#pettaline writing

[soapberrysheriff]

springysnaps: weigh-in

mushmellon:

I reckoned it was time to bulk up in a way that didn’t involve fluffernutters for breakfast lunch and dinner, especially what with being Sheriff and all. Now just about everybody in the Department is hitting the gym, which means we mow through the pastry table in reception a LOT faster. Hey, some parts of being a cop are sacred.

15m ago                           103 replies

[thisbrutalbelle]

          Wrapped in matte black paper with a bright pink ribbon wrapped around it the package was left at the Pettaline-Watts estate with a card attached. In metallic pink writing the black envelop read ‘Freddie.’

Happy Birthday, Freddie!        I’ve noticed how you love Dior and I didn’t imagine I could find anything on the runway you’d like you wouldn’t have bought for yourself. So I found something indulgent and had the Fashion House engrave them. Purely ordered alphabetically, so it rolls off the tongue. Have a lovely day.       Bella.

        Each straw had ‘Pettaline-Watts’ on them in delicate and petite lettering, that if not looked for would go unnoticed.

@freddiewatts

[bumblingbrujo]

☯ : If you’re comfortable with it, write a drabble or so about our muses doing something naughty.

(An AU) in which the Sheriff and the Coroner learn what storage closets are for. 

@ephrampettaline

Emma Ungalaaq was enjoying her new job at the coroner’s office. It was a bit of a weird job, being an autopsy technician, but it was kind of fun. Or at least her boss tried to make it fun. Which was... well weird but not unappreciated. 

Her boss was a cute and short little doctor who seemed to find it easier to talk to dead people than living people. Emma was slowly starting to think of him as her friend. Even though she had read all those posts on the internet about your boss not being your friend because capitalism and all that. She felt like that couldn’t apply to a (cute little witch) and an atronach - not in Soapberry Springs at least. 

Though maybe being friends with her was only a hint of the kind of lines that Dr. Ojeda drew between work and personal life. 

The problem was, he didn’t draw the lines thick enough. 

Emma found that out the hard way. By opening the storage closet in the autopsy room and watching Dr. Ojeda and Sheriff Pettaline tumble out of it in varied states of undress. The Sheriff could zip his pants quickly at least, but Dr. Ojeda was on the floor and flailing for a moment before he could even find where his shirt had gone. 

“Emma! AH...” the doctor looked like a little rabbit staring into the eyes of a lynx. Once Emma felt like she had control of her body again, like she wasn’t glued to this train-wreck of a scene, she did a quick 180 and shielded her eyes with her hands. 

The sheriff looked calm and collected, there might have been a light blush on his face, but the smirk at his lips and the slight sheen of sweat on his brow was more noticeable. Doc on the other hand looked mighty frazzled - his curly hair was going in all directions, his face was red, and when his shirt was finally back on, it was inside out. 

“You... you know that’s not what the storage closet is for, right?” Emma’s voice shook like a leaf in the breeze. But she was sure this wasn’t professional or proper. 

Ephram skittered out of the room after making the universal I’ll call you motion with his hand. Leaving Miguel looking for his white coat and shame faced in front of his ‘employee’. 

[mayaparker]

📫 for a letter my muse would write about yours to a third party.

Spencer,

   I’m writing you a letter because I kind of don’t think you’d listen to me on the phone. You should come to Soapberry Springs. You could be yourself here, all of yourself. And you could still be a cop.   Actually you’d be better off being a cop here. The Sheriff, Ephram Pettaline, never would’ve put up with what happened to me. He wouldn’t have threatened your job for trying to protect to me. In fact he wouldn’t have insisted I testify in the first place. Which I know shouldn’t be high praise, but I’m not above tugging on your heartstrings to get what I want. James wouldn’t have happened either, which speaks better to the kind of man and Sheriff Ephram is. He’s good people. Law enforcement for the sake of justice not punishment. Plus he’s got a husband, who he’s like adorably in love with which is besides the point. The point is that I know you tried to keep it from me, but I heard what the other officers said about you around the station. That bullshit obviously wouldn’t fly here either.     I’d think he’d be likely to hire you too, if only for all the time you spent trying to protect me. I’d put in a good word obviously and Ephram and I are kind of family, so that’d probably mean something. Actually I don’t know if he considers me family so that might not actually mean anything. There’s lots of, well, affectionate physical contact for lack of a better term, but I’m also pretty sure that’s just the way he is with everyone. Anyway, my family hang-ups aside, I really think you would like it here.

… (more letter describing other benefits of town that it took me way too long to write this anyway so I’m going to skip it)

Love,

Maya@ephrampettaline

[ephrampettaline]

* pink and orange skies that fade to purple

“It’s almost same colour like your dust. Your wings.” The last word gets stretched out as you yawn widely and Essie waggles her fingers in the air to produce fairy dust that’s far more purple than the lavender sky.

“You need to go home and get some sleep if you think that’s the same colour, Sheriff,” she says, the glimmer of her violet dust making everything prettier and more mesmerizing, and just at the mere word sleep you can feel your whole body sag in a physical ‘yes please’.

But still, you rub your chin and mumble, “...dunno, there’s gonna be so many more folks comin’ in tonight....” because whatever weird thing is sweeping through Soapberry making people fixated on showing up at the station to narc on their pets and familiars, it’s not gonna stop anytime soon. You blink, tired, and Essie snaps her fingers and you realize she’d been talking and you had zoned right out.

“No offense, but you’ll be no help to anybody in this state,” she says briskly, and you give her a rueful if grateful smile. She always tells it like it is, does Essie, even if she gets that look of mortification right after. Finn chatters on her shoulder, his eyes dark and keen, and you nod slowly.

“Reckon you’re right at that,” you say, as your phone pings. Freddie’s informing you that Oliver, in retaliation for the beard his fairy’s grown at your behest, has interred one of your favourite slippers in the runner bean patch. You shake your head and Essie says, with a little squeeze to your shoulder and a kind, firm intonation,

“--I called you a cab.”

@alessafalling

[ephrampettaline]

* conversations in Latin

“I don’t understand what I’m saying,” you sigh, and Ciara gives you that slanted look she does sometimes, from behind her curtain of hair. Her mouth is quirked and you haven’t figured out yet what exactly that exact configuration means. You’re thinking of starting a running list, only you’re only right half the time so that might be premature.

“Sometimes you don’t need to understand it right away, Ephram,” she says, lifting her head to look at something rustling in the trees. “There’s a power in words, put together in a certain order, repeated by other witches down through the years. It’s a legacy, it’s not ... reinvention.”

You chew on the corner of your thumbnail and taste sap and syrup -- from working with trees all morning and before that, the waffles you shared with your husband -- two kinds of sap, when you think about it. “I ain’t never had no legacy when it comes to magic.”

Ciara tilts her head again (maybe you could map out the angles and what they mean? give up on the translations of her mouth-quirks?) and says as she rubs the thin fingers of one hand over the bony wrist of the other, “...sound out the syllables. That’s how Latin works. There’s no tricks to it.”

She pauses, for a moment, to let the irony settle between you. There’s always tricks, in Ciara’s view of the world. But she’s trying, and you can see it, so you nod and push the sounds out: luctor et emergo. 

You still don’t know what it means but you don’t ask. She’ll tell you, when you need to know.

@thatwhichbindsus

[ephrampettaline]

My muse has been drugging yours

…JUST A PERFECT DAY

weekenders on our own it’s such fun  |  psychopath au@cassiegermaine

“This is just fantastic,” Ephram says warmly, and leans over to kiss Cassie with the taste of cinnamon and syrup on his lips. She kisses back, she thinks; her own lips move, anyhow, and he seems pleased when he sits back and picks up his coffee and picks up his newspaper folded over at the sports section after solicitously putting aside the arts insert for Cassie. “I don’t need to stay late at work today so maybe we can go out for supper, huh? Won’t that be nice,” Ephram says, and Cassie thinks she feels herself nodding.

A photograph on the arts section catches her eye. A train of elephants wearing brightly coloured … (she doesn’t know the name for the elephant saddle-seat-covered-tent things and her mind helpfully fills in ‘chuppah’ so Cassie goes with that even though she knows it’s not right) range from end to end of the photo, each trunk firmly holding the tail in front of it, so they all know where they’re going. “Elephants are matriarchal,” Cassie says, and touches her fore- and middle fingers to her face.

She’s surprised when they come away dry. She’d thought she might be crying.

“Uh-huh,” Ephram says from behind the baseball scores. “That’s nice, honey.”

The sex is good, or at least it seems that way, or at least Ephram seems to think so. From the way he curls his big hands around the back of her head and the small of her back when they’re in bed, and buries his burning face against the spot between her collarbones, from the way he groans her name in an endless string of breath and sweat and fingermark bruises that never last the night.

Cassie’s body seems as confused and yielding as her mind and her memory, because she thinks she comes, but she can’t be sure once it’s happened. And after, Ephram pulls her against him and falls asleep while he’s stroking her hair. Cassie never remembers falling asleep.

But he wakes her every morning with a cup of tea in bed that he gets up early on purpose to make for her. Every single

every

everysingle

every. Single. Morning.

This morning, the morning of the elephants, Cassie had sipped and swallowed her tea while Ephram hummed around the room, smiling when he took the empty cup from her and went downstairs. She’d gone into the bathroom and forced it all out with fingers down her throat, like she’d been doing for the past week, and she didn’t even remember why she’d started doing it but that’s not the important thing, now. 

The important thing is that Cassie had gotten something special to put into Ephram’s coffee, while she sat with him at the breakfast table and watched him methodically eat her stuffed french toast and read the sports section. She’d only been mixing it into his coffee for three days yet, but she had a month’s worth of the stuff and there are, still, places in her house to hide things that Ephram doesn’t know about.

“Elephants,” she says as Ephram folds down one corner of his paper to look at her with a mix of perplexedness and fond exasperation, “remember everything that’s happened to them.” 

Cassie smiles and picks up her teacup, because then, Ephram will out of habit mirror her and he will drink more of his coffee. And he’ll do it every single morning.

[ephrampettaline]

💔 38: My muse is a cult leader and yours is a devoted follower. - Ruby

…A FLAKE OF YOUR LIFE

do you don’t you want me to make you  |  cult au@scarlettxruby

Ephram wears his long dark blond hair up in a messy knot now. It had only taken two members of the Poppy Family making allusions to him resembing the Nazarene before Ephram stopped wearing it down, although he’s kept the beard. Ruby knows from her talks with him that Ephram secretly thinks the reference is a silly one, that the Jesus with the pale skin and lachrymose blue eyes is a farce. Besides, in the worn jeans and thin white tunics he prefers, Ruby thinks he looks more like some erstwhile folk rocker. When they sing together, dilated and dreamlike on peyote, she thinks she’s a fit to him.

Ruby drinks apple cider vinegar till her teeth are edged. She concentrates for as long as she can on reciting nursery rhymes. She sucks on ice cubes till she’s shivering.

These are only a few of the suggestions that Ephram’s given the Family for how they can control their libidos; it’s their strictest tenet. He doesn’t want the media writing exposés about them being a bunch of sex-crazed freaks, and he’s stringent about making sure nobody’s fucking on the side. The way that Ephram makes sure about that is … well, it’s nothing they haven’t all agreed to, but….

Anyhow. It’s a tenet Ephram put into place years ago after the night that Iann and Freddie left, taking with them half of the Family’s coffer and the Westfalia that had been their sole method of transport. And when Ephram makes sure nobody’s having sex, he’s rigorous about it. Unsparing.

Ruby rubs her damp palms against the sides of her embroidered sundress as she pads up to where Ephram is standing in the low sunset, smoking weed at the rubbly edge of their compound parking lot. “Hey,” she says softly as she approaches, and he gives her a glance and a smile before taking a long draw and handing her the joint.

She takes it and sips a cautious puff as Ephram lets the smoke stream from his lips and inhales it neatly again into his nose. “I needed to talk to you away from the others,” he starts, looking out over the empty field. “About somethang serious, Ruby, about your place in the Family.”

The resinous herbaceousness in her chest nearly chokes her, like she’s swallowed a hammer. Ruby drinks that damn apple cider vinegar, but it doesn’t prevent her from seeing how handsome that new boy in the Family is with the dark curls and wide-set eyes, and it doesn’t sour her desire any. “Okay,” she says in a very small voice, thinking about Jack and Jill going up that hill.

“It’s recruitment time,” Ephram says when he takes the joint back, and his fingertips are dry and cool. “You can stop following the tenets for as long as you need, to bring us in more recruits.” He looks over at her and his eyes are as cool as his fingertips; not even so far as cold, nothing that extreme. Cool and appraising as they look her up and over the way you’d examine any tool in your toolbox or weapon in your arsenal. Ephram’s eyes don’t change even a degree either way when he adds to finish their conversation, “–that new boy’s gonna find potentials for you, and then you’ll recruit them. All right?”

Jack fell down, Ruby thinks frantically, and broke his crown, and Ephram’s looking at her waiting for a response. Ruby’s about to open her mouth to say yes, of course, yes, she’ll do anything to help the Family even if it means that, but Ephram’s already walking away from her towards the open field. “If you get pregnant,” he says, voice floating back with marijuana smoke, “I’ll take the baby. It’ll be … useful.” He laughs, a dry grassy chuckle, and leaves her behind as he wades out further and fades and disappears.

–and jill came tumbling after, is the only thing that screams, over and over, through Ruby’s mind.

[ephrampettaline]

40 - For Collette. Didn't look at the options and I randomised the number =D

…THE BRIGHT AIR FANNED

we play with fire and take the consequences  |  horror alternate reality @collettemackenzie

“...for the best. I mean if you look at it the right way, it’s sort of an honour.”

Collette tried to reach up to the rim of the basket she seemed to be folded into, hoping to gain some purchase and pull herself out, even if she had to topple the big wicker bin in the process. But her fingers only starfished, like a baby’s, her fingertips feeling wet and sticky. She opened her mouth to protest and to her horror all that came out was a pleading yawn that trailed into a whine.

Ephram’s face loomed into her view, the beiges and blues and pinks of him resolving into something facelike after Collette blinked a few times. He looked sympathetic, but only mildly so. Like she’d lost a copy of a book she liked or she’d banged her elbow really hard.

“It’s kinda your own fault,” he began, then backtracked hastily: “--not fault, that’s the wrong word, it’s your ... well, if you wasn’t so good at your job we’d of never ended up in this situation.” Ephram produced a bucket and a hand-mop, dipping it into the treacly concoction and then anointing Collette with it. “Sorry I had to strip you down and dress you and all,” he said, motioning with the mop at the short white raw cotton shift she was wearing, nothing underneath, bare feet, loose hair. “Couldn’t have you wearin’ nothin’ with, uh, metal or plastic on it. Wouldn’t go down right.”

Collette managed what she thought might be words, her head starting to go all swimmy again, and Ephram leaned in, frowning, to try and make it out. He seemed to get it, because then he straightened and said, “It’s Soapberry, kiddo. Iffen a feller really needs some potion or drug what can knock even a nymph for a loop, it’s only a matter of findin’ the right place to get it. And I’m the Chief of Police. I know how to get away with shit.” He gestured again with the mop, drops of treacle-mixed-with-sulfur hitting Collette’s cheek. “It took weeks, slippin’ it in everythang I gave you to drink, but it’s been buildin’ up inside you and, well -- here we are.” 

Setting down the wet bucket, Ephram took up a dry one (Collette gave a sick, choking laugh at the fact that she still recognized what they were for) and dug out a handful of flat dime-sized seeds, strewing them all over her so they stuck to the viscous goop. “He likes you a lot,” Ephram said with a smile that, incredibly, he seemed to think would buck her up. “He thinks you smell divine. You’re gonna make ‘im real happy, Collette.” Ephram upended the bucket over Collette’s basket, then turned to leave. 

He paused for a moment, looking over his shoulder, and said, “--you really were good with em, my birds. I appreciate that.”

Collette finally managed to get out one distinct word -- “bastard!” she groaned -- but by then, the eleven-foot tall Ossuary Roc had clawed its way out of the deep limestone cave it lived in, the monster bird’s bony head swiveling slowly in her direction. It spread its wings, the dry ivory feathers clacking hideously, and ducked its long neck as it approached, flat red eyes filled with hunger.

The times she’d fed it -- not often, the Ossuary Roc only required food once a month -- Collette had dragged a deer carcass out in the big wicker basket to the edge of the deep cave pit. She was, technically, supposed to leave and let the bird eat, but she’d been fascinated by its appearance, like some battlefield haunt, and watched it from a few feet away. The Roc hadn’t seemed to mind. 

The fifth time, it had portioned out the foreleg of a deer for her, hopping closer to her with its wings spread and head ducked to toss it at the nymph’s feet.

“You remember me,” Collette managed to croak as the huge bird loomed up, just as Ephram had. “You know me. You like me.”

The Roc watched, redly unblinking; Collette could see herself reflected in its stare, limbs spindled into its feeding basket, her own eyes huge, dark, doelike.

[ephrampettaline]

48. Our muses are in a post-apocalyptic wasteland

…a single instinct

she went under the tires. she went under the wheels.  |  post-apocalyptic au

“We should move out from the city.”

It’s about the hundredth time Ephram’s reiterated this opinion, and Freddie can barely bring himself to make the same argument for the hundredth retort. “There’s nothing out there, love. I know your instinct is to go to ground and live off the earth, but I’m telling you. They wouldn’t have left any space for us to survive, no cover, no food to forage, not one bloody thing. They destroyed it all.”

Huddled by the oil fire that burns a thick greasy ash into the air that settles on everything, marks them with the constant reminder that they are dust and to dust they shall return, Ephram scratches his bare blackened fingers against his knobbly knees. “It might be better,” he says, which is new. It’s also a breakdown from his usual more impassioned protests, and he barely puts any breath into it before giving up and reaching for the thin strip of protein bread that’s his allotment of food for the day.

Freddie watches his husband, a tight sour feeling building in the hinges of his jaw like rubber bands winding up. He takes his own strip of bread, breaking it into thumbnail-sized pieces and chewing them slowly, twenty-five times each. It’s only been about three weeks since they stopped automatically dividing their bread into fours. Somehow it doesn’t feel like any sort of improvement.

“We can head out tomorrow, early,” Freddie says, almost like he used to, without a series of plotted-out considerations measured first. The way Ephram smiles at him? That’s almost like it used to be, too.

—

Teo’s not much of a talker. He prefers chirps and whistles, clicks and growls, and sometimes Freddie wonders if his mother would be fine with it or if she’d be appalled. He worries about things like that. It helps him forget for moments at a time that Cassie would probably just be glad that they’re keeping her child alive at all, in this depleted and blasted-out wasteland.

(There’s also the fact that this way, Teo doesn’t ask about Cassie; they’d told him what happened to her while they were hunkered down in the abandoned department store basement where they’d hidden out for half a year – a sanctuary that came too late for Cassie, to their nearly-overwhelming grief – and Teo didn’t ask many questions about it. Other than “did you try to save her” and “does she know she left me”, which neither of them have ever been able to answer.)

They’re all three of them anointed with the red sandalwood paste that covers their scent as they move out in the morning, Freddie in the back and Ephram in the front with Teo between them stepping carefully into the soft prints that Ephram leaves. Cassie used to sometimes walk second, sometimes third, and those times she’d point out to Freddie that Albie’s little foot taps in the huge kidney shapes of Ephram’s were like the pawprints from The Lion King. And Freddie, never indoctrinated into Disney himself, would smile and nod and feel a sense of loss that wasn’t even his own.

It’s not a difficult walk, so long as they’re careful, otherwise Ephram would be toting Teo on his back. As it is, he murmurs quietly at them from his place in the lead, some of it relevant and most of it not. Teo chitters like the monkeys he’s never seen, and Freddie makes sure his family doesn’t deplete in number any further. It was easier to stay sane when Cassie was there, sharing the responsibility. Before they lost her under the wheels, rolling clackity-clack until they couldn’t see her anymore.

Ephram turns to look at Freddie, his hair grown long to hang over his marred left eye socket. “Not far now,” he says, voice clearer and more lucid than it’s been in days. Freddie nods, letting hope lift into his eyes, wanting Ephram to see it. Teo meeps and stops walking, bumping back against Freddie, wanting to be picked up; he’s light as daybreak, lighter even, and Freddie has no trouble carrying him. Stepping carefully into Ephram’s footsteps.

They know something’s wrong before they even get close enough to see what’s been done to the trees. There’s a stink of rotting paper and fur, and Freddie adjusts Teo so the boy’s face is pressed against him when he and Ephram come within sight of what used to be the treeline. Now it’s nothing but withered half-decayed corpses of bark and sap, shot through with razor wire and hung with tar-bombs, the ground heavily silted with corrosive grey salts.

“Ephram, love,” Freddie says near-soundlessly, a sheet of paper slipped under a door. Teo gives a little sob, clinging tighter to him. Ephram keeps walking forward.

@freddiewatts, @cassiegermaine

[ephrampettaline]

52, because I love that AU of them.

…we had us some fun

well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world  |  spree killers au

“Pour me a glass of milk there, would you, darlin’?”

Bellamy rattled the glass bottles in the metal carrier that she’d collected from the back door that morning after the milkman had come, counting out, “Heavy cream, skim milk–” she made a derisive sound, turning to face Ephram and flopping around the folds of the silk robe she’d had to double-lap and tie up on her tiny frame, before going back to the bottles she was unloading on the counter, “–chocolate, yum, and oh here we go!” 

She took out a bottle of whole milk and pranced over to the kitchen table where Ephram was eating his leisurely breakfast of bacon and eggs accompanied by a pile of sliced white bread and margarine and a half pack of cigarettes (not his brand, but you know what they said about beggars), smiling brightly as she poured a jelly glass full of milk for him. “There you go, honey,” Bellamy said, her voice as sweet as silk pie as she pressed a creamy lipsticked kiss to his forehead. Her pretty house slippers danced around the spreading dark thick stain on the linoleum as she sat on the counter next to the milk, drinking the chocolate straight from the bottle.

“Don’t you look pretty, lil girl,” Ephram said, leaning back in his chair as he chewed and smoked, not his brand but dang they’d do in a pinch. “Too bad the daughter din’t have no scanties like them ‘uns.” He gestured at her getup and Bellamy pouted, sticking her full bottom lip out.

“I know,” she whined, kicking her feet. “Just the fat old mum. Can you imagine her dressed up all frilly tryin’ to get her old man in the mood?” Bellamy laughed, the carillon of the sound a jarring counterpoint to the staccato gunshots of the night before.  She’d laughed then, too, of course; Bellamy had never been anywhere or done anything, she’d told Ephram when she’d jumped into his car after he’d finished his day job putting up fences on her daddy’s ranch. She was just a bored girl, a cute girl, looking for some sort-of kind-of excitement in a town too sleepy for how awake she was at only fifteen.

And she knew how to shoot a gun if she was standing close enough to what she wanted to hit, and it turned out she was real good at strangling the life out of twin little boys with the cheap cowboy lasso from out their toy chest. They’d done the twins first, then their teenage sister who preferred jeans to dresses, then the mom when she went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee, then the dad with the shit taste in cigarettes when he came home from work. Ephram had done them, the adults. It was a more sophisticated job than doing kids, he told Bellamy, but the truth was that he liked how adults could really understand what was coming. The little kids, they didn’t really get it right up until their animal terror kicked in, but the parents? Yeah, they caught on. The mom screaming for her kids before the answering silence registered in the anguish on her face; the dad knowing in one searing moment that his entire life and all the life he’d helped create and nourish, it was already over.

“They had them three kids,” Ephram pointed out. “She must of been pretty good at getting ‘im in the mood.” And just like that, like it was on cue, they both heard it: the stuffy, mewling gulps that precursored a bawling infant cry from one of the upstairs rooms they hadn’t gotten around to exploring yet.

Bellamy’s eyes lit up. Ephram tapped another of those cigarettes from the pack, switching the new one out for the one he was finishing and lighting it with the cherry. Not his brand, these fuckin’ cigarettes, but hey – they’d kill you just the same.

[ephrampettaline]

I want that angsty meme and I'll let you pick whatever number for our bbs :D

…SCOLD’S BRIDLE

screaming deceiving and bleeding for you  |  inquisition au@xxtuaharjunaxx

“The worst is almost over,” Ephram said, lifting his stained hands to the hood of his robe and folding it back with a disturbing amount of care and neatness. He favoured Tuah with a smile almost beatific in its gentleness, if you didn’t look up to his eyes and the mad fervour in them.

Tuah knew that fervour well. He’d felt it himself, from the moment he’d first donned his initiate robes and spent his years of poverty serving the destitute, the godless, the uneducated. He’d believed in all of the liturgy and ritual behind this; he’d been a man of faith.

He’d been following a calling. And if people perhaps looked at him with admiration and defered to him and believed that Tuah held the keys to salvation, it was incidental. Tuah had never relished the power he held.

Never. Not for a moment.

Not once.

liar, laughed a voice in the back of Tuah’s head, and Ephram rubbed his bloody fingertips over his pale cheek, his blond beard, and said, “…this is normally the point where we tell them that they can stop what’s happening, any time they like, if they confess.” He touched those fingers to the bridge of Tuah’s nose, so lightly and quickly they wouldn’t be distinguishable from a fly alighting for a moment, and then stepped back to pluck the tongs from the brazier of embers.

“You know that already, though, don’t you, brother?” Ephram held the glowing tongs in front of him as he contemplated Tuah, stripped down to the smallclothes, strapped into one of the chairs they’d used to question so many people in the months that had led them to here and now. “You, after all, were the best of us.” 

There wasn’t even any mockery in the comment; it was a plain observation, with perhaps even some tinge of respect. Ephram had been a good acolyte. Observant and unquestioning, never flinching from the hard work that the Lord had set them to, believing entirely in the necessity of their task. Ephram truly believed in mortification for the sake of purity.

Ephram hadn’t hesitated even a hair’s breadth when Tuah’s turn had come.

He reached out and held one of Tuah’s hands. “You always said that the Devil could corrupt even the most sanctified of us,” Ephram murmured, stroking Tuah’s palm comfortingly. “That there was only ever one amen between us and the worst sort of sin.”

He smiled at Tuah, then unfurled Tuah’s fingers, laying them flat on the wide arm of the torture chair. “Say ‘amen’, brother Tuah,” Ephram urged, and when he cinched the lip of the tongs at the base of Tuah’s middle finger and pinched searing-hot right through skin and flesh and bone until it clipped through and the stench filled the tent, Tuah thought maybe amen was, indeed, the sound that tore wet from his blameless throat.

55. Our muses design and test torture devices/methods

[ephrampettaline]

ephram and miguel

- and play me close (alternate reality)

Maybe it’s 6:45Maybe I’m barely aliveMaybe you’ve taken my shit for the last time - girls like you, maroon 5  

There’s a feeling inside Miguel’s belly that he can’t explain, when he sees Ephram’s face, sees the stark realization there and the contemptuous twist of the man’s (perpetually) kiss-bitten mouth. It feels almost like … satisfaction? No, that’s not quite it.

He steps aside to let Ephram in, but the sheriff merely lingers on the doorstep like a mis-delivered newspaper. “Really,” he sneers. “Are you fuckin’ serious.”

Miguel considers this, scratches the tipitty-tip of his nose. The gesture is mouselike and it makes him feel like Ephram’s a big yellow cat, except the cats don’t always win, do they? No. Not in cartoons anyhow. And Miguel’s always liked Itchy and Scratchy, a cartoon within a cartoon; a good metaphor for himself, in a funny way. 

“Rarely,” Miguel says, finding that funny too. He’s the only one, because Ephram leans in and snarls, “You’re a god damn idiot. You think I give a shit? Them days is long gone. You’re puttin’ on a show for nothin.” He strides past Miguel into the house, straight towards the ritual room where Ciara has been teaching him how to better access his mountain magic or whatever it is, leaving Miguel the field. 

Miguel the field mouse rubs his fingertips along the intricate marks on his skin where Ciara cuts him, the same places every time to make him groan with new and remembered pleasure. They’re still dark red; he hasn’t healed them all the way. Ciara will be flush with magic, Miguel knows, replete with sex energy as she teaches Ephram (sans contact, of course) to tap into his own adulterated witch-fairy magic.

Maybe he does know the name of that feeling after all. Maybe it’s triumph.

@bumblingbrujo

[ephrampettaline]

soul satisfying view || ephram, anaxis

.... an interlude during bluebird, wherein ephram cages anaxis once more.

accidental bird: one that has strayed far enough from its home territory that its presence is notably unusual

You’ve been dutifully using the birding notebook that Cassie gave you, noting down each bird you see without prejudice or favouritism. Each one deserves a place, after all, and in Soapberry Springs there’s a number of them that require a little research with a professor up at the university to identify properly. 

And lately you’ve started jotting down things about yourself, too, between sparrows and seagulls. You aren’t sure why you began this habit, but perhaps the first entry -- scribbled under a detailed description of an owl with heterochromia reading simply but which side is which -- sheds some light on it.

Stupidly, when you left Kentucky there was a minuscule part of you that hoped Anaxis would linger behind, that the demon was bound to the holler. It didn’t take long for you to realize how wrong you were; it took precisely till the hellmouth under the town opened up and your demon clawed its way to the fore and you spent the next month in constant, silent agony as it used your body for all manner of atrocities that still wake you up at night.

The woman you thought of as a sister carved your eyes out with her sharp knife and she took some of your trust and self-worth with them.

Your best friend went along with flights of carnage and played house with Anaxis, happily, gleefully. She only balked when the demon spoke of its obscene plans for the baby girl that Iann owed it. Not when it merrily contemplated having you gang raped just like back in prison, hey-ho.

It was easy after that to accept that you just weren’t ever going to be worth that much to anybody. Unusual enough to attract attention, with Anaxis dressing you up and wielding your body as both a weapon and a punching bag; accidental enough to not really matter at all, when it came down to it. The cocaine helped you forget that for a while and the cage matches did too. Meeting and allowing yourself to love Ruby and let her love you helped.

Freddie was the one who understood, for the first time out of anyone, that Anaxis had no interest in smiting the town and torturing its residents. Anaxis’ sole concern was you. 

But so was Freddie’s.

(no, that’s not exactly true; iann caught on to the demon’s purpose too, but iann doesn’t love you. his hatred of the demon eclipses his indifference about you and that’s all, folks.)

Freddie melted away your scar tissue of i don’t deserve any better and you found, to your surprise and gratefulness, that he’d replaced that self-recrimination with his own its entire goal is to hurt you, love, and i won’t let that happen anymore.

Since then you’ve stopped being surprised. You’ll never stop being grateful.

bird plow: when a group of resting birds is chased into flight, becoming increasingly exhausted with each interrupted attempt to recover.

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, EPHRAM? THIS WON’T WORK! EVEN IF THAT USED-UP WHORE FAIRY HEALS YOU I’M GONNA USE THAT TIME TO STRANGLE HIM AS I FUCK HIM. IT’S A CLASSIC, YOU’LL LOVE HOW IT FEELS IT’LL FEEL SSOOOOO GOOOOOOOOOOOOD WATCHING THOSE COCKSUCKING LIPS TURN BLUE WHEN I CHOKE HIM OUT

When Anaxis works your vocal cords, it can make human sounds, more dulcet than your own whiskey-burned voice. Inside your head is a different story. There, it speaks in a constant roar, a hellish tinny crash reverberating off the back of your skull.

You’re not listening to it. You’ve lost the white place that you’d burrowed for yourself long ago, where you could be sealed up and safe and alone, tuned out to the demon. To everything, really. You can’t find your white place anymore, but that’s all right and maybe you needed to move on from that desperate childhood haven, anyhow. Maybe you need to catch the ropes of silver fairy dust that are beginning to swirl into your blood and bones and the dying rotted meat of you, reviving you, reconstructing you as perhaps you were meant to be before poverty and violence and the world had their way with you.

OH, YOU’RE GOING TO REGRET THIS, BABY, YOU’RE GOING TO GET PULLED STRAIGHT DOWN TO H-E-DOUBLE-HOCKEY-STICKS FOR THIS ONE, YOU’LL WISH FOR ME BACK ONCE THE LOWER DEMONS MAKE FILTH OF YOU, THEY’LL MAKE YOU FORGET YOU WERE EVER ANYTHING BUT AN OBJECT OF SUFFERING, OH, EPHRAM, IT’S GONNA BE SO FUN! BYE-BYE, FREDDIE YOU PATHETIC CUNT, BYE BYE!

It’s not as if you can say, when it happens, that you’d planned on forcing a joining of two magics that were never meant to work together; you certainly never considered that the demon’s influence would make your witch green permeable to your fairy’s silver. It’s an act of desperation but it’s the good kind, the kind that keeps you alive for one more day. You know the taste of that like mother’s milk, like blood and laughter in your mouth, like Freddie’s silver dust reaching your diseased, slumped brain and galvanizing you to action. 

Skin slaps against skin and both of you cry out from the alignment of the two branded symbols, your hip and his hand, crackling from the contact. That brightness sounds through your entire being like the trumpets of the angels, holy holy holy, beyond comprehension, undeniable. Anaxis is silent. You know that the demon is there inside you where it’s always been, wedged behind your liver maybe, creeping up to try and reclaim the lost territory of your frontal lobe. But it is silent right now and you’re getting stronger by the minute from the direct contact sealing you against your fairy, your beloved Freddie, your salvation. 

You would say it’s almost more than you can take but no, that’s not right. As Anaxis retreats under the relentless force of your twinned magic, you think that you could take this for the rest of your fucking life.

zootie: a bird that although local, is unusual to find; a “good” bird

Since the moment you met, Freddie has been tinkering with you. Not making improvements, exactly; he would never characterize it that way and anyhow it’s inaccurate. More like he’s been spot-cleaning dirt and grime to liberate aspects of yourself, the portrait of you, that had long since fallen into disrepair from abuse and neglect. He treats you as though you’re a treasured find, something shiny and precious that his acquisitive magpie heart wants to tuck into his nest to admire as his own. You soak it up like cake in warm syrup and it sweetens your flesh, your spirit, your ability to love. You and Ruby were raised up in the teaching that even the best love still meant pain; Freddie tenderly excises that from your shared vocabulary.

look at you, those beloved lips murmur when you shut the door of the demon’s prison and join your darling in a whole skin again, remade as you always should have been. His quiet voice is throaty, his slate-blue eyes alight. my god, love.

He looks at you, and you know that you’re all he sees.

[ephrampettaline]

...edith & emory crabtree  |   ephram’s maternal great-grandparents

edith crabtree, née o’leary (fc ellen burstyn) emory jem crabtree (fc sam shepard)

Ephram only knew Emory for a few years before he was killed in a mining cave-in, but Edith was a key figure for twelve years of his childhood until she passed. He spent summers on Edith’s farm, an entire year at one point, and for a rather pixilated child it was a place where Ephram was free to be himself.

Although this side of the family is human, Edith was known to have a touch of the sight. She provided Ephram with a pragmatic sort of education when it came to dealing with haints, spirits, apparitions, and all manner of religious phenomena -- along with schooling him in the basics of tending crops and animals, and traditional crafts like whittling.