Hills!Barnes x Female!Reader (this is entirely self indulgent)
>His wife’s appearance is not described in this, only referred to briefly as “Mrs. Barnes”, interpret her how you like
>Before reading this PLEASE acknowledge the below
>My grammar and punctuation are a little bit insane but this is not a serious publishing so idgaf
-Descriptions of gore + blood
-Tagging pregnancy but it’s only really mentioned in snippets, it’s not a plot point and does not affect much of the story
-There are no sex scenes but the above warnings do put it in the vein of nsfw just because of the disturbing factor
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This fanfic is based on @senka-mesecine's Hills!Barnes AU which I literally fell in love with. All the credit for my idea goes to them. They’re an amazing writer and genuinely have done so much for this small fan base ❤️
>Partially inspired by the visual novel Chilling Devotion
Mr and Mrs Barnes living in the sprawling hills of Pickett County Tennessee had nearly become a mythical fiction. The tale told by local women of the scarred wretch kidnapping a poor woman off the lonely beaten path and dragging her deeper into the sticks to his dilapidated home. To them, Proserpina, whisked into the underworld by Pluto in a cautionary retelling. Come unwillingly, to a life of labour to a man as unruly as he.
They knew not of where the couple originated from separately, only wherever Mrs. Barnes roamed, her husband stalked not far away. The mystery itself was fed by their animosity and guardedness, fire fanned by small minded people of a less than forgiving breed. Watching them carry about, with habits unfit for their rigid family-to-family settlement, equipped with the strange and unusual traits of two outsiders. They rarely interacted unless by need, not the type who’d take you in and goad you about framed pictures on the wall or wreaths on the door. Unfriendly by their standards. For a low river town referred as a home-valuing, close-knit paradise, such newcomers with different ways were subjects of hostility.
The man had to be nothing but foul, just looking upon his face, one eye drooping in hasty reconstruction, like gluing back together shattered pottery. Robert E. Lee was a name that fit like a smack in the mouth, a dead confederate general risen as a disgruntled veteran again.
“If a jaded, lone soldier living in a wooden shack in the sticks professes his undying love for you beneath the oak tree and promises you a comfortable, submissive life, run.”
“Certainly not a soldier whose entire left cheek looks like it’s been split like cracked glass, running up one side beneath his eye and even cutting across his lips to the other cheek. There has to be something else that is keeping her, poor girl.”
Of course the extent of the exaggeration of their relationship and its origins was debatable, only the two’s treatment by common folk during visits often entailed some wide-eyed, concerned stares. There was more obscure talk, in the vein of his job and how he chose to provide for her. How on earth that beast kept her happy up there was beyond even them, living simple lives. Was she a woeful, dutiful wife dreaming of a home far away and a life she once knew freedom in? Or was she just as content cut off from the rest of society, nestled in the sticks?
She had to be crazier than him.
The truth was much more innocent, depending on who you asked. If you asked sweet Mrs. Barnes, she’d giddily tell you it like any other love story. Living off the land, happily married in a cosy little cottage with the man she loved, content with the secludedness of it and needing for very little. She was ever-enduring, humble, and the life was perfect for her.
If you asked Mr. Robert E. Lee Barnes, he likely wouldn’t glance once, let alone twice in your direction or acknowledge you. ‘Mean motherfucker’, as the store clerk described. “Great, you’ve just stuck your nose where you weren’t supposed to. Do you want that bastard on your case? A man who killed for a living and might yet still?”
They weren’t church goers, to the delight of gossipers. They lived together as though they were long before their officiation in god’s witness, only tying the knot for legal benefits. Hillbillies, heretics, cannibals, the insults uttered behind their backs didn’t perturb the seemingly peaceful couple.
Rumour on top of rumour, falsehoods likely born of rejection of the set, traditional ways of life most of the poor townsfolk saw as law. They were strangers, no less. The only folks that settled here were ones that knew the area well, so Mr. Barnes being a veteran meant only one thing in their simple minds: He was escaping something he had done.
They were proclaimed man and wife in witness of the lord on a rainy Thursday in September despite all holy grievances. They exchanged rings in front of a pastor in the town’s homey little wooden heritage chapel, promptly skipping on home again afterwards like it was just another day, needing not a gathering for gifts, cake and booze.
She was drenched in her best for wear, what little makeup she wore ruined. At least not having a proper wedding with guests meant she wasn’t expected to muck around in a long, white dress and ruin it that same day. Her only wish was that he’d carry her from the truck, over the threshold.
Intimate, for the supposed heresy common folk of the town assumed, that didn’t erase the months they shacked up together unmarried.
For the following weeks she’d simply admire the glimmering bands on their fingers as her hand slid over his. Even in darkness, huddled together in the comfort of their bed, it seemed to glow.
A bonding of legal practicality, late for their years before spent living on the edge.
They fell into a minimal routine most days, he’d start awake at the crack of dawn and shift beneath the covers, kiss her forehead while she was still in bed, gear up and leave to go reset his traps and cut down trees, maybe game hunt if he still had a cartridge from their last trip in town. She’d get up and cook breakfast, leaving his savoury plate wrapped in foil for him when he returned in a couple of hours around lunch time, beginning her rounds cleaning and organizing, tending the property until he returned again just shy of supper.
On uneven days, Sundays primarily, they’d spend full evenings together, at least with her sitting by him and falling asleep over him to the hum of slow songs on the radio, with him stroking her knuckles. The silence was all she needed, just simple moments of peace to draw in a breath, to feel and see him, falling back from her household duties to admire their life.
To her, it was beautiful. Mrs. Barnes willed the serenity and quiet intimacy of it, she lived in that carefully constructed, purposefully unlatched cage and didn’t dare leave.
But it wasn’t so, golden mornings in the rolling hills and chaste kisses, greeting him in the doorway and taking his coat, that was a fantasy concocted to contain her. That life was just too passive for him. Like wearing a costume, toting about in a persona, he could only wear it to appease her need for normalcy.
You could dress such a beast up in fine clothes, mount him up for his fur, a panther bust on a hunter’s trophy plaque frozen in taxidermy, bearing his magnificent sharp teeth for years even after his killing. But to coexist with one in life, formidable and lethal, comes at the well being of those around you.
Putting a man like Barnes back into the civil world with lifelong wartime grudges was a mockery of him, whether the lord intended to bring out that part of him in other ways.
Many a day she attributed the splotches of blood on his clothes, dried over his hands, and spattered across his maw to hunting. He never said a word more about it, only shimmying by her in the kitchen to scrub it off. Those once green fatigues he wore out were faded, stitched back up again and again until they were ragged, and yet he always insisted on having them, never dirtying what she bought him.
She’d still kiss him no matter his state, even when he reeked of animal musk, sweat, soil and metal.
Barnes was strangely invigorated in his nature-honest state. Hunting made him energetic. Many times he’d stroll in, grabbing up on her, squeezing her shoulders and upper arms tight, the low of her waist, pressing his scarred, rough lips to her jaw, smearing blood on her freshly washed and ironed clothes in the process. He was rough, at times fully wrestling her down until she was subdued, messing up her soft, brushed hair.
Something about it excited her, too, mind not for the mess which she squabbled with him playfully over. The wild look in his bright blue eyes pinned her in place. Like the moment before springing on someone, her heart pounding against her ribs, laughter bubbling in her throat.
They were always bordering between harmless play and an actual fight, exhilarating, intimate in its own sense for the mere exchange of hot-blooded stares.
He could eat her alive, she thought.
Her husband brought home many geese, occasionally a nice, fat deer that he’s throw over the shed table and gut while it was still warm.
Him killing the animal didn’t deter her, even wearing its blood, cooking and handling the still bloodied meat was no challenge, only the butchering, the savage tearing, shredding and splitting of flesh. The sounds, oh, the sounds.
He dealt with the parts that made her queasy, such as the pulling away unneeded guts and dropping them into a tin bucket, cleaning away the blood at his station the end of the day, soaking his own stained clothes so that her soft hands didn’t have to prune over it, quietly giving her the wrapped and cleaned product of his day’s labours.
He hung the hides by the shed door, drying and scraping, sweating over it when he hadn’t anything else to. She’d watch, just to enjoy the view of his shirtless, glistening form.
The catharsis must’ve deeply and inexplicably made him feel alive, she gaged.
She watched him with his knife, finely cutting away strips of fat and meat from bone, stripping it down until it was good and bare, before packing it up for her and handing it to her cleaned.
The labour of love, she supposed, a strange, romantic gesture between them of him gutting apart and delivering still warm cuts to the woman so she could fix it up for both of them. They’d always share it, that was the deal, the fruits of it, together end to end at their supper table each day.
By the winter she fell pregnant. She could sense the change in him, as if something in the back of her mind were suddenly shouting at her. For a man so ordained in his routines and habits he suddenly began breaking from it.
He’d spend longer and longer periods of time away in the dry, cold forest, hunting, lugging traps, setting and making his rounds along the borders of their territory. Before the snows she expected him to be saddled down with tasks. Instead of prying into what he was doing out there, she remained blissfully naive.
As long as he returned home to her at some point each day, complete, he could have the forests and she’d take the safety of home for granted.
The coming frost and her condition seemed to motivate him, rather than begging that he listen to her pleas and stay inside to huddle by the fire she so meticulously kindled. What once became four hours in between, became five and six. She ran out of chores, even books to read at times, but never wandered from the door of the home by herself.
Come hell, come monstrous snowstorms, very rarely would he break his routine.
It was early, for lack of aches and pains. She went without his non-existent fussing, figuring he needed the space to think. When she delivered him the news, he held her in silence, kissing her, and then promptly disappearing into himself again. She read it as collection of thoughts, but with it his workload seemed to triple.
Barnes wordlessly lumbered in through the door one evening in early December just shy of supper time, kicking away his snow trodden boots, shucking off his coat, and wandering up to her. He caught her with her apron on, listening to the radio as she leaned over the counter, waiting on boiling vegetables. Arms circled around her, caging her into the ledge, silently holding her there and burrowing his face into the junction of her exposed shoulder. He didn’t wrap himself around her, more leaning over her and crushing her into a strange nuzzle, pressing himself into her with all the intention of wanting to feel and wear her soft skin.
From his fingertips to his elbows, and the tips of his ears down to his neck, he was covered in dry blood. There was a different scent clinging to him too other than sweat and grime- motor oil.
For a moment they swayed, with him breathing in as much of her scent as he could, cradling her so close that she felt his heartbeat against her back. His nose, lips and upper right cheek brushed against the nape of her neck, warmth bathing against her skin with every breath. Each beat was more uncomfortable, alarming, restrained in an awkward position in silence. What was supposed to be innocent made the hairs on her arms rise and her guts churn.
It seemed like minutes had gone by before he finally let go of her, ignoring her confused calls after him, and wandering off to the bathroom to scrub himself down.
She’d overslept on a later morning with no real chores to busy herself, feeling sick and dizzy as she lay bed bound still. The holidays were soon upon them in just two weeks, blizzards piled snow on until she had to nudge Barnes out of bed at nights to go dig them out.
There, on the wooden headboard post above her, his fatigues jacket was left hanging uncharacteristically. She nearly missed it as she stretched her arms above her head, half assuming it was her robe until her fingers grazed the rough, firm material, unmistakable cotton twill.
She glanced around the quiet room in a panic, still feeling groggy, wondering if her husband was away without it and had simply broke custom to wear something heavier, or of he was just fixing himself in the shed without need for it.
He never forgot. Nothing, not the smallest details, definitely not a flack jacket he’d kept from his service, a thing that was akin to a second skin.
She slowly sat up right, pulling apart the covers and kicking her feet out of the bed. As she tugged it down and fanned out the worn jacket on her lap, its faded olive colour, many rounds of sloppy needlework and rolled, wrinkled sleeves showing its years of age from his service, his pockets made a distinct clinking sound. She shook again, and again, patting the spot and feeling for a tiny lump.
She stilled, reaching her hand in and fishing around, her fingers first gliding over cool change, a nickel and two quarters which could have been from anywhere, and then on something smaller, rounder, with strange jagged edges. Non-metallic, but almost like porcelain, a rock, or some kind of smooth glass, maybe a bent button.
She grasped it, pulling it out between her two fingers to inspect it in the dim grey light, holding it over the oak beside table.
Gleaming against the warm maroon, almost yellowish, was a tooth too big to be any prey animal’s, but too small to belong to anything bigger that lurked the woods surrounding their home. Still, with dried blood embedded in the sharp roots, plucked from its fresh host. It was almost columnar, long, but roughly square shaped, like a human molar.
She dropped it with a shriek, batting her hands off on the worn jacket and hanging it back up on the post again, clamouring from the bed in a panic.
Leaning over the sink and scrubbing until her skin was raw and pink didn’t make her feel cleaner after all. The woman was nearly convinced she’d spread around disease or germs, and stomach sick already with the thought of her husband somewhere along his trek finding a human tooth and deciding to bring it home to her. Or worse, finding someone half frozen and pecked apart by birds, jaws still wide open, leaning in to pluck out a tooth and keep as a sick souvenir. She believed- No, convinced herself that it wasn’t human. Could it only look the part and just be a product of his hunt? It was novel, he’d never given her any indication that he saw anything unusual, let alone stumbled across some decaying corpse! Law enforcement would have to know.
The world around her kept spinning, her throat beginning to retract and heave. Against all contents of her own guts, something told her to keep digging, something bad, some buried part of her conscience that only existed prior to their relationship.
Necklaces of human teeth, ears, jaw bones of enemy soldiers, pictures burned into her mind of the things they claimed. The whispers of child killers returning from Nam’ as he once did, mutterings of a barbaric justice and writ of freedom executed on a foreign nation. She wondered grimly if it was reminiscent of that, if the tooth really was as grimly acquired as other sick markers were for the time, whether he truly had abandoned that nature.
As she stumbled out of the bathroom and into the hall again, wandering across the living room, there was a flicker of something in her peripheral, a flash of grey, green, brown, filling the square front windowpane.
The door all but burst open before she could arm her thoughts, and in her husband dragged. He caught her, draped over the back of the sofa, nearly white in the face, his own expression clarifying, knowing.
She scurried from the room as his lips began to move, her stomach upending, the blood roaring in her eardrums.
She didn’t eat with him that night.
Long had he been out that day, until the blue skies above Tennessee’s snow-dressed wilds kissed the twilight. She might as well have called it night.
Her husband was still nowhere to be found, leaving at lunch and missing supper, his plate wrapped for him and left in the oven. It was by far the longest he’d ever stayed away, dug out in the snow with his traps. The long arm of the clock kept swirling around and around, numbers vanishing as the room around her grew dark. The winter’s early sun-setting made managing her time feel more urgent, short.
He had the decency other nights to warn her.
She felt sicker the longer she laid in bed waiting for him, chalking up her lack of appetite and rolling nausea to her current condition. All food seemed to disparage her now. She wouldn’t eat alone, that was their agreement, or rather hers when they first began living together.
He didn’t outright miss a day, or night. Something was wrong.
She could show him, stride out into the porch and click the lock shut on him, to hang a nice, big sign on the door, but the dry chill kept her from raising the covers. She could remain nestled comfortably in fleece and warmed by her own body heat, turn over and simply shut her eyes when he arrived, give him a real bitter taste of the silence he so fondly enjoyed.
Only, she caught herself reaching into the left beside drawer, on his end, grasping for the battery flashlight.
Gathering her pride, coat and boots and finally grasping for the doorknob, she sucked in a breath of the warm air once more, Her mind wandered, to what she was doing, why she was doing it, but something inexplicably pulled her further.
It wasn’t whispers on the wind that compelled her into the ominous rows of mist-cloaked trees, bare of leaves with branches sticking off like thorns into the purple sky.
The shed was empty, she’d have heard him clunking around in there, their bedroom window was on the side of the house where it stood. He was still out there somewhere. The light was off, where it usually poured under the gaps in the door.
Departing into the calf-deep snow, unarmed except for the beam of yellow light.
The snow only seemed to deepen the further into the sticks she trudged, the end of her nightdress wet and dragging. He had a cowpath made, a little tunnel in the overhang of trees, his earlier footprints buried. The way ahead was uncertain, fuller, thicker with dormant, dead trees and bushes. Her flashlight barely managed to bring everything back to clarity in front of her when the world seemed to blur What warmth she could muster in her heavy flack coat with her face nestled into the collar sparsely comforted her from the tugging winds. Loose snow frayed her path, obscuring her own tracks.
In the distance a wall of black stood, square and still. A structure, although more dilapidated the closer she drew. Abandoned, by judgement of loose boards and nailed-shut windows, but with something glimmering between the tiny gaps. Whatever paint or varnish it might have had was faded, unapparent without daylight, the signs pitched in the earth and nearly covered completely in snow indistinguishable, some last names likely attributed to some dead valley-family folks.
Not one person came and went from this area, not a person with sense. If so, she’d know. Her husband would have gruffly commented on it, said something. A trespasser was a trespasser and they owned several untouched acres.
She drew up to the door, leaning out and pressing her ear to the wood.
She raised a hand, hesitating for half a breath before knocking.
The door swung open easier than she expected.
It seemed colder within than out there in darkness bare to the open gusts.
A pair of eyes met her before any features of the room, but not the clear, soulful blue of her husband’s. A timber brown, belonging to a fear-stricken face that was too soft to belong to the man she loved. Still wet behind the ears, she gaged. Recently shaven, wearing an urban-bought grey and black snow suit and clad with a wooden stocking cap. The urban kind, wandering out into these parts with some others.
He remained crouched down with a hatchet clutched in his shaking hands behind a cloth-drawn oak table in the corner, by appearance, a frightened young man no older than 25.
Neither of them spoke for a spell, with the strange man appearing even more stunned than she was to see her standing there.
“You scared the shit out of me, lady-”
He laughs, though the trembling in the words he spoke gave him away. Terrified, uncertain.
“I thought for sure the bastard had come to finish me off-“
She demanded, daring not move any closer as she shut the door behind her.
“Some big ugly bastard wearing a sheepskin, broad hat and scarf up to his nose- I didn’t get a good enough look at him. Motherfucker started pursuing when we crossed the ridge, I don’t know what happened to the others I was with. He had to have stalked us from our camp. He moved in fast too. I heard-“
A calmness fell over her that she didn’t expect, as the man before her launched into a rapid, crazed rant, a strange clarity settling deep in her gut.
She cut in almost automatically, her stare lead-hard, blood cool.
He touched his leg, patting, feeling around, before raising his hand to examine the soaked glove. The source of the wound penetrated right through the front of his snow suit pants’ thigh, blood trickling down from the nickel sized hole in the fabric. Another wound grazed his lower calf, shallow, but still nasty.
The screech that tore from his throat snapped her from her awestruck state, a man never before then even recognizing his own actively pulsating open wound, and the burning sensation numbed by what had to be shock.
Effective, he was still alive, still fearful.
She got the jump on evac, the familiar numb routine returning to her. She couldn’t hear half of what he was babbling, all the while pulling him along.
He wasn’t heavy in god’s honest truth, only, he strained more and more the further they walked together. If he were dead or in the breadth of dying, it’d be a different story.
With one of his arms slung over her shoulders and his wounded leg hanging between their shuffled steps in the snow, he limped with her.
Stripping fabric from an undershirt and tying a makeshift tourniquet around the upper thigh was quick, sloppy work. His hunter could easily return and catch them, find the fresh trail of blood in the snow and circle them. She’d be worth sinking his teeth into, a lone woman in these parts, slow, in no real condition to fight. A fat partridge.
Sloppy work for a sloppy shot, his pursuer likely only managed to get the one off before he bolted, missing anything major but puncturing with horrid depth.
She soldiered on, dragging him a distance as he slumped over her side, before he ultimately drooped forward and collapsed into the snow with a hoarse sob. She let him go down, staggering some feet away.
Snot and tears stung against his frozen face, a trail of blood leading right to them in their fresh tracks. Everything was a flurried haze, bright colours dancing in the corners of her eyes, magnificent artificial fabric dyes in his snow suit like great reflecting road signs on a highway in the white snow.
She hadn’t treated for such a wound in years, if he wasn’t gripped with shock already, he’d perish from a nasty infection. In less than sanitary fashion, she’d need to tease out that lead pellet stuck in him. She lacked medical tools beyond primitive home kits, no real surgical gloves, no cot, no fluids.
As she craned her neck to look at him, just steps in front, she caught another swirling, darkened figure.
He was standing on the right row of trees, lingering silently and stalking the two- or perhaps one and a half traversing the snowed in cowpath back home.
The sinister click of a rifle made her recoil sharply. She leapt away from the wounded man, her arms flying up to her face.
A single shot rang out, followed by a shrill cry, and then a soft thud.
The mass stepped free from the brush. pulling his shag scarf from his face and raising his head. His gaze darted between the gargling body, now turned onto his back as he floundered. His limbs extended and contracted, twitching, clutching at his chest, his front heaving. In and out, in and out, barely grasping air from the open hole in his upper lung.
Barnes lurched forward first after a breath of staring, dropping his weapon to his waist and throwing himself into her. His weight barrelled into her side, nearly taking her from her feet as his arms closed around her. He hugged into her tightly as she stood still, his face falling into hers, head leaning into her temple, nose brushing against her cheek. She didn’t move, rooted in that spot and tangled up with her husband and his heavy gear, as the man she’d been carrying just moments before struggled for his life. Barnes squeezed her for the first time- really squeezed her, arms locked around her middle.
His voice instructed gruffly, his large, gloved hand patting the back of her coat, giving her a soft shove.
“The cock sucker was nosin’ around our home. Caught him fuckin’ around on the edge of the border.”
“He’s dead- On our property. They’ll figure when the group doesn’t turn up at their camp.”
“Same as they always do, they wouldn’t send a patroller all the way out here.”
“He looked young. Real young.”
“You wanna sympathize with meat?”
The foul look on her face made his own crinkle, lips drawing back in an odd half-scowl.
“We have to get rid of him.”
His brow cocked, but he made no outward protests. He stood half turned to her, hands held under the running tap.
She stood by, wringing a cloth in the soapy, warm water and leaning in to scrub away the splotches of blood on his face and neck despite his rumbling. She held the back of his head, fussing, examining him closely and pulling back again, satisfied only when the patchy, dried bloodstains had finally come flaking off. He remained still, hunched and craning his neck and letting her work without a bone of contention in him.
They met in the middle, he kissed away her worries and silently laboured, and she worked beneath him, never amiss to their sickening domesticity despite all. Something had to be keeping her, those women often wondered. -Keeping them both, serving to their dynamic which remained. They made each other, beyond a shared surname and golden bands. Lovers a world away from the Cambodian border, still thriving in their explicit ways.
>My exams actually fucked me so I threw myself back into writing to cope, thanks for reading <3
>I’m gonna be doing some editing and refining on this fic in the next few days so bear with me
