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poptod · 4 years

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Dusk and Dawn (Ahkmenrah x Reader)

Description: A gardener and a prince look for the beauty in the world and end up finding it in each other.

Notes: This is mostly a drabble that came about after I played with the hose while watering my flowers, and also after I read some ancient Egyptian poetry. gender neutral. Word Count: 10.5k

AO3 Link: Dusk and Dawn

God, you loved to watch him. He didn't know about that, of course, but you still liked to look up every now and then. Your garden was right below his room, and he often sat in the open arches overlooking the city. A soft sigh fluttered through you – the sun set on your end of the palace, and the warm rays always glittered in the prince's golden robes. Surprisingly you actually had met him, though that was a long while ago and you doubted he remembered you. Still, you held the hopeful fantasy that maybe he was looking down, watching you tend the blue lotus pond.

For a long while you'd been tending to the western garden, bringing water for the plants, keeping the pond clean and making sure the turtles and geese were fed. There were a few birds who lived there, and those that did each had a name assigned by you. One had electrically orange tail feathers; that one's name was Abayomi. Another had black feathers surrounding her eyes – her name was Nuru. An ibis also stopped by every now and then, though you didn't have a name for it, as it usually roosted up in the treetops.

None of that really mattered, but tending the garden all day and living without many friends had set a special loneliness upon you, and with no visitors you could generally do as you wished. That's why you kept one of your prized possessions there amongst the flower bushes; a flower from China that grew in the shade. The Pharaoh was not aware of the flower, but you doubted he'd actually care anyway. After all, he barely glanced at the list of gardeners before hiring you, and he seemed to be doing it more to satisfy his wife's wishes than to fulfill a passion for the earth.

Either way, you were lucky to have the job you did – it paid well, was an easy enough, enjoyable job, and every now and then you could see the prince in his palace windows. The best times were when you could hear the jangled notes of him trying to play harp, though most times it was rather out of tune.

You circled the sandstone path of the garden once more, watching every flower and testing their sweet scent in the warm air. Once you checked the health of each vine, bush, and tree, you turned to the pool of water, the alabaster edge marking the lillies encircling a tiny, grass island in the center, where turtles liked to relax.

As the last vestiges of sunlight disappeared over the desert and oasis horizon, you stood from your knelt position against the white lip lining the water, looking up to a purple dusk above you. One glance at the open arches and he was not there. Slightly disappointed, you enjoyed the last few minutes of your job before you left. You didn't ever really like going home – your roommates didn't like you all that much (and to be fair, you didn't like them), and the gardens were much quieter. Unfortunately, you had to pack up your remaining tools, as your garden was the home of nesting animals and the few nobles who meandered the paths at night.

Tomorrow you would have to tend to the bushes. Their branches, while fruitful, had to be trimmed properly so as to keep a 'clean' look about the place. Another issue was the overcrowding of the date trees; you'd have to look into that, but you left that for tomorrow. As for tonight, you wandered on home, watching the stars appear in the sky like distant candles marking an oasis.

You awoke to the screech of birds outside your window, roosting in the tall trees even with your third-floor bedroom. Grumbling, you hid away from them, slowly acclimatizing yourself to the idea of standing up. When at last you did so, you turned to the small mirror in your name. Kneeling before it you tidied up your hair, making sure you looked even before reaching for your clothes. Normal clothes today, you thought – nothing special happening, just another day of tending.

Beneath the pile of cloth, something rattled, and as you pulled the folded clothes away you found a golden armband beneath them, clinking against the stone floor. You paused, curiosity consuming you until you set the clothes aside and picked up the band. Examining it, you admired the sun's reflection and the lapis beads dug into the shape of a scarab. Your brows knitted together; you had no recollection of seeing this, much less buying it. Maybe one of your roommates had gotten it for you, but it seemed improbable, as they often failed to pay rent. For a moment you contemplated wearing it, ultimately deciding it couldn't do any harm.

With a soft smile on your face you pulled on your sandals, tying up the leather laces before slinging your linen satchel over your shoulders. Running down the stairs, you made a quick stop to the pantry, taking one of the parts before you left out the front door. It would be a beautiful day, you thought, as the sun shone warm overhead, and in the distance you saw naught but a pale blue sky and faraway mountains. You passed by a couple birdsongs as you made your way to the palace, and though you made sure to appreciate them you also made sure not to be late. Not that you actually had to check in or anything – just a personal preference.

It didn't take too long before the palace stood in front of you, the tall, stone walls leering over the city. The sight unsettled people sometimes (mostly foreigners), but you found it familiar over all else. Another soft smile crossed you – if you could find time to stop by the kitchens, you could get leftover bread and scraps for the birds, which always helped in their amiability with you.

You passed by several people in the halls, none of which you knew, though silent nods were usually exchanged. Politeness was key when dealing with royalty and nobles, and your fear of them helped to keep you in check. You would never be able to find it within yourself to disobey nor befriend royalty.

Fortunately, you did stop by the kitchens, and the servants working there bid you a cheery hello and pleasant good bye as you came and went, stuffing day-old bread in your bag.

Continuing on your way, you came to the large archway leading into your garden. Sunlight shone through it and onto the stone you stood upon, lighting up the intricate detailing of the carved arch, and the bits of metal in your sandals. Warmth rolled up your body, comforting your skin as you continued forward. The sun had always been your friend, and you hoped it would remain that way, as you always smiled when the sun touched your face.

Setting your bag down on the stone floor you snuck behind the bushes, pulling out the box of various tools you needed. Shovels both big and small, shears, bags of earth direct from the Nile's shores, such and such – you dug through for a moment before reaching the large, metal clippers. Holding it with both hands you smiled, satisfied with the size before you stood. The bushes needed trimming; you'd do that first, and once you finished with that, you could climb up into the trees and harvest the dates, and later the figs nabk berries.

In the meantime, you listened to the faraway music of the temples, carefully snipping away at the loose leaves and branches. Out of habit you looked up to the sky, watching for both birds and the prince. When you found neither of them you let out a dissatisfied mumble, returning to the task at hand with a tinge of disappointment.

By around noon you finished off the bushes, and you excitedly prepared for your next task of the day. It was a tad harder than your previous work, but more worth it, and certainly more enjoyable.

Grabbing a wicker basket you set it beneath the date tree, looking up so as to carefully measure where the dates would fall. Date trees were tall, tall enough to need either a ladder or a rope, neither of which you had. You contemplated your various options before deciding you could probably climb up the trunk. Whether or not that was safe you didn't know, but it wasn't particularly important anyway. Climbing trees was fun.

Your first attempt ended up with you flopping onto your back as you fell. It wasn't a very long fall considering you only made it two feet into the air, but it still knocked the air out of you, which was an unpleasant feeling all around. Trying again, you kept your hands tight around the wood, using your shoeless feet to get a better grip. With a little more flailing you made it to the top, wrapping your legs around the trunk and releasing your hands. You floated midair, and with a wide, triumphant grin you began to pick at the branches heavy with dates, letting them fall into the basket far below.

Through the tree branches movement caught your eye, pausing your hands as curiosity once more overcame you. High above you, the prince stood at his golden arches, and for a second the two of you made eye contact. Reaching your hand out wide, you waved at him. He laughed – at least that's what you thought he was doing, and he waved back. Your own bright grin crossed you, but before you could think of something to yell, he returned to the safety of his room. You tried not to let it disappoint you and returned to the dates.

A few minutes later and the heavier branches were lifted of the bulk of their fruits, making the brush of the leaves much lighter in the breeze that passed by. You climbed carefully to the floor, jumping off when you could, and looking over the collected dates. It was a good batch – clean, well shaped, with little to no bruises. You had a special talent when it came to that, which you liked to believe made you a better gardener.

Lifting up the heavy basket you took it to the waterside, kneeling on the ledge and dipping the basket in. The design of the flax allowed water to pass through, and as you soaked the fruit the bugs and dirt washed away, fluttering to the bottom of the clear pond. With a grunt you lifted it out, the remaining water draining till all that was left was clean dates. You took one – just to taste, and within the first bite you knew the trees were having a wonderful spring.

As you made your way to the arch, ready to take the basket to the kitchen, you were stopped by nearly walking head-on into a man entering the garden. You fumbled only a moment, your grip on the basket tightening so as to not accidentally drop it on both your and the stranger's feet.

"Oh goodness," you breathed out as you stepped backwards, narrowly avoiding collision.

"I'm sorry, I – I didn't see you, sorry," he stammered, holding his hands out in front of him defensively.

Looking up to his face, your breath stopped, eyes widening imperceptibly. Immediately you dropped the basket, kneeling before him in a bow that pressed your forehead against the stone floor.

"My prince," you said, your voice weak from nerves.

"Oh, there's no need for that," he said quickly, helping you back up to your feet while you stared in awe and confusion. "I'm the one that almost ran into you, after all. You're the gardener, right?"

You nodded, heart pounding against your ribs.

"I see you from my room, sometimes," he said, and right away you recalled crystal clear memories of seeing him far above you that dated back years.

"I think I waved to you," you said softly.

"Yes," he said with a smile, "you did. I just... I thought I should introduce myself. I think we've seen quite a lot of each other, but I still don't know your name."

"I am Nedjem," you introduced yourself with a shallow bow.

"Ahkmen," he said, offering you his hand. Gingerly you took it, shaking his hand.

"I'm sorry to leave so shortly, but I need to take these to the kitchens," you said as you knelt, ignoring how close you were previously standing before him in favor of lifting up the heavy basket. He scooted to the side to allow passage.

"Will you be back?"

"Of course, my prince," you said with another short bow, this time bidding him a short good-bye.

A shiver ran through you – both from your encounter and the sudden shade in the chilled walls of the palace. Passing by the paintings adorning the hallways, you noticed your hastened step with bashfulness, and the ceaselessly happy smile creeping upon you. You couldn't control it, so instead you kept your head up and waved to the couple people you passed by.

It wasn't a long trip to the kitchens, and though the chefs wanted to discuss something with you, you quickly excused yourself with the excuse that the prince was waiting for you. They shut up pretty well after that.

The prince was just as nice as you thought he would be, something even you could tell from your brief meeting. A giddiness ran through you – he was so polite, especially considering his other family members. You'd only met his brother once, but you preferred it that way, considering in that one meeting that lasted exactly four minutes, he managed to find seven different ways to insult you. A creative lad for sure, but not kind.

You reentered the garden with the large, empty basket at your hip. Humming quietly to yourself, you stowed it away with the other tools, not bothering to look back at the pond.

"Is this where you keep your tools?" The voice of the prince said behind you, and before you could help it you jumped, whirling around to face him with quickened breath. At your reaction his eyes widened, and he said, "I'm so sorry, that's twice now I've made you jump. Oh dear."

"No, it's my fault, I should've noticed you standing there," you said quickly, trying to get your breathing under control. The prince didn't make it any easier – he was practically standing chest to chest with you, and with you backed up against the thick brush, you couldn't move anywhere. You could feel your cheeks boiling with a vibrant blush.

"I'm still sorry," he said with a weak chuckle, taking a few steps back so you could leave your little hole behind the bushes. You nodded your head gratefully, but you couldn't hold that long of a conversation with him, even if you wanted to. After all, you were still at work, and the fig trees needed to be plucked and trimmed.

As you took one of the smaller baskets to the northern row of fig trees, the prince followed behind you, looking over your shoulder as you worked away. With your bare knees dug into the soft earth, you ducked beneath the tree branches and reached for the more invisible of the fruits. There had to be a few visible for the King to pick, should he come through, so you took up the tendency of taking the bare minimum. The King hadn't said anything, so you assumed it was fine.

"Can I make it up to you?" The prince said in that mellowed, honey voice that you doubted you'd ever grow used to.

"What do you mean?" You asked, reluctant to turn away from your task, as any eye contact you held with the prince had your heartbeat picking up and your palms sweating.

"I frightened you terribly. You could've dropped your basket. Both times, too," he added, drawing a soft laugh out of you. Shaking your head, you tried to think up a response as you debated whether or not you actually wanted to spend time with him. He was kind, but you couldn't trust yourself to keep calm.

"That's really not necessary," you said.

"I know," he said as he knelt down beside you, dirtying his golden robes. Before you could say anything, he added, "I just want to."

"I would love to, but I'm busy with the garden most days," you said with a sigh, your heart sinking ever so gently into a pit of regret for something you hadn't even decided not to do.

"What about tonight? I can take you down to the river, we can sail for a little while," he offered, and though your immediate reaction was to turn him down, you paused before speaking. You could certainly use more flora and such for the garden (it was a little sparse around the walls), and one of the best, cheapest places to get it was in the wild.

"Can I collect plants?" You asked quietly, almost embarrassed to bring it up. But he just smiled, warm and comforting, as though what you said was not only special but worth hearing.

"Of course. When do you finish off here? I can meet you then," he said, and you answered with your usual time, which was around sunset.

He bowed curtly before he left, a hint of a smile tugging at the ends of his lips. You let out a heavy breath – he could be quite intense, but you looked forward to the day you could relax around him, should that day ever come. In the meantime you fantasized while you gardened, dreaming of picking figs beside him and wading in the shallow pools.

The sun set slow that afternoon, verging carefully into evening. You didn't notice, still caught up in your plants, and having yet to feed the geese circling the pond. The ibis hadn't come today, but you weren't worried – it could handle itself just fine. As for the domesticated ducks and turtles, not quite so much, and as one of the servants brought you a small basket of wide, crisps leaves, you thanked them with a short bow. They left quickly, and with that you turned to the animals gathered in the pond and on its' island.

Slipping off your sandals you kept the basket of leaves close to you, carefully readying yourself for dipping your feet into the water. It chilled against you, crawling slowly up your leg till you stood calf deep in the water, wading across the soft dirt floor towards the island. Several of the turtles looked up to you, but the rest didn't pay your presence any mind. Smiling softly, you pulled a few leaves out, holding them in your hand for the more hungry ones to bite into. The crisp of the leaf in a sharp beak snapped in the quiet air, bothered only by the soft giggles leaving you at the sight.

Ahkmen watched as the edge of your skirt dipped ever so slightly into the water, smiling to himself at your absolute concentration. He stood, leant against the arch while you hummed quietly, taking short pauses to speak to the many turtles now staring at you. It was a rather unfamiliar sight to him, but he still couldn't help the smile on his face.

"I've got to feed the others now," you told the turtles quietly, leaving the rest of the leaves on the center of the island before wading back to shore.

Setting down the now-empty basket, you reached for the bag of bread crumbs, only then catching Ahkmen out of the corner of your eye. You nearly jumped – again – but fortunately, you kept your composure this time.

"Do you often feed them?" He asked, his arms crossed over his chest, watching you with a lopsided smile.

"Feed them every day," you said with a nod. "They live here."

"Really? I thought they were wild," he said, stepping away from his place beneath the arch to join you at the side of the pond. Still dressed in his golden robes, though this time wearing neither his cape nor his crown, he sat down on the pond's ledge.

"Some of them are," you said, sprinkling crumbs over the water around the ducks, "but some understand the ease of life here a little better than others."

They began ducking their beaks underwater, fast movements allowing them to eat before it soaked too terribly. You watched with a distant smile, sprinkling more over as they ate quickly, the sound apparently amusing Ahkmen.

"Could I feed them?" He asked, his eye switching between the geese and you.

"Of course," you said, handing him the bag.

With a grin he grabbed a rather large handful, mimicking your sprinkling, but ultimately failing when a sizable chunk fell from his palm, sinking into the water. He frowned.

"Don't worry," you said, "they'll get it eventually. They always do."

The two of you stayed there a little while longer, you calf-deep in water, and Ahkmen sitting on the ledge, his skirt crumpled in his hands to avoid soaking it. As you fed the last bits of bread to the ducks, the sun fell behind the horizon. That familiar purple tinted the sky, making way for the first stars, and in the southern sky, the moon. Dusk settled itself upon the land, and with that you looked to Ahkmen who was already staring at you.

"Nice evening, isn't it?" He murmured, tracing his finger over the lily pads. You agreed with a hum. "Shall we go then?"

He stood before you answered, and wordlessly you followed him, wading carefully in the water before making it to the edge. Hauling yourself off, you wrung out the end of your skirt. You offered a small smile before taking your bag, slinging it over your shoulder before you left the garden, walking beside him like good friends. For a little while he led you through the palace corridors, into places you'd never been before and didn't really care to be. It didn't take too long, though – soon he was leading you down an outdoor path to a distant boathouse, sitting on the edge of the Nile with its' canoes brushing up against the dock in time with the gentle movement of the water.

The scent of the shore hit you all at once, enlivening your heart till you were practically giddy, your pace quickening to reach the river sooner. Beside you Ahkmen smiled at your excitement, fixing his steps to match yours.

"I don't get a lot of free time," you told him quietly, your eye never straying from the fertile shore. "My work takes a lot of... well, work."

"I feel the same way," he said with a chuckle, "with all the studies I've got to do."

"At least we have free time in the night," you said.

"Indeed. And I'm happy to spend it with you," he said, leaning forward to catch your reaction. He was quite a lot taller than you.

"You hardly know me," you mumbled as a blush began creeping up your cheeks.

"I know you care deeply about the earth. That tells me a lot about you already," he said.

"Like what?"

"You're kind and thoughtful," he said, pondering quietly for a moment before he continued. "You're also quite beautiful, though I didn't need to see your garden to know that."

You said nothing, instead staring at the ground while Ahkmen watched your growing blush with much interest. He had a soft blush of his own, invisible in the dark of night, and he preferred to keep it that way.

At last you stood beside the shore, following him into the boathouse where the skiffs were tied up. As he set about positioning oars and untying ropes, you sat on the end of one of the many wooden docks, your legs dangling off the edge, just barely skimming the surface of the water. Staring upwards, you watched the sky's movements in the approaching midnight. Soon it would become much harder to see, but you didn't mind all that much – night was a beautiful time to be alive, and the moon above would be able to mark the definitions of the plants along the Nile. You fidgeted thoughtlessly with the strings of your bag, only pulled away when Ahkmen tapped your shoulder.

"Ready?" He asked as you pulled yourself to your feet.

"Yes, my prince," you said with a smile.

"You don't need to call me that. Not when we're alone at least," he said, taking your hand and leading you to another dock, where a boat sat tethered by only one rope in a weak knot.

Helping you inside, he had you sit on the end before entering himself, untying the rope and taking an oar in hand.

"Do you want me to do that?" You asked, too aware of his royalty.

"Aren't I the one who invited you here?" He asked in reply, a questioning smirk on his face.

You huffed, but unfortunately couldn't stop your own smile from appearing. He clearly liked your compliance, though you felt nothing but restlessness as he rowed, taking the two of you far from the boathouse and the palace. Sighing, you tried to comfort yourself – the prince was perfectly safe, and you had nothing to worry about. The thought alone didn't rid you of your anxiousness, though blamed that chiefly on the way Ahkmen kept an expectant eye on you, smiling when you smiled and generally watching you with an innocent curiosity.

"By the way, if my father catches us, this trip is for your garden," he said, breaking the silence, followed by your laughter muffled by your hand.

"I'll keep that in mind," you said when you calmed down enough to form words.

He was beaming at your delight, his eyes shining even in the dim light of the moon. You hadn't taken the time to notice it before, but he had a childish curiosity for the world, something you often found in yourself as well. After all, you tended to the geese and turtles as though you could speak with them, a trait more commonly seen in children than adults.

The shore rolled slowly by, marked only by the soft sound of water rushing against Ahkmen's oar. Ripples ran from the droplets falling in by the oar, brushing against the fingers you dipped ever so slightly into the water, finding comfort in its' familiarity. There were no fish in the river, at least none you could see – it was a bit hard to look for fish at night.

When at last you found your search fruitless you turned back to the shore, feeling nothing but your heart beating harsher every second you spent with the Prince. Not out of any logical anxiety, of course; just the need to be seen as good, as worth his time.

Out of the corner of your eye you caught a flower resting in the water, the petals white and the center pink. Your eyes widened.

"Could we stop here for a moment?" You asked, your eye never leaving the flower.

Wordlessly he followed your request, guiding the boat to shore, where you immediately jumped out. Water splashed up your leg, a few drops reaching him. You didn't watch, caught up in the search, though you still heard Ahkmen's quiet chuckle.

In the garden you tended, the lillies were blue – blue lotus to be exact, and though they were beautiful, blue was the only color they showed. Maybe it was just that specific strand of flower, but excitement still filled you as you reached the white lilly resting on a wide, dark green pad. Pulling the small knife out of your bag, you dipped your hands into the water, running your knife across both the pad and the flower's stem till it broke, allowing you to pick the two up as one.

"You know, people come to our gardens, and they always marvel over our blue lilies," you said, wading the short way back to the boat, "but I always find white lilies to be more worth the time. They grow everywhere in the rest of the world, but so rarely do you find one here. I think it'll make a good addition to your garden."

"I've always thought of it as a bland color," he admitted, taking your hand and helping you back into the skiff.

"It's purity, and it is silence," you said softly, still admiring the flower, even as you took your seat back in the boat, dripping river water on the floor. "Think of alabaster, and clouds, and the reflection of the sun – white isn't bland. Not when you look closer."

"Maybe you're right," he sighed, taking the oars back in hand and rowing you away from shore.

"It's also good to have more than one type of lily. Makes sure the colors don't clash," you said, bringing a soft chuckle out of him.

"That too," he said.

You turned to the stars, looking up with a distant smile as you admired their light. They had patterns – looking close enough, you could find anything, just like in summer clouds. Lions, trees, chariots, and all of it hidden in the heavens. You sighed softly, filling yourself up with a calm you rarely found while in the presence of someone else.

"I feel as though I already know you," he said, drawing your attention away from the light of the stars and to his light.

"How so?"

"Well, I... um, I've actually watched you for a while, from my room," he said, clearing his throat awkwardly. "I hope that doesn't make you think any less of me. I just... you're very nice to watch."

Despite him initiating the conversation, he wouldn't make eye contact with you, intent to concentrate on the oar that really didn't require all that much concentration. Reaching forward you stilled his hand, allowing the boat to come to a stop in the river as he looked to you.

"I already kind of knew that," you admitted. The two of you had made eye contact enough throughout the years for you to realize a pattern.

"Really?" He asked, a blush burning onto his cheeks as he gripped the oar tight, letting his knuckles turn white.

"I don't mind," you said softly, smiling gently as he met your eye. It brought a small comfort to him.

"It wouldn't've happened if I were allowed to leave the palace, mind you. I just... it gets terribly lonely, sometimes. I know I have to complete my studies since one day I might rule this land in my father's stead, but I am still young," he said, spilling out information you hadn't expected to hear anytime in the next month. You took a moment to contemplate your response.

"At least you're aware of it. Better than ignorance or anything of that like," you said.

"You're a very kind person, aren't you?" He asked, tilting his head slightly to the left.

"I don't think that's for me to decide, but thank you anyway," you said with a soft giggle, making him grin as well, dimples creasing into his blushing cheeks.

"I enjoy your company a lot more than I thought I would, and to be fair, I already thought I'd enjoy your company quite a lot," he admitted, making you laugh. Immediately you covered your mouth with your hand, unable to stop the giggling falling from you. His smile only grew.

"I enjoy your company quite a lot, too," you said in a posh voice.

He let his head hang from his shoulders as silent laughs shook his body. Delight filled you – from his smile, from your own comfort, from the gentle current of the river, from your flower, and ultimately just from him. You were expecting a polite man. Not a warm one, but the surprise was one you welcomed with open arms.

As you headed back up the Nile in search of the city, you watched the shore carefully for any other flowers. You didn't end up finding any more, but you did pause for a few fern leaves, and the root of a vine whose leaves splayed wide. Watching the water pass by, you leaned against the edge of the boat, your chin supported by your palm, watching the shadow of your reflection beneath you. She smiled, and your lips quirked up just slightly.

Soon the bottom of the river could be seen, making you raise your head away from the water and towards the prince. The boathouse sat ahead of you, and as Ahkmen rowed you back, you took the little time left to watch the muscles on his back move with every stroke of the oar. You hadn't noticed before, but he was actually rather muscular. Just another thing you realized about him that night along with a dozen other things.

He gently maneuvered the skiff back into its' place at the dock, tying up the rope on his end before tossing his oar onto the dock. Placing his hands on the wood he lifted himself out, tying the other end before lending you his hand, helping you out. You murmured a soft thank you, following behind him as he put away the oar.

"We can do this again, if you like," he offered quietly as the two of you headed back towards the palace. "Or we don't have to. Up to you."

"I'd like to," you said, "if only to get more seeds."

He grinned, shaking his head.

"Shall I find you at dusk again?"

"That sounds nice."

When I hear your voice, it's pomegranate wine

I live to hear it

And if I look at you, at each look,

it is purer than any honey or beer.

True to his word, he did take you on more short excursions, though he called them expeditions, something that always made you chuckle. Maybe it was just because you were bashful around him, but no matter the reason you both enjoyed calling them that. Expeditions or adventures – you still found yourself enjoying them, even if you took the same path through the Nile every time.

At sunset he appeared in the threshold of your garden, watching you silently as he always did. Sometimes you spied him out of the corner of your eye, but most times you didn't, leading to you jumping when he made a sound. The other times that you did see him you let him stand there, feeling the heat of his gaze on your back.

What exactly he was doing you didn't know, but you didn't mind all that much, as he'd never shown any cruelty to you. It was a polar opposite to his brother – at least, in your interactions with the two princes. Kahmuh didn't talk to you nearly as much as Ahkmen did, and you preferred to keep it that way.

"How's the garden today?" He asked, making you twist around to him. The moment you saw him a bright smile lit up your face, now an instinct whenever you met his eye.

"Doing quite well. I need to feed the geese less, though," you noted as you stood from your seat beside the pool, your feet dipped in the water.

"Why? Growing too domesticated?"

"No, just too fat," you said, pulling a laugh from the prince.

As you stepped out of the pond, the geese tried to follow you, honking at you demandingly. You turned around, scolding them quietly before you hurried over to Ahkmen.

"My prince," you greeted him with a bow of your head, a habit you made sure to keep. Just in case. He didn't like it, which was obvious from his knitted brow, but he would have to learn to like it.

"Want to go out on the river again?" He asked, mostly ignoring your greeting.

"Of course."

And you found yourself out on the water for the umpteenth time, staring at the same stars, watching the same shore pass you by, and yet every time you joined him it felt new. Just like the first time you watched the shore carefully, scanning for any flora you could add to the garden. You paused only to look to the sky, charting the stars with your imagination, drawing lines across the heavens to form the earth in the sky.

"I've finally started taking astronomy lessons," he said, his voice airy as he, too, looked up to the stars. "I've always loved the stars, but... never got around to learning much about them till now."

"Is it a difficult subject?" You asked, leaning forward.

"Not yet," he said with a chuckle, making you smile.

With the skiff resting the middle of the river, he set down the oar, moving to sit beside you. He took your hand and pressed your cheek against his, matching your eyes together as he pointed upwards.

"Up there," he said, "you can see Hathor's constellation, right by the brightest star."

"Oh, yeah," you mumbled, watching where he pointed and drew out the sacred cow.

"Over here is an eagle. The tail runs pretty far, but it connects through the southern star," he said, and in your concentration you almost forgot about his touch against yours, curling around your fingertips and pressed against your blushing cheek.

"It's beautiful," you murmured thoughtlessly, not even noticing when his finger dropped down, landing on your intertwined hands. He hummed in agreement, keeping at your side.

Only when silence encompassed you did you pay attention to his closeness, an anxious warmth crowding out your thoughts as he breathed against you. You could so easily rest your head on his shoulder, or stroke your fingers across his forearm, or kiss his cheek – you didn't do any of those things. Instead you enjoyed the softness of his hand while you could, letting your imagination run free as you stared up at the patterns of the stars.

You almost drifted off, almost – one moment you were almost leaning into him, your eyes just barely closing, and the next he once more stood on the other end of the boat, the long oar in his hand. He was humming, quietly enough that you had to strain to hear. As the seconds rolled by you stared back up at the stars, memorizing his thoughtless hum and teaching each note to the distant lights above you.

Upon your return to land your feet grew shaky, too used to being in the gentle rock of the tide. Like all the other times he offered you his hand, and you took it, lifting yourself out of the boat and pressing your side against his for support. He didn't seem to mind, so you stayed right where you were. With your heart thumping so harsh you were worried he could feel it, the two of you left the boathouse, heading up the path back to the palace.

"Have you got anywhere to be in the morning?" He asked.

"No," you answered.

"I'll walk you home, then," he said with a soft smile, and you looked at your feet, ashamed of the blush that so easily overtook you. "I haven't anywhere to be tonight or tomorrow."

"Is that rare for you?" You asked quietly, your shoulder bumping against his arm as you walked.

"Let's just say it doesn't happen often," he said, making you chuckle.

Soon you found yourself at the fork of the path, the well-trodden one leading to the palace, and the overgrown path leading into the city. He took you that way, adopting a slow stroll that you didn't mind in the least. Even if you did get subpar sleep, it would be worth it to spend more time with him, listening to crickets and the distant sound of music. Like most summer evenings, the city was alight with the life of several different parties. The scent of alcohol grew thick in the air, and the shouts of patrons louder, marking where solitude ended and unease began. The prince didn't seem to mind it, but he noticed your discomfort, and in a motion both exciting and familiar, he held your hand in his.

Behold, if I pass before him,

I shall tell him of my turnings;

Behold, I am yours, I shall say to him

And he will boast of my name.

On a late summer morning, you awoke before the sun, bringing yourself to life with a heavy sigh. The blankets across your body draped as you sat up, already awake from the rather disturbing dream you'd had. With the thought of sleep eradicated from your head, you stood, dressed yourself, and left your home without word or breakfast. You regretted the decision about five minutes into the walk to the palace, as you stomach began to grumble uncomfortably. Instead of stopping by anywhere, you thought of your Chinese flower, and how beautiful it would be to see it in the total dark of the hours before dawn. Surely it would be a marvel – and that was what led you away from your comfy bed and fresh food.

Slowly you climbed the steps of the palace, keeping quiet footsteps to keep the peace. Two soldiers were always stationed at each end of the staircase, and though you'd never said hello to any of them, you did wave, which earned you an odd look and confused wave in return. You almost stopped to laugh and initiate and genuine conversation, but the pull of your flower was strong enough to hurry your footsteps towards the garden.

As you reached the open hallway leading into the garden, you paused, already hearing a voice from inside. Silently you approached the arch, hiding behind the wall as you peeked inside.

Ahkmen sat on the pond's ledge, wearing naught but a loosely tied skirt that tugged down with every movement he made. For a moment you lingered on the soft skin of his waist, but your thoughts were torn from there when he spoke, and with one glance you found him talking to Nuru. She didn't look like she minded, but it was hard to pinpoint the emotions of a goose.

"You see Nedjem a lot," he said, his right hand curled around the fabric of his skirt, and the left petting Nuru's wing feathers. "Do you think they like poetry?"

You perked up slightly, though kept in mind it'd be best not to be seen.

"I hope they do," he hummed, a gentle smile on his face as the goose burrowed her neck into her fat body. You really needed to stop feeding them so much. "Lately I've written so much. Mostly on pottery shards, but still... maybe you'll have an opinion on them?"

He proceeded to dig into the small pocket sewn to the side of his skirt, shuffling around before pulling his hand back out, opening it to reveal shard upon shard of limestone. Your heart began to race, your grip on the marble arch tightening.

"I'm not a poet, mind you," he added, talking to the goose as though she were a person. "I can barely write. But..." he trailed off, sorting mindlessly through the collection before pulling one out, holding it up to read.

"Oh to be the artist – able to stare at you for as long as I please. To be the writer, capturing your essence, the sweet melody in your laugh. Oh, to be the musician, mimicking that melody, serenading you with the kindest words and softest tone, to be an artist – what an endearing form of love. How wonderful it must be to be an artist in love. Um..." he stuffed it back in his pocket, picking a new one. "When I touch you, I am love incarnate. I have found a home in the touch of your hand against mine. That one's... quite a bit shorter. Probably won't use that one. Oh, I shouldn't be too straightforward with it, either."

You almost giggled – you didn't, fortunately, managing to cover your mouth with your hand before any sound escaped. But the sight was so sweet, so endearing you could almost imagine him saying those things to you, looking you in the eye, and running his thumb across the curve of your lips. A lump grew in your throat, hurrying your breath as you watched him continue.

"There's only one more that's worth mentioning," he said, although there were a great deal many more shards than the last one he pulled. "I want to love you in so many ways. I want to love you as a servant, as a master, I would love you as a king and I would love you as a farmer. As long as it's you, I could be anything if I still loved you."

"That's a pretty poem," you finally said, leant against the arch and surprising him just like he'd done to you months ago. He immediately looked up, his expression softening when he recognized you.

"Nedjem," he said with a smile, a tinge of relief evident in his eye. "Gods, I thought you were my brother."

"Fortunately no," you said, walking to join him at the side of the pond.

"What are you doing here?"

"Well for one, this is where I work," you said, making both of you laugh. "Who are you writing these poems for?"

He stared at you a moment before answering, "someone very special."

"I'm sure she's quite happy to have your companionship, then," you said, ignoring your own feelings on the matter, as anything detrimental you could say would only worsen your own heart's decay. "And I do like poetry. You can show me them, if you'd like."

"I -"

"Ahkmen!" Came a voice from the hallway, shouting with terror-laced words. "There's a fire in the kitchen!!"

"Again?" He groaned quietly, moving to his feet and running towards the hall. "I'll be back in a moment," he promised you before he left, disappearing behind a corner.

You almost smiled, but instead you turned to Nuru, who was still mostly asleep.

"He's a nice man, isn't he?" You said.

I hear thy voice, O turtle dove-

The dawn is all aglow

Weary am I with love, with love, Oh whither shall I go?

The edge of the sun touched the horizon, casting a hazy, golden glow across the land. Your skin tingled beneath its' touch, warm and familiar as you sat on the docks of the boathouse. Ahkmen was God knows where – you hadn't seen him after the fire incident, and assumed he was busy with princely duties. He had a fair amount of those. You, on the other hand, had spent the last few days fixing up the array of new plants near the garden walls.

"He likes poetry," you murmured aloud to yourself, your concentration on the setting sun and its' peach clouds wavering as you thought on the prince.

He hadn't ever mentioned that about himself before, but it was obvious he enjoyed it quite a lot, and as you thought of his poetry in crystal clear memory, you wondered if perhaps you could write your own poetry. Of course, it wouldn't be written down – you didn't have any papyrus or clay, and you didn't even know how to write. No, you'd have to memorize the words you pieced together, and you imagined yourself serenading him as you closed your eyes, letting your feet drop into the river water below.

You thought and thought, racking your brain for ideas or clues as to what you could do. Compare his beauty to a rose – a tad too feminine, but you hadn't any idea what else to call him. He was sweet; like a rose, and his skin soft, like the red velvet petals. His humor was the scent of a rose's nectar that delighted the bees so, and when you caught him brandishing a spear in a spar against his teacher, he was the thorns of a dark green stem. His life was the roots and you were the water, happy to be something within him, be it a thought or a melody – and he kept you close, safe, like the leaves of a rose bush and the spike of thorns protected every wonderful thing that coexists to form pure life.

You closed your eyes and breathed. You would remember; you had to. Hopefully it would stay in your mind for a good long while, as you had no idea when you would see him next, much less be able to actually speak to him in that manner. It was rather daring, though – a lowly worker infatuated with a prince locked up in a high tower. A reverse fairy tale, and as you opened your eyes to see the quiet ripples of the water, you thought of nothing but him and the stars he drew in your eyes.

Slowly the sun set low, dying once more as the moon took its' place in the sky above you. Looking up, you found the moon as a sliver, smiling in the dark. A cool wind settled over you, making you curl up to avoid the chill. Another deep breath and you turned to the water, watching the reflection of the sky dance, rippling with every slight movement.

Hours passed by and you stayed right there, memorizing your image of him, trying to imprint it in your memory. It would have to be perfect; he deserved no less, especially from someone so low as you. Neither of you had remarked much on your class difference, but every now and then it did bother you – you'd be less than human if it didn't. Sometimes class didn't matter, but sometimes it did, and that but had you gripping the wood of the dock tight. He was a kind man, of voice, touch, and words, and you had no doubt he could love someone beneath him. Whether he could love you was something else entirely.

Soon the darkest hours of night overtook you, and in the dim glow of the moon you could hardly see your hands, only feeling the way you drew your fingers up your thigh to rest in your lap. The silence that surrounded you was broken only by the roll of the river against the wooden dock, a few of the boats clanking against each other. You breathed deep, relaxing in the familiar scent of the Nile, comforted by the breeze and the dissipation of every physical thing. Nothing but pitch black – it might as well have been a new moon, as the distant shore melded into the faraway mountains without hesitation.

A hand touched your shoulder and you jumped, feeling the fingers run a line down your upper arm before stopping and disappearing. You looked up, finding nothing but darkness, yet as the figure sat beside you, you could hear the even breaths and the creak of the wood beneath them.

"What are you doing here so late?" Ahkmen asked softly, worry evident in his tone.

"I needed some time to think," you answered honestly. "There's a lot on my mind as of late."

"Would you like to talk about it?" He said after a moment to let your words rest in the space between you.

"Not really," you said with a smile he couldn't see.

The two of you sat there for a couple minutes, your shoulder brushed against his, his thigh against yours, and the chill wind keeping you close to one another.

"I wrote something for you," you finally said, breaking away from the thought of holding it back. What was the use of memorizing if you weren't going to tell him? Besides, you were alone – just you, and just him.

"Really?" He said, sounding surprised.

"I didn't actually write it down. I just put together some words," you said, smiling when he chuckled. You were looking directly at him and you still couldn't see him, but your head replayed every time you saw him grin.

"How does it go?"

"I want you to close your eyes," you murmured, moving to cup your hand over his jawline, running your thumb over his now-closed eyes. "Imagine the garden. My garden." Your heart raced when you felt his breath on your skin.

Once assured he followed your command, you began your recitation, digging your nails into your palm to avoid slipping up.

"I am yours like this garden," you said, keeping your voice soft either out of love or fear. "Planted with flowers, and fragrant herbs. Its canal is pleasant –– dug by your hand, cooled by the north wind. A lovely place to wander hand in hand; my body satisfied, my heart rejoicing, walking together. When I hear your voice, it's pomegranate wine –– I live to hear it, and if I look at you, at each look, it is purer than any honey or beer."

He didn't speak, but he remained in your touch, melting into the way you caressed his cheek. Raising his hand ever so gently, he set his own hand on yours, pulling it away just enough for him to kiss your palm, just enough to send you into a blazing blush.

"You remind me of the moon flower," you mumbled, barely able to get the words out without stuttering.

"A moon flower?" He asked curiously.

"I keep it in the garden," you said as your hand fell back to your lap. "Would you like to see?"

"Of course," he said, and the two of you stood, taking that familiar path back to the palace.

Gravel crinkled beneath your sandals, and birds circled overhead, but none of that fully processed with him so close to you.

"That was a beautiful poem, by the way," he told you in a murmur, almost reluctant to compliment.

"Thank you," you said, a small smile spreading across your face. "I suppose you inspired me a little this morning. I've never heard poetry before."

"Really? I've heard it quite a lot," he said.

"That's probably because you can afford it," you said, and the both of you laughed, leaning imperceptibly closer together.

He snuck you into the palace, and in return you snuck him into the garden, taking his hand and leading him onto the sandstone path. With a distant torch lighting the outside hallway, you could see the shapes of the garden trees and the walls. Ahkmen, ever so helpful, pulled a rushlight from his pocket, lighting it to reveal the closed lilies and, in the corner, the blooming petals of the Chinese flower. Once more you took his hand, leading him to kneel before it.

The white color that previously coated it was replaced with a vibrant pink, a color you were sure you hadn't ever seen before. If you had, it certainly wasn't as vibrant, and it didn't have you quite as awestruck as the flower did. The stem reached your shoulder when you knelt, covered in tiny petals, each belonging to its own blooming flower, ruffling in the slow breeze.

"I got it from a trader in the markets at Tanis," you told him quietly, careful not to break the trance of its' beauty. Turning to him, you saw his amazed face lit by the flickering rushlight, glowing in the dim of the garden.

"Where's it from?" He asked, his lips still parted in curiosity.

"She said it was from China. I'm not sure where that is, but she told me it's far in the east," you said, watching his expression carefully. The curve of his nose, the crinkles around his eyes, the slightest dimple from his smile filled with wonderment.

"I... I want to show you something, too," he offered quietly, as though you could ever say no.

"As long as it isn't too far away. Dawn will come soon," you said, noting the slightest variation in the pitch black sky.

"I don't care about dawn," he admitted as he took your hand. "Will you come with me?"

"Of course, my prince."

He pulled you to your feet, leading you away from the garden and into the palace. You turned down twists, letting him take you up staircases and through empty rooms. For a moment you thought to ask him as to his destination, but as you watched his delight in your curiosity, you let it be. You'd find out soon enough anyway – the palace wasn't outrageously large, though you'd bet without a guide it was easy to get lost. Fortunately, you had him, and he never let go of your hand.

Through hallways painted from top to bottom, through unused servant's quarters and empty storage rooms, and at the end of it all a large, wooden door in an unassuming hallway.

"My parents moved me here after Kahmuh started fighting with me," he told you, looking up at the bolted door. "I used to live in a much more occupied hallway, but I like the solitude. It's nice to hear the quiet."

You agreed but said nothing, letting his touch drop from yours as he worked with the bolt, eventually unlocking it with a heavy click. The doors slowly rolled open, aided by his hand till the whole of his room stood before you. In the center, pressed against the far wall was his bed, a silk canopy hanging above it. To the left his desk, and against the nearest wall a bookcase. At last your eyes wandered to the right of his room, finding the arches you saw so often from below, the open alabaster viewing the whole of Memphis.

When you didn't move forward he intertwined his fingers in yours, pulling you gently closer till he closed the door behind the both of you.

"It's a beautiful sight, isn't it?" He said, noticing your stare past the arches and into the city. "On festival nights the buildings light up like fireflies. So many people, all with their own thoughts and agenda, and all so small from here. Doesn't stop the city from reeking of alcohol, though."

You giggled, pushing him away as a dopey grin overtook him. While he went to light the torches hanging off the wall, you made your way to the arches, sitting on the cold floor and letting your legs dangle in mid air. His room had to be five or six stories above the ground, and as you looked down an anxious shiver ran through your body. Your legs and arms tingled, excited and fearful of the garden fall below you. Soon he joined you, letting his legs dangle beside yours, placing his hand right next to yours, where his pinkie could touch yours in a hesitant grace.

"You can see the Nile from here too. Fleets of ships, their banners covered in vibrant colors right next to the boats of fishers, whose boats carry no sail at all," he said, pointing into the distance where you could just barely make out the river. "It gets incredibly crowded sometimes."

"I see where you get your poetry inspiration from," you murmured, your eyes still stuck on the sight before you.

"That's not where I get it from," he said, and you turned to him with a confused expression, wondering why he was smiling and wondering where he was going when he stood.

Looking down, you picked at the dust on the floor, fidgeting with your nails as you turned back to the city. There were no celebrations or festivals, but still there were lights scattered across the many houses. If you keened hard you could hear the laughter of dinner parties and the music of dances.

Soft, calming notes came from behind you, struck on a harp. Turning around, you found Ahkmen sitting on a blanket, his legs crossed and a harp against his chest, plucking the strings with careful, gentle fingers. You didn't move – you couldn't, caught up in his focused expression, unable to tear yourself from his melody for even a moment.

"I'm not very good at harp," he paused to tell you, allowing you to break from concentration and make your way over to him. "I had to teach myself, and I'm not a very good teacher."

You giggled, covering your mouth with your hand as you did so.

"Is this what you wanted to show me?" You asked quietly, tilting your head.

"I... well.. yes, I'm... I'm just nervous, I'm sorry. I've never played in front of anyone, and I know you like harp. That's sort of why I, um, picked it up," he admitted abashedly, hiding his face from your eye.

"When did you learn that?"

"On one of our expeditions on the river," he said, his lip quirking up into a half-smile. "You were half asleep at the time. I don't expect you to remember it."

"I don't," you said, pleasantly surprised that he would remember that.

"The point is, I've been trying to get better. I practiced a lot, so hopefully I don't.. slip up," he said as he reached beneath a nearby pile of blankets, pulling out a roll of papyrus which he set in front of him.

You watched in curiosity as he cleared his throat, cheeks blushing despite the fact he hadn't even started. First he poised his fingers above the strings, then, after double checking the papyrus, he began. A sweet melody in major, simple to remember, and easy on the heart.

He cleared his throat again before he opened his mouth, a song falling from his lips. In that moment everything in your body stopped – you hadn't expected him to be a good singer. Hell, you hadn't expected him to actually be able to even play the harp, but here you were, being serenaded by your prince, comforted by his words and his simple presence.

"I love you, O still heart," he sang, "I stand alongside your image. Rejoice in sacredness, strong of voice – you are everything, perfect and pure, you are the earth and you are the sky. The ways I have hidden myself in you; My soul, My throne, O still heart, is yours."

When he finished you finally breathed again, your chest blooming a warmth you hadn't ever felt before. There were moments that could be considered similar, but when he looked up at you, uncertainty lacing his expectant eyes, nothing could compare.

You leaned forward, and wordlessly you pressed your lips up against his, kissing him sweetly in a moment he happily reciprocated. Comfort in his presence, happiness in his word, and it was home in his touch.

My hand in your hand

I walk with you

in all the beautiful places.

#ahkmenrah x reader #Ahkmenrah #Night at the Museum #rami malek #rami malek character #ahkmenrah x male reader #ahkmenrah x female reader

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boyduroy · 3 years

Text

Shave and A Haircut

Fandom: It (2017/2019)

Characters: Bill, Richie, Eddie, Stanley

Word count: 2,044

Genre: slice of life, hurt/comfort

Warnings: language, mentions of bullying

Synopsis: Just another day of being bullied by Bowers. Luckily Richie knows what to do.

{Not beta’d/proofread, sorry for any typos}

Bill, Eddie, and Richie are all sitting at the Tozier dining room table, waiting for the fourth member of their party to arrive. Their geometry homework is spread out across the wooden table, most of it unsolved, along with an array of snacks, most of which have already been devoured. Bill looks at the old clock on the wall as Richie and Eddie bicker over who gets the last of the barbeque-flavored potato chips. Stanley should have been done with baseball practice 30 minutes ago, and it doesn’t usually take him this long to bike to Richie’s house. Bill briefly considers riding up to the baseball field to check on him when a knock comes from the front door.

“About time,” Richie mutters, quickly swiping the final few chips from Eddie’s hand as he gets up to answer the door.

“Richie, you turd!” Eddie screams as

“Y’snooze, you lose, skeddi-boy,” Richie calls back to the dining room with a mouthful of chips. He rubs his hands on the edge of his shirt as he reaches for the door handle. He doesn’t remember locking it, and Stan knows he can let himself in, but Richie figures his friend is just being his usual polite self.

“Stan the man,” he announces loudly, swinging the door open. “Where’ve you been? You know we suck at math…”

Richie trails off as he takes in the sight of Stanley on his front porch. The other boy’s head is hung, defeated, and his baseball cap covers his face completely. Still, Richie can see the faint outlines of tear tracks running from Stan’s chin. His knuckles are paper white as they clutch his gym bag, and aside from the usual dirt stains on his uniform, he doesn’t look too roughed up in any apparent way.

“Stanley?” Richie asks, tilting his head to peek up under the baseball cap. Stan’s face is red from either crying or from exercise, or possibly a combination of the two. “What’s wrong?”

Stan sniffs, his dark brown eyes refusing to meet Richie’s. “May I come in please,” he asks, his voice a bit raw.

Richie pulls him inside, taking his gym bag from him. “Go sit down on the couch, I’ll grab you a glass of water.” As Stanley quietly kicks his cleats off near the front door, Richie races to the kitchen, tosses the bag down haphazardly, and grabs a clean glass from the cupboard. Any other day he would’ve just grabbed one of the dirty ones from the sink, which would’ve earned him an earful from both Stan and Eddie about how gross that was – “I drank from it earlier, so why should it matter?” – but right now was not the time to instigate. As he fills the glass from the kitchen sink, Eddie and Bill poke their heads in.

“What’s going on, Rich?” Eddie asks. “You drop something?”

Richie hurries back to the living room, trying not to spill the glass that he accidentally filled up with too much water. “Something happened to Stan,” he calls over his shoulder. “Come on, he’s in here.”

“What h-happened?!” Bill asks worriedly, he and Eddie hot on Richie’s heels as the three of them come to gather around Stan, now sitting stiffly on the edge of the couch. Richie offers him the glass, which spills a little onto the couch cushion, but Stanley accepts it and takes a drink. Eddie perches next to him, his hand on Stan’s shoulder, and subconsciously starts checking his friend for any signs of outward injury.

“You alright, Stanley?” Eddie asks. Stan swallows the water eagerly and gasps, handing the now half-full glass back to Richie. He nods but continues to look down, his face still obscured by his baseball cap.

“What happened?” Bill asks again.

“Bowers and his gang…” Stanley answers quietly. He suddenly shrinks into himself, unwilling to reveal any further information. “I can’t, it’s embarrassing.”

Bill kneels, putting a gentle hand on Stan’s knee. “It’s okay, you can tell us. W-why don’t you take off your h-hat so we can hear you better.”

“I can’t.”

“Huh?” Bill blinks, confused.

“I can’t take it off,” Stan repeats.

Richie smirks. “Don’t worry about your hat hair, Stanley, we’ve all been ther—”

“No.” Stan sniffles and looks up finally, his brown eyes swimming with tears. “I can’t take off my hat, Richie, because Henry Bowers and his asshole friends put krazy glue in it,” he enunciates sharply. “My hat. Is glued. To my head.”

The three of them stare stunned at their friend, whose head falls back down sadly. Bill can feel his own face growing hot with anger. Fucking Bowers… It was one of the cruelest pranks you could do to someone: paint the inner brim of their hat with krazy glue and just wait for them to put it on.

Eddie is the first to break the silence. “Oh Stanley,” he whispers, his own eyes threatening to mist. “It’s okay, you’re okay.” He rubs Stanley’s shoulder and looks to the other two. “What should we do, guys?”

Bill strides towards the door. “I’m guh-gonna got kick the sh-sh-shit out of Bowers,” he says matter-of-factly. Stan is on his feet in an instant.

“Please no, Bill! Don’t, he’ll do something worse to you,” Stanley yells, grabbing Bill’s shirt. Bill tries to shake him off as he opens the front door. “Please, it’s okay—”

“It’s not okay, Stan! He hurt you!”

Stan hardens. “Fine, I know, it’s not okay. It fucking sucks. But I don’t want you to get hurt fighting my battles for me! Bowers is going to get what’s coming to him eventually, but I don’t want you or anyone else getting hurt today.” He loosens his grip and sighs, rubbing his face. “Just… leave it alone, okay? For now, at least. Please?”

Bill huffs but eventually closes the door again.

“Fine,” he says, resting a hand on the offending baseball cap on Stan’s head. “But we still need to figure out what we’re g-going to do about th-this.”

“You’re gonna have to cut it off, I guess,” Richie offers.

Stan frowns. “No, I can’t. It’ll look so stupid.” He tries gently tugging the cap, but it doesn’t budge. “There’s got to be another way.”

Eddie approaches and carefully inspects where the hat and Stan’s hair are connected. “He really did a number,” he admits. “It’s stuck to your scalp in some places.”

Stanley groans. “Great,” he sighs.

“It’s just hair, it’ll grow back,” Richie insists. “My dad has some clippers in his bathroom, we can take care of it right now.”

Stanley shakes his head. “I especially don’t want to shave my whole head, Richie!”

“Why not? It’s just hair.”

“It’s my hair!” Stan argues. “Excuse me if I don’t want to look like Sinead O’Connor the rest of the school year!”

“It’ll grow back, Stanley!”

“I don’t care!”

“Oh my god, you are so sensitive,” Richie grumbles as he marches off and slams his parents’ bedroom door. Bill is about to suggest something when they hear the telltale buzz of an electric razor. The three of them are frozen in place.

“He wouldn’t,” Eddie says, looking wide-eyed at the other two.

They stumble past one another as they race to the bedroom and Bill pounds on the bathroom door. “Richie, what are you doing?!” he yells over the loud buzz of the razor. He tries the doorknob but it’s locked.

“Hey dumbass, you proved your point,” Eddie shouts at the door. “Cut it out, you’re freaking us out!”

Finally, after a few more bangs on the wood and jiggling the doorknob, does the buzzer click off and the door swing open. Richie stands there proudly, glasses off, clippers in hand, and with a freshly (and poorly) buzzed head.

“See? I told you it’s not a big deal, you wuss,” he says, gesturing to himself. The other three just stare at him in utter shock until Stan finally sputters.

“Richie, you… you--” Stanley says, then dips his head down into his hands, his shoulders beginning to shake. Richie frowns, worried for a minute that he’s crying again, but then Stanley tosses his head back and he’s laughing so uproariously. “You idiot! What the hell is wrong with you,” he asks through gasps.

The tension broken, Bill and Eddie also begin to laugh while Richie just smiles stupidly.

“You missed like so many spots, dude,” Eddie snickers. “Geez Richie, were you even trying?”

“Hey, I had to take my glasses off,” Richie protests. He tosses the razor to Bill and points to the back of his head, where tufts of black hair remained in messy patches. “Mind cleaning me up, Bill?”

Bill smirks and gets to work shaving off the rest of Richie’s hair. He actually didn’t do too bad of a job, just missed a few places here and there. At least he put a guard on it so he wasn’t just freehanding it.

“There you go,” Bill says once he’s finished. He hands Richie back his glasses and dusts the loose hair off his shirt. Richie examines himself in the mirror, his hands running over the short buzzcut.

“Looks a hell of a lot better than Sinead, if I do say so myself,” Richie remarks, satisfied with his handiwork. He throws a look to the other boys and grabs a pair of mustache scissors, snipping them threateningly. “Your turn, Stanley.”

Stan shakes his head quickly. “Not from you, four-eyes.” He takes the scissors and hands them to Bill. “Please be gentle.”

Bill nods and carefully starts cutting away the worst of the glue/hat/hair combination until the hat is freed, along with a substantial amount of hair. Eddie throws it unceremoniously into the trashcan. Stanley shuts his eyes, not wanting to see how ridiculous he looks with half his hair missing. Then Bill methodically shaves away the rest of his golden curls and it’s over before he knows it.

“Okay, you can look, if y-you want to.”

Stanley peeks one eye open and looks in the mirror. His face looks back at him, now sporting the same crewcut as Richie. It’s… not as bad as he thought it would be.

“It’s different,” he admits, touching the short prickly hairs gingerly. His heart aches for just a moment. It sucks but Richie was right: it’s just hair, and it’ll grow back. He glances at Richie. “I think I pull it off better than you, at least.”

Richie feigns a wounded look, clutching his chest dramatically. “Hey, whoa, watch yourself there, Staniel! Don’t forget, you copied me. I started this trend.”

They all laugh at this, then Bill looks at himself in the mirror, shrugs, and buzzes a line right down the middle of his head. They watch with amazement as he gives himself a haircut to match, smiling the whole time. Afterwards he clicks the buzzer off and turns to his friends, offering another shrug.

“I wanted to f-fit in with the cool k-kids. This look is v-very in right now.”

Stanley beams and throws his arms around Bill and Richie. “You guys are so dumb, but thank you,” he says. The three of them hug, then Richie looks mischievously at Eddie, who suddenly pales.

“Eds,” he states. “Snip, snip.”

Eddie glances between the three of them who now appear to be ganging up on him. He sighs and digs into his fanny pack. “My mom’s gonna think I joined a cult,” he mutters to himself. He pulls out his inhaler, takes a big puff, and looks to Bill. “Do it.”

Soon brunette hair joins the piles of auburn, blonde and black on the floor of Maggie and Wentworth’s bathroom. The boys take turns dusting each other off and inspecting one another for any missed spots, but Bill was careful and thorough and they all look good, if not a little bit off for the current fashion. Stanley felt grateful for his friends, idiots though they may be, for always making sure he was never alone in his suffering. They return to their long-forgotten snacks and homework, enjoying the pleasant company of one another – until the cry of “RICHARD TOZIER, WHAT IN GODS NAME HAVE YOU DONE TO YOURSELF” from Richie’s mom interrupted their time together.

#it #stephen king's it #fic #fanfic #richie tozier #bill denbrough #eddie kaspbrak #stanley uris

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etherrealoblivion · 4 years

Text

Chapter Sixteen: The Seventh Book

Table of Contents

Fic summary: Owning a bookstore in downtown D.C. came with its fair share of downsides. You never thought that being the target of a serial killer would be one of them. Luckily, a nice FBI agent by the name of Spencer Reid is assigned to watch over you. What's the worst that could happen?

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Reader

Words: 2,803

TRIGGER WARNING: GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE!!!!! BEWARE!!!!

A/N: thank you everyone for reading this fic i love you all. one chapter left to go. i am so sorry for what follows.

MASTERLIST

Your eyelids were so heavy it was almost impossible to open them. The chair you were in was cold and hard against your back, the discomfort prompting you to wake up a little faster.

Then your surroundings forced the memory of what had happened into your mind.

It was a dark metal room with a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. Across the room on the wall were several closed metal hatches. Although you couldn’t make out much more. After all, your eyes were still partially closed and the dim light of the room made it even harder to see.

A small gasp next to you alerted the presence of someone else in the room.

Turning your head — with immense effort — you saw Spencer Reid slouched in the chair next to you, hands tied behind his back, slowly coming to.

“Spencer,” you said, voice quiet and strained. But he seemed to have heard judging by the way his eyes snapped wide open and he began to writhe in the chair.

Grunting harshly, he finally got his arms untied, jumping up and running toward the back of your chair and pulling off the rope, leaving your wrist burning slightly from the scratch.

Quickly analyzing the situation, Spencer firmly pressed against each of the four metal walls, ensuring that there was no way out. Then, when he was sure none of the walls would give, he started ramming his elbow against the metal slots in one of the walls.

“Spencer!” you had found your voice suddenly at the thought of him hurting himself. Strangely, you had just noticed that the two of you were only wearing your underwear. Even your bra had been put back on. Although he was wearing a watch you’d never seen before with a tight leather band that squeezed his wrist.

His gaze snapped to you, a determined look in his eye with a fire behind it that sent a spark through you.

“Where are we?”

It was a stupid question and you knew the answer, but you still had to ask. Spencer attempted to soften his expression but to no avail.

“I’m sorry.”

The words hurt on a whole new level. There was so much meaning behind them. They confirmed the fact that you had indeed been kidnapped and taken to some sort of torture chamber, they signified that he had failed to protect you, and they broke the pact you had to never apologize to one another.

There was a crackle and heavy breathing filled the room, the sound coming from a minuscule vent in one of the corners of the room.

Spencer stepped between you and the vent, reaching out a hand behind him to make sure you stayed behind him.

The breathing hesitated and after a moment, someone spoke.

“Hello, Y/N.”

The voice was so familiar. You knew you knew it but you didn’t know from where. The memory was just out of reach and it kept slipping through your fingers.

Spencer, however, had frozen, presumably recognizing the voice. Your hand moved to his shoulder of its own accord, finding the skin there to be freezing cold.

The voice from the vent chuckled.

“I understand that you and Spencer have become quite attached lately.”

You looked at him, unsure whether to respond or not. He glanced at you over his shoulder and nodded stiffly.

“Ye—ahem—yes, we have. Why?” To recognize the voice, you needed to keep him talking.

“Hmm. Let’s see how far you’re willing to go for each other.”

There was a whooshing noise and one of the four slots in the wall shot open, revealing a small hidden space.

“I’m sure if you can’t figure out what to do, Doctor Spencer Reid can help you.”

And then it clicked. And it all made sense.

How he’d found your address, “Whoever accesses your card, even for something as small as a stick of gum, has the opportunity to use that information to find your name, your address, your workplace—” “Ok. I get it. People I see frequently and my credit card info. Gotta warn you, there’s not much I buy with it other than books and coffee.”

How he’d known which hotel you were at, “Whatever. Gives me more time to prepare for a cute date with a hot barista. Or . . . the other way around.”

Even how he knew you were at the cabin, “I actually had a coworker who had a cabin in the woods and he never mentioned becoming one with nature.”

All because “ . . . the waiter here, Tom, works at my regular coffee shop. Barista by day, waiter by night.”

“Tom. . . .”

Spencer looked at you sorrowfully as the voice chuckled through the vent.

“Very good . . . Honestly, I’m disappointed it took you this long to figure it out. I mean, it was pretty obvious. And so easy to get so much information about you! But! But, that's beside the point. You have a task I expect you to begin. After all, time is running out.”

Spencer reached into the hole in the wall, withdrawing a stopwatch, an electric hair clipper, and a small Exacto knife.

The stopwatch had two minutes and thirteen seconds on it, counting down slowly.

“What are we supposed to do?” you yelled at the wall, holding up the timer as if he could see it. You don’t know, there might be a camera, you thought to yourself, wrapping an arm around your bare stomach.

There wasn’t a response though, just the sound of the stopwatch clicking quietly.

“Y/N . . .” Spencer spoke from behind you. “It’s the seventh book.”

Frantically trying to remember the order of the books in your nightstand, you realized what the clippers and knife meant.

The Handmaid’s Tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Telltale Heart, The Great Gatsby, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and . . .

The seventh book was a very old and very rare edition of The Gift of The Magi.

“So we have to choose . . .”

The watchband on Spencer’s wrist was too tight to slip the knife through without cutting through his skin. And your hair would take much longer than two minutes to cut with a knife and clippers.

Without a word, Spencer took the exact-o knife and plunged it into the skin around his wrist, wincing in pain as he cut through the band.

“Spencer, no!”

But the watch fell from his hand to the floor, dripping with blood, Spencer’s wrist sliced open neatly. The wound was superficial but it looked like it hurt. He collapsed to the floor, dropping the knife and you rushed to his side.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded weakly, putting pressure on the cut.

“Very interesting . . .” Tom’s voice echoed around the room and you felt your stomach fill with rage like never before, spinning around and throwing the clippers at the wall with all of your might.

“We’re not going to play your fucking mind game!”

“Y/N,” Spencer whispered from the floor. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

The answer to your question came in the form of an ear-splitting siren, the noise resonating around the room, forcing its way past your eardrums, giving you an abominable headache.

The noise suddenly stopped and Tom spoke again.

“It is your choice whether you play or not. But consider that a preview of the punishment for refusing to. And trust me, there’s worse punishments than that.”

The second hatch slid open.

Head darting between it and Spencer on the floor, holding his wrist, you opted to fetch the next items.

There was another stopwatch, this time with five minutes, two small slips of paper, and some kind of device transmitting footage of two people in a poorly lit room, strapped to chairs similar to how you had been moments ago.

“What the fuck is this?”

The light in the room came on, showing the people in the chairs to be a man and a woman. You didn’t recognize either of them, and, judging by his face, neither did Spencer.

“Oh no.”

You read the slips of paper.

Man and Woman, they said.

We have to choose one.

“We have to choose one.”

Spencer looked at you shaking his head, so overwhelmed by the fact that the two of you were in this situation.

You scrambled, unable to deal with the thought, “What if we—“

“—I’m sure the punishment will be worse if we don't choose one. Most likely, he’ll kill both of them. Statistically, men die younger than women and they can’t bear children. But women have a higher pain tolerance and—“

He was talking himself in circles, trying desperately to come up with a solution to an impossible problem.

“Spencer, this is something you can’t reason. We just have to pick one.”

You couldn’t believe he was only twenty-six. His eyes bore the weight of someone much older.

You forced a weak laugh that tasted terrible on your tongue, “Eenie Meenie Miney-Moe?”

He chuckled weakly. “No luck, I know you land on whichever one you didn’t start with.”

“Me too.”

“Time’s running out,” Tom reminded you.

Your face fell, all hints of a smile gone.

“The man.” You gaped at Spencer who had piped up just enough to make the decision.

There was a pause, then a dark figure walked into the room onscreen, brandishing a gun and aiming at the back of the man’s head.

The muffled sound of a gunshot rang out, making you and Spencer jump as the man went limp in the chair and the feed cut out.

Bile rose in your throat and you ran to a corner of the room to throw up.

“Very interesting,” Tom repeated, his voice sparking disgust deep in your stomach.

“Why are you doing this?” you begged, reaching out for Spencer who seemed to be doing a bit better judging by the fact he could now stand and his wrist was no longer gushing blood.

“I like watching the way you think.”

The now-familiar sound of the hatch opening brought you back to the situation at hand, trying desperately to get the image from the screen out of your mind.

Spencer reached into the hatch and pulled out two more slips of paper and another stopwatch.

The screen flicked back on, showing two more people in a dark room, another man and woman. The room was still dark so you couldn't make out much more.

You looked up at Spencer, confused, but his face had gone white as a sheet and he was staring at the pieces of paper.

“No.” Spencer ran to the vent, slamming on the wall. “No! Ahh!” shouting in pain when his wound made contact.

Tom didn’t say anything so you approached Spencer, snatching the pieces of paper to better understand why he was so angry.

The room on the screen lit up the moment you read the papers. This time it didn’t say man or woman. This time there were two names.

Steve and J.J.

Spencer’s blonde coworker and your closest friend were slumped over in the chairs on-screen, wriggling against their restraints. All breath left your body, your heart stopped in your chest.

“TOM! Please don’t do this.”

The desperation seeped into your voice pitifully.

“Please, I’ll do anything.”

“Y/N,” Spencer stepped between you and the vent again, holding your shoulders. You suddenly felt how wet your eyes were. Strange how you hadn’t even realized you were crying.

“I . . . I can’t.”

Being forced to decide who lives and who dies was difficult enough to break anyone’s spirit. But this . . . this shattered yours to the core.

“You don’t have to,” Spencer said, “I can do it.”

“Ah, ah, ah,” Tom chided playfully, voice muffled through the speaker. “You’ve already chosen twice, Doctor. I think it’s Y/N’s turn, don’t you?”

“Look, I can make the decision. You don’t want to put her through too much, do you?” Spencer’s voice was soft, but the way he was gripping your hand suggested he felt otherwise. “You wouldn’t do that to her.”

“I suppose you’re right. Though, while I do care for her, it is her turn. But don’t fret! You can make the next decision together.”

Your eyes were locked on the screen, watching as Steve and J.J. came to, becoming rapidly aware of their situation and struggling against the bindings. Spencer gently squeezed your hand, showing you the time on the stopwatch. Fifty seconds left.

There was no right decision.

J.J. had a child, a husband, a family. Steve had no one. Steve had you.

There was no right decision. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a wrong one.

“Steve.” You hadn’t said it out loud, just mouthed the word letting the breath flow out of you.

Then, realizing he couldn’t hear you, you repeated yourself.

“Steve.” It was barely a whisper but it was the loudest sound in the world.

Actually, strike that, the loudest sounds were the footsteps entering the room and standing behind your friend, holding a gun to his head.

Tom’s voice came back over the intercom.

“I need you to say it.”

It took every ounce of strength not to fall to the ground and burst into tears. The only thing keeping you upright was fear. Pure terror. You couldn’t say it, but if you didn’t they’d both die.

“Kill Steve.”

You closed your eyes before the gunshot went off, knees giving out and collapsing to the ground, feeling Spencer fall with you, trying to keep you as upright as possible.

“Hey,” he grabbed your head, forcing your gaze to him, his dark brown eyes dark with rage. “We’re gonna be okay.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Tom’s voice made your stomach contort.

The fourth and final hatch slid open.

“I can’t . . . I can’t . . .” your hands were trembling harder than your voice as you shook back and forth, clutching your legs to your chest.

“Okay, it’s okay. It’s almost over,” Spencer said, standing and reaching into the last slot.

He didn’t move for a while, back turned to you, looking down at something.

“Spencer?”

“Me, I choose me,” he said, turning towards the vent, revealing the item he was holding. A gun. His gun.

“No!”

“Very well,” Tom said, chuckling. “But that’s not quite how this works. One of you has to die, but the other has to do it.”

Spencer ran and sat next to you on the floor, forcing the gun into your hands, lightly placing your finger on the trigger.

“Spencer . . .”

“Listen to me, it’s okay. Okay? If we don’t do this, he’s gonna kill us both. I need you to understand that I am okay with this. I am choosing this, not you. This is for me to decide.”

He slowly brought the gun up to his head, resting just between his eyebrows.

That was too much and the sobs that had been building up in your chest escaped your lips, tears pouring down your cheeks and falling onto your legs. Your hands trembled harder, the gun shaking against his head.

“Y/N,” he smiled, eyes bright and twinkling. “It’s okay.” Then, he swallowed, looked away for a moment, then looked back at you with fire burning deep behind his eyes. What he said next changed your life.

“I love you, Y/N.”

You sobbed as he cocked the gun and steadied your finger on the trigger.

“I love you, Spencer.”

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. You didn’t even have to think before you did what you did next.

You removed the gun from his head, held it against your own, right on your temple, and stood, turning toward the vent.

“5 . . .”

“Wait!” Tom called out.

“4 . . .”

“Y/N, stop!” Spencer shouted at you.

“3 . . .”

“That’s not how this works!” Tom yelled furiously, voice cracking. “Stop! You have to shoot him!”

“2 . . .”

The wall under the vent slid open and a dark figure stumbled in, holding out a blunt object, approaching you threateningly, rearing back.

The instant you saw the whites of Tom’s eyes, you aimed the gun directly between his eyes and squeezed the trigger, attempting to keep your arm as still as possible. In a flash, you were brought back to the alley where you shot a gun for the first time. All you could think of were your and Spencer’s lips meeting for the first time.

You didn’t realize you’d closed your eyes until you opened them and was met with the image of Tom The Barista with a bloody hole in his head, falling backwards to the floor, crumpling like a rag doll, a blank expression on his face.

Taking one last look at Spencer to make sure he was okay, you felt your legs give out beneath you and you fell to the floor, losing consciousness.

Again, everything went dark.

last chapter tomorrow. i am so sorry. bring tissues.

Taglist: @aperrywilliams @mjloveskids666 @dolanfivsosxox @criesinreid @fanficsrmylife @racerparker @sammypotato67 @lukeskisses @reidcrimes @you-had-me-at-hello-dear @l0ve-0f-my-life @thatsonezesty13 @yourmisosoup @queenofthebees003 @pinkdiamond1016 @eu-solidao @perverted-guardian-angel @boiled-onionrings @rainsong01 @lesbian-emilyprentiss @andiebeaword @itsmoony @cielo1984 @baby-i-am-fireproof @mendesminimuffin @fukyouthink @addie5264 @gretaamyk @sercyan @expressiodeppresio @matthewreid

#spencer reid smut #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid #spencer reid gifs #spencer reid fic #fanfic #fandom #criminal minds fanfiction #fanfiction #angst #only angst #graphic depictions of violence #blood #potentially triggering

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mhdiaries · 4 years

Photo

Wave 2 Diary of Draculaura

15♥September

I “broke up” with Jackson Jekyll today... not that we were ever really dating I mean officially, which would have been nice but every time he would ask me out he would totally pull the invisible boy act on me and not show up. Or call. The next day he was always very sweet and apologetic but he could never remember why he forgot our date. I guess the final nail in the coffin was when he didn’t meet me at this party and I totally felt like a one tombstone graveyard. I ended up dancing with this scary hot DJ named Holt Hyde who acted like he knew me although I’m pretty sure that we hadn’t met before. Jackson and I are still friends but sometimes that’s just how the tombstone crumbles.

25♥September

Went to the beach with Frankie, Clawdeen and Clawd to watch Lagoona surf. It was a beautiful day, which meant I had to break out the sunscreen although the stuff I have to use is more like sunwall. It’s so thick it’s like being coated in honey and it’s like a sand magnet so I pretty much have to stay on a blanket the whole time or I end up looking like a sand sculpture. Oh well, it’s worth the annoyance to get to spend the day at the beach.

30♥September

I stayed up late reading a new novel about a forbidden romance between a werewolf girl and a vampire boy... like that would ever happen... but it’s so sweet and tragic I couldn’t put it down. Of course I slept through my alarm and was almost late for school, which meant my makeup was a mess cause I couldn’t take my time putting it on. Luckily, Ghoulia saw me before anyone else did and she helped me straighten it out so I didn’t walk into my first class looking like an undead clown... not that there’s anything wrong with that.

1♥October

I took one of those quizzes to see what kind of creature I am - I think all the teen monster mags have them now - which seems kind of strange since like I already know. Anyway, the quiz had questions ike: What is your favorite haunt? What is your favorite food? Would you rather be dead or undead? Do you run, shamble, fly or ooze? So after I answered all the questions I turned to the back to read: Congratulations! You are a Woodland Nymph! You are kind, gentle and love sunshine and nature. You probably make your home in a tree where you enjoy the company of many woodland animals that you would never scare or eat. I wonder if I should share this with father? LOL... maybe not = )

7♥October

Clawd and Spectra had a monster argument today and it created such a fuss that both of them got called into Headmistress Bloodgood’s office. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Clawd so angry or Spectra so self-righteous but neither of them would talk about it when they came out of HHB’s office - not even to me! Clawdeen thinks it has something to do with Cleo and Clawd but I totally don’t understand how she made that connection. Now Clawdeen is mad at Cleo. Again. This is really sad and since it seemed like they were starting to actually tolerate each other.

12♥October

I know a lot of monsters are not excited about having to write an essay on our monster heritage but I think it’s creeperifically cool! First of all, I’m writing a screenplay about my un-life and I think this will really help the third act and secondly because it gives me the opportunity to set the record straight about a couple of things. Beginning with the fact that my father is much older than any monster realizes. I mean he was already a vampire back when togas were first considered fashionable... sooo glad father doesn’t wear one anymore. Then there was that whole identity theft calamity that happened when we rented our castle in Transylvania to a total con-monster who went around pretending to be father. Now I have to carry a copy of my death certificate to prove that I really am as old as I say I am cause some monsters think I must be related to that loser. Unfortunately for the imposter his bats came home to roost and not in a good way either. The rest of my story, like how father took in me and my mother when no one else would and why I’m a vegan vampire I’m going to save for the screenplay which I would like to film in pink and white. How scary cool would that be?

16♥October

In the span on 3 days Clawdeen missed a test in Mad Science, a school dance and a buy one get one shoe sale at the Maul. Frankie and I knew something had to be wrong but Clawdeen wouldn’t answer our texts or emails. Finally Clawd showed us a picture he took of Clawdeen with his iCoffin. Her hair... it was... it was... not of this world. Clawd said she couldn’t fix it and had to “ctrl+alt+delete her new ‘do” with a pair of electric clippers. He said she was so depressed that she turned all her mirrors toward the wall and wasn’t even growling at Howleen for borrowing her clothes. I suggested we shave our heads too but then Frankie reminded me how fast Clawdeen’s hair grows and that we’d be bald a lot longer than she would so we came up with the idea of going to the Maul and buying Clawdeen a fierce fashionista scare package to cheer her up instead and that’s just what we did. Of course we bought some things for ourselves too = )

25♥October

I was supposed to fang out with the ghouls last night but I didn’t. I tried to explain what happened to Clawdeen but I couldn’t. She was annoyed with me cause I always tell her everything. She thinks I’m keeping a secret from her which I guess I sort of am but I’m not sure I want to talk to anybody about it yet. So I wrote this poem to describe what happened. I don’t know why it’s easier for me to express emotions in verse but sometimes it just is. I read it to Count Fabulous who usually leaves the room when I get too sappy but this time he flew down and gave me a little bat hug when I was finished.

One fall autumn night I took a walk jaunt

to meet some friends at a familiar haunt

The sky above was very starry bright

and there seemed to me not a cloud in sight

So off I went without sans umbrella or coat

although what I probably needed was really a boat

Caust the clouds came rolled in with a dragon’s roar

and shortly thereafter it bagan to pour

Not a pleasant rain, good for plant and flower

but a driving, unfriendly, cold hard icy shower

Now I was halfway between home and there

my makeup was running ruined and so was my hair

With no shelter in sight or a way to get dry

I put my head face in my hands and started to cry

When out of the shower rain a voice broke through,

“Hey D it’s me Clawd, hey D is that you?”

As I blinked through the tears and rain I could see

Clawdeen’s brother Clawd, waving at me

Across four lanes of traffic bravely he dashed

with umbrella in hand to my side he flashed

He led helped me back to his car warm and dry

said not a word till I’d finished my cry

“Here’s a hot coffinccino whip cream no foam,

it’ll warm you right up while I drive you home.”

From the car he walked me up to my door

protecting me still from the storm’s downpour

As he turned to leave I placed a kiss on his cheek

then I ran inside before he could speak.

And while I watched his car disappear from sight

I felt something happen change for me that night

No longer did I see him as just my best friend’s brother

that night, to me, he became something other.

The great thing about poetry is that it doesn’t have to be epic to express how you feel. Now I have to wonder, “Does he feel the same?”

#monster high #monster high diary #draculaura #wave 2

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anna-hawk · 4 years

Text

In the line of my Always time for coffee serie

"Think you could cut my hair?"

You turn around from where you are preparing lunch, to face Frank who looks at you inquiringly from over the counter that separates the kitchen from the living room.

You look from his eyes to his hair thoughtfully. It is getting long. Though you don't really mind the curls actually. But if he feels better afterwards.

"Sure? I mean... I've never done anything like that before but..." you blink a few times as you consider his request and walk around the counter to join him.

"I usually do it myself bu' I thought it would be easier if someone else did it for me" he shrugs with one shoulder and actually looks a bit embarrassed.

"If you're sure, then of course I'll do it" you smile softly and kiss him lightly on the lips.

"Don' hafta be perfect, y'know... jus' shortenin' it a bit" he mumbles against you lips.

"I'll do my best" you still promise.

So this is how you find yourself in the bathroom just after lunch, holding a pair of electric hair clippers. Frank sits with his back to you on one of the bar stools you opted to use for their adjustable height.

You talked about the overall length over your meal and decided to shorten the hair evenly, removing just an inch or two.

When you switch the clippers on, you take a deep breath and start at the back of his head.

You work in a focused silence, going through his hair at a slow pace to make sure you don't make any mistakes. You shouldn't really, considering you're using a guide over the clippers, but you're still a bit nervous about the whole thing.

After a while, when you go over the sides and the top of Frank's head, you start getting a bit more confident about the process, seeing that the result is fairly good for now.

You stop a few times to shake the device and remove the excess of hair in it, before continuing steadily.

Once the wished length is achieved, you rake your fingers through the shorter strands to get the cut hair out of it and see where you still have to trim a little more.

Frank hasn't said one word since you started and neither have you. But when you step in front of him to get a better picture of what you've done so far, you realize with surprise that Frank has his eyes closed and looks utterly relaxed.

Your lips stretch into a large, fond smile at the unexpected sight. Frank opens his eyes, probably because you haven't moved at all for several long seconds. You bite your lower lip while you share a long look.

"Enjoying yourself?" your voice is low and calm in the intimate atmosphere. You lower the clippers to the sink and card your fingers through his hair again, both because you want to see what remains to be done and because you just really want to.

In answer, Frank closes his eyes again and hums out a deep rumble in confirmation.

You chuckle affectionately and step between his parted thighs to get closer to him, taking the clippers back in hand.

You start trimming again, going behind his ears with slow care, using your fingers to lower the tips of his ears to gain more access and be as precise as possible.

You card your fingers through his hair methodically again, making the uncut hairs stick up.

You lean slightly back to see them better, when you notice Frank's eyes are open again and focused on you. He's sitting so that the top of his head is at nose level with you and you don't have to lower your gaze too far to meet his and see he's wearing a small private smile. You return the smile and are about to keep going, when you feel his large hands on your hips. You don't say anything and lift your arm again, going as far as sliding the clippers once over one side, before his hands travel from your hips to your ass and squeeze lightly.

"Frank" you laugh lightly and smack his hands away with your free one. "Stop it if you don't want me to mess up"

But Frank lifts his hands again and slips them under your top and up your sides before going back down and inside your pants to grab your ass firmly.

You gasp and swat at one shoulder, holding the humming device away from his head just in case.

"We're nearly done" you manage to get out when he leans forward and nibbles at your jaw and down your neck.

"We can finish later" he rumbles into your throat, then lifts one hand to it and slides his fingers to the back of your neck to angle your head down to his waiting lips.

As your eyes close, you still manage to blindly turn off the clippers and put them down on the sink then let yourself sink into the slow deep kiss.

Frank rises from the stool to gather you in his arms and deepen the kiss even more. But as he does so, you feel hair falling all around you so you slightly push away from him.

"We're not having sex with you covered in hair" you state firmly and swipe some away from his neck and shirt.

Frank stares at you for a second before he grins and tugs you toward the shower.

"How 'bout you help me get 'em off then, huh?" he reaches into the shower while still holding you and turns it on.

You snort lightly in amusement and cup his face to kiss him slowly and then take hold of your top to get it off. Frank lets go of you immediately and does the same.

When you step into the shower, Frank is quick to follow.

So, my husband asked me to do exactly that this morning. Since Confinement = no hairdresser. I thought I'd use this for a sweet domestic Frank x Reader ficlet

#the punisher #frank castle #jon bernthal #the punisher fanfiction #tps ff #drabble #my writing #my work #confinement idea #fanfiction #always time for coffee series #frank castle x reader #sweet domestic stuff

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redbeardace · 4 years

Text

Quarantine 4: Stay Home

[This is a post for the May Carnival of Aces.]

So much is different now.

So much is the same.

I have been very fortunate so far. The disease hasn’t touched me or anyone close to me yet. I still have a job and am working full time. The biggest practical impact on my life is that I no longer have a daily commute.

I see other people talking about their experiences and they’re so... strange?

Someone remarked on my “8 days without human contact” sign, shocked that I hadn’t needed to go shopping in 8 days, that I must have really stocked up. But I routinely go two weeks without shopping, 8 days is nothing. I’m going on my 23rd day on this cycle and the only reason I’ll have to go shopping now is that I’m out of milk. I still have plenty of everything else.

It’s weird to me that people seem to think that having more than three days of groceries is prepper level stockpiling. And watching everyone make a run on the stores and seeing what they were grabbing was just baffling. When Cascadia puts on its big show, what are these people planning to do?

People talk about how little gas they’ve been buying lately. Welcome to my life. I have a mostly electric car and go months between fill ups.

I am truly concerned about the number of people posting “My kids are making me drink haha” jokes. Sure, maybe it’s funny for the first few days, but if you’re still saying that on day 57, I think you seriously need to step back and look at yourself and consider if maybe you have a drinking problem. Because you’ve spent two months talking about how you routinely drink in order to cope with the stress of your children, and that seems like you might have a problem.

Anyone know how to tell a bunch of my coworkers that they may be alcoholics in a tactful way...?

I’ve been telling a daily WFH joke on the company chat system. I can’t keep it up anymore. It’s gone on too long.

I’ve been making masks.

I’ve been putting hats on scarecrow owls.

I’ve been making subtle changes to the backdrop of the daily video calls for work. Yesterday it was an vintage photo of an old man, a middle aged woman, and a teenage girl who might be a timelord, standing in a field. Tomorrow it will be a jazzy picture of a roll of toilet paper with a face drawn on it.

It is named Sir Roland of Charmaine.

I ordered pizza delivery for the first time ever today. I like pizza and hate people, so how come I’ve never done this before.

I haven’t had a nasty headache in weeks.

I haven’t put on any weight.

I live alone. If I get sick, I’m going to have to take care of myself somehow. I don’t know if I’d be able to do that. There won’t be anyone to leave dinner at the top of the stairs. There won’t be anyone to take me to the hospital if things get bad.

Stuff is piling up. Like literal stuff in literal piles. My stairs are on the verge of becoming hazardous. I’m not sure where all this stuff has come from.

I’m now treating my mail as hazardous material.

If I ever had to deal with actual hazardous material, I probably wouldn’t survive.

I see all these people talking about how much time they have now. I have no extra time. I’m feeling like I’m being an unproductive loser because I’m not going to come out of this knowing how to play the mandolin in Romanian or whatever, but I don’t have newfound free time. Even the time gained back from the commute has vanished somewhere.

I have to have a timer at my desk so that I’ll stop working after 8-ish hours.

They’ve been giving me plastic bags at the grocery store because they refuse to use the reusable ones. Reminds me just how much I hate plastic bags.

I have to get my house painted. I’m kinda digging this no contact thing. I need to take advantage of it more while it lasts.

The president is still a fascist, there’s gun-toting nutjobs on the loose who aim to kill us all one way or another, and the MURDER HORNETS ARE HERE.

Seriously. The Murder Hornets are here. WTF.

I’ve mostly been in good shape. Two incidents threw me off balance.

I lost a notecard of WFH jokes. That was kind of a last straw situation, where I had to shuffle and strain to try to make a usable workspace and nothing was going right and even after a best attempt, the chair didn’t fit and I didn’t fit because I never fit and now there’s all sorts of stuff in my hallway that doesn’t belong there and what am I going to do with it all and I didn’t want to do any of this and NOW WHERE IN THE HELL IS MY NOTE CARD BECAUSE IT WAS RIGHT HERE AND I WAS CAREFUL WITH IT AND WHERE DID IT GO AND HOW DID I LOSE IT IT LITERALLY WENT SEVEN FEET AT MOST AND I’VE SEARCHED THE WHOLE AREA A DOZEN TIMES AND HOW COULD IT JUST DISAPPEAR LIKE THAT.

The latest Stay At Home order extension. I knew it was coming, but just running the calendar out based on the dates they were saying and extrapolating for the dates they weren’t saying, and coming up with the middle of July at the earliest and just...

Somehow, the loss of the Pride Parade didn’t hit me that hard. It should have.

Quarantine beards. I don’t get it. I mean, I’m lazy about shaving, but this I don’t understand. Also, I’m pretty much incapable of growing a proper quarantine beard. I grow in a month what others do in a few days.

I cut my own hair. I’ve got electric clippers. It’s really not that hard and it doesn’t involve potentially giving the plague to any barbers or pretending that democracy is threatened by my bangs getting a bit too long. Of course, I only do it about once a year. This is around the time of year that I do it, though.

I’ve worn pants every day. Regular pants. Not PJs or sweat pants. But pants pants. You all really not wearing pants? Maybe I’ll wear a skirt one day to mix things up.

I have been routinely testing my sense of smell. Haven’t lost it yet.

There’s stuff I want to do, but I don’t feel like doing any of it. There are time-sensitive projects I want to do, but I don’t really want to sit in front of the computer for the time it would take to make it happen. Because I sit in front a computer in my house all day for work now and there’s no energy left for anything more. Not that there was energy for that stuff before.

Am I supposed to support the economy by ordering from local businesses online or save the lives of delivery workers by only ordering essential things? And how come when I ordered a bunch of stuff from a place that claims they’re prioritizing essential items, the one thing that I ordered that could be considered essential was the last thing they shipped?

I had a Nigerian organized crime ring file for unemployment in my name. The state’s apparently lost millions in this scheme. I don’t understand how that can be. It seems like “Don’t Send Money To Nigeria” would be a pretty straightforward check in the system.

Oh. Wait. I’m a software engineer who’s spent my time on the quality and reliability side of the house. I can totally see something like that getting deprioritized and won’t-do’d.

Also had my credit card number stolen and used on a wild shopping spree. Not sure if that’s ‘rona-related. It’s the credit card I use for all my online shopping. So that’s all on hold at the moment.

My car battery died. I had to use a battery pack to jump it. Fun fact: I drive a plug-in hybrid, which had been plugged in this whole time. Apparently the 12v battery doesn’t get charged by the wall plug. Which seems really weird to me.

I see lots of people complaining about how they can’t have sex right now or how dating is weird. So not a problem for me.

#carnival of aces #overreactions from the outbreak

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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403: City Limits

I only have one story about this movie and that’s how a while back I had a dream in which Kim Cattrall and Jennifer Connolly were trying to escape from an evil toy factory owned by Nicholas Cage, and in the dream I was thinking wow, City Limits is different than I remember. Moving on.

In the non-dream version of the movie, a plague has killed off all the adults except James Earl Jones – I must admit, if you have to keep one he’s a pretty good choice. He adopts some bland kid named Lee, who grows up, puts on a Cubone costume, and heads off into the ruins of Los Angeles to find other badly-dressed, motorcycle-riding survivors like him. If he had any sense, he’d have stayed in the middle of nowhere with Horse Girl, since the first bunch he meets try to arrest him and the second just aren’t impressed by his resume. Lee ends up killing some guy named Dirty Bob, so the various motorcycle gangs that now rule the world decide to subject him to trial by combat, based on something they read in a comic book. Somehow this results in smashing a couple of dinosaur skeletons and uniting the gangs to take on the federally authorized Sunia Corporation, who shoot anybody who doesn’t want to work for them. What the hell happened to Horse Girl?

Yeah, I have a lot of trouble following what is going on in this movie. Most of it takes place in poorly-lit darkness, the characters all look alike and dress like piles of laundry, and nothing anybody does is properly motivated. There’s something almost Ed-Wood-ian about the way scenes in City Limits refuse to add up to a narrative. Reaction shots get dropped in with no explanation of why characters are reacting the way they are, and there’s some bits, like the Beer Santa or what Yogi sees out the window, that I honestly can’t tell whether they’re flashbacks or not. It’s a good thing the narrating voice of James Earl Jones shows up from time to time to tell us what people are doing, or else I would have no idea.

What does the Sunia company want? They say they want to provide electricity and food for the world, and if this is just a front for something evil we never hear about it. Shooting people who won’t work for them is pretty evil, but if there’s a larger Evil Plan at work I couldn’t tell. What do the Clippers and the DA’s want? They might have had some kind of system of their own at work before Sunia showed up but all we hear about is the truce between the two. What was Lee’s plan at the end? Why bother having people zoom in on armored motorbikes if Albert was right there with the air support? Why the hell is Carver the main villain when he never even gets out of his fucking chair?

Note To Self: if I ever want to conquer the world, I should avoid saying I am inevitable. It doesn’t go well for anybody.

Maybe Sunia isn’t the problem, but the government that sponsor them? Possibly, but we know even less about what passes for ‘the federal government’ in this dystopia than we do about Sunia. We never meet anybody who represents them. What kind of government can you have after almost everybody over the age of twelve died of the plague? This is one of those things that, if the movie hadn’t brought it up, I would never have thought about it – but once they’ve mentioned it, it bugs me.

The impression I’m left with is City Limits is basically a sequence of ideas somebody thought were cool, with minimal effort made to string them together into an actual story. Skull Helmet? Cool. Motorcycle race through dinosaur bones? Very cool! Biker Viking Funeral? Extremely cool! James Earl Jones blowing shit up with RC kamikaze airplanes? What could be cooler than that? And yeah, all this stuff is fun to watch, but unfortunately that’s just not the same as actually caring about it.

Without coherence or character development to get us interested, the audience is left in exactly the spot Space Mutiny managed to avoid: we just don’t see the point. The only real entertainment value in the film is a few moments of amusing absurdity sprinkled in here and there. The fake-ass dinosaur skeleton is hilarious – as is the establishing shot of the museum, which looks extremely well-groomed for having been ruled by motorcycle gangs for fifteen years. The stinger moment of Bolo hollering in panic as the dinky RC plane closes in to blow him up also got a laugh out of me. Even these would be much improved, though, if we had a better idea what was actually going on.

Because of all this stuff stacked against me giving a shit, I had to watch the movie twice to get anything out of it. On the second viewing, when I stopped expecting to understand what was happening in the plot, I managed to find a couple of interesting ideas peeking out. One was how, here and there, City Limits tries to create a culture for these people who were abandoned as children. Like the film itself, this is based on what a twelve-year-old might think looks cool: the clothes and lairs made out of scavenged bits of 80’s culture. The party-animal, bike-riding lifestyle. The use of comic books as a guide to what life was like before the apocalypse. The weird funeral they hold for Whitey. There’s a Trashpunk Neverland sort of vibe to the whole thing, as if we really are in a world designed by children who never grew up. I wonder if that’s brilliant, or just a poor reflection on the maturity of the film-makers.

The other is an apparently earnest attempt to say something about colonialism. Dr. Wickings (who the hell is giving out doctorates after the end of the world?) argues that the bikers are human beings who are just defending their homeland, and should be treated with compassion. Her bosses at Sunia reply that the bikers are barbarians who need to be gotten out of the way. This is the logic of everybody, everywhere, who has ever conquered anybody else. The Romans said it about the Gauls, the Spaniards said it about the Aztecs, the bad guys in Avatar said it about the Na’vi. In each case, the conquerors who call the conquered ‘barbarians’ use it as an excuse to treat them barbarously.

This is stated explicitly enough in City Limits that it’s clearly intentional, and the analogy continues: Sunia has technology the locals don’t, and that could be of real benefit to everybody – but Sunia aren’t interested in peaceful trade or selfless charity, and the only benefit they want is for themselves (presumably, since like I said, their overall plan is never gone into). The natives had plenty of problems and enmities of their own before this outside force showed up, but they had a system and it worked before Sunia pitted them against each other for gain (again, presumably).

As a theme, this falls apart in two places, both of which I’ve already mentioned. First, we don’t care – we don’t know who these characters are and we can’t tell them apart, so we’re not invested in whether they get conquered or not. I think the laundry-heap costumes are also a major contributor to this. They tend to make all the characters look alike, jumbles of colour without distinguishable silhouettes. Costuming can say quite a lot about a character, but if there’s too much going on the details get lost.

Second, we don’t really have a compelling reason to consider Sunia the bad guys. I swear I know better now than to expect that MST3K cut anything that really mattered, but it was still kind of a surprise to find that there was no missing scene that detailed Sunia’s Evil Master Plan. A supervillain with no Evil Plan is a pretty lousy supervillain, even if his non-evil plan is to be achieved by evil means, and especially when we don’t care about the victims. We just don’t know enough about what was going on here before Sunia showed up to be able to say if it was better or worse in any way. As it stands, Sunia’s offer of food, medicine, electricity, and an end to the gang warfare seems like a pretty good idea to me.

A couple more random notes that didn’t fit anywhere else in the review: since I work in that field myself, I have to say that I’m happy glasses survived the end of civilization. It must be much easier to rediscover all the other technologies when everybody can see. Maybe that’s why there’s so much gasoline and electricity in this post-apocalyptic world – people like James Earl Jones and Kim Cattrall with their glasses could see well enough to keep them coming!

Then there’s the fact that everywhere Lee goes, girls kinda smile awkwardly at him and then immediately take his side. Horse Girl does it, Kim Cattrall does it, Rae Dawn Chong does it… why? There seem to be lots of boys around, so it’s not like the apocalypse left the world with a shortage of dick. This is why so-called ‘incels’ go on shooting sprees – because movies like this have told them that dull white boys should have girls all over them just because they showed up.

Seriously, what the hell happened to Horse Girl? Why was she even in the movie? She comes and goes before the opening credits are over and has no effect on the plot. Did she reappear somewhere and I just never noticed? That’s one of the big rules of storytelling, folks – if you place a horse on the mantlepiece in Act I, you have to use it!

#mst3 #reviews #city limits #80s

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negasonicimagines · 6 years

Text

Cutie

request: Can you do an imagine where reader and Ellie are girlfriends and reader wants to try the shaved head look? So since Ellie had her hair like that a while ago she helps her buzz her head and its just supportive girlfriend fluff.

notes: aaaaaaaa this is so cute! I’m sorry it’s kinda short! I experimented with a more lovey Ellie here, hope that’s not a problem

warnings: Ellie makes a dirty comment, but nothing serious, just teasing.

“Just cut it, babe. Just cut it,” you urge your girlfriend. Your hair is in a few small ponytails on your head, and Ellie holds scissors, preparing to snip the first away.

“Are you sure you want me to do this? I did it to myself, yeah, but this is a little different,” Ellie asks, looking nervously at your eyes in the mirror.

“I’m sure, babe, there’s no one I trust more than you,” you reassure, and you see the ghost of a smile cross her face.

“Alright,” she replies, taking a deep breath (and the scissors) and cutting off one ponytail. She holds up the still-bound hair, eyes wide. You feel that Ellie seems more nervous than you, watching her mentally prepare herself to continue.

“No going back now,” you say, and she nods, cutting off the next. After that, the last. Once that’s done, she sighs in relief.

“You look so different already, babe,” Ellie acknowledges, and you begin to worry she might not like your new look. You hadn’t really thought she wouldn’t, considering she rocked it not too long ago. But now… “I like it. It’s gonna look great.”

Ellie gets the electric clippers out and shaves off almost all of the rest of your hair, leaving you with your desired buzzcut. She takes the towel you had draped over you and discards it into the laundry basket before taking a wet washcloth and cleaning off your neck and shoulders. You stand up from the borrowed dining room chair and turn to face her.

“Wow…” she says, holding your face in her hands, and you can’t tell if she’s frightened or awestruck until she presses her lips to yours. You respond immediately. When the kiss gets a little too heated, she pulls away and smiles. “You look amazing.”

“Thank you,” you reply with a blush. “I was a bit nervous for a second there, that you might not like it.”

“Really? I love it,” she tells you, beaming with pride. “I’m glad you trusted me enough to let me do it for you.”

“I mean, having you do it is also free…” You joke, and she playfully hits your arm, scoffing.

“Yeah, yeah. Trust me, I like it. Even if there are certain downsides,” she says, and you furrow your brows, confused. “I can’t pull your hair anymore, love.”

You gasp with clearly fake indignation. “You perv.”

“Just for you,” she retorts with a snicker, smirking and petting the bristles of your hair. “Cutie.”

#ellie phimister imagine #Ellie Phimister #ellie phimister x reader #negasonic teenage warhead #negasonic teenage warhead x reader #negasonic teenage warhead imagine #x-men #marvel #deadpool #fanfiction #x-men fanfiction #marvel fanfiction #wlw #lesbian #wlw fanfiction #lesbian fanfiction #wlw imagine #lesbian imagine

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the-uptake · 5 years

Text

Between You and Me

The Uptake, With Symbiotic Self-Indulgence. Book III, Chapter 11. Go to previous. TWs: Shaving, alcohol, drugging, hangovers of both kinds, bondage, epidemic, isolation, bombing survivorship mention, descriptions of lethal body horror. Bite the hand that feeds, tap the vein that bleeds...

________________________

Come third shift that night, the faint hum within the complex’s walls had faded, and only one wall of each apartment’s main room and bathroom illuminated its inhabitants’ way with the pale Wolfram phosphorescence accumulated during the second shift. If not for the potent, unfamiliar scent of vaguely sandalwood aftershave and the dark gold towels, Cecil could nearly have forgotten he stood shirtless in someone else’s bathroom. That, and he’d sooner be caught dead than own bathroom rugs.

His halo lay, turned off, on the counter beside the sink. The internal elements in its opalescent clear plastic emanated faint pulses. To his surprise, he found the tenant owned a rechargeable power bank. Possibly several, he supposed, considering the facility with which he located it in the fluorescent twilight. So as to let ‘Choly keep theirs to get through the night, the redhead gladly made use of the foot-long clear-housing device, so the aural aureole could maintain its juices that night well past the hour it normally flickered off altogether. Unlike the backup electrical source, his boyfriend wouldn’t have any need at the time for the clipper that he then produced from its case. He fished around in the like-new guard attachments, recalling that ‘Choly didn’t use any. When he snapped on the size two, an ebullient nerve jolted through him. He pulled the drain stopper, and leaned into the mirror to get to work.

As the chunks of two-inch hair fell to the counter, floor, and sink basin, the act felt more natural than he’d expected. He’d trimmed himself dozens of times over the years, and maintained his own facial hair, but he’d never buzzed off all his hair. If he’d ever seen a Leveler with their hair this short, they hid it beneath the translucent cranial plates which the Northeast US deemed especially fashionable. Full-scalp plating was unheard of, though: these functional successors to the fascinator always had either brightly colored, vee-reactive, or even fiber-optic extensions wefted through exposed sections, or the wearer’s natural hair pulled through it to be styled somewhat akin to how people used to style hair around combs and other such devices. The reverberations of the clippers on his scalp rendered the sound for him as would a deep bone conduction headset. He wondered how someone might even wear such an accessory without hair long enough to clip it into.

He set down the clippers to run his hands all over his work, and smeared around his chin and jaw with the heels of his palms. The length of what remained on his head now nearly matched that of his third-shift shadow. The more he stared at himself, the more his heart lightened. Content with the catharsis of self transgression, he moved to clean up after himself. With a lock of the longest hair from the top of his head in his fingers, he wondered whether ‘Choly would want it. He flinched at himself, but still tucked the sizable brassy chunk into the inner pouch of his toiletry bag regardless, unable to quit the habituation of such thoughts. He did his best without a broom and dust pan to corral the rest of the trimmings into the wastebasket.

Without building power, the plumbing lacked necessary pressure, so he instead used some of the tenant’s reserve water supply, from the interconnecting clear stackable units stashed in the bathtub, to shampoo and rinse his head in the sink.

Suspiciously well equipped for the unplugged shifts, he noted, of the tenant’s specialized furnishings. The sensation of scrubbing the fine clippings off his scalp with his fingernails got him whistle-humming softly with his mouth open. The small spigot on the side of it made it incredibly simple to measure out cupfuls to pour over his head as he held it over the basin. Having it in these units is so much handier than our repurposed leftovers bins. Maybe he’d help us get set up with something like this.

He tossed the borrowed towel into the hamper by the tub and put his unbuttoned gold dress shirt back on, then reconnected the four flexible ports of his halo and handshaked it. In the next room, he could hear struggling that had, from the labored nasal breathing, likely gone on for some time. He murmured dully to himself, put his glasses back on his face, and took his empty highball with him to investigate.

Though Jacob’s apartment had the same floor plan as Cecil and ‘Choly’s, the furnishings denied any meaningful confusion. The back third had an office area, the middle a series of utility shelves and an L-shaped workbench perpendicular to the wall, and the front a peculiarly spacious third of open floor with a single broad cabinet. Just as theirs, dozens of potted plants peppered the long, narrow quarters. Unlike theirs, rather than literary in nature, the grey-area verbot that peppered Jacob’s was technological and mechanical.

“Hope you don’t mind that I’ve let myself in, neighbor,” he remarked as he approached the upholstered swiveling desk chair from behind. “Decided I’d stay the night with you, to make sure you recovered right from the tranq. My brother and their friend helped me carry you over here before they headed out.”

Jacob stilled at Cecil’s voice, and stopped straining against the ropes that anchored him to his seat. He didn’t bother craning his head to look up over the back of the chair.

“I do still have both kidneys, right?” The snark received deadpan silence. “--Where’s Angel?”

“Powered off, in the front. I could teach you better encryption, if you want.”

Cecil casually refreshed his glass from the small lacquer dry bar in the very corner of the office space. He plunked a few cocktail cherries suspended in lime gelatin cubes from the zippered package, and splashed in whiskey, ginger ale, and some kind of Vek bitters. He sipped at his concoction until he netted one of the bright blue fruits in his mouth and twisted off the stem, and chewed before he spoke again.

“I appreciate your hospitality, really. These jellies are something else. I’m on my third Premier.” Cecil faced into the apartment, skirting eye contact, to lean his weight against the side of the desk. Behind him, rain had probably strafed the naked window for most of the evening already, and would definitely continue through the night. The stem went back in his cup, since he didn’t trust his ability to hit the waste bin two meters away. “Place’s nice, too. See you’ve greened it up. Did my brother do yours, too, like some kinduva traveling snake oil dealer?”

The blond let a slow breath escape flared nostrils, and an intermittent low whine corrugated his affect.

“What time is it? Can’t be super late. Glow’s still going. --Are you sure you wouldn’t rather a slice of confec? You seem like you could use some confec right now. Don’t strike me as the type to drink--”

“--About twenty-two. Not too long before first shift. Then it’s just the two of us. And I’ll be blind, drunk,and deaf.”

“It’s just you and me here?”

Inebriation had misinformed Cecil’s tongue, since he didn’t usually keep a continuous charge in the halo, but he couldn’t be bothered to correct himself. He worked at draining his glass, so he could earn the rest of the fruits that had glued themselves to the bottom of the crowded glass. He nudged the chair back a bit with his foot to slide over to sit on the desk and face him. He just stared blankly at the tall, thick blond while popping the prized garnishes in his mouth one at a time, removing the stems each time and letting them accumulate in the highball.

Jacob slouched when Cecil’s enjoyment of them seemed more like absent cud-chewing, and he shut his eyes, folding to the implicit staring contest.

“Are you all right, pal? Is that a stupid question? Is that okay to ask? --You know you can just eat the jellies without making a drink, right--”

Cecil sat the glass down on the bar, and gripped the edge of the desk, to swing his feet under it.

“I just shot you. You’re tied up, and I can’t let you go. And I can’t even look at my boyfriend right now. Do you even really need to ask?” His mouth scrunched and he glanced at the ceiling before resuming more agreeable eye contact. “Question of my own now, since you can clearly intuit some modicum of transparency: What made you a repairman?”

Jacob’s exhausted eyes stitched in a smile, and he shifted back in the chair.

“Cred’s never been the only currency. There’s lost potential in everything around us. Call it alchemy, in the most abstract sense. Mend and mod. Turn something into something else. In lieu of cred, people used to trade goods and services all the time, back in the day. The tradition never died. It just changed. Like everything else did.” He squinted again, his mouth becoming a wide thin line. “Look, I can’t turn on the poetic charm just like that. If you’re asking why a repairman’s decided to live in Tri-City, with everything like it is, I stayed behind because I knew there’d be survivors who’d still need the building to work right. Simple as that. Why’s it matter to you?”

“How altruistic of you. Of course it matters. You weren’t just fixing the garbage chutes. You were going through people’s trash. Just doesn’t add up to me, though, why you’d put yourself at risk to return something so patently thrown away.”

“Again with that box!” Jacob scoffed, the stress flickering out of his grin. “Would you have rather I just let that stuff get destroyed? Wait. You’re scared I’d tattle. Weak. You’d better freakin’ believe I wouldn’t bring police into the building. Your honey isn’t the only gremlin in this place, you know. I’m not gonna burn the whole house down just to smoke out one cockroach.”

“I know I can’t be the only one with a weapon. What’s stopping you from dealing with the... roaches... yourself?”

The subtext read louder than the text. Jacob knew why Cecil didn’t think he could untie him, but now he’d said it outright.

“You feel personally responsibly for Central, don’t you, librarian? That’s what all this is. You just can’t let it go.”

Cecil let out a broken laugh, and his eyes glassed up as he steeled a snivel.

“How can’t I? I should have been able to stop it. I was working a Level 7 server room when Central became a Roman candle. You snarked about my burn scars and all that shit, but surely from the look of me, you can tell how close I had to be to one of the payloads.” The ex-librarian couldn’t sit still anymore and paced. He quickly conflated the habit with his brother and sat back down on the desk, to lace and fold his hands in his lap with a sour, desperate face. “You know we’ve only got a localized Nikola-web here, repairman. Just what they’ll feed us, accept from us. Have you got an Underweb connection? Has anyone here?”

Jacob didn’t like not being able to watch Cecil pace, but he didn’t like it even more when the pacing halted so abruptly, only for the strung-out stocky little man to perch in front of him all over again. His eyes slowly widened as his brow raised, and he frowned thoughtfully.

“Now just what exactly would somebody like you need the Underweb for?”

The ginger nearly objected, but recognized he hadn’t been shut down. He shifted in place as he formed his narrative response.

“‘Choly needs medical stuff. But he’s scared of billing. It’s exciting to know he’s taken care of all that himself his whole life. You know Stalkers had two options with their medical needs. They either bartered with verbot to get care from this one clinic... or they didn’t. He’s been disabled since before he was a teen. He racked up an awful lot of debt with their lead doc. It got to where he couldn’t afford the emotional, sociological, or physical cost of enlisting the doc’s help.” He stilled himself by chewing at his spider bite studs, but his voice began to break. “He asked me this afternoon about a... maggot debridement kit. And Trylocaine saline. The bullet you asked about. He told me, he got shot in the leg. That night. It’s gotten so fucking infected. You think the 25-line garbage chute smelled bad? Just be glad you weren’t in the bathroom this morning helping him sop up the pus in the first place.”

The repairman huffed, eyeing the dry bar.

“So he wasn’t puffing up to scare me, by describing all the...” He realized he couldn’t gesticulate, and slouched in a sympathetic resignation. “The skin or whatever. Slag, though. Leather. Real leather,” he whooped. “And that much of it. It’s all kind of revolting, isn’t it?”

“Everything about him is so revolting that it’s charming. If there’s a way to keep him... keeping it. Oh, I don’t know.” He caught himself trying to stand to pace and burked the compulsion. “I just don’t understand why he threw it away, when he literally put years of blood and sweat into it.”

“Everybody’s got their own exchange rate, their own value of things. He might just not value the same things you do. Or at least, not in the same way. Whatever value that thing, and crafting it, has to him. Might be past tense. --Why’s it so important to you, that he keeps on like he has? You only just today found out about it, from the sound of it all.”

“Because this has been his ‘normal’ for the past four years!” he cried, throwing his hands up. “I can nearly forgive that he never told me, or showed me. He hasn’t had his hair bleached like that since we first met, and then he goes and does that the day after the bombing. And that tattoo. That triangle thing immortalized in the leather. I know he got it, a month after we started going steady, just to push my buttons.” He rubbed at his tattooed arms and couldn’t look at Jacob anymore, trembling deep in his lungs. “...I guess a part of me’s worried that he’s either trying to move to a time before he knew me. Or a time before he had to be nagged up over all this mess. It’s an understatement, that everything’s gone to shit since Central went dark, but everything really did feel right until that day. We managed. We worked. Like, it was all falling into place, not apart.”

Jacob barked a laugh, disquieted by his inability to unpack the brand of Cecil’s loyalty to ‘Choly.

“Geez, pal. Gonna sprain something, overthinking so hard. Mister Thorn’s on your side, and he’s going to guarantee your Ever After won’t be ending any time soon. Promise.” He got a bit lyrical as he drafted the laundry list. “Is leather working stuff all you think ‘Choly would need? The surgical stuff. I’ve got pharmaceutical connections. Wonder if Trylocaine’s enough...”

Cecil’s head picked up when he heard Jacob humoring him, and a hollow enchantment overwhelmed him at a loss for the spectrum of what the repairman must have had access to.

“I’m... not sure what you’re suggesting here,” he mumbled.

“All you’ve gotta be is specific. I can get it.”

“...And the cost?”

The repairman scoffed, in a wide-eyed detachment.

“The cost? You mean, what’s in it for me?” He thought it over a moment. “All depends on what it is, I guess.”

“What about Ketonamil?” Cecil blurted out, a little too intensely. Worried to have been mistaken for anger, he softly amended, “--Or at least, the stuff to make some?”

Cecil’s head rang in a complex grief, that the cyanogenic steroid was the first thing to fly out of his mouth. Maybe he felt more threatened than he thought by Jacob, in ways the tranq couldn’t adjust for. Or maybe he just wanted to gauge the repairman’s going prices. Jacob melted in a stunned, warm fascination.

“All this couch psychiatry mess has been fun, but if we’re going to continue to be neighbors, I really have got to work on how I keep letting you lot continue to surprise me with gems like this.” A wistful sigh escaped him, stuttering into discomfort. He wagged his head toward the reader on the square pad in the windowsill. “Yeah, I’ve got Underweb access. It should still have a charge. Parked it before third shift. If you... untie me... I could--”

“--Or,” Cecil asserted with a wild glare, gripping the man’s kneecap until he squirmed, then balance back to put the other hand on the device slightly behind himself. “You could just tell me your sequence so I can browse for myself.”

Cecil turned on the screen and waited. Maybe the liquor had loosened his inhibitions. He never got drunk. Was he a mean drunk? A talkative drunk? He’d disclosed to a near total stranger things he’d never come close to discussing with anyone close to him. He could see Jacob sweating.

“...Or that.”

Jacob told him the finger pattern design to draw through the symbols, and the lock screen shut off. He’d never been able to get the hang of ‘Choly’s rooted reader, and he’d purposefully left its updates off for years on top of that. The rooted user interface of the current model had so many more buttons to swipe among, and many menus necessitated the use of manually typing with the keyless entry pad that occupied the last third of the flat device. He didn’t ask Jacob to tell him how to use it, lest he risk inviting giving Jacob good reason to insist, If only you’d just untie me, I could show you myself, I’m no good at explaining things like that with words, et cetera, et cetera.

He’d figure it out himself.

The time in the corner indicated 22:52. If only you’d just untie me. The hypothetical request repeated itself in Cecil’s head. Did he really trust what Jacob told him, or was he being spoon-fed whatever might get him to free him? Though the wine key didn’t look like a reliable option, he pocketed it. Then he picked up the pronged Japanese bar spoon, and twiddled it between two fingers while he browsed with the other hand trying to locate the merchant apps. Apparently, its owner had the news Web app set to auto-load certain tiers of noteworthy news broadcasts. The screen split between three different pieces:

“Bloom Set to Ramp to Full Pandemic Status”

“Bloom Victims Now Sprouting Up on International Soil”

“New Developments in Bloom Survivor Procedures”

He skimmed the first, his brow sinking against his glasses. Something was effectively causing people to spontaneously turn inside out. He could recognize the “plant” and “insect” or“crustacean” traits the article described in the structures that jutted from and leafed out of the bodies knotted up in the apparent agony of such a gruesome death, even with only the photographs included of the casualties. His jaw tightened, recalling his brother mere hours ago making casual discussion over how Vekarix couldn’t graft an exoskeleton donor into a mammal’s genetic expression without lethal consequences. He boiled inside at the incredulity that Ben could be involved. The thylacine hybrid hadn’t seemed remotely out of sorts during the insect grafting discussion with ‘Choly. Had he been about to tell them all about this‘Bloom,’ only to have gotten interrupted by Jacob? By the Box?

The second article, he only skimmed, his ears ringing too much to focus. He gleaned victims had been found on both coastlines of the States, and in the past week cases had been discovered in Scandinavia and South Asia. Investigations had already been underway to pinpoint if a sole food supplier might have shipped out tainted stock, and pressure had intensified once the epidemic had crossed international waters. He spaced out a ways, despising the reality how disconnected from the outside world their apartment building was. Unplugged from reliable transportation, let alone utilities, including Web. Fed only what FEMA deemed suitable to funnel into their location-specific Nikola-based Web broadcasts. He stared at the photos, revolted fundamentally at what could only be some manner of genetic disease.

Speechless, the ex-librarian looked up, haunted, and turned around the reader to set it in Jacob’s lap to observe him.

“I’ve got to keep up on current events,” he lampshaded. “Sue me for having auto-load set on some stuff.”

“--You knew about this then?” Cecil snipped. “Have there been any in Tri yet?”

Jacob shrugged, and decided giving him his closest understanding of the crisis better served them both than instructing specific topic searches.

“Only a matter of time, I guess. They’ve started refining a cure. Made their first survivor announcement a few days ago. Nasty stuff. Comes in flare-ups. Seems to start just turning you green, but every episode after that just fucks you up sideways. Looking like the key to surviving it is catching it before‘crab phase’ or whatever the hell that explosion of sharp mangled guts is. Worst part is, it makes you complacent to the changes, or oblivious altogether. You don’t seek medical help. You stop eating, and seek light and water above all else. The first survivor only got there‘cause he stuck close enough to home his steady found him and took him somewhere.”

All the while, Cecil had stared at the reader screen, not Jacob.

“What... is it.”

“A virus, maybe? No one knows. It’s got to be genetic, ‘cause they reversed it with humanization serum. Look, if you wanna read up on it, that’s fine. I’m probably missing scientifical parts of this whole shebang. Use my reader all you want. I don’t care. Just lemme get up and piss, pal. You really are tormenting me at this point.”

Cecil finally folded, and crouched behind the chair to cut the knots with the wine key. By the time the ropes loosened off the chair, Jacob was already rounding the chair to gently knuckle-scrub the ex-librarian’s fresh buzz cut with a chuckle, and he strolled off to the bathroom. Cecil bundled up the rope, then sat to resume reading the news articles. Without all the bookshelves to dampen the sound, having the door open while he took care of his business echoed awfully. Cecil sneered, but appreciated that even though Jacob saved reserve water by not flushing until in the morning, he at least heard him wash his hands.

The third piece was almost totally in video broadcast. He started it, but couldn’t find the volume to turn it up, so he tapped at it until closed captioning started streaming. They interviewed a tall, older man with worn features and an angular nose, bespoken in layered burgundy and navy leisure suiting. The man had shoulder-length receding chartreuse hair, and blood-black sclera and fingernails. From his manicured brows and sideburns, he could tell it wasn’t a dye job. He grimaced as he skimmed the text.

Ivory Rasmussen. Prior already renown as the Confectioner responsible for Resin. Lives in Level 22, in the solar sector of still-crippled Tri-City, New Jersey.

He didn’t get anything more from the interview beyond the understanding they wanted to know what he felt, knowing his survival could mean a large-scale success in overcoming the pandemic globally. Except his insistence that, despite the global incidence, he discredited anyone who thus far considered the Bloom a pandemic of any kind. How dare Jacob simply shrug when a Tri-City native was the survivor in mention. When Jacob came up behind him and put a hand to his shoulder, he jerked to glower up at him, but softened immediately.

“Dude looks super wild. Am I right?” He patted the shoulder for emphasis.“Now how about that shopping list? Gotta get it before first shift. My receiver’s in a third shift sector, so their glow-time is in less than an hour now.”

“Leather crafting tools,” Cecil seethed. “Maggot debridement. Trylocaine. ...Antibiotics! And Ketonamil.”

At first, he’d just been sticking to what he’d thought was an accidental request, but certainty laced his voice now as though he hadn’t known he meant it the first time he’d said it before.

“And Ketonamil,” Jacob repeated. He sat on the edge of the desk and took the reader from him, flipping through with routine cynicism as he easily located every item requested. “Sorry for doing it for you. We’re just in a time crunch, is all.”

“You ordered the things!” Cecil nearly bolted up out of the chair. “But we hadn’t even negotiated what it’ll set me back yet!”

“Shh, shh,” he soothed, waving him to mentally sink back down in the chair. “Prices on delivery, neighbor. Prices on delivery.”

“But--”

“There a problem? No questions asked, why you want any of this stuff. I can conveniently forget anything you’ve said to me tonight, if you like. Doctor patient confidentiality, or whatever bullshit you want to call it. Services are the oldest human currency. I’ve got the means and the motivation. You won’t find both so easily in the same individual. Not in these parts. I’m not for anything too violent, I promise. I can already reassure you, I’ve never set a death in motion in providing any of these items in the past.”

“Up to, but not including,” the librarian jabbed dryly.

“Say, I wonder if we could find a genuine purpose for all that genuine leather,” he proposed aloud, stroking his short under-chin beard thoughtfully. “Something the little gremlin might like to keep.”

“He fancies himself an insect,” he corrected. Though the deprecating endearment nettled him, it worried him more that this endeavor might imperil his priceless object so quickly after he’d come into its possession. “I’m sure of it, that if you asked him, he’d consider the leather his chrysalis.”

“And just what do you think it’ll make him, if we can convince him to turn the stuff into something else?” The repairman offered the bag of cocktail jellies with a benevolent glance.

“Something that he might like,” Cecil repeated as he awed up at the taller man, accepting the cherries in a deferential entrapment.

“You still wanna fall back and keep an eye on me tonight?”

“I don’t think I could go home just yet.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

Cecil snorted, and popped another fruit in his mouth.

“Depends on your hourly rates, I guess.”

#biopunk #dystopian #cyberpunk #body horror #dystopia #the uptake #with symbiotic self indulgence #jacob thorn #george cecil #between you and me

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