Stranger Things
One Nice Bug Per Day
oozey mess
ojovivo
Love Begins
Claire Keane
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Not today Justin
noise dept.
we're not kids anymore.
ellievsbear
Game of Thrones Daily
The Bowery Presents
Show & Tell
★
taylor price
cherry valley forever
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shark vs the universe
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@imbricare
private multimuse written by v (she/her, 30+)
this blog contains mature, unsavory and potentially triggering content including but not limited to narrative explorations of e.g. trauma, horror (including gore & body horror), toxic relationships, power imbalances, age gap relationships, and more. 👉 proceed or hardblock at your own discretion.
He has his mother's eyes.
The realization — one he could not have made himself, not once the murmurs began to be too loud to ignore — slips through his subconscious as if Will had slid a blade between his ribs.
It's been a long time since he's seen his own reflection, but he can remember enough to accept Will's observation as truth. (Remembers before he can force himself to forget: occasionally catching sight of Virginia in his eyes, Alice in the curve of smiles he practiced to make sure they were friendly enough for the lab children. Victor when the shadows fell just right.)
"You have yours."
His mom, darker-than-amber and honeyed gold. She's all fall colors, always has been. Will doesn't know how unique it is that he can see her like this, that he can see anyone like this, and so he can't appreciate just how precious a gift it is what he assumes is commonplace. A swirl of colors that lives in her laugh. The sight of her, the brown and ocher of home. Hazel-gold like the rabbit stories she used to read him as a kid. He saw them all in colors, too: blue and black and silver and, of course, his Hazel.
(Just like your eyes, sweetheart! That's the hero of our little story.)
And because he was easily excited and four years old, he got them all mixed up at the start, the hero and the prince. El-ahrairah eyes, Will crowed the next time she read to him, and then it stuck with him, all his life it stuck with him, for a laugh and for love, for fondness and a bond inextricably woven.
In the trenches of another mind's memories, and it's still stuck with him.
El-ahrairah eyes, Will thinks – clean, simple, clear, after an avalanche of recollection.
"That's a compliment," he says, and the smile that warms him inside out is all honeyed gold, too. It's sorely needed, to chase the coldness of the lab away. To chase Victor's shadows away.
The tension forms like a need piercing between his shoulder blades and emanates outward until he feels it in the tips of his fingers and toes.
I don't like her.
Sorry.
Which is more surprising, he doesn't know at first. The former, he decides; Will's the sort of boy she would have preferred to have, the kind who apologizes for feeling badly about someone instead of beating them with a rock.
"She was smart. She always noticed everything until she couldn't."
He's still looking at her. "He was always an idiot."
would have preferred
Thoughts like tributaries into one shared stream of consciousness. Will turns that new piece of information over but he doesn't like it, no matter which side he's looking at. It's not a compliment to be the would-be chosen one of a woman with eagle talons. And then, what muddies the waters: Who would he have been, if he had been Virginia Creel's son?
A vision blooms like a pastel cartoon of the fifties in Will's mind, overlaid with the real-unreal tangible memories that Henry's shared with him; but instead of a lanky golden-haired boy wearing scout shorts and a neckerchief, the boy has a mop of unruly dark hair and a pair of hazel eyes. He's more fragile than lanky, although that will change; but when he smiles–
Eyes of arctic blue.
Virginia's eyes.
And Will looks back to Henry, Henry by his side, Henry as real as he'll ever be again, and the scene dissipates. Henry has his mother's eyes. Will's never realized it before.
Watching Will has he crams himself into the front seat before he adjusts it to fit him, El's already comfortable in the seat that had previously held Will. Seatbelt on. The click's already confirmed it, but she still nods in the affirmative. While he's busy reacquianting himself with the gauges, she takes advantage to yank off the band holding her hair pulled back. Tension she hadn't even realized was there is released, and her scalp feels almost tingly as it relaxes. Running her fingers through her hair —
— she nearly spills forward onto the dashboard before Will hits the brake.
Still, she trusts him not to kill them. Even if her eyes are super wide. Even if she's preparing to use her powers to make sure he doesn't kill them. Just in case.
But things are okay, and Will's really not so bad at driving, and she's relaxed by the time he finally has the car parked and off. Climbing out of the car, she pushes her hair out of her face and behind her ears as she looks around at where they are.
With a nod, she moves around the car towards his side, glancing out towards the trees he indicates. She's a little glad it's just them, but she's always a little glad when it's just them having small (non life threatening) adventures. It makes her feel like she's really his sister. "Is it another tunnel?" she asks, voice in that specific turn of sincere that's easy to miss that she's joking.
"No, no tunnel." He doesn't know why he's being so cryptic, but it's nice to be secretive for something innocent for a change. As innocent as can be, in their lives: where he's bringing her hasn't been left untouched, and you could say it played a vital part in what happened to him, but still… Will's smile turns pensive around the corners.
The shrubbery is more dense than he remembers; but then again, he hasn't been here in almost a year, and no one else would have had a reason to come. Unless the new owners– he thinks with a pang, but. No. It doesn't look like it. He's glad it never occurred to him before – that they might have kids and their kids might make Will's wood his own.
Will's wood. Their wood – it belongs to them all. Belonged.
Maybe that's why he's here. Maybe it needs to be reclaimed. Or maybe it's just that he realized El's never been here, not really, and Will suddenly, desperately needs her to know this place that always meant so much to him.
And then they step through the last of the hickories and the black raspberry bushes, and,
oh,
there it is. Castle Byers all in ruins - the way he left it behind, the last time he was here last summer. It felt like forever ago that he took a baseball bat to his childhood refuge. After that, he only returned once: the day before they left. He didn't touch anything then. He didn't have the heart.
Now he crouches down by some broken up planks, weathered and rotting in the seasons, and starts plucking away what splinters and bits and pieces of blown-away moss that catches his eye.
Henry's been full of cracks and flaws and caverns since he was too young to understand they were being created, when ice filled him until it melted and left behind the pathways the Mind Flayer would deepen until they could not be refilled or remade. He knows emptiness and bars and pain.
He didn't expect the gaping emptiness left behind as the being in his mind has shrunken from the way Will causes warmth move through the crevices that should be too full to allow it, the way it would shy away from whatever it is that Will coaxed out of him and into his throat.
With you it's easy.
With Will it was so hard. Memories buried nearly as deep as the cave were forced back up to the surface like bloated corpses, and he'd been dragged through every one, rediscovering parts of himself that had been cut off and buried away. Having to relearn how to feel something other than deep betrayal and murderous single-minded hate.
And now he has to learn how to navigate these new emotions. It's more frightening, more difficult, than it had been to explore a new world while his body crumbled and rebuilt, and Will dragged him through relentlessly until they found themselves here.
He's not a cure, but he's become a sedative to make all the edges softer, more endurable. To blur away the line dividing all the worst selves. Maybe, he'd like to think, he's an antidote for Will against the worse creature that waits in the wings for him.
"It's still complicated."
The question simmers at the bottom of the well that is his mind, and inch by inch Will drags it up with a brittle chain. He shouldn't, he knows that, knows it's not something he needs to ask because he already knows the answer. Any question, any answer. But then something he learned with Henry is that some questions aren't asked because they need answering. They need something else.
And so he asks: "Do you regret it?"
Any of it. All of it.
❝ you don’t understand. i need you safe. not because i don’t think you can handle yourself but because i can’t focus on anything else if there’s even the smallest possibility you’re in danger. ❞ (( leto for jessica! ))
Every breath on this planet, we are all in danger.
She doesn't say it; doesn't need to, least of all after last night.
The body of the Suk doctor is cryo-frozen on the barge Leto wants her to enter. Wants her off world. Wants her safe. Control within control: the illusion of it all. Jessica knows then that this is one of the rare moments that he will wring out a lie from her: "I would be no safer on Caladan," she says calmly. Controlled. "All it would accomplish is splitting your forces in two."
And split theirs too. She knows the rationale will come, reads it in the clench of his jaw and the unblinking stare with which he pins her.
As long as you are here, as long as Paul is here, she wants to tell him. But underneath her heart beats another. And alongside that child grows another lie; this time by omission.
"Very well," Jessica relents, in words and with her eyes, letting him have the closing gaze.
Caladan, then. Her to her haven, and after Hawat has seen her off, he will take the body of Yueh and throw him at the Emperor's feet. For all the good it will do.
"They will come at you again. You know this." You must know this. "At Paul."
And you send me away.
And her responsibility is split in the middle. Leto's household entire – everything is pulled, pulling apart. It cannot last. It cannot hold. This makes it simultaneously easier and more difficult to honor his wish and see herself out of the fire. For now.
You guess? But of course he doesn't let himself say it. This is already going better than it ought to, considering who their topic of discussion is. He can't understand Will when it comes to Henry, and he can't understand Will when it comes to dating someone so much older. But, he's forced to realize for the first time, he's only ever dated within a couple of years of his own age. Any further than that felt oddly close to dating to Will's age, and Jonathan spent too much time helping parent him to have any interest in that.
But Will puts the portfolio case in his hand, and Jonathan is fully aware of what that means, how important this has been to Will. How private this is, and how private childhood in the Byers home left them both. Let alone what Henry put them through, and having to learn to hide it all from the world.
And now he pages through the case, slowly as he pauses to take in every picture's detail. The horror and pain and fear emanating from strokes of charcoal and pencil. The horror of two into the completeness of two-in-one, and Jonathan's heart never aches any less, only yanks in different directions as he's forced to reckon with what the progression means.
He doesn't know how to accept it, but he knows that doesn't matter because he has to. He has to or he has to mourn Will. He has to believe that Will truly feels this way, or he has to believe that Henry returned and his little brother's gone.
Will hasn't truly been gone yet, and he isn't now.
Finally, he looks up at Will, doing his damnedest to understand something he knows he never will. "Are you happy?"
He's as happy as he'll ever be, as happy as he's come to accept, as happy as the riverbed of life will allow him to be. With the baggage he brings, what else is there to say?
"I'm better than happy," he tries, slowly, a truth that forms as he speaks it into existence. His eyes don't quite meet Jonathan's; not because he's shifty, but because he has to look inwards first. "I'm loved."
Inwards: the pages that lie, open still, between Will and his brother. A sketchbook like a bridge. When he looks up to meet Jonathan's gaze, it's like he's asking him to cross it.
"He always wants you."
To get a foothold back into their dimension, to build Hawkins in the Upside Down, to use Will against them. To destroy three worlds at once.
How could he forget the lab? What they did to El. He has less sympathy for whatever they might have done to Henry; even less after losing her. If either of them had deserved to live life with someone they cared about it was her.
If anyone deserved to lose everything it was him.
"And you trust him?" There isn't room for anything but the skepticism and suspicion in Mike's voice. "What if this is just another trick?"
Will takes a breath and holds it. For a moment, for as long as it takes to let Mike's statement wash over him and away, so that he doesn't have to respond.
He does. But not how Mike means it. It's different now. It's–
"And I want him, too." He says it low and quiet, like the truth is a sleeping child he must carry down the stairs. "For the longest time, I didn't know if I wanted to fight him or if I wanted him to– to stay. I fought him until it wasn't fighting anymore, and then… things became clearer."
Nothing about this is clear but Will's convinced that clarity isn't in the cards for him anyway. Not with the life he's lived, not with the whiplash he's been through. Good and pure one day, possessed and evil another. When your childhood is a constant tug of war between black and white, you just naturally gravitate towards gray later on, don't you?
He'll be content with gray. He can live with gray. He can live with it very well, he thinks.
"Yes, I trust him," Will says in the same low voice. "It's not a trick."
Another deep breath. If he holds it in any longer, he might burst. If he lets it out, he can't take it back. It's now or never. And now that the moment's here, Will is suddenly gripped by the fear that he waited too long in the first place.
"He… I asked him to help me with something. Something important."
Will's shock and rancor is enough to jar Henry from the memory burned into his mind even without the Mind Flayer's influence. Something closer to satisfaction or grim vengeful pleasure had been expected. Henry wouldn't have even held it against him anymore, considering it seemed to be universally felt around him.
It's so unexpected that for a brief moment he thinks it's come from him.
"Your friend didn't tell you?" It's easier to be dry and sharp-edged in this moment. "She called the good doctor to remove the infection from her family." And then the infection killed her first.
…no, she didn't.
Maybe she did. Maybe by the time he and Robin got close, their friendship was cut from a different cloth than the tattered rags of history she and Nancy had been gathering. Sure, Will knows the basic brushstrokes of the story: an old man in the asylum, a family dead, the fifties backdrop; it all converged as spectacularly and impossibly as a King novel. The only thing missing were a full moon and a red balloon over the asylum.
Virginia Creel lowers her eyes and now the smile is for her daughter, her hand on Alice's shoulder.
A family dead.
"Why did you–"
He stops. Starts over.
"Why your sister?"
Lonnie left an impression. That much was easy to identify in the way Will immediately understood what the hell he was saying, at least... that's how Eli read it as he watched his younger brother work over the terrain of knowledge he had stored in his mind. Eli watched him for a moment, worried he'd unlocked something too close, too sharp to the surface of what Will kept locked up.
And then, in turn, popped the lock on a box Eli usually kept shut tight. "What was he like?"
Eli had a very different Lonnie in some ways. And in some ways, very similar to the Lonnie they knew. "He got my mom pregnant on accident. I guess that's how most stories start. Ma said he was really in love with your mom, but she didn't buy that he could be responsible... Obviously. So he went out, got drunk, shacked up with my mom and... voila." Of course, a year or two later Jonathan would become a reality.
"He came around whenever your mom and him fought and would try to make a home with her. Of course, uh... their love language was a bit different than what I imagine he was like at your place. Lonnie drank. My mom did drugs. They got loud. They got violent. And when they didn't want to be angry at each other..." Eli sniffed, looking down at his hands. "Being invisible came in handy a lot when I realized it meant safe."
Will was silent for a long time. Inside of him, though, his own thoughts were so loud that he couldn't grasp a single one of them. It was like sitting in a full restaurant and trying to understand what one person at the other end of the room was saying. Call it guesswork or intuition; he blurted out the thing that screamed the loudest.
"I don't know if he was really in love with my mom." He blinked. Looked away. "If you're in love with someone, you're not supposed to treat them like they're expendable."
A strange and unexpected bitterness. It sat somewhere between his lungs and his throat. A pressure like heartburn.
It didn't occur to him that what he felt – beyond the anger and the distress – was something sickly green. Resentment like bile. Jealousy?
Of what?
The best side of Lonnie was his back. He heard Hopper say that once, long before Hopper had become the fixture in their lives that he was now. Will had been angry and distressed then, too. With Hopper for saying it? With the part of himself that silently agreed?
With the part of himself that wanted to defend a man who had turned his back?
He had a hard time looking at Eli just now. Eli, who had been an accident. What it does to you, being an unforeseen circumstance in the lives of your parents.
Will had a sudden impulse to ask about that – to ask if that's what he told him, if that's how he put it. If he ever called him that. If she ever did, that nameless, faceless other woman. Impulse gave way to caution, and then it seemed like a stupid thing to ask.
"Do you still see him around?" He asked instead, trying to keep his hammering heartbeat out of his voice.
The whispers are always incomprehensible, heard from a room away, and yet he always knows what they're telling him: turn the hurt around, turn the steak knife Will's slid in him into a mallet and hurt — break — shatter — ki
He doesn't remember when he started focusing on breathing through his nose, but his left hand itch-aches.
Another breath.
The knife slips out while he's busy keeping the mallet in check: "Because it never hurt you to be pushed aside in favor of the novelty of more interesting people."
Itch-ache-twitch. It isn't something Will can miss. It isn't something Will can close his eyes to. His mind empties as icy waters rise in his belly, drowning his system in gut-response adrenaline. It's what makes rabbit-runners tremble with pulse before flight.
Flight like escape. Flight like flying away. Away like Henry walking out the door. Away like Will.
Will who was once thirteen years old and in agony, in tears, in pouring rain: tearing up his refuge. What does it say about him that the blood of his father possessed him then?
What does it say about him that his mother's tender heart beats in his chest, still and still and still, despite it all? Slow like the quiet before the storm. Slow like his gaze that finally lifts from Henry's hand to look him in the eyes; and by then, his heartbeat rushes his ears like the tide pulls on a cobbled beach.
"That isn't fair." Instinct. Impulse. He squeezes it out, past deflated lungs.
❝ tell me what you want me to do. i’ll do it. whatever you want. ❞ (( vera for jessica rip ))
"No."
Finality is brutality with finesse. Verbal. Intellectual. She knows what she is demanding; the altar and the lamb and the sacrificial blood that must flow. Her unsmiling eyes challenge Vera to stop spreading breadcrumbs on the dark and narrow path through the chaos of their entwined lives.
"For what I want, you're not ready."
And maybe neither am I.
the prompt: on the day of conception, lady jessica interacts with hara and knows she's pregnant.
It is not witchcraft, nor is it science.
Ten to twelve days from now, the rhythm will change: the cadence of the lungs, the quickening of the pulse. Jessica will look to confirm it in Hara's eyes, the way her pupils contract. The way she will track the light differently now, while her heart beats discordant with another.
Thump-thump. Thumpthumpthumpthump.
Yes. Once implantation begins, even her very skin will sweat out Hara's secret.
It is not witchcraft, nor is it science when on the day of conception, Jessica watches as the servant girls bathe and dress her daughter-in-law. Honeyed milk for honeyed hair. When you have an excess of water, you do not glorify its self-evidence.
"Leave us."
The girls leave. Jessica rises from the seat on the marble-tiled corner of the tub. Her reflection grows in the mirror until she stands behind Hara, and wordlessly holds out her hand for the hairbrush.
It is simply common sense: The princess is young and eager and immaculate. And Paul bedded her last night.
"A daughter, then," Jessica speaks into the silence. And looks up. Eyes to eyes in a mirror. A world of glass between them; distortion if it ever splinters into shards. Jessica's face splinters into a smile instead. "A daughter for my daughter."
Her daughter-by-marriage.
Her daughter that never was.
Leto's spurned child, and her broken duty.
Shards and shards and milk and honey.
Mike's read enough fantasies — and written enough of his own, both for the party and in the stories written in his attempts to process losing El — that he thinks he knows where this is going. It sends a rush of nausea through him to think about it, the things Will had put himself through in order to save Holly and the rest of the kids. How he'd looked when they'd found him, so much further away than even the Upside Down.
"Yeah, but that deal should have been null and void when he died." That's the problem, isn't it? He isn't dead, he's somewhere and he's in Will's head just like when they were kids.
Love had freed Will then. Maybe that was what it would take to free him now.
"Is that what he wants from you? The deal?"
Will shakes his head. "I don't think he understood it any more than I did. And by the time we finally figured it out, it… it didn't matter anymore."
"He just wants to live, Mike. As much as he's able to, as best as he can. It's not like he had much of a chance to, before. Or ever." Or did you forget he comes from the same place that raised El? "And–"
…and he already said it, somehow, a little bit. Spoke around it like he can give structure to the sentiment, in so many words. It's not how they do things, though. It's not how Will wants it. There was a time when all he could conceive of was talking to Mike in code. He doesn't want to go back there; not even for someone else. Especially not for someone else.
"…and he wants me to be a part of that life."
— Angela Carter, from “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.”
@imbricare / Jessica from here!
Paul holds her gaze a moment longer, jaw locked so tightly it hurts.
The protest stays within him, hot and shapeless. He wants punishment— wants the clean simplicity of fear set into the right hearts. But she has already named it, and named things lose their power to move, to yield.
The words in him do not die gracefully. They scrape on the way out.
“You’re right. It's just...”
It tastes like surrender: bitter, necessary. The taste of a boy becoming.
He looks away first, toward the slit of light at the chamber’s edge where dust turns slowly in the air. Rainfall presses against the walls, close and soft as a hand over a mouth.
“You deserved better than how they came to you,” after a moment, quieter now, the wound beneath the anger finally showing, “You deserve more respect, Mother.”
Respect. Respect is a ceremonial blade. When cognitive processing precedes emotional reaction, it can bruise – but it cannot cut. A point of contention she has danced around with the boy's father more often than necessary. An uphill battle is not an uphill battle when you already know it is a victory conceded. Leto is as stubborn as the bull whose glory-blood immortaliezd the name of his father; the name of his son.
"Paul."
Jessica tilts her head when she looks at him, looks skin-deep. The taste of a boy becoming. If his hormones are churning, it is because he is: becoming. In his bloodstream, stress hormones and androgens in excesssive amounts. He is agitated; but he is also growing. The threshold of manhood has to be crossed with bitterness.
She wonders – not for the first time – if there will arise, in him, an appetite for more tastes than one, always more than one, the way she has molded him since conception. Leto thinks she made him a gift of an heir; but in truth, she gave him a son, and herself an heir.
Perhaps the other way around.
Blinking, Jessica pulls back, spine-straight and wall-faced, and–
–startled.
Not for the first time, he astounds her. Her son. Leto's heir.
"So do you," she surprises herself by saying. Surprises herself more: "Which means you are right, too."
He chooses to ignore the pedantry of whether Will forgot to come home or forgot plans or simply forgot him. There's no winning there for anyone, and he can feel that Will's stubbornness around it is just as entrenched as his is.
So, surmountable things: "Because you have forgotten plans with me —" there, look, he's being good and compromising "— before when Mike is nearby. All he has to do is say he's in the state and I get put away for later."
Like so much leftover egg salad to be consumed in contrition later.
Like a child that's become too much a problem to keep in the house.
"Why did you stop me from leaving?"
Circles, circles, circles.
"Because we live together and I get to see you every day!" No lies between us, he once told Henry. No lies now: It slips out harsher than Will intended but not harsher than it's felt, frustration reverberating around his skull like something that accelerates, that he can't stop, that he has to stop before–
Momentum can be a slope with no vale.
"And I stopped you from leaving because I didn't want you to go. I like spending time with you." Contrary to what you believe. "And–"
The word unfinished forms in his mind, but Will's too frazzled to press it into a coherent thought.
