CW: Stalking, harassment, threats, dehumanizing a d derogatory language, implied recordings, referenced consensual spice and past noncon, brief reference to past ableism
Laken wakes with a long stretch and an arch of their spine, turning their head to look through the tumble of their thick black hair at Chris beside them.
He’s still sleeping, his feet twitching lightly and rubbing at each other beneath the thin sheet in the early-morning light, thin and pale through the gauzy curtains. His hair gleams lavender, and they love the way the moment makes him look inhuman, almost elfin, as if they’d found the love of something supernatural and not only a man.
Laken’s body, though, is a little more insistent on needing the bathroom than they are on staring at their sleeping partner, so they slip out from under the covers, walking barefoot across the floor in boxers and a tank top and out into the hall.
They’re flushing the toilet in the bathroom when they look to their right to see the bathroom window is wide open.
Dark thick eyebrows furrow over black eyes as they stare, almost too confused for conscious thought to break through their tiredness, at empty space where glass or at least a window screen should be.
Leaning out, they look down towards the grass. The window screen lays there, staring back up at them.
Did it fall off? Can that happen? Laken blinks again and pulls their head back inside. A door shuts somewhere in the small, decrepit house they rent with two friends across from a church and they jump, hand over their heart - only to let out a breathy nervous laugh when they hear one of their roommates humming, clearly the source.
Laken shakes their head, then their whole body - like a dog shaking off water. What a weird way to start a day, they think as they drop their boxers and tank top into the laundry hamper.
They shower, the house waking up around them. They hear their roommates calling to each other faintly over the sound of the water, scrubbing shampoo into their hair, rinsing it out and watching the bubbles circle the drain. Drying takes a while longer - lucky this place has two bathrooms - and then Laken steps out, wrapped in a towel, to hear back to their room.
“Hey, Chris, it’s time to wake-… Chris?”
Their partner sits up in bed, staring with huge green eyes across the room, full of a terror Laken can barely fathom.
They turn, following his stare.
Written on their bedroom wall in bright green market is ONCE A PET, ALWAYS A PET.
Below that is SLUT, WHORE, a few other words Laken has heard Chris call himself on his worst days. Words he learned from the place that hurt him.
Below that…
YOU DESERVED IT, TRISTAN PAUL HIGGS.
Laken swallows, breath and voice gone as they look at photos taped to the wall, realizing they’re seeing crime scene photos - two people murdered, bloody bullet wounds, seated against a wall in a home somewhere. A woman whose blank dead eyes stare forwards, dark hair framing her look of endless, unending grief.
A man, next to her, and in his emptied-out expression… The shape of his face and the way his eyes look so huge against the smear of blood that runs down over nose and mouth…
“Dios,” Laken whispers. “Chris, those are-”
Chris doesn’t speak, but his lips move. My parents.
“I just-… I was just in here, none of this was-” Their voice catches and they move forward, lunging to tear the photos down even as Chris sits in a terrible frozen stillness, a statue of fear in their bed. “Who came here, Chris? Who was here?!”
“N, n,… Nobody,” Chris manages, voice thin, cutting in and out. Forcing the words through the overwhelm in his mind. “It, I, I, I woke up and and and it was, um, it w-was here, all, all here-… Once a pet, always a pet once a pet always a pet once-”
“Chris, stop. Listen to me!” Laken puts a hand on either side of his face, forcing him to look them in the eyes. Chris shudders and Laken lets him drop the eye contact, realizing too late it’ll only make it worse. They try to gentle their voice. “Listen, baby, none of that was here when I got up, that’s, that’s all less than an hour old. Okay? And my roommates didn’t hear anything, someone has been in my house-”
The bathroom window was open.
“… And I know how they got here. But why the fuck-”
“More,” Chris mutters. He tries to sway, in their grip, and they let him go to find what peace he can from the movement. “More on, on the end of the bed, more.”
Laken looks, and sees more photos piled there. They brace themself against the possibility of more gruesome murders scenes, but what they find instead sends cold straight down their spine.
They’re photos of Laken and Chris last night, fooling around on the bed. Laken with their arms around his neck while they kiss, Chris with his head between their legs, smiling up at them with pure love in their eyes. Laken’s eyes wide as they reached their climax with his fingers inside them. The two of them cuddling afterward, Laken flushed and smiling and so, so in love.
The angle the photos came from…
Laken looks.
Their closet door is open. When they race over to fling the door wide, their clothes are shoved to either side. A small throw pillow sits on the ground, an empty soda bottle beside it. An equally empty protein shake.
There’s another note written on the inside of Laken’s closet, just below a scratch in the paint.
This note is written in black.
Kauri, come home. Or else.
“Wh-… What the fuck? Chris, what-”
Chris is suddenly behind them and Laken lets out a breathy scream in surprise before turning to pull him close, holding him tightly. He shakes against them, burying his head against their neck.
“Someone was in my room all fucking night,” Laken says, almost whimpers, and hates themself for showing fear. “Someone watched us-… Someone watched us and took photos and waited-”
Chris nods, his fingers digging into their back. His tears burn against their skin as he cries. “My, my, my mom and my d-dad, they they they Owen has has photos of of them, d-dead, dead, d-d-d-… Silence is better than stammering, stillness is better than what I do silence is better-”
“Chris, stop! Baby, baby no, I need you to stay with me right now, okay? Please, baby, stay with me, we need to call someone-”
“K,Kauri come home,” Chris mumbles, shaking his head back and forth, back and forth, still sobbing in-between hitched attempts to stop. “Kauri come home-”
“Chris, fuck, please don’t do this right now-”
“I, I, I need to to to-to call Jake.” Chris looks up at them, his eyes far, far too wide. “I have to to to tell Jake.”
On the bedside table, Chris’s phone starts to vibrate.
Both of them jump and turn to look, half expecting another threatening message.
But all it shows is Jake calling them.
“Oh, shit.” Laken swallows and slowly looks back at the graffiti all over the wall. Slut. Whore. Oliver Branch’s Little Bitch, god, what fucking monster could have seen Chris now and still think of doing this?
They don’t answer the call in time. It cuts out.
Jake immediately calls again.
“What the fuck is happening?” Laken whispers. Inside of them, fear begins finally to melt as the heat of anger takes hold, and they turn to the closet and punch the writing on the wall.
Their hand hurts. They shake it out and punch again. Cheap plastered drywall starts to crumble under their fist.
Chris reaches for the ringing phone with trembling hands to answer.
Decided to put my Paul Higgs story on the backburner so I can have more fun with it, and wrote a wee little epilogue for this week’s Nanda and Jameson showcase instead!
CW: Pet whump, intimate whumper, internal injuries, injured whumpee, creepy comfort, some brief dubcon references, dehumanizing/degrading language, Nanda is kind of a possessive creep, but also this is pretty soft? They’re so weird. Just a little epilogue, of sorts.
-
The pet’s eyes narrow as he watches Nanda enter the room. He’s weighted down under heavy blankets, layers that keep the air around his body warm, working with the painkillers to keep him loose-limbed and languid, barely able to move.
Not that he wants to. Every slight shift sends a thrill of pain up his spine from somewhere deep inside of him. Even taking too deep a breath brings to brief, blurry life the aches and pains he’s littered with. It breaks through the wall constructed by the drugs that hold him, fuzzy and protected from the awful ache of his own body.
The odd, unpleasant medic is gone – with his businesslike invading fingers, his way of causing pain without any method of making it good,his flat stare as he worked. His pet is gone, too, the Platonic who had come out of shock only to cry until Arvid took him in his arms and whispered to him, the pet nodding and nodding like a puppet on a string, his sobs turning to sniffles and then to whispers in return.
He had never looked at the pet, not once. The other pet had treated him like he’s invisible, like the others always treat the Romantics, but at least it’s better than treating him like he’s a lying little snitch.
Eventually, they’d gone, with Arvid shoving a bottle of rattling pills into Nanda’s hand and giving him timing and dosage the pet couldn’t overhear. He doesn’t know if he’s being given too much or not enough.
CW: References to violent noncon, internal injuries, dehumanization, pet whump, abduction and hostage-taking, Nanda is a possessive creep, guns, intimate whumpers, sadistic whumpers
It also has the distinction of being the only place the pet can remember ever sleeping that is evenlesscomfortable than the WRU facility room floors.
Still blindfolded, all he has is smell, taste, sound, and touch. The lumpy mattress is scratchy, stiff with stains he can’t see and refuses to think too much about, some of which must be his own dried blood. His heels hang off the edge, where the concrete floor is, his fingers tingle with near-numbness.
All he can smell is concrete, blood, some faint sick-sweet smell of old decay, and the remnants of cigarette smoke and french fries. The taste of the cheap cheeseburger they fed him lingers on his tongue, as does the bitter and salt of what they fed him after that, laughing and gripping him by his newly-cleaned damp hair until his scalp ached and his jaw burned from how they forced it open.
He shifts, slowly sliding himself up on the mattress until his feet are on it again and off the floor. The motion flares sharp pain deep inside of him, and he whimpers, biting down hard on his lower lip to keep the sound to a whisper.
It has never hurt this badly, afterward. Not even when there were multiple handlers.No, they took their time and took care, knowing he was going to a buyer who wouldn’t stand for pre-existing damage. These men… They’ve torn something, reallytorn it. This is all he’s even good for, and if he’s too broken for it…
The pet tries to push down the panic, to ignore what the pain is trying to tell him.
Even if he comes for you, you won’t live long if he can’t have you. If you can’t do what he wants. After that, it’s back to WRU, you’ll be refurbished. No one will want you, they’ll wipe you and start clean with someone new, with-
He has to stop thinking like this. The panic is cycling, and his chest has gone tight and sharp with every gasping, shallow breath. He can’t be afraid of that, not yet. He has to deal with the rest of the things he’s afraid of first.
