn’t throb anymore without provocation. Not much danger there; not even much inconvenience. He supposed if he hurt his middle finger too then he might have some trouble with his trouser button the next time he had to pee? Right, yes, what a cross to bear. I hurt myself doing x; now it hurts to do x. But it already hurt to do x, didn’t it? Didn’t x always hurt, before the change? Why did he so fear to face an hour or a day where it hurt more than usual, but not so much I can’t do it?
“So you’re saying it won’t… come off?”
“Ha, ha.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”
“What if I open it and it’s full of spiders?”
Martin had smiled, rolled his eyes, pulled the jar toward him, and twisted its lid off with a pop. “See? No spiders in this one.
“While you’re here, Annabelle,” Jon heard Martin say, “I don’t suppose you know anything about where Salesa keeps his screwdrivers?”
Annabelle tapped her chin and said, very pleasantly, “Hmmm. Perhaps they’re where he left them after the last time something broke.”
Martin’s lips drew closer together. “Yeah,” he nodded, “probably. Any idea where that might be?”
“Perhaps he keeps them next to whatever screw comes loose most often.”
“And do you know which screw that is?”
She shook her head, though who knew whether that meant she didn’t know or merely that she didn’t mean to tell him. “Perhaps he only uses the item when he’s alone,” she said, with a shrug and a sly smile.
“…Ew.” Annabelle cackled like a school kid pulling a prank. “Right, great,” sighed Martin. “Thanks a lot. Forget it. You done, Jon?”
Jon glanced sleepily down at his plate. Only half empty, but cold by now. “Yes.”
“Nice of you to grace us with your presence, Annabelle,” Martin said, sliding his and Jon’s plates toward her side of the table.
Instead of energy, lunch gave Jon only a slight queasy feeling—like one gets from eating sweets on an empty stomach.
“God”—hissed Martin, with clenched fists, as they ambled back to their room—“‘Perhaps he keeps them next to the screw that gets loose most often.’ Yeah, figured that out already, thanks! Can you even believe her? Sitting down to eat with us, as if she’s all ready to help, and then the best she can do is,” he paused and straightened, then said with a finger to his chin in imitation of Annabelle, “‘Oh, hm, guess he only uses it alone. Oh well!’”
“Don’t know what else you expected.”
Martin sighed, his arms crossed now. “Guess I should’ve done what you asked after all, since that accomplished nothing.” After a moment he went on, “Least it wasn’t a trap, right? I tried not to give her anything she could use against us.” With a smile Jon could hear without looking at him, “You notice how I pointedly didn’t offer to help clean up?”
“No, I didn’t,” Jon confessed, laughing a little.
“No?!” Again Martin paused on his feet, frowning, incredulous. Jon wished he wouldn’t; standing still made him dizzier, took more effort than walking, like that poor woman in Oliver’s domain. Daniela? Martin shook his head at himself. “Ugh—then who knows if she noticed, either. I thought I was being so obvious!”
“I mean—”
“Wait, hold up, let’s double back.”
“Are you going to go back and tell her it was on purpose?”
“No, just”—he echoed Jon’s laugh—“no, of course not. I just wanted to try that wing’s toilets next. Didn’t want her to see which way we were going.”
“Oh.” By this time Martin had turned around and started to walk the other way; Jon hung back. “Er. I thought—I thought we were going to our room first.”
“What, the new one you mean?” asked Martin, turning his head around to look back at him.
“…Yes,” Jon decided. Until this moment he’d forgot about that, and been daydreaming of their original bed.
“Sure, if you want. Do you need a break?”
“I… I think so, yes.”
Martin turned the rest of the way around, shuffled toward Jon and looked him over, with a concerned frown. He took his free hand between his fingers and thumb, brushing the latter over Jon’s knuckles. “Yeah, okay. You still seem pretty out of it. How are you feeling?”
“Not great,” answered Jon, though he smiled in relief at Martin’s willingness to change the plan for him.
“Food didn’t help?”
His stomach seemed hung with cobwebs; his mind, like a large room with half its lights burnt out. His light head seemed attached to his heavy, aching body only by a string, like a balloon tied to an Open-House sign. He still needed the toilet. “Not really?”
“Yeah, thought not. You need a statement, huh.”
Jon shrugged, avoiding Martin’s eyes. “Probably.”
In the interim bedroom Jon sat down at the edge of the bed, bent down over his legs, and untied his shoes, wondering why his life always came back around to this. His hip got stuck like a drawer that’s been pulled out crooked, so he had to lever himself back up with his arms, trapping fistfuls of counterpane between thumbs and the meat of his palms. It made his hands cramp, but that helped—the way it would have helped to bite his finger. When he’d got himself upright again he sat and blinked for a few seconds, hoping each time he opened his eyes that his vision would’ve cleared.
Martin sat down next to him and put his hand on Jon’s arm. “You’re blinking again. You okay?”
“Just… kind of dizzy? It’s an Eye thing.”
He let Martin pull him towards him until their shoulders touched. “Yeah. Makes sense. Nap should help. Statement’ll definitely help.”
“Right.”
They agreed to lie on the bed rather than properly in it, not wanting to have to put the covers back together afterward. Jon set his head on that squishy part of Martin’s chest where it started to give way to armpit, knowing to angle himself so the scar tissue pressed the hollow part of his cheek rather than anywhere bonier. It was normally dangerous to lie half on his back, half on his side like this, but he’d lately discovered he could use Martin’s leg to keep his hip from falling off. He could feel the muscles in his shoulder twitching and cramping, whether to pull the joint out or keep it in who could tell. But it’d be fine as long as he shrugged the arm every few minutes.
All the ways they knew to spend time in each other’s company had come together in Scotland, where he’d had none of these worries. Even after the change, on their journey, with nothing but sleeping bags between them and desecrated earth, he’d borne only the same aches he’d been ignoring since he read the statement that ended the world. Jon imagined lying next to Martin like this on the cold stone of a tomb in the Necropolis, surrounded by guardian angels’ malicious laughter. Not feeling the cold, or the grain of the stone against his ankles and the bandage on his shin—just knowing it was there, like when you watch someone suffer those things in a movie. Less vivid even than a statement about lying on a tomb; in Naomi Herne’s nightmare he’d felt the stone in her hands.
“Hfff, okay—ready to get back to it?”
“Mrrr.”
“…Jon, are you asleep?”
He shrugged his hanging shoulder. “No.”
Nose laugh. “Come on, wake up.”
“Mmrrrrrrr.”
“My arm’s asleep.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It won’t wake up ‘till you get up off of it, Jon,” said Martin, gently, between huffs of laughter.
“Hmr.” Jon rolled away to face the wall with the window, freeing Martin’s arm.
“Do you want me to go look without you?”
“Okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mhm.”
Cold air washed over his newly-exposed arm, ribcage, side of face, the outside of his sore hip. It was cold on this Martinless side of the bed, too. He rolled back over into the shadow of his warmth, but that still wasn’t as good as the real thing. Maybe he could pull the covers halfway out and roll himself up in them.
“Aaagh, no—Jon”—Martin’s cool hand on top of his as he tried to hook his fingers round the counterpane— “we’re trying to leave the room the way we found it, remember?”
“Hmmmrrgh.” He consented to leave his hand still when Martin’s departed from it. A few seconds later, a rustle against his ear, the smell of smoke and old clothes.
“Here.”
Jon crunched the jacket down so it wouldn’t itch his ear. “You won’t need it?”
“Probably not.”
“Hm.”
“I’ll be back for it if I have to go outside again, yeah?”
“Okay.”
In his mind’s eye they trudged into the wind, hand in hand. It blew Martin’s hood off his head, and inverted Jon’s cane like an umbrella. He shrunk himself further under Martin’s jacket, relishing the new pockets of warmth he created as his calves met his thighs and his hands gripped his shoulders.
“Ooookay…! Wish me luck?”
“Good luck,” managed Jon around a yawn.
Martin had been right about the wallpaper. Not only was the red too bright to look at comfortably; it also had the kind of flowered pattern just complex enough that every time you look back at it you’re compelled to double-check where it repeats. Every fourth stripe was the same as the first, right? Not every second? And that weird little scroll-shaped petal—he’d seen that one too recently. Was it the same as?—No, that one was a bud. He pulled Martin’s jacket up so it covered his eyes.
They’d put their jackets through the laundry with everything else, their first day here, but that hadn’t got the smell out. Enough time had passed between the burning building and their arrival here for the smoke to embed itself permanently into their jackets and shoes, like how duffel bags once taken camping always smell like barbecue. And everything they’d ever shoved in those backpacks still had some of that odd, sour, Ritz-cracker smell of clothes left unwashed too long.
Daisy used to smell like smoke and laundry, too, once she quit smelling like dirt. It was the smell of the old green sleeping bag she’d zipped up to Basira’s. She said she’d have showered it off if she could; she didn’t like it. To her it was a Hunt smell—it reminded her of her clearing in the woods. But there weren’t any showers in the Archives. She’d point this out every time, in the same wry voice, so Jon was sure she’d intended the metaphor. No showers in the Archives: you couldn’t hide your sins in a temple of the Eye. This had comforted Jon—or maybe flattered was the word, though he knew her better than to think she’d have done so on purpose. He just wasn’t sure he agreed. He’d hid his sins pretty well from himself, after the coma. It was easy; you just had to lose track of scale. No one could remember all of them at once, after all. Others had had to point the important ones out to him.
Were those footsteps he could hear out there? Not Annabelle’s—? No; her clicky shoes. These were blunter. Could be Salesa, awake at last, come to invite them to play a game with him. “How do you two feel about… foosball?” he would say, drawing out the last word in a husky whisper. Only then would he swing the door wide open to reveal himself in a shiny jersey, shorts, and studded shoes. He set his fists out before him and turned them in semicircles, pretending to manipulate the plastic rods of a foosball table. Jon curled still more tightly into himself at the thought of Salesa’s face, how his showman’s grin would crumple like a hole in a cellophane wrapper when he realized the fun one had gone and that he faced only the Archivist. “Oh—hello. Jon, is it? Where has your lovely Martin gone?”
“Oh, uh. Martin needs a screwdriver to fix our door, so I.”
He watched Martin march his silent way slowly, solemnly down a corridor that grew darker, grayer, vaguer with every step until the webs that lined its every side and hung in laces from the ceiling began to catch on his shoes, his belt, his glasses.
“I let him go off alone.”
Jon’s whole body flinched. He gasped awake—oh shit. How had he just let Martin go? He had to—couldn’t stay here—find Martin—keep him out of Annabelle’s clutches—
Stick-thin bristling spider legs tapped the floor of his mind like fingers on a table. Find Martin. Jon instructed himself to sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed and reach down to grab his shoes. He twitched one finger. See? You can do this. In a minute he’d try again and be able to move his whole arm, push himself up onto one hand. Find Martin.
Also probably go to the toilet. With an empty bladder his head would be clearer, he could figure out which direction to look first.
After Hopworth, while he laid on the couch in his office waiting for the strength to throw himself into the Buried, Jon had imagined Martin and Georgie and Basira and Melanie all stood around that coffin, wearing black and holding flowers. Denise? No, it definitely had three syllables. A scattered applause began as Jonah Magnus emerged from his office, closed behind him the door printed with poor dead Bouchard’s name, and stepped up to the podium. Georgie, not knowing his face, began to clap; Melanie stayed her hands. Elagnus’s shirt, hidden behind suit except for the collar, was striped in black and white. A ball and chain hung from his sleeve like an enormous cufflink. He opened his mouth to speak, and a tape recorder began to hiss.
“What are you doing here?” asked Basira.
“Never underestimate how much I care for the tools I use, Detective. I wouldn’t miss my Archivist’s big day.”
“So they just let you out for this.”
Elias shrugged with false modesty. His chain jingled. “When I asked them nicely.”
“How did you even know he was dead?” interposed Melanie. “Basira, did you tell him about the—”
“She didn’t have to,” said Elias, raising his voice to cut Melanie’s off. “Nothing escapes my notice, and I like to keep an eye out for this sort of thing.”
“Well—it’s—good to see you.” Tim’s voice. Unconvincing, even then.
Jon steeled himself to hear his own voice stammer out, “Yes—y-yes!” but heard nothing except the hissing of the… tape. Yes, that was the wrong tape—the one from his birthday.
“Anyway. Somebody mentioned cake.” Elias jingled as he arranged his hands under his chin.
Tim scoffed. “They didn’t serve cake at my funeral.”
“I preferred going out for ice cream anyway,” pronounced Martin, his arms crossed and his nose in the air. Jon pushed himself up on shaking hands. Find Martin.
They had gone for ice cream at John O’Groats before the change, while living at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin had apologized on behalf of the kiosk for its measly selection—no rum and raisin. Jon pronounced a playful “Urgh,” assuming Martin had cited this flavor as a joke. “I think I’ll manage without that particular abomination.”
“Wait, what? Why did you order it at my birthday party then?”
Jon stood still with his ice cream cone, squinted into space, and blinked. “I did?”
“My first birthday in the Archives, yeah!”
“Huh. That’s… odd.” Martin placed a gentle hand on Jon’s back to remind him to resume walking. “I suppose I must have been—huh. Yes,” he mused, nodding slowly as his hypothesis came into focus between his eyes and the ground. “I must still have thought I was tired of all the good flavors at that point.”
He heard Martin scoff a few steps ahead of him. “What, and now you’re happy with plain old vanilla?” Then he heard arrhythmic footsteps thumping toward him from Martin’s direction; he looked up to find Martin reaching his napkin-draped free hand out toward Jon’s ice cream cone. “You’re dripping again,” he explained.
Jon mumbled thanks and shrugged a laugh. “I-I’ve, uh. Come back around on most of them.”
“Except rum and raisin?”
“No—I’ve come around on it, too, just, uh.” He tried to make the shape of a wheel with his ice-cream-cone-laden hand. It flicked drips of vanilla across his shirt. Martin came at him with the napkin again. “Thank you. I just disliked that one to start with.”
“…Right. Okay, so what revolution occurred in your life before the Archives that overturned all your opinions on ice cream flavors?”
So Jon had told Martin about that summer when his jaw kept subluxing. He’d used that word, assuming Martin was familiar with it already—incorrect, as he knew now. Presumably Martin had gathered from context that Jon meant he’d hurt his jaw, in some small-scale, no-big-deal way whose specifics he’d let slide as an unimportant detail. But then as the anecdote wore on he must have begun to feel the hole in his knowledge. And lo, at last Martin had invoked that dread specter the clarifying question.
“Okay but so your grandmother had no problem with you basically living off ice cream all summer?”
“Well, she did when I could chew. But not when it was that or tinned soup.”
“Ah—right. ‘Cause you hurt your… jaw, you said?” Jon nodded. “What happened exactly?”
“Oh. Uh. Happened? Nothing, just my—I was born, I guess. Just part of my genetic condition; I happened to get it especially bad in the jaw that year. I-it’s much better now, though,” he hastened to add when he noticed Martin’s frown.
“What genetic condition? You never told me you had one.”
“Didn’t I?”
At the time, the anger in Martin’s answering scoff had surprised him. “No, Jon, you never said.”
“Oh. Sorry? I—I mean, you’ve seen me with this for years—I just?—thought you knew.”
“Seen you with—what, the cane, you mean? I thought that was Prentiss!”
Jon glanced to the doorway to double-check that was where he’d left his cane.
“What? No,” he had mused. “Of course not. I’ve had this since….”
“But you never used it.”
“No—surely, I—”
“Not once before Prentiss.”
Even as he’d said the words, Jon’s memory of that time had returned to him and he’d known Martin was right. Before Prentiss attacked the Institute he’d brought his cane with him to work in the Archives every day, and every day left it folded up in his bag. All out of an obscure notion that if he’d used it before Elias and before his coworkers, they’d take it as a plea for mercy, an admission of weakness or incompetence. God, he was naïve back then. He’d used the cane often enough back in Research; why hadn’t he worried Tim and Sasha would find its new absence conspicuous? That they’d worry just as much about his refusal to use it? The whole thing seemed even more stupid, too, now that he knew Elias must have noticed the change. How it must have pleased him, to see his shiny new Archivist so obsessed with proving he was fit for the job.
“Yeah but,” Jon pursued, instead of voicing any of this, “Tim never—?”
Martin nodded and shrugged. “I don’t know; I figured Tim didn’t get them in the legs as much as you did. I didn’t see you guys after the attack, remember? Not ‘til you got out of quarantine.”
“Right, no, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry,” said Jon mechanically, already consumed with the question he asked next. “Martin—did you think it was the corkscrew?”
From Martin’s sigh Jon figured he’d been expecting this question. “Kinda? At first, yeah. Half for real, half just—you know, as a habit? Like, ‘Look, a way to blame yourself!’” He splayed out his hands, rolled his eyes.
“Yes—I do that too.” Jon barely got the words out above a whisper; he couldn’t not smile, but fought to keep it from showing teeth. A muscle under his chin spasmed with the effort.
“But then I noticed you switching sides with it a lot, so, yeah. I knew it couldn’t be just that.”
“Really?” He waited for Martin’s answering shrug. “You’re the first person who’s ever noticed that. Or at least commented on it.”
“Sorry?”
“No—it’s.”
This attempt to communicate a similar sentiment, Jon recalled as he reached for his shoes, hadn’t gone as well as the one a few days later (over unseen horror &c.). Beholding had at that moment presented him with the image of a fat, hunched woman in shorts. She shuffled forward a few steps in a queue at Boots, next to him, and shifted her weight so the cane in her right hand supported her nearer leg. He felt a strong impulse he knew wasn’t his own—one born partly of resentment, part exasperation, part concern—to tell the woman that was bad for her shoulder, that she should switch hands too. But knew if he tried she’d either pretend she hadn’t heard it, or tell him off for criticizing her. Jon didn’t know what she would say more specifically; the Eye didn’t do hypotheticals. It had given him no more than this single moment of preverbal intuition. After the change he could have sought out other conversations Martin had had with his mother, and they might have given him a pretty good idea. But he’d promised Martin not to look at things like that.
He managed to dislodge a finger while tying his shoe. The other shoe he’d pulled off without untying; in a fit of impatience he tried now to shove his foot into it as it was. No good—he got the shoe on, but it just made the other index finger, the one he’d hooked into the back of the shoe behind his heel for leverage, pop off to the side too. Jon was afraid to find out what shape it would end up in if he pulled his finger back out of the shoe like that, so he had to untie it after all, one-handed. Then carefully extract his finger. It sprung back into place as soon as he removed the offending pressure (namely, his heel), but he still whimpered and swore. The corners of his eyes pricked with indignation when he remembered he still had to pee.
In this case, for once, Beholding had told him the important part: that that was why Martin had noticed. Had he noticed Melanie, too, Jon wondered, when she got back from India? She would switch hands sometimes, too—but, of course, without switching legs. He wondered if that had picked at the same unacknowledged nerve of Martin’s that his mother’s habit had. It had bothered Jon, too, but in a different way. He’d resented it a little, but also felt humbled by it, the way he always did by others’ discomfort. Getting shot in the leg seemed so big? Like such an aberration. So uncontroversially important—probably because it was simple, legible. Georgie could convey its hugeness to him in three words. She got shot. Obviously there was more to the story than that; there were parts he could never…
Well, no. There was a part of it he felt he should say he could never understand: that she’d kept the cursed bullet because she wanted it. In fact he was pretty sure he did understand that. But he didn’t have the right to admit it, he didn’t think. And no reason to hope she would believe him if he did. The second he’d learnt the bullet was still in there, after all, he and Basira had rushed to dig it out. Surely, from her perspective that could only mean he didn’t and could never understand. Or maybe he just wanted her to see it that way—wanted her to get to keep that uncomplicated resentment of his ignorance. It made his perspective look stupid and ugly, sure. But the truth made it look self-absorbed and pitiful. The truth was that until Daisy insisted otherwise, he’d assumed only he could see his own corruption and assent to it: that the others must not have known what they were doing.
Then again, maybe even if Melanie knew that, she would see only that he had underestimated her. Maybe it didn’t matter how much she knew.
Melanie switched off which hand she held her white cane with now, too. But that was probably healthy? Jon knew no more than the average person about white-cane hygiene. He just remembered feeling the floor drop out of his stomach when they’d got coffee together during his time in hiding and he had seen her switch her original, silver cane from hand to hand. Part of him had wanted to scoff or rationalize it away. How much could the shot leg hurt, really, if she still noticed when her arms got tired? But another part of him shuddered at the thought one arm alone couldn’t compensate for the weight her leg refused to take—that she had to keep switching off when one arm got weak and shaky from supporting more weight than it should have to. It wasn’t that he hadn’t experienced pain or impairment on that scale. He had, though the thought of a single injury sufficing to cause it still made him feel cold inside. It was that he kept seeing proofs, all over, everywhere, that the parts of his life he’d only learnt to accept by assuming they were rare weren’t rare.
Leitner hadn’t made the evil books; he’d just noticed they were there. And then had his life ruined by their influence, like everyone who came across them. Jon had had no time and no right to deplore the holes Prentiss had left in him and Tim, because on the same damn day he learnt someone had shot the previous Archivist to death. Alright, so it was him, then, right? Him and Tim—just doomed, just preternaturally unlucky. Tim, handsome face half-eaten by worms, estranged (as Jon then assumed) from a brother who seemed so warm and accepting in that picture on his lock screen; Jon, saved from Mr. Spider only by his childhood bully, now fated to take the place of another murder victim—and also half-eaten by worms. But no; he and Tim had got off lightly. Look what had happened to Sasha the same fucking night. The very thing whose influence convinced him the world had it out for him? Had killed Sasha. Literally stolen her life. How many lives around him got stolen while he mourned his own?
“I want you to comment on it,” Jon had managed to clarify. But Martin had scoffed as he stood in the foyer of Daisy’s safehouse, hopping on one foot to pull off the other shoe:
“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly led by example on that one.”
“How could I?”
He accepted Jon’s scarf and long-discarded jacket, hanging them up beside his own. “Gee, I don’t know—commenting on it yourself?”
“On… switching which side I used the cane on.”
“Don’t play dumb, Jon. On this ‘genetic condition’” (in a deep, posh voice, with a stodgy frown and fluttering eyelashes) “you’ve apparently had this entire time. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“I thought you knew, Martin! Why would I mention it in a childhood anecdote if I didn’t think...?”
“Well I didn’t know, okay? You never told me. You never tell anyone anything about what’s going on with you, you just—you just make everything into another heroic cross to bear.”
“That’s not—?” He wanted to tell Martin just how little that made him want to say about it. But he guessed Martin was really talking less about the EDS thing, more about how he’d spent their whole first year in the Archives pretending to dismiss the statements that scared him. How he’d sent Tim and Martin home when he’d found out about Sasha. How he’d stayed away from the Institute even after his name got cleared for Leitner’s murder. “What do you want to know.”
“Why you never—?” In a similar way, Martin seemed to reconsider his initial response. “Yeah, okay, right. Object-level stuff, yeah?” Jon nodded and wanly smiled. “Okay, so. What’s it called?”
After taking a minute to ditch his shoes, wash the sticky ice-cream residue off his hands, and drink some water, he’d sat down on the couch with Martin and told him its name, what it was, what it did. What does that mean, though, Martin kept asking, so he’d explained how it applied to the anecdote about his jaw. Martin asked why it meant he needed a cane.
“Be…cause all my joints are like that.”
“Yeah, but why does it help with that? What is the cane actually for, is what I’m asking.”
Jon hated being asked that question. “It—it means I don’t fall over when one of my joints stops working? A-and… also makes walking hurt less. I suppose.”
“So, when they’re working right, that’s when you don’t need it?”
“No—yes?—sort of. Now sometimes I just need it when it’s been too long since I had a statement. I get sort of. Weak.” Quickly Jon added, “But I don’t need it for stability so much since the coma.” He’d shown Martin how now, when he pulled out his finger, the Eye would just sort of erase that version of reality—how the dislocation wouldn’t snap back, but simply cease to exist. As if his body were a drawing on which the Beholding had corrected a mistake. He put his palms together behind his back, in the way he’d been told one couldn’t without subluxing both shoulders, and told Martin to watch how the hollows between his shoulder bones vanished. He opened his jaw ‘til it jarred to the side, and told Martin to listen for the static.
But Jon had never shown Martin how these things worked before the coma. Martin had no reference for this kind of thing; he understood only enough to find the sights unsettling. “That’s—no, that’s okay, I’ll”—he stuttered as Jon fumbled with his kneecap in search of a fourth example—“I-I get it. I’ll take your word for it.”
“I just thought.”
“No, I—? I don’t need you to prove it to me, Jon.” (The latter nodded, blushing, trying to smile.) “I get… I’m sorry. I guess I get why it’d feel easier not to say anything if? If you think it’s either that or have to convince people it’s a thing.”
Again Jon nodded. He suspected Martin wasn’t through talking yet. But Martin still wasn’t looking at him, eyes squeezed tight against Jon’s party tricks. So, to show he was listening, Jon said, “Yes. Er—thank you, Martin.”
“I just don’t like it when you hide things from me.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You could at least ask if I want to know about them, yeah?”
Even at the time, Jon had doubted this. If they’d had this conversation after the change, he might have pointed out to Martin that when you mention something the other person has no inkling of, you make them too curious to decline your offer of more information, even if afterward they’ll admit they wish you’d never told them.
“Or ask me if I even recognize what you’re talking about, the next time you start going on about some childhood anecdote where you incidentally had a dislocated jaw. Honestly, would it kill you to start with, ‘Hey, did I ever tell you about x’?”
“No, it wouldn’t. You’re right. I’ll try. What… kinds of things did you—? For the future, I mean. What kinds of things did you want to make sure I tell you about.”
Martin sighed, in that way he did when he thought Jon was going about something all wrong. But after a pause to think, he did ask, “About this, or in general?”
“Either—both—first one, then the other.”
“Okay. I guess… I want to know when you’re hurt, mostly. Like—I can’t believe I even have to say this—that’s kind of important, actually? How am I supposed to know how to behave around you if I never know whether you're secretly in pain or not?”
This seemed weird—both now and at the time. Jon figured he must be missing something. If Martin thought he only needed the cane because of Prentiss then, sure, that might have affected how he imagined Jon’s discomfort to himself, but? Wasn’t the cane itself an admission of pain? Why did Martin think he owed him more than that—that he had owed him more than that at the time, no less? Did he not realize how fucking private that was? What a surrender of privacy the cane represented?
But, no, he reminded himself now; nondisabled people don’t realize that, unless you tell them about it. Repeatedly. Over and over. It only seems obvious to you because you lived it already.
“Er.” At the time he’d just shown Martin his teeth, with the points of his left-side canines joined. Nominally a smile, but more like a show of hiding the grimace beneath than an actual attempt to hide it. “That’s harder than you might think? Technically I’m always….”
“Oh.”
“Sorr—”
“—What do you mean, ‘technically’?”
“I’m—not always aware of it?” He disliked that phrase, in pain—how it implied a discrete and exclusive state. One could not be in Paris and at the same time in London; similarly, most people seemed to assume one could not be in pain and also in a good mood. In raptures. In a transport of laughter. That when one admits to being in pain, one implies that’s the most important thing they’re conscious of.
“Well that doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes, I know—‘if a tree falls down in a forest’—blah blah blah.” With a gentle smile to acknowledge he’d picked up this mode of speech from Martin. He turned his wrist in circles so it clicked like an old film reel. “Philosophically speaking, if you’re not aware of pain, you can’t be in it. Maybe ‘technically’ isn’t the right word.”
“Oh yeah ‘cause that’s the angle I want to know about this from.”
Jon sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. I just mean, it doesn’t always matter to me.”
“Well it matters to me,” Martin scoffed.
“Yeah—I’m getting that. Is there any way I can explain this that you won’t jump down my throat for?”
Martin sighed, groaned, pulled at his hair a little but made himself stop. (He doesn’t pull it out, Jon knows—he just likes having something to grab onto during awkward conversations. Usually emerges from them looking like a cartoon scientist.) “Okay, yeah,” said Martin. “I get it. I’m sorry too.”
“I mean—when you get a paper cut, that hurts, technically, right?”
“Well yeah, a little, but that’s not the kind of—”
“But just because you notice that hurt doesn’t mean?” He paused to rearrange his words. “You’re not going to remember it later unless someone asks why you’ve got blood on your sleeve.”
��Y—eah. Sure.”
“Is that…?”
“When you’re suffering, then. I want you to tell me that. And—whenever something weird happens? Like, before it stops being weird and you talk to me like I’m stupid for not already knowing about it.”
“What if”—this far into his question, Jon worried it might come off as a smart-alecky, devil’s-advocate thing. So he paused, pretending he needed time to formulate its words. “What if I haven’t decided yet whether it’s weird or not.”
“That in itself is pretty weird, Jon.”
“Fair enough.”
“I want to be part of that conversation. I want you to trust me enough to bounce ideas off me! It’s not like—? I mean why wouldn’t you do that?”
Jon had shrugged and grimaced, hands in his trouser pockets. “Not to worry you?” he’d suggested. But as he bit his lip and shimmied down from the bed Jon knew now that that was the sanitized version—and probably, if you’d asked him a day before or afterward, his past self would have known that too. Most things you told Martin, he’d either ignore them completely or latch onto them, refuse to let them go, and interpret everything else you said in the light they cast. Jon had learnt not to raise any given topic with him until he was sure he wanted to risk its becoming a long, painful discussion. This was part of why he hadn’t kept his promise, he told himself as he turned their interim bedroom’s doorknob. Why he’d said so little about anything weird that had happened to him at Upton House.
“Martin?”
“Oh hey, Jon—you’re awake.” Martin glanced in his vague direction but stayed bent over his work, so Jon could not meet his eyes.
“You found the screwdriver.”
“Yeah! And a screw that matches better, see?” He fished the first one they'd found out of his pocket and held it up next to the door for comparison. Jon supposed they looked a little different—bright yellowy gold vs. a darker gold. “They were in the library, of all places. There’s a little box full of ‘em that he keeps right next to his reading glasses, apparently. Guess he must break them a lot. How are yours, by the way? Any bits feel loose?”
Dutifully, trying to keep his dazed smile to himself, Jon pulled off his glasses. Folded and unfolded each arm, jiggled the little nose pieces. He shook his head. “Don’t think so. You can have a look yourself though, if you like.”
“Remind me later. Should’ve brought the whole box, probably,” Martin said, voice strained as he twisted the screw that last little bit. “There!” His open mouth broadened into a smile. “Time to see if it worked. You wanna do the honors?”
Jon shook his head, breathed a laugh through his nose. “You should do it. You’re the reason it’s fixed.”
“I mean, yeah,” shrugged Martin as his hand closed round the doorknob, “but I’m also the reason it broke.” It opened with a click. “Ha-ha! Success! Statements—our own clothes—our own bed! Er. Ish.”
Something tugged in Jon’s chest; he’d forgot the statements were why Martin thought this quest so urgent. He lingered at the side of the bed while Martin rummaged in his backpack, remembering for once to toe his first shoe off while standing.
“Man. Looks sorta underwhelming now, after the other room, huh?”
“Least our wallpaper’s better.”
“Tsshhyeah, and our view.”
Jon didn’t turn around, but surmised Martin must be looking out at that tree he liked. “Is it four already?”
“Uhh—nearly, yeah. You were out for a while; took me ages to find that damn thing. Here you go,” announced Martin as he slapped a zip-loc bag full of statement down on the bed.
(“So they won’t get water damage,” he had answered a few days ago, when Jon asked him why he’d individually wrapped each statement like snacks in a bagged lunch. “What? It’s not like we have to worry about landfills anymore. If I put them all in the same bag, you’d take one out and not be able to get it back in.”)
“What happened to my jacket, by the way? And yours?”
“Uhhh.”
“Right, okay,” Martin laughed; “I’ll go get them before I forget. I’ll put this away too, I guess” (meaning the screwdriver still in his hand). “Don’t wait for me, yeah? I don’t mind missing the trailers.”
Jon smiled. “Sure.”
As Martin hurried off, Jon sat down to untie and pull off his other shoe, threaded the lace back through the final eyelet from which it’d come loose, picked up the first shoe and untied that one, then stood up and set them by the door next to his cane. Both hips and all ten fingers behaved themselves throughout. As he walked by the vanity he grabbed the coins he’d removed to do laundry the other day and stuck them back in his trouser pocket. Useless, of course, but he’d missed having something to fidget with. He squatted down and peered under the vanity for the hair tie he’d dropped, for the fifth or sixth time since he’d misplaced it. Didn’t find it. That was fine; he had another one around his wrist. His knees felt weak, so instead of standing back up he crab-walked to the foot of the bed and sat down with his back against it. Straightened his legs out before him on the floor. Then he dug the coins from his pocket and counted them. Yup—still 74p.
Danika! Not Daniela—Danika Gelsthorpe. God, he would never forget one of their names out there. Never underestimate how much I care for the
“I'm back. What’s down there? Did you find the screw?” asked Martin as he hung their jackets up behind the door.
Jon shook his head. “Forgot about it. I was looking for that hair tie.”
“Well you’re on your own there; I’m done finding things today. The screw can wait,” Martin laughed—“he’s got a whole bag inside that box in the library. Do you need a hand getting up?”
He let Martin help him. Both knees cracked; the world’s edges went dark for a second. “Thank you,” he said, and it came out more peremptory than he’d meant it.
“Statement time?”
“Right. You don’t mind? I can wait ’til we’ve both had a rest, if you don’t want to be in the room while I.”
“No, I’m alright; I’ll stay here.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you hated statements.”
Martin shrugged. “Not these ones so much, now that. Heh—they’re almost nostalgic, if I’m honest. ‘Can it be real? I think I’ve seen a monster!’”
“They are a bit,” agreed Jon, looking down at the plastic-sleeved statement and making himself smile.
“Go on. Seeing you feel better will make me feel better too.”
That made it a bit easier to motivate himself, Jon supposed. From the moment he’d lain down on the bed he’d felt like he was floating on gentle waves—like if he let himself listen to them he could fall asleep in seconds. But that wouldn’t make Martin feel better. And no guarantee it would him, either, once he woke up again. He rearranged the pillows behind himself so he’d have to sit up a little; this might help keep him awake, and it meant he could rest his elbows on the bed while he held up the statement, rather than having to lift them up before his eyes. It made his neck sore, a bit, this angle, but that was fine. That might help keep him awake, too.
He sighed, readying himself for speech. Then heard a click, and felt a familiar buzz and weight against his stomach. The tape recorder had manifested inside his hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.
“Statement of Miranda Lautz, regarding, er… a botched home-repair job. Heh. Seems appropriate. Original statement given March twenty-sixth, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.”
[Image ID: A digital painting of Jon and Martin on an old-fashioned canopy bed with white sheets and orange drapes. Jon sits on the near side of the bed, reading a paper statement. He frowns slightly, looking down at the statement in his hands; he wears round glasses perched low on his nose. He’s a thin man, with medium brown skin dotted by scars left from the worms, and another scar on his neck from Daisy's knife. His hair is long and curly, gray and white hairs among the black. Jon sits supported by pillows—several big, white, lace-trimmed ones behind his back, and one under his knees. His right leg is slightly crossed over his left ankle, on which a clean white bandage peeks out beneath his cuffed, dark green trousers. He wears an oversized red hoodie and red-toed brown socks. Sat on the far side of the bed, next to Jon but facing away from both him and the viewer, is Martin—a tall and fat white man with short, curly, reddish brown hair and a short beard. He has glasses and is wearing a dark blue jumper and gray-brown trousers. Past the bed on Martin’s side, the bedroom door hangs ajar; in this light, it and the wall glow bluish green. On the near side, though, the light grows warmer, the orange canopy behind Jon casting pink and brown tints onto the white pillows and sheets. End ID.]
It seemed to be a Corruption statement, or maybe the Spiral. Possibly the Buried? A leak in Ms. Lautz’s roof caused a pill-shaped bulge to appear in her kitchen ceiling, about the size of a bread loaf. Water burst from it like pus from an abscess (as she described it. Nothing else Fleshy though, so far). Ms. Lautz repaired the hole in her ceiling, but every morning a new one reappeared somewhere else. Sometimes they appeared bulging and pill-shaped like the first one; other times she found them already burst, covering the room in water shot through with dark specks like coffee grounds.
Jon wished he’d refilled his empty water glass before starting to record. His mouth was so dry that every time he pronounced an L his tongue stuck to its roof. At this point he’d welcome a hole to burst in it and flood his mouth with water. Then again, he did still have to pee.
Eventually she and her spouse hired someone to find out what was wrong with the roof. She described hearing boots tramping around up there for half a day while they checked out all the spots where she and Alex had reported leaks. The inside of Jon’s trouser leg pulled at the bandage on his shin, making it itch. The repair men told Ms. Lautz it’d be safer and barely any more expensive to replace the whole thing. The ring and little fingers of Jon’s left hand were starting to go numb from having that elbow too long pressed against the bed. Miranda and Alex thanked the roof people and sent them off, saying they’d think it over.
He began to regret crossing his legs this way. He’d balanced his right heel in the hollow between his left foot’s ankle and instep, and in the time since he’d arranged them that way gravity had slowly pushed his foot more and more to the side, widening that gap. By this time he was sure it was hyperextended—possibly subluxed? It hurt already, and, he knew, would hurt more when he tried to move it. This rather ruined his fantasy of heading straight for the toilet when he finished reading.
Martin was right; these old statements seemed positively tame, now. He knew he owed it to Ms. Lautz to engage with her fate, but?
No. No buts. Whatever hell she lived in now, it looked just like the one she was about to describe for him, only worse. You can’t even pretend you’re sorry she’s living out her worst fear if you stop in the middle of reading that fear’s origin story. Never underestimate how much I
Once the repair men had left, Miranda Lautz wandered into her kitchen for lunch. She found her ceiling bulging halfway to the floor, with the impression of a face and two twisted arms at its center. Like someone had fallen through her roof, head first. Jon’s stiff neck twinged in sympathy. Miranda screamed and strode to the other side of the house in search of beer, figuring she'd find better answers at the bottom of a bottle than in her own head. When she got back to the kitchen with them, the beer bottles didn’t know what to do either, but said—
“God damn it. Not ‘ales’—‘Alex’. Obviously.”
He let the statement’s pages flop over the back of his hand, let his head tip backward until the top of it bumped against headboard and his eyes faced the ceiling. That settled it, then, didn’t it. If he had the Ceaseless Watcher looking through his eyes, he wouldn’t make a mistake like that—and he certainly couldn’t change position while recording. On top of his more substantial regrets, Jon had spent their whole odyssey before they came to Upton House ruing that he’d sat at the dining-room table to read Magnus’s statement, rather than on the couch or the bed. The chairs at that table had plain, flat wood seats—no cushion, no contouring for the shape of an arse. When he opened the door to the changed world, the cataclysm had preserved his bodily sensations at that moment like a mosquito in amber. He’d had a sore tailbone and pins and needles down his legs for untold eons. Right up until he and Martin crossed from the Necropolis onto the grounds protected by Salesa’s camera, where his tailbone faded out of awareness and his head filled up with cotton.
“Ohhh. ‘Alex’. Okay, that makes a lot more sense,” laughed Martin meanwhile. Jon could feel Martin’s shoulder bouncing against his. “She must’ve written it in cursive, huh.”
“I can’t do this right now, Martin.”
“Oh—okay, yeah. You rest; I’ll finish it for you.”
Jon closed his eyes and let air gush out from his nostrils. But you hate the statements, he knew he should say. Wouldn’t this make it easier, though? To let Martin have out this last bit of denial first?
The tape recorder in his pocket still hissed, still warmed and weighted down his stomach like a meal.
“Thank you,” he said.
The operator on the phone said she and Alex should wait for the ambulance to arrive, rather than try to free the man in the ceiling by themselves. Jon turned his neck back and forth, hoping Martin couldn’t hear its joints’ snap/crackle/pop. He picked his elbow up off the bed and shook out his hand. But when the paramedics cut the ceiling open, only a torrent of water gushed into their kitchen—water flecked with a great deal of what looked like coffee grounds. A day or two later the roof people called, to ask if they’d decided whether to have the roof repaired or replaced. They assured her none of their employees had gone missing. At the time of writing, Miranda and Alex still hadn’t decided what to do about the roof. A week ago, they’d found a squirrel-shaped bulge in their bedroom ceiling; they’d packed their bags and come to stay with Alex’s sister in London.
“Right! That wasn’t so bad.” Martin set the statement down and stretched his arms over his head. “Huh.”
“Hm?”
“Oh, I don’t know, just—it’s been a while. Thought it might feel, I don’t know, worse than that? Or better, I guess, since the Eye’s so ‘fond’ of me now.”
“I don’t think they work here.”
“What?”
“The statements. The Eye can’t see their fear.”
“Oh.” Jon could feel Martin deflating. He let himself avalanche over to fill the space. “You don’t feel better, do you.”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s just—slower here, like it’s taking a while to load or something. Remember how long the tape recorder took to come on last time? It was like—you were like— ‘“Statement of Blankety Blank, regarding an encounter with”—Oh, right,’ click.”
That was true. The tapes had known Salesa would give a statement before it happened, but with these paper ones they’d seemed slow on the uptake. Martin had also sworn the recorder that manifested to tape Mr. Andrade’s statement was a different machine than the one Salesa’d spotted that first morning. Jon wondered which machine the one in his pocket was.
Not relevant, he decided. He shook his head in his palm, stroking the lids of his closed eyes. “No—if they worked here I wouldn’t be able to stop in the middle of one.” As soon as he said it he winced, bracing himself for argument.
After the change he remembered wailing to Martin about how he couldn’t stop reading Magnus’s statement—how its words had possessed his whole body, forced him to do the worst thing any person ever had, and forced him to like it, to feel Magnus’s triumph as they both opened the door. Martin had pressed Jon’s face into his clavicle, rubbed his nose in the scent of Daisy’s laundry soap, covered the back of Jon’s head with his hands. Tried to interpose what he must then have still called the real world between Jon and what he could see outside. He’d said over and over, I know, and We‘ll be okay. Jon had known that meant he wasn’t listening, and yet still hadn’t been prepared for the argument they had later, when he mentioned in sobriety the same things he’d wailed back then.
“Hang on”—Martin had pleaded—“no, that can’t be true. I’ve been interrupted in the middle of a statement loads of times—and I know you have too.”
“By outside forces, yes, but you can’t decide to stop reading one. Believe me, Martin, I wouldn’t have—”
“Tim did.”
“No, he didn’t—”
“Yes he did! He was gonna do one and then Melanie—”
“No, Martin, I’ve heard the tape you’re talking about. Tim introduced the statement but didn’t actually start—”
“He did so! He read the first bit, and then stopped. ‘My parents never let me have a night light. I was—’”
“‘Always afraid, but they were just’....” Behind his own eyes he’d felt the Eye shudder and throb with gratitude. Just that sort of stubborn, it had seemed to sing, in a bizarre combination of his own voice with Jonah’s with Melanie’s, which doubled down when I screamed or cried about something, instead of actually listening.
“Yeah,” said Martin, forehead wrinkling. “And then he said, ‘This is stupid,’ and stopped.”
“You’re right.”
Jon still had no satisfying answer to that one, and cursed himself for having opened that can of worms back up again. It had been Tim’s first-ever statement, he reminded himself, and maybe Tim had never intended to get even that far. Maybe he’d been waiting for someone to interrupt him, as Melanie eventually did. Even out there, the Eye couldn’t really show him things like that. He could find out what Tim had said—could look it up, as it were��and what he’d thought, but motivation was a bit too murky, multilayered, complicated. It wasn’t real telepathy? The vicarious emotions the Eye gave him access to worked in broad strokes, generalities—just like common or garden empathy. Sure, he could imagine other people’s points of view more vividly, now that he could see through their eyes. But he still had to imagine them to life, based on the clues around him and what emotions those clues stirred in him. It didn’t work well for situations like this; he could hear Melanie’s footsteps and feel Tim’s reluctance to read a statement, but that was it. Enough to concoct plausible explanations; not enough to pick out the truth from a list of them. Plausibilities were too much like hypotheticals.
In the timelessness since that argument with Martin, though, Jon had also wondered whether it mattered if Tim had read the statement before recording it. He didn’t have footage, as it were, of Tim doing so; either the Eye had more copies of the statement’s events than it needed already and so had deleted that one from storage, or, conversely, perhaps it could no longer see versions of it that relied too heavily on the pages Mr. Hatendi had written it on, since Martin had burned those. But Tim’s summary, before he started reading. Blanket, monster, dead friend. It was bad, sure (like the assistants’ summaries always were, a ghost of past Jon interposed). But it sounded like the summary of a man who’d read it with his mind on other things. Inevitable and gruesome end. How he tried to hide; he couldn’t. Not at all like that of someone skimming it for the first time as he spoke. He did rifle through the papers though? So Jon couldn’t be sure. The suspicion ate at his mind, especially here. Could he have kept the world from ending just by—reading Magnus’s statement, before he went to record it? The way he used to way back at the start, before he trusted himself to speak the words perfectly on the first try? You didn’t mean to record it, did you? No, I’m sure you told Melanie and Basira you were just going to
“Guess that makes sense,” Martin said now. “So, you’re still feeling…?”
“Not great?”
“Yeah.”
“I… I feel human, here.”
“Oh wow. That’s—”
Jon told himself to put the hope in Martin’s voice to bed as soon as possible. “I know I’m not—not fully.” He allowed a smile to twitch the corners of his lips, flared his nostrils around an exhale that almost passed as a laugh. “Most humans don’t spontaneously summon tape recorders. Or sleep with their eyes open.”
“Yeah, but still, you don’t think maybe—?”
Again Jon hastened to cut Martin off. “A-and even if I was, it’s. I know that should be a good thing? But—”
At this point Martin interposed, “Should be, yeah! You don’t think it might mean you could—I don’t know, go back to normal? If we stayed here for a while?”
“Maybe? I-I might stop craving the Eye so much, but we’d still have to go back out there eventually, to face Elias, and. To be honest with you, Martin?” He huffed a laugh out, bitterly. “My ‘normal’ wasn’t exactly...”
“Right.” Martin sighed. “So you mean you feel like you used to, as a human. Which was…”
“Not great.”
“Right.”
“I haven’t been very well, here.” Jon shrugged for the excuse to duck his head. He could feel himself blushing, the heat spilling from his face all down both arms. Good thing the tape recorder in his pocket had gone cold.
Next to him, Martin puffed air out of his cheeks. “Yeah, I know.”
“I’m dizzy and confused without the Eye, and it—it can’t fix me here? When I.” He drew in breath, lifted his heel off his ankle and set that leg to the side, letting its foot roll into Martin’s shin. Bit his lip and scrunched his nose in preparation. Flexed the other foot’s toes, trying to isolate the lever in his ankle that would—there. Clunk. Then a noisy exhale: “Jyyrrggh. When that happens,” he choked out, voice strained by both pain and nerves. “It’s like before I became an avatar. I have to fix it myself, and it doesn’t just.” Magically stop hurting, he hoped went without saying; already he could hear Martin sucking air through his teeth. It made Jon’s cheeks itch. “Shouldn’t have let myself get used to a higher standard, I suppose.”
“What? No—of course you should have. Did you think I was gonna say that?”
“No, of course not; I just meant—”
“You deserve to feel healthy, Jon.”
“Do I? Health is clumsy, it’s callous, it, it lets terrible things happen because they don’t feel real—it can’t imagine them properly, can’t understand what they mean….”
“Okay, first of all, ouch.” Jon snarled a laugh at that, without knowing whether Martin meant it as a joke. “Second of all, that is not why you—why the world ended, okay? Especially, ‘cause, you weren’t ‘healthy’ then. You read Elias’s bloody statement because you were starving, remember?”
“Hmrph,” pronounced Jon, to concede he was listening without either confirming or denying the point.
“And thirdly, you’re not ‘callous’ out there? You don’t”—a scoff interrupted his words. “You don’t ‘let things happen because they don’t feel real’—that’s sure not how I remember it. Okay? I remember you crying for—god, I don’t know, days, maybe? Weeks?—about how you could feel everything, and couldn’t stop any of it. That’s the thing we’re hiding from here, Jon, so if you don’t actually feel any healthier here then what even is the point?”
In a voice embarrassment made small Jon managed, “I mean? I’m still kind of having fun.”
“Really? You don’t seem like it—”
“Not today, maybe—”
“Right, yeah, no; spending all day trying to fix a doorknob isn’t exactly—”
“But I don’t want to leave yet. I should still have a few good days left before the distance from the Eye gets too….”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.” For a few seconds he tried to think of something better to say, then gave up and told the truth, though in a jocular voice to hide his self-consciousness. “Always was the person who got ill on holiday.”
“Oh, god, of course you were—”
Voice growing higher in pitch, Jon pleaded, “It didn’t usually stop me from enjoying it?”
“What about America?” laughed Martin. “Did you still enjoy that one?”
“Of course not—I got kidnapped.”
“I mean, yeah, but you were pretty used to that too by then, right?”
“God.” Jon sniffed, crunchily, reeling back in the snot he’d laughed out. “Besides. That was a business engagement.”
Martin acknowledged this comment with a quick Psh, as he turned himself around on the bed to face Jon a little more. “Can I trust you to”—he stopped.
“Yes.”
“No, let me—that wasn’t fair; I can’t ask you that yet.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, Martin; I didn’t—”
“Of me, I meant, it wasn’t fair.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I’ve been ignoring your distress all week because I wanted it not to matter.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘distress,’” pointed out Jon. “Plus, I have been sort of, er. Secretive, about it.”
The exasperation in Martin’s sigh was probably meant for him, not for Jon, the latter reminded himself. “Yeah, but you’re not subtle. I can tell when you’re hiding something. It wasn’t exactly a big leap to figure out what. But I told myself it was temporary, and that you were acting like.”
Jon laughed preemptively. “Yes?”
“Like a little kid in line for a theme-park ride.” Again Jon laughed—less at the comparison itself than at how much Martin winced to hear himself say it. “I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you more seriously.”
“And I should have told you what was going on with me.”
“Yup,” concurred Martin at once.
“I know you hate it when I keep things from you.”
“I do—I hate it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry too.” Martin waved this away like a fly. “I just—you said you think we’ve got a few more days, before it gets too much or whatever.”
“Yes.”
“Can I trust you to tell me when we need to leave?”
Jon tried not to answer too quickly, knowing vaguely that that might sound insincere. “Yes,” he said again, after pausing for a second. “You can trust me.”
“Okay? Don’t try to spare my feelings, or anything like that. Like—don’t just go, ‘Oh, well, he’s having a good time. That’s fine; I don’t have to.’ Yeah? ‘Cause I won’t have a good time if I’m worried you’re secretly suffering.”
This Jon did know; it sent a thrill of recognition down his spine, as he remembered their first day’s ping-pong adventure. “Right. I’ll do my suffering as publicly as possible.”
“Uh huh.” Martin’s arm tightened around Jon’s shoulder. “Just don’t worry about disappointing me? I mean, sure, I like it here, with the whole ‘not being an evil wasteland’ thing, but I’d much rather be out there with you happy than with you than spend one more minute in paradise with her.”
With a smile, Jon replied, “That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Yeah, yeah. Come on. We’ve got a job to do.”
“I suppose we do.”
As they walked on out of the range of Salesa’s camera, Jon glanced backward one more time and thought, Yes, that makes sense—but couldn’t quite recall what he had expected to see. It was like when you look at a clock, and tick Check the time off your mental to-do list, then realize you never internalized what time it was. “Pity,” he mused.
“What?”
“It’s, er, going away. That peace, the safety, the memory of ignorance.”
“That’s… Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Do you remember any of it? W-What Salesa said? Annabelle?”
“Some, I think. It’s, uh… do you mind filling me in?”
“Wait, you need me to tell you something for once?”
“I guess so. It’s, er… it’s gone. Like a dream. What was it like?”
After a pause Martin said, “Nice. It was… it was really nice.”
“Even though Annabelle was there?”
“I mean, yeah, but she didn’t do anything,” shrugged Martin. “Except cook for us. That was weird.”
“She cooked?” Jon watched Martin nod and smile around a wince. “And we let her do that? I let her do that?”
With a scoff Martin answered, “Under duress, yeah.”
“Huh.” Jon twirled his cane in circles, wondering why he’d thought he would need it. “Well, she didn’t poison us, apparently.”
“Nope. And believe me, we had that conversation plenty of times already. Er—maybe just let me put that away for you before you take somebody’s eye out, yeah?”
Jon nodded, folded his cane and handed it to Martin, then made himself laugh. “Was I… a bit neurotic about it.”
“About Annabelle?” Again Jon nodded. “Oh, we both were. We kept switching sides—one day I’d be like, ‘But she’s got four arms, Jon!’ and the next you’d be like—”
“She had four arms?”
“Yup. And six eyes. But your powers didn’t work there, so we thought maybe hers didn’t either? Never did find out for sure. God—you remember the day we got locked out of our room?”
“Er….”
“So that’s a no, then.”
“Sorry.”
Martin’s lips billowed in a sigh. “No, don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”
“So… what happened? Who locked us out? Was it Annabelle?”
“No, no, no one locked us out. It was just me, I uh—I sorta broke the doorknob? God, it was awful. Went to open it and the whole thing just came off in my hand, like” (he made the motion of turning a doorknob in empty air, and imitated the sound Jon figured it must have made coming off) “krrruk-krr.” Jon fondly laughed; he could imagine Martin’s horror at breaking something in a historic mansion. “It was just one screw that came loose, though, so you’d think, easy fix, right? Except the bloody screwdriver took forever to find. Turns out Salesa kept them in the library, of all places.”
“S-sorry—what does this have to do with Annabelle?”
“Oh—nothing ultimately, just.” Martin grimaced at his own recollection. “God, we had this whole argument over whether to ask her about it, and when I finally did can you guess what she told us?”
“What?” managed Jon; his throat felt small and weak all of a sudden.
Martin put a finger to his chin, and blinked his eyes out of sync. “‘Perhaps he keeps them next to something that breaks a lot,’” he recited, with an inane, self-congratulating smile. For a fraction of a second Jon could recognize it as Annabelle’s I’ve-just-told-a-riddle expression. But the memory faded and he could picture her face only as he’d seen it in pictures before the change.
“O…kay. And was that… true?”
“I mean, yeah, technically. Useless, though. And after we spent so long agonizing over whether it was safe to ask her….”
Jon allowed himself a cynical laugh. “Are you sure she didn’t orchestrate the whole thing?”
“Ugh—no, it wasn’t her. We had this conversation at the time. You made me check for cobwebs and everything.”
“And you… didn’t find any?”
“Of course not, Jon; it was a doorway.”
“Right. Doorway, yes.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling better? You still seem a bit….”
“No, I’m—I feel fine, I just can’t seem to. Retain anything concrete about… where did you say it was? Upton House? God that’s strange, that it would just be….”
Part of Jon felt tempted to deplore it as a waste of space, on the apocalypse’s part. These stretches of empty land were one thing, but a mansion? Couldn’t they at least get a Spiral domain out of it?
“I mean, not really. He told us all about it, remember? With the magic camera?”
“Right, yes,” Jon agreed.
“Well, we got it all on tape, if you want to listen to it later.”
“Yes, that sounds—all of it?”
“Well not the whole week or anything. It just came on whenever it thought it was important, I guess.”
“So not the part about the doorway.”
“Nope.”
“Pity.”
#tma fic#the magnus archives#rqbb2021#rusty quill big bang 2021#jonmartin#jonathan sims#martin blackwood#suddenly a tma blog#scri wrote something
28 notes
·
View notes
Text
Title: Lasting Rivalries.
Word Count: 4.1k
Written for an anonymous commissioner.
Synopsis: Izuku loves you, but he doesn’t like Katsuki very much. It’s just a shame he can’t separate one feeling from the other.
TW: Kidnapping, Captivity, Mentions of Sexual Assault, Mentions of Death, Delusional Mindsets, and Emotional Manipulation.
[Part One] / [Part Three]
If you thought about it, you could still feel his hands on your skin.
It’d been hours since you were strapped to that bed, hours since he tormented Katsuki and made you suffer and mistook his delusional, crazed jealousy as love, or something close to it, at least. It’s been hours, and yet, if you closed your eyes, you could still feel his heatless touch, the way his skin seemed to leech the warmth from yours and how no amount of time and shivering could bring back what you’d lost. You’d done what you could to rid yourself of the feeling. After he… finished, you’d been too weak to try to run, and he’d been too love-struck to care if you did. As much as you’d wanted to, you hadn’t resisted as he undid your restraints, as he wrapped you in his suit jacket and dragged you - stumbling and reluctant - through the halls of his bunker.
When he brought you to a bedroom, dark and dim but only half as dirty as the room you’d come from, you hadn’t tried to push your way past him as he locked the door and explained that some of his men were untrustworthy, that ‘Kacchan’ might get loose and try to hunt you down, that the locks were for your own good. You’d flinched as he slid the slick, black keycard into the tiny slit, the one that’d keep you trapped here, the one you should be scrambling to find a way to pick, to break, or smash into such an unrepairable state, you and Izuku would both starve in here together. But, you hadn’t, and you’d lost the opportunity to.
There was a cramped, militaristic bathroom attached to the suite, and you’d stood under the rusted shower-head until the boiling water blistered your skin, then went cold, then went freezing, and you had to get out or face the repercussions of hypothermia. It’d been uncomfortable, it’d been painful, but it’d been a cleansing pain, the kind that cleared your head and made it a little easier to process the world around you, to differentiate what was happening now to what was already over, what you couldn’t change. What had left you sore and bruised and aching, but what you’d survived, and what you would get past, eventually. You’d get back to Katsuki, and then--
Oh, god.
Katsuki.
You’d been moved to another bedroom, but if Izuku had any intention of doing anything his less-favored captive, you hadn’t been able to tell. No, he’d been left bound and muzzled to rot in his own affliction, and if Izuku’s aggressive apathy was sincere, you doubted he’d be treated with much kindness, going forward. It felt wrong thinking about your boyfriend like that, a victim who needed to be saved, someone who needed to be helped rather than the guiding hand you’d always known him as. He was a hero, and you weren’t. He was strong, and in so, so many ways, you couldn’t be. But, he couldn’t do anything heroic while he was restrained from wrist to ankle, so it was beginning to seem like you might have to be--
“Darling, are you alright?”
You stiffed as soon as you heard his voice, going rigid and scrambling for a weapon, a shield, something to defend yourself, but Izuku was already opening the bathroom door, stepping in before you had a chance to make a move. You could only be glad you’d already pulled on the clothes he was generous enough to provide, even if one of his white button-down shirts did little to separate you from his prying gaze. But, you doubted he’d be able to give you anything sturdy enough to block that out.
His expression softened when he saw you, his eyes lighting up with the faint, flickering glow he hadn’t bothered to hide when you first woke up, in his captivity. You tried to scowl, attempting to glare at the barren floor as imposingly as you could manage, but it couldn’t have been very effective. Izuku didn’t hesitate to approach you, to come too close, to think too little, only stopping when he was directly in front of you, one hand cupping your cheek and the other coming to rest on your arm, drawing circles in your bicep as if you were a scared animal that needed to be soothed. You supposed you were. Despite your budding plans, you couldn’t help but shiver so violently whenever he was near enough to meet your eyes, let alone put his hands on you.
He didn’t try to deny it. “Poor baby… You’re still scared, aren’t you?” A small, patronizing smile painted itself across his face, just barely pulling at the corners of his lips. You didn’t nod, didn’t try to answer, but he didn’t seem to need you to, either. With a quiet hum, he continued, speaking more to his paranoia than to yours. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re with me, now, and Kacchan’s going to be taken care of.” There was a pause, a playful wink. As if you should be proud you’d been important enough to earn a few hours of his time. “I’m won’t let anything bad happen to you. Certainly not by his hand, not again.”
You flinched at the mention of Katsuki, and this time, you were thankful that Izuku wasn’t paying attention to you. Not enough to care about such a small show of displeasure, at least. “You’ll take care of him?” You asked, hesitantly, still unsure how far you wanted to push his boundaries. “What do you mean? How long are you going to keep us here?”
“How long am I going to keep you here,” He corrected, softly, just beginning to tilt your head back. He let out a soft chuckle, as if the statement was a joke he’d been telling himself far too long for it to be truly, genuinely funny. “Just you. He’ll be lucky to make it through the night.”
You should’ve expected that. You knew it was going to happen. You knew Izuku had to be planning something for Katsuki, something violent and something inpermanent.
You should’ve expected that, but it still felt so awful to hear.
Now more than ever, you should’ve tried to stay calm. You should’ve been composed, and you should’ve accepted the development with a purse of your lips and strategic silence, the kind that’d mean anything Izuku wanted it to mean. But, he’d just threaten someone’s life, he’d just threatened your boyfriend’s life, and he should’ve counted him lucky you only got mad. It took every ounce of your self-restraint not to lunge at him, consequences be damned. “You can’t do that. You went through the effort of getting both of us, you can’t just--”
“I can do anything I want to.” It wasn’t a question, nor was it the kind of arrogant declaration made by someone with too much power for it not to go to his head. It was a truth, a fact. Or, Izuku thought it was, at least. “He’s been a thorn in my side for decades, and I’ve been much too sentimental when it comes to removing him. He’s a disgrace to the world of Heroes. He’s a disgrace to the world. I can’t justify giving him another chance to root himself under my skin.” A sigh, a languid shake of his head. He let go of your cheek, but having him take up your wrists and press your hands against his chest was only a minor improvement. “If he gets free, he won’t stop until I’m dead and you’re locked away somewhere so deep and somewhere so dark, you’ll be lucky to ever see sunlight again. I love you too much to risk losing you, but I promise, I’ll never be half as mean as Kacchan. If someone ever tried to take you away from me, I wouldn’t stop until their head was mounted in my office.”
“If you lay a finger on him,” You spat, fighting the urge not to pull away from him. “I’ll never think of you as anything but a monster--”
You didn’t get a chance to finish. This time, he didn’t let your little show of rebellion slide. Still, you heard the blow before you felt it - a sharp, sterile crack of skin against skin, and then the burning, the flare of heat, a spark that ignited everything from your jaw to the bridge of your nose. It took you a moment to process what he’d done. A moment too long, for such a simplistic offense.
He’d slapped you.
He’d slapped you.
It was so straight-forward, so impulsive, you weren’t sure whether to be angry or afraid or something between, something darker than either emotion could fully cover. He hadn’t hurt you yet, not in a way that’d be so difficult to hide behind a half-hearted justification and an excuse about love or protection or something lovely and rotten. You weren’t sure whether that made it better or worse. You weren’t sure if you wanted to know.
Izuku didn’t seem sure either, if you were being honest. As soon as you moved to nurse your bruising cheek, he was on top of you, one of his arms draped around your shoulder, pulling you into his chest, leaving his free hand to card through your hair and flit around the edges of your minor injury, a worried scowl pulling at the edges of his lips. But, Izuku didn’t move to apologize, only attempting to open his mouth before whatever he was going to stay was muted by a grimace - obviously horrified, but far from regretful. When he finally broke the silence, his stance didn’t seem to change. Disappointed, but not shocked. Distressed, but resolute, at the same time.
“I.. I shouldn’t have done that,” He admitted, his posture straightening defensively. He pulled away, slightly, scanning over your face. As if he hadn’t already done so much more to harm you. “You just… you have to understand that this is for your own good, (Y/n). You’re going to be happy with me, I want you to be happy, but you’re going to have to let go of that stain, first. This is what he does to people.” There was a pause, a shake of his head, and slowly, he fell away from you, taking a step back when you failed to react. “He drives them apart. He makes people hate each other. You can’t trust anything he says. Bringing him back to my hideout was a mistake, I should’ve killed him in his sleep - clearly, he’s already worked himself into your brain.” Izuku bowed his head. It was the closest he’d come to showing his remorse, and you had a feeling it was the closest he would come. “I should’ve taken care of this sooner. I shouldn’t have drawn it out. I’m going to take care of it, I will take care of it. I’m not going to let him do anymore damage, not when you’re at stake.”
He turned, starting towards the bathroom door without another word. You didn’t think, you didn’t give yourself time to. You weren’t sure you’d be able to stop yourself from faltering, if you did.
Frantically, you stumbled forward, grabbing Izuku’s forearm and taking him by the sleeve, dragging him back towards you. Acidic bile rose in your throat at the thought of giving him what he wanted, but that didn’t stop you from clenching your eyes shut and forcing out the words, regardless of how much they burnt at your tongue. “Midoriya,” You mumbled, fighting not to stutter over such a simple sentiment. “I don’t think I can… I might not be able to… Could you---Could you stay?” Your grip tightened around his wrist, your nails digging into cloth and the thin, pale skin underneath. If Izuku cared, though he didn’t pull away, and you took that as a cue to keep going. “I don’t think I’ll be able to fall asleep, alone.”
The declaration was too hasty, too sudden, too flat and too desperate, but Izuku’s eyes still lit up, whatever skepticism he might’ve felt fading into a broad, careless smile. As enamoured as it was entrapping.
“Of course, sweetheart. All you had to do was ask.”
~
Izuku slept. You didn’t.
You doubted you’d be able to. Even when you tried to relax, when you tried to close your eyes and put on a convincing act, you could never get further than curling into yourself and willing Izuku not to notice the way you trembled despite the humid air, how easy it was to make you shy away despite his touch being relatively innocent, considering what he’d proved himself to be capable of. He’d rambled on about he’d always be there for you, rambling off threats and the mutilations he’d be willing to commit in your name like bedtime stories, but for all his vows of protection and security, he’d been quick to fall silent as soon as he realized you weren’t contradicting him, anymore, his body limp and still half-slouched against your side. His weight was oppressive, and you doubted any amount of rest would aid the dark-bags dyed into the skin under his eyes, but it was fine, it was perfect. If anything, you should be glad he was so exhausted.
It would be easier to pick his pockets, when he was asleep.
It wasn’t a difficult task, something you’d done a dozen different times with drunk friends you thought you could trust with your keys, but you still froze in place every time he made a sound, even as your fingers slipped into his left pocket, the one you’d been staring down since he first showed you this shiny new cage. You went still as he let out a groan, stiffening as he burrowed himself deeper into your shoulder, but you knew you’d get what you want as soon as your fingers brushed against that warm, metallic shape. The key to the rest of his bunker, the key to getting out of here.
The keycard.
Your keycard, now.
Repositioning Izuku to lay against the headboard as gently as you could, you slipped off the cot, your bare feet hitting the pavement floor silently as you found the exit and pushed your prize into its designated slot, your hands steady for the first time that night. There was a small, high-pitched ping, but Izuku didn’t stir, didn’t wake up. You could only hope you’d be out of his reach, by the time he did.
The halls of his bunker were surprisingly empty, considering how expansive Izuku’s organization was supposed to be, but that didn’t stop you from pausing at every turn, holding your breath whenever you heard the sound of another voice, doing your best to imitate the way trained Heroes were supposed to move, when they didn’t get caught. You couldn’t be sure where Katsuki was being kept, hell, you barely knew which direction you should be going in, but there wasn’t much you could do, not beyond picking a hall and hoping it didn’t lead you into the stronghold of Izuku’s labyrinth. You had to be quiet, but fast. You had to be stealthy, but effective. You had to be so, so many things, but…
Apparently you couldn’t be any of those things.
As you moved to round another corner, your back pressed against the wall and heart struggling not to beat any louder than it had to, something latched onto your shoulder, jerking you backward as a hand shot out, sealing itself over your mouth as you haulted, caught between the reflex to scream and the awareness that you shouldn’t attract more attention than you absolutely had to. As a compromise, you didn’t make noise, but you struggled, thrashing and kicking and throwing your elbow into your assailant’s chest, but all your efforts earned were a tightened grip and a soft grunt, throaty but muffled, not meant to be heard.
“Really, babe?” He asked, his voice just as quiet as his sounds of discomfort. “I thought you’d be happier to see me.”
It took you a second too long to recognize that voice, much lower and much drier than the endearing arrogance you’d grown fond of. The voice you only heard while you were sitting in uncomfortable, plastic chairs beside hospital beds, on the scenes of attacks where the dust had already settled and the medics has long-since finished doing what they could. It meant exhaustion, it meant injury, it meant dehydration and desolation and suffering, but god, were you glad to hear it.
You didn’t even try to hold yourself up, not after you realized how many times you’d fallen into the pair of arms wrapped around you. No, you just went slack, letting a grimy, blood, glorious Katsuki support you as you went slack. It might’ve been the relief. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours since the last time you’d seen him, but you'd been so, so worried, and just knowing he was still alive seemed to make all the difference in the world. It might’ve been the stress, the adrenaline, you didn’t think you really cared, not as long as you could twist around and wrap your arms around his neck, burying your face in his chest as he pulled you closer, entangling his fingers in your hair and pushing a soft, lingering kiss into the top of your head, his touch so much less preformative than Izuku’s, so much more loving. You wanted to melt into it. You wanted to attach yourself to him and never, ever leave his side again. You wanted him to hold you, and you didn’t want anyone to rip him away again.
But, he was already moving back, taking you by the waist and scanning over you, looking for signs of further abuse. “What happened? Did he hurt you--”
“What happened to you?” It was all you could do not to yell, not to scream. You’d been assaulted, but he’d been cornered, he’d almost been killed. “Midoriya was going to… He made it sound like you were already half-way dead. I thought he was going to get to you before I did.”
“With the weak-ass lackeys he sent to do it? Those motherfuckers couldn’t put a scratch on me, not once the kiddie-gloves came off,” He scoffed, smirking confidently, if only to calm you down. You doubted there hadn’t been a fight, there was always a fight with Katsuki, but if he could brag about it, he could pretend things were fine for a few more minutes, long enough to run and make you think everything would be alright, too. “If Deku could kill me, he would’ve done it by now. You’ve got nothing to worry about, not when it comes to me.”
For the first time since you’d escaped from Izuku’s hold, you let yourself exhale, rigid tension melting off in waves. “Promise?
His grip loosened, but any hope you might’ve lost was quickly restored as his hands fell, taking up yours and squeezing lightly. “I promise.”
There might’ve been another hug, another kiss. There might’ve been one, or their might’ve been many, if you had another minute, another second, another moment. But, all too suddenly, all too realistically, Izuku or some force under his control was determined to separate you, this time in the form of flashing blue lights and sirens so loud, you could hardly hear Katsuki curse as he took up your wrist and started running.
You hadn’t known where to go, but Katsuki seemed to. Whether it was through luck, overheard information, or blind inhibition, he found his way to the exit, or, rather, what you had to assume was supposed to be the exit. You must’ve been underground, because the only way out seemed to be a thin, utilitisic staircase, wide enough for one person and so steep, a ladder might’ve been a more practical choice. The climb wasn’t what concerned you, though, you’d scale a mountain if it meant getting a little further from Izuku, but it didn’t seem like that was a choice you’d get to make.
You should’ve expected it. You should’ve seen it coming as soon as the bunker went into lock down, as soon as you’d been naive enough to leave Izuku alone without slitting his throat, first. It made sense. You hated it, but it made sense.
You wouldn’t make it through, because faster than you could run, a thick metal sheet was sprouting from either side of the doorway, nearly blocking your only way out.
You wouldn’t make it.
But, Katsuki could.
He moved the same time you did, scrambling to get a grip on your forearm as you pulled yourself free of his hold, barely bothering to work your way behind him before you shoved Katsuki through the narrow exit, forcing him through the small gap before he could process what you were doing. He might’ve yelled, might’ve tried to clamber his way back to you, but any sound was cut off by the make-shift door sliding into place. Even if any of his curses or rants or screams made it through the barrier, you wouldn’t have been able to hear them. Before you could think to run, before you could think to do anything, something sleek and smooth and strong wrapped around your neck, slamming your back into the nearest wall. A leather glove, as familiar as it was fatal.
You didn’t have to look to know it was Izuku.
You didn't have to, but it wasn’t like he was ever going to give you a choice.
“Congratulations,” He growled, the back of his hand pushing into the bottom of your chin, forcing your head back and keeping your eyes level with his, frozen terror forced to stand on the same ground as swirling, spiraling rage, a lightless flame that burnt at the edges of your vision and made your entire body feel cold. “You saved your boyfriend for a whole three seconds. What makes you think I can’t just send someone after him while I break every single one of your kleptomanic little fingers.”
You swallowed, but you didn’t hesitate. You knew what you were going to say. “You won’t.”
He grit his teeth. “And why’s that, angel?”
“Because if you do,” You started, letting your focus drop to the scuffed cement at your feet. “I’ll never stop hating you.”
There was a disgruntled frown, a move to pull away, but you were the one to cling to him, this time, to throw yourself into his chest and pray he didn’t notice how badly your shoulders were shaking, how much you didn’t want to go on. But, you had to. He’d kill Katsuki, if you didn’t. He might’ve killed you, if you didn’t. “Please, please, just let him go! Do this for me, and I swear, I’ll stay with you.” Izuku stopped, but he didn’t pry you off of him. You took that as a silent cue to continue, to grovel for all your life was worth. “I won’t try to run. I won’t try to fight. I won’t even talk back. You can have me, but you need to let Katsuki go.”
Despite your desperation, Izuku didn’t seem convinced. His fist balled around the collar of your shirt as he tossed a glance over his shoulder, signaling to one of his associates out of the group forming behind him - a brunette on the shorter side, one who looked like she’d just rolled out of bed to run to Izuku’s aid. “Uraraka, get me their file. There could be a quirk--”
“There isn’t.” It was an instinctive correction, albeit one that burnt at the tip of your tongue as you choked it out. “I mean, you shouldn’t bother. I’m… I’m quirkless.”
There was a pause, a recalculation, and for the second time that day, you saw Izuku’s mind work to twist around a piece of new information, his expression softening as he rearranged formless parts into a more suitable, more agreeable whole. One he could accept, one that let him be angry with Katsuki rather than you. It was revolting. It was sickening. It was pathetic, but you didn’t try to push him away as he wrapped his arms around you, pulling you into his chest and burying his face in your hair, insecurities boiling the surface in tandem with the jagged, ugly shapes his delusions were so eager to take on. “Poor baby,” He sighed, the words almost lost to the airiness of his voice. “No wonder you needed to get Kacchan as far as possible, I wouldn’t be able to rest if I was in your position, either. You should’ve said something sooner, I would’ve been able to help.”
He continued to fuss, continued to lament your shared limitations as he pulled you through the forming crowd, but you couldn’t bring yourself to listen, you couldn’t bring yourself to think about anything but how his skin burnt where it touched yours. You wanted to pull away. You didn’t want to let him touch you, you didn’t want to let him pretend he cared about you, but you didn’t. You wouldn’t.
All you could do was bite your tongue and hope Izuku loved you more than he hated Katsuki.
#yandere#yandere love#yandere x reader#yandere x y/n#yandere x you#yandere imagines#yandere oneshot#yandere scenario#yandere drabble#commission#writing commission#yandere commission#izuku x reader#yandere izuku#yandere deku#deku x reader#yandere midoriya#midoriya x reader#villain au#villain izuku#boku no hero academia#boku no hero acadamia imagines#yandere boku no hero academia#bnha imagines#yandere bnha#my hero academia#my hero academia imagines#yandere my hero academia#yandere fantasy#yanderecore
366 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
newty
Ephemeral Peace
homestuckgenerator
homestuck generator
hirukawa-takuto
The Tsundere Takuto
egittae
To forget is to die.