Chimken Tendies, aka, I Had an Idea at 3.47 AM & Then I Wrote It...

So I'm a certified night owl and I do some of my best (and also...worst, let's be real) work between the hours of midnight and 4am, when I'm not working and don't have places to be in the real morning. Such was the case with my new work-in-progress Chimken Tendies. (I will be taking no questions about the working title at this time 😃) 

Anyways! I was scrolling through TikTok when I saw a POV video of a guy acting as 'your' (the viewer's) bodyguard, judging your choice in boyfriend. My heart went tha-thump. My hands started twitching. My overworked computer fans started pre-emptively whining. And I had an idea. 

I'm a huge fan of tropes and archetypes, and I also really love subverting or otherwise twisting those tropes and archetypes. The concept of bodyguards has long been a delight, but also one I have...never written? Somehow? It's a delicious dynamic, and it's a crying shame that I've never put my spin on it!

So I went on tumblr, yelled exuberantly at a friend, added a few other narrative tropes into the mix, and arrived at Chimken Tendies, where Etienne, the very wealthy scion of a very shady family runs away the one day his loyal bodyguard, Sacha, is on leave. His parents (are terrible people) want him home primarily so no one can try and use their son against them, so they hire a shapeshifter named Cipher to double as him. Sacha must, of course, guard Cipher as though he's the real Etienne, all the while worrying about her original charge, and trying to teach Cipher how to be more like Etienne. Cue misadventures (so far indistinct). 

Here's what I have so far of this ridiculous fun!

content warning | depictions of violence, blood

​Etienne Lamarque runs away from home on a rainy Tuesday morning.

It’s not a premeditated occurrence—he wouldn’t have been able to pull it off if not for a series of accidents coinciding to provide him with the perfect opportunity. But the chance comes to him, and he seizes it with both hands and doesn’t look back. He leaves his bodyguard, he leaves his wealth, and he leaves his parents, but most importantly—he leaves their legacy behind him.

Etienne Lamarque runs away from home on a rainy Tuesday morning.

Three days later, he is spotted shopping at a high-end boutique in the downtown core. He is shadowed by a tall woman with short hair wearing a black mask that obscures the lower half of her face. Her name is Sacha—just Sacha—and she has been Etienne Lamarque’s bodyguard for seven years. Nobody watching them—and there are several people watching them, and not just the sale representatives hoping to earn several hundred dollars in commission—would note anything about them that was outside the norm.

Except there’s one problem. The boy Sacha is guarding is not Etienne Lamarque, for all that he looks exactly like him.

*

Seven hours after Etienne disappears, Sacha’s day off is interrupted by a call from Ralph Lamarque. “Etienne is missing,” he says. “Dara’s sending you a portal.”

Sacha’s already up and moving. She’s only dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, but it’ll have to do. The portal glows in the dark of her room—she steps through and into the foyer of one of the Lamarque homes. Dara, grey-faced from forming and maintaining a portal from several kilometers away, directs her to Ralph’s study.

She doesn’t get to ask the witch what’s happened. She knows it’s something to do with Etienne, and she has to concentrate to keep her hands from trembling. Two men carry a body past her as she makes for the study. She recognizes it, even with half its face blown out. Mark had worked for the Lamarques nearly as long as she had. She’d liked him—he’d never get needlessly violent with her when they sparred. 

She follows the blood splatter into the study and finds Mr. Lamarque sitting behind his desk, tie loose about his throat, eyes on the rain streaked window overlooking the grounds. His wife, Evette Lamarque is perched delicately upon the edge of his desk, one expertly manicured hand resting lightly on his shoulder. The other is just setting a pistol with an ivory inlaid grip down.

Sacha positions herself across from them, hands behind her back and shoulders set, eyes fixed straight ahead. She’s very conscious of her bare feet, the tackiness of Mark’s blood, and the way it contrasts with the cold hardwood.

“He hasn’t been kidnapped,” Mr. Lamarque says without preamble. “His accounts haven’t been touched. Neither have any of ours. CCTV last saw him entering the empty restrooms at Silver Arrow while Mark waited outside. Eight minutes later, a figure matching Etienne’s description was spotted entering a vehicle with unregistered plates, alone. No ransom has been demanded, and there’s been no chatter—”

“What my husband is getting at,” Mrs. Lamarque interrupts, her voice cold and soft and cutting. “Is that everything points to Etienne having left of his own free will.” She looks at Sacha and cocks her head. Her eyes are flat and glassy, like a doll’s, and have about as much emotion.

“We’re rather impressed that he managed to slip past us this well, for this long. We didn’t think he had this sort of initiative in him. But there’s nowhere in this world he can go that we can’t follow.” She picks up her pistol, cocking it and pointing it unwaveringly at Sacha, who does not blink and does not move.

“What we want to know,” Mrs. Lamarque continues idly, “Is how he managed it in the first place.”

“I don’t know ma’am,” Sacha says.

“I told you,” Mr. Lamarque says.

Mrs. Lamarque hums and squeezes the trigger. Sacha hardly stumbles as the bullet tears through her shoulder. Even as the pain sears through her, the blood is slowing to a trickle, and then to a stop, the hole closing. She’ll have to open it again, later, make sure the fibres of her shirt haven’t been sealed into her flesh. Doubtlessly, Mrs. Lamarque knows this. She cocks the gun again.

Sacha swallows, straightens, and braces herself.

“How can you not know?” Mrs. Lamarque asks. Her voice is calm. She might be asking about the weather and not her only child’s disappearance. “Your job is to watch him. Your job is to keep him where we want him, to keep him alive and untouchable. He can’t have done this without extensive planning, and he couldn’t have done this without help. Did you give it to him?”

“No ma’am,” Sacha says.

“She’s telling the truth,” Mr. Lamarque remarks, swivelling minutely in his chair to regard her. Where his wife’s eyes are dead, his are deep pools of darkness, alive with many things, none of which bode well for anyone. Sacha allows herself to be drawn into them, even as dread shudders up her spine. The descendants of fae folk, even those with as little true blood in them as Mr. Lamarque, are always recognizable by their devouring eyes.

“Then how did he get away?” This time, venom bleeds through Mrs. Lamarque’s imperturbable calm, and Sacha refocuses with a blink.

“I don’t know ma’am,” she says.

This time, the shot is to her thigh. She drops to her knees with a grunt of pain. The bullet is lodged in her bone. She heals—she always does—but it’ll be agonizing to cut out. When she stops bleeding, she drags herself upright, hardly panting, hardly sweating, even as the pain radiates through her bones. She prides herself on this.

Mrs. Lamarque sighs and sets her pistol down again, slipping off her perch. “You deal with this,” she tells her husband, and leaves with a staccato click of her heels and a waft of perfume.

“I need a list of names of everybody in our employ who you think may be compromised in any way or might have helped Etienne in his little escapade. I need another list of every single one of his friends and associates, everyone he ever went clubbing with, everyone he met on any kind of regular basis, even if it was a sales rep. I need both by the end of the day, and I need it all to be compiled discreetly.”

Mr. Lamarque sighs and picks up a glass, admiring the play of the light against the crystal before he sets it back down on its tray. He doesn’t drink anymore, but he likes to be surrounded by the accoutrements. “We can’t have anyone trying to find him before we do. They’ll try to leverage him against us, and if they can’t, they’ll try to leverage his absence. You understand?”

“Yes sir,” Sacha says.

“Good. Go.”

She nods, bows, and turns.

“Oh,” Mr. Lamarque adds. “You can see medical after you’ve given me the lists. Not until then.”

“Understood sir.”

*

Twenty-six hours after Etienne disappears, Sacha is still alive. It’s more than she expected. Etienne is still gone, which is more than his parents expected. Sacha’s lists and their own inquiries unearthed two moles—one from the police, and one from a rival Family—Sacha doesn’t know who and doesn’t care; both are made examples of, but neither had anything to do with Etienne’s escape.

(That’s what it is, really. An escape. Sacha knows this. So do the Lamarques.)

As far as they can tell, no one helped Etienne at all or had any inkling of what he was planning. The only way this is possible is if Etienne ran away in the spur of the moment. Since this is completely improbable, nearly impossible, it’s quickly dismissed. And by then, how he got away is rendered secondary compared with finding him.

 A team is put together to track him down. Sacha expects to be put on this team. She isn’t, and she wonders if it’s because the Lamarques don’t trust her anymore. But that can’t be it, or she’d be dead. And she isn’t. Instead, she’s called back to the study as soon as she’s cleared by medical. This time she’s dressed in her usual gear—black shirt, black pants, black boots, black mask. Hair combed and pushed out of her eyes.

Mr. Lamarque looks unchanged, though the circles under his eyes are a shade darker. This time he’s standing before the mantle, smoking. He took it up when he stopped drinking.

“Evette thinks we should get rid of you,” he says, tapping the end of his cigarette clear of ash. “I told her it would be a waste. You’ve been with us—what, eight years?”

“Nine, sir.”

“Nine. And you’ve been Etienne’s guard for most of those years. You know him better than anyone—current cockup notwithstanding.” He blows out a thin stream of smoke, stubs the cigarette out on a dragon scale ashtray. “No, you’re still useful.”

There’s a knock on the study door. “Open it,” Mr. Lamarque tells her, and she does as she’s bid.

It’s only her training that keeps her from freezing when she sees who’s on the other side. It’s Etienne. She steps back automatically to let him in, and he sweeps past with only a cursory look at her to throw himself into one of the chairs besides the mantle.

“’Sup,” he says, his dark eyes—so much like his father’s—giving the room a thorough sweep.

This is definitely not Etienne.

Sacha’s hands twitch towards one of her knives as she steps smoothly between the imposter and Mr. Lamarque. She doesn’t kill the kid, only because she hasn’t been given leave to, but she’s ready for whatever this is.

“Stand down, Sacha,” Mr. Lamarque says, amusement curling through his tone. “I know it isn’t my son.”
She stows her knife away and stands to the side, eyes flickering between not!Etienne and her boss. Maybe she’s not ready for whatever this is.

“Tell me how you knew,” Mr. Lamarque says.

Sacha only hesitates for half a breath. There were many things—the way the kid looked at her like she was nobody, the way he walked into the study with his shoulders back and a swagger and he studied everything like he was cataloguing the worth of every item, the way he sat without permission and looked at Mr. Lamarque without any fear.

The fact that he said ‘sup.

“He’s too bold,” she settles on.

Not!Etienne raises his eyebrow.

“Your kid’s a soft thing, huh?” he asks.

Mr. Lamarque ignores him. “And this is why you’re useful,” he tells Sacha. “This is Cipher. Until Etienne is found, Cipher will take his place, and you will guard him as if he really is my son. Further, you will teach Cipher everything he needs to know to play Etienne convincingly.”

“Yes sir,” Sacha says.

“This is Etienne’s bodyguard?” Not!Etienne—Cipher—asks. He cocks his head and gives her a slow lingering look, from top to bottom and back up, and his expression tells her he isn’t impressed by what he sees. “I thought bodyguards were supposed to be big, lumbering brutes. You must be special.”

“She is,” Mr. Lamarque says, “You had better be worth the fortune I spent on your contract.”

“Hey, I’m a professional,” Etienne drawls. “I’ve memorized the dossier you gave me—quiz me if you don’t believe me.”

“I’m a busy man,” Mr. Lamarque says and smiles thinly. Sacha is gratified to see a flicker of fear flit across Cipher’s face at the expression. “Sacha, train him on how to behave like Etienne. Nobody else, other than Evette, knows who he really is, and it will stay that way, understood?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. Prepare him for tomorrow. It’ll be his first test—an outing downtown, I think. Wherever Etienne liked to go when he was bored.”

The dismissal is clear. Sacha bows her head and turns to Cipher, who blinks lazily up at her before he seems to realize they’re supposed to leave now, and draws himself languidly to his feet. “Lead the way,” he says.

“No,” she replies, “You lead, I follow. That’s my job.” She knows Mr. Lamarque must’ve given Cipher a floor-plan of the house. If he really memorize the dossier, Cipher knows where to go. His eyes curve into crescents with a smile, like he knows what she’s doing and is amused by it.

​“Right,” he says, “Bye Daddy.” And he strides out of the room.