Jeremy Frazier X Oc - Tumblr Posts

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The Wanderer

jeremy frazier x fem oc.

chapter one: hey, sadie, it’s 1999.

From Jeremy’s window, you get a good view of the town. The trees all turning brown and gold, the leaves which fall from them in varying shades of reds and yellows. Some are dead, with only branches to spare. Then there is the winding road, of course, and the small stores that tunnel it.

From Jeremy’s window, people are putting together Christmas decorations on their houses, string lights in multicolours, and Santa Claus signs in the yards.

From Jeremy’s window, she stares down into his backyard. Her backyard. Their backyard, as it has been for so long. There’s the stolen bike propped up on the inside fence, waiting for the cops. There is the eyesore pile of leaves laying crisp in wait for the kids from next door to come and dive into when they’re feeling daring. There is Jeremy’s childhood treehouse, its paint red and faded but standing strong. And sitting at its edge, strumming a guitar, is Jeremy himself. His long fingers dance along the guitar strings, long legs hanging over the edge of the doorway he sits in. Today, Jeremy’s dressed in her favourite teal sweater of his, and black jeans. His head is bent over the guitar ever so slightly, chocolate curls brushing his eyes. It’s strange, how she gets the urge to grab his curls and slam his face into the treehouse wall. Strange indeed.

As if he can sense her watching, Jeremy raises his head and tilts back, lifting a knee up to his chest under the guitar. Milky skin is unchanged in the cool weather, darling pink lips turning up to a smile. A set of dark brown eyes meet her’s, and they set there. He’s calm today, apparently. He’s kind.

Sadie isn’t.

Today she feels…angry. They’re always conflicting emotions, the two of them. A match strikes inside her, and she raises a confident hand to her neck, swiftly moving it across in a slicing motion, clenching her teeth.

Jeremy’s mouth only tugs upward, perfect white teeth on display. He tears his eyes away and down to the guitar strings, and begins to play again. The song is familiar, but she’s never learned its name. He won’t tell her. She can’t help but latch her eyes on his hand, strumming the strings like they’re the most delicate things in the world. Memories cast phantom fingertips along her wrists, searching somewhat softly for a pulse. She’d had one, then, at that particular moment in time.

Which was why he’d swung the bat again.

“You should come down!” His voice calling pulls her from the past. It’s like honey, not at all uncaring, and it does the trick. “The fresh air’ll do you some good!”

Sadie scoffs harshly. Fresh air…Is he trying to be funny?

“Move away from the window, Sadie,” he chastises, he advises, he urges.

She folds her arms and waits heavily on one hip, tapping her fingers along her arms, and steps backward until she’s definitely out of his vision. The street is busy, today, but the treehouse is just behind the fence and out of sight. She could really annoy him and open the window, throw herself out—that usually gives him a bit of a shiver, at least. Or maybe—

“I know what you’re thinking, Sadie! Stop plotting and come down!”

He knows her too well. Being house-bound for twenty years will do that to a person.

Tilting her head, she allows herself to consider the options:

One—leaving their room today would be a nice change of scenery. She hasn’t left it in exactly a week, rotting in desperation and depression. Eyeing the movie posters on the walls, Sadie thinks of all of the things that could go wrong by going outside. Absolutely nothing, to be real. She just risks blowing up on Jeremy for the third time this week.

Two—Jeremy would try to serenade her with a sweet word and deescalation techniques, and she couldn’t promise that she wouldn’t try to throw herself and him out of the treehouse.

“What do you think, Prisoner Panda?”

Sadie turns to their bed. There are Jeremy’s old plushies of course, only an alien from the movies in Montana, and a blanket. But there is also her panda, a small and ragged thing left here by chance many moons ago. He’s cartoonish and limp, now the stuffing has moved so much. But he’s still smiling, and he smells like home. Prisoner Panda is Prisoner Sadie’s only best friend.

The other one killed her.

Prisoner Panda does not answer her.

“I should go out, right?” Sadie nods to the inanimate object. “A change of scenery will make me feel better, huh? Yeah. I think so, too.”

She takes a jacket from the back of Jeremy’s desk chair and pulls it on over her outfit of red dress and tights. The next step is getting out of the bedroom. Jeremy’s music is still playing away from the yard, as Sadie slips through the hallway. The yellow patterned wallpaper smells faintly of cigarette smoke and baking, the smell of which only becomes stronger the closer she gets to the ground floor and the kitchen.

The staircase is somewhat creaky, the banister painted dark brown, like old varnished mud, and the steps are the same. She can’t count the times she fell on these stairs, all the times Jeremy’s mom would help her with an ice pack to the knee, or the head.

As if she can sense Sadie thinking about her, Jeremy’s mother comes hurrying by the staircase just when Sadie reaches the bottom. Her long blonde hair is tied up today in a pretty bun, and stuck through with green sparkling pins. She has a rag and a bottle of cleaning detergent in her hand, peering at Sadie with her one good eye. She bursts into a bright smile exactly like her son’s.

“Morning, Sade.” Her pale hands wipe down every inch of the walls. Always cleaning, is Sara. Obsessively so.

You’d deduced together, you and Jeremy, that his parents were completely unaware that they were dead. To them, it was just another day. The kitchen utensil sticking through Jeremy’s mother’s eye was nothing to her, and the same for the one in his father’s head. The weapons their son had used didn’t phase them in the slightest, because to them it never happened. Life went on as normal. Was it a coping method, she wondered? Or hadn’t they reached the level of self-awareness in the afterlife of which she and their son had?

Passing by the living room, Sadie clears her throat. “Morning, Ted.”

Ted Frazier is by all means, a couch potato. While Sara cleans, Ted hogs the television. “Mornin’. Think Jeremy’s outside…”

Through the homely hallway, decked in frames of she and Jeremy in Montana, the last one at their graduation, and snapshots of Ted and Sara’s life together, including small images of baby Jeremy, and other family members Sadie only met the once. It smells strongly of lavender and lemon cleaning products, like a little trail of Sara.

Through the dining room, past Sara stress-polishing the table, Sadie strolls to the open back door, and out into the world.

There’s the plain garden fence, encasing the small bench on one side (where Jeremy can’t reach), the red treehouse, and down to the open driveway.

The wind blows firmly today, but not enough to put her off coming outside. It kisses her skin like she’s still alive, and the grass is cool under her feet, bare beside the material of her tights. Jeremy’s coat blows, forcing her to wrap it tighter with her arms crossed around the front. Sadie raises her gaze to the sound of strumming, the high notes blending softly together.

“Hey, Sade,” his voice comes down, gentle, like he’s approaching a frightened animal. “It’s a nice morning.”

Across the damp ground she approaches him, staring from the bottom of the ladder at first. She wishes to scare him, get her own back. Not that she hasn’t done so in the past twenty years, but it’s long overdue since the last time. Two weeks, exactly, since she’d tried to throw him down the stairs. Jeremy had the upper hand, and pushed her over the banister instead.

“If you came here to stare at me and say nothing I’d say just go back inside,” he drawls. “You’re being boring.”

“You’re an asshole.” She spits, full of spite.

“You said that last week. And then you couldn’t get enough—”

Quickly, she raises her hands and claps them around his thin ankle, feeling the bones grind beneath her fingers. And she yanks, hard on his weight. He shifts only once, enough to be startled, the guitar falling hard to the wood beneath, and then she pulls again, unforgiving this time. Jeremy yells in surprise and pain, body landing with a thump on the thick tree roots at the base. Groaning on his back, a hand stronger than it looks takes a fistful of her hair and twists, as her own balls up and pounds into the junction at his neck—right where he broke it.

“Get off!” He’s angry, now. And good, she thinks, he deserves to feel what she is feeling, and slaps her palm across his face. It’s only eleven in the morning, but they’re about to have many, many fights today. “You little psycho, go back inside!”

Sadie laughs, and then cries out. Jeremy slides his fingers through her hair to her temple, digging firmly into the place of injury.

“Ow! Ow, fuck!” She lets go of his collar. Jeremy wrenches himself from her grip.

They’ve had this particular back-forth situation happen a million times. She knows how to hurt him—digging into his broken neck—and he does her—by pushing on the spot of impact.

“You told me to come out!” She manages to yell, pushing a hand free between them both to take a dig at his bruised neck. “You—told—me!”

“I thought you were feeling angry, not murderous! I can deal with angry.”

“Shame I had to deal with murderous!”

She bites at his wrist, grazing it, and Jeremy laughs like he can’t believe it, taking a handful of her hair to pull her away. They’ve done this a million times, and he still acts shocked.

It makes her think of his twentieth birthday back in 2001, play-fighting in the front room. They’d just watched a rerun of some army movie and tried to replicate their moves. Surprisingly, she’d had him on his back, watching in glee as he wrestled her over, hovering carefully between her knees and complaining about a girl being stronger than him.

Such a shame things went the way they did back then.

She doesn’t stop fighting him because she wants to; they stop because of his mom. She yells from the doorway.

Sara sighs heavily. “Jeremy! Not again, guys! Back To The Future is playing in five, don’t you want to watch it?”

The two of them are quiet, just breathing hard, adrenaline running. Jeremy moves away slightly, giving her space. He lightens the hold on her hair, brushing the bloodied dip of her skull from the incident so long ago. His thumb brushes over it, a loving touch and a tender warning all the same.

“Yeah!” He calls, stumbling back to his feet. “We’re coming now.”

“Well, don’t be late for it! You know what your dad’s like.” Sara laughs nervously, tittering in place. “I’m going to get started on lunch!”

Lying on her back watching the clouds float by, Sadie waits to catch her non-needed breath. After a few seconds, she sits upright, and uses the tree to get to her feet. Jeremy stands a little way off with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, observing her.

“Feel better, psychopath?”

She nods her head, and hums. “A little.”

Jabbing his thumb to the house, he lets that smirk appear. “Can we go watch a movie now? You’re not gonna smash the television over my head are you?”

Sadie pushes him aside, passing. “Don’t push your luck.”

They settle on the couch for the movie, and stay there until it’s nearly time for dinner. There’s no benefit of eating in the afterlife—the food is nice, but pointless. It has no nutritional value whatsoever, but Sadie does it to appease Sara, who has never known she’s dead.

That night, in the dark coziness of their bedroom, tucked under covers and blankets galore, Jeremy presses a mirage of kisses along the impact zone on her skull, raining love along the violence. He noses at her neck, and breathes in the flat of her collar.

“I’m tired,” mutters Sadie, laying a warm hand against his bruised neck. She feels the blood pooled under his skin, tiny fragments of bones dancing around under there.

“So sleep,” he says.

For the first time in weeks, she does.

—

“We really should put out the Christmas decorations. I’ll ask Ted and Jeremy to go get them down from the attic later…”

It’s raining hard this morning of December seventh. The sky cries, presenting itself in dark blue. The stand mixer whirs, and so does Sara, spinning back and forth around the kitchen for the things she needs to make cupcakes. Sadie’s supposed to be helping her, but the Vogue magazine from 1999 that she has read a million times is just so damn interesting…

Rain cracks down on the windows. Lifting her eyes, she watches the droplets slide down the glass, and pool at the dip in the window ledge.

“What do you think, Sade?”

She looks to Sara, now. The cooking utensil sticking out of her face used to bother Sadie greatly, but now it’s like looking at a friend—the abnormalities don’t bother her much anymore.

“What?”

Sara smiles but rolls her good eye. She waves the bowl of batter. “I said, vanilla or strawberry flavoring?”

“Strawberry,” she decides, looking back to page four. “We had vanilla last week didn’t we?”

“Right we did, Sade. Right we did…”

It’s boring, being dead. Trying to find ways to pass the time when you’re aware that you’re no longer living is difficult. At first, they tried everything, she and Jeremy. Football games in the yard (once they got past the initial hatred stage); moving household furniture around; and other things. But there’s only so much time that being intimate and pushing furniture pieces around can fill.

They started to get creative.

By trying to kill each other again.

“Bet this isn’t what you thought came after death,” she told him once upon a time, trying to gather a bit of broken skull off of the floor.

“Not. One. Bit.” Jeremy seethed, trying to crack his neck back in place.

It’s been twenty-two years since this Vogue magazine came out, but when she looks out of the window, the style is coming back around. The two-thousands never dies, it seems. She’s seen it come back about five times, now.

The chair shrieks across the tiles when she stands up. Sara grimaces and casts a look to the hallway, where Ted’s programme can be heard. It hasn’t gone amiss that there’s been a lack of arguing on Ted’s part this past week—he’s bound to blow up anytime now. Every little noise Sadie makes is like pulling on the tense wire that is Sara’s nerves.

She leans down to the windowsill, her head down on her arms, watching the world go by. School kids wait for the yellow busses, a couple of teens bike on by, laughter high on the rain. The headlights on the newer cars shine down the street, whizzing past at a speed waaaaay over the limit. Longing pulls at her heart.

A shuffle somewhere behind her draws her eyes up, refocusing on the reflection of the lit kitchen in the glass.

“Morning,” Jeremy sighs, pulling a chair from underneath the table and sitting heavily. He’s in black pyjama pants and a loose-fitting red sweater, and he takes the bowl of cereal his mom offers him, digging in straight away.

Ugh. Sadie looks away, out of the window again. This time, she swears a kid looks right at her. Probably not—Jeremy’s always said living people can’t see them one bit. Unless they’re Lydia Deetz, but she’s a bit of a folk story in their world. A could-be, whom people want to believe can give them a way out. There are whispers, and shouts, but nobody has proven her to be the real deal yet.

“Did you get a good sleep?” Sara lays a gentle hand in her son’s curls, shifting them. “Your father and I didn’t keep you awake yelling did we? I tried to tell him to quieten down; that he’d wake the two of you. But…well, you know how he is.”

As a matter of fact, yes, Ted did keep them awake. Something about slipping on the stairs because they’d been polished too much. Unable to sleep, Sadie had turned on some alternative rock from Jeremy’s player, and watched the world go by all night at his desk chair, contemplating life and the afterlife. Nearly twenty-three years of the same posters on the walls, twenty-three years of Ted and Sara, twenty-three years of Jeremy sleeping with his back to her, tossing and turning, like he can’t face the consequences of his actions.

In the middle of the night, governed by moonlight, she had even dug out Jeremy’s copy of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased and had a good old flick through. Hers had been thrown under the bed when she missed her target of Jeremy the week prior, and she couldn’t be bothered to go crawl under there and grab it.

Seven-hundred pages of illustrated explanations, incantations in different languages of all kinds. Nothing particularly helpful, besides the whole ‘draw a door!’ thing it offered, for those who wanted to talk to a case worker.

They’d done that in the early days, when the desperate need to escape became too much for even him. See, Jeremy’s death had been an accident. Hers, an unfortunate consequence. Wrong place, wrong time. In another life, she might have stayed home. Jeremy wouldn’t have come out to the garden to find her. The cops would have found him in the house and arrested him before taking him to prison, and her life would have continued in a decent deal of shock, but at least it would have continued.

Jeremy had drawn a messily-etched door on the wall, tearing down his precious posters, and knocked three times. It materialised and opened up into winding hallways passing grotesque endings and frightful things. It was a whole city—dry cleaners and police forces in terrible hues of reds and greens, dirty and depressing; a waiting room, and an immigration centre, for those wanting to reach the Pearly Gates, the Fires of Damnation, Elysium or the Great Beyond, governed by the dead. Their case worker, Juno, in her last year working, sat them down and explained the basics.

They were dead. This was the afterlife. No, Sadie, there hadn’t been a mistake. No, Jeremy, he couldn’t go back. But the good news was that they weren’t stuck forever! Sadie blew her nose noisily at this on a tissue Juno handed over the desk as Jeremy side-eyed her, clenching his fists. This was not what he’d hoped for.

“One-hundred-seventy years for you!” Juno slapped a stamp down on a business-like card, a bit of slip with Jeremy’s name in blood-red ink looped along the top line. “For soul redemption, and per the guidelines.” She slapped it down in front of him. “Don’t lose that, young man!”

She turned to Sadie next, human-looking with permed blonde hair and kind eyes. “Sadie, darling, I know this is hard to comprehend.” She touched Sadie’s hand, before offering a glance to Jeremy, as if willing him to understand. “Murder victims are often the hardest to console—the shock.” She picked up her pen with the other hand and began to write out another card.

“Only fifty years for you, my dear. Your life review deemed it unfair to have you repent for his sins. But, per the guidelines, you also have a lot of reviewing to do.”

“What happens after the time is up?” Snapped Jeremy at her side. His foot tapped anxiously at the ground. “What does it mean?”

“You’ll come back here and head on over to immigration! Show them your passports—they’ll arrive in a few days, so not to worry about that. You’ll have a choice: reunion at the Pearly Gates with other family members. Damnation if the council decides you have more repentance to continue. Or the Great Beyond, if you would like another shot at life. We give significant wait times between your death and your departures overall to allow those who have passed into our current side the opportunity to really think through their choices.”

Jeremy shifts, leaning forward. When Sadie shifts her gaze away from Juno to her boyfriend, there’s this look on his face. Anger, shock, mixed with a bit of terror that this is what the afterlife is.

“So this happens to everyone?” He asks.

Leaning back, Juno shakes her frizzy hair. “Not everybody, no. Some people become ghosts, others don’t. Luck of the draw. We aren’t completely sure why only certain people end up in our state, but it happens more often than you think. The live people think it’s down to unfinished business. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, both? You’re very new here. And oh, so young! Twenty…what an age! Not to worry—we have some pamphlets I can give to you. We run acceptance classes on a Thursday night, all about accepting you’re dead. It helps some dead to make peace with their circumstances. And of course if you ever have any queries or complaints, we’re always here to help!”

Thunder cracked, and the book in Sadie’s hands slid from them, falling to the floor with a heavy thud. It fell open, face-up. She leaned down to it and examined its pages contents. The book only displayed the contents when it deemed the reader ready for them. The pages her book showed would not necessarily be the same ones as in Jeremy’s.

SO YOU WANT TO EXCHANGE YOUR AFTERLIFE FOR ONE OF THE LIVING? READ ON NOW, WE CAN HELP!

The bed sheets ruffled, Jeremy rolling over in his sleep. Ted screamed at his wife two floors below, and Sara’s words came through among the sobs.

Creeping across the room on light feet, she sat down at her boyfriend’s side. “Hey, Jeremy…you’ve got to get up.”

He opened his eyes, seriously unimpressed, rubbing them.

Sadie leaned down, smugly smiling. “I’ve got an idea.”

The following afternoon, residing in the same chair after a fight with Jeremy and an aching heart, Sadie thought back on her whole twenty-two years in this house. Her parents were somewhere out there in the big wide world, in their sixties. Her siblings would be grown with families of their own, having been to college, or travelled. Maybe she was a sad reminder in a photo frame on the mantelpiece somewhere, or a candle lit in memory on the anniversary of her death, or her birthday. She might be a story shared at Christmas, replayed every few years on the news. She missed them terribly.

She thought long and hard about the lead up to her death, and spiralled. For the rest of the afternoon and well into the night, curled up beside him, she thought over first encounter with Jeremy in the town, and a long drive into what became her new home.

She thought way back when, to 1999.

CHAPTER 2 -> to be published.