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irkimatsu · 3 days

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@monstrousvoice sent me fanart of Husk in a muzzle: https://www.tiktok.com/@zammyx0/video/7330695414468988166

And it's my favorite form of Husk art, the sort where I'm not sure whether to cry or be horny. Curse how hot this man looks in bondage, despite his unfortunate circumstances...

For fic purposes, though, I went strictly for the crying. Husk is being punished for disobeying Alastor, Reader finds him after a few days, hurt/comfort but mostly hurt ensues. 1.8k words. No sexual content but still emotionally rough, with mentions of alcoholism and withdrawal.

---

“Niffty? Can I ask you something?”

You try not to make any startled movements as the small Sinner slowly turns her head and looks at you with her one large eye. She continues smacking her feather duster at the wall as she looks up at you. “Yeeeees?” she replies cheerfully.

“Have you seen Husk?” you say. “He hasn’t been at the bar for a few days, and no one else knows where he is. Not Charlie, not Vaggie, not Angel…” It’s not unlike Husk to disappear every so often, usually due to errands from Alastor, but it’s not like him to not warn you before vanishing for this long.

“Ohhh.” Niffty giggles as she turns back to the wall and continues dusting. “Husker is being punished. He was a bad boy.”

“...punished?” Dear god, what did this little gremlin do to your boyfriend?!

“He’s supposed to do what the boss says! That’s the deal!” Niffty continues. “But he said no, so now he’s being punished! Those are the rules!”

“Do you know where he’s being, um… punished?”

“He’s in his room,” Niffty says casually. “He’s not allowed to leave until Alastor isn’t angry at him anymore.”

Alastor is mad at Husk, and now he’s being kept in his room like he’s a naughty child? The more you learn about Husk’s predicament, the less any of it makes sense. “You have a master key so you can do housekeeping, right, Niffty? Is there any way you could let me in there?”

“Nope, not supposed to!” she says. “Supposed to go in there to clean, that’s it! Don’t talk to him, don’t give him anything he asks for, nothing else!”

“Please, Niffty?” you beg. “I’m worried about him…”

“Hm…” Niffty looks back up at you with her eye, giving no hint as to what on Earth is going on in her head. “Well… he is your bad boy, isn’t he? Maybe if I let you in, you’ll… punish him further?” God, her laughter about that is fucking creepy.

“Um… yeah…” You can’t be more committal about it than that, even if it’s for the sake of seeing Husk.

“Okay, I’ll let you in!” She pulls a key out of her pocket and hands it to you. “Don’t lose that! It works on all the doors in the hotel, so losing it would be very bad. And don’t let Alastor know I lent you that, or see you using it!” Her voice lowers to a menacing pitch. “Make sure you punish that bad boy real good, okay?”

You nod slowly until she turns back to her cleaning tasks, and as soon as her gaze isn’t glued to you, you immediately flee to the stairs.

—

The reek of booze assaults your senses as soon as you open Husk’s door. You don’t know the last time Niffty has cleaned in here, but in that time, the floor has become littered with shattered glass and puddles of drink. You shut the door behind you and gingerly tiptoe around the mess as you look around for your boyfriend.

“Husk?” you call out quietly. Are you in here?”

Another full bottle rolls to the floor and shatters as the lump on the bed starts to squirm.

“Husk…?” you repeat, more concerned than ever, as you approach the bed. You slowly pull the blanket back to reveal Husk curled into a ball, his whole body concealed by his wings. They’re in a terrible state, with feathers pulled out in clumps that left behind bloodstains. His tail is curled around himself, and the plumage on the tip has been equally tattered.

Even more concerningly, now that the blanket is gone, you can see the metal chain tying him to his bedpost.

You gently stroke at his wing, only for him to growl and shrink back from your touch.

“Fuck off…” he groans, his voice muffled by what remains of his feathers.

“Husk, it’s okay. It’s me,” you assure him.

He slowly lifts one of his wings and stares at you with pupils blown wide. Now that you can see his face, you can see the chunk of metal fastened against his mouth with a series of leather straps. Only the extreme sides of his mouth are visible, just enough for you to see sharp teeth bared into a snarl. His only other attire is the metal cuff around his neck for his chain; the rest of his body is exposed, revealing deep claw marks and bald patches all over him.

“Husk!” you cry out in horror. “What happened?!”

“What are ya… doin’ here…?!” he asks in turn. You get the feeling he’d sound a lot angrier if he had the strength to. “Get out of here… he’s gonna... be pissed-” He interrupts himself with a groan and a series of dry heaves. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…” he grumbles to himself between heaving.

“I’m not leaving you like this,” you insist as you sit beside him on the bed. His body begins to spasm, and his heaving soon turns to sobs. You gently stroke one of his ears, knowing it won’t provide him any meaningful relief, but if there’s any sense of comfort you can give the poor man…

“...drink.” His groaning and mumbling finally manages to form a coherent word. “Haven’t… had a drink.”

Normally, the last thing this man ever needs is more alcohol. But as you put the pieces together, you begin to realize how he got into this state, and how this was done intentionally.

Niffty’s words echo in your mind. “Don’t give him anything he asks for!” All you can see is Husk desperately pleading with his friend for a drink, just one drink, even while both of them know she can’t risk that sort of mercy…

But you don’t owe Alastor any promises. “Where do you keep them?” you ask.

Husk weakly lifts a claw and points, and you follow the trail of glass and puddles he’s indicating to a cabinet pushed against his wall. You open the cabinet, and it’s just as much of a disaster as the floor, its shelves lined with more shattered bottles and puddles. Thankfully, you manage to find a miniature bottle of whiskey that’s survived the carnage. You take the bottle and rush it back to Husk’s side.

“Open it for me?” he asks weakly. You nod at him.

“I’ve got you. Don’t worry.”

You position yourself cross legged on the bed, then gently pull Husk’s shaking body into your lap, careful not to touch any of the bloody gashes in his skin. You balance the back of his head against the crook of your arm, then unscrew the cap on the bottle.

“I’ve got you,” you repeat, your voice much softer now, as you position the opening of the bottle against the exposed side of his mouth. “Are you ready?”

You’re not sure if his groaning response is a yes or no. All you can do is take a chance. You slowly tip the bottle up until the contents begin running out. Some of it runs down his chin and stains the panel over his mouth, but some manages to drip to where his tongue can reach. You finally find a position that gets most of the drink into his mouth, and he gulps desperately until the bottle is completely drained. Slowly, his tremors begin to cease, and his breathing becomes much less labored.

“Thank you,” he whispers, his voice little more than a ghost. “Thank you… thank you…”

Surely that one little bottle won’t be enough to fight his symptoms for long, but you’re not ready to leave his side just yet. You set the bottle down on the sheets and wrap your now-free arm around him to pull him closer to you.

You know you shouldn’t start crying. You’re supposed to be the one comforting him. And yet…

“Hey… doll…” he murmurs as he wipes a tear away with his claw. His paw is still trembling slightly, though not as badly as it was before you got him his drink.

“What happened?” you ask. “Niffty told me Alastor was upset with you, but that’s all I know…”

“She the one who gave you the key?” he asks. You nod in response, and you can just barely see him smiling behind his muzzle. “So she figured out how to help me after all…”

“She told me I’d be in trouble if Alastor saw me in here,” you say.

“Yeah, you probably will,” he says. “Though I’ll be the one in real shit for accepting your help…”

“Why’s he this upset with you?” you ask.

“Refused his orders,” Husk says simply. “I don’t wanna do what he wants, so he’s drying me up until I’m desperate enough to go through with it. He’s done it to me before, he’ll do it to me again.”

Before? Again? You knew Husk and Alastor’s deal was heavily unbalanced to Husk’s detriment, but before now, you hadn’t fully grasped just how dire Alastor’s treatment could be.

“What is it that he wants you to do?” you ask.

He averts his gaze. “You don’t need to know that,” he says simply. “It’s just something I don’t wanna do. No matter what he does to me.”

“But what if he hurts you even worse if you keep refusing?” you ask. “I don’t want you to have to do something you’d hate! …but if it’s the only way… I couldn’t stand losing you, Husk…”

His next words are so quiet, and the muzzle doesn’t help you hear him any better. “...that’s how I feel about it, doll…”

You hold him in silence for a while, your only movement a continuous light scratch behind his ear. He returns the silence, only responding with a faint purr. As you hold him, you can’t help but look over the injuries to his body and his wings. Did Alastor do this to him?

On closer inspection, you notice that the tips of his claws are caked in dried blood…

“You should go,” he says. “I don’t want you to, but if he finds out…”

“I understand,” you say, trying your hardest not to imagine how badly Husk might be punished for daring to accept comfort in a time like this. “Just… whatever it is that Alastor’s asking you to do… I’ll understand if you do it, okay? I won’t blame you, no matter how awful. I just want you to get out of this…”

“...I can’t,” is all he says in response.

You lift him up so you can kiss the plate separating his mouth from yours; never before have you missed the taste of his alcohol and tobacco so much. He wraps his arms around you and cuddles close, and you can feel his tremors starting to return.

“I can get you another drink before-” you start.

He cuts you off. “Go,” is all he has to say. “Please.”

You kiss his forehead, desperate to feel his warmth somehow, before gently laying him back down on the bed. As soon as you let go of him, he returns to his earlier position, tucked in by his own tattered feathers. You give his wing a few more strokes, and this time he doesn’t flinch; he doesn’t do anything at all.

The only thing you can do now is leave, give Niffty her key back, and hope with everything you have that even Alastor is capable of some level of mercy for the man you love so much.

#hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel husk #hazbin husk #hazbin hotel x reader #hazbin hotel husk x reader #hazbin husk x reader #irk blubbers about nothing #irk huskposts #alcoholism #abuse #withdrawal #self harm

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flanaganfilm · 10 months

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You have spoken about dealing with addiction in the past (congratulations on your sobriety, btw), and Hill House, Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep, etc, all feature characters struggling with addiction. Do you find a sort of catharsis in writing those characters and their storylines, and do you find that having gone through that affects how you write those characters and their stories? p.s. if the question is too personal, I apologize. You are, of course, free to ignore it.

Happy to talk about it. I was writing about addiction long before I admitted having a problem. Looking all the way back to my student films, many years before Absentia, I can see myself starting to pick it apart. The fact is I was a really shitty drunk. I was absolutely a problem drinker. It was always that way, going back to school - I was never able to handle it, and there were times throughout my life starting very young when that thought would occur to me, and I'd get scared, and then I'd convince myself I was being dramatic and that I had no problem whatsoever.

The truth is that I didn't have an OFF switch, I was inclined to hide my drinking, and the older I got the more self-destructive I became when I was under the influence.

But I was also very committed to the belief that I could handle it, and that I didn't have an actual problem, so for years I'd coast by, telling myself whatever issues I may have had weren't so serious. "Nine times out of ten, I'm just fine - I'm the life of the party," I'd think. I wasn't, though, and soon enough it was 50/50 whether I'd have to make apologetic phone calls on a given hungover morning. And those stretches where'd I'd really let go and drink hard, the person who emerged was less and less like me. It got to the point I didn't recognize him at all - there was this stranger who lived inside, and if he got out, he was could destroy everything I held dear, and he didn't give two shits about it. Looking back at the last decade of my work with the perspective I have now, I can see an escalating subconscious urgency in the way I was talking about alcoholism and addiction. My 2003 student feature Ghosts of Hamilton Street features a wanna-be writer with a horribly self-destructive alcohol problem. The people in his life begin to physically disappear, and the world around him resets as though they never existed at all, so he's the only who notices. I was 25 years old when I made that movie, and looking at it now, the addiction issues are a huge blinking red light all over the movie. At the time, I thought it was just interesting context for the character.

I wrote the opening scene of Midnight Mass (which features Riley Flynn waking up from a blackout drunk driving session to find that he's killed someone) all the way back in 2010, eight years before I finally sobered up. That was always something I was absolutely terrified of - not that I'd die because of my drinking, but that I'd kill someone else and live with the consequences. That was probably my biggest fear for most of my life, if I'm honest. And there were mornings I'd wake up at home and wonder how the hell I'd driven myself there the night before. I remember those mornings with a stomach-turning degree of terror and shame.

It was always somewhat cathartic to write about characters with addiction issues. There's a long stretch between Absentia and Hill House where it appears that I'm not dealing with those themes in my work (though I'd argue there's a subtle addiction meditation at play in Before I Wake that I've only recently noticed), but I was also secretly working on Midnight Mass that entire time, and just pouring all of my thoughts and anxieties about alcoholism into that story. So while Oculus, Hush, Ouija: OOE, and Gerald's Game don't seem to dwell much on addiction, that's really because I was spending my nights pouring all of that into the pages of Midnight Mass, which existed alternately as a novel, a screenplay, and then a series during those years.

Working on Doctor Sleep is what brought it all to the surface for me. Stephen King's novel deals thoroughly with the theme of recovery (The Shining is about destruction of addiction, and Doctor Sleep is about the journey and reality of recovery), and a lot of people in my cast were sober. It was while we were shooting that film that I realized I needed to make a seismic change in my life.

My wife will say that reading the scene in Doctor Sleep where Dan sits at the Gold Room bar in the Overlook was when she knew I was reaching a critical moment. That scene isn't in King's book, and my first draft of that conversation between Dan and Jack was almost fifteen pages long. It's basically a prolonged argument between the addictive and sober voices in my mind, and writing that scene shook something loose in me. I stopped drinking just a few days before we filmed that scene for that movie, and I haven't had a drop since.

But for catharsis, Midnight Mass truly is the most personal piece of work I've ever made. Riley is a very thinly disguised avatar of myself. I look at that series and I see several distinct versions of myself in conversation with each other over more than a decade. I'm glad it took so long to get that show made, because if I'd made it in 2016 like I wanted to, I wouldn't have done a good job - there is no way I could have told that story until I was finally sober. If you listen closely to the AA meeting scenes between Riley and Father Paul throughout the series, you're basically looking directly into my conflicted brain over many, many years.

This year is my fifth year sober, and I spend my days happy, busy, and so grateful that I was able to make those changes before my drinking destroyed my career, my marriage, and my life. I was lucky. I am lucky. But since I finished Midnight Mass, I haven't felt that pull when I'm writing. I haven't felt those themes elbowing their way into my work. That part of me is still in here (it always will be), but I feel like I was somehow able, over many years, to coax it to sleep. I'm sure I'll return to those themes over the years, as I hope to learn more about myself and have more to say... but for now, those voices are peaceful and quiet. I have projects on the horizon that will touch on some of those things (if I'm able to make The Dark Tower, there's some wonderful elements with Eddie's addiction issues that I look forward to exploring) but it feels different.

One of the things I hold onto when I look back at that time is the hope that the work can be helpful to someone else who may struggle in a similar way. And talking to fans, I've heard here and there that it has, and that means the world to me. I think storytellers can't help but use their stories as a mirror, it's one of the ways we take ourselves apart, look at the pieces, and put them back. It's one of the only ways we can see ourselves clearly.

Sometimes we don't even realize we're doing it. It's only looking back that we can see ourselves, and our work, with any real clarity.

#midnight mass #alcoholism #sobriety

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