Summary: William buys a chocolate bar, and that’s the start of his end.
Prompt: Goretober, In the air
Warnings: rumors being spread, societal expectation, societal judgement, death mention, someone is wrongfully accused of murder, mentions of being on tour, succumbing to expectations, anti-gay mention.
Note: day five! I hope you all like this one!!^^
It buzzes around, a quiet hum from mouth to ear, mouth to ear, mouth to ear. They say rumors spread like wildfire. The more scandalous, the faster it bursts, the faster it spreads, the sooner action is taken. And if it turns out to be true? Well, there’s no accurate comparison for that.
Judgement is passed and that who the rumor is whispered about, faces a punishment. Shunning, exclusion, whispers of other things that they might be keeping hidden. Every act of theirs is suddenly on display, and everyone else a critic to the show.
Townspeople are not kind critics. No, they’re the harshest sort.
A mountain of expectation is held for every individual and a rumor of any deviation from it lowers it to the depth of a chasm. One is either flawlessly perfect, or horrendously flawed. There is no in between.
A rumor proved true, a rumor spread and whispered and horrifying, can be the end of everything. Service will be refused, disgusted looks will be held and the person will be seen as a monster. In small towns, a belief of the people becomes truth of the street.
If one is seen as a monster, then that’s what they are.
Starting a rumor is easy. For William, his first rumor, the pebble of snow that starts the boulder, is a chocolate bar. He buys it for the boy he likes. His friend, brother in name and not blood, whispers it to a classmate at school and by the days end, everyone is wondering who William likes. It hums through the building, in every child’s ears, and for now, the teachers don’t care enough to decipher the taste of it in the air.
Everyone keeps their eyes peeled for the wrapper of the brand of the bar William bought. It’s spotted peeking out of Damien’s bag and the rumor leaves the school. Parents whisper now, eyeing Mark’s parents suspiciously, torn between distrust and sympathy. They settle on sympathy. For now. There’s no reason to doubt them, not yet, but now they’re watching.
They’d taken William in, when his parents died. How tragic that he turned out to be gay. Poor them. How kind they were, to take him in, how kind they are to keep him, despite his flaws.
They’re too kind-hearted for their own good, they whisper. One day it’ll backfire on them.
Backwoods town, different is synonymous with bad. People avoid bad things, it’s easier then trying to understand. Shunning is undoubtably easier then the alternative of accepting that people are human and mistakes are made.
Damien heard the rumors. Sees the pity and curiosity in his classmate’s eyes as they wonder if he’s gay, too. His sister staves off the worst of them, keeps him from being approached directly, but they still whisper and he takes dramatic action to make it stop.
He approaches William in the cafeteria, some say, in the hallway between class, at his desk after school. Details differ, but the heart of the story stays the same.
Damien returns the candy bar.
Some say that he’d said nothing, had been disgusted to be in his presence, that he had wiped his palms on his pants as he walked away. Some say that he’d rejected him with words, humiliated him in front of everyone and clearly voiced his disgust at the other boy and his feelings.
In reality, he’d passed the candy bar back after class, discreetly. He’d whispered an apology, pity and fear in his eyes as he told William that they couldn’t be what he wanted. Heat fades off him, his impeccable reputation restored, and people whisper and compete over which version of the story is true.
William cried, one person says, eyes wide in mock pity. Laughter follows his footsteps in the halls now, ringing behind him like it’s his heels that are laughing, not his peers. Crybaby is his new name whispered around the halls. He’s mercilessly teased for the rest of that year.
Months pass, years drag on, the intensity of whispers fade. William tries very hard to be a perfect student. The rumors are nasty, and the pranks are worse. Humiliation is the only kind of social interaction he has in public anymore. He’s become a shut-in.
Mark’s parents die a handful of months before their schooling is over. They’d been found in their bedroom, wide-eyed and together.
Eyes turn to William, who had been home while Mark was out with friends, who had been found screaming outside their door. A word echoes through the air, fear spreading it wide, an accusation and question all in one.
William avoids school, not able to handle the fearful looks and whispers that scream in his ears. Classmates take it as an admission of his guilt, his confession to a horrid crime. Murderer is a question no more, but a statement.
He took a week off school to grieve and that became his confession to everyone who was listening for words about him to drift through the air. More people join the trend of hating him and thinking he’s bad and evil and wrong. The few sympathizers left turn on him, pitiful whispers losing their kind edge.
To them, he is as good as guilty. No trial, no judge, no jury. Business owners hear secretaries whisper of a high school student who killed his adoptive parents, who was gay. When he graduates, he isn’t accepted into college and no place wants to hire him.
Horrid reputation precedes him. He’s known as crybaby and murderer and backstabber.
Monster is now synonymous with his name and no one wants anything to do with a monster. People flock to wherever he isn’t, and the new rumor floating around town is that if you hang around him the you’ll either end up an accomplice or dead.
Damien, still friends with the boy, bless him, suggests that William move out of town. “It’s impossible to change their minds,” he says, “it’s set in stone and you can’t do anything to reverse the damage.”
It’s insulting that he says that so nonchalantly. This all started because of him. William had had a crush and Damien was too scared of what people thought to accept him, to do what he’d secretly wanted. In saving himself, he had damned William. They could be burning together, if Damien hadn’t been so scared.
Part of William hates Damien for that. Because he had been willing to take that risk, to throw away people opinions of him for a chance to make Damien his. For a chance to be happy, in love, even.
“That’s easy for you to say.” William bares his teeth, frustration and anger bubbling under his skin, wrapped around his bones. “You don’t have to deal with their hate. This is my home and they hate me because of you.” His words are venom, tone bitter and hard. He wants Damien to hurt.
Damien softens, reaching forwards. “I just want what’s best for you. Maybe their rejection will soften some, if you go away for a bit.”
It feels like Damien is rejecting him all over again. First as a lover and now as a friend. Damien was all he had, outside of Mark. Damien was the only outsider who looked past the evil pinned on him by others.
He staggers back a step. “Fine,” he says. “If you don’t want me here, then I’ll leave.”
And leave he does. He joins the military, where the only thing they see is a stellar report card. His reputation is left behind, lingering under the surface.
Touring, fighting, he gets few letters. Damien becomes mayor, Mark’s career is going well, he got married to Celine, Damien’s sister. No more. Basic pleasantries are exchanged and it feels like it’s just an unpleasant chore for them, something they have to do but don’t want to.
He’s still bitter. Still angry.
Returning, he learns that his good deeds, his service and sacrifice for the country don’t outweigh his old reputation. Rumors stir up again, him being an easy, popular topic to discuss. They say he moved so he had permission to kill, that he had a hunger for it, that it was the only time he felt real joy.
Blood stains his hands as a ghost he will never outrun. Killing wasn’t something he’d enjoyed, but it’s something that they drove him to do. He would’ve stayed, if he wasn’t driven out.
It turns out that Celine doesn’t care for others. He moves back in with Mark, in that childhood home, and they befriend each other. She’s pretty, and William can only think of Damien when he looks at her. His childhood crush never faded.
He does get an idea. It’s horrible and terrible and awful, but it’s a chance for him to do what he’s never been able to.
His life has been spent trying to dispute the town’s hate of him. Bitter, hurting, angry, he decides that he’ll succumb to it instead. Instead of looking for redemption he shouldn’t need to be seeking, he turns to revenge.
This all happened because Damien rejected him. He was going to make sure he knows that was a mistake.
He woos Celine. Seduces her and undermines her marriage. He makes her care for him and maybe his heart softens a little, doubt creeping in, but maybe that’s just another rumor, something said from someone who knows nothing but loves to talk.
His whole life is narrated in rumors, in whispers between townspeople, people he’s never met. He’s starting to lose perspective of his own life, what’s actually truth and what’s something that someone said just to vilify him even more.
And he has been vilified. He’s infamous in town. Children he’s never met know to skirt around him and not bend to his friendly ‘act’. He’s a monster, their parents whisper, tucking them into bed.
It’s terribly lonely. So he woos Celine, out of a mix of loneliness and bitterness and anger. He thinks that it’s her fault, for trusting him, for believing him to be more then what people said, for falling for him. It takes two to tango and she had danced quite well.
Running away with her, degrading names thrown at their backs as he steals her away (from her loving husband, poor man), he almost thinks he’s being genuine. That he actually fell for her, somewhere in his ruse.
Then he learns that she had her own ruse. That he was simply a pawn in her game to rid herself of Mark. Maybe that should anger him, but he supposes it’s fair. It hurts more then he ever lets on.
He gets an invite to a Poker Party. Mark wishing to reconcile, to apologize, to be brothers again. Or so he says. The night ends in death. More blood stains his hands, blood of friends, allies.
William, grieving the loss of Damien’s friend, of Damien himself, of Celine and Mark, he wonders how all of this came to be. They were all so close, once.
He supposes it the rumors that tore them apart. That at some point, he’d been vilified so much that they doubted him or believed him not to be worth the trouble anymore, of what people thought and what people said.
It’s hard to believe that this all came to be from a crush, from a confession gone south, a cheap candy bar that wasn’t enough, in the end. Or maybe it was William that wasn’t enough.
All he’d wanted was for Damien to give him a chance.
Fear had stopped him. Rejection had been sewed into William, carved into his bones, burned into his skin. He was made a laughing stock. Rumors had been pumped out, making him a beast, a monster, something he wasn’t.
And William, poor him, had succumbed to the years of pressure and depraved opinions made clear.
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