#11 mile hike

[jujuistrulyoutrageous]

this is quite apropos for today

[restinthewest]

Camping has gone to the dogs

[assiraphales]

todays rock photo :

[adilab]

hi friends, keep my adi girl in your thoughts ❤️ she isn’t feeling too great and was monitored all day at the vet

[rustpuppy]

up an old forest road to wallace lake and jay lake

[goddamnshinyrock]

hiking trails on the west coast: Begin climbing on a soft earthen trail through beautiful douglas fir-western hemlock forest for 2.5 miles along a series of switchbacks, then break from the tree cover for 1 mile of straight even trail through a stunning wildflower meadow just below the ridgeline, after which the trail makes a sharp right and continues to the summit with a further 2 miles of switchbacks. Enjoy beautiful views of the nearest dormant stratovolcano and also at least two waterfalls and a crystal-clear alpine lake along the way. Round trip: 11 miles, 3,000ft elevation gain. Difficulty: moderate :)

hiking trails on the east coast: Go 1.5 miles up. Yes, straight up. Switchbacks? What are you, a baby? Are you a little child? Fuck you. Go up. [Seasonal note: first half of trail is a running stream during mud season and a multipitch ice climbing route during winter.] Round trip: 3 miles, 1,200ft elevation gain. Difficulty: jesus christ

[brings-color-to-my-eyes]

Just a casual exploration photo dump 🤸🏿‍♀️🐕

[novemberheart]

{overview} You get attacked. Does your pack step up for you?

{warnings} violence, blood, mentions of sexual content (no sexual abuse), fem reader, cursing, poly141, pain, crying, angst, a/b/o dynamics

Chapter 10 <- Chapter 11 -> Chapter 12

It was Simon’s last day of physical therapy. If he passed this he would be cleared to get back out in the field. On his way, he dropped you off at another Omega Committee event. This one you were actually excited about. It was a hike through the forest at the far end of the base. Priya wasn't there and you wished you had the presence of mind to have asked her for her number. But luckily you ran into Anais.

“You smell like peaches and cream. Anyone ever told you that?” she asked. The sound of Johnny yelling “peaches” instantly ran through your mind.

“A few, yeah.” you smiled.

“Well that's what I'm going to call you, PC for short.” she giggled. You had been called worse. Anais was a chatter. You didn't really mind though.

“Can I ask you something- something personal,” she whispered, leaning even closer to you. Curiosity killed the cat.

“How does it work with all five of you? Do they take turns-” she whispered.

“Oh my god, Anais.” you couldn't help but chuckle, despite the flaming of your cheeks. To be honest you were wondering the same thing.

“That was too much! I'm so sorry. I was just curious and I thought we were friends”-

“Anais it's alright. If I knew I probably wouldn't mind sharing a bit of info.” You assured. She relaxed.

“So you haven't?”

“No,” you responded truthfully.

“Have you ever?” she trailed off. You hadn't. You never really had the chance. You weren't sure if your pack members would approve of you spilling this information everywhere. “I'll take that as a no.” she snickered. You gave her a playful side-eye.

“Don’t worry about it. Took me forever to lose mine too.” she signed.

“It has not been forever!” you gasped, swatting at her. She laughed loudly causing a few heads to turn. Neither of you really cared.

“Just don't get your hopes up. First times are always terrible,” she advised, bumping you with her arm.

“Thanks for the pep talk.” you huffed.

“Do you have a favorite pack member yet?” she asked suddenly. You quickly shook your head. You enjoyed them all- truthfully. “I think if I was in a pack I would have my favorites. Hopefully one would be my alpha, but you never know,” she smirked.

“Can I ask you something?” you began.

“Shoot.”

“Did it hurt when you were marked?” you questioned.

“The first time, yes. I was in a long-term relationship with an alpha who wasn't entirely nice.”

“I'm sorry Anais.”

She quickly waved you off. “Don't worry about it. It was a long time ago. The second time, not as much. He did it during my heat and it only hurt for a day when I came out of it.” she explained.

“You’re strong Anais.” you said. She flashed you a smile.

“We’re omegas, PC. We have to be.”

The hike back was partly uphill, which was nobody's favorite.

“It was so beautiful when we left. When did it get so bloody hot out?” you panted.

“Look. The heat turns you English.” Anais chuckled through her own pants. You may have picked up a few phrases from the boys.

“Alright, everyone, take five!” One of the group leaders shouted. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. You had made it to the edge of the base, still a little under half a mile to get back.

“I’m going to go refill my water. You need some?” you asked. Anais flopped down on the grass, her arms blocking her face from the sun.

“No thank you.” she groaned, rolling onto her stomach. You made your way up to the front, intending to tell one of the leaders you were going to go get some water. You huffed as the same five omegas were consuming all their attention. “Whatever.” you sighed. You knew where it was, you had filled your water bottle up with Kyle a few days ago when he took you bird watching. Besides, Anais knew where you were.

You made your way quickly towards the buildings, going between them to the other side where the water fountain was.

“My thumbs gonna fall off,” you grumbled. You had to press and hold the button down hard. Kyle made it look easy. Your ears perked up at the sound of footsteps. Your head darted around not seeing anything. You figured you didn't need water that bad and began walking back.

You were abruptly thrown to the ground. Your shorts offered absolutely no protection against the rough gravel. The whole left side of your body slid against the ground, the force of the shove sending you a few feet. There was a low growl behind you and you acted purely on instinct. You felt a hand on your ankle pulling you back. You flipped yourself around, swinging your arm luckily catching a man's face with your claws. He howled, throwing himself away from you. You quickly shuffled backward trying to find your footing.

“Shit, that's 141.” the other man with him cursed. He grabbed the bleeding man pulling him away. Even though they were leaving, you knew you weren't safe. You were finally able to get your footing and began running around the corner, almost knocking Anais down in the process.

“What the fuck!” she shrieked. You were beginning to bleed at this point. It started dripping down your left leg, and right knee. It was starting to show through your shirt on your left side, your elbow, both your hands, and your chin. “It's okay, lovie.” she soothed. You were trying your hardest to keep it together, not wanting to create a scene, however, the pain and fear were making it very difficult.

“I can't go back to the group like this,” you whined. People will think you’re crazy.

“Don't worry. This wasn't your fault. Everyone will understand.” she soothed, gently pulling you along. You held your ground shaking your head. “PC you're bleeding a lot. You need help.” she insisted.

“I want my pack.” you whimpered. You pressed the backside of your hand against your mouth, your throat constricting.

“If you come with me you can get to them.” she urged. It was the push you needed. Luckily you didn't get very far before a group leader noticed and raced towards you.

“What happened?” he questioned. You ignored him, not really in the mood to talk to strange men, and pulled your backpack forward grabbing your phone out of the front pocket. You were lucky it hadn't shattered in the ordeal.

“Someone attacked her.” Anais growled, annoyed that he couldn't use the context clues.

“Hello?” Johnny had picked up after one ring. Hearing his voice made it impossible to hold back any tears. You sobbed into the phone. You heard him repeat your name on the other end, it growing louder and louder every time it left his lips.

“I need you, please. I'm not really sure where I’m at.”

“It's alright, Bon. I have your location pulled up on my phone, I'm near there. Just don't hang up,” he assured. Your chip. You breathed a sigh of relief, leaning against the side of the building.

“I think you should head back to the group.” The group leader directed towards Anais.

“No way,” she growled. “I’m not leaving her”

“Thank you.” you mouthed.

“Of course,” she whispered back. She leaned against the building with you. The rest of the group was still there, the other group leaders trying to prevent them from getting any closer. You didn't need to worry about that, as Johnny quickly rounded the corner, gravel flying under his feet. His mouth fell open at the state of you. His arms extended out and you quickly threw yourself at him, neither of you caring about any blood, sweat, or tears.

“I got you, baby,” he whispered, causing you to lose it again.

“I want to go home.” you whimpered, against his shoulder. Your legs were wrapped firmly around his waist, his arms squeezing you so hard you might have even more bruises.

“Alright.” he soothed. He nodded his head to the group leader and Anais.

“I'll come and visit you in a few days,” Anais called after you.

“Thank you.” you sputtered back. He didn't say a word but pressed his lips against the side of your head every few feet. He stopped setting you down causing you to sob louder. He peeled off his jacket quickly. Carefully dabbing your legs, where the most blood was coming out. He didn't want you to leave a trail of blood everywhere.

He went a back way, not wanting everyone to see his bloodied-up omega. Johnny carried you like you were a feather, weaving through buildings like it was just another day. Well to him it probably was.

Luckily too many people weren't hanging out around your home, the few that did were ignored or met with a snarl. You whimpered at the sound, all your senses on overdrive. You could tell how upset Johnny was, even though you couldn't smell him. He was shaking, growls escaping him nearly every moment. “Almost there.” he soothed. He made it out of the elevator, slamming his key card against the sensor and throwing open the door.

He set you down on the kitchen counter, making no move to pull away from you. He needed to calm you down first.

“S’alright,” he repeated against your head. “I need you to relax for me, lass. Gonna get you all taken care of, aye?” he shut his eyes tightly, resting his body against yours. Your hands dug into his shirt, and you growled at the inability to smell him. “I know what’ll help.” he soothed. He pulled away causing you to whine, and he darted into John's room grabbing a shirt out of his dresser. He brought it back, holding it up towards your face. You were about to bury your face in it but stopped.

“I don't want to get it bloody.” you sobbed.

“He won't mind, bon. Plus we know how to get blood stains out.”

You didn't need to be told twice, you buried your face into the fabric, nuzzling up to Johnny again. After a few moments, your breathing returned to normal and the tears fell quietly. You were quivering now, the pain making up for the loss of adrenaline. “Gonna tell the rest, okay?” he asked, causing you to nod.

He grabbed his phone out of his pocket.

-come home asap. Omega emergency

He tossed the phone on the counter, pulling away from you, sitting down in one of the stools so he was almost face-to-face with you.

“Need you to tell me what happened,” he demanded softly. He kept his jacket pressed against your legs and used a sleeve to stop the bleeding of your elbow.

“I went to get water,” you whispered. Your eyes burned, now dry. “I heard someone walking so I started to leave then all of a sudden someone pushed me to the ground.” his face twitched, his jaw clenching so hard you worried for his teeth. “He grabbed my ankle and started pulling me back, but I turned around and scratched him across his face. One of them said something about 141 and then they ran away,” you explained.

“That’s good. Did exactly what you should've. This happen by the water fountain?” he asked.

“Mhhh,” you confirmed, wondering what he was getting at. The door swung open.

“Holy shit,” Kyle hissed, eyeing you up and down. He was a bit out of breath and you wondered if he ran all the way here like Johnny had. “Let me see.” he insisted, nearly pushing Johnny out of the way. He peeled away the sweatshirt and pulled John's shirt out of your hands.

“Some bastards shoved her.” Johnny snarled.

“By where you took me to see the birds,” you spoke up.

“They've got cameras.” Kyle said exactly what Johnny was thinking. “Should get it pulled up for when the alphas come.” As if on cue the door slammed open again.

“Where is sh”- John cut himself off. “Let me see.” he demanded, pushing Kyle out of the way. If you weren't in pain you would've laughed.

“Someone pushed me, Johnny’s trying to find it on the cameras.” you caught him up to speed. Simon moved towards Johnny glaring over his shoulder at the device. “It was my fault,” you whispered to John. Everyone's head snapped to you. John had your face in his hands, looking over your chin. “I went away from the group to get some water. I should've stayed with the”-

“You don't get to take credit for this.” John sneered. “I don't care where the hell you are, who you are around, this should never happen to you. Understand?” he ordered.

“Yes, Alpha,” you responded quickly.

“Don't make it a habit though,” Kyle spoke, hovering back over by you and John.

“Got it,” Johnny said. John left you but Kyle stayed.

“I'm gonna take a few pictures of you, love. Gotta keep the evidence,” he explained.

“Okay,” you replied softly. Your eyes trained on the three men watching the video. Johnny's face curled again, gripping his phone so tight his knuckles were white. Simon and John appeared to be fairly level-headed, trying to pick up on every detail.

“Record it before someone deletes it,” John instructed. John came back to you, pressing his lips against your forehead. “I’m going to go take care of a few things. Me and Simon’ll be back soon,” he spoke through gritted teeth, taking an inhale of your scent to prevent himself from shaking. He pulled away, Simon following behind him like a dog. “Send me the pictures after.”

“You did good, pup.” Simon praised, heading out the door with John.

Hi friends! Hope you enjoyed this chapter! Chapter 12 will be up in two days! See you then! 🧡

[explicit-tae]

ik it would be very out of character but i’d LOVE to see ungodly hour’s jk react to oc admitting she likes (or loves 🫣) him!! knowing him he’d cry

thank you for your amazing work !!!! ly<3

honestly let me just write about it

Ungodly Hour

Word Count: 3.413

Warning: dirty talking, oral sex (f), alcohol intake, intoxicated/unprotected sex, fingering, creampie, overstimulation, riding, love confessions,

“Okay,” Jungkook enters the living room hastily as you arrive, a gift bag in your hand. “I finally finished it.”

“You know you didn’t have to make me wait until you were done.” you tell Jungkook as you sit on the couch. “I’ve had the gift for weeks now.”

“We couldn’t exchange gifts until mine was complete.” Jungkook says.

Jungkook had insisted on waiting to exchange gifts. You knew he was making you something - he kept it hidden in an extra bedroom that he locked to assure you didn’t peek. He also refused to look at whatever gift you got him and prompted that you take it out the house so he himself would be tempted. 

“Well,” you hold out the gift bag - it’s medium sized and a sparkly blue. “Merry Christmas.”

Jungkook notes that you’re nervous as he takes the bag and he isn’t sure why. He would be happy with whatever you gave him - even if he was surprised initially that you told him you got him a gift. He would often think about what it was.

Jungkook opens the gift bag and takes out the rectangular box. He sees the bottom first - it’s a solid yellow color. He flips it around to inspect it, the rest of the sides being black. His eyes capture the name on the top of the box. His eyes widened. 

“Y/N…?”

Now Jungkook understands why you’re nervous. His eyes flicker to you in disbelief. “This camera is expensive!” he gasps. “How did you know-”

“I saw it on your wishlist.” you say, licking your lips. “When you let me borrow your laptop, you left a few tabs open.”

You weren’t going to admit that you were snooping for answers. Jungkook seemingly had everything there was to get and buying a gift for him was becoming difficult. 

Jungkook opens the box gently, his eyes softening at the camera. “You must’ve spent a lot on it…” he says, trailing off. He knows the exact price and knowing that you spent thousands on a gift for him pulls at his heart strings. “Thank you.”

You give Jungkook a smile. “I can finally quit my job now that I’ve spent a few checks on a gift.” you say, joking with Jungkook to lighten the mood. 

“You can!” Jungkook smiles back with a nod.

“Just kidding.” you sing-song. “Don’t be so gullible.”

Jungkook rolls his eyes and snorts. He places the camera beside him. “Always teasing me with a good time.” he murmurs. “Now for yours.”

Jungkook had wrapped the canvas neatly. It’s a decent size, you noticed, maybe 11 inches all around. Your heart is beating with anticipation as you unwrap it.

Jungkook awaits your reaction, his own nerves hiking. “Do you…like it?” he murmurs. You haven’t said anything and instead have been analyzing the painting silently, expression unreadable.

The painting is full of life, emotion. The scenery is what you initially noted, a mountain of flowers that seemingly went on for miles by the way Jungkook had painted it. The flowers are colorful, different shades of yellow, orange and pink. The sky holds bright gray clouds, covering the sun that appears to be setting. What captures your attention fully are the hands. Both pairs of hands are connected by the pinky with one wrist sporting a gold watch and the other a bracelet while the arms are painted to appear out of the canvas frame.

“This is us.” you say aloud, glancing up at Jungkook. It was a picture you and he had taken a few weeks back. You recall telling Jungkook that it was one of your favorite pictures of the two of you together that didn’t showcase faces. 

Jungkook nods. “It is.” he agrees. “You said it was your favorite picture so I painted it.”

Your throat tightens at his words.

Fuck Jeon Jungkook, you think, because this was entirely too much for you to handle. Your mother didn’t raise a weak woman who felt like she was seconds away from crying tears because of how happy she felt.

You blame it on your period that must be nearing - even if you never cry on your period. 

“Thank you.” you murmur to Jungkook, glancing away shyly to avoid his gaze. “I love it.” you say sincerely, and the admission causes Jungkook to smile.

“You’re d-drunk.” Jungkook snorted before full on laughing as you stumbled through his bedroom door.

“Fuck you.” you retort, plopping yourself down onto Jungkook’s large bed. “So are you.” you slur back.

Jungkook doesn’t deny it.

This is what happens when you drink with friends - more importantly, Jimin. It was nothing new, Jimin always insisted on going into the new year buzzed - this time, they all just went a little overboard. Luckily, Jungkook had agreed for the party to be at his apartment so he could just walk down the hall to his bedroom.

Of course, Jungkook would soon come to regret it because that meant that he would have to clean the mess they made in the morning - but you were with him, so that was a plus.

“Not as drunk as you.” Jungkook closes the door behind him, along with the loud music and laughter of everyone just down the hall in his living room. “Told you to not challenge Jimin.”

“Fuck Jimin…” you murmur to yourself, more so because Jungkook was right.

However, you wouldn’t say you challenged Jimin - he was the one who came to you with a whole cup of alcohol declaring that you were, in his words, too much of a coward to drink.

It was a complete set up, Jungkook knows this, but the only thing he could do was assure you had water and a lot of greasy food ready for when you were going to need it - and luckily he was there to do so. You’re sure you would’ve been passed out long ago.

Jungkook squints his eyes at you, an attempt to get a look at your lying figure. You and he had matched tonight - an idea that was yours. You wore a long sleeved-black dress with a deep v cut that stopped mid thigh while he wore a compressed black shirt (by your request ) and ripped jeans. 

“Do you need to throw up?” Jungkook asks, stumbling  closer to you when he hears a low moan-like whine. “I told you not to drink so-“

“Shut up,” you sit up and look directly at Jungkook. “Can I sit on your face?” 

Jungkook stops in his tracks, his doe eyes widening slightly. Yes is what he wants to say - he loves the act of pleasuring you. However, he’s unsure if he should be doing anything with you in your intoxicated state. 

“You’re drunk-“

“We’re drunk.” you correct, eyes narrowing at him - and also focusing on him all of the same because the room was still spinning. 

“True.” Jungkook murmurs to himself, trailing off. “Still, I don’t want to take advantage-“

“Save the theatrics, Kookie.” you’re already tugging your underwear off, the lacy material falling right by his bed. “Unless you…”

You don’t finish your sentence and Jungkook titls hisnhead. “What?”

“…unless you suddenly don’t like me anymore.” you whisper, and slowly, your eyes widen as if you had figured out the biggest secret. No other world conspiracy was important - not the Bermuda triangle, not whoever the fuck Jack the Ripper is or whether if Atlantis was ever real. No, not even your favorite cold cases could be as important as this new revelation of Jeon Jungkook not liking you anymore. 

“Now you’re extremely drunk .” Jungkook cackles. “Of course I like you!”

It brings Jungkookk back to when you were convincing him that you liked him, now it was the other way around. His heart swells with your drunken ramblings and overall cute appearance. 

“You don’t.” You cross your arms over your chest. “You refuse to have me sit on your face.” you say, and Jungkook realizes that he truly spoils you like everyone claims he does - you never got told no to mainly anything. 

“So who gets to sit on your face?” you ask with narrow eyes. “I bet-“

“Don’t say that girl's name.” Jungkook cuts you off before you can get started. “You know you’re my girl, Y/N.”

“So you hate me.” you deadpan, saying the words matter-of -factly. “All of a sudden you aren’t obsessed-“

“I am!” Jungkook interrupts, raising his voice. He couldn’t believe that this was a conversation that needed to be had and if he remembered this sober, it’s something he was definitely going to tease you about. 

“Hm.” you uncross your arms and stand to your feet. “I'm going to go party with Jimin.” 

Jungkook steps in front of you. “You aren’t wearing any underwear.” he states. “That and you’re already had enough to drink-“

“If you aren’t going to fuck me,” you wave your hand in his face to stop his speech. “then I’m going to go out there and drink with Jimin.”

If Jimin knew that he was the person that would be used against him it would cause ultimate chaos in the groupchat and in his friend group. 

Jungkook licks his lips. He doesn’t have time to entertain his and your friends any longer. He can only imagine how it would look if he chased after you because you wanted to be drunk and petty. The room is already spinning for him as it is for you and he knows that it wouldn’t be a good idea. 

“You’re such a bitch…” Jungkook murmurs, tone low. It’s a tone that you’re all too familiar with - and you know that you had Jungkook where you wanted him. “Get on the bed.”

You do as you’re told, laying on Jungkook’s bed and open your legs, dress hiking up entirely. 

Jungkook drops to his knees and hooks his hands beneath your thighs. You yelp when he snatches you closer to him. His lips place themselves onto your inner thigh and he presses a kiss. “I spoil you too much.”

Jungkook kisses closer and closer to your heat and he does so to tease you. “You looked so good tonight.” He couldn’t help but cave, wanting to give you whatever you wanted of him. 

Fingernails dig into your skin as Jungkook speaks against your skin. 

“You did, too.” you hitch your breath when you feel Jungkook's lips directly against your clit. 

Jungkook kisses it gently. “Thank you, baby. So needy.”

Your back arches when you feel it, wet tongue sliding directly up your clit. He dips it between your folds, holding you directly still so he can pleasure you like you desperately wanted him to. 

Eyes flickering up, Jungkook grunts. So beautiful, he always thinks of you. You couldn’t help but grow spoiled because he never told you no for anything. However, it wasn’t something he could help - you don’t ask for much to begin with.

The room continues to spin, but you no longer care. Your body erupts with arousal and it clouds your being entirely. You should’ve never drunk as much as you did, but there was no taking back the past. Besides, you cannot remember being filled with lust when you would drink prior - you’re unsure why you appear so insatiable.

“Feels so good, Kookie.” you moan, hips buckling against the rhythm of his tongue. The top half of the dress constricts your body entirely and you cannot wait until you can get out of it. “So, so good.”

Jungkook's eyes are as dark as can be and he’s positive he is a man starved right now. The alcohol runs through his system and causes his movement to be sloppy, but capable. His tongue completely savors your arousal, suckling on your clit to dipping between your folds and now, plunging it inside of you entirely.

“You must want me to fuck you.” Jungkook disclosed. “Your pussy’s clenching around nothing.”

How correct Jungkook was and you’re far from sober, so there was no snarky remark for you to retort with. You were beyond your regular self - you weren’t going to deny anything because you truly, desperately wanted Jungkook.

Your sober self would surely be screaming at you when your intoxication wore off.

Jungkook would lean back a bit every few minutes, his lips and chin fully coated in you. His tongue would still be flicking against your swollen clit and he’s truly doing this as an act to tease you further. He likes when your breath - that you’d be holding - would release when he gave you a bit of a teasing break, all before he devoured you once more.

“Kookie,” you moan Jungkook’s name so lovingly - it’s hard not to want to be between your legs for hours. His hand is bruising the skin of your thigh to hold you against his tongue. “wanna cum.”

Jungkook’s eyes stare into yours, a silent telepathic moment that tells you that he wasn’t stopping you from cumming. But he is also not a fool when it comes to you or your body and soon, you feel your pussy - so greedy to be stuffed and full - stretched out with his fingers.

Jungkook loves your whimpering and moaning - more so when you don’t hide them from his ears. There’s a party right outside his door where people are all huddling to celebrate the new year, and here the two of you were forgetting about them entirely. 

Jungkook plunges his fingers deep inside of you. He hits the familiar sweet spot he knows so well, your thighs quivering in the process. His tongue licks circles around your clit, fingerings thrusting rhythmically. Your moans bounces off the walls and louder than the muffled music in the background.

Jungkook doesn’t mind when your hands grip his hair tightly because he just knows that you’re going through it - and he has no intention of stopping until you’re cumming on his tongue. It’s close, he notes, the way your walls are clenching around his fingers greedily and your cries grow louder and louder in contrast to the way your fingers grips into his hair.

Jungkook allows you to ride against your own high, laying his tongue flat against your clit and allowing you to grind against his tongue, fingers plunging deep inside of you. Your high comes hard, body twitching and Jungkook allows it all to happen, determined to make sure you are satisfied completely before he stops.

You feel dizzy when your high slowly comes down, your forehead lined with sweat and your body completely flushed. Your body molds itself against Jungkook’s soft sheets, your breathing slowing down.

“Where are you going…?” you ask Jungkook when you no longer feel his presence before you. Your eyes flutter open. 

“Nowhere.” Jungkook responds sincerely. “We should get you out of this dress for bed-”

“Bed?” your senses peak and you jolt upright, eyes narrowed once more. “I want to ride you first.”

Jungkook snorts and stumbles back a bit at your sudden action. “You’ve already came so hard, baby. Are you sure-”

You aren’t listening to Jungkook in the slightest. You’re tugging the dress off of you entirely and getting naked right before his eyes. 

Jungkook is but a man and there isn’t much convincing he needs - especially not when you’re tugging him towards you needily. You connect your lips to his while pushing him against the bed. Jungkook loves how needy you are - how much you express that you want him. Of course, he knows that you do any other time - but this time it’s different; getting to witness just how much you want him is a feeling he never knew he craved.

Your fingernails dig into Jungkook’s clothed shoulders as you slowly feel him inside of you. You push him backwards so that he’s laying on the bed, your hips rising and falling.

“Fuck,” Jungkook groans, hands firmly on your hips. You’re going so fast, fully determined to cum once more - and Jungkook couldn’t be upset. Your face displays just how good you felt in this moment. “your pussy feels so good, baby.”

Your pussy clenches around Jungkook as if responding to his words. By the time the pair of you were done, you were going to be bruised entirely with Jungkook’s hand marks. 

Jungkook finds it hard to look at you - not when you looked so completely fucked out and beautiful. He’s unsure where your stamina appeared - maybe you were just that fucked out and drunk; that you didn’t care that you were overstimulating yourself (and him). 

Jungkook clenches his eyes shut to get the image of you out of his head, but all it does is follow him in his thoughts. Your naked figure using him to pleasure yourself, your bouncing breast to your creaming pussy dripping all over him and making a complete mess.

Jungkook is so hot - so beautiful himself. He’s hissing to himself with clenched eyes, experiencing pure bliss just as you were. His forehead is covered in sweat and a few strands of hair are sticking to it. 

Jungkook feels a hand upon his cheek and his eyes open. They're so dark and full of lust - similar to your own. Your eyes connect to his and Jungkook swallows, adam’s apple bobbing.

“Drunk Y/N is so needy.” Jungkook jokes, voice deep and raspy. “Drunk actions are sober intentions.”

Jungkook begins to thrust upwards, matching your rhythm. His thrusts are brutal, fully determined to satiate your hunger for him. His eyes never leave yours, the pair of you stuck in an intimate, lust-filled moment.

“I-I’m gonna cum again!” you mewl, breaking eye-contact first to shut them tight. The familiar sensation bubbles into you again and Jungkook only fucks into you harder, pounding with all his might; how the both of you could be drunk and full of stamina is beyond him.

Your walls are squeezing around Jungkook and within seconds, your juices squirt around Jungkook entirely, fully coating his abdomen. “I-I-” Your body is twitching, your head pushed back when Jungkook hears your words. “I love you.”

Jungkook is still for a moment, completely silent. He’s contemplating if he heard you correctly and before he can speak, you repeat yourself. “I love you.” it’s low and a bit slurred, but Jungkook hears it entirely.

“You’re drunk.” Jungkook laughs it off, cheeks flushed and heart beating out his chest. He doesn’t want to call you a liar - you wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true. However, you’re drunk and maybe you meant to say you loved the way he was fucking you -

“Shut up,” you say, walls tightening on Jungkook’s cock. “I do love you.”

You yelp when you feel your back hit the soft mattress, all without Jungkook removing himself from inside of you. The room continues to spin for you two, but neither of you could bring yourselves to care. 

“You’re going to forget you said that.” Jungkook begins to thrust, holding you close in his embrace. “Gonna deny it until the end of time.”

“I love you.” you repeat and Jungkook’s pounding only increases. Skin slapping echoes off the wall and the two of you are so entranced in the moment that neither of you notice the music dying down outside the room. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too.” Jungkook whimpers with a shake of his head. His thoughts are consumed by your words - the love confession. 

Jungkook could never get tired of hearing it and at this moment, you don’t get tired of saying it. You repeat it over and over again as Jungkook continues to fuck inside of you. You’re creaming his cock, a white ring forming around the shaft and Jungkook couldn’t get enough of you.

I love you.

I love you.

You love him, Jungkook’s thrilled at the revelation. His head drops back as his body tenses up, his thrust becoming sloppy. “Say it again, baby.” he pleads with a choked whimper. He needed to hear you say it again, as selfish as it was - he’s unsure how long it’d be before he could hear it again.

“Fuck,” your pussy is seeping with arousal and staining his sheets, your clit swollen and pulsing. “I love you, Kookie.”“Oh, shit…I love you, too, baby.” Jungkook continues to stretch your pussy completely until he’s shooting hot cum directly inside of you, a hand directly on your stomach as he does so. He’s panting, the both of you covered in sweat and bodily fluids.

[ckret2]

Chapter 58 of human Bill Cipher in a quantum uncertainty state between being and not being the Mystery Shack's prisoner:

Everything you've wondered about how Bill survived his execution.

Let's rewind a couple of days.

####

Friday, 11:00 p.m.

"Welp," Mabel said, "I've got the rest of summer to try to get the whole story out of him! Goodnight, Dipper!"

Dipper's stomach flipped with guilt. "Yeah." The rest of summer. Mabel left for Portland in the morning. "Goodnight."

He lay down, pulled his sheet back up, and stared at the ceiling.

####

Friday, 11:04 p.m.

It took less than five minutes before the guilt won.

Yeah, no, nope, nuh-uh, Dipper couldn't do this. Not to his sister. He rolled over and hissed, "Psss, hey. Mabel."

"Hm?"

"Listen," Dipper said. "I hate Bill, okay, but I care about you, and also I think Bill might be part of a prophecy, so, because of that—I... There's something I need to tell you."

####

11:15 p.m.

Bill hadn't even had time to start dreaming before something dragged his mind back into the waking world.

There were white points of light as he passed through the hazy twilight of half-sleep. Those lights were his eyes. Lately, every time he started to wake up, he'd been seeing his eyes in the distance.

This time, there was one right in front of him, so bright it almost blinded him. He thought he could see something in the light.

He touched it.

And then he woke up, laying on his cushion bed as usual, watching as Mabel slid out of her room, crept near, and knelt beside him. She shook his shoulder. "Hey, Bill. Wake up."

And then he woke up—which was strange, considering he'd just done that—and stared at the dark inside of his hoodie.

He pushed back his hood. There was Mabel, crouched next to him, just like he'd "dreamed." Huh. Well done, Cipher, it seems you've just learned a new trick.

He tamped down his excitement; he could figure out what to do with this trick later. For now, he had a higher priority. "'Sup, kid?" He pushed himself up on an elbow, roughly flipping his hair out of his hood so it wouldn't keep tickling and choking around his neck. "It's the middle of the night." He yawned and mumbled, "Not that it makes a difference to me, but..."

"Shhh! We've gotta stay quiet," Mabel whispered. "I need to get you out of here. They're gonna kill you."

He sat bolt upright. "All right," he said. "You have my attention."

####

Dipper refused to say how, but according to him they'd synthesized just enough fuel for one shot with their fancy quantum whatever gun, and they couldn't make any more. They planned to execute Bill once Mabel was gone.

Mabel could just open a door for Bill and let him escape in the middle of the night—but that had dangers of its own. Bill would have to travel to a hiding place on foot—and his shoes were crap for hiking—his feet were also crap for hiking—and he'd only have until the adults started waking up and realized he was gone. Even if he kept moving all night, the adults would probably be able to cover the same amount of ground in a couple of hours, he'd probably inadvertently leave a trail a mile wide, and the forest's local supernatural population would definitely snitch if one of the Stans asked if they'd seen anything.

Plus, it wouldn't be very hard for the adults to figure out that Dipper had cracked and Mabel had helped Bill escape, and then everyone was in hot water.

They needed a way to cover Bill's escape to make it harder for the adults to pick up his trail, to give him as much time as possible to get some distance from the shack, and to delay Mabel getting in trouble. ("And Dipper," Mabel said. "Sure," Bill said unenthusiastically.)

But if they could, it would be best if they found a way to ensure the adults never even thought to look for Bill, Mabel never got in trouble at all, and the Quantum Destabilizer could never be fired again.

It was possible, Bill said. It wasn't guaranteed, but it was possible. They had a good chance. A very good chance. In fact, never mind, he'd decided it was guaranteed, they'd pull this off easily.

All they had to do was fake his death.

He knew a way.

####

11:45 p.m.

Dipper was stirred out of a drowsy near-sleep by the door creaking open and a couple sets of footsteps shuffling in. He rolled over and squinted across the room.

Mabel was quietly collecting craft supplies—pens, papers, her small starter sewing kit she used for repairs. Bill climbed into the loft to grab some musty pillows and blankets that had been stored for years in a cardboard box.

"Mabel?" Dipper mumbled.

Mabel put a finger over her lips. "Hey Dipper," she whispered. "You can go back to sleep, we'll be up in the loft."

"Doing what?"

"Scheme-y stuff. Don't worry about it." She flung her arms around Dipper, whispered, "Thank you," and ran across the room to grab her backpack and the height-altering flashlight.

Dipper glanced toward the loft. Bill was waiting at the top of the ladder, a dark vaguely-triangular silhouette, only his eyes visible as they reflected the dim light like a cat's. Dipper had had more nightmares than he could remember about waking to find Bill hovering in the dark above him.

Bill's gaze flicked from watching Mabel to staring at Dipper. They made eye contact. Bill didn't say anything.

Then Mabel climbed up the ladder, supply-stuffed backpack slung over her shoulders. Bill gave Dipper one last silent look, then turned away to follow Mabel to the back of the loft.

Dipper rolled over and tried to fall back asleep.

####

The plan was to create a dummy that looked like Bill to take the Quantum Destabilizer's shot in his place, while the real Bill got as far from the shack as the weirdness barrier around town would allow.

Bill told Mabel that the dummy didn't need to be complicated: he had an enchantment that could make it completely convincing. All he had to do was write out a spell and leave the paper over the dummy, and anyone who looked at it would be convinced it was really him in the flesh.

Similarly, sneaking Bill out of the shack didn't need to be complicated. They could shrink Bill down and stick him in Mabel's backpack, and all she'd have to do was come up with an excuse to get out of the car and set him free before they left town. 

The hard part would be the choreography of the whole thing. They needed Bill to put in an appearance that morning, to prove it really was him walking around; and then go somewhere that Mabel could hide him away without anybody noticing; and then ensure that nobody would see the Bill dummy until they were safely out of range, just in case. "The enchantment's pretty good," Bill said, "but the more people see it and the longer they get to look at it, the less potent it gets. And all it'll do is make the dummy look like me—it won't be able to walk and talk. It's best if the only person who gets a good look at it is my executioner."

The word executioner made Mabel shudder. It would probably be Ford, wouldn't it? She knew he thought he was doing the right thing. She knew it wasn't the first time he'd tried to destroy Bill. She knew she'd been fine with it last summer. She even knew that Bill would be okay. But all the same, she wasn't sure how she'd look at Ford the same way.

Once they had the dummy set up somewhere away from the family's prying eyes, they had to discourage everyone from trying to approach "Bill" until they were ready to kill him. And, ideally—just in case the executioner tried to speak to Bill or the enchantment otherwise failed—they should stage it all in a way so that no one would think Mabel had been involved in the escape plan.

The solution was obvious.

"I live to cause drama for no reason," Bill said. "I upset mortals recreationally. Can you act?"

"Can I act? Pshhh!" Mabel flipped a hand dismissively. "Maybe you were too busy badly impersonating my brother to watch, but last year I kind of staged an entire puppet show performing and singing as every character."

So it was a plan: they would stage a fight.

They were sitting in the very back of the attic loft, behind stacks of forgotten boxes and abandoned junk, beneath the meager light of the loft's window. Bill didn't need the light. He had a pen and paper and was writing out his enchantment's spell while they talked, long lines of inscrutable text. It was so dark that Mabel couldn't even see what language he was writing in, but that was fine; Bill had said that if she read his spell—if anyone read it—it would break the enchantment.

"Whoops," Bill said, "yeah, afraid I missed your whole show! I was too busy backstage trying to avoid your friends and looking for a way onto the catwalk."

Mabel shook her head in disapproval. "You would have liked it. There were live pyrotechnics and lasers and fog machines and a giant tentacle monster war and seventy-four songs and puppets!"

"I'll admit, sounds like a killer show. How about gore?"

"There was a whole song about my love interest getting his legs chewed off in the war," Mabel said. "The sock puppets don't have legs, but everyone knows your own imagination is a lot scarier than anything you actually see."

This kid could have a brilliant artistic career as a serial killer. "That's familiar. Is this war based on that 'cats versus the giant octopus' dream you keep having?"

"Yeah, and you'd have known that if you'd actually watched the opera! Too bad you missed the whole thing," Mabel said. "I guess you were just too busy being evil to appreciate the simple joys of a good, clean, non-villainous puppet show."

"Oh no, I can't believe my actions have consequences," Bill said flatly. "What would I ever have done if you hadn't enlightened me."

"Died, probably."

Bill glared.

"You know! Like you did last summer? As a consequence of your—"

"You shush."

Bill shoved Mabel away when she started to laugh, and held the enchantment up between their faces so he didn't have to look at her. He read his work over, then folded the paper in half and half again. "Hey, maybe you can put on an encore presentation sometime." Bill carefully inscribed four symbols in a square on the folded paper. "I promise I'll laugh at the jokes and fake cry at the sad parts."

Mabel shuddered. "No way. I'm never touching that show again. Too many bad memories."

"Awww, how come?"

Mabel stared at Bill.

Bill said, "Oh, right."

"Yeah," Mabel said coldly. "Thanks."

Bill shrank back. He leaned against a cardboard box, not sure where to look, drumming his fingers self consciously on the floorboards. Trying to figure out the right thing to say to make it better.

"Hey," he said. "If you ever change your mind about reviving the show... can I play the reverend again?" He grinned.

Mabel wadded up a paper and chucked it at Bill's face.

####

They agreed that scripting out every bit of the argument would make it sound too fakey; and anyway they were going to do this on no sleep and with no time to practice, if one of them forgot a line mid-argument it would ruin their entire plan. Bill said he was great at improvisational acting (which Mabel suspected was his way of trying to make "great at lying on the spot" sound good), and Mabel was a pro at getting into character for pretend games, so this should be easy. They just needed to choose a few topics they could realistically argue about.

So they started making a list of things that would totally infuriate each other.

"I can't think of anything that would make me furious," Bill said. "Outside of something serious like a murder attempt, anyway. I'm an even-tempered triangle! I don't sweat the small things!"

"You got sooo mad when I forgot to tell you about my Summerween plans."

Bill grimaced. "Right," he muttered. "That." 

Teasingly, Mabel asked, "Are you still grumpy I made plans?"

"I was not grumpy you made plans. I wasn't grumpy at all! I just would have appreciated if I'd known sooner, I planned my whole evening assuming I'd have somebody around to open doors—"

He saw Mabel's increasingly amused smirk, stopped himself, held up a hand, and said, "I'll save it for tomorrow morning."

Mabel wrote down the idea beneath four ideas she'd already scratched out. She'd temporarily removed the crystal from the height-altering flashlight so she could illuminate her paper while she wrote. "The concert will definitely come up tomorrow morning! And you can act like that's the first time you heard about it."

"Sure, no problem. We haven't talked about the concert where your uncles could overhear, have we?"

"I don't think so."

"Then that's perfect. I can pretend to be mad you didn't tell me." Bill forced a smile. "All right, your turn." He rested his elbow on his knee and his cheek on his fist. "I realize that, apart from the unfortunate meat suit, I'm the most flawless person you've ever seen—" he ignored Mabel's raspberry, "—but for the sake of argument, just imagine something you might get mad at me for."

"Um... insulting Dipper?"

"Now that sounds fun. But no, can't risk it, he'd be too tempted to jump into the argument," Bill said. "Besides, what if I said something you agreed with?"

"What! Why would I agree if you insulted my brother?"

"He smells like a sweaty ferret and when he has a crush he turns into a creepy little stalker."

Mabel laughed. "Yeah, he does. Okay, um..." She went silent for a moment, tapping the butt of her marker on the paper. 

She stopped tapping; and then quietly said, "I'd be so mad if I thought you were trying to keep me from hanging out with my friends."

"Oh, I could do that easily." Bill reviewed his wording, decided a human could take that as a threat, and quickly amended himself, "Could pretend that I'm trying to do that easily. You know I'd never, but hey, the adults here are ready to believe the worst about me—"

"You promise?"

"Sure I promise!" He processed the question after he'd already answered it. "Hold on—you think I'm the kind of person who would do that?" He was, but he didn't want her to see him that way.

She shrugged, looking down at her idea list again. "You've done it to other people."

"Name one!"

"Grunkle Ford and Old Man McGucket."

Oh, of course. That snitch of a backstabbing ungrateful ex-student, bane of Bill's entire miserable postmortem existence. Had to find as many ways as possible to make Bill look bad, didn't he. "All I did was tell Stanford that hick was a coward and a flake. I didn't make him do anything! If he agreed with me, that's on him." Bill crossed his arms irritably. "And Specs was a coward and a flake. Is it a crime to be right?"

"But you ruined their friendship on purpose, didn't you."

Bill tried to find a graceful way to wriggle around the direct accusation that excused his actions without contradicting whatever she might already know. "Did not," he said.

Mabel frowned at him.

Bill averted his gaze. "So! That's great. Trying to keep you away from your friends. Something I've never done to you but would be a really good thing to fight about. What else."

Mabel sighed and looked over her list again. She wrote something, scratched it out; started another line and scribbled it out; and then said in exasperation, "Your morals are terrible."

Bill had to clap a hand over his mouth to keep his sudden laugh from waking Dipper. "You've got too many morals, it's your biggest character flaw. How many does one person really need, two or three? That's an easy topic, arguments about morality can drag out for hours!"

"We probably only need to fight for like ten minutes, right?"

"Sure. List done! That's everything we need."

Mabel heaved a sigh of relief. She read over the list, glanced at the flashlight she was reading with, and said, "I should get extra batteries. It'd be the worst if we got you way out of the shack and then the batteries died while you were still small."

Bill wasn't sure about that. Being so tall for weeks on end felt awkward and wrong. His limbs were always in the way. He bumped into things he should have been able to slide between. The more time he spent in this body, the more he wanted to spend a month at the size and thickness of a greeting card. He joked, "Hey, I don't know; it'd be easier to hide..."

"Yeah, and easier to get squarshed." Mabel turned off the flashlight and picked up her backpack. "I'm getting batteries."

While Mabel was downstairs, Bill picked up her list to see what topics they'd found to argue about so far:

Weirdmaged

Making me think you were Blendin to get the

Kitten fists meow meow

Almost killing me

Not sharing Summerween plans

Trying to make me kill myself by

Ruining Glove Story

Insulting Dipper

Insulting Waddles??? (too lovable!)

Weirdm

Mabeland Isolating me from everyone

Spray painting your eyeball

Weir YOU'RE TOO EVIL!!

I'M TOO NICE!!! ♡

He reread the list, feeling his guts writhe and twist involuntarily.

Yeah. Those were all the things he'd decided not to bring up, too.

At least they were in agreement on what they didn't want to talk about. That was true friendship, right? Friendship didn't mean never hurting each other; it meant mutually agreeing never to talk about it again.

He read the list a third time.

####

A spare pair of Bill's black leggings and a pair of black socks would serve as half of the decoy body, stuffed with old bedsheets and half a pillow that Mabel had sized up with the flashlight so it was closer to Bill's actual torso size. For the time being, the top half of the decoy was constructed out of a flannel shirt; Bill would have to put in an appearance downstairs in his hoodie, and then they could quickly go upstairs and put it on the decoy to complete the look.

He'd miss that hoodie almost as much as he missed his own face. But it was a small price to pay for his life.

"I don't know," Mabel whispered, inspecting the dummy with the flashlight from near the edge of the loft. "It doesn't look super convincing. It's kind of lumpy all wrong." She knelt by it and tried to poke the fake thigh into a slightly more convincing shape.

"Don't worry about it," Bill whispered, waving the folded paper with the secret spell written inside. "The enchantment will hide all that. As long as the dummy looks mostly human at a glance, no one will notice anything."

Mabel gave it one last worried look, but nodded and turned off the flashlight.

####

Mabel crept out of the office and eased the door shut. "Got it," she whispered, holding up a faded black umbrella. "Are you sure you don't want a better umbrella, though? Some of the spikes are broken and I think it's supposed to rain today."

"The other humans will be less likely to notice a broken umbrella going missing," Bill said. "Anyway, this one saved my life once. I'll take it."

"Then that's the last supply we needed to pack," Mabel said, sighing in relief. "It's still a couple hours until morning. Should we get some sleep?"

Bill considered it, and shook his head. "No. Better not."

Sleep scared him. Sure, he endured it when he had to—he had no choice—and, under the circumstances, although it was a close call, he grudgingly preferred sleeping to dying of sleep deprivation; but he kept it at bay as long as he could, sleeping irregularly, infrequently, and briefly. Knowing it was necessary didn't make the fear go away.

It was the helplessness of the whole thing—knowing that, once his mind had shut off, anything could happen around him, anything could happen to his body—and not only was he ignorant and defenseless, but he was also powerless to wake himself up any sooner than his tyrannical circadian rhythm dictated. He lacked even the power to think about waking.

If Mabel hadn't woken him tonight, he might have slept through his own death. 

He continued, "What if we sleep in and don't have time for the fight? I'd be doomed." Bill didn't even have the luxury of an alarm clock.

"Oh—good point," Mabel said. "So we should probably do something to keep us awake."

"Right," Bill said, wracking his exhausted brain for an idea. "Overdose on caffeine?"

Mabel was quiet for a moment. "If this works, it might be a long time before we see each other again," she said. "You'll probably have to keep hiding until Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan leave town in the fall. And by then summer will be over, and I'll be back in California..."

She was right. If they pulled off this plan, he might never see Mabel again. It wouldn't exactly be safe to ring up the Mystery Shack. Sure, sooner or later he'd find a way to restart Weirdmageddon, and then he could invite her into his gang... And she'd join, wouldn't she? Of course she would. He just needed a chance to talk to her about it away from the closed-minded killjoys in her family that were holding her back. But until then...

She groped through the dark to grab at Bill's sleeve. "Dance party? While we still can?"

"Sure, star girl." Where had this lump in his throat come from? "Sounds fun. Dance party."

####

5:30 a.m.

It was the first time Bill had danced since his death.

All Mabel had to offer was Sev'ral Times, upbeat kid's show soundtracks, unlistenable synthesized junk, and whatever was playing before dawn on the radio stations that could reach Gravity Falls; the stained yellow shag carpet and homely plaid wallpaper made him miss the dark smoky rooms and strobing multicolor lights of a real club; he couldn't risk drinking this early in the morning if he wanted to have a head clear enough for escape; and he never forgot that, outside of the living room, the halls were empty and silent.

But he'd danced to music that made his eye bleed and his memories howl and he'd danced to no music at all; he'd danced in millions of crummy makeshift dance halls and night clubs and dive bars that had tumbled into or been cobbled together in the Nightmare Realm; he'd danced when he was so brutally sober that time in all its sharp cruel clarity seemed to have frozen to turn a spotlight on him; he'd danced with his worst enemies and he'd danced all alone; and there wasn't any force on this planet that would stop him from dancing now.

After spending four songs in a row making fun of Bill for attempting to figure out how to puppet a human body into some approximation of a dance, Mabel asked, "What were dances like on Flatworld?" It made Bill internally wince each time he heard it called that.

But he welcomed the opportunity for a break; he leaned back to half sit against the living room table, breathing heavily, arms trembling. "Dif—difficult question." He had to pause to catch his breath. His lungs and muscles couldn't keep up with him; this body was too hard to keep moving, so inefficient, 90% of the fuel that went into it was wasted uselessly. It was already beginning to atrophy in the few short weeks he'd had it, muscles withering from days stuck indoors with nothing to do but sit and stare out the window. He'd been made of pure energy for so long that maintaining all the little systems to keep a flesh body energized—food, water, sleep, exercise, not too much exercise, oxygen—felt like a Sisyphean torture. "S'like asking—'what're human dances like'? There's a—lot of variety."

"You know what I mean!" Mabel was still half dancing, bouncing from foot to foot. Bill wanted that kind of energy. "How do you dance?"

Bill shut his eyes, seeing colors flash behind his eyes—gyroscopic, kaleidoscopic, shapes spinning and whirling in spirals. "I'd show you, but there's not enough room in here for me to do a cartwheel."

"Seriously, Bill."

"I'm being serious! Plus I can't float. It wouldn't look right in a human body." It would look better if he cut his silhouette out of a piece of paper, taped it over a flashlight, and projected the shape onto the wall. "Tell you what—as soon as I'm back in my real body, I'll show you how I dance, all right?"

"Come on, Bill! You're just trying to wiggle out of—"

"Mabel," Bill said, "I can't do those dances in this body."

Mabel's teasing smile faded. "Really?"

"Unless you know a way to dislocate my shoulder so I can slide my entire arm from one hip over my head and down to the other."

"Ew." Mabel grimaced.

"It looks cooler on a triangle." Bill smiled wanly. "But hey, I spent all day yesterday teaching you everything I know—you can teach me something. I haven't used a human body in thirty years! What dances are popular these days, I haven't learned anything new since the moonwalk."

Mabel's eyes widened. "You know how to moonwalk?"

"Sure! It's easy. I figured it out in Stanford's body."

"I don't believe you. Prove it."

Bill pushed off the table. "Oh, yeah? Are you ready to look stupid?" He effortlessly glided backwards across the floorboards. He pointed at Mabel's gaping face as he passed. "What do you think of that?"

"Show me how to do that and I'll teach you every dance I know."

Bill grinned. He loved deals that were unfairly biased in his favor, and he loved it more when he didn't even have to propose them himself. "You've got yourself a deal, Shooting Star." It would keep them occupied for the next hour.

####

6:32 a.m.

About fifteen minutes ago, Bill had warned Mabel that he'd just glimpsed the beforeimage of Ford crossing the living room in the future; and then they'd kept partying, wanting to get in every last second of joy they could before he arrived in the present.

But once Ford was no longer approaching but actually there, seeing his face was like a bullet to the head. Bill had been having so much fun, for a few minutes he'd almost forgotten that today was execution day. 

And it wouldn't be execution day if he had anything to say about it.

Bill demanded, "What's with the sour face?" (Ford's eyes were so dull, his expression so heavy; Bill had never seen him wear that look, not even any of the previous times he'd tried to murder Bill.) "Hey, am I not allowed to dance now?" He squeezed Mabel's hands tighter.

Ford just gave a tiny shake to his head and hurried past them, not even deigning to look at Bill, as though he were telling himself he'd only imagined he'd heard the voice of a ghost.

I know what you're up to, Bill thought at top volume silently in his head. But you won't do it. You won't do it.

He met Mabel's gaze. She gave him a tiny nod. Party was over. Time to get to work.

####

6:36 a.m.

Over the course of the night, Dipper had been woken twice by bursts of quickly-hushed laughter; three times by random bumps and thuds; once by Bill falling off the loft and Mabel's squeal of alarm; and several times by Mabel waking Dipper to ask if it was okay if she gave Bill Dipper's old shoes (so Bill could finally walk in the woods properly), his sleeping bag (so Bill didn't have to sleep on hard rocks under a single sad Pony Heist bedsheet), his "Edible Plants of Oregon's Blue Mountains" booklet (self-explanatory), and several other things he also said "yes" to without hearing properly. It had better be one heck of a prophecy that Bill was involved in, because Dipper was this close to just murdering Bill himself.

When Dipper went downstairs, he couldn't even look at Mabel and Bill—terrified something in his gaze would give the whole conspiracy away. He didn't even know what they were planning. Was dancing in the living room part of it? Was it some distraction? He'd hoped Bill would already be gone by now.

He couldn't meet Ford's eyes either, for the guilt of betraying his trust. He didn't deserve these scrambled eggs.

He couldn't meet anyone's gaze.

He really, really hoped Mabel and Bill had a plan. He hoped it was a good plan. Because whatever the heck they were up to—Dipper was afraid it was on him to prevent Ford and Stan from intervening too soon and finding out.

####

6:49 a.m.

After they'd escaped the kitchen, Bill glanced over his shoulder toward the stairs before Mabel got the attic door closed. "Do you think Ford noticed something?"

Mabel was already running across the room, retrieving her phone charger and phone to stuff in her backpack and pocket, making sure she'd packed everything she needed for her trip—everything except for Bill. "I wasn't looking. Did he?"

"I don't know." Bill flashed one last worried look at the door; but he couldn't afford to slow down, he had a dummy to finish. He hurried up the ladder, took off his hoodie, pulled on a tank top, tried to fish his pre-written enchantment out of his pocket in the same movement, and fumbled and dropped the paper over the edge of the loft.

Mabel had been checking her bag for the concert tickets when a paper fluttered down on her hair. She instinctively grabbed it and unfolded it before she registered the four sigils written on the outside and realized this was the enchantment Bill had said would stop working if anyone read it. She'd reflexively read the first few lines before she could stop herself. She froze. Her gaze jerked up to Bill, eyes wide.

Bill dropped down the ladder, snatched the paper out of her hand so quickly it almost tore, and immediately climbed back up. "I told you not to look." He carefully refolded it.

"Is that...?"

"It'll work," Bill hissed, with an insistence that said he wasn't sure it would work at all.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes!" He held up the dummy's pillow torso and yanked the hoodie on top of it.

When Mabel didn't say anything, Bill sighed. "Even if it doesn't—this only needs to work until we're on the road. They can't stop us then."

"Bill—"

He shakily inhaled, and then he raised his voice loud enough he'd be heard downstairs. "What do you need to spend all that time around those two brats for, anyway?! What, am I not good enough company for you?!"

They didn't have time to adjust the plan. They were in the middle of it, right now, and the guys expected to hear an argument. Mabel swallowed hard and raised her voice as well. "Not when you're acting like this, you aren't! You're a bigger brat than—than both of—and my friends aren't brats!"

Bill bit his lip, brows drawn in pain, eye squeezed shut, trying not to laugh.

Mabel chucked a sock at him, don't you dare. "You can't say I can't hang out with my friends, that's stupid!"

"I never said you can't!" Bill held the folded paper a foot above the completed dummy, the square of symbols face up, and tapped it twice so it hovered in place when he let go. "Hang out with your stupid friends, I don't care! But two whole days is ridiculous—!"

####

7:02 a.m.

"I THOUGHT you were my FRIEND!"

All three eavesdroppers cringed—Dipper hardest of all. His heart was hammering out of his chest and his t-shirt was at least 50% sweat by volume. Was this part of the plan? It sounded like an insane plan. This couldn't be the plan. It had to be the plan. He'd already prevented Ford from intervening, what if they were really fighting? But what if this really was the plan? 

"WELL! If you're gonna act like this just because I wondered what you're up to, maybe NOT! What kind of fun are you good for, you wouldn't even be into burning a house down!"

Dipper messed up. He'd actually ruined their friendship right before Bill was about to die and Mabel would be miserableand it was all his fault. This fight was real. They were furious. They hated each other—

####

7:03 a.m.

"OH YEAH, WELL—" Mabel faltered as she struggled to think of a fitting retort. "YOU WOULDN'T EVEN BE INTO—into—n-NOT BURNING A HOUSE DOWN!" She cringed at herself, struggling not to laugh.

Bill had been fighting the urge to laugh so hard that his face was turning red. "OHHH WOW, GREAT COMEBACK."

Mabel's voice went shrill with suppressed hysterics. "SHUT UP!" Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes as she socked Bill's arm. If he made her lose it when everyone was outside listening—

The door opened. "Hey—!"

They both rounded on Stan. "STAY OUT OF IT!" Mabel snatched up a discarded sweater. Stan shut the door just before the sweater hit it.

Mabel quietly wheezed, "Do you think he saw anything?"

"No, n—" Bill had to clap both hands over his mouth and nose to keep silent. Mabel wrapped her arms around him and smushed her face against his chest to muffle herself. They stood there, shaking, until the hysterics passed.

The stress was getting to them.

####

7:06 a.m.

"Fine!!" Mabel lifted the height-altering flashlight. "Then you can just stay here all weekend!"

Bill had on his backpack (Dipper had "agreed" Bill could take his) and was clutching his umbrella. He gave her a thumbs up; ready. "FINE!"

"FINE!" Mabel turned on the flashlight. When Bill was around four inches tall, she turned it off, knelt down, and offered her hand for him to climb on. She stuffed the flashlight in her backpack, carefully set Bill in a sweater nest (how had Gideon flung her and Dipper in a jar so cavalierly? she was terrified of snapping Bill's bones like toothpicks), zipped the backpack and gingerly put it on; and then Mabel was storming out of the room.

"Leave him in there," Mabel snapped, pointing at the door. She was shaking with fear. "He's in TIME OUT."

Dipper glanced nervously at the door, "Um..." He looked so worried. She hadn't had a chance to explain the plan to him.

Mabel glared into his eyes. She summoned up all her mostly placebic Twin Empathy Powers to beam her thoughts into Dipper's brain. Don't. Please don't. If you say anything you'll ruin it.

He raised his hands. "Okay, fine."

Mabel rushed past him to the stairs, trying to escape as fast as possible without jostling her backpack.

####

7:08 a.m.

Buckled into Mrs. Grendinator's car, voice shaking, Mabel said, "Can we just go? Please?" Now, before someone ran out of the shack and waved them down to demand Mabel explain where Bill had gone. Her hands were trembling in fear, clutched protectively around her backpack with its secret cargo. One of her best friends was in there. She couldn't let anything happen to him.

Mrs. Grendinator nodded. "Of course."

As they pulled around the Mystery Shack and toward the road, Mabel glanced toward the attic bedroom window, afraid the adults might have already gone in and discovered their trick; but no one looked back.

Now all she could do was hope the paper Bill had left floating over the dummy would do its job.

####

(Shoutout to the one person who theorized the size changing flashlight could be involved, I'd @ you but I don't want you to see this before you read the chapter. You may claim credit in the notes. Based on the messages I received, one person guessed Mabel got involved halfway through the fight, no one guessed she was in it from the start, and NOBODY guessed Dipper got involved.

For a fun time, go back and read last chapter and this one in chronological order via the timestamps!

But first I wanna hear all your thoughts.)

[fitnessgeekandcoffeefreak]

7.9.2024.

📍 Upper Yosemite Falls

9.25 miles -- 3,300 ft elevation gain

First of all, nothing in this trip went as planned 😆 Road closures, longer travel times, my friends are mother and son so they argued (maybe I should've expected that), phone service giving out, Airbnb was probably haunted, and so much more. My husband also shared his cold with me and that popped up day one, cuz, of course it did.

Truth be told I struggled hard on this hike. It is granite stairs that go straight up the entire way. We started way later in the day than planned so it was already 100*. I should've hydrated better the day prior so I was playing catch up. DayQuil helped a little, but I just couldn't breathe very well so I had to rest A LOT more than I typically do. I was annoyed with myself.

We made it to the top and climbed down the stairs to the top of the Falls lookout, which was amazing! It really is such a gorgeous place. There are pools at the top of the Falls and I totally got in. The whole way, I didn't even care if that meant I was hiking down in wet clothes, lol. It was definitely worth it to cool my body down.

On our way down we ran into a family we'd leapfrogged a couple times throughout the hike. (The mom had backpacked her 3 year old the entire way up the mountain. She was badass, man.) She, unfortunately, twisted her ankle on the way down the trail. She didn't have poles so I let her use mine. Her husband refused Search and Rescue help so we stayed with them the entire trip down the mountain. It took longer going back down than my turtle self took going up and we got back to the car at 11 pm 🤦

It was a challenging day for me and my brain and my body. I knew I was capable of completing the hike, but I definitely underestimated how being sick combined with the elevation would have on me, that's for sure.

[emlovessid]

@jegulus-microfic february 11, map, 115 words

“Come on, up you hop.”

“James, I’m fine. It’s not even that far,” Regulus insists, holding up the map.

“It’s at least half a mile and you just sprained your ankle. Now stop being stubborn,” James says, looking up at Regulus from where he’s crouched down in front of him.

WIth a dramatic sigh he relents, wrapping his arms around James’ neck, James’ hands coming beneath his thighs as he stands up with an ease that shouldn’t be possible when there’s a person clinging to your back.

Pressing a kiss to the arm wrapped around his neck, James sets off on the trail again, and Regulus thinks that he actually might prefer hiking this way.

[techramonic]

What are some facts or tidbits about Daniel that you don't think is very well-known?

Hey! Thanks for the great question. I have a few things not a lot of people have talked about Daniel, all of which are information taken from his father's book: "Walking in Daniel's Shoes".

Facts about Daniel Mauser

1. Daniel's name came from the Biblical character Daniel and his mother Linda's fondness of Elton John's song titled with the same name. Conner was Linda's maiden name and since she was an only child, it was a way for them to carry her family's last name.

2. In sixth grade, he struggled somewhat with depression. After his mother sent him to a therapist, it was revealed that he was feeling stressed because at the time, he had pneumonia and missed school a few times. He felt that his teacher was pressuring him to catch up. Fortunately, he recovered after a few months.

3. Daniel used to be in cub scouts and boy scouts for a few years. Once school had became more hectic and he was more engaged in piano lessons, he dropped out of the scouts. He had earned basic badges but was not too enthusiastic with scouting long-term.

4. On July 24, 1999, Boy Scout 359 installed a park bench in Daniel’s memory along the South Rim Trail at Roxborough State Park, ten miles south of Columbine. Daniel was once a member of the Boy Scout Troop that preceded 359. Roxborough was the Mauser family’s favorite hiking area.

5. He played chess and won second place in a Denver metro tournament as a member of the school's chest club team. He also won two National Science Olympiad awards, presented to the top ten scorers in general science knowledge.

6. He was an occasional babysitter and was great with kids.

7. He was a Junior Volunteer at Swedish Hospital for two summers and helped in the pharmacy and he expressed interest in working in a medical or medical research field.

8. Despite winning often in games like Super Mario Brothers and even Foosball, his dad had caught on he was getting bored of playing with him, but despite that, he still played whenever he was invited because that was how much he loved his father.

9. He had a keen interest in current events and social issues and was a frequent reader of Time Magazine and viewer of 60 Minutes.

10. His father said he sometimes worried about little things, like if the gas tank in the car was getting too low.

11. He played soccer for a couple of years when he was younger, tried skiing, and played baseball on a YMCA team.

12. Before his death, Daniel's Biology teacher told his mother that he would be receiving an award for outstanding sophomore biology student. It was a supposed secret, one which Daniel never found out.

13. His family was very close. Tom described them as a "Dinner Table Family", who always ate dinner together. According to his father's words, "there was no sneaking off to watch the TV or play on the computer. We are together, talked together, and exchanged stories."

14. Daniel and his sister were close despite their contrasting personalities. Daniel was more like his mother—shy, introspective, intelligent, and calm. His sister Christine was like her father—outgoing, witty, a bit wild and crazy. He would often roll his eyes at her and in an exasperated tone, he would exclaim, "Theater people! Oh, my God!"

15. He had a dry sense of humor and his mom thought he prided himself on being a rational sort of fellow who was not given to drama of any sort.

16. Tom, Daniel's father, grew out of poverty. He came from Finelyville, a small town south of Pittsburgh. His father was a coal miner, his mother was a housewife, and he was the youngest out of four siblings. Tom rarely had pictures of himself. However, he didn't want that to happen with his children, so he would frequently take their pictures and film them to keep memories.

17. Daniel didn't like his pictures being taken when he was a teen. His father would still insist to take pictures for keepsake.

18. When he was fifteen and a half, Daniel was qualified to receive his driver's permit but he said he wasn't ready yet.

19. His nickname in debate class, according to Devon Adams, was "Moose": "So appropriate —it's a large, amusing but quick and fierce when-it-needs-to-be animal."

20. Daniel volunteered to rake the leaves off the lawn of a neighborhood senior citizen's house after he recently had a heartattack.

[casuallycryingoverbooks]

I gotta wait for my ipad to charge so i can draw this shit but here are my field hockey player!scully head canons:

- She was number 7. Like if she was at a school and she had to pick a different number whatever but seven was her number (because alliteration, Scully or Seven)

- She was that girl who ran like three miles a day during pre-season and then out passed everyone at tryouts

- never wore her mouth guard, it was always in her bra strap (and if her coach was like mine that means taking a hike 🗻🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️)

- ridiculously muscular thighs, had to start training arms to balance it out, giving you a 5’3 very muscular redhead

- she played midfield, probably left or center

- since she was changing schools so often every so often she’d get culture shock at one of those rich schools where they put your last name on the back of your jersey and shed get to keep it when she left

- one of those girls who wore a headband

- was NOT one of those girls who wore a glove (that shits for pussies, and she believed that)

- broke her thumb and kept playing anyway

- had the same stick from 6-11 grade and got a new one her senior season, it wasn’t the same

- played in college but probably just on a club because she had so much homework or only during undergrad

- played pick up games/summer leagues while in med school

- miss girl was NOT the team braider, someone was definitely etly doing her hair for her and if she didn’t know anyone well enough to ask she just wore pigtails to keep all her hair out of her face

- always forgot she had to take jewelry off for games

- I feel like she’d talk shit on the field

- has drawn blood while playing

-has gotten into a fight on the field

- it was with a guy and she bit him.

- I like to think she was at Mulder’s school for a couple months

[tastyvietnamesefood]

Spring on the coast of Ireland 🌅🩷

[bizaar]

Cruel Summer - Part 17

First - Previous - Next

pairings: Eddie Munson x fem!reader

summary: After breaking up, you and Eddie do your best to soldier on with your lives, but you slowly begin to discover that there is a stronger line of connection keeping you together than just history…

word count: 10k

warnings: angst, swearing, medical descriptions, mentions of death/violence

A.N.: i had to split this last part up, we were near 25k words, Chat. Wayne Munson continues to be the greatest man alive and continues to suffer for it

“Are you the father of Edward Munson?” The woman’s voice is short and terse, and Wayne feels his heart seize erratically in his chest for it.   

He’s been waiting all week for a call, biding his time between shifts at the plant and days at the Motel 6 where he’s been sequestered out on the interstate while his home languishes in police custody.  

He sits by the phone, chain-smoking and flipping channels, doing everything he can to avoid any and all news perpetuating the ouroboros of misinformation about his nephew, but there is only so much he can do when it’s everywhere he looks.  

Nothing catches people’s attention quite like murder in Middle America, especially if there is even the faintest whiff of a Satanic connotation to it.    

That’s what they were saying about him last he heard, that it was ritualistic, that they’d brought in an expert to “consult” … that his boy had sacrificed that poor girl, like something out of a goddamn movie.  

It makes Wayne’s stomach turn, because how could they think something so terrible?  

How could they not?  

He was the one who found her, lying there in a twisted heap of limbs. He hadn’t known what to think, dragging his sorry carcass home after finishing up a mind-numbing twelve-hour shift, only to find that waiting for him.   

Really, he didn’t think at all – he saw what was left of that girl, and he turned right around and went back out to his truck where he closed himself up in the cab and smoked half a pack of cigarettes just to try and stop himself from shaking.   

He wanted to tell himself that whatever happened wasn’t his business, that he ought to just turn away and pretend he didn’t see that girl, lying there on his floor, but this is not the type of thing you can just shut your eyes against and ignore.  

Wayne is a simple man leading a simple life. He likes it that way. He doesn’t concern himself with things beyond his ken and as a result, the world more or less leaves him be — as a man like himself in a town like this, it’s more than he can ask for, but sitting there staring unblinkingly at the open doorway, at the single socked foot he could still see from the cab, he knew two things for certain: that girl was dead, whoever she was, and he needed to call the police.   

When he finally managed to get his legs working again, he made the half-mile hike to the nearby 7/11 to use its payphone to report what he’d seen, because there was no way in hell he was setting one foot inside his home while the dead girl was lying there.    

It wasn’t until Wayne was hanging up with the 911 operator that the shutter finally clicked over and his brain jumped back into working order. 

Suddenly, all he could see was the glaring problem with this scenario, the angry red sign flashing over and over, demanding he ask himself what is missing from this picture. Better yet, who is missing from this picture?   

Eddie.

Oh, Christ… where the hell is Eddie…?  

Before Wayne could untangle his thoughts enough to understand what he’d just done, the Hawkins PD was turning off of the road beyond and roaring down the dirt path like a swarm of bats out of a flashing red and blue hell.   

Despite knowing exactly nothing about the finer details of whatever it was that had occurred in his living room the night before, Wayne barely had time enough to consider what he ought to tell them and what he was better off keeping to himself as they came screeching to a halt in his front yard and piling into his home like invading forces.

Suddenly, it was all questions, a hundred and one right after the other before he could even begin to answer the first.

Nothing he said seemed to satisfy them, and no matter what they asked, they always circled back to one question, again and again like a bastardization of those ominous public service announcements striking fear into the hearts of parents across the Midwest:

It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?  

Mr. Munson, do you know where your nephew is?  

Of course he didn’t. The boy’s business was his own, always has been, but with all these questions and thinly veiled accusations flying around, Wayne found himself wishing he’d paid a little more attention to his nephew’s comings and goings as he scrambled to provide the boys in blue with some kind of a credible answer.

He was desperate to drum up an alibi for the boy, but he couldn’t do it, much to his patent dismay, because he didn’t know where Eddie was, and he didn’t know what’d he’d been doing or where he’d been during those crucial hours during which the girl apparently died.

Wayne almost exclusively works the night shift out at the plant, so how could he possibly know what kind of shenanigans his nephew gets up to in the wee hours of the morning?

He tried in vain to tell them how he thought Eddie might have said something about staying after school to play that game of his – which can last for hours at a time, he explained, but that didn’t explain how the dead girl ended up on the floor in his living room.

It doesn’t explain where Eddie is now, or why their neighbor heard him screaming bloody murder and come flying out of the house like the Devil himself was snapping at his heels.   

In the end, Wayne was helpless to do anything but watch as the police came to their own conclusion, and very quickly their story fell neatly into place, like meticulously placed dominos.   

They were seen leaving the school together, Eddie and that girl.   

Now she is dead and Eddie is missing.   

Despite those glaring truths, Wayne knows without a shadow of a doubt that his nephew did not lay a finger on that girl, but more than that, he knows how hard it is going to be for people to believe that. Wayne is under no delusions about how people regard his family. He knows how this looks, and what people think of his nephew, but he knows better.   

Eddie couldn’t have done something like this, not even if his life depended on it, but all he has to back that up is his word, and what is the word of a Munson against self-righteous small-town prejudice?  

They don’t know him. They don’t know that the boy would rather lie down and die than hurt somebody, that he very nearly did last summer over the guilt hurting you caused him, but that doesn’t fall in line with the narrative they’ve worked so carefully to craft.  

As far as the people of Hawkins, Indiana are concerned, that’s not the Munson way, though only because no one has taken the time to separate Eddie from the image of his father, burnt into the memories of this town. Nobody cares enough to do so.   

People in a place like this are always going to need a monster. Al was more than happy to play the part for a good long while, and when he went away, they were happy enough to fit his son into the space he’d left in the zeitgeist.   

It must have seemed like a fair trade to them, what’s one Munson for another? The boogeyman is the boogeyman, after all, only they didn’t realize what they were doing, forcing a boy into the role that had been held so long by a man.  

You want to talk about a sacrifice?   

These good, God-fearing people may as well have offered his nephew up on a platter, the way they’re tripping over themselves to corroborate the story they’ve already decided on.  

That Eddie Munson is evil, and he killed that girl.   

Jesus wept.   

The press junket began with a relatively harmless photo of Eddie — one of his school portraits from his first year of high school, fresh-faced and bright-eyed, still riding the high of being freed from his father’s custody, before the world came crashing in and Eddie learned better than to hope for anything out of life.  

Wayne’s got no idea how the family photo album made its way out from underneath the couch, but suddenly there it was, on ‘round the clock display, occupying people’s homes throughout the duration of the morning, noon, and nightly news.   

The invasion of privacy makes his skin itch.  

Still, he knows the picture well, that first one they used. Wayne can see it when he closes his eyes: Eddie is still growing his hair out, and his face is stretched into that big goofy smile of his, teeth poking out, cheek indented in the illusive dimple the kid is more or less shy about. He was still under the hopeful delusion that he had a chance at winning his classmates over, back then. He didn’t know any better.

You can’t tell by looking, but Eddie has got a cast on his arm in the picture, sitting just out of frame. It was a final parting gift from Al Munson to his son, the straw that broke the camel’s back and lost him blissful custody of the boy after he marched him into Hawkins General with a broken arm and a lame excuse about how the boy had fallen off the bicycle he did not own.

One quick check from Social Services put the last nail in that tired old coffin, and the matter was finally — mercifully — put to bed.

Eddie went to live with Wayne that summer between eighth and ninth grade, Al was in prison for good by Christmas, and the rest is history.

Wayne can still see his nephew giving him an awkward thumbs up from beneath the plaster as he dropped him off that first morning school went back into session in August.

“Give ‘em hell, Kid.” Wayne had told him as he hopped down from the truck and slung his beat-up Jansport over one shoulder, and Eddie proceeded to do exactly that and then some for the next six years. 

There are only faint traces of the boy in that photo left in Eddie now, and yet here it is identifying him as the prime suspect in a homicide – condemning him.    

Ain’t that a kick in the teeth?    

That was days ago, back when Wayne was still glued to the television set watching the story unfold, guts seizing with every repeated instance of his home standing empty beyond some talking head speculating on what could have happened and who could have been involved.

Even before any names were named, the sight had Wayne’s throat closing up with anxiety – as if anyone in this nice little backwater hamlet was going to see that place and not immediately know who lives there.   

And then there was the photo of Eddie, all sweet and smiling.  

Seeing him on the news like that was a death knell rattling in the creaky halls of Wayne’s heart — they said his name.  

It was almost fine when it was all just speculation, when it was just him and the Hawkins PD, quietly turning over stones, looking for the boy while Wayne held out the hope that you would complete the secret mission he’d entrusted to you before anyone else would find him.

If he was really lucky – which he had never been before – by the time anyone turned up any shred of evidence, you and Eddie would be hundreds of miles away, and in time people would forget about his nephew.  

But they went and said his goddamn name, and there’s no taking that back.   

Regardless of how this all plays out, whether they catch up to him or you manage to get him far, far away from here, the name Eddie Munson will forever be synonymous with that dead girl … but at least they used that picture.   

At least he was smiling.   

It was about as much solace as Wayne could take in the situation for the few hours it lasted.   

The way he figures it, some ladder-climbing station executive must’ve decided that a big smiling face didn’t make Eddie Munson nearly scary enough for their ratings.

Probably the same ratfuck who thought it was a good idea to run that photo of a six-year-old Ed and his mother posing with a mall Santa under the caption Mother of a Monster – and God damn them for having the audacity, for bringing her into this.   

Not half an hour later, every channel had replaced the school photo with something a little less sanitized, an older, harder Eddie at some party, all done up in his chains and leather and ripped jeans with a cigarette pinched between his lips, making a rude gesture at the camera – it was the version of Eddie that they forced him into when Al went away, and it seemed to satisfy their craving for blood more than the smiling visage of a fourteen-year-old boy could.   

Wayne lays a thousand curses upon the head of whoever it was that sold that picture to the media – from that moment on affected devil horns, rock music, and midwestern fears went on to paint a bastardized image of the boy he’d fought so hard to raise right.

All it took was one photo to solidify him as the monster they all so desperately craved, and one slip-up from some fast-talking news anchor who insisted “...the whereabouts of Alan Munson are still unknown…” and there it was.   

What this was really all about.  

The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children…   

God damn this town and God damn his goddamn brother.    

With morning shows all the way to Terre Haute doing segments on the Munsons like they were the Mansons, Wayne turned off the news after that. Seeing his life and what is left of his family twisted so wildly out of proportion to fit their narrative is too much to bear.  

He can’t turn the television off entirely, however, because worse than the endless chatter is the silence. In the quiet, his mind starts to race.

He starts thinking about his boy, scared and alone somewhere, lost to the gnashing teeth of the world, and about that poor girl, lying twisted beyond comprehension in his living room.  

In the quiet, Wayne starts to wonder what on God’s green earth could have possibly happened to leave her like that, and his inability to come up with any kind of rational answer is what scares him the most.  

So, he leaves the television on and focuses on the background noise of sitcoms and sports broadcasts, going to work, coming home to the new normal, waiting and waiting and waiting for the phone to ring.  

And ring it does.  

“Sir?” The voice comes again.    

Wayne’s lungs rattle with the beginnings of a smoker’s cough as he removes his hat and wipes his brow with the back of a calloused hand, trying to remember what exactly it was the woman on the other end of the line had asked in the first place – Are you the father of Edward Munson?   

“Er, no, ma’am.” He says quickly, clearing his throat, “That’d be my brother, Al, but – uh – well, he’s out at Pendleton … been locked up goin’ on seven years now.”  

Above him, a fluorescent bulb hums with a thick static that makes Wayne feel like he’s underwater.   

He received the call at the plant, and it’s there he finds himself, standing in the breakroom at the telephone he’d been instructed to “pick up and dial 9” by the omniscient voice of the God that is Powerplant Administration.   

He can’t tell if he’s relieved about that or not.

Work was supposed to be a time of distraction, the other half of his life where he could busy himself with anything and everything that wasn’t the ramping helplessness he felt, swelling like a balloon behind his ribs with every hour that passed with Eddie missing.

Electrical technicians are the happy little worker bees toiling away in their subterranean hive, tending to the lifelines that provide power to the towns beyond, and tonight they are buzzing like someone just went and kicked the hive, thanks entirely to that bizarre earthquake that went and knocked out half the power to Roane County about forty minutes back.   

He’d been fully entrenched in the backbreaking duties of repairing connections, happy to have the distraction from the endless scroll of his thoughts when new instructions came through: collect call for Wayne Munson, please proceed to the nearest telephone.  

The list of folks who would be calling this late and would know to ask for him by name is not exactly long, he can count them out on one hand, but collect means one thing: whoever is calling is doing so from outside the plant, maybe even outside the county line, and it has him scrambling.

Work is supposed to be safe, but nothing is safe while Eddie is missing.  

Wayne dropped what he was doing and all but ran across the plant floor (at least as much as his middle-aged knees and tar-caked lungs would allow) past the nearest telephone and straight to the freight elevator that would carry him up three subterranean flights to the outside world where he could speak in relative private – no prying eyes or listening ears watching the man with the murderer for a nephew speak covertly into the phone while his co-workers discussed the game or the Russians or whatever it was that presently held their attention.   

Across the moon-bleached earth to the standing trailer that served as the technician's upper deck breakroom, Wayne vaulted the steps and whipped the hollow core door back hard enough to hit the flimsy siding with a loud bang that shook the entirety of the trailer.   

There was no one there to berate him for such an excitable action as it was thankfully empty, but that was to be expected, considering how this was the smaller, less desirable of the two break rooms provided for the technicians.

His coworkers tended to avoid this one unless absolutely necessary due to its lack of vending machines and central air, and normally Wayne does too, but tonight it serves him just fine as he picks up the phone and punches the third button down on the right. 

He finds no relief on the other end of that line. There is no calm and collected “Hi, Wayne,” in the chirpy lilt of your voice waiting for him on the other end of the line, though perhaps more disappointing, there is no long, guilty pause followed by a tentative greeting from his nephew, desperately trying to gauge Wayne’s frame of mind before diving into a stream of conscious tirade.   

No, just the next in a long line of brusque, terrifying questions that continue to knock the wind out of him.   

Do you know where your nephew is? Are you the father of Edward Munson?   

He would have sat down if he’d thought there was a chair there, but Wayne doesn’t fancy putting his ass down on hard flaking linoleum, so he locks his knees to keep them from buckling and stays standing.   

“Very well, sir this is –” He forgets the name the moment she gives it to him, all sense of identity washed clean by the direct follow-up of, “–from Hawkins General Hospital, we have an Edward Munson in our custody and we’ve been trying to get into contact with his parents—”  

Wayne does his best to breathe deep against the tightness forming in his chest as he fights to string together a coherent sentence through the bevy of thoughts and words and new information whirling around his mind and refusing to gel.

He is suddenly and woefully confused. If this woman is calling from Hawkins General, why in the hell would she use that word?

Custody.

It would make half a lick of sense if he was getting a call from Chief Powell or Florence, the Hawkins PD’s resident secretary for going on fifteen years now, but neither of them would very well be asking him how to get into contact with Eddie’s parents, would they?

They also wouldn’t be so goddamn formal about this whole thing – weirdly enough, that’s almost as jarring as any of it. Nobody calls the boy Edward, except for his mother and she’s dead, so what is Wayne supposed to do, direct this woman to the prison dispatch up at Pendelton? He imagines she’d have better luck with a Ouija board.

“Oh.” he says dumbly, for a lack of anything better to say, “Right. Well – uh – it’s-it’s like I say, the boy’s father’s locked up and likely to stay that way another twenty-odd years…”  

 “And his mother? Our records indicate her name is–” A short pause punctuated by the rustling of papers is the only buffer between Wayne and the name he is still not prepared to hear spoken aloud, even after a decade of distance – he grits his teeth to try and shield himself against it, “–Sherri Munson?”  

It hits him like a fist to the gut and Wayne makes himself breathe out as slowly as possible to keep from choking as his confusion deepens.

First Al, now Sherri? Like specters of the people who once populated his life, he sees their faces before his eyes and has to blink to banish them again.   

What are they asking about her for? Everybody in this goddamn town knows what happened to her, what Al did, even if only indirectly.   

Shouldn’t the good folks down at Hawkins General have that sort of thing on file? Death certificate or something? She only went and died on a slab in their custody.   

The word settles heavily in the pit of Wayne’s stomach as the situation finally begins to dawn on him.

Custody. They have Eddie in custody, which means something has happened.  

“She’s, uh—” he clears his throat in a futile attempt to remain calm, “She’s since passed.” He says slowly, “I look after the boy–”   

The woman doesn’t wait for him to finish speaking before she starts again.  

“You look after him?” She echoes in a way Wayne can’t help but feel is ever so slightly condescending, “Are you saying you’re his legal guardian?”

He nods quickly before remembering that the woman cannot grok non-verbal responses over the phone and scrambles to correct himself.

“Ah-yes, ma’am. I took custody after his folks…” He suddenly can’t bear to make himself say it, “Well … it’s like you said. I’m Eddie’s legal guardian.”

“Your name, please, sir?”  

“Wayne Munson, ma’am.”  

Another pause, the faint sound of a scribbling pen across whatever form this woman is clearly filling out.   

Wayne swallows hard and when his mouth stays dry and cottony, he swallows again. Somehow, he can’t shake the feeling that something terrible has happened, that this is not simply a courtesy call informing him of his nephew’s whereabouts so that he can come and pick him up.

Wayne does not have to wait long to have his suspicions confirmed.

“Mr. Munson, I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s been an accident –”   

He doesn’t hear much else of what she says after, his ears are ringing too loud. 

There’s been an accident… now, where has he heard that before?  

Wayne doesn’t remember the drive from the plant to the hospital, whether he informed his supervisor or even punched out before he hit the breeze.

He doesn’t remember whether he pulled into the structure or right up to the front in the ambulance bay, he only knows one minute the phone was slipping from his hand to dangle on its chord, and the next he was flinching under the gust of frigid air blasting down across his neck and shoulders as automatic doors whisked open for him.   

Wayne is accustomed to coming to Eddie’s rescue one way or another, but walking into this hospital is shades of the boy’s childhood in the worst way – the bad old days.

One very specific bad day, in fact. The last time Wayne was here, and the last time his family was intact.  

Stepping through those double doors, he is reminded of it so completely that Wayne half expects to see his good-for-nothing kid brother handcuffed to a chair, half out of his mind on something and trying desperately to convince him what had happened wasn’t his fault, as if anything ever was where Al was concerned.   

The ER is a warzone – every inch of the waiting room is crawling with folk he can only assume have been affected by the earthquake that he has very conveniently forgotten about until now.

There is no sign of Eddie, and Wayne can’t decide if he’s relieved about that or not, though with the violent way his guts are seizing, he’s leaning toward not.

“There’s been an accident,” is actually an extremely vague turn of phrase when he really thinks about it, and a bigger part of him than he is readily willing to acknowledge had almost been expecting to find his nephew sitting slumped in a chair off in some corner, a frightening mirror image of his father but otherwise fine, sulking and awaiting collection and the subsequent lecture to follow on the long drive home.

No such luck. 

Wayne has to fight to make his way to the check-in – the frazzled young nurse stationed there visibly pales when he tells her his name, and who he is here for.  

He watches, all but dumbstruck as she jumps up and runs for a doctor. Literally runs. That’s never a good sign – that’s what happened last time.  

The room is all but the same as it was the night Al went and wrapped Sherri’s sedan around that telephone pole out on Cornwallis – the one that is still cracked and half bent over from being struck at sixty-five miles per hour by a rusty blue Volkswagen Dasher.

People leave flowers at its base sometimes, and Wayne can’t help but marvel at the incongruity of it all, that this town would condemn Eddie Munson in one breath and in another, pay homage to the spot where his mother had been sent sailing to her untimely death through the windshield of her car.  

The waiting room has remained virtually unchanged in the decade it’s been since that night, save for the way it is suddenly filled to brimming with desperate souls.  

For as familiar as it all is – the squeaking of shoes across mottled linoleum, the arctic central air chilling him through his canvas jacket as he stares out at the same cluster of back-breaking chairs, the same hotel art, and informative posters he’d spent hours staring at a hundred years and a short lifetime ago – it’s completely foreign because Eddie isn’t sitting home safe this time.

He’s here somewhere, caught in the quagmire of whatever the hell just happened to this town.  

Cursed town. Cursed family, more like.     

Wayne still remembers the look Eddie gave him that night, the last time someone had been very sorry to tell him that “there’s been an accident” after he shook him awake and informed him he’d be going next door to Mrs. Downes’s trailer. 

That news went over about as well as expected.    

“That lady smells like cat piss,” an eleven-year-old Eddie mumbled with a mighty pout and little fists crammed into angry, sleep-swollen eyes.

Wayne couldn’t even fault the boy for his language, because as kindly as she was that lady did indeed stink something awful of the half a dozen cats she kept, but among all his neighbors, she was the only one who could be trusted to look after the boy for a few hours.    

“Yeah,” Wayne muttered, snatching up the same canvas jacket he wore now and ushering his moody, pajama-clad nephew down the steps, “That’d be the cats.”  

He had no idea just how long that night would be back in the summer of ‘77, and standing here now, he can’t help but get lost in a creeping sense of Deja vu.  

It takes no time at all for the doctor to arrive, a short bespectacled man with his face pulled into a severe grimace. With a shy hand at his elbow, he coaxes Wayne into the back hallway for “a quiet place to talk”, and his removal from the public eye has him breaking into a cold sweat.   

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is a very bad sign when a nurse runs for the doctor. And when that doctor pulls you out of the way for a quiet place to talk, it means he’s got something really hard to say, and he wants to make sure you hear every syllable of his hushed words.  

That’s another thing about hospitals that Wayne hates, how doctors drop their voices to impossibly muted tones when they know they’ve got to ruin your life, leaving you hanging on their every word.

It was true back then, and it’s not different now, standing in the hallway behind the nurse’s station, watching the Doctor’s lips move in a desperate attempt to make out what Wayne cannot hear him saying.    

It’s a lot of medical jargon, most of which goes right over his head, but he gets the cliff notes.   

Your nephew is in the ICU. Severe trauma. Emergency surgery. Touch and go…  

A lifetime and only a few years ago, he’d been told more or less the same thing in the same way.   

Your sister-in-law is in the ICU. Severe trauma. Emergency surgery. Touch and go…  

“Can I see her?” the Eddie who belonged to that different life whimpered, looking so small, still in his pajamas with the soundtrack of Saturday morning cartoons playing in the background as he sat stuck among the fraying couch cushions with wild hair and big wet eyes — his mother’s eyes.  

“‘Fraid not, Bud…” Wayne had told him with a quavering voice, speaking softly as he ruined his nephew’s life.   

It feels like some kind of karmic justice, having to relive this moment, tragically reversed. Wayne’s never felt so small, so helpless.    

“…C-can—” He clears his throat with a harsh grunt that echoes much too loud in the silence of the hallway, “Can I see him?”  

The doctor pulls a pained face that Wayne imagines is meant to read as sympathetic.   

It skews more indigestion than apology.    

“Ah—hmm… I’m afraid not, Mr. Munson,” The man says, skipping over the syllables of his name like most folk do when they extend him the courtesy, “Not until we can get him stabilized… your nephew has lost a lot of blood…”   

It’s the vagueness of that statement that hits him, like a fist to the gut – it’s only then that he notices the sleeve of the doctor’s coat, the faintest hint of red staining the hem. He feels his knees wobble and lies to himself that it’s just pen.  

Doctors carry lots of pens, the cheap kind that leak if you look at them wrong – only ink doesn’t have the funny little way of drying dark, and the stain on this man’s sleeve is suddenly much more brown than red.   

Wayne manages to stay on his feet, though only just barely, because Sherri didn’t do any of her bleeding on the outside, and he doesn’t realize just how fiercely he’s been clinging to the terrible familiarity of that night until its cold light is snuffed out, leaving him shivering in the dark.

The conversation fizzles from there. The doctor scurries away as he receives a page and leaves Wayne to find his meandering way back to where he belongs.   

He is in shock as he makes his way out of the hall, relying heavily on muscle memory as he takes the long march back to the slow doom of the waiting room.   

Waiting… waiting… waiting…  

The door whooshes quietly shut behind him and the din of half a hundred people all in varying stages of the worst day of their lives comes rushing back in, giving him an instant headache.   

He needs a smoke – more than that, he needs an excuse to get out of here, at least for a little while, but his legs have turned to concrete, and he can’t make his feet move far enough to carry him out to the curb, so Wayne slumps into the nearest chair he finds and stares blankly at a frame of muted pastels he thinks is supposed to be some kind of pastoral scene.

If he had been cognizant enough, he might have noticed that it was the exact one he’d spent hours staring at last time, but he’s too caught up in his racing thoughts and his thundering heartbeat as he braces against the misery roiling over him in crashing waves like the high tide as he tries to untangle the web of everything that has happened in the last week.

He stares at the picture, watching it begin to shift and move and blend together, and he’s reminded of a story he’d once read, of images of women creeping behind swatches of grotesque yellow wallpaper, rattling their bars, demanding to be let out. He’s reminded of Sherri.   

Folks like to say that Misery loves company, but she doesn’t love anybody like she loves the Munsons.   

Wayne never pictured himself as a family man, partially because of his natural proclivities, but mostly because of the funny little way that the men in his family tend toward turning into raging monsters when they have children, if they stick around long enough to even meet those children, that is.    

Even before Wayne knew he didn’t like girls – which he has known since he was old enough to realize there is a difference between boys and girls – he swore he would be different, and more to the point he wouldn’t give himself the chance to prove himself wrong.      

Al could never be bothered to worry about shouldering the task of breaking that cycle of violence and apathy, he was too busy indulging in his worst whims. Al Munson’s top priority had always been and would always be Al Munson, and everybody else could choke. 

Wayne knows he should have been a little more worried about what was to come when Al met Sherri, but he wasn’t. At the time, he didn’t rightly care, he was just glad someone else was finally going to be in charge of cleaning up his brother’s messes.

They got married fast – too fast if you were to ask him, but nobody was, and it was none of his business, anyway.

When they picked up and moved to Indianapolis, just a couple of wild and crazy kids in love, Wayne shelved the matter entirely, relieved that he could finally go back to living his own life, free from the responsibility of collaring his brother and once again safe from the monster in their genes that made life unsafe for anyone who hadn’t already survived a childhood as a Munson.

It was less than a year before Wayne received that first call, like some kind of bad joke, run ragged and kept in the closet to be trotted out at family gatherings: Al got drunk and had knocked the shit out of Sherri, busted her lip and broke a couple of her ribs, because of course he fucking did.

What else did anyone expect?

Their grandfather had been a monstrous alcoholic who regularly beat his family within an inch of their collective lives before dying thankfully young of cirrhosis of the liver, and the terror of his youth had turned their father into a flighty man who could never seem to make up his mind about staying or going.

And now here was Al, falling dutifully into place, continuing the cycle of violence.

Sherri was frantic when she called, talking a mile a minute through a bad connection from some payphone halfway between there and Indi. She was out of gas, and she’d run out of the house without stopping to grab her bag. She had no money, no plan, and not even a pair of shoes as Wayne would see when he went and picked her up.

She didn’t take a breath in the forty minutes it took to get back to Hawkins. Anyone who thought Eddie could talk and talk and endlessly talk until he was blue in the face had obviously never met his mother.

That woman spent the duration of the ride to safety working herself into a tizzy.

She was practically foaming at the mouth, ranting and raving about what a bastard Al was, how blind she’d been, and how she wasn't going to stand by and let him treat her that way.

She swore she’d kill him first, and by the time the headlights hit the front of the trailer, Sherri had made up her mind about leaving Al. Wayne advised her to do exactly that if she knew what was good for her, and he warned her, perhaps too late, that the only thing you could trust Al to do was disappoint you, and the safest way to love him was to do so at arm's length.

Of course there was no way he could know that by then it was already too late. In all the talking she did from Indianapolis to Hawkins, she very conveniently failed to mention that she was pregnant, already nearing her second trimester, and ever the smooth-talking snake that he was, Al pulled out all the stops to convince her that this was their second chance at doing it right.

One last second chance for Al Munson, just so he could slam the bars shut on his wife before she could escape, trap her behind the peeling yellow wallpaper. 

Sherri’s disappearing act began slowly during her pregnancy. Suddenly she was styling her hair differently and wearing big thick sunglasses in a blatant attempt at covering the bruises Al put there.

There was nothing Wayne could do to save himself from the guilt that ate at him, watching as the months and abuse chipped away at her until there was almost nothing left of the woman he knew.

His friend. 

They met while working at the plant. They were friends, and he knowingly fed her to the gnashing teeth that was his kid brother. Some part of him knew better, that there would be nothing but misery waiting for Sherri down the line with Al, but after a miserable six-month stretch of letting his brother crash on his couch while he got clean, Wayne was desperate to foist him off on someone else.      

He’d stupidly thought it would be different with Sherri. She was tough in a very kind and endearing way – she didn’t take people’s shit, and he’d thought that maybe she could straighten Al out, be a gentle guiding hand to lead him back up the destructive path he’d been headed down since he was fourteen, back to the person Wayne knew and loved. Back to his brother. 

He should’ve known better than to hope for something like that. He made a choice, and Sherri paid for it.  

If he had been a little kinder, a little braver, maybe Wayne would have taken responsibility for his actions and done everything in his power to free Sherri from his brother’s captivity.

He would have put her on a bus with her baby boy, sent her somewhere far away from his cursed family, and done everything in his power to keep his brother from ever finding them again, but he wasn’t, and he didn’t, and as a result his hands would never be clean of Sherri’s blood. 

Al was driving the car that night, but Wayne was the one who introduced them, who stood by, who put his head down and minded his own business while the bruises got bigger, darker, more prominent, so which one of them was truly responsible for her death?

And who is the one who continues to pay the price for the sins of the past? Eddie.

Wayne was never supposed to have a family, but he fought like hell to make sure he got custody of the boy when Al lost it. Call it penance for what he did to Sherri, he was going to do right by that boy, even if it meant he was never going to get his life back on track, even if it killed him.

He never wanted kids, but the moment Sherri thrust Eddie into his arms, Wayne would have done anything for that boy.

Six weeks old, red-faced, and screaming his little head off like he was absolutely furious at the very act of having been born, Wayne knew.

Without a shadow of a doubt, without a thought for himself or what was right or even decent, he knew.

He would do anything for that boy, including but certainly not limited to beating his kid brother within an inch of his life in front of God and everyone in attendance of Sherri’s funeral.

Thankfully, all the good folks who had been decent enough to remember her had extended that decency far enough to put in a word for him when the police were called, and the only one of the Munson brothers to be taken away in handcuffs that night had been the younger. Al went to sleep it off, and Wayne went to find Eddie, because Wayne always went to find Eddie — his boy, from that first moment he'd held him and looked down into those big, wet eyes.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sherri had muttered, half out of her mind with exhaustion, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was your boy, right there.”  

She was joking, even if only half so, but never had a truer statement been spoken into words.  

This was his boy.  

His boy — who was always too kind for the world he’d been thrust into.

Who stayed out all night tending to stray kittens, waiting for their mother to come back when he knew well enough that he’d seen her carcass spread flat on the road on his way home.

Who shared his meager lunch at school with the kids less fortunate than him, even though there arguably were no kids less fortunate than him in Hawkins.

Who at the age of six turned world-weary eyes up to his uncle and told him in a voice wise beyond his years “I wish you were my dad,”. 

Who lives a little too loud and feels everything a little too big. Who tries and tries and tries so hard, bashing his head against the powers that be, trying not to be vulnerable, to protect himself, and still getting his heart broken wondering “Why don’t they like me?”  

Eddie is the last of them, and in spite of all their efforts, the very best of them.    

All Wayne has known his whole life is loss, he can’t lose anybody else. That boy is all he has left in this world.   

He can’t lose Eddie.    

It’s been decades since Wayne set foot in a church. He stopped going to Mass after his mother died, she was the only reason he ever crossed that threshold in the first place, considering he and God never exactly tended to see eye to eye, but like a security blanket, like a crutch to lean on, Wayne suddenly finds himself muttering a familiar string of words under his breath.

There’s nothing he can do for Eddie; he’s got to leave it in the hands of the doctors. He won’t presume to leave it up to God, because he doesn’t believe in the bastard, but Wayne is not so jaded that he doesn’t recognize that this is one of those moments.

Those thresholds of faith that people tend to come to in times of great strife, where they must decide between two outcomes, only there are no choices waiting for Wayne on the other side of this. There’s just the darkness, the fear, the guilt.  

He doesn’t know what to do, so he prays. 

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven... 

Wayne might have been shocked that he still remembers the words after all this time, but good old Catholic guilt is the kind of thing that’s not so easy to shake, and the words fall in line one right after the other without any hint of hesitation like God’s just been waiting for him to come crawling back. He hates to give him the satisfaction, the all-powerful son of a bitch, but it's as they say, desperate times and all that bunk... 

He stares at that same pastel pastoral without seeing, twisting itself into images and faces that aren’t really there. Somewhere, the doctors work to save Eddie’s life while Wayne watches the painting move and mutters those tired old phrases under his breath – he prays.

He prays.

He prays until a commotion draws Wayne’s attention, and then – moving like he’s submerged in molasses – he turns.

There at the nurse’s station stands a handsome boy with sharp features and a half-deflated hairdo, arguing with the lady in the scrubs whom Wayne had spoken to when he first arrived – the runner.  

The boy is caked in the gray-green layers of something that can only come from having lived through a natural disaster, but much more curious is the way he’s spattered in something indiscernibly viscous, black almost like blood but thicker – darker.  

The blood on the doctor’s sleeve was dark enough… Eddie’s blood.   

The handsome boy is openly bleeding from a long cut, sliced across the expanse of his high cheekbone, and there is an angry black and purple bruise wringing his neck like he’d recently escaped the pull of a noose.   

“We can’t wait any longer, Lady,” He stresses, slapping an open palm on the counter before gesturing wildly to the far end of the room, “She’s bleeding like crazy–”  

Wayne doesn’t know why the statement catches his attention — he tells himself it’s nothing but good old-fashioned American curiosity and not the morbidly cathartic need to witness somebody else bleeding their life away.  

Your nephew has lost a lot of blood.   

He follows the boy’s aggressive pointing across the room over to a far corner where he spies a gaggle of kids, all roughly Eddie’s age, standing in a tense huddle. They’re all torn up, battered, and bruised, and dressed in a bizarre collection of costumes like they’d gone rifling through the bargain bin of an army surplus store.

Every one of them is caked in the same weird muck as their friend, looking like little commandos straight out of the bush as they stand fretting over whatever it is that has their attention, the object of the handsome boy’s tirade – someone sitting in a chair, Wayne realizes, the she who just so happens to be “bleeding like crazy.”  

He can’t see her, but he is struck as he realizes that under the dirt and grime, they are not all entirely unfamiliar, that group of kids.   

There stands that boy, the one with the braces who had been sitting in his living room with the rest of Ed’s friends, playing that game of his only a few months back – the same one he’d witnessed come flying into Benny’s like a bat out of hell looking for you.  

Strangely, it lights a fire in Wayne’s belly and breaks up the stone casing holding him to the spot.  

He moves with no real idea of what he means to do, pushing up from his chair and shoving past the handsome boy, still arguing with the nurse. That curly-headed boy, whatever his name is, has got a guilty look about him, and somehow Wayne knows he’s wise to what happened to Eddie.  

That boy knows something.   

He’s not looking to blame someone – he learned long ago that it doesn’t do anybody any good, shit happens, people get hurt, and pointing fingers doesn’t change that.  

But answers — answers change everything.  

Shouldering through the crowd, Wayne makes a beeline for the far corner of the waiting room where the boy stands with the other kids – the strangers.   

Strangers are no good when it comes to Eddie, strangers can’t be trusted to do right by his boy — it makes his blood boil.   

He’s never put his hands on a kid before, but he’s got half a mind to seize the boy by the scruff and shake him until the answers start to fall into place, then he steps aside, and Wayne sees what it is that’s got the boy arguing with the nurses so worked up.   

It’s you – it stops his nervous heart in his chest.   

He supposes some part of him figured that with Eddie here, you’d be hidden away somewhere too, but he’s been too caught up in the nurse’s reaction, the doctor’s words, the blood on his sleeve – your nephew has lost a lot of blood – to even remember that you exist.    

That part of him wants to be relieved to see you, that you kept your promise, that you’re here, but somehow, he can’t muster anything but blinding, gut-wrenching horror.  

It’s not your presence that stopped him in his tracks, it’s the sight of you.    

Beneath the cuts and bruises (of which there are many), you’re a hollowed-out version of yourself, pale, gaunt – the ghost of the girl he knows, sitting slumped in your chair, trembling, and staring off into space.    

Worse than that is the blood, soaked through the front of your shirt, flecked up over your face and arms, streaking down where it has dried sticky over the expanse of your bare legs to darken the scrunched cotton of your socks.   

There’s so much of it, too much of it, and Wayne suddenly can’t imagine that it’s all yours.   

Your nephew has lost a lot of blood…  

“Oh, my–!" someone squeaks to his left, startling him back into semi-working order – it’s that boy, the one with the curly hair and braces. "M-Mr. Munson–!"    

He’s staring at him, wide-eyed like the Devil himself just parted the crowd to approach their group, and Wayne has to take another one of those wheezy breaths to center himself, to try and remember what he was doing here.   

Answers… he was looking for answers about Eddie.   

‘Where’d, uh – when-when did you get here?” The boy stammers. “I-uh-I guess you heard about…”  

He trails off under the hard look Wayne gives him, just daring him to say Eddie’s name.   

Still, he can’t think about that right now. He can’t bear to think of his boy on a slab, tubes, and scalpels, and emergency surgeries, so Wayne pivots to the next best thing, the most pressing matter in front of him.   

You. Why aren’t you being looked at?   

He stares back at the boy as the gears in his head turn and he tries to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. It doesn’t make sense.

Folk are milling around the waiting room in varying degrees of distress, but you are arguably worse off than any of them, so what are you doing just sitting there like that?

Why don’t you have a room and a bed and your own team of doctors and nurses fretting over you? He imagines that’s what the boy at the nurse’s station was going on about.   

We can’t wait anymore, he’d said. She’s bleeding like crazy, he’d said. Wayne can see as much for himself, so why aren’t the nurses looking at you?   

The pieces of this puzzle don’t mesh - it’s the square peg round hole kind of nonsense that only comes with the Munson territory, and though you aren’t a Munson by name, you’ve certainly tied your wagon to their train, and by the looks of you you’d gone and paid for it. 

Just like Sherri – too much like Sherri.    

Wayne is still staring at the curly-headed boy, long enough that he’s starting to fidget under his steely gaze, then he thrusts an accusatory finger out to you, and the boy flinches.   

He doesn’t take his eyes off him as he speaks, mostly because he can’t bear to look at you again just yet.   

“Why’s she just sittin’ there like that?” Wayne growls, “How come she ain’t been looked at?”  

The boy pales and shakes his head.  

“S-Steve’s–” he starts before thinking better of whatever it is he was about to say, “He-he’s already… th-the nurse said–”  

“I don’t give a shit what the nurse said. That’s your friend sittin’ there bleedin’, so quit your woolgatherin’ and go and get her some help.” And when the boy remains frozen to the spot, he grits his teeth, “Now.”  

The boy takes off like a shot, hobbling across the room and fighting to squeeze through the throng of people.   

He’s got an impressive limp, and Wayne feels the first rumblings of remorse for having gone and bitten his head off like that – he didn’t realize the boy was hurt – but the thought passes through his mind without taking root and is instantly gone again because you’re in dire need of attention.   

You’re not alone, sitting in the chair. You’re flanked by two other girls and one of them he recognizes as the one who’d come asking about Victor Creel, the reporter.   

She’s got a delicate hand resting on your shoulder in what he can only imagine is an attempt at comforting you as your trembling form shakes with every ragged breath you take.    

The other kids edge away as Wayne’s attention snaps over to you, clearly not keen on receiving any portion of whatever is left of the vitriol he’d just dealt their friend, but the reporter stays where she is, watching Wayne with a cautious eye.   

He calls your name, perhaps a tad too brusque for the situation, but he’s never been great at regulating his tone when he’s scared. And if there is one thing that is true in this moment, it’s that Wayne Munson is scared out of his wits, standing there in the waiting room, still bracing against the rushing tide of misery battering him from all sides. 

You fail to respond to his call, which would be troubling even without the blood and the way you’re sagging low in your seat – there is a terrifying, far-away look in your eyes, dim and empty, glazed over like you’re staring without really seeing anything.    

When he gets close enough, Wayne kneels in front of you, despite the way his knees curse him for it.   

He steals a glance at the reporter girl, and she purses her lips in a way that seems almost apologetic – he can’t help but wonder what that could possibly mean, what she’s got to be sorry for.   

Wayne says your name again, trying in vain to bring you back from wherever it is you’ve gone. He needs to talk to you, to ask about Eddie — out of anyone here, you’ll know the truth and more to the point you’ll tell him with unflinching honesty, but you’re not answering him when he calls, and he can’t get the words out around the lump swelling in his throat.   

The guilt is creeping up his spine again, clawing at his throat. This is his fault, whatever happened. 

He asked too much of you, expected too much. He knew you wouldn’t refuse him when he saw you come stumbling out of the trailer, led by the same hands of the police sifting through his home and preparing to point the finger of blame at Eddie. You were there when you were needed, a tad too little too late, sure, but you were there all the same.

You came running without being asked to and that meant something, didn’t it? It was enough to leave Wayne feeling justified in asking a little more than was rightly fair, at least.

And was it really such a selfish thing to do? All he asked was that you find Eddie and that you don’t leave him, no matter what – keep him safe. Easier said than done, he’s sure, but what’s moving heaven and earth when it comes to his boy? His son? Nothing – child’s play.   

Only suddenly he is starting to realize how he may come to regret that request. The price, it seems, is far steeper than he ever imagined it would be when he’d pressed the crumpled billfold into your hand … when he gestured aimlessly to Al’s scruffy form and introduced him to Sherri.   

Wayne rests a tentative hand on your knee and gently tries one more time to rouse you from your catatonia.   

It’s the touch that finally does it, and just like that, you’re back in the land of the living.  

“Huh?” You stammer, blinking rapidly as if you’d only just woken from a deep slumber – the way you’d been staring, Wayne would not be surprised to learn that you had.   

“Where are you bleeding, Honey?” He asks quickly, heart pounding against his ribs – it's not the question he’d had waiting in the wings, what happened to Eddie was what he’d intended to say, but the state of your emergency has suddenly trumped all other thoughts in his head. 

You’re clearly hurt bad. He suddenly can’t help but get the feeling that he’s under the threat of a ticking clock here.    

You stare back at him, unseeing and unknowing, looking too long before recognition finally flashes across your features.   

“...Oh – Wayne…” You rasp.  

He does his best to smile.   

“Hi, Sweetheart.” He says gently, “Tell me where you’re bleedin’ from.”   

You blink sluggishly, brows furrowing like he’d said something unbearably cryptic, and you have to work to untangle the secret message hidden in his words. Then, you make a slow effort to look yourself over, scrunching your features like you can’t quite be sure what you’re looking at.  

You’re a visitor from Mars as you regard yourself, wrists turned to the sky, hands shaking. A glint of silver draws Wayne’s eyes down as you uncurl your fingers, and his mouth goes dry: there are Eddie’s rings, clunky burnished silver sitting in a slick wet jumble, pooling red in the palm of your hand.   

He makes himself breathe in deep through his nose to keep from reacting and lies to himself that it doesn’t expressly mean anything.   

The doctors are working on him… the doctors know what they’re doing … just like they’d known with Sherri?  

It’s the wilting sound of distress you make that rescues him from that line of thinking. When you turn your gaze back up at him your eyes are swimming with tears.   

“It’s—it’s not mine.” You rasp, looking through him rather than at him. “It’s not…”  

You get caught on a sharp intake of breath like a gasp that rattles audibly in your chest.   

Yeah, that’s what he was afraid of… Wayne can't stand to consider what that indicates, but more so he can’t stand the look in your eye, an unbridled terror like you’re seeing something beyond, something terrible.

A lazy drip drip drip of something pooling shallowly on the linoleum beneath you finally draws Wayne’s attention,  notice of the dark strip of cloth you have tied off at the top of your thigh, and more specifically, the belt pulled tight over the space above it - tourniquets.

He realizes with a start that he recognizes the buckle – the gaudy handcuff that Eddie had once argued was purposely offensive, and his chest swells with pride at the thought of his boy acting quickly, trying to save you from whatever happened, maybe at his own expense.   

Your nephew has lost a lot of blood…  

Suddenly, Wayne is awash with a strange parental clarity and he moves without really thinking about what must be done.    

He couldn’t save Sherri, and there’s nothing he can do for Eddie except try and follow in his fumbling footsteps. Wayne can finally do some good for once, break the cycle, and try like hell to do something for you.  

“...It’s not mine...” you’re still saying, a muttered utterance of those three words over and over like it’s the only thing keeping you tethered to your body.    

“Some of it is,” Wayne tells you, then takes gentle hold of your elbow, “Come on, Babygirl, let’s get you looked at.”