#Ice Upon a Pier

[ladzwriting]

HAPPY SAPPHIC SEPTEMBER! Women loving women and girls kissing galore.

My two standalones featuring lesbians are part of this promo highlighting FF pairings at the center of their narratives.

Ice Upon a Pier is my debut urban fantasy novella whose price is now $2.99

The Cradle of Eternal Night (illus. by Pom Poison) is a romantasy horror coming out next month on October 22nd, $0.99 this month

My women are in such good company.

CHECK OUT THE SHOWCASE HERE

edit note: removed the AI covers from the post; my apologies for platforming it

[itsmiyamore]

— thief

"You're just a thief, who stole all my moves and used them on me." — inspired by Thief by Maisie Peters

a/n: it's my darling boy's birthday!!! I think I wrote this fic before even starting this blog, so this is a super duper secret from-the-vault work that I've been gatekeeping for years hehe, but I figured what better way to celebrate Oikawa's birthday than by finally sharing it with you all?! Most of it is still from the original version I wrote years ago, just with some slight revamping and editing (ty @dear-koi for beta reading!); I really mean it when I say this is my baby and I'm proud, I hope you all love her as much as I do! :)

Warning: reader is gender neutral, but Oikawa's other love interest is fem

-> this is not part of the @/ficsforgaza initiative, but please consider sponsoring another wip!

"Hey, pretty." Oikawa Tooru slides into the seat of the desk in front of you, facing you. He smiles softly, resting his chin on his hand. Your heart flutters at the nickname, forever unused to the delicate attention Oikawa so graciously bestows upon you.

"Hey, yourself," you say softly, admiring the way Oikawa's eyes perfectly catch the sunlight. The flecks in his eyes take the shape of a flower around his irises, and you think it's the prettiest bloom you've ever seen.

Oikawa shifts and you watch, entranced, as he caresses the side of your face. His hand grazes yours, softly tracing the back of it—like silk fluttering in the wind. He turns it, intertwining his fingers with yours.

The morning sun comes through the classroom window and warms your skin, but your entire body soars with his touch. There’s a hush in the world as Oikawa hums, playing with your hand, admiring the way your fingers interlock. He looks fascinated, and maybe even a bit surprised you're letting him fiddle with them, and your heart thumps with the way he looks at you with the utmost adoration.

Oikawa handles you like you're made of fragile porcelain, wrapping your heart in thick blankets. He has always been careful with everything he does, but the way he treats your heart is so delicate, so pure.

Oikawa is your first love, and so, your only love. He never says it, and you never force the topic, but he cares so deeply for you it shakes you to your core. Everyone can tell; they'd be stupid not to. "Love," is the word they whisper as you walk down the halls with him trailing after you. “Love," is what his friends tease when they think you're out of earshot. And Oikawa just smiles that smile he knows you love because you turn back to wave, thinking yes, Oikawa loves you.

There's a special spot on the beach you both like to go to.

The glassy waves reflect the golden sky and the rolling clouds—the gentle sounds filling your ears, mouth going numb from ice cream on teeth. The waves lap up the pier and you glance at Oikawa sitting next to you, whose eyes are locked onto the boats disappearing in the distance.

As the stars begin to twinkle, you shiver, and he gives you his jacket, muttering something under his breath as he zips it up. His eyebrows are furrowed and his nose scrunches up, and something about the gesture is so endearing that you can't help but laugh.

He glances up, startled at first, then a faint smile of amusement appears as he watches you giggle. Your breath hitches as he leans in, something else blooming in your chest as the tips of your noses meet and his forehead rests against yours, your senses overflowing with him.

He stays for a moment, and you wonder what would happen if you leaned in.

But he pulls away and you can't help but wrap your arms around yourself and shiver, feeling colder than ever.

You're naive, you think, as you watch your castle crumble like sand under the ocean's unforgiving waves. Your world is slipping through your fingers and you're grasping, but he's gone.

And you realize that you'd become spoiled on a love that was never really yours to begin with.

Oikawa met her where he met you: by the shore of the ocean (your spot that you shared with him), skipping stones—a prom queen and heartbreaker jeans, a romance just waiting to happen, adorned with something precious and real.

You hate it. You hate the way he writes over the memories of you—replaces them with a shinier, prettier version—with the girl he says he's in love with.

The girl he is in love with.

You're angry at Oikawa for giving you the illusion of being royalty, and you're bitter, resentful, and angry at yourself for building up your hopes. Sometimes you can't help but wish you had it in you to tear them apart—to fight for Oikawa and maybe get to keep him—but when it comes down to it, you just can’t. You're not mean.

You're just unfortunately, irrevocably, hopelessly in love.

He's happy; you can see it in the way he hums as he walks to class or smiles out of nowhere. He's happy, and it kills you because it's no longer because of you—was it ever because of you?—but you would rather have the crumbs of his affection than nothing at all. It works—at least a little bit—you whisper to yourself, tearing your gaze away. But you can't help but pity yourself and your lonely little heart that was too drunk on fantasies to realize they were never meant to be.

Sometimes, you wish you had told him as you watch him go, hand in hand with her—smiling at her like he did with you, caressing her face like he did with you. He never knew, or maybe he always did.

He leaves anyway, and it hurts all the same.

I miss you like mental, you think as you look out to where memory has taken you. The sunset is beautiful, glittering on the ocean's surface, blissfully unaware that something sacred has been brutally taken from you. It's a curse that your heart does not know how to let go.

You loathe it.

You walk onto the pier, shivering as you wrap your arms around yourself. You try to remember the weight of Oikawa's jacket around your shoulders, the warmth of his body as he pulled you close, his fingers intertwined with yours. There's so much you would give—you sigh as you pick up a stone, turning it over in your palm before tossing it, watching as it skips over the water. There's so much you would give to feel his love again; and you cross your heart, hope to die, that you won't go insane with the way you miss him.

But maybe you already have.

There must be a cure, you think, for all the lonely, pathetic people who spilled their hearts out to pretty thieves who changed their minds.

Oikawa loved you, and you have no one else to blame but yourself for thinking that meant he was in love with you.

No one to blame but yourself for believing his beautiful, silver-lined words and bewitching gestures—like a sailor, doomed from the start to follow the siren to your death. There’s nothing but leftover hopes and wishes piled up like meaningless dunes of sand inside you, and as they begin to spill out of your eyes, you decide you won't keep them for him anymore. 

"Goodbye," you whisper to the gentle waves, small ripples fading as the only remaining evidence of your heartbreak. A simple promise you make as you turn your back, swearing off all the places and things he made you love.

Maybe you'll be back one day. Maybe one day after you've stitched yourself up in a slow, clumsy way because you don’t have his delicate fingers to guide your own.

Maybe one day, when you're finally alright.

[bad268]

Could u write a princess of Monaco and Arthur lecrelc , I see this being written so much for Charles and none for Arthur

thank you :)

Queen of Monaco (Arthur Leclerc X Reader)

Fandom: RPF/Formula 2/3

Requested: Clearly (haha we have the same mind bc I was already drafting this before you requested it)

Warnings: death of parents and brother (mentioned), google translate, the Monaco curse is affecting Arthur now and that's a warning itself bro. I am in denial about the race results today, so I made this to make me happy.

Pronouns: She/Her

W.C. 4108

Summary: The beginning of the relationship between Arthur Leclerc and the Queen of Monaco.

As always, my requests are OPEN

MASTERLIST // HITLIST

~~(@/Arthur's insta from January 29, 2023)

It was a normal day in Monaco. It was not a race week, and there were no pressing matters to attend. I had just returned to Monaco last week after attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, but I just received my Bachelor's degree and wanted to return home before starting my Master's. I decided to take my first semester online, so I could go home and spend time with my family.

When I got back, my parents urgently began to train me for the throne even though I was not next in line. Despite having an older brother who was scheduled to become the King of Monaco after my parents, he had to serve in the military before he could move forward. They wanted to have me prepare in the event that something happened to him in battle. 

I had never really been in the public eye due to my brother being the next in line. He was always the one attending meetings, trainings, and keeping up appearances. I was free to do as I pleased for the most part, but in 2015, they sent me to a training school in London. It taught the basics of monarchy and the foundations of how to run a country. It was the same one my brother attended. Even in my spare time, I found my passion in mechanical engineering and aerodynamics. It took some persuasion, but my parents allowed me to attend MIT after my graduation because they were so sure that I would not be needed. My brother is in the final stages of the training. All he needed to do was finish the last few months of military training, and then he would be crowned. 

Upon my return, I learned that my mother was ill, so they wanted to get my brother crowned quickly. However, they practically had to start from square one since I was provided very minimal training in London. My father was furious, not at me, but at the situation they had been placed in. They told me the best thing I could do while they prepare the training is to memorize Monaco as it had been nearly seven years since I had been here. 

I was walking down the pier, looking at all of the little shops that lined the pavement and the boats at the dock. There was a small ice cream shop, a couple of clothing stores, a few restaurants, and a salon. I realized that I had not had my hair professionally done since before college, so I thought it would be a good idea to treat myself.

“Bonjour, comment puis-je vou aider? (Hello, how can I help you?)” A lady greeted me as I stepped through the door. It was a small shop, no one else was in there, but it was cute and welcoming other than the fact that I could not remember French for the life of me.

“I’m sorry, my French is no good,” I replied sheepishly, fully prepared to leave, but the woman stopped me.

“Oh, not a problem, dear. My name is Pascale, what can I help you with?” She smiled, kindly, leading me over to one of the chairs. 

“Well, I haven’t gotten my hair done in almost four years, so I think it’s time to freshen up,” I explained. 

“Oh perfect, I can most certainly help with that,” She laughed, placing an apron around my shoulders. “Are you thinking about dye, highlights, trim, cutting…” She started listing more but I couldn't follow along with all of the terminology. 

“Uh, probably just a trim,” I chuckled, “my parents would kill me if I showed up with short, dyed hair.”

“Not a problem at all,” she grinned and began cutting the ends, little by little, as we made small conversations. “What do you do for work?”

“I actually don’t have a job at the moment,” technically, “but I just came back from the United States. I was at MIT for the last four years, getting my bachelors in mechanical engineering and aerodynamics, and before that, I attended boarding school in London.”

“That’s interesting,” she hummed, “Sounds like you like Formula 1?”

“Not so much the races. I just like the cars,” I laughed in response. “I like learning what could make the cars better, faster, stronger, and safer, but the actual races aren't something for me. I watched one too many accidents end badly, so I can never find enjoyment in it anymore. The last race I went to was in Japan, and I lost my best friend.”

“Oh, I’m sorry about that, dear. If you ever need to talk, I’m here,” Pascale consoled. I looked at her confused through the mirror. She just set the scissors down just as her phone got a notification. She pulled out her phone and opened the notification. It was a text message with a picture. “That is my son, Charles, and his best friend, Pierre. They’re in Formula 1. They went out karting today, and he just sent me this.”

“Oh, Charles Leclerc and Pierre Gasly! I know them,” I recognized immediately. “That’s your son?”

“Yeah, he’s always had this passion for driving, so I’m proud to see him living his dreams,” She smiled, putting her phone back, and resumed cutting my hair.

“Well, I’m proud of him too, and I don’t even know him.” I laughed. 

“Maybe, if you’d ever change your mind, you could join us for a race,” Pascale offered. “Only if you’re up for it.”

“I’ll have to see, but probably not,” I declined nervously. 

“It’s not a problem, dear,” She said, patting my shoulders. “But you are all done. How do you like it?”

My hair was shorter by a couple of inches, but it felt so much lighter and healthier than it did earlier today. “I love it so much, Pascale! Thank you so much! How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing, just promise you’ll think about joining us? It would do you some good to get to know more people, and you could even check out the cars before the race! If you’re not comfortable staying for the race, you can always leave. Just promise you’ll think about it before immediately rejecting it?” She pleaded.

“Fine, I’ll think about it,” I laughed, “but only because you were so persuasive!”

–

The next time I was out in the streets was nearly a week later. My time was being packed with different trainings and attending private events, but nothing public yet so as to not stir up controversy. I decided to go to a local bakery and get some tea and some food. The food in the castle just did not compare to my favorite bakery. Not by a long shot. 

When I walked in, there were not a lot of people in there. It was a small shop with only two tables and a counter. There was the person behind the counter, Ella, and three people at the tables. One sat by himself and the other two occupied the second table. I approached Ella and ordered a tea and sandwich. She said she would bring it right over once it was finished, and I approached the man sitting by himself.

“Bonjour,” I greeted, my French was slowly coming back to me but not enough to carry a full conversation. The man looked up from his phone at me. He had blue eyes and shady blonde hair. He had airpods in and took one out as I approached the table. “My name is Y/n. Would it be alright if I sit with you? The other table is filled.”

 “Of course,” He responded immediately, moving the bag that was hanging on the other chair to the floor. “I’m Arthur.”

“Nice to meet you, Arthur. Thank you for letting me sit with you,” I laughed, taking the seat that he pulled out for me. “I really appreciate that.”

“It’s my pleasure,” He chuckled along, “It was just empty anyway.”

~

That was the start of an inseparable bond. It was strange having someone so close again because even though I had some friends in school, they were never as close as Arthur was. For the first couple of months, any time that was not filled with training was spent with each other. Whether it be chilling in his apartment, driving around Monaco, boat rides, and random trips around France and Italy, we were content with doing random acts of entertainment. It didn’t take long before he asked me to be his girlfriend.

One thing we knew would be difficult is the time commitments. With his recent change from Formula 3 to Formula 2 and more royal training for me, we knew it was going to be more time-consuming. That didn’t stop us, however. Tuesdays were the most random day of the week, but neither of us had any responsibilities.

One day in particular, the day before he was set to go to Australia, we were at his apartment, and I was helping him pack since he *conveniently* forgot. We had gone to get smoothies and acai bowls earlier that morning before heading to his apartment. Then, after we ate, we put on some music as background noise while we packed and conversed back and forth.

“Would you ever come to a race with me?” He asked as he pulled a couple of shirts out of his closet. “I know you didn’t have a good experience at the last one, but would you be willing to give it another time?”

“I don’t know, A. I get anxiety just knowing you’re racing,” I explained. Moving to fold the shirts he’s pulling out. 

“That sound like an improvement!” He laughed, jumping over and wrapping his arms around my shoulders as I put the folded clothes in the suitcase. “When we first started talking, you said no immediately. Now, you’re saying you don’t know.”

“What can I say?” I leaned back into his embrace, “You are pretty persuasive.”

“What are the chances of you coming to the Monaco Grand Prix with me?”

“The odds are in your favor since I don’t go anywhere,” I laughed in response. He turned me around in his arms. He was pouting and had his head tilted slightly. “No, don’t do the puppy face. You know I can’t say no to that face.”

“Please?”

With a heavy sigh and a joking eye roll, I caved. I was about to vocalize my decision, but my phone started ringing. This time, my sigh was out of annoyance after seeing it was from Mila, my personal guard and trainer.  “I need to answer that, but yes, I promise to go to the Monaco Grand Prix with you.”

“Of course,” He exclaimed, kissing me all over my face. “I will take care of everything. You go take the call, and I’ll finish packing in here.”

With a small smile, I walked out of his bedroom to the living room and stepped out onto the balcony before answering the phone. “Hi, Mila. What did I forget?”

“Nothing, but are you near the palace?” She responded. Just the tone of her voice made me nervous.

“Not really, I’m about 20 minutes away. Do I need to head back?” 

“Yes, let me know when you get here.” And with that, she hung up. I walked back in to see Arthur with his suitcase fully packed by the door.

“I need to head home,” I started. “Something’s not right.”

“That’s fine,” He reassured, pulling me into a hug. “I’ll need to head out for my flight soon anyway, so I’ll walk you to your car.” 

During the drive back, my mind wandered. Was there a meeting I missed? I couldn’t remember having anything scheduled on a Tuesday. Most meetings were on Mondays or Wednesdays and policy training sessions were Thursdays and Fridays. Maybe there was a last-minute meeting.

Pulling through the gates, I texted Mila once I parked in our car park, and a few guards were waiting for me. “Hi, what did I miss?”

“Y/n, we need to talk,”  one of the guards, Chris, said, and right then, I knew things were worse than I thought. We walked through the corridors to reach one of the meeting rooms, but the only person in there was Mila. The guards immediately turned around and left the room.

“Mila-”

“Have a seat,” She cut me off, gesturing to the seat next to her. I took it hesitantly as I looked at her skeptically. “So, I’m not going to beat around the bush with this. As you know, your mother, the queen, was sick.”

“I assume she died then? That’s what this was for?” I cut her short. However, there was something on her face that said she wasn’t finished. “Okay, I’ll let you continue.”

She shook her head dismissively, “No, it’s fine, but you’re right. She passed away early this morning.”

“So my brother will be crowned when he comes back?”

“That’s the next news,” Mila paused. I encouraged her to just rip the bandaid off because I was getting impatient. “Your father went to the base to get your brother, but there was an explosion. There was a gas leak, and somehow the building they were in exploded. We’re still waiting on the details.”

“Wait, so my entire family…” I trailed off, but she knew where I was going. She just nodded solemnly as she pulled me into her side. “So that means…”

“It means you are to be the queen.”

~

Third POV

Ever since the Melbourne Grand Prix, Arthur has been talking about how his girlfriend was going to join him on the paddock for the Monaco Grand Prix. To say that his friends and brothers teased him would be putting it lightly. Any chance they could, they asked questions about this “girlfriend” of his that they had never heard of, and Arthur was willing to spill all of the details. On the Thursday before the Monaco Grand Prix when he was driving to the track with Charles, he accidentally let it slip that he actually had not heard from her recently. He asked Charles to check his phone to see if she had texted him recently.

“Wait, you haven't heard from her in over a month and you’re not at all worried?” Charles asked, very concerned for someone he’s never met.

“No, we’ve definitely texted recently,” Arthur responded in disbelief. When they pulled up to a red light, Charles showed him that the last message from her was April 1. “No, we’ve definitely talked.”

“Here, pull over. We’ll switch, so you can call her, and I’ll drive us the rest of the way to the track,” Charles said, already getting out of the car as soon as they were on the shoulder. He immediately dialed her number, and after a few rings, it went to voicemail. He thought about leaving her a voice message, but she was already calling him back before he could start.

“Hey, traffic is hideous, but I’m almost there,” She started her explanation. She was sitting in the backseat with a couple of guards, and Mila as her driver took them to the track. “Are you already there?”

“No, we’re not there yet,” he laughed. “Charles and I are still stuck in traffic, but we noticed that I hadn’t messaged you since the Australian Grand Prix. Thought I would call to see if you were still coming.” Charles was half listening to the conversation, but he was smiling to himself, hearing how lovestruck his younger brother sounded.

“Oh, definitely,” She chuckled. Mila nudged the girl with a knowing grin. “I’ve just been insanely busy recently, but I promised. On the bright side, I finished my training!”

“No way, I’m so proud of you, ma chéri!” Arthur cheered. Charles was a little confused as he pulled into the track, but let it go, knowing Arthur would explain it later. “Does that mean there will be a ceremony or something?”

“You could call it a ceremony, yes,” She giggled. She noticed that they were only a few blocks away from the car park of the track, so she turned her phone away toward her shoulder as she directed a question to Mila, “Could I jump out and meet up with Arthur before the race? I promise I’ll be careful, and I’ll be in the box before it starts.” Mila turned to discuss it with one of the guards who was entirely against it. “Please, I won’t leave Arthur’s side, and you know he’s trustworthy.”

“I won’t let her out of my sight, Mila!” Arthur’s voice could be heard through the phone despite it not being on speaker. She gestured to the phone at her shoulder as Mila tried to reason with the guard.

“I’ll go with you,” Mila said as she started collecting their passes and jumping out of the car that was stopped in the traffic going into the parking lot. Y/n immediately climbed out of the back, pulling her phone back up to her ear.

“Alright, Arthur, where do you want us to meet you?”

~~

First POV

“You seem to have gotten shorter since Melbourne,” I laughed as I ran into Arthur’s arms from where he was waiting at the Dams garage. 

“You’re wearing heels,” he pointed out after we pulled away. “What are you and what have you done with my girlfriend?”

“You say that like you don’t like me in heels,” I teased back.

“Ok, lovebirds,” Mila pulled our attention away from each other, “I am going to head up to our seats. Don’t tell anyone I left.”

“Your secret’s safe with me. Thank you, Mila,” I responded as she started walking away.

“You have seats?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah, I didn’t want to rely on you for the passes for Mila, so she bought us hospitality seats,” I explain. It wasn’t the whole truth, but I could not just tell him that in the open. “Is it possible to talk somewhere away from the cameras?”

“You’re not breaking up with me, right?” He immediately jumped to conclusions.

“No, no, no, no,” I quickly shut down. “Je t’aime trop pour partir, mon amour. I just want to tell you something. (I love you too much to leave, my love)”

“Je t’aime, ma belle, (I love you, my beauty)” He whispered, pulling me in for a light kiss before leading me back towards the driver’s room he shares with Ayumu. “Make yourself comfortable.”

I took a seat on one of the beanbags as Arthur sat right next to me. I took a deep breath before deciding the best way to tell him was just to say it fast. “Arthur, I need to tell you about my family.”

“Are you trying to have me meet your family already? You could meet my brothers and maman today if you want,” He rambled.

“I can meet them, but you won’t be able to meet my family. That day you left for Australia was the day I found out they passed away.” I paused looking at his reactions. He looked sorrowful as he grasped my hands and ran his thumbs across the backs of my hands. “Maman had an illness, and papa went to get my brother from the base.”

“Your brother’s in the military?” He asked.

“Was,” I answered. He looked even more confused at that before I continued. “He was serving in the military as his last stage of training. Kind of like my trainings, he had to serve in the military.”

“What kind of training did you need to do? Was this part of your degree or something?”

“No, that’s the big secret I haven’t been able to tell you,” I whispered, putting my head down as I felt guilty for not explaining this sooner.

“Anything you have to say, I will accept you either way,” He reassured me as he pulled me into his chest and kissed my head. “I understand that you have your reasons for hiding some things, so whatever this is, it is not going to stop me from loving you.”

“What if it is complex with more spotlight than you already have?” I asked, throwing my head to rest on his shoulder and looking into his blue eyes. “What if it’s a big change?”

“When we go public, it will be a big change, but I’m willing to do anything for you, ma princesse.”

“Reine, (Queen)” I whispered.

“Quoi? (What)” He responded just as fast.

“What if I told you my parents were the king and queen of Monaco? And my older brother was the prince of Monaco? And now that they’re gone, I will be the queen of Monaco? What would you do?” 

He went silent for a few seconds before whispering, “Are you serious?” My silence was enough of an answer for him to jump up, pulling me with him as he starts laughing and spinning us in circles. He set me down after a couple of spins before holding me at arm's length,  “I would completely understand. I mean you probably didn’t plan on taking the throne because of your brother, and you’d just come back from studying. I only tell people who need to know, and when we met, I wasn’t someone who needed to know. We haven't talked since you found out, so I could never be upset with something like that.”

“But now, if we tell people, you will be heavily scrutinized as people will see you as a potential king,” I signed, happy to know he isn’t upset with me, but still wanting him to see all sides before completely agreeing to move forward. “You’d have more on your list.”

“The only question I would have is if it would interfere with racing,” He turned serious.

“I would never let them keep you from your passions,” I laughed. “They have to respect it by order of the queen.”

“Well, then I would see no issues against continuing to be by your side, ma reine,” he chuckled with a mocking bow.

“Merci mon beau prince, (Thank you my handsome prince)” I mocked back, “now by order of the queen, go win this race.”

~~

“And Arthur Leclerc passes Fredrik Vesti in the final turn of the race,” Crofty shouted over the radio during the final lap of the race. I was up in the hospitality seats with Mila and the guards but headed down to the pitlane a couple of laps before since I was going to be presenting the trophies. I was standing at the pit wall with Charles, Lorenzo, and Pascale, who I met (again) just before the race. “The Monaco Curse is broken for Arthur Leclerc as he wins his first Monaco Grand Prix!”

 I left the pit wall to meet everyone at the podium and stopped to meet up with Mila on my way over. She and the guards escorted me through the crowds. “I’ll tell you now, one of you will need to tell Arthur not to out our relationship when I give him his trophy.”

At the podium, I stood behind the steps as Alice announces the winners. “In third place, we have Théo Pourchaire! In second place, we have Frederik Vesti! And in first place, breaking the Monaco Curse, the home favorite, Arthur Leclerc! Presenting the trophies today is the future Queen of Monaco, Y/n.”

“I’m proud of you,” I said to Arthur as I handed him the trophy.

“Merci, now if only Charles could win,” He joked, taking the trophy and posing with it.

“I’ll tell him you’re talking crap about him,” I teased back, moving away to grab the next trophy for Dams. I handed them all out and expressed my congratulations to the other two drivers before posing for the picture and immediately ducking back as I knew Arthur would try to spray me. I walked down the stairs to meet up with Charles before he heads back to Ferrari for his own race. “Arthur’s talking shit about you. You better win.”

“I’m starting sixth, so we have hope,” Charles responded as he rolled his eyes.

“Just don’t box for hards at the last lap again and you’ll be fine,” I laughed as if it were really that simple. 

“Maybe I broke the curse for both of us or maybe I just had some good luck today,” Arthur said, coming up behind us and throwing his arm around my shoulders.

“Oh yeah, what good luck did you have?” Charles teased, punching Arthur into me.

“Maybe just the future queen of Monaco.”

~~~~~

© BAD268 2023. DO NOT REPOST WITHOUT PERMISSION.

[golden-heretic]

September is such a magical month-- it's bisexual visibility month, Latinx Heritage month, my birthday month AND Sapphic September? I just keep winning ♥️✨️

So in giddiness to participate in #SapphicSeptember 🌸 I've prepared a list of not only TBRs but recommendations but remember 🍷 READ SAPPHIC ALL YEAR AROUND💋

TBR 📚

🌙 The Cradle of Eternal Night by Ladz

🐍 Scales of Seduction by Rien Gray

🦪 Mother of Pearl by AA Fairview

🩸 Unholy with Eyes like Wolves by Morgan Dante

☀️ As the Sun Comes Up by Olive J. Kelley

Recommendations 📚

🐟 Providence Girls by Morgan Dante

🪽 The Fall that Saved Us by Tamara Jerée

🥀 Where Willows Weep by Luna Fiore

❄️ Ice Upon a Pier by Ladz

🍷 A Dowry of Blood by ST Gibson

[tgmsunmontue]

Once Upon a Time in 1996... 7/7

IceMav TimeLoop. Maverick wakes up to a great day. Then it all turns to shit. Explicit.

ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

              Pete rolls out of bed, doesn’t bother dwelling on the now over-powering sense of muscle memory wanting to find Tom and sink into the space beside him. He’s used to his day starting apart from him, has come to enjoy the anticipation of seeing him again soon. Has forced himself to learn to enjoy the anticipation, knows he needs to start his day with Carole and Bradley before giving in to his desire to see Tom. He doesn’t know how long it’s been now, he stopped keeping count after one hundred, but he’s got a rough idea that it’s been months. Many months. He’s learnt so much about Bradley and Carole and Tom, but also himself. The monotony and routine of day-to-day life with a family that always terrified him before is now his new normal.

              He gets dressed quickly, knows he will be showering before lunch for other reasons if he gets his way. He quickly heads into the kitchen, starts the coffee machine and makes toast for Bradley, puts the bottle of wine away and puts the tissues within easy reach. Then he goes back upstairs and walks down the hall, knocks on Bradley’s door and pushes it open. Bradley is up and dressed but busy reading a book and he looks up guiltily at being caught out. Pete can’t help but smile, wondering what kind of kid feels guilty for being caught reading.

              “Hey Bradley. Brought you some breakfast. I need to talk to you…”

              He knows now that Bradley has seen letters from the hospital, knows that his mom is sick. He knows it’s cancer. They’ve had the following conversation dozens of times, Bradley isn’t unaware of what his mom is doing today but is definitely an expert in hiding the fact. He is such a risk-averse kid, doesn’t want to rock the boat or upset the adults in his life and he knows he probably worries about being left behind but he knows he can allay those fears almost immediately.

              “Hey Mav…”

              He sits down on the edge of Bradley’s bed, rubs his hands together and smiles softly, sadly.

              “Hey. Wanted to talk to you about something pretty important.”

              “Okay. What?”

              “Well, you know how your mom is sick, well, I wanted to ask you how you would feel about me adopting you, incase anything happens to her.”

              “Oh. She’s really sick huh?”

              Pete nods.

              “Yeah, she is. I don’t know all the details, but she has an appointment this morning. I know you saw a letter from the hospital and have been waiting for your mom to tell you. But she’s been wanting to protect you from having to worry about all of this.”

              “I’m not a kid! She can tell me stuff!”

              “Oh Bradley, she knows she can. She just loves you and wants to protect you. But she can’t against this, and that hurts her more than anything else in the world.”

              “I just want to be there for her like she’s always been there for me…”

              “Yeah, that’s amazing of you Bradley. But I’m pretty sure that’s a hard idea for your mom to accept. I think you wanting to be there for her is amazing though, so even if she says no, I am still so proud of you okay?”

              “Oh… thanks Mav.”

              “You’re welcome kiddo.”

              “And it’s yes by the way. About wanting to be adopted by you. I’d like that. A lot.”

              “So would I. I love you kiddo.”

              “Love you too Mav…”

              He pulls Bradley into a hug and holds him for a good minute or so before loosening his grip and pulling away a bit.

              “Right, so she has this hospital appointment and I’m going to try and convince her to take you with her okay? So you can be there for her like you want to be. Afterwards go for a walk along the pier and get an ice-cream. Here, here’s a twenty. You treat your mom okay?”

              Bradley nods, and Pete can tell he’s close to tears, wants to tell him it’s okay to cry, because they’ve cried together a lot, and he knows they will in the future if they ever get a tomorrow, but he’s done enough for today, knows Bradley will be okay, feels reassured that things might suck, but he’ll be okay.

              “Just��� stay in here until I’ve talked to your mom okay?”

              “Okay.”

              “Read your book.”

              That gets him a grin and he ruffles his hair, laughs as Bradley tries to bat his hand away and he closes the door behind him, quickly going and turning the coffee machine on, because this is definitely a conversation that relies heavily on the consumption of coffee. He has his conversation with Carole down to a fine art, a script that runs almost automatically through his head without him even thinking about it. Her response, her easy acceptance of his weird living-hell, it’s both the hardest and easiest conversation of the day.

              He goes back upstairs and knocks on her door, knows not to just open it, that she doesn’t want to be caught crying, not yet, not if she’s going to agree to Bradley going with her. She needs to have coffee first. To feel more settled and to have already heard the bad news from him. The fact that he can prepare her, that she can begin to process it and then face the inevitable of telling Bradley.

              “Hey Carole, I need to talk to you. I’ll make you a coffee… ”

              “I’ll be right there.”

              “No rush…”

              He knows she’ll rush a little anyway, her mind already thinking about where she needs to go, and he knows it’s partly due to not knowing for certain that she’s hating right now. They’ve talked about it extensively and right now he probably knows how she’s feeling better than she does. She enters the kitchen and he passes her coffee, made perfectly after fuck knows how many days of practice and she takes a sip, clearly waiting for him to talk, seeing as he’s the one who told her not ever ten minutes ago that he wanted to talk. However he waits for her to be halfway through the first cup, glances at the time and he’s ahead of schedule.

              “You okay Maverick?”

              He laughs under his breath but nods, because despite everything her attentiveness still makes him feel incredibly lucky to count her as one of his closest friends.

              “Yeah. I’m… I’m okay. Mostly. Right. So this might sound crazy, but I’ve told you this well over three hundred times now and in none of those have you ever not believed me,” Pete starts, and sure enough her eyes are wide, eyebrows hidden by her fringe but he’s used to this expression now.

              “I’m stuck in a time loop. You have a hospital appointment about your cancer and the news is not good. Really not good. Six months, maybe a year. But I think you know that already. We skipped the appointment a good chunk of days. Got drunk a few others. I went with you to the appointment about a hundred times. We’ve discussed how much it sucks every single day…”

              She’s finished the cup and he silently pours her a second one, adding the creamer and sugar before handing it back.

              “It does suck,” she says, voice catching wetly and he nods silently, leaves her a few beats to think, to let the tears trickle silently, and this is why he has Bradley stay in his room. There had been yelling the one time, Bradley angry and Carole upset. It had only happened the once. He doesn’t like them yelling at each other.

              “It does. I wish I could tell you something different.”

              She wipes at her eyes, sniffs and he slides in close and wraps his arms around her and hugs her tightly.

              “What I can tell you is that you can stop worrying about telling Bradley. He already knows. He saw a letter you’d left out. For a little while now Bradley has been going to the appointment with you.”

              “What?”

              “He already knows you’re sick,” Pete repeats, continuing to hold her. “He’s been waiting for you to tell him.”

              He remembers the first time he’d figured out that Bradley already knew, it had assuaged his guilt immediately. He knew Bradley was smart. It had also reminded him that as much as he considered Carole and Bradley his, when he’s away on deployment, they’re a little duo, happily going about their day-to-day lives, always there for each other. It feels right that they’re together through this as well.

              “He has a lot of questions, questions the doctor can answer. He’s been reading up. He wants to be there for you like you’re there for him all those times while he was growing up.”

              “He’s still growing up Maverick.”

              “Yeah, he is and he’s turning out to be this amazing caring young man who wants to be there for his mom when she receives this terrible news. You’ve raised such an amazing person Carole…”

              “We’ve raised an amazing person you mean…”

              “I don’t feel like I can take the credit, but I won’t argue with you. He wants to be there with you. For you.”

              She starts crying again and this is fine, this is how it’s gone before, when she realizes that Bradley is mature enough to make his own decisions and agrees to let him go with her. He just needs to tell her one more thing.

              “Also, I asked him if he’d mind if I adopted him. He said yes. We’ll sort out a lawyer if we ever get out of this time loop. Wasn’t a fan of the one time we actually made it to a lawyer.”

              “Are you sure it’s okay that he comes with me?” Carole asks, and he’s glad that today that is her question, rather than what happened with the lawyer.

              “More than okay. He already knows and it’s going to be scary for him, but it’ll be scary for you too and you’ll be there together. It always works out well at the end of the day…”

              “What about you though, you don’t want to come with us as well?”

              Pete licks his lips and pulls away, because this is always the kicker, the bit that makes her tip over into knowing he’s actually in a time loop and he’s come to enjoy her delighted surprise rather than be insulted by it. He was a little blind before, he can admit it now.

              “No. I have another conversation I need to go have. This last thing, which I think is always what makes you realize I’m serious. I know Ice is in love with me. That he’s been in love with me for years. And god, I love him so much it’s ridiculous.”

              “Oh my god! You’re going to go and talk to him?”

              Like every single other day Carole is overjoyed that he’s realized he’s in love with Tom. That his happiness ranks above her own issues tells him how much she loves him and he grabs her and hugs her, his grin wild as he just lets happiness wash through him.

              “Hey Carole, I love you.”

              “Love you too Maverick… of my god. Iceman is going to be blindsided. Does he know how you feel? Of course not, you haven’t told him. Oh my god I wish I could be a fly on the wall when you tell him!”

              “Uh… you wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall.”

              “Why not?”

              “You want a show with your declarations of love?”

              “Oh really now? How many times has that happened?”

              Pete blushes, because he’s had plenty of sex, nearly daily, sometimes multiple times a day, and Carole is laughing so much she has tears in her eyes but they’re tears of happiness and Pete doesn’t care if she’s laughing at him.

              “Oh Maverick, that’s amazing. I needed some good news. How does he take it? Well obviously, if there’s a show.”

              “Took a few times to get there, learnt about his secret stash of vodka. Drank his bottle of vodka. He… he’s surprised but happy,” Pete decides on, because that’s a pretty tidy summary of his repeated days with Tom. They haven’t progressed past that honeymoon realization, even if he has, his own emotions settling into a bone-deep assuredness that he loves Tom with every fiber of himself.

              “So, Bradley and I go to the hospital and you go off and have sex with Iceman. I know what I’d rather be doing…”

              Pete coughs, coffee catching in his mouth and Carole is laughing again, eyes crinkled shut and he can’t help but join in.

              “We’ll come around this afternoon.”

              “Don’t drag yourselves out of bed on my part,” Carole says, still sniggering with amusement and Pete shakes his head.

              “He’ll want to see you and Bradley.”

              “Okay, well then. I guess I better get going. Has Bradley had breakfast?”

              “I took him toast.”

              “Of course you did.”

              “He’s reading, told him to stay in his room until I came and got him.”

              “Thanks Maverick.”

              He shrugs, because he feels like he’s only getting everything right because he’s had so much practice at it.

              “I’ll see you later.”

              “Of course.”

              He leaves them to it then, doesn’t need to hang around to watch them leave. He eyes the grass as he walks to his bike and he knows it’s not any longer than it was yesterday but it still annoys him. He can’t rush to Tom’s, he’s out running and he’s learnt to time talking with Ice for after his morning run. Tom has too much nervous energy that tips over into annoyance if he hasn’t gone for a run, although there were a couple of times when Pete managed to distract him with sex, but the best days are the ones where he’s waiting for Tom and gets to see him run toward him dripping sweat. He’s quite a fan of the sight.

              Sure enough there’s no answer at the front door, which he knew would be the case but he also can’t stop the habit of checking just in case. He settles on the porch stairs, stretches out his legs and leans back, knows that the pose is a little provocative which is exactly why he does it, times it for just as he spies Ice running toward him and he tips his head back, eyes closed and soaks up the warmth from the early morning sun. He hears the rhythm of Tom’s pace falter as he sees him and he cracks an eye open, smiles slowly and resists the urge to just go over and rub himself all over him.

              “Hey Tom…”

              He loves the surprised delight on his face when he hears Pete call him Tom.

              “Maverick… what are you doing here?”

              “Well, I need to talk to you,” Pete starts, because he’s learnt after all the times of doing this, that fast and to the point are best. Ripping off a band aid. In all the times he’s done this Ice has never reacted violently, sometimes he’s gotten angry, thinking Pete was making fun of him, but he’s learnt exactly how to do this now. He stands up, the one step giving him the height advantage and with it he can see the way Tom’s eyes track over his facial features, dipping to his mouth and he licks his lips automatically.

              “What do you need to talk about so urgently that it couldn’t wait until tonight?”

              “Well, I want to spend more of today with you than just tonight. Also, what I really need to tell you is that I love you. So much. And for a long time. I don’t even know how long any more,” Pete says, because he knows he’s over three hundred days, but has given up trying to keep track for his own sanity. “I know you’ve been making yourself sick, smoking too many cigarettes, thinking about telling me. How I might react. Well. It’s better than your best-case scenario, because I love you, and I want to be with you, and I know it’s not going to be easy. Sometimes you’re going to want to kill me. I’m going to drive you crazy. But I’ll always love you…”

              He holds his breath then, because there’s four different ways that Tom usually reacts. Disbelief; have you been drinking? Shock; oh my god, you can’t be serious. Anger; don’t make fun of me Pete. I think you should leave. And his personal favorite, terrified hope, which is never words but actions, trembling hands reaching out to touch him. He takes one in his hand now, tugs him up the steps and nods toward the door and watches as Tom’s hand shakes a little as he slides the key in.

              “Come on, let’s talk some more…”

              Of course, once the door is shut he doesn’t let a single moment pass, simply lets himself give in and presses himself against Tom and leans up to kiss him, lets his hands rest on his waist, but he doesn’t make any effort to hide his attraction or the fact that he very clearly wants to be there, here, with him. He also knows it stops Tom from doubting him, from overthinking his declaration.

              “Maverick… what…”

              “Today has been a very long day…”

              “It’s not even nine-thirty.”

              He laughs, kisses him again, doesn’t want to ruin this time with Tom yet, knows he can and will tell him later about Carole, but they have plenty of time and he also knows that Tom is going to want a shower, wants to wash off the sweat of his run and Pete wants to help him. The talk about the time loop goes a whole lot better when Ice is one orgasm in, like he takes Pete’s declaration of being in love with him much better after he’s been for a run. It’s been a lot of trial and error, but he’s learnt these things now.

              “Come on… shower.”

              “What?”

              “You want a shower but are feeling like a bad host because you don’t want to leave me alone. Solution is to have me shower with you…”

              Every.

              Single.

              Time.

              He grins at the expression on Tom’s face, like Pete has spoken a foreign language that he feels like he should know but still can’t understand. He helps the translation by walking toward the shower and stripping off his clothes as he goes, looking over his shoulder with an expectant look and sure enough Tom catches on and scrambles to follow. He leaves a trail of clothes, can sense when Tom enters his personal space because he can feel the heat of his body, still elevated from his run. He turns the shower on and grabs towels, before turning to face Tom who is still standing there, fully dressed and watching him silently.

               “I know this seems fast for you… just, trust me?”

              He knows Tom trusts him with his life, but every day he gets to watch this decision as Tom trusts him with something more. His heart, his vulnerability, his fears… Pete will do his utmost to never make that trust falter, not in this. In them. He waits for the short sharp nod of Tom’s head and then tugs at his t-shirt. Tom gets the message and immediately strips it off over his head, his hands hesitating briefly at the band of his shorts but Pete knows this now, strips off his own underwear, unafraid of going first.

              He lets his fingers ghost over Tom’s skin, damp with sweat and the raising humidity of the bathroom and he pushes him toward the shower, but not before placing a soft kiss to the edge of his mouth, pleased when he feels the twitch of a smile and he gives him a few seconds, just enjoys the view before Tom realizes he’s being watched and reaches for him, hand still trembling slightly and Pete squeezes it reassuringly. Then he’s under the spray of water and he sinks to his knees, smirks at the expression on Tom’s face which is sheer wonder and disbelief. He knows that this is one of Tom’s fantasies, and okay, it’s not the locker room, but he’s still on his knees in the shower.

              “Oh my god… Pete.”

              He bites his lip as he grins, meeting Tom’s eyes. He runs his hands over Tom’s thighs, coarse hair under the pads of his fingers tips and he runs his fingers over the swelling flesh of Tom’s cock before he places a gentle kiss to the head. Smirks when he feels Tom’s hips jerk with little to no control and he knows better than to wish to be able to do this every day for the rest of his life, considering his current issues, but god he has hopes for his future.

              He knows this is going to be over quickly. He knows exactly how to get Tom off as quickly and efficiently as possible, and while he’s not aiming for a personal best today, he’s not going to waste time either. Round two is always much more enjoyable. He licks his lips and lets a little of the shower water gather in his mouth before he then sucks Tom’s cock into his mouth, three small sucks in quick succession, head bobbing as he feels Tom getting harder, feels the muscles under his fingers flex in an effort to not buck wildly.

              He massages his thighs, imitates a rolling motion and Tom latches on, his body slowly rocking forward and back and Pete relaxes, lets him slowly and shallowly fuck his mouth, lets one of his hands drift to Tom’s balls, savors the muffled groan Tom makes around the fleshy part of his hand that he’s shoved in his mouth. He’ll have time to make Tom loud later, make him forget to hold himself back. He presses a knuckle to his perinium, massages it, gently, sucks at Tom’s cock as he rocks into his mouth and Pete moans, his own erection heavy between his thighs but so far neglected. He can wait. His body might not think he’s gotten off, but his mind knows and if he can holdout it will be amazing. There’s nothing but the sound of water, gasp-y breaths and skin moving slickly on skin, moan and groans echoing around the confined space, his own name punched out of Tom every so often and then he feels every muscle under his hands tense up and then he’s swallowing, Tom coming with a shudder and a painful sounding whine, his fingers resting softly on Pete’s head before pulling back.

              Pete stands, his knees and jaw both aching but in the best ways and he swallows a mouthful of shower water and then pulls Tom down into a kiss, knows Tom’s brain is still throwing up disbelief with every second thought.

              “Love you,” Pete says, knowing Tom needs to hear it again, needs to know that this isn’t just something sexual.

              “I… I love you too. I. You… you’re really good at that.”

              “Mmm. Come on. Finish washing yourself. I need to get clean as well, then I want to get you into bed.”

              He watches as Tom’s Adam’s apple works soundlessly and he wraps his arms around Tom’s waist, presses a kiss to his bicep and presses his erection against his thigh. Tom’s hand goes to it, wraps around it tentatively and Pete’s reminded of how inexperienced Tom is now, compared to him with his hundreds of days’ worth of experience.

              “No rush, but I want you to fuck me.”

              Tom makes an inarticulate sound and Pete ducks his face to hide a grin, because he knows what he wants and he knows now how easy Tom is for him, that he doesn’t even have to really ask before Tom will give him anything within his power. He can’t believe he missed it for so many years. They make out, slow and exploratory and he let’s Tom take his time, savors the sensations the gentle finger elicit and wonders if he’ll get to have Tom fuck him with familiarity, be a little rough with him, not be so gentle like Pete is a gentle precious gift. Not that he’s complaining, but he wants that. Wants everything.

              They move to the bedroom and he makes Tom lie down in the middle of the bed, pretty much lies on top of him like a weird body-shaped blanket and continues to run his hands over him, rocks his body against him and lets him feel how turned on he is, knows he finds it reassuring and he’ll tell him later that it’s all because of him. That Pete wouldn’t be like this with anyone else, not anymore.

              “How are you feeling?” Pete asks, because there’s a couple of variable answers to this question as well, none of them bad though, nothing he can’t course-correct.

              “Good… so good.”

              “Good. Want to tell you something. It’s not as important as me telling you I love you, but there are a couple of things which are pretty significant, and one is definitely tied to the fact that I know you love me and have done for a long time. And that you keep a bottle of vodka in your freezer for when you just can’t bear it anymore…”

              “What are you talking about?”

              “This is where I need you to trust me. I’m in a time loop and am stuck in this day and have been for a very long time.”

              He’s straddling Tom’s thighs, hands resting on his chest, staring down at him and Pete knows his expression is deadly serious, has to be if Tom is going to believe him.

              “A long day. You said it had been a very long day.”

              “Yeah. The first few days were a bit messy, I was dealing with something else and didn’t take your coming out with quite the grace I would have liked. Plus you never knew about me sleeping with men as well as women.”

              “Maverick…”

              “Sorry, I’m usually better at this part. I’m in a time loop and every day I come over here and get to tell you that I love you, that I feel the same way about you. I’m sorry I didn’t see it before, but I see it now…”

              “A time loop…”

              “Yep.”

              “Why should I believe you?”

              Pete grins then, because this is one of his favorite bits and he slides his body against Tom’s, quirks an eyebrow.

              “Because you’ve told me all your fantasies. Wasn’t a coincidence that I gave you a blowjob in the shower. And I know you want to spank me next time I do something stupid. I know who you’ve had sex with… hundreds of days with you and I want hundreds more.”

              He would of course like hundreds of different ones, but he’s not going to bring that into their conversation right now, wants Tom to hear and realize the truth of what he’s saying.

              “Is that why you’re…”

              “So good in bed? Well, I probably know your body better than I know my own now.”

              “How…”

              “I have no idea. But one time I said I felt bad that I got to remember all our firsts and you just said I was racking up the flight hours and could show you all the tricks…”

              Tom quirks an eyebrow.

              “That does sound like me.”

              Pete grins and leans down to kiss him, feels one of Tom’s hands grasp an ass cheek and squeeze and he knows they’re going to be alright. For today.

              In the beginning he’d mixed it up every time they had sex, knowing that he’d get to start afresh, just making sure it was always good for both of them in case tomorrow did arrive. There have been some truly hilarious moments together, and some not great awkward moments because sex is messy and bodies can be inconvenient things. However his favorite is riding Tom, watching his face as he pushes into Pete for the first time.

              “Oh my god you feel good… Gorgeous.”

              “Lots of practice. With you.”

              “Think that’s a good thing, don’t like the idea of you with anyone else.”

              Pete smirks, because that isn’t a surprise either, Tom wanting to lay claim and ensure Pete knows it. Tom’s hands won’t stop moving, touching everywhere they can reach and Pete leans down so they can kiss easily and enjoys the shift of Tom’s body under him, cock in him and he groans appreciatively. Rocks his hips a little to repeat the motion and yeah, feels good.

              “You like this?”

              “Yeah. Yeah I like it. So do you by the way…”

              “Really?”

              “Yeah. You look beautiful stretched around my dick.”

              Tom’s hips jerk then, and he presses into it, can’t help the grin, nips at the sensitive skin of Tom’s throat and kisses him again before sitting back up and raising off Tom’s cock before sinking back down, feeling smug at the broken sounds Tom makes.

              “Fuck… Pete.”

              “Yeah, come on. Want to hear you…”

              He’s been hard or semi-hard for over an hour, his body reaching a level of arousal where it just simmers away while he waits for Tom. His delayed gratification is worth waiting for every time, something he’d never thought was worthwhile before. Now the anticipation just winds him tighter and higher and the sounds their bodies are making, adding to it all. Tom is panting, his eyes not leaving Pete’s body, tracking his facial expressions, but sliding down his body to his cock. His hands are scrambling for the lube, then a cool slick hand is wrapped around his own dick, and he lets out a shout.

              “Pete… come on Pete.”

              His thighs are burning, knees tender from kneeling on the hard tiles, his stomach tense with curled-tight pleasure aching to be released. His entire body feels electrified, alight with energy but tinged with a side of pain which he knows how to ignore. Their bodies are shifting against each other, both chasing their own release and he wraps his hand around Tom’s, encourages his hand to go harder, faster and then he’s coming, breath punched out of him and his eyes squeeze shut despite him willing himself to keep them open so he can watch Tom.

              He can watch him now though, mouth fallen open, eyes almost black with how wide his pupils are blown and he doesn’t even resist the urge to reach for his mouth with a couple of his fingers, a little come on them and then Tom is sucking them into his mouth, fingers of both hands suddenly gripping so tightly to Pete’s thighs he’s going to have bruises tomorrow. If he gets tomorrow. He pushes the thought away and enjoys the moment, leans down again for a kiss, ignores the cooling come now being smeared between them, swallows Tom’s whimper with his own mouth as his body tightens and Tom comes, body shaking.

              Pete lets him enjoy the afterglow for a few minutes, but reaches for the condom as Tom’s cock softens and slips out and he kisses him through it all, doesn’t let the body contact break. Then he bullies Tom into having another shower, ignores his grumbling about wasting water and Pete grumbles back that showering together will actually save water, which always makes him flush with pleasure and Pete knows he’s thinking about the blowjob.

              He still has to tell Tom about Carole, and he doesn’t want to tell him in bed, or in the shower, not with the memories he wants those places to have for them, so he tells Tom he wants a coffee, maybe a snack to keep his energy up which gets him an eyeroll but it’s affectionate and when he kisses Tom on the cheek he delights in the shy surprise. Once they’re seated at the table, no romantic dinner evidence in sight he rests his feet alongside Tom’s.

              “So there’s still something else I need to tell you.”

              “Something else?” Tom asks, expression on his face disbelieving and he wishes he didn’t have to do this part, but the few times he’s not told Tom he’d simply felt physically sick about keeping it from him.

              “Yeah. Not good news this time. Carole is sick. Cancer. She has six months, maybe a year.”

              “What? Where is she?”

              “At the hospital.”

              “You let her go alone?”

              “She’s not alone. Bradley is with her. They’re… she knows about the time loop as well. I told her what the doctor is going to say, so she’s prepared for it. Bradley has lots of questions though, and he so desperately wants to be there with her. They’re okay. Trust me. She knows where I am.”

              “Oh.”

              “Yeah, I’m here with her blessing. She wants us to be happy…” Pete says, remembering her chortling laughter from that morning. “Also I’m going to adopt Bradley.”

              “Oh my god… is there anything else?”

              Pete huffs then, realizing adopting Bradley is probably another piece of news he should maybe break a bit softer, although Tom doesn’t seem too surprised by it.

              “No. Nothing else. Just…” he glances at his watch. “Come on, we have an ice cream date…”

              “We do?”

              “Yeah…”

              He hasn’t done this before, not with Tom as well, but he knows Carole and Bradley go for a walk along the pier and get ice cream after they visit the hospital. Some days after his morning with Tom he’d joined them, leaving Tom to process everything. Today though he wants Tom to come with him, not ready to say goodbye. Hopefully they can catch them and the four of them can do something together, rather than just the usual dinner which has happened so many nights instead.

              He lets Tom drive them, spies Carole’s little Honda Civic and points it out, Tom parking not far away. They don’t hold hands as they walk, he learnt the hard way that is a step too far for Tom, too much considering he isn’t in this loop with the sure feeling that there are no consequences to his actions out in public. But he whispers in his ear that he wishes they could and the shy smile he gets back makes him feel warm all over, and the drag of warm fingers over the back of his hand add to that.

              Bradley sees them first, his happy yell at seeing Tom after getting back from his deployment reminding Pete that he’s actually been away for months, even if Pete feels like Tom’s been back longer. Bradley tries to convince them he should be allowed more ice cream, but Carole refuses. She’s smiling, even though her eyes are a little red. Tom gives her a bone-crushing hug and Pete distracts Bradley with some boat watching while Carole and Tom quietly murmur to each other, no doubt discussing either the time loop, cancer or the fact that they collectively think he’s finally lost his mind.

              Most days he’s either stayed with Tom, or just gone home and waited for Carole and Bradley. For a very long time the days have ended with the four of them having dinner together, although what they eat changes. Tom has always sought him out when he’s left him alone, although some days it’s only an hour while other days it is several hours before he turns up on Pete’s doorstep. Today though he doesn’t want their time together to end and they’re almost back at their cars, so he suggests they get a late lunch before heading to the zoo. Bradley is enthusiastic, suggesting a whole list of potential lunch places.

              “The zoo?” Tom asks, leaning against his car.

              “Maybe I don’t want our date to end.”

              “Our first date has Carole and Bradley tagging along?”

              “Our first date today does, but don’t worry, you’ll have me all to yourself later.”

              “Mmm. Good to know,” Tom says, tone soft but expression completely serious and Pete lets the wash of anticipation flow through him.

              Lunch is easy, a diner half-way to the zoo which apparently does great milkshakes and Bradley is talking animatedly about his plans for summer and the conversation between them all is comfortable and relaxed. Tom lets his ankles rest against Pete’s, lets their hands brush and thighs press against each other in the booth. It’s not holding hands and screaming from the rooftops but it’s more than enough compared to the nothing he had.

              They spend over three hours at the zoo. Pete buys four disposable cameras, gives one to each of them and keeps one for himself. Informs them they’re documenting everything from then on and he gives Carole a kiss on the cheek as she smiles at him, eyes almost brimming over with tears and he tries to be positive; the idea that taking photos that won’t even exist on the negatives in twenty-four hours isn’t a heart-breaking thought.

              They get back to the house and it’s been an amazing afternoon, full of laughter and love and he thinks he will try and do this again tomorrow, the novelty of it still there, the feeling of rightness even more so. Still wishes he could get the photos developed and keep them, knows they’ll be gone by the time he wakes up tomorrow. Carole and Tom are discussing making dinner and he eyes the grass. Remembers his first couple of days, when he cut the grass and it’s been bugging him today, more than it has other days so he decides to give in and cut it, muttering under his breath about needing to cut the grass and Tom simply shrugs.

              “Getting to watch you get all hot and sweaty while you carry out yard work. Hard life but I think I’ll manage…”

              Pete wasn’t expecting that and he laughs.

              “God I love you.”

              Tom blushes and Pete gives him a quick kiss, grips his hand before he pulls away to go and fetch the lawn mower from the garden shed.  It’s not a large lawn by any stretch, but if he’s going to do the job, he’s going to do it properly so he does the edges with the trimmer as well. Doing it late afternoon is definitely hotter work than it is first thing in the morning. He tidies everything away and goes back inside and he’s definitely hot and sticky and now in need of a third shower and says as much, excusing himself for the upstairs bathroom and ignoring Carole’s snort. He doesn’t expect Tom to follow him, but he does and he’s being pushed against the bathroom door, the shower not even running warm yet and Tom is stripping his clothes off.

              “My turn to clean the sweat off you hmm?”

              “Pretty sure I didn’t lick you clean…”

              “Don’t ruin my fun.”

              He mimes zipping his mouth shut, although the effect is likely ruined when his mouth immediately drops open as Tom curls a hand around his cock and he jerks into it, his breath punching out of him in surprise.

              “God you’re gorgeous…” Tom says, voice quiet and whispered into his ear and Pete can’t help the high-pitched whine he lets out. “Got to be quiet.”

…           …           …

              Carole generously gives them an hour before she’s yelling for them, telling them dinner’s ready and as she places food on the table she raises an eyebrow.

              “You’re on dinner tomorrow night. Regardless of how that tomorrow shapes up. I’ll know.”

              Pete snorts, because neither Carole or Tom have remembered anything from any previous days, but he nods and promises to make dinner tomorrow night. He usually orders pizza on the nights he’s meant to cook, but he has to admit to himself that he’s a bit sick of pizza. They sit and eat, similar to lunch, feet and ankles touching beneath the table, although in the privacy of home Tom lets his hand rest right beside his. They listen to Bradley talk about the book he’s reading, Tom’s deployment, things Carole wants to do, which is bittersweet, but it also feels right.

              He and Carole are doing the dishes together, Tom and Bradley now discussing something else related to the relative speed of land mammals versus aquatic mammals and he’s not worried about being a solo-parent to Bradley, because he won’t be. He’s going to have Tom there if it ever does happen.

              “Good day?” Carole asks, bumping her hip against his and he smiles.

              “Yeah, definitely one of the best.”

              “Good. Glad to hear it. You seem happy.”

              “Yeah. Yeah I am,” Pete says, accepting the truth of it. He’s had good days before, some of them better than this one, many a lot worse. But today is definitely in the top ten

…           …           …

              “Is it okay if I stay?” Tom asks, his hand resting softly on his hip and Pete presses into it, needs to feel the warmth and strength of his hands on him.

              “I’d love to wake up with you tomorrow morning. Of course you can stay.”

              It’s not the first time Tom has stayed over, and while he usually sleeps in his underwear and a t-shirt because he gets cold alone he knows he will be plenty warm enough with Tom in bed with him. He doesn’t even have to worry about waking up cold, because he’ll wake up and magically be dressed again. They kiss softly, mouths cool and minty-tasting and he relaxes into it.

              “That will never get old…”

              “I’m glad to hear it.”

              He feels the soft kiss to his forehead as he drifts off to sleep.

…           …           ..

              He wakes up.

              Alone.

              Tom isn’t there and yesterday had felt… right.

              Not perfect, because no day can ever be that, but it had felt right, and good, and okay, if he can make today feel like that again then he’ll count it as a win.

              He rolls over, kicks the blankets off and stops, looks down at his chest, his thighs.

              He’s still naked.

              There are bruises on his thighs.

              He’s never woken up naked before.

              He sucks in a sudden panicked breath and stumbles to standing, then his bedroom door is opening and Tom is stepping inside, closing it quietly behind him and Pete reaches a hand for him.

              “You’re here.”

              “I’m here… where did you think I was? Do you not want me here?”

              “You’re here,” Pete repeats, and his breath catches, eyes sting and then he’s crying, unable to breathe in deep enough and Tom has scooped him up into his arms, is rocking him back and forth while Pete is pretty sure he’s going to pass out and they both ease down into the bed. Tom is running his fingers through his hair, mouth near his ear, voice quiet.

              “Yeah… I’m here. It’s Saturday.”

              He curls his fingers into the cloth of Tom’s t-shirt, unwilling to let go for fear of him going somewhere else, of not having this anchor to this new day. He is in his bed, in his bedroom, in his home with Carole and Bradley but it’s the next day. His brain can’t compute it, that he is somehow no longer trapped repeating the same day over and over again. He doesn’t know what he can do that might help convince himself that it is indeed the next day.

              “The photos… can you get the photos developed?”

              “Sure we can Pete, just… it’s not even seven. Nothing will be open yet. But I’ll find a place that can do them in an hour.”

              “We’ll go together,” Pete says, gripping Tom’s hand and he nods.

              “Together. Jesus Pete… are you okay?”

              “No… I… do you remember yesterday?”

              He feels shaky and knows it’s the shock of it being over, that he is finally getting all his tomorrows handed back to him and he can’t believe he gets to have them all, that he gets to spend them with Tom, watch Bradley grow up, make as many happy memories as possible with Carole before they have to say goodbye. But also if they don’t remember yesterday he’s certain his heart is going to break.

              “Yeah… I remember yesterday. Every amazing, unbelievable, crazy second of it.”

              He lets out a wet sob, the relief almost unbearable and then Tom is kissing him, sweet and gentle and Pete feels himself melt into it, knowing that Tom remembers, and is here, is kissing him. He pulls back.

              “I love you.”

              “I remember. I love you too. I’m not going anywhere. Was planning on spending the entire weekend with you anyway.”

              “There will be a lot more sex then you planned.”

              “I’m okay with that.”

…           …           …

              He’s scared, he realizes. Doesn’t want to fall asleep in case he once again wakes up repeating the day. Stuck in a different time loop.

              “It’s okay Pete. I’ll be here when you wake up regardless.”

…           …           …

              It’s another tomorrow.

              He gets his happily ever after, after all.

THE END

[lordadmiralfarsight]

I (main blog of avantlalettre) will butcher you my beautiful saber and throw your remains in a river if you dont publicly denounce vaspider for calling ME,a female of 16 years,a perverted man. And furthermore your soul shall go to hell afterwards where it shall forever be trapped in a pool of flie's larvae,ice,and human refuse wherein you shall be tormented by your demonic hosts and force to pursue the Adversary's standard through this ocean of purulence for the remainder of eternity. However you can avoid this if you denounce vaspider,apologize to me,and delete your reply

Don't be surprised that people assume you're a guy when the name of your blog is Karl prince of darkness, Karl is a typically male name and people are gonna assume, doesn't matter how long you've been a female.

I didn't see anything about perversion in Vaspider's reply, so I'm going to guess you tacked that on yourself and that it's your opinion of all men. Nice essentialism there dipshit, but switching "woman bad" with "man bad" doesn't make you a genious or anything close to good, it makes you a narrowminded asshole. As a man, vas te faire retourner par une chèvre, suce-merde.

I don't believe in your soul thingy, so your threats mean fuck all to me.

Even if I somehow took into account your worldview, calling you an idiot on the internet wouldn't justify that severe of a punishment, especially for eternity, so you claiming that shows you are either exaggerating or you have an incredibly inflated opinion of your own worth on a metaphysical level. Either way, your threats are worthless even in your own belief system.

Reading the first line made me wonder if I had somehow gotten a yandere stalker. If you want people to give you the time of day, try not to talk like a deranged lunatic.

The overly wordy way you write is also doing you no favor, as it makes you sound like a melodramatic twat. You don't sound smart, you sound arrogant. Just in case, and so you understand, here's a TL;DR in your own language : I, Farsight, Lord Admiral by the Grace of my Shipping Heart, do declare that your vile perfidy and obtuse demagoguery are most unwanted upon these hallowed piers, that your hackneyed threats are as void of meaning as the soul of a gull is of decency, that your biases are a stain most revolting and that your very presence is neither wanted, nor tolerated. Begone from my dock. Or, for normal people : blocked. And if you somehow contact me again, I will contact the police regarding the very real and actual death threat in the first sentence of this bullshit. And as I live in France, where death threats ARE legally penalized, that means legal consequences :) So fuck off my dock, and never come back. Vas te faire voire chez quelqu'un qui en a quelque chose à foutre de tes conneries.

[hannahssimblr]

Once, years ago now, Aunt Maureen took me to visit her eldest daughter, Karina. In the midday heat, beneath the shade of a fig tree we sat in a Venice restaurant, where bougainvillaea draped over the front of flat roofed houses and fragrant blooms edged the terrace. 

I loved Los Angeles. The food was always better, the people happier, the streets more colourful and picturesque than in Albuquerque, where everything was brown and beige, blending with the dust land. Karina laughed when I said this, sitting back in her chair in her oval sunglasses, a cigarette balanced between long slender fingers. 

“You should see where I live downtown, then I’ll ask you again how much you love it here.”

I didn’t know what she meant. I was thinking about those cool guys I’d seen on a basketball court earlier with their hats on backwards, the loud, bass heavy music they played from a speaker, and the skaters who dropped lazily into concrete basins on their boards. I wanted to be one of them, though I knew Maureen would never buy me something dangerous like a skateboard. I played things a bit fast and loose at the best of times and once almost rollerbladed clean off a pier, so she’d developed a fear that I might one day die of pure stupidity. Maybe when I was older and she wasn’t watching me from the kitchen window anymore I would move to LA, get myself a board and skate around on it without wearing a shirt, and get muscles and a deep tan like everyone else here. 

These were the kinds of thoughts I lost myself in as Maureen and Karina had conversations that either weren’t interesting or which I was unable to understand, but I was content sipping on my Fanta with ice, lurid orange, and so fizzy that it stung the back of my throat and thinking about being a grown up in LA while Maureen had her white wine and Karina her cigarettes. Soon they would order a plate of oysters that looked too much like boogers for me to sample and speak more about things happening, things that had already happened, and plans they’d made for the summer. 

“What’s your favourite time of year?” Karina said to me suddenly, snapping me out of my thoughts. I knew this is the sort of question you ask a seven year old when you don’t know how to speak to children, but I thought hard about it anyway to make sure I gave her the best answer I could. She was my cool, mature cousin, and I always wanted so badly to impress her. November and December, I told her, because I got presents on my birthday, then time off school on Thanksgiving and both these things on Christmas. I was still reeling from the PlayStation console that Maureen and her husband Mario had bought me last Christmas, slotted perfectly within its square, silver box, which I still had, stored carefully beneath my bed just in case I ever needed to pack it away and move it. 

“What about you, mom?” She said, and Maureen didn’t have to think. 

“The spring,” she said, “I just love to be out in my garden then, with all the flowers and that lovely sun, it’s not too hot. It feels like everything is just on the brink of bursting to life.”

I thought about that later as we passed the canal, all the beautiful spring flowers that erupted from the banks, and of home too, where by now, in the hazy days of mid May, the desert was blanketed with spring grasses, with violets and golden poppies and bluebonnets, burning a trail of vibrant indigo all the way to the mountains. 

Beginning // Prev // Next

Ty to @scrapplesims for suffering living in LA once upon a time and for answering my weirdly specific questions about what it was like

[desognthinking]

the pier. 9.3k. (or, more from the haunted house designers au.)

ava & (her new) co. have one and a half years to construct three groundbreaking, mindblowing, prestige haunted houses around the country, all in time for halloween. this is scouting/teambuilding trip numero uno. it's not going well so far.

---

Ava sees her at the end of the pier, a dark figure in the already-dark; a smudge of barely-moving ink on the line between wind and water. Barely, indeed – wavering less than the yearning swallow and swoop of the waves interrupted by pillars of wood, and, further back, stone. 

At night, after everything’s shut, this place is quiet until the fishermen get out in the early morning. In the off-season, even more so. Rain slings down frequently, and it’s not warm enough for balmy walks by the rocks. Not many come out, if any. Ava’s one.

She calls out as she walks down the planks, only thinking belatedly that perhaps she might not want to be disturbed. Out here behind the motel, unmoving under the preliminary drizzle of rain, embraced and cocooned by temperamentally warping air. It is, after all, that tremulous transitory phase between spring and summer that borrows its faces from both, and switches its masks sharply in the slit-time of blinks.

Bian lian, Beatrice had murmured, not even looking up from her laptop. Face-changing, literally, in Sichuan opera. A flick of a wrist, a deft flourish, and an elaborate face falls and reforms in the fraction of a second. 

This was in the motel’s breakfast room, the one with the dubiously cleaned burgundy felt chairs where they served a  modest continental breakfast. Mostly cleared out after said breakfast, the air was stained with lingering cigarette smoke from the lounge next door, and the smell of cheap canned ham. The plastic display vases on each table had been stowed away, and in their meager place someone – probably Beatrice – had stuck a crinkly, disposable plastic bottle containing a bunch of freshly picked yellow flowers.

It was not an especially private space, what with the pale pink bellies sunning themselves right outside the glass panels, but it wasn’t as if the conversation had progressed to anything especially private. Legally speaking. Or productive, for that matter.

For the fast forty-five minutes Ava and Lilith had been busy prodding, pacing, and sending small metaphorical pockets of firework powder across the room to burst and splatter all over each others’ skin. Skating them like over wet ice so they would knock against each others’ ankles and bruise upon detonation. Camila, who’d been trying, at least, to keep the situation under control, had gone to pick out some maps and free guides, leaving them simmering in the quickly-warming confines of the space.

A lot of trivial inconsequential things, and a lot of hard, serrated words. First it was an argument of how transformative a depiction of folklore ought to be, theoretically, to balance originality and faithfulness. Then they’d snapped at each other over their personal choices of A24 horror, and Ava’s awfully ignorant lack of exposure to some obscure ‘60s Romanian indie production that Lilith really liked.

And in the corner Beatrice was curled up into a chair, laptop sitting on the flat plane formed by the side of her folded knees. 

She was strangely quiet, considering the poorly-veiled spats being undertaken just a couple feet away. By Beatrice Standards, however, this was possibly normal, as Ava was learning. When, riled up, she’d gone around to get a glass of water from the lightly stained dispenser, she’d found her watching an unlisted YouTube video from a couple years ago featuring an in-house presentation Ava had given at Disney. It was about scary rides and storytelling; translating horror into immersive park experiences. A singular earbud was stuffed into her left ear. 

She didn’t make any attempt to minimize or pause the video as Ava went by. 

“What are you doing?” she blurted, interrupting Lilith going on and on about something or another.

Beatrice hummed. “Camila sent it to me.”

Ava waited, but that seemed to be the end of Beatrice’s explanation. Pixelated tiny Ava on the laptop screen sputtered and spread her arms out as the powerpoint slide behind her belly-rolled to its successor in a kitschy transition.

“Wait,” Beatrice said, before Ava could awkwardly walk the rest of the way to the dispenser. She bent down to scoop something up. “Here.” She held up a can of Pepsi to Ava, still cold enough that the scant condensation on it had not yet beaded up into little pearls. Ava saw that underneath her chair she had stowed a rectangular cooler box of canned drinks, with two or three more cans left in it. 

Ava took the can with a soft thanks. 

Beatrice quirked her head and murmured something that sounded like you’re welcome.

Beatrice said the damnedest things sometimes, amidst her quiet. Appropriate, sure, but unexpected unless you were looking out closely for the tell-tale flicker at the corner of her eyes, a horizontal dart-to and sometimes a shutter-quick sly twitch of her mouth that indicated she was preparing for an interjection.

Amused, if hardly full-blown entertained. Sharp, but never cruel. Indirect, and three layers deep. Oftentimes three planets away. Ava found it less than scrutable, and more than fascinating.

Bian lian, when they were talking about transitions between spaces and narrative divisions within Houses, which was a convoluted way to say that Lilith was getting evasive over the psychology and philosophy of putting fucking walls and doors in a haunted house. Just when the pressure was about to burst, Beatrice had piped up, and Lilith had turned around, her fists gradually unclenching. 

Later, Ava repeatedly scrubbed back and forth through the timeline of a video, mesmerized and marveling by the Chinese art. A minor flourish, or a glance of a cheek and – thwp – an entranced audience guided to look wherever the artist led.

The changing of faces. The fuzzy in-between of seasons. Here on the coast it is even more stark, this time of year. 

She calls out to Beatrice as she walks down the planks, and Beatrice turns around. Her hair is bunned up loosely, low and unresistant to ocean-blown stragglers

Ava walks closer when Beatrice turns around, calmly, and hovers a distance away so that Beatrice can keep a cushion of space between them, if she likes.

“It’s drizzling.”

“I know.” Beatrice doesn’t take Ava up on the offer to –leave? To chase Ava back in and away? To reassure Ava that she’d prefer to stay out here, alone? She pauses, though. Looks up, as if there was anything to see up in the sky, too dark for the clouds to distinguish themselves in plumes or pillows. Ava looks up too, just in case, but it’s a mess of splotched black-gray. 

Over their heads the apertures in the sky are widening into gulfs, and the dribble of water turns into sheets. 

Like the crepe streamers they used to hang up on the doorways in St Michael’s, fluttering maddeningly out of reach. The nuns had thought it was some kind of sick kindness to drape them from low enough beams that their papery ends would lap at and blow into Ava’s face as they wheeled her back and forth down the corridor like the monotone automation of a fucking metronome. Each blue and yellow and pink streamer touched her cheeks like a slap. Ava’d wanted to grip them with her teeth and pull them down. 

The rain, Ava reminds herself, is cold and uncaring and holds no such malice. 

Beatrice keeps staring into the ocean. “It’s beautiful out here.”

There’s words on the tip of Ava’s tongue but she holds them there and thinks; considers for once, before replying. Something about Beatrice, without saying anything aloud, asks this of her. If she recites a pun it must be good.

“It is.”

Beatrice hums. She turns her head back and inclines her head slightly as she regards Ava. Ava holds her breath. 

It occurs to her faintly that she’s never spoken one-on-one with Beatrice, ever. Of her three new coworkers, Beatrice feels the most faraway. She refolds Ava’s strewn, barbeque sauce-stained maps while Ava’s in the restroom, and plugs her wired earphones into a Spotify daylist full of musicians Ava’s never heard of. She has a phone widget on her homescreen tracking migratory birds,  and she goes out to the pier alone under ten-thirty p.m. rain. 

Ava studied Beatrice’s folders – all their folders – back at the office, once this whole thing was confirmed. Before even they’d found out. It felt almost prying, in a way, even if Suzanne herself had invited her to sit at the desk and passed her the papers. Sure, the Houses they detailed were long public; analyzed and reviewed to death, but this was different. This seemed private. Creativity and creation, to Ava at least, were wild creatures; bounding and bold on the outside, raw and sensitive and prone to clawing themselves apart on the inside.

She switched on the reading light and thumbed through the dossiers. Lilith’s had pen gashes through each iteration, angry and decisive, her documentation otherwise sparse and terse. Camila’s included scrapbooks of fabric and postcard-sized paintings, image references taped on each page.

The shells that Beatrice left behind were schematics and scripts in perfect order and format. Comments typed out formally along margins left deliberately blank, and mechanics illustrated in labeled figures, which were different from tables and clarified as such in the appendix. Without effusion or exaggeration, and with only harshly limited information to be gleaned from a couple of drily humorous notes thrown unexpectedly into the handwritten rightmost column of her change logs.

Amendment for review: section 7d entryway from section 7c now to be approached from visitors’ 9 o’clock, she’d written. Do remind reviewer S. Masters to be awake for it.

Said jester herself stands with her back still facing Ava, just out of reach, on the pier. Her hands dig into the pockets of her oversized windbreaker as her feet dig into the wood under them. Rogue strands and locks of dark hair follow the course of the wind. It’s beautiful out here, she says, just loud enough over the waves for Ava to catch.

Beatrice takes one and a half steps, precisely, so that she’s partially, intentionally, facing Ava. She says something, blown to the wind – about the facts of this place, maybe. Ava hears the name of the town crunched around the round Rs of Beatrice’s accent, and feels her feet willed, as if by that same wind, to step closer. 

Closer, closer, until she’s but an arm’s length from Beatrice, close enough she could reach out and adjust on her shoulder the crooked hood of her windbreaker, long blown off the top of her head. 

Then Beatrice turns back to face the pier, and she cranes her neck to look at Ava wordlessly, and Ava finally, finally, steps up beside her.

They got to town by car yesterday afternoon, a coastal place long salted by tourism when the tides were right, and only recently rejuvenated very slightly in biology circles when a couple of the further-flung waters got identified as hotspots for particularly unique marine ecosystems. 

Beatrice tells her there’s a small new outpost set up from newly-won grant money, although it’s far away from where they’re staying. She glances at Ava. There was a book at the information center, she quickly explains.

Ava knows what she’s talking about – said information center is a ten-minute walk inland, in the town center, and it’s more of a weatherbeaten cubicle with yellowed pamphlets and dusty books than a living, breathing tourist pitstop. It’s battered on all sides by the elements and seems to be standing only because it’s too difficult to dislodge from where it’s wedged between an ice cream shop and a postbox. Beatrice, all the same, peered through every peeling poster on the wall. 

They’d gone there yesterday after picking up some groceries while exploring the little town. Ava reached for an easy word to describe the town and found ‘fatigued’, and then she thought some more and concluded that it was drowned in a weird heavy-light emptiness. 

The time of the year did it no favors. Nobody goes island hopping in the rain, and it’s not dive season at the reefs. The fishing spots are browbeaten for everyone but the seasoned local fishermen, so the commercial tourist pontoons are netted up and fenced off. 

As a matter of fact, it had been so hard to get a ride to the caves, Ava had had to pay extra out of her own pocket. Lilith, of course, had nonetheless taken offense at her ‘poor planning’. Whatever. They have a ride. It leaves before dawn.

Now, side by side, Ava can’t tell if Beatrice is swaying lightly or rocking to the rhythm of the waves, or if it's just an illusion of movement on the pier.

“Sadly a lot of places are shut,” Ava states the obvious, “but at least the rooms were cheap.”

Beatrice tips her weight onto her heels, and this time Ava’s sure of it. It’s easy and balanced. 

“No,” she says, after some thought. “I didn’t know much about this town before, but it was a good choice to come here. Especially now during the offseason, when it’s quieter.” 

She skews her head oceanward as if trying to listen for something, and Ava follows suit, engrossed to the point of almost being bowled over by the jar of a wave hitting the wooden poles of the pier with a crunching thud. 

“It’s strange,” Beatrice says very seriously, “to be congested in so much stillness and silence.” 

There is nothing still or silent about the roar of the waves and the rain.

Beatrice’s work, Ava knows, has been increasingly skewing towards exploring a sort of apprehension and anxiety generated by the opposite of a traditionally suffocating enclosed-space experience. It’s strongest in her recent projects; Ava can spot it immediately – bleakly open space, elements of naturalism and realism manipulated with great technical care to subvert expectations and stir up something deeply uncomfortable and primal. 

Three years ago, Supermarket Massacre had had her fingerprints all over it. The year after that, the award-winning Aquarium, with Lilith and Camila and that one guy Vincent who’d apparently slacked off then ran off. Last year she took point on her own set for the first time. And in all three, like a bloody fingerprint, the opening scenes – the first sets located immediately past the entrances –  were all so characteristically, deceptively normal. Regular, in an unsettling, skin-crawling way. This was only the prelude, of course. Slowly the knife would be driven in and twisted unforgivingly.

It’s funny, because Beatrice insists, time and time again, that she doesn’t see herself as an artist or a creator. She wrote a guest article on a blog describing herself as merely an engineer organizing a space and Ava wryly thought the prose itself, elegant and clear, had given away the lie. What does a haunted house mean? How do we execute a nightmare into something feasible and tangible? Questions that had a myriad of answers and I do not believe we have yet exhausted them. There are many themes and concepts I’d like to reinvigorate beyond their traditional face value.

Subtlety, Ava sees, in last year’s factory-set After Hours. Movement, in increasingly sophisticated ways, beyond simple towering puppetry or rattling machinery or killer clowns scaring people into scurrying down claustrophobic pre-marked corridors. Soundscapes and landscapes that teeter on the brink of too-real, sped up or slowed down or taken one inch rightwards. Of course, unsettlingly unassuming opening scenes. Fear, Beatrice wrote, must be given time and space to breathe and self-propagate.

In a way, if this weekend getaway is a scouting trip less concerned with laying down concrete narrative groundwork and cultural research, and more concerned with opening a door into how each of Beatrice, Lilith and Camila see the world creatively, this bare coastal town is right up Beatrice’s alley. 

The least supernatural place in the world. And yet in Beatrice’s eyes it is a town that has dotted perforation lines across its torso tempting her endlessly to tear it open to unearth something deeper and darker that adheres to the inner surfaces of its pleura.

She speaks too-softly but almost excitedly against the thunder. Underneath the reserved, controlled demeanor there’s a glint of a thirst and challenge hidden underneath her tongue. 

“The park in the middle of town,” she says, “desire paths all through the long grass and not a footfall on the real ones. There’s a tape that stretches across the pavement with a warning sign dated two months ago.”  Her hands have crept up their sides to prod out at waist level, tangling and twirling in the air like dancing with the rain. Or making the rain dance and twist around them. 

They freeze in awareness, and the rain slaps down on them. 

“Go on”, says Ava. It comes out like a request, coiled up at the end and disappearing into the air.

She thinks Beatrice smiles a tiny bit at that, her eyes unreadable, but she doesn’t go on, and Ava is disappointed. 

“Well,” Beatrice’s tone is steady and tells Ava that the door is shut for now, “perhaps we’ll speak more about it after the caves.”

She says this matter-of-factly as if they’re all going to come back on that boat after sunset, sit down cross-legged in a circle with notepads and laptops, and excitedly paint a mural across the ceiling with lime-sharp ideas and skin-crawling narratives. This isn’t going to happen. Lilith nearly put a fist through the glass panels of a cabinet mere hours earlier. 

Beatrice is usually the most brutally pragmatic and unsentimental of the four, and here she is talking about the future like the present is a bubble that will undoubtedly pop and reveal a rose-tinted world. Ava doesn’t know what to think of it.

The coldness of the rain is starting to gnaw at and numb her fingertips. She breathes, strange and short. The words come out too easily: “You were watching my presentation from two years ago.”

Beatrice nods. “I was, yes. I finished it over afternoon break.”

“Can I ask why?” 

When Beatrice turns, Ava can’t see her face all that clearly. “Well, I wanted to know your principles and approach to designing fear experiences.” In the first flutter-crack of her composure Beatrice coughs twice. “It seemed, at least, something productive to do. And it’s important if we are to work closely together.”

The wind, walloped and fickle so that the rain beating down on Ava’s face seems to change its direction of attack every ten seconds or so, does not seem to pull them closer together, like in fanciful, romantic stories. It just tugs Ava about at her shoulders and knees like a ragdoll and makes her dizzy.

Beatrice pulls her jacket close. She gestures for Ava, shivering harder, to pull her sleeves down her elbows. Ava hadn’t even noticed, and does so now, but she’s still cold – damp-cold then air-frozen from salty windspray. She puts her hands as far as they can go in her pockets. Shifts her weight.

Beatrice’s face twists with – perplexion? Concern? 

In the meager light Ava sees her glance back behind them and cock her head towards the light from which they came, questioning. 

Ava shakes her head, and Beatrice doesn’t push. She doesn’t sigh out loud but her shoulders follow the trajectory of its motion as she peels off her outer layer, quickly and without fanfare. Underneath she is wearing a thick hoodie that only now begins to darken everywhere except for its already-exposed hood. Clearly, she’d planned to come out to walk, unlike Ava. 

Who’d stumbled out late after dinner, full of thoughts that had nowhere to stew and nowhere to run.

They’d had a big fight over the dinner table, boiled over from where it had been bubbling the last two days. There was a slamming of fists on the table, and Ava had torn her napkin from the tablecloth and went to sit alone at the bartop. 

What exactly do you want? What’s your structure? Churning in her head like an infinitely turning contraption, mixed fiercely over the anger of being asked to prove it and being goaded harder and harder towards standards that Camila and Beatrice never seemed to be asked to meet.

Full of feelings and other weird, warped rumblings that were difficult to thoroughly unpick as usual. And the messy sensation of all the air in her chest compressed from pushing frustratedly and hopelessly against a wall. Hoping the nebulous concept of Outside might put it into place or at least shove it all into boxes for her to sort out later. Ava, head hot and too-bright, lightheaded and needing to have it tamped down by the physical weight of darkness, had stumbled out into the night. She’d thought only of draining off the alcohol slightly and having it evaporate, along with everything else, from her scalp into the cool air.

It has, now, in any case. 

Burned out rapidly from the initial buzz, and then she’d seen Beatrice at the edge of the ocean. 

Beatrice holds her windbreaker out,  pinched between her fingers. Her hands curl neatly on both sides over the shoulders, and she brushes it once, twice, to chase away the little droplets accumulating on the water resistant surface. They smooth away into a flat of smaller droplets, and she offers it up to Ava.

“Here,” she says softly, “I have a few layers on already.” 

Ava hesitates, but Beatrice simply dusts off some water again and turns it with the change in the direction of the wind so that the rain doesn’t get inside. “Before the lining becomes soaked,” she urges in a whisper. 

The windbreaker is soft and lined with fleece, and it slips from Beatrice’s hands as Ava takes it and turns away to shrug it on. Beatrice watches her as she pulls her hands out of the sleeves; it is large already on Beatrice’s frame, and on Ava it is almost swallowing, like a ghost encumbered by its drapes. She fumbles with the zipper,  pulling it up to her neck eventually before straightening the collar and turning it up. 

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Beatrice says. She puts her own hands into her hoodie and looks very warm. Wet strands of hair drip down now and cling to her face, but she looks settled. 

“So, why did you come to the OCS?” she asks. It doesn’t sound cutting. 

Ava pouts and takes the bait. She deliberately shifts backwards onto a foot and crosses her arms so that her sleeves meet and zip with a rubbery drag.

“And what did you learn from my presentation?” Please don’t let this come off as rude please don’t let her take this the wrong way please don’t let her take offense–

“--Guilty,” Beatrice shrugs, a motion that looks almost foreign on her. “But I asked first.” She takes her hands out of her hoodie pocket and wrings them together absently, then lets them fall back down and tucks them back, relaxed, snugly into the pouch. 

She looks younger, like this, with her hair mussed by the weather and comfy in her hoodie. Like the windbreaker it is oversized and of indiscernible color. Ava can almost convince herself that it’s bruised lilac or dark blue. More likely it is some shade of plain gray.

Ava exhales, and feels more than hears the wood creak beneath her feet. The water is opening up and closing shut endlessly and Beatrice is looking at her, waiting, watching, and suddenly Ava needs to move; needs to curl her toes and stretch her fingers and get somewhere else. Move somewhere. 

And somehow, somewhere inside, needs also –hopes also, for Beatrice to move with her. 

Ava nods quickly. The wind changes yet again and her throat is dry. Instinctively she licks her lip and finds it salty. 

“How about the path behind the airstrip?”

Beatrice smiles tentatively. “Okay.”

They retreat from the water to concrete. The motel is built on part of an old private airstrip. There’s no longer sand here, just rocks and gravel petering out into the water. Behind the airstrip, though, there is a path that inclines upwards, lit by lamps until it reaches a boarded-up platform that drops harshly down into foam. 

Hands in windbreaker pockets, Ava leads them farther from shore. She doesn’t know if it’s the temperament of the sky or an illusion of distraction but the drizzle is slowing down now until it is in comparison barely noticeable as they head up the slope by the lamplight.

“So, why I joined this place,” Ava huffs. Beatrice hums in acknowledgement.

“A few things, I guess. You’ve watched the video,” Ava goes on, and Beatrice nods. “It was about storytelling, and scares, and honestly there’s some truth to how much you can do behind squeaky clean Disney barricades. I said it the first day – I love horror and what the OCS has done with it.”

She tells Beatrice about the first time she went to an OCS House, years ago; they must both have been in college at the time. University, she rolls her eyes, as the corners of Beatrice’s mouth dance upwards, whatever. She’d taken two days off class with a bunch of friends just to travel, because it was the only major independent place that had good wheelchair access back then.

Ava’s not using a cane now but she’d had it with her yesterday after getting out stiff and sore after the long car ride. Beatrice doesn’t ask. 

“That halloween, with all the houses – it blew me away. God. No kitschy carnival music, no colorful performers prancing around giving candy out to children at the doors. The food stands?” she gestures, “All outside the gates. No fucking carousels in the scare zones.”

Back then there were fewer Houses, and the compound was significantly smaller. Already it was a carefully calibrated maze, ready to scare in every weather contingency, with traps that would move and performers that would sit very still on steel chairs and, back then, the services of expensive external contractors to beef up the outdoor scenic design. 

“But d’you know what’s scary?” Ava turns to Beatrice and stops. Beatrice doesn’t startle, like Ava had feared in the split second after she’d spun around. “Traditionally, you don’t talk about a House, right? It’s rude to put spoilers in reviews or whatever. I loved that. I thought it made it fun, like a secret you’re all in on.”

“Then the OCS comes along and says: No, actually it’s important that people have access to our Houses, and the full extent of that means discreetly available trigger warnings and official spoilers, anytime.  We’ll make it a keystone of our design that every House has easy Outs in every section, and advertise it front and center.”

Ava knows Beatrice knows this, of course. 

“Which people thought was stupid, right? A terrible business move at best, if not a betrayal of the values of the art.”

Everyone knows what happened next. The move turned out wildly successful: a careless, confident vaunt that the OCS could afford to go to such daring lengths and still terrify people.  Daring would-be visitors, almost, to try and stay unaffected. We’re different, it said. Fucking try us then. They were free then, too, to do the worst possible things, in the safest possible environment. And nobody who didn’t need to have a look at the trigger warnings did so, while the number of first-time haunted house visitors shot up.

“Psychology,” Ava nods fiercely, “which is, as everyone knows, at the heart of manipulating fear.”

She leans forward, finally, looks Beatrice in the eye. It’s honest, and it’s terrifying. “I want that – to break the rules. All of them.”

Is that a controversial thing to say? To someone whose modus operandi famously is carefully twisted and controlled restraint, compared to the overflow and excess of most Houses. Who calculates, psychologically, the impact and ideal-slash-worst-case reactions to each moment in the House cascade, as if the mind is a kind of a machine and the House is a code passed through its system. Ava’s read what her critics say of her – that she’s cerebral to a fault. Technically masterful and horrifying; nauseating, in that cold, disturbing way, but that sometimes she fails to recognize that bombast is not a bad thing. That some excess does not the route suboptimize, or that instinct can give rise to flair and not undercooked loose ends.

Frigid, aloof. Beatrice tugs her from where she was headed towards a dead end off the slope, and nudges her up towards where the gradient beneath their feet tapers off. The back of her hand, where it brushes accidentally along Ava’s wrist, is warm.

They’re standing on an outcropping now. The rain has stopped fully and the path is more clearly illuminated by the higher density of lamps on the ground. They’re paid for by the motel, presumably, and somehow dug into the earth. There’s a bench here, too, and in sync Ava and Beatrice wordlessly sit down. The stone surface is wet, the kind that will soak into their dark jeans and leave the seats damp. 

They sit, anyway, the bushes crudely truncated so that the view looks out to dark water. 

Ava is one of them, now, no matter how much it doesn’t feel like it. Yet, a telltale voice quietly hopes. 

The business of haunted houses is a cyclical thing, isn’t it? Unlike working in the park year-round. Sure, there are two permanent fixtures that run through the year and get refreshed every year or so to keep the base revenue going and the OCS name in people’s mouths, but ultimately that’s the side show. It’s a seasonal business and so now the main seasonal campus is dark, strewn with work lights and scaffolding and blueprints.

But even if the OCS as the upcoming season’s visitors will know it is primordial now, with nothing even to show for it yet, she’s one of them. Even if she feels out of place, knee deep in viscous fluid. 

In Disney they’d hardly ever travel, because the rides she worked on were drawn from existing fictional worlds and their stories. Perhaps if she was lucky they would visit the place from which the fictional world was mined. Many other haunted house production companies, too, mostly drew inspiration from local or regional folklore or culture. Currently, the trend was, in fact, to camouflage the House itself into the very environment and location on which it stood.

Not many production companies would have her here, in a scraggly nowhere town of her own choosing, filmy with rain-gunk and algae, roofs discolored by harsh caustic cleaning sprays. Dipping her toes into somewhere unknown and parsing out something to bring back to the city and its bad 24-hour coffee vending machines and paint spills on uneven concrete and rough graffitied walls. There is, ironically, something fresh, new and strange about it all. 

And it’s why Ava’s here, really. To eat food from different places. Run her toes through grass in every country. Put her tongue out to the breeze and bring it back in the form of twisting walls that cave down around the people within. To behold nothing the same way twice, and to insist on nothing as sacred. Break all the rules. 

The waves are distant but the sound carries up and towards them.

“That’s what I gathered,” Beatrice says, wistfully, or thoughtfully, “from the presentation.” She sits a little way away on the bench, her hands crossed at her wrists and fingers peeking out from the thick sleeves. Under Ava’s hands, pressed down on either side, the seat is rough. And Beatrice, back straight and so calm, is soft. Like her eyes.

Beatrice looks down and runs her fingers over the grain of the bench too, coarse and stuck together, although smoothened with time. She seems to sigh, soak the air around her into her pores, and relax. Rise, like foam in a glass. 

“In the beginning of the video,” she starts, “You compare a good ride to a good haunted house.” She puts up three fingers and duly counts them off. “Both tell an immersive story. Both twist away from what the audience knows to be reality. Both break convention to surprise.” 

Her voice, Ava finds, is endlessly different from the only times she’s heard it at length, over a stuttering video call. Far away from the stricturing of bad connection and Zoom audio, it sounds different – just as modulated and thoughtful, but full of something, contained, yet to overflow. Ava thinks of a pot with a lid with hot, rich soup in it, sizzling lightly with a fragrance that perfuses the whole kitchen.

She talks through the presentation – Beatrice, that is, in her own words, and Ava’s maybe-kind of-perhaps bewitched. It’s the way she fits Ava’s points gently into a structure and perspective that even Ava hadn’t thought of; the way she spins Ava’s hamfisted tangent on dueling flight-or-hug-tight instincts into a dizzying fifteen-second suckerpunch insight into isolation versus community in group horror experiences. Or the way she recites her favorite of Ava’s bad jokes, word-for-word, from memory, and looks genuinely pleased by it too.

Ava doesn’t know for sure. She’s still reeling when Beatrice simply pauses and settles. She bobs her head, a tiny, barely-there smile on her face. “So yes,” she says, “that’s what I’ve learned about your design outlook.” 

Her expression changes in hints and tiptoes to something more considering. “But about you, and how we – I,  will work with you – that’s not so easily gleaned from one video.”

Ava laughs at that, almost speechless. Still breathless and oddly naked, in a way she’s not used to feeling. “No, no it isn’t.” 

She looks up and away, registering suddenly and overwhelmingly the indistinct shapes of trees. Grass. Path markers. 

It’s true. They don’t know her, and she doesn’t know the three of them. Not like they know each other, twisting like moss and creepers around each others’ spines. There is something there that’s old and impenetrable and bound in the covers of a book in a different language she doesn’t speak. And she speaks a whole bunch of languages, yes, but none like this one.

“We need to learn how to work together,” she admits. This is an understatement, Ava knows, and grossly so. She thinks about Lilith, but also about Camila and her expansive imagination, its rhythm slightly out of sync from the drumbeat of Ava’s mind, and her easy physical affection that masks an unspoken space between them. She thinks about Beatrice and her uncanny wordlessness and then her uncanny wordfulness that Ava hasn’t had the chance to learn how to anticipate. To everyone that’s not her closest circle Ava thinks she must seem like a pendulum that’s always being chased, and never getting caught, her thoughts running and pivoting a hundred miles ahead. 

And together they are musical lines in a contrapuntal piece, and hell, Ava knows only four chords on a guitar.

“We will,” Beatrice decides, suddenly. Ava’s mind has slipped from the conversation, but the bite of it snaps her to alert.

“What will we– what?” 

In her alarm their eyes meet. She watches Beatrice’s fingers stretch out towards her on the bench instinctively, and then quickly retract into a half-fist, drumming once, twice on the seat before slotting into her pocket to slide her phone out to sit loosely in her palm. 

She wrinkles her nose apologetically. A hairball of worry in Ava’s chest untangles itself.

“I.. just know that you’ve googled us like we’ve googled you.”

As Beatrice talks she turns over her phone slowly, hypnotically. Long fingers press and flip it in a well-worn sequence: the screen forwards and over twice, then clockwise along its side, before repeating in the opposite direction.  

“Earlier on you said that Lilith locks herself in a room to brainstorm.” 

Huh? Oh yeah, she did. When they were arguing over timeline flexibility for their project and the frequency of check-ins. Lilith said she was flighty and ill-disciplined. Ava told her she was out of her mind and a cold-blooded reptile who’d lost touch with all shreds of human needs and interactions. She’d made a snarky joke about Lilith’s grotesquely fancy ensuite bathroom and finding someone else to try and shit on.

“Well, that piece of trivia is only found in an interview from two years back that’s out of print. You can only find its scans on some niche member-only forums.” 

Ava shrugs – this is what you do with new co-workers, is it not? You do your part. And Ava is doing the best she can.

“Yeah, sure,” she concedes, “but that’s not – it’s not–” plainly, it’s not the same. What can Ava do except shrug again?

Beatrice makes a small noise. 

“I know,” she reiterates, and the deep furrows of her forehead release and smoothen, like she seems to have come to a realization. 

She offers cautiously, hesitantly, “the article does say that. But it’s not true.” She inhales sharply.

“Lilith appreciates her independence, yes, but she knows better than to entirely isolate herself anymore.” Clearly, there’s a story in that. “But the deadline was at midnight, and the editor wanted to add something else in the copy they sent. Lilith was grouchy, we were drunk, and Camila made it up in the return email without telling her.”

Beatrice pauses and tilts her head. Up the curve of her chin to her cheeks, dimples reveal themselves shyly and momentarily.

“Lilith was furious. She only found out when the article was released. The only reason she grudgingly refrained from further action was because, I believe, the falsified information fit into the image of how she wanted to present herself to the world.” 

She gazes straight at Ava then, curious and the most open that Ava’s ever seen her. “Nobody’s ever brought it up again,” she remarks, searching Ava. “Well. Not until you.”

Beatrice’s hands still; she wipes her phone against her shirt, and looks carefully at Ava. Ava’s intelligent; far more than people give her credit for. She knows what Beatrice is doing – trying to do, in her own way. 

After a long pause, during which the drone of the waves becomes deafening and then recedes, “I won’t pretend that Lilith is merely aloof, or that the things she has said are not unkind or unfair. She’s treated you poorly.”

Ava resists a scoff, and scrambles instead to clear her throat noisily. She doesn’t bring up again the simple fact that, foremost amongst a host of reasons, Lilith is why they’re here. The last straw. The final trigger.

Beatrice regards her like she isn’t fooled.

“She is less coarse to those she’s close to, but has been known on occasion to be rather prickly, even then.” Beatrice, as if remembering something then, chuckles lowly. Gorgeously. “She’s very particular about safety standards and protocols, for example.”

“Once, she yelled at me in front of the whole crew for taking a nap on the floor of  an unfinished room in a maze in the dark during lunch. She was angry, and worried, but still. I needed to get away from everyone for a break, and as you might expect, it backfired.”

“I’ll try not to do that,” Ava offers. “I’ll break into her trailer and sleep on her desk instead.”

“Oh dear,” There’s palpable mirth in it. Ava’s poker face shatters into a beam.

Beatrice probably can’t see it. It’s dark. 

“Ava?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to be alright with any of it.”

Ava breathes. 

“Okay,” she replies, finally. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

She lifts the palms from where they’ve been pressed tightly to old, uneven rock. The soft flesh of the heel is kissed with the pattern of the grain.

So Ava turns, on the bench, and her feet squelch most uncomfortably in the wet shoes as she adjusts herself to face Beatrice – not directly,  but at the slight angle from which the light of the moon and the light at their feet call out to each other and meet on the tip of her nose.

Beatrice tucks her phone carefully in her lap and turns to Ava too.

And slowly, in dribs and drabs that spill out like the corners of dough sheets cut out from metal molds, Ava introduces herself to Beatrice. 

No, not the dramatic, tragic moments – the accident, the orphanage, all that. The night is transient and thinning fast into its wee hours, and it’s the little things first, you know? 

The one-coffee-one-energy-drink-one-juice combo routine that gets Ava through long days and overtime hours. The overnight movie marathon treat she grants herself at the culmination of each project. The lucky Super Mario Bros. spoon and bowl set that she’s got to eat out from the day before a big pitch. 

Her hiring, Ava thinks, is still a dry and excoriated topic, and so she tries to skim over it. She tries to avoid going into detail on how she got poached, and then how she’s painstakingly combed through all their archival documents and notes, so as to understand. She doesn’t mention the fan content and critic reviews she’s pored over, the world beyond OCS doors she’s tried to immerse herself in to grasp the scale of the project and the context of her addition.

Beatrice narrows in on it, anyway. It looms, Ava supposes, far too large to avoid.

It’s sometime after one A.M. when she puts her head down slightly, and Ava feels the shift. 

“You know, I’ve seen some of the forums,” Beatrice strokes down the damp strands of hair that have come loose over her ears.  “They’re – not entirely true. I don’t dislike working with others.”

Ava had seen the forums too, and the flint-tipped speculation that slithered about the different pages. Usernames pockmarked with numbers, an argot of acronyms and the slang of self-proclaimed megafans. Posts that didn’t have Beatrice’s name in them but that were transparently about her, describing with vulgar flippance a cool, isolated oddness that locked crew members out from the indecipherable machinations of her mind. 

Beatrice’s hands tighten over her phone. “It just takes me some time –” she forces out, and then bites her lip.

Ava thinks about Camila in the corridor this afternoon, after Beatrice had wordlessly entered her own room and shut the door – now, she knows, to watch the video. Ava had stopped for a second too long, looking puzzled after her, when Camila had brushed breezily past.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she’d laughed, “she’s like this. Once she opens up, she’s a completely different little beast.”

Ava hadn’t doubted that – there was evidently a Beatrice that bantered with Lilith and Camila in branching links of long chains that she couldn’t understand; a Beatrice that must have climbed up the towering tree at the back early in the morning to pluck yellow flowers from its crown. 

This Beatrice had been ready to go ahead to the counter before Camila and Lilith had even sat down at yesterday’s lunch to place their orders on their behalf.

She hadn’t even needed to check in with them, but came over to Ava’s seat and looked over her shoulder. “What would you like?” she’d asked, and Ava rushed, panickedly, to look over the menu. She traced each line with her index finger, and looked up to find Beatrice, eyes wide and patient.

“This one, please, the burger,” she’d jabbed the flimsy laminated paper, “and a Pepsi.” Beatrice had strode off before a waiter could come over. She’d refused to let any of them pay her back, and when Ava had tried to send her money on her phone she raised her eyebrows very questioningly and Ava melted back into the plastic-backed seat.

In the end, Ava can only personally vouch for the epipelagic – the shallowest fraction of ocean pierced by sunlight. The parts of the person allowed tentatively to surface in every halting, hesitant attempt forward as a quartet. As of now, too, in the drizzly shadows of tonight. 

Perhaps the light can reach only fingertip-deep, but Ava wagers there has to be water all the way down. The rest is gut feeling and instinct; slowly glowing embers like a fist in her chest.

“Beatrice,” Ava says, once it’s clear she’s still working her way out of a labyrinth of word finding, “Listen. I believe you.”

Tense shoulders quieten and flatten into a horizontal plane. Ava feels Beatrice’s eyes scan her face, go past her ears and her messy hair and the tip of her nose and then settle, finally, with a helpless little smile. 

Ava calls out on the boardwalk. She listens to Beatrice whisper on this stone, and Beatrice listens back. There’s sunlight, hours away, on the horizon but at this moment there’s only secret shades of moonbeam, and those shades are all for them. It’s not enough, still. It’s not enough. Ava wants more.

She wants, she finds with some desperation, to be inside of the invisible circle. There is nothing worse than dragging her feet outside, half a step offbeat, unable to reach in and with nobody reaching out. A ghost, intangible and aware of it, when all she wants is to feel the hot flames of real life – to have Lilith’s sharp tongue lash out and scald her in the way it does Camila or Beatrice – with blunt honesty and easy comfort instead of probing malice. To have Camila’s name light up on strings of text notifications as it buzzes constantly on Beatrice and Lilith’s phones almost the moment they are apart. Beloved, joyful, alight. To have Beatrice… to have Beatrice —

The phone in Beatrice’s hands lights up, too bright, and it makes her squint. A flash of numbers – time – sears itself into Ava’s eyes before Beatrice frowns and puts it away into her hoodie. It’s late, Ava thinks, considering the boat is coming by early to bring them out for sunrise. But Beatrice doesn’t move to go back, and neither does Ava. 

Of all the things Beatrice finds terrifying – enough, she’s always been quoted, to transplant them into the nightmare fuel of haunted houses – the dark now doesn’t seem to be one of them. Ava agrees, she thinks: there is no place safer now than where they are, on a rock one measly wooden fence away from a dizzying drop into rock and rushing depths. It feels, for once, and for maybe the first time –

(since the start, after that final infuriating video call when she screamed into her duvet and yelled into her shower and limped to the computer where she bit her lips raw and booked the tickets here and told a trio of uneasy still-strangers that she might struggle to pull them out their homes with her own hands and nails but they would be getting out and traveling to a coastal nowhere-town and fucking sitting down to get this partnership going –)

–it feels like she’s making headway. 

Not on the Houses, not on the inspiration for them or the mechanisms and processes with which to put them together, no, although all those, too, in their own ways.

Here, far off from home, next to choppy waters, shorn into grass and trees readying themselves to be busted up by summer storms, amongst flowers somehow poking up through the salt and sand, a breath away from the touch of waves and the tiny crawling organisms that besiege it, (beside an odd girl in the giddy, open air,) – here.

Solid ground.

And maybe Beatrice is right, you know? Maybe life is more similar to the business of soul-sucking fear-buildings than people believe. 

Ava’s always had, she thinks, an incredibly lucid understanding on what makes good haunted houses tick. It’s trust, essentially, and safety. How do you enter a situation that frightens more viscerally and wholly than a movie or even a 3D dark ride – and then keep walking? 

Headway. The only thing that gets you out of a haunted house is burrowing deeper within.

Arms outstretched, palms open, into its guts and chest. There’s extensive academia on thrill rides: on how much of the atmospheric and storytelling work goes into the sections of the experience that precede the ride, because once the carriage croaks to life, it’s easy to close one’s eyes and lose all clarity.

Haunted houses aren’t like this.

Since she got out of St Michael’s, Ava’s gotten by on a brand of fearlessness, a reputation built on a willingness to try almost anything. But fearless perhaps isn’t the word. She’s scared, still, with every step forward. Worried out of her mind of having to work from scratch all over again. Terrified of going back to before. But this, unfortunately, or blessedly so, is life: the only way out, Ava’s found, is further in.

She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be there, already there.

Ava wants so badly to be elbow deep in the mud and wires of bringing stories to life far more fully and physically than in almost any other medium. She wants it so bad and so bare that she doesn’t even really know how to spell it out on a cloudy spring-summer night in a way that won’t chase Beatrice away with the breathless depth of her desperation to make people feel in a way they will never forget. Or frighten her with the too-much, too-fast of it all. 

She wants to flood people’s imaginations and send adrenaline through their arteries; have them wrap themselves around each other until the impression of lovers’ arms are engraved around the frame of each other’s bodies, shared warmth and solidity the only things keeping them upright through the maze. 

And Ava doesn’t need someone to hold her through a haunted house – god, she’s the one with her fingers tugging the strings that shift and twist its spine in circles around its terrified visitors – but it would be nice for once to stand in the control tower, eyes alight, heart racing, with hands as bloodstained as her own. 

To run through second-by-second early test run footage and data with another pair of eyes over early morning coffee and buns, discussing furiously the corners where the tourniquet can be tightened or loosened. To have conversations over the mixing console worth muting the scream track for. Even if – no, especially if they have nothing to do with work; conversations past awful awkward shop talk and instead all-in on the minutiae of home furnishings and dream pets and eschatology.

There was an impermanence to the constant shuffling of working groups, the fast paced turnarounds at Disney, but truthfully, she hadn’t been unhappy there. But then the email came through to her inbox on the rare once-fortnightly day that she would sit in her office, cartoonish vampire mug in hand, daydreaming with her laptop open, and that was it.

She flew down to headquarters to meet Suzanne in December. It was quiet in the office, with everyone off on final scouting trips and finalizing plans and sourcing materials and manpower. Suzanne had therefore been able to give her a private tour, and Ava did everything to pretend her mind hadn’t been made up long before.

First there was her personal office, which was the downright coolest room Ava’d been in for a while, forest green and quietly centered around the unassuming framed family picture on the desk. Cabinets of fossils with extra labels in a child’s scrawled handwriting: Terry the trilobite :D and spoonface and illustrated stickmen with swords. Delicate, beautiful, floral watercolor diagrams mounted on the wall and a soft, thick rug with complicated, beautiful depictions of scenes from the Tempest. 

Suzanne showed her the generous pantry, which would have sealed the deal if it hadn’t already been set in stone, and then they passed the meeting rooms into the archive gallery. 

This was, essentially, a museum of past mazes. A large, dark place of glass and thin, sharp panes of burnished golden light. Suzanne brought her, wide-eyed, through its displays of early Houses. 

“You’ve been visiting our Houses, on and off, over the last few years, correct?”

Ava nodded. Since that college trip, really, and whenever she could spare the time and the money.

“Good,” Suzanne said. “If you accept this offer, you will be joining a team of some of our best young designers, so you may be familiar with some of their work.”

Indeed, within the glass cases sat Camila’s famed dioramas, fixed in place now but ready to stir to life once hooked up to a battery. Detailed, hand-painted and assembled, its parts sliding apart into modular sections that could be split open and shifted around.

Lilith’s meticulous blueprints too, and ruthless postmortems and analyses she’d done of her own work, although those were sealed away. “I had to demand that she hand them over and not keep them pinned up at her desk hanging over her head,” Suzanne remarked beside Ava, looking up into the glass at the nondescript manila folder. 

“If not you, it would have been her.”

Unsurprising. Disney had used Lilith Villaumbrosia-masterminded sections of mazes in case studies for scene-setting and scare actor interactions. And Ava had entered her House two years ago. She knew.

“I will be honest with you, Miss Silva.”

“Ava.”

“Ava. Lilith is not what you may be expecting, and it may be difficult to get across to her at first. She is as acerbic as she is brilliant.”

That was the twist that was coming, of course: that they were all good friends. That the three designers that Suzanne had long had in mind to join Ava already knew each others’ minds and neural pathways so keenly that they could probably unzip the gyri of each others’ brains like a ribbon and then put them back together. 

“They don’t know it yet,” Suzanne warned, “and they will not like it at first, but I see it.” She opened up one of the cases with a key to remove a polaroid of three grinning faces, arms looped together. She held it to the light. “You’re the missing piece to the puzzle.” 

But what about everything she’s still missing?

The gravelly ground is solid beneath their feet, and Ava doesn’t feel the vibrations of the waves. The world appears still and frozen even as everything is changing and morphing and blooming, and gaping thirstily for something more she can’t put a finger to. 

The water could flood and Ava’s eyes might smart with exhaustion in the morning, or she might try to get two or three hours of sleep and wake up after one anyway, screaming as usual, and all the same Ava thinks she would still be chasing. Running. 

There is nothing in her mind resembling gory sets and the creak of animatronics, then, as she looks to her right at a girl she can scarcely even see in the dark, yet that she finds she cannot look away from. Ava can see why the magazines call her a mystery: Beatrice says she’s always on heightened alert, and yet – and yet –

She’s gazing back at Ava in a blanket of complete calm.

The wind from the ocean is blowing, the darkness feels safe. Ava and Beatrice, on a stone bench, talking, close. Easy steps, Ava thinks. Small steps, small questions. Maybe this is how it starts.

She takes a chance. Asks.

Beatrice closes her eyes, exhales, and begins to answer.

(Here are some requirements for a successful haunted house, or a horror film, or a heart-pounding roller coaster: it must evoke emotion that travels in icy ringlets down your spine, and it must stay indelibly in your mind.)

[mdzs-fics]

Lotus Flower by Mydla

Series, AU - canon divergence 8 works 38k words

An insistent thought was buzzing in Lan Qiren’s mind, just out of reach. He furrowed his eyebrows, trying to focus on it. Soon enough, he realized that he actually knew who had planted them there; it must have been Wei Wuxian, probably as a memento of the Lotus Pier.

But why would he do that? There had been no connection between the Yunmeng Jiang sect and him for years now, he had cut all the ties, just as his former sect had done. Why would he make the effort to make lotus flowers bloom in such a desolate place as the Burial Mounds? And how did he achieve it in the first place? Lan Qiren found it hard to believe that using demonic cultivation could be any good for anything alive, flowers included. So had Wei Wuxian just taken the time to grow them normally? With hard labour and fighting against nature itself and the resentful energy alike?

Lan Qiren could not understand anything anymore as he was watching the withered flowers swaying gently in the wind, as if unbothered by its fierce and ice cold nature.

Suddenly, he noticed that there was one flower stuck up the dead tree next to the flower bed. It was odd enough how it had managed to get all the way up there, not even talking about staying in place. Lan Qiren was intrigued for no apparent reason. Something was just not right with this image.

Upon more intent observation, he could see something resembling a human hand holding the flower in place. The hand was small, the size of a child’s hand really and it distressed Lan Qiren even more. Of course he had heard stories about Wei Wuxian even raising fierce corpses who had been children in their previous life, but he had never seen one himself. It was revolting.

And then it hit him. Why would a fierce corpse be holding a flower? And so gently too? He had never heard about anything like this.

Despite himself and the situation he had all but forgotten about for the moment, he stretched his senses all the way to the hollow tree where the child – whoever or whatever it was – was hiding. He blocked everything else away, he could no longer hear the noises the cultivators had been making and all he could see was that single withered lotus flower and the hand holding it.

Suddenly, he thought he could hear silent sobs and desperate calls of ‘Xian-Gege!’. His heart skipped a beat. It could not be; it was simply impossible. His senses were just deceiving him. Or perhaps the Yiling Patriarch was actually playing a trick on him. It just could not be that there was a child in the Burial Mounds, because what he was seeing and also the voice clearly pointed only to one reality. There was a child, a living one, hidden inside that hollow tree.

The series Lotus Flower began as a stand-alone story, Withered Lotus Flower. The premise is that Lan Qiren notices a withered lotus flower above the ground in a dead tree. He then notices a child's hand holding the flower, and the history of the Second Siege of the Burial Mounds suddenly takes on an entirely different turn from canon.

Over the series, Author Mydla builds on this stand-alone story through seven additional short stories that move from the immediate aftermath of the Siege through a period of three years. There is hope at the end of this first story that continues through the rest of the series. There are themes of recovery and guilt. As in canon, Lan Wangji is not present at the Second Siege because he's in seclusion as part of his punishment. The Wen, on the other hand, experience a different outcome, as does Wei Wuxian. There are problems along the way, and unpleasant truths are revealed.

The stories are a reflection of Lan Qiren's thoughts as he faces his past and where he wants to be in the future. In the final story everyone is in a much better place than the first. A happy, satisfying ending to tragedy averted because of a single lotus flower.

[cho-aaacho]

(Flufftober 2023) Coffee Shop/Book Shop

Main Masterlist I Archive of Our Own

Flufftober 2023 Masterlist I Prompts List

Tags : Fluff, Romantic Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Coffee Shops, Flufftober 2023, Reader is genderless

(Flufftober Day 23)

"Tell me if you need something. I hope you like our new cake. It's my new recipe!"

"Thanks."

The aroma of a luxurious cup of coffee wafted through his nostrils, wrapping him in romantic vibes. The heavenly jazz music whispered in his soul, floating him away to the seventh heaven.

Piers gingerly cradled his cheeks, his skin feeling the warmth that only shyness could evoke. He rarely talks to strangers, but when he is with you, it's something else. It was a moment when he could feel his heart melting, fluttering like dove wings, and blossoming like a sunflower.

"Should I tell the truth to my cute little barista there?" He was debating his feelings.

The chocolate cake before him waltzed seductively upon his taste buds. The sweet touch of the chocolate invaded his mouth, surpassing even his wildest expectations.

This cake is a masterpiece, and it was baked by your delicate hands. Oh... Piers is so addicted to your skillful hands.

He couldn't help but giggle like a teenager each time his sight line was set on the curve of the cake. Everything around him changes drastically; it feels like he is trapped inside a cubicle full of daffodils. 

The cake was wrapped in rich chocolate with a bright red cherry on top. Don't forget about a tiny little message written in white chocolate that graced the plate.

Have a nice day (◠‿◕)

Piers scanned the coffee shop, and eventually, his eyes set on you. He found your presence gracefully and stood behind the counter, adorned in a black polo shirt and a maroon apron that kindly wrapped your curves.

Sipping his coffee, he couldn't help but accept the romantic scene in front of him. His focus was only on you as you engaged in conversation with a fellow barista.

Piers didn't know what you were talking about, but he was hoping that he could join that conversation, to hear his first name escape from your sweet lips, to gaze at him with shy glances and giggle at his joke.

"You know, you look like a dumb stalker when you do that?" Jake's teasing voice interrupted as he sipped his iced coffee. "Why don't you talk to that barista about your pathetic love? Your obsession annoys me."

Piers' eyes widened; his hands were trembling. Something inside his head was spinning like a commuter line as if he had consumed too much caffeine.

"Are you stupid, Crazy Bald? I'm not you! My cute little barista is probably terrified of you. You shouldn't come here and disturb us!"

"What?! How—" Jake's anger flared, boiling his head with anger. He clenched his fist as if ready to punch the air.

Jake sighed. "Listen, Shorty. Firstly, I'm not bald—clearly, I have hair, don't you see that? Secondly, Chris Redfield has requested that I pull you out of this goddamn coffee shop. I have no time to listen to your puppy love story."

After hearing Jake's nonsense fill the atmosphere, Piers has a terrible urge to punch that face. It feels like Jake's existence was a big mistake that God made. He couldn't hold himself from yelling at that kid or bumping his car into Jake.

Piers knows very well that he always hates Jake so much, and his hating is unreasonable sometimes. 

Piers feels like falling into a black curse after seeing Jake in the same coffee shop and engaging in a cute conversation. All of this is frustrating him. However, he tried to calm himself in front of you. He didn't want you to see how bad-tempered he was when he was with Jake.

"Jake, where are you going?"

"Toilet," Jake replied casually.

As Jake walked away from their table with confidence, he headed toward the counter to meet you. His eyes are catching a sparkle in your eyes, and he is talking casually to you with a different intonation than he always does to Piers. As his explanation arrived in your ears, you were caught off guard. You almost fell off, and it made Jake freeze for a moment.

"WHAT? Are you sure, sir?"

"Shorty—eh, I mean Piers asking you to date if you are free. But he's too shy to talk to you. So what do you say? Is it a yes or a no?"

[astridellejo]

The Silent Spear Maker of Tiger Seal Cove A story about Anouk, an airbender of the Southern Water Tribe

I spent eight weeks this summer drawing twelve (now thirteen) pages of what is basically a fan comic. I used up almost my entire webcomic buffer to do it. Set during the era of Avatar Korra, this is the origin story of my airbender OC, Anouk. I first made this character almost ten years ago not long after The Legend of Korra had ended, but didn't start fleshing out her story until recently. Now I'm beginning to think I'm going to wind up making a whole graphic novel about the airbender girlfriends!

So here's my little passion project. Thanks for reading!

Page descriptions in alts, page transcripts below the cut.

Page 1 Tiger Seal Cove. The Southern Water Tribe. On the day of Harmonic Convergence. A small fishing village of brightly painted houses are illuminated from within. The purple sky above shimmers with green spirit energy. A freckled woman with long brown hair sits in a dog sled like patio furniture and looks up at the lightshow. She foofs out a puff of air, closing her eyes and smiling.

Page 2 Two weeks later. The woman is in her workshop chiseling a design into bone. Around her at her workbench are an assortment of tools as well as some of her spears that she has crafted. While there is a window looking out upon a snow covered hill illuminated by low winter sunlight, most of the light comes from an oil lamp below the window. Just to the side of the window is an old framed photograph of the woman's parents. She stretches broadly. Behind her is another workbench and more equipment. In the next room is a kitchen, stove, and low dining table. Looking in from outside, the reflection of the hillside is visible over the woman inside looking out. She smiles. Time to get up for a break! She swoops on a bolero-style jacket and heads out.

Page 3 She stands on the snow-covered icy hillside overlooking a small gathering of tiger seals snoozing on the beach. She goes through the waterbending forms for a water whip. On the attack strike, a sudden gust of wind blows by, loosing her hair from her hair stick. She rewraps her hair and looks around, confused about the sudden and inexplicable wind.

Page 4 She focuses her attention and moves through the attack strike once more. Again, a strong gust of wind blows by, this time fully blowing her hair down and sending her hair stick flying. She stares in shock at her hands? What is going on?! Behind her, the glow of the spirit portal aurora frames her head like glowing wings. She tries a few more swings and each time a gust of wind accompanies them. There is a wide panoramic shot from the icy blue mountains to the bright orange-yellow glow of the low late winter sunrise. A light breeze wafts by.

Page 5 A note on the front door reads: "Gone to Wolf Cove. Back in a few days. Anouk." Anouk sets out on a kayak journey to the city. A trail of bioluminescent algae accompanies her as she paddles through the early morning water. Once in Wolf Cove, Anouk ties her kayak to the pier and heads into the city to her waterbending dojo. On the street, other people are out strolling. One shop has four lanterns hanging above it in each color of the four nations.

Page 6 Inside the dojo, Anouk greets her bending master. No words are spoken. The dialogue balloons are pictographic. In the corner of the dojo is a large blue ceramic pot filled with water. The floor appears to be ice, with wood pillars emerging from it. The master arches her eyebrow with a wry smile and inquires if Anouk has done any waterbending yet. Anouk responds she's been practicing, but she's still not a waterbender. However, she did airbend. The master is shocked. Airbend? Anouk asks her bending master if she knows anything about the Air Nomads. The master ponders for a moment before asking if Anouk has a dog sled for travel.

Page 7 One sled rental later, Anouk is on her way to the White Lotus compound. The guards at the gate look at each other. The Water Tribe guard turns to the Fire Nation guard and says to him, "This might be our guest." He responds with a gruff, "We'll see." He scowls with piercing yellow eyes and yells out at Anouk, "Stop there! What is your business?" Anouk signs her name in Southern Water Tribe hand talk (which looks surprisingly like American Sign Language for some reason ). Panels below show the fingerspelling letters for A-N-O-U-K. The Fire Nation guard sheepishly turns to his colleague and says, "Oh. Uh, Rina? This is your department." Rina smiles and begins signing, "Can I help you?" A very excited Anouk rapidly signs, "I know this seems crazy, but I think I might be an airbender. I hoped to meet with Master Katara since she's the closest to an airbending expert in the South." Rina smiles with an excited, "Oh!" before resuming signing, "Yes! She told us to be on the lookout for any new airbenders!"

Page 8 Rina and Anouk sign with each other as Shen walks through the gate. Rina: Shen will let Master Katara know she has a visitor. Anouk: Thank you! Rina: If you like, I can interpret for you. Anouk: I would appreciate that! While Anouk waits for Shen to return, she gives scritches to the fuzzy polar bear dog who pulled her sled. Doggy closes his eyes and leans his head into Anouk's hand. Soon, Shen emerges from the gate and shouts loud enough to get Anouk's attention, "Hey!" He continues at a more reasonable volume, "Master Katara will see you now." Gruff Shen then wanders back to play with the polar bear dog. Rina follows Anouk into the interior of the compound as a nervous Anouk absentmindedly tucks her hair behind her ear.

Page 9 The legend herself, Master Katara, walks toward Anouk and Rina. "Welcome! I am Katara." Rina interprets this for Anouk. "Master Siqni was one of my students. When she contacted me and told me about you, I knew I had to meet you!" Katara smiles and tilts her head toward Anouk. "I'm so glad she thought to send you to me! Please, tell me about yourself." Anouk begins signing while Rina interprets saying, "My name is … Anouk. I craft fishing equipment in the village of … Tiger Seal Cove. I like to practice bending forms for exercise and meditation. Even though I've never bent an element in my life."

Page 10 Anouk continues signing while Rina interprets saying, "But the other day, a strange thing happened during my practice. I started airbending! Since you are the matriarch of the only airbenders in the world, I thought you might know how this happened." Katara's monologue: I'm not entirely sure. Though I expect the Harmonic Convergence had something to do with it. My son, Bumi, radioed me a few days ago with the incredible news that he was suddenly an airbender! At first he wasn't sure if he was simply a late bloomer. After all, airbending does run in our family! But then my youngest son, Tenzin, told me he'd received word of more airbenders in the Earth Kingdom. An inset circular panel shows a very excited Tenzin on the radio. Katara continues: He told me to keep my eyes open for other new airbenders, because they could be anywhere. And here you are! Anouk smiles.

Page 11 A wide shot of the three of them in the compound shows the wide space available for Katara's request. "Anouk… Could you show me your airbending?" Anouk begins the water whip forms, which is not lost on Katara. Just as before, the final strike releases a strong gust of wind. Katara is shocked. Here is an airbender before her who is not related to her. "Oh, Aang! It's really happening! The airbenders have returned!"

Page 12 Katara holds a teapot and pours. Steam wafts up from the hot green tea as it flows into the cup. Katara walks around the dining table to her seat. She speaks to Anouk as Rina interprets. "Tenzin told me he'll be traveling to the Earth Kingdom to meet the new airbenders there." Katara sits, placing the teapot back on its tray. Katara: And he encourages all new airbenders to go to Air Temple Island in Republic City. There they … you … can receive formal training on how to use this new gift from the spirits. What do you think? Anouk glances at Rina as she signs. Did Master Katara just say to travel to Republic City?! Anouk has a big decision to make.

Page 13 The note on Anouk's front door now reads, "Gone to Republic City. Back in a few months. Anouk." She puffs out a nervous foof as moonlight shimmers on the ocean behind her. Anouk is on a ship headed north. Three people behind her, one from each nation, sit on the deck benches to look at the moon while Anouk closes her eyes and smiles. She looks back at the city lights of Wolf Cove and how they pale in contrast to the glow of the bioluminescent algae kicked up by the ship and the majestic shimmer of the spirit portal aurora in the sky above. Her world has changed and she has no idea what's next.

[ladzwriting]

A fantasynoir novella about a morally gray lesbian hitman with ice magic that takes place in a reimagining of 70s/80s NYC, perfect for Sapphic September

ebook price is now $2.99

[savagewildnerness]

Interesting (you’ll be the judge of that!) , the song: about a soldier out for war, relentlessly driving onwards with a wild (surely misplaced!!) enthusiasm, no matter what! Remind you of anyone?! 😉

“Paddy Mack drove a hack
Up and down Broadway,
Pat had one expression and he’d use it ev’ry day;
Anytime he’d grab a fare, to take them for a ride,
Paddy jumped upon the seat, cracked his whip and cried:


“Where do we go from here, boys,
Where do we go from here?
Anywhere from Harlem to a Jersey city pier;”
When Pat would spy a pretty girl, he’d whisper in her ear,
“Oh joy, Oh boy,
Where do we go from here?”
here?”


One fine day, on Broadway,
Pat was driving fast,
When the street was blown to pieces
By a subway blast;
Down the hole poor Paddy went, a thinkin’ of his past,
Then he says, says he, I think these words will be my last:


“Where do we go from here, boys,
Where do we go from here?
Paddy’s neck was in the wreck, but still he had no fear;
He saw a dead man next to him and whispered in his ear,
“Oh joy, Oh boy,
Where do we go from here?”


First of all, at the call,
When the war began,
Pat enlisted in the army as a fighting man;
When the drills began, they’d walk a hundred miles a day,
Tho’ the rest got tired, Paddy always used to say:


“Where do we go from here, boys,
Where do we go from here?
Slip a pill to Kaiser Bill and make him shed a tear;
And when we see the enemy we’ll shoot them in the rear,
He saw a dead man next to him and whispered in his ear,
“Oh joy, Oh boy,
Where do we go from here?”

Where Do We Go From Here? is a classic World War I song written in 1917 by lyricist Howard Johnson and ragtime composer Percy Wenrich. Johnson served in the Navy during World War I, and then he moved to New York and immediately found himself working in Tin Pan Alley. Amongst his many hits, mostly with particularly long song titles, was the popular novelty song I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream.

[t-hornapple]

Do you have a rec list of fellow indie authors?

my friend @pegglefan69 is writing a really good wizard book that i'm currently beta reading. in the 1970s, an immortal wizard gets trapped in a tree by his evil apprentice and is found later by a goth in 2007. lots of hijinks, lots of gay, and if it sounds like it might be YA because there are wizards + hijinks: NO. absolutely not. you can read the first chapter (for free) on his patreon. he's a really really fabulous writer and i don't say that lightly or just because he's a friend. his narrative voice & skill with creating characters are fantastic.

my friend @katieaki is an incredible artist and author and has spent the last... few years(? a long time) building a really beautiful, queer post-apocalypse wasteland. she's working on a Choose Your Own Wasteland Story which posts live on twitter, and it's interactive, meaning you get to vote for what you think should happen at certain plot points. the current story is Pony Express, which you can read (for free) on her patreon.

like robin, her narrative voice is great, she has SUCH an incredible cast of characters (who all eventually get drawn) and it is really really sure to delight anyone looking for some fantastic queer literature and worldbuilding. she's written other things too, and i think they were up on a gumroad maybe... but i couldn't find that (katie if you see this can you let us know??)

i'm also beta reading for Ladz (i'm not sure if they're on tumblr) and they have two books up for sale right now on their itch--their latest is Ice Upon A Pier, a Lesbianoir fantasy novella about a prolific contract killer in a secondary world inspired by 70s/80s New York. I haven't read it, and i'm not sure what CW/TWs it might need, but i'd check out their stuff! the book i'm beta reading for them right now is really fun and they've got a lot of huge fun big ideas in the works.

if you want some queer gothic stuff, look into @velvettapeworm. he has a book out called So Sang the Riverman, "a story which tells of the primordial world’s destruction after the spirit of growth, Fervor, makes off with the heart in Decay’s grave." I've read a little bit of it and it's very good, but also "i've only read a little" means i can't give CW/TWs for it. he has some shorts out as well, which you can read here on his website. he's also a really fabulous artist.

[simply-windy]

You said the phighting deities have temples, how are them?? :O

Firebrand: The biggest temple out of them all considering he's not only the oldest, but the strongest as well. A temple worthy of a great king like Firebrand. Made of lava rock, brimstone and towering pillars of volcanic rock Windforce: A temple built for a mighty goddess like Windforce, sky-kissing marble towers and flowing banners that get gently rustled by the strong winds. Fresh sunlight pouring in through windows. Whites with golden accents, some touches of purple that had been added when Banhammer was born. Strong, fortified and able to handle even the mightiest of storms the deity could cause Illumina: Elegant, beautiful and shimmering like precious stones. A temple that rests atop of a dense cloud with the purest of waters pooling around various parts of the temple. Hanging flowers, vines that spiral around pillars of pale-purple stone and a large waterfall that cascades down into one of the deepest pools within the temple. The call of birds never-ending. Ghostwalker: Simplistic, easy on the eyes.... Ghostwalker isn't one for the extravagant. A haunting atmosphere, a place of salvation and protection for wandering spirits and lost souls alike. A seemingly never-ending graveyard stretching out behind it where a beautifully decorated church lies within. Ghostwalker's temple is simple and inviting, but also a warning sign for the living to turn back. Venomshank: Elegant, but in a grim way. Darkened stones, murders of crows flying around in packs, the groans of the undead being a sweet lullaby for all who lie within. A towering, strong wall surrounds the temple, one that a general like Venomshank could only think up of. Training grounds lie within the confides of his temple, perfectly placed out for warriors to train and hone their skills. Venomshank's temple wouldn't be called "beautiful" by all means, but it's semi-gothic nature is still captivating in every way. Darkheart: A temple that some would claim is a mere illusion. A mirage, you see. Fading in and out of existence, but no matter how hard one times, you are unable to see within unless you actually step into the temple. Cracked, eroding away and covered in all sorts of glowing green runes. Darkheart's temple is no real safe place for mortals to tread. Shadows cover every corner, a vast murky ocean that stretches on for miles and miles with a pier attached to the shoreline. Dead trees, broken structures. Surely a sight to see for only the bravest. Icedagger: A lot smaller in comparison, almost looking like a snowglobe from one's childhood. Icedagger's temple, while freezing cold, gives off a warm and cozy sensation upon seeing it. Made with snow and thick blocks of ice, the outside looks rather intimidating, making one believe they'd freeze up the moment they stepped inside. But the inside gives off a homey, winter cabin kind of feeling. Gentle lights flicker from never-freezing torches, icicles hang from ceilings and all sorts of little snow-made creatures wander the temple, acting as both helpers and guardians.

[tgmsunmontue]

Once Upon a Time in 1996... 6/7

IceMav TimeLoop. Maverick wakes up to a great day. Then it all turns to shit. Explicit.

ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

DAY 10

              “Carole… I think I’m going crazy.”

…           …           …

DAY 15

              “He’s already been through so much… loosing Nick.”

              “You can’t protect him from this Carole. Let him be there for you, because he’s going to want to be there. If you lie to him it’s only going to make him angry. Remember how he was when he found out about Santa?”

              She gives a little hiccupping laugh at the memory and Pete smiles, his heart breaking.

…           …           …

DAY 20

              “Carole… I don’t know what to say. What do you want me to say?”

              “Nothing. I don’t want you to say anything. Just hold me.”

              “I can do that.”

              He’s still holding her when Bradley arrives home from school and he just looks at them for a brief moment before pulling a face.

              “I’m going to my room.”

              Pete groans.

…           …           …

DAY 23

              They walk down the pier together and he looks out at the ocean.

              “You have to tell him…”

              “I don’t want to.”

              “I don’t want you to either, but I want you to keep it a secret from him even less.”

              She starts crying again and he pulls her into a hug, lets her cry it out and he feels awful for pressing, but he can’t go through this again, can’t have her lying to Bradley. Having him lie to Bradley by omission.

              “Will you let me adopt him?”

              “Oh Pete… of course I will. He loves you.”

              Pete smiles, because he knows that.

              He also knows Bradley will say yes when he asks.

…           …           …

DAY 27

              “Pete… what are you doing here?”

              “I needed to see you.”

              “Oookay. Come in.”

…           …           …

DAY 30

              “When did you get so wise?”

              Pete laughs, a little hysterical with it, doesn’t want to say he’s had versions of this conversation over and over. That she had been adamant in the beginning that Bradley be kept in the dark. Now she’s almost come around to the idea that she can’t protect him, only prepare him, and that’s what Pete wants as well.

…           …           …

DAY 35

              “Life is for living Maverick, there are risks in everything we do.”

…           …           …

DAY 42

              “Maverick… Pete…”

              Ice pulls out a box of condoms, unopened, and lube, the flush in his cheeks a little embarrassed and he doesn’t want that. Doesn’t want him to ever feel like he has any reason to be embarrassed around him, not about this.

              Ice is a quick learner, has clearly thought about what he wants to do to Pete’s body, his hands never stopping as they trail across his skin.

…           …           …

DAY 46

              “I told him… he cried. I cried. Thanks for being there Pete.”

              “Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

              She gives him a look like she knows he’s bullshitting her and he flushes, embarrassed.

…           …           …

DAY 50

              Running away doesn’t work.  Wherever he ends up in the evening he wakes up in his bed in the house, Carole and Bradley asleep in their bedrooms down the hall.

…           …           …

DAY 57

              “Pete. What are you doing here?”

              “Needed to see you. Missed you.”

              One of Tom’s eyebrows shoots up.

              “Have you been drinking?”

              “No!”

…           …           …

DAY 60

              “Why do you always think I’ve been drinking?”

              “Always? I don’t always think you’ve been drinking…”

…           …           …

DAY 68

              Instead of heading back to the house he drives them toward the pier, buys them ice cream and they walk.

…           …           …

DAY 70

              “Jesus Tom, want your hands on me…”

              “You do?”

              “Yeah.”

…           …           …

DAY 73

              He wakes up and immediately vomits over the side of the bed.

              Okay.

              Lesson learnt.

              Not that it had been on purpose, but he remembers the car hitting the side of Carole’s car and well…

              Apparently dying won’t stop this either.

              And no going to the lawyers.

…           …           …

DAY 77

              “So this is going to be a weird conversation, but you told me yesterday to keep Bradley home and have him come to your appointment. He actually already knows you’re sick. Is just waiting for you to tell him.”

              “What?”

              “Oh, shit. I forgot the part about the time loop. I’m stuck in a time loop, and I know Ice is in love with me, and you’ve already made every joke imaginable about how I am too unimaginative to make this type of story up…”

              “How…?”

              “How many days? Honestly? I’ve lost count. More than fifty.”

…           …           …

DAY 80

              “Carole, I think I’m going crazy.”

              “More than usual you mean?”

              He barks out a laugh, but there are tears close to the surface now as he remembers the conversation he had yesterday.

              He’s had so many yesterdays now he’s lost count.

…           …           …

DAY 90

              “Let me take the edge off, then I want you to fuck me. Think you can manage that?”

              He probably shouldn’t voice it like it’s somehow a challenge that he expects Ice to meet head-on regardless of any reservations he might have. That’s not what this should be.

…           …           …

DAY 100

              He wakes up.

              The grass is not cut.

…           …           …

DAY …

              As he falls asleep he wonders if having them all under one roof will be the solution he’s looking for.

              When he wakes up the next morning and goes downstairs and it’s the same he starts to wonder what the hell it is he’s got to do.

              Is it even him that has to do something?

…           …           …

DAY …

              He wakes up and he’s in his bed, but that’s what he expects and he needs to know if Ice is asleep on the sofa downstairs. If it’s become the weekend.

              Fuck he hopes it’s become the weekend.

              It’s the same day.

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Ice, I’m stuck in this day, and I wake up every morning, and I know Carole is going to find out she has incurable cancer, and I know you’re going to tell me you’re gay, and I just… I’ve lost count. I’ve lost count of the number of days it’s been.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “What do you need from me today?”

              “What do you mean?

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Just remember we’re here and we love you, okay?”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Hi, I know this is going to be completely left field but I really need you to fuck me right now. I just… need to not think for a bit.”

              “What?”

              “Tom… this isn’t our first time. Hell, it’s not even in our first ten times. But I just need… I’m stuck in this time loop or something. I know you keep a bottle of vodka in your freezer which you take shots from when you’re dealing with being in love with me. Except you don’t know I’m in love with you too, but god, I am so in love with you.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Ice. Tom. I’ve been in love with you so long I can’t even remember when it started. I just… needed to tell you that.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Fuck this… just… fuck it all to hell and back.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “I don’t know how to escape, it’s become this almost hell… but I get to spend it with you, and Carole and Bradley.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “You’re not alone okay?”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Hi…”

              “Hi. You’re here.”

              “Yeah. I just… realized something today and made me want to see you. And I can see you, so I got to give in to it…”

              “Pete,” Tom says, and his voice cracks on his name and Pete steps forward, closing the door behind him.

…           …           …

DAY …

              “How about we go and pick Bradley up early. Go and do something fun.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              He falls asleep with Tom draped over him and he really wants to wake up in a similar position.

…           …           …

DAY …

              He wakes up in his bed at the Bradshaw’s and he rolls over and punches the pillow.

              “Goddammit!”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “I want you to remember our first time together, but we’ve had so many first kisses, I’ve sucked you off, given you hand jobs…”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Mav. You need to calm down. No matter how many firsts I get to have with you, I will not regret a single one of them okay? And I don’t want you to, either.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Plus just look at it like flight hours. You’re racking them up and going to be so much more experienced with my body, you’re going to be able to turn me boneless.”

              “Oh… yeah. We should get onto that.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “I love you. So many different ways Tom. I know it’s new, that I never gave you any idea that I was… that I am… but I am. I want you. For as long as you’ll have me.”

              “Forever then, because that’s what I want.”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “How are you so good at this?”

              “Well, that’s an interesting story…”

              He starts with the basic outline, brushes over his worst moments, tells him how many times they’ve had their first kiss…

              “No wonder you know my body so well…”

…           …           …

DAY …

              “I want you by my side every possible moment.”

              The smile Tom gives him is shy, almost bashful and Pete reaches up to cup the side of his face with a hand, draws him down into a kiss.

…           …           …

DAY …

              “Mav. What are you doing here?”

              “Needed to see you. Wanted to see you.”

              “And you couldn’t wait until tonight?”

              “No. I couldn’t. I need to talk to you. Tell you some things.”

              “Uh, okay. Sure. Come in.”

              He carefully waits until he’s inside, the door closed behind him and then he reaches up, a hand on each of Tom’s face and he kisses him, soft and sweet, but certain, no hesitation and tries to pour into it every ounce of love he feels for him.

              “I love you. Have loved you for a long time. I know you’ve been making yourself sick, smoking too many cigarettes, thinking about telling me. How I might react. Well. It’s better than your best case scenario, because I love you, and I want to be with you, and I know it’s not going to be easy. Sometimes you’re going to want to kill me. I’m going to drive you crazy. But I’ll always love you…”

              “Pete.”

SEVEN