#The Bees is fun in that you can file it in a box along with The Horrors or The Gorilla

[falderaletcetera]

brain's full of bees and I'm dealing with an annoying tail-end-of-a-cold thing still But I have fajita ingredients and a murderbot diaries audiobook on the go (with another for after) so LET'S DO THIS

(these audiobooks are a godsend (sidenote I do need to find a secular alternative to that.) like this is probably indicative of a less than great baseline mental state but it is in fact so so helpful to be able to just pick up where I left off while doing small chores and in need of the escapism & something to calm The Bees. thank you martha wells thank you kevin r free keep up the gorgeous work <3)

[victorluvsalice]

Hello folks! I feel like I need to start moving to an "every OTHER week" schedule when it comes to posting the Chill Valicer Save updates, just because they always have a LOT of pictures, and it takes me a good long while to get them sorted with everything they need (even WITH the ability to now put like thirty pictures in a post if I so desire). So, this week, you instead get a look at one of my more recent builds -- the Community Conservatory! My first-ever Community Space lot! I actually built this for my potential "Valicer In The Dark" save file, as it's meant to represent the abandoned conservatory that Victor turns into a neighborhood garden during the course of that AU. I thought doing it as a community space and having the building noticeably improve as you took it through the Community Garden, Maker Space, and Marketplace lot subtypes would be a neat idea --

And it was indeed! :D It proved to be a pretty simple build -- I knew pretty much exactly what I wanted it to look like, meaning getting the initial shell down was really easy -- but it was a very fun one too. :) Let me take you through the various stages:

Community Space: The "default" space, this is just the shell of the building, with a little outhouse to the side and the voting board. It's completely empty inside, and I've done a little "moveobjects on" to put some cracks and such on some of the windows to make it look a little more rundown. This is the basic "abandoned conservatory" lot.

Community Garden: This is what it looks like after the Three Pillars have got it cleaned up, started making planters, and word has spread around their neighborhood, Six Towers, about this new free garden. I wanted it to look like the community had revitalized it, so all the various cracks and such are gone and there's a bunch of flowers outside. :) The entrance hall has a few hale bales to sit on and some gardening tools; the main octagon has floor planters, a bee box, and various garden-related decorations (lots of potted plants, a potting bench, and the like); the left wing is all about vertical gardens; and the right wing is all about insect farms! Oh, and the outhouse has been gussied up with a floor rug and a bit of art. :) I wanted it to be fun and inviting, and I think it came out well!

Maker Space: People have decided they want to do some crafting here, so some old beams and tin roof sheeting has been scavenged from an old factory and set up as extra cover around the back so people can set up communal crafting projects -- plus some stuff for their children! :) As I didn't want to mess with the main build (the whole point is that this space is CLEARLY the same building, just being built up more and more as you progress through the various spaces), I ended up having to put the "maker space" stuff outside -- and I wanted to make sure it was protected from the rain, so I did the old "floating roofs" trick and put some columns at each corner to make it look like the beams were holding them up. (I WAS going to do proper awnings/pergolas, but either they didn't look right or I couldn't get the stuff underneath them.) Included is the recycling machine, a fabricator, a woodworking bench, and a candle-making station under one roof, and a juice fizzer, three children's activity tables, and some toys appropriate for all ages under the other! So there should be something for just about everyone.

Marketplace: People have decided as long as they're MAKING stuff, they may as well SELL it too and have dragged some selling tables into the front yard...and if they're doing that, there's this old barrel someone turned into a grill, and these planks could be painted or carved and turned into picnic benches... :) The final upgrade to the space, we have the Jungle Adventures selling tables out front, along with some picnic tables and a grill. I was going to put one of the vendor stalls too, as that's a optional thing the game suggests, but none of them looked right, and this is a small lot with limited room, so I decided to forget it (I mean, the picnic area IS already really close to the outhouse, which is both good and bad XD). This is when the conservatory becomes a true community space for the residents, and I wanted it to look even more happy and colorful. I think I succeeded. :)

So yeah, that's the Community Conservatory build! Now, I haven't put this one up on the Gallery, but I would be open to doing it -- if I knew how putting these types of lot up on the Gallery worked. Since, you know, it's REALLY four lots...do you just upload one lot variant at a time, or do you get all four if you upload one? If it's just one lot variant at a time, that's okay -- I'm thinking I'd put up the base "Community Space" build as the only build of mine that does not require fifty million packs. XD Let me know what you think, and how uploading would work! More store shenanigans with the Chill Valicer trio next week!

[thr-333]

Just Another Class Trip :)

Part 7

Siblings fight thats just part of the deal, nothing out of the ordinary here.

First< Previous >Next

---------------------------

“You’re sure you’re alright Pollen?” Marinette asks, leaping across the city hoping to catch hide or hair of the miraculous.

“Yes my queen,” The bee Kwami answers, nursing an entire jar of honey Marinette had given her as an apology, “I’m only sorry I can’t tell you anything more,”

“It’s alright,” Marinette sighs, it really wasn't but that was hardly Pollen’s fault, “I know the miraculous are out there, I just need to find them… before we get another Hawkmoth,”

“It’s alright Marinette,” Tikki squeaks, she and Kaalki had yet to leave Pollen’s side, “Hawkmoth had years to rise to power,”

“Yes but Paris wasn't already full of supervillains,” speaking of, “Hide,”

The Kwami’s dart into the many pockets of her outfit. Marinette tries not to betray she knows she is being followed. She doesn't have time to avoid the Batman tonight. However, it doesn't seem it’s just him she needs to worry about, there more people on her trail. Apparently he had learned his mistake from trying to corner her last time, she wished he hadn’t.

She lets them believe she is stopping to stretch for a minute, getting them to lower their guard. Just as they should be content she’s staying put she jumps down to the wall below, sprinting along the narrow surface with speed a little above human. There are few ways to follow her now, Robin lands behind her on the wall, keeping pace with almost the same accuracy. He isn’t the only one, there's someone on the rooftops above her, she can hear the mechanics of a grappling hook.

She jumps from the brick wall to a mesh metal one surrounding a construction site. This one’s hard for even her to balance and the emptiness should force their other friend down. It works, but unfortunately, they were already ahead of her and Nightwing drops down in her path. As if she’s going to run straight to him. She makes a jump to the nearest digger, landing on its arm, slipping down the metal a bit, her boots really aren’t suited for this.

Her pursuers need to use grappling hooks to make up the gap she jumped, giving her enough time to slide down the arm of the digger, the roof giving her a good surface to jump to the next machine. Nightwing lands next to her as she races along the bucket of a dump truck. She jumps down into the empty basket, the metallic clang ringing out in the quiet night.

Predictably, they follow her down, blocking the exit. Lucky for her she is able to jump high enough to land back on the roof with a little flip. Without bothering to look back at their reaction she jumps to the next highest point which happens to be a cement tube being suspended by a crane.

She runs along the inside, the structure swinging a bit at the movement. Her curse echos through the tube as Robin jumps in, blocking her exit. Turning around Nightwing is on the other side, both closing in. Robin is closer, approaching with a sword so she does the only sane thing, ducking below it to punch him. He jumps back, landing the force of it has the tube swinging more, sending them all off balance for a second. Marinette uses the distraction to bring out her staff, meeting Nightwing’s weapon head-on. There's strength behind it but not more than she can bear, using the movement of the tube to force him back a step or two.

She doesn't’ have long to spend on Nightwing as Robin attacks her back. She moves the staff to meet the katana facing away from him. Nightwing doesn't immediately attack her so she pivots around to meet Robins's next swing. She paries with her staff, noticing there is less strength behind it as he expected that. Playing off his expectations the next swing she pretends to parry, using her wrists to change the direction of the staff at the last moment she lets the sword graze her shoulder, it cuts into her a little more as the tubes swing forces her to step into it. She lets the staff go the force of it hitting Robin's side, she uses the precious second to twist his hand holding the Katana. Using a pressure point Master fu had been taught by the guardians, she needs some Ladybug strength to make it work through the glove but he releases it with a hiss.

Catching the Katana she spins around to brandish it against Nightwing, having expected him to make his move already. Instead, he raises his hands, which are still holding his weapons.

“We didn’t come here to fight,” He explains when Starling doesn't lower the weapon.

“Oh, you did a fine job of that didn’t you?” She scoffs, half turning to face them both, having to shift to keep balance in the rocking tube, not at all happy with their brief fight. Robin is on her other side, now holding her staff in a mirror of her with his Katana, “So what do you want?"

“You’re looking for a jewelry box right?” Nightwing asks, how did they know about the miracle box? Did they know what it was? Had they figured it out from the pool?

“What’s it to you?”

“We were just going to offer our help,” He says kindly, but Marinette had met far too many people(or just one person) who used a kind tone falsely, it brings her guard up more. Then again she desperately needed their help, if they knew what she was actually looking for or not. If worse came to worse she supposed she could transform into Ladybug, or with another miraculous and pretend that was why she was in Gotham in the first place.

“What do you know about it?” She demands, had they seen other miraculous already?

“First you tell us why it’s so important,” Robin snaps, growling slightly as she threatens him with his own sword. Nightwing gives him a pointed look, silence hanging as the tube swung back and forth lightly.

He made it seem like he didn’t know, but it could be a trap to see how much she knew. Or they really didn’t have the information and were trying to get it out of her. She could say Marinette asked her to find it, but that would risk both identities and possibly even reveal her as Ladybug. Marinette had once received the miraculous, maybe she could pretend Ladybug had handed her the box for safekeeping while on a special mission. It wasn't something Ladybug would actually do but she had never talked with the Justice League so they wouldn’t know that. Could she pass herself off as being three different miraculous holders? Depends on how fast she can find the fox miraculous. In the meantime.

“A girl had it stolen, I bumped into her and she asked me to look for it, that's all,” Starling shrugs, relaxing her pose, lowering the sword some.

“Why?” Robin demands, even as Nightwing seemed to accept the answer.

“It’s a nice thing to do?” Starling posed it more as a question, forcing herself to drop out of the defensive pose, “Speaking of nice things to do, I give you back the Katana and you give me back my staff?”

Robin scowls but accepts the exchange. Starling holds her weapon loosely at her side.

“So what’s the plan, you got any leads?” She looks at Nightwing, eyes narrowing in annoyance, “Cause your boss kind of chased off my only one,”

“Sorry about that,” Nightwing rubs the back of his neck, “You know, just random person threatening a civilian and all that,”

“Yeah sure,” She gives him a flat look, “So do you have any leads or not?”

“Follow me,” He turns, leading the way out of the tube, Starling hesitates to face her back to Robin but ultimately follows him out. It’s easy enough to keep pace until they come to a much too high building.

“Yeah, there's no way I can make that,” She looks down at the gap for the street, then the good thirty feet of height the next building over had on them.

“Hold on then,” Nightwing grins at her, holding a hand out, “You alright with this?”

“As long as you don’t let me splat on the road we should get along just fine,” Nightwing gives her a dazzling smile, she still holds on tight as they are pulled up to the roof by the grappling hook.

On the roof, the first person she spots is Batman, which is quite the feat with the bright colors of Red Robin's suit right next to him. Batman just gives her a nod as they land, she raises a brow at that, um, no?

“I’m surprised that wasn't all a plot to get rid of me,” She lets the bitterness into her voice, who throws knives at people before asking what they’re doing?! “What's that on the pavement? Oh not to worry it’s just Starling! Oh, I’m sure Batman had nothing to do with it, look no tacky knives around! That serves more purpose as a collector's item than an actual weapon by the way,”

Batman looks at her with as much shock as the stoic can muster, while Red Robin next to him tries to turn his snort into a cough.

“So you go by Starling then?” he says gruffly and that cannot be his real voice.

“Well I had hoped I said it loud enough the other day for you to catch but I guess your hearing is as bad as your eyesight, how quickly did you lose me in that crowd again?”

“You’re upset,”

“You’re very astute for the, what was it?” She looks at Robin for dramatic effect, “World's greatest detective, was it? Yeah…. Rrrriiiight,”

There must be something going around since both Red Robin and Nightwing seem to be coughing an awful lot, the sound suspiciously close to a laugh.

“So, since you ruined my only lead I hope you have something to make up for it,” She switches back to business before Batman can regain his bearings enough to retaliate.

“We haven't seen any report filed so we were thinking you could give us a description-”

“That's the thing,” Starling cuts Red Robin off, she could tell where this was going and did not have time for it, “How did you even hear about this if no report has been filed? I’m starting to get the feeling you're just doing this just because of me,”

“... well-”

“Worry not then, rest assured I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I fulfill my promise,” She gives a quick bow, and yeah she can see why Chat finds this fun, "Trust me I have no desire to stick around longer than that after this welcome,"

“We can’t just let a meta-human run around my city-”

“First of all,” Was cutting off the Batman a good idea? No, but that wasn't going to stop her? No, “You really can’t do anything to stop me, legally and morally, despite you thinking it’s your city you’re still as much an illegal vigilante as I am, quite frankly you don’t have the authority to kick me out,”

“Second, a meta-human? Yeah not quite, and no I will not clarify,” She stares him down, “If your problem is with me being a meta-human there are a lot more vigilantes than me running around with powers that you let fly, not that is should really matter anyway,”

“Third, you don’t care about this,” well if they didn’t know about the miraculous the didn't, “I know your wheelhouse and petty theft isn’t on your radar, so why don’t you let me do my job in peace and I’ll leave you to yours,”

She looks them all over, sparing a second to take note of their shock, before turning on her heel. It’s then she realizes they are really high up and she has no way to get down. Well, might as well make his meta-human theory harder.

“Hey, they didn’t know anything,” She says, bringing her hand up to her ear, pretending to press a communicator, “Pick me up will you?”

She waits a second so they think she’ll be staying awhile, then jumps off the ledge. She calls on Kaalki quickly, hoping to transform quickly enough they don’t notice her costume change before she disappears into a portal, landing in her hotel room.

“You know I’m starting to think I should stop pissing them off,” Marinette says out loud, dropping the transformation.

“You think? Are you going to transform every time you meet them,” Kaalki scoffs, but is handed a sugar cube before they can complain too much.

“It wasn't the best approach,” Tikki says gently, flying out of her cape.

“I know,” Marinette pulls off her mask, “But the less time I spend around them the better, I just need to find the miraculous quickly before they realize,”

“If they haven't already,” Pollen says solemnly, settling in on the bed.

“Well the best I can hope if they don’t think I know anything and know just as much themselves,” Marinette flops down onto the bed with the Kwamis, “And that they stay out of my way from now on, hopefully, the rest of the trip runs smoothly enough I can keep slipping off to look for the miraculous,”

Her Kwamis accept this, curling close she starts to drift off, before a horrible realisation strikes;

"I'm getting blood on the bed!"

--------------------

Taglist:

@smolplantmum @flufflepuffle296 @dawnwave16  @caffeinetheory   @g-arya   @Maribat-2k20   @ladybug-182    @Actual-disaster-human    @fusser90   @messrs-weasley   @soap-lady  @paintedhope7   @zeneralla    @mochegato     @random-nerd-3 @clumsy-owl-4178  @throneoffirebreathingbitchqueen   @too0bsessedformyowngood @certifiedbidisaster  @Purplegeekypanda @awkward0ghostfan @theymakeupfairies @tikki-marinette @insane-fangirl-of-everything @elmokingkong @inarachi02 @slytherinhquinn @moongoddesskiana @dast218 @buginetye @redscarlet95 @biodad-bruce-month @hansa-12 @waiting247 @toodaloo-kangaroo @how-to-fuction-properly @trippingovermyfeet @greekmythgal @whatthefox22 @the-alice-of-hearts @bigpicklebananatree @indecisive-mess-named-me @nalu-ismyjam @deepestobservationwombat

[ask-the-nursery-au]

MasterPost - Character Information

A basic overview of the characters of the Dream SMP Nursery AU!

More characters will be added to this list over time! If your favourite character is not here, I apologise. Check back soon for updates!

Caretakers

Drista -

Drista doesn’t fully work there, but she mostly comes in for work experience. However, she spends a lot of her time on Tommy and sometimes Ranboo. She does officially have a time table where she comes in to work, but she never follows it. She is the older sister of Dream, and she’s 16 years old.

Dream XD -

Dream XD is Drista and Dream’s older cousin. He is extremely awkward around the children, and prefers to spend more time in his office. He mostly does the heavy lifting around the nursery, and the paperwork. His favourite kid is probably George.

Kristin -

Kristin is the only caretaker that the kids actually listen to, and as such, she’s in charge of snack times and nap times. She is ‘married’ to Phil, or so he thinks. She is an avian hybrid, and everyone calls her mum. She has since adopted Techno, Tommy, Wilbur and Phil.

Puffy -

Puffy doubles as the behavioural councillor and the nurse. She’s the ‘fun’ caretaker, as she plays with the kids the most. Foolish is her child, but Dream is overly attached to her. Her favourite game to play with the kids is Pirates, where her shoulders are the crows nest.

Children

Wilbur -

Wilbur is extremely dramatic, and very good with telling stories. He wants to be a singer in a band when he grows up, and wants to be famous. He has been banned from the sand pit for multiple reasons that include him eating the sand. L’manberg was a big game he made up elaborately, planning out every detail.

Fundy and Eret -

Fundy and Eret are twins. Their parents are Sally and Herobrine. Sadly, Sally and Herobrine’s relationship broke down, but Herobrine is still allowed to see them both on certain days of the week. He and Sally get along, but as friends. Eret got Hero’s God powers, while Fundy got Sally’s shapeshifting abilities. Eret is more calm and controlled, meanwhile Fundy likes to bite everyone. Fundy is also an ipad kid.

Tubbo -

Tubbo is a moobloom hybrid. He married Ranboo after watching Phil propose to Kristin. He was raised on a farm, and probably eats grass. He has way too much energy a lot of the time, but he usually burns it off by chasing bees or bugs around outside.

Ranboo -

Lugs around a fat diary with him constantly. His mother is the enderdragon. Just the whole dragon. He always collects little trinkets for her because she doesn’t get to see the overworld too often. He is terrified of a lot of things (worms, water, heights, mud) and writes a lot. He always writes letters to Tubbo.

Phil -

Phil is the oldest in the nursery, and probably the most independent. He proposed to Kristin and got very much rejected. He is an avian hybrid, however, he cannot fly currently, which really upsets him. His wings are bigger than he is. Fundy showed him one episode of Bleach and now he is obsessed. Despite being the oldest, he is probably the smallest, due to bird bone structure.

Techno -

The nursery went on a field trip, and brought Techno back. Now, he lives with Kristin. Techno is technically six months old, but he has the mental and physical capability of a 4 year old. He is very interested in reading, and is best friends with Phil. Anywhere Phil goes, Techno is sure to follow. Carl is a toy horse that he is very attached to.

Tommy -

Tommy is the youngest kid in the nursery, and spends a lot of time in the time out corner. He taught most of the class cuss words. He is also an avian hybrid, but his wings are very small. He takes the games way too seriously, and gets put in time out because of it. He’s barely 2 years old. 

Dream -

Dream is a jealous kid. He gets jealous of people very easily, and ends up in time out a lot due to this. He tells the other kids things that his parents have told him, and while he never means to, he ends up making them upset. He took Tommy and Tubbo’s toys once and that was the big thing for the whole class for a long time.

Sapnap and BadBoyHalo -

They are twin demons. Sapnap is a fire demon who looks more human, while Bad is a shadow demon who looks less human. Sapnap was raised more around violence and the idea that humans should be killed, while Bad took his mother’s mentality of all humans being good. Sapnap, as such, is a trouble maker, and a bit of a bully, while BadBoyHalo hates making trouble, and is a bit of a snitch.

George -

George spends all of his time in the nap corner, because it’s very calm and its away from all the chaos of his classmates. He only really comes out to play with Dream and Sapnap or for snack times. Most of the other kids forget he’s there sometimes. He mostly just gets dragged out by Dream to play.

Niki -

Niki is the kid that everyone likes. She always pesters the caretakers to take her into the kitchen and help her bake cookies, and they always give in, as she is a master of using the cute face to get what she wants. She always goes around with the cookies afterwards and shares them with the other kids. Overall, she’s calm and wholesome, and is essentially everyone’s friend - until you annoy her, anyway.

Foolish -

Foolish spends most of his time there building in the sand pit. He only really comes inside to ask for water so he can wet the sand or other little trinkets he could use to add to whatever project he’s doing in the sand currently. However, most of his time is spent outside. 

Sam -

Sam is a very smart kid. He’s pretty quiet, but he likes to make silly little contraptions. He helped Foolish make a working drawbridge with some lollipop sticks and other junk. No one knows how he does it. He ‘built’ Tommy’s hotel, which is just a box (he just scribbled ‘Big Init Hotell’ on the side of it and scribbled red on parts of it). He guards the time out corner for reasons still unknown.

Skeppy -

Skeppy is a pretty big troublemaker as well. He does a lot of stupid little pranks, but he never gets away with any of it due to Bad’s nature of wanting to do good. His favourite victim of his pranks is Techno. Skeppy is almost never seen without Bad, and vice versa.

Karl -

Karl’s parents are The Inbetween and The Other Side (nonbinary parents pog). He tells lots of stories about his ‘Time Travelling Adventures’. No one is really sure if the stories are real or not, but this group of kids are full of weird magic anyway so everyone doesn’t ask. He usually uses the other kids in the stories as well, and everyone wants to know if they’re in the latest story, so they don’t really care.

Remember that more information on the current kids listed and new character files for other kids are coming shortly! Check back for more!

[guessimjoiningthespidermanfandom]

No One Lives Forever Not Even God

Peter Parker x bisexual!reader

Peter Parker x fem!reader

Peter Parker x black!reader

Peter Parker x villain!reader 

Warnings: Language, Insomnia, mentions of antidepressants, mentions of drugs, drug use, mentions of addiction, mentions of nazis, parental neglect, mentions of the dead, cemeteries, mentions of meltdowns,  corrupt government, mentions of cancer, low self esteem, self destructive behavior, medical testing, thoughts of murder, mentions of injury, and mentions of knives, 

Word Count: 6.1k

Songs: Mother- Pink Floyd, He Can Only Hold Her- Amy Whinehouse, A Pearl- Mitski, Me and My Husband- Mitski, Saint Bernard- Lincon, Why Didn't You Stop Me?- Mistki, Nuestro Planeta- Kali Uchis, You Know I'm No Good-Amy Whinehouse, and Love Is a Losing Game- Amy Whinehouse.

 "I’ve been in a very poetic mood lately. I think it’s funny how anything could be considered poetry and something you relate too. Like Twitter or any other social media and the ongoing gag of people feeling the need to announce the fact that they’re making moves in silence. But that’s what I’m doing, making moves in silence. If anyone is in my business now I’m politely asking you to remove yourself from it before I make you.”

A/N: I only did one proofread so sorry if there are typos and this is just more of an infodump to set up other chapters so enjoy ig. I almost gonna start another series a social media AU let me know if you'd want to be tagged in either of these series.

Series Masterlist Previous Part   Next Part

Nightmares come while I’m asleep but, when I’m awake the nightmares of the day just come for me then, so really I’m just stuck. I would like to say the antidepressants are working, it's just the insomnia that comes with them isn't working for me. I’m honestly starting to think mood stabilizers would do me better.

Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb?

I’m not sure I could blame this all on the pills though. I’d have to give some of the credit to the massive bombshell that a certain ex Avenger had dropped on me. 

It's almost like every five seconds a new giant secret about my mom is unveiled to me. Like sure I saw from the video that she’d left me that she had associations with some bad people like Kingpin but nazis? 

SHIELD had apparently collapsed because it was infiltrated by Hydra but it was prevalent while my mom was still alive. Seems like she had worked for or with everyone who was anyone. I’m just gonna give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she didn’t know because up until two weeks ago I didn’t either. 

Her and Natasha had been recruited at the same time and worked together but for someone who claims to have been so close to her you’d think she’d know that she was dead. “She went off the grid and that was the last I heard from her,” is all she gave me with a smile that even I could tell was fake and I’d just met the woman. 

You know when grown folks come up to you and expect you to remember them because they met you once while you were like in the womb that’s kinda my relationship with Natasha. She knows so much about me and I know absolutely nothing about her save for the fact she's a spy meaning she’d be a great liar. 

She used to babysit me sometimes if I could trust what she says that is. Apparently I called her “Auntie Nat”. For some reason no one ever thought it was a good idea to inform me that I had a godmother. Maybe they did and I just forgot. 

I thought they were supposed to take care of you when something happened to your parents. And the one who’s alive is about as useless as the other. It might be fun to have another person that was considered family. Just maybe not a spy at least I’d know she’d walk out of my life so I won’t get attached. 

Mother, do you think they'll like the song?

“Hey mom,” I sighed sitting down in the light dusting in front of her tombstone. “I know it’s been a while and I’ve got a lot to catch you up on,” 

It took a bit of digging before I found what I was looking for in my bag. I ran my fingers along the cold surface of the small jewelry box. There was puffy white glue holding the larger pieces together. 

I placed the box in the grass sitting next to the tombstone. I removed a purple coiled bracelet and sat it next to the box. 

I tucked my legs under my body admiring the piece of jewelry. 

“I brought you a bracelet,” I spoke. “It’s kinda like a friendship bracelet cause I have the other. I don’t know if I should leave it here in case someone steals it,” I laughed. “You’d have to be a real shitty person to steal from a cemetery though,”

I curse so often I didn’t realize I did it until I had already done it. 

“Ah sorry! Excuse my French,” I chuckled.

“I met Natasha Romanoff and she said she knew you. She said she knew me too. I don’t remember her though…” I trailed off. 

For someone who claimed to have a lot to say I sure was at a loss for words. I just didn’t know how to get any of them out. 

“Oh! You’re not gonna believe me if I tell you but I got to meet some of the Avengers. Most of them were new though. You’d know some of them. Like Captain America I wanted his help but he couldn’t provide it,” 

I had a bit of an episode when I was told no one knew where Thor was. I think it was justified though.

 How the fuck do you lose two Avengers let alone the ones that can’t possibly be hidden. One is green and huge and the other leaves lightning bolts everywhere they go.  

Mother, do you think they'll try to break my balls?

“The other is Natasha but I don’t think I really knew that yet. She went by Black Widow. I’m sure you knew that though. You probably know a lot,” 

I wonder how many secrets she never told me about. I mean I could only imagine all the secrets working for the government would let you in on. Like she probably knew about big stuff like the Tesseract and aliens maybe she could’ve known about that. 

“Okay I have a question. I have a lot actually but I think if you answer them I’m gonna get up and run out of here,” I joked. 

“Number one is my middle name Natalia because of your SHIELD buddy? Like it might just be a coincidence but it could also be a godmother typa situation or something,”

It was a running theory. She would’ve known my mom before I was born. And if what I was told is true they’d be pretty close too and Natasha translates back to Natalia and I know she’s Russian. It makes sense. 

Ooh

Mother, should I build the wall? 

“Uh… there’s this boy,” 

When was there not? It seems like there was always someone in my life. Carmen in therapist mode said it’s because I put my self worth into my relationship status.

 “He’s really nice. Like really really nice. Nicer than anybody I’ve ever been associated with. It’s just he’s like…” I didn't know how to put the next part into words. “He’s just too nice. Too nice for me at least. Like he’s such a good person and I’m just me,” 

“And it’s I feel bad,” I sighed. I was getting myself too worked up over this. “Like I keep playing like a game of tug a war with him where I let him in and kick him out again it’s tiring. I don’t even do it on purpose. I feel like we could be something maybe. But I can’t let that happen. I won’t let that happen. It’s a self defense mechanism. At least I think.” 

I do it with everyone. I shut them out before they can get it. The less people you let into your life the less people that can walk out. 

It’s a bulletproof tactic. At least I used to think it was. Never realized people could get hurt including myself. 

“I saw dad,” I informed myself? I guess I’m not sure how healthy it is to have a conversation with someone you know can’t respond and isn't listening. “Like two days ago actually I didn’t say anything I freaked out and ran away. It made me think though,”

Mother, should I run for president?

Made me think about how I’d done so well on my own. Well I’m not gonna take all the credit, most of it was Carmen keeping my ass in line. I haven’t talked to her in a while. I haven’t talked to anyone in a while. 

”I found a small studio apartment in Queens. It was the cheapest one I could find. I’m just renting it like an Airbnb right now. I need to find a permanent place and a job,”

 I couldn’t find a permanent place at my age unless I had full autonomy which leads me to my next topic. 

“So I was thinking about getting emancipated which everything would’ve been a lot easier if you were here then we could just go to court for custody cause you’d win for sure.” 

Mother, should I trust the government?

“I know you never got to know how corrupt SHIELD was but do they like keep tabs on everyone who does anything to them or related to them? Because like I did a little snooping and I know they had files for all the Avengers and other people like Kingpin.” 

I knew I was going to have to do more than sit here and ask a dead person what to do but ranting to someone who couldn’t spill my secrets was a start.

 “I was just wondering how deep it went or if they had hidden stuff on me,” 

Mother, will they put me in the firing line?

It’s probably common knowledge that if you mess with the government they’ll mess back. I’d like to think they were like bees. You leave them alone they’ll leave you alone. Only stinging when provoked. 

But every branch of the government is like a wasp. They don’t die if they sting and they’ll sting you for no reason at all. They just like to see people in pain.

And I’m sure the energy research branch of SHIELD would probably be more than interested in a walking fire bomb that can move things without touching them. 

I mean I’m not going to stop poking things around until I figure out what’s wrong with me. So might as well not complain. 

“So I don’t have many things figured out right now and the whole you and SHIELD thing only confused me more so if you could just like come tell me what to do just this once that’d be great,” I laughed.

 At first I was contemplating if this was weird or not but hearing me say that I now know this is pathetic. It always has been.

Ooh

Is it just a waste of time?

But I didn’t know if I should keep searching. Maybe I should just pretend like I’d never gotten introduced to the world of powers or mutations at all. For all I know Peter, Carmen, Felicia, Wade and I are just normal people who do normal people stuff. 

Sure I wanted answers but I didn’t want to end up like those people who spend their whole life searching for an answer they won’t find any and end up never living at all. 

Like a quote my mom used to say all the time “The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all,” 

She really just used it so she didn’t have to listen to being put on bed rest but it obviously had a deeper meaning and she knew that. 

I keep finding myself stuck on that phrase. That and the whole when the dust settles poem. 

I’ve been in a very poetic mood lately. I think it’s funny how anything could be considered poetry and something you relate too.

 Like Twitter or any other social media and the ongoing gag of people feeling the need to announce the fact that they’re making moves in silence. 

But that’s what I’m doing, making moves in silence. If anyone is in my business now I’m politely asking you to remove yourself from it before I make you. 

“Uh I don’t know if I should even tell you this cause you died before it was even a problem in the first place but…” I blew out a breath digging my feet deeper into the ground.

 “I’ve been clean for like two weeks now. Which is actually a thing I’m pretty proud of right now.” 

I’d stopped using everything except weed, nicotine because those weren’t drugs and even then I used it way less than before. Oh, and my antidepressants too but that’s obviously okay they’re prescribed. 

I hated the word clean made me seem like an addict which I wasn’t. I’m many things but I wasn’t an addict. I just didn’t know of any other words to use. 

I wasn’t an addict but I’d say the lines between recreational use and dependency were blurring just a bit. I had gotten it straight though. I’m good now. The antidepressants are helping. 

Hush now baby, baby, don't you cry

“You have a superpower of just making people feel better immediately. I don’t know if it was the fact you were my mom or what but if you even just put a bandaid on a stab wound it’d probably stop hurting and disappear,” 

I wasn’t even exaggerating there was this one time I got hurt at the zoo and she just kissed it and I forgot about the fact that I even fell. 

I’m not sure how true that is though because I couldn’t actually recall the memory I was just told about it by my mom a few years after it happened. So I guess I remember not remembering then being reminded. Weird. 

“I wanna see the giraffes!” Aaliyah cried, stomping her feet down on the concrete.

This was one of the only times mom didn’t have to work on the weekends and Liyah had to have her way like always. 

“Mom!” I screamed “Tell her you said we could see the lions first,” 

She just sighed. “Well since she’s the youngest do you think you could be nice and let her go first please?” 

“Fine,” I huffed. I wasn’t doing it for Liyah, I was doing it for mom. Even a blind person could see how tired she’d been lately. 

Liyah laughed at me sticking her tongue out. She’s such a brat.

“You’re so dumb.” I rolled my eyes at her.

“I know you are but what am I ?” She teased hitting my shoulder before running away.  

I took off after her. She may have been fast but I knew I could catch up to her. 

I almost had her when my foot got caught on something. It launched me towards the ground and I put my hands down to catch myself but I still hit my knee.

I slid on the concrete scuffing my leg. I didn’t scream because that would make me weak and it didn't hurt that bad. I just bit my lip and stood up. 

I didn’t want to limp but it hurt too much to put pressure on my leg. 

Liyah had beat me back to mom and when I reached them she was already apologizing. 

Fake.

 She was just scared to get in trouble. I wasn’t gonna snitch on her anyways. 

“Let me see it,” Mom asked, grabbing my arm, pulling me to sit down on a stonehenge. 

She reached into her purse and pulled out a first aid kit. She always had everything in her purse. It was kinda like a super power. The black Marry Poppins. 

She wiped the scrape with an alcohol wipe and I just barely hissed. It didn’t even really hurt anymore. 

She placed a bandaid on it, smoothing her hands on top of it before placing a kiss there. 

“There,” She wiped her hands on her thighs before standing up “All better?” 

I nodded my head and we went off to see the giraffes because I’m nice like that.

“In case you were wondering, Aaliyah still always gets her way even now. I’d say she’s got me beat on the manipulation game honestly,” 

It’s fine though I taught her everything she knows not everything I know. I could still get one over on her if needed. 

Mama's gonna make all of your nightmares come true

“I found your pendant, the SHIELD one. Which I guess makes all of this real no matter how much I want it to be fake. I just want this to be a poorly written book where I wake up and the past five years were all a dream,” 

God knows how much I meant that. Well maybe I didn’t mean it too much because some people I’ve met in the past five years are people I don’t think I could survive very long without. Even though I kinda exploded on everyone so maybe I’m gonna have to test my theory on how long I can really survive. 

“Hey Doc,” I greeted pushing up the door of the restaurant. 

“Hey sweetheart, how ya been?” He queried.

“I’ve been better,” 

“I hear ya,” He nodded. 

Once we were in the back of the restaurant aka his office. I pulled out the diamond. Doc knew everything about everyone and anything. He could also make a duplicate of anything you gave him. 

“Whatcha got for me?” He asked, rubbing his hands together. 

“This, I’m not sure what it is,” 

I placed the bird pendant on the desk. I found it in a shoe box filled with my mom's stuff. 

“I was wondering if you knew,” 

He lifted it up to his eye to get a better view, His eyesight so bad that his glasses were practically a magnifying glass. 

“It’s a crest, I don’t think I’ve seen this before it’s most likely from a government branch,” He placed it back down on his messy desk. “I can do some more extensive research for you if you’d like,” 

“Yes, that’d be great,” 

“Stop by again tomorrow and I’ll fill you

I wish I never went back to Doc’s place or found out about flash drive, Vulture, SHIELD, any of it. Just when I thought my life couldn’t get anymore fucked up the devil came out the woodworks and spit in my face. 

Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you

“I remember all that testing they did after I agreed to do whatever Stark needed me to do sooo badly. I still don’t really know what he did- or he’s doing with all that DNA and other stuff he’d gotten from me,” 

Aren’t the Avengers and by default Tony Stark products of SHIELD so wouldn't that mean whoever’s behind all of that could’ve been the one to tell Tony about the fire thing in the first place. 

That had been the main thing about the whole Stark situation that I still couldn’t figure out. Someone needs to tell me how he found out and they better tell me now. 

“There are multiple lacerations 1-2 inches lining the upper and lower abdomen,” The doctor lady announced to her assistant. Before moving her cold hand away from my side pushing my shirt back down. 

Okay that’s chill nothing I haven’t had before. 

“We’re gonna have to do another X-ray is that okay?” Her assistant asked. I wasn’t going to bother to learn their names. I was planning to stay that long anyways. 

What’s the point? They’re just going to come back and say the machine is broken and then do another blood test. 

“Yeah sure,” 

I was led into a much bigger room than the last. There was much more machinery too. 

I was strapped down to a cold blue cushioned table by leather straps. Straps weren’t really necessary, not like I was planning on lashing out and mauling anyone. 

I closed my eyes when the flashes of the machine went off. Apparently I had fractured three of my ribs and bruised my sternum. 

You’d think they’d let me go now but noooo they need more blood and then when they were done drawing blood. 

They had to hook me up to a machine to monitor- I don’t even fucking know what they were monitoring. 

I just know I had all the pads with wires on my temples and chest and everywhere else. It reminded me of that one time I had to do a sleep study. 

Except they didn’t have holographs to read off and fancy probably government funded tech then. They sure as hell didn’t have all this whispering either. Or maybe they did and I was just unconscious.

Still I didn’t even want to actually be here and I was cold for once. 

“How much long do we have here?” I groaned.

“Not much longer. We just have and MRI left,” 

Yeah right. I was gonna be in here for the rest of my life

“I could probably go back there if I wanted answers,” I spoke quietly. 

“But I don’t want the government in my business like that well at least just not more than they probably are already at least and the tests are so invasive,” 

Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing

That’s not the only invasive thing in my life. Or should I say was in my life? I don’t fucking care really.

 My dad was somehow the strictest and the most lenient person ever. I think he just wanted control.

 I used to blame his alcoholism for everything he did but no really he’s just a shitty person. A shitty person who likes to beat on women and take doors off the hinges. 

“You are so pathetic!” My mom screamed at my dad. 

 They had been at this all night. For so long that I’m seriously contemplating jumping out of this small window right now. 

Sapphire had no qualms sleeping on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. Aaliyah and I however were still wide awake. 

I’m not sure exactly what was going on in her head but I’m assuming we're still up for the same reason. To kill our dad if he even touches our mom. 

I had a kitchen knife in hand as I sat on the bathroom sink. I always had a knife every time my dad started yelling a little too aggressively just in case but this time felt different. Like I was really prepared to stab him this time. 

I didn’t know what it was but something felt off. 

“Are they done?” Aaliyah asked, rubbing her eyes. The apartment had fallen silent. 

“I don’t know. Stay here,” I hopped down off the sink. 

I should’ve known she wasn’t gonna listen to me. The kitchen was empty which means they must’ve moved to their room.  

The next moment was the sort straight out of a family sitcom except the family was falling apart and the kids were going crazy but otherwise it could’ve very well been an “oopsie” misunderstanding moment. Where the younger child asks “Are mommy and daddy getting a divorce?” 

Then the oldest child pulls them into their body and whispers “I dunno kiddo,” or “No they’re just going through a rough patch,” anything like that.

 Except it wasn’t that. That wasn’t what she said and that wasn’t what Aaliyah asked me. 

God how I wish that was what she asked me. 

I have a bad habit of acting before I think. I opened the door opening my mouth to let out the words in my brain. 

“You’re dying? How are you dying?” 

They both turned to look at me like they were just noticing they weren’t alone. 

My mom sighed moving closer to me grabbing my arm. 

“I’m- Im not no ones dying,” 

The door creaked as Aaliyah pushed her way into the room. 

“But you said ‘I need you to step up you need to know how to handle it when I’m dead’,” She paraphrased cleaning out the cuss words. 

“It didn’t mean literally dying right now,” 

Now I could see how this could be us just jumping to conclusions from like two sentences but she had been weird lately. Like she’s always traveled a lot and been secretive but lately she’s been extra secretive. 

And I could tell the secret wasn’t to protect herself so whos to say it wasn’t the fact she was currently dying. It actually makes perfect sense. 

I’m starting to wish I wasn’t always right. Stage 4 Lymphoma. Basically we should go coffin shopping pretty soon. 

If only she wasn’t so selfish and would get treatment for it. She couldn’t leave me here by myself. Who’s gonna take care of us if she dies.

 I’d thought about it before and I decided I’d take on the role of caregiver for my sisters but then it was only a what if situation. 

Wade has cancer and he’s not dead but that’s only because he got pumped with like super drugs shit. 

Now I just needed to find some super drugs and figure out how to get her to take them. 

Fuck Cancer and fuck my dad. Why couldn’t he have gotten the diagnosis instead of my mom. A life for a life type beat. 

I guess that wouldn’t have made for a good tragic backstory would it. And what fun is life without a tragic backstory.

 My only question is when does the backstory end and when does the actual plot begin because clearly I’m not there yet. It’s only tragedy after tragedy.

 Maybe that is my story, just pain and suffering. Someone has to be the butt of the joke. 

She won't let you fly but she might let you sing

“You always told me to surround myself with people who you could block out the rest of the world with. Peter’s like that so was Olivia she was one of those people for me. When we weren’t yelling at each other or crying, I mean. Still wish you could’ve met her though,” 

“AH YES!” I exclaimed, pumping my fist. “I found it,” I waved the joint in the air. 

“Alright come sit down then,” Olivia laughed, patting the seat on the couch next to her. 

“Shit,” I muttered. “Where’s the lighter?” 

She just laughed at me again. Before reaching into my pocket and slipping it out. I couldn’t help but smile at how intimate that action felt for no reason at all. 

I quickly and lightly pressed my lips to hers muttering a quick “thank you,” 

About three minutes had passed and I could feel the weed taking course through my system. 

My head was in her lap until I abruptly shot up gasping at the beginning of Super Rich Kids by Frank Ocean. 

“Dance with me,” I pleaded it didn’t take much convincing because here we were twirling around. Although it was much more giggling than dancing. 

I bumped my leg on the glass coffee table and immediately apologized making Liv and I laugh so hard I almost peed my pants.

I was laid out on the soft white fur rug with Olivia laying her chin on my chest. I ran my hands through her hair. 

It was actually very easy there were no knots my fingers just glided smoothly through. 

“I mean shit,” I breathed “I know I can’t run from the rest of the world forever but until then? Bitch you can call me Flash cause I’m zoomin’.” 

She giggled at that before speaking up.

“You don’t have to run you can just stay here with me forever,” 

Her words were so genuine it made me want to cry. She basically just said “I love you” in more or less words. 

“You know what? I think I might,” 

She gave me a tired smile, turning her head to place a kiss on the top of my breast. 

I smiled back at her and how adorable she looked right now. I just want to kiss her for the rest of forever. 

When I glanced back down at her I could hear her breathing slow and her eyes had fluttered shut. She was asleep. 

I felt all warm and fuzzy and at peace and I couldn’t tell if it was the weed or if it was just being in Olivia’s presence. 

I wasn’t ready to say these words to her when she was conscious yet maybe I’d never be ready but I’d say them now. Just to get them off my chest. 

“I love you,” I whispered. 

I never really felt comfortable saying that to anyone. Probably a result of not hearing it enough as a child or something. My family’s never been affectionate anyway. That’s fine because I wasn’t my family, I was my own person. 

Stroking her hair gently before drifting off to the land of dreams myself.

So much for forever huh? 

It’s funny to think how I took times like that for granted if only I knew those were some of the only moments of normalcy I’d get for a while. I’d spent too much time thinking about what could’ve been with almost everything. 

So much so that I didn’t take much time to actually be. Now I feel like I’ve made it to the point of no return. Not mentally but like with everyone else around me. I think I pushed people too far away this time. Not so sure I could get them back. 

“Uh I can't really remember what I’ve already told you so I’ll run through it all. This vigilante or superhero Spiderman started doing his thing then I got caught up in his mess.” That was most definitely an oversimplification but what do I look like telling my mom I was a well known thief. “Then his relation to Tony Stark got extended to me so now I kinda do stuff for him but I don’t work for him.” 

I don't work for him he might think I do, but in reality he works for me. I had almost everyone at the compound wrapped around my finger. 

“I don’t think I really wanna work for anyone. I was offered to be an Avenger in training but that isn’t really my style. I will use his gym though.” I rambled on. 

It was kinda weird how easy it was to rant to my mom like this because not like she could voice her opinions about anything. I guess I hadn’t visited in so long that I forgot what it was like. 

Mama's gonna keep baby cosy and warm

“Oh!” I exclaimed remembering a very important factor that I left out. “Then we have the whole Staten Island fiasco that I told you about. I remember telling you that. I’m still searching for answers on how I did that too,” 

Like some real answers not that radiation BS.

“Your phone’s broken,” I pointed out the cracked screen sitting on the wood. 

“Oh shit!” Peter cried “May’s gonna kill me this is the second phone I’ve broken this month,” 

I came off way calmer than I was feeling. I’m surprised I wasn’t running around screaming right about now. I was probably just paralyzed in fear. 

How do you react in a situation like this in the first place. 

“Okay how long are we going to be sitting here? What are we waiting on?” We’d be up here looking down at the fire crackling underneath the pier for like 15 minutes now. 

“I don’t know actually,” He sighed. 

“Uh…” 

How was I supposed to respond to that? That was the driest response to anything in the history of the world.

 “Well since I’ve already pinky promised I won’t spill your secret can I ask some questions while we wait for you to figure it out?” 

“Sure, go ahead,” He nodded, shaking his arms. 

“Okay number one did you think I had died or something because if someone burst into flames in front of me I’d probably think Satan was coming for me. I’d cry too,” I laughed but had to stop myself as the stabbing in my ribs ran through me. 

“No, I didn’t think you were dead, you had a pulse,” He pointed out “Maybe I could’ve thought you were dying though. And I wasn’t crying,” 

Liar. He so was crying. 

“Aw you don’t have to lie I think it’s cute,” I teased if I didn’t feel like my body was falling apart I might’ve poked his side.

“Alright, second question: do the webs like come out of you? Cause that’s kinda disgusting,” 

“No, I make them with chemicals ‘n stuff. I’d explain the science to you but I’m not sure how much you’d care.” 

I let out a small laugh knowing what feeling would come if I laughed too hard. 

“I mean you could explain it ‘m just not sure how much of it I’d understand,” 

We both laughed at that. 

“On the topic of the webs what’s there integrity like how well do they hold up or like how long,” 

“Uh…” He blew out a breath running his hands over his face “As far as I know they last up to two hours. That is unless someone cuts them or something,” 

I couldn’t help but wonder if Thorn was one of those someone’s to cut the webs maybe I was the only someone. I didn’t really need to ask the question. Aaron had already answered the question for me when he told me about the deal at the ferry. I just wanted to see what Peter would tell me honestly. 

I spent the rest of the night asking questions and cracking jokes. I was talking for so long I didn’t realize how late it’s gotten. 

It should be a world record how fast I managed to fuck up 5 friendships. Well it’s my personal best at least. Only took like 4 minutes. 

I feel like that’s all I do is just fuck up everything. I used to believe there was a difference between being fucked up and being a fuckup but the older I get the more I realize that there isn’t. 

It’s like someone built a self destruct button in my head and every time something good happens to me I feel the need to run away. 

Like Peter he’s literally perfect he's smart, respectful,  adorable, and selfless. He’s literally a fucking superhero for godsake. 

I was trying so hard not to fall asleep. I really was but all the Trigonometry chapter was doing was mixing with the sound of rain outside and triggering the urge to fall into a deep sleep. 

“Okay,” Peter tapped his textbook with his pen. I wish I could be confident enough to do math with a pen. 

“So sin is equal to the opposite of whatever angle you’re trying to find so first you have too…” 

He droned on, I knew he was talking about the math problem lying on the bed in front of me but I wasn’t listening. Maybe if I sat at the desk I could actually be paying attention right now. 

“Y/N?” 

“Hmm?” I sat up on my elbows yawning.

“Are you tired?” 

I just hummed again. Until I realized what the question was. I reached for my phone and it was already 9:03 that woke me up for sure.

“Oh shit! I gotta get back,” 

Not like I’d get in trouble or anything but Carmen would get on my ass about the fact I didn’t come back when I said I would then she’d make something out of nothing. 

I scrambled around trying to find all my things to put them back in my bag.

“Wait it’s raining though,” Peter pointed out.

“Yeah,” I chuckled “It’s New York it’s always raining,” 

“Yeah but it’s cold and wet and dark so if you tried to skate you’d probably get hurt,” 

I knew what he was doing and it was working because frankly all his excuses were shit because one I don’t get cold and two I could just walk and there are lights everywhere but I was gonna stay anyway. I was too tired to argue right now. 

“May!” Peter shouted.

“Yes?” She called back. 

“Can Y/N stay for the night?” 

“Yeah if her parents are okay with it,” 

That’s how I ended up wearing some shirt with some dumb science pun sitting on the couch watching Aladdin for like the millionth time ever. I was singing along to One jump ahead  when I felt eyes on me. 

I turned my head but before I could make eye contact with Peter he acted as if he was watching the movie the whole time.

“What?” I giggled. Fuck, I hadn’t like genuinely giggled in the longest time.

“Nothing,” He replied, turning back towards the TV again. 

This time I was the one to stare at him wondering what was going on in his head. Not even the fourth song in and I was already yawning struggling to keep my head up.

 This goes to show how much willpower I had because I couldn’t even stop my eyelids from falling shut. I deserved to sleep though I’d been exhausted lately. 

There’s only like 6 people on this planet that I trust enough to fall asleep around and surprisingly Peter had become one with like 5 months of knowing me.

 I would still trust him if given the chance I’m just not sure how much he trusts me right now. I understand though. I don’t deserve anyone’s trust. 

Taglist: 

@tomdiddlyumptious​

[bbyx]

ripple effect - part three

Summary: During her fourth year at Hogwarts, (y/n) Deauxville falls for none other than Cedric Diggory. But it's not easy when you have to deal with protecting your family's fortune, keeping your father's illness a secret and having two of your closest friends catch feelings for you.

Pairings : reader x cedric, reader x draco, reader x harry

With help from some of the Ministry's interns, your tent was finally up. It was lilac purple with a beautiful satin finish. Walking inside always took your breath away just because of the sheer size of the tent. It smelt brand new and didn't have that homey feeling like the Weasley's tent but it would do for a couple nights.

(y/n) plops down on the bed. She opens up and rereads the letter that Minister Fudge had sent her father two months ago. You had started reading your dad's mail and answering for him since he was no longer capable of doing it himself. Your father had a very formal way of writing so it had been easy enough to imitate his handwriting to answer the Minister's letter.

You open the creamy beige envelope and pull out a sturdy white letter with gold embellishments. It reads:

Dear (f/n),                                                                                                                  I hope this letter is finding you in good health. I've heard that you have recently been traveling Europe in search of new properties. Barty and myself were wondering if you would be so kind as to join us for a meeting during the Quidditch World cup. The time is nearing and we must finalize the deal.  Looking forward to seeing you,                                                                                                                                Cornelius

You tried remembering what you wrote in the answering letter. It went something like this.

Dear Cornelius,                                                                                                         I am currently in Romania for business and I unfortunately will not be back in time for the Quidditch World Cup. However i've left my daughter (y/n) in charge of my business affairs while I am away and she would be delighted to join you. Barty and yourself can finalize the deal with her.  Wishing you the best,                                                                                                                                             (f/n)

Your father had started a real estate company when he was twenty four and it had grown into one of the most successful businesses in the wizarding world and in Britain. You assumed that the Minister and Barty Crouch wanted to buy a property but you didn't know anything further. It was a very secretive affair and you had searched your father's files extensively but there was no mention of this mysterious deal anywhere. You were essentially going in blind.

The meeting was going to be over dinner in the Minister's box during the Quidditch Match. (y/n) had time to kill so she walked back to the Weasley's tent.

You arrive just in time to see the Weasley twins and Ludo Bagman betting on the games.

"Personally I have to agree with Mr.Bagman, my money is on Bulgaria winning" You tease and the twins shake their ginger heads.

You hear sirens that signal the stadium has opened. You head over with your friends. The inside of the Quidditch stadium is just as breathtakingly festive as the outside. Red and green coats everything, it is filled with headshots of various Quidditch players and drunken voices singing national anthems.

"Blimey how far up are we dad!" Rom complains.

"Well, put it this way, if it rains you'll be the first to know." You turn towards the familiar cold posh voice. Lucius Malfoy.

You had grown up with the Malfoy's and practically spent half your childhood at their house. Narcissa has become a second mother to you after your own mother's death. (y/n) had her suspicions that her parents and the Malfoy's were hoping their children would get married but (y/n) cringed at the idea. It wasn't that you didn't like Draco but your relationship was more like cousins. He was like that one favourite cousin everyone has that makes all family gatherings fun. But you couldn't stand the snobby facade Draco put on whenever he was around other people. Like now.

"Father and I are in the minister's box. A personal invitation from Cornelius Fudge himself."

"Don't boast, Draco" Lucius says while nudging him with his cane. " There is no need with these people."

You rolled your eyes so hard it felt like you could see the back of your skull.

"Ah miss Deauxville, I believe you'll be joining us in the Minister' box." Lucius says in a respectful tone.

You hated how he talked to your friends like they were lower than you. Lucius nudges Draco with his cane and Draco immediately offers you his arm. You look back at the trio and mouth help me as you take Draco's arm.

"Have fun" Hermione says sarcastically.

The Minister's box is filled with house elves carrying trays of little delicacies and wizards and witches dressed in overly formal clothing. You immediately felt underdressed in your sweater and tennis skirt. But to your delight you could see the sweat glistening off their skin, after all it was still mid August.

A curly haired blonde woman in a ridiculously tight plum dress and green glasses walks over to Mr. Malfoy.

" Ah Lucius, darling, I see Draco has brought his little girlfriend along." She sneers at you, clearly not recognizing you. However you knew exactly who this was, Rita Skeeter, a slimy idiotic gossip columnist with worms for a brain.           " Hope she enjoys this once in a lifetime opportunity to dine with such fine people."

You feel a hand on your shoulder.

"Miss Deauxville, so glad you could make it. The Minister would like to talk in his private room."

Rita Skeeter's face blanched when she realised you were a Deauxville and you follow Barty Crouch through a curtain into a smaller room with a round table and a huge window.

Seated at the table was Minister Fudge, you took a seat just as the team mascots stepped out on the field. The beautiful Bulgarian veelas danced on the field while the Irish leprechauns bounded with their gold, this angered the veelas who in turn transformed into demon-like bird creatures. The teams stepped out on the field, national anthems were played and the snitch was released.

"Well let's get this over with quickly so we have a chance to enjoy the game" You say.

Cornelius Fudge starts.

"Yes, yes well as I'm sure your father mentioned, the Ministry would like to lease a property for a couple months."

Just then Percy walks in holding a stack of papers.

"Here are the papers you asked for Mr.Crouch." He says importantly.

"Ah thank you Weatherby. You may go now."

You almost choke trying to stifle your laugh, earning a glare from Percy as he leaves. Mr Crouch hands you a stack of papers.

" The contract." He simply states. You're too distracted to notice the house elves bring the meal to the table.

You take your time to look it over for any loopholes. Normally your father would have his team of lawyers draw up his own contracts but this would do.

"You want to lease lot number 637? The two acres in the Black Forest, next to Hogwarts? You're sure?"

"Yes" The Minister replied looking uncomfortable.

"There are a few modifications we would like to do to this property." Barty Crouch cuts in.

"What kind of modifications?" You ask, eyeing him suspiciously.

"Well first we would like to cut most of the trees off"

You squawk.

"What! You realise that property will lose all value without the trees."

"Indeed but the ministry is prepared to compensate you for the trees and any fire damage." Mr.Fudge adds.

"Fire damage! What on earth are you planning on doing there!" You blurt out, you're voice rising several octaves.

" Miss Deauxville, we would tell you if we could, trust us it would make this so much easier, but unfortunately you are still a Hogwarts student and therefore we regretfully have to keep our lips sealed."

You decide to let it go. After all your father had done plenty of suspicious deals before he fell ill.

"How much are you offering?"

"370 000 galleons for eight weeks" Barty answers. You knew that property in the middle of the Black Forest was essentially worthless because of the aggressive centaurs that lived around it. They were offering a lot more money than expected so you quickly grabbed your pen and signed the contract. The two other men did the same. You got up to shake their hands and left the room.

(y/n) sat next to Draco and Lucius Malfoy for the remainder of the game. They made small talk but she couldn't focus on anything other than that property in the Black Forest.

Why the hell would the ministry be so eager to lease that dump? Why would there be fire damage? Why cut all the trees? Questions were swarming your mind like bees.

You look up when you hear the tremendous cheers coming from all the Irish fans. The game was over. You smile to yourself.

Those bloody Weasleys predicted it. Krum caught the snitch but Ireland won.

Both teams came up to the Minister's box to shake his hand. Everyone got up and clapped when the Irish team proudly walked in. The Bulgarian team stomped in with it's sulking seeker Victor Kum leading them. You started shaking hands with people you barely recognized just trying to get out of there as fast as possible. You shake Viktor Krum's hand and give him a warm smile, after all the guy had just lost the biggest game of the year, and he gave you a smile that never completely reached his eyes. Suddenly a bright flash blinds both of you. When you regain sight you see Rita Skeeter standing there with a camera.

"Beautiful photo" She says with the phoniest widest smile.

You finally join the Weasley clan and Cedric Diggory around a campfire later that night after the Malfoys had insisted that you have dinner with them.

"Where were you? I was getting worried. I mean. We. We were getting worried" Harry says quickly. The others give him strange looks.

"Stuck at a dinner with the Malfoy's." You sigh "If anyone mentions politics or the stock exchange one more time I will slit all your throats ok?" They all laugh and explain that they're playing truth or dare.

"Give me a dare! Give me a dare!" Ginny pleads.

"That's not how it works Ginny, you have to get picked." George explained.

"We've been playing for an hour and nobody's picked me !" She whines.

"Fine, eat this" Fred says, handing her a candy.

She pops it in her mouth and her tongue starts to swell enormously. She runs to find Mr.Weasley.

"She asked for it." Fred says, throwing his hands up.

They all keep playing, (y/n) not really paying attention. She was distracted by the Minister's words: "we would tell you if we could, trust us it would make this so much easier, but unfortunately you are still a Hogwarts student and therefore we regretfully have to keep our lips sealed."

"Cedric, truth or dare." George asks, smirking.

"Dare."

"Very well, your dare is to go ask one of those veelas on a date." He says pointing to a group of breathtaking creatures. You feel a pang of jealousy as Cedric gets up. Instead he comes and sits next to you.

" (y/n), how about a date?"

"Sure" You smile and turn red as George gets up, flailing his arms around..

"No no no. I said a Veela."

"George, are you a bloody idiot, everyone in Great Britain knows (y/n) is a quarter Veela." Hermione says.

Fred and George look at you puzzled.

"Really?" Asks Fred.

"Can you do that cool demon bird shit?" George looks at you suspiciously.

You laugh. "No! It would be kinda fun though if I could. But no, I can't turn into a bird or enchant men into falling hopelessly in love." You say making dramatic hand gestures.

" I don't know about that" Mumbles Harry. You shoot him puzzled looks.

As the night goes on the group keeps talking and playing various games. Your eyes start to feel heavy.

"I think I need to go to sleep." You mumble.

"You can always sleep with me." Fred purrs. Ron hits him with the back of his hand. Cedric's jaw stiffens as he glares at Fred. He looks like he's about to say something when Hermione cuts him off.

" I'll walk you back to your tent (y/n)"

You agree and say goodnight to everyone. As you're walking back you hear screams and see dark figures with masks levitating and torturing a muggle family. You and Hermione run towards the forest where you catch up with Ron and Harry. Ron trips. Lumos Hermione whispers and a bright glow appears on the tip of her wand.

You spot Draco leaning calmly against a tree close to you.

"Better go Hermione, unless you want to show everyone your underwear, if so stick around it would be tremendously funny" He sneers while gesturing to the levitating family.

How can he be so freaking calm when people are literally being tortured less than fifty feet away?

Harry and Ron start defending Hermione and question Draco about his parent’s whereabouts. Meanwhile, you're stuck in a trance watching the family of muggles being tortured and feeling helpless.

"Have it your way, Potter" Draco grins maliciously. "If you think they can't spot a mudblood, stay where you are"

Anger ripped through your body at the sound of those words and you were about to tear his vocal cords out and jinx him within an inch of his life when someone gently squeezes your hand.

"(y/n), let's go." Cedric says, his eyes pleading.

[ferryboatpeak]

chapter 6.2

time for some more tom/harry/ben/meri! turns out this took so long to write because it is a very long chapter. infinite thanks to @lunarrua for the beta and @wanderlustwaning for the encouragement. only one or maybe two more chapters to go!

previous installments all linked here

As Tom’s getting Ruby up from her nap the next morning, gravel crunches under tires in the driveway. Ben’s been out late on night shoots this week; maybe he’s home midday to make up for it. Tom lifts a corner of the blackout shades to see if it’s the Range Rover. 

The driveway’s empty. Completely empty. At the end of the lane, the sleek tail of Harry’s black car disappears around the corner. Tom’s stomach lurches.

He turns back to Ruby, who’s halfway dressed and busily emptying a bin of toys. “Let’s go have a snack.” Grabbing the first sundress he sees in the drawer, he kneels behind her and snaps her into it while she plays. He sweeps a load of blocks and musical instruments back into the toy bin before tipping it back onto its base, and offers Ruby one of the blocks that remain scattered on the floor. “Can you help?” 

Ruby grabs a second block from the floor and wanders off toward the window. Tom hooks an arm around her waist and hauls her back to the mess on the floor. “Time to clean up, see?” He tosses another block into the bin. Ruby squirms and giggles. Tom gives up. Keeping Ruby contained with one arm, he gathers up the rest of the blocks with his other hand, and finally guides Ruby toward the bin to drop in the last two.

Tom glances through the open door of Harry’s room as they pass, just quickly enough to see a pair of trainers and a used set of workout clothes on the floor at the foot of the bed, and a black hoodie sliding halfway off the duvet above them. The panicky feeling under Tom’s ribcage subsides. Harry’s not gone for good. He’s not entitled to any information about Harry’s plans; soon enough, Harry’s going to go and be gone forever. Still, Harry seems like the kind of person who says goodbye.

Meredith’s standing by the sink in the kitchen, eating yogurt and granola from a teacup. She makes it look casually elegant, not at all like Tom eating cereal from a coffee mug because Carl didn’t do the dishes again. She smiles and sets her cup on the countertop when she sees Tom and Ruby. “Hello, sweetheart.” As Tom deposits Ruby into her seat at the island, Meredith leans over to kiss the top of her head. With a quizzical look on her face, she plucks at the strap of Ruby’s sundress. “That one’s getting a bit snug, isn’t it.”

“Maybe,” Tom says noncommittally. He supposes it was harder than usual to get her snapped in.

Meredith goes back to her yogurt. “When you’re packing up, can you separate out the things she’s outgrowing? No need to carry those back to London.” She scrapes the inside of the cup and licks the last bits of granola off the edge of the spoon. 

“Sure.” Tom hands Ruby her sippy cup. “What do you want me to do with them?”

Meredith rinses her mug and leaves it by the side of the sink. “Just leave them here. The maids can take them.”

“Oh, do they have kids?” Tom hasn’t talked to the cleaners. He’s usually been outside with Ruby when they come around every other day or so, bringing with them a different kind of awareness of hierarchy. They’re on the payroll just like Tom is, but after they bustle through the main house leaving the beds plumped and tucked and the scent of lemon and bleach in the scrubbed farmhouse sink, they clean Tom’s room too. The first time he came upstairs and discovered the fresh tracks hoovered evenly into the carpet, he’d walked carefully along the lines in his stocking feet, one foot in front of the other.

Meredith shrugs. “They may be able to use them.”

Tom’s no expert, but Ruby’s clothes seem nice. Soft fabric, prints that aren’t garish or babyish, some labels he recognizes from adult clothes. “Don’t you want to save them?”

“Can’t count on the next one being a girl.” Meredith pauses on her way out of the kitchen. “Wait. If the romper with the orange stripes is too small, save that one. And the hedgehog pyjamas.”

Tom nods. “Those are cute.”

“They’re my favorite.” Meredith presses a hand to her heart. “The rest of it isn’t worth the hassle. There’s enough to pack up as it is. I’ve got to start breaking down the office...” The words trail back to the kitchen behind her as she heads off to work, closing up the summer, box by box.

***

Harry lopes in from the kitchen as Tom’s coming downstairs at the start of Ruby’s afternoon nap. He’s fresh out of the pool, hair trailing in the same damp tail that Tom wrapped his fingers in yesterday. Harry ought to stay away from the pool, Tom thinks. He’s like one of those gremlins that gets dangerous if you let him get wet. Or more dangerous, at least.

“Hey.” Harry leans one hand on the end of the stair rail. He tucks his other thumb into the fold of the towel wrapped around his waist.

“Hey.” Tom stops halfway down the stairs, keeping a height advantage. The most defensible position. He’s tried to hold himself carefully away from Harry since the pool yesterday, and it’s only made him more conscious of how Harry takes up space, filling every room he’s in. Legs sprawling over the couch, index finger jabbing the air with every point he makes, always a hand on someone’s shoulder. Harry’s hard to avoid, but Tom did his best, tucking his knees up under him at the far corner of the sofa while they watched Queer Eye with Meredith last night.

By the end of the first episode, Harry was stretching out those legs of his over the cushions, poking his toes into the side of Tom’s thigh. Tom cautiously side-eyed him. Harry smirked and toed him again. The least awkward option was what Tom would have done all along: good-naturedly shove at his feet, elbow back when Harry kicked at him, let Harry’s legs wind up in his lap anyway. So that’s what Tom had done. He still doesn’t understand what happened yesterday, but apparently Tom’s forgiven. Or he’s forgiven Harry.

At the bottom of the stairway, Harry shifts from one foot to the other. “Do you want to go into town for dinner tonight?”

The nerve-jangling possibilities explode in front of Tom: dinner with Harry, just the two of then, a chance to get out of the house, a chance to figure out where they stand after yesterday. And then he realizes that Harry’s question wasn’t specific to Tom. It probably includes everyone.

“What’s Meredith think?” There are logistics, things that probably haven’t occurred to Harry. Will they have to bring a baby seat, will it be all right to eat early enough for Ruby to be home by bedtime, can all of the rest of them manage to eat while Ruby’s squirming and screeching and needing attention the way she does whenever they eat dinner with her at home.

Harry gives him a strange look. “You get off once Ruby goes to bed, right? We’ll go after that.”

“Yeah, but…” Tom should check, even if it’s not all five of them. Just to make sure. He dodges around Harry, heading for the office.

“Meredith!” Harry tips his head back, bellowing. Tom’s hand jerks up reflexively, trying to shush him before he wakes Ruby, but Harry ignores him. “Can Tom come out and play tonight?”

Tom cringes. He would never yell at Meredith from the next room. He darts toward the office, wanting to catch her before she has to get up from her work. 

“What?” Meredith calls back, just as Tom reaches the office door. She’s at her desk, sorting through an array of file folders spread in front of her.

“Tom and I are going out tonight and he wants your blessing!” Harry hollers it from the staircase almost gleefully. Ruby’s going to wake up, and Tom’s going to have to try to put her down again, and she’s going to refuse to sleep and she’ll be cranky all afternoon, and Tom really needs her to nap for an uninterrupted 90 minutes so he can clean up the kitchen and have a small meltdown about tonight.

Meredith looks up from the files with an expression of mild surprise. Tom’s face burns. “Sorry, I…” 

“Of course you should,” Meredith interrupts him. “You ought to get out of here for a night.” She waves him away. “Go on, have fun. Do you want me to put Ruby down?” 

“No,” Tom says quickly. “I’ve got it.” So Meredith’s staying with Ruby. He’s going to dinner with Harry. “We can go after,” he adds.

“All right, then.” Meredith reorients herself back to her work.

Tom blinks and turns to leave. His pulse is still racing.

Harry looks at him from halfway up the stairs. His towel has come untucked, probably from all the yelling. He’s holding it up around his waist with the fabric bunched in one hand. The hemmed ends fall open to frame the narrow triangle of paler skin at the top of his thigh. “All right?” Harry asks.

Tom nods. “See you tonight.” Somehow the words come out normally, casually, despite the swarm of bees that’s forming in his stomach. He’s going out with Harry, just the two of them. To dinner. Harry asked him. Almost like a date. Not that he should be thinking in those terms. But still.

***

When he comes downstairs after putting Ruby to bed, the sight of Harry doesn’t do anything to quell Tom’s nervous anticipation. Harry’s wearing a pair of white trousers Tom hasn’t seen before, just as baggy as his usual gray ones, and a short-sleeved black shirt with one too many buttons undone. Something glints around his fingers, and for a single irrational second Tom thinks Harry’s got a set of brass knuckles on. But it’s just a fistful of rings, all different shapes and sizes, blurring into each other to make his hand look armored. Harry was wearing them the day he arrived, Tom remembers, and he hasn’t seen them since.

It reminds him of how the sight of Harry naked used to set him on edge. How he lived for a week determinedly directing his gaze away from the pool, away from Harry’s narrow hips and broad thighs and the rivulets of water tracing down the defined lines of his back. How it made him feel under attack, jealous and jittery and wanting. But now Harry’s naked body is familiar, by sight and touch and taste. And it’s the sight of Harry clothed -- clothed like this, cleaned up and trying -- that scares him more than anything.

Harry smiles up at him. “Ready?”

“I’m just going to change.” He hadn’t planned on it, but with the way Harry looks, Tom feels underdressed in his usual shorts and sandals. He’s got to make some kind of effort, even though this isn’t a date. It’s just dinner. Dinner with someone he’s fucking. He’s had a lot of those dinners this summer. They’re not dates.

Up in his room, he ransacks his haphazard pile of clean clothes and the dregs of his duffle for something presentable. Trousers. A clean t-shirt. A plaid buttondown over it. He does up the buttons as an experiment, and then undoes them to leave the shirt open like he usually would. His boots are waiting in the closet, where they’ve sat untouched since the day he arrived. It feels like pulling a secret weapon from under a floorboard. Thick soles to buoy him through the evening, artificial confidence laced tight around his ankles. Armored, like Harry with his rings.

That makes him think of his pendants, which he stopped wearing as soon as Ruby decided they were fun to grab. It takes a moment to remember that they’re zipped in the side pocket of his duffle. He looks in the mirror as he loops them back around his neck. He hasn’t had a haircut all summer; the tails of it are sticking out behind his ears. He rakes his fingers through it instead of reaching for his brush, trying to scrape it into some sort of order that doesn’t look like he’s trying too hard. 

Harry’s waiting by his car in the blue-gold evening light when Tom comes back down. The sunglasses that were pinning his hair back are on his face now. Tom cuts diagonally across the terrace toward him. As he gets closer, he can hear the car key clicking against Harry’s rings as Harry works it through his left hand, fidgeting.

Harry grins at him. “You look nice.” The sunglasses steal the rest of his expression; there’s no way for Tom to tell if he’s serious. He should have said it to Harry first. Or nobody should have said it at all; Harry’s had his mouth on Tom’s dick too many times this summer for an all-purpose “you look nice.” That’s not what you say to a sure thing. That’s what you say on a first date. 

“Something without baby mess on it.” Tom twitches one of his shirttails to demonstrate, hoping his response works whether or not Harry’s serious. It’s too late to say you too, and anyway you too implies an equivalence that’s not reality. Harry, in his white trousers and loafers, looks nice like he ought to be strolling along the Riviera and Tom looks nice like Ruby hasn’t smeared applesauce on this particular t-shirt.

“Shall we?” Without waiting for an answer, Harry opens his door and slides into the driver’s seat.

The passenger door resists Tom. He tries the handle a second time. Harry’s disappeared, invisible through the dark glass, and for a moment it feels like he’s being tricked. Tom raps his knuckles on the blind window. A second later the door unlocks soundlessly, recognizable only by the smooth release of the latch he can feel through his fingertips on the handle. 

“Sorry,” Harry says when Tom opens the door. “Not used to this car.” 

“Thought you were going to drive away.” The passenger seat is tilted backward at an indolent angle, so that he’s looking at Harry from behind and below. He leans over his knees to feel for the lever to bring it upright, but the underside of the seat doesn’t have any mechanism. 

Harry cackles and zooms his hand forward to pantomime peeling out. “Go back inside, have some salad with Meredith.”

Tom laughs, as if that hadn’t been his exact fear ten seconds ago. He slips his hand down by his door and finds three different switches. He presses cautiously at the top of an oblong one. With a faint whir, the seat back rises to meet him.

The inside of the car is all black leather, punctuated with swoops of wood grain along the dash. There’s no trash on the floor, no coffee cups in the console, nothing that’s been tossed into the back to clear out the passenger seat for Tom. It doesn’t even smell like Harry.

Tom buckles his seat belt. “Is this your car?”

“It’s a rental.” The engine comes to life with a restrained purr. 

The gravel underneath them is barely noticeable as Harry pulls down the drive, even though Tom feels like he’s riding just off the ground. He tries to remember the last time he was in a car. Maybe some errand in town with Meredith and Ruby. Compared to the high and mighty Range Rover, any other vehicle would probably feel low.

“How does that work, renting something like this?” This car, sleek and soundless like a predatory sea creature, doesn’t seem like something they’d just hand over the keys to at the airport counter.

“I don’t know,” Harry says reflectively, as if it’s only just occurred to him that this sort of information would be possible to know. “I didn’t book it myself. They just met me at the train station.” Harry brakes suddenly at the end of the lane, just before the turn onto the country road, and looks over to Tom. “Do you want to drive?”

“Are you serious?” He hasn’t driven anything since the last time he was home, in the spring, borrowing his mum’s car, Molly singing in the passenger seat. He hasn’t ever driven a car like this. What’s Harry trying to prove?

“Come on.” Harry throws the gearshift into park with a flourish, and opens his door with the engine still running.

As Harry lopes across in front of the windshield, Tom scrambles to unbuckle his seat belt. The car pings with an unnecessary reminder about the door Harry left open behind him. Tom stands up with his hand still on the latch of his own door, blocking Harry’s path as he rounds the front of the car. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I am.” Harry rests his hands on the top of the open passenger door between them and leans toward Tom. “Do it.”

His eyes are still hidden behind his sunglasses. There’s no way for Tom to tell whether this is a gift or a challenge. “What if I put it in a ditch?” The possibility seems simultaneously remote and imminent. Nothing could disrupt the perfect lines of this glossy black machine, but also Tom is the very thing that might. 

Harry leans forward, pressing the door back toward Tom. Tom’s body flashes to yesterday: cool water and hot sun, Harry’s weight pressing him against the wall, Harry’s mouth on his. He swallows.

“I trust you,” Harry says. His face is inches away, inscrutable. Tom can see himself reflected in Harry’s sunglasses. The frame of the car digs into his shoulders and his calves as the door presses him back. He wants to punch forward, break the window between them, get his hands on Harry. The intensity of his want ought to shatter the glass all on its own.

He gently lets the latch go and slides out from behind the door. Without Tom’s resistance, the door lurches forward under Harry’s weight. Tom jams his forearm back into the opening just in time to stop it from closing on Harry’s fingers. “Easy,” he warns, elbowing the door toward Harry to extricate himself.

Harry takes the door from him and steps back to open it, hip-checking Tom as he passes so that Tom stumbles a step down the verge at the edge of the lane. Tom shoulders up into him, jostling Harry towards the car. His cheek connects with the sun-warmed back of Harry’s black shirt. Tom’s body sings at the contact, propelling him around the nose of the car to open the driver’s door with an assurance he doesn’t really feel.

The view’s different from the driver’s seat, disconcertingly on the wrong side of the car. He reaches for the seat controls as if he has any idea what he’s doing, moving himself forward until his foot connects securely with the gas pedal. Every inch is a reminder of Harry’s long legs. He checks the mirrors.

“Ready yet?” Harry asks, reclining back in the passenger seat.

Tom flips him off, and shifts into gear. At the tentative press of his foot, the car surges forward, faster than he expected but faultlessly smooth. He turns onto the country road and reaches automatically to flip the visor down when the evening sun hits him full in the face. The view is still searingly bright even with the worst of the sun shielded behind the visor. Tom squints and focuses on the road, second-guessing himself about which side he’s supposed to be driving on.

“Here.” A pair of sunglasses hovers in front of his face. Harry tries to push them up his nose one-handed. One of the arms pokes Tom in the cheekbone.

Tom swats his hand out, first at Harry and then at the sunglasses that Harry’s shoving into his face. “Trying to drive here.”

“Hold still,” Harry says, unperturbed. “The sun’s in your eyes, you can’t see.” The sunglasses disappear for a moment and return. This time Harry’s using both hands. The arms of the sunglasses trace past Tom’s temples and hook onto his ears.

“Because your hand’s in my face.” Tom tips his chin down to look over the tops of the sunglasses. Harry pushes them up his nose with a thumb at the bridge. The view darkens as the glasses slide into place. Harry pats him twice on the forehead.

Tom glances sideways. “Thanks.” Harry’s looking at him still, the corners of his mouth tucked up in a small pleased smile. His hair creeps toward his face without the sunglasses to pin it back. 

Tom snaps his attention back to the road. He’s the one who’s inscrutable now, his expression safe behind Harry’s lenses. The shift in gears as he picks up speed is imperceptible. Every slight movement of his foot on the accelerator tells him the car’s got more power than he expects. More power than he wants. He’s not sure what it’s good for, on this narrow country road. But oh, it’s fun to drive.

Tom takes a curve a little faster than he should, just to feel the car respond. It pushes against the turn like a cat arching its spine to be petted. The sun soaks a late-summer vineyard golden on one side of the road. On the other, the valley falls gently away toward the hills in the distance.  

Harry sees that he’s got his bearings. “What do you think?”

“Drives nice.” Secure behind the sunglasses, Tom tries to sound mildly, appropriately impressed. “What do you drive at home?”

“Um.” It doesn’t seem like a complicated question. “In London,” Harry starts, as if he’s collecting his thoughts. “Usually an Audi.”

“Usually?” 

“I have a few?” Harry’s voice tips up at the end, like he’s uncertain. Or embarrassed. “Mostly in LA, though.”

There’s a vastness to that answer that Tom’s not sure how to probe. “What’s your favorite?”

“Jaguar,” Harry says immediately. “An E-type. I wanted one forever.”

Harry tells a rambling story about the model year, buying the car from an aging hippie in the Hollywood Hills, but Tom loses track as they reach the clustered cottages at the edge of the village. The country roads that lasted an eternity with a fussy toddler yesterday pass in a matter of minutes. 

Easing off the accelerator feels like returning to solid ground, relief and disappointment at the same time. The signs of a summer town melting from day into evening are all around: dogs being walked, shops being shuttered for the night. Tom slows as they turn into the lane at the center of the village. “Where are we going?”

“Turn left.” Harry directs him around one corner and then another. The streets are narrow and cobblestoned, predating cars and not quite friendly to them. Fiats and Citroens are neatly packed into any available parking spot. Tom glances in the mirror, anticipating the dimensions. He’s not sure what would be worse, trying and failing to parallel Harry’s posh car into a tiny slot on what may or may not be the wrong side of the street, or giving up and turning the driver’s seat over to Harry.

Harry points ahead. “There, on the right.” It’s barely a car park, three spots with tufts of grass poking up between the paving stones, tucked between two brick shop fronts. Tom pulls haltingly into the only open space. Tendrils of ivy from the side of the building practically brush the car door. Gratefully, he shifts into park and cuts the engine. The blocky key fob is unbalanced in his hand when he pulls it out of the ignition.

“Nice.” Harry slaps Tom’s palm and scoops up the key. He folds the business end down with his thumb, and it disappears back into the fob with a click.

Tom opens his door cautiously, trying not to scrape the edge against the wall under the vines. Leaves brush the backs of his legs as he eases himself along the side of the car. Harry’s waiting at the front of the ivied building, at an entrance marked by a tented chalkboard on the cobblestones. The specials chalked onto it are all in French. The only word Tom recognizes is beurre.

The door to the restaurant is painted a cheery yellow. There’s a rush of sound as Harry opens it, and when Tom follows him inside, he has to remind himself that this is exactly what a restaurant is supposed to be. There aren’t even that many customers – maybe thirty, forty? -- and they’re not being unusually loud. Parents with summer-blonde children. Four women about Meredith’s age, erupting into laughter. Older couples finishing their meals. A child bent over a tablet at the end of a table full of adults. Tables pushed together in the back corner for a group of families on holiday together: dads with sunburned scalps, teenagers surreptitiously glancing at their phones under the table. Two older daughters, maybe university age, bare-shouldered in strappy sundresses and holding their wineglasses with a casual assuredness that suggests they’re French. It’s the most people Tom’s seen in two months, and the clamor of dozens of conversations trapped underneath the low beamed ceiling makes it hard to think.

“Harry!” A man in a chef’s jacket hails them from across the dining room, his voice cutting through the cacophony. He has thick-framed glasses and unruly gray hair and a general air of being in charge. He weaves through the tables toward them.

Harry shakes hands like he means it, sticking his elbow out to swing his hand into the grip with enthusiasm. Like he’s deeply excited about this particular handshake. Tom wonders if Harry’s that way about every hand he shakes. He can’t remember if he shook his hand when they met. Probably not. Tom’s hands were probably busy with Ruby.

The proprietor greets Harry in some combination of French and accented English that Tom can’t parse. And then Tom’s being presented, Harry’s hand warm and heavy on his shoulder. “This is Tom,” Harry says.

“Welcome, Harry’s friend!” The man shakes his hand enthusiastically. Tom mumbles a greeting, wondering how his own handshake compares to Harry’s.  He misses the proprietor’s name when Harry introduces him.

The man points toward the back of the restaurant, past the countertop that separates the kitchen from the dining room. A pair of glass-paned doors stands ajar. “I have your table out back.” Tom can see the glint of fairy lights outside. 

“Perfect.” Harry claps him on the shoulder, and they’re led through the dining room. From behind, the slight stoop of Harry’s shoulders is more noticeable. He walks like he’s keeping a secret, like standing up straight would require a burst of energy he’s conserving for something more important.

A woman in a striped apron catches sight of them as she slides a steaming plate over the kitchen counter to a server. She looks like the kitchenside counterpart to their host: same age, same enthusiasm. She waves energetically at Harry, and he presses his fingers to his mouth and flings his arm open wide to throw a kiss across the room to her. Her laugh as she turns back to the kitchen is lovingly dismissive.

The garden out back is surrounded by a stone wall thick with the same vines Tom parked the car next to. A strand of lights twines through them. The host leads them to the furthest of the three tables, tucked into the right angle of the wall. He produces menus, a wine list banded to a wooden backing, a lighted candle in a scarred red jar.

And then he leaves. The din of conversations filters out from the restaurant, and the other two tables in the garden have their own occupants. But it still feels like the most alone they’ve ever been. The farthest from anyone else’s oversight. Tom’s back is to the restaurant, and he can’t see anyone but Harry.

“Have you been here before?” The narrow folded menu sits untouched in front of Tom, laying in wait to confound him with French. He can’t think of when Harry would have eaten here. Nearly a month and Tom can’t remember him leaving the house before today.

Harry looks up from the wine list. “Scoped it out this afternoon.”

It’s a rush like Tom’s already emptied his first glass. Harry planning this. Wanting a table out back. Somewhere private. “You just met them today?”

“Came by, had a drink.” Harry shrugs. “It’s nice to eat where you know the people.”

“How did you…” Tom can’t think of the right question. Make friends? In French? Minutes after strolling into town for the first time? “They look ready to adopt you.” 

“They’re really nice.” Harry seems brighter with it, lit up by this small connection. “They’ve had this place for forty years.”

“Remind me of his name?” It’s embarrassing to ask, but he wants to be part of it, to reinforce Harry’s delight in being known by the proprietors.

“Luc!” Harry turns it into a greeting as their host returns to the table.

Luc slides a small plate between them. Two small toasts, topped with a triangle of something, a swoop of sauce, and a tiny cornichon. “From Anne-Marie.”

“The chef in there,” Harry gestures back at the kitchen. “His wife.”

Harry thanks Luc - in French - and Tom smiles and mumbles some echo of Harry’s thanks. Luc asks something and gestures toward the wine list in Harry’s hand, and oh no, it begins. Harry holds the list out to Tom. “Do you want wine?”

Tom doesn’t take the board from Harry, or even bother to look at it. It’s not like he can make sense of a French wine list any more than an English one. “Sure.”

Harry pulls the wine list back to his side of the table. “Red or white?”

“Either’s all right.” Harry looks ready to ask him another question and Tom cuts in before it turns into an embarrassing display of how little he knows about wine. “I’ve got no idea, I’ll drink whatever’s being poured.”

“All right, that’s easy,” Harry says, as if Tom’s position is convenient rather than ignorant. He identifies something in French, pointing to the menu. Luc approves. Tom’s able to get the gist of the response: he’ll be back with the wine, and to take their order.

Tom opens the menu gingerly, like it’s a mousetrap that might take off his fingers. At first, he’s relieved: French menu words are apparently portable enough that it’s not so hard to get a general idea of what each entrée might be. Poisson. Cassoulet. Haricots verts. The bigger problem is finding something he can pronounce without sounding like a complete idiot when it’s time to order. 

Luc returns with a bottle of wine in one hand and two small wine glasses in the other. He adds a glass to each of their place settings, produces a wine key from his apron pocket, and deftly uncorks the bottle. Tom resolves yet again to master the skill someday. He’s watched Ben open scores of bottles of wine this summer with a casual competence that’s devastatingly hot. He’ll have to practice, once he can afford the kind of wine that comes with a cork.

Luc pours a splash into Harry’s wineglass - not a full pour, just a mouthful - and lifts the bottle expectantly. Harry picks up the glass and takes a sip. His lips purse to one side, then the other. “It’s good,” he says, with a thumbs-up to Luc, and Luc tops off Harry’s class and pours for Tom. It’s like watching Harry arrange and light the candles in Ben and Meri’s bedroom - an unfamiliar ritual, one that has meaning to someone else but not to Tom.

Tom relaxes once it’s clear that the ritual doesn’t require his participation. In fact, everything’s easier once the wine’s poured and the hurdle of ordering is past. (“The pasta?” Tom says, fairly certain that there was a recognizable pasta on the menu, and Luc enthusiastically confirms.) 

Luc ties a napkin around the wine bottle and leaves it at the table, and Harry lifts his glass. “To... getting out of the house?” he says, his voice lifting in a question, as if he’s looking for Tom’s assent.

“To getting out of the house,” Tom echoes, fugitive and free. The clink of their small sturdy glasses seals the deal, audibly different from the throaty chime of the big red wine glasses at the summer house.

He really, truly has Harry to himself, without Ruby’s needs to interrupt them, without Ben and Meri to please. It’s just talking to Harry now, and it’s easy, like it used to be when it was the two of them on the lawn with Ruby, fitting in scraps of conversation while they let her pour them pretend tea. Harry’s funny, and thoughtful, and his answers are meandering, as if he starts talking without entirely knowing where he’s going to end up. His deliberate pace gives Tom enough space to think, so he never feels like he’s struggling to keep up.

“Did you take French in school?” Tom asks, after Luc delivers a basket with a baguette wrapped in a blue and white tea towel, prompting another exchange with Harry that’s part English, part French, part gestures.

“A little.” Harry separates a slice from the baguette. “But… a while ago. Too long to remember.” I stopped going when I was sixteen.”

“Really? Why?”

Harry brushes the spray of breadcrumbs to the edge of the table. “That’s when the band started. I finished up with tutors after that, so I never had to do a language.” He tears the slice of baguette over his bread plate and pops half of it in his mouth.

“So how do you…” Tom gestures back at the restaurant, toward Harry’s pals.

“Eh.” Harry chews and swallows the bite of bread. “Interviews and shows here, and we’d go out in the evenings when I was here for the film.” Harry’s mouth could carry on a whole conversation without any sound, twisting from one side to the other, corners turning up or exaggeratedly down. The tiny wine glass is dwarfed by his hand. Tom imagines a different world, one where he’d be noticing all of this for the first time, here, on a perfectly normal first date. He knows far too much about Harry’s mouth and hands for this to be a normal date. Or a date at all, really, no matter what it feels like. “You pick up phrases here and there,” Harry finishes. His rings clank against the glass when he sets it down.

“From your French ex?”  It’s impossible to think about Harry picking up French phrases without wondering about a French girl murmuring them in his ear.

Harry’s mouth quirks to one side, and he wrinkles his nose. “A little bit, I guess.”

Tom can’t stop himself from the questions he’d be asking if this was a date. A normal date where you get to know someone and try to figure out what their baggage is, whether there are any buried landmines you could blow yourself up on. “How long ago did you break up?”

Harry has to think about it. “Couple of months,” he says slowly, slow enough that Tom knows there’s more coming. “But it feels like longer. I was on tour all spring, so we were mostly long-distance.” Harry grimaces. “It didn’t work very well.”

Tom’s trying to formulate a follow-up question that will keep Harry talking, but Harry beats him to the punch. “When was your last relationship?” he asks, looking a little smug at turning the topic back around at Tom.

It’s startling to have Harry looking at him expectantly, waiting for the answer to a question like that. But he asked. He wants to know. Or he would, if this was a date. It’s getting harder to tell himself it’s not. “A year or so, I guess?” It’s hard to account for the passage of time in the outside world. “We graduated, he moved abroad for work.”

“Didn’t even try distance?”

“Nah. It was never going to be…” Tom trails off. Nicholas’s chief attributes – a smooth confidence right at the edge of dickishness, and being a head taller than Tom – were not the stuff of long-term relationships. It was a fun three months. He can’t remember if he’s texted him since Nicholas moved to New York.

Harry’s tilting his head just a bit to the side and watching Tom in a way that feels like he’s listening hard enough to hear everything Tom’s saying and some things he’s not. It’s unnerving. Tom deflects back to Harry instead of finishing his answer. If the door’s open, he’s going to ask about all the things they’d never talk about while hanging out with Ruby. “Have you ever been in a relationship with anyone who’s not a girl?”

“Eh.” Harry wavers his hand back and forth. His fingers are spread awkwardly wide around his rings. “Sort of.”

Tom’s pulse pounds in his ears. He rolls the hem of his napkin between his thumb and forefinger, pinching it into a tight point. “Sort of a relationship, or sort of not a girl?”

“Sort of a relationship.” Harry laughs like it’s not funny. “Definitely not a girl.” The way he draws out definitely creates a broad-shouldered strong-jawed kind of a picture.

“Why sort of a relationship?”

“I thought it was one, turns out he didn’t.” Harry reaches for the breadbasket and tears off the heel of the baguette with a sharp twist.

“We’ve all been there.” Tom inclines his wineglass toward Harry in a toast of sorts. “Straight guy?”

“Not too straight for me to suck his dick.” Harry smirks, but he sounds more bitter about this asshole than he does about the French girl.

“Too straight for breakfast in the morning?”

“Strangely, no.” The corner of Harry’s mouth quirks up at some remembered breakfast, and Tom wants to punch this guy. He’s not sure if it’s on Harry’s behalf or his own. “But definitely too straight to date me.”

“That put you off guys forever?” Tom tries to ask it offhandedly, leaning back in his seat, as if the answer doesn’t matter. As if it’s a casual thing to ask the guy he’s possibly on a date with if he dates guys.

“No,” Harry says, looking at Tom with an intensity Tom can’t escape, like he knows exactly how casual the question wasn’t. His voice is slow and low. “No, it didn’t.”

“Well,” Tom says, “good.” He takes a sip of wine, which turns into a gulp, because he can’t just keep looking at Harry, not when Harry’s looking at him like that. It’s like staring too long at the track of the setting sun on the sea - dazzling, disorienting.

“Yeah?” Harry asks, a note in his voice that’s pleased, maybe even hopeful.

Tom has to look at him then, beautiful and blinding, making sunspots dance in front of his eyes. “Yeah, good.” It could plausibly be an endorsement of the general concept of dating guys, a concept that Tom is broadly in favor of. But it feels a lot more specific.

 Luc picks that moment to deliver their dinner. The freighted moment is buried under steaming plates and shuffling silverware and inquiries about whether there’s anything else they need. Tom asks what Harry’s having, and Harry shares a forkful of his fish and steals a bite of Tom’s pasta, and the dinner conversation settles back into places less dangerous and thrilling.

Harry asks him about his thesis, and Tom tries to explain his graduate program to someone who has no concept of university. “When’s term start?” Harry asks.

“A week after we get back. I was supposed to go out to Croyde with my sister for a few days first, to surf.” He needs to talk to Molly about that. With an uncomfortable twinge of guilt, he remembers that he hasn’t talked to her all summer.

“Yeah?” Harry’s using his fork to separate his fish from its skin, a little bit at a time. “I’ve only ever surfed in California.”

Somehow it’s no surprise that Harry surfs. “Are you any good at it?”

“Terrible. Absolutely terrible.” Harry’s talking differently tonight, Tom realizes. He’s missing his usual loose-limbed big gestures, punctuating jokes with jerky swoops of his arms. But his hands are still constantly in motion, hovering in front of him, index finger jabbing to make a point, gestures weighted with his rings. “It’s hard there, though. Rough. You get pretty beat up.”

 “Do you have a house there?”

“Eh,” Harry pauses. “Sort of.” 

Tom snorts. “Sort of a house? Is that like sort of dating?”

Harry’s eyes widen a bit, like the joke hit too close to home. “I have the house… I have some stuff there… it just never really felt like I moved in. I usually stay with friends. Sometimes Ben and Meredith. I was staying with my girlfriend a lot, but…” Harry shrugs and takes a sip of wine.

Tom watches his lips against the wineglass and casts about for a change in subject. The reference to the Winstons reminds him. “What’s your and Ben’s show about?”

“It’s only sort of mine,” Harry says, and Tom can’t help laughing. Harry waves him off as soon as he realizes. “All right, all right, I get it,” and Tom laughs again. “But Ben and James put it together, mostly,” Harry says. “James Corden.”

Tom nods. It’s strange to think of Harry working with famous people. Ben must, with the kind of work that he does. Harry must, too. 

“It’s kind of based on when I lived with Ben and Meredith.” Harry rubs his thumb and forefinger over the thick stem of his wineglass. “But, like, not really. Just, sort of, loosely inspired. Popstar moves in with regular married couple…” Harry waves his hand in an etcetera kind of way.

Tom snorts. “So it’s X-rated, then?”

That shocks a laugh out of Harry. “God, no.” He presses his face into the palm of his hand and then looks back up at Tom, offended. “I was, like, a kid.”

A stray branch from the top of the wall is arched above Harry’s head. The Winstons feel far away from their birds nest here in the corner of the garden, snug between stone walls. “When, then?”

The candlelight catches on Harry’s rings as he reaches for his wineglass. “A while ago,” he says. “Like three years, maybe four? But, like, all before Ruby.” He doesn’t take a sip, just draws the glass closer on the tabletop and traces the tip of his finger in a half-circle around the base of the stem. “I was jealous of you, when I got here.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tom says easily. There’s no reason for Harry, rich and good-looking and favored, to be jealous of Tom. But when he thinks back to the week Harry arrived, it was a different Harry. Strutting around the pool, smug and mocking him from the dais of the master bed. Tom had all but forgotten the Harry who found Tom’s sore spot and poked at it, throwing his insecurities about the murky line between his job and his sex life in his face. He wonders whether it was unintentional, or whether Harry saw him that clearly from the start. But the question seems academic. He trusts the Harry he knows now - Harry insisting he drive, Harry towing Ruby around the pool, Harry sprawling on the couch for a romcom - not to do it again.

“No, I was.” Harry drags his finger slowly back and forth in a crescent along the base of the wineglass. “It had been... a while, and I thought they were just like, past it. Because of the baby or whatever. But then, it was kind of like, oh, obviously, they weren’t.”

How… Tom wants to ask, but he can’t quite get the question past his lips. How Harry knew. Whether Tom was painfully, embarrassingly obvious. Or whether Harry had to be told. The thought of the three of them discussing it, talking about him, makes him want to sink through his chair into the garden pavers. Welcome, Harry, glad you could visit. By the way, we’re sleeping with the au pair.

“But it all worked out, right?” Harry's voice brightens, exaggerated, and he waggles his hands out to both sides, like he’s just pulled off a magic trick. Ta-dah.

His smile’s big enough, bright enough, that Tom stops looking for the hidden trapdoor, the trick mirror, the scarf hidden up his sleeve. “Maybe it did.” Harry’s smiling back at him over the wine bottle and the empty breadbasket and the bud vase with its sprig of yellow flowers, and maybe it’s as easy as Harry makes it out to be. Maybe it all worked out.

Harry slides one foot forward under the table. “How did it happen?” Tom can feel the moment of connection when Harry rests his foot against the side of his boot, but he can’t tell through the sturdy leather whether Harry keeps it there. “With you, I mean. How did it, like, start?”

“I don’t know,” Tom says automatically. “How does anything happen?” It’s a lie. He remembers every single moment, every small smile of Meredith’s, every touch of Ben’s hand on his shoulder, each incremental stretch of the rubber band pulled tighter and tighter until the satisfying snap.

Lingering in the kitchen after dinner, leaning just a bit too hard against Ben’s side. Bracing his hands against the countertop and tipping his head back against Ben’s shoulder as Ben brought him off. Closing his eyes against the intensity of Meredith’s oversight, chin propped on her palm across the island.

Ben had kissed him after, firm and confident, sliding his tongue into Tom’s mouth, prolonging the shivery reverberations still thrumming through Tom’s body. Meredith brushed his hair back from his forehead and kissed his temple and told him they’d see him in the morning. Then she and Ben disappeared upstairs, leaving Tom confused and desperate and elated. He’d wanted to do something, to be of use. He hadn’t actually understood until the other night, when he and Harry were kicked out of the bedroom, what they were using him for.

Harry’s looking at him expectantly. Tom gives him an honest answer, but probably not the spicy answer Harry really wants. “We were dancing.”

“Dancing?”

“I did ballroom and Latin back in school. Like, competitions.” He was a national champion, not that Harry needs to know.

Harry cocks his head to the side and looks at him consideringly. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Why?” It’s Tom’s most surprising thing, really, the ace that always makes everyone else drink when they’re playing two truths and a lie. I’m afraid of balloons, I’ve never broken a bone, I’m a champion ballroom dancer. Everyone always assumes that’s the lie. He can mix it up after this summer, though. He’s got some more unlikely truths now.

“You walk like a dancer, like… how you move.” Harry circles his wrist aimlessly, his fingers spread open, as if the explanation is a bird that will light in his upturned palm if he’s patient. “It’s like… you’ve always got everything under control.”

Tom laughs, startled. “I can’t believe you think that. I don’t have anything under control.”

“Yes you do.” Harry leans back in his chair and stretches his legs out, hooking his foot around Tom’s ankle. “You always know what to do with Ruby. Ben and Meredith love you.” Harry tilts his head forward in a way that makes Tom feel more intensely examined, like Harry’s turned up the focus. “I can’t ever tell what you’re thinking. That’s control.” His voice gets lower, slower on the last syllables. Tom watches his lips move around the words.

He flushes at the thought of Harry observing him, forming opinions, liking the way he moves, wondering what he’s thinking. “I don’t have anything about you under control,” he says, and realizes too late it sounds more like a confession than a statement of fact. 

He watches Harry carefully for a reaction. His mouth is so big that Tom can see the smile spreading over it, like watching a sunrise. The corners turning up, dimples blooming. “Yeah?”

There’s probably a joke that could water it down. An explanation that he meant Harry’s a force of nature completely outside the realm of Tom’s influence, not that Tom can’t control the dizzying intensity of the way he feels about Harry. Tom doesn’t take the out. “Yeah,” he acknowledges, face burning and Harry’s smile seeping through his veins like a serum.

The moment’s broken by Luc’s arrival, clearing their plates and asking how the meal was. “Wonderful,” Harry says, very seriously. “Thank you.” He looks as if he’d shake hands again, if their plates weren’t in the way.

Their host returns a moment later and holds out a small square menu to each of them. Harry pauses before taking it, looking at Tom. “Do you want dessert?” 

Tom hasn’t had dessert all summer. The entire genre doesn’t exist in the Winstons’ diet. He hadn’t thought to miss it. He could take it or leave it tonight. No, he’s about to say, and maybe even take me home, because he’s far more greedy for that than he is for tarte tatin. But going home with Harry still means going home, where the sound of Harry’s tires in the driveway will mean something to someone else. Where Tom will follow Harry into the main house, or Harry will follow him up the carriage house stairs, and either way someone else will know. As long as they’re here, tucked in their quiet corner of the garden as the evening fades to twilight, Harry only belongs to him.

“Sure,” Tom says, and orders creme brulee. Harry asks about the sorbet on the menu, and after a spirited discussion with Luc that doesn’t seem to result in much additional information about the two flavors, orders them both.

Of course Harry wants it all, wants everything at once, flings himself at it without a second thought. His perpetual too-muchness is the thing that’s most compelling to Tom, who can’t imagine being too much because he’s always trying to be just right. It’s all backwards that Tom saw it first in bed - Harry unselfconsciously sensation-seeking, wanting everything, pulling everyone with him, needing to be overwhelmed - and only now is he seeing it applied to something as prosaic as ice cream. But that doesn’t mean he can’t give Harry a hard time. “Is it that hard to choose?”

“Fuck off,” Harry says, cheerfully. “I love ice cream, I’ve barely had it this summer. Meredith doesn’t eat it.”

“What’s your favorite flavor?” Tom asks, and they’re still on the subject when dessert arrives, Tom defending simplicity and Harry enthusing about flavors of ice cream that Tom’s never even conceived of.

Harry’s trying to explain something called chocolate honeycomb when it happens. His eyes flick away from Tom, midsentence, catching on something over Tom’s right shoulder.

Tom waits silently, willing Harry’s attention back to him. He refuses to look. He’s not going to dignify this distraction by looking at it. He’s only going to project waves of hatred directly from his shoulder blades.

“Sorry.” Harry focuses back on him.

“Um…” Tom can’t remember what Harry was saying. As he tries to reorient himself, Harry looks away again, toward the back of the restaurant. “What’s…”

“Don’t turn around.” Harry says it casually, but Tom freezes all the same, as if Harry’s only going to give him back his attention if he’s good enough. Harry’s expression hardens into a stare, the intensity like a bullet directed straight over Tom’s shoulder. He shakes his head slowly from side to side, just once. Telling somebody no.

“What’s going on?” Tom’s neck is tense with the effort of not looking at whatever is drawing Harry’s displeasure.

“It’s not a big deal,” Harry says, but his shoulders are pulled up and in. “Somebody recognized me.”

“Someone you know?” Tom wonders who Harry could possibly know here, but apparently this afternoon was enough time for him to become the adopted son of a French restaurant. He could have made any number of other friends. Or not friends, based on his reaction.

“No.” Harry’s fishing in his pocket. “Did you see those girls, inside? Two of them.”

“I think so?” Tom vaguely remembers the big table, the holiday families, the girls in sundresses and glossy ponytails.

“They were trying to take a picture just now.”

“Of what?” The garden’s not that picturesque. He and Harry aren’t that interesting; to anyone not inside Tom’s head, they probably just look like two guys having dinner. Tom’s stomach tightens, his ever-present instinct for hostility kicking in. The heightened awareness that picks up on the bellow of “you cocksucker!” from across the pub and leaves him wondering whether the thick-necked guys in the booth are insulting each other, or whether it means Tom’s sitting too close to his boyfriend on their barstools.  Whether the shoulder check in the crowd transferring trains was accidental or whether it had something to do with the rainbow flag pin on his bag.

“Me.” Harry says it matter-of-factly, like this is just the course of things.

Tom gapes. He wonders why Luc and Anne-Marie aren’t stopping this, but that seems rude to ask.

Harry shrugs. “It happens.” He takes his hand out of his pocket with thumb tucked under his fingers, concealing something.  “Although I would have preferred not tonight.” He cups his palm on the tablecloth and slides it across to Tom, stopping at the tip of Tom’s unused salad fork. When it’s safely in Tom’s space, blocked by his body from view of anyone inside the restaurant, Harry lifts his fingers to reveal the black block of the car key. “I’m going to go take care of it. If you don’t want to… you know...” Harry makes a gesture that Tom can’t quite make sense of. Maybe it means you don’t want to deal with this. “You can meet me at the car.”

Harry cocks his head a bit to the left, and flicks his eyes in the same direction. Tom follows and sees a narrow wooden gate leading out to the alleyway behind the restaurant. Harry nudges the car key further toward Tom with a fingertip, clinking it against the tines of his fork. “I’ll get them inside.”

Harry’s chair screeches against the paving stones, and then there’s nothing left of him but the last melty bits of sorbet in their dish. Tom stares at the empty space and the garden wall behind it.

He can hear when Harry reaches the girls. “Hello,” he says, gravelly and plain, like that’s a reasonable way to greet someone taking photos of you at a restaurant. “I’m Harry.” There’s a noise in response - wordless, high-pitched - and Tom shoves his chair back and grabs the car key.

The garden gate has a funny latch. Tom fumbles and slaps at it and a moment later he’s alone with the bins in the narrow space between the buildings. It’s fully nighttime back here, unmitigated by the fairy lights and candles of the garden. He slumps back against the wall to get his bearings. He was almost on a date. No, not almost, not by the end of it, not with Harry hooking his ankle around Tom’s as his smile bloomed in the candlelight. It felt like a good date, like a date that could go somewhere. And now he’s hiding in an alley, banished to sit in the car like a child.

Tom picks his way to the end of the alley and circles back around to the car, passing closed storefronts. There are planting baskets hanging from the lamp posts along the street. Droplets from under the pink and red flowers spatter on the cobblestones, as if someone’s recently been through for an evening watering, but the street is empty.

The car blinks its tail lights at him as Tom approaches, before he even looks at the buttons on the key fob, but the door handle on the passenger side won’t yield to him. He’s not going to take the driver’s seat. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, and the last thing he needs is to be in charge of the car. He stabs mindlessly at the unlock button and wrenches at the handle, letting his efforts cancel each other out until he takes a breath and lets the door go long enough for the lock to work.

The passenger seat’s still dropped back the way that Harry set it, a languor that’s entirely inconsistent with Tom’s mood. He sits up and jams his thumb against the lever beside the seat until it rises up to meet his rigid spine. The car key’s still smooth in his palm, like a river stone begging to be skipped. He presses the button at the corner and flicks the key out, snaps it back into place, again and again until Harry rustles through the ivy and opens the driver’s door.

“Sorry about that.” Harry sits and then swings his long legs into the seat through the narrow opening.

Tom holds the car key out to him.

“I had to…” Harry backs out of the parking space, smooth and quick, offering an explanation Tom hadn’t yet asked for. “Usually if you ask people… they’re pretty cool about it, if you ask them not to post anything, or at least they’ll wait a few days.”

Tom remembers Meredith’s warning about social media and understands now that it wasn’t just about privacy. In a few days Harry will be gone, off to Italy, or wherever. It won’t matter if anyone posts a picture of him in a French bistro, because he’ll be in Italy, or LA, or something. Somewhere far from Tom.

He pictures Harry talking to the girls, to their parents maybe, trying to convince them to keep his secret. “Does that happen to you a lot?”

“Sometimes.” Harry accelerates as they leave the village behind. The engine responds like it’s eager for the challenge, humming through the gears, smooth and powerful. Soon there’s nothing but their headlights and the road dipping in front of them.

There’s something Harry’s not saying. He’s distant, and Tom’s resentful and confused, and the evening’s ruined. Tom’s used to Harry’s silences. Usually they’re expectant, like he’s waiting for Tom to say something. That’s not how this one feels. Harry’s focused somewhere else entirely, or inside his own head.

Tom presses his cheek against the window. There’s a half moon making its way up over the hills. It’s golden, promising autumn. The same color as the creme brulee. The spray of stars around it seems chilly.

“Hey,’ Harry says, as they turn into the lane toward the house. “I don’t know if you’re on Instagram or whatever.” The hedge looms in front of them, lit up by the headlights. Gravel crunches as Harry pulls into the circle drive. “But you might want to go on private for a little while. Instagram, Twitter, whatever.”

“Okay,” Tom says cautiously. “Um. Why?”

Harry kills the engine. “If they post pictures, and anybody knows who you are…” The car’s lights go dark in front of them and the house winks out of view, shrunk to the small circle of the front porch light. “It can get a little weird, is all.”

“Weird like how?” Harry’s profile is shadowed next to him, lit from the front porch so Tom can’t see his face.

“Just… a lot of comments. People messaging you.” Tom doesn’t have to see Harry’s face to know there’s still something he’s not saying.

He undoes his seat belt and opens the car door. “Thanks for…” Suddenly Tom realizes he completely missed the tab when Harry shuffled him off down the alley. “Shit, did you pay for dinner? Let me give you some cash.” He fumbles for his wallet, even as he realizes it’s futile, he has no cash, has had no reason to carry any cash at all this summer.

“No, I got it.” Harry touches his arm.

Tom flinches without meaning to. Harry’s fingertips raise goosebumps up and down his arm, but Tom can’t get past the contrast between the warmth of their dinner and the reserve of the drive home. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.” Harry drops his hand to his lap. “I had a nice time.” It’s polite, formal, a world away from Harry’s smile across the table and the pressure of his foot against Tom’s ankle. Harry’s not going to kiss him, and the obviousness of that fact fills the car, forcing all the air out of the small space.

“I did too.” Tom heaves himself out of the door. “Thank you.”

He looks back before he lets himself into the sanctuary of the carriage house. Harry’s still sitting in the car. Tom can’t imagine what he’s thinking about. 

He slumps back against the door after it closes behind him and lets the wild swing of emotions catch up with him. How, how did this evening get so fucked up. He trudges up the stairs. It’s not late, but he’s exhausted.

At the desk, he shoves aside a stack of photocopied sources and peels the sticky note with his most recent thesis to-do list off the screen of his laptop. Once the aging operating system comes to life, he opens his Instagram for the first time all summer. The photo at the top corner of his grid is from May, the day he and Carl cobbled together some packed lunches from the odds and ends in their fridge and drove out to Brighton. The selfie shows the wind off the sea blowing their hair to one side, chilly spring sunshine pale on their faces. There’s a new comment from Carl underneath it, a couple of weeks old. last known picture of tommy before his disappearance, rip.

Tom clicks quickly into his settings to get away from the post. He can’t deal with the guilt on top of everything else tonight. He ticks the box to set his account to private, and then hovers the cursor over the search box. Fuck it. harry, he types, and before he can get to the s the drop-down’s already offering him two different blue checks in Harry's name. For fuck’s sake. How is he the first Harry to come up? There’s a fucking prince.

Tom whistles at the follower count before scrolling down the page in Harry’s name. It’s impersonal, all professional-looking photos of Harry onstage and backstage. But aside from his bright costume-y suits, Tom recognizes all of it: the expansive way Harry flings his arms around, the unselfconscious lines of his body. His smiles, small and smug or wide and beaming. Harry shoving clothes into the same luggage Tom’s seen on the floor of his room.

All of it feels like the Harry he knows, until further down the page the camera pulls back to show Harry onstage, spotlit, the focal point of an entire arena filled with lights. Tom zooms in and blinks at it a few times, unsure if he’s seeing it right. It’s disorienting, like the time he opened the door to what he thought was the closet in Ruby’s nursery in London and it turned out to be an entire bathroom practically the size of his flat. 

He backs out and keeps scrolling down. More arenas, more crowds, more of the dizzying telescoping of Tom’s sense of scale, until he screeches to a halt at Harry on the cover of Rolling fucking Stone? After opening the post to make sure it’s not a joke, Tom abandons Instagram and types harry styles rolling stone into the search bar.

Instead of a fancy bathroom, it’s like he’s opened the closet door and found Narnia. One Direction, for fuck’s sake. Tom’s pretty sure Molly had their posters on her bedroom wall years ago. Somebody should have told him. Meredith should have warned him. Harry should have warned him. Tom’s mad, all of a sudden, about every story Harry’s told him about traveling. He’ll talk about the pasta he ate in Milan, the art museum he went to in Spain, the funny name of the soda backstage in Japan, and none of it’s given Tom any sense that the reason Harry’s been all over the place is that he has millions and millions of fans. Who will, apparently, sell his puke on eBay. Tom’s been wasting a revenue stream. Bet he could have gotten top dollar for the bodily fluid he’s had access to this summer.

Tom stands up and flexes his palms against the edge of the desk. Bent over the laptop, braced as if it might punch him, he keeps reading. Harry’s first album, Harry’s new band, Harry driving around Los Angeles in a Range Rover. He remembers Harry deflecting his question about what he drives at home. I have more than one. He should have asked. Maybe he would have learned enough to keep his guard up, not to get deluded by a candlelit dinner and a smile that felt like it was just for him.

The punch comes from an unexpected quarter. “Family,” answers Ben Winston. Tom jerks upright as if he’s been caught. He hadn’t thought googling Harry would lead him to Ben, but how naive that was. Of course they have a whole relationship in the outside world. One that Rolling Stone interviews them about, for fuck’s sake. Tom reads on, stomach quivering, as Ben brags about Harry moving into his attic, talks about Meredith, how they’d be in bed waiting for Harry to come home. All the girls Harry would bring with him.

Oh.

He’d thought he was pressing his luck tonight, asking Harry about his past relationships, ferreting out hopeful crumbs about his sexuality. What poverty of imagination. They’d even talked about his past with Ben and Meredith, and Tom never thought to put two and two together. Quite literally. What an idiot, to think he’s been the only one.

Tom abandons Rolling Stone, which doesn’t know shit, and searches harry styles girlfriend. The top result is the most recent, a tabloid headline. Model Camille Rowe and Harry Styles split after just over a year together. Ah. The French ex-girlfriend. Tom opens a new tab, leaving behind search results that promised a longer history of supermodels. The results of his camille rowe image search are all blonde hair and tanned skin and many more pictures of tits than Tom might have expected without intentionally searching for porn. He can acknowledge, objectively and painfully, that they are very nice tits. He wonders what Meredith thought. He wonders how it worked. Whether she went down on Meredith, what Meredith allowed Ben to do to her.

Fuck it. He switches to harry styles boyfriend. There’s more in the image search than Tom would have expected. He rejects Nick Grimshaw, who’s definitely gay enough to have a boyfriend. He spends a while on Louis Tomlinson, but the sources are too weird, the images too blurry and doctored, the rhetoric too strident. Something about it feels off. 

But there it is, well down the page. Harry and a guy hunched over their menus at a restaurant. Casual, like it’s brunch. Harry’s got long hair, but his sunglasses are pinning it back same as ever. Tom makes a mental note to follow up on the long hair after the extensive google search he’s about to conduct on Xander “definitely not a girl” Ritz.

Half an hour later Tom’s got a better idea of why Harry banished him to the car and told him to private his insta. He snaps the lid of his laptop shut, burying tumblr timelines and paparazzi pics and Harry flirting with his straight guy crush in front of entire goddamned stadiums of fans. None of it matters.

He unlaces his boots and throws them halfheartedly toward the corner of the room. One of them leaves a scuff mark against the creamy walls but Tom can’t bring himself to care. The security deposit isn’t his.

He brushes his teeth without looking in the mirror and turns out the lights without slitting the blinds to see if Harry’s still in his car. In bed, he curls on his side with the duvet up to his ear and tries to calm down, to talk some sense into himself.

He’s sealed himself in the idyllic bubble of the summer so effectively, resolutely refusing to think about what his life will be like once the summer’s over. The summer house has been his world, small and complete and perfect. Harry disrupted it, until he was absorbed into it, and Tom’s forgotten that Harry exists outside the bubble too. He’s understood only generally that Harry’s rich like the Winstons are rich, and that Harry’s a musician. Here, where there’s nothing to spend money on, he’s had no reason to connect the dots, to realize that if Harry’s money comes from music, Harry must be a big deal. The kind of big deal who gets stalked at restaurants. The kind of big deal that dates supermodels. There’s an entire world of Harry out there, an entire world that Harry and Ben fit into together, and Tom was crazy to ever think he had a place in it.

[genethequeen]

| SUMMER LOVIN | (Roger Taylor Smut)

request: none ( :') )

synopsis: you're visiting your cousin, John Deacon, after finally graduating high school. you definitely hit it off with a certain blond drummer.

pairings: Ben Hardy!Roger Taylor x f!reader

warnings: i mean,,, it's steamy and strange, like it’s a smut man so 18+ even though i was reading these when i was 13. 

a/n: so I wrote this a million years ago with Maurice Gibb in mind (I know leave me alone) but yeah. im a virgin --- love that for myself --- so have a virgin written smut :))) maybe listen to the beatles or the bee gees or even the beach boys when reading?

timeline: whack

character accuracy: whack

The heavy air of the summer attempted to weigh down your excitement as you practically danced to find your cousin in the crowd on the boardwalk. Despite the heat, everyone had come out for the festivals and series of concerts accompanying the rides near the water. You couldn’t deny the liberated feeling you possessed since finally finishing high school a few weeks prior, and coming to visit your cousin had been what was pushing you to finish out. Rollerbladers in colorful patterns and sunglasses skated past you alongside businessmen in fedoras and ties as you took in the life of the boardwalk.

You jumped slightly, spotting your cousin in a grouping of a few other boys. You waved an arm in the air as you neared them, capturing his attention as well. He came forward to close most of the distance, hugging you tightly. He threw an arm around your shoulders while the both of you talked a mile a minute, trying to get everything in from last Christmas until now as you made your way back to his group.

“But the thing is-”

“No Aunt Suzie made it clear about-”

“Deac, high school was a waste-”

“It’s a new song-”

It seemed that the two of you were telling five stories at once to the outsiders, but you both clearly knew what the other was saying. You stopped short as you finally looked up at the four other boys, eyes landing on one in particular with a slightly unbuttoned shirt and curious eyes.

“This is my cousin, guys. She’s from upstate.” Deacon gestured to you under his arm and quickly said the names of the other boys, but you really only picked up Brian and Freddy, the other two names were muddled in John’s accent. Deacon began to congregate with the taller man of the bunch while you stood beside the blond boy you grew to know as Roger.

The blond boy turned to you slightly as the three of you leaned against the railing surrounding the boardwalk. “So, how old are you?”

“Does it matter, Roger?” Brian spoke up, flicking his cigarette into the water and sending the Roger boy a joking smirk. “You’re going to hit on her nonetheless.” You rose an eyebrow at the confident blond as Brian then slinked away while shaking his head. “How long are you staying with John?” He asked. You looked up at him with wandering eyes, taking in his appearance the most you could. He couldn’t have been more than a year older than you were.

“Uh, just for the summer. We’ve always planned that I’d come see him after graduation.” You straightened up, pacing to stand in front of him. He was leaning just far enough that the two of you were the same height. His shirt collar moved slightly in the wind. “You in the band, too?” You were nervous about his response, knowing that your teenage heart would melt into a pile of mercury if his answer was just right.

He smirked at you. “No, their music sucks.” You laughed at his remark and he stood also, fixing his shirt. “I play drums a bit.” As his hands landed on his hips, you noticed just how big they were, meaning he could probably play pretty well.

“Come on, kids. We have shit to do,” Freddy snapped at the two of you, sending Roger into an eye-roll.

“Big schedule?” You lowly asked Roger.

He nodded. “Oh yeah, strategic bathroom breaks and making sure Freddy gets his funnel cakes on time―very important.” Deacon looked back over his shoulder, making sure you were following the group.

You were giddy, getting on ride after ride, being let in on inside jokes between the guys, and learning how much of a primadonna Brian actually was, all while staying close to Roger’s side, holding his hand on and off again. After the bumper cars resulted in a quarrel between Roger and Freddy, the group b-lined for the Spook House ride. The loud, pulsating music of the Beach Boys from the nearby Matterhorn melded with pleasured screams as Freddy attempted to divvy up the group into who was riding with who, but everyone shook him off instead. While you all made it to the front of the line, Roger filed into one of the carts with you, wrapping his arm around the back of your section of the cart and pulling the safety bar over the two of you. You sat forward a bit, pushing your shirt down slightly, attempting to keep his attention on you.  

"You think Freddy likes me?” You joked, looking at him with big eyes, causing the boy to bite back a chuckle.

“He’d be crazy not to be in love with you by now.” He flashed you a smile.

“How charming,” you quipped as the ride jerked to a start. You sat close to him so your legs were against each other. A mummy leaned forward, almost falling off the wall as the “Addams Family” theme song tried to set a Halloween mood. The both of you laughed.

Roger wet his lips next to you and you couldn’t help but keep your eyes on him. He seemed fidgety in the close proximity to you. “So,” his blue eyes traced over you. “You’re staying all summer?” You could easily lean an inch and kiss him. He seemed to notice too, tightening his arm around you.

“Can we skip the small talk?” You requested, triggering his sudden actions. His hand instantly braced the back of your neck, closing the gap between the two of you. You fisted the front of his shirt as his lips moved against yours, literally taking your breath away. Your teeth grazed his bottom lip as if by instinct paired with his fingers tangling in the ends of your hair, near the collar of your shirt, dangerously close to your breasts. You never wanted him to stop touching you. The ride ended quickly, much to your disappointment. You sat away from each other as the blinding sun came into view, along with the loud bustling of the boardwalk.

“I don’t see what the craze is about that ride,” Deacon griped as the group migrated. A murmur of agreement rippled over the boys, but you remained silent, slightly stunned at what had just happened and how you wanted it to go further.

Roger walked beside you, smirking to himself. “I didn’t think it was that bad.” Parts of your boardwalk adventure separated you from Roger, giving you a slight pang of envy at whoever was with him when you weren’t. Did that make you crazy? You didn’t care. Finally, he swatted off Freddy and grabbed your hand, pulling you into a Scrambler cart with him.

“Have fun with Fred?” You implored, trying to hide how much it affected you to be this close to him.

“You have some serious competition, love,” he leered. As the ride began, his hand left yours only to land on the inside of your thigh close to the bottom hem of your shorts. Your breath caught in your throat as you snapped your eyes up to his. The ride began to spin in circles, sending everyone into a fit of giggles, but you could only focus on was the position of his hand.

You laid in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the water drip into the sink in your adjacent bathroom and to John’s distant phone conversation from the other side of the house. You couldn’t get your mind off of Roger, and couldn’t fight the flush that came to your cheeks thinking about his grin or his voice, maybe even when you thought of the veins in his hands. A small tapping at your window startled you, pulling you from your thoughts. You stood slowly, making your way across the room and pulling back the curtain to reveal Roger with a handful of pebbles just beneath your flower box in the moonlight. You nodded for him to come to the front door and rushed down the hall to greet him. You held your breath as you lifted the latch, hoping it wouldn’t click loud enough for John to hear. You thanked whatever higher power that John was on the top floor.

You practically yanked Roger into the house and then to your room. His hands wrapped around you, pushing you against your door as he trapped your lips in a deep kiss. You instantly pulled his shirt over his head and went for his belt buckle. After skillfully removing your nightgown, he hooked his hands beneath your thighs and lifted you up, moving across the room to the bed. You sat on your knees, pulling his pants the rest of the way off before he climbed over you. “Where’s Deaky?” He whispered against your neck, already sucking at the tender skin.

“Upstairs. Best be quiet, Rog.” He chuckled, his warm breath falling over the coldness of your now wet skin, sending an enticing shiver across your body. The thin fabric of his boxers hid none of his excitement pressing against your leg. He kissed you again, beginning to rock his hips against yours, eliciting a small moan to escape your lips in pleasure. His fingers brushed your side slowly, taking note of every goosebump they drew out, grazing until landing just before your panties. His mouth left yours as he peppered your shoulders with lingering kisses, his fingers now just over your entrance, gingerly rubbing circles to arouse the growing sensation in your lower region. One of your arms hooked over the arm holding him up, positioned to the left of your head, while your other hand coiled in his hair.

“You’re already wet. Were you waiting for me?” He questioned gruffly against your ear. He stood momentarily, sliding off your underwear and pushing his off, dipping back down to cover your body with his again. He entered you slowly, teasing you with steady strokes, making you squirm with pleasure. One of his hands held tightly onto the sheets while the other graced over your sides. As his lips met your neck, barely touching you and making your head fall back.

You moaned quietly as he kissed behind your ear. “Roger, faster,” you practically begged. He let out a husky chuckled and slowly picked up his pace with your fingers digging into his back. You hummed again.

The floorboard above you creaked, making the both of you freeze. “It’s the house,” you assured, hoping John wasn’t up still. You pushed Roger over and he pulled you on top of him. You moved your hips against his, leaning forward to kiss him briefly as his hands ran down your back and up to your neck. He smirked momentarily at you above him. The ends of your hair brushed against his chest slightly and you bent down to kiss his collarbones, causing him to moan. The floorboards creaked loudly in a distant part of the house. The both of you froze once again as you quickly covered his mouth. Roger waited for it to go silent again before taking control. With you on your back again, he tightly held onto you, moving with you, bringing the two of you closer to release. Muffled moans blended together quietly before Roger withdrew from you, releasing.

He fell onto the bed next to you as you wrapped the blankets around the two of you. He pulled you closer to him, putting an arm behind your head. The both of you looked up at the ceiling, listening to the crickets outside. After you turned to put your head on his chest, throwing your arm over his body, he took your hand in his, looking at it in the moonlight.

“So you’re staying all summer?” he affirmed.

You chuckled slightly and nodded. “Unless John gets tired of me.”

“Good,” he hummed.

lemme know if you barfed because i felt uncomfy yet would definitely write more of these :)

[words-with-friends-cheat-yz]

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[goodfortune-au]

Good Fortune (Soulmate AU) Chapter 7: Halloween

October was winding to a close, with only a couple days remaining until Halloween. With all that had been going on, Angel hadn’t a lot of time nor the enthusiasm to get riled up like in years past for what was surely her favorite holiday, but she still planned to dress up nonetheless. She had plans, too. Nothing too extravagant; she simply planned to take the Losers out trick-or-treating, participate in the festivities as an full-fledged adult rather than a carefree child on a quest for free candy. The Losers spoke of their respective costume choices with glee; Richie naturally chose to play Ryu from Street Fighter, Stan put together an elaborate costume and planned to go as one of his favorite birds, one he'd read about called the European Bee-Eater, and Eddie was going as a Pierrot. Bill, who’d been goaded into coming along at the last second, was attending as a simple sheet ghost.

Angel even had an ensemble of her own to wear, though it had admittedly been recycled from Halloween’s past. A character from one of her favorite movies, one she paid tribute to in one of the posters decorating the walls of her living room, she planned to play the despicable Alexander Delarge from A Clockwork Orange. She had it all; the white dress shirt, carpenter pants and suspenders, the cane, the codpiece, and of course the characteristic black bowler. She enjoyed the look immensely, found it simply outrageous and certainly iconic, and she didn’t mind using it again for this year’s celebrations. She spends the last couple days of the month lazily tracking down all the pieces and then the 31st arrives, quickly dissolving from daylight into dusk.

Let’s have a party

There’s a full moon in the sky

It’s the hour of the wolf

And I don’t wanna die~

Oingo Boingo is playing on her stereo, perfect Halloween music that fills the room and besets it with a truly festive energy. It’s No One Lives Forever, her favorite track off Dead Man’s Party, an album she felt perfectly encapsulated the spirit of the holiday. Just as she’s putting the final touches on her costume, affixing the single pair of false eyelashes to her right eye, she hears a shower of knocks at her front door. Her hair is in a loose ponytail, tucked up into itself to mimic Alex’s almost bob-like hairstyle, and she laces up her Doc Martens to complete the stark and unnerving look. She answers the door and the Losers come parading in, all donning their costumes proudly. She looks them over with exaggerated enthusiasm, and compliments them all on their ensembles. Eddie’s costume was her favorite. And all the while, the music on her stereo warbles along, fast-paced and electric.

I'm so happy

Dancing while the grim reaper

Cuts cuts cuts

Well you can't get me

“Wow guys, not bad! Bill? Simple but iconic. You too Eds, you nailed the facepaint. And Stan? Lovin’ the bird look, it suits you.”

“Thaaaaank you.” Stan says pleasantly, standing up straight and beaming. His plumage is beautiful. "I spent months on it, had to get it just right."

“Well, it came out f*ckin’ fantastic.” She gives him a winning thumbs up.

“What about me?” Richie pipes up from the back. His gi hangs loosely about his chest, and the costume overall looks about two sizes too big. He has a long red tie knotted about his head to mimic Ryu's distinctive headband.

“Hmm… Size it a little better next time Rich, your t*ts are hangin’ out.” She says, half-serious. “Also, are those boxing gloves?”

“Hey, gimme a break. The thrift store didn’t have sh*t.” He says, trying and failing to snag a Reeses from the candy bowl sitting on the coffee table.

There’s giggles from the peanut gallery.

“What about you?” Ed asks, looking her over.

“Yeah, w-what are you s-s-supposed to be?” Bill asks from underneath the sheet.

“A fashion disaster, apparently.” Richie snorts. He’s taken off one of his gloves to get to the candy. “And what’s with the jock strap?”

“Shut up Richie.”

She’s unsure of how to answer the question, scratching her head nervously. “Oh, uh… A character from a movie you definitely … Shouldn’t watch. Not uh… Not until you’re at least sixteen.” Truth be told, she was about their age when she first saw it, but the kids didn’t need to know that.

“I’ve actually seen it.” Richie admits casually, popping the candy into his mouth. “Snuck it out of my parents’ collection one night. The shit is wild.” Then he clears his throat and slips into one of his voices. He mimics Alex’s manner of speaking in perfect nadsat as he slings an arm around Stan’s shoulder, which Stan promptly pushes off. Richie seems unphased. “Welly welly well my droogs, are we ready to have a flip horrorshow time this evening? Time’s a wastin’, o my brothers, let’s get to the streets and crast around the ol' neighborhoods before the night is done, right right?”

Angel stares at him for a moment. “I don’t like that.” She says blankly.

“No one does.” Eddie adds disdainfully. He truly looks a picture-perfect Pierrot at this moment.

“Pshhhh, you guys are no fun.” Richie sighs, shaking his candy bucket at them with a flippant wave of his hand.

“He is right, though.” Angel says, looking at the clock overhead. “It’s getting late, and we only have so much time to make the rounds.” She opens the door and waves them out. “Let’s go, kiddos, after you.”

They go walking out in a single file line and she closes the door behind her. “Alright, let’s make our way down Witcham, shall we? I say we start from the bottom and work our way up and around.” She says, gesturing with her cane.

The night is alive with true Halloween spirit. The moment they step outside, they can feel the biting chill of the air sweeping through them. The streets are filled with questing children all on the prowl for the same common goal, with parents tagging along in mostly halfhearted reluctance. She swings her cane as she walks and leads the way for the Losers, acting as a pied piper of sorts to guide them through the organized chaos of the adolescent-populated thoroughfares. They begin with the house adjacent to Angel’s, and cross over to the house across the street afterward. Angel hangs back as the kids saunter up to the front doors to collect their candy, and the kids rejoin her after accomplishing their end.

“Well, what’d you guys get?” She asks nonchalantly, leaning up against a tree.

“I got a Blow Pop.” says Eds.

“B-B-Butterfinger.” says Bill.

“Two Twizzlers.” says Stan.

“I got shafted.” says Richie.

Angel gives him a look. “What does that mean?”

“Butterscotch.” He says, looking appalled.

She laughs with a shrug. “Better than nothin’, bud.”

“I’d rather have nothing.” He says defiantly.

“Alright, then give it.”

“No.”

They continue on, and gradually make their way through the neighborhood. They collectively start to amass a modest amount of candy, and Angel even finds herself collecting a few pieces here and there at the insistence of a few benevolent parents (including one of her personal favorites, the grape-flavored Tootsie Pop). There’s even a few among them that recognize her costume. Some are amused, others are less so. She found it par for the course; the town was routinely uptight when it came to just about anything she liked. Still, she takes it in stride, and starts to find herself in genuine good spirits. Things had been hard as of late, and it was nice to have another occasion to celebrate that gave her much-needed respite from her troubles. It went without saying, too, but the presence of the Losers always put a smile on her face. Cheesy as it was, they were practically a ray of sunshine in the otherwise moody and fickle storm that was her life. They didn’t always have time to visit, but when they did, it made for good times. She tried her best to cherish that and not take it for granted.

After having sojourned as far down the street as they reasonably could, the party makes a 180 pivot once they can start to see the Hanlon farms off in the distance, and then they slowly but surely make their way back past Angel’s house where they had started. The night is still young but the sky is as black as coal, the moon luminescent as the dozens of flashlights brandished by costumed children scurrying about the pavement. Their chatter and glee makes for pleasant background noise as the Losers collectively journey through Witcham toward Up-Mile-Hill, their pillowcases and buckets rustling with increasing bounty after each and every house. They stop off at a few more doors and then take a moment outside of Bill’s house to assess their current stashes.

“...Two, four, five… God I’ve got six f*cking butterscotches.”

“Heh heh, the old ladies must love ya.” Eddie snickers. He peels the wrapper off a KitKat and methodically breaks off one half to eat. Richie smacks the other half into the dirt with his boxing glove.

“Hey are you f*cking serious?” Eddie exclaims, gesturing to the fallen KitKat in patent dismay.

“That’s the toll.” Richie shrugs. His gi is so baggy it almost slips off his shoulder. “You make fun of me you lose your candy. You’re just lucky it wasn’t anything good.”

“You got something against KitKats, a*shole?” Eddie snaps back venomously.

“Okay, okay, break it up you two.” Angel says from behind a chick tract. She flips to the end of the little booklet and tosses it into the dirt. “The Gay Blade,” it’s called. She crushes it beneath her boot heel.

“S-S-Sorry I’m late, g-guys.” Bill says from underneath his sheet. “T-Thanks for waiting up.”

“Late?” Stan asks. “Late from where?”

“I h-had some trouble cutting the h-holes in the right p-p-places. Went through t-t-two old sheets before I got it.” He laughs.

“Oh. I thought--”

“And what the hell is your costume, anyway, huh? It’s giving me the creeps!”

“Mimes scare you, Richie? What are you, like, five?”

“Weren’t you here with us before?” Stan is puzzled.

“H-huh? No, I don’t… T-Think so?”

“Then, who was--”

‘I’LL LIQUIFY YOUR KNEECAPS WITH MY HURRICANE KICK.”

“I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS.”

“GUYS!” Angel roars. They all stop. “Quit fighting or I’m gonna knock both your heads together. Eds- I’ve got an extra KitKat. Richie- quit whinging about your butterscotches.”

“But-”

“Shut it!”

“Sorry.”

“We’ve still got a lot of ground to cover, so if you guys don’t want to waste the night I say we get going.” She sighs.

“Fine, but keep this painted creep away from me.” Richie snipes, scooting away from Eddie. He immediately starts picking at Stan’s plumage. “Looks like it’s you and me tonight, Stan the man. The dynamic duo.”

Stan smacks his hand away. “Absolutely not. And don’t touch my plumage.” Stan glances at Bill again. “Angel--”

“Come on, we’re burning moonlight.”

“Fine, fine.”

He tries to just forget it.

~~~~

The party of Losers makes their way past Derry Elementary as they stroll down Costello Avenue, hitting as many houses as they can along the way. There’s even more people on the streets than before and the traffic seems to be increasing as time wears on. By now everyone has gathered a decent amount of candy, weighty to the point of having to be slung over shoulders and lugged around like dense sacks of potatoes. Their feet are growing tired but still they trudge on, determined to make the most of the holiday and squeeze as much productivity out of the night as possible. Angel finds her mind wandering with her stride, and as she continues she starts to contemplate the presence of her guardian angel. She wondered if they were watching over her that night, wondered if she might find another gift, waiting for her in some crack or crevice ready to be found and picked up for her growing collection. She hadn’t told the Losers about this so-called guardian of hers; she thought it to be a thing best kept private. It was better savored that way, and felt like a delicious little secret only she was privy to. She simply enjoyed the imagined security in silence, the feeling that she was special to something, special enough to look out for and leave little trifles to keep her faith and interest. It was nice, it was thrilling in a sense. She had no idea of the identity of this thing, but she appreciated it nonetheless, so taken with the nice gestures that she was blind to any perceived ulterior motives.

“That makes ten f*cking butterscotches.” Richie says, swiping through his candy in frustration. “It’s like I’m a magnet for them or some shit.”

“Yeah but I’m s-sure you’ve got a lot of other stuff t-t-too.” Bill says, trying to offer a bit of positivity.

“Yeah, look on the bright side, kiddo.” Angel chimes in. “Could be candy corn, or… God forbid, black licorice.”

They all shudder with disgust.

“Still.” Richie says, rustling through his bucket again. “If I get another one I’m gonna f*ckin’ lose it.”

He picks one out and examines it with distaste, then chucks it over his shoulder. There’s a snarl from behind him as it clacks against the sidewalk, and Ed’s eyes widen into saucers as he preemptively steps back, hiding behind Angel.

“Uh oh.”

Richie hesitates, then turns around. Henry Bowers and his gang of thugs, Belch Huggins, Victor Criss, and Patrick Hockstetter are standing in a group on the sidewalk, and the butterscotch had just so happened to bounce off the back of Henry’s head. He gulps.

“Which one of you f*cking twerps threw that?” He asks, turning around. His voice is low and dangerous.

“No one. It was Eddie.” Richie blurts out.

“Dude!” Eddie squeaks angrily from behind Angel’s pant leg. Henry seems unphased as Richie backs away.

The group begins to congregate around the Losers, with Henry advancing slowly on Richie like a slithering snake cornering a helpless mouse.

“I’m gonna gut you like a f*cking fish, Tozier.” He growls, leaning down to look at him. His eyes glint meanly in the darkness and Richie shrinks ever so slightly.

“Hey, that’s enough Bowers.” It's Angel, coming in between the two of them. “Back the f*ck off or I’m calling your dad over. I’m sure he’d be none too happy to find your little punk ass threatening a bunch of little kids.”

Henry stares at her for a moment in silence, then pops his neck and steps back a pace or two. “...Fine. You kids are f*cking spineless, you know that? Always hiding behind big sister.” He mocks. He gives a fleeting look to his goons and gestures with an upward nod of his head. They uncross their arms.

“Come on, guys.” He says angrily. They start to leave. Belch elbows past Angel harshly, but not before whispering something nasty into her ear on his way through. She freezes and glares at him in disgust, watching as they all fade into the crowd in front of them.

“Let’s go.” Angel says darkly.

The kids hesitate, then all agree after an uncomfortable silence. They try to forget it all as they continue on.

Angel is stony-faced and silent for a time, keeping her lips pursed in dismay as she leads the kids forward through the neighborhood. She plays with the pearl heart around her neck, rolling her thumb over the smooth polished surface slowly and methodically while she thinks. She’s angry about them, and she’s upset with herself for it. They were just a few shitty kids, she shouldn’t let their bad attitudes interfere with her night and spoil everything for her. She’s the adult, she’s supposed to be better than this. The kids are quiet, sensing the tension, and not even Richie breaks the silence to keep bickering with Eddie or crack lame jokes. She tries so hard just to let it go, but she’s stewing in silent resentment now. She got so sick of hearing things like that. She’d grown up being called those things, before she even knew the first thing about what they meant or the malice behind them. It didn’t matter if it was true or not, it was… The cruelty and the intolerance behind the words. She hated herself for being so easily rattled, but she couldn’t help it. It’s the way she’s always been.

“Are you… Okay, Angel?” Eds asks carefully, looking up at her.

She pauses, then sighs. “...Yeah. Yeah, I am. Don’t worry guys, I’m okay. Just… Sh*tty kids is all.”

“No need to explain.” Richie says with an uncharacteristic solemnity. “Bowers is just a jerkass. I swear, kid looks for reasons to be mad.”

“Yeah.” she says quietly. “They all do.”

“ I’m still mad you tried to blame me for throwing that f*ckin’ butterscotch.” Eddie says, glaring at Richie from the other side of Angel.

“The dude was sweatin’ me, it just came out!” Richie exclaims, excuses at the ready. “I guarantee you’d do the same damn thing in my position.’

“No, because unlike you I have a sense of honor.”

“Alright you two.” Angel sighs. “We should keep going, yeah? Still plenty of houses to hit.”

“Actually,” Stan pipes up. All eyes fall on him. “O-Oh. Well, I was just gonna say… My house is just down the block a little, and I kind of need to go to the bathroom.”

“Oh, well that’s no problem.” Angel says casually. “Go right ahead, we could all use a break anyway.”

He’s silent. “Well, uh… It’s kind of an elaborate costume…”

“Jesus, Birdman, are you really telling me you can’t get in and out of that thing by yourself?” Richie asks incredulously. “What, did your mom help you put it on?”

“Cool it, Rich.” Angel says tiredly.

“That’s irrelevant.” Stan says delicately. “Point is, I need someone to come with just in case I… You know… Last thing I need is a wardrobe malfunction.”

“Eds, go with Stan and help him with his costume please. And be quick.”

“You got it, Anj.”

Angel climbs onto the branch of a low-hanging tree so as to rest her feet and takes a great big heaving sigh as she watches them disappear from her peripherals. Richie and Bill hang back in silence for a time before Richie starts needling Bill with questions about his costume to pass the time. Angel doesn’t participate, finding that the exhaustion of being socially present was starting to weigh on her just the slightest bit now. She cranes her neck up to look at the sky and gets lost in the stars as she swings her feet. They’re so bright from so far, distant and almost vaguely familiar in their golden splendor; lighthouses that beckon brilliantly from lightyears away, from a place so far-flung she could hardly even fathom it and her mind wanders, hopping seamlessly from one constellation into another. She’s lost in fleeting thought about all the complicated little details of her life, from far off memories of years past to old fights she had with loved ones; problems she’s had and forks in the road she’s had to face before eventually arriving here at this present moment in time. Some part of her briefly wonders whether or not her life was building towards anything at all, and whether or not everything that happened to her was all for a reason or simply cruel twists of fate. She suspected it to be the latter.

Still, she couldn’t deny that she seemed exceptionally lucky, especially for an outcast. People… Like her, they didn’t tend to last very long in a place like Derry. She’s surprised she was able to make it this far to begin with, really. Though the 80’s were a modern and revolutionary time to be living in, places like Derry were less subversive. It was such a small town in such a rural place that things at times seemed a little backwards. If you weren’t a specific kind of way, if you didn’t conform to certain standards, you made yourself the target of many. People in this town could be downright nasty and she knew it. It didn’t stop her from being a relatively brazen girl, however. Growing up, she reveled in being weird, in being the oddball. She had a quirky, offbeat sense of humor, she listened to strange music, she drew creepy things no one liked to look at and she dressed like a clown, all bright and offbeat and mismatched. People tried to beat that out of her, and to some extent they definitely succeeded, but Angel was lucky that was all she got. For her own reckless daring she should be dead somewhere, the victim of some lowly scumbag that had crawled out of the dregs below to take their anger out on someone the town surely wouldn’t miss. She shouldn’t have lasted her entire childhood, and that was to say nothing about all the rumors. Those kinds of rumors were exceptionally dangerous in a place like this and still she managed to survive. It was remarkable to say the least.

Was she actually a lucky girl? Hard to say. She’d been the unlucky contestant of quite a few dicey situations over the years, situations that left nics and scratches and mental scars, things that kept her up at night when all that was left to do was think, but she still came out of all of it alive and well in the end. It was hard to ignore such a notable lifelong track record, and although it would have been easy to chalk it all up to good fortune, she knew that things simply weren’t that easy in Derry. With all of the town’s history, with all of the strange happenings and the presence of things unknown beyond anyone’s understanding, good fortune seemed too convenient of an excuse. She wondered, in the end, if she had anything to do with it all, if her fate was somehow tied to this town and all of its intricacies. Maybe the manifestation of her guardian angel wasn’t just a strange development but, in fact, a stepping stone to something she couldn’t yet understand.

She wanted to believe it, but the mere thought of it was making her more tired than before and, in a sense, melancholic for reasons she couldn’t properly justify. She was also starting to worry. It’d been an awfully long time since the kids left, and as time went on she couldn’t stop herself from starting to think dreadful things. For the sake of coping, her mind jumps from these heavy topics into things of less weight. Happy thoughts, she tries to think. Yes, she was looking forward to November. She was looking forward to the holidays to come. She was looking forward to the change of seasons, the segue of gorgeous autumn into breaktaking winter, the way that the trees would shed their foliage completely to welcome the blankets of virgin snow descending from the sky. Derry was positively resplendent in the wintertime, and the sight of snowcapped pines dotting across the land alongside festive lights, garland, tinsel, and other colorful decorations brought the town much-needed vivacity and cheer in perpetually grim times. She couldn’t wait for it.

Despite the excitement of the night, she couldn’t wait to go home either. Couldn’t wait to go home, say a goodnight to the kids and to her precious cat, peel off her costume and crawl into her warm bed where she’d take much-needed relief from it all. Couldn’t wait for the next day, when she would have the house to herself again, when she could turn on the TV and spend the hours searching for things to watch and keep her fickle attention span. She couldn’t wait to drown her troubles in junk food, a nasty habit she did well to keep to herself, and forget all her problems for as long as she possibly could. She couldn’t wait for the Derry Children’s Hour, and she couldn’t wait to see him. She couldn’t wait for the night to come again, where she’d fall asleep all over again and have that dream. The dream that would sometimes play out exactly as it had the night before, or the dream that would go just a little bit further, teasing at something that made her wake every morning with a blush staining her cheeks.

It was not unlike Angel to develop crushes on fictional characters or people on the TV, she’d grown up doing it her entire life. It was one of her most ingrained coping mechanisms, a way to deal with how exceedingly lonely she had always felt. Usually these things, these fixations lasted for about a couple weeks to maybe a month or two at most, and then they would fade to give way for the next one. Some were intense and lasted short amounts of time, others were more subdued and lasted longer. It simply depended on who it was and how much they struck her fancy. This one struck her fancy an awful lot if she were honest. Clowns were admittedly something of a weakness for her. She couldn’t exactly explain it, but her fascination with them didn’t just stop at the way they dressed or the way they acted. There was something else there too. She thinks about him, his bright blue eyes, the way they turned to gold in her fantasies and her stomach flutters with something delightful. And when she lets her gaze fall back down on the crowds of people trekking by, she almost thinks she catches a glimpse of him among the horde and a vision of his form paints itself in her mind, coifs of beautiful wildfire bouncing ever so slightly with each step, pleats of silver silk complimented by the reflecting moonlight overhead. Before she can let her mind wander on him too long, however, her attention is called by the sight of Eddie, who comes running up from the crowd wearing panic on his painted face. His makeup is smudged and he appears a little disheveled.

“Angel, Angel!” He calls frantically. He’s out of breath, and he pulls his inhaler from a specially sewn pocket on his suit. After taking two long indulgent puffs, he puts it back with shaking hands.

She jumps down from the tree, unease striking her veins. “What’s going on Eds? Where’s Stan?”

He’s still catching his breath, but he wheezes out the answer. “Its-- It’s Bowers.” He gasps. “Him and his gang caught us in the alley by Secondhand Rose.”

“F*ck.”

“Are you o-okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, Patrick almost chased me down but I got away. I tried to go back for Stan after but I couldn’t find any of them when I did. I think maybe they took him somewhere else.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Okay well--” Angel says, picking up her cane again, which was resting idly against the trunk of the tree. “We can’t waste any time. We’ll drop by Secondhand Rose first just to make sure he's not there, and then we’ll start scouting Up-Mile-Hill. Come on, guys.”

No time to think about the clown now. Her mind is consumed now in the search for Stan, overcome with worry and concern that she cannot assuage with thoughts of a best case scenario, because best case scenarios simply didn’t exist with Angel. It was easier simply to assume the worst so that she wouldn’t take a single better outcome for granted, and right now, she assumed the worst in the vain hopes that she would end up being wrong. The Bowers gang was a violent bunch, and she feared what they might do if left alone with a defenseless child for too long. Stan was also a fairly delicate kid, and besides Eddie was least liable to stick up for himself in dire situations such as these. She tries not to think of it too much, keeping her mind solely on the task at hand. The remaining Losers are calling out for him as they search the streets, and she joins their efforts with a strong, loud call into the darkness.

“Stan, Stan!” They all keep shouting endlessly, but their voices are simply not enough to locate the whereabouts of their lost friend. Their best efforts are only met with silence among the chatter, and no one around pays heed to their dilemma, purely oblivious to their desperation and almost mindless in their dogging pace. Checking the alley of Secondhand Rose proves fruitless and futile, and after reaching that dead end they take their investigation elsewhere. Up-Mile-Hill is saturated with an almost obscene amount of people in costume and as time goes on the masses start to blend into one another, a mosaic of cheap, gaudy material, masks and outrageous makeup. Devils, witches, skeletons, and ghosts litter the streets among other more creative getups, and Angel finds herself thankful in this moment that Stan was wearing something fairly distinct; it made him easier to draw out of the crowd. If she could ever find him, that is. She continues her surveyance of the path ahead of her, searching like a watchful eagle over empty valleys and canyons, eyes trained on a certain and specific target. Her eyes scan restlessly over them all, raking over endless bobbing waves of people wandering aimlessly towards god-knows-what and she thinks she sees a clue on the ground, an iridescent feather distinctive of Stan’s flashy ensemble.

But then-

“Bill!” She hears Eddie scream.

She turns back, bringing their pace to a grinding halt. The crowd moves around them, unfazed.

“Wha- What about Bill? Where is he?” she asks breathlessly.

“I don’t know!” Richie says frantically. “He was right behind us and then when we looked back he was just gone! We lost him!”

“Jesus f*cking-- Okay, okay.” She takes a deep breath, eyes closed tight as she thinks. When she opens her eyes and surveys the crowd again, it's almost as though there’s five times as many ghosts as before. It gives her a headache just looking at them all. “We can’t stop looking for Stan, just-- Just keep a lookout for Bill too.”

“But there’s a f*ckton of kids dressed just like him! How are we supposed to find him in this sea of ghosts? It’s like the goddamn River Styx out here!” Richie exclaims.

“There’s nothing else we can do, Richie! We’ll find them both eventually, just trust me, okay? Come on!”

They start moving again, and she’s even more terrified than before. That ever-familiar fear and mortification frosts over her heart, and it takes everything she’s got not to have a panic attack right there on the sidewalk. She needed to stay strong for the kids, she knew that, so she trudges on, swallowing the dread forming hard lumps in her throat and ignoring the knots twisting and churning in her stomach, different than the pleasant ones from before. Now more than anything she wishes for her guardian angel, wanting to feel their presence simply for the sake of comfort and security in these uncertain circumstances and disheartened that she couldn’t find a single trace of them. As she kept collecting the gifts she started eventually becoming in tune to a certain feeling, an aura that manifested itself in powerful warm gusts of wind or insectile chatter that seemed to come through her from all directions. Strange exhalations of something cosmically different, brief demonstrations that something was definitely watching over her, presumably speaking to her in the only way it could. As much as she longed to feel that aura now, however, there was simply nothing to console her, leaving her alone to navigate this difficult terrain on her own.

“Stan!” She continues calling out. But there’s still nothing.

She keeps scanning the crowd. Her eyes don’t stop for even a second, trying to find the bright and colorful plumage of his intricate costume amidst the comparably dark, bland tones of the others blending into one another. There seem to be more people than before. With each passing moment the numbers only increase, and now Angel can’t even see the path in front of her. Another category of overdone costumes seems to have entered the fold, a swarm of zombies and walking corpses ambling alongside her now as she conducts her frantic investigation. It’s getting tight and claustrophobic, she’s elbowing and shouldering past countless people, hoping in vain that Eddie and Richie can keep the pace behind her, knowing that she truly couldn’t afford to lose any more of them. She doesn’t have the time to look back and check, but the presence of their voices is enough to reassure her. There’s so many people she can hardly believe it, more people than she saw at the concert some weeks back, and surely more people than reasonably existed in Derry. She can’t question it, doesn’t have the energy to, so she just keeps searching, calling. The pace of the crowd is relentless and unstoppable now like droves of stampeding wildebeests, and she fears they might get trampled if they stop for even a second. She’s moving, searching, calling and then she’s interrupted; her eyes fall on something in front of her that makes her heart skip a beat in her chest.

It’s him, moving along with the horde, far ahead of her but still very much recognizable. She can hardly believe her eyes, and he doesn’t disappear when she blinks in confusion. In her panic-riddled mind she briefly wonders if its really him or simply a person imitating him, and she comes to the quick and hopeful conclusion that it must be the former, as she saw no reason anyone in this town would want to dress up as a character on a bizarre local access show of all things. Something strange overcomes her and her pace quickens; she can hardly think as she pushes past more people, becoming consumed now in the throes of a different chase. Her feet feel numb and she can’t control herself. She keeps her eyes on him, his tall figure distinct among the bobbing throngs of people shorter in stature, and she can hardly hear the calls of the children behind her.

“Angel! Angel!” Ed and Richie are yelling desperately. They sound far away, almost as though they had floated off, light as balloons and skyward-bound. She shuffles forward, static in her ears as she leaves them behind. “Where are you going?! Angel!!”

She’s swallowed by a strange desire, something she can’t muster the power to break from; not here, not now. She’s almost hypnotized, taken by an urge she doesn’t understand, but she knows she has to get to him. She doesn’t even know what she’ll do when she does; what she’ll say, how she’ll explain herself. She simply continues thoughtlessly, her canter almost quickening into a run, as much of a sprint as the current surroundings would allow her. It’s almost like a sickness, intense and vivid and overwhelming, heat settling over her temples as she pushes closer towards him.

And then he stops for a second, the crowd moving around him like currents of the red sea parting for the will of god through Moses’ staff. He stops, he turns, and he looks through her with a piercing stare. His eyes are highbeams of golden headlights in the dark of an unlit road.

She becomes dizzy, she loses all concentration. Everything is blurry, she can’t see straight. The static in her ears becomes deafening, almost like there’s a chorus of screams fighting to break free from her veins. There’s something mad roiling furiously through her blood now. Her eyes glaze over for a long moment before she snaps out of it, and she finds him gone from the crowd, almost as though he were never there in the first place. And then as she sobers, it all comes flooding back. Oh. Oh god. The children. She looks around her, but Eddie and Richie are gone now. She’s alone in the crowd. She’s alone, and she’s managed to lose all four of them.

Angry tears brim in her eyes as she immediately breaks from Up-Mile-Hill back onto Costello Avenue, quick and nimble on tired feet, her pulse thrumming in her aching temples as she continues her search more frantically than before. She longed to be at home resting after such a long night but she knew it wouldn’t end until she found them. It was hard, but she knew she had to take responsibility for all of this and see it through. She was just so worried for them. She spends eternal minutes scanning over the comparably empty road, interrupted only by the occasional passing streetcar, shivering in her costume and almost wishing for the feverish warmth of the previous chase to take her again. The feelings of self-hatred are starting to work their way through her blood again, blaming herself for all of it as she carries on. They were all lost and it was all her fault. If she’d just kept everyone in one piece, if she hadn’t gone chasing after the stupid clown, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place. This wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

She crosses from Costello Avenue onto Canal Street, and from there she starts to trek across Bassey Park towards the Kissing Bridge. She knew the Bowers Gang liked to hang out there on occasion, and there was the vague possibility they’d taken Stan there. Yes. Yes, it might be a better idea to search for one kid first and move on from there. She could at least take comfort in the fact that the others were simply lost in the crowd on Up-Mile-Hill, and they had a better chance of being safe while she tried to track down Stan. She hoped anyway. The Kissing Bridge comes up on the horizon and she stops for a moment. She slides her hands down the length of her cane until she reaches the bottom, and unscrews a compartment on the end until a hidden flashlight pops out. She turns it on and keeps going, shining it on the path in front of her until she reaches the bridge. She flashes it momentarily at all the names on the bridge, down at the Kenduskeag across the way, then scans it over the tunnel ahead of her. She listens for noises, any noises, anything that might give them away if they were anywhere nearby. So far, there’s nothing. She waits, and waits, but still there’s nothing.

She feels the tears come welling up in her eyes again and she stuffs the flashlight into her pocket in frustration. She leans out over the bridge, elbows propped on the white wood, and starts sobbing as she lets her face sink into her hands. Her cries echo in the emptiness of the surrounding nature, mocking her panic and her fear as the silent moon looks on indifferently from above. She indulges in this dejection for some time, unable to do little else than use this time to collect herself through her misery. She closes her eyes and lets her tears drop from her face into the foliage of the downward sloping hill below. She groans and buries her face in her hands again, but jerks up in alert when she hears rustling in a nearby underbrush. She whips her flashlight out again, cautiously searching with its beam of light to discern what she had heard, but she gets the wind knocked out of her as something rams into her from the side and slams her to the ground.

When she hits the ground her vision blurs, and she gasps desperately for breath as she waits for her vision to return. Something hits her in the ribs again and she sputters, coughing out a shriek as she rolls over and curls into a fetal position, trying to shield herself from her assailant. Another blow, this time aimed at her back and she cries out, further pushed into the wood of the Kissing Bridge. Her forehead scrapes against the pavement and she can see her blood smeared against the ground, black in the dim moonlight. She squeezes her eyes shut, almost hoping that that perpetrator might stop eventually if she just laid there and took it. She wheezes in agony, trying to catch her breath, but she’s suddenly jerked upward by her shirt and slammed against the bridge. She coughs again, blood and drool trickling down her lip, shaking as she faces her attacker.

It’s Patrick Hockstetter. He’s alone, and he wears a look of smug content on his face. Smug content and just the slightest hint of resentment.

“Nice to see you again.” He sneers.

She gasps, still short of breath, unable to react immediately. She straightens her back in his hold and winces at the aching pain in her bones.

“Patrick Hockstetter.” She groans. “I knew one of you slimy fucks was hiding around here.”

He punches her in the ribs and she cries out again, losing her breath as he looms over her. He’s pressing her backward into the bridge like he intends to push her over the edge, but he still holds her there, clearly enjoying her discomfort.

“I’d shut my mouth if I were you, you stupid meddling b*tch.” He says with venom in his tone.

“F*ck...You.” She growls, and he hits her again, this time across the face.

She coughs and sputters, and then she looks up to glower at him.

“What… The f*ck...Did you do to Stan..?” She asks darkly, swallowing back the taste of rust.

“You mean that kid in the lame little bird costume?” He asks. He leans in, and she can smell the revolting stench of alcohol on his warm breath. “...We beat the everloving piss out of him.”

She lunges forward, roaring in rage but he’s too quick. He punches her in the ribs once more and laughs when she lets out a pained howl, crumpling over as she tries in vain to protect herself. He keeps a tight grip on the front of her shirt, and a spike of fear shoots through her veins when she can hear a click from outside her peripherals.

He raises a switchblade to her throat, slowly pressing the sharpened metal against her throat, savoring the way she squirms.

“You’re a f*cking freak, you know that?” He sneers. “Grown woman friends with a bunch of lame ass little kids, f*cking lifeless weirdo. No wonder you hang around with those f*cking losers, you’re no different than they are. ”

“Better than hanging around a bunch of limp-dicked nobodies who get their rocks off threatening women and children.” She whispers with hatred in her voice. Despite her fear, she can’t stop herself from taunting him even in the face of danger.

He presses the blade against her throat harder now as he pushes her back against the bridge.

“Shut up, b*tch, or I’ll slit your f*cking throat right now. I’ll let you bleed out right here on the ground.”

He looks around her and down into the underbrush below. He looks thoughtful for a second, and then an evil grin spreads across his face.

“Or… I’ll throw you over this f*cking bridge. How about it, bitch? Maybe you’ll break your neck from the fall.”

He inches her back even more until half her body is dangling back over the wood, and she’s struggling against him.

“Yeah, yeah I think that’s a pretty good idea. I think this town would be better off without you anyway. Just one less of you making us all look bad.” He says.. He notices the pendant around her neck and smirks. “Hmm, won’t be needing this anymore, will we?” He yanks it from her neck and throws it to the side, delighted at the way she cries out in dismay when it clacks against the ground and skids out of sight into a nearby bush.

"Well, it was nice knowing ya…"

He leans forward to whisper in her ear.

So long dyke.

And then he pushes her over the edge.

She screams out as she falls and then she hits the ground. There’s a sickening crunch upon her impact and gravity sends her tumbling painfully down the underbrush. She’s lost her breath completely and she gasps for air, gulping it down into her lungs desperately as she plunges toward the bottom of the hill. She’s got scratches on her face from stray branches and she’s covered in dust and leaves as she lays there helpless, immobilized in the dirt. The pressure against her ribs is unbearable and it takes all of her strength to roll from her side onto her back. Her bowler is gone, having gotten lost when she was pitched over the side. She can’t muster the energy or the strength to get up, time has slowed to a crawl as she passes the minutes fighting to stay conscious. She can see the black starting to take over and she tries her best to combat it, but she knows it's only a matter of time before she passes out. She coughs into the cold air, and each cough sends a sharp pain stabbing against her insides, sends fresh tears in her bloodshot eyes, which brim over the surface and trickle warmly down the side of her feverish cheek. She’s almost gone when she hears laughing overhead. Laughter, self-indulgent despicable cackling which turns into a blood curdling shriek out of nowhere. She thinks she’s hallucinating the rumbling snarls and the wet, ripping sounds, the chewing, so vivid in her ears like surround sound in a movie theater, the stench of death rolling over the cold air like a carrion perfume. It’s a maddening assault to the senses, one she can’t muster the energy to question or justify as she lies there like a captive audience. Then, just as quickly as it came, there’s simply an eerie silence now where there was once a disorienting cacophony of screams and tears and she can’t stave it off anymore, the pain and the exhaustion. After a few more moments of vainly trying to fight it, her sight eventually goes to black.

Silence, silence, silence and sleep. And then…

“Angel…” A voice calls to her. “Angel…”

She’s still out like a light, but she can still hear it, the sound of someone familiar. The voice is sweet and soft and lilting, almost like a lullaby. Almost like… No, it couldn’t be.

But when her eyes flutter open ever so slightly, she can see something reaching towards her from above, a blackened figure she can’t quite make out in her haze. The figure appears tall and looming; it reaches its hand down towards her and she wants to grab it, but she just doesn’t have the strength. Her sight is returning and the stars above her are so vividly blinding even in her haze; they stare down at her from above, bold but kind as she comes out of her trauma-induced stupor. This moment is so vaguely familiar to her, almost like deja vu; it's as though she’s reliving that night at the Terrace, with the mysterious benefactor that had saved her from getting very nearly trampled. She wants to reach… She tries so hard, but the pain is too much and she falls back again, thudding against the ground. The shadow looms closer still.

“Angel…? Angel!”

The world slowly returns to her weary eyes, and when she comes to all she can see is the kids standing over her.

“Holy sh*t, are you okay?”

They’re all crowded around her in worry, looking over her in concern, crouched to examine her beaten condition. The stars are merely a backdrop now.

“Oh I’m fine…” She says weakly, letting tears of relief well in her eyes. “Just… Slipped and fell. Clumsy me, right?”

She laughs bitterly and then sucks in air through her teeth with a gasp. She groans.

“Nah, I… I went looking for you guys and… Ran into Hockstetter. He beat a raincheck into my stomach and t-threw me over the Kissing Bridge.”

“Jesus.”

“ F*ck man.”

“They got you too, huh?” Stan says, his voice feeble and frail. She takes a closer look at him, standing above her. He’s all disheveled and bruised and his costume is ripped to shreds. Eddie and Richie have him with an arm around each of their necks, propping him up.

“Awh, Stan, your costume…” She says, genuinely heartbroken. She coughs again.

“It’s… Okay. Definitely could’ve been worse.” He assures her. She can see the pain on his face.

“How’d… F*ck… How’d you guys… Find each other again?” She asks, trying to sit up but only making it about halfway.

“Well, Richie and I stuck together in the crowd after we lost you.” Ed explains. “We only managed to find Bill near the library because he took his costume off, and the three of us went down Up-Mile-Hill again to look for Stan after that.”

“We found him in the alley next to Tracker Brothers, said the Bowers Gang split up and left him to look for us after they were done beating the snot out of him.” Richie adds. “They didn’t find us, thank f*ck, but it looks like they found you. Well, one of them anyway.”

‘A-Anyways…” Bill speaks up. “We heard you s-s-scream… From across the Barrens, so we hurried over as f-fast as we c-could. Couldn’t find you on the b-bridge, but then s-suh-Stan spotted you down here near the canal.”

“Sorry we got here so late.” Eds says apologetically.

“Don’t worry about it.” She says, trying to sit up again. She winces. “I just… Think I’ve had enough for one night, and I'm sure… God… All the rest of you have too. Think we should probably find some way to get me home that doesn’t involve a stretcher.”

“We could all try to help get you up the hill, but what about Stan?” Eds asks, glancing at him from the side.

“I’ll be fine.” He says. He steadies himself before removing his arms from Ed and Richie’s shoulders. “I’m sore but nothing seems broken. She’s definitely in worse condition than me anyway.”

“...Thanks Stan.” She sighs with gratitude.

"Don't mention it." He smiles.

“Alright so… Are we doing this?”

“Yeah.” Angel agrees weakly. “Let’s give it a shot.”

Ed and Richie both pull on her arms and Bill supports her back as she struggles to get up. She hisses in pain as she scoots forward on the ground, and then she finds her legs, moving forward onto her knees so she can stand. She gasps as she gets up, and all four of them immediately move to keep her upright. She straightens her back and takes a deep breath in through her nose, breathing out through her mouth as she takes her first step forward. It gets harder as they reach the steep incline leading up towards the road, but against all odds they make their way back up. The walk home is long and painful despite the shortcuts they take but thankfully the crowds have all but dissipated completely at this point. Halloween seems to officially have come to an end and the streets are deathly silent now.

The second they come through Angel’s front door they waste no time in getting her to the couch. They lay her down on the cushions and she immediately sinks into the soft gingham, wincing and groaning in pain. Bill takes one of the pillows laying decoratively on one end and uses it to prop her head up. Richie and Ed help get her situated while Stan sinks down tiredly onto the floor next to one arm of the couch.

“You think anything is broken?” Ed asks worriedly. “Because, I can call 911. In fact, I think we probably should just to be safe.” He’s already walking towards the phone.

“No no, Eds, that’s okay. Don’t worry, I think I’m good. I think maybe my ribs are bruised, but I don’t think I broke anything.”

He puts the phone back on the hook. “You sure?”

“Quite sure. Promise promise.”

“Well… Alright. Either way, we should try to get the other stuff patched up.” Ed says, immediately striding over to his backpack now. “Luckily, I came prepared. My mom always makes me carry a first-aid kit around.”

“Nerd.” Richie mutters under his breath.

Eddie makes quick work of Angel’s wounds, disinfecting them with alcohol and applying bandages to all her cuts. Then once he’s done, he admires his handiwork.

“There. Not quite good as new, but I’m sure you’ll be better in a couple days.”

“Thanks Eds.” She says gratefully. Eddie has already gotten to work patching up Stan too.

“What now, though?” Richie asks. “Do we just… Go home? I was hoping to trade candy.”

“Dude, she’s dying.”

“I’m not dying.” She insists thinly from the couch. “If you guys wanna trade candy, then by all means. I owe you for getting me home tonight.”

“Are you s-s-sure, Angel? We don’t want to make things any h-harder on you.”

“Nah,” she says with a wave of her hand. “I don’t mind. Trade candy, watch a few movies, have some fun. Forgive me if I don’t join you, though, need some sleep after all this sh*t. Do your parents know you’re spending the night?”

“We can spend the night?” Richie asks, perking up.

“Sure. I don’t want you kids walking home alone after what happened tonight, too risky. And I’m not in any shape to take any of you back, either, so I don’t mind.”

“Well, n-none of us really c-cuh-cleared it with our parents…” Bill admits.

“Yeah…”

“...Maybe you can call them up in the morning.” Stan suggests, his voice muffled from between his hands. “Tell them we were too tired to walk home after we got done trick or treating. They know we’re with you, and we’ve slept over before.”

“Works for me.” Angel shrugs. “Well, I’m heading off to bed, you guys know the drill. Out before 6:30 and fold the blankets before you leave.”

“You got it, boss.” Richie salutes.

“Thanks Angel.”

She stops in the doorway of her room. “Thank you.” She says with a genuine smile and a wince. She shuts her bedroom door behind her.

Mayor Jello is already asleep on the bed. Time seems surreal as she gets undressed, peeling off all the layers to her costume and shucking them carelessly off to the side as she tiredly scans the walls of her room in vacant thought. Her eyes travel all over her various keepsakes and eventually make their way over to her open closet. Dozens of painted ceramic clowns stare at her innocently from the shelf as she removes her clothes and in the silent emptiness of it all, she blushes. She pops a couple painkillers, washing it down with a hearty swig of water at her bedside table, then carefully crawls into bed with a long and hedonistic sigh. She can hear the chatter and uproarious laughter of the children just down the hall and it makes her smile.

Nestling into the blanket, she lets her mind wander as she lays her head down into the plush of her cotton pillow, reflecting over all that had happened tonight with a kind of wistfully retrospective lens. She couldn’t deny that it was most certainly a very eventful holiday, more than she quite frankly could have bargained for. She’s just beyond relieved that she and the children all managed to end up together in one piece again. She’s worried for Stan’s condition, and quite frankly, worried what his parents might say when they learn of it, but she pushes those worries away for now, instead letting her mind wander toward Pennywise again. It was strange, what had happened earlier that night. She was almost sure she saw him in that crowd, but even stranger still was her reaction to seeing him in the first place. The urge to approach him had overcome her like a mad fever, and it had been an urge so powerful it separated her from the children. All she could do in that moment was try to reach him, like she was a moth fluttering desperately towards the warmth of faraway flame. And then, once he had gone, she had been so cold again. It was like he was a vision, a mirage so vivid and tangible but a mirage all the same, dissipating into nothing as she drew ever closer. Just a vision, a fantasy, a dream.

Her thoughts bring her into peaceful slumber, and from there she meanders into the all-too-familiar setup again, the same telltale scenario she’d encountered dozens of times by now. Waking up in the morning, getting ready for work… The feeling of loneliness and desolation stewing within the town, the clacking of her heels against the sidewalk the only instrument playing in an otherwise empty orchestra as she makes her way to the library. Working her shift, ignoring the cold shivers that roll down her back, the way the emptiness made her feel small and vulnerable… And the way that things always shifted, when she hears the whispers for the first time. How she follows the voice, and the way warmth seeps back into her bones with every step, like she’s simply a corpse rediscovering life. The feelings that bubble up inside her when she sees him for the first time, there in a place far below the town, standing there like he’s been waiting thousands of years just for her.

He faces away from her for a time, and when the silence becomes too much she always finds inexplicable strength in her voice. She calls to him.

“H-Hello?”

He slowly faces her now, his eyes glowing warmly in the darkness. They’re not mean or intimidating, only warm, like two golden tears shed from the sun, like glimmering, shimmering stars. She does not shrink back from his blinding stare even as it numbs her, even as it makes her blood scream out for something unknown and fills her with shrieking, seething insanity. He doesn’t answer with his words but the way he holds out his hand fills her with purpose; she trudges forward on deadened feet, closing the gap between them slowly but surely. And usually, that’s where the dream would almost always end. Sometimes she would hear a delicious whisper in her ear as she drew closer, might even feel the sensation of hands ghosting lightly over her exposed skin, but she would always wake before anything really happened, before he got a chance to truly touch her. It always frustrated her to no end.

“Angel…” She can hear the smile in his voice. There he stands, waiting for her to come. But then, but then… He takes a step forward himself, keeping his arm outstretched as he moves, her heart skipping a beat in her chest as he does so. This was… This was new. She resists the powerful urge to run towards him now, forcing herself to keep the same slow and composed pace from before as she keeps going. He continues in his own fashion, his eyes rooted on her, his suit jingling ever so slightly with each step and all she can think about is how desperate she is to feel it in her fingers. The thought is so deliciously sublime that each step gets lighter and lighter, and then eventually she leaves the ground completely. She starts to float in the cold air, starts to float away from him, and her dismay only sends her higher, higher and further away from his reach.

“P-Pennywise!” She cries out. She tries to swim down towards him to no avail, the current of the air is simply too strong. He doesn’t speak as he stares at her from below, but his voice is there in her mind regardless.

“I’ll always protect you, my sweet.”

Her eyes flutter open. It’s morning, she can tell by the light that shines through the curtains and the way the birds chirp from the trees outside. 7:27 , the clock at her bedside reads. Reality returns to her waking mind as she wiggles her toes underneath the warmth of the comforter, and as she adjusts her head on her pillow she can feel something odd laying underneath it. Another gift, maybe? As she sits up and regards it with wary eyes, she feels almost like a child unearthing spoils from a late night visit from the tooth fairy, and when she removes it she can’t stop the breath from hitching in her throat, a smile spreading across her face at the discovery.

It’s her pearl heart pendant, and beside it, a grape-flavored Tootsie Pop.

She walks out into the chilly living room, nothing on save for the necklace and a t-shirt. The living room is bare now, all sign of the Losers gone as she surveys the surroundings with tired eyes and steps towards the couch. Unwrapping the Tootsie Pop, she slides it in her mouth as she sits down, turning on the TV with a sigh. The local news is on, and the sight of the headline makes her heart sink with dread.

Patrick Hockstetter was declared missing.

[old-lady-material]

Can I please have a lyric drabble? Its "She called from a truck stop In Tucson Arizona" God Love Her by Toby Keith. I'd prefer Jax or Happy but your choice :3 thank you

first off, LOVE THIS SONG! Toby Kieth - God Love Herreally hope this is okay, didn’t go the direction of the song but with the line you gave i got inspired.

——————————————————-

4 days, 3 hours, 32 minutes and counting, he was counting.thats how long you had been gone, taken without a reason given though there was plenty of reasons to choose from. being the old lady to someone who knew how to kill you with a teacup put targets on his back and yours.

you loved that man, Happy made you happy and no amount of torture or spilled blood could make you turn rat. not on him and not on your family.

you repeated the lies over and over hoping they would believe you, hoping you would believe yourself if you said it a couple more times. you don’t get a man like Happy’s crow inked on your body unless you’re all in, unless you know everything. Happy was the kind of guy who needed that and you were the kind of women who wanted that for the both of you. peace of mind comes only when everything is layed on the table.

it was dark outside when you came back to reality again but it had been for some time, early morning, had to be around 4am? you were guessing at this point. your body had gone numb in places you never thought could. if you were right that meant you had two hours before the next ‘guard’ came in as they long thought themselves safe and decided they wanted all their men to get sleep. that had started 24 hours ago, they gave up on a rescue coming for you, they had their fun with you and today you feared they would believe your words and do away with you.

it had taken every minute of every day sanding away with a piece of metal at your chains, every hour you grew closer. your hands were cuffed with a long chain inbetween so they could hand you from a hook like meat for slaughter and your one ankle was cuffed and chained to the wall.  when fatigue didn’t take you you worked like a mad women using the numbness in your limbs to keep at it, keep going to get away. filing away at the metal and wearing it down before you became wore down. it would do no good to go through the cuff metal as it was to thick but the chain attached to your ankle was thinner and the welding on some of the links softer.

they hadn’t fed you but they had given you water. it was enough to keep yourself alive but you knew you looked like hell. you could only see out of one eye, bruises turned colors you were sure would take months to fade and that still didn’t begin to hit everything. you couldn’t scream as your throat had been squeezed and rubbed raw the first 24 hours, you hadn’t tried to walk or stand but you knew with the deep bruise around your swollen ankle when it came time to run you would have trouble. the cuts, your blood on the floor, all ignored for freedom.

there was a ‘chink’ and you were thrown back a bit from the tight metal suddenly giving way you knew you would have cried if you could have but you didn’t have that luxury. looking outside it had to be 5am and that meant you had only 1 hour before someone came in and that wasn’t enough time to get away. cursing you looked around the old barn and you thought up a plan.

you waited in some hay and watched it all unravel for them. they thought you had escaped most of them left in a hurry and you just waited, waited for the right moment for a stupid prospect to come along to look at where the remains of the chain hung nailed to the wall. all it took was a good hit with the help of a wood board to the head and his gun was yours. hell the silencer attached did they rest. you would take out two re-stock and take out two more. 

you didn’t bother with the bodies you just limped along. once you cleared out what you could you made your way to a van, hot-wired that shit and got in.

you didn’t stop until you hit a truck stop in Tucson Arizona. you pulled in beside the semis and waited in the back until it got darker when you could sneak to the pay phone.

——————————–

“HAP! I got her!” juice ran out of Teller-Marrow’s office and Happy was right on him.

“Where! let me talk to her!” Happy was already walking into the office but stopped after juice continued.

“She called from a truck stop In Tucson Arizona! she hung up but i got the address!” 

“Arizona? that’s at least 12 hours away Hap!” Jax didn’t sound thrilled but Happy was already bee-lining to his bike. 

“Hap, brotha’ you can’t jus leave now! your lass is alrigh’ let me get some medical supplies and get the van ready, then we’ll go get er’.”

Happy’s hands ran over his face but he had stopped moving upon Chib’s making sense. he knew you had hung up to quick because if he started talking to you he wouldn’t have been listening to anyone, sense or not. he wasn’t born yesterday, he knew what 5 days of being in the enemies hands meant, what he would have to look at upon seeing you.

—————————————-

6 days and some hours since you had been taken. you left the truck stop continuing to a school where you broke in the gym to use the shower. you called juice again, as much as you wanted to hear Happy’s voice you knew once you did you would break down and you still had plenty to do. 

as an old lady the title came with an image attached to it. you had stopped beside a donation bin and grabbed clothes out of it, the large shirt you had grabbed at random turned out to be tye dyed with a large yellow smiley face on it and after your shower seeing it had you finally breaking down. 

you managed to get yourself into the van and drive to the place you rested at now, a lake in some park off to the side. its as far as your gas would take you. crawling into the back you stayed curled up in a ball and slept.

12 and a half hours later from the first time you called them you finally heard the sound you had come to love. motorcycles, not just any but the sons. blinking you tried to roll over and sit up but you had met your limit all you could do was face the doors. with no adrenaline your body was demanding rest. the sound cut and in no time at all the back doors of the van you were in were flung open. 

time stood still, your eyes adjusted to the light and they met dark eyes full of worry. he stood there one hand on the door the other stretched out to you. Happy wasn’t a man that feared many things but seeing you, broken in every sense of the word did something to him and for once he questioned if touching you would do more harm then good.

you could see the conflict in his eyes, the emotions turning, the darker thoughts surfacing pushing forward trying to win over his mind seeing all that had you finding strength to sit up and touch his hand with your own.

“Hap-” your voice was almost as gravely as his but you kept going, you didn’t even know what to say really. you brought his hand to be held by both of yours and brought it to your face. he tried to pull back once his skin touched yours under the eye you couldn’t see out of but you held him strongly and didn’t let go.

bringing his palm to your lips you kissed it, a tear finally falling meeting his thumb and thats all it took for him shimmy his way into the van and rest his head on your shoulder holding you. his face nuzzled your neck and you could feel his tears, both of your hands grabbed his head cradling it there. you rested your head on his and cried with him. shushing him, running fingers down his back. 

Chibs, Tig, and you think that was Rat looked on faces full of concern. you gestured to the blurs they were in your eye to come closer and chibs set the medical bag into the van floor beside you. Happy let go enough to move you, he sat with you in his lap patting your hair down and touching your face as the scott climbed in and started evaluating your wounds. 

Tig turned away flipping his phone open no doubt calling the others telling them they got you. 

his voice was low and he talked to you, his mouth close to your ear he had you smiling and content just hearing him again after days of not knowing if you ever would. he whispered apologies and promises, ones you knew he planed to keep.

Chibs continued to work with what he had an hour fast going by. Tig had gone off on his bike and brought back large metal cutters to free your hands and ankle, he to apologized for the movements, he wasn’t as bad as chibs was though, the man was saying sorry every time he touched you and had to move you in any way.

—————————-

you slept most of the ride home, switching one van for another, layed out on the floor in the back, head on Happy’s lap. Chibs drove and Rat the nervous wreck he was rode Happy’s bike next to Tig on his. they stopped only for gas and food, happy tried to get you to eat anything but you just weren’t hungry.

at the end of the 7th day you pulled into the clubhouse and Happy moved you to a room he had claimed in the back. Tara had been in and out many times but Happy stayed.

by the 8th day Happy had you soaking in a bath and fed enough he was content.

by the 9th day you took a walk to the bathroom yourself to take a piss.by the 10th day you moved to the front and greeted your family.

by the 11th day you were well enough to move to your house.

by the 12th day you were going to Gemma’s to eat

and by the 13th day after your bath you came out to Happy sitting on your bed with a small box in his hand, moving it this way and that. nervous but smiling he held it out to you.

“This really isn’t the time, but i figured with our lives I want to do this now, i want to do this with you. this used to be my moms.”

you fit in between his legs perfectly, your hands holding his face, he was blurry from the tears in your eyes but the smile on your face made his grow even wider. one of his large hands came up to your cheek and pulled you into a kiss. pulling away only a short distance you gave him your answer.

“this is the perfect time, nothing would make me happier.” 

and if he got a little teary eyed well your eyes were still to blurry to see. you had his heart, his crow, and now his forever.

——————————-

THIS WAS SO LONG IM SO SORRY!

i have work in…FOUR hours! sorry for any mistakes! 

also a shout out to @telfords-glasgow-smile & @samperv for inspiring me to write and get better!

[onychaos]

Hypers Quest 2 beta - 9/16/19

Ah, it's time again. There be a new demo of sorts to try out to see what needs to be fixed, what's broken, what's new, and so on. Anything that is not new, I will sum it up and skip. now we are ready to start.

back to good old..

Ecstatic City Zone. This zone got some nice changes here, they are very minor changes but good ones.

The level layout has changed a bit the empty space have been filled with new stuff and some areas have been changed to make the first level a bit easier so players can play the stage with out hassle

Stage is fine for a first level and like the little changes here. it's great stuff. The bee puns though. 

Ok. Skadoosh Zone

This is kinda interesting as this zone has a new changes in the select few areas and a brand new object to carry you from Point A to Point B

In the last update there was a downhill pipe where if you didn't jump off would lead you into a pit, which was kinda unfair for new players since you go so fast but glad it was fixed in the beta

The ending of the stage though is a bit questionable since you would assume that you would be fine but you kinda just die if you don't jump before the thing hits the other one, otherwise you fall and you can't jump or move. But the player has no way of knowing that this can happen. Since there is no real area to use this gimmick in a safe spot.

I feel it would be best to do what Mario does.

1 - Get a new stage object or stage gimmick 2 - Show the player how it works and what it can do where there is no danger of harm 3 - Then allow them to use the stage gimmick where there is a sense of danger if you mess up once they learned it.

The Stage is the same with some minor layout changes but still fun

The other zones and boss are the same from what I went through and those will be skip as there is nothing worth noting there.

Some stages have text boxes where characters will talk about the level or plot but this bring us to the final two areas to talk about which are pretty interesting.

If you find the giant portal when looking for items in the shop, it will take you to a Zero boss fight map screen.

Cyber Network Breakout Demo is the final boss / level of the demo and it's interesting to say. The boss fight has a lot of work to do. So this boss has a simple pattern left to right and right to left.

He can block shots He has a mid air attack that is done after 3 jumps or 4 jumps He has a normal attack he does after a jump

The boss is fine but has some issues and the main one I have is when the boss attacks, the sprite is a hurtbox to the player. Sometimes when he attacks you bounce off his attack just fine.

If you fight him you will need Hyper's Special skill to beat him. I'm not sure if you can beat him any other way beside using a special skill. But once you beat him, the level itself is ok. it's basic and blocky.

Maybe you was going for this, and that's fine but the background animation gives me a headache. It needs to be slowed down cause this is a bit too much for the eyes. it's too busy. Maybe make it more transparent.

The start of the stage is eh. You will need to make a weird low jump or have the Hyper Dash skill to pass the first area.

The Arcade has gotten a update. You can earn prizes so red rings now have a bit more value which is rad to know.

The beta is coming along but for the next demo I think it's best to as much done for a new demo but you know this. This way you can find more bugs to fix later down the line.

The super Sonic in this fan game has a rad theme song and looks nice and plays well.

Speaking of bugs.. I found a few I want to show off

Game bugs

1 - You can overlap the super Sonic theme by turning super again and by pausing after doing as mentioned, all the super themes play at once.  A fix: The game is checking to see if you have 50 rings or more which it should see if you are not super and have 50 rings to fix that issue

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nqyqN6GiWkeou8lkPMhFgkdezjmulsZv/view?usp=sharing Lower your volume before watching

2 - Skadoosh Zone stage gimmick bug. It carries you over to a set path before stopping, as long as you don't get hit. If you get hit, you will fly to the end of the stage and you can't jump free while in your hurt state, the object will not destroy itself cause you to skip the stage. see below.

3 - Title Screen spam. If you mash the start button or enter key you will re-trigger the screen fade animation which will keep you on the title screen till you stop You may need a variable that checks to see if enter or start has not been pressed to keep players from doing this.

4. Going back to Skadoosh Zone. There's a weird pipe bug and the no audio bug was not fixed. Here a video of both bugs as mentioned. The pipe bug is where you have no iframes after getting hit

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhIicce3iOmHxmcfBhtLbDW2XE7n8nXq/view?usp=sharing

5 - No iframes when knocked into a spring which can lead to a cheap death. This bug seems to happen anywhere when the player is in the hurt state but is set to a different state causing you to get no iframes. This is just a guess. I am assuming. I don't know how Game Maker works in terms of coding https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L5C8HxKlwgDlLeC8ymIYu0voZrcOWBu5/view?usp=sharing

6 - The Zero fight. Sometimes when he attacks you are getting hit or you are getting hit while hitting him. Something worth mentioning

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ECzrcclpoMREwjC1riij6mSo0Cx6tCiU/view?usp=sharing

7 - Ecstatic City Zone heroes blocked by invisible walls and a hidden text trigger off frame. Not sure if this is a bug or meant to be this way. If this is not a bug, you can ignore it

8 - You can still grab a Air Bubble when you have a water shield

9 - Super Sonic is missing some animations. :P

10 - Hyper's Animations work fine when facing right but when facing left they are slowed down or just don't work

11 - Not so much bugs but more like glitches

12 - Cyber Network Breakout Demo level and not boss has lasers that fire when you go past them but they only fire once. This may not be a bug but wanted to bring mention to it

I guess it's time for my final thoughts

This Beta demo is interesting, while there are new things here and there and some great changes, The demo kinda feels underwhelming like 1 stage got a bit of makeover at the end and the first stage is kinda new till you leave the starting area.

But the Arcade is great stuff, super sonic is nice and the stage gimmick in Skadoosh Zone is fine but needs work. What do I mean? Well for Super Sonic, the stages don't have Super Sonic in mind. I think if you add in a super state, make sure the levels are build around that fact.

and for the gimmick in Skadoosh Zone, The zone is too small for it. I'm sure you can do some very fun platforming with it but I like the idea. And the Zero Fight needs work but I know it will be fun.

Rough around a few areas but that's progress and that's great. Overall Not too bad, It needs work as stated but I am very proud of the progress here. you have come a long way and keep up the good work, sir.

[themurphyzone]

Spend the Day with Someone You Love Ch 5

Happy Platypus Day!

Ch 5- Lights, Camera, Traction! Part 1

“Silly face!” Sara and Milo posed, making ridiculous expressions as they took selfies in front of a life size statue of Time Ape. Melissa ate her chocolate sundae, blissfully unaware of her surroundings. Zack whistled, pretending he didn’t know the Murphy siblings when other people gave them strange looks. Three bags containing pillows, blankets, and snacks lay at his feet. 

“This is so going on my blog!” Sara exclaimed. “Come on, everyone! To Edgy Subject!” She led the others to the ground floor, stopping to check Milo’s shoelaces before he stepped on the escalator.  

“What’s Edgy Subject?” Zack asked.

“The store for all our Dr. Zone needs! Oh, and other shows too,” Milo said, grinning wildly. “We make it a point to go to Edgy Subject every time we go to the mall. I’d estimate about 84% of Sara’s allowance is spent there.”

“And once you see something you like but can’t buy, it will be ingrained into your memory. Forever. Forever!” Sara laughed maniacally, holding a flashlight under her chin. She frowned. “I can never pull this off without sufficient darkness.” She stuck the flashlight in Milo’s backpack.

Zack looked at Melissa for help. “There’s no escape, Zack,” she smirked. “You’ll preserve your sanity much better if you go along with it.”

Sara held the door to Edgy Subject open, shooing Milo and Melissa inside. “Zack, since you’re still a newbie, let me give you some advice,” she said, throwing out an arm to bar his path. “First, you must show self-restraint.”

“Whoo! Vinyl figurines, here I come!” a teenager with pink hair screamed. Sara pulled Zack out of the way as she barreled past them. 

“Watch out for that puddle!” Melissa yelled. The teenager paid her no heed, slipping on a small puddle and crashing head first into a nearby display stand. 

“Otherwise that happens. Is she okay?” Sara called to Milo.

“She’s not concussed!” Milo yelled. 

“She’ll be fine,” Sara murmured in relief. She turned back to Zack. “The second is that you should never venture to the back of the store.” 

“I’ll take your word on that one,” Zack wrote it down in his notebook. “Is there a third rule?” 

Sara nodded. “The third and final rule is to just find something nice! So what are we waiting for?” Sara walked over to a shelf displaying Dr. Zone merchandise, picking up a small box and examining it carefully. 

Milo was looking through a stack of Space Adventure T-shirts. “Hey, Zack! What’s your shirt size?” 

“Why?” Zack asked.

“Milo wants matching T-shirts in case we ever have a school event that might call for it in the future,” Melissa explained. 

“A medium,” Zack said. Milo handed him a shirt. Zack’s eyes widened, staring at the price tag in shock. “That’s expensive!” he gasped. 

“Quality isn’t cheap, but it’s totally worth it,” Milo said. “If you’re worried about the price, it’s fine! I was planning on paying for these myself. It was my idea anyway!” 

“No, that’s all right,” Zack protested. “You don’t have to! Really!” 

“Zack, we insist! We’re all friends here, and we are absolutely not letting you walk out of here empty-handed!” Melissa declared. 

“She’s right, Zack!” Milo agreed cheerfully, walking over to the register to purchase the shirts. As he pulled out his wallet, his elbow smacked into a rack of stuffed animals, the entire display crashing to the floor. “My bad,” Milo laughed nervously. “Sorry.” 

The cashier handed Milo his items. “Just a typical day here. No worries.” He moved away from the register in order to clean up the scattered stuffed animals. 

By the end of their spree at Edgy Subject, Sara had bought several boxes of keychains and was attempting to explain their appeal to Zack. “So far I’m missing two out of a set of twenty. I still need Time Ape in his transchronological form and Dr. Zone’s infamous toga outfit.” 

Zack raised an eyebrow. “So what if you get a repeat? You’re throwing five dollars away just to satisfy your collective need to have the entire set?”

“If you get a repeat, give it to a friend!” Sara grinned. “I forgot how many I gave to Milo and Melissa.” 

“Eleven for Milo, three for me,” Melissa said, sliding several wristbands of anime characters onto her arms. 

Zack had simply purchased two buttons with cheesy slogans on them, pinned to his backpack strap proudly. “I still don’t see the appeal.” 

Sara tore one of the boxes open. “You’ll understand soon enough-hey! Guys, I finally have the toga now!” She proudly showed off a small, detailed keychain of Dr. Zone in a white toga, one arm outstretched while the other held a scroll, as if he was dictating a speech to an audience. She passed it around, keeping an eye on Milo as he studied the figure. 

“I take some of what I said back,” Zack scratched his head awkwardly. “This looks really cool actually.”

“I’m gonna get lucky a second time, just watch!” Sara pulled a Trashcandroid out of another box, frowning. “Maybe this one? No. Now? Ugh, I always get the Time Bee-icle.” A pile of plastic and cardboard was increasing on the bench next to her. After a fruitless effort, she was finally left with one box. “One more. Please be the one I need. Please, with a double scoop of rocky road and cherries, be it!”  Sara reached inside, pulling out yet another Trashcandroid. She groaned. “Take the hurt away guys. Take it away.” 

Melissa grabbed one of the Trashcandroids, pushing the other repeats to Zack. “You’ll get it next time, Sara!” Milo patted her on the back. 

“Hey, check this out! There’s a contest that’ll be held at 2 in the center of the mall!” Melissa showed them a pamphlet plucked from a small kiosk. “And the grand prize is a truckload of pistachios!” 

“Cool! We should enter!” Milo said. “It’d be fun!” 

“We’d have to re-enact a love scene though. And Phantom of the Opera is banned. That’s a shame,” Melissa said, pointing to the fancy cursive letters that stated the objective of the contest. “Are there any good ones from Dr. Zone?” 

“You and Zack sign us up, Milo and I will start brainstorming,” Sara said, sitting down on a marshmallow cushion. Zack and Melissa headed to the sign-up, while Milo set police tape around the perimeter. “How about the scene from ‘The Zone’ series where Sierra kisses Dr. Zone in the lair of the evil Antonian matriarch?” 

“I didn’t really care for Sierra,” Milo admitted. “Not much personality.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Sara scratched her chin. “I don’t want to go with the one from the Dr. Zone series where Valerie kisses his corpse. I mean, ew.” She shuddered.

“I’ve got it!” Milo snapped his fingers in realization. “The love scene from the Pendulum of Space-Time arc in the Dr. Zone Files!”

“That’s it! Melissa and Zack have at least finished that arc! And there’s four parts to play, so it will be perfect!” Sara exclaimed. 

“Can I be Dr. Zone this time?” Milo asked. 

Sara nodded. “Good idea. You need to branch out more. I’ve been meaning to try role-playing Time Ape myself. We should probably look at that part again.” Sara scooted closer to Milo so he could see the video on her phone. 

“Boo!” a hand clapped Milo’s shoulder, making him suddenly jerk forward, yelping. Milo lost his balance, falling off the seat and hitting his chin against the carpet. 

“I’m okay!” he grunted. 

“Sorry, Milo!” Melissa knelt down to help him up. “I couldn’t resist.”

“It’s fine. So did you and Zack sign us up?” Milo rubbed his sore jaw. 

“Our number is 13,” Melissa showed him an entry slip with all their names printed on it. “Anyways, any ideas for our skit?”

“We do! So, you want to be the villain or the damsel in distress?” Milo asked.

“Villain,” Melissa said without hesitation. “I can’t damsel. And I only distress about grades.” 

“Cool!” Sara said. “Here are your lines, so we can at least run through it before we go on. Milo, get the props! Let’s break a leg! Triple exclamation point!”

Everyone stared, unsure what to make of her poor choice of words. Sara laughed nervously. “Not literally, of course. I’d really prefer no femurs getting crushed or snapped.” 

Zack gulped, clasping his hands together as he looked at the ceiling. “Don’t make me wear a skirt... Don’t make me wear a skirt....”

“Ladies and gentlemen! My name is Phineas! Welcome to to our 2nd annual Valentine’s Day contest! Like last year, contestants will be performing a love scene from any media of their choice, sans Phantom of the Opera. You can thank Buford for that one,” the host, a boy with a triangle-shaped head, announced. The audience cheered loudly. 

“Sure,” a husky boy grunted from the judge’s panel. “Everyone blame the bully.” 

“You have five minutes to impress the judges and wow the audience! And if you have last minute problems, Ferb is always happy to help,” Phineas pointed to his expressionless brother, who simply gave a thumbs-up.

Milo fussed with his Dr. Zone hat while Buford and the two other judges, a scrawny boy and a girl in a pink bow, bickered over who was at fault for that embarrassing incident. “It’s amazing they allowed a bunch of kids to host the contest,” Sara commented. A felt stopwatch hat rested in her lap. 

“This is entertaining in itself,” Melissa smirked. “Beats midday programming by a longshot.”

Zack buried his head in his arms. “Does anyone have a spare sweater? I’m freezing,” he complained. After learning that they were being judged in presentation, Sara had dug up an old, spare dress from her preteen years out of the trunk of her car. The dress fit him surprisingly well, although it had a color that reminded Milo of compost. He was starting to remember why Sara used to fight tooth and nail to avoid that particular article of clothing. 

“Without further ado, let the contest begin!” Phineas exclaimed. 

The first four entries all had elaborate costumes, though some of their acting suffered. The fourth group, consisting of two brothers and a mannequin in a dress, were extremely bad. The older brother kept shoving the younger one to the side so he could hog the spotlight. It was clear both of them were becoming increasingly aggravated each other, and the audience started to boo them. Finally, their disastrous skit ended when the mannequin’s head popped off during the climax and hit a switch to the side, causing a trapdoor to open on the stage‘s floor and send them plummeting to the mall’s basement. 

“Ferb, you might want to bubble wrap that switch,” Phineas remarked. “Thoughts, Isabella?”

“I do!” Isabella said in an odd, dreamy voice. Buford tapped her on the shoulder. “Huh, what?” She looked around, blushing madly. “Oh. It was bad. Two out of ten for acting. Three out of ten for presentation. Just plain bad.” The other judges agreed with her, though it took a little convincing from Isabella and Buford (the latter with his fist) so that the other boy didn’t whip up a complicated equation to explain what went wrong. 

“She’s way too nice,” Melissa mumbled. “I wouldn’t give a one to that performance.” 

Sara stood up. “I’ll be back in a minute. I need to chat with Ferb and see if the stage will be safe for us.” She awkwardly moved to the aisle, apologizing to various people as she blocked their view. 

Milo nodded, engrossing himself in the next skit, where a girl in a Ducky Momo outfit sang about loving a tree. The lyrics were silly, but she was an excellent singer and pulled it off incredibly well. Milo and Zack got up to give her a standing ovation, while Melissa whistled from her seat. The rest of the audience loved it too, and it took several minutes before the applause quieted enough so the judges could give their assessments on it. 

“Give it up for my sister, everyone! Next up, we have-” Phineas squinted at his cue card. “Blastweneededagroupname? Strange. Baljeet, didn’t you look these forms over?”

“I told you not to let Derek handle the sign-up station but did you listen to me? No, of course not!” Baljeet fired back. “He did this last year too!” 

Phineas stared. “All right then,” he coughed, a grin quickly returning to his face. “Please welcome Arthur, Frank, and Rebecca!” 

His hand swept towards the empty stage. Milo could have sworn he heard crickets.

“Awkward,” Sara singsonged as she came back. 

“So how’d it go?” Zack asked. 

“Pretty well,” Sara shrugged. “He agreed to rig up some safety precautions behind the scenes. Well, I think he did. He’s not much of a talker.”

“Arthur, Frank, and Rebecca?” Phineas repeated for the tenth time. “If you’re not on stage in two minutes, we’ll have to disqualify you!” 

I couldn’t resist putting in the PnF group. I miss them.  

[seriouslyhooked]

Wedded Bliss and Asterisks (A Modern CS AU) Part 9/?

Emma Swan is an enemy of love who just happens to be an up and coming wedding dress designer. She’s convinced that a fairytale kind of romance is nowhere in her future but when she meets Killian Jones, whose magazine is covering the opening of her new boutique, things change. Suddenly Emma finds herself drawing up new plans for her life, ones that seem to all be leading towards her own form of wedded bliss. Rated M.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven. Part Eight. Also on FF Here.

A/N: Hey all! This chapter brings us some big steps. First and foremost, it signals the publication of Killian’s article. In the aftermath of that we get even more fluff and some smut for good measure. This chapter is all from Emma’s POV, but no worries, Killian’s will be back next chapter. I hope you guys enjoy and thanks for reading!

Humming to herself lightly on Monday morning, Emma sat in her office sketching at random. The images she drew on the page weren’t thought out dresses or objects, but a variety of swirling designs. Emma was too lost in the memories of the past weekend to create anything specialized right now and instead she let herself linger in the same happy mood she’d had the past few days while her pencil dragged across the page of its own free will.

It was so easy to give into this joyful state given the way things were right now, and that feeling of comfort and rightness changed the way Emma engaged with her morning so far. She’d gotten up bright and early after a somewhat restless night without Killian. There was a tangible difference between the quality of sleep she’d had Saturday compared to last night, but the tension and fatigue all melted away when she met him on the train this morning:

“I think we might have a real problem, love.” Killian claimed in the middle of their ride.

“Oh?” Emma asked, not worrying about whatever he was about to say thanks to the warm look in his cerulean eyes and the gentle feel of his hand in hers.

“I may very well never sleep easy again without you there beside me. You’ve ruined me for normal nights.”

In the face of such a sweet remark, Emma pulled Killian in closer for a kiss right there in the train car. It was light and relatively reserved, but it still left both of them smiling at each other. If she was an outsider looking in Emma likely would poke fun at two people making eyes at each other, but it felt too good to pull back from.

“I think we can probably arrange another night together sooner rather than later,” Emma said, her thumb running back and forth against his in a soothing motion.

“I’m thrilled to hear it, Swan. In fact, that might be the only thing that gets me through the day.”

From there things moved too quickly, and they pulled into Emma’s stop before much more could happen, agreeing to see each other soon. Emma then arrived at Bliss at her normal time and through some lucky happenstance none of her friends were directly in her path once she passed through the front doors. Emma bee-lined for her office after a bit of conversation with Tiana and now here she was, sketching and daydreaming before her appointments for the day came through. But though she’d deftly managed to avoid her friends up to this point, Emma knew it was only a matter of time before they…

A knock sounded at the door as if Emma willed her friends into appearing and she smiled as she told whoever it was to come inside. Immediately Ruby, Mary Margaret, and Elsa filed into the room, shutting the door behind them quickly and all setting their gazes on Emma intently.

“So…?” Mary Margaret prompted and Emma feigned ignorance.

“So, what?”

“Okay, enough of the act, Emma. You are giving us answers and you’re giving them now. We want a damn play-by-play already. No more coy diversions. What did you do this weekend?”

Emma looked at her three friends for another beat before caving and giving them the answers that they wanted. Some of her moments with Killian she protected, keeping details close to the vest so that they could stay private and just between she and him. However, her friends were more than held over with what Emma did impart. By the end of her summary they were practically beside themselves, allowing their excitement to bubble over into an almost ridiculous level of giddiness.

“He took you to the Gardens? How did Killian even know about your going there all the time?” Elsa asked, and Emma shook her head.

“He didn’t. It was a coincidence. He thought I’d like to go and he was right. He just didn’t realize I’d been doing so for a while.”

“Why do I get the feeling that you enjoyed yourself more than you usually do?” Mary Margaret countered and Emma shrugged.

“Because I did,” Emma confirmed. Elsa and Mary Margaret both sighed happily in the face of Emma’s comment, and surprisingly Emma didn’t feel an active need to roll her eyes. Damn, clearly she was in pretty deep if she was taking the heat like this and not actively retreating from it.

“So in this little weekend-long love fest, did you find out anything else about the article?” Ruby asked.

“Nope. He was pretty tight-lipped, but I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt what it’s going to say. I trust Killian and I know whatever he wrote is going to be great.”

The silence that followed Emma’s assessment, coupled with the slack-jawed gapes from Mary Margaret and Elsa made Emma slightly uncomfortable for the first time in the past few days. She shifted in her chair a little before finally asking them what was wrong.

“Nothing it’s just… you’re letting him in,” Mary Margaret said, clearly stunned but thrilled at the prospect, and from the nodding of Ruby and Elsa, Emma assumed they were all thinking along the same lines.

“And that’s a bad thing?” Emma asked, already anticipating their reply.

“No!” Her friends all yelled at the same time.

“It’s a great thing - totally great - but also not a big deal. Just you know, good, but not necessary. Like we’re happy for you, but we are managing expectations,” Elsa’s incoherent ramblings were something Emma had run into before, and she had mercy on her friend who lacked any ability to play a situation cool.

“It’s alright, Elsa, I’m not going to freak out. You can act natural,” Emma said and Elsa immediately sagged in relief.

“Oh thank God. I was barely holding it together,”

“Ya think?” Ruby asked but before she could give Elsa too much crap, another knock came at the doorway and Tiana appeared with a sly smile.

“You’ve got a delivery, boss.”

Emma accepted the box Tiana extended towards her trying hard not to blush as her friends oohed and ahhed about the parcel they all assumed was from Killian. It was a soft cream color, with matching white ribbon to tie it closed, and there in the bow was another rose. The blossom contrasted beautifully with the rest of the box and Emma immediately removed it, putting it in a safe spot on the edge of her desk. She was dying to open this package and see what lay inside, but when Emma tried to wait for her friends to leave, they all remained just where they were, Tiana included.

“Seriously guys?” Emma asked.

“Seriously,” Ruby replied. Emma shook her head smiling at her friends’ persistence as she opened the box up and found five copies of this week’s Citizen NY that wasn’t supposed to be out until the next day. Attached was a small note from Killian that made Emma chuckle lightly.

If anyone asks, these fell off the back of the truck. -Killian

“Jackpot! Knew there was another definite plus of you sleeping with the writer,” Ruby mused.

“Ruby!” Emma yelled and her friend grinned as she stole four of the copies and distributed them to the others.

“What? You said he stayed the night so I’m not wrong.” Ruby must have read Emma’s intent to set the record straight so she made one last claim in an attempt to deflect. “Plus you know the longer you fight with me, the longer you have to wait to see what he said, right?”

Well with an argument like that, how could Emma disagree? Instead of doing so she frantically flipped to the story on a page that Elsa yelled out, having found it first and then dove into the spread.

The most prominent part at first was a picture of the four of them. They all looked happy and effortless, but it was a candid shot, one captured not when they’d all been paying attention but when they were working on something together without realizing the camera was turned their way. Emma vaguely remembered the moment, but she hadn’t realized Killian was paying attention. That whole day with the photographer, he was there with a vision, leading the cameraman towards the shots he wanted, and if this was the indication of what they’d reaped in that time, Emma and her friends were in for a treat.

“Oh my gosh this picture is perfect.”

Emma didn’t need to look up to know Mary Margaret would be teary eyed. Her love for the image was clear in her tone of voice and where Mary Margaret’s love came, happy tears often followed. Emma made a mental note to ask Killian if there was any chance they could get a digital copy of the photo. Mary Margaret would definitely want it, and any others that they might have gotten.

“Jeez, all of them are, look at this!” Elsa said excitedly, pointing at a picture the next page over with her and her latest cake creation. “And he even included my nickname. Major brownie points.”

“Even I make a cameo, and wow do we look good,” Tiana teased, pointing to a picture of her and Emma both considering one of Emma’s sketches, lost in their mutual train of thought.

“Okay, so how are we doing this?” Ruby asked and the friends looked at her for clarity. “We reading it together or silently devouring it alone?”

Mary Margaret made the decision for them all when she began reading the opening line.

‘With an estimated eighty thousand weddings happening in New York City last year alone, it’s clear that, despite popular opinion, finding love in the city of New York is possible.

‘Now, saying that doesn’t change the fact that two in five New Yorkers polled doubt the existence of true love, or that roughly fifty percent of your neighbors has a harrowing tale of love lost and heartbreak they’ll share with you while stealing your morning paper or causing a racket at all hours of the night. But it does lend a bit of hope in a city that could always stand for some more of it.’

“Wow he’s pretty good,” Elsa mused happily and Emma bit back her plea for them all to keep the commentary to themselves. She was desperate to read ahead, but for the sake of her friends she held back. Thankfully, Ruby pushed onwards, taking over the reading.

‘New York to many is known as the city of dreams. Some come here to live, to thrive, to flourish, others to fade away or perish all together. That’s the beauty of this city. Time spins on, new heroes rise and fall, some make it and some don’t, but the dreams remain all the same. Yet for four women on the corner of 4th and 71st street, New York is more than a place to build on a long cherished hope; it’s the site of an experiment with a model of love few (if any) have ever tried before - a one-stop shop for wedded bliss.

‘Matrimonial harmony is hardly a guarantee, but to Ruby Lucas, Mary Margaret Blanchard, Elsa Dellaford, and Emma Swan of Bliss Boutique in the Upper East Side, which opened it’s doors earlier this month, it’s a launching point, both in the lives of their clients and for a business they’ve all been building for over a year.’

Elsa took over the reading at this point, interrupting Ruby’s narration when she recognized the first quote in the story as one of hers.

‘You could say that Bliss is the culmination of one too many bowls of egg-free cookie dough,’ Dellaford states proudly when asked about the origins of such a scheme. ‘The idea first came to us a few years back. All of us were running ragged at our starter jobs, wishing we were back in the comfortable bubble of undergrad when we realized that our dream jobs didn’t just include our chosen industries, but closeness to each other too. That got us thinking – was there a way for all four of us to do what we love surrounded by the people who mean the most to us?’

“Oh Elsa, that’s so sweet,” Mary Margaret claimed, the tears now streaming down her face.

“Just wait. I say more nice stuff, I swear,” everyone shared a laugh as Elsa read on, proving herself right.

At the same time, Emma was glued to every word, soaking in the flattering picture that Killian presented not only of her friends, but of their work here. He seemed to understand what their vision was at the end of all of this, and it was amazing to read his words and have this window into what he truly thought. Though her friends were the ones reading, Emma swore she heard Killian’s voice in every syllable, and she was filled with butterflies and happiness all at once by the time the story got to her. Without needing to interrupt anyone, Emma picked up the narration aloud.

‘Though the dynamic of this shared venture is the unit of four pillars and four women devoted to one heart-felt and thoughtful wedding assembly line, perhaps the easiest sell for Bliss Boutique to women in the market for a wedding comes in the form of it’s designer, rising star Emma Swan…’

Emma trailed off, forgetting to speak and letting herself sink further into the words. Thankfully her friends didn’t push her to do anything else but there were the occasional comments that flittered in along with Killian’s words.

“Oh my god are you kidding me?! Elie Saab called you inspired, daring, and ‘one of the most romantic designers in the industry right now.’ That’s insane!” Elsa exclaimed.

“And so totally true,” Ruby countered before tossing her own comment on the article Killian had put forth. “But wow, Elie really holds back compared to Monique: ‘I don’t think I knew design envy until I saw my first E. Swan original.’”

Emma moved forward, tracking the details Killian had so intricately woven together. Her past was glossed over, though there was a mention of her being brought up in the system. It was by no means the focal point though, and if anything, Emma found herself reading a piece about her amazing talent that shone a light on her while also bringing her friends up with it. 

This story felt like validation in the purest form, and it was mixed with humor, a bit of teasing about some elements of this line of work, and a final quote of Emma’s that she was so happy he’d included. She thought it would get lost in everything else, but that message, that one that said people were in charge of their own happy endings, and that she and her friends were just here to help them make it for themselves, meant the world. It was a sure sign that Killian not only knew what she was trying to do here, but that he knew her too. This whole article was a love letter of sorts, and it left Emma almost speechless, caught as she was in his talent, kindness, and tremendous insights.

And then at the end, with two small asterisks, there was the line she’d been waiting to see for days now. What it said was basic enough, and would no doubt work for his other readers, but for Emma, it held so much more in it’s intricate depths:

**In the spirit of full-disclosure with out readers, Killian Jones has a steadily increasing romantic attachment to one of the subjects of this story. This fact did not, however, influence the tone or findings of this piece, even if he finds Emma Swan to be beyond enchanting and far too good for him.

“Wow. That was…” Mary Margaret began, pulling Emma from where she was running her fingertips along the disclosure line.

“That was freaking fantastic!” Ruby said assuredly. “Like ‘turn a major profit in our first year because we are never going to have free schedules’ kind of fantastic!”

Her friends tossed their excited analysis of the piece back and forth, and Emma was only vaguely aware of what was said. She was too caught up in this story, and in the man who’d made it possible. This all started as a mistake – something Emma actually worried might pull her and Killian apart before they really got a chance to see if there was anything between them. She’d rationalized that while her friends had good intentions, they’d jeopardized a fledgling relationship that was too fragile to bear that kind of burden. Now though, she saw that they’d really given her a gift.

To have this piece by Killian, to have this truth he’d offered to her and to thousands of people across the city, was amazing. She’d never had a man so publicly announce his admiration for her, and she’d never let anyone in enough for their opinions on who she was and what her dreams were to matter. But with Killian it did matter, and Emma was so relieved to see more proof of the man he was, the man who was quickly taking up space in her heart that she once believed would forever be empty.

“Emma?” Elsa asked and Emma’s eyes moved up from the pages of the magazine back to her friends. They were all looking at her expectantly and in that moment Emma knew what she had to do. She stood up and grabbed her jacket quickly from the hanger by the door.

“I have to go,” Emma said, without any more information and then she turned to Tiana. “Ti, can you handle the first appointment? Even just the first twenty minutes?”

“No problem,” Tiana responded happily and Emma grinned.

“Go get him, girl!” Ruby yelled after her and Emma intended to do just that.

Only before she could manage to get farther than sidewalk just beyond the front door, Emma was shocked to find the man she was looking for already here, waiting for her. He was pacing out front, looking more than a little concerned, but after a moment Killian glanced her way and all his attention was turned towards her.

“Emma?” He uttered her name as if unable to believe that she was really there.

“What are you doing here?” Emma asked, thrilled at the fact that the wait to see him was over.

“Losing my bloody mind? I don’t know, love, I was worried and I wanted to be here, for better or worse. I -,”

Emma could see the lingering uncertainty in Killian’s eyes, and since he wasn’t able to read from just her expression that she loved his story, she tried to show him another way. She brought him down for a kiss out there right in front of her store and showed him beyond the shadow of any doubt that she wasn’t going anywhere, and that he didn’t have to worry about her being mad, or scared, or anything of the like.

This kiss was just like their first, and every once since. It was sweetness itself, pushing the limits, hinting at more and making Emma crave a closeness they couldn’t actually have right now. For years Emma had been told about kisses like this one, but they were only supposed to happen in romance movies or in the pages of storybooks. Yet here they were, making a moment that Emma knew blew any of those fictionalized ones out of the water, because this was real. She and Killian were real and Emma truly hoped that this feeling they’d found in each other never went away.

“So how bad is the damage?” Emma asked, when she finally pulled back, her breathing slightly labored, and her body humming with desire that couldn’t be fully sated right now.

“The damage?” Killian asked, his eyes blinking open just a second too late for him to pretend to be totally collected. Emma smiled, running her hand along his chest and enjoying the sped up pace of his heartbeat against her fingertips.

“At work. You just left your post to stand here and wait for me. I’m assuming you’re missing something.”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you, Emma. Whatever it is, it doesn’t compare to this anyway.” 

Emma’s heart tripped happily at that, and she tilted her head back up to try and kiss him again when she heard a sudden thump from the storefront beside them. A realization hit then: while it was wonderful for Killian to be so close when she’d needed him, that proximity left them right in the line of sight of the store’s windows. Oh crap.

“How good are you at sneaking a look without being noticed?” Emma asked and Killian looked entertained at her random question.

“I’m a journalist, Swan. I can be discrete when the moment calls for it.”

“Good. Now, is the window currently filled with my friends openly ogling us?” Emma asked and Killian’s eyes darted that way quickly before he looked back and his grin widened.

“Aye it is.” Of course it was.

“Great,” Emma replied tightly and Killian laughed, the sound washing over her and taking that edge and frustration with her friends away from Emma’s mind completely.

“Can I see you tonight, love, and not just on the train?” Killian asked, his hand running along the small of her back and leaving trails of pleasure in its wake.

“Well I figured that was a given now that the article is behind us,” Emma knew her attempt at seduction worked when she saw Killian’s eyes darken. He looked as hungry as she felt for more in this moment.

“Technically it comes out tomorrow at -,”

Emma cut Killian off with another kiss, knowing full well that she was going to get applauded for putting on a show in a few minutes when she walked back inside. It was totally worth it though, especially when Killian agreed that they’d waited long enough and that tonight that was going to change. She was going to his house for dinner and then that bit of something they’d both been waiting for.

“You should know I’m damn well requiring you to stay the night, Swan. One taste isn’t going to be enough.” Emma’s heart fluttered at his words but she offered a sly smile of her own.

“Or you’re desperate for a decent night’s sleep and you can’t find one without me.”

“That too,” Killian replied, kissing her one last time before returning to the town car that had been idling at the curb all the while.

Emma watched him go and bit her lip, thinking about all that lay in store for her tonight. She was flying high right now, between the article and Killian and everything ahead of them and not even the sight of her four friends staring back at her and then subsequently cheering when she walked through the door could take away from that.

“I’m sorry, don’t we have a business to run here?” Emma asked, deflecting only slightly in the face of her friends’ reactions.

“Yeah, a business dedicated to love. Excuse us for wanting to see some in action,” Ruby quipped, and Emma shook her head.

Ruby’s witty retort actually hit a lot closer to home than her friend probably realized, because these emotions Emma was currently grappling with might be foreign to her, but they resembled something she’d heard of and seen in person enough times to recognize. This was definitely love in its earliest stages, and it was very different than anything she’d ever known. Whatever relationships she had before this weren’t the real thing, but Emma knew that with Killian she’d stumbled upon what most people spent their whole lives looking for.

Emma carried that sense of possibility with her through the rest of the day, and though she was able to distract herself in intervals, Ruby’s words wormed their way back into Emma’s mind more than once. The waves came randomly like when she found herself comparing a bride’s story of meeting her future husband to her meeting Killian on the train, or when she was dragged from her studio in a fleeting moment of quiet to come taste four types of wedding cake for a desperate Elsa. Emma was in the business of weddings, and yet for the first time in her life, the idea of someday (still very far off in the future) having one of her own didn’t actively terrify her. If that wasn’t a sign that Killian was different, Emma didn’t know what was.

When the workday finally gave way to quitting time, Emma enjoyed seeing Killian on the train briefly and then stopping home. She got everything she needed together, pretended to find something to do for the remaining amount of time, and then ran into Mrs. Hubbard on the way out. One look at Emma’s overnight bag and the woman was all smiles and happy proclamations.

“I just knew that boy was a keeper!” Mrs. Hubbard chortled as she clapped her hands over Emma’s in an eager pat. Emma meanwhile tried not to laugh at the woman’s classifying Killian as a ‘boy’ when he was definitely all man.

“Mrs. Hubbard, this is still new. I don’t want you to get your hopes up too high,” Emma said casually, knowing she was uttering the words partially for own benefit as well as her neighbor’s, and the old woman waved that idea away.

“The only way to live is all in, Emma. If you ever learn anything from this old lady, let it be that. You’ve got good instincts. Don’t start doubting em’ now.”

With that, Emma was dismissed and sent on her way to Killian’s. It took only ten minutes or so to get there, but the look on Killian’s face when she buzzed up and he opened the door made Emma feel like she wasn’t crazy for thinking that distance was still too far.

“Emma, you made it.” The relief in Killian’s voice made her laugh.

“What? Did you think I would back out or something?” She asked, shrugging off her jacket after he promptly took her bag and kissed her in greeting.

“Not at all. It’s just still hard to imagine my luck that we get to do this at all,” Killian confessed and Emma melted at the words. She felt the same way, but he always managed to put it in clearer terms.

“Something smells really good. Did you cook again?” Emma asked, surprised as she stepped into his kitchen, the one that she’d fallen in love with a few nights ago.

“Aye, Swan. I know how to prepare more than one meal. Shocking I know.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that you don’t have to do all of this.” Killian came and wrapped his arms around her from behind and Emma loved the warmth that seeped through from him to her in the process.

“I wanted to Emma. I like the idea of having you here in my home, sharing a meal of any kind. Next time we’ll do pizza if you prefer. But tonight, I wanted to show you that I care.” That was incredibly touching, and it made Emma feel valued in a way that she still wasn’t entirely used to. She turned around in his embrace to look at him so he could see that she meant what she said next.

“I always know you care, Killian. Trust me, that part isn’t up for debate.”

“Then what is?” Killian asked sincerely and Emma decided to take a risk.

“Whether we start with dinner or dessert. Can all of this keep for… awhile?” Emma asked looking around and then smiling when she felt a low growl emanate from Killian’s chest.

“I had plans, love. Wine and dine you then make good on every promise I’ve laid at your feet thus far.” Emma shivered at that but shook her head.

“I had plans too. Then you happened. Plans change, and sometimes that’s a really good thing.”

From the look in Killian’s eyes one would think Emma was the one with a mastery of words, but she only spoke the truth. Killian had changed things for her and all the rules she’d once made about her love life were long gone. She was starting fresh, and though she fully planned to enjoy the meal he’d made, she also knew they had all night, and that right now what she wanted more than anything was to take the next step with the man who’d thrown her world into a beautiful, spinning chaos.

Without any actual words in reply, Killian’s lips crashed down to hers and Emma immediately responded. Her hands ran through the hair at the nape of his neck as her body molded to his. The kiss was driven by an overwhelming desire for closeness and contact. The last week had been a tease of what could happen when they came together, but tonight this chemistry would be put to the test. Would the spark be snuffed out, or would it ignite into something so much brighter?

“I have a mind to take you right here, love, but I swore the first time I made love to you I’d have you in my bed, and I’m a man of my word.”

Emma shivered deliciously at his heated words, and how she found the strength to stay vertical and move with him from the kitchen to his bedroom was beyond her. But one second she was in the bright lights of the kitchen, and the next she was in the warmer space that was his room, anticipating stripping away the layers between them and actually getting what she so badly wanted.

Yet where Emma was all about action and moving swiftly, Killian was languid, setting a pace that had her throbbing with want and near begging for him to move faster. His kisses were slow, and deliberate, pulling every ounce of need from her that they could but he stilled her hands when she reached for his shirt to strip it off of him.

When he was confident Emma wouldn’t push for more, Killian’s hands roamed over her body reverently, tracing the blue of the dress she wore tonight that was the closest approximation to his eyes that she could find in fabric, and Emma ached for him to take this further. Still there was a part of her that loved this and that fed off of the look in Killian’s eyes like she was the most important thing in the world to him. Emma had always wanted to be someone’s everything, and looks like that made her believe that finally she could be.

“Killian.” Emma whispered his name aloud, drawing his eyes back to hers.

“The first time I saw you in this dress was a few days after I started riding the train. I thought I’d finally stumbled upon perfection. The muse every writer I studied in school wrote about was made real in you. I didn’t think anyone could be so beautiful. Then someone - I’m assuming Ruby in hindsight - called you and I heard your voice for the first time. I realized then I didn’t even have all the facts yet. There was so much more to you than I had access to, and I wanted to know it all. I still do. I don’t think it will ever be enough.”

Emma longed to say something back, but she was feeling too much and Killian took advantage of her silence, stepping back around her and sliding the zipper down along the back of the dress. He stood close enough for her to feel the whisper of his breath along her ear and Emma closed her eyes as Killian murmured more words about how everything about her was remarkable. Every piece to the puzzle that she let him see only made him want more, and Emma wanted to let him have it all, to show Killian all of her as she’d never done with anyone else.

When her dress was gone, Emma enjoyed the string of curses that Killian let slip. He was all hard lines and tension, fighting for control, and Emma used that shift to her advantage. She turned back around to face him, and let down her hair from the tie she held it back in, Emma felt her confidence rise as his eyes took her in. The look on his face was so much more intense than anything she’d ever seen, but instead of lingering in that moment, Emma started to strip away some of the clothes that separated him from her view. She made quick work of his shirt and then her hands came to unbutton the jeans he’d put on after work. Emma felt Killian’s hum of approval at her actions deep down to her soul, but when her hand slipped inside, Killian halted her actions and took the reins again.

“I want nothing more than to give you everything you want, love, but I won’t last that way.” Killian’s words were firm, but Emma couldn’t help the smile that played at her lips.

“I think you can handle a lot more than you’re giving yourself credit for.”

Emma’s teasing tone was met with Killian moving her to the bed and then stripping the rest of the clothing he wore away. This was a side of Killian she hadn’t seen very often; he was stern and commanding, still restrained in some ways, but brimming with energy all the same. Emma knew all of that was about to be channeled into pleasing her, and it practically guaranteed her the best sex of her life, but then her mind went blank. In the face of all of Killian, Emma was speechless, and left wanting more than she had been all these past few months.

“Take it off, love. I want you completely bared to me.”

Emma’s eyes widened at the request, but she immediately complied, feeling the trail his eyes traced along her skin like a physical touch as she shucked away her bra and then the scrap of lace between her legs. Shit, she was so hot right now, it felt like being engulfed by flames, and she couldn’t tell if she wanted it to stop or to just let everything between them incinerate her completely.

She had her answer when Killian finally moved forward onto the bed and touched her. Whatever the cost to her sanity, she wanted this with Killian. If he ruined her so be it. She was desperate and unashamed of letting him see that. Emma wouldn’t call him gentle per se, but precise and filled with intent. He gave just enough pressure in just the right places to set her heart racing faster, and Killian definitely knew exactly what he was doing to her based on the grin that appeared on his gorgeous face.

“You’re even more beautiful than I imagined, Swan. I hardly know where to begin.”

“Anywhere. Just as long as you start,” Emma said in a rush, the last word squeaked out as one of his hands trailed to her breast.

Killian’s reply was a physical one, with his mouth covering hers in a branding kiss. She knew he was as ravenous for her as Emma was for him, and though he started slow and teasing that course of action deteriorated in seconds. Suddenly he was everywhere with roaming hands and kisses at her neck and then lower. It was all so good and yet the ache in Emma that craved more still throbbed almost painfully. That clawing need was only added to when she felt the scruff of his beard against her smooth, exposed skin or the mastery he had over every response. By the time his mouth came to her breast, she was panting, and then his fingers were at her sex and she was lost. Emma couldn’t tell up from down, all she knew was this was so much so fast and she was desperate for more.

“Fuck, Emma, you’re so ready for me even now,” Killian growled against her sensitive flesh and Emma nodded, unable to process enough to give him actual words. Her fingers ran through his short hair and when he sucked at her aching bud at the same time that his thumb swirled against her clit and two of his fingers pressed inside, she cried out his name.

That quickly she crashed into a climax, but Killian was hardly satisfied. Emma could tell from the look in his eyes that he wouldn’t rest until he’d given them both so much more pleasure and bliss. He made slow work of things, remaining as he was and knowing instinctively when her oversensitivity gave way to wanting again. Emma doubted it was possible to recreate that toe-curling release, but he proved her wrong once more with his hands and then again with his mouth at her sex. It got to be so much that Emma feared she would pass out but finally he was back with her, hovering just above her with a look of love in his eyes that only sparked her desire for him all over again.

“I think it’s only fair to warn you love that it won’t be easy to get rid of me after this. A man can’t taste heaven like you and merely walk away.”

Emma shivered at the mention of tasting, recalling everything he’d just managed to elicit from her with that skilled mouth of his but finally she found the means to speak and to assure Killian that wouldn’t be a problem.

“Good. Because I don’t want you to walk away,”

With a growl, Killian thrust into her, leaving Emma completely filled in a moment. She’d gone from empty and waiting to so beautifully completed so quickly that she lost it, clawing at his back and urging him to move. She wanted him in every way, hard and fast, in a rhythm designed to combust, and Killian delivered in every way, dragging her back to the edge and then pleading with her to step off with him.

“Let go, Emma. Let go.”

That was all it took for Emma to give Killian what he wanted. His sincerity and the miraculously good sensations he was causing in her body coiled tight before springing free, and when she fell, he followed suit, sealing the moment as one of the best Emma had ever known.

The blinding feel of total completion was heady and gorgeous, but Emma felt it fade into something more valuable: a peace that came from being in Killian’s arms that she’d never felt before. No one else had ever earned her trust like him, and no one else could look at her after all of this and still seem just as genuine as Killian. In his eyes, Emma saw all sorts of hope, and she knew in her heart that his earlier promise was real: he wasn’t going anywhere and Emma was so beyond glad for that.

“You know, I didn’t get a chance to say this before, but I really liked the word you used in the disclaimer.”

“And which word was that?” Killian asked, his arms pulling her in closer to him.

“Attachment. I don’t think I’ve ever felt particularly attached to someone before. But with you I do,” Emma admitted.

“Well I’m honored that you chose me, Emma. God knows I’d choose you every time, and the proof is in the fact that we had dessert before dinner.” Emma laughed at that, feeling the moment when Killian did the same before offering a solution.

“We could always remedy that now if you want,” Emma offered, but she was left staring after Killian when he hopped out of bed and insisted she stay right where she was.

“I have every intention of keeping you in this bed as long as I can, love. I’ll bring everything to you.” Killian pressed one last kiss to her lips and then set off towards the kitchen, but before he disappeared, Emma called out to him one last time.

“Killian?” her voice warbled through the air, reaching him just before he left her line of sight.

“Yes, love?”

“Keep choosing me, okay?” she asked, really hoping that he would.

“Always.” And with that gentle promise, he departed for a few minutes before coming back and granting Emma those same feelings of safety, and belonging and love all over again.

Post-Note: So there we have it. I hope you guys enjoyed this installment, and I am so excited for where the story is going next. I have a lot of things I still want to incorporate, and I see quite a few more chapters in this AUs future filled with lots of smuffy goodness. Thank you all so much for reading and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day!

[authormarialberg]

A few years ago, after reading Dufresne’s Is Life Like This?: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months, I created my go to story idea generator; my Plot-o-Matic. The Plot-o-Matic is a set of three different colored cards: green = Subject (person or occupation), yellow = Conflict (something the subject wants or needs), and blue = action (something the subject does to achieve that goal or overcome the conflict). When I’m looking for a story idea, I pick three cards, one of each color, and see if the story I want to write comes together. I have used that Plot-o-Matic to come up with many short story and flash fiction ideas. It’s a fun and useful tool and it was free, other than paper and printer ink.

When I became a blogger, I started searching Amazon for fun things to recommend for you, writers and readers, and noticed there were Plot-o-Matic-esque products on the market like The Storymatic and The Writer’s Toolbox: Creative Games and Exercises for Inspiring the ‘Write’ Side of Your Brain. Then, when shopping for a game for my nephew, I noticed Rory’s Story Cubes among the games and bought a set to try them out.

Rory’s Story Cubes

The game and how to play

Rory’s Story Cubes are six-sided cubes with simple images on each side. For a long time I’ve been fascinated by human symbols. They dominate my fabricglass art and my puzzle design. I love looking up symbols in symbol dictionaries and dream dictionaries. How people express so much meaning through a simple shape over eons is exciting to me. So this game is  right up my alley.

There are different ways to play. The instructions page provided with my set provides 3 ideas:

Roll all 9 cubes and look at the face up images. Pick an image that will be the starting point for your story. Beginning with “Once upon a time . . .,” make up a story that somehow links together all 9 face up images.

Think up a title or theme for a story. (Examples: The beach, My fantastic vacation, Dream.) Then roll all 9 cubes and try to tell a story that relates back to the title or theme.

Divide the cubes evenly among the players. (It’s ok if some get more than others.) Starting with one player and continuing in a circle, take turns rolling the cubes and adding to the story based on the face up images. Stop after all 9 cubes have been rolled, or continue rolling for additional rounds.

Rory’s Story cubes also offers more inspiration on their website.

Let’s Play

So let’s test it out. Can these story cubes inspire my writing? How will they compare to the Plot-o-matic?

What story does this roll give us? Hmm. Who’s my protagonist?

A happy man examines a letter that says he has to come home right now, so he jumps out of the plane, but on the way down a bee stings him. While sucking on the sore sting on his hand he does not pay attention to his magnifying glass that sets fire to his parachute. Luckily he lands in a tree, but he walks with a limp from then on and has to use a cane.

How about another one?

The hour was getting late for saving the earth, so the alien came disguised as a rainbow to alter the magnetic poles, but when it did, the water flowed upside down confusing the fishes and killing the bees and now the earth is overrun by scarab beetles.

Here’s one for you. Please leave your stories in the comments.

Now let’s play another way. One cube at a time.

Sasquatch, of course.

took a trip to Egypt to visit the great pyramids.

A freak storm surprised him. Lightning almost hit him, so he found an opening and hid inside the pyramid.

He pulled a flashlight from his backpack and began to look around the small chamber in the pyramid.

While examining an intricate spiderweb, he felt a chilly hand on his shoulder and roared turning around ready to attack.

But it was only a friendly mummified pharaoh who wanted to meet the furry large guest in his home.

The pharaoh asked if the bright light and crashing sound outside had been a meteor or an asteroid. He hoped it was the gods come to join him in the afterlife. Sasquatch hated to disappoint him,  but  told him it was only a bad storm.

Sasquatch pulled his favorite book out of his backpack. It was a book about the pharaohs of Egypt. He gave the pharaoh his flashlight and a sharpie. “Hey, could you find yourself in my book and sign your pic?”

The pharaoh started leafing through the pages. He started laughing. “I’m not in here. They haven’t found my chamber.” He shined the flashlight around the room. “See,” he said, “Not discovered yet.” He held the book and pen out to Sasquatch.

Sasquatch shrugged. “Wanna sign it anyway?” he said. How about right in the front?”

After the pharaoh signed his book, Sasquatch climbed to the very top of the pyramid, waited for a large gust of wind and opened his parachute. The giant wind, helped along by the ancient pharaoh’s good wishes took Sasquatch all the way back to his home in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

Here’s a video from the Rory’s Story Cubes website showing another story inspired by the story cubes:

Analysis

My stories inspired by story cubes tend toward the silly and ridiculous, but I had a lot of fun and wasn’t using them to work on anything in particular.

The Plot-o-Matic also lends to the silly and ridiculous. I’m seeing a trend here. It may not be the tools, but the user. Hmm.

I like the story cubes. They feel less rigid than the Plot-o-matic, as the different images can symbolize the subject, conflict and/or the action. The story cubes also seem more conducive to group writing and play.

As you can see, like the Plot-o-Matic, story cubes are a fun, playful, idea-conjuring resource with a vast array of outcomes, but what if some of the images don’t work for you and/or you would like something more specific to your story idea?

Rory’s Story Cubes has created a variety of different cube sets to address that issue. You can choose from:

Rory’s Story Cubes Actions

Rory’s Story Cubes – Voyages

Rory’s Story Cubes Bundle with Original, Actions, Voyages, Prehistoria, Enchanted, Clues, Intergalactic, Medic & Score 

But what if you want something very specific to your story that all those almost infinite possibilities didn’t symbolize?

How to personalize your Story Cubes

I came up with a quick DIY project for you to get the most out of your Story Cubes.

Here’s what you’ll need:

A pen

White label stickers

Scissors

OR for those who cannot read their own drawing

A printer

ink

printer paper and tape (double-sided preferred)

or printable sticker paper

I’m pretty sure you get where I’m going with this, but since I want to draw little symbols for my cubes . . .

Instructions:

Measure one side of a cube (height and width to cover image)

  I don’t think I need an abacus, a teepee, or an L in a box (?) so I’ve chosen to replace these three symbols with symbols more pertinent to my story.

  2. Take the sheet of labels and draw out a square that matches those measurements

3. Draw your preferred symbol within the square you drew

To be more specific to my stories, I’ve drawn a volcano, an alligator and a goatman. I’ve already cut out the goatman and placed him over the teepee.

My symbols may not curb the silliness of my stories, but they are more specific to what I’m writing.

4. Cut out the square and stick it over the side of the square you want to replace

5. Repeat until all unwanted symbols have been replaced

6. Roll cubes

And there you have it. Three unique and fun stories to write. I would love to see what you come up with in the comments.

I found that when I rolled with my story-specific tiles, the game changed for me. The symbols became more of a What If game. What if the alligator is afraid of his own shadow? What would happen if the goatman got a bee sting? Do I want to bring magic into my volcano story?

I may be onto something. Adding personal symbols to the story cubes may be a more powerful writing tool than I thought.

I look forward to reading your interpretations of the story cube rolls.

Happy Reading and Writing!

  Need your next great idea? Try this! A few years ago, after reading Dufresne's Is Life Like This?: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months…

[j-writes-and-suffers]

NaNoWriMo Day Nine

By the time his last lecture was over, Philip was exhausted, but much happier than he’d been in a long while. All of his classes had liked him, and a few students had even invited him to join them at lunch. He’d agreed, and ended up spending his lunchtime debating about Lord of the Rings trivia with undergrads. It had been surprisingly fun, and he felt way more welcome now, like he was really and genuinely a part of the Stag Family.

Done with classes for the day, Philip had a visit to make. He grabbed the jacket he’d brought off the chair, throwing it on. Packing up his papers and computer, he tossed his bag over his shoulder, and made his way towards the back exit of the academic hall. He ignored the sidewalks, taking the shortcut Lucien showed him. Moments later, he walking was out of the woods in front of the library. Philip smirked, a little proud of himself for remembering the path. He hurried up the stairs, yanking the hefty door open and strolling in. A petite Asian girl was sitting behind the circulation desk, thumbing through what looked to be a biology textbook. She looked up when Philip walked in.

“Hmm… blond, short, wearing a tweed jacket that’s clearly not yours… You’re Philip.”

He raised an eyebrow, slightly confused and very alarmed. “Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Luci hasn’t shut up about you all day. He’s in the back. I’m assuming, of course, that you’re here to see him.” She replied.

Philip nodded. “I… I am, yeah. Thanks.”

“No problem.” The girl went back to reading.

Tiptoeing through the aisles, Philip headed for the lounge in the back room. He walked slowly and cautiously, determined to sneak up on Lucien for once. The lounge door was open, so he crept up to the entrance, pressed against the wall as he peeked inside.

“Hello, Philip.” Lucien turned away from the coffeemaker to smile at him.

“How the fuck!” Philip burst out of his hiding spot, enraged. “I didn’t make a sound the whole way over!”

“I heard you talking to Heather.”

Philip’s jaw dropped. “That was all the way across the library.”

Lucien chuckled, “My sight may be awful, but my hearing is superb. Don’t just stand there all day like a shitty statue. Come in, sit down.”

Philip walked in, dropping down on the familiar, cozy couch. “Do you have any hot chocolate over there?”

“I might… let’s see.” Lucien started rifling through cabinets, after a moment, producing a metal tin with candy canes painted on it. “Aha! Would you like extra dark, marshmallow madness, or cinnamon twist.”

“Mm… marshmallows.” Philip nodded confidently.

Lucien gave a thumbs up, turning back to the coffee maker. He poured the last of the tea out into his own mug, rinsing the pot out and returning it to the maker for fresh hot water. While it filled, he turned to Philip, leaning on the counter and raising an eyebrow. “So, how was your first day?”

“It was really good!” Philip beamed. “The kids were nice, and they liked me, and some of them took me to lunch.”

“Really?” The older man smiled warmly, “I’m glad.”

Philip leaned forward, asking, “What about you? I see your student assistants showed up.”

“I’ve been giving tours most of the day. Teachers that assign lots of reading like to bring their students out here. So do the research nuts.” Lucien turned back to the coffee maker, pouring out a mug’s worth of hot water to make cocoa. Once the chocolately powder was dissolved, he walked over to the couch and held out the mug.

The chipper blond accepted his drink, taking a sip and grinning. “Tastes like nostalgia and diabetes.”

Caught off guard, Lucien busted out laughing. Much louder and lower than his speaking voice, his genuine laugh was deep and hearty. Philip’s eyes widened in delight and surprise.

“Wow! You have a non-library voice! I never would’ve known.”

Lucien smiled, his laugh trailing off as he replied, “I use my indoor voice constantly these days. It’s a habit I fell into years ago. I suppose it comes from hardly socializing when I’m not at work.”

“You really are a hermit, aren’t you, old man?” Philip teased.

Rolling his eyes, Lucien huffed. “I should’ve poisoned that cocoa. You’re so mean to me.”

“Yeah, but you like me anyway.” Philip insisted, “Besides, you’re too nice to hurt anybody.”

Lucien’s eyes darkened briefly, but Philip was too busy sipping cocoa to notice. The older man regained his composure by the time the younger one was paying attention. “I like to think so.”

“I think so.” Philip nodded insistently.

Forcing a smile, Lucien rushed to change the subject, “Do you have classes tomorrow?”

Philip had to stop and think for a second. “Just one, in the afternoon.”

“Ah, so you get to sleep in?”

“I do!” The blond nodded, clearly glad to not have to be up at the asscrack of dawn.

Lucien smiled more sincerely, “That’s good. I know you’re more of a night owl.”

“Yeah, my brain just can’t really get going till like ten. Doesn’t matter when I go to sleep.”

“I’m just the opposite,” Lucien mused, “Up early, and asleep as soon as I’m home. I honestly would prefer that the library close earlier, but I know you manic children love to stay up late and study.”

Philip snickered, mumbling something about ‘sleepy old men’ into his hot chocolate.

“What was that?”

“Nothing! Nothing.” Philip grinned mischievously. He knew sharp-eared Lucien had heard him just fine.

The older man rolled his eyes, sighing and adjusting his glasses. “I don’t know why I put up with you.”

“Cause you’d be bored otherwise.” The younger man beamed back at Lucien, setting his mug aside and sticking his hands in his jacket pockets. “Oh! I almost forgot. This is yours.” He started to take off the jacket, but Lucien put out a hand to stop him.

“Keep it. I must have ten of those. It makes you look… more professorly.”

Philip smiled, tugging the jacket back on and puffing out his chest. “It does?”

“Oh, indeed.” Lucien nodded, “You look so studious and wise.” He chuckled, but he was only half-joking. With the addition of a real jacket, Philip really did look more mature. It took him from ‘awkward kid at a school dance’ to ‘turn to page 394’.

“Yesss.” Philip grinned, “I’ve finally got my aesthetic. Maybe next I can - ‘choo!” He was distracted by a sneeze, groaning and rubbing his nose.

Lucien frowned. “Are you sure you’re not getting sick?” He scooted closer, hovering over Philip like a worried mother.

“Nah,” Philip shook his head. “It’s been on and off all week. Gotta be allergies. There must be a dog running around campus.”

“That… seems a little far-fetched.” Lucien mused, “Are you sure you don’t have any other allergies?”

Philip shook his head. “Nah, there’s no way. I got shit-tons of allergy tests when my mom found out she was allergic to bees. Luck’s on me, I guess, cause I’m not. Dogs are my only weakness.”

“That is lucky, I suppose.” Lucien forced a smile. “Will you walk with me? I have a few new books to put in the system. I’ve not had time earlier, what with all the tours.”

“Yeah, of course.” Philip hopped to his feet, sniffling and grabbing his cocoa. “Let’s go.” He scurried after Lucien as they headed down a narrow stairwell to the basement. “Whoa… this shit is spooky.” The peppy blond paused on the steps. “Hold up a sec. This isn’t like… a murder basement, right? I’m gonna come back up in one piece?”

“Nope. This is how you die.” Lucien chuckled, knowing Philip would continue to follow him anyway.

The two made their way down to the lowest floor of the library. With bare concrete walls and a pretty pathetic heater, it was cold and unwelcoming. There were reams of blank paper, cans of toner, and shiny new textbooks on one wall. Along another sat a workbench, along with boxes of books in various states of disrepair. In a smaller back area, there sat outdated technologies, like overhead projectors and CRT TVs with VHS players.

Philip began snooping around, particularly fascinated by the piles of torn-up books. He pointed to the workbench, asking, “Is this like… a repair shop? For books?”

“Yes. I try not to let my books get that bad, but some borrowers are particularly cruel to them. When I get a book back that’s in bad shape, it comes down here, and I do my best to bring it back to life. If it’s missing pages, or has water damage, I can’t do much, but I can fix loose spines and tears no problem.” Lucien was digging through a file cabinet, from which he produced a stamp bearing the school seal. He opened a second drawer, pulling out a roll of labels and a barcode scanner. “This is going to take a while, feel free to sit down.”

Turning the workbench chair to face Lucien, Philip sat down and pulled up his laptop. “Dude…” he groaned, “There’s no WiFi down here.”

“Oh, you poor Millennial, how ever will you live an hour without it?” Lucien’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

“Look, you didn’t tell me we were coming to a bunker from the 90s. What am I supposed to do, dust off one of those TVs and watch Bill Nye?”

Lucien shrugged. “You probably could. I think I have some tapes around here somewhere.”

“Wait, for real?” Philip perked up, “Cause that would be kinda dope. I haven’t watched Bill Nye in years. Well… good Bill Nye. His Netflix series was fucking terrible.”

“So I hear.” Lucien smiled. “Do you want me to find the tapes?”

“Yes! Please.” Philip nodded, bouncing in his seat.

“Alright. Just a moment. They’re definitely in one of the these boxes, but I’m not sure which…” Lucien gestured to a corner of the room that was stacked floor to ceiling with cardboard crates.

Philip gaped. “Oh, shit. Good luck.”

“Don’t you doubt me. I’m fairly sure they were right.... Here.” Lucien slid a box from the middle of a stack, like he was playing jenga. Flipping open the top, he grinned. “Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Am I good, or am I good?”

“You’re pretty good.” Philip smiled, coming over to dig through the tapes. He grabbed one at random and went over to plug in the nearest TV. “This is gonna be awesome.”