#it's adhd it's not some huge medical issue that's slowly killing him i promise

[starboundsingularities]

making these is the closest i have to a hobby btw

similar posts: 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

[thewhumperinwhite]

Guardian Angel

OKAY SO LISTEN. this is not the update anyone was hoping for but sometimes the only thing that’s gonna keep my contrary adhd brain from Abandoning a project is to Invest Energy Somewhere else for a while. case in point, I've been plugging grimly away at both café and wkw for weeks and written ~500 words total, and then I wrote this whole thing in About Twenty Minutes.

So uh. You know how FBI is an au of an Actual WIP I have about vampires? Well this is... technically also that but it’s a lot closer to the actual canon of that WIP. If you don’t know anything about FBI or those characters, that’s great, you’re in the same spot Karim is here lmao.

Also this is heavily inspired by this very good spn fic, which I keep coming back to despite not being active in that fandom at all anymore. This goes in a very different direction than that, but they open in similar ways.

Also please note, the main character of this is a young teenager, and there will be some mild underage whump, but this is my official promise that there is no underage sex in this story. 

Anyway uh let’s get this..... car wreck underway I guess

TW for: car accident due to reckless driving resulting in serious injury (or by rights it should anyway); body horror; animated corpse (of a sort); religion/Christianity.

----

For about—let’s say—the first fifteen miles away from his house, the thrill of the stolen car and his notable lack of driver’s license was enough to keep Karim in his own skin, not spiralling into rushing panicky thoughts. After a while that thrill starts to fade into the background and every time it does he hits the gas a little harder, and the new speed is enough for him for another fifteen miles until he has to hit the gas again because his brain is catching up with him.

Which is to say that when the thin pale shape of a human being stumbles out of the bushes along the side of the highway, Karim is going easily a hundred miles an hour, and no amount of slamming on the brakes is going to get him to stop in the hundred feet between himself and this person’s human body.

He hits the white shape at, optimistically, sixty miles an hour. It shoots up the car’s hood, cracks the windshield with its skull, and disappears over the top of the car. Realistically there’s no way the quiet hard thump of the body hitting the pavement many feet behind the car is audible over the sound of the car’s squealing brakes but it feels like Karim can hear it, can hear the accompanying crack of bones breaking against the asphalt.

The car rolls to a stop, and Karim spends several unfathomable seconds staring at the windshield, not bloodied but almost completely starred with a huge spiraling crack just off the center, and all he can think is, no, no, no no no no no oh no oh no.

Then he hears a muffled groan from behind him and dives for the car door, tumbles out onto the pavement on his hands and knees, scrambles back toward the pale body squirming and twitching in the middle of the left lane behind his mother’s SUV.

Somehow there’s still no blood, even back here, but it is immediately clear that there is something seriously, deeply wrong with this body.

“Motherfucker,” it says, and Karim freezes a few feet away from it, still the most horrified he’s ever been and now also very confused and between those two feelings no longer able to move. The voice issuing from the ruined and twisted body sounds, at most, annoyed. It flops horribly onto its back, like a boned fish, and rolls its head awkwardly on its shoulders to face Karim. “Going a fucking million miles an hour on an—” The body stops speaking, and stares up with wide shocked eyes in its colorless face.

“Karim,” the dead thing says.

Karim stumbles back a step, the horror already overfilling his chest growing and mutating so fast he loses his footing and falls painfully backwards, scraping his palms as he catches himself to stop from sprawling completely. The initial all-consuming terror of having killed a person with his mother’s car is turning into a—different, harder to parse all-consuming terror.

Because every instinct he has is telling him that this thing that just called him by his name is a corpse.

Watching it sit up on the pavement, in a hopefully unconscious mirror of Karim’s own half-sprawled pose, is like watching a marionette puppet being controlled by a very unskilled puppeteer. It’s movements are jerky and uneven; it falls back when it puts its weight on one of its arms and the leg on that side is stuck out stiffly in front of it and bending in places that aren’t joints. And above its wide filmy eyes its forehead is starred with cracks like an egg dropped on a hardwood floor.

“You’re alive,” it says. Its voice is—completely normal, which is somehow the strangest thing about it. About—him.

“I—I’m so sorry,” Karim says, starting to run on autopilot now, fumbling in his pocket for his cellphone, “I’ll call, I’ll call an ambulance, I’ll—”

“I don’t need an ambulance,” the dead boy says absently. He leans forward, his mangled arm hanging useless at his side, though he doesn’t move like he’s in any pain at all. “You’re—holy shit, you’re a baby.”

Karim blinks, away from his phone screen, up at the dead boy. He looks—older than Karim, but not by that much, like a college student, maybe. And he’s looking up at Karim with alarm that’s almost horror, like Karim is the weird mangled abomination here.

“I am not,” he says automatically. There’s still no blood, anywhere. There’s—he can see that the skin of the boy’s head is broken, but it’s not bleeding, not a drop. 

The boy searches his face with his weird foggy eyes, still leaning forward. His hair is short, maybe even buzzed in the back, and it’s a dull sandy-brown, above a face that might be handsome if it wasn’t gray-tinged and bloodless and cracked open.

“What year is this?” the dead boy says urgently.

Karim stares at him.

His arm is dangling limply at his side and his leg is definitely broken in more than one place and Karim did that, which will continue to be true regardless of whatever else is going on with this guy medically, and Karim has no idea what to do about that, is almost paralyzed by the desire to physically twist time back ten minutes and have this not be the moment he’s in right now.

But he can’t do that, so he answers, “Uh, 2009?” in a high squeaky voice like it’s a question, instead.

The dead boy’s eyes go even wider.

“It’s,” he whispers. “You’re,” and then he stops and looks at the ground. He raises his still-working arm to scrub across his cracked forehead, maybe tries to raise the other one, winces.

“I’m sorry,” Karim croaks. “I should— I gotta get you to a hospital.”

The dead boy shakes his head. “I don’t need a hospital,” he says, “I need a church.”

Karim feels himself gasp sharply. “Oh god,” he says, “Oh no, I’m— sure you’ll— make it, man, you’re—” He laughs, the sounds grating and hysterical in his own ears. “Look, you’re not even bleeding!”

The dead boy blinks up at him, and then he laughs, throwing his head back, and it’s a full, pretty laugh, sparking up toward the darkening sky— and when he lifts his chin Karim can suddenly see a bizarre pattern of marks all over his neck, a dozen little dots, in pairs, clustered around where you would look for a pulse on someone you weren’t sure was alive.

“That’s not what I mean,” the dead boy says, his eyes squinty and warm with laughter, and then he takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly, staring at Karim, the smile fading from his pretty dead face. “Christ,” he says softly, and then, again, “Karim.”

Karim takes half a step back. “How— how do you know my name?”

“Ha,” the boy says, “that’s—” He tries to push himself to his feet and hisses, falling back like his broken leg won’t take any weight. Karim takes a step closer, unable to keep from reacting to obvious pain that he definitely 100% caused. “Actually,” the boy says, “I—would love it. If you could give me a ride. To the nearest church before I try to answer that. Karim.”

Karim stares at him. “What?”

“Catholic would be best if you’ve got it,” the boy says, with the air of somebody who knows he’s saying an absurd thing and is trying very hard to play it off. “I’m sure another kind would work but I’d just as soon not—” He shifts, winces a little; Karim looks down at his leg and squeezes his eyes shut, he’d momentarily forgotten how awful it looks. The boy laughs, sounding slightly hysterical. “I’d just as soon not drive around between a bunch’a churches if it’s all the same to you. Save you some gas money, huh?”

“Why,” Karim says, and he forces himself to look at the boy’s leg for real. There’s a place beside the— crooked, displaced— kneecap where Karim can see a strip of skin missing, and the exposed flesh is pale and bloodless; he feels his stomach squeeze in panicked nausea. “Why would you need a church right now.”

The boy sucks his teeth audibly, bowing his head, and then spreads his still-working hand wide with a fine-you-got-me shrug. 

“Because,” the dead boy says, “I need holy water to put my leg back together.”

Karim blinks. Blinks again, for good measure.

“What,” he says. He shakes his head. “What. Why would that. Why.”

The boy looks away, tilts his head like he’s doing math in his head, and says slowly, in the voice of someone trying a gambit they’re pretty sure won’t work. “Because I’m... your guardian... angel?”

Karim narrows his eyes. The boy could at least have the decency to say it like he means it.

“Okay,” the dead boy says, and nods like he’s trying to psyche himself up. “Okay, yeah, no, that’s fair, I— Hold on, I’ll— I’ll show you.”

The dead boy sighs and shakes his head. “This is gonna fucking suck,” he mutters, and he closes his eyes. 

At first Karim doesn’t think anything weird is happening— that an evening breeze has just kicked up. But as the wind gets stronger and he can see pebbles and bits of loose asphalt skittering away from where the dead boy sits on the pavement, it becomes clear that the sudden rush of cool air is coming from him. His sandy hair is whipping around his head, too, like it’s in a stronger wind than the one Karim can feel, and Karim realizes a second late that there’s— light coming from him too, a cold white glow growing so slowly he didn’t see it at first.

The dead boy lets out a shaky breath, his face creasing in concentration, or maybe pain.

Karim stumbles backward, hitting the back of the car and pressing his back against it, staring at the dead boy. The wind picks up and the light suddenly flashes, so bright that Karim throws up his arm to shield his eyes— and through his fingers, he can just see that the light beaming from the empty air above the dead boy’s shoulder blades, where it almost forms the shape of two enormous wings out of thin air and dust.

The wind and light sputter and die roughly in unison. Karim lowers his hand enough to stare at the dead boy in— he’s not sure what feeling, actually. Possibly terror.

The boy’s hair settles back against his cracked forehead. “Oh, good,” he says, breathing hard, like he’s just run a mile on a hot day. “It worked.”

Then the dead boy sags sideways and flops limply onto the pavement, and lies still, like corpses generally do.

“What the fuck,” Karim Mun says, with feeling.