Being Human: Past, Perfect Tense [Hal/Cutler]
Title: “Past, Perfect Tense”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: NC-17 [dub-con]
Timeline: 1950s; post-series 4
Summary: Back in the fifties, Hal was cruel temptation. Now it’s Cutler’s turn to return the favour. [Hal/Cutler, Cutler/Rachel]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Two lines taken from Episode 4x07, “Making History”. Hal quotes George Orwell in the next-to-last segment.
A/N: This is the result of my Cutler muse going completely bonkers.
Dedication: for shirogiku - because BSG and Head!Nick and the idea about the freckles and do I even need a reason?
PAST, PERFECT TENSE
They are not those who used to feed us
When we were young--they cannot be -
These shapes that now bereave and bleed us?
Thomas Hardy. “The Puzzled Game-Birds”
“Do you remember how you always used to adjust my tie? I would spend half an hour in front of the mirror, trying to get the damn thing straight, thinking that it annoyed you or something. I don’t know why I bothered.”
Hal says: “You’re not here.” He doesn’t sound certain; doesn’t even try.
“Why? Because I died?” In the coal-black darkness of the basement, ghosts finally look like ghosts. “Or because you don’t want me here?”
Cutler saunters up to him, his shirt half-buttoned, his facial expression oddly smug for someone who, according to reliable sources, has been “kebabbed”. Restraints prevent Hal from moving. He tenses in the chair and half-wishes Tom and Alex hadn’t relocated him downstairs on his insistence.
Cutler smiles and straddles him. Hal feels the weight and stiffens beneath it. There is a faint scent of blood coming off of the apparition, but that may just be Hal’s imagination.
“Tell me,” Cutler mouths.
“I don’t want you here,” Hal says, and he can’t hear his own voice.
Cutler gives him a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
He says: “Let’s talk.”
--
The weather is uncharacteristically warm. Rachel must have been hugging the door like she sometimes does when she is not sure if Nick can be disturbed, and her nighty sticks to her belly. She gets into the car where Nick has been sitting at the wheel, staring blankly at the windshield, and asks him what’s on his mind. He doesn’t want to be obvious, so he doesn’t reply. He looks at the pale stain on her garment and imagines it’s blood.
“You enjoy it,” Hal tells him in his memory.
“Yeah.” Does it come in different flavours?
And Hal would look at him like he’s five and maybe buy him an ice cream and make an ambiguous comment; something about Nick’s talented tongue.
Rachel thinks he’s sulking. He doesn’t dissuade her; it’s safer than the truth.
She straddles him, and he is half-hard just because she has touched him. The nightgown is light, almost non-existent around her body. She presses a finger against his lips just as he opens his mouth to protest. She will not take no for an answer.
He trails his fingers up her inner thigh. She raises herself a little and kisses him on the mouth, wet and mind-blowing like they are sixteen and desperate. He sheathes his fingers inside her and she moans into his mouth, and the sound trickles down his throat and splashes into him like blood would.
“You like the blood though,” Hal reminds him.
“Have you got any?”
Because it hurts, it physically hurts. There are five litres of untouchable blood in Rachel. She would part with some of it once a month. The realization makes him jerk in horror, and she clenches around his fingers and drowns another moan in another kiss. He feels nothing but mortal terror.
--
“There is something about being so utterly helpless, don’t you think?”
No, Hal doesn’t think. He thinks he used to play inane games and Cutler is stealing from him now.
Cutler is maddeningly hot inside, almost as if he were not dead. He bobs up and down Hal’s shaft in a strangely organized rhythm, and scoffs upon catching Hal’s look: “You’re into that stuff now, aren’t you? Routine?” Hal strains against the ropes that are cutting into his skin. He opens his mouth and Cutler invades it too, sweeping his tongue over Hal’s, sucking at his parched lips. Maybe it’s good or maybe it’s Hal sitting alone in an empty cellar, biting his lips and swelling with hunger.
--
Hal pretends to watch him work. He’s given Nick all this paperwork to process but Nick can’t focus when Hal is watching.
“What?” Hal asks innocently, stealing the word right out of Nick’s mouth.
Nick wants to tell him to leave and ends up mumbling something about missing paper clips. Hal arches his eyebrows, picks up the box, which is right there on the desk, and hands it to Nick, smiling like the serpent directing Eve to the forbidden fruit.
He fucks someone’s secretary on Nick’s desk a few hours later. Then he kills her. Nick’s fingers hover reverently over the dried stains of blood and semen. He remembers that time in the car when Rachel rode him hard and he just sat there doing nothing, looking at her like a dull-witted pupil looks at his Maths teacher struggling to explain to him the fractions for the tenth time. Rachel’s skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat and her hair hung loose over her shoulders.
Rachel is in the ground now. Just like that other girl will be tonight.
--
He spits obscenities at Alex the next time she comes to visit because he can’t stand company at the moment. Cutler winds his arms around Hal’s neck, standing behind the chair, and sucks at his earlobe playfully. He tells Hal to play nice and “It’s your fault the girl’s dead anyway.” He’s always been good at shifting the blame.
“Do you want me to apologize?” Hal asks as soon as Alex leaves, seemingly unperturbed by his verbiage (to give credit where one is due, both she and Tom have been extremely forthcoming). “For what I did to you?”
He could do that but it would never be enough.
“Oh, write me a letter of apology when you regain control of your hands,” Cutler says nonchalantly, with underlying venom.
He walks around the chair and kneels before Hal, calculating eyes never leaving his face. Beads of perspiration crop up on Hal’s forehead. Cutler unfastens his trousers and takes him into his mouth. Sweat pools in the hollows of Hal’s body, making his shirt stick to his skin. The stains on the dark fabric look almost like blood.
“Do you miss it?” Cutler asks.
Hal chooses to believe he means blood. He says: “Yes.”
“I don’t want to punish you,” Cutler tells him. “I want you to enjoy it.”
--
She is pretty but he kills her quickly because she screams. She does all the right things, hits all the right spots, she’s all teeth, elbows and knees, but she’s not even out of her dress yet when Nick’s eyes flash black and she starts hollering like she’s seen the devil. He panics and digs his teeth into her throat. It’s his first solitary kill. Hal never taught him to be gentle.
Tonight’s full moon. Nick feels giddy. He likes to watch Hal watching the fight. There is such ardour in his eyes, even though lately it’s been mostly restlessness and something that Nick can’t quite pin down.
The cage is empty, the dog is nowhere to be seen and the audience is munching on the humans prepared for the fight. No one tells him what’s wrong. He feels their silence like a punch in the gut.
“Fuck,” says Fergus when Nick asks him where Hal is. He sounds exasperated and tired. He punches the cage bars and says again: “Fuck,” and Nick has never seen him like this.
--
Cutler inclines his head, exposing his throat, a white patch of skin over the windpipe embedded in the expanse of muscle.
“Go ahead. It won’t hurt.” A wicked grin. “Unless you want it to.”
His jacket is lying in a heap on the floor; his shirt is sliding off his shoulder. Hal stares at the scattering of freckles on his skin. He starts counting them and trips and starts again.
“What?”
Hal says, looking at the darkness condensed in the corner of the room: “I’m sorry you died. I mourned your passing.”
Cutler grabs the collar of his shirt and spits:
“Don’t you dare be sorry.”
--
He loves the fifties while Hal is there and hates them after Hal is gone, but the sixties are a different story. They are restless and mental, and the world boils like a fishbowl set on a burner, with all the uprisings and the revolutions and the man on the Moon. The blood of the flower children has a herbal taste.
It’s when he stops looking for Hal, too. A dozen years after the vanishing act, Cutler is completely certain that Hal is dead. Someone once told him he should try everything life has to offer. The feeling of having your heart ripped out of your chest and served back to you on a silver platter is not a thing he would try willingly, but he gets it anyway.
--
“You ain’t been outta here for a month,” Tom tells him. “Think you’re takin’ this a bit too far.”
“I’ll know when I’m safe to be around, Tom. Thank you for your concern.” He filters every word, brimming with unjustified loathing, eyes focused on Cutler who is leaning against the wall, the promise of things to come.
“You could maybe defrost that freezer,” Tom suggests. “And help me out at the chippy. ‘Cause it’s been a bit- Well, I ain’t sayin’ it’s boring without you or anythin’…”
“Tom, please!” Leo would have listened. But then, Tom “ain’t Leo.”
Cutler strolls up to him and whispers:
“I’m afraid I don’t have a one month sobriety chip on me.”
Tom is still talking, telling stupid stories about the café, which Hal couldn’t care less about. Cutler snakes his hand into the pocket of Hal’s trousers, making him squirm. He fishes out a domino piece and twiddles it between his fingers pensively before pressing its edge against Hal’s lips. He traces the outline of Hal’s mouth with it, and Hal fails to hold back a small sigh.
He tilts his head up, letting Cutler trail the domino piece down his neck. It lingers briefly in the hollow at the base of his throat, pressing just a bit harder. Hal takes a sharp breath and growls, “Leave!” not knowing who exactly he is talking to. Tom blinks, looking a little bewildered, mutters something unintelligible and finally disappears.
“I missed that, you know,” Cutler comments. “That commanding voice.”
A load of good it does if commands are never obeyed.
--
Nick enjoys the twenty-first century. It is loud, fast-paced and it takes huge bites out of people who cannot cope with it. He is just waiting for it to gobble up Griffin. The old-fashioned prick will get what’s coming to him; Nick is certain of that. For now he grits his teeth and makes the bastard another cup of tea, leaving the bag in just a little too long and making a mental note to add some bad milk next time. Petty, Hal would say. But what can Nick do? He’s just that bloke with the phone.
They dream bigger these days, jump higher. Sometimes Nick misses the old days when it was really just Hal and him and Fergus and Crabbe and Goyle. Because yeah, those two were never really relevant to the plot. Nick couldn’t even tell why they were there in the first place. They just glowered and looked scary. (Nick is almost willing to bet that whenever Dennis won at poker, he would hand his winnings over to Hal either way.)
Dennis and Louis fell away at some point. Fergus stayed. Some scruffy keeper of scrolls or whatnot drifted into their pond and somehow took root. Some Old Ones gathered. Now they’re planning to take over the world. Nick doesn’t mind. He disagrees with their methods, and nobody’s listening. It figures.
“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them,” Hal says, straightening out Nick’s tie. It’s been a while.
He can’t figure if that’s a gibe at him or the others.
Hal gives him a cold smile. Nick looks away. His gaze lingers at one of the car models on a shelf. He always wanted a real posh car. Never did get to have it.
“You’re not here,” he says, half-stubbornly, half-resentfully.
“Why? Because I’m dead?” Hal places his hand on Nick’s belt buckle. There are teasing notes in his voice. Nick’s always had an overactive imagination. “Or because you don’t want me to be?” He flicks his tongue over the rim of Nick’s ear and drawls: “Say it.”
It’s been half a century. There is something very unfair about it. Nick knows he can hold his ground but what’s the point?
“I want you.”
That’s putting it mildly.
He can feel Hal smiling. “Come on, Nick. I want you to enjoy it.”
--
“Thirty-three days,” Alex comments. “Impressive. Were you practicing turning into a bat or something?”
Daylight hurts a little after the comfortable darkness of the cellar.
“You always did like dungeons,” Cutler whispers, and how would he know? He wasn’t even there when Hal had a dungeon.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hal says to both of them, and adds: “I can’t turn into smoke either if you’re interested. That would rather negate the point of keeping me locked up, wouldn’t it?”
He clenches and unclenches his fist, watching the digits flex as if they are not his own. He asks: “Why are you still here?” Two voices answer:
“I live here.”
“Hey, maybe this is my unfinished business,” Alex notes cheerfully. “To haunt you.”
He can tell she is about to start the whole you-drank-my-blood thing again. Sometimes she sounds like a broken record.
He trundles up the stairs. He has two objectives: to take a shower and to sleep on a horizontal surface. Not too much to ask, is it?
“Are you trying to drive me mad?” he wonders.
“I hate to break it to you,” Cutler snorts, “but you’re hearing voices and chatting with people who aren’t exactly real. I’d say we’re halfway there.”
Hal is too tired to argue. Maybe Cutler is real and the rest of them aren’t. Maybe it’s vice versa. He opens the door to his room and says:
“Let’s talk.”
June 18-20, 2012
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: NC-17 [dub-con]
Timeline: 1950s; post-series 4
Summary: Back in the fifties, Hal was cruel temptation. Now it’s Cutler’s turn to return the favour. [Hal/Cutler, Cutler/Rachel]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Two lines taken from Episode 4x07, “Making History”. Hal quotes George Orwell in the next-to-last segment.
A/N: This is the result of my Cutler muse going completely bonkers.
Dedication: for shirogiku - because BSG and Head!Nick and the idea about the freckles and do I even need a reason?
PAST, PERFECT TENSE
They are not those who used to feed us
When we were young--they cannot be -
These shapes that now bereave and bleed us?
Thomas Hardy. “The Puzzled Game-Birds”
“Do you remember how you always used to adjust my tie? I would spend half an hour in front of the mirror, trying to get the damn thing straight, thinking that it annoyed you or something. I don’t know why I bothered.”
Hal says: “You’re not here.” He doesn’t sound certain; doesn’t even try.
“Why? Because I died?” In the coal-black darkness of the basement, ghosts finally look like ghosts. “Or because you don’t want me here?”
Cutler saunters up to him, his shirt half-buttoned, his facial expression oddly smug for someone who, according to reliable sources, has been “kebabbed”. Restraints prevent Hal from moving. He tenses in the chair and half-wishes Tom and Alex hadn’t relocated him downstairs on his insistence.
Cutler smiles and straddles him. Hal feels the weight and stiffens beneath it. There is a faint scent of blood coming off of the apparition, but that may just be Hal’s imagination.
“Tell me,” Cutler mouths.
“I don’t want you here,” Hal says, and he can’t hear his own voice.
Cutler gives him a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
He says: “Let’s talk.”
--
The weather is uncharacteristically warm. Rachel must have been hugging the door like she sometimes does when she is not sure if Nick can be disturbed, and her nighty sticks to her belly. She gets into the car where Nick has been sitting at the wheel, staring blankly at the windshield, and asks him what’s on his mind. He doesn’t want to be obvious, so he doesn’t reply. He looks at the pale stain on her garment and imagines it’s blood.
“You enjoy it,” Hal tells him in his memory.
“Yeah.” Does it come in different flavours?
And Hal would look at him like he’s five and maybe buy him an ice cream and make an ambiguous comment; something about Nick’s talented tongue.
Rachel thinks he’s sulking. He doesn’t dissuade her; it’s safer than the truth.
She straddles him, and he is half-hard just because she has touched him. The nightgown is light, almost non-existent around her body. She presses a finger against his lips just as he opens his mouth to protest. She will not take no for an answer.
He trails his fingers up her inner thigh. She raises herself a little and kisses him on the mouth, wet and mind-blowing like they are sixteen and desperate. He sheathes his fingers inside her and she moans into his mouth, and the sound trickles down his throat and splashes into him like blood would.
“You like the blood though,” Hal reminds him.
“Have you got any?”
Because it hurts, it physically hurts. There are five litres of untouchable blood in Rachel. She would part with some of it once a month. The realization makes him jerk in horror, and she clenches around his fingers and drowns another moan in another kiss. He feels nothing but mortal terror.
--
“There is something about being so utterly helpless, don’t you think?”
No, Hal doesn’t think. He thinks he used to play inane games and Cutler is stealing from him now.
Cutler is maddeningly hot inside, almost as if he were not dead. He bobs up and down Hal’s shaft in a strangely organized rhythm, and scoffs upon catching Hal’s look: “You’re into that stuff now, aren’t you? Routine?” Hal strains against the ropes that are cutting into his skin. He opens his mouth and Cutler invades it too, sweeping his tongue over Hal’s, sucking at his parched lips. Maybe it’s good or maybe it’s Hal sitting alone in an empty cellar, biting his lips and swelling with hunger.
--
Hal pretends to watch him work. He’s given Nick all this paperwork to process but Nick can’t focus when Hal is watching.
“What?” Hal asks innocently, stealing the word right out of Nick’s mouth.
Nick wants to tell him to leave and ends up mumbling something about missing paper clips. Hal arches his eyebrows, picks up the box, which is right there on the desk, and hands it to Nick, smiling like the serpent directing Eve to the forbidden fruit.
He fucks someone’s secretary on Nick’s desk a few hours later. Then he kills her. Nick’s fingers hover reverently over the dried stains of blood and semen. He remembers that time in the car when Rachel rode him hard and he just sat there doing nothing, looking at her like a dull-witted pupil looks at his Maths teacher struggling to explain to him the fractions for the tenth time. Rachel’s skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat and her hair hung loose over her shoulders.
Rachel is in the ground now. Just like that other girl will be tonight.
--
He spits obscenities at Alex the next time she comes to visit because he can’t stand company at the moment. Cutler winds his arms around Hal’s neck, standing behind the chair, and sucks at his earlobe playfully. He tells Hal to play nice and “It’s your fault the girl’s dead anyway.” He’s always been good at shifting the blame.
“Do you want me to apologize?” Hal asks as soon as Alex leaves, seemingly unperturbed by his verbiage (to give credit where one is due, both she and Tom have been extremely forthcoming). “For what I did to you?”
He could do that but it would never be enough.
“Oh, write me a letter of apology when you regain control of your hands,” Cutler says nonchalantly, with underlying venom.
He walks around the chair and kneels before Hal, calculating eyes never leaving his face. Beads of perspiration crop up on Hal’s forehead. Cutler unfastens his trousers and takes him into his mouth. Sweat pools in the hollows of Hal’s body, making his shirt stick to his skin. The stains on the dark fabric look almost like blood.
“Do you miss it?” Cutler asks.
Hal chooses to believe he means blood. He says: “Yes.”
“I don’t want to punish you,” Cutler tells him. “I want you to enjoy it.”
--
She is pretty but he kills her quickly because she screams. She does all the right things, hits all the right spots, she’s all teeth, elbows and knees, but she’s not even out of her dress yet when Nick’s eyes flash black and she starts hollering like she’s seen the devil. He panics and digs his teeth into her throat. It’s his first solitary kill. Hal never taught him to be gentle.
Tonight’s full moon. Nick feels giddy. He likes to watch Hal watching the fight. There is such ardour in his eyes, even though lately it’s been mostly restlessness and something that Nick can’t quite pin down.
The cage is empty, the dog is nowhere to be seen and the audience is munching on the humans prepared for the fight. No one tells him what’s wrong. He feels their silence like a punch in the gut.
“Fuck,” says Fergus when Nick asks him where Hal is. He sounds exasperated and tired. He punches the cage bars and says again: “Fuck,” and Nick has never seen him like this.
--
Cutler inclines his head, exposing his throat, a white patch of skin over the windpipe embedded in the expanse of muscle.
“Go ahead. It won’t hurt.” A wicked grin. “Unless you want it to.”
His jacket is lying in a heap on the floor; his shirt is sliding off his shoulder. Hal stares at the scattering of freckles on his skin. He starts counting them and trips and starts again.
“What?”
Hal says, looking at the darkness condensed in the corner of the room: “I’m sorry you died. I mourned your passing.”
Cutler grabs the collar of his shirt and spits:
“Don’t you dare be sorry.”
--
He loves the fifties while Hal is there and hates them after Hal is gone, but the sixties are a different story. They are restless and mental, and the world boils like a fishbowl set on a burner, with all the uprisings and the revolutions and the man on the Moon. The blood of the flower children has a herbal taste.
It’s when he stops looking for Hal, too. A dozen years after the vanishing act, Cutler is completely certain that Hal is dead. Someone once told him he should try everything life has to offer. The feeling of having your heart ripped out of your chest and served back to you on a silver platter is not a thing he would try willingly, but he gets it anyway.
--
“You ain’t been outta here for a month,” Tom tells him. “Think you’re takin’ this a bit too far.”
“I’ll know when I’m safe to be around, Tom. Thank you for your concern.” He filters every word, brimming with unjustified loathing, eyes focused on Cutler who is leaning against the wall, the promise of things to come.
“You could maybe defrost that freezer,” Tom suggests. “And help me out at the chippy. ‘Cause it’s been a bit- Well, I ain’t sayin’ it’s boring without you or anythin’…”
“Tom, please!” Leo would have listened. But then, Tom “ain’t Leo.”
Cutler strolls up to him and whispers:
“I’m afraid I don’t have a one month sobriety chip on me.”
Tom is still talking, telling stupid stories about the café, which Hal couldn’t care less about. Cutler snakes his hand into the pocket of Hal’s trousers, making him squirm. He fishes out a domino piece and twiddles it between his fingers pensively before pressing its edge against Hal’s lips. He traces the outline of Hal’s mouth with it, and Hal fails to hold back a small sigh.
He tilts his head up, letting Cutler trail the domino piece down his neck. It lingers briefly in the hollow at the base of his throat, pressing just a bit harder. Hal takes a sharp breath and growls, “Leave!” not knowing who exactly he is talking to. Tom blinks, looking a little bewildered, mutters something unintelligible and finally disappears.
“I missed that, you know,” Cutler comments. “That commanding voice.”
A load of good it does if commands are never obeyed.
--
Nick enjoys the twenty-first century. It is loud, fast-paced and it takes huge bites out of people who cannot cope with it. He is just waiting for it to gobble up Griffin. The old-fashioned prick will get what’s coming to him; Nick is certain of that. For now he grits his teeth and makes the bastard another cup of tea, leaving the bag in just a little too long and making a mental note to add some bad milk next time. Petty, Hal would say. But what can Nick do? He’s just that bloke with the phone.
They dream bigger these days, jump higher. Sometimes Nick misses the old days when it was really just Hal and him and Fergus and Crabbe and Goyle. Because yeah, those two were never really relevant to the plot. Nick couldn’t even tell why they were there in the first place. They just glowered and looked scary. (Nick is almost willing to bet that whenever Dennis won at poker, he would hand his winnings over to Hal either way.)
Dennis and Louis fell away at some point. Fergus stayed. Some scruffy keeper of scrolls or whatnot drifted into their pond and somehow took root. Some Old Ones gathered. Now they’re planning to take over the world. Nick doesn’t mind. He disagrees with their methods, and nobody’s listening. It figures.
“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them,” Hal says, straightening out Nick’s tie. It’s been a while.
He can’t figure if that’s a gibe at him or the others.
Hal gives him a cold smile. Nick looks away. His gaze lingers at one of the car models on a shelf. He always wanted a real posh car. Never did get to have it.
“You’re not here,” he says, half-stubbornly, half-resentfully.
“Why? Because I’m dead?” Hal places his hand on Nick’s belt buckle. There are teasing notes in his voice. Nick’s always had an overactive imagination. “Or because you don’t want me to be?” He flicks his tongue over the rim of Nick’s ear and drawls: “Say it.”
It’s been half a century. There is something very unfair about it. Nick knows he can hold his ground but what’s the point?
“I want you.”
That’s putting it mildly.
He can feel Hal smiling. “Come on, Nick. I want you to enjoy it.”
--
“Thirty-three days,” Alex comments. “Impressive. Were you practicing turning into a bat or something?”
Daylight hurts a little after the comfortable darkness of the cellar.
“You always did like dungeons,” Cutler whispers, and how would he know? He wasn’t even there when Hal had a dungeon.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hal says to both of them, and adds: “I can’t turn into smoke either if you’re interested. That would rather negate the point of keeping me locked up, wouldn’t it?”
He clenches and unclenches his fist, watching the digits flex as if they are not his own. He asks: “Why are you still here?” Two voices answer:
“I live here.”
“Hey, maybe this is my unfinished business,” Alex notes cheerfully. “To haunt you.”
He can tell she is about to start the whole you-drank-my-blood thing again. Sometimes she sounds like a broken record.
He trundles up the stairs. He has two objectives: to take a shower and to sleep on a horizontal surface. Not too much to ask, is it?
“Are you trying to drive me mad?” he wonders.
“I hate to break it to you,” Cutler snorts, “but you’re hearing voices and chatting with people who aren’t exactly real. I’d say we’re halfway there.”
Hal is too tired to argue. Maybe Cutler is real and the rest of them aren’t. Maybe it’s vice versa. He opens the door to his room and says:
“Let’s talk.”
June 18-20, 2012