#anyway I've got a decent bit of the next chapter written already (wrote it at some point back when I was working on 2 or 3 tbh)

[we-were-so-beautiful]

4. shower

wow look it's another chapter!!! like... not that long after the last one, even! honestly I had the first 3 sections of this basically entirely written not long after finishing the last one, but eventually I decided I should probably do literally anything else for a while (hyperfocus is a real dick lol), and so I'm just now getting back to it. I thought this was gonna be on the shorter side, but it's about the same as the last one, around 1.3k! there's a pretty important reveal in this one...

Content warnings for this chapter: box boy universe, pet whump, dehumanization, conditioning, infected wounds, (severe) illness. As always, please let me know if there's anything else I need to tag.

[masterlist] [chapter three]

Vanessa’s never been particularly sensitive to scents—it’s a saving grace, in a mind where too much light or sound or texture can make her feel like she’s dying. But by the time the guy lying shaking on the seats behind her practically falls out of the taxi in front of her stoop, even she’s having a hard time with the smell coming off of him. Given how the driver peels away with all his windows down the second she pulls the last scrap of soiled newspaper from his backseat, it probably isn’t just her.

She turns back to the guy, for the first time finally alone with him. She’s too short to be used to talking down to people, but he’s hunched himself into that weird curled-up position again, so when she speaks it's aimed vaguely toward the top of his head. “Okay. First things first, we’re getting your ass in the shower,” she tells him. “And then we can deal with the effects of my questionable life decisions.” She pauses for a moment, considers. “Well. This one, anyway.”

There’s no way she’s getting him in through the front like this. Too many stairs, and too much dirt. The garden door will have to cut it. She motions for him to follow her down the alley, and he unfurls himself just enough to shuffle after her.

As soon as the shadows close in around them, she looks back over her shoulder. When she’s satisfied that no one can see them, she unclasps the collar from around his neck and tosses it, leash and all, into the garbage.

—

Vanessa can’t say she’s ever been grateful for the fact that her parents are insane enough to have a swimming pool in the basement of their New York fucking brownstone. Quite frankly, she still isn’t; they got the fucker installed when she was a kid and she screamed for so many days they finally packed her off to a hotel with her nanny of the week just to shut her up. Which they probably should have done in the first place, given that she was nine and there was a jackhammer in her fucking basement.

What she is grateful for now, though, is that the part of this floor that isn’t taken up by the pool—or the hot tub, or the weirdly redundant multi-person bathtub—is a shower stall the size of her literal bedroom. Complete with benches, and removable showerheads, and, she’s hoping, everything else she could possibly need right now.

“In here,” she motions, and he drags himself onto the tiles. “I’d offer you the weirdly redundant multi-person bathtub, but you’ve barely been able to keep your head up all day and the last thing I need is to fucking drown a guy in my basement. Also no offense but you’re literally so dirty right now I’d have to drain the fucker the second you got in. After this you can have a bath whenever you want, if you’re into that sorta thing, but for right now you’re getting a damn rinse.”

—

Once he’s more or less situated on the built-in shower bench, propped up in the corner in hopes it’ll keep him from falling ass over, Vanessa gets to work, still fully clothed down to her chucks on the marble tile. She unhooks a showerhead and aims it at the drain while it warms up. “Is this okay?” she asks, pointing it at his feet, and he flinches sluggishly but doesn’t respond either way.

“I don’t know what that means, guy.” She tests the water again with her hand. “It can’t be that bad, can it?” she muses out loud. “It’s the same temperature I’d use for me, and fuck knows I’m… y’know, picky. So if you want it different you gotta tell me, okay.”

He doesn’t tell her shit. But he doesn’t flinch too much harder when she moves the stream of water up toward his knees, either, and she figures that’s the best she’s gonna get.

She leans over him and focuses the showerhead on his hair. It’s matted stiff as tree bark, the water barely able to permeate through the layers of filth. “Shit, I dunno man, your hair’s got so much crap in it. Not to mention it wouldn’t surprise me if that shelter gave you goddamn lice.” She shudders. “Might be better off just cutting it short.”

There’s a noise she barely registers as a gasp before his ice-pale eyes fly open and he clutches her arm, quicker than she’s seen him move by fucking light years. She jerks automatically out of his grip, dropping the showerhead in her alarm, but he fixes her with a lidless, panicky stare and the eye contact is so startling she’s frozen to the spot. “Please…” he wheezes, “don’t.”

“You fuckin’ what, dude?”

“Don’t… cut… my hair.”

She blinks, astonished. “That’s the first thing you’ve said all fucking day, isn’t it?” He doesn’t offer another. “Christ. Typical fuckin’ me not to notice.” She huffs quietly. “Well shit, dude, I guess if you give enough of a fuck to speak up about it it can stay. But so help me if I find a single fucking nit in there.”

He whimpers quietly, squeezing his eyes shut, but he doesn’t say another word.

—

Vanessa gingerly retrieves the showerhead from where it’s spattering up at the ceiling, along with an oversized lace bath pouf and a mostly-full bottle of body wash she’s pretty sure is fucking designer. If you could see me now, Mom, she thinks, squirting the gel at his left shoulder, the one closest to her. You… well, you probably still wouldn’t give a shit. 

She touches the pouf to his sullied skin as gently as she can, and she knows she’s not well-coordinated at the best of times but she really doesn’t feel like she deserves the choked-off sound he makes or the way he shrinks away from her when she makes contact. “Oh cmon, guy, look I know but you gotta let me get this shit off you, there’s no way it’s not fucking your shit up worse than it already is,” she cajoles, and whatever she’s said it makes something in his posture go slack and he rolls back toward her, opening himself to her touch. “Thanks, uh, I think,” she hedges, and begins to lather him up with slow, concentrative strokes. She flicks the shower back on, sluicing suds and dirt from his skin in equal measure.

"Ohhh, fucking yiiiiikes," Vanessa says softly.

With the first layer of filth washed away, Vanessa can see the far grimmer reality that’s been hidden underneath. Rows of jagged, infected gashes streak their way across his shoulder to his chest. The skin around them burns an angry red, the wounds themselves all but smothered in sickly whitish-yellow. What narrow swathes of skin remain intact are mottled purple, and now that she’s touching him, she can tell he’s just… way too much hotter than any person should ever be.

She lowers the temperature of the water and keeps washing him, afraid to look but needing to see. Each stroke only reveals more of the same. His chest and left shoulder seem to have gotten most of the worst of it, but there are stripes across his arm, his back, his stomach, deep gouges in his legs. She hasn’t tried to touch his face yet, but now that she knows what to look for she thinks she can even see a scratch or several across his cheek, trailing up into his hairline. Jesus fuck.

It all makes a sinister sort of sense now, she thinks: the shallow breathing, the shivers, the near-total lack of response. And here she thought he just had regular rescuee trauma.

“Fuck,” she breathes out quietly, as the realization creeps over her like ice.

There’s something really, really wrong with this guy.

-

taglist: @maracujatangerine @pigeonwhumps @tragedyinblue @marchtothefuckingsea @octopus-reactivated @briars7

[creamypudding]

I finished my very tricky chapter 10. And before the weekend ever finished. And while I was sick with a cold and fatigued because I haven't been getting decent sleep the last few nights.

So I'm very pleased with myself.

As I suspected the dialogue was very tricky. I rewrote most of what I had already written in the 1st draft. I tried to keep some of the gold nuggets of dialogue but maybe about half of the stuff I wanted to keep didn't fit, or I had to alter it, which then lost the sheen of the gold nugget, which I'm sad about. But I got to work a few new bits of dialogue in and location changes which helped flesh out the scene and also build up the relationship better than what it was before.

There came a point in my writing where I realised I needed to change the beginning of the dialogue before I could proceed with the rest of it — because everything has cause and effect — so I copied and pasted the whole dialogue I had in the main chapter into a side document where I could retain the original, then version 1, and then alter it and create a version 2.

I'm trying to work a little smarter these days. Instead of editing things that I know will be tricky within the main body of the chapter I'm trying to remember to do this thing instead. So I have the version of one scene in one document and that saves me having to go through the many version histories on Google docs of the main chapter document, which will have so many revisions I wouldn't know where to begin looking to see what I had written previously.

So that's been a wonderful way of working, especially when I don't know what I might want to keep or cut from other scenarios that I've tried writing out.

I just about tripled my word count from 1st draft (2000) to 2nd draft (8000) of this chapter, which was stellar.

I've got some good ground elements established that will have ramifications for how I tackle the next few chapters — as I suspected would be the case, which is also what freaked me out initially.

I think I'll be ok though. I've got this. I even had some shower thoughts and epiphanies on how to strengthen the end, whenever I get to that part of the story.

Now I just need a way to catalogue these thoughts.

I wrote them down in my 'aside dialogue' document as I had that open and it was easiest to access... But now I should transfer it to some safe place. A vault of ideas or something where I clearly label the theme of the idea, or what chapter or scenario it pertains to. And then, of course, I'll need to remember to check that document when the time comes to implement these things.

Anyway... Chapter 11 is up next and I have no clue what to do about it, because it slips into the characters every day life when he is away from the main story arc.

I'm not sure how long to linger in that as in the 1st draft I glossed over that and just had him go back into the main story. But now that I'm allowing myself to explore more which helps to flesh everything out, I might need to explore this more too.

Who knows what I might find. And if it's nothing, well then, I guess I'll hop back into the main story.

But that's for my future self to worry about.