#almost set fire to my bedroom once though (i was burning a cardboard box) and now i do not play with fire

[enbysiriusblack]

WHY ARE YOU COMMITING ARSON

cause i have a little dorcas meadowes, holding a lighter, in my head who tells me to. and i'd do anything for them.

[pascalpanic]

Okay hi I’m back with an IDEA☄️

So. I’ve been thinking about how stubborn javi would be with his feelings. Like maybe he’s being messing around with this girl and he knows he has feelings for her and she knows it too but both of them are so stubborn so they go out of their way just getting under each other’s skin.

Like imagine they’re at a bar with steve and she’s just flirting around and dancing with guys all the while shooting him bedroom eyes and he’s just there BROODING AND ANGRY n Steve is just like “you guys are so insufferable” UGH

aaaaaaa i love this so much!! here we are:

Always Been Yours (Javier Peña x f!Reader)

Summary: Javier doesn’t take kindly to having his dance partner stolen from him.

W/C: 2.7k

Warnings: language, lots of bad flirting, mentions of sex and sexual topics but nothing too explicit, Javier is his own warning. alcohol and cigarettes.

A/N:  ☄️ anon you have done it again!! this was so much fun to write I hope it’s what you were thinking!!

Restraint is one of Javier’s best qualities. He can hold back when he needs to, save his emotions until they’re all too much then channel them out by fucking or drinking them away. He does it often, in fact. Sometimes, that restraint is too strict. Javier never allows himself to relax, never allows himself the luxury of feeling the powerful emotions his mind creates. 

This restraint can sometimes transfer over even when Javier doesn’t mean to. He wants to let loose, he really does, but he physically can’t most of the time. Contrary to the men at work who tell him he’s too impulsive, he’s an overthinker. He mentally runs every possible outcome of any situation he’s in. He just picks the more dangerous options sometimes.

Javier holds back his emotions even more when it comes to romance. He sleeps around quite a bit, does what he pleases with whomever he chooses. It’s not because he lacks feelings or attachment, it’s because he fears them both. He knows what he did to Lorraine hurt her immensely. He never wants to hurt someone again, and so he avoids romantic relationships. 

He fell for you when he met you. It was as plain and simple as that. When you moved your cardboard box into the desk in the corner of his and Murphy’s bullpen, his eyes were drawn to you. You had such an elegant and beautiful walk, he noticed. Your head was held high, your hips swayed like you were dancing. When you shook his hand, when he felt your soft fingers in his calloused palm, he was fucked. 

He flirted with you. Of course he did. That’s how Javier does things. The flirting was subtle and quiet, not loud and brash like he normally was. He told you he loved those earrings, that that blouse was really beautiful. It always tied back to how beautiful you were. 

It escalated when he realized you were into him too. You’d flirt back shamelessly, telling him that you wished you were involved with the narcos so that he'd pay more attention to you. He’d shoot back that you weren’t looking right, because his eyes were always trained on you. Steve made a vomiting noise at that and left for more coffee. “You’re just jealous he’s flirting with me and not you, Murphy,” you called out after him. You looked back at Javi with a devilish grin, and he shot one back in return.

That’s how your relationship has been going this time. You’re down hard for Javier, completely entranced by him. When he talks about cases, you have a hard time listening. Your eyes trace his biceps, the way they bulge against the sleeves of his shirt. You make snarky comments just to see the fire in his eyes ignite again.

Javier really wants to ask you out, he does. But he fears it’s unprofessional. He fears that you just want to hook up with him, and he likes you too much to do something like that. He wants you fully, in an all-consuming way. 

You really like him, but you fear the same from him. His reputation precedes him, and you know all about Javier’s habits. You know he sleeps with informants to get information in those quiet moments after the work is done. You know he flirts with anything in a skirt around the office, and has slept with a decent number of those women too. Javier is a tornado, tearing through women faster than they can recover. If that’s not enough for him, you know he loves to frequent certain brothels in the area. You notice the sneaking way some of the girls there will grab his arm and murmur something as he walks past, the way he’s far too into it for being on the job. They know him by name sometimes. He knows them too. 

As much as you want to be with Javier, you don’t want to be with the womanizer. You want to be with him in the early hours of the morning, want to tighten his tie for him before you walk into work together. You want to make him laugh and want him to stay with you and hold you after the events of the night. 

You’re practical though. That’s not really who Javier is. You know that as well as you know the man. You want him in any way you can get him, really. That means you’re willing to just sleep with him. You’d take a night with him over never touching him at all. 

Drinks after work are a common occurrence for you, Steve, and Javier. All three of you need the assistance of alcohol to relax after the chaos that is working for the DEA. The two men order beers, and you order a strong cocktail the bar you frequent is known for.

Tonight is a rare night where Connie is out of town. You and Javier, the two single ones, demanded that the three of you absolutely must go to the club. It’s a Friday night, you got off work early for once, and you want to let loose. Steve reluctantly agreed, and now you’re sitting in the backseat while Steve drives you and Javier. 

As you enter the club, the music is loud and the bass pounds. You whoop excitedly and wander into the dance floor. Steve and Javier find barstools and sit. 

You return after that initial song ends, resting one arm on Javier’s shoulder. They ordered a drink for you, the one they know you love. “Aw, thank you guys,” you coo and rest your head on Steve’s shoulder.

“Jesus Christ, kid. You haven’t even had anything to drink yet and you’re acting like this?” The blonde scoffs and looks down at you.

You frown. “Steve, come on. It’s a Friday night, I’m with my favorite guy, and Javier is here too. How couldn’t I be this happy?”

Javier rolls his eyes at you. “Thanks for that, princesa,” he murmurs as he sips at his whiskey.

The three of you remain at the bar for a while, chatting and laughing. Eventually, a song comes on that you know Javier loves. “Alright, you big buzzkill,” you laugh and grab Javier’s strong bicep. “Come dance with me.” 

Javi groans as he stands and sets down his glass. “Fine. Only because you look so good tonight,” he mumbles to you.

Once you reach the floor, his arms wrap around your waist and yours encircle his neck. His hips start moving against yours to the music and you shudder, bare arms prickling in the humid air of the club. You rest your face in the curve of his neck as you dance, both of you moving your feet in perfect time with the other. 

He’s a wonderful dancer, you already knew, but something about it is extremely intimate. Your bodies, which have long desired the other’s, are flush against each other. He can feel your tits pressing into his chest and one of your hands slides up into his hair, toying with the waves it finds there. He uses all of the power he physically has to stop the blood from flowing straight to his dick. 

“You’re good at this,” you mumble into his ear.

“Only because it’s you I’m dancing with.”

Your time in Javier’s arms doesn’t last long. You dance more separately now, one hand of his still on your waist. It all shifts when another man puts a hand on your hip and turns you his way. “Can I steal you away?” He asks. He’s handsome, dark hair and dark eyes. He’s tall, taller than Javi. You don’t want anyone but your DEA agent, but this presents a wonderful opportunity. 

“Of course,” you nod and he twirls you into his arms, wrapping one arm around you and taking one of your hands in his.

Javier watches in disbelief at the ease the man had in taking you from him. You’re now pressed to this random man’s chest, one hand resting over his heart. You giggle at something he murmurs to you and your body is pressed tight against his. 

Javier stalks off back to the bar, sitting back down next to Murphy and slamming his whiskey. “Another one,” he calls from the bartender, who has another glass tumbler sitting in front of the man in a matter of seconds.

He watched you from the bar with a growing fire in his eyes. The way your hips moved was like the spinning of a hypnotist’s wheel, drawing him in until he couldn’t look away. You were passed around from man to man, grinning and laughing the entire time. You were having fun, that much was clear, and it almost made Javier feel bad for the jealousy that burned a pit in his stomach. He lights a cigarette to dull the want he feels for you.

Your partner spins you around and you lock eyes with Javier. They’re trained on you, they have been the whole night. You smirk a little before continuing the turn, wrapping yourself into your partner’s chest as he pulls you along across the floor. 

Steve rolls his eyes and downs the rest of his beer. “For the love of fuckin’ Christ, Peña. Either quit staring at her like that or go fuckin’ get her from that man.”

Javier glares back at Steve. “Shut the fuck up. You’re supposed to be my wingman, not to fucking yell at me.”

“You need to be yelled at. I am being your wingman. In my professional opinion, as a man who’s fucking married to a woman who played the hard-to-get deal, you need to go show her that you actually do like her or she’s gonna end up going home with that fucker.”

Steve always gives Javier the tough love he needs. He groans as he realizes that Steve is probably right. He needs to go do something now. You lock eyes with him and give him your best teasing smile, your eyes showing everything. You’re having fun, but if Javier comes and stops you, you’d let him do whatever the fuck he wants. “Come get me,” you mouth to the man before resting your head against your partner’s chest, laughing and swaying along with him. 

Javier downs his second whiskey and stands. “Fuck it.”

“Atta boy,” Steve laughs and claps him on the back. “I’m telling you now, I’m not driving the two of you home if you’re gonna be making out in the backseat.”

Javier smirks and stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray on the bar. “I live close enough to walk.” He cracks his neck and makes his way out into the rainbow-colored chaos that is the crowded dance floor. 

You’re hard to find in a sea of people, all of them twirling and moving. Some women have their heads on their partner’s chest, making it even harder to find you. Javier finds the last man who held you in his arms, the one wearing a green shirt. He’s got someone else now. 

Javier is caught by surprise when two arms wrap around his neck and his naturally find their way to rest on the hips of the person: you. “Hey, Peña,” you grin at him, one hand resting on his chest. “Sorry I got pulled away.”

“No you’re fucking not,” the man laughs, moving you along to the music.

“I am,” you refute him, frowning a little. “I wanted to dance with you, but I figured I’d give the other guys a shot. Especially since you’re taking your sweet ass time with me.”

Javier’s eyes darken slightly. “They should’ve realized you’re mine.”

You look up at him, tilting your head and eyes narrowing. “Oh, I’m yours?”

He shakes his head. “We both can tell. You know that, know what’s between us.”

“No clue what you’re talking about.”

“Can I show you, then?” He offers. 

You nod, scrunching your nose. “Do your worst, Javi.”

He cups the side of your face with one large hand and kisses you deeply. You gasp in surprise, even though you knew it was coming. It’s warm and perfect, Javier’s strong arms holding you in place.

The rest of the dance floor twirls and moves along, but you and Javier have stopped moving. Your feet are planted firmly to the ground, arms wrapped around him like an anchor point in a sea of people. He kisses you harder and you allow it, kissing him back just as deeply. He tastes like whiskey and you taste like the fruity cocktail you drank earlier. Normally, the two would taste awful combined, but it doesn’t matter because now it tastes like you and Javier and anything with him included is the most delicious thing you’ve ever had the pleasure of gracing your tastebuds.

He breaks away a moment later. “Can I buy you a drink?” He asks teasingly.

“Not if you want me in your bed tonight,” you flirt right back. You can feel the apples of your cheeks warming with a rush of blood from the kiss, from what you’re insinuating, from the alcohol and from the movement on the floor.

“I don’t. I just want you in my arms and maybe on my lips some more.”

You look up at him, truly astounded. “I thought you’d just want to fuck me and be done,” you admit honestly as you push back a strand of dark brown hair that fell into his face while the two of you moved.

“I don’t want that,” he shakes his head still breathless from the kiss. “I want you to be mine. I wanna take my time with you, and yeah I wanna fuck you, but I wanna date you properly and bring you flowers and walk you home late at night, and then I wanna rail you into the mattress so hard all you can feel is me. But that can wait. For now, I just wanna dance with you and tell you that I really like you. Have for a while now.”

You’re grinning ear to ear at his words. “Really?” You ask.

“No,” he deadpans. “I just said all that shit for fun.” 

“Your sarcasm is really annoying when I’m trying to be sweet and sincere with you.”

He sighs. “Yes, really, princesa. I just want you to be mine.”

The grin on your face only widens, your heart in your eyes as you look at him. “You don’t need to want it. I’m already yours. Didn’t you say that?” The music changes into a new song, something slower and sultry. “Ooh, I love this one,” you sing to Javi, forcing him along so that the two of you are once again dancing. “I’ve always been yours, Javi,” you admit, your thumb softly tracing the side of his neck from where your hand rests on his shoulder. “Since the moment we met. I really like you.”

“I really like you too, dulzura,” he murmurs and kisses you again. It’s not all-consuming or hot and sloppy like the last one. It’s warm and chaste with only the purest of intentions, Javier’s hands gripping your waist a little softer. 

He gets carried away by the way your lips meet his. One of his feet steps on your toes, exposed by the heels you’re wearing. “Fuck,” you cry and wince. 

“Oh, shit, I’m so sorry,” he mumbles, instinctually taking a step back from you so that he can’t possibly do it again.

You smile up at him softly as the pain subsides. “It’s alright. Maybe we’ll just need to get you some dancing lessons,” you tease and pull him close again.

You spend the rest of the song like that, slowly swaying along. Javier’s arms wrap around your waist, and he softly kisses the side of your head a few times. Eventually, your head finds its way to his shoulder, where it rests as Javier quietly mumbles the lyrics of the song to you. 

He’s not very good at it, and he’d be the first to admit it, but it’s beautiful when he’s soft and quiet. He’s doing it just for you, this quiet act of intimacy. You press a kiss to the skin of his neck when the song ends and he hums a chuckle. “My girl,” he murmurs and kisses you one last time. “Let’s go home.”

-

taglist: 

@remmysbounty @mishasminion360 @softly-sad @blo0dangel @binarydanvvers  @sleep-tight1 @apascalrascal @randomness501 @spideysimpossiblegirl @notabotiswear @pedro-pastel @sanchosammy @lv7867

[deja-you]

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

t. jefferson x reader

summary: you tell yourself lies because you know the truth would crush you.

word count: 2.2k

warnings: somewhat smut (but like, not really, more like a heavy make out sesh) and lots of angst. this is like 60% angst even though it’s really 100% angst.

masterlist

You don’t even think about him anymore.

The scalding hot tea cup in your hand could’ve burned off your finger points to the point where you wouldn’t be able to be identified anymore and you wouldn’t even notice. The cool feeling of sheets against your skin. The vibrations from music that’s playing too loudly. The barrage of water droplets in the shower. You couldn’t feel anything anymore, and there was a time where you would feel everything to its fullest extent. 

Maybe you couldn’t feel anything anymore because you could still feel his touch on your skin. That was too overwhelming, wasn’t it?

People said that the first thing you forget about a person is their voice. But you could remember Thomas’s voice all too well. You could remember the sound of his laugh when you told a joke that you knew wasn’t that funny. You’d never forget how your name sounded on his voice in between kisses. 

It wasn’t likely you would stop thinking about what he looked like, either. No, he was just too memorable that way. Bright eyes and wide grin. You forced yourself to stop thinking about him before you fell in love all over again. 

At times like this, you’d stop thinking about the sunshine he created and you would remember the storms. The terrible, horrible storms that washed up in faded photos months later. Tornadoes that ripped through your soul and left you with broken pieces to put back together. Wild fires that made you feel more alive than you had before, but left you with a charred core and third-degree burns. 

Even after living through the apocalypse, you knew you’d do it all again if you had the chance.

You don’t think about that evening in his kitchen.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he mumbled in between kisses. “God, you’re so beautiful.”

Thomas could feel the vibrations of your laugh when he placed kisses upon your neck. “Does that line ever work?”

“You telling me it’s not workin’ on you, sweetheart?” The satin of your dress began riding up your thighs as Thomas’s hands travelled further up your legs. The hickey he was currently sucking onto your neck made you lose any ability to speak.

Thomas pulled away just long enough to shrug off his jacket, and then his lips were back on yours, his thumbs sliding the thin straps of your dress off your shoulders. He gently pushed you back against the cool marble of his kitchen counter. Thomas pulled your hips against his.

You gasped his name in between kisses. “Thomas, you don’t want to... you don’t... you don’t want to move to the bedroom?”

“Sweetheart,” he pressed a kiss along your collarbone between every word. “I. Want. You. Right. Here.”

You groaned when you felt his lips leave your skin and cracked open one eye at a time. Thomas stood over you, his hands on either side of your head. You tilted your head to the side.

“What is it?”

He drew his bottom lip into his mouth and shook his head. “Nothin’. Just admiring the view.” 

You smacked his chest and rolled your eyes. “Put those lips to better use.”

Thomas did, and you couldn’t help thinking this is going to ruin me. I want it to.

You don’t miss those weekends when you’d visit his family.

“Of course you’re good with children, too,” you rolled your eyes. 

Thomas briefly looked up from his two-year-old niece he was playing with. “S’that a problem, sweetheart? I read somewhere that girls find guys who are good with kids attractive. I hired this child actor just to impress you.”

You laughed through your nose and shook your head. “You know what? I wouldn’t put it past you.”

“You know I’d do anything to impress you,” he said with a lopsided grin. Thomas turned back to his niece and waved a rattle in the air above her, making her giggle loudly. 

“Is there anything you’re not good at?” You leaned against a wall and took a second to appreciate just how perfect this moment felt. 

“M’not very good at Pretty, Pretty Princess.” He admitted with a shrug. “You always seem to get all your jewelry pieces and the tiara before I can. I don’t get that.”

“It’s a luck game, Thomas.” These were the days where you couldn’t stop smiling.

“Still think it’s rigged,” he mumbled under his breath. “I think we should play again. I have a new strategy that I think will get me that tiara this time.”

You hummed softly. “Maybe after lunch. And speaking of lunch, I should go help Lucy out. Set the table at the very least.”

Thomas glanced up at you and furrowed his brows. “Now don’t go and be too helpful. I swear my sisters already like you more than me. M’afraid they’re going to try and replace me.”

“Can you blame them?” You teased. 

He laughed and picked up his niece, holding her closely to his chest. Thomas walked over to you and placed a chaste kiss on your cheek.

“No, I can’t. You’re perfect, sweetheart.”

And you’ve kept your distance since the breakup.

Once more you feel his arm laid around your waist like a laurel wreath or the best of your plans that had gone awry. 

If it wasn’t for the cool air drafting through the cracked open window, the discarded tie on the hardwood floor, and the steady breathing of his body beside you, you would’ve thought you were dreaming. Well, it was less of a dream and more of a nightmare that had been haunting you for months. 

Thomas shifted his weight on the bed, alerting you to his state of consciousness. You shut your eyes quickly, hoping he’d believe you were still asleep. It would be easier if he just left without saying anything. You could both pretend like this relapse had never happened. 

One hand gripping your waist, Thomas leaned forward and pressed his lips against your skin. 

He left kisses against your neck like he wanted to leave you with something more to remember him by than just the scars on your heart.

You kept your eyes closed when you felt his weight leave the bed. You kept your eyes closed when you heard him picking up his scattered clothes from around the room. You kept your eyes closed when you knew he was pausing in the doorframe of your bedroom, watching you “sleep” and wondering what things could’ve been like if he hadn’t messed up. 

It was only when you heard the front door of your apartment shut behind him that you opened your eyes.

Immediately, you wished you had kept them shut. The empty bed was an open wound that had never scabbed over. There was no trace of Thomas left in your apartment. No proof that all the events that had occurred the previous night hadn’t just been in your head. 

You didn’t cry. You would’ve welcomed tears with open arms at this point. Anything would be better with the cloying taste of emptiness that was left in the back of your throat. 

You don’t replay scenes from that night again and again and again and again in your head.

“We’ve both made mistakes, sweetheart.” The enchanting nickname you used to love was being twisted against you, and you hated it.

“Don’t compare me to you. I’m nothing like you.” The words were spat out like venom. 

“It takes two people to destroy a relationship!” Thomas’s voice raised a few levels.

“But I never slept with your secretary!”

The words struck him like a knife to the heart. Thomas hadn’t realized you had known about his affair. Of course you did. It all made sense. The guilt that had been building up for weeks now finally reached a breaking point when he saw the hurt look on your face.

Any anger Thomas held dissipated, and you turned away from him, not wanting him to see just how much he had broken you. Something in you wanted him to yell at you, tell you you were wrong. You knew the truth, but you desperately wanted Thomas to lie to you one more time. It could be good like that. It would be better. 

The denial that you prayed for never came. 

“Could you forgive me?” The words were nearly silent, like anything louder would break the fragile tension between the two of you. 

“I would do anything you wanted me to do. Of course I could forgive you. Just don’t ask me too. Because forgiving you would absolutely destroy me.” You told the truth and decided then and there that you didn’t like telling the truth. 

“So we’re over, then?” Thomas leaned against the counter, and you didn’t know this at the time, but if he hadn’t leaned against the counter, he was sure he would’ve collapsed. 

“Yeah. Yeah, we are.” You wiped at the tears on your cheeks and hoped he couldn’t hear them in your voice.

“I guess this is goodbye.”

You never loved him.

Not when you came home after a long day to find him playing the violin. Especially not then. 

Thomas didn’t even notice when you walked into the apartment. He got like that when he was playing. He wouldn’t be able to hear anything over the sound of horsehair on strings, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. 

You set down your bag on the kitchen counter and pulled out a chair. After dealing with your coworkers who were incapable of the smallest tasks, you were ready to collapse. Thomas’s music had a lulling affect, and you had almost fallen asleep right there in the kitchen when he stopped playing.

“Hey, sweetheart. I didn’t hear you come in,” Thomas said as he began putting his violin back in its case. “How was your day?”

You slowly opened one eye to see his smiling face. “It was good.”

It wasn’t completely a lie. When you would look back on that day, all you could remember was the evening you spent with Thomas. The sound of his violin playing some vaguely familiar tune. Your loud laughter that must’ve woken the neighbors. The food Thomas claimed to be “fine cuisine.”

“It’s delicious, sweetheart, don’t even try denying it,” Thomas pressed a few buttons on the microwave and it whirred to life.

“Thomas, it came out of a cardboard box, and the ‘cheese’ was a powder!”

“It’s an easy and efficient meal, if anything, I think that adds to the appeal.” Thomas may have been a star in the courtroom, but you were struggling to see how he ever won any arguments.

“I know you can cook. And I mean real food. Remember that time you made Italian for our anniversary?” You reminded him. 

“That was a good meal, wasn’t it?” Thomas mused. 

You nodded. “You made the pasta by hand. I think that was the best dinner I’ve ever had.”

“Well, I’m about to top that dinner.” Thomas pulled the hot bowl of macaroni out of the microwave and set it in front of you.

You looked down at the bowl, then back at Thomas. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“M’not.” He shook his head and handed you a spoon. Thomas leaned forward on the counter, waiting for your review to come in. 

You laughed and shook your head. “You’re ridiculous.”

What you meant by that was “I love you,” and Thomas knew.

You don’t love him.

If you had a nickel for every time you told yourself that, you would’ve been able to move out of this apartment that still felt like him. You’d have enough money to move out of this godforsaken city that always felt like him. 

He had left his mark on everything in your life. You couldn’t escape him. The coffeeshop near your work reminded you of him. Your favorite song on the radio reminded you of him. Board games reminded you of him. Your own kitchen reminded you of him. And every god damn box of Kraft macaroni and cheese reminded you of him. 

Even in a city with a population of 8.3 million people, you couldn’t avoid him. Occasionally, you’d see Thomas walking into a grocery store while you were on your way to the dry cleaners. All the glue, tape, and bandages you had used to put your heart together again would fall apart. 

You told yourself that one day you would get better. That one day you wouldn’t fall apart at the mere sight of him. Who knows, maybe one day you’d be able to hold an entire conversation with him.

Thomas wasn’t a mess like you were, even though you hoped he would be. From what you’d heard from mutual friends, he seemed to be handling the break-up well. The knowledge that he was fine when you weren’t was another stab in the heart. 

But maybe those same friends told Thomas that you were doing fine as well. On all accounts, you looked like you were doing fine. It was only when you locked yourself away in your Thomas-free bedroom that you could really be honest with yourself.

And if tissues filled your room, who would know? You were the only one who had to face the unmade bedsheets and piles of unfolded laundry. If anyone asked, you kept your room spotless. 

And if you asked yourself, you would say that you didn’t love him anymore. 

The lies we tell ourselves.

[unsettlingshortstories]

Catskin

Kelly Link (2003)

Cats went in and out of the witch’s house all day long. The windows stayed open, and the doors, and there were other doors, cat-sized and private, in the walls and up in the attic. The cats were large and sleek and silent. No one knew their names, or even if they had names, except for the witch.

Some of the cats were cream-colored and some were brindled. Some were black as beetles. They were about the witch’s business. Some came into the witch’s bedroom with live things in their mouths. When they came out again, their mouths were empty.

The cats trotted and slunk and leapt and crouched. They were busy. Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork. Their tails twitched like hairy pendulums. They paid no attention to the witch’s children.

***

The witch had three living children at this time, although at one time she had had dozens, maybe more. No one, certainly not the witch, had ever bothered to tally them up. But at one time, the house had bulged with cats and babies.

Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way—their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses, and yet even witches must have heirs, even witches wish to be mothers—the witch had acquired her children by other means: She had stolen or bought them.

She’d had a passion for children with a certain color of red hair. Twins she had never been able to abide (they were the wrong kind of magic), although she’d sometimes attempted to match up sets of children, as though she had been putting together a chess set and not a family. If you were to say a witch’s chess set, instead of a witch’s family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.

One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch.

Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.

***

Are you still reading? The witch, up in her bedroom, was dying. She had been poisoned by an enemy, a witch, a man named Lack. The child Finn, who had been her food taster, was dead already and so were three cats who’d licked her dish clean. The witch knew who had killed her and she snatched pieces of time, here and there, from the business of dying, to make her revenge. Once the question of this revenge had been settled to her satisfaction, the shape of it like a black ball of twine in her head, she began to divide up her estate between her three remaining children.

Flecks of vomit stuck to the corners of her mouth, and there was a basin beside the foot of the bed, which was full of black liquid. The room smelled like cats’ piss and wet matches. The witch panted as if she were giving birth to her own death.

“Flora shall have my automobile,” she said, “and also my purse, which will never be empty, so long as you always leave a coin at the bottom, my darling, my spendthrift, my profligate, my drop of poison, my pretty, pretty Flora. And when I am dead, take the road outside the house and go west. There’s one last piece of advice.”

Flora, who was the oldest of the witch’s living children, was redheaded and stylish. She had been waiting for the witch’s death for a long time now, although she had been patient. She kissed the witch’s cheek and said, “Thank you, Mother.”

The witch looked up at her, panting. She could see Flora’s life, already laid out, flat as a map. Perhaps all mothers can see as far.

“Jack, my love, my birds nest, my bite, my scrap of porridge,” the witch said, “you shall have my books. I won’t have any need of books where I am going. And when you leave my house, strike out in an easterly direction and you won’t be any sorrier than you are now.”

Jack, who had once been a little bundle of feathers and twigs and eggshell all tied up with a tatty piece of string, was a sturdy lad, almost full grown. If he knew how to read, only the cats knew it. But he nodded and kissed his mother’s gray lips.

“And what shall I leave to my boy, Small?” the witch said, convulsing. She threw up again in the basin. Cats came running, leaning on the lip of the basin to inspect her vomitus. The witch’s hand dug into Small’s leg.

“Oh, it is hard, hard, so very hard, for a mother to leave her children (though I have done harder things). Children need a mother, even such a mother as I have been.” She wiped at her eyes, and yet it is a fact that witches cannot cry.

Small, who still slept in the witch’s bed, was the youngest of the witch’s children. (Perhaps not as young as you think.) He sat upon the bed, and although he didn’t cry, it was only because witch’s children have no one to teach them the use of crying. His heart was breaking.

Small could juggle and sing and every morning he brushed and plaited the witch’s long, silky hair. Surely every mother must wish for a boy like Small, a curly-headed, sweet-breathed, tenderhearted boy like Small, who can cook a fine omelet, and who has a good strong singing voice as well as a gentle hand with a hairbrush.

“Mother,” he said, “if you must die, then you must die. And if I can’t come along with you, then I’ll do my best to live and make you proud. Give me your hairbrush to remember you by, and I’ll go make my own way in the world.”

“You shall have my hairbrush, then,” said the witch to Small, looking, and panting, panting. “And I love you best of all. You shall have my tinderbox and my matches, and also my revenge, and you will make me proud, or I don’t know my own children.”

“What shall we do with the house, Mother?” said Jack. He said it as if he didn’t care.

“When I am dead,” the witch said, “this house will be of no use to anyone. I gave birth to it—that was a very long time ago—and raised it from just a dollhouse. Oh, it was the most dear, most darling dollhouse ever. It had eight rooms and a tin roof, and a staircase that went nowhere at all. But I nursed it and rocked it to sleep in a cradle, and it grew up to be a real house, and see how it has taken care of me, its parent, how it knows a child’s duty to its mother. And perhaps you can see how it is now, how it pines, how it grows sick to see me dying like this. Leave it to the cats. They’ll know what to do with it.”

***

All this time, the cats have been running in and out of the room, bringing things and taking things away. It seems as if they will never slow down, never come to rest, never nap, never have the time to sleep, or to die, or even to mourn. They have a certain proprietary look about them, as if the house is already theirs.

***

The witch vomits up mud, fur, glass buttons, tin soldiers, trowels, hat pins, thumbtacks, love letters (mislabeled or sent without the appropriate amount of postage and never read), and a dozen regiments of red ants, each ant as long and wide as a kidney bean. The ants swim across the perilous, stinking basin, clamber up the sides of the basin, and go marching across the floor in a shiny ribbon. They are carrying pieces of Time in their mandibles. Time is heavy, even in such small pieces, but the ants have strong jaws, strong legs. Across the floor they go, and up the wall, and out the window. The cats watch, but don’t interfere. The witch gasps and coughs and then lies still. Her hands beat against the bed once and then are still. Still the children wait, to make sure that she is dead, and that she has nothing else to say.

***

In the witch’s house, the dead are sometimes quite talkative.

***

But the witch has nothing else to say at this time.

***

The house groans and all the cats begin to mew piteously, trotting in and out of the room as if they have dropped something and must go and hunt for it—they will never find it—and the children, at last, find they know how to cry, but the witch is perfectly still and quiet. There is a tiny smile on her face, as if everything has happened exactly to her satisfaction. Or maybe she is looking forward to the next part of the story.

***

The children buried the witch in one of her half-grown dollhouses. They crammed her into the downstairs parlor, and knocked out the inner walls so that her head rested on the kitchen table in the breakfast nook, and her ankles threaded through a bedroom door. Small brushed out her hair, and, because he wasn’t sure what she should wear now that she was dead, he put all her dresses on her, one over the other over the other, until he could hardly see her white limbs at all beneath the stack of petticoats and coats and dresses. It didn’t matter: Once they’d nailed the dollhouse shut again, all they could see was the red crown of her head in the kitchen window, and the worn-down heels of her dancing shoes knocking against the shutters of the bedroom window.

Jack, who was handy, rigged a set of wheels for the dollhouse, and a harness so that it could be pulled. They put the harness on Small, and Small pulled and Flora pushed, and Jack talked and coaxed the house along, over the hill, down to the cemetery, and the cats ran along beside them.

***

The cats are beginning to look a bit shabby, as if they are molting. Their mouths look very empty. The ants have marched away, through the woods, and down into town, and they have built a nest on your yard, out of the bits of Time. And if you hold a magnifying glass over their nest, to see the ants dance and burn, Time will catch fire and you will be sorry.

***

Outside the cemetery gates, the cats had been digging a grave for the witch. The children tipped the dollhouse into the grave, kitchen window first. But then they saw that the grave wasn’t deep enough, and the house sat there on its end, looking uncomfortable. Small began to cry (now that he’d learned how, it seemed he would spend all his time practicing), thinking how horrible it would be to spend one’s death, all of eternity, upside down and not even properly buried, not even able to feel the rain when it beat down on the exposed shingles of the house, and seeped down into the house and filled your mouth and drowned you, so that you had to die all over again, every time it rained.

The dollhouse chimney had broken off and fallen on the ground. One of the cats picked it up and carried it away, like a souvenir. That cat carried the chimney into the woods and ate it, a mouthful at a time, and passed out of this story and into another one. It’s no concern of ours.

The other cats began to carry up mouthfuls of dirt, dropping it and mounding it around the house with their paws. The children helped, and when they’d finished, they’d managed to bury the witch properly, so that only the bedroom window was visible, a little pane of glass like an eye at the top of a small dirt hill.

On the way home, Flora began to flirt with Jack. Perhaps she liked the way he looked in his funeral black. They talked about what they planned to be, now that they were grown up. Flora wanted to find her parents. She was a pretty girl: Someone would want to look after her. Jack said he would like to marry someone rich. They began to make plans.

Small walked a little behind, slippery cats twining around his ankles. He had the witch’s hairbrush in his pocket, and his fingers slipped around the figured horn handle for comfort.

The house, when they reached it, had a dangerous, grief-stricken look to it, as if it was beginning to pull away from itself. Flora and Jack wouldn’t go back inside. They squeezed Small lovingly, and asked if he wouldn’t want to come along with them. He would have liked to, but who would have looked after the witch’s cats, the witch’s revenge? So he watched as they drove off together. They went north. What child has ever heeded a mother’s advice?

***

Jack hasn’t even bothered to bring along the witch’s library: He says there isn’t space in the trunk for everything. He’ll rely on Flora and her magic purse.

***

Small sat in the garden, and ate stalks of grass when he was hungry, and pretended that the grass was bread and milk and chocolate cake. He drank out of the garden hose. When it began to grow dark, he was lonelier than he had ever been in his life. The witch’s cats were not good company. He said nothing to them and they had nothing to tell him, about the house, or the future, or the witch’s revenge, or about where he was supposed to sleep. He had never slept anywhere except in the witch’s bed, so at last he went back over the hill and down to the cemetery.

Some of the cats were still going up and down the grave, covering the base of the mound with leaves and grass and feathers, their own loose fur. It was a soft sort of nest to lie down on. The cats were still busy when Small fell asleep—cats are always busy—cheek pressed against the cool glass of the bedroom window, hand curled in his pocket around the hairbrush, but in the middle of the night, when he woke up, he was swaddled, head to foot, in warm, grass-scented cat bodies.

***

A tail is curled around his chin like a rope, and all the bodies are soughing breath in and out, whiskers and paws twitching, silky bellies rising and falling. All the cats are sleeping a frantic, exhausted, busy sleep, except for one, a white cat who sits near his head, looking down at him. Small has never seen this cat before, and yet he knows her, the way that you know the people who visit you in dreams: She’s white everywhere, except for reddish tufts and frills at her ears and tail and paws, as if someone has embroidered her with fire around the edges.

“What’s your name?” Small says. He’s never talked to the witch’s cats before.

The cat lifts a leg and licks herself in a private place. Then she looks at him. “You may call me Mother,” she says.

But Small shakes his head. He can’t call the cat that. Down under the blanket of cats, under the windowpane, the witch’s Spanish heel is drinking in moonlight.

“Very well, then, you may call me The Witch’s Revenge,” the cat says. Her mouth doesn’t move, but he hears her speak inside his head. Her voice is furry and sharp, like a blanket made of needles. “And you may comb my fur.”

Small sits up, displacing sleeping cats, and lifts the brush out of his pocket. The bristles have left rows of little holes indented in the pink palm of his hand, like some sort of code. If he could read the code, it would say: Comb my fur.

Small combs the fur of The Witch’s Revenge. There’s grave dirt in the cat’s fur, and one or two red ants, who drop and scurry away. The Witch’s Revenge bends her head down to the ground, snaps them up in her jaws. The heap of cats around them is yawning and stretching. There are things to do.

“You must burn her house down,” The Witch’s Revenge says. “That’s the first thing.”

Small’s comb catches a knot, and The Witch’s Revenge turns and nips him on the wrist. Then she licks him in the tender place between his thumb and his first finger. “That’s enough,” she says. “There’s work to do.”

So they all go back to the house, Small stumbling in the dark, moving farther and farther away from the witch’s grave, the cats trotting along, their eyes lit like torches, twigs and branches in their mouths, as if they plan to build a nest, a canoe, a fence to keep the world out. The house, when they reach it, is full of lights, and more cats, and piles of tinder. The house is making a noise, like an instrument that someone is breathing into. Small realizes that all the cats are mewing, endlessly, as they run in and out the doors, looking for more kindling. The Witch’s Revenge says, “First we must latch all the doors.”

So Small shuts all the doors and windows on the first floor, leaving open only the kitchen door, and The Witch’s Revenge shuts the catches on the secret doors, the cat doors, the doors in the attic, and up on the roof, and the cellar doors. Not a single secret door is left open. Now all the noise is on the inside, and Small and The Witch’s Revenge are on the outside.

All the cats have slipped into the house through the kitchen door. There isn’t a single cat in the garden. Small can see the witch’s cats through the windows, arranging their piles of twigs. The Witch’s Revenge sits beside him, watching. “Now light a match and throw it in,” says The Witch’s Revenge.

Small lights a match. He throws it in. What boy doesn’t love to start a fire?

“Now shut the kitchen door,” says The Witch’s Revenge, but Small can’t do that. All the cats are inside. The Witch’s Revenge stands on her hindpaws and pushes the kitchen door shut. Inside, the lit match catches something on fire. Fire runs along the floor and up the kitchen walls. Cats catch fire, and run into the other rooms of the house. Small can see all this through the windows. He stands with his face against the glass, which is cold, and then warm, and then hot. Burning cats with burning twigs in their mouths press up against the kitchen door, and the other doors of the house, but all the doors are locked. Small and The Witch’s Revenge stand in the garden and watch the witch’s house and the witch’s books and the witch’s sofas and the witch’s cooking pots and the witch’s cats, her cats, too, all her cats burn.

***

You should never burn down a house. You should never set a cat on fire. You should never watch and do nothing while a house is burning. You should never listen to a cat who says to do any of these things. You should listen to your mother when she tells you to come away from watching, to go to bed, to go to sleep. You should listen to your mother’s revenge.

***

You should never poison a witch.

***

In the morning, Small woke up in the garden. Soot covered him in a greasy blanket. The Witch’s Revenge was curled up asleep on his chest. The witch’s house was still standing, but the windows had melted and run down the walls.

The Witch’s Revenge woke and stretched and licked Small clean with her small sharkskin tongue. She demanded to be combed. Then she went into the house and came out, carrying a little bundle. It dangled, boneless, from her mouth, like a kitten.

***

It is a catskin, Small sees, only there is no longer a cat inside it. The Witch’s Revenge drops it in his lap.

***

He picked it up and something shiny fell out of the loose light skin. It was a piece of gold, sloppy, slippery with fat. The Witch’s Revenge brought out dozens and dozens of catskins, and there was a gold piece in every skin. While Small counted his fortune, The Witch’s Revenge bit off one of her own claws, and pulled one long witch hair out of the witch’s comb. She sat up, like a tailor, cross-legged in the grass, and began to stitch up a bag, out of the many catskins.

Small shivered. There was nothing to eat for breakfast but grass, and the grass was black and cooked.

“Are you cold?” said The Witch’s Revenge. She put the bag aside and picked up another catskin, a fine black one. She slit a sharp claw down the middle. “We’ll make you a warm suit.”

She used the coat of a black cat, and the coat of a calico cat, and she put a trim around the paws, of grey-and-white-striped fur.

While she did this, she said to Small, “Did you know that there was once a battle, fought on this very patch of ground?”

Small shook his head no.

“Wherever there’s a garden,” The Witch’s Revenge said, scratching with one paw at the ground, “I promise you there are people buried somewhere beneath it. Look here.” She plucked up a little brown clot, put it in her mouth, and cleaned it with her tongue.

When she spat the little circle out again, Small saw it was an ivory regimental button. The Witch’s Revenge dug more buttons out of the ground—as if buttons of ivory grew in the ground—and sewed them onto the catskin. She fashioned a hood with two eyeholes and a set of fine whiskers, and sewed four fine cat tails to the back of the suit, as if the single tail that grew there wasn’t good enough for Small. She threaded a bell on each one. “Put this on,” she said to Small.

Small puts on the suit and the bells chime. The Witch’s Revenge laughs. “You make a fine-looking cat,” she says. “Any mother would be proud.”

The inside of the catsuit is soft and a little sticky against Small’s skin. When he puts the hood over his head, the world disappears. He can see only the vivid corners of it through the eyeholes—grass, gold, the cat who sits cross-legged, stitching up her sack of skins—and air seeps in, down at the loosely sewn seam, where the skin droops and sags over his chest and around the gaping buttons. Small holds his tails in his clumsy fingerless paw, like a handful of eels, and swings them back and forth to hear them ring. The sound of the bells and the sooty, cooked smell of the air, the warm stickiness of the suit, the feel of his new fur against the ground: he falls asleep and dreams that hundreds of ants come and lift him and gently carry him off to bed.

***

When Small tipped his hood back again, he saw that The Witch’s Revenge had finished with her needle and thread. Small helped her fill the bag with gold. The Witch’s Revenge stood up on her hind legs, took the bag, and swung it over her shoulders. The gold coins went sliding against each other, mewling and hissing. The bag dragged along the grass, picking up ash, leaving a trail of green behind it. The Witch’s Revenge strutted along as if she were carrying a sack of air.

Small put the hood on again, and he got down on his hands and knees. And then he trotted after The Witch’s Revenge. They left the garden gate wide open and went into the forest, towards the house where the witch Lack lived.

***

The forest is smaller than it used to be. Small is growing, but the forest is shrinking. Trees have been cut down. Houses have been built. Lawns rolled, roads laid. The Witch’s Revenge and Small walked alongside one of the roads. A school bus rolled by: The children inside looked out their windows and laughed when they saw The Witch’s Revenge walking on her hind legs, and at her heels, Small, in his catsuit. Small lifted his head and peered out of his eyeholes after the school bus.

“Who lives in these houses?” he asked The Witch’s Revenge.

“That’s the wrong question, Small,” said The Witch’s Revenge, looking down at him and striding along.

Meow, the catskin bag says. Clink.

“What’s the right question, then?” Small said.

“Ask me who lives under the houses,” The Witch’s Revenge said.

Obediently, Small said, “Who lives under the houses?”

“What a good question!” said The Witch’s Revenge. “You see, not everyone can give birth to their own house. Most people give birth to children instead. And when you have children, you need houses to put them in. So children and houses: Most people give birth to the first and have to build the second. The houses, that is. A long time ago, when men and women were going to build a house, they would dig a hole first. And they’d make a little room—a little, wooden, one-room house—in the hole. And they’d steal or buy a child to put in the house in the hole, to live there. And then they built their house over that first little house.”

“Did they make a door in the lid of the little house?” Small said.

“They did not make a door,” said The Witch’s Revenge.

“But then how did the girl or the boy climb out?” Small said.

“The boy or the girl stayed in that little house,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “They lived there all their life, and they are living in those houses still, under the other houses where the people live, and the people who live in the houses above may come and go as they please, and they don’t ever think about how there are little houses with little children, sitting in little rooms, under their feet.”

“But what about the mothers and fathers?” Small asked. “Didn’t they ever go looking for their boys and girls?”

“Ah,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. And after all, who was living under their houses? But that was a long time ago. Now people mostly bury a cat when they build their house, instead of a child. That’s why we call cats house-cats. Which is why we must walk along smartly. As you can see, there are houses under construction here.”

***

And so there are. They walk by clearings where men are digging little holes. First Small puts his hood back and walks on two legs, and then he puts on his hood again, and goes on all fours: He makes himself as small and slinky as possible, just like a cat. But the bells on his tails jounce and the coins in the bag that The Witch’s Revenge carries go clink, meow, and the men stop their work and watch them go by.

***

How many witches are there in the world? Have you ever seen one? Would you know a witch if you saw one? And what would you do if you saw one? For that matter, do you know a cat when you see one? Are you sure?

***

Small followed The Witch’s Revenge. Small grew calluses on his knees and the pads of his fingers. He would have liked to carry the bag sometimes, but it was too heavy. How heavy? You would not have been able to carry it, either.

They drank out of streams. At night they opened the catskin bag and climbed inside to sleep, and when they were hungry they licked the coins, which seemed to sweat golden fat, and always more fat. As they went, The Witch’s Revenge sang a song:

I had no mother and my mother had no mother and her mother had no mother and her mother had no mother and her mother had no mother and you have no mother to sing you this song

The coins in the bag sang too, meow, meow, and the bells on Small’s tails kept the rhythm.

***

Every night Small combs The Witch’s Revenge’s fur. And every morning The Witch’s Revenge licks him all over, not neglecting the places behind his ears, and at the backs of his knees. And then he puts the catsuit back on, and she grooms him all over again.

***

Sometimes they were in the forest, and sometimes the forest became a town, and then The Witch’s Revenge would tell Small stories about the people who lived in the houses, and the children who lived in the houses under the houses. Once, in the forest, The Witch’s Revenge showed Small where there had once been a house. Now there were only the stones of the foundation, upholstered in moss, and the chimney stack, propped up with fat ropes and coils of ivy.

The Witch’s Revenge rapped on the grassy ground, moving clockwise around the foundation, until both she and Small could hear a hollow sound; The Witch’s Revenge dropped to all fours and clawed at the ground, tearing it up with her paws and biting at it, until they could see a little wooden roof. The Witch’s Revenge knocked on the roof, and Small lashed his tails.

“Well, Small,” said The Witch’s Revenge, “shall we take off the roof and let the poor child go?”

Small crept up close to the hole she had made. He put his ear to it and listened, but he heard nothing at all. “There’s no one in there,” he said.

“Maybe they’re shy,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “Shall we let them out, or shall we leave them be?”

“Let them out!” said Small, but what he meant to say was, “Leave them alone!” Or maybe he said Leave them be! although he meant the opposite. The Witch’s Revenge looked at him, and Small thought he heard something then—beneath him where he crouched, frozen—very faint: a scrabbling at the dirty, sunken roof.

Small sprang away. The Witch’s Revenge picked up a stone and brought it down hard, caving the roof in. When they peered inside, there was nothing except blackness and a faint smell. They waited, sitting on the ground, to see what might come out, but nothing came out. After a while, The Witch’s Revenge picked up her catskin bag, and they set off again.

For several nights after that, Small dreamed that someone, something, was following them. It was small and thin and bleached and cold and dirty and afraid. One night it crept away again, and Small never knew where it went. But if you come to that part of the forest, where they sat and waited by the stone foundation, perhaps you will meet the thing that they set free.

***

No one knew the reason for the quarrel between the witch Small’s mother and the witch Lack, although the witch Small’s mother had died for it. The witch Lack was a handsome man and he loved his children dearly. He had stolen them out of the cribs and beds of palaces and manors and harems. He dressed his children in silks, as befitted their station, and they wore gold crowns and ate off gold plates. They drank from cups of gold. Lack’s children, it was said, lacked nothing.

Perhaps the witch Lack had made some remark about the way the witch Small’s mother was raising her children, or perhaps the witch Small’s mother had boasted of her children’s red hair. But it might have been something else. Witches are proud and they like to quarrel.

When Small and The Witch’s Revenge came at last to the house of the witch Lack, The Witch’s Revenge said to Small, “Look at this monstrosity! I’ve produced finer turds and buried them under leaves. And the smell, like an open sewer! How can his neighbors stand the stink?”

Male witches have no wombs, and must come by their houses in other ways, or else buy them from female witches. But Small thought it was a very fine house. There was a prince or a princess at each window staring down at him, as he sat on his haunches in the driveway, beside The Witch’s Revenge. He said nothing, but he missed his brothers and sisters.

“Come along,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “We’ll go a little ways off and wait for the witch Lack to come home.”

Small followed The Witch’s Revenge back into the forest, and in a while, two of the witch Lack’s children came out of the house, carrying baskets made of gold. They went into the forest as well and began to pick blackberries.

The Witch’s Revenge and Small sat in the briar and watched.

***

There was a wind in the briar. Small was thinking of his brothers and sisters. He thought of the taste of blackberries, the feel of them in his mouth, which was not at all like the taste of fat.

The Witch’s Revenge nestled against the small of Small’s back. She was licking down a lump of knotted fur at the base of his spine. The princesses were singing.

Small decided that he would live in the briar with The Witch’s Revenge. They would live on berries and spy on the children who came to pick them, and The Witch’s Revenge would change her name. The word Mother was in his mouth, along with the sweet taste of the blackberries.

“Now you must go out,” said The Witch’s Revenge, “and be kittenish. Be playful. Chase your tail. Be shy, but don’t be too shy. Don’t talk too much. Let them pet you. Don’t bite.”

She pushed at Small’s rump, and Small tumbled out of the briar and sprawled at the feet of the witch Lack’s children.

The Princess Georgia said, “Look! It’s a dear little cat!”

Her sister Margaret said doubtfully, “But it has five tails. I’ve never seen a cat that needed so many tails. And its skin is done up with buttons and it’s almost as large as you are.”

Small, however, began to caper and prance. He swung his tails back and forth so that the bells rang out and then he pretended to be alarmed by this. First he ran away from his tails and then he chased his tails. The two princesses put down their baskets, half-full of blackberries, and spoke to him, calling him a silly puss.

At first he wouldn’t go near them. But, slowly, he pretended to be won over. He allowed himself to be petted and fed blackberries. He chased a hair ribbon and he stretched out to let them admire the buttons up and down his belly. Princess Margaret’s fingers tugged at his skin; then she slid one hand in between the loose catskin and Small’s boy skin. He batted her hand away with a paw, and Margaret’s sister Georgia said knowingly that cats didn’t like to be petted on their bellies.

They were all good friends by the time The Witch’s Revenge came out of the briar, standing on her hind legs and singing:

I have no children and my children have no children and their children have no children and their children have no whiskers and no tails

At this sight, the Princesses Margaret and Georgia began to laugh and point. They had never heard a cat sing, or seen a cat walk on its hind legs. Small lashed his five tails furiously, and all the fur of the catskin stood up on his arched back, and they laughed at that too.

When they came back from the forest, with their baskets piled with berries, Small was stalking close at their heels, and The Witch’s Revenge came walking just behind. But she left the bag of gold hidden in the briar.

***

That night, when the witch Lack came home, his hands were full of gifts for his children. One of his sons ran to meet him at the door and said, “Come and see what followed Margaret and Georgia home from the forest! Can we keep them?”

And the table had not been set for dinner, and the children of the witch Lack had not sat down to do their homework, and in the witch Lack’s throne room, there was a cat with five tails, spinning in circles, while a second cat sat impudently upon his throne, and sang:

Yes! your father’s house is the shiniest brownest largest the most expensive the sweetest-smelling house that has ever come out of anyone’s ass!

The witch Lack’s children began to laugh at this, until they saw the witch, their father, standing there. Then they fell silent. Small stopped spinning.

“You!” said the witch Lack.

“Me!” said The Witch’s Revenge, and sprang from the throne. Before anyone knew what she was about, her jaws were fastened about the witch Lack’s neck, and then she ripped out his throat. Lack opened his mouth to speak and his blood fell out, making The Witch’s Revenge’s fur more red now than white. The witch Lack fell down dead, and red ants went marching out of the hole in his neck and the hole of his mouth, and they held pieces of Time in their jaws as tightly as The Witch’s Revenge had held Lack’s throat in hers. But she let Lack go and left him lying in his blood on the floor, and she snatched up the ants and ate them, quickly, as if she had been hungry for a very long time.

While this was happening, the witch Lack’s children stood and watched and did nothing. Small sat on the floor, his tails curled about his paws. Children, all of them, they did nothing. They were too surprised. The Witch’s Revenge, her belly full of ants, her mouth stained with blood, stood up and surveyed them.

“Go and fetch me my catskin bag,” she said to Small.

Small found that he could move. Around him, the princes and princesses stayed absolutely still. The Witch’s Revenge was holding them in her gaze.

“I’ll need help,” Small said. “The bag is too heavy for me to carry.”

The Witch’s Revenge yawned. She licked a paw and began to pat at her mouth. Small stood still.

“Very well,” she said. “Take those big strong girls the Princesses Margaret and Georgia with you. They know the way.”

The Princesses Margaret and Georgia, finding that they could move again, began to tremble. They gathered their courage and they went with Small, the two girls holding each other’s hands, out of the throne room, not looking down at the body of their father, the witch Lack, and back into the forest.

Georgia began to weep, but the Princess Margaret said to Small: “Let us go!”

“Where will you go?” said Small. “The world is a dangerous place. There are people in it who mean you no good.” He threw back his hood, and the Princess Georgia began to weep harder.

“Let us go,” said the Princess Margaret. “My parents are the King and Queen of a country not three days’ walk from here. They will be glad to see us again.”

Small said nothing. They came to the briar and he sent the Princess Georgia in to hunt for the catskin bag. She came out scratched and bleeding, the bag in her hand. It had caught on the briars and torn open. Gold coins rolled out, like glossy drops of fat, falling on the ground.

“Your father killed my mother,” said Small.

“And that cat, your mother’s devil, will kill us, or worse,” said Princess Margaret. “Let us go!”

Small lifted the catskin bag. There were no coins in it now. The Princess Georgia was on her hands and knees, scooping up coins and putting them into her pockets.

“Was he a good father?” Small asked.

“He thought he was,” Princess Margaret said. “But I’m not sorry he’s dead. When I grow up, I will be Queen. I’ll make a law to put all the witches in the kingdom to death, and all their cats as well.”

Small became afraid. He took up the catskin bag and ran back to the house of the witch Lack, leaving the two princesses in the forest. And whether they made their way home to the Princess Margaret’s parents, or whether they fell into the hands of thieves, or whether they lived in the briar, or whether the Princess Margaret grew up and kept her promise and rid her kingdom of witches and cats, Small never knew, and neither do I, and neither shall you.

***

When he came back into the witch Lack’s house, The Witch’s Revenge saw at once what had happened. “Never mind,” she said.

There were no children, no princes and princesses, in the throne room. The witch Lack’s body still lay on the floor, but The Witch’s Revenge had skinned it like a coney, and sewn up the skin into a bag. The bag wriggled and jerked, the sides heaving as if the witch Lack were still alive somewhere inside. The Witch’s Revenge held the witchskin bag in one hand, and with the other, she was stuffing a cat into the neck of the skin. The cat wailed as it went into the bag. The bag was full of wailing. But the discarded flesh of the witch Lack lolled, slack.

There was a little pile of gold crowns on the floor beside the flayed corpse, and transparent, papery things that blew about the room on a current of air, surprised looks on the thin, shed faces.

Cats were hiding in the corners of the room, and under the throne. “Go catch them,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “But leave the three prettiest alone.”

“Where are the witch Lack’s children?” Small said.

The Witch’s Revenge nodded around the room. “As you see,” she said. “I’ve slipped off their skins, and they were all cats underneath. They’re cats now, but if we were to wait a year or two, they would shed these skins as well and become something new. Children are always growing.”

Small chased the cats around the room. They were fast, but he was faster. They were nimble, but he was nimbler. He had worn his catsuit longer. He drove the cats down the length of the room, and The Witch’s Revenge caught them and dropped them into her bag. At the end, there were only three cats left in the throne room and they were as pretty a trio of cats as anyone could ask for. All the other cats were inside the bag.

“Well done and quickly done, too,” said The Witch’s Revenge, and she took her needle and stitched shut the neck of the bag. The skin of the witch Lack smiled up at Small, and a cat put its head through Lack’s stained mouth, wailing. But The Witch’s Revenge sewed Lack’s mouth shut too, and the hole on the other end, where a house had come out. She left only his earholes and his eyeholes and his nostrils, which were full of fur, rolled open so that the cats could breathe.

The Witch’s Revenge slung the skin full of cats over her shoulder and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Small said.

“These cats have mothers and fathers,” The Witch’s Revenge said. “They have mothers and fathers who miss them very much.”

She gazed at Small. He decided not to ask again. So he waited in the house with the two princesses and the prince in their new catsuits, while The Witch’s Revenge went down to the river. Or perhaps she took them down to the market and sold them. Or maybe she took each cat home, to its own mother and father, back to the kingdom where it had been born. Maybe she wasn’t so careful to make sure that each child was returned to the right mother and father. After all, she was in a hurry, and cats look very much alike at night.

No one saw where she went—but the market is closer than the palaces of the Kings and Queens whose children had been stolen by the witch Lack, and the river is closer still.

When The Witch’s Revenge came back to Lack’s house, she looked around her. The house was beginning to stink very badly. Even Small could smell it now.

“I suppose the Princess Margaret let you fuck her,” said The Witch’s Revenge, as if she had been thinking about this while she ran her errands. “And that is why you let them go. I don’t mind. She was a pretty puss. I might have let her go myself.”

She looked at Small’s face and saw that he was confused. “Never mind,” she said.

She had a length of string in her paw, and a cork, which she greased with a piece of fat she had cut from the witch Lack. She threaded the cork on the string, calling it a good, quick, little mouse, and greased the string as well, and she fed the wriggling cork to the tabby who had been curled up in Small’s lap. And when she had the cork back again, she greased it again and fed it to the little black cat, and then she fed it to the cat with two white forepaws, so that she had all three cats upon her string.

She sewed up the rip in the catskin bag, and Small put the gold crowns in the bag, and it was nearly as heavy as it had been before. The Witch’s Revenge carried the bag, and Small took the greased string, holding it in his teeth, so the three cats were forced to run along behind him as they left the house of the witch Lack.

***

Small strikes a match, and he lights the house of the dead witch, Lack, on fire, as they leave. But shit burns slowly, if at all, and that house might be burning still, if someone hasn’t gone and put it out. And maybe, someday, someone will go fishing in the river near that house, and hook their line on a bag full of princes and princesses, wet and sorry and wriggling in their catsuit skins—that’s one way to catch a husband or a wife.

***

Small and The Witch’s Revenge walked without stopping and the three cats came behind them. They walked until they reached a little village very near where the witch Small’s mother had lived and there they settled down in a room The Witch’s Revenge rented from a butcher. They cut the greased string, and bought a cage and hung it from a hook in the kitchen. They kept the three cats in it, but Small bought collars and leashes, and sometimes he put one of the cats on a leash and took it for a walk around the town.

Sometimes he wore his own catsuit and went out prowling, but The Witch’s Revenge used to scold him if she caught him dressed like that. There are country manners and there are town manners and Small was a boy about town now.

The Witch’s Revenge kept house. She cleaned and she cooked and she made Small’s bed in the morning. Like all of the witch’s cats, she was always busy. She melted down the gold crowns in a stewpot, and minted them into coins.

The Witch’s Revenge wore a silk dress and gloves and a heavy veil, and ran her errands in a fine carriage, Small at her side. She opened an account in a bank, and she enrolled Small in a private academy. She bought a piece of land to build a house on, and she sent Small off to school every morning, no matter how he cried. But at night she took off her clothes and slept on his pillow and he combed her red and white fur.

Sometimes at night she twitched and moaned, and when he asked her what she was dreaming, she said, “There are ants! Can’t you comb them out? Be quick and catch them, if you love me.”

But there were never any ants.

One day when Small came home, the little cat with the white front paws was gone. When he asked The Witch’s Revenge, she said that the little cat had fallen out of the cage and through the open window and into the garden and before The Witch’s Revenge could think what to do, a crow had swooped down and carried the little cat off.

They moved into their new house a few months later, and Small was always very careful when he went in and out the doorway, imagining the little cat, down there in the dark, under the doorstep, under his foot.

***

Small got bigger. He didn’t make any friends in the village, or at his school, but when you’re big enough, you don’t need friends.

One day while he and The Witch’s Revenge were eating their dinner, there was a knock at the door. When Small opened the door, there stood Flora and Jack. Flora was wearing a drab, thrift-store coat, and Jack looked more than ever like a bundle of sticks.

“Small!” said Flora. “How tall you’ve become!” She burst into tears, and wrung her beautiful hands. Jack said, looking at The Witch’s Revenge, “And who are you?”

The Witch’s Revenge said to Jack, “Who am I? I’m your mother’s cat, and you’re a handful of dry sticks in a suit two sizes too large. But I won’t tell anyone if you won’t tell, either.”

Jack snorted at this, and Flora stopped crying. She began to look around the house, which was sunny and large and well appointed.

“There’s room enough for both of you,” said The Witch’s Revenge, “if Small doesn’t mind.”

Small thought his heart would burst with happiness to have his family back again. He showed Flora to one bedroom and Jack to another. Then they went downstairs and had a second dinner, and Small and The Witch’s Revenge listened, and the cats in their hanging cage listened, while Flora and Jack recounted their adventures.

A pickpocket had taken Flora’s purse, and they’d sold the witch’s automobile, and lost the money in a game of cards. Flora found her parents, but they were a pair of old scoundrels who had no use for her. (She was too old to sell again. She would have realized what they were up to.) She’d gone to work in a department store, and Jack had sold tickets in a movie theater. They’d quarreled and made up, and then fallen in love with other people, and had many disappointments. At last they had decided to go home to the witch’s house and see if it would do for a squat, or if there was anything left, to carry away and sell.

But the house, of course, had burned down. As they argued about what to do next, Jack had smelled Small, his brother, down in the village. So here they were.

“You’ll live here, with us,” Small said.

Jack and Flora said they could not do that. They had ambitions, they said. They had plans. They would stay for a week, or two weeks, and then they would be off again. The Witch’s Revenge nodded and said that this was sensible.

Every day, Small came home from school and went out again, with Flora, on a bicycle built for two. Or he stayed home and Jack taught him how to hold a coin between two fingers, and how to follow the egg, as it moved from cup to cup. The Witch’s Revenge taught them to play bridge, although Flora and Jack couldn’t be partners. They quarreled with each other as if they were husband and wife.

“What do you want?” Small asked Flora one day. He was leaning against her, wishing he were still a cat, and could sit in her lap. She smelled of secrets. “Why do you have to go away again?”

Flora patted Small on the head. She said, “What do I want? That’s easy enough! To never have to worry about money. I want to marry a man and know that he’ll never cheat on me, or leave me.” She looked at Jack as she said this.

Jack said, “I want a rich wife who won’t talk back, who doesn’t lie in bed all day, with the covers pulled up over her head, weeping and calling me a bundle of twigs.” And he looked at Flora when he said this.

The Witch’s Revenge put down the sweater that she was knitting for Small. She looked at Flora and she looked at Jack and then she looked at Small.

Small went into the kitchen and opened the door of the hanging cage. He lifted out the two cats and brought them to Flora and Jack. “Here,” he said. “A husband for you, Flora, and a wife for Jack. A prince and a princess, and both of them beautiful, and well brought up, and wealthy, no doubt.”

Flora picked up the little tomcat and said, “Don’t tease at me, Small! Who ever heard of marrying a cat!”

The Witch’s Revenge said, “The trick is to keep their catskins in a safe hiding place. And if they sulk, or treat you badly, sew them back into their catskin and put them into a bag and throw them in the river.”

Then she took her claw and slit the skin of the tabby-colored catsuit, and Flora was holding a naked man. Flora shrieked and dropped him on the ground. He was a handsome man, well made, and he had a princely manner. He was not a man that anyone would ever mistake for a cat. He stood up and made a bow, very elegant, for all that he was naked. Flora blushed, but she looked pleased.

“Go fetch some clothes for the Prince and the Princess,” The Witch’s Revenge said to Small. When he got back, there was a naked princess hiding behind the sofa, and Jack was leering at her.

A few weeks after that, there were two weddings, and then Flora left with her new husband, and Jack went off with his new princess. Perhaps they lived happily ever after.

The Witch’s Revenge said to Small, “We have no wife for you.”

Small shrugged. “I’m still too young,” he said.

***

But try as hard as he can, Small is getting older now. The catskin barely fits across his shoulders. The buttons strain when he fastens them. His grown-up fur—his people fur—is coming in. At night he dreams.

The witch his mother’s Spanish heel beats against the pane of glass. The princess hangs in the briar. She’s holding up her dress, so he can see the catfur down there. Now she’s under the house. She wants to marry him, but the house will fall down if he kisses her. He and Flora are children again, in the witch’s house. Flora lifts up her skirt and says, see my pussy? There’s a cat down there, peeking out at him, but it doesn’t look like any cat he’s ever seen. He says to Flora, I have a pussy, too. But his isn’t the same.

At last he knows what happened to the little, starving, naked thing in the forest, where it went. It crawled into his catskin, while he was asleep, and then it climbed right inside him, his Small skin, and now it is huddled in his chest, still cold and sad and hungry. It is eating him from the inside, and getting bigger, and one day there will be no Small left at all, only that nameless, hungry child, wearing a Small skin.

Small moans in his sleep.

There are ants in The Witch’s Revenge’s skin, leaking out of her seams, and they march down into the sheets and pinch at him, down under his arms, and between his legs where his fur is growing in, and it hurts, it aches and aches. He dreams that The Witch’s Revenge wakes now, and comes and licks him all over, until the pain melts. The pane of glass melts. The ants march away again on their long, greased thread.

“What do you want?” says The Witch’s Revenge.

Small is no longer dreaming. He says, “I want my mother!”

Light from the moon comes down through the window over their bed. The Witch’s Revenge is very beautiful—she looks like a Queen, like a knife, like a burning house, a cat—in the moonlight. Her fur shines. Her whiskers stand out like pulled stitches, wax and thread. The Witch’s Revenge says, “Your mother is dead.”

“Take off your skin,” Small says. He’s crying and The Witch’s Revenge licks his tears away. Small’s skin pricks all over, and down under the house, something small wails and wails. “Give me back my mother,” he says.

“Oh, my darling,” says his mother, the witch, The Witch’s Revenge, “I can’t do that. I’m full of ants. Take off my skin, and all the ants will spill out, and there will be nothing left of me.”

Small says, “Why have you left me all alone?”

His mother the witch says, “I’ve never left you alone, not even for a minute. I sewed up my death in a catskin so I could stay with you.”

“Take it off! Let me see you!” Small says. He pulls at the sheet on the bed, as if it were his mother’s catskin.

The Witch’s Revenge shakes her head. She trembles and beats her tail back and forth. She says, “How can you ask me for such a thing, and how can I say no to you? Do you know what you’re asking me for? Tomorrow night. Ask me again, tomorrow night.”

And Small has to be satisfied with that. All night long, Small combs his mother’s fur. His fingers are looking for the seams in her catskin. When The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he peers inside her mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face. He can feel himself becoming smaller and smaller. In the morning he will be so small that when he tries to put his catskin on, he can barely do up the buttons. He’ll be so small, so sharp, you might mistake him for an ant, and when The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he’ll creep inside her mouth, he’ll go down into her belly, he’ll go find his mother. If he can, he’ll help his mother cut her catskin open so that she can get out again and come and live in the world with him, and if she won’t come out, then he won’t, either. He’ll live there, the way that sailors learn to live, inside the belly of fish who have eaten them, and keep house for his mother inside the house of her skin.

***

This is the end of the story. The Princess Margaret grows up to kill witches and cats. If she doesn’t, then someone else will have to do it. There is no such thing as witches, and there is no such thing as cats, either, only people dressed up in catskin suits. They have their reasons, and who is to say that they might not live that way, happily ever after, until the ants have carried away all of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?

[hiyo-silver]

Behind Blindfolds

Nobody expected the world to end the way it does until it starts. It was always thought to happen all in one go but instead it drags on for years of feigning really living when all they’re doing is surviving. In this situation maybe, surviving is really losing.

Summary: another new person joins the losers- survivors- and he may or may not have been a really bad person to let into their space.

Chapter 1 2 3 4 + ao3

Taglist: @fuckboykaspbrak @thesquidliesthuman @rachi0964 @beepbeep-losers@bigbilliamdenbro @jalenrose11 @sleepygaybrough@itandstrangerthingsfanfic@boopboopbichie @peachywyatt @aizeninlefox@sockwantstodie @ahoybyeler@yooonbum @coffeekaspbrak @sedanleystanley

The drive home goes mostly uneventfully, thank goodness. The homecoming with the groceries is exciting for them all. It’s the first time they’ve been truly successful at what their goal was. It gives them a sense of hope that they can be strong despite the hardships. They can’t be brought down, laughing and talking as they put the groceries away into the kitchen.

After they finish, Beverly finds her way back to the living room, spotting the notebook that was Ben’s. It brings a pang to her heart, she hadn’t known him well but it still hurts when she remembers the scream they’d heard from outside the door. It hurts even more to realize how numb they already have become to the pain that loss brings. Ben seemed nice, and she wonders how intrusive it would be to read bits and pieces of his story. She hopes it wouldn’t be too awful, because she already finds herself picking it up to read through. The first page is dated, it’s from months and months ago. It brings a small smile to her lips, it’s almost like Ben had predicted the apocalypse. It’s very good actually, his words string together like song lyrics or prose. It’s nice to read, although his ideas could have used so much more development, and she wished he was still here to finish them off, or even explain them out loud to her.

She doesn’t even feel Bill sit next to her on the couch, “I used t-to write, lost motivation to a-after a while,” he says, looking over her shoulder, reading a few of the scribbled words at the top of the page, “Thriller w-was never my genre, usually h-horror,” he admits, before this he never really talked about his writing to anyone, he found it embarrassing and thought of it as something to be ashamed of, that since he likes to write about fearful things that people would see he himself as creepy or weird. But y’know, there’s no reason to keep it private anymore. With what he’s seen, he’s not even sure he’ll be around for much longer. He can only hope, and he doesn’t know what he really hopes for. Life is the human instinct to want to hold on, but does he really want to stick around to see how far this will go?

“Did you ever write something about everyone in the world dying?” she asks with a little smirk, trying to make light of it the way Richie does. They are all learning from each other and picking up on each other’s traits, it’s inevitable with their close proximity. The more jokes the better, and it’s even better if they don’t pick up on all of Stan’s grumpiness, because he doesn’t seem anywhere near lightening up, they wish he would but they can’t force him to. He’ll come to terms with everything on his own time.

“I can’t say so, m-mostly just the n-normal amount of death,” he says with his own chuckle to her. At least they can keep the conversation light, they jive well. It’s important, if they were getting into fights it would probably be the most counterproductive thing they could do. Facing death tends to bring people together, all fighting for a common goal instead of each other, at a point personal inhibitions and views don’t seem so important on an individual basis. They’re distracted from the conversation when there’s a rustling in a box on the kitchen island. The birds.

Beverly suddenly remembers her little secret passengers, getting up quickly to check on them, opening the top slowly and peering in at the scared creatures. She wishes she could comfort them, but she knows next to nothing on birds and grabbing them to try and give them a chance at life had been fully on impulse, but now she feels worse. They’re in her full responsibility and if something happens to them it’s her fault. Maybe that’s why she’s so scared to be a mother and why she had been so close to having an abortion but then didn’t. It’s just like the birds. Wanting not to take away any of their chances, but not wanting to actually have to follow through with all the care. Maybe caring for the birds can almost be like practice motherhood in some simple way.

She sees the three of them cowered into the corner of the cardboard box, she feels bad for them. She’s never been a big fan of birds, they’re finicky and unpredictable which is a reason most people aren’t a fan of them, but now she realizes how much bigger and more powerful she is than them and most of that anxiety evaporates. She opens it fully to expose them to the light. “Hey, Stanley, anything you can tell me about the kind of birds these are? What do they need to eat?” she asks, she hopes that he is as interested in birds as he seems by his decor. She wants to see him replace that scowl with at least a little smile for once. She knows the joy pets can bring people, she hopes he’s one of those people.

“Parakeets. I don’t think we have proper bird food but let’s see,” he says, trying not to get too worked up over the fact that she’s kidnapped live animals into his home. At least they’re not something too wild like a squirrel or coyote. Birds are beautiful, and they’re gentle if you’re gentle with them. He likes that about them, they’re an easy animal to admire from afar, he’s not ever owned one. He doesn’t like to trap them. Birds are different than humans, if they’re out in the open they can fly. They can’t fly as well in a building, you can be an amazing bird owner. But a golden cage is still a form of cage.

He learns to be less peeved though as they work on setting them up a place to be, Beverly even thinks she sees the ghost of a smile on his face for the first real time since she’s met him. Night falls and they’re almost even some sort of content. Life feels normal, they’re creating their own sort of normal and it’s almost beautiful.

Kay and Bev are cuddled up in the guest bedroom, they’ve come to find endless comfort in the other’s touch. It’s a pure kind of friendship, one Beverly has never has had before. Kay isn’t so sure she’s had this before either. It feels safe. It feels better than it had ever felt with her ex husband. It feels like some sort of intimacy and closeness she’s never experienced. It almost feels like feelings.

“Beverly, if something happens to me, I want you to be my daughter’s mom,” Kay whispers to a half asleep Beverly, who is at least awake enough to nod and agree, letting the information sink in. She leans her forehead against Bev’s with a soothed sigh, and the two of them both fall into a light sleep void of any dreams or nightmares.

There’s a knock on the door like when Kay had come originally, the first one to flinch awake is her. She pulls gently away from Beverly, sitting up and rolling off the bed, waddling her way to the front door with her hand on her stomach. “Hello? Who are you?” she asks, tapping back onto the door to let the other person know she’s there. Soon she’s joined by Bill also woken by the pounding. It feels better to not be alone with whoever the stranger is.

“I need help, they’re trying to kill me, please!” a man’s voice yells, continuing to pound so desperately that Bill is sure he could definitely break the door down or at least punch a hole in it. He’d rather listen and help the have them exposed to the danger of a broken door, not after they’ve come as far as they have.

“I’m g-going to open the door,” he says in a calm voice, cracking it only slightly. Stan is awoken now by the noise, he has the same gun on his shoulder that Mike had been ready with when it came to Kay’s arrival. He looks livid, his eyes burning with the anger, it’s almost like the normal hazel has been replaced by pure fire.

Bill cracks it open and a lanky man with dark hair tumbles in through the door and falls to the floor. Bill slams the door behind him. The man wails and squirms on the floor. If anyone in the house had still been asleep they aren’t possibly anymore, just too exhausted and out of it to make their way to the foyer.

“Put your hands in the air and state your name and where you’ve come from right now or risk being shot on the spot,” Stan says in a voice loud and clear, it’s not a bluff. He may seem cold, but by now he’s here to protect himself and his new friends, he’s got enough friends, he doesn’t need any newbies. Newbies means change and change is dangerous, it always has been.

The man collects himself up to his feet. “I’m Patrick, I was hiding but a group of men found us and opened our eyes to see that thing, I was the only one to get away,” he says, choking and hiccuping on a sob at the thought of what he’s gone through. He’s loud and dramatic, Stan doesn’t like that. The man’s eyes are red and irritated, his pupils enlarged as he takes in his new location.

Stan shoots a warning shot but it only hits the wood floor as the man dodges the aim. Stan grumbles out a sigh and drops the gun, putting the safety back on, “You’re on thin fucking ice, Pat,” he says, it’s almost a trigger for him. His wife died only recently, and she’d been a dark haired woman named Pat, and now here’s a threatening dark haired man named Pat sitting on the floor of his home.

“Stan, put that thing down!” Bill scolds, grabbing the gun from him as soon as the safety is on it and it’s safe. “Be nice, y-you know how hard this is f-for everyone,” he grumbles himself. “If you have a pr-problem with it you can take the garage.

And that’s how it end up. Stan ends up staying in the garage of his own home due to his massive distrust of the new guy, the rest of them all returning to bed and Patrick to the couch in the living room, laying there in the dark fully clothed with his shoes on before he starts rifling through the backpack he travelled with, a sketchbook coming out in his hands with a devious smile on his face. In due time.

[glitchinthesystemspiderbyte]

[17] Glitch in the System - Warmth

By E. The morning after happens.

–

Sombra woke up the next morning in a slow, languorous dawning of consciousness. With it came her memories of the previous night, along with all the feelings and fears one might expect to accompany them.

As a blinding spike of adrenaline shot through her chest, she looked over to see the spider sleeping soundly beside her, fingers delicately curled beneath her chin as she slumbered. Her breathing was slow by normal standards, but in keeping with the pace of her heart, and Sombra watched her for what felt like a very long time in an attempt to convince herself that she was not, in fact, dreaming and had not, somehow, ruined it all.

The characteristic restlessness that colored her days took hold of her eventually, and she wiggled around a bit, trying to scooch closer without waking Widowmaker up. She’d gotten near enough that their foreheads were almost touching when the sniper opened her eyes with a soft flutter of lashes.

Sombra reached out a finger and touched the tip of her nose. “Boop.”

Widowmaker’s slow smile - a genuine smile, Sombra noted - lit up her sleep-heavy expression like a fire in the darkness. “Tu es mignonne,” she said, grabbing Sombra’s outstretched hand in her own. “Are you okay?”

“Better than, mi cielita.”

Widowmaker propped her head up on her hand, brushing some stray hairs from Sombra’s face. “I am glad to be home.”

The inflection in her voice filled Sombra with an unfamiliar heat that she masked by leaning forward and placing a single, soft kiss on Widowmaker’s chilled lips. The spider wound an arm around her waist, keeping her from shifting away, and Sombra felt a comfortable, growing familiarity in the way Widow’s cool skin pressed against the length of her body.

“Two weeks, no mission,” Sombra smirked, snaking an ankle around Widow’s calf to bring her closer. “What are you going to do?”

“I could always call Gabriel and ask for an objective,” she replied, raising an eyebrow in challenge.

“He is going to give us such shit,” Sombra groaned, thinking about all the side-eyes and sighs that awaited them back at the Talon mansion.

“Gabriel can think what he pleases,” Widowmaker murmured into the curve of her throat. She felt the gentle pressure of teeth on the skin of her collarbone as the spider pressed against her side, and promptly stopped thinking about Gabriel, missions, and Talon in its entirety.

An hour later, they made their way out of bed, and descended into the chateau proper to review the details of the endeavor they’d signed up for. Sombra held her hand down the impressive staircase from the upstairs rooms to the primary kitchen and dining room, hungry, but not quite willing to let her go just yet.

“Would you like me to make you breakfast?” Widowmaker asked as they stood before the kitchen, its newness a strange sort of contrast to the rest of the estate. Someone had gone through considerable effort to make the oven and refrigerator blend in with the 17th century architecture, but there was just something about modern appliances that would never quite exist unnoticed in a place that predated electrical grids

“Sure,” Sombra said, running a hand over Toulouse’s back as he hopped on the table to greet them. Widow was perusing the cabinets, and Sombra lifted him into her arms before the spider noticed and complained about pawprints on the marble countertop

“What would you like?” she asked, turning back to the hacker, her expression indicating she already knew the answer.

“Cereal,” Sombra replied as Toulouse purred. “And a mimosa.”

Widowmaker rolled her eyes. “You have the palate of a five year old child. I’m making us omelets.”

“And a mimosa?”

Her incredulity shifted ever so slightly into a smile. “And a mimosa.”

Widowmaker, of course, made them hearty 3-egg omelets with swiss cheese and spinach, setting a small bowl of Sombra’s cereal on the table beside the plate without any additional comment.

“You spoil me,” the hacker said.

“I know how petulant you can be when you don’t get what you want.”

Sombra grinned and they sat down to their meal.

After breakfast they started on the outdoor terrace, raking away the soggy remnants of fall, sweeping old fallen twigs and leaves from the trellis over the side. It was rather lovely once you looked past the rust spots on the iron and the dead vines. The work wasn’t hard, but it took some time, and by the time the afternoon rolled around they were ready for a slight change of tasks.

“This place needs some serious work,” Sombra commented as she took in the piles of paint cans, drop cloths, and ladders littering the interior.

“It is several centuries old and has been uninhabited for quite some time,” Widowmaker replied. “It is going to be an endeavor.”

“That’s a word for it,” Sombra sighed, stretching her sore muscles from the morning, tapping at one of the boxes of stuff that was stacked in a corner by the bay window overlooking the lake. “So, where do we start?”

Widowmaker did not answer right away, taking in the sheer unfinished chaos of the chateau. “Here,” she said, picking up the top box from the pile and placing it on the counter. “We should take care of these first. They are taking up space.”

“What’s in ‘em?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, squinting and pulling the cardboard flaps back. Sombra walked over to join her, hopping up on the table as she pulled out album after album of old, mostly black and white photographs.

“Oof, memory lane,” she said, picking one up and flipping through the pages. “These have to be a century old. Do you even know who these people are?”

“They are familiar to me,” Widowmaker said, her voice soft as her eyes flicked over each picture one by one. “Relevant to the Guillard line, although I cannot recall their names. Or their familial importance.”

“Well unless you’re secretly also a vampire, you probably never knew them, anyway.” As she tugged out another album, a single loose photograph slipped free and floated to the floor.

Widowmaker bent to pick it up, flipping it over. “Oh,” was all she said, voice deadpan and detached.

“What?” Sombra asked, immediately recognizing the shift in the spider’s intonation.

“It is nothing,” she said, setting the picture on the table and continuing through the box.

Sombra picked it up. “Oh,” she echoed, frowning and uncertain what to say. She’d never met Gerard, but unless Amélie had been married to some other Overwatch agent in her life, then she’d stumbled across their wedding photo. “Lo siento, cielita.”

“It means nothing to me,” she replied, head down as she sorted through the remaining photographs, the detached vehemence with which she moved indicating to Sombra that it did, in fact, mean something. What, she had no idea, and it didn’t look as though Widow had any intention of elaborating. Sombra tucked the picture covertly into her pocket and said nothing more on the matter.

They did not sort for long, Widowmaker’s silent perusal of the photographs becoming more and more erratic as she reached the bottom of the box.

“I am finished,” she said, packing them back into the musty cardboard.

“What do you want to do with them?” Sombra asked, frowning, the image of Amélie and Gerard feeling conspicuous against the fabric of her pyjamas.

“Burn them,” was Widow’s casual response.

“Burn them?” Sombra replied, uncertain. “But they’re part of your past.”

“They are not my family anymore,” she replied, stepping away from the table. “Burn them. I will be back soon.” Turning from Sombra and the stack of albums, she left the room.

She didn’t return, not after an hour had passed, not after the sun had begun to dip low in the sky. Sombra did as she had asked, tossing them page by page into the fireplace, wrinkling her nose against the acrid smell of burning paper.

As night descended on the chateau, Sombra gave up on the spider returning of her own volition and decided it was time to go look for her.

“Widow?” she called out as she crossed back out to the terrace, the sky dark now, but the sniper was nowhere to be seen. She checked the kitchen, made her way down to the wine cellar, and back out the the main entrance. The chateau was huge; if Widowmaker did not want to be found, even Sombra would have a difficult time locating her.

It took her the better part of an hour, but eventually she found Widowmaker where she’d retreated to the balcony outside their bedroom, standing stoically out beneath the stars.

“Hey,” Sombra said softly, walking to stand beside her. She didn’t acknowledge her immediately, so she settled in silently beside her, joining her in her quiet survey of the the vast holdings of the Guillard Estate stretching out beyond. The moon was high and the stars were out in force, illuminating the pair in their silent moment of reprieve.

“Sombra,” Widowmaker asked after what felt like an eternity of silence, eyes focused on some nondescript feature in the distance, “what does love feel like?”

Sombra raised one notched eyebrow and snorted out a laugh. “You’re asking me, araña?”

“I’m asking you.”

Sombra shrugged, the skin of her arm brushing against the chilled blue of the sniper’s, bared in a plain black shirt not nearly covering enough for the temperature. “I’m not really an expert on love. I find more solace in circuits than people. You know,” she shrugged, leaning against the railing. “Historically speaking.”

“I remember feeling it. I just don’t remember how it felt.”

Sombra thought for a moment, back into her own past, and found it decidedly lacking in both wisdom and unbiased affection. She hadn’t spent much time on people; on really getting to know people aside from learning how to manipulate and use them. It hadn’t seemed like a problem to her before, but now she wondered if, perhaps, she might benefit from a companionship without any manipulative strings attached.

Something, she thought, like was undeniably blossoming here in the chateau.

Strangely enough, as her mind wandered in pursuit of something, anything she could offer in response, the one thing she kept returning to was Toulouse. Toulouse, the small, fragile creature she loved more than anything else in this world; the vibrant ball of joy who wanted nothing more than affection and safety. Perhaps it was because there was no manipulation to be had. Even if she’d wanted to, how did one manipulate a cat? Through tuna and catnip?

At any rate, she thought, it gave her an answer she could believe in.

“I think it’s warmth, araña,” she replied, smiling as she glanced at the stoic woman beside her. She was still staring into the distance, features strained as she struggled to remember the feeling she’d once possessed in excess and now only recalled as a vague shadow.

“Well, then, there’s no hope for me, is there?” she replied, her words an attempt at a joke, but coming across much more despondent than she’d likely intended.

Swallowing, Sombra reached a hand out and took Widowmaker’s, twining her fingers gently between the sniper’s. “Not that. It’s not a warmth you generate, it’s a warmth you get from somewhere else. Like the glow off a fireplace, or the security of being held.” She squeezed her hand, smiling. “I know you can feel warmth, even if you can’t quite offer it in return.”

Widowmaker was silent for a long time, unmoving from her steadfast regard of the horizon. Sombra struggled against her natural inclination to move and do, stifling it for the sake of the moment.

“You are very warm,” Widowmaker said after a long time, so softly that her words were nearly carried away by the subtle breeze that whispered past them.

Gently, and as gingerly as she could manage, Sombra rested her head against the spider’s shoulder. A host of words paraded across her mind, but in the end she chose none of them, deciding instead to simply exist as the fire Widowmaker needed at that moment.

They stayed there, hand in hand, until the sun came up.

*Read from the beginning or check out our intro post! All stories tagged under #glitchfic

[survivorsupport]

Gasoline&Harmonies

Ever bought something brand new from the store, only to arrive home and tear open the packaging like a salivating canine and find that your freshly acquired and carefully wrapped possession was already cracked, scuffed, shredded? I know that you have, and within that knowledge I am equally as aware (if not more so) of the fact that though your face may or may not have betrayed the holocaust of anger roiling around inside of your chest at your misfortune, the great fire was burning bright and hot.

But I wonder if you know what it is like to realize that the shiny cellophane paper printed with raving reviews of its supposedly phenomenal contents is you, your own body, mind, heart and soul? I wonder, dear one, if you could ever begin to understand what it feels like to have your life inside of a cardboard box sent in the post marked as FRAGILE: HANDLE CAREFULLY, and then crushed mercilessly under someone else’s foot.

Typing this now, my mouth fills with a faint sour taste, one akin to noxious chemical burn searing canker sores that would never fully heal to the roof of my mouth and destroying my esophagus completely. It is a taste that I know, a flavor my palette only encountered once yet never, ever forgot. Gasoline, in a metal cup that you served me in a ditch just far away enough from society that no one could hear me scream, no one could bear total witness to the inhumanity of your callous actions. An inhumanity that was brushed underneath the rug that we never moved when we vacuumed, underneath my bed where I hid my favorite toys, begged of the dust bunnies to watch over them (the way the man they sing the songs about, the reason we dye Easter eggs and eat chocolate bunnies was supposed to watch over me).

 It is not an evil thing, gasoline. Rather it is an incredible accelerate, a catalyst to the inevitable demise of the stratosphere. I thought that my throat must feel exactly the way the ground does as a vehicle speeds over it at 90 miles per hour, burnt rubber. I think that day was when my vocal chords were forever altered in a way so that I no longer could sing beautiful hymns. Irreparable damage done to the tone of my melodies that did not make it so that I was never able to sing again, instead the defamation of my insides and my purity was mutated to a frequency only certain ears can hear.

Sadly, flammable chemicals were not the worst horror I would ultimately bear.

I will not go into detail about the things that took place under the blanket of darkness. An artificial darkness created by off-white walls that mother insisted were painted with actual top-coat and not just a thick layer of primer. A sheet of white color that remains sticky even after it has been drying for an impossible amount of time, an avalanche of snow so cold and lackluster, its ivory body streaked with dirt, caked with mud, and littered with debris. The walls were a color that somehow made even direct sunlight feel like cave darkness, like an eternal winter spent in Alaska.

A single window, above either my bed or yours, my mind’s lockbox has mostly blurred the memory of the iciest, most lonely and hopeless chrysalis my caterpillar alter ego would ever know, icier than any place meant for a creature meant to grow their wings out properly. I was forced into a morbid metamorphosis that irrevocably warped my ability to fly, and while almost the entirety of my essence had transformed into a new being completely, a tiny slice of my heart, mind, body and soul were cryogenically frozen.

There will always be a memory, a whisper of the frost that will never die, that I can never truly kill, no matter how many ways I try. In between my ears is quite a loud and busy place, often as I tell a story the words that I was so sure of a moment before dissipate completely into the foggy layer of my neurological stratosphere that hangs just above my temples, though only on the inside. This fog is not unlike the kind that plagues the Northern Pacific, even on Independence Day the brightest of any and all star rays cannot do any damage beyond faint and miniscule Swiss cheese holes in this pseudo-atmospheric reminder.

Through the fog, I once heard a child’s voice, a lullaby so sweet and delicate I dared not breathe. Faint at first, willfully reasoned away as the wind catching chimes on the front porch on a particularly stormy day. But the soft and supple nursery song then grew to a dull yet cutting roar that could not be drowned out and could never be mistaken. Notes lilting through the tunnels of my nasal cavity, the complete and all-encompassing harmony healing the raw, red, bloody trails that carried oxygen to my brain. I had not realized just how much time had passed since the last clean breath I inhaled had filled me with the human body’s least noticed and yet most sacred necessity. But we tend only to notice oxygen when we are deprived of it. And the way a song on the radio reminds you of a break-up or a road trip, this tune conjures up the feeling of suffocation, tearing in every way possible, skin or soul, or heart. I may be alive, but there is a part of me that knows the way it feels to truly suffocate.

Cracks are okay, they let the light in.

Darling I know your scars, as I’m the one who received them.

My tears fill bottomless wells, somehow you prefer dying of thirst.

I’m sorry you’re throbbing- but I felt the worst.

I know that you love to read, escape to Neverland

where you fight off pirates in your sleep,the floor hasn’t ever met Tinker’s feet

and you grew up nice and balanced

(although if that had happened we’d likely never meet)

Even still you love to scribe, your version of events was how you survived

you wrote infinite alternate endings where I stayed alive.

But please don’t disrespect me, my ashes deserve the memory

of recognizing our travesty, still you choose to live in the desert

sand every way that you can see.

And of course no one ever drowned in the desert, So you wonder how you cannot breathe?

Return with me, for once, though the theme of my lullaby is my pain.

The setting of our horror film, that primer coated bedroom,

filled with such a humid inhumanity-

stealing the last spark from my fading hopeful eyes-

summertime, or hurricane season, no one heard (or at least pretended not to)

the caterpillar’s final cries.

Instead you grew up to hide just like I did, in the folds of the dark blue curtains,

Pink insulation peeking out from behind them, killing the last shred of possibility,

That there could ever be light in this place.

You call that cave a chrysalis- there’s been fiction shelved with fact.

The cold prison where I died (and you grew) was a pupa.

Moths are drawn to the light, For Godsakes, a child would have gotten that right.

Most of my senses are dulled now, as I have worn away my nerves with all the ways I tried to numb wounds that were much too severe for my psyche to bear. The cruelest truth is that my blanket of chemical amnesia ended up taking my capacity for any feeling at all (especially joy) and leaving only the softest whisper of emptiness as my homeostasis. A sound so low that it is felt and not heard, the hiss of the horror haunts me no matter what time of year. I wonder if you know what I mean when I say that every part of who I am disappears in between those ivory lines or dissipates along with supple, serpentine trails of smoke. It is as if the world as I once knew it still exists all around me, present in body. Shades of red and pink muscles stretched across bones, covered in skin and adorned with scars I’ve never seen before and wavy lines on my fingertips that are unique to me, and only me. I know a certain secret that is written within the vices long since tucked in the box labeled “taboo” and hidden in the back of morality’s messy closet.

Visualize a time lapse, mental moving pictures of smoky garages, dried herbs and blown glass, red eyes and a cough so bad that I threw up several times. Then blue footballs and yellow submarines that carried me with velvet arms into a living purgatory, an absence of all memory. Fermented fruits that tasted worse than even the contents of that gas can did and burn just the same way all the way down my body. Ivory lines that numb my tongue and shake the world, then icy ones melted in the most unnatural and revolting igloos. Finally the taste of toasted marshmallows on my tongue, roasted by hand with no stick, instead foil underneath. Does this make you feel uncomfortable, the details of all the awful things I’ve done to because of the awful things you’ve done to me?

I grew into a creature who I wasn’t meant to be, somehow with your filthy hands you changed my very DNA. So, I became a moth instead of a butterfly- and all we seek is light. A moth is desperately pinging from streetlight to strobe-lights, looking for a source that will make up for all the darkness faced alone in that prison. I sought it through every facet I could find. I gave my body, and I gave my mind. I gave my money and I gave my pride. I gave the love I could have saved for myself and I loaded up the rig with it. I traded green papers in parks for bags of white, step into my teacup and spin around all night. That’s all I’ve ever done, is spin, and I don’t know how to stop, a carousel in Hades, attended by my flesh and blood. I can’t remember a time when I did not feel alien, empty.

I would not say you ruined me, as without you I would not exist. Instead you ruined who I might have been, how I might have lived and loved and lost. Certainly, you were the first person to teach me what it felt like to be lost, and I remain that way to this day.

              Our family will not talk about it, Daddy even asked if I made it all up. They still bring you up at holidays, though they know if you’re attending I will not be. You called me on my birthday last year, and I wasn’t even disgusted. I was at a loss, and I still am. I do not know where the story ends of how I lost my innocence. What I do know that it’s my duty every day to live, not as if I have never tasted gasoline, but to use mouth wash every morning, look into my hazel eyes and remember that there is nothing but honor in being a survivor. Every day I remind myself that though my melodies are off-key, they are notes as beautiful as the ones Orpheus played on his lyre, and I feel the singing girl in my head float softly closer and closer to the light. One day soon she will be free, I will be free, and you will be damned to hell, or whatever horrid after-life that you deserve. I sleep well at night now, though I cover my windows with blinds.