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Language:
English
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Published:
2024-02-27
Words:
440
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1/1
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why were you digging? what did you bury before those hands pulled me from the earth?

Summary:

Emma has always been small, but here, crumpled in a heap beneath him, she looks downright miniscule.

(or: The moment after 'Paul' makes his decision.)

Notes:

hi hello!!! i have been very autistic about hatchetfield for eons now and trying to write something for it for ages - i have a fuckton of half-finished drafts - and somehow this silly little 11pm drabble ended up being the first one i was happy enough with to post. funny how that works, yeah?

there is a good chance this isn't canon compliant in some way or another - tbh, i just wanted a slightly horror-adjacent bittersweet 23/emdroid drabble, exploring that moment between the last 2 scenes of the episode. please don't look too closely at the intricacies of the lore, with this one. (it's also... probably a little gorier than canon, because horror is my special interest and I Had To, Okay?)

the capitalisation of certain pronouns is intentional (though lmk if it's confusing at all!). title is, perhaps predictably, from "like real people do" by hozier. enjoy :]

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

The thing with murder is you can't really go back on it. 

It hadn't mattered, the first time. He'd won. The entire time that he'd been planning that day, and then with every trembling slash of his blade, he'd been hoping, praying, that the poor guy would just stay down - after all, His death was a net positive. It hadn't mattered that His shredded lungs couldn't breathe anymore, or that blood was a terrible pain to get out of suit fabric. It hadn't mattered that he was a stranger wearing His skin. 

Emma has always been small, but here, crumpled in a heap beneath him, she looks downright miniscule.

He doesn't notice that his hand is shaking until Her hand closes around it, gently prying the kitchen knife from his grasp - and She was right, it was one of the nice ones. It would be a bitch to get the blood off before it started rusting. Some part of him is bracing for a smug, fond “I told you so” - the rest of him, trembling with half-baked rationality, is waiting for Her to turn the blade on him instead. 

“Oh, baby,” Her voice comes out soft, warm. His gaze stays glued to Emma - to that terribly familiar face frozen in an entirely foreign expression of slack-jawed horror - even as She lowers Herself to Her knees beside him, gathering his shaking form in Her arms.

It isn't what She thinks. He isn't some blushing virgin - he's done worse, really, in the name of self-satisfaction. The skin of his wrist burns indignantly as he presses it against his mouth in an attempt to smother the blankness of his expression. 

Still, it is nice to be held, especially by Her.

“I love you, honey, I love you so much,” She whispers into his hair, stroking his blood-streaked face with an even bloodier hand. “You're so good to me, Paul, I knew I could trust you.”

Something wicked lurches in his chest at the sound of His name - their name, though it had never been chosen for him. He meets Her mismatched gaze as evenly as he can - spots the devotion deep in Her eyes, the shades of possessiveness mixed in with Her love, and wonders, distantly, how things might have gone if this had happened backwards; if he had been the nameless stranger in Her husband's place, if He had come knocking for His life back instead of Emma. 

It's not a question he needs to ask - not really. She gently pries his wrist from his face, presses a gentle kiss against his chewed-open lip, and he knows the answer in his core. 

Notes:

pls pls pls come yell at me abt hatchetfield i am Begging

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