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the end

source: the devil all the time part: one/? pairing: arvin russell/reader requested: no tws: n/a (canon typical in later parts but this ones safe) word count: 1652 synopsis: you make some bread, and contemplate finality. extra: i wanted to challenge myself to write a reader insert without using y/n et cetera!! im so excited for this, and very proud :) Someone once told you that there is nothing in life that isn’t a beginning or an end. You’re not quite sure what you think about that, but you figure there must be some sense of truth to it. Hell, you reckon that if those words are true every damn thing you do is the beginning of the rest of your life. This train of thought will come back to you later.

For now, you wake up in the morning to begin your day, and eventually you’ll sleep at night to end it.

You open your dresser to begin looking for your outfit, and close the dresser to end that search. Naturally, you’ll put on your clothes to begin wearing them, and take them off at some point to end that.

You open the window in your kitchen to begin a steady flow of fresh air, but you won’t get a chance to close, and thus end, it.

Later, all the beginnings you started and endings you caused in the coming few days will become viscerally apparent to you. You’ll wonder which one is more important; those beginnings or endings? You’ll wonder if that matters at all. It probably doesn’t.

Currently, you are kneading the dough that you began only 15 minutes ago for a loaf of bread that you’ll never get to eat. Your radio plays quietly in the corner of the kitchen and you sing along, finding a rhythm in your movement. You feel as though you could live in this moment for the rest of your life and stay happy the whole time. But of course, the song ends so another can begin and your timer goes off to tell you’ve kneaded enough, and the tranquility of the moment slowly dissipates. You wet a towel and delicately place it on top of the lump of dough, and set it into a bowl and aside to begin it’s second hour of rising. That means that you have an hour to yourself, and you resign yourself to laundry. It gets boring pretty quickly, however, so you resolve to finish this load and continue a book you started reading last week.

You’re only a few chapters from the end. You like it well enough- the characters are charming and the plot is compelling- but the pacing of it all is what’s really losing you. It started as a decent slow burn character study into the mind of a troubled woman that tragedy followed like a shy dog, which you find interesting. However, at some point it seemed like the author was as swept up in the world as you were and was caught off guard by the need for an ending. The past few chapters have been a rushed attempt at a satisfying conclusion, and the original message of the story has been lost. The woman started out as thoughtful and resilient, despite the shit life kept throwing at her. You like her a lot. At this point in the book, though, things should be calming down. They aren’t.

You pick up the book where you left off, and immediately it seems to be trending in an unnecessarily painful direction. You wouldn’t dare tell anyone, but you definitely prefer a happy ending. The appeal in watching decent people suffer for nothing is lost on you. It makes it difficult to ignore the more uncomfortable truths of the town you live in.

By the time you’ve gotten to the last chapter, your timer is going off again, letting you know that it’s time to move your dough from under the towel and in the bowl to the oven. You leave the book open on the counter (it stays, because you accidentally broke the spine when you first bought the book. Your best friend chided you for getting as upset as you did. “There are bigger things in life to worry about than a 50¢ paperback novel, darlin’.” He had said.) and stand to wash your hands. The front door opens and closes as you turn on the water, and you call out a greeting to your father. There is no reply while you move the dough to a pan, and you wait a moment before calling out again. This time you get an answer, though the voice that responds is not your father. A smile creeps its way onto your face as you slide the pan into the oven and close the door.

Something you’ve noticed about Arvin Russel is the way he refers to the people. It’s never “good afternoon,” or “thank you,” or “how are ya?”; it’s always a “good afternoon miss,” or “thank you ma’am,” or “how are ya, sir”. He calls his sister Lenora little lady or hun; his grandmother is grandma or ma’am; his grandfather is grandpa or sir. Friends are bud and fella, and enemies are any number of vile swears and adjectives. You’re doll or darlin’, and you have been since you found him hiding behind the school back on the first day of sixth grade. It’s common down here in the south to call people anything but their name whether it be from respect or the opposite, but even as a child Arvin seemed to actively avoid using someone’s name unless he was saying something that he needed you to know he meant. Most people figured he was just some overly respectful kid, but you’ve always suspected that he just understands the power of his words. As you got older, you got the sense to wonder why a kid so young seemed to know so much about power and violence, both mental and physical. You’ve heard the rumors about why he moved to Coal Creek in the first place, but it never came to you to just ask if they were true and what living in Knockemstiff was like. You never considered it your business.

That’s all to say that when Arvin Russel greets you by name in your kitchen at 3:30 PM on a Saturday in the fine year of 1965, your hand stops on its way to the kitchen timer. A quick glance at the clock confirms that Arvin has work in 10 minutes, and you know that you live a solid 15 away from where he needs to be. You turn to face him, apprehensively studying the way he sits on a stool on the opposite side of the island that divides the room. He sits with a slump that shows an extent of exhaustion that seems deeper than the physical body. You wonder if someone’s soul could yawn. He seems like he hasn’t been able to relax all day, and even now there’s tension in his shoulders. Not to mention that his breathing’s uneven and he’s sweating like a sinner in church, so you decide to dampen a washcloth before asking any questions. He looks at you in such a way while you dab at his damp brow that chips away at your heart. He’s looked haunted since you met him, like Satan himself is dancing in his peripheral, always 3 steps away from finally claiming his soul, and you wonder for a moment if he’s always fought the devil all the time.

“Christ almighty Arvin, what happened t’you?” You ask, blotting away at his forehead.

His eyes snap into focus at that, like he’s remembering something, and he pushes out of his seat, snatching the cloth from your hand. “We gotta leave, doll,”

You look at him incredulously. “What in the world? You sit yourself back down and tell me what is goin-”

Arvin interrupts you by saying your name again. “I mean it,” he says, and you believe him. “You got- you got to get on packin’ and we gotta leave.”

“I’m not packin’ anything until you tell me what the hell is goin’ on, Arvin Russel. I mean it.” You say, and he believes you.

Unfortunately, you’ll come to understand that he doesn’t have the time to explain.

The two of you have fantasized about skipping town more times than you could count. A couple of times, you even packed your bags into the back of Arvin’s jalopy before school, planning on picking up Lenora and never looking back at this shithole. You were serious about it too, your father and whatever spends its time haunting Arvin giving you more than enough motivation. Still, you stayed. Arvin would say he’d miss his grandmother, which was true, but you both knew it wasn't what Lenora would want. After she died, Arvin swore he should have said damn it all and left anyway.

When he makes eye contact with you again, you know whatever is happening now is different than your idealized life on the run. Every time you planned this, you both swore you’d do it all together, and that included choosing the right time. Arvin was so particular about choosing the right time. Now, it seems that whatever he did that you two are running from didn’t have a right time. It just had to happen, and he was tired of waiting. A sense of dread nags at you perversely, and you know suddenly and without a doubt that if you don’t go with him now, you’ll never see him again.

He drops the rag then and leaves the kitchen with a sense of urgency you’ve never seen, and you tear after him. You meet him in your room and you both throw together two bags of your bare essentials. You’re out the door and shoving the bags into his trunk before you even get a chance to turn off the oven.

It won’t be until you’re leaning your head on the passenger window of Arvin’s automobile, speeding past the sign that cheerily reads You are now leaving Coal Creek! We hope to see you again soon!, that you will realize that you forgot your book at home.

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