Chaeyoung: I Like My Men The Way I Like My Coffee.

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“BABY” - toni topaz

i feel attacked

trying to let you know signeul bonae signal bonae i must let you know signeul bonae signal bonae

signeul bonae signal bonae

signeul bonae signal bonae

signeul bonae signal bonae

i must let you know!

once upon an april day

Pairing: Beast!Arlecchino x fem!Reader

Word Count: ~3500

Warnings: Beast described as grotesque, mentions of death, grave robbing, and allusions to necrophagia.

(A/N): Had some ideas on what a beauty and the beast-esque story with Arlecchino might look like. These are just ideas, barely coherent and not well-developed. Listened to Wicked Game by Chris Isaak and thought of a malformed, unloved thing stumbling into something bigger than itself.

Summary: Each summer, the beast takes a young woman for company.

In April, a red cross greets you when you wake.

From frame to porch, the village elders have drawn two red stripes onto your house, marking you for this year's harvest.

You run a finger across the red. Two. Then, your entire hand, rubbing away what little you can.

The colour stays.

It sticks to your door. Remains on your porch. Clings to your hand, and to the skin beneath your nails.

And in the early drags of summer, the beast comes for you.

Its heavy gait rouses you from restless slumber, long, dark claws scratching against wood and stone as the hulking, hunched thing prowls towards your house.

The noise is jarring; everyone who hears it bolts their doors and dims their lights.

Only you remain, a spot of red still on your thumb.

You watch it through the window; see the long, deformed snout rise and turn this way and that before a massive paw settles on the first step of your porch. The beast lingers for a moment. Then, a second paw joins the first, and the thing all but hauls itself towards the entrance in one sharp forward motion.

A crooked black claw scratches against the still-red frame, and you obediently twist the handle to open the door.

It looks so much bigger up close.

The beast cranes its long neck to look at you, head twisting to the left with an ease that makes you think it boneless. Its snout is close enough to touch, two round red compound eyes unblinking as they stare you down.

"Your Lordship," you greet it quietly.

The beast's head tilts to the right, to where the cross remains painted on your open door. Again, it raises a claw, dragging it past you to tap against the red. Tap. Tap.

"The elders chose me, yes," you affirm, lowering your head. The beast does in kind.

Beady eyes meet yours from below, the thing's neck contorted unnaturally, a would-be cheek pressed to the wooden planks of your porch. It seems intent to keep your gaze, lumpish muscles jumping beneath strange, thick fur when you finally give it such satisfaction.

"A year."

You all but startle when it speaks. Nobody had ever told you that it could.

"A year," you repeat, aware of the village's agreement with the disfigured Lord.

The beast makes a low sound somewhere in the back of its throat. Then, it opens its maw again, rows of sharp teeth glinting. "Come." It rasps, tone low, warped, and overlapping with some strange sort of hum. "Come," it repeats, though no more firm.

Silently, you follow.

The Lord Knave's castle is as tall and as dark as the beast itself. Old brick whines underfoot when the misshapen thing crosses the bridge and stalks up the stairs leading to the entrance.

It flings the large doors open with startling ease, heavy wood slamming against stone walls.

The beast slows inside the foyer. Then, settling on its haunches, it turns to you. It seems to regard you for a moment, your reflection visible in each of its ommatidia before it nudges its neck closer still, until its snout all but touches your nose.

In the warm light of the candles, the tiny simple eyes at the very edges of its face appear almost black, while the ones closest to the centre glow a turbid red.

It is there your reflection shines the brightest.

It is there the beast intends to keep you.

The longer you stare, the more the Lord Knave strikes you as a loveless mess of bone and sinew. A creature stitched rather than born.

Years ago, when the village elders first met the towering Lord of the land, they dared to describe it as wolf-like. And certainly, you see the resemblance. A large, powerful body, covered in thick black fur. Four legs and two perked dark ears. A tail and a big snout. Claws and paws and teeth. All things that greet you when you regard the beast.

But its eyes are like that of an insect. And the closer you look, the shinier its humpback seems, as though protected by some sort of shell.

(It rattles softly whenever the beast breathes. It makes your skin crawl.)

The thing continues staring, and you stare right back. And for a long moment, that is all you do.

Then, the creature shifts, neck angling back, head turning from yours. Its curiosity seems suddenly sated, though whether it likes what it saw remains unclear.

For a moment, you do not know what would be worse. The creature's satisfaction or its ire.

And, in truth, you doubt it matters either way. No young woman has ever returned from this castle alive.

The screeching of a black claw against dusty white marble startles you back to awareness. You flinch at the noise, and the beast makes a sound as though amused before it raises that same claw towards a flight of stairs.

That is the last you see of it for weeks.

Properly, at least.

At night, hidden inside the oily darkness, the creature skulks around the castle grounds. Always a little too loud. Always rattling. Restless.

Sometimes, almost agonized.

You think the warmth is doing it under, that towering, tumorous thing. Think that the same heat that's making the fabric of your clothes cling to your sweat-soaked back might very well be boiling it alive.

Maybe that is why the beast is so loud sometimes.

Why it scratches and claws and bites at its shell like some angry, flea-ridden mutt.

Why, occasionally, when the midday sun is hanging high, it whimpers and groans, voice almost human.

"My Lord...?" You approach quietly, but the beast startles all the same.

You do not understand, not entirely, anyway. You saw its ears twitch and flatten the moment your hand met the railing all the way across the hall. It heard you—knew you would come long before you did.

And yet, the beast flinched still.

Perhaps, it is the fact of your presence that caused its fright, not the suddenness of it. You consider the thought as you step closer, waiting for the beast to raise its head.

"Hot, isn't it?" You try, voice unexpectedly soft, skin clammy.

The beast does not speak. It hasn't done so in weeks, not since it first brought you here, but its eyes find your form—a hundred tiny yous staring back at you in its red, webbed eyes.

"You must be hot," you continue, still soft. "With all that fur..." you trail off.

The beast inclines its head. Then, as though stung, suddenly twists and snaps its jaw at its back. Unable to catch its own skin with its teeth, it raises a back leg, long claws scratching where its maw failed to gnaw.

"Does it itch?" You ask, stubbing the toe of your shoe against the floor when the creature remains silent. Part of you feels stupid for asking, and stupider still when the beast halts its motions and inclines its head again as though to question your intelligence.

"Right..." you murmur, settling on one of the many couches in the great chamber.

Finally, the creature lowers back onto the ground, stretching out onto the cool marble with a rattling sigh. Its lumpish muscles writhe beneath dense fur and greyish flesh, shell clattering gently.

You still hate that sound, and, briefly, you wonder whether this is how all the women before you have felt. Whether they hated this sound, too. The sound and the scratching and the Lord Knave. That twisted, wrong thing.

What has it done to them? You wonder. The dozens of women that were meant to return after serving it for a year. What did it have them do?

What will it make you do?

Beside you, the Lord Knave has curled into a ball, hard shell turned to you. Its claws have made deep lacerations in the plating, and its skin twitches as though itching still.

"Scratch." It rasps out, voice low and as layered as it's always been.

Your hand wanders before your mind catches up. Coarse fur greets your fingertips, matted in spots and all too filthy. And yet, you don't draw back, keeping your hand settled below one hard plate, fingers scratching into the thick strands.

"You have some grey in your fur..." you murmur, a fire's warmth and strength beneath your palm.

The beast does not reply. Its pulse thunders like the wings of a hummingbird.

Days drag like this. Slow and lonely.

The beast spends the endless warmth of summer in shadows and slumber. When awake, it does not speak more than a few words at a time, as though the act itself requires effort, and you do not ask it to, finding its voice unpleasant.

(The hum that wraps around each syllable is low enough to skitter along your bones. And, sometimes, you think it cracking, almost feminine. You do not like the images your mind conjures up at the thought.)

Eventually, however, your boredom makes you restless.

So, during the day, you explore and clean the castle, finding fur and rags and dust. Broken furniture and bones—splintered and bent and far too small for whatever they'd been asked to hold. Finally, beneath a moth-eaten, yellowed cloth—a painting of the young lady of the castle.

You falter.

Almost two decades have passed since anyone's last seen her. Two decades since the strange, crooked creature has taken residence in the castle and started prowling the lands.

(Lord Knave, it told you all to call it, when the winter was harsh and the village could not bear to lose another soul. Seal unto this bond, it said. I will be merciful. How many have disappeared since then?)

You touch the dusty frame, the beast's beady eyes on you.

It's been following you around as of late, a looming shadow that swallows yours.

"Pretty?" It warbles.

"Very." You agree, raising a small rag to brush away the cobwebs and layers of dust. "Do you not think so?"

"I used to," it says. One by one, the small, strange eyes stop reflecting the painted image. "Those were her bones you burned last week."

This time, it is you who does not reply.

In autumn, you find that your attempts at cleanliness have been for naught. Tufts of dark fur line the halls at any given time, the furniture and all your clothes sporting stray hairs no matter how often you remove them.

"Is this..." you pause, pointing to a basket's worth of fur in the corner, "...normal?"

"It is autumn, is it not?" The creature asks, unblinking eyes drowsy from the hearth's heat.

"Yes." You agree. And tilting your head, "So...you shed every autumn?" Like a dog, you want to add but decide against it. The beast seems to understand you all the same, a low, displeased sound bubbling up in its throat.

"I do not enjoy pointless questions."

"...those words would hold weight if there was anything you did enjoy," you sigh, picking up the tufts to throw them into the fire. The hair sizzles away in a heartbeat.

It reeks horribly.

Another deep rumble escapes the creature, its shell clattering in irritation. "Foolish woman," it chides, burrowing its snout between its paws. "Foolish, foolish woman."

"Uncombed beast," you shoot back, scowling. Whether it's in anger or disgust, the creature cannot tell. "Uncombed, unbathed beast."

It springs to its full height at that, glowering and towering over your sitting form. The plates on its back make loud, horrid sounds, cracking and crunching against each other in the creature's agitation.

For a moment, you fear it might strike you. The thing must see it too, for the next moment it snarls and falls back onto its paws before lurching out of the great hall.

You blink at the empty space it left behind, pick up another tuft of hair from the floor, and—before you can do something foolish like throw it to the flames like you had done the others—watch the beast return on three of its four legs.

Cradled in the clawed paw of the fourth, you find a small, old comb, which the creature promptly throws at you.

You dodge the projectile, hissing. "Rude beast."

"Comb," it huffs, slumping near the couch.

You take the comb, momentarily consider poking one of its big, beady eyes with it out of protest, then stand. On your tippy-toes and none too gently, you comb the creature's fur, nose crinkling at the growing pile of it collecting on the floor.

All the while, the Lord Knave's sharp, searching gaze remains on your hands, as though patiently awaiting the moment you fashion the flimsy comb into a weapon to strike it down with.

No such attack comes, and the brutish thing stills on the floor. The peevish rattling of its shell quietens, replaced by the lazy thumping of its tail.

Soon, the curious creature—made docile by the gentle crackling of the hearth's fire at its back and the repetitive motions of the comb—succumbs to sleep.

Graves line the backyard of the castle. Rows upon rows of once great lords and ladies of the land.

You think they speak to you sometimes. Or one of them, at least. A woman's voice keeps you up at night. Hoarse. Wrecked. As though it screamed itself raw in its last moments on earth.

Girl, it calls to you.

Sweet girl, it beckons. Come. Why won't you come? Leave the monster. Leave the beast. Leave like the others have.

For a long while, you think you might be going insane.

The beast seems to notice your unease, for it starts prowling the graveyard at night.

When it finds what it is looking for, it tells you to lock the windows in your room up tight and close the curtains before you go to sleep.

You do.

The voice does not speak to you again.

Still, you cannot sleep.

(No window is thick enough to block out the noise of the creature's relentless digging and that horrible, horrible crunch of brick and bone between its teeth. The name Crucabena remains barely legible on the broken tombstone that it left behind. If you were to ask, the Lord Knave would tell you that the old witch tasted of the rot that took her heart and grave.)

(It will upset the creature's stomach, that ugly, cloying rot. You will be there to soothe its tremors and quiet its wretched wailing.)

It looks at you oddly sometimes, that bewildering thing.

Like last week, when you washed the vegetables for dinner while it sat with its head on the counter, the reflection of your hands in its eyes.

Like yesterday, too, when you stood soaking up the last rays of autumn's sunlight while it sat silently in the shade.

And just now, while you're dozing off to its familiar rattling and oozing warmth. It yawns and cranes its neck to face you, looking at you as it always does in the mornings; in the evenings; at night.

You think it yearns for something, that massive clump of heat. Your strange Lord Knave.

And, drowsy as you are, you think it most human just then.

But for now, you doze. And the beastly lord stays and clatters as it always had.

In winter, the beast loses its shell.

It started with a single, old plate.

The creature had joined you in the great hall late in the evening, sated and slow, presenting its hard carapace to you as it had done many times before. You barely looked up from the book you were reading, hand gliding beneath a segment to scratch into the ever-irritated skin.

"Read," the beast told you, languidly stretching out its paws. The rippled, grey matter of its body rolled beneath your fingers, strange muscles clumped together and terribly warm.

"Do you have no manners?"

"No."

"You are difficult."

"You make me so." The Lord Knave said. The heat of its flesh had metastasized to its vocal cords some time ago. Now, its words were warped with tenderness that rendered them barely loud enough to hear.

You never quite knew what to do with that. With that strange, warm sound. But you read, and your fingers continued rubbing below the hardened segment closest to you.

By the time you finished the chapter, the lord beast had all but curled into itself, ears lazily slanted towards the sound of your voice. It did not react when you moved to withdraw your hand, webbed eyes clouded with exhaustion and a mellow rumble sitting deep in the cavity of its chest.

You had focused on that odd sound, on the way you felt it in your bones much more than you heard it, so much so that you did not notice when your sleeve snagged on the rough plating of the creature's back. You tried to free the fabric gently at first, then tugged when it did not budge, until finally the Lord Knave noticed your struggle and swiped its tail against the point of connection.

The sleeve fell free. And with it, the entire plate. The large segment departed from the creature's flesh with a wet, fetid squelch, startling both it and you.

By the end of the week, the creature's back sported nothing but its fur.

The first snowfall takes its claws; the heavy winter storms, its eyes.

(You spent hours scrubbing the dark, sticky mess from the floor while the great beast blindly paced the halls, howling like some wounded animal and a woman all at once. Once it had exhausted its voice and the pain dragged its heavy body to the floor, you came over with a pitcher of water to find the eye-sockets empty.)

It is useless now, your poor Lord Knave.

Useless and blind and more demanding than ever.

Touch replaces its sight, its large paws clumsy as they glide across furniture, floors, and you.

It will find you by smell and sound, then trail a trembling joint across your arm as though to reassure itself of your presence before slinking off to some corner of the castle.

Always hunched.

Always awkward.

It does not know why you stay. Why you do not run like the others had. It would let you.

The old witch's rotten heart knows it would let you.

Is that why it's hurting so? Because the year is coming to an end and you're still here?

(Kind you. Patient you. Do you know you've become all that is dearest to the beast?)

In the evenings, when you come to join it for warmth and company, the beast will make space for you.

At night, your mind drifting and weary, it will tell you its name.

"Peruere," it says, heavy tail thumping against your leg.

"Peruere?"

"That is my name." The beast yawns. Does it know it's lost a row of teeth? "You may stop calling me Lord Knave now."

You hum. Peruere...

What a peculiar name. How stupidly lovely.

That winter, in the arms of Peruere's unseasonable, insistent heat, you wish for the year to never end.

(Beside you, ears slanted in the direction of your heart, the Lord Knave slumbers to a melody it finds more soothing than anything has ever been)

When the snow has thawed and the blind beast does not show up to greet you come evening, you begin to worry.

You search the halls, the cellars, and the balconies, before finding the creature—your useless, foolish Peruere—half-frozen in the garden.

It takes you a moment to recognize the lord. Its once massive body had shrunk and lost its fur, leaving a heaving, grey clump of torn tissue and a host-less structure of bones—far too large to uphold the small mess of a being within.

You drag the sickly, formless thing back inside and bundle it in furs by the hearth's fire.

And then, you wait.

Bones start crunching in the pile by morning, the clump slowly gaining shape.

By evening, the screaming starts. The once-beast hollers and writhes as its body finds its form, skin knitting over flesh and gaining colour.

Before the day is done, a woman lies in your lap, shivering from everything but the cold. For she is still warm. Still the Lord Knave in anything but appearance.

(You press a finger to her pulse. It beats like yours.)

Her eyes are last to form, appearing sometime at dawn. Their sudden weight forces the woman from her exhausted slumber, beauty meeting her when she opens her eyelids; then, the rising sun.

She raises a trembling hand, finds it hers again and kinder than it has been in decades, and places it onto your warm cheek, the softest thing she's ever been allowed to touch.

It is April again, and red crosses greet you when you wake, the lady of the castle staring at you from beneath expensive furs.

Fancy should be song of the year.

HI ROOSTER TEETH JUST FKING SNIPED ME, I AM OFFICIALLY DOA😭😭😭👌👌

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