Under a cut because this one got long. Fatherhood, accidentally adopting abused children and contemplating the wounds of your own past.
Using @thepromptfoundry's Ominous October list. Ira, Nat, Helen, Stephen and Zion are mine. Also borrowing Chicago Spirit OCs--Aloysha is skrim's, Rosie is @diristine's, this version of Chappell is @krakaheimr's.
CWs for children in an eldritch horror setting, flashbacks to child abuse and neglect.
**
Nat is inside getting the cake ready. Ira sits on the stoop with his knees stuck up in the air and watches Helen and her friends play. They're picking dandelions to make beds for their dollies. Their pig-tails and curls bob and sway and gleam in the spring sunlight, and they're getting streaks of yellow and green on their pretty dresses and their socks.
Belatedly, he remembers girls are supposed to be careful of their clothes. He should probably stop them.
Their laughter and their little-girl voices float across the yard to him. What a horrible thought. He lights a cigarette instead and watches them organize a dance show with their dolls.
***
Had he and Stephen ever played in a yard? Yes, yes they must have, right?
Ugh, it's so hard to remember, some days. Sets of memories muddle together. They'd played in a yard. Somewhere, in some life. They'd thrown a ball and a dog had chased…no no. That's the wrong set. Ira never had a dog. That was another life, not this one.
In this one they'd played in a yard with…people whose limbs had been too long. Who would climb down out of the trees at the edge of the woods where they patrolled when the boys came out. Tasked with keeping intruders out, and the children in.
Right, he remembers now. He remembers playing tag with his father's monsters, in those big grassy gardens with the forest surrounding on all sides like dark looming walls. The creatures had laughed, he remembers now, with wet gobbling voices that didn't sound human anymore. When they'd smiled their teeth had been sharp and snaggled. But they'd still had fun playing with Ira and Stephen.
***
Ira is flinching back and ducking to the side as the man swings the pipe, when Al slips into the space before him that shouldn't even be big enough to fit him.
Aloysha isn't so little anymore. He's 15 and only a couple inches shorter than Ira. He'd been such a little thing, just two years ago. Small and as blank and immovable as a boulder. But he's still only 15, and his hands are coming up, crossing at the wrists. He's pivoting on the balls of his feet. Every bit of him is moving together with an unearthly coordination Ira couldn't summon if he spent his whole life trying, and the man's wrist and elbow are in his hands and the pipe is incribing an arc back the way it came and the man is screaming, one leg bending the wrong way and blood starting to drip.
Al stands there, broad-shouldered and pale in the shadows of the alley, and looks down at their attacker. His face is empty with the terrible emptiness of a man considering whether to finish the job. A 15 year old hanging with perfect, experienced grace on the razor edge of murder.
Ira wants to be sick.
"It's enough, Al," he says instead. Al tosses the pipe away behind them. He blinks, and personhood pours back into his face.
The man on the ground flinches at the clattering echo.
Al's eyes cut to Ira, assessing him up and down, full now with muted but definite anger and relief and—maybe gratitude? He's so hard to read, even now. Twelve years with a man who taught him to be a living weapon, and only three learning to be a real boy, whose job is to live and not to kill.
But he's learning. He finishes his assessment of Ira with an approving nod—not a hair out of place—and then looks down at the man he just broke. "We should take him where help can find him, yes?"
"Yes."
***
He had loved Zion. Loved him. Adored him with every fiber of his body, wanted his father to be proud and happy of him. Even when he'd been terrified, staring down some too-many-legged monster with a dripping maw—his little feet would shuffle backwards, but he wouldn't run, because he knew Zion didn't want him to, and Ira wanted to make him proud of how he trusted his father. Zion wouldn't let him be torn to pieces, he valued him too much.
That love had been baked into him, Ira understands now. A consummate flesh-crafter, Zion had poured devotion into his boys like they were vessels for his will. And weren't they? Flesh of his flesh, his most of all to claim and mould to his liking.
He hadn't needed to. Look at Al. He nearly became a monster all for a child's defenseless-hearted need for a parent's affection.
Sometimes Ira thinks he got off light, that his dad tried to magic him instead of win his love.
***
Hunched over the table with his chin resting on his balled-up fists, Ira watches Rosie.
"Your face is gonna stick that way," he warns her.
She shoots him a narrow-eyed, defiant glare over her shoulder, rat-snout twitching and her magnificent whiskers flouncing.
The half-demon girl has just figured out she can shapeshift, but hasn't, you might say, even tried to read the manual.
Not that there's a manual, exactly. But around the Chicago Spirit, there's a surprising number of people you could ask.
She's a DIY kind of girl, though, is Rosie. She's worked out the snout, and the whiskers, and now she's set to work on the ears.
The front door clatters open.
"Oh shit," Rosie mutters, and Ira flinches. He needs to watch his mouth around kids.
Rustling comes from the foyer, where Chappell's probably taking off his coat, taking off his shoes, doing all the things a man does when he gets home to settle in for the evening. Rosie paws at her face, trying to set everything back, not wanting him to know.
She paws harder, with a little whining sound. "Ira! It's not coming off!"
Ira sighs. "I'm not a wizard, kiddo. You might have to sleep in it. We can take you to ask Derringer tomorrow."
"Ask Derringer what?" comes a gravelly masculine voice from the doorway. They both jump. There's something so…so about Chappell's voice. It just arrives with him. "Carpenter. Why is my daughter a rat?"
***
It isn't that he stopped loving Zion. He can't explain this to people; the words choke in his throat and he feels insane. But it's not that he stopped loving him. He still does, even now, when he looks that fucker right in the eye and draws his gun to try to shoot him. And fails, because what's the point of trying to shoot someone who has more control over your body than you do? But it feels good to try, anyway.
The point is that Ira gets to decide. He can try to shoot Zion. He never had that before.
He will always love his father. He'll love him in his bone and blood, like it possesses him. He'll love him in the parts of him that remember the days when Zion spent time with them, brushed a hand over Ira's hair and complimented him on his pronunciation of a difficult word or a math problem. The days when he took them out for ice cream and a museum and smiled like he was glad they were there with him, or played with them himself in their back yard, all of them on their knees together in the garden getting their trousers muddy while he showed them the plants and taught them about their properties.
But after a couple decades out from under the man's shadow, Ira won't hesitate to try to kill him, just to draw that line of where he begins. His own will. His own life. The parts of him that Zion can't own.
He remembers that, every time he watches Rosie, watches her fighting to grow into herself, discover the world and make a place in it. He thinks of her birth father, not Chappell but Ruprecht, and how he wants his daughter to live as a painting of a perfect girl. How much she's willing to pay to fight free and be herself.
Ira's not a good father. But he'll make sure his kids never have to fight that fight alone.
Using @thepromptfoundry's Ominous October list and Chicago Spirit OC borrowed from @asininestars (Ira is mine)
Ira's shout of warning comes too late. something dark and heavy collides with Warren's back. Envelops him, sloughing down down around his sides. Slipping inside him, shrugging him on like a perfectly fitted coat.
This is it, he thinks as it closes over his head. This is how he finally dies, swallowed by one of the monsters in Ira's gate. He's not sure whether he's surprised or not by the tinge of relief that comes with that thought.
Only… it hits him like a gong, the notion that he would want to die. The revulsion of that, the shock that he is shocked, they crash through him, shaking him to pieces. He's choking on it.
He has nͣˡeʷvͣʸeˢr wanted to die
Ever since his father sͭ ͬeͥ ͤnͩ tͭ ͦ hͩiͬ ͦʷmᶰ aͪwͥaͫy
Staring into himself in horror, in revulsion, Theo meets Warren's eyes with a lifted chin and angry defiance.
His father tried to kill him?
His father didn't?
Warren reels back from Theo's gaze, the judgment he sees there.
Distantly, they—he—they hear Ira's voice calling, pleading for him to come back to him. It's the wrong name. It's not.
I've never been worth anything.
Contempt, disgust, defiant self-worth. That you wouldn't fight for yourself? That you let that trash decide what you were worth?
Horror, revulsion, heartbreak. What can I do but trust someone will help me?
Bitterness, ripping his organs apart like a rusty saw. Who else but me can I ever trust to stand up and fight for me?
He opens his eyes to double-vision. The world of this nightmare self that lets itself wither and be butchered for the sake of approval. This nightmare self that rejects love and trust and the hope of an outstretched hand.
ʷtͣhͬ ͬeͤᶰo looks up at Ira and feels the glass of their self shatter.
CWs: Zion, rotting flesh, Zion doing horrible gross body horror rotting flesh things to some poor innocent bastard. Dead dove warning.
+++
"Is it gonna have to come off?" the workman asks, his bared leg stretched out before him atop an unraveled pile of disgusting, greenish-stained bandages.
Zion bends over it, inspecting the infection. He'd recognized the stench before the bandages had even come off; a large part of the calf muscle is gangrenous. Under the medical capabilities of modern science—such as they are—it would call for amputation.
For his skills, on the other hand, it's eminently curable. But that doesn't suit his needs here.
"I think we'll be able to save it," he answers, tracing fingertips along the skin at the edges of the rot, sensing its invisible spread. He's spent some time putting feelers about, doing little healings here and there, making a mild name for himself among the hard-up. Working to lure in someone exactly like Mr. Schoeller here. "I won't lie; it's in a severe state. I'll need some time to get things ready, but I can apply a poultice to keep it from progressing further in the meantime. Can you come back tomorrow?"
Schoeller's broad form sags with relief like an undermined dam. Tears have started in his eyes. "Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, God, thank you."
Zion looks up to hold his eyes, projecting sincerity. "It's my pleasure."
He wasn't lying about it taking some time to prepare. Much of this work couldn't be done ahead; the forms and materials need to be fresh, or there's no point to this.
When Schoeller arrives the next afternoon, leaning on his crutches and radiant with new hope, Zion sits him down with some tea to help him relax, and then escorts him into his work room. "I'll need you to lay down here." He points at a place in the center of a spiral of markings.
Schoeller is turning his head this way and that, looking at the arrangements. "Mr. Carpenter? Is this…godly?"
Zion cocks his head—what a question—and then looks around himself, considering Schoeller's perspective. "It does look rather diabolical, doesn't it?" he answers wryly. "Well. Far be it from me to summon divinity, but I can promise it's nothing God would frown on."
He and Mr. Schoeller have very different notions of God's temperament, but this is hardly the place to go into that.
In any case, Schoeller's scruples are outweighed by his desperation. He allows himself to be helped down to the ground, uses his hands to lay out his bad leg and then lies back, tucking the provided cushion beneath his head. Zion circles around behind him to pick up a large box, and then takes his place cross-legged at Schoeller's side with the box beside him.
He sets a Bible on Schoeller's chest, just to make him feel better.
All these preparations have nothing to do with Schoeller's wound, which Zion hardly needs ritual trappings for. Schoeller cradles his Bible and prays and pays little attention as Zion nurtures the rotting flesh of his leg, feeding and encouraging the tiny organisms until the gangrene seethes outward, the flesh around the wound deforming and bubbling with pus and gasses.
By the time Schoeller opens his eyes, sensing something amiss, the foul infection is climbing his thigh, his leg swollen several sizes too big, a hideous purple black with seeping green.
He screams and thrashes, trying to claw himself away from the monstrosity that is, after all, attached to him. Zion leans back away from one flailing arm as he opens the casket next to him to invite the feaster of rot into the new home he's prepared for it.
I need to share that recent updates to my OC's background make it plausible for my bi-disaster boy to canonically have learned how to belly dance in his youth.
