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thatesqcrush · 4 years ago

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The Nanny, Part 2

Bryan Kneef x Reader. Follow-up to part one here. Warnings: NSFW - smut, oral (male/female receiving), squirting, daddy kink), language. WC 5.3K.

It was early in the morning when you woke up. You stretched, arching your back and elongating your limbs, enjoying the way the expensive sheets felt against your naked body. You winced as you did so, realizing you were sore in the best way. You looked over and realized Bryan was not next to you. You knew he was up early most days as he had to deal with legal business overseas.

You quickly redressed and made way back to the joined apartment, where after your shower, you admired the bruises and marks that decorated your body. As your fingers traced over the love bite on your breast, your mind went back to the events of the night prior. A feeling of nervousness developed in the pit of your belly - you wondered how you would get through the day - would Bryan have regretted it? Would you still have a job? Looking at the time, you realized you didn’t have much time to ponder the what-ifs. Sandrine and Jasper would be up soon and you had to get them ready for the day.

The hustle and bustle of the morning did keep your mind otherwise preoccupied. “Turn around, let me see.” You told Sandrine as you finished doing her hair. Sandrine did so and looked up at you a toothy smile. You gave her a smile in return as you brushed her bangs from out of her eyes.

“Ms. Y/N, did you have a fun Valentine’s Day?” Sandrine asked.

“Ummm, something like that.” You murmured as you leaned to grab a hair bow to clip to her hair. You slid the purple bow and then gave her a once-over. “All set - let's go have some breakfast.”

“Did you kiss any boys?” Sandrine continued to inquire as she followed you into the kitchen. You opened your mouth to reply when you halted in your steps seeing Bryan ahead, pouring coffee.

“Morning sweetheart.” Bryan greeted, his gaze turning toward Sandrine. You tried to move discreetly past the six-year old when Bryan turned to you.

“Morning Y/N.” Bryan winked as he sipped his coffee. He was shirtless once more, and your mind flashed to how you gripped his strong, defined arms as he came inside of you not even 24 hours before.

“Hi Bryan.” You murmured, barely meeting his gaze as you walked over to where he was. Bryan watched you as he leaned against the sink, his arms crossed. You stood on your tip-toes to reach into the cabinet to get a coffee mug.

“Let me get that for you.” Bryan offered, stepping behind you as he placed his own mug down beside you. The feel of Bryan being pressed against you and the scent of his soap caused a shot of arousal to course through you. As a result, your pussy clenched involuntarily around nothing. Bryan’s breath was hot on your neck and you felt your skin prickle. Bryan reached around for his mug once more and leaned against the counter.

“Y/N, after you get back from drop-off, you and I need to talk.” Bryan announced quietly.

You felt your heart drop into your stomach and your cheeks burned. “Um… sure.” You replied, hoping Bryan would not hear the shake in your voice. “No work today?” You asked. “I thought you had to go into the office?”

“Took my calls earlier and two of my cases have continuances. I have the entire day ahead of me.”

Jasper happened to catch the tail-end of the conversation as he placed his empty cereal bowl into the sink.

“Dad, you have the day off? Can we have a movie day?” Jasper asked. Sandrine let out a squeal, hearing her brother.

“Please, daddy, please!” Sandrine begged. “With popcorn and everything!”

Bryan smiled as he leaned over to ruffle Jasper’s hair. “Of course we can - that’s if Y/N would care to join us?”

Your brows furrowed. ‘Maybe I am not getting canned after all.’ you thought to yourself.

“Please Ms. Y/N, please!” Both children pleaded in unison.

You shook yourself out of your thoughts and smiled brightly. “Of course I can! Now, if you’re done, brush teeth and put on shoes - we have to leave in ten minutes.”

As the children ran off, you turned your attention back to Bryan, who was looking at you once more. His face was unreadable and you awkwardly gave him a small wave before following the children to help them finish getting ready.

You rapped on the door quietly, with your knuckles. “Bryan? You wanted to talk with me?” You called out.

You heard Bryan beckon you in and when you opened the door, you found him sitting at his desk. He looked up at you from his laptop and gave you a smile. “Please sit.” He extended his arm to the chair in front of his desk.

Your pulse quickened and your mouth suddenly went dry. You swallowed hard and wiped your now sweaty palms on the tops of your thighs. “So you wanted to talk?”

Bryan nodded. “About last night. It - you - I…” The normally loquacious litigator found himself at a loss for words. He cleared his throat and let out a deep exhalation. “Last night was a lot of fun, but--”

“Oh that’s never a good sign.” You interjected, nervously laughing. Bryan responded with holding a sole finger up and you instantly quieted.

“We cannot let last night happen again.” Bryan continued. “I would be remiss to say I didn’t find you attractive - and really, I should be trying to find someone to replace you as we crossed an inappropriate line. That said, you are really integral to Jasper and Sandrine’s happiness, so I will keep you on unless you want to tender your resignation - which of course, would be understandable.”

You felt your cheeks burn once more and your eyes well up. What were you expecting? A proclamation of love? That he would fall for the nanny? 'This isn’t a Harlequin romance novel.’ you chastised yourself.

You put on a brave smile. “I totally understand. I would be happy to stay on. There is no reason why we cannot go back to a strictly professional relationship.”

Bryan tapped his desk with the top of his hand. “Great. I am so relieved that we are on the same page.”

You nodded and you waited for him to continue. After a beat, Bryan gave you a pointed look and you took the hint to leave. You shut the door behind you as you left and allowed the tears to freely fall. Unbeknownst to you, Bryan had just dropped his head into his hands, defeated.

Time moved forward and the seasons changed. The freezing temperatures of winter in Chicago gave way to the blistering heat of summer. The twins birthday had arrived and turning seven was apparently a much bigger deal than when you turned seven. No expense was spared. Bryan’s home was bustling with children, caterers and party professionals.

The spectacular event (held inside a makeshift circus tent, of course) included a “trapeze” photo op, circus-themed treats like popcorn and candy, an outdoor swing, tons of colorful balloons, a “TICKETS” booth and more. Circus performers were preparing to liven up the party. Topping everything off was a truly lavish multi-tiered birthday cake with miniature versions of the children as acrobats in front of a circus tent.

Bryan had gone to pour himself a glass of water when he caught sight of you through the kitchen window. He swallowed hard as he watched you busy yourself with the children. You had dressed up for the occasion, cosplaying as Anne Wheeler. You wore a lilac sleeveless leotard with a matching short length lilac cape. White shorts were molded to your ass and thighs. Your hair was sprayed bubblegum pink.

Bryan swallowed his drink, desperately hoping the iced cold water would help cool him from the sudden warmth he was feeling. He decided to go outside and distract himself with some of the guests. The sun was beaming bright and hot, nary a cloud in the sky. The sounds of children giggling and shrieking filled the yard space. Bryan couldn’t help but keep you in his line of sight. You had taken off your cape and was now in just the leotard and shorts. As you danced with one of the kids, Bryan couldn’t help but watch your tits bounce. His mind was suddenly brought back to Valentine’s Day and how he got an up close shot of those tits bouncing as he fucked you.

A hand clasped Bryan on the shoulder and he turned, seeing it was the dad of one of Sandrine’s and Jasper’s friends. Another joined, a colleague, with beers in hand. “This is one hell of a party Kneef.” The blond in a teal polo replied - Bryan vaguely recalled his name was Bryce and was opposing counsel on an old case.

“Agreed.” The other man, Derek, replied. His gaze steered to you and he let out a low whistle as you bent over to talk to one of the kids.

“Damn Kneef, your nanny sure is something.” Derek continued. “Tell me, are you fucking her?”

“No!” Bryan denied, a bit more loudly than he intended. Derek looked at him with brows arched. Bryan shook his head. “I - I - I wouldn’t jeopardize her relationship with the twins. They really love her.” Bryan replied. “Good help is hard to come by.”

Bryce snorted before taking a swig of his beer. “If I wasn’t married, I’d be taking her home right now.”

“Hell I’m married, and I am considering taking her home.” Derek chuckled. “Lily’s away on business.”

Bryan stiffened, doing his best to swallow the urge to clock both men. He was filled with a surge of jealousy at the idea of you going off with one of them, who in his mind were just a bunch of douchebags. “Really?” he sneered, turning his attention to Derek. “You’d do that?”

“Oh fuck off Bryan. You’re one to talk. If you didn’t have the kids, this would be something you’d absolutely be doing - hell, you have done it!” Derek replied, rolling his eyes. “How many times have you been caught with your pants down and some bimbo paralegal over your desk?”

Bryan chose to not respond, as the answer was too many times to count. He was the office playboy for a number of years. The only reason he was even kept around as long as he was, was because he brought in a lot of business for the firm.

“Neither one of you are going home with my nanny.” Bryan gritted, taking another swig of his beer. “She’s…a person, not just a piece of ass.”

Both men didn’t reply, instead just looking away. Bryan let out an audible sigh before walking over to another group of friends and colleagues. “Come on, the game should be on and I have some Cubans that need to be smoked.”

At one point the adults and kids changed and it became a pool party. You sipped on a lemonade and watched as Bryan climbed out of the pool. His body was soaking and was more toned than from even the last time you saw him naked. ‘What is he doing? Pull-ups on the scaffolding?’ You wondered as he wrapped a large towel around Sandrine and Jasper.

Your pussy clenched, remembering how you clawed his back desperately as you came all over him repeatedly, with his cock, mouth, and hands. Arousal coursed through you and you let out an irritated sigh, knowing you’d need to rely on your battery operated boyfriend some more if you were going to survive this job.

Hours later, the festivities were over. You and Bryan each carried an exhausted twin and set them in their room, each likely down for the night. You followed Bryan out and shut the door behind you with a gentle click before making way to the kitchen. You found an empty tiered cupcake carrier and began to pack away some of the leftover cupcakes.

“You don’t need to clean up.” Bryan commented as he opened another beer. “I hired a clean up crew for that reason.”

“I don’t mind.” You shrugged, turning to him. Bryan’s gaze fell to your breasts again, and it was apparent you weren’t wearing any bra as he could see the outline of your hardened nipples.

“Idle hands are the devil's workshop.” you continued. Some frosting got on your fingers and you sucked your finger clean, while meeting Bryan’s eyes, which were blown with lust.

“I can find something to do with your hands.” Bryan retorted, stepping towards you and closing the gap. One arm wrapped around your waist while the other brushed some hair out of your face. You gazed at Bryan’s lips, pink, soft and plush and you licked your own lips in anticipation. His mouth began to drop to yours when the sound of a voice clearing caused the two of you to jump back in response.

It was mommy dearest herself, lips pursed in a thin line, arms crossed. “Am I interrupting?”

“Constance.” Bryan greeted coolly, turning away from you. “What are you doing here? Party finished two hours ago.”

“I was hoping that I could be with the kids on their birthdays and give them a present.” Constance replied, her eyes still locked on you. You dropped your head and choked out an ‘excuse me’ before dashing off to your apartment. Bryan watched as your form disappeared before turning back to his ex-wife.

“Connie - we have a custody arrangement in place for a reason. You cannot just show up unannounced.” Bryan gritted as he took the gift bags from her and placed them on the breakfast bar.

“I know, I know.” Constance stated. As she walked towards Bryan, the echoing sound of her heels against the marbled tile filled the room. She clasped her hands together, her bracelets jangling together. “I was just hoping we could make an exception for today, after all I am their mother.”

“You left us. You were never part of their lives. You may be Sandrine’s and Jasper’s mother on paper, but that’s all you are. You are lucky I was considerate enough to entertain the amount of visitation you have in place right now.” Bryan spat.

“Bryan, don’t be like that. I was young, I had a burgeoning model career that got derailed when two pink lines showed up on the test. I have more than made up for it.” Constance argued.

Bryan pinched the bridge of his nose and blew out a deep breath in exasperation, wanting nothing more than for his ex-wife to leave. “Connie, the kids are asleep. Please just go - you have the kids next weekend. I’ll make sure they get your gifts.”

“Fine.” Constance looked at Bryan, her brow arched perfectly in judgment. “Before I go, just tell me since when did you start fucking the help?”

Bryan spat out his beer. “What you saw--”

“Please, I am not an idiot. Just wait til I let my lawyer know.” Connie threatened.

Bryan’s blood pressure shot through the roof. A fresh swell of rage rose inside. He clenched his fists, his guts churning in turmoil.

“Don’t you fucking threaten me. Get the fuck out.” Bryan growled. And when Constance didn’t move, he burst in anger. “Now! Go home Connie!”

***

You watched from your window as Constance climbed into her Mercedes and drove off. You climbed into your bed and stared at the ceiling as you contemplated everything from the last few months. ‘What were you doing? Sleeping with your boss - then the near kiss! You are such an idiot! How did you think that was going to end?’

‘But there is something more’ the voice in your head said. 'Isn’t there?’ that same voice continued. ‘Or were you both just so good at pretending it was real?’

There was a knock on your door and you shuffled your way to the door. The knocking continued followed by the sound of Bryan’s voice.

When you opened the door, the sight of Bryan standing there, kicked your libido up fifteen or so notches. His form was stiff, with set shoulders.

“Hey.” You greeted, stepping aside. “Come in.” There was already an awkward tension and the two of you hadn’t even spoken yet. You took a deep breath as you shut the door and followed him into the living room.

“Can I get you anything?” You asked nervously. “I can make some co--”

“Why’d you run out?” Bryan asked, interrupting you. His expression had hardened.

Looking away, you sighed before sitting down. Your shoulders sagged and you rubbed your face, smearing some of the glitter on your face. “It was awkward! We said we weren’t going to do anything… and then it felt like we were. And then of all people to show up, it was your ex-wife! What else was I supposed to do?”

“Not run out.” Bryan gritted. “We could have talked about this.”

“Well isn’t that what we’re doing now?” You asked, crossing your arms. You hadn’t changed and you were still in cosplay. Your breasts were pushed up under your arms and Bryan felt his cock twitch in his pants. Bryan looked around your apartment for something to distract him and his eyes settled on a picture of you and the twins at the park. He let out his own deep breath.

“You don’t need to worry about Constance. She’s just bitter - she is the type of person who shouldn’t have become a parent.” Bryan replied, taking a seat next to you. He cocked his head. “Admittedly, I was that type too.”

You turned to Bryan. “What do you mean?”

“I won’t sugarcoat it; I had more than my fair share of partners. I met Constance at a rough time in my life and she helped settle me down. We did the whole wedding thing and she got pregnant. After the kids were born, she just had a hard time giving up her old life - it was probably some kind of post-partum thing but I was too busy prioritizing my work otherwise to notice the signs. One day she was just gone. Left me a ‘dear John’ letter and that was that.” Bryan explained.

“But the kids see her. How did that happen?” You inquired.

“She showed up around when they were older. Showed interest. Wanted to make amends. For the sake of the kids, we negotiated visitation. I have primary custody and there’s a schedule. She wasn’t supposed to come today.”

Bryan continued, now pacing the length of the room. “I was cut off guard when I saw her. With her, I always feel like another shoe is about to drop.”

You walked in front of him, pausing him in mid-stride. “Oh Bryan.” You wrapped your arms around his neck and looked up at him. Bryan watched as you licked your lips and as he saw the pink of your tongue dart out, he had made his decision. He leaned down to kiss you and you met him the rest of the way. You sighed into the kiss, molding into the heat of his embrace. You felt him harden against your belly and you dropped your hand to rub him gently through his pants.

“I thought we wouldn’t do this again. The rules.” You panted in between kisses.

Bryan broke the kiss. “Fuck the rules. Let me make sure the cleaning crew is done and then we’ll pick up where we left off.” His voice was gravelly, the tone lustful.

“Sounds like a plan.” You agreed; a shiver went up your spine and your heart quickened in anticipation of what was to come. “I’ll freshen up and meet you there.”

You let out a moan as Bryan’s lips found purchase on your neck. His hands cupped your tits from behind, squeezing your flesh. You pushed your hair to the side to allow him greater access. A hand slipped down in front of the leotard you wearing. “No bra? Naughty girl.” He murmured as his thumb and forefinger tugged and rolled your nipple, until it was at attention. You turned around and cupped his face, tugging on his beard as you drew him in for another kiss. His tongue pressed at the seam of your lips, requesting access and you opened your mouth in response. His tongue slid into your mouth, exploring and rolling against yours. Bryan’s hands cupped your ass, squeezing them through your shorts.

Bryan broke the kiss. “You in those tiny shorts - all I wanted to do was haul you off and fuck you.”

“You should have.” You purred as you took his arms and led him to the bed. “And then you could have told the guys that you had filled me up and that my panties were dripping with your load.” You nipped his ear, causing Bryan to growl.

“You knew we were talking about you?” His green eyes were blown with lust and searched yours.

“Of course, I did. I have eyes you know.” You rolled your eyes. “I saw how you were all staring.”

“But now we can make up for lost time.” Bryan remarked, kissing you once more. You smiled against his kiss as you dropped his hands and walked a few steps ahead. You made a big show of removing your clothes. “See, no panties either.” You shimmied the leotard down your hips and thighs letting the material pool around your feet.

Bryan’s eyes darkened with lust as he watched you and made his own removal of his clothes. His cock sprang to attention as he pulled down his boxers and without a word exchanged, you dropped to your knees. You took the hair elastic that was around your wrist and you scooped your still-very pink hair into a ponytail.

Bryan’s cock was painfully hard and aching, with a bead of pre-cum weeping from the head. Bryan chuckled darkly and gripped his cock, pumping it a few times before dragging it back and forth along your lips. “You want this?” He asked, as he now tapped it on your face.

You looked up at Bryan and opened your mouth wide, extending your tongue over your bottom lip. Bryan let out another chuckle as he fed you his cock. “That’s it, take daddy’s cock.”

You relaxed your throat as Bryan continued to press his cock into your mouth. Once he had hit the back of your throat, he holds you in place, causing you to gag, and spit to start dripping from your mouth. He released himself and before you could get another deep inhalation of air, he slammed his cock into your mouth all the way again. He again held you in place and your eyes began to water as you gagged; more saliva dripped over your chin and onto the floor. Bryan withdrew again and this time you used your hand to pump him. You gathered some saliva and spit on his cock for lubrication. You gave him a few more pumps and then you took his length into your mouth once more.

Bryan threw his head back as you closed your mouth around him, using your tongue to go over every ridge and vein. The weight of his thick cock against your tongue caused your pussy to ache with need. Bryan focused his gaze back on you, watching as his length disappeared in and out of your mouth.

Bryan grunted and groaned, moaning your name in encouragement as you worshipped his cock. You flattened your tongue and ran it along his length before sucking on the sensitive crown, flicking your tongue against the tip. Bryan reached for your ponytail and wrapped your hair in his grip, guiding you along again. You let him set the pace and soon he was fucking your throat, the only sounds in the room being wet, slurping sounds and the obscene moans you were making from around his cock.

“Fucking love your mouth but I love coming in that pussy more.” Bryan grunted. You let out a whine and Bryan removed himself from your mouth. With your hair still gripped in his hand, he tilted your head up. “Is that what my girl wants?”

You nodded, desperately. “Yes daddy, come in my pussy! Please.”

Bryan helped you rise to your feet. He gripped your chin, and took in the sight of you. Chin messy with saliva, streaks of mascara down your cheeks. His cock twitched once more - you never looked more beautiful. “Bed - now. I want to feast on that pussy.”

You turned to climb onto the bed and Bryan gave you a smack on your ass, causing you to squeal. You flopped onto your back and spread your legs wide. Reaching down with your hand, you spread your folds apart, giving Bryan an ample look at your arousal.

“Have I told you that you have such a pretty pussy?” Bryan murmured against your skin. He used his fingers to spread your lips more, revealing your flesh. He stroked your pussy teasingly, gathering your arousal on his fingertips but never sinking them into where you wanted it most. As he continued to stroke your lips, he pressed kisses along your inner thighs. You reveled in the feel of his wiry beard along your skin. You recalled how Bryan liked a bare pussy and you were happy to endure repeated Brazilians in hopes of anything would come about in the future... and now it had.

His breath was hot on your aching cunt. You cried out as he wrecked your pussy with his tongue, burying his face inside of you, sucking and licking and devouring your slick folds.. To Bryan you were like a juicy peach, with your arousal dripping into his mouth. You were delicious and he couldn’t get enough of you. He licked you with big, broad strokes, before targeting your swollen, sensitive clit, taking it between his lips, trapping it so he could torment it with his tongue, scraping just slightly with his teeth. He reached up to grab at your tits, his large hand gripping one tightly. You cried out from the sensation of how his tongue massaged your clit furiously before dipping inside you, mimicking what was to come.

You ground against his mouth, riding against his face, as pleasure coursed through you. Bryan lifted his mouth from you and you whined at the loss. It was short lived, as he sucked two of his fingers and then slid them into your tight cunt, knuckles deep. As he massaged your walls with his fingers, he used his free hand to rub your clit.

“Gonna come for me Y/N? Gonna make a mess for daddy?” Bryan rasped as he curled his fingers, pumping them into you faster.

“Yes, fuck, yes!” You cried out, throwing your head back. Your thighs began to shake and Bryan began to rub your clitoris roughly and haphazardly. You shouted Bryan’s name as you clenched around his fingers, squirting and soaking him in the process. You began to push away from him, overstimulated but Bryan threw his large arm over you, keeping you in place.

“Oh no, no.” Bryan darkly commanded. “Daddy wants more.” He slipped his fingers back into, this time, adding one more into your fluttering cunt and began jackhammering them. He rubbed your clitoris roughly again, the squelching wet sounds filled up the room. You cried out again, feeling the pressure inside you burst, as you squirted again. Bryan lapped you, cleaning you with his tongue, enjoying your flavor.

You barely had a chance to recover, as Bryan slid his body over yours and slid his cock easily into you. You groaned as he filled you, the slight burn sensation mixing with pleasure as you accommodated his girth. He gripped your wrists and placed your arms overhead.

“Hold onto the rails sweetheart.” You looked back and gripped the wrought iron rails, which elongated the length of your body. Bryan covered your mouth with his as he began to drive into you with long, deep strokes. He pounded into you, and you could feel his balls slap against your pussy.

“Yes, oh fuck, yes, yes, fuck me!” You cried out. Bryan leaned up, so he was sitting on his haunches and took both your legs and hooked them over his shoulder. Bryan continued to thrust into you and you let out a wrecked moan as the angle changed, causing his cock to hit your sensitive spot. A sheen of sweat coated both of your bodies as you fucked each other. You released your grips on the rails and began to play to play with your tits, pushing them together and tugging on your nipples.

“Yes…” Bryan grunted. “Play with those titties.”

You moaned, and continued to do so, encouraged by his words. Bryan slowed his thrusting, rotating his hips, teasing you. You let out a choked sob as he did so, and he reached down to rub your clit. “Come for me.” Your legs trembled as you felt yet another orgasm begin to build.

“Oh fuck daddy, oh yes!” You cried out, squeezing your eyes shut as you began to tighten around his cock. Bryan paused his movements and withdrew, tapping his cock against your clit furiously. A gush of your come squirted out, covering him and soaking the bed below. You had barely caught your breath when Bryan pulled you up and flopped you onto your stomach. You looked up at him, meeting his eyes as you took his length into your mouth again, bobbing on him enthusiastically. You could taste yourself on his cock.

“My dirty slut.” Bryan cooed, as he stroked your now sweaty hair. He wrapped some of it in his fist, guiding you along. You squealed as he reached over and began to lay spanks on your ass.

You released him from your mouth, gasping more. “Yes, daddy, spank me. I have been such a bad girl.”

“Bad girls get punished.” Bryan growled. You looked up at him and nodded eagerly.

“Mmmm, punish me daddy!”

He pulled you up roughly and crushed his mouth against yours - the kiss was all teeth and tongue. He broke the kiss and lightly smacked you on the face and then gripped your chin.

“Is that what daddy's girl wants? To be punished for being such a dirty fucking slut?”

You nodded again. “Yes. Please.” You begged desperately. Bryan repeated the slap and then reached down to grab your tits before also slapping them. You let out a whimper, as the pain mixed with pleasure. You wrapped your arms around him and pulled him back down onto the bed. He rolled so you were on top. You leaned forward, rising slightly and reached down for his cock, lining it up along with your entrance.

You both groaned at the sensation. Bryan’s grip on your hips were tight and you were certain there would be marks on your hips in the morning. The room smelled of sex and sweat and the only sound were moans and groans as well as the sound of skin slapping on skin.

You wanted one more - just one more to lessen the ache that only Bryan seemed to create. You reached down and rubbed your clit, closing your eyes as you let this final orgasm crash over you. You slumped forward, dropping your head by his ear as Bryan planted his feet up onto the bed and hammered into you, now chasing his own release. You mewled and whimpered in his ear, begging sweetly for his cum. Bryan stifferned, gripping your hips tightly as he let out an animalistic groan as he spilled his release into you. His release dripped out of you, pooling where you were connected.

You both stayed there for awhile, catching your breaths. Bryan stroked your back as you nuzzled against him. Finally, you rolled off of Bryan and curled into him, stroking his chest hair.

“You certainly know how to keep me young.” Bryan murmured, causing you to laugh. Bryan rolled onto his side, turning to face you. He pushed back the hair from your face. He observed a pink strand. “I like it - you should keep it.”

You smiled. “We’ll see.” Bryan hummed and pulled you to him, where you both fell asleep from the little party you had with one another.

FIN.

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lorirwritesfanfic · 3 years ago

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A Promise - Part 2: The Trouble With Growing Up

Author's note: I‘ve been daydreaming about this story for way too long and it was time to write it again. What are the odds that I managed to post it on the birthday of the wonderful person who requested it? ...😏😁 Happy birthday, @missameliep! ❤ I hope you like this part (despite the angst 🙈) [Leading characters are owned by Pixelberry Studios and original characters are creations of the author]

Book: Desire & Decorum (modern day AU) Pairing: Prince Hamid x MC (Daphne) Rating: M Word count: 5073 Reading time: ~20min Summary: On her way to meet Hamid before his wedding ceremony, Daphne finds herself remembering of her own mistakes. Based on the prompts: AUgust 2020 - Childhood friends AU + Arranged Marriage AU / 1000 Times

Warning: This piece contains adult material (bullying, description of side effects of mixing alcohol and ecstasy) that may be disturbing/offensive for some people. Reader discretion is advised.

Istanbul, August, 2020

Car honks and shouts from different directions filled the air as the rain poured down the streets, making the traffic heavier than usual. Inside the taxi, Daphne looked out the window absentmindedly. It's been a couple years since her last visit to İstanbul and as much as the city changed, she barely paid attention to it. Her mind was somewhere else.

London 2007

Daphne stepped out of her father's car and walked towards the entrance of her house in silence. Right behind her, Vincent followed his daughter in hopes to figure out what made her change her mind about staying with him for the weekend. Unfortunately, the Earl of Edgewater had a hard time understanding his young girl sometimes.

She was about to press the doorbell when her father placed a hand on her shoulder.

"Sweetheart, are you sure nothing happened when I was away?"

The young girl frowned at the tone in her father's voice. She knew how much he had tried to make her feel welcomed in his home. Alas, he was never the problem.

She turned to him, giving him a genuine smile despite her sadness. "Yes, dad. I'm sure. But..." She trailed off, biting her lip in worry.

"You miss your mother."

The girl nodded.

"Okay," he said, caressing her cheek softly.

Daphne turned back to the door, pressed the bell and waited. It didn't take long for the door to be opened. The young girl rushed to her mother's arms as soon as she spotted her.

"Mama..." The girl sobbed, burying her face on her mother's soft night robe.

"It's all right, darling," Mary cooed, kissing the top of her daughter's head. "Say goodnight to your father and go upstairs."

The young girl pulled away from her mother and turned around to hug her father. "Goodnight, Dad."

"Goodnight, dear."

"I'm sorry..."

"It's okay, my dear. Sleep well."

Once Daphne disappeared from view, Vincent spoke up. "My apologies for waking you up in the middle of the night. She couldn’t sleep and kept calling you. I didn't know what to do."

"Don't worry about it. She can be a handful sometimes."

"Mary, I—" His brows furrowed as he searched for the words. "I was wondering if you could help me with something."

"If you think I can help, sure. What is it?"

"I'm trying to get closer to her, but every time I think we made progress, the next moment it feels like we didn't. It's been four years. What else do I have to do to be worthy of her love?"

Mary took a moment to steady herself. She had no doubts he was a wonderful person. But to see him so eager to earn Daphne's affection reminded her of the man she fell in love with.

"Vincent, if you think she doesn't love you, you're sorely mistaken. But she's not as outgoing and loquacious as your son. Sometimes she keeps her feelings to herself because she needs time to understand them."

"Oh..." He nodded in understanding. "What do I do then?"

"Be patient. She'll come to you when she's ready."

"I'll try."

Mary couldn't help but smile. It was sweet of him to try, yet she knew he'd struggle to succeed. After all, impatience was one of the many traits their daughter took after him.

"Have a goodnight, Vincent."

"Goodnight, Mary," he replied and returned to his car once she closed the door.

As time passed by, the young girl's gloomy behaviour didn't change. If anything, her mood got worse at each passing day. Soon, her parents and friends began to worry.

"Daphne?" She opened the door to her daughter's room and frowned as she spotted the young girl curled up on the window sill staring blankly at the sky. "Your father called again. He wants to know if you're still joining him and the boys on the trip to Edgewater."

"Okay..."

"Is that a yes?"

The girl gave her shoulders.

Mary inhaled sharply. "Daphne, you don't have to go. But you need to tell me so I can understand what's going on."

"There's nothing to tell, mum."

Yet, the dull tone in Daphne's voice told her otherwise. Fortunately, she knew just exactly what to do.

"We have a guest today and I prepared biscuits. Do you want to go downstairs and join him?"

"Whatever..."

"That was mean..." A young male voice commented. Disappointment was clear in his tone.

Her eyes widened as she immediately recognized the voice.

"I'm sorry, dear. I think she's not in the mood to see anyone again," Mary said, closing the door to Daphne's bedroom.

Again?! He was here before?! Her brows knitted together in a frown.

"Okay..." The voice replied.

Everything went quiet for a moment. But as she heard steps, Daphne rushed to the door and opened it. "Wait!" She yelled.

To her surprise, she found her mother grinning whilst her friend leaned against the wall nonchalantly.

"Impressive!" Mary praised.

"Thanks, Mrs. Wang."

"Have you thought about joining the theater at school, Hamid?"

"I haven't. But if a talented actress like yourself thinks I should, I'll add it to my list of options of clubs to join next year," he answered.

"Well, aren't you a charmer?" Mary chuckled. "I'll be downstairs if you need me."

"Okay." He then turned to his friend. "Hey, stranger," Hamid greeted her with his trademark smile that seemed to get more mesmerizing as the boy grew older.

"You played me!" Daphne gasped.

"I had to. You didn't show up at school, you’re taking forever to text me back, you cancelled movie night on Sunday, you didn't open the door yesterday... Should I go on?"

Daphne shook her head, avoiding his gaze. "Sorry..."

"What happened to you?"

"Nothing..."

"Liar..." He murmured.

"Hey!"

"You are. You said to Briar you were sick and you're not. You're lying to me right now. Why?"

"It isn't like that, Hamid. I just..." Daphne looked down at her hands. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay. Then we will not talk on the way to Ernest's house."

"What? You're not mad?"

"I'll save that for later because right now we're going to have a Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero competition and you're my partner. Mrs. Wang already gave you permission, so hurry up."

"I don't know, Hamid..."

"Daph, look at me," he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. "You don't have to talk about whatever happened this weekend at your dad's. I just need you there with me."

She eyed him confused. "How do you know it's about my dad?"

"Wild guess..." He shrugged.

"But how do you know it?"

"Because you always get upset when you visit him."

The girl chewed on her bottom lip. She didn't want anyone to think her father was the reason why she was upset. She was happy to be close to him. The problem was everyone else.

"I mean it. You don't need to talk about anything if you don't want to. But I miss my best friend," he said with an encouraging smile.

"I thought Yusuf was your best friend..."

"I have two best friends. You're my best girl friend."

"Girlfriend?" She eyed him in confusion.

"As in two separate words, Daph. You're a girl and my best friend," he corrected.

"Oh!" Now it makes sense.

"Anyway, you'd better go grab your coat. They're going to start in fifteen minutes, there are gelatos at stake and only you can beat Ann on Through the Fire and Flames solo."

The girl chuckled and went back to her room to change clothes and join her friends.

Hours flew by whilst the group of kids played video games and junk food. Laughter and occasional spats could be heard by anyone who passed by Mr. Sinclaire's townhouse. But given how loud the kids were, the Master of Ledford Park was obviously not at home. Fortunately, whenever he finds out about his son's little gathering, it'd be old news that his wife would make sure smooth things over.

Unluckily, the fun afternoon grew a little tense when Daphne's half brother arrived. Much like his mother, Harry was often rude to his older sister and always found a way to make it clear she was an intruder in his family.

"Ah, damnit..." Briar mumbled as she watched Daphne and Hamid finish the song of the round with perfect score.

"Briar!" Annabelle chided.

"I told you not to say it out loud," Edmund mumbled.

"But I am frustrated!" Briar nagged.

"It's all right. Briar is a sore loser," Daphne teased and grinned as her friend responded by sticking her tongue out.

"Cheater..." Harry grumbled.

Daphne's head whipped towards her half brother's direction. "What did you just say?"

"I said you're a bloody cheater because it’s what you always do. You cheat!" The boy sneered.

"You're talking gibberish, Foredale. Settle down," Hamid said, in an attempt to end the argument.

"Oh, excuse me. Are you talking to me or to her?" Harry stood up, lips twisted in a scowl. "Because this bastard cheated her way to my home and stole not just my father, but my name too."

Gasps spread through the room as Harry glowed at his sister, whose face reddened as anger pumped through her veins.

"Mate, don't." Edmund warned.

"Am I wrong?! She and her mother are ruining our family!"

"Harry, stop it!" Annabelle chastised.

Daphne could feel herself being pushed to the limit. She heard those offences more than once, but tried to hold back at school or her father's house to avoid getting in trouble. But this was a neutral ground and Harry had gone too far. "You take that back!"

"Take it back?" He sniggered in a way that reminded her so much of the countess.

"Harry, you'd better stop insulting Daphne right now or you can see yourself out of my house," Ernest warned.

"If he doesn't, you don't have to call security. I'll kick him out myself." Hamid glared at Harry.

"Why are you all defending her?!" Harry shouted.

"Harry, stop it right now!" Briar yelled.

"You know what? I don't care!" The boy spat and turned to Daphne once again. "Your mother is a homewrecker and you're a bloody cheater. Do I have to say it louder, you little bastard?"

With her features clouded by rage, Daphne stomped into Harry's direction with her hands balled into fists only to be held back by Hamid. "Shut the fuck up, you dickhead!"

Whilst Briar and Annabelle stared aghast at Daphne fighting against Hamid's firm grip, Harry was about to raise his hand when Ernest and Edmund stopped him. To prevent things from getting worse, Hamid carried the furious young girl out of the house, making sure to cover her mouth in case she had more bad words to say.

Once they arrived in the backyard, Hamid sat Daphne down on a patio chair and glared at his friend. "Are you mad?! You can't drop F-bombs like that just because there are no parents around. What if the staff heard you?"

The girl didn't say anything or look him in the eye. Instead, she simply bit down her lip and fiddled with the buttons of her coat.

"Daphne?"

Worried that he could have been a little too harsh, he crouched down to look at her and spotted the tears rolling down her cheeks. Without a second thought, he sat beside her and wrapped her in a tight hug.

Hot tears ran down her face. Tears she had been holding since Saturday night, when she was at her father's townhouse. But she couldn't control them anymore. So she just hid her face on her friend's chest and cried.

"I'm sorry..." He whispered.

"Why? It's not your fault that my brother is an arsehole."

"Daph..."

She pulled away from his embrace and scowled. "Don't look at me like that. I've seen you say a lot worse when you're watching football matches."

A small chuckle escaped his lips. "I'm not judging..." His smile quickly faded as images of what happened earlier came to view. "This fight with Harry... He's the one who upsets you when you visit Lord Vincent, isn't he?"

"Yeah…” She sniffed. “But he's not the only one."

Hamid clenched his fists. He only had the misfortune of meeting Countess Henrietta a couple of times, but it was obvious to him how much she disliked Daphne. The young girl disrupted the image gentry folk had of the Foredales and she could be a threat to the countess Henrietta's sons. "Harry is a spoiled brat. We just tolerate him because of Edmund."

"But he still is my brother. I always wanted a sibling and the only one I have hates me."

"You don't know if he really hates you. For all we know, he's just repeating what the countess says. You have all the reasons to have to hate him and you don't. Why would he hate you?"

The young girl gave her shoulders. "I don't know... But I know I don't want to spend the entire summer with him."

"And you don't have to."

"But dad wants me to go to Edgewater with them. What should I tell him?"

"The truth."

"I can't!"

"Daphne, your dad has to know why you don't feel comfortable staying in his house."

"But what if he gets mad at Harry? Or his mom?"

"That's their problem. Besides, he's going to find out about the fight anyway."

Daphne's eyes widened. "Oh my god, it's true! Bollocks..."

The boy failed to suppress a laugh.

"What? Oh..." She covered her mouth with both hands.

"It's fine. You know I won't tell."

The girl nodded and rested her head on her friend's shoulder.

"I just wish I could've protected you from all of this mess..." He sighed.

"You can't protect me from everything, Hamidciğim."

He draped an arm over her shoulder, pulling her close once again. "But it doesn't mean I won't keep trying."

Istanbul, August, 2020

Daphne was pulled out of her reverie by her body suddenly being pushed forward and held back by the seat belt followed by a loud honk. The taxi driver began to yell in Turkish and gesticulate things to the other cars then glanced at her through the rear view mirror.

"I'm sorry for my language, miss. These Sunday drivers never learn..." He shook his head and twisted his lips in a sneer.

"It's all right, sir."

For a moment, she was thankful Hamid told her to fasten her seat belt at all times whenever she’s in Turkey. He did try to protect her as much as he could from anything that could potentially hurt her. Yet, he was never so good at stopping her from hurting herself.

London, 2016

Daphne's fingers slowly hovered the keys of Lady Dominique's grand piano as Chopin's Prelude in E minor came to an end. Applause erupted in the room. But given how the professional musicians playing since the beginning of the night didn't earn the same attention from the guests, she knew most of those praises were insincere. Still, she looked at the crowd applauding her and bowed her head.

The young viscountess walked around the lounge unamused. The reception was anything but a party most teenagers would expect to host. Instead of a pub crowded with people her age flashing their brand new IDs to get wasted, dance or make out in dark corners, Daphne was surrounded by British politicians, nobility and gentry folk at her father's opulent lounge. Obviously, this wasn't her idea of a party to celebrate her graduation. Or her father's. But at some point in her life, she stopped butting heads with her grandmother. It was easier to simply smile and concede.

After making her rounds to mingle with the guests, Daphne excused herself for a moment and stepped outside. Sitting down on the patio chair, she looked out at the dark moonless sky embellished by the stars. Spring night breeze softly ruffled some locks of her hair when her back and shoulders were covered by a large coat that smelled just as good as its owner.

"I knew you'd be here," Hamid said as he sat down next to her and handed her a champagne flute. "Congratulations, canım¹."

"Thank you."

They clinked glasses and took a sip of the light gold bubbly drink.

"I didn't expect you to be here tonight," she began.

"Why?"

"You're a Cambridge student now. I thought you'd be at a nightclub with your girlfriend and uni friends."

"I still prefer the company of my best girl friend."

"I don't think your girlfriend would approve what you just said," she hinted.

"Fortunately, I no longer have to worry about that," he said before taking a long sip of his champagne.

"Did you break up with Ida?"

"No. She broke up with me."

"What happened?"

"What always happens... " He sighed.

"Hamidciğim, a relationship will only last if you open up to your partner."

"I'm aware of it. But I'll only do it when I'm in a relationship with someone I truly love."

Daphne turned to him, studying his features. "That was the problem, wasn't it?"

He nodded in silence.

"Aw..." Daphne intertwined her arm with his. "Someday you'll find a girl worthy of your love. And she'll be the luckiest person ever."

He smiled ruefully, avoiding her gaze for a second. "Enough about me. This is your night, viscountess. What are your plans for the summer?"

"I don't know..."

"You don't know?" He stared at her confusion. "This is your last summer before you get overwhelmed by textbooks, deadlines, posh fabrics and creepy mannequins at Central Saint Martins. We have to think of something."

"Not all mannequins aren't creepy."

"So was it just the ones in your old bedroom?" He teased.

She elbowed him playfully, making him laugh. As they grew quiet, she began to speak. "I thought about going on that trip I told you about the last time you were here."

"The one where you'd visit the cities and opera houses your mother sang in Europe? That's fantastic!"

Her lips curled upwards. He obviously would love that idea. He was the impulsive one of all her friends. It was one of the many things she adored about him. "I just wanted to do something fun with no worries about etiquette and tabloids." Her smile weakened as she continued. "But it was cooler in my head when Annabelle and Briar were coming with me..."

"They bailed on you?"

"Ann got an opportunity to take a summer course in Sussex and Briar will stay here to help Mrs. Daly at the bakery."

"Oh..." He went silent for a brief moment then spoke again. "I can go with you."

"It's all right. You don't have to... It was a silly idea..."

"No, it isn't. I know how important this trip is to you and I'd love to be there with you."

Her heart fluttered at the idea. Ever since her mother passed away, traveling to visit the seven cities Mary sang in her years as an opera singer was Daphne's biggest dream. The thought of having her favourite person beside would make this journey even better. Alas, Hamid has always been a popular guy. He certainly had other plans and chances were neither of them included her.

"Hamidciğim, it's okay. Really. I know you must have other plans. Besides, I was going to ask for a refund or reschedule anyway."

He immediately made a disgusted face in response. "That's a preposterous idea! You're so not doing that."

"Hamid, I don't want to impose..."

"You say it as if it'd be such a burden to travel across the best cities in Europe with you. We're going, Daphne. Accept it," he said with a playful grin. "Now stop with this nonsense and help me get my train tickets."

Daphne agreed with a smile watching her friend produce his mobile from his coat to buy the train tickets.

...

Amsterdam, 2016

It was quarter to three in the morning when the taxi rolled to a stop in front of the Ambassade Hotel. Daphne, however, barely noticed anything that happened during most of the night after the "new friend" Hamid made at lunch insisted they should try a pink heart shaped pill at the nightclub. Of all the many impulsive and silly acts she could choose to make whilst traveling abroad, getting high as a kite was the dumbest one.

"Daphne?"

Struggling to open her eyes, she shifted on the backseat.

"Daphne, wake up. We're here."

"Mmm?" Her eyes fluttered open, she smiled. Somehow, in the dimly lit backseat of a car and with her foggy vision, she could see him clearly. And he looked as handsome as ever. "Hi..."

"Welcome back, canım. Are you okay?"

"Yes..." Her grin went wider and she slid closer to him, rubbing her face on his chest in a cat-like way.

"Uh... Okay..." Caught by surprise, he failed to hide a smile, but proceeded to hand his credit card to the driver. "Here you go, sir."

"Oooooh! Platinum card!" She enthused. "You're so posh, Hamidciğim!"

"So are you. You paid for the drinks tonight, remember? Thank you," he said once he received his card back.

"Oh, that's right! I have one of those too!"

"Yes, we're indeed very posh and fortunate. Now let's get you out of here." He then climbed out of the car and helped her get out.

"Bye, mister driver!" Daphne waved.

With one of her arms around his shoulder and supporting her by the waist, Hamid brushed the loose strands of her face, tucking them behind her ear. His brows knitted together as he gazed at her in worry. "How are you feeling?"

"Sweaty, tired…” She squinted her eyes, trying to focus. “You look blurry..."

"It'll get better. How about nausea? Chills? Hallucinations? Do you feel like you're going to faint?"

"No… I'm fine, Hamidciğim, you don't have to—" But as she took a few steps forward, her legs weakened. Still, she never hit the ground. Holding her close to his body, Hamid's arms wrapped around her legs and back and hoisted her up, carrying her into the hotel.

"You're so strong..."

"Did you realise it just now?" He asked once they stopped before the elevator.

"Nah..." She said as she pressed the button to call the elevator. "Everyone in school knows you're strong. The highlight of the day was when you took off your shirt after a match. All the girls and some of the guys swooned every time you did it."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah. Everyone missed those moments."

He stepped into the elevator, still carrying her.

"Daphne?"

"Mmm..."

"Press the button to the floor where our suites are. My hands are kinda busy here."

"Oh!" She giggled. "Sorry..." She looked at the elevator control panel as her brows furrowed as she tried to remember the right floor.

"It's the eleventh floor, Daph."

"I knew that..." she scoffed.

For some reason, he chose not to make a joke about it. Instead, he changed back to the previous subject.

"Daphne?"

"Yeah?"

"Did you miss seeing me shirtless as well?"

"No." She made a face, offended by the idea of her objectifying him the way the entire school did. "I miss all of you."

His forehead creased in surprise.

"You are incredibly handsome. But the most beautiful part of you is on the inside," she explained, poking his chest with her index finger.

"Why thank you."

"Don't mention it..." She said between yawns, resting her head on his shoulder. "You changed your cologne."

"I did. This is the one I use at night now."

"I like it... It's so you."

"Really?"

"Yeah..." She replied, using the hand resting on his neck to caress his hair. "Do you remember that expensive wine we stole from Edgewater cellar four years ago?"

Goosebumps spread along his skin at the gentle touch, but he still seemed impassive. "Yes. What about it?"

"You smell like that wine..." She paused for a moment, thinking of the words as her fingers continued to idly caress the back of his head. "Sweet, strong, enticing..."

He didn't say a word, but it was obvious that he looked surprised by her compliment.

Just then the elevator doors opened and they stepped out of it, walking towards Daphne's suite.

"I still prefer the smell of your aftershave though."

"Do you?"

She nodded. "It smells like summer mornings on the beach. Fresh, warm, invigorating..."

"I didn't know that..."

"Now you do."

Once they stopped by her door, he put her down, but still held her. "Can you find your key card on your own?"

"Huh?"

"The card that opens the door, Daphne."

"Oh..." She opened her clutch bag and fished out her ID and three different cards, including the one that opened the door to her suite. "It's one of those, isn't it?"

He pressed his lips together, fighting back a grin. "Yes. This one." He pulled the key card from her hand and placed it inside the lock. "You can put the other ones back in your purse."

"Okay..."

Hamid leaned her against the wall and released her for a moment to open the door only to see her sliding down. "Allah kahretsin²..." He mumbled as he bent down to help her.

"I'm sorry..."

"It's not your fault. It's mine. It's all my fault..." He said as he picked her up from the floor and carried her inside.

Once they were finally inside the suite, he sat her on the bed and went to the bathroom. When he returned, he had a glass of water and her toiletry bag in his hands. "Drink."

She obeyed without questioning.

"What do you use to remove makeup?"

"Makeup wipes and a cream..." She said, placing the glass on the nightstand. "It's that package." She pointed to the product and reached for the makeup remover cream. "Thank you. Now turn away."

"Excuse me?"

"Turn away."

"Why?"

"Because I look ugly when I remove my makeup. I don't want you to see it."

His lips curled up. "I highly doubt you'd ever look ugly."

"You're saying it because you haven't seen it."

He chortled. "Okay." He then turned away and waited.

"Hamid?"

"Yes?"

"Why did you say it was all your fault?"

"Because it is. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't have met Amani, went to that dodgy nightclub, drank that much, had a Molly..."

"No, it wasn't. I told you to get her number. I told you to go out with her. You didn't want to leave me here, so you had to take me with you so I wouldn't feel alone."

"I didn't have to. I only went out because you agreed to go out too. By the way, I'm pretty sure Amani wanted both of us."

"She did?" She stared at him unsure of what he was talking about, but as he gave her a knowing look, she understood. "Oooh... Really?"

"Yep."

"Okay..." She giggled. "She would be very disappointed though. I mean, what could a bloody virgin like me do that would please a runway model and Cambridge's hottest bloke?"

"I'm not even going to comment on that..."

"Of course you won't. You're too much of a good friend and a gentleman to admit you wanted to bring me back here then go back to end the night with her."

"I..." His brows furrowed, as though he was truly struggling to understand her. "No. What I meant is that we could've stayed here. Or just went out somewhere else," he insisted.

"But you wanted her. And it's fine! I get it. I was the stupid one who took a Molly in hopes that my best friend would want me more than he obviously wanted that insanely gorgeous girl."

"What?!" He turned back to face her.

"Don't look at me!" She snapped.

Startled by her tone, he faced away from her again. "Why would you think I don't want you?"

"Because you don't. You always date these tall and beautiful Muslim girls, who also happen to be way more fun, successful and mature than I am."

"Daphne, I—"

"Save it, Hamid. I don't need your pity or excuses. I know it's not going to happen. You're off limits," she spat.

He turned back to look at her once again. "What are you talking about?"

"I have to wash my face."

"No, you have to answer my question first."

"No, I don't!" She tried to stand up, but once again, her legs gave in.

And one more time, he promptly held her. "Daph, I told you're too weak to walk on your own now. You have to wait until the side effects fade away. Come on, you need to sleep."

"No. I have to wash my face first!"

"Fine..."

Taking her to the ensuite, he held her as she washed her face and brushed her teeth. They exchanged glances through the mirror a few times, even though she tried to avoid them.

She shouldn't have said anything, but it slipped. As "the fun" side effects of ecstasy began to fade, she only had the bad ones still going. And among them, a feeling she didn't foresee began to emerge.

When they returned to the room, he helped her out of her clothes, put on her pyjamas and tucked her into bed.

"Are you leaving?" She asked.

"No. I'm staying with you tonight."

"Then come to bed."

"I"ll just crash on the couch..."

"Please?"

He nodded and proceeded to remove his jacket, shoes and shirt. After placing them on the chair nearby, he crawled into the king size bed, keeping a respectful distance from her.

"Daphne, I still need to know what you meant."

She let out a tired sigh. "We have different lifestyles, goals in life... You still see me as the little girl you need to protect. That's why you don't want me."

"Canım, you got it all wrong. I don't—"

"I know it can't be. And it's okay."

"Daphne, please..." He shifted on the bed to gaze at her. "We need to talk about this."

"We really don't, Hamidciğim," she whispered, cupping one side of his face.

She shifted to the other side and closed her eyes, hoping to look asleep as naturally as possible. At least, there were two things she could take advantage of getting high on ecstasy: faking to doze off fast and pretending not to have any idea this conversation ever happened.

Istanbul, August, 2020

Honks incessantly created a cacophonic and odd symphony as the traffic grew heavier. Daphne looked back at her phone and read the last messages Hamid sent to her one more time.

Did he mean it as a friend as always? Or did he ever feel something else? Something more than an attraction to the idea of a life with freedom, away from the burden of following the footsteps of his parents? And if so, would it change the course of their lives? Her stomach fluttered at every thought that tortured her with impossible scenarios of this love she could never have.

"Miss, is everything okay?" The driver asked, looking at her from the rear view mirror.

"Yes. I'm fine." She faked a smile. "Is it going to take long, sir?"

"I'm afraid so. Traffic always gets crazy when it rains."

"Can you take a different route?"

"I can, but it's a bit longer."

"How much?

"Three kilometers."

"Will we get there faster?"

"Yeah."

She looked out the window and at her phone again. It'd take forever for her to get there if they waited. So, against her best judgement, she ordered. "Take the longer route and step on the gas."

"Yes, ma'am."

_____

¹ My darling

² Damnit

#choices fanfic #desire and decorum fanfic #prince hamid #hamid x mc #desire & decorum modern day au #au_gust_2020 #childhood friends au #arranged marriage au #lorirwritesfanfic #lorircreates #tw drug abuse #reader discretion is advised

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concealeddarkness13 · 3 years ago

Text

WHG 15 Post-Games Brains and Brawn Part 3

This is a few days after part 2! Tagging: @sparkles-and-hens, @knmartinshouldbewriting, @maple-writes (also thanks for Skyler, Aurora, and Volt!), @pen-of-roses, @thoughts-of-nora, and @ratracechronicler!

A few days later, and I had nothing to do. Shine hadn’t even come by the room to check on me today. I was so bored. Volt had mentioned Skyler was still here, so I could find him. Better than sitting in this room any longer.

I found him in a bigger room (really, how many rooms were in this apartment?), and when I saw him, I automatically got a little bristly. He had beaten me last time, so it was time for a rematch. “I finally found you. Volt told me you were around here somewhere.”

He tensed up when he saw me. “What are you still doing here?”

“‘Still’?” I scoffed. “I’m here to save my friend. But I was told I couldn’t do anything because someone cut my legs open.”

He glared at me, putting down what he had been working on and facing me head on. “What do you want?”

I pointed dramatically at him. I was in a mood. “To spar with me, pretty boy. If you need incentive, you can insult me for the rest of the day if you win.”

That didn’t go over well. He drew his knife and pointed it at me. “Don’t fucking call me that!” he snarled.

I knew how to get on his nerves now. I pretend curtseyed. “Oh, does pretty man suit your tastes better?”

And he was in front of me and shoved me against the wall in a heartbeat. Perfect. A fight it was. “Don’t call me pretty. Don’t think of calling me anything else either, handsome, whatever, unless you want to get hurt.”

I laughed a little, pulling out something Triel had called me as a joke. “Loquacious and charming then?” I slipped my knife into my hand and elbowed him in the stomach.

He backed up, holding his knife out and almost yelling. “Didn’t you get beat up enough already?”

Hell no. Not with my mind being the only company I had at night around here. And sometimes during the day. If I did get beat up, it would be fair punishment for how much I had fucked up everything. I smiled. “I’m used to getting beat up. What’s a little more?” I paused, grinding my teeth a little. “I can’t just sit around and do nothing all day.”

“You’re fucked up,” he spit. He had no idea. “Why not go back to wherever you crawled out of if you like it so much?”

Nah. At least here I was relatively safe. I went to kick at him, but the wounds there throbbed, and my legs gave out. I cursed as I fell to the ground, but when I tried to stand back up, I couldn’t. Shit.

He watched me as he circled me, and he gripped his knife tighter, but after he looked away, he seemed to change his mind. He just crossed his arms. “Dumbass.”

Tell me something I don’t know. I cursed under my breath. “Hey, you haven’t won yet, so you can’t insult me.”

He just stared down at me. “I’m not the one on the floor.”

Well, that could change. I reached out and snagged his legs so that he fell down too, and I held onto his legs as he tried to grapple with me. “Now we’re both on the floor.”

“Let me go!” He tried to bite my arm, and I gladly obliged, scooting away from him.

“Shit! Shit. Sorry.” Noted. He didn’t like being held down.

He sat up as he held his injured arm and glared at me. “Happy now?”

Shit. I was so useless. I was just basically annoying him because I was bored. How stupid was I? I shook my head, fighting tears but not letting a waver appear in my voice. “No. I can’t find Shine anywhere, and Volt’s nowhere to be found either, and I don’t trust anyone else besides you and Richard. And he’s not up for competing. And I can’t sit around all day and do nothing. But I can’t fight either. Shit.” I took a shaky breath. “I hate being useless.”

He blinked. “You trust me?”

Why wouldn’t I? “You fight well. What’s not to trust?” I paused. I should at least apologize. I had been mean. “And sorry I insulted you. I’m in a bad mood,” I mumbled.

He kept staring at me. “Oh.” He looked away after a little bit. “You look like you got hit by a truck or something and survived so there’s that.”

I shook my head. This was nothing, honestly. “I’ve had worse.” I sighed. “But hey, since you did win, you can insult me all day.” A smile tugged at my lips. “That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to insult you back.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a prize.” He leaned back a bit.

We both had knives. What was the logical conclusion? “Well, we could see who’s a better knife thrower and whoever wins can laugh whenever the other falls the rest of the day. Which for me would be a lot.” I gestured at my legs. No need to tell him that I had no idea how to throw knives.

“Fine.” He got up and glanced down at me, but I just stood up on shaky legs and gripped my knife tightly as I pointed at a farther away vase.

“Whoever breaks it wins.” I threw first, and it landed point-first in the wall right next to the window which wasn’t very close to the vase. Shit.

He took the next throw and actually grazed it. But it just wobbled but didn’t fall or break. He cursed under his breath as we both grabbed our knives. My next throw was still too far away, and his next throw bounced off the table. This could take a while.

For my next throw, Skyler made a move as if he was going to try to trip me, and my throw went a little wilder than normal, and it smashed right through the window. Brilliant. I stared at the window for a little bit. “Okay. So that’s your fault. So, you have to come with me to go get it.”

He crossed his arms. “What, scared you might fall down the stairs or something?”

No. It was just common courtesy. I crossed my arms back. “It wouldn’t be like you could keep me from falling anyway with those arms.”

“I only need the one,” he grumbled, but he did start heading toward the door.

I huffed and followed him. “Yeah, sure. I’m not that light.”

We left the apartment without anyone seeing us, and when we got to the bottom floor and the door outside, he waited for me.

I went toward where the window was pointing, but when I turned the corner, I froze and scrambled out of sight. Meras, one of the Shades, was here. Why? What business could she possibly have here? And there was a woman with her who looked a little like Skyler. Shit.

Meras spoke up enough for me to hear. “The crash came from over here. And what’s this?” She probably found the knife. Double shit. I slipped another knife into my hand even though it wouldn’t do any good. She would recognize my knife. I had had it when I escaped.

I hadn’t even noticed that I had bumped into Skyler, and he was about to say something, but he stopped and spoke quieter instead. “What’s wrong?”

It took me a little bit to speak clearly. “That’s someone I…knew when I was a child being held by the Capitol.”

“You what?” He shoved past me to look around the corner.

The other woman started talking. “Well that’s not something you see everyday, knives falling from the sky.”

Skyler tensed when he saw her and pressed himself against the wall. “We have to get back inside,” he hissed at me.

Shit. She would recognize it, tell Churi about it, and he would investigate the area and find all of the tributes. There had to be something I could do. I had already fucked something else up. “But—but if that get’s back to Churi, he could recognize the knife. And anyway, they could figure out where it came from.”

Skyler started shaking and looking in every direction. “What the Hell do you want me to do about it? I can’t go out there!”

You don’t have to do shit. I have to. But could I? Willingly give myself over to the Shades? Just the thought made me sit down and start rubbing at my scars as I started shaking. “I’ll go out there. Tell them it was mine. Should be able to keep suspicion from the apartment and all of you.”

He stared down at me. “Shut up!” He grabbed me and tried to drag me back to the building. “If she hears you and finds me I’ll fucking kill you!”

I couldn’t go back into the apartment and just hope they didn’t do anything. I had to do something. I yanked my arm out of his grip and started walking toward the corner. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t, so get the fuck out of here,” I hissed.

“Whatever, let them find you. I don’t care.”

Fine. I walked out into the open, shoving my other knife into my pocket so I wouldn’t look threatening. Meras looked around and smiled. “Nesri, darling!” I had to stop myself from flinching. “I thought this was yours.” She rolled the knife in her hands.

The other woman looked over at Meras. “You know her?”

“Oh, she’s just a wayward child Churi has been obsessed with for a while.”

The woman gave a short laugh. “Small world isn’t it?” She put a hand on her hip, smiling over at me and nodding. “We heard something and I was wondering where in the world this would have come from in this neighborhood. Practicing for something or just messing around?”

I still stared at Meras. She was the bigger threat. “Messing around.” I forced out a laugh. “You know me. I’m a reckless fool.”

Meras smirked over at me, but glanced over at the other woman when she checked her watch. Meras nodded. “Just one more thing, dear.” She looked back at me, and I did flinch under her stare. “You know, Churi would kill to get you back.” She paused, and I took a deep breath and nodded. This was it. She would take me. But it would be the right punishment for what I had done. Meras shook her head. “But I’m not him. And you were too much of a problem for me to want you back.” Wait, what? She walked forward and handed the knife back to me before caressing my cheek. I stiffened. “Be more careful next time, darling. If any other Shades found you, they’d take you in a heartbeat.” She laughed lightly and nodded at the woman.

The woman waved. “Good to meet you, Nesri.” She headed off, and Meras followed after her.

I wasn’t going to be taken? What? Why? I stared after them until my legs gave out, and I collapsed to the ground and started sobbing. Shit. I should have been taken.

I didn’t notice Skyler until he was right beside me, and I didn’t recognize him right away, so I jumped up and pointed the knife at him before I recognized him. He went to hit it out my hand, but that didn’t work, and I just lowered it and took a shaky breath. “I thought you got the fuck out of here.” He shook his head, and I swallowed hard. “Well, they won’t bother us. Meras only cares about someone if she thinks they’re pretty and not annoying. Which I was neither to her.” All right. No more talking about this. “Well, I’m fucking hungry, so I’m going to make some popcorn. I’ve never had it before, and Triel didn’t have any on her airship.”

We started climbing back up to the apartment, and I kept trying to not think about what just happened. The breakdown could happen when I was alone. But then Skyler stopped and sat down as tears welled up in his eyes and he breathed shakily.

I looked back at him, and my will to keep it together broke down as well. I cursed under my breath at my inability to keep calm, and I sat down next to him as tears started spilling down my cheeks as well. I tentatively took his hand, since I normally liked human touch to anchor myself, but he just took it back.

He leaned against the wall, and we both took a moment to just let the tears fall before we could get it back together. I took a deep breath and spoke up first. “That was my fault. I’m—I’m sorry.”

He glanced over at me and shook his head. “I made you mess up the throw.”

How sweet. But it certainly wasn’t his fault. “But I shouldn’t have suggested that in the first place.”

“And I shouldn’t be here,” he mumbled.

Wait, what? He was so cool. I frowned. “And why would you say that?!”

He rested his head against the wall. “It was stupid for me to come here. If she’d seen me…” He stopped, swallowing and rubbing at his face.

“Well, if that’s the case, I shouldn’t have come here either. But here we are. And she didn’t see you.” And I added under my breath. “Maybe I should have punched her as a farewell gift.”

“She might be back.” He hunched over a little. “And she won’t be happy that I’m still alive and she’ll probably send people after me again.”

Well, she was awful. “And I’ll punch those people too.”

He was quiet for a little bit. “She’s my mother.”

I barely remembered my mother, but they were supposed to love their kids, weren’t they? Fuck her. I nodded. “I’ll certainly punch her if I see her again.”

“Is that how you solve every problem?” he asked lightly.

I nodded again. “It’s the only thing I’m good for.”

“You really think so?” He smiled a little. “You really are a dumbass then.”

It was a kind sentiment, but yeah. I was only good for fighting. I didn’t know anything else. I was a dumbass. I snorted. “If I was good for something else, I would have been able to get away from Churi and keep the crew from getting involved so that they would have been there to help the tributes escape.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, and I wouldn’t have needed someone to hide me my whole life.”

Actually, I was looking forward to have someone smarter than me hide me. I hadn’t done a good job of it after I had escaped. I leaned back and closed my eyes. “Well, isn’t that a mood. Triel’s planning on doing that for me too. I just have to get her out so she can follow through on her promise.”

“It was like that when Volt got reaped. We couldn’t just let her go after what she’s done for us.”

I opened my eyes again and nodded. “I’m glad you were able to get her back. She is a good person.”

“Yeah.” He wiped his eyes. “I think she’s the first person who really ever cared about me.”

I just stayed silent, and we sat there for a while. I didn’t want to get up until my tears were exhausted, and Skyler seemed to agree. But then after a while, Volt and Shine walked up the stairs and stopped and stared at us.

Shine was holding a file, so they must have gone somewhere to get something (smart, right?). They frowned and signed slowly so I could actually tell what they said. “What happened?”

I responded in their sign language, mostly spelling out the words. “Where were you two?”

Volt looked over at Skyler and spoke. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

I nodded but still faced Shine so they could read my lips. “Just a little misadventure. Where were you two?” Shine signed something so fast, I couldn’t tell what they had signed.

Volt helped both of us up and held Skyler against her side. “We had something to attend to, but we can talk more inside.”

When Shine and I were alone in my room, I pulled out my phone to text them. “Okay, where the hell were you?”

They grinned and held out the file they had so I could look at it. I frowned. It was packed with blueprints of machines. My phone buzzed. “I’ll share one fact for one fact of yours. I went to Indigo Carmine’s lab.”

I sighed and texted back. “I found Skyler and tried to fight him.”

They huffed. “I was looking for the blueprints for Richard’s machines.”

Well, that was lucky that she had the blueprints. “I was bored and wanted to do something.”

“While I was looking for the blueprints, I ran into Indigo herself.”

I frowned. They had to have gotten out of that safely, right? “I threw a knife out of the window, and Meras and someone else came across it.”

Shine’s lips thinned, but they continued on. I’d get a text rant about it later. “I pretended my name was Geoff, but that didn’t fool her, so Volt threatened her to help me get out.”

“I revealed myself to keep the apartment and the rest of the tributes safe from prying eyes, hopefully, but she didn’t take me, as you can see. She wasn’t interested in dealing with me again, I suppose.”

Shine sighed and typed rapidly on their phone until a paragraph showed up on mine. “You’re supposed to be resting. Please don’t be reckless. If you would have been captured, I would have cried.” With their perfectly neutral expression watching me at the moment. “Please, I want you to take care of yourself.”

I frowned. “You were reckless too. What if Carmine had captured you?” I sighed. “I’ll try not to be so reckless. But that means that you need to find me something to do.”

They grinned. “No problem. You can help me with the machines.” They grabbed the file and ran off to probably get some of the machines to my room. I sighed. I could do something, but was it really helping Triel? How could I help her? She had to still be alive, didn’t she?

#writeblr hunger games #writeblr

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joelmillerthirstqz · 4 years ago

Link

Fill for this ask~

(slight liberty taken with request for reader to get excited about the shop; Ellie's working through sixteen-year-old, new-to-commitment-as-a-concept with Cat, pre-dina tattoo girlfriend, so i went with that)

Joel, y/n, and Ellie are all out on patrol and come across a small town. In the town, there’s an abandoned wedding dress shop. Y/n gets all excited and goes inside to see there are untouched wedding dresses. Joel’s slightly annoyed when y/n and Ellie want to try some on for fun. But then he sees y/n in a wedding dress and realizes he sees her as more than a friend.

yeah, of course I wrote with reference images up:

texture/sheerness/skirt shape/front dress ref back of dress ref, specifically the window-back with the little covered buttons up over the lower part of the hips

[I evade y/n as a convention like the plague, it’s really immersion crushing for me. However, I’ll edit it for your OC’s name if you hit the ask box, so.]

There's already a second chapter if you we want to get into this, comment or kudos and I'll get brave!

----

Ellie grimaces, scrunching her whole face. She looks across the main street of the town you’d come to scout out, Joel taciturn on his horse a few yards away, scanning storefronts and alleys.

“What?” you jerk your head to her sightline and back at her, unholstering your revolver on reflex. Your horse snuffles below you, hoofing at the ground. You can never tell if the creature is clueless, indifferent, or confident in his rider, but he would certainly be perturbed if there were infected.

“Dude, people had whole shops just for weddings?” Ellie asks, snorting derisively.

You follow her extended arm to the storefront she points to, a frilly off-white dress draped over a sunken model, glass from the smashed display window embedded.

“I mean, you had to have seen them in Boston, plenty of bored people with money,” you supply warmly. You’d grown up there, a cataclysm between the city you’d known and Ellie’s birthplace. Weddings were for people who’d given up, who’d aged out of chasing their dreams, settled into dull domesticity. People, usually the woman-coded partner, whose parents had quarter of a million to drop on a party with lifelong implications.

You’d been a little relieved when social ritual had been mostly taken off the table by the apocalypse, so the wedding pressure never reached you. Hadn’t thought about the concept in years.

You wondered who in Victor, Idaho, just over the border from Jackson, had kept a bridal shop open even before the outbreak. The demand just couldn’t match thousands of dollars of dress.

“Oh, no,” Ellie said softly.

“Well, it was a whole thing. Get some champagne, drag a bunch of girls with you, try on all the shapes and get yelled at by your mom, make jokes about the wedding night. Mostly pointless rituals,” you explain.

“You ever go to one?” Ellie asks.

“I mean, I was my cousin’s bridesmaid, so I got drunk in one and shoved into a blue satin thing, if that counts,” you clarify, shifting in your saddle.

Ellie nudges Shimmer forward, Joel drawing up to your position with a helpless shrug to you.

“It was strange. Were you in Jackson for Tommy’s?” you ask. Maria and Tommy still have that thing where they see each other and tune everything else out, even for a beat, seeming like every sense recognizes the other, no matter what else they’re doing. It feels so belligerently normal, and you watch the younger couples in the town taking note to emulate it, like they knew what they were doing because they were born before.

“No,” Joel says, looking wistful. “Seen pictures,” he adds.

“Imagine they were a bigger deal in Texas,” you say, your horses trotting a few paces behind Ellie.

Joel looks at you, face cycling through the decision to keep speaking, the same circuit you always saw him loop before he bit down on a memory and fell silent. You let the afterimage of a smile cross your face before looking down, feeling like he needs the same privacy he’d proven skilled at respecting in your own expression.

—Yesterday—

“Ask you a favor?” you feel your bones leave your body and slam back into place with fear, registering Joel’s low drawl. You’d groggily found your way into the stables to start patrol, hoodie tucked over a beanie, praying not to be seen. Nobody was supposed to be awake this early—you were avoiding a less experienced, loquacious patrolmate you’d been sentenced to and your throat clasps around itself to find that the previous night’s team, Joel’s, was only just returning.

“How bad was it?” you tip your head at the blood spatter on the side of his jacket, reddened bucket and sponge set where he’d been cleaning the infected byproduct off of his horse.

“Oh, I straggled, rest gone home. Patrol route’s quiet now, though,” he non-explains. You’re not sure if he’s trying to keep his voice low out of respect for the early hour or if that’s just his usual rumbling tone resounding it in the stark, chilly air.

“Mhm. What’s the favor?” you ask, busying yourself with saddling your own horse.

“About scouting that town for the group to search, tomorrow. Ellie’s comin’ and…” he trails off, looking at the wood-plank wall, blinking an eye at the fierce early morning sun beaming through a sliver.

You’ve learned not to rush him, learned he’s easier to talk to with his hands full, and he finishes scrubbing off his horse’s bridle while you tack up your own.

“She talks to you, easier,” Joel admits, face obscured behind his horse, taking his time to brush through the animal’s fur, obliviously slurping hay into its mouth before crinkling it in its teeth.

“Huh?” you ask, marvel of articulation that you are.

“Ellie, she’s more talkative,” he repeats himself.

“No, I mean, what?”

You hear a sigh and he leans around his horse, hands on his hips.

“Please?” he asks, slightest edge of irritation at having to say more than he’d practiced. It's all insecurity, not directed at you, but you bristle anyway.

“Alright. It’s your business, but I’ll lend my girl talk instinct,” you prod with bite, stuffing your foot into a stirrup and swinging a leg up onto Clover, who’d been named before you got to Jackson. Your emotional labor threshold never existed, and Joel was fucking pushing it.

“That’s not what I meant,” he sounds defeated as you look down at him, Clover slowing helpfully. His eyes look full, and you peer at him. He looks a little vulnerable—even if your worst anxieties read it as him noticing that you squint to avoid looking at his mouth—which is parted a little, black beard flecked with, for you, exactly the correct amount of grey. Joel rubs his lips together three times, quick, the way you’d seen when he wanted to stop talking at town meetings, shy of the eyes on him.

You soften, aware you’re irritable from lack of sleep and scarcity of good caffeine. You look ahead, reins creaking in your gloves conspicuously in the still space.

“Owe me a beer when I’m back tonight, okay?” you nod at him and press into Clover’s flank as Joel silently assents, focus snapping back to brushing out his horse. You risk looking back as Clover picks up, relieved and let down to see Joel doggedly focused on his task. You’d taken to drinking with the other patrolmen in the Tipsy Bison, edging into something resembling a social life borne of something like mutual responsibility. The group repeatedly made plain his welcome over the last few months until Joel had started to show up routinely, even murmuring a few words here and there, coming to the point that you’d notice when he wasn’t there.

—

“Okay but, why, though?” Ellie paws at a veil as you enter the store, pompous fabric ballooning halfway down the mannequin’s back.

“Dunno, it’s what people wore. I think that was for modesty, symbolically. Only went to a couple. My friends never hit the ‘wedding season’ stride. Too young,” you explain, your senior year of college on outbreak day. A look crosses Joel’s face and he spins the barrel of his revolver, leaning against the counter, trying to look busy checking the register, just in case something helpful lingered.

“Go try one on, Ellie,” you try, unsure what the sixteen-year-old is working through. Her attention hasn’t drifted to the next shops to explore, yet, so it clearly matters.

“Not for me,” she protests, hands raised. “Will you?”

You laugh ruefully, years away from the last time you’d put on something close to a dress, much less something formal, and you'd certainly never thought about being a bride. Not materially.

“C’mon, I’ve never seen like, a normal human in one,” Ellie pouts. You narrow your eyes for a second, lightly dubious.

“That’s not the best idea,” Joel grouses next to you, looking over both his shoulders like he was expecting an ambush even though it had been placid the whole way up here. Two of your three horses nudge each other for space near the tree you’ve secured them too, whinnying.

“I’ll keep my boots on for running. And you’ll keep a lookout,” you reply blithely, rolling your eyes at him.

“Yell for help!’ Ellie still discovering nuptial detritus she’d seen alluded to in comics at most.

You busy yourself finding something not set through with rot, moving towards the back of the store. Ellie swings open a display case and picks up a circular, springy fabric, a pale blue garter, squinting with the effort of discernment.

“Were the hair tie things a thing for a reason?” Ellie asks Joel, looping the blue-ribboned elastic around her wrist for later. Joel’s eyes widen in horror, ready to run towards the nearest infected to avoid explaining the whole garter thing to Ellie.

A second, more frigid wave hits him, remembering his own wedding day, Tommy helping him get just drunk enough to go through with the embarrassing ritual that complemented the bouquet toss. Sarah’s mom had loved all the stupid little wedding-day-things, though, so he’d accepted the shot(s) his brother snuck him and was grateful his red face would be under a skirt. He’d barely been eighteen, doing the right thing with Sarah’s mom pregnant, and two-years-younger Tommy held it together for him the whole day. He thought of not being here for the day his little brother had gotten hitched, a candid Polaroid in focus in the reel of guilt he’d built for himself these last twenty-some years. Tommy looked like his brother as he was before in it, looking up Maria with rapt awe as he accepted her hand to be led back to the dance floor. The crinkling at the corner of his eyes, though older, looked like Tommy again, and the joy Joel felt for him was dulled by the impossibility of ever speaking enough words to draw a partner near.

“Joel?” she pokes, twanging the elastic a little to jar him. He eyes it warily, expression the most intimidated you'd ever seen him.

You trudge past Ellie, awkwardly dragging a plastic-encased parcel of a voluminous dress, the best-preserved and least yellowed you’d found. You really didn’t relish the idea of figuring out how to get it on alone, but seeing their exchange, you fully self-preserved your way away from that particular explanation to the changing space.

“Fuck me,” you grimace, noticing the trail of covered buttons leading from the open mid-back to the very last point it could presentably grace between the dimples on your back. Wrestling this on would be a chore.

Before you shuck everything but your boots and socks, you try to smooth your hair down, the moss-flecked mirror of the changing space indicating how hopeless it is. You re-strap your pistol holster to your thigh, an overabundance of caution rubbing off on you from Joel's mere anxious proximity.

You look at your reflection a minute, appraising heavy breasts, softer hips than before. You’re proud that your abdomen and arms remain taut and toned from a combination of riding and patrolling, sprinting for your life, and helping around Jackson. For once in your life, you fall asleep at night when you hit the pillow, naked and alone, no longer captive of the ceiling’s backlighting of unidentifiable darting thoughts. Blinking your musing away, you remember how your cousin’s bridal attendant had made a circle of the dress for her to step into, and do your best to prepare it so you can slide it up and ask Ellie to help.

—

Ellie slingshotted the something-blue at Joel’s face as he finished explaining the garter tradition, hushing her ferociously and finally placing both palms over his whole face, crossing and re-crossing his ankles where he leant against the counter, rifle over his shoulder.

Ellie rolled her eyes, haughtily full of recent knowledge of thighs and what they connect to from Cat, fern and moth tattoo freshly peeling over her acid burn.

—

“Ellie!” you call once the skirt is over your hips, bodice with laced cap sleeves over your shoulders. You feel a little bad stepping past the carefully sewn fabric in your hiking boots and high socks, grimy from the trail’s dust, trying to hold it up while keeping the bodice straight.

She smiles wryly as her head pokes around the corner.

“I’ll help if you tell me if people really launched their bouquets at people and one person really pulled a—uh, shit, uh, thigh lingerie thing—off of the bride in front of everyone?”

You honk a laugh, a horrible sound, thinking of the velocity with which you’d seen Ellie launch bricks, knowing she has no sense of the soft lob of flowers at friends that she refers to. You guess she's picturing a full-bodied overarm spike ending in flower shrapnel instead of the over-the-shoulder choreography towards the bride's most single friend that happened in reality. You clasp the delicate buttons at your lower back together as best you can with your palms.

“Sounds like that was regionally universal in America, yeah, but—”

“Holy shit,” Ellie comments, suddenly shuddering in a very teenage, possibly exaggerated ripple of disgust. “Looked like a hair tie,” she mutters.

“Just—please help,” you hold the tulle and hand-cut lace near the buttons out to her.

“Wow, this was for everyone to see you in?” Ellie asks, alluding to the sheer fabric that gave the impression that the lace filigrees were directly applied to your skin. Asymmetrical, hand-sewn flowers cinch around your breasts and middle when she finally secures it.

You turn to the angled three-part mirror, noticing where your epaulet tattoo complicates the sheer effect the designers intended by the lace, nose bunching up. Not the flesh of the intended buyer of this thing, for sure.

“Come on, in the light!” Ellie goads gently.

Bracing to self-deprecate, you tuck your hair up in one hand and hold the front of the dress up and away from your muddy boots. You and outward, finding the weird little podium that was apparently customary—you remember your cousin twirling on it a similar one in delight when she’d found the right dress.

“Yeah, fuck, I can’t do this for long,” you bristle, feeling ungainly in the garment, dropping the skirts around your feet.

“And you’d just walk up to someone and kiss them in front of everyone and that worked?” Ellie prattles, tailing you closely.

Joel’s retreated to the store entrance, hunting rifle comfortable in his hands but pointedly ready.

He turns in the middle of running some sort of ten foot patrol route along the length of the store’s entrance, inevitable that he’d face you eventually. You realize he’s just pacing, the town quiet, stuck in a situation he accidentally created.

Ellie gives you a look that looks through you, and you recognize the contemplation in it. She’s thinking of someone, and what formalizing intimacy means, probably. Certainly where your mind was at around her age. Fuck, you’d not go back to sixteen for all the pre-outbreak world.

“I’m gonna go check the horses,” she mumbles, maybe in her own head, maybe more deliberate than that.

Your eyes bulge as you realize you’re stuck in this fucking thing and Ellie’s across the street.

You turn to Joel with a prepared face, tugging your dimples into a self-effacing “look at this shit” face.

“Wanna try one on?” you jab first, trying to get there before Joel can make this worse, more stupid. He’d kind of asked you, or asked for a favor that led to this, so you felt contented blaming him for it. You definitely will if his slight over-caution is vindicated and you get rushed by anything hostile while you're wearing this. Your holster may feel comforting, but the weight of the skirt would put a real drag on any reflexes you had if you actually needed your pistol.

Joel halted at the midpoint of his circling, rifle slack in his hands, hanging limp before him. The light from outside rings his form, broad shoulders and imposing frame worn uneasily in his posture.

His mouth parts the way it had when you’d ridden past him in the stables, chest expanding and falling in quick iterations, hazel eyes stranded on you.

You breathe as you hold his eyes, unable to back down from any time he proved capable of holding direct eye contact. Now that you had it, you realized you’d been teasing it out of him for months, forcing him to look right at you, any creative way you could, driving him up the wall.

Joel might as well have been waist-deep in water for how slowly he moves towards you.

“Sorry, not meaning to bring up anything—” you swallow the word painful, revising quickly, “from before,” you finish weakly. Gold star, idiot. You had no idea, but what if it had been a wife he’d lost? Fuck’s sake. Though, Ellie wouldn't be cruel like that—

Joel shakes his head absently, dismissive. He was run aground, captive to taking you in. The dress made no overtures to performative modesty, sheer tulle slits up to the edge of your hipbones, catching on your holster where you shift. Joel assesses the fabric spread over your chest quickly, mouth upturning too subtly for you to feel 100% confident you’d seen him do it. You’d seen him get the lay of a whole horde in a split second, and stood curious what it was he’d noted from the two and a half seconds his eyes drifted over you.

“‘m here, now,” he mumbles, looking down and pulling the bolt back, a dull click as it confirmed he’d chambered this particular round ten times in the last five minutes. If a weapon could sound exasperated with him, it did, and he jerks his head without turning it to Ellie’s retreating form.

Joel’s mind sprints between stations, picking up an artifact of your expression at each one: your body, your easy conversations on patrol, fumbling between them all, not sure where to start.

Ellie wasn’t far enough away for Joel to start this now, to cross the shop and kiss you, podium leveling you to the perfect height for him to lean into, hands on your face. Something in his posture looks ready to move quickly, and it's not to use the weapon his knuckles whiten around.

The edges of his eyes pinch, like he’s struggling to make sense of an indescribable noise. The tendon running from your ear to collarbone stands out as you look to the side, pretending to appraise the way the dress fits over your hips, snugly buttoned. Joel’s face shifts from startled to starved while you take reprieve from his focus.

Your furrowed brows while you watch Joel watch you spark understanding of the mechanics of a constant, firm draw towards your person. He’s recognizing you as more than a formidable shot he can be at ease with, not just a pleasant confidante with different but complementary pre-outbreak life experiences and a healthy sense of privacy.

Joel glances down one more time, catching your eyes on the way back up as he clears his throat, finding you looking at him sheepishly. He hadn’t tried to say a word in minutes.

“I’m. I’m stuck in here. Ellie—” you stammer, face reddening viciously. This was going to be a long, tiring patrol excursion, and you worried you had already made it weird.

You idly wonder where he might put his hands on you if you were alone, right now, and your terror is visible as the thought drifts by. If he would.

Joel doesn’t look back at Ellie where you’d normally expect a concerned jolt at her name, hazel eyes heatedly dark. You can chalk it up to the dimmed interior of the shop, but enough sunlight streams in to make you doubt its just the environment.

Grimacing at a clearly out-of-earshot Ellie, you need to be out of this fucking thing and redouble.

“Joel, can you? I feel bad ripping it and would really like my jeans again,” you offer weakly.

Joel’s fingertips, fingertips you wish you didn’t know were callused and so goddamn cautious when they’d had the occasion to meet yours, flex on his gun.

“Not sure I know how to, I mean, those seem—special?” he stammers at the prospect, you having turned to bare your back to him.

Joel breathes in a way you can hear on the silent street, usually so contained.

She’s just helping you see the buttons. Joel thinks, counting out twelve of them, in total.

Joel steadies his gaze, tipping his head forward and choosing to take in the slope of your back, mostly bare and deep-dipping expanse scantly wreathed in lace. His face looks like he’s staring something potentially fatal down, gritted jaw muscles pulsing. He steps towards you, though. He’d never done anything in the right order, not Sarah, not with Tess, not a bit, one single time. Might as well get you dress off before he can even get the courage to kiss you.

Slinging his rifle’s strap over his shoulder, Joel keeps his fingers at a careful angle, purposefully not against your skin. Pushing the top button through the satin loop containing it, he steps up on the podium with you, only because it puts his lips well out of an easy distance to drag along the nape of your neck. Hoping he can feel his way down the buttons without touching or looking at you, he fails three buttons down, knuckles brushing the bottom of your spine.

You laugh nervously, looking back at Joel. Every part of your core is twining into a spiral, abdomen first, then a layer deeper, then a clench you won’t register because then you’d have to admit that something was going on.

For his part, his dark brows are furrowed in effort, decidedly back in the realm of watching every movement to avoid the electrocution he’d just experienced from grazing you. Now was the time for accuracy, not speed.

Joel takes in your little cap sleeves between buttons, down to the eighth of twelve. The hand-cut lace outlines your shoulders, leading to lean skin below, dipping lower in the front than he should be noticing now that you’ve turned away from him—but he’s too tall to miss it once you’re standing on level ground. He wonders what you would do if he pulled you against him now, back pressed to his front, his mouth on your neck before your own.

‘Thank you,” Joel says.

You crane your head to meet his eyes again, hands pressed to opposite shoulders to prevent the now-loosened dress from slipping all the way. Maybe you didn’t need the rest of the buttons, but there they went. You blink at him, wondering what would happen if you leaned against him.

“What?” you feel all wrapped in half-fabric, half-suggestion, no idea what the fuck he means.

“For comin’,” he gives. “Didn’t, uh, thanks for…” he trails off, so unaccustomed to indirectness and illocution that he doesn’t know what to call it. He clears his throat.

Joels hits the tenth button and breathes deep, flicking through the last two like he’s reloading, stepping back to reclaim his rifle and get so, so many feet away from you.

You turn to him, holding the weighty dress flush against your skin with both hands.

Joel’s chest is rising and falling every three seconds in rapid cycles, peculiar as you’d patrolled enough together to hear how he can silence his breath, the infrequent draws of someone yards underwater. He either can’t control this or made a choice to stop, and you can only think that the rust colored plaid he’d worn today was truly nice on him.

The rest of your scouting trip is deafeningly quiet, like Joel riding next to you and his surly expression produce volume equivalent to standing under a roaring set of falls. Ellie punctures it every few minutes with an attempted joke and you can almost feel Joel groan before you hear it each time, thoughtful.

Notes:

Here's the meta you didn't ask for

In current 2020, hard to see in weddings as anything other than class signifiers/routes to wife-n’ up, but:

holy shit does the apocalypse , esp. Tommy’s hope-imperative thing, make room for meaningfully coded rituals and aspirational ideologies not hijacked by the wedding industry’s profit motive.

Joel’s coming from the context of a wife who left Joel alone because having Sarah ruined her young life, so his view of it is understandably dismissive. Reader was more interesting to make opposite—college-aged asshole without responsibilities on Outbreak Day, less room for traditions.

But: Jackson is frozen in time and CRAVES ritual. Where it was meaningless in a world of abundance, you need markers of the years and ways to say “that person is my person;" it's joy as resistance.

For instance, something about Christmas hits different when you’re not fist fighting consumers for prelit trees after scuttling past a Salvation Army Santa in a mall. Jackson feels so sincere, every decoration scavenged or hewn with love, with purpose and forethought.

There’s joy in scarcity and glut in abundance is my point, I guess. Joel gets that on a basic level, even though he’s obstinate as hell about letting himself have anything good or even open to the idea.

#prompt fills #joel tlou #tlou #tlou ii #dumb epiphanies #joel miller #joel x reader #joel miller x reader #the last of us joel #the last of us #the last of us fic #the last of us ii #the last of us 2 #asks #filled prompts #prompts #joel/reader

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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The Walking Dead: What “Here’s Negan” Changes from the Comic

https://ift.tt/3cPPtnS

This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead season 10 episode 22.

Negan (no last name given…or needed) is one of the most unexpectedly beloved characters on The Walking Dead. Loquacious, charismatic, and unfailingly vulgar, Negan practically jumps off the page of Robert Kirkman’s comic series, and makes a big impact through Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance of the AMC series.

Over 193 issues of Kirkman’s comic, it became clear that the writer was just as enthralled with the brutish villain as the fans were. It would have been easy to kill Negan off at the end of the extended All Out War arc. Rick even slashed the man’s throat! But Kirkman made sure the jerk lived to fight another day and he soon became an integral part of the Whisperer War before finally retiring to a life of quiet contemplation in the woods.

Prior to Negan gracefully exiting the pages of The Walking Dead, however, Kirkman and longtime illustrator Charlie Adlard presented his origin story in a miniseries called “Here’s Negan.” Told over 16 short chapters and published in its entirety in 2017, “Here’s Negan” tells the story of how a lowly gym teacher came to be a bat-wielding, leather jacketed badass in the post-apocalypse.

Not that readers needed a reason to love the antagonist more, but the miniseries added a new sympathetic layer to the character and revealed how he broke bad. Now, in the finale of its six extra season 10 episodes, The Walking Dead TV series will be doing the same thing.

The Walking Dead season 10 episode 22 “Here’s Negan” serves as a fitting conclusion to a super-sized year for the show, while also filling in some of the blanks on Negan’s story. Here is how it does so along with what it borrows and what it changes from its comic miniseries inspiration.

Lucille’s Introduction

The characterization of Negan’s wife Lucille and her failing health going into the zombie apocalypse represents the biggest similarities between “Here’s Negan” on the page and on the screen. In fact, there’s really only one key difference between the comic and the TV adaptation. In the comic, Lucille dies right as the zombie apocalypse breaks out. In the show, Lucille makes it to at least seven months into the end of the world.

Aside from the time and setting difference, much of Negan and Lucille’s arc remains the same. The “Here’s Negan” comic reveals that Negan was every bit the charming asshole pre-zombies that he is now. The story opens with Negan, a gym teacher, mercilessly schooling three kids in a game of ping pong in his garage. Because he’s Negan, he can’t quite help but cuss them out upon his victory (just as he does while pwning some n00bs in a game of Gears of War in the episode). Lucille overhears Negan behaving inappropriately in front of the children and begins to tell him off. Unfortunately, shortly into her admonishment, she passes out.

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The story then cuts to the hospital where Lucille’s diagnosis is revealed. Shortly thereafter Negan sleeps with the woman who he has been cheating on Lucille with (yes, even after hearing about her cancer). Thankfully, after that tryst, Negan finally breaks the affair off and returns to Lucille’s bed side where he apologizes and tells her he’s all in now. We get a fun little example of Lucille’s sense of humor (and maybe her current state of mind) when she tells him “What’s wrong with you? Why would you pick the sick one?”

Shortly thereafter, Negan is present with Lucille at the hospital when the world ends. Doctors rush into Lucille’s room to tell Negan to run as some seriously messed up stuff is underway outside and within the halls of the hospital. Negan refuses to leave Lucille’s side naturally, but she passes away suddenly and becomes Negan’s first introduction to the walking dead.

The TV series does an admirable job in picking out what works about the beginning of “Here’s Negan” while finding ways to improve everything else. Getting to see what Lucille is like after the fall is a great way for the audience to warm up to her. Even when suffering through another round of chemo, Lucille musters the energy to take down a walker when Negan can’t.

This change also allows for Negan to mourn her loss more acutely when the time comes. Having to put down a zombified Lucille long after he’s acclimated to the world’s deadly new rules has a greater emotional impact than having to do so right at the beginning.

On the Road

The TV version of “Here’s Negan” begins to deviate from the comic quite a bit after the Lucille origin story is out of the way. The middle portion of the comic miniseries finds Negan doing what pretty much every other character has had to do: wandering out on the post-apocalyptic streets, looking for company, community, and safety.

While the TV Negan struggles to put down a single walker, the comic Negan is preternaturally gifted at both zombie-killing and survival. He encounters one group while promising he can hotwire a car (he cannot). Later on that night, Negan and the group face their first real test of the apocalypse when a horde of walkers attacks their campfire gathering. All of his new friends die, but Negan survives and loots the baseball bat that will one day become the new “Lucille” off of one of their corpses.

Negan surviving while his new partners die becomes something of a recurring theme. We see a montage of Negan making new acquaintance after new acquaintance, only for them to prove incapable of making it in this harsh new world. When his latest partner reveals she sustains a zombie bite on her neck, Negan reacts in pure rage.

“I’m sick of you people. You’re all fucking WEAK. ALL YOU EVER DO IS DIE.”

Negan wants to find someone strong, someone who can survive like him and who won’t break his heart by dying. He eventually finds just that in a group led by Dwight (hey, remember him?) and Sherry.

Negan’s origin story in the TV series, of course, differs a great deal. Since Lucille is still alive in the apocalypse, Negan’s inciting moment to get him on the road and moving is the need to secure more medicine for her.

What’s interesting about this alteration for the show is how it potentially changes Negan’s motivation for society-building. In the comic, Negan comes to view strength as its own virtue – because in the new world strength is the only way to avoid pain. But the people that Negan comes across in the episode are anything but strong.

Franklin and Laura (who fulfills Dwight and Sherry’s role as the “hey, I’ve seen that person before!” character) are unfailingly kind and compassionate. That only makes them an easy target for the Valaks Vipers MCs of the world. The comic version of Negan might be disgusted by Franklin and Laura’s charity and therefore weakness. In the show, however, it’s their selfless act that encourages him to take up the mantle of being the badass who can “save the world.”

Negan Becomes Negan

Speaking of being a badass, both the comic and TV versions of “Here’s Negan” feature a moment in which the character self-actualizes into the Savior leader we come to know later on. In the comic that moment comes when Negan gets a chance to display one of his only truly decent qualities: his hatred for sexual violence.

Soon after Negan joins Dwight’s group, he becomes their de facto leader. He’s simply too strong and his survival instincts are too good to be ignored. The others start to follow him, not Dwight, because they seem to instinctively understand that he’s their best bet for survival. Eventually the burgeoning Saviors encounter another group and invite them in to join forces because strength can be found in numbers.

Unfortunately that group’s leader soon implies to Negan that the women with them are sex slaves. Negan acts quickly and instinctively, beating the man to death with his beloved bat. After the deed is done, Negan begins to ominously adorn the bat with barbed wire while telling the rest of the group that they’re free to stay. He articulates his new modus operandi in the verbose way that a newly-born supervillain can. It was Lucille who made Negan stronger and gave him the armor to survive when all the people around him couldn’t. Now with this new barbed wire Lucille, Negan will finally be able to protect those around him, shielding them from the evils to come.

It’s a typically overwrought Negan speech, blunted by the Glenn-murdering version of Negan we know is yet to come. But if you squint a bit, you can kind of see how Negan’s mission of protection could become one of subjugation and domination. Negan really thought he was saving the world, one swing of Lucille at a time, because he was the only one strong enough to do so. It wasn’t until he came up against the power of Rick Grimes’s egalitarian group that he realized he was mistaken.

Was The Walking Dead Planning to Go Past the Comic Stories?

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Negan comes to a similar conclusion in this episode, he just takes a different route to getting there. After Lucille mercy kills herself and Negan is forced to put her zombified form down, he returns to confront the Valaks Vipers. Once the goons are dispatched outside, Negan can’t help but opt for theatrics once again. He puts the Viper leader on his knees for his very first “lineup,” though this time it’s a lineup of one.

He tells the Viper the story of how he got into a bar fight one night that jeopardized his gym teacher career. All he wanted to do was to listen to “You Are So Beautiful” with Lucille at a bar. But one particular loud mouth had other ideas. So Negan beat him up. Now that the world has ended it seems like only the loudmouths and douchebags are left. Truly decent, selfless people like Franklin and Laura at a premium. And when you find them among the zombies you must do whatever it takes to protect them. Who better to project the weak and the meek from the monsters than the ultimate monster – Negan, himself.

At that, my friends, is how you get a Negan.

The episodic “Here’s Negan” ends with a touching little coda where Negan lays his shattered bat to rest and finally, verbally says goodbye to the flesh and blood Lucille. His full eulogy is as follows.

“I’m sorry that I named a stupid baseball bat after you. I hope you found someone in the afterlife and you are screwing your brains out. Well, not really. But fair is fair. I miss you. I love the shit out of you. And I am gonna do your fighting for you.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Here, The Walking Dead is borrowing directly from the comics once again, but not from “Here’s Negan.” Issue 162 of the comic series opens with Negan burying Lucille, which was destroyed in The Whisperer War. His parting words are nearly identical right down to “I’m sorry that I named a stupid baseball bat after you” and the colorful passage about brains being screwed out in heaven. This is a particularly important passage for The Walking Dead season 10 to go out on. For while the comic version and Jeffrey Dean Morgan version of Negan have their differences, their stories start and end in the same place: Lucille.

The post The Walking Dead: What “Here’s Negan” Changes from the Comic appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/39I6sX8

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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aces-to-apples · 5 years ago

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OOO! AU mashup, please! Ship of choice (also because I don't really know Mag7 beyond gifsets) with Time Travel and Hair Brushing/Braiding!

Trope Mash-Up ask meme

Vasquez/Red Harvest, Time Travel [97] and Hair Brushing/Braiding [94]

Sam Chisolm is intimately aware that the desert is a dangerous, unknowable place. Many a traveler, homesteader, bounty hunter, and outlaw has stumbled their way out of it with tales taller than mountains about all manner of inconceivable happenings. This, though—this is something else entirely.

Not a full day out from Rose Creek, settled around the fire for supper, and two very familiar figures walked out of the darkness and sat down for their share. Only problem is, they number nine already, and Vasquez and Red Harvest have already settled into place in the camp.

As unnerving as the encounter is, he can admit they look well.

Vasquez, from what Sam can see, has filled out—not quite so lean and rangy. His clothes are clean and well-made, with intricate patterns and neat stitching; a couple small loops of silver and gold glint at the tips of his ears and the bright red feather slipped into the band of his hat catch the eye. He looks at ease with their circumstances, adopting an easy sprawl next to Emma Cullen and giving her a pleased grin when she hands over supper without faltering.

On the other hand, aside from having a bit more meat on his bones and a mulish expression, Red Harvest is virtually indistinguishable from his counter-part but for the hair. Sam understands that their—for a given value of possession—Red Harvest wears his hair unusually short in mourning of a recent loss of a family member; this strange newcomer wears his past his shoulders.

It makes for an odd tableau, them sitting next to each other, resolutely refusing to meet each other’s eye.

Not much is said as they eat their shares.

“Ahem—” Vasquez, the stranger, eventually begins, turning to face Faraday. A long groan cuts him off, startling the rest of the camp, Sam included, by the fact that it comes from his companion.

“If you even start, so help me,” the strange Red Harvest warns, shocking them all further.

“Rojito,” Vasquez says imploringly, twisting to meet his eyes, “please. When will I have this chance again?”

“You don’t have this chance now. Eat your disgusting beans,” is his flat reply. After a beat, his gaze moves to their employer and, with a fair imitation of apology, says, “Nothing against your cooking, Emma.”

White-faced and purse-lipped, she nods and says, “Thank you.” It does no one any good to be discourteous to whom- or whatever the desert places in one’s path.

“You are a cruel marido,” the strange Vasquez says without heat, causing his counter-part to choke on his food. The grin the stranger shoots him is broad, edging on filthy.

Red Harvest’s mirror sighs and leans over to catch their Vasquez’s eye. “We’re not married,” he says, as if to be reassuring.

“We are a little bit married,” Vasquez protests.

“Then I want a divorce.”

“Mexicans,” the strange, settled Vasquez informs his companion with great dignity, “do not get divorced. We die.”

“I can arrange that.”

The uncomfortable silence following that statement—uncomfortable for the rest of them; the participants seem very at ease with such banter—is broken, of course, by Faraday. “Uh, wow. I would not have predicted the two of you gettin’ hitched.”

“Well,” Vasquez drawls, with a trouble-making glint in his eye, “only after Sam turned him down.”

Refusing to react to the bait, Sam breathes evenly and takes an unconcerned bite of supper.

“If you get to tell lies about me and Sam, then I get to tell lies about you and güero,” Red Harvest serenely replies. The younger version at his side looks mostly unaffected and uninterested in the conversation, but for the tightness around his eyes. There, he looks a bit hunted. “I have plenty of material.”

The interlopers size each other up.

“You let me do it, I let you tell one”—Vasquez holds up his index finger for effect—“outrageous lie.”

“Deal.”

Grinning like a coyote, the stranger whips out a familiar deck of cards and holds them out to Faraday with a troubling amount of glee. “Pick a card, ¡güero!”

“Oh, Jesus,” Faraday mutters, and somehow that’s what breaks the tension within the camp. Their resident gambler, faced with an older and cheerier image of one of their own, beaten at his own little game. They all manage to at least crack a smile when Vasquez pulls Faraday’s card from the Irishman’s own vest pocket.

After that, the older Red Harvest mutters a exasperated, “I can’t believe I put up with this on purpose. Make better decisions than I did,” to his younger self and then launches into the promised tall tale. For all that the man isn’t the loquacious sort, he still manages to tell a sweeping and dramatic tale of love unrequited between Vasquez and Faraday.

It includes much maidenly sighing on the part of Vasquez, and unwitting encouragement on the part of Faraday, until the truth outs and the two resolve their miscommunications. Faraday lets Vasquez down gently, who takes the rejection with stoic acceptance and a single, beautiful tear, before riding out into the sunset. The entire camp, minus either Red Harvest and including both Vasquezes, is in stitches by the time the tale ends with, “And that is possibly the most intricate lie I’ve ever told.”

The evening winds down and their unexpected company offers to take the first watch. Sam allows it, knowing that the two travelers will likely be gone come morning. He watches them with curiosity, Vasquez’s fingers carding through Red Harvest’s hair, which the Comanche accepts with a put-upon sigh.

It’s encouraging, seeing these two together in whatever way they are, clearly years after whatever may happen down in Rose Creek.

The image of Vasquez tenderly creating tiny little braids in Red Harvest’s long hair carries him off to sleep, and later, through the battle. These two, at least, come out the other side better than they had begun.

AO3 (Mag7 Pseud)

#ask meme #answered asks #by apples #norcumii #the magnificent seven #mag7 fic #vasquez my love #red harvest #time-travel

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author-morgan · 5 years ago

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Phobia ☤ Alexios

eight - perikles’ symposium

masterlist

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.”

Fate decrees two kindred souls from two different empires will find one another, and the spear shall be made whole again.

"DON'T RUN OFF," Irene tells him. "I'll only be a moment." She returns garbed in loose robes of kyanos and cream, golden cuffs around her wrists, and dark hair pulled away from her face and tucked into a gold diadem. A far cry from how she looked upon their initial meeting on the beaches of Samos.

Alexios is speechless –she is ethereal, and he truly believes she is a princess or perhaps even Aphrodite disguised as a mortal. Irene motions him toward the entrance of Perikles' villa. The guards standing vigilant lower their heads as the princess passes but their gazes follow the mercenary trailing behind her with intense apprehension. "Alexios! It's you!" A girl exclaims, darting forward to wrap her arms around his legs.

"Phoibe?" He's sure his eyes are playing a trick on him. She looks up at him grinning.

"You said you weren't coming back to Kephallonia, so I decided to leave too." The way Phoibe says it makes it seem like the most obvious decision.

"I said I wouldn't be coming back," he reminds her, "but I don't remember saying you should leave too." Kephallonia was her home and with the Cyclops gone, it was safer than a place like Athens. "What are you doing here? How did you get here?" He asks, doubting she'd been able to make it across the Aegean on her own by legitimate means.

The girl glances around her friend, finally noticing a strange but pretty face smiling at her. "Who is she?" Phoibe asks. If her attire is anything to go by, then she must be important –like Aspasia.

"This is Irene," Alexios answers, knowing she was only trying to avoid his questions. Sighing, he rises –he'll get answers out of her some other time.

"I'm here to get you ready," Phoibe remarks, remembering why Aspasia had sent out from the study. "I have to make sure you leave all your weapons and change clothes," she tells him.

He looks down at his armor. "What's wrong with my clothes?"

Irene steps around him and pokes the dark leather cuirass. "Phoibe is right," she remarks. "Athenians tend to be more trusting of people who don't look like they're about to stab them." Alexios puffs out his chest –indignant. She would have offered him one of Zephyr's chitons, but her brother did not have the height or breadth of a warrior.

The Eagle Bearer glances between Phoibe and the princess swallowing his pride and comfort. "Fine," Alexios concedes. Pleased with his decision, Irene leaves to join the symposiasts.

Phoibe smirks. "I like her," she tells Alexios, noticing his gaze still lingers on the woman. "Don't worry," Phoibe says, "I have just the outfit for you."

Alexios clears his throat and Irene turns. His armor and weapons are gone, replaced by a blue chiton fastened at the shoulders with bronze fibulae. Phoibe did well in choosing the ensemble –the color brings out gold flecks in his dark eyes. "You look the part," she tells him, smoothing out a wrinkle in the fabric on his chest.

"I don't feel it," he admits glancing around the courtyard –unable to remember a time when he had felt so vulnerable. He'd feel better if Phoibe let him keep just one of his knives.

Irene thinks it strange to see a near-legendary warrior so intimidated by a group of poets and playwrights. "Don't tell me the Eagle Bearer is frightened of a few Athenian aristocrats," she teases.

He holds his hands out, caught off-guard by the missing weight of a blade or bow. "I am unarmed in this fight."

She smiles, taking a cup of watered wine as one of the servants passes by. "Don't think of it as fight," Irene tells him, taking a drink of the dry vintage, "it's more like a dance." One must learn how to navigate around the symposiasts. Aristophanes enjoys dry wine. Euripides will only speak freely when intoxicated. Protagoras will avoid Sokrates like the plague. Perikles never participates in his symposiums. It is precarious a dance she learned at a young age.

"I don't dance," Alexios retorts, crossing his arms.

There is a quip on the tip of Irene's tongue –it fades when Alkibiades staggers forward having just arrived. "Vile Sokrates!" He exclaims though most guests pay him no mind. "Always appearing where I least expect him." The licentious man stumbles toward her and Alexios, though his gaze is entirely focused on the latter. He grips onto the misthios' arm. "Warrior protect me from his amorous gaze."

Alexios looks as if he's ready to strangle the man. "Allie!" Irene scolds. He's always known how to make an entrance and at least this time he is still partially clothed, but it does not excuse his behavior.

"Irene!" He cries, wrapping both arms around her. Months have gone by since he had last seen her –sailing off to a new horizon. She's one of his favorite people in all of Attika, and her absence makes for a dull time.

"You know each other?" Alexios asks, equal parts amused and surprised. He had not pictured Irene to keep such perverse company. In truth, he had not imagined any Athenian to behave like Alkibiades –the man must drink like a Spartan, though Alexios doubts he can fight like one.

"Of course," Alkibiades purrs whilst twirling a lock of her Stygian hair around his finger, inhaling the sweet scent of lavender and sage, "I know her better than I know myself, misthios."

Irene rolls her eyes and lightly elbows the ribald man in the ribs. He grunts, distancing himself should she try to harm more important areas of him. "Unlike you, Alkibiades, I have standards," the princess bites back.

"You wound me!" Alkibiades exclaims, clutching his heart. His pout turns into a sensual simper. He tugs on a lock of her hair again and circles around the princess appreciating the finer details of her robes and the figure that lies beneath –she could be his greatest prize. "But you're always welcome, my sweetling, as is your new friend."

Irene scoffs, watches as he turns toward the andron with two courtesans following in his footsteps. There are times when she pities Perikles for haven taken in such an inordinately vain and libidinous relative. Even Sokrates has failed to teach Alkibiades morality. "He's better company when sober," she tells Alexios, drowning out her annoyance with wine, "though not by much."

Herodotus joins them after Alkibiades' flippant display and remarks on their tardiness but Irene is quick to accept the blame and leaves the two men to converse with old friends.

"It is good to see you," says a familiar voice at her ear.

Irene turns –finding Thucydides standing behind her. "Likewise," the princess replies, struggling to keep a reserved smile. It seems like a lifetime since she last saw the aspiring writer. Life had not been as kind to Thucydides as Herodotus. The former was now a general who stood with his men in battle -a rarity for Athenian commanders. Even now he wears an ornamented bronze breastplate beneath a gold-trimmed himation.

"I have an experiment in which I would like you to participate," he notes. She hopes it's similar to the last experiment he conducted –having found proof that given breath Sokrates would drone on for hours on end, enamored with the sound of his voice. Thucydides presses a wooden cup filled with wine into Irene's hands. She eyes both the cup and him, curious. "How do you see this?" The scholar inquires.

"With my eyes," she remarks promptly. Thucydides tilts his head, lets out a quiet sigh as he rolls his eyes. He should have known her wit had not dulled since their last encounter. Irene notices his displeasure and reconsiders the question, weighing the cup in her hand and looking into the dark red liquid. "Half-filled with wine," the princess decides.

"But is it not also half-empty?" He poses.

Irene rolls her eyes and takes two long drinks from the cup, turning it up. "And now it is empty," she points out.

Thucydides chuckles, but his point had already been made. "I believe within this simple test is the key to understanding our surroundings." Irene raises her brow, a subtle way of urging him to continue with his explanation. "We must be pragmatic and view the world how it is, not how we think it is or should like it to be."

The princess takes Thucydides' hands –they are quite rough given his status. He is not even a decade older than she, but age has taken a toll on his kind features. Part of her thinks he's being to look more like Hippokrates. "You are beginning to sound like Sokrates, my friend," she remarks with a soft laugh.

He ponders the statement for a moment. "Perhaps in moderation that is not such a horrific thing," the general reasons. Irene hates admitting it, but Thucydides is right. For his loquaciousness, Sokrates has a rare talent for challenging people to question presuppositions and think critically about the world.

There is a light tugging at the waist of her dress. Irene looks to her side and sees the girl staring up at her, having been afraid to interrupt the discussion at hand. "Phoibe," she greets.

The girl glances in Alexios' direction. He is conversing with Protagoras. "He likes you, I can tell," she remarks, confident in her observation. Irene smiles –unsure of how to respond. "Aspasia wants to see you," Phoibe quickly adds.

Irene thanks the girl for the message and parts from Thucydides with a friendly farewell. She finds the hetaera in the adjoining study holding a slip of papyrus over a small beeswax candle. As soon as it catches flame, she drops it into a half-broken amphora and rises to meet her guest.

"Aspasia," the princess greets, dipping her head down in obeisance. Aspasia does the same and the two women embrace.

"How goes your search?" She asks. Irene searches for justice though people know that. Aspasia believes she searches for information about the Order of Ancients and her father, Apollonides of Kos.

"I have nothing," Irene tells the hetaera with a shrug. Dry laughter follows as she extends her arm to reveal a new scar running down the inside of her bicep. "Save one or two new scars," she adds but Perikles' partner does not find it amusing.

Aspasia already knows the next question Irene will ask. She shakes her head. "Nothing has surfaced since your last departure." The Order would not have halted their pursuit though, only moved into the shadows. "We always keep our eyes, and ears open, if anything is seen or heard, you will know it," she assures the princess. Aspasia smiles and motions for Irene to follow. Her work is done for the evening, now it is time for her to join the symposiasts.

The hetaera clasps her hands together and observes her guests. All but one are familiar. "Perikles tells me you know this mercenary," she comments, surprised to find the misthios is engaged in debate with Sokrates and Thrasymachus, formidable opponents for one presumably not accustomed to scholarly avocation.

Alexios follows Sokrates' gaze to the two women. Their presence commands the attention of the room. For a fleeting moment, his and Irene's eyes meet. Irene tears her focus away from him, pushing a lock of fallen hair behind her ear, flushed –she had only just met the Eagle Bearer. "I wouldn't say know," she amends, stumbling over the words. Aspasia turns back to the princess. "He's looking for information to help find his mother."

PHOIBE BIDS THE two of them farewell and makes Alexios promise to come back soon after returning his armor and weapons. He slings his belongings over his shoulder and follows Irene out of the villa and back into the quiet street. "Some party," he mutters –exhausted from the mindless talking. It feels like hours passed and he only has three weak leads on where to look for his mother.

Irene takes hold of his arm as they pass another villa. She can recall the first symposium Zephyr had taken her to, it had been far less tame. Her brother quickly made friends with Alkibiades after he'd strode through the courtyard completely unrobed. "I would say you get to use to it-" she smiles, shakes her head "-but you never do." Even some Athenians couldn't handle the frivolity of the city's notorious symposiums.

"Wine?" She asks, pouring herself a glass. Her tastes are sweeter than any vintage served at symposiums. He takes what is offered and follows her up to the roof. "Phoibe seems sweet," Irene remarks. In some ways, the girl reminds her of herself at a similar age –headstrong and curious.

The observation makes him laugh in earnest. "When she's not getting herself into trouble," Alexios adds. He's lost count of how many times he's had to rescue the girl from tight spots. She'd always enjoyed picking fights with people who were older and bigger than she was –mostly because she knew Alexios would always have her back. "She was born here," he explains, motioning to the city, "but managed her way to Kephallonia after her parents died."

She can hear the fondness in his voice –he speaks of her as a little sister. "Did she do this?" Irene inquires, touching a golden bead in his hair. He nods. Phoibe had pleaded with him for days after she'd found the beads washed up on the shore. They numbered too few to string a bracelet or necklace and her hair was too short to use them as adornments. Finally, he caved. It's a memory that feels like a lifetime ago.

Alexios takes a drink of the watered-down wine and glances up at Irene. She has a soft smile playing on her lips and cheeks flushed pink from the wine. Bathed in the silver glow of the moonlight, he is sure she is a goddess –or at least a demigoddess.

#Alexios #Alexios x OC #Alexios Imagine #Alexios Fanfiction #Assassin's Creed Imagine #Assassin's Creed Fanfiction #Assassin's Creed Odyssey #story: Phobia #my writing

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artificialqueens · 5 years ago

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intents wicked or charitable (trixya) 8/10 - beanierose

AN: thanks as always to validation station for cheering me on, and stutter for looking at this over and over again and being gentle and kind each time.

(read on ao3) | (find me at katiehoughton)

[one.] [two.] [three.] [four.] [five.] [six.] [seven.]

a practical magic au for the spooky season. there’s a curse on any man who dares love you? love a woman, instead. | 5,141 words

The nearest bar is a town over but Trixie keeps driving until she gets to the next town after that. The chance that she’ll see somebody she knows is much too high. Everybody in the whole town has been laughing at her behind her back, and if she has to face them right now she will start screaming. She feels it building at the base of her throat, and if she lets it out she doesn’t know how she’d ever stop.

Since she left Los Angeles, she’s only gotten drunk that one time in Katya’s kitchen. She’s out of the habit, now. Katya doesn’t drink, and Trixie doesn’t like to drink in front of her. She’s had the occasional glass of wine with dinner, but even that she hasn’t indulged in since they-

Well. Since they what?

Trixie hasn’t ever been courageous enough to put words to it, to ask Katya to commit to a label. She’s been pretending that she’s the sort of casual, low-maintenance person who doesn’t need to use words like relationship and girlfriend, but she isn’t. In her head, she’s been thinking of Katya that way, but for all she knows Katya doesn’t see her like that. For all she knows, Katya has a whole string of dumb, impressionable women bobbing along behind her like buoys on a line.

Trixie settles herself on a stool and gets a concerned tilt of the head from the bartender. Her hair is wet. Once she got Cash settled in the cowshed with his brother and spent a long time kneeling in the hay petting Guthrie’s nervous head, she took a shower.

She brushed and flossed and swilled mouthwash twice. Her mouth still tastes artificial, like mint, and she keeps working her tongue around her teeth. Trixie asks the bartender for his recommendation and orders that. When it comes it’s some kind of cocktail that’s pink and way too sweet, and it tastes awful in her toothpaste mouth, but she drinks half of it down without pausing for breath.

Her stomach is empty. On the stove the crockpot had burned dry. She’d come in the mudroom door and smelled it right away. It’s supposed to be foolproof, and she has a fucking Michelin star. Trixie had pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead and allowed herself to bend double for just a minute. Dolly had been looking for her dinner, hanging her head over her empty dish and whining insistently. Trixie fed her, turned off the crockpot, dumped her whole ruined dinner into the sink.

She sucks down the rest of the cocktail until she hits ice and her straw makes that awful, dry sucking noise. The alcohol is beginning to hit her now and she takes her first deep breath in hours, lets it all out in one long shuddering exhale.

The bartender has already prepped a second drink for her without her asking and he slides it wordlessly along the counter to her. After her shower she looked at herself in the mirror over the sink for a long time; she knows it’s bad. Her face is swollen and pink, her eyes glassy.

All of the Verbena products that Katya’s ever given her — the ones from that very first time they met and the things she’s tucked into Trixie’s coat pockets for her to find later — had littered the countertop. Trixie swept them all off into the wastebasket.

Katya certainly has a cabinet full of potions that would make her feel better. Now that she’s thinking about it, she’s sure every product Katya has ever given her has been imbued with a little magic. She could probably just press her hands to Trixie’s raw cheeks and think very hard about it and make the redness and the swelling disappear. The indignity of that, the shame of the imbalance between them, brings a fresh rush of hot tears. She keeps thinking she’s cried herself out and then her breath shudders in her chest and another wave hits her.

Being alone in the house had unsettled her. She’s let Katya in to her life, the tiny world she was inhabiting all by herself, and now the solitude she used to crave just makes her skin prickle. Sitting by herself at the bar is not that much better, but the alcohol is helping.

Mortification still burns in the pit of her stomach. Everyone in the whole town has been looking at her with pity, and Katya most of all. Trixie circles her finger around and around the rim of her glass. She used to be able to make it sing, but it’s been a while since she’s tried it and all she can manage is an unpleasant squeak.

“Can I get a sidecar, and a glass of water for her? Thanks, Will.”

Trixie turns to see Violet, the femme fatale from the grocery store, arranging herself delicately on the stool next to Trixie’s. Her hair is down from its ponytail and pinned up at the front in two victory rolls that accentuate the taut pull of her face, her sharp cheekbones and the V of her cupid’s bow.

Out of her uniform polo, Violet’s waist is waspish to a degree that makes Trixie nervous for her. Sitting beside her at the bar, even two towns over, is making Trixie feel pudgy and too big for her skin. The first time the two of them met, Trixie had been unmoored by her feelings for Katya and the wet ends of her hair had dripped onto the floor of the grocery store. Now her hair is wet again, and there’s a chasm in her chest. Trixie works the knuckles of two fingers against her breastbone and doesn’t meet Violet’s eyes.

“Thank you for calling Betty a hateful bitch. She fucking is.”

It seems a peculiar way to open the conversation. Violet accepts the champagne saucer from the bartender and holds it delicately by the stem. She takes a careful sip, somehow managing not to slurp or get the sugar from the rim of the glass stuck to her lipstick. Trixie feels like she’s encountered an apparition and has to blink a couple of times to shake it off.

She’s annoyed to be babied, but she drinks a little of her water anyway. She feels it hit her stomach. It’s so empty that it’s aching, clenched like a fist and drawing the rest of her in tight. Another wave of nausea crests up and she breathes slowly through it. She really doesn’t want to get sick again. Not in front of Violet.

Violet sets her glass down, carefully so as not to spill it, and folds her hands neatly in her lap. It makes Trixie nervous, and when she’s nervous she talks.

“You’re the only one who doesn’t hate Katya.”

It gets a laugh out of Violet. Like every other time, it’s startling. It’s like she suddenly remembers that she’s a three-dimensional person and not an art installation and she tips her head back, her mouth open wide.

“They don’t like, hate her. They’re afraid of her.”

There’s a bruise blooming furiously purple at the base of Trixie’s spine, from pressing herself against the cabinets as Katya approached her. It hurts when she leans on the back of the barstool. “For good fucking reason, don’t you think?”

“Are you scared of her, Trixie?” Violet arches one perfectly carved brow.

That’s the worst part. It’s the most humiliating part. Trixie doesn’t care about the magic. She’s not upset that Katya is a witch, and she’s not afraid of her. She was ready to stand by her when there was a chance she might have killed somebody. This isn’t worse than that.

“No. I guess not.”

Violet takes another sophisticated sip of her drink. She doesn’t put it down this time, instead gesturing at Trixie with the glass. “That’s what I thought, you bitch.”

They don’t know each other well. Trixie’s seen Violet around town a few times, and she came in to Verbena once while Trixie was there, but this is the first time they’ve been alone together. It isn’t like her, to be so loquacious with somebody she barely knows, but the alcohol and the ache in her chest have left her vulnerable.

“I never had enough information to be scared. I didn’t know I was supposed to be. She didn’t even give me the courtesy of letting me know that that should cross my mind.”

“Wait, what?” Violet sets her glass down, and this time a little of her drink does slosh over the rim and onto the countertop. “What do you mean you didn’t know? Oh my God. Oh my God. You only just found out? Bitch, I’m dead! That’s like, so major.”

Violet’s voice is loud enough that a few people nearby have turned to look, and Trixie feels the insistent bloom of embarrassment in her pink cheeks. It’s not busy enough tonight that she’s worried about it, but she’d prefer not to be overheard.

“I’m the only person who didn’t know, apparently,” she mutters.

“Well yeah, you dumb bitch. We’ve all known her for like, her whole life. It’s whatever. Like, we’ve all seen it for ourselves. You haven’t? Not even when you’ve been fu-” Trixie’s cheeks flame and she glances down at her lap. “Okay. Damn.”

Violet snags the bartender down again and asks him for a couple bags of chips. They seem to know each other, because he questions her about her dog — Trixie didn’t even know she has one — and she asks after his wife. Trixie sits sullenly like a chastised child and works on her glass of water.

She doesn’t really feel like eating, but Violet opens both bags down the middle and sets them on the counter between the two of them. A wave of longing for Katya surges up from the pit of Trixie’s stomach so suddenly that it takes her by surprise and she bites the inside of her cheek.

“It’s different with you two. You shop at her store. You defend her in public.”

“I fucked her,” Violet says calmly.

Trixie’s water goes down the wrong way and she chokes a little bit. It’s very undignified. The spluttering hack of her lungs would be embarrassing if she had any energy left for that. Violet lets her cough it out, wordlessly hands her a couple of paper napkins. When it’s over, she shifts to cross her legs at the opposite ankle. Trixie looks at her long nails, her tiny waist, the way her hair moves in one glossy sheet when she moves her head.

“A couple of times,” Violet gives Trixie the most disinterested, apathetic shrug. “It was no big deal.”

“You- when was this?”

Violet rolls her eyes and chews delicately on a couple of chips. The wait is excruciating. Trixie picks at her nail beds, bites the swollen inside of her cheek. Obviously, there’s a lot she doesn’t know about Katya, but she doesn’t want to believe that she would actually…it seems impossible.

“She didn’t like, cheat on you, you dumb whore.” Relief drops heavily over Trixie so that her shoulders sag. “It was before she was even married. We were both…figuring some things out. You know what I mean?”

“Did you date?” Violet levels her with a look. “Right. Sure. I just- you defended her.”

“Trixie, I’m a lesbian.”

Hearing it said so plainly sends a small thrill through Trixie, even though it isn’t the first time she’s heard it. She’s said it herself, lots of times to lots of people, but it’s different here. Violet seems entirely unbothered, and Will the bartender is right there but he doesn’t even look up.

“You think I don’t like, understand having a secret? You think I don’t get what it would be like to be an- to be an outcast?” She waves one hand flippantly. Trixie keeps getting stuck on those nails, dark red and shiny and filed into stiletto points.

“Oh please, look at yourself,” Trixie scoffs. “You’d never be an outcast, you femme fucking bitch.”

Violet’s eyes widen and she tilts her head. It makes one perfect curl tip forward over her shoulder. “Oh?”

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know. I saw you checking yourself out in the napkin holder, you whore.”

That gets a laugh, Violet’s mouth open wide again. Trixie sees the pink dart of her tongue against her white teeth and it makes her think of Katya, because everything makes her think of Katya. Violet shifts in her stool and crosses her legs at the knee so the toe of her absurd heel just barely brushes Trixie’s shin.

“No, I know I’m everything. Mama, please. How could I not. It’s just…interesting to hear that you think that.” Violet reaches out and rests her hand at Trixie’s forearm. Her eyes are even more sultry than usual so that they’re hardly even open.

“I’m sorry, what’s this?”

“Do you maybe want to work through your frustration?”

Trixie screeches, can’t help herself, and snatches her arm out from underneath Violet’s grip. She shunts her barstool backwards for good measure, to put an extra inch or two of space between them. “No! Oh my God! It’s just a compliment, it doesn’t mean that I want to fuck you. You lunatic.”

“You think I’m hot but you don’t want to fuck me?” It seems to dawn on Violet quite slowly. Trixie finishes the last of her water, traces her fingertip around and around in the salt left on the foil of the chip bag. “Oh! Ohhhh. You’re like, really in love with her aren’t you?”

“It fucking sucks,” Trixie says, and is horrified to feel the burn of tears again. Now that she’s rehydrated a fresh wave is threatening and giving her headache.

Violet doesn’t seem at all shaken at being shot down by Trixie. She can’t imagine what that must be like. Trixie’s pretty confident; the descriptors attached to her throughout the years have run the gamut from self-assured to arrogant bitch. Violet is a different creature entirely.

“Well yeah, you dumb bitch. That’s like, what love is like.” Trixie drops her head into her hands. “It makes your heart race. It turns the world upside down. Whatever. But if you’re not careful, if you don’t like, keep your eyes on something still, you can lose your balance. Know what I mean?”

“Yes. Yeah,” she mutters without lifting her head to look at Violet.

A cool, bony hand comes to rest at Trixie’s shoulder. It makes her flinch in spite of herself. She has only been touched by Katya for such a long time. She is only interested in being touched by Katya, even now. It’s a peculiar thing: she wants Katya to be here, to be the one comforting her, but she’s the reason that Trixie is hurting in the first place. The cognitive dissonance is making her feel a bit untethered to reality, like at any moment she could float up to the ceiling.

“It’s like, you can’t see what’s happening to the people around you. You can’t see that you’re about to fall.”

Trixie straightens up, then. Her forehead feels hot. “You think I didn’t notice the witch in my bed because I’m such a dumb lovesick idiot?”

“Girl, I get it. I know what it’s like. She’s pretty captivating.” Violet’s grinning now. She drains the last of her sidecar and nudges her empty glass over towards the bartender.

“It’s so embarrassing.” Trixie pinches the bridge of her nose hard. It doesn’t really help to stave off her headache, but it does give her an excuse not to have to look at Violet for just a moment.

Clearly, she’s a regular here. Will has poured out a soda for her without needing to be asked, and he offers one to Trixie as well. She declines, because she really needs to eat something more substantial than half a bag of chips before she drinks anything else at all.

“Don’t be embarrassed.” Violet presses her lips together and rakes her eyes over Trixie very slowly. “Not about that, anyway. This wet hair, mama.”

“Fuck off.”

Violet grins at Trixie around her straw. It’s humid in the bar with body heat and alcohol and Trixie’s hair is frizzing as it dries, but Violet is still sleek and shiny. It’s like she’s been encased in resin or vacuum sealed.

“She told me that she hoped she would never fall in love. That she used to whisper it to herself when she was a little kid. Sitting at the top of the stairs watching her aunts helping people with potions and all that shit, I don’t know. Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?”

“When we first met, you said something about a curse.”

“Oh, yeah. People say that there’s like a curse on her family. That any man she loves is destined to die. It’s just because her parents died and her aunts were spinsters and then when Michael died…people are gossipy and bored and fucking dumb. That’s all it is, Trixie.”

“Yeah, but if the magic is real-”

“Even if there is a curse,” Violet cuts in and lifts one hand. She has a gold ring just above the knuckle of her middle finger, and a red indentation in her pointer finger. “It’s on men. I don’t think you should worry about that. You’re not gonna die.”

“Oh, I’m not worried. You said the curse is on the people that she loves, right? I’m safe.”

Violet very suddenly loses all of her decorum and honks out a laugh. Both hands fly up to her hair and she skims her fingers delicately against the tight pin curls like she’s worried they might have come loose with that outburst.

“Trixie, you dumb fucking bitch. She’s head over heels for you. Sometimes when I’m working nights she comes into the store and just sits at my register and like, talks and talks and talks about you.”

“She does?”

They spend most of their nights together. There have been a few times when Katya has needed to be up extra early to accept a delivery, or Trixie has had a moment of claustrophobia, and they’ve spent an evening apart. She’s wondered, those times, what Katya’s doing while Trixie soaks in the bathtub with the radio turned down low.

“Yes.” Violet sighs. There’s a tiny smudge of dark eyeliner just below her left eye. “God. I know more about the two of you and your relationship than I ever needed to.”

Trixie clears her throat. She’s spent the whole day feeling foolish and chastised, and a small childish creature in the pit of her stomach wants to go home and pull the sheets over her head.

“I didn’t know that.”

“She’s not so great with the emotional honesty stuff. Not since Michael. It’s hard for her to like, open up or whatever.”

Violet has finished her soda and she shunts the empty glass down the bar towards Will. She declines the offer of another and folds her hands neatly together in her lap again. She meets Trixie’s eyes, insists upon it, but hers are warm and kind.

“But I know she cares about you a whole lot. Her face lights up when someone even mentions you, it’s disgusting.”

Trixie has chewed on the inside of her cheek so much that it’s raw and swollen. She probes at the sore spot with the tip of her tongue.

“I thought she was…” There are things she hasn’t gotten the chance to say yet. And even though she so desperately wants to speak them into existence, Katya deserves to be the first person to hear it. Not Violet. “I care about her so much. I just don’t understand why she couldn’t trust me with this. I trust her. I trusted her.”

Violet slides off her barstool in one fluid motion like water poured from a tall glass. She holds out her hand to Trixie, and when she doesn’t take it she clicks her tongue and grabs Trixie by the wrist to haul her to her feet.

“Come on. I’ll drive you home.”

“My car-”

Violet puts a couple of folded bills down on the bar and calls out a goodbye to Will. Now that she’s on her feet Trixie is a bit woozy and she’s glad for Violet’s arm hooked through hers.

“I’ll bring you back in the morning to get it. You look like a fucking nightmare, mama. Let’s go.”

It’s kind of nice to be on autopilot for a little bit. The ground rushes up to meet Trixie with each step that she takes and she clings to Violet, allowing herself to be babied. She’s not entirely cooperative when Violet tries to get her into the passenger seat. When the door is closed she slumps against it, her cheek pressed to the cold of the window. The engine makes the whole car vibrate and Trixie feels it into the roots of her teeth. Whenever they hit an uneven patch of road she’s jostled, her head lolling back and forth.

She doses off a little bit. The cold of the car is sobering her up, but she still feels pleasantly outside of herself. Violet doesn’t play any music or the radio and the silence makes it difficult to tell how much time is passing. She cuts the engine, and the sudden cessation of movement makes Trixie’s eyes open. She grunts and immediately closes them again, covers them with a hand for good measure.

“Nuh-uh. No. I wanna go home, Violet.”

“You can’t like, ignore her. Be a grownup. Tell her what you told me.”

Trixie huffs a sigh and peels one eye open. “That I think you’re hot?”

“No, you rotted bitch!” Violet is uncomfortably loud in the intimate confines of the car. “That you care about her. That you love her.”

“I did tell her that.”

“Tell her again. Tell her while you’re not crying.”

Violet leans across Trixie and opens the passenger door. She hadn’t really noticed it getting warm in the car but the middle of the night cold is rushing in unpleasantly now. Trixie gets out, because Violet has unbuckled her belt for her and is shoving on her arm and she’s going to fall on her ass in the snow if she doesn’t.

There’s a whisper of movement inside as Trixie trudges up the driveway. She didn’t have the presence of mind to put her coat on earlier this evening and she’s shivering in just her sweater after only a couple of steps. It’s sobering her up. The front door pops open before Trixie even makes it up the porch steps and Katya comes out to grab her and tug her inside.

It’s warm, because Katya’s house always is. There’s a fire burning in the grate and Katya brings her all the way into the living room and sits her down on the couch. She fusses with a blanket, tucking it around Trixie, and she eases her boots off for her so that she can curl her sock feet up onto the couch cushion.

Katya kneels at her feet. Even in the firelight, Trixie sees the red tip of her nose and her swollen eyes and satisfaction twists in her stomach for just a moment. It’s swiftly replaced by a grief that rushes through her like a saline flush. She doesn’t want Katya to hurt; even just a few hours’ distance has clarified that for her.

“Trixie, honey, what are you doing?” Katya says very softly. For just a moment she’s a stranger, and then she gets those twin creases between her brows that Trixie loves to kiss off her.

Trixie is grouchy and petulant and it spills out in her voice. “Violet is an agent of chaos.”

It startles a laugh out of Katya. She looks very small, kneeling on the floor. It reminds Trixie of the last time she was drunk. Trixie frees a hand from the blanket and lays it on the couch cushion close to Katya’s head. She takes it immediately and threads their fingers together, rests her cheek to the back of Trixie’s hand.

“Are you okay?” Trixie nods, but Katya doesn’t seem entirely convinced. “You’re good?”

She feels suddenly weepy again. Trixie scrapes a clumsy hand through her hair and encounters a knot that makes her hiss a breath through her teeth. “It sucks that even when you’re the one who hurt me, you’re also the only person I want to see. I really hate you for that.”

“You’ve been feeling drawn to me, haven’t you. Since we met.”

Katya sounds exhausted. She’s still resting her head against the clasp of their hands and her lashes brush Trixie’s skin with each slow blink. Even in the wan light of the late evening, even from this angle, even after so much sorrow today, she is still so beautiful that Trixie can hardly bear to look at her.

There’ve been a couple of times when she’s tried to bring it up, tried to ask Katya if she feels the same tug low down in her stomach, the same sharp, curved hook. The problem is, Trixie allows herself to be easily distracted. She’s a talker, and she’s needed reassurance, but Katya will slide a knee over Trixie’s thighs or curl her fingers at Trixie’s ears and the words just don’t seem so urgent anymore.

“Yeah, I have. You’re a banshee.”

Katya turns her head to kiss the back of Trixie’s hand, a little scrape of teeth to show that she really means it. “That’s not what banshees do, baby.”

“Are they real too?” If she had the energy, if she weren’t exhausted and hurting and still a little drunk, Trixie might rear up from the arm of the couch. She stays slumped, and she doesn’t press the issue when Katya doesn’t answer.

“The reason that you have been — the reason that you’re here — is because I sent for you.” Katya’s eyes are closed now, like she doesn’t think she can make it through her explanation if she has to look at Trixie. “When I was a tiny little girl I worked a spell, so I would never fall in love. I asked for qualities that I knew couldn’t possibly exist. But here you are.”

She sounds so achingly sad that Trixie can’t bear it. From the moment they first met, Trixie has wanted Katya. She made herself wait, because she knew that they had something worth being careful with. She isn’t about to waste all of that hard work.

She slides off the couch, bringing the blanket with her, and lands half in Katya’s lap in a messy knot. Katya’s arms come around her and she arranges them both, frees the edge of the blanket where it’s gotten trapped beneath Trixie and threatens to tip her over.

It’s not exactly comfortable, but Katya is warm and smells like herself. Trixie lets her heavy head rest at Katya’s shoulder. “You’re saying what I feel for you is just one of your spells?”

“Yeah.” There’s a wet lump of sorrow in Katya’s throat that she has to cough to clear. “It’s not real, honey.”

“Yeah well all relationships have problems,” Trixie says.

It makes Katya laugh a tiny bit. She’s got one hand cradling the back of Trixie’s head now. The floor is uncomfortable, making Trixie’s ass go numb, but she’s so tired that she can’t imagine trying to move.

If Katya has been thinking that this entire time. If Katya has been certain that Trixie doesn’t really love her, that she’s bewitched-

Trixie can’t bear that.

“I’m right, aren’t I? You don’t know for sure.”

She sounds so resigned to it. Trixie can’t stop thinking about Katya, awake and alone in the middle of the night with Trixie out cold at her side. Katya, wondering when the curse is going to take Trixie from her. Trixie struggles to get to her knees so she can look at Katya properly. Her eyelashes are all sticking together and her eyes are dark and enormous.

“Curses only have power when you believe in them,” Trixie says. Her voice is firm, no wiggle room for argument. As she says it, she imagines that it’s made true. “And I don’t.”

“Trixie-”

She touches her thumb to Katya’s chin. “You know what? I wished for you, too.”

Katya’s whole face crumples and her mouth opens on a sob. Trixie reaches for her and gathers her up, rocks Katya against her chest like a small child. She’s crying soundlessly and without moisture, dry sobs wracking her whole body and making her jerk violently in Trixie’s arms.

I don’t want you to die, she says over and over.

Trixie holds her until she exhausts herself, and a little longer after that. Katya has one hand fisted in Trixie’s sweater so that the wool bunches up and exposes the bare skin just above the waistband of her pants. The fire has burned out in the grate and it’s chilly in the living room now. Trixie gets the blanket around them both. She thinks about moving them back onto the couch, or to the bed, but Katya is curled up tiny like a pillbug.

“I’m not gonna die. I’m way too stubborn.”

It doesn’t earn her the laugh she’s looking for. Instead, Katya straightens out and puts some distance between the two of them. “I don’t think it’s safe. For you to be here. For you to be near me. I don’t think it’s safe.”

“Katya, I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. I believe you. I believe in you. But I don’t believe you’re cursed.”

Trixie swipes impulsively at her cheek with the pads of her fingers, but they come away dry. She’s done crying for tonight. The suggestion that she can’t make decisions for herself, that she loves Katya because of a spell cast twenty five years ago, has rankled her. Katya is refusing to look at her now. Trixie wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her, wants to put her to bed and stroke her hair until she falls asleep.

There’s an angry purple vein in Katya’s forehead that Trixie has never seen before. Katya catches her looking and touches a self-conscious hand to it. “I think you should go.”

“I can’t go. Your side piece has me trapped here.” Katya’s eyes fly to Trixie’s at that and her mouth drops open. Something small and vindictive inside of Trixie is glad for it, hopeful that Katya is ashamed the way Trixie has been. “She’s gonna take me back to the car in the morning. So I’m sorry babe, but we have one last night.”

#rpdr fanfiction #trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #trixya #magical realism #tenderness #isolation #slow burn kind of #iwoc #beanierose #lesbian au

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katreal-fic · 5 years ago

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Day 7 — for #fictober 10/10/19

Prompt: “No, and that’s final.”

Fandom: Homestuck

Warnings: Cursing, 2nd Person POV

Part of a series. Please start from the beginning!

Characters: Dirk Strider & ARquiusprite; ARquiusprite & Davepeta

First | Previous | Next

ARquiusprite is ignoring you.

That’s fine. That’s cool. Two can play at this game. You came despite having to deal with him. Not because of him. This works out for the both of you. If he wants to completely ignore your presence all throughout breakfast, not even so much as a sarcastic, “Long time no see” except in many more words and probably more than a little insultingly, that suits you just fine. You get enough of that shit seeping into your thoughts you don’t need it from an external source too.

Dirk > Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth

You trail a little behind Roxy, her housemate–? You’re not exactly sure what relationship is going on here, but it feels a bit more than housemate–and an exuberant squared sprite as they wind their way through what amounts for a Carapace-targeted market. There’s a lot of…things… you would never have considered food items, being haggled over by chessmen (or women) of both the prospitian and dersite variety. You wonder if New Derse and New Prospit are as segregated as the names implied, or if they are merely historical relics at this point. It’s been several thousand years since y'all seeded civilizations and then completed your big time skip. You don’t see any obvious tension in the mingling of the two types here; and there’s even a few other races either meandering around window shopping or actually manning the shops.

It’s definitely an…interesting set of wares, as the three actual shoppers on this venture stop at a clothing shop. You keep half an ear on the others, Roxy and Davepeta’s chatter loud enough to track even over the odd clicking sounding dialect of the other patrons. A lot of different styles and colors of drapery, from things as simple as something you recognize as bed-sheets, exquisitely tailored little petticoats fitted for the unique cylindrical proportions of the caraparians.

“Dirkleton! Stop being a stinker and get over here! It’s time for ice-cream!” Roxy quite literally drags you out of your head, latching onto your arm. You aren’t sure how long you’ve been gone, stoically looking out over the crowd with a tension that reminds you of the early days of the game, when you still were still hopped up on adrenaline from your dramatic entry into the session and the bone deep knowledge that your charge was in danger and there’s nothing you could do about it. Nothing you should do about it. Because baby bird need to stretch his wings and fly and it would doom them to coddle them.

Ice-cream is an…event. True to Roxy’s word ARquiusprite is the one to pay for everyone’s sweet treats. Except yours. But you don’t want one. You hang back while Roxy and Davepeta put their heads together to decide on a good flavor for the cherub, who is wringing her (their? You didn't ask.) claws, a lime green blush staining Calliope's skull-like face.

You don’t notice the drift until you find yourself next to the red sprite that still towards a head above you, despite you finishing off your growthspurt in the intervening years. Not that the contest is really all that fair, what with the floating and the ghostly tail. At this point you’re fuckin’ committed, you guess. He’s still wearing that off-white tank with the weird arrow-shades on it that he had when he was prototyped, which lends credence to your wondering about the staticity of their appearance. The advantage of a tank-top, you note, is that you can see all his those freakishly big muscles. Bulging as he unconsciously shifts and flexes. You can almost see the tension running off his skin. So can the poor bastard pawn behind the register, who is sweating bullets glancing between you two.

Like Davepeta, ARquius’s shades are completely opaque. You can’t read anything, except for the perpetual frown hiding broken teeth. Black cracks running through the constructed shades stirring up the guilt in your gut. (Cracks. A pressure. Your life in his hands. You can do nothing but talk. Stall. Try to buy your right to live with logic and cajoling and guilt)

“How do you even plan to pay for this shit? I don’t see anywhere to keep a wallet.”

“Small-talk still isn’t your STRONG suit is it, Dirk?” ARquiusprite’s voice is a strange rumble, straight red hair shifting as he turns to regard you (you assume) out of the corner of his eye. It’s not like you can see it.

“Can’t say it’s yours either, bro.” You shot back, before gritting your teeth, “You’ve barely said a word.”

“To you, maybe. To those DESERVING of my brilliance I am one loquacious motherf*****. I have a f****** degree in small talk, dude. Graduated from the sh**** auto responder school of horsesh*** and improvisation. I’m afraid being your entertainment is rather low on my priorities right now.”

That’s more like it.

“They made you promise to behave, didn’t they?”

He twitches. Your lips curl into a smirk. “Dude, don’t hold yourself back on my account. I’m the interloper here”

“I’m not doing it for you.” He bites back, broken teeth peeking out behind a stifled growl, “I’m doing it because my moirail asked me a f****** favor. If it were up to me you wouldn’t even be crashing this party.”

“Roxy invited me.”

“It was an invitation for the future not right this f****** second. You knew full well she had guests and you decided to crash anyway. There’s no other word for that but inconsiderate as hell.”

He’s right. The fuckin’ arrow straight to the heart causes you to clam up, shut down. The protection of your shades and stoicism is nothing before a being that was once closer to you than anyone in the fuckin’ world every could be.

(you’d thought about it once; trying to create life. Looking at the result, you’re glad you kept to dumb as rocks chat-bots instead)

“You wouldn’t understand, Dirk.” It’s quiet. Nothing more than a rumble in his chest, “At least everyone else cared when they came back. I know you better than anyone–no one f****** matters when you get your head stuck up your own a**.”

Everyone came. Except you.

Before you can respond–how the fuck do you respond?–Davepeta bounds up with what looks like, and probably is, strawberry flavored ice-cream, Calliope with some hot pink flavor, and Roxy with cone full of mint chocolate chip. She turns that smile on you as ARquiusprite goes back to ignoring you (much to the relief of the poor chess dude behind the counter.) You watch as he reaches into Davepeta’s coat to withdraw a wallet from the currently mostly-green garment. Smart. Maybe ARquius didn’t have any pockets in his skin-tight sweat-soaked tank, but Davepeta lucked out into a much more versatile clothing selection.

“You sure you don’t want anythin’ Dirk? I saw they had orange sherbert in there. I kno you’d love that.”

You shake your head, not looking away from the way Davepeta flings themselves into ARq’s arms in excited gratitude. At the way ARquiusprite’s glow seems to intensify, curling his tail around them. You swear there’s a red blush staining his off-white semi-corporeal face.

“Yo, earth-c to Dirk, do you copy?”

You don’t understand?

Maybe you don’t.

ARquiusprite was one of the few voices you don’t have popping up in your head.

You wouldn’t understand, Dirk.

You have a feeling that’s gonna change.

“No, Rox,” You purposefully shake yourself out of your own head again, “No, I’m good.”

First | Previous | Next

#fictober19 #homestuck #homestuck fanfic #dirk strider #arquiusprite #earth c fic #fic:diamonds #a sea with a sky full of diamonds #waaaay behind #but eh

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writeradamanteve · 6 years ago

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And there’s this, too. I call it: Advanced Reading Copy

Another one of those winter prompts that I didn’t ignore. I can’t remember who asked for this, because like an idiot, its been too long ago, This prompt was asked for by @earthlaughsinflowersblog (thanks, babe!) :

we’ve been arguing for the last six years about everything and the only thing we can agree on right now is the fact that being snowed in the office together sucks

And here’s the first part of the story.

“Bet you can’t guess who’s coming to New York?”

Betty looked up briefly from her laptop screen, just quick enough to catch a glimpse of Veronica Lodge’s impeccable visage, with her perfect makeup and expensive suit, standing at the threshold of her office door.

Betty cast her a distracted smile before going back to writing her email. “Oh, hey, gorgeous. Did the drunk ladies behave today?”

The Drunk Ladies were the loquacious hosts of the Today Show, dubbed just so by publicists across the New York metro area because they were so often inebriated first thing in the morning. Veronica complained about them on a daily basis, mostly because they went off script. Whether it was because they were drunk or because they just didn’t give a fuck was yet to be determined, but they were, according to Veronica, a publicist’s bad dream. Not quite a nightmare, but enough to make Veronica wish their bosses didn’t always want the Drunk Ladies on their authors’ press tours.

“Bold of you to suggest that they ever would,” Veronica replied with an arch of her professionally shaped eyebrow. “But I didn’t come here to complain about them. You’re not listening. Guess who’s coming to New York.”

Betty felt that she had way too many things to do to stop and gossip. She still had a couple of hundred pages of a bestselling author’s manuscript to edit apart from the email she was writing to another author where she was telling him to extensively rewrite two chapters of his manuscript because, Betty thought, it read like he was high out of his mind. Emails like these tended to become a flood of email exchanges between her and the authors, with the latter grousing that she was wrong, and her arguing that she was right. It was going to be a long day.

She didn’t have time to play guessing games with Veronica, no matter how much she loved her favorite book publicist.

“Just tell me, V. I’m a little busy here.”

Veronica sighed, rolling her eyes. “Your favorite author, Jughead Jones!”

Betty pursed her lips. “Great. There goes the neighborhood.”

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

Jughead Jones, New York Times bestselling author and her publishing company’s long-time Golden Goose, lived and wrote mostly out in the upstate New York country home he had, and he mostly communicated with his editor, Kevin Keller, by Skype. He prided himself for being a recluse and whenever he published a book, he limited himself to two major talk-show appearances. He would take interviews at his secluded house and he refused studio photoshoots. Vehemently.

He liked to do book tours, however, showing up for book readings and signings with unlikely enthusiasm.

He liked buying the strangest things in bulk--Tylenol packets, oddly shaped paper clips, cheap party favors, and even condoms at one time--so that he could give them to every person who asked to sign his book. He had quick-fire conversations with them so he could personalize each message:

“Dear Aliyah, Poor you. Sincerely, J. Jones,” he wrote for someone who said she lived in New Jersey.

“Dear Jeff, Get well soon. Yours, J. Jones,” he wrote on another who told him he was addicted to Jughead’s books.

To the grandmother who told him she had asked to be buried with Upon the Winding Staircase in her will, he wrote, “Dear Helen, I hope you would consider being buried with Beneath the Cobbled Stone, instead. Like honestly, you’d be better off. Truly, J. Jones.”

“He likes people who read,” Kevin had told her.

“Yeah, well,” Betty had replied. “David Berkowitz likes to read.”

“Serial Killers probably rank low on people he likes, but I’d venture to guess he may like you a little more than David Berkowitz.”

***********

Their office rolled out the red carpet whenever Jughead Jones came to town, and it wasn’t that Betty hated him. It wasn’t like that at all. If there was any hate, or dislike, harbored between them, it would be from him to her, because the day he met Betty Cooper, he had seen the first chapter of his manuscript on her desk and it looked like road kill. He had, perhaps, never seen his manuscripts bleed so much in his life.

“Well,” he had said, his acerbic smile cutting straight to the pit of her stomach. “That didn’t work out for us, did it?”

It wasn’t the kind of first meeting she liked having with authors, particularly when they were going to be published for the first time, and six years ago, she was new to the publishing company herself. Perhaps it wasn’t really fair to either of them, to meet over the carcass of what eventually became the biggest selling book of that year. She wasn’t Jughead Jones’s editor, even then, but Kevin did like giving her first chapters of the authors he handled so that she could edit it, completely unfiltered by corporate bias, personal relationships, and self-congratulatory hype.

“Keeps me honest,” is what Kevin says it does for him.

Of course, Betty didn’t explain all that to Jones. She didn’t feel she had to. There was something vaguely smug about what he had said--the way he seemed un-bothered by how she had murdered his work in cold blood. One side of his mouth was lifted the tiniest bit, and his blue eyes looked directly into her green ones. That he was tall enough that she was half a foot shorter than him meant that he had to look down at her and that a forelock of his luscious black hair flopped over the brow of one eye.

She remembered frowning petulantly at what she assumed was intellectual arrogance.

So full of himself, she remembered thinking. Nevermind that getting snapped up by one of the biggest publishing companies of the world, known for publishing brash and bold authors with creative talents that often frightened most of their peers in the industry, did tend to get into any author’s head. It was almost an imperative that authors published by Little, John & Co. had the gumption to jump off planes butt naked, screaming passages of Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment on their way down.

She didn’t assume Jughead Jones was any different, and as a book editor in said publishing company, honed by the huge egos of other authors past, she had grown expert at handling guys like Jughead Jones.

Or so she thought.

She was helping out a friend, was all she had said, and it was her duty as an editor to look at an author’s work with a critical eye.

His only response had been a smirk, and biting his bottom lip, he wagged a finger at her and said, “You don’t scare me.”

That was six years ago. Since then, she’d gotten countless emails from Jughead, asking her what he thought of certain passages of the books he was writing. Of course, she at first told him that he had to direct all these questions to Kevin, his editor, but with Kevin insisting that his author considered this part of his writing process, she eventually stopped trying to punt Jughead’s emails to Kevin and just began going along with it.

She was often merciless, never holding back on what she thought were the flaws in his work. And while she always thought he was a brilliant writer, she figured that wasn’t what he was emailing her for. Enough people probably told him how great his work was. She wasn’t going to drop the ball on his expectations.

They argued a lot in their emails, but Betty found a strange sort of satisfaction from the push and pull with an intellectual equal, because even when she savagely won most of their written debates, he always came back for more.

It was true what he said. She didn’t scare him and she respected that.

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

The next time he would drop by the New York office, it would be three years later, gearing up for the publication of his second book, expected to be as wildly successful as the first. She had expected they would greet each other in the hallway like old friends.

They’d exchanged a few comments on Instagram outside of their professional relationship and he’d even, at one time, commented “Wow,” at a picture of her in a red cocktail dress.

It was hard to tell if it was a good wow or a sarcastic one, but he had Liked the photo, so she preferred to assume the former rather than the latter.

So when she saw Jughead through the glass window of her office three years ago and he walked past her door, she had smiled and waved, saying “Jughead!” like an old friend.

His response was nothing she expected. He had said, “Hey, Cooper,” before getting immediately distracted by their esteemed Publisher, Waldo Weatherbee.

That was it. That was all he thought she deserved.

And after he left Weatherbee’s office, he didn’t drop by her office to say hello or goodbye. To say that she felt a little snubbed was an understatement. She was pissed. She hadn’t spent hours arguing with him in email about his work, giving him what could be considered helpful pointers on writing his bestselling book, only to be treated like that.

She remembered Kevin telling her that afternoon that Jughead was hoping she could make it to drinks with them later, along with his then rumored girlfriend, Toni Topaz, and Betty had said, “Tell him to kiss mine, Kevin.”

She never thought that Kevin would actually tell him that, but clearly, he did, because Jughead Jones showed up unexpectedly that night at the door of her apartment, his brilliant blue eyes darker than she remembered them, and said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

Well.

She thought she’d be angry enough that she could slam the door on his face, but that dark hair over his blue eye, the dark scarf around his neck where motorcycle goggles rested loosely upon its creases, and that black leather jacket with the gang patch, did something to her breath--because it was caught in her throat, and two seconds later, their faces were smashing together with torrid suction, and after a few seconds more, he was unceremoniously nailing her against her apartment wall.

She never thought Jughead Jones would be the standard of every sexual experience she had thereafter, but he would be.

After he made her come two times standing up, he took off all her clothes (yes, she wasn’t even completely naked), dumped her on her bed, and made her come three more times before he let himself go.

She remembered lying on her bed in disbelief, still tingling from her last orgasm, and listening to Jughead catch his breath beside her.

As they both stared up at the ceiling of her room, perhaps lost in their own post-coital thoughts, his hand kind of crept into hers, and she let him take it.

“Betty Cooper,” he had said, breathless.

When she could speak, she began to say his name back when a shrill ringing sound pierced through the room.

It wasn’t her phone, so she could only suppose it was his. He let it ring for a couple more times, waiting for what she had to say, when she said, “Aren’t you going to get that?”

Maybe that had been her mistake.

When he picked up that phone, the look on his face was one of devastation and alarm. It was Toni, and he looked like she had delivered bad news. He was still on the phone with her as he pulled on his clothes frantically, telling her to calm down, to call hs lawyer, to meet him at his hotel.

She watched him as he did all this, as everything she and he did the last hour withered to nothing, and when he ended his call and put his phone into the pocket of his jeans, he was already headed for the door. “Betty, I gotta go, I’m sorry.”

She remembered worrying for him, walking right after him swaddled in her blankets as she said, “Is everything alright? Is it something I can help you with?”

“Not really. I gotta--I’ll call you.”

She doubted it, then. Disappointed, but not surprised. “Sure. Well, let me know.”

“I will.” He had paused at the door, his gaze intense on hers, and he pulled her close, planting a firm kiss on her forehead. She remembered closing her eyes, and before she could open them again, he was gone, the slamming of her door putting the period on what could’ve been.

Not that she was heartbroken or anything. Not really. What they had had been an interlude. A brief moment of physical connection.

It had come and now it was gone.

As it turned out, what had sent him rushing out of her apartment was all over the news the next day.

Jughead Jones’s father, Forsythe Pendleton Jones II, had been arrested for drug trafficking charges the night before. As president of an upstate New York gang, the Southside Serpents, he had allegedly overseen the largest drug distribution operation upstate New York has ever seen in 20 years.

Jughead Jones’s second book skyrocketed to #1 on the NYT bestsellers list and the publishing company barely had to lift a finger. In the meantime, Jughead Jones stayed by his embattled father’s side for the next year and a half.

She had to admit--he was understandably preoccupied, so when he didn’t call, she really couldn’t bring herself to be sensitive about it.

Perhaps to keep his sanity, he never stopped writing, and once again, the emails to her resumed, so with his father’s legal troubles in the background, he finished his third book.

Betty had briefly considered telling him then that he had some nerve, but really, aside from their one-night stand being the least of his problems, that would seem disingenuous. She actually liked these email exchanges (she would never admit that to Jughead or Kevin), and if he wanted to keep it strictly professional, as in--let’s pretend that night didn’t happen--then she could do just that.

She never told Kevin or Veronica about that affair, and three years after that, while writing his fourth book, he was coming back to New York, as Veronica said, and she wondered what sort of reunion they would have now.

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

FP Jones had recently been exonerated of all drug trafficking charges, his lawyers having successfully argued that he had been framed by a rival gang. Jughead was arguably less distracted now, and with his fourth book in full swing, his writing career was unburdened by personal matters.

She had learned that their email and online exchanges predetermined nothing about their face-to-face encounters and that uncertainty, out of everything, was what gave her a fair measure of agita.

“Try not to hurt yourself in your excitement,” Veronica told her.

Betty sighed, giving up on her work to look at her friend and address the issue. “Is there something in particular that you need from me?”

“Nothing, B. I just thought you should know. Kevin just got the news, himself, and he’s been pestering me to set up an itinerary of interviews for him. He wants Jones to use every minute he’ll be in New York for press, talking about book 3.”

Betty’s eyebrow arched in surprise. “Book 3? Not book 4?”

“I think Jones’s agent is on the cusp of making a book to TV series deal with Netflix and media noise about what’s already up would help.”

“Well, good luck getting anything on short notice.”

Veronica scoffed. “Please. I get calls about booking Jughead Jones everyday. The guy’s hot, literally and--well, literally.”

Betty had been waiting for someone to make that publishing joke for ages.

And yes, Jughead Jones was incredibly hot.

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

It was snowing outside. Badly. And Betty trudged into work in her waterproof parka and snow boots. The guard at the reception greeted her with a knowing smirk as he shook her head.

“Don’t work too hard, Cooper.”

She said, “Look who’s talking?” She liked him, Security Guy Jeff. He remembered names and faces and it shows.

As she got to her floor, she noted the silence that seemed to settle through the hallway. She was sure most of her coworkers were working from home, what with the snow storm raging outside, but she never liked working from home. She liked the cold efficiency of an office, with no distractions and relatively good coffee.

She wasn’t alone--a few other people were there, braving the snow to impress or because they liked coming to work, like she did.

As she settled in her office, hanging up her damp coat and stepping out of her snow boots into something more office appropriate, she took in the calm and silence. Here, she could work. Here, she had purpose and she was living her dream of editing great books. Sure, sometimes acquiring books felt like battling for supremacy and grabbing land, sometimes it involved cunning and intrigue, but for the most part, when she had a manuscript on hand, she did her best and her best was rewarded.

Life, she thought, could not get better than this.

She worked all day, occasionally taking breaks to comment on inappropriate memes, but she steadily went through chapters and chapters of authors’ work.

At around one, she could see a stream of people leaving, and as the clock neared 2, the Publisher, Waldo Weatherbee, peeked into her office and said, “You should head home, Cooper. This storm isn’t slowing down anytime soon.”

She cast him a grateful smile. “I’ll be leaving soon, I promise.”

Weatherbee nodded and tapped the frame of her door. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He left and she was relieved that she didn’t have to keep explaining herself. She worked on, reveling in the silence.

It was around 3:30 that she heard the soft ding from the elevator lobby. It had grown so quiet that the sound filtered down the hallway and caught her attention.

She figured it may be the cleaning crew and she began to put away some of the detritus that had gathered on her desk, sweeping them into her trash can.

As she straightened her papers and set aside some wayward pens, Jughead Jones appeared in her line of vision, and as he looked around the empty office, she realized she was holding her breath.

The man looked good. Really good.

He was wearing a parka. Any reasonable man would in this weather, and it was the expensive kind, too, so it fit him nicely, but peeking from that practical piece of outerwear was that hint of black and grey plaid--that look of his that the publishing world knew so well. She couldn’t imagine that he would have his gang jacket on, not in this weather, but what wasn’t covered by the parka showed that he hadn’t changed much since she last saw him in person.

She could see the dark tangle of leather bracelets around his wrists, for one, and while she remembered him having tattoos on his body, she quickly spied an unfamiliar one on the underside of his wrist. His dark jeans and black motorcycle boots assured that he was still every bit the motorcycle riding Southside Serpent he was known for, and when he tore off his beanie, his glorious black hair sprung up like freaking magic.

God, I hate myself.

Betty’s self loathing was, even to her, almost perfunctory. Did she really hate having this crush on him? Or was it just a mental defense mechanism? She liked to think that she was a modern enough woman who could have sexual relationships that didn’t devolve into awkward encounters. She’d had other lovers in the past and she never had a problem filing them away in her mental cabinet of Good or Bad experiences.

Then again, those other lovers were never constants in her Inbox, engaging her in incredibly stimulating discussions about character development, off-page backgrounds, and dark human motivations.

When Jughead turned and saw her, she may have imagined the changing expression on his face, how his look of neutral inquiry suddenly became purposeful determination, his piercing blue eyes seeming to darken as he approached. By the time he got to the office door, leaning against the frame, and saying, “Betty Cooper. I was hoping you’d be here.” She knew she it was over.

tbc

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hvndcvffed · 5 years ago

Text

“ let me just –– can you –– uh. ” grizz clears his throat and raises a finger. because this? oh, boy. stomaching this shit without laughing mandates a breather. “ hold that thought for a moment while i collect myself. s’been quite the day and i want to give you my undivided attention. ”

or, alternatively : yo yo yo, party people ! guess who finally made it ? i’m lev / linc ( she/her/hers ) , comin’ atchu from the ever so lovely est timezone with ya boy, the tru ledge, grizz visser! click on that read more to read some headcanons i’ve got goin’ for west ham’s resident handcuff-owning, intellectual beb !

[ g r i z z v i s s e r –– B O Y O N F I R E .

✔ ┊❝ ( nick robinson. 18. he/him &. cismale ) rumor around town is that gareth “grizz” visser was on one of the buses that left for the field trip. they’re the eighteen year old that resides in new ham. over the summer news spread that he purposely botched his chances to win a football scholarship to a local uni because he applied to several ivies behind his parents’ backs, but who knows if that’s true or not? what we do know is that their friends describe them as well-read & piquant, but who knows when they’re known to be elusive & misanthropé from time to time.

( &&. general information )

full name: gareth visser

nickname(s) or alias: grizz

preferred name: grizz –– call him gareth and he will... not be happy.

current age: eighteen

astrological sign: leo

gender: cismale

preferred pronouns: he/him

sexual preference: homosexual ( but closeted )

romantic preference: demiromantic

home environment: a quaint three-bed / two-bath house with his parents. a positive, almost sickeningly sweet home: family portraits all over the place, cheesy “ home is where the heart is ” décor all around from his mother’s many trips to pier 1 imports.

current occupation: student, student athlete.

language(s) spoken: english, french, a tad of latin. wants to learn more hebrew, but that shit is complicated as heck.

native language: english.

current relationship status: single.

( &&. background )

reason behind name: y’know, he’s asked his parents this countless times. why gareth? why. gareth. and each time he’s just gotten the same vague response: they liked it. it sounded respectable. ack.

birth order: only child.

ethnicity: american. west ham born & raised, baby!

nationality: american.

religion: agnostic. goes to church with his mother as a way to keep the peace, but... the idea of a god out there saying homosexuality’s a sin gives him a bad taste in his mouth. he’d rather discount his whole existence and uphold morality than accept that there’s a bigoted big guy in the sky. sees the bible more as a literary exercise to instill human value. did jesus really walk on water? heck no. but it makes a good fable.

political views: very, very liberal. doesn’t subscribe to labels, but as close to democratic socialist as you can get in this country without causing riots. anti-brexit. anti-trump. anti-bullshit, basically. maybe socialism or communism done right wouldn’t be a terrible idea.

financial status: very, very comfortable. his parents earn well and know how to save / spend frugally. the vissers are modest in living so they can pour more into experience. for grizz’s twelfth birthday, his parents took him hiking through the adirondacks. they’ve gone on some awesome trips together, and most of their vacations include some aspect of super cool nature. unbeknownst to grizz, his parents’ planned grad gift for him was a month-long backpacking tour through new zealand.

hometown: west ham, connecticut. cool beans.

level of education: high school senior. but he’s one of the learned folk: ap literature on lock. he took some college courses at the local community college last summer, because his job as a summer camp counselor wasn’t exactly intellectually stimulating. leading kids on hikes is fun ‘n all, but... not as engaging as college-level philosophy.

( &&. physical appearance )

looks like (or face claim, if applicable): nick robinson. with longer hair. reference [ here ] .

height: 6′0 ( jack’s shorter, but nick’s my main fc i’m workin’ with so i decide to bump it up. plus, height? football? makes sense. )

weight: 158 lbs

shoe size: 10.5

figure/build: athletic build. muscular. broad shoulders, lean waist.

hair colour: deep, deep brown. almost black. natural.

hair length: about jaw-length. curly. ( REFERENCE. )

eye colour: brown with an overlay of hazel-y jade-green. his campers over the summer compared his eyes to moss a lot. it kinda felt badass. “moss boss” had a ring to it.

glasses?: nope. 20/20 vision. but he’s been known to steal friends’ glasses sometimes, just for funsies.

skin tone: light, but not necessarily pale – spends a lot of time outdoors. no freckles.

tattoos: none, yet. would love to get a quote from walden. or a pine tree, if it wasn’t so cliche.

piercings: none. but getting an ear pierced has always intrigued him.

birthmarks/scars/distinguishing marks: some miscellaneous scars on his hands from whittling incidents growing up. a faint line across his arm from stitches, when he broke it in the peewee football league in fifth grade.

dominant hand: left-handed, but very recently learned he’s marginally ambidextrous for important tasks.

if painted, what color are their nails?: never painted. he keeps them short.

usual style of clothing: letterman jacket. jeans. tall socks, boots. pants tucked into socks, because why the hell not? flannels, hoodies, utility jackets layered over plain white tees. pendant necklaces, leather bracelets. occasionally he’ll wear a statement button-downs that looks like your grandmother’s upholstery, but somehow it’ll work really well. varsity t-shirts. hats of all varieties. if he could, he’d showcase some edgier styles. but he’s paranoid. he’s got a stanford hoodie buried in his closet. and a yale one, too.

frequently worn jewelry: leather bracelets. a silver ring strung on a chain, engraved with “ for sylvie, with love ”. he found it on a hike, and... figured he’d be sylvie for a day, or something.

describe their voice, what accent?: he has a light, gentle voice. a soft autumn breeze. laced with some gravel. strong, resolute. kind.

what is their speaking style (fast, monotone, loquacious)?: often speaks slowly, surely. not always keen to fill silences. but words are some of his favorite devices of deflection. if he’s unsure, he’ll cut himself off, leading to some choppy and hard to follow sentences. he very rarely mumbles. not afraid to speak eloquently, but will certainly match his speaking style to those he’s around, to an extent. rarely seems bothered. he masks it well.

describe their scent: amber, sandalwood, musk. vague hints of cinnamon.

describe their posture: grizz holds himself proudly. shoulders broad, chin up, chest open. it makes his vulnerable moments very easy to spot.

( &&. legal information )

any speeding tickets?: nope. this kid drives by the book. probably because he very much prefers to walk or bike around town, when he can help it.

have they ever been arrested?: never. he’s only been to the police station once, to drop off some promotional donuts for the homecoming football game.

do they have a criminal record?: nah.

have they committed any violent crimes?: no sir.

property crimes?: no.

traffic crimes?: nope! unless you count accidentally cutting cars off with his bike, because that’s happened a handful of times, when he’s been deep in thought.

other crimes?: just breaking hearts.

( &&. medical information )

blood type: o negative.

date/time of birth: july 26, 1997. 3:23am. during a rainstorm.

place of birth: west ham hospital.

vaginal birth or cesauren section?: vaginal birth.

sex: male

smoker? / drinker? / drug user?: no / yes / marijuana.

addictions: does good lit count?

allergies: sulfur-based antibiotics. bullshit.

ever broken a bone?: his left arm in fifth grade. right foot at the seventh grade dance –– the girl he asked to slow dance tripped and grizz, wanting to show off his cool socks, wound up with a stiletto heel to the talus. ouch. collar bone, freshman year of high school: he climbed a tree to save his neighbor’s cat and slipped.

any physical ailments/illnesses/disabilities: nope.

any medication regularly taken: allergy meds. sometimes he gets the sniffles.

( &&. personality )

direct quote from them: UNO. DOS. TRES. QUATRO.

positive traits: charismatic, cunning, introspective, virtuosic.

negative traits: cataclysmic, self-destructive, reckless, careless.

likes: classic literature, trail mix, synth vibes, 60s/70s/80s rock, the beatles, radiohead, faith by george michael. old vinyls. bob ross. vanilla-cinnamon candles and jasmine tea. wind-rustled leaves. fresh fallen rain.

dislikes: bitter coffee. the disappointment just after sunrise. katy perry. cleaning, laundry. the warmer side of the pillow. waking up without a hand to hold. gareth. secrets, but he harbors a few big ones. pretending. hiding. transitively, himself.

strengths: can be quite resolute but sometimes about the wrong things. his ability to analyze and respond to complex literature is… uncanny. intelligence. deduction. survival facts. he’s a postmodern bear grylls trapped in suburbia.

weaknesses: impatience. do-it-yourself attitude. fear of rejection. fear of acceptance. fear of others. fear of himself.

insecurities: what if people in west ham discover who he really is? how’s he supposed to postpone that?

fears/phobias: irrelevancy. book-burning. ignorance. time.

habits: playing with his fingers. biting his bottom lip and twisting it between his teeth. humming when he thinks no one is listening. going for late-night walks through the emptiest parts of town. staying up ‘til 4am to read and re-read and read again.

quirks: rarely settles his gaze on anything for more than a few seconds, except for other peoples’ eyes. eye contact is probably one of grizz’s biggest conversational strengths. probably why he makes such a good liar, when he needs to. he’ll finish a pint of ice cream and just sit there for over an hour sucking on the spoon, lost in thought. licks his lips when he’s nervous. plays with his hair a lot. you know he’s nervous when he keeps tucking his hair behind his right ear. chuckles to himself, even when things are the pure opposite of funny.

hobbies: jotting notes in book margins. he dabbles in poetry but feels like his shit is too beat-generation to be that cool. wandering through the woods and attempting to generate his own maps, then checking them for accuracy. lighting matches in the cold, mid-evening air just to watch them burn.

guilty pleasure: peanut m&ms. twizzlers. burned marshmallows. apartment tour videos on youtube.

desires: to prove he’s… sometime more than this. something more than a footballer destined to pretend.

wishes: he could come clean about college. wishes he could come clean about himself. wishes he could work up the courage to ask a guy to prom.

secrets: he purposefully botched an interview he had with central connecticut state university’s football recruiter because he doesn’t want to play in college. he wants to go to yale, or stanford, or brown. to study literature. classics. philosophy. his sexuality. but it’s getting harder and harder to keep that locked down.

turn ons: intelligence. genuine, pure intelligence. sharp-witted humor. dimples. dorky laughs. gentle touch. someone who doesn’t bother with worries ‘bout tomorrow.

turn offs: idiocy. khakis. people with too much pride. line cutters. naggers. people who don’t think the proper way to eat bugles is by fashioning crisp-claws first and pretending to be edward scissorhands. people who overlook adrienne rich’s poetry, or claim dante shouldn’t be taught in school.

lucky number: 0.

pet peeves: hearing people scratch their scalps. sniffly public transit users. people who don’t use earbuds. cold fries. nail-clickers. knuckle-crackers. people who slurp from straws like they’ve never had a drink before in their lives.

their motto: “ i’m surrounded by idiots. ”

( &&. favourites )

food: curly fries with cajun seasoning.

drink: half-oreo half-chocolate milkshake. extra whipped cream. two cherries. please.

fast food restaurant: he’s not huge on fast food, but he can fuck with five guys.

flavour: anything chocolate and peanut.

word: fuck !!! or zephyr: a soft, gentle breeze.

colour: a nice, deep forest green.

clothing: his letterman jacket. his deep green flannel’s a close second.

accessory: “ for sylvie, with love” . silver ring. he likes pretending he’s sylvie and that someone cared enough to get his name etched into a precious metal forever.

candle scent: the connecticut homesick candle. it smells like cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla and fireside bliss. and pine trees. yum.

game: monopoly. but only if he wins.

animal: fish. they’re so graceful.

holiday: halloween. boo.

weather: sunset, just after rain. golden rays peering through deep gray clouds. it makes the greens of trees practically scream against the sky. it’s glorious. it’s heartbreaking. grizz loves it.

season: late fall.

book: le petit prince by antoine de saint-exupéry. it was the last book his grandmother ever read to him, on his fifth christmas eve.

artist: edvard munch. or van gogh, simply because he chopped his ear off and mailed it to his lover. now that’s modern romance.

band/group: the divine comedy, radiohead, pink floyd, the beatles, the rolling stones, the kooks. the avett brothers. belle & sebastian.

song: high and dry, radiohead. elephant, tame impala. anything by the beatles.

movie/film: mr. nobody. eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. the first time little grizz saw alice in wonderland, he wouldn’t shut up about it for two weeks.

tv show: he grew up watching wallace and gromit. he’s still got a soft spot for it.

sport: football.

possession: his dad’s collection of beatles original release vinyls.

number: 0.

person: henry david thoreau.

( &&. skills )

talents: writing, but he won’t admit it. football. wood-whittling. gardening. navigation.

ability to drive a car?: yes.

can they ride a bike?: yes, and will frequently do so with no hands.

do they play any sports?: football.

anything they’re bad at?: juggling. sleeping. pretending to like gross food.

do they have any combat training? why?: grizz once yahoo answered how to punch somebody to the moon, after one of his best friends got made fun of in grade school for accidentally wearing a costume the day before halloween. he’s still waiting for an answer to that post.

( &&. firsts )

childhood memory: waging what was left of his fruit gummies during a game of fireside poker on the first visser camping trip.

crush: matty kerrington, pre-k. his hair smelled like strawberries and his smile reminded grizz of the hot honey that clung to his mum’s spoon after stirring tea. but to this day, he’ll say his first crush was amanda vander-voss, because her hair was pretty in braids and she reminded him of the pretty deer from bambi.

email address: [email protected]

job: camp counselor at a hiking / adventure camp based in west ham.

phone: a nifty samsung with a slide-out keyboard. made him feel like a god.

kiss: jessica winthrop, in a game of third grade truth or dare.

love: tess de luca ( @tessdl )

sexual experience: with jessica winthrop in the woods behind the middle school, three years later. jess got poison ivy in all the wrong places. grizz thought it was hysterical.

( &&. childhood )

best childhood memory?: honestly? wearing that boa in dance class. his mom was quick to stop that.

worst childhood memory?: nearly breaking his nose on the neighbor’s front porch, while attempting to ding-dong ditch with his friends. he’s not sure what gave them away more –– his blood staining their pavement, or the fact that he blubbered the whole run home.

what were they like as a child?: grizz tended to poke his nose into all the wrong matters, landing him in oodles of trouble. he’d steal from the snack cabinet, sketch constellations across the walls… even stole his dad’s old walkman so he could listen to music under his covers past his bedtime. tried to sneak into the library after hours to get his hands on another thoreau novel. but it was all harmless. the vissers weren’t very firm disciplinarians: they just loved that their son was engaged and passionate about knowledge.

any crushes growing up?: oh, loads. more than he’d like to admit.

( &&. this or that )

expensive or inexpensive tastes?: inexpensive, but lasting.

hygienic or unhygienic?: hygenic.

open-minded or close-minded?: open.

introvert or extrovert?: ambivert. thrives in social settings but the mood has to be right.

optimistic or pessimistic?: pessimistic with a weak optimistic veil. pragmatism, is how he’d put it.

daredevil or cautious?: cautious daredevil.

logical or emotional?: a blend of both, but emotions often influence his actions more than he’d like to say.

generous or stingy?: generous.

polite or rude?: polite when it’s socially mandated. but if there’s no threat of repercussions? a bit rude, if he has to be.

book smart or street smart?: both.

popular or loner?: popular, by proxy. but grizz vibes with some solid solitude, especially to recharge.

leader or follower?: leader. follower, though, in the high school structure of things. it’s a way to ensure his place and avoid potential fallout. he’ll call his friends out if they’re up to no good, though.

day or night person?: night. definitely night.

cat or dog person?: both! prefers cats just a smidge more.

closet door open or closed while sleeping?: open. maybe his demons wanna cuddle or some shit.

( &&. social media )

do they have a facebook? twitter? instagram? vine? snapchat? tinder/grindr? tumblr? youtube? yes to instagram and (begrudgingly) snapchat.

if so; name on facebook: none.

instagram user: grizzvisser

snapchat user: grizzybear

( &&. musical tastes )

theme song: kimochi warui ( when? when? when? ), car seat headrest. god... get him OUT of this town.

makes them sad: blackbird, the beatles. his grandparents used to sing this when he’d sleep over/ they’d be in the kitchen early in the morning trying to convince him to eat his cereal. they’d change the lyrics and snap slightly off-tempo, all smiles and coaxing gestures. ave maria. he’s not sure why. it inspires melancholia.

makes them dance: hazy miss daisy, kid bloom. anything with a sick beat and erratic synth. take on me, a-ha. good times bad times, led zeppelin.

loves the most: fool of myself, the band camino. it’s a song he can throw his head back to, close his eyes, and sway in the breeze.

( &&. miscellaneous )

do they have a fake i.d.?: yep, used to, but now that’s not necessary!

are they a virgin?: nope siree!

describe their signature: it’s unapologetic on the page. takes up more room than it should with lateral squiggles and grandiose swirls. G and V are decipherable, but everything else is convoluted by its own physics. a muddled mess. beautiful in its self-collapsing structure.

how long would they survive in a zombie apocalypse?: he’d outlive everyone. survivalist visser, right here.

do they travel?: yes, but he wants to do more, see more. the grand canyon would be cool. or maybe the alps. he’s always had a dream of hiking yosemite.

one place they would like to live: anywhere but here.

one place they would like to visit: new zealand. australia. hawaii.

celebrity crush: young johnny depp. emma watson.

what can you find in their pockets/wallet/purse: tic tacs, but never the mint ones. only the odd flavors.

place(s) your character can always be found: anywhere with trees. rooftops. alleyways. the football field. coffee shops. the local diner. roadside sunflower fields. his parents’ garden.

when does your character like to wake up?: with the sun.

what’s your character’s morning routine?: blink at the ceiling for about 20 minutes. wash his face, brush his teeth. annotate a few lines of whatever book he’s reading. push-ups, pull-ups, crunches. run a mile or two. rush into the shower. grab his lunch from the fridge and bike to school (and barely make it).

what does your character eat for breakfast/lunch/dinner?: grizz’s mom loves to cook, so they’re always trying some new paleo trend. some of it’s awful. but he’ll try to eat it and if he can’t, he’ll sneak a granola bar later. if the school’s serving smiley face fries, he’ll have those. he really likes green apples and those little clementines.

how does your character spend their free days?: hiking. reading. writing. lying in the sun and just... thinking. lately, he’s been daydreaming a lot about an ivy league education. something more engaging than west ham’s high school snoozefest.

what’s your character’s bedtime routine?: some kind of pre-bed stretching routine. wash his face, brush his teeth, curl up in bed with a book. fall asleep with it still open on his chest.

what does your character wear to bed?: boxers and a t-shirt.

if your character can’t fall asleep, what are they thinking about?: the past. mistakes. time ticking away.

what is their idea of perfect happiness?: he’s still workin’ on that bit.

on what occasions do they lie?: very rarely, if he can help it.

most marked characteristic: his hair. it’s all russet waves. untamed. some days, his hair truly has a mind of its own. it screams free spirit. it doesn’t let on that, inside, his soul is burning.

what is one thing they’d most like to change about themselves?: honestly? it’s not so much what he’d want to change about himself as it is about this town.

how would they like to die?: well-read.

do they snore? not unless he’s got a head cold. then there may be a few soft snores here and there.

can they curl their tongue?: yes!

can they whistle?: yes indeed!

do they believe in the supernatural?: not really. but it’s fun to indulge on halloween. did he move your cup, or did the ghouls?! s p o o k y .

has anyone ever broken their heart?: no. haven’t had the opportunity to.

have they ever broken anyone’s heart?: yes. little marsha lapone’s, at summer camp. she was 8, he’s 18. he told her there was no chance, and she cried into her pb&j. tough.

are they squeamish?: no.

have they ever seen anyone die? what happened?: just in films.

are they a lightweight?: heck no.

that was a very lengthy thing but... yeah! hit me up for plots! i’m gonna get to crafting and replying to starters v shortly!

#newhamhq:intro #ᴛʀʏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴀᴄᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴀɴ ɪ ᴀᴍ ! ɪꜱᴍꜱ.

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