Tell me if I shouldn't do this, put this here. But it's a story, one I don't really want to put on tumblr, not yet, and I'm still figuring out my new AO3. Is it okay to put ongoing stories on forums? I don't know- I hope people read. Leave comments, I guess, and since you can quote direct bits of things, maybe you can do that. I'm going to do two formats, a notepad file, and pasted right in here in a spoiler. Notepad files don't have color or italics. Don't think I'll be doing chapter titles. Should have thought to do this yesterday sorry: Spoiler: Content Warnings: (Contains Spoilers) Blood, HOLY SHIT so much BLOOD. Hinted at child abuse. Weird text color choices. ETA: There is a corpse. That had to be sewn together. Also, unhealthy perspectives towards life and death. --- Spoiler: Tide, Chapter 1 drip drip drip drip drip dripdripdri plink. plink. Atheist shoves the bucket underneath the bare metal table, an autopsy table really, though no autopsy has been performed in this morgue in years. It sunk below eons ago, after all. Worn away enough that there’s a leak in the metal. How many years does it think it’s been down here? Probably more than a century, if the rust is anything to go by. Nothing live, or pretty even will ever lie on it again though, so the rust doesn’t matter, nor do the flakes of red that mix with blood and dust on skin. plink Magic’s screwed up again, made this one die too violently- the blood really is everything, and it’s leaking out, even after death without a heart to pump it. Going everywhere. Not clotting. Dirty. Good thing he took his gloves off with his coat and hat. Hands are easier to clean. snip Atheist ties off the thread he’s using to sew the body’s bowels back together. Pulls it off the table, hangs it up upsidedown over a second bucket. plink. plink. plop. plop. It fills, but not as much as sometimes. This one hadn’t fed in a while, so it seems. Still, all the organs are intact. That and Magic mauled the poor thing so badly, at least a quarter of any usable blood ended up on the alley floor, even disregarding what bled out when he dragged it into the workroom from the street. All doors lead here, sometimes. The brain especially, no sewing there necessary. The heart had needed some patching up, little bits of thread, trying his best to make it not so visible. Hide the stitches, pass it off for a complete heart to a less scrupulous dealer. The other organs can be more sloppily put together, not as important magically. Except to the Egyptians- they have a thing for guts, it seems, for whatever reason. Who knows, it’s not important, not really. They pay well, food for another month. There isn’t really school down here, especially not in this part of the below. Steff’s London, you keep your children close. Or at least inside. Atheist takes the body down, carefully puts it into a body bag, lays it down in one of the no longer refrigerated cabinets. Doesn’t matter, it’s cold down here, so far underneath. Always a chill, at least where he works. His dad will take the body where it needs to go, sometime after night. He grabs the first bucket from under the table and dumps both of them into glass jars, only a few jars worth this time, there really was a lot of blood lost. That’s what he deals with. There are a lot of vampires around here, and you’re not technically allowed to kill someone of your own kind. That’s really the only rule. Kind is fluid, in some ways, but vampire is vampire, always. The corpse will be dissected, experimented on. Probably mostly by his father, or maybe his mother, if she’s bored or needs new eyes. Apparently vampire blood is a delicacy, but no one cares if rust or something else gets in. It’s prestige, hard to get. Expensive. You don’t want to hear that it’s coming from a workroom with a rusted table buried underneath a long sunk down brownstone. There’s never enough demand for them to live well, but they live, and it’s been a decade since either Atheist or Magic woke up with their toes missing. They grow back, but it is sort of rude, especially with your own kids. Atheist leaves the bottles on the table, temporarily so he can walk over to the wall closest to the door and shrugs his coat on. He wipes his fingers on his trousers first, they’re already badly stained so it doesn’t matter but his coat has to stay clean. Always clean. Puts his hat on, and places the bottles in his pocket. They’re bigger inside, the pockets, that’s why he’s kept the coat. Licks a stray bit of blood from a knuckle, he’ll deal with what’s caked under his fingernails later. He doesn’t need to worry about disease, not with his mother’s blood inside him. Ghost, unreal blood. Atheist can sew though, even without eyes. He grabs the dark glasses, pulls them on. Steps into the sort of light, closing what looks like cellar doors behind him. Locks it. Blinks, and flickers. A wereman walking by, confused, looks around. Something had been there, just then. He could smell it, taste it. Blood. Flesh blood, grayman blood. And then it’s gone. He hurries on, spooked, and Atheist comes back to reality. He opens the door to his house, walks in, shuts it. The transition isn’t disconcerting, even though the inside doesn’t match the outside at all. Unwanted experiments and therefore avoidance aren’t the only reasons he and his little brother haven’t seen their parents in years, only knowing they still exist because either side of the family business runs smooth as ever. The house, unbidden, expanded, protecting them. The part of the house they live in, their parents haven’t walked for years now. That’s the way Atheist wants it. Magic is just glad for sunbeams and vampires to maul. He goes to the kitchen, which is up a flight of stairs and down another, both of which swing to their destination, always a puzzle and a hideaway to be navigated only by those who live there and know it. He pulls the bottles of blood from his pocket, places them on the table. Easy preservation magic keeps it good, like the sunken cold in the workroom. Magic can distribute it, he’s the one who does that, killing and getting the actual transaction to take place. No one trusts the eyeless, and that’s what Atheist is, of course. An eyeless grayman. The little brother pads into the kitchen, first on four feet, gray and black fur matted around his head, eyes mismatched blue and green and yellow, and then on two feet. The contrast between the brothers is there, in the same way that there is a contrast between a void and a dark room. Magic has blue eyes. And he often goes barefoot. Atheist has shoes, and he’s pale. He’s covered in blood splots right now, though his coat mostly hides it. It’s a greatcoat. Black. His hair is gray, his skin is gray, his lips are gray. He doesn’t have eyes. Magic has blonde hair, to his shoulders. But he’s mostly a cat, these days. Like Dad, but he keeps his experiments quieter. And never on family.
