flypaper.
Watchmen.
Traps; some intentional, some not.
Another kink meme prompt: Rorschach/Laurie, pre-OT3, with vague Laurie/Dan and Rorschach/Dan.
(aka: procrastination is fucking AWESOME, at this rate I'm never going to finish that slew of festering unfinished original pieces, etc etc etccc)
This started as quick smut, then evolved into some god-awful longer thing, THEN refused to end until I scrapped the original sexins and wrote in something entirely different. Oh, boy.
The first time they met, she had nightmares for almost a week.
He'd appear from stillness, from chilled gloom, from absolutely nowhere - slinking not from shadowed alleyways, but those vague places that exist only in dreams yet still seem familiar, like the spookhouses on the Coney Island boardwalk her mother took her to as a kid (plunging into darkness, the sharp clack of rusted chain pulling pretzel cars along, false-faced monsters made of plastic and groaning metal sliding out from behind walls to appreciative shrieks) - and with gloved fingers he'd peel back that unnatural (no other word for it) mask, something straight from the grisly third reel of a horror film, just peel it back, revealing an utterly blank, featureless face, only the hollowed impression of bone structure beneath sick flesh, no mouth, no nostrils, no eyes--
(It's easier, hating someone than being afraid of them.)
-
He works with Dan on fixing the ship, sometimes; emerges from the basement with grease streaked like warpaint high on his cheekbones.
He's only stopped wearing his "face" inside the house because Dan asked, she knows. This somehow annoys her more than it would've if he'd just kept wearing the goddamn thing.
She doesn't voice her suspicions on just what exactly they get up to when they're down there alone, of things pulled apart and put gaspingly back together, things aside from Dan's collection of mechanical toys.
She knows. God, she'd be blind if she didn't, to not see it, that ease at reading one another's movements, remnants of their old crimefighting partnership seeping through--
(Watching the two of them, their silent camaraderie, makes something twist in her gut, like they're characters in a book she discovered with the first few chapters ripped out, those missing pages strangely important ones she's never going to understand just by asking. And it's odd, probably, to be jealous of just that, that history - yet while she doesn't miss the calm strangeness of being with Jon, she still feels like part of her has been ripped away with him, her own piece of history nestled comfortably between distant constellations.)
-
She's in an oversized button-down over a pair of faded panties, sleeves rolled to her elbows and singing (shouting) at her loudest (voice cracking slightly at look at you with your mouth watering). Making over easy eggs for one. Pretending Mark Mothersbaugh wouldn't want her unskilled vocal cords severed if he'd been there to hear her. There's the soft creak of bare feet on wood and she spins on reflex, spatula gripped lamely in one fist, glimpsing him at the doorframe, just-- just standing, watching, that slack mouth surely the result of her tone-deaf performance.
"I-- I didn't know anyone else was here--" she stutters, hating herself for it, hating him more for the dismissive grunt he throws her way before disappearing down the hallway, and she hadn't known, goddamn it, she never knows half the time when he's going to slink into the house unexpectedly - it's like living with a particularly large, particularly offensive cockroach--
-
She likes blaring Tom Tom Club from crumbling speakers at two in the afternoon. Just because she can.
Just to piss him off.
(Let's just chalk this one up to "making up for lost time"; not like she had time to be a real teenager the first go 'round, anyway. Part of her suspects he didn't, either.)
-
Disappointing Dan always feels like disappointing a parent - a beloved, overworked parent.
(God-- what psychiatrist wouldn't go to town on that train of thought.)
He grips the kitchen counter with those same large-knuckled hands that soothed hot, slow circles between her legs last night, sighing over stale coffee. Time for a talk, apparently. She itches to light a cigarette, then remembers she's supposed to be in the middle of "quitting"; starts tearing open a tangerine with bare fingernails, instead.
"Can't you be more--" he stops, slides his glasses up his nose, turns to face her, starts again "--more positive, towards each other?"
It's a hell of an understatement. And they both know it.
Juice crawls down her hand, cooled acid settling into the spaces between her fingers. She tears out a section of fruit and swallows without really chewing, lets the ragged flesh work its way down her throat.
He started it.
-
She remembers the paper boy they used to have, back when she was a kid.
Jimmy Linnell - with his sun-streaked blond cowlick and nasty smile, who tried to hit her with the Tribune every time he zoomed past on his rusting ten-speed Raleigh (That means he likes you, her mother told her after she'd relayed this information for the first time, and she'd gone to her room and sat listening to records for the next hour, thirteen and confused and skinny in all the wrong places, thinking that her mother had never made less sense in her life), and the next morning when Jimmy rode by, she smiled sweetly at him as the paper clipped her ear, smiled even wider when she perfected her first double-jab on his goddamn smirking freckled face two weeks later.
Sometimes, she likes getting good and drunk before calling her mother.
At least that way, she thinks, they'll be on the same wavelength.
-
Restless sleep comes with twisted sheets, dry and heavy on overheated skin. Her teeth gnash in crude Morse code, scraping dead skin from her tongue, trying to erase the sour taste in her mouth, and those perverse thoughts that seem almost sane in the four a.m. darkness come scrabbling not far behind.
She feels as lifeless as she did those nights when Dan's fingers bit hard into her hip and she cried out too sharply (he can be good and rough when she coaxes him into it), eyes flying open, struggling to adjust to dim light and hearing the groan of weight outside the half-opened door, seeing that dark blot of shadow against pale grey wall, that awful hollow look on his face.
Like he was experiencing a violent kind of déjà vu.
(When she's feeling spiteful, sometimes, she makes sure not to close the door the whole way.)
She wonders if he looks at them and sees only the dark, thrashing limbs of a monstrous spider, jaws slick with blood, open, waiting.
She wonders if she watches too many late night B-movies.
-
There are voices, low and intense, coming from down the hallway.
She's woken from another uneasy dream (only endless falling, in this one), damp bangs sticking to her forehead, and for some stupid, irrationally hysterical moment, thinks she's six years old, at her old house again, that it's her mother and Laurence who are clearly arguing (that's what the steady, cadenced beat of those voices always means, after all - the slower and softer the pace, the sharper the words), that they're arguing about her.
She pulls on her robe. Moving down the darkened hallway, she tries not to think of plywood spookhouses.
They're standing several paces apart in the kitchen, stiff-shouldered and tight-jawed, and even though she doesn't know what's happened, in her mind's eye she sees a bright white chalk mark drawn on the smooth tile between them, some damn sitcom cliché. (Until things are worked out, boys, why don't you each take a half of the room?) She always feels a certain bitter satisfaction when he's just as stubborn with Dan as he is with her.
"What's going on?" she mumbles, voice thick with sleep as she pads over to the fridge. She stands surveying its contents for a good minute, not really hungry but needing to gnaw on something, anyway, considering a half-gone chocolate bar wrapped clumsily in foil a good enough substitute (this is I Am Definitely Quitting This Time attempt number fourteen, folks) before Dan chuckles darkly, a sound that raises gooseflesh on the back of her neck.
Rorschach, apparently, thinks it's time they've already moved on ("unwise to keep complacently rooted" seems to be his mantra, tonight). Dan disagrees.
He's already staring (expressionlessly) out of the cramped window over the sink, get this over with written over every inch of his posture, every line on that rapidly-aging face, and it suddenly strikes her that he's expecting her to side with Dan. They both are.
(She hates to admit it, she truly does, but--)
"It's... it's a good idea, Dan."
She gets nervous as hell, anymore, just from being in this city. Especially when it feels like they've betrayed it.
Dual stares turn on her, one surprised, one quietly judging. She feels like an insect pinned under a microscope, because he doesn't look at her, just looks right fucking through her, stripping away layers of skin and muscle and smoke and bullshit she takes care to hide behind on a daily basis, just peels it all down to the raw ugly bone, and okay, sure, she hates him for that, too.
She coughs.
"And now that the token female's said her piece, she's going for a smoke."
Dan doesn't raise his eyebrows, tell her to be careful. Doesn't point out her verbal slip.
(Maybe things are changing.)
-
He's terrifying to watch when he's practicing.
His movement is so terribly brutal, like he's bottled every inch of hate and hurt he's ever felt and is driving it into every hit aimed at the swaying, wheezing leather; the cold fury curling that flat mouth, creeping slow onto a face always so carefully arranged into dull apathy, usually makes her shiver and pass quickly by.
Scarred muscle strains beneath a thin undershirt, soaked through with perspiration. She tells herself she's fascinated by the inner workings of such efficient violence.
(Her dry throat has nothing to do with the sinewy pull of muscle under broken flesh.)
That's clearly why she strides in without waiting her turn for their makeshift little gym, why she lets those fighting hands slowly bruise her shoulders, her waist, lead her into the perfect stance for a jaw-shattering uppercut.
-
The pound of leather on concrete has been trailing her for three blocks, now.
It's so soft, so discreet, that she wouldn't have heard it if she hadn't been listening for it all this time (another well-worn habit of the paranoid fugitive), and when it finally speeds up, finally comes close enough to be not more than several yards behind, she twists around without a second thought, every muscle tensed for a fight-- heaves a sigh when she sees him.
(Partly relief; mostly wilted disappointment.)
"Not safe out here alone."
That voice is like metal scraped flat over gravel. She tries not to shudder at it; instead, focuses her strained anger on how unapologetic he is for frightening her. His expression is so detached, dirty coat collar raised high around his neck like a battered shield. Like it's not eighty fucking degrees outside.
She wants to hit him but can't; presses a palm against the side of her neck, a forgotten habit, annoyed to find she's already perspiring from the summer humidity. She's trying to think of a suitably biting retort - something about being able to take care of herself, thanks, dutiful representative of the misogyny brigade - sucking air in shakily through her teeth.
What comes out, instead, is:
"Is it anywhere?"
-
His skin doesn't fit his face right. It's almost another well-worn mask; that short stub of nose looks like it's been broken more than once, doesn't match his square jaw or sloping brow (the surprise of littered freckles turn him into a half-man/half-boy hybrid, perfect for bouts of twisted, childish logic).
It's nothing and everything like she always expected. So mangy-looking, just like a dog-- like an old stray dog with hackles always raised, beaten into snarling ferocity.
This comparison twists deep into her memory, suddenly makes her uncomfortable. Reminds her of that shy childhood pledge to work with lost, abandoned animals, stitch them up, take care of them when no one else would.
-
Dan's gone for the afternoon. (She's done with these games.)
He stands scouring a pan in the sink like it's personally insulted him; she's staring at the dark yellow bruise on his ankle, visible below the fray of his worn trouser leg.
"I know you were there, watching us," she says, suddenly. He stiffens.
-
She traps him beneath her like an animal, like a snarling thing that curls into itself in shame when she skims the heel of her hand over his hip, grazing the hot flesh just below his navel, slowly pressing harder until he lets out a startled hiss. She tilts her head forward, brushes her lips over the space between that flat bottom lip and stubble-rough chin; he growls, jerks his head back like his veins were shot through with cold electric current, and completely exposes his throat to her.
That's when she attacks (the ol' one-two-three, as always; she should probably feel guilty for using his own technique against him - she just feels frantic, furious), scrapes grinning teeth against the slick skin of his neck, his jaw, nipping at the tremulous bob of his Adam's apple; he whines low in his throat, wide-knuckled hands clamped tight around her elbows, as though he were completely at her mercy, as though he couldn't snap her clean in half if he wanted to.
He pins her with a hard look when she pulls back - not that awful blank stare but a new one, a look that says she's been clawing beneath his skin all this time, and it makes her more nervous than (the dry snap of bone) anything.
She strangles that look into a low, desperate moan when she licks a straight path from one bare shoulder to wrist, lets her tongue linger over a straining bicep.
-
Blood washes out with cold water and vinegar, her mother says, but you've got to be quick about it.
He's still shuddering beneath her, head lolled back, arms trembling. A piece of damp hair falls like a thin gaping cut across his forehead; she smoothes it back with a steady hand.
"We clean up pretty good," she says.
Traps; some intentional, some not.
Another kink meme prompt: Rorschach/Laurie, pre-OT3, with vague Laurie/Dan and Rorschach/Dan.
(aka: procrastination is fucking AWESOME, at this rate I'm never going to finish that slew of festering unfinished original pieces, etc etc etccc)
This started as quick smut, then evolved into some god-awful longer thing, THEN refused to end until I scrapped the original sexins and wrote in something entirely different. Oh, boy.
The first time they met, she had nightmares for almost a week.
He'd appear from stillness, from chilled gloom, from absolutely nowhere - slinking not from shadowed alleyways, but those vague places that exist only in dreams yet still seem familiar, like the spookhouses on the Coney Island boardwalk her mother took her to as a kid (plunging into darkness, the sharp clack of rusted chain pulling pretzel cars along, false-faced monsters made of plastic and groaning metal sliding out from behind walls to appreciative shrieks) - and with gloved fingers he'd peel back that unnatural (no other word for it) mask, something straight from the grisly third reel of a horror film, just peel it back, revealing an utterly blank, featureless face, only the hollowed impression of bone structure beneath sick flesh, no mouth, no nostrils, no eyes--
(It's easier, hating someone than being afraid of them.)
-
He works with Dan on fixing the ship, sometimes; emerges from the basement with grease streaked like warpaint high on his cheekbones.
He's only stopped wearing his "face" inside the house because Dan asked, she knows. This somehow annoys her more than it would've if he'd just kept wearing the goddamn thing.
She doesn't voice her suspicions on just what exactly they get up to when they're down there alone, of things pulled apart and put gaspingly back together, things aside from Dan's collection of mechanical toys.
She knows. God, she'd be blind if she didn't, to not see it, that ease at reading one another's movements, remnants of their old crimefighting partnership seeping through--
(Watching the two of them, their silent camaraderie, makes something twist in her gut, like they're characters in a book she discovered with the first few chapters ripped out, those missing pages strangely important ones she's never going to understand just by asking. And it's odd, probably, to be jealous of just that, that history - yet while she doesn't miss the calm strangeness of being with Jon, she still feels like part of her has been ripped away with him, her own piece of history nestled comfortably between distant constellations.)
-
She's in an oversized button-down over a pair of faded panties, sleeves rolled to her elbows and singing (shouting) at her loudest (voice cracking slightly at look at you with your mouth watering). Making over easy eggs for one. Pretending Mark Mothersbaugh wouldn't want her unskilled vocal cords severed if he'd been there to hear her. There's the soft creak of bare feet on wood and she spins on reflex, spatula gripped lamely in one fist, glimpsing him at the doorframe, just-- just standing, watching, that slack mouth surely the result of her tone-deaf performance.
"I-- I didn't know anyone else was here--" she stutters, hating herself for it, hating him more for the dismissive grunt he throws her way before disappearing down the hallway, and she hadn't known, goddamn it, she never knows half the time when he's going to slink into the house unexpectedly - it's like living with a particularly large, particularly offensive cockroach--
-
She likes blaring Tom Tom Club from crumbling speakers at two in the afternoon. Just because she can.
Just to piss him off.
(Let's just chalk this one up to "making up for lost time"; not like she had time to be a real teenager the first go 'round, anyway. Part of her suspects he didn't, either.)
-
Disappointing Dan always feels like disappointing a parent - a beloved, overworked parent.
(God-- what psychiatrist wouldn't go to town on that train of thought.)
He grips the kitchen counter with those same large-knuckled hands that soothed hot, slow circles between her legs last night, sighing over stale coffee. Time for a talk, apparently. She itches to light a cigarette, then remembers she's supposed to be in the middle of "quitting"; starts tearing open a tangerine with bare fingernails, instead.
"Can't you be more--" he stops, slides his glasses up his nose, turns to face her, starts again "--more positive, towards each other?"
It's a hell of an understatement. And they both know it.
Juice crawls down her hand, cooled acid settling into the spaces between her fingers. She tears out a section of fruit and swallows without really chewing, lets the ragged flesh work its way down her throat.
He started it.
-
She remembers the paper boy they used to have, back when she was a kid.
Jimmy Linnell - with his sun-streaked blond cowlick and nasty smile, who tried to hit her with the Tribune every time he zoomed past on his rusting ten-speed Raleigh (That means he likes you, her mother told her after she'd relayed this information for the first time, and she'd gone to her room and sat listening to records for the next hour, thirteen and confused and skinny in all the wrong places, thinking that her mother had never made less sense in her life), and the next morning when Jimmy rode by, she smiled sweetly at him as the paper clipped her ear, smiled even wider when she perfected her first double-jab on his goddamn smirking freckled face two weeks later.
Sometimes, she likes getting good and drunk before calling her mother.
At least that way, she thinks, they'll be on the same wavelength.
-
Restless sleep comes with twisted sheets, dry and heavy on overheated skin. Her teeth gnash in crude Morse code, scraping dead skin from her tongue, trying to erase the sour taste in her mouth, and those perverse thoughts that seem almost sane in the four a.m. darkness come scrabbling not far behind.
She feels as lifeless as she did those nights when Dan's fingers bit hard into her hip and she cried out too sharply (he can be good and rough when she coaxes him into it), eyes flying open, struggling to adjust to dim light and hearing the groan of weight outside the half-opened door, seeing that dark blot of shadow against pale grey wall, that awful hollow look on his face.
Like he was experiencing a violent kind of déjà vu.
(When she's feeling spiteful, sometimes, she makes sure not to close the door the whole way.)
She wonders if he looks at them and sees only the dark, thrashing limbs of a monstrous spider, jaws slick with blood, open, waiting.
She wonders if she watches too many late night B-movies.
-
There are voices, low and intense, coming from down the hallway.
She's woken from another uneasy dream (only endless falling, in this one), damp bangs sticking to her forehead, and for some stupid, irrationally hysterical moment, thinks she's six years old, at her old house again, that it's her mother and Laurence who are clearly arguing (that's what the steady, cadenced beat of those voices always means, after all - the slower and softer the pace, the sharper the words), that they're arguing about her.
She pulls on her robe. Moving down the darkened hallway, she tries not to think of plywood spookhouses.
They're standing several paces apart in the kitchen, stiff-shouldered and tight-jawed, and even though she doesn't know what's happened, in her mind's eye she sees a bright white chalk mark drawn on the smooth tile between them, some damn sitcom cliché. (Until things are worked out, boys, why don't you each take a half of the room?) She always feels a certain bitter satisfaction when he's just as stubborn with Dan as he is with her.
"What's going on?" she mumbles, voice thick with sleep as she pads over to the fridge. She stands surveying its contents for a good minute, not really hungry but needing to gnaw on something, anyway, considering a half-gone chocolate bar wrapped clumsily in foil a good enough substitute (this is I Am Definitely Quitting This Time attempt number fourteen, folks) before Dan chuckles darkly, a sound that raises gooseflesh on the back of her neck.
Rorschach, apparently, thinks it's time they've already moved on ("unwise to keep complacently rooted" seems to be his mantra, tonight). Dan disagrees.
He's already staring (expressionlessly) out of the cramped window over the sink, get this over with written over every inch of his posture, every line on that rapidly-aging face, and it suddenly strikes her that he's expecting her to side with Dan. They both are.
(She hates to admit it, she truly does, but--)
"It's... it's a good idea, Dan."
She gets nervous as hell, anymore, just from being in this city. Especially when it feels like they've betrayed it.
Dual stares turn on her, one surprised, one quietly judging. She feels like an insect pinned under a microscope, because he doesn't look at her, just looks right fucking through her, stripping away layers of skin and muscle and smoke and bullshit she takes care to hide behind on a daily basis, just peels it all down to the raw ugly bone, and okay, sure, she hates him for that, too.
She coughs.
"And now that the token female's said her piece, she's going for a smoke."
Dan doesn't raise his eyebrows, tell her to be careful. Doesn't point out her verbal slip.
(Maybe things are changing.)
-
He's terrifying to watch when he's practicing.
His movement is so terribly brutal, like he's bottled every inch of hate and hurt he's ever felt and is driving it into every hit aimed at the swaying, wheezing leather; the cold fury curling that flat mouth, creeping slow onto a face always so carefully arranged into dull apathy, usually makes her shiver and pass quickly by.
Scarred muscle strains beneath a thin undershirt, soaked through with perspiration. She tells herself she's fascinated by the inner workings of such efficient violence.
(Her dry throat has nothing to do with the sinewy pull of muscle under broken flesh.)
That's clearly why she strides in without waiting her turn for their makeshift little gym, why she lets those fighting hands slowly bruise her shoulders, her waist, lead her into the perfect stance for a jaw-shattering uppercut.
-
The pound of leather on concrete has been trailing her for three blocks, now.
It's so soft, so discreet, that she wouldn't have heard it if she hadn't been listening for it all this time (another well-worn habit of the paranoid fugitive), and when it finally speeds up, finally comes close enough to be not more than several yards behind, she twists around without a second thought, every muscle tensed for a fight-- heaves a sigh when she sees him.
(Partly relief; mostly wilted disappointment.)
"Not safe out here alone."
That voice is like metal scraped flat over gravel. She tries not to shudder at it; instead, focuses her strained anger on how unapologetic he is for frightening her. His expression is so detached, dirty coat collar raised high around his neck like a battered shield. Like it's not eighty fucking degrees outside.
She wants to hit him but can't; presses a palm against the side of her neck, a forgotten habit, annoyed to find she's already perspiring from the summer humidity. She's trying to think of a suitably biting retort - something about being able to take care of herself, thanks, dutiful representative of the misogyny brigade - sucking air in shakily through her teeth.
What comes out, instead, is:
"Is it anywhere?"
-
His skin doesn't fit his face right. It's almost another well-worn mask; that short stub of nose looks like it's been broken more than once, doesn't match his square jaw or sloping brow (the surprise of littered freckles turn him into a half-man/half-boy hybrid, perfect for bouts of twisted, childish logic).
It's nothing and everything like she always expected. So mangy-looking, just like a dog-- like an old stray dog with hackles always raised, beaten into snarling ferocity.
This comparison twists deep into her memory, suddenly makes her uncomfortable. Reminds her of that shy childhood pledge to work with lost, abandoned animals, stitch them up, take care of them when no one else would.
-
Dan's gone for the afternoon. (She's done with these games.)
He stands scouring a pan in the sink like it's personally insulted him; she's staring at the dark yellow bruise on his ankle, visible below the fray of his worn trouser leg.
"I know you were there, watching us," she says, suddenly. He stiffens.
-
She traps him beneath her like an animal, like a snarling thing that curls into itself in shame when she skims the heel of her hand over his hip, grazing the hot flesh just below his navel, slowly pressing harder until he lets out a startled hiss. She tilts her head forward, brushes her lips over the space between that flat bottom lip and stubble-rough chin; he growls, jerks his head back like his veins were shot through with cold electric current, and completely exposes his throat to her.
That's when she attacks (the ol' one-two-three, as always; she should probably feel guilty for using his own technique against him - she just feels frantic, furious), scrapes grinning teeth against the slick skin of his neck, his jaw, nipping at the tremulous bob of his Adam's apple; he whines low in his throat, wide-knuckled hands clamped tight around her elbows, as though he were completely at her mercy, as though he couldn't snap her clean in half if he wanted to.
He pins her with a hard look when she pulls back - not that awful blank stare but a new one, a look that says she's been clawing beneath his skin all this time, and it makes her more nervous than (the dry snap of bone) anything.
She strangles that look into a low, desperate moan when she licks a straight path from one bare shoulder to wrist, lets her tongue linger over a straining bicep.
-
Blood washes out with cold water and vinegar, her mother says, but you've got to be quick about it.
He's still shuddering beneath her, head lolled back, arms trembling. A piece of damp hair falls like a thin gaping cut across his forehead; she smoothes it back with a steady hand.
"We clean up pretty good," she says.