Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Your living situation is pretty strange. You live with a bunch of monsters, literal monster, in a big old house in the middle of nowhere. You’re not sure where you would be right now if they hadn’t taken you in. Now you’re sort of their housekeeper. Mostly you just keep things tidy, cook meals for the ones who eat, and don’t ask questions when Slenderman comes home with blood all over his clothes.

You’re watching the local news while you iron one of Slender’s suits. The yards of black fabric are difficult to handle, but somehow you manage to keep the long sleeves and pant legs from sliding off the ironing board. The news is running another story about Jeffrey Woods, the serial killer who’s been terrorizing the state. They show a picture of his mutilated face, the Glasgow smile and the huge staring eyes. The story was already bad enough, but now it’s getting even scarier, because the latest killing was right in the next town over.

The news has you completed distracted until you smell singed fabric, and you look down and realize with horror that you just burned a hole in one of Slenderman’s suits. Oh shit. You lift the burned part to examine the damage more closely, and that’s when you catch sight of a dark shape from the corner of your eye, making you jump. Slenderman is standing right next to you, tall and looming, staring right down at the burned pant leg held up in your hand. Your mind races with guilt. You can’t believe he saw you ruin his suit, he’s gonna kill you.

You flinch when he lifts his long hand, but he only places it gently on top of your head. His long fingers are warm and oddly comforting against the crown of your skull. He leaves his hand there for just a moment, his empty white face staring down at you. Then he leaves the room in just a few long strides on his freakishly long legs, vanishing like he’d never been there. You let out a long shaky breath. You’re not used to people being so nice to you when you mess up.

The washing machine finishes with another load of laundry. It’s a nice day out, so you take all the wash outside to hang it up on the clothesline. The wind gently whispers through the grass as you pin each piece of laundry to the clothesline. It’s mostly bedsheets, Slender’s shirts, and your own laundry, since you and Slender are the only ones who wear clothes.

Siren Head is wandering around in the nearby fields of grass. He stands absolutely still, like an abandoned telephone pole in an empty field, so still that birds land on him. Then he’ll suddenly move or take a long step and all the birds will scatter in a huge flutter of wings. Sometimes he won’t move but instead he’ll suddenly play a loud sound from his speakers, scaring all the birds away. He doesn’t seem to mind them landing on him, rather you think he is amusing himself by scaring them. You wish he wouldn’t play with them though, because you’re going to have to clean all the birdshit off of him later.

Your phone dings from your pocket. It’s a text message from MalO. It’s just an image, a picture of a hairbrush on a nightstand. The rest of the room is dark and the flash from the photo is the only illumination. The image was sent with no explanation, but you know what it means. He wants you to brush him.

Shaking your head, you finish hanging the laundry then go back inside the house, heading upstairs to MalO’s room. You slip inside and close the door behind you, plunging the room into absolute darkness. You accept your blind slowness and feel your way around in the dark. You grope around until you find the hairbrush on the nightstand. Then you sit down on the side of the bed and reach out blindly until your hand finds the massive bulk of warm rough fur.

You sit on the edge of the bed and slowly brush his fur, letting him maneuver around you so that you’re brushing whatever part of him he wants. You catch glimpses of the ghostly white bones of his skull, the only thing bright enough to stand out in the dark. It’s warm and comfortable in the dark room, and your mind wanders pleasantly while your hands are busy with their task, until eventually a large clawed hand takes the brush from you, meaning that you’re dismissed. Laughing to yourself, you leave the room, shutting the door again behind you.

At the end of the day, you relax on the couch and watch TV in the dark. The house doesn’t have internet, so the only TV you can watch is whatever you can pick up over the antenna. In this case, old black and white episodes of Perry Mason.

You hear a big muffled thump from the roof of the house, making you look up from the TV. It must be Mothman. He comes and goes. He never uses the front door, if any of them do. He’ll crawl in through an open window.

He slowly creeps downstairs, a large dark shadow with huge glowing red eyes. The shadow settles itself into a hunched up figure at the bottom of the stairs, red eyes quietly watching. He never comes near you, but he loves watching TV. You don’t know if he understands what’s going on, maybe he just likes the lights. He’ll sit there in the dark with you and watch all night if you let him.

But eventually it’s time for bed. You get up and turn off the TV, plunging the room into darkness. By the time you reach the stairs, the huge red pair of eyes is gone.

Chapter Text

You wake up to a text from MalO. It’s a picture of a hillside in the nearby wood. The trees look fresh and green, and the grassy hillside is covered in beautiful flowers. Looking at the photo, you can almost hear the birds chirping and whistling in the early morning sun. You smile to yourself, glad that he went outside.

After breakfast, you go outside too, to work in the garden behind the house. You’ve been trying to grow things. You tried to grow a little patch of corn this summer with no luck. Now you’re stubbornly hoeing the soil to make way for squash and pumpkins.

Siren Head is loitering nearby. For a long time, he stands completely still and plays old scratchy music from his speakers. The music drifts down softly to you while you toil away under the sun, and Siren is so still you can almost forget he’s there. He becomes a fixture of the landscape, as invisible as the telephone poles you pass every day without really seeing.

The music slowly grows softer and softer, until it ceases altogether without your having realized, and all there is left is the light breeze rustling the grass and cooling your overheated skin. Siren then starts making random little boops and toots over your head, interspersed with strings of static, random little sounds almost like he’s talking to himself. Then the honks and beeps get louder and louder, more insistent, annoying on purpose. He’s bored now and trying to get your attention.

“Alright already,” you tell him, laughing. You abandon your gardening and follow the towering creature into the woods to play his favorite game with him, hide and seek. He is surprisingly agile on his towering skin-and-bone legs, surprisingly silent as his colossal figure slides between the trees. Before long you lose track of him, and you wander around looking for him through the warm afternoon shade of the woods. You wonder if MalO is out here somewhere too. Every so often Siren lets out a loud whoop or a distant bleat to turn you back around when you’re getting too lost. “Marco!” you yell, joking with him, and he makes you laugh by honking back obediently from somewhere in the middle distance.

But after a while, it starts to feel less like you’re hunting for him, and more like he’s hunting for you, trying to scare you, disorienting you on purpose, until the golden afternoon starts feels eerie and threatening. You never fail to get caught up in the thrill of the chase, tense and jumping at shadows, and you scream when Siren Head’s towering form suddenly steps out of the trees right in front of you.

He rewards you for being a good sport by picking you up and lifting you up above the tops of the trees. He puts you on his shoulder and you grip the pole of his neck as he walks through the woods with you, brushing branches out of the way and upsetting all manner of birds. He walks you back to the house at a dizzying height, then sets you down safely in the grass next to your neglected vegetable patch.

For dinner, you cook rice and steak and roasted vegetables. You put half in the fridge for MalO. He’ll come get it later when nobody’s looking. You take the other half of the food outside with a beer, along with a package of raw steaks.

Siren Head sees or hears you exit the house from far across the field. He starts sprinting for the house at a speed that always shocks you, sending flocks of birds flying up out of the grass, black against the sunset.

You set your food down on the old wooden picnic bench. You can see a dark shape up on the roof. It’s Mothman, ripping chunks out of whatever game he’s killed, probably a rabbit or a raccoon. You eat your steak and rice and drink your beer, and every once in a while you take one of the raw steaks out of the bag and throw it as far as you can out into the field. You notice from the corner of your eye that Mothman always looks up from his kill and watches as Siren Head runs for the steak and unerringly catches it in the cone of one of his loudspeakers. He horks it back like a bird swallowing a fish, and the steak is quickly gobbled. The three of you spend the evening together like this until the darkness pushes you back inside.

Later that night you go out onto the porch to smoke a cigarette. The nights are still warm, summer lingering. You’re startled to see that someone else is already on the porch. Slenderman is there, tall and dark, staring out into the nearby woods as though deep in thought, although that’s only a guess, because of course his empty face reveals no expression. He doesn’t look over when you emerge from the house, as if he hasn’t noticed you, and you’re surprised because you never catch him unawares.

You step up to him cautiously, unlit cigarette forgotten in your hand. “Are you okay?” you ask. Finally he looks down at you, and after a moment of faceless staring his long hand comes up to cup your cheek, an unexpected gesture that fills your stomach with butterflies. Then he steps away, ducks in through the open screen door, and disappears into the house.

Chapter Text

You wake up in the middle of the night to a terrifying sight. A corpse-pale face with huge round eyes and a too-wide stitched-up slasher smile is hovering over you in the dark. When he sees your eyelids flutter open, his smile grows even wider. You recognize the face of Jeffrey Woods, and the silver glint of a long knife, and you realize that you might be about to die.

“Shhhh,” he says. The air hisses through his mutilated face. “Go back to sleep.”

As he raises the knife, another pale sort of face materializes out of the darkness of your room just behind him. You give a terrified cry of relief, causing Jeffrey to stop and glance behind him, and in the next few seconds he is lifted and hurled across the room with a yelp of surprise.

The darkness of your bedroom seems to be writhing, alive, as Slenderman looms over Jeffrey Woods. The young man jumps back up with shocking speeds and lunges towards you, laughing, knife flashing, but he is caught and lifted upside down in the air by one of his legs.

“What the fuck is this?” he yells, “What are you?” But he’s also laughing like crazy as if delighted by this turn of events. He slashes wildly with the knife. You see Slender duck his head back to avoid being cut, but then Jeffrey manages to slice something and Slender drops him, making an inhuman sound that makes all the hair stand up on your arms. Jeffrey dashes out through the open door into the hallway. Slender gives chase, and a mad tangle of long black limbs is illuminated for half a second in the doorway. After a moment of stunned shock, you scramble out of bed and dash after them.

You stop dead in the doorway, struck with momentary terror, because now you can see what was causing the darkness of your bedroom to whip and writhe. A dozen long black limbs or tentacles have sprouted out of Slender’s body. He’s using them to grapple with Jeffrey Woods, who seems incredibly strong, and whose long knife whips through the air in a blur. The killer continues to cackle with laughter like he’s having the time of his life, even though he’s bleeding from a head wound now. You watch in horror as he manages to plunge his knife into Slenderman’s stomach, before Slender hurls him down from the top of the stairs.

You cry out and rush towards Slender, not thinking, wanting to help him, to stop this. He catches you with his large hands as you fall into him, black tentacles whipping around you. He wrenches open the nearby door to MalO’s bedroom and shoves you inside, slamming the door shut behind you and plunging you back into darkness.

You instantly turn back to the door but before you can grab the handle, a pair of large furry arms wraps tightly around you, pinning your arms to your sides. MalO holds onto you as you hear Slender chase Jeffrey Woods downstairs, then out of the house. They must be heading towards the woods. After another minute you hear a loud whoop! as Siren Head joins the chase. You wonder if he understands what’s going on, or if he just can’t resist chasing someone who’s running in the dark. MalO does understand. Slender trusted him to keep you safe in here. He holds you tight against your struggling, preventing you from leaving the room.

Eventually you give up struggling and turn your face into his large warm shoulder and start to sob. What if Slender gets killed? And what were all those things coming out of him? Oh what does it matter, you already knew he wasn’t human. MalO’s large clumsy paw strokes your hair, and you cling tight to him, trembling with shock over what just happened.

The two of you end up on the bed, with you curled up into a tight little ball, and MalO’s large warm body surrounding you. His warm fur, the familiar animal scent of him, encloses and comforts you. You absently stroke the smooth bones of his bare skull with your trembling fingers.

At some point you fall asleep, but you wake up again when a set of spidery fingers touches your hair. Someone else is in the room: You can just make out Slender’s ghostly white head hovering high up in the dark. You start to sit up, but he gently pushes you back down into MalO’s arms. He sits down on the bed beside you both, crossing one long leg over the other and folding his long hands on his knees. You hear a few soft thumps in the dark: MalO’s tail thumping against the bed in greeting.

You stare up at the pale oval of Slenderman’s empty face. He seems calm and composed in the darkness. But what happened to Jeffrey Woods? “Aren’t you hurt?” you ask him. Looking down at you, he shakes his head slowly. But you saw him get stabbed. You reach for him in the dark. He surprises you by taking your hand and placing it against his stomach. You gingerly explore with your fingers, expecting to feel the dampness of blood, a ragged hole. There is a hole, sliced through both his jacket and dress shirt. You slip your fingers inside and feel nothing but smooth undamaged skin.

You let out a long heavy breath, returning your hands to yourself. MalO gives a huge sleepy snort against you, having fallen back asleep already. Soon enough you join him.

Chapter Text

You wake up maybe a few hours later. Slenderman is gone, but MalO’s long arms, warm and rough with fur, are still wrapped around you. His large body expands and contracts with each huge sleeping breath. You comb through your recent memories. This isn’t exactly your usual sleeping arrangement. But did all of that really happen? You decide that you deserve the biggest, heartiest breakfast you can make. You extract yourself from MalO’s arms and slip out of the room, carefully shutting the door behind you and leaving MalO sleeping in the cozy darkness.

It’s barely dawn. You go down to the kitchen and put the coffee on, and take bacon and eggs out of the fridge, and start mixing batter for pancakes. You take a photo of everything spread out across the kitchen counter and text it to MalO, hoping to tempt him out of his room. He doesn’t come out but he does text you back the prayer hands emoji.

Before you can put the bacon on, you hear a loud cursing voice start up outside the house. A human voice. You go outside and look out from the porch at two people: Tall and thin, looking even more unreal in the morning light than he ever does at night, is the looming figure of Slenderman, perfectly pressed and pristine-looking in his long black suit; and standing in front of him, looking stocky and bedraggled by comparison, with Slender’s long hand clamped tight on his shoulder, is the scruffy figure of Jeffrey Woods.

He’s no longer laughing like he was last night, not even smiling. He’s glaring like a sullen teenager. You’re shocked by how young he looks in the growing light of day. They said his age on the news, but it hadn’t really hit you until right this second. His long black hair is greasy and unwashed, his clothes are scuffed and rumpled. He looks underfed. All that combined with his disfigured face and suddenly you feel kind of sorry for him.

He avoids your gaze, but he speaks: “He says I can stay here, but I’m not allowed to kill you.” Slenderman gives him a rough shove with the hand still clamped on his shoulder. Jeff glares up at him over his shoulder, but says to you, forced as though rehearsed, “I’m really sorry I tried to kill you. I promise it won’t happen again… Scout’s honor.” He holds up three fingers, grinning sarcastically.

When you can finally speak, all you can say is, “He spoke to you?”

Jeffrey finally meets your gaze. His smile turns mysterious and secretive. “Not exactly.”

You look from Jeff to Slender. The empty white face stares steadily back at you. The long hand remains clamped tightly on Jeffrey’s shoulder. He holds the boy in place as if presenting him to you. You peer into the empty blank void of his face, trying to read his mind. Are you being given a choice here, or not? You guess he really did tell Jeff that he can stay. He’s adopting another stray, apparently. But what about you? Can you accept this kind of monster?

You turn your attention back to Jeff, finding inside yourself the resolve to try. “Are you hungry?” you ask him.

He stares back at you, and then his face splits into a huge, misshapen grin. “I’m fucking starving.”

He follows you back into the house, with Slenderman looming close on his heels like his long black stretched-out shadow. He better be planning to keep an eye on his new pet.

As the three of you make your way into the kitchen, a loud thump sounds from the roof, making you jump, and making Jeff glance up towards the ceiling. It’s just Mothman, you remind yourself, putting your hand over your racing heart. You feel another hand, long and thin, gently squeeze your shoulder, and look up to find Slender standing near, staring down at you. You stare back up at him, trying to read his mind again, like maybe Jeffrey can. You fail, but his warm and comforting touch, his silent attention, makes you feel just a little bit better; enough that you don’t jump a second time when a loud siren goes off right outside the house.

This time Jeff is the one who jumps at the sound. He freezes like he’s about to bolt. Then Siren Head’s emaciated pole-like legs stride by outside the kitchen window. The sound of the siren skips unnaturally and then ceases, followed by an old scratchy song blasted at top volume, a crooning old voice warbling from the speakers, playing faster and faster until the voice becomes a string of little mouse squeaks.

Underlining all this are the loud wooden thunks coming from the roof, the offended fluttering and scuffling of Mothman getting harassed. Siren Head’s long stilt legs pass back out of view through the kitchen window, and there’s a huge woosh against the roof as Mothman takes off, probably to chase after him.

Jeff turns away from the window and back towards you. You warily meet his searching eyes. His eyebrows have been singed off his face, but you can still tell when he dryly raises them, his questions obvious. You almost smile.

“You get used to it,” you tell him.