#decladam

welcome to my mr gray / declan + adam parrish / declan trc fic for the freaks.

prev chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

🏷️ cnc, violence, gore, sex, but make it romantic 💞

fifteen | regroup

The Gray Man cracks into his Eton mess when Adam first says the word Harvard.

They're eating. Declan's at the Gray Man's feet, off-leash and off-duty. Dozing.

"Harvard," repeats the Gray Man. He crushes a spoonful of macerated strawberries against the roof of his mouth. Adam nods. He chews his meringue. Young teeth, surprisingly free of cavities. No fear of the toothache from the sugar.

They're in a quiet stretch. Adam couldn't come on jobs for a few weeks. Too much heat on the streets. Too much blood lost out the hole in his leg. 

They're past that now. There is a new equilibrium in Henrietta. The Gray Man had gambled, killing Adam's old boss, but it's a gamble that paid off. He split his bonus with Adam.

The Gray Man asks questions about programs. Costs don't come up. Adam compulsively checks the bank account the Gray Man set up for him. He calculates the exchange rate himself when the wires come through, to check the math. He's fallen asleep to the bank app open on his phone, reviewing interest payments of pennies. He'll do well investing, soon enough. 

He's been using his set of keys for about a month, and something about their jingling when he removes them to unlock a door, or a cage, made his presence seem more permanent. 

"The acceptance came a month ago," Adam frowns as he scrapes the bottom of his coupe glass. He never brought up Aglionby Academy, but is smart enough to know that the Gray Man knew all about it. Knows his SAT score. Recognizes an LSAT prep textbook for what it is. Adam hasn't talked about it because he hadn't decided.

The Gray Man says nothing against it. He was always going to let him go—no, it's not his place to let Adam do or not do anything. He was always prepared to say goodbye.

"They're lucky to have you," the Gray Man says. His framework always included this. His building plans were for a person who could leave.

---

Adam leaves through the heavy front door on a gray day. The sky is low, overcast. If there were trees visible in any direction, their leaves would be the yellow of death.

He leaves with a nod. In the morning, he's there. In the afternoon, he's not.

The Gray Man retreats to the attic. Declan notes the shift in atmosphere, and becomes something like a person again. He cooks, passably. He serves meals. He takes them away. His voice becomes unused, because without the Gray Man to talk to, he has nobody.

On the third gray day, he gets dressed, and takes his phone, and leaves a ham sandwich and a glass of milk on the floor at the top of the stairs. 

On the fourth day, the Gray Man finds the note Declan left on the table. 

Moving my little brother to DC. Call if you change addresses. 

There is no promise he'll be back, but like there will be blue sky again, the Gray Man is certain he'll return when he can. 

When he needs to. 

The house readjusts.

---

The radiators tick, tick, tick. The Gray Man keeps the house cool, because that is how he runs it.

He returns from a job, and an envelope pokes from the mailbox on the stoop. There is no address on it. No return address, either. 

Inside, he plucks the gloves from his fingers. He drops his keys into the bowl. Locks the door. 

In the kitchen, at the counter, the Gray Man opens the envelope standing up.

Inside, in a drawstring bag like the kind jewelry is sold in, the second set of keys.

A bag, and three Polaroids.

The first is a car, plates included.

The second is the layout of a house. A new build. One bedroom. Open concept. 

The third is a photo of this new home's basement. Single, bare bulb. Cinder block walls. Gray as the day is long.

The implication is whatever the opposite of a threat is.

I carry this with me, it says. It is an invitation.

In the other room, the sounds of laboured breathing. The Gray Man will leave Declan to struggle through a rather inventive predicament until his breathing comes erratically. He, personally, cannot wait.

The Gray Man has the strange urge to show him the photos. He does not. He slides them back into the envelope, and takes it upstairs, and locks them away. 

The wall is still there. It has to be—it is load-bearing. It is a matter of life or death, the wall, but there is a window in it now where there wasn't before. The window is the thing. It isn't going anywhere. 

---

fin.

thanks for reading!

welcome to my mr gray / declan + adam parrish / declan trc fic for the freaks.

posting a chapter a day to tumblr (two today, cause they're extra short). complete at 15 chapters ✌🏽

prev chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve

🏷️ cnc, violence, gore, sex, but make it romantic 💞

thirteen | cuck chair

Summer's heat is gone, but the temperature in the room is elevated. The screen-mesh vibrates as wasps head-butt it, trying to get in. Gold light catches the dust motes floating above the rug. 

Adam is in the wingback chair across from the sofa. His thigh scarred badly. Declan's nose has set crooked. The Gray Man's ear is what it is.

The Gray Man sees Adam in the chair when he comes up from the basement to refill a water bottle. The stim sequence has another quarter-hour to run. Declan is on the mat, leads taped in the correct placements. The hum of the machine is the only sound from below.

Adam holds a glass of water to his throat. Condensation runs from it onto the shirt. A book is spread face-down on the chair's arm. He has been reading while he cools off. He has taken a break in the living room and not upstairs, because he wanted to be within earshot of the basement, probably. He wants the Gray Man to know he's heard what's happened in his absence.

They catch each other's eyes as the Gray Man passes. He runs the water in the kitchen until it's properly cold. Fills the bottle. 

On his way back to the basement, the Gray Man smiles to himself. The chair, in the intervening weeks since The Incident, has become a thing. Adam installed himself in it to watch the front road. Lately, he sits in it doing paperwork, after dinner. The Gray Man's interior has supplied the word for it—cuck chair—and the word amuses him because when the Gray Man takes a moment to step outside himself and look at his life, he sometimes finds it amusing.

welcome to my mr gray / declan + adam parrish / declan trc fic for the freaks

posting a chapter a day to tumblr. complete at 15 chapters ✌🏽

prev chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven

🏷️ cnc, violence, gore, sex, but make it romantic 💞

twelve | darkness

It is the clear, hot sort of day after the storm passes, and the clarity feels wrong. The light scours surfaces, returns information on every fingerprint pressed onto every surface. Where the dust has gathered between and under and on.

A single jagged chunk of glass arches like an iceberg into the empty space where the living-room window was. The pane's remains scatter the floor. Bullet holes riddle the sofa. Casings litter the hallway. 

In the bowl at the front door, a second set of keys. He had put them there that afternoon, intending to hand them over after dinner. He had not gotten to dinner.

The Gray Man props a kitchen chair under the door's handle. He keeps moving.

The kitchen counter tile is streaked with blood. Blots of it trail in and out. If he were hunting, it's the amount of blood he'd follow until he found his quarry's body, fallen, dead. 

He grabs towels and the first aid kit and two knives and the vodka from the freezer and heads down to the basement.

Adam lies on the worktable. His old boss made his move on the house, and it went wrong for everyone.

Adam's new wound is less serious than the first—bullet beats knife—but in a worse place—his thigh is bleeding in a way the bullet wound hadn't. The half hour the Gray Man spends with him in the basement tending to this wound is the kind of work the Gray Man prefers to do on himself, alone, or with Declan, when Declan needs it most.

Declan has been exposed. Briefly, to a stranger who should not have seen him. It's a breach of the Gray Man's pact with him. The clause is printed in black-and-white on the contract in the desk in the attic. The Gray Man's on-paper authority is something he takes very seriously. It means nothing if a man with a gun walks into the wrong room, on the wrong day, and takes a look at Declan Lynch's recognizable face while he's in a compromising position, and forces that gun between Declan Lynch's remaining, very nice teeth, and beats his face in until it sets into new shapes. 

The Gray Man will think about this for a long time. He will think about it later.

Adam's tawny skin's gone green-grey. The Gray Man leaves him with the vodka and his lightest hand gun and instructions.

"Lock this door behind me. Don't open it. If I'm not back by tomorrow, the safe combination is on the inside of the second drawer of my desk. You can figure out the rest."

Adam whispers, "Okay."

The Gray Man's made his choice. He will end this tonight. He will end it personally, and in a way that closes every loop that could lead back to another man with another gun entering his house and pissing on his property. 

The Gray Man returns upstairs to change. Old slacks, a dark shirt for the day ahead. Boots that lace. 

He checks his gun. He checks the second gun. He checks his knife in the boot, and pockets the burner. He removes the chair and pulls the heavy door open, and crosses the threshold. The dusk light paints the shadows long and the heat hits him like a wall. 

He gets in his car, turns off the radio, and backs out.

He has work to do.

---

It is full dark by the time he arrives at the Boss's house. The windows are sealed, and there is a light on in the office over the garage. 

The lock is the same as the last time the Gray Man checked. The Boss is careless and his carelessness will kill him tonight. Inside the house, there is a familiar, chemical smell in the air. Hair, burning.

There are men between the Gray Man and the Boss. The first goes down across a glass coffee table. It shatters beneath him. The Gray Man drops the second on the staircase. The body tumbles down and blocks the path. The Gray Man steps over it and takes the rest three treads at a time.

Upstairs there is a desk and a filing cabinet and a wall safe and a chair the Boss ends up in. The Gray Man's suppressor kills quietly but not silently. The Gray Man has lost the advantage of surprise. He bounds over the body on the stairs, and when he arrives in the office, he fires, and the Boss fires. 

The Gray Man's shot is marginally better; the Boss goes down when the Gray Man sinks his third bullet into him. The first two worked fine; the third one is for the Gray Man.

No, he thinks, not pausing his movements, which are automatic. No, he thinks, grabbing the Boss's phone and the laptop on the table and the folder from the desk. The third bullet was for the knife wound that could have opened an artery in Adam's leg, and for the permanent resetting of Declan's nose, and possibly jaw.

He tosses the abandoned tumbler of bourbon onto the rug, because by smell he can tell it's cask strength. He uses a lighter on the table to set the stain on fire, and leaves through the window. The trellis leads to a balcony, to the garage, to the neighbours yard. He exits through the far side of the neighbours place out the front, and walks to his car at a normal pace. He does not run, as cars pour down the block. Running is what people remember.

He gets in. Sits. Flips down the mirror.

The top of his right ear is gone. It looks like someone clipped it off with kitchen shears. Docked, is the word he's looking for.

A centimeter over and he could be dead. 

Declan's in a locked room. Adam's in a locked room. 

There's no guarantee Adam will make it to morning. That he's still breathing. 

Declan couldn't escape that room. The door is heavy. The Gray Man installed the door himself. 

He starts the engine.

---

The Gray Man stops once to swap plates and change his clothes and dispose of the gun in a creek. He tosses the knife out the window on a back road, and saves the speeding for the last ten miles.

He notices the sound of cicadas when he returns. He parks at the end of the lane, running lights off. He hadn't noticed the insect song when he was leaving, but it is all he hears now.

The walk is part of the procedure. This is protocol. He thinks of how he should have stopped a second time to get rid of the boots, bagged in the trunk. He will burn them later. 

Inside, the keys are missing from the dish. The light he left on has been turned off. 

The Gray Man slips the safety off. He clears the front room. He listens for the creaks an outsider wouldn't know how to avoid upstairs. When none come, he clears the bathroom. The kitchen.

Declan is not in the room where the Gray Man left him. The cage door is open. The cage is empty.

The cage is empty.

The keys at the front door are missing, and the door was opened from the outside, and Declan is missing.

There are no signs of violence. The Gray Man thinks about how what he finds in the basement might leave a stain. On him. In his brain. 

He pushes his key into the lock, and turns it. 

The door does not move.

The Gray Man swallows. He should leave. He has sixty seconds to leave. He will call for Adam, and if Adam cannot make it to the door in sixty seconds, the Gray Man—

—the deadbolt turns from the inside, and the door opens.

Adam's in the t-shirt and jeans he was in when the Gray Man left. He is slick with sweat. The room smells animal, like an abattoir. 

"Good to see you, Mr Gray," Adam says, slumping against the wall. "Don't worry. I got him."

The Gray Man has forgotten what the saying 

my heart stopped 

meant. 

He hasn't felt it in such a long time, he's forgotten what it feels like when one's 

heart skips a beat.

He feels it then, as he shoulders Adam Parrish's weight and sees Declan Lynch curled in the foetal position on the mat below, a water dish by his head, a blanket wrapped around his sleeping frame.

The Gray Man moves Adam to the sofa.

"How is it?" the Gray Man asks.

Adam doesn't open his eyes. "I've been worse." 

He slips his hand into his pocket and returns with the second set of keys. Dangles them in the air. 

"These are yours," he says. "I borrowed them."

"They're yours, actually." The Gray Man clears his throat. Adam, after a beat, drops keys and hand both to his stomach. 

"Coffee?" offers the Gray Man. His throat hurts. He wants to go to the basement. The window in the wall inside him is cracked open and the air seeping in is sweet and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

"Please," says Adam.

enormous chapter today. and it's porn! enjoy!

🏷️ cnc, violence, gore, sex, but make it romantic 💞

posting a chapter a day to tumblr. complete at 15 chapters ✌🏽

prev chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten

eleven | fuck and twist

In the basement, the Gray Man knows it's sometime before dawn. Knows the storm is still going above ground, or it isn't. Above ground, minute-hands tick and the earth orbits the sun. In the basement, for once, there is no time. No weather. Just the room, and Adam, and himself, and his pet in it.

Adam looks like he does in the garage. The Gray Man's caught him in there a few times. T-shirt, work jeans, bare feet on concrete, sorting bolts in a tray by a headlamp's light. 

Before the workbench is the mat. His pet, wrists clipped above its head, shoulders open, ribs expanded, chest exposed, in the frame. Eyes down.

The smell in the room is animal. Fucking enters the frame of possibility. Adam's been circling it, unwilling to work out in his head how to get there. He has figured out his path: it is a reward for the dog. The dog has been good, and Adam needs to work out—or through—needs to work through this thing he wants with his body.

"What do you call it, down here?" Adam asks.

The Gray Man opens a cabinet of tools. He takes the flog off the peg board and hands it to Adam, to let him feel the weight in his hand.

"It. Thing. Good dog."

"People name dogs," Adam says, adjusting his grip on the flog's handle. He hands it back. "Declan's a fine name for a dog."

He's cheeky. The line of naming things is a fissure he's found in the Gray Man's skin. The re-naming of his pet is Adam slipping a fingernail into that fissure, and teasing it apart. He does it with curiousity, not malice. 

"Sure," says the Gray Man. He sees his acceptance as a flare of surprise in Adam's eyes. He was testing a boundary and expected pushback. He wants an excuse for a fight, still. He still hasn't come to terms with the fact that this is the Gray Man's house, and he doesn't use Declan's name for Declan's sake, or because he asked nicely. He removes his name as a means of separating his on-duty life from this off-duty one. If Adam wants to transmute some of good-old boy, Washington, DC-bound, Declan Lynch into his toy for the night, that'll play.

"Watch," says the Gray Man to Adam. "Turn," he says, to Declan.

Declan. Even thinking the word, it sticks in the mouth like a too-big wad of gum. 

The Gray Man flogs Declan. His strokes are heavy and slow. He starts on the upper back, the meat at the sides of and between the shoulder blades, and works down. His strokes land with thuds, like tenderizing meat on a butcher block. It is a rolling, muscular, percussive beginning. Declan absorbs each stroke.

The Gray Man says nothing for a while. After about three minutes—long enough for Declan to rise and drop, his canonical shape—the cuff overhead stops being a guide and starts being a crutch. He leans into it now, head tipped forward. His shoulders are still tense. There are darker spots on the mat under his feet where drops of sweat fall.

The Gray Man stops mid-stroke. He turns to Adam and reads him. After training him for months, the kid's an open book to him: his breath is shallow, pupils dilated. The coiled thing inside him is uncoiling. He is responding to the violence. Not the way the Gray Man expected, either.

"Here," he says, handing the flog over, handle first. "Your turn."

i missed posting yesterday because i was travelling, so you get two chapters today. we're officially getting to the stuff i'm not 100% sure we're still allowed to post to tumblr. let's find out! 🏷️ cnc, violence, gore, sex, but make it romantic 💞

posting a chapter a day to tumblr. complete at 15 chapters ✌🏽

prev chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine

ten | bloody lesson

It is deep night and the gutters are overflowing. Rain has been pouring at a sustained pace, hours of it. 

Adam's at the kitchen table, treating his knuckles. Around him, the IKEA starter tools and towels, not the good set they cook with. 

He came in from the jobs dirty and bleeding, his jaw locked shut. He is no longer flat. The Gray Man sits across from him. He spits answers to the Gray Man's questions like they're bullets aimed for his brain and heart. Yes, things went sideways. Yes, he's hurt. No, it's nothing he can't handle. Yes, he got the job done.

If he were a cat, he'd be hissing.

Adam pours peroxide over an open skin flap and asks if the basement's locked. When the Gray Man asks why, he answers, "I want to take it down. Work this off."

"No."

The Gray Man switches chairs for the one next to Adam. It's the configuration they were in that first night, when he first sewed Adam closed. He takes the bottle from him, and folds the towel, and presses it over the wound. He applies pressure. He lets go when Adam rankles, but tells him to do the same.

"That needs stitches," the Gray Man says. He washes his hands. 

"It isn't a punching bag. That's a different kind of toy. This one's a dog, remember? We don't beat dogs in this house."

Adam's face is a rictus of bafflement. "He likes being beaten. Want me to quote your psycho fucking contract?"

The Gray Man dries his hands and regains his seat. He clucks at the curse. It's not like Adam to cuss. Or at least, not like this.

"No," the Gray Man pulls the tin first-aid kit towards himself and removes the sewing materials. "It wants to not exist. It wants its options narrowed. That isn't the same thing."

"Sure as shit sounds like you beat him. Looks like it, too." 

Adam hisses at the first catch of the needle in his upper dermis. He goes slack while his hand clutches the empty cardboard dowel from the roll of paper towel he demolished. The Gray Man modulates his method.

"I'm sorry. I did that on purpose."

"I can tell."

"Are you done?"

Adam huffs through his nostrils. The Gray Man leans into his work.

"Being a good owner means you don't get to not exist for even a second," he says. Adam's heart rate is coming down. "It's surrendered control to you. You have to keep it. All of it. All the time. Or you can cause harm you cannot apologize for. You cause harm you cannot take back."

The Gray Man finishes. Eventually, Adam's hands unclench. Eventually, he asks again, his voice level this time: "I get it. Can I have the keys, now?"

The Gray Man considers this. He gives him the keys.

"You can watch," Adam says.

The Gray Man's brows rise. "Oh, can I? And in my own home too. Thank you ever so much."

Adam rolls his eyes. He's not limping, but walks stiffly, the adrenaline covering for the inner injuries wearing off. He won't be able to sleep until the crash hits him, and that won't be for hours.

At the top of the basement stairs, Adam flicks on the light. Half turned:

"What kind of tricks does he know? I'd like to see." 

He rolls his neck, sighs at the flood of cracks released.

"I'll tell him he's a good boy."

the raven cycle fic for the decladam + graylan heads.

🏷️ cnc, violence, gore, sex, but make it romantic 💞

posting a chapter a day to tumblr. complete at 15 chapters ✌🏽

prev chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight

nine | pinch

In the hallway between the attic stairs and the rest of the upstairs apartment, the Gray Man can usually see due north out one window and due south out the other end. Today he can't see anything. Fog descended overnight and stuck. It stuffs the windows with white, the kind you can't see through. 

The phone on the credenza just rang and hung up. There is a gun in the drawer underneath. He put it there months ago. Hasn't touched it since.

He takes it out now. 

The sword of Damocles has sharpened. The threat posed by the problem of a runner showing up at the door one day and never leaving is materializing. Adam's old boss poses a problem the Gray Man had overlooked.

His annoyance at losing a runner is one thing. The fact that he wants Adam back, specifically, is another. This wanting, apparently, has teeth.

The Gray Man not noticing this wanting is a failure on his part. He was so busy diagnosing Adam he didn't go outside and read the threat landscape. Adam had come to the Gray Man pre-loaded with problems the Gray Man had, for one reason or another, ignored. Dismissed. Failed to evaluate properly.

The Gray Man exits through the back door. The gun is a familiar weight, holstered against his flank. He walks the perimeter. It's been too long since he's done this. Searched for holes in the fence. Tire marks. Signs of life in the trailer across the way.

When the Gray Man returns, Adam's waiting for him on the stoop. 

He hands over the gun.

"Here," he says. Adam takes it. His hand drops with the weight, unused to this caliber.

"Something wrong?" Adam asks. 

The Gray Man chews the idea. He will tell Adam the combinations to the locks. Today will include target practice. In the fog. Yes. He can stand more responsibility, more autonomy. 

Without the gun on him, the keys in his pants pocket droop heavy. The Gray Man ought to get a second set made. He files the thought away for later.

"Not yet," the Gray Man says. 

Adam is quiet. From inside, the sound of coffee beans being ground by hand. 

The house is no longer as secure as it was. The Gray Man's closed loop has a leak.