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No. 73644
Soo... no porn this time, but an instalment of Punk!AU? If you want? It's part 1 of 2, there'll be another bit once both lovely proofers are done with it. Follows on from The Shape Of Things To Come and includes references to all sorts of other stuff as well. It's up on Y!Gal as well, sorry for double posting to those of you both here and there.
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"Hanna?" Jayne paused, aware that the delicate subject he was about to broach could easily cause some hostility. "How exactly did you come to break your arms, again?"
"wsmn'nuhdmn." The punk's incomprehensible mutter was as unhelpful as ever, and his tense posture did not suggest that he was all that amenable to further explanation.
"I couldn't quite hear that, nor could I make it out last time I asked. Hanna, you have to tell me. If it's some kind of trouble that might follow you here, then I think I have a right to know." Jayne phrased it as gently as possible, every ounce of his training in criminal negotiation edging through.
"It's just a left over from something a few years back when I was doing stupid stuff, alright? Now leave it out!" Hanna glared up from the sofa, sharpie midway through another arcane inscription on his plaster casts.
With Hanna hunched, snarling, half-feral like that, Jayne could almost detect something else on the edge of his perception. The black ink snaking across the grubby plaster casts seemed to move at some eldritch angle to the plane of reality it was scribed upon. Something in the corner of his vision moved suddenly, and Jayne was snapped out of his trance.
Hanna was staring at him with the impatience reserved by all youths for figures of authority, utterly unaware of anything amiss.
Jayne shook his head, clearing it of the weird visions, and headed for the kitchen. Better to hide out there than try to reason with his punk houseguest again any time soon.
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The ink on Hanna's broken arms continued to writhe and crawl when looked at directly. When Jayne asked why it did this, he was inevitably treated to the flat look bestowed upon an idiot. It was not moving, he was informed. He should get his eyes tested. It wasn't even runes, just the logos of some local punk bands, which Hanna kindly detailed for the education of the clearly ignorant policeman upon whose sofa he lay.
Other things continued to dart and twitch in the corners of his vision whenever he looked too directly at the casts. He wondered if, perhaps, Hanna was somehow enchanting them without realising it? This was impossible, apparently, and Jayne should stop drinking so much coffee if he was imagining shit.
But it didn't stop at all that day, or all of the next.
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Hanna was becoming more withdrawn, spending more and more time scribbling as best he could on his own plaster casts. The restrictions imposed left his mid- to upper arm blank, but the wrists were absolutely covered till there was barely an inch of white space left between them. The drawings overlapped and intertwined, in a way that Jayne was increasingly convinced no normal, Euclidian linear images could.
He studied the images while Hanna slept, and pored through the few, battered, books of eldritch lore that Hanna had brought to the apartment. None explained what the symbols were, and Jayne didn’t buy that they could be anything as innocent as logos for the city’s many punk musicians. There was nothing left to do but to examine the strange drawings more closely.
Hanna stirred as he reached out to gently lift one plaster-covered arm, and he hesitated for a moment. When the punk’s breathing settled, Jayne laid hands on the weird runes for the first time.
And tried to let go almost straight away as they crawled up his fingers and over his hands, binding him to the cast and twining like inken brambles. Hanna stirred again and didn't wake as he sat upright, head lolling on his shoulders as his other arm reached over to add its own weird shapes to the thickening mass of semi-real lines.
“Hanna – Hanna!” Jayne hissed urgently at the still-sleeping youth. “Hanna, wake up! Help!”
Hanna didn’t wake, and the strange ink squirmed further up, reaching Jayne’s elbows. His fingers felt cold and tingly now, appearing oddly colourless underneath the complex meshwork of black ink. Jayne searched helplessly for something that might wake Hanna and help undo whatever this horrible process was.
“Hanna! If you do not get up, so help me, I will track down and arrest the last of the Ramones, and it will be your fault.”
And now Hanna’s eyes peeled muzzily open, a half-slurred “R’mones?” on his lips. He became very quickly aware of the situation, Jayne’s threat to the ancient punks unheard, and swore as only a vexed magician can.
“The fuck did you do? Where did you even find this shit, never mind why did you start drawing it, and why the hell on me, Christ, Jayne, this is fuckin’ dangerous!”
“I wasn’t drawing it! You’ve been at it for the last three days, I only wanted to see what it was, and what it was doing.” Jayne responded, tugging futilely at his bonds, and patiently controlling his sense of panic. “I can’t feel my hands any more, Hanna, so tell me how to get rid of this.”
Hanna looked at the casts blankly, expression settling oddly.
“Can’t. Now it’s started, can’t stop it it’s done. Might have a brief window then, but probably not.” From beneath a sleep-bedraggled mohawk, Hanna fixed Jayne with a stern look. “This is why you should leave the magic to the professionals and just stick to catching muggers or beating up witnesses or whatever it is cops do on the clock. This is a demon summoning spell, and is the reason I have broken arms and no defensive capabilities right now, so you’re just going to have to wait right there till it’s done.”
A memory stirred at the back of Jayne’s mind, forcing its way up through the clouds of panic as he lost all feeling his forearms. The mumbled, reluctant explanations of how Hanna came to have broken arms. "wsmn'nuhdmn." Or, to put it in English, “was summoning a demon.”
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