Hospitals, offices, podiatrist clinics? Those are his bread and butter. Retirement communities? Not his taste, but he can do that.

Once or twice he’s gotten requests for the offices of public officials, and those were a challenge. But it was worth it for the self-satisfaction alone — and the added bonus of keeping him ahead of his rent for nearly a year.

His rules at least keep the garden variety pervs to a minimum. They might have helped cover chemotherapy treatments, but now that his mom’s in a better place, he doesn’t need to rely on them quite as heavily. But the money’s too good to give up entirely, especially nowadays. Especially if he ever wants to go back to art school, like he promised his mom when he did what an only son does and dropped out to take care of the woman who’d raised him alone.

He keeps meaning to re-enroll. Really. He can’t count how many times he’s logged back in to sign up for classes.

He’s just waiting for… something. More distance from his mom’s death, so all his work isn’t just about her and his own grief. More money in his savings account before he stops working full time.

He’s maybe waiting to feel alive again, but it would take him admitting that to himself to also admit that he’s not sure if it’s ever going to happen.

So when he gets an odd request from a Mr. Sunday (via an unexpected phone call, as if he’s trying to prove a point, rather than ordering through the dark web like a normal person), he goes through the motions of fulfilling it as usual. One series of cameras for a private home, single resident — okay, so probably just someone’s stalker, or an ex-spouse looking for more dirt for the divorce. A pain to set up, but he could do it in his sleep, and once it’s on he can charge for data storage/system upkeep. easy money.

The other is a series of cameras for… a family-run mortuary, in some little town he’s never heard of.

Not the first time he’s gotten a request for one of these, but they still unsettle him more than most.

Still, money’s money, and inflation is inflation. he preps his gear and sets the date.

The job, however, goes south faster than ice melts in this Louisiana summer.

He recognizes your car when he pulls his van up outside the address — your address. He knows you. You’re that person from his monthly book club who actually knows what they’re fucking talking about. The one who gives him that winning smile when he quietly backs up your points, or chats with him sometimes over the bad library coffee. The one he keeps meaning to work up the nerve to ask out, someday, eventually, when he feels like he actually has a life worth talking to someone about again. A life worth sharing.

The fuck does some sleazeball guy like Sunday want with you?

He finds out fast when the prick has the audacity to come over and flirt with you, while he’s snuck into your attic without you knowing. He can hear the guy making you laugh through the fucking vents, all charm and smarmy lines — he recognizes the voice that placed the order.

What’s worse, the smug son of a bitch even makes eye contact with him through the vent slats in your bedroom while he’s setting up a camera. as if he’s checking to make sure it got done. The insult to his professional pride would be enough to piss him off, but having him set up in your home is salt in the wound.

He doesn’t know who you know or what you’ve done to end up somehow involved with this guy, but fuck a contract. He has to find some way to warn you. Until then, he’ll keep an eye on you himself, to make sure whatever con Sunday’s trying to pull can be mitigated quickly.

You don’t deserve that. He can have enough of a spine to put it between you and this guy’s designs on you, at least.

The mortuary install doesn’t improve matters. Not only is the building fucking ancient and sprawling, making it a backbreaking effort to infiltrate and traverse, but the entire time he’s in there something feels… off. Like he’s being watched, despite being in parts of the house no other living thing should be. He hears sounds in the crawlspaces that almost felt in his ears like fragments of words, whimpers, whispers.

In the chilly space above one of the rooms, he thinks he smells his mother’s perfume — before the radiation turned it rancid on her skin.

Something - dust, or asbestos, or even a spider - falls just right between his shoulder blades to make him remember her fingertips. The way she had to gently tap him on the back when he got taller than her all too soon.

He’s trying to wipe the grit out of his eyes (that’s what it had to be, making them water like that) when in a tiny burst from his tablet, through the speakers, he hears it: a recording of her voice he couldn’t remember making. One he can’t find in the tablet’s memory or in the cloud storage connected to it afterwards that night, no matter what he searches.

‘Go home, mijo,’ she whispers. ‘Get away from these people.’

He about jumps out of his skin at that, nearly dropping his own very expensive equipment to the boards he’s treading.

When he checks the vent nearest him, trying to determine if he’s been detected, all he sees is a man in multiple layers of plastic PPE standing stock-still over a cadaver, an enormous needle-like object attached to a machine poised above the abdomen.

For oceans of time crammed in mere minutes, neither of them moves, as though one were waiting to see if the other would acknowledge them first.

When the man in the plastic mask drives the object into the body’s stomach, Hector makes his break for his exit.

He doesn’t breathe again until he makes it back to his van parked near the empty side of the property and locks the doors.

When the tablet shows him all cameras inside are active and broadcasting, he wonders briefly what he would’ve done if they hadn’t been. If he’d be brave enough to go back inside. To sit in those shadows again, his back to something he couldn’t name as he fiddled with some switches.

Driving away, he’s grateful he would never have to know.

Or so he thinks.

—

It’s only three weeks before Sunday was beginning to suspect interference. The cameras always seem to glitch when you’re changing, or whenever you look truly vulnerable. (If Hector has noticed that you’ve been crying more often since you started seeing this Sunday guy, there’s nothing he could do about it. not really. Not outside the odd bunch of local wildflowers that turn up on your doorstep, or your spotify shuffling to quiet, yearning melodies that you know aren’t on your playlist. Nothing that truly makes a difference.

Maybe he’s gotten in the bad habit of sitting parked across the street from your house whenever he knows Sunday should be leaving, but that’s just to check on you. To make sure that rat bastard, whatever he was doing, hasn’t gotten away with it.

If he’s started getting out of his car to sit by your bedroom window, hidden behind your crepe myrtle bushes outside, then that’s purely to make sure you’re really, truly okay. Not at all because he loves hearing your laugh when you watch tv, or your excitement when you talk on video chat with your friends, or when you sing along to your music, or your pensive expression when you’re reading that month’s book late at night on your bed—)

But if it takes that long for Sunday to catch on, then it only takes a couple days more for a manila envelope to show up in his always-empty mailbox. From there, it only takes another forty five minutes to have the contents of that envelope spread across his own kitchen table:

Photos. Real, physical printed photos. Of him.

Of him across the street from your house. Of him outside your window. of him at home, with one or two things that he may have maybe possibly slipped out of your laundry hamper when you’re out with Sunday.

Of what he does with them after, thinking he’s alone in the dark with the guilt of it.

Alongside these, a note in a precise, flowing handwriting:

"Tomorrow, 8 sharp, or they get these and more.”

Followed by an address that, one websearch later, turns out to belong to a tiny twenty-four hour diner not far from the mortuary Sunday asked him to bug.

So, of course, he goes. he goes early, even, trying to see if he can pick out his blackmailer from the camouflage of his mom’s old car, something other than his van. He half-suspects it's Sunday himself — he’s the only one who knows about Hector’s moonlighting, after all, he’s the one who placed the order. He’s the quickest connection between Hector and you.

But the person who sets off alarm bells in his brain isn’t his erstwhile employer. It's the pale guy in the glasses and suit who parks a hearse outside the diner and walks in, accompanied by an even paler woman in a wide-brimmed sun hat that hides most of her face, and a white dress that hides most of her body, and finally a dark-haired guy in a hoodie and sneakers —

With a professional-grade film camera, hanging prominently on a strap around his neck. like he wants it to be seen.

The three of them are sitting on one side of a table at the very back of the place, and when Hector sits down across from them, his hands itch for charcoal and good quality paper. The three of them have such distinct faces, all cheekbones and sunken eyes, clearly related despite how differently they each wear that same haunted look. Like they all grew up starved for sunlight.

The men are seated on either side of the woman, but she looks the least interested in being here, stirring her iced tea with barely a glance in Hector’s direction. “This him?” she says to her glass, and at first Hector can’t be sure who she’s talking to.

The man in glasses takes one look at Hector and sighs, pulling out a pack of nicotine gum from a pocket inside his suit jacket. “Yeah, that’s the guy from our vents.”

The man in the hoodie jerks his chin at the gum. “I thought you quit.”

“So did I,” Glasses guy says, but there’s more resignation than anything else. He gives Hector a grim smile as he pops a piece in his mouth. “You know, dependin’ how long you were up there, you could’ve been exposed to a good deal of formaldehyde.”

Hector shrugs at this. “Not the worst hazard I’ve run into.”

“You do that a lot?” Hoodie guy says. “Put cameras over embalming rooms for creeps?”

Hector feels a shudder run down his spine at the memory of the trocar plunging into the cadaver’s stomach. “No,” he says simply. “Not often.”

“Yeah?” Hoodie guy pulls a photo out of his pockets, holding it up like it’s a playing card and this is a trick. “What about in their house?”

It’s a photo of you at the book club meeting just last weekend, shot through the library window. The angle is such that it catches you while you’re looking at the ceiling, clearly choosing your words...

And Hector is seated next to you, his expression doing nothing to conceal just how you make him feel.

He goes to reach for it without thinking, his face threatening to overheat, and the whole table shifts.

tTe woman in the middle looks up to watch him, green eyes cat-like and curious now. This close to her, Hector can see the strange scar tissue running all along her jawline that the hat brim was hiding before.

Glasses guy sits forward in his chair, looking between Hector and the photo. When Hector looks his way, sheepish, he winces like he knows exactly what Hector’s feeling.

Hoodie guy leans back, the photo still between his fingers and a smug grin on his face. “That’s what I thought.”

“You don’t understand,” Hector says quickly. he takes a breath, trying to keep his voice from shifting too high with concern. “The guy that hired me - Sunday - he’s doing something to them. I don’t know what.” He feels as crazy as he’s sure he looks when he says this. “But it’s making them… sick. Depressed. Something.”

At the name, all three of them exchange a dark look. Like Hector’s let something vicious into the room even by speaking it.

“I’m just trying to help them,” Hector pleads. “You have to believe me.”

A long pause. more exchanged glances. A silent conversation.

The woman, at last, looks back to Hector. “What are you willing to do to protect them?” she asks, her voice low.

“Anything.” Hector speaks without hesitation, for once in his life.

“Anything?” Glasses guy repeats, peering owlishly at Hector over said frames.

Hector leans towards them across the table. “Whatever it takes. Whatever I have to do. I don’t care.” He shakes his head. “There’s nothing that scares me anymore, not after what I’ve seen. What I know people do to each other.” A bitter taste fills his mouth. “It just can’t happen to them. I won’t let it. I refuse.”

Another pause.

One by one, each of his blackmailers rests the index finger of their left hand on the tabletop.

He doesn’t realize they’ve voted on something until Glasses guy reads the back of the box of nicotine gum again before shrugging and popping a second piece in his mouth.

“Maxi Morvant,” he says with a crooked half-smile. he tucks the gum back into his suit jacket once again, then nods to the woman next to him. “Rora.” He adds in a mumble, like it’s a secret: “My sister.”

Rora nods to hoodie guy on her other side. “And this is our Hector. Our cousin.”

Hector stares at his counterpart, with his long glossy hair and hunger-pang good looks, and hates him immediately.

The other Hector smirks. “Hex is fine.” He gives Hector a lingering once-over, and his body isn’t sure whether to blush or clench his fists. “Saves us any… confusion.”

Hector decides he really hates Hex.

“Alright, Valentine,” Hex says the name like a taunt, and Hector’s blood runs cold.

Hex slides the library photo across the table so it’s right in front of him, like it’s nothing, like he’s got a hundred of them printed out somewhere.

“Tell us about your friend, there.”

Hector stares at you like a man asked to explain what beauty is to a martian.

They stay until it’s dark outside, planning your rescue from the creature in a man's skin that's stealing your life from you breath by breath.

(I don't know that this individual story with my OCs is going to much further than this snippet, but I might make a post of just Hector and his reader in this AU later on

reader notes: reader is primarily a queer, plus-size non-binary/genderqueer person. when I first wrote this a few years ago, they used she/they pronouns interchangeably, but in this version, I've made the choice to use exclusively 'they/them' pronouns. other characters may still use femme-esque nicknames in places, though I'm in the process of changing those too. there are discussions of PMS symptoms/menstruation, be advised. all mentions of skin and hair are kept as neutral as possible so any reader can have a seamless experience in regards to those, and any recommended tweaks are appreciated. reader's body size is usually only referred to in pleasurable/intimate contrast with other characters, no body negativity present. reader does at points have discussions of isolation/depression/suicidal ideation (based on my own experiences), so discretion is advised.

warnings:

sexuality related: explicit sexual content; explicit horror content; mention of established light D/s dynamics and daddy kink in a relationship (both partners are switches); blood kink, knife kink, spit kink; fluidswapping/eating; sex without protection; penetrative sex; oral sex (enby and cis male receiving); period sex; stalking/possessiveness as a kink; facesitting (enby receiving); marking; rough sex; dub-con at one point (one participant is possessed); lots of sex in cemeteries, churches, and other frowned-upon places.

violence/harm related: discussions of homophobia and being closeted in the US South; graphic violence and murder; brief discussions of an attempted reader-targeted drugging/date rape from an antagonist; brief sexism, homophobia, and transphobia from an antagonist; reader wields a knife and stabs other characters; descriptions of decayed/rotting flesh; depictions of embalming and other processes involving bodies of the deceased; depictions of necromancy, sacrifice, and demons that eat flesh; violence from a partner (while they're possessed); discussions of abusive family dynamics; discussions of past partner/familial homicide.

general heads up: discussion of gender experimentation and presentation play; mentions of death by aneurysm; mentions of family alcoholism; brief vomiting mention; brief depictions of drinking alcohol and being intoxicated; discussion of grief; discussion of losing a relative to cancer; discussion of pet murder/depictions of reanimated pet (dark humor); discussion of child death.

this has been one of my favorite stories I've ever written, and I'm so excited to get to repost it with some much-needed updates, now that it's years later and I understand the characters immeasurably better than I did the first time through.

Because, not only was she lucky in terms of the body — an already miraculous stroke of fortune — she was lucky in that the man who had once been her sniveling older brother was slipping.

Maybe it was from the latest mortal that caused him to deny his true nature, and his pathetic compulsion to follow them around like a lovesick puppy. Maybe it was due to the tinny vibrations of another, achingly familiar voice she’d heard the other night; one that she hadn’t heard in this House in over a decade, that compelled her to squeeze herself through the scraping, grating weaknesses in the salt barrier around her old bedroom to follow it, stinging and raw, up the staircase just for a listen. (If she’d still had a heart to speak of, it would’ve broken a little when she’d realized it was only a recording, and not the actual breath from his lungs.)

Either way, in Maxi’s haste to leave the House today — probably to insist on escorting the human somewhere, so paranoid he’d been lately — he’d forgotten to renew the salt in the embalming room. 

And today, with the body lying prone in the dim sepulchral cool on a steel table, there was just enough room in the ring for her to be able to make her way through.

She was gazing down in hushed awe at the slightly decayed face, having the worst time trying not to levitate in her own excitement. This was real. It was happening. She would accomplish what no Morvant had done since the earliest ancestors, the original acceptors of The Covenant — the ones who had transcended to join the demonic choir in the bottom layers of the House — and in doing so, stake her immediate and obvious claim a the true heir to her family’s necromantic legacy. 

After all, between Maxi losing what little spine he managed to develop, and Hector getting stalled by his own sloppy mistakes, why shouldn’t it be her? She’d always been the most studious, the most driven of the three. She had been the clear choice from the beginning, even if her father had been too set in his outdated foolishness to see it. Even if her mother refused to acknowledge the possibility that maybe she was meant for more than just carrying on the bloodline.

Decades of rage sluiced messily forward, and with it the sensations of her previous failure — sliding from her own physical body on a wave of ectoplasm, the feeling of her brother’s clammy hands clinging to her cooling shoulders, his tears splashing onto her ruined cheeks, her mother’s bellicose wailing — overwhelmed her, causing her to fuzz around the edges and lose sense of where she ended and the House began. She fought to focus, trying to set her feet solidly on the tile beneath her, shutting her eyes against time trying to tear her in two: one half here, the other years upon years ago, on the mercilessly solid floor of the bathroom between her and her brother’s rooms. She forced herself to stay grounded, stay as whole as she could, in a House that had refused to let her stay in one piece since she died.

For any other soul, this level of concentration and conviction would have been impossible. But she had been studying, all these years. Seated at the foot of the withered husk on the bone altar, she had listened to the endless whispering, the tongueless humming. 

Out of her first loss, she would find triumph that no one in the family had ever known, would never have been competent enough to know.

She was ready.

With a quiet, precise grinding, the grate above the metal chute in the floor began to slide loose.

On the steel table, something more than electrical impulses in cold muscle prompted the Jane Doe to sit up - for the first time since she had stopped breathing.

In the chamber underneath the foundation of the House (the one that shouldn’t exist this close to a bayou, that shouldn’t be structurally possible),  something began jerkily stirring behind a marble slab in the family mausoleum.

One where the name on the plaque had become eclipsed behind the slow creep of moss: 

Aurore Marie Morvant.

When Maxi walked in from an afternoon of keeping you company at your house (and trying not to reach for the scalpel in his vest pocket at every creak of your floorboards or settling of the wood), he found the usual spectral cacophony of the House, for once… completely silent.

As though hundreds of years’ worth of the dead and murdered had abruptly held their collective breath, the very air heavy enough with a sense of Wrong to nearly make him gag. 

Something that, in the face of constant decay — both natural and at his own hand — hadn’t happened for years.

Standing stock-still, Maxi pulled the scalpel free with his left hand, his right one clenching and unclenching at his side as he scanned as much as he could from the back door.

A strange flickering on the tiled kitchen floor revealed that not only was the door to the basement stairs open — something he definitely had locked before he left — the fluorescent lights were on, albeit… unsteadily. Like another kind of energy was overpowering the circuits.

The hair standing up at the back of his neck left no doubt that it was something necromantic.

Fuck. All his efforts to protect you — from what he was, from what he was meant to be, from the reality of his life — and he knew immediately from the way his gut twisted that it was all about to have been for naught.

The silence of the House continued to press insistently on his ears, and his nervous swallow did nothing to relieve the pressure building.

“Hector?” He called at last. “…Hex?” The name felt strange on his lips, the questioning lilt on the latter less an inquiry and more a feeling of pronouncing something incorrectly. Like he’d forgotten how, after so many years.

The only response was a sourceless breeze that swung the basement door open wider, nearly banging into the wall behind it.

If the scent of skin ruined by water and heat wasn’t enough to confirm something was absolutely wrong, the familiar droning overture of tongueless humming caused his heart to race until it physically hurt.

Bolting down the stairs two at a time, he found the salt in front of the embalming room door ever-so-slightly scattered; something disrupting his solid, carefully drawn line across the threshold floor like it had been pushed through. 

His head swiveling as he stepped inside, he knew immediately that the room was freezing  for reasons well beyond industrial refrigeration. The skin of his hands and palms abruptly crawled and itched in a way he hadn’t felt in years, since the last time he’d been around another indebted to They Who Provide. As his gaze found the now-bare embalming table, only stray traces of fluid remained to tell of the young woman’s body that had lain there, the shroud that covered it also absent.

Too close by, a set of footprints in a dull, oxidized red, lead in a haphazard gait to the steel hatch in the floor.

The hatch that had definitely not been open when he left.

With the presence of mind to grab a flashlight from a drawer, he descended to the chambers underneath — the ones that definitely should not exist.

The first thing within the scope of the light was the wall of his interred relatives. Between the plaque engraved for his mother, and the one to the left that already had his name and birth year carved into it, there was a cracked, gaping hole. Like something had somehow broken through solid marble from the inside, the nameplate dented on the floor amidst the rubble.

He turned from the empty tomb towards the altar at the front of the room, realizing there was still a low sound of something… slithering?

He couldn’t help but flinch as the light illuminated something across the room: a heap still in ragged grave cloth. The beam — slightly shaking as it lingered — revealed a small, delicate corpse in a once-white dress; obviously some decades old, hair clinging just barely to the remnants of a scalp and skin stretched like parchment over bones.

Except for the face. The face had been pulled clean off the skull.

“What the fuck.” He only just managed to keep his voice at a low whisper, despite the force of the sentiment.

At the sound of a sigh, his flashlight shot upwards to his father’s face, his empty eye sockets staring down from where the remnants of his torso had been pinned to the wall above an aged sepulcher of black, gleaming marble. 

Vincent Morvant was mostly undisturbed in his restraints, the movement of the thing inside his bones barely perceptible unless you were looking for it. 

But his face, rather than pointed upward in the eternal anguish customary to one made into the family figurehead, was very definitely pointed at something under the sepulcher, just out of the weak light of the few candles that were meant to remain eternally lit.

Something that looked like a body twitching and spasming under a sheet.

“Oh, goddamnit,” Maxi muttered. “Not today, whatever this is. I already have enough to deal with.”

There was a sound from under the cloth, a noise. He recognized it with a start as the sound of air passing through already decayed vocal chords. 

There was a pause, a hacking cough, and another wheeze — before, finally, he heard it:

“Rude.”

The thing sat up, the white cloth falling away to reveal… whatever the fuck was happening to its face. 

Maxi had seen a lot in his embalming career, but watching the leathery skin of his dead sister meld to the flesh of a fresh corpse was enough to even make him wince.

“You wanna tell me who the fuck you are?” he snapped, trying to sound more poised than he actually felt right now.

“Aw, Maxi,” said the voice, and it still didn’t sound quite right: like two people talking in unison, a girl in her late teens and a woman in her late thirties. The body from under the sheet wheezed again and made a dry rattling sound, as if trying to reconcile the two before it spoke once more. “Don’t tell me you aren’t excited to be a twin again.”

“My sister’s dead, pull the other one,” he deadpanned, but his left eye twitched.

The thing laughed, and it chilled him how close the sound was to one he hadn’t heard in twenty years.

“Death is relative,” the thing that looked and sounded like his sister said, pulling the sheet up over the fresh Y-incision. As her face finally settled into place over her borrowed skull, she attempted something like a twitchy imitation of a smile, the veins at the corners of her mouth discolored and bruising. “You of all people know that.”

He shrugged, poker face still in place. “You could be any damn fool who managed to wriggle into a body. Just ‘cause you stole some girl’s face don’t mean you’re— her.” He frowned as he stumbled over saying her name, unable to get it to leave his tongue.

And ‘any damn fool’ was doing some very heavy lifting, considering the sheer amount of power and skill it took.

The living were easy to possess: all the necessary machinations were still in place. Possessing the dead meant starting a lot of things over from scratch.

The revenant laughed again, the laugh closer now to what he remembered, like it was improving through iterations. “Fine. I’ll play nice.” She pulled her knees to her chest, tilting her head with a grin like a knife. “Tell me what you want me to say to prove it. Ask me anything at all.”

He stared at her, mind going immediately blank. How could an entire childhood be summed up in a question? What answer could confirm decades of scabbed knees and shared toys and whispered secrets?

“Oh! I know.” The revenant sat up further, almost eager. “You know what the last thing I heard was? Bleeding out on that cold bathroom floor, your hands doing jack shit to staunch the flow?”

Maxi felt his jaw drop slightly, the breath sucked from his lungs.

It leaned forward, eyes glittering in the dark. “When she wasn’t making a scene and carrying on like always, our mother said it should have been you.”

For a moment, the two just stared at each other — her silence gleeful, his stretching past dread and into cold realization.

If the thing in this body wasn’t his sister, then she was the damn closest imitation he’d ever seen.

“Look. I don’t know what the fuck you think you are,” he said aloud, not willing to crack in front of her. “But you—“

He never got to finish that threat, that ultimatum, whatever it might have been. Because a low rasp from somewhere else in the room, a third set of lungs desperate for air, made them both turn back towards the pinned figurehead.

The thing that used to be their father was smiling down at the corpse from upstairs, flakes of skin falling away from what was left of the preserved face. It took a while for the wheeze to turn into a word, but when Maxi recognized it, his blood ran cold:

“Rrrroraaaaa.”

Maxi turned from Vincent’s corpse to the now very apparently alive Jane Doe, the one who now looked like the woman his twin had never got to be. 

It took a lot to make him feel physically sick, but this was the closest he had felt in a while.

Rora Morvant tossed her hair triumphantly over her shoulder; a gesture he’d seen a million times, now with locks belonging to a stranger. “You were saying?”

(she is my beautiful perfect princess and I love her 😍

Actually, being the only stranger might not have been an exaggeration. Every so often, you felt the crawl of eyes across your skin when people thought you weren’t looking, or when you took another long sip of your drink. You might have been the topic of a few conversations even now, having moved to town three months ago. Greymoon was small enough that it didn’t seem to get newcomers regularly.

Though, the way people kept looking at you like they expected something bad to happen, you couldn’t imagine people moved here very often.

You looked down at your outfit, trying to keep your face outwardly blank. You didn’t think your clothes stuck out too much, even for the quiet part of Louisiana — hell, some of the people here were wearing less than you. It was a house party, after all. When you were pretty sure you didn’t have anyone looking at you, you quickly gave the shoulder of your top a sniff. These clothes were clean, and you’d even managed a shower before you’d been picked up after work. Was it the makeup you were wearing, or maybe what you weren’t? Your hair?

Or, maybe you made for kind of a disappointing stranger. You’d walked in here with your coworker, and after she’d pointedly shoved a drink in your hand, you had awkwardly followed her around a little as she worked the room before finally dismissing yourself to go sit on this couch in the back corner. You’d told her you were only going to be a minute, you just wanted to take things in, get the vibe of the place.

That had been… nearly an hour ago, according to your phone.

A thud to your right startled you, heralding a body falling onto the adjacent couch cushion.

“So are you just gonna sit here all night and pretend you’re not here,” said your coworker, Imari. “Or are you actually going to get up and make me not regret inviting you?”

Imari was gorgeous, with black skin like glass, lipstick that was somehow perfect at any point in her shift, and clever dark eyes that more often than not glittered like she had a private joke. She was too good for a town this small, and until you’d gotten to know each other, when she told you about taking care of her ailing grandmother, it was a mystery to you why she hadn’t left for somewhere that could appreciate her properly. While she could often be dry and sometimes cutting, she was the first person in town who had been genuinely kind to you, and tried to pierce the shell of awkward silence you’d taken to hiding yourself in. 

You gave her your best attempt at a half-smile. “Ugh, yeah. I’m sorry-”

“Don’t,” she said, shoving you lightly in the shoulder. “Don’t say sorry, that’s not what I’m asking for. I invited you so your sadsack self could get out of your house, and people could stop thinking I’m crazy when I tell them you’re actually funny. But you have to get up and talk to them for that to happen.” She glanced pointedly from you to the surrounding crowds. “They’re not gonna bite you, I swear. And if they want to, just make them ask first.”

You actually laughed, and Imari smiled. “See, that’s half your problem,” she said, relaxing further into the cushion next to you. “That’s the first time you’ve smiled all night.”

Honestly, if you were at a different point in your life, you would’ve had a giant crush on her already. You hadn’t realized she’d been paying attention to you, she’d been so busy talking to everyone she knew — which was seemingly everyone in the room. Your eyes fell to your drink again, hoping she didn’t see it all over your face. “No, you’re right,” you said quietly. “What’s the point of coming to a party if I don’t even try, yeah?” You glanced back at her as you took a sip from the red plastic cup you’d been clutching this whole time, trying to drown your nerves. “Thanks again for inviting me. That was really nice of you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” Imari ‘tsk’ed, taking a drink from her own cup. “Give it a bit. I bet you someone’s gonna do something real stupid, knowing this crowd.”

“Is that why you brought me along? To bear witness?” You were still smiling. Huh. It’d been a while since you felt like doing that.

“Partially the company, partially so you wouldn’t think I was bullshitting you on Monday.” Imari nudged you playfully. “In a place this small, crazy bubbles up whenever it sees an opportunity.”

You looked around the room, idly taking in the faces of the people chatting, drinking, some managing to dance despite the cramped space. “…Can I ask a stupid question?”

“Sure, anyone can.” She smirked at her own joke. “Shoot.”

“Whose house are we even at?”

She paused. “…You know what, fair enough.” She moved so she was sitting shoulder to shoulder with you, squinting slightly as she scoped the crowd. “You see that guy right there, with the sides cut out of his shirt like it’s still 2006?” She pointed with her chin to a beefy blonde white guy who had just stabbed the side of a tall boy can, and was now chugging for all he was worth.

“…Sure do, yeah,” you said, watching him crush the can with a loud whoop to his waiting buddies. 

She laughed, seeing your expression. “He only looks annoying as fuck, I swear, he’s actually alright. That’s Bubba. We’re in his daddy’s basement; he moved back home from Atlanta about six months ago, when he got laid off. Rent, y’know?”

You winced sympathetically. “Sure, yeah.” Your brow furrowed nonetheless, certain this guy was like… thirty-something. “…Does he ever get to not be ‘Bubba’?”

“Even if he didn’t live here, he still works as a coroner’s apprentice, and his daddy’s the coroner,” Imari said, shaking her head. “So… no, probably not.”

“Damn.” You took another sip of your drink. “And I thought I had problems.”

Imari let out a surprised giggle, her eyes alight, and you managed to smile at yourself. When was the last time you had made a joke?

Maybe there was hope for you after all.

But then Bubba broke away from his crew with a grin like a little kid with a secret, grabbing a shape in a faded purple Southern Comfort bottle bag off a shelf before unveiling it on the table with a flourish:

The Hand.

Sitting there on the grimy table, it looked… surprisingly mundane, despite the way a hush fell over the room.

It was coated in plaster that had once been white, dinginess having settled in as a patina amidst under layers and layers of scribbled missives in multiple languages. You could recognize some; a lot names, mostly. Maybe people who'd been here, or people they wanted to talk to.

There were other things you recognized too -- short messages: 'I want to see you.' 'Open your eyes.' 'Don't leave me.' 'Speak to me.' Evidence of all the other parties just like this one that it must have seen, all the people who must have reached out to complete the silent entreaty of its outstretched grasp.

'El diablo esta conmigo.' The devil is with me.

'L'enfer est vide.' Hell is empty...

You took another sip of your drink, refusing to finish that quote even in your mind. You'd heard rumors of what this thing was supposed to do, but you never actually thought you'd get to see it up close.

You’d seen it pop up in a few photos of people who knew people that you’ve just met, accompanied by strange reels - both of which had a tendency to disappear, pulled down almost immediately after. Videos of people with pitch black eyes as they held the Hand seemingly out of their minds: speaking in languages they don’t know, screaming words that don’t make sense, shrieking and raving at the top of their lungs as their body writhed with god knows what —

They almost looked... possessed.

But in those rictus grins that split their faces until the skin tore, the laughter high and mad and shrill in crowded rooms, you saw a glimmer of something that you hadn’t felt in forever.

They looked happy. Euphorically giddy. Like they’d never known what sadness was.

So when the party’s host looked expectantly at the knot of guests gathered around the chipped coffee table, their phones already out to film, but no one with the gumption to be the one in the chair, you surprised even yourself when you didn’t immediately return your gaze to your plastic red cup.

“It’s legit,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows at the waiting crowd. He was... cute-ish, in a homespun sort of way, you guessed: he had the muscles of a high school football star-turned-college benchwarmer, with bright brown eyes and cornsilk hair in a cut that would’ve looked like an e-boy’s... if his shirt didn't also have a faded Bass Pro Shops logo across the front. “The real deal. Story goes its the embalmed hand of a medium -- y'know, those guys that talk to ghosts?" He looked around eagerly for his guests' reactions, and you couldn't tell if he was wetting his lips from excitement or a touch of anxiety. "If you use it right, it'll let you talk to them, too." He preened a little as the crowd broke into curious murmurs, clearly proud of himself. "Snuck it outta the coroner’s office myself.”

“Aw, come on now, Bubba, you work there. Be honest,” called Imari. She tossed some of her locs over her shoulder, giving you a smirk before she looked back to the man standing in front of y'all. “Did you really sneak it out, or did you just stuff it down your pants when he put it on the evidence shelf?”

The crowd tittered, and Bubba rolled his eyes, trying to keep his showman's bravado in place. “Whatever, Mari,” he said, with all the familiarity of two people who’ve known each other since grade school. He leveled his gaze at her, raising an eyebrow. “You gonna do it, or are you just all talk?”

“And end up online screaming and spitting all over myself? Absolutely not, thank you very much.” Imari rolled her eyes in turn, settling in back in at your side.

“You heard it here, y'all! Imari Reeves is all talk.” Bubba stuck his tongue out at her, trying to look rakish but not quite able to pull it off. “Who isn’t, huh? We got anyone here with the balls?”

"Who the hell is that crazy?" she whispered to you.

You could barely manage a grimace, your eyes back on the layers of writing and thinking again about what you'd seen.

The grins. The eyes.

'Et tous les démons sons ici.'

And all the devils are here.

You didn't even notice yourself inhale, your lips dry, until a sound escaped unexpectedly between them:

“I’ll go.”

There was a pause as everyone turned to look at you. From Bubba's face alone, you almost thought he hadn't realized you could talk.

You felt Imari balk at your side, pulling back to try to look at you, but you didn’t turn to make eye contact or seek assurance. This was not something you want to see reflected back at you in someone else’s face.

This was you being stupid. Reckless.

But if you could feel even a fraction less of the empty ache that had come to inhabit the space behind your chest, you’d take it.

You got up right as Imari leaned towards you, looking concerned, and you barely registered as Bubba and a burly friend of his strapped you down to the wooden kitchen chair with multiple belts.

Your gaze was fixed on the Hand, still sitting on the rickety table and looking for all the world like an art piece. A conversation starter you’d buy at a local craft fair on the weekend, like the kind you used to go to with—

You cut off the thought, and when the guys finally step[ed aside, you nearly slammed your elbow on the table like you were about to arm wrestle the thing. “How do I do it?”

“You get ninety seconds. Just ninety, because otherwise they get too comfortable." Beckett made eye contact with a few of the people moving in for a closer look, before he leaned down next to you, the two of you suddenly close. Though you weren't touching, he gave off a surprising amount of heat, and his cologne wasn't unpleasant. More... nostalgic, in a college dorm sort of way. "You reach out,” he said softly, the whole room so quiet that his voice still fills the space “And hold it. Like you're shaking hands with it, you know? Ask it for what you want - say, ‘Talk to Me.’

“And then, when you see them,” he continued, and out of the corner of your eye, you caught him looking around for effect. “You say the magic words: ‘I let you in.’”

At this, the very air seemed to change, becoming… thicker, somehow. Heavier.

Like more bodies were pressing in around you than are actually in the room.

“…And then I feel it?” you asked, licking your lips nervously. Fuck talking to a ghost. You were no stranger to dead people, you knew enough of those.

You just wanted what came after. You just wanted the obscene-looking magic to take over your brain for a little while, to let you out of your own body. Let you just be… something else, for a while.

Maybe nothing at all.

Beckett looked over your shoulder, giving the crowd in front of you another showman’s grin. “You’ll feel somethin’, alright.”

Before the group finished tittering again, you caught another glance of Imari, her doe-ish black eyes watching you with a mix of anxiety and confusion. There was no impatience there now. It was all soft compassion. Like she was seeing you for the first time.

You had to look away before it could break through the numb shell around you. The one that put you in this chair. As kind as she was, compassion - pity - was not what you wanted to feel now. You needed something, anything else.

“Ready?” Beckett asked, his thumb hovering over the button to start the timer on his phone.

It was only for ninety seconds. If you hated it, then that was it. You'd never have to do it again.

But at least, for those ninety seconds, it would be something new.

You swallowed hard, looking back to the Hand.

Before Beckett had even given the signal, you seized the cold porcelain Hand in your sweaty palm.

“Talk to me.”

There was a rushing in your ears that drowned out Beckett scrambling to start the timer, people hurriedly hitting ‘record’ on their phones and whispering giddily to one another as they crowded in closer.

You realized without warning, without even a shimmer of a change, that you weren't holding the Hand anymore. You were holding the hand of someone sitting across from you, as though you'd meant to take theirs in the first place.

The other chair's new occupant was a thin girl in a tattered lace dress, with pale skin that seems almost... blue. At first you thought it was just the lighting down here, the shadows at play, but no. As you looked at her arm, at the hand holding yours, her nailbeds were blue too, and the skin at her knuckles as well.

'Hypoxia,' said the part of your brain that used to be smart. 'Oxygen deprivation.' You knew you were staring, but you couldn't help it; for it to be this obvious, she would have come close to - no, actually, must have suffocated.

When you looked back to her, taking in the frail figure before you, you realized with a jolt that she couldn't have been any older than eighteen. Her black hair hung heavily about her shoulders, obscuring her face. You could hear her trying to breathe underneath it, but it was wheezy, wet and stuttering, like too much air was getting in somehow. The hair at chest level was matted with still-wet clotting blood, seemingly from a deep laceration across her breast, where her heart would conceivably be...

But then she gasped a broken breath, and shifted her hair away from her face.

The wet sound, you realized, was coming from a hole torn through her skin - as though by acid, or some sort of gunshot wound - through the bottom of her mouth. Her tongue kept slipping thickly from the exposed mandible of her skull down towards her neck, which was also collapsing under the corrosive weight of whatever was still eating through her esophagus. You could still hear the faintest hissing sound as her flesh seemed to be eternally dissolving. Blood and saliva mingled in a thick pink river, staining the neck of her dress where you couldn't see before.

Now that her face was exposed, she looked up from her lap -- and locked eyes with you, as if realizing for the first time that you could see her.

When she lunged towards you across the table, you realized hers are the deepest shade of green you have ever seen.

She tried to speak — to scream, really — and the sound that came from somewhere at the edges of her gaping wound was muffled, squelching, but still upsettingly human-sounding.

You thought you could make out the bare semblance of a word. Her tongue didn't work, flopping uselessly outside of where her jaw should be, and there were no lips to give it shape. But her eyes filled in the context of what she's trying to say almost effortlessly:

"Please."

Immediately, you let go of her hand, somewhere on the verge of vomiting or screaming yourself.

The girl in the chair was gone.

Where her hand was, there was only the Hand, once again looking for all the world a weird find from a curio shop or someone's cousin's etsy store.

In her place, you stared once more at the mortified faces of the other party-goers.

They did not lower their lit, recording phones.

Only Imari didn't have one out, but her hands were otherwise occupied: covering her mouth in shock and horror as she stares at you, eyes silently screaming.

You whipped around to see Beckett, who was gawping at you with his mouth open like a fish. “Did you see her?” You were panting, your mouth suddenly too hot and too wet as your stomach twisted in on itself.

Beckett only shook his head, still stunned. “…No,” he said, when he finally remembered to speak. “No one sees the ghost but the holder. What did you see? Who?" He leaned closer, showmanship forgotten for pure curiosity.

“A girl. She was... her face." You went to gesture to your jaw with your hand, unable to speak the words, but it was unsteady. You were shivering.

You forcibly tried to shake your head as if to clear it, but when your eyes squeezed closed, it was like she was etched on the insides of your lids.

Her ruined mouth. Her eyes. Pleading for something you can't give.

"Is that it?” You opened your eyes to look back to Beckett, and then to the Hand, swallowing hard against the gag threatening at the back of your throat. That was barely anything. You wanted what you'd seen that mindless ecstasy, floating in a sea of chemicals in your brain and god knows what else. “Is it over?”

Beckett blinked at you like he was certain you’d lost it. “Nah,” he said, trying to get back into his party persona. He gave you an unsteady grin that just looked like a wince with teeth. “You didn’t say the second part. You just got a peek, that’s all.”

Imari started to rise cautiously from the couch, uncertain but taking the chance. “Look, it's getting late, and we closed today. Let's just--"

You beat her to the end of her sentence, grasping the Hand again. “Talk to me.”

The girl that had sat across from you is gone, but any relief you felt was cut short by the sight of the new person holding your hand.

A man. Older than you by a decade, you’d estimate. Or at least, he was.

He was bent nearly double in the chair, curling into himself, with brown hair hanging in lank, greasy clumps around his face. The hoodie he was wearing was black, but still gave off a shine from soaked patches scattered across his torso — blood, gleaming like an oil slick all over. Like he’d been drenched in it, when he finally took his last.

When he took a sudden, gasping inhale, like he’s just come up from underwater, your skin threatened to crawl off your body.

He jerked up, and you startled again — both from the motion (too quick, angled oddly) and from the face suddenly staring back at you through the hair.

Your stomach twisted in sympathetic pain, seeing the clearly broken bridge of a once-elegant nose, deep purple bruises blooming around both his eyes. If you imagined away the blood and the swelling, he might have been handsome, once.

But of everything you'd seen tonight, his eyes were perhaps the most… unreal thing about this encounter, seeming to be lit from within. They were glowing a color of purple that no human eye could possibly be.

When he opened his mouth to speak, blood spattered the floor, thick and nearly black. A stomach wound, the smart part of you said distantly. Something deep for the blood to be that dark. Maybe the hoodie was hiding stab wounds, something in his gut.

“Sunday’s still looking for me,” he groaned, his eyes unfocused. “He’s not gonna stop until he’s found all of us, until we’re all dead. More than dead. Escúchame.” He jerked closer to you across the table, and you flinched away from his pleading stare. “You gotta listen to me, bonita. You find my cousin, okay?” He licked his busted lips, blood congealing between his teeth as he hissed in pain. “You gotta warn him, warn my mom. He’s coming for all of them—“

He shuddered, racked with spasms of pain and curling again around a specific part of his body. You heard the muffled sound of more blood splashing against the floor. Despite your best instincts, the buried logical part of your brain screaming for you not to, you leaned slowly downwards to look under the table.

One of his hands was holding yours on the table: clammy, trembling, covered with sweat and missing a few fingernails, like they'd been ripped out. But it took you a minute to realize that there is no corresponding hand down below.

Instead you saw a ragged, torn hoodie sleeve that had been clumsily tied off with a ziptie, soaked through with blood that continued to drip into a steadily-growing puddle of red.

A tourniquet. Someone was trying to keep him alive, staunch blood flow, but it didn't work.

His hand being amputated must have been the thing that did him in. No one could have survived as much as he was bleeding over an extended period of time.

But why his hand? And what did they do with it?

"H-hey. Háblame, ángel."

Your gaze snapped back up to find him trying to lean even further across the table, staring at you and clearly in a pain you couldn’t begin to imagine.

For being dead, his eyes still managed to somehow look on the verge of manic.

"Escucha bien, okay? I need your help. You're the only one who can tell them what's happening, you can still save them. Please, ayúdame, I'm begging you." His eyes seemed to gleam an even brighter purple, and for a moment, you could've sworn they were wet with unshed tears. "It's too late for me, but I'll do anything, give you anything, if you can just get to them, please--"

Your mouth fell open, your lips stumbling to form words before you could speak again:

“...I let you in.”

You didn't know exactly what happened next, but all you saw was darkness.

You were finally - finally - weightless.

[I always felt kind of guilty about that Rora cameo, ngl. :'D but I feel worse about reader being so dead inside that they're just like 'yeah okay hold please' to Hector's plea!! and it only gets worse!!! Imari is actually a cameo from the manuscript version, but no one's seen that yet, so it only counts for me lmao