This was written for a prompt on the kink meme, asking for some kind of afterlife for Abigail (Prompt Post 6, Page 34), and what you'll notice while reading is that this is not polished at all. I actually lost my head of steam for this fic after the first edit/read through. I couldn't get it to flow, and nothing read right, and I was going to give up and make my apologies to the OP for promising and not delivering, but then the finale. The freaking season finale. And so I figured I'd attempt one last edit (I may have missed some things, and it's not beta read) and then put it out there for anyone else who just needs good things for Abigail right now. I rated it M and while it's not very explicit, just keep in mind that it is for a kink meme prompt.
So here is my fill, such as it is.
She wakes to a brain-scrambling migraine. Needles of pain tearing through the wet mass of her grey matter like cheese wire through butter. Her hands claw for the covers, intent on huddling in the black hole of her over-washed, hospital regulation bed linen until Group. Finding none, she groans.
"Sh-h. Easy there."
It's not the voice of any orderly Abigail knows and she cracks open her eyes, brightness slamming into her consciousness like a two-ton truck. The room warps and blurs around her, and Abigail feels cut like a glitch; as though she where being severed from herself, from the world and into pieces.
"Hey. Just take your time. I know it hurts. It always does."
The voice is female, a little gravelly, and sensible in that matronly way. Not what you'd call a really sympathetic, nurturing voice, but caring, nonetheless.
"What, what happened?" she whines, shading her eyes with her hand and trying to focus on something, anything. It doesn't help that, from what she can perceive, the room she is in is entirely white. "Where am I?"
"Look, I realize it's unpleasant to hear this. But just think, it's not very nice to have to be the messenger either. You're dead."
"I'm what?" Abigail pulls herself into a sitting position, squints through the glare in the direction of the voice. "I'm WHAT?"
A slender, lanky woman with cropped red hair sits some distance away from her in an old, overstuffed chair. She is utterly gorgeous in a white tank top and a pair of white shorts, hugging one knee to her chest and resting her chin on it. "Yeah. Sorry. It's a shock, isn't it?"
The memories come; jagged and quick, but dull, colors mute like an old day time soap behind her eyes, and Abigail's hands fly immediately to her left ear. When she pulls them away again they are clean, dry and clenched. Fists always so fatally ineffectual.
"Hannibal," she whispers. A keening sob stitching the last vestiges of her self-control like twine. "I didn't.. I thought...God, I was so trusting." She looks around her; noting the white room, white floor, white ceiling, the horrific whiteness of it all, and slams a palm down hard on the unyielding surface beside her. "I knew better!"
Abruptly the light in the room changes from colorless white to a dark sapphire. Casting the sparse expanse around them in soothing hues of blue. With it, Abigail is calm again. Her rage tapped and drained like tainted, bitter wine. There are no windows, there is no door, but if she had ever felt trapped she doesn't anymore. She feels comfortable and safe in the blue, like nothing can hurt her here. She begins to think, in fact, that nothing can hurt her anymore, anywhere, though she is still terribly sad. She suspects she'll be working through that for a while.
"Mood lighting," the stranger explains. "It always starts out with white but then it kind of picks up on your emotions and changes."
Glancing down Abigail realizes she is completely naked in front of a stranger and quickly crosses her arms over her breasts, then thinking better of it, lowers them again. Who knows how long she's been lying there, T&A out for all the Underworld to see. Or wherever. The woman simply proffers a conspirational smile: been there and done that.
"What's your name?"
The woman shifts, taking a deep breath and resettling herself cross-legged in the chair. "Officially, I'm 22,498,517, but you can call me Evey."
"I'm Abigail," she offers, scrubbing a hand down her face. "This isn't fair."
"Oh honey, I know." Seemingly from nowhere, Evey snatches a cigarette. Sparking it from a lighter which seems to vanish the minute she's finished using it. She looks untouchable as she exhales, head craned high, and Abigail wonders if she has ever killed anyone.
"Nothing about death is ever fair; not the timing, not the selection, not the way it all goes down in the end." She shrugs. "My very last memory is of lying in the bathtub, and watching my cat, Jim, jump up to the sink to play with the coiled wire of my electric hairdryer."
"But look on the bright side: you'll never have to flounder around in the job market, you'll never have crippling debt. No traffic jams or sit-ups. No fretting that you'll out last the world's oil reserves and starve in the mass die off." She slides gracefully from the chair, her bare feet without sound on the tile, and plops carelessly beside Abigail on the slab. "Being dead is really not that bad. You'll get used to it, I promise."
Around them the smooth blue transitions into a deep gold, and Abigail reaches a tentative hand to the scar on her neck - to where the scar was once, the skin there now unsullied and smooth.
She had known death all her life, he had fathered her and loved her. Had kissed her scrapes when she'd fallen, and listened to her worries. Had read her to sleep at night, and taught her how to ride her first bike. He had made her the center of his world, and had taken, and taken, and taken, until there was little enough left to make him the center of hers too.
Abigail had slept on pillows stuffed with hair the color of her own, had eaten flesh the contours of which once measured hers, and she'd had a lot of opportunities - far too many, probably - to consider the nature of what came after.
All of her imaginings were similar, none of them anything like this.
"I - I didn't expect to end up somewhere so benign." Her brows furrow as she surveys the room again. If there was anything lying in wait to harm her, it was in it for the slow play. "Towards the end there I was certain I'd land somewhere much more south of benign."
"Why do you say that?" Evey asks, but there is no authority behind it, no real inquisition, and Abigail can't believe what she's hearing.
"Don't you know what I've done?"
Evey drops a hand on her shoulder, answers with a shrug, a knowing smile: "It doesn't matter."
"Whatever you heard about death, just forget it. It's nothing like what they told you. No heaven, no hell, no God; well, I've never seen him anyway." With a quick flick of her wrist the cigarette is gone, swallowed whole by the ether. "It's not really like reincarnation either, although the karma stuff is kind of true."
"What do we do, then?" Abigail pinches the bridge of her nose between her eyes. She is only being given the bare minimum of information here and she doesn't like it. She's having a hard time figuring out what all of this is leading to. "What do we do with our time?"
Evey stands, pulling Abigail with her to her feet. "Well this is only the receiving room, not much to do here." Around them the gold gives way to a nice burnt orange. "Lets get you dressed, and I'll introduce you to some of the others. Just think clothes, any clothes. They'll pop right on."
Abigail closes her eyes, trying to think about being dressed, and feels her body become covered. When she opens them again she is garbed in her favorite pair of jeans and a top she has never seen before. A blue, cotton affair. Snug at the waist and short sleeved, with tiny, white Fleur-de-lis all over and buttons down the front. The length leaves almost an inch of pale, bare flesh visible above her jeans, and Abigail smirks with the knowledge that her father would have hated it. Revels privately in the fact that there's nothing he can do about it now. She imagines a hair tie around her wrist and scoops her thick black curtain into a ponytail.
Evey holds out her hand, smiling. "Come on."
With gut-wrenching vertigo, the world smears into a thin, multi-striped line and quite suddenly they are at what Abigail would sware was an International House of Pancakes. They stand in front of a long table of breakfasters: men and women, all young, all absolutely gorgeous, all chatting at once and reaching across each other for syrup pitchers, butter dishes and the like.
Evey steps up close behind her, and all at once Abigail is glad to have her at her back in this room full of strangers.
"Everyone, this is Abigail."
A number of diners look up, some with grudging smiles others with lukewarm murmurs of greeting. All of them seem confused when they turn away again
"I guess they don't like newbies" she mutters, following Evey around the table to a couple of empty seats.
"It's not that you're new, sweetie. It's just that you remind them of what they once were. They're not crazy about remembering their earlier incarnations."
Abigail doesn't understand, just settles into her chair and nods gratefully when a perfectly innocuous looking waitress comes around with a pot of coffee.
Directly across from her a very handsome Latino boy proffers a beautifully manicured hand and a dazzling smile. "Hey there! I'm Jose."
She shakes it, unable to take her eyes off his face, his body. He is stunning. He looks her up and down aswell before turning to Evey. "One of these things is not like the others, QueeniE."
Abigail sits her cup on the table with a decisive click. "What is all this?" Leveling a determined stare at Evey she sets her shoulders back, the way Hannibal's always were. Injects a confidence she doesn't feel into her voice. She wants to come off as more than what she is; that is, the new kid, and the only teenager in a room full of adults. "What are we doing here? What is the point of us?"
"We," Jose begins, dramatically. "We are the things that go bump in the night."
"What?"
Evey hands her a plate of pancakes, but Abigail passes it along. She had been a little hungry before, but that was gone now. Pushed aside by her need to know whatever there is to know. "I don't understand."
"Well, there is a technical term for us. You sure you don't want a pancake?"
Abigail shakes her head and Evey heaves a reluctant sigh. Evidently they've reached a part of orientation that's caused her trouble in the past. "Technically we're demons. At least that is the human definition for what we are."
"I thought you said all that god stuff was a load of crap."
"It is, but we don't really know why we are here. We just know what mythology has labeled us: incubi and succubae."
The words almost seem to echo as the information sinks in, and Abigail begins to laugh. Slow and light at first, then heartily, bodily, like she hasn't laughed in years. "Of course," she huffs. "Of course that's what we are." Thank you, she thinks, to no one in particular. Thank you.
When she calms, ribs sore and lungs tight, Evey pushes forward. Looking almost relieved.
"Honestly, nobody knows why we exist like this. But we do. And we do have an interface with the world of the living. I guess they just had to make something up to explain us." Another cigarette appears out of nowhere and Evey takes a drag. Tapping idly at the ash, which, predictably, disappears. "Personally, I think its karma. Payback for a lifetime of being, well less than attractive. Which is why some of us aren't so happy to see you in your current form. The memories are just too painful."
Astonished, Abigail turns an incredulous look to the woman beside her, lithe and slender and beautiful. "Are you blind, you're gorgeous!"
Evey smiles, takes a drag on her cigarette and closes her eyes for a moment. Suddenly the image before Abigail begins to morph. Evey shrinks, bloating and re-forming into an altogether different person. This new creature is decidedly less attractive than Evey: short, squat and definitely overweight, with a truly hideous case of acne, buckteeth and no discernible chin. The penny-red hair was shoulder-length and greasy. The emerald-green eyes were porcine and lashless.
Abigail can only watch, stunned as the rotund woman changes again, back into Evey. "That, that was you?"
"Sure was."
She turns to Jose, and with a secretive little smile he slides his own eyes closed. Slowly, as if he were being ultra-seductive. Instantly, the man across from her is a short, fat, balding, sweating nobody. Then opening them again, just as quick, is the stunning pretty-boy he'd been before.
"Oh my god!" Abigail sputters.
"Uh-huh," he confirms. "Now you get it, baby!"
In front of him he pushes a half-eaten stack of double choc-chip to the side. "Which makes you something of an anomaly, Miss Thing. You've got our prettiest newb beat by miles. Thoughts?"
Abigail knows exactly why she's there, but snaps up a pancake from Jose's abandoned plate to buy some time.
She had been a pretty girl, in a plain sought of way. Naturally thin and blessed with good skin. Though she had never liked her nose much. Certainly she'd been no Eva Green, but she had never suffered because of the way she had looked. Not in any lasting way, not in the way she imagined these people must have.
But she had been incredibly repressed.
Abigail had discovered sensuality very early in life, and from that moment her libido had been fierce, all-encompassing. A fiery creature caged inside her, just beneath the skin she wore. She remembers the first inexpert brush of her little fingers between her thighs. The desperate, fumbling scramble to sate a hunger that would, as she grew older, seem larger even than life to her sometimes. Nine years old with fireworks on the inside and seeming to understand, instinctively that her father could never, ever find out.
Her overbearing, constantly watching, father. Who even then reacted with thinly veiled, red-faced horror to even the smallest indicator of her growing up.
She remembers reading the literature, doing her research and being left woefully unprepared. The books and websites spoke of ordinary things, of hormone fluctuations that finally succumb to plateaus and none of it enough to explain the thing that lived inside her.
But she had known it was there and God, she had wanted to live it. Had wanted to do everything, with anyone. Male, female, both, neither. One at a time or all of them together. She had thought it a cruel cosmic joke, when she was old enough to reckon such things, that fate would create a being with such want, and then bare that child to a father such as hers.
Abigail remembers need; constant and bone deep and always, always stifled for fear of her father.
"I had an extremely overactive sex drive," she states. Wiping chocolate smears and pancake crumbs from her fingers with an errant napkin. "And a father that would sooner see me dead, than a woman or away from him."
A familiar sense of despondency settles around her then; a fog born of the emotionally incestuous attention that her father had showered on her, her impotence against it, the indignity of, and the betrayal. Abigail pushes it away, makes a promise to herself to deal with it later. She is mindful not to show too much weakness on her first day.
Instead, she gives the best approximation of a smile she can manage. Draws a finger across her throat with that irritating sound that often accompanies it.
Evey puts an arm around her shoulder.
AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB
After a meal filled with questions that only get her half-assed answers, Abigail lets Evey lead her, with Jose, along some indescribable streak of light to a room that looks an awful lot like a showgirl's dressing room.
"Welcome to chez moi!" Jose sings, arms spread like Vana White.
Rolling her eyes at his theatrics, Evey stands Abigail in front of a wall of full length mirrors.
"Now, you do have a dressing room of your own," she starts. "It was assigned to you when you first materialized in the Receiving Room. But I thought something more lived in would be nicer for your first night, homier. Anyway," she says, tossing her head in Jose's direction. "We need a man to give us an honest opinion."
Abigail glances doubtfully over at Jose, raising an eyebrow at Evey. "Are you sure he's the man we want?" She's feeling more comfortable now, getting her sense of humour back and it is pretty clear that, dead or not, Jose isn't exactly your run-of-the-mill macho guy.
"Oh," Evey snickers. "He's only been gay since he died. He used to be totally hetero."
Abigail glances at Jose again.
"Yeah," he smiles. "Hideous, ain't it? Thank god for death!"
Abigail smiles, thinks maybe Evey is right. That maybe death isn't so bad after all, once you have truly reconciled the residual pain and displeasure of your former life. At least here she has decent company. People who do not seek to harm her, and know little of her past.
They spend the next few hours helping her practice getting in and out of clothes, and after that, teach her how to change her appearance. The mirrors come in handy, and so does Jose, funnily enough. After years of being stuck in the body she had; anchored in her fathers orbit by both it's physical place in space and time and it's particular aesthetic, it isn't all that easy to decide what to become. It's like going shopping without having to look at the price tags.
Initially she goes for waif-like and ethereal; her own body but taller and skinnier, a little better proportioned and a little bigger in the bust, but Jose scraps the look immediately.
"Forget Vogue," he says. "Forget models and fashion week. Don't waste your time with how you think others want you to look. Create for yourself a body that reflects who you are on the inside, a body that makes you feel comfortable, that is the right fit for you. Whatever you choose, baby, I guarantee there will be hundreds of thousands of people down there that will want you."
Finally, after what seems like a thousand changes and many debates, Jose stalks around a stiffly posed Abigail, eyeing her up and down appraisingly. "Now, you girl are hot." He licks a finger, pressing it to her butt with a little hissing sound.
What she sees in the mirror is hard for Abigail to own. A statuesque beauty of medium height, coal-black curls tumbling over gracefully sloped shoulders, firm, cantaloupe-sized breasts perched high on her chest. Beneath, her belly is trim but not flat, her hips generous but not heavy. She is amazed at this body she has made, so scrumptiously female. Not feminine but female. Fleshy in all the right places. She has haunches that beg to be grabbed, breasts that demand mauling. Heart-shaped buttocks that take a slap and reverberate with the force of it.
Admittedly, she feels like the body reflected in front of her is something that she can relate to. A vivacious instrument of pleasure. Luscious in that adult way her mortal form had never had the chance to be.
She flattens out the bump in the bridge of her nose, and shrinks the whole lot down a little before adding her own quick nod of approval. She is absurdly grateful for Jose's advice, spinning this way and that in the mirror to learn herself as best as she can while in company.
"So what happens now?" she asks.
Closing her eyes she slips on a dark red evening gown, smoothing the silk over her newly delicious ass. When she opens them again, Evey and Jose are on either side of her, inspecting their own changed outfits for the evening.
Evey glances up at a large clock face mounted on the opposite wall. "Now, we join the others and wait to be called."
This time, after the lateral blur of speed and space, the vertigo is less. And as she, Evey and Jose, pop into what looks to be a crowded 1950's cocktail lounge, a number of the patrons turn in their chairs to look.
"Ta-da!" Jose calls. "This, ladies and Gentleman, is the real Abigail!"
A couple of people smile at first, and then the applause begins. Some people stand in clumps and cheer, others clap and cat-call.
"Oh, wow," Abigail says, blushing deeply and grasping Evey's arm.
"See? I told you they didn't have anything against newbies." To Abigail's surprise, Evey beams with pride as she pulls her through the crowd toward an empty table. Jose lagging behind to gossip and take compliments.
When they take their seats and the room settles again, Abigail begins to worry. "You said we wait to be called. I take it you mean called by the living."
"Yes. They call us in their dreams, and then we're there, and we go to work." Evey smirks. "Though you can hardly call it work, really."
"I don't think I can do that," Abigail admits. Her bravado, buttressed by the afternoon of dress-up and the applause of the crowd, begins to crumble at the thought. This isn't anything she has ever had to deal with before.
"I'm not the type of person that can just turn up and be intimate with someone I don't know." Two martini glasses appear before them, and Abigail downs the contents of one before Evey has even moved to reach for the other. It tastes terrible.
"I mean, I had hoped to be, one day. When I got out from under my father, and moved away for college. But that never happened." She clutches at Evey's arm. "Can't I tag along with you? At least the first night, please?"
"It doesn't exactly work that way, Sweetie. I wish I could explain it better, but there's just no point. Once it happens, you'll understand right away. But don't worry, I swear there's nothing to be scared about."
"But. But I died a virgin, Evey. I don't even know what to do, not really." There were strange whooshing sounds in the room and all of a sudden the woman at the next table vanishes. "Shit. Shit, Evey."
Jose strides towards them, taking the last empty chair at the table. "I think it's show-time, ladies."
Evey takes Abigail's hand between both of hers and holds it tight. "You're going to be just fine, Abigail. I promise."
Suddenly, Abigail feels a squirmy sensation in the pit of her stomach, like butterflies on PCP. She looks down, watches her hand grow transparent in Evey's grasp. "Oh, Shit."
"Don't you worry, Miss Thing," Jose smiles, reassuringly. "You're going knock their socks off."
AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB/AB
The room she materializes in is almost pitch black. Beyond a curtained window Abigail can hear cars swishing over rain-wet streets. Only a crack of street light interrupts the darkness, illuminating the sleeper in the bed.
She knows she should feel fear, but no matter how hard she searches her interior for it, it just doesn't seem to be there. There is only the silence of the room and the form beneath the covers. It is that form, that living, breathing thing, that draws her.
Abigail steps towards it, the stuff of her dress swishing in the mute room. She can smell him now, the musky odor of a warm male body. Her mouth floods with saliva at the scent, an insistent fluttering itch catching between her legs and crawling upwards over her breasts. Her nipples stand erect, pressing against the silk.
She is like a cat now, standing over this huddled form as it makes a faint sound of want. His need filling the air with something so male, so human, so irresistible.
Abigail reaches behind her, drawing the zipper of her dress down. Lets the straps slide from her shoulders, taking the gown to puddle on the floor at her feet. What had been only an itch a few seconds earlier has grown, spread. All the way to her fingertips her skin sizzles and sings as she pulls the covers back, slipping into bed beside the sleeping figure.
Contact with her skin makes him moan, turning towards her. His cock hard and hot, pressing against her hip. The urgency of his loins hisses at her, calls to her, speaks softly begging words into her brain and she takes his throbbing cock between her hands. Caresses it's length, it's head, slides her fingers through the beaded precum that springs like pearls from it's tip.
The sleeper moans, reaching for her. Buries his face in her hair to sigh and keen among the curls. "Please," he pleads softly. "Fuck me."
Although she would like to do much more than that, wondering what each inch of his body would feel and taste like against her tongue, his desires, it seems, are her own.
Abigail pushes him onto his back, straddling him. Wriggling slowly, deliciously onto the thick, marvelous heat of his cock. The act of engulfing him is thrilling, setting her whole body alight with pleasure.
This is what she had longed for, what she had spent half of her life imagining; the energy of the atmosphere, the heat of another body. The deliciousness of being filled, the raw sweetness of the thrust.
"Yesss," the sleeper gasps, hands blindly, instinctively scrambling to push her down and take him deeper. He arches his hips, thrusting up into her as she rolls her own experimentally. The motion is fluid, natural. Marvelous.
Briefly, she thinks back to her panicked exchange with Evey. Wonders how she could have ever been afraid of this, or worried that she wouldn't know what to do?
Delightedly Abigail laughs, and bracing a steady hand around the sleepers neck, begins to ride.