Chapter Text
It’s Tuesday, you’re tired, and as of ten minutes ago, you’ve found out that the route home you’d wanted to take is closed because of… flooding?
You don’t even know and you don’t bother to ask.
All you really know is that it means your original plan of taking the bus won’t be worth it.. At least you can count on the train, yeah? You should have just taken it to begin with, but you’d wanted a change of pace.
Oh well.
The crowd is, as always, a little too noisy, a little too cluttered, a little too much with weird smells and body odor. You can ignore two of the three with an app under your thumb, but the smell’s a whole other ball park.
Still, you don’t find the train bad. You even like it in a way – makes the whole thing a little interesting.
“Agh, Officer - Officer, please , I just forgot my wallet back at home! It’s only a few dollars – isn’t this a little bit of an overreaction - ?”
You look up from your phone, your pass hovering over the reader high enough it doesn’t take. The source of the noise, you find, is some guy in a completely white bodysuit getting harassed by some subway cop. People walk on by just a little bit faster not wanting to get caught up in the drama.
Someone loudly clears their throat behind you.
You blink and step back out of their way, shifting your bag further up your shoulder. Your attention goes back to the scene and you see the cop practically backing the poor guy against the wall. And then the officer turns his head and your eyes narrow in recognition.
Dicklen.
You don't even realize you've moved away from the gate until you're standing in front of the pass kiosk, card already at the ready. You glance up, seeing the guy in the bodysuit - you'll just call him Bodysuit for now - gesture widely with his hands, before huffing out a sigh and going through with the transaction.
Ten dollars and a half minute later, the machine spits out a flimsy card with a mechanical "thank you". You take it, pocket it, and begin the trek over to ruin officer Dick's power trip.
" - this really isn't necessary, sir!" Bodysuit continues helplessly – dramatically, even - his voice raising an octave. "I'm sure you have more pressing matters to attend to than just – wait, wait, wait!"
You sigh, take in a breath, and put on your most customer-friendly smile you can. "Officer Dicklen," you call, taking satisfaction in how his shoulders tighten. "I can't believe you found another one of my friends! Without his wallet, too! Isn't that crazy?"
The way Dicklen grits out your name causes your smile to widen just a little bit. You tame it when he finally turns your way, his thick eyebrows turned low. He probably wishes he could set you on fire with his eyes. You'd even bet money on it.
Looking past him, Bodysuit's pretty much frozen at your intervention as if hoping Dicklen's a dinosaur and staying still will make him invisible. You can’t really get a read on the guy – his face is a smooth blank slate thanks to his fashion choices. Well, whatever, it is New York.
"Hey, man," you say to him, ignoring the disgruntled officer and whipping out the card you'd just gotten and loaded with ten dollars. You offer it to him with an encouraging shake of your hand. "I think you forgot this with me. I'm so glad I caught up to you in time. You gotta be more careful next time, yeah?"
Bodysuit hesitantly turns his head towards Dicklen before reaching out to the pass and taking it. The pass looks small in his long, thick fingers, and his head tilts down at it as if staring.
Your name pulls out of Dicklen like a tooth. “You can’t keep doing this,” he says, crossing his arms and looming over you like it’ll actually do something. It hasn’t worked for him so far, but whatever makes him feel tall, you guess.
“’Course not,” you agree easily as you take a step back. You snap your fingers at Bodysuit, startling him. “C’mon, bud, let’s get going. We had that thing to do, right?”
Bodysuit falters for a moment, before nodding. “Yeah – yeah, of course. How – how could I forget about the thing we totally have together?”
Eh, good enough.
You nod with a pleased smile before directing it to Dicklen, who’s growing redder by the moment. “Tell Patrisha I said hi, would you?” And just because you’re petty in the face of law enforcement, you add, “I look forward to seeing her again on Saturday – it’s been so long since we’ve seen each other.”
You think you hear his teeth grind and you take it as your cue to leave. You jerk your chin at Bodysuit and take a step back. Realization dawns and he scrambles to follow behind as you make a beeline towards the gates and flash your pass at the reader.
"Don't look back at him," you tell Bodysuit, looking down to your phone as you step through the gate. You feel Dicklen’s eyes boring holes into the back of your head. "Just keep moving forward. Don't give him any reason to come after us. He’s a nosy bastard when he wants to be."
Bodysuit stiffens before forcing himself to relax. It’s only when you’re to the escalator that he finally says something.
“Who’s Patrisha?” he asks as he steps on behind you. His voice is strangely subdued for someone who’d been making a scene trying to plead with a cop over the subway fare, of all things.
“His wife,” you answer, opening up your social media and beginning the long trek down your feed. “We’re friends of a sort. She’d give him hell for trying to arrest me again and he knows it.”
“Again?” Bodysuit whispers to himself. There’s a beat of silence before: “Do – do you do that often? Just… help random people like that?”
“If it fucks with Dicklen? Absolutely.” You glance to Bodysuit and see the slight droop to his shoulders. “...but more seriously,” you add after a moment, “I usually keep an extra ten in my account just for people who can’t afford the fare. I know how it is to be unable to pay for a ride when you need to get somewhere.”
Bodysuit makes a noise at that, but with that suit over his face, you don’t know how to interpret it. Ah well, you think as you reach the bottom of the escalator and step off, you probably won’t see him again after this anyway.
“I’m headed that way,” you say with a tilt of your head, “try not to skip the fare around cops in the future, okay, man?”
“Y-yeah, okay,” he says, stepping off after you and standing there like he doesn’t know what he wants to do with himself. “Though in my defense, there weren’t any around when I’d started – there were just… some complications from point A to point B.”
“...uh-huh. Well… good luck anyway, bud.”
And then you give him a little parting salute and go your separate ways.
… or, at least, that’s what you thought you were doing. It’s not even two minutes of walking later that you hear his voice yelp, followed by a string of “excuse me’s” and “sorry’s”. You look over your shoulder, exasperated to find the guy apologizing with his hands raised to someone who glares at him as they pass. When his head turns and meets your eyes – and you know he meets your eyes – he gives a sheepish shrug.
“We, uh – were going the same direction and I didn’t know how to tell you,” he says, embarrassed.
…right.
“Fair,” is all you say, before you return your attention forward and continue walking. You don’t look over your shoulder again, but he is definitely still there; you can see his reflection in the shined surfaces of the trashcans and the plastic ads as you pass them.
Are you annoyed? Not really. Exasperated? Possibly.
He even follows you past the crowd to where you know the traffic’s thinnest. He doesn’t say anything, though, and lingers just out of your peripheral as if afraid you’ll bite him. Maybe you will; today’s been a day, after all.
And then the subway train speeds in, slows down, and Bodysuit is temporarily forgotten. The doors slide open, you step inside, and make a line for a couple of empty seats that are pressed up against the corner. You take the second to the wall, your hand winding around the metal bar, and swing your bag into your lap.
The subway voice says its piece, the doors slide closed, and your phone’s already out when the train starts moving.
You’re drawn out of your phone when something knocks into your leg. The string of apologies after cause you to actually look up and you find the source to be the guy from before.
“S-sorry,” he says, gesturing to the seat next to you, “but I was wondering if I could maybe sit here?”
You guess it makes sense – the only other seat available is next to a man who looks like he chews through wires for a living and you’ve already done Bodysuit a solid with the fare. And honestly, he’s not the worst person to sit next to you – Wire McGee is clear proof of that.
You shrug. “Knock yourself out, bud.”
And he certainly tries to, the train giving just enough lurch to send him into the wall as he’d turned to sit. He slides into the seat with all the grace of a wet bag before he pushes himself back up and tries to pretend like it never happened in the first place.
It’s – kinda sad, in a way. Hm.
His whole body does a little jump when you meet eyes – or at least you think you do? The costume makes it hard to tell – and he looks away like your eyebrows suddenly grew teeth. All this after he’d apologized to you, too.
Interesting… but is it interesting enough to keep you from your blog?
Deciding not, you go back to scrolling. You’ve got a bit of time before your stop arrives and your favorite artist just posted a juicy piece of work that could give a lesser person a heart attack. You like it, reblog it, throw some praise into the chain, before you continue your journey down your feed.
And then the guy makes a little noise that normally you’d ignore – but then he follows it up with the tapping of his shoes. Another little noise. Muttering. Fingers rapping nervously against his knees.
You can practically feel him looking at you without even having to check- oh, damn, that’s a good picture right there. Like, reblog, comment to the chain...
Tap, tap, tap.
You glance over him with a little sigh before looking back to your phone. “So… got a name I can call you or something?” you ask, if only because he chose the seat next to you - maybe to avoid the guy, or maybe to thank you for the subway fare - and it’s a little painful to watch him work himself up for it.
He startles, as if he hadn’t expected you to speak first.
“O-oh? Me? Oh -” Yeah, he really didn’t expect you to speak first, did he? “- I hadn’t expected you to actually ask for my name, this is actually foreign territory for me -” ...what? “- but you can call me... the Spot.”
He even emphasizes it with a little flare of his fingers. Wow.
You glance over him. “Okay… Spot,” you say, raising your brows and deciding to not comment on how he seems more like a “spotless” than a “spot”. You’re not gonna tell people what to name their weirdsonas – that’s just rude. “You going to an event or something?”
That seems to catch him off guard.
“Event...?” Spot’s head quirks to look down at his body. “Oh - oh, this? Funny story, actually, this isn’t - this...”
He trails off and doesn’t elaborate immediately, instead turning his head away from you to look out to the rest of the car as it slows to another stop. People stand up and go. A few more people filter in. His fingers tap on the metal arm rest almost anxiously. The person two seats down shoots the two of you an annoyed glance.
You’re about to tell him to forget that you asked, but just as you begin to, he turns back to you.
“Yeah, uh, this?” he begins quietly with a clearing of his throat, as if he doesn’t want to be heard. “Not a costume, actually. It’s... my skin.”
“Yeah?” you ask, a little skeptical as you lower your phone, the article on the screen now forgotten. You reach out to him -
“Uh, what are you-”
- and pinch his upper arm. He makes some sort of strangled noise that you ignore in favor of taking in the texture between your fingers. Well, it's definitely attached to him. It doesn't feel like spandex or nylon, but it's not quite human skin either. Soft though. Smooth, too. You tug at it a little, your mouth skewing in concentration before your hand is suddenly slapped away. You blink, the focus cracking like ice and fizzling away like smoke.
… huh .
The guy’s retreated back from you, his arms and legs almost comically folding over each other to put as much space between the two of you without actually leaving the seat.
Why didn’t he just leave the seat?
“Ah,” you say, putting the thought on the backburner. You barely resist the urge to do it again, if only to see how he’d react. Instead, you lean back, your hand still hovering in the space between you. “Sorry.”
“Do you – do you always go around pinching random people’s skin? Should I have chosen a different seat?” he sputters, his words squishing together even as he slowly relaxes his limbs. “That’s a violation of personal space, you know, and I -”
“So what happened?”
“- and I… I, um. What?”
You gesture at him. "Your everything, my guy. What happened?”
“Oh. Uh. You’re not… not bothered?” he asks after a moment, as if thrown for a loop. “Not even with the -” he waves a hand in front of the blank slate of his face “- the – this? Not even a little bit?” There’s a beat, before he smacks your reaching hand down much gentler than the first time. “Would you please cut that out.”
“Sorry,” you say again. You move your hands into your lap and keep them loosely wrapped around your phone. “The whole thing seems kinda surreal, and the urge to validate it with my hands is like... weirdly huge.”
It also does not help that he is very, very pinchable.
“Well, I can assure you, it’s as real as real can get,” he says in a voice you think sounds a tad bitter. “I have to live with it.”
Ah, no, wait, that's full on bitter.
"So," you press for the third time, "what happened then?"
He folds his hands and leans on his knees with his elbows. He doesn’t look at you, instead once more looking out to the car. When you once more follow his gaze, you find that the rest of the people are giving you something of a wide berth. Assholes, you think before deliberately rolling your shoulders hard enough to crack the joints, drawing Spot’s attention back to you. You raise your eyebrows, not really wanting to ask a fourth time.
Thankfully, you don’t have to.
“...you, uh, know what happened with Alchemax?” he asks, his voice once more going low, and you get the vibe it’s more from his own feelings than from trying to keep it secret.
You squint in thought – the only real thing you can remember about Alchemax is that whole debacle from like… a year ago? You couldn’t go two feet without something, somewhere mentioning it. There’d been a lot of rumbling, and hell, you only remember that much because you’d been typing out a sentence and the sudden movement had caused you to write “fuck” instead of “luck” and the recipient of that message seemed all too excited about it. Blugh.
Instead of saying all that though, you just say, “Explosion, right? News said it was… a generator or something?”
“That’s the one,” Spot says, hunching in on himself. “Only it wasn’t a generator, and I… I was there. When it exploded. And then I became this.”
“Oh.” And what else can you really say to something like that? “That’s… yikes.”
He snorts, but it sounds acidic. Angry. Like it’s slowly sizzling away at him.
“That’s one way of putting it,” he says, his hands clenching around each other. “It ruined my life.” His shoulders tremble, as if now that he’s started the words are pulling themselves out of him unbidden. “My coworkers laughed at me when they saw me. Like I was just a joke. Turning into – into this stripped me of my job, my face, my family! My parents want nothing to do with me now, and – and my wife -” His head drops into his hands, his fingers digging into his skin. “My wife won’t even look at me.”
Oh, that’s - that’s a big yikes. A whole “please unpack it with a therapist” yikes. You suck in air through your teeth, and because you can’t keep your mouth shut, you add, "Didn't bother doing the worm test with her, huh? Ouch."
"I - what? What? Worm test?" You watch his head tilt up to you, his body language thrown for a loop. He turns his torso your way like he's trying to focus solely on you. Like his attention’s a pin-point laser that can pry you open.
You flap your hand in a vague sort of gesture. "You know,” you start, making your voice go an octave higher, “'honey, would you still love me if I was a worm? What about an alligator? Would you love me even if I was smelly slug?'" Your vague gesture gets even vaguer. “Etcetera, etcetera.”
Spot's shoulders draw in just a little. "No," he says almost defensively. "We - we did that.” He pauses. “Maybe. Probably."
"Ah," you say, "so then she's just a coward."
He sputters and hops to his feet, the undertones of his words warbling almost angrily. "Don't - don’t say that about her! You don’t know her at all! She's still my - ” He stills, then, as if registering his words. He deflates after a moment, his voice going quieter. "I - I still - " He sighs, turning away and collapsing back into the seat next to you.
"...It doesn’t matter,” he says, tone despondent. Flat. Empty. “I can't even blame her for turning me away. I mean, look at me!"
"I have been," you say, giving him a slow once over. It’s like he withers under your eyes as you do so. "And like… you're really tame, buddy. You don't even have scales. Or extra limbs. You could’ve ended up looking like the alien from Alien, but she gets mad ‘cause you’re now… what? Paper-white without a face?"
You let that hang in the air before shrugging. “A coward.” You look down to your phone, scrolling through your social media for a moment and add almost as an afterthought, “If I had a husband and one day he showed up looking like you, I’d’ve been exploring him like he’s a forgotten tomb and I’m Indiana Jones, not gonna lie.”
Spot looks at you for a very long time.
“...really?” he finally asks. “You’d - you’d still want him? Even though he looks nothing like himself anymore? Even when everyone else…?”
Your eyes glance at him before you angle your phone his way.
“Oh,” Spot says, his voice doing a little waver. “That’s, uh - that’s a lot of werewolves.” He tilts his head, shoulders slumping. “Is that... a Denny’s parking lot?”
“Yup.”
“And what they’re doing - ”
“Mhm.” You gesture at yourself casually, as if you didn’t just show him a beautifully rendered image of a petite little human getting railed by a pack of werewolves. “Bonafide monster-fucker, Spots. It literally doesn’t matter to me how uncanny valley my imaginary husband would look.”
Spot lets out a little sputter that kicks into a laugh that sounds like it’s bordering on unhinged disbelief.
"You're - you’re a freak, of course you are." His hands go to cover his head, as if wanting to pull at hair he no longer has. His shoulders are trembling. "It takes a freak to like a freak, why am I not surprised?” His voice turns low and bitter. “Like anyone normal could ever want -"
“Buddy,” you cut in, tapping your phone against his shoulder. He flinches. “Breathe.”
“I don’t - I don’t need to breathe,” he says.
“Then start listing the multiplication table of like… seven or something,” you suggest, bumping your knee into his and keeping it there. You know a spiral when you see one, and this guy’s taking it like a water slide. You pull up your phone’s browser and type in a few words. “You’re a scientist, right? You got the periodic table memorized, nerd?”
“I don’t see how -”
“What’s the first element?” you ask, peering down into your phone.
“Hydrogen.” Spot’s knee doesn’t shake as much against yours. “I still don’t -”
“Fourteen?”
“Uh - silicone.”
“Nice,” you say. You glance up to him, finding his head tilted at you in what you assume is a stare. “What about… mm, eighty-three? Eighty-four?”
“That’s, uh. Bismuth.” After a pause, he adds, “Eighty-four is polonium.”
“Twenty-nine?”
“Copper.”
You glance at your phone, finding that he’s right. When you turn your attention back to him, Spot’s posture feels more centered now, like he’s ready for the next question instead of burying himself in his thoughts. Time for you to strike; you look through the list on your screen and find it. “Fifty-nine?”
“Praseodymium.”
Your lips pull back into a smile. “Gesundheit.”
It takes a moment for the joke to sink in, and then Spot’s shoulders begin to shake. You don’t think it’s because of the bad thoughts this time, and your feeling’s confirmed when he tilts his head back, a light laugh dancing across his voice. “Did you really look up the weirdest sounding element just so you could make that joke?”
You’re still smiling when you look back down to your phone. “Maybe. I have a fondness for dumb jokes. You could even say they’re my…” You pause dramatically, even as Spot shakes his head at you, as if he knows what’s coming. “...element thirty-six-ite.”
“Krypton,” he says with an exaggerated groan, dropping his head into his hands. “That was terrible. Your jokes are terrible.” He looks up, and you think he’d be squinting at you if he could. “They’re bad and you should feel bad.”
“Made you laugh though.” You flash him a finger-gun and pretend to fire it. “As far as I’m concerned, mission accomplished.”
And it must’ve been something you said, because any good mood you had pulled out of him is washed away. He sighs, shoulders drooping a bit, and... you think he might be studying you? That is, at least, until he opens his metaphorical mouth and speaks. "Why,” he starts, his voice almost seeming to quiver around the word, “why are you being so – so cool about all this?"
Oh. Huh.
You swallow back the knee-jerk response. There’s something about the way he asks that feels… open and raw , and you want to give it an answer that takes a little more thought than “because you look like slenderman’s pathetic wet brother”.
Eventually, you settle on an answer you feel might be the best at not making him feel like he’s being pitied.
"I’ve got a cousin who's married to a guy that turned into a literal vampire overnight,” you tell him, pulling up a photo from the last family gathering on your phone. You show Spot your screen as you zoom in on the guy with long, sharp canines and a complexion the color of dead. “We serve blood at the family reunion now, and vampires are pretty much banned from Halloween gatherings. You're pretty fun in comparison - dude's kind of a snob.”
It takes Spot a moment to register your words, and when he does, he makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a wet laugh. He turns his head away from you, shoulders trembling, and runs his hands over his scalp. His body expands and contracts with a heavy breath. Two. Three. When he faces you again, it’s like the moment never happened.
You’re... polite enough to not bring it up.
“Your family’s just full of weirdos, huh?” he asks, his voice only wobbling just barely.
“Maybe,” you reply with a smile that shows teeth. You tuck your phone back into your pocket. “Or maybe everyone else is just boring.”
Spot shifts in his seat as if he wants to say something else, but then your eyes catch the lighted sign above the car’s doors. Your face must’ve done something without you realizing, because he’s looking over at the sign, too.
“...that your stop?” he asks, voice carefully even.
You drag your eyes over to him and take in the way he’s gone unnaturally still. The raw emotion that had been cracking in his voice earlier echoes between your ears.
You lean back into your seat.
“...nah,” you say, “I’ve got a little bit yet. Which stop’s yours?”
He tells you, and you know you probably should listen, but you’re paying more attention to how his shoulders relax just a hair. How his fingers go back to drumming against his knee.
Good.
“- and I usually get off sooner for home,” Spot says, his feet tapping against the floor, “but I have to, uh, stop by a place first for a – a project I’m working on.”
“Really?” you ask as if you didn’t just tune back into the conversation. You raise your eyebrows just enough to fake surprise. “I’ve got an errand to run in the area, too. Guess we’ll be travel buddies for a bit longer then.” And because you’re not completely devoid of your manners, you add, “That’s assuming you want the company, anyway-”
“Yes!” Spot says, and it must’ve been louder than he’d intended, because he clears his throat and settles back into the seat. “I mean, yes, it – it’s fine. The company would be more than welcome.”
You smile. “Great.”
And isn’t that something, you think. You actually mean it.