Pigment (Millard Nullings X Reader)

Murder, He Spoke

"And you don't remember anything from your dreams?" I asked Horace once again.

"I'm sorry, but no," he answered, looking at the floor. What a liar.

But I let it go and went back to my reading. If he didn't want to share his apocalyptic predictions with me, then that was fine. It was private, after all, and I already got the gist on what they might have been about, since I was the only one who actually heard the whole thing happen. Plus, from what I did hear, I wasn't quite sure I wanted to know. I just felt bad that Horace was having to carry around all that repressed emotion because he was cursed to be the only one to see it.

"Everyone in the sitting room!" I heard Miss Peregrine announce. "Right now!"

Almost anything could ruffle her feathers right now, although I knew it was serious when I saw Jacob in the sitting room as well. I slowly made my way over to him as the room slowly flooded with more people. Miss Peregrine did a headcount to make sure everyone was actually here, then angrily stomped out of the room after figuring out that a few kids didn't arrive.

With the help of Emma and Millard, we were able to corner Jacob. 

"What's she in such a tiff about?" Millard asked our American friend.

Jacob leaned closer to us, and quietly told us what happened. An older man named Martin was found dead earlier that morning, and from what Jacob described, it seemed to be a murder. Not even that, too, because by the way he said the man was found was way too fricking familiar. And Jacob noted the fact that Emma, Millard and I were giving each other anxious looks.

"Is it really that bad?" Jacob asked us, obviously concerned. I couldn't tell whether Jacob was either very innocent, or a complete moron. "I mean, it can't have been hollows. They only hunt peculiars, right?"

Emma sighed, and blocked Jacob out the best she could. "Do you want to tell him, or shall I?"

Millard decided to take the bullet for us. "Hollows vastly prefer peculiars over common folk, but they'll eat just about anything to sustain themselves, as long as it's fresh and meaty."

"It's one of the ways you know there might be a hollow hanging about," Emma added. "The bodies pile up. That's why they're mostly nomads. If they didn't move from place to place so often, they'd be simple to track down."

"We've had a hollow track us down before," I mumbled. "We were lucky enough that it only took two people, but still....tracking down peculiars is a hard task, so sometimes they will make do with whatever they find."

"How often?" Jacob asked. "Do they need to eat, I mean?"

"Oh, pretty often," Millard answered. "Arranging the hollows' meals is what wights spend most of their time doing, as (Y/N) just explained. All the Wights have to do afterwards is hide the remains."

"But don't the Wights get caught?" Jacob asked. "I mean, if they're helping murder people, you'd think-"

"Some do," Emma answered. "Wager you've heard of a few, if you follow the news. There was one fellow, they found him with human heads in the icebox and gibletty goodies in a stock pot over a low boil, like he was making Christmas dinner. In your time this wouldn't have been so very long ago."

"Oh my god, why did you have to bring him up?" I complained. "You know that he absolutely disgusts me."

"Because he's the most recent one that I can think of!" Emma defended.

Jacob was thinking for a bit, and then said, "You mean... Jeffrey Dahmer?"

"I believe that was the gentleman's name, yes," Millard said. "Fascinating case. Seems he never lost his taste for the fresh stuff, though he'd not been a hollow for many years."