Title: Yikes
Summary: Nothing has been written for Professor Screweyes or Stubbs or the mature rating, so I shot down three birds with one gigantic stone.
Warning: Written for an internet rule that goes something like "If it exists, there is slash of it." Also, this fic deals with hints at physical and sexual trauma, psychological disorders and what happened after the crows got at Screweyes. Let's face it, this section of fanfiction NEEDS an 'M' fic and since that's my specialty…
Dedication: To Kirra kills, as another one-shot to feed my growing support of the anti-cyber bullying movement. Please give me a bit of a standing ovation for hitting a new low when it comes to extreme pairings.

-:-
…They've been together for two years so I guess it's okay.
Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just.

-:-
I may not be Dr. Freud or a Mayo bother, or one of those French upstairs girls,
but could I take another crack at it?
-Some Like It Hot.

i.

Regardless of what people might have thought (including Louie and Cecelia after they had seen the short clown years after an event that Stubbs would never forget and thanked them for at least once or twice a week in the back of his mind) about the relationship between the former of a legitimate circus clown and the ring master of terror, Stubbs was not ignorant of the fact that there was something disturbingly wrong about the Professor.

Not in the obvious way, of course. No, there was a whole other layer of wrong after you got through the fact that Screweyes was a bit of a sadist to everyone regardless of age, the fact that he delighted in terrors hidden in the dark and the fact that he didn't laugh (yes, that was what dug into Stubbs the most) no matter what.

He seemed, since Stubbs had started working for him, to be suffering in the soul in only ways that Stubbs had seen when he had worked for hospitals in the children wards for the hurt, the sick and the abused. There was a way that the Professor acted around certain people and a way that he held himself away from others to keep them from touching him—even a hand shake was taboo to the aged man.

Then, of course, Stubbs had heard the man screaming himself awake one night when the circus had settled somewhere with water everywhere (it made pitching the tent and settling the elephants difficult, but Stubbs had liked, in a quiet chuckling way, that they were in The Land of a Thousand Lakes—it started up ideas he might be able to use to make the white haired ring master laugh that involved ducks and electric eels) when the sun was just coming up. The clown had gone to check on the man and found him wrapping himself in saltwater colored silks that could barely constitute a nightshift let alone blankets, hugging himself and biting his lip—that metal eye was open as it couldn't close, but the other eyelid was tight with the skin flexed over the iris and pupil; white licorice colored scars slightly visible along his chest and bellow his ribs that seemed as phantom and worn as Screweyes's hair. When Stubbs came closer inside the man's hideaway and his shoes clapped the floor to make the squeaker in the toes do their job, the Professor jolted like he'd been smacked, looked up towards the door (that metal eye had flashed a darker, moss color in rage and panic) and the short comedy lover was ordered out with a glass jar (filled with something bulbous and swimming in brown-yellow fluid like piss and sewage water) thrown at him and Screweyes shouting profanities in a language that sounded similar to European, but different.

The jar hadn't hit Stubbs and he'd gotten out of that room and made himself scarce from the Professor for the next few days but the image of the man at his lowest had made it obvious of exactly why it was almost impossible to make him laugh. People only got scars and nightmares like that if something bad had happened to them and Stubbs guessed that they had happened when Screweyes was still young and just as gangly as he was in old age.

He put it out of his mind and kept trying to get the man to laugh like he always did.

Then New York and those kids and their intellectual dinosaurs came along and Stubbs left—for what he had made up on the fly, and made possible almost on absolute terms, to be permanently.

And then one of those black crows that always hovered around the Professor showed up tailing Stubbs in his little Clown buggy on the way to a different circus he had heard was travelling to California.

The Professor's metal screw was fizzing green along its grooves and the crow had simply taken a seat on the back of the buggy's seat until it became obvious that Stubbs would be turning around.

ii.

The Far Future setting on a device, in the Professor's private chambers, that looked like a cross between a radio and an orange that had been rendered apart by a hungry chimp gave the entire room Stubbs had been led to by the crow turn into a place that was a sort of unreal once the dial had been set. The bird seemed a little thrilled at the dizziness the clown pantomimed in exaggeration when the husk of what was left of the Eccentric Circus sort of combed together like an ugly beehive and then rose up into the atmosphere, shivering dark and white light together until the sky turned black and Stubbs felt like he could touch the milky stars outside what became their transportation.

He didn't have the chance to raise his hand towards the elaboration of what he was pretty sure people called the constellation of Capricorn when the dial spun once or twice in the clock-wise motion of real existence in numerology and mathematics and then tilted the entire—oh, it was a ship spun together like the one that belonged to Captain Neweyes; but on the human dark side—place on its head.

He landed on his back and the crow standing beside the dial dropped the screw it had been clutching for long enough as the light (where that light was coming from was all along in the walls and the metal wiring of the ship in places it would be near impossible for a human to put them) of the ship flickered dark green that would make a person sick if exposed to it for too long. It blinked and blinked and then when Stubbs tried to get off of the floor his hand went too far forward and he knocked into a few glass beakers that hadn't really been behind him last he checked, but had been there when he turned like they were just supposed to be there so he could knock them to the floor.

His unsteady feet tried to avoid the glass with some liquid—or was it gas?—moving around in them when they hit the floor, but the crow wasn't having that, spinning in the air a couple of times about the dropped screw and then swooping over towards the clown's other foot. Pecking it. It made certain that Stubbs stepped on the glass and made whatever was within spill out, whirl around on the floor and over to the screw that still glinted clever, clever wickedness from its place on the lowest of human surroundings that was the ground on which people stepped.

While Stubbs bent down and tried to remove one of his candy striped socks now dripping blood from getting pricked with the glass shards, he failed to notice that from out of the ether of dark pollutions and vapor that shouldn't be inhaled; the screw rose up, twisted around in the air once it reached a height just above Stubbs at about six (almost seven) feet. Its grooved center seemed to point down at the injured comedy lover before the vapor swallowed it up and the lights went out altogether with the crow giving a little noise so Stubbs turned his head just as he was blinded.

Just for a moment of course. Everything was just pitch black, save for the screw that maintained its place above the man's height and glowed fizzy green.

When the lights flickered back on, bright and a sort of blue that looked especially keen on Cinderella or the Blue Fairy that Disney Studios prided themselves on, Stubbs actually screamed and slithered down into his oversized trick overalls—nothing of him visible but his hat as the top of it spun in half circles while he shivered on inside of his hiding place.

(Later, much later, after Professor Screweyes had gotten on clothes that covered his lean figure, his tightened skin that shouldn't have been possible on a man of his age, the tattoo on the heal of his left foot that still looked fresh in the inks of red and yellow that made up a top hat with a skull mark on the rim, the white hair of his that swayed and tried to curve to his shoulders when there was no gel to hold it in place, the scars adorning him that (yes, Screweyes was aware) Stubbs knew about, the white marks of better hidden scars on his knees, the blanch inducing sight of his uncircumcised penis that also had little red scars near his pelvic bone, the caved in look of his stomach… Stubbs would be told after much yelling, on his part, that Screweyes had needed a scream from someone he knew personally—or he would have been stuck in the stomach of a lot of other crows for a very long time and the safety precautions he had put in place through fear of his own death would have been for nothing.)

iii.

Screweyes wasn't going to change his ways.

Stubbs made peace with that.

The Professor would never laugh at the clown's jokes.

Stubbs expected that.

The lover of all things terrifying was willing to give Stubbs a chance at his comedy at the end of each show. To please the kiddies that some of the adults brought along to the shows.

In return, Stubbs was allowed to be brought up to date on knowing as much about Professor Screweyes as Vorb did about Captain Neweyes.

…It wasn't perfect, but at least Stubbs could live with himself and Screweyes was basically telling him that he trusted the clown not to let the older man get eaten by crows again.

vi.

(Stubbs wouldn't be told, ever, that the REAL reason for the Professor's trust was that, when Stubbs had once seen the man vulnerable and the older man had been violent... he had been quietly and internally impressed that the clown hadn't simply left him THEN. It would have been easy-plenty of people had done it before. But the clown-the infuriating, annoying, spineless, gutless, SHORT clown-had stayed.

And that, right there, is something worth holding onto until someone pried it from his freezing, blue, dead hands.)