Crash-Bang-Wallop (4.8k)
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⏾ Summary: Steven, your new neighbour, is unpredictable, sure. But only when a series of crash-bang-wallops brings you to his door (and the chance of imminent death), do you realise quite how unpredictable.
Basically, being saved by the Moonboys!
⏾ Warnings/Tags: Steven Grant x Reader, Marc Spector x Reader, socially anxious!Reader, no use of Y/N, Steven being adorable, Marc being distant (as per usual) until it counts, unnamed attacker, threat of death, entrapment, brief kissing without consent, vague injury detail
⋆.˚ ☾⭒.˚
Following the arrival of your new neighbour, ‘Late For Work’ (your inventive title) rapidly becomes the norm.
Every chance to flash a wave, or exchange a greeting, he’ll be LFM. Around a corner, with every dart of ebony – like the accidentals of a piano – you come to expect he’ll be pressed to his phone, rapt in conversation. You long abandoned all hope of learning his name. Although, a couple of times in mounting frustration, he does puff out a name.
Marc.
A colleague? you wonder, tucking this information into your catalogue. Maybe his brother. Or is it his partner?
Systemizing mediocre life details is like sustenance. You stuff loosely related events into patterns, patterns lending rules. Like with your neighbour, the pattern says he’s occupied, so the rule demands that, every time your paths collide, you smile, meet his eye, and exchange a ‘hi’, ‘hello’. Like at work, two weeks is fortunately enough time to measure up different coworkers’ expectations: Alice, who is loud, but doesn’t expect reciprocation; Pete, who enjoys intermittent conversation; Rahish, who tends to stick to short phrases about work itself, and on and on and on.
It’s not until today that a succession of crash-bang-wallops tears you from your music. You remove an earbud. And breaks the pattern, your neighbour’s anonymity.
A rap on the wood: the latch slides free.
“Oh, hello. You alright?”
Your preloaded question, he fires right back at you.
And whether it’s the politeness of his expression, or the airiness of his tone (or his hair, which is slightly skew-whiff), you stiffen.
You glance down. Hot water bottle.
Then, catching yourself, “Hi,” you say. “Sorry, I don’t want to int—int—int.” You break off, forcing a self-deprecating smile, and it’s usually at this point that the one on the receiving end fills in the blank.
He doesn’t. His attention diverts to the bottle with a small, “Oop.” Hands shrugged inside the little pocket, he scoffs at himself before flinging it to the carpet. When his gaze lifts, the upturn of his lips is soft, as if sharing in your inconvenience.
“Start again,” you say. “I don’t want to interrupt. I heard a bang, that’s all, so I just wanted to check everything’s okay?”
“Okay? Oh, yeah. Yeah, don’t worry. I am an absolute menace for hanging everything up on the floor. Well—first example right there. Thank you, though. For checking. I’m sorry, I should have said before. Steven.”
You balk. Your cheeks flush.
“Err, I’m sorry?”
“Oh!” He flings a hand between you. “I’m Steven. You are…?”
Accepting his offer, you say your name, which he repeats under his breath before releasing you.
“Really, I would have introduced myself sooner. My neck of the woods, you keel over in the middle of the road, and someone might, might get out the car to have a go.” You chortle, and he hops back in: “‘S’alright, I don’t mean that, like, literally. I’m not that accident-prone, swear.”
“You’re not. I am.”
“Really?” His eyes light up expectantly, and you realise you hadn’t anticipated that far.
“Well… Yeah. The other day I—I was preparing this meal and I…” With each word, that familiar hole widens, that self-sabotaging voice that chants, ‘you’re about to forget what you want to say’, ‘you’re going to forget’, ‘forget, forget, forget.’ “I made an absolute mess.”
When it clicks for him that you have nothing left to add, “Snap. Don’t get me started, mate,” he says. “I can make you a late welcoming meal if by ‘make’, you don’t mind me banging her in the oven. Food absolutely disagrees with me, and not in the stomach way. Cooking? Pfft, nope. I usually leave that bit.”
“Oh, you don’t live alone?” you ask innocently.
Dread inks down Steven’s features.
“What? No. No, I do live alone.”
“Oh. You just said about leaving the cooking, so I…” Your voice starts to wane, a tell-tale sign that the rest of that sentence isn’t going to escape ungarbled. You swallow. But it doesn’t matter: you’re not certain Steven heard you in the first place.
His focus pulls away. A fog creeps down over his focus. He’s gone. For a second, he’s completely gone.
“Are you—"
“I’m sorry,” he suddenly says, collecting himself. “It’s lovely talking to you, it really is. But I just remembered I’ve got to accept some silly call in a minute or two.”
“Oh. Course. Don’t wanna miss that.”
His fingers curl around the doorframe.
“It’s nice meeting you, too. But I won’t be keeping you.”
“Cheers.”
He raises a hand. Several farewells manage to squeeze through the gap before he disappears. Even then, you stare at his door, just as readable.
Did you say something wrong?
You slip your headphones back on before you let yourself back into your flat. One inside, you crash into your chair and crank your music ear-scathingly high. You look past your phone screen, dimly aware that your concentration is liquifying.
Several minutes later, you awaken from the trance.
The jingling of keys. It’s coming from next door. You press pause.
A rumble sails through the wall. The sound had become a familiar companion, but only now do you register its source, and as you listen closer, Steven’s intonation. He jangles the keys again.
“That’s what you are. ‘Stop talking. Stop talking.’ Well if you... harping on in my ear… actually think straight.”
You frown. So maybe you did say something wrong. But it wasn’t about your shared neighbour.
It didn’t even cross your mind, the innumerable phone calls day in, day out. You asked him whether he lived alone. Perhaps, literally, Steven didn’t, but by the sounds of it, someone was taunting his life day-in, day-out. An ugly long-distance relationship.
At least, that’s the opinion you carry until another unexceptional weekday.
It starts when the lift begins to slide shut.
Stifling a curse, you surge ahead, tote bag enclosed in an iron grip, and call out a belated, “Excuse me!”
The doors pause.
You close the distance in a heartbeat, hopping over the threshold and mentally singing the figure’s praises as you crash against the wall. In your month and a bit, you’ve never been late to work. You will not let a buggered alarm clock fizzle that streak.
“Thank you,” you breathe.
Only once secure in the fact you’re not going to be rejected like a foreign organ do you look up.
“Oh. Hi,” you say.
Steven presses his lips together in greeting. Silence weighs in, digging into your sides.
“Slept in,” you joke, because it’s easier than the real explanation. You just need a first step up for Steven to bridge the quiet.
This time, he offers a curt nod. Tighter, he tugs the line of his mouth. His focus melts through the floor as if he hopes to discern the impending ground, and unease ripples in your gut. That wasn’t the reaction you’d anticipated.
You twist as if to meet your reflection, and you drift towards the circles pressed beneath Steven’s eyes, narrower than usual, and the hardiness of his low-hanging brow. It isn’t just the silence. It’s something indescribable, an alarm of otherness that the rational mind scolds, but for all it tries, can’t push down.
His attention flickers in your direction.
He steps out first. A second sooner and he’d have slammed into the door. A transactional wave, and he marches for the exit. You watch him go as you release your hold on the shoulder of your tote. You stretch your fingers, the colour rushing back into the tips.
That feeling… Maybe if he hadn’t been so fast, you would have been the first to beat a quick retreat. It’s nonsense, you swear, it really is, but the thought won’t leave your head. He didn’t look like Steven. The features were there, plain and simple, except you’ve always had an ineptitude in facial recognition. It’s the other things you find yourself clinging to, like hair colour, build, mannerisms. He carried his features incorrectly, almost as if someone—or something had tucked itself away beneath the folds of his skin.
You suppose that’s what happens when you hyper-theorise around mediocre life details. Next stop, delusion.
You have to reshuffle your system to accommodate this new Steven. It’s accompanied by an odd sense of grief, which is, again, odd, because what was there really to lose? You spoke a grand total of once. No doubt the encounter meant significantly more to you than it did him, which is fine. You let yourself get too far ahead, picturing you would become part of the world where people are good acquaintances and chat with their neighbours. You see now that that’s not going to happen.
It starts off simply and unintentionally: he strides your way, you duck down a perpendicular corridor; he locks up his apartment, you wait a moment longer before following suit; he waves at you and he’s Steven again, you wave back but don’t speak a word. You’re a teen again, missing cake ingredients because someone was stood in front of the shelf, being late for school because your neighbour was fastening her kids’ seatbelts.
After a little while, he stops saying hi. After a while, that conversation you shared becomes a distant memory with stretched edges, rewrapped and reshaped in your vault, until he was never that chatty, until the smile didn’t really meet his eyes and he was just being polite.
The only confirmation the conversation happened in the first place is, one spring morning, is a striking sense of déjà vu.
A slam. A muffled cry.
You don’t jump-to like the first time. Should you go to check considering last time’s events? It’ll probably be just another continuation of his saga against static objects. Besides, he’s already made it abundantly clear he would rather keep you on the receiving end of a wave than a conversation.
But concern soon wins out against embarrassment. At the risk of making a muppet of yourself, only a moment later do you wind up outside his door.
A rap on the wood.
You leave it a second. Silence hunches over your shoulders, scrutiny in tow.
You knock again, then again.
“Steven?” You didn’t intend to practically whisper. Your raise your voice. “I’m just harassing you again… I heard next door… Are you okay?”
Nothing. Uneasiness begins to take root, prickling down your neck, as you incline an ear towards the door. He’s in there. You know he’s in there not because you hear him, but because he got back from work. Didn’t he? Yes, he was earlier than usual, around 3 instead of after 5:30.
What if he came back to the flat early because of sickness? Could it have been bad enough to pass out? If he passed out, would he have had enough time to react? Could he have landed on something and gone under?
A tangible warmth curls around your ears, pulsing and expanding. If you don’t do something right now, something terrible is going to happen. What if it already has? What if you’re wasting time?
“Steven!” Fuck. “Steven, please let me know you’re there.” The pretence of politeness evades you now as you pound a fist against timber. “Listen,” you shout, “if you can hear me, don’t worry. I’m coming in.”
Before you can even assess the next port of call – the time-intensiveness of the landlord, the silliness of ramming your foot against the door, the simpleness of checking if it’s even unlocked in the first place – the door cracks ajar.
Darkness stares into you.
“Steven?”
Could he have dragged it open?
“Steven?” You cross over the entrance. “I don’t…” Without thought, you flick the light switch.
A man is stood in Steven’s flat.
He marches towards you; you recoil.
Your balance gives.
And he’s there, this stranger, who eloquently wraps his arms around your waist and steers you to your feet. In a beat, he releases you.
“Woah, nelly!” he says with a grin, clapping his hands together. “Woah. Be cool. I’m a friend.”
Is this… Marc?
“Sorry, who are you?”
“Told you. Just a friend, collecting something. Don’t mind me. I’ll get out of his hair—”
This is stupid. This is so stupid. You should just let him go. You should just ignore the bulge in the back of his pocket, or the absence of keys, or the fact he drew the curtains, or the dark shape swirling behind the figure’s eyes. But then you go and ask,
“What’s your friend’s name?”
He chortles. Filling the beat of silence that precedes that answer.
And that’s all the confirmation you need.
“Steven,” he says.
When he caught you, he brought you deeper into the room. He’s now blocking your only exit.
Your mouth snaps shut.
Your breath punches against the muzzle: the texture of skin. You sink your teeth inside, spluttering, choking, as salt, iron swashes against your tongue. Something edged bristles against your spine.
“Stop.” The ‘p’ sound ricochets off the internal chambers of your ear.
No, no, no.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
“Fucks sake,” the man murmurs, as he slides the door shut with his boot. It clicks.
NO.
Instinct possesses like a familiar ghost, the compulsion to kick, to thrash. But it doesn’t understand this entrapment. Not only in this man’s cage, but in your own limbs, which betray for their inability to slice through skin. Whilst your mind, ablaze with horror, could do it easily.
“Now, you’ve made me another job, haven’t you? So, we’re going to have to take this to your room. Do me a favour. Which side?”
You tilt your head to the left.
“Leave the door unlocked?”
You nod.
“Beautiful. Going to scream?”
You shake your head–he tears an incision across your side. You scream into his hand. As you fight to abate each breath, chest heaving up, down with the weight of each exhale, he pivots until you’re facing dead-on, the switchblade, towards your stomach.
“Again for me. Are you. Going to. Scream.”
The cut – it’s small like a dash of kerosene, your skin set alight.
You shake your head.
He slowly removes the pressure from around your mouth and drapes himself over your shoulder. The other, he buries beneath your jacket as if hugging the small of your back, the honed edge of his blade only a hair’s breadth away.
You have to do it. You have to propel yourself forward, then scream as all hell.
“No time like the present.”
You can do it.
Just don’t think about the knife.
You open the door, and he bows his head. The camera is directly above, flashing its red bulb. But before you can cross the threshold, he smashes his lips against yours.
Nausea lurches in your throat. He pushes you into the corridor; you slam against your own apartment. You practically fall inside, him fumbling the lock, and by then, it’s too late. He shoves you aside, and he has the fucking audacity to wrinkle his nose in disgust as he snaps the door—
—shut.
It’s too late. You didn’t have time to think.
You didn’t.
Immediately, you feel it rising. You shake your head. No, no, no. A bawl of warning escapes caged lips. Don’t cry. Don’t. Exhales rush in shallow, painful gasps. As your focus sears through the floor, the pain pushes deeper, deeper against your ribs. You need to get out. Whatever that means, you just need out.
His gaze flickers to yours, and he must realise the crazed look in your eye because he’s there when you lunge for the lampshade. His fingers enclose around your forearms, twisting. You shrink. He rears closer. You smash into his nose. He barks, instinctively reaching to massage the inflicted spot. An opening: you shoot for the ankle.
Your stomach slams into the ground.
The scream cracks open. You scream until you can no longer breathe. You scream until, panting, acid pushes its way to freedom.
You will not die.
You scream into his hands. No one can hear you. No one can hear you.
He strikes your head against the floorboards. Pain erupts through your nostrils – you gag – followed by the sickly stench of iron. His footsteps recede.
Again, you try to scream, but your mouth is the texture of dried paint. Dimly, you hear the low shirrk as your curtains snap shut. You prop yourself atop trembling elbows, ignoring each strangled moan. Please. “Please.” Just keep going. Just keep moving.
His shadow descends, and with it comes the bobbled fabric of a towel. Bile explodes in your mouth, but it has no escape. The screech of floorboards, your chair, approach. You shudder. It doesn’t stop, the shuddering, not when he lifts you, not when he binds your arms, ankles. There’s nothing you can do.
This time, less temporarily, he vanishes from view. You watch the curtains. They’re still: no breeze.
You don’t sink into severance. It claims you. In the vault, there is safety in sedation, and you’re tucking yourself away.
You drum your fingers.
You can’t.
You have to think. You have to. You have to stay alive.
Skywards, you blink back your blurring vision. Your shoulders tremble in an irregular rhythm of hiccups and gasps. Softly, in the dark, a world revolves unperturbed. And this time, you let yourself panic.
You’re going to die.
He’s just biding his time. He’s waiting to take you somewhere more convenient.
You’re going to die.
You know how this works. Foot tapping, eyes darting, head bobbing. Energy coursing from crown to toe, you’re a lightning rod, conducting slashes of your own decimated corpse.
For half an hour, there is no hope for you. Your world is ending, and it will not be missed. You die and you die and you die.
After half an hour, your tears begin to dry up.
Your heartrate slows. The energy concentrates to a narrow point.
And you think.
With your neighbour’s door unlocked and his belongings tossed in disarray, Steven’s intruder must have pictured himself long gone by his return. Vague scuffles interject your thoughts. Why he’s pillaging your belongings, you can only presume. This isn’t just a regular break-in. He had to be looking for something in particular, otherwise, what kind of thief would scoff at Steven’s wall of pricey collectables? So he thinks you possess the object of his interest. That, or more likely, he only wants to discern who will notice your absence.
But you can’t think like that. It’s much more solvable to pretend this is a treasure hunt, and you’re the only one who can lead him towards the X.
In your periphery, the man straightens from beneath your bed and suspends something in the light. You twist to get a read.
“Now this is lovely.”
The light traces your friend’s face.
The man runs a thumb across the frame.
“Who is she, I wonder?”
Someone who’ll miss you? you think, completing his sentence.
Now’s your chance. You mumble into your gag.
“What’s that? You’ve got something important you want to share?” He closes some of the distance. “Wow. Wow, that’s really interesting. You know what? I must hear all about—” He tosses the picture onto your bed. “That was rhetorical. Learn to tell the difference.”
Someone knocks.
Hope plunges through you like a harpoon. Someone’s at your door. Shit. Someone’s at your door. You crane your neck until it throbs. Another knock.
Then a voice, his voice. “You in? It’s just a quick one!”
Steven.
“Fucking piccadilly circus, this place,” the intruder hisses between his teeth, marching behind you.
Already, Steven’s footsteps begin to retreat. No. You will not let this opportunity fly.
You shove your weight, and your heart skips a beat. You bite down. Hard. A roaring ache, like a dozen bared nails, tears into your side. But it’s all worth it. Lying skywards, you raise your head from the crook of your neck. Because Steven is rattling a fist against the door.
“Hello?” Voice pitched with anxiety, “Is everything okay in there?” he shouts.
“You little shit,” The intruder is by your side, yanking the chair upright. You recoil as he squeezes your arm. “You repugnant little shit.” His breaths fly quick and hot, all the while Steven is rattling the handle, calling your name.
Then he lets his hands fall.
Steven is about to make a scene. Good. Please, Steven, shout all you can.
He takes a knee. Confusion breaks through your dread. That’s when, as methodical as a worker bee, he frantically begins untying your binds. Before you can think to move, it prickles against your neck. You inhale sharply.
With a moment’s hesitation, he wrenches you to your feet. The next thing is your gag, which he tosses to the ground. He assesses you, snatches a hoodie from the floor.
“Up and over.”
He tugs it down – “Hey, if you can hear me, I’m gonna go get the landlord, yeah?” Steven calls – and, as you brace, pats it into place.
“You fell and hit your nose. Comprende?” he whispers, as he steers you to the door.
When he releases his grip, a fist balled within the plush lining of your sleeve, you slide the key from the hook. Just before you open the door, the man gives you pause.
“Tell me… does he sound like a fighter to you?”
Steven breaks off.
Relief wells within you when the gap falls away and reveals his matching expression. For a moment, you forget the blade that punctuates the space between your ribs.
“Jesus. You gave me a fright.” His arm jumps from his side. “Oh fuck! What happened? You need a first-aid kit. I have all sorts of—”
“No, no. It’s okay,” you cut in, gesturing for him to cool off. But, unbeknownst to your captor, you’re fluttering your eyelids. Only pausing for a beat in between to widen, narrow your eyes. Help, you silently cry. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you. Tripped. That’s all.”
It fleets across his features, an apparition of bewilderment. As you prop an arm against the door, his focus chases towards the trail slithering down your wrist, moulding into comprehension.
“I’ll be fine.”
He snaps back to you as you continue to blink. Please.
“My fault, really, for making my apartment a deathtrap.”
“Oh.” As he clings to you with wide eyes, the buoyancy in his voice gives the uncanny impression of clambering from another’s mouth. “Thank God for that.” He nods, pressing down on the air to signal for you to stop. “Speaking of deathtraps, your mum’s not coming round anytime soon is she? I mean, I’d be safe if I wanted to pop over this weekend?”
“Don’t know about safe,” you say slowly. “She might just be psychic. Doesn’t matter where, when, how. I swear, she’s got a watchdog on me. You can bet anything she’ll know I’ve got a man around.”
“Yeah, well mums can be a bit like that sometimes.” He laughs. It’s like watching the rumble of a tomb. “Take it from me, at least you’ve got the safety of distance. Where abouts is she?”
He glances left and right in question.
You copy the former. That’s all it takes.
He hurls at you like a man possessed. The entryway screeches against its hinges, discordant against the thrumming of Steven’s footsteps.
With one hand, he shields you against the door; with the other, he twists the man’s blade and grinds it into his shoulder. A shriek – he cages the man’s mouth, heat reeling from his breath as he meets him against the wall, the blade pushing deeper. You don’t think before bolting your captor’s escape. His eyes bubble with tears as they scramble for something, anything, to grab on to. Steven sends a boot to his shin.
When he whirls, time disintegrates.
You stagger.
This is wrong. You’re slipping. You squeeze the cut on your arm to sharpen your senses, but this man’s face, which lies somewhere between imagination and a loose conjure, swims and shifts, from a thinning mouth to an atypical nose, from exchanging kindred smiles, not counterfeit, but with crinkled eyes and lips curving upward with ease, to rage. It’s just the dark. It has to be.
Your attacker dislodges the blade.
“Steven!”
His mouth springs open in protest.
“No!”
A knee adjoins his stomach and sends him to the ground.
The instinct to surge forwards evaporates: your attacker wastes no time clambering over Steven’s coiled frame. And you just bolted the door. He drags his feet with a monotonous thump, thump, thump.
You seize a side-table and bring it down hard. Its severed legs, you snap and wield in mid-air.
Panting like a dog, he slides a grin into the corner of his cheek.
He hits the ground.
And you don’t hesitate. You don’t care about the mummified hand enclosed around your attacker’s ankle, or the fist rising to beat your attacker’s head in.
You strike.
Someone is calling your name.
You strike again.
“Can you hear me? You’re okay.”
In your periphery, that hand now hovers. With each hit, it wavers.
“He’s done.”
The second skin retreats, revealing Steven’s unfamiliar familiar face. What—
You drop them. They clatter against the ground. You step back. The world sways. Your captor lies in a whimpering heap, blood oozing from his back.
“Hey.” Steven shadows him, snatching you back from unreality. “Concentrate on your breath. You’ll get through this. Just focus on breathing in… and out.” But his accent is all wrong. This whole thing is all wrong. How is he on two feet? “Can you tell me where you’re hurt?”
As if awaking for the first time, you pull away from him.
“Where are you hurt?”
His pace racing, “I will explain everything, I swear, but now is not the time,” Steven says. “Look, I get it, that you’re in shock, but right now, I really think I should—”
“Stay away from me.”
“—take a look.”
So you have an ineptitude in facial recognition. But right now, you know exactly where you’ve seen this face before.
You’re shaking your head as you retreat. “No, no. Are you kidding? I don’t even know what you are. You were… You were stabbed. I saw it…” Your gaze falls to the intruder, the pool of red seeping between your feet. “I am fine!” you all but yell, despite the throbbing in your side. “You shouldn’t be!”
And you don’t miss it, the way he instinctively looks to your arm, guilt bleeding through his composure.
“What the hell even are you? Who are you, when you’re not hiding behind this stupid ‘Steven’ act—”
“Steven is not—” He encloses the words in a fist. He exhales. Then, as if compelled by some sudden irritation, folds his shirt sleeves, clawing them up one by one. “It wasn’t a lie,” he says, slowly. “I am real; Steven… Steven is real. It’s just difficult for me to explain right now. I’m trying to help. That’s all.”
You stare. When your lips part, he glances away, jaw tightening as if preparing for your reproach.
“Can I speak to Steven?”
Surprise flutters across his features.
“Okay,” he breathes. “Okay, if you need.”
You watch it happen. That alarm of otherness rings out as his eyebrows lift, his eyes widening somewhat. His shoulders slacken. Immediately, he takes a step closer, and, without thinking, you flinch.
“Ah, sorry. Sorry!” He withdraws. “We’re both speaking to you. We’re trying,” he says, and he’s Steven again. Actual Steven, accent and all.
Is this a joke? part of you demands to snap, but you can’t. No, not can’t. It would be all too easy, given the events of the last hour, to launch your anger. But you won’t. Why? Because you’re worried you might upset him? The man that just ground a knife into someone’s shoulder without a second thought? Except, that wasn’t really him, was it?
On the ground, your attacker emits a low groan. Something flickers in Steven’s expression.
He stalks towards the body and, with a shout, boots him in the face.
“Plug-ugly bastard,” he murmurs with his retreat. His face softens. “Sorry.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean we’re really really both in here.”
Do you actually believe him? Them?
“So, you’re Steven…”
He hardens. “Marc.”
“Two of you,” you murmur.
“Two of us.”
Marc.
When you speak, Marc’s isn’t the only voice that sounds foreign. Yours is too eccentric, whilst your stare lingers in the air as though misplaced. “To be honest, that was the last thing I was actually going to ask.” The amusement slips from your face as fast as it sprung.
“I have a medi-kit in my apartment. I’d understand, given the circumstances, if you didn’t want to. But I think it’s best we get you away from that body.”
You nod.
“Okay.”
He looks past your shoulder, a beat of silence passing between you.
Then, “I’ll sort it. Don’t worry,” he says.
You only nod.
