#stokcd

They were sat as close as they could be on the lounge, a couple of inches apart still but close enough that she could feel cooler on the side where he was. An infinitesimal difference, but one she had grown to know well. At first she doesn’t know what to say and so she stays quiet, she hadn’t felt true fear in a long time, not since...

“ The first time I remember being scared I was twelve years old. I’d been at Hilltop a few months and I knew something was... wrong, but I hadn’t seen it, you know? ” for all the watching she had done. “ And then I went down to the basement. ”

It was a funny thing. After everything she had seen as a child; all of the fear and pain she had been fed, she hadn’t known it herself until that house. Until she saw the others that were suppose to have left. 

“ They were so still, except for their bellies. They were engorged and they would sometimes... move, like something was alive inside, ” she had stood there for what felt hours, looking up at the husks of those children and felt the fear for the first time; the cold grip of it starting at the base of her neck and paralysing her. “ I thought, that maybe that was why they had sent me there. Maybe they didn’t love me anymore and they had given me to Raymond to make one of those... things. ”

She swallows hard at the memory, so vivid even decades later. Agnes only takes the moment to sit in horrified recollection though, because this wasn’t about her fear       it was about his.

THIS ISN'T exactly how it was supposed to go. Point is, humans rarely take the truth well - which made him so reluctant to talk about himself in full, honest detail, and can you even blame him for that - and he has gone through cycles of denial, rage, and fear countless times, and this isn't the first time someone points a weapon at him, but he can't deny he expected a different reaction. More understanding, maybe. Or, well, not understanding, just... something better. As if being neck deep into the supernatural would help Tim accept Sy's confession faster. And yet there they are, a desk between them and a knife poi ring straight at Sy's chest. Even if a blade won't be enough to kill him he'd still rather avoid getting stabbed, thus he keeps his arms slightly raised, hands open to show the other he has nothing to hide. He looks concerned rather than scared or shocked.

"I don't wanna kill you. Never did. Never planned t' hurt any a' you guys here." He doesn't know who Tim is talking about, but that matters so little at the moment. Right now his priority is explaining himself, giving all the good reasons to trust him and drop the knife down, because at the end of the day he has grown to like this boy and he'd hate to destroy what's just been born because of a misunderstanding. He can't allow it to happen. (Idly, he wonders if mister Bouchard can see this. If he's enjoying the show. That thought only manages to fuel his determination.)

He has her there and she acquiesces with a purse of her lips and a slight inclination of her head. 

Optimism wasn’t exactly her beat. Born into this world amongst the smouldering remains of her mother and raised while being primed for the ultimate destruction of it. Agnes was familiar with all the bad that words could do. 

But... she also thinks of Jack      long, meandering conversations that meant nothing and everything at the same time. She thinks of the children in the home of Raymond Fielding, how they would talk and laugh and she would listen. 

How doubt had been building in her belly long before she had told the Lightless Flame. And all because of the words of strangers, not even any that meaningful. Just... normal. 

“ They can though, just not as often as we would like, ” she knows he’s uncomfortable around her, can see it in his posture, but she can’t help but want to seek out the company. If only for a short burst of time. Her place in the archives with them was undetermined and she spent so very much of it alone. 

Gerry snorts at Tim’s repeated insistence that he is the expert on the topic.  Imagine—him, the expert on Jurgen fucking Leitner—God forbid.  He has absolutely no desire to be considered a scholar on the topic, to answer too many questions or give lectures or whatever else.  “I’d hardly call me an expert,” he says.  “All I do is set fire to his shit.  I’m as much an expert on Leitner as an arsonist is an interior designer.”  He tries to know as little as possible, to strike a match and be done with all of it.

Still, he knows more about them than some other people, whether he wants to or not, so he nods.  “Sure, sometimes there’s the Compulsion aspect of them, where they pick victims, but anyone can read them, even the person they’re not intended for.”  How many assistants had Leitner gone through, people who weren’t compelled by anything other than the man himself?  “So, as a general rule, it’s what’s inside them that counts the most.”

❥ 𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐓𝐒. || not accepting. || @stokcd

     QUITE THE reaction he was expecting, and to be honest this one time he can’t blame Tim for it. They parted ways in the worst way possible - anger and regret and heartbreak all swirling in the same vortex, dragging them further down and away from each other - and then his death sealed the end of their story without leaving any room for an eventual reconciliation. Or so it seemed. Sy - although names feel even more constricting than before; it was bound to happen when his own vessel lost any sort of stability, adapting to the drastic changes of the world and mankind - Sy, or the Entity that once wore that name like his favorite dress knows that the one standing before you is and isn’t Tim. All wrong and all right. Different to tell the old and the new from one another, and nonetheless he’s glad this encounter happened. It fills him with relief, and then that same emotion pours out of his cracked body, warping and sculpting the melodies cascading out of him.

     The snarl, well; that can be justified easily. Any semblance of human disguise has mostly worn off him, leaving but a vaguely humanoid shape that pulsates and trembles in the light following the rhythm of the landscape he’s in. Sharp angles, body parts coming and going, dissolving and being rebuilt out of thin air and sounds - the new music of a tortured world. If he focuses, though, his face can resurface, although it won’t be any more than a vague outline if compared to what it used to look like. Even the hands he raises aren’t hands. They’re songs talking about hands and the perfection of each finger and nail and blemished skin, the projection of an image into another’s mind. He is here and everywhere else - in the battlefields of the Piper, in the endless carousel of the Stranger, in the endless nightmares of the Dark. Not a god but almost. The closest to his true self he can afford to be here.

It was nice to be out of the archives. Agnes often felt a solace in the outdoors, with the fresh air and the sun on her skin reminding her that for all of her own power, there was something out there that burned brighter and hotter. This universe was so much bigger than her very small destiny and sometimes she took comfort in that. 

“ Where would we go? ” both of them knew that it wasn’t actually an option. He couldn’t leave the archives any more than she could live a normal life. They were both tied to their respective patrons ( her to more than one ), just two people who had found themselves in impossible situations. 

But it was lovely to imagine. To fantasise. 

“ I’ve always wanted to visit Australia. I used to go to this second-hand bookstore in Brixton, ” in the nineties, it had closed down sometime in 2002. “     I’d spend hours with the travel books and... I always thought the beaches looked amazing there. White sand and blue water - they’re so different to the beaches here. ”

She looks out over the water, at sky reflected on the surface, disrupted occasionally by the paddle of ducks. It was lovely, but she’d thought she’d love to get lost in the endless heat of a southern summer. 

She's stirred from her reading by the sound of the door creaking open and looks up, the second edition copy of Tender is the Night forgotten atop the bench as she spots the colourful bouquet in his hands.

Nobody had ever gotten her flowers before and she's delighted at the sweet gesture, smiling ear to ear. It felt so normal. A man coming by his girlfriend's home and bringing her flowers. It was what she had read about in books and seen in movies and watched out in the world that she had never before felt like she was a part of.

" For me? " instinct has her stepping around the bench to meet him halfway, reaching for the flowers before she thinks better of it. Agnes doesn't let it sully her good mood though, she simply backpedals, turning and ducking her head into cabinets before finding an empty jar big enough to home her present ( she isn't even entirely sure how the glass jar had gotten there, but she's thankful for it ). She fills it three-quarters of the way before turning and holding it out for him to put the flowers in.

Once they're settled she carefully plucks a single honeysuckle from the bunch and brings it to her nose, deeply inhaling the warm, nectarous scent. The stem of it singes in her hand and she knows it will die quicker than the rest of the bouquet sat untouched by her in the water, but she doesn't mind, because for a moment she can pretend.

Love had always been a foreign concept to her     something intangible that always seemed to pass her by but never hit the mark. 

Whoever her father had been was a secret that went up in flames alongside the body of the woman who brought her into this world. The one whose skin had bubbled and cracked, cooked flesh falling from her bone into ashes so that she could bring her into the world. If that was an act of love, it hadn’t been for her. 

Neither had the anything the Lightless Flame had ever done for her. The moments of nourishment and doting, the way they worshipped and fawned over her. It had been the same breed of love that had taken up residence in her mother. For an eldritch horror, not for her. Not even Jude who had looked at her with fire in her eyes and hunger twisting her mouth. Agnes had often confused it for love when she was young, but as she grew older and wiser she saw it for what it was. 

And then there was Jack      with his lopsided smile and his ability to talk about nothing at all and still compel her to listen. His was a different kind, but on the same vein. Where the cult had loved her only for her horrors, he loved her only for her mystery, naïve to the ugliness that lie below. He had been a short-lived infatuation for her, a curiosity that needed itching. And while she regretted the hurt she had caused him, he didn’t sit at the forefront of her mind the way a loved one should. 

She thinks as she looks at Tim that she knows now, what it feels like. That the concept had long since become foreign and she just hadn’t realised. And the cruelness of not being able to indulge was not lost on her. Even as she had ceased to give her patron what it hungered for, it took what it wanted now. For every soul she did not torment, she was being tormented. There was something about reaping what you sow in that. 

She’s so close to him that she can feel the soft puffs of his breath on her cheek, cool against the ever burning and she knows that he feels the opposite in turn. That they straddle the line of danger in being so close and yet can’t pull away, compelled to take as much as they could without falling over the edge. 

Her eyes fall to his lips and tightening want curls in her belly, chasing away the fire in her veins and replacing it with something just as molten, but in a better way. The kind a person was suppose to have, the kind that begged indulgence. 

Agnes wonders what he would taste like, what his hands on her would feel like      she wonders on all of the things she misses out on that make a person human. Something she wasn’t. 

It’s that thought that finally as her pull away, the desperate cord of desire between them torn as she stands, walking away from him a few steps. Enough to clear her head. 

She would have loved to have loved him the way he deserved. Instead she can only give him this; heated glances and almost touches, settling for the intoxicating headiness of looking but never touching. It isn’t fair on him, for her to trap him in this prison of isolation with her. To leave him cold while she burns so hot she feels numb. 

“ You shouldn’t have to, ” she murmurs after the longest of moments, not looking at him because she felt shame     for all she was and all she could never be. “ You should be kissing all kinds of people. You shouldn’t be stuck here doing this with me, ” doing the same dance over and over that was never given sweet resolution.