wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2021-09-12 09:29 pm
wintersday) wrote2021-09-12 09:29 pm
Entry tags:
- character: friendsim: folykl,
- character: friendsim: marsti,
- fandom: homestuck: friendsim,
- fanfic,
- fanfic: length: under 1k,
- fanfic: rating: teen,
- fanfic: type: f/f,
- pairing: friendsim: folykl/marsti,
- trope: angst,
- trope: au - canon divergence,
- trope: first meetings,
- trope: ghosts,
- trope: hurt/comfort,
- trope: pre-relationship
Fic: With You Through The Dark
Title: With You Through The Dark
Fandom: Friendsim
Major Characters/Pairings: Folykl/Marsti
Wordcount: 900
Rating: Teen
POV: Second Person
Summary: Marsti acquires a ghost.
Your name is Marsti Houtek, and you’re pretty sure you’re being haunted.
It’s not the goldblood boy you pulled back from critical condition half a perigee ago, after he decided to take on an entire flight of drones “for the lulz,” because he isn’t dead. You checked up on him, got a few wiggler-grade insults for your trouble, and resolved, as soon as his condition stabilized, never to check up on him again. But that’s when the sense of it started – the feeling of being watched at odd moments, and followed, like if you turned your head quickly enough you’d see someone there at the edges of your vision. Lightbulbs going out too soon, circuits tripping, your e-reader dying just as you try to get through a new chapter at the end of a long day. Inconvenient, mostly. Weirdly lonely. Not actually confirmed by anything like evidence, until the highblood trying to get in your face for doing your job went bloodless as they looked behind you, then turned and booked it in the other direction. And now you’re standing here in the alley they just vacated, still gripping your scrub brush like Alternia’s least effective weapon, reminding yourself that whatever’s back there just intervened in your favor.
You take a steady breath, and then another. Then you turn around, slowly and calmly, and say to the empty air behind you, “You know Kuprum?”
Nothing dramatic happens. There’s simply someone there where no one was before, slightly translucent, sitting hunched over on an overflowing trash bag: a girl, a little younger than you and a lot smaller. You recognize the signs of advanced voidrot in her empty eye sockets, blackened and scarred over, and in the unhealthy pallor of her skin beneath an almost geological layer of old dirt and grime. Her claws are chipped and filthy. Her hair is a knotted mess. Your palms itch with the knowledge that you cannot clean a ghost.
You can’t treat her wounds, either, or wash away the blood that’s crusted on her sweatshirt. None of that damage is the kind that can be healed. You hate feeling helpless.
The dead girl gives you a one-shouldered shrug, and says, “He doesn’t know I’m still around.”
Her voice is quiet and flat. It’s obvious that the voidrot is not what killed her. You recognize the three neat puncture wounds of a culling fork too, and you’re beginning to understand the shape of what happened.
“You want me to tell him?”
She looks down, tugging at a loose thread in the sleeve of her unwashed sweatshirt. “He’ll probably cry.”
Right now, you kind of want to do that yourself, but it would be even more useless than trying to put bandages on a ghost. You reach for her hand instead, like you have before for wounded trolls you couldn’t help, in instinctive offer of comfort. You’re not sure what to expect, but what you encounter is the resistance of contact – solid and cool and staticky, not very much like skin at all – and an icy, vertiginous pull that rushes through you in the moment before she jerks away.
“Dumbass,” she says, clutching her hand to her chest. Her hair falls back from her empty eyes as she watches you intently.
You’re not actually an expert on ghosts, caste-based assumptions aside. You prefer to concentrate your efforts on keeping the living from joining them. But you don’t think they usually exert this much influence on the physical world, and you’re not sure why it’s different now. Habit, maybe. Maybe need. You want to know, with the same unbounded feeling you remember from nights of scanning through medical texts, in the sweeps before you realized where the limits of your possibilities fell. More than that, you want to make sure she’s alright.
“He’ll get over it,” you say, and touch the back of her hand again, brushing scraped up knuckles, ignoring the chill. If you’re right about what they are to each other, she’s been away from Kuprum too long. You need to get her back to him.
When you tell her this, she doesn’t argue, though her face goes blank, and she doesn’t pull away when you slip your fronds through hers and hold on tightly. She lets you lead her out of the alley and into the city, your scourdray abandoned behind you. It’s not the kind of thing that anyone but you would value enough to steal. Even if it was, this matters more.
The streets are near deserted this time of night, with sunrise coming soon enough to be worth worrying about, and no one hassles you as you make your way to the basement block where, last you checked, Kuprum was holing up to recuperate. The best part of the morning hours for you has always been the solitude, but you don’t mind your new companion. The strangeness of her existence catches at you all the same. You find yourself watching her, drawn by curiosity and the feeling of some magnetic shift in your bloodpusher, like a needle spinning north. Streetlights shine through her skinny form, and her footsteps make no sound, but you can feel the way she leans against you as you walk, less weight than presence, steadying and dizzying at once. Even through your heavy work clothes, her touch is draining.
You hold her hand the whole way there.
Fandom: Friendsim
Major Characters/Pairings: Folykl/Marsti
Wordcount: 900
Rating: Teen
POV: Second Person
Summary: Marsti acquires a ghost.
Your name is Marsti Houtek, and you’re pretty sure you’re being haunted.
It’s not the goldblood boy you pulled back from critical condition half a perigee ago, after he decided to take on an entire flight of drones “for the lulz,” because he isn’t dead. You checked up on him, got a few wiggler-grade insults for your trouble, and resolved, as soon as his condition stabilized, never to check up on him again. But that’s when the sense of it started – the feeling of being watched at odd moments, and followed, like if you turned your head quickly enough you’d see someone there at the edges of your vision. Lightbulbs going out too soon, circuits tripping, your e-reader dying just as you try to get through a new chapter at the end of a long day. Inconvenient, mostly. Weirdly lonely. Not actually confirmed by anything like evidence, until the highblood trying to get in your face for doing your job went bloodless as they looked behind you, then turned and booked it in the other direction. And now you’re standing here in the alley they just vacated, still gripping your scrub brush like Alternia’s least effective weapon, reminding yourself that whatever’s back there just intervened in your favor.
You take a steady breath, and then another. Then you turn around, slowly and calmly, and say to the empty air behind you, “You know Kuprum?”
Nothing dramatic happens. There’s simply someone there where no one was before, slightly translucent, sitting hunched over on an overflowing trash bag: a girl, a little younger than you and a lot smaller. You recognize the signs of advanced voidrot in her empty eye sockets, blackened and scarred over, and in the unhealthy pallor of her skin beneath an almost geological layer of old dirt and grime. Her claws are chipped and filthy. Her hair is a knotted mess. Your palms itch with the knowledge that you cannot clean a ghost.
You can’t treat her wounds, either, or wash away the blood that’s crusted on her sweatshirt. None of that damage is the kind that can be healed. You hate feeling helpless.
The dead girl gives you a one-shouldered shrug, and says, “He doesn’t know I’m still around.”
Her voice is quiet and flat. It’s obvious that the voidrot is not what killed her. You recognize the three neat puncture wounds of a culling fork too, and you’re beginning to understand the shape of what happened.
“You want me to tell him?”
She looks down, tugging at a loose thread in the sleeve of her unwashed sweatshirt. “He’ll probably cry.”
Right now, you kind of want to do that yourself, but it would be even more useless than trying to put bandages on a ghost. You reach for her hand instead, like you have before for wounded trolls you couldn’t help, in instinctive offer of comfort. You’re not sure what to expect, but what you encounter is the resistance of contact – solid and cool and staticky, not very much like skin at all – and an icy, vertiginous pull that rushes through you in the moment before she jerks away.
“Dumbass,” she says, clutching her hand to her chest. Her hair falls back from her empty eyes as she watches you intently.
You’re not actually an expert on ghosts, caste-based assumptions aside. You prefer to concentrate your efforts on keeping the living from joining them. But you don’t think they usually exert this much influence on the physical world, and you’re not sure why it’s different now. Habit, maybe. Maybe need. You want to know, with the same unbounded feeling you remember from nights of scanning through medical texts, in the sweeps before you realized where the limits of your possibilities fell. More than that, you want to make sure she’s alright.
“He’ll get over it,” you say, and touch the back of her hand again, brushing scraped up knuckles, ignoring the chill. If you’re right about what they are to each other, she’s been away from Kuprum too long. You need to get her back to him.
When you tell her this, she doesn’t argue, though her face goes blank, and she doesn’t pull away when you slip your fronds through hers and hold on tightly. She lets you lead her out of the alley and into the city, your scourdray abandoned behind you. It’s not the kind of thing that anyone but you would value enough to steal. Even if it was, this matters more.
The streets are near deserted this time of night, with sunrise coming soon enough to be worth worrying about, and no one hassles you as you make your way to the basement block where, last you checked, Kuprum was holing up to recuperate. The best part of the morning hours for you has always been the solitude, but you don’t mind your new companion. The strangeness of her existence catches at you all the same. You find yourself watching her, drawn by curiosity and the feeling of some magnetic shift in your bloodpusher, like a needle spinning north. Streetlights shine through her skinny form, and her footsteps make no sound, but you can feel the way she leans against you as you walk, less weight than presence, steadying and dizzying at once. Even through your heavy work clothes, her touch is draining.
You hold her hand the whole way there.