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— 𝐜 𝐨 𝐧 𝐭 𝐚 𝐜 𝐭
NOTE: I am forever backtag friendly and absolutely open to doing things from past events that won't really have an effect on things at any given time. For example, if you'd like to do something with Peter aged down or when he was his spider dream guide, etc.
sometime this week 🎁
Her frustration is spring-loaded with no viable trigger or target to unload it on, and she spends a lot of time glaring out at the new addition to their house. The set dressing changed while she was busy losing her shit, it seems. She doesn't like it--not the gigantic tree house now nestled in the trees by the forest, or the inexplicably missing stream running by the house. Change is suspicious at the best of times, but these changes are like the sudden absence of so many people: abrupt, unexplained, and unwanted.
She likes the way Peter blanches at the tree house even less. She's sure it's for some awful fucking reason--because everything about their lives seems to built on some awful fucking foundations--and that tempts her to grab some gasoline and a match and take care of at least one of these problems.
For a few days she fumes, and she glares, and she sketches in her little black sketchbook--first absently and then with a purpose once she resolves to exert some kind of control without starting a forest fire.
Once her design is done, she slings her bag of paints over her shoulder and disappears up into the tree house for the better part of an afternoon. Empty paint cans drop from the hatch one after another. Finally, the last thing to leave is her, with her hands a little more smeared with paint than they were when she started.
Peter will find some alterations the next time he goes up. The first thing he'll see upon climbing off the ladder is a poster affixed to the plain wooden wall, something she'd found once upon a time at the department store and thought was funny. She'd always meant to one day jokingly put up in his room, but then she'd gone back to Reston and... well, maybe it's time for that cheesy laugh.
But when he turns around, he'll see her real effort to write over whatever past this eyesore has had: a white doe made out of moonlight and stars, poised in the rain-soaked greenery of what she envisions peaceful Utah back country must look like.
Happy birthday, Petey.]
A COMPLETELY UNNECESSARILY LONG REACTION bc this killed me.... (1/2)
Such that, when the treehouse just appears overnight — out back, supported by four tall trees, exactly as it was back home — he's not surprised. Horrified, frightened, wounded, yes. But it's not a surprise. He wasn't expecting it, but seeing that last real remnant of Charlie doesn't bowl him over the way he thought it might. That ultimate thing was always meant to find its way to him, that place where his fate was always destined to finally reach its climax.
Of course, he doesn't know exactly what that treehouse will eventually hold for him, back home: how the second he returns there, he'll be led up the ladder and to a room full of people, to the beheaded remains of the women of his family. To be crowned king, only it won't be Peter anymore. He'll be hollowed out all the way, and something else will fill up the insides of him.
The appearance of the treehouse does, however, weight heavily on him. He's already tipping towards another depressive spell — turning eighteen feels.... weird, and he's melancholic through the early days of November. Not distancing from Henry or outright behaving any more gloomily than he already does, but it's there in the subtle things. How he spends more time in bed, how he stops shaving again, doesn't bother to trim locks of hair that have grown completely wild from October. How he spends a lot of time staring at nothing, lost in his thoughts — eyes too clear to be the usual demon zone out spells.
The treehouse is the unwelcomed final push, and Peter mostly ignores it, eyes purposefully avoiding looking that way. It's in view of his bedroom window, so he leaves the blinds and curtains drawn shut.
But he does go up into it. Just briefly, just to look around — and he draws his knees to his chest with his back against a wall and cries a little, and misses Charlie, and misses his family, and then he comes back down. It'll be some days before he goes back up into it again, and he can't say why he does. It's numbly, movements up the ladder robotic, stiff. He'll probably just sit up there in it again for awhile (and unknowingly, half of his compulsion is Paimon, the strange and jumbled Charlie-part of his memories that are drawn to the treehouse as their safe space).
But something tugs Peter out of his unfeeling state, replaces it with a startle instead: a poster that he definitely didn't hang up, and he doesn't quite hit him that it had to have been Henry just yet. Because what he sees when he turns around is slowburn shock, and he just stares, mouth tipping open, eyes wide.
It's.... Luna. He recognises the white doe right away — he'd seen her too, in that form. At first he hadn't known it was her, and the realisation had come later, but.... he'd remember her anywhere, now. An ethereal swirling of white, as though she was comprised of the essence of the moon itself. An impossibly sweet and yet so familiar softness, a.... safety.
He... doesn't understand, not at first, completely stunned: How is this here? But then it comes, the realisation slowburn and building. He lives in a household of artists: Paimon.... does things with art, draws and collects and creates. And there's Henry, and.... Peter recognises her handiwork even if this is different from anything he's ever seen from her.
Henry did this. Somehow, she... knows Luna in that form. Because it's absolutely Luna; there isn't anyone or anything else in this place that looks like the particular deer. Peter slowly moves to sit cross-legged in front of the artwork, just staring at it for an unknown period of time, transfixed. Forgetting, for a little while, his anxiety, his upset, his hurt.
When he finally comes down, he's still dazed, but quietly. He'll find Henry, wherever she is, and he doesn't quite know how to say 'thank you', because he can't quite put into words what he's thanking her for. It's... too much to simplify. How she'd known to paint Luna. How she'd known to paint her for him. The treehouse is the same, but... also different, now. Something different. Something that has pieces of Luna, and Henry, in it.
He doesn't know how to stay 'thank you', so he slips his arms around her for a shy hug (a rarity for them both, and he probably inflicts much more awkwardness than if he had simply said 'thank you'), and says "the treehouse looks good" (oh Peter.... you tried....)
...Henry's become something different for him, too, over the past months. Or maybe she always had been really, since the moment he appeared in this house and instantly became a resident. "Family" is what they were assigned to be, after all. But the word resides in a different place in him now. They're each other's family.
Following inevitable awkward laughs and/or generous eyebrow raises, he'll invite her up for a smoke after dinner, in the treehouse. It was never his; it was always Charlie's. And then it would be Paimon's.
But here, maybe it's his and Henry's. ]
(2/2)
.......He's less thrilled with the poster and there will be numerous times it ends up thrown on the floor of the treehouse. Occasionally, he'll even carry it down and leave it in Henry's bed when she's not around. He won't destroy it; there's... something in him that seems bound to have a certain respect for gifts, and he recognises that this is a gift to his vessel, but that doesn't mean he has to like it. Take it back, Henry!! ]
grOSS FAM FEELS
His gratitude comes across loud and clear, and the pat he gets on his back is her you're welcome. And a thanks, too. A thank you for a lot of things: for being there; for being braver than he thinks, and kinder than he has to be. It's only awkward if the sentiment doesn't run on a two way street.
But Paimon better not even think about stepping foot in her room when she's not there, or there will be more. Don't test The Bitch, motherfucker.]
Sometimes a family is........ whatever the fuck all this is......
WHAT THE FUCK, THERE'S MORE OF THESE THINGS AND THEY'RE TAINTING THE ESTEEMED NAME OF HELL. You better not, Henry, or you're getting dead birds with their heads cut off left in your laundry basket. He used to just leave these in the yard, but he won't hesitate to bring them in, just for you.
a multiple homicide waiting to happen
#girlbosshustle
#womenempoweringwomen
#fuckoff
IDK how they haven't killed each other yet, tbh.....
You better not lock his ass up there, you need Peter to reach stuff off the top shelves. (Literally the only thing Peter's useful for, but still)
it's never too late
Too bad. Cry more, snot demon. She'll just get Luna to move in, she can have his room and levitate things down, bing bang boom.]
One day they just fucking go to town on each other's heads, Peter wakes up to a literal bloodbath
Something relevant that was also made recently:
She's so mEAN to hIM, what did he ever do to deserve this treatment.
(He did many things.... endless crimes) ]