HUNTER ⁽ᵃᵖ⁾

I am under the handle @lessersinned now and that’s where I, and Gaston, shall be.

Laughter from the blonde, blue eyes shining with mirth. Gaston has been the one happy constant in his life for ten years now. Being shot at, being scolded by their superiors, being awarded medals side by side. Getting out, trying to move on, trying to cope with life after war. Fighting. Laughing. He was the very best thing to come from joining up in the service. Adam treasured him.

It didn’t help that he also happened to be madly in love with him, but that was a heavily guarded secret.

“Honestly I may pay money to see that. So we’re going to have to get you good and liquored up.” He muses, grabbing his wallet, the same but symbolically so much thicker. It almost terrifies him, to have what he has from Peter after the man had taken so much from him over the years. His mother, his childhood, sixteen of his previously healthy bones and 7 of his molars. A part of im had wanted to turn the inheritance down.

But the bastard could burn in hell and pay for all his porn.

Eyes move to the key ring he’s waving around and he shrugs. “Whatever you wanna do, man. Uber is fine by me.” He would pay for it, that was only right.

The next words make him glance at him, swallowing hard. “I…might actually take you up on that.” He says softly, the house is bitter and cold and stained with his own blood. He hates it. But he had moved in to pack it up and then find a new apartment.

“Assuming it isn’t any trouble, at least. I’m a pretty annoying house guest. I clean up after myself and I never wear a shirt.” He jokes, shrugging like he was serious.

He is a man who doesn’t understand humility, and that is an act of self-sabotage. He is in this present moment, watching his friend suffer, and what he knows is this vicious desire to help.

Gaston can count the number of times he has helped another human being in this civilian life on one hand. He is, at his core, a good man, but that is burrowed so far down beneath the bark and the mutilated roots that have encompassed his entire life, that this is all he knows: this fever-slick form of life that has claimed him, vanity his altar, a thirst to become far better than before.

And in that, he thinks, that new voice rising in him, a malformed shape of shadows and twisted things, a goddess buried beneath the soil of things long-since covered, he feels it. The burn to help someone else, to help a man who understood him through every stage in his life.

“Not at all. I remember what it was like, with my mother - I didn’t want to be home at all. I wound up staying at friend’s homes a lot. A change of scenery would do you good.”

He thinks about his own spacious house, modern in its upkeep, clean by his own hand, trimmed and polished, the very image of some form of perfection, but, it is empty. He doesn’t think on this much, but, one day, he hopes to fill it with the sounds of living.

“I have a lot of vegetables around my house. My green smoothies, supplements...I’m pretty clean...I’m up early a lot, so if you hear noise, it’s just me.”

And he smiles then, satisfied, thinking that surely, some time away from this palace of horrors will fix everything.

Or so he hopes. He’s never made an attempt to repair things before.

“Now, I was thinking we hit every single club and bar we possibly can. The night hasn’t even begun yet, but we’re going to get you good and laid if you want.”

He curls an arm around Adam, gliding his hand across the empty air, as if revealing a secret entrance. “Pole-dancers, Adam, as far as the eye can see...imagine it! There’s nothing a lap-dance can’t cure.”

More writing now!

At mention of Peter Bertrand’s death, Adam’s eyes drop from Gaston’s. He wants to scoff, to roll his eyes. But the thought behind his saying that is so kind. So unusually tender for the bigger man, he doesn’t have the heart to belittle it. Even if only because he had hated his father.

“Thank you,” He says softly, remembering just as warmly, how much he had looked up to Gaston in the beginning. The scrawny kid in the barracks, the pretty boy that the bigger guys always took their frustration out on. Except him. He had never treated him like anything less than his equal. And he was his best friend to this day.

He remembered bloodshed and darkness, light and pain. And always that as a team, they always came out of everything. The scariest situations and the most unlikely escapes always managed by them.

The hug is perfect, just what he has been aching for. And he smiles as Gaston pulls back. “Hey, I’m absolutely up for going out. Maybe we can have a fashion show after we get trashed.” He teases, unbuttoning the nice dress-up shirt and shrugging it off, reaching for his t-shirt from before to pull over his head.

“I’m just…glad that it’s all over.”

He likes to think he understands what it is to be full of sorrow, but he falls short as, he attempts to be happy, bombastic, always. He knows nothing of what it is to have a father like Peter Bertrand, as his own father, in his eyes, did a superb job of raising him.

Leo Duval, the man with the countenance of a lion, and the claws and teeth to match, cared for his little cub when mother lioness was not there. A man Gaston owes his life to, as he sees it, no matter how he fears disappointing him even now, no matter how he fears a variety of scattered things when it comes to his father.

These things he has never spoken aloud. They are within him, tarnished pieces of gold on a path of iron, curlicuing to some semblance of a path, a notion of paradise, that is the sunlit place of his youth.

He’s never, nor will he ever, speak this aloud. It isn’t about him for once, he thinks, and it’s an inner-voice he is not used to, that ferocious thing in the back of his mind that has stirred forth depths of doubt that he has never met, nor experienced.

A frightful thing, what the human heart can produce, a black and twisted creature.

“I’ll help you with whatever you need. That’s the perks of living so close to me, aside from you know, living so close to me,” and he’s smiling, thinking of construction, of packing away boxes, of the sweat and the productivity of it all.

“I’ll be more honest if I’m drunk. That one striped thing you own? Garbage. Those leather shoes? Keep them, you never know.”

And he’s excited now, thinking about how to help his friend, and it shows in the way he takes off Adam’s jacket, his fingers fiddling with his key-ring.

“Let’s take an uber or something. It’s the weekend, we’re hard-working men, and we should be relaxing and chasing tail.”

He then thinks about being surrounded by death, by the notion of loss, and it comes out of his mouth before he can stop it, and there’s another voice, suddenly: selflessness.

       his voice is a sudden PRESENCE in her          otherwise quiet shop, and velma has to          grip the ladder she’s precariously perched          upon to keep from falling in fright.

                 with a pounding heart, the asian spares a                  glance down to gaston; another ? velma                  was almost CERTAIN that the aforementioned                  woman of interest must be drowning                  in gifted novels by now.

          this is the third time just this week and it’s           only TUESDAY.

                “ another ? i think you might be buying them                   faster than i’m received them, gaston. “

          descending the ladder cautiously with her           stack of non-fiction, velma takes the aisle           in a stride and gives the taller a nod. a smile.

               “ come on, we’ll go find something. “

He is so hyper-focused on the thought of potentially, finding something for Belle that he doesn’t notice the way she wobbles slightly on the ladder. He does, however, see the stack of books she’s carrying and he opens his arms.

If someone knew him, the man on the surface who was as health-obsessed as they came, they never would have thought that Gaston would have been caught dead holding books. 

And yet, here he was, offering to lighten the load of a woman whom he considered a very, very dear friend.

“Thank you - I just thought perhaps, it might make her day. Books are to Belle what flowers are to others.”

And he’s proud of that similarity, and the fact that he said it as he heard it in his mind, and with a soft bounce to his step, he’s off, eyes scanning the shelves.

“I will let you know how this encounter goes - I have a feeling something very important is going to take place this week, and, should Belle and I marry, I want to invite you! I will honor you in any way you’d like, Velma, for helping me with this.”

@killsbeasts

v:m

soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkg8WhKzPVg

It’s the late shift. As owner and operator it isn’t required that she man the counter, but she does. She likes to. She likes her clientele. Each entry at differing times of the day are extraordinary, but it is the early birds and the night owls that she is particularly fond of. The ones that make their way to her door in the dark, at separate ends of the spectrum. Alike and so wonderfully dissimilar. 

Soon she will shut the doors after shooing the last of the midnight crowd out, lock up, and retire to her flat above, her straight Scottish Fold, strawberries and basil over bleu cheese melted bread, and perhaps an episode of Coupling, before sifting into sleep like sand in an hour glass. 

It doesn’t sound like a half bad plan at all, as she rings up the second to last customer, until her cell signals a text alert which informs her of a last minute still life sitting orchestrated by her professor, worth a significant uptick bonus in the grading medium. Which was, to her view, inordinately unfair to make one choose between a feline friend and fuzzy slippers or appreciating the fine unclothed form for extra credit.

Slipping her phone into her pocket and pondering the eventual course of action sprung from if she decided on one or the other, she turned to the last person in line and found herself shocked speechless for a stunned second before settling heavily into a self satisfied sense of heady familiarity,

“Well, well….look who it is.” Her lips ticked up dryly in rememberance. “Gaston Duval. It’s nice to know you grew into that CHIN at long last.”

He has a natural way of living. It’s how he stays healthy, how he stays on a proper form of focus with all of his various physical workouts and aspects of his job that he enjoys, as, in the end, it is all he has.

This he doesn’t think about. All he wants to do is keep living the way he’s been living and not think so deeply about what could, potentially, be his existential downfall.

He rests on the balls of his feet as words sweep over him, his eyes creasing as he surveys the woman before him. She’s beautiful, of course, and something about her voice reminds him of mud-pies, of yellow rubber boots, of digging up worms and chasing one another around...

Memory vanishes, slips, and he looks at her again, palms pressed to the edge of the counter.

“Have we met? I feel as if we have.”

Maybe in another lifetime, if he believed in that sort of thing. Maybe in another world, much like this one, but everything was veered slightly to the right, where gold shifted to blue and red became violet.

And then he, self-consciously to his great shame, presses his fingers to his chin.

    Everything about Adam’s day had to be planned to a T. His driver always arrived at the exact same time, his assistant always had his coffee ready to hand to him as soon as he walked into the door and his meets were always on time. 

   Everything was like clockwork, there were no surprises. That was, until today.

     Adam eyed the man sitting in front of his desk, slight annoyance in his gaze as he thought of what scolding to give Cogsworth for not giving him a warning he’d have to meet with someone on such short notice. 

     ❝ Right. Have a seat. ❞

     Adam moved to his desk, fixing a button on his suit before sitting down. There was a file on his desk, no doubt left there to explain who this man was in place of actually warning Adam. 

  ❝ Mister Duval, is it? You’re…attempting to publish a..cook book..? ❞

    He raised a brow and looked the other up and down before back at the paper. Why did they send this guy to him? Adam only dealt with novelist and best sellers. Not brutes like this jackass.

    ❝ You’re looking for marketing and investment in your project to help it get off the ground, correct? ❞

It’s instinct, not liking the man before him. It’s as if he’s turning a bad taste in his mouth, something that twists itself against his throat, slipping down down, copper coins clinking into a well. 

He doesn’t like him. Something about him...something about the way he looked, maybe, how polished he looked, how prim.

Perfect. He looked perfect. And he hated that. 

He most likely had this place handed to him. This man thought he could inflict orders on others and control them.

If their roles were reversed, Gaston thinks, he would have been more casual with everything. 

Perhaps, the propriety is what gets to him, digs under his skin and rips it apart to see what’s underneath, a subtle exposure of a dull knife: a pain that he can’t shirk, something that makes his stomach roll, despite how he speaks of strength. 

“Yes, sir,” Gaston says, still proper. “I was told your company wanted to see me, and we were to be working together on this. As the phone call stated, by a man who was not you.”

His father, perhaps? Oh, that was rich. 

He resists the urge to smile and bites the inside of his cheek with his teeth.

This is incredibly late, but, my guess is, that you wanted something to grant you hope.And hope I will give you, in the form of Gaston telling a story…

“There once was a powerful buck in a forest much different than the ones you know. There existed a sort of harmony between all of the animals, between every bird, every stream, every stone turned up by its animals.

And this powerful buck reigned the forest, like a good king, his crown of antlers as tall as the branches of the trees. Birds slept there, all manner of animals came and slept beside its body, and even in the winter, when food was scarce, the king would share his food with all of the other deer.”

“All things must die,” he says, pausing for effect, his eyes looking pained, “but this buck had sons and daughters. They then took the forest for themselves, taking his lessons and honoring their father. So you see, nothing ever dies, it all changes, but, it keeps going. A cycle, like nature. We can learn from it.”

The hunter sets his feet on the table, stretching as he thinks of rolling green fields, of sunlight, of the changing seasons.