#dawn: ambrose is a murderer

[relamune]

Hauser has frequent nightmares from his time with the Bane Growlers (local werewolf gang from his hometown). From the shit he witnessed personally at their hands and things they subjected him to left a lasting scar (both physically and mentally). His nightmares are usually memories from this timeframe as well as during the time he was on the run across Europe.

later on in his story, years later, after getting jumped by a few members of the Grimbones and being chased from London, this would both add to his nightmares as well as drudge up old memories from the Bane Growlers.

Both instances have given Hauser frequent & recurring nightmares. While he's in a far better place these days, his past still haunts him a lot despite knowing it's just his mind playing tricks. These nightmares contribute a LOT to his insomnia as well.

Dealing with these nightmares is a whole other story completely. They still affect him a lot even if he won't admit it (even to himself). In the past, he'd usually turn to alcohol or sex to take his mind off of it all. They were exhausting. Nowadays, though, he's got Ambrose to vent to or hold him on the nights where he needs it most; the ones where he aggressively wakes up in a fit and afraid. He's still working on his bad coping habits but because of his boyfriend and close friendships hes made in recent years, Hauser is learning how to deal with them in a ... Somewhat lesser way. Slowly but surely anyways.

Your OC has just woken up from a nightmare that left them shaking. What happened in the nightmare and who was in it?

[soullessdianthus]

Soft!Bo Sinclair X Reader | Headcanons | PART 2

<< PART 1

Author's note: Due to your positive responses to the first part - here's the sequel of our murderous husband! Thank you very much for all the reblogs and notes <3

Warnings: mostly fluff, canon typical violence, tiny bit of Stockholm Syndrome?, NSFW under the cut

Word count: 1.6k woops

First days after your arrival in Ambrose, you were following Bo like a ghost, a shadow - since the dawn until the sunset you were alongside him

Bo had to keep an eye on you, see if you wouldn't try anything foolish, so he told you to come with him

But deep down he was almost sure you wouldn't dare to leave the abandoned city, you were a smart girl after all and he was your saviour

When you finally gained a bit of his trust he let you stay inside the house while he worked in the garage or outside the Ambrose

In the second case, he would tell Vincent to watch over you, from a distance of course, his brother would be quick to eliminate any occurring problems

Then, after Bo had completly fallen for you and his heart softened (don't tell this anyone), he wouldn't mind you going with him, staying in the family house or walking around the town - without anyone looking after you

At this point he was sure of your commitment to him

You were gratefull for his care and kind words

Mornings of those days when he wouldn't have to go to work was your favourite part of the day

You'd lay in bed longer than usual, entangled in the lengths of yours limbs

Each night Bo would try to hold you as close as possible - by being a big spoon, craddling you with his arm into his embrace

But when he chooses to sleep on his back, he would keep one of his palms on your thighs

Just to feel you near him

When he seriously has to wake up and start preparing for the work day, he takes a short glimpeses now and then at your sleeping form, sunk between the sheets, spreaded where he used to lay during the night

Bo appreciates when you make him coffee in the morning

And breakfast

During your first weeks in Ambrose he was overwhelmingly trying to shield you from his brothers or "the workshops" (with your friends' corpses still there)

Bo was extremly mean towards Vincent (nothing new), because he kept staring at you akwardly, not understanding why are you still alive

And even if you and all the Sinclair boys met in one place, Bo would instantly place his hand over your shoulder or on your back to underline you're his

As the time passed by, he became more handsy - by keeping his hand on your back (upper and lower), hips or waist

Bo loves to keep you close, so he can feel your scent, touch your hair or soft skin - which is a complete opposite of his coarse, mechanic hands, in his opinion at least, you long for his touch

He'd appreciate if you cook for him, he finds it really sexy

After some time he takes you outiside the town - for a simple car ride kind of date, dinner in the city nearby or a picnic near the lake

Just to be alone with you

If any foolish "tourists" came into the town, you'd stay in the house for your own sake - that's what Bo and Lester suggested to keep you safe

But that one time, while you were slicing the vegetables for dinner, minding your own buisness, someone intruded the house in the hill, almost breaking the doors - a member of a local motorcycle club, his leather vest revealing everything

"Who the hell are you?" you asked, grip tightening around the kitchen knife you held "You shouldn't be here."

The man was already partially covered in blood, probably one of his friends, he kept staring at you, something vile sparkling in his eyes

"Get out, he won't like your presence" you stated, slowly backing away as the intruder walked towards you

"You're with 'em?"

Within a brief moment he was painfully squezzing your wrists, wrestling you until you tripped and fell down

He was trying to take away the knife from you, but you kept struggling under the attacker

During the scuffle you managed to stab him once in his arm - shallow, but always something

"Fucking bitch!" he yelled when he couldn't rip the weapon out of your grip

But those were his last words ever spoken, before a bullet of a rifle put a hole in his upper back

The blood splashed over your cheek and his agonizing body fell to the side

You saw Bo pointing his gun to the dead man's corpse from the door's threshold as he stepped inside the house

"Stupid sonbitch" Bo hissed through his teeth, before pulling the trigger again, making sure the intruder is stone cold dead

You crawled to the side to get as far from the body as you could

Barely keeping up with the scenery, a kitchen knife was still inside of your palm

"Come 'ere, sugar" Bo instructed you, helping you up from the floor

Mechanic gently grabbed your arm and took a quick glimpse over your frame - to see if you had any wounds, if the dead motherfucker hurt you

Oh, only if the biker was alive, Bo would make him regret every single second spent in Ambrose

Then he caught your jaw, just beneath the chin, tilting the face of his lover to the sides, looking frantically for a wound "You alright?"

You nodded and his hand slid to the back of your neck, pulling you into his heated chest

You dropped the knife to the floor

"You did real good, sweetheart. I'm sorry"

Bo let out a loud breath, his lips pressing against the tip of your head, man's body turning with you around, creating a space between you and the corpse

"Hey! Ya were supposed to keep them OUT THE HOUSE, fuckin' freak"

Only when he yelled just above your head, you realised Vincet was in the room too, taking care of the bloody mess

"For fuck's sake"

"Bo... It's over"

His gaze softened as your voice sounded like a milk and honey, whilist your body shuddered in his embrace

"Go upstairs and wait for me, okay? We're gonna take care of it"

"Are you sure?" your eyes asked him non verbally - the wrinkles on his forehead beacame even more distinct in that setting

"Off you go, girl"

Later that night Bo's head was pressed tightly to your chest, your arms drawing him closer, soft fingers gently rubbing his occiput

Listetning to the heartbeat of yours helped him fall asleep, especially after such... troubles

The heartbeat he could have lost that night in a matter of second

And it scared him to death for the first time in ages

NSFW

Bo would dirty talk to you, only to see you blush and be all flustered

If you're rather a shy person and topic of intimacy makes you embarassed - he'd be in heaven, that man has a corruption kink you cannot prove me otherwise

He wouldn't talk dirty in a deregatory way though, just to mess with you and your shyness

"Ya keep putting those lil' skirts like you wanna me to look under them. Would ya like that, huh?"

"Gone all quiet now? You'd never dare to be this silent in the bedroom, sweetheart"

Beauregard enjoys taking the time to prepare you for the lovemaking - make out session, slowly undressing you and himself, his big hands tracingevery inch of your body? God, yes!

In a bedroom? Definitely a soft type of dom

Experienced or not, Bo would guide you through it all taking a lead between you two

He'd appreciate picking positions when he can see your face - all the emotions and pleasure spasm being visible

A traditional missionary (with your legs close to the chest) or a cowgirl are his top fucking tier (also pinball wizard)

Bo loves when you ride him - slow, sensual sways or rapid, wild bucking, doesn't matter to him as long as he can devour your sweet, little noises of pleasure

It helps him to relax after a long day at work

And the view of your tits just in front of him? He loves your soft, warm flesh bouncing before his hungry gaze

He might lick or suck them

During such intimate moments he places a trail of kissed along your skin - face, neck, spine, stomach, breasts, thighs... EVERYWHERE

Lots of praise mixed with dirty talk

"Takin' mah cock so well, darlin'. Doin' real fine"

"Like that? Like when I stuff your pussy full?"

"Jesus, such a good girl, all wet and warm for me"

You even manage to pull some grunts and moans from him, occasionally, but hey - it finally happens, it's very intimate for him, as it shows his vulnerability (look at the attachment below, you won't regret it) 👀

"Gonna make you feel real good"

Bo won't admit it, but he likes when you pull his hair

When the white light and tickling pressure hits you like a truck and you grasp onto his strong arms and curls - he loves it, absoluetly doesn't mind if you pull to hard or if you scratch him with your nails

"Go on, sugar, show me how much you love this"

Sometimes he would eat you up like a champ - your body squirming between the sheets, eyes watering with pleasure, thighs shaking uncontrollably

Bo is more of a reciver in that case, but he does just fine in the reverse role

When you're both done, he invites you into his embrace - his strong arms entangeling around your back, gently rubbing the curves of your body

He'd offer you a glass of water (such gentleman) or a quick shower

Oh, how he loves to take a shower or a bath with you

Bo would be willing for a round two after you caught your breath, but it all depends on you - if you still had enough strenght for that kind of fun

If not, both of you would try to fall asleep in the embrace of the lover

I'm gonna drop the link for his "noises" 👀 God bless you @bosinclairz <3

[venus-haze]

Creep (Bo Sinclair x Reader)

Summary: You’d grown up in Ambrose, but seeing the mill town’s glory days coming to an end, your family packs up and moves the summer before your senior year of high school. You never expected to return to Louisiana, let alone see Bo Sinclair again, but when your distant husband’s new job brings both, your life goes to hell faster than you can blink.

Note: Yet another Bo Sinclair fic because that man lives in my head rent free. Reader is a cis woman (and a horrible judge of character), but no other descriptors are used. Title comes from the TLC song. This one isn’t as implicitly dark as my other Bo fics, but it’s still there…lurking through the rose-colored lens of nostalgia. Do not interact if you are under 18 or post thinspo/ED content.

Word Count: 7.3k

Warnings: Death, murder, violence. Marital infidelity, emotional manipulation. Implications of kidnapping and prolonged captivity. Sexually explicit content that involves coercion (dubcon re: degradation, choking, bondage, and unprotected sex). Do not interact if you are under 18.

The Traveling Wilburys song that was playing in Taylor’s Drug Store only served to remind you of how old the place was. You stopped in to pick up a prescription for your husband and do some light shopping. The interior hadn’t been updated since at least the ‘80s, save for the digital cash registers and security cameras, a monitor above the glass doors where you walked in reminding you that you were being watched. You shuffled along the scuffed linoleum tile, shopping basket on your arm as you looked at the shelf of painkillers. 

Throwing a bottle into the basket, you continued along, trying to remember what you had put on your mental list and coming up blank. You went to the snack aisle, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to grab a bag of chips. While considering whether to go with barbecue or sour cream and onion, you noticed a man walk over just a few feet away from you, holding a basket filled with odds and ends. Normally, you minded your own business, but you turned your head to get a better look at him. He was tall, wearing a well-worn flannel shirt that made you wonder for a brief moment what it’d be like to have your legs thrown over his broad shoulders. Despite the trucker cap pulled snugly over his mess of brown hair, almost covering his eyes, his profile seemed hauntingly familiar until it dawned on you—Bo Sinclair.

You could remember Bo being a cocky troublemaker with no regard for his own personal safety, regularly getting into fights in and out of school. With a swoon-worthy smile and an attitude that made your mother emphasize to stay the hell away from him, you did have a bit of a crush on Bo, one that you kept locked in a box to wither and die when your family moved out of Ambrose. Years had passed, though. You’d changed so much since high school. Undoubtedly, he had to have changed too.

Fuck it. You’d been in town a little over a month and had yet to make any friends. It was nice to see a familiar face—a handsome one at that. 

“Bo Sinclair?” you exclaimed, as if you hadn’t spent the past ten seconds staring at him out of the corner of your eye.

As expected, his eyes didn’t light up in recognition when he saw you. In fact, he seemed startled and suspicious. Brows furrowed, he stood stiff as he straightened his posture as you approached him in the snack aisle. His hostility made you second guess your decision to approach him, but you’d already made a spectacle of yourself. Nothing else to do but follow through and hope for the best. 

“I’m not sure if you remember me. My family moved out of Ambrose at the end of our junior year, but—“

He relaxed a bit, giving you a grin that made you want to throw your wedding ring on the ground. “Now I know I must be dreamin’ if I see Y/N standin’ in front of me.”

You smiled. “Yeah, you look great—I mean, y’know, it’s great to see you.”

“It’s great to see you too, doll. Ain’t many familiar faces ‘round anymore.”

“Do you live in town, or—“

“Still in Ambrose, few of us left out there,” he said. “Most of the stores shut down, so I gotta drive out here for stuff.”

“Well, maybe I’ll see you around, then. I just moved here a few weeks ago, and I still don’t really know anyone.”

“You mean you and your husband just moved here,” he said, motioning to your wedding ring.

“Yeah,” you sighed.

You had just barely missed it, the gleam in his eye at your response. Somehow, you suppressed the chill that threatened to run down your spine. That much hadn’t changed about him, the darkness that reared its ugly head whenever you found yourself getting too comfortable around him.

Just as quickly, he claimed he had to get going but that you’d see him again. You gave him a half-hearted goodbye, taking his promise with a disappointing grain of salt. 

Looking at the bags of chips yet again, you grabbed several, intending to spend the rest of the day marinating in your loneliness with snacks and movies until your husband arrived home from work. Maybe you could talk him into getting takeout rather than you having to cook.

The half-empty house was eerily quiet when you arrived back, ignoring the unopened cardboard boxes that had been taunting you for weeks. Unpacking on your own was a monumental undertaking, since your husband worked so much during the week and spent the weekends doing home repairs that you weren’t able to take care of on your own. 

The red light on the answering machine was flashing, and as you set your shopping bags down, you would have bet a million bucks on who the message was from and what it said. 

You folded your arms as you listened to the message, huffing discontentedly under your breath. “Hey honey, I’m working late tonight. We hit some snags with that big project for the quarter. Don’t wait up for me. I’m not sure when I’ll be home. Love you.”

“Yeah right,” you scoffed aloud, pressing the button to delete the message.

Just because it didn’t surprise you, it didn’t mean your feelings weren’t hurt. You’d suspected for a long time that your husband had been cheating on you, though you could never prove as much. Still, it didn’t take a genius to put together the consistent late nights, how he’d finally arrive home with the scent of another woman’s perfume lingering on his clothes as if to taunt you. The part of you that was still a little bit in love with him had hoped that the move would bring the two of you closer together, and for the first week, it did. Then, he started at his shiny new job and found someone to scratch his itch just as quickly.

Being in a new town meant you didn’t have your normal circle of friends to gossip and air grievances with, and doing so on the phone wasn’t the same. You wondered if they’d forget about you eventually, tuck you away in a corner of their minds that they didn’t explore often. It wasn’t as if you hadn’t done the same, running into Bo Sinclair earlier that day was the first time you’d even thought about him since high school. 

Your morbid curiosity getting the better of you, you wondered where your old high school yearbooks were. Looking at the intimidating stacks of cardboard boxes on the other side of the room, you wracked your brain for where you would have packed them.

The cardboard box labeled ‘photo albums’ proved your gut right, as you dug through it to find your high school yearbooks. The familiar blue and gold design that covered each of the books sent a rush of conflicting emotions through you. Fuck, did anyone actually enjoy high school? 

Even back then, Ambrose had been such a small town that to save money, the county had the middle school and high school in the same building. There were so few of you left that it hardly made a difference. Students often had to go to surrounding high schools to participate in extracurriculars and varsity sports. Families who saw college scholarships as their kids’ ticket to a better life would put thousands of miles on their cars to drive them to and from practice during the school year. Your graduating class–at least what was supposed to be your graduating class–couldn’t have been more than forty people. 

Such a small town with an even smaller school meant everyone knew each other’s business. It was suffocating. Still, you opened the yearbook from your junior year of high school and flipped toward the back of the thin book, skimming past the R’s and to the S’s. You studied his photo, strange yet familiar. Handsome with his messy brown hair and cocky grin, you wiped at the paper, assuming there was some kind of smudge on his cheekbone until you realized, no, it was a bruise.

Beauregard Sinclair. You’d forgotten that was his first name, not that anyone ever called him that anyway. You certainly never did. Vandalism, fighting, and hot-wiring cars were his hobbies of choice back then. He did well in shop, you knew as much because your home ec teacher bitched about how the shop instructor pulled some strings to let him stay in the class, even after he swung a wrench in another guy’s face and knocked out three of his teeth during class. You’d see him at house parties, lurking in the shadows with a dangerous and almost feral gleam in his eyes, a beer in his hand as he waited for the right time to pounce on a tipsy target. More reason to stay away from him, your high school best friend who you hadn’t spoken to in years would whisper to you. He was young, then, troubled and immature. The man you spoke with in the convenience store was so different–confident and flirty, a strong, blue collar man you should have pursued instead of being blinded by the false promises of white collar domesticity. Damn.

You looked at the photo directly to the right of Bo’s. A boy with long hair who seemed to shrink into himself, as if to be in as little of the picture as possible. You squinted to make out his odd expression–the mask, how could you forget the mask.

Vincent Sinclair. You remembered Vincent, odd and quiet, though by the end of freshman year no one said anything about it. Bo had beat that out of more than enough people that the gossip was only whispers. The two of you had several classes together. Perhaps because you were one of few students who actually gave Vincent the time of day, your US History teacher had assigned you as partners for the final project, an essay on a past president with a visual element to accompany it. Luck was on your side when you reached into the bowl at the front of the classroom to draw the name of the president you and Vincent would cover—John F. Kennedy. While most of the other duos made poster boards or had someone dress up for the visual element of their project, Vincent had crafted an incredibly detailed wax diorama of the Kennedy assassination that almost got the two of you sent to the principal’s office because the blood splatter looked a little too realistic for your teacher's taste. 

You set the yearbook down, wracking your brain for the name of the youngest Sinclair brother, a friendly boy who’d run around Ambrose barefoot and often covered in mud. He had just started middle school when your family moved, but you’d seen him briefly in the two times you had gone to the Sinclair house to work on the history project with Vincent. Linus? Leonard? Lester.

In all honesty, you didn’t remember Lester very well. All of the Sinclairs were odd, though. Their father was a doctor, but not the kind your parents ever wanted you to go to. Their mother’s wax sculptures lost their appeal after you turned about 10, the last year that you’d go to the wax museum as a school trip. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair had always been nice enough to you, but in the second grade, Bo had cut off one of Cindy Jacobs’ pigtails during craft time. He came into school the next day with a black eye, his already scarred wrists an angry red. You could never bring yourself to like the Sinclairs after that.

Slamming the yearbook shut, you closed your eyes, trying to keep memories of Ambrose at bay. Maybe it was for the best that your family moved. You took a deep breath before throwing the yearbook back into the box you found it in and retrieving a bag of chips.

Your husband had already put together the entertainment center, all of your VHS tapes and DVDs well-organized. They were one of the first things you unpacked. After briefly pondering your first movie choice of the evening, you grabbed The Postman Always Rings Twice and put it into the VHS player. 

As you settled onto the couch with your bowl of chips, the black and white screen was your security blanket, lulling you to forgetting your woes and instead on Lana Turner and John Garfield making the screen their home for the following two hours. You’d fallen asleep on the couch just before the movie ended, and your husband didn’t bother waking you up when he arrived home at some point that night, because you woke up with a crick in your neck and a note on the fridge that he’d be working late again. You threw the dirty plate he’d left in the sink at the wall. It didn’t make you feel much better.

The rest of the week dragged on as you went about unpacking on your own, your husband working his usual late nights. 

When you pulled into the parking lot of Taylor’s Drug Store the next Thursday afternoon, the same day and time you saw Bo the previous week, you couldn’t help but feel a little bit pathetic for deliberately planning your shopping trip around the possibility of running into him again.

Any negative feelings that festered within you on the short walk from your car into the drug store vanished as soon as you walked inside, seeing Bo standing in the shampoo aisle, brows furrowed as he stood in front of the dozens of bottles on the shelves. This time, however, he was dressed in a mechanic’s work shirt and jeans, his cap still pulled over his face, cigarette tucked behind his ear.

“Hi Bo,” you said as you approached him. 

He grunted in response. “Huh? Oh, hey, Y/N.”

“3-in-1 not cutting it?” 

“You always had a smart mouth?” he said, glaring at you. For a split second, you thought he was angry with you for your quip. “Vincent needs one with this Jujube shit in it. I don’t even know what the fuck I’m lookin’ at.”

“Jojoba oil? Here,” you said, grabbing a shampoo bottle and handing it to him. “He still got long hair?”

He nodded. “Yeah, he ain’t got it cut in a long time.”

“It suited him,” you said.

“I’ll let ‘im know you said so,” he grinned. “You always come in here on Thursday afternoons?”

“I do now.”

“Sure know how to make a guy feel special.”

“Do you wanna get coffee?” you asked, feeling foolishly bold.

He raised an eyebrow. “Your husband gonna be alright with that?”

“I don’t care,” you answered. So what if people thought it was a date, it’d be about time your husband got a taste of his own medicine.

“Well, we can at least pretend you care about your reputation and go somewhere a little bit outside of town.”

You smiled. “Sounds like you already got a place in mind.”

He wasted no time in throwing the rest of what he needed into his shopping basket while you picked up your husband’s prescription, not bothering to grab anything else that was on your list. It wasn’t like you had any other plans for the week.

You followed his truck to a small roadside diner, a greasy spoon type of place family would go to some weekends growing up as a treat. Even though you’d already eaten lunch before going shopping, the smell coming from the restaurant when you got out of your car was tempting enough for you to consider seeing what they had on the menu. 

The restaurant’s decor was simple, old yet charming, and as indicated by the handful of cars in the gravel parking lot outside, there weren’t many people there. A friendly-looking older woman sat you and Bo in a booth, the kind with worn out upholstery that cracked in some places to reveal the cushion underneath. You couldn’t help but smile when you sat down.

“Hi there, what can I get started for y’all?” the waitress asked.

“Just coffee for me,” you said.

Bo nodded, pulling the cigarette from behind his ear and sticking it in his mouth as he muttered, “Same for me. Thank ya, ma’am.”

“You got it,” she said.

He lit a cigarette, leaning back in the booth seat a bit. Of course he managed to find one of the few places that still allowed smoking indoors. Looking at his hands, you didn’t notice any kind of wedding band on any of his fingers. The waitress returned to the table less than a minute later with two mugs of hot coffee, pointing out the creamer and sugar at the end of the table.

“So, are you working as a mechanic now?” you asked, fixing the coffee to your preference.

He smiled. “What gave it away?”

“Shut up,” you laughed. “You were always great in shop class. Didn’t you help one of the teachers fix their car once?”

“Vice principal, and he got me out of a suspension for it.”

“Do you work around here?”

“Got my own place in Ambrose. You’d be surprised how many people end up with car trouble in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’m really happy for you,” you said, trying to suffocate the ‘what if’ scenario that began making itself comfortable in your mind. Visions of helping him run a small family business, a kid or two with your smile and his eyes hanging around left you with a lump in your throat. “How are your parents?”

“Folks kicked the can a while ago. Nothin’ really you could do,” he said with a shrug.

“Yeah, mine too,” you said. “How about your brothers?”

“They’re good,” he answered. “Just doin’ their thing.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Any weddings, or—“

“Nope. But how long ago d’you tie the knot?”

“‘Bout four years.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

You paused, considering how to phrase your answer as you played with the ring on your finger that suddenly felt like it weighed a ton. Growing up, you and Bo weren’t what you considered friends, but his familiarity made you feel comfortable. Still, you felt odd airing your marital woes to a man you were supposed to just be catching up with over coffee.

It was one thing bitching about it with your friends, most of whom had their own relationship issues, offering you the validation you were seeking. Your strained marriage had come to define your life, as embarrassing as it was to acknowledge.

“Things were good for the first year or so, but after that, I could tell he was getting bored. No matter what I did, it felt like I was an obligation,” you said. “Then the late nights at work started, and by the time I realized what he was pulling, I didn’t know what to do.”

“Why not get divorced?”

“I haven’t worked in years. I’d be on my ass, and he knows it. Sometimes, I think he took the job out here so he could fuck around behind my back and not have my family or friends breathing down his neck about it.”

“Maybe he does it ‘cause he knows you’ll be a pushover about it.”

You scoffed. “I ain’t a pushover.”

“He’s only been pullin’ this shit for so long because he knows you’ll just take it,” he said, the cigarette pointed at your face punctuating his harsh words. “Sometimes when people do ya wrong, they don’t get the message ‘till you show ‘em.”

Clenching your jaw, you looked out the window, avoiding the knowing expression on his face. He was right. Your marriage had been on the rocks for far longer than things had ever been good, but you couldn’t bring yourself to be the one to initiate the end. It was long overdue, and you knew with his history of infidelity that you could get a decent settlement from a divorce. 

Perhaps you couldn’t admit to yourself that your marriage was nothing more than a dead horse you just kept beating. Throwing in the towel on your relationship felt like failure and inadequacy, which left a sour taste in your mouth. Things couldn’t continue as they were, though. You had to do something. 

You frowned a bit, looking at the clock on the wall behind Bo. He startled you by snuffing out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table, the rattling bringing your attention back to him.

“Got somewhere you need to be?” he asked.

“Nope, he won’t be home for another three or four hours. I got nothin’ but time.”

“Me too.”

You nodded, suddenly feeling shy and averting your attention to the empty coffee mug in front of you, tapping your nails against the ceramic. He put his hand over yours, the clinking noise ceasing as you mustered up the courage to look at him again. As soon as your eyes met his, you were a goner the moment he whispered something about a nearby motel that charged for rooms by the hour, his lips curling into a dangerous grin when you merely nodded in response.

It felt like you blinked and he had paid the check, pulled you outside with him, and led you to his truck, your heart hammering like it did when you were sixteen. The motel was just as sleazy as you’d expected, but when the clerk handed the room key to Bo after he’d gotten it for two hours, you couldn’t bring yourself to care.

As soon as the door opened, it just as quickly slammed shut, Bo grabbing your purse from you and throwing it aside as he trapped you between himself and the wall, feeling as though you were shrinking beneath his intense gaze. When you tried to avert your gaze, he grabbed your chin, forcing you to look at him, and you did. For the first time since you were in high school, you really looked at Bo Sinclair. He was just as handsome and terrifying as you remembered him being back then. You wanted him just as much as you did back then, too.  

He growled his one and only warning, “I ain’t gonna be gentle with ya, darlin’.”

“I—alright,” you said.

Your hesitance didn’t deter him at all. The kiss that followed was devoid of any romance, but you supposed you’d settle for passion. You kissed him back, trying to keep up with how much of you he wanted. Your open mouth, free for him to claim with his tongue, suddenly felt foreign to you, as if it were no longer your own. Oddly enough, it reminded you of your first kiss.

Despite being a memory you hadn’t revisited in at least a decade, as you replayed it in your mind, you could remember it a bit more clearly. Bo’s truck idling in the driveway, the radio playing soft as the two of you talked. He’d driven you home at his mother’s request as you’d stayed at the Sinclair house late to work on your project with Vincent. You had kept glancing at the front door, waiting for it to swing open and one of your incensed parents to drag you out by your hair for being alone in a car with a boy for so long. 

Then, taking you by surprise, he had kissed you, far rougher than you’d anticipated your first kiss being, especially when he tried pulling you onto his lap when you actually kissed him back. You remembered your heart hammering in your chest when he pawed at your thighs. Something else had happened which you couldn’t quite remember. You had felt shameful and uncomfortable when you walked into your parents’ house.

You gasped, brought back to reality when he stripped you of your shirt and bra, exposing your skin to the cool air in the motel room. He unbuckled his belt, and so quickly you could hardly process what he was doing, he grabbed your wrists, binding them tightly with the worn leather so that your skin chafed whenever you so much as tried to move your hands. 

If anything, it seemed your shocked and worried expression only served as motivation for him to rid you of the rest of your clothes, pushing you onto the dingy bed as he took off his own clothes, his wild eyes glued to your nude and vulnerable figure.

He stroked his hard cock in his hand as he approached you. “You’re gonna take all of it, ain’t ya?”

“Bo, I don’t know—“

“Don’t act stupid, doll,” he grinned, licking his lips. “It ain’t a good look on you.”

He slid two fingers in your pussy, kissing you as he pumped them in and out of you, and you moaned against his lips. Sure, you’d used vibrators and dildos to make up for your husband’s lack of attention, but you were almost overwhelmed at getting the real thing from a man who actually wanted you, even if it was on such dubious terms.

When he pulled his hand away, your whine at the emptiness became a strangled moan when he slid his cock inside you. His thrusts were harsh and unforgiving, as if he were punishing you for something. Maybe you deserved it for being unfaithful to your husband. You’d initiated everything with Bo until the moment you stepped into the motel room. 

You felt helpless beneath him, your bound wrists emphasizing what little control you now had over your body. The way his thrusts became more erratic, sweat beading on his forehead, you knew he was close. You could only imagine the state you were in.

“Gonna fill you up real good,” he groaned.

“Not inside, Bo. Don’t—“

He covered your mouth with his hand that he’d used to finger you. “What? Lil’ slut don’t want my cock all of a sudden? ‘S all you were thinkin’ about when we were sittin’ in that booth earlier.”

You shook your head frantically, unsure of whether you were doing so in protest of his cumming inside you or his taunts. A pathetic whimper came muffled from your lips, and he cursed under his breath, thrusting harder.

“Your pathetic fuckin’ husband don’t make you feel this good huh?”

Again, you shook your head. Sex with your husband was painfully boring. This was more painful than pleasurable, and you considered if you were the pathetic one for being so desperate for attention you’d let your old high school crush treat you with such brutality. You hated how the smug grin on his handsome face made you feel, wishing for a moment you could smack it off of him. 

His calloused fingers were ruthless on your sensitive clit, and your stomach tightened as you felt yourself nearing orgasm, struggling to catch your breath with his hand over your mouth. You were dizzy and could feel a tear roll down your cheek from the overstimulation. Digging your nails into the leather of his belt that was still secure around your wrists, you writhed as you came, your pussy clenching around his cock. His own orgasm followed soon after, and you felt him bottom out inside you, cursing under his breath as his cum filled you. 

When he pulled out, he pulled his hand away from your mouth, leaving you humiliated at the string of saliva that went along with it. He, on the other hand, didn’t mind as he licked it up, almost to your disbelief. 

Freeing your wrists from the restraints of his belt, he threw it aside and settled next to you on the bed. You rubbed your sore wrists, but found the additional friction only made them sting more. For a split second, you wondered how you were going to explain your soreness and the raw skin to your husband. You let out a frustrated exhale. He probably wouldn’t even notice, or maybe he would, but not mention anything, the same way you never called him on the proverbial lipstick on his collar.

A pit of shame and discomfort formed in your stomach as you lay next to Bo, but chalked it up to cheating on your husband for the first time. He deserved it, after all he put you through. You’d thought about cheating on him before, wanting desperately to for so long, but in your mind, it was more on your own terms, as an active participant rather than how Bo threw you around. 

Turning over to face him, he was sitting against the headboard, a smoldering cigarette between his fingers. You scooted over, throwing an arm over his bare torso as you rested your head against his chest. He stiffened, but before you could move away, he pulled you a little closer. 

The two of you spoke softly for the next hour or so, before finally getting up from the bed. Neither of you said much when you got dressed, you waiting by his truck while he turned in the room key. He drove you back to your car, which you’d left at the restaurant.

“See you next week?” you asked quietly, the slightest bit of hesitation in your voice.

He grinned. “You can bet on it, darlin’.”

This rendezvous continued for the next few weeks, the two of you eventually stopping the pretense of getting coffee altogether and meeting at the motel once or twice a week. Whenever you’d see him, he’d have a new bruise or scratch somewhere, claiming it was just a byproduct of his work. That didn’t explain the scratches that looked like someone had clawed the hell out of his arm. He never mentioned having a cat, and while you knew better to assume the two of you were exclusive, you wished he wouldn’t lie about it.

Though generally you knew what to expect from him, it was as if each time you had sex he was testing your limits, pushing you further than you were comfortable at times. Still, you were worried that if you protested too much, he wouldn’t want to see you anymore, and you’d be on your own again.

“He’s gonna be out of town this weekend for a work trip, at least that’s what he says. You wanna stay over?” you asked as you got dressed, taking care to keep the fabric away from the fresh bruises on your hips.

“You askin’ me to defile your literal marriage bed?”

“Yeah, and I’ll cook dinner too.”

He laughed. “You drive a hard bargain.”

In the days leading up to Bo staying for the weekend, you could hardly contain your excitement. You didn’t know anyone to have a housewarming party, so you never got the chance to show off the house to anyone. It was neat enough, but you wanted the place to be spotless, each room cleaned and unpacked so you could indulge in your increasingly frequent fantasies of Bo coming through the front door at the end of the day.

As much as you didn’t want to admit it to yourself, you were excited for the gossip. You had a cordial enough relationship with your neighbors, but you wanted them to see the truck that certainly wasn’t your husband’s in the driveway, the handsome man leaving your house Sunday afternoon looking far too disheveled and satisfied for an innocent weekend visit. What’s more, you wanted them to hear you, no doubt what you were up to while your husband was away, word eventually getting to him that his wife was stepping out on him. Finally he’d get a taste of his own bitter medicine.

Your husband hadn’t bothered returning home after work on Friday, bringing his suitcase to work with him in the morning so he could head straight to the airport from the office. You honestly didn’t remember where he was going, and you couldn’t bring yourself to care. Not when a little after six, you heard the knock that made you rush to the front door.

A change from his usual work shirt, worn out jeans, and cap, Bo stood on your front porch in a dress shirt and nicer jeans. You smiled, giving him a kiss on the lips for the neighborhood to see. Moving from the doorway, you felt a bit nervous for him to see where you lived.

“Some place ya got here,” he said, looking around.

“It’s his. My name’s nowhere to be found on the mortgage,” you said.

“The guy buys a house like this and is barely in it?”

You shrugged. “I don’t get it either. I’ll give you the grand tour later, though. For dinner I was thinking chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and I forgot to get a vegetable so that’s just gonna be frozen green beans,” you said as you walked into the kitchen.

“As great as that sounds, I was thinkin’ of startin’ with dessert first,” he responded, his gaze hungry as he took in the sight of you standing in what had become your natural element.

“The bedroom’s right up those stairs,” you whispered, glancing toward the staircase.

He grinned. “Lead the way, darlin’.”

Taking his hand, you led him upstairs and down the hallway, past the closed doors of the empty spare bedroom and hardly stocked guest bathroom. Your bedroom door, however, was wide open. You’d never admit the amount of time you spent cleaning it before he came over, at least wanting a nicer experience than the dingy motel rooms that the two of you had been accustomed to having sex in.

He hardly took a look around before pushing you back onto your own bed, kissing you as he slid one of his knees between your legs, pressing it against your clothed pussy.

“You know what I wanna see you do tonight?” he asked, his voice low.

“What’s that?”

He practically spat his answer back. “Ride my leg like a bitch in heat.”

Your breath hitched, and you nodded, wasting no time in moving over so he could sit on the edge of the bed. When you reached for the hem of your shirt to start undressing, he clicked his tongue.

“Clothes on, darlin’,” he said, patting his thigh. 

You could feel your face heat up as you settled on his lap. Doing this fully clothed left you with a sense of humiliation you weren’t sure whether or not you liked. Slowly, you grinded your hips against his leg, holding onto his shoulders for support. 

His hand slipped between you, his fingers rubbing your clit through your panties while the other squeezed your hips. You could feel your orgasm building up when he pulled his hand away from your clit suddenly, giving you a cruel grin in response to your look of betrayal.

He smacked your ass. “C’mon now, you gotta work for it.”

It didn’t take you long to get a rhythm going from there, squeezing his shoulders and letting out high-pitched whines of frustration as you chased the pleasure that seemed just out of reach. Something in your core tightened, and you desperately tried to get more friction from the rough material of his jeans to your aching, clothed pussy.

Biting your lip, your eyes fluttered shut for a brief moment as you considered the situation you were in, humping the leg of a man who wasn’t your husband in your shared bed while he was none the wiser. It was wrong and debauched, but it made you wetter than your husband ever had.

“Jesus Christ, ya really are a lil’ bitch in heat, gettin’ my nice pants fuckin’ soaked,” he taunted, flexing his thigh as you rutted your hips against it.

You moaned, hiding your face in the crook of his neck. “Bo, fuck, I’m close.”

“What the fuck?”

You felt like someone had dumped a bucket of cold water on you upon hearing your husband’s voice. Turning around to look at him, he was furious—and marching right toward you. 

He pulled you off of Bo, and you landed painfully on the ground. Just when you thought he’d start in on you, he punched Bo square in the jaw. Pushing yourself off the floor, you narrowly avoided the two men beating the shit out of each other in your bedroom. Your husband managed to get a solid kick to Bo’s leg, and his knees buckled as your husband readied himself to land another blow.

“Fuck you! Get off of him! Get off—“ without thinking, you grabbed the lamp off of the nightstand and swung directly at your husband’s head.

The ceramic base shattered upon impact. He collapsed to the ground, blood slowly pooling from his head, though his limbs continued to twitch. You dropped the broken lamp, eyes wide in shock at what you’d just done.

“Oh my god. Oh my god—what am I gonna—“

You looked to Bo, who despite his split lip, was shockingly unbothered by the situation as he stood up. From the floor, your husband emitted a groan, choking on his own blood.

“He’s still alive. Oh fuck, call an ambulance or-or—“

Bo rolled his eyes, grabbing the cord from the lamp and strangling your husband with it until he stopped making noise. You turned away to vomit on the carpet.

“Are you finished? ‘Cause the way you were carryin’ on, there ain’t no way one ‘a your neighbors haven’t called the cops by now.”

“What do I do? I mean, can we say it was self defense?”

He kicked over your husband’s limp body, showing you the damage in all its bloody glory. “That look like self defense to you?”

“Fuck. Bo, I can’t go to jail. I can’t—“

“Darlin’, no one’s goin’ to jail. You just gotta do exactly what I say. Got it?” he grabbed your face, pulling your attention from your dead husband to him. “Got it?”

“Okay,” you whispered.

He instructed you to break the lock on the front door, and then gather any valuables you could. Your stomach lurched when you realized he wanted to stage a break in, your husband an unfortunate casualty and you abducted in the fray. It was genius, but worrisome how quickly he came up with the idea. 

As you set the scene of your now ex-husband’s untimely demise, you tried not to think about how Bo didn’t hesitate to kill him, cold and calculated. No time to consider the implications. You’d made your bed, and there was nothing to do but lie in it—except you couldn’t even do that, because your husband’s blood was splattered all over it.

You took one last look at the house, knowing whatever Bo had in mind involved you leaving and never coming back. The thought evoked no emotions in you. The place was never a home, somewhere you felt particularly attached to. Instead it served as a facade, an ornate casket that was fit for your marriage to formally be laid to rest in. 

Upon returning to your bedroom, you grabbed your duffel bag, the one you’d kept packed and hidden in your closet for when you’d meet Bo at the motel. Shoving what you could into the bag and your purse, you attempted to appear casual as you walked outside, putting your things in his truck and waiting for him to join you. You wished you had time to clean yourself up before leaving, feeling self-conscious of getting your husband’s blood and your own wetness on the passenger seat.

Your heart skipped a beat when he opened the driver’s side door a few minutes later, but you calmed down a bit when you saw it was him. Wordlessly, he started up the truck, leaving the headlights off as he slowly drove up your street. When he turned them on a few blocks away from your house, you let yourself breathe a little easier, but you weren’t off the hook yet, not until you got the hell outta town. 

“You passed the turn for the motel,” you observed.

“We’re not goin’ there.”

“Then where—“

“Ambrose. Ain’t no one gonna look for ya there.”

“It’ll be all over the news. Anyone could see me and turn me in,” you said.

“They won’t. Trust me,” he said, his firm tone giving you the assurance you were seeking.

He continued driving, the old country backroads becoming more and more familiar to you. So many times when you’d thought back to your youth, you wondered what was a dream or a memory, but these narrow, pothole-littered roads confirmed it was all real.

As soon as you saw the sign welcoming you to Ambrose, you felt like you could finally breathe. The sign had definitely seen better days, but it didn’t matter. You were home.

“God, it’s like nothing’s changed,” you whispered, mostly to yourself as Bo drove up Main Street, passing the places your teen spirit would haunt when life seemed so complicated but was still so simple. 

“A few things have,” he said, “but yeah, ya know how people are ‘round here.”

You nodded, about to respond when you noticed the gas station coming up. “Wait, can we stop here? I wanna see your shop.”

He hesitated for a moment but obliged, wordlessly pulling into the station and turning off his truck. You got out, leaning into him when he wrapped his arm around you. Being in your hometown again filled you with conflicting emotions, but the safety you felt on Main Street slowly began to fade as soon as you stepped foot in the gas station.

“So you run this place on your own?”

“Yeah, just me. Not enough people comin’ by to warrant extra help, but—“

He was interrupted by the sound of metal clanking and what you could have sworn was a woman’s muffled screams.

“Bo, what was that?” you asked, anxiety lacing your words as you stepped closer to the source of the noise.

He sucked on his teeth, the sound making your skin crawl. “Nothin’ you need to worry about.”

You stopped in your tracks, feeling yourself become dizzy as the distressed yelling didn’t stop. It sounded far too clear to be your imagination. “What the hell did you do?”

“See, if I was you, I wouldn’t be showin’ so much hostility to the man who saved your ass from the electric chair,” he snapped. “‘Less you want me to drag your ass to the cops that’re crawlin’ all over your house by now?”

“Bo, c’mon,” you whispered, feeling tears well up in your eyes.

“Just get back in the damn truck,” he said, his voice low. 

You nodded, dazed as you made the short walk back to his truck. Sitting in the passenger seat, you put your head in your hands, trying to figure out how your life got fucked up so quickly. You’d never know what brought your husband home from his work trip early—if that was even the case, maybe he had his own plans to cheat over the weekend that didn’t work out, his usual squeeze standing him up. 

There were so many what if’s that raced through your mind, like if you hadn’t impulsively grabbed the lamp and made the situation go from bad to worse. The way Bo had escalated things to absolute worst by dealing the death blow to your husband, cold and calculated, suddenly made sense. Even if your husband had approached the situation calmly, you knew Bo wouldn’t do the same. It would have come to fruition at some point, but you didn’t expect it to be so soon.

When Bo returned to the truck, you noticed the fresh blood on his knuckles as he grabbed the steering wheel, but didn’t mention it. What was there to say? It wasn’t like you could do anything to help whoever he had trapped somewhere in that gas station. It did explain the scratches and bruises he’d show up to the motel with.

“So, how about that dinner you were gonna make? I’m starvin’,” he said nonchalantly, the key in the ignition making the engine roar to life.

Staring blankly ahead, you whispered something about mashed potatoes. He gave you an unreadable glance from the driver’s seat before throwing his arm over your shoulder and driving up the street to his place, the Sinclair family’s house atop a hill. When he drove past your childhood home, the lights were on inside. You wondered who lived there now.  

[achy-boo]

Dominique De Luca

Sapphire Lake Dorm's only Master.

A boy with secrets that is too disturbing to heard or talk about

Never ask or mention his bloodied camera..

Name: Dominique De Luca

Romaji: De Luca Dominique

Quote: "Is it wrong to take a photo of every..single..thing just to keep the memories forever?"

V/A: HiMERU from Enstars(Japanese), Lyney from Genshin(English)

Gender: male

Sexuality: Bisexual demiromatic

Age: 23

Birthday: March 12th

Zodiac Sign: Pisces

Eye color: gold with a grey aim mark on one eye and an x on the other eye

Ha Color: dark blue(before TWST) a grey and light blue duo color hair (After TWST)

Height: 6'6ft

Weight: 120 lbs

Race: Human????

Homeland: Strasbourg, France

Family:

Unknown French Mother(Deceased/Murdered)

Unknown Italian Father(Deceased/Murdered)

School Status and Fun Facts

Dorm: Sapphire Lake Dorm

School Year: he had to repeat 2nd year due to…an incident

Class: 2-A

Student Number: No.38

Occupation: Florist/Photographer(Part time)

Club: Photography club

Best Subject: History

Favorite Color: Funny enough he loves pastel colors

Favorite Food: Paris-brest

Least Favorite Food: He does not like pecan pie and pumpkin pie(It is the taste of it)

Likes: Desserts, Food, music, coffee or tea, photography, rainy/cloudy days, trying new food, children, watching movies at 3am, anime, manhwa

Dislikes: He hates bitter food/drinks, heat, summer, Crowley(depends), people asking or mention his bloodied camera, reliving his past

Hobbies: drawing, listening to music, drinking tea in the rainy days, photography(this is very important later on)

Talents: Empathy to apathy depends on the situation, silver tongue, blackmailing

Nicknames: Sapphire Lake’s Master(Original Title) France’s Ghost Face(Formal/Never heard in NRC)

Other Nicknames: Domi(Tsukii) Quince(Dawn, Deuce), Mimi(Only the kids and Kianisha can call him that)

Appearance and Personality

Appearance: Dominque De Luca stands at 6'6 and a half with grey and light blue duo color long hair that reach his knee length, golden eyes with one had a grey aim mark on one eye and a x on the other. He has dark tan skin with two marks on his face(It is removable btw), In Sapphire Lake Dorm, he wears a gothic baggy clothes however he is very fit and muscular under it. He have four tattoos and three piercings(He is more silent about them). One of his signature items is the chains around his right arm.

Personality: Dominique is what people call him. A good package deal. Meaning that you will have to deal with his constant mood changes depending on the person who he is with. Dominique is flirty(HELLA flirty) but he knows his limits. Bro is sadistic in general when it came to words or actions. However due to him being Sapphire Lake’s only Master, he learn to held off the urge until he gets the green light. Other than that, he is one very interesting guy.

𝑻𝒓𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒂

He is the only one in 2nd years that have a deep connection with the Libya Family due to him being friends with Valerian and Ambrose Libya(Ambrose is a boy btw)

He had two photographic cameras(one is forbidden to mention or even ask about it)

He is more protective if you get to know him

He had scars on his back

he is very fit and muscular underneath the baggy clothing he wears

He prefers baggy clothes( But skin tight clothes is fine by him)

He lets the others do his hair(He lets Vil, Crewel and Tsukii chooses his aesthetic)

He used to be a RSA student but bride Crowley to never tell anyone but Sapphire Lake Dorm about that

The Dark Mirror has to look into his soul 4 times to confirm which dorm he belongs too

His main aesthetic is Gothic Victorian

He has veiny arms and hands

Scream for the Camera

“Pictures held a thousand words and stories so look at the camera and make your loudest screams. Scream for the camera!!”

Dominique's UM and its involves his bloodied camera. The UM is about you being your childhood/ favorite places and Dominique taking pictures of said places but each picture get more and more terrifying as time past. The pictures will involves your worst fears and regrets until a unidentified killer appears and the real nightmare begins. You will be chased by said killer as you tried to escape while agonizing and blood curling screams was heard constantly. You have 30 minutes to find a camera and snapped the picture of anything until its too late. What happens after you failed? Then you will see Dominique in front of you with a malicious smile and take a picture before...and after your brutal demise.

The skull in the camera is the final moments of the person's life before they are never waking up.

@yukii0nna @queen-of-twisted @sweetlyvibe @lxdymoon0357 @yumeko2sevilla @kousaka-ayumu @yoghurtsan @aventxsha @txemptress

[ashen-crest]

OC vs. a cockroach

Thanks for the tag, @oh-no-another-idea!

Rules: Rate your OCs on how well they’d fare against a cockroach.

Let's go with the Rival kids for this:

Ambrose: 2/10 - a roach? in his shop? he thinks the fuck not. that sucker is OUT. GONE. ANNIHILATED

Eli: 5/10 - doesn't like 'em, but isn't as fazed by them. Will toss them out in the street or kill them if he can't easily throw it somewhere.

Dawn: 1/10 - screaming. so much screaming. probably grabs a blast wand and kills it that way. there's so much destruction. it doesn't matter, the thing is gone now.

Sherry: 7/10 - similar vibes to Eli, but far more efficient.

Banneker: 10/10 (or 0, depending on your opinion of roaches) - absolutely doesn't bother him unless they're in his kitchen. he's probably set up a tiny bed for them somewhere in his workshop.

Grim: 8/10 - swift, silent, no-mercy murder.

Tagging in turn, with zero pressure: @akindofmagictoo, @zmwrites, @winglesswriter, and @tc-doherty!

[scatteredthoughts2]

THE SOFTLY FALLING NIGHT.

If the darkest hour,

Is before the dawn,

Then alas! it is the hour,

That I was surely born.

For when I came into this world,

My mother went away,

And my father took it out on me,

Yes! My father made me pay.

He blamed me for my mother's death,

And he always told me so,

How he prayed that mother had lived on,

And I was the one to go.

He said I was a parasite,

And I lived upon the dead,

And he made my life a hell on earth,

And filled my days and nights with dread.

I lived a life of misery,

In a household filled with hate,

Praying for forgiveness,

For his hate to dissapate.

But every day the hate just grew,

It did stifle and did smother,

For when my father looked at me,

He saw my dear, dead mother.

Then one stormy winters night,

My mother came to me,

And told me, from my father's house,

That I must quickly flee.

She said my father's hate had grown;

He had murder on his mind,

And to sanity and reason,

He had gone completely blind.

I fled my lonely, hostile home,

I'd no possessions for to pack,

No things that I could call my own;

Just the rags upon my back.

I raced into the raging storm,

I ran into the night,

Through the thunder and the blackness,

Through the lightnings, strobing light.

I travelled far and I travelled wide,

I sailed the seven seas,

And every night and every morn,

I prayed upon my knees.

I prayed for light and guidance,

For the strength to carry on,

Until the countless roads I travelled,

Led me back to my bleak home.

I had vengeance in my heart,

And I had murder on my mind,

But despite the way that I was reared,

I was not the killing kind.

I stopped and gazed at the old place,

It was gone beyond repair,

The windows cracked and smeared with grime,

And rubbish everywhere.

I saw a man upon the steps,

He was bent and old and grey,

Just a shadow of the man he was,

On the night I ran away.

The hate that I had nourished,

The anger I had fed,

Just fell off from my heavy heart,

And pity filled my head.

How could I hate this broken man;

This wretch of skin and bone,

I could not see the daemon,

Who had made me flee my home.

I turned away with n'er a word,

And my heart was warm and light,

And I went upon my way,

In the softly, falling night.

@Ambrose Harte

@Scattered Thoughts

[charleslee-valentine]

Cats in The Cradle

Characters: Bo Sinclair, Lester Sinclair, Vincent Sinclair (no ships)

Word Count: ~6,000

Warnings: Abuse, cyclical abuse, toxic dynamics, Bo has complications from the surgery (missing cerebellum) and obsessive compulsive disorder, mental breakdowns, gun violence, delusions, religious trauma, implied sexual abuse, murder and the wax figures, Bo being mean to Vincent, blood and injury, vomiting, medical irresponsibility, paranoia, trauma bond.

~~~~~~~

Every day in Ambrose is the same. It’s when there’s change the trouble comes along.

Makes Lester world-weary. Got to run off on his little rot-filled road trips for some air. Though he stays tethered to the house, even if only at the end of the night, when he’s got to wander home for normalcy. It ain’t about the protection, he’s got a slugger under the seat for that, and it ain’t the occasional cooking his brothers get up to and burn each time either. He’s grown enough get shit done, even if it’s the ass crack of dawn outside and he ain’t eaten in a whole day, he’ll whip somethin’ up.

That’s the argument anyhow. That he can take well enough good care of himself to be allowed to roam some. Don’t make sense that he’d be the first, bein’ the youngest and all, but the antsier he got, the messier he got with the huntin’, and suddenly his big brothers had to leave Ambrose to track some fella that got out through the trees Lester was s’posed to be watchin’.

Thought that would get him strung up himself. A perfect wax Lester placed inside Trudy’s pride and joy tendin’ to little, pure wax, babies. Maybe down the pet store with Jonsey’s pups that never come to be, or shovelin’ shit out in the cemetery. That’d be like them, to leave him outside to melt and wither away.

Never come though. Got him a reprimandin’ sure, but he left it with a smile anyhow knowin’ big brother wasn’t gonna use his own bowie to slit his throat. And then again when Vinny told him he could leave on the condition he started tendin’ to himself and his chores without help from either brother, and come home every night.

Really if it were up to Vincent, they’d all get the same freedoms, but it weren’t. Never was going to be, when Mama kept him firm in her shadow. Bo’d kill ‘em all if he caught wind of Lester’s thinkin’ it, but fact is he figures Bo just replaced Mama when she keeled over.

Trudy was out her mind the last few years of it. Never went to no homes, despite what Bo likes to tell folks. They stayed and fixed Mama up. Ambrose got empty and miss Trudy got needy. It was every day pickin’ up shifts the tradesmen was droppin’, leavin’ the schoolhouse forever. Old fashioned as it was, s’not like they was learnin’ anything in a one-room, all-grades schoolhouse anyhow.

Still woulda been nice to have a shot at normal. Coulda left with the rush and forgot about highchairs and smelly wax. Nope.

Now Bo’s jus’ as mean as Trudy, enforcin’ his rule with the same flat palm. ‘Cept’n the part where his is rung around with scars.

Different, ‘cause Trudy’s off burnin’ in hell, not missed by a soul, but they stick close with Bo. Know it ain’t really his fault.

The Doc called it compulsions. Some kinda disorder come from havin’ to lose a piece or two of the lowest part of his brain in the surgery. Lester never gonna forget bein’ tiny as can be, sat on the table cause Trudy put him down and forgot him there, while Bo, who seemed so much older back then when the six years made a difference, was strapped down. They’d use the highchair still if they could, but he was too big and awful by then.

Shove him in a standard dining chair and tape his arms underneath. Let him cry and try to kick and pull and bare his teeth. Lester was just learnin’ to speak, and he’d asked what was happening’, curious about all the shouting and pain.

Bo told a little lie turns out. Same thing with the surgery, his mind would wander back then, forgetting what made reality real and made the stuff in his head not. He carved up some critter and left it in the art studio. Said Trudy gave him permission. Well she didn’t. Little Vinny was her artist, and notably, nowhere to be seen in this memory, autonomous enough to stay away, but never going far.

Must’ve hurt him too, listenin’ to Bo losin’ his mind now and again. Knowin’ it was him that leeched off the back of his head and absorbed that one important little piece out his skull. Payback for the whole, not having a tongue, thing.

Nowadays Bo’s a little better, but Ambrose still got to be pretty particular to not send him right back to the pale, polished arms of the hallucinations. Those belong in the casket down the road.

Lester blames Trudy. Even when he goes with to honor her when Bo needs to do it. Every Sunday is when he’s down there, so ‘less he’s got a job Lester’ll come down to see. Vincent’s usually there too, if nobody been through in a while.

They take off their hats and masks, bow their heads, and pray. They pretend they don’t notice Bo’s hips and knees splayed wide in an arc and struggling to walk straight when that metaphorical mask of the Doc’s training wares off. His hands shake. His words don’t come out right. Sometime’s Lester’s the only one in the house usin’ words, while the twins do their motioning about.

Really should’ve gotten more interested in those sign language books he’d been given way back when. It was funny, a lady on the TV could use sign ‘cause she couldn’t hear words and that meant she couldn’t make ‘em. Trudy saw it and was livid. Banned them all from 123 Sesame Street and whooped Bo for even turning it on. Like it was bad to communicate.

If Vincent knew how to make his signs back then, maybe he’d have told the papers the truth. After all it was Mama that did the talking. Givin’ him words gave him the chance to say no. To bein’ her little protege and heir. Like hell she’d ever let that happen. Had to teach it to himself in secret. Bo picked it up from watchin’ and snatchin’ up Vinny’s books and papers to tease.

Lester wishes he were that smart. Hell, Doc even said it himself, sometimes seemed like he was born with even less brain than Beauregard. ‘Cept he had a different name for Bo all the boys promised never to repeat. They’d get nasty, but none of that usin’ Mama and Papa against each other.

Prolly why they’s too scared to tell Bo he’s becomin’ like Trudy. Stumblin’, shakin’, pissed at everything.

Ambrose falls well into his liking. Bo got it all down to memory.

Bodies he don’t like don’t even go on display. Vincent could work his big ass off on a statue for weeks, but if Bo couldn’t squeeze it into however he’d categorized the town in imaginary gridlines, they’d be put on reserve. The wax house held the rejects, mostly. Once upon a time Vincent left Lester a note tellin’ him he sometimes dressed the statues up funny and messed up their makeup if they were his favorites, so Bo would reject them, and he’d get to keep ‘em. Worked every time too.

Be nice if they could laugh about things like that anymore. ‘Specially with Bo.

A new batch come through back in the early spring, just a couple months shy of a year or so ago then, and filled up lots of the empty space. Mostly went to the theater. Baby Jane and sister Blanche didn’t used to be lightin’ the place up with their sad story, they just tossed an old closed sign up ‘til the bodies rolled in.

It pissed Bo off when Lester was helpin’ him and wanted to put his statues in a line. Made sense, like they was all friends together! But Bo had it all mapped in his head, talkin’ who’s clothes matched who, color in their hair matchin’ with the number on their seats. That was more confusin’ than his fits.

Most of the time in Ambrose his workday was tidying, checkin’ on rat traps and the like. But sometimes when Lester could slip in a lunch break or two off patrol he’d see Bo pacin’. Drawin’ lines in the sky with his hands, mutterin’, kickin’ things. Like inside the theater but on the whole town.

Funny thing is they do gotta crown a new Miss Ambrose once in a while.

The silky bright colors of a beauty queen dress stand out far too much against the pale, sunfaded town they live in. Her smile too white, the makeup too sparkly. Bo tears the bodies to bits and takes them back to Vinny, like a child with his broken toy.

There’s nothin’ he can do, and they both know it, but Bo is different from Trudy in that he will admit regret. Not directly, he’d sooner swallow a gator in one bite, but showin’ the broken pieces is still better than tyin’ ‘em down to hide.

At least most of the time it ain’t like that. One thing he’s always picky about is the lights. Town gotta come to life some time, but Bo’s got a tradition. Generators don’t kick on ‘til he flips the switch manually, else he’ll block the sky with the burning neons of mom’s and pop’s updating with the times, and firey orange street lights. Bo insists they don’t got color. Just a disgusting haze that makes it hard to see. Lester takes the accusation of him being wrong, even though he knows it’s Bo’s head.

And he’s gotta see the sky. Star light, star bright, first star and all that- it’s his one shot at a wish. Not even his brother’s knows what he wishes for each night, peekin’ his head out the window ‘fore callin’ down to Vincent to flip the switch.

Maybe to make Ambrose perfect the way he sees it in his head, so he can stop runnin’ around town tryin’ to adjust it all. Finding those little pockets of feelings and digging in until anythin’ that stands out has to go.

Way back when, Lester kinda hoped Bo would set him free by thinkin’ he didn’t match. Not like he was part of the squirming mass his brother’s was born as. Nobody remembered Lester. Not for bein’ quiet and shy or for bein’ devilish.

Longer he stays though, he knows it’s not really Bo takin’ real care of Ambrose. His head needs it perfect, destroyin’ progress for somethin’ only he can reach and grasp and toss about like it means anything as a scolding hot weapon. Perfection burns hotter, stings worse than wax, and Trudy Sinclair wanted both from her boys.

Trudy might’ve been sick physically, but it come along long before that. Only a matter of time before Bo’s head gets angry ‘bout the dank environment up there and tries to plug it’s missing bits with the same cancer that took Mama the rest of the way to hell.

She had to’ve been there before she died. Else she wouldn’t have done what she did on her way out. Her last words. “Beauregard. Bo.. Promise me you’ll keep Ambrose tidy. You were Mama’s boy. Kept things in line. Don’t let it got to chaos, to hell.”

It was bullshit. If she weren’t already gasping for life Lester might’ve grabbed her throat then and there. Vince knew it too, cause he stepped in front of Les and went to Bo. Chest to back, the way they was conjoined, he’d tried to force his whispers with his half of a tongue, getting at least his twin’s attention to start gesturing.

“Don’t listen.”

“Mama is a liar.”

“You know how you are. You know how she is. Don’t.”

It was hopeless.

That word again. The Doc said compulsions, well sometimes he also said obsessions. Same disorder, different symptom. Neither one Bo could escape. Even if he’d been listenin’ to his brother, which he wasn’t.

All he heard was Hell and that was enough. Bo was terrified of the spiritual. They all oughta remember the way he’d been in church, even when it was full, bawlin’ his head off, havin’ those fits ‘cause he thought he was goin’ to face demons and hellfire for breakin’ rules. The panic meant he kept breakin’ rules, and he kept gettin’ scared, and so on.

It was a trap to scare kids into bein’ good, nothin’ worth anythin’ in adult life, but those Sunday mornin’s Bo kneels at Trudy’s coffin and prays for real, not just at her but at any God that will listen and spare him and his brothers. If Ambrose can be a haven, when it reaches that state of perfection, they’ll be guaranteed eternal life away from screamin’ babies and burning wrists and “please Mama I was doin’ my best-“

The script Bo operates on never ceases. Pretty girls get their mouths glued shut so they have to follow it. Lester drives the same route to catch the same folks and scrape the same families of deer off the roads. Hell it ain’t official, if it were he couldn’t keep the little trinkets and bones he does. Or the meat. But it covers well and no government gonna complain about free labor from a guy like him.

With the girls, they’re just like the deer. Bo takes their pictures and calls them sweet things, but he’s on repeat. Same task, get the restraints, tune out the noise or find a way to stop it, stay sickly sweet with ‘em all the while. Throw in some affection so they don’t fight so much.

Just. Like. Mama.

Lester don’t much like toyin’ with the art. Feels like goin’ in a museum and draggin’ your fingers all over the paint. Which actually is somethin’ Bo would probably do, if it wasn’t up to his standard, takin’ the whole frame and just tossin’ it right out. But they stay neat and displayed on his cellar walls, in scattered checkerboard rows that Bo thinks are straight across.

Thing that always stumps Lester, and Vincent actually, is when he catches Bo slicing little knicks under his fingertips. His palms. Adding newer scars to the thick band around each of his wrists. Always says the girls died too soon. Broke the script, the rules. Now he’s gotta make up for the pain that would be cast into the realm of Ambrose if it weren’t for the failure of another little miss coulda been the one. As if.

They ain’t for keeps. Nothin’ is. Ambrose changes, and changes, and changes. Still every day is the same.

Wake up at a certain time, make the rounds, play pretend, sit itchin’ by the one landline behind a locked door that works, waitin’ for Lester’s call home. If it don’t come in a few minutes, it’s down to make his rounds countin’ heads. Move a few things this way and that on the store shelves. Hang up a picture or two cut out meticulously (as shaky hands can be) from books and magazines, a mimic of the ranging advertisements on display in the bigger cities.

Not a mimic. A replication. Nothin’ bad, nothin’ wrong- that thing is not my baby!

Bo spirals a lot. When he’s on his own. Part of why he’s got to dig his hands so deep into Ambrose. There’s shame in it he tries to squash down with mixtures of somethin’ too strong for a normal day. Mixin’ rum and brandy in a big bottle of orange juice. Vodka in his morning coffee.

Drunk Bo is more coordinated than sober. That little cocktail comes to work with him, and he makes do. Let it be known he isn’t the twin to come away with an issue. Can’t be. He’s mama’s boy, remember?

Lester is sickened by it. Watchin’ his trances like that, knowin’ it’s all ‘cause of Trudy in her final moments.

Shit they didn’t even need to do the killin’, ‘f Bo coulda got his head screwed on a right way. Too late now ‘course. They’re hundreds of innocent lives deep in this thing. Got themselves a dog outta killin’ her owner. Another responsibility, a life to keep up.

Jonsey herself stresses Bo out to no end. Her wagging tail, her happy jumpin’ when she recognizes her dearest friends. When she barks at creaky staircases settlin’ at night, his jaw sets so tight his teeth creak audibly. If he got a cut, he won’t touch the dog. Says it’ll kill him to get any of her in with his blood. Seems silly to Lester, by Bo’s designation the one that plays in guts and bone splinters all day, gettin’ plenty of that himself.

Sometimes a storm’ll roll through in rain season and bring some nasty wind with it, scarin’ the life outta the poor puppy dog. She starts to shake and drool all over. It makes Bo so nauseous to watch he has to leave the room or hack up that nasty concoction he drinks that shouldn’t be stayin’ down anyhow.

Vince stays, always stays, ‘cause someone’s got to. Bo’s a flight risk and Lester just don’t much like bein’ the trapped one. So it’s a system set in stone, or carved in blood and bone more like. Breathed in like the ashes of Bo’s more or less wasted cigarettes.

Way Lester sees it, just like the papery stubs, the routine gotta but extinguished ‘fore they all choke to death on it.

But he hadn’t meant for things to get so different.

Like even thinkin’ it cursed the place, he sends one scrawny group their way and suddenly Bo’s bleedin’ all over the kitchen tiles. Wouldn’t even know it if Vincent hadn’t dialed his bother’s number and left the phone in Bo’s pocket. Keepin’ tabs on his pain so Lester can hear it all and know somethin’s up.

The arrow in his chest stays right there, until Lester pulls up. Somethin’ about knowing Vince called in backup is sign enough to take it serious. Insists on doing it himself though.

Lester says they oughta snip the arrow where it lies and take him to emergency later on. Bo says he’d rather die now than leave a vulnerable spot stickin’ six inches out his chest. Yanks it ‘til his knees buckle and he damn near smacks his teeth off the linoleum. Then vomits stinking alcohol everywhere.

Vincent can see it ain’t gonna happen that way, and locks eyes with Lester. Tells him mentally to pass on an apology for what he’s about to do. Which is, he grabs the arrow by just under the fletchings and yanks the damn thing out before Bo can lose his shit over splinters and weakness and all that.

Well, he loses his shit anyhow, screamin’ bloody murder that he’s gonna kill Vincent for that. Only for a moment before he blacks the hell out from the pain. Prob’ly won’t even remember callin’ Vince a freak.

The hunt goes on without ‘im, without what would’ve been -though Lester never likes admitting when his big brother is right- a weak point for the shifty ass kids to stick their fingers into. End up gettin’ a pretty good knock on ‘em too.

Just like before the girly made it out almost to the roads, but Lester’s a better shot than Bo. Don’t got those phantom shakes and all. Though Vinny would hafta to pick all that bullet scrap out if they was to use her as a figure.

The next time Bo’s conscious, he’s demanding to see what Vincent gonna do with the statues. And it’s a damn good thing they didn’t set out on digging up the shrapnel, ‘cause Bo’s pissed about the arrows, and the shop windows, and the church goers, and the house. It’s all messed up, that safety cushion gone and deflated in one night.

Can’t make art outta enemies. This particukar chase weren’t fun or even close to it. No bright side to it.

Bo wants them destroyed. All of ‘em at first, but Vincent won’t ‘llow that. Threatens to hop in the yellow truck again and take off just like last time knowing damn well it pissed Bo off and was the reason he took two still bleeding blows.

They gets rid of the twins, the girl and the boy ‘ gave ‘em the most trouble. Let Bo decide what he wants done with ‘em.

Could shred ‘em up, sink ‘em to the bottom of the road kill pit, though Lester’s hesitant to do so knowin’ the same group was already thinkin’ he hid bodies in it ‘stead of jus’ Trudy’s old model mannequins. There’s always the marshland they’d rot away in nicely, unnoticed.

He wants ‘em gone though. Not buried and rotting, not waxed over into someone new, gone.

Burn the bodies. Peel the flesh. Boil the bones. Smash ‘em into dust. Mix it in with Vincent’s pigments. Their crystallized, powdered remains make for some perfect shiny makeup on the blonde’s eyelids, and extra sparkle in her wax-cast jewelry.

Felt fitting, to adorn another member of the group in those two’s particular sins. It was them two that got the rest killed so brutally after all.

Speaking of sin.

Bo slept in the church for a few nights, sprawled painfully over a dusty pew, nothing but a jacket as cushion against the solid wood. Ambrose was different now. The order had been broken and he needed to hide from the wrath that would bring.

Mama’s empty husk of a corpse wouldn’t help him. He just hoped the proximity to the altar would get some divine figure’s eyes on him, even if not her. At least send down a quick recovery so he can fucking fix the mess those kids left behind.

The pain, he can swallow, but some part of his system got fucked over right into overdrive and now he’s got no control of his shakes. His legs are as bowed as they’ve ever been, limpin’ and draggin’ himself all this way to the church was humiliating enough. No way he’s installing fresh window panes and rearranging statues to his heart’s content like this.

The dog comes and gets Bo first in the morning. Sunlight pourin’ in through the stained windows, Bo feels like he’s burnin’ up in hellfire instead of kissed by heavenly rays. Or the sticky tongue of a staffordshire terrier. Pitbull mix. Whatever the fuck the mutt is.

Jonesy is always a sign Vincent is close, ‘nd Bo cannot, will not let either of his brotherd see he’s all but given up. Their ignorant little asses are s’pose to be none the wiser he even left the house last night.

The ramblings of a man happens to be clueless that they both watched his sorry ass limp on down there, fallin’ to his knees once and skid down the hill. Anyone alive in Ambrose could’ve heard him cry out when he jammed his busted up shoulder tryin’ to catch himself and struggled for a few minutes to throw weight into his legs and stand. His gait was fucked but so were his patterns, zig-zagging from one side of the road to the next and never knowin’ it.

Really he’d blacked out in the first empty pew, taking no time to get comfortable. It wasn’t about comfort, it was necessity. A shield around his already wounded heart. His brother’s checked on him every few hours.

Bo’s blood stains the church now, far beyond a dried raisin of a corpse in the center of the holy building. Trudy’s eternal wake seems more and more pointless. Her soul can’t be saved for the life she inflicted on her trio of tragic babes. But her son can. Even the devil on earth can be shown God’s graces if he could just fucking stand up and-

He’s humbled by Jonesy. She was his chance to get his ass up and find whichever one of his asshole brothers sicked the bitch on him. The way she curls up next to his boot, singular, that he managed to get off but not back on is her final brag. ‘You lost. Now my caretakers ‘re yours too.’

As expected, right on cue, Vincent creeps in the church then, forever stomping in too heavy boots, settling into the pew in front of Bo. Silent. Back turn so signs won’t work.

“Fuck you.” Is the first thing out of his mouth. Bo repeats it ‘til he vomits a pathetic tiny cough of spit and stomach acid onto the ruined floors.

Vincent doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t react to being screamed at. He’s not the one with open wounds. Never fucking has been.

“I’m talking to you, freak!”

That word again. Bo doesn’t know why he keeps saying it. Got him choked up last night, rambling about his promises. Because that should be more important. Vincent’s face don’t mean shit when it comes to Ambrose. Hell, he’d probably be capable if the surgery took his arms too. That talent is unstoppable.

Like the silence.

“Don’t make me say it, Vincent. Fucking.. I ain’t here for your damn power trip, alright? You ain’t savin’ shit.”

Nary a fuckin’ glance. From behind, all inky hair and broad shoulders, it’s hard to pick out Vincent’s feelings. That frustrates Bo. Just like with victims, his brothers got a script too. He’s supposed to be in the know, in charge. Vincent can’t keep secrets from him. Secrets get brothers shot inches away from vital organs and arteries.

“Vincent. Vinny. Help your brother out..”

It reminds him of being younger. The highchair. Pleading with Vincent to cut the tape and let him go because Mama and the Doc never listened. His one little eye would shed enough tears Bo could see ‘em across the room. Stuck in place, while Vincent could come and go as he pleased, but still chose distance. And he never did free Bo from the restraints.

“C’mon, now. Gotta get this fuckin’ shit show on the road. Need a hand, Vinny..”

Begging for help out of the pew, it takes ‘em both back there. Bo hopes Trudy is the one stuck now, held down by ugly demons in that coffin of hers, watching her boys get along enough.

Well, Vincent listens anyhow when he’s talked to softly like that. Gets right up and takes Bo by his palms, never his wrists, and heaves him up. Even doesn’t make a comment when Bo’s ankle twists under itself for some godforsaken cranial reason and he stumbles straight into his brother’s shoulder.

Face first in a grimy sweater, he sort of understands what it’s like to be in Vinny’s place. At least in the conjoinment. Bo hates the pictures, of their little bodies all twisted up and stuck. The weight of Vincent is suffocating like that, not comforting like the feeling of warm cashmere. Makes him want to crawl right out of his skin.

Bo scratches at the bands of scar tissue on his arms, never a day in his life since they formed without drawing blood from a raised line of the itchiest goddamn feeling. Only way to describe it is like mosquitos stakin’ their claim on every last blood cell in the area. Poison in his blood, from his highchair days on.

Gotta push away from bein’ stuck in Vincent’s careful proximity. Can’t get comfortable, vulnerable, like a silent, squirming little bastard child.

Bo can’t do this. This switching places thing. If he’s gonna be the weaker twin, Vincent better fuckin’ do his part. One way or another. Provoking him is the easy part.

“Heard you kept the pretty blonde. Took some video to remember her, huh. You got the hots for some wax bitch, Vin?”

Nothing. He physically pushes Vincent, uncoordinated enough to miss his chest and thump into his shoulder instead.

“Look I don’t got much interest in your creepy fuckin’ Quasimodo dungeon, but I gotta know. D’you fuck her? Get up reeeeal close in that wax pussy?”

Bo swallows down more acrid bile. Forces a tight, painful laugh.

“Of course she’s special. Tiny. Blonde. Just your type yeah? Just like your whore mommy-“

There we go. Vincent shoves him back, both of them knowing damn well that’s enough to take Bo down right now. And it does alright. Knocks some ribs pretty good against the back of the pew on his way down, forcing out a painful puff of air.

While he’s down, Vincent takes a second swing with his boot this time, pinning Bo on down to the floor. Pretty sure he cracked his head when he got forced down. Or maybe just put too much strain on the arrow wounds, ‘cause damn is he seein’ little stars and Angels dancin’ in his narrow vision.

If he wanted to win, Vince would press down with that boot and put his twin out of both of their misery, crackin’ ribs into bits and stabbin’ his heart. That’s not his goal though, never had been. It’s to knock some damn sense into Bo that he’s injured and needs to forget about his spastic bullshit.

Pisses him off. Bo fights back by jabbing his fingers in the back of Vincent’s knee, bringing him down to kneeling on pure instinct. Now Bo can reach the straps of his apron, pull himself back up to Vincent’s level in this fight for his spot.

“You think you get to boss me ‘round jus’ ‘cause I’m fucked up.. Well you’re fuckin’ mistaken, boy! I am in charge ‘round here. Not you. Not Lester.”

Vincent just stares. Tears apart Bo’s attitude with just that familiar glare. Fuck him.

“Look at you, fightin’ your sick brother. Think ‘at makes you better’n me?” Bo feels like he’s suffocating, even without the pressure holding him down. He licks across his lips and ignores the taste, “Guess you oughta put a fuckin’ cap in me. ‘Member? I killed the bitch when she got too fucked up. Two for her and one for the Doc.”

Vincent’s eye contact wavers, drifting over towards the plush coffin, like he’s considering it. So Bo doesn’t shut up, doesn’t even know if he can, “Leaves three more in the chamber. Could take us all out. One for baby Les. One for you. One for me. I’d do it if you left me for last. Don’t got nothin’ without-“

His intense staring finally processes in his brain, noticing the off details about Vincent’s face. The mask, the good one, was ruined in the hunt. There was a smaller one that would make do but wasn’t comfortable. Bo examines it, eyes flitting around, confusion in his bunched brows.

“The fuck happened to your face?”

‘You did.’ Vincent thinks, but he doesn’t tell him that. Instead he shrugs, hopes he won’t press the issue. Redirecting ain’t as easy when Bo’s still askin’ more questions.

And Bo is furious now, “We could fuckin’ quit it, you know. Got no right touchin’ your fuckin’ face. Fuck ‘em, Vinny. Can’t believe they’d fuckin’ lay a hand on you, I’ll kill them all!”

He must know they’re already dead in truth, because he goes silent for a while. When he comes back, he’s talking about their other conversation. The one with the pistol that killed Mama and the Doc in their beds, years and years apart.

Dangerously close to being honest, Bo hisses and acts like he’s adjusting his aching shoulder, but really, the pain is nothing compared to what’s going on in his head.

“Can’t do it on my own. One of us dies, we all die. You fuckin’ promise me that?”

Bo seems to think he’s ill. His eyes blur over and it’s not tears, just a pounding in his head. He’s dehydrated from vomiting so much, delirious from the blood loss, but he thinks he knows better. The tumor. Come for him this time. That’s what he convinces himself.

“You’d do it, Vinny, wouldn’t ya, if I couldn’t?” His nose is running from the humidity, the pain, his body forcing a fever to fight for himself. In his mind’s eye, it’s blood pouring from his nose. Just like Daddy after his skull popped.

Fuck. He’s already dead.

“Vincent. Vincent you can’t let go of me!” He clutches that sweater like his life fucking depends on it, glancing at the ground and back up at his brother, over and over, like it might fall away any second.

His brother tilts his head in confusion, but Vincent obliges his ramblings, holding onto Bo around one arm, the other hand balled in his trashed uniform shirt.

“You let go of me ‘n I’m a goner, y’hear? Don’t you fuckin’ let me go. Hell ain’t ready for me. I’m not- My soul got business here and you ain’t fucking gonna turn me into wax, goddamn it. I ain’t the monstrosity here. Fuckin’.. You aren’t either Vincent. That bitch- That fuckin’ demon in Mama’s coffin, don’t let it take me-“

His rambling goes on like that ‘til he passes out again. Under Vincent’s ill-fitting mask, his best one ruined in the hunt, tears are running down the left side of his face. Finding meaning in this fit, knowing full well Bo won’t remember it tomorrow, is idiotic. But he does it anyhow. Lets himself take it to heart that he’s necessary, and loved, and nothing at all like Miss mama Trudy.

He’s right though, Bo doesn’t remember a thing. Vincent carried him home and Bo woke up on the couch, had a plate of eggs like nothin’ happened. Across from him, he nodded to Lester, “You spot a single soul out there, you let us know ‘n we’ll be by. Not too much work today.”

Lester scowls and nods his head, dumbstruck by how much he forgot this time, “Yeh, alright. Got nothin’ better t’ do myself.”

There ain’t gonna be a hunt for a long while, and just as likely he ain’t gonna leave Ambrose. Too many repairs to leave to Bo in this state, all fucked in the head by his disorder. It’s like that sometimes in cycles, but they ain’t seen it get this bad before.

Routine is routine. Bo’s disorder robs him of his sense, his brain defects makin’ him weak. His brother’s fix everythin’ up ‘til his brain gets all better, and he gets bored of doin’ the small stuff. Thinks Ambrose is always the same, nothin’ ever happenin’ to disrupt his perfect plan.

Make Mama proud. Make Bo calm. Same goddamn difference.

Lester looks at Vincent across the table, and he nods, the signal to keep lying to Bo. “Saw a group campin’ in the woods. Two girls, ‘bout four boys. Teenagers, I could get ‘em back and Vinny can take ‘em.”

They’re already dead. The keepers of the group already a part of Ambrose. Dead men walking.

“You sit tight, rest that arm up. Show you the new figures in the mornin’.”

It’s gettin’ too easy to lie through his teeth, but harder to keep Bo inside.

Neither knows what the stiff nod from Bo means, ‘til he says, “Have your fun. Jus’ be fuckin’ careful. You fuck up my town, I’ll fuck up somethin’ of yours.”

‘Uh-huh, we know, asshole.’ Lester thinks, tension in his jaw pushing it forward. There’s all kinds of words just dancin’ on his tongue, but he swallows them back, if only ‘cause Vince puts his hand on his shoulder.

Instead, he manages to choke out a simple, “Yessir.”

[charliedawn]

Bo Sinclair x Reader :

WARNING : EXPLICIT. MINORS KEEP OUT. I MEAN IT.

Author : I've got no excuse for writing this. It's pure filth. I just discovered Bo Sinclair and I wanted to write something about him because....HE'S SO PRETTY ! And the accent got me. Okay. I just...Yeah. I'm going to Azkaban for this. Enjoy. 💜

It all started with a look—barely a glance really...He could have ignored it easily. He could have looked away and kept praying to whoever was listening...But, his eyes seemed to find yours every single time.

Bo was but a wee boy at the time, and you were...How should he put it ? You were infuriating in the best possible way. Your parents had landed in Ambrose a few years back for work, and he had met you at one of those boring Sunday church's gatherings.

A discreet smile, a knowing gleam in your eyes and then, the tip of your tongue wetting your lips...His eyes were drawn to it immediately and his breath hitched. He bit his inner cheek in order not to huff out a laugh as you cheekily winked at him and you hid your smile behind your conjoined hands. You were doing everything but praying at this point...But, he still pretended to be focused on what the priest was blabbering on about instead of how his heart was beating a thousand miles an hour.

His parents noticed. Hell—the whole town noticed. But, they didn't care enough to stop the both of you from seeing each other.

True. You had never called him more than your best friend when he wanted to kiss you and let you ride him from night till dawn but, hey ! Losers can't be choosers. That's what his mother had always told to him anyway.

So, when you had decided to leave and start a new life outside of Ambrose, he didn't stop you. He actually wanted to go with you. He had left you a letter—telling you he would be go with you if only you'd ask. He wanted to go and be happy with you—like he knew he could have been.

But, he didn't find you the next day and realized that, you were already gone—without even saying goodbye...And he regretted that letter every minute of every day, because it was the only existing proof of your power over him, the proof that he used to have a heart...one you tear away from him the day you left. He never told you that the only thing keeping him sane at the time was you. He went down the murder slide the moment your lovely self wasn't there to be his moral compass any longer...and when his parents died, that's when Ambrose really went downhill and he couldn't do a thing about it.

The Sinclairs were the only ones remaining now, and he thought he would never get to see you ever again...until his little brother found you that is.

Now :

You had just turned left to take Curtly street when you car seemed to hit something on the road. You soon found out that one of your tires had burst—because of the heat no doubt—and you sighed deeply in annoyance.

It was going to be a long day...

You closed you eyes and then, you heard a car pull on your side of the road a few steps further. You opened your eyes and looked at the old run-down truck and frowned.

Why did it seem so familiar ?

"Damn. That was a pretty nasty bump on the road. You' alright, stranger ?", the owner of the truck asked before leaning forward to check on you. The way he drawled his words, his kind smile and familiar dark eyes made you think back of the days where this town used to be your home.

"...Letty ?", you asked hesitantly and his smile faded for just a second as he wondered how you knew him ? You were both surprised, but his eyes quickly lit up in recognition as you smiled up at him.

"...Y/N ?"

You nodded and quickly got out of the car to give him a big hug. He was taken aback for a moment before he smiled—happy to see you again.

"Letty ! It's been too long."

Lester's smile turned genuine as he remembered fondly all the memories he had of you. True. You had never shared the same special connection than you used to have with Bo—but you had always been good friends. He closed his eyes and took a big breath of your familiar fragrance...Even after all those years, you still smelled like sweet pineapple to him.

You eventually had to pull away and he bumped your shoulder playfully.

"Sure has ! What are you doing back in town ?" He secretly hoped you were here to visit them. Lester eyed your car and mentally registered that it looked like you would need a little help to get back on the road...Maybe you'd even accept to stay for a few days ?

"I was driving by and thought I'd give the old folks a visit. How have you been ? How's the family ?", you asked and Lester's smile faltered slightly as he thought about his brothers. He rubbed the back of his neck nervously before answering you frankly.

"Well, Vincent still is ol' Vincent. Still carves. And Bo...Bo is Bo. He took care of us. Ya know...since Ma' and Pa' died.", he explained and you lowered your eyes in sorrow. You had never approved of how they treated Bo, but it didn't mean you had wished them any harm.

"I'm sorry.", you told him truthfully and Lester nodded absent-mindedly.

"Yeah...", he replied and shook his head before smiling again. "Say, dya want me to drop you off in town ? Bo could fix your car and you'd be on your way in a day or two—tops.", he estimated and even though he knew it didn't take long for a flat tire to be changed—he hoped you'd accept.

You smiled and were about to accept when you thought back on how you had left things with Bo...He didn't know you were back, and you didn't know if he should ? Lester was too young to remember, but you had entered into a huge fight before you left and you didn't know how he would react by your sudden reappearance ? Would he mind you staying for a little while ? On the other hand, it would be considered rude to refuse and you really needed someone to get a look at your car...

"Fine.", you finally said before getting in the passenger seat and Lester's smile widened. He then drove you back to town and you arrived in front of the garage. You hopped off and started looking around—but no Bo to be found.

"Thank you so much for giving me a lift.", you told Lester who beamed at you.

"No problem.", he then eyed you a little closer and then realized something. Your clothes. You were dressed very...nun-like.

"Say, Y/N. Why you dressed like that ?", he asked.

You looked down at your clothes and offered Lester a knowing smile before extending your hand forward. "Sister Y/N."

Lester's eyes widened at the realization and he laughed in disbelief.

"No shit ! You actually a nun, or sumthin' ?", he asked and you laughed kind-heartedly before shaking your head.

"Nah. Not yet anyway...Just preparing myself for it. I was on my way to the covent to pledge my vows. I truly believe it is my calling...you know ?". Lester tilted his head to look at your blissful smile. He didn't really understand, but you seemed really happy...which meant he was happy.

But then, he thought of Bo. He knew his brother had been waiting for you to come back since forever...Lester was even sure he had a picture of you in his room somewhere...

"Wow...Deep. Didn't know you cared so much about all that religious stuff. Kinda figured you came here because Bo was here.", he confessed and your eyes widened slightly in surprise.

"...Really ? Why ?"

"I was asking myself the same damn thing."

You both turned around to see Bo standing there—his eyes set on the both of you with a small scowl on his face. Bo sent a warning glance to his little brother who immediately started staring at the floor sheepishly. He hadn't meant to talk more than he ought to—but sometimes his mouth seemed to go faster than his brain.

Bo then took a glance at you and stopped himself from snorting at your new dress code.

Yeah...As if that was true. You couldn't hide anything from him. He knew you. You were no saint.

He had thought of you for years—had dreamt of you even. He had imagined all the ways his hands could have grabbed you, squeezed you, make a big fuckin' mess out of you...And, you were here now. Damn. To think he had just wished upon a star to get you home and here you were.

Wishes did come true.

"Y/N. It's been a long time..", he greeted you with a polite smile and didn't expect it when you suddenly embraced him and smiled against his cheek.

"I missed you, Trouble.", you said and Bo almost lost it at his old nickname. He was almost ready to shed a tear and return your hug—only to remember how you had left him. You hadn't replied to a single letter he had sent you and the knowledge made his hug a little too tight for comfort.

"Yeah. Me too." You frowned at the sudden coldness in his answer, but didn't say anything.

Bo finally released you and glanced up at Lester who seemed confused at the odd exchange. Bo then eyed the exit sign significantly and Lester quickly understood and let out an awkward chuckle before walking away.

"Well, now that I brought you to the best mechanic in town, I'll be going. He'll fix your car in no time.", Lester assured you and you nodded with a small smile.

"Yeah. Thanks, Letty.", you said with a bright smile.

He nodded shortly and when you had your back turned, Letty's smile vanished for just a second as he glanced at Bo worriedly. He knew what the look on his older brother meant, and Lester shook his head negatively.

'You ain't killing her. She ma friend.', he seemed to say with his eyes. Bo cocked his head and narrowed his eyes at Lester who quickly understood he better get out of here before he got his ass whooped. So, Lester gave you one last concerned look before shaking his head once more and walking out.

Bo waited until he was definitely out of sight before turning back towards you—all prime and proper. You had grown into a fine young woman, and he had an itch at the tip of his fingertips to tarnish this repugnant stench of perfection emanating from you. He had followed your discussion with Lester from the shadows and the thought of you—belonging to anyone but him—made him sick.

You had left him behind, but you were back now. He knew he could paint you in suffering and bring you back to the Y/N he knew and loved. He just had to be patient and make sure to wait for his moment to strike...

He smiled.

"Candy ?", he asked before pulling two out from his pocket. You smiled and accepted one gratefully before popping it into your mouth without a second thought—not noticing how the corner of his mouth twitched upward at the sight.

"It's been a while since you last visited. Want a tour ?", he asked and your smile widened as you nodded eagerly.

"Sure. Hope I didn't miss much. Did you get to do that little wax museum you and Vincent used to talk about ?"

He didn't answer. He preferred to show you.

You walked side by side in the streets and you frowned in incomprehension at the empty streets that used to be buzzing with life. What had happened here ? He led you to the church where you had first met and a chill ran through you at the wax statues there...They all seemed so real—their expressions so life-like. It made you feel as if they were staring at you—warning you. But, you then glanced at Bo and the look he gave you made you want to understand.

He seemed so broken.

"What...happened ?", you asked and Bo let out a small sigh.

"They all left...like you did." He hadn't meant to add that last part—but the way you looked up at him in surprise made him frown.

He grit his teeth and his jaw twitched as you seemed so innocent...free of guilt.

'Lucky you', he thought bitterly before looking at the alter. He had waited for you...For fuckin' forever. Only to realize that you were never going to be his when your parents had told him that you had decided to go away, live your life away from Ambrose—away from him.

"Bo...What are you talking about ?", you asked and he couldn't help but snort in disbelief.

Why did you seem so clueless ? Didn't you know how many times he had tried to reach you ? That night...you hadn't even answered his letter. He had waited all night for the both of you to run away together. He had waited...and waited...and waited...only to be met with big fat disappointment.

"...I don't fuckin' understand, Y/N. What happened that night ?", he asked and your eyes turned sorrowful as you turned back towards him with your eyes playing a sad tune of pity...He hated that look.

"Bo…I…", your heart quickened and you felt trapped as you were surrounded by Bo and the other various wax statues. You couldn't breathe. You tried to move, but he kept an iron grip on you as his ocean blue eyes stared at you intensely—pinning you into place.

"I don't understand, Bo...What night ?"

Bo groaned loudly in annoyance before grabbing your arm and pulling you flush against him. He wanted you to look at him—see the pain and hurt you've caused him.

"...That night. The night you left. The letter I left you. We were supposed to go together. We were suppose' to be good for each other."

You eyes widened slightly at the information and his arms felt like molten iron chains around you—burning you. You tried to push him away, but to no avail.

"Bo...Please. You're hurting me.", you protested—but your complain fell into deaf ears as Bo let out a blood-curdling laugh that reverberated all around the church and only tightened his hold on you.

"Hurting ?", he asked in mocking disbelief. "You don't know hurting...You only know how to hurt."

You had left him behind—as if he was nothing. But, no more. You would never leave him again...

You didn’t have the time to ask what he was talking about that he weaved his fingers in your hair and suddenly pulled you against him, his lips mere inches from yours. He had waited for so long to have you like this...Who could have guessed you would be stupid enough to come back ?

"Kiss me…", he commanded you in a whisper and Bo was so close to you—you could feel his hot breath hit your face. He sounded so desperate and on the verge of breaking.

"I...Bo...I can't.", you tried to deny—but he wasn't convinced. He had waited for so long—it was high time to rectify his mistake and get rid of whatever little regret and conscience he had left. "Come on, sis’. One kiss. And god as my witness…I'll fix yar car brand new and you won’t see me ever again."

You hesitated. Bo seemed adamant and not in a negotiating kind of mood. You didn't know what letter he was referring to, but it seemed to have deeply affected him. You wished you had the letter in your possession, that you could read it and make out what had been so important to put Bo in such a state.

Was it a love letter ?

An apology letter ?

A lovesick poem ?

"One kiss ?", you finally asked and Bo smiled victoriously—knowing he had won.

"That's right. One kiss."

You looked around at the wax statues and gulped. You were uncomfortable to do this in a place like this, but you had no choice. You puckered your lips and Bo found it endearing when you closed your eyes shut and leaned forward—like a child about to get their first kiss.

"Good girl.", he praised and then smashed his lips against yours. You whimpered slightly at the brutality of the kiss as he started discovering every single part of your mouth and devouring you like he was a starving man—ready to die for a piece of you. He was sucking your soul out of you and you could only fall limp into his arms and let out a series of small high-pitched noises as he seemed unbothered by your buttery state.

"Ssh…Wouldn’t want to wake up the wax puppets, right ?", he teased you when you could barely stand up straight and he grinned knowingly before snaking an arm around your waist to hold you up. "Don't worry, darlin'. I got ya."

He then started leading you further into the church and your brain could barely comprehend what was happening to you as your legs started moving on their own. No..That's not...Something was wrong.

"You...liar.", you whispered as your eyelids fluttered—the glaring lights of the church rendering you blind—and Bo chuckled as he pulled you closer and opened the back door to the church.

"What ? Never said I was honest. Besides, you can’t give a kid a lollipop and just expect him not to suck on it to the heart. I want more. And you' gonna give me more."

You felt dizzy...What was happening to you ? You couldn't think straight and it seemed that Bo knew exactly what was going on as he settled you down on a bed and didn't hesitate before binding you to it.

"You can't imagine how long it took me to find you...How long I've dreamt of this moment...", he spoke to himself more than you—but you listened—and the pieces of the puzzle finally slot into place in your head. A vague moment of clarity.

He had planned it all...You realized. Not only this moment. He had planned it all...The flat tire, Lester coming to get you, the candy...He had planned the whole damn thing. And you had been so easily tricked.

Your eyes watered and you started crying beyond your control. You wished you had never come back to this damn town in the first place. Bo looked at you and his eyes softened for a moment.

"Ssh...sweetling. I'll make you feel good. Promise. Just, stay still while I see what I'm workin' with, yeah ?" He dropped to his knees and raised your skirt quickly, eager to show you just how good he could make you feel. He thought he would have to prepare you first, but smirked as he discovered something that made his lust for you go through the roof as he glanced up at you.

"…Damn, baby girl. You’re actually drippin' wet. If you wanted me that much, could have just said so in the garage. Would have saved us both sum' time.."

He wanted you to laugh. He didn't know why...He just wanted you to laugh like you used to. He hated the fact that he had to tie you up and make you stay still, but he couldn't trust you yet...And, he had waited long enough.

"You're the devil...", you told him with tears straining your cheek. You looked up at the ceiling and tried not to let him see how affected you were by all this. You loved Bo. You always had...But, you had genuinely no idea why he was doing all this.

He was the one who had asked you to leave in the first place...

"Thanks for coming to terms with that fact so fast, darlin’.", he replied sardonically with a small dark chuckle before suddenly burying his face between your thighs to lick a long strip along your inner thigh. "....You taste sweet, sister. Gotta give it to ya'."

You tried not to cry and think of the way his face was now staring at the one place you thought you'd get to keep intact until the day you died. And even though it was wrong, you liked the way his hands felt as he was pining your down on the table, you liked the way his lips felt against your skin, and most of all—you loved those deep blue eyes fixed on you as he was doing his best to remain focused. Your eyes blurred as you threw your head back at the sensation in your lower region. You didn’t know if he would be mad if you screamed—so you tried to remain silent and still as he kept working on you.

But then, he clicked his tongue in annoyance and stopped. "Ain’t you enjoying this ? Why ain’t you making any sound ? I know I ain’t the Michelangelo of suckin' pussy, but come on !"

For just a second, you were sure to have seen a flash of insecurity in his eyes and you wondered if he really thought you ought to scream to tell him how you felt ? But, it was clearly over as he tsskd dismissively.

"Ya know what ? Fine…I love a good challenge." He then proceeded to throw your legs over his shoulders and pull you infinitely closer as your hand desperately weaved itself into his hair and you pulled instinctively at the dark brown locks. Bo moaned as he started licking and sucking at your clit like a wild savage beast. Your eyes prickled with tears as you threw your head back once more—but still—you refused to give him the satisfaction of your screams. And then, you felt it—this irrepressible urge to just let go. And then, with one last pull on his hair, you came all over Bo's face who seemed surprised at first, but finally laughed.

"Damn, girl. You really missed me, didn't you ?" You looked down at Bo who seemed to be waiting for something as he watched you intently. You opened your mouth to say something—but were interrupted by Lester's voice in the church.

"Y/N. Bo. Are you there ?", he asked and Bo sighed loudly in annoyance before wiping your cum off his face. He ran a hand through his hair to get back a semblance of composure and then, he lowered your skirt and helped you up. You almost fell on him—but he caught you and smirked smugly.

"Don't fall for me too fast, darlin'. It's just the first day. We got plenty of days to go for that."

You eyes widened in horror at the realization that he intended to keep you. You tried to shake your head negatively and speak up—but the look he gave you shut you up immediately. You could only hold onto him for dear life as your whole body seemed to be shutting down. Did he mean to kill you ?

However, the door suddenly opened and Lester appeared. He looked at the both of you and frowned in disapproval at the position you were in.

"Y/N. You alright ?" You wanted to answer—but Bo squeezed your hip in warning and answered for you instead.

"She's perfectly fine. Just a little dizzy. Ambrose will do this to ya, isn't that right—sister ?", he said before looking down at you with a small playful smile and even though your body couldn't hold itself, you tried to push Bo away. But, it was like trying to get a stubborn bull to move—impossible and pointless. You finally looked up at Lester with tears in your eyes and opened your mouth—but no sound came out.

Lester understood and looked away—his lips pressed into a thin line.

Somehow, it felt ten times worse than if he had hit you.

He turned around and left without a word.

He couldn't help you...You were Bo's now.

Bo looked at him leave and like everything so far—seemed to have planned it all...He knew that Lester would be coming to check on you, and hadn't hesitated to break his own brother's heart...

That's when you knew.

Beauregard Bo Sinclair was the devil. Lucifer used to be beautiful before he fell...And Bo was the incarnation of this ethereal and terrible beauty. As if he could feel your eyes on him, he gave you a side glance and licked his lips significantly and he cackled at your bewildered expression.

"Come on, darlin'. Let's get you home."

Somehow, you doubted 'home' would be into the safety of your own.

A few days later :

For days on end, you had been kept in Bo's bedroom, praying for forgiveness to whatever god would want you now. Bo hadn't touched you since the day of you arrival, and you still maintained thus a small glimmer of hope that he would set you free eventually—when he would get bored.

As you had done so many nights over, you had your hands joined in front of you and praying harder than ever. But, Bo kept coming back to you...Bo and his eyes. Bo and his mouth. Bo and the temptation.

And, as if summoned by the thought of him alone, he came trudging in with a small disapproving scowl on his face. He leered at you as you didn't even look up at him when he came in.

"Hey, sis'. Are you gonna say sumthin' today—or your words are just for the Pa' in the sky ?", he asked and you glared at him.

You refused to talk, because you were mad at him.

He smirked at the spite in your gaze.

"Sumthin' to say, hun' ?", he asked—but was disappointed when you turned your eyes away and got back to your praying.

Oh...So, that's what you were going to play at, huh ? Playing deaf and dumb.

Fine.

If you weren't gonna talk to him, then he'd make you scream.

You yelped when he caught your legs and dragged you towards the bed to throw you on top of it. You tried to kick him, but he seemed amused rather than angry.

You dared give him an attitude—the silent treatment. He chuckled darkly...He was going to tame it outta you faster than any dog he ever had. You were going to be so good after this. He was going to make you his one and only slut for a lifetime...The thought alone made him dig his fingers into the flesh of your thighs and you couldn't help the little gasp that escaped your lips.

"Come on, darlin'. Talk to me. Pretty please ?" You glared at him and the pent-up frustration of suddenly becoming one of Bo's many conquests made you grow confident—unwisely so. You huffed a humorless laugh of disbelief.

"You stole my vertue. My future. My everything...And you want me to talk to you ?"

His eyes darkened perceptibly at your accusation before he took a handful of your hair and forced you to look at him when he spat harshly.

"Shut up. I stole nothin'. I just made you come, Y/N. Be grateful I wasn't in a selfish mood that day, or it could have been far worse."

He then all but growled at you before pressing his lips against yours and your eyes widened at the harsh way he attempted to force your mouth open—his available hand gripping your jaw with enough force to pop it open.

You wouldn't give him the satisfaction to beg though—no matter how much it hurt. He had taken enough from you already.

Bo was sure there would be a time when your arms would finally wrap around his neck and he would be able to finally get you to return the favor—but not today.

Instead, he got slapped so hard—he almost fell backwards. He glared up at you and was about to yell when he saw the tears in your eyes.

"Fuck you, Bo. I loved you, you son of a b—! I loved you and you...you...", you were at a loss for words. He had just threw your life away without a second thought. All of that for some stupid letter you had never received...

"Ya....Ya really mean that ?", he asked—sitting on his ankles with his legs spread and in different circumstances—the sight could have been taken as attractive...But, you were too mad to think about it and just sniffed and looked away.

"Get out, Bo.", you tried to tell him—but were taken aback when he pressed a tender kiss to your bare ankle.

"You have no idea...how much I wanted you to say those words. How much I...How much I dreamt of hearing them. All those nights...Alone. Dreaming you'd have say those damn words the night you left."

The pain in his eyes made you question everything you thought you knew about Bo. He was looking at you like he used to...like the little boy you loved used to.

"What was in that letter....Bo ?", you asked softly and slowly moved to the edge of the bed to look him in the eyes—no longer angry.

"You really don't know ?", he asked—surprised and confused. He had put it on your nightstand, right next to your bags. He had waited for an answer...For anything.

But you never gave him an answer.

"I was gonna ask you to marry me.", he disclosed and your eyes widened as your eyes watered.

"Oh Bo...I'm so sorry..."

He let out a humorless laugh.

"Yeah. Me too..."

You hesitated before sliding to the floor and gently wrapping your arms around him. He stilled for a second before finally burying his face in the crook of your neck and hugging you back. He hummed against your soft skin and couldn't help but smile at your familiar scent...Sweet pineapple. He took a deep breath and tightened his hold on you—bathing in your warmth. He was fucked up. There was no denying it. But, goddamn...He wished you could love him again.

Just for one night.

Just for one moment.

Just for a minute...

"Come on, sweet thin'. Gimme a kiss.", he told you—his voice almost whining as he pressed his nose against yours and tried to convince you by pulling you closer to him. He tried to steal another kiss from you—but you turned your face away.

No. He wouldn't trick you again.

But, your refusal wasn't received agreeably as his hold on you tightened and he insisted.

"Gimme a kiss I say."

At this point, you knew there was no point in arguing. You complied and he hummed appreciatively.

"Hmmm...Good girl."

However, he didn't expect you to bite down on his lip and stomp hard on his foot before sprinting for the door. You succeeded in opening it and running down the stairs faster than a coyote a night of full moon. You weren't getting caught. You had to get out of here.

You loved Bo, but the Bo you knew was dead—he had died the same day the whole town did. The front door was thankfully not locked, so you succeeded in running past the garden. But, you hadn't expected Bo to actually jump out the window and chase after you. You were bare foot and you knew the man had the stamina and the muscles of a beast. But, you would be caught dead before returning to that house and be locked up again.

However, you were tackled to the ground with such force—the air was momentarily knocks out of your lungs. You struggled underneath him—but it was useless.

"I give you one—only one—chance to make me believe you. Make me love you again. And you do this ? You’re another kind of b*tch, you know that ?!", he hissed through gritted teeth and you cried out.

"Let me go ! Please !"

He froze for a moment and you thought he'd at least consider it...But, he only hummed before leaning his front flush against your back to whisper in your ear.

"Hmmm…Beggin'. Now, that’s a new thing I might get used to pretty quickly. Beg me for more, darlin’. Come on. Beg, and I might give you what you need."

"Please. Please, Bo. Just…Please…Just let me go. I won't bother you. I'll go back to the covent. I'll spend the rest of my days there...Just...", you pleaded—but it seemed the mention of the covent only angered him further as he buried your face in the dirt.

"Shut up ! I'm tired of you whining about some dumb covent. Now, you gonna tell the sisters you ain't taking no damn vows and promise to stay with me. If I have to drive a mile to fuck you on their own goddamn dinner table right in front of them to make you understand, I will !"

He was so upset, he didn't notice when hot tears started running down his face. He was just so goddamn tired. Why won't you see ? Why won't you understand ? Your place was here. With him.

He turned you around swiftly for you to face him as his stormy blue eyes seemed to bore into yours.

"...Why won't you love me now ?", he asked with something emotional in his tone. He then lowered his head to hide his face from view and gripped you tighter than ever. He didn't want to let you go..not again..never again.

"Bo...", you called him softly—trying to calm him down. He was angry and you were afraid of what might happen if he was to stay so upset. You called his name again and when he finally looked up at you once more, you smiled and pressed a light kiss to his cheek. It was the best you could do—the best you could offer a man like him. It was one weak attempt to call him back to you, to reassure him. Because no matter what your told yourself—you still cared for him.

He hummed before closing his eyes and for a moment—you thought it was working. But then, he gripped your chin and hushed you when you started whimpering at the pain in your jaw.

"Tell me, ya really thought that would work on me, sister ? You gimme a kiss and that'd be the end of that ? A way to 'get Bo to stay happy'. Nah. Don't think so...You ain't getting away with it so easily."

He then pulled you up by the hair and started drag you back to the house—but you shook your head and grabbed his arm.

"Please, Bo. Please. No. Not again. I don't want to go back in there. Please."

He stopped dead in his tracks and sighed.

"Fine. We can stay here.", he indulged and your eyes widened in shock—but you should have know better than to hope. "Out in the open for everyone to watch and see.", he added with a small smirk.

"See what ?", you asked and Bo looked down at you with a malicious grin.

"See you pray of course..."

Your eyes widened at the request and you shook your head. No...Everything but that. No. He wouldn't..He couldn't...You lowered your eyes and closed them tightly. This was a nightmare. You had to wake up eventually...right ?

He tapped the side of your leg with the tip of your shoe and you were brought back to reality.

"Well ? Start praying, sister. Start praying to the only god who has power over your current life and death. Better pray hard. Your life depends on it..."

You took a deep breath before looking up at Bo who was looking at you expectantly. But, you then asked with a weak smile.

"Bo. Tell me...Did I ever do anything to deserve this ?"

His smile faltered for a second before he burst out laughing and wiped an imaginary tear from his left eye.

"Aww...You're just too cute, sweetheart..You think this is about you ? Nah, darlin'. It's all about me. Cause ya see...Every single time I tried to be nice to people, it'd come back to bite me in the ass. I take care of my sick parents ? I lose my parents. I take care of my town ? I lose my town. I take care of the love of my life ? I lose. AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN !", he seemed frustrated at the end and his knuckles turned white as his breathing started picking up significantly. He was exhausted and bad memories just kept coming back at the front of his mind like a bad horror movie...He then looked down at you with cold and merciless eyes.

"And to be honest ? I'm fuckin' tired of losin', sweetheart.", he admitted and then, he stood back up before patting his lap significantly. "So, get to it. Start prayin' and worshipping—because I'm the only one keeping you alive.", he told you and your breath hitched at the lack of all warmth or empathy in his gaze.

He was dead serious.

And you knew better than to disagree.

Your started fumbling with his belt as your trembling hands seemed unable to unbuckle his belt and Bo licked his lips. He didn't try to help you—reveling in the way your hands brushed against his crotch occasionally as you couldn't help but struggle with the belt buckle. He stared down at you and after few seconds, finally tutted playfully.

"You're making your god wait...Rude little doll, ain't ya ?", he teased.

Your face flushed different shades of red and you were scared you might end up dead if you took too much time...so, you decided to improvise. You didn't want to make him mad and zipped his fly open to start mouthing his cock through the fabric. He hadn't expected it and his eyes grew wide.

True. He had been expecting a blowjob, but he didn't thing you'd be this eager.

True. You didn't really have a choice...But, hey. He did think you'd use your hand instead of your mouth.

You knew that was a possibility, right ? No ? Well...Oops.

He smirked darkly at the sight of your spit-covered chin and realized—you must have actually seen porn before. Had to. You had gone straight for the target—no hesitation or big wide doe eyes fixed on him, waiting for him to explain. He bit the inside of his cheek at the realization and his eyes fluttered shut for a second.

Had you ever thought of him in all those years apart ? He hoped so...

"Always knew you'd be a natural. On your knees all day and spurting prayer over prayer...But, you’re just a little slut inside, huh ?" He eyed you with a knowing grin and then pulled you away from his still-clothed cock to effortlessly open the belt you had had so much trouble with before and let it fall to the ground before grabbing a fistful of your hair and getting rid of his boxers with the other. You had never actually seen one up close like this and couldn't help but feel shy all of a sudden. It was one thing to lick a piece of cloth, it was another to have the thing shoved down your throat...

Shit. Had you been a porn star in another life ? He'd have probably bought all of your VHS'...He threw his head back and let out a deep sigh as you kept sucking.

"~Yeah. That’s my girl…", he praised you when you started bobbing your head up and down and your eyes closed as you started focusing on the task at hand. And lord help him, he was actually starting to believe in heaven... "Ya know...There’s something about your face that I love. This why I didn’t glue those pretty little lips before. You’re a terrible tease, but I got the message pretty quickly. I saw it in your eyes. You were teasing me, weren’t you ? With all those innocent little glances and lovely little blushes you desperately tried to hide…The fuckers at the time fuckin’ dared to call you innocent in front of me."

He made sure to pull you further onto his cock until you were desperately gasping for air and he kept you there—watching as tears streamed down your face and you couldn’t even move your head. He tsskd mockingly before jeering. "If only they could see you now...Innocent…INNOCENT MY A** ! You're sucking dick like a true sex dream come to life."

You closed your eyes and tried not to let him know how much his words affected you. But, Bo seemed dead set on knocking some good hillbilly wisdom in you while you were desperate not to suffocate on him and his words.

"...Pretty girl from' big city. All to end up sucking...", he took a shaky breath. "...the worst guy possible in the...*another shaky breath*...worst town possible."

He sighed and grunted occasionally as you swirled your tongue a certain way. He didn't shoot his load in you—but because he would have been unable to stop otherwise. He turned his cock away from you and the white substance ended up on the grass. He sighed at the sudden change of temperature. Your mouth was so warm and the cold air hit his balls faster than if it had been Christman Eve.

"Come here.", he commanded and left no room for discussion as he started rolling your dress up. He was tired of waiting. He wanted your fucking blood, sweat and release on his cock and he'd have his damn wish.

"Please, Bo...Don't.", you tried to stop him—but it was futile. Bo pulled your back flush against him and clamped his hand over your mouth firmly.

You had ignored him for days without saying a word—and now, he couldn't seem to be able to shut you up.

"What ? You ain't ready for the main event yet ? Aww...Baby.", he faked feeling sorry for you—only to use his fingers to circle your clit.

"Promise ya. You soon will be..." He pressed a sloppy kiss against the skin of your shoulder while urging your orgasm by picking up the speed of his movements. He wanted to feel you come apart, right next to the wax statues. He'd send the covent a lovely letter with stains of your tears on the paper.

When you came, he bit down on your shoulder—hard—and relished in the small cry you let out.

He'd only allow you to worship one god from now on:

Beauregard fuckin' Bo Sinclair.

He suddenly retrieved his hand and wiped it on his pants before leading you outside of the main street. He then pushed you unceremoniously in his car and started driving out of Ambrose with a small smirk on his lips.

You were going for a ride...

The lost letter :

[ae-neon]

What's your favorite book?

In the ACOTAR series? None. They're all mostly bad in their own way. But probably TAR?

the best romance

peak Feyre

Moment Nesta became the best character by having the only natural character reveal/plot twist

peak Lucien

Amarantha has a better villain motivation (Clythia n Jurian) than KoH

best Fae (Alis, the bogge, the Attor, the winged summer Fae, the puca, the naga etc)

Everyone was at max potential

the cast chemistry was good cause Alis and Lucien weren't up Feyre's ass the second they met her even tho they knew or hoped she would end up with Tam, it built up naturally and individually

Favourite books in general? Idk but books I look back and remember enjoying:

Honourable mention is The Story of Old by Chelsea Starling, which I recently read for review. You can find my review on Goodreads

Patrick Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go (series)

I haven't reread it since I was a kid so I can't give a current, more updated review but it's about a rural planet colony where a virus killed all the women and made everyone's (including animals) thoughts audible and visible to one another, called Noise. The MC is Todd - the last boy born in the colony who's set to become a man around his 13th or 14th birthday when he discovers an impossible spot of silence: a girl.

(now being an adult, that sounds terrifying for that little girl but fortunately Patrick Ness doesn't take it down that route - the story is more of an action adventure)

It's written from the perspective of a child but it's not exactly a children's story, especially later books which tackle things like sexism and even genocide.

Ambrose Parry's The Way of All Flesh

I read about 2 years ago and really enjoyed.

It's historical fiction set in Edinburgh in 1847 at the dawn of modern medicine particularly around gynecology and anesthesia. With elements of a murder mystery as young women keep being found dead all around the city.

It follows Will, a poor young apprentice doctor to Dr Simpson, and Dr Simpson's housemaid, Sarah, whose gender limits her station despite how clever she is.

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

Unfortunately I'm not much of a fan of Sanderson after trying to read the Way of Kings but before that I read Warbreaker and I enjoyed it - though apparently most of his fans don't

The story follows two sisters, Vivenna - the oldest, set to inherit her kingdom - and Siri - sent to marry the terrifying God King of their enemy kingdom. Vivenna, usually so obidient, sets off to save her wild little sister.

The story also follows Lightsong, a reincarnated God bored with life and Vasher, a hobo Dilf wizard with a talking murderous sword.

The magic system is called Breath and is really interesting. Each human is born with one but you can give yours away or get more from others and the more you have the more you can do.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (book 1)

I'm a little hesitant to put this because I never like recommending horror or generally disturbing content even if I love consuming it - plus I don't know if I really liked the book even though I have reread it. I like the concepts.

The book follows a girl named Alex Stern who is a high school drop out but gets accepted into Yale to be part of a secret society centred around magic.

Ghosts in this world are called Grays and are generally harmless and invisible to most people even those who practice magic but Alex can not only see them but touch them. Unfortunately that means they can touch her too - something that has made her life very difficult.

We follow her through her 1st and 2nd semester as individual timelines to figure out what happened between her coming to the school and her mentor going missing.

I will say the book has major flaws in character development and use outside of the main 1 or 2. The villain reveal at the end was absolute garbage that has maybe the worst monologuing since Alis in acotar.

Trigger Warnings for the book should include gore, racism, rape - including gang rape and child rape, drug use, murder and someone being forced to eat human feces

[hauntedbestie]

Hide 'N Seek

Bo Sinclair/F!Reader

word count: 2.7k

summary: Bo gives you the chance to win your freedom. But what if you don't want it?

warnings: implied stockholm syndrome, references to self-harm, references to physical/mental torture/abuse and murder, im back on my bullshit

It was meant to be a game.

Hide and seek, but with a twist. The twist being that you were technically being held captive, and this little game was how you’d win your freedom. Bo would let you out, generously giving you an hour to run and hide somewhere and, should you make it to sundown without him catching you, he’d let you go. You weren’t stupid enough to believe that the man who incapacitated your friends so his brother could turn them into wax figures would actually let you go after what you’d seen, but the thought of getting to roam freely for a couple hours was very nice.

This would be the third round, your third attempt at besting Bo in his town. The first had lasted about an hour, he found you hiding behind his mother’s casket in the church but did give you the privilege of walking yourself back up to the house because he had something to tend to in town for Vincent. Not one to even try to betray his trust anymore, you went straight to the house and to his room and he found you there two hours later.

“Did ya eat?”

“No,” you’d murmured, looking up at him when he asks why. “You didn’t tell me I could get food. You just said to go back to the house.”

“Baby’s learnin’,” he had praised, leaning in to kiss your head. You do your best not to cringe at the contact, it was still very unfamiliar to have that kindness extended to you. “I like that.”

The second attempt lasted four hours. You’d guess he found you in the movie theater at around noon based on the sun’s positioning. It was then that you learned that Bo knew exactly where all the figures should be – since he’d counted your extra head in the fifth row on the left side. That time he didn’t send you home, instead keeping you by his side as he tended to basic maintenance around the town.  

“You really know where everyone is here?” you asked, watching as he screwed in the new lightbulb.

“Sure do. I’m the one that had to put ‘em there. Mama had a plan all sketched out, we’re just finishing it.” He sounded proud, and you crack a smile when he looks down at you from his perch on the ladder. He doesn’t smile back, but you know by his tone that he’s not upset with you. “I reckon you’re starting to get used to where everything is by now.”

“I’m not sure about that.” You really aren’t. There were places you’d seen a lot of, the church and the museum itself, that you probably did know the layout better than you should. The town as a whole, though? Not so much. That’s why Bo always won the game.

And here you were on your third attempt, listening to Bo as he talked to Vincent and Lester. Something about staying out of your way today, acting like you weren’t even there if they saw you because you were allowed to run around today. But this was your time, and you move back to Bo’s bedroom and climb out the back window – intentionally pushing off the wall to avoid the trap that you knew was in the bushes beneath the window. Lessons learned the hard way.

The game had started at dawn, technically, and now it was 6:45am. The sun was still working it’s way into the sky, but you still had some darkness to work with as you made your way to your chosen hiding spot this month. You’d thought about it over the last couple weeks, and now you knew what Bo expected of you. He was going to look low, in places that were easy for you to get in and out of – he was not going to look up.

There was one house that you knew had a ladder behind it and a chimney you could hide behind should you need it. You were going up hang out up there until you couldn’t, then when the sun set, you were going to get out of here. That was the deal that Bo made with you. And then you’d head for-

Oh, fuck, where could you go? You’d been in Ambrose for…how long had it been? At least three months where you’d been kept in the house – Bo’s room specifically – but there was a while where you were in the basement of the gas station at the start of your stay. How long was that? Was anybody still looking for you? Did your family think you were dead? Had it been so long that they’d given up?

The thought had you stopping midway up the ladder, uncertain that winning this game would even be worth it if everyone thought you were dead. Life here wasn’t so bad these days; Bo was nicer to you now that you stopped crying and trying to escape so much, Vincent would let you watch him work (he’d even started to let you work with his wax to make your own art), and Lester, well, you didn’t get a lot of time with Lester but he always gave you extra snacks and that was enough.

“Smart girl got a head start.” Bo’s voice nearby has you startled, and you freeze on the ladder to avoid making any unnecessary noises. Based on sound, it seemed like he’d be heading towards the church, so you give it a moment before slowly continuing up the ladder. You had dressed light, ready to move at a moment’s notice and used sunscreen to prepare for sun exposure. You were more than just smart, and you bask in that information as you lay back on the roof.

The only issue with this plan was that, if it worked, you were about to be bored as hell.

If the plan was going to work, you’d have to keep still unless you absolutely had to move, since you did not want to draw any attention to your little rooftop. You didn’t have any sort of mp3 player or game to play, all you could really do is watch the clouds and listen to Bo try to stay quiet as he cussed his way through town trying to find you.

The time gives you the chance to really think about how long you’d been there. You knew for certain at least three months, that part was easy. It had been wintertime when you’d watched your boyfriend at the time be rendered immobile by a well aimed knife to the spine; the plan was for your group to travel for a basketball game, college sports had been a big deal to your boyfriend, and it had been his birthday weekend. The marks on your arms that you’d given yourself to keep track of the days in the gas station basement had long since healed, thanks to Vincent’s caring touch, so the count you had of the early days was gone. You did know that it was October now, thanks to the calendar kept in the house, and it was….January (you think) when you’d left for that weekend trip. Nine months, give or take a week or two, which was a long time to be missing.

Nine months of fear, pain, tears, and hunger; but there’d also been light in the darkness. Life in Ambrose was a life where you had very few responsibilities. You did laundry and stayed out of the way, that was pretty much it. Sometimes the brothers would hurt themselves in their work, and you’d tend to those injuries if the opportunity presented itself, but that wasn’t much of a responsibility. The care was returned; Vincent’s care over your injuries, both the ones you’d inflicted upon yourself and were inflicted upon you in your captivity, Lester making sure you ate enough, and Bo sleeping in the living room chair for three weeks after moving you into his bedroom in the house. You’d been given your own bed in the large room but clearly, he was aware that you weren’t comfortable sharing a space like that with him at that point. Obviously, the man cared enough about you that he’d do that, and that was enough for you right now.

The world outside might have forgotten about you, but you knew the brothers here wouldn’t.

You don’t even register how long you’d been on the roof until it starts to get cold. You must’ve fallen asleep at some point, since the sun is now setting, and you decide that if Bo hadn’t found you yet, he likely wouldn’t. Which meant that you won, but was getting out really a prize if you had nowhere to go?

“Oh you’re fuckin’ kidding,” you hear Bo from down below, and turn your head to see him looking up at you from the street.

“Hey,” you greet, turning so your legs dangled off the edge of the roof. “Spend all day looking?

“Fuckin’ everywhere, and you were up there this whole time?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” you confirm, watching as he moves out of your line of sight towards the house. It’s only a couple moments before he’s sitting on the roof beside you, a quiet settling between you since you both know what it means now that you’d won. “I expected that you’d be looking anywhere but up.”

“People do tend to go low when they hide. You’ve been paying attention.” The praise is rare, and to an extent you hate that you grow warm at his words. Bo meant what he said when he was giving compliments, though, that’s why the words meant so much. “Where do you wanna go? I’ll take you there, give you money for a bus ticket, whatever you want.”

The moment of truth, and you shrug as the daylight continues to fade into dark. The stars were becoming visible, and you look up at them as you try to prolong your response. Because you didn’t know, and you didn’t want to make any decision like that. It was too much to think of; the idea that your family had given up, that everyone you knew before thought you were dead. Maybe it was better that way?

“Well?” he prompts, and you look over at him to see that he’d taken his hat off and was holding it tightly in his hand.

“I’d like to stay here, with you, if that’s okay?”

That wasn’t a question either of you had expected to come out of your mouth, but you knew deep down it was what you wanted. Why try to become someone else somewhere else, declare yourself alive again and have to answer questions you didn’t want to answer? Put the Sinclair brothers in danger when you really didn’t want to? Life would be easier if you stayed here; better, even, you were sure of it.

First he nods, and you take the opportunity to scoot closer so you can rest your head on his arm. He tenses at the contact but relaxes quickly, and you crack a smile when you feel his hand on your back. Bo was….abrasive at worst these days and you found a weird brand of comfort in him letting you stay and be so close to him without him explicitly initiating.

“Yeah, sweetheart, you can stay here with me.” The verbal confirmation has you relaxing, and your eyes close when you feel a hesitant kiss be pressed to your head. Were you sure what was happening here? Not at all. But in this moment where you’d just denied your opportunity to go back to the life you once had to keep the life you have now, you needed the comfort and were grateful that Bo was allowing the close proximity. “That’ll make Vincent happy. He really likes you.”

“Does it make you happy?”

This time he pauses, but you don’t move to look up at him. You don’t want to see the uncertainty in his features or look him in the eye should he lie to you.

“I chose you all those months ago, to have you finally choose me is a blessing.”

“Then why give me the chance to leave?”

“Because you’re not a pet. At first it was kinda like that, yeah, but then it became more than that.” You still weren’t proficient at translating Bo-speak, since the man kept anything that was vaguely reminiscent of a “feeling” close to his chest unless he was so mad that he snapped, but you supposed that he was saying that he cared about you. The fingers on your back begin to gently tap, and you look up at him finally to see him looking at you. “Look, I care, and I want you to be happy. I just have a fucked up way of showing it, according to Lester.”

“It is a bit fucked, yeah,” you agree, letting out a small laugh when he rolled his eyes. “But I’ve come to care about you too, Bo. Vincent and Lester, too, but you’re my favorite - don’t tell them.”

“I’ll be sure to keep that nugget of knowledge between us, sweetheart.” The assurance has you smiling, but he looks like he has more to say so you keep your gaze on him as he cracks a small smile of his own. “But Mama always said that good things come to those who wait, and also something about God sending angels in different forms, and I think I got both of those in you. Just needed you to actually want to be here.”

“I like playing this game, but we’re going to have to figure out different prizes for winning since I don’t want to be anywhere but here.”

“You think you’re going to keep winning?”

“Plenty of hiding spots here. You just have never had to think about it.”

He nods at that, and you take a moment to rest in the fact that you’d never really just sat and talked to Bo. Small couple minute conversations while he was working on something and you watched, or short questions that didn’t require lengthy answers or follow up from him were the norm, not sitting side by side chatting like this. You hoped there was more of this now that you weren’t going anywhere, since changing your mind about staying wasn’t on your agenda.

“I’m heading out to town tomorrow; you’re welcome to join if you want.”

“I’d like that, Bo,” you murmur, feeling him relax a bit more. This was nice, surprisingly comfortable given the circumstances that brought you to him and the events of the past nine months, but you weren’t going to question anything about it. You knew better. Questions would destroy your outlook on the situation. Bo cared about you, and you cared about him. Perfect world, no need to question it. “Thanks for not killing me after I punched you in the face that one time.”

“It was one helluva punch, that’s for sure.” The compliment has you smiling, your eyes closing as he leaned in again and the familiar feeling of his kiss on your forehead has you sighing. “Told you that you’d learn to like me.”

You weren’t going to tell him that ship had sailed over a month ago. You don’t have a chance to, as Lester is calling out for Bo to see if you’d been found yet. Bo stands, and you look up at him as you realize the moment is over now and he’s putting his hat on so he can go be an elder brother.

“You can stay out here as long as you like. House’ll be unlocked, I think I’ll have to make dinner since I doubt those two did. Hopeless, both of ‘em.”

You could stay out, but instead you stand while volunteering to make dinner if it was needed. Bo hated cooking, and was terrible at it, and you’d had enough time to yourself on that rooftop for one day. So he heads down the ladder first, watching closely as you make your way down after him, his hand settling on your back for added support when you were in reach and staying there until you were on solid ground. That warmth leaves your back, but your hand does brush against his multiple times on your way back up to the house as Bo tells you about how his supply runs usually went to prepare you to tag along on tomorrow’s run.

[stationrats]

Ambrose sat in the prison. His tears had slowed and his sniffles were far and few between. But the dread had stayed. They were still trapped, much more literally now.

“What am I going to do?? What am I going to do??” Ambrose whispered, head pressed against their knees.

He felt a scorching hand touch his shoulder. He jolted. Ramus pulled his hand back. It was just Ramus.

“Hey Ramus.” Ambrose grumbled. Ramus did a small flip in the air.

“Hey, new guy. Um, I’m sorry you got framed for murdering my dad.” Ramus sounded genuinely ashamed. “Um… I know you didn’t do it. But I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“If I what?” Ambrose asked. Their eyes flicked towards Oast, who was once again in charge of guarding Ambrose. If Oast could hear, xe kept it to xemself.

“If you killed dad.” The ghost clasped his hands together. “He didn’t like me very much. He was a bad dad. I saw how Renin looked after Oast and Fiel, and Albata wasn’t like that at all.”

Any positive thoughts towards Renin were currently dead to Ambrose. He grunted. Ambrose turned his head away from Ramus.

“Hey, I really am sorry!” Ramus repeated, floating to Ambrose’s other side. The ghost’s eyes were round. “I want to help you, ok? Churyn is being comforted by mommy, and I heard you got hurt, so I came as soon as I could.”

The tip of Ambrose’s tail had ripped off. Darling had bandaged it, and apologized profusely to Ambrose. Wick wasn’t allowed near Ambrose. None of the witnesses were. There was just Ambrose in the rat trap with Oast making sure they didn’t escape.

He could still hear preparations for the trial. That was almost as bad as falling and injuring his tail. Hearing the excitement made Ambrose feel sick. Any influence they had was gone now.

“Influence.” Ambrose repeated. “Hey, that’s it!”

“That’s what?” Ramus asked.

“You’re a ghost. You can influence things! You can go and spy! Or… or pass a message to Wick!” They stood up, and ran to stand at the edge of the cage. Oast tightened his grip on the pole in his hands, but made no move to stop Ambrose.

Ambrose wrapped his hands around the cage’s wires, and stuck his nose out between two bars. Their eyes searched for Wick.

“There. She’s gathering up my drawing.” Ambrose pointed. With a small rush of air, Ramus floated out of the cage slightly. “Go over there and find out what’s going on!”

--

Wick sniffed loudly. She had been scolded for encouraging the murderer to sneak around. But she still had to do her scribe duties. Thus she was picking up the fallen pages.

As she reached for Ambrose’s self portrait, a small wind picked it up. She took a step forward and tried to grab it. The wind moved it slightly out of reach again. Wick continued to try to grab the page, but it moved again and again, until it came to rest where Ambrose had fallen.

She felt a tug from the pile of pages in her arms. Another page was moving on its own. She pulled it out of the stack. It was the drawing of herself. She held it out, and felt the now familiar jerk take the page from her. Her eyes widened.

“Ambrose? Are you doing this?” She asked quietly. The papers gave no answer. Abandoning her task, she quickly spread out the other drawings.

“If this isn’t just the wind,” she said, confidence growing, “then show me the real killer.”

After a long moment, the doodle of Tisane wrinkled. Wick brightened. “Woah! So you can like, make yourself invisible and stuff? Why didn’t you tell me! Do you know how many pranks we can pull off now?”

She was so excited she didn’t even notice the wind shuffling through the papers, trying to find a drawing of himself. Finally, it pulled itself out of the others, and flicked it onto Wick’s foot.

Understanding finally dawned on her.

[little-lemon-lattes]

The Scheme

🌛Zelda Spellman x fem! reader

—Word count: 1.9k

— Triggers: Mention of murder and burning in a non-violent context

— Summary: We have part 2 to The Set Up! You and Zelda spend a blissful day together since kissing the night before, and make the most of being together before the mortuary fills with life- and typical Spellman scheming- again!

You were on Cloud-fucking-9.

The previous evening, you and Zelda had kissed. It had been truly extraordinary, even better than the few times you had allowed your mind to indulge in that kind of imagery concerning her. You had never felt that good with anyone before; well, minding that you had neither felt for anyone like that of which you had been trying to cover for the astonishing woman.

She currently lay in the grass next to you, cheek resting tentatively on your belly, as you both just watched each other in comfortable silence. Gosh, kissing Zelda had felt SO good that it had been hard to stop at just one. Like now. Her stunningly bright and beautiful green eyes were boring into yours, but you really couldn’t tell if she was trying to send you a signal or was just unwittingly that gorgeous on the daily. Probably the latter. You also had to remind yourself that, EVEN though you two already lived under the same roof, you would take things one step at a time together. The last 24 hours with Zelda had been like a dream, and the Spellman mortuary had a new air to it now that you knew where you stood.

That morning, you had woken just before dawn (which was much earlier than you preferred), likely still on a high from the feel of Zelda’s lips. Rather than lay there attempting to force yourself back to sleep, you rose from your pillow. Perhaps it was your always-lingering insecurity pulling some strings, but it suddenly seemed desperately important to you- then and there at 4:56am- that you find a way of proving to Zelda that she hadn’t made the wrong choice opening up to you the night before. Just one more bonus of Hilda’s disappearance that weekend being that the kitchen was inevitably free, within a few minutes you had decided to make a spot of breakfast to share. You would never admit it out loud, but you were also buzzing to showcase your culinary ability; of which had been somewhat hindered by the unspoken acknowledgement that Hilda was the kitchen witch of the house.

With that, you were out of bed and clothed in a black turtleneck and mom jeans, as you put the finishing touches on a French braid: all by 5:15. THe next two hours flew by as you whipped up black coffee, almond cake, black sausage, eggs, salmon, bagels, mushroom, and tomato. You were just laying out bloody-fleshed plums and yoghurt when you heard gentle footsteps on the landing above you. Smiling softly, you stopped to admire as the woman padded down the stairs, wrapped in a silky black robe and wiping bits of sleep from her eyes. She stopped dead as she spotted the food on the table, hand still raised to her eye.

“Surprise...?” you peeped.

Zelda’s hand flopped to her side as she tilted her head adorably, treating you to a giddy smile. And you were hopeless to try not to smile right back. That there was enough to have made the last two hours worth it. “

“What’s all this, y/n?”

“I, uh... breakfast?”

Zelda couldn’t help smiling a little more at the cute way you had made it seem like a question. “I see that,” she laughed, “but why?”

You forced an expression of mock pain onto your face.

“I am hurt, Spellman, hurt! Does there have to be a reason?”

All she did was raise her eyebrows in disbelief. You supposed it was probably best to build any chance you had together on honesty.

“Okay, FINE. I just... wanted to show you that last night wasn’t a mistake, in case you were having any doubts.”

Zelda trotted, cat-like, down from her post against the railing, and came to rest just half a metre in front of you.

“Why, there was absolutely nothing of the sort. I hardly slept a wink all night; your lips have something of a memorable feel to them, if I am honest.”

And this time, it was her that closed the space between you, snaking her arms around your waist to pull you closer. One long peck later, the bubblegum-pink shade of your cheeks matched hers in perfect unison, as if in competition.

Breakfast was sweet and long, spent thigh to thigh next to each other, chatting about all the things you had been too afraid to ask each other until that point.

The rest of the day was passed laying next to one another in the winter sunshine, beneath an age-old willow tree. After what felt like just minutes since you had arrived (but had really been hours), you pointed to the sky with the hand that wasn’t clasping Zelda’s.

“Look, the sun!”

You received a lazy “hmmm” in response. Twisting to face her on your left, you couldn’t fight your sigh of content. The High Priestess was laying with her eyes closed in utter bliss, the final rays of Sunday’s sunshine dancing across those glorious lashes.

“It’s setting, Zelda. Everyone will be back soon.” you murmured to her. It was as if you had thrown a bucket of ice over her. Cloud 9 disappeared with the snapping open of her eyes. The soft expression that had occupied her visage all day visibly hardened into her more familiar, stoic one. She leapt to her feet, snatching up the open novel beside her and swinging out her hand to you with force. Time and Space closed in around you the moment you took it, and, the next thing you knew, the two of you were outside the mortuary once more.

You turned to her sharply.

“What was that about?” you demanded. Standing silent for a moment, Zelda’s ears visibly pricked. After a few more moments, she seemed appeased, and swivelled to you. Her shoulders were tense, and you took note of her fingernails digging into her palm.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I didn’t mean to be so abrupt. I just... I am enthused about where you and I are headed, y/n, and I’m terrified that others may not share my enthusiasm. I want to enjoy things as they are at present for a while longer, before having to think about who needs to be involved in our business.”

It was understandable, you supposed, and admittedly: there was a certain appeal to keeping things 007-style, like that fantastic mortal film. You relaxed a bit, and instantly felt awful for raising your voice at her.

You reached for the woman’s shoulder.

“You’re right, Zelds. I understand.”

She looked unconvinced.

“Are you sure? You have every right to want to murder me right now, if you so wished. Although, only if you were to bury me in the Cain pit...” she added as an afterthought.

You had to giggle at that one.

“You’re safe for now, Zelda,” you teased, “now, come on! I need to find a good hiding spot for scaring the BANSHEES out of them when they get back!”

Hilda, Sabrina, and Ambrose literally stomped their feet in sheer disappointment when they arrived back at the house and hadn’t caught the pair of you locked in some form of intimate embrace.

“Aw man! What will I tell my friends?! I had Roz totally excited about y/n finally getting some action... Like, she seriously admitted that she had this big crush on her when she first met her; whiiiiich definitely earned a few looks from Harvey, to say the least. The take-away from it all is that we now know exactly how fragile that guy’s ego is, YIKES, is all I can say.”

All the while, Ambrose was muttering a consistent string of “fuck”s under his breath, and Hilda was deciding whether to scald Sabrina’s ass to Hades and back.

“Sabrina!” her aunt admonished in disbelief, “how could you be so careless?! If any of this gets back to your aunt Zelda, we should consider ourselves excommunicated from her presence for good!”  

All of them fought a cringe. Sabrina looked a bit sheepish.

Hilda turned to Ambrose.

“And what about you, mister? What’s with the constant profanities?”

Ambrose took a step back from his aunt, nobody was sure whether consciously or not. “Erm...hm. Yes. Well. I-” his sputtering was resembling a car trying to start up. Ambrose’s eyes suddenly seemed unable to reach past the witches’ knees.

  “-um. Damn. Hecate, yes, I have... just lost a particularly large sum of money to one Dorian Gray.”

Hilda’s eyes were ready to pop out of her head.   “I was so unequivocally certain that our plan would work! Now where I am supposed to come up with $1000?!”

He was a little manic. The only one of the three who seemed somewhat happy about Ambrose’s situation was Sabrina, sticking a finger at him. “HA! Now that makes what I did so much better!”

Her plum-coloured lips parted with glee, and without warning, her and her travel bag had disappeared. Ambrose made a furious mental note to pour formaldehyde in her evening tea for leaving him here alone. When he had finally built up the courage to look his otherwise cheery aunt in the eyes again, a flash of fear struck him at the murderous look in hers. A low growl exited her throat.

“Well,” she snapped, “I suppose there will be no more silly little attempts on our part to play Cupid.”

As quickly as it had started, her anger dissipated, and was replaced by a certain sadness. Her mouth raised just a fraction, into a tired little smile.

“ ’just thought that Zelds could do with something nice for once. We failed. It didn’t work.”

With that, she picked up her carpet bag and shuffled off up the stairs. Ambrose watched her go, now a lone silhouette in the entrance of their home.

Or so he thought. You waited until Ambrose had moodily trudged down to the embalming room before emerging from your spot in the broom closet. Sniffling a little from all the dust- those things hadn’t been flown for years, SO old fashioned- you felt a mix of emotion at what you had just heard. You hadn’t intended on becoming an audience to some type of scheme, and especially not one of which involved you.

At first, there was embarrassment. You hadn’t realised that your feelings were apparently so obvious! Paired with the fact that Zelda’s must have been too in order to warrant such a matchmaking scheme; along with that you had truly thought that you had done a superb job at keeping it all under wraps, you were left feeling a bit stupid. But then came the funny side of it all, imagining Hilda, Ambrose, and Sabrina sneaking about like the Pink Panther and holding secret meetings about your love life. And finally came the warmth, the realisation of exactly how much the Spellmans had grown to care for you- so much that they trusted you to love Zelda as much as they did.

The whole situation was entirely too much of an opportunity to just leave alone. Grinning with total delight and schemes cooking of your own, you rematerialised in Zelda’s study at the Academy. The loud CRACK that accompanied that particular piece of magic made the woman flinch. Her brow crinkled at the sight of you in front of her great oaken desk. She was a little taken aback, and (it delighted you even more) flustered to see you there.

“Y/n?”

“Zelda. I NEED to tell you what I just heard!”

A game was now afoot.

And your opponents weren’t finished yet either.

[metinthehallway]

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Hello! Here is a simple little 3.5k fic! I thank @goldenbluesuit for hosting this spectacular fic challenge! I love what I've read so far and I can’t wait to keep reading. Also, thank you to @lilacobscure and @arrogantstyles for beta-ing and just being...awesome. I hope you all like it. :) 

Warnings: mention of the word bloke from a non-Brit

Annie has had it. She’s holding two of her fluffiest pillows against both of her ears and has her white noise machine droning on at full volume. And she can still hear the sultry bass of Andy Williams singing his little heart out. She can hear him as clear as day, as if he were performing his very own live concert in the corner of her bedroom. Don’t even get her started on the Christmas lights. Annie had actually gone out and bought an eye mask in order to sleep, as her windows faced the neighbors front yard where Annie’s neighbor, apparently, was the sole reason their local supermarket was sold out of blow up decorations and string lights. 

Harry Styles didn’t even have a lot of real estate to work with in terms of space. But he really made every centimeter count. One morning mid-November, whilst getting her mail, Annie counted about fourteen deflated pop-up corpses staked to the frozen ground, multiple candy canes lining his driveway that were about half the size of her, and masses of tangled lights strung up across every visible square inch of his home. If that wasn’t enough, he had a carefully crafted playlist he turned on every night at eight p.m. sharp that was approximately three hours and forty-nine minutes long before it looped back to the beginning song. She thought, fleetingly, that she should invest in ear plugs.

Annie prides herself on being a patient and understanding person. The only reason why she hasn’t held a covert operation at three in the morning to mercilessly stab a hole in each blow-up, or cut every single criss-crossed wire, or even ambush her neighbor while he walks out his front door in nothing but a fuzzy pink robe and no shoes, demonstrating that universal, oh shit the ground is cold, oh shit, oh shit, jerking walk, is because he only recently moved in next door. She was not about to be the one to ask him to maybe take it easy on the city’s power source, that she also needs electricity for her home, and also how do you fall asleep with this godforsaken music?

Annie is not prideful in this moment. All it takes for her to snap is hearing, “It’s the hap-happiest season of all,” for the forty-fifth time. With a loud groan, she tears off her beautiful, beautiful down comforter and stomps into her shoes, scaring Cindy, her sleeping Persian cat, off the bed. It’s two thirty-six in the morning, she realizes in a far off thought that doesn’t seem to make it to the forefront of her brain, and makes her way over to Harry’s front door. She has the immature urge to punch a smiling Santa sat atop a sleigh filled with presents as she passes it. All the lights are off in his house and Annie doesn’t feel a bit of remorse as she raises a half-asleep arm and slams it against the sturdy oak door of Harry’s house. For a full minute, it’s silent and there appears to be no movement from behind the door. A sliver of apprehension begins to worm its way into Annie’s bones. 

There’s a better way to do this, Annie. Like, in daylight, during normal people hours. 

She starts to turn on her heel, continuing her internal chastising and also external chastising, muttering to herself like a lunatic, when she hears the tell-tale creak behind her and a porch light flickering to life. Annie stands there, her right hand over her eyes, shielding them from the harsh yellow rays. She can make out Harry’s figure, dressed in flannel pajama pants that look like they were previously crumpled on his bedroom floor, a white T-shirt on backwards and inside out, and his signature pink fuzzy robe. His hair sticks up hazardously, sort of like a halo illuminated by the bulb behind him. His eyes are puffy, brows furrowed together and indenting a line in the center of his forehead. Lips as pink as a rose purse together as nostrils flare.

“Is there something I might be able to help you with?” Harry asks, a slight lilt to his gravelly voice. It’s a polite enough question, however it holds an air of carefully restrained annoyance. For a moment, Annie thinks she would be annoyed as well if someone pounded at her front door in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning. She quickly dismisses the thought, actually raising her hand in the air and waving it off as if it was a tangible thing. Harry raises one eyebrow. 

“Good evening, well- morning, my name is Annie. I live next door, I’m twenty-two Ambrose Ave,” Annie starts. She doesn’t know why she announces her house number. She watches his eyes flick to his right where an engraved twenty-four lies, and back to hers. Annie shakes her head slightly before launching into a speech she never prepared.

“I’m here because I think the way you decorate is rude. Do you think, at all, of your neighbors? How do you fall asleep? Do you even have a job?! I never see you leave your house! Not that I’m keeping tabs, I’m just genuinely worried for your electric bill,” she continues, pausing to take a breath. “I have not had a single good nights rest since you started all of this, back in November. I have never hated the sound of Andy Williams’ voice more deeply than I do this holiday season.”

“Excuse me—,”

“Ah-ah! I’m not done, sir. Some of us are employed and have to work at eight a.m., some of us have cats that wake us up in the ass-crack of dawn anyway with their screeches and need all the sleep we can get. Do you know I had to buy a sleep mask because of you? Because of,” she pauses, a red rotating light from a candy cane passing over her face ominously as she turns around and gestures wildly to the commotion around her, “all this?”

“Can I just say—,”

“And the music. Are you eighty years old? The least you could do with this god-awful playlist is add some Mariah Carey, some Buble; even Ariana Grande has some sick Christmas tunes. The ones you chose haven’t been remastered since nineteen thirty-eight,” she finishes, eyes a little too wide, hair disheveled and falling in her face. Her hands are shaking and her heart is beating entirely too fast. Confrontation has never been Annie’s strong suit, evident of the lack of response from Harry as she cuts him off throughout the duration of her mini rant. He just peers back at her, face as still as stone as an uncomfortable silence falls between them. Frosty the Snowman rears its nasty head and Annie finds herself slowly closing her eyes and clenching her fists.

The second Annie starts to open her eyes, she hears the light closing of Harry’s front door and two locks click into place. She stands there, mouth slightly open as the early December chill works its way into her bones. She stares ahead of her and a murderous look takes over her face, cheeks red with the winter wind, lips chapped and tears starting to form on her lash line from the cold.

“What a fucking prick,” Annie mutters to herself. He can’t even respond to her? How childish. She turns around slowly, walking back through the winter wonderland, feeling defeated. She didn’t know what she expected to feel after finally expressing her thoughts, but she knew defeated was not it. 

As she crosses the threshold into her home, she thinks, maybe I could’ve handled that better. Annie prides herself on her patience. She was not patient that night.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Over the course of the month, Annie and Harry bump into each other way more than either of them would like. Once, when the mailman dropped off her mother’s monthly care package to Harry’s house, another when Annie had to begrudgingly ask to borrow his shovel when she found her car snowed in one early morning and a broken handle on her own. 

They’ve even begun to see each other in the aisles of their local supermarket. Annie enters the store, unsuspecting and looking for ingredients to make her world renowned charcuterie boards for a work fundraiser. She stops in her tracks and almost drops her jar of green olives when she sees a familiar head of frizzy brown hair. 

Harry is hyper-focused, reading the back of a spray cheese can. Annie tries to sneak by him and grab a box of herb filled crackers. Tries. She is unsuccessful, however, when her purse strap catches on a display and yanks her arm backwards, making her lose grip of the glass jar. Everything seems to happen in slow motion, as she watches the jar sail past Harry and hit the ground, glass exploding all over his shoes. The chattering happening around her ceases, as all of the blood in her body travels to her face. 

“Clean up in aisle four,” deadpans a nearby worker dressed in a horrid shade of neon green. He sighs heavily, murmuring under his breath that he doesn’t get paid nearly enough to be picking up all of these olives. 

Annie is mortified. She is unable to tear her focus away from Harry’s soaked suede shoes.  It’s only when he clears his throat and shifts his feet that she raises her head.

“I see… that you’ve really got a vendetta against me,” Harry scoffs, eyes trained on his feet, where the olive juice has to be seeping into his socks. No one likes wet socks. 

“That was completely on accident! I swear! Why is that display sticking three feet into the aisle anyway? That has to be a a safety violation,” Annie pushes out in a rush. There doesn’t seem to be enough air for her lungs in this store. Especially not with Harry now looking intensely at her, almost like he could see right through her. She folds under his gaze.

“It’s okay. I didn’t like these shoes much, to be fair,” Harry shrugs. 

“Really?”

“No,” Harry says. 

“Oh. Well, I can buy you a new pair. How much did you pay for those?” Annie asks, pulling out her wallet.

Harry raises a single eyebrow, the left corner of his mouth turning up and a dimple appearing out of thin air. 

“Too much. Really, it’s fine. The juice is translucent enough. I’ll just use them as house slippers,” he says. He opens his mouth to continue, but is interrupted by the loud squeaking of a bucket skidding across the floor. The neon green worker returns, a dingy looking mop in hand and a frown on his face. His free hand makes the shoo motion to Harry, starting to swipe at the floor, completely ignoring the glass scratching the linoleum that’s mixed in with the olives.

“Do you want any help?” Annie offers, stepping forward to at least pick up the larger shards scattered across the floor. The worker, whose name tag reads Roger, holds up a single pointer finger in her direction and shakes his head. Annie takes the hint, while Harry just shifts his gaze between Roger and the mess on the tiles, mouth somewhat agape. She nudges his shoulder with her own and gestures with her head for them to leave the aisle. 

Annie makes her way up to self-checkout, Harry following suit. They ring their items up in silence next to each other. They find themselves walking through the front door together, and it’s only when they’re outside in the sunshine that Harry lets out the deepest belly laugh Annie has ever heard. 

“Oh my god, my toes are so wet,” Harry says in between breaths. “Did you see the way that bloke’s vein was popping out of his neck? I thought he was about to commit second degree murder right in the condiment aisle.”

Annie’s heartbeat starts to pick up and she begins to laugh along with him. Tears form in both of their eyes and they sparkle in the cold afternoon sunlight. 

“I feel so bad! I don’t even like olives. They were just for my stupid charcuterie boards,” Annie says, laughter dying down. She sighs, wiping at her cheeks. She looks up, meeting Harry’s eyes. He looks down at her, smile fading slowly but his face still holding traces of warmth. 

“Well, I should be heading home. See you soon,” Harry bids his goodbye. Annie nods her head in his direction and turns, palming her keys and unlocking her car across the parking lot with a chirp. She unloads her groceries into the trunk and slides into the drivers seat, thinking for a brief moment about the shape of Harry’s smile. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The snow outside is falling. And it’s falling hard. So heavy and consistent that the power lines are drooping underneath the weight and the electricity in Annie’s house is flickering in and out. It’s Christmas Eve and all she wants to do is sleep the night away, then sleep the morning away, then sleep the weekend away. She draws back a curtain and peers at Harry’s lawn, the usual eyesore dark and covered in a blanket of sparkling white snow.

A sharp crack and the sound of something large tumbling to the ground close to Annie’s house makes both her and Cindy jump, eyes alert and tail all puffed out. She goes to open her front door to investigate and sees Cindy dart between her legs a second too late, a gray blur running into the stormy night.

“CINDY!” Annie yells, voice carrying eerily across the empty street. She takes off after the small cat, wearing only her pajamas and a pair of worn slippers. Annie loses her immediately in the snowfall. While outside, she sees the huge tree limb that fell onto Harry’s front yard, covering a third of his decorations, deeming a good chunk of them broken. She wonders for a short second why he hasn’t come out to check on the noise. 

Annie’s heart starts to race as she tries to get a rein on her growing panic. Cindy is a strictly indoor cat, only having been outside for vet visits. She thinks of what would bring her cat back home, yelling her name sweetly and kissing her teeth loudly. She starts to walk towards the tree line, snapping her fingers and chattering her teeth. 

“Annie?” She hears her name being called out from behind her. She throws her head over her shoulder and locks eyes with Harry, standing there in his infamous robe. He’s got his face turned away from the harsh wind and his face is scrunched up in confusion. “What on Earth are you doing out here?! Are you mental?” 

“Cindy got out! I don’t know where she went. She ran in this direction. She never goes outside, I don’t know what to do,” Annie exclaims, feeling the urge to tear at her hair. 

“Who’s Cindy?” Harry asks.

“My cat! She was scared by the branch falling and snuck right past me when I opened the door,” she explains, arms crossing over her chest as the chill of the night bites at her skin. She shivers, turning back towards the trees. They look like they’re beginning to come alive.

Harry looks her up and down and comes up behind her, wrapping that godforsaken robe around her shaking frame. She looks up at him, grateful for the extra layer. He has a serious look on his face, determined with a mix of compassion, and also curiosity. Annie is suddenly relieved that she has someone with her to handle the situation with more calm than she ever could.

“Why don’t you go inside and grab her favorite treats? And a blanket she loves? Something that smells like you would be best,” Harry says, listing off the necessary items as if he’s done this before. She looks at him, a bit puzzled, and he reads her expression easily.

“Our cats growing up were professional escape artists. I’ve done this once or twice,” he lets out a small chuckle. She nods and heads towards her house, grabbing everything they need and changing into a pair of winter boots and shrugging on a coat, shoving Harry’s robe towards him. 

“I got everything. Here’s your robe,” Annie says, unable to meet his eyes. She already feels indebted to him, and they haven’t even found Cindy yet. “Thank you for helping me. I’m just… scared,” she confesses, tears starting to well up. She presses her fists into her eyes roughly as if she could stop them from falling. 

Harry just nods, takes the garment, and starts shaking the treat bag. His deep voice carries into the night more than hers did as he walks around, zig-zagging across the snow. Annie holds Cindy’s favorite blanket that resides on her bed and wraps it around her. She follows Harry, both chorusing, Cindy! Cindy, baby! Come back! It’s too cold for you out here!

They walk the perimeter of Annie’s house, keeping to the tree line, when Harry shushes her. He stops in his tracks and listens to the silent night. Faintly, from the direction of Harry’s house, comes a small mewl. He walks briskly over, slowing his movements as he gets closer in order not to scare the small Persian. 

“Cindy? Where are you girl? Come out for your mama,” Harry half-whispers, half-shouts. He’s still shaking the treats lightly, starting to open them. From their right they can hear a crumpling of plastic, a flash of gray shooting out from underneath the collapsed blow-up of Santa on his sleigh. Annie cries out in relief as Cindy comes running towards them at full speed, crashing right into Harry’s legs. He scoops her up swiftly with one hand and holds a treat out to her in his other. 

“You had me so worried, Cindy! I cannot believe you. You want nothing to do with the outside world but decide to run out into the coldest night we’ve had so far! You’re crazy,” Annie half-sobs, holding the cats face in two hands. Cindy shakes the snow out of her fur and licks at Annie’s nose. Harry watches the interaction, feeling something unfolding in his own chest. He gestures for Annie to take her cat, picking long hairs out of his robe.

“I see everything’s all in order here, I’ll just—oh,” Harry lets out a grunt as this peculiar woman collides into his body, cat trapped between the two of them and licking at the pink fuzz surrounding Harry as if she were grooming a kitten. His eyes go a bit wide, arms frozen around Annie while she releases a string of, thank you so much, you have no idea how much she means to me, you didn’t have to do this but you did so I owe you, I’m sorry for what I said that night, I’m sorry about the olive juice, thank you, thank you, thank you, muffled into his chest. His hands find themselves resting on her back, stroking up and down in a means to calm her.

“Hey, hey… it’s okay. I know what it feels like. I’m glad she was okay,” Harry soothes. Annie pulls away, and a strange longing passes through his heart. He frowns slightly and clears his throat. 

“I’m going to go to bed now, and get this little gremlin inside. Thank you so much, Harry. I really do appreciate it, more than you know,” Annie says, a bit breathless. Snowflakes lay themselves to rest upon her eyelashes, lips pink from the cold and Harry has the innate urge to tuck a piece of unruly hair behind her ear. He blinks, forcing himself out of his head.

“Really, it’s no problem. I’ll be heading in as well. See you soon, Annie,” Harry declares. Annie realizes with a jolt that Harry just said her name for the first time. She’s suddenly overheating, and gives a single nod, holding Cindy tight to her body as she walks up the few steps to her front door. Harry watches her leave, only taking his eyes off her when he can’t see her anymore. He then turns around, looking at the demolition of his lawn. He inhales deep. 

“Fuck.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Harry does a double take when he sees Annie outside his home the next morning, attempting to break apart the large tree branch. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the remainder of the season, Harry and Annie spend an inordinate amount of time together. From binge-watching their guilty pleasure TV shows to roaming the streets downtown at midnight, sharing the same love for empty places. It seemed as though, somewhere in the universe, a story began to unravel itself.

As the last snowflake melts on the first stem emerging from the soft ground, Harry kisses Annie. He wasn’t even planning on it. It was like second degree murder. He found himself looking at her looking at the bluest sky, the sky looking back at her like it wanted to kiss her as well; so he kissed her first. 

[lynelovespopculture]

THE CHILLING ADVENTURES OF ZELDA CHAPTER 19-SALEM FAUSTUS MUST RESCUE HIS DAUGHTER FROM WHERE NO WITCH SHOULD GO.

Zelda didn’t believe what she just heard. She walked across the room so she could read the text herself. She read it twice and still shook her head. “No, I don’t believe it. Our Cordelia just can’t be on her way to Salem. She just can’t be!”

Jake, who wasn’t exactly in the loop, gasped. “You can’t mean that Cordelia is on her way to Salem, that Salem, THE Salem?!”

“Apparently so,” Ambrose answered him.

Faustus, meanwhile, checked his watch and walked quickly to the front hall where everyone followed him.

“Where are you going, Uncle Faustus,” Ambrose called out.

“It’s 8:30 now and I know that the bus should have left at 5:30. Despite that 3-hour head start, I going to see if I can catch it before they reach Salem.”

“I’m going with you.” Zelda reached for her coat but Faustus stopped her.

“No, dearest.” Faustus shook his head. “I understand completely why you want to come along, but if worse comes to worst and I have to go all the way to Salem, I won’t be able to explain your presence. It’s my class on that trip. The only reason I’m not with them right now is that I told them I was sick.” Zelda looked upset and Faustus sought to comfort her with his next statement. “Our girl is very clever. She might get away and come home on her own so someone needs to be here.”

Zelda was still upset but managed to put on a brave face. “Faustus, your trip will go by faster if you don’t have to stop much. I could pack you some sandwiches if you want.”

“Excellent idea, my love.”

10 minutes later, the car was packed and Faustus was ready to go. Jake and Ambrose hung back to allow Zelda and Faustus a private goodbye.

“Do you have everything?” Zelda asked.

“I think so.”

“Call me as soon as you find Cordelia. I don’t care where you are.” Faustus nodded and Zelda sighed and threw her arms around her husband. “And for Hecate’s sake, Faustus,” Zelda whispered into his neck. “Please, please be careful. I simply wouldn’t know what I would do if anything ever happened to you or Cordelia.”

“Shhh, hush my love, the only thing that going to happen is mine and Cordelia’s safe return. Any other outcome is unacceptable.” He then kissed her goodbye. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” Zelda returned “Bring home our girl.”

Faustus nodded, kissed her again before he got into the car, and drove off. Even before Faustus’s car drove out of sight, Zelda could feel Ambrose’s arm around her shoulders.

“Don’t worry, Aunt Z, if anyone up to this task, it’s uncle Faustus.”

“Absolutely,” Jake agreed. “They’ll be back before you know it.”

The 7-hour bus trip flew by. From the very back, Cordelia watched the other students filed off the bus. Cordelia took a deep breath and got up and tried to get off the bus. However, Mrs. Robinson blocked her.

“Not yet, Cordelia. They’re not ready for you.”

“Ready for me?”

Nina didn’t respond but when Cordelia was allowed to leave the bus, Nina was right by her side. Cordelia noticed that the rest of the class had formed a half-circle. Then, a tall, scary man dressed in a black robe walked out of the shadows and stopped right in front of Cordelia. “Is this the child, then?”

Nina nodded. “It is, your honor.”

Your honor? Cordelia looked from 1 adult to the other.

The man in black pointed at Cordelia. “Has she been charged yet?”

“No, your honor. We thought it best to get her down here and then charge her.”

Charge me? The horror finally dawned on Cordelia. This was no field trip, this was a witch trial. HER witch trial!

Meanwhile, the man in black continued. “What is the child’s name?”

“Cordelia Spellman.” Nina answered.

The man in black arched his eyebrow. “Really? SPELLman? And the name Cordelia hasn’t been in fashion for at least an century. It’s like she’s not even trying to hide it.” For the 1st time, the man in black spoke to Cordelia directly. “So, what do you say, girl? Do you deny it? Do you deny that you’re a witch?”

Cordelia stood tall. “Of course, I deny it. Everyone knows that witches don’t really exist.”

“Is that right, girlie? Let see if you say that after you see this!” He grabbed Cordelia roughly by the arm and guided her between 2 old houses.

“Hey!”

The man in black let go of Cordelia after giving her a little shove. Cordelia looked up and was in shock. There they were; all in a row, bound and gagged, all standing on barrels with nooses around their necks. Her entire family, Faustus, Zelda, Jake, LJ, Prudence, Ambrose, Sabrina, Hilda, and even Dr. C.

Without a 2nd thought, Cordelia turned to the man in black. “Okay, you got me. I am a witch. But I’m the only 1. My family didn’t even know, they’re completely innocent. Do whatever you want to me but let them go!”

“Bull!” The man in black declared. “Everyone knows that magic goes through the bloodline so if you're a witch, so is your family.”

“But I’m adopted!” Cordelia stressed. It was the 1st thing she could think of.

“Then why do you look exactly like your mother? You’re lying!” The man in black turned to the men behind the barrels. “Hang them!” He ordered.

“NO!” Cordelia screamed but the man in black held her as the barrels were kicked and the Spellmans were hanged.

“And as for you,” The man in black stared hatefully down at Cordelia. “You’re a witch by your own admission. Your punishment will be to burn at the stake.”

Cordelia didn’t, couldn’t say anything. Her entire family was just murdered for just being born witches. She choked back tears as she was tied to the stake.

“Daughter, would you like to do the honors?” The man in black asked.

“I would love to.”

Suddenly, Cordelia was face to face with Sara, who had a torch in her hand.

“I knew you were trouble since the 1st day I saw you!”

Sara only smiled. “Goodbye, witch. Thanks for the friends.” Sara lit the pyre and Cordelia watched the orange flames crack, flickering, and then it jumped? When the fire jumped for the 2nd time, Cordelia felt her body jump with it.

The next thing Cordelia knew, her eyes opened and she realized she was still on the bus. As the other students were laughing and talking, some about the recent speedbump they just passed, Cordelia sat up. Her hand on her chest, willing her heartbeat to go back to normal. Cordelia looked up at the sound of loud laughter. She grew sad when she realized it was Sara and the triplets. Cordelia frowned; she was so happy and excited to get the text this morning. She practically ran all the way to the schoolyard. When she discovered that they were already on the bus, Cordelia thought nothing of going on the bus. Yet the more she talked, the more Cordelia saw the triplets’ faces grew blanker and blanker. They had no idea what she was talking about! Cordelia’s heart sank yet she knew she wasn’t crazy. She knew that the text came from Erin’s phone. Cordelia suspected that Sara may have stolen the phone and sent the message herself to make Cordelia look foolish. Cordelia turned to get off the bus when Mrs. Robinson stopped her. Mrs. Robinson then showed her the paper and the name on it. Cordelia knew it was faked, (it must be!) There was no one there to save her. Cordelia’s heart fell into her shoes when she realized the bus to Salem was moving and she was still on it. With no other choice, Cordelia sat in the very back, which on a deluxe bus was like a padded bench with seat belts, and tried to control her breathing, just like she was trying to do now.

“Are you okay, Cordelia?” asked a classmate who sat nearby.

“I’m fine, Anne.” Cordelia lied. She was anything but fine! It was actual life and death if someone discovered her secret. As she sat up and looked around the bus, she envied the happy carefree smiles of her peers. Half of Cordelia just wanted the earth to open up and swallow her whole. The other half of her just wanted to stand up and scream. This entire journey was billed as an educational trip but Cordelia couldn’t understand what, if anything, could be ‘educational’ about a town infamous for killing witches, her kind, her people. For Cordelia, this was just as cruel as taking a person of the Jewish faith to tour a WW II death camp. Cordelia sighed as she quickly wiped a tear away. She had already decided that the only way to survive this weekend was to stay down and keep quiet. Hoping to distract herself, Cordelia took out her phone.

“Aw, man!” Cordelia groaned as she read the new message. Cordelia decided earlier not to involve her family. After all, nothing good could come from bringing even more witches to Salem. Despite this, by around 8:30, in a fit of panic, Cordelia texted her father. The instant she hit send, she regretted it. The only thing she could do now was hoping against hope that Faustus didn’t get the message. Now she knew; not only did her father get the message, but he also sent a reply.

Dear Cody,

Stay clam. I’m coming to get you as soon as can. I love you. Dad.

With a defeated sigh, Cordelia let her phone drop into her lap and rested her forehead against the window. She was already stressed as hades and they weren’t even there yet! When Cordelia noticed the sun was beaming down on her, she reached for the golden crescent moon at her neck. “Father sun, mother moon, make time fly. Make this weekend end soon.” She whispered.

Faustus didn’t understand. It was only 2 days ago that Cordelia came home crying at the mere thought of going to Salem, convinced she would die. Now she was on a bus going there? It just didn’t make any sense. Faustus knew how important Cordelia’s friends were to her but still, he just couldn’t imagine his strong-willed daughter being so desperate to win her friends’ favor that she would be talked into taking the trip. Further proof of this was Cordelia’s own text message. The message wasn’t a confessional of a kid who got carried away. It was more like a cry for help. It actually contained the phase S.O.S, which had to be a plea for help. Even if Cordelia had gone to Salem willingly, it shouldn’t have been allowed by her teachers. Even though he had always planned to claim illness and pull out at the last second, as the 7th-grade teacher, Faustus was preparing for this trip all week. Therefore, he knew that every student needed a permission slip signed by a parent or guardian to even go on the trip. Now he knew that Zelda would never sign anything that would put their daughter anywhere near Salem and Hecate knows he didn’t sign a permission slip so Cordelia should have never been able to leave with the others. She should have been kicked off that bus the moment a teacher saw her. Every time Faustus thought of his sweet, youngest child alone in that witch-hating town make Faustus pressed his foot hard on the gas pedal. He was driving on the highway, just about to enter yet another town, when something odd happened. The bottom left side of the car bounced and then dragged. The sudden movement startled Faustus so he took his eyes off the road for just a second to see what was wrong in the back. When he turned his attention back to the road, he saw a cat lying in the middle of the laneway. On instinct, Faustus turned to miss the cat and went up onto a curb. As soon as Faustus collected himself, he got out of the car. He slammed the door, angry at what he saw. The rear left tire had a big nail in it and was still leaking air. The front tire was busted up from hitting the curb.

“Damn!” Faustus swore. So much for catching up to the bus before it got to Salem. Unless…Faustus knelt by the rear tire, raised his hand, and was about to say a spell when-

“Hi there, fellow. Do ya need some help?”

Faustus looked up and saw a kind, elderly man with a tow truck right behind him. Faustus sighed, now he felt stuck. Yes, it would undoubtedly be faster to fix the car by magic, Faustus couldn’t use magic in front of a witness nor could he deny that he was in trouble. So he greeted the man, who was named Gus and it turned out that Gus owned an auto shop in the city. So Gus hooked Faustus’s car up to his truck and they drove to the shop. When they got there, Gus left Faustus in the lobby. 10 minutes later, Gus returned, frowning.

“I’m sorry, friend, but I just found a note from my partner and he had to go tend to an emergency so I’m the only 1 to look after the shop. Plus, I was just in the back, and I swear this never happens, but we seem to out of tires. So, I’m afraid you’re stuck here for a while.”

Faustus sighed. He knew he should have used magic! “Thank you for the ride into town.” He told Gus. Faustus began to walk around the waiting room as Gus went back to work. In the seating area, among the magazines, Faustus found a town map.

“Hey, do you have a bathroom here?”

“Yeah. 1st door on the left.” Gus answered.

“Thank you.” Faustus was pleased to discover that it was a private, single-person bathroom. After locking the door, Faustus unfolded the map and studied it until he found that there was A Walmart supercenter in this town. Astral projecting to a place you never been before was always risky, but desperate times called for desperate measures. He laid the map on the floor and then he laid beside the map. Faustus closed his eyes and slowed his breathing. It worked; for when Faustus opened his eyes again, he was right in front of the store. After thanking Hecate, Faustus entered the store. It was big and crowded so Faustus knew he had to hurry. Faustus made quick work of finding the auto department and selecting the correct tires. The trouble, as Faustus soon learned, was upfront. There was only 1 check-out station open and a very long lineup. Faustus stood in line, carrying a tire in each hand when he saw the 1st of those hateful birds in the window.

Oh no! Come on, come on, come on! Faustus silently willed the line to get a move on already.

Soon after, came another bird and another. By the time there were 4, Faustus realized his nose was bleeding. When 6 birds were all in a row, Faustus’s entire body was shaking and his head felt ready to explode. He could hold on no more. Sighing, Faustus dropped the tires and closed his eyes, only to return to his body on the bathroom floor. Faustus sat up and hit the titles with his palms. “Damn it!” He had to find another way to fix his car and get to his daughter and soon!

After all the stories about how all the mortals tortured and killed them, Cordelia wondered if any of the Salem witches ever simply died from boredom. If so, Cordelia may have found their descendent. It was late afternoon and the class was listening to a lecture in an old town hall. The only thing that Cordelia found remotely interesting about this guy was he has been talking for over 2 hours and had still to get a single fact right. If this so ‘witch expect’ attended the academy, Cordelia felt certain that he would easily fail 1st-year witch history. Cordelia sighed and looked out the window, only to see a graveyard, because, of course, there was a graveyard right there! Maybe it was because she was a real witch, but ever since she had arrived in Salem, Cordelia has been experienced odd things. Like wherever she went, Cordelia heard noises, like moaning and weeping, possibly from the murdered witches. Even though the Salem roads were paved, Cordelia could swear she heard splashing, as if she was walking on blood. Cordelia shook her head and turned the other way. Cordelia managed to lock eyes with Erin, and they smiled at each other. The bus had arrived in Salem at 12:30. So the first thing the class did was have lunch at a restaurant called The Witch’s Brew. (Salem got absolutely zero points for subtly.) Cordelia had a bit of luck when she was seated next to Erin at lunch. She was finally got to explain about the text, how the girls wanted to talk to her before leaving for Salem and how it came from Erin’s phone. Erin then explained that she lost her phone 3 days ago. In fact, the last thing Erin did before she left the house this morning was to ask her mom to keep looking for it. Therefore, Erin couldn’t have written that text. Still, the 2 girls got to talking during the meal and at least, for now, there was peace between Cordelia and 1 of her friends. The lecture was finally over and the class started to file out. Cordelia sneaked away to the bathroom. She did this several times today, whenever she felt the need to regroup.

You’re doing great, girl. Cordelia thought to herself. All you have to do now is get through supper, another walking tour, and then it’s off to the motel for the night. Then just 3 more days, Cordelia sighed.

When Cordelia returned to the front, she noticed that everyone from before had gone and only 2 maids were talking to each other.

“I don’t know, Dru. We come in here every day and we listen to that blockhead, every single day, telling lie after lie. But it seems especially wrong to let him tell all this to schoolchildren. It just seems so irresponsible to me.”

Drusilla, the other maid, sighed. “Shelley, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, he’s just another mortal spinning fairy tales for mortal children. It has nothing to with us.”

“Us?” Cordelia jumped into the conversation without thinking. “You’re not mortals either? Are you witches?”

The 2 maids were visually shocked. “Mortal? Who said mortal?” Drusilla asked. “I said more tell, yeah, more tell. That darn lecturer is always leaving without telling us.”

While Drusilla was trying, very unsuccessfully, to talk herself out of trouble, Shelley knocked over the bucket of water she was mopping with. “Oh, for Hades’s sake!”

Cordelia smiled. “For Hade’s sake? That sounds like a witch phase to me. Don’t worry, I’m a witch too.”

“Oh, great. Another little girl who thinks she’s a real witch.” Although Drusilla muttered this to herself, Cordelia still overheard her.

The Spellman witch raised her hand and the spilled water was back in the bucket. “Now do you believe me?” Cordelia smiled.

“You are a witch.” Shelley said with awe and then pointed to the door. “What about the class you came in with? Are they witches?”

“No.” Cordelia shook her head. “They’re all mortals, I’m the only one.”

Drusilla raised an eyebrow. “You’re here all alone? What are you? 11?”

“12, actually,” Cordelia answered. “Yes, I’m alone, but it’s a long and confusing story and I don’t know how to explain it. What about you 2? Do you live in Salem as well as working here?”

“Dru lives in town, but you wouldn’t find me here after dark.”

Drusilla rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t be such a baby, Shelley. I figured I’m safer here than anywhere else, kind of how like a farmer will never search for a fox in a henhouse.”

Cord smiled, she wasn’t sure whether that statement was madness or brilliant.

“Don’t worry, kid.” Drusilla continued. “Your day trip must be almost over. You’ll be home before you know it.”

“Oh, it’s not a day trip. The class will be here until Monday.”

“You’re staying overnight? Here? At a motel? But what about the rebels?” Shelley seemed frightened.

“The rebels?” Cordelia asked. “Who or what are the rebels?”

“They’re a secret group of mortals who believe that witches never left Salem. It’s said that to this day, they go around at night, leaving fresh blood on the motel door of witches.”

“Don’t scare her with that old wives’ tales! I’ve lived here for almost ten years and that never happened to me.”

“That’s because you don’t use motels.”

Drusilla dismissed Shelley with a shake of her head and took something out of her pocket. “Pay no mind to Shelley, but I would feel better if you took this good luck charm.”

“I just can’t take it. What if I pay for it?” Cordelia suggested. “$5 bucks?”

They agreed and as they exchanged items, Drusilla caught sight of Cordelia’s wrist. “Oh my gosh! Have you always had that?”

“What? My birthmark? Yes, I’ve always it.”

Drusilla rubbed it a bit with her thumb. “It’s not coming off. If this is what I think it is, well, honey, you are not a witch, you are THE witch.”

“What does that mean?”

Before anyone could speak further, Mrs. Applegate, another teacher from Greendale middle school, appeared at the door. “Here you are, Cordelia. Come along, it’s time for dinner and it’s starting to rain.”

It was still raining when Faustus watched the sunset from 1 of the auto shop’s windows then he sighed and turned away. Faustus simply couldn’t believe he had wasted most of the day here. This partnership with the van had yet to show up and Gus was busy with a steady stream of customers. Despite being in the same place most of the day, Faustus tried desperately to make contact with his daughter with a series of calls, texts, and video messages, all to no avail. It wasn’t surprising. After all, the class must have arrived in Salem hours ago and the 1st rule of any field trip was to turn off any and all cell phones. As for Zelda, Faustus sighed again. Faustus was too ashamed to call Zelda. Yes, he promised to call his wife as soon as he found Cordelia, but not only had he yet to find their daughter, he had no new news of her whatsoever. Maybe because it was later, Faustus thought he should try to reach Cordelia again. He took a seat in the waiting room and once again, pulled out his phone.

“Hey, I know that girl,” said the guy next to and tapped where Cordelia was on the family picture that was Faustus’s screen.

Faustus turned to the stranger. “You do?”

“Sure. I’m a traveling salesman and today I had a business lunch in Salem. Anyway, I was just leaving the restaurant when I saw a bus with a pile of kids coming off it. I remember that girl because she was the last 1 off the bus and she didn’t seem at all happy to be there.”

Faustus nodded as he listening to the other man. Knowing that his daughter was in fact in Salem and had been since lunch lit a fire under Faustus. He stood up and walked with purpose.

“What are you doing?” asked the salesman.

“What I should have done hours ago,” Faustus murmured to himself. He borrowed a phone book from behind the front desk, looked up the listing for a local cab company, and called. He then took a taxi to Walmart and picked out the 2 correct tires in person. 20 minutes after he returned to the auto shop, a man came to see him.

“Mr. Spellman, your new tires are on and ready to go.”

“Great!”

“But I’d like to have a look at your muffler.”

“My muffler?” Aside from the tires, Faustus knew that his car was fine. This guy was just trying to play him for a sucker and Faustus simply didn’t have time for this.

Still, he just said, “Sure, do whatever you have to.”

The man went back into the garage. Faustus found a discreet place to hide, where he could see his car. He waited until someone touched his car before he whispered a spell in Latin. Then the car roared to life, seemly by itself.

Faustus then ran up to the man. “Wow, you seem to have the golden touch. My car is purring like a kitten now. I gave Gus my address so you can bill me. Thank you.” Faustus got into his car and drove off while the man was still trying to figure out what just happened.

Before long, Faustus was back on the highway. One advantage of driving at night was there was barely any traffic. However, as the hours passed and Faustus got closer to Salem, the rain came down harder and harder. So hard that the paved road, that Faustus could barely see, seemed like silver. Still, Faustus kept on driving because of heaven or high water, he was determined to find his daughter…tonight! The clock on the dash read 10:37 when he finally passed the Welcome to Salem sign. Now, all he had to do was find the motel with a bus in front of it. He found it on the 3rd block he went down. Faustus parked his car and ran out of the rain and out the roof of the motel. He ran into some of his students that were lingering outside. They seemed surprised to see him but unfortunately, none of them knew where Cordelia was. Faustus was making his way to the motel’s office. He rounded the corner and ran into Nina, who smiled at him.

“Fausty! You made it! I knew you would.”

“Mrs. Robinson, please tell me, where is my daughter?”

“Oh, she’s rooming with a couple of other girls.” Nina said casually but then she leaned in and whispered “As for me, I’m in room 13, alone and ready whenever you are.”

As Nina walked away, Faustus rolled his eyes and beyond him, he heard a door open, girlish laughter, then a firm closing of the door, and finally a splash, as if falling in a puddle. Faustus turned and indeed, it was a mud puddle. It took a second for the girl to moan and turn over.

“Cordelia?”

Her eyes widened. “Dad?” Cordelia got up and went up to her father. With a quivering lip, Cordelia let go of the tears that she had kept inside all day as she threw her arm around Faustus’s waist.

“I’m sorry, Dad” She nodded. “I really am. I got scared and panicked. I regretted that text message the moment I sent it. I never meant for you or any of the family to come here.”

Faustus gently put his hand under Cordelia’s chin and forced his daughter to look up at him. “Never mind that text.” Faustus gently said. “What are you doing here?”

Cordelia shook her head, furiously. “I don’t know, I really don’t! I meant it when I told Jake I would be back in 10 minutes. I only got on the bus because the triplets were already on it when I reached the schoolyard. It was a total bust because Erin didn’t even send me the message and they just kicked me out because, for the 1st time in my life, I lied to the triplets about believing in witches.”

“Cordy, why didn’t you get off the bus?”

“I tried, but Mrs. Robinson wouldn’t let me. I begged and begged. I even considered teleporting myself home but there were too many witnesses. Then she showed me my permission slip.”

Faustus was confused. “What do you mean? Permission slips are useless until they’re signed.”

“But it was signed, Dad,” Cordelia told him. “It had your signature.”

Mine? Faustus thought, dumbstruck. Then, Faustus thought about how everyone was rightly surprised to see him, except for Nina. Faustus took off his coat and wrapped it around Cordelia. “You’re wet, muddy and you must be cold. Go and wait for me in the office. I’ll be right there, I promise.”

As soon as Cordelia was out of sight, Faustus sighed, turned, and muttered to himself, “Nina Robinson, for your own sake, I better be wrong about this!”

Faustus walked up and knocked on the door of room 13.

“Come in.”

As soon as he opened the door, Faustus noticed that there were candles everywhere in the darkened room, even on the 2nd bed. On the 1st bed, lay Nina, on her stomach, posed as if she was in a playboy magazine. All she wore was a black leather corset, a matching thong, and heels. “I knew you would come. All I had to do is get you away from the school and your wife.”

Furious, Faustus entered the room and slammed the switch that turned on the big light.

“Where are they?” He demanded.

“Where is what?” Asked Nina.

“The permission slips. You have them with you I know it!” Faustus returned, quite fiercely.

Nina said nothing so Faustus looked around and saw a teacher’s leather briefcase leaning against the TV.

“Ah!” Faustus went to the case and searched through it. 1 brief look in the mirror told Faustus that Nina had crawled to the end of the bed and was now was dangerously close to him. “Madam, I advise you to keep your hands to yourself.”

Oh?” said Nina in a flirty manner. “And why is that?”

“Because anything of yours that touches me, you are not getting back!”

Nina frowned. “You’re in a mood.”

Faustus turned to face her. “Yes, I am. Especially since I just found these.” There was a piece of paper in each hand. “Here is a permission slip for Cordelia Spellman and it does indeed bear my signature but I don’t remember signing this but this might explain it.” Faustus raised his other hand. “This is a lined paper, with nothing but my name written on it, over and over again, front and back. Yet the strange thing is at the top of the front paper looks like your handwriting, but the bottom of the back page looks like my handwriting. You forged my name on this permission slip, didn’t you?”

Nina wore her smile proudly. “It worked, didn’t it? You’re here.”

“I came here to bring Cordelia home!” Faustus fumed. “It has nothing whatsoever to do with you! And where do you get your nerve? Kidnapping my daughter and bringing her here, of all places!”

“Kidnapping? Oh, don’t be so overdramatic. It’s only a field trip.”

“To a town infamous for its injustice and murder! It wasn’t your place. It’s up to me and Zelda to decide what our daughter is exposed to!”

“Did you really have to bring your wife up again?” Nina asked, looking bored. “If you ask me, I think that Zelda is too old for you.”

“Not that’s any of your business, but Zelda and I are the same age and you want to know what I think? I think you’re not worthy enough to speak Zelda’s name!”

“Oh, come on, next you’ll tell me that you’re not attracted to me.”

“I’m not and another thing- “Faustus’s voice was drowned out by the ringing of a phone. Faustus automatically looked to the bedside table, where Nina’s phone lay charging. However, Faustus soon realized that the ringing was closer to him. In fact, the phone was in the briefcase. Nina leaped off the bed, trying to get the phone first but because he was closer, Faustus got it.

The pink, sparkly girlish phone looked oddly familiar. “Hello?” Faustus answered. “Mrs. Warner?” Faustus listened for a moment. “Oh, I see. May I ask how long has Erin been looking for this phone? Oh, I see. Yes, I’ll bring it by soon.” He ended the call and then turned to Nina. “Oh, this is low, even for you.”

Nina gave an innocent shrug. “What?”

“You know perfectly well ‘what’” Faustus snapped. “This cell phone belongs to Erin Warner. According to her mother, Erin had been looking everywhere for this for the past 3 days. This makes it impossible for Erin to send that message to Cordelia about wanting to make up at 5 this morning. You did it, didn’t you? You knew the girls were fighting and you knew that Cordelia and I were not coming on this trip. You took advantage of my daughter’s desire to make up with her friends, and once you got her on that damn bus, you kept her there, knowing full well I would come to collect my daughter!”

“But Faustus, I did it for us.”

“There is no us, you lunatic!” Faustus spat. “And I’m getting so tired of rejecting you.”

Nina smiled. “Then don’t.” She tried to put her around Faustus’s neck but he fought her off.

“Enough!” Faustus growled. “I have had it with you! I’ve tried to reason with you, to avoid you, and to explain to you how important my family is to me. All that’s left is the ugly truth so here it is. I will NEVER sleep with you! You could be the last woman, scratch that, the last person on earth, and I would still never sleep with you. In fact, you sickened me because you remind me of who I used to be and who I swore I would never become again. The fact that you would steal a child’s phone makes you a disgrace to the entire teaching profession!” Faustus then ripped up the permission slip and let the pieces fall to the floor. “Consider this me taking back custody of my daughter.” Faustus turned and left without another word, slamming the door behind him. Faustus didn’t want Cordelia to see him angry so he took a moment on the motel’s tiny porch. That’s where he first saw the thunder and lighting in addition to the rain.

The Spellman house had been filling with family all day. As word got around about Faustus, Cordelia, and Salem, people came running. Prudence was first. She was worried when Zelda, who was never late, missed the morning assembly at the academy. Prudence was even more worried when she learned when Zelda wouldn’t be leaving the house today. Hilda learned everything when she called the mortuary. By the time late afternoon rolled around, all the family knew and Ambrose, Jake, Prudence, Hilda, Sabrina, and LJ were all at the house. After dinner, they were joined by Dr. C and the other 2 weird sisters. At first, the plan was simple, just keep Zelda busy and distracted until Faustus called then everything would calm down. But the later it got, the more worried everyone got. By 11, they had run out of topics of conversation and games to play. They all felt helpless as they just sat in the drawing-room and Zelda walked0 up and down the hallway for the million time. Zelda couldn’t sit down; the only reason she ate at all was due to Hilda’s pleading. Zelda refused to go 10 feet without a phone so she stayed on the main floor all day. Zelda had no idea what to do with her hands since her last cigarette was long gone. Zelda sighed when she checked her watch. It was getting so late. If there was still no word from either Faustus or Cordelia by dawn, Zelda had already decided to go to Salem herself but she hadn’t told the others because she didn’t want anyone to talk her out of it. Zelda’s head whipped around as the phone began to ring. She ran to the phone and picked it up.

“Hello, hello?” Zelda tensed as the family gathered around her.

“Zelda? Dearest?”

Zelda’s grip tightened on the phone and closed her eyes and cherishing her husband’s voice. “Faustus! Finally, how are you? Where are you? Have you found Cordelia yet?”

“I’m fine, my dearest,” Faustus assured Zelda. “It’s been an insanely long day but I’m finally in Salem and as for Cordelia” The line went silent for a second and then… “Hi, Mom!”

Zelda bit her lip to keep her tears of joy and relief in check. “Oh, Cordelia, my sweet, precious girl. How are you? Did anyone hurt you?”

“No. I’m fine, Mom. I’ve been with the class all day and no one suspected me at all, I promise. And I definitely feel safer now that Dad’s here with me. Mom, is LJ there?”

“Yes, she’s right here.” Zelda passed the phone to her stepdaughter.

“Hello? Cordy? What’s wrong?”

“LJ, I’m so sorry.”

LJ was confused. “Why are you apologizing to me?”

“Because tonight was the night you were supposed to bring your boyfriend to dinner to meet the family.”

LJ was touched. “The fact that you remember that after all, you had to deal with today proves that you are the sweetest little sister in the whole wide world. Peter can wait. What’s important now is to get you and Dad home safe and sound.”

The sisters chatted for a few minutes and then LJ gave the phone back to Zelda and after a few moments, Cordelia passed the phone back to Faustus.

“So, now that you’re located Cordelia, are you in your home now?” Zelda asked.

“Oh, not exactly dearest. I know that it was my idea to just grab Cordelia and then drive all through the night back to Greendale, but there’s a problem here. You see, there’s a raging storm here and it’s not safe to be on the road. I barely made it here.”

“Can’t you teleport?” Zelda suggested. “Surely you must know the way home.”

“I do, but people saw Cordy and I come in this motel room so we just can’t up and disappear.”

Zelda frowned. “I don’t like the idea of you and Cordelia spending the whole night in Salem.”

“Neither do I,” Faustus agreed, “but it could be a lot worse. You see, Mrs. Applegate was kind enough to give up her room so she will have to share with Mrs. Robinson.” Was it Zelda’s imagination or was there laughter in her husband’s voice? “Anyway,” Faustus continued, “this is a single room so Cordy and I will have to share the bed tonight. The storm is sure to be over by morning and then Cordy and I will be on our way. I can assure you, dearest, I won’t be in this town a moment more than I need to.”

Zelda sighed; she still didn’t like it, but she understood. “Please be careful, Faustus, and give Cordy a goodnight kiss for me. I love you.”

“We’ll be home before you know it. I love you too.”

Although she had taken her wet clothes off when she first got to the room, Cordelia was still cold after the phone call home, so she treated herself to a hot bath. Since she had no PJs, she put the white plush motel robe back on and double knotted it so she could wear it as a nightdress. Faustus then took a quick shower to wash off his road trip. When he stepped back into the main room, he found Cordelia standing before the window, the rain and the moon casting her face in a ghastly glow.

“You know; you were born on a night very much like this.”

Cordelia looked up at him. “Don’t you hear them, Dad?”

“Hear what?”

Cordelia frowned. “The moans pleads and cries of our people. Thousands and thousands of them, crying out in pain and for justice. I’ve been hearing them all day, ever since I got off the bus.”

Faustus heard nothing and thought it must be a divine child thing. “Come on honey, we have a long drive home tomorrow. We better get some sleep.”

As they made themselves comfortable in bed, Faustus noticed something he hadn’t before. “Cordy, why are shivering? Didn’t that bath warm you up?”

“Oh, am I shivering?” His daughter asked. “I’ve been doing it all day. I guess I don’t even notice it anymore.”

Faustus could help smiling to himself. As a 12-year-old witch who had in the company of mortals, doing a tour of Salem all day, Cordelia had every right to be afraid but she would never admit it. She was so strong, so proud, so like her mother. “You’re very brave.”

Cordelia rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. If I was so brave, I would have never caved and texted you that message.”

“Oh, will you stop! I’m glad you sent that message. I’m glad that I was able to track you down. Besides, the text doesn’t take away from the fact that you just spent an entire day learning about 1 of the darkest chapter in our people’s history.”

“Yep, that’s me. Cordelia the brave…and the friendless.” She muttered.

Faustus felt his face grow hot. This whole thing started because Cordelia wanted to make right with her friends. She must have been heartbroken to learn that her friends didn’t text her this morning. Damn you, Nina! Faustus thought and then said out loud, “Don’t worry Cordy. You’ll make up with the Warners soon, I know it.”

Faustus turned off the lamp and despite being quiet, neither Cordelia nor Faustus slept all night. Maybe they were overtired or overstressed by being 2 witches in Salem. It was dawn when exhaustion finally took Cordelia and she rolled over into her father’s arms. Faustus curled his long-limbed body around her protectively before kissing her forehead. “Don’t worry baby, Daddy’s got you.” He whispered before sleep claimed him too.

1 hour later, a scream woke them up. They jumped out of bed and open the door to see the class, teachers and all of the hotel staff were in front of them. Faustus looked at the door. “Is that paint? Or blood?”

“The rebels” Cordelia whispered, suddenly remembering what the maids told her. She looked around and froze. Her room wasn’t the only marked. There was also blood on the door of the room that the triplets shared with Sara.

[blujaydoodles]

Tsakesh!

Full Name: Tsakesh Gender and Sexuality: male, bi Pronouns: he/ him Ethnicity/Species: suthay khajiit Birthplace and Birthdate: somewhere in Anequina, Elsweyr; his birthday is the 12th of Sun’s Dawn (February-- one nice thing about tes astrology is that he’s a good fit for both the in world sign of The Lovers AND the irl equivalent, Aquarius) Guilty Pleasures: talking circles around someone dumber than he is, catching them in double entendres or tricking them into agreeing with something ridiculous Phobias: ghosts and deep water (totally unafraid of any other kind of undead, just very spooked by ghosts in particular) What They Would Be Famous For: with any luck, the discovery of a new Dwemer ruin, or some kind of research breakthrough on Dwemer technology What They Would Get Arrested For: being a khajiit in Skyrim, being in the vicinity of Chaotic Asshole party members who don’t understand how much effort he specifically puts into not getting arrested as a khajiit in Skyrim 😒 he’s not actually lawful good, but he personally never breaks laws and goes out of his way to be as visibly friendly and polite and as disarming as possible as a defense mechanism, so he’s not getting arrested for any actual fair reason OC You Ship Them With: You know, I feel like I could see him and Ambrose as a thing 🤔 that’s just a gut check tho, Ambrose is new enough I don’t have a clear idea of what that’d actually be like, haha. he and Melliwyk would actually get along EXTREMELY well I think but I can’t imagine it as a ship, I think there’d be a mutual lack of attraction there for one thing ^^;; OC Most Likely To Murder Them: hmm. Probably Kiele, I feel like he’d hate her and it’d probably be mutual, but she’s 100% the more aggro of the two Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Mythology/ folklore, mystery-- although I feel like mysteries written by non-khajiit he’d find annoyingly unsubtle Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: Chekov’s Gun. if your story is gonna just telegraph its foreshadowing then what fun is that?? Talents and/or Powers: Finding, dismantling, disarming, and rebuilding mechanisms/ traps/ locks/ etc. He got into adventuring specifically after encountering a really elaborate dungeon trap that nearly killed him and he was like *O* and started studying traps and dungeons in fascination Why Someone Might Love Them: he’s just! a good good boi!! he very intentionally curates his behavior to be the most appealing and least threatening to whomever he’s dealing with to stay on everyone’s good side, but he’s also genuinely really kind, friendly, and curious about other people. he’s also clever and witty, so he’s fun to chat with. Why Someone Might Hate Them: he’s very careful about saying what he means, especially if he feels it might put him at any kind of threat, so he can come across as disingenuous. He thinks he’s smarter than most of the people around him. He’s inclined to weasel his way around issues with cunning, so a more straightforward person might view him as a coward, either morally (kissing ass to an evil person’s face, with the intention of dealing with them in subtler ways later) or literally (talking or sneaking his way out of a fight) How They Change: this campaign didn’t really go long enough for him to experience major change? he’s got Opinions about daedra now (They Are Bad) Why You Love Them: HE’S! SO GOOD!! he’s a LOT of fun to roleplay, because he’s smarter and sharper than I am but somehow, magically, I am still able to roleplay that? he’s sort of snarky but also just genuinely good and kind, and trying to do right by people without drawing too much attention to himself and getting murdered in a spooky basement in every godsforsaken town we go to

Ask about an OC :3

[beyondconfessor]

The Infernal Contract [13/16]

Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Lilith/Zelda Spellman

Summary: It would be so easy to stay, Zelda realised. Wait it out, but she couldn't. If there were a chance in Heaven that she could save Sabrina from such a fate, she would take it.

N.B.: Also posted on AO3

Zelda sipped at the cup of tea, watching as Hilda shuffled around the kitchen. She pulled down the biscuit container and began setting half a dozen out on a plate, before looking over her shoulder at Zelda.

"You've got a look," Hilda said, with an ill-advised chuckle before wringing her hands. "Has he done something?"

"Honestly, sister. Not everything is about Faustus."

"Well, no, I suppose not." Finally, she sat down at the kitchen table, setting the plate of biscuits before her. "You do look quite worried, which is making me worried."

"It's Sabrina," Zelda said. Before pausing to sip at her tea. She still didn't feel it was right to say it out loud. Lately, there was a horrible feeling that someone was watching her. Since Faustus had taken Lilith's ring, since she'd gone down those tunnels of the mines, Zelda felt as if she needed to keep looking over her shoulder.

"What about Sabrina?" Hilda urged.

"There's a prophecy," Zelda began, feeling the anxiety gnaw at her belly. It seemed like a rather large can of worms to open, but so be it. She couldn't speak about it with Lilith, despite how much she wanted to.

When had the woman become her confidant?

Zelda shifted her thoughts away, focusing on the issue at hand. She began by first advising of the footnote prophecy––while misleading her sister to think she'd found it herself––before going on to explain the mosaic found in the mines, fabricating a lie that she'd overheard the children speaking of it.  

Hilda paled, but she kept her lips pressed until Zelda finished speaking. "Well," she said. "I mean, you always thought she was special."

"Yes, well, I had thought she was special as Edward was special, not prophetically brought to bring the end of times." She placed her teacup on the saucer louder than intended. Pulling her hand away, Zelda felt her right thumb reach for her ring finger, only to find it empty.

She needed to find that ring.

"What do we do?" Hilda asked her.

Zelda drew in a breath, feeling the strain in her lungs, "I don't know," she admitted.

"Oh Zelds, is this why you've been so...?"

Zelda looked at her sister, watching the woman's lips press together as she began bumbling around her words, circling over the topic, but she knew what the subtext was in Hilda's flustered speech. Was the prophecy the cause for her distance and agitation? It wasn't, and once again, she felt a need to drum her fingers against the wood of the table or wring her hands or have a cigarette.

Instead, she lifted the cup of tea and sipped the hot beverage.

Lilith had left her at the entrance of the mines. The two of them had glanced at each other. Worldlessly vowing to not speak of what had transpired, and yet Zelda felt it like a heavy stone was sitting in the pit of her stomach.

It'd shattered her view of the Dark Lord. Centuries of devotion now wasted, making her feel all the more idiotic. And worse, underneath all of that had been her promise to follow Lilith––rejected.

It would ruin you. Lilith had looked terrified at that moment, desperate for her to understand. Could it be that the witch cared for her? No, that would be ridiculous. What could she offer the witch that a thousand lovers before hadn't?

"Zelds?"

She looked up at her sister, realising that she'd missed some question. "Pardon?"

Hilda sighed. "I said, what do we do? We can't just sit and wait."

"No, we can't. The final perversion is to be suicide. Thankfully, Sabrina has enough self-preservation to avoid that. But I admit, I am afraid, sister, you know as well as I that prophecies always find a way. What if I'm missing something?" Her hand shook as she felt her eyes prick.

Hilda's hand came over hers, holding it warmly with her soft smile. "We'll figure it out. Isn't that what you always say? We're Spellmans," she teased. "Whatever this is, we'll save Sabrina, keep Him locked to Hell, and you can go back to your life."

Except it would be without Lilith. And what would happen to her if His plan failed?

Zelda didn't mean to get so upset, but it was all unravelling before her. She could feel her throat swelling with emotions, with her fear for Sabrina, her family, and Lilith. It felt as if she was balancing on the tip of a sword, and whichever way she stepped, someone was going to get hurt.

"Zelds?" Hilda called, squeezing at her hand. "What is it, tell me?"

She had unintentionally found herself wrapped in the woman's thrall, and she couldn't even bring herself to say anything to her sister.

Zelda paused, closing her eyes until she felt the swell of emotion cease. "Nothing," she said, pulling her hand away to clear her throat. She blinked and felt her expression smooth back into a façade of confidence. "You're right. We're Spellmans. We'll sort this out."

Hilda gave an inquisitive look but smiled at her nonetheless. "Right, well, we just need to figure out how not to let the prophecy happen, right?"

It was easier said than done. Zelda looked at her hands before lifting her head, realising how quiet the house was. "Where's Sabrina?"

"Oh! Ah...I'm not sure. She said something about seeing her friends."

Perhaps it was time Zelda admitted that she knew what was going on to them all. She felt her skin crawl at the idea, but the charade had gone on for long enough. "Well, we should summon her and Ambrose first. We'll all need to be involved in this." Zelda pushed back and then thought of Prudence. She needed to search for her, too, ensure she and her siblings were safe.

Ambrose was easy enough to convene. He came and sat down at the table as they called to Sabrina with difficulty. Briefly, Zelda filled him in on the prophecy as Hilda tried to send for their niece. She'd only informed him of what laid in the mines before Hilda admitted she couldn't find Sabrina, let alone summon her home.

"Let me do it," Zelda said, stepping back in the kitchen to give herself enough room to project her psyche to her niece.

Briefly, Zelda found herself projecting to the Greendale woods, finding herself surrounded by the tall trees, but if Sabrina was there, she could not see her.

She brought herself back to her body and frowned at Hilda, who shrugged in return. It wasn't uncommon for projections to fail if you didn't have a clear idea where someone was likely to be. The Greendale town was large enough that trying just to say 'somewhere here' could lead the magic to just pop up in a general area of where the intended person's magic had touched. But their familial connection with Sabrina had previously been enough in the past.

"Maybe we should contact one of her friends?" Hilda offered. "She might be with one of them."

Zelda went to agree before noticing that Ambrose was sitting at the table with sudden agitated energy. Pausing, she turned to inspect him, watching at his eyes purposefully danced away.

"Out with it," she demanded.

"I––" he began, mouth opening as he began to stutter around whatever lie was on his tongue.

"Now," Zelda demanded.

"Sabrina and I may have tried to complete a Mandrake spell," he admitted, dropping his eyes.

"You what? What on earth gave you that idea?"

"We...knew of the prophecy, Auntie. And Sabrina was terrified of becoming the Dark Lord's puppet, so she thought that if she rid herself of the magic, she'd become useless to him. We didn't think it had worked, but if it had...it would make sense as to why you can't find her."

"Because there's two of her," Hilda said. "It would make––"

"Of all the reckless things!" Zelda shouted, watching as her nephew flinched away. "Do you have any idea of what you've done?" Zelda felt the room shake before she closed her eyes and settled the anger. It was done, she needed to move on. "Has she––did she murder the mandrake-self?"

"No, no, we woke up, and the mandrake was still a root. We thought it hadn't worked, but..." he trailed off.

"When?"

"Yesterday," Ambrose said. "I tried to warn her against it, but she was adamant. She would have done it without me or someone else, Auntie."

"By trying to help her, you may have done the very thing that you were trying to avoid," Zelda spat. "Why didn't you come to me?"

Ambrose opened his mouth, but no explanation rose. He closed it again, looking defeated. Zelda already knew the answer.

Sabrina didn't trust her. And in turn, he didn't either, despite everything that she'd done for this family.

Zelda turned on her heel, walking out of the room. If Sabrina hasn't murdered her self, then there was still time. She could hear Hilda and Ambrose chasing after her, but she didn't have time to deal with their ideas. With a wave of her hands, she teleported from the Spellman Mortuary to the front steps of Lilith's home.

The wash of magic spun her, but as she settled, grounding herself, Zelda raised her hand and rapped her knuckles on the front door.

When the door opened, Zelda didn't wait. She launched into an explanation of Sabrina's stupidity to rid herself of magic, as summed up by Ambrose, before explaining that she couldn't find her.

"If she knows the Mandrake is out there, she'll finalise the prophecy and––"

"Come inside," Lilith said, interrupting her. Zelda paused, feeling the agitation subside from the injection. Come inside, why would she come inside? They had urgent business to complete. "Zelda," Lilith spoke, a small smile on her lips. "Why did you come to me?"

"Because I can't find her, and you're-" the most powerful witch to exist, Zelda felt the words catch in her throat, they rose and fell in her mouth, laced thick with a deeper meaning. "You're Lilith."

"I am. Mother of Demons, Satan's Concubine, the Dawn of Doom, first wife to Adam and so-on we could go. The only title that remains important here is that I am the Dark Lord's. Whatever you want me to do, I can not go against His will. Not when it seems His plan is coming to fruition."

Zelda's chest tightened. "So, you're just going to let Him destroy us?"

"He won't. You mean too much to Sabrina. He wouldn't risk alienating her unless He thought the risk outweighed the reward."

Zelda felt her mouth part. Trying to find arguments in her head shatter. Lilith wouldn't help her. Couldn't. "Find her, and I'll stop her from completing the task," she decided, looking up at the woman. "Just tell me where she is. Please. You can have whatever else you want from me, but I will not let my niece become some child-bride!"

Lilith smiled at her. It was honest and soft and mournful. Zelda didn't care if the woman pitied her; she needed to save Sabrina.

"Please, Lilith."

Lilith reached out, taking Zelda's hands in hers and tugging her forward until she'd passed the threshold.

The door shut with a click, and then the woman's lips were on hers. Soft and pliant. There was a desperation to it, a hope that compelled Zelda to respond, melting into her until it heated, and Lilith's hands were running through her hair, and Zelda was clutching at Lilith's waist, holding her firm to ensure she was real.

Zelda's back hit the door, their kiss breaking as they stared at each other, a breath apart.

It would be so easy to stay, Zelda realised. Wait it out, but she couldn't. If there were a chance in Heaven that she could save Sabrina from such a fate, she would take it.

Lilith stared at her, her hand coming up to cup her jaw as she brushed her thumb across her cheek. Zelda leaned into the touching, wished it didn't hurt as much as did.

"Stay with me," Lilith said to her. "You can be mine in Hell while He rules over the Mortal Realm."

"Is this your price?"

Lilith's face hardened, "It's me asking you to forget your fool's errand and stay with me."

"Lilith," she whispered, feeling herself tug at the choice. Had she not once dreamt of such a placement when she was young and had naive ideals of romance? "I won't be yours, or anyone's to own. You know that."

"We could guide Sabrina, teach her how to rule. I promised you that once."

Were they both to look at the surface of the opportunity, if they pretended that the Dark Lord was merciful, then the chance to run away to Hell may have been tempting enough. But Zelda didn't need to say anything for Lilith's hands to drop from hers, eyes closing with defeat. "She's near the clearing. Where her baptism occurred."

"Thank you," Zelda said, giving her a last look before she exited from the house.

Zelda rushed through to the clearing, pushing through the brambles and vines that coiled out at her. The forest was pulling her back, determined to keep her from whatever was occurring.

She tugged at the vines, ripping them away from her, and finally made it to where Sabrina's baptism had occurred.

There was Sabrina, and in her lap was the other, Mandrake Sabrina.

She was too late.

Zelda looked from her to Nicholas Scratch, who stood at the stone altar, eyes wide open with relief as if this had solved everything, and Zelda felt as if her world had finally cracked apart.

"Aunt Zee?" Sabrina questioned, looking up at her. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to prevent this, but I can see that it's too late."

Sabrina sniffed, wiping the tears from her face as she gently placed the Mandrake self on the ground, closing the eyelids, so she at least looked peaceful. "I had to do it. I know you're angry, but I had to. I had to get rid of my magic. There's a prophecy and-"

"And the final act for it to come to fulfilment was a suicide," Zelda said, walking over to where her niece shakily rose to her feet. "Sabrina-" she paused as thunder cracked from the lightning striking down behind her, onto the altar. There was a pulse, and then magic reverberated through the air. Even Nicholas looked askance as his eyes went from the stone to the mandrake Sabrina and finally to Zelda, feeling the dark magic swell against their psyche.

Zelda grew nauseous at the touch. It was oily, infernal magic that all witches and warlocks had felt at least once in their life when they signed the Book of the Beast.

"But––no," Sabrina insisted. "No, I did the right thing. I got rid of my magic. The prophecy can't come true because I'm mortal now! Auntie, I'm mortal, I did all of this to...to..."

"I know," Zelda whispered, bringing her niece into her arms. The moment her arms went around to hold her, she felt the sobs shudder through Sabrina.

"I'm mortal. I did all of this to save them. Save everyone. I'm mortal!" Zelda held her for a few moments, feeling the guilt weigh heavily on her self as Sabrina repeated over and over again. And finally, when the sobs softened, Zelda pulled back and looked to Nicholas Scratch.

"Let's go home."

----------

Zelda handed a glass of whiskey to Sabrina because, at this point, what did mortal laws matter? Before she took a sip of her drink, letting the warmth of it slip down her throat, through to her belly. It was mid-afternoon, over two hours had passed since lightning struck the alter.

The room was silent. Nicholas sat beside her niece. Ambrose said on the armchair, and Hilda stood beside her, looking at the mess.

No one had spoken since they'd deciphered the different stories from Sabrina to Nicholas to Zelda. Now they looked around each other, drinking in the information and allowing the weight of it to settle.

Zelda felt her hands shake as she thought of what would happen next. Lucifer would walk the earth (in His angelic form). Sabrina would marry Him, or rule beside Him, or whatever He had planned. The Mortal Realm would go to war and inevitably lose against the Dark Lord, becoming His new kingdom as the demons flooded over every street.

"How did you know?" Sabrina asked, breaking the silence. "How did you know about the prophecy?"

Zelda brought the glass to her lips, finishing the contents in a single shot before she set it down on the table. Lying was what had got her into this mess, and yet she knew if she told the truth, Sabrina would never look at her the same. None of them.

"Mr Scratch," she said, starting in the middle of her story as if was the beginning. "He came to the house with a book of prophecy detailing what was to happen. I erased his memory––not realising the consequences he would face––and tried to find a resolution while keeping you ignorant." She gave him a brief, apologetic look.

"Why would you do such a thing?" Sabrina asked.

"Why did you keep the initial prophecy from me?" Zelda asked, raising her brow. "We were trying to stop it from occurring. I thought that keeping you in the dark of the exact premises of the prophecy would prevent you from completing it. I was wrong."

Sabrina's jaw clenched, but the anger softened, likely realising it didn't matter either way.

"Can you undo it?" Nicholas asked.

Zelda walked over and reached out, touching the boy's head. She found were her spell laid and pulled at the thread, undoing the woven magic. Stepping back, she looked down at Nicholas with a raised brow. "Did that work?"

Nicholas frowned, his brow pinching. "I'm not sure," he admitted.

"It will likely take time," she said, stepping back to where she'd been previously. "I am sorry, Nicholas. I had thought it was the best thing at the time to keep everyone safe."

Nicholas looked away, frowning to himself.

"So, Auntie," Ambrose said. "Why was suicide the last thing Sabrina needed to do? In terms of prophecy, I would have expected self-sacrifice rather than suicide. A proper blood spilling."

"It's not a sacrifice if she knows she can be resurrected," Zelda said. "And suicide was the final act because it was the last of the Nazareth perversions. She'd already done everything else, as I would understand."

"What do you mean?" Sabrina asked. "I didn't do anything knowing it would unleash Hell on Earth."

"No, but the exorcism, curing blindness, going to mortal purgatory, raising the dead, they're all perversions of the Nazareth's holy acts," she explained. "Knowing it or not, you did every act of your own accord."

"No, I didn't," Sabrina said, her face shifting into fury. Zelda realised her mistake too late as her niece's anger became focused on the one person Zelda wished it hadn't. "All of those acts, every last one of them was guided by Ms Wardwell. She had me complete the perversions. She's working for the Dark Lord."

Zelda pressed her lips shut, willing for another drink to appear. She shouldn't have said anything.

"We can't let her get away with this," Sabrina said, looking around at the room with sudden confidence in her voice that had Zelda panicking, knowing where it was leading to. "We have to-"

"What, Sabrina?" Zelda snapped, breaking the chain of thought before anyone else rallied behind her. "If she's working for Him, what will you do? Right now, you're about to be married off to the Dark Lord. It doesn't matter what Lilith has done. We need to focus on protecting you. Saving you." Zelda drew back, and then realised her mistake, feeling the words claw at her throat.

Unholy Hell.

"Lilith?" Sabrina echoed. "What do you mean, Lilith?"

Zelda drew a breath, feeling the room turn to face her with sudden interest. "No," she said, though it was a ridiculous response. "I meant nothing by it. It was just a slip."

"Auntie?" Ambrose questioned softly. "Do you know something we don't?"

"Aunt Zee," Sabrina hissed, pushing to her feet. "Are you working for the Dark Lord, too?"

Zelda felt panic claw at her chest as she took a step backward. "Absolutely not!"

"I mean, you cursed Nick, and you've been strange these last few weeks. Since Rome, in fact. You and Father Blackwood...you're both working for the Dark Lord and Ms Wardwell?"

"No, it's not that at all!" she defended. "Sabrina, I am not working for the Dark Lord, or with Faustus. I've only ever-"

"Then tell me what's going on," she said, fury growing in her. "Because right now, you look pretty guilty, and I think we all know something has been going on."

"Auntie," Ambrose asked. His voice was warm and calm, and Zelda looked to him, hoping he would be a voice of reason. "Have you been...having an affair with the Dark Lord?"

Sabrina's nose wrinkled, staring at her with unveiled disgust. "That's why you were so strange after your wedding night. You and the Dark Lord- I mean, I heard rumours but-"

"No!" Zelda panicked. "No, not the Dark Lord. I swear it. He has nothing to do with this."

"But you have been having an affair?"

Zelda drew in a breath. Every part of her wanted to run, but if she did, she knew it would only further concrete the idea of guilt. Splaying her hand on her stomach, she bit her tongue and closed her eyes, finding herself recalling the familiar prayer for strength.

"I struck a deal, an infernal deal. But it had nothing to do with you or anyone else. It was just a simple transaction between two consenting adults."

"Zelda," her sister whispered, making her horror known. "Did you promise your soul to the Dark Lord?"

"For the last time, it wasn't with the Dark Lord!" she said.

"It was with me," Lilith said, standing in the doorway beside Zelda. Sabrina rose. As did Ambrose and Nicholas Scratch, moving to defensive positions. A defensive barrier rose between them, but Lilith tilted her head, staring at Zelda. "I bet you wish you'd taken up my offer now."

Zelda narrowed her eyes, disliking the woman's choice to flirt with her. It was an inopportune moment, and she didn't find it cute.

"What offer?" Sabrina demanded.

Lilith smirked. "Nothing of your concern. That's between your dear Aunt and me," she said, giving a meaningful look to Zelda.

"Lilith," she warned.

"You're Lilith?" Sabrina inquired. "Why...?" her brows pressed together, and then Zelda saw the moment it clicked. "You're screwing the Dark Lord's mistress?"

Lilith's eyes opened wide with mock shock. "Such vulgar language. Honestly, Zelda, I thought you were teaching her the proper etiquette of being a young witch?"

Zelda could feel her frustration rising and yet knew the woman's cauldron stirring was due to their current situation. They were all afraid. And if Lilith was here, then Zelda knew it was for one reason only.

She looked to Lilith and watched as the woman's eyes softened in an apology, her expression otherwise perfectly neutral. It confirmed Zelda's fears, the Dark Lord had summoned her here to take Sabrina, and now she must play the obedient servant.

Zelda felt her mouth dry as her heart sank. The last few weeks had flown by, and Zelda felt herself wishing she'd spent more time speaking to Lilith. They were on the precipice of doom, and all she craved from Lilith was a few more hours.

Maybe she cared more than she thought.

"Gross," Sabrina said as looked between the two of them, her face twisting in the same disgust as she had before at the idea of the Dark Lord, which Zelda took personal offence to. Lilith was far more an attractive option. At least she wasn't trying to make some claim over Sabrina.

"If the deal wasn't about Sabrina," Nicholas asked, "then what deal did you two make?"

Zelda looked to Lilith, who looked back at her, her smirk only growing wide with mischief at the current situation. "Shall I tell them?" she asked, "Or will you?"

"Honestly," Zelda said, folding her arms and looking away from the woman. "It's nothing interesting and completely unrelated to our situation, so perhaps we should direct focus on-"

"No," Sabrina said. "I want to know."

"Believe me, you don't," Zelda said.

"Tell me."

"Your Aunt," Lilith said, apparently having enough of the back and forth, "wanted more power. I wanted...well, let's just say I quite enjoyed crashing the pre-wedding evening and decided that I wanted her all for myself."

Zelda looked away from her family, feeling her face burn at the sudden focus. Though she wasn't one to feel ashamed of engaging in sexual acts, it was another thing to have it aired out like laundry in front of others. Whatever acts she participated with Lilith should have remained between the two of them.

"But she's married," Sabrina said.

Lilith rolled her eyes, looking to Zelda with a pointed stare. There was a brief, shared moment between them. Both of them knowing that Zelda had about as much interest in Faustus as anyone else in that room.

Zelda looked away and raised her eyebrow at Sabrina. "You should know better than most that monogamy isn't something most witches stick to."

Sabrina's mouth fell agape, and Zelda sighed, looking away.

"If we're all done with my sex life, can we move to the problem at hand?"

Sabrina's eyes narrowed to Lilith, "As if she's not apart of the problem?"

Admittedly, there was a lot of catching up to do with that regard, and Zelda wasn't sure where to begin.

"Oh, no," Lilith said. "She's quite right to be upset." Turning to Sabrina, she reached out a hand, as if to compel her to follow, "The Dark Lord's summoned you. You will need to come with me."

"I certainly will not!"

"You will," Lilith said. "Because if you don't, He'll come for you and destroy everything and everyone in his path. It won't be pretty, believe me."

Sabrina paused, twisting her face before she conceited stepping forward, "All right," she said as if agreeing to a Sunday Lunch.

Zelda turned her head sharply, a protest rising as a cacophony rose across the room as everyone but Lilith and Sabrina, objected to her leaving.

Turning on her heel, Sabrina looked around at them. "I have to face Him."

"She's right," Lilith said, raising her eyes to Zelda's. There was no promise of safekeeping, and it only caused the agitation to grow in Zelda's stomach. The idea of her niece, facing the Dark Lord alone. There were too many unspeakable actions that could occur.

"Sabrina, be rational," Zelda urged. "You are no match against the Dark Lord."

"At least let me come," Nicholas said.

Lilith's eyes rose to him, a strange, knowing smile on her lips. "If you wish." Before turning to Sabrina. "You can bring your familiar too if you so desire."

Sabrina looked to where Salem sat, curled up in the corner of the room on a chair. The familiar lifted his head, mewling softly as all eyes turned to him. For a moment, Zelda wanted to interject herself and follow Sabrina, but she knew Lilith wouldn't allow it.

Walking over, she picked up the cat and placed him into Sabrina's arms. "Whatever you think of me," she said. "I would never turn on you. Everything I did was with this family's safety in mind." She paused before standing up straight, holding back the anxiety that twisted inside of her. "Now, come home safely. Please. If not for me, then for your Aunt Hilda and Ambrose."

Sabrina looked at her, a strange mix of emotion in her eyes as Lilith placed her arm around her and Nicholas' shoulders. Once again, the woman looked into her eyes, a soft nod, a promise to at least try. And then they disappeared.

Zelda pressed a hand to her mouth, moving to a seat as she sat down. There was still much to worry about, afterall Prudence was still missing. The Dark Lord had returned to his celestial form, and the future was uncertain. She had no idea what would happen to Sabrina but wished only for her safety.

"What now?" Ambrose asked.

Zelda looked up at him, her heart beating fast in her chest as nausea twisted in her belly. As much as she wanted to believe there was hope, she felt very lost in what their next move should be.

They could ward the house, but what good would that do them? Lilith could still bypass it, and they couldn't stay in there forever. Eventually, they would need supplies.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know."

Hilda and Ambrose both looked to her at a loss of words, before Ambrose made some excuse to rush off to read up on books and Hilda just looked to her. "Zelda, why didn't you say anything?"

She looked to her sister's face, feeling her throat swell at the much-too empathic expression. "Hilda, I'm already buried in enough guilt. I don't need to be reminded of my failings. If I could take it back, I would never have stopped Nicholas. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe Sabrina would never have..." she trailed off, holding back the sob that rose. She wouldn't cry. Not over this. There was too much to do.

"Yes, well, that. But I mean...why didn't you tell me about...the deal you made."

Ah, Zelda realised as she blinked away the tears. Of course, her sister would focus on the hidden truths between them. "It was no one's concerns but mine."

"It seems that you...maybe...care for her?"

Zelda shook her head, laughing. "Of course I do. I've worshipped her since our Mother first read the Satanic bible to us." How could she not? A woman who fled the garden, fled paradise, in pursuit of her power. Who scavaged the wastelands, survived them for years even before the Dark Lord rose her up. The first witch, forged out of spite and determination to survive without the False God's grace.

How could she not worship her, desire her? She was everything Zelda admired in witch kind.

Hilda gave her a knowing smile, reading more in-depth into the adoration than she should. "Since your wedding?" she inquired.

"Hilda, forgive me, but I do not wish to discuss this with you or anyone for that matter."

"Oh, yes, sorry," Hilda said. "Well, at least now everything's out in the open."

"Before our doom," Zelda said. She sighed, feeling a headache grow. "Sister, will you help me with something before Sabrina returns?"

"Of course."

"Prudence has been missing, and I'm...concerned that Faustus has done something. I've provided as much protection as I could, but it's been a few days, and she hasn't returned from whatever ghastly mission he's sent her on."

"Well, there are a few location spells we can use. How about I put a spot of tea on, and we can begin with the basics?"

"Thank you." She paused, looking at Hilda. "Truly. Thank you."