Work Text:
“Why…” Purple meets amber-green. “...is my cat…” Purple meets blue. “...a velociraptor?”
“Our cat.”
“My cat.” Purple thins. “She was my cat before you moved in.”
“Maybe.” Diego shrugs. “But that’s in the past.” He gestures at the ‘cat-iraptor’, as he had referred to it earlier, and smiles. “And in the present, we have been given this.”
“I don’t like this .” Gets Up meows, and presses her paws to the carpet with a lid of her eyes. She is dressed in a glossy, velvet looking costume of green colour, with a small hood of a raptor-looking creature’s head atop her own, and a body and tail trailing down her back, which settles next to her real cat tail on the floor. “I want my cat back.”
Diego doesn’t speak for a moment, head tilting with disinterest and lips parting minutely. His eyes glance up and down her, settling mostly on her black eye shadow and midnight purple lipstick, and then driving back into her own. His brow folds curiously with it all taken in, and he gestures at her loosely. “What are you supposed to be, anyway?”
“A witch.”
“Yeah, but what are you dressed up as?”
Hot Pants gives him a wide, furiously sarcastic smile and an irritated tilt of her head, to which he smirks in response.
“Where’s your hat?”
“I don’t have one.” She pouts with a smack of manicured, purple lips. “I am the modern witch; the days are over where I simply turn up on a broom with a wart on my nose and cast a spell of impotence.” She smiles at her boyfriend, though he seems unconvinced. “I am subtle yet enticing, and that makes me deadly.”
“And black eyeshadow is subtle, is it?”
“Well…” She shrugs. “...I have to be somewhat enticing, don’t I?”
“Hm.” He gestures at her torso. “And that’s why you’ve put a see-through top on?”
“It’s not…” Despite it being a dark scarlet-purple, it was certainly translucent, and enough to see her black bra underneath. She thinks her efforts to come across as ‘sexy’ to Diego may have strode a slight too far, fingers tugging at the top as she returns the favour. “What are you meant to be then?”
Diego himself dons an intricately painted-on row of carnivorous-looking teeth, which curl up from each of the edges of his naturally snarled lips and end with a black-outlined, sand-scaled brush of colour. It was certainly an impressive artistic spectacle for something that she hadn’t helped him with. “I’m a dinosaur.”
She does laugh. Just a little. Just a little snort, a snigger. Just a teeny little laugh.
“A dinosaur?” Her eyes glow with unreleased mirth. “What type of dinosaur?”
Diego grinds his human teeth, something Hot Pants can hear. “Utahraptor…”
She laughs more at that, a contorted, long snort of pent up amusement, and then a short cackle after. Diego was a stickler for everything Mesozoic, with stacks of DVD-based documentaries in their bedroom and a small, silver brushed sculpture of an ‘allosaurus’ on his bedside cabinet. His little obsession was cute, really cute, but instead of telling him that, she mainly relished in just teasing him about it.
“How old are you?”
He shifts on his feet slightly, and there’s an unexpected flicker of thought through his eyes. “One-hundred-and-twenty-five million years old…”
Another, longer cackle sounds, one that pulls Gets Up from cleaning the pads of her paws. “I mean you, you idiot!” She sighs with a grin. “Not the dinosaur…”
Diego flushes red. “You don’t have to be a child to like dinosaurs.”
“Sure...” The nod that follows fails to reassure Diego, his lips parting irritatedly as his brow flattens. Hot Pants bites at her own lip at his reaction, her tongue hit with a hint of plum as her lipstick smudges slightly under the pressure. “Is that all there is to your costume?”
Lips turn to a snarl, hands gesturing at his raptor teeth. “I spent a while on that. It’s good!” He had a dinosaur ‘hat’ hidden in his wardrobe, but that was for the spinosaurus and he didn’t feel like dressing up as that one. Mainly for the ‘spino’ part. “All you’ve done is dress up as a prostitute.”
“I’m a witch!”
“What definition of ‘magic wand’ do you recognise?”
“Have some respect for your girlfriend.”
Gets Up meows again, and then stretches forward and nibbles at the thinly-socked flesh of Hot Pants’ left foot.
“Ah-!” She grimaces, kicking her foot away from the reach of small yet sharp teeth. “You’ve already eaten…”
“She’s a velociraptor now. Bigger appetite.” Hot Pants lids her eyes at his lame yet acceptably amusing joke. “So, what are we meant to do now?”
“Well…” She pouts. “I have a box of sweets for any trick-or-treaters, and then I thought we could watch a scary movie.”
“Sounds good.”
“Uh, I’ve got strawberry, orange, or grape.”
“Strawberry!”
“Strawberry!”
“Strawberry!”
“Orange!”
“Uh…” Diego scrunches his face in thought, the mess of voices from the four costumed children in front of him blending into a muddle of noise in his brain. “Right, which one of you wanted orange?”
“Me!”
He nods, and serves a generous handful of orange-flavoured chewables to the pot that the girl holds. “Alright.” He gathers a handful of strawberry-flavoured ones. “And for you.” And another. “And you.” And another. “And… you.”
“Thank you, mister!” The children beam happily, and as Diego waves them off and notices another group walking up the path, he closes the door hurriedly, dropping the sweet basket to the floor and pressing a hand to his groin.
Hot Pants smiles at him admirably, impressed with his propensity for dealing with children, having just served his tenth group of trick-or-treaters of the night.
“Can you do the next one? I really need the toilet.” Diego darts up the stairs hastily, and gestures at the closed door. “They’re just coming up the path now.”
Hot Pants nods, and runs a hand through her hair as she prepares herself. “Yeah, sure.”
Diego flashes her a look of thanks, and disappears upstairs. The front door rattles with a gentle knock soon after, and picking up the basket of sweets, Hot Pants opens it energetically.
“Trick-or-treat!”
The noise is admittedly jarring, but the kids seem delighted with the tradition and she can’t bring herself to complain about it. Two of them stand in front of her, one dressed in a skeleton outfit and another as a surprisingly creepy spider. A woman of middle-age stands behind them, presumably their mother, though she appears less enthusiastic than the two, and her eyes seemingly drop disappointedly as she sees Hot Pants.
Hot Pants chooses to ignore her, and brings the basket forward with a smile. “What do you guys want?”
The boy speaks up quickly. “Do you have any strawberry flavoured ones?”
What was it with strawberry? “Yup.” Hot Pants scoops up a handful of the wrapped chewables, and drops them into the boy’s jack-o-lantern bag. She looks to the skeleton girl beside him, who smiles brightly as her eyes settle on her. “Do you want some too?”
The girl nods eagerly, and opens her bag prematurely as Hot Pants scoops up another handful of red. They fall into the bag with a rattle, her bag clearly already stacked with sugar, which instigates another round of sugar-rushes smiles.
“Thank you!”
The two children spin around quickly, and jog down the path with their bags gripped tightly in their hands. They dart quickly past their mother, to whom Hot Pants looks at curiously.
The woman stands still for a moment, examining her as the air between them turns a weird stagnant. All Hot Pants can do is smile hopefully at her, hand halfway around the edge of the door to close it.
“I don’t think you should be talking to children in that.”
The words travel through her with quick realisation, and Hot Pants burns slightly with embarrassment, looking down at the top she had forgotten about in her eagerness to involve herself in the practice of trick-or-treat.
She gives her an apologetic smile, and tries her best to excuse herself. “They’re only kids, I didn’t...”
The woman’s brow curls disapprovingly, lips thin and unsettling as she speaks again. “They can still see.” Her head tilts cynically. “And it’s not hard for me to see what’s underneath.”
Hot Pants narrows her eyes at her, understanding that this woman had a bone to pick. She gestures at her dark yet translucent silk covering, and the undergarment beneath with a perplexed look. “It’s only my bra.” It was hardly a statement - it was completely black, and certainly wasn’t showing anything but a slight of shaded cleavage.
“It’s a lace bra.” Purple eyes roll at her words, to which the woman scoffs. “It’s very suggestive - what does your boyfriend think of you?”
“Excuse me?” The woman must have seen Diego as well as she walked up the path. “What does my boyfriend have to do with this?”
Just before the argument grows even more heated, there is a convenient rhythm of footsteps that sounds from the stairs, and ‘her boyfriend’ comes jogging down them. “Everything alright?” He gives the two a smile, though Hot Pants looks… something - he can’t decipher it but it doesn’t look good, and the woman on their doorstep doesn’t seem very amiable to him.
“I was just wondering what you thought of your girlfriend showing herself off like that.” She hums. “To children, no less.”
Diego stands silent for a moment, and as Hot Pants glances over at him worriedly as the woman’s words settle into the air, having now dragged him into it, his eyes have turned a sharpened narrow and his lips are nearly matching the predatory snarl of his painted-on ones. “Is this about her top?”
“Yes, it’s about her top-”
“Well, I think she can wear whatever she wants.”
She grimaces. “There are children walking around.”
“I think they have bigger things on their mind-”
“Children do not want to see all that on a woman!”
“All these kids are hopped up on sugar and halloween spirit, they don’t care!” He swings an arm out into the distance, tension jumping up a few marks, and his words are immediately reinforced by the woman’s children, who are now devouring candy instead of paying attention to the argument. “You’re just being a prude!”
Diego’s voice starts turning thickly British the angrier he gets, so much so that Hot Pants is struggling to keep up with the speed of his tongue between listening to it and translating it.
Hot Pants could easily defend herself, but watching Diego go off on this woman was a specially sweet form of revenge, and so she leaves herself to indulge as it happens.
“I have a five year-old daughter-”
Diego scoffs. “I don’t give a shit how old your daughter is. You don’t come to my doorstep, ask for candy for your kids and then lecture my girlfriend on what she can and can’t wear!” He is clearly more articulate than the woman had expected. “Do you understand me?”
She doesn’t respond, and as only a few seconds pass, Diego elects that her time is up, and he takes the door from Hot Pants’ hand and closes it quickly.
Hot Pants was angry, sure, but by the way Diego pauses slightly in the moment and his breath broils with dripping adrenaline, she suspects he has gone a step further.
Her anger dissipates, and turns to lip-pursing amusement. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah.” He narrows his eyes to himself, and sighs confusedly. “I don’t understand who she thinks she is.”
She gives him a thankful smile, and turns to walk back into the lounge as she gestures at the door. “Can you do the rest of the trick-or-treats?”
“Yeah, no worries.”
Hot Pants suspects that the mother had quickly run her mouth after the incident, because no other trick-or-treaters turned up at their door for the rest of the night, which led Diego to devour the sweets in protest and condemn the neighbourhood to a fiery hell.
The clock had eventually ticked over to ten o’clock, too late for any sane parent to be taking their kids trick-or-treating, and that had meant her and Diego were left to their own devices. So, with a leftover set of fruit cider in the fridge and a collection of blu-ray horror movies that she had stocked up on, they had chosen to jump straight into their scary movie for the night.
Scary movie.
“This isn’t even scary.” Diego gestures at their guiltily widescreen television, rested into Hot Pants’ half-hold with one of her arms strewn across his stomach, both of them lying comfortably across the sofa with their heads sunken into cushions. “These two have just been flirting for the past twenty minutes.”
“Something will happen soon.”
“This is just one of your rom-coms.”
“I don’t watch rom-coms.”
“And I hate dinosaurs.” He shuffles further into the mould of Hot Pants’ body, who frowns embarrassedly at his rebuttal. “Where’s the grandma?”
“I dunno.” Hot Pants tightens her grip on his stomach, smirking maliciously out of her boyfriend’s sight. “Maybe she’s been possessed.”
“I doubt it.” He snorts, unaffected by her efforts to spook him. “Grandma looked like a fighter. She had a shotgun in the kitchen.”
“You can’t shoot a ghost.”
“I was saying she would shoot herself before the ghosts got her.”
Hot Pants grimaces at him, meeting his snarled grin with contrasting displeasure, but their meeting of eyes is broken by a sudden, loud smash of wood, and a choked yelp from the television.
“Oh shit!” Diego’s eyes widen abruptly as his neck snaps back to the screen. “What the fuck is that?”
A thing of short, slim stature rips through the bedroom door with a screech. It’s eyes have turned to a venomously fluorescent colour, and it’s teeth rattle together like it’s trying to echolocate.
“That’s her!” Grandma wasn’t looking very healthy.
“Huh, you were right.” Diego hums, watching the two lovebirds tumble out of the bedroom window in hurried panic as grandma scrambles at them with loose legs. “The ghosts really did get her.”
The two land on a conveniently placed, snow covered flower bed in the black of night with crackled yelps. They try to make for the surrounding woods, but the open window above them shatters fully, and grandma leaps from it with haste. She lands to the floor without error, but seems unable to locate the two in front of her, who sit frozen and horrified in a close huddle. The camera pans up, passing cramped arms, and comes to reveal a scaly growth gradually enveloping her neck and face, and protruding teeth that glisten with coverings of saliva slowly tear through the skin of her cheeks with the growing pitch of the musical score.
Hot Pants’ brow flattens with disappointed realisation, but Diego’s raises and his eyes sharpen, and as grandma’s eyes turn green and sliced with sharp irises, he laughs out.
“She’s a dinosaur!”
Hot Pants sighs, and flops back into the cushion she had leaned up from in anticipation, having been under the impression that the movie was going to pick up.
“This movie’s sweet.” He settles into the crux of his girlfriend’s neck, long, blonde locks splaying out and tickling the sensitive skin there. “Good pick.”
When Hot Pants had chosen the film ‘Prey’, she hadn’t expected it to be a very literal representation of the movie. She was here to see some freaky, paranormal shit, not two horny teenagers get ripped apart by arthiritisaurus.
And it irritated her slightly that she had fallen straight into giving Diego the perfect movie.
Perhaps that’s what she got for not reading the description.
The movie, a runtime of an hour and a bit, had ended surprisingly well, with grandma’s isolated cottage incinerated in a deliberate, deafening gas explosion and the surrounding, secluded land sinking in on itself under the force of it.
As for the plot? Well…
It turns out, discovered in an ecologist’s abandoned journal by the two lovebirds, that there was some sort of ‘sentient tree’ buried underground, whose roots and branches were connected to a litter of dinosaur skeletons fossilised in the earth around it. The tree, being sentient and therefore malevolent (as with all things in horror films), somehow harvested the nutrients from the bone marrow using its root hairs and leaves, and used them to enrich the surrounding soil, which meant grandma’s garden fruit patch (a very significant plot point) was growing dinosaur fruit, which had the ability to awaken the soul of the dinosaur’s skeleton in whoever ate the fruit?
Hot Pants didn’t really know, but grandma ate the fruit at some point and that meant she was subconsciously an apex predator underneath, which was why she tried to eat the two protagonists.
But Diego seemed to enjoy it, for certain, quite blatant reasons, and that was enough for her.
With the movie over and their empty cider cans strewn discarded across the floor, their cuddling had quickly changed from a horizontal parallel of spooning to a vertical parallel of straddling.
Diego finds himself pressed into the corner of the couch, legs spread forward loosely with Hot Pants’ own knelt around his lap, and her body pressed eagerly into his.
Her lips taste thickly of plum, with a warm, contrastingly thin slick of saliva lining them. She kisses him hungrily and hotly, giving him firm, telling presses of plump flesh, which glide alongside her searing breaths and whines.
It hadn’t taken long for Diego to slide his hands up her forsaken top, finding the strap of her bra and unhooking it deftly, then leaving it to sit loosely around her stomach and granting him the space to massage at her breasts and run the tips of his fingers along the curvature of her bosom.
Every stroke of his touch sends her deeper into her excitement, and she grinds into him again to encourage him on, wishing her jeans were thinner. Diego responds with a grunt, and a squeeze of his hands, which makes Hot Pants press into him further and moan through her breath.
He lets out a throaty chuckle at her response, and his hands start to slide down from her chest and trail along the smooth skin of her stomach. The incandescent touch of his fingers makes her breath twitch and her groin buckle eagerly against his, but before he can reach the button of her jeans, there’s a weighty impact next to them on the sofa, and a curious, high-pitched noise.
The hands stop, and Hot Pants pulls her lips from his reluctantly as the thing starts to manoeuvre about with investigative nuzzles.
“Gets Up…” She sighs the name, looking down to the intruder as she burrows her way in between the two of them.
“Your damn cat…”
She looks up incredulously. “Oh, so it’s my cat now, is it?”
Gets Up lets out a rich purr, and then settles into the cavern between their stomachs and curls herself up into a content ball.
“She does look really cute in that velociraptor costume.” He looks to Hot Pants, who still sits desperately pressed to him but with unimpressed eyes. “Maybe we should take this upstairs.”
“Yeah.” She kisses at his lips tellingly. “Maybe we should.”