Work Text:
Thomas King does not want to be in this dead end town.
Sure, there was some part of him that was lonely enough to see the flyer in the Dead Boys’ Office and think that little girl shouldn't be stuck lonely and scared wherever she is, because I know what it's like to be stuck in your own mind, terrified and isolated, and no one deserves that-
And then, when oddly handsome and annoyingly stubborn Edwin Payne insisted on being a stick in the mud- god, that shouldn't be so tempting to Thomas, but he's only human, sue him- Thomas was unashamed of flirting with Edwin and coaxing Charles with a flutter of the eyelashes and a tug on the heartstrings.
Truth of the matter, though, is that once they saved little Betty- Becky? He can’t be sure. He tries not to memorize the names of people unless he’s planning on seeing them again, unless he can get a bargain from them, and he saved the little girl so that done is done and all that- Thomas was ready to leave this dead end town. Ready to go searching for his memories. Ready to go searching for whether or not there is anyone out there that knows him and loves him, because the demon that he refuses to accept is haunting him (what self-respecting twunk can’t get their ex out of their brain? Thomas refuses to accept that he was ever stupid enough to fall in love with someone, no matter how much Esther’s voice in his head still makes him shiver and tremble and his heart threaten to fall apart within his chest) and he needs to know that there is someone out there who cares about him, because he couldn't have been that horrible a person.
But then came the fucking cats, and Edwin's fuck-up, and with them, the goddamn cannery with the fucking tree.
In the middle of the cannery, a tree grows taller than any tree ever should have gotten, considering how little sunlight there is in this place.
But then again- Thomas will bite off his left tit if that is a natural tree.
Thomas can feel the magic radiating off of it and the table sitting in front of it, not to even mention the fact that the boughs of the tree are heavy with glowing purple leaves, either woven with magic or born of magic.
No, that table wasn’t carved from the wood of the tree- it’s growing out of the floor, and seated at each of the seats is a skeleton.
It’s enough to steal the air from his lungs, all of that casual power, all of those possible shots at an answer.
“What the hell is this place?” Charles asks, cricket bat raised, “What do you want with Edwin?”
And Thomas is about ready to wash his hands of whatever bullshit Edwin pulled. Not his circus, not his clowns, no matter how pretty Edwin is. Thomas is lonely- he’s not an idiot.
But before Thomas can take more than a step back, purple fire flares and a woman appears from nothing with glowing purple eyes and a crushed purple velvet jacket, like the sort of thing that a smoker from another era would wear.
(Like Esther would wear, some part of Thomas’ brain thinks, and he shoves that to the side. Charles and Edwin exorcized the demon from him. Esther took his memories, yes, but she is also gone.
The flashes he keeps seeing of her haunting his every footstep are just that- flashes.
Because she has to be gone.
Thomas won't be able to handle it if she's not.)
But beneath the jacket, unlike Esther’s more chainsmoking-witch appearance, the woman seems far more modern, orange overalls and a white t-shirt tucked into floral-painted boots. Quite the appearance, for who knows whatever the fuck she is.
The thing that really catches Thomas’ eyes, of course, is the pair of purple eyes glowing right above a languid smirk.
Thomas can feel the power from across the cannery as the woman clucks her tongue. “One of you has been a very fucking bad boy." Her gaze stops on Edwin for a moment, then Charles, then him.
Something in Thomas shivers beneath her gaze. Beneath the press of all of that magic against his senses, just begging for him to respond, for him to react.
The Queen herself is hot to begin with, the spark in her eyes sending a shudder down his spine, and the power only makes her more so.
“I’m the Cat Queen of Port Townsend,” the woman says, and it’s somehow both a casual thing and a declaration heavy with magical significance. Thomas can taste it on her words.
(America doesn’t have queens, Thomas wants to say, save the ones that capture the divine and dance in dive bars and compel a club to remember themselves even in the clutches of aching, empty bodies, but there is something about the Queen in front of him that begs very much to differ.)
"And one of you is very much going to need to face a punishment," she says, but she seems rather bored by the whole endeavor, truly.
And Thomas wants to get her to react. He wants to earn something from her.
Thomas is lonely. He has something itching beneath his skin, carving a hollow out from within him.
Edwin is so stiff and uptight and clearly not onboard with the living. Charles is even more repressed than Edwin, whether he'd like to admit it or not.
Bickering with them hasn't been enough. It hasn't filled that hole in his chest.
And being lonely and empty and amnesiac and itching doesn't exactly improve a person's already tenuous self-control.
And so he blurts, like a reckless idiot with as much self-preservation as a bird landing right in front of a cat: “Why the fuck do you have a table of skeletons growing out of your floor?”
In an instant, the Queen’s gaze snaps to him.
He can hear Edwin smacking his palm against his face behind him, but Thomas can’t bring himself to care, not when the Queen is staring at him.
“Y’know what?” the Queen asks, “I’m bored. Things around here get so incredibly mundane. But you? You’re fucking interesting. You’re going to come with me.”
“Wait a tick,” Edwin says, “I was the one who bound your cat-“
Even Charles is lunging forward to fight the Queen, to pull Thomas back, but neither of them get to him fast enough.
Because in an instant, the Queen cocks her head to the side and the world flickers around him.
In an instant, the cannery and its wide, open floor plan and tree and its army of cats is replaced by a smaller, cramped room. There is a purple neon sign on the wall in the silhouette of the same tree that is upstairs, albeit in a far more stylized fashion, and the neon glow matches the purple glow of her tree back in the cannery, the light glinting off of her septum piercing.
And beneath it is a small bed covered in purple silk sheets, a table, almost like the boys' office, and then finally, the throne.
It’s a strange thing, to have a throne only in your own bedroom, but the bed next to it makes a bit more sense.
And it’s just Thomas and the Queen herself, staring at each other.
She examines him like a cat might, this long, sweeping stare, almost bored, but still somehow intrigued. There's a saying about curiosity and the cat for a reason, after all.
Standing beneath her stare causes an itch under his skin, though, as if she might be able to find something that Thomas himself could not. As if she can see beneath the layers of missing memories to whatever is buried beneath the hollow.
And Thomas is not a fan of it.
So how can he get rid of it?
Thomas is the one who goes to flirt, on instinct.
Thomas might not have the memories needed to know who he was back before he woke up in the London Underground with two hot boys kneeling over him, but he does know himself enough to know how he deals with situations. How he gets out of them. How he survives.
He’s a bitch, sure, but he’s also a flirt. That’s how he survives. A sweet word to a girl or a boy alike, enough to make them weak at the knees, enough to give him the deal that he wants. He’s always smart enough not to give away too much of himself, but he’s also not afraid to tumble into bed with someone if they’re pretty enough and they have something that he wants.
For example- when he’d shamelessly flirted with Edwin when waking up on the subway, and in the office, and on the ferry, and the way he’d made Edwin’s cheeks pink and him look away.
And it’s not like the Queen isn’t attractive. Like she doesn’t have a certain vibe to her, all grunge-chic, all I’ve-lived-so-long-and-each-year-has-only-added-to-my-hot-mystique sort of appeal.
So Thomas goes for the option that seems like it would work best.
“I do know that uptight girls like a little bit of rough play,” Thomas says with a wink, “So…might I earn my freedom that way?”
“They call me the Cat Queen and yet I’m not the one acting like a bitch in heat,” the Queen drawls.
Something in Thomas shrivels at that- he might not know much, but he knows that he doesn’t like getting called a bitch outside of the bedroom- but he refuses to show that she’s getting to him, just as he refused to let Charles Rowland know that he was getting to Thomas when Thomas woke up, makeup done to the nines and skirt, and the little twink from the ‘80s who clearly hadn’t unlocked his sexual repression yet had made a comment about flashiness and boys and he sounded too much like a bro-ey jock for Thomas' liking.
So since they've been in Port Townsend, Thomas has refused to let go of his skirt and has reapplied his golden eyeliner, because fuck that. He wasn’t going to let anyone make him feel self-conscious about himself. He has things like amnesia and demons to deal with- his sense of self-worth is off limits.
And in that same vein, he’s not gonna let the so-called Cat Queen show her that she gets to him.
"You're one to talk," Thomas says, "You just need-"
But Thomas doesn't get to finish his statement, because in an instant, the Queen lunges forward, all feline grace, and something clicks into place around his wrist.
Thomas jumps back- something he never does when he's flirting, but he has to see what happened-
And he finds himself with a golden bracelet clamped around his wrist, evidence of him being bound again.
The Queen smirks. “You're a fucking bitch, you know that?” She says, but she says it with the smallest of flirtatious edges, "So tell your friend that the punishment for a binding is a binding in return, and that if he is going to bind one of my subjects, I am going to bind one of his. You are stuck in this town until you satisfy a desire of mine."
Thomas' gaze flicks to the bed and back to her as he immediately defends, "I'm not his subject," before the far more practical argument of: “We can't stay in this town."
“Why not?” The Queen asks, "Can't stand the fact that your special friends might not stick around? That the dead married couple on acid isn't going to fuck you?"
And Thomas is on his last fucking straw.
That's not why he's here. That's not why he's ever been here.
Thomas is in a completely different country, no memories in his head, with a couple of ghosts who are clearly seven degrees of repressed on their long-term attraction to each other, so dedicated to each other that they'll never tap anything else, much less genuinely care about anything else. He is empty and hollow and hungry for anything to call his own, because right now not even his body feels like his. It feels like a fucking shell of something that once belonged to him.
Thomas is trying his best. He is always trying his best, and his best is never enough for anyone, but it is fucking there.
And a fucking Cat Queen is slut-shaming him.
And fuck that noise.
“You have no fucking clue what it's like to wake up with a fucking hollow in your head and no goddamn clue who you used to be. I'm a fucking ghost- don't tell me I don’t know a thing or two about demons.”
The Queen’s expression sharpens. “I know a thing or two about ghosts, kid,” The Queen says.
Thomas rolls his eyes. “Try again."
The Queen’s mouth twists and the air in the room crackles, purple light flicking on the neon sign. Thomas can see her fangs descend for just a moment as her purple eyes flash and she snaps, “My aunts planted this tree here nearly two hundred years ago, lifetimes before you were even a dream inside your mother’s womb. I died my first death under this tree. Watered it with my blood. You think your demon is bad, sweetheart? Try fucking with mine.”
In an instant, the Queen's loneliness cracks right through him, edged with teeth, sharp as her claws.
Two hundred years. Immortality. No one here in town to know her, truly know her. No one remembers her as she is. No one remembers her.
Thomas knows a thing or two about forgetting.
And Thomas can’t help himself. Some might call that a problem. Some might call him impertinent.
Thomas just argues that he knows another lonely person when he sees them.
So he doesn't know what the Queen expects, but he doesn't know if it's him saying, "You know, you don't have to bind someone to you to get them to talk to you."
The Queen's eyes go wide. "Excuse me?"
"So I've got my ghosts. So do you. I see you, Your Majesty, whether you like it or not-"
The Queen interrupts him. "So. You do not wish to fulfill my desire. I shall set you a different task instead: count all of the cats in Port Townsend, and return back your count to me."
But before Thomas has a chance to respond, to protest, to argue that he knows her, that she knows him, that he honestly wouldn't have minded solving his bindings with a trick of desire, the Cat Queen snaps her finger and the whole world vanishes.
He’s back in the cannery, right in front of her tree, and the sunlight is streaming through the windows
And there Charles and Edwin are, Edwin looking almost perturbed, Charles looking concerned as they run across the floor of the cannery, ghostly shoes slapping against concrete. "Where have you been, mate?" Charles demands, sounding worried.
"You have been missing since last night," Edwin informs Thomas.
Thomas smirks. He doesn’t bother to ask a question about what was clearly some sort of fae or divine time interference. While he seems to have lost all memories of emotion and person, facts like how his powers and the world around him work seem to have stayed in place, and it seems that Thomas got up to quite his fair share of shenanigans before he got a demon inside of him wearing him like a sock made of human meat.
(He also doesn’t comment on the fact that they stayed. They stayed, for him, and he doesn’t want to admit what that means to him.
Thomas might not remember who he was before he woke up with a demon being peeled out of his head, but he has had this sinking feeling for awhile that if he wasn’t actively in someone’s bed, then most people didn’t want to be around him. That they didn't consider him important enough to stay.
Hell; Edwin didn’t want to bring him back to the Dead Boy Detective’s office until Thomas started flirting with him and flustering him, and Charles only agreed to let Thomas stick around because Thomas made a jab at the two of them and how much they only care about children after they’re dead.
So it means something, that they stayed. That they cared to make sure that he was okay. They could have left through the mirror to London in a moment and never gave him another thought, and yet they stuck around, and it might have been nothing more than a sense of duty, but it still means something.)
So instead of asking questions, he winks and flutters his eyelashes and says, “Aw, did the two special friends miss me?”
Charles scowls. “We were just making sure that we weren’t going to leave behind a partner."
Now, it’s not like Thomas was afraid of wearing jewelry before. When Charles and Edwin picked him up, he had hands filled with costume jewelry and a couple of bangles on his wrists.
So it takes a second to register the new bracelet on his wrist that has followed him out.
Thomas whistles as he raises his wrists to flip around, glancing at his new bling. “She really wants me to stick in town, doesn't she?"
Edwin's eyes widen- in disappointment, in fury, in frustration, in exasperation, Thomas doesn't know. He has a feeling he's used to all of them. “You were foolish enough to get trapped-“ Edwin begins.
And the fact of the matter is that Thomas has had a very long few days.
He is exhausted. He has been possessed by a demon, had the demon peeled out of his body on the floor of a London metro, tossed around by warlock, nearly killed by the same, herded by a group of fucking cats like he’s nothing more than prey, and then trapped by a Queen.
And somehow, despite it all, a fucking Cat Queen seems to be the one person in this entire situation who truly seems to understand him best, and she's a loner with a creepy skeleton tree table who literally trapped him.
So excuse him if he loses his shit a bit.
“And who’s fucking fault is that?” Thomas snaps.
“You mouthed off to a Cat Queen,” Edwin argues.
“After you trapped one of her subjects,” Thomas points out right back. “God, you’ve been a ghost for how long, sweetheart? And you didn’t think about the possible ramifications of binding a living being? It’s like you’ve never been bound against your will before.” Edwin flinches at that one, and some part of Thomas has sympathy for whatever likely happened to Edwin at some point- maybe hell, who knows- but Thomas is too tired to care. He can’t deal with this all anymore. He can’t deal with being more hollow than human, more pit than psychic. “So I’m fucking stuck in this town, all because you were too hasty when solving a case. But that doesn’t matter to you at all, does it? You said that the living were too messy, and Charles doesn’t trust me because I’m too fucking obvious that I think you’re hot, and sue me for flirting a bit because I don’t have any fucking memories and you’re pretty, okay? So you two can fuck back off to wherever you came from while I have a warlock on my ass as I try to find a way to solve this bullshit and leave me to fucking rot.”
Both of them wince.
“Listen, mate,” Charles says, and his voice is softer than it’s been so far. “I think we might have got off on the wrong foot."
Edwin clearly has some shit that he’s repressing just as much as Charles has been, because he turns to Charles and says, “He’s still living."
But before Charles can say anything more than “Oi, Edwin-“ Edwin sighs.
“But you are correct that this is partially my fault,” Edwin admits, and Thomas’s eyes go wide. He never would have predicted in a million years that Edwin would admit such a thing. “And I do know a thing or two about being bound against one's will." He looks to Charles, lips pressing together. "And I would prefer not to resign someone to the same fate as punishment for my own decisions- even if said living didn't help things whatsoever with his impertinence to a demigod."
"So, you'll help me?" Thomas asks, and something relaxes in his shoulders.
Edwin sighs again. "I suppose so," he says, and it might be through gritted teeth, but he's still saying it.
And that's something. They're staying. They are staying with him, an impossibility, because Thomas has a very strong feeling that no one has ever stayed with him. That he has never known anything truly welcoming as home before this glimpse into what actual devotion looks like, all thirty years of it.
As they leave to go back to Jenny’s, Thomas looks behind him at the cannery, at the purple tree.
I watered it with my blood, the Queen had said.
Thomas knows a thing or two about loneliness. About peeling out a part of yourself in order to gain something greater in return, all for the sake of not being lonely anymore.
And maybe he would have said yes to fulfilling a desire or two, if only it meant not being alone anymore.