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ashintheairlikesnow · 1 year ago

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“What’s wrong with your friend?” For 5 sentence game

CW: Some frank references to dubcon/noncon, also Juliet is fucking calculated and I love her

Beringer's masterlist is here

"What's wrong with your friend?"

"What?" Juliet looks over her shoulder, blinking a few times, trying to figure out who in the hell Gina could possibly be talking about. There's at least a dozen people eating dinner in here already, and the other two dozen or so will come in on their own, stragglers fighting the wind cutting their cheeks and freezing their lungs.

"Who... who do you mean, Gina?"

She doesn't exactly have a lot of friends. She holds her bowl out while Gina ladles the soup into it.

It's been bubbling on the stove all day in a giant pot and smells like sheer heaven, slow-cooked pork with hominy and tomatillos and a pile of cilantro as big as her head waiting for everyone to decide what they want. Juliet looks down at her steaming bowl and adds cilantro, radishes, cabbage strips, a dollop of sour cream. The others add different things, and she thinks about how when she worked, she mostly just ate shit from the convenience store. Sometimes she was lucky enough to snag a tamale from the tamale cart.

Sometimes, her clients took her out to fancy dinner at restaurants that had four-month waits for reservations, but none of that food ever tasted as good as the tamale straight from a big plastic bucket, wrapped in corn husk, making her fingers damp and slick with lard and condensation, burning her tongue. Sometimes Romeo was with her and would buy her one with money he got washing dishes at restaurants, paid in cash with no question asked. He used to make more selling his mouth and hands, but he's got too many scars for that, now, he said. People want Romantics to look young and flirty and like innocence defiled, and it's hard to look innocent when half your face is a twisted line pulling your mouth to one side.

Still, he made life work.

She hopes, sometimes, that he's still out there, still making it work. But life expectancies for runaway Romantics aren't more than a couple of years, and he'd already outlived his by the time she met him.

She'd love to see him one more time, though. Those tamales, sitting on the curb with Romeo giggling over them with fruity jamaica soda fizzing up her nose, those were the greatest things she ever ate, the best times she had. Those tamales, and Romeo's good-natured cursing, tasted like home, like laughter and Christmas, in ways she isn't allowed to remember.

The posole that Gina makes, though, that brings memories, too. Headaches, sure, but lately she can get through the headaches, more and more.

Gina snorts. "Him," She says, gesturing with her ladle. Broth shimmery with pork fat drips off of it, unnoticed. She has tendrils of dark curls stuck to her forehead and cheeks and the back of her neck, where her heavy hair is swept up in something both like and unlike a bun. "That one. He's with you all the time lately."

Oh. Beringer.

Juliet shrugs. "He's not really my friend. He's the one that came in with the handler out in the shed. I've been helping him figure stuff out here. Might as well be useful before Brock notices I don't do shit around here."

"Brock's a softie, he won't make you do anything you don't want to do." Gina leans around Juliet to look more closely at Beringer. "Huh. Ophie said he was a daycare pet."

"He was, I think."

"Really? But he's..."

"Handsome?"

Gina smiles, slightly shamefaced. "Well... I just. He looks more like one of your kind, is all I'm saying."

Juliet snorts. "My kind. Right. The whores, you mean. The giant fucking sluts."

Gina turns bright red. "I didn't say that!"

"Thought it, though. Anyway, we're all good-looking, remember? It's part of the draw of the whole damn system. Get a pretty person to do whatever degrading shit you dream about with a smile on their face and a song in their heart." Juliet laughs without humor. Outside, the wind whirls snow past the windows. It stopped actually snowing a while back, but it's dry stuff, easily lifted by the breeze that whistles past the corners of every house. It races itself over the salted, plowed roads like horses hellbent on making it to the horizon.

"Well. Not everyone has to... you know." Gina's smile fades, and she won't meet Juliet's eyes as she says it.

Juliet lifts her chin. It's not her fucking fault, she reminds herself, that she only knows one way to get by. It's not her fault, she was made that way, and you can't blame someone for doing what they know. "Trust me. You might not have had to fuck them, but you still had to act like less than a person, and that's a kind of fucking, too."

Gina swallows, hard. Silence draws out, and then Juliet stomps away, over to the table where Beringer sits. The daycare pet watches the window, lost in his own mind, a cup of coffee long since gone cold in front of him.

"When's the last time you ate, huh?" Juliet sits her tray down a little too loudly, watching him jump in surprise. There are scars on him, too - she can see it on his hands, creeping up the side of his neck, just barely visible. He has more under his shirt, like cobwebs of dead skin.

"Wh-... oh, hi." His smile is brief, but gentle. She could see how he worked well with kids. There's no malice, in a smile like that. No aggression like the men at bars she'd pick up, no desire or demand like the more expensive clients who scheduled in advance. It's just a soft smile, easy as an older brother waking up for church on a Sunday morning so your mother won't know you slept in.

The little girl that's usually glued to his side is off in the play area in the big building where everyone eats, giggling through tag with another girl. One of the Domestics had come with a child in tow, too, unable to bear the thought of losing her. No one has asked if the child is hers.

Juliet wonders if she was a happy kid, when she was that age.

She'll never know.

"Hi doesn't answer my question, Beringer."

"Oh... uh. I don't know." He goes back to watching the window, and she sighs.

"He's not coming out of that shack any faster because of you making goo-goo eyes, you know."

"I know." Beringer leans forward, resting on his elbow, hand in his hair and palm against his forehead. "Rye says he's got a cough starting up. If helping me escape is what gets him killed-"

"Then it's exactly what he fucking deserves."

Beringer looks up, startled, at the flat, sharp edge of her voice. She watches his adam's apple bob as he swallows, sees the slight flare of whites around his eyes. "... Juliet. I told you, he didn't want to do it anymore-"

"Yeah, I hate to let you in on this, but that doesn't matter. Not even a little bit." She smiles to cut the sting in her words, but it doesn't work. His own eyes narrow in response. "Look. Just. You're still in it, I can tell, and it makes sense since you're so new at being out. But he's a handler, Ber. He was a handler, he's still a handler. You don't stop being a handler once you sign their fucking contract. We all know that."

Beringer's jaw works, but he only looks away, back to the window. "He's..."

"What? Nice?" Juliet laughs, bitter as raw chocolate. "Oh, sure, no doubt. Nice to you, you were taking care of his precious baby girl. But I bet he beat the shit out of someone else as soon as he got downstairs to the training rooms, or had one with a mouth on his cock and told the poor trainee it's breakfast. Handlers aren't nice."

"... he isn't like that-"

"They're all like that. You think it was just Romantic handlers who came to my training room to have their fun?" She smiles, and it's a grimace. A snarl. "God, no. I had to spread my legs for every kind of handler you can imagine. At least the Romantic handlers were fucking honest about it."

Beringer stares at her. He has beautiful dark eyes. The kind you could fall into. She can see why the handler out in the shed followed him here, brought him. She'd have done anything for those eyes, too, once upon a time.

"Stop," he whispers. "He was never like that."

"Guarantee he fuckin' was."

"You don't know him."

"Neither do you. Handlers go through fucking months of training, Beringer. They only keep the ones they know will do the dirty work, the worst sons of bitches, the worst bastards, the worst people on earth. I probably sucked fifty handler cocks in training, or more, and you know what?"

He looks like he'll be sick, and some part of her feels good at seeing one of the lucky ones realize what it takes to keep existing when you've been what Juliet had to be to survive. "What?"

"The only ones I saw wearing wedding rings weren't wearing them anymore a few months later. They can't stay married because they don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves."

"His wife-... Marc's wife hated what he did for work, she left-"

"She left? Lucky woman. You should be that smart. Take the kid, go to Canada, and let the handler out there rot. He deserves it. He let plenty of us rot, didn't he? That great good man out there? Looked the other way, probably did plenty of shit he isn't telling you about. While his little girl learned her ABCs upstairs, he taught one of us how to clean grout knowing they'd get shocked half to death if they ever paused for a single. damn. second."

Beringer's eyes go back to the little girl. She's stopped playing. She's watching a show about a cartoon dog, now, standing with a stuffed tiger crooked in her arm. "I-I don't-... know. I haven't really asked him... if he..."

"I know." She sighs, trying to soften her voice, and reaches out to lay a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry. I'm being really rude about this, but I swear, it's because I'm worried. If you let him take you to Canada, he'll just want to keep you, to use you. They just have people they want to use. He's using you, Ber."

"He's not." Beringer shakes his head, running his hand over his mouth. He's pale, haunted around the eyes. "He's not. He wouldn't have thought of it on his own. I... I talked to him for months, let him think I'd kiss him, made friends... flirted... did the things I saw them do on TV. I used him."

"Now you don't need him any longer." Juliet nudges his foot under the table with his own, until he looks back at her and she can give him her best wry smile. It's as much a performance as the flirty little grins she'd been so good at once upon a time. "So let him go. Thanks for all the fish, thanks for your baby girl, now go to hell."

"... Rye, he was Rye's handler. Rye said he was always so nice-"

"Right, sure. Bet he was. Then, once Rye knew how to count pills and give baths to old ladies and smile his face off, he sent him on to a house where he got the shit beat out of him by his owner's daughter over and over and over again until he ended up in the clinic four times in a year. Even when he's nice, he's not nice."

Beringer is silent for a long, long time. "What do I tell Mallie when she asks where her daddy is, then, huh? What do I tell her?"

"Tell her he died." Juliet shrugs. "He will anyway, if you're not here to vouch for him any longer. Tell her whatever the hell you want. She's not even old enough to remember you lied. She'll never know. She'll call you daddy after a few months, dad in a few years. You'll be the only father she ever knows. You can watch her grow up, knowing that he can't. Erase him from everyone who mattered to him. Just like they do to us. Take his life and make it serve your needs, what you want, leave him for dead when you're done, and once he's gone through all of it and died after, he'll have paid for everything he ever did to the rest of us who weren't you."

Beringer's breath catches. She thrills, just a little, whenever she lets a man see inside her mind and he looks that frightened afterward. She's never hurt a man in her life - but she's frightened a few, and it's always felt so good.

Romeo was never scared of her, though. He would just find some way to twist her idea and make it even more terrifying. They laughed all the time about the things they could come up with to have their revenge.

"Christ Almighty," He whispers. She's not even sure he knows he said it.

She eats her soup, delighting in the heat and lime and salt and spice, in silence until she's done. She stands to take her dishes back over to the pile of them next to sink, deciding she'll make sure she washes for a half an hour or so to help earn her keep, and pauses.

He's staring out the window again.

"You don't owe him anything." She makes her voice as calm and as gentle as she can. "Understand?"

He doesn't look at her, or answer, but she knows he's thinking about what she said.

Outside, the snow blown by the wind makes sure you can't even see the shack where that handler is being held. Only the fence, and the darkness beyond.

Right where every handler belongs.

#beringer #juliet #bbu #box boy universe #box babe #box boy #runaway whumpee #escaped whumpee #whump #referenced past noncon #referenced past dubcon #referenced beatings #defiant whumpee #whumpee #referenced prostitution

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ashintheairlikesnow · 1 year ago

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How is Beringer 🥺

You can find work involving Beringer, the daycare-worker pet who ran away thanks to a handler who decided to stop being a handler, in this masterlist.

Beringer finds himself staring out the window at the endless span of white outside as the dirty water drains out of the sink, towel forgotten in his hands.

Snow covers the houses in the little town in a heavy blanket, obscures any suggestion that there had ever been a road that ran through it. A fence cuts across the plain white, where the pasture is. The horses are huddled warm in the barn, though, and the only thing visible in the pasture is the tiny house at the far end, almost cradled by the woods that rise just behind it.

Marc's in that little house, freezing slowly to death while his daughter at least is napping warm and dry and Beringer sits here like a lump, not allowed to see him alone.

We have to be sure, was all Brock had said by way of explanation. Hurried quick kisses before witnesses, having to tear Marc's own daughter from his arms after the far too short visits, holding Mallie while she wailed for her daddy in utter misery, not understanding. That's all he gets, for now.

Beringer understands.

They want to see if Beringer felt forced to offer himself to a handler who offered him kindness, if he's someone who knelt for a man with a badge and a shock baton, if any of this is him or just what WRU wanted. If it's real or if it was conditioned into him.

He gets it.

He doesn't like it, but he gets it.

He feels awful about it, too.

If he hadn't roped Marc into his plan...

No. He needed a way out, and Handler Sonders was that way. He needed someone who showed interest, who could be convinced that Beringer is a real live man who should get to choose where he goes. Marc Sonders fell for it, that's all. He fell for Beringer's half-smiles and soft flirting. That's it, that's all it was.

Marc Sonders was a man too easy to con.

But now Beringer can't bring himself to leave the mark behind. He's too aware of the way it feels to have Marc kiss his knuckles, like a knight in the television shows he watches with a lady. He remembers too well how Marc's lips are warm and dry, and that he isn't the best kisser but he makes up for it in how badly he wants to.

Beringer probably seems the same to him.

"Hey-yo, Earth to new guy," A voice sing-songs from behind him, and he realizes someone is knocking against the doorframe. He turns away, drying his hands off quickly, feeling himself flush. There's a woman there, with hair a thousand tiny braids that run shockingly far down her back, held together by a cord tied loosely at her nape. She has an oversized sweater that slips off one rounded shoulder, long as a dress over leggings. "You're him, right?"

He blinks, trying to jolt himself back to reality. "Uh. Yeah, I'm... one of them."

"Rye says you worked in the daycare at Facility One," She says, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the little drip pot. Everything is community property here. Nobody owns one coffee pot, everyone owns it. He just watches her add creamer from the fridge, French Vanilla flavor, enough to turn it from nearly black to a tan lighter than the color of her skin. That idea of drinking coffee that sweet makes his stomach flip and he winces.

"I did."

"I thought you guys were supposed to be perfect." She gives him a look like a challenge, leaning back against the counter. She's pretty, but there's a hard look to her, too. He realizes all at once that the colors in her braids aren't dyed hair, but colored thread, or yarn of some kind, woven through all the way from top to bottom. "Like, loyal to a fault. Supposedly you're trained so you can't ever leave. Don't even want to, can't even think about it."

"We are." He shrugs, lifting one shoulder more than the other. His eyes find their way back to the little shack at the edge of the pasture, just barely visible after the blizzard finally ended. He can see Rye, now, wearing snowshoes as he makes his way there weighed down with a heavy backpack. Beringer had sent fresh hot coffee, new bread baked by a woman who seems to do nothing else in a house two doors down. Salted butter.

I keep asking them to let him come into town, He'd said to Rye, before he came in here to wash the dishes. Please tell him. Tell him I keep asking for them to let him come here to me.

Rye had promised, sworn up and down, and Beringer had to trust him, because nobody trusted Ber or Marc at all. They were a runaway handler and a runaway daycare worker, two people who are supposed to be WRU's most perfect creations. Still...

Nobody's perfect, right?

Beringer runs fingertips over the back of one hand, where ancient scars still twist across like fading ropes. The reason he couldn't be made into something to serve. Pretty face, a handler once said, but get his shirt off and it's a goddamn ruin under there.

The burns cover sixty percent of your body...

"Then why are you here?" Her eyebrows raise. He jolts back into the present. There's no hostility in her, he thinks. Just a curiosity that seems even riskier than resentment would have been.

"Because I was..." He hesitates. Then he just shakes his head. "Because I was tired of having to watch my babies leave me."

"What? Your what?"

"Every four years they took them from me to go to real school. Every four years. I met them as infants, some of them brand new. I saw them roll over for the first time, watched them learn how to smile. We helped them take their first steps and then swore up and down that their parents were the ones who saw it first. Taught them alphabets and numbers and I taught them some Spanish, too, I know it for some reason. They had to be taught not to call me Dada. I loved each and every one of them, we're good at that, that's why we get picked for it. But we have to let them go. And when they leave, they get told we never mattered to them at all. They get taught to leave us behind."

"And... you can't leave them behind."

"Had to. No choice."

She blinks. Her voice - her whole face - softens now, with real compassion. "That was... really rough, huh?"

"Agony, thanks for bringing it up. Really love that feeling."

She doesn't look pissed at his snappy reply. Instead, she laughs. "Oh, man. You remind me of a friend of mine from the city. He was all bristles and thorns like you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Probably saved my life a couple times that way. I tried to save his, when I ran. Tried to take him with me." She looks down, her smile wavering a little. "He stayed. I hope he's okay."

"I hope so, too. Was he one of us?"

"Yeah. He went through a lot more shit than most of us do, though. I think. He never talked about it, but I don't think you learn to be as paranoid as he was without there being a good reason. What's your name? I'm Juliet."

"Beringer. Or, well. They called me that, but... I like it."

"That's funny, too. My... friend I told you about called me Juliet, so I called him Romeo. Are you going to Canada? That's my plan. I heard you shouldn't try Montreal unless you speak really really good French, but supposedly Toronto and Vancouver are safe for us."

"That was the plan, yeah." Beringer hums. Rye has vanished, having made it to the little shack where Marc Sonders sits. Beringer wonders if Marc likes the coffee. If he likes the bread.

If his mouth would taste like coffee.

Does Marc still think it was worth it to bring him here? Maybe he's realized now that Beringer just needed access to a car and a fool who could drive and who wouldn't realize it was all a big lie to get here.

Is it still a lie if it... isn't a lie any longer?

"It was the plan? What's the plan now?"

"I'm waiting for them to let my-... my friend out. He's in the house out there." He gestures towards the pasture.

"Your friend is the handler?" Her lip curls, half a snarl that fades away as soon as she realizes she's doing it. He can tell she was a Romantic - she has that way of standing, with an unconscious grace. One hip slightly tipped, begging you to notice the way waist curves into hips. If she flirts, he thinks, she'll put a hand out, run it down his chest. She'll bite her lower lip, tilt her chin down slightly to make her eyes seem bigger as she looks up at him.

They all do it.

Just like the Domestics all have the same distant smile and way of disappearing into the walls as they walk past, like they're shadows who clean when your back is turned and not people. The way the Platonics always look excited and wait to be given attention, affection, some sign that things are okay, that they're being the right kind of friend or surrogate son or whatever they've been bought for.

Everyone has their false expression, everyone gives away their body in one way or another and pretends they're happy to do it.

He likes the look on her face now much better. It's mingled suspicion and disgust, as her eyes move to the window over his shoulder. It's an honest look. She makes it because that's how she actually feels, not just because she has to do whatever it takes to survive.

They all do whatever it takes to survive.

Just like Marc got a job to pay for a child and a wife and then kept the job when the wife vanished and he had to figure it out on his own. The way needing the job made it easier to sell his body to hurt other people, because then he went home at the end of the day. Just like Beringer went into his little back room with the beds and watched TV and wondered what it was like to be the people in those shows, who could just open a door and go for a drive. For a coffee. Just to smell the air.

"He quit," Beringer says with a shrug. "Or. Um. I think he's legally dead or missing now. There was a fire-" His hands tremble at the memory of the heat, mixed up with a deeper memory of the skin on his back firing every nerve as he reached, desperately, for a hand that no longer reached back for him-

"He quit," he repeats, cutting it off before his headache can start. He isn't going to entertain the memories, he wiped them for a reason. He feels better without them anyway. "For me."

"Oh." Juliet blinks. Then, her eyes widen. "Oh. Are you fucking him?"

Romantics. Always the one assumption. Beringer holds back a sigh. "You're the fifth person since we got here to ask me that."

"Well? I mean, are you?"

"No." His voice is flat. "I'm not."

He wants to.

She doesn't need to know that.

"Did he ask you to?"

"No. Hey, what happens in my pants is kind of my business, okay? I just needed a way to get to Canada, and he wanted to get his daughter away from the system. He didn't want to do this anymore, and I didn't either. That's it. Simple as that."

"Nothing is that simple." She sets her empty mug down in the sink. Beringer's jaw tightens when she doesn't bother to rinse it out, just leaves it dirtied there. "Nobody does shit for free, Beringer. Nobody helps just to be nice. Nobody does a good thing without getting paid for it. Nobody's good. Everybody just does what it takes, and fuck whoever stands in the way."

She walks away, and Beringer manages to wait long enough for her to leave before he turns and washes the mug out, so aggressively he's afraid he'll break the handle from how tightly he grips it.

He has no idea how to tell her that he never had anything to lose, not really. It's Marc, not him, who has had to give up everything just to get him here. It's Marc who lost his entire life.

Beringer is the one who convinced him to throw it away. He tells himself it had to be done, though. He had to get out of there. He had to stop watching them take his children from him, year after year after year. He had to... He had to trick someone, and Marc was close and easy.

It doesn't make Beringer the bad guy here.

He just did what he had to do to get beyond surviving.

@burtlederp @finder-of-rings @arlinthesnep @endless-whump @doveotions @emdeighamae @wildfaewhump @whump-tr0pes @hackles-up @orchidscript

#whump #beringer #marc sonders #juliet #a little town called hope #the little town of hope #bbu #box boy #box boy universe #runaway whumpee #referenced dubcon #scars tw #scarred whumpee

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