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“Have you ever considered getting a hobby?”
After escaping his hometown with little more than his dignity and his life, and after encountering Jack Townsend for what will hopefully be the last time, Spencer finds himself in a remote area of the Sierra Nevada mountains, perched up in a tree, with his longtime companion and annoyance, Vanessa Riggin, pestering him with some inane bullshit for the thousandth time this week. Vanessa, sick of driving all the time and persistent enough to wear Spencer down, convinced him that they could use a break. She wanted to go to Disneyland, but Spencer would rather have died than step foot into a populated area, so they compromised: they let Kieffer pick.
They probably should have expected Kieffer to pick camping. After all, he is technically still a plant.
Spencer opens his eyes to see Vanessa standing beneath him, hands wrapped around the straps of her backpack, and Kieffer exactly where he left him, still laying on the ground as he works his way through a puzzle book. He stares at her for a second, hoping she’ll go away, but when she doesn’t budge, he sighs and runs a hand down his face. “What?”
“A hobby,” she repeats. “You know, something to do to pass the time. It usually involves doing something with your hands, but-” Vanessa gestures vaguely to him, “-you can probably find something that doesn’t.”
Spencer sneers. Makeshift prosthetic be damned, she still thinks jokes about his missing hand are the height of comedy. “You think you’re real fuckin’ funny, don’t you?”
Vanessa offers him a solemn nod, turning away from him. She shucks her backpack off and flops down into the lawnchair she designated as hers at the start of the trip. “I do. All joking aside, though, do you have anything you do for fun, or do you just stare off into the distance like your life is one persistent Vietnam flashback?”
“I absolutely have hobbies. Don’t give me that shit.” Dimly, he notes the way his shoulders inch closer and closer to his ears, bristling as he grows more defensive, then ignores it. He totally has hobbies. Everybody does. “What do you do other than drive?”
“I just got back from a three mile hike. I’ve been birdwatching recently. I kinda wanna learn which plants are edible, which ones will kill me immediately, and which mushrooms will get me high the fastest. I find shit to do when we’re not running around all the time.” With a harsh pull of the zipper, Vanessa opens her backpack and starts digging through it. “Kief, back me up here.”
Kieffer’s eyes never leave his book. “You do spend quite a bit of time staring out the windshield. Usually in silence,” he replies, the little traitor. He marks something down on the page, then, with a hum, glances over at Spencer, propping his chin up on a fist. “What do you think about? I can’t imagine you zone out for that long.”
“Don’t ask me that, you won’t like the answer.” Honestly, he does tend to zone out, having done the same thing to get through plenty of other boring tasks in the past. School. Basic training. Most conversations. He turns back to Vanessa, who, as expected, looks as smug as can be. He frowns. “Fine. If you’re so smart, what do you suggest?”
“I don’t know, man. You like movies. Have you ever considered books instead?”
That frown turns into a grimace in an instant. Just the thought of trying to piece words together into a coherent story makes his head hurt. “God, no. That’s work, not fun.”
“You’re missing out,” Kieffer chimes in, as though he can read above a fifth grade level (which is still a hell of a lot higher than he used to and may as well be a miracle).
A snort. “The hell I am.”
Vanessa ignores both of them entirely and continues. “You could try knitting or something. I bet tons of old ladies donate old supplies, so we could find them pretty cheap.”
“Do I look like somebody’s grandma to you?”
“It’s an age-neutral hobby!” Without a word, Spencer holds up his prosthetic, a cheaply assembled mass of scrap metal and wire, and Vanessa winces. “Okay, whatever, fine. Something with less hand dexterity. Sewing?”
“I know how to sew. You’ve seen me stitch my own bleeding stump of a wrist shut before.” A beat. Spencer jabs a thumb towards Kieffer. “And Kieffer’s face.”
Kieffer nods right along with him. “He’s actually quite talented.”
“There! Perfect!” Vanessa says, throwing her hands up. Spencer lets out a sound from somewhere in the middle of his throat, if only to express disinterest without having to defend himself, but she, of course, decides to piss him off anyway. “If you’re so good at it, then why don’t you do it more often?”
Spencer shrugs. “Why bother? My clothes are perfectly fine, and I’d rather just buy them than make my own. I do it when I have to, and I really don’t care otherwise.”
For a second, he thinks she might accept that as an answer. Vanessa opens her mouth, then closes it again. Gets a good idea, loses it. Does that song and dance a few times, gives up, and goes back to digging through her backpack. “God, are your only hobbies hunting and being a jackass?”
“It works for me. Sorry I don’t need an endless well of entertainment to keep me from losing my mind. I’m more than happy with the shit I do.”
“You haven’t moved since I left two hours ago.” Oh, like that’s so horrible. She pulls a granola bar out of her bag, tears it open, and takes an annoyed bite, stuffing it into the side of her cheek like a squirrel so she can talk before swallowing. “You’ve just been staring at the sky, probably in silence, like some kinda freak.”
“And that’s fine by me. Try it. Think of as many stupid hobbies as you want so I can keep shooting them down.” Spencer yawns, shutting his eyes again. “I wouldn’t mind the entertainment.”
To her credit, Vanessa does try it, as does Kieffer. She lasts about five minutes before declaring that this- all of this, she declares emphatically, waving a hand around the entire campsite- is driving her crazy, and she is, instead, going to go find a creek to dunk her head into. Kieffer gives him another two minutes of peace before he asks who dictates what shapes clouds come in for the nth time, and Spencer, not willing to try and explain the water cycle again, sighs and comes up with another story about dragons. Kieffer always seems to like those answers better anyway.
-
“Leatherworking.”
They seldom light fires for reasons other than light, warmth, and a bright place to sit while they mill around before bed, but tonight, Vanessa pulled an entire bag of marshmallows from her backpack after dinner and proudly announced that she’d managed to sneak them out the last time they went to a grocery store. Spencer told her off for it, not for the theft, but because not locking up your food is the quickest and dumbest way to attract bears on a camping trip, then told Kieffer not to steal shit as an afterthought. With that out of the way and Vanessa promising to put them in the trunk next time, they split the bag open and went to town on them.
Spencer glances down at the bag to see it half-empty. He lost track of how many he ate a while ago, but judging by the marshmallow on the brink of catching fire on his stick and the stickiness of his hands, that number sat somewhere between ‘at least three’ and ‘a lot’.
He pulls the stick back and blows on the barely scorched part of his marshmallow before sticking it directly in his mouth, then suppresses a pain response when it burns his tongue. Terrible move, but Vanessa, still staring into the fire, seems none the wiser. He finishes eating that one before he responds. “Why do you mention it?”
“It’s like, the perfect hobby for you.” Vanessa raises a hand and starts counting off on her fingers. “You can make new, practical stuff, it relies on skills you already have, and you can’t say it’s only for eighty year old women, so… yeah. It ticks all your boxes.”
Those car rides do get pretty boring after a while. On long stretches of two-lane road, there’s only so much navigating he can do, and sometimes, Spencer would love a reprieve from that, but god forbid he let Vanessa know he agrees with her. He’ll never hear the end of it. “Did you miss the part where I told you that I’m perfectly fulfilled with some menial task to keep me busy?”
Vanessa shrugs. “Your loss, man.”
Leatherworking.
As a kid, Spencer’s father used to drag him out into the woods during hunting season, just like he used to drag Spencer’s older brother out before him and his younger brothers after. The way he saw it, his sons should know how to hold a rifle before they knew how to hold a pencil, and to this day, Spencer still feels more comfortable with the former in his hands than the latter. His father saw ‘bonding’ as something that mothers did with their daughters and did his best to keep his distance, but sitting in deer stands, mostly silent, mostly bored, the two of them always found something to talk about in hushed tones. As long as they shot something, his old man would consider it a good trip, and he may even tell Spencer he was proud of him if he shot something big enough.
Before any of that, though, before learning how to take the life of another living creature or where to aim or the yearly hunting schedules, Spencer learned how to skin a deer.
He remembers being young the first time his older brother- maybe thirteen at the time- and his father dragged a deer into their garage while Spencer was out there, messing around with things he shouldn’t have been touching. He froze up, expecting one of them to start yelling at him, but they ignored any panic on his face in favor of telling him to go grab them some rope off of one of the shelves. Cautiously, Spencer retrieved it for them, watching as they strung up a larger-than-life buck from the rafters. No one told him to go inside, so he didn’t. He sat on the stairs in front of the garage door and watched them arrange it in the way they liked, pull out a knife, and start carving into it.
Neither of them noticed him for a solid fifteen minutes.
Then, halfway through, his dad looked over at him, sneering. “What’re you gawkin’ at, son?” he asked. Spencer didn’t even know he was gawking. “Close your mouth. Ain’t no different than any other piece of meat you’ve ever eaten. Same thing happens to all of ‘em.”
“‘Cept for birds,” his brother chimed in.
“Don’t you talk back to me.”
“Yessir.”
Spencer did as he was told and closed his mouth. He decided it was better not to explain to them that he wasn’t staring out of horror or disgust, just curiosity. He’d never seen an animal that bloody before. Didn’t know what happened when you peeled off the outer cover. He kept watching out of a sheer fascination with the process, and when his father finally asked him if he was just going to sit there or if he was going to get off his ass and make himself useful, Spencer was all too eager to help.
They never kept the skin. Just the meat. The skin went to someone else for an amount of money Spencer never put a number to, even when he was the one to shoot and skin the deer all on his own. His mom said it went into a college fund. His dad said it was none of his business where it went. Seeing as Spencer never went to college, he figures his old man was right on that one.
“I’ll consider it,” Spencer says after a while, grown again, having not gone hunting or even thought about skinning something in years. Vanessa nods, content that she got that out of him, at least, and excuses herself for bed. For the two seconds that she holds the tent flaps open, Spencer spots Kieffer laying inside, already asleep.
When she suggested the idea, Vanessa probably meant cow leather. Nevermind the fact that it’s expensive as hell, they’re in the mountains; where would he get cow leather? Where would he get any leather, period? What does she expect him to get out of this?
He spares another glance at the tent. No shadows move inside of it. Most nights, he sleeps up in the trees, making sure that neither of them get eaten or die on the way to piss in the middle of the night, but they usually don’t need him. Against all odds, Kieffer has started getting around just fine on his own, especially with Vanessa to help out. What could possibly happen if he stepped away for one night?
Silently, Spencer retrieves his rifle from the floorboards of his car, slings it over his back, and heads into the woods.
-
The next morning, Vanessa steps out of the tent, rubbing her eyes blearily as she struggles to wake up. Spencer, meanwhile, plants the blade of his skinning knife into the edge of a deer’s hide, its body hanging from the tree in front of him, and pulls hard. “Hey.”
“Man, what the fuck,” Vanessa says, defeated.
“You told me to get a hobby. You suggested a hobby that interested me.” He pulls the knife out, yanking on the skin, and it gets just a little bit looser. Spencer grins, sticking his hand out behind him. “Hand me the knife over by the fire pit. I’m gonna need it here in a minute.”
“This is really gross. I mean it.” She doesn’t move, stock-still behind him. “We eat over here. Dunno if you were back in town for this yet, but a while ago, a restaurant got shut down for skinning deer in their kitchen.”
Spencer lets out a hum of acknowledgement. “That’s not even the worst part. That deer was out of season, so someone either shot it illegally or it was roadkill. Amazing drinks, though.” He pauses to look back at her, waving his hand around. “Knife, Vanessa.”
With a sigh, Vanessa hands the knife to him. He expects her to duck out, citing nausea or a complete lack of interest, but she hovers for a second, staring at the deer carcass with pursed lips and a tired look on her face. Spencer pays her no mind until she flops onto the ground, sitting criss-cross. “If you’re gonna make me watch this horror show while I eat breakfast, can you at least show me how to butcher a deer?”
“With pleasure.”
(Kieffer thankfully has a much better reaction when he wakes up. He pays the deer virtually no mind until Vanessa points it out to him, and when she does, he turns to her, one eyebrow raised, and tells her that it’s ‘just a corpse’. Spencer laughs at the look of shock on Vanessa’s face for a solid two minutes, and then periodically over the course of the day. Kieffer does, however, ask to try hunting sometime, and Spencer immediately makes a mental note to invest in a much, much sturdier gun safe).
-
Spencer has to wait to do the next part. He manages to get all of the skinning and the fleshing done in the woods before they leave- hell, he gets it done before dinner- and that’s where everything grinds to a screeching halt for a few days. Like most rational people, he doesn’t keep a ton of lye sitting around, which he apparently needs for the next step. In the meantime, he dunks it in the creek over and over again, makes sure there’s no ticks there to accidentally give Kieffer lyme disease, rolls it up in the trunk, and forgets about it until they make it to their next motel. Vanessa swears she can smell it. Spencer tells her that the trunk of his car has always smelled a little bit like a corpse.
Then, back in civilization, he gets to work.
While Spencer doesn’t keep lye around, goggles, gloves, and masks aren’t exactly hard to come by. He waits until late one evening to start, dragging everything out to the hose so he can fill the bucket with water, and, as expected, no one asks questions. Sure, some guy smoking against one wall gives him a weird look, but what’s he gonna do? Say something to the guy with a skinning knife on his belt? Spencer would love to see him try.
From there, it’s mindless work. He puts water in the bucket, and lye in with the water, then mixes. Shoves an entire deer pelt into the bucket, then mixes again. Double checks to see how long this will take (a couple days), then regrets not buying materials instead of making them himself.
“What are you doing?”
Kieffer.
Spencer jolts, but not out of fear; he tears his gloves off and jams his hand into his pocket, taking out a second mask and putting it on Kieffer’s face as fast as possible. Kieffer just stands there with his hands folded behind his back and lets him, expression unchanging. Spencer pulls away once he gets it on, sighing softly. “Why aren’t you with Vanessa?”
“She was on the phone with her friend, and I got bored, so I decided to give her a little privacy.” Jerry. That son of a bitch. What a tool. “Why are we wearing masks?”
Spencer gestures to the bucket. “There’s chemicals in there. Go back inside.”
“It looks completely normal to me, though.” Kieffer ignores him, taking a step forward, and Spencer grabs him by the back of the shirt before he can go any further, tugging him back to his side. Kieffer stops again, staying put. “You’re sure it’s not just water?”
“Okay, first of all, yes. I’m sure. Second, I’ve seen you drown in a puddle before.”
“Point taken.” Begrudgingly, Spencer lets go of him, only for Kieffer to step forward again. He takes in a sharp breath, watching as Kieffer carefully approaches the bucket and kneels down beside it, still within arm’s reach in case something goes wrong. A small part of him reminds Spencer that Kieffer isn’t entirely helpless, and that he can’t protect him forever, but a bigger, much louder part says that yes, he is and yes, he can. Spencer refrains from pulling him back, if only barely. “What is it doing?”
“Cleaning it.”
“Well, I knew that,” Kieffer replies with a twinge of annoyance. A few months ago, he wouldn’t have, and frankly, Spencer’s almost impressed that he does now, but Kieffer doesn’t need to hear that. “How?”
“It, uh.” Shit. What did the website say again? “Does something to it. Makes it easier to pull all the hair out of it.”
“Ah.” Kieffer reaches for the bucket, and all Spencer has to do is mutter a sharp ‘don’t’ for him to retract his hand. “How long does that take?”
“A couple days, maybe?”
Kieffer hums, standing up again. Spencer prepares himself to have to catch him so he doesn’t melt his face off, but he makes it to his feet just fine, and remembers how to breathe a second after that. “What are you doing this for, exactly? You never told me.”
Spencer sighs, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Vanessa thinks I need a hobby. I’m trying this one. I’m going to make it one sheet of leather, then… make stuff with it. I’unno what yet. I still think this is stupid. I’m just doing it to prove I don’t need something like this.”
“You could always make me or Vanessa something.”
Huh. Not such a bad idea. “I’ll think about it. Either way, there’s nothing I can do with it tonight. C’mon, I’m gonna go in and rinse all this shit off of me.”
Kieffer complies without a word, trotting along behind him. It hits Spencer, if only for a fleeting second, that there was a time where he would walk Kieffer through parking lots with a death grip on his arm to keep him from running off, and here he is now, letting him walk across on his own. It’s not like Kieffer has gotten any less susceptible to getting hit by cars or anything, nor that drivers have gotten any better, he just… trusts Kieffer more now, maybe.
He forgets about that almost immediately, because the second he walks into the motel room, Vanessa sits up from her spot on the bed, raises her phone, and snaps a picture of him. “You owe me five bucks.”
Spencer starts to protest, only for Jerry’s voice to come out of her phone’s speaker a second later, tinny and slightly distorted. “Damnit! You’re sure I can’t get a recount?”
“What do you want him to do, walk outside and come back in? That’s not gonna change anything.”
“Do I at least get to know what bet I’m the subject of?” Spencer interjects.
“Whether or not you were gonna walk back in here looking like a serial killer,” Vanessa replies, totally casual. She picks up her hairbrush from the nightstand, speaking into it like a microphone and putting on a terrible newscaster impression. “Mr. Middleton, has anyone ever told you that you look like you kill people?”
Yes. Yes, they have. Plenty of times, and plenty of different people.
That’s not the answer he gives, though. He shucks off the mask and the goggles, stepping inside and heading towards the bathroom, and instead, he says, “yeah, but usually only when I’m killing ‘em.”
Vanessa laughs, Kieffer laughs (likely only because Vanessa’s laughing), and Jerry- Jerry kind of laughs, but right after, he hisses through his teeth. “Chat, clip that.”
Whatever that means.
(While he’s in the shower, Spencer overhears Vanessa and Jerry talking about plans to go to some concert somewhere. Spencer prays he’s not going to get dragged into that, but he knows damn well he will, especially when Kieffer asks a single question and they both invite him to come with. He hopes the music is decent, at least. Maybe it won’t be a total waste of time).
-
People stare at the scar around Spencer’s throat when he goes out in public.
He shouldn’t be surprised. It’s obvious. It sits just below his face. It’s jagged, because Jack couldn’t even bother to hold his hand steady when he killed him. Spencer already forgave him, sort of, but god, every time he notices someone staring at the scar instead of his face when they’re talking to him, a tiny part of him wants to rescind that forgiveness.
Which- okay. He can’t do that. Nevermind the fact that, if he’s lucky, he’ll never have to see Jack again, Jack has the opposite of Kieffer’s luck. No matter what, he always seems to get the upper hand, and Spencer can’t risk dying again, not with all of his ties to the gods of their hometown severed, stomped on, and burnt.
If he’d gotten it anywhere else, or from anyone else, or hell, even if it was some other problem, Spencer may have accepted it. If he’d gotten it in the army, he would have accepted it as an occupational hazard with a story behind it, just like all the other ones. If it were a port wine stain or something to that effect, he wouldn’t care, seeing that as out of his control and just another neutral piece of him. It doesn’t hurt anymore. It doesn’t cause problems. He barely notices all the other scars, and he has plenty of those.
This one, though.
This one marks the single most humiliating moment of his life. This one shows that someone else managed to get the jump on him, and Spencer has to live with the fact that that ‘someone’ was a greasy little nobody who doesn’t even remember killing him. This one stretches behind the shadow of his hair when he lets it get too long, because not only did Jack slit his throat, he almost decapitated him in the process. This one stakes a claim on Spencer’s body where Jack inadvertently marked permanent ownership over him. When Spencer looks at the rest of him, he sees himself; when his eyes land on that specific scar, all he sees is Jack’s impassive expression, totally unenthused by the sight of Spencer choking to death on his own blood.
When he looks in the mirror, he never sees his eyes first. He sees the scar, then himself.
People want to ask. He can tell. They want to know where he got a scar like that, who did it, how he even survived, but Spencer never gives them an answer. They’re all too afraid to ask, anyway; before dying, sure, he was big and a little bit curt, but no one ever cleared a path for him like they do now. Like it or not, it makes up a critical part of how people see him, and he never had a choice in the matter. Jack’s contribution to his body draws the eye first, then the rest of him. He just has to live with that.
With the hide laid out in front of him and his fleshing knife in hand, Spencer thinks about what he’ll do with it for the nth time. Vanessa and Kieffer haven’t been any help figuring that out, of course, and he can’t think of anything he wants that isn’t already in the car. He sent both of them away before he came outside so he could clear his head, standing in the back lot with the street lamps illuminating the area, and that certainly hasn’t helped yet, but it may. He steps forward, and-
His knife glints in the dim lighting. Spencer’s eyes snap down to the flash, and as he tilts his knife to avoid blinding himself, he catches a glimpse of the full scar in all its glory.
And suddenly, he knows exactly what he’s going to make.
-
There’s a certain amount of intimacy that goes into the act of collaring, and it makes Spencer’s skin crawl.
A collar, in the most traditional sense, implies ownership. A collar on a dog denotes who it belongs to, tag and all, and may or may not give the animal itself a name. While not inherently degrading- and honestly the smarter choice- a collar can also be used as a training tool. It can hold a dog back, either with a leash or a hand hooked in the back of it to keep them from running off. Prong collars dig into the wearer’s neck with equal force and pressure along the entire collar, letting them know that they need to back down, now, or else, but a standard collar gets the job done just fine; Spencer figures that, if someone were to drag him backwards by the windpipe, he’d be liable to stop whatever he was doing, too.
Ownership in dogs isn’t harmful, though. Domesticated dogs have warm places to sleep at night, plenty of food, and people to pet them whenever they’d like. They probably think that all that for the cost of a couple tricks and a cloth around their neck is a pretty sweet deal.
Spencer, however, is not a domesticated animal.
He almost was, and he’ll be the first to admit that he tried very, very hard to get to that point, so hard that he believed wholeheartedly that he’d gotten there. He cut his hair, sold his soul to the government, and took to the collar and leash without much issue. When they said eat, he ate. When they said sleep, he slept. When they said ‘shut your mouth and deal with whatever we want to put you through, because we know better, and you need to know your place’, Spencer gritted his teeth, rolled over, and bared his throat to them, because that’s what was expected of him. Piece by piece, they chipped away the parts of him that made him human, taking away his autonomy, then his ability to want, then his humanity, until all that remained was a perfect, blank slate for them to impose upon whatever they pleased.
And then Spencer bit his handler.
He woke up from a years-long daze with hot blood running down his chin and a grown man cowering beneath him, hands up to block his face. As far as Spencer knows, he didn’t actually bite the guy; the blood in his mouth was likely his own, but he never bothered to check. He doesn’t know what happened, nor did he ever, but he knew immediately that he needed to find a way out of there, fast, before they took anything else away from him.
All he had to do was last a little bit longer, behavior perfect, muzzle on, rage boiling just beneath the surface of his skin, and they finally let him off the leash for good behavior.
He took off running and never looked back.
After that, though, where could he go? He knew no freedom, not anymore. He needed orders, and structure, and routine so he wouldn’t gnaw his own hands off out of stress, but the idea made him nauseous at best. A new handler- a new owner- could, at any moment, take everything away from him again, and this time, he may not have been able to get it back.
The situation with the Dark God and the original Kieffers worked well enough. He had his orders, and he followed them. He was good at his job, for the most part, and he got to make use of skills he already knew he was good at; at the same time, he had the autonomy to do- fucking whatever, man. Kick ass. Take names. Brutalize LISA agents beyond recognition. Honestly, who gave a shit? No one ever reprimanded him for it, and slowly but surely, he figured out how to drag himself out of bed in the morning, make it through the day without someone hovering over his shoulder and spitting commands at him, and keep himself under control, all at the same time.
Every exhausting second of it brought him a little closer to death.
(Literally).
That job opportunity slipped away from him before he knew what happened, and, lost and unmoored and two seconds from ripping Jack Townsend’s intestines out to choke him with them, Spencer moved on to the next one. And the next. And the next one after that.
The Collector and Roger gave him more orders, but their style of ownership didn’t exactly cut it, either.
With the Dark God, Spencer had no limits. Sure, he encouraged Spencer to make better choices or to find nonviolent means to solve his problems, but he never took anything off the table. He always told him that if he wanted to get better, he had to do so of his own volition, and Spencer- well. Spencer didn’t give a shit. Self improvement took work, and when he spent every waking hour trying to keep the world’s most killable man alive, he wasn’t willing to put in the effort.
The Collector was lax in a similar way. After a while, Spencer started to suspect that he couldn’t actually order him to kill anyone, no matter how frequently he implied that Spencer should take more drastic measures with each hunt. The difference, though, was the way the Collector always felt entitled to share his opinions on what Spencer did. He issued corrections, ‘helpful notes’ that would make the next one easier, and slid tiny little reprimands into his compliments. Every chance he had, he pulled a little bit harder, tightened his hold just a little bit more, and Spencer snarled and barked and expressed his displeasure with it, but never left. The Collector gave him full run of the yard. He did sign up for this. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.
Roger, though?
If that creepy, self-important, soulless little control freak didn’t have each and every one of his ducks in a perfect, single-file row, he lost his mind. His word wasn’t just law: it was immutable fact, holy scripture directly from a god’s mouth. If Spencer forgot to walk on eggshells around him or to keep his promises and favors to a minimum, he could end up a mindless shell with no motivations beyond serving him. Death would not release him from that servitude. Every moment under him felt like suffocating, slowly but surely, over the course of a year and a half. He got out by the skin of his teeth, one hand still caught in that trap, and some days, he still thinks about how he could have very easily lost his life instead.
Vanessa and Kieffer- his most current ‘bosses’, for lack of a better term- hold no real power over him. Both of them piss him off sometimes. They can ask things of him, and Kieffer’s requests may not always be phrased in the most polite ways, but they don’t make orders. Even if Vanessa tries to, Spencer knows she’s not serious. He protects them, and in exchange, their presence gives him a weird sense of purpose. In the meantime, he waits for them to stop needing him. One day, probably soon, he’ll go back to being a stray.
Most days, he thinks he wouldn’t have it any other way. This works. He knows what freedom feels like now, and while things could always use a little more structure (like a house or zero warrants out for his arrest), he doesn’t have to worry about screwing things up. There is no threat of punishment, because Vanessa and Kieffer can’t hurt him. He made it out of that shitty town, so no one holds power over him anymore. That level of authority grows more intoxicating with each passing hour, and he delights in knowing that, if he wants to, he can take his car and drive wherever he pleases, and not a soul on earth can stop him.
Other days, Spencer misses the weight of a hand around his throat.
He could never go back. Knowing what he knows now, having barely figured out what it means to exist as a living, breathing human and not a cog in a machine, he would sooner tear out the lungs of someone trying to control him than expose his neck to them, let alone allow them to possess him. Without a collar, there is nothing to grab onto. No one can force him to do something he doesn’t want to do. He holds no single bond with another being that says ‘you answer to me and me alone, and if you displease me, I get to tear you to pieces to my heart’s content’. Letting someone collar him would imply a level of trust that he can no longer instill in anyone on earth, and no matter how lost he feels, he’ll always prefer that to the slim chance that if he ever changed his mind and tried to run away from someone else, they’d catch him and kennel him before he’d make it to the property line.
But collaring himself?
Putting a collar around his own throat says ‘I can handle myself, thank you very much’. There’s no tag with a return address, no spot to clip a leash on, because he is exactly where he’s supposed to be, and he should know, because he took himself there. If someone takes issue with it, they have to defer to the collar’s wearer, not to some higher power, and he doesn’t have to punish himself. He doesn’t have to live in fear of slipping up and getting hurt, nor of being taken advantage of. It presses against pulse points and blood vessels with all of the authority of any other collar, and it proclaims just as loudly that its wearer is under control, but all the agency lies with the person who takes the collar on and off. It soothes a need for authority while putting the power back into Spencer’s hands. It says ‘I have one owner, and that’s me; if you want to take that from me, you have to swap this collar out for a new one, and to do so, you have to get awful close to my teeth’.
And it covers up decapitation scars oh-so-beautifully.
-
“Figure anything out yet?” Vanessa asks one day on a particularly boring stretch of highway, completely out of the blue. The radio keeps crackling in and out, but neither of them can get their phones to load any music, so they sit in silence. Spencer glances up at her from the strip of leather and the needle in his hands, waiting for her to catch on. She doesn’t. “Well?”
Spencer rolls his eyes. “No,” he deadpans. “I haven’t figured anything out. This is unrelated leather that I’m stabbing over and over again for the hell of it.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. That totally sounds like something you’d do.”
It does. That sounds sort of fun, actually. He might have to try that. “Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.”
Vanessa huffs. “At least tell me what it is?”
“You’ll see it when it’s done.” A beat. “Probably.”
The radio kicks back on, and both of them lapse into silence again. Perfect timing, too. He keeps putting off telling either of them in case he fucks up so bad that he gives up altogether. If she’d pressed any further, he would have given up eventually. He hasn’t looked forward to something like this in a long, long time, and it’s getting a little more difficult to keep in every time someone asks.
-
The final product, after all of the oiling and the dyeing and the painstaking effort that goes into stitching the pieces together, is simple, but functional. The leather is thin enough that it won’t be obnoxious to wear, deep brown in color, with a silver buckle in the middle of it as a clasp. There’s no place to hang a tag or clasp a leash onto. Nothing to grab. A tag wouldn’t work out, anyway, not with the amount of warrants out for Spencer’s arrest, but if he hides his name somewhere where people can’t see it, then it won’t be a problem.
In neat, all-capital letters, Spencer’s name is seared, almost imperceptibly, into the inner part of the collar. When he drapes it around his neck, he gets to watch in his rearview mirror as it disappears from view.
With his free hand, he brings the ends of the collar together and feeds the end through the buckle, the metal cool against his throat once he gets it situated. He straightens it, arranging it over the scar, and sticks two fingers in it to make sure he isn’t going to keel over dead if he wears it for too long. As a final touch, he reaches back with both hands, pulls his hair out from underneath the back of it, and-
And it’s nice.
Almost handsome, even.
More importantly, it suits him. He can’t remember wearing an actual, physical collar at any point, but now, wearing this one, it just feels right, and it gives him this weird sense of accomplishment that almost makes him want to do it again.
He straightens the collar over the scar one last time for good measure, gets out of the car, and sets out to find Vanessa.
They set up camp again, this time a bit further north, earlier this morning, and Vanessa, sick of driving, sent Spencer out to go get all of the stuff they’d need for a few days. Once he got back, he stayed in the car to finish up his project, yet manages to find her right where he left her. Sort of. Everything is set up properly now, so instead of digging through crates as she tries to sort through their collectively terrible organization system, she’s standing over the edge of the creek, watching the water flow by at her feet. Kieffer lays in the shade nearby, arms draped over his eyes like Spencer does when he’s trying to nap, so Spencer opts not to bother him, taking a spot next to Vanessa instead.
Neither of them say a thing. Hell, it takes Vanessa a solid minute to look over at him.
They make eye contact for a split second, and wordlessly, Vanessa reaches down and picks up a stick. Without looking at him, she winds back and throws it as hard as it can; it soars over the water, landing somewhere on the opposite bank. Then, she turns back to him, staring at him expectantly, and there’s only so long he can ignore her before she takes matters into her own hands. “Well?”
Spencer furrows his brow and glances over at her. “Well, what?”
Vanessa starts to answer, but has to pause right before, letting out a strange, choked sound that might be a laugh. She tries to suppress a smile, fails, and continues anyway. “You gonna fetch the stick or what, Fido?”
“Oh, come the fuck on,” Spencer groans, and immediately, Vanessa starts cackling. In response, Spencer shoves her hard, which only serves to make her stumble and laugh a little harder. “Don’t you have a basement to smoke pot in somewhere, you little burnout douchebag?!”
Well. There’s worse reactions, at least.
(Vanessa later informs him that she had to take the opportunity, even if she didn’t mean it. She likes the collar, actually. She thinks he did a good job on it. Kieffer likes it so much that he asks for one himself, just so they can match, and Vanessa keeps making jokes about friendship bracelets. She does that so often, in fact, that Spencer starts to think she’s not kidding anymore. It’s weird, being not only allowed but encouraged to do something with his leisure time, but not having to sit there and be bored is almost freeing. People like the end results. He gets to feel properly useful again without having to break himself to pieces in the process. He gets to do something because he wants to, not because someone told him to, and that’s not the worst thing in the world).
(In somewhat related news, he’s thinking of ordering a ‘BITE RISK’ patch for his jacket. It matches the collar a little too well).