#milkvember

❧ fandom: doctor sleep

❧ warnings: corpses; references to child death; misogynistic slurs; body swap

❧ also on ao3

I should've known better, I'm sorry is what she'll tell Dan so he can go back to bed at the hot spice he still works at, hopefully on his way to dreamless sleep, no boogiemen to roam his halls anymore.

rp: will to live

characters: jericho david & kat de la cruz & tb degawa @traumataako & @michirukaioh

warnings: disturbing thoughts, unreality, horror

He sits back, quiet and sober after Kat sets down her controller and stretches. After she turns off her recording, camera and microphone, and turns back to the two of them with a look that Jericho reads as curious.

"All of that went over my head," he admits, scratching the back of his neck as he looks to T for their response.

T has their eyes on the screen proper, that look on their face like they're inside themself, searching and searching for something they can't find. They look like that a lot, Jericho finds

especially in times like these, where Kat is in her own fugue in a certain game and even Jericho has paused to watch.

(They also look like that shortly before they leave again, weeks at a time

and shortly when they return home as well.)

"What do you think would be dragged out of us, if we were sent there?" T says finally, several minutes after Kat has already flipped on their laps with her DS in hand.

"What are you talking about?" Jericho asks, a little rough because he doesn't want to think of anything horrifying being dragged out of him.

"Psychological horror-monsters," T replies, dreamily, like they don't even notice Jericho's tone

which, isn't really that hard to believe.

"I think I'd like mine to have a spear through the gut. Just like... here," they say, pointing to a spot just above Kat's nose where her head sits on their lap. She hums, concerned, looks to Jericho for help.

"You gotta stop saying stuff like that. You're going to freak yourself out."

"Really? I haven't yet."

"Yeah... well..."

"I wouldn't let either of you go there," Kat interjects quietly. "We start driving into a fog, I'm making you slam on the fucking breaks."

T lays back, laughing the way they do

nothing in the world seems to bother them.

She plants a garden in his chest.

There had been one on her skin for years, blossoms spreading out over flesh, vines as their scars, red and purple and angry and ugly. It grew easily where he placed his hands, petals blooming and withering over weeks, hidden under clothes, never seeing the sun. She’d closed her eyes to them, ignored their growth, smiled as the roots grew deeper and deeper into her body. The inside decomposed to feed the blooms until she was only a rose.

One day, a girl came into view. There were no flowers inside of her, none growing from her skin. In the garden of time she was barely a seedling, and she didn’t stay for long. But while she was there she took a petal from the rose, and soon it shed the rest; petals fell to the ground and left nothing but a stem, and from its core she fell out.

Now the rose is a girl again, and she plucks the last seed from her body and tucks it between his ribs. Roots take hold and vines spread out slowly, creeping through his ribcage. Thorns puncture his lungs. Brambles constrict his heart. It isn’t long before he’s torn apart.

rp: from the ash

characters: persephone hua & hyacinth mandira @traumataako

warnings: abusive relationships implied, violent imagery

"I'm sorry," Persephone is saying, over and over with her pathetic sobs. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry -"

she's always been inelegant. More like a weed than a rose.

It's what Hyacinth always liked.

Even with her hair dyed away from her bright pink, and skirts instead of shorts, she still sticks out of their garden like a sore thumb. A girl who can't put on lipstick.

Lipstick red as roses is smeared across her cheek, smeared across the back of her hand where she's wiped it from violently, angrily. Her hair is floaty, picture perfect and a coppery color like a thousand pennies that belonged to his hand, useless as the change was. Hyacinth wants to tear it out of her head.

Persephone looks like she wants to tear it out of her head.

She's crying, and Hyacinth thinks that every romantic drama has it wrong when their heroine cries. She has an ugly face when she does it, red cheeks all blotchy and eyes rimmed just the same.

(She resists the snide thought in her head: that's because she isn't anything like a romantic heroine. That she, Hyacinth, if asked by her brother could do better.

Has done better.

That isn't anything to be proud of, she knows.

So does Persephone, her bruised kissed lips and smeared lipstick. This is nothing to be proud of either.

She has to remind herself: it's neither of their faults this went bad.

It's him.

It's always been him.)

Hyacinth wants nothing more than to press her hands against the girl's mouth, smear the red so it comes out more wrong, so it comes off in her hand sloppy and imperfect. He'd hate that, she thinks. Both of them ruined by each other. He hates that, that they ruined each other for him, that they broke each other apart to their smallest pieces and smeared each other across their mouths.

More like weeds than flowers.

When her fingers touch down, brush against Persephone's mouth, the girl jumps back. Her own eyes wide, her sorrys cut off halfway.

"Hya," not Cinthie, "Hya I'm so sorry, please -"

"That was never the right shade for you anyway, he was stupid to try," Hyacinth says, cutting her off. "Come on, I'll teach you how to take it off properly. It won't leave a trace."

(As good as a smear and mess was, she knew a better revenge was to make it all disappear completely.

The papers all said Queen Kye Disapproves Of Her Granddaughter’s Engagement: does this mark the end of the Kye Corporation? and the headlines make Jinny and Daisy laugh as they tear the papers up and drop them like stones into the trash. “I’m proud of you,” Jinny says, and Daisy beams back with her cheeks bright red.

“Yeah, well, I couldn’t let everyone else be disappointments to the family and not join in,” her cousin says proudly, holding out her left hand where a glimmer of rose gold shines on her ring finger. 

“Marks the end of the Kye Corporation,” Jinny says, giggling and snorting the way that she did. “I don’t know if grandmother’s going to give up that easily.”

Daisy shrugs, “fuck it, it’s not ours anymore. Now, Jinny Cakes, that’s what we should be focusing on. Something new and cool and better than Kye Corp ever was. Svetlana and I have been talking, she’s got some ideas for where we should market, she’s really creative like that and -”

“No, no, uh uh,” Jinny cuts her off, prodding her cousin in the stomach to elicit giggles.

“You still have a wedding to plan. No talk of business until after that.”

“I can talk business and weddings at the same time,” Daisy protests, a laugh still in her voice, but she doesn’t push the issue when Jinny shakes her head.

“Suppose grandma has a heart attack after the wedding,” Jinny says, a grin on her face that she’d show to no one else but her cousin, especially with such cruel words on her tongue. “We’d need to make sure incorporate that into our brand new beginning.” And, matching her cousin, Daisy grins back, staring lovingly at the ring on her finger.

“That would be cool, out with the old in with the new. We could use that as our slogan whether she kicks it or not, I think -”

She's had time to scatter on her bed (where her workspace has been relocated to, messier than ever) all the cargo she brought from Coake Mechanics and then get bored with it when sure as rain, it's Pepper Coake himself calling from the other end of the line when her phone rings.

She sounds bored when she greets him, a drowsy "Hello shitstain, what's up? You sound like you're dying... are you?" accompanied by a yawn, even though she is more than a bit interested and can more than guess what's up.

This is her side of her conversation, said in a droning, low voice punctuated by hmms and 'kays:

"Well I have no fucking idea where you left it so, bye."

"Why the fuck would anyone steal it. Why would anyone steal from you, full stop. You're the one who should be mugging people."

"You have to wait more than that to fill a missing person report, though."

"Pepper, don't cry, I'll buy you a lifetime supply"

"Yeah shitlord, I could even make you one with paper maché and spit and it'd still be better than that stinky wrench"

"Don't cry, Pepper,"

"I'm going to roll up tomorrow and if you're still crying, I'll find it just so I can beat you to near death with it."

"I know you're crying, I can hear you. I'm paraplegic, not fucking deaf."

"Yeah, I'll help you look for it tomorrow, yeah."

And finally a beep as she hangs up and tosses her phone back on her bed, leaves it to get lost amongst the bedsheets and the debris and all the bags of snacks.

She doesn't have to close her eyes to imagine the runny nose and the high pitched croak after Pepper found- or rather, didn't find. She knows him to the point of being able to tell without turning to look at him if he's keeping himself tightly locked as to not burst into tears in front of her. Not like it's hard. Not like it comes from growing closer. Pepper Coake is simple, not hard to read,

(Safe.)

Which gets us back to the wrench that left it's owners side safely stored in her carry-on with the rest of her cargo and that now she inspects this way and that in the relative safety of her room, her fingers sliding through every groove and indent.

It's cheap, as everything Pepper is. Not valuable, because “sentimental value” doesn't mean shit. It's useful, and that's all one could say about it- except for the fact that Pepper doesn't even use it. Monica doesn't think it could be used as a weapon, either, if it came to that. She doesn't see the appeal in treating it like the weird precious thing Pepper treats it as, but.

She spins it in her hands over and over, beats the air with it.

Whack, Whack, Whack.

(Yeah, I'll help you look.)

It’s always been the two of them.

Its only natural they would come up with such ideas.

(Young, alone for the evening, maman patting their identical heads equally when she says take care of each other now, maman will be home soon, though “soon” for eight year olds and “soon” for adults is a time zone that spans hours. They never think she returns home soon enough. Almost always, they’ve already tucked each other into bed, read stories and given each other “good night pecks”. Almost always, they’re already dozing off by the time the door opens.)

“Found these while I was unpacking earlier,” Parker says, lifting a small box onto the table where Adlai is chopping vegetables for dinner. They raise an eyebrow at Parker, setting aside their knife as Parker opens the box. Inside are photos, old polaroids from Parker’s youth, from his time in New York, then pictures the two of them took together back in their college days. Adlai laughs slightly, leaning in close and squinting to see better -- they’ve misplaced their glasses again. Which is, by the way, making cutting vegetables a little bit of a harrowing experience.

“You were a looker back then,” Adlai says calmly, looking between Parker’s hands. “So was I, actually.” They lean back and keep chopping.

Parker laughs quietly. The pictures with the two of them, those are fine. The ones where he’s younger are a little harder to look at, and it shows on his face. Adlai furrows their brow and goes to the sink to rinse off their hands. They pluck one from New York out of Parker’s hands and set it back in the box. Then they lift Parker’s hand to their mouth and brush their lips across Parker’s knuckles.

“You’re still handsome,” they decide, and let go just as quickly as they picked it up. They return to the vegetables. “Now put those away and help with dinner.”