#And the morning shift has been mercifully released home

[creepyscritches]

My grandma is 80 and almost never wants to go do things, but every year she gets excited to go shuffle around her little shops on Black Friday with me and my mom and eeeeevery year she heehaws at me buying my annual supply of handsoap from bath and body works during their buy 3 get 3 sale. I have so much soap, by god, if I run out again before next November I'm going to kill myself

[libradusk]

Morning Embers | Rex

Word Count: 4.6k

Pairing: Captain Rex x Reader

Summary: The morning after your unexpected ‘activities’ on Felucia leads both you and Rex towards a string of confessions you should have stumbled down long ago.

Warnings/Content: AFAB reader (though no gender is explicitly mentioned), smutty soft sex, admission of feeeeeelings and morning-after anxieties, a much more subby Rex than in the previous chapter (I mean...)

a/n: This is set during the events of “Bounty Hunters” from season 2 of TCW, except instead of fighting pirates the reader and Rex end up boning down.

Follow up chapter to this

It's the morning sun that first leads you to stir. It slips its finger-like rays through the cave’s mouth to rake across your marked skin, and play across your face until your lashes flutter open and force you to squint against the light. The rest of your body soon follows in whirring to life in a cascade of sensation, starting with the ache rooted across your muscles and ending with the solid warmth and weight of the second body currently entwined and draped across your own.

The trooper curled around you groans at the light’s intrusion, the sound vibrating down the slope of your shoulder from where his face nestles in the crook of your neck. You shiver at the feeling, it's a welcome distraction to the cramp brewing in your legs and the tenderness throbbing at the apex of your thighs.

You grimace slightly as you attempt to stretch out your limbs as best you can from where they remain trapped beneath the entanglement of Rex’s body. There’s a sizeable pool of slickness smeared across your inner thighs that has long-since gathered and cooled there following your ‘activities’ the evening before. It serves as another reminder of the line you had finally crossed alongside the Captain beside you, a prelude to the mark he had branded onto your heart that would neither fade nor be washed away, unlike the more physical reminders he had littered your body with.

But despite the discomfort and the aching and the little comfort your flimsy nest of clothing provided, you’re content, happy if not completely wrecked in a wonderful way.

You can’t help but smile to yourself as you turn to glance at Rex snoring lightly against your shoulder. For the first time since your impromptu landing, and possibly even before that, he seems peaceful, comfortable even despite sharing the same unforgivably hard surface of the cave floor, and no doubt sporting an arm that is devoid of feeling from where you’ve been laying on it all night. You risk the chance to ghost your fingers over the slope of his back, marvelling in the warmth of his skin even in the chill of the morning air. He’s no longer as furnace-hot as he had been at the peak of his lust-induced delirium, and you wonder if you had succeeded in fucking out the last of whatever toxin it was that had made a temporary home in his body.

The outside world begins to stir alongside you now, though you find it difficult to focus on the chimes of birdsong whistling through the morning air as your fingertips idly trace the indents your nails left behind on his shoulder blades, and the constellations of faint scars that you had failed to focus on before.

Your mind begins to drift and spiral before you can stop it.

Things were bound to change between you now.

Despite how much you had enjoyed your night with the trooper, it hadn’t exactly been with the Rex you had known for so long now. Granted you could look at it as a necessity for helping someone you cared for so deeply, as well as it scratching the itch that desperately needed sating between you both, but you still stung with the knowledge that when he awakened, you would no doubt be forced into an uncomfortable conversation, one that could only end with the two of you figuring out how to function as colleagues for long enough to survive the journey back to the others without getting yourselves dismissed for inappropriately fraternising before finally severing whatever it was that had built up ever since you had met him.

And that realisation hurt. You would happily spend the rest of your days trapped against the cold floor if it meant that reality would never unfold at your feet.

At least you could enjoy these last few stolen moments for a little while longer before they were locked away from you forever.

But as Rex subconsciously tightens himself around you once you place a soft kiss to his sleep-furrowed brow, you realise that it's never going to be that simple. Your chest aches with a newfound guilt that you know his own will mirror when he awakens.

You’re not entirely sure how long you lay there counting the steady rise and fall of his chest and daring to run your hand down the length of Rex’s back before he finally stirs awake, but it seems much too short all the same once his sleepy gaze locks with your own and causes the lump in your throat to constrict further. His vision appears honeyed and blurry as he releases an arm from you to paw at his eyes with the back of his fist, a yawn tapering off into a disgruntled grunt as he scowls at the morning light now spilling around the shield of your body and pouring through the entirety of the cave. Rex wears an expression that would be more befitting of a man hungover from a night at 79’s, rather than one who had just engaged in a night of toxin-induced fucking. The scene is almost too domestic in its nature, the contrasting softness of his expression and the painful emotions staining your thoughts only twisting your heartache further until it wrings your stomach between its claws with a sickening force.

Before you can spiral further into your misery however, he’s blinking the remainders of sleep from his eyes and focusing them directly on you.

You swear you can pinpoint the exact moment the realisation hits him as his pupils contract.

“Good morning, Captain.”

You’re not sure what exactly possesses you to say it. Even when you’re all but wilting under his gaze, your brain apparently can’t resist the urge to tease him, though your voice quivers despite its lightness, betraying what little attempt to save face your mind has scrambled for.

Rex remains frozen, and in any other setting you would find his expression comical. His eyes dart between your face and the way you absentmindedly worry your lip between your teeth, to down to where the two of you are tangled like lovers and sticky with a mixture of fluids. Another beat passes before his entire body catches up with his mind and attempts to curl in on itself in clear mortification. This time a bitter laugh tears itself from your throat as you shuffle away from him and catch the way he subtly attempts to flex the blood back into his dead arm.

“Oh, fuck.”

His expression is hidden as the expletive leaves him in a strained sigh, the shame coating his words like a clear, thick poison despite the hands smothering his face.

You bite down harder on your lip at the way his cursing muffles into frustrated gibberish as his body attempts to sink back into the unforgiving surface of the floor. His face remains hidden by the shutter of his fingers, though the flush colouring the tips of his ears red is a clear indication of what he looks like behind his hands. He lets out what you think is a cross between a sigh and a shout of frustration into his palms, tone raising in what you rationalise to be the finale of his self-deprecation. There’s a smidgen of comfort to be found in the way he has completely forsaken the stoic demeanour befitting for a Captain in the simple hope that the ground beneath him would mercifully open up to claim him.

You almost have the urge to pat him on the shoulder in a sign of solidarity until you catch yourself and cringe at the thought. Instead, you focus your attention on picking at a loose thread poking out of the seam of the uniform crumpled beneath you and attempting to formulate an excuse you could supply to the others to explain the various stains tarnishing the fabric.

Rex takes another moment to himself before clearing his throat and folding his hands atop his chest as he turns to address you properly.

“I’m sorry.” His words are simple and exhaled within a sigh, yet the crease etched deep in his brow speaks volumes in place of them. “I shouldn’t have - I wasn’t… kriff, I’m so sorry for everything.”

His face is painted in layers of shame and you have to fight back the urge to kiss away the guilt lining his forehead and mouth.

“I’m as much at fault in this as you are, maybe even more so.” Your voice comes out much smaller than you intend it to, almost getting lost in the shadows of the cave itself. Rex’s eyes wander from yours after you finish speaking, expression shifting into something unreadable, and for a horrible moment you fear you’ve said the wrong thing.

His fingers flex instinctively against each other, nervously - you note. You had seen them do this countless times before battle and meetings alike, though you weren't sure if he ever noticed this habit himself. The pair of brown eyes before you remain glossed over in thought even as you attempt to desperately search them for some semblance of a response.

“...No. I never meant for it to, you know, happen like… this, between us I mean.” The last word leaves him in another exasperated sigh that has him gripping the bridge of his nose in frustration. His tone holds a familiar discipline now, but his thoughts seem to spill out in a jumbled heap that reflect the state of his current head-space.

It takes a moment for the words to fully sink in, but as soon as they do, your pulse is back to hammering in your ears the same way it had yesterday when you had returned to stumble upon his naked form.

“What exactly are you trying to say?” The words jump from your mouth before you have a chance of reeling your thoughts back, and you hope to the stars that he doesn’t pick up on the swell of hopefulness buttering your shock.

You aren’t stupid, you can guess what it is he’s attempting to voice, anxious as he is, but you can’t trust that you’re not dreaming until the words fall from his lips themselves.

Rex breathes out deeply from his nose. For a brief moment, his eyes threaten to wander down to where the sunlight settles warmly over your naked chest before they firmly lock on to your own. An involuntary shiver passes through you at their intensity. The way he stares at you makes you feel more naked than what even your own bare body can reflect - though the urge to run away and hide has long since died. There was no point in attempting to hide yourself away at this point, especially considering you had all but implored him to expose the layers of his own vulnerability in front of you.

“I’ve wanted this, wanted more than just this I mean, for a long time now.”

A smile somehow manages to tug at the corner of your mouth despite the way your pulse has skyrocketed in your ears at his confession, the noise whiting out to a pleasantly shocked buzz as you let the words sink in and wrap around your heart. In the very back of your mind, you register the faint sting of a pinch against your upper arm. It's one that you don’t even realise you have bestowed upon yourself until your shoulder shifts uncomfortably with the pressure, but also reassures you all the same that, no - this is not a dream.

In a heartbeat, Rex has melted from a disgraced, morose soldier to a flustered mess of a man. He rubs at the back of his neck in a way that's almost cliché, but also so endearing that you can’t look away from the sight of him.

“‘Suppose there's no use in hiding it now is there? Not now I’ve gone and made a royal kriffing mess of everything, that is. Guess I’m the same old di’kut I’ve always been” He punctuates the statement with a bitter chuckle and a faux smirk that doesn’t meet his eyes. You frown, an uncomfortable weight settling itself in your gut once more.

“...Rex, I’ve wanted this too, you know. I just didn’t hedge my bets on it taking the effects of an alien toxin to force me to confront it.” Not the most eloquent way of putting it, but you attempt to match his embarrassed smirk with a smile of your own, hoping that the intention behind your statement reaches him all the same. “The only di’kut you’re guilty of being is an oblivious di’kut.”

That gets a grin out of him, one that stretches until the corners of his eyes are crinkling with mirth. Happiness blooms within you at the sight, and your body finally allows itself to relax for the first time since awakening that morning.

Where before there had been a burning heat stretched between you, now there is a comfortable marigold warmth twinkling across your skin as Rex leans forward to catch your lips with his own. This kiss is gentle, almost hesitant in how soft it is. You can feel the tickle of laughter bubble in your throat as your smiles meld together.

“I’ve made a real mess of you.” Rex murmurs the words half-apologetically against your lips as he ghosts a touch over the love-bites decorating your neck. The trail of his fingertips threads goosebumps across your flesh as he dips them towards your collarbone - itself painted with bruised hues that could rival the vividness of a night sky.

He sounds almost proud, feigning an apology through the way he dances butterfly kisses over your marked skin before drifting them back towards your face. You roll your eyes at him before sweeping him into a deep kiss that steals the breath from his lungs and has him keening into the hand you have cupped around his jaw, effectively silencing him with the sound of his own groan.

You remain like this for a while longer, lazily locked in an embrace that has you glowing from the inside out with a steadily creeping heat, both breaking apart only momentarily each time to mouth over the expanse of the other’s skin, hands caressing and exploring as though you hadn’t spent the better part of yesterday grasping onto each others bodies as though they were the only things that grounded you both. Rex’s broad hands rub apologetic little circles across the bruising peppering your hips and wrists, brow twitching each time your reflexive squirming forces his eyes to crack open to face up to his misdoings. You swallow his concerns behind kisses before they can leap from his lips, curling around him a little tighter each time.

He doesn’t fight you - finally content to give in to the affection dripping from every single one of your touches and allow it to wash over him.

“Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum”

I love you.

The words slip off his tongue easily, as though they were always meant to be spoken against your lips. You find yourself smiling into the kiss once again, teeth scraping slightly against the plush velvet of his mouth just enough so that he knows you’ve translated it - you’ve spent adequate time around him and his brothers to pick up an inkling of mando’a, it proves to be enough to allow you to stumble through his words with a dizzy heart.

He freezes suddenly, and it dawns on you then that these words were not meant to reach your ears just yet. But he no longer needs to speak them for their intention to be known, to be felt by you in the way he holds you close as though you are the most valuable treasure across all the moons and stars. Your body sings as you press back against him with more fever than before, determined to have him feel the depth of your own adoration through the press of your lips alone.

I love you, I love you, I love you. I fear I have always loved you.

You kiss the mantra across his jawline, delighting in the way his heartbeat hammers in a crescendo with your ministrations as you flatten your tongue against his pulse. That all too familiar flicker of warmth begins to bloom deep in your stomach, snapping into something stickier once again as a particular scrape of your teeth sends a rumble echoing through his chest. The urge to pull him even closer prevails, and you resort to throwing your thigh over one of his own to tug him harder against you. The heat of his cock grazes against you as you straddle him. It weeps and twitches with the contact and succeeds in pulling a groan from you both even as your lips and tongues continue to mesh together.

Despite the ever rising fever of the situation, there is no animalistic urge driving the force of both of you this time. Instead you find yourself lazily dragging your hips over his, the movement slow and resonating with teasing affection and a desire to truly feel every part of him underneath you. Though you can feel his thighs shaking as they remain caged beneath the weight of your body, Rex remains largely still, the small cues his body whispers to you being the only indicators of his aching desire to be joined with you once more.

He’s being so good, but you can’t help but want to tease him a little more, to stretch this moment out even further behind each smile that twists into your kisses. A frown pulls halfheartedly at his brow and you trace it lightly with the tip of a fingertip in mock-comfort. Yet still he submits to your wiles, continuing to surrender himself to your mercy even as your core grinds wetly down against his arousal. It's only when the tip of it grazes over the slick seam of your opening that his hips finally betray his composure. They canter upwards with a jolt that has him hissing through his teeth and has you feeling the wettest you’re positive you’ve ever been in your life.

It's an impossible task to not revel in the sight of him twisting beneath you, blown ochre peering up through his lashes to stare up at you pleadingly as his hands sit patiently atop your hips. Your smile threatens to wobble into a smirk as Rex lets out a whine that edges on being pathetic. He’s so responsive to every touch, even the ghosting of your nails as you run them down and over the expanse of his chest with a feather-light caress. 

You map out the crossfire of scars stitched across the skin there in the way you had longed to do the night before, circling each one lovingly as you sit back against the cushion of his abs. He moans openly now, emotion thick in his throat as you continue to lavish attention over the marks decorating his body, the sound betraying what little discipline he had left to hide behind. His hands drag themselves in an electrifying path down your thighs, fingers just barely brushing over the bone of your knees. Despite the lust swimming in his stare, his entire focus is trained on you as he silently begs for you to emancipate him with some form of relief.

Your touch wanders down towards the dip of his hips behind you, coming to rest just short of the base of his throbbing cock, and you delight in the way he twitches and writhes even further as you deny him once again. At last, the trooper throws his head back in defeat, practically growling with frustrated arousal yet never breaking eye contact with you, his face twisted with a tortured anguish of the most delicious degree.

“Please.” He mouths the words to you, voice stolen by a shuddering breath that falls from him in ragged pants. You cock an eyebrow, heart pounding all the while as you lean forward to tower over the quivering mess of a man you had sculpted with your teasing. Your palms press smoothly into the ground beneath Rex’s head as you support yourself to glance over him. The sensation is almost icy against the clamminess of your palms, but it's easy to ignore the cutting feeling as your lips brush just barely against his own with the proximity of your faces.

“What is it you want from me, cyare?”

Rex groans at the sound of his mother tongue on your lips, panting harder as his resolve crumbles to dust at last and forces him to jerk upwards to cup your face with a clammy palm. Your lower half sits slick and eager against the muscles of his abdomen and you know he can tell that you’re just as desperate for him as he is for you. But even still, you refuse to back down, not until you’ve succeeded in winding him just that last little inch further.

His thumb swipes over the apple of your cheek and you tilt your head to steal the tip of it past the part of your lips, tongue dashing across the pad of it just slightly, but enough to leave him reeling once more and tighten the fist his spare hand now has fisted in the mess of uniform beneath his hips.

“Please-” his voice is strained and gravelly as his words finally find purchase in the hazy air between you. “Need you, need you so badly.”

The way his groans wrap so delightfully around his whine of your name is all it takes for you to put an abrupt end to your foreplay. You grant him one last fleeting kiss before pulling backwards from his face, savouring the way his eyes snap open wide with shock and the way his upper body all but catapults upwards on his forearms when your hand reaches behind to finally grasp hold of his weeping cock. He barely has time to choke down on his words as you rise to angle your hips before you sink down and split yourself open across his lap.

Your eyes roll backwards behind closed lids at the stretch of him. He’s impossibly hot and pulsating within you as your hips settle flush together, his pelvis pushed directly against your clit with the angle. It dawns on you then, amidst the haze of sensuality clouding your thoughts, that you’ll likely never quite get used to the incredible size and strength of him, and that thought excites you more than you thought it possibly could.

You sigh deeply as you give an experimental buck of your hips, the sound tapering off into a moan at the creeping pleasure that licks up your spine from the shallow movement alone. The calloused palm of a hand laces itself with your own, and your eyes crack open to see Rex staring up at you with utter reverence. The borderline slack-jawed expression he sports as gazes over your body promises to turn you bashful with the sincerity of its emotion, of all things.

“You’re beautiful.” His voice is the softest you’ve ever heard it and it threatens to sap the final dregs of your bravado from your bones, your dominance faltering to fold in on itself. You counter his praise with another roll of your pelvis, only to whimper as he hits up inside you so perfectly that stars flash behind your vision. Your hands splay out against his chest as you work yourself into a sloppy rhythm, pleasure dictating the pace of your hips. Rex’s free hand slips down your body until the pad of his thumb can swipe against your clit in firm strokes, his ministrations still managing to drag a sob from your throat despite the slight quiver in his wrist.

“Fuck, Rex!” Your words are as broken as the shuddering movement of your hips and Rex’s other hand unfurls itself from your own to support your body as you bounce on his cock. “If you keep - if you keep doing that…”

He’s thrusting up into you now in return, grinding against your cunt so perfectly that you can feel your toes curl. His thighs slap against your own in a way that’s almost obscene, but it's difficult to focus on the sound amidst the way his hands work you in tandem: rubbing tight little circles against your clit with one while the other firmly pulls you down in time with his thrusts.

“It’s ok.” He whispers hoarsely to you, concentration strangling around the pent up affection in his tone. “Let me take care of you - take care of you the way I want to forever.”

The force of your orgasm knocks your head back and drops your mouth open into a silent scream. It ripples through you, catching the breath in your lungs and causing you to flutter around Rex even as you still above him. The increased sensation has him gasping and lunging forwards off of the ground. He pulls you against his chest and holds you tight as his hips stutter up into you harder. The newfound angle catches the both of you off guard and has you warbling his name with a sob, wound tight and shaking through the waves of white-hot pleasure bottoming out within your belly, completely and utterly overstimulated as you chase the light few drops of your release.

Rex follows soon after, yelling out as your walls milk him for everything he has until you slump forward against him. A plea of your name fades into a groan that you echo in time as he releases inside you, his abdomen flexing as you bury your face into the crook of his neck and delight in the way his breath fans across your skin and tingles over your frazzled nerves.

Your limbs buzz with fatigue as you drop your full weight against him, completely sated but exhausted once more. A mewl of a moan shivers from you as Rex shifts beneath you to support your boneless weight and pull you closer within his arms. His breathing has evened out much faster than you thought it capable of, yet he’s currently still clinging to you as though you’ll disappear if he relaxes in full for even a moment. His head rests lightly against your own as you hazily latch on to the exposed stretch of skin next to where your face is situated, slowly but possessively marking his collarbone in a way that has him shivering and tightening his hold on you even further. Your lips and teeth pair to stain him with a wordless contract that mirrors the one that decorates your own décolleté.

You are mine and I am yours.

The sun casts warmly into the entity of the cave now and you know that soon you’ll need to begin your journey back to Obi-Wan and the others, or at the very least contact them with the reassurance that you are both still alive. But alas, your mind is foggy with the lull of your afterglow, and as Rex begins to massage the aching expanse of your back and hips you find your thoughts occupied solely on the Captain once again. You smile, love-sick and dopey and so grateful that he can’t see your expression from where you’ve melted against his neck.

Though the rumbling chuckle that sounds throughout his chest and the twitch of his jaw against the crown of your head makes you realise that he most certainly felt it.

Surely the Jedi could bear to wait a few extra hours at least.

You certainly needed the time to formulate a stream of excuses for the state of you both, if nothing else.

[monstersandmaw]

Taurgust - Male centaur x reader (nsfw) *Starfall Springs*

Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.

To celebrate Taurgust, the celebration of all things '-taur', I present Jaime, the hafflinger centaur and horse trainer. I know a couple of my Patreon supporters have been excited about this for a while, so I hope it lives up to expectations!

It's going up on Tumblr today (3rd August) so that I don't get too behind with the Taurgust prompts, after having only gone up on Patreon yesterday. I know that's a shorter 'early release' period than I usually like to give my patrons, but I think they’ve forgiven me, given that I’ve got my dragon shifter series starting this month (Ep. 1 is already up), and the giveaway drabbles are also being posted, so there’s lots of unique and early release content on Patreon!

Reader is gender neutral, and divorced (married young and foolishly…). They had a terrible accident while out on the horse one day, and have been searching for a trainer to help Peregrine get over whatever it is that’s still tormenting him…

It's 7984 words and quite story-heavy, but there is some nsfw at the end.

---

“I’m at my wit’s end, please…” you begged down the phone. “I’ve tried trainers from all over my part of the country. No one will look at him. I don’t know what else to do. They’re all telling me to put him down but I won’t give up on him.”

The trainer on the other end of the line took a deep, steadying breath, as though preparing to turn you down. In fact, you knew he was going to turn you down.

And so you interrupted him before he could deliver the news, just like all the others had. “Please, this horse has been through a lot. He means everything to me and… I can’t…” Choked with tears, you ground to a halt. “Please…”

“You really intend to load him up in a trailer and drive six hundred miles with him to Starfall? You think that’s what’s best for him?”

“Don’t you dare -!” you started hotly, but managed to contain yourself a second later. “I’m sorry. I just… I refuse to believe he’s unreachable.”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t think it’s practical. There must be someone in your area who -”

“Weren’t you listening?!” you cried. “No one wants to look at him. They say he’s too broken after the accident. The vet’s fixed him up physically, but there’s so much that he’s got going on in his head…”

“I'm sorry.”

Anger flared, hot and bitter, and you simply slammed the phone down. “Fuck!” you spat, kicking at the skirting boards in the hallway and leaving a big scuff mark on them.

The next morning you awoke with an oddly calm sense of resolve and rose well before dawn, backed the trailer up to the entrance of the barn, propped the doors of the barn against the sides of the trailer so that there was nowhere for Peregrine to go, and went to his stall. As usual, when he saw you, he reared and plunged, eyes rolling, his storm-grey coat already shivering.

“Easy,” you said, but you knew it would make no difference.

He was wild now. Ever since the accident which had nearly killed you and done a lot of damage to him nearly six months ago now, he had refused to be around you without going berserk. It was heartbreaking to see the once calm animal that you’d bought with the settlement from your divorce - as something to enjoy during your free time - become this crazed beast, lashing out, snorting, whinnying, screaming…

Undoing the bolt and standing well out of the way, you watched him charge up the barn at a fast trot, blowing and snorting. He shot into the trailer and you rammed the door shut behind him. He immediately kicked the closed ramp with both hind hooves, sending you reeling back, but mercifully not before you’d slammed the bolts across.

With tears in your eyes, you set off.

The total journey to Starfall Springs would probably take you about nine or ten hours, given the traffic. You stopped three times, once to take a long nap in the back of your four by four, your dog Pip curled up along your legs. You'd be coated in his black and white fur by the time he shifted, but it was worth it for the comfort and closeness. You didn’t get a whole lot of that from anywhere else these days.

Every time you stopped, Peregrine would start up his banging and stamping in the back, but eventually he would stop and fall quiet. Each time he did, the tears came afresh. “I’m sorry,” you murmured to him as you pressed your hand against the side of the trailer before getting back into the car and setting off for the last leg of the journey.

The lights of Starfall Springs came into view long after sunset, and with your eyes prickling and your back and legs stiff after driving for so long, you pulled off the main road, down a track which your Sat Nav told you would lead to Broadleaze Farm. If he turned you away now, you were just going to leave Peregrine here. You couldn’t inflict another journey like that on the poor animal.

As you jolted along the track, you heard a barking from the farmyard up ahead, and a light flicked on. It was nearing midnight, and you knew this was a crazy-stupid idea, but some part of you was whispering that it might just work.

The clop of hooves on concrete greeted you as you killed the engine at the farm gate and climbed out. Looking around, squinting through the pitch darkness, you caught sight of what you thought was a loose horse walking towards you, but as he stepped closer to the beam of your car’s headlights, you realised he was a centaur.

“Can I help you?” he asked, his voice a curiously wary tenor. You recognised it instantly from the phone.

“Jaime?” you asked.

“Yeah, that’s me. Do I know you?”

“Uh… I’m the one who phoned up about the problem horse…”

His hooves fell silent on the yard and he stopped. “Fuck me, you actually did it,” he breathed. “You actually dragged your horse all the way out here.”

“Please don’t turn us away…” you practically whimpered.

He let out a great sigh and shook his head. In the half light, you thought his equine half looked remarkably like that of a hafflinger, a gingery blond with pale fetlocks and a thick bushy tail. His human torso was clad in a rusty red t-shirt, and as he raised one arm to scratch the back of his blond hair that was cropped close above his pointed ears and floppy across the top, you saw that there was a big hole in the armpit. Clearly he hadn’t been expecting visitors at this hour.

“Get back in,” he said, gesturing at your car, and your heart sank like a stone.

“No, please…”

“Get back in,” he said firmly and gently, “And I’ll open the gate for you.”

“What?” you couldn't be sure that you hadn’t just hallucinated after such a long time on the road.

“You can park over there by the barn. I’m assuming he hasn’t been out of the trailer for the entire journey…”

“That’s right.”

He shook his head again. “Pull up against that paddock gate. He can be turned out in there for the night. Has he eaten?”

“I put a couple of big haynets in this morning.”

Jaime nodded. “No hard feed.”

You shook your head. “And… not much water either. I just stuck a bucket in through the jockey door when we stopped.”

A slight scowl crossed his face. “At least you gave him that much. Come on.”

And with that, he unhitched the gate and opened it inwards while you drove through and parked up where he’d told you to, near a large, red barn with white window frames and eaves. Backing the trailer up in the dark was a challenge, but he guided you expertly.

He stood beside the open gate of the paddock so that Peregrine would only be able to bolt out of the side door into the field once the ramp had been opened.

The smell when you opened the upper hatch door was… pungent. Undoing the bolts one at a time, you then stood to one side and lowered the ramp.

Peregrine stood there, sixteen hands tall, soaked in sweat, chest heaving, eyes rolling. He took one look at the open space, stamped, tossed his head, and shot out down the ramp, hooves clanging and clattering as he thundered into the paddock.

Exhaustion washed over you, and with it came a fresh wave of gut-twisting guilt, and you simply burst into tears. Cover your mouth with your shaking hand, you watched him tearing around the paddock, head in the air, tail streaming behind him.

“He’s a beautiful animal,” Jaime commented from the gate. “Come on. It’s late. You can stay in the guest cottage. I usually use it for self-catering holiday lets but I had to do some renovations this summer. The bathroom is out of action, so you’ll have to shower at the farm house, but the plumbing is still ok.”

“Thank you,” you said, getting a handle on your emotions again. “And Jaime…?”

“Yes?”

“I’m… I’m so sorry.”

His sapphire blue eyes met yours in the light from the automatic lamp on the front of the barn, and he came about as close to telling you off as he’d got so far when he said, “I can’t say I’ll be able to do anything for him, but since you dragged the poor thing all the way out here, the least I can do is look after him.

At that point, Pip woke up in the back of the car and launched himself at the window in a flurry of barking.

Jaime shied slightly in surprise and then laughed. “You got a whole ark full of animals in there, or is that it?”

Sheepishly, you said, “I couldn’t just leave him home alone. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone.”

“I understand. He’s welcome too, so long as he doesn't eat my chickens…”

“I’ll keep him on a lead,” you promised. “Thank you so much.”

Jaime stepped to one side and said, “I’ll meet you over by that building there,” and he pointed to a single-storey cottage that might have been an old apple barn on the far side of the farmyard. “You can park up outside.”

You closed up the revolting trailer and after you’d driven slowly away, Jaime closed the gate on Peregrine, who was still trotting around and snorting, and then crossed the yard to join you.

The steady, syncopated rhythm of his hooves on the concrete was somehow soothing - especially since the only hooves you’d heard had been the chaotic clattering of Peregrine’s as he either paced his stall or thundered out into the paddock.

“The house is open,” Jaime said. “I’ll go and grab the key from the farmhouse. You need anything?”

“I wouldn’t mind a quick shower. I had planned to go and find a hotel in Starfall Springs itself while I’m here… I didn’t bring a towel.”

He grinned, causing a little dimple to appear in his cheek like a pulled thread. “I can get you one. You are one determined human, I’ll give you that. You must really care for that horse.”

“He… He means a lot to me. Represents a lot…”

“I get it,” he said. “I’ll take a look at him in the morning. Like I said, no promises. You get yourself settled and come over when you’re ready for your shower.”

You nodded. “Thank you again.”

The centaur just shook his head again in surprised disbelief that you were actually nuts enough to have pulled this all off, and then walked away.

The farmhouse door was open when you showed up a quarter of an hour later, and he was in the kitchen filling up a water bottle. Jaime showed you to the bathroom and left you to it, saying he was going to bed, and just to pull the door closed behind you when you left. You couldn’t believe how trusting he was, but maybe it was a small-town-thing.

His downstairs bathroom was actually more of a giant wet room, and as you showered you realised that the whole ground floor had been adapted and refurbished to suit a centaur. You wondered if he lived here alone. There was only one toothbrush in a glass by the sink, so you assumed that he did.

Later, curled up on the comfortable double bed in his holiday cottage, with Pip snuggled up beside you, you suddenly felt hopeful for the first time since before the accident. He hadn’t turned you away; you’d made it this far; and tomorrow was a new day.

Sleep, unusually for you, claimed you pretty quickly, and you tumbled back into blissfully deep, blank sleep until well after sunrise the next day.

When you did eventually stir, you realised with a jolt that it was almost ten o’clock. You never slept that late. You seemed only to have woken up because Pip was whining and asking to go out.

Clipping his lead on, you opened the back door of the cottage which backed onto a small patch of grass, bordered with lavender and other flowers, and you let him snuffle around and do his business while you stood there in your bare feet and pyjamas, blearily rubbing your eyes.

The sounds of the country were hardly unfamiliar to you but there was a fresh, odd kind of strangeness to this place. The dew had long since burnt off the grass, but it still smelled lush and green. The land around the farm rolled away in gentle, undulating grassy pastures until it reached a patch of oak woodland in the distance, and the whicker and whinny of horses reached your ears every now and again. You wondered idly how many he had here.

When Pip was done, you apologised to him for feeding him so late, and then fed yourself with a snack bar in your bag, and dressed. Taking your collie with you, you stepped outside onto the main farmyard and looked over to Peregrine’s paddock, only to find it empty.

Had he escaped? Jumped the fence and bolted?

Half blinded by panic, you rushed over to the field, but at the sound of a clicking tongue and the thud of hooves in a sandy surface, you followed the line of the barn around to the sunnier, south side of the building, and found a wooden round pen with high sides. There, cantering around the edge with his head held defiantly high, was Peregrine. Jaime stood at the centre, a long rope in his hands, attempting to do join-up with him.

The horse was having none of it.

He ignored Jaime’s every attempt to connect, his ears pressed back against his head instead of having one locked onto Jaime, and he just cantered round and round. Seeing that it was going nowhere, Jaime sighed and dropped his energy, turning away from your horse, at which point the gelding stopped cantering around and just stood there snorting at him.

You watched, silent and fearful, as Jaime left the ring, closing the gate on Peregrine and hanging up the rope on a hook on the fence. Then he turned to you.

“I’m sorry I slept so late,” you blurted. “I… I don’t normally… I didn’t set an alarm.”

He just smiled. “You’ve been through a lot. I’m glad you slept.”

You turned your gaze back to Peregine who was now looking out at the pastures beyond the round pen. “So… what do you think?”

“I think he’s been through a lot too,” he said quietly. “He doesn't want to know. He’s not interested in forming any kind of connection.”

“Is he a lost cause? Should I just have shot him the way everyone else thinks I should?” you asked bitterly.

Jaime tilted his head slightly as he regarded you steadily. “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll work with him. See what I can do.”

“Thank you,” you breathed and turned to look at him.

He was so handsome, it almost took your breath away. He had a dark dusting of freckles across his cheeks and over the bridge of his straight nose, and those eyes were the colour of a summer sky.

“Can I help in any way?” you asked.

Jaime chuckled. “You can help me with the other horses if you like.”

Your days settled into a rhythm after that. You had driven into Starfall Springs to stock up on groceries, and you lived in the cottage with Pip, getting up early to walk him down to the copse at the far end of the fields before retuning to bring in the horses from the overnight pastures with Jaime. He was an absolute delight to watch, there was no denying that. He wasn’t particularly tall, and his equine half was stocky and muscular, but when he cantered out into the field to round up the horses, he moved with such confidence, it was hard not to admire him.

The horses loved him and followed him without question. He introduced you to Leaf, a dappled two year old with one blue eye and one brown, and she took an instant shine to you and to your interesting pockets. She nosed around in them for a while until you pulled out an apple and flicked a questioning look at Jaime who just laughed and nodded. He watched you bite off a big chunk for her and hold out your palm, knowing that to offer an entire apple to a relatively young horse would probably result in her just choking on it. However, she quickly learned to bite off bits of the apple for herself while you held it, and she became your confidence booster while you were there. Progress with Peregrine was… nonexistent.

While Jaime worked with Peregrine, you worked with Leaf; getting her used to being handled by a human in preparation for being backed.

By contrast with Leaf, your own horse showed no signs of wanting anything to do with anyone, Jaime included, and it was slowly breaking your heart all over again. You’d let yourself hope that this might be the answer and it was becoming clear that it might well not be the answer at all.

One afternoon, about two weeks after you’d pulled up unannounced at his farm gate, Jaime was leading Peregrine from the round pen back to his paddock, when Pip, who had been sitting quietly beside you for the entirety of the schooling session, suddenly leapt to his feet, snapping at a passing butterfly.

The sudden movement startled Peregrine, and he shied, head jerking upwards, and he yanked himself free of Jaime’s grip and galloped off through the farmyard and out towards the freedom of the acres and acres of pasture beyond.

“Shit,” Jaime hissed as the gelding thundered down the farm track in a cloud of dust and out into the pastures to the south of the road, lead-rope dangling from his head collar and flailing this way and that. You prayed he wouldn’t step on it as he tore along the path.

“I’m sorry,” you gasped, grabbing hold of Pip far too late and making him sit back down, but Jaime shook his head.

“He was looking for any excuse today,” he said. “I could feel it. It’s not your fault.” He shot a look at the chagrined collie and added, “Nor his.”

“What now?”

Jaime sighed. “I’ll go out and get him.”

“Should I come too?”

He looked at you and nodded. “Though maybe leave Pip at the cottage…”

You nodded in return and led Pip away. The collie seemed to sense he’d done something monumentally unhelpful, and you tried to reassure him as you crossed the yard to the cottage. You settled him in his dog bed and gave him a rawhide bone to chew so that it didn't feel like a punishment, and then tramped down the dirt track in the direction that Peregrine had bolted.

Eventually you came to the sunny, wide hayfield that smelled of chamomile and wild flowers too, and found Jaime standing by the fence, resting his weight on his palms on the top rail, just watching Peregrine.

Coming to rest beside him, you stopped and looked from Jaime to the horse and back again. “Everything ok?” you whispered.

He just nodded without looking at you. He hadn’t taken his eyes of Peregrine.

“What’s going on?”

Nothing.

You sighed.

“Should I go?”

Silence.

“I’ll go.”

“No,” Jaime murmured gently, voice barely audible. “Stay. Look at him.”

You did.

He had his head down and was eating the lush grass. Your first thought was that he’d get colic if he had too much, but since Jaime himself was susceptible to colic, he must have known as much and wasn’t worried. Forcing yourself to relax and really look, you saw the way that Peregrine’s flank twitched idly as a fly landed on it, his tail swished casually, and he stepped eagerly forward to the next patch of clover. “He… He looks chilled out for once…”

Jaime smiled. “Yeah. I think… part of him has forgotten just how to be a horse, you know? He’s been so uptight since… well… whatever happened.” He fell silent for a while and the two of you continued to watch Peregrine out in the meadow. “You know,” Jaime said. “It might help me if you told me a bit about that…”

“No.”

The centaur didn’t look down at you or move, but he did tense up slightly. Then he sighed, but still he said nothing and passed no judgement.

“I’m sorry,” you said a second later. “I… I don’t like talking about it.”

“Neither does Peregrine,” he muttered.

“You can talk to horses?”

Jaime shot you a wry grin. “Horse whisperer, remember?”

“Yeah, but…” you glanced at his equine half, and he whickered a soft laugh.

“No,” he said. “I can’t speak to horses in the same way that you can’t speak to monkeys either.”

Your cheeks flushed at that. You should have known better than to insult him by even insinuating as much. “Sorry.”

“But he does have plenty to say,” Jaime amended. “He just doesn’t know how to say any of it.”

The two of you stayed there watching him for a long time. When perhaps half an hour had elapsed, you looked up at the sky, blue and endless above you, and said, “It was a day like today. Perfect weather, not a cloud in the sky.”

Jaime, who had been halfway through adjusting his weight on his hocks, went very still.

“We’d been out for a hack on the Downs; our usual long route. Lots of nice canter tracks. He’d been really good - he was always good - and we were just walking along the lane back to the yard.”

You bit back the memory of what happened next, even as it flashed before your eyes, which were stinging with unshed tears.

“Some eighteen year old who’d just passed his driving test came flying around the corner in his fucking Subaru, and he lost control at the corner. He swerved and skidded. I had my reins all long and wasn’t really paying attention. Peregrine went up and then the car slammed into him. We were thrown back into a dry drainage ditch. Peregrine landed on top of me. I fractured my skull and my spine, broke my shoulder and my leg and three ribs. ’Grin got off a bit lighter, with a lot of cuts and bruises, a fractured skull as well, and some other fractures to his legs.”

You still recalled the weight of him on top of you and the taste of blood in your mouth. The crushing, winded struggle for breath. And the pain. The doctors were surprised that you recalled all of it, given that many trauma victims have no memory of the events surrounding their injuries. Every horrifying second had stayed with you ever since.

Jaime still hadn’t moved. He was watching Peregrine, but every fibre of his being was concentrated on you and your story.

“I was in hospital for a long time. The vet wanted to put ’Grin down, but I kept saying no. I’d got some spare cash from the divorce settlement, and I said I’d use it all up on him if necessary. It’s mostly all gone now. Insurance paid for a lot of it, but… they don’t cover the call out fees and consultation fees for horse whisperers.” It struck you then, and not for the first time, that Jaime hadn’t asked you for a penny; not for the rent of the cottage nor for his time with Peregrine.

Eventually, he turned his clear eyes on you and said, “You know what? I think… I get it now. I think I get what’s troubling him so much.”

“What?”

“You said he reared up when the car shot round the bend?”

“Yeah?”

Jaime’s lips twitched into a sad smile. “We don’t usually rear up when we’re frightened. If we’re frightened, we equines just run. It’s instinct. We rear up when we think we have a chance… when we want to look intimidating… when we’ve got something worth defending. I think he was trying to protect you.”

Your chest heaved and tears welled up, hot and blinding. “Oh god,” you choked. “Grin…”

“I think…” Jaime went on in his gentle way, “I think that he’s still trying to protect you.”

“What? How?”

“If you don’t get on him, if you don’t go near him, you can’t get hurt.”

It was too much.

Your knees went out from under you as you sank into the grass and broke down. It was the first time since coming out of hospital that you’d really gone to pieces like this.

“Easy,” Jaime murmured, and to your surprise, he started to fold his legs to lie down beside you. Once he was on the same level as you, you just tipped forwards and hugged him. He let you cry against his chest, your back heaving, wracked with desperate, gulping sobs.

He stroked your back until you had nothing left to give and simply slumped, listless, against his body. Drained, wrung out, without even a shred of energy left for embarrassment, you pushed yourself shakily off his red tartan shirt and sniffed, smearing tears across your face with the back of your hand.

Jaime held you steady with a hand on your shoulder for a little while longer and then stood, levering himself upright and then he held out his hand to you. “Come on. I’ve got an idea.”

You cocked your head curiously, and allowed him to pull you upright.

“Can you mount from the ground?” he asked with a twinkle in his eyes.

Your voice was hoarse, your throat raw as you croaked, “What?”

He was still holding your hand, even though you were definitely steady on your feet now.

“You want me to try and get on Peregrine, despite the fact that he won’t let me anywhere near him, and I’m not wearing a back protector or a hat?”

Jaime laughed. “No. I’m not that reckless.” He turned his body parallel to the fence and added, “You can use the fence if you like.”

“Holy shit,” you blurted. “You want me to ride you?”

His ears darkened to a dusky red at that, but he laughed quietly and said, “I have an idea. Do you trust me?”

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I just… I didn’t think centaurs, you know, let just anyone hop on…”

“We don’t,” he said, rolling his eyes. “But I think this is going to work.”

“Ok…” you hedged.

It was easy enough to clamber up onto the fence a couple of rungs high and then settle yourself down on his sunny, golden back. His whole body tensed up as you landed gently, but as you adjusted yourself - and realised with a disconcerting jolt that you had nowhere to put your hands, no reins, no saddle - he relaxed a bit and glanced back over his shoulder. “Comfy?”

“Uh… yeah?” you said.

“Ready?”

“Absolutely not. What are you planning?”

“I’m just going to go and get him.”

And so he did.

It’d been a while since you’d ridden bareback, and it wasn’t exactly the most comfortable way to sit. Your thighs and calves gripped him so tightly that he wheezed softly and said, “Relax. I’m not going to let you slide off. Have you done much dressage by any chance…?”

“My mum ran a dressage stables,” you whispered as the two of you neared Peregrine, who was still eating nonchalantly, though his ears told you he knew you were coming over. “I grew up riding horses too big and powerful for me.”

“I can tell,” he said dryly. “Ok. Keep quiet now.”

He didn't try to sneak up on Peregrine, but he was soft and gentle in his approach. The big horse jerked his head up and snorted, backing away.

“Easy…” Jaime said and then, to your surprise, he turned broadside to the gelding so that he could see you clearly, riding on his back.

Peregrine whickered softly and then let out an ear-piercing neigh, nostrils flared wide.

“I’m just going to stand here for a bit,” Jaime told you. “Keep still and relaxed. Let him get used to it.”

The seconds ticked by, becoming a minute, then two, then three. After nearly five minutes, Peregrine shivered and seemed to go soft all over. His muscles stopped twitching and he lowered his head, licking and chewing in equine submission. His ears went soft too. He took a tentative step towards the pair of you.

The meadow grasses hissed and whispered around his hocks as he came cautiously over, delicate flowers bobbing their heads at his passage. Stopping perhaps a metre from you, he extended his neck and snuffed at your thigh, taking another cautious step closer.

“Hey buddy,” you murmured. “Hey. Come on; it’s ok.”

Your hand had been resting on your thigh and his velvety muzzle brushed over your knuckles, his warm breath fanning over your skin. He huffed gently and you turned your palm over, daring to touch him and, to your utter astonishment, he let you.

You and Jaime stayed like that for a long time until finally Jaime moved his hind quarters away from Peregrine and turned to face him himself. The gelding then quietly allowed the centaur to pick up the dangling lead rope from the ground and, without a word, Jaime led the horse back to the yard with you still aboard.

“You want me to get down now?” you whispered but Jaime shook his head.

“You’re good.”

Riding a centaur was one of those things you’d always dreamed about as a child, but never once imagined you’d ever get the chance to do. It was notoriously a very big deal for them, and in the name of helping your traumatised horse, this quiet trainer had allowed you, a relative stranger, to clamber up onto his back in what had to be a degrading act for him. It moved you more deeply than you cared to admit.

Jaime turned Peregrine loose in his paddock with an affectionate pat on his quarters, but this time instead of bolting off, Peregrine simply walked away, head low, tail swishing idly back and forth. With a smile and a gentle click, Jaime closed the gate and looked over his shoulder at you. “You want a hand down?”

“Sure,” you smiled, though really you didn’t need any help to dismount. He reached back and steadied you as you swung down off him, and as you landed lightly on the concrete beside him, you squeezed his rough hand. It was a hand that spoke of manual labour and the clever capability of the horse trainer.

“I’ve got someone coming over for a lesson in about half an hour,” he said. “You think you can get Ellie ready for me?”

You nodded. “Listen, Jaime… thank you. Not just for… you know… letting me ride you like that, but for everything you’re doing for me and Peregrine. And… And for back there in the field too…”

He closed his eyes and smiled softly, bowing his head. “You’ve been through a lot. I think I understand you both a bit better now. I think I know how to go forward from here.”

And with that, he left you to go and prepare the sand school for his lesson, and you headed out to the pastures at the back to catch the little bay mare for him. She was tricky to handle, but once caught, she usually behaved herself, and she had the most beautiful paces. You longed to ride her, but you were probably a bit too big for her.

Watching him teach the little human girl how to ride was a delight, and you stayed near the school, just watching them from the edge of the arena, and offered to take Ellie off her at the end of the lesson. The kid was beaming as she handed the reins over to you.

“Nice work,” you said and she grinned up at you.

“Jaime said he’s gonna teach me to do a leg yield next week, and that we might do some trotting poles too!”

“Whoa, that’s awesome!” you laughed and she suddenly darted off as a car approached and the person you took for her father stepped out.

You let their chatter slide into the background as you loosened Ellie’s girth before running her stirrups up and slipping the reins over head, unaware that Jaime’s eyes were on you, taking note of the way you moved around the horse; gently, calmly, efficiently. Horses had always made sense to you, which was why the trouble with Peregrine had been so heartbreaking. You’d backed youngsters, you’d coached lazy horses into fitness, and you’d even managed to get one of your mother’s best mares into a grand prix level dressage competition, but when it came to your own horse, perhaps you were just too close to see the problem in full.

You were brushing Ellie down in her stall, waiting until you could give her a small feed, when Jaime’s hooves sounded on the concrete of the barn and he came over and leaned on the stable door. “Got a proposition for you,” he said without preamble.

“Oh?” you asked, ducking under Ellie’s neck and running your hands over her coat between brush strokes. Jaime’s eyes drifted down to watch the movements of your hands and he didn’t respond for a moment.

He cleared his throat and said, “Uh… Yeah. I’d… I’d like you to help me back Leaf. If you’re up for it.”

“I’d love to!” you exclaimed softly. “Are you sure?”

“Well, I can only do so much before I need someone to sit on her,” he said. “Consider it your payment?”

“I have offered to pay you actual money, you know?” you said flatly.

“I know. You don’t have to do it, but… think about it.”

And with that, he was gone.

Work continued with Peregrine, and this time you were present. Jaime worked on lungeing and long-lining him, and when he wasn’t repairing fences or shuttling hay in his large hand-cart from the feed barn to the horses, you and he were backing Leaf together. She was an excellent student, and had been well prepared by Jaime. She trusted him implicitly, and now you, so she only twitched her back as she got used to the thick, cotton numnah that would sit beneath the saddle.

“Good girl!” you laughed, nuzzling her nose and running your hands up her cheeks as she relaxed again. “You’re so good…”

You shot Jaime a glance and he said, “Ready?”

You nodded. You had your hard riding hat and back protector on now, and though you weren’t expecting her to go berserk, it was always a danger. Jaime raised his foreleg and you grinned in thanks as you used it as a leg-up to lie across her shoulders so that she could get used to having weight on her back. She didn’t even shift. When it came to the saddle, however, she whipped round and nipped you right in the ribs with her sharp, pincer-like teeth as you did the girth up, and the string of curses that left your lips made Jaime blush and chuckle.

“Are you alright?” he asked, trying not to laugh outright.

“Fuck, that hurt!” you growled softly through gritted teeth and rubbed subtly at the blossoming mark on your torso, not wanting to spook Leaf. “Oh man, that’s going to leave one hell of a bruise.”

In the end, you backed her without any major issues, and you simply walked around the arena a couple of times with Jaime leading her, and then you dismounted and untacked her. Best to end on a positive note.

Once she’d been brushed down and fed, Jaime took her out to the paddock while you cleaned and stowed away her tack. You were just finishing up as Jaime came back into the barn, and he was noticeably hobbling on one back hoof.

“You ok?” you asked, hanging up her grooming box and coming over to him. “What happened?”

“Stone in my shoe I think,” he grumbled. “I’ll go sort it out. I won’t be long.”

“You… uh… you want me to get it out?” you asked.

His chest heaved just once, and then he laughed. “Sure. Thanks.”

“You mind if I use Leaf’s hoof pick?”

“Not at all.”

Instinctively, as you stood beside his hind leg, you placed your hands on his golden quarters and ran them the length of his leg, right down to the soft, creamy fluff around his feathery fetlocks. The centaur shuddered and a soft groan escaped him. You weren't sure if you should pretend that you hadn’t heard it. You dug the sharp flint out from between the frog and the iron shoe, and he grunted again in relief.

“Perfect, thanks. Listen,” he said, setting his hoof down and turning to look at you. “I… I was wondering if maybe you fancied eating with me tonight? It’ll be vegetarian, but… I’m not a bad cook? And you’ve spent every night in that little cottage alone since you got here…”

Your heart skipped a beat at that, but you smiled up at him and nodded. “I’d love to.”

His cheeks warmed beneath the spattering of freckles on his tanned skin. “Cool, well, I’m gonna go wash all this dust off my coat, but just come on over whenever you’re done. And… thanks for your help with Leaf today. She really likes you.”

“She’s had a good teacher all her life,” you said as the two of you headed out of the barn and parted ways in the farmyard. “I think she was looking forward to being backed today.”

You’d have been lying if you’d said you hadn’t spent a little longer on getting ready than usual before going over to the farmhouse later that evening, and when you pushed open the wide door and stepped inside, the most wonderful smell of cooking wafted out to greet you. Jaime was in the kitchen, and when you joined him he grinned at you from above a wok, a cotton apron protecting his human torso from splashes.

“Hi,” he said. “Help yourself to whatever in the fridge - there’s beer, and some wine too. Should be cold enough… I only got it out an hour or so ago…”

“You don’t normally drink?” you asked, checking out the selection and picking a bottle.

He shrugged. “Beer, yes; wine, not so much.”

“Well, I appreciate the thought. Though really it should be me buying you things to say thank you…”

He just grinned at you and shook his head.

Jaime was indeed a good cook, and after you’d shared stir fry, with Jaime sitting on a wide, flat cushion on the living room floor and you on the sofa, he asked if you wanted to walk Pip down to the lake. You told him that you’d already given him his evening run before coming over, and he nodded.

Mellow and just nicely full, you lay back on the sofa and your thoughts drifted to lying against his solid body as you’d broken down in the pasture after Peregrine had bolted, finally confronting what had happened all those months ago. Jaime’s mind seemed to have kept pace with yours, because he said, “About Peregrine… I wanted to thank you for trusting me.”

“Oh? I just told you what happened to us… you know…”

“No,” he said, shaking his head so that his floppy hair fell briefly into his eyes. “I meant… when you, er, rode me.”

“Oh!” you exclaimed, flushing. “Surely I should be the one thanking you…? Isn’t it, like, a huge deal for centaurs?”

He nodded and swallowed. “Yeah, it is, but I guess you’re alright.”

“But you hardly know me! I’m just some batshit insane human who showed up at your gate a month ago with a mad horse and a mutt, and you just let me stay!”

His rich chuckle filled your ears for a moment and you watched as the dimples formed in his cheeks again. They made you want to kiss them. “I like you,” he said. “I didn’t think I would after your phone call -  I thought you were pushy and selfish - but when you turned up, you turned out to be alright.”

“Just alright?”

Those sapphire blue eyes narrowed playfully and his voice deepened as he murmured, “No. Much more than alright. The horses trust you, and if the animals trust you, then you must be a good person.”

That moment hung between you before you set your glass down on the table at the end of the sofa that was clearly meant for non-equine guests, and stood. “Mind if I join you down there? It looks so comfy…”

Jaime shuffled slightly on the large, mattress-like cushion, stowing his legs out of the way against his body. When you plonked yourself down and immediately lay back against him, resting the back of your head on his human torso, he gave a shaky exhale and then brought his hands affectionately to your shoulders.

He whispered your name and you felt his hands tighten slightly on your arms.

“Mmm?”

“I’ve… I’ve never… um… with a human…”

You sat up and pushed gently so that he rolled over onto his side. He could easily have resisted, but he didn’t.

The momentum rocked him slightly onto his back, his forelegs bent, his human torso flat on his back. He was still smiling, eyes locked on your face. His belly was pale as parchment, and you could see his cock was already starting to unsheathe itself, the tip weeping onto his creamy coat. Again, he rasped your name.

In a swift motion, you straddled him and he gasped. “Is this ok?” you asked and he nodded. Scraping your fingertips the wrong way through his coat, you leaned your body forwards like a stretching cat as you moved your hands upwards towards his equine chest, and he shivered conspicuously. “You like that?”

Jaime nodded. “Feels so good… You know, when… when I saw…” he swallowed thickly, having difficulty speaking as you continued to caress him. “When I saw the way you were brushing Ellie down, all I could think of was your hands on my coat…”

“Like this?”

“Mm mph, like that,” he whimpered, his hind legs kicking slightly as his cock twitched eagerly. “Gods…”

His cock, hard and weeping and now fully exposed, was huge. There was no way that you could take much of him now, and none at all without some serious prep-work, so instead you decided on something else; you stripped naked while he lay on his back, unable to reach his own cock to ease the tension. It continued to twitch and drool onto his belly and he groaned at the sight of you.

“You’re gorgeous,” he moaned dazedly.

“So are you,” you replied, letting your gaze sweep slowly over his whole body. As you sank back down astride him, you let his slick, leaking cock slide against you, and he cried out, hind hooves thrashing suddenly.

“Gods, that’s so good,” he rasped, more to himself than to you as his eyes rolled and he arched his human spine up off the floor.

As you ground yourself steadily against his length, repeating the gesture, enjoying the slide of him beneath you, you felt him starting to shake beneath you. “Jaime?”

“I’m getting close,” he laughed nervously. “You look so good like that,” he added.

“Well, you did say you didn’t mind me riding you…”

“I can’t believe you went there,” he half gasped as you gave a long, slow, deliberate roll of your hips and then raised yourself up off him so that you could grab his cock with both your hands. You worked him closer and closer with your hands, occasionally flicking your tongue over his head just to hear him yell and pant in pleasure and watch his legs kick.

You tightened your grip and he curled his abs, almost sitting up towards you as his front legs pawed the air.

“I’m… I’m going to… I… uhnnff…” he grunted, and a heartbeat later, his cock pulsed and he spilled all over his belly, crying out as he came, his whole body going rigid and tense, muscles straining beautifully, powerfully.

His body convulsed, his chest heaving, and he came so hard you thought he might just pass out on you as you stroked him through the last throes of his orgasm. Finally he flopped back to lie flat on his back, his legs limp and his twitching cock softening slightly.

Still very much aroused yourself, you released him to lie down beside him and moved your hands down your own body to take care of yourself. He cracked an eye open and said, “Wait for me… to… recover, and I’ll… I’d like to… I mean… if you want…”

You grinned. “I’m not sure I can wait much longer, Jaime,” you said as you began to pleasure yourself. Your eyes fluttered and your lips parted, and Jaime watched you closely with his bleary eyes.

Rolling over onto his side, careful not to crush you, he clamped one surprisingly heavy foreleg over your own legs to stop you moving, and he brought his hand down to replace yours. “Please…” he said, whispering in your ear and nosing gently into your hair before kissing you softly on the side of your head. “Please let me make you come…”

And as he returned the favour, the weight of his strong foreleg pinning you down, you felt heat crawl up your body and down to your toes, the pleasure of his rough hand and the unfamiliar rhythm he set combining into an intoxicating mix that had you barrelling towards your own peak in no time. You could still feel what his cock had been like beneath you, and as you thought about that, he gave one final motion and you came hard, mind blank and body alight under his touch.

He kissed you and murmured as you came down from your orgasm, “Stay…? At least for tonight? Stay with me?”

You couldn’t really manage words, but as he showed no signs of moving his hand from where it still was, you smiled and nodded.  Your answer was met with another kiss and accompanied by a teasing touch that made you jolt and groan.

“Yes, I’ll stay,” you gasped.

“Good. I want to do that to you again.”

—

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—

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[prouvaireafterdark]

For the H/C meme: Gotta Stay Quiet To Avoid Discovery and Malex

Wasn’t sure if I wanted to write fun almost-interrupted smut or a suspenseful ‘shit we’re in enemy territory, we gotta stay quiet’ kinda fic and ended up with something that is simultaneously both and neither of those things lmao hope you like this ridiculous fic about Michael discovering he’s got a new kink. 

Also, apologies in advance for grievously misappropriating a line from canon, but I couldn’t help myself

Also on AO3

***

They’re walking down the hall of a top secret Project Shepherd compound that the government has no official knowledge of when Alex suddenly grabs Michael by the jacket and hauls him around a corner and into a supply closet.

“What are y—“ Michael’s startled whisper is cut off by Alex’s hand as he crowds him flat against the wall beside the door, his eyes flashing between the glowing figures on the tablet in his hand and the window looking out into the hall. Michael struggles to turn his head to get a look, but Alex only holds him tighter.

“Shh,” Alex whispers, lips brushing his ear and Michael knows they’re in danger right now, that they could be discovered at any moment and all kinds of bad things would happen then, but standing there, pressed firmly between Alex’s warm body and the cold cinderblock wall at his back, Alex’s hand cutting off any noise he could even hope to make, Michael starts to get hard.

It takes Alex a second to notice, but when he shifts his stance slightly, his leg inadvertently coming up between Michael’s thighs, there’s no mistaking the bulge at the front of Michael’s worn denim jeans. Michael flushes with shame as Alex’s eyes flash to his, wide and surprised.

Alex has been in peak “BAMF Alex Mode,” as Kyle calls it, since they got there, all business as he led the two of them on this recon mission to find out more about the compound, but Michael can see that veneer of professionalism crack just a little, his eyes hungry and predatory. Michael only gets harder under his gaze, leaking in his jeans like a teenager when he lets out the slightest whimper and Alex glares at him and presses tighter against his mouth.

Michael can hardly breathe and he’s never been so inappropriately horny in his whole fucking life. If they weren’t in enemy territory right now, he’s sure he’d already be on his knees.

Footsteps echo in the hall and Alex tears his eyes away from Michael’s to watch the screen of the tablet he’s holding with bated breath. His body is tense against him for a moment until the footsteps fade. Alex relaxes and releases Michael’s mouth, taking a step away from him.

“We need to move,” Alex says in his best Captain Manes voice. It does nothing to help Michael’s predicament like Alex probably hopes it will. “Now.”

Michael nods, not trusting his own voice and follows Alex out the door, adjusting himself in his jeans as discreetly as he can.

Twenty minutes later, when they’ve got all the hard drives Alex needs and have made it to his Jeep without tripping a single alarm, Michael finds himself shoved up against the unforgiving metal of the passenger-side door with Alex’s tongue down his throat.

“We’re getting out of here,” Alex pants when he pulls away, his lips shining in the moonlight and so so tempting, “and when we’re safe, you’re going to tell me what the fuck happened in there.”

“Think you know what happened in there,” Michael says, fingers digging into the meat of Alex’s ass to tug him closer, high off the adrenaline of their escape and having Alex in his arms.

“In the car. Now,” Alex orders with one final kiss before he leaves Michael’s arms and heads around to the driver’s side. Michael does as he’s told.

They’re fifteen miles away, the road behind them empty as far as the eye can see, before Alex has Michael call their friends on the burner phone he picked up earlier in the week.

“Hey, Alex!” Kyle calls when he picks up and there’s some rustling on the other end before Jenna Cameron’s voice filters through the speaker phone.

“Status report?”

Alex’s lips quirk up in amusement. “Package acquired, exfil in progress.”

“Good to hear it, Captain. Any hiccups we should be concerned about?”

Alex gives Michael a long, considering look that makes him flush and squirm in his seat a little. He doesn’t think Alex is angry with him, but he certainly could be. If he’d been just a little louder or less careful earlier he could have fucked up the entire mission and gotten them caught. It had taken a fair amount of convincing for Alex to let him come with him tonight and he’s suddenly worried he’s blown his chance to prove to Alex that he can be an asset, not a liability.

All in all, he really doesn’t know what he’s in for when this conversation is over.

“Captain?” Cameron asks again.

“No,” Alex says at last, and Michael releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “We’ll meet you at the bunker tomorrow morning for debrief.”

That makes Michael’s ears perk up, and Cameron’s too, by the sound of it.

“Tomorrow morning? I thought you were coming straight here.”

“Change of plans. Got something to take care of first.” Alex’s voice is nonchalant, but the look Alex is giving him tells Michael that he’s the ‘something’ that needs taking care of.

“I see,” Cameron says, and Michael doesn’t know her that well, but he thinks he hears a smile in her voice. “Well, take your time then, Captain. And tell Guerin I say ‘Hi.’”

“See ya, Cam,” Alex says and Michael hangs up the phone.

“So,” Alex starts, chancing another look at Michael before turning back to the road, “you wanna talk about it?”

“Not sure what there is to talk about,” Michael shrugs, chewing on his bottom lip a little.

“No? You got hard while we were infiltrating a Project Shepherd base,” Alex says calmly. “There were men with very large guns in the hallway and you were whimpering into my hand and rubbing yourself on my thigh. You don’t think we need to talk about that?”

“It won’t happen again, okay?” Michael rub the back of his neck. “I just got caught up in the moment, I’m sorry.”

Alex laughs suddenly and Michael’s eyes whip in his direction.

“Sweetheart, I’m not mad,” he says, reaching across the center console to rest his hand on Michael’s thigh. The calculated, professional Alex from earlier is gone and in his place is his Alex, fond as he smiles at Michael.

“You’re not?” Michael asks hesitantly.

“No, I’m not,” Alex reassures him.

“Even though I could’ve gotten us killed?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Alex says. “It would’ve been inconvenient, sure, but I would’ve gotten us out of there. Do you really think I’d have let you come if I thought I couldn’t handle it if things went south?”

“I guess not,” Michael says. He’s not sure he’s flattered by the statement, but as long as Alex isn’t angry with him he can deal with his estimation of Michael’s field capabilities another day.

“So,” Alex continues, “you wanna tell me what was going through your mind? Was it the location, the possibility of getting caught…?”

“It wasn’t really about the guards,” Michael counters. “Definitely not about the location.”

“What was it about then?” Alex asks him, curious.

“You were practically trying to put me through the wall with your hand over my mouth,” Michael explains. “It was, um… a lot.”

The warmth of Alex’s hand feels good, and when he squeezes ever so gently, the tips of his fingers digging into the soft flesh of his inner thigh Michael can’t stop the gasp that escapes him. “That does it for you, huh? Me holding you down?”

“You do it for me,” Michael says honestly. Alex resumes petting his thigh and Michael leans further back in his seat, relaxing under his touch. “But…yeah,” he adds at last. “You caging me in like that, keeping me quiet so no one could hear… I don’t know, it just… did things to me.”

“Have you ever fantasized about it before?” he asks, stroking a little higher up. “About me holding you still and keeping you quiet while I fuck you?” Fuck Alex for trying to have this conversation at a time when Michael can’t crawl into his lap.

“Alex,” Michael moans, his thighs spreading as Alex’s insistent fingers work their way ever higher.

“You have, haven’t you?” Alex grins, sliding his hand between Michael’s legs where he’s hard and aching.

“Yeah,” Michael gasps as Alex palms him. The keeping quiet thing hasn’t crossed Michael’s mind much before today, but Alex holding him down and making him take it? For a guy with such a problem with authority figures, Michael sure does spend a lot of time thinking about Alex manhandling him.

“Tell me about it.”

“Alex,” Michael pleads. He reaches for Alex’s wrist, not sure whether he wants to pull his hand off him or grind himself harder into it. “Don’t make me say it. We’re too far from home right now and the cab of your Jeep isn’t big enough for the things I want you to do to me, so please. Ask me later.”

Alex smirks at him, but mercifully releases his grip on Michael’s cock. “Later then,” he says and turns his hand into Michael’s so he can twine their fingers together.

“Later,” Michael promises, smiling when Alex lifts their joined hands to press a kiss to Michael’s knuckles. Michael has a feeling Alex is going to wreck him later tonight, but, well, if anyone’s going to destroy him, it might as well be Alex.

[slasherholic]

Easy Prey

Michael Myers x Reader (NSFW)

Your fingers clamp like a vice around the clammy brass handle of your bedroom door. For just a moment, that is where they linger; your heart slams frantically against your ribs and your breaths come short and stifled, as if you fear drawing too deep an inhale, lest you disturb the eerie silence which hangs in the air like a glass teetering on a ledge.

Your fear of what might lurk in your bedroom is not without reason— after all, you had come home only minutes ago to find the front door to your house swinging carelessly back and forth in the evening breeze, wide-open, like an invitation.

At first, you had hoped it was only Michael— perhaps he had forgotten to shut the door on his way in. However, your sweep of the house revealed nothing— no Michael, and no intruder, and nothing out of the ordinary.

Rather than ease your nerves, this revelation served only to heighten your paranoia, and made the knot in your stomach tighten until it had become like a suffocating weight pressing down on your gut.

That knot hasn’t gone away; and now that only your bedroom remains unvetted, your stomach is clenching so hard that you fear you might be sick.

It happens all at once—you throw your weight against the door. It slams jarringly open. You burst like a banshee into your bedroom, and your fingers scrabble madly at the wall for the light-switch. Click.

The sudden light banishes the shadows from the room, and your eyes flit frantically from wall to wall, and you see…

—nothing. You see nobody. There is no intruder. Your paranoia has gotten the better of you.

You lean to press your back flat against the wall and heave a deep, throaty exhale as you slump down to sit on the floor. Your face scrunches into a scowl and you pinch the bridge of your nose. You feel ridiculous— ridiculous, and exhausted, and in need of a long, hot shower to clear your head.

You strip carelessly, leaving your garments strewn about the floor, and snatch up a towel to wrap yourself in as you head hastily for the bathroom. The door creaks softly open as you slip inside, and you fumble for a moment in the dim light to fold your towel across the vanity.

As your fingers hover above the light switch, you catch your disheveled, shadowy reflection in the wide mirror. You pout at yourself— at your messy hair, and wetted eyes, and sweaty brow— you still feel silly for having been so worked up over an open door. Surely, you had just forgotten to shut it on your way out of the house this morning?

Suddenly, a movement interrupts your thoughts. There is something in the mirror— a reflection, you realize, from the blackness which lurks behind you. It appears so fast that your stomach hardly has time to do a flip-flop before the pristine white of your bathroom is doused in harsh yellow lighting.

Much to your dismay, the sudden light reveals that your pouting face is not the only thing staring back at you.

Michael’s porcelain-pale visage towers behind you like a phantom. For an instant, you gape at the dark figure in the mirror, and the breath is sucked away from your lungs. Michael’s coveralls are stained with fresh red. You can smell it on him, too, you realize— that pungent, metallic stench that you have grown all-too familiar with is impossible to miss. A dark shadow obscures the glint of his eyes, turning them into empty voids of their own, and if you hadn’t known any better you might have guessed that no human at all existed behind that mask.

Through your shock, another realization dawns on you— the intruder was Michael. He has been watching you, stalking you through your house like a predator around unlit corners, always lurking just out of view.

You are all-too familiar with this predator’s motives; and right now, you know that Michael intends to use you to satisfy his most carnal of desires. The sex between your legs tingles in anticipation of what you know is coming next.

The dark reflection in the mirror comes to life— Michael lunges. You gasp as his strong hand clamps like a vice around the nape of your neck, and flinch at the pressure of his calloused fingers digging into your skin. A moan leaves your lips as you are bent forcefully over until your bare nipples kiss the cold vanity countertop. The towel is ripped from your grasp. Chilly air whips across your exposed skin.

A second hand slips down to seize your hip, and Michael shoves you eagerly forward, so that your thighs meet the side of the counter. His large body curls over yours; suddenly, you are pinned between him and the vanity. Escape, if it ever was an option, is one no longer.

The warmth of Michael’s hand falls suddenly away from your hip. From behind you comes the hasty ruffling and repositioning of stiff fabric, and then, the tell-tale drag of a zipper.

You gasp and shudder as the throbbing head of Michael’s hard, burning length grazes your sensitive cunt. He rocks his hips against you, and your fingers curl around the edges of the countertop at the sensation of Michael’s erect member prodding against the flesh of your bare ass.

Michael’s hand finds its home again around your waist. You whimper as he begins to tease himself along your opening, sliding the thick head of his cock torturously up and down your cunt. His length slides easily along the wetness which already pools between your folds. Your walls convulse and clench around nothing, in eager anticipation of being filled by Michael’s considerable girth, and you groan at the hollow feeling— every time Michael rubs himself along your opening without sliding in, the emptiness leaves you aching.

Fortunately, you know Michael better than to expect this teasing of his to last; he has waited patiently for this, and now that his animalistic impulses have finally won him over, he will not bother to pace himself.

Above you, Michael’s muffled inhales are deepening. The hand at your neck shoves you further down into the countertop, so that your cheek is pressed against clammy marble. You clench your jaw and brace yourself for what is about to come.

Michael thrusts. In one quick motion, he buries his length deep into your walls. A cry of both pain and pleasure leaves your lips as you are stretched by Michael’s girth. The burn of his length stabs against your cervix, and suddenly, you are painfully, blissfully full, split open entirely on Michael’s cock.

Michael pulls out, and then pounds ravenously back in to your slick opening. You gasp and whine as he hilts himself again and again within you and begins to fuck you like his life depends on it. The rough fabric of his coveralls chafe against your thighs and ass, drawing rashes across your flushed skin with every roll of his hips.

“Michael— oh god, Michael—” you cry in shallow, broken gasps, your breath hitching in your throat as Michael slams harder into you, undaunted by your pleading.

Michael’s own panting is quickening— his fingertips clamp down painfully against your hips and around your neck, leaving streaks of hot, wet crimson where they fall across your tender skin. His pulsating length pounds relentlessly in and out of your opening as he madly chases the release which has eluded him for hours.

A low groan rumbles up his chest, and you shudder violently as the sound fills your senses. You savor Michael’s rare vocality— you know it means he’s close.

Suddenly, Michael’s fingers tighten dangerously around your throat. You feel his cock twitch within you as a pressure builds against your walls. You gasp and sputter as Michael hilts himself inside of you completely. Your muscles clench around his cock, and a sudden heat spreads within you as Michael comes against your cervix.

You draw deep, needy gasps as the fingers around your throat become mercifully slack. Shifting under Michael’s grasp, you crane your neck upwards, and steal a glance at his imposing reflection in the mirror.

Michael’s broad chest heaves up and down with his every labored inhale. However, besides his panting, the dark figure towers above you with an eerie, statuesque stillness. He draws back his hand from your neck, but the other still lingers at your waist. You catch the gleam of his eyes from beneath his mask and realize that Michael is staring right back at your reflection— the intense, hungry glint in the crystal-blue of his good iris is impossible to miss. His fingers grip your hips tighter in response to your wiggling.

It’s clear what Michael is telling you— you aren’t going anywhere. He’s not finished with you just yet.

[myfriendpokey]

50 Short Years!

This January makes a full 5 years since releasing 50 Short Games!

I admit, it is weird to think about.

In general I don’t have very strong feelings about anything I’ve worked on, since anything like that has usually burnt itself out somewhere in the process of making the thing.

But it feels a little startling that this particular game came out 5 years ago, because in many ways I feel like I’m still working somewhere in it’s orbit – it still feels “close” to me in terms of, I guess, setting up the way I’ve been thinking about and working on these things ever since then. I still feel like I’m working out some of the stuff that came up in its production.. compare to older games which can feel like they were made by different, mercifully forgotten, people.

The game is temporarily discounted on itch down to just $1, until valentine’s day - good for friends, good for lovers.

When this first came out, I included a big note file of the processes and ideas and etc that went into it. I have posted that to my website for free to mark this little anniversary. But since a decent bit of time has passed since those impressions, and since I don’t feel like refreshing them, I thought it might be interesting to try writing up a sort of “afterlife” of this game, specifically the ways it sort of covertly turned out to influence what I did for the 5 years after it, as well.

Here are my notes seperated by theme.

- colour - mice - pacing - work / life - gameplay - theme - writing - distribution

- COLOUR: this is a strange one. 50SG felt like the first time I was really aware of / interested in trying to add “colour” as an element I could play with within my games, trying to add it to the lego set along with “rocks” and “little guys”. More colours, interesting colours, colour combinations, games which would be colourful as images. Because I’ve never actually been a very visual person (surprise surprise ha ha ha) and even when I draw, or sculpt, I tend to focus on lines and omit colour as much as possible... When I was a kid I disliked any kind of colouring or painting, as opposed to scribbling, but just before 50SG I’d been working on an uncompleted game with painted textures, and enjoyed it enough to want to explore the effects more.

The reason I call this a strange one is that, mostly - - I failed!!! I feel very aware now of how much of this game is just scratchy line drawings, how little colours are actually used once I'd worked out which ones I preferred working with from the set. I did try to change things up over the course of the series and some games (specifically the Mogey ones) tried to use flat colour or colour patterns more. But when I think about the game now the memories I mostly have are of essentially monochrome or mostly-monochrome drawings.

In fairness, some of this was technical too - I never had any kind of consistent way to light my pictures for when I was photographing them, and a lot of the time the bright markers came out muddy, which sort of discouraged me from trying to do anything specifically with colour effects. Strong lines are also a lot easier to chop up into discrete little game-shapes.

But I think this sense of missed opportunity - having this big bag of markers in all colours, all translucent lines, and not really using them - was specifically what made me spend the next few years trying to work with colour even more. Hence stuff like Mouse Corp, and certain entries in the Hardpack 11-in-1, and Magic Wand. I think I moved more towards pixel art again because it gave me a very quick way to play with colours, and swap them in and out, without having to worry about correctly photographing them first. And in fact my current game came about directly from trying to play more with ideas of translucent outline sprites on top of flat fields of colour – trying to combine colour with line in a looser way than just colouring stuff in.

I'd like to go back to playing with markers some time.

- MICE: I think this was the first time I used mice in my games. Previously the emblematic animal was the Dog – Murder Dog, Goblet Grotto dog... The dog is a "LAWFUL" animal, one which can be aimlessly malevolent on behalf of some higher system or master. The dog stands in for the implicit malignity of the game system as a whole. 

Meanwhile, mouse is the "UNLAWFUL" animal - they live in spaces they do not construct, and scavenge from what they find within, they are constrained by those spaces but also have something of an independent life within them. By this time, I had been working on a lot of games where the gameworld itself was sort of an ominous presence - Crime Zone, Goblet Grotto, Drill Killer etc - and I think the move from "dog" to "mouse" came about as a way to think about these spaces as just kind of indeterminate and abandoned instead of actively malign. Places which don't really notice your being there, which were constructed and then left for some unknowable purpose. I cannot say if this shift in thinking is good or bad.

- PACING: I forget whether I mention it in the notes - but the prototype for all the marker games was an earlier one-off called "Gold's Enigma", done with crayons and in Klik N Play. And that game felt like sort of a revelation because it was so quick to just add new areas to it, or copy and paste elements around, or switch from one game control system or mode of representation to another.  So you could have an extremely short, quick game that still contained enough of a shift to make you feel like you’d gone somewhere or like the view from one side of the game was different to the view from the other. I don’t know how consistently or successfully this was ever really done (the end of Happy Bird is my personal favourite version) but it did stick in my head, as an ideal to work towards. And I think something like the more longform Magic Wand was still sort of driven by a desire to try a “fuller” take on this same idea.

- WORK / LIFE: I don't remember exactly but I think this was my first time successfully trying to start a new, slightly longform project while also having a day job. With other games either they were short enough for me to just blow through in a concentrated rush or else enough pieces had already been laid down (eg  Goblet Grotto) that I could just brainlessly slam together any remaining levels in the  mornings before I went to work. Making games as a hobby isn't necessarily hard but figuring out how to do it consistently over long periods took me a long adjustment period. For the short games I ended up doodling ideas at lunch, coming home, eating dinner, and then around 7 or 8 I'd start chopping up my image sheets and putting them into the game. And hope to finish by 11 so I wouldn't be too wiped the next day. These days it's more like 8-10pm. Working in the early mornings can be good if you're very determinedly getting through some pre-assigned tasks but can be harder and more frustrating if you're trying to be more exploratory about things. I guess to the extent I’d draw any lesson from this it’d be, set aside a very specific time period for working on stuff but also try to have a process where “working on stuff” can involve a certain level of constructive busywork just so you don’t come home and have to immediately face a blank page? “Placing stuff around on a screen” is ultimately what absorbs me so working in a way that let me do that as quickly and aimlessly as possible helped a lot. Well, that’s my opinion.

- GAMEPLAY: I used the default 8-directional walk system in MMF2, and the default screen-follows-the-player function, so many times in the course of these games that I just burnt myself out on them entirely. They’re fine, but using them so many times over a brief period made me more and more conscious of them to the point where it could feel like I was just filling in the same template each time... I think part of why I shifted to Unity, even though it’s more of a hassle, is just to be able to escape that sense of a singular unchangeable “point of view”  and make things where moving or looking around would feel a bit looser and less set in stone. I hope this helps explain my gradual, doomed love affair with extremely idiosyncratic camera systems.

- THEME: Did any themes carry over to any of my post-50SG games? Maybe some but to me it’s less noticeable than seeing what was stripped out. Having a deadline and a very fixed scope did sort of push me more towards including “real world content” in whatever strange way – dreams, specific moments of the early morning or the night, events like work nights out, locations I knew... Compare that to the longer games I’ve done which all kind of take place in these dreamy, private fantasy dimensions. I enjoy that too, and it’s easier to do that when you’re making a game that’s just sort of endlessly adding to itself over time.. It’d be good to get back to working in a way which encouraged that material connection.

- WRITING: I think the notes file that came with 50SG was the first time I did any real writing about the process of making these things, or ideas and notes, etc. And now I can’t shut up!! Well, I did a similar writeup document for Magic Wand, and hope to do so with my current game eventually as well. I think writing that, and having people be encouraging about it, did help me become more interested in looking at and recording the state of my brain as it’s slowly rotted into goop from exposure to these terrible machines. Which is in itself not a bad reason to keep doing it. 

- DISTRIBUTION: This was my first commercial game and probably the biggest impact of that was in getting me to move away from PC-only tools. I'd planned a mac version of this game at some point, or specifically to do HTML versions and then use a workaround I'd read about to convert HTML files to Mac and Linux apps... but the HTML conversion sometimes led to strange bugs, and I never had a testing computer to see whether the actual ports would work, and the multiple layers of things that could go wrong (making a html export, to be put into a mac or linux wrapper, to be loaded from a Unity scene...) eventually made me slowly give up on this. I think of getting back to it but to be honest I have such limited energy and for the five months a year I don't just want to hibernate I'd rather keep working on new projects.... I am sorry.... Well, this was a big impetus to try moving to pure Unity and HTML which had more multiplatform support from the get-go. I don't know if I took any other commercial lessons from it! It sold around 500 copies, and talking to other people making weird scrappy narrative type games it sounded like they mostly also sold 500 copies, maybe to the same people or maybe just to each other. At this level of economic activity you can just do what you like.

So in conclusion 50 Short Games is a land of contrasts. It feels distant to me, I don't have any strong feelings about it anymore, but I also feel sort of like I'm still moving around in the terrain this game originally sketched out for me, and still kind of responding to it in either positive or negative forms. Thank you to anyone who bought it. I just put it on sale again to mark the five year anniversary, you can find it on itch.io, gamejolt or kartridge. Please buy several hundred copies and salt them around through hidden disc drives buried in a desert somewhere so that some day they can inspire some form of apocalypse cult.

In the year 2525 if man is still alive if woman, still survives they will find.....

- stephen 2019

[jash62]

What the Hell Universe

Entry 1 Montague

What the actual fuck universe. What have I done in a past life to piss you off so!? What have I done to you to make my life the multi headed dick Hydra that is my current life!  

Everything is a burnt husk or ruin. If it's not burnt it's mutated if not burnt and mutated. I mean cockroaches the size of Corgis, angry murder fly-bees that shoot it's larva young at you. I swear if there are mutated spiders the size of dobermans, I'm ending it right now. I will eat that bullet with ketchup(if I can find some) damn nature you scary with a irradiated vengeance.

Okay where to start. first I need something to help get my thoughts in order so diary, Journal, log thingy ,or Incase someone finds this on my corpse out in this hell scape. We're about to get real personal real quick. So I guess I'll start with my name.

My name is Montague Alister Hawk, and I'm a time traveler for the year 2077 pre war America.

How is time travel possible you ask hypothetical reader. Well apparently its one part: ignore your best friend's advice and instincts, one part: submit to the peer pressure from your wife and one part: smooth silver tongue Vault Tec rep, and Two part: the fucking Chinese or American government nuking the shit out of each other! Mix with Corporate America mindset and a dash of Vault Tec experimentation. Poor over the iced tears of the working class and bam you get one maybe two possibly three time travelers.

Gods please let my wife and child be safe. Also thanks for keeping my last bottle of whiskey together for the past 210 years.

Okay so here's the thing, my psychologist doc Anders, said that in times of great stress with nothing to do, is to write down my thoughts or this case type them. So here I am, drinking a the last (possibly unirradiated) bottle Jameson. In the burnt out ruins of my home, with the computer (I scavenged from the drug dealer down the street), and with the hopes my wife and son are alive in this hellscape that is the Boston wasteland as Codsworth dubs it.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact when I woke up this morning in the year of 2077 and now it's 2287. In fact we went into vault 111 around 1000 hrs on Oct 23 and I came out of said vault on Oct 23 1100 hrs. And what's worse is today is still a blur.

It started like any other day, I was shaving my beard off in my preparation for the speech I was suppose to give at the VA. I remember Cods giving me some coffee and the knock on the door from that Vault Tec basterd, my wife pleading with me to just deal with him. Because it was free.

Pffpht nothing is free, "Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost.” that is the Law of Equivalent Exchange and I have yet to find a way to circumvent this law, but enough philosophy.

The next thing I remember is hearing my NORAD waring blare on my computer, gathering Cassandra and Shaun. Then booking it towards the vault. the air was thick with fear. There was air raid sirens blaring and vertibirds mobilizing.

If I wasn't in such a panic I would have recognise the first warning something was off. It was the Vault Tec rep having been denied at the gate. The second warning was when we were granted access to the vault even though we finished the paperwork not 30 minutes before. Gods hindsight is 20/20 and a bitch.

I felt it before it went off somehow, all the thing Cassandra and I feared most. The reason I joined the rangers and went to war, was to help prevent what we saw. The reason Cassandra went to law school and put up with those stuff shirts that made up the law community, was to prevent what we saw. All the hardships, late nights, ptsd fueled nightmares, our hopes dreams, and all the hours put to fight the injustice we fought against. All of that time and effort, went up in the ash and dust fueled, mushroom shaped cloud.

I still see it when I close my eyes. Still hear the screams.

Anyway I instinctively grab Cassandra hold her against me as we ducked down against the blast wind as we were lowered into the vault. We hit the bottom and all I can think is how much time we wasted to prevent the unpreventable.

The next hour was a blur again and the next thing I can remember is Cassandra handing me Shaun so she could change into her vault suit. I remember looking into his blue eyes and holding close. Silently promising him the best I could in this fucked up world. Then I looked at my Cassandra, my rock, my harbor in the storm. I looked into the stormy steel eyes and kissed her for all I worth. Hoping my unsaid message of love and devotion was noticed.

Then of course we were interrupted by some Vault Tec asshat in a lab coat telling us it's time to enter our individual decontamination chamber. Hince the third waring something was wrong.

Now thanks to my years in the Rangers I have seen a lot of things. New tech and research of Big MT things but this was no decontamination chamber I have ever seen. In fact it looked more like a sarcophagus pod than a decontamination chamber.

Of course my fears of the future and my small family standing in front of me (and my instincts of finding a safe and secure space for us) distracted my “IT'S A TRAP” instincts. Well that and the armed Vault Tec security officer standing behind the asshat in the lab coat.

We then of course follow instructions and get in to the sarcophagus of decontamination. Luckily Cassandra Shaun and I were able to get pods across from one another and see each other from across the hall via view ports. We hear the computer voice say  “Decontamination start in 5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1..” as it hit one Cassandra and I reached for each other then the blackness took me.

The next thing I remember is hearing voices as I was coughing up liquid. Then I see these science types in light blue radiation gear with what looked like Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man as a symbol over their right breast, and a man that was definitely a mercenary.

They stop in front of Cassandra's pod, gods knows I tried to get out but I was weak. The merc took a fighting stance pointed his (I'm guessing .44) revolver at Cassandra's view port and nods to the DaVinci wannabe. They activated her pod and as it open I can hear Shaun's cry's. Of course I'm shouting and pounding on my viewport, trying to get people's attention to no avail.

Then the gun shot (definitely .44), and all I can see is Cassandra's shocked face. Then I hear this ungodly roar (I guess it was me by the way that merc and that DaVinci wannabe looked at me) and that fucking merc smiled at me. and I swear to all that is holy, I will find him and wipe that smile off his face with his own gun.

Then blackness again.

I don't know how long I was out but the next thing I hear is a kalaxian blaring over and over again. I shifted and cracked one of my eyes open to immediately shut it again as the low light seared through my brain. Igniting a headache that has yet to leave me. Then all that has happened to this point, slams through my brain. Panicking I look up to my wife's pod to find it empty!

As I slowly get up, ignoring the pain as my muscles scream for me to lay down again, and stumble to the empty open pod. As I reached the pod I fall to my knees, I rub my eyes a couple times in disbelief. Then all I see from my position is a small but dried blood smear and the bloody bullet lodged in the upper corner of the interior pod. I grabbed a flat head screwdriver form the nearby tool box and proceeded to attempt to dialogue the bullet. I can't tell you why it was important but it was.

After sometime I finally work the damn thing out and as it popped out from its position I missed the catch and it bounced to the floor. Wanting that bullet I went after it. Fate must have been with me because it landed next to a blood spot and the broken chain of Cassandra's pendant necklace that she inherited from her mom. As I pick up the pendent I realised that Cassandra rarely took it off and was often a favorite chew toy for Shaun.

The pendet Itself was shaped in the form of a mother (tigers eye) cradling a newborn (lapis lazuli). Behind it was my dented dog tags and behind those Cassandra's wedding band and engagement ring. Unfortunately part of the mother was broken as well my tags were bent  from what looked like a bullet going through or at least ricocheted off them.

Hope then. Not much but enough to move forward.

I look around and see the vault in disrepair as well as the other pods. I get up stretching my muscles and walk to the next pod to the right of mine. The viewport was fogged up so I pull the release switch and the body of ole Bob fell out. He was dead from the looks of it (and no pulse I checked). He seemed to be dead for a while. Then the next pod down (left of mine) to his wife, same condition. So was the next and the next one after that. All dead. Then I see a computer at the beginning of the hall.

I turn on the monitor to see the screen blinking in time with the klaxon, saying cryo Lab 3 critical malfunction. I acknowledge the waring and the klaxon mercifully stop blaring. I continue to read the warning displayed on the screen and discovered that all residents of the pods pronounced were dead. With the exception of my pod and Cassandra's pod. However nothing was timed stamped or dated even.

Diary, Journal, log thingy, or hypothetical reader. I'm going to say right now, I been alone for a long time even during my military service but before I met Cassandra I could handle that feeling and let me try to describe that feeling.

It's like your hollow inside and nothing you do matters. You go through the motions of life, do what's expected of you, try not to make a fuss. Be that man your father wanted, be a pawn in his games. That pawn for the government. Of course I had ambition but it had nowhere to go and it kinda peters out. I joined the military to get away from my father in Texas. Went north to get away from that toxic family but it followed me here and everywhere I went. I was looking to die at the start of Anchorage.

Of course I wasn't wanting to go alone so decided to take as many of those invading Chinese bastards with me. But somehow I lived through that campaign. I was in Washington DC receiving my medals when I met Cassandra and that's the day I finally knew how to live, I wasn't alone anymore.

However in that moment after reading how Everyone in that bay was dead. That lonely feeling hit me full force and truthfully I don't know how I handled the loneliness before. Because for the first time in 10 years I remember what it felt like. I don't know how long I stood there looking at nothing but eventually I moved. Looking at the ground I saw more blood pointing out a side door.

Following the trail, it lead me to a side office that looked like a tornado ransack the place. If I had to guess it was my wifes doing. Because in all the mess was a bloody discarded vault suit, empty packaging of a new suit and the remnants of a first aid kit. I also noticed blood leading in but not out.

Good signs. Like Cassandra's uncle Nick always said, “If there ain't no body, then there ain't nobody dead.”

I proceed through the vault to see if there was any supplies missed, and proceeded after hopefully after Cassandra. As I continued through the vault I saw the evidence of Cassandra throughout the place. Bodies of well squished Radroaches, (which made tracking her easier) messy mess hall (phtb) and other signs of life. Eventually I proceeded to the overseer’s office ransacking what supplies I could along the way. At the overseer's office is where I found my first weapon and information about the vault.

Yeah I remember that dash of experimentation that I told you of for the making of a time traveler? Well it turns out vault-tec was doing social experimentation on us for the long-term effects of cryogenically freezing the human body.

Bastards

At the overseer got what was coming It seems that the security crew pulled a coup de gras after rations was getting low to leave the vault. I can summarize this because I'm standing over the bastards bullet-riddled skeletal remains and by the entries of his computer. Not even sorry

I then proceeded to the access tunnel that the overseer had and came into the supply room where I was able to find a Pip-Boy brand spanking new in the box. After starting it up and getting it tuned to my body I proceeded to the vault door into the entrance of this gods-forsaken tomb.

I was able to reach to the top of the Vault and finally see the destruction of those idiots. If my other description of how fucked our world is, see my earlier description of the world. I will say this however nature is slowly reclaiming what is hers I have no doubt that you'll be able to do it in the next couple thousand years or so. Because life marches on with or without humans.

However there is the problem of me losing the trail of my wife at the top of the vault. So naturally I thought she would head down to the house that we wants to live in that is now a ruin. Funny enough I come across our old robot codsworth still trying to do his programmed duties.so after a not so heartwarming reunion, I found out that Codsworth has not seen my wife and we sweep the neighborhood, looking for supplies and clues of Cassandra or of Shaun's kidnappers, until the sun was on the horizon.

I need to apologize to Codsworth, I don't think he appreciated my smartassery. Though Codsworth did say there was a rainstorm not to long ago but that makes tracking Cassandra that more difficult. However not impossible.

I pray that the gods are still with me on this journey. Lord Hades take the dead into your realm and give them proper rest. Also if you could thank Bob for me, his fallout shelter was still intact and relatively stocked hope he didn't mind. Lady Diana and Lady Freya guide me into the hunt for my wife and son, keep my shots square and true. Odin help me keep my knowledge and strength in this endeavor. Lady Athena help me keep my strategy sound and wit about me. And to Jesus grant mercy to those who stand against me for I will have none to give.

This is Hawk signing off

End entry Oct 24 2287 0107

(quote from Fullmetal Alchemist and Band of Brothers)

[the-pontiac-bandit]

and the dish ran away with the spoon

okay. here it is. if you’ve been wondering why i’ve been posting about geese for so long, this is why. it’s The Goose AU. based on this joke prompt sent to me by the lovely @lovelycraters (who also drew ABSOLUTELY AMAZING ART for this that imma make her post asap). all the thanks to @startofamoment, who helped me world-build and egged me on from a dumb 3-sentence response to this and to @jakelovesamy for listening to me whine and googling yacht clubs in nyc and obscure latvian dishes. and to @wrenjamin​ who has listened to me develop a severe goose phobia over the past several weeks THOSE THINGS HAVE T E E T H YALL 

For Terry, it was a falcon. A dark, oversized, absolutely majestic (at least, according to Terry) bird landed on his windowsill every day for a week, disappearing as he got dressed in the morning, until Sunday morning, when it tapped on his window gently with its beak, asking for entry. It led him to the farmers’ market, where he bumped into Sharon, also in line to buy locally-sourced honey.

For Charles, it was a dog, a mutt who ran up and started humping his leg in the middle of the grocery store. It wasn’t until he’d taken the dog home, when none of his neighbors seemed aware of its presence, that Charles realized that this particular stray was meant to lead him to his soulmate. Twelve days later, on a walk, the dog dragged him to an exotic food truck he’d been in search of for almost a year, where Genevieve was doling out Latvian frikadelu zipa.

For Gina, it was a panther, large and sleek. It twined around her legs for a day, prompting her to frequently and dramatically strut around the precinct, bragging about jeweled collars and fur as smooth and voluminous as her own perfectly-conditioned hair. The squad resisted the urge to point out that none of the rest of them could appreciate the apparent magnificence of the panther – Gina may live her life out loud, but they’d never seen her this transparently happy. That night, the panther accompanied her to watch a dark, curly mane of hair win a motorcycle race for which her love was the prize.

Given these experiences, Jake is fully prepared for a majestic, dignified lone wolf. Obviously, it would be large enough for him to ride like a horse straight to Diamond Point Yacht Club, where a gorgeous speedboat model would be lounging in the sun, her own wolf napping beside her.

These expectations are why, when a goose lands in his passenger seat on a mundane overcast Monday morning, Jake’s first emotion is annoyance.

Cursing his windows, which never close, he tries to shoo the bird away. This is far from his first unwanted avian passenger – pigeons seem to be regularly attracted to the various unhealthy delicacies that sit in his glove console – so he’s become an expert at shooing birds out the window one-handed with his eyes on the road.

Much to his deep annoyance, the goose won’t leave.

That should have tipped him off, he tells everyone later. Terry reminds him that hindsight is 20/20, Gina tells him that any true dazzledove would have known instantly, and all he can think is that he should have gotten more sleep – maybe then he would have put things together quickly enough to make a better decision.

Instead of embracing this goose, who was nuzzling affectionately at his elbow resting on the console, Jake chooses a less advisable course of action. At the stoplight ten blocks from the precinct, he grabs it and dumps it unceremoniously into the bike lane.

He hears its squawks as he drives off, and he spares a moment to be thankful that he won’t have to keep listening to it – the loud, nasal squawks were ruining his already-awful Monday morning.  

It isn’t until he gets in the elevator to head up to work – only ten minutes late today – that he realizes he made a mistake. That’s when the goose reappears, standing next to him. He sees it, notices that not one other cop waiting for the elevator to come has reacted to the very large goose standing in the crowd, and starts to wonder. And then, it bites his ankle – hard, with a shockingly sharp set of teeth – and he groans aloud.

He’s not at all surprised when the goose hops into his lap before Terry starts the morning briefing. He’s doing his best to ignore this highly unfortunate development – he has no desire at all to admit to Gina that his wolf (which he’d already named Vendetta) had been replaced by an intrusive, vicious goose. Seeming to sense his thoughts, the goose hops up, beating its wings in his face so hard that he tips his chair backwards. Jake’s indignant shouts and flailing arms, swatting at something no one else can see, as well as the resulting crash when his chair tips backwards, leaving Jake lying on the floor with a goose sitting triumphantly on his chest (who knew geese were this heavy) is impossible to ignore. Charles is hovering over Jake, concerned about bruises and broken bones and bruises and brush burns – “They’re no joke, Jakey! You could scar that perfect skin!” – Jake decides to come clean.

“So, my animal may have…dropped in this morning,” he mumbles.

Charles gasps, tears springing to his eyes at the idea that his best friend will finally meet the love of his life.

Terry, from the front of the room whoops. “What is it? Come on – spill! You know Terry loves love!”

Gina, reclining with her feet in a beat cop’s lap and her nose in her phone in the back of the room, looks up. “Oh, goose!” she exclaims.

“Yup, that’s it. Did you guys know geese are the worst?” Jake mutters darkly, unceremoniously dumping the aforementioned goose on the ground as he stands up, brushing off his wrinkled flannel and showing Charles he’s still alive.

“What’s it?” Charles asks, a little confused. “Jakey, do you have a concussion? I didn’t even think to worry about a concussion!”

Charles is trying to make Jake follow his finger as he waves it wildly around Jake’s line of vision, and the chaos is all too much, and the goose is pecking at his toes through his shoes, as if testing to see if they’re edible. It’s a lot – especially for 9:21 in the morning.

He sighs. This was not how this was supposed to go. “My animal is a goose. A really mean goose,” he adds with a pointed look at his foot.

Terry smiles affectionately and starts babbling about personalities and animals and birds and the beauty of finding your match, and Charles starts to sob uncontrollably, talking about happiness and futures and the majestic nature of Vendetta the goose (Jake immediately regrets telling Charles the intended name of his wolf. Vendetta the goose sounds much less badass, much to his dismay). Gina just laughs.

Jake shuts his eyes, trying to pretend that the morning isn’t happening. Tragically, the goose, which has flown up to perch uncomfortably on top of his head, isn’t particularly interested in allowing him to forget.

It takes nearly twenty minutes to calm down Charles, with Terry holding him (a few tears leaking out of his own eyes as Charles sobs happily into his shirt, suspenders clutched in both hands). Gina live-tweets the whole thing. Jake wants someone to sink into the floor – whether he’d rather it be him or the goose, he truly isn’t sure.

Jake’s awful morning doesn’t improve as it progresses. Charles, sitting in the desk across from him, keeps staring at him for truly weird amounts of time, with a starry look in his eyes. He puts Genevieve on speakerphone, where they shout loudly about the beauty of new love over the din of angry Latvian construction workers placing their lunch orders.

Jake doesn’t make it out on any cases. His life has stalled over the appearance of the goose – he can’t concentrate on his cases, and the goose ate his X, H, and A keys while he was at lunch, so his progress on paperwork is slow and riddled with far more spelling errors than usual. Finally, mercifully, his shift ends, and he’s allowed to leave his desk, now covered in goose feathers that only he can see (there are so many feathers he’s convinced the goose must be pulling them out and putting them there on purpose, but he can’t prove it to anyone else).

Jake directs his car out of the parking lot and onto the street. Then, he pulls the goose onto his lap. “Okay. I can’t ride you, but you’re going to have to show me where this person is somehow. Try driving?”

The goose honks (Jake already hates this noise more than he hates listening to Charles talk about Genevieve’s hair) and grabs the steering wheel with its beak. Briefly, Jake is encouraged. Maybe the goose will drive and Jake can find whatever nerd he’s supposed to end up with (seriously, who ends up with a goose as their animal, he wonders sourly, pointedly ignoring the fact that he, too, has a goose as his animal). Then, exactly twenty yards into his experiment, the goose jerks the car right, doing his best to run them onto the sidewalk.

Jake slams on the brakes, coming to a screeching halt in the shoulder of the street, mere inches from a very solid-looking mailbox. He mutters a string of curses under his breath as he looks around on the street for another goose, hoping beyond hope that his goose turned right to find his match, rather than out of sheer malice. The lack of other people battling mean geese, as well as the self-satisfied expression on the face of his passenger, suggest otherwise.

Jake repeats the experiment twice more, on side streets where he’s less likely to accidentally hit a pedestrian. First, the goose tries to run him into a lamp post. Then, a giant statue of a teddy bear advertising a nearby toy store. Finally, Jake decides that geese must not be able to drive. When he releases his companion, the goose jumps, flapping his wings in Jake’s face (he gets a smelly mouthful of feathers when he protests) before heading for the passenger seat. For half a second, Jake thinks he’s headed out the still-open window, and his heart leaps. It’s only been eight hours and thirty-nine minutes, but Jake would already commit to a life of solitude where he never found a soulmate if that life lacked geese.

Unfortunately, the goose just lands on the interior door handle, lengthening his neck out the window and sticking his tongue out to catch the breeze like a very white, very feathery, very mean dog. Jake sighs and turns the car around to drive home – if he has to deal with the goose, he at least wants pizza and Die Hard to help.

Pizza and Die Hard do help, but only marginally. The goose dives in and licks a full half of the pizza before Jake can even touch it. Much to Jake’s frustration when he tries to feed the goose the spoiled pieces, geese don’t even seem to like pizza – apparently this particular goose just wanted to spite him. Then, the goose sits on the remote (Jake swears it’s on purpose) and turns off the TV thirty-eight minutes into the movie. Jake doesn’t really mind having to start it over – the first thirty-eight minutes are eternally rewatchable, but he’s still mad at the goose on principle.

Finally, mercifully, it’s time for bed. Jake manages to save his toothbrush from the goose, who has decided it would be an excellent idea to sit on Jake’s bathroom counter, carefully positioning its rear end over all of Jake’s toiletries. He also manages to save his favorite academy t-shirt from the goose, who grabs it for a game of tug-of-war. He manages to settle the goose in the hallway (an extended process that involves the sacrifice of several old t-shirts for a goose bed and a sprint for his bedroom door, which he locks, breathing hard after the sprint down the hall and hoping beyond hope that magical animals are unable to charm locks open), and he goes to bed, hoping that either his soulmate will be on his doorstep tomorrow or that the goose will be gone – he’d honestly settle for either.

But only thirty minutes after he drifts off to sleep, he wakes up to a loud squawk and a very warm weight on his chest. He groans and turns over, dumping the weight in the process.  For a second, his groggy brain thinks he’s solved the problem. And then, only centimeters from his ear, he hears the loudest squawk he’s ever heard in his life. He jumps up, startled, and hits his head on a surprisingly hard goose beak. The goose reels back with the impact before nipping Jake’s arm in retaliation. He has never sympathized with the stranglers he puts away before, but he thinks he finally gets it.

While murderous thoughts flood through his brain and he begins to consider asking Charles about the various ways to cook geese, wondering whether magical invisible animal flesh is edible, the goose hops off his bed and runs to the doorframe, looking back at him expectantly.

His first instinct is to bury his head back in his pillow and hope the goose goes back to bed. But then he remembers why he has a goose squatting in his studio apartment in the first place – is it possible it’s actually trying to be useful? Could it be that his soulmate is walking by outside at this very moment?

Jake is disgusted by the sappiness of the hope running through his brain, but this doesn’t stop him from rushing for his shoes and following the goose out the bedroom and towards the front door, with a quick stop in the hall bathroom to squeeze some toothpaste into his mouth. His eyes are bloodshot and his hair is mussed, but he’s sure his soulmate won’t care – surely she’ll just be happy to get rid of the goose, too.

He sprints out the door, the goose nipping at his heels, urging him faster. He stubs his toe hard against the kitchen counter and bumps his head against the corner of his cabinets as he rounds the corner, but he makes it to the front door in eight seconds flat – a personal record. He slams through the entrance, already turning right to head for the staircase. It’s as he barrels down the hallway that he trips over the goose, wings spread wide and feathers fluffed to look as large as possible. He goes down hard, catching a large mouthful of dirty carpet, and rises to his feet, uttering a long string of curses that he’s sure will wake his neighbors, only to find that the goose is still blocking his path.

When he tries to approach, it squawks at him, all of its sharp teeth on prominent display, so Jake takes a few steps back, hands up. He tries some soothing words, muttering nothings about goose tacos and fried goose and goose sandwich in the most calming voice he knows, but as he takes his fifth step back towards his open apartment door, the goose flaps its way over his head (slapping him in the face with its legs in the process) and slams his door closed.

“Oh, God, that auto-locks,” Jake groans, his words slurred a little with sleep. He walks over and tries the handle anyway – the goose stands off to the side, watching almost as if it knows the door won’t open, no matter how many times Jake rattles it.

Five minutes of non-stop leaning on the door knob yield no results, and Jake is finally forced to admit that he’s locked out of his apartment in boxers and a t-shirt. His neighbor has a key, but he works a night shift as a hot dog vendor, and his phone is inside, so he can’t call Gina for her spare. So instead, he slides down the wall so that he’s sitting, head on one knee, against the door, hoping against hope that the goose locked him out here because his soulmate is some new girl who moved into the vacant apartment down the hall and will be walking home any minute. His last thought before his eyes fully shut is that a speedboat model better be the one waking him up.

Tragically, the next face he sees is that of Fred, his middle-aged neighbor who lives across the hall, asking him if he’s okay. He mumbles something about automatic locks and broken doors and carpet that smells like mildew, but it isn’t until he adds “…and dumb soulmate geese trying to ruin your life…” that Fred’s face lights up in understanding.

“I’ll go get my key,” he assures Jake quickly before speeding inside.

The sounds of his clumsy neighbor slamming cabinets and rifling through drawers, accented by a colorful string of angry curses, clears Jake’s mind enough for him to sit up, stretching out his cramped limbs and rubbing his eyes, dry and itchy from one of the worst sleeps he can ever remember. That’s when he sees the goose, curled up peacefully like a dog on his welcome mat. He has never hated anything more.

Fred disrupts his reveries about gruesomely bloody water fowl murders by returning with a key, slightly bent but still functional. Jake pushes himself off the ground – with a great deal of effort and several loud (arguably unnecessary) groans – while Fred unlocks the door.

“Well, Jakey, I’ll bring you some hot dogs tonight – you look like you need them. Good luck with your soulmate…did you say goose?”

Jake dives in the door before he has to explain further. Of course the goose is already sitting on the couch, and even though beaks are possibly the least expressive food-holes available, Jake knows it’s grinning at him.

Work doesn’t improve his mood – he goes out with Charles first thing in the morning to check out a crime scene, and it should be simple, but the goose starts moving around critical pieces of evidence, scaring the beat cops who see nothing but floating kitchen utensils in the trashed apartment, and Charles, with tears in his eyes threatening to soak his face, has to tell Jake he should probably wait outside.

Charles also calls the goose Vendetta almost obsessively, as though he’s trying to convince Jake that this goose is somehow better than the wolf Jake’s always dreamed of. Jake calls the goose Quackers. This elicits a fresh round of honks every time he uses it.

In the afternoon, Terry tries to take Jake out to investigate a B&E – a low-stakes call was made about a broken window a few blocks away. The goose spends the car ride using its beak to open and close the windows so much that it breaks the button for the passenger seat. Jake’s a little mad about the repair costs that now fall on him, and very mad that the goose got to be the one to break the window – something he’s wanted to try all his life.

He’s confined to the precinct after that.

The goose seems more interested in eating the Chinese takeout Jake picked up on his way home than it had been in the pizza the night before. Jake’s even hopeful that they’ve reached something of a truce – Jake feeds it the vegetables that always come in his fried rice, no matter how many times he requests carbs and meat only, and it lets Jake eat both fortune cookies.

Jake’s smart enough to know now that when the goose wakes him up - more gently this time - he shouldn’t follow. Part of him - the part that still maintains some iota of optimism - wonders if maybe tonight is the night when Quackers actually does his job, but the part of him that is maybe now convinced that his bed - lumps and all - is actually probably his soulmate lets his eyes fall all the way shut without a second thought.

He wakes up to the angry beeping of his alarm far too early, and he groans as he slams the snooze button. He could sleep for another ten days, so it’s the easiest decision of his life to slam the snooze button - just once.

Five painfully short snoozes later, the hell-goose, whom he’s forgotten is sleeping at the foot of his bed, stinking up all of his favorite shirts and peppering his blankets with feathers, decides to intervene.

With something vaguely resembling a growl, Quackers lands on his face, batting the side of his head with its wings. Jake lets out a strangled yell, muffled by the feathers that are obstructing his airways, and flails his arms wildly until they make contact with the large goose that is definitely trying to kill him.

When Quackers goes flying, Jake takes the opportunity to roll over and bury his face in his pillow, which might be suffocating him, but at least it doesn’t smell like bird. He thinks that he’s done it, that Quackers will leave him alone, and then it only takes a few seconds for him to doze off, content in the knowledge that his alarm won’t go off for another nine minutes.

But thirty seconds later, the hell-goose is back stomping ferociously on his back, so hard that the breath is being forced out of his lungs. For a split second, Jake wonders how long he can endure this, if he should just resign himself to the fact that this is the end. That he’s going to be killed by this feathered beast, half goose and half demon, in his own bed. Then the goose shifts, allowing Jake to take a tiny breath in. Jake’s a cop, so he’s had his fair share of near death experiences, had to fight for his life more than once, but he swears that it’s never been as difficult as the fight with this goose. He waves his arms around, angled back towards the goose, rolling to one side to try to throw it off of the side of the bed, feeling its short claws digging into his skin. Somehow, Jake manages to turn and wrestle the goose off of him, finally rolling off of the bed himself, more breathless than he’d care to admit.

He takes a minute to collect himself, glaring at Quackers as he pushes the blankets around the bed, making a nest for himself and perching smugly in the middle (Jake didn’t know that geese could look smug before). Once the goose is settles, Jake briefly considers just climbing back into bed and reclaiming his blankets just to spite Quackers, but then he realises that he may very well be late for work if he doesn’t get dressed right this second. Much to Jake’s dismay, the goose won this round.

Jake’s sure that this particular Wednesday is the day that he’s going to find his soulmate. He’s earned it after a goose-fight that was somehow more exhausting than taking down even Brooklyn’s most hardened criminals. The day finally seems to be going his way - the sun is out, he gets his bagel for free after he accidentally drops it while paying, and no one notices when he’s five minutes late to work, Quackers trotting in behind him. Things seemed to have changed between them since the bedroom fight. Quackers settles at Jake’s feet quite happily for much of the day, with a self-satisfied possessiveness that makes Jake wonder if the goose thinks it’s the alpha.

This school of thought is reinforced when Charles brings in a casserole dish full of vaguely-green paste and orange chunks. With a sigh of resignation, Jake goes for his desk fork and stabs the casserole, steeling his stomach against whatever concoction Charles has brought for him to try.

When the fork, dangling mysterious strings of green, hits his tongue, though, Jake loses it. He spits it all over his keyboard, eyes watering as he rubs his tongue with his hands in a wild attempt to erase the taste from his memory.

“Charles! What was that?”

Charles looks only mildly concerned. “It’s a grass-and-carrot pâté. You know - for Vendetta!”

Jake blinks twice - both to communicate his confusion and to rid his eyes of the tears that are still forming at the memory of the grassy, overly-spicy taste that reminds him of the time Gina dared him to eat a handful of dirt on a dare. “Charles. You know that the goose doesn’t deserve a name like Vendetta. It’s Quackers, and it definitely doesn’t deserve treats. And also - why would you let me try it?”

Charles shakes his head, as if he knows something Jake doesn’t. “Jakey, Jakey, Jakey. Sharing food with your animal is a beautiful and natural part of the soulmate process! When Jason and I split his dog treats, it led to an entirely new level of understanding and devotion! It was almost as meaningful as the humping! If you won’t share goose food with Vendetta--”

“Quackers--” Jake interrupts.

“--then maybe you should try sharing human food! You need to find your soulmate, Jake. We’re all waiting for her - Genevieve needs a best friend!”

Jake shakes his head at his friend, mumbling thanks and vague words about goose-friendly pizza. Charles looks appeased - even more so when Jake throws in the word Vendetta - and leaves Jake to bond with Vendet--Quackers over the “intimate joy of shared vertebrate sustenance”.

When Charles leaves on a case thirty minutes later, a very-relieved Jake dumps the entire casserole dish on the floor, leaving Quackers to spend the afternoon licking it up (with a razor-edge tongue that makes Jake withdraw a few inches at the sight of it) while Jake successfully busts two cases of identity theft. He doesn’t, however, successfully find his soulmate, meaning he is still stuck with his vicious modern dinosaur.

He actually likes Quackers marginally better when he thinks of him like this. He may or may not spend an hour training Quackers - who is surprisingly smart, when he wants to be - to stomp around the apartment, wings extended, honk-roaring loud enough to wake Fred across the hall. It only looks marginally like a T-Rex, but Jake will take it.

Quackers never stops doing the walk. When Jake wakes up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, as his third day with the goose wears into his fourth, he trips over a goose silently marching up and down the hall. He does it across Jake and Charles’ shared table at the morning briefing (Charles tears up at the knowledge that the animal responsible for finding his best friend’s soulmate is here and wrinkling his case files), and he does it through the break room during lunch, stopping to “roar” so loudly in Jake’s ear that he falls out of his chair, much to Gina’s delight.

Quackers continues his march across the bar at Shaw’s that night, when the squad decides to take some of the edge of the week off together. Gina and about a billion of her friends are playing darts across the room, and Charles and Genevieve are sitting in the booth that Jake just vacated, slowly and painstakingly feeding each other fries to analyze the regional origin of the artificial cheese melted on top. Jake’s just looking for another beer (and to maybe collect Quackers, who just broke his fourth wine glass, which is a habit that Jake really can’t afford) when he sees Terry and Sharon sitting at the bar. With Quackers under one arm and a new beer in the other, Jake pauses to watch.

Terry’s got one arm around his wife, and she’s whispering something to him, close to his ear so that he can hear her over the comfortable hum of the regular patrons. He throws back his head, roaring in laughter, and she has to elbow him in the side to remind him to loosen his strong grip. They look so comfortable together that it makes Jake’s heart ache just a tiny bit.

And then Quackers, all but forgotten under his arm, nudges his cheek. It’s light, almost gentle, as though he’s trying to be nice. And Jake remembers, for the first time since a goose started attacking him during a morning briefing four days ago, why the goose is here. His chest fills with warmth at the thought, and there’s a tingling inside him that has nothing to do with what must be his fourth or fifth beer. This is why he’s been losing sleep to a malicious goose.

So he calls Captain McGintley (who is slurring far more than Jake is) and gets Friday off.

The next morning, he finds himself in the middle of Prospect Park, with Quackers on a leash in front of him. He gave the goose a solid breakfast (or, rather, Charles did) and sat down and tried to explain what would be happening today. It felt weird - trying to talk to a goose like an adult, and Quackers’ beady eyes were boring into his very essence, but he’s hoping that mutual respect and increased caloric intake will aid his search.

The plan, as Jake explained it, is that Quackers will be allowed to walk on his own - on a leash - and will lead Jake wherever he needs to go to find his mystery woman. Jake’s pretty sure Quackers gets it, and he’s been far more cooperative in the past twelve hours than he had been in the past four days combined. And yet, things go wrong almost immediately.

Quackers struts through the park, and at first, Jake is encouraged. He knows he must look insane to passers-by, with a leash suspended on an invisible animal, but then he sees at least three other morning walkers doing the same, and he decides he must be okay.

And then they come to a small pond, teeming with geese. Jake continues to walk, but Quackers jerks right and dives straight in. The leash is yanked out of Jake’s hand, leaving a nasty rope burn that will definitely require some hot chocolate from Charles (or maybe from the owner of the matching goose) later. In frustration, as he watches Quackers fraternize with the other normal geese, he kicks the boulder next to his leg.

And immediately lets out a shout of pain because he’s at least 99% sure he just broke all of his toes. He hops on one foot, nearly falling into the pond, and manages to steady himself. His foot is throbbing, and he lets out a string of curses so loud that a mother nearby claps her hands over her toddler’s ears. He removes his shoe - gingerly, carefully - to examine his toe - it might be bruised.

His sneaker - his favorite one (even better than its match, which has a scuff across the toe) - is sitting forgotten on the boulder while he peels off his sock when things go really, truly wrong. All of a sudden, a white blur trailing a blue leash with rainbow pawprints flies by, snatching up the laces of his sneaker in his beak before turning on a dime and flying back out over the small pond, feet skimming the water.

Jake shouts, caught off balance, and spins on the spot, trying to spot Quackers against the too-bright sun while hopping on one foot, his right foot still throbbing as he holds it up. Almost immediately, he lands face-first in the pond, scattering geese and taking several full gulps of algae before he manages to sit up, sputtering.

Quackers is sitting on the boulder Jake just vacated, the most self-satisfied Jake’s ever seen another living thing. He puts down the sneaker, honks loudly at Jake, and struts off, wings out in his best T-Rex strut.

Jake lets out a roar worthy of the best prehistoric reptiles and leaps out of the water, clothes streaming as he sprints after Quackers, who is hopping and flying in between waddles to stay just out of reach. Jake bowls over some teenagers playing hackey sack (the sack itself hits him in the face) and splatters mud on some small girls playing hopscotch as he tries to wipe the pond grime off his face. He rips around corners and through flower bushes (he emerges from one with purple flower petals stuck to the grime on his shirt) and runs headlong into a tree trunk when Quackers stops to take a break on a branch.

Eight minutes later, Jake’s run a decent chunk of the park, all just to retrieve the sneaker. His sprint has slowed to a jog, and he lost the breath to scream insults at his animal several minutes ago. He’s considering giving up on the sneaker - but something about this feels different, and he can’t quite shake the image of Terry and Sharon from last night, so he keeps going.

And then, in the distance, the blue lights of police cars. Jake mutters one final shit under his breath because for some reason, just for the sake of maximum embarrassment, he knows exactly where Quackers will take him.

Instead of seeing Charles or Terry or one of the beat cops from the Nine-Nine, like he’s expecting, though, he bowls over a beat cop from the Seven-Eight, a man he’s met a few times before on various joint stakeouts and tactical village events. Before he can stop to apologize, though, Quackers has sped up, heading right towards a white blob Jake can see in the distance.

As he draws closer, he can see that there’s another goose - this one wearing a police badge around its neck and proudly sniffing the perimeter of the crime scene. Next to it is a pantsuit-clad woman with the shiniest hair Jake has ever seen - the severe bun that contains it is blinding in the bright sunlight.

Jake’s so distracted that he doesn’t notice Quackers stop, doesn’t notice the goose standing in his way, until he’s tripped over it and skidded facefirst through the fresh, soft grass at the feet of Amy Santiago, the legendary detective from the Seven-Eight who kicked the Nine-Nine’s butts at Tactical Village two years ago.

“Are you okay?” she asks, looking more than a little concerned. Only then does Jake remember that he’s covered in mud and flower petals and missing a shoe and lying on his stomach in front of her, jaw hanging open.

“Your…Detective Santiago...goose…” is all he can manage.

“What? You mean Quackson Pollock?” She indicates her goose, but when she turns to see the direction of her pointed finger, she finds her bird not dutifully solving crime but instead nuzzling into the long neck of Quackers.

“Oh.” A blush starts at the tip of her ears and creeps onto her cheeks, darkening her bronze skin. “Oh.”

“Jake Peralta. Detective Jake Peralta. I work in the Nine-Nine.”

Reflexively, she reaches out to shake his hand. Her grip is firm, and he’s tempted to tease her about it, but there’ll be time - there’ll be years for that. So instead, he lets his hand linger, noticing the calluses that line her palm before looking up to see laughter in her eyes at his appearance. “I...I know you,” she says slowly, her eyes lighting up in recognition. “Coolest kill last year, right?”

“Yeah, sorry...Quackers took me on a bit of a wild goose chase.” He tries the pun, and is relieved to hear her small chuckle in response. He wonders what it would take to make her really laugh.

“You know geese are really smart, right? I’ve had Quackson Pollock working as a scent hound all week. Most cases I’ve ever solved.”

She sounds so seriously proud that Jake has to smile in response as he replies. “Bet you can’t beat my record.”

A competitive gleam lights up in her eyes. “Loser buys the coffee?”

“Good thing it’s gonna be you because I definitely lost my wallet in some flower bushes back on the south end of the park.”

She picks at one of the petals decorating his sleeves. “It’s a good look.” All of a sudden, she’s a little bit shy, and Jake gets it. His heart’s been threatening to jump through his throat and land at his feet at the sight of her warm, brown eyes.

“So, coffee?” she asks, breaking the silence. On Jake’s left, a white blur passes by, dropping a sneaker on top of his shoulder and affectionately batting his head with one wing before flying off.

“Coffee sounds great,” he replies, with a small pang of affection for Quackers and a great deal of nervous excitement as he watches Amy pass off the case to her secondary with more authority and poise than he could muster even in his John-McClane-daydreams.

“Time for a shower, though?” she asks, appraising his still-dripping clothes as they walk away.

“Title of your sex tape!” he shouts on impulse. And then, as he blushes, she laughs for realz and he decides immediately that this is a sound he never wants to stop hearing.

[swanqueeneverafter]

19. The Crocodile, Pt.2

Storybrooke. Present day. Blanchard Loft. (David Nolan is talking with Mr. Gold.) Mr. Gold: “May I have a word, (Looks down at the badge on David’s belt:) Sheriff?” David: “Uh, acting sheriff. And I'm already late on another busy day, cleaning up the mess you made.” Mr. Gold: “My apologies. That was a moment of poor judgment on my part. And it's not lost on me that I'm now here to ask for your help.” David: “Well, then it shouldn't be lost on you when I say no.” Mr. Gold: “Hear me out first. I'm here to report a missing person. (David sighs:) She left my home early this morning. Her name is Belle.” David: “Back in our land, you mentioned you loved someone once. Is-” Mr. Gold: “Yes.” David: “You also said she died.” Mr. Gold: “I thought she had.” David: “How can you be sure she's gone missing and not run away?” Mr. Gold: “I can't. Look, the townsfolk are less than sympathetic to my plight, but you- you're in the rather unique position to understand exactly what I'm going through. (Points to a picture of Emma and Mary Margaret:) Will you help me?”

Enchanted Forest. Past. (Killian Jones comes back to the alleyway, prepared to fight Rumplestiltskin. He spots the imp sitting on top of an arch.) Rumplestiltskin: (He drops a sword in front of Killian:) “Pick it up, dearie, and let's begin.” Killian Jones: “There's no need.” (He reaches for his own sword, but Rumplestiltskin takes it from him using magic.) Rumplestiltskin: “Sorry, but killing a man with his own sword was just too delicious to pass up. Hmm? (The two begin to duel:) Ships that pass in the night. Well, at least one ship.” (Rumplestiltskin flings Killian into a pile of barrels. He gets up and continues to fight. Rumplestiltskin disarms him, and steps on his sword before he can pick it up. He puts the tip of his sword and Killian's throat.) Killian Jones: “Go on. I'm ready for the sword.” Rumplestiltskin: “No. Do you know what it's like to have your wife stolen from you? To feel powerless to stop it? It feels like having your heart ripped from your chest. Actually, let me show you.” (He sticks his hand into Killian's chest.) Milah: “Stop!” Rumplestiltskin: (Looks over in the direction of the voice:) “Milah.” Storybrooke. Present day. (Smee brings Belle into her father's shop.) Belle: “Who are you? What- what do you want from me?” Smee: “I'm just a man who procures hard to find objects. In this case, the object was you.” Belle: “So then who- who put you up to this?” Moe: (He steps into the room:) “Belle? Oh. Oh, how I've missed you, Belle.” Belle: (Crying, muffled voice:) “Father?” (They embrace.) Moe: “I'm so sorry this is how we had to be reunited. Please understand. I had no choice.” Belle: “But to kidnap me?” Moe: “After the curse broke, I searched all over for you and discovered The Dark One still had you captive.” Belle: “He wasn't holding me captive. I chose to be with him.” Moe: “Are you saying you fell in love with him?” Belle: (Nods:) “But I fear it may be over now.” Moe: “It must be. Promise me you no longer love him, that you will never see him again.” Belle: “I'm not- I'm not a child.” Moe: “You don't understand what that man will do to you, what he's already done.” Belle: “No, you don't understand. It's my life.” Moe: “Then I don't have a choice. I'm sorry. (To Smee:) Do it.” Belle: (Smee grabs her and drags her away:) “What? Father? Father, what- what are you doing? Stop!” Moe: “Goodbye, Belle. I love you.” Belle: “Father!”

The Enchanted Forest. Present. (Emma, Mary Margaret, Aurora, and Mulan discuss the newly-found Captain Hook.) Emma: “You’ve seen him before?” Mulan: “Yes, I've seen him around. He's a blacksmith. Came to our camp a couple of months ago. Said he lost his hand in an ogre attack.” Emma: “Why would Cora leave a survivor? It's messy, it doesn't make sense.” Mulan: “You think he's lying?” Emma: “I think Cora’s tricked us before. I don't want that to happen again. (To Captain Hook:) Here you go.” Captain Hook: “I can't thank you enough for your kindness. Fortune it seems has seen fit to show me favor.” Emma: “An island full of corpses... you're the only one to escape. How exactly did that happen?” Captain Hook: “She attacked at night... slaughtered everyone in one fell swoop. When she started ripping out peoples' hearts, I hid under the bodies of those who had already been killed. Pretended to be dead myself. Mercifully the ruse worked.” Emma: “So much for fortune favoring the brave.” Captain Hook: “It was all I could do to survive.” Emma: “I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. I am pretty good at knowing when someone is lying to me.” Captain Hook: “I am telling you the truth.” Mulan: “We should leave here, in case Cora decides to come back.” Mary Margaret: “We should start searching for a new portal back to Storybrooke. I only got about five minutes with my husband, not to mention my grandson.” Captain Hook: “You have a grandson?” Mary Margaret: “Long story.” Captain Hook: “Well, I know this land well, I can guide you...” Emma: (Draws a knife and holds it over Captain Hook's throat:) “You're not gonna guide us anywhere until you tell us who you really are.”

Storybrooke. 1983. Mayor's House, Regina's bedroom. (Regina awakens for the first time in Storybrooke. She looks out of the window, sees the town of Storybrooke and realizes that the Dark curse has worked.) Regina: “I did it. I won.” (She walks to her closet and chooses her clothes for the day.) Cut To: Storybrooke, Main Street. (Regina is walking down the street and sees Marco struggling to repair a sign.) Marco: “That should hold you.” (She passes Granny’s Diner to witness Ruby & Granny arguing.) Ruby: “I cannot believe you put me on the early shift.” Granny: “Not my fault you stayed out all night. When I put over easy on the menu, I was talking about the eggs!” Archie: (Walking by:) “Morning, Madam Mayor.” Regina: “Good morning, Crick—Dr. Hopper.” Archie: “Beautiful day, isn't it?” Regina: “Yes. Yes, it is.” Cut To: Storybrooke Elementary School. (Mary Margaret, holding a bird in her hand, is teaching.) Mary Margaret: “As we build our birdhouses, remember: what you're making is a home. Not a cage. A bird is free, and will do what it will. This is for them, not us. They're loyal creatures. (Releases the bird out the window; it flies up to a birdhouse:) If you love them and they love you, they will always find you. (Bell rings; class rises:) We'll pick this up after recess. No running! (Regina enters the room:) Miss Mills, what are you doing here?” Regina: “Refresh my memory. How long have you been a teacher here?” Mary Margaret: “Um I -- I'm not sure. As long as I can remember.” Regina: “Come with me.”

Storybrooke. Past. Storybrooke General Hospital. (Mary Margaret and Regina are in front of John Doe's room.) Mary Margaret: “Why are we in the hospital?” Regina: “Tell me. Do you know this man?” Mary Margaret: “No. Why? Who is he?” Regina: “He's a John Doe, coma patient. No one's claimed him.” Mary Margaret: “Maybe someday he'll wake up. Maybe someone who loves him will find him.” Regina: “That would be nice for him. But I wouldn't count on it.” Storybrooke. Present. Dr. Hopper's Office. Dr. Hopper: "And the day would just repeat itself over and over?" Regina: (Nods:) "With a few differences here and there. Don't you remember?" Dr. Hopper: (Shakes his head:) "I mean, it was all pretty hazy-" (The door opens. Mr. Gold rushes in.) Dr. Hopper: “Mr. Gold, this is highly inappropriate.” Mr. Gold: “Quiet, you. (To Regina:) Where is she?” Regina: “Excuse me?” Mr. Gold: “You took her from me before, where is she?” Regina: “Why don't you check the ‘Missing’ board like everyone else?” Mr. Gold: “She’s not missing, she’s been taken.” Regina: “Well, then I'm sorry for your loss. (Looking to Archie:) But I’ve been here all morning.” Mr. Gold: “A likely story.” Dr. Hopper: “Mr. Gold, I have to insist. Please. Go.” (Mr. Gold leaves. Dr. Hopper closes the door.)

Enchanted Forest. Past. In the alleyway. (Rumplestiltskin still has his hand in Killian's chest. He pulls it out.) Rumplestiltskin: “Milah. How?” Killian Jones: “Milah, you have to run.” Milah: “No. I'm not leaving without you.” Rumplestiltskin: “Oh, how sweet. It appears there's more to this tale than I know. Tell it to me, Milah.” Milah: “Please don't hurt him. I can explain.” Rumplestiltskin: “Tick-tock, dearie. Tick-tock.” Milah: “That first night, when Killian and his crew came into the tavern, he told stories about the places he'd been, and I fell in love with him. (Rumplestiltskin sticks his sword into Killian's side:) I didn't mean for it to turn out this way. I didn't know how to tell you the truth. I'm sorry.” Rumplestiltskin: “And so here we are. You've come to save the life of your true love, the pirate. I didn't realize the power of true love before. It is impressive. I'd hate to break it up. Actually, no. I'd love to.” (He continues to stick his sword in to Killian's side.) Milah: “Wait. I have something you want.” Rumplestiltskin: “Well, I find that very difficult to believe. (He pulls his sword out of Killian's side and Milah shows him the trader's red hat:) Where did you get that?” Milah: “You know who I took it from. I may not know what The Dark One wants with a magic bean, but I have it.” Rumplestiltskin: “Oh, I feel a proposal coming on.” Milah: “The magic bean in exchange for our lives. Deal?” Rumplestiltskin: (Moves closer to her:) “I wanna see it first.”

[itsfinancethings]

It’s only April, but Fiona Apple may have already given us the lyric of the year: “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long.” Fetch the Bolt Cutters is, in fact, the title of both the song where she murmurs the line as a refrain and her first album since 2012. Apple couldn’t have known when she quoted the line, first uttered by Gillian Anderson in the BBC crime drama The Fall, that she’d be releasing the record into a world on house arrest. But Apple has always been spookily prescient about the mood of the culture, magnifying her own internal landscape until it starts to look like a near-future map of the universe.

As a young artist in the late ’90s she wrote piercing songs about, among other things, her experiences with sexual assault and mental illness—topics mainstream pop culture mostly avoided until well into the 21st century. Critics praised her music but mocked her preternatural candor; in retrospect, you get the sense that the presence of such a talented, articulate, tortured brain in the head of a beautiful teenage girl threw them for a loop. Two decades later, Apple has outlasted her haters and now lives a tabloid-proof life in Venice Beach. For company, she has her dog, a roommate and the roommate’s dog. When a reporter asked her, last year, whether she’d seen the movie Hustlers—which includes a scene where Jennifer Lopez strips to Apple’s 1996 hit “Criminal”—she replied, “If I were a person who actually left my house, I’d go.”

It figures, doesn’t it, that Apple was voluntarily self-quarantining years before the rest of us were forced to? She even did much of the work on Bolt Cutters at home, where she cobbled together a studio and recorded with the help of GarageBand and a three-piece band of veteran musicians (bassist Sebastian Steinberg, drummer Amy Aileen Wood and singer-songwriter David Garza on guitar), with whom she shares production credits. According to a recent New Yorker profile, Apple laid the rhythmic foundation for the album by leading the ensemble around the house, where they chanted and banged on homemade percussion instruments. Comfortable though its author might be in semi-seclusion, the album arrives as a message in a bottle from one castaway to a sea full of them. You bet Fiona Apple knows what it’s like to be bouncing off the walls of your bedroom—and your skull—with too much time to second-guess every choice you’ve ever made. How lucky for listeners that her unsparing introspection possesses the alchemical power to make us feel less alone in ours.

Mountaintop sage is a role that suits her better than enfant terrible ever did. Now that the culture is catching up with her, Apple has evolved in the public imagination into a sort of folk hero—trolling powerful sexists, reaching out to other artists who struggle with mental health, donating two years’ worth of proceeds from “Criminal” to refugees. In a 2018 video, she responded to a fan’s question about whether she still believed the words she’d notoriously muttered during a photo shoot in the ’90s: “There’s no hope for women.” Apple patiently explained that she was a scared kid back then and that the music industry in particular had changed for the better in recent years. “We’re gonna be fine!” she exclaimed, shifting into encouraging-big-sister mode. “There’s always hope for women. We are hope.”

Courtesy of Epic Records

That’s not to say she’s gone full girl-power cheerleader. Bolt Cutters can be quite dark. In “For Her,” Apple executes a devastating variation on the standard “Good Morning” with nothing but sparse, hollow percussion as a net: “Well, good mornin’, good mornin’, you raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” Like most the album, it’s a song that calls attention to its own construction, transitioning from one sound to the next with minimal artifice. What begins as a clapping, stomping jump-rope rhyme becomes a rhythmic chant whose intonations fall at the intersection of rap and R&B, then stretches into something bluesier. Finally, the shocking “Good Morning” line gives way to a layered, angelic chorus that feels like a sonic representation of healing. The song reportedly originated from Apple’s anger over the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

Her (mercifully non-literal) form of Trump-era rage coexists on the album with blunt dissections of her past, personality and public image. The incantatory refrain of “Relay”—“Evil is a relay sport, when the one who’s burned, turns to pass the torch”—makes for a timely indictment of our hate-poisoned political discourse but actually comes from one of Apple’s teenage notebooks. She vents her resentment at fakes, jerks, people who present their “life like a f—ing propaganda brochure.” (Never one to perform happiness she doesn’t truly feel, Apple is a conscientious objector to influencer culture.) Yet the song resolves with her finding the wisdom to break the relay’s chain: “I know if I hate you for hating me, I will have entered the endless race.”

Bolt Cutters takes a special interest in her relationships with women. Though she’s proven her feminist mettle over and over again, she has also taken more than her share of abuse from women—especially early in her career, when she was accused of giving girls eating disorders and allowing her 19-year-old self to be objectified in music videos. On “Ladies,” she repeats the title until its two syllables become meaningless, then slides into a lilting torch song for “good women, like you/Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through.” Still, Apple admits that she can be weird with, say, her exes’ new girlfriends. Amid a gentle metallic clatter, the title track opens with a plaintive, charmingly clumsy admission: “I’ve been thinking about when I was trying to be your friend—I thought it was, then, but it wasn’t—it wasn’t genuine.” Perhaps because having compassion for women also means having compassion for herself, she affords herself the same respect: “Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up,” goes the sing-along chorus to “Under the Table.”

The record’s conversational tone, manifested in Apple’s talky delivery as well as in lyrics that scan as prose more often than poetry, creates a rare intimacy. And it’s echoed in compositions defined by their rough edges: hand claps; a cappella passages; sudden shifts in tempo; vocals that alternate ragged whispers, attenuated moans and bracing falsetto with her unmistakable throaty croon. Ambient sounds—the dogs barking, people talking—as well as seconds of near silence, made their way into the mix. As beautiful as the melodies and the epiphanies they carry often are, the songs are not what you would call “pretty.”

This makes the album a significant departure for an artist whose early style was defined in large part by sophisticated, bespoke arrangements created with collaborators like acclaimed producer and composer Jon Brion. Yet Bolt Cutters wouldn’t be the extraordinary experiment in aural and lyrical honesty that it is if it sounded too polished. The record is a missive from the mini-studio in Apple’s house to whatever confined space we’re stuck in these days, compelled as we are to spend a lot more time than usual in our own heads. It offers us a roadmap to understand who we are and make peace with who we have been; to take responsibility for our worst selves and protect our best ones; to come out of our ordeal stronger, wiser, but still self-critical. From Fiona’s lips to God’s ears: We’re gonna be fine.