1 - 20 of 212 Works in Archive 81 (Podcast)
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"It doesn’t feel like catharsis,” he said through his teeth. He was clenching both of his fists so hard it reverberated pain up into his shoulders. “Why? Why me?”
“Now, Dan, I have a light, and I am going to ask you to follow it.”
“What?”
“I want you to follow the light with your eyes,” Rat said calmly, “and do not look at me. Look at the light. While you look at the light, I want you to think about those feelings. That anger, that resentment, the feelings about how people have treated you. The pain. The loss of autonomy.”
Dan opened his eyes. Rat pulled back, letting go of Dan’s wrist. In his hand was a small light, and he flicked it on but didn’t flash it. Dan looked at it, hesitated, and then nodded. He was still skeptical, but he didn’t know what could possibly go wrong. Anything Rat could do to him would be easier done through simpler methods, and it seemed like a waste of time to go the therapy method if he wanted to just make Dan more damaged. And if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be the end of the world either.
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 11,600
- Chapters:
- 1/1
- Kudos:
- 5
- Hits:
- 45
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“You should take a break,” Rat said. “Just! For a day or two. Clara and Lou will be okay.”
Dan still doubted Rat, considering how little he’d shown himself to care about them in the first place, but the idea of taking a break was appealing.
“Rat,” Dan said, slowly. “Can you get me a heating pad?”
It was another humiliation, but he thought it might be worth being subjected to that humiliation if he was able to procure something.
Rat’s face crumpled. “Oh, Daniel Powell,” he said, and then he shook his head slowly.
Dan didn’t ask again.
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“This isn’t about a body,” he said, and it would’ve been more honest to say it wasn’t just about a body, but it wasn’t like there had ever been much honesty to spare in this house. “This is about - we were kind of becoming friends, the three of us, and I know you felt it too. There was, you know, a connection.”
Nicholas turned to lean back against the counter, crossing his arms over his stomach, and fixed Static Man with an inscrutable look. Sometimes, when Static Man was really having trouble reading him, he felt like he was looking at one of those optical illusions. The two faces and the vase, the girl and the old lady. He knew there was something to see there - in the heavy, straight brows, maybe, or the deep-set dark eyes; or the tension at the corners of the mouth, its sharp Cupid’s bow beneath the carefully trimmed edges of the mustache - but he just couldn’t get his vision to focus right.
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Rat paused. He had to test the waters a couple of times before he could be sure; was Dan as easily susceptible to words as he believed, or would he resist at first? Dan was quiet for a moment, then said, “Is this supposed to be relaxing?” very quietly.
Rat giggled, under his own breath, and stroked his thumbs over Dan’s cheekbones. He was easy - even if not as easy as he could have been. Token resistance. It was common, in something like this; Rat was employing some methods that were traditional, based on emotional capacity of the person on the other side, and the rest was his own creativity and the right string of words. One could find anything, if one works hard.
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It was the way Rat asked him questions. How he framed everything in terms of Dan’s comfort or pleasure. How his voice had a liquid quality when he asked Dan about his masturbation habits, as he had recently. How often do you partake? he’d said, and Dan had sputtered and laughed because it sounded more like being asked about how often he smoked, or drank alcohol, but he knew that wasn’t it. Indulge me, Daniel Powell.
Honestly, Rat asking was better than Dan had expected. Frankly he wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Rat listened to him jerk off. He couldn’t help but think that, anyway. Rat was there when he fell asleep, most of the time, and similarly he was there when he woke up. He had woken up one morning, very slowly, and realized he wasn’t dreaming - there really was something metal and cold pressed to his chest. The bell of a stethoscope had not been his first guess, and when he’d jolted awake Rat had hushed him and held him down and continued to listen to his - frantically beating, upon waking - heart.
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“If you want to say something,” Dan finally said, “just say it.” Rat was staring at him, openly but with an air of judgement, like some stain was on his face that Rat thought himself too polite to point out, but found disgusting regardless.
“It was cut from you with an untrained hand,” Rat said, blandly. He exhibited emotion by placing his palm on the rickety table and then clenching it into a fist.
“The new flesh,” Dan said, glancing down at his chest. Dan didn’t understand the magic, and he mostly didn’t want to, but he was still scarred, though most of the marks had faded. They were the same scars he’d had when Rat had cut him open, at least. Maybe that would be enough to provide Rat some small comfort.
“Yes,” Rat said, his mouth tight. Dan took a few more swallows of his beer, then pushed the can aside. “It is unfortunate to see so much of my precious work undone.”
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“How much longer can you hold it?” Rat asked lazily, tugging roughly at Dan’s hair as he dragged his fingers through it to the back of his head. He cradled him there, tipping Dan’s head back again so that he was looking up at Rat with half-lidded eyes.
“I don’t know,” Dan said, and Rat believed him this time but didn’t like the answer.
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the broom blooms bonny and the broom blooms fair by plutonianshores for santanico
Fandoms: Archive 81 (Podcast)
22 Apr 2025
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Fortunately, Michael Waters' collection has a ritual that dispel the curse Nicholas and Chris have stumbled into. Unfortunately, this ritual entails having sex, with each other.
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When a ritual requires Nick to sleep with a woman, Chris is more than willing to help. He is more willing to consider it than other options.
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He kept his hand there, hovering over the jewelry cuff on the lobe of her ear and then he said, nonsensically, “I never knew anything about you.”
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Rat had, through months of study and practice, become very good at touching Dan in his sleep without waking him. It was not an exact science, but then, so few things were, and Rat had been operating in that nebulous, subjective area between science and magic for so long that he might have been more discomfited if it had been entirely predictable. No, there was a small element of chance to it, and it also depended on whether Dan had slept well the past few nights, and whether they had had sex before he’d fallen asleep, and a number of other factors. Rat was good at gathering data, and he liked to do it, and never more so than when the data had to do with Dan Powell.
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“Your mind is racing,” Rat said. He kissed the edge of Dan’s temple. His lips were cold, which wasn’t unusual but still made Dan shiver like they hadn’t just been touching. The rest of him was warm, anyway, comforting. His hands, his legs. They were in bed.
“I know,” Dan said. Rat nudged his knee between Dan’s and sat up to press their foreheads together. Dan felt his eyes cross as he tried to look at Rat. “I’m…scared.”
“Of what?” Rat said, not missing a beat.
Dan thought many answers, vocalizing none of them:
What it might say about me. What you might think. What I might think. How I’m gonna look at myself, after. What if I want it again? And again. What if it’s not enough? What if I’m never satisfied?
In the end, he said what was most honest: “I’m scared I won’t want it to end.”
Series
- Part 12 of drive the pathway through the pines
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 9,494
- Chapters:
- 1/1
- Kudos:
- 10
- Hits:
- 96
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The first time he watched a video where a woman was slapped across the face, he came in seconds, and then felt so terrible about it that he didn’t touch his laptop for days. The whole experience scared him, and it scared him even worse how much he wanted to watch it again, when he finally did venture back to the same website. He didn’t want to be one of those guys who got off on hurting women.
As it turned out, he wasn’t.
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If Dan were given the chance to not get involved with Visser, or LMG, or magic at all, he would probably take it. Only that requires him to remember everything that went wrong.
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"You could still tell me about the constellations," he said. "They're starting to come out - look."
And they were: the sky was a deep velvety blue - it wasn’t quite dark yet but the sun was barely a thread of gold in the distance, and the stars had begun to blink on here and there. The sky wasn't entirely clear - there were dense grey clouds that Dan had been eying nervously all day, wondering if they would open up and he would find out what rain in this hellscape was like - but in between the clouds, he could see them glittering.
He had never exactly been into stargazing. Light pollution made it impossible to pick out anything but satellites, back home. But somehow he could still tell that these weren't his stars - he was sure he would have known, intrinsically, even if he'd just woken up here. That instinctive knowledge sank through him, heavy in his limbs, and he felt - not for the first time, but stronger than ever - a nauseating twist of homesickness, deep in his gut.
"Yes," said Rat, craning his neck to look up at them. "I hope these clouds pass. I suppose we have a little while yet, before night truly falls."
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Dan couldn’t think of a cogent argument to disagree. It wouldn’t hurt, but he didn’t believe it would be as helpful as Rat had said. He rolled his eyes to say that he was a bit unbelieving about the whole thing, but climbed onto the bed and put himself in position. He looked at Rat upside down, and lifted a hand to wave at him.
Rat smiled, almost indulgently. “Stay like that, for a while.”
Dan twitched. He hadn’t been sure what he’d been expecting, but the way Rat said it so casually made his insides squirm. He shifted to try to get comfortable. It was true that he wasn’t so heavily angled as to hurt himself, but he could feel the rush of blood to his head anyway. He let himself sit with it, considering the strangeness of the sensation for a few moments.
But it wasn’t exactly interesting. He drummed his fingers against his own stomach, stretched his arms. He’d left his phone out in the living room, though he thought it probably would have been uncomfortable to try to scroll mindlessly through social media like this anyway. He stretched his neck to the side and looked at Rat, who was standing very still.
“Don’t you get bored?”
“Boredom is natural, Dan Powell.”
Series
- Part 11 of drive the pathway through the pines
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Arthur, famed heterosexual, has graciously given Nicholas permission to flirt with him. He didn't expect him to be good at it.
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But, this was, perhaps, the first time he really looked at the new flesh. He saw not just the major parts that made it - the primary tape deck, with its solid, VHS-type construction, always recording and akin to being a secondary heart or brain - but the secondary as well. The flesh button that snapped open the secondary tape deck near his groin, the twisting of wires and metal that hinged him together, the impossible mesh of technology, aged as it was, and what remained of what made his body human. Dan still didn’t know what to think of it, nor did he know what to think about Rat, straddling him at the hips.
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Afterward, he knelt. Samuel looked at him with a lazy expression, like he didn’t care what Jacob did, but Jacob knew this wasn’t the case. He had seen the desperate edge in Samuel’s expressions earlier, the microcosms of emotion as they prayed and chanted and sang. Samuel, Jacob knew, was no better than the rest of them; he just played the role of leader so well that no one would ever ask for anything more.
Jacob was included in that reverence. He had always wanted to be charismatic, like that; but he had never wanted the responsibility. Someone like Samuel took that responsibility gladly. If it was a ploy for power, that didn’t matter, at least not to Jacob, who tilted his face up and saw the way that Samuel looked at him, stroking his cheek.
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Dan laid in the silence for a moment, listening to Rat as he took a tissue and wiped himself down. As he resettled on the bed, Dan said, "Was that number one?"
"Yes," Rat said, glad that Dan had caught on so quickly.
Series
- Part 10 of drive the pathway through the pines
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 8,210
- Chapters:
- 1/1
- Kudos:
- 5
- Hits:
- 133