Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 14 - sexual content warning

(Author's note: Sorry y'all. Gonna have to delay Jake getting to eye-fuck his girl just a little bit longer. Gotta get a few things out of the way plot-wise first. Four more chapters have already been written 💀 and will be posted shortly, sorry for the blue balls. I love each and every single one of you. ❤️)

As the morning sun reached its zenith of high noon in the pristine blue sky over the quiet town of Duskwood, its golden luminance bathed the slumbering and quaint buildings of the downtown proper in a wash of brilliance that only somehow seemed to heighten the peculiar soporific effect of the town instead of quell it.

It was perfectly poised in the sky, seemingly directly above the town square, its perfect verticality over everything below creating a surreal, dreamlike effect - everything appeared to be in 2D as there could be no shadows to give them their customary visual depth as was lent by the sun when it was at any other angle in the sky.

Vivid autumn leaves that had fallen from the trees that peppered the downtown core danced to the choreography of the wind as it swirled in cold gusts around the buildings and through the streets, sending emmisaries of crimson, tangerine, and gold to every part of the town that they could reach. They skittered into every driveway and every yard, grouping together in momentary murmuration before spiralling away once more. A strangely beautiful lullaby as the town slept, even at the height of day.

But at the Duskwood motel, in room #6, one would be forgiven for mistaking it for night; the darkness of the interior being so utterly complete as to create the impression of a darkened cave deep in the earth, silent and empty in sightless vigil as countless eons slowly passed slowly through and away.

That was, until, a soft click sounded, and the darkness was suddenly ripped away as three computer monitor screens sprang into life, sending their glowing artificial light over every surface of the room. One of the surfaces that was illuminated in brilliant relief was Jake's face as the light revealed it in a deft display of sleight-of-hand; one moment it had not been there, and in the next it was the only thing that could be seen with any clarity in the pervasive dark of the room.

The pale quality of his skin seemed to absorb the light that touched it, drawing it into its cells and transmorgrifying it into a luminance that seemed to glow. The pastel ghosts of his hands could be seen as his fingers began to type on the keyboard in front of him, summoning forth a pulsating deep blue gleam from the keys as they responded instantaneously to his touch.

His dark hair hung in sleek black layers that he now paused in his typing to sweep away from his forehead with a hand, his fingers coming away damp as the water from the shower that he'd just returned from still remained in situ in the obsidian strands. Small droplets of water could be seen on the bared skin of his shoulders, arms, and chest, glittering like ghostly diamonds in the light of the screens that faced him.

As he resumed typing, several windows opened on the middle screen simultaneously, and he scanned their contents quickly. With Lilly's consent - a courtesy extended only out of politeness however; if she had refused, he would have done it anyway without her knowledge - he had installed access to her GPS data on her phone, and he had taken a shower as he waited for the location information to confirm her arrival at the destination city several hundred miles away from Duskwood.

Once it had, he had heard the quiet ping of the app notification as he had been stepping out of the shower, and he had wrapped a towel hastily around his waist as he had padded with dripping wet feet to the desk that housed his rudimentary set up.

He sat silently for a while, simply watching the byte counts as they grew in slow degrees of information exchange, allowing his sister some time to arrive at the apartment that she had driven so far to get to. Once the location data was in close sync with the other location data that he was monitoring, he knew that Lilly's phone was within a few feet of the other phone that he had been, in varying degrees of fidelity, monitoring like a hawk since he became aware of its existence almost a month prior.