#but that bed is a tar pit and they are all trapped

[pangur-and-grim]

interlocking….

[sandinthemachine]

Chilling Rapture

Part 2 of Deadly Nightshade, a monster!König au.

Part 1

Masterlist

I actually had so much fun finishing this one, my power went out and I had to handwrite it by candlelight until my wifi came back on, hopefully it's strong enough to post this now because the lights keep flickering.

I also have a draft sketch of the map so hopefully that can come soon as well.

For those interested, the songs at the beginning will sometimes be chosen for a little bonus foreshadowing. There's also a Shirley Jackson reference in this one for any classic horror fans out there. Hope you enjoy :)

Warnings: nothing serious yet (lemme know if I missed anything)

Word count: 3,313

There's someone walking over my grave For a sudden shiver is making its way Creeping over me, coursing down my spine And taking over this body of mine I can feel it in the depths of my being A chill of the blood, an ominous feeling -"Walking Over My Grave" by Blackbriar

It is a quiet kind of night.

No. To say it is quiet does not do it nearly the kind of justice it deserves, nor does it stir up the emotions such a night as this has urged forward, deep in the pit of your stomach where your dinner still sits heavily.

Quiet ushers forth a peaceful kind of relaxation wholly unlike the thick black tar rising up your back.

Silent perhaps is closer, only insofar as the word conjures in you the hopeless repetition of the phrase silent as the grave.

You find every warning and caution drifting through your head as you shift in the bed, but where you would expect fear you feel only an anticipation, strangely dissonant with the weariness of your body.

Where are the birds? Where are the whales? Why hasn’t there been a single gust of wind?

The sea, in clear view of the window when the curtains are open, is soundless. How is that even possible? It is as if some strange god has thrown a great smothering blanket over the entire island, trapping each tiny soul in the silence below. Like flies in honey.

You can’t even hear the blood rushing in your ears.

You find yourself staring at the window curtains, their blackness somehow darker than the shadows around them.

With no notion of why or even how, you find your legs swinging over the bed very much of their own accord, carrying you to those curtains, and behind you the soundless void presses in, a great wave bearing you forward, and you think perhaps you could open this window, let it carry you right to the ocean itself and down below, for surely then you’d hear something, even if it was your own splash before you were dragged below.

You brush the thought aside with a quiet resignation. You will open the window, you think. But only to hear the water.

The curtain fabric brushes velvety soft over your fingers as you push them aside, ears perked to hear a shuffling of fabric, a metal scrape of rings over curtain rods, but neither sound ever comes.

You pause at the drawn curtains, staring at what you know to be the window. It is completely indistinguishable from the darkness of the walls and the curtains, such that you find yourself raising a hand, pressing a palm into the cool glass to make sure it’s there. But when you remove your hand it is as if the window once again vanishes, leaving you staring blankly, eyes nearly burning in their hopeless struggle to see.

You feel strangely dizzy all at once, as if gravity is shifting, pulling at the air around your face, warping the flooring beneath your feet, tilting the walls in hopelessly contrived angles you can’t possibly see in this crushing dark. You could be upside down now, walking on the ceiling with no idea. Perhaps there is no ceiling at all and you are stepping straight up the walls and soon you will step off and fall sideways for an eternity and you will never even see the ground flying by you. Or maybe you will keep walking right up into the sky, only all the stars are gone and you’ll never know the cool mist is clouds wrapping around you as you climb for the rest of eternity.

You shake your head.

Why are you here again?

You suddenly get the overwhelmingly primal feeling that something is watching you, something carved from the darkness itself with no need for eyes or ears, stalking up to you, and you will never see or hear it, you’ll only know it’s there the second it reaches through the window and claws sink into your ribs, grabbing at the heart whose frantic beating it senses like a beacon in the night and…

You yank the curtains closed, stumbling backwards. The need to gasp briefly possesses you, but your throat tightens against your will, cutting off even that sound in a mocking kind of rage.

My quiet, a thousand thoughts chant through your head. My quiet, my darkness, my place, mine mine mine.

And you, who are you to break the silence of this night that doesn’t belong to you?

Your heart stuttering and flapping against your chest, you fall back into bed, tucking your legs up against your chest so tightly you feel it in your lungs.

You bury your face in your knees, swallow a sob.

And try desperately to sleep.

You finally shift again, dragging your head upward as a sluggish grey takes over the room, shoving the shadows further and further into the corners. You stare at your bare shins as the light hits them, a single finger tracing delicately over deep blue-black. You hover your hands over the outlines with a detached kind of contemplation, fingers stretching back into place, perfectly aligning with the rounded shapes.

You hadn’t felt it last night.

Best not to think about that, actually. You let your eyes drift back to the window curtains, fitting your lower lip between your teeth as you take in their limp form.

Right now, stained by the leaden rays of another grey dawn, they’re just curtains. Old and decrepit, with a fraying bottom corner and a coffee stain along one edge. Beyond them is a dusty window, and a view to a monotonously dark sea.

Nothing more.

Never anything more.

The walk to the kitchen is uneventful, the shadows thin and cowardly. A persistent chill worms its way up your neck, but even that gives up when you pull a blanket around yourself, tucking it over your head like a fluffy oversized hoodie.

When you were little, you and your mother always used to bundle up like this, huddled on the couch on cold winter nights as you begged your father to hurry up and restart the fire, please, I’ll freeze solid this instant if you don’t.

Be a lot less complaining around here if you did. And he’d grin at your indignant face, winking over at your uncle in the armchair as they both chuckled.

He’d always pull out extra blankets afterwards, though.

With a loud gulp, you pull the blanket tighter around you.

You should write to your uncle. Yes, that’s exactly what you’ll do, you know you packed stamps and envelopes and...

Damn.

You forgot to pack a pen.

It’s fine, that’s an easy enough thing to find.

In any other house, that is. For the more you search, the more you realize just how little this place has. One floor of cramped rooms smelling of dust, dust, and more dust. A tiny office with an empty desk. Even stranger, atop the desk, atop every surface, actually, are no clear patches, no thinner patches of the dusty coating to indicate that anything had ever been on top of them. Did your uncle have any stuff? Or was he really just content with this place as it was?

You begin to wonder if he ever really lived here at all, or if maybe this is some kind of cruel prank the world is playing on you, sending you to this decrepit old cottage on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere with no friends and nothing to-

Elisha. Probably not a friend. Yet. You’d met her once, after all. But maybe friendly enough to give you a pen. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

You try not to dwell on that question as you throw on some warmer layers and shove past the front door.

Immediately you’re greeted by a frenzy of your own coughing as the acrid tang of cigarette smoke floods your lungs.

What the hell?

You spin all around, scanning your yard, but of course the only one here is you. As you walk forward, the smell quickly fades, and you decide that’s a problem for another time. For all you know, it won’t ever happen again, anyway.

Elisha’s house shows no signs of life, so you knock on her neighbor’s door instead. Almost immediately the rickety door swings open to reveal a stout old man glowering at you past a crooked hooked nose.

You stutter out a hello, earning nothing but an eyebrow raise. “I…uh, well, I just moved in down there and, anyway I just came by to ask Elisha for a pen but it doesn’t seem like she’s…home.”

You trail off as he marches past you, right up to shake Elisha’s poor door with a trio of hard knocks. “New one’s here!” he yells out, not even listening for a reply before picking his way back to his own porch, giving you a wide berth. “She’ll be down in a minute.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He pauses in the doorway, regarding you for a moment before giving a quick nod. With that, he disappears back inside.

A little creak pulls your attention back to Elisha’s door just as her head pokes out of it. “Oh, sweetie, what are you doing standing out in the cold?” She gestures frantically. “In, in!”

With nothing better to do, you oblige.

Her cottage is as small as yours, but that’s where the resemblance ends. A warm fire blazes in the fireplace, combining with the soft light of a couple candles to cast the entire living room in a comforting orange glow. There’s no hint of dust to be found, only soft chairs and a couch covered in extra pillows and fuzzy blankets. Dark blues and emerald greens. An oil painting of a salt marsh hangs above the fire place. Peaceful. Full of sunlight. You take a deep breath, sighing. Woodsmoke and vanilla. Fresh coffee. A hint of ocean salt.

She’s watching, you now realize, heat flushing through your cheeks as you glance at the floor. Even the carpet looks soft. “I…I was actually just stopping by to ask if you have a pen.”

She smiles softly. “Of course, dear.” She moves to the counter, deftly plucking one from a hand-painted mug before pausing. “Have you eaten yet?”

“No, ma’am.” The carpet is the perfect shade of green.

“You had better stay, then. I just made fresh rolls, I have plenty of extra.” She tucks the pen into her pocket.

“Oh, I really shouldn’t.” There’s a faded spot in front of the fire. Does she have a cat?”

“Really, it would be my pleasure.”

“I have to get b-”

A hand taps on your shoulder and you jump, finally looking up again. Something warm presses against your sternum, and you glance down. Tea. Your fingers curl around it hesitantly, the weight of it somehow unfamiliar in your stiff hands.

Elisha was just talking. You glance up, trying to force a smile. “Sorry?”

She only sighs. “Couldn’t sleep, could ya?”

Your eyes drift back to the mug, taking in the little gold stars painted along the rim. Their edges begin to blur, and you blink, a little too fast, shake your head even faster. The walls feel cramped again.

“Hey, hey.” Bony fingers wrap around yours, gently pulling you forward, and a hand is on your shoulder, guiding you to sit on the couch. You let yourself sink down, barely noticing Elisha walk away until she’s back and a plate of warm food is being placed in your lap. Your eyes are wider now, burning just a little as you look up at her. She’s already turned away, though, swiping a book up from a side table and curling in an armchair to read.

Tentatively your fingers close around a roll, guiding it to your mouth as the smell floods through your brain.

You’re sure Elisha’s cooking is lovely, but you regret to admit the food is gone before you’ve even tasted it, the crumbs cleaned from the plate with careful fingers, the tea drank in great desperate sips and embarrassingly loud swallows.

You smile at the bottom of the mug now, counting the gold constellations dancing along it. There are dozens of little stars stretching across the inky blue, the gold paint twinkling gleefully as you tilt it this way and that. How did someone paint so many so neatly? Did they have a stamp, maybe? A really long brush and a steady hand? When was the last time you painted?

You push the thought away, glancing up at Elisha. She’s on a new book now, eyes wide and focused.

“Who’s the man next door?”

She jumps a little, eyes a bit wild as they focus on you again. “Hm? Oh.” She laughs. “He scare ya? Don’t worry, George is harmless. Just not a morning person. Runs in the family, I guess.” She holds her palm over her mouth to cover a big yawn.

You giggle, and she raises an eyebrow. “Sorry, guess I didn’t see the resemblance.”

She laughs. “What, the eyebrows weren’t a dead giveaway?”

“Everyone here has the same eyebrows.”

She snorts, slapping her palm over her mouth with wide eyes before you both burst out laughing. “Don’t let anyone hear you say that,” she wheezes between laughs.

“It’s true, though!”

She rubs her eyes, shaking her head with a grin still plastered across her face. “Oh, dear me. You met Martin yet?”

“No.”

“Now there’s a set of eyebrows.”

You quickly lose track of time as the pair of you sit there, her happily describing in detail all the people on the island. And, of course, their eyebrows. The ferryman is Francis (the alliteration makes you smile). He doesn’t live here, but everyone knows him anyway. You learn her brother’s name is John, but that was their father’s name, so everyone calls him Jack. He doesn’t talk much in the mornings, but he sings in the town bar some nights. The man at the general store you met yesterday is Ed. He’s ‘a grouchy old eyesore,’ apparently. But Elisha had smiled as she said it.

Eventually she trails off, her eyes shifting to the window. “It’s probably time you headed back.”

Your eyebrows knit together in confusion before you realize she’s right. The fire is long dead, and the candles flickered out hours ago. Without their light, it’s easy to see the grey outdoors steadily fading to black once again.

Elisha walks you out the door, hovering on her porch. “You come back here if you need anything, you understand?”

You nod dutifully. “Of course.”

“Oh! Almost left without this.” She fishes the pen out of her pocket, stuffing it into your hands.

“Right, yeah. And…Elisha, thank you…for today.” You gesture vaguely, not sure what else to say, but she only smiles softly, giving you one last nod.

You start down the steps and pause, eyes settling on her brother’s porch. He sits in his rickety old chair, eyes fixed on the distance. Smoking a cigarette.

“Um, Elisha?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Could you tell your brother to be careful when he smokes? I think the wind blew some of it my way this morning, and my lungs can’t really take that.”

She stares at you for a long moment, head tilting slightly. “There wasn’t any wind this morning, dear.”

“Oh.” You swallow, shaking your head. “Never…mind.”

With one last look back at her brother, you head home.

Something feels…off. Your heartbeat picked up as soon as you entered the driveway, and now the hairs on the back of your neck prickle.

Your hand hovers over the doorknob, trembling slightly.

You glance back.

Nothing. A little bird hops across the lawn. It freezes, shaking slightly as it looks at you, before flying away with a squawk.

Your hand tightens around the handle, wrist turning very carefully, opening the door.

A bellowing howl echoes across the marsh.

You leap through the door, slamming it behind you. Your hands shake as they grab at the lock, slipping and sliding off it before it finally clicks into place and you back away, stumbling and barely catching yourself.

You rush over to your bag, flinging it to the side as you throw the closet open, fingers curling tightly around the old bat. You flick it upwards, relishing in its comforting weight as you clutch it to your chest.

THUNK.

You leap backwards as something heavy crashes against your bedroom window.

Did the house shake, too? Or was that your imagination?

Did the curtains quiver just now? Or was that you?

A tiny croak sounds through the window, and you gasp, taking a step closer. Another strangled sound breaks the silence, garbled and unintelligible. Your eyes narrow as you press your ears against the wall, the little sounds continuing.

Carefully you pick your way to the door, the bat resting over one shoulder. You open it just a crack, poking your head out. Nothing. You slide out of it sideways, crouching low as you work your way around the house, eyes fixating on every shadow lengthening and waving in the rapidly dimming light.

You turn, the corner, raising up the bat.

A raven lays twitching on the ground below the window.

Your shoulders slouch, letting the weapon drag along the ground. Slowly, you approach the struggling bird, taking in its pitifully flapping wings as it lays on its back, legs kicking uselessly upwards.

“Oh, you poor thing.”

Gingerly you kneel in front of it, laying the bat aside as you gather it into your arms.

A hulking black shadow gallops across the yard, disappearing into the thick bushes with a crash.

You snatch the bat and sprint inside.

The bird doesn’t seem hurt. Its wings stretch and bend fine as they flap weakly against you, and its legs are shaky but not broken. Only its eyes betray it, flickering wildly around as frantic pants shake its entire body. You cradle its limp head, quietly shushing its cries as you hold a glass of water against its beak. It shudders, throwing its head back before swallowing. Gradually its head tilts, and it stretches its neck forward again for another long drink.

“There you go, that’s it,” you soothe, laying it on the floor with the water as you pull down a blanket, tucking it around the bird. It shudders, fluffing up its feathers before settling in, tucking its head under a wing.

You can’t help but smile at that.

With one last glance at the window, you climb into bed, bat still in hand, and try to sleep.

A raucous squawk yanks you from consciousness, followed by a crash.

“What the…oh, no.”

You leap out of bed, dashing into the kitchen to find the raven dragging a shiny pan across the floor.

“Hey, nonono, not yours.”

It squawks belligerently, hopping backwards with a glare.

You sigh, shaking your head. “Fine, then.” You pick your way around the disgruntled bird so you can pull out the can of tomatoes. “Trade?”

The bird tilts its head expectantly, letting the pan’s handle fall to the floor with a twang. You nod and fish out a tomato, dropping to a crouch to proffer it. The little devil eagerly hops forwards, snatching the food from your grasp and ripping it to pieces, spreading tomato guts all over your floor before happily taking a couple more from you.

You straighten again, regarding the bird with a discerning look. “Yeah, I think you’ll be just fine, buddy.”

You slide the jar back onto the counter and open the door with a sweeping gesture, smiling as the bird croaks joyfully, catapulting itself through the doorway and whirling in the air. You skip around the house after it, watching it whirl higher and higher before diving down into the trees and brush of the swamp.

Maybe being here won’t be so bad, after all.

But as you turn to head back inside, your entire body stiffens.

Carved into the dirt beneath your bedroom window…is a single massive footprint.

taglist: @die-prophetin, @fatedeniedhope, @kakashiislut, @lirinchi

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[yourfellowhuman07]

Where Do We Go Now?

A She-ra: Princess of Power 2018 fanfiction

The war is finally over. Prime is dead, the hive mind is broken, and everyone is reunited with their loved ones. However, there are some questions left unanswered. What will be the fate of Catra and Hordak? What are these new memories Wrong Hordak has? What is Etheria's place in the wider universe? Where do we go now?

___________________

Chapter 11. This is going to be a long one so I suggest grabbing a snack. It's what I get for combining two chapters.

___________________

Chapter 11: Personal Missions

As the day moons rose, so did Perfuma, who breathed in the feeling of a new day. She had a personal mission: talk with Entrapta about her relationship with Hordak. Despite his recent docile nature, she still believes Hordak is evil. No man with a soul could cause that much harm. She was determined to talk Entrapta out of her relationship with Hordak for her own sake. All that man spread was misery and decay, and she would be damned before that happened to Entrapta.

_____________________________________________

Adora woke up bright and early that morning and started her day with a small workout to get her blood pumping, this day especially. She had a personal mission: talk to Hordak about that memory she saw inside his mind. She had wanted to speak to him earlier, but never found the right time; thus, she determined today she would finally get the answers she so desperately craved.

___________________________________________

Hordak woke up with his face feeling damp. Then the events of yesterday’s events and embarrassing display of emotion flooded his mind making him emit a frustrated groan.

Idiot.

Hordak rubbed his head and paused in terror when he felt the feeling of hair on the sides of his head. They were small enough to where only a keen eye could notice them, but it could become a problem in the future. All the more reason he needed to leave this glittery tar pit. The man managed to drag himself out of the fluffy death trap these people called a bed and put his white tabard on. Afterward, he heard a knock on the door.

He quickly got up to open the door, it was She-Ra-no-Adora.

“Good morning Lo- Hordak. How are you?”

“I am decent.” He closed the door behind her.

“Do you have time to talk for a little bit?”

“Seeing as I cannot leave, I have time.”

“He heh, yeah….”

Adora stepped fully into the room and sat on a nearby chair.

“What do you wish to talk to me about?”

“Ok, so you know how I had to enter your mind to kill Horde Prime, right?”

Hordak inhaled sharply.

“Yes, I recall.”

“Ok, so when I went in there, I saw this memory of when I was a baby, and you were holding me out in a field. I was wondering what that was about.”

Hordak inhaled deeply, and sat on a bench, his posture impeccably straight and ridged.

“When I first took power as Lord of the Horde and ruler of the Scorponi kingdom, I took it upon myself to scout out areas that would be useable for army bases. Everything was running smoothly. Then I saw an open portal. Without thinking, I ran towards it, hoping it was a way off of this accursed, backwater planet. Not taking into account that the gateway could lead to an even worse place beyond my imagination. Right as I get close, something came out of the portal, and with a flash, the portal was gone. That someone was you wrapped in traditional Eternian clothes. Now-”

“Wait, you knew I was Eternian? Why did you not tell me?”

“One, yes I knew by what you were wearing and the fact you resembled who I assume is your grandparents, who, before I was banished, were still in power in the Eternia solar system. Secondly, I was going to tell you, but you left the Horde before I could speak to you. Now, as I was saying, when I returned to the Fright Zone, I managed to hide you for a week before Shadow Weaver found you. She then talked me out of keeping you permanently. I theorized she sensed your connection to magic and wanted you for herself. So, I gave you away to her. I would not have been wise to keep you anyway: my sanctum was not safe for children, and there was a chance others would have harmed you because of your association with me. Is there anything else?”

Adora sat, staring at the floor. She felt conflicted. Hordak was once her greatest enemy; on the other hand, he could have been her father. She does not know if he would be a good one, though. It was clear he cared about the ones he loved based on his relationship with Entrapta and Imp, but would he be caring and nurturing like a father should be? Adora then realized how little she knew the man. Maybe she should get to know him better.

“No, nothing else,” She had multiple questions, but she already had so much information to swallow she decided against it. “I guess I owe you one, for telling me.”

Hordak then had a thought.

“How soon can I use that I.O.U., as you Etherians call it?”

“Whenever you want.” Adora shifted her gaze around the room nervously.

“I know it is probably an inappropriate use of your powers, but can your powers be used to grow hair?”

“...yes.” She backed away slightly, confusion painting her face.

“Could you perhaps do that for me, so I can skip the awkward stages of my hair growing out, please?”

“I mean, sure.” Adora stopped asking questions a long time ago. “FOR THE HONOR OF GRAYSKULL!”

In a blinding flash of light, Adora transformed into She-Ra. She-Ra pointed her sword at Hordak, and they both closed their eyes tight as She-Ra began to work her magic. Hordak’s head felt tingly as hair began to spring out from his scalp and past his shoulders. When the feeling stopped,  he gingerly touched his head. To Adora’s surprise, his hair was his signature dark cobalt and was in medium-sized curls. The only exception to this was the tips which were straight and white.

“Thank you, Adora. I greatly appreciate this.”

“Any time,” The light around her dissolved, changing her back to Adora. “I must say curly hair works for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, I better get going, breakfast will be soon, and I don’t want to keep everyone waiting. Bye.” She quickly left the room, closing the door behind her.

“Goodbye, Adora.”

______________________________________________________

Entrapta woke up refreshed and energized, it was the first time she had slept in a bed in months, and she already felt much better. As she got ready for the day, she started to think of all the future projects she and Hordak could do. Her first priority was to make Hordak a new suit of armor, not that the previous one was outdated, she just thought it would be fun to mix things up. She was thinking of something more sleek and streamlined, but Hordak will of course have the final decision. She also wanted to somehow be able to harvest tech from Beast Island without actually going to that accursed place.

Just then, Entrapta heard a quick yet firm knock on the door. She bounced over toward the door and opened it revealing Perfuma, who automatically stepped in.

“Good morning, Entrapta. I came by to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“I just wanted to know how you feel after everything that happened. I worry about you, you know. Oh, might I recommend some tea or yoga? Clears the mind and spirit?”

“Oh, no, thank you, but what are you concerned about exactly?”

“I’ll just get this out of the way. Entrapta, I’m concerned about your relationship with Hordak.”

“Why?”

“I’m just concerned about how Hordak may affect you in the long run. Negative energies are contagious and can negatively affect your mental health, Entrapta. With all the awful things Hordak has done and said, it could start to make you change and become a hateful person yourself.”

“Perfuma, I get what you are saying, but Hordak isn’t like that. He loves and cares for me and twice risked his life for me. Sure we bicker with each other, but everyone does. Once you get to know Hordak he is a good person.”

Perfuma sighed, she expected this response and was prepared for it.

“I also get what you are saying, but have you seen how he treats people? Take Catra for example, according to her he was always cold and uncaring with little regard to how others felt.”

“And Catra was the same way. She was terrible to the people around her and even tried to kill me. How can you love one but hate the other.”

“Because, Catra proved herself to be a good person, and I have not seen anything like that from Hordak.”

“Because you have not given him a chance to, plus when you get to know him, he isn’t like that.”

“Yes, he is! Whenever he walks into a room he spreads paranoia and negative energies. How could you stand him when he destroyed so much? Open your eyes Entrapta. He will make you miserable in the long run, so please break up with him!”

“All of your arguments are baseless and biased. How could you hate someone you never even talked to?” At this point, Entrapta’s mask was down and her hair began to wrap an almost protective cocoon around her.

“Ugh, I knew you would bet like this! I’m your friend. I am just trying to help you, Entrapta.”

“No, you’re not helping me! I love Hordak, and he loves me! I don’t care about whatever energies you feel or whatever unscientific nonsense you think. He deserves love as much as anyone else and is the most caring, understanding person I have ever met. You can not change that, so can you please leave.”

In a huff, Perfuma stomped out of Entrapta’s room and into her own.

They deserve each other.

_______________________________________________________

Hordak stared at himself in the mirror. It had been over a lifetime ago since his hair had been this length. He quite liked his hair like this and wished Prime never had him cut it. He was also relieved to not go through the maintenance that his mohawk required. Every month or so, he would have to douse it in various chemicals to keep it flat, and every morning he would slick it back. Even with his efforts, it would always find some way to defy him and fall in his face.

Speaking of maintenance, his eyes spotted the white ends of his hair, so different from the indigo hue of his hair. Despite using them sparingly, he had an understanding of metaphors. He knew by cutting off this chunk of dry, white hair, he would be fully abandoning his fat- Phime. From birth, he has been loyal to him, cared for him, and obeyed nearly all he said. Now he is dead by his hand, so what is the point in holding on? Part of him still craved his love, but he knew that was impossible. What does it even matter? He made his decision to be with Entrapta. A decision he would make over a billion and one times.

Before he could change his mind, he took a pair of scissors he found in a drawer and hacked away at his hair. It was messy and choppy, two words he hated, but it got the job done. He looked at his visage in the mirror. With a loud clatter, the scissors dropped on the floor. His shoulders and face dropped. His mind was blank. He didn’t know what to think.

Then a wide grin spread across his face. It wasn’t out of malice for others or love for his Starlight, but out of joy, bliss, and freedom. It was like a weight he had been carrying for decades lifted off of his shoulders.

After the initial euphoria wore off, he picked the scissors off the ground, trimming and cleaning up the ends of his hair until he was satisfied. He pulled it up into a bun before getting ready for the rest of the day.

______________________________

Hordak walked out of his room, and just as he headed to Entrapta’s door, he heard faint sounds of crying. He lightly knocked on the door, and a small voice allowed him entrance.

Entrapta was sitting on her bed, tangled in a cocoon of her hair, crying silently to herself in the dark of her room. Hordak rushed to her side and immediately asked what was wrong. The only answer he got was tendrils of her hair wrapping around him and pulling him closer. They each wrapped their arms around each other as Hordak began to rock her back and forth. When she calmed down Hordak asked him again what had happened.

“Oh, Perfuma came in here first thing in the morning complaining about how me being in a relationship with you is terrible, and your terrible, and I wish she could just mind her own damn business and leave us alone.”

Hordak then scooted him and Entrapta to lay on the bed, he held her tightly as she cried. He found it best to just let her have it all out and to just be there for her.

He knew this was going to happen. The princess would target and antagonize her for her relationship with him. She doesn’t deserve this. If he knew it wouldn’t crush her, he would end their relationship to keep her from the Alliance’s scrutiny. All he could do was support her and pray they would get away from them.

“You know I love you, right?” The small princess muttered.

Hordak looked down at his beloved and smiled.

“Of course, I do, Starlight, and I love you too.”

_____________________________________________

 The Alliance all sat around the large dining table for breakfast. The Best Friends squad was reviewing the reconstruction plans for Etheria. Micah and Castaspella were discussing Mysticorian affairs, and the rest were all happily exchanging words with each other over bacon and eggs. That was until Hordak walked into the room, and everyone fell silent. He cleared his throat.

“Entrapta has requested that I bring her and my breakfast into her room. She is currently feeling under the weather and does not feel like seeing anyone.”

“Any what gives you special access?” Mermista said with obvious disdain.

Instead of dignifying her question with a response, he grabbed two plates and filled them up with food before quickly walking out, giving Perfuma the sharpest and nastiest of death stares.

“Woah, what did you do?” Catra sat next to Perfuma and grinned at her.

“I only gave Entrapta some friendly advice that would help her grow, she just… didn’t take it very kindly.”

“Listen, when she wants to be Entrapta can be stubborn as a mule, so I’d cut my loss and let her handle her own life. She isn’t as helpless as you think she is.”

“I know, I just do not want Hordak to take advantage of her!”

“HA! Oh please, there is no power that man has over her. Even back in the Fright Zone, he was wrapped around her finger. Trust me, Entrapa will be fine, besides, the last time I got tangled up with those two Hordak almost killed me.” Catra walked away with her cat-like grace and sat over with Adora, leaving Perfuma sitting alone.

Fine, I’ll leave them alone, but mark my words Entrapta will come crying back saying I’m right.

____________________________________________________________

Entrapta and Hordak sat together on the bed. Entrapta was meticulously separating her food into tiny pieces and Hordak sat watching her.

“Starlight, why do you prefer such tiny foods?”

“It’s more efficient and I hate the texture of chewed food. Why aren’t you eating?”

“I am not hungry.”

“Hordak you have not had a good meal for who knows how long, you have to be hungry.”

“I simply do not wish to eat right now.”

“Hordak, are you making me use the princess card right now?”

“Now what jurisdiction do you have to use that card? Last time I checked you are not the ruler of this domain.”

“True, but whose kingdom are you going to live in? Do you want to go live with Perfuma and her weed-smoking drum circle?”

“Touche.”

The two finished their breakfast and discussed future science projects. At least Hordak was, Entrapta was only half listening as she eyed Hordak’s hair. It was odd when she first saw it, but she quickly warmed up to it.

“Can I braid your hair?”

Hordak stopped dead in his tracks, resembling a deer in headlights. 

“You… may.”

The two maneuvered themselves to where Entrapta sat on her hair chair above Hordak as he sat stiffly. Entrapta removed her gloves and began to run her fingers through Hordak’s hair. Hordak’s face flushed slightly as she tried to distract himself from the calming sensation Entrapa created. Entrapta braided his hair in what was called a French braid, tying it off at the end.

“And there you are.” She kissed him on the cheek.

“May I braid your hair now?”

“Yes please!”

Entrapta sat in Hordak’s lap, causing Hordak’s face to flush and ears to pin to his head.

“Wanna watch a movie?”

“That is acceptable.”

As Entrapta picked a film Hordak undid her twin pigtails. Her hair fell like a waterfall, creating a lilac river of silk. He took it in his hand and slowly sectioned it off into two, still grappling with the fact she is allowing him to touch her. On each side of her head he made medium braids that reached to a little below the nape of her neck; afterward, combined the two sections into one and braided it, tying it off at the end. By then Entrapta had picked a movie about a rat that is a chef. Hordak thought it was unsanitary to have pests near food, but the plot was good enough that he could look past it. Entrapta leaned back into Hordak’s chest as the two enjoyed their quiet day together.

______________________________________________________

Bow and Glimmer sat staring at Adora as she recounted what had happened to her that morning. Bow had a million questions. He had always been taught that Hordak was a monster hell-bent on commanding others. Now the past couple of days had started to unravel what seemed like concrete ideas. He then looked around him at all the people in the room. Adora: a promising Force Captain turned symbol of hope for the people she despised for years. Scorpia: former Force Captin turned kind princess. TD: a blank slate programmed to serve his master who became the most revolutionary of the Alliance. Catra: the most hateful, spiteful person he had ever met changed herself to become a part of the best friend's squad. All of these people who were once set in their ways became amazing friends when someone gave them a chance. Entrapta gave Hordak a chance he killed the man who was his entire reason for living, imagine what he could do with even more support. Bow was then suddenly filled with a newfound mission: befriend Hordak, his greatest challenge yet.

[catharsiswritings]

Some nights my mind decides it needs to ruminate on what are the deep injustices I feel I've experienced in life. This is not helpful. Not even remotely helpful. It does nothing to cure any anger or regret that I feel for certain situations, towards certain people. All it does is gets me all wound up and frustrated and wide awake.

Books help, but they don't completely push the unwelcomed rumination away. What is absurd about all this is that it doesn't really seem to have any connection to what I've experienced that day. It just bubbles up from the depths of my lived experiences, and like a tar pit, just traps my brain in its mire until I force my way out (usually by getting out of bed and reading something on the couch). Late night herbal tea and a book seems to be the best non-pharmaceutical cure. Note: I am not above using melatonin when a book and tea doesn't work.

I'll be sitting there in bed, comfortable, warm, cozy, safe. physically in a different part of the world than where any of the injustices took place, thousands of miles away from anyone who committed or supported said injustices. I am surrounded by love and a warm house. And yet I'm angry and upset and unable to sleep. I always notice the silliness of it, staring up the ceiling in the dark, listening to nothing but the fan humming along quietly. I'm safe, I'm comfortable, I'm warm. I'm next to someone who loves me and whom I love. Live in the moment, as they say. Just stop thinking about these old injustices. Just...Move on

This rational self-coaching doesn't really help. My brain is hellbent on taking me to a completely different place. Back to the tar pit we go. Part of me wonders if writing it out might help. Organizing my thoughts, putting it out there.

Which brings me to this blog. I'm going to, on occasion, try to write my way out of the tar pit. Or at least, write out a few lines that I might be able to tie to solid ground, lines that might help pull me out of the muck...at least a little bit. I need to refresh my headspace.

This can be my Plan B when books and herbal tea don't work.

[twentythirtytwos]

i'm realizing i don't want to be trapped in this slowly filling room with you. you're a man who's far too lost- miserable and unwilling to see how beautiful our lives are. i don't want to drown like this. i'm not going to sink with you. the water is rising, we're gasping for air at the ceiling as we try to stay afloat. i have many things to say, but also nothing at all. the gifts, the dreams, things you offer to me are so beautiful.

they say to be loved is to be changed, but this isn't love. it's cruelty. you're chaos, you're pain. you are smoke that fills my lungs and chokes me. everything i had built, everything i had loved, has been destroyed by you. maybe that was your goal. did you mean to break me down? did you mean to peel back the flesh that guards my heart, only to pour your tar into me?

i lay here in my bed, punished once again for being the person you've turned me into. i think about ending my life while you sleep. i think about it every night. i think maybe my death will give me freedom from your harm. but i am loved, i am adored. i am cherished by many to your dismay. to free myself from your clutches, only for your abuse to hurt them too. i wouldn't be able to stand it. i'm weak, i'm hurt, i'm dying. you have extinguished the fire in my heart.

my happiness is your enemy. your heart is full of envy. you are a ball of fury hellbent on making the person you claim to love to nothing more than a shattered body. nothing can bring me joy, you will stomp on it. nobody can speak to me, you will destroy cities with your jealously. i can't even speak to my own mother without facing your rage. you will always hold me accountable for the actions of others. this is no way to live. i do not feel alive.

you can accuse me of being the bad guy. i know you will. i will be the villain, you will be the poor victim. people will look at me with disgust. people will tell you they hope i kill myself. i don't care. any amount of talking behind my back would be better than your venom.

stay in your pit, never see the light of day. let me be free from the darkness you've grown so acquainted to. don't kill me with you.

[aspiring-house-husband]

May I interest you in a story? :P

maybe an adventurer stumbles upon some sort of tomb hidden away in Egypt, and they discover that some sort of warlord prince was buried there?? they find so much artifacts and priceless treasures and scrolls, and the place is filled with many booby traps that nearly get him each time, but eventually he manages to get into a room filled with piles of gold and a coffin in the centre?

then they get some inexplicable urge to open the coffin and bam, there's a rotten corpse there, but wait, it's not a rotten corpse anymore, it's a huge hung prince with a body that has the adventurer drooling and with barely any clothing covering him...

-charlie

why does this remind me about fantasies i’ve had about rami malek’s portrayal of the pharaoh in night at the museum

egyptian tombs were filled with things that the pharaoh king would need to take with him to the afterlife. there’s food and chariots and statues of soldiers and hunting dogs. there’s murals of instructions to the afterlife and every sort of scene on the walls. and there are traps, to make sure the pharaoh goes undisturbed.

this particular pharaoh wanted an interesting caveat put to his tomb. all that’s been found in primary sources was that he had made it so that “if any entered his tomb, they would follow him to the afterlife”. Seemed like pretty standard curse stuff. of course, unlike the curse of King Tut, this one was inscribed by the egyptians themselves, not a bored newspaper crew, so there were some more precautions to be taken.

you were obsessed with this tomb, one of the last to be discovered and basically given up on. the archeological world had decided that if the pharaoh’s tomb ever really did exist, it was long looted and destroyed. you still held out hope, and went looking.

you found it’s entrance when you were alone, and chose to enter it immediately, rather than wait for media to arrive. there were booby traps still active, surprisingly- darts that tore through your clothes and left them in tatters, spike pits, the cliche stuff. but what really sent terror through your body was when you heard gas leaking. you hoped that it was harmless, but stood stock still for a moment with even breaths, awaiting your fate.

and there was nothing. whatever it was, it did nothing. though you were feeling a bit warmer than before.

finally you come to the first chamber. it’s grandiose, of course, but filled with more practical objects. foods, chariots, objects of comfort. beyond it, a second corridor. the more you walk, the warmer you feel- even as your tattered shirt hangs from your frame, you feel too warm to wear it.

the second chamber is even more gilded and beautiful than the first, filled with gold and statues of soldiers and dogs, with tools and comforts. surprisingly, even a large, comfortable bed clad in undoubtedly that famed egyptian cotton. you’re too hot. it’s starting to make sweat pour down your body.

and in the center, the sarcophagus.

open it, something within you whispers. you know you shouldnt- what an incredible find this is! an untouched tomb, this hasnt happened since Tut! besides, there was probably another sarcophagus buried in this one, probably sealed with tar and ridiculously heavy. there was no way you could even get it open on your own. especially not with how you’ve been effected- your legs are starting to get weak.

and yet, the desire to see the pharaoh with your own eyes burns at your stomach, and abandoning all thought, you set to work.

there was no second sarcophagus. this one was barely even sealed- odd, but almost definitely intentional. and when it first cracks open, you’re shown the familiar preserved body- but a burst of more gas makes you stumble back, and now all that heat has found itself between your legs. you pant, throbbing, as you watch the sarcophagus. and to your surprise, long smooth fingers wrap over the edge, and a healthy, live pharaoh sits up within it.

you feel your cock jump.

he sees you, and smiles. his skin is smooth and his features so handsome, and you can’t keep your legs under you. when he stands, gods, he’s gorgeous- and you just- you want- fuck, you want to ride him so bad.

“hello, little one,” he says, stepping from the sarcophagus and approaching you. his hands are warm, and he uses very little strength to pull the last of your torn clothes from your body. “what a beautiful surprise to wake up to.“

you’ve never wanted anything more than to fit him inside you. he seems to sense that, and helps you to your feet. you’re for a moment so glad that there was a bed left in his tomb, because he sets you on it, lets you spread your legs and show just how badly you want him.

he wastes no time nor words before freeing his hard, gorgeous cock and pressing it into you. he fills you like only a king could, the stretch delicious and the friction mind-melting.

it’s not a curse, that any who enter his tomb would follow him to the afterlife. it’s a choice, in fact- one to be made by the explorer. should they enjoy his attention, they can stay. forever.

[haikyuuuuuhypeeeee]

Ch. Thirteen

⚠WARNING: Emotional hurt, mention of previous character's death

• ────── ✾ ────── •

Your nose is running and your breath hitches as you weave through other strangers on the sidewalk. A few glance at you, a college-student nearly sobbing on her walk. But to your relief no one stops to talk to you.

It’s almost what you want. You’re desperate to get back to your apartment, lock the door and burrow into your sheets to fully process the events from tonight alone.

Oikawa selfishly spilling your secret, the deepest secret you hold, in a fit of childish rage. And yes, your argument with him didn’t help but you didn’t think he’d stoop that low.

Your phone has been ringing nonstop since you’ve left but you haven’t bothered to pull it out to check the messages or voicemails. You know it’s Oikawa who’s bombarding you with calls and voicemails. And it’s Makki and Mattsun who are sending the texts.

But you don’t want to talk to them.

You acquiesce as you wait for a stoplight to change so you can continue your sad, pathetic walk home. You glance over your shoulder, paranoid that your friends are coming after you to talk. In between the glances you grab your phone and open it up.

You ignore the incoming call from Oikawa and unlock your phone. You see notifications coming into your message app and tap it open. You briefly watch the ever growing number coming from Oikawa’s chat with you before you open the texts from Makki and Mattsun.

You slip your phone back in your pocket without replying. You just want to be alone.

Well, not really. The only person you can imagine talking to about this right now is dead. And that fact kills you.

You can’t tell him how embarrassed you are that Makki and Mattsun know your pathetic secret. You figured that they suspected something was happening between you two in high school because you had such a different relationship with Hajime compared to the others. You’d harbored the idea of finally confessing and actually being with Hajime but you’d shelved it until you were ready.

But then he died. He was taken from you way too soon, and now you’re left with your confusing mess of emotions and thoughts and what if’s.

Having to live with these feelings is unbearable. Having your friends know that you live with these feelings, and the circumstances surrounding them, is even worse.

Fresh tears fill your eyes and you wipe them away.

You round the corner and see your apartment building in sight. You reach into your pocket to get your keys so you’re ready to get inside and lock behind your door.

Except you don’t find your keys in your pocket. Not the right one, not the left. Not in your bag, not in your pockets even after checking - you don’t have your keys.

You let out a whine. Fuck, you do not need this right now.

You think for a second, retracing your steps and trying to remember where you went today. You can cancel a few spots but there are others that could be where your keys are.

You pull out your phone to send a message, starting easy.

The short feeling of victory you felt at finding your keys is erased when you realize you have to walk to Osamu’s apartment. It isn’t far…but you’ve had a long day.

A long day, long week, long couple of months. A long time stuck in this hell of constantly bickering with Oikawa, studying and working your ass off in your classes, navigating life without your best friend.

Is this your life now? Is waking up every day, crying, dragging yourself out of bed to be a civilized member of society, coming back home to cry and then sleep - is that your destiny?

The harrowing thought settles around your shoulders and you feel yourself sink further into the black tar pit you’ve been trapped in for months.

Osamu’s apartment looms above you, and the idea of putting on a friendly mask, even for someone who you want to be friendly with, exhausts you. Hopefully you can get your keys and leave.

You need to be alone, you are alone. Your friends are worrying about you, concerned for you. You are a burden. For all you know your friendship with Oikawa is shattered. You don’t deserve his friendship.

The dark thoughts pick up speed, spinning around and around and around. You feel yourself getting lost in them.

Hajime would know how to help. He would always bring you into the light. He is your light.

Standing in front of Osamu’s door (how did I get here?) you use an embarrassing amount of energy to lift your hand and knock. It doesn’t take long for Osamu to open the door. His calm look is quickly replaced with genuine concern.

Fuck, now he’s worried about you.

“Sorry, I’ll just get my keys.” Your voice warbles, much to your humiliation and shame.

Osamu holds open the door wordlessly and you walk back into the apartment. You spot your keys on the counter. You walk in front of them and stop.

They’re your keys - the black heart keychain is heavy and “able to do serious damage,” as Hajime once said. He got it for you, back in the summer after high school.

He was always creative with the gifts he gave you. Even with something as small as a keychain you knew he put in time and effort and love into them.

If there was one person who you could depend on, it was Hajime.

Tears well in your eyes. You don’t ever seem to be in short supply of them.

Is this my life? You wonder. Am I ever going to feel normal again? Am I ever going to be okay?

You tell yourself to lift your arm, grab your keys, and leave. Leave Osamu alone, don’t burden him with your mess of feelings and your thoughts.

“Y/N?” Through the screaming swirl of thoughts in your head you hear Osamu call your name, and through the watery film in your eyes you see Osamu looking at you.

Leave, you have to leave now.

“I should-” you croak out. You can’t finish your sentence, you don’t know how to finish your sentence. Your brain is malfunctioning, error codes flashing like a broken computer.

Processing error, malfunctioning error, human error.

Error, error, broken, broken.

Only Hajime could fix you.

And he’s dead.

You stare at Osamu, and burst into tears.

Like a damn bursting, the sobs fall from your mouth, unrelenting. You curl into yourself, trying to ebb the flow. It’s pointless, as you are broken. You cannot be fixed.

It hurts, it hurts so much.

Harsh cries rattle your body, rip through your throat and spill out into the serenity of Osamu’s apartment.

Hajime, I miss you.

The ache in your heart flares white hot. It burns and hurts and just adds to your growing pile of misery.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you’re embarrassed that you’re having this intense emotional release in Osamu’s apartment - it's not the first time you’ve cried like this but it is the first time doing it in front of a friend. But you can’t gather yourself to apologize or try to escape. You’re stuck, standing in the apartment crying.

A hand comes to rest on your back. Your turn, finding Osamu standing next to you. He rubs his hand on your back in a soothing, comforting motion. His eyes are full of concern but also something akin to reassurance.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs gently. His hand is rubbing up and down, and you feel subdued by the unseen motion. You feel your aching pain diminish with every stroke down your back, but the tears are relentless.

There must be something wrong with you that you can’t even be comforted properly. If the tears won’t stop when someone says “it’s okay” what does that say about you?

Broken, broken.

You turn into Osamu, seeking comfort that is wasted on you. Your head finds relief on his shoulder. You feel him guiding you to the couch and gently sitting you down. Your hands stay clutched in his shirt and you sob into his shoulder. Once sitting you feel the hand on your back drift to your shoulders, while his hand gently guides your head to the crook of his neck.

“It’s alright,” he says softly. “‘M here, it’s okay.”

His gentleness just makes you cry harder and you can’t help but lean further into him. He lets you sit against him, crying through the piercing pain stabbing at your heart, howling against the constant misery in your soul. He lets you come undone and offers you words of comfort and a shoulder to cry on.

“‘M here,” Osamu murmurs into your ear. “It’s okay.”

It’s such a loaded phrase - it’s okay. Everyone and their grandmother tried telling you that when Hajime died. It’s okay. You wanted to ask ‘what’s okay? NOTHING about this is okay.’

Your face scrunches up as you cry, knowing you are so far from okay that it would take a miracle to get back.

“It’s okay Y/N, it’s alright.”

It’s funny, hearing this reassurance from Osamu. Because he knows, more than the average person, how not okay everything is. For him and for you. And yet, it seems to be his go-to phrase right now.

“It’s okay.”

He’s not telling you “it’s okay so you should feel better.” His reminder allows you to grieve, to feel how not okay everything is. And feeling that pain is okay.

So you cry and cry, leaning on Osamu as you fall apart.

• ────── ✾ ────── •

A/N: Congratulations, you've made it through one of the heaviest chapters in the entire story. :( Y/N is going through extraordinary times right now, the cumulation of the past weeks' events finally catching up. I hope if anyone reading this is going through any similar situations you can find someone like Osamu to help you through them. 💖

Taglist Open! Please send an Ask with the request to be added to It’s [Not] Okay Fic & SMAU: @psycho-nightrose @camcam1617 @kamalymaly @toobsessedsstuff @shookykookie30 @roro-707 @qualitygiantshoepsychic @cerealfrdinner797 @ara-mitsue @gray-444 @tanakasimpcorner @rintarovibes @jellien @everytimeswift @bongofrito @babucrow @beidouluvr @kozuken-ma @imarriedachef

[thebemoon]

Well, I couldn't leave you all with that evil cliffhanger, so Chapter 48 of "The Darkwood Wand" is up!

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: "Night Thirteen--Moonlight" Excerpt

Tennant leaned against a bedpost, wand in hand, entirely at ease.

“I wouldn’t take another step if I were you,” he said. “Tar pit trap.”

Hermione couldn’t suppress a shiver, although she knew it was no longer there. Tar pit traps slowly engulfed their victims. The memory of roving the room on the night of the Ravenclaw party chilled her blood. Draco had been so angry, and rightly so. She looked around, hoping for inspiration, anything she could use. The room was heavy and ominous, even with the bright lamp. The only sound was the snapping fire, the low tick of the grandfather clock, and Tennant’s soft rumbles. Even the silver inkpots were still. Draco’s bed stood open, gaping, like a giant green snake head with a wide pink mouth.

[littlefreya]

The Way to Hell - Part 13

Summary: Post Mi6, Alternate Canon. August escaped Ethan Hunt with his face intact and just won himself the title of being the most dangerous man on earth. Brooding as he is, August is unwilling to back down on his murderous agenda he plots to continue where he was stopped.

Series Completed: Previous Chapter | | Chapters Masterlist | Next Chapter

Pairing: August Walker x OFC (Ingvild) 🖤

Word count: 5k

Warnings: Mentions of sexual encounters, child neglect, betrayal, hinted physical abuse,  foul language and lots of angst.   

A/N: I thought chapter 13 will be the last one, but I didn’t want to rush the ending or have a chapter too long. So for those of you still waiting, hang in tight! Many thanks to @agniavateira​ who’s my muse and my editor, to @raspberrydreamclouds​ for this amazing cover and to those who’s been asking me about the chapter, means a lot to me. I am going into my usual Way to Hell posting panic attack. So bye for now.

*No permission is given for reposting my work, copying it or parts of the source material and claiming it as your own*

Please comment, review and reblog.  💖

Title: Paradise lost

There cannot be peace before first a great suffering.  There cannot be love without first a great tragedy.

~*~

Opaline droplets of sweat form on his forehead. In his ears, a constant buzzing rings wretchedly as if an angry hornet is caged inside his skull. What was long buried abruptly awakens, stabbing at the back of his head. Red flashes sear through his eyes while images of Ingvild dissolving to ashes play in his mind, her bloodsoaked feathers crumbling to the ground.

“Why did you go?” August mutters under his breath, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He crumples the little yellow note with sheer frustration before throwing it on the bed. 

‘I told her not to go, I commanded her!’

The air in the room grows thick like the pit of a stygian forest. Tentacle-like branches appear behind his eyes creeping closer, clutching his limbs. Even though lost and abandoned in the thicket of his mind, her angelic scent still lingers on his skin, impossible to wash off. Sniffing at his biceps, he inhales the mixture of their union on his flesh;  what begins as euphoric mirth quickly meets the sharp edge of rage and hatred.

She’s gone and it gnaws at the dark matter of his brain. 

He hates it. 

Hates her for being absent.

Frowning deeply, August reaches a rigid hand for his clothes, forcing himself to get dressed. The very first memory of her hinges on his mind: An icy woman with silver-moon eyes who refused his pursuit. 

‘Did you think the two of you are going to ride toward the sunset together? That’s not you.’

Letting out heavy gasps, he shakes his head. “She’ll be fine,” he whispers dismissively, pulling on his trousers and hastily buckling his belt. 

The new world order awaits, so close he can feel the fresh sun sitting on his open palm. It is his vision, his legacy: bigger than whatever it is Ingvild and him have together. 

There was no her in his plan, to begin with. 

The Devil never had a queen. 

‘You know what they’ll do to her…’

Another ray of daytime terror cuts through his thoughts: her wings plucked from her back, threads of flesh tearing from her naked body. Her screams die in silence.  

“She chose to leave, I asked her not to!” August yells into the empty room, frowning at no one but himself as he grabs the used shirt which hangs from the tall mirror. Turning to his reflection, he tenses at the sight of his body. Crimson valleys lead down his back, courtesy of her claws branding deep into soft tissue and toned muscles.

‘Do you know what is the probability of finding someone like her? A woman who wants to see the world burn with you? Who believes in your cause of building a new one?’

August swallows hard and combs his fingers through his hair with haste, attempting to act normal through the intensifying drumming in his ears. Being completely methodical, he pulls his long trench coat over his shoulders and collects his belongings into his black duffle bag on the bed. With a heavy painful breath, he forces his thoughts away, zipping the bag with urgency and reciting in his mind everything necessary for his trip. Time is scarce, the end and the new beginning are nigh; the smart thing to do is to forget her, erase her existence from the chambers of his heart. 

He doesn’t have one anyway. 

His hand secures the gun in its holster and harsh fingers lace around the black straps of his bag as he stretches himself straight, ready to leave this bedroom. That’s when his eyes fall again to the crumpled yellow note. 

‘You’ll never see her in Kashmir, you’ll never see her again.’ 

~*~

‘Amazing,’ the silver-haired wolf muses while scratching his bristly jaw. For 13 years the evil spawn’s eyes remained exactly as they were the day he picked her from the orphanage. Grey crystal orbs so naive, clueless, and oh so hungry for validation. A child desperate to prove herself worthy to someone, anyone. 

It was her single flaw and his greatest advantage.

Even now in the bloom of adulthood, the pale, scrawny thing standing before him is nothing but a lost little girl who wants someone to hold her bony hand. 

‘How can someone be so smart yet at the same time so blind?’

The cheap motel room smells like mildew and rotten wood. Speckles of dust float between the handler and his prodigy, cascading over his glance that seems rather alien and naked as glass. It pierces through her muscles - this sudden sense of peculiarity and estrangement.     

She chews the inside of her cheeks and sways slightly on her spot, arms hanging loose at her side. Ingvild lifts her chin to look at Liam, her eyes round with what can only be guilt. It makes her look like a child who broke an antique vase. 

“Thank you for answering my call,” she begins, wrapping her fist around a disposable phone before throwing it on the tidy bed.

Liam scoffs and shakes his head, ridicule spreading on his face. “You’ve gotten yourself into trouble over a boy, child?” He stares up and down the young woman, noticing the obvious change in her posture.

‘So, she truly is a woman now; how did I not see this one coming with her constant chatter about how handsome he is when I handed her the dossier?’

“Please don’t tell me you need money to get an abortion.” 

Ingvild frowns with disgust and shakes her head right away. “Never. No, it’s not what I’m here for.”

Displeased as always, Liam emits his usual grunt. He slowly shakes his head at his asset while running his fingers through his lanky grey hair. This is not how he imagined this mission to end. Her lack of emotions was a key element; Ingvild could have had a few good years running several missions for him, but what tipped the scale was for her to run into the wrong psychopath.

“Then tell me Ingvild, why should I listen to a failed assassin such as yourself? You’ve been weird about this mission since day one. Acting discreet, irresponsible, and reckless,” the old man’s Adam's apple bobs up and down in his throat as he speaks. Taking a small stride, he moves closer to get a better look of her diamond irises. So sharp and so strange, they’ve always irked him. As a child she downright looked like something out of a horror movie. 

“You’ve had 445 successful missions, not even 30 years old. Yet here you are a failure, and for what? For a boy?”

Shame traps her tongue and her glance drops to the floor. Failure stings like a rod of hot iron piercing her beating heart. Yet her mind races to the night at the pit where August finally claimed her, the memory of his lips sets glowing embers through her veins. On her skin remains the evidence of his embrace. Microscopic cells, tinted by his DNA. 

She doesn’t want this feeling to go away. 

Liam clears his throat, tearing her away from memories that turn from tar to honey the longer she dwells on them.

“You know why your mother gave you away, Ingi?” Liam asks, giving her a ghastly sardonic smile while cocking one eyebrow.

‘Liam never smiles.’ 

A small frown sets creases above her freckled nose. “I asked you many times before and you always said you don’t know.”

The Dane scoffs at her, his smile widening, exposing cigarette-and-coffee-stained teeth. The rot around his gums makes her curl her nose slightly and flinch as he leans closer. 

“You were a rape baby.”

The words send a pang through her muscles, like stepping on glass. She shakes her head with protest and steps back, yet Liam nods knowingly, standing in front of her.

“You’re lying.”

His small hazel eyes burn holes through her skull, his smile sinister and impish. “Your father was a savage, a rapist. He left your poor mother half-dead and impregnated in the forest you love so much. Who knows, maybe that’s why you kept going there as a child, reconnecting with your true nature.” 

Refusing to listen, she shies from his piercing glare. Liam reaches a coarse hand to cup her jaw, forcing her face back to his. “Your mother hated you. Your very existence reminds her of the most terrible thing that ever happened to her.”

For a child with such a limited emotional range, Liam finds that the muscles of her face are capable of stretching thoughtfully with spite. Pent up hatred creases her brow, her silver eyes turning to hot, molten gold. She bites on her tongue, keeping a vow of silence but he can read her face just the way an assassin would. 

“Nothing but a mistake, disowned by your own mother. So why would this man, this... mass murdering psychopath love you?” Liam shifts her head from side to side, inspecting the healing cuts and bruises that decorates her pale skin. “He saw an opportunity and seized it, used you…”

He pauses, moving away from a stare colder than icy lake water, “just like they will.”

Ingvild parts her lips with wonder, glaring at the person she knew all her life with disbelief. In the glossy reflection of Liam’s honey-brown eyes, she sees several black, long rifles pointed at her head.

Liam curls his thin lips with an utter lack of remorse and shrugs indifferently.

“She’s yours.”

*~*~

If colours had sound then the pale blinding white would be a continuous high-frequency hum. The tunes and shades of death. Like angry flies feasting on a corpse. 

‘Is this Valhalla?’

A small groan escapes her mouth, her eyes hurting from the sickly radiance of the narrow fluorescent lamps hanging from the ceiling. Her wrists feel numb as they’re pulled behind her back in restraints. 

“No,” she opens her mouth to speak, her throat burning, her voice a hoarse whisper. “Definitely not Valhalla...” 

‘You need to be a hero to enter Valhalla, stupid girl.’

Stupid didn’t even begin to describe it. August would never let her hear the end of it.

Loud, angry steps tap on the white marble floor, growing louder as the person approaching enters the room. Ingvild blinks, peering at the silhouette when a smile of comfort paints her drowsy face. Like a god, her lover strides toward her with his usual confidence. His ocean-blue eyes beam at her sight, his palm spread open to embrace his tiny Valkyrie. She chuckles at the mischievous, charming grin on his face as it reminds her the day they first met. 

Oh, she wishes to nibble his stupid chin right now and brush her fingers along his thick moustache.

But as she blinks again, large brown almond-shaped eyes replace the ocean-blue. A panther of a woman stands before her: confident, strong, and impossibly beautiful. Her dark, succulent lips are pressed together and concern shines through as she observes the small woman who has her arms cuffed behind her back and her feet shackled to the metal legs of the chair. 

With her head still heavy, the assassin turns her face from side to side. She quickly observes the armed guards at the entrance, the tall, greying agent standing nonchalantly against the wall awaiting orders, and lastly the sickly-looking, lean man who is positioned at the fore of a metal desk with his fingers laced together. Anticipation is written all over his line-riddled face. 

“Erica Sloane,” Ingvild calls knowingly, the ghost of a wicked smile dancing on her chapped lips as she turns her head to face the CIA director. Dressed in a black power suit and crimson pumps, the director is drenched with big dick energy.

“August told me so much about you, but he didn’t mention how fuckable you are.” Ingvild drawls, fluttering her lashes as she scans her from head to toe. 

Tilting her head, Erica grabs a white plastic chair and places it in front of Ingvild. She then takes a seat, crossing her long smooth legs together. Kindness and motherly concern pours from her dark eyes, expressions Ingvild never received from anyone in her life.

“Poor child, I imagine August Walker filled your head with many stories.”

“No…” Ingvild swallows, trying to dampen her sore throat. Noticing her struggle, Erica snaps her fingers and the greying agent rushes to bring her a plastic cup of water like a loyal dog. Focusing on the translucent beads around the cup, Ingvild flicks her tongue over her lips. “August was too busy filling other parts of me.”

The intrepid woman begins to laugh at her own joke, her voice dragging groggily while Erica rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

“I imagine so.” She answers and then carefully tilts the cup to Ingvild’s lips, offering the drink to the girl who sips with desperation as if she walked the desert. “August was my best agent,” she explains, watching the stream of water that rolls down Ingvild’s chin as she gulps with an incredible thirst, “a really proficient assassin, ranked high in every mission I sent him to. My golden boy. Even though that shit-eating attitude of him was something else...”

Withdrawing the cup, she looks into Ingvild’s cold silvery stare. “Those snarky, arrogant remarks and him going through the whole department like a fox in a hen coop I could overlook. But that fucker had us all fooled, Ingvild, as he fooled you.”

Ingvild flutters her dark lashes and tips her chin up. Her defined cheekbones sharpen even more as a snake-like arrogance poisons her face. “August told me what you did,” she utters sincerely, while Erica commands the agent to refill the plastic cup. Loathing melts her beautiful sullen glaciers as she focuses on Erica. 

The CIA director narrows her eyes at her in return, and curls her lips downward as disdain fills her mouth. “I am not the one who made Walker murder Agent Hartmann, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“You deceived him,” Ingvild retorts calmly and sucks in her bottom lip, collecting the remaining droplets of water onto her tongue. “That’s what you and your little agencies do to people like us. Set up traps for predators and pretend to act surprised as they eat the bait.”

Holding the cup, Erica stares at the young woman thoughtfully, the burning hatred in her eyes reminding her so much of Agent Walker: An entitled spoiled brat, thinking he can wind the world to the direction only he sought to be right. 

“You can’t blame a predator for following its nature, and you can’t expect him to behave otherwise.” 

“Is that how you see yourself?” Erica asks, moving the cup away, though she can see the thirst on Ingvild’s gaping bottom lip. “August poisoned your mind but I assure you, you are not the monster he is. You never had the choice that he did.”

Erica’s voice suddenly becomes soft, and her big brown eyes become round with care that only a parent can express. But the only form of parent Ingvild ever had was Liam, and he was never much of a father, was he? It took less than a few hours for him to give her away. 

She wonders how long it took for her real mother.

Her gaze drops, peering at Erica’s shiny crimson shoes as they counter the lifelessness of the floor like blood in the snow. Memories whisk her away again, a man in pursuit of a woman deep in an icy forest. She should have died that night and yet here she is, shackled to a chair. The voice of the man who saved her echoes through her head with a fair warning: ‘Liam never gave a flying fuck about you.’

Sharp as a needle, it pricks her heart.

“I know what Icarus did. Moulding you into the perfect assassin, depriving you of the childhood and the life you deserved.” Erica’s voice cuts into her trail of thoughts, making her raise her gaze back to the beautiful woman. “Now, I don’t know what twisted fantasies August may have offered but I can assure you, they are empty just like him. You read his file, you know what he’s capable of. Looking at your scars and bruises I assume he hurts you for his own sick pleasure, taking advantage of a woman who only wants to be loved.”

‘She doesn’t know him like I do, the way he drank my lips and called me his angel, the way his fingertips beat the warm blood in my arteries.’ Ingvild shuts her eyes, soaking in the remnants of his touch as it still ghosts across her body.

Erica’s kind, tepid hand wraps around the young woman’s jaw, lifting her pale face with the cautiousness of a human tending a wild creature. Grey and dark-brown collide at the seams as they share a silent stare.    

“If you’ll give us his location, we can arrange for your freedom and protection.”  

Ingvild breaks away from Erica’s grip, pushing herself back in the chair as much as she can. The screech of metal against marble makes the guards cringe. Slow and cold, a sardonic chuckle begins to burst from Ingvild’s lungs. The laughter echoes off the walls while she shakes her head with disbelief. 

“Do I look like a dumb bitch to you? Even if this was true, do you think I’m willing to be a slave to another government? Kept ignorant and tabbed? I’d rather rot in this cell while my beautiful monster dismantles your old world order.”

Drops of water splash at her face as Erica squashes the plastic cup in front of her, sulking with fury. Her eyebrows knit together and she purses her lips as if this young woman is something sour on her tongue. 

Evidently, Liam was right; the girl is far too gone, living in the little fantasy world August built for her. 

“If you think he ever cared about you for a split second, then you are a dumb bitch. No matter how this plays out, you and August are never going to end up happily ever after.” Erica spits, holding her finger at Ingvild’s childlike frown. “He’s never going to come for you. You were nothing but a toy, a plaything for him to pass the time.”

Ingvild scoffs and rolls her eyes, refusing to let these words cut into the beating muscle in her chest. 

`Stick and stones may break my bones...’

Solid, slender fingers wrap around her jaw, squeezing around her cheeks like a big spider. She is met with Erica’s long lashes, while those deep brown eyes slice into her soul. 

“You might think you know him, but I’ve worked with August long enough to know that he never loved anything other than his precious ego. So I would consider this as your final chance little girl, because if you don’t talk right now - this nice fellow here...” Erica pauses and gestures her head to the scrawny man who begins to hum a blissful tune while cracking his knuckles. Twisted excitement shines through his beady eyes as he glances at the set of sharp surgical tools lying on the desk.

“He’s going to make you sing like the precious bird you are.”

Fear shies from Ingvild’s stoic, icy face. The well-lubricated gears in the labyrinth of her head begin to work, observing the possible escape options and scanning every cavity, crease, and man in Erica’s lovely torture chamber.  

The door suddenly bursts open. A man in his mid thirties with bright red hair and a freckle-covered face rushes in, huffing heavily. His pink skin glistens with sweat, the strands of his fiery hair sticking on his large forehead while his hand holds onto his chest with distress. 

“Sloane, there is something you need to see…” he opens his mouth breathlessly.

“Not now!” Sloane snaps at him, looking at Ingvild with contempt. There is nothing she wishes more than to avoid torturing a young woman, especially someone as misguided as this poor porcelain doll. All she needs is to make her see the truth, that August never cared for her, that she was just another pawn in his grand scheme. 

“Director, I am sorry, but you really need to come and see this.” 

Agitated, Erica snaps in her chair to look at him. “What is it, Agent Louis?”

“It’s John Lark’s manifesto, ma’am…” he sighs, shoulders slumping, “it’s… it’s everywhere.”

A shivering hiss escapes her mouth. The shiver that graces the rail of her spine is like a shower of icy water, making her slowly rise from her chair. August’s harmful “poetry” is released into the air like toxic gas, contaminating every fragile little mind in an already unstable world.  

“Do you like my little surprise?” Ingvild asks, making the baffled woman turn to gaze at her. There’s a malicious little smile dancing across her eyes, her brows lifting with an arrogance that strongly resembles Agent Walker. 

Swallowing hard, the CIA woman takes a step back, tugging her jacket straight and looking at the torturer who lifts a small hammer between his pliable fingers. 

“Break her, until she talks.” 

The harsh tapping of her heels dies down and her silhouette becomes smaller until it disappears behind the shutting door. 

“Pretty girl...” The man’s voice is brittle and thin as he is, every word ending with a slight snake-like hiss. He moves to scrutinise her from head to toe, flicking his tongue over his bottom lip with a prying nature. 

“You know August used to mock me…”

“I can see why,” she spits out, looking back at him with both fearlessness and utter disrespect. She killed men bigger than him, hell, August’s kneaded her to submission and his torture was nothing but sweet. 

She can take him on, she can take all of them on.

The lean man beams at her, holding up the small shiny hammer and running his finger over the rim pervertedly. The dead skin around his nails rouses disgust in her gut, yet she rolls her eyes and fakes a yawn.

He chuckles at her theatrics and kneels in front of her with one unstable hand pressing onto her thigh. His revolting fingers scratch gently at her denim, making her shiver. If August knew another man was laying his finger on her… 

But August is not here.

“Well… shall we begin, little bird?”

***

‘When this world ends and the new one begins, what will be of your little Valkyrie? Merely bones and rotting flesh laid in an unmarked grave in the middle of nowhere and mourned by no one. Won’t you be jealous of the insects feasting on her narcotic tissue?’

Cold air seeps through his nose as sharp bullets of hail hit the ground with the fury of angry gods, shattering onto the ruins of an old bridge with a loud, clattering noise. Sheltered from the rage of the heavens, August stands beneath the wreckage, facing the men who came to make the final exchange. 

Blue and green ferns have grown over the decaying surroundings, climbing over rusted metal. Nature reclaiming its place over man’s occupied space. Justice and beauty in decadence and rot. 

‘Memento mori.’

“The plutonium,”  August demands, his thick brows shadowing his eyes in a battle to remain composed. Those same parasitic visions of sheer terror burden him like a daytime nightmare: pale as porcelain, she sinks to the bottom of a lake thick with blood. His hand reaches out for her, fingers trying to grasp whatever he can but she slips away. 

‘How far do you think Erica will go this time?’ 

A rogue droplet of sweat glides languidly down his temple, crossing over a bulging tendon. Unfortunately quite apparent to the three men who scrutinise him with wonder: two well-paid bodyguards and a slimy-looking slug, wearing a dark business suit that does nothing but emphasize his fragile masculinity. 

“The money first!” The businessman whines, attempting to make a tough face.

‘A cock and two balls.’ August jests and does his best to remain indifferent while anxiety threatens to claw its ugly talons in his throat. The seller’s receding hairline is thick with dandruff, his dull green eyes attempt to mimic confidence, as a beta male would do when facing a pure alpha, trying to compensate for lost dignity.  

‘I don’t have time for this,’ August huffs, his chest puffing and the immense shoulders stretching even wider, exhuming his natural overpowering dominance. His patience runs brittle as a dry twig. A restless throb thunders between his ears like a scab, latched inside his brain. 

The slug pries his mouth open to speak, yet his voice becomes dull as if the world just went underwater.

‘Do you think she’ll go as far as to let her men touch her? You know, not just the usual torture they put interrogated suspects through, but the type of touch only you are allowed to.’

‘She doesn’t have the balls, she won’t do that to another woman.’ 

‘Won’t she? It’s personal this time. Erica knows what you are capable of. And your Ingvild, she’s an apostle too now, an enemy of the world…’

Fever burns at his sweaty forehead and his lungs gradually collapse. Visions he can’t even bring himself to imagine attempt force their way into his mind. The yapping of the man who stands in front of him goes on and on; while August can feel himself speak in response, the words spouting from his lips are on autopilot. 

All he can think of is her, stripped naked, torn to shreds by dark shadows.   

‘She holds back a lot, but when she slips, aren’t her screams so beautiful? Her pleasant little voice, stretching so melodically, like skin over bone, thin and light.’

“Shut up!”

All eyes lift to August in silent bewilderment. His fists tighten, nails digging into his coarse palms as the will to rip someone to shreds beats through his blood. These men will be no more than a casualty. 

“Do you know who I am?” He asks in a deep, menacing tone, his hand but a second from reaching his holster. By measured calculation, he already anticipates how quickly he would shoot them one by one without so much of a scratch on his cheek.

“I’m John, fucking, Lark. My apostles are awaiting orders this very instance,” he reaches for his phone, ignoring the flinch in their posture as he draws it from his pocket and shakes it in his hand on display, “and you want to stand here in this shit weather and measure dicks? Spoiler alert,” he takes a stride in front of the little man, careless of his bodyguards who reach for their weapons, “mine is far bigger.”   

The seller peers at him silently, noticing the icy crust of rage in August’s glare. His pale eyes cut like diamonds while the shadow of his brooding figure falls upon the small man’s face. 

“You will get your money once I get to see the plutonium and confirm it’s authenticity,” August calls out assertively, each word distinguished, each syllable emphasised and sharp as a blade. Death is no longer an enemy to August Walker but an old friend, and those trolls under the bridge are a mere joke to the inferno he’s been basking at his entire life.

‘Limb by limb, feather by feather, while you waste your time...’

‘She wanted me here, she wanted me to secure the plutonium. If I don’t do this, it will all be for nothing.’

‘So now you are doing this for her?’

Not saying another word, the seller nods and snaps his fingers. Agitation is evident on his face yet the violence emanating from August forces him to bite down his pride. One of his henchmen approaches with a suitcase and opens it up to show August the orbs.

Thunder rips through the sky and the hail turns into a symphony of wrath. Icicles break across the construction site above, splashing water everywhere around them. Staring at the platinum spheres, August sees his own reflection dulled by the dirty silver curve. 

A dormant thing. But when set into motion, ever so deadly. 

He presses the beryllium rod to test the authenticity of the material and a sigh of relief pipes itself through his nose at the sound of the radioactive note on his testing device. Celebration blooms in his weary heart but the festivity is deemed achingly empty and dies out right away. 

‘Stop thinking about her, she’s gone. Focus on the cause, you’re almost there, just keep pushing through the doors.’ 

~*~

The blizzard melted into shy rain. The soft little drops dampen his hair, perming his large curls with the assistance of the cool winter breeze. Standing with the suitcase on the side of the rural road, August awaits his ride taking him to the helipad to proceed to Kashmir. It has been so long since he last met his true colleagues, since his departure from Lane in Norway. Avoiding any risks, contact was kept only necessary for the last stages of their tasks.

Doom’s day.

Securing the plutonium should have brought him relief, yet his chest continues to sink into his spine as if it’s being filled with coals. August Walker threaded through life alone, yet this sudden solitude is suddenly harrowing, making him feel like a gutted fish. Looking to his empty side he the ghost of her appears, giving him a bratty smirk. 

“Go away,” he chides, refusing to think of her. Of that stupid mouth talking back, tormenting him with sweet saccharine and cinnamon-like kisses. In his reminiscences, the softness of her lips still hinges. Tenderness meeting the bristle of his neck as she lay gentle wet markings up his coarse jaw. 

His fingers press to his mouth trying to harness the memory. 

A large car drives into the side of the road, speeding up and braking right next to his legs, missing August’s foot by an inch. Frowning at the careless driver, he grunts and brushes his hair before opening the passenger door.

“Took you awhile,” he grunts as he slips into the seat and peers at the driver. A bulky man in his early 40s with dark short cropped curls and thin lips. He shoots August a glance and turns back to the steering wheel.  

“Not my bad, you made a fucking mess, Lark.” The man answers and begins driving right away, careless of the fact that August didn’t put his seatbelt on and that he is holding radioactive material. 

Throwing the seatbelt over himself and fastening it, August growls and carefully secures the case on the side of the driver seat, his index finger remaining on the brim. He gently caresses the hard black leather. “What the fuck are you talking about?” 

The driver peers at him oddly before looking down the road, driving fast and passing a large log truck. “Releasing the manifesto. MI6 and the CIA are all over the place,” he says and turns the radio on, letting August hear the news on his own. “I get why you did it now, it’s brilliant to cause another distraction but you’ve made shit a bit harder with those cunts running around. They tracked it back from London and have been surveying the entire area.”

“I didn’t release the... “ 

August stills, his muscles shriveling up as realisation quickly hits him. 

‘Oh angel, what have you done?’

Drawing out his mobile phone, August immediately begins to search the newsite, his eyes an ocean of panic, fluttering back and forth. It’s everywhere, news about an anarchist manifesto, spreading like a virus through every social media outlet, leaked by codename “Jane Lark”. 

“Fuck,” he hisses, reading his own written word as he goes through an article posted on the BBC’s newsite. But she changed the last verse, added a little piece of her own:  

“Valkyries mounted onto beasts,  We will ride eternal to the sun. The blazes will sear us but we will not back down,  United by our cause of just war, Unflinching we will scour the earth, Until humanity comes together in tranquil and harmony.”

‘She loves you, you see? The way she lets you bleed her, use her, spill all your pain inside her. The way she held onto you just a night ago, your name falling from her lips, her body pressing into yours to take all of you. She’s the only one. The only woman who did and ever will. 

And you left her to die.’

________________________________

Disclaimer: I don’t own Mission Impossible and August Walker

[magnetictapedatastorage]

I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s more baffling than distressing, most of the time.

Full text of the (excellent) article is under the cut. (The Atlantic, March 8th, 2021)

I first became aware that I was losing my mind in late December. It was a Friday night, the start of my 40-somethingth pandemic weekend: Hours and hours with no work to distract me, and outside temperatures prohibitive of anything other than staying in. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to fill the time. “What did I used to … do on weekends?” I asked my boyfriend, like a soap-opera amnesiac. He couldn’t really remember either.

Since then, I can’t stop noticing all the things I’m forgetting. Sometimes I grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and find myself bewildered as to why I am there. (At one point during the writing of this article, I absentmindedly cleaned my glasses with nail-polish remover.) Other times, the forgetting feels like someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything loose. I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s more baffling than distressing, most of the time.

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A Quite Possibly Wonderful SummerJAMES HAMBLIN

Everywhere I turn, the fog of forgetting has crept in. A friend of mine recently confessed that the morning routine he’d comfortably maintained for a decade—wake up before 7, shower, dress, get on the subway—now feels unimaginable on a literal level: He cannot put himself back there. Another has forgotten how to tie a tie. A co-worker isn’t sure her toddler remembers what it’s like to go shopping in a store. The comedian Kylie Brakeman made a joke video of herself attempting to recall pre-pandemic life, the mania flashing across her face: “You know what I miss, is, like, those night restaurants that served alcohol. What were those called?” she asks. “And there were those, like, big men outside who would check your credit card to make sure you were 41?”

Read: Sedentary pandemic life is bad for our happiness

Jen George, a community-college teacher from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, told me she is losing her train of thought in the middle of a sentence more and more often. Meanwhile, her third grader, who is attending in-person school, keeps leaving his books, papers, and lunch at home. Inny Ekeolu, a 19-year-old student from Ireland, says she has found herself forgetting how to do things she used to do on a regular basis: swiping her bus pass, paying for groceries. Recently she came across a photo of a close friend she hadn’t seen since lockdown and found that she couldn’t recognize her. “It wasn’t like I had forgotten her existence,” she told me. “But if I had bypassed her on the street, I wouldn’t have said hi.” Rachel Kowert, a research psychologist in Ottawa, used to have a standing Friday-night dinner with her neighbors—and went completely blank when one of them recently mentioned it. “It was really shocking,” Kowert told me. “This was something I really loved, and had done for a long time, and I had totally forgotten.”

This is the fog of late pandemic, and it is brutal. In the spring, we joked about the Before Times, but they were still within reach, easily accessible in our shorter-term memories. In the summer and fall, with restrictions loosening and temperatures rising, we were able to replicate some of what life used to be like, at least in an adulterated form: outdoor drinks, a day at the beach. But now, in the cold, dark, featureless middle of our pandemic winter, we can neither remember what life was like before nor imagine what it’ll be like after.

To some degree, this is a natural adaptation. The sunniest optimist would point out that all this forgetting is evidence of the resilience of our species. Humans forget a great deal of what happens to us, and we tend to do it pretty quickly—after the first 24 hours or so. “Our brains are very good at learning different things and forgetting the things that are not a priority,” Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at Georgia Tech, told me. As the pandemic has taught us new habits and made old ones obsolete, our brains have essentially put actions like taking the bus and going to restaurants in deep storage, and placed social distancing and coughing into our elbows near the front of the closet. When our habits change back, presumably so will our recall.

That’s the good news. The pandemic is still too young to have yielded rigorous, peer-reviewed studies about its effects on cognitive function. But the brain scientists I spoke with told me they can extrapolate based on earlier work about trauma, boredom, stress, and inactivity, all of which do a host of very bad things to a mammal’s brain.

“We’re all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment,” said Mike Yassa, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine. “Based on everything we know about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is chronic and perpetual stress.” Living through a pandemic—even for those who are doing so in relative comfort—“is exposing people to microdoses of unpredictable stress all the time,” said Franklin, whose research has shown that stress changes the brain regions that control executive function, learning, and memory.

That stress doesn’t necessarily feel like a panic attack or a bender or a sleepless night, though of course it can. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all. “It’s like a heaviness, like you’re waking up to more of the same, and it’s never going to change,” George told me, when I asked what her pandemic anxiety felt like. “Like wading through something thicker than water. Maybe a tar pit.” She misses the sound of voices.

Prolonged boredom is, somewhat paradoxically, hugely stressful, Franklin said. Our brains hate it. “What’s very clear in the literature is that environmental enrichment—being outside of your home, bumping into people, commuting, all of these changes that we are collectively being deprived of—is very associated with synaptic plasticity,” the brain’s inherent ability to generate new connections and learn new things, she said. In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Marian Diamond conducted a series of experiments on rats in an attempt to understand how environment affects cognitive function. Time after time, the rats raised in “enriched” cages—ones with toys and playmates—performed better at mazes.

Ultimately, said Natasha Rajah, a psychology professor at McGill University, in Montreal, our winter of forgetting may be attributable to any number of overlapping factors. “There’s just so much going on: It could be the stress, it could be the grief, it could be the boredom, it could be depression,” she said. “It sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it?”

The share of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or both roughly quadrupled from June 2019 to December 2020, according to a Census Bureau study released late last year. What’s more, we simply don’t know the long-term effects of collective, sustained grief. Longitudinal studies of survivors of Chernobyl, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina show elevated rates of mental-health problems, in some cases lasting for more than a decade.

I have a job that allows me to work from home, an immune system and a set of neurotransmitters that tend to function pretty well, a support network, a savings account, decent Wi-Fi, plenty of hand sanitizer. I have experienced the pandemic from a position of obscene privilege, and on any given day I’d rank my mental health somewhere north of “fine.” And yet I feel like I have spent the past year being pushed through a pasta extruder. I wake up groggy and spend every day moving from the couch to the dining-room table to the bed and back. At some point night falls, and at some point after that I close work-related browser windows and open leisure-related ones. I miss my little rat friends, but I am usually too tired to call them.

Read: The most likely timeline for life to return to normal

Sometimes I imagine myself as a Sim, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering above my head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them. Mealtimes come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them. I have a finite suite of moods, a limited number of possible activities, a set of strings being pulled from far offscreen. Everything is two-dimensional, fake, uncanny. My world is as big as my apartment, which is not very big at all.

“We’re trapped in our dollhouses,” said Kowert, the psychologist from Ottawa, who studies video games. “It’s just about surviving, not thriving. No one is working at their highest capacity.” She has played The Sims on and off for years, but she always gives up after a while—it’s too repetitive.

Earlier versions of The Sims had an autonomous memory function, according to Marina DelGreco, a staff writer for Game Rant. But in The Sims 3, the system was buggy; it bloated file sizes and caused players’ saved progress to delete. So The Sims 4, released in 2014, does not automatically create memories. PC users can manually enter them, and Sims can temporarily feel feelings: happy, tense, flirty. But for the most part, a Sim is a hollow vessel, more like a machine than a living thing.

The game itself doesn’t have a term for this, but the internet does: “smooth brain,” or sometimes “head empty,” which I first started noticing sometime last summer. Today, the TikTok user @smoothbrainb1tch has nearly 100,000 followers, and stoners on Twitter are marveling at the fact that their “silky smooth brain” was once capable of calculus.

This is, to be clear, meant to be an aspirational state. It’s the step after galaxy brain, because the only thing better than being a genius in a pandemic is being intellectually unencumbered by mass grief. People are celebrating “smooth brain Saturday” and chasing the ideal summer vibe: “smooth skin, smooth brain.” One frequently reposted meme shows a photograph of a glossy, raw chicken breast, with the caption “Cant think=no sad .” This is juxtaposed against a biology-textbook picture of a healthy brain, which is wrinkled, oddly translucent, and the color of canned tuna. The choice seems obvious.

Some Saturday not too long from now, I will go to a party or a bar or even a wedding. Maybe I’ll hold a baby, and maybe it will be heavy. Inevitably, I will kick my shoes off at some point. I won’t have to wonder about what I do on weekends, because I’ll be doing it. I’ll kiss my friends and try their drinks and marvel at how everyone is still the same, but a little different, after the year we all had. My brain won’t be smooth anymore, but being wrinkly won’t feel so bad. My synapses will be made plastic by the complicated, strange, utterly novel experience of being alive again, human again. I can’t wait.

ELLEN CUSHING

is the special-projects editor at The Atlantic.

[hngrylikethewoolf]

Cry Wolf, Bleed Red || Errigan

IN WHICH...Errol's work behind the scenes on a case he was mysteriously handed months ago finally comes to fruition. He travels to London, information asked of him in hand (or, rather, hidden but nearby) and allows his curiosity to finally pull him toward the person in question. Little does he know that he already knows then, and he's possibly bit off more than he can chew. Then again, when hasn't he?

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Blood, Violence, Guns, Improper Medical Treatments, Errol’s Shady Military Shit (i.e. Special Forces) Mentioned, Death 

[BACKDATED JULY 19TH, 2021] @professorofcrimeratigan

ERROL: 

He never thought he'd be back in London so soon. 

There was a certain hunger in this city, just a Bart away from the town he had put roots down in for the last two years, the town he had never thought that he would stay in for more than a few months nor find people to care about within it. But that wasn't what this was. This was something else entirely, a maneuvering, a life-sized game of chess and shadows. 

The life Errol had lived by the hand of a state and had thought he'd put to bed with a medical discharge and its night terrors. This case had deemed it otherwise, however, and so here he was, rucksack in hand and information at the ready. 

It seemed someone wanted to kill this mysterious shadow he'd been tracking and they couldn't have that, now, could they? Regardless of what the man might or might not be involved in, Errol could cite plausible deniability. He'd grown particularly fond of the shadowy bastard, after all. Or, as much as one could without knowing their face.

The sheriff had made the appropriate arrangements to get himself to the city, the flash drive of information he held in hand a culmination of every skill he possessed. It had been damn hard to unravel, but it had been done, in the end. 

And the results were alarming enough that he walked, dressed in civilian garb, knife and handgun hidden on his person, to a predetermined meeting to discuss it. 

RATIGAN: 

It went without being said that he did not want to be here.  

Usually he wouldn’t— his involvement in things like this were slim to none. That was the benefit of where he sat at the head of the table, there were so many people working under him that he rarely had to lift a finger let alone carry out a job himself. Obviously the circumstances for him to be here, in person, had to be special. 

Or, as it was, dire. 

This situation had blown itself out of proportion. He had only anticipated a slight ripple in the pond when he had sent the head sheriff on the case. The man he had wanted arrested and put on display for his wrongdoings had more to him than Ratigan previously thought. And what was worse, the sheriff had been quite good at his job. So good that he had uncovered the plot against him faster than Ratigan had and if he hadn’t been so angry at the notion that someone had been working against all he had built, he would have been highly offended by this. He could deal with that and all it implied later, for now he had information to obtain. Ever since the slip up last year that had resulted in the getting bitten Ratigan’s paranoia for things like this had grown substantially. And with the promise of an attempt to overtake his empire he knew he couldn’t trust anyone else to oversee the workings of this plot. While he would not face the sheriff in person, he would be there to make sure the information was obtained. 

They had been tracking the sheriff’s movements as he moved about the city— and this late night stroll was no exception. They had already gone through the room the man was staying in looking for the evidence he had collected, only to come up empty handed. Unfortunately he was smart enough to know the safest place for it would be on his person. 

“Where’s he going?” Fidget asked from the driver’s seat. The rest of the crew that had been assembled would be close behind, their wardrobe had needed an upgrade for this change of plans. 

“Seeing as he is not in uniform, I think our sheriff is trying to infiltrate the enemy’s line undercover,” he sighed, annoyed by this turn of events. It had made all of this needlessly complicated. “And yet he has not informed anyone else of his intentions.” 

“...what’s that mean?” 

“It means we’ll be playing his back up.” 

ERROL: 

At the back of his mind, waking down the street, the sheriff was running over the list of information he had. Of course, it wasn't on him, not really. That would have been stupid. But, then again, so would leaving it just lying around so anyone could waltz into his room and find it. 

(He would be surprised if they hadn't done so already, actually. He hadn't been gone long, but there would have been time in between. It would have been what he'd done.) 

No, the flash drive was safe and hidden somewhere no one would think it to be, a trick he'd learned during his stint pretending not to exist for twenty years. Hiding in plain sight was easy. Acting like a civilian was easy, too, but Errol still felt eyes watching him with every step he'd taken. 

There was a certain feeling one had to recognizing they had a tail. It started at the base of the spine, the pit of your stomach, a bit of a tingling as it raised the hairs on your arms, the back of your neck. Skin stippling with the gooseflesh that dotted your flesh. An alarm that rang off in your head, telling you there was someone there but that if you acted normal, acted ordinary they wouldn't know. 

This notion flashed through his brain in only a few seconds. It was easy to pick out from his other, more inane, thoughts. The sheriff thought about how he should have worn full Kevlar, how there was a nagging sense that things were going to go poorly, but that he knew if he was to be searched a vest would have given him away. Errol had been undercover before. He knew how it worked. 

It still didn't make the feeling go away. 

Errol ducked into the closest coffee shop, the smell of it detectable a mile away and where he had been heading this whole time. He wove in between customers, snagging bits and bobs as he went by, a genteel smile on his face as he pocketed money, fake stumbled into someone and took a scarf to cover his face and neck, a dark beanie hat he shoved over his curls.

He was in and out of the area in about a minute, parts of himself concealed that had not been previously, pilfered coffee in hand. The back door made little noise as it swung on its hinge, his boots making more noise as trash and alley goo squelched beneath them. 

He was at the mouth of the alley, turning back onto the main street, when a solid impact to the ridge of his shoulder had him spun into the bricks, startling him. Automatically, he glanced up. No sniper in sight, but then if there were, they weren't a good one. They'd missed his head, if that had been the target. Errol had stumbled but he hadn't fallen, a glancing ricochet of a bullet off his shoulder strong enough to move him, so he rolled his arm and kept moving, weaving seamlessly back into the crowd with a grimace on his face and the smell of blood in his nostrils. 

They wanted him alone, but the safest place was amidst people.

A trap, however, was never ideal. Not unless it was his, and the gun at his hip said it would be. 

RATIGAN: 

“What’s he doin’ now?” Fidget leaned over to get a peak at the screen while they were stopped at a red light. 

If there was one thing that Ratigan did not miss it was the population of the city and all that accompanied it— traffic being among the top 10 behind all the other environmental determinants and housing crises it perpetuated. 

“Gettin’ coffee?” The driver cackled, head tilting back slightly as he let out his amusement. Ratigan simply rolled his eyes at the sound and leaned against the arm rest so that he could rub at his temple. He knew by now what he was getting into when being alone with Fidget and yet there he was, making the mistake all over again. (Yet another reason he would resent the sheriff for his actions after this.) 

This was why he did not miss being a part of the field work. He could remember the days when he would sit for hours on end in the dark listening to the conversations of that of his mark or between people who would soon lead him to where he needed to go. The inane, unintelligible nature of them. Back then when he had nothing but himself and the lone weapon the family would lend to him upon giving him his instructions. How different it was now, with a whole team and technology his brain had not even fathomed into existence back then. 

Of course, his insides were all the same— filled with black like tar of vitriol. He would always be that creature that roamed the shadows of the world like a wraith, observing the people around him in an attempt to mirror their movements and expressions. All in the hope that in the few moments he did step out into the light, it would be enough to convince those that saw him that he was derived from the same beginnings. 

“I don’t get it,” Fidget started up again, making Ratigan breath in deeply, preparing for what was to come. “Why can’t we just take him out? Why all this chasing?” 

“Because, Fidget, there’s no point in that.” Even if it would have been more fun compared to this absolute mess. “Despite his superiors' lack of interest, he is still law enforcement.” 

“Suddenly we care about Scotland Yard?”

“No, but should he die they will be informed and all will be lost to that failed organization of so called investigators.” He glanced up and rolled his eyes again at Figet’s confused stare. “If he dies now someone else will take over this case and since an officer died while investigating it there will be more interest, as well as all that he has already managed to dig up. I have no doubt our half will be untraceable but the people targeting the sheriff are not so careful, and I do not intend to let the police get involved. These people are mine to deal with. The police will just get in my way and they do not deserve prolonged hope of life.”

Fidget nodded slowly. After a moment he asked, “What’s he doin’ now?” 

ERROL: 

There was something like single mindedness that could narrow a man's focus down into pinpoints, the tunnel vision of pain or fear of the smell of his own blood sending him off to do something stupid. Errol couldn't afford that feeling. 

He breathed in through his mouth and out through his nose, kept his shoulder as protected as he could, edging through a small crowd of people. Tried not to flinch when something whizzed past his good ear and struck the concrete in a small spray of dust. Another miss again but this time more purposeful, an indication that whoever was herding him didn't care that other people were involved. 

Hell, they probably barely cared that he was police. It would be more trouble for them in the long run if they killed him, he knew, but he wouldn't put it past them. This group wasn't exactly smart, they were just ruthless. Or, well, what amounted to their version of it anyway. 

The car that had been following him wasn't their handiwork, though. It was a bit too subtle, save for the fact that he'd seen it too often to be coincidental. He glanced toward it, briefly, with a smile as he stepped off the curb and jogged across the street, switching sides to the less populated areas. Errol's left hand rested on the gun settled at his hip, jaw clenching as he jarred his shoulder. The knife was already hooked around his thumb, the handle curled into his palm. 

RATIGAN:

Ratigan had taken his eyes off the tablet for a moment when one of the other members of the crew had sent him the text that they had hit a slight delay but would be on their way soon. He cursed silently to himself. 

The police really were just a bunch of pests, weren’t they? Ironic that them holding up these people would only put one of their own in danger. Normally this would have delighted Ratigan but knowing what could be lost and what was at stake only made him frown. 

Ever since the sheriff had uncovered more than was expected in this investigation anger had begun to simmer under his skin. All that kept him from getting lost to it and putting his fist through any given surface was that he had been trained not to— but it was a near thing. This was not how his plans were supposed to go. He was careful, thought through every perceivable outcome thoroughly before making his move and planning accordingly. It was why his systems worked so sufficiently, why those who had entered into his game rarely complained of how things worked since they did not have to pay attention to the system they were working with. It was simply there to make sure their world moved along smoothly and without those in it having to worry about the semantics. 

But, as this whole affair had shown, not everyone enjoyed the efficiency. Wanting to revert back to the ways things used to be run. That thought alone made him want to smash his fist through the window beside his ear. (Given the extra strength from the bite, he knew his fist would go through the bulletproof glass.) 

When he looked back, the dot had gone off course— this time he cursed aloud. 

ERROL: 

The silence of this side of the street was unnerving, enough to make any normal person turn on their heel and stride back into the crowds. Errol wasn't most people, certainly wasn't normal, and he breathed calmly when most people would have started panicking. 

That first scuffle of sound further down made the famous words of Admiral Ackbar ( it's a trap! ) ring in his ears. He hated the feeling that coursed through his veins, the adrenaline of it all. He didn't have anyone to back him up, save for the car that had been following, quite obviously, behind. But even they were too far away right now. Both Dublin and Delilah were back in Swynlake. 

He felt the loss of the dogs keenly when he was rushed from his left side, a large beast of a man all but hooking his hands under Errol's arms and throwing him into the wall across from him. Probably done to try to get rid of his weapons, or maybe just to be a tit, but the slag certainly didn't expect for him to clamber to his feet, snarl in his face, and cut his belly open. 

Served him right, Errol thought, watching as he slumped to the dirty floor, and kept moving. He limped more visibly this time, the impact he'd sustained cracking his head against the brickwork and wrenching his hip. Everything else was sore, pounding with an ache he hadn't felt in ages. The thought crossed his mind that this was what they'd wanted, to get him into a secluded area before trying to pick him off. It made frustration well up in his chest. 

He'd been so worried about someone else being hurt, had reverted back to that mindset, that Errol had forgotten what was at stake here. Namely, whose life would be taken if he didn't play his hand expertly. Like a chess match, and one that he was currently losing. 

The sheriff took his own advice and turned back the way he'd come, picked his way carefully toward the more populated areas. He wasn't quite back at the street yet when a loud banging sound from behind him made him heave a sigh and  adjust his grip on the tactical handle curled in his grip. The blade was slick with blood and gore. He'd need to clean all of his weapons later, make them shine again. 

A slight grimace curled around his mouth when he turned and noticed not one but four men blocking the only other exit. Errol should have kept walking, could have, but the people that streamed past the alley entrance had no clue what violence was about to be wrought a few feet away. He really shouldn't make them aware of it. That was when people, more than himself, got hurt. 

He made the first move, not waiting for his assailants to attack first. Every movement was economical, purposeful and forceful, and the surprise on each of their faces as he came closer, drove them back through the doorway of the building off to the side, and dispatched them neatly one by one was almost amusing. 

Unlike their boss, they hadn't done their homework. It was clear they'd had no idea what he was capable of, even injured.  

It was almost laughable. 

The blade of his knife cut through throats and tendons, his free hand helping block attacks that came to close, snapped arms like toothpicks when they came at him. The gun at his hip stayed where it was; bullets went through buildings. He didn't need to shoot someone walking outside. 

The men in the room, most now crumpled dead to the floor, had no such qualms. Handguns lay scattered around them, quickly dispatched and removed from the equation. One of them had hit their mark ( clearly they weren't taught how to shoot ) and exited through his side. Another caught his leg, tearing into the meat of his thigh. He'd stumbled, but kept moving. He could worry about it later.

When all was said and done, the engagement lasted for only a short while. Blood covered Errol's hands, clothes and face. His chest heaved from the exertion of the fighting, but he still stood on his own two feet, if a bit less stable now. 

The next three came a few moments later, or so he thought. This time, he had his gun in hand, stance shifted to keep his balance from wavering. If he could see his own face, he wouldn't recognize it. 

He had survived, but the part of him that would have been sickened was nowhere to be found in his eyes. 

RATIGAN: 

In the time it took for the sheriff to be corralled the crew had finally bypassed the delay and were moving in on the location within their assigned groups. The first few had been able to navigate to where Ratigan had relayed the location. The description of the carnage was not his priority, the bodies could be taken care of later. He wanted to know where the sheriff had run off to and whether or not he was still able to give them the answers he needed. 

This organization (if that’s really what they were calling themselves) had only been the instigators. The top of the pyramid. What he needed were the names of everyone that had been willing to place themselves underneath to hold them up. He could find them, but that could take time— something that he was not willing to give them to reorganize. Or run. 

He let out a frustrated noise and cut off Himari, assigned leader of this particular operation, before she could finish describing the injuries the men had sustained. “Does anyone have eyes on him?” 

Only static replied. He sighed, hitting his head back against the headrest. “Pull over.”

“But boss we don’t even—”

“Fidget.” Ratigan’s voice fell into a low warning. “Pull over.” 

The driver didn’t need to be told a third time. 

Ratigan stepped out of the car and onto the busy sidewalk they had pulled up beside. “We’ll need to follow on foot.” 

Fidget gave a short nod, reaching forward to turn off the ignition. He checked his person to make sure he had his weapons on him before stepping out to join Ratigan on the sidewalk. The two made an odd pair standing next to one another, one short and shifty as he glared at everyone who passed by who eyed him oddly while the other stood in an elegant line as he buttoned his suit’s jacket with no concern for anyone else. 

“I’ll be with you shortly,” Ratigan said, turning to find Fidget looking up at him from under his well worn jaxon cap. He received a confused lift of an eyebrow. 

“Where’re you gonna be?” 

“I’ve just said I’ll be joining you soon.” 

“But—”

“Trust me, Fidget.” Ratigan smiled, the sound of it evident in his voice. “Go help the others, you’ll know when I’ve arrived.” 

He began down the pavement in the opposite direction of where his people had entered the building. Fidget watched him as he went only when he blinked, the man had disappeared among the various figures. (He hated it when he did that.) 

The first team consisted of three people, all dressed in police uniforms and they had arrived at the scene in the car to match. The second and third groups would do the same, all dressed as some form of local law enforcement because who would question the presence of police at a crime scene where one of their own was in harm’s way? 

They moved in silence, following the silent hand signals of Himari as they made their way toward the sounds of fighting. The closer they got the easier it was to make out the groans of pain and bullets sounding off despite being suppressed by silencers under all the yelling. Along the way they took out the men that had been loading their weapons to join in against what appeared to be a one man army.  

When they had reached the nearest hallway the two other groups had announced that they were in position. (One had taken out the set of snipers, the others had taken care of those that were waiting around the perimeter of the block.) 

Himari stepped forward to look into the room, eyes roaming the men inside until she could see the figure they were there for. She pulled back, relaying his position to the other members of the team so that they wouldn’t take him out by mistake, and then gave the final signal. 

With that they all stepped inside and took their shots. The rest of the men that had been gaining their ground on the sheriff were taken out within the span of a few seconds. Everyone entered the room, guns trained on their marks and checking over the bodies to collect the weapons and ensure that they wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon. 

Fidget, having joined the secondary team, approached the sheriff alongside Himari. They shared a glance with one another that communicated their concern for him. (Not because they cared for his life, but they feared what would become of them should their boss not get the outcome he desired from this.) Fidget flicked his head forward for Himari to take this one. She rolled her eyes at him— he had always been a scaredy cat. Especially when staring down a man covered in blood surrounded by a trail of bodies. 

“Sheriff Woolf,” she said softly, holding her hands up as she approached with measured steps. “We’re here to help you. Please lower your weapon so we can do so.” 

Somewhere outside the distant roar of sirens had everyone looking up in alarm.

ERROL: 

The sheriff panted, winded by his own injuries, and finally laid the last gun down to rest, dismantled where he stood with a few deft movements of his hand. He'd kept away from windows, knowing snipers lay beyond (though based upon their shooting, he highly doubted their ability to hit anything vital). 

The last body had fallen, but it wasn't by his own doing. As it stood, however, there were about ten or so bodies sprawled at his feet, all incapacitated by a tactical knife, a snapped neck, or their own weapon. The kills had been clean, efficient, and would have made any normal person's stomach roll. To Errol, it had just been another brush with death, the training from the SRR put to use when he needed it. Looking at the carnage, Errol was fairly certain the bastard had it out for him after he'd been cheated twice before. 

The team that moved in toward him, however, were not familiar. They had also been late, and he leaned against the wall at his back to keep himself from swaying as he studied them. Fatigue was finally taking over, the adrenaline running its course, and the pain in his leg was no longer a dull throb, but he still had information to give. 

Stripping the scrap from his neck while two of the team spoke in hushed tones, Errol made a makeshift tourniquet just above his wound. The sluggishness of his movement upward suggested he had lost a fair amount of blood, more than he had believed. 

The sound of the siren was a relief, made his shoulders inch downward from their defensive position, but he still bared his teeth at the woman when she came closer and raised his knife. 

"While I appreciate t' assistance, I ain't sayin' shite tah any o' ye. T' information 've got 's fer yer boss. No one else." He turned his gaze to rake through the crowd of people clustered around the room on instinct, a sardonic laugh pulled from his chest as he spied one of the men on his list of information. Errol pointed toward him, a smirk on his face. "An' 'at rat bastard 's why. Wouldna trust 'im if I was ye, luv, he'd stab ye in t' back fer a few extra pounds." 

Errol didn't like bastards like him. His commanding officer, the one who hadn't died, had been one of them. The contempt was palpable in his gaze, a hatred there that was more than just about the information he had. Two of the other team grabbed the one he'd pointed out by the arms and dragged him out the back of the building half of them had come through, unconcerned with the fact that he was struggling. 

Good. 

Errol did another sweep of the room, then, and found no one else he'd memorized the names and faces of plus all the information he'd gathered (legally and...not so legally) on them. It was only then that he put his knife back into its place on his person. 

Nodding toward the exit, Errol spoke not to the woman who had come toward him but the lad in the jaxom cap, a slight grin on his face. "Show me where yer boss is, eh, lad? He'll want t' information 've got, an' yer t' only one that didna travel wif t' rest o' 'em." 

It was as he took his next, limping steps, that Errol sagged a bit, tiredness and blood loss finally, and firmly, grabbing hold. 

"Lad," he called, motioning for him to hurry up, as best he could, anyhow. Errol had noticed the prosthetic the moment he'd walked through the door. When the younger man finally edged closer, Errol dropped his voice so he could speak, the words serious. "Yer boss isna jus' dealing with a mutiny, like he thought. They're tryin' tah kill 'im."

RATIGAN: 

Fidget blinked at the man, eyes wide from both fear and general shock at being addressed. How had this guy known who he was? Or that he worked right under the boss? How had he pulled all this off on his own? How was he standing and talking right now when he looked like he had stepped right out of a scene in some horror movie? 

Just who the hell was he?

Himari stepped back over to them before he could even process what he had just been told.

“Sorry to interrupt but there will be enough time for this later, we’ve got to move.” She turned her dark eyes onto Fidget. “The boss isn’t answering. Do you know where he is?”

“Uh, no. No, he disappeared.” He made a motion with his hand and blew on it, as if trying to depict smoke. 

 Her jaw clenched a few times before she spoke again. “Did he say anything to you before that?”

“Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he uh— he said that he would meet us here! Yeah!” Fidget smiled up at her, proud of himself for remembering but she only rolled her eyes. 

“What’s going on?” Landon, sturdy both in build and on any job, came over to join the commotion. “What’re we doing? We moving him out of here or what?” 

“Yes.” Himari leaned in closer, “I just don’t know how far he’ll make it.” 

Landon eyed the man they had come here for in the first place from over her shoulder. The sheriff already looked like he was a few inches in the ground; maybe the information he had was better left with him. All this trouble for one man, and what for? Because he couldn’t keep a secret? It wasn’t like they could leave him alive after all this anyway. They could just explain to the boss that they hadn’t gotten there in time— that it had been too late. His fingers curled, arm lifting slightly so his thumb brushed against his weapon holster. 

“H, we’ve got an ambulance pulling up outside. What do you want us to do?” Mandy, who was posted outside, asked, voice coming over the comm. It made everyone pause. 

Landon and Himari shared a look before she reached up to press a finger to the talk button.

“Confirm if they’re real or not. If it’s more of these guys deal with them but secure the vehicle. If they’re the real deal, keep them out there.” She turned to address the sheriff. “Can you walk?”  

“Uh, H?” Mandy interrupted. 

“I told you—”

“I know, but H—”

“What?” Himari snapped, annoyed at the unusual backtalk. But no one had to answer as the door was shoved open. 

A man, dressed in the green paramedic uniform complete with the fluorescent green night jacket, came through the door pushing a stretcher with a medical bag on top. He paused when everyone in the room holding a weapon aimed them at him, raising his hands and looking rather annoyed when someone shined their flashlight right in his face. 

“While I appreciate everyone’s professionalism, we don’t have time for this.” 

ERROL: 

The sheriff's eyes flickered between the young man in front of him, the woman who thought she ran the joint, and the man with the itchy trigger finger. The last one is who he focused on, squaring his shoulders and baring his teeth in a slight snarl at the man, his own hand edging toward the gun at his hip. 

Errol might have looked like hell, but he was a stubborn bastard. The only thing that would kill him would be something on his own terms. This? Wasn't it. 

"Aye, I can walk. But keep t' whelp away from me." 

Staring Landon in the eye and lifting his chin, snarl still in place, the radio chirped that there was an ambulance pulling up outside, giving them all pause. Errol, however, just waited. There was no need to panic, not to him anyway. It gave him a good chance to watch the way this team operated, anyhow. 

With the other information he'd gleaned--that their boss had disappeared but that he'd said he would meet them, that they intended to move Errol himself somewhere, but wouldn't say where--Errol figured the boss was here. Besides, the people walking around outside wouldn't have heard anything, let alone sent an ambulance. How could they? He'd not used his gun, every other one had silencers attached to their barrels.

 If he had learned one thing during his time working both undercover and for the government it was that no one paid attention to the world around them. Certainly, not when something was right underneath their noses. 

So, unlike the rest of the people milling about, Errol didn't raise a weapon when a man walked through the door. He cocked a brow and crossed his arms across his chest, shifting so he kept a bit of the weight off his leg. When the man, pushing a stretcher and its accompanying medical equipment, stepped into the room and raised his hands and head, a snort escaped from the sheriff, amused and chagrined at the sight of a familiar face.

The woman who appeared to be leading this little operation glanced at him from the corner of her eye but Errol didn't pay her any mind. Instead, a lopsided grin broke across the sheriff's face and he started laughing, quietly, to himself.  

While he was surprised, the information he had gathered made more sense now and all the pieces of before fell into place around it. Certainly the fact that he'd been given the investigation. He knew the man they were trying to kill, after all. 

"Ye know, I should be surprised an', yet, I ain't," he mused, unfolding his arms to run a hand down his face, pulling a face when it came away bloody. "But I s'pose it makes sense, really." He had, fleetingly, of course thought something of Ratigan, but those thoughts were neither fit for present company nor along the lines of 'international criminal.' More...WitSec for a crime he'd witnessed, maybe a turncoat to his organization, but not that Pedram Ratigan was running the bloody show. He waved a hand to indicate the entire scene, jumpsuit and all, grin still firmly in place. "That ambulance fer lil' ol' me?" 

RATIGAN:

“Stand down!” Himari motioned her hand in the silent command as well and everyone followed direction, though that did not stop them from looking at the man with curiosity. Many of them would not connect the dots because it was not their job to do so. For now they would just believe that someone had called in the paramedics on their payroll to come help with the extraction. 

Ratigan continued to push the stretcher across the room until he was standing with Fidget, Himari, and Landon. The smell of fresh death was rank as it clung to the back of his throat— and the most prominent smell belonged to that of the sheriff, his own blood having seemed to spill out in vast quantities. There was too much of it covering him for Ratigan to be able to tell where his injuries were but the tourniquet was telling enough. 

“Do be quiet, sheriff, unless you’d like another hole through that thick skull of yours.” His tone was controlled yet anyone could hear how close to the edge it was. He was in no mood for the man’s games. In fact, he was quite angry with him. For all the marks he had gotten on his professional career he had been stupid enough to get himself caught up in this and had nearly died in the process.

“Boss, where—” 

“Marasete gomennasai.” Ratigan turned and looked at Himari pointedly. Her eyes wandered around to their audience for a moment before she returned to him, understanding. They spoke for a moment to one another in Japanese, fast paced and with little to no animation. The conversation ended with a nod of agreement from both parties and she turned away, motioning for Landon to follow her as they went to address the rest of the crew. 

“Uh, boss? What’s with the get up?” Fidget raised an eyebrow as Ratigan approached where himself and the sheriff were still standing. Ratigan ignored him, his glare focused on the metaphorical thorn in his side in the shape of a blood stained police officer.

“I’ll give you a choice, though you’ve not earned the right to it. You will come with us willingly to tend to your wounds. Or, you refuse and this ends here.” Again, the room’s weapons took aim. Only this time they were pointed at the man they had come here to save. Ratigan’s eyebrows lifted. “Judging by the blood on your trousers, I would say time is not on your side.” 

ERROL: 

Dramatic entrance aside, Errol would give his whole performance a 7/10. 

You know, purely because he knew him. Bedside manner could do with a little work, though.

And it appeared that Ratigan’s people barely knew who he was, if the guns a moment ago were anything to go by. Errol looked to have been correct in his assumption, too, that the lad worked closely with him, as Ratigan maneuvered the stretcher to where he, the woman and the other two men were clustered. 

Ohhh and he knew Japanese. How quaint. 

The tone Ratigan projected, while controlled, was one that held an undercurrent of...oh was that an emotion? Directed at little ol’ him? Oh, Errol was flattered, really. He couldn’t even argue with the snip at his stubbornness, either. It was true enough. It was part of why he’d been dinged during basic training, why he and his second commanding officer had often butted heads. There was nothing different here, except he didn’t hate the man that was currently glowering at him. 

The sheriff tossed off a jaunty salute in reply, smile still firmly in place while he waited for Ratigan to finish his hush-hush conversation. There was a bit of relief, however, when the woman took the little whelp away. Meant one less person who clearly didn’t care if he died or not. No matter what Ratigan might say on the matter, or how he may affect an air of not giving a shite, Errol had information about the people he’d been asked to find. 

He had a lot of information, and all of it was pertinent to the other man and his survival. 

Errol chuckled again and answered the man in the jaxom cap, not waiting for Ratigan to do so because he had a hunch that he would not. “‘e stole t’ ambulance, lad. Frankly, ‘m impressed. Ain’t easy.” 

And, yes, he knew from personal experience. 

Ratigan started speaking, saying how Errol didn’t have a right to a choice and the sheriff’s brows mirrored the man’s across from him, hiking up into the curls at his hairline. He didn’t flinch when some...ten? Ten, odd guns pointed at him. Instead he laughed, nothing more than a huff of breath. “I ‘appen tah like those odds,” he mumbled, rolling his stinging left shoulder back, “but aye, yer right. Bullet nicked me femoral artery, I fink. ‘S been bleedin’ fer a lil' while. Tourniquet slowed it down, though. But, I, ah, also know who’s tryin’ tah kill ye so--” The emphasis on kill shouldn’t have been lost on the man. After all, Ratigan wasn’t stupid. In fact, he was quite the opposite. Errol had been tasked with finding the men willing to start a mutiny, but he had uncovered something that appeared to run far deeper than the surface appeared to show.

The sheriff shrugged his shoulders, pointedly ignoring the guns pointed at him from all sides and the twinge in his leg. Instead, he cocked his head to the side, watching Ratigan’s face the whole while. Finally, after another moment, he smirked and nodded. 

“Ye brought clamps, aye? ‘M gonna need 'em. An’ another pair o’ ‘ands.” 

RATIGAN:

(The sheriff was, unfortunately, correct in his deductions. Still, he had to run through the scenario for his own benefit.)

Had the sheriff not been an advantage in this tiresome game then Ratigan would not have cared what happened to him. He would have left him at the mercy of the people standing around this room, all of whom did not like law enforcement, and been on his way. 

The option was still there. It was tempting, too. The rage that boiled just below the surface of his skin, made the wolf grow agitated. It clawed at his ribs, the bars of its cage. Whenever it wanted out his chest would ache against its efforts, but the pain did nothing to tempt him into letting it free. It was the concentrated anger that enticed him. That black tar that consumed and spilled into every part of him, the heart, the soul, the mind. It all was placed on this one man who was threatening everything he had worked for. After all Ratigan had undergone to obtain what he knew was rightfully his. 

He wanted violence, so deep was this rage, so heavy his vindication. The wolf could have made it easy. 

His mind cleared rapidly after that. Ratigan regained awareness of the situation and knew he could not do that.

To run an organization such as the one he had helped to build, one could not move with only the next ten minutes in mind. It was why so many failed in this line of work— it was why the Shrivani’s had. They had seen a boy kill a man and did not stop to think how that could be the beginning of their end. 

No one here was aware of what he was, not really. Neither wolf nor a killer. To his network he was just a very smart man who had made his way to the top with clever words and letting other people pull the trigger for him. They did not know he had been dipped in blood, no inch of him untainted. He would like to keep it that way for as long as possible. If he chose to expose himself now, over such a man, he would never forgive himself for such a mistake. 

As for the sheriff— Ratigan did not have the time to waste on digging up everything while he was being buried in the ground. He would just need to find relief from the mad grief in bringing the people who thought killing him would be a move made without negative consequences. 

Ratigan blinked in the span at which his decision had been made, expression unchanged. He did not say anything to the sheriff or anyone else before turning away and back to the exit. There was no need to. 

Fidget moved forward with the stretcher toward the sheriff, giving it a pat to indicate to the man to get on. “We gotta go.” 

ERROL:

Used, quite frankly, to these small bits in time of waiting for people to decide what to do with him, Errol's patience held out well enough. It was tired and it was frayed at the edges, but it held. Besides, it gave him an opportunity to study that look on Ratigan’s face, the one that hinted at some deep, boiling anger. 

For a man that clearly held himself to a higher check in standard, probably claimed he was emotionless, Errol saw quite a lot of it in the few seconds he had to search it out. And he didn't say a word, just as Ratigan himself didn't say anything before he blinked, turned, and walked back the way he had come. 

Errol's shoulders fell a fractional inch and his chest ached with the force of holding himself still, keeping himself in check when his heart beat thrummed and fluttered in the wound at his thigh and blood had begun to dry across his entire body. 

The lad with the cap on moved forward with the stretcher and Errol couldn't help the small smile that curled one side of his mouth upward. He nodded his thanks to him as he leveled himself up onto the stretcher, eyes darting toward the rest of the assembled teams. 

When their boss had turned, their guns had lowered, but there were still some whose guns had taken a split second too long to do so. While their faces weren't familiar, not like the man he'd picked out before, it was something to consider. 

Yes, he was quite aware that they probably hated his profession but he didn't give two fucks about that. They had no idea why he had done the things he had, why he worked the way he worked. What he had seen or lost or why he didn't sleep at night. 

"Thank ye," he murmured, glancing down to his leg with a sigh.

 The tourniquet helped, but it was not a proof-all solution. If this had been like what had happened before, back in Afghanistan, he could have stopped the bleeding in the field. But he couldn't. He needed tools, a pair of steady hands that weren't his own….

"Lad, yer gonna need tah get me intah t' otharcarr. Now. I'll talk tah yer boss while I fix meself up, right as rain." He proffered a smile, voice leaning a bit further into the 'calm and collected and everything was okay' persona. 

He was calm, but he was starting to feel the cold, and that terrified him. 

RATIGAN: 

Once the sheriff had situated himself onto the stretcher Fidget turned it around and began to follow after Ratigan. Their path had been cleared of the people that had been dropped, but the wheels still had to roll through the pools of blood that had been left in their wake.

When she was done telling everyone else where they were supposed to go from here, Himari joined Fidget in the effort to get the man out to the awaiting ambulance. They did not look at one another or share any words as they rolled him through the corridor and out into the back alley. 

The arrival of their boss in person had been a surprise, but more so than that had been the way in which he conducted himself. Normally he was much more upbeat than he had been tonight, words as if they were lyrics to a song in the way they were said on his smile. When put in front of an audience he would capture everyone’s attention, even when he was in a foul mood. His annoyance was well known in relation to the tolerance of something not going to plan, but it was always telegraphed in louder ways. Slammed doors and barked orders, as if he knew that these were the only ways people would clearly understand that he was angry with them. 

Tonight there had been none of that. Everything he had done was quiet. His silence scared them more so than when he was shouting at them— it meant that there was something wrong, not just a misstep that could be corrected. 

He was waiting for them beside the ambulance, the lights and sirens having been turned off. Again, he said nothing. It set the tone for the two of them, that there was no time for anything else but the work. 

Fidget stepped aside to let Ratigan and Himari get the stretcher into the cabin of the ambulance and he went around to the front to get himself acquainted with the driver’s seat. 

Himari stayed behind in the alley and shut the doors on them. She clapped her hand against the side of the vehicle for Fidget’s benefit and they were off. They needed to get to one of the doctor’s the network had within the city— the only problem was that they were all just out of reach of the time limit they were working with given the sheriff’s condition. As always, time was the enemy that no one could touch. 

“As hard as this may be for you, sheriff, I’d appreciate it if you refrained from any of your usual need of having to be the funniest person in the room.” Ratigan sat beside the stretcher, pulling on a pair of gloves and grabbing the scissors from the supplies. He leaned forward, over the stretcher to get at the fabric of the man’s blood soaked trousers. 

ERROL: 

The silence around him was almost deafening, but Errol didn’t let it penetrate. He focused on his breathing, instead, about keeping his heart rate steady, calm. If he could do that, it would slow the blood flow, would hopefully keep him alive for long enough that he could repair the damage done to himself. He let himself be wheeled after Ratigan, gaze fixed on the back of the other man’s head. Something familiar to anchor himself when his head would start swimming from the blood loss or the nausea would hit. 

It was, unfortunately, a dance he’d done before. Didn’t mean he liked the familiarity of it, but he was quiet the entire time he was being loaded into the back of the ambulance, barely looking at the woman or Ratigan before the doors were closed. Errol only turned his head when he heard the telltale clap of a palm against the side of the ambulance’s back paneling and felt the slight lurch of the vehicle as they started driving. 

Beside him, Ratigan was pulling on gloves, some quip about finding it in himself not to be the funniest person in the room. He snorted, quietly amused, but nodded. He’d be good, though, really, that wasn’t why he did any of what he did. Not that Ratigan would know that, but his bravado, his lines and his sarcasm were all a way for him to compartmentalize, to get done what needed to be done. 

“Mm ain’t ‘ard,” he disagreed, nudging his leg to the side so the other man could get at the inseam of his bloodied trouser leg. “Yer jus’ sore ‘cause I did me job. Long list o’ people ye pissed off. Ain’t jus’ a mutiny, either. ‘S more ‘put a bullet in yer ‘ead an’ call it a day.’” He lapsed into something like silence for a while after that, face pinching slightly when the cloth stuck to the skin around his wound was pulled away. It gave a lovely view of the scars that already existed there and Errol huffed a laugh and leaned his head back from where he'd angled it to give Ratigan room to do whatever he was going to do. After a moment he tilted his face to look Ratigan in the eye. “If ye gimme a needle an’ suturing thread I can take care o’ t’ wound on me shoulder. Eventually gotta patch up me side, too, but ‘s a through-an’-through.” 

He just wanted to be useful, really. Needed his hands to be busy or else his head would start spiralling, he’d start cataloguing the injuries, the blood he’d lost, how many quarts he would need, if they had blood for transfusions (even though he’d done all of that within a split second of being in the rig and cataloguing all of the equipment at their disposal) but that wasn’t the path he needed to go down in the back of an ambulance with a halfway irate man holding a sharp pair of surgical scissors so close to his soft bits. 

Ironically, though, not the first time he’d been in a situation like this one. 

“Ye know...ye could’ve jus’ asked instead o’ all t’ bloody cloak an’ dagger shite. Like I said. All o’ this--'' he gestured minutely with the hand furthest from where Ratigan was working, indicating the encounter as a whole “--ain’t a surprise. 'S jus' a bit different, mutiny an' murder." 

And he'd done both, himself, so the slight shrug of a shoulder was nonchalant. 

RATIGAN: 

Ratigan highly doubted that. In situations like these people were always looking for some sort of release. From the pain. From their current reality. From the possibilities of what that reality may be for them. Many people turned to humor. Laughter like an air bubble that brought them back to the surface before they were inevitably dragged under once more. As he had learned, the sheriff enjoyed pressing the people around him— it was his form of coming up for air against the heaviness. Someone else may have appreciated it, someone else may have even joined him in such a method, but he was here with a man who had never learned to stop for air should he need it. He had always kept his head down until the weight was cut and allowed it to sink itself.  

“If that is why you believe I’m angry then you are more self absorbed than I originally believed.” Ratigan threw the fabric out of the way and turned, digging into a drawer to pull out the IV needle and tubing that led to a bag of saline that would need to be pushed through this man’s system. 

Outside there was a loud honk and the vehicle they were in gave a sudden jerk as it veered to the side sharply. 

“Fidget!” he yelled, having to push himself up from where he had fallen back against the seating.

“S-sorry, boss! Not my fault!”

Rolling his eyes, Ratigan returned to what he was doing. He applied the IV to the back of the man’s hand, and placed it on the hook beside the stretcher. “You’ve lost too much blood to be trusted with anything regarding your health.” 

Not that he would have trusted the man with it even if he had not been shot and bleeding everywhere. “Focus on staying awake. How about telling me where it is you’ve hidden the information you’ve almost died for?” 

ERROL: 

"Nah," Errol drawled, smirking. "Ye jus' like ev'ryfing jus' so." He tilted his head to get a look at the other man's face, ready to push or concede the point depending upon the tick in his jaw. It was a slight little thing, just like the flare in his nostrils when he'd walked into the room and smelled all the blood, but it was there. 

That was about as much of a tell as Errol had ever gotten, and he learned to read the little things for what they were. 

The sheriff was about to comment about the saline bag, offer up his arm even, but the vehicle lurched and he jerked to the side, jarring the bullet wounds under his ribs and throwing his shoulder into one of the cabinets. 

A curse ripped from Errol's mouth as he pressed a hand to his side, grumbling under his breath as he drew back his shirt carefully with a sigh, relieved when he saw the wounds hadn't started bleeding again. He'd been able to wrap them a bit with a section of the scarf while people had been speaking, but they would need to be cleaned and dressed properly. 

A noise of offense was pulled out from the depths of Errol's chest at the other man's words and he offered his hand for the IV with a furrow between his brows. "Who d'ye fink fixed me leg t' first time?" It was an ugly scar, and he knew it too. But that was what he got when he only had gunpowder and his mate's matchbook to cauterize the wound. Then, the tone became curious, brow curling vaguely upward. "'d'ye even know 'ow tah clamp off an artery?" 

Ah. Yes, Ratigan should hear all of that shouldn't he. 

"Ain't wif me, if 'at's what yer wonderin'. Drive's hidden at t' hotel, but 's got a fail safe. Memorized all t' names an' faces, though. One o' 'em was at t' extraction."

RATIGAN: 

Did Pedram Ratigan know how to clamp an artery? 

What reason would he have to know such a thing? Or any first aid for that matter. He had certainly never been a soldier at war nor had he trained in the medical field. As far as anyone knew (disregarding the detective back in Iran), he did not like to get his hands dirty. No one knew the reason for that, either, though. They simply thought it had something to do with his nice suits and the conceited attitude. 

He did not mind this— it was better than the truth. 

He did not answer with words, instead proving his use by actions alone as the point was not to explain or prove himself to any capacity. What did it matter where or how he had learned it? It didn’t. The sheriff already knew more about him than Ratigan cared to acknowledge. 

His touch was not gentle or as precise as that of a surgeon, the only thing he knew was efficiency. Using the tools available to him within the cabin, he cut an incision to the sheriff’s leg for better access to the real cause for concern. He pushed past the muscle to find the severed artery and placed the forceps’ ratchet to the second click centimeters above the separation to stop the bleeding, and did the same for the other side. 

While he did this his mind was elsewhere— on the drive that was hidden in that hotel they had checked over. All this time wasted on one man when he could have just bought that hotel and torn it apart brick by brick instead. 

“Tell me where it is.” He looked up at the sheriff, gaze steady. “Tell me and be done with this. It has nothing to do with you, it never did. You gain nothing from the information, only from giving it to me and keeping out of it.” 

ERROL: 

Right. Because he totally didn't think he was going to die the moment he gave the information over. 

Errol would have said that, or something to that effect, but he was robbed of any ability to say much of anything when Ratigan sliced into the meat of his thigh, deftly twisted past the muscle and clamped the artery down within a matter of, perhaps, a minute. Errol bit into the inside of his cheek to keep from saying something nasty, though the 'bastard' that slipped out when he pressed the heel of his other leg into the base of the stretcher to stop it from twisting away was well-earned. 

Breathing rapidly through his nose to keep both his heart rate down, because he knew that wouldn't help, and his mind from the pain, Errol glared balefully from beneath a fringe of curls. "Right. So ye answered me question 'en. Good tah know. Better than usin' a lighter an' gunpowder," he grumbled, tapping the ugly knot of scar tissue higher up on his leg absentmindedly with his free hand. 

A distraction from the renewed pain in his leg. 

He was quiet for a moment, mulling over the words he wanted to say and how he wanted to say them. Because, really, it did mean something, particularly that he knew the person these men were trying to kill. Shifted a few things about in his head, so to speak. Thankfully he was still coherent enough, despite his blood loss, to remember everything. His vision blurred a little at the edges but when he turned and held Ratigan's gaze, it was clear and it was steady. 

Errol held up his pointer finger on the opposite hand, indicating a list. "Ain't said anythin' 'cause if ye havena found t' drive by now it might nah have yer information anymore, since it was time-sensitive. Also 'cause I fully expected tah be shot after I gave ye t' information," he murmured, gaze steady as ever. He knew the measure of this game, after all. 

"If it does, the key is faolchú. Erases itself if ye get t' password wrong so make sure ye spell it right. If ye need me tah write it down, I can. Know ye can barely understand me normally." Yes he was taking the piss with that last comment, but he was right. He held up his second finger, a smirk curling the edge of his mouth upward. "I didna say anythin' before 'cause I knew whoever asked me tah show up wasna who I'd been workin' fer. Messages sounded off. 'Ad tah know it was t' real fing."

As he had said before, Ratigan or the correspondences that had come from him through whoever had relayed his desires, had a particular way of wording his messages. Straight, to the point. Efficient. That hadn't been the case when he had been called to London, but he'd gone anyway, knowing that something would come of it either way.

He held a third finger up, switching to Farsi, his normal accent all but disappearing to make room for the new language. He had a hunch the man driving the rig wouldn't understand anything they said using it, anyway. "You've got a lot of people trying to kill you. The information is coded in triplicate. 'M sure you'll figure it out quick like but t' key to get it started is a chara, no space."

You know: speak friend and enter. 

Then, he rattled off a handful of names, their information, and the positions they held within Ratigan's organization. Hell, he even had some of their banking information. "There's more than them, about four times that number actually, but they're all on there. I can tell ye, too, if need be. Names, positions, banking information, etcetera." 

RATIGAN: 

Well, at least the sheriff had the foresight about one thing, that his life was only as valuable as the information he could provide. 

“Very presumptuous of you to believe that they are trying to kill me.” He turned, grabbing gauze from the supplies. For all the sheriff knew he could have just been the leader of this branch, another cog in the machine. 

Why did he have to be so careful about this when he had been the complete opposite before regarding the people that had been trying to kill him? Had he been under Ratigan’s crosshairs they would not be having this conversation right now. And yet, had he been less careful with a drive rather than his own life, they would also not be having this conversation. Ratigan would have left him to his own devices and not had to intervene on the order to kill the sheriff. 

It seemed as though this man, despite not even knowing of Ratigan’s involvement, would always deliberately make his life that much harder than it ever needed to be. 

“Then why go at all? If you knew they were not a part of your team of officers, why show your face? And why go alone? Why put yourself in such a position?” In truth, he didn’t care to know the man’s train of thought. The questions were more accusatory, a way in which he could convey his irritation. 

The more the sheriff spoke, the angrier he became. Four times that number of people who had been trying to turn over the table? After all he had done in the name of organized crime? And why? Because they thought they could do better? 

He grit his teeth and let out a slow breath through his nose to keep the anger repressed. It would not do to blow up in the back of an ambulance with a man who had everything he needed being held together by clothing accessories. 

“Very well.” Ratigan nodded to him. “Continue. In exchange, I will ensure you survive the night.” 

ERROL:

“Not if ‘m right it isn’t,” he shot back, eyes following the other man’s movements as he reached for the gauze to pack the wound with. Which would also hurt like a bitch, but he wasn’t surprised by that, not in the slightest. Everything hurts now. His entire body was throbbing, both in the way his heart beat in every open wound and the variety of injuries he had sustained. 

Sure, Ratigan could have just been the leader of a particular section of people but that didn't seem like his style. He didn't seem like the type to play second fiddle. Didn't seem the type, much like Errol himself, to like authority when he could be it. 

The questions the other man raised were good ones, and they deserved a decent answer, but the only one he could give at that moment was a small shrug of his good shoulder. "Curiosity, probably. And figuring if they were dumb enough to think I'd give them the information, that I would be followed by the person who actually needed it." 

It didn’t take a genius to recognize that he would have someone following him. Someone who would want the information more than the other, who had a reason behind it that kept them there. The comment about knowing if it was one of his officers or not made the Irishman snort and he laughed, quietly, for a moment before tilting his head to watch Ratigan’s face, speaking normally for a moment. “Didna tell anyone else. None o’ me officers knew anyfin’ an’ fer good reason. ‘S less people tah protect if ‘s jus’ me. An’ I did it because my client’s a bit of a ponce, a bit of a bastard, but ‘e’s t’ kinda bastard I like.”

He could hear the growing anger boiling just beneath the man’s genteel tone, the flash of it in his eyes, and Errol smirked slightly to himself, brows twitching as he shifted around to straighten his leg ever so slightly. His knee was starting to stiffen and he knew if he did not move it, the joint would lock up and it would make moving around later a pain in the ass. Errol dropped his head back with a thump and a sigh, a hand settling across his stomach as he waited to have the gauze shoved into his leg. 

“Yes sir,” he muttered, poking a bit at the man just because he could, mouth curling around the familiar, lilting tones of Farsi once more. “Your biggest problem’s a bloke named Bartholomew. Nasty little bastard thinks he’s got it in him to run an entire organization from the ground up.” Errol rolled his eyes, clear distaste for the man stark on his face. “But he’s got people who agree with him, a lot of them, and they won’t be easy to just...get rid of. They’re everywhere, top down.” Errol paused for a moment and lifted a hand to rub at his eyes, the ceiling and Ratigan’s face swimming a bit. 

“D’ye ‘ave any transfusion bags? Fink ‘m gonna need ‘em. Any’ll do, ‘m a universal donor.” And then, to himself as he glanced behind the other man to try and catch a glimpse of any, he said, “‘Course, direct transfusion could work in a pinch, too, ‘cept yer Muslim. ‘M nah gonna ask ye tah do that.” 

No, he hadn’t realized that little factoid had slipped out, but he didn’t care even if it had. Despite what others might think of the religion, Errol had been around and actively participated in portions of it off and on for the twenty years that he’d been stationed in Islamic countries.

RATIGAN: 

It was not often Ratigan made mistakes. They were few and far between. Yet, only a year ago he had made several that had nearly cost him his life. Perhaps that is where this had all started, in that warehouse when someone had thought they’d gotten the best of him. Back then there had been a line of them that he had traced back as if he had been carrying a spool of thread with him all along. 

Here, he had only made the one— misjudging the motivations of the sheriff. A single dismissal and it was costing more than he would have liked.

Judging by the shade of the man’s skin and the disorientation he was fighting to hide, the blood loss was significant, as it should have been given his wounds. It was a miracle he had not bled out as soon as his artery had been hit. (Or perhaps just stubborn willpower.) Ratigan did not care whether he lived or died by any moral standard, his life meant nothing to him. In fact, it would have been easier if he did die. His body could be used to frame the people he was going up against and everyone knew that the loss of one of their own would light a flame under that of Scotland Yard. 

“I’m afraid there are none, and I cannot give my blood for reasons that are not tied to my religion.” It did anger him to think this man knew anything about him but it wasn’t as if he had done anything to hide it from his cover in Swynlake. But, despite what people may think, it was fine to donate blood so long as one did not collect any sort of reward in return and did not cause harm to themselves by doing so.

It was clear to Ratigan that unless they got this man to their medical facilities he would not survive. They were too far out to make it before he would be passed saving. But he needed those names the sheriff claimed to have wrapped up inside that head of his. They only needed just that much more time. 

“Thank you for the advice, sheriff. I am sure the time you’ve spent on this has made you such an expert, I will be sure to pass along your valuable advice.” His tone was polite and proper, but perhaps that is what made the facetious point of it all the more biting. “What are the rest of the names?” 

ERROL: 

Errol hummed his acknowledgement, tapping his index finger against his good thigh (or, rather, the thigh currently not housing a few clamps) and screwed his brow together, forehead wrinkling as he shifted a bit. His leg was falling asleep. "'S fine. Figure we're almost where yer wantin' tah take me any'ow." 

The sheriff listened to the other man speak and snorted, despite himself, amused at the tone that would have normally made him bite back his own sarcastic retort, a lopsided grin taking over his face, more unguarded than it normally would be in a situation like this. He almost wanted to tell him to quit being such a prick, that he was telling him. Didn't he see his hand, the tapping? Except, his voice wouldn't work, words wouldn't come, and Errol knew he needed to fix that. Right now. Even though he was wavering, fading into the edges of black around his eyes, Errol was still gritting his teeth and swinging back around, wrenching his eyes open and shifting forward, allowing the pinch in his leg, while painful, to wrench himself from the darkness of unconsciousness. 

"Yer a genius," he mumbled, words slurring a bit despite how confident they were, and it was a fact because he was, Errol knew that, "ye'll figure it out. Jus' watch, 'cause 've been tellin' ye." 

If anyone could figure out some sloppy Morse code in the back of a stolen ambulance by a man who'd lost more than a few quarts of his own blood, it was Pedram. 

RATIGAN: 

The Morse code, while juvenile and annoying beyond belief, was noticed. It was also a testament to how much longer this man had if he had already given up on the effort of speech— seeing as it was all he ever did. 

“Unless you are taken to a medical professional there is nowhere that I can take you that could save you. For all that I am, a surgeon I am not.” He glanced down at the open wound, knowing very well that there was nothing he could do to fix it. 

It would take some sort of miracle to do such a thing with the amount of time that had passed already and the amount of blood that had no doubt been lost. It was already astounding that the man’s heart was still beating now. There was only so far his beliefs would stretch outside his logic.

Silence followed this as he focused on the code the man was giving out. It was only so much information that could come across. There was not enough time. Wouldn’t be enough time unless he survived and there was nothing that could keep him among the living that Ratigan had within the cab of the ambulance. He sat back, tearing off his gloves in frustration, throwing them away. His mind cleared to work over the problem at hand, the sound of the traffic faded and he closed his eyes against the overhead lights. 

The man was dying. Ratigan needed him alive, unfortunately, if he was to get the information. 

He was overlooking something. But what was it? What—?

Inside, the wolf whined. 

Ratigan’s eyes opened and slid over to the sheriff.

“You are dying.” A fact. “If I make sure you live, do I have your word you will give me everything you can remember?” 

ERROL: 

Errol could speak but he was starting to tire, a fuzziness about his vision that made the back of the ambulance and it's equipment almost grey, like the color had been leached out of the world. Slowly, and then all at once, the blackness would descend, and he, for the first time in a long while, feared it. This time did not feel like any other, like any other of his 'almost-but-not-quites.' Rather, this was the 'not quite yet' that had been hanging above his head like a scythe ever since he was a lad. 

He'd cheated death one too many times. This would be his last, unless they figured something out. 

A bark of bitter laughter escaped, and it almost sounded more like a punch to the gut or a cough. If he'd chanced a look downward he would have seen a grayish pallor hanging over his skin, from blood loss and death's gaze both. "I know," he mumbled, sighing through his nose when he shifted to glance upward at the other man's face (neck, chin, jaw, half of a cheek but not the eyes) with a little grin. "Feels like it did, t' last time. Was in a coma fer...weeks. 'S when they took me dog." 

There was something angry in that, something brutally, visibly wrong there. He hated the thought of someone that wasn't family taking Delilah and, now, Dublin, too. Someone he did not trust and fuck he might have just learned perhaps one of the biggest secrets of the other man's life, but he trusted Ratigan enough to be here, dying, in this ambulance with him. Trusted him enough to try to fix what he could not, he would trust him with his dogs, too, if he knew the man would take them (he wouldn't, but Errol was okay with that). 

"'S unfortunate ye ain't, luv," he mumbled, allowing the moniker to slip rather than the real first name like it wanted as he shrugged a shoulder, trying to sit upward a bit more. The world tilted and he groaned, fingers white-knuckling the edge of the stretcher he was laid along, cursing beneath his breath. 

Errol watched in placid fascination as Ratigan stripped off his bloody gloves and threw them across the ambulance, every line in his body radiating frustration. It was clear it was about the information he was not getting now because there just wasn't enough time, never enough time, but Errol wondered why there was such a large upwelling of it. 

The sheriff waited, patient in the face of his own death, for Ratigan's eyes to open again and slide back to his face. Both brows raised up into his hairline, intrigue and confusion sliding together in his gaze before the edge of his lip curled, showing teeth. Despite his acceptance of death, he was a stubborn bastard. If Ratigan could think of a way to fix all of this, then Errol would take it. 

"Cross me 'eart. Everyfin' 've got an' then some. 'S yers." Despite the tone, the false-joviality of the attitude, there was a deep seriousness that said he meant every word. 

RATIGAN: 

As soon as the permission was given Ratigan put the plan into motion. The behavioral straitjacket of control and posturing was locked into place once more as he leaned forward to clap his hand against the wall between the cabin and front seats of the ambulance. 

Fidget startled but turned his head to glance through the little viewing window. The pair exchanged words, the driver confused at first but once consoled with an unwavering gaze simply nodded his head in understanding. He would do as he was told, like always. 

It didn’t take him long, the instructions had been simple. (Whatever happens, whatever you hear, do not stop driving until you’ve taken the sheriff to the doctor. I will contact you tomorrow, Ratigan had told him. Fidget had no reason to think he wouldn’t.) 

This was a bad idea, of this he had no doubt. When desperation entered into a situation there never seemed to be any other kind. All he had was this if he wanted to right the wrongs. He would be inflicting great harm to a man, changing the course of the sheriff’s life just as it had done to Ratigan, to anyone who had been inflicted by this magic. But he had no choice— he was not dead yet and if he waited too much longer the infection wouldn’t be able to save him anymore than a hospital could. He was out of options. 

The wolf whined again, pacing and clawing, looking for its way out. 

For once, Ratigan let it. 

It took no more than an intake of breath— where once there was a man there was now a wolf. 

The wolf was distracted by everything all at once. The smell of blood made it whine in the back of its throat. The enclosed space made it start to pant, it hated the man’s basement where it had only been allowed out, but this was smaller. Too small. It felt caged and threatened and it wanted out. It hated it here, it didn’t feel stable, every time it tried to move the floor would shift as the ambulance rocked against its weight. The wolf barked and the sound of it bounced against the too close walls.  

Then, the wolf noticed that there was something else in the cage with it. 

The smell of blood and sweat made its eyes snap to the man laying there. It knew just by looking at the figure that he posed no threat. One slash of its paw across his throat and he would be dead. It bared its teeth, growling, ready to— that was when the man’s thoughts met the wolf’s. 

The man’s were different, he wanted this one alive for reasons that were complicated and had been calculated down into something that was less to do with emotion and more to do with business. The wolf was not like the man in that regard. While it did hold his intelligence, its thought process was more base.

It barked again, a warning shout before it reached. The wolf sunk its teeth into one of the man’s biceps. (One of the only places not injured, easily hidden by clothing for the scarring that would be left behind.) The flesh caved easily around its teeth and it thought, briefly, about just pulling back while its jaws were still locked. It would be easy. Just as easy as it would to go for somewhere softer next. It could feel those thoughts from the man inside, from the days when he had known only blood and death and darkness. It could be like that, perhaps that was the connection it needed to— 

The wolf released the man’s arm, the fur around its mouth now matted with his blood, and barked again. The walls were too close. It could feel Ratigan’s fear of enclosed spaces now boiling to the surface, too. They were together on this— it needed out. 

Its eyes roamed the steel cage until it spotted the windows at the back of the space. It waited until the constant movement of the box to come to a stop. (Fidget pressed on the brakes, adhering to a stop sign.) 

It lunged. 

The doors to the ambulance popped open and the wolf stopped only long enough to sniff the night air before running off. 

ERROL: 

There was something like dread, or finality, in Ratigan's eyes. Errol could see it. Maybe not dread, then, but a knowing. The kind of knowing that Errol hadn't yet picked the thread of yet and run with, the kind that was still forming, sluggishly, at the back of his mind. Perhaps, if he had been more aware, if he had not lost so much blood, he'd have been quicker on the uptake. 

He heard every word exchanged between the man in the cab and the one beside him; as drowsy as he looked, his mind was still sharp, was still taking in and processing information. The weight of the ambulance shifted as the driver started driving again, just as he had been instructed, not stopping unless it was warranted. They needn't draw attention to themselves, after all. 

That one was loyal, perhaps unconditionally so. Good. Maybe he could help Ratigan fix his problems if Errol couldn't. 

(And maybe Errol shouldn't have been glad for that, given the divide between law and lawlessness that veiled them, but Errol understood what it was like, having a foot between both right and wrong, doing what he could to survive and skating just beneath the surface of the law to do it. It was not something he forgot, never probably could. He didn't blame the man). 

Ratigan turned to him and he breathed and in one second to the next Errol was no longer staring at the face of a man but the face of a large, snarling, wolf. 

Somehow, the second shoe had dropped a long time ago and only seconds ago, at the same time. Errol was not surprised. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he ever would have been. 

The wolf growled and barked, the sound echoing off the too-small walls. The body language was apprehensive, put off by the instability of the ambulance cab and the smells that surrounded the beast. If Errol had been of any other mind, he might have been able to speak with it like he did his dogs, to get it (Ratigan) to understand he was no threat. 

Though, when it paused, considering in that all too human way a beast had when it burst forth from its first skin, Errol figured it already knew that. Errol had seen it, once, a long time ago. 

He didn't have much time left, he knew that. But he did recognize when an animal was about to lunge, the coiling of the body and the way their head angled to grab hold, to grab for the softest flesh it could reach. 

Usually the throat, normally, if given half the chance. Ratigan had every one. 

The wolf took a chunk from his left arm, the scarred one, and Errol was almost grateful. It would be easier to hide amidst the mass of damage already done. Would look like any other mark done to him in the first attack. Easily believable that it was another. 

His own blood running down his arm, a burning sensation radiating from the wound, was what he was left with when the wolf backed away. Errol's eyes tracked it, alert but tired, and watched as its great big body bounded against the ambulance doors and out into the street, letting the night in. There were no sounds of cars honking frantically at the wolf loping into traffic. There wouldn't have been. Where they had gone, the streets were nearly deserted. Errol chuckled half-heartedly, glancing at his arm, and pulled his hand into a fist against the stretcher.  The thumping, throbbing ache was still there but it had slowed, spreading out into a fire instead. 

The sheriff sighed and dropped his head back against the wall once he fixed  himself more firmly upright. He knew what this was, what had been done. He knew how this had changed everything but, in the back of his mind, Errol was already past caring, even while his blood burned. 

Just like every other time life had dealt him a shitty hand, Errol would slip a new card into the deck and make it his own. It was the one way he knew how to survive. 

When Fidget finally stopped and opened the ambulance doors and wheeled him into the makeshift hospital, Errol didn't tell him anything, suggesting only that he would see his boss tomorrow, just like Ratigan had said. 

[thefoulbeast]

Monstrum Malum (Evil Monster)

It’s finally october!! U know what that means!! Aoextober!! I’ve been waiting to be able to post this hahhhahahaa… some good ole soft horror in the spirit of the month of scary… I’ll also put it up on ao3 soon…

Characters: Todou Saburota, That demon he had at first, Todou Homare (mentioned). Contents: Violence & gore, monsters, memory manipulation, surrealism (or is it derealisation? basically we got some weird stuff going on), elements of horror. Rating: Teen & up. Word count: 2 888.

__________

It’s all a little fuzzy, this far back in his memories…

According to family tradition, Saburota receives his temptaint at ten years old. It’s scary beyond belief – the sudden grotesque presences that await him at every turn.

There’s a thick black snake on the teacher’s desk that watches him, a cat with two heads and three tails and no skin that doesn’t meow as much as it yells, spidery, shadowy hands that wave at him from dark corners and alleyways, always beckoning closer in silent invitation.

The horrible sounds of screaming and crying at night he can’t drown out no matter what he tries to do.

He doesn’t understand how his father and brothers and – everyone, really- can just ignore it all, can just pretend like it’s all normal and okay.

Though, he supposes it’s not too implausible – their ability to ignore things is quite remarkable. One time they pretended he didn’t exist for a whole week – and honestly, he’d been questioning his existence himself by the end of it.

But the problem is these… demons. These ghosts and spectres that follow him and distract him and terrify him.

Saburota tries to focus on the page in front of him – a test in maths that he’s writing in pencil because his pen is bleeding red blood – an ever-growing puddle over the surface of his desk that never reaches his papers and drips over the edge with quiet plips.

The numbers in the problems tilt and tumble and his hands are tingling. But if he focuses just so- if he can keep them in his mind long enough, he can do this.

Pit-pat… Pit-pat…

The blood drips steadily down onto the floor. No one else notices it.

–

“Oh, come now! You’ll get used to it,” his aunt says when she sees him flinch back from a dark mass that covers the floor like a living carpet, undulating and scintillating and breathing.

She walks right over it, and the black sticks to the heels of her shiny beige pumps like tar – but she doesn’t even seem to notice-

“Come on, Saburota, let’s go,” she pulls him by the arm, stronger than he can dig his heels into the ground. The black thing is unpleasantly soft under his feet. He feels it writhe.

“Don’t be so obstinate, we’ll be late to the opera!” she huffs, exasperated, “Honestly, you’d think a boy your age would have some manners.”

The black clings to the bottom of their soles without end even after they’ve crossed all of it and are out on the street, spreading out from every point of contact their shoes make with the ground, melting together to form a winding, snakelike path.

“What show are we going to see?” he asks cautiously, trying to distract himself.

“Three dead men and the devil, of course” she answers haughtily, “Why, Saburota, it’s as if you’re trying to irritate me on purpose! You’re the one who wanted to go!”

He did?

“Oh, I remember now!” he says, but it’s a lie, it’s his mouth moving on its own, “I hope it’s as good as the reviews promise!” he says again, a giddy edge to the words- but they’re not his words.

“It will be,” his aunt answers with a mysterious sort of smile, her hand tightening around his wrist.

–

Saburota’s hiding under the bed, curled up in the dark. It seems like no matter how much he shrinks down; he still feels watched, still feels threatened. Feels like he’s not alone, like there’s something else inside him.

The door opens and footsteps make their way over to the bed – but they’re sharp, like knocking wood on wood, and so loud.

Saburota holds his breath when hooves come into view right in front of him. Fear is like a bird trapped in his chest, raging desperately against the bars of his ribs.

Whatever it is climbs up on his bed with an ominous sqeak of the springs and a decidedly animal huff.

“Oh, you’re already in bed, honey?” the voice of his mother speaks from the doorway. She all but floats over soundlessly. Her skin is deathly pale and dry beneath the hem of her nightgown.

“I’m scared, mommy,” the thing says in a voice that’s nowhere near Saburota’s own. “I think there’s a monster under my bed.”

“Monsters don’t exist, silly,” she coos, “but I’ll look and make sure for you, alright?”

She gets down on all fours and peers beneath the bed. Her unseeing eyes look straight at and through Saburota. Her face is as pale and bloodless as her feet and hands, a greenish-blueish tinge to her lips and eyelids.

“There’s nothing here, honey,” she says in her beautiful, sonorous voice. Her smile reveals her teeth that look much longer and sharper now that the gums have dried out and shrunk back.

Then she rises again and says, “Now, will you be a good boy and sleep? We have a busy day tomorrow. You need to be ready to do what has to be done.” She kisses the thing sweetly goodnight before leaving, footsteps as soundless as when she entered. The door closes behind her, and so disappears that last bit of illumination the room had.

The darkness left behind feels like it’s eating Saburota whole, encompassing him in a tight and claustrophobic space. He reaches out to prove the feeling wrong, but the darkness is smooth and solid against his hand, pushing up against it with incrementally increasing force.

“You don’t have much time left down there, do you?” the thing up on the bed asks, soft and sleepy. It yawns. “You know, God can’t see you anymore, and neither can most other things.”

The darkness pushes up against his skin, too tight to move, too tight to breathe.

–

They’re in the main hall. A soft record plays in the background, a gentle but somber croon accompanied by a saxophone and a cello.

“You know they don’t exist,” the shadow sitting across from Saburota at the dinner table says, “right?”

It’s gesturing at his family, where they’re chatting amongst themselves as they eat. At the other, farther end of the table – it’s farther than usual. The table is as long as the room as opposed to taking up just the center.

There are so many empty seats. So many set plates, untouched. Like there’s supposed to be a banquet, but no one’s shown up.

Saburota stares down at his plate. The soup is black and thick, and there’s the smooth off-white surface of a bone peeking out from beneath the surface.

He’s not particularly hungry.

“You’re wrong,” he tells the shadow quietly ad he pushes the plate away, and the damn thing laughs in response. It’s fuzzy and translucent, and smears in Saburota’s vision when it moves.

“Oh, my bad!” the shadow chortles and picks up a knife, and twirls it around the fingers of its hand; the gleaming facets of the blade catch red and orange lights from some strange and unknown source, “You’re the one who doesn’t exist, I meant to say. Easy mistake to make.”

Saburota feels goose bumps break out over his body. A cold gust of wind whistles over the edge of his collar, ruffling the back of his hair. He places one of his palms protectively over his nape, feeling unsafe.

The room is colourless now, and his family sounds all muffled - and the shadow is gone. He shivers, then takes a fortifying breath and reaches for the spoon again, hand trembling minutely.

Saburota lifts a spoonful of the simple noodle soup to his mouth hesitantly. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with it, but… he’s just got this nagging worry that something isn’t right.

–

“I see right through you,” the creature says hotly in his ear, “you’re little more than smoke - a miasma leaking through the cracks of the skin you wear.”

Saburota stares at it through the mirror. It’s taller than him, wider than him, has horns like an ibex and hands like eagle claws, poised up in the air, talons glinting menacingly.

“Poor little Saburota,” it hisses, leaning in even closer, snake tongue peeking through its teeth on the ‘s’. “So damaged and twisted that no one could ever like you. You empty little puppet, you pathetic fucking piece of shit.”

Saburota shrugs at its words. They sound about right. It’s what he’s heard all his life, what he’s thought all his life. A truth confirmed over and over.

“You should bite them back for making you,” it says with a beastly leer, talons wrapping around his shoulders and digging in, drawing blood in small beads, “Make them regret your existence. Teach them what it means to hurt. You want to. You need to. I’ll help you. I’ll make you strong, I’ll make you dangerous.”

There’s a certain desperation to the thing’s words.

“Maybe someday,” Saburota murmurs, stepping forwards - out of the creature’s embrace towards the sink, heedless of the shallow wounds left behind by the drag of its talons. He needs to brush his teeth and get to bed.

The bathroom darkens and the walls and floor wobble dangerously, like light broken on the edge of water, like matter passing through the planes of a prism and coming out wrong.

“You’re ready,” the creature wails, upset at his coy evasions of what needs to be done.

“No, I’m-“ he stammers. God, everything here looks so fake it makes him nauseous. He needs to- he needs to set himself straight. Needs to recalibrate.

”I’m not ripe yet,” Saburota says gently, cautiously - looking at the beast without turning, eyes dark like the sky on the night of a new moon.

–

Father’s saying something to him. He looks angry. He’s gesticulating like crazy.

Saburota can’t hear it. The sound’s muted. Pure silence.

No, not pure… there’s something whispering in his ear. It takes a moment for him to understand what it’s saying…

Saburota feels a smile spread out over his face at the promises of violence, bloodshed, nasty ugly retribution-

The world seems sharper somehow. Like it’s come into focus after being blurry and vague for his entire life.

Saburota looks at his hands. He’s got claws – mean, nasty looking things, the kind that maim and rip and rend. When did that happen?

The little whispering voice giggles in his ear. I’ll give you this. I’ll give you this if you just let me-

–

“I’ve been cultivating you for years,” the thing says, looking down at him from its full height. The creature is menacing, attention catching, terrifying. “You’d be nothing without me. You’d be small and powerless and pathetic.”

Its arms wrap around his shoulders covetously, possessively. The talons sink into the flesh of Saburota’s deltoids like a butcher’s knife sinks into a hunk of meat.

“You’re all mine,” the thing whispers, opening its maw to reveal row upon dizzying row of teeth arranged in a beautiful rosette. Saburota touches a tooth and pricks his finger.

Blood red. Drops on the floor. He smears them with the toe of his shoe and suddenly realises.

Oh, what a clever thing. Had him really going for a while.

“No, I’m not,” Saburota says, something in his voice dark but… whistful and dreamy. “You did nice this time, I’ll give you that. Too bad you’re so slow with it all,” he says, and reality shifts.

Well, the not-reality shifts. Saburota’s holding the thing – a squirming little creature with a long leathery tail, smaller than ever and…

And perfect for eating.

–

He’s not afraid anymore. Despite the thing’s attempts – this particular memory remains unchanged, remains his fully. So far.

There’s carnage all around – his family, the house staff – mutilated sacks of meat, strewn about carelessly, all carved up and bled out.

Saburota can taste it – the metallic tang of something raw clinging to his palate, the edges of his teeth.

He knows what he did. He knows how he did it. But… he’d been too excited, too in-the-moment about it. It’s all a red haze in hindsight.

“Well, this was easier than expected,” he says, all light and happy and unburdened.

“You finally did it,” Homare says as she watches him from the top of the stairs, her face a blank mask.

“You’re free now,” Saburota says with a wide grin, “This power could be yours too, Homare.”

It slips off his tongue like a well-oiled phrase. This isn’t the first time he’s said this.

“Why won’t you let me out, Saburota?” she says in someone else’s voice. Shadows cling to her, making her larger and darker than what she is. The beast is here again, messing with his mind and senses. “Why must you deny me so? You can’t hold me down forever. I will claw my way out.”

The house is dark and crawling with black shapes and bugs the size of rats. Saburota feels his mood sour. That’s not right, that’s not what she really said.

Homare’s walking down the stairs towards him, heedless of the gore she steps in, looking at him like she wants him to burst open like an over-tense bulla.

“Kill yourself, Saburota, you worthless fucking heap,” the thing says, even if it’s Homare’s lips that move, “Getting all cocky and full of yourself. You will regret it. I will make you regret it.”

Saburota smiles lazily, “You’re just throwing a tantrum because I’m stronger than you. Tsk-tsk. You’d think that demons had more class than that.”

Saburota flicks open the zippo in his hand, and the smell of buthane hits him above the wet smell of fresh guts. His hands are shaking, his heart is racing. There’s a cacophonous screaming in his head above it all.

“Let me out, Saburota,” the thing says through Homare’s lips, low and thunderous and so angry, “Let me out and let me in for real.”

Saburota flicks the wheel and sparks the flame, looking right into Homare’s eyes where he sees it looking at him.

He drops the zippo carelessly, ignoring the beast’s words. This – all of this is his.

And he’s going to burn it all down.

–

Saburota wakes with a jolt that has the water sloshing against the sides of the tub. He’d dozed off again.

The nightmarish pictures of his dream fizzle out into the subconscious part of his brain. The phantasms are creeping upwards again, seeking to dig their claws into his more recent memories.

He sighs tiredly, rubbing a palm over his face. It had taken him too long to notice. Next time the demon might get him for good. He rests a palm over his stomach where he feels it like a hot, familiar weight in his gut. So small, so stubborn, so bothersome.

Saburota can’t remember his childhood clearly anymore, not the way it really was. His recollections are all twisted and maimed, cut up and pasted together into tid-bit horror stories and fantastical exaggerations, much like the dream had been.

It comes with being a demon eater. There’s a certain cost, a sacrifice he has to make in the form of his memories and occasionally, his personality. One can only hold on to darkness for so long until it grabs back.

Saburota barely ever sleeps anymore. Whenever he dreams, the distortions get worse and feel more real.

Realistically, he knows there wasn’t a dead man lying on the table and singing at Homare’s tenth birthday party… he knows that his mother died in childbirth when she had her last pregnancy, that he’d never heard her voice and had only ever seen her in pictures… but he can remember these delusions so very vividly it’s kind of scary.

“Your brain’s rotting…” He tells himself in a low voice. Then, he chuckles,�� Heh, who knows if what’s left is even you anymore…” He pauses, moving his hand through the water, watching it slosh against the sides of the tub.

He’s awake, sure, but he still feels like he’s dreaming, like this isn’t reality. Another chuckle, a little more self-deprecating, “Good thing that won’t matter soon enough.”

Saburota sinks lower into the water so that his nose just above the surface. The water’s lukewarm now, so it doesn’t seep into his bones and muscles the way he wishes it would.

He’ll get out in a minute and get dressed and do things, but for now he just… ruminates. On what he is. On what he’s done.

He doesn’t regret his choices, but… sometimes he wonders what life would be like if he was… more normal. If he’d never clashed with his family the way he had… if he’d just…

Well, whatever. Those thoughts don’t lead anywhere.

He’s made it this far – that’s the only thing that matters. He just needs to pull through and do his part in getting the phoenix for the Illuminati. He’s been planning it for years now, sowing doubt and trust in the right places, and it’s finally so close he can taste it.

That’s his purpose now. That’s what’s important. He has a goal and a purpose, and he is needed. With that much, he’s satisfied.

As long as he does what he needs to do for the Illuminati, for The Commander, what happens to him afterwards doesn’t really matter…

[theholycovenantrpg]

In the beginning was SAMAEL, a DEMON loyal to the cause of the DEMONS. He is said to be IMMORTAL and uses HE/HIM pronouns. In this New Testament he serves as a MEMBER of the VICES. Blessed be his name.

THE INDELIBLE MARK.

As the Vice of Sloth, Samael’s gift remains the one that he had once possessed as an angel. It is anchored in slow, insidious corruption, granting him the ability to conjure a wide array of ailments in his targets of choice -- from slow-acting poisons and horrific night terrors, to noxious diseases and falsified ideals. His powers are rooted in the decay and deterioration of body and spirit alike, yet they are not foolproof. For one, their effects are irreversible; once the seed is planted, it cannot be uprooted from the feeding grounds, which makes it dangerous for them to be harnessed impulsively or carelessly, especially as it’s a risk that Samael often neglects. For another, his powers are practically useless on an active battlefield and in close-range combat, as their effects are gradual and take place across a period of time. Any attempt to expedite them or hasten their impact, along with any overuse of his abilities, causes the effects to begin leaking through to him and corrupting him in the same manner as his target. There is only one singular cure for his influence, and it lies in Raphael's hands.

THE HISTORY.

It was with a slow, molten flare that his creation came to be, like the reverberations of water as they bubbled and burrowed into the depths upon impact; a winding citrus-green trail worming into porcelain-paleness like poison upon milk. With the insidious, slithering trickle of contagion, God’s breath ran through the mold of the angel Samael, and as it began to feed on the lifeblood, black veins etched themselves into God’s impenetrable skin, fumes coiled up from the holy grounds upon which He stood, and the scent of acid and liquefied lightning singed the air until every angel was choking on a mouthful of it. When Samael burst into existence, Heaven screamed with it, as though gripped by disease. Yet ultimately, it came down to nothing more than God’s design. He had concocted Samael in order for him to be one instrument out of many with which He carried out His will, if not the most crucial. After all, what better method could there possibly be for the enactment of divine punishment, than with venom drawn from God’s fang?

For countless centuries, Samael would go on to be a testament of that. Crowned with the duty of carrying out God’s retribution through festering, far-reaching means, he bore the gift of poisoning mankind with the fruits of their transgressions. Stirring madness, planting terrors, injecting malice; imbuing all those whom God found deserving with cancerous influence until they either crawled through their remaining days as husks of who they had once been, or perished in enforced, sometimes willing, pursuit of redemption in the eternities beyond. Hailed as the Poison of God, revered and dreaded in equal parts among the echelons of the angels, Samael thrived. He found home in the horrific landscapes he sprawled across people’s dreams, drew nourishment from the ravenous growth of the illnesses he fed into their hearts, sought thrill in the patient, painstaking skew of their characters as they decayed under mounds of soiled sentiments and warped ideals. However rotten, such was the core around which he had been crafted, the purpose for which he had been created; and he upheld it to heights that lay far beyond any mundane notions of empathy or remorse. In his eyes, there could be no fault in carrying out his own will alongside that of God, otherwise he would not have been made into a grand corruptor; he would not have been built in the shape of one of God’s many guiding hands.

Yet in the face of such selfish, wicked commitment, no matter how bold or unwavering, God could harbor nothing but scorn. The moment He was finally able to glimpse the black burnt spark ensnaring Samael’s heart, His love for the noxious angel was naught but ash scattered along Heaven’s steady, whispering winds -- carried right alongside the frail, faded grains of Samael’s divinity. For when caught within the snare-trap of God’s judgement, the very same pit from which he had once carved himself a virulent, unshakeable throne, Samael found himself gripped by the wings and sent scurrying over the edge of the soaring kingdom of Heaven, mindlessly cast away, without a crutch or any chance of being heard. Whether in moments or millennia, the blur of time rushed ahead, dragging Samael through his fall and hurling him into an awakening as scathing as the memory of God’s gaze as it traced his descent. He succumbed to it with a lurch, sitting up frantically with a desperate clutch on burn-riddled arms as he lay atop a bed of coals, thrown at the foot of Lucifer’s throne in an unspoken offering -- right in the scorched, scarred heart of Hell. A lingering look and a charred smile was all it took for the Morningstar to declare him as one of their own, and thus Samael was reborn.

His once vigorous, purposeful existence grew dull and meaningless in Hell; wicked deeds losing their dark, lively glow to all-encompassing crimson, their purpose eaten up and burned away by the aimless churning of demonic livelihood. His choices had always been his own, yet now they were barren of any cause to grant them power, hollow of any reason for him to return to once the last hazy coils of his influence had faded away. It left Samael reeling, disheartened and overwhelmed by his own aimlessness; stirring random terrors and wreaking reckless havoc in the hope of filling in a fissure that only splintered further with each passing moment. It ran through him, even as he was approached by the Anti-Christ and anointed as one of his chosen; even as he sat back and watched Lucifer wither and decay in his wake until the rebellion was able to land its first strike. It wasn’t until his narrowed existence was cast into the open world that Samael finally regained his breath, and he could only relish the tang of opportunity that weaved itself into it with every venomous inhale. This was his chosen rebirth, and he couldn’t find it in himself to care what ailments it brought to the world. After all, it was never meant to survive him.

THE CONNECTIONS.

RAPHAEL: Scourge. They had been created as the two opposing scales that kept God’s order in balance; with Samael as the corruption and Raphael as the cure. Though in spite of that, they had grown to share a rare, ravenous affinity, stirred up by the tar-dripping tie that bound their black hearts, wicked angels as they were. Yet any chance of it tugging them closer had eventually been lost; the thread brutally severed by the swipe of Raphael’s hand as it cast him over Heaven’s treacherous edge. Now they repelled one another exactly as God had once ordained, with Raphael proudly proclaiming himself as the catalyst to Samael’s blighted metamorphosis. He knew nothing of the parting gift that Samael had slipped beneath his skin; a sickness that Raphael had been meant to carry until he was close enough for God to be infected with it. A betrayer’s cancerous kiss, designed to skirt along his blood until it found its rightful place upon God’s cheek. Samael didn’t know if it had survived Raphael’s harbored healing, or if it had actually latched onto God and weakened Him enough for the angels to vanquish Him -- yet he knew that Raphael believed himself to be the harbinger of Heaven’s ruin, and he relished the potential of being the one to rip away that falsified power by revealing himself at the root of God’s defeat, even if there was no evidence or truth to the declaration. They had always existed in a careful, primordial balance, and now it was Raphael’s turn to fall.

CAPHRIEL: Key. So much had been lost in the wake of his fall; his purpose, his glory, and his past alike. Yet if the centuries he had spent mourning it and mulling over it declared anything, it was that none of it was unattainable or beyond his reach -- with memory as the sole, grand exception. The cause eluded him, but Samael knew that the moment he had first opened his eyes in Hell, something had locked itself away in his mind. He had had blanks in his memories of Heaven ever since, and it wasn’t until he had brushed shoulders with Caphriel in a mindless, boredom-driven encounter that Samael had begun to toy with the possibility of those fissures being filled. A casual exchange of words and an untouched meal shared with a lingering sense of familiarity had ushered Caphriel into relaying a faded scene that Samael once witnessed as though she had walked through it right alongside him. He had offered no greater response than a startled blink and a shaken sigh, soon falling back into the mundane flow of the moment as though she had done nothing worthy of his prolonged attention -- but he never forgot it. He didn’t trust the ease of her revelation or the intention behind it, yet he couldn’t help but feel tempted by her unspoken promise of remembrance.

LUCA RICHE: Conquest. In Samael’s eyes, beautiful things shone the brightest in their decay, and how could one speak of beauty and brightness without any thought to Luca Riche, the Holy Land’s glorious, gilded knight? It was on a ruinous whim that Samael had afflicted him with night terrors, eager to see his light dimmed and deadened and swallowed up in shadow where it did not belong. It was sublime, the way the nightmares had ravished Luca in the early weeks, yet as time went on, Samael had been surprised to sense intrigue in place of horror, and then it was as though he had blessed the mortal rather than cursed him. Suddenly a wondrous gleam was casting light upon the hollows beneath Luca’s eyes, the tremble in his fingers and the stiffness to his gait chased away by the brimming acceptance he exuded; as though he embraced his blight and welcomed the trials and terrors it was due to bring forth. Samael found it thrilling, rare as it was for him to inspire awe, of all sentiments. He looked forward to seeing how far he would have to burrow before Luca caved in around him.

RAUM: North star. As a concept, guidance was as repugnant to him as the notion of purity. Even when he had been under God’s reign, Samael could never claim to be guided or governed by Him; he had simply used the tools of God’s arena to carve his own individual, singular path through it. However, it had been different in Hell. There had been no tools, no system, no structure for him to mold himself around and no horizon for him to warp into his own design. There had been nothing for him, reduced as he was to a mere demon no different from any other. But then he had come upon Raum, who was as lost and dazed as he was yet hadn’t thought twice about taking his hand and setting him on the trail of her scattered, wandering steps -- and it was then that Samael allowed himself to be steered along, for the first and only time in his existence. He granted Raum that rare trust, and she never gave him room to regret it. Now they trekked through the New World and all of its opportunities along the same shared path, and Samael would want no one else at his side. If there ever came a time when he ceased his prowl and found his place, he would still belong with Raum.

Samael is portrayed by Oliver Jackson-Cohen and was written by JEN. He is currently TAKEN by JEN.

[jckelly]

how easy it is to pretend / para

goes with this playlist

& this one (for jack’s relationship w his brother

Piece things back up for me, it’s hysterical to think that it’s almost a year to the day.

Maybe the lyrics aren’t meant in the way Jack is hearing them at all. They could be a love song, an ode to a long-lasting relationship. Or a friendship, because does everything really have to be about sex? Or perhaps he’s not hearing them right anyway, it’s often the case when his mind is elsewhere, the words blur into something else entirely. Maybe they’re just about drugs and shit. Fuck knows he’s never been good at analysis. But right now, the words he thinks he heard are hitting a little too close to home. 

Home, which is six thousand miles away, and yet today he can’t quite feel the distance because there’s a bungee chord screwed right into his heart, yanking his feelings until they crash right back into a rainy morning in a church, the last time Jack set foot in a place of worship, probably the only time. He’s never been one for spirituality. Even that morning, the one he tries so hard to keep from reentering his mind, the presence of God is noticeably absent. The only comfort he recalls is the feeling of his brother’s hand in his, a gesture of solidarity in the face of death. I’m here. 

Finn’s not here now, though, and maybe it’s harsh of Jack to see his silent statement back at the funeral as an abject lie now that he sits alone, devoid of the presence of his brother, but it’s not like he can quite help his emotions, or the thoughts that split in his head into fragments, pieces of each other. If a vase breaks, which shard is the original piece? Which thought came first, the thought that Finn had been there for him or the thought that Finn is a liar? (It’s not usually in Jack’s nature to be so philosophical. Maybe he should be cursing the fifth can of cider his palm curves around instead of his brother, who’s nine hours behind and therefore probably unaware even of the anniversary. His brother is rarely to blame, as much as he blames him all the same. In most cases it’s Jack’s fault. Most things are.)

Inhale, exhale, smoke travels through his lungs, swells his airways, the beginnings of a tar clogged artery, perhaps a touch of lung cancer. Self destruction is often so aesthetic. He thinks back to the girls back home, in a line outside the club puffing on ciggies, like a line to the slaughterhouse waiting to be picked up by a guy like Jack, a guy as destructive as the nicotine they’re inhaling. He’d been happy to play along back then, take his pick for the night and take her home, bodies push together into socially expected sex, more out of habit than desire. He didn’t have much desire for anyone back home. He’d never really desired a connection. 

Back then, it had been a mark of pride amongst the boys he knew to fuck girls and never call back. Walk them back to the bus stop in the morning, like an empty gesture of nonexistent chivalry, mouths sour with the aftertaste of the night before’s vodka. He’d mastered the system at sixteen, understood the unspoken rules of fucking and leaving and hurting. Attachments had never been his forte at any rate, the questionable morals of secondary school played only to his strengths. He only fucks up once the fucking ends and the feelings begin, once the words he says begin to be taken seriously and suddenly he has to think about them, question the contents of his mouth before it spews out into a mushroom cloud, an atomic bomb of emotional destruction. As much as he pretends otherwise, Jack doesn’t always intent it that way. The hurt is more accidental than he lets on. 

The rooftop is cold, and the skyline is unfamiliar. They’ve been in Japan for barely a month at most, he still gets lost every other time he ventures off campus. He’d just gotten past the feeling of unfamiliarity in America when they announced the travel program, and now he gets to be a stranger in a city every month, once again covering the anxious feeling in his stomach with shards of dry wit. Jack’s never been a big fan of change. He’s had too much of that.

Teenagers in Sheffield change quicker, he’s noticed. Or maybe it’s true that when your privilege is lessened, you’re given less time to be a child. They can’t afford to fuck around for their whole lives, or maybe they simply mature quicker in the context of living in a city which never quite seems to wake up on the surface, eternal slumber leading to them finding different occupations for their beds. He’s reminded every time he goes home of his relative immaturity. How dare he exist without responsibility at 19? What has he done to deserve to be different? It’s something Jack has yet to figure out. Possibly, he never will. He’s not sure he actually does deserve to be different. He’s not shown it through his actions yet. 

And yet it seems to him as if Finn has always risen above whatever the others had been doing. Known before they had come to the realisation years later that their methods of amusement would never pay off in the real world, known to prepare for things other than just fucking with other people. Maturity. It’s a trait Jack has never managed to acquire, no matter the fact that he’s nineteen now, an adult. A man, people like to remind him on occasion, people like Claire and George and whatever other adult influence he’s managed to come across, despite his best efforts. No, while Finn seems to be aware of social rules and all the things Jack can’t quite crack, Jack stays internally delayed. Maybe it’s a genetic thing. The influence of his mother never moving on, staying in the same place from the moment he was born to the moment he lost her. Passed out on the couch, needle marks staining her arms. A state of arrested development she never quite overcame. Maybe Jack will never overcome either. 

It’s hysterical to think that it’s almost a year to the day. The lyrics are churning around his brain, still. It is hysterical. Although he’s not quite sure what’s more hysterical, the fact that he lost her or the fact that it still comes as a surprise to this day when he catches himself reminiscing and is struck again and again, nearly a year later, by the realisation that she’s gone. Shouldn’t he have expected this? Known that she would leave? (Everyone in Jack’s life leaves eventually. It’s a truth, rather than a comment founded in melodrama. Perhaps it’s for the best that his mother doing what everyone before her had chosen to do was not out of her own decision. And then the fact that he’s just felt it was a good thing that his own mother died makes him feel sick to his stomach, the cider tipping back and forth through his intestines. Suddenly, he’s not a nice level of drunk anymore. He’s just sad and tipsy and tired. Tired more than anything else.)

As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, there’s a trap door in Jackson Kelly Fielding’s mind. Whenever it opens - and it’s rarely because he opened it, more often because it forces its way up - he falls back into a pit of memory, hitting each stair of trauma on the way down until he’s lying at the bottom and the world around him is barely a tiny dot of light a hundred and fifty feet above. Then the stupid fucking cinema opens and the curtains draw back, and he’s stuck for hours, reliving every minute, every opportunity he had to save her. Was there a moment? A minute when if he had said one less word, or one more, it would have changed things? Was there a turning point that Jack was too oblivious to see? (He hasn’t found it yet. But he remains certain that he will.)

Tokyo, Japan is eight hours ahead of Sheffield, United Kingdom. Jack’s googled it. It’s one in the morning here, on April 1. In Sheffield, it will be April 1 in seven hours. In seven hours it will be the one year anniversary of his mother shooting up in her flat, alone. Of a sad, solitary death. And it feels so unfair to Jack that in seven hours, as with the year before, the rest of the world will continue living their lives without a thought to someone who lies cold in the ground. It feels so fucking unfair that the sun will rise and rain will fall in some countries and snow in others and people will be laughing and getting engaged and having children, that people will be playing practical fucking jokes on each other and that the event which has torn Jack in two will have had no impact on anyone. It feels damn unfair to Jack that everyone else is allowed a life. That some people are even allowed a mother. He’s allowed neither. His life revolves around his mother, and his mother doesn’t exist. 

(And the thought of his mother lying alone in her flat waiting to be found really feels like a punch to the gut. Was she cold? Did it hurt? He could spend endless hours googling if heroin overdoses are painful. If there was any chance she could feel as she slowly ceased to breathe. How long it would have taken before the arms which held him went cold and stiff. And the worst thought of all, the thought of her screaming and screaming inside her coffin underneath the piles upon piles of dirt and Jack being too far away to hear as she suffocated and swallowed the worms. He’s had nightmares of her coming back, her lips curled into an eternal scream as a beetle crawls out and drips onto his bed.) (Maybe this is why they never let Jack see the body. He’s always had an overactive imagination.)

Jack knows Finn doesn’t struggle in this way. Or at least, he assumes so from the brief conversations he has with his brother, held across oceans over the phone or on video call, the blurry impression he gets of his face. Then again, Finn’s maturity just makes it clearer to Jack that there is little of their mother in him. Jack admires the ability to be someone different, in part because it’s something he lacks. He himself is barely more than the sum of his parts: an absent father and a mother who perhaps should have been absent. He often thinks that if their places were swapped and it was Jack laying cold in the ground, the impact on the world would be similar. Or more likely even less. Maybe it would be a day of celebration, since all he ever creates is damage. Damage on those around him, damage to those who dare to show him the slightest bit of affection. Damage to Balo, who has never deserved anything but love. Yes, he thinks the world would be better off without Hurricane Jack. He is an explosion of a person, and the only lasting impact he can hope to leave is the debris of those unfortunate enough to know him. 

Inhale, exhale. The smoke is clearer now that the sky is becoming lighter, and he wonders how long he’s been on the roof. Or if it even matters anymore. It’s not like waking up early for lectures and going to class and doing his exams will make much of a difference, because he is still Jack and he’s long since lost hope that he can reinvent himself beyond a name change. He casts his mind back to the teenagers in Sheffield that had held his attention before - and he almost laughs at the idea that he had thought about them with such disdain. How could he? Their bad decisions seem to just create a life which goes a different way, and in Jack’s head nothing they do with that life could ever be as bad as what he has done to the people around him. And what he has done to his own mother. Psychic matricide. Or maybe he just sucked all of her traits from her until there was nothing left to sustain life. It would explain why he has taken on her entire personality. Naturally, he’s too empty to come up with his own, with his own taste in music, with his own appearance, with anything. Originality would require some sort of positive trait. 

The sun is starting to rise above the unfamiliar skyline. Another day, and yet it can’t just be another day because it’s still some sick anniversary. One year of his mother being gone. One year of sunrises she hasn’t seen, one year of days she has not checked off of her calendar. One year of mornings in which she hasn’t been able to wake up. For once, when he looks across the view, Jack doesn’t feel the pang of homesickness which usually hits him. Why would he? There is nothing to go back to in Sheffield but memories he’d rather suppress and people he’d mess up even further. 

He realises with a jolt that he’s had the same song on loop, without even realising. The last lyrics float into the air: nearly every other word that comes from your mouth keeps me hanging on.

Apt. Even in death, every word that his mother ever said to him rings in his ears as if she’s just saying it now. And every single one is accompanied by a fresh stab of guilt. He’s not familiar with the song, but he makes a mental note to remove it from his playlist regardless. It’s hitting far too close to home. 

[volunaryroom3]

CHAPTER 4

My keys rattled in the door as it locked it behind me. It clicked shut and I rested my head on the door, hair tangling over my ears. Thank fuck that was over. Being a slave to the wage crushes your soul, some more days than others.

Now I was home. My sanctuary. A place where I was safe from the anger of the public, complexity of the world and could batten down the hatches with my favourite human before I had to once more put on my armour and head back into battle.

“What are you doing” said Jamie from the kitchen, who could see me resting my head on the front door, sighing in my zombie like state.

“I don’t know” I muttered into the wood. I straightened my back and walked through the to living room, kicking my shoes off and flinging myself onto a chair.

I took my socks off a wriggled my toes above the carpet. There’s something about bare feet that’s so rebellious. Being completely naked, free from the constraint of polyblend, gives you the pleasure of freedom but is also attractive and conventional. Feet were meant to be covered. They can be ugly, toes utterly offensive and fragile so they must be protected and hidden. For them to be naked feels so audacious, to feel carpet fibres beneath was so unruly and these small rebellions got me through the day.

“Here” said Jamie, entering the room and grabbing my naked big toe as he walked past and placed a mug on the table.

“Is that for me?” I said perking up.

“Well I don’t drink tea” he answered, not looking but gesturing with one hand and scrolling through his phone with the other.

“Okay, what do you want?” I asked, raising one eyebrow and looking at him with a wry smile.

“Just drink it” he said laughing.

We both looked at each other and smiled and I felt my heart skip a beat.

There had been a lot of heartache but then there was Jamie.

In my life there have been many boys, many girls, many people and subsequently much loss and sorrow.

My last boyfriend cheated on me. One minute he was one the phone telling me he loved me and the next he was snapped in an incriminating photo with someone else.

It was early morning when I saw the photograph online. I hadn’t been able to sleep, i was scrolling through my phone under the sheets when I saw his hand on her thigh, my eyes widening in the glow of the screen. A series of incidents flashed in my head; the missed calls, his phone vibrating accompanied by shifty glances, disappearing from the room to take a phone calls, whispering in secrecy, always carefully placing his phone face down on the cabinet, me touching my hand on his and him recoiling, leaving me cold. All these images flickering, falling on top each other like dominos until the last one dropped- he’s cheating on me.

My confrontation was subtle. “It looks like you’re having a good time haha I miss you” I text hoping my agony and urgency would feed through the phone.

No reply. Message read. No reply.

Hours passed as I laid in bed staring at the ceiling until the light of dawn rolled over the walls, White noise humming in my ears.

I went to work that day and I smiled, drank tea and did my job but I wasn’t there. I was on a autopilot. I was trapped in my mind, those images flittering past, unable to escape like a slideshow I could not take my eyes off. The pieces of a puzzle were falling into place, my head putting them together and I was lost in my thoughts, nipping and clawing at me through the day. My stomach tight and head spinning.

That evening I was staring into the TV set, blind to the screen and still arguing with myself. I was paranoid. Yes I was paranoid. This isn’t real. The words all muddling together and stacking on top of each other until it just became noise.

Suddenly a text.

“I’m sorry”

My world crashed around me. I felt my hands tightly grip onto each other and my tears fall in slow motion.

“Why?” I cried softy.

A numbness fell over my entire body and I collapsed onto the sofa, my tears running down the tip of my nose and staining the cushion.

After a while the numbness wore off and was replaced by pain. A sharp slice from neck to stomach not visible to the naked eyes but real to my nervous system. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I was just an exposed nerve; open with excruciating pain.

Weeks passed and I was still spiralling into oblivion. I was in trouble at work for mistakes and absence. I was worrying my family and friends but even that wasn’t enough to stop me slipping into the black hole. The dark pit of depression is all consuming and once you are stuck in the tar, you sink further down, you gasp for air until there’s no return.

“What a bastard” everyone said

“What a loser. His loss!” They chanted

And they were right of course. However this did not help me. I loved him. Somehow he subconsciously became my whole world and now I was lost. Lost and isolated in my loneliness but I knew I had to stop. This wasn’t healthy behaviour.

Grief has a timescale. Death can be a lifetime but the breakdown of a relationship? You are limited. You have the get on with it. You have to bare your teeth and show the world how strong you are. You have to prove to others that you are leaving it behind and if you aren’t moving on? You are weak and you can’t show weakness. You can’t be the one to lose.

So I moved on. I washed, I put clothes on and pushed myself back into life. I had an amazing few months embarking on journeys and weekends away by reconnecting with my lost friends. I immersed myself in live music, healing my soul with the beauty of beats and sound with pilgrimages to gigs and festivals. Wild, drunk nights in the sun building hundreds of memories to last a lifetime. The evidence consisted of a mosaic of Polaroids pinned around my desk: my favourite a muddy photo of me grinning ear to ear, hands in the air which screamed look at me! I’m living life!

When I talked to people I laughed. When I looked at people I smiled.

But every night I still cried in the shower.

Later I found out the girl that in the photo was his ex. They have a child together now. In the end it was all for the best but that still doesn’t stop that painful twinge whenever it crosses my mind.

Every time you are hurt a part of your heart breaks and creates a gap. Tiny shards splinter off and disintegrate into tears. You heal, you recover and you fight but there’s now a hole there that will never close up.

Once I am hurt, I am hurt forever.

He wasn’t the first but he was the last one who took a sledgehammer to my heart and shattered the remaining pieces. With the fragments I had left I swore I would never do it again, that I wouldn’t open up because I could cope, the pain would kill me. From then on I lived my life as half a person. Content but never allowing myself to fully feel. I was comfortable in my solitude but always empty.

That was until I met Jamie.

After lounging around the living room for a while I heard my stomach rumble.

“I’ll make tea” I said stretching. I got up and padded through to the kitchen.

I laughed as I heard him yelling at the tv. I know the match was on and I loved how passionate he was; the same amount he showed about everything in his life, including me.

I opened the cupboards and reached for the pan on the top shelf. I stood on my tiptoes, unbalanced and stretching, my fingers fumbling on the tip of the handle. Just as I felt my hand grip the handle they all came crashing down. Metal clanged onto the worktop, thundered to the floor and onto my bare feet.

I didn’t even make a noise, I just bit my lip and fell to the floor.

“What’s happening?” Yelled Jamie running into the room, seeing me rolling around on the kitchen floor.

“Ow! Sorry” I laughed but still grimacing in pain.

“You’re an idiot” he laughed

“I know”” I said rubbing my toes and frowning.

“It’s not funny” he snapped, his tone angrier than before. “I keep telling you to be careful. You’re so stupid. We were having such a nice time and now you’ve done this’

For a moment he stood over me, towering and serious with disappointment. I felt so small looking up at him and feeling shame wash over me.

“I’m really sorry, its been a long day”” I replied, looking at my feet in remorse.

He helped me up and marched me back to the living room in silence. I sat down on the sofa, raising my injured foot and resting it on the table. Jamie sat down on the other side, his attention brought back to the match.

I’ve always been clumsy. Bruises, broken bones and bangs peppered my childhood memories followed by reckless behaviour as an adult. He was right I needed to be more careful. He was only stern because he cared.

I turned my head towards him but he was still fixed on the tv, unwavering and stoic. I looked down at my feet and felt tears well up in my eyes.

There hadn’t been any trauma, no life changes and nothing worthy to make me unhappy but recently I’d started to feel a weight press down on me. My head had began to feel heavy as tiny bits of stress had started to drip on me and one by one it was building up. I was starting to feel cold and disconnected. Sometimes I’d suddenly freeze in time, stare at the wall, feeling like I was floating away until a friendly face asked if I was okay and brought me back down to earth. I was finding it hard to fall asleep and sometimes I was waking up with a bolt in the night, sweating after a bad dream and then worrying about insignificant things until my alarm called me to work. The other day it rained and I didn’t feel it. I saw the rain fall and land on my face but I didn’t sense it dripping down and onto my collar. I couldn’t feel anything anymore.

It was just a few bad days and I was being dramatic.

I sucked the tears back into my eyes and reached for the cold cup of tea on the table.

Things will get better soon.

[mintea-in-space]

Tar In His Veins Chapter 5

God it was dark. Why was it so dark? Lydia strained her eyes, struggling to see in the pitch black.

It reminded her of the Netherworld.

Too much.

She heard more than felt her boots hitting the floor, arms pumping.

Running.

Somewhere.

Anywhere but here.

She knew tears were streaming down her face, as she ran blindly in the dark. But where could she go? Her dad wasn’t here, and her mom was gone.

No one could save her this time.

A pin prick of light snatched her attention.

There! A person! Maybe? No, for sure!

She ran faster, breaths coming out in huffs, combat boots thumping with every step.

She almost sobbed when she saw stripes.

It was him, he was here! In the light! She locked her gaze to his striped back.

Just get to your demon, then you can figure out how to leave this awful place. Just get to Beej-

She stopped when he slowly turned.

He wasn’t right.

His eyes were swimming voids of green, hair white, face blank.

Empty.

Lydia’s heart dropped to her boots.

She took a step back.

And he took one forward.

“Beej? Beej what’s going on?”

She whispered.

No answer. Just that blank stare.

“Okay Beej that’s enough! You’re kinda freaking me out here! And not in the good way!”

Another step forward.

Another step back. She shuffled back until she felt her back hit an invisible wall. Her ears were ringing. And it smelled.

It smelled like death.

He just kept walking. Black beaded at Beetlejuice’s tear ducts, and suddenly it overflowed. It dripped, black ooze, welling in his eyes. It streaked down his cheeks, smearing dirt and grime and makeup on his face.

Lydia felt her breath catch in her throat. Frozen with fear, while the shell of her best friend shuffled closer.

“Beej please.”

It came out in a whisper.

Tears fell down her own cheeks, fear twisting with confusion.

Beetlejuice shuddered to a halt.

Opening his mouth, black dripped from his maw, sliding down his chin.

And then it was a stream, then bigger, until it poured out of him. It just wouldn’t stop. It pooled around her feet, and she felt it rise.

No.

No no no nonononononNONONONONONO!

She was going to drown. The viscous liquid was at her knees now. And still he stared.

It just kept coming. And she was trapped.

It was at her waist now, clinging to her skirt and legs, thick, like ink.

Or blood.

She finally turned and slammed her fist against the invisible walls around her, crying, screaming.

She was up to her arm pits, the blood trapping her arms under it, she couldn’t move, it was everywhere, and just before she went under, she saw his face twist into fear.

He gargled the words.

“I’m sorry Lydia.”

And she sucked in a lungful of black.

She woke up screaming, flailing around, eyes wild in her head. Beetlejuice, who had phased through the floor as soon as he heard screaming, almost got a punch to the face.

“Whoa kid! Kid what’s wrong?! What happened?!”

Grabbing her wrists, he gently rubbed the back of her hands. Beej hoped she couldn’t tell he was shaking.

The Maitlands had brought him up to the attic. They showed him to a couch they had placed in the corner, and gave him several blankets, most of which he was sure one of them made. They let him get settled, arranging the blankets to form a nest of sorts, before he smiled. His hair was dusty pink on the tips, just barely there, but Barbara caught it. They smiled at him, before whispering that they were right across the hall, and that their door was always open. He tried not to get his hopes up, but it was hard. The two were so kind, and vibrant.

Beetlejuice didn’t know the dead could look so bright.

So he did his best to sleep.

It wasn’t easy.

The Netherworld didn’t exactly have a lot of warm beds and safe feelings.

No, you always felt the nagging feeling you were lost, that something was wrong. And he sure as hell never slept with his mother around.

“Demons don’t need sleep you worthless excuse of a man!”

Juno’s voice still echoed in his mind.

Shuddering, he snuggled further into his nest.

“Just close your eyes Beej,” he mumbled. “Just close your eyes and relax. It’s warm, you’re safe, everything is-“

The first high pitched whine hit his ears. Startled, Beetlejuice whipped off the blanket covering his head, looking around.

That came from downstairs.

Ears twitching, he sat up further, straining to hear another sound.

The moan shot through him like a bullet, and just like that he phased out of the nest and straight through the floor.

Lydia was still on the couch. Charles hadn’t wanted to risk moving her and waking her up, so he had simply draped a quilt over her and let her sleep.

But her face was twisted. She let out short breaths, hands and legs twitching in her sleep. She let out little mumbles, and he couldn’t make out many words. Just a few ‘no’s’ and ‘please’s’.

Beetlejuice did the only thing he could think of.

He knelt by the couch, and waited.

He knew what night terrors are. It’s hard not to, living with Juno. But he knew that usually, it could be bad, even dangerous to try and wake someone up during one. So he just put a hand on her arm and waited.

It was torture.

He couldn’t do anything, even when Lydia’s eyes rolled behind her lids, when the little mumbles became words, then shouts. And the thrashing. Hair white, hands shaking, he just tried to hold her through it. And when she finally woke up he could have sobbed.

“Whoa kid! Kid what’s wrong?! What happened?!”

Lydia ripped herself from him. His hair was the same as before, a stark white. She trembled.

Confused, and hurt, Beej pulled away, sickly yellow creeping into his hair. Shit he messed up this time. He should go. They wanted him to stay until Lydia woke up except now she was scared of him.

Lydia Deetz.

Scared.

Of him.

He curled on himself, or at least he tried to, thoughts forming a blizzard in his head. But Lydia launched herself off the couch and into his arms. She was shaking.

He gingerly put his arms around her, and when she didn’t pull away, he tightened his grip on her shirt.

“I’m sorry I didn’t mean to scare you.”

It was muffled, face pressed into his shirt. Puzzled, the demon shook his head.

“I’m sorry, you’re sorry? I clearly did something! Lyds you’re shaking. I know night terrors can be a bitch, trust me I’ve been there, but I’m the one who should be sorry! God you were scared of me! You’ve never been scared of me! I-“

Lifting her head she glared at him, effectively shutting him up. With a sigh, she pulled away, wiping her face of tears.

“It wasn’t you Beej. It was just... never mind.”

Oh no, that wouldn’t do. Beetlejuice, master of communication, can’t let that one go!

“No tell me. I wanna know. Is it a person? Someone I can kill? Or scare at least? Come on kid just point me in the right direction and they’ll wish they were never born!”

Lydia snorted.

“No Beej it isn’t a person. Really, it’s fine, been having these stupid nightmares for weeks.”

He furrowed his brows. A third arm sprouted from his back to scratch his chin, pretending to be deep in thought.

“Hmmmm, that’s miiiighty suspicious Watson. Don’t think I can let you off that easy.”

He smiled at the giggle he got, then frowned when she looked away.

He waited, letting her make the first move. He knew how to read his best friend, and he knew it would eat at her from the inside if she didn’t talk about it, so he waited.

Picking at the hem of her skirt, Lydia kept her eyes glued to her lap.

“It was the Netherworld.”

Oh.

Oh.

“I was just, running. And it was empty,” her hands fisted in her skirt. “Until you showed up. But it wasn’t you. It was wrong. And shit Beej all this black came out of your mouth and then I was drowning and-“

Beetlejuice snatched her, gripping her tightly. He really was a fuck up. Fuck... Fuck!! He always did this!! He didn’t even know how he showed up here, it was a miracle, but he just, messed up this kid, this perfectly strange and unusual normal kid. Fuck he-

“Beej I can’t breathe.”

He loosened his grip and buried his nose in her hair.

She smelled like flowers. Funeral flowers. He took a moment to just, feel her there. Hold her and keep her safe. His bffff forever, his little scarecrow.

Finally he sighed, and let her wiggle out of his arms.

“Beej you’re turning blue bud.”

His hand flew to his hair, before he gave her a look.

“Did you just call me bud?!”

She laughed.

“Maybe, what are you gonna do about it, friendo?”

“Oh my god you sound like Adam.”

“Shut up!” She playfully shoved an elbow in his side, grinning when he groaned and fell over.

“Oh god. You killed me. Holy shit. I’m gonna die now. Look at me Lyds, I’m actually dying.”

Giggling, Lydia nudged him with her foot.

“Dead people don’t talk dumbass.”

Gasping with fake offense, Beej dramatically draped himself across the floor.

“I can’t believe it, I trusted you! And now, I die!”

And he finished with a loud “bleerrghfh” before sticking his tongue out. Lydia flicked his forehead.

“End scene genius.”

With a poof of green smoke, he was standing, bowing deeply with a bouquet of frankly horribly ugly flowers while she clapped. Beetlejuice dropped back down to the floor, smiling.

“Glad you’re okay Lyds.”

She mock gagged.

“Ugh don’t you get mushy on me. Gross.”

Giggling, the two bantered for a while, just sitting on the floor. Beetlejuice was happy, he got to see her again, and she was happy, not all that panicked crying and screaming before.

He tried to bury the nagging voice in his head, telling him it wouldn’t last, they’d kick him out eventually, they’ll get sick of you Lawrence. Nobody loves you Lawrence.

And he just flipped off the voice that sounded like his mom. Because Lydia was warm and laughing at his jokes, and he could see that spark in her eye that he missed. And she got him.

Arguing with him was easy. Lydia knew he could read her like an open book, and she could do the same to him. He was like a brother, or weird uncle. Brunkle? Oh god he would love that.

The demon in question looked at her when she had gone silent in thought, head just barely tilted. Beetlejuice cocked his own, tapping her feet.

“Okay spill, whatcha plotting?”

“I was thinking about how you’re like a brother, or an uncle,” she snorted. “And then I thought of Brunkle and I realized you’d love that.”

Looking at him, his eyes were shining. And knowing him, they were literally shining. He beamed, and Lydia braced herself. He wrapped his arms around her, more times than humanly possible, and cooed.

“Awwww! You do care about me! I’m a brunkle!! Oh man, look at me now ma!! I can’t believe it this is such an honor!”

A large obnoxious trophy materialized in his hands. Beej dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief pulled from nowhere, and blew his nose like a trumpet.

“You know? This really is the best day of my life! Being promoted is such an amazing feeling! Oh Lydia how can I ever thank you?!”

Laughing, she punched his arm.

“Shut up nerd!”

“No you shut up!”

“Nu-uh! I said it first!”

“I said it second!”

And the two bickered. Adam walked sleepily down the stairs to find the two of them still on the floor of the living room, sun just barely peeking through the curtains. He watched for a few moments, smiling.

They went back and forth, flicking foreheads, elbowing sides, giggling about something or other.

Adam felt his heart swell with affection, and it took him by surprise. Watching them, watching how Beetlejuice was with Lydia, really cemented what he thought of him.

That demon had a heart of gold, and he was going to find a way to polish it until it shone.

Wait that didn’t make sense. Or did it? Hm. He wasn’t sure, but he knew what he meant and that’s what mattered.

Smiling, Adam quietly made his way back upstairs, letting the two talk. He knew once Delia was up it would be time for breakfast, and he wanted to give them some alone time. He gently ushered Barb back up the stairs and into their bedroom, carefully closing the door behind them.