Once, there was an island.... // MPHFPC one shots, imagines, and misc !

Seven New Ways That You Can Eat Your Young { Movie!Enoch O'Connor x Reader }

a request for the darling @i-am-bob

totally totally not named after one of hoziers new songs. not at all. also i've unironically fallen in love with shakesperean english and just overall dramatic ass writing so yeah. have fun with that//

Get some,
Pull up the ladder when the flood comes,
Throw enough rope until the legs have swung,
Seven new ways that you can eat your young.

𓅃

The world has always been one of biblical proportions.

Y/N was well acquainted with the strange mannerisms that plagued their every step, the dizzying way their features changed with each breath, each swell of emotion. They knew their eyes had a horrible habit of looking like a snakes, slit and judgmental, and they knew their hands carried the gnarled grasp of a birds, and they knew their tongue was as slick and cruel as a predators. They knew they were not like the others, despite their longing to be so.

Because, of course, that is exactly what they were. A beast writhing beneath the flesh. 

They had known the damage that could be caused by their monstrous nature— they knew the cold looks, the grimaces of pain, the voices raised in pure, red-hot horror. Y/N cradled that fury, pure and silver, they gripped it tight to their chest, like a knife, like a blade. The ending of lives, the beginning of the great story.

Enoch never once looked away during those raging moments of grief.

He had been there, running his softened hands down their back as they curled into themself, choking on their own saliva and wailing to whatever God would answer, begging for a reason, a justification. He had been there when the old ymbryne couldn't bear the blind rages anymore, couldn't bare the torn curtains and bed sheets stained by blood, all caused by their teeth tearing through the cracked flesh of their bottom lip, couldn't bear the nights filled with echoing sobs. 

" I was born a monster," Y/N would wail into their sheets, curled around the bloodied pillowcase, face streaked with gashes from their own hands and smeared with the thick lava of tears. " I am the beast, I am the wolf, I am the destroyer. I cannot control what I become. I am become unforgivable. I am become the end of all things."

And Enoch, sitting at the edge of their bed, would fashion a little man into a falcon, and place it upon their shoulder, and say, " I think you're beautiful."

Their exile came as no surprise. After all, they were the beast. He, on the other hand, was the prince, and the prince refused to let them go alone. Enoch had never been kind, but he had been brought up stubborn. Indifferent to change. Impossible to sway.

So the wolf and the prince disappeared from the bustling streets of an old and dusty city to an island off the southern coast of Wales that may not have existed beforehand. Maybe it never existed at all. Where ever it chose to stand, in between truth and falsehoods, between life and death, it served as a safe haven for children like them.

A girl named Olive with thick, leather gloves, who at first was helplessly shy but soon grew into the trustworthy guide Y/N was fond of. Olive who had others braid her hair, for she'd singe it all off if she did it herself; Olive, who made tea in the early hours of dawn so no one else would have to; Olive, who's very existence sparked such a warmth inside Y/N's chest that they couldn't help but like her. 

The masked twins and little Claire, inseparable as they were similar, the children of the snake and a princess. Emma, light as air and thinner than believable, so much so that Y/N was convinced that if they breathed wrong around her, she'd simply shatter and disappear. Smart-mouthed Millard, who told Y/N stories of people like them, who were long dead but who had survived their beasthood. Those who had thrived in the nature of monsters. For the first time in any memory, Y/N breathed in that hope. They swallowed it whole and prayed it would heal the fractures within them. A bandage for the bullet hole.