#They kiss one time but it’s still solidly a friendship - you could maybe read it as a QPR - they don’t label things though

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads / storygraph

Small Joys

literary fiction set in 2005 rural south England

follows a depressed/anxious young Black man who’s moved back to his hometown after dropping out of uni, becoming friends with the excessively joyful new flatmate who takes him under his wing

recognising mental health struggles and harmful relationship and finding community and happiness

music, birdwatching

gay MC, ace-coded SC

[forasecondtherewedwon]

Schwarzenegger Holiday

Pairing: Peter Parker x Michelle Jones (Spideychelle) Rating: E Word Count: 11,874

Includes the following prompts:

snowed in

making latkes together

“You didn’t think I’d let you spend the holidays alone, did you?”

Summary: When MJ’s granted a sudden visit to the safehouse where Peter’s been hidden for six months, she’s... nervous. What if he doesn’t want her to come? What if he doesn’t like her that way anymore? She has 24 hours to figure out what they are to each other and make peace with it. That’s the plan. Until they get snowed in.

MJ’s leg is jumping in the backseat of the SUV, the bop of her foot barely audible over the thickly-packed snow grinding under the tires. Anywhere else, this large, white vehicle would be conspicuous, but she supposes it’s fading in pretty well against this wintery backdrop. Probably less visible from above too; she quits bouncing her foot long enough to unbuckle her seatbelt and slide over to glance up at the sky, until the driver brusquely reminds her to keep her face away from the windows.

She’s dying to snark back and ask what the darkly tinted windows are for if they aren’t good enough to conceal the face of the vehicle’s occupants, but this guy kinda scares her. He’s something more secret than the Secret Service. If Nick Fury (the real Nick Fury this time, apparently—she has a whole backlog of questions and complaints that there wasn’t time to bring up during the handoff) hadn’t done an extra security check on the driver before sending MJ off with him, she’d be really worried right about now. Her suitcase is in the trunk and she’s clutching the box May gave her to her hip, wondering how she’ll be able to use its contents for self-defence if the need arises. Tear open the bag of flour and throw it in the guy’s eyes maybe?

Her strategy with the flour is sturdy, but there’s something else in this box for which she has no plan. There wasn’t time for her and May to discuss it, like there wasn’t time for MJ to interrogate Fury on where exactly he was while Peter was grappling with Quentin Beck all over Europe. Time, time, time. It’s been months, actually, since any of them seemed to have enough of it. She’s curious to know how the summer, fall, and now early winter have passed for Peter. He doesn’t even know she’s on her way. Nervous, MJ bites at the skin around her thumb nail. She hopes he’s happy to see her.

When Jameson totally fucked up her first date (and her new boyfriend’s whole life), Peter fled. He had to. Luckily, he’s being protected—so MJ’s been told—though the trade-off for safety is isolation. If it were her, she’s not sure she’d mind being handed an extended stretch of time to catch up on her reading, but she knows Peter’s different. Peter needs people. (She needs Peter.)

MJ knows that May Parker misses her nephew desperately. That’s why she tried to get the woman to go in her place, but everything with these Super-Secret Service assholes has a reason and a rhyme, even when the Scrabble tiles for Peter’s situation clearly spell ORANGE. May visited him for his birthday. Ned spent the weekend over Thanksgiving. Taking time away from work and school qualifies as a ‘noticeable absence’ and those need to be minimized. In the plainer terms May used when she explained the circumstances (at the same time that she proposed MJ take a trip to see Spidey the Desperado), none of the people formerly known to be close to Peter Parker can draw attention to themselves. They’ve been watched on the street, questioned by reporters, photographed by tabloids, and otherwise surveyed by who knows what methods operated by who knows whom. The last is MJ’s assumption; she isn’t stupid.

Apparently, becoming Peter’s girlfriend right before his identity was leaked to the world bumped her up to the third most important person in his life. She’s yet to learn whether Peter views her that way. The people protecting him do not have a schedule coordinated with him, so this trip wasn’t his call. Windows of opportunity open and close, schemes are adjusted, and girlfriends get left on doorsteps hugging boxes with the ingredients for latkes, crossing their fingers for a warm reception. MJ hasn’t figured out what she’s going to say to him after six months of nothing.

Then again, that’s basically how their friendship in high school went until her crush on him stopped crushing her enough to allow her to get the occasional insult out.

If he’s gotten over his feelings for her or just isn’t in the right headspace to entertain her, this is going to be awkward. At least it’s only until tomorrow. The same driver (for security reasons, blah blah) is picking her up before noon. One night of struggling to transition from dating back to just friends would, ultimately, be bearable for her, if that’s what Peter needs. She’d be able to talk it out with him without pining for their quick first kisses on Tower Bridge. Or their sloppy make-out session in the airplane bathroom when they woke up from their nap with half the ocean still to cross and the sudden feeling of relief that they were both alive. Yeah. MJ could definitely put that stuff behind her. In fact, maybe it’s better not to think of it at all and go into this visit assuming Peter’s feelings have cooled in light of other priorities. That way, this can be a night away from home hanging out with a friend, and not being left undisturbed with Peter ‘Where’d Those Abs Come From?’ Parker in the middle of nowhere.

She upends the mixing bowl in the box over that other item May included.

After so much doubling back and zigzagging down what have to be the most deserted roads in Upstate New York, the driver rolls to a stop in the shadow of a cabin-like house. It’s too house-like to attract the attention of wandering hipsters thirsty for cottagecore, but too cabin-y to suggest anything beyond temporary residence. MJ judges it to be a convincing safehouse. She climbs out, hefting May’s box, and accepting her suitcase from the driver. He moves much more swiftly, evidently uninterested in assessing the dwelling’s façade. Probably not his job. Even with her arms full, MJ steps precisely in the man’s footprints in the snow, just to see if her overexaggerated precaution will get under his skin. He ignores her. By the time she reaches the porch, he’s already completed whatever secret handshake or password exchange or retinal scan he had to do with Peter and is brushing past her, back to the milk-white SUV. She turns and stares after him, her last tie to civilization (until tomorrow), squinting against the light glinting off the snow.

Eventually, when the vehicle is gone and everything’s quiet, MJ accepts that she’s stalling. Eyes lowered, she faces the open door.

She starts at his feet. Red socks, the wool bobbled, the toe of the left twisted slightly like he put it on wrong and didn’t fix it. Her throat’s thick as she scans up his legs, in sweatpants, and remembers them encased in the Spider-Man suit as he crouched on the streetlight and watched Jameson blow his life apart onscreen. Hovering by his thighs are his hands. Oh, his hands. Though MJ’s gripping the box and suitcase with all her might, she’s recalling the gentle way he fit his fingers between hers. With a shaky breath, she can’t wait any longer and her gaze darts up to his face. Peter’s wearing this look she’s seen in videos of soldiers being reunited with their dogs—specifically, she’s seen it in the eyes of those dogs. The look is mushy and wet-eyed and begging for an eyeroll, possibly some verbal ridiculing, and instead, her heart reacts by flopping around unfamiliarly inside her chest. Him, is the sound of its thumping as it stumbles into her ribs. Him, him, him.

“Hi,” she says, voice coming out high. “Don’t hug me. The porch is wet and I’m holding a box.”

“I see that.”

He speaks. MJ’s mouth twitches into a relieved, silly smile. She’s missed the sound of his dork speaking so much that three words have her tripping over the threshold, almost slipping as her snow-slicked boots hit wood floor.

“The box is from May,” she explains, putting her back to Peter in order to set it down and to collect herself all over again. She’s here. He’s here, right where he’s supposed to be and where she was expecting him, but looking at her like that and with a jawline erupting in a faint scruff. It feels like a million years since she saw him last. It feels like a day.

“Can I hug you now?”

The suitcase she just drops.

MJ whirls to throw herself into Peter’s arms, hiccupping a relieved breath when he squeezes her close. Before she shuts her eyes to concentrate on the sensation of him solidly in her grasp after so long apart, she gets a glimpse of the living area beyond, the unlit fireplace. It’s homey and she isn’t sure if that makes her sadder, knowing he’s been living here alone. His hands slide over her back and she realizes she’s been hugging him a long time.

With a tight, uncertain smile, she draws back, cupping his shoulders, then dropping her hands to swing at her sides.

“Are you surprised to see me?” MJ asks. She already knows he should be, but she has to do something besides just stare at him.

“Yeah.” Peter laughs. “Take off your boots and stuff, come sit down.”

He’s smiling at her even as she’s fumbling to untie her laces.

“Sorry,” he laughs again. “I’m not trying to stare. I’m just not used to—”

“People?”

“Well, I see some people. I get supplies. But not super often and not people I… know.”

She saw how his face went pink before settling on that final word.

“You didn’t think I’d let you spend the holidays alone, did you?” MJ teases, now shrugging out of her coat. She didn’t notice that she forgot to zip it up when she got out of the SUV. She stuffs her gloves down the sleeve and passes it to Peter to hang on a hook by the door.

“I didn’t really think that was anybody’s call,” he admits.

His tone is joyfully unconcerned, but she frowns a little, experiencing second-hand frustration at the way Peter’s life isn’t so much being lived right now as run.

“I didn’t either.” She shrugs. “But your Avengers handlers, or whatever their job titles are, contacted me through May, so I figured I might as well come out. Not that I didn’t want to see you. I did. I really wanted to see you.”

God, now she’s probably come on too strong, overcorrecting after worrying she sounded like she could take or leave being reunited with her boyfriend.

“I really wanted to see you too,” Peter assures her. His expression softens. “We didn’t get a lot of time, before.”

“I’m only here until tomorrow,” MJ warns.

“Oh, no, that’s perfect. That’s great. I wasn’t expecting you at all, so this is incredible.”

He goes to grab the box, but she shouts, “No!” Peter stares at her. “Uh,” she says, “can you take my suitcase instead? I don’t know where to put it.”

“Sure.”

She follows him into the living room in her sock feet, wishing she packed slippers.

“The floor can be cold,” he says before she can voice her regret. “I have slippers around here somewhere that you can wear, and it’s warmer when there’s a fire. We can light one tonight, if you want.”

“That sounds nice,” MJ agrees.

“You can put that down in the kitchen.” He points her through a door. “I’ll just take your bag to the bedroom. The, uh, second bedroom. There are two bedrooms. I wasn’t gonna put it in my room. I don’t want you to think—”

“Peter, it’s fine.”

He nods jerkily and walks, glancing back once. She spies the promised slippers and shoves her feet into them before racing into the kitchen. Instead of systematically emptying the box and laying out each item, MJ rifles desperately through to the bottom and grabs the thing she avoided the whole way here. What was May thinking, including condoms in the care package? Well, logically, she can guess. Peter, mostly alone, opening the door to discover his girlfriend, arrived for an overnight stay. Yes, she can see exactly why May wanted to take precautions on their behalf because MJ definitely didn’t think of that and she doubts whoever brings Peter his updates and frozen pizzas has thought to equip him with prophylactics. They’re mostly concerned with keeping him alive and out of the hands of the authorities, not getting him laid.

Knowing Peter will return any moment, MJ looks frantically around the kitchen. She thinks she hears his footsteps. Shit. She yanks a pullout drawer open and chucks the box of condoms in next to the Cheerios, hitting the drawer shut with her hip as Peter walks in and grins at her. She plasters an anxious smile on in response.

He joins her at the counter and they begin to unload the box.

“Wait,” he says, partway through, “is this the stuff for latkes?”

“Mhmm. May told me she didn’t want you to miss out on any of your regular holiday traditions, even if she couldn’t be… Peter?”

MJ observes him, sympathy wringing her heart like a wet washcloth. He turns away from her and raises a hand to his face. She hears a sniff and assumes he’s wiping at his eyes and cheeks. She reaches out, hesitates, overcomes, lays her hand on his shoulder.

“I told her it should’ve been her coming instead of me,” she mumbles.

“No, no,” Peter assures her, still facing away, “I’m so happy to see you, MJ, seriously. I just miss her.”

“She misses you too.”

When he turns to face her, eyes still shining, MJ rewards his vulnerability by taking his hand.

“It’s not fair,” she tells him.

“It’s what’s gotta be done,” Peter says with a resigned shrug. “What I want isn’t as important as fixing this mess so I can go back to being Spider-Man. People need me.”

“You’re people too. There are people you need. That’s part of your humanity.” She’s ramping up now, arguing on his behalf with no one there to argue against. “Without that humanity, you wouldn’t be a good Spider-Man. You wouldn’t be a good guy. Protecting you shouldn’t just be about sticking you somewhere and watching you by satellite or whatever! Exposing your identity is a psychological attack and Nick Fury and the rest of them should be doing everything to ensure you can weather this storm psychologically, including keeping you connected to your family and your friends and—"

“My girlfriend.”

MJ exhales.

“Maybe not her,” she jokes. “She might just come in here and rant at you about reducing your stress, which is kinda counterproductive.”

“If I could listen to you rant every day, I’d be happy.”

She flushes and busies herself with putting May’s gifts away, probably all in the wrong spots, but Peter never corrects her, just works quietly alongside her until there’s nothing left in the box. Because she wasn’t permitted to bring her phone, MJ checks the time on her watch. It’s early afternoon.

“What do you do all day?”

Peter’s face lights up.

“You wanna see the room?”

“I recognize that look. This has something to do with Ned, doesn’t it?”

Her hypothesis is proven right when he leads her down the hall and opens a door to reveal a room housing a dozen Lego models. Everything’s probably Star Wars related, but she’s lost beyond the Death Star.

“Ned,” she says.

“Ned. He brought them when he came. I’ve done them all… well, a few times each.”

“I know I should be delicate with you because you’re a genius hermit, but, Parker, that’s so lame.”

Peter laughs out loud.

“That’s not all I do. Come on.”

He takes her hand (it doesn’t seem like he’s thought for a second about scrapping their relationship) and they walk back to the living room. On one of the couches, he has his Spidey suit laid out. But it’s freaky, like a skinned animal, with the innards of its tech exposed and skinny screwdrivers scattered on the floor nearby. He’s been tinkering. Because they have nothing else on the agenda, he explains the maintenance he’s done, more features he’s discovered. The list of protocols and capabilities seems almost endless. Watching him speak so enthusiastically, she wonders if maybe this is Peter’s version of holing up with a tall stack of books.

“No tracker in the suit?” she asks when they sit down at opposite ends of the remaining couch, legs stretched out and resting against each other.

“Nah. All that stuff’s turned off.” He lays his arm along the back of the couch and tips his cheek against it. “Where do your parents think you are right now?”

“At Betty’s.”

Her family knows she pines for Peter, but they don’t know she’s been granted this opportunity to see him. She doesn’t know what they’d say. Like the majority of New Yorkers, they like Spider-Man and don’t believe that he murdered Quentin Beck. That doesn’t mean they’d want her as involved as she is—though involved feels like a strong word when she hasn’t seen him since the day he was exposed and had to ride the first leg of this journey with a blindfold on. Seemed pretty antiquated. Her parents just want her to be safe, like how May wants Peter to be safe. MJ recalls the condoms. Ok, not quite the same.

“They think we’re in some kind of study lockdown, prepping for a decathlon thing in January, phones off,” she continues. “Betty doesn’t know I’m here, but Ned told her enough that she’ll lie for me if my parents call her. I’m thinking of promoting her.”

“How’s the team doing this year?”

MJ studies him. I spend every practice thinking about you even more than Flash talks about you, she thinks. I went home and cried the day Mr. Harrington told me I’d have to fill your spot. Nobody’s as smart as you. I’m bored without you. Sometimes I worry that I’m not a good captain and I just want to talk to you because I know it’d make me feel better, but you’re not there.

She pokes her toes into his thigh.

“Decent,” she says. “Flash wanted our name changed to the Midtown Spider-Men, but Mr. Harrington said no.”

When Peter groans and tucks his face into his arm in embarrassment, MJ does what she’s been too shy to do yet: she moves down to his end of the couch and kisses him as he turns his head to look at her. He holds her securely around the waist as she darts back in for a second kiss, a slower one. There’s no one around to spy, no one to interrupt. Everything in her zings upward like a hurled snowball and the kiss gains momentum. It’s not as hasty as the one on the flight home—it’s deeper, more grownup somehow. The prick of his facial hair enhances that adultness. For her, this is a kiss that says she’s been surviving without him, but now that they’re together, she prefers catching up this way rather than with words. They kiss like they can’t be stopped. MJ cups the back of Peter’s head, then his face, as their mouths nudge and coax, their tongues tracing each other’s lips before retreating. They separate to breathe and she presses her face to his neck, letting him hold her as she sits, still twisted with her feet on the floor, wearing his slippers.

“That’s one of the toughest things to do without,” he tells her. “I forgot it felt that good.”

“Too good,” she says wryly, lifting her head.

“Hey, based on what you were saying about my psychological needs, I’m due something ‘too good.’”

Really, it just isn’t possible not to think about the condoms as she smiles at him and chews the inside of her lip. Having sex with Peter is something she’s contemplated. She contemplated it when she watched him play trombone with the marching band during football games, and when he smiled as he walked down the hall at school with Ned. She contemplated it when she silently observed his late entrances to decathlon practices, and when she muffled her moans in bed at night, fantasizing about him. They kissed in London and sleeping together went from a daydream to an inevitability; they separated in New York and it went back to a dream. But now…

She’s only here for one night though. It’s too soon. When MJ kisses Peter, she knows she wants to keep going, but she doesn’t want to do anything impulsive and hurt them both more when she has to leave tomorrow. They need to think about this together. She should probably tell him about the condoms, so they have all their metaphorical cards on the table. And yet, she’s not able to jump from a single reunion kiss to asking if he wants to have sex on one of her future visits (if there are future visits). It’s not organic. It feels like working out their romantic plans on somebody else’s schedule. That makes her feel gross, cheated even.

MJ sags back from Peter and asks him to give her a tour of the rest of the house.

—

She’s rubbing the skin off an onion when, pausing in the grating of a potato, he turns to her and suggests something that proves he has gone a little screwy living alone: he wants to cook the latkes in the fireplace.

“You have a stove,” she points out.

“Yeah,” he agrees, now grating vigorously.

“We cook these in oil, right? You want to put a pan full of oil on an open flame?”

“We don’t fill the pan to the top or anything.”

“Ok, right, but still,” MJ persists. “Oil. Fire. A house you kinda need to stay standing because, one, it’s your secret hideout, and two, the sun’s gone down and it’s freezing outside and we’ll be cold without shelter.”

“How could we be cold if we had a burning house to stand next to? Kidding.” Peter grins at her. “It’ll work, MJ. I’ll be careful.”

“You will? No way am I letting you do this alone.”

“Aww.” He leans towards her and kisses her cheek.

“I didn’t say that to be romantic. I’m genuinely worried that you’ll set the place on fire.”

“I know.”

They continue preparing the batter and, after pouring oil into the heavy pan May packed for this, MJ warily hands it off to Peter. He carries it into the living room, where he lit a fire half an hour earlier. Setting the pan down away from the fire, he retrieves his nanotech suit and tugs his sweatshirt off to put it on, extoling its temperature-control virtues. He’s sure it can withstand a little heat. After all, it handled the cold of space no problem. MJ watches him nervously.

At least the fire’s died down some, so when he grasps the handle of the pan to hold the base over the heat, there aren’t any flames licking up his arm. Once the oil’s sizzling, Peter withdraws the pan so that MJ won’t have to reach into the firebox to distribute the batter. She spreads each glob out quickly to avoid melting the spatula. And, after standing way back because the oil pops from the pan to splatter Peter’s metal sleeve, it doesn’t go terribly. Though some of the latkes seem overcooked to her, he assures her he likes them better crispy. The way he says it has her touching the lump her black dahlia necklace makes beneath her sweater.

They return their latke paraphernalia to the kitchen, then settle on the couch again to eat.

“Good?” MJ asks. She likes them, but she’s never eaten a potato pancake before, so she has no frame of reference.

“Best ever.”

She smiles at Peter, watching him chew for a minute.

“You’ll miss this house’s fireplace when you’re back home.”

“This is my favourite meal in a long time and it has nothing to do with the fireplace,” he says. Her heart genuinely skips a beat. With quiet pleasure, she goes back to eating.

At home, she has her phone and her books and the TV—so many reasons to postpone loading the dishwasher. Here, there is no dishwasher and MJ realizes it’s really nice to dry while Peter washes the dishes by hand. Until he somehow cuts himself on the grater, bleeds in the water, and they have to leave the remaining dishes in the sink for a rewash while she forces Peter to the paltry selection of first aid equipment in the bathroom. Thankfully, the nick in his finger is small enough to cover with a single band-aid. She glares at him the whole time.

“I don’t even need this!” he says. “It’ll be healed up by the time I go to bed.”

“Keeping it clean until then won’t hurt you. Just take care of yourself, please?”

MJ isn’t aware that she’s pleading until she glances from his bandaged finger to his face and takes in his expression. He’s looking at her like he’s starting to get that she cares. Really cares. Cares more than it would take to come all the way out here just because someone else arranged it for her and provided the ride.

“Ok,” Peter gently agrees.

Without the usual evening distractions of a night at home (and after MJ refuses to construct a Lego Star Destroyer, whatever the hell that is), Peter pulls out the checkers he found on day two of his stay. Apparently, he was stir-crazy enough by then to raid ever nook and cranny of the house in search of entertainment for his overactive mind. They sprawl out in front of the fire. Neither of them know the rules, so he stacks his checkers into towers while she lays down patterns and skips them across the board. That devolves into deciding to create a single high stack, which devolves further into attempting to flip the checkers of the collapsed tower into the air with their thumbs, like tossing a coin. Peter flicks one as MJ’s leaning forward and it drops straight down the front of her sweater. He makes an offhanded joke about retrieving it and they laugh until their eyes meet and they remember that they’re alone, that it doesn’t have to be a joke. They scatter the last of the checkers scrambling to get close to one another.

She kisses him fiercely. The fire makes one side of her body hot, one of her eyelids glow orange before her closed eyes. Every time they do this is one time closer to having to let him go, but MJ isn’t interested in that right now. His neck is warm under her palm and her foot slips on the empty checkerboard when his fingers hook behind her knee to draw her leg towards him. They aren’t in each other’s laps yet, but it’s close. She’s getting used to the scratch of his scruff against her cheeks, chin, and upper lip. Can Peter feel her sweating when he slips a hand up the back of her sweater? Is his shiver as she moves her leg over his more than a sign that he wants to scoot closer to the fire? Pulling back from the kiss, she lets him strip her sweater off. The checker plonks out. He smiles as he spots the pendant hanging against her t-shirt. He groans more than he did cutting his finger as she takes his hand and places it on her ribcage, urging him with her eyes to reposition his palm where they both want it to be. MJ watches him swallow. Looking down, she sees firelight rippling in the flower’s black glass and Peter’s hand rising to cup her breast. She leans into it and grabs the back of his neck for another kiss.

As she’s psyching herself up to straddle her boyfriend’s lap, there’s a trill from nearby.

“What was that? I thought you didn’t have a phone.”

MJ releases Peter and—it’s not her fault—her gaze skims down his body as he stands. There’s a noticeable bulge in the front of his sweatpants.

“It’s an alert,” he says, tone so serious that she feels bad for staring at his erection. She only sneaks one more glance as he unearths a tablet from amongst the tools he’s been using to fiddle with his Spider-Man suit. Two glances.

“What happened?” she asks. “Are you in danger?”

“I’d protect you if there was any danger,” Peter promises, not looking away from the screen. He says it like it’s obvious, but the statement floors MJ, preventing her from quipping back about being able to protect herself. “But it’s not that. Just the weather.”

He tilts the screen in offer and she rises to stand next to him, looking at a swirling graphic.

“Snow?”

“Mhmm.”

“But it’s already snowed,” she says. “This is worth sending you an alert about? How do we set this thing to ‘do not disturb unless someone has a missile locked onto this house’?”

“Jesus, MJ.”

She shrugs.

“Or just a shifty-looking mail carrier driving by. Whatever. I don’t want to be narrowminded in my assumption of the appearance of a modern assassin.”

“Sometimes the people looking out for me go overboard about the wrong things,” he allows. “Looks like the snow isn’t coming until around three in the morning. We’ll be asleep. It won’t bother us.”

“It’ll bother me if I have to hear that sound again for no good reason.”

Peter tosses the tablet back onto the couch.

“I’m supposed to keep it on, but we can ignore it.”

“Yes,” she agrees, the heat of the fire around the level of her knees inspiring new heat to rise higher. “Let’s ignore it.”

“We can just get ready for bed. You’re probably tired from the drive today, right?”

And he’s looking at her so honestly, so innocently, that MJ finds herself nodding at his solicitousness. He’s too busy being kind to appreciate that she wants to stay right here by the fire and rub up against him until she sees stars. But maybe he doesn’t think they’re there yet. The timeline of their relationship is slightly fucked up, what with Peter having to flee the city as a fugitive. Have they been together the past six months or is this their second date? Maybe shyly holding hands is still their speed and MJ is majorly jumping the gun in wanting to pull his pants down and get a better look at what she started by putting Peter’s hand on her boob.

So, he puts the fire out and she brushes her teeth, then changes into her pajamas in the second bedroom. The house has central heating, meaning it’s still warm, but the walls and bedspread are bland, there’s no atmosphere without the hearth. MJ realizes she’s kept Peter’s slippers all day when she sits down on the edge of her mattress with a sigh and kicks her feet free. He’s right, she should be tired. The travel and the overwhelming joy of getting to see, hear, and touch him should make it easy to crawl into bed and let the sound of the wind—it’s picking up, carrying snowflakes—lull her to sleep.

MJ doesn’t even get the blanket folded down before she’s up, opening her door and crossing the hall to Peter’s room. Her hand hovers over the doorknob, then raises, ready to rap on the door instead. No, fuck it, she twists the doorknob and steps into his bedroom. Peter’s lying on his back in the dark with his eyes wide open. She leaves the door open behind her so the light he left on in the bathroom (in case she needed to get up during the night) can continue to show her the look on his face. The look of relief.

“I was gonna come to you, but I wasn’t sure…” He trails off.

“That would’ve been ok with me,” she assures him, holding her arms as the chill of standing around in a t-shirt starts to get to her, “but I don’t mind coming to you.”

“Come to me then,” Peter says, pushing back his bedsheets and shifting over.

“I missed you so much,” she gasps.

“I missed you.”

She strides to the bed and feels his arms tug her close even as she’s still drawing the blanket over herself. Peter hugs her hard and it’s ok that it’s horizontal because he’s also held onto her a hundred feet in the air, the two of them swinging between buildings. Any way he wants to hold her is ok.

What MJ thought, when she barged in here, was that they’d have some dramatic, fiery scene with passionate kissing and creaking bedsprings. She regrets undervaluing Peter’s warmth. As a person, but also physically. Cuddling into him beats slipping between cold sheets in the other bedroom. It’s nice to be wrapped around him in a moment that isn’t immediately following an attempt on his life, knowing that he isn’t going to leave her this time. Though she’s the one who’ll have to leave the next day, trusting Peter to stay put while she sleeps is what gets her to start drifting. This is better than having him as a captive napping buddy on the airplane. No motion sickness. They’ve already landed. He kisses her temple and she ducks her head into his chest, imagining she can count his heartbeats instead of sheep, knowing the steady glug of her own heart means more to him than he could tell her in words alone.

—

This morning is not last night.

The first thing MJ does is raise her head to squint at the time on the digital clock next to Peter’s bed. The second thing is pressing her mouth to his as he mumbles a sleepy, “Good morning.” It’s 6am, a disgusting hour at home, but here, a perfect time to start the day, and seize that day, as she is seizing a fistful of the t-shirt he slept in. She can feel him smiling. She can feel him reacting in lots of ways.

When she doesn’t slow the kisses, loosen her grip on the front of his shirt, or draw back entirely in embarrassment, Peter pulls her beneath him. It’s a lazy motion, like a cat swiping at something with a paw. His weight rests comfortably on top of her. Shifting around rucks her t-shirt up, so she drops a hand to his waist and slides his up too, until their skin meets from their ribs to the bands of their pajama bottoms. Her boyfriend groans and gropes for her thigh, hiking it against his hip. The noise and the blatant display of want (in addition to the erection now pressing directly between her legs) have MJ rubbing against him excitedly. She attempts to simultaneously kiss him harder and get his shirt off over his head. They struggle together, laughing, and once it’s gone, Peter drops back onto her with fervour.

His hands grip her hips, skim her waist, get tangled up in her hair. MJ catches one and guides it beneath her t-shirt. Their gazes lock and he seems to buck against her involuntarily, lightly squeezing her breast. With an airy moan from her, their kisses turn rabid. Their hips rock agonizingly out of sync for a minute—maybe less, maybe more, her mind isn’t on the clock anymore—then his erection strokes firmly up the center of her and they figure it out. They have to. She’s suddenly hellbent on feeling that again and, honestly, Peter doesn’t look any less devoted when their kisses are forced to stop thanks to the violence of their clothed grinding.

She comes first, clutching his back and his shoulder. He comes with a sharp flick of his hips that brings to mind the way he looses a web from his wrist. Kinda the same principle, she concludes, feeling the dampness of his pajamas against her abdomen before he flops to the side with a blissful, disbelieving sigh. MJ stretches out her legs and curls her toes. A grin creeps up her face.

“Good morning,” she replies.

Peter lets out a solo laugh.

Then he just says, “Wow.”

Still smiling, she buries her face in his pillow and lets him move around her as he gets up for the day.

“It’s early,” she says, lifting her head at the creak of him pushing the bedroom door wider.

“I know.” He stares at her adoringly. There’s no other word for it. “Being in bed with you is… too good. If I stay, I’ll go back to sleep, and I don’t want that. I want to see you as much as I can before you go.”

MJ’s smile fades. Right. That.

“And you’re walking out of the room,” she points out.

“Because I have to take a shower,” Peter laughs. “A short shower. Then you can shower, or not shower, and we’ll have breakfast and make the morning last as long as we can, ok?”

Can she just make him tuck himself into the box of kitchen stuff she brought and take him back home with her? Being apart from him again—willingly turning her back on this house and making new tracks in the snow—feels impossible. They aren’t supposed to be apart. But MJ nods, knowing it’s easier on them both that way. She watches him head towards the bathroom and reminds herself that this stay with him has already meant more to her than she anticipated.

She’s in her room gathering toiletries and clothes when she hears Peter shut the shower off. That’s on purpose. She doesn’t need to wonder any more about her lack of restraint today; seeing him walk back into his bedroom soaking wet and likely dressed in nothing but a towel would definitely test her. His presence in her thoughts as she shampoos her hair under the low pressure of the showerhead is sufficiently distracting. She braids her hair when she’s done, simply to focus herself with the task (and because she didn’t bring a hairdryer and accepts that her boyfriend’s probably not hiding one here someplace). Pausing at the door, she takes a deep breath, determined to look him in the eye and not just stare at the floor and blush because he’s touched her skin and brought her to orgasm. She smiles to herself in a moment of private congratulation.

Peter would probably hear her approaching footfalls no matter what, but with his too-big slippers flapping on her feet, MJ’s prepared for him to be looking at her when she makes her entrance into the kitchen. She’s not prepared for the box of Cheerios sitting on his table. Shit. Only now does she remember the condoms and where she stowed them. As she looks on, trying to think of what to say, Peter cheerfully pours himself a bowl and adds milk.

“Two things,” he says while she shuffles cautiously into the room. “First thing: you won’t believe what I found in with the cereal. Talk about a prize in every box.”

“Loser,” she mutters, rolling her eyes even as her cheeks flush.

“Super weird that that’s not the biggest thing I have to tell you, but I definitely want to get back to it, but, second thing, it snowed.”

She narrows her eyes.

“Uh, yeah, I remember.”

“Ok, well, it really snowed. Serious snow. Big, high, white and drifted snow.”

“You’ve slipped into song lyrics.”

“I got an alert,” Peter says, lifting the tablet he showed her the night before from the table.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“It came through when you were in the shower, though it is harder to hear the noise from down the hall.”

MJ gives him a questioning look.

“I might’ve been on my way to the bathroom to, uh, see if you needed anything,” he explains, blushing guiltily, “when I heard it and had to come back out here.”

“Is this your handlers overreacting again?” But even as she asks, she turns towards the window. Of course, for security reasons, the blinds are down and the curtains are shut. “Can I look?”

He nods and she crosses the kitchen to take a quick peek, not wanting to jeopardize his safety. The level of the snow dips down near the side of the house, but the drift rises steeply. Within a few feet, it appears high enough to come up to her hips if she waded outside. And it’s still falling.

“There’s a lot of snow out there,” MJ informs him in a mildly panicked tone, snapping the curtains back into place.

“Mhmm. Cheerios?”

“You should be eating the eggs I brought you while they’re fresh,” she counters.

Her comment is half-hearted and distracted though and she too goes for the cereal. Between spoonfuls, Peter, across from her when she sits down at the table, unspools the consequences of the heavy snowfall.

“So, obviously, this isn’t an emergency, but it’s not ideal. You’re probably gonna have to stay another night.”

“Ok,” MJ says slowly. “Another night. But my parents are expecting me home tonight.”

“I’m sure Fury or somebody’ll get in touch with May and have her make something up. Trust me, nobody wants any questions to come up that’ll lead back to me.”

“What’s the ‘probably’ depend on?”

“Hmm?” He slurps the milk off his spoon.

“You say I’d probably have to stay tonight. Does that depend on how much more snow we get?”

“Um, yeah, that and a couple other things,” Peter says vaguely. MJ frowns at him.

“I came all the way out here to be with you, Parker. I could not be more in the middle of things than I am right now. Tell me what you know.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” He lets his spoon clink into his bowl. “So, the snow for sure. I mean, I’m guessing they have something heavy-duty that could plough the road if they had to, but getting a plough here would be conspicuous thing number one and having this rural road cleared when the rest of the area won’t be would be conspicuous thing number two. If you left that way, I’d have to leave too, get put in a new safehouse—”

“I don’t want to cause that big of a problem,” MJ assures him, finally pouring out her own bowl and trying to find some comfort in breakfast.

“You’re the furthest thing in the world from a problem,” Peter says with a quick smile. “But alright, so, with the alert, they suggested another option.”

“Which is?”

“To airlift you out.”

She bites down on her spoon as her jaw tenses.

“I don’t, um, really enjoy heights.”

“Yeah,” he laughs, “I remember.”

“You dropped me and it wasn’t funny.”

“Aw, that was months ago. Can’t we laugh about it now?” Her expression is his answer. “I actually did figure you’d feel that way. This would’ve been a helicopter, no landing, just somebody coming down a ladder to grab you and help you up into the chopper.”

“Don’t say ‘chopper’ like you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger. You’re way too much of a dork to be using that word. And yes, before you ask, I am criticizing you to mask my fear over how horrifying that sounds.”

“I told them no.”

“Wait… I thought… you didn’t have communication, right? Like, that’s why you can’t talk to your aunt.” Or me, MJ tacks on internally.

“Oh, it’s not a conversation. They just send through the planned course of action and usually I don’t have a choice, but this time I could basically give them a yes or no, proceed or no-go, you know?”

She sighs shakily.

“Thank you for not making me do that.”

“Well, based on the weather, they could ask again, so you always have a chance to change your mind, if you want.”

Peter’s not meeting her eye.

“Why the hell would I change my mind about dangling from a helicopter in a blizzard?”

“If you wanted to go,” he says quietly. “You’re the other thing this plan depends on. Like you said, your parents are expecting you and—”

“Peter,” MJ says, “the fact that I’m not being subjected to an extreme chopper rescue is only the thing that I’m second most grateful for. Getting to spend more time with you is number one. If they don’t have to draw attention to this house, and if your aunt covers for me, that’s great.”

Looking up, he gives her a mostly-convinced smile. Seeing it, she knows she has to press further. She taps her slipper against the top of his foot under the table.

“I hope it snows for a week,” she says firmly.

Peter beams. He lifts his cereal bowl and holds it out to her.

“Cheers,” he offers. After a derisive snort, she taps her bowl against his.

They eat in a comfortable silence for several minutes. Blocking out the death-defying premise of the recent plan, MJ considers the ramifications of staying put. She trusts May. May will know what to say to her parents, she’s very compassionate—and hopefully a believable liar. Well, MJ figures she’d have to be, with Spider-Man under her roof. School’s on winter break, so she doesn’t need to worry about an alibi for her teachers, though the flu would’ve worked as an excuse. It seems like she’s good from every angle. Resting her cheek against her hand as she scoops the remaining Cheerios onto her spoon, she observes Peter and feels herself smiling just to see him in front of her. His face in real life is still sorta miraculous.

“So,” he begins when she grabs his bowl (the guy’s been doing his solitary dishes for months—she doesn’t mind helping out), “I have a really important question.”

“Still a no to the helicopter.”

MJ has her back to her boyfriend, placing the bowls in the sink, when he responds.

“Should I shave?”

She turns, frowning in confusion.

“That’s up to you.”

“Well, see, maybe I would’ve this morning, except I promised I would be quick in the bathroom, and then anyway, I figured you’d be leaving soon and there wouldn’t be that many more opportunities for us to—”

“Oh my god,” she says as she catches on. “Please stop.”

“But if it bothers you,” Peter presses, rubbing the back of his fingers up his stubbled cheek, “when we’re kissing…”

“It doesn’t. It’s different, but… I’m good. You don’t have to shave for me.”

“Hypothetically though, if we were kissing for a longer period of time, I wouldn’t want to hurt your skin.”

“God, Peter, how long are you imagining we’d be kissing for that my face would be damagingly abraded?”

“Then,” he says, spreading his hands to their apparent future possibilities, “what if it wasn’t rubbing against your face?”

Spinning away from him, MJ stares with wide eyes at the wall above the sink.

“Does the idea of me kissing your neck freak you out?” Peter asks her back. “I don’t have to do that.”

Her shoulders slump as she laughs.

“My neck,” she murmurs to herself. “He meant my neck.”

“What do you— oh.” Goddamn enhanced hearing. “Uh, well, I-I didn’t know you had stuff in mind.”

“I don’t have anything in mind,” she says, turning to look at him.

Peter grabs the Cheerios and gets up to put them away. Holding her gaze, he pulls the box of condoms out of the drawer as he slots the cereal in.

“These showed up when you did. Unless some assassin broke in and left me a really sickening present.”

“I didn’t pack them, your aunt-slash-wingwoman did.”

His expression changes several times as he digests that.

“That seems like something May would do,” is what he lands on.

“It’s… thoughtful of her. Responsible parenting,” MJ agrees stiffly, trying to deal with the visual of Peter casually holding a box of condoms. Cool. Fine.

“So, the thought of… It’s just May making sure, in case anything… Yeah. I got it.”

But that’s not quite right.

“I’ve thought about it,” MJ blurts. “Not for this weekend, because I only expected to be here a night and this is something we should, you know, discuss.”

“Totally,” Peter says eagerly.

“I just don’t want you to think I haven’t…” She waves a hand.

“Thought about it,” he finishes.

“Yeah.”

“Me too. I’ve thought about it. Like, a lot,” he divulges with a relieved laugh that he quickly concludes with a clearing of his throat. “A normal amount.”

“That’s good,” she assures him. Her gestures feel gawky, her features feel misplaced on her face.

“I’d definitely be up for discussing it, especially after, uh…” Peter ruffles his damp hair as his face flushes. “…this morning.”

MJ’s suddenly made up of thoughts, so many thoughts that there’s no room for words, no possibility of speaking. This morning. Uh huh. Valid recollection on her boyfriend’s part. This morning was fantastic and kind of but not wildly unexpected and certainly closer to the sort of thing they’d need those condoms for than the few times they’ve made out have been.

“That makes sense,” she says, voice weak when it finally comes out, along with plenty of nodding. Too much nodding, really.

He sets the box on the counter.

“We could talk about it now.”

“We could do that,” MJ agrees, pulse accelerating with every additional second he spends looking at her. “The thing is, it’s early, it’s really early, and if we talk about that now, we’re gonna lose the whole day.”

Peter’s eyebrows raise.

“God, yeah, you’re right. You know, I think I’m, like, oversimplifying this discussion in my head because, yep, definitely, if you have a lot you want to say about it before—or if, even!—we, uh, proceed, then you should absolutely take the whole day to just get all your thoughts out there. For sure. I… yes. I support you and you should take all the time you need. More than a day! You could definitely take more than a day, obviously. You know that. I hope you do. Whatever you want, MJ.”

“I actually just meant that if we started talking about it, we’d lose the whole day to doing it.”

“Oh.” He sits with that thought for a minute, eyes roving the kitchen ceiling. “Why would that be a problem?”

He asks with such genuine confusion that MJ has to laugh, and that relaxes her.

“If we can’t think hard enough to determine why it’d be a problem, it’s a problem,” she reasons. “I want to think this through. I want us to both be ready. That alone—” She points at the condoms. “—doesn’t make us ready.”

“Ok. We’ll completely forget about them. No problem.”

Fueled by the intense focusing power of sexual tension, they pass the morning learning something that may actually be checkers as it was intended to be played. Anything around them making sense is an accident, as far as MJ is concerned, and mastering the probably-rules of the game isn’t really a win because it means they have to scramble to find something else to distract them. Peter takes up a post on the ceiling, cross-legged, and lets the body of his Spider-Man suit dangle down while he retools something in the hands. When he puts on the mask and starts talking to Karen, MJ quits watching him and goes into the kitchen to make them an early lunch of an extra-large omelette. It seems like a nice idea to curl up and eat together until Peter touches her hip a certain way and she looks at him too long. They force themselves to sit on separate couches.

After lunch, he digs out some non-Stark-tech supplies, like paper and pens. He lights a small fire and she draws. Once he starts paying more attention to her drawings than to his stuff, she draws for him, pulling her legs back so he can share her couch. She crafts caricatures of their friends, plays them across the page in short cartoons that are semi-faithful to the boring goings-on of their lives at Midtown this fall without Peter. He falls asleep with his head resting against the back of the couch and she executes swift sketches to capture the softness of his features. She doesn’t know how long his supine pose will last. She never knows how long anything will last, with him. He stays asleep, so MJ leaves her drawings and steals into the Lego room, disassembling at will. Peter’s a little panicked when he walks in half an hour later, but sorting the pieces she’s jumbled will give him something to do while she takes her own nap, she reasons.

But where to? The spare room doesn’t call to her in the slightest and returning to his bed will bring thoughts that’ll only keep her awake. She needs to revive after their too-early morning; she troops back to the couch and passes out with the warmth of the fire near her feet and the jangling of plastic Lego bricks in the other room.

The rustle of paper is the first thing MJ hears when she wakes up. She can’t remember dreaming last night, but during her nap, her subconscious played a short film of the two of them giggling as Peter cooked his Spidey suit in the fireplace. Weird. She blinks, tracing the sound to her boyfriend, cross-legged on the floor with his back against the couch as he flips through her rough portraits of him.

“Maybe you can do one of you,” he suggests without looking back at her. “And I can keep it when you leave. I don’t have any pictures of anybody.”

She hesitates a moment, then leans to wrap her arms loosely around his shoulders from behind.

“How’d you know I was awake?”

“I heard your breathing change.” A pause. “It sounds pretty creepy when I say it out loud, but I’m just doing what you do.” Peter twists to look at her, putting his hand over the back of hers on his chest. “Observing.”

“Right.” MJ glances down abruptly. “Like with the cereal drawer this morning and what you observed in there.”

“I hate to tell you this, but it sounds like you’re gonna talk about the thing you said we shouldn’t talk about.”

“I found clarity in unconsciousness.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means our problems don’t just disappear. Obviously.” She waves one hand in front of him, indicating the room where Peter’s presumably spent most of his waking hours since arriving here. “We have to solve them.”

“Is it… us having sex… a problem?”

“I don’t want it to be. I just want us to be, you know, in agreement. Not rushing into anything.”

“I think…” Peter sighs and shifts so he can look at her without contorting. She withdraws her arms from him and sits up, crossing her legs in her lap, planting her elbows on her knees. “I think we’re not gonna get everything we want. How can we, with these conditions? I don’t even know when I’m gonna get to see you again. We can wait, which is alright with me, but I can’t tell you how long we’ll be waiting for.”

“I’m not asking.”

“Because you know I have zero control here,” he says in a tone full of more irritation than she’s seen him display yet. “I don’t even choose what I eat for breakfast! It’s not like they’ve asked me to write up a grocery list. I am so sick of Cheerios. Out there, I was helping people, but stuck here… I don’t know, MJ. I’m basically powerle—”

She folds forward and kisses him, grabbing his face to hold him in place for a few extra seconds until his lips copy hers and quit trying to form the rest of that word.

“No,” MJ insists, face still close to his, “you’re not. And just so you know where I stand…” She takes a deep, terrified breath, pushing out the only truth she’s ever had trouble articulating: “…you are everything I want.”

Peter’s eyes are awed and hopeful as his gaze darts across her face.

“What about what you said about not rushing?”

“That was for your benefit. Personally, I can’t rush what I’ve already decided.”

“Especially not when May sends you here prepared, I guess,” he checks with a coy smile.

“We don’t have to do anything else,” MJ emphasizes, sidestepping the dork’s comment. “It’s amazing just being with you—and I will deny I said that so bluntly if you ever tell anyone.”

She smiles so he knows she’s teasing. He still jerks his head back in mock offense. Suddenly, his expression clarifies to… horror.

“You don’t wanna do this because you’re worried, do you?” Peter demands. “Not because you think I’m gonna forget about you or stop caring about you like this?”

“No.” But she averts her eyes because she did have that concern on the drive here yesterday, right up until they hugged. “I’m not trying to use sex for anything. If… if you did stop… and you wanted to be just friends again, that’s not something I could prevent. I realize now that I can’t focus on that possibility because—”

“Because it’s not a possibility at all.” He ducks his head until her gaze is trapped by his. Shaking his head, Peter says, “I’m sure about you, MJ. I’m not sure when I’ll be home or if the world—or even just the neighbourhood—will still want a Spider-Man by the time I can be that guy again, but I know the first thing I’m gonna wanna do when I get back is give you a kiss. Not as friends.”

“What about now? Do you want to kiss me now?”

“I always wanna kiss you.”

Right as he stretches towards her—seemingly poised to prove what he said—MJ jerks back. Peter looks up at her quizzically.

“Anything while I was asleep? Any alerts? I don’t want a whole team to come storming in here while I’m taking your pants off.”

It takes her boyfriend a few seconds to get his words out.

“I-I don’t want that either,” he says, voicing cracking as his cheeks redden. He shakes his head. “No alerts. Nothing. That means no change to the plan for you to stay here tonight.”

“Good. I was sorta getting used to the idea. They would’ve had a fight getting me out of here.”

She raises her chin confrontationally and Peter grins.

“And some people think Spider-Man’s trouble. They should meet his girlfriend, who marches in with a box of condoms and won’t leave until he sleeps with her.”

MJ gapes at him.

“That’s not what I did.”

Peter pushes up to his knees, smiling as he cradles her face in his palm.

“It’s basically what you did.”

“You massively oversimplified the events of the past—” She squints and makes a guess. “—thirty hours.”

“I was hitting the highlights,” he argues, sliding his hand to the back of her neck to draw her down to him.

Her laugh is as brief as one of her quick heartbeats as Peter’s fingers stroke her neck and he angles his head.

“Is that how you’re going to tell this story to our grandkids?”

The mirth falls from both of their faces; they absorb her facetious quip in the same instant. Then, their mouths slam together—MJ diving down, Peter surging up. Though she has the high ground (and doesn’t say as much to the guy with a roomful of Star Wars Lego), he builds momentum out of nowhere, driving her up until he’s hovering, then lowering, on top of her. She’s holding him as tightly as she can as they continue to kiss hard.

On instinct, she assumes, their bodies copy the morning’s posture with her thigh against Peter’s hip. He grasps it and presses his hips to hers. MJ swipes her tongue along his when she feels him hardening between her legs. This was always only a maybe, she thinks, eyes moving fast behind her lids as they follow the red glow of the fire that the movement of his head is causing to shift across her face. But this definitely feels like they know where they’re going. Somebody’ll need to go get the condoms from the kitchen at some point. Peter swings his head to kiss down her neck and MJ sighs. Yeah, at some point.

These clothes might not come off as easily as the red suit on the opposite couch, but his eagerness compensates for the fact that he can’t just tap his chest to drop everything to the floor. When both their top halves are bare (as with anything, Peter does not mind lending a hand in undressing her), he pulls MJ up so he’s sitting with her straddling his lap. He groans into her mouth as she traces the muscles of his abdomen and she hops forward to nudge her hips into his again.

“If I don’t go now,” he pants, “I don’t know when I’m gonna get up to grab a condom.”

So, he’s been thinking the same thing she has. MJ smirks.

“You should probably get one,” she encourages.

But he has her jeans undone and her hand down the front of his sweats—still over his underwear, for the moment—before he manages to repeat his words with any resolve. She throws herself aside and stares into the fire, licking her lips to chase the memory of his mouth’s pressure, while he scurries to the kitchen. His naked torso is beautiful in the glow when he jogs (dork) back in.

“You think it’s safe to leave that?” MJ asks, nodding towards the fireplace. “My preference would be not doing this on a couch the first time.”

“Second time?” he jokes.

“Maybe,” she says seriously, just to see the dumbfounded look it puts on his face.

“Yeah… we can, yeah… It’ll be fine. So, you wanna… my bed?”

“The traditional yet practical choice.”

He happily sighs out his, “Yeah,” and she wonders if he heard anything following her agreement to a theoretical second round. Probably not—he spoke staring at her boobs.

“What if I carried you?” Peter blurts as she’s about to stand.

“…I can walk.”

“Yeah, but… can I carry you?”

She watches him for a moment as he awaits her answer. She’s watched him so many times, but never while he was waiting for her, trying to find something to grasp in the silence, this guy who’s more than human and always flitting from one web to the next. MJ ends his freefall.

“Ok, Peter.”

As giddy with nerves as she was on their first date when he held her tight and wrenched her off her feet, she stands. He steps in close, taking her face softly between his hands, kissing her. She hops into his arms the second he lets go and laughs at Peter and herself when the action tips him back. He holds on though, pulling her thighs in snugly around his waist before catching her back to press her to his chest. MJ’s scared to kiss him as he walks them to his bedroom; arms wrapped behind his neck, she stares at him instead. They’re about to do this. He’s going to be inside her.

“You got it?” she checks once he’s sat her on the edge of the bed.

Peter plucks the condom from his pocket to show her. MJ nods in acknowledgement and he sets it on the nightstand. With a condom nearby—this assurance that they are responsible people and can therefore do whatever the fuck they like—she reaches for his hand and draws him in. Kissing, she scoots back and he crawls over her. She gasps when he moves his mouth enthusiastically to her neck and he jerks his head up with a self-satisfied expression.

“The sheets are cold,” she lies defensively. Peter just smiles and burrows his face back into the warm crook between her neck and shoulder.

“They’ll get warmer.”

MJ can’t believe it when she’s the one being stripped out of her pants first (her boyfriend is such a willing undresser). She feels vulnerable, between the sheets in only her underwear, but she’s determined enough to relocate Peter’s hand from her waist to her breast. He thanks her in a passionate mumble that raises hairs on the back of her neck as he darts in to kiss her firmly. Parting her thighs, she thanks him in return, for the kiss or the way he’s kneading her nipple between finger and thumb or something, relieved when he lowers his hips and she can feel his erection under his sweats. Fuck, a week ago, she was trying to convince herself that she’d be lucky and get Peter back next year. This is the greatest surprise.

Though she doubts she could knock the wind out of him, he huffs when she squeezes her thighs to his hips and unbalances him, rolling him over and landing on top.

“Wow, you wanna do it like this? I mean, yeah, awesome.”

Sitting astride him, MJ rolls her eyes.

“I just thought it’d be easier to get you out of your pants this way, since you seem like you’ve forgotten that you need to actually take them off.”

Peter shakes his head rapidly.

“I just didn’t want to rush you, like you said. Or freak you out or scare you,” he rambles.

This idiot.

“Why would I be scared? Are you concealing a weapon or something?”

“No,” he jokes with a goofy smile, pressing his hips upward, “I’m just happy to see you.”

“You so did not deserve those condoms.”

“Didn’t I?” Peter asks, the two of them working his sweatpants and boxers down. (She’s touching his thighs. His bare thighs. Jesus.)

“No. Huge mistake. You’re not mature enough for this. I’m going to tell your aunt.”

As long as MJ keeps talking, dropping onto her side and slipping her own underwear off is just a background thing that’s happening while she speaks. Her heart is hammering.

“Oh, are you?” he questions, running a warm, tentative hand down the curve of her naked hip.

“Mhmm. She’ll be really disappointed in you for, uh, wasting supplies.”

“Maybe I could make it up to you and you could forgive me.”

Peter’s fingers trace low over her belly, making her stomach flinch with the anticipation. He touches between her legs, the contact the subtlest flirtation. The look in his eyes says he doesn’t know what he’s doing either, but that he wants to do it together. Holding his stare, she rolls onto her back.

He proceeds when she widens the space between her thighs. His touch feels… fine, but not exciting, and MJ wonders if it’s because she’s watching him, possibly making him nervous. She closes her eyes and instinctually angles her head to press her forehead against Peter’s shoulder. Gradually, he strokes her with more assurance and she quietly mutters “yes” each time he does something that feels good. By the time he’s gotten her seriously wet and turned on, she’s gripping the sheet with one hand and his wrist with the other, urging him to go faster. Her body’s not satisfied but humming as Peter jolts recklessly across her to snatch the condom. He kisses her right as she’s opening her eyes at the disturbance.

“Yeah?” he asks, dick in hand.

She nods, breathing quickly and needing him to act before the sensations he’s stirred up dim.

“Yeah.”

It’s out of character, how slowly he moves next. He’s capable of care in abundance, of course, but patience? Caution? Restraint? None of these are words that would come to mind if someone asked her to describe her boyfriend. They cling to each other as he works his way deeper in incremental thrusts. Because he’s trembling, she holds him tight. She probably would regardless. Things almost stall, but then he gropes between them, locating her clit, and her clutch on him squeezes and releases, allowing him to suddenly slide all the way home.

“Fuck,” he says softly, head hunched down beside hers.

MJ rubs her hands over the quivering muscles of his back, certain the two of them are generating enough heat to melt the snow around the house and all the way up the road.

“I’m gonna come if I do anything,” Peter says in a desperate tone. “I can’t move.”

“You can move.”

“No. I… I wanna take care of you. MJ, please.”

Between them, she finds his hand and guides it in rubbing her clit. His body’s held taut above her and she turns her head to meet his searching eyes. Her neck arches involuntarily at her first unexpected moan and Peter clamps his eyes shut like it’s all too much. So she watches his tense, determined face while manipulating his fingers over her. When she’s close, coating his cock in her arousal many times over, MJ tells Peter to open his eyes. Then, she begins to rock her hips, letting him glide in and out. Their hands continue to stimulate her until she orgasms with a wet cry and pulls his fingers away. They hold hands hard and he thrusts with crazed strokes, coming with an understated choked noise.

He hasn’t quit shaking when he climbs off of her to deal with the condom.

“I don’t know,” Peter says, sliding back into bed and allowing her to weave her limbs around his. She smiles at how baffled he sounds.

“You’re ok.”

“This feels like shock, like I get after a bad beating.”

She sighs exasperatedly at this news. She might’ve suspected his secret identity for a while before he confirmed it, but she doesn’t know everything, isn’t in on all the missions and outcomes yet. When he gets home—after all this bullshit—she’ll demand to be kept in the loop.

“I guess you’re just overwhelmed.”

“That felt really fucking good,” Peter confesses in a low, stunned voice.

MJ starts to giggle and can’t stop. Tears stream down her face, into her hair, onto her boyfriend’s skin. He laughs too, but holds her greedily all the while. It reminds her how temporary this is.

Except, no. It’s not. No one can stop them from remembering this after she goes and he stays. No one can stop them from making plans, having hopes. Days are temporary, like snow, but feelings can last. How she feels about Peter definitely can. She’s made it this far and, on his end, so has he. On impulse, MJ kisses his forehead.

“I know what’ll help. Something to eat. We can see what else you have that can be cooked in the fireplace.”

“Frozen lasagna?” he proposes.

“Why not? Let’s try it.”

[afteriwake]

London, Oxford, Causton

And here is the fic I wrote for Holmestice! It’s a Sherlock/Inspector Lewis/Midsomer Murders crossover with some of the loyal DIs at a police conference. Enjoy!

London, Oxford, Causton - Every year, Sally gets to see two of her favorite coppers from other cities, and this year is no different.

READ @ AO3

It was that time of year again, when coppers all over the country gathered to learn new techniques, swap stories, and commemorate those lost to the job. Sally wasn’t a particular fan of the lessons to learn, but she was a fan of the company, especially the company from Midsomer County and Oxford.

And as she waited in her favorite pub, she was glad this year they were all meeting in London. New Scotland Yard wanted to show off, and admittedly, so did she. Last year the conference had been in Oxford and Hathaway had gotten to play host. Jones always commiserated that unless they were to hold the conference in Causton he’d never get to show them where he spent his days.

But she had plans for her two mates and her tonight. They were going to have a proper night out in London town. Drinks, then a meal at her favorite Thai place, then a nice film noir movie at the theater Greg had introduced her to when they’d had that bad case last year.

James Hathaway arrived first, his height easily making him stand out in the crowd. Not that he was taller than most blokes there, but he carried himself almost regally, which served the Oxford DI right, she supposed. He was an intellect and a good man, sometimes seeming too good for a copper’s work. He should really have been an academic, but if academia had taken him, she’d had never had a good friend in him.

“Sally,” he said, and she stretched up to kiss each of his cheeks in greeting. “You look a sight for sore eyes.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said with a cheeky grin, smoothing down the front of her black dress. It wasn’t one of those little black dresses, meant to titillate and stir up emotions, but it was nicer than what she generally wore on the job. The shoulder covering jacket accented the look, but it did nothing to keep her warm, just make her look as smashing as she could while still looking mildly professional.

“Not everywhere, I’ve found,” he said. She could see his fingers flex and she knew what he wanted. They all had their vices and Hathaway’s was high tar cigs. She smiled and nodded her way to the door, and he relaxed. As soon as they were outside and a few feet away from the entrance he dug out a crisp pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, getting a lighter next and lighting up. He knew better than to offer one to her, or one to Jones whenever he arrived. This was one vice not shared equally among them. Jones's was gambling, low stakes of course, and hers was messy, no good relationships.

Speaking of, Sally looked over and saw Ben Jones getting out of a cab. He paid the driver and then flashed her a smile as he caught sight of them. He was tall, too, but more solidly compact than Hathaway was. She had to admit she fancied them both a bit, but Jones was warmth and humor and liveliness while Hathaway was coolness and intellect and sly smiles like they were both in on a secret. Push come to shove Jones was more her type, but she never pushed things farther than friendship with either of them because she didn’t want to risk things. Maybe it made her a coward, but she kept her blokes and for that, she was happy.

“Sally!” Jones said, opening up his arms for a hug. Oh, she loved being hugged by him. He always smelled so nice, like he was trying to impress, but there was also the scent of his shampoo and his aftershave and she had to admit, it was a comfort. She wrapped her arms around him and inhaled, happy to find over the last year some things hadn’t changed. He held on a bit longer than normal but when he let go he clapped Hathaway on the shoulder and Hathaway nodded back.

“I see you couldn’t wait,” Jones said, stuffing his hands in his jacket pocket and then leaning forward to put his weight on his toes.

“I always want a smoke before I have a drink. At least in Oxford, there are still places where I can sit outside and drink.”

“One of the downsides of London,” Sally said. “Smoking seems to have gone out of fashion, even at businesses with outdoor drinking. But we’ll let James have his cig and then we’ll have a pint or two before Thai food.”

“Thai...sounds good to me,” Jones said. “Causton could use half as many restaurants as London’s got.”

“But then I wouldn’t get to show you my favorites,” Sally said with a mock pout, and Hathaway’s grin and Jones’s chuckle washed it away almost as quickly as it settled on her face. “And besides, don’t we have things to talk late into the night about?”

“It’s a good thing this is a four-day long convention,” Hathaway said as he took another drag of his cigarette.

“Well, it might be my last,” Jones said. “At least, coming from Causton.”

“Oh?” Sally asked, genuinely surprised at the news, and slightly dismayed as well. She didn’t want to lose her yearly time with her boys. She didn’t want things to change. “What’s happened?”

“Well, you know how Tom left, and his cousin took over? John Barnaby recommended me for a position as a DI outside of Causton CID. I might have a chance.”

“Oh, that's good,” she said. “Where at?”

She swore there was a twinkle in his eye when he spoke. “Brighton. You know, where next year’s conference is supposed to be held.”

“Congratulations, you bastard,” Hathaway said with a much warmer grin, clapping Jones on the shoulder. “Next year, drinks and dinner are on you.”

“So we’ll still get to see you?” Sally asked.

“Like I would abandon the two of you to each other. I make this trio what it is, after all.” Sally smacked his arm but she was pleased. Promotions and transfers apparently wouldn’t pull the three of them asunder, it seemed. That was good. “Whenever you have enough nicotine in your system, James, then we can get a pint to celebrate. I’ll even make it my treat if dinner is still on Sally.”

“You’re on,” Hathaway said, dropping his cigarette on the ground and stubbing it out, then picking up the butt and slipping it into his cigarette pack. Sally knew they couldn’t be too careful with things like that; she remembered people being caught with a fingerprint of a cigarette butt in the wrong place. Nailing a cop to some crime would be a coup for some of the enemies they might have in the woodwork. She knew that by working with Greg that meant working with Sherlock, and while they were civil now, Sherlock had enemies she could only wonder about. Her association with him didn’t put her at risk as much as Greg’s did, she hoped, but she couldn’t be sure.

But melancholy thoughts were washed from her mind when Jones offered her an arm and Hathaway one as well, and she linked an arm with each of them as they headed back to the pub. Thoughts of the future could keep for the time being. For now? It was time for them to take London and give it a whirl.

[onthevirgeofdestruction]

Plea for My New Self

Sanders sides Vampire College AU - it’s gay - it’s full of fun fluffy tropes - a bit o’ hurt/comfort - mostly fluff

Words: 4,648  Warnings: Food, Anxiety Characters: Virgil, Roman, Patton, (Logan & Deceit mentioned) Ships: Moxiety, Prinxiety Eventual LAMPD/CALMD Universe: Plea for my New Self Genre: Fluff

Chapter 25: The Star

Chapter 1 for New Readers - ffn mirror

   Virgil wished he could replace his whole IT class with laying side by side with Logan on their laptops and learning to code. Learning is three times as fun when it’s paired with kissing your boyfriend, and it’s already pretty damn fun. Logan really lights up when he’s learning and Virgil loved watching him smile while they went over some extracurricular learning. The class was even less dreadful afterwords. Or perhaps Virgil was just walking on clouds still from Logan’s very gentle kisses. Virgil plodded back to his dorm afterward to catch up on his new online class homework for the week so he could get it out of the way.

   Roman must have left to practice his pieces again since he wasn’t in the dorm when Virgil got back. After being will all three of them at lunch, it was a little lonely in the dorm by himself. Virgil didn’t mind the time to focus on his schoolwork, but he must have gotten used to working quietly with Roman across the room already. Either that or there was just a little bond separation melancholy going on. Virgil didn’t fully know how all this bullshit worked with Broods. He hadn’t made one since D, and Virgil didn’t remember much before they met. He knew someone who might though, someone he promised he’d text. Virgil pulled out his phone and texted Emile.

   ‘Hey, you busy? This is V. Ro gave me your number,’ Virgil sent.

   ‘Not at the moment. I have an appointment in 20 minutes. Roman mentioned he’d been bothering you to text me. Did you want to set up an appointment?’ Emile sent back. Virgil groaned in objection. This was about how he thought it would go.

   ‘No. I’m not interested in opening up that can of worms. Thomas said you could help with disambiguation and I wanted to know if there were any Brood facts I didn’t know. Like, for instance, if I just miss my friends or if there’s some bond bullshit happening right now.’ Virgil sent back.

   ‘There’s a little of separation anxiety with the bond, yes. (Perhaps also an instinct to protect being on high alert.) The bond isn’t bullhonkey, V, it’s a wonderful thing to share with others.’ Emile responded.

   ‘Tell that to the last time Deceit and I broke up.’ Virgil sent back bitterly.

   ‘I wouldn’t know what happened there, friendo. you’d have to tell me.’ Emile sent.

   ‘Let. Sleeping. Dogs. Lie. Emile.’ Virgil texted with clapping emojis. ‘What about emotional disambiguation?’

   ‘As Remington puts it, I’d love it if you spilled the tea. But I can’t force you to talk about anything you don’t want to.’ Emile sent. Remington? Wow, that’s an older one. Maybe he was like Virgil and kept his name for the most part. ‘The best tip I can give you, without you attending a couples session with your friends, would be that they should do it the same as you.’

   ‘The same? I thought Brood couldn’t shield.’ Virgil texted curiously.

   ‘Not as thoroughly as you or your Blood, but there’s power along the bond. Especially if they have fresh venom. They wouldn’t be protected from psychic or emotional attacks like you, but they could go about their day mostly unaware of you, say, harboring centuries of guilt.’ Emile sent back. That bitch.

   ‘Exactly how much did Roman tell you?’ Virgil texted, feeling annoyed.

   ‘Just because Roman isn’t a client doesn’t mean I won’t keep our vent sessions private.’ Emile texted back. Virgil groaned and smacked his head against his desk.

   ‘great, fantastic, magical,,,’ Virgil sent, tapping his foot furiously and scowling. 

   ‘Do you often use sarcasm to cope with stressful situations?’ Emile replied.

   ‘I’m rethinking that double date with Remy now’ Virgil responded.

   ‘All right, I’ll drop it. Remy is very excited to punch you.’ Emile texted back.

   ‘Same. Do you have any hints for Remy’s emoji code? I’m this close to cracking it.’ Virgil sent back, changing the subject.

   ‘The dancing girl is a mood but also a modifier.’ Emile texted.

   ‘I already knew that, Emmy. tell me about the wrench.’ Virgil sent with an eye roll emoji.

   ‘It means a problem or some kind of labor, usually.’ Emile replied.

   ‘Damn, more metaphors? Maybe I’m not that close to cracking it.’ Virgil responded.

   ‘Good luck, V.’ Emile sent with a smiling emoji and a waving emoji.

   Well, that was a thing that happened. Virgil wasn’t making an appointment with Emile unless Pat and Ro really struggled with shielding. Virgil got the distinct feeling that Emile was like a dog with a bone. And Virgil just really didn’t want to talk about it. He wasn’t a sad business recluse anymore, and that was plenty of progress for now.

   It would still be light out for a few hours, but Virgil could invite Patton over early. He wasn’t sure if they were available right away, but if they wanted to draw together tonight, they probably wanted to hang out, anyway. Virgil shot Patton a text and turned back to his computer to read some fiction.

   Virgil only read a chapter when Patton sent a few celebration emojis and some arrows pointing up. They came knocking on Virgil’s door a few minutes later, and it sounded a little like they were dancing in the hall behind the door. Virgil got up from the computer desk to let Patton in, feeling very amused and endeared.

   “Virge!” Patton chirped and leaped into hug Virgil in a manner that could only be described as aggressive friendship. Virgil was surprised by the sudden hug attack and backed out of the doorway with Patton still clinging tight. “I missed you so much!” Patton nestled into Virgil’s chest.

   “I missed you too, Pat. Can I close the door?” Virgil asked, bewildered and bemused by Patton's clinginess. It had been hours, not days.

   “Sure,” Patton tittered, not letting Virgil go. Virgil rolled his eyes and used one arm to lift Patton and turned to close the door. “To the bed!” Patton cheered. Virgil chuckled and picked up Patton and carefully maneuvered the both of them into Virgil’s loft. And it was a feat of angling and gravity alteration since Patton refused to let go. Patton wasn’t afraid to use their strength for aggressive friendship.

   “You want to learn how to use the telepathy and stuff or do something else until the sun sets?” Virgil asked, wrapping his arms around Patton, who finally let go slightly to readjust themselves to sit more comfortably on the loft.

   “Teach me the brain magic!” Patton cheered.

   “I’m glad you’re enthusiastic, but it’s better at first if you’re calm,” Virgil said with a little chuckle. Patton seemed to try to settle down by making an impassive face, but their cheeks puffed up a little with the effort and it made Virgil break out laughing.

   “Virge,” Patton whined and stuck out their lower lip.

   “Sorry, sorry,” Virgil said, still chuckling. Virgil took a deep breath and focused.

   “How do you do that?” Patton asked curiously.

   “Ages of practice, so I tortured my boyfriend less. Take a deep breath, hold it, and let it out slow and try not to focus on a specific emotion,” Virgil supplied. Patton took a few tries but did settle down.

   “I did it!” Patton said excitedly. “Whoops,” Virgil broke out laughing again.

   “You’re just a bundle of emotions in a meat suit, huh,” Virgil said.

   “Gross, Virge,” Patton grimaced and stuck out their tongue. Virgil and Patton both took a breath together and settled back down.

   “Alright, this stuff is all about projection. I just want you to start by thinking about a shape and get it firmly in your head,” Virgil instructed.

   “Okay,” Patton said with determination, squeezing their eyes shut.

   “Don’t try so hard, or you’ll hurt yourself, hon,” Virgil warned. Patton’s face loosened.

   “Now what?” Patton asked.

   “You’ve got it solidly? I want you to mentally push it at me. Visualize it flying to me if it helps. Hit me in the head with your shape,” Virgil said. Patton’s mouth shifted around like they were mulling something over. “It’s okay if it takes a while. Once you do it the first time, It’ll open the path and be so much easier after that,” Patton stiffed and loosened, almost going through a face journey in Virgil’s arms. “Keep breathing normally, Pat,” Virgil chided when Patton started breathing shallowly.

   “This hurts my head,” Patton groaned, opening their eyes and pouting at Virgil.

   “Then you are trying too hard. Just picture yourself throwing something at me and it hitting me in the head or something. It doesn’t have to be complex, it just has to connect,” Virgil said softly.

   “I don’t want to imagine that!” Patton whined and chewed on their lip.

   “It can be a pillow or shooting a water gun or something. I just need you to connect with me at a distance,” Virgil explained consolingly, ruffling their hair a bit.

   “Distances suck,” Patton pouted again, pushing out their bottom lip and wobbling it dramatically.

“You’re literally in my arms, Patton, the distance is mental. You just need to feel yourself, your object and me, and make me and the object connect. It’s much easier than the other methods,” Virgil offered, feeling a little exasperated but keeping even. He knew it was hard at first, but Patton was being a little melodramatic about it.

   “What’s the other methods?” Patton asked curiously, dropping the ridiculous pout for curiosity.

   “Astral projecting or me forcefully opening it, which would hurt like hell,” Virgil said. “I can’t teach you how to project, and I’m not willing to force it open. Hit me in the head with a snowball or something. A ball of kisses. A tiny dragon. It doesn’t matter as long as you feel the shape firmly in your head to connect yourself to it,”

   ‘Unicorns!’ Patton thought loudly.

   ‘Pat, I flubbed my lines! Why are you shouting about unicorns?’ Roman thought back loudly.

   “I think you pushed too hard, Pat. If you project that hard Deceit and Roman can hear you too,” Virgil said with a chuckle. “You opened the connection though. All you have to do now is just try to project the thought you’re focusing on a little less,”

   ‘Sorry, I’m just teaching them, and they were very enthusiastic as usual,’ Virgil thought to Roman.

   ‘Yeesh, it scared the shit out of me,’ Roman thought back.

   ‘Daffodils?’ Patton thought at Virgil, much quieter this time.

   ‘Are lovely flowers,’ Virgil thought at Patton. Patton screeched in excitement and wriggled excitedly in Virgil’s arms. ‘I’m not sure if he heard you, but why don’t you apologize to D for the sudden thought of unicorns?’ Patton laughed and looked up and to the side. A classic thinking face. It was adorable.

   “No response,” Patton said. Virgil hugged them close.

   “He’s probably just out of range. You’ll have to text him first for him to reach out to you,” Virgil said.

   “How come I didn’t have to connect with Roman or D for them to hear me?” Patton asked.

   “It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s basically because I’m the conduit. If I was somehow incapacitated, it’d stop working. You’re thinking through me to him. I just won’t hear unless you want me to,” Virgil explained and stroked Patton’s hair.

   “Wow,” Patton’s eyes sparkled. “Wait! Hair!” Patton shouted and raised up an arm suddenly, smacking Virgil in the face. Patton looked concerned and Virgil rolled his eyes, shaking his head with a half-smirk.

   “What about hair, Patton?” Virgil asked testily.

   “You made Roman’s red, right? I want to make mine pastel rainbow! It’d be too hard to do myself and my hair would get fried,” Patton supplied.

   “I think I would need a reference picture,” Virgil said, a little confused. “You know it feels wrong, right?”

   “I know, and it’s a small price to pay for cool hair,” Patton said firmly, with a little nod. They reached into their pocket and pulled out their phone. “Like this,” They said, showing a photo to Virgil on their phone. It was dyed vertically across the hair, a side-swept style that was a few inches longer than Patton’s short loose curls.

   “Did you eat enough for me to grow your hair? Deceit says it makes him ravenous,” Virgil asked, raising his eyebrow.

   “You can grow my hair!?” Patton shouted with wide eyes. Virgil flinched back at the volume and Patton looked apologetic.

   “Maybe?” Virgil supplied, shrugging. “If I picture that specifically, it might make your hair grow and I don’t want to take the chance of you passing out,”

   “Let me eat some pizza!” Patton said excitedly, sitting up and climbing down the ladder. They pulled the leftovers from lunch out of Roman’s fridge with a little shimmy. Virgil chuckled at Patton looking eager as they extracted a piece from the box. “Even if it doesn’t grow, I got more pizza, so it’s a win-win,” Patton smiled slyly.

   “I can’t argue with that logic,” Virgil chuckled and sat back on his loft, watching Patton eat cold pizza a little faster than was probably safe. “Pat, it would be the worst turning story in history if I had to Blood you because you choked to death on pizza,” Virgil chided. Patton slowed down and turned to Virgil, looking a little pale. “Just slow down,” Virgil rolled his eyes and motioned with his hand. Patton nodded and ate at a more reasonable pace.

   Patton pulled out a sports drink from Roman’s fridge while putting away the rest of the pizza leftovers. They climbed onto the bunk and sat expectantly in Virgil’s lap with a bright expectant grin. Virgil sighed and placed his hand on Patton’s head, raking his fingers through Patton’s hair, trying to replicate the photo. Patton writhed uncomfortably in his arms and made a very sickened face.

   ‘Holy shit, what the fuck is that?’ Roman thought at Virgil as the last threads separated from his fingers.

   ‘Um, sorry, Pat wanted their hair dyed. I didn’t realize you’d be able to feel it,’ Virgil apologized.

   ‘Ugh, I feel like I got digested by an eel or something. Never do that without warning me again,’ Roman thought at him, rather uncharitably.

   ‘Fair. Sorry again,’ Virgil thought sheepishly back at him.

   “Okay, so Roman felt that so I think it’s only fair to not do it again today, so I hope you like it. But it grew your hair,” Virgil said, still feeling sheepish.

   “Ugh, that really is awful,” Patton groaned. “My hair grew, though?” Patton asked hopefully and pulled out their phone. They checked their hair in the selfie camera and squealed in delight, though sounding a little tired. They opened the sports drink and chugged half of it after a second of admiring their hair. Then opened back up the camera and flipped the hair around some more, playing with the strands.

   “Glad you like it,” Virgil said jovially. “Do you want to work on shielding so we can maybe disturb Roman’s rehearsal less?”

   “Okay. Roman said it was something about separating the emotions, though, and it all feels muddled to me,” Patton said, sounding less than optimistic. Virgil dropped his shield, and Patton’s face settled into a soft smile.

   “We can work on that. Roman’s feeling determined. So you can just look up something that makes you sad. I’ll do something that makes me happy. Anything you feel other than sad is me or Roman. And you just need to know what isn’t you instead of knowing who's feeling what,” Virgil offered.

   “Why can’t I look up happy things?” Patton pouted.

   “Because happy and determined are like warm colors, so you need to be on the cool colors spectrum of the rainbow. You can do melancholy or scared if you like. It’s easier to separate if it’s opposite enough,” Virgil explained. “We don’t have to do this now,”

   “No, I feel bad about bothering Roman twice…” Patton grumbled and trailed off.

   “That’s the spirit! Focus on that feeling. I’ll just be proud of you,” Virgil said with a smile. Patton was confused for a moment, but their face returned to dower and they raised their hand to their chest and seemed to consider something with their eyes closed. It was a little frustrating there was no way to guide Patton further without the basics. Virgil tried to keep his concern at bay and focus on being cheery while Patton carefully parsed out what feeling meant what. Virgil had to switch from proud to hopeful, his anxiety opposing him too much in his head.

   “I think something changed that wasn’t me?” Patton said, sounding confused.

   “That was me. That’s good. Are you getting it?” Virgil asked, his hopefulness being bolstered.

   “I think so,” Patton mumbled.

   “Can you visualize your emotional energy as separate from the others?” Virgil guided them. Patton nodded and scrunched up their face again.

   “Visualize a shield around yourself and your energy and force it like you forced out a unicorn,” Virgil said, trying to guide them as Emile recommended. And then Virgil was rammed into the wall by an invisible force. He exhaled in surprise and looked around quickly for a moment.

   “Holy shit, Pat,” Virgil mumbled, pressed against the wall while Patton was balled up and concentrating.

   “Hey, don’t cuss, Mister- Why’d you stop holding me?” Patton opened their eyes and looked in confusion at Virgil. “Why are you sitting weird like that?”

   “I think you’ve got a gift,” Virgil said, in awe, slacking as the force receded back into Patton. The confusion slowly morphed in to shock on their face.

   “What?!” Patton cried in excitement after they realized what Virgil meant. “What is it? What did I do?”

   “You’ve got a shield. Like a literal one. You projected like a force field out of you,” Virgil said, hugging Patton gently and rocking slightly with excitement.

   “I thought you had to give me venom or whatever for that?” Patton said, bouncing excitedly in Virgil’s arms.

   “Well, you still have fresh venom in you and you’re extremely blessed, I suppose. That was faster than Deceit even got his gift,” Virgil offered, not entirely sure himself of how it happened.

   “Well shoot, now how am I supposed to block off my emotions?” Patton asked, suddenly sobered.

   “Um. This might have been another one of those ‘you’re thinking too hard’ things. And you need to do it passively instead of actively, maybe?” Virgil offered, still feeling thrown for a loop about the whole shield thing. He really only knew how to use his gift. He’s heard of shield gifts before, but never how it’s different to put up a mental shield instead of a physical one.

   “Well, now all I feel is excitement,” Patton said, sounding pretty cheery despite the disappointment.

   “I can try to be sad when Roman finds out and assuredly gets jealous,” Virgil offered facetiously.

   “Oh, no! He’s gonna be so upset!” Patton frowned. Then Patton must have realized the three moods were separate again and tried another time. Virgil braced himself for hitting the wall again, but it didn’t come. Which is great, since Virgil really didn’t want to have to explain to the college why there was a person-sized hole in his wall. Patton exhaled and looked around. Virgil didn’t feel Patton at all anymore. It was like they were completely disconnected.

   “Um, I think you have a mental shield better than mine, Pat, because I can’t even find a strand of you,” Virgil said, a little baffled. Patton bounced around again, cheering and whooping. Even choking a little and coughing they got so excited. “Pat, breathe!” Virgil said, holding them upright.

   “I did it so fast!” Patton said after catching their breath.

   “I guess you have a skill with shielding. Maybe that’s why you got a gift for it?” Virgil supposed.

   “Nuh-uh, it’s because I want to protect my friends. I’m sure of it,” Patton said, beaming.

   “Well, it’s not like I could ask Hecate, so I’ll defer to your judgment,” Virgil shrugged and leaned back against the wall with Patton in his arms.

   “You sounded like Logan for a moment,” Patton giggled.

   “So how does shielding yourself protect your friends?” Virgil asked curiously, interested in Patton’s reasoning. “And don’t say human shield or I will go berserk,” Virgil added angrily.

   “Maybe if I can project it through the bond thing? I’d have to figure out the difference between you and Ro and you’re both just so extra,” Patton stuttered.

   “Patton, there’s no way you’re not at least as extra as me,” Virgil rolled his eyes.

   “I didn’t say I wasn’t!” Patton laughed. Virgil could feel them bubble back up in his chest again. Patton sighed wearily. They must not be able to hold the shield long.

   “Glass houses, Patton,” Virgil warned playfully, pulling Patton up into a tighter embrace and rubbing his cheek against the top of their head.

   ‘You two are an emotional roller-coaster and I give up trying to rehearse anymore!’ Roman thought loudly. ‘See you in a few minutes,’ He added mentally in frustration.

   “Uh… not it,” Virgil said, the concern heavy in his voice.

   “I don’t want to break his heart!” Patton whined.

   “I want to break it just as much as you!” Virgil objected.

   “You’re the alpha-thing!” Patton stated.

   “Come on, we just started dating, I won’t be able to get the words out,” Virgil groaned. “I’m already scared enough he’ll change his mind!”

   “I’m not lying to him,” Patton pouted.

   “Is a lie of omission really that bad?” Virgil pleaded.

   “Lying is wrong!” Patton crossed their arms and shook their head.

   “Well, I think that means you’re voting to tell him the truth,” Virgil supplied. Patton made a shocked scoff and looked away. Patton never pulled out of his arms, though.

   “Fine, but you’re gonna hold him and put out calming vibes while I do it,” Patton said grumpily.

   “I will have to do a lot more than put out calming vibes,” Virgil rolled his eyes.

   “You’ll make out with him if you have to!” Patton said angrily.

   “That’s kind of… manipulative, isn’t it? More than just helping him to keep calm?” Virgil asked, feeling kind of weird about the suggestion.

   “You’re right, I’m sorry,” Patton mumbled. “I just don’t want him to hate me,”

   “I don’t think he’ll hate you, Pat,” Virgil offered in solace. “We’ll find out soon, though, I can feel him nearby,” Virgil added, his voice heavy with concern. Patton stiffened and swallowed. Roman came through the door a few tense minutes later.

   “Okay, now you two are feeling all weird and conflicted, what’s the with emotional madness and how do I stop it?” Roman asked, walking over to his desk and pulling the camera out of his bag. He hooked it up to his laptop and looked over to them when neither answered. “Hello?” Roman asked, waving his hand at them.

   “We’re having unshielded cuddles time if you want to join us, pal,” Patton offered hopefully.

   “You’re both acting weird,” Roman said, raising his eyebrow, walking over to climb up with them.

   “We’re both a little worried about your reaction,” Virgil supplied. Roman climbed up and Patton scooted out of Virgil’s lap to let Roman take their place.

   “I can’t react until you tell me whatever the big deal is,” Roman rolled his eyes, and Virgil wrapped his arms around Roman. Patton leaned up against them both nervously and smiled weakly to Roman. Roman just raised his eyebrow at them.

   “I’ve got a shield,” Patton said quietly.

   “Like Virgil’s?” Roman asked for clarification.

   “No, it’s my own,” Patton explained.

   “I thought humans couldn’t shield like vampires can,” Roman said.

   “Emile says you can, though it’s not exactly the same,” Virgil supplied. “But Patton’s talking about something different,”

   “What? But that would- I mean… Oh,” Roman sounded confused and upset.

   “I’m so sorry, kiddo,” Patton said remorsefully. “Do you need me to leave?” Patton asked mournfully.

   “No. No! I- It’s fine, Pat. It’s not like you got any say in it. I’m not mad at you,” Roman said, feeling stiff in Virgil’s arms. Patton exhaled in relief and Virgil continued to stare at Roman in his arms. “I’m not mad at you either, you drama queen,” Roman said, sounding a little sour but not angry. “Have you two been pulling a Virgil and freaking out over my reaction this whole time?” Roman relaxed in Virgil’s arms and even smiled.

   “Hey,” Virgil objected. But it was fair. “Maybe,” Virgil admitted quietly.

   “You two are idiots, I’m not going to hate you because I’m jealous. What kind of man do you take me for?” Roman explained, sounding a little affronted.

   “I guess I did pull a Virgil,” Patton mumbled.

   “Hey,” Virgil objected again. “I don’t like my name being used as an adjective,” Roman reached up and ruffled Virgil’s hair.

   “Then stop acting like one. I love the new hair, Pat,” Roman said and ran his fingers through Patton’s new colorful locks. “Is it longer?”

   “Yes, Virge can grow hair, too. It takes a lot out of you, though, oof,” Patton said, sounding more upbeat than before.

   “Does that mean you can grow out your hair if you want to wear it longer?” Roman asked.

   “Yeah, I used to wear it very long in the past. I've mostly kept it shorter this century, though. My hair doesn’t grow otherwise,” Virgil answered, still feeling a little unnerved, and his voice was somewhat shaken sounding still. Roman gave Virgil a lopsided smile and sat up to kiss Virgil on the lips.

   “Quit worrying about it. Pat’s lucky, but I’ll have my time to shine,” Roman said gently. Patton’s heart jumped next to Virgil.

   “Thanks. You know I can’t help it,” Virgil mumbled.

   “If I could help it we’d all have cool powers and you wouldn’t be a sad-sack anymore,” Roman said playfully. Virgil pouted a little.

   “Virge isn’t a sad-sack,” Patton pouted with Virgil.

   “You’re right, Virge is a sad-sedan. This bad boy can fit so many centuries of sorrow,” Roman said, patting Virgil on the head.

   “Oh, my Hecate. You did not,” Virgil laughed boisterously.

   “If my darling must speak the language of memes, then it is a language I must learn,” Roman said cheerfully. “Whatever an immortal vampire is doing being a meme lord, I will never understand,”

   “He was probably bored and lonely, like every other meme lord,” Patton said with a little smirk.

   “Darling, I think you just got roasted by Patton of all people,” Roman said and kissed Virgil’s cheek. Virgil groaned and flushed slightly.

   “I’ve been hiding for centuries, you’d think I’d be less transparent by now,” Virgil lamented. Patton patted Virgil’s shoulder affectionately. “What do you say I order some real nutrients for you two and then we can head out to sketch that sculpture when the sun’s set?”

   “We have plenty of pizza,” Patton objected.

   “And you grew 2 inches of hair and are surely replete of essential vitamins that cheese pizza most certainly does not have,” Virgil reminded them.

   “Oh, I heard about this place that has killer bhudda bowls with seared salmon, let’s get that. It’s supposed to be, like, enough nutrition for the entire day,” Roman suggested. “There’s a guy in the practice hall who orders that before locking himself in a room until they kick him out. He says they’re delicious, and he doesn’t feel the need to eat for hours after,” Roman said with piqued interest. Patton sighed and nodded.

   “That does sound nutritious,” Patton conceded. Virgil smirked and pulled out his phone to go order them.

taglist: @elizabutgayer​ 

[skeletonscribbles]

Wishes - Finale

it is....finished. thank you all for the love you’ve shown this little story. I love these Losers so much and I will miss the hell out of this AU, but...this is where I leave them, so, without further ado:

Title: “The Second Star To The Right” (Richie)

Warnings: I personally am sad because it’s over but otherwise I don’t think anything except Bad Star Wars Jokes

Rating: G

Read on Ao3

Tag List:  @roobarrtrashmouth @jem-carstairs-is-perfection@tozier-club @aizeninlefox @stanheartsbill@imrichie @softeds@pretzelstoday @melancholypurple@wheezygreens@ayyyymichele @loser-marsh Special Shoutout to Michele ( @ayyyymichele) for all the wonderful art she’s produced for this AU. she’s incredible and I am so fucking grateful <3

RICHIE TOZIER ATTRACTIONS CAST - JUNGLE CRUISE soon to be NOT EMPLOYED BY THE MOUSE but for the meantime, he’s in ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA - DISNEYLAND PARK JULY 20th 8 P.M.

“I have something to say.”

If any one of the five people trudging towards Tomorrowland that weren’t Eddie had spoken up, Richie would have kept on walking. Total cold shoulder, doneski. He was tired of hashing shit out with his friends in public places, and they’d all promised to be cool at Disneyland. They’d kept that promise so far. There was no reason to ruin everything with only two park hours left in the whole fucking trip.

But. It was Eddie, so he did what needed to be done.

He stopped in the dead center of the walkway, and let Stan, Bev, and Bill crash into him like demented human dominoes.

“Richard,” Stan said into his back. Richie hadn’t turned around to assess the damage - he couldn’t, given the fact that Stan’s face was firmly planted between his shoulder blades - but the violent whispered curses and smack of hands against pavement coming from behind him suggested that Bev and Bill had truly been knocked down and were getting back up again, Chumbawumba style.

“In my defense--” Richie began, but he knew before he even started the sentence that it was fruitless. There was a 100% chance that Stan was going to shove him towards the nearest trashcan (and there was always a nearest trashcan - good ol’ Walt with his ‘trashcans every 10 feet’ rule).

His only real mistake was trying to catch his fall with his hands rather than just crashing into the aluminum menace forthright. Putting his arms out in front of him meant that he pushed open the swinging trash cover just enough to be elbow-deep in someone’s discarded Dole Whip.

“Well,” Richie said, extracting his hands and assessing the damage. “At least we weren’t in Toontown. Dunno what I would have all over my hands if we were.”

“Yeah, at least coming out of Adventureland you know that if it’s yellow-orange, it’s Dole Whip,” Ben agreed. Bev, who was still glowering at Richie, smacked Ben on the arm as if to chastise him for even speaking to Richie, and Ben was forced to shrug apologetically.

“Oh, you idiot. You deserved that.” Richie heard Eddie’s disgruntled mumbling before he saw him, but even without the visual, Richie knew exactly what his boyfriend was doing: rushing towards Richie with Kleenex and maybe a wet wipe in his outstretched hands. Richie turned a little bit to look at Eddie’s frenzied fumbling, smiled softly at the sight, and decided that it probably wasn’t the right moment to tell him that he hadn’t zipped his fanny pack back up all the way. There’d be a funnier time to break that news - like right before they were strapped in at Space Mountain, for example.

Richie took the Kleenex and looked back at the rest of their friends. Bill was examining his hands - it looked like he’d taken the brunt of the fall, as further evidenced by the expression on Mike’s face as he looked conflictedly between Bill’s stinging red palms and Richie’s face. Stan was over leaning on the nearest lamppost, a satisfied smirk on his face, and Ben and Bev were right behind Eddie, trying and failing not to giggle to themselves over Eddie’s nursing tendencies.

Even with everything that had just gone down, the energy in the air felt really chill. The seven of them were zen with one another in a way that they hadn’t been since the previous fall, and Richie was totally into it.

He turned his eyes back down towards Eddie, who was muttering to himself as he meticulously sanitized and wiped down every inch of Richie’s hands, and allowed himself to feel a little bit surprised.

It was kind of a fucking miracle that their little orientation group of sorts had made it through the year.

More than that - it was definitely a fucking miracle that Mike was crossing over to Stan the way that he was, that their mock-exasperated nudges were still precursors to enclasped hands. It was a gigantic fucking miracle that Eddie was getting rid of the Kleenex, now, and attaching himself to Richie’s side like a sloth - a gigantic fucking miracle that Richie had to re-wrap his mind around every damn day.

Ben and Bev were...less of a miracle, but that was heterosexuals for you. Richie didn’t begrudge them their stability - in fact, he was pretty frigging impressed by it, especially given the shit Bev had gone through. (As the only two occasional smokers in the group and often the only two who had any taste in anything at all, they’d decided to suck it up and go all in on their individual friendship...and fuck, had that been a good decision. It was enough to make him almost regret heckling her at costuming before they’d really known each other, now. Almost.)

And then the biggest miracle of all was Bill fucking Denbrough, who had now crossed to lean against the offending trash can. Richie was no expert on maturity, but even he could tell that Bill was a different kind of dude now than he was six months ago (never mind the kid he’d been when he and Richie had first met). 25 years old, and Bill was finally getting somewhere.

And Richie...Richie was too. It was different, but also kind of the same, so he and Bill had a neat little solidarity that neither of them really understood going on. It was pretty fucking great.

“Eddie, did you want to say something?” Bill asked, steadfastly ignoring his phone buzzing in his pocket in favor of paying attention to his friends. Richie made eye contact with Stan upon noticing Bill’s lack of attachment to his device, because he knew Stan would notice too, and they shared an impressed eyebrow waggle before turning towards Eddie.

“Yes.” Richie couldn’t see Eddie’s face in the position that they were in, just the top of his head, but he could feel Eddie nodding against his arm. “And it’s important.”

“You’re leaving Richie for me,” Mike guessed, sliding his hand out from where it had been intertwined with Stan’s and planting it on his hip jauntily. Richie mirrored him with his own hand, bopping his hip a little to distract everyone from the fact that he really, really hated this joke.

Not that they didn’t know, anyway. Not that he hadn’t made it obvious every damn time that he was sensitive or insecure or whatever the fuck about this particular thing. But - what kind of funnyman was he if he couldn’t take a joke, right? Even if it was the same damn joke about one of Richie’s deepest fears made for a month straight .

But - there was still something different in the air tonight, and Richie could tell that Stan was in touch with it. He was less drawn back than usual; more comfortable in his own skin - if Richie was going to do an impression of the Stan in front of him in that very instant, he’d slump his shoulders a little bit instead of drawing them up to his ears like he usually did.

It was probably for that reason that Stan said “Say it, Eddie,” instead of his usual “No, you’re leaving Richie for ME,” and Richie let out a relieved guffaw.

“Hit it, Fer-gie,” he drawled, keeping Stan’s ‘say it, Eddie’ cadence, and Stan flipped him off with a sweet, sappy grin.

Eddie noticed absolutely none of the weirdness in the previous exchange, which Richie found to be equal parts adorable and concerning. He just plowed on ahead.

“I want to remind everyone that Bev and I have little legs,” Eddie said, taking a moment to glare at every single one of them individually, “and that we have been walking for four days, and when you have to jog to keep up--”

“Good point!” Bev chimed in. “You’re giants and monsters, all of you.”

“So,” Bill said, looking between Eddie and Bev in an attempt to figure out what was being asked of him. “You’re...tired?”

“And also I would like some ice cream,” Eddie finished, and immediately turned on Richie to give puppy-dog eyes.

God, the fucking puppy-dog eyes. He really needed to get better at resisting those, or he’d be at Eddie’s beck and call for the rest of his miserable--

...well, no. It wouldn’t be miserable if it were with Eddie - not by a long shot.

“I’ll buy you one,” Richie said resolutely, and then absolutely couldn’t help but lean down and kiss his smiling mouth.

(He still couldn’t really believe he got to do that whenever he wanted, when all was said and done. He wasn’t about to waste an opportunity.)

“We can afford to slow down, definitely.” Ben was smiling that soft, easy, reassuring Ben smile, and Richie kind of loved him for it. He was shutting down the ‘pack as much as you can into the last two hours’ counterargument before it had even begun. “Maybe we just do Star Tours and then head to the hub for the fireworks? If we get there early we’ll probably be closer to the castle.”

“Good deal,” Richie agreed, grinning at the thought of riding Star Tours again. He’d been making up new little incorrect facts about Star Wars throughout the trip and feeding them to Eddie, and he was hoping that by the time they finished their vacation, Eddie would have total confidence in a version of Star Wars that absolutely did not exist. He was sure that particular prank would pay off solidly someday. “Wanna walk?”

“Ice cream cart first,” Eddie insisted, grabbing Richie’s hand and leading him out towards Main Street. “I wanna bite Mickey’s ice cream ears off.”

“Bizarre and vaguely sexual of you, Eddie,” Stan commented, mirroring Eddie by taking Mike’s hand and pulling. “We’re in.”

“Same,” chorused Bev, sneaking up to push her way in the middle of Richie and Eddie. They allowed her into their sphere with matching smiles, slinging their arms over and around her. “Boys? You ready?”

Ben and Bill looked quickly at one another, and then back at Bev, and Richie inhaled sharply. There was a secret inherent in their interaction - Richie was kind of generally a dumbass, but he was good at reading a room, and what Ben and Bill had going seemed like kind of a big deal.

Was tonight going to be the night…?

Bev, for her part, didn’t suspect a thing. She waved an idle hand at them and carried on. “Hurry up, then.”

Richie bit his lip and allowed himself to be dragged along. His thoughts were racing, which meant he was uncharacteristically silent amidst his friends’ chatter.

If Ben was going to say his piece, Richie should probably follow suit, right? Not that Ben’s thing and Richie’s thing were even remotely similar, but...Richie was starting to learn that it was better to have everything out in the open.

It was funny, he thought, that wishes came with responsibilities - that he’d gotten exactly what he wanted with his friends and his relationships, and things were still sometimes hard. There was no way around having to fix his garbage communication skills anymore. Self-improvement had become a weird sort of necessity.

But. Maybe he had kind of wished for that, too.

“Eddie,” he said, willing himself to not chicken out.

They had arrived at the ice cream cart. Eddie disentangled himself from Bev, slid past Stan and Mike, and planted himself in front of Richie, eyes dark with concern.

“My whole name, huh?” Eddie asked softly, biting at his bottom lip. Behind him, Bill and Ben were finally approaching the group. They were talking in low voices, and Richie clenched his fists, wishing vaguely to have some of their strength; to be less terrified of telling the truth.

“Eds,” Richie corrected himself, pushing a hand back through his hair nervously. “I’ve been meaning...I was going to tell you something. Or ask. Maybe.”

Eddie’s eyes widened. “Richie, if this is a proposal, why did you pick the least romantic spot in all of Disneyland--”

“No, no,” Richie said quickly, putting his hands in front of him to drive home the point. “No. Uh. I got a call right before we left from the theatre I’ve been performing at, and they have an opening for a full-time member of their production team…”

“You told me you applied,” Eddie reminded him, putting a reassuring hand on his forearm. “Are you trying to tell me you got the job?”

Richie stared at Eddie’s face, willing him to express some kind of emotion for Richie to gauge, but it wasn’t taking - Eddie’s features remained annoyingly blank.

“Yes,” Richie said, closing his eyes and hoping for the best. “And. I think...I think I really want it.”

Eddie didn’t respond out loud for a moment. Instead, he slid a hand up to Richie’s face, and traced his thumb over Richie’s cheekbone.

“I’m so proud of you,” Eddie whispered, and Richie felt all of the tension leave his body in one fell swoop. He fell down into Eddie’s arms bonelessly, and Eddie stumbled backwards a little bit.

“It means that I’d be leaving the company,” Richie reminded him, lips tight against Eddie’s ear.

“But it’s a permanent position,” Eddie replied, and Richie could all but see the smile on his cute little face. “You’re going to be in Orlando, still. We’re going to be together.”

“We are,” Richie confirmed, straightening up and smiling back down at Eddie. “I was just...I didn’t know if--”

Eddie laughed sweetly and took both of Richie’s hands in his own. “Idiot. Aren’t we past this? I love you.” He tilted his face up expectantly. “I’m glad you told me.”

Richie couldn’t help but oblige him with a kiss. “Sorry I’m stupid.”

“Don’t get in the habit of saying that or it’s all you’ll ever say from here on out.” Stan was walking towards them, holding out two Mickey ice cream bars. “You’re welcome for these, by the way. If you try to pay me back by sneaking money into my wallet when you think I’m not paying attention, Richie, I’ll release incriminating screenshots into the group chat.”

“If it’s the conversation where the two of you talk at length about High School Musical, I’ve already seen it,” Eddie said, taking an ice cream bar and tearing open the wrapper.

Stan sighed. “I’ll think of something else, then.”

“If we’re set with ice cream, then we should get moving,” Bill announced, checking his watch. “We don’t have as much time as we think. We should get in line for Star Tours as soon as possible.”

“We’re really gunning for good seats at the fireworks, huh?” Mike asked teasingly, clapping Bill on the shoulder. Bill smiled a little bit, but it was clear that his agreeing nod was serious - and his little glance at Ben after he finished nodding was, too.

God. It was really going to happen tonight.

“Let’s go, then,” Richie said, not wanting to begrudge Ben any last little detail. He unwrapped his ice cream bar and tried to insert as much of it into his mouth as he possibly could. “Strrrr Trrrrr awhrrrh!”

“He means Star Tours away,” Eddie translated, biting one of Mickey’s ears off neatly. “And let’s please not run. My legs are so little.”

“Walking fast?” Bill offered, smiling cheekily.

“Walking at a pace that is comfortable for everyone,” Mike said, moving to demonstrate said pace, and together they fell into an easy step.

The wait time for Star Tours was short - only 10 minutes - and they gathered at the mouth of the line for a quick moment before plunging ahead.

“We’re okay with this being our last ride?” Bev asked, leaning against the metal frame of the attraction with her hands in her pockets. “Ben, you didn’t want it to be Indiana Jones?”

Ben shook his head wistfully. “As great as that ride is, I’m good.”

She met Richie’s eyes, then, and he knew immediately what she was about to ask. “And Richie--”

“Mr. Toad and I are good for now,” Richie assured her with a wink. “No need to revisit that one. Let’s go into space, huh?”

No one agreed out loud, but Bill started moving into the queue and the rest of them were following suit, so Richie allowed himself a moment of feeling like his leadership skills had improved before wandering after them.

“Do you think that if we see the Ewoks again, Luke Skywalker will be with them? He’s their leader, right?” Eddie asked, turning towards Richie with wide eyes.

Richie slid his arm over Eddie’s shoulders in a practiced motion and made to respond, but Stan beat him to it.

“Luke Skywalker can’t be the leader of the Ewoks because his lightsaber is red and theirs are all green, Eddie,” Stan said matter-of-factly. “If you knew anything about Star Wars, you’d know that. Luke Skywalker’s only allowed to lead those guys in planes. Red Luke Leader and all that.”

Richie quickly pulled out his phone to set a reminder to thank Stan somehow for his genius addition to Richie’s newly invented Star Wars lore, and also to ask Stan how much of that he genuinely believed was true.

“Planes?” Eddie wrinkled his nose. “I thought the stereotype was that gays couldn’t drive.”

“I am very proud of the work that I’m doing on Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge,” Ben interjected loudly, “and I cannot wait to never show any of you what I’m doing, or go to that park with you when it opens, or talk to any of you about Star Wars ever again.”

Richie laughed out loud. “Ben, buddy, you’ve got to settle down. Your emotions are betraying you. Have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise--”

Bill turned around from the front of the queue, forehead cinched up in either stress or amusement. “Wait, no, that can’t be a real thing.”

“That’s the only thing that’s been said this entire time that’s a real thing, actually,” Mike said through gritted teeth.

“Should we watch Star Wars on our next movie night?” Bev asked, smiling thinly. “Would that resolve a few things?”

The responses to that were chaotic and entirely mixed, and Richie reveled in the fact that the anarchy he’d caused lasted all the way up until they got on to the ride.

Their simulator went through the pod-racing section, and then Naboo with the Gungans, which meant that Stan was going to be speaking in incomprehensible memes for days. Richie would have complained loudly and obnoxiously about that, but it was almost time for the fireworks, which meant that it was almost time for Ben’s big moment.

Richie didn’t want to insert himself in the middle of whatever Ben and Bill were planning, but he couldn’t help feeling a little bit nervous about the whole thing….which was weird, because he usually didn’t feel nervous about things that weren’t his.

This thing was different, though. This thing had some gravity to it, and there were a bunch of different ways it could go wrong.

First of all, Bill didn’t have an amazing track record with plans like these. Granted, Ben and Bev weren’t Stan and Mike, but having Bill involved meant that everything was probably going to be a lot riskier than it would be otherwise, and Richie was tired of risk-taking where his friends were involved. They’d agreed on no drama for this trip. This could knock that whole agreement out of whack.

Second, if Ben pulled this off...well, everything would change, wouldn’t it? They’d just finally gotten their shit together well enough to be friends again. Would they be able to survive a change at this point?

Third...well, third was Eddie, and all of the things that he was going to have to start thinking about if Ben was successful.

Third could wait.

But. First and second were legitimate issues, and it was for that reason that Richie found himself slipping away from Eddie and Stan and sidling over to Bill.

“What’s the plan?” he asked, speaking quickly and quietly so as not to be overheard.

Bill raised his eyebrows, but otherwise didn’t seem surprised that Richie was asking. “Just getting as close as we can so that Ben can do his thing when it starts. Nothing elaborate.”

“Nothing risky?” Richie asked, doing his best Stan impression. “No personal pyrotechnics, no Goofy go-go dancers--”

“Just you,” Bill joked, eyes shiny with mischief. “You’re the only risk. Don’t fuck anything up, Richie.”

“Yeah, nah, I won’t,” Richie agreed. “But. It’s gonna be okay, right?”

Bill took a moment to look thoughtful, and Richie almost rolled his eyes. It was a yes or no question, and the correct answer was obvious, but when Bill responded, Richie found himself kind of grateful that Bill hadn’t taken the easy way out.

“You know how Bev thinks our friendship is destiny?” he asked, smiling a secret smile.

“Don’t fucking beat around the bush, Denbrough,” Richie complained, tugging at the hairband around his wrist irritably.

“I have a point,” Bill said, “which is that I agree with her, except that I think that the destiny part is more us destined to want to be around each other, which is different than just being destined to be friends. We have to work on it, but we will, because we want to.”

Richie sighed. “So what you’re saying is that it doesn’t matter what we do because we’re gonna work it out in the end no matter what?”

Bill shrugged. “Sure.”

Richie thought about pressing the issue, but ultimately decided against it. What Bill said had been comforting, in a way, and that was enough.

“Why are you helping with this, anyway?” he asked instead, adjusting his glasses idly. “Aren’t you sick of being around relationships at this point?”

Bill tapped at his phone in his pocket with another secret smile. “Don’t count me out yet, Rich. I’ve got someone to introduce you to when we get back. And so...no. I’m good.” He paused, looking over at Ben and Bev, who were talking excitedly to one another as they pushed through the crowd, looking for an optimal spot. “And they’re going to be so happy.”

“I guess that’s all we can ask for,” Richie said, smiling a little bit as he watched them laugh together.

“What is?” Eddie, Stan, and Mike had caught up to them - or maybe had come back to them, Richie had lost track of them completely for a moment.

“Being happy,” Bill replied, stopping just off to the side of the Disneyland Partners statue. “Is this a good spot?”

“Yes!” everyone chorused in unison. They’d have a perfect view of both the castle and the fireworks from where they were.

Richie turned to Eddie and proffered a hand, and Eddie took it, beaming widely up at him. Seized with a sweet impulse, Richie raised Eddie’s hand to his mouth, and Eddie laughed, rolling his eyes with a quiet sort of affection that made Richie’s heart stutter a little bit. He opened his mouth to speak, but Eddie shushed him before he could start.

“Don’t say a single thing about dreams coming true or whatever tacky Disney shit,” Eddie warned amidst giggles, trying and failing to narrow his eyes.

“No…” Richie started, willing the right words to come out of his mouth, “no, I was thinking, actually…”

Eddie tugged sharply at his arm, huffing out a shaky breath. “Is THIS a proposal?”

“No.” Richie turned his head to make solid eye contact with Eddie. “No, we’ve still...not yet, sweetheart, we’ve still got some shit to work out before that goes down, I think. But I was wondering...I was wondering if you were happy. That’s all.”

The music around them swelled, and the first firework lit from over Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Eddie gasped, eyes alight, and out of the corner of his eye, Richie saw Ben go down on one knee.

Richie knew Bev had said yes by the whoops and cheers that exploded around him, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of Eddie’s face.

“Eddie,” Richie said again, willing Eddie to smile.

Eddie’s responding grin was absolutely enormous.

“I’m happy, Richie,” he replied, “I am so fucking happy.”

When Richie closed his eyes, he could see reflections in front of his eyelids - of Ben kneeling down, of the fireworks going off over the castle, of Eddie’s blinding, beautiful smile.

He opened his eyes again.

“Me too, Eds,” he said, taking Eddie’s hand and soaking in the moment. “Me too.”

[thesubtlegatsby]

Well then you do all for Charlie. :>

slippin in a readmore to save yall the trouble of the size of this post

☾ - sleep headcanon: Charlie has trouble sleeping without a lot of pressure, so he often sleeps in like really heavy sweaters or under large amounts of blankets regardless of temperature.  obviously in summer, he requires it to be somewhere very cold to make up for it.

★ - sad headcanon: Charlie in general when he should be feeling strong emotions, mostly looks like he’s feeling nothing at all.  So when he’s sad, he’s even quieter than normal, looks very far away, and is very confused?  like, he’s not checked in enough to understand what’s going on around him.

☆ - happy headcanon: Like above, Charlie’s emotions when they’re strongest almost seem hardest to find?  But when he’s really happy, it almost surprises him.  Like, he won’t have a response and then he’ll just laugh and grin like it’s escaping from him, and the surprise of it just makes him grin wider.

☠ - angry/violent headcanon:  Charlie’s anger is cold.  He doesn’t burn hot, he goes glacier slow, intentional, methodical, ruthless.  Angry Charlie walks up to his enemies when theyre down and says nothing as he pushes the heel of his foot into their throat, only pushing harder as they struggle.

✿ - Sex headcanon: Charlie leads with the mouth.  Kisses, biting, oral.  He’s got a praise kink a mile wide.

■ -  Bedroom/house/living quarters headcanon: Charlie’s bedroom in his childhood home is full of really nonsensical decor; twigs and branches tied to float in the air on ropes made of different colored yarn, leaves just glued onto the walls, floor lamps he’s magyvered to be mounted on the ceiling and table lamps hes screwed into the walls.  But apart from the chaotic decor, it is immaculate.

♡ - romantic headcanon: Charlie starts giving Wyeth a bunch of odd gifts.  Single flowers of no discernible species.  Small mesh bags full of impossibly fresh looking acorns.  A rock that glows a vague magenta on the full moon.  When asked what or why, he just shrugs and says “It told me it was yours.”

♥ - family headcanon: Charlie’s mother was always very distant after his father left when he was young, but one day when he was about 13 she looked him in the eyes, panic on her face, and said “you’re not my child.”  She’s looked right through him ever since, and has barely spoken a coherent word to him in that time.

☮ - friendship headcanon: Charlie is the type of friend you can monologue your problems at and he’ll just sit there being like “Mhmm...  Yes... Oh, no...  That’s wise...” etc, and you’ll finish and thank him for being so helpful for giving you advice when in reality he just listens.

♦ - quirks/hobbies headcanon:  He draws.  A lot.  On everything.  If he’s got a pen or a pencil and a place to draw, he’s doing it.  The images that he makes don’t... don’t really make sense.  They look almost like images from nature, but just to the left in the way where the longer you look at it, the less you really think that’s what it is - but you have no idea what it actually is.

☯ - likes/dislikes headcanon: Charlie’s favorite features of Wyeth’s are his fingers, his true smile, the jut of his adam’s apple, his ears, his eyelashes, and that inch of stomach that shows when Wyeth stretches.

▼ - childhood headcanon: Charlie disappeared from home one night when he was six years old, and was found a day and a half later in the woods with no memory of how he got there or what happened in the time from laying in his bed reading to the point where a cop found him by the riverside.  He’s starting to remember pieces of it now, like ten years later, and frankly none of the details he’s getting make any sense.

∇ -. old age/aging headcanon: Charlie... well, depending on how the plot goes, there’s a distinct possibility that Charlie will stop aging within the next few years, unless he sacrifices his immortality.  So either he dies happy and old having chosen that life, or he lives forever and stops aging at about 21 or so, feeling his heart die a little more each time he remembers the friends who passed away and left him behind.

♒ - cooking/food headcanon: Charlie is solidly vegetarian.  But he’s almost like a flat out rabbit.  He’ll just sit somewhere and eat like a bunch of raw vegetables and call it dinner, without thinking that’s weird.  He’s started calling it “Deconstructed Salad”

☼ - appearance headcanon:  Charlie is 5′2″ and 105lbs.  He’s itty.  But between his mop of curls and the gentle point to his ears, he seems to take up more space than he should.  Maybe it’s the fact that he’s definitely bigger on the inside.

ൠ - random headcanon:  Charlie was diagnosed/had treatment attempted for a lot of different mental disorders that all stemmed from his abilities as a fey, so he’s still really sensitive to developing weirdness that overlaps with any of those past diagnoses.  Even once he learns he’s fey, the reflex to panic each time he does something that could be a symptom of schizophrenia or could be a symptom of ADHD or could be a symptom of OCD doesn’t go away.

◉ - Any other question  headcanon of your choosing: on the night before, of, and after the full moon, he can hear hunting horns in the forest that no one else can seem to hear.  He’s told people about them.  What he hasn’t mentioned is how difficult it is not to just go into the forest to find them, join them, hunt.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Do u know any fics where Sherlock is jealous?

NONNNNYYYYYY YES. 

I love Jealous Sherlock so much. I know I’m missing a tonne of them here, but these are the ones I could quickly find or remember being Jealous!Sherlock! I’m also adding Possessive Sherlock here as well, because I LOVE LOVE LOVE “his / My John” SO SO MUCH and literally I fave every fic that has it in there. GUH. 

JEALOUS SHERLOCK

Unimpressed by 221b_hound (M, 3106 w.) – Sherlock has no intention of attending the Met's New Year's Eve party. The start of a new year is all but meaningless to him. But he ends up there anyway, having odd conversations, and John does not find Sherlock's jealousy the slightest bit cute. And then there is dancing. Part 10 of Unkissed

Unforgiven by 221b_hound (M, 4721 w.) – Sherlock's latest case is for his ex boyfriend, the brilliant and handsome Professor Victor Trevor. John is not too happy about that. But things aren't what they seem, an old friend of John's is involved in the case, and John has a few surprises up his sleeve. Also - a proposal! Part 16 of Unkissed

Mine (He Says While Still Being Smol) by beejohnlocked (E, 1,319 w.) – A suspect flirts with John. Sherlock gets a bit jealous. Okay, a LOT jealous.

Maintaining A Personal Life by Gingerhermit (E, 24,284 w.) – Sherlock and John discover some interesting revelations about each other’s sexuality, which lead them both to question the assumptions they've made about one another for years. In the midst of their mutual discoveries, a dangerous psychopath looms on the side-lines who threatens to destroy their new beginning.

For you, there's only me by shock_blanket (E, 19,557 w.) – Sherlock realizes he has fallen in love with John, but believes he is unlovable. Cue lots of pining and jealousy on Sherlock's part, followed by our favorite cuddly marksman making it all better. Because for Sherlock, there's only John.

Matters of National Security by mistyzeo (E, 8,465 w.) – John starts dating a male client of Sherlock's, and Sherlock can't figure out why he's so incensed about it.

Velvet by headlessjess (G, 1,155 w.) – It's the day, the wedding day - John and Mary, getting married. And then there's Sherlock, in pain and in love, without knowing how to deal with it.

5 Times John Got the Girl (and lost her) and 1 Time John Got the Guy (and kept him) by LiviKate (M, 21,695 w.) – John has always had good luck with the ladies. He's charming, friendly and funny, not to mention great in bed. However, his usual skill with the opposite sex is constantly being thwarted by Sherlock and his outbursts. How will John ever get a leg over when Sherlock is always cockblocking him?

Five Times John Noticed But Didn't Really by ScandalousMinds (T, 6,383 w.) – 5 times John (thought) he noticed something peculiar about his and Sherlock's relationship but really missed the obvious.

The Kissing Disease by cottonballz_of_death (E, 30,856 w.) – John brings home a boyfriend, shocking Sherlock, who long ago gave up hope that his straight flatmate would ever take a romantic interest in him. In a bid to reconnect with John, he tries to infect himself with a "harmless" virus. Neither of them is prepared for the emotional fallout that results.

Surety by hudders (G, 2,477w.) – "Sherlock is pissed because it seems that four pints of larger, two shots of tequila and a glass of wine has resulted in Lestrade becoming a little bit too friendly with everyone. And by everyone, Sherlock really means John."

Butterfly, Pinned Under Glass by billiethepoet (E, 4,648 w.) – It started as a desire to keep John safe and whole, and ended up as just desire.

Correspondence by Cleo2010 (T, 8031 w.) – Sherlock’s been spirited away on a case for Mycroft. Part of the deal was that he and John could communicate via letter until the case was completed. Maybe the cliche is true, absence does make the heart grow fonder. Or perhaps something is growing on the feet in the fridge. Read their letters month by month. Written after series one.

Presence by LostGirl (M, 8625 w.) – Sherlock has recently noticed a shift in his own perceptions, but he can’t quite figure out when it started.

Obsession, Appassionato by shinychimera, Yeomanrand (E, 4,249 w.) – John is late, and he hasn't called, and Sherlock works himself into a state. Part 1 of Love and Ysaye (FAVE!!)

Interlude by sussexbound (SamanthaLenore) (G, 2,837w.) – “Are you actually doing anything?” Sherlock scowls. “What?” “Are you busy? Because if not, I could use your help peeling potatoes.” “I’m not eating what you’re making. Why should I peel the potatoes?” John just shakes his head. “Because it might be a polite and thoughtful thing to do for the person who loves you. Just a tip.”Oh…Part 8 of The Homecoming

Understanding by sussexbound (SamanthaLenore) (T, 4,556 w.) – John’s face stretches into a smile that fades again, just as quickly. “It just comes like that, sometimes—all of a sudden. You don’t expect it.” He murmurs against Sherlock’s skin. “What does?” “Grief.” Part 9 of The Homecoming

Sibling Rivalry Or Fighting Over John Watson by Jessa7 (T, 8K+ w., Romance and Humour, FFNet) – Mycroft is just as much of a genius as Sherlock is. He keeps randomly kidnapping John for chats, and the locations get better. Cue Sherlock's younger sibling complex rearing up and jealousy ensues.

Come Home by hudders-and-hiddles (E, 3,763 w. | more pining than jealous but close enough) – When John leaves for a medical conference, Sherlock tries to entice him back home.

The Semantics of Crop Circle Formation: a case study by Sherlock Holmes [unpublished] by canolacrush (M, 41,710 | Cockblocking Sherlock) – "Look at these photographs," I said, gesturing to the wall of crop circles. "What do you observe?""Crop circles," John replied."Obvious. What else?""Are...are those intestines surrounding them?""Yes. The majority are bovine and ovine in origin. The farmers who have acquired these crop circles in their fields have also had a tenth of their livestock murdered and arranged thus.""Why?" John said, presumably in a rhetorical fashion.I detest rhetorical questions. "That is what I must find out, John."

Down with this Ship by FrostedFlame (PinkOrchid) (M, 10,862 w.) – Sherlock drags John undercover to a gay bar - for a case, of course - looking forward to seeing John flustered by their surroundings (since you know, he's NOT GAY). John decides that he has hidden both his orientation and his feelings for his daft flatmate for far too long. He is done hiding, time to be honest with his bloody best friend in the world. He just hopes it won't change anything between them. And then it does.

That Partitioning of the Things of Youth by wearitcounts (Sher_locked_up) (E | 35,353 w.) - Victor Trevor is in town, and nobody’s happy. [[I really like this one. Jealous John AND Sherlock and lots of Angst]].

Paparazzi by SilentAuror (E, 10,543 w.) – John moves back into 221B Baker Street after his marriage falls apart and the paparazzi won't leave him and Sherlock alone about the status of their supposed relationship. Sherlock, of course, never denies it, until one day he does...

Pattern Behaviour by SilentAuror (E, 14,835w) – Sherlock doesn't even know why he resents John's dates so much. Until the day he does know. Slight angst, unrequited feelings (but don't let that scare you off!) (FAVE!) 

OBSESSIVE / POSSESSIVE SHERLOCK

Perdition's Flames by i_ship_an_armada (E, Treklock, 63,435 w., | mild Possessive Sherlock) – Sherlock would do anything to save him. Risk anything. Give anything. His money, his life. His soul. What he does, though, is change both of their destinies forever. Genetic re-engineering is the only option left. It turns out researchers underestimated the life expectancy and potential abilities of genetically re-engineered subjects. The British government and what would eventually become the United Federation of Planets, however, had not. Part 1 of PF Universe

The Things You Hide *Adult Edition* by verityburns (E, 10,821 w.) – Sherlock and John have been working and living together for nearly a year, each finding the other's friendship to be the one thing they would not risk or want to live without. Until something happens to disturb the status quo…

Let Go by thisisforyou (G, 2,743 w.) – In the end, separating John's things from Sherlock's in the chaos of their sitting room is like pulling a limpet from a wet rock. Especially when the rock is clinging on for dear life, because Sherlock doesn't want to let go. 

In the cherry blossom's shade by Eliane (M, 3,934 w.) – "This isn’t new. Sherlock has already done this – has gone through cities, and dingy hotels, and sleepless nights but it was different before. John wasn’t there before. They’re in this together."

The Marriage Proposal Negotiation by Goddess_of_the_Night (G, 2161 w.) –  Sherlock hasn't ever really done anything the traditional way, so of course it wouldn't bother him to propose to John even though they're not even dating. And the fact that John is already on a date with someone else when he decides to do it? Tedious. Marrying John was the only thing he could do to ensure John was his.

The Light of Day by allonsys_girl (M, 7297 w.) – Rewrite of the end of Sign of Three. John actually notices Sherlock leaving the reception early, and chases after him. Angsty Johnlock. Happy ending, for sure. Part 1 of The Light of Day

Let the Sun Fade Out by nothingislittle (E, 2711 w.) – "He could warm the sun itself, Sherlock thinks, could heat their flat with just his presence, could brighten the room with one dazzling smile or just the sparkling in his eyes. Everything hurts when John looks this beautiful, but it’s a dulcet, aching pain, one that consumes Sherlock from the inside, that sends soft pangs through his abdomen and lodges a lump solidly in his throat. John glows, he glitters, he’s light itself, Sherlock thinks, and doesn’t even bother to scold himself for exaggerating, because he’s not, he’s not, John is everything, he’s beautiful and he shines, he’s everything."

On a Sunday Morning by SD_Ryan for jimmytiberius (G, 3136 w.) – Sherlock has a little problem. He can't stop obsessing about John Watson.

His by I'm Nova (T, 1K+ w., Humour & H/C) – Sherlock doesn't share what he's fond of. (FAVE!!)

Foresight by niffler09 (K, 2K+w) – It's raining and neither John nor Sherlock have an umbrella so they huddle under Sherlock's coat. And then Mycroft walks past and makes smartass remarks. (FAVE!!)

Possessive by Fang323 (T, 850w. H/c & Friendship) – His John did not belong. Not here. Not in this blasted hospital. It simply was not logical.

As I’ve said in the past, all my rec lists are of fics I’ve read, so I’m sure I’m missing a tonne more that are probably on my MFL list, but please feel free to add your own recs! 

[strangesmallbard]

1, 2, 7, 15, 25, 28, 37. you don't have to answer them all! I'm very curious and I love your fic!

ghfgGHF thank you so much!! this made me smile oh gosh. i’m sorry this is so late, i haven’t been on anything but tumblr mobile in a good while and i tend to only lurk on there.

1. Describe your comfort zone– a typical you-fic.

swan queen LMAO. anything with a lot of women tbh, i haven’t completed a fic with a dude narrator in so long. romance could probably be considered a comfort zone even though it’s not irl. i love writing one-shots, and they’re either in a short prose style w/ more humor and attention to dialogue or long-winded, almost stream of consciousness. i usually write aus these days for ouat lmao, but i also like working w/ canon if there’s something interesting i want to expand on. i’m also trying to get more comfortable writing multichaps w/ longer plots! it’s challenging bc my brain is a mess, but v fun.

2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

hmm, nothing super in particular comes to mind. maybe best friends to lovers? snowed-in? i’ll keep thinking on this one. i recently wrote a meetcute in the airport, and that was really fun.

3. Share a snipped from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

hoo boY i think this section from “there’s always love if you need it,” which is a year in the life fic post emma breaking up w/ ho0k. i like this bit bc i feel good about the descriptions, imagery, and i feel pretty solid about the characterization which is rare bc i’m always nervous about that.

winter,

After Emma leaves Killian, she considers leaving Storybrooke. It wouldn’t be forever, she reasons, just to get her bearings, walk along once familiar streets in the skin of a once familiar life. She used to be a lot of someones and no-ones, and now she doesn’t know what shape tomorrow will take.

But she doesn’t leave. She finds herself driving to 108 Mifflin Street and ringing the doorbell. Regina answers and Emma is brought back to her last someone, when nervous, confused energy burned in her belly and something like hope burned equally bright in her chest. She didn’t know it was that word, then.

“Emma,“ she says, not Ms. Swan. “I heard.” Concern curves the end of the consonant, and Regina shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Her hand grasps the door frame, maroon nail polish catching cool porch-lamp light.

Emma wants to say, I was ready. Emma wants to say, I felt hollowed out like a pumpkin during halloween, all my everything somewhere else and I don’t know where. Emma wants to say, I’m tired.

She says, “Still have that glass of the best apple cider I’ve ever tasted?”

(regina’s smile is like sunset along the maine coast; gradual, soft, picture-worthy but you don’t want to spare a moment looking away.)

“Of course.”

15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?

god “when in the chronicle of wasted time.” regina saving emma w/ true love’s kiss. can you imagine. GOD

25. What do you look for in a beta?

oh man i haven’t Officially Looked for a beta in a long time. usually i pass it off to trusted friends and i’m like PLEASE TEAR THIS APART. what i would look for though is someone with a similar style?

28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

oh gosh!! i love so many that i’m gonna expand this a little bc even in swen i have so many. so here’s three swen, two non-swen.

amycarey, deemn, skywideopen, wagyubeefy, and montparnasse! 

what i love about amycarey’s fic is that emma and regina (and their relationship) are still so recognizable in every single au. like, no matter what the premise is, it’s like AH YES THERE THEY ARE. and all of her aus!!! some of my favorite sq fics. down the rabbit hole was such a beautifully written and healing fic, it’ll stay with me always.  

deemn’s fics are like…gosh every single word she puts together in a sentence. i feel SO much. if you like swan queen and haven’t read who needs shelter yet please read who needs shelter please let that fic be part of your life. 

skywideopen wrote an AMAZING sw!dw fic that was absolutely everything i ever wanted out of a sq!dw fic, it was so emma and regina i cried, and it was also so true to the dw universe! spark is absolutely amazing.

wagyubeefy writers wicked fic and it’s !!! wicked was my first fandom and i always wanted a modern oz au, and boy does wagyubeefy have modern oz aus! they translate the issues of wicked to a society that also deeply reflects ours and has an incredible take on elphaba, glinda, and every character and have such a seamless, clear way of telling stories and !! so awesome.

montparnasse writes for hp, dragon age, and other fandoms and their narration/use of language is so gorgeous, like. i can’t even convey. they write rarepairs for hp like tonks/fleur and ginny/luna and each fic has just so much beautiful imagery and description and characterizations. GOSH wow.

37. Talk about your current wips.

aah!! unfortunately they are Very wips bc i have no time until the summer to work on any of them. but! here they are.

“one step, not much (but it says enough)” is my first tentative step back into multichaps, and one chapter is released already! the premise is that henry goes away to college, and emma/regina suddenly are confronted with their feelings w/ each other and It’s a Mess, also someone is trying to destroy sb, so that’s a mood. it’s also solidly in the romcom genre w/ some very sharp/sad moments, and i’m having so much developing sb into the hilarious mess it should be. the parks department hates the charmings. lesbian nights at the rabbit hole

unnamed as of now but i lovingly call it the “disaster road trip au” even though the road trip is only half the fic. it’s a college au and the basic premise is that emma and regina dated in highschool, they break up, emma moves away, years later in college she runs into zelena and they miraculously start a wild friendship. over winter break they take a road trip and end up having to pick up regina along the way and it Is A Mess and i’m excited to write it.

unnamed parks and rec au. if you’re on twitter u might have heard of this one, but regina is leslie, emma is ben, marian is ann, mm is chris, and hook is jamm.

that x files au i think i’ve been working on since last summer OH boy. regina is mulder and emma is scully but they’re also both mulder and both scully. one day i’ll figure it out.

[pixelonline]

(I am so sorry, mobile users. This is really long.)

My Mass Effect Andromeda thoughts:

1. I was gonna stream the trial, but proceeded to use almost all 10 hours at once because I couldn’t stop playing. I suppose this is a good thing. I’m definitely streaming it once it’s actually out.

2. I hate the character customization. Mass Effect has always been ugly as fuck when it comes to making characters, but my dudes it is 2017 what is going on here.

2a. Side note but I laughed for like 15 minutes that there is only one “White People��� face and it is honestly the ugliest thing. Cool feature (sorta not but I’m viewing it as a positive) is that there are designated skin tones with each face set. Speaking of sets, all facial features are stuck to a specific preset face. You can slightly move them, but there’s no changing. I’m hoping this is just for the trial, as other things in the game were locked off until it’s official release.

2b. so many pony tails. no undercut. despite reports saying that hairstyles would be less militaristic as you’re not a soldier, they’re more or less the same. let me be the woman i want to be dammit. There were braids, but only one style. Still double the representation compared to previously I guess? I have very much so white people hair so I don’t feel comfortable having an opinion on that subject. I will say that the braids are exclusive to fem!Ryder and m!Ryder gets 2 different textured styles. I, personally, cannot wait for the beautiful mod community to fix this hair travesty, both with representation variation and all these fucking ponytails. Maybe they can make something happen with the faces, but I hold little hope. They had “alt” hair colors, so it’s already way better than ME Original Trilogy. My Ryder has blue hair, because of course she does. There’s not much shade difference in the colors available, and some of the unnatural colors were, in fact, so unnatural looking that it was hard to accept as a hair color. dyed hair doesn’t reflect light the way it did in game and it didn’t look like much shade variation between the strands so it occasionally looked like the hair hadn’t actually finished rendering. The color selection suggested a more soft ombre look than was actually present.

3. I like that you can customize your twin also, but limits on the CC still drives me crazy. Male hair diversity isn’t super, like I said before, but it just felt like more than the female counterpart. I just really, really hate ponytails you guys.

3a. In your CC options, you can pick story bits. The only options that connect to the previous games is a selection between your Shepard having been male or female. I suppose that’s so pronouns are correct later on.

4. Prologue: I feel it takes too long, the tutorial is honestly not that great. SAM, your AI, is down for most of it, so you have no idea what anything is. It was fine at first, adding to the worldbuilding and urgency and whatnot but it got irritating by the 30th “unknown” enemy.

5. The Omni-Scanner is a neat addition, but it felt sort of...forced at times. More on that later.

6. The prologue story is okay. The ending of it, and the beginning of the actual game, was actually pretty dramatic and I didn’t expect it given the hype around certain characters that Bioware has tried to generate.

6a. Dad Ryder seemed really one dimensional with his kid. Like, never referred to them affectionately even at the last bit. This is sort of explained when you go to his room later, but it felt really hollow to me as a whole. Cool dad fact: CC of your Ryder and their twin decides what Dad looks like. Mine had obscenely blue eyes but grey hair.

6b. Evil dude looked really sad during his introduction and I wanted to be friends with him. This feels like a failed attempt at showing off the ominous silent bad guy, as I immediately started rooting for him. You go, evil dude, touch the stuff and let your dreams be true.

7. I hate the weapon interface. Inventory functions like ME1, allowing you to see the items you’ve picked up (both upgrades and actual weapons) but you cannot equip them. I couldn’t until the first mission after getting my ship. Which is terrible, as I got a sniper rifle I wanted to use and couldn’t for the prologue portion.

8. The Hyperion’s travel system is awful. There’s very little instruction about it. The tram looks as if it’s a one way thing, from the ark to the new citadel-like port, but in actuality you use it to travel around the ark itself too. Didn’t notice until my camera turned slightly to the right and another thing on the board was selectable.

8a. Not travel related, but you do get more info about the ending of the prologue and a new ongoing mission on the Hyperion. It felt like a bit of a slap. It’s all “Here’s this cool new power and a friend BUT ALSO FUCK YOU JON SNOW YOU KNOW NOTHING and you’ll never find out until you go look for these things randomly around. But not around here! Fuck you twice!” It was clearly created to push the story more later on, which is all fine and good, it just ticked me off at this moment.

9. The new Citadel is a goddamn mess. I’m not a huge fan of it right now, though what I’m 100% sure will happen is that as you make more homesteads, the place gets nicer until you’re at endgame and have a fully functional hub. I’ll like it more once it starts changing. It looks like it has really good potential. I hope it functions more than the keep in DA:I, and your choices really DO have an effect on what is opened up and how the society there builds itself.

9a. The Original Trilogy made each race very distinct, with their own speech patterns and everything. I didn’t really get that from this game’s other races. The Salarians didn’t speak in fast bursts with lots of words jammed together, and the Turians more often than not didn’t have that robotic twinge to their speech, and weren’t all that hostile. It seems unlikely to me that there wouldn’t be any left over anger as they left for Andromeda seeing as it’s possible some actually fought in the first contact war. It is about 30 years apart. It was something constantly prevalent in the previous trilogy, which every NPC lived during (at least ME1)

9b. I do, however, love super not Krogan Krogan lady. She’s perfect and I wish I could romance her. You do talk about the genophage. Sucks that she and her clan have no idea that there’s been a cure for over 500 years now.

10. The ship, Tempest, is really nice. I always felt like Normandy was very irritating to navigate around. ME1 especially, but 3 wasn’t so hot either. This one isn’t as large, but it has a really nice flow that I liked. Pathfinder quarters were way better than Shepard’s.

10a. It has a system like the Dragon Age: Inquisition war table where you have timed missions that NPC complete for materials, items, and intel. Seems interesting, but I didn’t see one to completion. They’re still running.

10b. the R&D table is interesting, and I like the separation between the two, but it didn’t feel like a huge asset so early in the game.

11. The traveling system is beautiful. Visually it gets 100% approval. However, it’s extremely slow paced. any selection of a new planet or system takes you back to where you were originally, lets you stare at it a moment, then flies you to the next place where you zoom in for another moment before zooming out and then FINALLY getting information about it. It’s nice, but by the 12th time I was incredibly tired of it.

12. Your Salarian pilot is cool. Not especially Salarian-like, but still I liked him. Cannot kiss. I tried.

13. Material gathering is kind of limited. You scan a whole system, and you have the option to scan planets, but there’s not much point to it as SAM tells you if there’s something worth scanning there. Usually it’s a single deposit of a mineral.

14. I hated the MAKO in ME1, but this one isn’t so bad. I think it helps knowing that I can customize it later.

15. Speaking of customization, you can change the colors of your casual clothes and your armor. It’s the same color selection tool as in CC, so it’s awful. The dial to change the color overlaps with the bubble to select the actual shade so there’s a lot of trial and error involved. Once again, no indication that [SPACE] is necessary to confirm your color choices. I hate the whole design of it.

16. You do meet some companions that you’ll pick up, but you barely interact with them. Good intros though. Really gave them personality right off the bat.

17. ROMANCE: Being fem!Ryder is rough at the start.

17a. Gil is one of the ship’s crew. He’s one of the few genuinely attractive males in all of Mass Effect’s history. As a woman, you can flirt with him, but he turns you down solidly. He’s kind, but firm. He states that he’s interested in men. Which is awesome, because now I have a reason to play a male Ryder after my first play through is done. Female Ryder apologizes, nothing is weird (unlike other interactions) and it actually made me like him more as a character.

17b. Liam kind of blows off your advances but it definitely felt like a rejection. As he wasn’t very clear, I don’t know if he’s a bi character that you have to develop a friendship with first, or if he’s gay and just doesn’t want to come out to your Ryder. I didn’t like the wishy-washiness of the interaction but we’ll just have to see what’s what when the full game is out.

17c. Doc. I forgot her name, so now she’s Doc. I knew this interaction wouldn’t go well, as I’ve read articles about it. She definitely turns you down because you’re a patient. I’ve read that she has a crush on the Krogan that joins you, so is he not a patient too? Either way, she’s very professional about it and as with Gil it made me appreciate her character. Knowing that it’s Natalie Dormer and I’ll never hear her tell me she loves me hurts me deep in my soul though. Why does the world hate me like this???

17d. Blonde biotic woman with the goddamn hair that I want on my Ryder. Cora. I don’t like her. You have the option to hit on her early on, and her reaction felt really awful to me. She gets kind of hostile and all “I already told [person you never met] that I’m not interested in women and I’m telling you too.” Like, ok. Damn. You aren’t my type anyways. I just wanted to see the option play out. 0/10 poor way to handle the interaction. I’m not super fond of the Asari commando thing either. Jack was a kickass biotic too and she was treated like a monster. This woman gets to take part in something very culturally specific like it’s nbd? jnasdlfknasdivhbna, not a fan of her. She looks somewhere between confused and murderous all the time. Also, she walks like Stretch Armstrong. It makes me laugh.

17e. Vetra. The only individual that actually reacts positively to fem!Ryder flirting with her. Even then she really only takes it like a compliment. But, as I love Vetra and much like Garrus I would die for her from first glance, I’ll take it. I think it’ll be a beautiful relationship. She’s also really tall. And pretty. One thing I thought was strange with her is that it always looks like she’s posing when she’s just standing around. One hip is thrust out and her arms are crossed. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think they rigged her to always be in mysterious seductress pose.

17f. I couldn’t flirt with the pilot. Let me kiss the Salarian, damn you Bioware. Also, our nice Scottish friend Suvi can’t be flirted with, but she sounds really soothing to talk to. I’m def a fan of all these non-American, thicker than previously heard, accents on the ship. The Original Trilogy was full of light British accents or full on American. Sort of hard to believe the Alliance was multinational when everyone spoke like they were from the US.

18. Combat: I mostly use the sniper rifle and the pistol. Pistol was nice. I love the sniper rifle in this game. Other ME games it was hard for me to confirm headshots but this one was a clean and clear animation. Very nice. The companion AI was strange at times, as they’d just use their abilities but in odd places so the skills would get stuck in corners or just go off to nowhere. There was combat stutter on the first planet you can visit but I think that’s more my graphics card. The update refuses to finish so I’m stuck 2 updates behind where I should be.

I have, like, an hour I think left so I’m gonna try to rush through a male Ryder play and see how companion reactions differ. I’m really only in this for the romance, you know.

[tune-collective]

Boys Meet World: Love Finally Finds Japandroids on Life-Affirming 'Near to the Wild Heart of Life' (Critic's Take)

Boys Meet World: Love Finally Finds Japandroids on Life-Affirming 'Near to the Wild Heart of Life' (Critic's Take)

Everyone who attempts to hang on the highs of adolescence longer than traditionally deemed acceptable is ultimately forced to face the very scary question: When does this stop being romantic and start to just be kind of sad? No one’s self-ascribed glory days last forever, and the only thing more heartbreaking than giving up on your ideals and dreams too early is holding onto them for far too long. Eventually, you take one wrong look in the mirror, or in the faces of the similarly minded people you surround yourself with, and suddenly everything you knew to be right and true in the world seems to flip — from there, it’s pretty tough to ever get all the way back. And at that point, you just hope that there’s still something else out there beyond fire’s highway.

Vancouver power duo Japandroids, who release their long-awaited third album Near to the Wild Heart of Life today (Jan. 27), have been one of the world’s most exciting rock bands for nearly a decade now, largely because their music has always teetered on the precipice of this moment. They were never that young, at least as we knew ’em — by 2009 debut album Post Nothing, Brian King and David Prowse were already about a half-decade out of college, though they still thrashed and threw down like a couple of undergrads. Even then, the weariness was setting in: “We used to dream/ Now we worry about dying,” went the chorus to breakout crit-hit “Young Hearts Spark Fire.”

The true thrill came from how Japandroids acknowledged the sun setting on their youth, but still raged against the light’s dying like true believers in rock’s power to grant immortality. And the stakes doubled for 2012’s highly acclaimed Celebration Rock, recorded in the duo’s late 20s after ulcer scares nearly robbed King of a lot more than his innocence. The album was a triumph, more fearful and more resolute than ever, shot through with a now-or-never urgency that made for emotional and instrumental catharsis more explosive than the firework sounds that opened and closed the LP.

The worldview of Japandroids before Wild Heart was based on obvious and agreeable central tenets: going out, drinking, smoking, yelling. But most of all, it was based on devotion to one another: The rush of Post-Nothing and Celebration Rock tapped into the quintessentially young feeling of your group of friends — maybe just one friend in particular — being your entire world, of everything being “We” by default, of any other way of life being virtually unimaginable. Because they played as a guitar-and-drums duo uninterested in roster expansion, because so many vocals were delivered in unison, and because pronouns were more often plural than singular, the sense of solidarity was absolutely intoxicating for two albums.

But the longer Japandroids took to return for LP3, the less the formula seemed repeatable for a third time — could Brian and Dave, now solidly in their 30s, really spend a third LP seeking teenage kicks and have it feel more inspiring than depressing? Or would there finally have to be something else?

Near to the Wild Heart of Life arrives with that something else in tow — the duo has found love, in a place that wasn’t nearly as hopeless as they might’ve feared. Which isn’t to say that Japandroids’ first two albums were heartless by any stretch, but they mostly treated opposite-sex interaction as an adolescent combination of fantasy and curiosity, something to be talked up (“We run the gauntlet, must get to France/ So we can French kiss some French girls”) more often than actually achieved.

Celebration Rock‘s “Younger Us” was inarguably the duo’s greatest love song to date, and it was of course an ode to each other, with the kind of pinpointed moments of true friendship (“Remember that time when you were already in bed/ Said ‘Fuck it,’ got up to drink with me instead?”) to make you waste a whole night digging for dumb college photos on Facebook. But the “pain from an old wound” element of the nostalgia in “Younger Us” pulls no punches; the song’s emotional wallop comes from its open admission that those days of peak fraternity are now firmly in the rearview, and only getting farther away.

From the first track of Wild Heart, it’s clear that Japandroids’ world has expanded beyond one another. The title-track opener is a narrative that posits itself as a sort of origin story for the band itself, telling the tale in wide, apocryphal pen strokes of how King left his hometown to conquer the world and “make some ears ring with the sound of my singing.”

But break the song down by verse and it reads as the story of how King learned to move beyond Prowse and his old life, with his “best friend” instructing him “You can’t condemn your love/ To linger here and die,” and ultimately getting his buddy “all fired up/ to go far away.” (Indeed, in real life, King moved from Vancouver to Toronto before the album’s recording.) Then in the second verse, the singer receives further encouragement and a kiss “like a chorus” from a female bartender, and in the third and final verse, he’s visited by an ambiguous apparition (“My body broke out in a sweat/ From seeing you in dreams”) that seems to be prepping him for that something even bigger than friendships and hookups.

The majority of the ensuing album finds King embracing that thing called love — the more conventionally romantic kind — in a way seen only in flashes through the duo’s first two albums. “Be the beast, but free what burdens me/ And I’ll love you ‘cause you love me/ All life long, till I’m gone,” he sings on “True Love and a Free Life of Free Will,” an eternal commitment echoed in second-side centerpiece “Morning to Midnight” (“But if you’ll hide me and heal me in your sanctuary/ I’ll stay forever”), statements from a place in too deep to remember what life was like on the outside.

Wild Heart‘s most seemingly inconsequential track, the swirling two-minute interlude “I’m Sorry (For Not Finding You Sooner)” unfolds as the key to maybe the whole album, as King follows the titular apology with the explanation: “I was looking for you all my life.” Of course it’s not literally true, it just feels that way when you’ve found the person that finally allows your entire life to make sense, and you can’t help but look back in frustration on all the time you wasted beforehand.

It’s not just the lyrics that offer a newfound sense of contentedness and spiritual calm, either. The group’s production has flattened significantly from the first two albums, no longer allowing King’s guitars or Prowse’s drums to froth over the top like a beer poured from the tap without caution. The tempos have slowed, too — the title track still blisters and “North East South West” makes you want to grab a hockey stick and rush the ice like the third Sedin twin, but the majority of the album is more early U2 than early Replacements, more open plains than dingy basement. Even the chant-along vocals have chilled, with the howled “OH OH OH OH-OH-OH”s and twenty-two syllable “WOAHHH-AH-OHHH”s from their previous album replaced with Gallagher Bros-like “Yeahhhhhh, yeahhhhhh“s and ghostly “Sha la la la la la“s. The result remains thrilling, but it’s a different kind of excitement — with lower peaks but a wider base, less heart-stopping but also less ephemeral.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3KtKAySDBs

On Celebration Rock, the duo began the album asking themselves “Don’t we have anything to live for?,” answering the question: “Of course we do, but until that comes true — we’re drinking / and we’re still smoking.” Now, on Wild Heart emotional climax “No Known Drink or Drug,” they’re testifying that neither of those titular vices “could ever hold a candle to your love” — not so much an open repudiation of those cheaper early thrills as an unapologetic acknowledgement that they’ve since located a better deal. The considerable power of Near to the Wild Heart of Life is in its explicit presentation of Japandroids as living proof that those who fear the story of their adult lives will end up as one long ellipsis can still have chapters, even entire books to go. True love and a free life of free will can make the nights of wine and roses last forever.

Source: Billboard

http://tunecollective.com/2017/01/28/boys-meet-world-love-finally-finds-japandroids-on-life-affirming-near-to-the-wild-heart-of-life-critics-take/