Trope Tuesday #4 - male ghoul x reader (sfw) 'embarrsing yourself in front of a stranger' (Patreon)

It's Tuesday again, folks, which means it's time for another fluffy story full of tropes and schmoop! This one is sfw, and features a shy academic ghoul. It's a bit plotty, so I'm sorry about that, but I hope you enjoy it anyway, and it's got a cute ending. 

Reminder that you won't be charged in March as I don't plan to post anything, but if I do, it'll be a freebie for you. That also means it'll be our last Trope Tuesday for a little while. Thanks for getting involved with it though, and I'm glad you're apparently enjoying these fluffy little bits of escapism once a week. 

Content: museums (using my own experience here, though sadly without the handsome ghouls), ghoul/being undead, fluff, reader having an unlucky day and embarrassing themselves, more fluff, discussions of necromancy, magic, modern magicWordcount: 3893

“Murphy’s Goddamn Fucking Law!” you spat to yourself, alarming the heck out of an elderly rakshasa at the bus stop. The very last bus that you could possibly have taken to get in to work on time had just drawn away from the stop, and the driver refused to halt for you, despite the fact that you waved your arms like a bloody scarecrow in a high wind. 

This was the latest incident in the disastrous catalogue of failures that morning, starting with your alarm not going off and currently ending with missing the bus. Oh, and it was raining too. Of course it was. 

Sighing, you apologised to the old rakshasa, who shook her head at you and scowled, and set off for the museum. You’d just have to hope that your new boss was understanding. 

When you got there, instead of going round the back to the staff entrance, you decided to take the shortest route and go through the main visitors’ entrance. Given that it was now after opening hours, it didn’t make any difference, and you could nip into the antiquities room, dump your stuff, and then go and sign in with security after that. 

The marble entrance hall of the centuries’ old building had been lovingly polished to a mirror shine, and as you skidded in with your wet boots dripping embarrassingly all over it, you must have moved just a bit too quickly. It all happened in slow motion as your feet went out from underneath you, and you slid sideways like a drifting rally car, and careered straight into someone who had been standing beside the main reception desk. You barrelled into them, buckling their knees and sending them crashing to the floor as well, and - to add insult to injury - as they hit the deck, their briefcase sprang open, scattering sheets of paper everywhere. 

Winded, slightly dazed, and thoroughly mortified, you scrambled to your feet and began to apologise. “I’m so sorry!” you gasped, extending a hand down to them. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” they grunted, but they took their time to get back to their feet. Moving in slightly unusual movements, jerky and a little uncoordinated, they stood upright and you took half a step backwards, mouth falling open in awe.

You’d heard about ghouls - everyone had - but you’d never actually met one, and had never expected to in the daylight. Like vampires, they tended to be a little flammable in the sun.

One completely black eye with a blood red iris stared out at you from under a mop of black hair, damp from the rain, while their right eye blazed a cold sky blue. Dark, spidery lines traced down the greenish-grey skin of their face, spreading out like veins from their eyes on both sides, and around their lower face - just covering their mouth - they wore a solid-looking mask with very small vents in which looked like filters. For all that ghouls were the ‘undying’, they were notoriously sensitive to air quality. Just visible above the mask was a huge scar that cut horizontally across their face and over their nose, almost from ear to ear. 

“I’m such an ass,” you blurted, looking away and seeing that some of the papers had landed in the small puddle you’d created on the floor with your spectacular slide. “Oh gods, look, I’ve made your papers all damp too…” and you began to pick them up for him while he stood there, scowling down at you. 

When you handed them back to him, he extended a slightly tremulous, gloved hand and snatched them from you without a word. 

“Jeez,” you hissed as you stalked off, your hip smarting from the fall and your pride in tatters. “What a dick. It’s not like I meant to run into him…”

When you rounded the corner, you glanced back over your shoulder and found him still glaring after you, that one red eye giving you the shivers. Could he put a hex on you without knowing your name? What magic did ghouls have? You shuddered and tried to forget about him.

Luckily for you, when you arrived in the antiquities room, your boss wasn’t there, so you took a moment to spread your things out and get settled. The main room was divided into two halves; one with a large table for visiting scholars to use while examining objects alone or with the curators, and the other half contained three small desks where, buried amid the mountains of books and papers, you and two other researchers worked. 

When your boss did walk in five minutes later and looked you up and down, to your immense relief, she chuckled slightly and said, “Vile weather, eh?” 

“Ugh,” you exclaimed in relief, with a stricken expression on your face. The door to the antiquities room clicked open but you ignored it and added, “I missed the bus and had to walk most of the way. And then I ran into a ghoul of all people in the entrance hall and knocked his stuff everywhere and bashed my hip too…” You scowled, rubbing it where a bruise was clearly developing already. “Still, at least he probably didn’t feel anything, you know, being dead and all…”

Your boss’ eyes were not on you any longer, and had drifted to someone who was standing behind you. One eyebrow rose very slowly and she pursed her lips a little. From behind you, the voice of one of the museum staff said, “This is Mr. Ó Broin.”

“Ah,” your boss grinned, and said, “That’s right. Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ó Broin.” She turned to you. “He’s going to be here all week, studying the lead bulla that has just come back from conservation.” After a heartbeat and a glance at your mortified face, she added, “I take it you two have already met then.”

Taking a deep breath and summoning every ounce of professionalism, you turned to face him and nodded. “Yes,” you said. “I’m really sorry…”

He shook his head and looked slowly around the room. Beneath the long raincoat he wore, you could see that he was slender and almost fragile looking. “Where might I leave my coat?” he asked, his voice softly accented. 

“Here, I’ll take it,” you said, stepping forwards. He slid out of it and handed it to you and again, you noticed the very slight tremble to his fingers. He didn’t make a move to take his gloves off immediately, so you hung his coat up behind the door and ushered him towards the felt-topped table. “I’ll bring the seal out for you in just a moment,” you told him, remembering that it had been brought down last night from the conservation department. 

He merely nodded once and sat himself down at an empty seat at the table and started to prepare his notes. 

Your boss caught your eye as you left to go into the locked storage room at the back, and as you passed her in the narrow space, she said, “You really aren’t having a very lucky day, are you? You sure you don’t want me to carry it through?”

“Now you’ve said that, you’ve definitely jinxed it,” you said. “I’m not touching it now.”

Laughing, your boss fetched the ancient lead seal and waved you off towards your computer, adding, “And try not to drip on anything, alright?”

You rolled your eyes and grinned at her, glad that she was as nice as you’d remembered from when she’d come to interview for the position a month or so earlier. You risked a glance at Mr. Ó Broin and found that he was watching you again with the eerie stillness of a cat on a garden wall. 

“I really am sorry,” you said again in bashful murmur and his strange eyes crinkled a little, as if he were smiling behind that mask. 

He’d taken his black leather gloves off and you saw that his fingers were carefully wrapped down to the final joint in very fine, pale bandages. Deciding not to keep staring at him and make him feel doubly uncomfortable, you headed over to your desk and fired up your computer. You had a load of accession numbers to add into the database, and it was going to be a long day. 

Mr. Ó Broin worked silently all morning, ignoring you when you got up to fetch a book here or check a written record there, but when you decided it was time for a coffee break, you looked at him and cleared your throat. “So… uh… I’m going to go and get a coffee… Do you want anything?”

He turned his head slowly and you tried not to look too closely at the spidery, ink-like lines on his grey-green skin, and instead focused on his searingly blue right eye. “You’re allowed to drink in this room? What about the antiquities?”

You grinned. “So long as you don’t go anywhere near that table with it, it’s fine.”

He growled and shook his head. “No. Thank you.”

“Fair enough. See you in a bit then,” you added, and left the room. Tough client, you thought, but he did have a point, and normally you just drank your tea in the staff break room. Fancying a stretch of your legs, you headed over to the museum’s cafe and got some fancy coffee there.

The first few days of the week passed in slightly tense silence after that first awkward start. Mr. Ó Broin arrived at museum opening hours, knocked politely on the study room door - a distinctive, syncopated, three-beat rap - and you let him in. He did his research, occasionally asking you for another object with which to make a comparison, and you would scuttle cheerfully off to the storage room to fetch it from the archives. 

On the fourth day of his study, he looked up to regard you when you brought him a pair of rare silver coins in a clear storage box, and surprised you by asking, “How is your hip now?”

“My…? Oh!” you smiled. “Yeah, it’s fine. Bit bruised… thank you.”

“Good.”

“I didn’t leave you with any injuries, did I?”

He shook his head and let his gaze fall to the tabletop, his thick black hair bouncing with the movement. Now that it wasn’t soaked from the rain, you could see that it was slightly wavy and in an odd way it made you want to run your hands through it. He still wore his mask, and now that you were standing so close to him, you could see that the scar on his face more clearly. As if sensing your gaze on him, he looked up at you again. “Did you need something?” he asked. 

“No,” you smiled. “How’s your research going?”

“Well, thank you,” he murmured in a soft, rasping voice. 

With a chuckle, you said, “It’d be going a lot better if I wasn’t hovering around at your elbow though, right?”

His eyes crinkled again, the red iris in his left eye flaring slightly, and he shook his head again. “Not necessarily. Tell me something, do you notice anything interesting when you look at this seal and those coins…?”

He pointed from the seal which still lay nestled in its protective plastazote bed to the two coins in their case. It was possible to see the design on the surface without touching it - which was the whole point of the plastazote, given how fragile it was now - and he shunted it carefully across the felt of the tabletop towards you. 

Leaning down and resting your elbows on the table, you squinted at the seal. It bore a figure in the centre of the mandorla and an inscription that was now mostly illegible around the outside. Something about the figure was slightly strange, and you pressed your nose almost against the protective casing to see it better. The robes they wore were different in style from almost everything else from that period, and they bore a strange pattern of distinctive marks. 

Casting your eye over at one of the coins, which were still as sharp as the day they was struck, you saw the same patterns on the robes. When you said as much, he nodded slowly. “I thought so,” he mused, sounding at once pleased and pensive. 

“What is it?” you asked, stepping back just a little so he didn’t have to crane his neck up to look at you. 

With a sigh, he said, “Do you know anything about my kind?”

Confused by the sudden change in topic, you blinked and shook your head. “I’ve never met… uh… someone like you before.” You didn’t even know if it was polite to refer to them as ghouls. 

Instantly picking up on that, he laughed huskily. “You can call us what we are,” he said, and then he sighed as he reached for the wrappings that covered his left hand. 

Slowly undoing them, he revealed leathery looking skin, the same dark, greenish-grey as his face, but as he unravelled the bindings over the back of his hand and up his wrist, your eyes went wide. He bore tattoos all over his arm that almost perfectly matched the markings on the seal and the coin. His right hand began to shake and he took a steadying breath. “These tattoos are specific to how a ghoul is created,” he said very quietly. “I believe that these objects -” he gestured to the crumbling lead seal and the perfect silver coins “- are evidence of the practice of a particular sect of necromancers, acting nearly three centuries earlier than previously thought.”

“That’s incredible,” you breathed, eyes still flitting from the artefacts to his arm. The marks were the same, looking like tally marks almost, or the Ogham alphabet. “Can… uh… May I ask what they mean…?”

He blinked a couple of times, as though trying to work out exactly what you’d said, and then chuckled softly. “They are marks of resurrection.”

You started to ask an extremely impertinent question about ghouls actually being zombies, but cut off after the first couple of words. 

Again, Mr. Ó Broin laughed quietly. “Listen, I’d be happy to discuss anything you’d like with you, but my time in the research room here is limited.”

“Of course. I’ll… I’ll stop bothering you,” you said, flushing and stepping back. 

“I’m trying to ask if you’d like to -” he began but his back stiffened suddenly and he changed tack. “You probably realised that though. I’m sorry.”

To say that you were confused would have been an understatement. You walked away, unease broiling in your stomach, until the proverbial penny dropped and you halted again. Whipping around, you exclaimed, “Wait, were you trying to ask me out?”

He didn’t look up, but nodded. “Please, forget it if I overstepped.”

“I’d…” you began, and you realised that you really would love that, but couldn’t quite express why. He’d been a bit rude to you to start with, but then you had quite literally knocked him off his feet, so perhaps you deserved that. “I’d love to,” you finished simply. 

The expression in his mismatching eyes when he looked back at you struck you deeply, and you smiled. “When?”

“Tonight? After we’re done in here?”

You kept clock watching after that, but he didn’t seem to get much more research done either, and when you left the museum that evening, you headed into town with him, instead of out of it alone. 

As you strolled slowly towards the area by the river where a lot of restaurants catered for all tastes, he turned to you and cleared his throat. The mask still muffled his voice a little, but you’d grown used to the sound of it in the short time you’d known him. “I don’t actually know your name,” he admitted. When you told him, he said, “I’m Túathal.”

You’d seen it written down, but the way he pronounced it sounded like ‘too-A-hal’. “Irish?”

“Didn’t the accent already give it away?” he asked and you smiled. 

“Little bit, but it’s kind of faint. Have you lived here for a long time then?”

He nodded. “I moved here about ten years ago. Not all ghouls and vampires are hundreds of years old, you know?” Túathal said playfully. 

“May I ask how old you are then?”

“I’m only forty,” he said. “Well, forty three.”

That wasn’t so much of an age gap, you supposed. Certainly not, as he put it, where ghouls were concerned. “I’ve never met anyone who’s not human before,” you confessed. “At least, not to my knowledge.”

Again, he rasped out a laugh. “Most of us lot can’t get away with anonymity. The magic used to create us leaves too much of a mark.”

“How does someone even become a ghoul?” you asked, sidestepping round a puddle which brought you a little closer to him. His steps were steady but slow, careful, as if one fall might do serious damage. With that thought, you recalled how you’d careered into him in the foyer of the museum, and blurted out, “Did I really not hurt you when I ploughed into you?”

“I was only winded and surprised,” he reassured you. “Very surprised.”

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I was so rude to you that day.”

“It’s alright. I do make quite the first impression, I know, what with this eye and the mask…”

You had to admit he was right. 

“But to answer your question, we are raised from the dead, usually, by a master necromancer, and usually it’s because a loved one doesn’t want to let us go. I was a little different, but it just goes to show that we’re not all the same.”

“Can I ask what happened to you?” you ventured tentatively. 

You’d just arrived outside a decent looking restaurant and he paused. “Shall we go in?”

The table you were shown to was at the back of the restaurant, overlooking the river. Again, as he held the menu card idly in his fingers, you noticed how he shook constantly. When he saw you looking, he smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. 

“I was once a mage,” he said. “The marks you saw on my arms were created by my master. I had made a will when I was still pretty young - mostly because it’s something my parents did, and I just assumed that was what you did. Anyway, I… I stipulated in my will that if anything should happen to me, I would like a second chance at life as a ghoul, but only if my master was the one to bring me back, and only if she deemed it an appropriate lesson at the academy.”

You knew that the academy was where the top students in the country studied various forms of magic, and your eyebrows rose at the mere mention of it. “So you were brought back… wait… for science?”

He laughed heartily, which ended in a bit of a wheezing cough, but he nodded. “For science.”

“You know what? I like your sense of humour,” you said, deciding not to ask the question about how he died first time around. 

When the waiter returned to take your order, you were surprised that Túathal declined to order any food. When the waiter had politely left, you looked at him and found pain in his eyes. “I don’t want to put you off your food,” he said. 

“What?”

“I wear this…” he gestured at the rigid mask, “Not only to assist with my breathing, but… being a ghoul is… well… I should have thought about the less glamorous aspects of being brought back from the dead.”

Images of decaying corpses flashed through your mind, but he didn’t smell rancid or anything, so you sighed and said, “I’m sure I wouldn’t mind, but of course, it’s up to you.”

He looked around at the empty tables nearby and sighed. Bringing his hand up to the back of his head, he undid the strap that held the black mask in place and then lowered it away from his mouth. The spidery lines that forked down his face like lightning faded into bruised-looking skin that was much darker along his jaw on the left hand side, and on his right, the skin simply wasn’t there, revealing bone and teeth behind, and a blackened tongue. “See?” he said. 

Your first question was ‘how on earth do you eat without it all falling out of the side?’ but you decided not to open with that. “It’s not so bad,” you said. “Thanks for being honest with me.”

After that, he seemed to relax, but he did put the mask back on, and he didn’t eat or drink anything. He did answer all your questions about the marks on the coins, and told you how the school of necromancy that had raised him was an ancient one, and that his master had decided to use him as an experiment to test an old spell tome she’d unearthed in a forgotten temple. 

“So if you can connect the magic of the book from the temple - which uses your tattoos - to the lead seal which has a date, you can prove that it’s an even older practice than people thought…”

“I can prove that it existed at all,” he said. “Most people think that my master just… made it up.”

“I hope you can prove them wrong,” you said, sitting back in your chair after the meal. “And… thank you for taking the time to talk to me tonight. It was fascinating.”

He nodded. The waiter returned and Túathal insisted on paying, even though he’d not eaten anything himself, and the two of you left the restaurant and stepped out into the chilly night air. 

“I live at that end of town,” he said, pointing. “What about you?”

You jabbed a thumb over your shoulder and said, “Opposite way for me. I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess?”

Túathal nodded. “Thank you for… humouring me tonight…” he said, and the tone of his gravelly voice hurt something in your chest. 

“Hey,” you scolded him gently, reaching for his nearest hand and squeezing gently. Even through the bandages that covered his skin - protecting the tattoos, you now knew - you could feel how warm he was. “None of that. I really enjoyed myself.” 

His eyes glistened more than usual and he seemed unexpectedly choked. “It’s been a long time since…” His throat worked and he seemed to be staving off tears as he squeezed your fingers in return. “Since I’ve done anything like this with anyone. No one seems to want to give us ghouls a second look…”

“Being dead and all?” you grinned, quoting yourself from their first meeting at the start of the week. 

“Exactly,” he said, laughing. 

In a rush of bravery, you popped up onto your toes and kissed his cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” you practically squeaked and walked away as your courage failed you. 

He was still standing there when you looked back at the corner of the street. Slowly, he raised his hand and you mirrored the gesture before turning away, heart thudding, and very much looking forward to seeing him again. 

___

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