Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The view from the new office window didn't have much to recommend it in terms of aesthetic, as he'd told Arthur when they'd signed the lease. (Certainly not in memory of the lurid landscapes of the Dreamlands, anyway.) All the same, it pleased him to catch a glimpse at it as they maneuvered around stacked boxes and furniture. The dingy layers of brickwork, the solid lines and right angles, the smokestacks reaching from the horizon, the pulse of car traffic through the city's capillaries – it all spoke to the comforting hum of thousands of people going about their lives. 

The office, similarly – just a pair of rooms, a bathroom barely large enough to stand in and a kitchen not much bigger. They hadn't had anything to bring with them; there was just the desk and the couch the previous tenant had left behind, everything from carpet to ceiling saturated with cigarette grime. 

"Help me hang this on the door, John."

But the placard they'd ordered first thing in a pique of almost giddy excitement had arrived by morning post. 

Now? We're hardly in a fit state to take clients yet, he said.

"I know, I know, but–" Arthur plucked at the brown paper wrapping the parcel.

But it'll help the place feel like home.

"Exactly." 

The fondness in Arthur's voice warmed something under John's skin, and he helped peel the paper away. 

It was a simple little thing, hardly distinguishable from all the other placards lining the doors of this building. He watched as Arthur slowly traced his fingertips across the embossed lettering: LESTER & DOE. It gave him an unexpected thrill, to see his name – his self – made so tangible. 

Arthur continued circling the pad of his thumb around the contours of the ampersand; he had otherwise gone very still.

Very official.

"Parker– had been hesitant to put his name on our door at first," Arthur said after a long moment, deliberately and carefully nonchalant. "He wasn't sure if clients would– but I told him that was absurd, we wouldn't have been anything without…" 

He cleared his throat, twisting his neck slightly as though trying to crack it and planting his palm flat on the desk surface.

John touched his fingertips gently to the back of Arthur's hand. You were right, he said. We wouldn't. 

An absurd, sentimental thought seized him and he moved to realize it before he could think better of it.

Here, hand me your pocket knife.

"My pocket knife?" Arthur repeated, already reaching in his pocket. "Why–"

John turned over the placard to the other side and took the knife as Arthur passed it to him, flicking it open. Hold it still for me. There. And concentrating carefully to compensate for the slightly awkward angle, he dug the point of the knife into the surface and carved into it. 

"John, what're you–" 

As he finished his work, John brushed the metallic dust away and took Arthur's hand, placing his index finger atop the first letter.

Y-A-N-G: Arthur slowly traced each stroke of the clumsy block letters.

"That's–" he started, voice thick, still reading back and forth across the carved letters. "I–"

I remember seeing some screws in one of the desk drawers. Let's get it hung up and then we can go out for more supplies.

Chapter Text

Clare Stenson double-checked the placard against the newspaper ad clutched in her hand ("Lester & Doe, P.I.s: specializing in missing persons, will take occult cases") and rapped three times on the door.

The man who answered startled her at first. He was close to her height, handsome, with grey in his hair – but the rough scarring across his face and the tense set to his expression took her aback. But she supposed both made sense, considering his line of work. It must be a rough life. 

She watched him take her in as well, looking at her curiously but slightly askance. 

"Clare Stenson," she introduced herself, holding out a hand with a confidence she didn't feel all the way through. The man shook it after a brief pause. His hand was softer than she expected. "I'm here about– I saw your ad in the Gazette ."

"Of course!" he said, expression brightening considerably. "Arthur Lester. Please come in."

The office he led her into was very sparse, just a desk with two chairs in front and a cabinet, none of it matching and all evidently second-hand. That made sense too, she supposed: God knew times were hard. And if Lester & Doe were advertising their services in all the local papers, they likely were just getting started.

She just hoped to God they were any good.

"Is… is Mr. Doe in today?"

They took their seats opposite the desk and Mr. Lester set out a pen and notepad on the desktop. Left-handed, she noticed, feeling a flash of kinship – her grandmother had wasted years trying to force her to write with her right.

"I'll fill him in on all the details," Mr. Lester said. "Please, tell me what brings you here, Miss Stenson."

"My sister, Evelyn–" Clare clenched her fist around the handle of her bag, breathing steadily through the choking spasm in her throat. She was not going to blubber in this man's office like a goddamn Christie ingenue. 

Still schooling her composure, she reached into the bag and pulled out the calling card, setting it face-up on the desk.

Mr. Lester's eyes immediately widened and he snatched up the card, turning it over in his hand: that horrid curved symbol on the front, the looping, crawling shorthand on the back.

"You recognize this?" Clare pressed, watching his face go very grave. She knew it. She knew it. 

"Tell me everything."

She took a deep breath, setting her hands on her trouser knees and mentally arranging all the facts just as she had been over and over since deciding to come here.

"My younger sister, Evelyn Stenson, is a student at Miskatonic. She lives in a house near campus with… five other students, I think. The two of us and our parents, Robert and Grace, and our younger brother Wallace always have Sunday lunch together at my parents' house, one o'clock sharp. 

"Yesterday, Evelyn wasn't there. Nobody had heard from her – she hadn't called or sent a telegram or anything. This was very unlike her character. She can be a little flighty, but… Evelyn wouldn't scare mum and dad like that. She just wouldn't. She knows I'd– anyway.

"We left Wallace with the neighbors and went looking for her. Grace went to the university, Robert was making calls to the hospital, and I went to her house. None of her housemates had seen her in the last twenty-four hours, and I talked one of them into letting me in, but the door to her room was locked. So I…" 

Clare faltered for a moment, staring intently at her own hands clasped on her knee. Mr. Lester wasn't police, she told herself, even if he must necessarily work with them.

"So I picked the lock on her door, and–"

"You broke into her room?"

She looked up – Mr. Lester had paused his note-taking and met her eyes.

"Yes," she said, chin held defiantly. "I couldn't–"

"No, no, by all means." He smiled slightly as he returned to his notepad. "Go on."

"Yes. Alright. Well, everything was… not exactly neat, but it didn't look as though it had been much disturbed. There was nothing obviously missing, although– I suppose she could have packed a small bag. It was hard for me to tell. But I did find that thing–" She nodded toward the card on the desk. "-- under some schoolwork on her desk. 

"It made me feel sick to look at. Still does." The way those curved lines coiled around that shape in the middle, like– like a hole in the world, like a clawed fist clenching closed. "I can't read what's on the back, but… it gave me a bad feeling." To put it mildly. "I didn't show it to my parents – I didn't want to upset them any more than they already are. They're at the police station today. They don't know I'm here."

Mr. Lester finished taking down his notes, and looked up at Clare with a cold determination that made her breath come up short.

"Miss Stenson," he said, "I promise you I will do everything in my power to get your sister back to you."

Chapter Text

I want to get you a piano.

Arthur tossed his head back and failed to hold back a high, strangled bark of laughter. "John– "

I mean it.

"Fuck, John– is– is now really the time?"

What, are you terribly busy?

Pulling where he's got his right hand hooked under his knee, Arthur spread himself just at touch wider, shivering at the tight, burning stretch up the back of his leg and lower. For his part, John took the opportunity to crook his wrist, claiming the space he'd been given and working his two fingers deeper.

"You're– you've got–"

Speak up, you're stammering.

"F-fuck you–"

Quite the opposite.

A third finger nudged up alongside the others holding him open, and Arthur gasped through the initial stretch, breathing deep while John rumbled low encouragement deep in his chest. 

He let himself drift in the sensations of John working his way inside him: the wet slide of it, the way the burn of muscle stretched open then settled into something warm and satisfying, the deep satisfaction of feeling so full, full of John– not troubling to hold back the groans and sighs that he knew John collected like trophies–

I miss hearing you play.

"What–"

The piano, Arthur, keep up.

"Fucking– John, I'm–"

I want you to teach me to play.

"God– you want me to–" Arthur blinked hard, trying to pull enough of himself together to follow the thread of this conversation that they were evidently having right now . 

Teach me, yes.

John was perhaps making it more difficult than necessary, slowly twisting his fingers to stroke and pet at the inside of him, sending hard shivers down his fingers and toes and making everything else float out of his consciousness.

I want us to play together. I want you to show me – your hand on mine, guiding me. You play so beautifully – I want to do it with you.

"God, John–"

How does that sound? Would you like that?

Arthur's laugh melted into a shaky moan as John curled his fingers inside him. "Yes, fuck, that's–"

We could compose something together. A song just for us.

"God, yes, John–"

Then it's settled. We'll call the music store in the morning.

Thoroughly finished cooperating, Arthur released his hold on his knee and reached to finally get a hand around his cock. "You fucking– bastard– "

Chapter Text

Evelyn sat alone at the bus stop, turning over the calling card in her hand under the harsh streetlight. On one side was painted a coiling sigil that reached deep into her brain and twisted , and on the other was scrawled an address in Leerie.

A man sat next to her on the bench, and she shoved the card away in her bag.

"Evelyn Stenson?" 

She scooted a couple inches further down the bench and turned to get a good look at him. His face made her uneasy – he was thin and covered in scars – but his posture was unthreatening, with his shoulders loose and both hands in view.

Then he met her eyes, and their light brown color glinted a startling gold under the streetlight. 

"You-" she leaned toward him, transfixed. " You're the one I'm supposed to meet. You can help me with the dreams!"

His brow furrowed and his head tilted slightly. "The dreams–?"

"Are we going to Leerie together? Are you my escort?" 

"Let's just–  start from the beginning. We're here to help you. You've been having dreams?"

"Okay." From the beginning – from which beginning? From the feeling of never quite belonging here, in this world, from childhood? "I'm– a student. Was a student." She hadn't attended classes in a few weeks now. She wasn't sure anymore. "At Miskatonic, researching esoteric theater."

The stranger's eyes tightened, flicking rapidly back and forth between hers. He knew where this was headed already.

"And– and I came across a mention of a play– just a footnote, really–"

"The King in Yellow ," he said, and Evelyn found it suddenly very hard to breathe.

"Yes," she whispered. "And suddenly, I started dreaming– I've always had weird dreams, as long as I can remember, but this was. It was music, like– like opera , something so beautiful and so powerful that I always woke feeling– shaken , all the way through, only I can never remember…" She took a deep, shuddering breath, clasping her hands tight together on her knees in an attempt to keep her composure. Any time she tried in vain to remember the song it felt like some incomprehensible scream trying to rip its way out of her.

"Song of my soul, my voice is dead, " the stranger recited, so quietly she could barely hear over the wind, but it flared in her memory and dropped the ground out from under her.

"Yes! " She tried to hum a few notes, to dig her nails into that feeling and hold on, but it fell flat and stupid on her own ears and she slapped her cheek three times in quick succession in punitive anger.

"Hey–"

"And then I saw – it was a city, with towering black spires, only– and it was on a lake covered in fog, just surrounded by fog, with black stars–"

Evelyn watched the stranger's face fall as she spoke, and suddenly she was certain: "You know of it."

His mouth twisted and his frown deepened, and she somehow, beyond the slightest doubt, she knew . "You've been there." 

She grabbed both his hands and gripped them tight despite his hard flinch. 

"You have to help me," she fervently whispered. "I can't go on like this, I can't live like this. I have to– I have to go there, I have to find out how , I–"

"That place is gone," he said, flat and abrupt, and Evelyn felt a terrible, empty expanse yawning above her head.

"What– " She swallowed hard, letting go of his hands just long enough to swipe at her eyes. "What do you mean, gone? "

The stranger tilted his head slightly, as though he were listening to something. Evelyn only heard the low moan of the wind and the rumble of distant traffic. When he spoke, it was slow and deliberate, just a few words at a time: "You've encountered something– very dangerous," he said. "Pursuing it will bring you no relief. It does not care about you or anyone. It will destroy you if you get too close."

Evelyn dropped his hands as if they had burned her, scoffing with anger and disappointment. "I don't care–" She stood to leave, she'd walk to Leerie if she had to, but the stranger's left hand gripped her hard around the wrist and pulled her back.

"Listen ," he hissed. 

"There's a whole universe out there and–"

"Just– listen to me. There is a whole universe in you , and you have so much living to do – grander and more meaningful than anything in that dead fucking city."

The cold wind bit through Evelyn's stockings and swayed the arthritic branches of the trees beyond the streetlight. Evelyn's throat tightened and she could feel the hot, blotchy pressure in her face as her breath hitched.

"Will I have those dreams forever?" she whispered, voice breaking.

"I– I don't know. Maybe."

"What do I do? The house in Leerie–"

The stranger shook his head.

"They said they can help me–"

"No. No, they don't want to help you. Your sister–"

"Clare? She sent you?" She should have known something like this would happen. The guilty twist in her gut dampened her anger – she had meant to tell them, she really had, she just… it was all happening so fast, and the dreams were getting worse, and this was the last bus to Leerie until next week, and– 

"She wants to help you. Talk to her – tell her about your dreams."

"I can't believe–"

Evelyn backed away a few steps, unsure if this man would… she wasn't sure what. But he let go of her wrist. 

"Please, we're not going to– you can walk away right now if you want."

She suddenly felt very in over her head… or, she thought, blinking tears out of her eyes, she had been feeling that way for a while now, and the look of concern and, fear maybe, in the stranger's eyes made her feel it all anew as if from outside of herself.

She should– she should go. She should go back home, and try to get back in contact with the masked person, and maybe going to Leerie could wait until next week, she just needed more time–  

"The choice is entirely yours to make," the stranger said, almost pleading. "You can take the bus to Leerie or you can let us call you a cab home or to Clare's, or hell, anywhere else. But John's right: you have family who love you and are looking for you, and they'll help you if you ask."

"Okay." Maybe home, maybe just to cool off for a couple days. Just to get her feet back under her. "Okay. Alright, I'll– who's John?"

Chapter Text

Western Union telegram

Received at 4580 Bedford Ave, Nov 17 1935, 10:25am

EVELYN CAME HOME STOP STAYING WITH ME A FEW WEEKS STOP THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU BLESS YOU

CLARE

Chapter Text

John narrowed his eyes, carefully comparing his hand's position on the piano keys with Arthur's on his right. He lifted his wrist a little. Arthur's fingers looked so elegant, comfortable and confident and pretty, perched lightly on the keys. His own– well he supposed they looked quite similar, all things considered, but they felt clumsy and leaden.

And a little tingly at the fingertips, he noticed, now that he was paying attention. Fuzzy. Bubbly?

Arthur danced the scale they'd been working on, up and down, airy and graceful. Like a pirouette, he finished on a tinkling flourish that took John's breath away.

Arthur , he breathed. How the fuck–

Arthur laughed, delighted, just as light as his touch on the keys as he plucked up the champagne flute and downed a long swig.

"Now you!" he pressed.

Concentrating so hard the world swam a little at the edges, John pressed one key after another up the scale, slow like a child's uneasy steps. A faint spell of dizziness made him lose his place in the sequence, and he growled at the sour notes he found.

But Arthur's snorting chuckle was warm and fond, and when he took up John's hand and laced their fingers together, it soothed the frustration cleanly away. 

"Hey– hey, a toast–" 

Arthur picked up the flute again – his fingers really were lovely – and gestured toward the mostly-empty bottle. When John picked it up to refill Arthur's glass for him (missing a little at the first attempt – as his fingertips knocked against the throat of the bottle he was briefly terrified it would tip back and christen their new instrument in a way they hadn't intended), Arthur instead clinked the glass against the bottle.

"To…" he said. "To! To a home to go home to. And to people who care."

Cheers . He tipped more champagne into Arthur's glass, suddenly wishing with a surprising fervor that he could watch him toss it back. He wanted to look at Arthur more. Maybe he could convince him to hang a mirror in this corner of the room.

John's hand was suddenly seized in a warm grip as Arthur lifted it and pressed it to his cheek.

Arthur , he gasped – Arthur's skin felt very warm. Are you– are you alright?

"Mm--" Arthur pressed him firmly against his cheek, nuzzling his nose into John's palm and breathing him in deep. His lashes tickled John's skin as he pressed a row of soft kisses up the heel of John's hand. "More than alright."

The warmth of Arthur's touch buoyed him on the swells that tipped the bench from beneath them. He held on for dear life, petting at the soft hair at Arthur's temple, purring as Arthur's lips parted, wet and hot, against his skin–

And Arthur snorted loudly into the join of his thumb.  

"God, look at us," he giggled. He didn't move to pull away.

John couldn't help it, he laughed too: loud and awed and undignified. Yes, look at them. Look at them, together, with music and a warm bed and each other.

"You– you mean the world to me. John," Arthur said, still mouthing against his skin. He never wanted to go without feeling Arthur speak to him, now that he had it. "You're everything to me. You're my par– Fuck. You're, you're my– my best fr–"

Arthur.

John felt a welling of moisture against his fingertips as Arthur squeezed his eyes shut. As gently as he could, he wiped it away, still feeling unforgivably clumsy.

I've taken so much from you.

"John, don't–"

Listen. I'm– listen. I owe you everything – I wouldn't be who I am if I hadn't met you. 

"That's not–"

But. You – you wouldn't be who you are, if you hadn't– met him. So, I owe him too. I can't take back what I've done. And I can't replace him.

"John– "

But. I don't want to forget him, either.

Arthur pressed John's hand tight to his face as he struggled to steady his breathing. As he cleared his throat and let go, obviously trying not to sniffle, John brushed a stray strand of hair back from his forehead.

"Another toast, then," Arthur said, reaching for the flute. "To Parker."

To Parker. John tipped the neck of the bottle against the lip of the glass.

"May his memory be a blessing."