Work Text:
Usually Arlo didn’t leave the bath until the suds had vanished and the water had gone cold. Today, though, she was restless; steam had still been curling off the water’s surface when she’d gotten out. She was standing in the middle of the bathroom, leaving footprint-puddles on the marble.
There was still a towel draped over the chair from when Auggie had bathed earlier, not getting any drier with the steam from her own bath filling the room. Auggie. They’d had a lovely time this afternoon, picking out new suiting.
It was nice to have a friend.
But now, she was alone again, naked and dripping in front of her mirror, the condensation wiped away so she could take a good look at herself. She craned her neck to see exactly how far the dead grey flesh crawled up her throat. Her blouse collar could still take care of it, mostly, but she’d have to be careful. No more occult rituals if she wanted to still be presentable. (Lately, much to her family’s chagrin, she found herself caring less and less about respectability, less and less about the costs that might come with frequenting the grimier parts of the city and keeping company with people who would never even dream of setting foot in Briar Green. The currency she held by being from the Black family was undoubtedly helpful, even with the fussiness of her connection to the Eastons and, by mere association to Eddie, their disappearance...but she thought that, perhaps, she might have to find a new sort of social cachet. It had been so bizarre to have to explain about Eddie earlier without everyone in the room already knowing him and trying to remember him as best as they could. Arlo tried to remember him at least three times a day so that she could be sure she was remembering him best of all: how his hair stuck up in tufts no matter how it was brushed, how his teeth looked when he laughed, how he would rub the skin behind his ear when he couldn’t think of something to say. Sometimes those three things formed a touchstone and tufts - teeth- ear was all she could remember, instead of remembering Eddie as an entire person. But if she had at least that she could be somewhat grounded. She couldn’t explain any of that to the Vassal and have them understand. Anyway.)
No more occult rituals if she didn’t want to feel how else the Bleed might change her. Her greyed hand had been unchanged for years; she hadn’t even imagined that it could change, become worse than before.
“You should definitely do something about this,” she said to her reflection. You should cut your hand off. Before you become a monster.
She looked at her hand, at the void that ripped her palm open. Would the rest of her become the same, hollow and unfillable? What would happen once it reached her heart (or her mind)? Would some magick keep it beating (thinking)? Would she have to become some new creature? The idea left her cold. She didn’t want to become a skin filled with void. A monster.
A gurgle resonated from deep within her and she pressed her hand to her stomach. She was hungry and it wasn’t a usual sort of hunger. Her stomach had been complaining with the same simple, gnawing need she’d felt when she’d examined Mr. Ferris’s hand, and that had only grown when she’d taken on the Gredarn demon in the sewers. She’d thought the bath would have helped more; hot water and bubbles and thick, fluffy towels had always been curatives before for whatever ailed her after working a case, but not this time. Her arm couldn’t seem to get warm. Her body couldn’t seem to forget.
She’d brought her occult text with her to read in the tub — not an unusual pastime for her — but she hadn’t stayed in long enough to desire to read. Now, with damp fingers she turned the pages in her book until she found the entry again. The passage on Gredarn was short, just references to feeding and Oldfairen folk tales. She flipped to the next page and back again, but she hadn’t missed anything the first time. There was nothing to tell her what to expect next from having connected with it so deeply.
Her stomach growled again. The demon had consumed people . It had absorbed flesh and limbs and people fucking in their hotel rooms. She couldn’t do any of that. But she was starving, and if she was hungering like it was, would she develop a taste for human flesh? The idea terrified her, but still she poked her tongue out and licked the palm of her hand, testing. Her skin tasted like salt and soap and it was not unpleasant, but neither did it spike the pressure in her gut. Curiosity spurred her to lick the palm of her right hand, too, to see if it tasted of bleed or death or anything . The tip of her tongue tingled with how she imagined incandescent lights might taste. She inspected her tongue in the mirror for any tell-tale signs of bleed, but it looked pink and alive.
She’d have to find another way to test the edges of her craving.
Where am I?
Seconds crawled by as she got her bearings. She was outside and she was still in Briar Green, that much she could tell immediately, but she was barefoot in the garden of someone else’s estate. She remembered deciding to go out — a constitutional to ease the teeth gnashing in her belly — but she’d been certainly wearing boots when she’d left home. She had a vague sense that she’d spent some time tailing a stranger in broad daylight for no reason other than that her gut had told her to, but she had no idea what had become of him or when she had decided to let that quarry go. (She did not think she’d done anything to him except follow him, but her teeth felt fuzzy and her tongue tasted sour. Her ungloved hand felt like it was filmy with grime, like something might be cakes under her fingernails, but it looked clean enough. She mustn’t have done anything because she was still so, so very hungry. Anyway.) The grass around her was tall and prickly underfoot. As she walked toward the house, she realized that the windows were boarded up. She was at the Eastons’.
The realization gave her pause. It was better, she thought, to look forward. Closure could only be in the future, after all. It wasn’t in an empty home, and certainly not this empty home. But still she found herself climbing its steps and testing its door just in case it was unlocked.
She hadn’t been inside since that day when the portal had opened up and taken Eddie from her. Every room she wandered into looked like a storm had blown through it. Glass and porcelain was shattered, rugs were tossed, floors and tabletops were chipped and gouged. She picked her way through carefully, sometimes stopping before putting all of her weight into her step so that she wouldn’t cut her foot open on something broken.
She tried to see everything through the eyes of her past self: this was where she and Eddie had sat many times and talked for hours. This was where she had taken meals with his family. This was where Eddie’s mother had given her a cameo as a welcome to the family after their engagement had been announced. This was where she had imagined a very different future.
But this was also where he had been taken from her. And because of that she was a different person now.
Could I have saved him? she thought, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last. Years of studying occultism had so far told her that she could not have, but maybe that was just because she hadn’t read the right text yet, or studied the right ritual, or spoken to the right person who just happened to know why and how portals yawn open and suck people away.
She pushed her sleeve up to check her detector: everything was soaking with bleed. Even after all this time.
She was still so hungry.
As she crept back toward her rooms she could hear her parents’ voices drifting out from the sitting room.
“—And that young man she brought home looked like an overgrown urchin. I didn’t realize we were in the habit of clothing the local riff-raff.”
“Don’t be ungenerous. We raised her to be a philanthropist after all.”
“We raised her to be a credit to the family name.”
Arlo didn’t need to hear any more. She still believed in who she was, but she found it admittedly challenging to be a person in the way that it was expected. She fidgeted with the fingers of her glove. The easy thing to do would be to blame what had happened to Eddie, and her parents would accept it regularly. They saw Eddie as a good man from a good family and that their daughter had been happy with him. Losing that sort of happiness would change anyone. But if she was being honest, it was really everything that had happened after that had shaken apart how she understood the world and her place in it. She knew what she was supposed to do, she just couldn’t seem to do it anymore.
“Auggie is my friend,” she burst out, surprising herself as much as her parents.
“Arlo! We thought you were out!” Her father said, at the same time that her mother sputtered, “Arlo! Where in God’s name are your shoes?”
Arlo tucked one foot behind the other, as if that would hide their nakedness.
“He’s a part of my Circle. We do a lot of good work.” That was about as much as she could explain to her parents about Candela Obscura. They thought it was a social group.
“Of course, darling,” her mother said, more composed this time, “but you know you needn’t work.”
“It’s the sort of work that’s no work at all. You know: charity work. Philanthropy.” Sacrificing some part of your soul to kill monsters was certainly charitable if you looked at it sideways. Certainly more generous than just giving money.
“Yes, and your …Circle has helped you so much since the incident—” Arlo smiled. No one ever seemed to be able to call it anything but the incident , a term that she felt tidied up the horror that it had been too neatly. A crashed car is an incident. An uncovered affair is an incident. A portal filled with demonic entities that sucks away your loved ones and renders your flesh dead should be given a different name, but it was just another incident because no one else who had witnessed it remained. Anyway.
“—You’ve been holding up so well,” her mother looked down at her hands instead of into Arlo’s face. “I was just telling your father how beautifully I think you’re doing.”
Arlo kept smiling, unsure if she was supposed to thank her mother for the lie and pretend that she believed it.
“I’m going to have a bath drawn. My feet are dirty.”
In her second bath of the day, she stared at the ceiling, memorizing the patterns in the plaster. It was dull and beautiful at the same time.
The ache in her stomach wasn’t getting stronger, but neither was it going away. She soaked in the tub, thinking of what she could tear to pieces if she were a monster. (Maybe it would be a relief.) If the feeling didn’t go away, she wasn’t sure she could keep it a secret.
She imagined telling Auggie. He’d be the easiest to tell and the one she’d like to tell the least. Because he was such a sweet boy, and because she was certain he would still be sweet to her even if she were a hideous thing.
If she told Charlie she’d wrap an arm around her like a mother. Tell her that everything would turn out fine, even if they both knew it wouldn’t. They’d find a way to approach fine as well as humanly possible.
She couldn’t tell Howard. He would be fascinated. He would just treat her like an experiment. But maybe what she needed was the experimental. It wasn't ideal, but if the rest knew he'd have to know, too.
Anyway.
Arlo waved her hands through the bathwater, one pink and one deathly grey, and decided that this time she would let the water grow cold with her in it.