Author: grayglube
Title: Gin Rummy
Summary: They're a suited King, Queen, Jack set. They're Aces strung together. One type of different things or different types of one thing.
Rating: M
Warning(s)/Kink(s): Language, sexual situations, incest
A/N: So for the most part this was meant to be one straight forward oneshot instead of drabbles strung together but I kind of like playing with ways to tell a story every once in awhile.
It's not that he looks like someone else, not completely anyway.
It's that he's alive and something else without any of the downsides either come with on their own.
He doesn't need to whisper with a disembodied voice in someone's ear to cause a violent reaction.
All he does is suggest and the reaction happens, it's usually violent but not in the same sense as what happens when the whisper comes from a ghost. When a ghost does it the chair the person is sitting in usually rockets back and they usually spin wildly looking for something they won't find, usually there're gasps and fear.
Not with him.
He suggests in easy languid tones and they obey. Because they want to.
His babysitter walks out into the street, right out into it where kids just out of school for the day do sixty down a residential and she flies up and flops down on the asphalt in the only way flesh and bone flies and flops when thrown by two tons of metal and too much moving force.
The velocity and impact sends her shoes in opposite directions, one lands on the front lawn and the other disappears over a neighbor's back fence.
Violent in a completely different sense.
He's ten years old and they zip the girl up in a body bag leaving her shoes where they lay and her teeth and majority of her face streaked across black asphalt and the dashed white line.
And as he gets older she thinks about it.
It's not that he looks like some else, more with every year, not completely.
It's that he's so much like everyone stuck in the house and so much else at the same time.
It's that when he speaks people listen, people do, people want.
She can hear him, and even though she's dead, even though she knows it's not the same for any of them in the house as it is for the living outside it, she listens too.
The difference is what she does. What she wants.
It feels like it did before, with the boy she loved, loves, hates, in confusing quantities at the best of times. But there's something else.
There always is.
Before when she was alive with a dead boy it was attraction she felt, she feels it now but it's different.
It always is.
Because she's dead maybe, or because the boy who looks too much like the one who fathered him is alive, or because they're all something else, monsters; her, the boy she loved loves hates, and the boy next door who gets to grow up.
The something else is what other people would feel if they were attracted without that edge of fear that no doubt creeps in when he talks or stares or comes into their space.
She supposes it's the being dead that makes fear less of a factor than it used to be, just how she supposes the house means something to the boy living next to it in similar terms of what it means to her.
It means living.
But not in the same way. For her it means living. For the boy who lives so close it means living the way he wants.
Power is what it means.
More than simply wanting, there is want, because he looks like someone else, there's something so much more deeply rooted in her that needs.
Something that craves and whispers and smiles because it knows she's already dead so a missive from the boy to go do just that is null and void.
Something that knows if she says hello to the boy peeking over the fence one day that he wouldn't run away.