Title: Pick Your Poison
Author: LM Simpson (Kady the Red Panda)
Pairing(s): Calculus/Castafiore?
Rating: M
Warning(s): Adult Situations
Disclaimer: Moulinsart, please cancel your lawyer appointment. I'm trying not to get money from this, promise.
Other tidbits: Why couldn't I had played with my Barbies like this when I was a child?
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They were all drunkards at Marlinspike Hall.
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Captain Archibald Haddock was the most obvious toss-pot of them all. Loch Lomond flavored his tongue and drops of it from his beard perfumed his pullover like it was his mistress. He had promised on and off again to swear her off for good more times than tenfold the amount of fingers and toes on his extremities, only to come back, plead for forgiveness, and then resume suckling from her like a hungry infant. He was most certainly intoxicated with his lifelong love, regardless of how illicit it could be at times.
But he also had another mistress. This was not one from spirit, but of mind.
Haddock did not consider himself much of a reader, but he kept that beat up Webster's dictionary for longer than before he was even a cabin boy. Words, as a group, muddled his mind. But individually, words intrigued him. He especially fancied looking up obscure words and applying them in real life, whether he used its proper definition or use or not. For a man dressed in neutral black and navy, it was his way to stay colorful.
0000
As Haddock engaged in a threesome with his mistresses in the reading room, sipping Loch Lomond in a glass as he skimmed through his well loved tome, Tintin rested on the couch and opened a book the size of the coffee table he was reading on across from Haddock.
Whereas Haddock preferred words and whisky, Tintin was often drunk on adventure.
The captain took pleasure in exploring the dictionary for obscure words, but Tintin took pleasure in exploring the atlas for obscure worlds. It's not like the reporter could help it. The world was a playground to him, and playgrounds were meant to be explored. Who could be so cruel to deny a child access to a playground?
From a young age Tintin loved how no two cultures were completely identical. He loved the varieties in traditional dress, he loved how one word could mean "love" in one language only to translate as an insult against one's mother in another, and he even loved how natural hair color came in five different varieties.
Tintin grew to depend on his adventures over time. He loved Marlinspike Hall, but was always the first to admit that he was convinced that if every place in the world was just like it, he would die from thirst. He could only go for days before the withdrawal symptoms became too intense to tolerate.
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As Tintin eagerly memorized a physical map of the Middle East, Snowy tiptoed into the reading lamp-lit room, located his master, and cuddled around the man's sock cloaked feet.
Whereas Tintin preferred adventurous variety, Snowy was addicted to comfortable stability.
If every day was uniform for the rest of his life, Snowy would not care less. The terrier adored his master, but he did not like going on airplanes or having to walk outside attached to a leash. He certainly did not enjoy being shot at. Only rarely during the adventures did he feel completely at ease or even somewhat content.
Snowy detested change, especially when it was radical. Someone that could've been Tintin's ally could suddenly become a villain, or a simple plane ride to somewhere (mostly) quiet could turn into a tumultuous hijacking.
Was it justified, then, that Snowy relished those rare moments of tranquility to the point it dulled his fears? And was it justified, then, that when that calm was disturbed, that he would be truly shocked, as if he was a man awaking hung over and stark naked in the lion's cage? Without those little moments, he could be a worse nervous wreck than he already perceived himself to be.
As he curled up on Tintin's feet and savored his master's calming scent, Snowy hoped that Tintin would stay there until he finished his nap. Without Tintin's constant presence, he would be lost in a hell of uncertainty and inevitably drown in his sorrows.
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As his main charges enjoyed themselves in the reading room, Nestor suffered from insomnia in his darkened bedroom.
Nestor was a drunkard for his job. After decades of serving the various inhabitants at Marlinspike, the job had become what he was, similar to how Loch Lomond at one point was what Haddock had become. He could not remember at all the last time he took a vacation, but at the same time he feared the concept of them—what would he do on a vacation if he was not serving someone else but himself?
Master Haddock and Master Tintin often asked him why he always appeared so fatigued. He often brushed it off, saying that he wasn't tired, but rather just looked like it due to age.
In reality, decades of being a butler dominated his brain, completely rewired his thinking of how to do things. Nestor stayed up most of each night wondering how it took so long for his employers to request his assistance. Would it had killed one of them to ask for a glass of water, or to bring the dog out to relieve himself? If he was no longer a butler for any reason whatsoever, he would have to end his life. Without his choice of poison, there would be no more purpose for him on this Earth.
0000
While some read downstairs and another tossed and turned in his sleep just down the hall, Professor Cuthbert Calculus bathed.
Calculus was perhaps the most addicted of the five inhabitants. On the surface, science was his addiction. His interest was definitely present, but it was only just a symptom to his true drink:
Women.
Calculus loved women, all women, and how! He loved them short and he loved them tall, he loved them fat and he loved them skinny, he loved them flat chested and he loved them well endowed, he loved them hairy and he loved them shaved, he loved every essence that made even the butchest women feminine. At times he wondered in pity how every one of his male acquaintances did not or, maybe, could not appear to know the love of or how to love a woman, short of perhaps his own mother.
Women were always on his mind. Calculus forbade anyone to enter his laboratory while he worked, and it was not just so that he could attempt to work on his pioneering experiences, like color television. When he was not conducting physics experiments, he slowly, but steadily attempted to develop an android that could perfectly resemble a human woman externally and all of one's normal functions internally, except for full-blown reproduction. So many injustices in the world against the fair sex would've been solved, Calculus hypothesized, if all men knew and understood the wonder that was womankind.
He was quite the womanizer in his university days until that one fateful night where a man beat him to a bloody pulp when he unknowingly flirted with the man's girlfriend. He could not recall exactly what the man could've done to make it happen, but his hearing was never the same afterwards. Cuthbert was bothered by his hearing loss for years, until he realized, first off, that he could work in peace without any distractions, and second off, that some women just happened to love naïve, near-deaf men because they were "cute."
Back then he was a striking young man. Now he was getting old and getting frailer by the nanosecond. As intense as his crush for the Milanese Nightingale had become since he first heard her on the radio all those years ago, his own self-consciousness shied him away from making explicit advances to her. When she stayed at Marlinspike, he was so tempted to attempt to sneak into her room while she was dressing or undressing, but the fear of being caught was too great within him… In real life.
He began stroking himself under the warm bath water as he imagined what could've been in an ideal, fantasy world: Bianca would be only wearing a cream white full –length slip when she noticed the door being slightly cracked open and a pair of bespectacled eyes staring on the other side. Instead of screaming or otherwise shooing him away, she would invite him to come in and lock the door behind him. Before he knew it, they would being kissing, with Bianca using a free hand to play with his goatee and the other to play with his enlarging sex under his pants. They would eventually tear each other's clothes apart and kick the remnants off the bed before Bianca, his beautiful Roman Goddess, would lie atop him and stay there their sixty-nine. Bianca would be as turned on by the position and the mere idea of fucking as he was, as proven by her sopping wet mound. She tastes coppery, yet sweet, contrasting the salt-like taste from his own fluids that she would soon partake in. His orgasm would mount closer and closer to the mountain's apex as he would lick more and more intensely the ambrosia from her cup. It never seemed to empty, and Calculus could not care less as he became more and more drunk on the such feminine syrup; if he drowned in it, it would be a wonderful end to his life. The same would be true for Bianca, who would increasingly take in more of him with each lick and suck. She would be taking him completely in, balls and all, when he violently came.
Calculus returned in the real world dizzy headed and gasping for air. He was still coughing up water when heard a knock on the door.
"Sir, is everything all right?" Nestor asked.
Calculus's head ached. "…A bite? Would I like a bite?" His face as red and his lips curled into a satisfied smile as he replied, "Oh no, I'm sorry, but I am quite full. I just had the most scrumptious snack, you see…"