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yeyinde · 6 months ago

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STRAW HOUSE, STRAW DOG

Baby Trap + Soap x Fem!Reader : or, Johnny finds a wife in the woods and decides to take her home.

18+ | DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT: noncon, kidnapping, breeding/baby trapping. somnophilia. implied stalking. obsessive behaviour. forced reliance/dependency. non-con drug use (implied). vulnerable character (injured reader) being preyed upon by an opportunistic scavenger.

Somehow, getting hurt in the remote wilderness of Nahanni National Park without any immediate rescue is the least of your worries when a rugged man shows up and claims he's going to help. Out here, you've been told your biggest fear should be bears, steep canyons, and a swift death with fangs and claws.

But maybe you should have been more concerned about strange men with crowlike smiles and blistering eyes.

ADDITIONAL TAGS: descriptions of injury. implied head trauma. bearded Soap. smut. this is my love letter to NWT and a what not to do in a national park.

BABY TRAP MASTER LIST | AO3 LINK

It happens in an instant.

The trek up the fjord narrows suddenly. Chossy growing slick from rainfall the night prior. You pace yourself, stepping carefully on the wobbling slate, testing its resilience before you take another step. Climbing higher. Higher.

There's a storm brewing in the distance. Its burgeoning pace grows rapidly, nipping at your heels as cool winds whistle through the steep valley below.

The park wardens at the visitors centre warned you about it when you set out into the rugged wilderness of Nahanni this morning. Brows pinched, wary, when you'd come to them—all alone—and signed your name on the barren ledger collecting dust on the counter. A fact that drew your attention when you flipped through the empty pages.

Don't get too many visitors around here, the man murmured, eyes cresting in apprehension at your question. Not the most isolated or remote, no. That's probably higher up. Quttinirpaaq, maybe? Heard from some buddies up there that they had no visitors last year. We do pretty well. About one thousand a year? Usually filmmakers and the like. Adventurous types. Gets kinda lonely up here. Ain't no Banff, that's for sure.

They added that the weather was unpredictable this time of year. All year, really. Nahanni is known for sudden swells and white-outs, for weather that can turn in an instant, going from calm to cataclysmic within seconds.

(“Storms,” the man huffs, and you think the sigh was meant to be a laugh. One that falls flat when he takes in your hiking boots (too big, but the sales lady at the sporting goods warehouse assured you it was fine, that you would grow into them), and your cheap Lululemon knock-off tights. Your flimsy rucksack. The tinge of green around your ears; the stench of an overeager novice. “And, uh, it’s urban legends.”)

Valley of the Headless Men, he intones, squinting up at you when you ask about them. Adding: be careful out there when you turn to leave.

Dauntless, you still set out into the park, determined to at least make it to your campground before it set in. But the majesty surrounding you on all sides distracted you from your pace. Eyes caught on the Xanadu of an untempered wilderness slowing your trek to a crawl as you took in the steep, rolling batholiths reaching high into the aether, their sides sloping down in a dizzying, vertiginous drop to a lush valley below of scheele’s green below. It all looked so perfectly symmetrical from the high point in the valley where you stood, breathing in the scents that perfumed the air. With the rugged mountains cupped around a winding white line where the river sawed through.

A lone moose grazed at the bottom of a rolling fell. The sight of her stopping you in your tracks long enough that the plume of darkened clouds—all a terrifying burnt sage—had time to catch up to you, crackling overhead as thunder rumbled through the canyons.

Your campground is at the top of this ravine. Three nights spent inside a cabin with nothing but yourself and several paperbacks for company. Into the Wild amongst them—a morbid parting gift from a friend on what not to do—and its inspirational predecessor, On the Road.

You won't read it. You never do. But it sits, a humourous paperweight, in your rucksack as you clamber up the ravine. An anchoring comfort. A piece of home. Something that reminds you you're not completely alone even though you are.

The book, your friends, and the encroaching loneliness that you feel prickling behind your eyes, all weigh on your mind. Spooling out before you in loose, loop threads. You follow them eagerly, glad for something to abate the unnatural silence, and—

A sound.

It comes from the left, hidden in the thick tangle of furze. A click. It shatters through the eerie quiet of the sprawling boscage. An animal, maybe. Hopefully.

It must be, you think, heart hammering thunderously in your chest. There's a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. You hold your breath. Eyes glued on the thatch of green shrubs lining the base of the dense forest.

Nothing happens. You blink, shifting on your feet—

A red line pierces through the gap between the leaves, aimed straight at your ankle. It's thin, diaphanous. Slips over the scraggy rock like liquid.

It's so out of place here that it takes you a second to familiarise yourself with its unexpected presence. A laser—

An explosive boom fills the ravine the moment the thought connects. A rifle. Aimed right at you. It happens fast. The world turning over itself, spinning right off its axis. You fall against the ledge in a crumpled, heavy heap, legs so close to dangling off the precipice.

Gravity is a choking weight on your sternum, pushing you down, down, toward the jagged, rocky shoreline. A fall like that—

You curl into yourself instinctively.

“Ah, shite—” is all you hear amid the roar in your ears. “Y’alright? ah didnae see ye thare—”

In your tear-stained periphery, a man appears. He stands into the glare of the waning sun, limned in a halo of gold. There's a pinch between his dark, thick brows. A steep ravine. He's ragged. Wild. Tuffs of black hair hang loose past his ears and nape, curling slightly at the ends. It blends, almost seamlessly, into his thick, scraggly beard. He pushes a hand through the top, grabbing a fistful in his palm.

“Easn't expecting anybody oot 'ere. Nae this far intae th' woods.”

He seems to be speaking to himself more so than he's talking to you. There's anger writ in the fine lines of his face, but this ire isn't turned toward you. It's inward. Self-admonishment. His eyes darken when they flicker down to your ankle, as if reminding you of the hurt there when you'd been so focused on how out of place his accent is in the Northwest Territories.

The ache in your ankle brings you crashing back into reality. The pain seems to vibrate from within your marrow, riveting up your bones.

You chance a glance—

You swallow down the drum of panic. A trick of the light. It must be.

A dream. A nightmare.

But the man appears. His hand falls onto your knee, holding you steady.

“Ah will hae tae put oan a tourniquet. Will hurt a lot, doe.”

Absently, you nod. Keep nodding. Can't stop.

There's a hole cut through your ankle. Tore thro' yer Achilles, he's saying, words water in your ears. He instructs you to wiggle your toes.

"Ah know it hurts, but just dae it fer me, okay?"

You do. You—

Nausea buds in your guts, churning your stomach. The apple you ate earlier is choked out into the bushes dotting along the ravine. Insides purging themselves, replacing everything—food, water, coffee from earlier, bile—until nothing but shaky panic remains. It tastes like iron in the back of your throat.

“Ah know, doe,” he's saying, fingers knotting into your slick hiking trousers. Lululemon knockoffs from an outdoor warehouse in the city. A pocket knife follows, and cuts a seamless line inches below your hip.

Sad tae see ‘em go, he murmurs, accent thickening around the words. Saturating them in a drawl that's too liquid for your unpractised ears to catch. He makes a mournful sound when he slides the blade down your leg, adds, “hugged yer arse like a dream, doe.”

Another trick. The mountains do funny things to sound, you know. It must be all in your head. All—

“Don't worry,” he's shushing you now as he peels the fabric off your legs, groaning low in his throat. “Ah have ye. Ah will take care o'ye, tae, doe. Bonny thing, aren't ye? a' alone. Nae anymore, doe. Jus' me 'n' ye now. Jus' us —”

You always thought you'd have your wits about you in a traumatic situation. Be able to think clearly, rationally. Make appropriate decisions that befit the situation unfolding. Life saving ones. Practical.

To gear up for this trip, you watched survival videos on YouTube. How to make a fire. How to make drinking water. How to build a shelter. Tips on weathering down for a sudden storm. Tucked it all inside your head, and thought, I got this.

Had to, really, because everything you've read about Nahanni says it's unpredictable. Calm weather, gorgeous views one moment, and then a sudden deluge the next. Snow falling quicker than you keep up with. Animals blend in seamlessly with the landscape. Slips, falls. It's so easy to get lost, someone wrote.

But as he uses the scrap of your trousers to wrap around the wound on your broken, mangled ankle, you realise all that planning was for nothing. This was one of those moments when you discovered just how much you bit off. That panic made you mute, made you freeze up.

The pain is almost secondary to the surge of adrenaline. Fear.

You need to go home. You tell him this, slowly. Muttered through numb lips.

There's something almost like pity in his eyes when he glances up at you.

There was a mix-up, he says, slowly. Cautiously. You got yourself turned around in the opposite direction. There's no campground on the fjord above. All the lodges and cabins are in the opposite direction.

Y'got lost, he tells you. Turned the wrong way out. Ye'r in th' backcountry.

“I'll go back,” you press, urgent. Insistent. Panic is acidic in your throat. Corrosive. It burns when you swallow. “Please, just tell me which way to go, and I’ll—”

"Cannae dae tha'."

“Why?”

“Storm,” he points in the distance where a plume of cloud gathers. So dark, they're almost black. Ominous. “Gonnae skelp solid. Na choice but tae git oot."

“I don't have anywhere to go—”

He rakes his hand through his hair. “Ah kin take ye tae mines. Git a cabin in th' woods. Juist ootdoors o' Nahanni Butte.”

“No, I—”

His hand squeezes tight around your ankle. The pain makes itself known in a visceral, awful throb that travels up your leg, curdling at the base of your spine. Wrong, wrong. Something is wrong. Your body is trying to reject the agony. The breaking of your bone. It's foreign, it doesn't belong. But there's nowhere for it to go.

Pain pulses in tandem with your heartbeat.

You don't realise you're screaming until you hear the echoes of it rebound against the limestone walls. And then there's a whisper in your ear. You feel the scratch of his beard against your cheek.

"Shush, bonnie. Cannae let ye go oot oan yer own. Gonnae take ye home, yeah?"

Home. Home. You nod furiously, and it's only when the scraggly black curls covering his chin and jaw catch on damp skin do you realise you're crying.

He leans away from you, arm stretching toward the rucksack behind him.

The rifle leans against it. You feel sick all over again.

“Drink this,” he says, unscrewing the cap. “It'll make ye feel better.”

He presses the lip to your mouth, a hand slipping over the back of your head, tilting your chin up. “Drink,” he says again, and it's firmer this time. A command. “Ah promise ye'll feel better, doe.”

It tastes bitter. You swallow it down. Keep swallowing.

“Good,” he rasps, hand sliding down the length of your spine until it rests against your lower back. “Keep drinkin’, sweet thing.”

It pools in your belly, sloshing uncomfortably when you move, but it washes the bitterness from between your teeth. You keep drinking. Swallowing it down. You know you shouldn't, that you might get sick again, but it's a distraction from the mess that is your ankle—bloody, twisted, mangled—

Nausea swells. You choke it down until you can breathe without feeling as though you were going to be sick again.

“You'll be okay,” he's saying, moving around you with a practised efficiency for something so broad. It's almost graceful. Agile.

He patches you up as much as he can with the supplies he has, but you refuse to look again at your ankle. It's broken, that much is clear. You can feel your bones grinding, sliding against each other. The sensation is horrific. Wrong. You turn your head to the ledge you were standing on just to distract yourself from the agony of it all.

You're surprised you're not crying. Screaming. The urge is there, just beneath the surface. But for some odd, unfathomable reason you find you can't. Your chest feels heavy. Lungs sluggish. Slow.

It must be an adrenaline crash, you think. Why else would you feel so tired, so exhausted.

“I'm—” you start, but you feel dizzy. “‘m—”

“Shush, doe.” He mutters, and it sounds far away. Garbled. “You need yer rest. Had a traumatic accident. But don't worry. Ye can trust me. A wouldnae let anythin' ill happen tae ye ever again."

“Yeah,” you breathe, nodding. Nodding. You can't stop, can't—

“Lay back. Git some rest. A'm almost done, 'n' then ah will hae ye back home in no time—”

You come to on a groggy whimper, head buried in the messy locks curtained over his nape. There's a soft, pulsing thud in the back of your head when you try to lift it up. It feels heavier than it should. Leadened. You groan again, fighting against the currents dragging you back down to those soporific depths—

Your head is a slurried marsh. Thoughts ephemeral, broken. Fragmented. They slip through your fingers when you reach for them, diaphanous wisps you can't seem to catch.

“Don't worry, doe—” your world quivers when he speaks. Words vibrating through your chest, catching on the heavy rails of your ribs. The seismic vibrations rumble in your ear, coming to life as a mere echo in your head. “Ah will keep ye safe.”

It's comforting. A raft in squall, something to cling to as the waves make futile attempts to drag you under. Your arms, dangling loosely over his shoulders, sluggishly flatten to his chest, linking over his chest.

He grunts at your touch, palms slick on your skin.

“Thank you,” you slur, words thick in your throat. Sluggish. “Thank you for helpin’ me. Fer savin’ me—”

Your body shakes when he trembles. With your forehead against his nape, you hear his thick swallow. The air ghosting out of his lungs in a soundless whisper.

His hands flex around the backs of your knees. Squeezing tight. The man doesn't say anything for a moment. In the silence, the pursuing somnolence catches up to you. It digs heavy fingers into your eyes, dragging you back down into the sticky, thick tar.

Sleep finds you in an instant.

You try to read his words in the quiver of your bones when he speaks. Make sense of the tremble reverberating through the hollow gaps, tangling in the pulpy mess.

But there's a mistranslation somewhere. A missing decibel. A forgotten wavelength.

It almost sounds like he says—

“Wouldn't leave mah wife alone in th' woods like tha’.”

How funny, you think, and hide a giggle into the hardened ridge of his shoulder blade.

Cognisance is a transient flicker.

You're not sure how long he matches through the thicket with you on his back, navigating the unending chaparral with an ease that feels innate rather than practised. You stare down at the ground, world hazy around the edges, and think, suddenly, intrusively, that you ought to remember the steps. Every left, every right.

You get to seven lefts, three rights—a small ravine, a flattened coppice; a gnarled spruce sat alone in a valley of lush green and clumps of topaz podzol—before your eyes are too heavy to keep open. They slip shut. And you think, only for a moment. Just a second, I just need to rest my eyes, and then come to at the sound of a groggy engine growling to life.

The world morphs from a dense forest intercut with sheer cliffs looming, indomitable, in the grey distance, to the faded beige felt covering the ceiling of an old truck.

Your blink is a slow crawl, lashes weighed down by anchors dredging over the seafloor. Gritty, raw. It hurts, now, to hold them open. A furious throb jabs at your temple. It aches like a bruise. But it's nothing compared to the nauseating agony that floods your core each time your foot is jostled. Nerves being lit aflame in an endless throe of pain unlike you'd ever experienced before.

Your mouth feels sealed when you go to speak. Lips glued together. Sluggishly, you squeeze your tongue through the crack between your teeth, licking along the seam.

A plastic bottle appears in your periphery, nozzle tipped toward your mouth. A hand curls around the body of it. Fingers overlapping. It looks small in this big hand. Tiny. Long wisps of black hair cover their ruddy knuckles, spreading in a dense crop up their forearm, growing thicker at the wrist.

Their skin is pale, tinged slightly pink. Even through the brume, the lambent light of the sun catches on their skin. Illuminating small scars, cuts. Little scratches from the snagging furze.

Their hand shakes. The dark veins that branch off from the white-capped peaks of their bent knuckles pulse under the thin skin when they move.

“Drink, hen,” he murmurs, bringing the bottle to the jut of your lower lip. “Ye’ll need it.”

A plastic bottle is an odd choice to bring into the backcountry, but as you peer through the translucent skin, you find the water inside is cloudy. Chalky.

“Donnae worry—” he gives the bottle another shake, disturbing the sediment congealing at the bottom. “It's electrolytes, ken. Nothing fishy.”

Your teeth ache from the cold when he slips the rim between your lips, prying them apart. With your head already tilted back in the seat, the water slips in. A slow trickle. He feeds it to you, humming in appeasement when you swallow.

“Tha’s a good girl.”

It carves a jagged tunnel through the murk in your head. The praise slipping in, liquid, until it coats your burgeoning trepidation in a sudden swell of endorphins. With their unpractised, gauche hands, they paint a mockery of Sargent in the gaps of your synapses, stuffing the spaces between with oversaturated hues of teal, white, yellow, orange, and pink.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

But despite the shoddily crafted pastiche, it works.

Your eyes flutter, bones growing heavier, heavier, as they're forced to carry the weight of your liquified flesh. This molten heat in your chest turns your insides into putty.

Water dribbles down your chin. He sees it and coos.

“Ah, doe. Right mess ye are now. Ah will hae ye home in no time. Git ye a' cleaned up."

The idea of home melts you further. You sigh in the seat, soft and drawn out, and shake your head slowly when he wriggles the bottle in front of you again.

“Get some rest, doe,” his hand falls, heavy and warm, on your thigh. Thumb stroking along the curve of your leg, fingers curling into the seam, digging deep. Resting there.

It's too high to be appropriate. You know this. Went through lesson upon lesson in school of bad touches and what's considered friendly, polite. But when you try to open your mouth to say something about it, you catch the spread of his palm over your flesh. Wide, broad. Masculine. It catches in your throat, and gets tangled in the mush at the base.

It should be fine, you think, dizzy over the way his hand swallows you whole. He saved you, after all.

But it burrows. Digs deep. Some sense of wrongness permeates out from the firm grasp he has on you. It feels possessive. The sort of thing you might expect between people who are intimate with each other. A couple. You've known him for—

Hours, maybe?

Most of it was spent in a pain-induced hypnagogia.

It curdles in your stomach. Rotten, spoiled milk.

But—

He saved you.

You'll choke yourself on it if you keep thinking about it. So, you don't. You push it down. Cover it beneath the sediment, and bury it deep.

He's just a man.

Kind. Helpful.

As you dig a hole for this unease, he keeps his hand fixed on your thigh. The other is pressed against the steering wheel, the ball of his palm under the curve at the top of the wheel. Relaxed. Easy. You try to adopt his nonchalant disposition and glance out at the blurry world around you.

You feel exhausted. Unsettled. The sort of fatigue that comes with a raging fever. There's sand in your mouth. Your throat is dry.

You don't ask for water.

In the lull, he pitches the truck forward with a grave rumble. The silence is broken by the crunch of vegetation and gravel beneath the wheels as he ploughs forward.

There are public roads to get to Nahanni. The floatplane you entered into the park on was chartered by Parks Canada. And yet—

He commandeers the truck around a flatbed of rock and dirt. Muskeg dots the tops in some places, and he veers expertly to avoid them.

It's less of a traditional road and more so a forged desire path. You know the highway has to be close by, the link between Fort Liard and Fort Simpson, but as you peer out the window, the world around you looks overgrown. Wild. Alien.

Sloping hills in lush green stretch out into the distance, meeting with the dense montane forests dotted along the stretch of land. The grassy coppice under his wheels is matted down, and interspersed with clumps of brown, wet muskeg and crushed slate.

Over the grey peaks of the mountains in the distance, a thick, black cloud looms. The sky turns gunmetal, almost indistinguishable from the monoliths jutting beneath them.

At some points, he takes his hand off your thigh to navigate winding turns better, but it always ends up back on you. And always a little higher than it was before.

Your mouth is filled with lead. Tongue thick, malleable. Tensile like mercury. You can't speak. So you just ignore it. Dig your crown into the headrest, and breathe in the woodsy scent of him. Laurel, tree moss. Coumarin. Rotting pine. Sweet acacia. It tickles the back of your throat. Sticks there, glued in the syrupy mess.

You'd hoped it would get easier to ignore, but it stays there, a constant weight, even as the world outside fades into a hazy twilight.

In the hush of the cabin, he squeezes your thigh. “Cannae wait tae get ye home, doe.”

Against the staggering backdrop of a black, jagged mountain, a doe stands in the talus. Her fawn fur and tuffs of white spots stick out against the charcoal-coloured cliffs, and you watch, some distance away, as she bends down to fossick through the scree in search of food.

With the looming clouds of gunmetal and ash gathering around the craggy peaks, her presence here feels dangerously out of place. Jarring. She shouldn't be here. She doesn't belong.

But the beauty of this moment is breathtaking. Mesmerising. You stare in muted horror, awe, as she grazes in the rubble, slender neck bent in a graceful arch. The sloping handle of fine china. Her wet, black eyes are so open, so kind. Puddles of ignorance, naïvety, as she flicks her tongue out against the desolate rock, a fruitless search for grass in which to mull on.

Thunder crackles over the snow-capped ridges. Her ears flicker, but she doesn't run. You should warn her. Scare her away. But you can't move. Can't speak. You're a mute spectator, a piece of dross on the ground watching the approaching calamity without a mouth. Horror churns. You want so badly to tell the doe to run—

An impossibility, you know. It's much too late for her to do anything at all.

Around the doe’s leg is a shackle.

Your skin rips, tears, as you force your jaws apart, blood pooling in your mouth. If you can make a sound, she’ll—

A boom echoes through the canyon's cradle.

The scream gurgles in the back of your throat.

Agony rips through your leg—

—you wake with a gasp.

Sputtering, choking on the saliva pooled in your mouth. It tastes bitter, brackish. You feel something gritty between your teeth. It sticks to the backs, granular specks that dissolve, sour and chalky, on your tongue when you run it along the ridges of your gums.

You swallow it down, grimacing at the acidic taste.

“Awake, aye?” His voice chips through the dense fog. You blink the haze away, glancing sideways at him through bleary, heavy eyes.

His profile is lit by the harsh glare of high noon. The sharp jut of his ball cap. The curve of his nose set in the thick bushel of his scraggly beard and moustache. His broad chest concealed most of the view from the driver's side window. The lax bridge of his arm, knuckles loosely curled around the steering wheel.

He tilts his head toward you. “How're ye feelin’?”

Sluggish. Awful. There's sand in your eyes. Cotton in your head. You feel like you've been left out in the hot sun all day. Dizzy and sunburnt. Feverish. Heatsick. Your throat is dry, but you don't ask for water. You don't answer him at all. Can't. Your tongue is laden. Lips numb.

It takes you a moment to reorient yourself, squinting through the glare of the sun—

That reels you back. Breaks through the fog.

You know that the concept of day and night in the summer is different here. Twenty hours of daylight with twilight lasting all night. But even with the skewed perception of time and the heavy molasses thickening around the edges of your cognisance, you know that something is wrong.

When you left the park, it was close to five in the evening. It should be twilight, not—

Your gaze lists sluggishly to the clock on the dashboard. Through the haze, the unmistakable gleam of one-fifteen stares back at you.

It was the right time last night.

“Wha—?”

You're not sure what you're asking. It's not even really a word, but a garbled sound. A noise of distress, confusion, in the back of your throat.

He seems to understand it all the same.

“Park had a bad storm,” he answers, pitch far too light for the severity of your situation, of what you're feeling. It makes you frown, sharp and sudden. “Washed through th’ river. Where ye were—well. Wouldnae ‘ave made it out, ye see. Would’ve gotten all torn up in th’ storm—”

You read that storms in Nahanni are vicious, sudden. Weather can turn in an instant, going from moderate to devastating in a blink. But—

What he's saying doesn't make sense. You remember bits, pieces, from earlier. He said you got turned around. Wandered too far off the trail, lost in the deep wilderness of Nahanni’s sprawling valley.

“Where are we?”

“Nearly home.”

You push the wave of nausea down. “I need to go to a hospital.”

“Can't dae tha't'.”

“Why not?”

He doesn't answer for a beat, eyes fixed on the dirt path. Unblinking.

Finally, he mutters: “had tae leave th' park oan th' opposite side when th' storm came in. No roads take us tae town.”

“I have—” you're not sure where your bag is. You hope he had the wherewithal to snatch it up after you fell. Hope. “I have a satellite phone. I can just call—”

“Sorry, hen. Yer bag flew off th' ledge. Ah coudnae grab it 'n' ye. Ah dinnae hae a phone oot 'ere. Never needed one—”

Hopeless. Hopeless.

“How—how could you survive out here without one?”

“Nahanni Butte is a few hours awa'. Go intae town when th’ winter road is open. Inaccessible now. Th’ rivers flooded it. Cannae cross it. Can hunt, 'n' ah hae everything a'm needin' oot here.”

“So…” the reality of your situation is beginning to dawn on you. Helpless. Hopeless. “I'm stuck here until—winter?”

“Ah hae a friend flying oot fae Yellowknife. Comes tae drop off supplies 'n' th' lik'. He'll be 'ere in two months—”

“Two months?” This whole situation feels impossible. Wrong. You're so close to people—Fort Liard, Nahanni Butte, Fort Simpson. How could you be stuck here for two months? The idea of it is absurd. “You're not—you can't be serious.”

“Aye. I am.”

There's a pinch between his brow. You wonder if it's meant to convey the severity of the situation, but as it grows deeper, deeper, you have the sudden sense that it's not an emotional decree of his sincerity. That it's, instead, a sudden twist of anger.

It scares you.

“I want to go home.” You mean for it to be forceful, but it comes out in a whimper.

The man nods. The punch in his brow lessens. “Aye, me tae.”

“Where are you from?” You pry, needing the distraction from the endless trawl of green and slate and permafrost enclosing in on you. “You're not from around here, are you?” At the gentle raise of his brows, you add, hurried, rushed: “you just. Have an accent, and I—”

“Fae Scotland,” he answers, and there's a quick grin on his face. Roguish. Charming. The sight of it has your start thudding in an uneasy gallop. “Edinburgh."

“Oh. Far from home.”

“Aye—” the grin fades, twisting into something ugly. “Had an—accident,” he spits the word out, brows pinching once more. Anger is writ in the hard clench of his muscles, his jaw. His knuckles blanche around the steering wheel, and you think you should have just kept your mouth shut. “Sent me here.”

There's a multitude of questions you want to ask. Vying for the top is the most obvious—why did this happen? why isn't he letting you go?—but what comes out instead is, “why?”

Just that. Nothing else.

“Military.”

He adds nothing, either.

“Military?”

A nod. “Go’ hurt. Had rehab. Sent me here tae clear ma heid, and well—” his eyes flicker to you. You can't read his expression. “Got a fresh mission, dinnae I?”

“You don't—”

“I cannae leave ye. Both oo' us are stuck 'ere 'til someone comes tae pick us up, 'n' take us home.”

The idea that somehow he's just as trapped as you are hasn't occurred. Why would it when he has a rifle, a truck, freedom—

But what good is all of that when you're landlocked in a place known for winter roads. Permafrost. The forced shift in perspective doesn't quell the anxiety roiling in your guts, but it lessens it. Somewhat.

“Two months?”

He nods. “Aye.”

“And you have no cellphone? No satellite?”

“Ye can check it—” he makes a flippant motion toward the glove box in front of you. “Deader than ever.”

You hesitate only briefly. Long enough to level him with a searching look that yields no results before you reach for the compartment, gingerly pulling it open, and—

Sometimes, things get overlooked by their surroundings. Swallowed in the vacuum. Blending seamlessly into the muddle, the commotion.

This isn't like that.

It sits on top of a manila folder. Sleek black and cold silver. You're not terribly well-versed in guns—the extent of your knowledge stemming mostly from formulaic crime shows aired late at night; CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds—but you recognise this one instantly. Some sort of handgun. Police issued, you think. It's bigger than you'd expected. Looks heavier, too.

Your heart stutters. The air galloping out of your lungs in a stammering rush.

He makes a noise, soft and nonchalant, as if keeping handguns in the glove box of his old, burnt orange truck is perfectly normal.

“Fer protection,” he mumbles. You catch the jerk of his chin in your periphery. “Forgot I had it in here. Been usin’ th’ rifle fer huntin’ mostly. Or th’ shotgun.”

Three guns. You swallow. “Why—” your voice comes out in a brittle whisper. You clear your throat. “Why, um, why do you need three?”

“Not fae around here, are ye?” He echoes your words with a wry twist of his mouth, eyes slanting in the sunlight. “Tha’,” he takes his hand off your thigh to jab his finger at the handgun. ��Is fer wolverines.” His index finger falls, his thumb juts out. He jerks it over his shoulder. “Tha’ is fer huntin’. The shotgun back home is fer bears.”

You try to move out of the way when his hand falls back to your thigh, but the pain radiating up your leg immobilizes you. There's not much you can do in this situation but endure.

Military. Wounded in action. Three guns. Touchy.

You're not sure what to think. It would be easier if you couldn't.

“What do you hunt?” You ask instead, glancing out the window to the barren landscape rolling out around you. There doesn't seem to be much in the jagged hills, and towering mountains.

“Gettin’ hungry? Donnae worry, doe. Go’ tha’ pesky hare I was tryin’ tae shoot oan th' ledge fer dinner tonight.”

It's not much of a comfort. The idea of being injured—by accident, he claims—to such an extent over a rabbit makes you feel a little sick.

“That's it?”

“I can make a mean steak oot o' anythin'. Stews fer tougher meat. Fish—whitefish, arctic grayling, and lake trout. Learned how tae make a nasty fishfry from th’ locals in Nahanni Butte. Bannock, too. Got berries ‘round ma cabin. Caribou, Moose. Taste better in tacos or burgers. Mountain goat, Dall’s sheep. Been eatin’ better ‘ere than ah did at home.”

“And you're—just allowed to hunt them?” The website advised about a permit through some special outfit needed to hunt when you requested your pass into the park. Said that only aboriginals were allowed to do so. “You're not—”

“Aye,” he cuts you off with a small nod. “No huntin’ in th’ park. But. We're nae in th' park anymore.”

“Where are we?” You ask again, firmer this time.

“I told ye. Nearly home.”

“And where is home?”

The way he sucks his teeth makes you recoil slightly. Wet. Irritated. As if he's tired of this conversation already.

“Close.”

You don't let his flat tone deter you. “Are we—are we still in the Northwest Territories?”

“Thereabouts.”

It's not an answer. It doesn't reassure you in the slightest.

You open your mouth to say so, words curling on your tongue when he jerks his chin toward the handgun, brow furrowed.

“Thought ye wanted tae check oan th' satellite phone.”

His tone is severe. A growl curdling the ends, pitching it down, down. Displeasure, irritation, blooms in the gnarled petals of witch hazel when he narrows them into slits.

You swallow, wrenching your gaze from the storm brewing over fields of wheat, and set your jaw. Masking your fear for annoyance. Confidence.

But your hand shakes when you reach for the black box shoved into the corner. Palms slick with sweat. You try not to touch the gun, doing your best to curve around it. It feels—

Real.

A real gun. In the real world. In a place you came to get away for a weekend, experience something you'd never had before. Freedom. Reliance on nobody but yourself. And now—

Somewhere in the Northwest Territories. Injured. Locked inside of a truck with a man who wavers between warmth—an unending heat, a furnace; a beacon of light—and severity like a swinging pendulum. You feel safe with him. You commit every turn to memory. He's in the military. He's going to take care of you. You think he's lying to you. He'll—

He'll let you go.

You're sick. You're paranoid. You're taking all of your grievances out on this poor man who is just as trapped as you are, turning him into a monster for no reason at all. At the end of this, when he drops you off at the airport in Yellowknife, you'll have to grovel on your knees for his forgiveness. Sorry I thought you were a bad man.

It could be worse, you suppose. He hasn't done anything untoward to you—touching your thigh like he's owed the right aside—and you shove it down. A problem to deal with later even though the suspicion tucks itself into your head, folded up against your skull. Metastatic. It eats all of his expressions, turning them over and over again for hidden clues.

If he does something, you'll run.

You'll—

“Almost there,” he murmurs, and you hear the rasp of exhaustion glued to the hinge of his jaw. You wonder how long he's been driving for. And why didn't he just go back to Nahanni Butte. Flooded he said. Too deep into the park. Never would have made it.

If that's the truth, you suppose you should thank him.

It sits in the back of your throat. You swallow around it, reaching for the phone instead.

There's a small thread of hope in your chest that it'll work. That he's wrong, doesn't know how to work it, and all you have to do is press a button and it'll crackle to life. Freedom within reach.

But when you press down on the button, the phone doesn't even whimper. Broke, as he said. Dead.

“Can you—can you charge it?”

“Tried. Must’ve blown somethin’ inside. Fried it.”

His words are a prison sentence carrying a punishment of two months. You knew this, of course. He said so himself. But the reality of it breaking over you is different from blind belief. The realisation of your predicament is a jagged knife cutting through tissue, letting corrosive panic entrench you as it spills out.

This is the sort of thing you’d only read about. Novels, and biographies. Memoirs. Movies. An extraordinary event that could never happen to you. Never.

And you're aware of it. Optimism bias. The not-me fallacy. But everything in your life thus far had been so unequivocally mundane that the possibility of it not happening seemed to eclipse any chance of it occurring at all.

The crux of the bias, you suppose. Though it does little to stem the disbelief surrounding it all. Even when you told your friends, and your family, that you were going on this trip, the most mordant of them said you'd get eaten by a bear or end up lost in the wilderness.

Injured, unable to walk, and stuck with a man you only marginally know (trust) seems like the plot of a lifetime movie.

But—

Two months.

You're sure in the meantime, someone will notice your absence. Raise the alarm. Call the police. They'll launch an investigation, and come searching for you. It's just a waiting game.

And—

(You glance at the man once more, his profile limned in a halo of gold. The rim of his hat casts shadows over his face, eyes concealed in the thickening tenebrous that enshrouds him down to his broad chest, dense with corded muscles. Athletic. Trim. Big.)

—staying alive.

Survival.

If only for just two months.

But the facts are cold, unforgiving. You are alone with a man you don't know. A man with three guns. Military. His experience in this wilderness vastly eclipses your own.

He's fine. Fine. Touchy, sure. But he hasn't asked for anything.

—his hand is on your thigh—

You'll be okay.

It hurts to swallow. “Thank you,” you murmur, hoping the conciliatory lilt eats the panic you feel. “For saving me.”

His gaze darts to you so sharply that the truck veers slightly to the left, tires crunching over thick beds of furze that line the forged road. The action is sudden—surprised, maybe, by your reedy gratitude. A deviation from the demeanour he'd shown you so far—calm friendliness. Affability. It jars you. Scares you. You grip the seat cushion tight in your fists as he mutters something sharp you can't discern under his breath.

It only takes him only seconds to correct, rippling his hand away from you to commandeer the truck back into the centre of the beaten path. Even keeled now. Almost as if nothing amiss had happened at all.

But it's undeniable. Congeals in the air, tense and unignorable. A vacuum that siphons the breath from your lungs. It sits in the whites of his knuckles, arsenic bones jutting from thin, rough skin, demanding to be seen; the terse set to his shoulders. To the grind of his jaw as he clenches his teeth.

You take him in with bated breath, swallowing whole each microcosm that buds to the surface of his demeanour. Wary. Watchful. Squeezing the satellite phone tight in your hands. But he doesn't meet your wide-eyed stare, choosing instead to keep his gaze fixed on the dirt road. Knuckles popping, brows furrowed. Silent.

But it's heavy. Oppressive. The same unrelenting chill as outside. You fight back a shiver in the blooming cold, wishing you'd packed more than just a pair of hiking tights (in tatters, now) and a thermal windbreaker for the trip.

The hum of the engine, and the cracking of rock and muskeg crushed under the wheel, are the only noise that fills the cabin. You stifle your breath. Hold it in your throat. Skewer your eyes to the landscape yawning out around you. The deep, thickening sense of unease grows in the pit of your stomach. Metastasizing.

Outside is a sprawling taiga forest. Emaciated spruce, balsam fir, jut out from the muskeg, dusted in a sparse layer of sphagnum. You can almost hear the trickle of a stream. The dirt road is wet under the tires now. A creek must be close by. A river. Flat River. South Nahanni. Further out might be Slave River. The Liard. Little Buffalo. Great Slave Lake, even.

Narrowing it down seems impossible when nearly the entire south corridor of the Northwest Territories is wet marsh and snaking bodies of water.

It both worries and reassures you at the same time. Getting to Nahanni alone was a challenge. With most of the surrounding area limited to a few year-round highways, there are not many places he could go without reaching dead-ends or winter roads closed for the season, inaccessible in the warmer summer months as the snow melts.

Though—these highways arch as high as they can. From Yellowknife to Tuktoyaktuk, right on the coast of the Arctic Ocean.

But he hasn't driven on any stretch of highway since you woke up. The road is unpaved, wild. You're confident you're still south, but the exact location eludes you. Northwest Territories. Yukon. Northern Alberta. It's overwhelming. Daunting.

You try to commit the geography to memory. Sifting through an endless trawl of nothing to find something familiar. A mountain range. A sign. Anything. Anything—

“Ye mean tha’?”

The sound of his voice draws your attention, raspy. Hoarse from disuse.

He swallows. There's something raw in his expression, fractured. Yearning, you think. For something. What that something is, however, you can't place.

It stays on as he slowly slides his tongue out, licking over the bristles of hair covering his lip.

You offer a shallow nod, unsure why this matters to him suddenly.

“Yeah, I'd be—”

You pause, words turning to smoke in your throat. Uninjured, is the first thought. Without him, your leg wouldn't be—

Whatever it is. Ankle broken. Achilles torn. A gunshot wound clean through tendon and tissue.

But at the same time—

All turned around, he said. Lost. He was hunting, too. You must have somehow wandered outside of the park limits. Must have because the sound of a rifle would have drawn attention from nearby wardens. They'd have come to investigate.

You swallow down the bloom of unbridled panic. The aftertaste is bitter in your mouth. The thought of being outside of the borders, all on your own—

“I’d be dead if it wasn't for you.”

The hush that falls is immediate. Your own mortality dangling by a thin thread. Happenstance keeping you alive.

He clears his throat again. Your fingers tighten around the metal until it hurts.

“Names Johnny.” He twists in his seat, facing you. “Johnny MacTavish.”

It's a bit late for introductions, but you take it in all the same. Johnny. Johnny.

(saviour—)

His eyes grow wide when you slowly, haltingly, breathe yours out. Letting it sit in the air where it dissolves into the silence, the weight of it somehow more damning than being alone in the woods. There's power in a name. In knowing it. Military. You're not sure why it matters, but it does.

You fight another shiver when he says it back after a beat, much too fond, adoring, for the sparse companionship you've barely begun to build.

“I'll keep ye safe,” he says your name again, accent curling in between the bridges of each letter. There's a heat in his eyes; pyretic. A sickness. “Don't hae tae worry aboot anything.”

He turns back slowly, angling the wheel around a sudden bend in the thicket. The path is clearer here, looking more like an established dirt road than a sparse coppice. It twists upward, cutting a meandering line through a dense cropping of spruce. The canopy above—as thick as it is—curls over the road, enclosing it in a bed of conifers branching overhead. Concealing it from view.

The sight fills you with a new bloom of unease. How quickly the wild swallows you whole, shielding you from prying eyes, prickles against the nape of your neck, dripping like hot oil down your spine.

“Where are we?” It comes out in a whisper.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat. In your periphery, you see him lift his hand off the wheel, but sit, paralyzed, when he brings it down to your thigh, giving what attempts to be a pacifying squeeze.

“Home,” he answers, making the turn.

A log cabin comes into view. It’s situated at the end of the clearing, covered by the same dense tangle of trees as the path. The forest seems to bend around the single-storey home, enclosing in a cradled embrace of intermixing wry jack pine, bold tamarack, dark spruce, and white birch. Trembling aspen peaks above the heads of the other trees, hiding the smoked black spruce roof from view above.

It might look homey under different circumstances, but the thick, stripped logs—made of varnished white spruce—jutting out half-crescents to form the walls seem brooding. Claustrophobic. It's small—just a storey and a half. A camper's cabin not meant for longtime use. It wears its age in wood rot and peeling varnish. The scent of wet wood clings to the air when he rolls the window down, coming to a stop a few paces away from the single step leading to the porch.

Firewood stacked high to the awning on both sides of the blue door, encased in metal to keep it dry. Moss-covered concrete foundations lift the house off of the ground, keeping it from melting the permafrost below. The remains of a snuffed, charred campfire is perched to the left of the winding path leading to the door. Felled lumber lays on its side, the top whittled down onto a seat. A wooden rack leans against a tree close by. The hide of an animal is stretched taut across the panels. Leather-making materials sit in a bucket beside it.

A metal box—bear-proof, you're sure—is half-buried in the soil. Storage, perhaps, for the unusable remains of the animals he hunts.

It's fairly standard for a cabin up north, you think. But something about this place makes you feel anxious. Trapped. You can't see anything at all through the dense cluster of trees, but you can hear the sound of running water. A river, maybe. A stream. It splashes against the rock, the current too quick for you to even think about swimming in it.

It only adds to your unease.

“This is home,” he says, jerking his chin toward the house.

Home is a cabin nestled somewhere in the unorganised wilderness of the Northwest Territories. Nahanni National Park is several hours in another direction. Too few communities exist on highway seven for you to even stumble onto them—

Assuming, of course, that you could walk there to begin with.

The lingering pain in your ankle, the heavy bandage wrapped around it—it's an immediate certainty that you can't walk. Broken, you know, from the glimpse you'd taken before. Milkwhite against raspberry red—

You don't think about that.

You don't think about much at all.

“Right.” You murmur. This place is the furthest thing from home you could imagine.

He moves in your periphery, reaching for you. You jerk back, driven by instincts. The need for distance, space—

The jostling of your foot makes you hiss in pain, and he offers a conciliatory hum.

“Ye’ll be alright, bonnie. Lets jus’ get ye inside now.”

The inside is made of varnished wood. A mix of black and white spruce. It's cosy, you suppose.

It opens up to a living room immediately upon walking in the door. A mat sits under your feet. A small closet to the right with the door slightly ajar. Along the length of the left wall is a doorway spilling into a small kitchen. From your vantage point, you make out a sink, and then another door to the right.

Along the back wall beside the arching doorway is a brick fireplace. Soft fur is spread out on the ground in front of it. An old, weathered couch is pushed against the left wall, a shawl tossed over the back.

There's no television. A stack of books and magazines sit above the couch—used more for an end table than entertainment, you note, spotting the glass of water resting on the pile. A pack of cigarettes beside it. An ashtray on the floor. Bottles of beer sit on the small table shoved under the window. One of the chairs is covered in clothes.

It's lived in, you note, but lifeless.

There are no pictures on the wall. No personal artefacts littered around. It's—

Perfunctory.

He comes home, shucks his boots off by the front door, and drinks warm beer on the couch until he falls asleep. An inference, of course; but as he carries you further into the house (his insistence—ye cannae walk oan tha’, doe, stop bein’ stubborn and lemme carry ye), your notion gains credence. It's sparse. Threadbare.

There's a single plate in the sink. The old stove, separated from the sink by a small countertop, is covered in a layer of dust. A fridge is pushed against the back wall.

The door you glimpsed in the kitchen leads to the washroom. It's tight. A shower, a sink, a toilet. No windows. A towel is hung over the curtain rail, still damp from his shower before. A single mat covers most of the tiled floor below. A tube of toothpaste sits in the porcelain basin of the sink.

Beside the washroom is the master bedroom. The bed is unmade. An untouched glass of water is left on the end table beside a worn leather book and a bible.

An open closet sits across from the bed. The window is open. The breeze flutters the old, jaundiced curtain.

He gives you his room and says he'll take the couch. Under normal circumstances, you might have fought it. Insisted that he sleep in his bed. You're a guest. You couldn't put him out like that. But the door has a lock.

“Thank you,” you murmur, and he seems to tremble at your words before nodding.

“O' coorse.”

Johnny places you on the bed before he sets to work rebandaging your ankle. You're all too aware of the fact that you need to know. You need to see what you're dealing with, and how bad the damage is, but the pain that cuts through you when he rests your ankle—as gingerly as he can—on top of an extra pillow makes you yowl in agony.

It's vicious. Whitehot. The pain rattles through your bones.

He shushes you as he unwraps the clumsy brace he put on in the park, murmuring incomprehensible things under his breath that you think must be Gaelic. Words of comfort, perhaps.

You feel none of it except an uneasy dread pooling in the empty pit of your stomach.

“How bad is it?”

He hums, brow pinching tight. “Th' hare took most o' th' damage,” he says, eyes tracing along the congealing blood on your ankle. Dark cherry red. You swallow down a gag. “Tore yer achilles, though. Clean. Doesn't seem tae be any fragments. Broke your ankle, though. But,” he taps your calf, just above the bend of your foot. It doesn’t hurt. “It’s a clean break. Maybe just a fracture. Shuid heal up in no time.”

“And what about infections?”

“Got some stuff oan hand if that happens,” he leans back, and gives you a wink. It feels out of place considering the severity of your predicament. Garish, almost. “But ah was a good nurse. Patched ye up nicely.”

You don't ask anything else, and silence trickles in as he refocuses his attention back to cleaning your wound and redressing it. The bed is soft under you. Giving. You lean back, staring up at the log ceiling, and will yourself not to think at all. Each slight jostle of the wet cloth running along your ankle feels like fire licking at your skin. If you had anything at all in your belly left, you might have thrown it up on the side of the bed.

This pain is consuming. Persistent.

Your fingers knot into the soft blankets below, gripping tight until your knuckles ache. A futile attempt to exchange this pain for a lesser one. Something you can ignore, forget.

Through the open window, you can hear the playful caws of a raven searching for food. You want it to distract you, to pull you away from the sickening sensation of your ankle separating from the heel, but it doesn't.

All you can think about is the fresh pain. Your flesh ripped apart. Torn achilles, he'd said. You feel it as he moves, washing away the dried blood, the viscera. The break in your tibia. It's a nauseating feeling. Visceral. It screams at you that something is wrong, reverberating through your bones.

The raven caws again.

“Gonnae ‘ave tae stitch yer heel up.”

You make a sound—a pathetic whimper choked in the back of your throat.

“Fine,” you rasp, tensing. “Just—”

Get it over with.

Johnny seems to understand, offering a consolatory pat on your shin. “Ye'll be fine. Ah know what am doin’.”

You glance back at him, avoiding whatever is happening below his elbows. Refusing to look.

He reaches up, fingers stained pink with your blood, and pulls the ballcap off his head, shaking the matted hair loose. His hair is thick, curling at the ends. Dark brown. Soft. You take in his expression, him, as he works, using it to churn your thoughts away from the prickling sensation of him pressing your torn skin back together, readying it for the needle.

He's intense, focused, as he works. Eyes lidded to half-mast. Long lashes fanning out over the dark circles beneath his eyelids. Bruises that speak of long, sleepless nights. The empty bottles of beer and the full ashtray within arm's reach make a little more sense as you see the extent of his fatigue.

It doesn't concern you. You rip your gaze away from the thin, twisting rivers of red that snake through the jaundiced whites of his eyes; the possibility of his vulnerability notches something inside your chest you don't want to think about. Can't.

Your saviour, you think again, veering sharply on the edge of too cruel—

“Might pinch a bit, doe,” he mutters low, soft. His thick, even brows pull together at the centre. You feel the prick of the needle pushing through your skin��

Down his brows. The oblique curve of his nose. Bottled to a point. The thick bed of hair beneath his nostrils. Thin, pink lips jutting from the thatch of black bristles. The wisps curl down the slope of his neck, thinning at the hollow below before thickening back into a dense crop on the scant patch of his skin visible from his unbuttoned shirt.

Another prick—

A thin, gold chain loops around his neck. Tucked against his sternum is a Latin cross. It's plain. Traditional. Solid gold, maybe. But not purely for decoration. Where the arms meet the body, the surface is smoothed down. Worn. In the reflection, you can see the thin, circular lines of a fingerprint.

The bible on his dresser makes sense. You glance over at it, taking in the folds and creases on the leather cover. Aged and well-loved. Used. Pages are dog-eared. Waterlogged. Scotch tape holds the spine together.

The Holy Bible gleams in faded gold lettering. Douay–Rheims is etched into the surface.

The sight of a worn-down book and thumbed cross shouldn't relax you, but it does. A good ol’ boy, then. You turn back to him, eyes caught on the gleaming gold flush against tanned skin. It's tight to his sternum. Hung delicately around his neck.

Seeing it now feels a touch voyeuristic. It wasn't intentionally bared to you. Wasn't offered up willingly for you to gawk at, mind looping around thou shalt not kill and do unto others as you yourself would want done unto you, and finding comfort in the ordered morality of its symbolism—however fickle that could end up being.

You know a man is not as moral as his religion demands of him, but he looks devout.

A good Catholic boy.

Still—

You peel your gaze away from his chest as the thread slides through. The sensation is uncomfortable. Ticklish. Forcing your attention back to him, well above the neckline. His nose. Nostrils flaring when your knee jerks. His hands close over your shin. Mouth parting slightly just to say, keep still, doe. Donnae want tae hurt ye.

His hair is slightly greasy near his scalp. Sweat from earlier dampens his locks, flattening it tongue head. It's longer at the top compared to the sides. An odd, asymmetrical hairstyle that doesn't feel like an aesthetic choice at all. Maybe he had a mullet. Or—

You see it when he tilts his head down, chin angled toward your foot.

A scar stretches from his temple back, thinning the hair that lines his scalp on the right. The flesh is jagged, uneven. Cratered. It forms a ravine. The canyon walls clumped scar tissue. The nullah in the centre is all pink and raw.

You think of a shooting star. Meteor showers in the indigo sky.

You think of his words from earlier—ah know what am doin’—and the depth of his medical knowledge. It stands out now. You suppose he would, wouldn't he?

The thought has shame dripping down your spine like hot, slick oil. Burning. Tarry. You remember what he said in the truck about being wounded in action, the misery in his words, the anger, and choke yourself on the regret that swarms your throat.

He looks up, then, catching whatever awful amalgamation of self-hatred, shame, and regret makes of your expression, and the words—sorry, I'm so sorry—tear through your throat until it's bloody and raw. Pulp. Unspeakable, now.

It dampens his brow, but there's no embarrassment in his eyes when he holds them to yours. Nothing except an intense, dizzying sense of curiosity. Of—

Intrigue.

It doesn't have a place here, and the sight of it is sobering.

Why is he looking at you like that when you're gawking at his injury? Confusion knots deep. Uncertainty coiling around your ribcage. Maybe he didn't notice. Doesn't care.

Is too used to it to worry about whatever conclusions you might draw from the jagged skin barely knitted back together. But his eyes flash. Understanding edging out the unfathomable greed lurking in hazel plains, nestled, restive, in the shade that falls over the sloping boscage.

You almost miss the shadow when it appears. Wrought with Leashed ghosts. Tempered anger. Wild, frenetic. The chains holding it at bay tremble. Shake—

And then it's gone.

Dissolve back into passive cordiality. All ire stayed behind a wall.

You want to apologize, but the words are ash in your throat. Unspeakable. Johnny doesn't address it. He dips his head down once more, silently refocusing his attention to your ankle, and offering no explanation for the scar on his head.

You don't ask. Don't pry. It's not your place. But your eyes are still glued to it.

It's a horrific injury. Survival from such a terrible wound seems like an impossibility. A gunshot, you're sure. Seeing the small chasm carved into skin, narrowly missing his eye socket, fills you with a blistering sense of pity for this man, and you quietly, quickly, peel your eyes away from the jagged surface, letting your gaze run across the room. A meagre sense of privacy, you're sure, but it lets you breathe a little easier when you can't see the way his temple split apart to make room for a bullet—

“Had a mohawk,” he says. “They cut it off when this happened.”

A mohawk. The asymmetry of his hair makes sense now, and you can almost picture it as you stare at him. The edges shorn, the top long. Unruly. His hair has a slight curl to the ends, but is mostly straight for the first few inches.

As wild as he looks now—untamed, rugged; the thick tangle of uncharted wilderness—the mohawk must have made him roguish. Boorish. With his broad shoulders, thick biceps, and piercing blue eyes, the mohawk would have added to the playful appeal. Boyishly charming with his cropped hair and puckish grin. The draw of a bad boy, a vandal.

But as you try and shape this around him, you catch the strain in his shoulders. The terse set to his jaw.

“You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”

“Was shot.”

It's said without a preamble as if he was waiting for you to ask. But the words are spat out like they're something foul in his mouth; like he's ridding the taste of it between his teeth. The anger, the aggression cows you slightly, but you offer a small, warbling smile you hope is conciliatory. Apologetic.

“I'm sorry,” you offer around a stuttering exhale. You can't imagine what that must be like. Shot in the head. The idea is unthinkable. Improbable. And yet, the evidence slashes across his temple; a meteor shower carved into his flesh.

He lifts his chin, staring down at you from the bridge of his nose. “Wasnae yer fault, doe.”

“I know, I just—”

Johnny gives a nod in response, ending the bubble of words and apologies building up behind your teeth. It is what it is, he mutters when you blink at him, flummoxed. This sort of reveal seems like it should necessitate a bigger conversation, a deeper one. Questions buoy to the surface—from prying (how did it happen, how did you survive) to intrusive (what did it feel like, does it hurt still)—but you trample them until they sit, a building mass lodged in your throat.

He seems content, then, to continue with what he was doing, and says nothing more about it. And it's not your place to pry. To chisel into his trauma.

You let it pass. Let it moulder.

The raven caws once more. You lean back in his bed, staring through the fluttering curtains, mind reeling at this discovery.

Stupidly, you feel more at ease in his presence. As if this show of vulnerability somehow negated the distress of your predicament, and the infeasible nature of how you ended up here, in his home. Gazing through the thick canopy of green to the golden sky above. A whole world away from your home. Broken. Injured. But the cross, the thumbed-through bible, and his human fragility seem to curl along the vicious dread curling inside your guts, soothing over the distrust with gentle, sweeping brushes.

Quelling a frightened child after a nightmare.

How strange, you think, but let yourself relax in his presence all the same, breathing in the scent of stale smoke, sweat. Coumarin. Tree moss. Fresh pine. It smells like the valley. Soft, waning detergent. Masculine.

You pretend you're watching for the raven as you sneak small glances at him. Taking in everything with a new perspective. The broadness of his shoulders. The thickness of his waist. There's power in his arms, in his thighs. Sculpted musculature, honed and refined. Despite the thickness of his fingers, he has a delicate touch. Deft and sure, as if he's used to working his bulk around small parts.

He's unkempt. The ballcap hid most of his dishevelled state, but he's not sloven. It reminds you of the outdoorsy explorers. The hikers you met on your trip out. Roughhewn and unconcerned about their overgrown beards and their tousled hair.

There's something potently masculine about it, and you can't deny that even with the garish wound on his head, all mangled scar tissue, he's handsome. Rougish. The scar elevating it somehow—a testament, perhaps, to his resiliency.

He catches your stare on the next glance, holding it as he leans back with a quirk of his lips. It's not quite the grins he aimed at you before, but the shadow of it lingers.

“Now,” he utters, the severity in his tone makes you flinch. Sobering quickly under the weight of his solemnity. “Th' bad part.”

“Bad part?” You echo, confused. “What could be worse than that?”

He taps two fingers against your swollen ankle, urging you to look. You swallow and force yourself to glance at where he rests his fingers.

With your split heel stitched up and wrapped in bandages, the sight of your leg doesn't make you want to curl into the fetal position and cry. But it's still horrifying to look at.

A mass half the side of a baseball juts out from your skin.

“Ankles dislocated,” he murmurs, sliding his fingers over the mound. “Gotta pop it back into place.”

“That's not—” you shake your head. “That's impossible.”

“S’okay, doe. I gotcha.”

“That's not the point. That's not—”

“Look,” his pitch lowers dangerously, firm now. “Gotta do it or you'll have problems later on. Much worse than a bit o’pain.”

“But—”

He inhales sharply. “Can't let it go, doe. Gotta fix it.”

You understand the logic in that. Leaving a dislocated ankle will undoubtedly cause problems later on. But—

“Will it hurt?”

Your fear quiets the irritation brewing in steeled hazel. “Aye. I won't lie tae ye, doe. It will hurt.”

You swallow around a whimper.

“But,” he leans over, his hand sliding over your cheek. Cradling your face in the palm of his hand. “I'll do mah best tae be quick. Ah won't hurt ye, doe.”

It must be the way he carries himself that puts you at ease, so assured in his abilities; confident in what he can do without any sense of grandiosity.

“Fine.” The word is juttered out of your chest. “Just—”

His thumb catches the tears that spill over your lashline, swiping them away with a tenderness that makes you shiver.

“Ah’ll be quick.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out two chalky white pills. Tylenol, he mutters, catching the furrow of your brow. It abates the unease somewhat, and you let him drop the pills into the flat of your palm, rolling them over with your thumb as he grabs the water on the end table. They're circular with a slit down the middle.

“It'll take the pain away.” He says, holding the water up to you. “Ready?” It's uttered so severely, so seriously, that your breath hitches in your lungs. Mirth blooming between your teeth.

“As I'll ever be,” you rasp out before popping the pills into your mouth, cradling them on your tongue protectively as you reach for the glass he holds out. They're bitter.

You wash it down with a mouthful of stale water before leaning back on the bed, letting the scent of his sheets wash over you once more.

Outside, the raven trills.

The pain of popping your ankle back into place leaves you a weeping mess in his sheets, but Johnny doesn't seem to mind the shuddering sobs. He pets down your back, shushing you quietly under his breath as he mutters something in Gaelic that you're sure is meant to be soothing.

“Ye’ll be fine,” he says, tracing figure-eights down your spine until the Tylenol kicks in, and the agony tapers off into an aching throb. “Jus’ breathe. Ah’ll get ye somethin' tae eat.”

He leaves soon after. You let the numbed, drowsiness of the pain medication lull you into a doze, listening to Johnny move in the kitchen. The squealing slide of unvarnished wood rubbing against old metal. The thud of a knife. The scent of hot oil. Muttered curses. A playful raven's caw.

You're not sure how long you slip in and out of this dreamless state, but Johnny appears in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he leans against the frame. He watches you with hooded eyes, a small, secretive smile tugging on his lips.

Blearily, you yawn, somehow still exhausted despite how long you slept between yesterday evening and today. Trauma, you suppose, and say nothing at all about it when he helps you sit up in the bed.

Dinner consists of leftover bannock—the fried dough soft in your mouth, the flavour buttery; smokey—and hare stew. He pulls a chair from the living room into the bedroom, eating on the edge of the bed with you.

He's sloppy about it. Slurps all the meat and potatoes out of the bowl before sopping chunks of bannock into the gravy, shoveling it into his mouth with a grunt. It dribbles down his chin, and dirties his beard. This slovenly display might have churned your stomach before, but you're just as ravenous.

And it's good.

The bread leaves grease stains on your fingers, but the toes on your uninjured foot curl when you bite into the crispy surface, teeth sinking into the pillowy dough below.

“This is bannock, you said?” You ask, dabbing the napkin he offered with a wink when you finish. At his nod, you continue. “It's good.”

“Aye,” he grunts around a mouthful. “S’the best. Make it every mornin’ so ah go’ fresh bannock tae go.” He swipes the back of his hand over his mouth, slurring out: “s’good wit’ jam.”

“Did the locals teach you how to make it?”

He nods. “Scottish dish, originally. Made wit’ oats. Drier, too. But—fuck. S’good—nae. Better like this. Ol’ couple taught me when ah first came. Paler ‘n’ shite, they said. ‘n didnae ken a fuckin' thing about surviving oot ‘ere. Big man, Jim, taught me ‘ow tae hunt. Where tae fish. An’ ‘ow to cook it. Made this cabin, aye. He, ah, and his son. Offered ‘er up tae me when they realised ah didnae come wit’ shite all but a bad attitude.”

“That was nice of them.”

“Most folk up ‘ere are. Quiet, ken? People take care’a ‘emselves, most. Take care’a others, too.”

You mull over his words as he leans back in the chair with a satisfied groan, legs spread wide. His hands folded over his belly. The picture of ease. Contentment. This freedom of motion makes you slightly envious.

“An’ wha’ about ye?” His eyes are lidded, leonine, and fixed on you. The intensity is always on the side of too much. Too dizzying. Consuming.

You stamp it down, running your thumb along the inseam of his gingham throw. “What about me?”

“Why’d ye come here?”

His question throws you off balance. “It’s a pretty park,” you offer with a shallow laugh. “Who wouldn't come here?”

“Lots of pretty parks. Why this one?”

“Dunno. It was—”

“‘ave ye ever been tae any other parks? Anything like this?”

“I hiked a bit, and, um—”

He sucks out a piece of meat from between his teeth. “A bit, aye?”

“Yeah. A bit. Why—”

“Ye came all the way here fer what? A pretty park? With no experience at all? And alone?”

The shift in his posture reads as angry, irate. You blink, bewildered by this sudden change.

“Well. It was supposed to be an experience.”

“An experience, aye? Survival skills of a lemming.”

It's derisive, cutting. You bristle through the sting of humiliation, grappling through the slurry of fatigue to cobble together some form of defence against this lambasting of your—admittedly—ill-thought adventure, but he's already moving on. Fingers tapping an off-rhythm beat against his belly as he levels you with a sober look. More serious than you'd ever seen him before.

“An’ yer family? They just let ye come here oan yer own?”

The mention of your family makes guilt well to the surface, buoying above the indignant anger at his mocking words. Cowed, you shrug.

“Sure.”

Something cracks in the severe mein he carries; fracturing through the blatant disapproval. Cutting it like a knife.

He sighs through his nose before reaching up and scrubbing his hands over his face. “Shite. Ye really needed me, aye?”

You blink at the odd choice of words, brows drawing together in a tight knot. It's indefensible, of course. In many ways, he's right. If he hadn't found you—

Well.

You temper that thought before it forms. You're too out of it, spatially unaware and unmoored, to let yourself fall into an existential pit of despair when you know you won't be able to climb out. Thinking of your assured doom out there, all because of a misstep somewhere along the path, makes dread bloom in the pit of your stomach. Nauseous, roiling. It froths over the basin, ready to spill over and drag you under.

Swallowing around the surge of panic—mortality a fickle thing in a place like this—you offer a despondent shrug in response. Unable to scrape together any sense of a defence that won't make you sound childish and idiotic.

You ready yourself for more mockery, having become the very thing the park rangers tried to warn you about when you showed, alone, in hiking boots much too big for you.

But then he's shifting, expression clearing. The anger folded back behind a quick grin.

“Pretty here, isn't it?”

You're not sure what to make of his mercurial temperament; emotions cascading by, quicksilver and sudden. The flashes of anger, intensity, curiosity, and this, all happening within such a short period. It's overwhelming.

It unsettles you. But—

“Yeah,” you mutter, unable to stem the awe from leaking through.

The change in conversation is freeing. Sometimes it's just easier to let sleeping dogs lie, and that's exactly what you do. Tucking his odd behaviour behind a plexiglass of indifference, pretending it wasn't there, lurking just out of sight. Something to unravel later, when your heart wasn't on the verge of buckling under the strain of your anxiety. When your chest didn't feel like it was slowly being crushed. Your stomach is all twisted up in knots too tight to untie with your bare hands.

It's easy to let yourself heave through jittering lungs, and pretend you couldn't feel the rot festering on the sides of them. Eating holes through delicate tissue.

The majesty of this place hasn't quite worn off, and you use that as an excuse to drift. To close the doors on the overwhelming deluge of hysteria creeping up on you.

You still think of the jutting fjords instead. The steep ravines, the moose in the distance—her colours sharp against the green backdrop—and let the untempered sense of reverence split you down the middle.

It comes out in a flood, then—as if you've been biting back the words this whole time.

You tell him about the valley. The waterfall. The white river. The marmot you saw poking its head out. No bears, you sigh; the forlorn lilt to your tone seeped with a touch of relief, an aspect he pokes at with a crooked smirk until you huff, rolling your eyes to the ceiling at his gentle ribbing. Huffily, you admit that as much as you want to see a bear, you're not quite ready to face them in the wild.

Lots’a bears ‘round ‘ere, he taunts, rolling his knees out further as he sinks deeper into the chair.

He dodges your next question of where, exactly, is here with a silky grin and a need tae know rolling off his lips before they tug downward in a sudden frown.

You must be acclimating to the strange ebb and flow of his emotions because the lour grimace on his face doesn't deter you as much as it did moments ago. You pick up the slack when the conversation lulls, telling him about the places you've been and how they compare to Nahanni.

“They just—don’t.”

It's hard to encapsulate the scale of it all into simple words; digestible pieces someone else can swallow. The park isn't too far from Yellowknife, and yet it feels like a world on its own. The remoteness, the vastitude of it all, is hard to describe, but Johnny seems to understand.

He listens with a slight quirk to his lips. A smile you'd almost call fond. He gets it, you know. The words you can't say. The ones that feel too lacklustre when you do.

“That really why ye came?”

You hesitate for a moment, looping a loose thread around your finger. Contemplating. Mulling it over. You've never told anyone the reason for the trip outside of a new experience for yourself. Testing your mettle. But with Johnny—

There's a sense of kinship, you find. An understanding.

“It seemed so—” he waits for you to find the words. “Lonely, I guess.”

“Lonely,” the way he says the word is ruminative. Rolling it around between his teeth; testing the weight of it. “Ah suppose it is.”

“You don't think so?”

“It's—” he pauses, eyes listing to the side as he mulls over what he wants to convey.

He does this sometimes, you think. Gets lost. Loses himself. Retreats inward. You can't help but wonder if this is a manifestation of his trauma—a head injury such as this would be classified as a traumatic brain injury, wouldn't it? You're not well-versed in this area, and it feels a little mean, cruel, to have this thought, but it blooms as his eyes fog over. As he struggles, almost, to find the words he wants to say, to give voice to what he feels, thinks.

“Lonely, aye,” he grinds out after a beat, but he looks frustrated about it, and glares down at his lap, silently fuming. Annoyed. “Big.”

The word is ripped out from between his teeth, and you nod, hastily, to both quell the looming anger brimming in the terse set to his shoulders and to let him know you understand. Can read between the lines—if only just.

“Is that why you came?”

The shrug he offers is noncommittal but you can see the tension pooling in his brow despite your efforts to quash it. “Couldnae go home after this—” he lifts his hand, tapping his fingers against the scar tissue on his temple. “Wasn't safe. Had tae give up everything after. Maw. Da. Sisters. Cannae ever see them again.”

It doesn't make sense. None of it does. The innate understanding between you is shattered by the impossibility of this moment, and his half-formed words. What you gave up seems paltry in comparison to what he's confessing to. His family. His whole family—

“Might see them one day. Once that fuckin' prick is in th' ground, but 'til then—” he shrugs again, easy. As if the look on his face wasn't cataclysmic in its anger. It's rage. Sorrow. Hatred. You flinch back as if the blackhole of these awful emotions will eat you alive.

Johnny sees it, and reaches for you, making soothing noises under his breath as his hand wraps around your thigh. “Ah, doe, don’t worry. He wilnae find us—”

You're not sure what to say to that, but the grip he has on you is firm. Unyielding. There's a scowl etching over his lips, as if the mere thought of such a thing fills him with disgust, fury, and you shake your head slowly.

“I'm not—I’m not worried.” You don't know how to tell him that this phantom prick from his past isn't what made you reel back, but the intensity of his wrath. The sudden infliction of his ire. So you don't. You give in with what you hope is a conciliatory smile. “I, uh, I trust you.”

It's loose. Shaky. Your conviction wanes around the edges, falling flat and hollow when it trembles out. If Johnny notices the brittleness around it, he doesn't show it. If anything, he seems to take it as a sudden gospel.

“D’ye—” There's a crack in his voice. He swallows, then. Adam's apple bobbing harshly against the skin of his throat. You wonder if you've upset him. Angered him. But he's leaning down, eyes widening. Feverish. Blue lagoons. “Ye trust me.”

It's not a question, but he poses it as such. You nod slowly and unsure.

Johnny ducks his head, then. Lifts one hand to rub at the bristles around his chin and upper lip. Lost in thought, maybe—

It's when he reaches around, scrubbing at the nape of his neck, do you see the flush peeking out from beneath the thick bed of hair covering his cheeks. The sight is jarring. Unexpected.

You're not sure what to make of it. Of this strange reaction. But it passes almost as quickly as it started. The red is replaced by a wide, blinding grin. He squeezes your thigh.

“Hah, doe. Ye really know what tae say tae cheer me up—”

You haven't said anything at all, but this, too, goes unacknowledged. And before you can even try to draw attention to it, he breathes in deeply as he sits up in the chair.

“Ye finished?” He motions to the bowl and plate on the bed. You nod. “Alright. Ah'll put ‘em away. Get ye some tea.”

“Oh, I'm fine—”

“Nah, hen. Tea is good for ye. Will help ye heal.”

He leaves without another word, carrying away your dirty dishes. The unfinished conversation lingers in the air around you, but beneath the loose strands of everything unsaid, you feel something tangle inside your chest as you replay his words in the back of your head.

All alone in Nahanni, unable to see his family. You're sure the prick he's referring to is the one who gave him that horrific scar, nearly taking his life.

Somewhere in the loop, a knot of pity begins to take shape.

Johnny brings you Labrador tea—a speciality he learned how to make from Ethel and Jim, the couple from Wrigley who took him in. It's good. It tastes sweet, earthy. Honey and pine. You sip at it as he grabs sleep clothes from his dresser, watching him with a muted sense of listlessness.

You can't imagine the next sixty days that loom before you. Restlessness, claustrophobia—it coalesces into this strange, itchy feeling that sits, uncomfortably, atop your chest; an increasing pressure. You wish you could pick it off like a loose scab. Dig your nail under the hard clot and tug—

Peel it all off until just silken new skin remains.

Johnny looks antsy when you finish the tea. Eyes bright. Wide.

As you contemplate the surrealism of your predicament over Labrador tea, he grins like a shark and tells you he only has one toothbrush.

“Dinnae mind sharin’, doe,” he offers, too jovial, eager, for the notion of lending his toothbrush to a stranger he met less than twenty-four hours ago. Ah ‘ave good hygiene, he adds, as if that might make this any better.

Putting away the disgust, the idea of sharing a toothbrush feels much too intimate to you. Something befitting a long-term partner, or kin, before a man you know only the bare bones of.

But like most things lately, what choice do you have?

Johnny grins brightly at your acquiescence. All teeth. He hands you an old sweater—his favourite football team, he adds with a wink when you blink at it—and then moves toward you with a wicked gleam in his eyes you try to pretend is just overeager hospitality.

“Wait—” you start, jerking back instinctively as he looms over the bed. “What are you doing?”

A dip forms between his brows, and he cocks his head quizzically at you. “What're ye talkin’ ‘bout, doe? Need'tae brush yer teeth, don't ye?”

“I—I can walk—”

He snorts. “Oan yer broken ankle? Will only hurt yerself more.”

Despite the truth in this statement, the flippancy in his voice stings. Prickles under your skin. Your loss of mobility, of being wholly dependent on another person, is a bitter thing to try and swallow. Especially when you're here for the literal antithesis of it. To be free. Self-reliant.

Not needing anyone at all except the grit in your bones and the determination to see things through.

Having all of that ripped into pieces in front of you, by a man who says it with such nonchalant disregard—as if your efforts were meaningless, insubstantial for what it got it—is humiliating.

You can't remember the last time you needed someone for something so simple as walking to the washroom to brush your teeth, to wash up. The loss of this minute freedom makes you want to cry; to break down. Rage. Break things with your bare hands just to show the world you still can. To fight against these shackles locking around your ankles, and run—

Johnny's hand falls on your knee, thumb brushing the torn edge of your tights, grazing the skin beneath the loose threads with each pass.

“Don't worry. Ah'll take care 'o ye.”

That's the problem, you think, chest burning. This awful feeling inside is churning. Frothingly acidic, corrosive. You don't want him to. You don't want to need this man at all. Ever. For anything.

But—

“Thanks,” you choke out. It tastes like iron. Like defeat.

He carries you to the washroom, cooing the whole time about how ye ‘ave nothin’ tae be embarrassed ‘bout while you blister from mortification, from shame.

You came here to be self-reliant. To grind your mettle against the wilderness and come out on the other side victorious and better for it. But what you've accomplished so far is getting lost, getting hurt, imposing on a man you barely know—

One who has to sit down on the ledge of the bathtub with you cradled in his lap like a child, injured foot elevated on the lid of the toilet seat. He cups his hand under your mouth as you scrub at your teeth, trying to catch any of the foam from the toothpaste that spills from your mouth.

It's mortifying.

You've never felt so vulnerable in your whole life.

“Sorry,” you choke out around the brush—his brush—as he slowly commanders the weight of you around enough to spit in the sink.

He waves you off with a noise. “S’alright, doe. Ye can lean oan me all ye like.”

So he says. But you feel the rapid inhales behind you. The soft pants spilling from his lips, lungs expanding, broadening his chest into your back. Exertion, you think, slightly cowed and humiliated. Desperately trying to hold some of your weight on your uninjured foot.

“Nah, ah,” he breathes, arm slinking around your middle, tugging you firmly into his lap. “Ye jus’ worry about gettin’ ready tae go tae bed now. Ah got ye.”

He soothes his palm up and down the length of your arm as you finish up in a fruitless effort to calm your nerves, but it doesn't work. Can't. Because you know what's coming next.

“Can I, um—” your tongue is thick in your mouth. “I need to use the washroom to–to, uh, washup, and stuff—”

His thigh jerks beneath you. When he speaks, his voice is rougher than normal. “Okay.”

But he stays where he is.

“I think I can do it on my own—”

“And if ye step oan yer leg?” He tuts, arm tightening around you. “Only gonnae hurt yerself more, doe.”

“I'll be careful, but I really have to—”

“S’okay,” he coos. “S’only me.”

That's the problem, you think wildly. Hysterical. That's the whole problem, isn't it?

“No, you don't understand. I need to, um, go.” He makes another noise, soft. Agreeable. Fuck. “I need to pee.”

It comes out in a hiss. Feral, like a cat. Embarrassment turns you into more animal than man.

Again, he hums. “I know, doe. Donnae worry, ah’ll hold yer leg.”

“Can't I just keep it, um, on the ledge?”

“No, no. If ye put weight oan it, doe, ye’ll be in serious trouble. Dislocated. Broken. Jesus, ye cuid slip the bone out of place—”

No. No.

The idea of him holding your ankle as you piss is beyond any measure of shame you've ever felt before. You like your privacy. Crave it, sometimes. You don't think you've ever done this in front of someone since you were a child.

You need—

A moment.

Time. A pause.

But he doesn't give you a chance.

Johnny's other arm loops under your knees, and with a small huff he stands, holding you aloft with an arm anchored across your belly. It's quick. Mercilessly so. He steps back and lifts his foot to toe the lid off the toilet seat, unbothered by the loud clang it makes when it hits the tank.

“There we go,” he mutters, and sounds almost breathless for it. “Let's get ye ready.”

It should be awkward. Clumsy. But he moves with a surprising agility that belies the firmness of his muscles, the bulk. He lets your uninjured leg drop to the floor, murmuring for you to put some weight on it as he cradles your shin in his hands, careful not to let your foot move more than it needs to.

The strange dance ends with him holding your shin in his hands, stretching your thighs out more than they'd ever been before. An image that might have been comical under different circumstances but just makes you flounder at the suggestiveness of the pose. Added, in large part, by the firm hold he has on you. There's not an ounce of give. No threat of falling.

You gasp when he moves, shuffling backwards to pivot you around until the back of your shin meets the cold porcelain.

“Alright now, doe,” he motions toward the seat as he slowly bends down to a crouch on the floor, your foot still held in his grasp.

You follow him down until you meet the seat, trying to avoid his gaze as you clumsily paw at your tattered pants, slipping the down your thighs in a hurry. Your panties follow after a moment of hesitation.

When his breath catches, you say nothing at all. Pointedly avoid whatever face he might be making as you stare, fixed, at the panels on the wall behind his head. Wallpaper. Probably moisture-resistant. It's peeling in some places. Decades ago, it might have been a soft canary yellow.

His breathing is shallow. You ball your hands into fists and press the flat of your knuckles against your thighs.

It's hard to focus when you can feel the scorching heat of his body bleeding into your leg, your knee. Close enough that all he has to do is bend down a little more, and his face would be pressed against your thighs.

There's no room, no privacy.

You close your eyes and pretend you can't hear how his breath seems to fill the entirety of the small washroom, ghosting over your skin. Virginia Falls comes to mind—a roaring rush of water—but even in the solitude of your mind, you can't ignore the way his stare drills through your skin.

You swallow. You can't do it. Can't do this.

“Can you—” back off, go away. Stop breathing so heavily because you might get the wrong idea, like this whole thing excites him somehow—

His voice is rough when he speaks. Ragged. “Cannae ah what, doe?”

“Turn the tap on? I can't—I can't concentrate.”

“S’only me, bonnie girl,” he murmurs, but does what you ask. Leaning over you, broad torso swallowing you up entirely under his bulk. You can feel the soft give of his belly on your knee as he presses it into you, but it only lasts a second before you meet a wall of solid muscle beneath. He braces a warm, rough palm on your naked thigh, leaning in as he reaches over to the sink above.

It's barely a fraction of his weight but the drag of it makes you blink in surprise. His skin is burning. Redhot.

Opening your eyes brings you close to his chest, nose only a hair away from the tanned skin stretched over his collarbones. The metal chain gleams in the flushed light hanging overhead, sitting in a golden contrast to his sunkissed flesh. Its reflection casts beads of glittering lambency over the slope of his neck.

Pretty, you think, watching as it coruscates in a mesmerising dance each time he moves.

The faucet turns with a metallic squeak, breaking you from your reverie. Water gurgles up from the pipes, spitting into the basin with a hiss. You pull back, twisting your head to the side as heat floods your chest.

“Thanks,” you mutter, unable to meet his stare.

His fingers tighten around your flesh. His voice is raw when he mumbles, “anytime.”

The trickling rush of water reverberates around the room, and it's easy to close your eyes and pretend you're alone.

So that's exactly what you do.

His palm grows slick on your skin. Damp. But you ignore it, focusing on nothing but the urgency of getting this over with as quickly as you can. It works, marginally—

(Johnny makes another noise in the back of his throat.

That, too, you ignore.)

“Finished?” His voice is thick, wet. You nod slowly, peeking out from the sliver between your lashes to paw at the wall for the toilet paper roll. “Here, ah’ll help ye out of fer pants—”

Your head feels heavy. Limbs laden. The embarrassment crushes you into a fine powder; malleable, putty. You let Johnny take the lead after. Let him slip your tattered tights down your thighs, and say nothing at all when too much of his palm glides along your skin as he pulls. Needlessly, of course, when just two fingers would do.

But it's fine. Fine. Maybe he's never taken off tights before. Maybe the material is too thin and he's worried about it catching on the scrapes over your knees, the bandage wrapped up to mid-calf.

Your shirt, too. When he slips his fingers under the hem, splaying them wide over your belly before dragging them up until it bunches around his wrist. Tugging, tugging. Hands gliding over your skin, fitting along the contours of your body.

He keeps one hand moulded to your neck, fingers brushing your jaw, as he gingerly pulls the shirt over your head. The ragged pants in your ear, the soft groans when you slip into his old shirt—

It's exertion, really. Must be. He's tired from holding you up the whole time you brushed your teeth, washed your face in the sink. It's all fine. He's being gentle. Doesn't want to hurt you.

He's just being nice.

(And when you notice that your panties are missing from the pile of dirty clothes he shoves into the corner behind the door, that, too, you ignore.)

Exhaustion takes you soon after Johnny tucks you into bed, dragging you under once again. He tells you he'll be on the couch. To holler if you need anything. Sluggishly, you nod. Thank him when he places a glass of water on the bedside table for you.

(Bite your tongue when he brushes his fingers over your cheek as he bids you goodnight.)

Through the gossamer of sleep, you can hear the floorboards creak in the doorway, but when you look, there's nothing there. Just an empty kitchen. The soft flicker of the fireplace smouldering in the living room.

Nothing, you think. It's nothing at all—

There's a weight on your chest.

Warm, searing. It dampens your skin where it sits, heavy, on your breast, cold air ghosting along the sweat building up each time it moves.

You stir. The pressure takes shape. A hand. A man's hand. Rough, calloused, and hot. In his palm, he holds your breast, thumb brushing along the curve of it. Sliding, sliding—

You come awake with a gasp.

There's a twinge in your ankle when you move, and the pain grounds you, silences you. His thumb twitches on your nipple, but he, too, stills. Quietens. An impasse.

And you suppose this would be where you'd scream. Rage. Slap him across the face, rip his hand off your breast. Curse at him for being a creep, and a pervert, and nasty, disgusting man because there's nothing at all that could justify the reason for why the shirt he gave you to wear to bed is tucked up over your chest. The bruising press of something hard digging into your hip negates any excuse he might try to give. This is unmistakable. You should scream, cry, and—

Leave.

This is what glues your lips together. Keeps you from moving at all, from making a sound. Where would you go? How would you even get there to begin with?

It's this—the uncertainty, your vulnerability—that paralyzes you. Keeps you still, silent, as his hands brush over your skin, touching, fondling. His palms are rough, calloused. Pyretic. He squeezes, kneading your flesh in his sweat-slicked hand like he's owed the right to touch you. Like he's allowed.

He pants against your temple, breath warm, humid on your skin. Heaves like a dog in your ear, grunting low as he ruts his hips into your side, smearing something hot, tacky across your skin. Something you try not to think about, to inch away from. But he catches you quick, and stops your meagre protests before they form.

His thumb and forefinger close over your pebbled nipple, pinching softly at your budded flesh. The shock of pleasure is unwanted. Awful. It churns your stomach, and you fight the urge to weep—

He leans up, ragged exhales growing heavier as he moves until milk-warmed breath shudders over your bare breasts. His excitement throbs against your hip. You swallow down around the sudden wave of disgust, the sickness knotting itself together in your belly. It devours the lingering pity you'd felt earlier. The safety, the comfort, that brimmed inside of you for him.

(bleeding heart—

he gorges himself on it.)

Stay still, you think. And maybe he'll go away.

But he doesn't. Of course, he doesn't.

Johnny leans down, mouth closes over your nipple. It's all searing heat. Wet, soft. A sudden jolt of pleasure shoots down your spine when he sucks in tandem with the soft, rolling pinches he doles out on your tiger nipple, and you hate your treacherous body a little bit more for it. For how good it makes you feel when he flicks his tongue over your hardened peek, laving it sloppily. Messily. Drooling all over you—the big fucking dog—

You wonder how long he's been doing this. Touching you in your sleep. The thought sits like hot oil in your guts; sloshing against the soft lining of your stomach until it aches. Burns. You blame it on that when he grunts against your breast, the vibrations send a shiver down your spine. Have to, don't you? Because the alternative is to admit that you're slick, soft between your thighs already; folds soaked, inner thigh damp. Wet. Blame it on him, and the burden in your chest eases when you feel the stirrings of desire, lust, thicken in your lower belly. Bodily reaction becomes your clutch, your lifeline when he lays his upper body against you, the weight, the heft, of his bulk forcing the air from your lungs.

Johnny lifts his head suddenly, eyes drilling into yours before you can feign sleep to avoid looking at him. You don't want this. Your body thrums with reluctance, with fear, but you can't drag your gaze away from him. The rapturous look in his eyes, burning in the low simmer of a never-ending twilight, is paralyzing. Electric. You can't remember a time in your life when another person has ever looked at you with such raw want. Desire. Need. It's covetous. Ugly. Marbled with heady streams of hunger, of awe, as if he's not sure whether or not he wants to eat you alive or savour you for aeons. Taking bites, nibbles, when this urge becomes too burdensome to bear; when the ravenous chasm in his guts threatens to devour itself, bones and all, like a man-made black hole. Under this heavy, unrelenting stare you wither. Submit. Your head rolls until your cheek is pressed against the pillow, neck bared. Offered up to him.

(anything, you think, to run away from the naked want on his face. because with his mouth slack, lips slick, glistening with spit, he looks predatory like this. animal. bathed in gloam and flushed a deep roseate.)

He props himself up on his elbow, watching you. Feasting. Your quiet submission makes him moan; hips juttering at the slow reveal of your vulnerable neck. A paroxysm. As if he just can't help himself to hump against you like a beast in rut.

He swallows. You watch his throat work from the corner of your eye, Adam's apple bobbing up and down, up and down—

Then:

He lifts himself up higher, angling his body until it's bracketed over you. Sliding between your legs until your slit is pressed against the coarse hair that covers his thighs. He keeps his elbow propped on the pillow, sliding up, up, until his forearm comes to rest beside your face. It boxes you in completely under his weight, and the position forces your legs to spread open to accommodate him. Not given up freely, of course; but your compliance in this is inessential, it seems. He moulds you how he likes, mindful of your injured ankle the whole time. A kindness that makes something molten thicken in your throat, stifling the scream that claws its way up your esophagus.

You try not to stare when he clambers over you, chest bare against yours. Hips chiselling a gorge between your thighs wide enough for him to fit. To press his fattened length on the insides of your sticky thighs; groins drawing together. Your legs slung loosely around his tapered waist. A dreadful pastiche of lovemaking. Intimacy.

But even as a mockery—bastardised as it is—it’s embarrassing how easily you open up for him. Legs falling, spreading further apart. Hot, sticky at the apex of your thighs. Wanting.

Blame it on sleep, on this endless hypnagogia you've been feeling since he leaned over you on the cliff edge, and said, pretty thing, aren't ye? All alone. No’ anymore, doe. Jus’ me an’ ye, now. Jus’ us—

You swallow, fighting the urge to cry. Blinking rapidly against the tears that pebble against your lashline, but you're helpless to stop the flood even though the levee doesn't break, doesn't spill over. It just sits, a sorrowful lagoon with nowhere to go.

In your attempt to hold back the deluge, you let your gaze wander away from the piercing blue that drills into your face—seemingly unbothered by the tears in your eyes, the ones that clot over your irises, stinging and hot—and stare down at his broad chest. A mistake, maybe, because you catch sight of the gold cross dangling around his neck. Like a pendulum, it swings. The motion is mesmerising. Hypnotic.

It distracts you for a moment. Or maybe you've just grown accustomed to his touch, to the heat of his hand on your skin. Whatever the reason, it's enough to pull you away from the feverish trail his fingers leave as they make a steady drag downward. It's only when they dance over your belly button do you realise the muted tickle is Johnny, and by then—

“Shush, s’alright, doe,” he's cooing, warm breath ghosting over the plains of your face. It might be comforting if he didn't rest his weight on his elbow, freeing his other hand just to bring it over your mouth, thumb brushing under your eye. A warning maybe. Don't scream. “Ah go’ ye. Ah’ll make ye feel so good—”

There's a fever in his eyes. Wildfires spreading through the yawning boscage, burning everything in sight. The heat is hot enough to char bone; to blacken meat into a dessicated husk. Eating away at everything in its path.

You know, almost immediately, that Johnny's beyond reason. Or, rather—

He's gone, turned inward; delusional enough to think that this is something he has to do.

You'd seen all the warnings of the kindling fire before. Something you'd decided to ignore even as the hunger in his eyes surged; as the shape of it morphed into a frothing devotion that felt ill-fitting for two strangers stuck together like this.

Stupidly, you thought you could outrun it. That he was a good man beneath it all, and wouldn't succumb to touching you in your sleep, to lulling you into a false sense of security—

Except. He hadn't, had he?

He'd been blunt about it all since the beginning. My wife—

How silly, you thought.

But the humour fades when he teases over your hips, resting his palm over your mound, middle finger perched above your clit. Just holding. Touching. The possessiveness of the action is unmistakable, unignorable.

It shouldn't send a shiver down your spine when you'd rather he didn't touch you at all, but it does. There's something about him, you think. Electric. A lightning storm. It crackles in the air around you, humming low in the atmosphere; this unavoidable surge, natural phenomenon. Maybe that's what he is.

More storm than man. A force you can't outrun, but can only endure—

His eyes flash when he slides his fingers further down your slit and finds your skin soft, hot. Drenched. When he groans your name out, it sounds like a prayer. An orison.

“So wet, doe,” he's heaving out in a whisper, eyes nearly rolling back into his head as his touch grows bolder, more insistent. As if the softness of your flesh, the wetness that sticks to your inner thighs, is all the consent he needs. “So fuckin’ wet fer me, aye? Been waitin’ fer this, haven't ye?”

You want to shake your head no but it's futile. He drops his head to look down the chasm between your bodies, watching his hand slide along your skin. Legs spread around his waist, inviting. He curses foul under his breath when he sees how wet his fingers are from just a touch, words mangled in the back of his throat. They sound less coherent as he roams your body, parting your folds and stroking through the slick spilling out of you, dragging it up to your clit.

His voice is closer now. Lips bruising against the shell of your ear. Butchered English. Gaelic. An amalgamation of low whines, and rasping grunts. He sounds more animal than man. A booming thundercloud groaning above you, as if touching you is enough to please him, too. Siphoning it from your body as he presses his fingers against your clit, circling, stroking.

It’s good. So good. And that's the problem, you think. It's easy to give in like this when he pets your pussy like the feeling of your fluttering heat on his hand is enough to make him cum. No one has ever touched you like they were starving for it. Needed it as badly as you did.

The sensation is almost too much. The notion of it getting tangled in the back of your head, looping around the part of you still screaming to run. To go home. To push him away.

(your arms are laden. your tongue is a puddle of mercury in your mouth—)

But just as the pleasure blooming in your belly raises with each pass of his thumb, he pulls away. Slides down, down—

Circles your hole with the tips of his slick fingers, petting with the same desperation he showed your clit until he deems you soft enough for him. He slowly sinks his finger inside of you to the knuckle, stretching your walls around him as he moans into your ear about how good ye feel around him, all tight. Hot. So fuckin' wet, do. So wet fer me—

He pulls out just as slowly, shushing the soft gasp you make when the ridge of his palm catches on your clit.

“Ah told ye, didnae ah? Ah’ll take care’a ye.”

He presses two fingers inside of you as he peppers kisses over your cheek, cooing low about how badly you need him. Only him.

Johnny fucks you slowly on two fingers. Gently. Deeply. Sliding into the last knuckle, petting against your slick walls, like he's owed the privilege and not touching you in your sleep.

He brings you to the edge, takes you right there, and—

Pulls away. His fingers slide down as your hips flit, lifting to make them catch on your clit again. It's embarrassing how badly you want him to touch you. Shameful.

He leans up and catches your mouth in a messy kiss. It's all tongue, wet, no finesse. The wild, unkempt tangle of hair abrades your skin, rubbing it raw as he devours you. Scoops out your tongue with his own, enticing it into his mouth. His teeth close on the thick of it, lips pursing. Sucking on the tip.

His kisses are doglike and obscene. Leaves drool dribbling down your chin, soaking into your neck. He can't seem to decide what he wants to do, so he tries to do it all. Everything. Biting your lips, trying to choke you on his tongue. Slurping up the taste of you until his mouth is stained with it. Beard matted down, drenched.

Despite it all, he's a good kisser. His pace is fast, breakneck. You can't keep up, but you try. Struggling along as he seems hellbent on eating you alive. But it's sporadic. He pauses just long enough to settle into an easy rhythm that makes you arch into it, silently begging for more as he fucks you on his fingers. Nips your tongue as he slides in a third, swallowing the gasp you let out, savouring your moans between his teeth.

Johnny ruins you with just a kiss. Leaves you panting, unmoored. Mouth slack, open wide for him to do what he pleases because the taste of him is divine.

“C’mon,” he urges, spreading his fingers inside of your cunt until you keen, whining his name. “Suck my tongue, bonnie.”

It's disgusting. You do it, anyway.

Your quiet acquiescence makes him moan, hips rutting against you. The hard press of his cock into your skin is bruising. It aches. Your inner thighs are tacky with your slick and the smears of pre-cum he leaves behind as he humps against you.

He sounds mournful when he pulls away, mouth messy with spit, and whispers, “fuck, wish ah could taste ye again, doe—” You don't know what he means until his eyes drop down to his hand, working insistently between your thighs.

Your stomach drops. Plummets. You thought this started when he was touching your chest, when you woke up to his hand on your breast—

“Ye didnae wake when ah did it before,” he says, as if sounding mournful, sad, over the fact that you didn't wake up to him eating your pussy while you were asleep, was normal. “Must’a had too much tea—”

You wish, so suddenly, so viciously, that he'd stop talking. You can't hear this. Can't bear to listen to him confess to all the needling worries that bloomed in the back of your head, ones you stamped down with a heavy foot and a potent sense of guilt, shame, for condemning a man who was just trying to help.

It makes you want to cry.

“Oh, doe, don't cry—” he coos the words out, contrite and conciliatory, but you can feel the way his cock twitches against your thigh. The unmistakable heat mushrooming in his eyes as the sight of tears streaming down your face.

He seems to take it as misery over not feeling his mouth on your cunt, a plaintive assertion he whispers into your ear (poor thing, jus’ wannae feel ma mouth on you, aye? wannae feel me lick yer sweet pussy again?), and decides to rectify your sorrow by kissing his way down your body.

His fingers slip out when he moves, resting them on your knee as he kneels back on his haunches.

You spare a glance toward him, nervous with trepidation, and—

This whole time, his cock had been this phantom sensation against your skin, bruising and hot. Leaving wet smears over your thighs. Hidden from view. But like this, it's the first thing you see as it hangs, heavy and thick, from between his thighs.

The sight is—

Something.

You don't want to think about the heat in your belly. The nervous flit of your heartbeat.

A pearlescent strand dribbles down the weeping, slick head, dropping to the sheets below. The shaft of his cock is similarly drenched, smeared with what seems like a copious amount of precum. It gathers at the base, a startling contrast of thick, black hair and globs of milky white.

Something about it makes you recoil. Almost instinctively, primal.

Your flinch just makes his cock twitch, spitting more out.

The motion seems to unveil more of it to you, adding to the growing unease you feel because his cock is the furthest thing from pretty.

It's flushed a daunting vermillion and purpling like a bruise around the engorged glands. Thickening at the base. Streaked with dark veins that run the length of it, like rivers intersecting and jutting up from his skin. Blotches of red, pink, purple, and peach make up the colouring of it. Marbled like a black eye. A busted lip.

It bobs when he moves. Ugly, garish. You don't want it anywhere near you—

But Johnny’s wet hand on your knee keeps you from moving. Holds you in place as he bends down, resting on elbow to bring his face as close to your pussy as he can get.

Johnny stares—unabashedly—at your bare cunt when he finally settles between your thighs, widening them further to fit the broad stretch of his shoulders. Eyes lit with a heady greed, a hunger, that knocks the air from your lungs.

“Missed ma mouth, didnae ye?”

For a moment, you think he's talking to you. Confusion colours the panic you feel, dampening the dread down until it's flattened by sheer bewilderment when you realise his eyes haven't left your slit.

“Such a bonnie girl,” he purrs, breath ghosting over your cunt. “Been so lonely without me, aye? Poor thing.”

It heats you up from the inside out. The mesmerised, almost unfettered look of pure adoration shaded alongside the raw want on his face twists a sense of desire inside of you. Has anyone looked at you with such naked need on their face? As if the idea of not having a taste was somehow the most agonising thing they could experience? The way Johnny looks at you is enough to make you ache. And with anyone else, having him address your pussy instead of you would be awkward, humiliating, but somehow, him doing it makes you burn white-hot. Makes you want—

“Johnny,” you whisper, paper-thin, and his head shoots up, brows inching high on his brow. You're acutely aware that this is the first thing you've said since this started. Since you woke up to him groping you, touching you, in your sleep. And it's his name. Johnny.

Not no, don't. Stop. Please. Just—

“Johnny.”

It's not consent. You're not sure you're fully capable of doing so right now, if ever. But it's the closest you think you could come to saying yes. Admitting that you want his mouth on you, even though the situation leading up to this still makes something ugly and awful twist in your guts, is as much as you can give. He seems to see this. To know.

But Johnny takes it between his teeth as an unequivocal yes despite that, groaning low in his throat, midnight eyes rolling back into his head. The hands on you tremble. Shake.

He breathes in deeply through his nose, the sound whistling as a great plume of air is forced through small channels, filling his lungs. Perfuming them with the heady scent of you, of sex, clotting in the air.

“Fuck, doe. Gonnae give ye what ye need.”

And then he bends his head, eyes lidded still, half rolled, and without any preamble, glues his lips to your drenched slit, forcing it between your soft folds.

The first touch of his tongue is molten. Soft, tensile, he laves it over the whole of your slit from the sensitive skin beneath your hole, to the crest of your clit. Digs his tongue in, swirling it over and under your folds leaving no part of you untouched. Feasting. Devouring.

It makes you mewl. Your back arches off the sheets, ankle throbbing in a heady, pulsing pain at the sudden movement, adding to the shrill whine in your voice.

He notices, and pets your knee once before sliding his bicep under your leg, looping his hand around to secure your thigh in the crook of his below. Locked in tight. Immoveable. The other he pushes down with the flat of his palm, until your joints ache from the stretch. Your knee is almost flush with the mattress. Widening you further for his searing, eager mouth.

If his kisses are dogish—wet, messy; sloppy with drool—then the way he eats your cunt is foul. Slobbering down his chin, slurping up the mess he makes with a series of chewed-off moans and muffled whines. He paws at you as if he was denied the pleasure of drink for aeons, feasting like a man half-delirious and starved. There's no finesse. No skill to speak of. Just a desperate man lapping at you like a beast. Worshipping you.

He nuzzles his chin and cheeks against your cunt, drenching himself until his beard is matted to his skin. The feeling of his coarse hair grazing your sensitive flesh is overwhelming. Too much. Too ticklish. But—

It feels good.

The contrast of his fleshy tongue rolling over your clit, and the rough brush of his hair when he nuzzles you with the point of his chin, cooing softly about how pretty this little pussy is, getting him all wet, is cataclysmic. The heat floods your belly, and you clench around nothing. Achingly empty. Moaning at the feeling of him bringing you right there, right to the brink, with nothing by the hair on his cheek. It's unreal. Inescapable. Your head drops, mouth lax, open wide as you pant and whimper through the madness of Johnny MacTavish trying to find a way to suck your clit and fuck you with his tongue at the same time. An impossible goal, you know, but he doesn't seem to care about logic or reason with his head buried between your thighs, mouth never leaving you once. He merely nods his head up and down, refusing to pull away.

It's divine. It's worship. It's—

He pushes two of his fingers inside of you, lapping at your taut rim to stem the sting of his sudden intrusion, and you think, for a moment, that you see Nirvana behind your eyelids.

It's embarrassingly how quickly he brings to you the brink, slurping messily as he drills his fingers into your hole, petting against your walls in a mockery of what he'll do to you once he's had his fill. Satiated his hunger with the taste of your pussy.

Something he can't seem to get enough of.

Your thighs draw together, crushing him between your legs. Arching into his mouth, nearly smothering him as you rut clumsily against his face, moaning at the rough scrape of his beard against your skin. You're not normally so aggressive, but he loses himself in it, eyes rolling as he grabs your hips and pulls you closer to his wanting mouth, encouraging you to use his tongue, his lips, to meet your end as you see fit. Riding his face as much as you can with your leg locked tight between his shoulder and bicep.

And it's in between his loud grunts, his whines—almost caterwauling into your slit—where you shatter. The sound of his pleasure, the feeling of his mouth on you—it’s all too much. You break when he sucks your clit into his mouth, keening in the back of his throat as he works another finger into you. It feels good. Too good.

Johnny works you through it. Lets you take, and take as your muscles spasm with the force of your release. Fingers digging into his shoulders, fisting the sheets. He moans along with you, eagerly lapping at your cunt until you whine, begging him to stop. You've had enough. Can't take anymore—

He only pulls away when you melt into the sheets, shuddering with the aftershocks bubbling through your body. Leaning back on his haunches once more, the hair around his mouth slick and wet. The evidence of your pleasure dripping down his chin, droplets still clinging to his beard.

He crawls over you once more, eyes boring into yours. Pits of coal. An endless black hole.

In this strange space, liminal, you lose yourself. Shed pieces of who you were before when he slots his hips between your thighs, cock heavy in his hand, and presses it to your slit.

This is happening. He's going to fuck you.

You wish the thought didn't make your knees fall apart a little wider for him. Make your hips flit, lifting slightly into the air. Eager. Hungry for it. For him.

It's loneliness, you think. Desperation.

Madness is addictive. It feeds itself and infects those around it. Noxious. An all-consuming black hole that eats, and eats. It must have bitten you, too. Dug infectious teeth into your skin, severing flesh to imbed its jowls in your marrow. Clinging. Poisoning you from the inside out.

There's no other reason for why you reach for him, hands sliding over his sweat-slicked skin as he falls into the open brackets of your arms, grunting when the head of his cock catches on your rim. He's a wall of heat. Firm muscles. Your nails dig into the thick cords of his shoulders just to feel the reluctant give of his skin.

Nothing about this man is soft. His waist, his thighs, his chest, his arms, the hard ridge of his cock. It's all unyielding muscle. Burning. Searing into your skin when it drags against his.

“Gonnae fuck ye, doe,” he whispers, words pitching low. Damp wood, felled timber. Rough. You shiver from the heat of it. The warning, the plea; both extremes coalescing together to make truism more potent. Weighty. “Gonnae fuck this pretty pussy, and yer gonnae beg me fer it.”

Despite the surety in assertion, he doesn't wait for you to plead with him to split you apart, taking the initiative instead to sink the head of his cock into you. The stretch stings already, and only his glands have sunk in, a fact he grunts into your ear as he drives forward another inch. Another—

You don't think you've ever been this unmoored before. Rendered this docile. A mere domicile for him to burrow inside of; to carve a home from the sanctum of your walls wrapped tight around him. And carve he does. Splitting you apart as he grunts with the efforting of forcing his cock into you, feeding it further with blunt jerks of his hips, his hands feverish on your skin. Sweat slicked already even though he's barely halfway inside of you.

“Feels so good,” he slurs into your ear, face pinching. Twisting up as pleasure blooms over his brow. “So fuckin’ good, doe, fuck—”

It does. Beyond the blunt pressure of him forcing his cock inside of you, the sting of the stretch, there's an intense, dizzying pleasure in the fullness you feel. In the press of him notching against something inside that makes heat bloom in your belly, turns your bones liquid. It might be the previous climax rendering you oversensitive, but the feeling of him splitting you apart is euphoric.

It's aided by the moans he lets out as you take more and more of him, as if the sound of his pleasure is funnelled into yours. By the look on his face, eyes widened, feverish, as he darts his gaze between your face and your pussy, unable to decide if he wants to watch his cock disappear into you or watch your face, pinched up in pleasure, in flickering pain, as you take him fully.

This sort of bliss, this pleasure, is addicting. Narrowed down to the sharp nudge of his cock grazing places inside of you that light your nerves on fire, burn through your synapses until your thoughts are muddled, mush. No coherency, no logic—just the fat length of him bludgeoning into your walls; the tap of his heavy, full sack slapping against your ass as he finally, finally, roots deep.

He must feel it, too. This strange, overwhelming pleasure loops around your lower belly, twisting itself into knots because when he pushes the last few inches inside of you, he nearly collapses on top of you, his whole body shuddering. Trembling. Presses his damp face to your cheek, matted, slick hair tickling your skin, and groans from deep within his chest at the feeling of you wrapped around him. The noise shivers through you. His pleasure is enough to make you clench down, tightening up around him. Already on the verge and all he did was slide his cock inside of you.

A fact he seems to luxuriate in, huffing shakily into your ear as he quenches himself on the soft, fluttering pulses of your walls around him. Content to grind his hips into yours in shallow gyrations that make your eyes roll into the back of your head. The tension in your belly coiling tighter and tighter, the pleasure ameliorating the shame you'd felt before, burning it into cinders.

As long as he keeps his cock inside of you, as long as he keeps pushing the blunt head into that spot that makes your vision whiteout, you think could cum just like this. Right now—

He doesn't.

Johnny lifts himself off of your chest, elbow coming to rest beside your head, taking the brunt of his weight. His eyes are bright, burning. He stares down at you, and the look of sheer adoration on his face is daunting, overwhelming. It threatens to eat you alive. Devour you whole. Pure rapture. Devotion.

You flush, face stinging with embarrassment. Prickling with unease. No one has ever stared at you like this, so hungrily, and the fact that it's him makes your head spin. Looping endlessly in circles of disbelief and fear.

He might be omnipotent, you think, with the way his lips tug sharply downward, brow bunching together as if he can hear your thoughts, taste your disquiet in the air.

Johnny rolls his hips back slowly, inching out of you with a hum until just the tip remains. The loss has your hands scrambling down his chest, fingers tangling in the coarse, drenched hairs at the soft incline of his belly. The other sliding around the thick breadth of his ribs, nails digging into the slick skin covering his spine. Pressing. Biting.

More, you don't say. Please.

The knot in his brow dissipates. Eases into something almost playful, impish.

“Want ma cock, doe?” He whispers it waggishly, like a cloy secret, and you pretend the tease in his voice doesn't make your heart lurch in your chest. “Didnae anyone teach ye some manners? Gotta ask politely.”

You won't. You won't.

Your reluctance makes him sigh. The chain around his neck swinging when he moves. His hips pull back, and he reaches down with his free hand, and grabs his cock, pulling it out of you, and sliding it against your slit. The head bumps into your clit, and you nearly choke on the gasp that's ripped from your chest. The pleasure is too much, too—

He pulls away, denying you the euphoria of release.

“No, no, please,” you babble, resolve crumbling into ash. “Please, Johnny, please—”

“That’s more like it,” he coos, and lets his cock dip back inside of your fluttering hole, rim stretched taut around him once more. The sting is lessened now, but still there as the thick glands force you open for him. “Sound so pretty when yer desperate for ma cock.”

He leans down, catching your mouth in another sloppy kiss as he slams his cock back inside of you hard enough to bruise. To make you see stars. Cockhead bludgeoning into your cervix in a dizzying amalgamation of pleasure and pain that makes you whine, the whimper snatched up between his teeth as he burrows them into your lip with an echoing groan.

He fucks you hard, working his cock into you at a maddening pace. Bestial, now. All animal. The tenderness from before dissolves into an choppy desperation. An eagerness to seek his own end as you fall to pieces beneath him, shaking from the force of taking him over and over again, each piston, each hard thrust driving the thoughts from your head until all you have left is sensation. An absence of everything except the way he feels above you, inside of you.

Sweat builds up along your hairline, gathers at the base of your spine, and soaks the sheets below. You feel liquid under him. A ragdoll for him to sink his jowls into, to toss around as he likes.

Johnny is all sensation and a cacophony of sound.

He ruts into you clumsily, groaning in your ear. Moaning out how good you feel around him. Pretty pussy made just for him.

“Oh, fuck, doe—” he moans, arching into the next thrust. Drool dribbles down his chin when he curves his spine, dropping his forehead onto your temple. “Feels so good. Feels like my cock is meltin’ instead ye—”

The lewd squelch of his cock pistoning into you seems to echo through the room, louder somehow than the ragged moans that spill from his mouth.

“Been so long,” he shudders against you, rooting his cock deep. Burying himself inside of you as his cockhead bullies into your cervix. The flash of pain is whitehot, blinding, but the bloom of pleasure eats it whole before it can pollute the puddle of bliss pooling in your belly. “Been savin’ it all jus’ fer ye—”

His hand slides from your hip, burrowing between your bodies as rubs at your clit. It feels so good that it nips sharply into pain, into agony. Too much, too much—

But he doesn't relent. Fingers toying, circling your clit in time with each jarring thrust, tightening the coil inside of you until it whines from the tension, the pressure—

It snaps when he growls into your ear—cum fer me, doe; wannae feel this pussy squeezin’ ma cock—and releases in a flood, a deluge of molten heat. Back arching, toes curling. You're barely cognisant of the ache in your injured foot, the throbbing pain. It's swallowed by the surge of endorphins roaring through you, ringing in your ears. Blotting everything out except the way you pulse around the thick of him still lodged deep inside of you.

You barely have time to come down before he starts again, forcing you to take him as he thrusts in harder than before, mindlessly seeking his own end as you gush around him, nails raking across his flesh.

He's babbling above you, spitting words into your ear about how he's going to take care of you. All of you. Take you back to Scotland with him so you can raise your children—

It slices through the haze, ripping a hole through the fog clouding your mind.

“No,” you whimper, devastation flooding your chest alongside the vicious pleasure still rolling around inside of you. “No, please—”

Children, he breathes like you hadn't spoken at all. Lots. Lots of them. Brothers and sisters. Two, maybe three, of each. But he's not picky, bonnie, he'll take whatever you give him. And keep fucking you over and over again until he gets what he wants. A whole family to raise. To surround himself with. Been lonely, you think he says. Needed something to keep him busy.

You don't want this. Can't. But he doesn't stop, doesn't relent. He breathes life into the picture he paints with the soft flutter of your cunt clenching tight around him at words, once again betrayed by your own body.

Despite the nausea that bleeds to the surface at his words, your eyes roll back into your head once more, driven mad with the thunderous pleasure that rips through you as he forces every last inch of his cock into you.

Johnny grinds his hips against yours, moaning, loud and untethered, muscles jerking, twitching, as he cums deep inside of you.

The aftershocks of his pleasure make him tremble, body spasming as he drives himself tight against the seal of your womb. A new heat grows inside of you as Johnny slumps against you, panting in your ear.

“Ah’ll be so good tae ya,” he promises in a rasping growl, shoving his head into the crook of your neck. Gyves close around you as he nuzzles his mouth into your flesh, licking at the sweat that beads on your skin.

“All mine. All fuckin’ mine—” The confessional is tainted with the sickness that leaks from the craggy hole chiselled into the side of his head. Obsessive devotion hewing ruinous dogma into the fibrils of your head. Tenderised, softened, by the blunt, unyielding touch of his hand. A slurry that this polluted notion slips inside, tainting your resolve until it's thickened into his whim. His wants.

You sob into his chest as he wraps you up in his arms, shackled against the man who carved a place inside of you just wide enough for himself to fit. Who spat poison in the hollow crevasses, and called it absolution. Love.

All you can do is heave through corrupted lungs as he smothers you under the weight of his madness.

“No’ gonnae let anyone touch ye. Ah'll kill anyone who tries to tae take ye away from me, doe—”

The conviction in his tone is bound in steel. In feverish blue.

“Ah’ll take care’a ye,” he rasps, voice thick in his throat. “Donnae worry about a thing, doe.”

“Will you let me go?”

He doesn't answer at first. Just digs his nose into your hairline, breathing in deep until the wide breadth of his chest expands across your back. Mulling it over, maybe. Coming up with an excuse for his behaviour. Something to negotiate with on reasons why you shouldn't call the police the moment he does.

And for a moment, a startling, terrible moment, there's hope. The assurance wells on your tongue. Some unfathomable amalgamation of please and i’ll never tell. Maybe you were going to tell him he was an honest man who did something bad. That there was still good within him. All of those hideous clichès bubble up through the cracks—

But it's all dashed when his hand drops down from its perch beneath your bare breasts, sliding over your skin until it curls possessively over your lower belly.

He breathes out and the hope inside you is snuffed under the gale of delusion, his obsession. “Why would ah do a thing like that?” He prompts, and the genuine confusion in his voice makes you shiver, as if the idea of it is so outlandish, so absurd, it negates everything he'd done to get to this point. You feel hollow. But not—

Not empty.

As if he hears the thought thundering in the ruins of your mind, he presses a tender kiss to your temple that you think is meant to be soothing. Shushing you softly when you begin to shake. “After it took me this long to find ye, doe. Am no’ lettin’ ye go fer the world, ken. Yer mine. All mine.”

And then he closes his jowls around your throat.

Time feels artificial here.

You wake up several hours later, groggy and disoriented, but the sun doesn't seem like it moved from where it was perched last night at all. Fixed in place. Lost in some strange, eternal twilight zone where the sun is a warden, watching you tirelessly through the window.

Cardboard cutout hung amongst the stars.

Your ankle aches horribly—an agonising throb. You must have turned in your sleep, jostled it. You're further away from the spot you were last night, too. Rolled over in your sleep, maybe. The burn brings tears to your eyes that you swallow down with a groan.

As you awkwardly settle your leg in a way that hurts slightly less than it did before, you let cognisance slip back in to keep your mind off of the horrible ache that tremors through your bones. Your neck.

Between your thighs—

It's then that you hear Johnny.

He's whistling in the kitchen. You peer out through the crack in the door, catching the broad expanse of his naked back as he works over the stove. Flexing. Muscles bunching. He hums a tune you can't recognise as he scrapes the spatula over the cast iron pan.

His grey sweats sit low on his hips. The divots above the hem—dimples of Apollo, you recall—are stark against the hollow ravine of his spine. You can't help but stare. Gawk. Limned in the soft light of the morning sun that spills through the open window, he looks almost ethereal. Unreal. Like something out of a magazine and not the middle of nowhere in Canada where the sun doesn't set this time of year.

He feels surreal. A man too good to be true. All sculpted musculature that looks like it could just as well be handmade by an amalgamation of both David’s by Michelangelo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. All sharp, angled lines; beautiful in their fluidity.

It's unfair, you think suddenly. To be stuck with a man you feel nauseous thinking about but can’t seem to take your eyes off of. Some paradoxical madness. Retribution for a time in a past life where you swindled fate and got away unscathed. All of your karmic sins pile down on top of you as the events last night flicker past, drenched in seafoam. Ghosts linger in the cracks; in memories.

The phantom weight of something slung over your waist, knotted tight between your breasts. Scorching heat glued to your spine. A heavy hand cradling your lower belly. Words whispered into your nape—

He turns, then. Catches your eye like he knew it was there the whole time. Stands there like the picture of ease, of a satiated man puttering around a small space while his sweetheart lounged in the bed, lazing the day away.

Like this wasn’t illegal. Immoral. He treats you like a lover even though you’d only met less than a day ago—

And already his cum was drying on your inner thighs, thick and sticky. His madness pooling in your head, words uttered into your ear about this cabin he has back home, back in Scotland. He’ll take you there, he said. It’s time he came home, he thinks. His head is on straight again, and he finally feels like he can breathe without shattering into a million pieces—

(He put your hands on his head last night, palm cradling the ugly scar on his temple, and whispered, fervent and insane, ye keep ma head together, doe. Ye make me feel whole again—)

Knows a man, he told you. A good bloke who’d help him get you home, too.

His smile is bright. Blinding.

“Mornin’, doe. Ah made breakfast.”

#johnny mctavish x reader #soap x reader #baby trap anthology #the kinks in this are just #wow #UM proceed with caution lmao

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darkspine10 · 1 month ago

Text

GF Fanfic - Amidst the Pines, Beneath the Falls

Pines Pawns 2.0 (7,311 words) by darkspine10

Chapters: 2/?

Fandom: Gravity Falls

Rating: Teen

The Pines household was in a suburb off from the main high street, but it didn’t take long for them to follow the trail of destruction to the centre of town. Telegraph poles had been toppled over and lay across the street, sparking occasionally. Burst water mains fountained over the tarmac, and a few people stood beside cars that had mysteriously skidded to a halt and broken down. Dipper shivered in the crisp morning air. This winter chill had been another reason he’d been hesitant to indulge Merrise and leave the house. He was still not used to seeing the valley’s trees bare of their leaves. In his memory it was always an eternal summer in these woods.

The devastation continued near the spire of the wooden church on the hill at the end of the street, but the Pines’ destination was a two-storey building beside the river, on the street opposite the history museum. The building was unadorned, appearing abandoned from outside.

As the door opened into a darkened space, a tiny jangling bell above the door rang for only an instant, before Pacifica reflexively reached up and grabbed it. Her fingers clenched tightly around the bell. She let the others inside before gently closing the door. Merrise looked at her quizzically. “Sorry Merrise. Hate that noise.”

Her daughter sympathetically grinned and hugged her side. “That’s ok. I don’t like fireworks either.”

The inside of the building was dimly lit, with curtains over the front windows blocking most of the light from outside. Dipper wandered along aisles covered in all sorts of strange memorabilia such as dreamcatchers, new age crystals, and wooden figurines. One entire row was devoted to t-shirts with magic eye patterns on them, catching his gaze and giving him a headache if he stared too long.

There was no-one to be seen at the main desk, but hearing the sound of a muffled voice Dipper leant over the desk. Lit by the glow of an old CRT tv screen showing a woman with her legs folded in a yoga pose, his sister was sitting in a similar way and staring at the screen. She hadn’t noticed him or the others entering.

Grinning to himself, Dipper tapped Mabel on the shoulder. She flinched and did a forward roll, bringing her arms up in a defensive position. Her eyes lit up when she recognised him through the gloom. “Dipper!” She scrambled to her feet and flicked a switch, lighting up the store and revealing to Dipper’s eyes her sweat pants and a tasteless bright green vest top. A slogan on the shirt read: ‘Note to Self: Be the Change’, in luminescent orange, almost distracting enough to draw the eye away from her tattooed arms.

Mabel threw her arms around her brother, forcing the air out of his lungs. A second later she broke the hug, straightened herself, and coughed into her fist. “Ahem, Boss Mabel at your service, can I interest you in a rainbow coloured fidget spinner?”

“Hello to you too,” Dipper said, gasping from the embrace. Since they’d last met up she’d cut her hair again, sporting an undercut on one side that showed off silver piercings on the same ear.

“Aunt May!” Merrise ran up and Mabel picked her up into a spin.

“Hey there, take it easy kiddo. We saw each other like last week.”

Merrise squeezed tightly. “I know, but it’s still nice to see you.” She let go and started wandering around the aisles, her attention constantly diverted by all the objects for sale.

Pacifica leant on the desk. Mabel gave a little wave to baby Leah, who gurgled happily on seeing her aunt. “So this is that secret project you were working on over Christmas,” Pacifica said, glancing around the store admiringly. “Setting this place up. Is that what you do now, you run an indie store?”

“Not just any indie store, Paz, this is- Hold on.” The woman on the tv was continuing to give yoga instructions. Mabel kicked the eject button with her toe and the black tape slid out, plunging the screen into static.

“Isn’t VHS a dead medium?” Dipper asked.

“Uh, is paper a dead medium just because tv became a thing?” she replied snarkily as she placed the tape on a shelf.

“I mean, not really,” he mumbled. “You can still read books without relying on an outdated machine from thirty years ago.”

“Anyway,” Mabel said, shaking her head and spreading her arms out wide, “welcome to Pines Pawns! Your all-in-one place to go for art supplies, kooky knick-knacks, and outsider culture.”

“This is so you,” Dipper said, folding his arms and smiling. “Your own little hippie outpost.”

Mabel nodded proudly and perched on a stool behind the desk. She put on a pair of butterfly glasses, her eyes boggling out from behind the circular rims. “Newly opened this week, and Zera and I have already had a bunch of tourists come through.” At the mention of Zera, Dipper briefly glanced at Mabel’s hand. Seeing her wedding ring being worn was still something of novelty. She’d only started wearing it out in public recently, having previously kept her marriage a secret. Now she was out and proud. Getting married to an alien had taken more getting used to for Dipper and Pacifica.

He was about to ask where her wayward wife was, before Mabel noticed him standing around awkwardly and said, “Take a look around.” At her command, Pacifica and Dipper joined Merrise in exploring the store. Their daughter’s attention was fixed on a number of shimmering rocks in a glass cabinet. “Over there’s the crystal shelf. We got kyanite, azurite, labradorite. Plus, more than half the cast of Steven Universe I’m pretty sure. There’s a shipment of plushies coming in next week, ooh, and we’re also hoping to open a co-op food bank to help the homeless. I got the name from Grunkle Stan and Ford’s parent’s place. They used to sell antiques and jewellery. This isn’t technically a pawn shop, but I wanted to carry on the family legacy.”

“By selling cheap tourist souvenirs and new age crap,” Pacifica said, though her tone wasn’t harsh and she snuck a small grin. She picked up a snowglobe containing a miniature replica of the valley, floating cliffs included. “It’s like you’ve recreated the Mystery Shack gift shop through your own lens.”

“Uh-huh. I made an arrangement with Soos, so I’m not stepping in on his turf. My merchandise doesn’t overlap with his, and I’ve got fliers to lead people to the Shack too.”

“How very professional.” Pacifica’s critical eye roved over the store, but she was genuinely impressed by Mabel’s effort. A lot of work must have gone into acquiring all the merchandise on display. No wonder her sister-in-law had received so many ‘hush-hush’ messages when they’d been together last. “So why were you down on the floor stretching out? You weren’t ‘visiting the astral plane’ again, were you?” Pacifica made quote marks with her fingers, remembering her tour of the arcane study-lounge Mabel had created in her house for just such a purpose.

Mabel shrugged. “We’re usually quiet this time of day. No biggie.” She grabbed a plastic jar from the desk and started eating a cookie from within. When Pacifica raised an eyebrow, judging her for the high-calorie content of the snack, she waved her off. “What, so I can be a bit of a slob sometimes. I need positive reinforcement when I exercise!”

“You call that exercise?” Dipper said, laughing to himself. “Wow, you learn a few basic spells and suddenly you’re relying on them for everything and letting yourself go. Pretty soon I’ll outclass you as the Alpha Twin, in strength at least.”

“Yeah, you wish,” she mumbled as she chewed. “It’s great that you guys could make it over here at last. I’ve been dying to show this place off. I figured that since I’m settling down at last that I could finally have a go at running place like this.”

“Mabel, this is awesome, really.” Dipper put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll always admire your chameleonic ability to resettle in a way that feels totally natural. Anytime I’ve moved house it’s been a major upheaval.”

“Chameleonic?” Mabel sneered. “You don’t have to speak like one of your journal entries, Mr ‘Author-Man’. You’re right about moving though, your place still looks like a show home.”

“Only because we spent the last few months repairing it from a Firebird attack.” He wasn’t going to mention today’s damage needing repair, he’d get to that soon enough. For now he wanted to let Mabel have her chance to show off to the family. “Look at you though. All that moving around you did as a protestor, you can just rock up and it’s like you’ve lived in a place all your life. Seattle, Sapphire Bay, that time during college when you went to Haven Springs.”

“Ah, that last time I was just chasing the girl who worked in the flower shop. Puppy love. With Zera I’m making a real go of things. This is my new pad from here on out. Besides, it’s not like it didn’t take effort. All the purchasing arrangements and redecorating and buying stock. Plus you know how hard it was for me to choose to come live in the Falls.”

Dipper looked left and right, making sure the others were out of earshot. “You sure you don’t need any help from us? I mean, Pacifica-”

“Yeah yeah, just cause she’s conventionally attractive you think she can man a desk better than me or Zera?”

Dipper scowled. “I meant financial help, Pacifica’s a wizard with that stuff. She can help you balance the books on this place. It can’t have come cheap. What, did you sell off the Stan O’ War II or something?”

Mabel waved a hand. “Oh no, nothing like that. She’s still moored in Seattle. It was easy, you know Chiu-Tech? Well Candy tells me anytime they’re about to drop a new product and we buy up stocks on the cheap. That’s how I got the windfall.”

“Mabel, that’s- that’s insider trading! You can’t just do that!”

“Lo siento, no hablo inglés.” Mabel winked at him, then nonchalantly fiddled with the pieces on a chess board she had laid out on the desk.

Dipper shook his head, both shocked and amazed by his sister’s audacity. Then again, he wasn’t really one to judge. He’d been pinching every penny for the last few months. He liked to say he was technically on paternity leave, though he’d been out of stable work for over two years now. His only income was from selling photographs to local newspapers and wildlife magazines, as well occasional freelance support work for the observatory he’d worked at while living in Trenton. With Pacifica’s intermittent writing and illustrating career having barely gotten off the ground, the couple were in somewhat precarious straits when it came to finances.

“You really are something else, Mabel,” he muttered.

She flashed a glorious smile that almost won him over. She dropped it and craned her neck when she saw Pacifica leaning over one of the shelves along the wall of the store. “What you got there, sister? Careful not to touch the merch, it’s all brand new.”

Pacifica stood up straight and held out the silver pendant she was wearing. It was in the shape of a Pine Tree - long ago gifted to her by Dipper - and it was spinning around in the air of its own accord.

“Ooh, I know what that means,” Merrise said, hopping up and down excitedly. She stared at the same set of shelves but couldn’t see anything that intriguing. There were paperback guidebooks and postcards, more crystals and trinkets, but nothing outright odd. “What is it?”

Slyly grinning, Mabel cracked her knuckles. “Oh, that. Wha-bam!” Mabel dramatically slammed her finger down onto a button behind the counter. Nothing happened. She rolled her eyes. “One second.” With her elbow she thumped the countertop. A creak of mechanisms sounded, and one of the shelves along the wall rotated. “That did it!”

The items that replaced those there before were superficially similar, easily mistaken for the same brand of novelty trinket. But with a keen eye, Dipper came over to examine them. A row of crystals now sparkled with crackling energy. Potion bottles contained mixtures he knew would do more than act as a placebo. In the place of the guidebooks were scrolls, covered in arcane etchings and symbols. He looked back to see his sister barely holding back a toothy smile of satisfaction.

Pacifica’s pendant was no ordinary piece of jewellery. He’d enchanted it himself to act as a detector for magical and otherworldly auras. It was now rotating even faster, reacting to the contents of the shelves. Pacifica picked up a blue gem and held it up to a strip of sunlight. As the light passed through the gem, it landed on the case of a relaxing nature sounds CD which began to gradually reduce in size. She rotated the crystal until the CD started growing again, then put it down. “Thought so,” she declared. “This stuff is real.”

“Really magic,” Merrise intoned, her gaze darting here and there to take in all the objects on the shelf. A jar filled with coagulating purple fluid extracted from a crashed alien spaceship. Small circuit boards that had once been vital components in the portal below the Shack. It was like coming face to face with a live exhibit of rare artefacts from one of the journals.

“Where’d you get all this stuff?” Dipper asked, fighting the urge to compare this catalogue to his own journal.

Mabel shrugged. “We found most of it together over the years on our adventures. I figured I might as well offer some to the discerning magically inclined customer. Or maybe we can cater to the magical folks who live in Gravity Falls. They might want to trade some of this stuff.” Without warning she pressed the secret button, flipping the shelf around. Dipper and the others had to pull their hands away quickly to avoid getting caught up in the mechanism. “That’s only a small sample of our merchandise. Trust me, most of this stuff is fake. If I learned anything running the Shack it’s that the schmucks eat this stuff up.”

Pacifica strolled over to the desk “Saleswoman, artist, purveyor of magical goods. You’re a regular polymath,” she said, impressed by the store’s presentation.

“Well, the poly part’s correct at least. That reminds me…” Mabel tapped the tips of her fingers together. “I don’t suppose you guys have met anyone new passing through town have you? Zera and I might be on the lookout, and if you can help-”

“No Mabel, I’ve already said, I’m not helping you find another partner,” Pacifica said in deadpan, trying to convey how unappealing she found the idea. “I’ll let you keep your relationship drama to yourself, thank you very much.” She couldn’t hide a small blush, which made her husband and daughter start to giggle at one another. “Anyway, we came here for a reason.” She flicked her eyes between the twins.

Dipper led Merrise back to the desk. “Right, yes, enough of all that. Mabel, we need your help: Rumble McSkirmish is back!”

His sister had a vacant expression. “Who?”

Dipper frowned. “You don’t remember? No, I guess you weren’t with me that day.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, I know, he was around during Weirdmageddon.”

Mabel pursed her lips. “Lots of people were around during that. We had to share our bedroom with half-starved unicorns and the Multi-Bear. I didn’t have time to memorise everyone!“

“Well, nevermind. Anyway, he’s back with Giffany-”

“Oh my god!” Mabel jumped back and toppled off her chair. In a tangle of limbs she pulled herself upright. “Uh, sorry about that.”

Merrise was at her side with a concerned expression. “Is she really all that bad?”

“You’ve probably not seen her at her most possessive.” Mabel shivered. “How’d she come back from the oven anyway? I thought she was melted for sure.”

Merrise was slightly shocked by the revelation that the twins had thrown Giffany in a fire, but Dipper didn’t have time to rehash the past. “I tried to fob my precocious daughter off with a video game, that’s what happened. Apparently it's a crime worthy of karmic punishment these days.”

“What does this chick have against Mr Ramirez anyway?” Pacifica asked. “That guy seems like he could hardly hurt a fly.”

Dipper steepled his fingers. “Let’s just say that Giffany wants to be his ultimate waifu. Melody’s an inconvenient obstacle, their kids too. Meanwhile Rumble will fight anyone he considers an enemy. The result is a highly unstable, paranoid obsessive, who’ll lash out against anyone or anything that gets in its way.”

“So two super-dangerous video game peeps fused into a deadly hybrid?” Mabel looked thoughtful, then shrugged. “Sounds like an average Tuesday. How do we stop them?”

“I’ve got some ideas. There’s one easy option for defeating Rumble: we let him beat one of us to a pulp so he gets a game over. Not very enticing, that one.”

“I can see why you came to me for help,” Mabel said in a dry tone. “Have you got the cd disc that Giffany came on? Or Mr McSkirmish’s cabinet I guess.”

“Nada, they’ve abandoned physical form and gone fully digital.”

“No handy phylactery to smash then.” Mabel stuck out her tongue, deep in thought. Merrise watched her elders closely, curious to see the moment when an idea would strike.

Pacifica drummed her fingers on the desk, wanting to help find a solution but with no experience of this specific type of threat. “I could offer to play them at something. Some kind of trivial contest. I could probably beat them, even if I’m rusty. What about-”

A muffled voice from the back of the store interrupted Pacifica’s stream of thought. “I’m back, at last. Don’t ask me why it took so long.” The voice was familiar to the Pines, and they weren’t even slightly surprised when a fish-like alien woman brushed through a beaded curtain at the back of the store with a cardboard box in hand. Zera, Mabel’s wife from another world, wore a white vest top, showing off her ample arms which Mabel swooned at. It was clear one half of the partnership was making up for her wife’s slovenly ways. Zera dumped the box behind the counter and flipped one of the knotted tentacles that passed for hair over her shoulder. Water droplets ran down every inch of her exposed, scaly skin. “That is the absolute last time I help you shift mystic talismans from the Crawlspace. The haggling took me forever, I’m not even sure this shit is worth all that- Oh, we’re not alone.”

Mabel aimed finger guns at Zera. “Hey baby, look who’s finally visiting.” With some pride she spun on her seat to aim at her brother’s family.

Zera smiled at her in-laws, revealing rows of pointed teeth. “Hey kid,” she said, ignoring Dipper and Pacifica and going directly to Merrise. “How’s school treating you on this planet?”

“School’s boring,” she said, frowning before defiantly grinning. “That’s why we’re here, on an adventure!”

“I like to hear it.” She winked at the girl and then leant on the counter next to Mabel. “So what is it this time? A repressed memory demon? Incomprehensible multiverse creatures? Is it stranger than I am?” She winked at Merrise again, drawing out a giggle.

“That depends,” Dipper said, “It’s not alien or magical, but it’s some kind of technology gone wrong.”

Zera feigned disinterest and examined the talismans she’d brought in. “How mundane. Nothing remotely as exciting as me.”

“Nothing is,” Mabel said dreamily with her head slumped in her hands, eyes fixed on Zera.

“Ahem,” Pacifica coughed into her fist. “If we could get back to the pixels rampaging down main street?”

“Oh, right. Well this is the perfect opportunity to show you my other cool project.” Mabel hopped off the stool and kissed Zera on the cheek. “Watch the store for me, we might get some old ladies once the bingo hall closes. I’ll be back for dinner. Now, follow me you guys.” As she went she threw on a pink jacket that had been lying in the corner, covering up the colourful pattern of tattoos up both of her arms. Emblazoned across the two halves of the jacket was a rainbow streak, trailing stripes of purple, green, and orange that culminated in a bright yellow star.

She headed for the rear of the store. Dipper was already craning his neck back there, trying to see past the curtain. “I was wondering where Zera popped up from.”

“I don’t know if this is cooler than having my own store, but it’s still pretty awesome.” Through the curtain she entered a cramped storeroom with bare cement walls. In the middle of the room was a square metal hatch, rusted brown with age. The hatch was lying open, and Mabel started descending into the hole down a ladder bolted to the wall.

“Oh great,” said Pacifica, sneering. “You’ve got access to the sewers. What a joy.”

Mabel just laughed and shook her head. “Come on, you’ll see.”

“Have fun, May,” Zera called disinterestedly. She had already moved on to picking through the talismans and playing around with the sparkling points of light that emanated from the box.

Merrise was next to follow her aunt, eagerly scrambling down the ladder excited to see where it led.

As Dipper put his foot on the first rung, Pacifica touched his arm. “If we’re going into danger we should leave Leah here. She could get hurt.”

Mabel’s voice came echoing from down the tunnel. “Don’t worry, Z’s great with babies.” Dipper raised a single eyebrow but didn’t say anything. Pacifica unslung her daughter from her pouch and handed her over. Leah was pliant in her aunt’s arms, though Zera held her outstretched.

Pacifica waved goodbye to her daughter, before her smile dropped and she put up with the unglamorous task of descending the ladder. Dipper was last to leave. “Keep good care of her. Hopefully we won’t be gone too long.”

“You can trust me, Dipper. Good luck stopping… whatever it is.”

Dipper disappeared from sight down the ladder. His head then popped back up and he pointed two fingers at his eyes, then back to her. Zera nodded and rolled her eyes, assuring him she’d be careful.

The instant his head disappeared down the hatch again, Leah burst into tears. “Easy does it, it’s just your Aunty Z.” Zera smiled uneasily, revealing rows of sharp fangs which only made the baby’s cries louder. She ineffectively bounced the squealing baby at arms length. “Come on kid, work with me here.” She balanced Leah on one arm and reached into the nearby box. Dangling one of the talismans she’d bargained for in front of the girl’s face seemed to calm her nerves. Zera sighed. “They’d better be back soon. Mammal babies are so helpless. You know, I was a tadpole for only a week. True story.”

At the base of the ladder it was pitch black. Mabel pawed along the brick wall until she turned a switch that sounded with a clunk. A dim passageway of concrete walls was illuminated, stretching perpendicular to the store as far as the family could see. Metal support struts formed archways, while jagged pipes snaked along the wall. Merrise cautiously strolled forwards, fascinated by the prospect of what lay at the end of the tunnel. Dipper tapped the stone wall with a pen and turned to his sister. “You didn’t build this.”

Mabel folded her arms. “How do you know? Maybe we did it on the quiet, through black-market contractors.”

“No, I mean you really didn’t build this. The cracks in the concrete, the weathering and rust on those pipes, all of it leads me to assume that this tunnel is over fifty years old.” His eyes glanced upwards and he traced the direction of the tunnel. “Looks like it goes under the main high street, to have it installed you’d probably have disrupted the road for a week or more, but there haven’t been any reports of traffic issues.” He flashed a wry smile. “And for another, that safety sign on the wall behind you has a 1970’s copyright notice on it.”

“Oh,” she said, deflated, turning to look at the sign before shrugging and skipping after her niece. “Zera and I found this place when we were digging around in the backroom.”

“Fascinating,” Pacifica said icily as she trudged slowly along the tunnel. Her eyes darted frantically to the ceiling, as blizzards of dust drifted to the floor with every step. She didn’t trust the roof not to cave in at any moment.

They heard Merrise’s voice echo from ahead. “Is it this way?” She’d come to a red safety door along the right wall, at what appeared to be the halfway point of the underground passage.

Mabel shook her head. “That leads to an accessway for the river. It goes underground for a little while before showing up again on the surface. Zera uses it to cool off and rehydrate sometimes. But that’s not the main show.”

She led the others onwards. Some of the lightbulbs above were flickering or broken. They walked in and out of darkness, placing hands on the wall to keep in a straight line. Stepping over a pile of bricks, Mabel entered into an even dimmer space. She pulled a box of matches out of her jacket and struck one. Her face was lit by an orange glow for only a second before she cursed and dropped the match. Plunged into darkness again, the family could only hear her struggling to slide out another match. A swift strike and they were lit again. “Ow!” Mabel waved her hand and sucked on a finger as the match smouldered on the ground.

She was about to try for a third time, when Pacifica held up her palm. “No, please let’s not go through that again.” A solid streak of light nearly blinded Mabel. Pacifica held up her phone’s flashlight, allowing Mabel to successfully conjure a flame, which she used to set light to a wooden sconce set into the wall.

Satisfied, Mabel blew out her match and put the box in her jacket pocket. She surprised the others by slapping her forehead and pulling out a lighter from the same pocket. “Whoops, forgot I had this.” The steady flickering of the flame was as nothing to the powerful phone torch, but was still enough to throw Pacifica’s scowl into relief.

Dipper blinked as his eyes adjusted, and noticed that the walls were now rougher, made of large stone bricks. A twinge of memory struck him. “Hey, are we where I think we are?” Mabel winked at him and he felt a buzz of excitement.

“Well I’ve got no clue.” Pacifica’s thumb swiped on her phone screen. “GPS is a bust, no signal down here.” Her eyes looked upwards to the ceiling. “Wonder how many layers of earth are between us and the sky? We could be anywhere.”

“Let me open your eyes.” Mabel wagged her finger and led them down a short flight of stairs to a velvet curtain, which she delighted in splitting apart theatrically. “Ta da!” They were in a circular chamber with a low arcing roof suspended by columns. A small pool of water had been excavated from the exact centre of the room. There were further torch sconces and she went around spreading the fire from her lighter.

While Merrise ran around the room, poking her nose into every nook and cranny, Pacifica folded her arms, not deigning to stroll into the dark. “Care to explain this place?” Her voice echoed, and she was vaguely unsettled by finding an entire space like this had existed right under her nose all her life.

“We’re underneath the history museum, this was all built by McGucket,” Dipper explained, “Along with help from the Society of the Open Eye-” He shook his head. “Sorry, they were the Blind Eye back then. Forgot they had a rebrand.”

“Those memory-wiping cultists? More ‘first summer’ nonsense.” Pacifica frowned, aggrieved at once again having missed a vital formative adventure in her husband’s life. “Well, if you had to run around in these mouldy old catacombs I’m glad I missed it.” She hoped her haughty air would cover up her minor disappointment from the others.

“You could have a great Halloween party down here,” Merrise’s voice echoed, and Pacifica panned her light to make sure she didn’t get lost down a hidden side passage. “Mom, get a picture of me under this arch!”

Mabel proudly slapped one of the columns, sending another cascade of dust. “A secret cult HQ right on my doorstep. Is that the coolest, or what! I figure they must have used the building over the road as some kind of backup entrance, to get down here without anyone in the museum seeing. Now it’s all mine! We can get up to the street this way.”

“That would be great,” said Pacifica, who was the least impressed by this brick dungeon. “Well, it would be great if we were any closer to stopping the rampaging love couple up there.”

“Oh yeah,” Mabel said, frowning. “We still haven’t come up with a solution. Dipper, what about you? Any genius ideas popped into your head thanks to my presence?”

He was off in the corner, his eyes tracing a pipe affixed to the wall. “Actually, now that you mention it… do you remember the way to the Hall of the Forgotten?”

“Absolutely, broseph. Sígueme and I’ll show you the way.” The route Mabel led them on seemed like an inexplicable labyrinth of passageways. She had a serene confidence guiding them as she took several turns with seemingly no indication of direction.

Finally they reached an arched tunnel that dead-ended at a thick set of wooden doors. The shape of an eye was moulded across the two doors, with a red cross painted over both. Mabel heaved casually against the doors and Merrise slipped inside as soon as there was a gap wide enough. She gawped at a carved statue of a hooded figure, arms outstretched, standing at the far end of the room. Someone had placed one of the blue and white caps from the Mystery Shack on the statue’s head, and it sat at a crooked angle.

Surrounding the statue were hundreds of small glass tubes, some placed upright around the statue’s base reverentially, others piled into huge messy heaps. Merrise picked one up but it was hollow. There were two more torch sconces in the room, but Mabel had evidently grown tired of relying on Pacifica’s phone or peering through the gloom. She turned on a makeshift extension cord on the floor and an LED lamp installed in the corner bathed the room in a steady electric glow. Merrise’s gaze was drawn upwards. The roof was tangled with a maze of circular glass pipes, each one leading from an unseen source and turning ninety degrees down before dead-ending in this alcove.

Dipper had seen it all before, and ignored everything else to go straight to a brass machine with a darkened screen lurking in the darkness at the edge of the room. He inspected it briefly before nodding to himself. “Perfect.” Pacifica blinked as she was last to enter the room, but had barely a second to take it in before her husband snapped his fingers. “Mabel, I need you to run back to your store, on the double.”

“Righto!” She saluted, then spoke in a hushed voice, “Uh, what for?”

“A little self-help.”

Mabel’s expression widened with understanding, and she shot off like a meteor back out of the hall. Pacifica turned to Dipper with a single eyebrow raised. “Are you being cryptic for a reason or do you just get off on it?”

He smirked. “Bit of both. By which I mean I’ve got an answer for our rogue video-game problem.”

Merrise heard this and halted her digging through the glass tubes to bound over the scattered piles to her parents. “What’s the plan then?”

“A little taste of their own medicine. We’re going retro.”

The townsfolk of Gravity Falls were in a panic. When an 8ft tall mass of pixels careened down the high street, their instinct was to ignore the disturbance. It was the town’s motto after all, to never mind all that and to let the weird be weird. Preferably out of sight and mind. But this was too much to ignore, especially once the multi-limbed hybrid started lobbing fireballs and bolts of static around the place. The pair of fused game characters had ambled towards the old wooden church at the end of the street, lingering near the statue of Nathaniel Northwest, still dusted with clumps of snow.

“I think it is time to admit that I do not know where we are,” Rumble McSkirmish said no less enthusiastically than he said anything else. “All I know is that Soos or this Shack are not located in this vicinity.”

A second mouth tore its way up the creature’s melded face. This one spoke in the high-pitched rhythm of Giffany. “It must be here somewhere!” she yelled in a staccato, before frowning. “Anything outside the mall is unfamiliar to me.”

“Likewise! Hee-yah! Yah!” He let off some more punches mindlessly, shaking Northwest’s statue. A layer of snow fell from the shoulders of the town’s so-called founder. “We need an electrical connection, some way to bridge the gap.”

Giffany caused their joined eyes to squint. “All this organic greenery makes me sick. Find us a physical construct to merge with, now!”

“Yes, beloved, of course.”

“And don’t get snappy with me!”

“Hey, you two!” The pair twisted their neck 360 degrees. Across the street was a blonde woman, with her hands in her pockets and a nonchalant slouch. “Mind the statue, it’s a family heirloom. On second thoughts, go ham, smash it up, see what I care.”

“What do you want, puny weakling?” Rumble grunted, walking to loom over the person who’d dared interrupt him mid-rampage.

She could only shrug. “I’m Pacifica. I hear you two are the best. Best fighting champion, best fantasy girlfriend, whatever. But you’ve got no competition.”

“Competition?” This was Giffany’s shrill voice. “We already know we’re superior!”

“Prove it. You want a real challenge? I’m an elite gamer,” the woman said. Pacifica outwardly grinned, while inwardly cringing hard. She hoped this plan would work without having to say such embarrassing trite for much longer. The things she did for her husband. “Catch me if you can, losers.” She broke into a run, down the high street towards the river.

Rumble and Giffany, angered by this show of irreverence, set off in an ungainly pursuit. They were decidedly unbalanced, with Giffany’s delicate legs holding up a muscly torso and far too many arms to stay stable. Pacifica had the advantage, keeping ahead as her enemies lolloped after. She crossed the bridge over the brook and backed into the museum. “Better hurry, this is a limited time only sale, last chance to preorder.”

To the game characters, this sounded exactly like a siren call. Ignoring all other objectives, they hurtled into the museum’s entrance, knocking one of the doors of its hinges. A woman manning the reception desk looked up. “What the?” She could only watch, mouth agape, as the rage-fuelled creature stomped past, knocking displays aside to chase their quarry. Pacifica made an inward note to try and explain things to the harried receptionist, but this would have to come later, after more pressing matters.

“That’s it, Rumble ‘n Gif, follow me, this way.” She made her way through the corridors of the museum, past displays of frontier life, covered wagons and stuffed bison, tracing the path of one of the pneumatic tubes running along the roof. She went slowly enough so that the pair never lost sight of her. Arriving at the room which housed the secret entrance to the underground passageways she pressed a hand to one of the carvings of an eye nailed around the room. With a hiss, the fireplace in the corner slid away into the wall, unsealing a staircase. She took the steps two at a time, ready to conclude her role as bait.

When she reached the Hall of the Forgotten her daughter was waiting, poised for action by the closed doors. “Are they coming?”

“Hot on my heels. Has Mason got everything ready?”

Merrise nodded and squeezed through the narrow door gap into the hall. Pacifica waited, her back to the door, catching her breath and hoping this crazy scheme would pay off. It was hardly the first time she’d put her faith in her husband’s ingenuity.

From around the corner came Giffany and Rumble, hunched over in the narrow tunnel. They were wide enough to get wedged, only able to advance by dragging themselves using their multiple arms. “Another rival to defeat,” cried both the voices in tandem, confused and tired from the chase. They fell to their knees in front of Pacifica, flickering as if out of energy, and insulated from electricity and internet signal down in the depths.

“Almost there,” Pacifica teased, before slipping behind the door.

Summoning up a wave of energy, Giffany and Rumble surged forwards, knocking the door aside. The room beyond was bathed in darkness, lit only by a faint and shaky light. Across the room was a tv screen, crackling with static. Suddenly a face appeared, joined by a voice partly lost in hiss. “F-f-fixin’ it with Soos!”

The four eyes lit up. There he was, Giffany’s idol, as pure and beautiful as she remembered from her years of dusty inertness. His head hovering amidst a halo of crackling green light. “Finally.” Her voice had begun to fray, echoing and fading. Various clips of Soos played out on the screen. Rumble used a powerful leap to cross the chamber. The pair fell in front of the dark glass screen right when Soos’s face melted away. The screen showed a static blizzard again, which the two constructs found reassuring. Almost without consciously thinking, they dissolved into a shower of pixels that flowed towards the screen. Out of the haze, they could be seen emerging onto the screen, now separated again, taking up only a few inches.

“What, where?” Giffany looked around, unable to see her Soos. Her face quickly expanded to fill the screen. “No, let us out!”

Still miniature in comparison, Rumble looked around, fear and loss etched in his well-defined cheekbones. “A trick? No, how can this be?”

“And, cut there.” Dipper flicked on the lamp and stepped over to the fuzzy image of the pair, now contained.

“Dipper Pines?” Rumble said, aghast. “We will simply break free and emerge once more, to become victorious!”

“And rip out your beating heart along the way!” Giffany shrieked, her hands pawing against the glass from within.

“Not if you two end up on an even more primitive piece of technology. Say bye bye, guys.”

“No!” The pair screamed out in defeat as Dipper switched the screen off.

He could hear the tubes inside the screen powering down with a fading hum. Satisfied, Dipper kicked the table that the brass contraption rested upon and it spat out a black box from the centre mechanism. Gingerly stepping close, Merrise grabbed the box out of the machine and tapped her fingers on the black casing. “Is it over? Are they gone?” She played around with the spinny white circles embedded in the side of the box, then stared down it lengthwise. “Is this thing supposed to be doing something?”

“What you’ve got there is a videotape, a VHS,” Dipper said.

“A video? How do I make it play?” She jabbed at the case again to no avail. “Where’s the touchscreen?”

“It doesn’t- kids these days. It’s not a touchscreen. Or any kind of screen, it’s a tape, you have to insert into a player hooked up to a tv.”

She squinted uncomprehendingly at the tape, before accepting this and smiling. “Cool.”

“It’s also now a dangerous and cursed object,” Pacifica said, grabbing the video out of her daughter’s hands. Merrise pouted, but deferred to her mother’s caution. “They’re really stuck on this old thing?”

Dipper nodded. “Normally a simple CRT monitor or VCR recorder setup wouldn’t capture the complex code of Rumble or Giffany. But this is a slightly more advanced interface, designed to process and play back stored memories via electrical impulses.”

“One of McGucket’s inventions?” Her husband nodded, and she let out a sigh of relief. “Then it’s all over, hooray. Thank goodness your sister happens to be a hoarder who never throws anything out no matter how outdated.” She twiddled one of the sprockets, watching the tape within spool and unspool. When the shiny black strip caught the light she could see Giffany and Rumble’s frozen expressions of anger and defeat. “What do we do with them now?”

“Couples therapy, I think.” Pacifca scowled, not appreciating the joke. “I’m hesitant to wipe the tape. Those two might have been crazy, but we tried burning Giffany once and she came back good as new. Best to leave them stuck on this thing.” Dipper wrote a note in his journal, intending to deal with the pair more decisively at a later date. “I’m sure we can find somewhere safe to store them. Probably in a cardboard box we can shove in a closet and forget about for another decade or two.”

Pacifica leant against Dipper, nuzzling against his cheek. “Sounds fine to me.”

He crossed his arms and smiled at her. “You’re all heart, Paz.”

“You know me so well.”

“Don’t I just.”

Merrise pushed between her parents, and interrupted their flirting. “Why don’t we leave the tape down here?” She took the tape and tossed it onto a nearby pile of tubes which rattled as they were knocked out of place.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Dipper said, stroking his chin. “They’ll remain insulated from electricity and internet signal down here in the depths. A perfect prison.”

“That’s my perfect girl,” Pacifica said, ruffling Merrise’s hat. “Come on, let’s get out of here, I need to see some sunlight again, and to make sure Leah hasn’t gotten into any trouble with her aunts.”

Dipper turned off Mabel’s LED tower, then put his arms around the girls and led them towards the exit “Another adventure complete. You know, this makes me want to see if we have any tapes lying around in a box somewhere at home. Might be fun to see if there are any home movies on them.”

“So,” Merrise said, “These tapes are like those DVD things you have at home?”

“Exactly. We can’t watch everything online. You can pry my physical media collection out of my cold, dead hands.”

“Now who’s the philistine?” Pacifica said, nudging Dipper in the ribs. “All we need to figure out now is how to pay to fix the smashed wall in our living room.”

“A loan from Aunt May?” Merrise put on her most adorable look, and her parents shared a look of teasing exasperation.

Dipper shook his head in mock weariness. “You’re devious, you know that?”

Merrise flashed a wicked grin. “I only get it from the best.”

The door to the chamber fell shut behind them, now home to one more memory that was best left forgotten.

#gravity falls #gravity falls fanfic #dipper pines #mabel pines #pacifica northwest #rumble mcskirmish #giffany

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theinvisiblewoman73 · 3 months ago

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Chapter 2 - The Market

He’d rather have been on patrol.

Even though it was freezing outside, the air icy enough to make your breath a cloud of mist, he’d rather have been doing that. Anything but this. This being the regular weekly market. Ellie, though, had insisted that he hadn’t been pulling his weight when it came to community activities and had needled him and nagged him until he had finally agreed to help her out on one of the stalls, eventually just to stop her from going on at him.

He knew she was trying to get him to socialise, to meet people and engage more in Jackson’s community, and he almost appreciated the gesture. Except that it meant he had to socialise. And he hated it.

———

He and Ellie had come back to Jackson in the late spring. They’d reached the top of a steep climb and seen Jackson spread out in the valley below, nestled amongst the green where before, when they left, it had been frozen into the landscape. The air was just starting to get warm, the early mornings and nights still fresh, but summer was on its way.

They had walked down together, into the valley, and he had felt Ellie’s mood lift for the first time since Silver Lake. She had been a shadow of herself after that day. So much so that he’d worried that she might not recover. Their roles had been reversed from then on - where once it was Ellie who had provided light relief in a constant attempt to cheer him up, he suddenly found himself with the job of trying to get the old Ellie back. It was he who looked for conversation topics to interest her, tried to cheer her up with jokes and stories, tried to tempt her waning appetite with pilfered treasures they found along the way. Even tinned ravioli had failed.

But as they walked down towards the wooden gates of Jackson, she seemed brighter. He tried to avoid thinking it was because she would finally have more people around her, and just tried to be happy too. Tried to think about what she needed, as a teenage girl who had been through so much in her short life.

They’d been welcomed back to the town with open arms. Tommy elated to see him, glad to have his big brother back as Maria’s due date drew near. They’d been given the same house they had stayed in before, Ellie reclaiming the bedroom with the teenage diaries she’d been so fascinated by. Life seemed to start anew.

It had taken Joel far longer than Ellie to settle. To imagine that he could stop moving, could relax. He hadn’t even managed that yet, he knew, but he might one day. There was just this constant feeling that he had to keep looking over his shoulder, had to stay alert. Maybe that was why when Ellie started to make friends, to engage tentatively in some of the social aspects of the town, had started to attend classes, he had volunteered for patrol.

All able bodied residents were required to do patrol, but he had volunteered for more. Had asked to be made part of the permanent roster, not just on rotation. Out on patrol, that feeling of being on edge, of being alert, was what was required. The nervous energy he felt at all times was a valuable asset outside the walls of the town and he felt at his best when he could channel that anxiety into something useful.

So as spring turned to summer and the town enjoyed the long days and the warm weather, the chance to spend time together, he stayed on the edges, where he felt comfortable. Circling the town’s periphery, in more ways than one. Looking in from the outside, keeping himself to himself.

———

And now it was winter again, a whole year had passed since they left for Salt Lake City, and he saw how Ellie had blossomed. She was happy in Jackson and was trying to get him to be happy too. And so he had agreed to help her at the market, despite it being the last thing he had wanted to do this Saturday morning.

The sale was held in the main hall of the former Baptist church. It was a lovely building with wood-panelled walls leading up to a vaulted ceiling. It felt warm and welcoming, sort of like a school hall. Far more welcoming now that it was no longer a church, Joel thought to himself.

The market was a time for people to barter, swap and acquire what they didn’t get from the community rations they were given by the town council. People brought things to swap and used the extra ration tickets they had acquired, through working overtime and volunteering, to get things they needed. Stalls were arranged around the sides of the room and people were allowed in only after queueing, but even so, it was always busy and noisy and it was Joel’s idea of a nightmare.

Ellie had volunteered them to take charge of the shoe stall. Everyone was entitled to a pair of shoes, by council law, so no one would ever have to go without, but sometimes those shoes didn’t suit, didn’t fit or people just wanted a change. There was a cobbler in the town and he was training up a couple of the young people in his trade, so footwear was mended and recycled and passed on as much as possible, until a pair was really not wearable any more.

As Ellie set out the different pairs of shoes in order, children’s at the front, working back to adult boots, Joel watched her. She took pride in this job, something she would have scoffed at the first time they were in Jackson. He remembered her sitting at the table with Tommy and Maria while they are their first hot meal in weeks. Her defensiveness, her spiky replies: a child not used to the kind gestures and relaxed atmosphere of the town.

He had felt the same, but had tried not to show it for her sake, asking her to mind her manners and her language, attempting to relax until Maria had got on his nerves and he had snapped. Now it was Ellie who sometimes reprimanded him for his caustic comments, although always with a hint of humour.

Joel looked round the hall at the other stalls while Ellie was putting the last pair of boots out. There were clothes, at least three tables of them, craft items that people had made, books and some toys, but not many. At this time of year there wasn’t as much in the way of fruit or vegetables, and they were more strictly rationed, the glut of them gone now that the autumn harvest was over, but there was some cheese, the odd bottle of apple wine and a stall with various condiments and preserves in jars.

Speaking of Maria, Joel could see her walking round with a clipboard, managing the logistics of the market, checking that everything was in order. Brisk and businesslike as usual. Tommy was with her and he nodded over to Joel and waved. When he turned, Joel saw that his other arm cradled his young son, Jacob, born at the end of the Spring. Tommy said something to his wife and left her to get on with her duties, sauntering over to Joel and Ellie’s stall with Jacob, who Joel could now see was fast asleep.

“Check him out!” Ellie exclaimed, dashing round the table to look at the baby more closely. “His little hands and his little mouth and his little eyes!”

“Yeah, we get it,” Joel grumbled good-naturedly, “Everything about him is little. You were like that once.” And he couldn’t help thinking back to another baby, so long ago, who would have been a woman herself now. His eyes locked with Tommy’s and his brother knew and acknowledged the moment that passed between them with a tightening of his mouth and a small nod. Joel shook his head briefly to clear the thoughts that would do him no good right now.

“Maria won’t mind if I tell you this now,” Tommy said, looking at Ellie and then to Joel, clearly trying to change the subject, “But we wondered if it would be ok for us to call you Jacob’s cousin?” Ellie’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened, her default reaction to something that delighted her.

“Cousin?” she almost yelled, making the people around turn to look at her, “Cool!” And she danced around in circles, singing “I’m a cousin, I’m a cousin,” until Tommy put a hand on her shoulder and reminded her that being a big cousin was a serious job and that they were counting on her to be a good influence. Immediately Ellie stood still, her hands by her side like a soldier and nodded vigorously at him.

“Oh man, I am going to be the best cousin,” she gushed, “I can teach him to read and to write and to shoot...” Her litany of tasks was interrupted at that point by Joel who quickly rounded the table, took Ellie by the shoulders and directed her back behind the stall.

“Sorry about that,” he told Tommy when she had gone back to checking the shoes, “She gets a bit excited.” His brother just shrugged, smiling.

“And that is why we want her in Jacob’s life,” he smiled. “I know her and Maria butted heads a bit at the start, but for her to ask that of Ellie, well, it means she really likes her.” Joel’s heart warmed at that. Maybe he and Maria still didn’t quite see eye to eye, but he was glad that Ellie had women like her to count on. Maria and he might not be exactly friends, but he admired her strength and her resilience, especially now after the last few months and the arrival of Jacob.

Joel looked down at his nephew snug in the crook of Tommy’s arm, thinking back to the day that Maria had gone into labour, much earlier than she should have. Tommy had been on a maintenance run to the hydroelectric dam that powered the town, the last time he was to go out before being allowed to stay on duties closer to home while waiting for his child to be born.

Maria and Tommy’s house was across from the Joel’s and he and Ellie had been tidying away things after lunch when he heard something that he couldn’t place. Telling Ellie to be quiet he stood in his kitchen, listening. Ellie mouthed what?? at him but he put his hand up to silence her. Then he heard it again, an anguished cry, coming from outside. Ellie heard it too and ran to the window.

“It’s Maria!” she shouted back to Joel, but he was already at the door, pulling it open, racing across the street to Maria who was bent over on the steps of the house, keening and gripping the newel post of the small fence that ran round the front of the house.

Joel took her hand and wrapped his arm around her back, her legs clearly about to give way. She was in so much pain she seemed delirious.

“Tommy?” she moaned through gritted teeth, “Where is he?” Joel knew enough to know that he had to reassure her and calm her down.

“He’s on his way,” he said, “You’re gonna be just fine. Now let’s get you back inside.” By that time Ellie was hovering nervously, unsure of what to do, her eyes wide as she watched Maria.

“Ellie, I need you to go and find Elizabeth and tell her that Maria is in labour, ok?” Joel said, turning to make sure that Ellie had understood what he had said. He knew that she would be so wrapped up in what was happening in front of her that she might not even hear him and he needed her to go now.

“Ellie!” he snapped, “Look at me. I need you to get Elizabeth. Go!” And this time Ellie responded, meeting his eyes, nodding and racing off in the direction of the town. Joel carefully helped Maria back up the steps and into her house, asking her where she wanted to go, the bedroom, the sofa?

It didn’t look like her legs would carry her up the stairs, so Joel tried to make her comfortable on the sofa, removing her shoes and asking her if he could remove her trousers too. She just nodded, unable to even say yes and he helped her to get out of them and covered her with a blanket. He went to the window to see if any help was coming but was brought back to Maria’s side by a moan of pain so desperate, he panicked. What the hell would he tell Tommy if something happened to Maria, to the baby?

She gripped his hand in hers, with that particular vice-like strength of a woman in labour and he was thrown back in time into another room and another woman screaming in pain. Sarah’s mother. It seemed so long ago now. He had been so damned young. So damned stupid to get someone knocked up, and she wasn’t even his girlfriend.

He didn’t remember much about the delivery but he remembered the lights in the room, Sarah’s mother screaming and the unreal feeling that he was about to be a father at twenty. And yet somehow being a father had been something he found he could do, something he was good at. And even when he had been left to do it alone, it didn’t seem to matter. He had Sarah, and that was all that mattered.

And then there were noises outside and voices and Elizabeth, the midwife, came through the door, followed by another two women and Ellie, breathless from her errand. The two of them, went to sit outside while the women got on with the task of helping Maria through the birth. Joel kept his eye on the street, praying to see Tommy turn the corner. Ellie paced up and down as Maria continued to groan in pain.

The light faded and eventually the air was pierced by the shrill cry of a newborn. Ellie looked at Joel in wonder and excitement. Joel, never the optimist, could only imagine a serious of awful outcomes. He hadn’t heard Maria since the baby cried, and his agitation was so bad that he went back up the stairs to the front door and opened it a crack, just to make sure that everything was ok.

He saw Maria, exhausted but alive, rested his head against the door frame with a sigh of relief. Looking back up he saw Elizabeth pass her the baby, saw her face crumple with a soft oh of sheer love, saw her kiss the tiny creature. Heard it cry out again in hunger and newborn rage.

“Let me see,” he heard Ellie whisper behind him, but it was too much for her and she opened the door before Joel could stop her.

“Ellie!” he hissed, trying to grab her as she ran past, but everyone smiled when she beamed down at the small bundle and Maria pulled back the blanket to show her the child.

“It’s so wrinkly!” she exclaimed and Joel rolled his eyes, but Maria chuckled.

“He’s so wrinkly,” she said proudly, and Joel heard Ellie whisper cool.

Then there were footsteps outside and Tommy burst through the door, pressing Joel’s arm as he went by and made straight for Maria. Joel signalled for Ellie to get out of the way and they all retreated to the kitchen to make well deserved cups of tea.

In the end, his early appearance didn’t seem to have harmed Jacob. It took Maria longer to recover, but eventually she was back to her council duties, more often than not with the child in a sling across her chest. And although their relationship could never be called warm, Joel had seen a mellowing in Maria, a settling into motherhood that he respected. He knew he should try and mellow towards her too, if if only for the sake of the child who linked them.

And it was Maria now who shouted that there were ten minutes until the doors opened, urging everyone to get ready for the first rush of people eager to see what was on offer.

“Big shoes, little shoes, crusty boots, old lady shoes,” Ellie rapped, laughing. Joel just looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Jesus, Ellie,” he muttered under his breath, “we’re supposed to be selling the things, not singing about them.” She grinned up at him.

“Seriously dude”, she said, a smirk on her face, “I will charm the customers with my delightfully musical shoe descriptions. No one will be able to resist,” she said in a deep voice with a waggle of her eyebrows and a flourish of her hand, as if she was some sort of hypnotist.

“Mmm, we’ll see,” Joel replied, but her happiness soothed him and he was ready to suffer through the next couple of hours of forced socialising if it made her happy.

———

Ninety minutes later, however, he was about ready to implode. How many questions could there be about second hand shoes? Yes, these were the only laces available. No, he didn’t know who had owned them before. Just try on the goddam shoes, he wanted to say.

Ellie had taken to the task with gusto, however, happily chatting with anyone who came by. It was down to her that the shoes had been reduced by about half. When the crowds started to reduce, he let her go and look round the other stalls for a while, his facial expression and the way he stood with his arms crossed a successful deterrent to anyone but the most badly shod.

When Ellie came back, it seemed they might as well pack up, but he saw Maria and Tommy leading a small group of people over and Joel rolled his eyes at the thought that they’d have to deal with another bunch of indecisive customers.

It was easy to see that these were newcomers to the town. They stood out, whether they intended to or not. It was actually rare for people to find Jackson, and so new residents were few and far between. The council worked hard to ensure that the town remained hidden, purely to stop it being overrun or taken over by outsiders.

Joel had only been alerted to the presence of the town by the old man whose cottage they’d barged into. Reading between the lines of what the man and his wife had told him, he knew he was headed in the right direction. The so-called river of death and the presence of mysteriously appearing bodies meant that someone was trying to keep people away - it was what Joel would have done if he had something to hide.

And all he had had to do was lead Ellie that way and a welcome party had met them without them even looking. His heart had sunk at the sight of the men and women on horseback, but thankfully they were able to take him to Tommy, not send him and Ellie to their graves.

Now that he had been in Jackson for a few months and seen a handful of people arrive in the town, he realised what he and Ellie must have looked like when they arrived - hungry, tired, pale and above all on high alert. He’d seen it in the faces of the people who had arrived after him. It took time to relax into the rhythm of the town, to stop looking over your shoulder, and in fact, as he knew, he’d never really settled at all.

There were four people in this group, and they all still seemed to be dazed by the fact that they were somewhere safe with access to regular food and shelter. He remembered that feeling, especially the relief that Ellie would have those comforts. She had rarely complained on their trek across the country, but he’d hated seeing her hungry and cold, had always been on the lookout for a way to better their circumstances.

While Tommy took the two men to be kitted out with winter jackets, Maria, now with Jacob in his sling fast asleep, brought two women up to the stall.

“Let’s get you some decent footwear,” she said kindly. Food, clothing and shelter were non-negotiables under the Jackson town charter and everyone took it seriously. There was no one in the place who hadn’t known hardship and need, and so these rights were part of the fabric of the town. And both women were wearing shoes that had seen better days and weren’t suitable for a Wyoming winter, even if they had been new.

“We got the best shoes in the county,” Ellie said in the voice of a tv cowboy, her hands on her chest like she was holding onto braces. “Yes siree!” Joel and Maria looked at each other briefly, but one of the women, the younger, gave a small uncertain laugh and Ellie started asking her about her shoe size and what she liked. She soon had her sitting on a stool, trying on some boots, while the other woman stayed back slightly. She stood perfectly still, watching Ellie and Joel saw her taking everything in silently.

He thought he’d better do his job.

———

The way you stood there, so still, made Joel pause for a second. It was like the room and everyone in it kept moving, but you were somehow somewhere else. And that anxious, jittery behaviour that he’d noticed in the other newcomers didn’t seem to apply to you.

“What size are you?” he asked you with a quick uptilt of his head. You met his eyes but didn’t hold them for long. Your face was very calm, almost without emotion and you looked down without answering. “Was it something I said?” Joel muttered bitterly. You looked up at him again and away just as quickly. If you weren’t even going to answer him, there wasn’t much he could do.

“Let me help you there,” Maria said gently, giving Joel a quick shake of her head and a look that he couldn’t read. Joel could see her trying to gauge the size of your feet and what shoes you needed. She tried to bend over to measure a pair against your feet but at that movement Jacob woke up and started fussing. By this time Ellie was finished with the other woman and came over to help, moving past Joel.

“I see you’re being your usual charming self,” she whispered and Joel just grunted, taking a step back and deciding to let Ellie take over. Maria had moved off to try and settle Jacob and Ellie picked up the boot she had been holding. She turned to you.

“Is this the right size?” she asked, holding it up and waiting patiently for your answer. There was a pause and Joel was about to move forward and intervene, but you were looking straight into Ellie’s eyes and not looking away, as you had with him. Ellie raised her eyebrows and smiled, as if to prompt you kindly and Joel saw your shoulders visibly relax. Then, looking first at the boot that Ellie was holding and then at the table, you shook your head and pointed to another set of boots.

Ellie reached for the boots and opened one, showing you the label with the size printed on it in faded ink.

“Is this your size?” she asked and Joel saw you nod. Ellie didn’t take her eyes off you and you didn’t flinch from her stare. “Can’t you speak?” she asked, and passed you the boot. Her tone wasn’t rude, just matter-of-fact. She didn’t ask with disbelief or criticism, she just asked, in the way she had, that was totally and utterly Ellie.

“Ellie!” Joel hissed, not knowing what else to say. But he saw you shake your head quickly. Ellie was unfazed.

“But you can hear?” she went on and Joel rounded the table and pulled her away to the side. You turned away and he started to tell Ellie to mind her manners, when Maria came back. Ellie immediately told her that you couldn’t speak and Maria said she was aware of the fact. The look she gave Ellie warned her not to continue the conversation, so she went back to help you, helping you lace up the boots and asking you to stand up in them so you could see if they were comfortable.

Joel and Maria stood to the side and watched, and he saw you nod at Ellie and give her a small smile.

“They look cool,” Ellie said, “And definitely better than these old things.” She held up your old sneakers, and he noticed that the sole was taped on. “Your feet must have been freezing!” she exclaimed and you nodded, a resigned look on your face. You met Joel’s eyes again briefly and he didn’t know what to say, so turned back to the stall.

“Ok, lets go and get you some warm coats,” Maria suggested and Ellie said she’d go and help. Joel was about to say something but Maria told her that was a great idea and they left Joel to pack up the stall. He spent the next few minutes dumping shoes into the storage boxes they would live in until the next market day - one which he was hoping to play no part in.

———

He’d helped stack boxes in the storage room at the back of the hall and then went to find Ellie. She was standing with Tommy and Maria. Jacob was fast asleep again. The newcomers were gone.

“I don’t know, Ellie,” Maria was saying, “They haven’t been here long and you know we have to let everyone settle in at their own pace.” She turned to Joel for back up. “It’s tough coming to a place like this, at the start. You remember?” Ellie nodded and was thoughtful for a moment.

“So no one knows why she can’t talk?” she asked. Maria shrugged.

“The other three came from the same place, but they found her on the way here,” she said, “She hasn’t even told us what her name is. That’s all I know.” Joel thought back to what he’d seen of your behaviour.

“Maybe she’s…” he started, and Ellie and Maria both looked at him. “You know….”

“What?” Maria asked in a flat tone that told him he was on a rocky path.

“I dunno,” he said, “….deficient….you know…” and he let his words peter out in discomfort. Ellie was just staring at him, her mouth slightly open.

“Dude,” she said, “Were you going to say retarded? That is so uncool.” Joel was mortified.

“Jesus, Ellie, no! I was not going to use that word,” he muttered back, crossing his arms defensively. He couldn’t be sure whether he would have used that word or not because that was what people would have used when he was growing up, and he was slightly ashamed that it took a fourteen year old to point out how unacceptable that would have been. Goddamn it, sometimes he doubted whether he was even fit to be in civilised company.

Maria raised an eyebrow in what he presumed was yet another moment of disappointment in him, and addressed Ellie again.

“Let’s give them all some time to settle in,” she said, “And then I’m sure you can help with things if they need it.” Joel watched the way she smiled at Ellie and saw Ellie reach out to rub Jacob’s little back over the fabric of the sling.

“C’mon, Big Cousin,” he prompted, “Dinner time.” He started for the entrance, Ellie following, immediately starting up a stream of chatter about everything that had gone on that afternoon. Every so often Joel nodded or responded with a yeah or a mmm-hmmm, as they made their way back to the house, but mostly he stayed silent, letting her voice drive away the anxiety with always seemed ready to crowd in on him; looking forward to being inside the place he was learning to call home.

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