paulmescalien
Fandoms
Recent works
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say it out loud by paulmescalien
Fandoms: The Long Walk (Movie 2025), The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
13 Jan 2026
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Summary
Billy knows what restriction feels like. He knows it intimately. The weight of responsibility and expectation bears down on him each day from the moment he wakes, a locked cage with shrinking walls and no key. To try and exist against the constant pressure is to breathe against a vice constantly squeezing his lungs. It feels tight in all the wrong ways, the sickening claustrophobia of being trapped in his own body. His own mind. For so long, Billy didn't know how to escape it. He wasn't sure if he ever could.
But Richard knows how.
With every cinch of a knot drawn taut against his skin, Richard Harkness unravels him just a little bit more. It's become a ritual of theirs—not often, not always, but there when Billy needs it most.
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or: a night with rope top!harkness and rope bunny!billy
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i'll fly away (o, glory!) by paulmescalien
Fandoms: The Long Walk (Movie 2025), The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
23 Dec 2025
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Summary
It rains in King’s Ditch the day Barbara Jean Barkovitch dies.
The rain does not come gently. Storm clouds bloom like thick smoke from the east before rushing forward and swallowing the sky over the town whole just to crack it back open in a thunderous storm—a downpour of biblical proportion, Baker might say. Gary doesn’t know what that means. He don’t go to church no more—ain’t gone in a long time, really, not since he was a boy. And even when he did go, Gary never sat and listened to the sermons. He never read the bible or learned the hymns. He was always restless in the pews, itching for the second he’d be able to burst through the churchhouse doors and be set free again. Gary doesn’t know heads or tails of no biblical shit, no, but he knows a real bad storm when he sees one. He’d have to be fucking blind not to. Water cascades down from awnings and rooftops to flood the streets and gutters, running off the road and soaking soil thawed from the spring. A deluge runs down from the mountain to the valley like a cleansing river, washing clean the streets of King’s Ditch.
Gary Barkovitch wishes it would cleanse him, too.
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or, the one where Gary loses his meemaw and the boys come together for him
Series
- Part 2 of country roads, take me home
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shake the frost by paulmescalien
Fandoms: The Long Walk (Movie 2025), The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
03 Dec 2025
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Summary
McVries tells him about meeting Ray when he’d only just meant to be passing through Freeport. He casually asks Stebbins if he believes in soulmates while he’s elbow-deep in the ceiling, and when Stebbins freezes stock still on the ladder, he only laughs that easy laugh of his and keeps on describing their meet-cute like he wasn’t really expecting an answer anyway. It’s a sweet story. Romantic, at least in the way McVries tells it.
It’s the kind of story that twists Stebbins up in places he didn’t even realize could get knots until his smile looks like it hurts. It was love at first sight. McVries doesn’t ask if he believes in that, too, and Stebbins is grateful that he doesn’t have to stutter out an answer that he’s not entirely sure he knows.
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or the one where ray and pete buy an abandoned bar in a dying mountain town and hire a local carpenter named billy stebbins to help them restore ita small town love story nobody asked for told in four parts over four seasons
Series
- Part 1 of country roads, take me home
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run (against the world that's turning) by paulmescalien
Fandoms: The Long Walk (Movie 2025)
31 Oct 2025
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Summary
Stebbins passes the time observing the other competitors while he walks. It proves a decent enough way to occupy his mind, at least for a while. He watches as the herd naturally begins to break off into smaller packs, camaraderie blooming in the cracks and crevices between them like invasive weeds breaking through the asphalt before they’ve even made it more than a dozen miles. It’s difficult for him to fathom how willfully ignorant they are to the danger of it all, as if misplaced roots have not historically caused even sturdy foundations to crumble.
But Stebbins isn’t like them. He knows he’s going to make it to the end. He’s going to be the last man standing in this race, and he knows exactly what that means. Out of fifty walkers—fifty young men—only one of them will win. Everyone who doesn’t win is going to die.
Everyone who isn’t him is going to die.
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The Long Walk, but through Stebbins' eyes because I have a lot of feelings that I'm still trying to process and I need somewhere to put them. Also because I feel like he deserves to have his story told, too. Canon-compliant—at least to the movie—so the deeper we go, the more we suffer.
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Tags
Summary
"Hey," Steve says after a moment, with all the softness you'd expect were he trying to corner and catch a wild animal. "Are you alright, man?"
Eddie, to his credit, tries to answer. It takes him a moment to find the words so at first he simply nods at Steve, one ringed hand pressing gingerly into his side, right where — oh. Suddenly it makes sense to Steve, like everything's clicked all at once, and he frowns. "Yeah, 'm good, it's just the, uh… the bites, you know?" And yeah, Steve knows. He knows better than most, actually, and the sympathy is all at once evidenced on his face. He can only hope it doesn't come off as pitying. "Quit looking at me like I'm some kind of kicked puppy, Harrington, it's weird."
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or Steve doesn't realize how bad off Eddie is (or how down bad he himself actually is) when he ropes him into helping chaperone a movie nightSeries
- Part 1 of could you let me go? (i didn't think so)
Recent series
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country roads, take me home by paulmescalien
Fandom The Long Walk (Movie 2025), The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
23 Dec 2025
- Words:
- 67,320
- Works:
- 2
- Bookmarks:
- 5
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could you let me go? (i didn't think so) by paulmescalien
Fandom Stranger Things (TV 2016)
01 Sep 2022
Summary
a place to gather all of my fics in the same soft universe
- Words:
- 58,753
- Works:
- 2
- Bookmarks:
- 27