Chapter Text
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| Entry tags: | fiction |
FIC: Welcome to the Jungle Ch 1: The Dom, The Freak, The Bar and its Owner
TITLE: Welcome to the Jungle Chapter One: The Dom, the Freak, the Bar and its Owner
DISCLAIMER: CM belongs to those guys at CBS. I own nothing. All characters revert to canon
RATING: R through NC-17
PAIRINGS:...Prentiss/Hotchner, Hotchner/JJ, JJ/Garcia, Garcia/Lynch, Prentiss/Garcia, Reid/Morgan, Morgan/Prentiss, Reid/Hotchner, Rossi/Strauss, Tobias Hankel/Reid, Frank/Prentiss, Morgan/JJ, (do you want me to go on or would it be easier to list the pairings that aren't?)
This is an ALTERNATE REALITY fiction! Canon has been fed through the Fargo wood-chipper, is being reflected in funhouse mirrors, and narrated by a chorus of Timothy Leary devotees.
Enter my spider's web, little chickies. All here is for your pleasure and what doesn't pleasure you, pass on to the next perv.
PandaGal here catching you all up on the RL weirdness that exists right outside your door. Keep tuned in, stay tuned up or we'll send someone out to do it for you.
FYI, Miss Em's Crewe has relocated from the swamps and have taken up new quarters. Check the gallery for the latest Whips and Chains and Tidbits of Torture. Come on, you silly subs, you know you want it. And just to spice things up, next Friday's webcast will feature our very own slaveboy Kevin who will get a paddling for every hit the gallery gets. So rack 'em up, kiddies! We want that boy to scream. Plus Miss Em will have a special guest sub in tow. No spoilers, you rotten scum! You can all lick my shiny pink patent-leather boots and tune in for our grand reopening. ROFLMAOASTS!
As always, Miss Em passes along her fondest fondles for all her personal correspondents. Messages for this week are:
---Howard, you're a duck. Don't get your wings clipped.
---xxLestatxx295780, bite my ass.
---Frank, you have my attention. Which body parts and whose?
That's all for today, sweetcheeks. May we meet again in different circumstances.
Yours with restraints, TTFN
PG the Cyberpanda
She hit send just before the power blew. Again.
"Dammit to hell! This dump is gonna wreck all my equipment!"
Her wailing roused Kevin, who'd been sleeping off Ms. Em's attentions in his corner.
It wasn't surprising that the power had blown: there were only two plugs per room in the crumbling 4-story brick building. Further inspection proved much too traumatising for Penelope. She curled up in her deluxe chair, pink-tipped fingers quivering over one keyboard.
"I'll take care of it." Kevin shoved his way around one bank of monitors.
"I don't know why she had to come here. Of all places. Richmond. It's not even a city! It's---it's ----it's dialup. Who goes to Richmond for shits and giggles? Honestly, I'm so much better than this. I deserve so much more. I'm talented. I have Mad Skillz. Trademarked. What karma am I reaping!?"
He crawled behind console #1 to check the power strips. "Did you know there's a windowseat back here?"
"Kevin, do not try my patience today! I have sixteen webfeeds to keep running if we are going to make a dime and we've got cloth wires. Do her clients even know where Richmond is? Does anyone?"
"Trainspotters."
Both looked up like startled geese. Her pigtails quivered.
Their landlord's low tone was, as always, menacing. Penelope rolled her chair back.
"I came up to tell you the power will be off for about an hour." His glance raked past her toward the console. "His diaper's slipping." For another moment, he loomed in the doorway, then stomped down the two flights to his bar.
Kevin peaked out from behind the tall shelves, strangling a grin. "Why do you let him scare you?"
Garcia shuddered. "I'm not sure. He's...creepy."
"Goodlooking."
"Creepy goodlooking. And dangerous. I'm always wondering how long it'll be before he thinks it's better to ....I dunno. He creeps me out."
Kevin's navel was just about even with her cat's eye rhinestones. "Says the women who lives in a cyberworld and loves a man in a diaper."
"That's different."
"Mmmmm."
Kevin's 'leash' (set by Ms. Em but Kevin knew his knots as well as any Boy Scout) trailed behind them towards the hidden windowseat.
"Kev?"
"What?"
"Lock the door."
The windowseat's ancient timbers squeaked like a pen of dying rabbits.
"Probably why he boarded up the window!" Penelope gasped, just before Kevin's tongue made it quite impossible to speak.
Down the hall, Mistress Emily Prentiss adjusted her earplugs and rolled over for another hour's sleep. She'd had a long night, her shoulders ached and she was looking forward to Kevin's massage when she woke. After Garcia got the site back up, which, judging by the thumping and squeaking, would likely take a bit longer than usual. The earplugs mercifully drowned out her own snoring and she dreamed of kittens gamboling through crayon-coloured fields.
Yeah, some called me garbage
While I was sleeping on the street
I never roll
And I never cheat
I'm filling a need
I'm plugging a hole
My mama's so glad
I ain't on the dole
When the whip comes down
When the whip comes down
M. Jagger, K. Richards "When the Whip Comes Down"
Exactly a half-hour earlier, the Acca trainyard bar had been vibrating with booming bass.
"TURN THAT GODDAMNED THING DOWN!"
The ear-shattering volume from the attic subsided at once but Aaron Hotchner had a hangover and it was never a good idea to provoke him. He'd been up for hours because he simply could not behave like a normal thug and sleep it off. He had to 'use' the energy, which generally meant either he was beating some poor slob senseless or using his monster F-250 as a tank.
This morning he took the stairs two at a time to the attic, put its occupant in a choke hold and repeatedly punched him in the ribs until he whimpered.
"I'm sorry! Sorry sorry sorry."
Spencer Reid wasn't really all that sorry: another punch-out would give him jackoff fantasies for a week. It was as close as he'd ever get to thanking his hero the way he wanted.
At 22, Reid looked a decade younger, wore coke-bottle glasses when he wanted to see and worshipped Hotch with a wistful intensity that was almost equalled by his relationship with heroin. He could reproduce nearly any pharmaceutical compound using a Junior Nye Chemistry Set and reportedly gave the best blow job east of the Mississippi. Hotchner had 'liberated' him from his last employer after a deal went sour by the expedient measure of driving his truck through the building and over said employer. He parked long enough to strong-arm Reid into the back and terrorised him over two states' worth of bad roads.
Reid, the deeply disturbed product of a lunatic and a Las Vegas loser, was charmed. He settled happily into the attic with his ever-growing library of stolen books, amid the buckets that were necessary to catch any precipitation.
Nursing his ribs on the soggy mattress, he decided against jerking off: it was pointless when he was using. His dick would either give up or give out. Besides, Hotch would eventually come up with a dime bag as an apology. He yanked at his grubby tee shirt, sniffing where it had been plastered between his skinny back and Hotch's chest, rolled onto one side and let himself dream a while longer.
His hangover burned off, Hotch stomped back down to the cellar, grabbing the miner's helmet on his way down. He never wasted breath on unnecessary speech even with himself. Miss Em's new dungeon was costing him more in electricity than Garcia's labyrinth of computers, the bar and the garage. He wasn't surprised to find the current had been highjacked again. He cut the feed and patched up the circuit board with his usual efficiency.
It was eleven am and three of his regulars were already waiting for the Rotgut Roll call when he squeaked open the door.
Gideon was planted at the end of the bar, face-down in a basket of pretzels.
"How'd he get in here?" Fat Louie was still slurring last night's bourbon.
Hotch shrugged and poured breakfast. Jason Gideon had been hanging around the trainyard for years. No one quite knew why, but Aaron suspected he just liked the 'choo-choo's'. At least that's what he seemed to coo in his continual stupor. There were times Gideon made sense; he and Reid had long philosophical discussions. Spencer liked company when he was in the garage cooking up a new batch of methamphetamine and Gideon was perfectly content with a bottle of Wild Turkey and an audience. Hotch made sure to avoid them both during cooks. They irritated him almost as much as his once-a-month call to his baby brother way up north in Attica.
He slammed back his own version of a pop-tart: exactly one pony of Jack Daniels. Any more would have been self-indulgent and Mama wouldn't have approved. She'd been dead for twenty years, but Aaron never forgot Mama. Whether or not he actually said goodnight to her picture, pasted next to the faded Pink Floyd poster across from his bed was not known.
He paused, staring at himself between the letters of a Budweiser mirror. Not too puffy around the gills.
One switch and Tesla's one and only hit lp made the tin signs on the walls quiver. Later on, he'd see about jacking the NASCAR cable feed. At the moment, the dishwasher was more important.
Hotchner had a skewed but acute sense of rhythm and Jason Gideon, mid-gulp, grinned at him. The old 80's heavy metal jived perfectly with the dishwasher's knocking and pinging.
"Backbeat, Aaron?"
The returning grin was surprisingly boyish. "Keeps things in order."
Conversations at the bar were usually short. The 11:23 Northbound Passenger local screamed its arrival down the yard and only the pretzels could hear whatever Gideon went on about next. He finished just as the 11:28 Eastbound Freight bellowed its departure.
That was the normal daytime pace: three sentences, two drinks, four trains and a siren. Repeat, stir. Add ice.
Hotchner tossed Gideon another beer and refilled Fat Louie's glass without comment.
At 12:01, just after the noon siren had rendered the entire trainyard and its adjacent neighborhoods temporarily deaf, the door slammed open.
"Where is he, Hotchner?"
He didn't hear her. Or pretended not to hear her. That was more infuriating than anything else because it spoiled her entrance.
Erin Rossi Pinzicelli-Jones Rossi nee Strauss (to be technical) hated having an entrance ruined, even in Richmond, VA, which was as close as her double-ex'd husband could get his sorry self to Atlantic City.
"Where is he?"
Hotch was almost glad he really was a bit deaf in his one ear. "Nice to see you, ma'am." The lingering drawl was as deliberate as his wink.
"I swear, Aaron, I'm gonna take him down and you with him. Who's he shacking up with this time? I just got declined at BLOOMINGDALES."
Gideon took cover in the men's room. Fat Louie retreated to a booth.
Hotchner's voice became rum and Southern Comfort, laced with molasses. "Erin, I don't know where he is. Sit down and stop yelling. Nice shoes."
She pushed back a stray strand of expensively-frosted hair. "Aren't they?" Then her eyes started blazing again. "I'll get another lawyer. I swear I will. I'll go to the Feds."
He put an extra cherry in her limocello, trying to figure out some way to calm her down without the use of blunt force trauma.
Cursed by an Italian great-grandmother when he was 6 with unimaginably bad timing, David Rossi chose that moment to call.
"That's him! I knew it! Give me that phone, you redneck punk!"
Her leopard-skinned legs didn't so much fly over the bar as wobble, cellulite hampered by 4" heels. But there was no playing keepaway with Erin. She was quite an Amazon.
Hotchner relinquished the phone.
"Goddamned it, David! How dare you! Who are you spending it on, huh? Huh? I'm gonna call my Uncle. What? what the hell are you---ok."
There was a long moment of silence, then she handed the phone back to Hotchner, one crimson reverse-Frenched claw inches from his nose.
"You'd better do this right!" She slammed the door again and her Lexus squealed away with the 12:13.
"Rossi?"
Between crackling interference and sirens, Hotchner tried to make some sense of the conversation. He got 'someone new', 'southern move', 'damned bitch' and 'later'. His brow lowered. 'Southern move' was Rossi-speak for a chance at Atlantic City.
David was not the most successful wiseguy to work his way from Commack LI through Pennsylvania. He'd wanted to get a nice little turf in Florida and ended up in Richmond with the local capo's blonde girlfriend. That wasn't as much of a mistake as marrying her. The second time. He was, however, an optimist with a eye for the future. Hence his patronage of such new delights as Mistress Emily and her 16 websites of porn and Spencer Reid's chemistry experiments.
'Damned bitch' was obvious, as was 'later' but 'someone new'? That carved a questionmark into Hotchner's forehead for the better part of a grilled cheese sandwich.
Charlie Hankel always said Hotch's home fries tasted much better when he'd tied on a load the night before: that's why he tried to time his deliveries to the Richmond trainyard bar for Saturdays. Hotch was dependably drunk on Fridays and Saturday's fries didn't suffer from the bruised knuckles that hampered Sunday's efforts. Every month, he came up from Georgia with a load of everclear, venison and cut-down Clearwater coke for which Hotch occassionally paid in cash. The home fries were always on the house.
He glanced at his companion. "Almost there."
Her smile was bright summer sunshine. "I could use a stretch. You've been so great, Charlie. Thanks for the ride."
For a moment, Hankel's face resembled Mount Rushmore melting. "JJ? What's that mean, little lady?"
She captured loose hair in a Hello Kitty barrette. "A nickname for Jennifer. We had too many of those at school."
"Well, Jennifer, you sure are a pretty little girl. Why on earth would you be hitchin' along here?"
"I like people." Her smile was a blind. He never picked up hitchers but that smile had made him stop.
"Wish you could meet my son. He hates people."
"Oh, that's probably not true at all. I'm sure he's just shy, Charlie."
For longer than he should have, Hankel believed her earnest blueberry eyes. The truck bounced over rivers of track, kicking up clods of mud as he parked closer to the bar's awning than usual. A lady wouldn't want to get her hair mussed, even if she was wearing combat boots.