Will Stutely (sly_stutely) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-01-05 12:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | friar tuck, will scarlet, will stutely |
WHO Will Stutely, open to anyone who has access
WHEN Tuesday 5 January, afternoon
WHERE The Sly Fox
WHAT This is Fine™.
WARNINGS Two emaciated men trying valiantly to punch each other
He shouldn’t have come back here. He’d just wanted some air. The last few days had been grey and rainy and oppressive. Will had spent them teaching Ella to play knucklebones and doing jigsaw puzzles with her and Clio. He’d been keeping warm, eating heartily, losing himself in his love’s body, and slowly going out of his mind. It was no fault of hers or Ella’s. Their love wasn’t cloying or suffocating. They were wonderful, they were— perfect. He was the one who was a mess. He needed to get out. Put his head in order. So when the first glimmer of sunlight peeked through the clouds that Tuesday afternoon, Will was out the door. A walk, he decided, was just what the doctor ordered. Fresh air. Get the blood flowing. Change of scenery, all that. But the sun was fleeting; within minutes, it was swallowed up again by the overcast sky, and the cold began to nip his fingers through his thick gloves. Bugger it, he told himself. The walk would warm him up. He made it no more than a block before he was puffing. Fuck, he was out of shape. But he wasn’t ready to go back. Not yet. He gave the cab driver the address of his workshop. He wasn’t going to actually work, he told himself. Even if the backlog was piled up waiting for him. Even if he could easily knock off the final layer of varnish on the church pews in an afternoon, no matter what Clio and the doctors and nurses said about the need for rest. No, he’d just sit like an obedient patient and read his book. Or… look at stuff on his phone, because he hadn’t brought a book. But when the cab pulled up to the kerb beside the workshop, Will’s feet took him right up to the door and then kept on walking. Down to the next corner, round the bend, past a bodega and a Chinese grocer, till they brought him to a shuddering halt outside the boarded-up facade of the Sly Fox. He shouldn’t have come back here. He told himself this, even as he stole through the alleyway, even as he slipped his key into the back door. The pub was empty in a way he’d never seen it before, a layer of dust coating every surface. None of them had been back since that first scramble when Marian had been taken, and that had been… god, coming up on two months ago. The tendrils of guilt writhed in his gut. Will moved slowly through the room, trailing an absent hand along the surface of the bar, leaving bright lines in the dust. It was inevitable where he ended up. The heavy door to what had been the men’s room had been left unlocked. The bolts slid back without protest; the room within was exactly as he remembered it. It was a generous cell, at least in comparison to the Sheriff’s. A tad more cramped, but at least it was properly insulated. It was carpeted, even – scratchy, mismatched squares that covered the floors and walls without any thought for comfort, but carpet nonetheless. You wouldn’t catch your death of cold in here, not like the concrete box they’d been in. There was a toilet and sink, about the same as the Sheriff had provided each of them. Not even the slit of a window, though. With the light off and the door closed, the darkness would be complete. Be honest; it was a dungeon, as surely as the one that had bloody nearly killed the three of them. He and Marian had both been deluding themselves by calling it anything else. Will wondered, would it have gone any different for them, if they’d not shouted Marian down? Would she still be in the Sheriff’s clutches right now? Could they have prevented the knife and the lash, the hunger and the chill, the pretty room with its chain and shackle? Or would they only have been trading one kind of slow destruction for another? He closed his eyes and pressed her forehead against the door jamb with a soft groan. |