₊˚⊹ ❤︎ HIS LITTLE SURGEON.
MDNI 18+.
COOPER ABBOTT, “THE BUTCHER” needed a little helper
WARNINGS. murder, dead bodies and discussions of dead bodies, mention of skinning and non-specific mutilation, blood, toxic dynamic, age gap, surgery on both dead bodies and a living person (not graphic), talk of organs and storing them, throw up, crying/meltdown, manipulation, fingering (fem. receiving), p in v intercourse, plan b
You met Cooper Abbott for the first time in a hospital hallway. You needed hospital hours for your degree, but you didn’t know why he was there. You still didn’t, actually—you never thought to ask him. The hallway smelled like antiseptic and burnt coffee, and Cooper was standing in front of a vending machine that had just eaten his dollar. He was staring at it flatly, with this bed-of-razors look in his eyes, but that vanished the second he saw you standing there, replaced with his pleasant, affable, handsome face. Cooper could put those different faces on effortlessly. He was good like that. You clocked his hands first—big, careful, surgeon’s hands, even though he told you he’s not a doctor. You didn’t totally believe him, weirdly.
Your college graduation felt like some dress rehearsal for a life that you were all-too-quickly realizing you didn’t actually want. Your classmates were all buzzing, talking fellowships and residencies and cities with glittering skylines that they’d be able to look down on with neurologist money. Eggshell white dress clinging to you, making you feel claustrophobic, you sat in the flimsy white chair and thought about the process of splitting a sternum in half, and how easy it would be to do cleanly with the right tools.
When you met Cooper for the first time, he gave you this smile. Like he already knew all that stuff, before you said a word.
“What kind of doctor are you?” he’d asked.
“Not one yet,” you’d replied.
“You look close enough!” he’d said encouragingly.
There was something gentle about the way he watched you, like you were an animal with it’s leg stuck in a trap, and he was trying to decide whether to get you out, or snap your neck and put you out of your misery.
You started seeing him at night. Only at night. Diners that were open twenty-four hours and hosted people much, much more odd-looking than you two. Parking lots behind closed shopping malls. Motel rooms under fake names. You always took the bus to go meet him, he never took you home—said it was “safer” that way. Safer for who? But Cooper didn’t specify, and you didn’t ask. You’re really good at not asking. It’s something he loves about you.
When you sat across from him, or next to him, or in his lap, he told you stories. He talked about a woman who disappeared and showed up skinned and floating down the river a couple weeks later. He told you about that man that was found hollowed out a couple towns over. Cooper never said “I did it,” never, ever—but the stories landed between you two like a blade laid carefully on the table. With every word he examined you, analyzed you closely with those eyes you were desperate to be laid bare in front of. He searched for the moment you realized, and what you thought when you did.
Maybe you didn’t know at the time, but if there had been fear, or anger, or concern that so much as flickered in your eyes for a moment, you would’ve been dead and gutted in the dumpster behind the motel in a second, and that would’ve been that.
Luckily for you, there hadn’t been.
You had to give him something in return—you told him about your anatomy labs in college. About the first incision you’d ever made, how clean it was, how your hands didn’t shake at all, even when everyone else’s did. You told him how good it felt to do such a good job cutting something. Cooper gave you a look that felt like sex, like every word you were saying was foreplay. You squirmed in your seat, your body reacted like he was undressing you.
“Just need you to look at something, sweetheart. Make sure it’s clean.”
Clean. You were good at that.
The garage was cold, so cold, and so bright. The fluorescent lights hummed relentlessly overhead, it felt like they were watching you.
The body on the table was already gone in the ways that mattered—eyes glassy, mouth slack, skin wrecked by pallor mortis. You felt calm and centered. Cooper watched you put the gloves on, listened to the snap of the latex. His face was just so relaxed, so pleasant. You were jealous of him, he was always so calm. That was the first time in your life you felt you could reach that, too.
It all made perfect sense to you, clicking into place without thinking. Muscle. Fascia. Vessels you memorized for exams, blooming under your fingers like familiar constellations. Cooper’s breathing changed as he towered behind you, watching.
Cooper never touched you while you worked. That came later. After. Once the organs were packed away with a reverent care. Once you’d scrubbed your hands raw, and he wrapped a warm towel around your shoulders like a little lamb that needed tending.
You threw up in the alleyway behind the garage, and Cooper held your hair back, rubbing your back and murmuring to you. “Good girl. Brave girl.” You clung to those words desperately. He rubbed your clit to take the edge off, massive hand down the front of your blood-spattered gray pleated skirt, circling your nerves in a way that makes your body writhe. His hand dwarfed you, covered half your face in his attempts to muffle the moans and sinful pleas that fell from your lips, held you flush against him from behind until you were shaking and releasing on his fingers in that dark, sickly lit alleyway.
After that, it became routine.
Cooper brought requests, and you fulfilled them every time.
The two of you were like-minded in your obsessive precision. Both people that needed a plan, that needed order and cleanliness. Rushed work gets sloppy, sloppy gets you caught. He liked your steady hands and your confident slices.
Your apartment fell to the wayside, you spent so much time in his carefully organized spaces—garages and basements of vacant houses, usually, that he had perfectly prepared for you. Your textbooks gathered dust in your apartment. Your diploma remained in it’s tube. Cooper called you his angel when he was in a good mood, his sweetheart, his smart, brave good girl. When he was in a bad mood, he ignored you completely. It was almost impressive, how convincingly he acted like you truly weren’t there.
You were so immersed in your work, in the delicate surgeries and the care of organ-keeping—which was harder than it sounds—you didn’t realize how much you’d lost to him. Not the work, him. You didn’t realize until you smelled his wife’s floral perfume on him.
It was a small thing, barely there, but so wrong to you. Your hands started shaking before your brain caught up.
“Where have you been?” you demanded. Your voice didn’t sound like your own.
“Home,” he was so placid, so casual.
“With… your wife?”
He laughed a little bit, like it was a silly question. It was. He was at his family home, where his family is. Of course he was with his wife.
You started crying in the most mortifying way. Loud, open mouth, spit forming a heavy string in your mouth and tears flowing past your lips and wetting your tongue with salt. Words tumbled out. You reminded him of everything you’d done for him, what you’d seen. What you’d done to those people. You were the only person who could do what you’d done for him, you thought you were special.
Cooper’s face closed like a door. He put that other face on. The one that was him but not him. The one that you never saw, unless he didn’t know you were looking.
“Don’t do that,” he said firmly. “Don’t make it ugly.”
Ugly. You slid down the wall until your butt hit the floor, knees tucked to your chest, breath coming in fragmented bursts. You told him that you can’t do this without him, that you need him, that he promised—
But he didn’t promise anything. Of course he didn’t, he never does. You both knew that.
Cooper let you tire yourself out sobbing and hyperventilating on the kitchen floor, begging him through choked cries not to sever the delicate strand that connects you. He waited until you were exhausted, covered in snot and spit and dried tears, to kneel down in front of you. He tilted your chin up with two fingers carefully, baring your puffy beet-red face to him.
“You’re spiraling,” he said it gently, his voice lulling you. “We can’t have that. Not right now.”
We.
Cooper held your face in one hand, squishing your cheeks together unflatteringly, and you sniffled wetly. He kissed you on your puffy, spit-slick lips. Firmly, a reminder of where you fit. A grounding action. You complied automatically, and later hated yourself for how totally relieved you felt in that moment, like everything had been fixed.
“There’s another job coming up, okay? It’s bigger,” he said, and your eyes were the size of saucers as you looked up at him. “I need you steady. Can you do that—for me?”
Lip still quivering, you nodded empathically. You could. Of course you could.
The next surgery took place in a basement that reeked of damp concrete and bleach. The victim was still alive when you started, but you weren’t expected to keep it that way. Cooper watched your face closely, monitoring you from his place near the basement stairs, tree-trunk thick arms crossed over his chest. You dissociated easily, immediately. It was just physiology, everything you learned in all your years of schooling. It was just practice. It was love, twisted into the shape of what you’re best at.
When it was over, Cooper leaned down and pressed his forehead to yours (covered in a thin sheen of sweat, shivering slightly)—and told you he was proud. You glowed under his words, even as something inside you calcified.
Later, alone in the bathroom, you scrubbed your hands until they were raw and red, and stared at your reflection. You looked hollowed out in a way that was reminiscent of the bodies you worked on. Dead just like them. Cooper knocked once before coming in.
He gave you what you’d been hoping for, pleading for, dreaming about the entire time you’d known him—split you open on the floor of that vacant house, your back pressed into the hardwood and knees to either side of your head. It was exactly how you’d imagined it every night since you’d met him. Precise, measured, hitting the exact spot you needed him in every thrust, making you babble and whine and scream. Somehow still punishing you, still taking something out on you, tears welling at the corners of your eyes and spilling down freely. He wiped them away and licked them from his fingers.
He was quiet, just strained breathing as his weight crushed you into the floor beneath and his hands held you where he wanted you, fingers leaving red and purple blooms behind that you’d admire for weeks and cry at the fading of. You tried to hold onto him, but he batted your hands away roughly and you didn’t try again—instead opting to dig your fingers into the ground, nails leaving little scratches behind in the wood.
You came long before he did, curling into him with a drawn-out scream, and then took what he was giving you with whimpers and drool and eyes rolled back into your head. You went limp long before he finally finished, your folded limbs putty in his grasp by the time he let out a final, ragged groan and came inside of you. The least careful thing he’d ever done.
You watched him with hungry eyes as he dressed again, bidding a bitter farewell to the bulk of his abs and his chest as he buttoned his shirt over them. You sat curled on the floor, back against the wall, your butt cushioned by your previously discarded pile of clothes that you’d scooted over to sit on. You stayed there, naked and curled up and staring at the wall, while he left to get you a Plan B. Alone in that dark, vacant house in the middle of the night, no one to hear you scream out his name or to hear the screams of his victims below. You were incandescently happy, blissed out, eyes glazed over.
This was what purpose felt like. You knew what the cost for love and happiness was. You were happy to pay it.
