#also me: fuck all my forensic science notes were on my school email

[demonhuntersuggestion]

((Had an idea, and wrote a follow-up to this thing. Time for plot))

People were... much harder to deal with than demons. Some unidentified monster in the middle of the woods? Riddle it with bullets, cut it limb-from-limb. Nobody knows it lived, nobody knows it dies. People though? 

“How much time do we have?” Aurelio questions the recon specialist. 

“I’d give you about.. Thirty minutes. Any more, and...”

“Yeah, I know. Suspicious people and shit. Go keep an eye out.”

People problems came with all kinds of complications. 

Say, if a renowned-but-not-respected private investigator went missing without a trace after losing his family, reputation and general happiness to misfortune. How long would it take for someone to look into it? How long would it take for a missing persons report to get to the police? How long would it take for the police to stumble onto his last case and start looking out for a band of suspiciously nocturnal criminals? 

The Hunters couldn’t let that happen. But they had to work differently. Separately. Secretly. There was only so much they could accomplish without raising suspicion, without attracting the attention of the proper authorities.  They would most certainly taken note of a long string of tampered-with crime scenes in Fairbairn. 

They had to stay discrete. Unseen. Which is why Aurelio found himself in a missing person’s home, in the dead of night, under orders and obligation to flit in and out of the scene like a fucking ghost. 

Easy, right?

“Azzy,” he mutters under his breath. “Look around.” Aurelio feels the demon leave his side, quietly moving to search somewhere else, with all his intangiblity to keep him undetected. Aurelio himself, thick cleaning gloves on his hands and plastic bags strapped over his boots, went off to conduct his own search. 

He’d concluded that Reginald Harper Dickman, despite having a name as fucking awesome-sounding as “Reginald Harper Dickman,” was either one of the plainest old men he’d heard of, or that whatever happened to him was covered up well. Ideally, Aurelio would find evidence pointing to the latter.

Aurelio did not live in an ideal world.

There’s death in the air, Azazel’s cryptic conclusion reaches Aurelio. Recent. Stay alert. 

“It’s never fuckin’ simple, is it?” Aurelio sighs. “Tell me you’ve got something?” From the window, the reconnaissance guy (Lio really should’ve paid attention to his name) gives Aurelio a wary look. He knew about Azazel, then. “Eyes on the street, security,” Aurelio says dismissively, and the agent begrudgingly focused his attention toward keeping watch. 

Traces of blood on the ceiling. High up on the wall by the door, too. Someone tried to clean it off, but they were too short to do it effectively. 

“Seriously?” Aurelio half-snickered, looking up at the spot Azazel indicated. There might’ve been blood up there, invisible to the naked eye. 

You have a blacklight? Luminol? 

“No. And what the fuck is ‘luminol?’“

Don’t worry about it. The blood is there. Spatter looks like impact stains. Low velocity.

“From... What, blades? Bludgeons?”

Can’t tell. Not without a body. 

“So, there is a body.” 

Probably. 

 Aurelio turned to the rest of the room. “Need more information.” 

As he returned to his own search with renewed (and irritated) determination, he noticed more and more things in Dickman’s living room that pointed toward foul play. Furniture that hand long sat undisturbed wasn’t re-placed perfectly, leaving relatively cleaner shapes in the dust and dirt on the floor. Innocuous-looking spots in the house were wiped clean: no prints, no dirt, no nothing. Azazel was picking up traces of blood from all over the floor, concentrated in one specific spot. 

“Something definitely happened here,” Aurelio notes. 

Something that drew a lot of blood. More than a mortal could afford to lose. 

“Someone moved all the furniture from the center of the room, then back.” 

They needed room to do it-

“But what did they do?” 

“What the fuck are you trying to get at?” the other hunter in the room left his post, signalling to Aurelio that they needed to leave, immediately. He had a rather impatient look on his face. Aurelio didn’t ask whether it was from the question or the need to exfiltrate the area. 

Aurelio took one last look around the room and moved to follow him. “Our guy definitely died here.” 

The recon guy gives him a look. “Definitely?”

“Most fuckin’ likely,” Aurelio gives. “Whatever the case, we’ll need to conduct a fuller investigation.”

They push open the door to the backyard, pausing to pull the gloves and bags off their hands and feet before they move to a more visible area. “I need to make a call,” Aurelio states. 

“To who?” 

“Not important.” 

The recon guy frowns, but doesn’t press the issue. They split up, Aurelio making his way toward his truck a couple blocks away, recon guy going wherever he holed up. 

In the relative privacy of his truck, Aurelio clicked Marcus on his phone, pulling into the street as it rang, once, twice. Then his contact picked up. Aurelio skips the pleasantries, “Marcus, I looked into your thing.”

“What’ve you got?” Marcus’ cool baritone voice responded. 

“You definitely need to have someone look into this more. Seems important,” Aurelio shifted into vague-talk-but-with-just-enough-context-for-the-one-guy-to-understand speak. 

“How ‘important?’“ 

“Like, ‘missing teenage daughter report’ important. Except, y’know, with an old white guy.” 

“Aurelio?”

Aurelio stops at a red light. “Yeah?”

“Speak fucking clearly,” Marcus deadpanned. 

“Well excuse me for trying to be discrete, ass-hat!” Aurelio retorts, only slightly miffed. The light goes green, and Aurelio keeps driving.

“You’re not being ‘discrete,’ you’re being a suspiciously-vague piece of shit. The call’s secure. Do I have to go on?”

Aurelio sighs. “Fiiiine. Dickman’s probably dead.” 

“Dickman?” 

“Yeah, I thought it was funny too,” Aurelio huffs amusedly, turning onto another street, “But no, that’s his actual name.”

Marcus paused to think about it. “What makes you say he’s dead?” 

“Found a shit-ton of blood all over the place. Haven’t found a body yet, but there was definitely too much blood there for any human to survive losing.” 

“...The place was cleaned out, wasn’t it? Nobody saw any blood, anywhere in there.”

“Yeah, I used, uh... ‘Specialized investigation tools.’ Hey, do you know if we have any ‘luminol’ in our supplies?”

“Luminol?” Marcus pauses, and Aurelio hears typing in the background. “That’s specialized forensic investigation shit. Did you get your hands on some?” he asks.

“Uh, no. Just curious.”

“Sure,” Marcus concedes, suspiciously-but-mostly-ambivalently. “You figure out anything else?” 

“Nothing. Whoever killed him must be good.” 

“If someone killed him,” Marcus corrects him. “No concrete evidence yet. But alright, I’ll have someone else look into this,” he continues, the admin in him resurfacing. “Also, I’ll need you to come back in. Got another tip that I need you to look into.” 

Aurelio’s interest is piqued. “Another investigation?” 

“Yeah.”

“Two in one night, huh Marcus? You do know I’m more of a fighter than a detective, right?” 

Marcus makes an annoyed noise and a face that Lio can’t see through the call, but definitely can envision in his mind’s eye. “Yeah, I fuckin’ know. But they asked for you. Specifically you.” 

What? Aurelio purses his lips. “You sure?” he asks, doubtfully. If people ask for him by name, they look for his prowess in a fight, and most likely not for his (admittedly lacking) deductive ability. “What, like, ‘the hunter kid with the red hair?’”

“No, literally. Some guys came into the bar, asked to relay a message to you. Think his exact words were ‘the Morgenstern boy with the demon pet.’“

Aurelio almost runs a red light. “What the fuck?” That more or less confirmed it. Somebody had eyes on him. And Azzy. For better or worse. 

“Says they have information, on this missing persons case. Wanted to give it to you. Personally.”

“Personally,” Aurelio repeats. grip tightening on the wheel. Somebody’s aware of his existence. And, more importantly, his demon. Somebody other than the three, possibly four people who should know. 

“They’ve set up a meeting. Tomorrow night.”

“Understood,” Aurelio tensely replies. He definitely had to meet this person. Friend or foe, anyone who could find out about Azzy was dangerous. And needed to be looked into. 

Tomorrow night? Aurelio could do that. Get the time. The place. Case it, secure it. Get ready. Aurelio changed his route, there were places he had to drop by now. “These people who contacted you... They happen to mention who they are?” Aurelio asks, warily. 

There was an unsettling pause. “Yeah... Uh, yeah. The Wilk Clan.” 

Aurelio froze. “Oh, shit.” 

[alltheangstmygifttoyou]

School vent below 

tw: explicit language because I am frustrated, anxious thoughts

So I’m at work and I told myself I would do my homework tonight and just relax while I was working since I’m not feeling very good. So I relax and find myself in a writing mood and I start typing. An hour and half later I have three thousand words and I’m pretty satisfied. Except then I start thinking, last Saturday I was working for an hour and a half and I only typed 500 words of my essay, and it was an agonizing 500 words. I remember sitting there for over fifteen minutes trying to word the first two sentences. It was awful, I was miserable, and I felt like a failure by the time I turned it in. And that was just the rough draft. 

But I didn’t always feel that way writing essays. My last two years of high school I really liked writing the essays. My teachers told us that when we got to college our essays would be more freeing and that they would want more personality in our essays. Fuck, I was in forensics in the category of oratory I wrote fucking essays FOR FUN! And they weren’t the longest essays by any means but they were enough to be a ten minute speech. Now I have to write 800 words and I want to cry because I’m so frustrated. There’s no personality allowed. None. Paragraphs have to be in a certain format, no contractions, no second or first person, no slang, no opinions. Nothing. The teacher wants us to be as dry as possible. And don’t get me wrong, I love my teacher, he’s a funny dude and he’s good at teaching, but I hate these essay’s. And he says this is what college essay’s are like, and all we read are these boring ass dry papers that make me wonder if the person writing them was sitting next to a thesaurus rubbing their hands together going “ah yes let’s use this obscure word that no body has said in thirty years! This will really make them think!” 

I had a communications class last semester that had a speech at the end I was really excited for because I thought it as going to be like oratory. But instead it was a strict five minutes max and no writing an essay figure it out from the top of your head with note cards. Which was still better than what I’m doing now. I know essays are supposed to be an audience for your professor but in high school they at least pretended that other people were going to read them and care. I used to personalize my essay for my class or teacher in case they were read out loud, make remarks I knew would make the teacher laugh or a reference that I knew people in my generation would get. I don’t understand why college would want to take that away. Especially since I’m going into the humanities. I came for a writing class, a research writing class but not a fucking science class. I hate lab reports. I found them some of the most boring things to write, but they were still easier than this because it was just restating facts. Every paper in my class is supposed to be an argument but I’m not supposed to have an opinion??? I do not understand. But my claim can’t be a fact, it must be interpretable. I want to scream but I work in a library. 

The worst part is because of covid office hours are now fully online through email and I get severe anxiety over sending emails. So I ended up chickening out over emailing my professor for help. Which is completely my fault and I get that but damn it I’m still frustrated. This essay is 10% of my grade and the next essay is an even bigger percentage and there’s only two giant essays after that so if I fuck up this essay but don’t figure out how then I’m fucked and I can’t get another C because I will just die. My GPA is the lowest it’s ever been in my life and I can’t handle it getting lower. But it will if I don’t write the damn essay. So I have to write the damn essay but I’m still here typing this because I feel like if I write the essay now I’ll burst into tears and then my work will send me home and I won’t get my full twenty hours for this week which means I won’t get my full pay check which means I won’t be able to pay my mom back for the order I made afaawfdadada

I am spiraling. Anyway. point is I really wish college didn’t take the personality out of essays. I don’t know how I’m supposed to have a voice if I’m not supposed to use figurative language or slang. I want to love writing essays again, not have them be a huge obstacle I have to overcome. I’m going into English and Creative Writing, I need essays to not be a horrible event. 

Also, to whoever wrote a fifteen page paper rambling about the culture wars and neoliberalism’s affect on the humanities in America and got it published in a real academic journal, please explain your secrets, because that was a mess to read and now I have to write an essay analyzing your paper and I am very confused on how to critique a paper whose main evidence is “look at the past and how well that worked, let’s do that again!” I want to get published for rambling too. That’d be cool.