#Instantly recovered when I went back to Chicago

[chicago-geniza]

Don't so much have seasonal depression as "mostly I'm pretty upbeat and unflappable and my mood tends to be, in psych parlance, stably ~euthymic, but whenever there's rainy, stormy weather that lasts for more than 24 hours I want to do something Drastic"

I use the word погодозависимый in Russian because I don't know any English word that suffices!!! Like, I am at the whims of the weather!!!

[t0mcruize123]

March 5th

Fifth March 5th🎀🫶

This is the last part to this story and I’m genuinely going to miss writing it, it’s been kinda fun😭 this part is massively inspired by the movie vanilla sky so u may wanna watch the movie first to understand this better💪hope you all enjoyed it but most of all @mqverick who this was originally written for🫶 HAPPY BIRTHDAY LUVVVV THIS IS ALL FOR U

Fifth March 5th:

“All of this, everything is your creation.”

David stared at the pink and peach clouds surrounding him, still trying to process everything that had been said, “When did the lucid dream start?”

A tall man dressed in a slick white suit claimed to be Edmund Ventura from Life extension - a company dedicated to placing people into Lucid dreams until their bodies were revived. David had initially laughed at the idea, convinced this was all a figment of his imagination after she’d drove away the previous night, but he couldn’t wake up.

“Do you remember the first March 6th? When you ran to the plane in slo motion?” Edmund looked at him from across the building, “When she left, you went back to your apartment and that was the moment that you chose for the splice.”

His eyes widened, “Splice?”

“The end of your real life and the beginning of your lucid dream. After that day, nothing was real in the traditional sense. Your lucid dream was monitored by life extension.”

David pinched the bridge of his nose in confusion and rubbed his hands down his face. So Edmund was telling him that 5 years ago when he kissed her on the plane was his last real memory? Everything else had been a dream?

“Precisely,” Edmund read his mind with a disturbing smile, “You barely knew her in your real life but in your lucid dream she was your saviour.”

David thought back to each year spent with her, how comfortable and content he’d felt within her arms and how nothing else had ever seemed to bother him. Had he really been dreaming the entire time? What had happened to cause him to even sign up with life extension?

“What happened to my real life? What did you erase?” He stepped forward eagerly, no longer convinced it was fake yet still unnerved, “Tell me everything.”

He drew in a slow breath, “after the plane took off, you went back to your apartment alone and never saw her again. You didn’t meet up next March 5th because you were both too busy, too worried the other had forgotten, and we’re trying to move on with your seperate lives. You got ownership of the company, you had great friends but you were still lonely,” his voice was filled with sympathy and David flinched, “You craved the comfort youd felt only with her, but had no idea how to reach her. Instead, You found life extension on the internet and signed a contract.”

In David’s real life, he’d been alone? Surely that couldn’t be true, he had tons of friends right? Had she really impacted him that much?

“It wasn’t danny who died in that car wreck two years later, David, it was you,” David’s head snapped up at the mention of his friend, “you gave yourself to us and you’re now in a suspended in a dream state.”

“Danny didn’t die?” He smiled in relief though there was nothing to be happy about.

Edmund shook his head, “Your friend Brian Shelby organised a three day memorial, and she flew from Chicago and never recovered.”

David found the thought oddly comforting. Even though they’d only known each other a day, she’d cared enough to fly back.

“It was she who somehow knew you best and she never forgot that one night at your party where true love seemed to blossom.”

And now she was gone…David shook his head fiercely and looked at the bright skies, “I don’t want to dream any longer.”

Edmund smiled slightly as I took form behind David. I knew I wasn’t real - I was just a figment in David’s dream and yet my thoughts, my emotions, my memories…everything still felt so real.

“You’re here,” David spun to face me, his features instantly relaxing as he took me in. I smiled as my hands came up to touch his face. I wasn’t angry at him anymore for falling in love with Violet. Right now on this rooftop, there was just me and him.

“There was a glitch in your lucid dream David,” Edmund confessed in the distance, “You were supposed to end up with her with the perfect happily ever after, but the glitch caused you to form a relationship with Violet. That was never supposed to happen.”

My lips tugged up as I moved closer to David, “Me and you were destined, I always knew it.”

There was a glint of mischief in his eye as he brought his lips close to mine. The feel of his mouth was familiar and I welcomed the soft press of his tongue. He was everything I needed and more - it was the kind of kiss I could’ve stayed in for the rest of my life, but we both knew it couldn’t last.

David needed to wake up.

“Look at us,” he pulled back and ran a hand through my hair, “Frozen and dead, and I love you.”

My heart would always hammer at those words, “It’s a problem.”

“I lost you when I left you on that plane,” his smile saddened for a moment and I kissed the corner of his mouth, “And when I got in the car wreck. I’m sorry.”

A sob clung to my throat as David interlaced our hands together, “Do you remember what you told me once?”

My lips parted in anticipation and he smiled, “Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.”

A tear rolled down my cheek but I didn’t bother wiping it away. Planting one last kiss to his lips, I closed my eyes and took a step back.

My hand reached out, “Come find me.”

“My life won’t be complete until I do,” the corner of his lip tugged up though his eyes glistened in the sunlight, “I’ll see you in another life when we are both cats.”

I grinned and David took a step back towards the edge of the building. My pulse raced but I knew he had to take the leap of faith; David was going to be okay. We were going to be fine.

Part of me worried when he woke up the real me wouldn’t love him as much as the dream me. But Edmund had said true love had blossomed at his party all those years ago, we had something special.

David hovered on the edge of the building, his pants echoing in the air as his hands clamped into fists at his sides. He was always terrified of heights but I knew he could do this. If anyone could do this, it was him.

As if David could read my mind, he inhaled sharply and fell forwards from the rooftop. The wind instantly smacked his face as he flew towards the floor, a strange feeling of peace unfurling in his stomach.

“It’s time,” Edward looked at me with a small smile as I slowly faded away. The world itself seemed to fade into the colour white, taking everything and everyone in its path. I looked at the edge David had stood on only moments before and smiled, knowing we’d be together in another life soon.

“Relax David….Open your eyes”

David blinked at me in bewilderment as though he was confused about where he was or who he was. With wide eyes and a slack jaw, he stared at me in confusion and I repeated the question.

“You promise?” I looked into his eyes and tried my best to ignore all the people on the plane watching us through their windows.

“Promise what?”

I almost laughed in disbelief, “To meet up with me next year…March 5th?”

He shook his head slowly as if coming to a sudden realisation, “I’m not coming next year.”

I shifted back in confusion and he added, “Because I’m coming with you right now.”

My brow creased, “What?”

“This is going to sound insane but I know that if I let you get on this plane alone, both of us are going to end up upset and alone, with broken promises,” he touched my shoulder, “And I’m tired of holding back and making excuses. You make me happy, and I know we’ve only properly known each other for what? A whole day? But I know you. I know you better than everybody else and I’m not going to let the one person I’ve ever truly loved slip through my fingers. I’m coming with you.”

I don’t think I could’ve replied if I tried. Everything we’d planned and talked about had just vanished and yet I was happy to see it disappear. I liked this new David. This David who didn’t care about challenges and thought with his heart, not his head; this David who I knew I was going to have so many fun adventures with. I could already see it.

“You want to fly to Chicago with me?” I confirmed with a small smile and he nodded, “You’re going to need a jacket.”

He flashed a familiar grin, “Trust me, I know.”

It felt surreal as we clambered on the plane together, hand in hand, with no luggage and no real plans and yet…no worries. Being with David always seemed to cool me down and I knew that as long as I was with him I was going to be okay. Maybe it was insane; I mean I hardly knew the guy and yet I felt as though we’d lived a thousand lifetimes together.

David went back to buy a ticket to the plane and we managed to swap places with other passengers so that we were seated together. They gave us small smiles and knowing glances and I couldn’t help but wipe the cheesy grin off my face. I wasn’t going to sit and wait 364 days to start living my life.

I looked at David at my side and squeezed his hand tightly, pressing my lips against his. We’d only kissed a few times and yet i felt as though I’d felt him a thousand times, held him and loved him thousands more. This was what it felt like to love. I wasn’t going to hold myself back anymore, I was going to seize the chances I had.

I was going to start living today, and that included David Aames at my side.

Who would’ve thought?

The end🫶

[justmelagain]

~RIL~ Anne Rice 💔😢

Oct 04, 1941 - Dec 11, 2021

My favorite author for most of my lifetime. I’m heartbroken right now.

My biggest fangirl moment EVER was with her! I’ll always remember it. I went to The Romantic Times Book Lovers Convention in Chicago, Illinois in April 2012. Just while checking in, she came up behind me, trying to make her way through the crowd & touched my arm, asking quietly if she could pass by me. When I turned to see who it was, my knees instantly buckled & I forgot how to breathe but somehow I made room for her. She smiled sweetly and thanked me. It took me several minutes to recover. Then, later on, once we were allowed in to start browsing the booths, I made my way to hers first. I stood in line for 45 minutes to have her sign my boxed copy of The Beauty Series. Once I got to her, again, I couldn’t do anything but stammer & stutter. She asked if I had anything she could sign with (she had pens on her table but they wouldn’t work on the case) & I handed her my Sharpie. When she was done, I thanked her profusely & finally made my way out of the line feeling like I was about to faint. It was only when I calmed down about 10 minutes later that I realized she’d KEPT MY SHARPIE! I laughed so hard that I cried! No way was I going to go back & ask ANNE RICE to give me my Sharpie back! 🤣🤣🤣 I’m sure that she thought I was a total nutcase. I saw her another time later on in the convention & acted like an idiot then too. But you should’ve seen how people rallied around her! I’m not even kidding. Everyone was in awe of her. She is fucking ROYALTY to us book nerds.

Anne, I hope you can now find all the answers you researched your life for. You will be sorely missed!

With Great Sadness, Your nuttiest fan

[headcanonseverywhere]

The Nightshade Sisters Go To Chicago

Plot: Gwendolyn's aunts - Seraphina, Odessa, and Adissa - pay her a visit in Chicago for her birthday. Chaos ensues.

I missed writing these ladies, so here ya go!

Part 1/?

It was nearly six in the morning when the Nightshade sisters arrived in Chicago through one of Saventhia’s approved portals. They wanted to surprise Gwendolyn on her birthday with a visit, since they had never been to her house before, and to make her day extra special.

So, they went out in search of their niece’s home. It would’ve been a much shorter journey if they were allowed to ride their broomsticks, but unfortunately it was prohibited according to the United Realms, much to their displeasure.

At last, they arrived at Gwendolyn’s house, which was also the place of her business, Sweet Delights, a quite popular bakery among the supernatural community. Though finding it wasn’t an easy task for them, as it was towered between two tall buildings connected by several skyways.

“Such ugly buildings covering little Gwen’s bakery!” complained Seraphina, as they reached the bakery’s front door.

“They look like two popsicles!” laughed Adissa, childishly.

“Hush, now!” scolded Odessa, and peered through the glass door. “She’s already up and about.”

“Already?!” exclaimed Seraphina, who followed her sister’s line of sight. “Well, I hope she’s had her breakfast first!”

While the two sisters were remarking on Gwendolyn’s early waking hours, Adissa had wandered over the small flower bed underneath the window, and was admiring its array of flowers.

“Pretty!” she sang.

“Adissa, don’t stray too far,” warned Odessa from the front door. “This place is a maze, you’ll get lost easily!”

“That’s all we need,” grumbled Seraphina. “A scavenger hunt for her!”

“Oh pipe down, pipe down now!” said Odessa. “Get back here, Adissa! Is everyone ready?”

The two sisters nodded their heads as they gathered together, when suddenly they felt a looming presence behind them, followed by a deep, intimidating voice of a man. “Can I help you?”

The sisters screamed and instantly waved their hands, each of them casting a different spell on him, to which he staggered back and fell to the ground, holding his face in agony.

Gwendolyn - who had heard the commotion from the bakery - came rushing outside to find her aunts and the disgruntled man at her door. The sisters turned and, unsure of what to do, simply smiled up at their niece and gave her a feeble cheer.

“Happy birthday, Gwen!” they sang uneasily, while the man still groaned on the ground.

“What happened?!” cried Gwendolyn, and hurried over to the fallen man.

The three sisters looked at each other, feeling very guilty.

“Oh, we’re sorry, Gwen dear,” Odessa finally spoke. “We wanted to surprise you with a visit for your birthday, but this young man startled us, and we thought we were in danger.”

Gwendolyn helped the man up, who had removed his hands by then, revealing a severely swollen face riddled with boils and warts, as well as a few feathers and scales protruding from his skin, as though they had always been there.

“Are you okay, Ajij?” Gwendolyn asked the man, to which he shook his head with much strain.

“We can fix up an antidote!” said Odessa, and they all helped him inside.

~~

“So, he works here?” said Seraphina, after Gwendolyn had explained to her aunts why Ajij arrived at the bakery in the first place, all while caring for him after giving the antidote.

“Oh, we’re terribly sorry.” Odessa apologized to him.

“No hard feelings.” he whispered in pain.

“You can take the day off to fully recover.” Gwendolyn told him.

“But who will help around the bakery?” he asked.

“We can!” piped Odessa, and the other sisters nodded in agreement. Gwendolyn began to protest, but Odessa insisted that they should.

“It’s the least we can do after what happened earlier.” she added.

Gwendolyn sighed in defeat. “Alright, we should go ahead and start opening then.”

And with that, the sisters hurried downstairs to the bakery, eager to help their niece’s business. As Gwendolyn followed her aunts’ lead, she felt Gumdrop scamper up her leg and nestle around her shoulders, squeaking at her very annoyed, to which she laughed at her familiar’s reaction.

“Don’t be like that, Gummie,” she said. “They’ll be just fine!”

At that moment, she heard a loud clutter of pans followed by an uproar of bickering and complaining from her aunts, and Gwendolyn let out a long sigh.

[detectiveupstead]

Coming Back [Upstead One Shot]

A/N: my little take on what happens after 7x18 “Lines”. Jay is the first person Hailey talks to after Voight tells her of her New York FBI assignment.

--

He was waiting for her at Molly’s, wondering what was taking her so long to show up. The rest of the team was around him, the buzz of the bar familiar as those who just got off work congregated to the local bar. Jay noticed something off about Hailey during the case, knowing her well enough at this point to pick up on any subtle shift of her demeanor to know something was going on in that quick-thinking head of hers. But she hadn’t told him, probably hoped he didn’t notice. Jay smiled wryly into the lip of his beer bottle, giving an absent shake of his head. She should know better at this point.

Jay glanced towards the table where the rest of the members of Intelligence were, mostly trying to keep Vanessa distracted from the outcome of the case that resulted in her losing a relationship she held close. Jay felt for her, aware of how rough the past few days had been for Vanessa. His gaze slid past the table just as the front door of Molly’s swung open, and he straightened where he sat on the stool at the bar when Hailey walked in.

There was a blankness in her expression as she entered, and Jay’s eyebrows furrowed together slightly as she walked past the table with their team members, returning their greetings with a brief smile but never pausing to stop by them. Instead, her blue eyes met Jay’s green, flashing seriously, and Jay knew immediately something was going on.

As soon as Hailey reached him, she said, “I have to tell you something.” She gestured towards the door, ticking her head towards it, and Jay nodded.

Silently, he got up and followed her, briefly exchanging a confused glance with Kim as he went. He shrugged his jacket back on as they made their way through the busy bar, walking out after letting a few people in. The sidewalk wasn’t busy, cars driving past occasionally on the street Molly’s was located on. Two men stood a few feet away leaning against the building, sharing conversation and cigarettes. The sidewalk was illuminated by the streetlights, and the music and chatter from the bar was muffled as they walked a few feet down the path.

“What’s going on?” Jay asked once they stopped, hands shoving into the pockets of his jacket as the familiar Chicago chill bit at him.

Hailey glanced away from him for a moment, the muscle in her jaw working, and Jay recognized this as her trying to find the right words. His eyebrows drew together, an uneasy knot forming in the pit of his stomach as he waited. Finally, her eyes met his, bright blue even at this time of night. “Voight’s sending me to New York for a few weeks as a loan officer for the FBI. I leave tomorrow.”

She spoke factually, trying to keep her voice monotone and flat, and yet her reluctance to following a direct order seeped through the longer she stared at Jay. He, in turn, looked right back at her, her words taking a moment to process, silently hoping that she was kidding, unable to say anything. Because panic had instantly flared in his head, feeling as though the universe was repeating a cruel joke—and Jay wasn’t sure if he was surprised that this time, it felt a hundred times worse.

His lips parted, yet no words came out, a tight lump in his throat making it difficult to speak. The Chicago weather had nothing to do with the way Jay stood frozen, all too aware of his heart beginning to pick up its pace, the panic slowly but surely increasing and threatening to take over every cell in his body.

History was repeating itself with a twist. He’d already lost one partner to New York—to the FBI. What kind of shit cards was he being dealt with to have another one leave, too, even if it was temporary? Jay knew the situation wasn’t the same. He knew he and Erin were done before she left—knew that leaving was her choice. She wanted to be gone. To leave Chicago. And leave him. So she did, without a word or a goodbye. Gone just like that.

And that had hurt. It hurt so damn much, to the point where Jay started spiraling in a way that frightened him, only allowing himself to get help, to get better, after Voight and Hailey gave him the push he needed. Hailey.

He knew she didn’t want to leave—hell, he could see it in her eyes, swimming with distraught and reluctance and absolute loathing for the assignment she was given. This wasn’t her choice—a difference from when Erin left. Another major difference: Hailey was giving him the respect of letting him know instead of merely disappearing.

Yet, Jay still felt as though he couldn’t quite breathe easily. Like someone had reached into the cavity of his chest, wrapped an iron fist around his heart, and was squeezing until there was nothing left to squeeze. And maybe that was a bit of an overreaction, but it seemed appropriate. Jay was too used to losing people, whether it be of their own doing or to death, but Hailey—she was someone Jay never thought would leave. She was someone he counted on never leaving him, even if the idea of it may seem wishful.

Jay appreciated and respected the partners he’d had in the past, whether it be in the military or as a cop, but Hailey was someone Jay was desperate to have at his side forever. A voice in the back of his mind teased him every time that thought came across—wondering if he meant it in a professional sense or more personal, more intimate. Jay tried his best not to dwell on it too much, not wanting to dig himself into a hole.

Was he even aware the hole had been dug, and he was already a good few feet in?

But now she was going and Jay didn’t get a say in the matter, and it foolishly pissed him the hell off.

“No—what the hell? Not happening,” he scoffed with a shake of his head, refusing to accept what he already knew was a done deal.

Hailey’s expression fell, like she expected him to react this way, eyebrows drawing together in an almost sad frown. “I don’t have a choice, Jay,” she rasped quietly, giving a shake of her head that had her blonde ponytail only slightly swinging. “Voight signed off on it himself.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Jay groaned through a clenched jaw, turning away from Hailey as he ran a hand through his hair. His back was to her, staring out into the parking lot, letting out a few heavy breaths as he tried to calm himself down from the anger mixed with panic running through his veins. He ran his hand down his face before turning to look at Hailey. With a shake of his head, he demanded, “Why the hell is Voight sending you?”

Hailey was silent for a moment, lips pressed together, as if she didn’t want to tell him. But Jay kept staring, green eyes clashing with blue, until she let out a breath, the air fogging in front of her, before admitting, “He says they run things differently there. By the book. Thinks it’ll be a good lesson for me.”

The frown of Jay’s face disappeared, chin lifting as understanding dawned on his features. The uneasy knot in his stomach only tightened, willing his fingers not to curl into tight fists as he looked down at the blonde woman in front of him. In a quiet voice, Jay asked, “This is because of what happened to Darius Walker, isn’t it?”

Hailey’s throat worked, instantly telling Jay that his thought was right, blinking once as she added, “And then some.”

Jay gave a disbelieving shake of his head as he broke their gazes, looking away as his jaw clenched together tightly. Darius Walker’s death was brought on by what Hailey did, talking to those gangbangers who had no problem seeking revenge for their dead brothers. He knew it and Voight knew it. Jay knew, the moment he talked to her after she’d done it, that Hailey was turning towards a road he didn’t want her going down. Ever since her CI Cameron’s death, there was a cloud hanging over Hailey that Jay had been trying to figure out how to get rid of. He certainly hadn’t helped matters when he ended up in the hospital, he knew, and Hailey was crossing lines Jay knew only Voight to cross.

And it terrified Jay, admittedly, to see Hailey like that. She was one of the best detectives he knew, a hell of a cop, and he didn’t want her to lose any of that because of some bad choices. As much as he hated to admit it, Jay saw the motive behind Voight’s decision of sending her to New York. The lines were clear there, no doubt about it, and he understood Voight wanting Hailey to take note of it, to work along with it and bring it back home.

Jay just hated that it had come to this in the first place. Hated that he could’ve helped her, been there for her, more.

“You’re pissed.”

He hadn’t said anything for a few moments, and Hailey uttering those two words reeled Jay back into reality, a sharp huff escaping him as his eyebrows lowered into a glare. “Damn right, I’m pissed. I think I have a right to be, given that my partner just told me she’s leaving.”

So many things—so many things he was pissed about. Deep in his heart, Jay knew this move would prove to be important for Hailey, understood Voight’s reasoning for it. But his chest still felt heavy, weighed down by the ghosts of the past that never seemed to entirely leave him, unable to completely ignore the sinister voice in the back of his head that taunted him with Hailey leaving for good. Away from Chicago. Away from him. He’d recovered from his past heartbreak. But looking at Hailey, at the woman who’d become his partner, his best friend, his confidant—Jay just knew if his fear came to light, this would be a heartbreak he wouldn’t recover from.

Hailey’s eyebrows knitted together, taking a step towards him, eyes never leaving his. She seemed to have read his thoughts, as always. “I’m coming back, Jay,” she reminded him pointedly, her sharp voice contradicting the softness in her blue eyes, desperate for him to believe her. It was enough to get his muscles to relax, to let some of the anger burning his blood to disintegrate. “It’s a temporary assignment, just a couple of weeks. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Despite himself, Jay scoffed, shooting her a flat look. A car drove by, its headlights illuminating Hailey’s face, and something softened in Jay’s chest at the glow of her features. Bright blue eyes glowing with reassurance, and a gentle smile successfully calming him down. With a raise of an eyebrow, he retorted, “You say that like I’m not gonna notice that you’re gone for a few weeks.”

Hailey raised her eyebrows. “You better,” she replied, her light tone cracking the tension. A ghost of a smile curled at her lips as she added, “I gotta have something to come back to.”

Jay’s throat worked at her words, though he still smiled, a warmth spreading through him as he nodded, “I appreciate you telling me, Hailey. You know, before leaving.”

“Of course,” she responded, as if not telling him hadn’t even been a thought that crossed her mind. “We’re partners, and even though I haven’t been completely straight with you, I wasn’t going to leave the state without telling you,” she continued with a gentle laugh.

A wry, almost bitter smile curled at Jay’s lips. Without thinking, he muttered, “You’d be surprised how many people would.”

What did it say about Jay that he felt more pain when people merely walked out of his life on their own accord as opposed to leaving by death, even if slightly?

He looked away as soon as the words slipped past his mouth, teeth clenching together as he focused his gaze on anything but Hailey. It wasn’t as though Jay was embarrassed by what he said—with Hailey, there was no room for that. Being openly vulnerable wasn’t exactly one of his strong suits, but his blonde partner was slowly changing that over the years for the better. And despite moments of morally gray decision making, Jay had a feeling it was mutual.

“I’m not any of those people,” Hailey spoke up, drawing Jay’s attention towards her once more. She looked at him meaningfully, a softness in her beautiful features that always stole Jay’s breath. Hailey was, without a doubt, so effortlessly stunning and if Jay wasn’t so damn good at his job, if he was someone else, he’d probably get distracted by her in the field. It didn’t mean he didn’t try to steal glances at her whenever he could, though. Jay watched as Hailey took a step towards him, gaze never leaving his as she peered up at him. “This is my home. I’m not leaving it. Or you.”

Jay’s heart leaped into his throat as he stared down at Hailey, the truth weighing down her words meaningfully, hanging between them in a silence not even the business of Molly’s could disrupt. And as Jay looked at Hailey, there was so much he wanted to say, so much he wanted to tell her—thoughts and feelings he’d been holding in for longer than he’d care to admit. But he was going to wait for when Hailey got back, to tell her when she was finally back home—back with him.

So he swallowed the emotions bubbling up, and instead he smiled, adoring the sight of her own small grin, before asking, “What time’s your flight?”

“9:15 A.M.,” she told him with a slight tilt of her head.

He smirked gently. “I’ll drive you. And I’ll bring coffee.”

Hailey raised her eyebrows, a teasing tilt in her voice as she asked, “You’re not gonna cry, are you?”

Jay gave a serious nod as they both began making their way back into Molly’s. “I’ll be sobbing on the inside.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder as they walked inside, a smirk dancing on her own lips as she approved, “Good.”

He wouldn’t be sobbing, of course. But as soon as Hailey would walk through the terminal gates at the airport, Jay knew he would be counting down the days until he could see her again.

[cpd5021]

Lines

Based on some prompts:

“We’re not just friends and you fucking know it”  

“Would you just shut up and listen to me for two goddamn seconds?!”

 Set in season 8 

        Lines. A concept Hailey was struggling to grasp in multiple areas of her life. Moral lines. Ethical lines. Personal lines. Friendship lines. They all seemed to be blurring together. Voight had sent her to New York because the lines in the FBI were very clear. And he had been right. The lines in New York were laid out in front of you, shining as bright as the lights in Time Square. Hailey could put on a good show, she could stay well within the lines if she wanted too. The problem was, she didn’t. The lines at work, the moral and ethical ones, those were easier to maintain. Especially with the threat of being fired lingering over your head. Hailey had been back from New York for a few weeks now. Her higher ups while she was there had sent Voight an outstanding report, told him she had passed with flying colors and that they would love to have her back any time. They had even proposed a job offer to her the day before she left. She had scoffed at it then, but now, as she sat on a bar stool in Molly’s with her head swirling, the idea didn’t seem so bad.

          The entire time she was in New York, she had been counting the seconds until she was back home in Chicago. Back with her unit, back in her condo, back with Jay....The latter of that list was proving to be an issue. Hailey hadn’t really been surprised when it was Jay who picked her up from the airport when she returned, or when it was Jay who picked her up the next morning for work, coffee and a bagel in hand. It wasn’t surprising when the first thing Jay had wanted to do after they finished her first shift back was to meet for some beers and do ‘their thing’. Hailey had wanted that too, if she was being honest. Talking over the phone, or even face-timing, just wasn’t the same as being in his presence. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was that made being with Jay so...special. But then the little voice in her head reminded her that it was because she loved him. She loved Jay. She had known that all along she thought, although it wasn’t something she had really faced until the moment Vanessa said it point blank in the waiting room after he had been shot. Of course she loved him, he was her partner. Those are the words she had told Vanessa, and they were the truth. She loved Jay, as a partner, they had grown extremely close over their years of working together and they just flowed so easily together. Vanessa’s statement had alluded to more though, and it was in the moments that followed, the long and agonizing moments of waiting for Jay to wake back up, that she realized it was more than a platonic love. She didn’t just love Jay, she was in love with Jay. The realization had rocked her to the core. It had shattered her walls that she had so carefully built and then when she was finally able to talk to him, to take him home, she almost blurted them out. She had started the conversation and her heart fluttered when she saw a brief moment of hope spread across Jay’s face, hope for what she wasn’t sure. Jay didn’t feel the same way for her, that much was guaranteed. He was an amazing guy and an even more amazing friend. He listened to all her dark and twisty thoughts, he knew about her past and they way it affected her to this day, and yet, he never ran away. He was there, always. A constant in her life, a rock. His phone had interrupted them in that moment and Hailey was able to have a minute of clarity, a minute to stop herself from ruining their partnership, their friendship. Jay had asked her what she was going to say, but she was able to brush it off easily and he never brought it up again. That alone was proof enough for her that he didn’t feel the same way. She was certain in that moment in his hospital room, that her body was radiating her feelings for him and you would have to be clueless to not pick up on that. Although, Hailey chuckled to herself and took a sip of her beer, Jay could be pretty clueless sometimes. After that moment in the hospital, Hailey had managed to securely push those thoughts down, locking them away and tossing out the key. She was able to work with him, day in and day out, without her true feelings affecting either one of them. These were lines she could stay within easily, Jay was too important to her to risk losing. Having him as her partner and friend, remaining status quo, would be all she needed. That was, until Voight sent her to New York. And then all the lines blurred. The more Hailey focused on staying within the lines of work, the more the lines of her personal life began to disappear. She spent almost every night on the phone with Jay, both of them hashing out their days at work, both admitting they were ready to be partners again because no one got them quite the same way. Hailey had said multiple times that she missed Chicago, missed working with Intelligence, missed the food.....on one particularly rough day she had even admitted to missing him. His tone had been light and teasing as he didn’t let her comment go unnoticed, but she had managed to recover and get off the phone with him before she could let anything else slip out. But now she was back in Chicago, back with Intelligence and back with Jay. Voight was keeping a careful eye on her, waiting for the second she might slip up and that made staying within the lines at work pretty easy. Jay however, was another matter entirely. They had been spending almost every night, either at his place or hers, drinking beers and watching crappy TV, talking over the cases they were working, or the drama of the people they worked with, and consuming way more pizza then she cared to admit. Having him back in her life, having his presence once again be a constant that she could rely on...it was making those lines extremely hard to maintain. He didn’t realize what he was doing of course, the small gestures of coffee in the morning or checking in after a particularly hard chase, the little smiles he would send her way or the jokes he would make when they were bored at work. Or even at home, whomever’s that may be, when he would stretch out on her couch and his feet would brush against her leg, or if she was at his place and they would get to close in his tiny kitchen, both laughing it off. He didn’t know that each of those moments would send her heart racing and make her breathing hard to maintain. He was all around her, even when he wasn’t. When she was alone in her apartment, all she could picture was him there. Or if she was working with a different partner, she would spend the entire time comparing their actions to Jay’s. It had been wearing down the cage she had locked her feelings in to. On multiple occasions she had felt herself ready to break and to tell him the truth. Thankfully, something had stopped her every time. But it was getting harder and harder to control. So that’s why, after they had a rough case today, one they would normally meet and hash out, she had told Jay she didn’t want company tonight. She had paced about her place for awhile, knowing that if she stayed he would inevitably show up. So she had grabbed her keys and headed out the door. Hailey knew it was risky coming to Molly’s, knew that there was a fair chance if Jay didn’t stay home, this is where he would be. But part of her was hoping that would be the case. His look of hurt when she shut him out and crushed her, he had pushed back, stating he knew this case was hard on her and that they should talk it out, but she had just built her walls up higher and kept him out. It wasn’t necessarily an argument between them, but it was certainly a harsher conversation then they normally had. And she knew shutting him out would hurt him.

    She sat at her table in the corner of the bar, slowly nursing her second beer, when she glanced up and saw him walk in. His eyes instantly met hers, finding her easily in the crowded bar as if he knew she was here. She followed him as he grabbed his own beer from the bar and then headed her way. She steeled herself in the chair, throwing walls up left and right, and picked at the label on her bottle. He finally reached her table, setting his beer down with a clunk before settling in to the chair across from her. He remained silent as his eyes studied her features. She could feel him staring but kept her eyes glued on the label she was picking at. Suddenly, his hand moved into her line of sight, taking hold of her bottle and setting in down in front of her. Now, empty handed, she had no choice but to look at him. Her eyes met his before quickly darting away. She felt vulnerable and realized that he would be able to see right through her. 

“Hailey...” He said her name slowly, his low tone causing her heart to skip a beat. She couldn’t reply, didn’t trust her voice to not give her away. So instead she just met his eyes again. His eyes were filled with concern and it didn’t make this situation any easier. “I thought you didn’t want company tonight.” He challenged her to speak, to say something, anything. 

“I didn’t.” She retorted quietly. 

“Then why come here?” He asked, not accusingly, just truly curious. 

“I was out of beer.” She lied, reaching for her bottle and taking a sip.

“You’re never out of beer.” His response brought a smile to her lips, one she tried to hide behind her bottle. 

“My house was too quite.” Hailey mumbled, it wasn’t a lie. Her house had felt deafeningly silent. 

“I would have come over...” Jay spoke carefully, not able to get a good read on her. 

“I know.” Hailey whispered, taking the final bit of beer into her mouth. 

“But you didn’t want me too.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement to confirm he was on the right track. Her eyes met his again and she tried to convey an apology as she stood from her stool and went to leave. His hand gently grasped her upper arm, preventing her from leaving and the slight action made her temper flare. She jerked her arm away, sending him one final look before darting out of the bar. He followed her, of course he would follow her. She was almost to her car before he caught up, hollering her name across the parking lot. 

“Hailey!” Jay yelled, jogging to close the gap between them. “Hailey, wait!” He called as she reached for her keys. 

“I just want to be alone Jay.” She huffed, feeling tears threaten to form in her eyes. The last thing she wanted was for him to see her cry. She wasn’t even sure why she would cry, but the sudden surge of emotions was a powerful one. 

“Hailey, we should talk about today...you should talk about today..” Jay pushed, not ready to give up this easy. Her eyes met his and she saw something there she hadn’t before, something she couldn’t quite name.

“I don’t need you to be my friend tonight Jay.” She lashed out, nostrils flaring and tears brimming. 

“We’re not just friends and you fucking know it!” He countered back immediately. His words took Hailey’s breath away and she struggled to comprehend what he just said. 

“Yeah Jay, we’re partners Partners don’t need to talk every little thing over. I’m fine!” She finished with a yell, hoping her words weren’t doing permanent damage. All she wanted to do was escape this moment, drive home and then pretend that nothing had happened tomorrow. But she knew Jay wasn’t going to give up that easily. 

“Hailey, it’s not every little thing. But this case...I know it got to you..and that’s okay. I just want to make sure you’re okay.” His words were a mix of anger and pleading with her to not shut him out. “We don’t even have to talk about the case, I just want to spend some time with you-” She cut him off before he could continue, her heart couldn’t handle the way he was speaking and she knew she was going to misinterpret his words as something else. 

“We talk about everything Jay. I told you I’m fine! We don’t need to be together all the time.” Her words came out harsher than she intended and she saw the hurt flash through his eyes. She knew she had finally pushed him to the point of anger and knew his temper was flaring. She started to speak again, to find a way to back peddle some how and undo some of the damage. “Jay...”

“Hailey....we don’t have to talk about today. That’s fine. But there’s something else I’ve been wanting to ask you..” He trailed off, looking suddenly nervous. Hailey’s heart was racing, not knowing what was going to come next. “I just feel like things have been different between us, like...I don’t know...more? And I keep replaying that day in the hospital...” 

“Jay...it’s nothing.” Hailey cut him off, head swirling with a wide range of emotions.

“What were you going to say?” He asked, eyes drilling into hers. 

“Nothing.” Hailey’s eyes dropped to the ground, knowing if she kept looking at him she would break. 

“It’s not nothing Hailey.” He pushed, seeming to know what she had wanted to say. Or at least that’s what Hailey’s heart was hoping for and she couldn’t let this happen, she couldn’t risk losing him. 

“Jay...don’t. Please. It’s nothing. We’re good. We’re partners-” She stammered and Jay finally cut her off, after he had been trying to speak over her the entire time. 

“Would you just shut up and listen to me for two goddamn seconds?!” He said loudly, still not quiet a yell. Hailey swallowed hard and stayed silent as she waited for him to continue. “I just...Hailey I know..or at least I hope that I’m not completely crazy here but...I..” He stumbled over his words, not sure how to phrase it right. He gave up and took a step closer to her. Hailey’s eyes widen as she looked up at him quickly closing the gap between them. She had to tilt her head to meet his eyes now, he stood close enough she could feel his warm breath battling against the cool air around them. 

“Jay...” She all but whispered his name, her words failing her as he saw his face change. His hand came up slowly and gently cupped her chin. Her heart stopped and the breath hitched in her throat. She knew what was about to happen but she couldn’t stop it, she didn’t want to stop it. He leaned in slowly, eyes never leaving hers and searching for a sign he should stop. She didn’t give him one and he finally closed the gap between them. His warm lips pressed into hers and she felt the world explode around her. It was soft and slow at first, both too timid to make the next move. But his lips continued to work against hers, giving her the confidence to reach her hands up around his neck, pulling him slightly closer. He moved his hands to rest on her waist and she felt the heat grow within her as if his hands were warming her from just a touch. They continued until they both needed to come up for air, their breathing coming out in a matched rapid pace. Jay’s eyes met hers again and she saw a sparkle to them she had never seen before. Her eyes were still wet from her earlier tears but she couldn’t help the small giggle that bubbled up from her chest. He smiled down at her, looking sheepish but ecstatic. 

“I hope that was-” He started but she cut him off, using her hands still clasped around his neck to pull him back in.  

“Shut up.” She told him with a smile before their lips crashed back in to each other. 

[chiseler]

Maxwell Bodenheim

In Letters from Bohemia, Ben Hecht declares his friend Maxwell Bodenheim “more disliked, derided, denounced, beaten up, and kicked down more flights of stairs than any poet of whom I have heard or read.” In his lifetime Bodenheim was at least as well known for his drunk and dissolute behavior as for his writing. Today he’s mostly remembered for the tawdry way he died.

He grew up poor and Jewish in smalltown Mississippi. He was bright but viciously boorish, physically handsome yet repulsively slovenly, and argumentative to a fault, with a genius for the insult that could end any discussion, usually with his being punched in the mouth. As young men Bodenheim and Hecht were the pranksters of the Chicago Renaissance. According to Allen Churchill’s The Improper Bohemians, they once filled a hall for a literary debate on the topic “Resolved: That People Who Attend Literary Debates Are Imbeciles.”

Hecht strode center-stage to announce that he would take the affirmative. Then he stated, “The affirmative rests.” Bodenheim shambled forward, scrutinized his confident opponent, and said, “You win.”

Bodenheim – Bogie to his long-suffering friends – was twenty-two when he blew into Greenwich Village with other Chicago émigrés in 1915, and instantly made a name for himself in the neighborhood as a poet of promise. Reading his facile, gaudy verses now, it’s easy to think that it was the brute force of his sociopathic presence, rather than his poetry, that convinced the best poets in the Village at the time that he was one of them, potentially even the greatest of them:

You have a morning-glory face

Whose edges are sensitive to light

And curl in beneath the burden of a smile.

Remembered silence returns to the morning-glory

And lattices its curves

With shades of golden reverberations.

Then the morning-glory’s heart careens to loves

Whose scent beats on the sky-walls of your soul.

Tellingly, those not directly in his orbit seem not to have been fooled by the clever romance-novel sham of such verses – and neither, apparently, was Bodenheim himself, though he would go on roaring about his genius for decades. Hecht records that after entering 223 poetry contests and failing to win a single one, he took to signing his letters to editors “Maxwell Bodenheim, 224th ranking U.S.A. poet.”

He did have a real talent for scandal, easy enough to generate during Greenwich Village’s prolonged drunken orgy in the Prohibition years. His haughty, insulting demeanor, and his habit of trying to steal other men’s women right under their noses, got him regularly socked on the jaw and thrown out of bars, soirees and the fauxhemian revels at Webster Hall.

Turning from poetry to prose, through the 1920s he wrote a string of best-selling, sensational potboilers like Replenishing Jessica, about a free-loving bohemian, Georgie May, about a fallen prostitute, and Naked on Roller Skates, about a middle-aged “onetime hobo, circus-pegger, doughboy, sailor, anarchist, con man, all-time sensationalist and wanderer of the world” who leaves a small town with a much younger woman who “wanted to try everything at least once.” They sound better than they read. Hecht called them “hack work with flashes of tenderness, wit, and truth in them.” When the Society for the Suppression of Vice brought Bodenheim to trial in 1925 on an obscenity charge for Replenishing Jessica, his defense lawyer used a familiar tactic of demanding that the prosecutor read the entire text aloud to prove his case. Judge, jury and the reporters covering the trial dozed as the prosecutor droned on and on, and the unaroused jury voted Bodenheim not guilty. Mayor Jimmy Walker agreed with the verdict. “No girl was ever seduced by a book,” he quipped.

For a bohemian poet, commercial success and celebrity could bring on a full-blown personality crisis (as it would do Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac and Kurt Cobain). Bodenheim squandered the money he made from his novels on drink and gambling, as though he couldn’t throw it away fast enough. He preferred to demand loans and cadge drinks from everyone around him, like a true bohemian poet should. Meanwhile, his reputation in these years as a daring, risqué writer attracted a cloud of what we’d call groupies today, many of them the sort of teenagers from the outer boroughs and the hinterlands who flocked to the Village in the 1920s to throw off the shackles of mainstream morality and abandon themselves to the neighborhood’s non-stop pagan revels.

He took his pick. One was Gladys Loeb, 18, from the Bronx. In 1928, he ended a brief fling with her, adding that her poetry was doggerel. Her landlady soon found her with her head in the gas oven, barely clinging to life, and to Bodenheim’s portrait. A few weeks later he did the same thing to twenty-two-year-old Virginia Drew, who threw herself into the Hudson and succeeded where Gladys had failed. When police went to question Bodenheim about Drew’s suicide, he’d slipped off to stay with fellow Villager Harry Kemp in Provincetown. Gladys, having recovered from her own suicide attempt, followed him there – trailing her irate father, cops and reporters. Bodenheim talked his way out of their clutches, but not out of the newspapers all over the country, which had a field day with lurid tales about the Greenwich Village Lothario.

Then came Aimee Cortez, widely feted as “the Mayoress of Greenwich Village.” She earned the title by stripping naked at private parties and Webster Hall shindigs and gyrating a wildly erotic dance. According to Churchill, this display sometimes ended with her going off with some lucky male, but other times she’d stop abruptly, with a look of terror and confusion, and run off. In a later era she’d be prescribed a drug for this clearly disturbed behavior, but in the Village of the late 1920s, where “a hideous lust… pervaded the air” as Bodenheim’s My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village put it, she was merely celebrated as the queen of the modern-day bacchantes. Not long after Gladys and Virginia made the papers, Aimee was found with her head in her own oven, also clutching Bodenheim’s portrait. She was dead at nineteen.

Bodenheim was indirectly implicated in the sad end of another lover, a teenager from the outer boroughs with the improbable name Dorothy Dear. When she wasn’t with him in his MacDougal Street apartment, he wrote her love letters that she carried in her purse. One afternoon she was aboard a rush hour subway train heading from Times Square to the Village when it derailed at a faulty switch, killing sixteen passengers, including Dorothy. Bodenheim’s love letters were found scattered around the wreckage.

By the end of the 1920s Bodenheim was a wreck himself. From the 1930s until his death he was a fixture on the streets and in the bars of the Village, by turns annoying and sad-making, decaying before his old friends’ eyes into a stinking, toothless ghost, “tottering drunkenly to sleep on flophouse floors, shabby and gaunt as any Bowery bum,” as Hecht put it. Still, Hecht gallantly added, “Bogie hugged his undiminished riches – his poet’s vocabulary and his genius for winning arguments. He won nothing else.” He cranked out more cheap novels, drank the money, and stooped to hawking his poems to tourists in Washington Square for a quarter each. Wiseacres in the bars fed him gin and laughed at his drunken mumblings and rants, which sometimes yielded a famous line like “Greenwich Village is the Coney Island of the soul.”

Poets were the main entertainment at Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard in the mid-1930s. Gordon couldn’t afford to pay them; they performed for whatever change the patrons tossed at their feet. Poet Eli Siegel, later founder of the Aesthetic Realism movement, was the emcee in the early years, but the crowd really came to see three ghosts of the Village Past – Joe Gould, Harry Kemp and Maxwell Bodenheim. They hung out there because Gordon tolerated them and his patrons were easy marks for a few free drinks. In his memoir Live at the Village Gate, Gordon describes how Siegel would call Gould out of the crowd with the cry, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Harvard terrier and boulevardier, Joseph Ferdinand Gould!” Gould would shuffle up to the spotlight and do his schtick, while Bodenheim, tall and imperious, would stalk the shadows at the back, “point his finger, and shout, ‘Eli Siegel! I hate you, Eli Siegel. You rat!’” Gordon continues:

Eli would wait for Bodenheim to shape up so he could call on him to recite. But it was no use. Bodenheim, swirling crazily, eyes glazed, arms outstretched, would suddenly stop and point his finger at a frightened girl who had refused him a dance during intermission. “Rat!” he’d shout at her.

Despite the frightening deterioration of his physical and mental hygiene, Bodenheim still attracted a certain type of desperate woman, usually in decline herself. He met the last of them in 1951 when Ruth Fagan bought a poem from him with her last quarter. She was thirty-two, he was a fifty-nine-year-old derelict, and within a couple of weeks they were going around as Mr. and Mrs. Bodenheim, though it’s not clear they ever bothered to make it official. They decayed together for the next couple of years, chronically broke and drunk, descending from cheap rooming houses to flophouses to sleeping in hallways and doorways. She turned tricks when she could, and he beat her when he found out. In 1952 they made a horrific spectacle of themselves at a fancy reunion for surviving members of the original Chicago Renaissance group, where he panhandled the guests while she propositioned them.

If the Bodenheim of the early 1950s was a disgusting or amusing clown to the tourists, and an embarrassment and bother to his old friends, he was something of a martyred saint to the generation of bohemians who came to the Village after World War Two. In his headlong descent into the abyss, his lust for the extremes of degradation, his lust for lust itself, he was like a dark archangel of negative capability for them, representing the ultimate rejection of bourgeois virtue and mainstream values, even to the point of total self-destruction. He comes up several times in the published diaries of Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theatre, from this period. One night in 1951 she and her husband Julian Beck were in the San Remo, the dark and smoky bar at Bleecker and MacDougal Streets that Bodenheim often haunted:

A ragged drunk approaches our table. In terrible shape. Ash blond hair askew. He lurches forward, his hands resting on the table. Directly to Julian: “What’s your name?”

“My name is Julian Beck.”

“My name is Maxwell Bodenheim. I’m an idiotic poet.”

And he turns and moves off before we can speak.

The late Roy Metcalf, who was a young newspaper reporter in the early 1950s, also encountered Bodenheim in the San Remo. “Bodenheim had a great face, an alcohol-ravaged face,” he recalled. “Once a guy from uptown wanted to see Greenwich Village, so we went down to the San Remo. There was Bodenheim. He said, 'Bring him over, let’s buy him a drink.’ He expected Bodenheim to say something. Bodenheim by that time was so paralyzed by alcohol that all he could do was bray, 'Aaaaargh.’”

In 1953 Malina went into the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue, where artists hung out. The food was lousy, the lighting made people look so bad they nicknamed it the Waxworks, and the other patrons tended to be bums, drug addicts, tough guys and cops. The staff was not particularly welcoming to arty boho types. So naturally that’s where Bodenheim and Ruth went to celebrate his birthday. Malina writes that a friend stole a pumpkin pie from the counter as a present for Bodenheim. “A cop sees him, but is somehow content with my explanation that Maxwell Bodenheim is a great poet and that his birthday should be celebrated. The counterman is not so generous: 'I ain’t doin’ this for love.’ We all eat. Ruth Bodenheim curses the cafeteria. Some junkies come and tell horrible tales of hospitals and arrests. One taps his eye with a knife to show us that it’s glass. Ruth Bodenheim smiles in an aristocratic manner: 'I’d never have believed it wasn’t real,’ as if she were consoling the owner of false jewels.”

“Do we not idolize Maxwell Bodenheim although we are sometimes loath to talk to him and always ashamed of our condescension to him?” Malina wonders in another entry. “What we admire is Bodenheim’s refusal to resist. We fight all the time, resisting temptation. We admire those who don’t. Even if it’s suicidal.” And later: “Even self-contempt when fierce enough is magnificent. The virtue of the extreme is its extremity. Nature loves extremes as much as she loathes a vacuum.”

In 1953, Ruth took up with a violent, mentally unstable dishwasher named Harold Weinberg. One night in the winter of 1954 the three of them wound up in Weinberg’s room off the Bowery. Bodenheim roused himself from a drunken stupor to see Ruth and Weinberg having sex. He attacked Weinberg, who pulled out a .22 and shot him through the heart. Then Weinberg stabbed Ruth in the chest. The last photos of Bodenheim show him and Ruth lying dead in the squalid room.

“The hideous death of Bodenheim blankets the Village in a funereal spirit,” Malina wrote. “Who dares confess to the wrenching excitement of seeing a companion’s mauled corpse on the front page of every newspaper, and all of us knowing that the worst has again triumphed?”

Cops picked up Weinberg a few days later. At his trial he called his victims Commie rats and shouted that he “did the world a favor” by getting rid of them. He sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he was led out of the courtroom and off to Bellevue.

Today, Bodenheim is remembered more for this tabloid end than for any other achievement. Even his memoir was a dispiriting sham. My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, published posthumously in 1954, was ghostwritten by a hack who, like everyone else in the Village, had bought him drinks to listen to his drunken ramblings. It’s a loose collection of vignettes, anecdotes, and racy gossip that was already antique when the book appeared. His old friend Hecht, who sent a check for $50 to help pay for Bodenheim’s cheapjack funeral, based his 1958 Off-Broadway play Winkelberg on him. (“There was never a man as irritating as Winkelberg.”) It ran for a month at the Renata Theatre on Bleecker Street, then sank into oblivion along with much of Bodenheim’s own writing.

by John Strausbaugh

[crowdedimagines]

I Married Your Daughter - David Dobrik

word count: 1957 an// i saw someone post that they wanted a fic about david marrying jason’s daughter instead of his mom!! loved the idea so here it is. sorry if someone else already wrote this concept too ~

I have an idea.

That one text from David was a sure sign that he’s up to no good.

What are you up to now?

Instead of responding to my text, David calls me.

“Hi, Y/n.” David sings into the phone.

“Oh no, this is bad.” I laugh, “You’re calling me? What evil prank do you have against my dad?”

“I want to marry you.”

The air falls out of my lungs causing me to cough and choke.

“What?” I ask after recovering. I can hear David still laughing at my reaction.

“I want to marry you, then I’ll be Jason’s son. And then I married his daughter.”

“It’s brilliant.” I agree, it’s the perfect bit for the vlog and I know that my dad will be obviously shocked.

“Can I fly out to see you then?”

I can tell just by his voice that he’s smirking right now.

“Are you in, Y/n?”

I pace back and forth for a couple of seconds, I take a deep breath and shake my head with realizing my answer.

“I’m in.”

I know David better than I would like to, even better if we follow through on his latest idea. I spend my time fairly split between New York and Los Angeles. I go to school in New York, but I fly home pretty often. David and I are close friends, occasionally it seems like like there could be more. We usually only flirt to bother my dad, this might kill him.

It takes David a couple of days to get everything set up and fly out to New York. He shows up to my door, vlog camera in hand.

“Hi.” He has his typical overly excited dopey grin on his face.

“Hey.” I open the door wider to my apartment to let him in. He sets up his camera on gets down on one knee.

“David, you’re ridiculous.” I laugh covering my mouth.

“Y/n Nash, will you marry me?” He is laughing too, unable to wipe the grin off of his face.

“Yes.” I answer with a roll of my eyes.

David gets up and picks me up with him, we both spin around laughing.

“You’re so stupid.” I laugh, finally getting to place my feet back on the ground.

“This is going to be my best vlog yet. We leave in three hours.”

“Three hours? David.” I smack his chest. Before I know it we’re on a plane and on our way to Vegas. Natalie and Zane are meeting us there to be our witnesses. We have to get our marriage licence before we head over to the chapel.

“Nat, help me pick out a dress.”

She follows me into a dressing room with racks and racks of dresses that people use to get married here.

“This is the one.” She holds up a dress.

“What?” I turn to see the one she’s holding up.

“This dress is made for you, Y/n.”

I get in the dress and help her find a bridesmaid dress. Zane films for David and I follow Natalie as we walk down the aisle.

“Y/n” David can only muster my name with his jaw on the floor quietly he mutters a ‘holy shit’.

“Like the dress?” I tease.

David clears his throat and we proceed with the ceremony.

“With this ring I marry you.” David slides the ring he got for me over my finger.

The priest gestures for me to do the same with his ring.

“With this ring, I marry you.” I smile, sliding his ring on his finger.

“With the power vested in me by the state of Nevada, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

David leans down and for the first time ever we kiss. I can hear Zane and Natalie cheering, but I’m only focused on David’s lips that are still on mine. Reluctantly, we pull away and smile for the cameras.

“You guys are married!” Natalie pulls me in for a hug.

“Oh my god, we’re married.” It suddenly hits me, I’m a wife. David and I are married.

“It’s too late to take it back now, Y/n.” David teases as he pulls me in for a side hug.

Shortly after that, we hop on another plane and head to Hawaii. Zane and Natalie went back to L.A. Jason thinks that David was in Chicago. We’re flying to Hawaii for only a day before heading to L.A to surprise my dad.

“I’ve never been to Hawaii before.” I admit as the plane slowly lands.

“Wait, never?” David asks, obviously shocked.

“Nope.”

“What about the trips Jason took Charlie and Wyatt to see your mom?”

“I was graduated by then. Out of the house and in New York.”

“Well, now we need to do all of the Hawaii cliches.”

“What?” I thought we were taking a couple of pictures to gloat and going home.” I laugh.

“Not anymore.”

David wasn’t kidding when he said that we were doing all of the cliches of Hawaii. We went snorkeling, surfing, and finally skydiving. It was a day packed full of everything.

“That was the most fun thing I’ve ever done.” I cheer.

David and I just finished skydiving and it was amazing. I couldn’t stop screaming and smiling at the same time. David too, he seemed nervous at first even though he had done it before.

“That was so much fun!” I say without even trying to hide the joy in my voice. I’m still not over it even now when we’re trying to find our hotel room.

“I know, this has been the best Hawaii trip yet and we’ve only had one day here.”

“Wow, it must be me. I’m just so much fun to be around.” I grin.

He stops at our door and looks to me, a smirk on his face. “Yeah, you are.”

I gulp, noticing how close we are. I take a step back and David puts the keycard in the door and holds it open for me. We both decide to move past and ignore whatever that moment was.

I walk into the room and it’s nice, it’s huge with a view of the ocean and a separate room.

“Y/n!” David calls from the bedroom.

I turn away from the window and follow where his voice was coming from. As soon as I walk in I am ambushed with bright red and pink everything. The walls, the pillows, the bed, everything. Rose petals are scattered on the bed.

“Natalie must’ve told them it was our honeymoon.” David pushes his hair back off of his head, obviously nervous. “I didn’t plan anything! I would never do-”

“I know, David.” I laugh and place a reassuring hand on his chest. “It’s not a big deal.”

We both notice my hand, which is still resting on his chest. I look up from my hand to catch his eyes, they’re staring at my lips.

“David.” I whisper, this successfully grabs his attention and he focuses on my eyes again.

He leans in closer and I tilt my head up for our lips to meet. It’s perfect, just like our first. His lips are warm and inviting, they make you melt into them. I take a couple of steps back until we land on the bed.

I can’t fight off the laugh which makes David pull away.

“What’s so funny?” He asks.

“We’re married. We’re making out. We’re on a bed full of rose petals.” I smile. David smiles too and pushes hair back behind my ear.

“We’re married, Y/n. That’s crazy.” He presses kisses all over my neck.

“I know.” I smirk, enjoying the feeling of his lips all over my neck.

“Y/n Dobrik.” David whispers the words against my skin.

“What’d you just say?” I ask, pulling lightly on his hair to pull him back up to me.

“I said, Y/n Dobrik. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” He has the best smile on his face. The smile I know so well. The perfect David smile that creates butterflies in my stomach.

“I think so too.”

It went all too fast. All too soon we had to check out of our hotel and get on a plane back to Los Angeles.

“I’m kinda nervous for his reaction now.” David’s hand is holding onto mine.

“Don’t be. He’ll be fine. I’m the son he’s always wanted.”

I know he’s joking, but it makes me happy anyway. We make it back to the house and Jason and a few other people from the friend group are already at the house. David has me go in through the garage door.

“Jason, I have a surprise for you.”

“What are you up to?” I can hear the nervous edge in my dad’s voice.

“I married your daughter!” David just blurts it.

“You didn’t.” He tries so shut it down, he doesn’t want to play along with this joke.

“I flew to New York two days ago and proposed. Then we got married in Vegas, and honeymooned in Hawaii.”

My dad starts laughing, obviously not believing a single word of what he’s saying.

“I have the legal papers right here, and I have her here.”

“No!”

I make my grand entrance and hold up my hand with a shiny new ring on it.

“Y/n, why would you do this?”

“Why wouldn’t I marry the hot millionaire who I’ve been flirting with for ages now.” I tease. David wraps his arm around my waist.

“This is so wrong.” Jason hides his face in his hands. “Y/n Y/M/N Nash, your mom is going to kill you.”

“Don’t you mean Y/n Y/M/N Dobrik?”

The whole group breaks out in laughter. We spend the rest of the time hanging out and having  a good time with a good group of friends. Everyone stayed until it got late and they had to go home. David has his arm wrapped around my shoulder, we’re the only ones left in the living room.

“Hey, do you regret getting married? I know we aren’t completely serious about this. But what happened last night. I can’t get it out of my head.”

“I can’t either. And no, I don’t regret getting married. Not yet at least.”

“Hey!”

David flips us down to lay horizontal on the couch. We start making out, something that in a few days we have both grown used to.

“When do you have to go back to New York?” David asks quietly, his question has bummed him out.

“Not for a couple of days. I’ll be gone for two weeks and then I graduate.”

“Does that mean you’ll be coming back to L.A.?” He instantly perks up.

“I think so.”

“Good, you can’t leave your husband for too long.”

“Hmm, my husband?” I laugh.

“Yes, your husband. I want to make this work, even if this wasn’t the most conventional way to start a relationship.”

I couldn’t agree with him more. This is too good to throw away or pass up on. Hell, he’s my husband now.

“Me too. We’ll make whatever this is work.”

“I’m really glad we got married.”

“I can’t believe it took us getting married for you to grow the balls to make this happen.” I shake with laughter thinking of all the times we flirted, but he bailed because of nerves.

“Shut up!”

[sweetblink]

Frozen in Time.

Frozen in Time.

___________________

Connor Rhodes x Reader.

Requested by: @megafandomsxassemble

Maybe an imagine where yn gets shot and either Jay Halstead or Connor Rhodes is dating her and they freak out when they find out shes in a coma cause the shot was lethal. Again angsty and feels.

Warning: blood, angst?

___________________

He was frozen.

For the second time in his life, Jay was truly frozen in his spot, heart beating like crazy, and everything around him, muffled. He wouldn’t talk about the first time because he never wanted to remember what he saw.

“Y/N!” He yelled so loudly, it caught the attention of the rest of them team, as he sprinted to your side. Hank Voight had seen what the shooter had done,  the suspect shooting down one of their own and about two other cops, quickly, with Al, and Antonio, they shot down the man, while the rest rushed to Jay’s side.

Tears sprung to Jay’s eyes as he desperately tried to stop the bleeding on where you had gotten shot, noticing that you were quickly losing a lot of blood. You were staring at him in shock, taking rapid breaths as you felt pain sear through your abdomen.

Jay was instantly covered by your blood, when he noticed the second gunshot wound, Kim was by his side, hands shaking a little. “Y/N, you’re going to be okay, don’t close your eyes please.” She begged as she began to rip part of her shirt

Jay began to caress your face, placing his forehead down on yours. “Please, Y/N, don’t leave us now.” He whispered. Upton was beside Ruzek, as Erin called for back up and ambo.

While all that went on, all you could really do is just stare at Jay, as you continued to gasp, and felt pain all over, including feeling lightheaded as well, thinking that what if this was really it? You were going to leave behind your fiance, Connor, who finally proposed after three years of dating, your two brothers, you loved dearly, because they took care of you the best they could and the rest of your Chicago family that you made.

Slowly your eyes drooped, and soon you closed your eyes, last thing you heard was Jay’s desperate cries.

**************************

Connor was finally finished with his night shift, finally ready to go home and rest, and after a successful night of saving the one patient that was brought in, he felt content. He was in the lounge room, putting his coat up, when Will entered, the room with a small tired smile.

Connor smiled and saw as Nat passed by the room, with a small smile of her own. “So, are things going good now? Are you guys finally together?” he teased.

Will narrowed his eyes. “You spent so much time my sister, you’re starting to sound like her.” He teased.

Connor barked out a laugh and shook his head. “Hey, don’t complain, you and Jay are both the same, we’re just too nice to point out how much of you Halstead’s are gossips.” He teased back.  

Will began to laugh and shook his head. “So how are wedding plans coming along? Y/N, turned into bridezilla yet?”

He shook his head and smiled fondly at the mention of your name. “Just for that, I’m telling your sister.” He teased.

Will looked scared for one second and shuddered at the thought of you yelling at him. “Please don’t, I still haven’t recovered from the last time she was angry, god, who knew she was a small devil in disguise.”

That just made Connor laugh at him, he grabbed his phone from the place he had left it, while Will made his way over to grab his own coat, just as he put on his coat, commotion was heard outside, Connor ignored what was going on, too tired to want to see what was going on.

It wasn’t until Will looked up and saw that it was Y/N that was being rushed into the OR, while Jay running in crying and looking like a mess, that his heart dropped. “Connor.” He croaked out. Connor frowned, and looked at Will, who was looking distraught now. “They just brought in, Y/N.” he said, making his way out the room.

Connor paused for a minute and followed Will out the room, heading in the direction towards where h e saw the whole Intelligence team, Gabby, and Sylvie, with Ethan and Dr. Latham. “Y/N!” He called out, rushing towards where they all were, he glanced at Kim and Jay, who were both covered in blood, that made him run even faster.

“Hey what’s going on, what happened?” he asked, trying to remain calm. Jay turned to him, and tried to talk, but nothing was coming out, which didn’t help, because he felt his anxiety building up every second Jay didn’t respond, as Will began arguing with Goodwin.

Finally, Kim answered him. “We were going to bring in the suspect on our case… and when we got there, … a group of three began shooting at us, Y/N got hit twice.” She replied in a monotone looking blankly ahead.

Without muttering a word, he quickly made his way towards the staircase and sprinted up, wanting to catch up before they take Y/N into surgery, in fact he wanted to be in the OR just to be sure that everything was going to be alright.

Finally, what like felt forever for Connor, he made it towards his destination, only to stopped by Goodwin. “Sharon?” he growled lightly.

“I can’t let you go past those doors, Connor.” Sharon Goodwin said in a light stern voice.

“But Y/N, inside there, I need to be in there with her, helping.” He began to argue, but Goodwin shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Connor, but I can’t allow you to go in that OR. You just barley got off a long night shift, and you’re way to close to this.”

Connor glared at Sharon, but in the end, he broke it off and looked away trying his best not to cry. He began to pace out in the waiting area, just as the rest of the group, along with Will came. Connor walked over at them.

“What they say?” Voight asked.

Connor shrugged. “I don’t know, I can’t go inside, but it’s a bit early to tell.” He replied. The sergeant nodded, and told his team to get comfortable, claiming they weren’t going anywhere and was calling backup to take care of the case. Connor ended up sitting next to the Halstead’s and tried to his best to calm his nerves.

*********************

Waiting was the hardest part for Connor, its been hours and there was still nothing on Y/N. He kept pacing back and forth, Jay was staring blankly ahead, while Will was dozing off in the seat next to him.

Finally, after what felt like forever, Ethan came out of the operating room Dr. Latham standing a few feet behind, instantly everyone stood up, Connor, Will and Jay all stood closer to Ethan as he prepared to give them the news.

“The surgery was a success, we managed to get the internal bleeding under control, and the bullets out clean.” Ethan began. “Unfortunately, Y/N’s slipped into a medical induce coma, one of the bullet wounds hit close to her lungs…”

Connor for the first time seemed to zone out what Ethan was trying to explain, a coma. Y/N was in a coma. “Oh god.” He whispered. Jay looked at him and let out a small frown that was laced with pain.

Ethan looked over at him. “She’ll heal, and she is expected to wake up”

Jay looked at him. “When?”

Ethan looked at him. “I don’t know.” He replied. Jay just looked away, and Will placed his hand on his shoulder as the brothers quietly cried.

Hank stepped forward. “Are we allowed to go in?” he asked. Ethan nodded, and allowed them to go in pairs, but that the siblings and Connor were the first to go in. Connor nodded and allowed for Jay and Will go in first and waited his turn.

Hank came over and patted his shoulder. “Y/N’s a strong girl, I’m sure she’ll wake up soon.”

Connor looked at him. “Could’ve lost her today Sarge.” He croaked out. “I don’t know what’d I do if I lost her.” Hank just patted his shoulder again but didn’t say anything. Finally, the Halstead brothers was out the hospital room and it was Connor’s turn.

He quickly made his way inside and his breath hitched when he saw you lying there, looking very pale. Silently making his way over, he sat on the chair and grabbed your hand and held it against his cheek. “You know. I was looking for places to get married, and I think I found a place, baby.” He began, his eyes watering.

“I just need you to wake up so you can finally agree on a place and become bridezilla.” He lightly teased. He looked at you, but nothing. Finally, he felt his tears trickle down his cheek. “Please Y/N, you have to wake up soon.” He croaked.

After a few minutes of talking to Y/N, a knock on the door was heard, and he hesitantly got up to open it. The whole intelligence team was outside and slowly allowed them all to head in. Will, Jay and him stayed behind the gang as they all muttered their words to Y/N.

Will turned to Connor. “You alright?” he asked. Connor shook his head and looked up at the ceiling.

“Yeah, I’ll be alright.” He replied. Will and Jay nodded.

It went on like this for two weeks, when one day you finally woke up. Connor was in the room reading when he saw your hand shift, he stood up and walked over to you. “Y/N?” he whispered, smiling now.  

Hearing your name, your eyes snapped open.

_________________________

Things probably came out wrong in this so I’M SORRY. 

HELLO IM HERE TO SAY THAT I WILL FINISH WRITING ALL THE IMAGINES THAT HAVE BEEN REQUESTED, I’VE JUST BEEN SO BUSY WORKING AND I GET HOME LATE BUT I WILL FINISH WRITING THEM ALL & CONTINUE WRITING!

Masterlist

[give-jack-a-lightsaber]

Just another Monday (Chicago PD x Officer!Reader)

A/N: Hi everyone! Just a little warning (?) I kinda implied the age of the reader here for the sake of the story, she’s around 40 or something like that, I didn’t put a number just keep in mind that she’s older than the team (not counting Hank). And a female reader again! I’m trying to write gender neutral but I’m having a hard time already just for writing in another language that I’m not that good at yet so bear with me! 💜 I hope you enjoy it!

Word Count: 2220 (I think lol)

The sensation of the sun caressing your skin right now was amazing, it made you like mornings just for this. You decided to get out of the car and lean on it to soak all of it while your partner was in the store, just crossing the street, when the radio inside the patrol broke you out of thoughts with dispatch describing a suspect in the area where you were.

You were about to answer to the call when you saw him walking in the same sidewalk you where, trying to hide with a red baseball hat wich was the worst “costume” you had saw in your life because the dude was enormous, with a horrific plaid vest that showed his big arms covered by ugly made-in-prison tattoos and looking everywhere like waiting for someone to jump at him. Fair enough...

There was a few people on the street so you decided to act distracted and wait for him to pass next to you where an internal street was desserted and there you could jump at him without hurting any civilian.

You saw your moment and punched him in the temple with all the force you could manage sending him stumbling on the empty street just like you planed. But what you hadn't previewed was that the guy was three times bigger than you and him recovering pretty fast. Just as you went for your gun he grabed your hand in his fist and throw you against a wall, sending your gun flying who knows where.

“Bad move you fucking pig” he growled at you with an incredibly pitched voice that thrown you off guard so badly that when you realized the situaction you were in he was grabbing you from your vest making your feet leave the floor, ready for toss you againt the trash cans next to you when he was sudenly hit in the back of the head releasing you in the moment.

That's when you saw him. Your fucking partner!!! But the reunion was short lived when the dude punched your partner in the face dropping him in the floor instantly and starting to go for his gun. Another possibility presented to and you didn't wait a second to jump in his back and start punching everything you could while holding him in a chokehold with your other arm to 1) not fall and 2) debilitate him enough until your partner finish recovering.

And that's how it when for what it felt like two hours of wrestling a bear. You guys landing pretty good and almost choreographed punches and the criminal landing all the nasty ones in your jaw and sides.

You could hear screeching tires in the background but you didn't have time to see what was it, you saw and opening and landed a punch in his groin destabilizing him so you finished with a kick on the back of his knees making him fall on his face. Quickly you cuffed him and sat down on his back so he wouldn't move. Panting hard you lifted your head up and froze when you saw the entire Intelligence Unit surrounding you and a few neighbors in the background.

You composed yourself when you realize that you were the one staring now and said "I think this belongs to you" and you were a bit relieved that a few of them laughed and not just your partner that was sitting against the wall. You were starting to get up when a rough looking hand appeared in front of you. Looking up you see Sergeant Voight with Burguess next to him and smiling at you.

"Thank you" you say taking his hand and trying to hide the pain that rushed through your entire ribcage but you couldn't help but wince. "You okay?" asked the rough voice. "Yeah just a bit very very sore" you answered panting through the pain and touching lightly your jaw to check it was on its place. "You probably have broken ribs, you're agitated" said Kim helping you towards the ambulance were your partner was being checked. "Just another Monday" you sighed sitting in a nearby bench while waited for them to finish. With closed eyes you tried to canalize the pain out of your body just like that only class of "experimental yoga" teached you to but like we already knew, it didn't work.

"I didn't remember you this badass you know" you heard a familiar voice talk next to you. Opening your eyes smiling at one of the best partners that Sarge Platt paired you with.

"Well you are a big boy now, playing with the big guns. I didn't even expected to be remembered by the famous Kevin Atwater" you joked giving him puppy eyes. You guys laughed and talked a little, now joined by Ruzek until a paramedic came and asked you to get into the ambo.

The second you lifted your right leg to get in a wave of unbearable pain shock your entire body and made you lose your balance. Thankfully one of the paramedics and Kevin catch you before the ground were even an option."Wow okay, Simon get bed out here now" yelled the paramedic lowering your body totally in the floor and started checking the vitals.

"I'm okay, just a bit dizzy" you reassured everybody as they came worried. You got lifted into the ambo and left with your partner by your side. He was okay but needed clearance from the ER. _________

You were in the locker room getting changed out of your uniform after being released from the hospital. 6 hours under observation. Yay. Now finally in the precinct you could grab your bag and leave to your now very tempting bed. You were in a sport bra and leggings trying to catch your breath after putting the laters on when someone talked from the door. "Damn that son of a bitch made an abstract painting in your middle" said Ruzek entering with Atwater, both looking at the colorful bruising that surrounded your ribcage. "Ha! You didn't see his best work yet" you commented while turning around to face them and pointing at the left side of your face. The bruise in your jaw was more like an angry red with touches of dark blue-ish already appearing. Thankfully, you guess, it was expanding more towards the neck than your face. That would just fucking suck. "Fuck woman, that's just ruining a piece of art" said Kevin grabbing gently your face and tilting it towards the light so they could see better. "Ha ha, fuck off Atwater" you said grabbing your shirt but it looked too tight so you just dropped it and went for an oversized hoodie and slowly put it on. "So why you guys here? You needed something?”. "Voight wants to talk to you, nothing serious, maybe go through a few details about today" "Okay, let's go" you breathe out, grab the bag and left with them. You were chatting, remembering the times you shared on the job with Kevin when Adam asked a curious question. "We never slept together, not even a little kiss, for God sakes Adam, he's way too young for me! And we were partners, it'll be fucking awkward" you answered him looking at him with a 'wtf' face stopping at the top of the stairs and of course dragging the attention of the rest that were up here. "C'mon, you're not old" replied Adam going to his desk, "even if you were you'll be totally a Milf". Your face turned bright red and everyone's jaw dropped at his comment. Out of the corner of your eye you could see Halstead trying not to laugh, Kevin nodding his head and Upton and Burguess scolding him. "Was it too much?" he asked honestly without a hint of regret. "I'll punch that pretty face of yours if I was able to lift my arm without passing out from the pain" you answered playfully narrowing your eyes at him but internally thanking the universe when you saw Voight's door office closed and him talking on the phone, not hearing anything of this. You talked a bit, the group asking how you were doing and remembering the badass movements you  pulled off earlier until the Sergeant opened the door and called you in. "Sit please" he said closing the door and going to his own chair. "What's the verdict? " "Well, where do I start" you chuckle lightly, "a nice looking jaw but it's just bruised. Two cracked ribs, one in each side and practically all of the lower ones bruised. Dr. Choi said that the dizziness was from the pain, it could happen again but from now painkillers and not sudden movements. And tomorrow I have to go get bandaged properly, so they can see if nothing got swollen". "Hell, you took a nice beating" he joked a they laughed a bit. After a moments of silence he talked again, "I like my unit how it is right now and we already have a new person coming, it'll get too crowded. But if I can have you as back up it'll be a gift. " "I love my job Sergeant" you breathe out after a minute of processing, "I love patroling and I love this city. This job saved my life...  I'm honored that you think of me like that and I'll gladly be a form of support for this unit". "I'm glad to hear that" he smiled at you. "Still I don't want you to get a wrong idea about me and later disappoint you for that" you tell him looking into his the eyes. "I'm not always this 'badass' officer that goes around beating bad guys and winning every fight. This is why I also am so grateful for, I been doing this for 16 years and I know I am not getting any younger and that the young boys and girls get picked up first because they malleable and ready to obey, so if you think of me for even a simple task once in a year I'll be the happiest gal in Chicago". You talk a bit more, it felt like a job interview but with a cool boss. You noticed he had your file on his desk and that he knew a few stories of you like if he had been around asking, but mostly was small chat. "Sorry to cut chat Sergeant but I took a few painkillers before coming up here and they started to kick in like right now" you said with an apologetic look on your face. "Please I'm the that should be apologizing, you had a hell of a day" said standing up and stretching his hand at you. "It's always a pleasure to meet people with such a conviction regarding work". "The pleasure is mine, sir" you said shaking his hand, opening the door and stepping a bit outside. "Thank you again, for the chance". "Bye guys it was nice talking to you" you smiled at the rest of the unit getting a few 'get well soon' and a 'see you later' from Kevin. Going downstairs, straight to the Sarge desk to check out. "You had a long chat with Voight, any news I should know about?" asked Platt handing you a paper to sign. "Just that I have young soul under this bunch of bruises" you winked at her and she chuckled a bit. "Come here tomorrow after your appointment and we'll talk about what you'll be doing until you heal". __________ Finally home. The sun was entirely hide from us and the moon was gigantic and shining, without a cloud bothering her. Opening the door from the apartment you were met with 3 seconds of silence until the sound of big paws and a soft 'meow' emerged from your bedroom. "Hello my babies" you greeted your dog, JJ, and cat, Atlas, that were already in front of you looking for kisses and hugs. You walked directly into your room, taking out the tight leggings but leaving the CPD soft hoodie on, just lifting it up to check your middle. Grabbed the painkillers from the bag and put them on the table next to your dresser, tall enough for JJ never reaching at them, and went to bed between your two fluffy friends. Just as you were reaching dreamland your phone alerted you of a message. It was an voice message from Kevin. If you don't remember wrong he was going to Molly's with the rest of the team. "Hey! It's Adam. Ruzek. Adam Ruzek you know? From today" he sounded totally wasted, "I just wanted to say sorry if I overstepped today at the precinct, calling you Milf and that. I mean you are not old enough to be a Milf, I think, wow I should have asked at least not just asume your age, but you'll totally will be a hot woman. Not that you aren't now, that's not what.. " and it cut itself. You stared at the ceiling for a few minutes until you started laughing like an idiot, even waking up your furry friends and having them look at you weird. And you thought after Voight chat this day couldn't have ended better.

[toomuchtv95]

What Going On Here?

Characters: Jay Halstead x Reader, other One Chicago Characters

Word Count: 1.9k+

Warnings: Gunshot (nothing graphic), swearing

Summary:  After getting shot, Jay who is your best friend temporarily moves in with you to help take care of you.

A/N: Excuse any major grammar mistakes hopefully Grammarly caught most of them.  

Masterlist Mobile Masterlist

“Okay, where is he at?” You and Ruzek were sitting in your car waiting for a suspect to show up. One of your CI’s confirmed that this is the place he hangs out with his group of people.

“I don’t know. We have been sitting here for hours.” Grabbing the tablet from your bag on the floor and pulled up the file. You handed the tablet over to Adam so that he could get an idea of who you guys were dealing with.

“Jesus is there something he hasn’t been picked up for?” Adam handed you back the tablet then you threw it back in your bag.

“Yea, he got a rap sheet a mile long.” Since intelligence formed 3years ago, you occasionally had joint cases with them that involved Narcotics. You have been in Narcotics for the last 5yrs and before that, you worked in Homicide for 4years. You got involved with intelligence because of Jay, who was your closest friend since childhood.

“Hey, is that him?” You snapped your head over to where Adam was pointing to a man wearing a black hoodie and hiding in an alleyway.

“Yea, that’s him.” The two of you climbed out of the car and started to walked over to him. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw the two of approaching him which caused him to run. “Why do they always run?” You sighed.

“Go that way and we can cut him off.” You and Adam went in different directions in hope to cut him off on the other side of the building. Just as you turned the corner, the suspect fired his weapon hitting you right in the shoulder. Groaning in pain, you went for your gun, but another round went off. Looking down at your stomach, you notice your shirt was starting to soak with blood. Your hands instantly went to your stomach then you started to feel light-headed and weak at the knees. As you feel to the ground, you heard Adam faintly in the background calling your name.

“Oh, god Y/N. You gotta stay with me.” You slowly started to close your eyes and everything around you was blurry. Adam was down on his knees with both hands pressed to your lower stomach. “You gotta keep your eyes just a little longer. The ambulance is 5minutes out.” You tried to keep your eyes open but you were getting sleepy and you could no longer keep them open.

“Ruzek! Where is she?” Jay came running into the ED with the Voight close behind him.

“Dr. Rhodes had to rush her to surgery.” Adam looked down at his hands that were covered in your blood that was now dried.

“Ruzek, what happened?” Voight spoke up from behind Jay.

“The two of us approached the suspect and he saw us coming and he started to run, so the two of us decided to go split up in order to cut him off. As I was running down the alleyway I heard gunshots and then when I turned the corner I saw Y/N laying on the floor.” Adam was still in shock of the current events.

“I swear to god if something happens to her.” Jay anger was getting the best of him and all he wanted to do was strangle Adam.

“Jay,” Voight put a hand on Jay’s shoulder to stop him doing something he regrets. “Okay, let’s send out patrol officers and let’s find this son of a bitch.” Adam nodded his head and headed out of the ED and back to the district. “Come let’s go find someone to tell us what’s going on with Y/N.” The two of them headed to the nurse’s station to find someone to get information on you.

“Maggie, please tell me something about Y/N. Ruzek said that they had to rush her to surgery.” As soon as they approached the nurse’s station they saw Maggie, and Jay was more than eager to know anything.

“All I know is that Dr. Rhodes had to rush her to surgery because her injuries were pretty bad. I will let you know more when I find out, but in the meantime why don’t I have a nurse show you to the waiting room?” Jay nodded before Maggie gave Jay’s hand a light squeeze and calling over a nurse.

Two and a half hours later, there was still no word on you and Jay was a nervous wreck. The thought of losing you made Jay sick to his stomach. You and Jay have known each other since you two were in middle school and you super close. As Jay paced the waiting room, he hoped and prayed that you would pull through.

“Jay.” Jay snapped out his thoughts the moment he heard Connor call his name.

“Please tell me she’s okay.”

“Surgery went well.” Jay sighed in relief. “One of the bullets was lodge in her spleen which at first I thought I was going to have to remove but I was able to save most of it. The other bullet hit her shoulder and did no damage at all. She did lose a lot of blood, but she should make a full recovery.” Connor gave Jay’s a shoulder a light squeeze. “She is awake and she’s asking for you.” Connor lead Jay down the hall to your room mentioned that if they needed anything he would be right outside.

“Jay.” The moment Jay walked into your room, your face filled with happiness.

“Hey, you.” Jay walked into the room and instantly sat on the bed. “How are you feeling?” Jay took your hand in his and rubbed the back of it with his thumb.

“Like I was hit by a truck.” Dr. Rhodes had come in after you had woken up from surgery to explain to you about what he did in surgery and then went over your recovery time. You started to feel the pain meds wear off which start to cause you to feel everything.

“I’m just glad you’re okay.” You looked at Jay who had tears forming in the corner of his eyes. Reaching up, you wiped the few tears that had slipped from his eyes with the pad of your thumb.

“Are you sure you’re going to okay by yourself? ” You were released from the hospital 5 days ago and both you and Jay agreed that he would stay with you until you were fully recovered from your surgery.

“I’m good. I promise. Go out to Molly’s with the team. I’ll be fine.” You sat on the couch with everything you needed in arms reach. Jay walked up behind the couch with your water bottle.

“Okay, fine, but if you need anything you call.” Grabbing the water bottle from Jay, you nodded your head in agreement. After saying goodbye to Jay, you turned on Netflix and got somewhat comfortable, which probably won’t last long. Since your surgery, the pain was most of the time unbearable, but you manage. Sleeping at night was the worst. You couldn’t find the right spot to lay and when you did it didn’t last too long.

You were lucky to have Jay here with you cause if you didn’t have him then you won’t have anyone. Throughout the years, you and Jay have been through everything together. When Jay left for the Army, you were devastated because you felt like the only person you had left in life was leaving you behind. Growing up, your mother wasn’t around she left when you were a baby and your father died right after you graduated high school. Your father was a detective in Vice before he was killed in the line of duty. When Jay came back from the war he had suffered from PTSD and you were the one that helped him through it.

There a saying that you never believe until it happened it to you, “A guy and a girl can be just friends, but at one point or another, they will fall for each other…maybe temporarily, maybe at the wrong time, maybe too late, or maybe forever”. Throughout the years, the connection between you and Jay have definitely changed and deep down you knew exactly what was happening. You were in love with your best friend. After watching an episode and a half of your new favorite TV show, you started to get uncomfortable and you just had to get up. Slowly getting up from the couch, you adjusted your arm in the sling and slowly walked over to the counter.

“Y/N, I’m back.” You leaned your back against the counter and looked over at the clock on the stove which read 9:30pm. Jay was barely out for an hour. He probably was too worried about leaving you alone for too long to even enjoy himself.

“I thought I told you to go out and have fun.” You heard Jay kick off his shoes and toss his keys in the bowl by the door.

“I went out, had a drink and now I’m back.” As soon as Jay turned the corner and saw you leaning up against the counter, he rushed over to you. “Hey, you are supposed to be taking it easy.”

“I am taking it easy. I just needed to get up. I was feeling uncomfortable.” Jay placed his hand on your upper arm to help you back to the couch, but you didn’t move. “Jay…”

“What’s wrong?” Jay looked at you with worriedness.

“I am so grateful that I have you around because I don’t know how I could do this on my own.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that cause I’m not going anywhere.” A smile spread on your face as Jay reached over and placed a hand on your shoulder for reassure

“How is that your still single? You should have women lined up to date you.” You slowly sat down at the counter while Jay walked over to the freezer and grab the tub of Chocolate Chip ice cream.

“What can I say. I just haven’t found the right women.” Grabbing two spoons, Jay sat down next you before handing you the tub.

“Oh, yea? What about Erin? You two seem to be pretty close.” You held the tub of ice cream with your bad arm while you used your good arm to scoop the ice cream onto the spoon.

“We are just partners. Nothing more.” Jay reached over and grabbed the tub and took a spoon full of ice cream. Both of you finished off the last couple of scoops before Jay turned to look at you.

“Jay,” Jay reached over and cupped your face and stroked your cheek. “What’s going on here?”

“You tell me.” For a brief moment, Jay hesitated before leaning in and connecting his lips to yours. Without even hesitating, you kissed him back because you have to wait for way too long for this moment to happen. After a few moments, the two of you pulled away to catch your breaths. “I have been wanting to do that for a long time now.” Jay pulled away just enough to see your face.

“When I got the call last week, I was scared that I was going to lose you. When I knew you were going to be okay I wasn’t going to wait any longer.”

“Jay, the only thing that I could think about when I was shot was you. I was scared that I would never see you again.” Reaching over, you grabbed hold of Jay’s hand and gave it a light squeeze

“I love you more than anything in this world.” A smile formed on your face as you heard those words come out of his mouth. “I have for a long time and I don’t want to waste any more time.”

“Either do I.” Leaning in, you planted a soft kiss on his lips and you could feel him slightly deepening the kiss. Pulling away, you whispered against his lips, “I love you too.” With that said, Jay stood up from the stool, helped you up from the stool and onto the couch. As soon as he helped you onto the couch, he sat on the other end of the couch with his feet popped up on the coffee table and your feet resting on his legs.

Tag List: @icameforthefics

[side-effect-of-the-meds]

These last two weeks have been tough so here’s something soft with just a smidge of smut. It is a little bit OOC for Erin but I’m sad and tired. This is an incredibly self-indulgent piece in honor of Nora’s return to Twitter.

Saturday mornings were for Erin. After a long night at Eden’s, serving drinks to daring men and women with far more daring hands, Erin retreated to the back rooms while Nicky and Aaron got shitfaced with the rest of the staff. Erin had never understood why Ronnie refused to participate in the festivities. Of course, it had taken Boyd just one night in Columbia to see what Erin had been blind to for the last year. After Boyd’s wondrous revelation, Erin found herself driving out to Columbia once a week for just one night, one minute, one second with Ronnie. Just to keep herself sane. If only Ronnie didn’t drive her insane. 

The handcuffs had been a necessary investment but they made Erin feel just a little cruel. She knew about Ronnie’s long list of abusive boyfriends. All she wanted was someone to treat her as more than a blow-up doll or a punching bag. It wasn’t hard. Not a single one of her past lovers had brought her to a climax, or anything close to one. Ronnie’s standards were right in the gutter where Erin lay. Pleasing Ronnie wasn’t hard. Pleasing herself was another matter. 

It wasn’t that Ronnie wasn’t enough. She was beautiful but in the way every rich girl was. Ronnie dressed in clothes that cost more than the twins’ inheritance. Layer after layer of makeup caked her face, smoothing over any imperfection. For her eighteenth birthday, her father had taken her to a plastic surgeon. He said that no man would ever want a woman with a chest as flat as hers. Plastic surgery became a hobby of hers. Ronnie was a woman on a mission to see just how much plastic she could have injected into her body. 

“In a thousand years, someone’s going to dig up my grave and not a single thing will have decayed,” Ronnie had joked. Erin didn’t think that was a good thing but Aaron kicked her under the table before she’d had the chance to say so. 

Physically, Ronnie was a dream. Emotionally, she was a nightmare. It wasn’t that Erin didn’t want to help her. She really did. Ronnie was the twins’ best friend but Erin wasn’t the most emotionally stable person as it was. Taking on Ronnie and her problems was just too much of a job for Erin. Instead, she settled for distracting her with her hands. Erin’s fingers were long and thin. Piano hands, Luther had called them. 

“It’s a shame you don’t play an instrument,” he’d said, inspecting them. In a way, Erin did. Anyone who’d heard the symphony of sounds she’d managed to draw out of Ronnie would agree (not that anyone had heard, Erin had made sure of that). 

As nice as her time with Ronnie was, Erin still needed time alone to recover from it all. On Saturday mornings, Nicky and Aaron were too busy nursing hangovers to bother getting out of bed before one. Blissful silence reigned through the Minyard house. There was so little time in which Erin got to savor such a silence. It was the weighty silence of her teammates holding their breaths when she entered the room. It wasn’t the expectant silence of Wymack waiting for her to explain herself after she’d caused another incident with the upperclassmen. 

This was a peaceful silence that quieted even the worst of Erin’s demon. It soothed something savage deep inside her, lulling her into an illusion of normalcy. Saturday mornings were the only times when Erin let herself pretend that she was really okay. Sure, Erin told herself she was fine when Aaron shot her icy glares, keeping himself well out of her reach but Saturday mornings were the only time she dared to let herself believe that they could actually get better. 

Learning to love herself was the most important step in recovery. Bee was incredibly adamant about it. The first time she’d said so, Erin had sneered in her face. 

“No one’s going to love a girl covered in scars. Why should I?” Erin asked as she rocked her chair onto its back legs.

Bee sat there a moment. Her dark brown eyes grew darker as she pursed her lips. “My husband loves me,” Bee finally said. 

“That’s because you’re pretty,” Erin said, waving Bee’s smile away. “I’m bitchy, not blind,” she drawled. 

“But you said that no one’s going to love a girl covered in scars,” Bee replied. Pushing back the sleeves of her sweater, Erin realized that she’d never seen Bee in short sleeves. She lost her balance at the first glimpse of the thickly roped scars winding up her arms. She was on her feet, seizing Bee’s forearms in her hands. 

“Oh, Bee. What have you done?” 

“Glass. From bottles. And window panes. Several mirrors.” Erin tore her gaze from Bee’s arms to look at her face. She was smiling softly at Erin. “We’re far more alike than you’d think, Erin.” 

That had been nearly ten years ago. In all that time, Erin had never really learnt to love herself. It didn’t matter. She’d found people who’d loved her enough to make up for it. Nicky loved her. Aaron loved her. Kevin and Wymack loved her. Bee and her husband, Colm, loved her. They’d loved her so much that they’d offered to make her Erin Dobson Minyard. She was grateful that they’d offered her a place in their home but to take it felt like a betrayal to the one she already had. Nicky and Matt were as great a mom and dad as Erin could have ever hoped for. Aaron could be a prickly little shit but Erin wouldn’t trade him for any other brother in the world. Bee and Colm hadn’t taken offense to her rejection. They still welcomed her with open arms and it made Erin love them all the more for it. 

It didn’t matter that she had the love of her entire family. Erin wanted more. She wanted Ania to love her and for everyone to know it too. She wanted to be Erin Minyard-Josten.

Ania had fought hard to become Ania Alora Josten. Josten was her truth and Erin desperately wanted to be a part of it. In the last eight years, not a single day passed where the thought of marrying Ania Josten didn’t flit through her brain. Staring up at the ceiling, Erin planned a wedding she knew she’d never get to have. The two of them had come a long way from when they’d first met but, in some ways, Ania was still just a pipe dream. Breathing in deeply, Erin rolled onto her side as the sun filtered into the room. From the bed, Erin could see the gray smog that had wound itself amongst the impossibly grayer skyscrapers. Chicago wasn’t a pretty city but, as with all other things, anything Ania touched instantly became beautiful. Even Erin herself felt beautiful when Ania’s fingers danced across her body. 

All her life, Erin had been pushed away. Everyone saw her as a monster or a half-starved guard dog that was always on the brink of biting the hand that fed her. Wymack had sat her down more than once and told her that it was wrong. He was a strong man but even he could barely hide the sheen of tears that coated his eyes as he sat beside her hospital bed after another one of her failed suicide attempts, insisting that she was still a person, that she still deserved to live. He’d told her that she wasn’t a monster and made her promise to try to learn to believe that she wasn’t. Laying beside Ania now, Erin believed it. There was something about Ania that made Erin feel… human. 

Ronnie had asked Erin to be her answer, something far more than Erin knew she was capable of being. In her haste to banish her own feelings, Erin had told Ania that she wasn’t her answer. Tracing the curves of Ania’s sleeping face with light fingers, Erin regretted it. Ania was her answer, Erin knew that now, and she desperately wanted- needed to be hers too. 

My wife. Erin mouthed the words but she didn’t dare say them aloud for fear that Ania would hear her. Erin had never asked Ania her thoughts on marriage but she’d planted the seed in Nicky. As expected, Nicky had gone bounding up to Ania to extract her thoughts on the matter. The interrogation didn’t last long. Ania had made her opposition to the institution of marriage crystal clear. But that was before. Before Drake and Easthaven. It was before they’d started trading kisses on the roof. It was before Erin had let her walls down far enough to let Ania see her lain bare. It was before they’d begun waking up in each other’s arms. 

“Staring,” Ania said as she peeled an eye open. 

“Shut it, Junkie,” Erin replied but there was no heat in her words. 

“Make me.” Two words. Just two words and heat was already pooling in Erin’s stomach. She shifted closer and pressed her lips to Ania’s. An arm wound around Erin’s waist and dragged her closer. “Better,” Ania whispered as she broke the kiss. She was still close enough that their lips brushed as she spoke. It wasn’t enough for Erin. 

“Yes or no,” she asked. 

“Doe, I’m not even awake yet,” Ania laughed. After a moment’s consideration, “Yes, but only if you make me breakfast after.” 

“Deal,” Erin said. She slid her arm beneath Ania, dragging her form so that she lay atop Erin. 

“Oh,” was all Ania could say as she processed what was happening. The two of them had been together for nearly nine years now, but Erin still had a hard time relinquishing control of herself enough to let Ania top. But today was Saturday and Saturday’s were for Erin. Self-care is letting yourself want and, right now, Erin wanted Ania on top of her. 

“Say it,” Erin whispered. She screwed her eyes shut in anticipation of the words. There were a few things that came before Ania would oblige and she ticked them off her mental checklist as they went. First, she heard Ania’s soft laugh. Then she felt Ania’s left hand winding through her hair, tilting Erin’s head to the side. Erin felt Ania’s other hand snake up beneath her shirt. With it, Ania caressed Erin’s breast. She shivered at the brush of Ania’s lips on the shell of her ear. Finally, finally, Ania said it. 

“I love you.” Erin’s breath hitched. Ania’s fingernails scratched soothingly at her scalp. Her grip on Erin’s breast tightened as she started moving her hips slowly, painstakingly. Erin whined. “What’s wrong, love?” Ania asked. Erin could hear the mischief in her voice. It only made her hips buck up harder. Her hands grazed Ania’s waist. “Sit up, Erin.” Erin obeyed. She shifted so that she sat with her back against the headboard. 

“What are y-” Erin stopped short as she watched Ania wriggle out of her clothes. After getting permission, she tugged Erin’s bottoms off too. She watched silently as Ania spread her legs apart and settled between them. Ania looked up at Erin, searching for confirmation that what she was doing was alright. Whatever she saw made her smile. It was a slow, sly thing so befitting of a fox. She wrapped her legs around Erin’s waist and dragged herself flush against her body, lining them up perfectly. Watching Erin’s features carefully, she rocked forward. The slide of Ania against her sent waves of pleasure crashing over Erin. She jolted forward, throwing her head back and hitting it against the headboard with a resounding thud. 

Ania’s laughter rang through the room as Erin cursed, rubbing at her head. Great. All she’d wanted was to get off and all she’d gotten was a lump on her head. 

“Honey, are you okay?” Ania gasped through her fit of laughter. 

“Do you want breakfast or not?” Erin snapped. 

“Aw, don’t be like that, my love. I’ll be good. I promise.” With that Ania, wrapped a hand around the back of Erin’s head, effectively cradling it from further damage. Once more, she rocked forward against Erin. A low, moan escaped Erin’s lips. She felt the brush of Ania’s lips at the base of her throat, sucking down just enough to send her pulse racing. “Oh, darling, yes,” Ania murmured. Sometimes, when Ania got too worked up, Erin was graced with hearing Ania slip into her British accent. It drove Erin wild. She surged forward, grinding into Ania in the hopes of hearing it again. Erin’s efforts were handsomely rewarded. Ania ground up against her just as hard, babbling a constant stream of barely coherent encouragement. 

Their lips crashed together. Their limbs intertwined. The bed creaked. It was Saturday morning and Erin felt so, so good. Most days, she wasn’t any more vocal than she had to be but she knew how much Ania enjoyed hearing the soft, rasping sound of her voice in bed. She moaned right into Ania’s ear, relishing in the way Ania shuddered at the sound of it. As Erin neared her climax, her hips started to stutter. Almost immediately, Ania picked up the pace. She pried her body away just enough that Erin knew she was watching, waiting to see her go over the edge. Ania’s grip tightened in Erin’s hair, anchoring her as she ground her clit against Erin’s and that was it. 

For a whole fifteen seconds, everything ceased to exist. Ecstasy. Pure, fucking, ecstasy was all Erin could feel. As Erin’s senses returned, she gasped. Ania was still going, chasing her own orgasm. Every part of Erin felt raw and oversensitive but she wasn’t going to deny Ania her reward. She sat there, trying not to squirm as pain and pleasure wove together until the two were inseparable. Tears burned her eyes as her legs quaked. She tightened her grip on Ania’s waist, working her hard and fast. When Ania reached her climax, her eyes glazed over and her entire body went utterly still. Erin stopped entirely too, utterly transfixed by the majesty of Ania. 

It was as if time itself had stopped. Did Erin deserve this? Erin wasn’t a monster but she’d done some monstrous things, never feeling an ounce of remorse for her actions. Instead, Erin only got worse. Every despicable act she committed took her a step deeper into the darkness. For so long, Erin had lived cold and alone in the dark. Kevin might have been the first person to offer her a shard of hope but Ania had given her so much more than that. 

Ania had been more than a single shard of light. She was the sun itself: bold and bright and brilliant and Erin couldn’t live without her. Being so close to the sun would only burn her up but Erin was as self-destructive as they came. If Ania had asked for the oxygen from her lungs, Erin would give it to her. If Ania’s heart broke, Erin would take hers clean apart to fix her. From the very second Ania collided into the racquet Erin swung, she’d known that her life would never be the same again. As the words “Fuck you,” dripped venomously from Ania’s tongue, Erin had known she was in love.

Things had only gotten worse from there. Ania Josten had been a pathological liar that offered up little pieces of her truth in exchange for Erin’s trust. She’d broken down her walls just to taste Erin on that toxic tongue of hers. Ania hadn’t given Erin a reason to live. She’d given Erin a reason to want to live, something no one else had done. A future in which Erin had Ania by her side was too good to be true. It was the only future she wanted. 

But did she deserve it? She’d hurt so many people, strangers, and family alike. Probably not. All her life, people had taken whatever they’d wanted from her. They’d tried to tie her down and own her. Now that she had complete control of herself, Erin was shocked to realize that what she wanted most was to belong to Ania. At first, it had scared Erin to want something like that so badly. In the years that passed, Erin slowly began to realize why she wanted what she did. Even if Erin gave herself over to Ania, Ania would never truly take control. Not once had Ania pushed Erin further than she was capable of going. Not once had she balked at taking no for an answer. 

Ania loved Erin with no strings attached. Up until Ania, everything in Erin’s life had been a constant power struggle. Being with Ania meant that Erin could stop being the monstrous creature she pretended to be. Ania had gazed upon the sad, shattered creature that Erin was and offered to help piece her back together. Erin would never be able to come back from the darkness to which she’d succumbed to. Taking Ania’s hand, Erin knew that. Nothing could ever undo the things Erin had done. Being with Ania didn’t make Erin a better person. It just stopped her from becoming a worse one. If Erin hadn’t met Ania she’d have never made amends with her brother, instead forcing him and Nicky further away. If Erin hadn’t met Ania she might not even still be alive today. 

The thoughts were knocked out of her head as Ania came back down from her climax. She settled back down, hissing as her oversensitive labia met the soft skin of Erin’s thighs.

“Jude,” she whispered as she nuzzled into the crook of Erin’s shoulder. Erin wrapped her arms around Ania. “Was… was it okay? Was I good?”

“You were amazing, Doll.” Erin carded her fingers through Ania’s hair, untangling it as she went. They lay there in each others’ arms as they caught their breaths. For just a few moments Erin truly believed that everything was okay. She felt her breath catch in her lungs as Ania began pressing kisses to the scars crisscrossing Erin’s arms. Erin didn’t deserve someone so kind. So caring. So full of love. 

“Eri?” Erin looked down to see Ania gazing up at her through her lashes. God, Ania was beautiful. Erin ran a thumb across the burn marks on her cheeks. “Aaron called yesterday.” Erin frowned. Her brother never called Ania. He usually just sent her photos of trash cans captioned ‘I didn’t know you had a twin, too’ or photos of stray cats he’d encountered on his way to work. Ania sat up and reached for the nightstand. Rummaging through the drawers, she continued, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you but it never seemed like the right time. One of us was always flying somewhere, or there were too many people around, or we were with Coach. Aaron said that I’d better hurry up before you realize that you can do better than me. He’s right. I think, deep down, I was just scared that you’d say no. I mean, it’s okay if you do. We’ll still find a way to make us work if you do.” Erin’s heart stopped at the sight of the black velvet box that Ania drew out of the drawer. 

“Ania-” 

“I know there’s a conversation that’s supposed to come before this but I saw it in the window and I- I just couldn’t walk away.” Erin heard the soft click of a button and the box swung open. Inside was a pale bold band, the same color as her hair. A large brown diamond glinted in the morning light. As the light passed through it, the hue seemed to shift from dark brown to hazel, the way Erin’s eyes did. Ania pried the ring from the cushion it rested in. Inside the band, a small heart-shaped key had been engraved. 

Erin surged forward, cupping Ania’s face in her hands and forcing it to face her. She kissed her lips so hard she was sure they’d both be badly bruised but she didn’t care. Salt stung her tongue from the tears pouring down her face. “Ask me,” she croaked. “I want you to ask me.”

“Erin Jude Minyard, will you-”

“Yes,” she said before pinning Ania down to the bed. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she said between each kiss she planted on her lips. Laughter bubbled out of Ania at the unexpected burst of affection. 

“Eri, I didn’t even get to finish asking. What if I was asking you to go make breakfast?” 

“I’ll do that too,” Erin replied. Laying her head atop Ania’s she whispered, “I’ll do anything for you.”  

“Anything?” Ania asked, 

“Anything.” 

“Say it.” Erin stared deep into Ania’s eyes. They’d thawed from their usual icy appearance. They sparkled with mischief, daring Erin to deny her. She wouldn’t. There was no fun in telling Ania ‘no’ anyway. Besides, it was Saturday morning and Saturday mornings were for Erin. 

Closing her own eyes, Erin took a deep breath. “I love you," she whispered.

[christie052780]

It was the gloves that were the first thing that seemed weird to me. I mean the rest of him was just fine. He was an attractive enough guy who was definitely older than my teenage self and everything else seemed right. He was dressed more for corporate Chicago than rural Michigan with his elegant top coat and a natty suit underneath. But it wasn't cold out. Not at all.

"So why the gloves?" I asked as I passed him the coffee he'd ordered.

He smiled and replied, "It's a long story but let's just say I prefer to wear gloves."

He took the coffee and went off to sit down.

Over the next half hour or so I would look his way and find him staring at me. I wasn't sure if it was flattering or creepy but that little voice that whispered 'Danger!' in my mind was a bit louder than the usual whisper.

Around nine he gathered his things, dumped his empty cup in the trash, and then headed out. As he got outside I caught him glancing my way and again my little voice was singing to me.

That was the end of it, so I thought. For the next several months I didn't see him buying coffee anymore and the memory of the nice looking guy with the gloves started to slip away.

High school graduation was on my mind and I was also starting to consider the upcoming change of life that I would see when I went off to university in the fall. I had my life planned out and that life included a doctorate in finance, a killer apartment in New York City, and fun times seeing Broadway shows and enjoying the good life that you can only find in the Big Apple.

It was the start of the Memorial Day weekend and I was out of school. I was looking forward to maybe getting in some time sailing around Grand Traverse Bay with my friends the next day. I didn't live far from the high school in Elk Rapids so it was a pleasant walk home on a late spring day.

I was just past the campus on East Third street where the street runs into a little stretch of forest. It had never occured to me that even though it was just a little way from the school and not far to the homes on the lake that it was also one of the most isolated spots on town. For about a hundred yards or so no one can see you as you're walking.

And that was where the very clean black Mercedes motorhome was parked. Not an unsual site around town, not at all. I didn't even care when I heard the driver's side door open as I walked past it.

"Hi there! Nice to see you again!"

I stirred from my reverie and turned to see the guy from the coffee shop. I recognized him immediately even though he was now dressed in shorts, sandals, and a nice button down shirt.

The gloves were nowhere to be seen.

"Hey, I didn't introduce myself last time we met...I'm Donald!"

His ungloved right hand was outstretched as if to shake hands with me.

Shaking hands is a very old custom that comes from a time when enemies would meet and they'd shake hands to demonstrate that they were not holding a weapon. It was meant to show that neither party was a threat to the other and it was considered very rude to decline a proffered hand.

The reason for the tradtion is lost to most people but the part about refusing a handshake being very rude is still with us.

So because of seventeen years of social conditioning I moved my books to one hand and then stuck out my right hand to grasp his own.

"I'm Lilly, nice to meet you!"

He hesitated for a moment and then took my hand.

I caught my breath as it seemed an electric current ran through me. My heart started beating faster. My skin felt warmer. I felt a little dizzy. My nipples swelled up and something between my legs stirred, too. I just remember wondering what the fuck was happening to me.

Then I looked up at Donald. He looked different to me now. He was still the same guy in the same outfit but something about him was different. He seemed more attractive somehow. It also seemed like I knew him all my life even though I'd literally just met him.

"You look a little flushed, " he said. "Maybe you'd like to come sit down?"

I trusted him.

He took me by the hand and led me to the other side of the motorhome and opened the side door to let me in. As he closed the door behind me I looked out the front of the motorhome and saw my mom drive by on her way home. She'd be there inside of two minutes. It was that close.

Donald took my bag and set it on the floor as he had me sit down on in a seat. He put on a pair of gloves and then opened the bag. Taking my phone out he opened the side door again and tossed the phone into the bushes.

He could see me struggling to protest. My phone was so important to me!

He removed his gloves again and then reached out a hand to touch my face. Once again an electric feeling came over me and the previous sensations washed over me but with a different focus...instead of making me breathless it made me feel calm and peaceful.

Donald took my face in his hands and then leaned down to kiss me. It wasn't my first kiss but it was so much more intense than anything else I'd ever felt before. When his tongue pried open my lips and slipped into my mouth all I can say is that it was amazing.

He eventually broke our kiss and when he did I was limp and unable to do much of anything. He buckled me into my seat and then went to get behind the wheel.

All too soon we were leaving Elk Rapids behind us. Eastport came along and disappeared. It wasn't very long before we were in Mackinaw City and then we crossed the bridge to Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

I was conscious of moving along and I was also conscious of the fact that I was now two hours late getting home from school.

"Donald, do you think I should be getting home now? My mom's going to be worried."

I said this as if I knew him and even as I said the words there was a part of me that felt they were wrong in some way. Like I shouldn't be so polite to this guy.

This guy.

I was starting to think there was something wrong when he stopped the motorhome and then came back to kiss me again. I didn't fend off the kiss and soon the euphoria I'd felt before was renewed and I found myself wondering why I'd been concerned.

When Donald broke off our kiss this time he seemed distracted. He left me where I was, belted into my seat, and resumed driving. Soon enough we were off the Interstate and after a while more he pulled off the paved road. We bumped along a little way and then ended up at a nice looking house looking off on Lake Huron.

Donald used a remote control to open the garage for the motorhome and then pulled inside before stopping the engine.

He undid my seatbelt and then said, "Come on." offering me his bare hand. I was ready for it when I took his hand and loved the feeling that swept over me. It was hard to stand up but he helped me and then took me into the house.

I remember looking out the window at the view of Lake Huron and being impressed. He took me to a windowless room that was like a hotel room with its own bathroom. The only difference was the chain bolted to the middle of the floor. Donald attached me to the chain with a handcuff that ratcheted closed on my wrist as I looked on.

"I've got a few things to do and then I'll be back, you understand me, Lilly?"

I looked up from the handcuff to his face and nodded my acknowledgment.

And a moment later he closed the bedroom door and I heard it lock.

* * *

I don't know how long it was, but after some time the effects of Donald's touch wore off and I started to look around my room to see if I could get out. The door was locked and it was solid steel. The bathroom was nicely appointed but it had no windows. The ceiling was obviously very solid and so were the walls and the floor.

There was no way out.

I was getting hungry when I heard the door unlock and there was Donald with a plate of spaghetti.

Frankly, I was too scared to eat anything.

"Hey, I brought you something to eat." He set the plate on the bedside table.

"Are you going to let me go?" That's all I was thinking about.

"No, but if you'll be patient with me I think you'll come to like it here."

I launched into a fit of crying and begging for him to let me go and then he walked over to me. I was expecting him to slap me when all he did was touch my cheek.

Instantly the feelings I'd had before came back. Donald looked better to me and that feeling of knowing him and trusting him all my life came back too.

"That's better."

He gestured at the plate, "Now go ahead and eat your dinner before it gets cold. You've got to be hungry after today and all the driving."

He went to leave the room. "When I come back we'll talk."

The door closed and I ate my dinner without even thinking about why I'd been worried.

I no sooner finished dinner and put down the plate when he was back. I took notice of how he was wearing his gloves again.

Seeing his gloves made me realize that the feeling from his touch had lessened a bit.

"Donald, can you tell me what's going on?"

He sat down in a chair across from the bed where I was sitting.

"Okay, I'm just going to get this all out of the way." He cracked his knuckles and drew in a breath.

"My wife Anne died from cancer last year so I was lonely and went driving around in the fall. Came across you at the coffee place and decided that you were the one to replace her. You're tall, thin, you got a nice ass and I love your tits...", he took a moment to stare at them, "...and I'm hoping that maybe we can have the family Anne could never give me."

All of this should have horrified me but somehow I was just taking it in stride.

"Um...okay...but what is this thing you've been doing to me?"

He nodded. "Yeah, that."

"My father was a geneticist back in the eighties and as a kid I had leukemia and he came up with a treatment that involved hamster proteins. The treatment didn't help me with the leukemia but it did help me recover from the chemotherapy."

"Did you know that hamsters have some of the strongest pheromones of any other mammal on earth?"

I didn't and I shook my head to say no.

"Well they do. And when I hit puberty the side effect of my father's attempt to treat cancer came up. When I'd get around girls they'd almost always start looking my way and if I touched them they'd often start acting like they were stunned or drunk and they'd do pretty much anything I wanted them to do. Over the years I've figured that it's a combination of something like sex pheromones and oxytocin that gets girls to see me as attractive and to trust me."

He added an afterthought of, "Hmph."

"You'd think that a teenage boy would love this but the problem was that I couldn't always tell if a girl had a boyfriend or someone. That meant I got my ass kicked a few times for getting too close to some guy's girl or daughter and that was when I started wearing gloves."

"The other thing I observed over time was that my touch had a lot less effect on girls who'd had sex with another guy and I think that's got something to do with the way the pheromones work. The best girls for me were virgins like yourself."

"And that's how I met Anne. She was a girl from church and to be honest she was way out of my league. She was smart, gorgeous, and she was always so happy! I fell in love and after we were both out of high school I went to see her that summer and I touched her hand. After that she was my girl and we were married right after we both finished college. We had a good twenty years together and I miss her."

He stopped and wiped an eye.

"Turns out that I don't like to be alone but it also turns out that the women my age are all spoken for in the way that counts. I don't have much effect on them and I hate to say but my personality isn't the greatest so it's tough to find a date. So last fall I decided to go look around and find myself a young lady."

"No offense, but you weren't the first one I looked at. There were a couple others but when I shook their hands not much happened so I knew they weren't virgins. Then I followed you around and shook your hand and can tell you're a virgin."

His previous touch was wearing off even more now.

"So if you can have any girl you want then why did you have to kidnap me?"

He took off his gloves and put them on the table next to the chair.

"I didn't kidnap you. Not at all. I touched you and then you came along because I asked you to."

I felt my nerve coming back, held up my handcuffed wrist and replied, "If you didn't kidnap me then prove it. Let me go."

He smiled. "I figured you were feeling a little more normal."

He got up from his chair and walked over to me.

"Okay, I'll let you go." The way he said it made it sound like a smartassed remark.

I held up my wrist and he took my arm in his hand and as I watched him unlock the handcuff I realized my mistake. His touch on my skin did its thing and I sighed from the feeling.

He let the chain drop to the floor. "I was going to try to have you settle in and see if you'd like me on your own but it's pretty clear we need to move things along."

He took my chin in his hand and kissed me on the lips. The intense feelings I'd felt before came back. My skin felt warm, my nipples hardened, and I felt myself get moist.

He stepped back for a moment and pulled me to my feet.

"Lilly, have you ever felt these feelings before?"

I nodded, "Yes, but nothing like this...it's so intense!"

Donald smiled. "You're feeling sexual arousal. You get some of it when I touch you but it gets more intense when I kiss you...like this..."

He kissed me again and it was like stepping into a warm shower. Chills ran over me and I wrapped my arms around him to return his kiss.

Part of me was ashamed when I realized that I was grinding myself against him.

He broke our kiss and left me breathless. And then he stepped close to me and started unbuttoning my blouse. I let him push it off my shoulders and then he undid my skirt, letting it fall to the floor.

"Take off your shoes." He told me. And I stepped out of them.

He unclipped my bra and gave me a rush when he licked my nipples before sucking on one of them.

I don't remember when he took off my panties.

I was standing there naked and more aroused than I thought a person could be as I watched him strip himself.

When he faced me I got to see my very first real life penis. I couldn't help myself when I took it in my hands to feel it and stroke it. Touching it gave my body a jolt and I felt my pussy seize with a contraction.

I heard him catch his breath as my soft hands ran over his velvety hardness.

He slipped a finger into me and I moved my leg to let him do it. It felt wonderful but it was missing something. I needed more of him inside of me.

Donald guided me to the bed and had me lay on my back.

He stood there for a moment.

"Lilly, I need to tell you that you'll never be the same after this. You'll never be able to go back to your old life and all the things that used to be important to you won't matter anymore. You're going to feel something that will change you forever. I guess a part of me wants to give you a chance to stop before it's too late."

I sat up and reached for him. "Please..." was all I could say.

He let me take his hand and pull him towards me.

I scooted back on the bed and spread my legs to make a place for him. He climbed onto the bed and then settled himself between my thighs and then kissed me.

How do I describe this? The best I can come up with is it was like when you have an itch and it so needs to be scratched and you'll do anything you can to get that relief.

Yes; relief. That's the right word.

We were a tangle of arms and legs as he was kissing me. He was hungering to take me and I was hungering for him to take me.

Remember having chicken pox and you were so itchy and painful that all you could think about was scratching yourself and then you felt that amazing relief when your mom put the calamine lotion on you?

That's what it felt like when he pushed his cock into me.

There was no pain or discomfort, at least none that I noticed.

But when he slipped himself into me I felt nothing but relief as my itch was getting scratched. He thrust himself deep into me and I thrust myself up at him trying to get him to go deeper.

I shrieked with joy every time he drove himself into me and then I cried with grief when he'd pull back...I was really afraid each time he withdrew that he was done and I needed so much more!

My heart was beating so fast...as if I was running as fast as I could.

I wrapped my arms and legs around him to try to hold him inside me.

He pounded away at me and too soon....TOO SOON!!! I heard him start to groan. Oh, no! I didn't want him to be done yet! I needed so much more!!

"Ahhhhh!!!" he cried.

I felt it inside me...his cock swelled up and then pulsed as he locked eyes with me. My hands went to his hips to try to force him deeper and then I felt it.

His cock was spurting inside of me and a crazy euphoria came over me. It was like being light headed and caressed all over my body all at the same time. There was a sense of well being I'd never felt before...as if everything in the universe was just perfect. I felt myself relax and slip into the embrace of this perfect calmness and then it started inside me.

I felt my pussy start to contract over and over. Every time it went off it was like lightning in my body and it wouldn't stop! Oh, my God, I didn't want it to stop! And it just got more and more intense!

Donald was still thrusting himself into me and then I remember seeing him smile as the contractions in my body grew into convulsions of unending sexual joy!

* * *

I can't remember what happened after that.

When I woke up it the sun was peeking into the bedroom and that was when I noticed I was in a different bedroom.

My pussy was sore but I felt so good. I had absolutely no worries and no anxiety about anything.

I was still naked and didn't care as I got myself up off the bed and went to the bathroom. I peed and cleaned myself up a bit and then used the toiletries that had been thoughtfully set out for me.

There was a bathrobe and I put it on only because it was kind of cold.

I followed the scent of coffee to the kitchen and found Donald waiting for me. We exchanged pleasantries as he poured me a cup of coffee.

"So, Lilly, how do you feel this morning? You still want to leave me?"

I looked at him and all I felt was peace. "I feel better than I've ever felt in my life and can't imagine ever wanting to leave you."

I kissed him and sipped from my mug.

He gave me a donut to eat and afterwards came over and licked the powdered sugar from my lips.

My pussy ran wet from his kiss.

I loved it when he pushed open my robe and ran his hands over my breasts.

My hand went to his boxer shorts and I fished out his hardening tool and gripped it.

Donald gently lifted me onto the kitchen counter and then pulled down his shorts.

As if they had a mind of their own my legs parted as he came up to me. He took his tool in his hand and ran it through my pussy lips until he found what he was looking for.

Then in one forceful thrust he buried himself to the root into my body.

I loved it.

The two of us fucked each other. That's the right way to say it, too.

And when he came inside me I had my mind blown again by that seemingly unending sexual joy.

Afterwards he picked me up and carried me back to his bed to recover as the orgasmic convulsions wracked my body.

* * *

The days and weeks went by in a blur of naked skin and soiled sheets. He fucked me whenever it suited him and I didn't complain.

When he'd leave to go do some business or go to the store I'd sit at home waiting for him.

One day he had me go back to the windowless bedroom and he told me to wait in there, that he was testing something.

In just a few hours I missed his touch.

I didn't sleep that night.

When he came back to see me in the morning I told him I was missing him. I begged him to open the door for me. He did, but just for a moment to give me a sandwich with a gloved hand.

The next day I was hurting for him. I needed to feel him inside me! I needed that calmness!

When he came to see me I was desperate for his body and I banged on the door to demand that he let me touch him.

It seemed like forever as I heard him unlock the door.

When I saw him I threw myself at him and kissed him. That just took the edge off.

Soon he was between my legs giving me what I wanted and when he went off inside me I cried tears of joy and relief before the expected sexual convulsions seized my heart and soul.

It was probably two hours later when I asked him if his experiment was a success.

"Yes, it was. I discovered that you're addicted to me and that's a good thing."

Part of me didn't think it was good. But the rest of me didn't care because I was starting to wonder when we'd fuck again.

* * *

Of course, all that unprotected fucking eventually led to my discovery that I was pregnant! And the best side effect of being pregnant was a constant sensation of peace and calm with just a mild, ever-present state of arousal.

Through the pregnancy when Donald would fuck me the result wasn't the crazy intense convulsions but instead an even more stated feeling of satisfaction. I eventually understood what I was feeling as love. Love for my man and love for his baby inside me.

* * *

When the baby was born I soon discovered he'd inherited something from his father. Donald had cleaned up the baby from birth and placed him at my breast to suckle.

As the baby latched onto my nipple I felt that same sense of arousal as when his father would kiss me.

Donald saw this and smiled. "Lucky bastard."

[sunsetinmyvein]

Just Off the Key of Reason - Chapter Nine - We Don’t Fight Fair

A/N - This entire story (yep, the whole. damn. thing.) was inspired by this minute and a half long Fall Out Boy interview below and me thinking "I bet he would be mortified if it turned out to actually be a girl."

https://youtu.be/x6fG9fh4lMk

Anyway.

Friday, 30th of March, 2007 – Cincinnati, Ohio

They walked down the narrow hotel hallway, her trailing behind Pete and Patrick but in front of Andy and Joe. “You guys have an interview with…” She pulled her phone out of her pocket to check the name she had written down “Rage? I think? Well, they didn’t call it an interview; I think you might just be talking about stuff.”

“Stuff?” Joe asked with an eyebrow raised.

“I dunno, Chicago and punk music and things.” She suggested with a shrug. Andy laughed lightly to himself, wondering why as a band they were so frequently derived down to only two topics. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked him about a different genre. “They haven’t given you a prompt or question to open with so I guess you can just say whatever you want.”

“That’s an unwise thing to tell us.” Pete gave a dark chuckle, already trying to work out what mayhem he could create.

“If you guys don’t do what they want, it’s only their own fault. They’re a music TV show so maybe hang around that sort of theme.”

They walked into the hotel room where they were supposed to be meeting the representative from the station; as per usual it was under furnished but trying to be homely in that all-too-familiar hotel way. A guy was sitting on a nearby arm chair smoking a cigarette, donned in a worn-out suit as he flipped through some paperwork. He stood up to greet the boys when they came in before gesturing for them to sit on the couch. They shared a collective look of confusion before cramming themselves into the considerably small leather three-seater. Patrick adjusted his cap and slipped his glasses into his pocket, trying to maintain a consistent image for the band. She excused herself for a moment, deciding it would be a decent time to check in with her manager while they were occupied; Pete surely couldn’t cause that much trouble while under surveillance and trapped in that couch they all barely fit in.

The rep handed them a list of songs before butting out his cigarette. Andy could feel the smell sitting at the back of his throat, glad that it would finally start to dissipate. “This here is a list of clips we can play during the show, if any strike your fancy, feel free to talk about them and we’ll play your interview before that song. We’ll just keep the camera rolling the whole time you guys are here and cut out the bits we need.” He explained as he began fiddling with the equipment.

“Are we like… announcing them?” Patrick asked in confusion. The guy nodded before hitting record and giving them a thumbs-up. One name on the list caught his attention and he was reminded of when he first heard it, so he decided to roll with that. “So, this next song, um, I… remember being in fifth grade and a friend of mine, um, like…” He tried his best to not stuff up telling the story, but interviews were harder when you weren’t asked questions and were just expected to talk. He was never good at talking at the best of times, let alone when he knew people would be seeing it and analysing it over and over. “Taking me under-under the table, the teacher wasn’t watching-”

“Making out with him” Pete interrupted with a chuckle.        

“Shut up.” Patrick instantly countered, wanting none of Pete’s crap today.

“I was in high school then, man.” Andy chipped in as he leaned forward, totally ignoring Pete’s comment.

“Yeah, okay.” He said dismissively, trying to continue the story.

“These two dudes kissed.” Pete added. Joe was trying his best not to laugh as he knew laughing would only made Pete worse, and he could see Patrick’s agitation building.        

“You were a baby…” Andy mused, leaning back in his chair as he ran off with that train of thought. He often forgot that Joe and Patrick were so much younger than himself and Pete.  

“All right, finish the story, you kissed the dude and then what happened?” Pete gestured back to Patrick with a playful smile, who only shook his head in response. He pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration before continuing.

“And bein’ like… bein’ like… ‘some-day you’re gonna meet this dude, Pete Wentz, and he’s gonna be a total ass.’” Patrick said, smiling to himself at the dig at his friend. “‘But don’t worry, this band is so cool.’ And he put on these headphones and played this thing for me, and it was awesome. And it was Green day’s basket case.” He said as he finished the story. The man nodded from behind the camera, clearly happy enough at the content he’d filmed.

  They talked for a bit about how great the music video was for the song as she slipped back into the room. Everyone but Andy was too invested in their conversation to notice her presence, he flashed her a smile as she walked over to them. She slowly moved her way behind the couch, trying her best not to disturb their interview. Her manager had told her to ask Patrick when he wanted to come and pick up his repaired Gretsch that had been sent to a nearby music store in Ohio, and she knew he wouldn’t want to wait to hear that it was finally ready. He had complained constantly at the last few shows because he wasn’t able to use it. The band took a second look at the sheet of songs on the table in front of them, trying to pick another. Joe leaned forward and pointed at one on the page before sitting back, giving her a small smile as he saw her. She was about to tap Patrick on the back but he started talking. “So…” She figured it was probably best to wait until after they were done and went to shuffle back from behind the couch to the side of the room. Pete grabbed her wrist with a smirk as she was about to move away, stopping in her in tracks, before he lightly dragged her fingers down Patrick’s back. “being from Chicago, um…” He paused, swallowing hard. She rolled her eyes at Pete’s antics, feeling Patrick tense up under the contact. “there aren’t a lot of bands, that uh…” He pulled her hand down to the small of his back, moving it to draw lazy circles. “we got to look up to and I think someone’s touching my back right now.” He rushed out the last part as he bit down on his lip for a moment, Joe sniggered next to him as he glanced at Pete’s grip on her wrist. “It’s really distracting.” He apologised to the camera.

“No, it’s a hot girl.” Pete replied as he looked up at her and winked. She wondered if he remembered calling her jealous in the bar that night, or was just being annoying in general.

“But I’m not gonna look.” Patrick continued, ignoring Pete as he shook his head lightly. The two uncomfortable parties tried their best not to give Pete the reaction they knew he wanted.

“No, it’s a hot girl in the interview.” Pete repeated, continuing to move her hand.

“’Cause I know it’s not a hot girl.” He kept going, trying to ignore whatever he assumed Pete was doing.

“Does it feel like a hot girl? Kinda?” She felt herself blush and tried to move her hand out of Pete’s grasp unsuccessfully.

“N-not really…” He stammered. At this point, Joe couldn’t hold his laughter in anymore.

“Aw c’mon.” He pressed as he practically yanked her hand to be at the waistline of his pants. Her eyes widened for a moment before her inner embarrassment took over and she pulled her hand away from the bassist.

“Oh… gross.” Patrick shuddered, making a mental note to think of a way to pay Pete back for this.

  “All right, so, um… being from-” He tried to start again.

“I think he was kinda into it for a second.” Pete laughed, looking over his shoulder at her. She shook her head at him before sticking her tongue out. Just once she wished that Pete wouldn’t try and cause drama, particularly in interviews when they were being recorded. The label hadn’t wanted her to be in any of their promotional material.

“Not for a second.” Patrick defended. She couldn’t help but feel a little hurt by the answer, but she shrugged it off with the knowledge that Patrick was unaware it was even her doing it. She leaned back on the wall until they’d finished the interview and she could excuse herself without ruining their shot.

“He thought a hot girl materialised out of the wall. He’s like ‘aw, maybe.’ ” Pete turned his attention back to his friend, grinning madly.

“Just maybe! That’s my best chance!” He laughed, turning around to look at Pete and suddenly meeting her gaze. He let out a surprised squeak, unaware that she’d been there the whole time. She gave him a sheepish smile as he felt his stomach drop. He suddenly realised it had not been Pete touching him and everything he had just said flooded back into his mind. Oh, no…

“Maybe Harry Potter is real.” Pete continued to joke. Patrick pulled his cap low over his eyes and shrunk into the couch, wanting nothing more than to leave this interview, hotel, state, country, and crawl under a rock to never be heard from again.

“Patrick, do you remember how you heard about this band? Alkaline Trio?” Joe asked, seeing his friend’s discomfort and doing his best to help.

“How I heard about Alkaline Trio?” He mumbled, trying to get back on his original train of thought.

“Yeah.” Joe nodded, trying to recover the interview and make Pete shut up. Despite the obvious discomfort, the rep seemed to be eating it up, loving that he’d have this relationship between the band members to show off on his show.

  Patrick was able to talk enough about the band to get a successful take for their program before deciding to call the interview there.

“That’s enough, right?” He asked as soon as he’d finished, standing up from the couch and not leaving them any time to call him back if it wasn’t. He darted out of the room and began walking down the hallway towards their bus. The rep was taken aback but his sudden exit, but had already gotten more than enough for what he needed. He shut off his camera and began packing away his things, thanking them for their time.

“Why do you have to be like that?” She huffed as she moved her gaze from the now closed door to Pete.

“You said we could say whatever we wanted.” He shrugged. Joe rolled his eyes, standing up and brushing off his pants before heading out the door.

“I said you could say whatever you wanted, not do whatever. And also, what you wanted, not me! I was not meant to be involved in that interview.” She argued.

“But I did want that.” He grinned up at her, flashing his teeth.

“Well, now you can go apologise to him.”

“Break it up you two.” Andy spoke as he grabbed Pete’s hoodie, pulling him up with him as he stood. “You,” He said as he turned to point at her. “Go talk to Patrick. He won’t want to talk to Pete. And you,” He said as he yanked at Pete’s hoodie closer to him, forcing him to meet his hard stare as he spoke. “lay off him. You know he hates this interview crap.” She saw the rep tense his shoulders slightly at Andy’s words, and was glad that the camera had already been switched off for that remark. He let go of Pete’s hoodie, standing there expectantly. “Well?” They both took the hint and rushed out of the door into the hall.

  She wasn’t sure where Patrick would’ve headed to avoid Pete. Assuming he probably wouldn’t head back to their motel given they were sharing a room, she looked around the hotel lobby and the bathrooms on the first floor. After coming up empty she made her way outside, eventually spotting a familiar black and white capped figure sitting on a bench in the park across the road. She made her way over to him, taking a seat on the other end of the bench. He still had his cap pulled down low, but she could see under the brim that he had his eyes shut, clearly trying to calm down a bit. She poked him lightly in the arm and he turned to look at her, adjusting the brim slightly so that she could see his eyes properly.

“Hey, sorry about the interview.” She said, staring down at her shoes. “I probably shouldn’t have interrupted it in the first place, but Pete clearly felt like causing trouble.”

“Don’t be sorry; it’s Pete’s fault, not yours.” He answered simply. There was a moment of silence before she decided to get away from the awkward topic.

“I was coming over to tell you your Gretsch is finally ready to pick up. Just let me know when and I’ll go get it.”

“Oh, awesome!” He beamed. “I’ll go grab it now, we still have a while before we have to be back at the motel.” He stood up from the bench, waiting for her to join him before heading towards the park exit. They walked in silence for a few steps, but the words Patrick had said in the interview rattled around his head. “Look, I… I didn’t mean the things I said in there. I was just trying to get Pete off my back. Literally.” He bit down on his lip anxiously as he stared at the pavement beneath their feet. “Like I didn’t mean to say it was gross, or that you weren’t a hot girl-” He caught himself as the words slipped out of his mouth. “Not that I’m saying you are a hot girl, I just mean…” His eyes widened in panic, suddenly regretting saying anything at all.

“It’s all right, Pat.” She laughed. He looked at her for a moment before letting out the breath he didn’t realise he was holding.

[cpd5021]

Welcome Home

Welcome back to another one shot Wednesday! This prompt was sent in by @castleporthq and was one I was super excited to write. It is set in season 8.

“Confession of feelings/love”

Jay stood under the arrival sign at the airport. Today was finally the day he was getting his partner back. Hailey had called him yesterday, as soon as she had found out that her stint in New York was finally up. He had asked for her flight information, stating he would pick her up but she had brushed him off and told him she would just grab a cab. Of course he wasn’t about to let that be the case so he pushed and eventually she conceded, sending him her gate and afternoon arrival time via text. Hailey, and Vanessa and Adam, if he was being honest, had teased him about wanting to be the one to pick her up. Hailey had joked about how he must have missed her pretty bad to want to be the one battling airport traffic and Jay had blown it off, rambling something about unnecessary cab fare. In reality though, he had missed her. A lot. Jay had felt a shift in their relationship after he woke up after being shot and he knew, or rather hoped, she had wanted to tell him something in his hospital room when she had come to pick him up. Of course, Jay and his phone had ruined the moment and despite his attempt to get her to talk, she had blown it off. Jay hadn’t brought up that moment since it happened, neither had Hailey, but the look in her eyes that day was something that kept him awake at night. Over the weeks that followed his incident, they had fallen back into an easy rhythm as partners, but there was something else coursing between them that he just couldn’t put his finger on. On multiple occasions he had caught Vanessa staring at him, a seemingly knowing look in her eyes. It usually happened when she busted him talking to Hailey on the phone or sending her a text. She had even smirked at him the day she noticed Hailey’s stack of mail on his desk, awaiting her return. He had half a mind to ask her what she knew, because he felt totally lost in the situation and she seemed to have it all figured out. He knew her and Hailey were close and there were day’s he was tempted to ask her if Hailey talked about him at all, but that felt a little to juvenile for his liking so he refrained. Jay glanced at his watch, noting the time and that Hailey’s plane should be landing right about now. He paced back and forth along the wall of windows, trying to catch a glimpse of her aircraft. He forced himself to take a deep breath, suddenly realizing that his nerves were on edge. Noting the sweat that had gathered on his palms as he anticipated her arrival, Jay rubbed his hands against his thighs. He took another breath, surprised by his current state and then turned when he heard his name being called over the crowds. 

“Jay!” Hailey repeated again, a huge grin plastered on her face as she lugged a large black suitcase behind her. He immediately reciprocated her smile and jogged over to greet her. They weren’t the touchy-feely type of friends, in fact, Jay could count on one hand the number of times he had actually touched her. But something about her smile and the fact that after three extremely long weeks she was standing in front of him caused Jay to throw caution to the wind and reach his arms out for a hug. Without hesitation, and to his happy surprise, Hailey threw her arms around his neck, pulling him into a tight embrace. His arms wrapped around her waist and before he could stop himself, he lifted her off the ground, holding her as close as possible. The night she had told him she was leaving, all Jay could picture was Erin leaving him for New York and never getting that closure. He knew it was a completely different situation with Hailey and that she had no real need to tell him she was leaving, but she had. And with a promise she would be back. He had replayed her words again and again, her promise getting him through the long lonely nights after his shifts were they would have normally met for drinks or watched some crappy television together to relax. He wanted to feel her against him, her weight in his arms, to somehow prove to himself that she was really here in front of him. He held her a few seconds longer and then set her down, she stepped back, hands lingering against his forearms and he smiled at the slight blush spreading across her cheeks. He could feel his own face flush and cleared his throat, hoping to break the suddenly thick air. 

“Um..welcome back!” He said, giving her a cheesy grin. “here, let me take that.” Jay reached behind her, grabbing the handle of her suitcase and turning to lead them out of the airport. 

“It’s so good to be back.” Hailey smiled, falling in step beside him. They wound their way through the terminal, finally reaching the glass doors leading back out into the cool Chicago afternoon. Jay tugged her luggage all the way to his truck, easily picking it up and tossing it in the bed. They climbed into the vehicle and Jay quickly started it up and began to merge his way into the airport traffic. Once they got back on the expressway, Jay set his cruise control and glanced over to Hailey. She sat, staring out his window as the city came into view, with a huge smile on her face. 

“Nothing like New York huh?” He said, eyes scanning the skyline ahead of them. 

“No way, Chicago is way better. The vibe, the food, the people...” Hailey trailed off, her eyes darting over to him before she dipped her head down sheepishly. She recovered quickly and her gaze returned to the city before them.

“Yeah, Trudy really missed you.” Jay teased, earning himself a chuckle from her. 

“Yeah, I’m sure she’s been eagerly awaiting my return.” Hailey retorted with an eye roll.

“Oh for sure! I heard she even had a countdown set on her phone.” Jay continued, enjoying their banter and immediately feeling at ease. She was back and he was loving every minute of it. 

“Are we talking about Trudy here or you?” Hailey’s reply threw him off guard and he found himself stumbling over what to say next. He risked a glance over to her and saw that the slight blush was back on her cheeks, eyes looking anywhere but him. 

“I mean, it did kind of suck without you here. Adam just isn’t the same as you are. Definitely lacks that chipper morning attitude.” Jay teased, trying to break the awkwardness in the air. 

“Oh I know all about Adam in the morning’s” Hailey replied, instantly pursing her lips and shutting her eyes at the double way her words could be interpreted. “I just meant...like at work..he’s a grump...” She stammered, sounding like she wanted to be talking about anything else right now. 

“I know what you meant.” Jay let her off the hook with a smile, pushing down the slight sting her words made him feel. He, of course, had known about their relationship, but for some reason the mention of it now left a bitter taste in his mouth. They fell into a somewhat awkward silence as Jay approached their exit, pointing them back towards the city. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Hailey busied herself with her phone, typing out a short message and smiling with whatever she received in return. His heart skipped a beat then, realizing that maybe she had met someone in New York and that’s who she was texting. He loved to see her smile but suddenly the thought of someone else causing it made his grip on the steering wheel tighten. “Vanessa know you’re back yet?” Jay asked, hoping his prod for other information wasn’t too obvious. 

“Yeah, I text her when I landed. I’m honestly surprised she hasn’t started blowing my phone up yet. I’m pretty sure she was trying to set up a surprise welcome back party but I think I talked her out of it.” Hailey glanced over towards him, looking for confirmation that she had in fact talked the younger officer out of a surprise party. Jay gripped the wheel again, feigning focus on the road ahead of them and blatantly avoiding her stare. “Jay....” She said his name slowly, shifting in her seat to face him directly. 

“Define...party?” Jay risked a look her way and was immediately met with a scowl. Vanessa had in fact attempted to plan a big welcome back party for Hailey’s return but Jay had managed to convince her just grabbing some beers at Molly’s would be more Hailey’s style. “Just Molly’s and just some drinks.” Jay explained when she continued to glare at the side of his face. Hailey let out a huff and flopped back into her seat. 

“I love her, I do...but she’s a bit much sometimes.” Hailey sighed, not really annoyed with Vanessa, just tired after her travels. 

“You should have seen the balloon banner I talked her out of.” Jay teased, causing Hailey to smile. 

“Balloons?” She asked, squinting her eyes at him in mock disbelief. 

“Massive. And shiny. I also think I talked her out of the glitter bombs too.” He sent her a smug smile and laughed when he saw her eyes bug out at the thought. 

“My hero.” Hailey smiled, sending his heart racing. 

“Yeah yeah.” Jay shrugged, trying to play it off. “She’s at work for a few more hours so at least you’ll have a little reprieve.” 

“Thank god.” Hailey chuckled, rubbing her eyes and looking tired. “All I want to do is take a hot shower.” She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. The sound of her stomach growling filled the truck then, causing them both to laugh. “And eat apparently.” She chuckled.

“I did promise you some Bartoli’s.” Jay smiled, remembering their phone conversation.  

“You did.” Hailey replied, looking suddenly more awake. “Do you care if we just have it delivered? I really do need to shower.” 

“Works for me.” Jay agreed, finally nearing her house. Once he pulled in, Jay hoped out and grabbed her luggage while Hailey went to unlock the door. He hauled it up to her front steps and then lingered in the doorway feeling suddenly awkward. Hailey raised her eyebrows at him questioningly, taking in his sudden nervous appearance. “I can just go pick it up. So you can shower..” Jay trailed off, shoving his hands into his pockets. 

“You don’t have to leave just so I can shower.” She laughed at him, kicking her shoes off and heading into the kitchen. “Just order it and then grab a beer, there should be some in the fridge unless Vanessa finished them off.” Jay nodded and pulled out a stool from under her island, grabbing his phone and bringing up the number. He didn’t need a menu, they always got the same thing. Hailey smiled, looking satisfied that he was finally relaxing and turned to head upstairs. Jay’s eyes followed after her until she disappeared from view. He let out a breath and then dialed the number. Once that task was done, he stood and made his way over to her refrigerator, pulling it open and pulling out the promised beer. Jay returned to his perch by her island, cracking open the bottle and scrolling through his phone while he awaited her return. A solid twenty minutes passed before he heard pad back into the kitchen. Jay looked up from his phone and instantly had to swallow hard. He had seen her in non-work clothes plenty of times before, he was sure he had even seen her in her most ragged sweats at some point or another. But something about her breezing into the kitchen, wet hair draping over her shoulders, a loose white t-shirt hanging dangerously low off her shoulder and a pair of tight black leggings did something to him. He shifted uncomfortably on his stool and hoped she wouldn’t notice. Hailey ventured over to grab her own beer before joining him at the counter. She took a sip as her eyes met him, a quizzical look within them as she took in his face.  

“Everything okay?” She asked, sounding genuinely concerned. 

“Fine.” He pursed his lips, shaking his head and hoping to play it off. Before Hailey could push further, because he knew she would, her doorbell rang. She jumped up to answer it, returning a few minutes later with a pizza box in hand. She grabbed some napkins out of a drawer and then nodded towards the couch. 

“I only have a little while to be home before I get dragged back out again. I want to enjoy it while I can.” She gave him a smirk and headed to sit down. He followed her, settling onto the opposite side of the couch and they fell into a comfortable silence while they enjoyed their meal. After they had each finished off a few slices, Jay stood and brought them each another beer. 

“Maybe if we pregame a little, it won’t be so hard to get you back out to Molly’s” He teased, handing her the bottle.

“On the contrary, the more tipsy you get me the more comfortable I’ll be.” Hailey countered with a smile. 

“If I wanted you tipsy, I’d have grabbed the tequila.” Jay finished his retort with a wink. The slight blush that spread across her cheeks didn’t go unnoticed by Jay, but he told himself it was just the alcohol kicking in. 

“Oh tequila is definitely happening tonight.” Hailey challenged, seemingly recovered from whatever made her blush. Jay sipped on his beer, taking in her appearance and feeling a smile reach his mouth. He tried to cover it with his bottle but she saw right through him, the blush on her cheeks deepening with whatever she saw in his eyes. Jay knew he should probably look away but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “What?” She finally broke the silence, speaking timidly as he continued to stare. 

“I’m just glad you’re home.” Jay smiled wholeheartedly then, his heart fluttering in his chest as he continued to stare at her. He took in her ocean blue eyes, the slight sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks and nose, they way her hair curled softly against her neck as it dried. He glanced at her hand grasping the brown bottle, the way her fingers delicately caressed it’s neck even though he knew first hand how strong her hands actually were. His eyes traveled from her hand back up to meet her eyes and when she smiled at him, looking mildly embarrassed under his blatant inspection, something inside him clicked. Suddenly, the shift that had happened that day in the hospital room, the unnameable tension that had been simmering even before that, and the simmering of feelings he just couldn’t put his finger on....suddenly they all made sense. It was love. He, Jay Halstead, was in love with his partner. He swallowed hard at the realization, blinking a few times and shaking his head slightly to clear his thoughts, the whole time his eyes never left hers. He watched as she studied him now, as she saw the realization hit him like a ton of bricks. There was a new look in her eyes. An unspoken hope. And it made his heart threaten to beat out of him chest. Jay wasn’t sure how long they sat there, silently staring at each other, neither ready to be the first one to speak. Somehow though, despite the fact that neither one of them had said a word, Jay knew that they were thinking the same thing. He was sure the look in her eyes matched his and it was one he had seen in her eyes before, all those months ago in the hospital. Hailey’s phone, laying on the coffee table beside them, let out a shrill ring and caused both of them to jump. Hailey blushed again, giving him a sheepish grin as she leaned forward to grab it. 

“Hey V, what’s up?” Hailey’s voice was thick and he detected a slight tremble in her words. She swallowed hard, blinking a few times and breaking their eye contact. “Yea I’m home. I’m pretty tired, not sure I should go out tonight.” Hailey rolled her eyes and he could hear Vanessa protesting loudly that she was almost there and that Hailey didn’t have a choice in the matter. Hailey sent him a sheepish grin, knowing she wasn’t going to win this fight. With a sigh, she conceded and hung up the phone. “Vanessa is demanding I come with her to Molly’s, imagine that.” Hailey chuckled slightly, the room still thick with tension. 

“Hey, I had noting to do with it.” Jay held his hands up in mock surrender. “Where is she at?” He wondered if he should try to broach the subject now or if it would be better to wait. Before Hailey could answer, they heard the younger woman rushing through the front door. 

“Ahhh, welcome back!” Vanessa jogged happily into the living room, not even giving Hailey the chance to stand up before she plowed her into the couch in a hug. Hailey let out an ‘oof’ with the sudden weight of Vanessa on top of her and Jay couldn’t help but laugh. It was almost as if Vanessa hadn’t realized Jay was even there because she quickly stood up and gave him a grin. “She’s back!” She announced and Jay laughed again. 

“I know.” He replied, feigning her level of excitement. “I was just leaving, I’ll let you two catch up.” He stood, nodding towards Vanessa before giving Hailey a knowing smile. 

“I’m dragging her to Molly’s, she needs a night out.” Vanessa announced proudly. Jay smiled, knowing that was the last thing Hailey wanted right now but the younger woman’s enthusiasm was cute. 

“I’d join but I’m meeting the guys at O’Malley’s for the hockey game.” He sent Vanessa a wink, having successfully executed their earlier plan to surprise Hailey. He had known that Hailey would catch on before Vanessa actually had the chance to surprise her, but she was so excited that Jay couldn’t burst her bubble. Hailey played along, giving Jay a small wave from the couch before he turned to leave. Jay made his way out to his truck, settling inside and letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Originally, he had been excited to take Hailey out to Molly’s, to let her see everyone and catch up. But now, he felt selfish as he wanted nothing more than to have her to himself for the rest of the evening so they could talk. Something had just happened between them, whether words were exchanged or not. With a sigh, Jay started up his truck and pointed towards Molly’s where he knew the rest of the unit would be waiting.

*******  

Almost an hour had passed since Jay left Hailey’s house. He had driven slowly over to Molly’s, taking the long way to give himself some extra time to clear his mind. Now, he sat at the bar, flanked by Kevin and Will on either side. Kevin was chatting away with Adam over something Jay had long since lost focus on. Will, who had just joined them, ordered himself a beer and then turned towards Jay, giving him a funny look.

“Something’s...different.” Will stated, taking his beer and bringing it to his lips.

“Not sure what you mean.” Jay shrugged, taking his own sip. He was trying to pace himself, having already had two beers at Hailey’s.

“Mhmm, something’s definitely off.” Will leaned in closer as if he was examining Jay. Jay gave him another shrug and tried to play it cool. Will looked as if he was about to say something else, but was interrupted by Adam and Kevin hollering loudly as Vanessa and Hailey entered the bar. Jays heart raced at the sight of her, his eyes instantly meeting hers across the room. He took in her appearance as they approached. Her long blonde hair still drapes over her shoulders, though it had completely dried now. She had changed into a pair of jeans and had added a denim button up over the white shirt he had seen her in earlier. As the two women got closer, he could tell she had even applied a little makeup, not that she needed it. Jay fought hard to keep the massive grin threatening to spread across his face at bay, but still gave her a warm smile as she finally reached him. 

“Hockey game huh?” She asked, playing along still for Vanessa’s sake. 

“Busted.” Jay smiled at her, taking a swig from his beer as he stood up. Jay shifted and threw what he hoped would appear to be a friendly arm over her shoulders, giving her a gentle shake before he let her go. “Welcome back Upton.” The smile she gave him sent his heart racing again but thankfully Adam piped up that they had grabbed a table for everyone. Kim and Platt made their way over to join them and even Voight made an appearance. Jay watched as Hailey’s good mood and big smile faltered slightly when their sergeant approached but as Voight pulled her into a sideways embrace she seemed to relax. 

“Good to have you back Hailey.” Voight gave her a nod and Jay knew the look the two shared told Hailey that she was in for a conversation with Voight before she could come back to work. Voight turned his attention to the rest of the group and Hailey turned to give Jay a halfhearted smirk. Jay knew she was replaying the argument she and Voight had had before she left, although it was more of a one sided screaming match and he hated how it had affected her. He fully agreed that Hailey had needed someone to intervene and that she was headed down a dangerous path. Jay had tried to help her but hadn’t realized just how far she had gone. He was thankful that Voight had given her the opportunity to right herself but he still felt a pang of heartbreak knowing how Voight’s actions had triggered memories from her childhood. Luckily, that was behind them now and Hailey was back with them, back with Jay, and he couldn’t be happier. The conversation flowed easily between the group, Hailey being asked a million different questions and happily answering all of them. Voight and Platt had left them shortly after they had arrived and now just the unit remained. Jay and Hailey, both wrapped up in separate conversations, kept managing to catch each others gaze and each time Jay had to force a huge grin off his face. He wanted nothing more than to take her home and have a proper discussion with her, to confirm that she was on the same page as him and did in fact feel the same way. But something in the way she was looking at him was all the confirmation he needed for now. Hailey kept up the conversation, doing her best to answer everyone's inquiries about life in New York while fighting back yawn after yawn. Eventually, she gave up. Letting out a huge yawn and stretching on her seat. 

“Alright guys, I think I’m calling it a night. I’m exhausted and these beers are going to catch up quick.” They all groaned, Vanessa protesting the loudest. Hailey shrugged and made to stand up but Adam quickly halted her actions. 

“Wait, we at least have to do one shot.” Before she could stop him, he jogged over to the bar and she sat back down with a sigh of defeat. 

“Well, you did say tequila was definitely happening tonight.” Jay teased, giving her a wink. 

“Yeah yeah...” Hailey laughed. “I’m totally going to have to call an Uber though. No way she’s leaving any time soon.” Hailey nodded over towards Vanessa who was challenging Kevin to a game of pool. Adam returned with a tray of shot glasses in hand. He passed them around to everyone and they all toasted ‘to Hailey’ before they tossed it back one by one. Jay grimaced as the burn from the liquor traveled down his throat, feeling thankful he had paced himself and would still be able to drive. From the corner of his eye, he saw Hailey pulling out her phone, presumably to call for a ride. Without thinking, he laid his hand over hers to stop her. The second their hands met a heat shot through him and he found himself swallowing hard once again. Hailey gave him a questioning look and Jay leaned in closer. 

“I’ll be your Uber. I haven’t drank that much.” He smiled when she easily agreed and then they both stood and said goodbye to the group. He followed her outside, the two falling into an easy pace on the way to his truck. By the time they rounded the corner of the building, Jay wasn’t sure if the tequila was kicking in or if he was really just that impatient, but he reached out to stop her just before they reached the truck. She instantly turned to face him, another questioning look in her eyes. 

“Hailey...I gotta say something before we go anywhere...” He stammered, his throat suddenly tight with nerves. 

“Jay..you don’t have too say anything..” She smiled up at him and he saw the hopeful look return to her eyes. 

“No I do, I need to tell you....” He trailed off, a million words racing through his head as he struggled to find the right ones. He took a step closer to her, hoping that maybe it would help him focus. If anything, it did the opposite. He knew what he wanted to say, he just wasn’t sure how to say it.

“Jay...” Hailey all but whispered, her eyes holding his. He took another step closer, heart racing impossibly faster. He proceeded slowly, searching her face for any hint that she wanted him to stop, that he was reading this all wrong. But he couldn’t find anything there to stop him. He took another step, effectively closing the gap between them. The look in her eyes was sending him over the edge and he was sure he was about to explode. 

“Hailey..I..” His words failed him once again but a different kind of confidence rose within him and he slowly raised his hand, bringing it gently against her cheek. She pressed into it, her warmth instantly spreading up his arm. He stared into her eyes and she was silently telling him this was okay. Without any further hesitation, Jay dipped his head down and pressed his lips into her soft ones. He had always thought the stories of people seeing fireworks when they kissed was a load of crap, but the second her lips met his he could have sworn sparks exploded within him. It was slow at first, timid as they each began to move against the other. He felt her hands rest on his chest before the slowly snaked up behind his neck. She applied a gentle pressure there, pulling him closer to her and he carefully deepened the kiss. He kept one hand on her cheek and let his other find her waist. Time stopped as they continued to kiss but eventually they both needed to come up for air. Hailey smiled up at him, biting her lower lip and sending a different kind of heat racing through him. He grinned down at her and he was sure he looked like a complete idiot right now but he didn’t care. 

“I love you Jay.” Her words were quiet but sure and he knew she had felt this way for a while now. He had too, when he thought about it. But he had been so against the idea of love after his previous failed relationships that he didn’t realize that’s what he had been feeling towards her all along. It was different with her, it always had been. And he knew this would be different too. That it would be good and all the things he had been missing before. 

“I love you too.” He told her before closing the gap and drawing her into another kiss. 

[a-mad-scientist-approaches]

The Cipher Conspiracy (7)

Phase 1: Collection Phase 2: Construction (this one!)

There's a bit of a time jump in this one, so if you find yourself wondering, "Wait, what's Stan doing here?" then that's your answer. It's only, like, a day, so don't freak out. This will only make sense after you finish reading the chapter, but, when we get to Ford's perspective right at the end, it's like we're going back in time a day to see what happened to him when the bros parted ways. Before that, it’s focused on what happened with the others. Things are going to be slightly out of sync until Chapter 9. :)

Adeline Marks is @hntrgurl13‘s OC, and I love her. So much. Honestly.

The Addiford ship belongs to @scipunk63 (not much of that in this one, sorry!)

Madeline McGucket a fun character from @missinspi.

AO3  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14

Chapter 7: A Dream Come True

Chicago, Illinois (USA)    ∆

No matter what Ford did, he could not seem to move fast enough. It was the ice on the road, the people in the way, the very air in front of him that slowed him down. Something unspeakable was happening to his brother, he could practically feel it, and if Addi was with him . . .

He and Fiddleford burst into the bar, barrelling past the doorman like he was non-existent. They stopped.

Too slow, too slow!

Back room. Ford saw it instantly.

Move!

People blocked his path. Drawing his gun solved that problem.

Faster!

His ears were roaring and he did not think it was all to do with the blood rushing through his veins. The look on his face cleared the crowd quicker than his weapon. Ten steps to the door, five, zero, Fiddleford slammed it open before him, two men, backs exposed, blocking the view beyond, God help them if either of their captives were hurt, strike that, not taking any chances. Or prisoners.

He fired two silent gunshots and he saw the bodies fall to the floor. There was no need to worry about them anymore, so they dissipated. The only important thing was that Stan and Addi were safe now –

On the floor. Shape on the floor. Lying.

Blood on his shoes.

He was too late.

There was already a round little hole in Stan’s head, and his skin was cold, so cold, colder than the outside air. Red trickled down his face, pooled on the floor, lapped against Ford’s knees as he fell, fisting his hands into his brother’s shirt and yelling into his chest while that same muted sensation continued to crash down, muffling everything.

There was another bloodless hand lying next to Stan’s – smaller. Addi’s. The hair splayed underneath her elbow was matted with darkness. He could not bear to look any further and reached out to touch her.

Footsteps. He looked up. Bill stood above him, looking viciously delighted at the shining memory gun in his hand.

“ALRIGHT SIXER, LET’S GET TO WORK!”

Everything flashed yellow.

∆

It was an hour past midnight. Stan really shouldn’t be awake. On the other hand, it wasn’t like he was going to get to sleep anyway, so he might as well do something productive.

The apartment lights cast a soft glow on the scene. He had been rooting carefully through Ford’s bags, looking for some evidence of whatever all these machines and materials were going to be used for. It wasn’t like he could stop Ford: they were at the end of their collaboration, as he would put it. He was just trying to settle his own fears about his brother going back to whatever situation he was in.

“STAN!”

The door on the left side of the entrance hallway banged open, Ford hurtling out in his shirt and boxers, ruffle-haired and wild-eyed, half-asleep. He crashed into the door opposite, knocked frantically for a fraction of a second, then fell through into Stan’s room. There was a moment of silence, then –

“STAN!”

“Whoa, I’m right here bro,” Stan said from the living room, hurriedly shutting a bag full of machinery. He stood and went to see what was wrong.

Ford stumbled out again, letting out a shuddering breath when he saw him.

“Just a dream, just a dream,” he muttered. Stan winced in understanding, patting his brother’s shoulder soothingly. He didn’t think it would be too far out of field to think Russia was no longer part of either of their preferred holiday destinations.

Ford raised both hands to rub his face tiredly. One had a gun in it.

“Okay, whoa, no, let’s get you back to bed.” Stan said, snatching the firearm away as Ford looked at it in bleary confusion. “Come on, let’s go.”

“I’m not tired,” Ford protested, swaying.

“Load of crap,”

He steered Ford back into his room, the man falling asleep as soon as he flopped on top of the sheets. Good enough, Stan supposed.

His search was getting nowhere. He should head back to his own bed and try to sleep, unlikely as it was to happen. He was turning to go when a shine caught his eye.

That journal of Ford’s was lying on his bedside table, hallway light bouncing off the gold six-fingered hand on the cover. He hesitated before sitting down on the edge of the bed, picking it up, and flipping through. Starting with the most recent entry, he began to translate and read the code inside.

Russia was . . . not ideal. B changed the plans so that S and I would be split up, which was only the start of the problems we would eventually face. Quite apart from anything else, I do not have much time with my brother left before we part ways, and I am feeling now more urgently than ever how every second counts.

I cannot help but feel as though B was wrong to set up the meeting with the Mafia, regardless of how beneficial it was – we did retrieve the filament. Far be it from me to second-guess him, nevertheless, I am unable to say with any sort of confidence that I have complete faith in his wisdom now. On the other hand, I expect that the incident would not have rattled me so badly had I been alone. Alone, I do not stand to lose the people close to me, and nor can anyone be tempted to take them. Perhaps this is why B is so adamant about having solitary operatives.

One of the agents we have encountered on previous missions, F, proved to be a great help in refining the design for the device. Conversely, A and S found themselves in a situation no one should ever have to face. I swear I have never been more scared in my life. I cannot understand why either of them were able to look me in the eye afterwards. After all, I was responsible for what they had to endure. That being said, I am also immensely grateful that they seemed to place not even the slightest blame on me. They deserve a much better friend than myself. Hopefully I will be able to live up to that one day.

The writing continued, detailing the events of the night. Stan didn’t read any further.

“Sixer, you knucklehead . . .” he said softly, shaking his head at Ford’s lightly snoring form.

∆

Chicago DuPage County Airport was busy. An unbelievable amount of people crowded the waiting area.

“Must be winter holidays,” Stan said.

“What?” called Ford.

“I said it must be winter holidays!”

“What?!”

Stan waved a hand, dismissing the comment. They attempted to move further away from the crowds. At this rate, they wouldn’t hear the calls for their flights.

Not flight. Flights. Here was where they parted ways. Stan to California, Ford to Oregon. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen to them after this. Would it be another five years of silence? Longer? Would he never get another postcard in the mail? He could always drive up to Gravity Falls. He knew where Ford lived now. But would Ford want to stay in contact? Would he decide that his work was too important again, or – especially after Russia – would he decide it was too dangerous for anyone else?

A three-tone dial sounded loudly over the speakers. Ford’s flight was boarding.

“I guess this is it,” Ford said, distinctly dispirited.

“Yeah,” Stan said, trying to convince himself that no, his throat was not closing up.

“I’ll, um, have someone get the Stanmobile back to you,”

“Oh yeah! Right.” He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten about his car.

A silence bloomed, where neither of them were sure what to say. Ford cleared his throat and frowned at the ground.

“Goodbye, Stan,”

Stan looked at the ceiling. “Seeya rou – I mean, bye, Ford.”

Ford nodded shortly, then spun on his heel and left. Stan sighed. Good one. He looked for somewhere to sit down –

- and Ford crashed into him, hugging him tightly. Stan responded gladly.

“Don’t get too caught up in your work, nerd,” he said thickly.

“I won’t. Would it – would it be okay if I came to see you after it’s finished?”

He did not sniff, he did not just sniff. “Yeah. Yeah that would be – be good,”

With a lot more throat-clearing and gruff pats on the back, they both pulled away and gave each other smiles that were definitely not watery. Then Ford went off to find his plane for real.

Another announcement was made over the speaker.

“-to Sacramento, California has been delayed. Approximate waiting time is thirty hours. The next available flight to Sacramento is in twenty hours. We are not that sorry for the inconvenience. It’s not our flight, after all,”

Unbelievable.

He might as well head back to the hotel, then. Glumly, he realised that this time he’d have to pay for a room himself, since Ford had taken all his money with him. Well, it had only been two flipping weeks without seeing Carla, what was one more day? A damn mess, that’s what.

A jewellery store caught his eye as he passed.

He supposed if he was going to do this, he might as well do it properly.

Manhattan, New York (USA)    ∆

“Agent Marks, come in,”

Addi entered Jheselbraum’s office, still stretching out her muscles after the flight from Atlanta and the drive from LaGuardia. It was very early in the morning, and she was still recovering from the jet lag hanging around after the Russia flight.

“How are you?”

“Happy to be back,” Addi said firmly, approaching the desk and sitting in the chair opposite the director.

Jheselbraum examined her closely. “You don’t look like you slept well,”

From past experience, Addi knew that deflecting the question or outright lying would not do her any favours. Once, Jheselbraum had gone so far as to drive her home herself when she had kept insisting she was fine after a particularly rough mission.

Russia had been a new kind of rough. Things had never gotten that close before. Addi didn’t want to admit it to anyone, even herself, but at the moment fieldwork . . . didn’t seem as fun as it used to. She bet that the most danger the building’s analysts had been in lately was of a stapler fight if someone forgot to unjam the printer.

“We had a couple close calls on this one,” she eventually said, avoiding Jheselbraum’s eyes.

The other woman stood up and walked around to her side, signalling that it wasn’t necessary for Addi to stand. She leaned against the desk and placed her hand lightly on Addi’s shoulder.

“You’re safe now,” she said plainly, “and you’ll have a rest from dangerous missions for a few weeks.”

Her tone brooked no argument, and frankly, Addi wouldn’t have protested anyway.

“Take the rest of the day off,” Jheselbraum added, “have a warm bath, do what you want for a change. Put high-stakes chance games out of your mind.”

Addi started. She hadn’t included Russia in her report or debrief, for the obvious reason that it hadn’t been a sanctioned operation, and the not-so-obvious reason that there were only a few people she was willing to talk about it with – four, to be exact, including the woman in front of her.

“How did you know about that?”

“About what?” Jheselbraum smiled. Then she sat back down behind her desk as Addi took her leave.

San Jose, California (USA)    ∆

“It’s about dang time,” Fiddleford sighed longingly, when he had retrieved his luggage from the baggage claim. He was finally getting to go home. It had been far too long since he’d seen Tate’s drawings stuck on the fridge, heard Madeline singing as she moved around the house, and held them both in his arms as they settled down to watch TV. Just a few more hours, and after that a few more months, and then he wouldn’t have to leave home at all.

His phone rang.

“I sure hope this isn’t Jheselbraum about to tell me Ah can’t go home yet.” He looked at the caller ID. “That ain’t a good sign. Yes ma’am?”

“Agent McGucket, I’m sorry to do this to you, but you can’t go home yet,”

It wasn’t a surprise, but it still chafed. However, it was not like he was going to ignore whatever assignment Jheselbraum had for him; the work they did was important, even if he was tiring of it.

“What is it? And is it at all nearby?”

“Indeed it is. If there was anyone else in the area, I would have asked them, but unfortunately you are the only agent in several organisations who is close,” Jheselbraum said, genuine regret in her voice.

“Aren’t I lucky,”

“Do you recall our FBI contact, Carla McCorkle? I’ve decided it’s time to unite our investigations. I need you to head over there immediately and give her a copy of our findings. She’s at the FBI field office in Sacramento,”

Fiddleford sighed again. Nothing like a few hours driving after a few hours flying.

“You got it,”

“I promise that you’re free to spend a few days off as soon as you’re done. Again, I am so sorry,”

“Thank ya kindly, ma’am,” Fiddleford said with only the barest trace of acerbity, which he simultaneously regretted and did not.

Sacramento, California (USA)    ∆

Carla tried not to feel like she was being watched. It was something she was fighting more and more lately.

There was a spy in the FBI, specifically assigned to her and her work. She couldn’t tell anyone about it, because that would draw their attention. She didn’t know who it was, and she couldn’t investigate, because the spy might find out. Everyone was a suspect. The janitor had surprised her the other day and she’d almost punched him in the face.

When she received a text from Jheselbraum, she breathed more easily than she had in days. With no word from her, no one to confide in, and no one to take her mind off the situation, she’d been feeling extremely cut-off and isolated, not to mention simultaneously anxious and bored. She’d swept her office for bugs four times.

Carla’s fingers were busy tapping a tattoo on the desk until the office phone rang. She scrambled to pick it up.

“Agent McCorkle, there’s someone here to see you. Says his director sent him here for a meeting with you?”

“Send him up!” She tried not to sound too eager.

A minute later, a weary-looking man with glasses and a green suit stepped into her office and closed the door behind him.

“Hi, I’m Senior Special Agent Carla McCorkle,” Carla said, holding out her hand.

“Agent Fiddleford McGucket. Jheselbraum sent me,” Fiddleford said, shaking it.

“Please,” Carla beseeched as they sat, “tell me you have something good. Our case has gone so stale that yesterday Agent Wexler tried to get the Special Agent-in-Charge to tell me to give it up.”

Fiddleford frowned slightly and handed over a thumb drive. “Ah can’t say whether this’ll do ya much good, but it’s worth a try. That there’s everything we’ve managed to collect on the Cipher Wheel,”

Anticipation stirred in her as she took the drive and inserted it into her computer. It contained a single file. Okay, so that’s a little unexpected, but this is the work of an entire agency here. It must be good.

She downloaded the document.

“Symbols?” she said blankly, scrolling through. The document contained pictures of maybe ten symbols, the locations said symbols had been found, and underneath each a detailed report of any unlawful, suspicious or just plain unusual activity in the area at the time it had been discovered.

Fiddleford grimaced. “Yep. Just symbols. Ah expect it doesn’t help much?”

“Oh no, no,” said Carla hurriedly.

“It’s alright if ya say so,”

“No, no, I’m sure it will be . . . of some use . . . maybe. I’ll have to go over what we have again, see if any crop up,”

“Good luck.” Fiddleford said. “We think those symbols are a kind of signature for Cipher Wheel operatives. If they contact someone, this is how they show they’re workin’ for Bill Cipher, or maybe it’s just to show who they are without giving away their names. We’ve only managed to get these from reconstructin’ burned documents. They’re thorough, whoever they are,”

“Tell me about it,” Carla muttered. She ejected the USB and put it safely in a pocket. “I suppose all that’s left now is to-”

The door banged open.

“Hey darl’, guess who’s back!”

Stan practically leapt into the room, motormouth running at full speed. “We are finally in the same place after two weeks and three days, so grab your coat because I’m taking you out-” He spotted Fiddleford and slammed on the figurative brakes, an astonished look on his face. Fiddleford’s mouth dropped open. Carla noticed everything.

Funnily enough, the first question she voiced was not “How do you two know each other?” because something more surprising had occurred to her.

“Did you cut your hair?”

“Uh, yeah,” Stan touched his shortened locks quite vulnerably, looking more like a deer in headlights with every passing moment.

Not only had Stan foregone the mullet, he looked like he was wearing some new clothes, too. He’d really neatened up while he was away.

Wait.

A thrill went through her.

He was back! He was finally back!

“You work for the FBI?” asked Fiddleford finally, looking baffled, but there was a faint grin appearing on his face which showed he was pleased to see Stan. Not enemies then.

“With the FBI,” Carla and Stan corrected at the same time.

“So what were ya doin’ overseas?”

“Actually, I’d quite like to know that as well. And why you two have met,” added Carla.

“Can’t say,” said Stan and Fiddleford quickly.

“Mission secrecy,” elaborated Fiddleford.

Stan addressed the Oracle agent. “What are you doing here?”

“That’s classified,” responded Carla and Fiddleford together. A strange mixture of emotions swirled around inside her. There was irritation and curiosity about what these two had gotten up to overseas, but they were quickly dissipating in an onslaught of sheer joy – she might just refrain from interrogating the men! For a maximum of two hours and thirty minutes!

Fiddleford suppressed a laugh at the way their inquiries were going. “Well, nice ta meet ya, Agent McCorkle, and it was good seein’ ya again, Stan.” He said, getting up to leave. “I doubt this’s the last time, either.”

“At the rate this is going, we’ll probably end up working together,” agreed Stan, shaking Fiddleford’s hand.

The agent went to the door, with a last amazed look in Stan’s direction.

“Oh! Wait!” Carla exclaimed before he could leave, her responsibility to her job shining through despite her excitement to spend some time with Stan. “Don’t you need the FBI’s informa-”

“Lalalala!” said Fiddleford loudly, sticking his fingers in his ears. “NolalalalalaI’mgoin’homelalalalahere’smanumberifyaneeditandonlyifyouneeditmindyoulalala!”

He tossed her a card that was blank except from a phone number in the centre, then hurried away, presumably before anyone could call him back and delay his departure.

“I like him,” Carla decided. Then she vaulted over her desk and flung herself at Stan, wrapping him in her arms and not wanting to let go.

“Whoa!” Stan laughed as he caught her and hugged her tightly. “I’ve missed you,” he mumbled into her hair.

“Missed you too,”

Stan let go. “Do you have work to do?”

Carla’s answer was a frown.

“Well, not anymore! We’re going out!” He grabbed her hand and dragged her out the door, snagging her coat and bag on the way. Carla didn’t complain.

Manhattan, New York (USA)    ∆

Addi could feel tension that she hadn’t even been aware of draining out of her. She was curled up in a blanket, sitting in her pyjamas, watching her favourite movie, and eating snacks. She was free to do what she liked for the first time in a long, long while, and as a result her head was beginning to droop with the peace of it all. She felt completely safe.

The phone seemed to blare into the silence, shocking her out of drowsiness. She tripped over her blanket as she shot off the couch towards the kitchen, stumbling over it and using an athletic manoeuvre to roll when she hit the ground and come up right where the phone was.

“Yes? Hello?” she said through uneven breaths.

“Agent Marks,” said an unfamiliar voice, “these are your superiors,”

Addi was quiet. “You mean . . . as in Jheselbraum’s overseers?”

“Yes,”

“The in-charge people?”

"Yes,”

“The head honchos?”

“Yes,”

“The-”

“Yes. We are contacting you for a very important reason,”

“Why directly? Why not through Jheselbraum? That’s how missions are usually assigned,”

“This is a one-time scenario. Rest assured, it will not happen again. To you, or any of Oracle Division, for that matter. It is for the best that we . . . shake things up. For good,”

Addi decided not to press any of her questions yet. The person on the other end of the line seemed rather preoccupied.

“We are giving you a mission. It is essential that you start immediately,”

The last of Addi’s good mood evaporated. “Understood,” she said, containing her frustration.

“At the FBI field office in Sacramento, an investigation is being undertaken to an unacceptable end. Efforts to derail it have failed.”

“What’s being investigated?”

There was a pause, during which Addi became certain that she was asking questions the other person did not know the answers to. She wondered if the superiors had superiors.

“That is not of your concern,” was the eventual reply. “All you need to know is that drastic action is required. Something that will put all investigations on hold while the case in question is altered to reflect more suitable facts.”

Something was knotting in the pit of Addi’s stomach.

“An assassination,”

“Who?” she managed.

“Start with the Special Agent-in-Charge. The Senior Special Agent leading the investigation may also be necessary if she continues to pursue this. You are expected in Sacramento immediately,”

The only thing able to permeate Addi’s numb mind was the thought that this flight would be a muscle-cramping six hours long. It was only eight in the morning, so plenty of time to get there.

She would be thankful for that, but really it depended on whose perspective it was considered from.

Gravity Falls, Oregon (USA)    ∆

Ford sighed and dumped his bags in his living room. Over two weeks away, and the only thing different about the place was the fine layer of dust covering everything.

Although . . .

Perhaps it was just the strangeness of actually being at home. Yes, it must be. It was bordering on superstitious to think that abiotic surroundings could be imbibed with emotional qualities.

Nevertheless . . .

It did seem to be missing a certain vibrancy he had become accustomed to of late. He surely had not felt this alone when he had left Gravity Falls.

He was torn from his thoughts by the sound of the basement door opening.

“Welcome back, smart guy!” Bill grinned, spreading his arms grandly as he walked into the living room.

“Bill,” Ford greeted, shoving away thoughts about how alike the smile of the man in front of him was to the one he had seen in last night’s dream.

“Got everything we need, I see. Alright Sixer, let’s get to work!”