#another way that Austin stands apart from the rest is he does actually have a proper job | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

zmediaoutlet · 4 years ago

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in support of Texas relief, @doilycoffin donated $100, and requested Liam & Cordell Walker. Thank you for donating!

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(read on AO3)

One of Liam's earliest memories is the time Cordell dropped him on his head. Not actually accurate at all to the way it went but that's how it's told in the family mythology. He was really little, three maybe or four—for some reason that part's indeterminate—and Cordell was climbing the stable and playing adventurer, or maybe just showing off and the adventurer part was a good excuse. Liam was following Cordell around like he always did and he tried to climb up, too, on the fence that kept in the horses when they were let out for their run, and Cordell told him no and that he was too little but Liam was determined to try. Cordell climbed back down and tried to steady him where he'd made it up to the top rung of the fence, and Liam lost his balance anyway, and fell straight backwards and landed headfirst on the dirt. There was a little rock and then a lot of blood, and then stitches, and Mama fussing and their dad ripping Cordi a new one—Liam doesn't even remember that it hurt—but the part that sticks it as a memory is how they all rode together in the truck back and forth from the doctor and Cordell held his hand in the backseat and he was crying, the whole way home, a silent seeping kind of crying that made his face a shiny mess. Liam thinks about that weirdly often. Cordi looking out the window and crying.

When the story gets retold for new friends, or the kids, or Cordell's buddies from the Rangers come around for coffee and Mama's pecan pie, they tell it that Cordell's so clumsy he dropped his baby brother on his head. Liam sort of hates it, every time. Cordell laughs and does the aw shucks routine he's so good at, relaxed with his beer and shrugging embarrassed apology. When Liam was about to head off to college, his eighteenth birthday dinner, Daddy told the story again as a kind of miracle survival, and Liam got up from the table real fast and went out onto the porch, annoyed for some reason beyond measure. It was Cordi who got up and came after him and said, a little cautious, "What's up, Stinker?" and Liam said to him, mad, "Why don't you ever tell people it was me? I was the one climbing up after you. It's not like you did it on purpose."

Cordell just blinked at him. "What does it matter?" he said. "You were the baby and I was a dumbass kid. So what?" He hooked his arm around Liam's neck and he smelled like sweat and Old Spice and that laundry detergent Emily bought that wasn't anything like the one they used at home. Liam pushed at his side but didn't try hard to get away. Not that it would've worked. "It's how we figured out how hard that head was, right? Come on. Mama's gonna wonder if you didn't like the brisket."

Liam let himself be dragged back into the house, and Cordi pushed him down into his chair right between him and Emily, and Emily smiled at him easy, and passed him the potatoes. "One month 'til the dorms," she said, very quiet so no one else could hear under Cordell telling some awful lie about Liam having gas, and Liam laughed, surprised, and it just happened that it was the same time everyone else laughed so that was okay. He always liked Emily. Cordell punched his thigh lightly on his other side, and gave him a warmer more real smile, and Liam dropped it, and he didn't complain about the story again.

Seven years between them. Liam always wondered if he was an accident, even if Mama said that with Cordell going to school she was ready to have another baby around the house. Cordell was always the one who was getting into trouble. Rambunctious, loud, falling headfirst into things and getting dragged out covered in mud. Liam learned from his example what not to do. Do not: run along the bleachers at the football stadium and vault the handrails until your foot gets caught and you fall and snap your wrist clean in two. Do not: get caught drinking beer with your high school girlfriend behind the horsebarn, and make Daddy give the most mortifying sex talk in the world afterward. Do not: make friends with the most delinquent-ass kid in the whole hill country and wind up explaining every other week why, really, he wasn't that bad, give him a chance—

Somehow even then he was the golden child. Not the best grades, not the most obedient. That wasn't what their dad cared about. Cordell was good on a horse, good on his feet. Respectful when it mattered and devil-may-care when it didn't. In high school he was the quarterback, of course he was, and Liam was right there in the stands with their parents every Friday night, cheering his lungs out. Weirdly boastful with his fourth-grade friends: his older brother was the star of the football team. His older brother could ride a bull for ten seconds and get off hardly winded. Bookish, kind of short, he needed the borrowed glory of Cordell's success to be proud of. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it got him pushed over on the soccer field while some bigger boy went, gawd, William, who cares?

Liam never got in trouble. Never broke a bone. After bringing Cordell back from the hospital with a fresh new cast on his ankle and a dopey slightly-drugged smile on his face, Mama settled him in bed with Liam's help and turned off the light and then, in the kitchen, sighed and said, "Liam, you are a real relief to the mind, do you know that?" He was proud of that, too, in that moment. It wasn't until later that it nagged at him. A therapist asked him, much later in a sleek Manhattan office that smelled faintly of sage, "Do you think your predilection for being contrarian results from that time?" He went home annoyed with her, and was more annoyed when he told Bret the story and Bret didn't even turn around from the carbonara he was making and said, "Babe, you're the most contrary person I know."

He wasn't. He didn't—think he was. He… was, he realized, after a week of sitting with it, and a week after that it made sense. He didn't pick fights, and he didn't make waves. His rebellion was quiet. His hard head, forcing him to make his own space in the world. Not able to live up to Cordell and knowing instinctively that it would be awful even to try—and so taking the opposite turn, every time. It was better than being compared, even if he knew there was no chance but to be compared.

He studied hard. He read, all the time. He liked math and literature equally and did equally well in both. He hated P.E. but he did what he could there, too, and he learned to ride even if he didn't actually love horses the way the rest of the family did, and when Daddy asked if he wanted to join up with the little league baseball Liam asked to play soccer, instead, and Daddy frowned but Mama said, "Why not, I've seen enough boys drop foul balls for a lifetime." So, soccer, and most of his games were during the day or on Saturday mornings, but Cordi came to a lot of them anyway, and when Liam's team won Cordi would jump down onto the field and grab him up by the waist and crow David Beckham, right here! Little David Beckham for sale! Liam would struggle and then he'd be slung headfirst over Cordell's shoulder like a potato sack and his face would get so red from laughing that it hurt.

On September 12, 2001, Mama and Daddy were gone from the house when Liam got home from school and he was glad for it. That was a Wednesday. He was in sixth grade. The teachers weren't even trying to hold normal lessons and everyone was talking about what had happened the day before. Melissa Kettering was out that day and the rumor was that her dad had been on a business trip in New York. Liam had raised his hand and asked the social studies teacher if there was going to be a war, like there was after Pearl Harbor, and she sat down on her desk and shook her head and didn't answer.

He was trying to read his book for English when the phone rang. Cordell, calling from his apartment in town. Hey, buddy, he said, over the line, and Liam sat down on the floor by the phone table and closed his eyes, unaccountably almost about to cry. Is Daddy there? Liam told him he was home alone. Lucky, Cordi said, you can totally throw a rager, and Liam didn't laugh, and neither did Cordell, even though he always laughed at his own stupid jokes. Hey, um. I shouldn't—I don't know if I should tell you this but I've gotta tell someone, and Em's in class, and I just have to—I did something, and I need to—

He interrupted himself and Liam could hear him breathing over the line. He didn't want Cordell to say anything. If he didn't say anything then Liam could pretend that he was going to tell a story about some party they'd gone to at Emily's sorority, or that Hoyt had come back into town and they'd seen a show at ACL, or that he was gonna come stay that weekend, and maybe he and Liam would go riding. Anything but what he was about to say. Liam could hear it, in his head. He could hear it like it had already been said and it was echoing, now, inside, like a verse from a song he'd always, always remember.

Cordell graduated from the Marine boot camp on a Saturday in the middle of December. Liam went along even if he wasn't allowed to attend the actual ceremony and Daddy complained about the cost of the plane tickets until Mama told him to shut up. Liam sat between them on the flight and it was the first time he was ever in the air. Over the top of Mama's crossword book he watched the clouds go by over New Mexico, Arizona, with complete wonder. San Diego, then, different to Austin—palm trees, and the air so wet, and even the parking lot at their hotel smelling like warm flowers.

Mama gave him fifty dollars before they left for the graduation. They were bringing Cordell back, after, because they got one night with him before they had to give him back to the military. "Order a pizza," she said, "at 4:30 exactly, and we should get back at the same time the pizza comes so we can all eat together." Liam watched American Pie on the hotel tv while he waited, something he would never have been allowed at home. He made the call when he was supposed to, and when the girl on the phone asked him what toppings his mind went completely blank because he was never allowed to make that decision. Cordi liked ham and pineapple and none of the rest of them did. Liam ordered it with extra pineapple.

When a knock came on the hotel room door Liam jumped up to open it, cash in hand. The one holding the pizzas was Cordell, grinning at him with Mama and Daddy standing behind. "Pizza delivery," Cordell said, and Liam crashed into him for a hug so hard that Cordi almost dropped the boxes and said whoa, Stinker, soft and laughing.

His hair was cut off, an inch on top and shorter on the sides, so he looked like those pictures of their grandpa when he was in Korea. He was skinny, too, which Liam didn't get, because he thought boot camp was all about building up muscles. "Mostly running," Cordi said. He was tired, dark circles under his eyes. He was stretched out on one bed with his strange starched blue pants and the awful khaki shirt that made him look washed-out pale even if he'd been running around San Diego for thirteen weeks, and Mama was sat next to him squeezing his arm like he'd evaporate if she looked away for a minute, and even Daddy was hovering. Proud but worried. Liam sat by Cordell's boots and tugged on the laces, wanting to ask more questions but not daring to.

Cordi fell asleep before six o'clock. Daddy turned on the television real quiet to the news. More stuff about the invasion. Liam hoped it'd be all over by the time Cordi got there. Mama boxed up the remaining pizza, shaking her head. "Don't know why you picked pineapple, kiddo," she said, and Liam shrugged, sitting at the table, watching Cordell's face, turned away a little on the pillow. Liam wanted to shake him awake but of course he didn't. For his whole life, after, he gets a little sick to his stomach when he smells pineapple.

While Cordell was in Afghanistan Mama and Daddy had Emily over to the house a lot. She was sweet. Respectful of Mama, calling her ma'am half the time, and charming to their dad even though Liam knew that she and Daddy probably disagreed on more than things than not. She liked that Liam played soccer and asked if he ever watched the Premiere League. Liam didn't even know what that was. She helped Mama cook supper and went out and took pictures of the horses which made Daddy smile, and one time when Liam went outside after dinner to read she was there crying, on the porch, quiet with her hand over her mouth, and Liam hung back and didn't know what to say. "Sorry," she said, dashing at her cheeks with the heel of her hand. She licked her lips and nodded at his book, sniffing. "That's a good one. You should read the sequel, too." He did, and told her about it, and she smiled like a sunrise, the way she always did, and he felt like—he didn't even know, what he felt like.

Liam was the best man at their wedding. He felt and looked ridiculous. Fifteen in a tux and he didn't know how to tie a bow-tie, but Cordi didn't either, so Daddy had to do it for both of them, grumbling the whole time that they should've learned this by now. "Not a lot of bowties in Kandahar, Daddy," Cordell said, winking at Liam, and Liam—blushed. Ridiculous, and embarrassing, the way the whole affair and the lead-up had felt, but Cordell didn't seem to care or notice, so—there was Liam, blushing in a bowtie.

Cordell had only been back for a year and somehow things were off. He was serving the rest of his contract out in the reserves but he wasn't finishing up his degree like he'd told Mama he would. He'd entered the training program for the state troopers and was set up to be a highway cop, of all things. He'd rented a house in Austin with Emily and they lived together the whole year before the wedding—an argument with Daddy about that one, which Liam listened to from the hallway with his heart pounding—and they weren't even going to be married in the church because Emily didn't want a wedding mass and, Liam suspected, Cordell didn't either. Daddy lost that argument, too.

The wedding was tiny. Liam the best man, Geri the maid of honor. Emily's aunt that raised her on one side and Daddy and Mama on the other, and a handful of Cordell and Emily's friends making up the numbers in the little rented hall. Afterward they had a bigger barbecue out at the ranch and in front of the crowd Emily fed Cordell a dainty forkful of the lemon cake and Cordell responded by dotting a tiny bit of frosting on her nose and kissing it off, and Mama's best friend Sue-Ellen sighed and said to Mama, where Liam could hear, "Well, Abilene, maybe they're atheists but I daresay you raised that boy right every other way," and Mama said something dry back but Liam was watching how Cordell cupped Emily's cheek in his hand, smiling down at her like she hung the moon, and he thought, yeah. Yeah, Cordell was just about perfect, wasn't he.

"High school in the fall, right?" Emily's aunt said, later. "Emily says you play soccer. Going to try out for the team?"

Cordell and Emily were dancing, swaying in the grass, the bonfire leaping up behind them. His hand still on her cheek. "I'm quitting soccer," Liam said, without even realizing he was going to. "I'm going to try out for wrestling, instead."

He figured out he was gay relatively early. His friends at school got hold of a Playboy in fifth grade and didn't really know what to do with it beyond blustering. This was before anyone but nerds was on the internet, and Liam was a nerd but did a decent job of hiding it. Scott beckoned Liam over while they were waiting for the buses and showed him the top of the magazine, the bold logo and the girl with her boobs pushing up out of her bra—the group of them snickering, saying how hot she was—and that they were going to look at it at Scott's house later if Liam wanted to come over—and Liam said, "No, my mom's making me go to the store with her." The lie came out effortlessly.

They did have a computer at home, and dial-up internet it had been very, very hard to argue Daddy into. He hardly knew how to find anything but he did some careful searches while Daddy was out with the horses and Mama was cooking, singing bad over the stove like she tended to. Made Liam's face hot to see some of what he was seeing. Hoyt came over, once, while Cordi was away in the war, and he helped Liam and Mama dig out a bunch of tomatoes that hadn't grown in right, and afterward they sat on the porch drinking lemonade while Mama asked Hoyt all about the oil field he said he'd been working in and Liam watched how Hoyt's legs sprawled out on the porch, how his jeans hugged up against his calf muscle and how the sweat had made his white shirt nearly transparent, and he had to sit very careful on the bench with his knees drawn up to hide the effect it had on him.

When Cordell came home from Afghanistan they threw a huge party. Everyone came, Daddy's friends and Mama's, and Emily and their friends from college, and even Hoyt, magicked up out of somewhere (for the promise of free beer, Daddy said), and then Liam, the youngest person there, watching from the corner of the porch as always. Cordi was very tan and finally bulky with muscle and his hair had grown out, just a little, from that military buzz, and he barely detached himself from Emily the whole time, his arm always around her shoulders or hers around his waist, and when they did step apart his eyes followed her and she watched him right back, smiling at the most random times. Liam was fourteen and a little more aware of the world and he wondered abruptly if they'd had sex yet. Cordi had only been home one day and he'd slept at the ranch and not at Emily's apartment. How would they have found the time?

He was chewing his thumbnail over it when a sweaty weight crashed down on his shoulders, arms trapping his in. Hoyt. "Hey there, Stinker," Hoyt said, and Liam shrugged fretfully and said, "Don't call me that," and Hoyt laughed at him but stood up and ruffled Liam's hair completely backwards instead.

"Still pretty shrimpy," he said. He was grinning, like he had some big secret. "You planning on growing up anytime soon, champ?"

"Don't you have a sketchy job to get to?" Liam said, annoyed. He tried to fix his hair and gave it up as a lost cause the second Hoyt's grin got bigger. Asshole.

Hoyt sipped his beer. Twenty-one—he was allowed, although Liam had noticed that Mama was being a little free with handing out drinks to Emily's college friends. "Glad big bro's home, I bet," Hoyt said.

Liam didn't dignify that with a response. Hoyt laughed, under his breath, and held out the beer for Liam to take, which he did because he didn't know what else to do. "Go on," Hoyt said, nodding at it. "I won't tell your mama. Not fair that everyone else gets to celebrate while little Liam's sober. And boring."

"I'm not boring," Liam said, although he knew he was because half the kids at school clearly thought so. He took a sip of the beer, anyway, not knowing if Hoyt would snatch it away. Nasty, and he made a face that made Hoyt hoot, and then he took a bigger gulp, determined at least to get something out of it.

"There he goes," Hoyt said, weirdly delighted, and he clapped Liam on the shoulder the same way he would Cordi when they were in high school, and the bit of warm in Liam's belly went lower. "That's a welcome home."

Liam kept the beer, curled against his chest. He felt dumb holding it and also weirdly adult. "He's not even here," he said. Sort of scoffing. "Doesn't matter."

Hoyt curled his arm around Liam's shoulders again and ignored how he went stiff, and nodded out at the party. Music playing from a radio Daddy had set up on a truck-bed. Emily and Cordell, dancing in the firelight. Same as it would be for the wedding reception a year from then, although of course Liam didn't know that at the time. "Aw, he's here," Hoyt said. He squeezed Liam's shoulders. He smelled strange, like—skunk, and Mama's compost bin. It was gross but also kind of appealing and Liam shifted, hoping his dumb body wouldn't react. "He's just with his girl, and who could blame him. No call for getting jealous."

He wasn't jealous. Not—exactly. That night after Mama and Daddy went to bed the party kept on, and Liam went to his room and watched from the dark window, the bonfire still going and all the college kids still going, too. When he finally fell asleep he had a strange, blurry dream about Hoyt—building a bonfire together, and Hoyt smiling at him and being a jackass and then touching his face, the same way Cordell touched Emily's face, and then Hoyt touching his stomach, low—and then the dream shifted, the weird way dreams shift, and it was Cordell, touching his stomach, and smiling at him, and leaning in close—with his hair longer like it was before he enlisted—but wearing for some reason the dumb khaki shirt of his uniform—and then Cordell's hand—

When he woke up he was soaked and it was bright morning. He washed his underwear out in the sink, feeling like his head was screwed on to someone else's body, and then he hid the underwear in the hamper, and showered, and tried not to think about it. He had that dream or one like it on and off for years, until he finally lost his virginity to Michael in college and it went away. He never told his therapist about it, or Bret, or anyone. He could rationalize it but he couldn't ever acknowledge it out loud because of what it—felt like, to think about it. To make it real in a place that wasn't just his stupid, crazy, dreaming head.

He had the dream again the night before he came out to his parents. January 2nd, trying out his new year's resolution of honesty. He figured in a ruthless sort of way that if his parents kicked him out or hated him or tried to change him then at least he had early acceptance at UT for the fall and a full scholarship and it was just eight months where his life would be completely over.

Cordell was at home on the ranch and Liam figured that's what triggered it. A couple days of vacation, since he'd worked over Christmas, and he and Emily and baby Stella had stayed up for ringing in the new year, and everyone had taken turns kissing Stella's forehead when midnight struck. Liam had been allowed a glass of champagne, Mama not even fussing about it since it was a holiday and the house was full—so he had two glasses—and when he went to bed he could still hear Cordell laughing from the front room, telling Daddy some story about a bust on the highway, something about stolen Santa suits, something light.

He dreamed they were swimming, up at the lake, and Cordell was naked. Laughing, that same too-loud booming laugh, but just because he was happy and not like he was making fun. Being kind to Liam. Holding him from behind with his arms around Liam's chest, their legs slipping together in the water. Liam could imagine what it would be like for a man to do something to him, he'd seen porn by that point, and he'd seen Cordell naked too because of the vagaries of living in an old house without a lock on the bathroom door, but somehow there was still a disconnect in his head. He was turned on beyond belief but nothing—happened, just the vagueness of Cordell behind him. His big hands.

Mama took Emily and the baby in to town, that day, for shopping. Daddy said they'd just bought half of Macy's and Mama shushed him so Daddy was up at the barn, checking over the new foal. Liam sat on the porch with a cup of coffee and watched birds come to the new feeder Mama had got from Emily and he tried to rehearse it, in his head. What to say. He'd seen it in movies but it didn't feel possible to come out of his mouth.

Cordell sat by him, on the bench swing. "Since when do you drink coffee?" he said. Then, less casual: "Is that my mug?"

"Yes," Liam said, and didn't protest when Cordell took it out of his hands. He rubbed his palms on his jeans. He had a hard time talking to Cordi after he had one of those dreams and so it was a relief that most of the time Cordell wasn't around, that he was in town at the house he shared with his wife. With his wife, Liam reminded himself, as though that could help. Another thing to make Liam different. Wrestling instead of football, reading books instead of riding, and now—this, on top of everything.

"Whatever's going on," Cordell said. Liam blinked, came back to the world. The cold, and the swing barely rocking from how Cordi had set his boot on the porch and pushed, and Cordell looking at him very steadily. "You know you can tell me, right?"

Liam swallowed. "Even if it's—" Bad is what came to his mouth and he shook his head. He prayed about this, he resolved. It's not bad. "Weird?"

"If it weren't weird you probably wouldn't be being so weird about it," Cordi said, frank, and Liam shoved his shoulder. The dream dissipated just like that. How could he possibly be crushing on his brother when his brother is this much of a jerk. Cordell swayed, grinning, letting Liam push him even if Cordell outweighed him then by fifty pounds, but then he set his hand on the back of Liam's neck, more serious. "Whatever it is. We can figure it out."

Liam licked his lips, and nodded. He knew then that was going to tell Cordell the one secret, if not the whole of it, before they left the porch that morning, and Cordi would—back him up, with Mama and Daddy, even if he didn't get it. "Give me back the coffee," he said, and Cordell raised his eyebrows but passed it back, so Liam could take a gulp. The caffeine probably wouldn't help but maybe it wouldn't hurt, and it felt nice to hold the mug. "Promise you won't freak," Liam said then, even if he was—mostly, ninety percent, pretty sure—and Cordell said, immediately, "I promise," and Liam believed him. That was the thing, with Cordell, in those days. It was easy to believe him.

It's Mama who calls, when Emily dies. Liam's already in bed because he's got court in the morning and Bret shoves at his shoulder, says, "Oh my god answer it and then change your ringtone, I hate that song," and Liam's still fuzzy from sleep and doesn't quite process that there's no good reason Mama would be calling him after nine o'clock in Texas because she always thought that was bad manners, it had been drilled into him all his life, and he says, mumbly, still waking up, "Hey, Mama," and there's a sharp intake of breath on the other side of the line before she says, Honey, I'm sorry, but I have real bad news.

He flies out the next day. Bret tries to dissuade him. "There's nothing you can do right now," he says, as though that's the point. JFK to Austin-Bergstrom is four and a half hours and he spends the whole time with his chest this weird achy knot. It doesn't feel real but it is. He texted Mama his flight plan and she says that Daddy will pick him up at the airport, and when he gets into the truck Daddy shakes his head and says, "Good to see you, son," but without any truth to it. Liam doesn't take it personally.

Cordell's not at the ranch when they get there but the kids are. "Hi, Uncle Liam," Stella says, remarkably clear, until he hugs her, and then she curls his hands into his shirt and cries silently, her shoulders shaking. August doesn't get up from the couch, sitting there with one arm crossed over his chest and the other over his mouth, and he looks—Liam's always shocked by it—so exactly like his mother. Stella's a copy of her grandmother, to the point that Mama set her prom picture side by side with Stella's first dance photo and the only real difference was the dress—but Auggie always took after Emily, from coloring to temperament to those long straight eyebrows, that mouth that curves up into a wide, easy smile. Not smiling now, and not for a while, and when Stella pulls away and wipes her eyes Liam sits down next to Auggie and sets his hand on the back of his neck and Auggie just folds over, quiet, like whatever was holding him up just isn't there anymore.

"Where is he?" Liam asks Mama, in the kitchen later. The sun's going down. It hasn't even been twenty-four hours.

Mama's eyes are red-rimmed. "Where do you think?" she says.

Liam takes the truck. Lady Bird Lake is officially closed at night but of course that makes no difference. He parks and walks, up to the lookout, and Cordell doesn't hear him coming. He's sitting on the steps to the gazebo, his elbows braced on his knees. The light hitting his hair. Long again. Liam doesn't know how he's always skirting regs and getting away with it, except of course Cordi gets away with everything. Golden child.

He regrets the thought as soon as he has it. "Cordi," he says, and Cordell looks up in complete surprise. Liam smiles at him, as much as he can, and comes and sits on the step. He tries to think of what to say and can't come up with anything.

"Aren't you in court tomorrow?" Cordell says, after they sit there for thirty seconds. His voice sounds thick and distant.

Liam shakes his head. "Today," he says, and Cordell nods and huffs and says, "Right," and then looks down at his hands again. They're twisted together, his thumb rubbing hard and repeatedly at the mount of his other palm. Liam reaches over and puts his hand over the knot of Cordell's fingers and Cordell's jaw flexes but he lets Liam do it. "I'm sorry," Liam says.

"Everyone is," Cordell says, halfway bitter. Liam squeezes his hands and Cordell makes a rough low noise, some sound Liam has never heard him make. "Jesus. They won't let me go in to work."

"Of course they won't," Liam says, and Cordell pulls his hands away, pushes them into his hair. "Cordi, they have to—they're going to be looking for who did it and it has to be by the books so it'll stick. They're not going to risk screwing it up."

"I just want to—" Cordell cuts himself off but Liam can imagine what goes there. He touches Cordell's back instead and the muscle flinches. Set to fly off the handle any second. Fight or flight, but Cordell never used to run from anything and Liam can't imagine he's going to start now.

He stands up. "Wrestle me," he says.

Cordell looks up. "What?"

Genuine surprise. At least it's not misery. "Come on," Liam says. "See if you can pin me." These jeans are nice, were a gift from Bret, but he'll sacrifice them. He holds out a hand and Cordell lets himself be pulled upright, and it's a shock like it always is when Liam's been too long away, how much taller Cordi still is. Liam always was the shrimp. He pushes Cordell's chest, lightly, and Cordell slaps his hands away. "Cordi," Liam says, coaxing, and pulls at Cordell's wrist. "Let me take your mind off it."

Stupid thing to say and he knows it as soon as he says it. Cordell gives him an ugly look and shoves him for real. "Take my mind off it?" he says, while Liam's staggering backwards. Liam sets his boots in the dirt and braces, and when Cordell pushes him again Liam grapples, and they are wrestling, then. It's sloppy, bad holds, both of them in too-slick boots for this ground. Liam manages to swing Cordell around and get his back on the ground but Cordi's always been stronger and shoves him off, and then they're just—flat-out scrambling, Liam's hand sinking into a patch of mud and both of them breathing hard, Cordell twisting out of his grip and getting an arm over his chest, tight, before Liam eels over and flips them—gets Cordell on his back on the dirt—his leg over Cordell's—and then Cordi drops his head back against the ground and taps out, panting.

"You been practicing?" Cordell says. His eyes are closed.

Liam sits up, says, "Class at my gym." Cordi nods and Liam gets off him, kneels next to him in the dirt. The gazebo's bright and the skyline's pretty, on the other side of the lake. Liam looks at that instead of at his brother, so he won't have to see the tears seeping down Cordell's temples, wetting his hair.

"It's not okay," Liam says. He sets a hand on Cordell's chest. At the DA's office in Manhattan he's comforted widows, widowers, orphans. Some of them seeking justice but most of them knowing it won't really be found. Cordell, he thinks, is one of the latter type, but Liam tries out the lines he's learned anyway. "It's not okay and it's not fair. I can't pretend I know what you're going through but I'm sorry." He swallows, his throat trying to close without his say-so. "Jesus. I'm so sorry, Cordi."

"Yeah," Cordell says, rough, and grips Liam's wrist. When Liam looks down Cordell's eyes are still closed. They stay there for a while, by the lake, long past when it's uncomfortable.

When they finally get up, Liam's knees creak like an old man's but Cordell doesn't make the joke he should. He leaves Cordell's truck and drives them both back into town, and gets drive-through Whataburger that Cordell picks at instead of eating, and says, "Do you want to go back to the ranch?" and isn't surprised when Cordell shakes his head, no. They get a hotel instead, two queens and a respectable mini-bar, and Liam calls Mama from next to the ice machine in the hall and says that he's got Cordell, and they're fine, and they'll be back in the morning. She clearly wants to object but doesn't know how and Liam hangs up before she can figure it out.

He gets back, with the ice. Cordell's sitting on the end of the bed watching the news like it's the Superbowl. "I was thinking about the funeral," Cordell says, when the door closes behind Liam. "I have to plan the funeral and I don't even have her body."

Liam sets the bucket on the bar and sits on the other bed. "We'll help," Liam says. Cordell's cheek sucks in on one side. "You don't have to do any of this alone."

"Yeah," Cordell says, remote, and Liam looks at him. Weird hollowness in his stomach and he realizes only after a second why: it's the first time, all his life, that he can remember Cordell lying to him.

The Rodeo Kings operation is supposed to be quick. Three months, is the estimate: to get in, to learn the operation, to get out. They need an agent who can be convincingly skilled as a traveling rider, who knows a ranch operation, who can act. There's a depressingly short list and one name at the top of it. Everyone thinks it's a bad idea except for Graves, and Cordell.

"It'll give me something to think about that's not this," Cordell says, when Liam's trying to talk him out of it. They're on the back patio of his and Emily's house in town. The kids are still staying out at the ranch. It's two weeks after the funeral and they haven't gone back to school. Cordell hasn't shaved in a few days and the sound as he scratches his jaw is loud. There's no music playing from the kitchen window, like there used to be. The plants out here are already dying. Liam wants to grip Cordell's shoulders, get in his face and yell, but doesn't dare to. He gets a deep sigh, instead, and Cordell flipping a poker chip between his fingers like a restless card shark, and then a smile, fake as fake. "Anyway, who do you know who can ride a bull better than me?"

"No one," Liam says, and Cordell nods, like damn straight, and in the morning Liam goes in to the Travis County DA and announces he'd like to transfer offices, due to a family emergency that's going to keep him here in Texas, and it's only afterward when some calls are made and the paperwork's signed that he calls Bret, back in Manhattan, and leaves a voicemail that he's going to be staying a lot longer than he thought.

It isn't three months. As the operation drags on, Liam sweet-talks his way into being one of the assistant attorneys on the case and he tries to alleviate how Graves is getting more and more suspicious. Cordell's old partner James gets promoted to captain, six months in, and he vouches for Cordell, too, not that it seems to matter either way. Cordell's the one who's embedded with the rodeo and he'll either finish the job or he won't. They don't have another agent to send in, not without compromising the work that's been done so far, and nothing else will do but to wait.

The kids ask Liam for updates every week when he comes for dinner at the ranch. "I can't tell you everything," he says, like he does every time, and Daddy's quiet at the head of the table, and Mama quieter on the opposite side. Cordell has a rendezvous every Monday when the rodeo takes the day off with a burner cell phone and an agent waiting impatiently for his call, and his reports are terse: still trying to get them to trust me. They're suspicious of newcomers. The ring seems really tight and I can't figure out an opening. Give me time. He's allowed to call Liam the same day and Liam answers every unknown number on Mondays, giving hope to spam callers nationwide. Cordell usually sounds tired but he still calls and they have a dumb, simple conversation—about how the Rangers beat the Angels, how he's breaking in some new boots and has a blister the size of Indiana, how he's craving, inexplicably, sushi. "Sushi?" Liam asks, trying to imagine when Cordell ever tried it, and Cordi says, with rare humor, "Hey, I'm not a big fancy New York lawyer but I've had my share of raw fish," and when Liam hands the phone over to the kids they lean over the speakerphone and talk over the top of each other about a class project Stella did, and a history paper Auggie got an A+ on, and Liam watches with his hand over his mouth for the moment when Cordell has to interrupt and say, tired-sounding still, "Sorry, guys, I have to go," and the goodbyes have to be quick, and then that's it, for another week.

The first time Liam sees him when he's Duke it's a shock to the system. Seven months in and the reporting agent says that Walker missed his check-in. Walker—that's what they all call him, even when Liam's in the room with them. There's a small frenzy in the operation office. Graves calls for Cordell's head, predictably at this point. James, trying again to calm her down, but looking a little like he agrees. Liam leaves the office unnoticed and walks outside to feel cold air on his face and feel less—how he feels—and there's a text, on his phone, from an unknown number. The Alibi, Driskill ST, thirty minutes. Come alone.

Ridiculously illicit. Liam takes off his suit-jacket and tie and ruffles his hair into something unprofessional and goes. It's hard to park—Monday night football—and inside is the opposite of his scene but he finds a seat at the bar. A girl in a too-tight orange t-shirt gives him a once-over and he smiles tightly, ignores her, drinks a watery beer, and almost exactly on the thirty-minute mark someone sits down next to him and it's—not his brother.

Duke Culpepper was the fake name they picked. Originally from Texas but had some misdemeanors that made Texas unfriendly so he'd been hiding out in Tucson for a few years, working the rodeo there. Not dangerous but willing to get up to something that was, and he looks the part. He smells like sweat and horse manure and hay and some shitty, awful aftershave, and there's a bruise on his jaw like someone suckerpunched him, and he doesn't look at Liam but smiles sweet at the bartender and says, with a fake low drawl, "Darlin', I wouldn't mind a shot of bourbon, when you have a chance."

Jesus, Liam thinks. The bartender has an expression like Cordell slid a hand down the front of her jeans and made her the happiest woman alive—the shot takes about ten seconds to arrive, when Liam's been waiting for a second beer for five minutes. Cordell knocks it back in one motion and says, "Again, and—" and he turns, like he noticed Liam for the first time, "another round for my friend, here. We're celebratin'."

She blinks, notices Liam's empty glass. While the next round's being prepared Liam raises his eyebrows and plays his part. "What are we celebrating?"

"Got a new job," Cordell says—but no—it's Duke, who's saying it, Duke who's drawling lazy and has his hat cocked at an off-angle and who's got a bandana tied around his wrist which for some goddamn reason is working the whole, hot-ass look.

"Congrats," the bartender says, and Duke grins wide and winks at her and downs the second shot, letting out a little whoop. "Another?"

"Better make it a double this time, sweetheart," Duke says, and Liam puts his hand on the warm lean stretch of thigh knocking against his under the bar and squeezes, very lightly, a warning, and sees Cordell's eyes tighten just slightly, and sees how his shoulders round out, like he's ready to get in a fight. Cordell takes a deep breath and toasts the bartender, but turns to look at Liam, face a grinning glad mask. "Got a new girl, too. Real pretty."

The bartender's disappointment would be funny, any other time. "Your lucky day, then, huh?" Liam says. Cordell's knee presses hard into his under the bar. "Girl got a name?"

"Miss Twyla Jean," Cordell says, almost crooning it, and Liam raises his eyebrows—he thought they had embarrassing Texas names—and then Cordell downs the double-shot, grimacing at the sting, and then says, much quieter so that only Liam can hear: "All it took was me making it eleven seconds on a bull and she took me straight to bed."

Liam takes a deep breath. Cordell's jaw flexes, in the silence, and he puts the empty shot glass on the bar. "Thanks for celebrating with me," he says, and slides off the barstool, backwards. He grips Liam's shoulder so hard that it actually hurts. "Gotta get back. Job won't do itself."

"Godspeed," Liam says, toasting with his beer, and Cordell gives him a tight smile and tugs his cap and walks out of the bar, taking with him the smell of the stables and his too-tight jeans and this sensation under Liam's gut that's murky and dangerous, unsettled. His shoulder hurts. It's only after he's written down Twyla Jean's name and texted it to James, and gone home to the apartment where Bret's still bitching about the décor, and taken a shower, and pressed his forehead against the cold tile, that he realizes that Cordell was wearing a fucking Texas Rangers cap. The absolute bastard.

The night he hears from Cordell again he has a fight with Bret. The same fight, worked over the same way. Bret hates Texas. He hates being away from his friends. He hates the politics and the food and how Liam's always with his family. He doesn't want to go to family dinner at the ranch because he's sure Liam's dad hates him. "He doesn't hate you," Liam says, for the fifth time, but to be honest he's not sure. Daddy never seems to like Bret that much, either. Cordi's never met him and Liam wonders, like he's wondered many times, if they'd get along, at all. Wonders if that'd be a dealbreaker and then wonders, washing dishes while Bret watches MSNBC in chilly silence, if the fact that he's wondering if it would be a dealbreaker makes it a dealbreaker, after all.

The text comes as a relief. Annunziata's. He dresses down more carefully than the first time. It's a weird spot, on the outskirts of town where it feels less like Austin than like a suburb. Karaoke and Italian food and mostly-fake cowboys slapping their knees to the absolutely horrific song being sung—very suburb. And there, at a table right by what passes for a stage: Cordell. But, no: Duke, Duke Culpepper, with his arm slung around the shoulders of Twyla Jean and his lips on her ear, grinning, wild. It catches Liam's breath like it did the first time. Duke, confident in his body and happy and having a good time, easy. Hot. Jesus, Liam doesn't get how it's so hot.

He waits in the backroom and watches Cordell shoves his face into the water. It's disturbing how panicked he is, once he's Cordell again and not Duke. "You have to," he's saying—babbling—"You have to tell them, they're going to kill people, you can't let them go through with it—" but of course that's not either of their decision and Liam can't help. It's awful, an awful awful feeling. His big brother looking to him for an answer he can't give. Cordell pushes his hair back from his face and puts his hat back on and looks miserable but he goes back, he sits right back down with that girl and lets her slide her hand down his thigh up the inseam of his jeans and Liam watches from the corner of the bar, where he won't be seen, drinking a beer he doesn't want, seeing his brother be someone who's not his brother. Maybe someone his brother could have been. They're going to sleep together, tonight. Liam knows it. They've been fucking for three months. Is it easy, he wonders. It shouldn't be, for Cordell, but maybe for Duke it is.

He goes home to Bret and wakes him up, and apologizes for the earlier fight, and kisses him, and gets Bret on his belly, and fucks him that way, a little hard, kissing the back of his neck, making Bret gasp and flinch and groan, delighted. "Where did that come from," Bret says, lazy and satisfied, and when he falls asleep Liam takes a shower and then only then calls James, from the hall outside their apartment door, leaning with his forehead against the wall. The bank location has been obvious since Cordell reported about Twyla Jean; the only thing that wasn't certain was the time. It'll be fine, James says, firm, and hangs up on Liam to coordinate with the rest of the team now that Agent Walker has finally come back in from the cold, and Liam stands there with his eyes closed in the hall and thinks, yes. Yes, it'll be fine.

After the bank—after the clean-up—Graves debriefs Cordell for a long time. It borders on unlawful interrogation at a certain point but Liam doesn't dare intervene when she's this furious—he can't risk being taken off the case. It takes James making a call to her supervisor at the field office, who then calls her and pulls her out of the room, for Cordell to be given a reprieve, and Liam goes in to the conference room and finds Cordell still in the stupid black hoodie stained with Crystal West's blood, his head in his hands, breathing with his mouth open like he can't get enough air.

"Cordi," Liam says, and Cordell shakes his head. Liam licks his lips and checks the hall. No one's guarding them—they wouldn't, because Walker's one of their own—and he says, "Get up." Cordell looks up at him, finally. "Come on, quick before she gets back. Come with me."

Cordell follows him. Down the hall, left to go through the atrium instead of the bullpen, then through the glass doors to the hall to, at last, the men's room, and Cordell stands in the middle of the tile blinking until Liam nods at the sinks and says, "Do it."

He's sloppier about it, this time. His hair hangs dripping in front of his face. He pushes it off his forehead and looks up at himself, in the mirror, panting a little. Water drips off his nose.

Liam brings him paper towels and he dries his face. "You should take that off," Liam says, and Cordell looks down at his clothes like he has no idea what he's wearing and only just realized, and tears off the hoodie in an awkward tangle. Underneath his t-shirt is black so Liam can't tell if it's stained. The big silver cross swings from his neck.

"What happened," Cordell says. A croak.

"Graves didn't tell you?" Liam says, and then bites his tongue. Obviously not. "Clint and Crystal are both dead. Clint at the bank. Crystal crashed the car. They think she passed out. Blood loss." Cordell nods, tight, looking away. These are his friends, Liam reminds himself. These are the people he knew, the only people he really talked to, for almost a year. "Two more people died at the bank. Twyla wasn't there and we don't have information to tie her to the job. I don't know where Jaxon is but we have people looking. They're still trying to recover the stolen money."

"Graves did tell me that much," Cordell says, and turns around, leaning his ass against the sink. It's slowly draining, behind him. "I think she wants to arrest me since she can't arrest them."

"I think so, too," Liam says, and Cordell smiles a little. He looks like he hasn't slept all year. "You did your job. It's over."

"It's not over," Cordell says, immediately. He drags his hand through his hair. "Graves made that clear. The money's still missing and Twyla and Jax are in the wind."

"And Duke's being sent to jail," Liam says. "So his part in the Rodeo Kings gang is over."

Cordell wipes his fingers over his mouth. He's still wearing that bandana around his wrist. Liam wants to take it off of him. Throw it away, burn it. "Duke Culpepper, common criminal," Cordell says, drawling it a little.

"Never liked him anyway," Liam says, and Cordell smiles, dropping his head. Liam touches his shoulder, grips his neck. "Hey. Means you get to come home. The kids will be over the moon."

"Yeah," Cordell says. He brackets a loose hand around Liam's wrist and nods. "Yeah. Can't wait."

His smile faded, as soon as Liam said it. Liam thinks about that, for that whole night, and for the whole next day, after, when James tells him that Cordell put in for one week's leave. "You talked to him?" Liam says, and James shakes his head, says, "He called Connie. I think he still doesn't even know I'm the captain."

He tells Mama and Daddy that Cordell will be home next Wednesday. Stella's frowning, not eating her dinner. "I saw that bank robbery on the news," she says. Auggie's big-eyed, watching, next to her. "Was that Dad's big case?"

"It was," Liam says, and Auggie's eyes get bigger. "But there's a debriefing period. We need to make sure his undercover identity doesn't have any loose ends that'll tie him back to his real one."

Daddy's eyes narrow and Mama's quiet. Liam got pretty good at lying, over the years, but he never was quite able to fool them.

He calls Cordell the next day. "Tell me where you are," he says, and Cordell doesn't answer for a long moment, letting the silence stretch out over the cell line. Liam considers it a victory that he even answered the phone.

He has a room at the Fairmont, on the fifteenth floor. Liam knocks and it's a minute before the door opens. Cordell's in bare feet, jeans, an ACL t-shirt. Liam follows him in and the room is—nicer than Liam's current apartment, that's for sure. King bed, outstanding view. "Wow," Liam says, and Cordell says, "Better than the Super 8 in Kermit," sort of sarcastic, and then sits down on the bed like he can't stand up anymore.

Liam doesn't sit. He doesn't think he's really invited, even if Cordell let him in the door. "I told them next Wednesday," he said. "Mom and Dad, and the kids. A week. Do you think that'll be enough time?"

"Honestly?" Cordell says, and doesn't elaborate.

There's a table, with four chairs, like a dining area. On it a box, like one of the evidence boxes from the office. Liam walks over and tips back the lid and: there's Duke Culpepper. The striped shirt he wore when Liam met him at Annunziata's. That was—god, only three days ago. A plastic bottle of aftershave. The cross necklace. The gun. Liam picks it up and checks the revolving chamber—that one bullet, still ready. It makes him nauseous just like it did the first time.

"I know you're probably not okay," Liam says. Understatement, he thinks, of the century. He closes the box and pushes it away, toward the center of the table. When he turns around Cordell's holding the beer in one hand and playing with a poker chip, in the other. "I know you're going to need some time. But when you're done, we need you back. The kids, and Mom and Dad. And me."

"C'mon, you don't need anybody, Stinker," Cordell says, with the barest thread of levity. "You climb right up to the top of the barn all by yourself, when no one's around to stop you."

Liam pauses, confused by the subject change. Surprised, then. "You were there for that?" he says, and Cordell shrugs, one corner of his mouth lifting.

When Liam was eleven, and Cordell was at college, and the world hadn't yet turned over on its head. It was early August and his school hadn't started, and Daddy and Mama had gone over to the feed store to pick up a truckload for the horses. He was bored, and tired of reading, and he'd gone out to the barn and looked up at it and thought about how Cordell had done it, at his age or maybe even younger, and if Cordell could then Liam could, too, if he set his mind to it. It wasn't even all that hard, once he was looking careful for the places to set his feet. He sat down on the top of the barn and looked out over the ranch—and further, over the where the road into the ranch pushed out into the hills, down toward the town. He wondered how far he could really see, to the horizon.

"Swung by to pick up my football stuff," Cordell says, now. "Em parked on the other side of the house and I didn't think anyone was home, until I looked out the back. You were up there just—taller than anything." He shrugs. "See? Didn't need my help after all."

"I wouldn't have climbed it if you hadn't dropped me on my head," Liam says, and Cordell snorts, shakes his head. Liam bites the inside of his cheek and crouches, and Cordell's forced to look at him or be ridiculous and so Cordell looks at him. Liam reaches out and gets his hand, the hand with the poker chip, and squeezes it, and Cordell swallows and squeezes back. The edges of the plastic bite into Liam's hand. "Come back," he says.

Cordell takes a deep breath. "I will," he says. "I promise, Liam."

Liam stands up and hugs him, around the shoulders, and walks out of the room. He takes the elevator back to the lobby and steps out into the sunshine, and takes a deep breath, and calls Bret to arrange lunch. Cordell's promises. Fifty-fifty, anymore, that it ends up being true. Liam decides to believe him. He's hardheaded. He might as well be hardheaded and optimistic about it.

#ffcc #walker #walker texas ranger #walker fic #my writing #if anyone ever needed an in-depth character study of liam #...here it is

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marjansmarwani · 4 years ago

Text

the truth is stranger than all my dreams

2.9k || ao3

Marjan likes to think that she’s confident, that she can take on anything. But things are showing her that she may not know herself as well as she thinks and that the future can be a scary thing.

------

A Marjan centric coda to 2x04

Because Marjan deserves a fic too. Beta’d by @officereyes

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Marjan’s two worlds collided with a thunderous crash when she saw Salim standing at the edge of the rink. Turning the corner expecting to see her friends and seeing him right beside them was so incongruous. For all her usual grace under fire, she didn’t know how to handle this, or what to say. These were some of the people with whom she felt safest with in the entire world - she trusted each of them with her life - but somehow having them all in one room left her reeling.

“Fiance” was the truth, but it somehow felt wrong. It didn’t feel like enough to encompass all that he was and all their relationship was. It may have been the wrong one too, judging by the reactions of her friends. Well, Carlos tried, but the rest were stuck in shock. She couldn’t say that she blamed them. It’s not like she had ever mentioned him before.

She was happy to see him; it had been over a year now since she had left Miami and their families behind. But with no warning on a day out with her friends was too much. It felt so foreign and somehow wrong. Salim fit into a specific space in her head, her life here in Austin in another. She had never anticipated the two having to collide without warning.

But he smiled at her and she returned it. He joined them in watching the next bout and all seemed at ease. He struck up a conversation with her friends, it all seemed normal. It was all fine, so she didn’t know why she felt an undercurrent of dread. When she asked him later on, when they were alone waiting for his uber, why now he had simply said he had missed her, that he had wanted to see her, that he had wanted it to be a surprise.

Mission accomplished there, for sure.

As they parted for the evening and he made her promise to free some time up for him tomorrow, after her shift, she agreed with a smile. The shock had faded and maybe the feeling of displacement would soon too.

Having another person she cared about in the same city should be a good thing, after all.

-------

She had been debating whether the smell was simply stuck in her head or if she actually needed to shower again when she was interrupted by her phone vibrating its way across the bench beside her. When she opened the message waiting for her all other thoughts fled her mind. Salim wanted to have dinner in one of the nicest restaurants in the city with her, alone. There was confusion, but there were also alarm bells sounding in her head. Him showing up here, him inviting her to dinner at a nice restaurant without a chaperone? They had a plan but she was starting to get the feeling that he wanted to change that plan.

She rewrapped her hair and headed to the bunks, reading the message again, looking for any clues she may have missed. There are none. He’s not coming out and saying anything, but she can hear it shouted between the lines. He’s tired of waiting and wants to move forward. She flops back onto her bed with a groan. This wasn’t the plan. They still have time. She still has time.

Paul and Mateo asked her about it and while she appreciated their words and show of support, it doesn’t change the fact that she had no idea how to handle this. Paul’s right: Salim is likely tired of waiting. She doesn’t know why, she doesn’t know what brought it on. All she knows is that when she showed up to dinner he was more than likely going to ask her a question that she didn’t know how to answer.

TK joined them and after the other two fill him in and he voices his support for whatever she decides, she smiled. If nothing else, she knew she could always count on her team. The thought of leaving Austin and them so soon; when she had just built a life here and found a family and happiness, is too much. She’s not ready. She just hopes it doesn't come to that and if it does, Salim can understand.

------

As Marjan let herself back into her apartment she fell back on the closed door and closed her eyes. For so long she had had this plan. For so long she had taken comfort in the fact that she knew what her future held. There had been no uncertainty, no wondering if every time she put her heart on the line it might just end up getting crushed instead. She was going to live her life for herself for a while, and then she was going to marry Salim. That was it, full stop, end of story.

Or so she had thought.

Just this morning she had been telling Paul and Mateo how much sense it made, how smart it was. She had been so sure. But apparently even the best-laid plans were still just that: plans. And plans could be changed, or broken.

She wasn’t sure where to go from here. She didn’t know what the next step was. What was the procedure for your intended deciding that was it, that you were done now? She should probably call her parents but she didn’t want to talk about this. Not yet; she was still processing it herself. She sighed and opened her eyes again before taking a deep breath and venturing further into her apartment.

She couldn’t deny that even past all the confusion, it hurt. Maybe it was petty or egotistical, but she had thought that she had been worth waiting for. The idea that she wasn’t, that he had managed to find someone else hurt more than she wanted to admit. This was exactly the kind of hurt this plan was supposed to avoid. She wasn’t meant to have her heart broken before she had even given it away.

But maybe that was the problem too. She never had given her heart to it, had she? She had hidden behind a wall of plans and rules and humor. She hadn’t allowed herself to be vulnerable. She had been so determined to avoid the pain of heartbreak that she may have inadvertently caused it. And not just for herself, either. She may not have set out to do so, but she had hurt Salim along the way too. As much as she didn’t want to accept it and as tempting as it was to lay the blame on him for choosing a way out, this was at least partially her fault.

But that, she decided, was a problem for the morning. Tonight she would allow herself to sulk, just a little. She would let herself feel this and she would get up in the morning and start again. Maybe by then this aching feeling in her chest would have faded, maybe by then things would look a little brighter.

------

Marjan loved Salim. At least, she was pretty sure she did.

The thing is she had never been good at that: at deciding what her feelings were, at feeling them at all.

All her life she had been told that love would develop over time. She really believed that, it made sense to her. It was far more logical, more reasonable to base a relationship on mutual affection, on friendship and respect for the other person than it was to take a gamble on passion; to rest your future on emotions that were as fickle as the weather.

She cared about Salim - he knew her better than almost anyone else. She trusted him, she cared for him. She did love him, in a way. She saw him as someone safe, she saw him as a future she could be happy with. They had always been on the same page and they had always had each other’s backs. It was simple, uncomplicated. It was what she wanted.

She had always thought he had wanted the same. She had spent half a lifetime believing it to be true, knowing that no matter what in the end, they would have each other. There was love in her heart for him, that she knew for sure. She’s just not sure if it’s the same kind he apparently felt for her.

Or, at least, she hadn’t been. Now that she was on the other side of the plan she had built her life around, she wasn’t so sure. There was an ache in her chest; a dull pain that stung even more with each thought she had of Salim and the night before. She wasn’t an expert, but she was fairly certain this was what a broken heart felt like.

She appreciated Paul and Mateo’s sympathy and Paul’s advice even more, but even as she left them to go to the kitchen she still didn’t know where to go from here. What was the point of sharing her feelings when he had already made his choice? What good was this realization when it came a day too late?

She entered the kitchen in search of some tea only to find it already occupied by TK, who was putting away dishes with far more force than necessary. She frowns as she steps forward, “Hey dude, you good?”

He turned to face her and though the expression on his face was decidedly not fine he nodded, “Yeah, I’m fine.” He studied her and his frown deepened, “Are you?”

“No? I don’t know.” She sighed and sank into one of the stools at the counter. TK crossed the kitchen to join her, leaning onto the counter from the other side so they were at eye level. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Do you?” she countered, “because I don’t believe your bs for a second and you are not okay either.”

“I will if you do.”

They held each other’s gazes for a long moment before she sighed and relented, “It’s Salim.”

“I figured as much. I take it dinner didn’t go well?”

“You could say that,” she said dryly, “he asked me if I ever loved him, and told me he was tired of being the only one pining, that he wanted to be with someone who loved him and he wasn’t sure he was willing to take the risk that I might grow to love him later, after all this time. And then, on top of all that, he told me he had met someone else.”

“Shit Marj, I’m so sorry.” She nodded and gave him a small smile. Paul may be the station mind reader, but TK knew her well enough that he knew also the answer without even having to ask the question: yes, it bothered her.

“The worst part,” she continued, “is that I realized I might actually love him after all, just a day too late.”

TK gave her a grimace of sympathy, but she patted his hand before he could say anymore, “Your turn now: a deal’s a deal. What’s got you wound so tight today?”

He studied her for a moment before he relented with a sigh, “Carlos and I ran into his parent’s at the farmer’s market yesterday, and he introduced me as his friend, from work.”

The quip was there on the tip of her tongue, the joke to break the tension, but Salim’s voice sounded in the back of her mind, and of course, you make a joke. As much as she hated to admit it, in light of everything, he was right. She did use humor to avoid confronting emotions whenever possible. But sitting here watching TK stare down at his hands miserably, she took a breath and jumped in: “Did he say why? Is he not out to his parents?”

“No, he’s out to them. I guess...I guess it’s just more complicated than I thought.”

“Most things are.”

TK gave a harsh laugh, “that’s for sure.”

They lapsed into quiet for a few moments before he spoke, “We both are going to have to swallow our pride, aren’t we?”

Marjan shook her head, “I don’t know if pride is really the issue here, for either of us. I think it’s fear.”

“You might be onto something there,” TK admitted.

The conversation faded as they each retreated back into their own thoughts before eventually, TK spoke again, “What are you going to do about Salim?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she admitted with a shrug, “I don’t really know where to go from here. None of this was ever part of the plan, but I guess nothing ever stays the same.”

“You should tell him.”

TK’s words are sudden and she looked up at him sharply, “What, like some dramatic love confession? To try to get him to leave someone else he has already made a commitment to? That all seems...very much not me.”

“And the decision is up to you, obviously, but I think you owe it to yourself to tell him the truth. It doesn't have to be dramatic, just give him all the information and let him make a decision. I think it’s only fair to make sure you are on the same page. Nothing good has ever come from hiding anything from someone you care about.”

She considered his words. They were remarkably similar to Paul’s, which should tell her more than the words themselves. Neither of her two friends would ever advise her to do anything less than what they thought best. Maybe it was worth considering. Maybe it was time to face this fear. Whatever came couldn’t be worse than the dread of missed opportunity.

“What about you?” she asked him, “what are you going to do?”

He was quiet again before finally, he shrugged, “I don’t know Marj,” he admitted quietly, “I love him. I thought he loved me. I want to think that he does, but if that’s not the case...I don’t see any way forward.”

Marjan’s heart broke for him. He looked so miserable and briefly she remembered her thoughts yesterday, how she had claimed even to herself that her future with Salim was safer, less likely to lead to heartbreak. Maybe some things simply couldn’t be avoided; maybe some things were just too universal, no matter your background or approach.

“I don’t think that’s true,” she told him instead, “don’t forget I have spent a significant amount of time with you two. He loves you just as much as you love him. Whatever this is, I don’t think it has to do with you. I think that maybe you’re not the only one that feels scared.”

TK deflated a bit before meeting her eyes, “If that’s true, what does it mean that I never noticed?”

Marjan gave him a soft smile, “It means that you’re human. But now that you know, you’re going to have to figure out what to do about it.”

“Any ideas?”

She smirked at him, feeling a little bit more like herself now after this talk, “I can’t just give you all the answers, TK. Where would the fun be in that?”

———

For the second time in as many days when her door closed behind her, she sank back onto it. She had said what she needed to say, and she had meant it. Despite everything she felt for Salim, despite all the plans and promises, there was no going back from here and once again she was left wondering what was next.

They had talked, before she left. They had decided that he would tell their parents, and she couldn’t be more grateful to him. They had figured out all the logistics of ending it; crossed all the figurative t’s and dotted all the hypothetical i’s. They had successfully dismantled the plan she had built her life around. She wasn’t sure if she was meant to feel relief or excitement, but all she really felt was anxiety. She didn’t know where to go from here. At this very moment she had a completely open future. There were no plans, no landmarks in sight. Maybe it should have been exciting and maybe someday it would be. Right now all she can feel is shock and maybe a little bit of grief too. The future was a wide and daunting thing that she was now facing without a map and it left her feeling unmoored; a leaf on the wind with no control over where she landed.

Maybe for now the best thing to do was focus on the now. Her now is something she can take comfort in; it is a space in which she is sure of her footing and where she is happy. Maybe the answer is to just focus on that: on her job, on her team, on her friends. Maybe if she did that the rest would reveal itself, in time.

So she pushed herself off the door and squared her shoulders, holding her head high as she entered her apartment. For tonight she would focus on her life. She would take some time to herself or maybe see what the others were doing. Then in the morning she would get up and go to work and continue focusing on the now and what she had.

The future was a problem for tomorrow and for now, it could stay there.

#911 lone star #911 lone star fic #marjan marwani #911ls spoilers #911ls season 2 #my writing #userkimmy #usermaximus #userac #tuserpaige #userjilly #userbones

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howtosingit · 4 years ago

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Fic: Somebody Misses You When You’re Away

TK returns to New York City for the first time since moving to Texas, and Carlos faces his own insecurities back in Austin.

Written for @tarlosweek2020 - Day 1: “Are you wearing my hoodie?” + Fluff

3.7K | Also on AO3.

-----

Carlos taps his fingers against the hard, wooden tabletop, his eyes fixed on the phone in front of him. While he watches, the screen goes dark due to inactivity, and he lets out a sigh, his heart clenching in his chest.

“You look really pathetic, you know that?” Michelle says, and he glances up to find her staring at him from the other side of the picnic table, her head tilted to the side as she sucks her milkshake through her straw. Carlos can see a teasing glint in her eyes, but there’s something else there too, something like pity, and it just makes him feel even smaller.

“Yeah,” he admits, leaning forward to rest his head in his hands, “I know I do.”

From his new position, Carlos can’t see Michelle’s face, but he feels her hand on his wrist where she reaches out to touch him, rubbing her thumb soothingly along his pulse point. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks gently.

This time, Carlos lets out a small groan, hoping to convey exactly how dramatic he knows he’s being. “It’s completely ridiculous, I know, but I miss him.”

When he gets no response, Carlos looks up again, catching the half-smile and gentle gaze of his best friend. “What?” he asks, raising his eyebrow in confusion. He definitely thought she’d laugh at him.

“You are just the softest soul, Carlos Reyes,” she responds, shaking her head slightly. “It’s hard to believe that you exist sometimes.”

Carlos feels a blush rise on the back of his neck and to the tips of his ears, rolling his eyes as he looks away in embarrassment. “You sound like TK.”

“That’s because he knows how good he’s got it,” Michelle fires back, no heat in her claim as she ducks to catch his eye. The statement sticks to Carlos, hitting at his current train of thoughts. The fear that maybe Michelle has finally learned to read his mind causes a grimace to take over his face. “Ah, looks like I poked something there,” she says in response to his reaction.

“I feel like I’m going crazy here, chica,” he grits through his teeth, the unsettling thoughts that have kept him up for the past few nights flying to the forefront of his mind.

“It’s okay to miss your boyfriend when he’s out of town, Carlos.”

“Is it?” he asks, his voice cracking slightly as his fears threaten to take over. “Because it’s only been four days, and it’s not like I don’t hear from him. We text or talk every night before bed.”

“Well, that’s a good thing!” Michelle practically yells, her eyebrows furrowing as she gestures widely as if all of his problems are solved by that one admission.

“Then why do I feel like I’m going to lose him?” Carlos whispers, biting down hard on his bottom lip to contain every other dark thought that’s been swirling around in his head.

Michelle’s arms drop back down to the table, her hands moving to cover his own on top of the table. She gives him a penetrating look, and after years of friendship, Carlos knows that she’s trying to pick up on everything that he’s not saying out loud.

“Why would you be thinking that?” Michelle hedges, tightening her grip on him.

“He didn’t choose Texas,” Carlos starts, looking down to avoid any judgmental looks that she might give him, “and he loves New York. He’s sending me all of these pictures of his favorite places, and when we get to talk, he seems so happy and excited to be back there.”

“Carlos--”

“What if he decides that’s where he wants to be?” he pushes forward, his voice breaking again. The thought makes his heart beat rapidly, the fear of TK leaving him coursing through him like an untamable fire.

“Didn’t he already consider moving back to New York, when he got shot?” Michelle reminds him, leaning closer. “He stayed, Carlos. He picked the 126, he picked you!”

“Yeah, but now he’s back there and it feels different. He’s remembering his entire life there, and it wasn’t all bad, ‘Chelle! What if he comes back and no longer feels like this is where he belongs?”

“Then he’ll talk to you about it!” Michelle exclaims, jumping up from the table to move to Carlos’s side. She wraps her arms around him, pressing her chin into his shoulder. “Carlos, you guys have been together for almost three months, and I know it started off a little crazy, but you two have built something solid. You love him, I know you do.”

Carlos takes a deep breath, the words cutting through him. “I do,” he agrees. “I love him so much, Michelle.”

“Have you told him that?”

“We’re not there yet,” Carlos says. “It’s only been a couple of months, I don’t want to scare him by moving too fast.”

Michelle huffs out a breath, dropping her forehead against his shoulder as she lets out a groan.

“Carlos, how many times do we have to have this conversation?” she starts, her voice serious, like she means business. “You can’t hold yourself back to make other people comfortable. It’s not fair to yourself. If you’re worried he’ll leave, you have to tell him the truth.”

“Michelle, you don’t get it,” Carlos says, turning to face her. “If TK decides that he wants to move back to New York, I’m not going to try to stop him.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, pulling back to look at him, the shock clear on her face. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“I just want him to be happy, Michelle,” he tells her, tracing the lines on his left palm thoughtfully. “I love him, I do, so much, but if New York is what makes him happy, if it’s what he wants, I’m not going to stand in the way of that. I don’t want to be that kind of person.”

“Oh, honey,” Michelle sighs, leaning her head against him again. “They really don’t make many men like you, Carlos Reyes.”

He wishes that made him feel better.

-----

When TK first told him that he was going to New York for a week to see his mother for his birthday, Carlos was really excited for him. They had talked a lot about his mom before, and Carlos knew that his boyfriend missed her a lot. He was truly happy that TK would get to spend some quality time with his mom, just the two of them in the city.

Except, there’s also the fact that it means they’ll have to spend an entire week apart.

In the two and a half months that they’ve been dating, he and TK have spent as much time as possible together. They both have insane work schedules that don’t always line up, but they make up for it where they can. When he’s working a late shift, TK will bring him takeout if he’s off, and they’ll eat together in the park next to his station. When TK is on a long shift, Carlos will sometimes stop by the 126 and hang out with the crew. He and Paul have become really good friends, and he enjoys the camaraderie that he finds with the team.

When their schedules do line up, TK usually stays the night at his place, and they like to wake up early and go for runs together before making breakfast - TK handles the fruit and toast, Carlos does the eggs and turkey sausage. It’s become a part of their routine, along with spur-of-the-moment nights out, exploring Austin.

The point is, they try to spend a good amount of time together, something that they both enjoy. Judd likes to joke that they’re still in the honeymoon stage of their relationship, and one day they’ll get sick of each other. (TK calls him a liar, knowing only too well how much Judd loves to spend time with Grace, even after years of marriage.) They haven’t really had the opportunity to miss one another yet, keeping each other in the loop about what’s going on in their lives regularly. It’s not that they’re dependent on one another to have a good time, but they’ve both been pretty clear about how committed they are to each other, and to building a strong, healthy relationship together.

So, when TK goes to New York for seven days, Carlos freaks out a little bit.

He doesn’t mean to, he actually tries really hard not to, but his insecurities are a little too strong for him to overcome them completely.

It starts with just missing his boyfriend. The sight of his smile, the twinkle of his green eyes, the way that his uniform clings to him when they see each other on a call. TK still texts him pictures, and they talk on the phone a couple of times, when they can find a moment. It’s not that his boyfriend ghosts him for a week.

It’s just different, and he’s trying to adjust. He’s trying to be normal. He hasn’t told TK anything, he hasn’t acted weird when they’ve talked; he’s answered all of his texts because he loves texting TK. He’s so, so happy that TK is having a good week with his mother in the city that built him. He would never want to ruin that.

It’s just that Carlos loves him, and misses him, and can’t wait to see his face again.

-----

TK texts him the morning that he’s due back in Texas, reminding him of his arrival information, as if Carlos hasn’t gone to bed every night looking at the note on his fridge.

He parks his Camaro in the lot closest to the terminal, willing to pay the fee if it means getting to see his boyfriend sooner, before heading inside to wait. He’s way ahead of schedule, his impatience pulling him out of his apartment and towards the airport earlier than necessary. Still, he takes a seat at the edge of the baggage claim area, pulling his phone out to make sure he hasn’t missed a text from TK.

Thirty minutes later, his phone chimes with a message from his boyfriend, letting him know that he just landed and he’ll be out to see him soon. Carlos jumps to his feet, a wide smile on his face at the thought that they’re finally in the same timezone again. He feels ridiculous and gets so distracted by trying to talk himself down to a normal level of excitement that he doesn’t spot TK until he’s less than ten feet from him.

“Hey, you!” a familiar voice calls out, and Carlos feels the way all of his anxieties and insecurities fade into nothingness when he turns and takes in the man he loves.

TK is dressed for comfort, rocking his day-off sweats and a hoodie, but Carlos swears that no one has ever looked more stunning. That, plus his unkempt hair, no doubt from sleeping on the flight, melts his heart to a liquid mess inside his chest. Before he can even consider it, he’s diving towards his boyfriend to pull him into a tight hug, burying his face in TK’s neck to press a kiss to his soft skin.

TK laughs gently at the reaction, wasting no time in wrapping his arms around Carlos’s waist. They stand there for a few moments, taking their fill, before TK moves away slightly. Carlos, thinking that his boyfriend probably wants some space, let’s him go, but before he can step back, TK is gripping his neck to pull him into a chaste kiss.

Carlos closes his eyes at the contact, fireworks exploding behind his eyelids. This week is the longest they’ve gone without kissing, and he definitely forgot how mesmerizing it is to be close to TK in this way. He may not have gone anywhere, but kissing his man always feels like coming home.

“I really missed that,” TK breathes out when they separate. Carlos huffs out a shy laugh, ducking his head to press their noses together.

“Me too,” he says.

TK gives him a smile, turning towards the baggage claim. He reaches for Carlos’s hand, interlocking their fingers as they stand side-by-side, waiting for TK’s bag to appear.

“How was your mom?” Carlos asks, his curiosity about how TK’s feeling right now getting the best of him.

“So good!” TK says, his eyes bright as he launches into the recap of his week, telling Carlos all about the surprise party they planned for his mom. He remembers TK being really excited to help with the preparations before he left.

They’re walking towards the car, hands still linked, when TK pauses mid-sentence and turns to look at Carlos.

“Are you wearing my hoodie?”

Carlos stops in his tracks, looking down at the outfit he quickly threw on before leaving the apartment. He’s unsurprised to find TK’s yellow hoodie stretched across his chest; in his boyfriend’s absence, he’s taken to wearing it around his apartment whenever he was really missing him. Up until yesterday, it even still smelled like TK.

“Um, possibly,” he answers, a small grin forming at the corner of his mouth as he gives TK a sheepish look. “Sorry?”

“Don’t be,” TK assures him, leaning towards him to press their lips together again. “I like seeing you in my clothes.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” TK laughs, dragging Carlos across the lot towards his car. “Though I should probably start buying them a size up if you’re going to be stealing them from me.”

A strange hope fills Carlos’s chest, and he can’t help but notice how TK’s joke implies a future investment in their relationship.

“So,” he starts, popping his trunk so that TK can throw his bag inside, “you want me to take you home?”

“Actually, if you’re okay with me using your shower, can we go back to your place?” TK asks, stepping close.

Carlos wraps his arms around him, his hands coming to rest at the base of his spine.

“You can use my shower anytime,” he mutters, pressing their lips together again, determined to catch up on all the kisses he missed this past week.

-----

Carlos flits around the kitchen while TK showers, throwing together a quick snack for the two of them. There’s a smile on his face the entire time, a response to hearing the running water from the bathroom down the hall. Nothing about this moment is anything to throw a party over, but after a week of thinking through worst-case scenarios, he’s going to soak up every single moment of having his boyfriend back in his apartment.

TK comes out in a different pair of sweats and a soft t-shirt, toweling his hair dry.

“I made you some lunch,” Carlos says from the couch, smiling when TK lets out a groan and dives forward to grab a chip from his plate.

“You are a literal dream, babe,” he sighs, dropping down next to Carlos and pressing a kiss to his cheek.

Carlos flushes, turning to take a sip of water to avoid responding, but he can’t help the smile that pulls at his lips.

“And you in my clothes?” TK starts, taking a bite of his sandwich. “Also an actual dream I’ve had before.”

Carlos laughs, his heart pounding in his chest. He remembers the advice Michelle gave him a few days ago and his mind spins, wondering if this is a moment where he can be a little more honest with TK about what he’s feeling.

“It, um,” he begins, breathing heavily through his nose as he pushes forward, “it stopped smelling like you yesterday.”

He feels TK shift next to him, pressing their knees together. Carlos glances up at him nervously, surprised to see TK giving him a strange look. Then, his boyfriend leans in, pressing his face into his shoulder and inhaling deeply.

“It smells like you now,” TK whispers, pulling back, his green eyes glinting softly. “You wore it a lot while I was gone?”

Carlos nods, maintaining eye contact. “Whenever I missed you, which, not to sound too lame, was kind of all the time.”

TK sucks in a sharp breath at the confession, his eyebrows furrowing slightly. Then, without warning, he gets up from the couch and moves towards the door, his sudden absence like a hot knife through Carlos’s chest.

“This stopped smelling like you after the fourth day,” TK starts, his back to the room as he digs through his bag, “but I still wore it to bed every night.”

He turns, and Carlos realizes that he’s holding his own grey zip-up hoodie, the one that he puts on after he showers, before he has to get into uniform for work. Carlos hadn’t even realized it was missing.

The tear falls unexpectedly, as does the overwhelming feeling of relief that, just maybe, TK struggled with their distance this past week, too. Before he can duck away, or go somewhere to pull himself together, TK is crossing the room and planting himself on the floor in front of him.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he asks, reaching forward to brush the tear from his cheek.

“It’s nothing, I’m just being ridiculous,” he assures him, avoiding eye contact.

“It’s clearly something,” TK says, rolling his eyes as he cups Carlos’s face in his hands. “Tell me.”

“I don’t want to freak you out.”

“Well, okay, but now I am freaking out a bit,” TK says, giving Carlos a serious look. “Carlos, I swear, you not telling me what you’re thinking is going to stress me out way more than just telling me the truth.”

Carlos bites his lip, trying to figure out the best way to approach this. It’s not that he doesn’t want to be honest with his boyfriend, he just doesn’t want to push too far and ruin this thing that they’ve spent the past few months building.

Except, a part of him knows that what they have is strong, and good, and that it works for them. They aren’t in the same place that they were three months ago; they have the hard conversations now, and this is technically no different. It’s just not hard in the way TK is probably expecting.

“My brain went a little nuts this week, while you were in New York,” he starts, reaching out to squeeze TK’s wrists gently when it looks like he might interrupt.

“I saw how much fun you were having there, back in your hometown and with your mom, and I got scared.”

TK pulls back slightly, a look of confusion taking over his features. “Scared about what?”

“I know it probably sounds ridiculous, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how you might decide that Austin isn’t where you want to be right now,” Carlos admits, his voice thin as he voices his festering insecurity.

“Oh,” is all TK says in response.

There’s a heavy silence as they sit close to one another, each of them working through their own thoughts. After a moment that feels like years, TK finally speaks.

“I didn’t get to tell you,” he starts, a small smile appearing on his face as he looks at Carlos openly, “but my mom is planning to visit next month.”

“Oh,” is all Carlos can say, confused by the direction the conversation has taken.

“Yeah,” TK continues, huffing out a laugh, “after the first two days of me talking about you non-stop, she said she wants to meet the man that I’m clearly in love with.”

All at once, the air is practically sucked from the room as Carlos’s brain replays the sentence over and over and over again in his head. Each time, he decides that he must have misheard the words, but TK just keeps staring at him, his eyes shining brightly with a look that Carlos would swear could only be affection.

“Sorry I told her before you,” TK apologizes, leaning forward, “but she was relentless. You know moms.”

“That’s okay,” Carlos assures him, his eyes filling with tears as the reality of what’s happening washes over him. “I told Michelle a few days ago.”

TK’s face breaks out into a giant smile as he shakes his head, leaning forward to press their mouths together in a gentle kiss. There’s no heat behind it, just a pure want for connection.

“You know, the whole time I was there,” he says when they break apart, nudging their noses together, “I was thinking about how I want to bring you with me next time, and show you off to everyone I know. I want to walk you around my city and show you where I grew up. I want you there with me, by my side, the next time I go, and every time I go after that.”

“Really?” Carlos gasps, cupping TK’s face in his hands.

“Really,” TK says. “New York was my home Carlos, and there’s still a lot of things that I love about it, but Austin is where I belong. I may not have had a choice in moving here and joining the 126, but I chose to stay. And even better, I got to choose you, babe. So far, it’s the best choice I’ve ever made.”

“I love you,” Carlos whispers, pulling TK into an intense kiss. He knows he’s crying again, but this time he doesn’t care. He can’t be embarrassed, not when he gets to hold and hug and kiss the love of his life, the man who loves him back. He’s waited so long for this and he can’t believe he’s finally found it.

TK pulls away with a gasp, and Carlos can’t help the pride that swells inside of him when he spots the blush on his boyfriend’s cheeks, along with his blown pupils. “I love you so much,” TK breathes out, already diving back in for another kiss.

Later, as they reach for each other in bed, Carlos finally allows TK to remove the yellow hoodie from his body, knowing that he no longer has any need for it.

Not when he’s holding the love of his life in his arms.

#tarlos #tarlos fic #tarlos fanfic #911 lone star #tarlosweek2020 #tk strand #carlos reyes #I wrote a thing

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getthesamovarready · 4 years ago

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First Sight

Owen x Michelle

@ana122892 had the idea of Owen and Michelle meeting in a bar the night before their first shift... so here it is!

also on ao3

Chapter 1: nice to meet you

He's sitting at the bar, turning his now empty glass in his hand when someone appears in the space next to him. Shifting over to allow them more room, he thinks nothing of it, and is about to signal the bartender when the person starts to speak. "Hey Chris!" She calls, and Owen's head snaps up. "Can I get a double?" He tries not to let her notice him while he tries to get a good look at the woman next to him, her turned head denying him a glimpse of her face. The bartender, Chris he guesses, lifts his hand in a wave, before confirming her order.

He can't see her face, but he knows enough to know that she's gorgeous. He knew that even before he saw her, saw her hair falling down her back, saw her fingers lacing together on the countertop. He knew it when her voice washed over him in a wave, shocking his system and sending him straightening in his stool.

He takes out his phone, pretending to scroll while he watches her wait on her drink, watches her thumb trace patterns in the back of her hand. His own need of a fresh drink is totally forgotten in his focus on the presence beside him. She starts to look around herself, and his eyes snap firmly to his phone when he sees her head turn to his side.

He can feel her eyes linger on him for a moment, and he almost opens his mouth to talk to her, when Chris sets her drink in front of her. "Ya'll back soon I hear?" Chris asks her, and Owen's interest is piqued.

"We'll be causing trouble again in no time, I'm sure." She replies with a weak, but affectionate, smile in her voice. Owen can hear it even without looking at her, and he so wants to see it.

"You make sure to bring them round, Michelle. I wanna meet em." He tells her, before turning to attend another customer. The woman, Michelle, lets out a heavy sigh, drooping onto the counter as she lifts her drink.

"So you come here often?" Owen asks, before cursing himself for not thinking of something better. The woman stiffens, turning to him slowly with a confused, concerned, and slightly amused frown. And she is... Stunning.

"What gave it away?" Blue eyes pierce him, and her lips draw into the most attractive smirk he has ever seen. "The bartender knowing me by name?" She cocks her head at him. "Or are you just a really bad flirt?" She looks him up and down, and he nearly shudders.

"I'm gonna go with both." He admits, after a moment of floundering. She nods at him, eyes narrowing. He can't seem to hold his tongue under her gaze. "I was curious." He starts, stomach tightening. "And it was a conversation starter. A bad, clichéd one, I'll admit." Her brow furrows, and it feels like a challenge. "And I would really like to try again." He flushes, before nodding at her. "Hi, I'm Owen." He holds out a hand, and she examines it for a moment.

"Michelle." She offers, still frowning. "But you already knew that." She smirks at him again. It pricks at his skin, making him want to squirm under her gaze.

He shakes it off before he speaks. "So what has you sighing into a double tequila?" He asks casually, finally summoning the bartender to order another drink.

She drops her head for a moment before answering. "I'll tell you, if you tell me why you're alone in a bar…" She looks him up and down again. "A long way from home?"

He doesn't ask how she knows that, just laughs a little before answering. "I start a new job tomorrow, I guess I'm pretty nervous." He takes his drink gratefully from Chris. "Your turn." He sips.

"Same as you I guess." She shrugs. "But I suppose it's not a new job. Same job as before. But it's different now, everything's gonna be so...different." Her eyes dim their sparkle. "So here I am." He gestures around the bar. "Pretending it's not different." In reality, it's not the kind of bar she'd normally go to on her own, but it felt like the right place to come tonight.

Owen watches as she tries to bring back the light tension from before she answered his question. "Ah, we have something in common." He offers with a smile, raising his glass to her. "To new jobs." He toasts, chest blooming with light when it earns him an actual smile. "You've got a good eye." He tells her when he's sipped his drink. "How did you know I'm a long way from home?" She actually laughs at him, a twinkling thing that dances around her before it fully reaches him, pulling him to lean towards her.

"It's just...really obvious." She smiles apologetically. "Sorry if you were trying to blend in. It's everything about you really." He just looks at her questioningly, before looking at himself, pressing her to elaborate. "Your clothes are too tight." She starts. "Not like...too tight, too tight, just like...not loose." Even in the low light she blushes, her eyes tracing his biceps. "The way you were sitting." He blushes at how tense he was when she appeared next to him. "You just look a little out of place, that's all." She brushes it off, as though she's worried she has offended him.

"I'm definitely out of place." He looks around at cowboy hats and flannel. He looks back at her. "It's not so bad now though." He quirks his eyebrows, and she shakes her head with a blush. "You though, you're right at home." He smiles at her. "Something tells me you're just the kind of friend a guy wants when he's new in town." It's forward, and he worries himself for a moment before she leans back on the counter, smiling.

"Ah, you want a tour guide." She muses. "Someone to show you around town." She clasps her hands in front of her, examining him, as though she's considering what he might actually mean.

So he clarifies. "I'm sure you know all the best places in town." He leans towards her, cocking his head to the door. And she understands, nodding.

She glances towards the door herself, before delaying. "You don't know me," she points out. She signals Chris for two more drinks. "And I don't know you." She says it with a smirk, leaning towards him now.

"What do you want to know?" He asks her, taking a swig of his fresh drink.

"Anything." She shrugs, finally settling on the stool next to her. He tells her about New York, skimming over the details of his life, and focusing instead on his places, his apartment, his street, his favourite cafes. He doesn't let her know him at all really, but he knows all she wants is to pretend she does.

She does the same. She tells him about Austin. Where she grew up, where she moved, where she drinks when she isn't here. He knows he doesn't know her, but he knows she doesn't want him to.

He doesn't ask her about her work, which she is obviously trying not to think about, and she doesn't ask him about his. Eventually, he tells her a joke and she leans forward as she laughs, steadying herself with a hand on his thigh. She doesn't move it.

So he tells her a story of his drunken 20s with her hand on his thigh, tingling as he desperately tries to focus on anything else. Preferably something that isn't her eyes. But they are difficult to ignore.

Which is how he catches the moment she decides to take his hand, lacing her fingers with his. She doesn't say anything as she picks up her bag, standing from her stool. He doesn't say anything while he follows her.

Neither of them say anything when they step outside, or while he turns her to face him, or before he takes her by the back of the neck, kissing her fiercely against the wall of the bar. He's been desperate to do it since she first started to speak, and his skin tingles when she responds to him, a slight whimper rising in her throat. "I've wanted to do that all night." He admits, breaking away from her. She nods, forehead resting on his.

"You want to start your tour of Austin?" She asks him with the tiniest of grins. He nods, releasing her to call a taxi, which she manages even with his arm sneaking around her waist.

They keep their hands, mostly, to themselves in the taxi. Her hand rests apparently innocently on his thigh, while his traces light circles on her shoulder and they try their best not to embarrass the poor driver.

Neither of them show any such restraint when they arrive on her porch and the taxi is gone, and she barely has the door unlocked before she's tugging him inside and slamming it shut behind them.

Later, she lies staring at the ceiling, brow furrowed. He can see the cogs turning in her head, and he starts to worry about everything he's done tonight. "Fuck." She whispers under her breath, the heel of her hand coming up to press on her forehead. "What the fuck did I just do?" She asks the air, and he pulls himself further away from her. She jolts and the movement, immediately reaching her hand out in apology. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that I just…" She sighs, sitting up, taking bedsheets with her in some imitation of modesty. "I don't do this. Ever. And I've been really… it doesn't matter. I'm sorry." She squeezes his bicep before pulling away from him, her hands dropping to twist together in her lap. "I keep doing stupid things." She tells them, squeezing her fingers together. "Carlos is gonna go crazy."

Carlos? Owen panics, if this woman has a partner this just went from amazing, to awkward, to horrible really fast. "He's had to arrest me fourteen times and now I've taken a total stranger into my house." She drops her head, bringing a hand up to catch it. "I'm supposed to be the smart one. What the hell is wrong with me?"

"You've been arrested fourteen times?" It mustn't be for anything serious, but he does wish he'd known this before she took him home. He assumes Carlos isn't a partner, but maybe a friend, or a relative. So he's left not with adultery, but run-of-the-mill bad decisions. So he tries to relieve the tension. "Not to pry, but how does that even happen?"

"A lot has happened." She offers, wiping at her eyes. "I'm so sorry Owen, I shouldn't have…" She's not really sure what she shouldn't have done. She probably shouldn't have taken him home, but that's not what she wanted to say. Shouldn't have reacted like this, probably. "You should go." That's not right. "I mean, you don't have to stay, and listen to me ruin the night."

"Nah." He smiles, settling back on the pillows. "I can't leave a woman's bed while she's upset, what kind of guy would that make me?" He grins at her, and she manages a weak chuckle. "Besides, I could probably help. I know a thing or two about regrets. I've been married twice." Regrets aplenty there. Especially the second time. He doesn't like to think about the second time. "This stuff that's happened? You can tell me about it if you want? No harm in telling a stranger."

She hesitates, as though she wants to take him up on his offer before she shakes her head. "Okay." He concedes. "Can I tell you my thing though? Cos I've got a thing, that I haven't told anybody about. And you seem nice." She flushes, she had certainly seemed nice half an hour ago, moaning beneath him. She pushes the thought away, and settles back next to him with a nod. "I've got cancer." She jolts beside him, concern radiating off her. "It's not serious, it should be totally fine." He waves her off. "But I haven't told my son yet." He has a son? She shifts again, now knowing too much about the man next to her. "Or my new boss. I took this new job down here because my son needed to get out of New York. And now I'm scared, because I brought him here with this secret, and now I don't know how to tell him." Even telling her, this total stranger, sends a rush of nerves through him, making his whole body tremble next to her, and she lays a soothing hand on his arm. She rubs her hand up and down his arm until he stops shaking.

Behind him, she watches the clock on the table flick over to midnight, and her chest tightens. "It's my sister's birthday." She chokes out, her eyes screwing shut to force back the tears threatening to break through them. "She's been missing." She explains, and it's his turn to be concerned, his hand reaching out to grasp hers. "For almost three years. Her boyfriend," she scoffs, her lips almost turning to a weak smile. "He has a restraining order against me. That's why I keep getting arrested." He nods understandingly, the tiniest hint of amusement pulling at his cheeks.

"I'm sorry." He offers weakly, unsure what else to say. His health seems so trivial, so easily fixed. Even withholding the truth from TK has such a simple solution. But Michelle? There's no easy way out for Michelle, if there is a way out at all.

"It's not your fault." She shrugs, biting her lip. "I'm sorry about you too." She offers, and it lingers in the air.

His chest tightens, something pulling at it, and he knows that he can't walk away from her now. A beautiful woman from a bar? Yes, he could move on from her, with a memory to smile about. But her? This woman, the first one to hear about its cancer. This woman who offers no advice, only comfort. Whose own troubles are so devastating behind her smile. This woman he couldn't walk away from. So he leans up to kiss her softly, and she stares at him dumbly when he pulls away.

"See?" He smiles at her, unable to contain the light fluttering in his chest. "The night isn't ruined." She smiles down at him, sighing before she lets herself lie down next to him. He takes her hand in his, squeezing lightly. "You doing anything for your sister's birthday?" He asks casually. As though she would be able to take the woman out for a drink.

"I don't know." She shrugs. "I'm working till late. Maybe I'll have a drink for her after, I don't know." It actually lightens her chest, the thought of celebrating for Iris. "Maybe I will." She stares at the ceiling with a tiny smile, her thumb stroking his hand. "You should tell your son." She turns to him. "You should tell him before something happens. You need someone to know."

He nods. "Thank you." He whispers, and she leans in to kiss him. It isn't the rushed, delirium from before. But she hooks a leg over him, moving to straddle his waist, and it is a slow desperation that he lets himself reciprocate.

It's early, but probably not early enough for Owen's son to not wonder where he spent the night. "I probably shouldn't have stayed till morning." He sighs, eyeing the dim sunrise. She hums from the bed, not opening her eyes. "TK will never let me live it down if he catches me sneaking in."

Her stomach rolls at the new information. It must be short for something, but even this half-identity presses her to ask more about him. "So, TK?" She starts, rolling to face him. "Tell me about him. How old is he?" She's imagining a young teen, too street-wise for his age, in need of some access to the countryside, while still having the familiarities of the city. So Owen's answer shocks her. "Twenty six? Twenty...so he's...an adult?"

"Well yeah." Owen chuckles. "Pretty sure twenty-six is an adult. But he makes me question that constantly." She doesn't dare ask how old he is, but she knows it must be considerably older than she first thought. She hopes to God that he was born when Owen was young, but either way he must be easily ten years older than she is.

"Kids always seem like kids." She laughs awkwardly. "No matter how old they get. Iris is ten years younger then I am." She laughs properly now. "She's always seemed like such a kid."

"Wow, some age gap." He tugs his shirt over his head.

"My parents were really young when they had me." She tells him, sitting up in her bed. She eyes him, his back turned to her. He drops his head back with a sigh.

"Oh, that's tough, I was twenty-two when we had TK." She lets out a tiny, relieved sigh. Not too huge an age gap, maybe Carlos won't absolutely kill her when he finds out about this. Because Carlos always finds out.

Owen drops onto the bed, shoes in hand. It occurs to her that it would be rude to make him walk himself out of her home in the early hours of the morning, so she slips out of bed, grabbing the robe hanging on the bathroom door. She doesn't settle back on the bed, but stands, leaning against the wardrobe, watching him put on his shoes.

Something in her stomach drops when she hears the taxi pull into the driveway. But she shakes it loose before he turns his head to smile at her. “I guess that’s my ride.” She nods silently, following him when he makes to leave her room.

He stops at her front door, and she waits behind him for him to turn around to her. She can’t help the smirk playing at her lips. He doesn’t want to leave yet. But he has to, so he turns back to her.

“Thank you.” He steps towards her. “For last night, for everything.�� His hand brushes at her arm lightly.

She grins, blushing. “Welcome to Texas, Owen.” She chuckles, leaning to kiss him softly before she leads him to the door.

#michelle x owen #owelle #michelle blake #Owen Strand #911 lonestar

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pls-let-me-out · 4 years ago

Text

Invisible String

Epilogue

12th of February

From Will to: the Royal Asshole

landed. where r u? i’m lost

From the Royal Asshole

At the entrance. Where else would I be?

From Will to: the Royal Asshole

where I landed so you could help me find the way out

tbh it’s like u don’t care that I get lost easily

From the Royal Asshole

Turn around, idiot.

Niccolò has grown even more beautiful during the time they’ve spent apart. Will’s breath is caught in his throat for a moment that feels like forever, and they just stand there, looking at one another, a secret challenge between them, to see who will break first and look away.

Niccolò is growing out his hair, which he told Will about, because he ‘wants to see how long they can get’. (“They are hair, doofus. They can reach your waist, if you let them. Honestly, are you just trying to piss me off?”)

The air is cold, and they both wear several layers of clothing. Niccolò is in New York for ‘very important business’, which means that Will has come all the way here from Austin to spend some time together. Seeing each other only on FaceTime is hard, but Will has to admit that it’s still good. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something.

Will doesn’t know whether he has moved or Niccolò has, but next thing he knows they are crowding each other’s space, and then hugging so hard it should hurt. The soul-mark on Will’s shoulder throbs, but not in pain. Niccolò still has a faint smell of pomegranate, and Will knows, as he takes a deep breath, that he’s going to deny doing so for the rest of his life.

They finally separate, and Nico takes both his and Will’s luggage. Niccolò is staying in some fancy hotel, while Will is going to be with his siblings, in his old room. When he told them he’d be visiting, Austin just sighed. ‘Where am I going to put my wardrobe? It’s literally all on your bed, Will.’ Will ignored him.

“How is everything going?” Niccolò asks, as they exit the airport, and cold air comes hard and unforgiving.

Will shivers. “It’s going, I guess. My grandma is happy to have me there with her for a bit, and I think we needed it.” He tucks his scarf over his nose, sniffling in the cold. A car stops in front of them, too fancy to not attract any attention.

Will gives Niccolò a side-glance. “How fancy, Your Highness.”

Niccolò blushes, but it might be the cold. “Fuck off, will you?”

Will bites back a grin. “Maybe I will. Maybe I Fitz-will.”

Niccolò shakes his head, but a fond and tender smile breaks out on his face, and they climb inside the car. Warm air is far more welcome than that outside. Niccolò rubs his hands together, with a little pout on his face that makes him look even more beautiful.

“How is your grandmother doing?” he asks.

He often does, he’s nice like that. He always sounds interested in Will’s life, even when Will himself realizes how boring it should be, to someone who lives between throne rooms and ancient gardens. Will tells him of his grandmother’s friend, Alice, but he doesn’t say that she’s trying to set him up with his daughter. People don’t recognize him as Prince Niccolò’s soulmate, and the people of his grandmother’s neighborhood know him as Naomi and Apollo’s son.

Will asks him how things are going in Elysium. Niccolò talks about his father, who stubbed his toe in a wall the other day, and has shouted so hard that the guards rang the bell, thinking they were under attack at three in the morning. As he tells the story, Niccolò leans forward to laugh, and hits his forehead against the driver’s seat.

It’s easy to forget the way they said goodbye the day after Christmas. They have been texting almost non-stop ever since, and sometimes they called each other, even if hanging up hurts.

“So, this event of yours,” Will says. He clears his throat. “What time does it end?”

“Late.” Niccolò huffs, crossing his arms on the chest. It seems like they’ll be going to be stuck in traffic for quite some time, but he’s looking out of the window as though he’ll never be here again. “I don’t even want to go there.”

“Prince business and all that,” Will encounters. “You don’t have much choice, do you?”

“Not really, no.” He clears his throat, and it’s terrible how awkward things get when they both remember he’s prince at the same time. “Unless I renounce the crown, I guess.”

Oh. Yes, that. Will snorts, amusement clear in his face as he flashes Niccolò another side-eyed glance. “As if.”

“Yah, I could live like one of you peasants,” Nico grumbles, sinking a bit in his seat.

Will snickers. “You peasants? Say that in Texas, and you’ll get shot.”

“I really hope that’s not a threat, principino,” Niccolò says, his voice low, little more than a whisper, as smooth as a caress.

Will blushes a deep red, ignoring the shiver that runs down his back, he looks out the window. Yeah, the view is very interesting. He tries to keep his eyes there for the rest of the ride, but he doesn’t have half the necessary strenght, not when Niccolò is sitting right next to him.

When he turns, Nico is already looking at him.

Kayla opens the door with a loud shriek, making Austin startle a bit. He pushes her aside, to step up and hug Will. He takes Will’s face in his hands, turning it left and right.

“What the hell? How do you have a tan?”

“I’ve been in Texas, you know, this past month or so,” Will says, words muffled by the way Austin is squishing his cheeks.

Austin hums. Kayla shrieks again, jumping back, and only then does Will realize that he hasn’t introduced Niccolò yet. He takes a step to the side, allowing everyone’s attention to shift.

“So, this is my–”

A dark aura falls upon the presents. A glittery, sparky Drew Tanaka steps in Will’s visual, wearing only a large flannel shirt he recognizes as his own, open to reveal a white, coffee stained t-shirt. Oh, yes, Kayla’s style has rubbed off on her.

“And who might that be?” She asks, managing to look intimidating. She throws her hair behind her shoulder, looking at Niccolò like he’s some kind of disease.

“As I was saying,” Will responds, grabbing Niccolò’s wrist to drag him forward, steadying him when he stumbles. “This is Niccolò, Prince of many things, and you might call him His Royal Highness on the days he’s particularly generous. On the other days, I suggest you don’t call him at all, because he can be a real bitch.”

Nico rolls his eyes, offering his siblings his hand. “Sorry about him, I’m sure you know better than me to never listen to him. It’s very nice to meet you, and just Nico is fine.”

“It’s nice to meet you too,” Kayla says, blushing to the tip of her ears as they shake hands.

“Well, are you going to offer us food or what?” Will says, interrupting Nico and Drew’s sudden staring contest. Their hands drop back to their hips. He drops his luggage in Niccolò’s hands. “Come, you can drop it by my bed.”

“I didn’t clean it!” Austin shouts after him. Will responds with a groan, louder when he realizes just how unclean Austin has left it.

“Who’s Drew to you?” Niccolò whispers when they are alone in the room.

Will blinks. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” Niccolò quickly retreats. “Was just wondering. So, is the saxophone Austin’s?”

Said saxophone is at the corner of the room, on a pile of books, shiny even if it has been used for many years. Will remembers Niccolò’s question a few moments later.

“Oh, yeah. It’s a gift from our father.” He grimaces. “I always thought I’d buy him another one when I became a doctor. I don’t like the thought of it being our father’s gift.”

“His birthday is on a week though, right?”

“Yeah. Next Wednesday, I’m going back to Texas on Thursday.”

“Oh, someone’s getting wasted then.”

Will throws him a sock, but Niccolò dodges it with a grin.

“I used to dodge bullets, you loser,” he says. “Before even having breakfast.”

Will narrows his eyes. That’s kind of a game of Nico’s, saying crazy shit about the army, and most of the time Will can’t guess whether he’s joking or serious. Even now. It sounds incredible, but he’s got that serious expression on his face.

“That’s true,” Will says.

Niccolò laughs, a sound Will misses even before it’s over. “Yeah, every day they woke up the Prince of their nation at dawn, so that they could shoot him.”

Will bites his tongue. “I knew that wasn’t true.”

“You still got it wrong. How much are we at? Fifteen for you, seventy-three for me?”

Will pulls him down on his bed, falling on Austin’s papers and schoolbooks. He hopes they aren’t too important.

“Get the stick out of your ass,” Will says, whacking him with the first textbook he finds. Niccolò has the audacity of laughing.

Someone clears their throat, and Will turns, only realizing he’s straddling Niccolò’s lap when he notices how red Kayla’s cheeks are.

“We have some coffee.” She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, looking everywhere but at Will. “I also took out the good cookies.”

“Oh, dear, this is a great occasion then,” Will says, getting off Niccolò. He stumbles, but doesn’t fall. “By the way, do we still have that stain of mold under the window?”

Kayla nods. “It actually has a child now.”

Will pouts. “It’s a manifestation. It’s because it missed me.”

“Are you comparing yourself to a stain of mold?” Niccolò asks, elongating his step to avoid a shoe abandoned in the middle of the floor. “That’s very unflattering but also very realistic of you.”

Kayla bursts out laughing, as Will grabs another pillows from the sofa and keeps on hitting Niccolò. Once again, he only laughs harder, and soon enough Will is, too.

“How’s being a prince like?” Drew asks Nico, as soon as they sit on the sofa.

“I thought you’d know with the way you put yourself on a throne,” Austin responds. She sends him a saccharine smile.

From what Will’s heard, she and Kayla haven’t changed all that much since they’ve gotten together. They just look at each other like the other has hung up the moon in the sky herself, and sometimes they hold hands.

“It’s not very exciting,” Niccolò says with a shrug. “I guess it’s like being famous, I just wear a crown sometimes.”

“And the cool, black military dress,” Will adds. He doesn’t add that Niccolò is extremely hot in that, and the thought alone makes him blush.

“It’s called a uniform, Fitzwilliam,” Niccolò says, tilting his head to the side. “You ever heard the word?”

Will blows him a kiss. Niccolò diverts his eyes, and Will counts it as a win.

“I guess you have lots of beautiful women around,” Drew adds, bringing the cup to her mouth. She grimaces at the taste. “Who wouldn’t want to be with a prince, after all?”

“Are you trying to seduce him?” Austin blurts out with a frown.

Drew pinches him in the leg, hard. “I’m making conversation, dear.”

“Don’t make conversation about his bedroom’s activity,” Austin hisses.

“Don’t be so fucking rude,” she responds.

“Alright!” Kayla exclaims, a blush deep on her cheeks, her grip on the cup a little desperate. “Why don’t you tell us more about your interests? Your hobbies?”

“By the way, talking about interests,” Drew jumps in again, this time looking at Will like a predator seeing its prey. “Remember Sherman?”

“No!” He exclaims. “Sherman who? Sherman… I don’t know any Sherman. Mh, no. You got the wrong Will, sweetheart.” He takes a long sip of coffee, only to sputter half of it back in the cup. “Who the hell didn’t put sugar in my coffee?”

“Me, because I’m not your fucking barista, you fucking rude animal,” Drew responds.

Austin sighs, leaning back in the armchair. He rubs his temples. “What even is this conversation.”

“I wouldn’t have given your number to Sherman if I’d known you’d be so rude about everything,” Drew continues, holding the cup as if it were a glass of wine.

Will spits his sip of coffee right on the table. He coughs, and Austin hits his back. Niccolò sends him a confused glance, but the rest of his face is completely blank. Will is pretty used by now to picking up his moods, by the sound of his voice and the crease of his brow. Niccolò still hides pretty much most of his emotions, but there’s an instant when he can’t, and the crease of his eyebrows betrays him. Now he’s skipped it, somehow. A pang of pain shoots through Will’s heart.

She turns to Niccolò. “He’s a friend of Will’s family’s son. Didn’t your grandma really like him, Will?”

“She didn’t,” Austin answers for him.

“Oh, I think you’re wrong,” Drew says, waving her hand in dismissal.

Kayla puts her hand on Drew’s on the cup holder. “Let’s have a word alone, mh?”

When they return from Kayla’s bedroom, Drew doesn’t add a thing about Sherman. She and Niccolò politely ignore each other, until he has to leave for the gala, or whatever he is attending.

Niccolò leaves around seven pm. Will hugs him on the doorstep, and if his breath hitches a little, no one has the heart to point it out. Afterwards, Will stays on the cramped sofa with his siblings and Drew, somehow everyone is on someone else’s lap. They watch Golden Girls, and Drew makes an Instagram Story. She’s careful not to take Will’s face in, he’s been trying not to appear too much on her social media. When he does, people remember that he’s Prince Niccolò’s soulmate, and somehow it ends up on gossip sites. He isn’t ready to be under the spotlights again.

Eventually, Austin and Kayla drift off to sleep, and Drew speaks softly to him.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have butted in.”

“No, you shouldn’t have.” He plays with Austin’s hair as he talks, avoiding Drew’s eyes, and everything he might see in them. “I never really told you what happened on our last day together, did I?”

“You haven’t told anyone, no.”

Will finally looks up, and Drew is already looking at him. “I don’t even know how to say it. We talked about… well, everything. He told me he couldn’t be with me, it wouldn’t be fair to either of us, we’d have to sneak around, hiding behind everyone’s back. He’d have to get married to a nice girl someday, anyway.”

“But he loved you.”

Tears burn in the back of Will’s eyes. “He said he knew he was already falling for me.”

“God. That’s awful.”

“Yeah.” He takes a deep breath, deep enough for his lungs to hurt. “We spent the night together.”

“You… like, sexually?”

He doesn’t respond. “And it was nice, the next day. Before we left the house. I thought that if I knew what it would be like to be with him, then eventually I’d be fine. I’d be satisfied with the night and half-day we’d had together.”

“But you aren’t.”

“I just want to go back there, to that day. Like, I wake up in the morning and I want to see him, what he’d be like with my grandma, if he’d be nice with her friends when they come over. You know the neighbor’s daughter? She has a son, now. He’s, like, four. He was learning to use his bike, and he fell, and then I saw his father going there, picking him up and everything. And I realized that I only once saw Niccolò with a kid, and it was in the middle of a packed road, but he was so nice with her, I mean he was talking in Italian, but she kept on giggling and everything.”

“You want kids with him?”

“I just realized that it has never been a possibility for us, and it hurt so fucking much I couldn’t breathe. I just–it’s so unfair. I wish he weren’t a prince and so famous, but then I realize that he is, and that’ a part of him.”

Drew looks down at her lap, playing with the hem of her shirt. “You always despised the thought of soulmates.”

“I know.”

“I was just saying. I was, I mean. I didn’t think you’d ever change your mind.”

“It was before getting to know him. He makes me all–he makes me feel like the world isn’t such a shitty place. And it shouldn’t even be possible, because he’s pessimistic and he pretty much says the world sucks. But he also wants to make it a better place.”

“Now I feel awful for how I treated him.”

Will laughs. “Yeah, the Sherman-thing was pretty shitty. By the way, I really don’t want his number.”

“I guessed.” She grimaces. “I haven’t actually given him yours.”

Will chuckles again.

15th of July

Will rubs his eyes tiredly, still in his pajama, and almost jumps out of his skin when something attacks him.

“Happy birthday, Willie!” Jonathan screams.

Will smiles, taking Jonathan off the ground and throwing him in the air. A smile blooms on his face, so strong he almost forgets the pain in the back of his heart. Kayla, Austin, Valentina and Grace are standing next to his grandmother, with matching smiles on their faces. Will opens his arms, adjusting Jonathan on his hip, and they all come crushing against him.

“Drew, Mitchell and Piper are coming in the afternoon,” Valentina says. She’s fifteen, and she’s actually thinking of becoming a pediatrician. She lives in San Francisco with her mother, and spends a couple of weeks each summer with their family in Argentina. “Lacy couldn’t make it.”

“Thanks for being here,” Will says. “Y’all are looking good.”

Kayla giggles. “I almost forgot how Texan you get when you’re here.”

Will groans. “Gimme a break.”

Jonathan laughs, throwing his fists in the air. “Gimme!”

Will kisses the top of his head. He hears a shutter going off, and when he glances up he sees his grandmother with a camera in his hands. She has a huge grin on her face, and the flowery dress she wears only on special occasions.

“We’re opening the gifts when everyone comes here!” She says. “And now y’all go off to prepare the table, Willie and I got a talk to get through.”

Austin groans, which earns him a smack on the head by grandmother. She puts her hands on her hips, until only she and Will remain in the room. She stands on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, and hooks her arm in his.

“Come see the geese. They’ve returned in the pool this morning,” she says.

Will grimaces. “Disgusting.”

“Shut up, boy.”

Outside the temperature is far too hot, the sun shines far too bright, but they walk to the garden in the back. There are no geese in the pool. Will turns to his grandmother, but she shushes him, and sits on the wooden bench, under the shadow of the apple tree. He sits beside her.

“Has something happened?” he asks.

His grandmother eyes the too long curls on his forehead. Will can feel them sticking to his damp skin. He brushes them away, but a second later they fall back.

“Your father sent you a gift,” she says. She takes a letter from her pocket, and passes it to him. “Do you want to read it alone?”

“Later. I’ll read it later.”

“Alright.”

Every year Will’s family flies to Austin for his birthday, and they stay at his grandmother’s house for the summer. They spend the morning together, then in the afternoon Drew’s family reaches them. It’s the first year since his brothers’ death that Piper comes.

Will is in the pool with her when he feels it, a tugging from his shoulder, his soul mark pulsing. He lets his empty glass fall from his grip, his fingers going limp.

Niccolò is standing next to his grandmother, shaking Jonathan’s hand with a shy smile as Valentina watches the scene unfold with her jaw gone slack.

“Fancy seeing you here, you gremlin!” Piper exclaims, shaking Will from his trance.

His grandmother has a hand on Niccolò’s shoulder, and he’s still holding Jonathan’s, but Will can see the way he turns softer around every edge when his eyes meet Will’s, comfort falling onto him.

Will doesn’t even realize he’s climbed out of the pool, until he is in Niccolò’s arms, and his clothes are getting wet.

“Ooops,” Will says when they let go, and Niccolò’s clothes stick to his body.

“Go, Will!” Drew shouts from where she’s sunbathing in the sun. “You still got your sneaky techniques to get the boys naked!”

Niccolò blushes a deep red, but Will just flips Drew off. His grandmother smacks him on the head, but it’s worth it.

“Is this how we welcome guests, children?” she asks.

Jonathan, the traitor, shakes his head, tugging her dress. “I shook his hand! You saw?”

Grandmother pats him on the head, a smile stretches on her wrinkled face. “Finally someone educated in this household.” She turns back to Niccolò. “Take everything you need. If you can’t find something, just ask Will. He’s missed you, you know?” She caresses Niccolò’s cheek, which has him blushing a deep shade of red, and leaves to go back inside.

“I really did miss you,” Will whispers softly. He intertwines his fingers to Niccolò’s, and tugs him towards the others. “You ever met Piper’s siblings?”

Niccolò shakes his head, but Will is blinded by the light in his eyes, and almost misses it.

They spend the night together, but this time they only stargaze, laying on the old deckchairs near the pool. Niccolò teaches him about constellations, and Will has lived in LA, his best friend is Drew, so he already knows. He doesn’t say, and just listens. If the smile on Niccolò’s face is anything to go by, he already knows.

19th of August

Nico spends the weekend in Livigno with Hazel. Every corner of the house is Will, and his smile, and his laughs.

“Do you miss him?” She asks, as they watch the TV in the living room.

Nico doesn’t find it in himself to answer. He looks back down, at the speech he is holding in three days in front of an audience filled with important people he doesn’t even know the names of. Taylor Swift’s Christmas Tree Farm blasts from TV, and Hazel along under her breath. Nico should have built a blanket fort with Will.

23rd of September

In New York, Will tells Nico that he wants to teach in kindergarten, and every time he talks about it his eyes shine, in a way they never did when he talked about medicine.

They sit on a bench in New York, and Nico asks Will a question he’s had on the tip of his tongue for some months now.

“Will you get your mark covered up?”

Will blinks, as though the question is a sudden thunder, and maybe it is. Nico continues eating his hotdog. It’s too spicy for him, his tongue burns, and so do his eyes. His heart is thundering in his chest, and he isn’t sure why. (That’s a lie. He knows.)

“I never thought about it. Not since I’ve known you.”

Nico’s shoulders relax. He sends Will a side smile, but there’s still a lump in his throat.

6th of November

Nico talks to his therapist. She asks him how he feels about Will, why they haven’t been talking much lately. It’s easy to trust her with the truth after all these years. When he was younger, he’s learnt that telling her half-assed truths doesn’t help him. He doesn’t go every single week to her studio anymore, but sometimes he needs help processing how he feels.

“Guilty,” he says, after thinking about it for a while. “He’s stuck with me, and he hasn’t done anything to deserve it. He deserves a soulmate that can be with him.”

His therapist, Juniper, tilts her head to the side. “If you had the possibility, would you like to be with him romantically?”

She’s one of the first people he’s told about his sexuality. Actually, she had been with him for quite some time when Cupid ‘exposed’ him for the first time. It was a moment of deep bonding for them, she told him it explained many things about his behavior. It also sucked and gave him trauma on too many levels to count, but Nico is trying to see the positive side.

“I don’t have the possibility. Day-dreaming about it won’t help me.” Nico’s tone is cold, far too cold in the regards of such a question. Heat comes to his cheeks. He scratches his neck, even that feels warm. “Sorry, I–I think I would like it.”

“Maybe it would help you feel less guilty if you talked about it with him. I shouldn’t say my personal opinion, but he sounds like a very sweet guy. Someone you can have a real dialogue with.”

9th of November

Will crushes Niccolò in a hug as soon as he sees him. Then, before he can reciprocate, he throws him back and flicks him on the forehead.

“Is this the way to behave?” He turns on his heels, hands on his hips, and walks right back in the apartment. He talks again only after the door is shut behind Niccolò. “You fucking ghosted me!” He sits on the sofa, it creaks dangerously, but it holds on. “You can just tell me when I’m too much, or, I don’t know, if I…when I annoy you.”

Niccolò’s hand is on Will’s shoulder, and then he’s the one being crushed in a hug. He holds onto Niccolò’s shirt, inhaling his perfume. He ignores the tears in his eyes. Will finds himself caged on the couch by Niccolò’s knees on either side of him. Eventually, they find themselves with their foreheads against one another’s. They haven’t been so close since Christmas.

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep on doing this,” Niccolò says, his words daggers in Will’s heart.

“I know. I know, it hurts me too.” Will sniffled. Niccolò’s hair are dark and soft, and he presses a kiss on his head. Niccolò is tall, but now he feels so small in his arms. “It hurt more when I didn’t have you anymore.”

“I know. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

23rd of December

The door opens, and Will is there, in the middle of his grandmother’s house, with his siblings scattered around him. Lidia, Will’s grandmother, hugs Nico, thanking him for coming, and saying words he can’t pay attention to, because his gaze is on Will, who’s looking back at him, and his heart skips a million beats.

Nico has brought Jason, Leo and Piper with him. Drew is already here, with Kayla’s head on her lap, and Jonathan talking her ear off about the gift he’s asked. Jason deposits their gifts under the tree (Nico has asked Austin what to bring to each of them, he didn’t want to be unprepared).

24th of December

Will finds Niccolò in the garden. The moon has been high in the sky for the past few hours, but the air is still warm. Will sits with him in the grass, linking their fingers.

“Can you believe it’s already a year?”

Niccolò smiles. “Next year we could fly to Livigno, if you wanted to. Bring everyone there. Do your siblings have passports?”

A smile grows on Will’s face, and he doesn’t even try to stop it. “Would you really do that?”

“If they are okay with having me for Christmas again.” He clears his throat, as he always does before starting a rant coming from his self-deprecation. “I’d leave you the house if you wanted to, without me. It’s not a problem, of course, we could–”

Will puts a hand on his mouth, stopping him. “But next year you should bring Hazel, too.”

Nico takes the hand off, holding on to his wrist even afterwards, although he’s also trying to maintain a frown on his face. “Would you like that?”

“We’ve been calling each other since Halloween.”

“Halloween?”

“Yeah. We saw each other, she was in New York with Annabeth and the others.” Will shakes Niccolò’s fingers off his wrist, to intertwine their fingers. “Didn’t she tell you?”

“Yeah, yeah, she did.” There’s a deep blush on Niccolò’s face, and he shouldn’t like it so much. “You also sent me a selfie with her.”

“She gets along a lot with Austin. A bit less with Drew, for some reason.”

“Some reason?”

Will lets his head fall on Niccolò’s shoulder, something he wouldn’t do normally, but it’s almost Christmas. He can have this on Christmas. “Drew can be a bit hard around the edges. As sharp as her eyeliner.”

“She hates me. Hated, whatever. Now she just looks at me strangely. Suspiciously.”

“We used to date. For a couple of years, but then–it was back when we lived in LA with my parents, we were neighbors. I really did think we’d last forever.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. After my brothers died, I moved here with my grandparents. I was shitty to Drew, I dealt really badly with grief. I talked with my parents only once since. You can ask me how my brothers died, if you want to.”

Niccolò hesitates, just a second, then his hand squeezes Will’s, and he talks. “How did they die?”

“Overdose, the both of them. Lee first. He was at a party with my father, but dad left him alone, and he overdid it. Michael a couple of months later. He and Lee were really close, and he–he did die of overdose, but he did it on purpose.”

“And your mom?”

“I’m her only child. We just don’t have a relationship. I don’t even hate her. I don’t know her enough for that.”

Will tries to smile. Nico wraps his arms around him, and Will hides his head in the crook of his neck.

27th of June

They talk over the phone every day, and Will calls Nico every night before going to sleep.

“I miss you,” Will says, and his voice is husky, a bit raspy, but his tone is soft.

I miss you, too. These days, I miss you so much I forget I do, and think the longing in my chest has always been there. “I know. Drew told me you’ve been turning that friend of yours down.”

Nico can imagine the frown on Will’s face. “Drew should mind her own business.”

“Why do you turn him down?”

“I’m not interested in him.”

Hearing these words shouldn’t make Nico so happy. They’re trying to move on, the both of them. If Nico doesn’t, nothing changes. He will still marry some girl, maybe be friends with her, have a child together, and die as king. If Will doesn’t, he will be lonely for the rest of his life.

“It might help, though. I–I assume the reason you’re turning him down. Don’t wait for me, Will.”

Will sniffles, and Nico closes his eyes. He closes them so hard his head starts hurting. He almost doesn’t breathe, so Will can’t hear how broken it is. He is.

“You shouldn’t be stuck with me,” Nico says. His words are spoken quietly, so much it’s a wonder how Will hears him. “I’m sorry.”

Will’s sniffles become louder. “I’m not stuck with you. How can you say that, when you make me feel free?”

Nico shuts his eyes tighter. He opens them again. There’s a photo of him with Bianca on the wall in front of them, one of the few he keeps around. He and Bianca are sitting at their table in their house in Venice, with pencils scattered around, as they draw with passion. Nico can’t remember what he was drawing, in the photo he is covering his paper with his whole body, as he leans forward to watch Bianca’s drawing.

29th of June

Niccolò is at the front door of Will’s apartment.

“I wanted to check in on you,” is all he offers as an explanation.

17th of December

“Oh, we broke up,” is all Will offers as an explanation, when he and his family land in Milan, a car waiting for them to bring them to Livigno, and his boyfriend of a couple of months isn’t with them.

Niccolò nods with a tight smile, but worry is clear in his eyes. Does he feel like Will is some kind of burden? Is that what it is about? Will turns away, taking his grandmother’s luggage.

Reyna and Hazel are waiting for them at the house. Will has never met Reyna before, she has never been able to come with Niccolò when he visits. She warms up to him quicker than he thought she would, saying Niccolò has talked plenty about him, and it makes Will’s heart flutter in a way it shouldn’t. His soul-mark pulses every second they are in the same room, yet not touching or at least close. Will uses it as an excuse to hang off of Niccolò’s arm for the rest of the night.

“And there, Lidia,” Niccolò says as he and Will show him the house. “Is where Will punched my cousin Percy in the face, thinking he was a burglar.”

Will blushes. His grandmother’s laugh echoes through the house, and Niccolò looks smug and proud. For a moment or two, Will can’t breathe. He belongs here, and Niccolò belongs with him, too. His eyes sting, and he looks away.

30th of June

Will visits Nico in Rome, in Italy. They travel by bike, and they are on a bridge over the Tevere, whose name Will can’t pronounce, but it’s close to San Pietro. It’s filled with people, and Will is looking at a little girl braiding her friend’s hair, one has red hair, the other is a brunette. When he looks forward again, Nico is some meters away, with the sun kissing his face so well, and his hair getting longer, almost enough to be kept in a ponytail. He smiles, and laughs at something a man says in Italian. He laughs, and over every other noise, it reaches Will.

He curses loudly, falling to the ground, but falling even harder for Niccolò, and now he knows.

He’s in love. Also, he has scraped his knees and a strange bruise with the shape of an almond appears on his cheek the next day.

He’s in love, and he’s been for a very long time, maybe even years.

25th of December

“I keep thinking of our first Christmas together,” Niccolò says.

Hazel’s laugh reaches them from the living room. They are even more this year. Hazel, Reyna, Frank, Piper and her siblings, Jason, Leo, Percy and his family, Annabeth and Will’s family. Earlier, they even had a video-call with Apollo. He’s trying. They’re all trying.

Will still hasn’t decided what to reply, when Niccolò shakes his head and takes a step back.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he says. “I can’t stand it.”

Will’s eyes widen. His hands shake, the glass of water he had been filling falls in the sink, cracking. The house is filled with loud people, there are a million other sounds, but it’s as loud as a bomb in the kitchen. “What–what do you mean?”

He heard his father saying that to his mother, a long time ago, and the next day he moved out. They separated, asked for the divorce, and now they don’t talk anymore. Will can’t let that happen. He can’t.

He surges forward, and kisses Niccolò square on the mouth. They haven’t done anything like that in a very long time, since that first Christmas together three years ago, when they were barely more than children. Even now, they aren’t all that grown.

Nico relaxes against him. He kisses back. Through the years, Will has always thought that yes, maybe Nico could be interested in him that way, but that they would never be able to do something like this again. That if Will kissed him, Nico would tell him they couldn’t, and step back.

Nico doesn’t step back. They have to break apart somehow, sometime later, but they don’t look away. Nico’s eyes are so, so dark. Will is so, so in love.

“That I can’t do anymore,” he says. His voice is warm, all kinds of soft, and he leaves a trail of pecks on Will’s cheeks, probably one for every freckle. “This I want to do forever.”

27th of December

It’s all over the news when Nico travels back with Will to America. It’s all over the news, that he’s decided to step away from the crown, and Hazel is now Crown Princess. They have talked about it, and it was her who convinced Nico that she was okay with it, it was something she wanted to do. She also said that she noticed Nico wasn’t happy, hadn’t been for a long time, and that his eyes always wondered to faraway places, even when they were together.

“If being with him makes you happy, and being here and having the crown on your head doesn’t, then I want you to do it.”

During the flight, Nico’s hand stays on Will’s, his thumb stroking with such tender movements over Will’s knuckles, it hurts a bit. They go back to Will’s apartment. Nico is going to look for one of his own, not too far, even though he still has his grandfather’s money if not the Crown’s, so he could buy a whole condo in Manhattan. He wants to be close to Will, close enough to never have to miss him again.

When they are in their pajamas, Austin and Kayla in their rooms, Nico presses a kiss to Will’s forehead, their sides flush together, their feet on the coffee table. There’s a show on the TV, and Nico should thank the director. If not for the plot, since he hasn’t followed it half-enough to know what it talks about, for the way the lights from the TV kisses Will’s face.

“I missed you, too,” Nico says softly. “All those years. I never said it, but I did, too.”

Will lets his head fall on Nico’s shoulder, and takes Nico’s hand to hold it on his lap. He looks up at Nico, through a thick layer of eyelashes, and he smiles. A little smile, because it may take a while for them to be completely okay, but they have all the time in the world now.

“I know,” is all he says.

#solangelo #solangelo fic #solangelo au #soulmates au #nico di angelo #will solace #pls forgive me for the angst #though we have a happy ending #so it's all good

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jerkbitchidjitassbutt · 5 years ago

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What If I Told You (9)

Characters: Jensen x Reader; Jared Padalecki; SPN Cast members at times.

Summary: You and Jensen have been the closest of friends for years after meeting on the set of SPN, but what will happen when you and Jensen have a kissing scene?

Warnings: Cursing; divorce; break up; angst-ish at times, but mostly fluff. For this chapter: Canon divergence from the show, spn-related sadness.

I consider this an AU, as Jensen is divorced from an unnamed ex in this fic. This is completely a work of fiction, and I wouldn’t want his reality to be any different, this is purely for entertainment.

A/n: Just a tiny bit more until the big one. Flashbacks are in italics.

The darkened wood of the porch swing rasped slightly as you swung back and forth, but the only sound that rung in your ears was your own heartbeat. Jensen’s eyes glazed as they stared into yours, the words he’d just spoken hanging heavily in the air.

“I was begging myself not to leave you.”

He gave you a small smile, as if to say a million words with a single action that was only meant for you.

Leaning slightly into his side, the scent of his aftershave filling your senses, you reassured him, “Don’t worry, Jay. I promise, I’m not going anywhere.” You whispered.

His dimples appeared as he gave a genuine, gorgeous smile. “You know…” he began, gazing at the jade lawn and blossoming blooms of the small garden, “this is a pretty nice place.”

Taking in the scenery, you agreed. The home itself was picturesque. “Yeah. Something I’d like to have one day.”

Jensen gripped your hand tightly before Clint whistled for you gently, hoping to usher you into the waiting SUV to take you back to set. Jensen, Jared, and Misha had one more scene to film on location at the ‘borrowed’ house with the red front door and another down the road, but it was already nearing four o’clock in the afternoon and you were due back at the studio for make-up and wardrobe removal.

The two of you stood from the swing on the front porch and, to your surprise, Jensen walked you down the steps and sidewalk to your bodyguard’s vehicle.

Jensen quickly stepped in front of you to grip the handle, opening the back door and gesturing for you to slide in.

“Ever the gentleman.” You giggled, feeling a rush to your cheeks.

“Well, you know me… gotta keep it interesting.” He smirked.

You halted before stepping in through the open door and turned to face him. Jensen had caged you within the frame of the door and his body, resting his hands both on the door and the cool metal of the car’s frame, blocking you from the remainder of those on set. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust those he worked with, but he was a man that enjoyed his privacy, especially with those he was closest to.

You felt suddenly small in the confines of the space and under the watchful gaze of Jensen. He was the person you felt most comfortable around and knew you to the depths of your secrets, yet in this moment you felt as though all new ones were coming to the surface. You wrung your hands into knots behind your back as you swayed onto the balls of your feet, anxiously posing, “So, I guess I’ll see you at Rob’s thing tonight?”

“Yeah. Yeah—I’ll be there. I want to say ‘screw it’ and run off with you now and, uh… have that talk, but you know how it is. I’ve got to get back in there.” He said, seemingly nervous as well, but also collected and steady.

“No, yeah… I get that. No worries.” You sputtered, casting your eyes to your shoes for no reason at all, other than to avoid his.

“Hey.” He said, releasing the hand that was holding the door to tuck it beneath your chin, he index finger and thumb planting themselves to turn your face to him. “It’ll happen sweetheart. I promise. I’m anxious too, don't worry.”

You smiled in his embrace. He had an unexplainable gift of knowing precisely what you needed to hear. It was almost as if you were consistently thinking that you were going to wake up and it would all have been a dream; the kiss, the message, the emotions he had expressed, but he was doing everything to ensure you knew it wasn't.

“Okay. Promise?” you said with a smirk, extending your pinky finger.

He eyed your outstretched hand with a grin, releasing your chin to lock his smallest finger with yours. As he enclosed it around his own, he tugged it gently towards him, pulling you closer to lay a gentle, quick peck of a kiss to your lips that left a tingle in its wake. “Promise.”

He retreated to the sidewalk as you hopped onto the leather seat of Clint’s car and shut the door for you, waving as the car sped off down the street.

You cast your eyes out of the darkened glass of the window, eyeing the man who had shaken you to your core who was still standing on the gray sidewalk. He seemed even more beautiful in the late afternoon light that shown behind him, blooming in iridescence and arcs of color.

Secretly, Jensen was as nervous and apprehensive as you were, but he couldn’t deny any longer that this was what he wanted and now—now he was sure you felt the same. All of the trepidation from days past was slowly dwindling to new nerves; now he just wanted to make everything perfect. If he was honest with himself, this was no longer a question of whether, it was a question of how.

.....

Yesterday

“Hey man, glad you made it.” Jared said, not standing from his seat on his couch when Jensen let himself in through the front door of his apartment. Gen and the kids were with family in Austin in their new home, so Jared was by himself for the majority of this season.

“Yeah, thanks for the call.” Jensen said sarcastically.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I… interrupt something?” he enunciated.

“No.” Jensen replied immediately and a little too quickly. “No. Well—maybe? I don't know.”

That was enough to make Jared quickly stand. His long limbs carried him to where Jensen was pacing, fists shoved tightly into his leather jacket when his friend reached him. “Tell me what happened.”

“Well.” He began, “We kissed.”

“Yeah, and?” Jared probed.

Jensen looked at his friend with a slightly stunned expression, “I… I don't know, man. I don't think I’ve ever had a kiss like that. It was just supposed to be rehearsal kiss, but I couldn’t stop myself.”

Jared hid the smirk that was sneaking below the surface, an unmistakable glint in his friend’s eye—it wasn’t just a kiss. There was more to be told. “Okay, what else happened?”

Jensen paused, his eyes widening with realization as he replayed the rehearsed scene in his mind, “I said her name.” he all but sighed.

“Huh?” Jared asked, confused.

“In the scene… I said Y/n instead of Y/c/n… when I said, ‘I love you’. It was part of the script and I—I messed up. I let it slip.”

Jared could sense the battle raging in his friend’s mind, so he pushed further, “Okay, so what is it?”

Jensen raised a brow, curious as to where his friend’s mind was leading, “What do you mean?”

Using his height to boost himself, Jared perched against his kitchen counter, his long legs and torso making it easy to prop his hips against the marble and gestured towards his friend, “What’s holding you back? What’s making it so hard for you to admit that it wasn’t a slip up at all, but that you actually do feel that way for her? You said it was about your friendship—that you didn’t want to ruin it, but could it be something deeper than that? I get it if you’re scared, man. You don’t want to get hurt again or put yourself out there if it’s not given back. But answer me this… Was there anything behind that kiss that makes you question it? In that moment, did you even question if she felt it too?”

Jensen let himself relive the feeling of holding you in his arms, the softness of your skin underneath his fingertips, and the fire that erupted in his chest the minute his lips touched yours.

Jared’s lip curled at the edges as he watched Jensen’s expression shift from shock and confusion to realization as he asked, “Do you really think she—”

“Yeah.” Jared interrupted, clasping his friend on the shoulder. “Yeah, I think she does. Now, the only question is: are you going to let your fear of ruining your ‘friendship’ ruin any chance with her, or are you gonna go for it? Because, if you want my advice—which you always do…” he said, giving a slight, boastful bow, “I think you should go for it. No more games, no more ‘what-ifs’… nothing. Just take the dive.”

Jensen felt his chest tighten with excitement at the thought. Giving his friend a nod and a smile, he left with a resolve and a dinner appointment with the executives of the studio fast approaching, one which he could only hope would pass quickly.

After reaching your voicemail later that night, he only contemplated stopping by your place about five hundred times before returning to his own apartment, sauntering in through the hallway littered with photos. He wasn’t always a nostalgic or ‘feely’ guy, but when it came to his friends and family, he liked to have a reminder of who was behind him through it all. He passed photos of his parents and siblings, of childhood friends who stood the test of time into adulthood, and of Jared and Misha.

Jensen took pause in front of one taken about a year ago, of the two of you on set in Impala. You were nestled under the crook of his arm, tucked into his side and holding him around his waist, but your face was beautifully lit up with laughter. Your eyes were closed, and a brilliant smile made your cheeks a rosy tint. He had just told you what was probably the lamest joke in history, but it tickled you to well into tears after the photo was snapped.

Trust. Laughter. Safety. Excitement. Love. Everything he’d ever want in a relationship—and it was right in front of him.

He couldn’t wait anymore, he had to jump in.

.....

Jared bounded down the front steps in his Sam Winchester attire and clapped Jensen on the shoulder, “Hey man. You gonna take my advice?”

A grin fell upon his lips as your car slipped from view, “Yeah… Yeah, I am.”

A/n 2: I received an anon ask when I was looking for fic ideas(see below) for a Jensen x actress!reader fic a while ago, but recently got hit with a spark of inspiration. This is based off of the song “What if I Said” by Anita Cochran and Steve Wariner and will be a short mini-series. Also there is a wife mentioned in some parts, but I purposefully left this person nameless as to not insinuate anything for Jensen’s real life.

Anonymous said: Hi! Just saw your post about looking for fic ideas. I’ve had this idea that I really like where reader is an actor on Supernatural and is friends with Jensen. They have a scene where they have to kiss or even just have to be right up in each other’s space and it makes them realize they like each other. It’s probably a common thing to write about, but I thought I’d ask anyway. Thanks!

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naturaldisasterfanfiction · 4 years ago

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30. Part 3

Smiling at Robyn talking to Royalty like that, she has given the boost she needed but I really want to knock those little niggas out that has been disrespecting my daughter, like who the fuck does that shit. I am going to need Royalty to start kicking some ass too “can I ask Rihanna?” my daughter is totally harassing Robyn now “sure, I am going to give your dad his phone now though, I am here” taking my phone from Robyn “can I ask Rihanna, dad I can’t see her face” rolling my eyes, turning my phone “I am listening” she doesn’t want to know me now “can I see my sister?” I find it rather funny that she has asked Robyn and not me, she knows the boss “erm, yes ok. You can see her but no screenshots baby. I am not being overly crazy, but I just think nobody deserves to see her apart from loved ones” Robyn said yes, I guess I can lower the phone so she can see her “hi Fenty, she is sleeping. Awww I like her, look at the pretty dress too. Awww” Royalty sounds so happy “she is so cute!” I chuckled hearing her excitement about seeing Fenty, that is so sweet “you seen her now” moving the phone away and looking down at Royalty “she is so pretty dad, like a princess. I can’t wait to hug her” smiling at Royalty “cool, so shall we open the gifts. You happy now, let’s forget what happened ok? Just lets’ be happy and do this, like we were supposed to do” Royalty nodded her head and grabbed the phone “I am running downstairs, wait” clearing my throat looking over at Robyn “thank you” I said to her, she didn’t have to do that for me, she could have easily told me no, she just goes above and beyond for me and I love that about her “don’t be, I love you. I want you to also be happy, I can feel you are sad” I smiled lightly, of course I am going to be. How can I just forget my mother, or just shrug off what is happening with my family.

Royalty’ house is like a zoo, she loves animals so that is what I always buy her “open this one” Royalty’ older sister is there “it’s so big!” smiling at my daughter opening the main one, this is the one I know what it is. Robyn kindly did that for her, she didn’t need too “baby, that is from someone special. I hope you appreciate it” watching Royalty rip open the paper exposing the stacks of Fenty goodies, Royalty screamed ever so loudly “oh my god! Oh my god! This is for me!?” I chuckled “yeah, every lip gloss and whatever she gave you, that is from Rihanna Ro” Royalty is so happy, she actually can’t believe her eyes and I think she is content with that “for me? Oh my god! This is so good” Royalty snatched the card out of her sister’ hand “I can read it” watching her open up the envelope, Robyn deserves a foot rub tonight. I think I will attempt it, but she will openly kick me because I am dumb at times “what does it say?” I asked her “let me read Ro!” Zillah said, my daughter is either confused or can’t read “it says, Happy Christmas Royalty Brown and welcome to the Fenty family. We have sent you all these goodies to show off on your very own channel, we look forward to seeing your work on the Fenty line” Royalty screamed again “you are in the Fenty family Roro, oh my god” my daughter screaming is making me laugh, she is just mind blown but this is big “did she open it?” Robyn asked, she went to put Fenty down “she did, she is screaming around the house, thank you” Robyn smiled before walking off.

Nia has done well; I did tell her to get things from me on my behalf and she did just that “what do you say to your dad and Rihanna Roro?” Nia said holding Royalty’ hand, my daughter’ looks so tired from all the screaming she did “thank you daddy and Rihanna” my daughter is so cute “it’s ok, I will tell her when she comes back that you said that. She is just in the kitchen, but I am happy you had a good day, makes me happy” Nia let her hand go “what is your favourite gift baby? I mean I already know but tell me which do you love?” I know what my daughter will say “Rihanna gift, I got lots of things I can use now, and I love it. I love Rihanna, she is the best. And we are besties now” I chuckled “calm down there, but good. Nia, thank you for today. We will speak soon. Text me when you go to sleep baby, I love you so much Roro” Royalty waved at me “love you too daddy” my daughter is smiling, she is happy, my daughter is obsessed with my wife now. Disconnecting the call sighing out, that is my daughter down, now let me see if I can know where my boy is. I have Amikka mother’ number here so I could try here, scrolling down to her name. Getting up from the couch as it rang out “hello” she answered “hey, is Aeko there?” I hope he is “he is, he is having a nap Chris” letting out an oh “ok, too much food I guess. Did he get my gifts?” I did send him things “he did, he was so happy, and he loved it. I can call you back when he wakes up” Amikka’ mother is nothing of that bitch “if you can, I will be waiting thanks” disconnecting the call.

I just feel sadness in my heart, I just have to get it off my chest with someone anyways. Blowing the smoke out from my lips just as my auntie answered the call “congratulations nephew!” Christine said aloud “thank you auntie, I am glad you are happy for me” I chuckled “why wouldn’t I be? I mean I was shocked but not shocked too. I am happy you made that move, well you listened this time” rubbing my chin laughing “I needed this auntie, I felt like I was doing though shit. The drugs were killing me, the loneliness was overwhelming. I was happy but I really wasn’t you know? I just needed this” placing the blunt between my lips “I know you did; I feel your vibe. I see the posts, I was laughing. I was like my nephew is so in love. She got you in a onesie. Me and the boys were laughing and Austin himself said love got him. I am happy for you, and another girl? I bet she looks like Robyn. Is she ok?” moving my blunt back from my lips “you know it, she is so beautiful auntie. I get emotional seeing her because I feel like she saved me, she saved us. You know me and Rihanna, she doesn’t know what she done for us, I am a married man now” blowing the smoke out hearing my auntie gasp “you married her!? Boy you wanted to marry her ages ago, teenage asses wanted to run away from us” laughing at that memory “you for real happy for me?” I have to ask, I am unsure about happiness right now “I am Chris, Robb and Aaron lost their cousin, they felt upset with you. You didn’t see it but they fell out with you, they moved away from you because you was becoming so toxic and we was talking just now and Robb was saying how you look so happy, he sees the old cousin back. Your face looks better, but they did fall out with you” I didn’t even know that “when did that happen, wow” I am shocked “it happened Chris, you just didn’t see it but it’s ok. We are happy for you. And you called me on Christmas day, that is shocking to me but it’s made me happy. I was not fucking with the nephew I knew anyways” nodding my head “means a lot to me, my mom is not happy” rubbing my eye with my hand “that is because she needs you, and I think my sister right now is just lost. I told her to not use you in terms of money and name, and she did. I didn’t agree with her pawning you off to Amikka because she wasn’t good for you. I am not shocked she is upset but I guess you can’t choose your mother Chris, you know me. I am real, I will just tell you to leave it alone. Let Rihanna take over, she is doing a great job anyways” my auntie knows “tell the boys I am sorry” I didn’t know that they fell out with me like that “they forgive you Chris, trust me they do” nodding my head slowly.

I needed that blunt but let me get back to my family, I was so hurt by none of them telling me they were happy for me but in real terms I fucked up. I was so drugged up that I never saw what I was doing or realised what I was doing, I mean thinking back they wasn’t with me like the rest of the niggas, they kind of ditched me and just left me to it I guess “there you are!” Dennis spat “sorry” I mumbled “I bought you a gift, I know but here” Dennis held out the present to me “is it a photo?” Dennis rolled his eyes “ruined it but look at it” I grinned “no don’t say that, this is so good. I never expected it and Fenty wrapping paper? Robyn bougie as fuck, when did you get this shit!? See I know which is my gift now, it’s wack compared Robyn’ now” she ain’t shit “I know, she was refusing to let me use it too” opening the gift, seeing the photo frame “I thought memories, we have had such a good time and we couldn’t have done without the team” looking down at the picture from our wedding day “I love it Dennis, look at us being so damn goofy. This will go on my nigh stand. Well, I didn’t forget you anyways” placing my arm around Dennis “let me show you the tiny box, you can tell it is mine because it’s not Fenty gift wrapped” side eyeing Robyn, she started to laugh but she is not shit for it.

Watching Dennis stare at the small box “is this an engagement ring? Are we getting married, Chris this was supposed to be between us” I laughed at Dennis, he is dumb “open it, this is from Robyn and I. With everything that has like gone on, and how you have rode for us. You have went beyond your job, and even now. Spending Christmas with us, having to see Robyn’ cooch. It’s just a lot” I chuckled saying “no way!” he spat all wide eyed, he slowly picked out the key to his car “G wagon waiting for you at home, I mean when you are able to go. It’s waiting for you” Dennis is shook, he held up the key in shock “no way! Oh my god! No! I can’t take this, I gave you both barely nothing, oh god!” Dennis shouted, laughing at his reaction “I did this because I am loyal to Robyn and then I gained a brother in your oh my god, come here” Dennis hugged me “you both have made me feel so welcome in the family, I am going to cry. A fucking G wagon” hugging him smiling “it’s for you bro, you deserve it. You have been putting in work putting up with us, you have seen a lot and you also working day and night here it’s not much of a fun time” I think Dennis is crying “I am crying, sorry. Come here!” Dennis went over to Robyn to hug her, his so appreciative and I like that about him, he has a good heart.

Sitting down on the couch “so like it’s all last minute with everything, the biggest gift is our daughter but behind the scenes I have been working on this for you, for us. We have Fenty Brown but under Fenty is where my other endeavours lie within, so as my husband I want you to be managing director of Fenty. And we will evtually merge the business ventures together but I want you to be my managing director, I want you to bring on what you have with Tuff Crowd and bring that to Fenty, and I think you will be great at it but not the make up side of course, but I literally have paper work for you to sign. When I meant I am going to build you I meant it, this business is going to be us. And also your gift is on the way, it’s a car. Ferrari, I am not even sure. Dennis, what was it?” Robyn said to Dennis “Portofino M edition, it looked so good. Eight gear drop top type of thing. You will like it, Robyn spent up” I am shocked “really!? Oh my god, baby. That is amazing, so you’re employing me too!?” I have to get this right “yes, welcome to the Fenty family!?” I busted out laughing “tell me yes because then I can like announce that shit and make it legal and shit, I just want to make it all in house, but that is my gift to you. Next I will put more thought into it, but you know me. It’s been busy” nodding my head smiling “you keep working too much baby, I love you so much” getting up from the couch walking over to Robyn “I can’t stop, I have so much to do” leaning down kissing her cheek as I hugged Robyn “thank you” she is the best “also we need to apply for citizenship here, now” moving back from the hug “you being for real about this shit huh” Robyn not moving anywhere else “this will be home, but I won’t stay in one place. Trust me” nodding my head “but is that something you want? Because like you still have California, I mean I don’t know in the future it may be a thing of we do go back but for now, we here” I shrugged walking back to where I was sat “I just want what you want” and that is the truth.

#Chrianna #Chrianna FF #Chrianna Fanfiction #Fanfic #Fanfiction

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rawiswhore · 5 years ago

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Shawn Michaels x Fem Reader- “Because I Got High”

About the Corona virus/Quarantine epidemic, I admit this Corona virus/Quarantine epidemic is horrible, no doubt about that, and I hate how I can't go certain places that I want to go to because of it (i.e. the library).

However, there is a positive thing about the Quarantine, and one of them is that I can type fanfics during the daytime.

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1997, the year this fanfic is set in, this would be the last year one of the most prominent, iconic and beloved stars of the New Generation era and throughout the 90's, Shawn Michaels, would fully be wrestling and giving promos throughout the most famous wrestling company in the world, until the next year, where he'd continue to wrestle until a back injury caused him to retire from the company until 2002.

Which is a damn shame, because how HOT was Shawn in 1998-2001, especially the summer of 1998 when he returned with shorter hair?

Speaking of hotness, you've grown a crush on Shawn Michaels lately, especially considering he's gotten rid of that tacky outdated mullet, and in 1997, Shawn was sexier than ever before (at least in my opinion).

However, Shawn's been on a downward spiral lately, even other wrestlers admit that, not just with his horrendous behavior and attitude towards other wrestlers, but with his drug and alcohol addiction he's struggled with since the late 1980's.

Even though you do wish Shawn could get clean and sober from drugs, however, seeing Shawn partying, and not the kind of partying that involves piñatas, but instead partying with booze and drugs, has given you a pretty clever idea.

You've done drugs before, in fact, you were addicted to them throughout the majority of the 90's because you were a stupid teenager who experimented with drugs, cigarettes, alcohol and sex simply because you thought all of those things were cool.

Tonight, you and Shawn were in a hotel room the two of you shared, you were lying on your back across the only bed in this room stark naked.

Not only were you stark naked, but before you could do anything that night, you removed the makeup off of your face in the bathroom before you shed your clothes off.

That way, you can go to sleep with him without falling asleep while wearing makeup. Smart thinking.

You hadn't drank any alcohol or done any drugs that night...yet.

You and Shawn managed to actually sneak some drugs into the hotel, and you had some bottles of alcohol sitting in a cooler filled with ice, that cooler was right next to the bed.

Previously before you went to your hotel room, you told Shawn what you wanted to do with him tonight, after the show was over, and he was absolutely down and excited to do this with you and to you.

You had a can of Zima next to you that looked like a soda can, that way you can just pop the can off like it's soda and not have Shawn open it with a bottle opener.

Though, Shawn did bring a bottle opener with him, just so he could open a beer bottle.

You asked Shawn if it's okay if you pour Zima on your body for him to drink up, and he was fine with it.

Shawn loves beer the most, but you'd rather have him pour Zima, vodka or tequila on you instead of beer.

He might be from Texas, but he's not Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Your hand reached for the Zima can next to you, where you wrapped your fingers around the can and held it in the palm of your hand, pulling that can above your torso.

You directed your other hand towards the top of the can, where you raised the cap and the can opened.

You moved your palm holding the can towards your stomach, where you tipped the can slightly.

You poured some Zima from your stomach up to your breasts, drenching both of your tits in alcohol.

Mmmmm. Shawn might like that, maybe.

Thankfully and luckily, Shawn was lying in bed right next to you, albeit he still had his wrestling tights on.

He was watching you pour alcohol on your body, and even he couldn't wait to drink all that alcohol up.

He crawled on hands and knees towards your right thigh.

"Can you spread your legs open for me?" he asked.

Even without saying a word, your legs suddenly spread apart.

"Thank you!" he exclaimed.

"You're welcome" you replied with a smile.

He lifted one of his legs above your legs, then the other, where he sat in between your legs.

So that's why he wanted to be in between your legs, amongst probably other things...

He then leaned and lowered his head towards your stomach, his neck and torso lowering to you as well.

His tongue left his mouth, where he gave the little puddle above your navel a lick, tasting that iconic 90's alcohol on his tongue.

Tastes...meh....

He prefers beer, but whatever floats your boat.

He gave your stomach another quick little lick, his tongue flat on your wet stomach until the tip of it was raised.

But enough of that...

He placed his tongue flatly on your stomach, where he raised and dragged his tongue up the middle of your torso, this time letting his tongue taste that alcohol.

The alcohol was kind of burning his tongue when he dragged his tongue up your damp torso, but he'll forget about that pain soon.

You felt his tongue drag up your skin, and it felt so good.

The hair on your arms was standing erect when he did this.

He was hovering over your torso more and more, and having such a sexy wrestler hovering over you, licking alcohol off of you made blood rush to your clitoris.

His tongue brushed up the middle of your torso, licking up that alcohol.

Even though it felt so good having his tongue brush up your stomach, it didn't feel good enough.

Some of the Zima actually spilled and splashed onto the bedsheets, but, whatever.

Once his face was in the middle of your tits, he moved his face in front of your left breast, only to lower his head down to your left tit.

Before he could suck your tit, his tongue crawled out of his mouth, only to land on an area a few inches above your areola.

He dragged his tongue all across your breast, licking up that Zima, getting it off of your tit, smothering the skin area of your tit in his saliva.

His tongue traveled from above your areola, only to snake on the right side a few inches beside your areola, then down to the bottom of your tit.

This did feel amazing, goosebumps were appearing on your arms, but it didn't feel quite good enough.

His tongue was snaking all over your tit, trying to get all the alcohol off of your breast.

Sometimes his tongue would crawl back into his mouth so he could gulp that alcohol down, but his tongue was snaking and swirling all on your breast, until he got all the alcohol off of your tit and reached your areola.

Once he finally reached your areola and nipple, after he finished licking up all the alcohol on your breast, he placed your nipple in his mouth and started sucking your nipple.

And not just that, but he was also sucking the alcohol off of your nipple, and the tip of his tongue was running in circles on your areola.

When the alcohol was in his mouth, he gulped it down, all while still sucking your tit.

Not just that, but if some alcohol dripped down your tit, his tongue would loll out of his mouth on your tit and lick up that Zima dripping down your tit like a raindrop down a window.

His mouth was wrapped tightly around your nipple.

Thank God your head was resting on a pillow, that way you don't have to arch your head back.

Your eyes had rolled in the back of your head, your eyelids shut your eyes and the small of your back was arched and raised from the mattress.

Both of your hands, specifically your palms, were gripping onto the mattress's sheets.

"Ohhhhhhhhh, Shaaaaaaaaawn" you moaned, hopefully no one will hear you next door.

He's probably hoping you moan out "aaaaaaaaaah, ahhhhhh, Shawnnnnn!" like those women at the beginning of his entrance music, which you have moaned out before.

"Y'like me sucking your tit, baby?" he purred, his voice warm and husky, like a glass of whisky.

He said this while his nipple was halfway in his mouth, his breath hot on your nipple and areola.

"Yesssss" you whined, hushing your voice so the people next door won't hear you.

"You're being a good girl" he coaxed, his voice hushed and quiet.

He went back to sucking your nipple, and he wasn't just sucking your nipple, but kissing your nipple like he kisses your lips, or any woman's lips, basically making out with your nipple.

Not just that, but the tip of his tongue was continuing to run in circles over and over on your nipple.

Sometimes his tongue would crawl back into his mouth so he could swallow the alcohol on his tongue, though, there wasn't really a lot of alcohol on his tongue.

"Shawn, this feels sooooo gooood" you whispered and moaned at the same time.

"Does it?" Shawn asked, the corner of his mouth stretching to make a smirk.

His mouth tightly wrapped around your nipple, and while he was sucking your nipple, your nipple bobbed and went up and down in his mouth.

You may as well do this now...

"Ohhhhhhhh, ohhhhhhhhhhhh, Shaaaaaaaawn!" you whined.

All Shawn could think when you moaned that were the cries of those women at the beginning of his entrance theme.

And while this was lovely and all, there's some alcohol on your other tit Shawn hasn't licked and sucked up.

He dragged his tongue across the right side of your tongue, his tongue gliding across the space in between your tits, until his tongue reached the top of your right tit.

Once his tongue was on your other tit, his tongue traveled all over your tit, dragging on the skin area of your tit, his tongue lowering down your breast, only to turn a swift curve across the bottom of your tit.

His tongue was getting stained in Zima, but surprisingly, he wasn't getting drunk, which might be a good thing, and I'll tell you why later.

He elevated his tongue up the left side of your tit, only for his tongue to turn across your tit.

His tongue swirled all over the skin areas of your breast, his tongue licking and making a swirl on your tit, lapping up and making sure he gets all the alcohol off of your boob.

His tongue tried not to miss any spots and was doing a good job, his tongue replacing the alcohol with his own saliva.

Surprisingly, while Shawn was busy licking you up, you didn't put your hand behind his head and run your fingers through your hair.

You forgot to do that!

But don't worry, you will do that.

Once Shawn was finished licking up all the alcohol off of your tit, he wrapped his lips around your nipple, then began sucking it.

And not just that, but he ran his tongue over and over again in circles on your areola.

While he was doing that, your hand ran behind his head, where your fingers roamed, ran and combed his hair, over and over again.

He felt you run your fingers through his locks and thought "Why didn't she do this to me while I was licking her body and her other tit?".

Indeed, you don't know why. But at least you're doing it now!

Some of the alcohol on your tit had dripped down his chin, heh, gives new meaning to "sweet chin music".

His tongue lolled out of his mouth, trying to lap up the Zima that dripped down his chin, but it was no use.

While he was laying on top of you, he was trying not to crush you considering he's heavier than you.

"Ohhhhhhh, yeaaaaaaaaaaah" you moaned. "Lick me baby, suck me!"

Your voice wasn't loud, but hushed, that way people next door won't hear you.

It probably isn't the best place to get high in a hotel room, you should've done it in the locker room, the dressing room or on your tourbus!

His mouth was sucking the alcohol off of your nipple, swallowing it.

His mouth sucked the alcohol off of your nipple and areola like a vacuum cleaner.

When he was licking your areola around in circles, he wasn't just licking it off, but also trying to make you feel good, great even.

Some of the alcohol on your areola was dripping down your tit, but he managed to catch that alcohol dripping down your tit with his mouth.

Then, he did something to your tit he didn't do to your other breast.

His mouth stretched out and widened, and not just that, but his mouth tried fitting your whole entire breast in his mouth.

Surprisingly, it worked.

However, the width of his mouth was shortening more and more, and he couldn't hold your whole entire breast in his mouth.

The walls inside his mouth as well as his lips were brushing all across your tit as his mouth and lips elevated to your nipple, until his lips and mouth stopped and paused at your areola.

His mouth was smearing your breast in his saliva.

Honestly, he spent too much time on your tits, now it's time to get to other areas besides your tits!

Your arm was stretched out, your hand was trying to grip wrap around the can.

Finally, your fingers were wrapped around that Zima can, holding it in your palm.

You pulled that can up to your chest, where you poured some of the can on your collarbone and on your neck, specifically the middle of your neck, and even poured some Zima on top of your lips, wetting your lips.

Your arm stretched out to the nightstand next to you and placed that can of Zima back on the drawer where you let the can sit there.

Shawn heard you spill some Zima on your collarbone and neck, where his head raised up and looked at you.

He actually could halfway even see your arm stretch out to grab the can, where he pulled himself away a few inches while you poured more Zima on yourself.

Hopefully his hair won't catch on fire.

Speaking of hair, you could feel his chest and body hair on your torso, and you'd love to lick alcohol and even snort cocaine off of his torso, but his torso's covered in chest hair, yuck!

When you sat the can back down on the nightstand, Shawn's head ran a few inches back towards your chest, where he placed his tongue on the puddle of Zima on your collarbone.

He dragged his tongue from your collarbone up to your neck, where his tongue brushed from your collarbone up to the middle of your neck, the top of his tongue getting drenched in alcohol.

Once he felt like he got enough alcohol in his mouth, his tongue crawled back into his mouth, only for his lips to shut right after his tongue got into his mouth, where he swallowed some of that alcohol.

Some of the alcohol, dripped across both sides of your neck and collarbone, and Shawn's tongue trailed all over your collarbone, licking up that alcohol, making sure he doesn't miss a spot.

While this did feel pretty good, it didn't feel that good.

His tongue directed to the left side of your collarbone, licking the drops of alcohol that spilled down the left side of your neck.

He then moved his tongue to the right side of your neck, where his tongue licked up the alcohol that dropped down the right side of your body.

He honestly doesn't have to lick up all the alcohol off of you.

His tongue then dragged up to the middle of your neck, where his mouth stopped there.

His lips began kissing the middle of your neck pretty vigorously and sexily, his breath hot on your neck.

His heavy breathing sent some heat into your pussy, specifically your clitoris.

Your head arched back, your mouth was open and your eyes were closed.

"Ohhh yesssss, Shaaaaaawn!" you moaned, your voice feeling hot and heavy.

Shawn directed his hand behind your head, where he held and cradled your head in his palm, his fingers in your hair.

He brushed and elevated his lips up your neck towards your own lips, that were drenched in Zima alcohol, where he locked your lips on yours.

When his lips locked on your mouth, the alcohol on your lips transferred to his lips, where the two of yours lips made lipsmacking sounds once they parted, only for your lips as well as his lips to join again, then part, then join, rinse and repeat.

While the two of you were making out, Shawn's tongue snuck out of his mouth and landed on the corner of your mouth, where the tip of his tongue trailed over your upper lip.

Once his tongue reached the other side of your upper lip, the tip of his tongue moved onto your bottom lip, where his tongue, specifically the tip of it, ran across your bottom lip.

Your upper part of your body (your head and torso) rose up from the mattress, where your hand was behind Shawn's head, your fingers running and combing his brown locks.

His fingers were running and roaming through your hair as well.

You then suddenly toppled on top of Shawn, where now Shawn's back was laying on the mattress, not yours.

And for a while, the two of you were making out with each other.

While you were kissing him, you could feel his tongue run over your lips, and that's awesome.

Your tongue snuck out of your mouth and landed at the corner of Shawn's upper lip, just like Shawn's tongue did with your upper lip.

You dragged and trailed the tip of your tongue across his upper lip, only to drag your tongue across Shawn's bottom lip once you reached the other side.

Shawn felt your tongue on his lips, sometimes your tongue bumped into his, and this is something that you wanted.

When your tongue nudged into his while kissing him, your tongue paused at licking across his lips, but instead crawled on top of his tongue, dragging your tongue across his.

He felt you trying to French kiss him, and he couldn't help but give in back.

Your tongue was now underneath his tongue, where the tip of your tongue was giving his tongue a few licks.

The two of you spent quite some time French kissing each other, flicking and, well, wrestling (ba-dum-tssssssh) each others tongues.

Even though this was sexy, this wasn't all you wanted to do with Shawn, oh no.

You lifted yourself off of Shawn, then stretched your arm out, your hand reaching out for the Zima can on the nightstand.

You wrapped your fingers around that can and pulled the can to you, where you directed that can over Shawn's neck.

Your hand tipped the can a bit, where some Zima poured out of the hole and landed on Shawn's neck and Adam's apple, drenching and wetting his neck.

You placed that Zima can back down on the nightstand, then you leaned your head down into Shawn's neck, you were now lying on top of Shawn on your stomach.

Your tongue licked a trail up the middle of Shawn's neck, and once you got back to the bottom of Shawn's neck, your tongue brushed up to his Adam's apple, where you paused there.

You then began passionately kissing and sucking his Adam's apple like you were kissing his lips not too long ago.

It's like there was a string connected to Shawn's genitals and his neck, this was very arousing for him.

He was even feeling like you when he sucked your tits, licked your areolas and what have you.

His neck and head were arched back, the back of his neck was raising from the mattress, his eyes were closed and his mouth was open.

"Ohhhhhhhhh yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah" he moaned.

The tip of your tongue was flicking and swirling on and around his Adam's apple, sometimes you even sucked his Adam's apple.

Your lips also sometimes puckered and scrunched up, giving little kisses on his Adam's apple.

Your tongue then went back down to the bottom of his neck, where your tongue brushed up his neck, not just the middle of his neck, but both sides of his neck as well, licking up the alcohol, going back down to the bottom of his neck once you reached the top.

Not just that, but your face was halfway smothered into his neck, your lips were making out and heavily kissing his neck, your breath and heavy breathing on his neck.

It was your lips smothering his neck, not your face!

Y'know those stereotypical "hot and heavy" sex scenes in movies, TV shows, even sometimes music videos, especially two

Sadly, Shawn has some chest hair on his torso, which will interfere with what you really want to do with him, and that's snort cocaine and speed off of his body, even lick alcohol off of his body.

However, there's always his hairless back.

Your head raised up from his neck, your lips no longer on his neck.

"Hey Shawn" you said to him "I want you to lie on the mattress on your stomach. I'm gonna snort some cocaine off of your back".

Shawn remembered what you said to him about snorting coke off of his body.

He never has snorted and done cocaine, which is shocking considering the party boy he is.

You'd love it if Shawn snorted coke or even his daily painkillers off of your body, and maybe he will.

"Shawn" you told him "Y'wanna snort some cocaine off of me?"

He never really did snort cocaine before.

Hmmmm...maybe he'll have to do that backstage during a future WWF show soon...

"Well?" you asked him.

"Maybe another time" was his answer.

Y'know, even though he never has done cocaine, he does have another match to do tomorrow...

"Alright then" you replied. "Now lay on your back for me, please"

Shawn lifted his body off of the mattress, then flipped the position he was laying on the mattress.

Instead of laying on his back on the bed, this time he was laying on his torso and stomach.

His back is wonderful. Not a single bit of hair there.

Although, before you do anything to Shawn's back, you have to ask him this...

"Shawn" you asked. "Would it be gross if I licked alcohol off of your back?"

"N-no, not really" he answered.

You walked on your knees on the mattress towards the nightstand, where you picked up the little Ziplock baggie of cocaine in one hand and a little plastic straw in the other.

That plastic straw is the snort the cocaine.

You walked up to Shawn on your knees, holding 2 things in both hands.

Once you were right next to Shawn, you opened that Ziplock bag and sprinkled a little bit of cocaine on his left shoulder blade, forming a little line of coke for you to snort.

You'd love to snort some cocaine off of his spine, but you're scared that once you snort all the coke and speed off of him and pour alcohol where those 2 drugs were previously on, his body will catch on fire.

At least you have somewhat of a conscience, and I'll get to that later.

You then sealed the baggie shut and leaned your face down into his left shoulder blade, holding that plastic straw under one of your nostrils, you were hovering over Shawn like a tent.

Once that plastic straw was at the end of one of those cocaine lines, you snorted that line of coke up your nose, dragging that straw across the line of cocaine on his shoulder blade until it reached the end of the line of cocaine.

Your pupils instantly dilated, becoming bigger and wider, your heart suddenly beating much faster than usual.

What you're about to do next is definitely not safe, and you're surprised you won't be dead after this, but...

You then raised the upper half of your body up and walked over to the nightstand again on your knees on the mattress, then placed the bag of cocaine on the nightstand and grabbed the Ziplock bag filled with speed.

The speed was crushed up and looked like powder, it looked like the bag filled with coke you previously snorted from, but you can tell the difference between cocaine and speed.

The bag itself wasn't really that much big, neither was the bag of cocaine.

You walked on your knees back to Shawn again on the mattress, where you opened the Ziplock baggie filled with speed, raise your hand above the bag and let your hand enter that plastic bag, only to fish out some speed on your fingers.

You sprinkled a line of speed on Shawn's right shoulder blade, you're afraid that some of the cocaine and speed will end up mixing together if you sprinkled it on his other shoulder blade, and when you snort that mixture together, you'll probably have a seizure or something...

You face leaned into that line of speed, putting the plastic straw you were holding under your other nostril.

Once that nostril hit the beginning of that line, your nose inhaled and snorted that line of speed.

You dragged that plastic straw across the line of speed, the speed getting sucked up that plastic straw and up your other nostril, until you reached the end of the line of speed.

You just hope and pray you won't die tonight from snorting 2 drugs.

You walked on your knees to the cooler next to the bed, where you wrapped your fingers around the shaft of a margarita bottle, pulling that bottle out of the cooler.

One hand popped the cork off of the bottle, and thankfully the alcohol wasn't spilling out like a champagne bottle...yet.

You walked on your knees on the bed back to Shawn, and once you were standing on your knees next to Shawn's back, your hand directed the bottle to the small of Shawn's back, hovering over the small of his back.

Tilting the bottle a bit, you poured a bit of alcohol on the small of his back, pouring a line of this alcohol from the small of his back to below the middle of his shoulder blades.

Even though you snorted 2 drugs up your nose, you were trying to be careful pouring that alcohol, why?

You were afraid if you poured that margarita and it touched where those cocaine and speed lines were, it would mix and his back probably would catch on fire.

Once the cold alcohol had touched his skin, he flinched a bit, shutting his eyes and clinching his teeth at how cold it is, what since it was in a cooler previously, but it isn't intolerable.

You placed the cork inside the bottle's hole, the cork blocking potential alcohol from spilling out the bottle for now.

You walked back to the cooler next to your bed on your knees on the mattress, and placed that margarita bottle in the cooler, then walked back to Shawn, still lying on his stomach on that bed.

Your head and face leaned into the small of Shawn's back, your tongue lolling out of your mouth as you leaned further and further into the small of his back.

Thinking of it, maybe it would be better if you sitting in between his thighs while leaning over his ass, licking up the alcohol, though you won't do that now.

Once your tongue touched that alcohol, you trailed your tongue up that puddle of alcohol up his back, licking that margarita.

You were trying to be very careful so the alcohol won't end up mixing with the cocaine and speed that was previously on his shoulder blades.

Your head was elevating more and more up his back, so was your neck and upper half of your body, for that matter.

Once you reached below his shoulder blades, you went back down to the small of his back, licking that little puddle of alcohol.

Your tongue pulled back into your mouth, tasting that bitter margarita.

While you were licking the alcohol off of him, you wonder maybe if Shawn could spread his legs, his thighs in particular, so you should sit in between the space of his thighs and lick up that alcohol there.

Hmmmmm...

It would also probably be safer to do that too, considering what would happen to the alcohol if it meets the cocaine and speed on his shoulder blades.

Those 2 drugs might've been snorted up your nose, but little tidbits and sprinkles of them might still be there on his shoulder blades.

"Shawn?" you said.

"Yeah?" he responded.

"Could you maybe...spread your thighs and legs wide open?" you asked him. "So I can sit in between your thighs and lick and suck up the alcohol from there".

His legs and thighs suddenly parted from one another, his thighs spreading out even wider just to make room for you.

Once his thighs spread out wide enough, you lifted one of your legs over one of his legs, only to place your leg in between the empty space in between his legs, then lifting your other leg over one of his legs.

Now you were

You leaned your upper body, specifically your head, above the elastic of his tights and below the puddle of alcohol spilled on his back.

You stuck your tongue out, placing your tongue on that alcohol.

You raised your tongue up that puddle of alcohol, your head elevating up that puddle of alcohol as your tongue licked up that alcohol.

You were trying to be careful with licking up that puddle of alcohol on his spine, making sure some of alcohol on his back didn't spill on opposite sides of his body.

You were licking that alcohol like Madonna licked the alcohol off of Willem Dafoe's body in "Body of Evidence", that scene where Madonna and Willem are in a bedroom, she pours a bottle of alcohol on his torso and licks the alcohol there!

Your tongue crawled back into your mouth, although there really wasn't a lot of alcohol on your tongue.

Once you reached the top of that spill of alcohol on his back, you lowered your head back down to the small of his back.

You may as well try to do something else to the alcohol on his back.

With your face right in front of the alcohol spill on his back, you opened your mouth, and began sucking the alcohol off of his back.

You were trying your best to get the alcohol in your mouth, not have the alcohol drip down his ass crack, cuz that's nasty.

More and more of that alcohol did crawl into your mouth, getting sucked into your mouth like a vacuum cleaner sucking up dust.

The margarita alcohol ran and walked from his back into your mouth.

Once all the alcohol got into your mouth, you raised your head up and gulped it down.

You looked down at Shawn's back, and seemingly there was no alcohol there anymore.

Next time, you're gonna lick the alcohol off of his back, but no snorting drugs off of his back!

Or if you do snort drugs on his back, don't follow it by licking alcohol off of his back.

"Shawn" you said to him. "You can get up now. I'm gonna lie down".

Shawn assembled himself off of the bed, no longer lying on his stomach across the mattress.

Before you could do what you were about to do, you lifted your legs over Shawn's other leg and walked on your knees to the cooler, grabbing onto the margarita bottle by its shaft and pulling that bottle out.

You then walked towards the middle of the bed on your knees, then sat on the mattress on your ass with your legs lying across the mattress.

You popped the cork out of the hole and moved the bottle towards your ankle, where you poured some alcohol from ankle up to your thigh.

The alcohol was drenching the top of your calf, knee and thigh as well as dripping on the mattress.

You moved your other hand on the bottle's shaft, where you wrapped your fingers around that bottle's shaft, now the bottle is held in your other hand.

You directed your hand holding that bottle to your other ankle, where you tipped the bottle and poured the alcohol from your ankle all the way up to your thigh, and again, the alcohol dripping onto the bedsheets.

Shawn could see you pouring alcohol on your legs and even he admitted he'd love to lick your legs, which is exactly what he's about to do.

"You know the drill" you said to him, your mouth spreading an evil grin across your lips, widening your face.

Shawn licked his lips, grinning back at you, excited to lick your body now.

He crawled on his hands and knees over to you, where he was now in front of your feet.

His face leaned into your ankle, where he dragged his tongue up your calf and all the way up your knee, tasting that alcohol.

His mouth automatically shut once his head and face were right in front of your knee.

Once he reached your knee, he went back down to your ankle again, only to lick up another soaked area on your calf, the left part of your calf, all the way up to your knee again.

He was replacing the alcohol on your leg with his saliva, his tongue cleaning off the alcohol on your leg, making sure not to miss a spot.

Again, once he got to the top of your knee, he went back down to the bottom of your ankle again, only to raise his head up to your knee again by licking up the alcohol on your right calf.

Your leg was getting shiny thanks to him licking the alcohol off of it, at least the bottom of your leg, for now, anyway.

It honestly tickled when he licked up your leg, you could nearly giggle at him licking your leg.

His tongue also was smearing some of the alcohol when he licked up your leg, but...whatevs.

His head moved back down to your ankle, where he dragged and elevating his tongue up your calf, and not just that, but his tongue ran up your calf, to your knee, to up your thigh.

You honestly would rather have him do this to your legs then just lick up your calf, then go back down to your ankle, maybe you should even say this to him.

"Shawn" you said. "I want you, when you lick up my legs, I want you to start licking at my ankle and drag your tongue up my thigh, not stop at my knee".

Shawn raised his head up and looked at your face when you said his name.

"That's actually want I wanted to do" Shawn said.

He then looked back down at your thigh, where his tongue traveled all over your thigh, making sure to get all the alcohol spilled on your thigh.

Sometimes his tongue crawled back in his mouth if he felt like he got enough alcohol on his tongue, only to swallow it down.

Your nipples actually reacted while his tongue ran around your thigh, they tingled a bit.

Meanwhile, maybe you could do something else while Shawn licks up the alcohol on your thigh.

"Hey Shawn" you said to him.

He raised his head up again, looking at you.

"Can I do something while you're licking my thigh?" you asked him.

"What?" he asked.

"Well, rub alcohol some other place on my body" you responded.

Shawn could probably figure out where the next place is. He doesn't have to guess.

"If you want" he said. "I'd rather you not, for now, anyway. The alcohol could end up drying up there".

Good point, Shawn.

And speaking of which, Shawn looked down at your thigh to see if he got all the alcohol off of your thigh.

Your thigh was now smothered in a mixture of alcohol and his saliva.

He did try the best he could to lick all the alcohol off of your thigh.

But he needs to lick the alcohol off of your other leg.

He then directed and moved his face and head to the top of your foot, where he dragged his tongue up your calf, licking and collecting that alcohol on your calf with his tongue, and you don't mean calf as in baby cow.

He dragged his tongue up your knee and then up to the top of your thigh, his tongue creating a road of his saliva thanks to him brushing his tongue up your leg.

The top of his tongue was getting coated and covered in that margarita drink.

This is exactly what you want, you'd rather him do this to both of your legs rather than lick up to your knee then go back down to your ankle.

"Yes, Shawn!" you exclaimed, albeit hushed and quiet so you won't wake anyone up.

You nearly feel like Val Venis during some clips of his titantron (when his head is tilted back, eyes closed and mouth open while sitting in a car without a roof or in a hot tub) with Shawn licking up your leg.

His tongue was halfway smearing some of the alcohol on your leg, but he'll make sure to get all of the alcohol off of your leg.

Or at least, almost all of the alcohol off of your leg.

He pulled his tongue back in his mouth once he reached the top of your thigh.

Once he was at the top of your thigh, he moved his head down to your ankle, where he dragged his tongue up a spill of alcohol up your leg, dragging and brushing his tongue up the left side of your calf, up your knee, and the left side of your thigh.

While he's busy licking up the alcohol on your thigh, wonder if you should try rubbing another place of alcohol where you want Shawn to lick you next?

"Shawn" you said. "You want me to rub the next place of alcohol I want you to lick up?"

Shawn raised his head and looked up at you.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"I've also thought of the two of us 69'ing each other" you added. "Should we?"

Maybe, but what if you fart in his face?

"I'd rather you not" Shawn suggested. "Maybe another time"

Indeed, maybe another time.

"I actually agree" you said. "But what about rubbing alcohol on a body part I want you to lick next? Should I do it next?"

"Do whatever you want" he replied.

Maybe it's best to wait. You don't want to get any alcohol in his hair.

Shawn went back down to your ankle, where he dragged his tongue up your leg again.

He went back down to your ankle only to raise himself up to the top of your leg courtesy of his tongue running up to your leg.

Not up to your knee, but up your leg.

He did this over and over again to your leg, making sure he gets almost all the alcohol off of your leg.

It's like his tongue was the one walking him.

He looked at your leg, and now the top of your leg was shiny, smothered and slathered in his saliva.

Seemingly he must've got all the alcohol off.

You looked down at your leg he licked, and he seemingly got all the alcohol off of your leg. Yay!

One of your hands popped the cork off of the bottle and placed the cork next to you, only to hold the palm of your hand out and hold the bottle to your palm.

Tilting the bottle and aiming it at your palm, some alcohol poured out of the bottle and onto your palm.

Your hand was cupping and trying to balance and hold the alcohol in the palm of your hand.

You directed your palm holding that alcohol towards your vagina, trying to be careful not to spill the alcohol in your palm as well as not spill the bottle you're holding in the other hand.

Your hand holding the alcohol splat on your pussy, where your palm smeared and smothered that alcohol on your pussy, making sure to get all the alcohol on your vagina.

Luckily, you were perfectly shaved down there.

You had no pubic hair above or on the sides of your vagina except for a little fuzzy line above your pubes, like Madonna's pubic hair in her 1992 "Sex" book.

Hopefully Shawn tastes the alcohol on your pussy!

"Shaaaaaaawn" you called to him.

He was busy watching you pour alcohol on your pussy.

And he, too, hopes he tastes the alcohol on your pussy.

He leaned his head face into your pussy, where he placed his tongue in the middle of your vagina.

He dragged and brushed his tongue up to the top of your pussy, his tongue tasting a mixture of margarita and your pussy juice.

Once his tongue reached the top of your pussy, his tongue went down to the bottom of your cunt, his tongue's about to take a trip.

He directed his tongue around your pussy, his tongue licking your pussy like it was a Popsicle.

His tongue ran up the left part of your pussy, then across the top of your vagina, where your clit is, then dragged his tongue down your right pussy.

Like your legs, he was making sure to lick your twat like he was licking your legs and tits, making sure to get all the alcohol off of it.

While he was licking your pussy, your hand reached for the cork next to you and grabbed it, only to direct that cork to the top of the bottle and shut the bottle's hole.

While it feels good having someone lick your pussy, it doesn't feel that good, his tongue isn't really licking your clit despite the few times his tongue nudges your clitoris, which is your most sensitive spot of your vagina.

Speaking of your clit, he wrapped his mouth around your clit, where he began sucking it, sucking the alcohol off of it.

Not just that, but as he sucked your clit, his tongue was dripping out of his mouth and across the middle of his chin, where he raised and brushed his tongue up the middle of your pussy, in between your vaginal flaps.

His tongue also licked up your pussy flaps as well as behind and in front of your vaginal flaps.

He also puckered and tightened his lips, pressing his lips quite hard on your clit.

This got an immediate reaction out of you and felt really good, but you'd rather him lick up all the alcohol off of your pussy instead of just eating your twat out.

"Shawn" you said to him, looking down at him.

He raised his head and looked at him.

"I'd rather you lick all the alcohol off of my pussy than just try to pleasure me and eat my pussy out" you declared.

He nodded his head, understanding you.

He moved his mouth towards the bottom of your pussy, this time to lick your pussy to see if there's still any alcohol there.

He licked a bit of your pussy, pulling his tongue back in his mouth and holding it there to see if he can still taste the alcohol there.

He already drank, licked up and sucked some of the alcohol off of your body, so he could barely taste the alcohol on your cunt.

But, whatever.

One last time, his tongue traveled all over your pussy, making sure to taste the alcohol and get all of the alcohol off of your vagina at the same time.

His tongue was now covering your pussy in his own saliva, which is what it should now be covered in.

While he was licking your twat, one of your hands touched and dragged up one of your pussy flaps, only for you to put your fingers in your mouth, your tongue touching and tasting your fingers.

You did this to taste if your vagina still tasted like a margarita.

Surprisingly, no, but his own saliva.

"Shawn" you said. "It's fine if you don't lick up all of the alcohol on my vagina".

He paused at what he was doing when he heard his name, only to nod his head afterward after what you said following calling his name.

But you're still not finished with this night, no.

"Shawn" you said. "I wanna suck your dick drenched in this alcohol"

Your hand pointed to the margarita bottle you were holding.

He figured that would happen pretty soon.

He ate your pussy smothered in alcohol, so you know you'll have to suck his dick soaked in margarita.

He moved his hands onto the elastic of his tights, where he pulled his tights down more and more, until his genitalia, especially his cock, sprung out of his tights.

He pulled his tights all the way down to his knees.

You rose off of the mattress and moved your hand to the top of the bottle, popping the cork off.

You moved the bottle above his cock, where you tipped the bottle and poured it gently.

Margarita was pouring from that bottle, drenching and soaking his cock, and you poured it from the top of his penis all the way down to the bottom of his dick.

Some of the alcohol was dripping off of his cock and on the mattress's bedsheets.

You then held the bottle up straight and stuffed the wooden cork back in the hole.

You then lowered and leaned your head, sitting on all fours, like how babies crawl.

You opened your mouth, where his cock crawled into your mouth like a train through a tunnel, and your face went further into his cock until it reached the bottom.

Once your mouth and face reached the bottom of his cock, you wrapped your lips tightly around his shaft.

You began sucking the alcohol off of his cock, gulping the margarita down your throat once it was in your mouth, and not just that, but your head, face and mouth elevated up his shaft, sucking off the alcohol off of his dick as those 3 body parts crawled up his shaft.

Once you reached the tip of his penis, you moved your head, face and mouth down his cock again, only to raise those things up, then down, over and over again.

Shawn's head tilted back, he looked like Val Venis in Val's titantron when his head tilts back and his eyes roll in the back of his head.

Even though you were trying to suck the alcohol off of his dick, some precum began to spill from his penis head, but you can still manage to suck his cock.

Not only were you sucking Shawn's cock, but your tongue snaked and trailed around his shaft like you were sliding down a stripper pole.

Your tongue rolled around his shaft, gathering the alcohol off of his dick.

You felt his precum slip out of his penis head, and once you reached the top of his penis head, you wrapped your mouth tight around his penis head, sucking the precum off of his dick and gulping it down.

Shawn was starting to do D Generation X's eventually iconic "suck it!" gesture in 1997, even before D Generation X were formed, wonder if he'll do that now that you're performing fellatio on his dick?

Your face then went back down to the bottom of his cock, your lips circulating around his shaft, only for your head and face to rise up his penis thanks to you directing your head to do this to his cock.

While your face rose up his shaft, your tongue did taste some alcohol that was still on his cock, but...eh....

Shawn's skin was getting hot and warm courtesy of you giving him a blowjob, but you just wanna clean the alcohol off of his dick, not just give him a blowjob.

Once you reached the top of his dick, his penis exited your mouth, his cock no longer in your mouth.

He felt your mouth no longer wrapped around his shaft, which made his head bow down and look down at his cock.

You looked down at his cock to see if there's still any alcohol there.

Even Shawn was looking down at his penis.

His cock was slippery and wet thanks to your mouth.

You put your index finger on his cock and ran it up his shaft, only to put that index finger in your mouth, your tongue tasting it.

His cock doesn't really taste like margarita that much anymore, which is a good thing.

It's also getting late, so you and Shawn should be hitting the hay by now.

"Shawn" you said "I wanna go to bed now, it's getting late".

He agreed with you, and he then sat on the mattress, pulling his boots off of his feet and his tights down, throwing those things on the floor.

Yay, you're gonna sleep naked with him!

Even though you do wanna sleep naked with him, there is something you want to do with Shawn before the two of you fall asleep.

"Shawn" you said "There's something I wanna do with you before we fall asleep..."

Oh God. It better not be fucking, like penis/vagina fucking.

He'd love to fuck you, but it's getting late.

"Is it fucking?" he asked, hushing his voice so people in the hallways and next door won't hear.

He also whispered that close to you so you'll hear.

"No" you replied. "I wanna take some pills with you and wash it down with this".

You tapped your fingernails on the margarita bottle you were holding, smiling at him.

Shawn smiled right back.

His biggest drug of choice is pills, which he always takes, and pills also helps you sleep and makes you drowsy.

He crawled over to the nightstand, where one of his pills were, where one of his hands wrapped around the pill bottle and grabbed it, pulling it to his torso, the other hand was on top of the lid, twisting it over and over until it popped off.

You, too, put your hand at the top of the bottle, where the cork was, and popped the cork off of the margarita bottle.

"How many pills do you want?" he asked.

"Two" you replied. "One for you and one for me".

Cute.

Once the cap of the pill bottle popped off, he held the palm of his hand out and held the bottle above his palm, where he tilted the bottle.

5 pills fell out of the bottle onto his palm, and then he shoved the 3 other pills back into the bottle.

"Stick your tongue out" he ordered you to do, and your tongue eventually stuck out of your mouth.

He popped one pill in his mouth, where he held and balanced the pill on his tongue.

While he was balancing one pill on his mouth, he placed the other pill on your tongue.

Your tongue crawled back into your mouth, trying to balance and hold the pill sitting there and not swallow it.

Shawn then put the cap back on the pill bottle and twisted the cap over and over again until it was shut, then sat the pill bottle on the nightstand.

He then grabbed the Zima can on the nightstand and pulled it up to him, where he put the can to his lips and gulped that drink down, gulping it like it was soda.

That pill was being washed down and now traveling down his esophagus thanks to that 90's alcohol.

You could see and hear his throat muscles gulping that alcohol down.

Since Shawn's doing that, you put the margarita bottle up to your mouth and started gulping and chugging down some of that margarita, where it washed down that pill you had on your mouth.

Once your pill was now traveling down to your stomach, you had to ask him.

"Shawn" you said "Y'want a drink of this margarita?"

You pointed to that margarita bottle with your index finger.

He then grabbed the bottle by its shaft, your fingers slipping out of the shaft's grip, and he gulped down some of that alcohol too, tilting his head back as he gulped it down.

He then raised his head up and handed you the bottle, where you moved the cork to the bottle's hole and shut the bottle up, that way it won't spill.

You then walked on your knees over to the cooler and the nightstand close to each other, where you put the margarita bottle in the cooler, then pulled the light's switch on the nightstand, turning off the lights.

Shawn had crawled his body below his chest under the blanket and comforter, resting the back of his head on the pillow, whereas you crawled close to him on the mattress, crawling under the comforter and thin blanket, those 2 things covering under your shoulders.

You snuggled up close to Shawn, wrapping one of your arms behind his back.

"I love you" you whispered to him.

"I love you too" he replied, pulling his face into your lips kissing your lips.

While the two of you were huddled and cuddling next to each other, the two of you kissed each other quite a bit on the lips, before the two of you eventually drifted off to sleep.

Epilogue: Pretty soon, you did snort coke, speed and some of Shawn's pills off of his back.

Triple H was worried about you being addicted to drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. He said that if you got clean and sober from those things, he'd marry you.

You did eventually get sober for him, going to rehab and leaving clean and sober, never doing drugs or smoking cigarettes again, and only drinking alcohol occasionally, but he didn't marry you, which is a shame, 'cuz he was hottttttttttttt in late 1997/early 1998.

Him not marrying you until 2004 made you doubt your love for him.

________________________________________________________________

I’m gonna be honest: I’ve never done drugs, though I do know what cocaine does to your body.

Also, the reason I didn’t make Shawn do cocaine, speed, etc. in this fanfic is because I think he probably never did those things.

#shawn michaels #wwf #1997 #90s #shawn michaels x fem reader

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marjansmarwani · 4 years ago

Text

You Can Learn to Love (Again)

A Tarlos Teacher AU // 14.3K

[Read on ao3]

TK Strand needs a fresh start. He needs to get as far away from the memories and temptations of NYC as he possibly can so when he finds an opening at a prestigious high school in Austin, he jumps at the chance.

As things fall into place he is surprised to find just how well he fits into Austin; how well this new life he built for himself suits him. There’s only one complication: another (insanely attractive) English teacher by the name of Carlos Reyes whose existence does not fit into TK’s carefully constructed plans. The universe, however, seems to have another plan entirely.

Or, the Teacher AU absolutely no one asked for.

Welcome to the most self-indulgent thing I have ever written! I had a good time writing it and I ended up really liking it though, and I hope you do too. Huge shoutout to @officerrxyes for helping me with the edits and putting it up me throughout the entire process.

-----

This is not how he had wanted to start his first day. He had been hoping to make a good impression, maybe make it through the first week without drawing too much attention to himself.

The universe had other plans, it seemed.

It had started with the traffic. He was still new to the area and had severely underestimated how heavy traffic was in this city (really, who knew?) Thankfully he had been nervous enough that he had left his apartment almost an hour earlier than he should have had to for a 4-mile drive, which had gotten him here with about 10 minutes to spare.

If it had just been that, it would have been fine. He could have shaken it off, gotten into his classroom and been ready to face the day with plenty of time before his students showed up. But no, it couldn’t be that simple. Instead, he was stuck here, in his current predicament.

By the time he arrived there was not a parking spot to be found. He had anxiously circled the parking lot twice before spotting an empty space miraculously close to the front doors. He thought maybe his luck had finally changed - until he tried to open his door. The car next to him was parked so close that he could barely even get his door more than an inch let alone wide enough to get out. He glanced over to the passenger side to find that car was almost as close. He banged his head against the steering wheel in frustration. Of course. Of fucking course - he had moved across the country, managed to get a job in one of the best high schools in the state, and now he was going to blow it because he was trapped in his car. Typical.

He forced himself to take a deep, calming breath before examining the situation again. There might just be enough room on the passenger side to open the door and squeeze out. Then he would just have to wait long enough that the other cars would be gone before he tried to leave at the end of the day. Totally doable — he just had to climb over the center counsel. He examined the layout and sighed. There was no way to do this gracefully. He took a silent moment to mourn his nice professional wrinkle-free first-day outfit before he resigned himself to the inevitable.

He had known it was not going to be a graceful process, but he had still underestimated exactly how awkward it would be. He cleared the counsel and got one foot on the ground outside the passenger door before carefully sliding himself out, careful not to let his door hit the car beside him. Once he had both feet on the ground he reached back in to grab his bag, which he pulled out before closing the door and walking to the back of the car. Once he was free of the confined space he took a deep breath as he smoothed out his clothes, wiping away any wrinkles.

“That was pretty impressive,” someone noted, voice full of amusement.

TK spun around to find an incredibly attractive man standing behind him, looking him over with a raised eyebrow. TK wanted to shoot back something clever but instead he tripped over his words, stuttering through half-formed thoughts before he blurted out “thanks.”

Inwardly, he groaned. Because this morning hadn’t been bad enough - now he was a stuttering mess in front of this guy who possibly had the most gorgeous eyes TK had ever seen and had just used those eyes to watch TK climb out of his own car like a contortionist. He was really winning today.

“Anytime,” the stranger returned with a grin. They stood there, not saying anything for a few more moments until the stranger continued, “Well I guess I should,” he trailed off gesturing towards the building. TK nodded vaguely before a glance at his watch pulled him back to reality, “Oh, yeah. Me too.”

“Well, I hope you have a good first day. My name is Carlos, by the way.”

“TK,” he offered, plastering on what he hoped was a charming smile.

Carlos grinned at him, “I’ll see you around, TK.”

And with that, he was gone. TK watched him walk away until the snap of the door closing behind him dragged him back to the present. He glanced at his watch again only to see that he only had two minutes before he would officially be late for his first day.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself before hiking his bag up in his shoulder and sprinting towards the door.

------

“Don’t forget to get those syllabi signed!” TK called to the retreating backs of his second-period freshman class. “Whether or not you think it’s stupid does not change the fact that it is an easy grade!”

This earned a few chuckles from the students still gathering their things and he flashed a grin at them. Despite the rough start, the morning has actually gone pretty well. His first two classes had gone smoothly and the kids seemed like a good bunch. He was optimistic about the year. Now he was looking at his first prep period of the day and since there was no grading to tackle yet he figured this was as good of a time as any to try to get the lay of the land, so to speak. Plus, he needed to find the copier. He had printed out the syllabi for the first day on his home printer but there was no way he was going to keep doing that. He fully intended to use the school provided resources, thank you very much.

He was just about to grab his ID and keys and head out in pursuit of a copy machine or faculty room when someone stepped into his classroom. TK recognized him but couldn’t put a name to the face.

“Hey Mr. Strand, I just wanted to stop by to see how your first day was going. I’m Judd Ryder, one of the Assistant Principals.”

TK smiled at him, crossing over to shake his hand, “I remember you, you were on my interview committee, right?”

He nodded, “That’s right. I was pretty impressed by you, I think you’ll do great things here.”

“That’s very kind of you to say, I hope I can live up to it,” TK responded, a little taken aback by the praise.

Mr. Ryder shrugged, “I was impressed by your thoughts on curriculum, but really I think you’re going to do a good job connecting to the students. You’ve got the freshman this year and they need that. That connection might be the difference between failure and success for some of them.”

TK nodded, unsure of how to respond. He fiddled with his lanyard for a moment before the AP laughed, shaking his head; “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump all that on you - my wife is always telling me I don’t need to voice every thought that pops into my head and, well clearly that’s a problem for me.”

TK relaxed and smiled at the older man, “It’s fine, it’s nice to hear such good things, it’s just the first day and all—a lot to take in, you know?”

Ryder nodded, “I hear that. Anything I could help with?”

“Actually, yeah—any chance you could point me towards a copier? My printer at home will never recover if I try to do much more with it.”

“Sure thing, I’ll take you there. It’s on my way anyways,” he said over TK’s protests, “no trouble at all.”

They step into the hallway and once TK is sure the door to his classroom is shut and locked behind him they move down the hall, back towards the main hallway. Judd keeps up a steady stream of conversation all the way and TK nods and makes noises of agreement where necessary. It’s not that he doesn’t like Judd, he’s just not used to such an amicable relationship with administrators. It had never been like that in any of his previous schools. He liked the feeling of familiarity but knew that it would be a while before he ever completely bought into it. He was much more likely to err on the side of polite professionalism.

They had arrived at the faculty room now and as TK went to open the door it swung open as another teacher stepped out. He was a little older than TK and his eyes went wide as he halted inches from colliding with him. Judd laughed from behind TK, “Well I was going to say you two should meet at some point, so I guess now is as good a time as any. TK Strand, meet Paul Strickland, one of our Earth Science teachers. He’s also your neighbor.”

Paul grinned and stuck out his hand, “it’s good to meet you, man. I was going to stop by later on, but bumping into each other works too I guess.”

TK chuckled and took the offered hand, “I suppose it does. So you’re my neighbor, huh?”

Paul nodded, “And part of the grade level team. You’ll actually be seeing the rest of us in a bit—we have common planning 5th period.”

TK nodded, he had noticed that on the schedule. “Cool, well, I’ll see you then. In the meantime, I should get some copies done while I have a chance.”

“Don’t use tray 3—it always jams.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Don’t mention it; I know how much it sucks to have to spend your entire prep clearing out a paper jam.”

“Still, I appreciate it.”

Paul nodded and then with another smile and a wave to Judd, he was gone. They watched him go for a second before Judd spoke again, “You have a solid team to work with in your wing, I’m sure you’ll all get along fine.”

“I think you might be onto something,” TK agreed. Then, with another thanks, he stepped into the faculty room, leaving the Assistant Principal behind.

---

Two periods later and TK was starting to remember how exhausting the first week of school was. The endurance it took to do this all day was nothing to scoff at, and each year in September it needed to be built up again. Somehow each year, he managed to forget that. As the last of the 4th-period stragglers filed out he sank into his desk chair and leaned back, allowing himself to take a deep breath. All he wanted to do was sleep for a week, but he still had common planning, hall duty, one more class, and an apartment full of boxes waiting to be unpacked. Sleep was a luxury he couldn’t afford right now.

A knock at his door wrenched him from his fantasies of peaceful sleep. He jumped to his feet, blinking the exhaustion out of his eyes as he looked towards the door to find Paul and two others standing on the threshold.

“The first week is always the hardest, isn’t it?” Paul noted as he invited himself into the room, the other two at his heels.

TK nodded, only cutting off for a yawn, “You could say that,” he finally got out.

Paul gave him a sympathetic grin before turning to his two companions. “Guys, this is TK Strand, the new English teacher. TK,” he said turning to face him, “this is Marjan Marwani and Mateo Chavez, Math and Social Studies teachers respectively.”

TK gave them each a nod and a smile. “So, we’re the ninth grade team?”

“One of them,” Marjan confirmed, settling onto one of the desks. “So you better get used to us - we’re stuck together and you get to see our lovely faces every day for this common planning period.”

“Where do we meet for that, by the way?”

“Your room of course,” Marjan said with a raised eyebrow, “the newbie always hosts.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “She’s kidding,” he informed TK, “but we do usually meet in here because there are more tables so it’s easier to spread out.”

“Fine with me,” TK replied with a shrug, “you guys are more than welcome.”

The others smiled their thanks before Mateo spoke up.

“So TK,” he asked in what was clearly meant to be a casual tone, “how long have you been teaching?”

TK raised an eyebrow, “This is my 4th year, why?”

“Damn it,” Mateo swore mournfully as Marjan let out a bright burst of laughter.

When TK shot Paul a confused look he stifled his own laughter long enough to explain, “Mateo here is our probie. He’s only in his second year and he’s desperately hoping to find someone lower on the totem pole than him. You being new to the district and pretty young, he thought maybe he had a chance.”

Now TK grinned outright as he turned his gaze back to Mateo, “sorry to disappoint you probie, but I already put in my time as the newbie. You have my sympathies though.”

Mateo pouted as the other two laughed lightly at him. TK shook his head fondly and sat on one of the desks to survey this group—his new team.

As Marjan crossed to Mateo to ruffle his hair and Paul rolled his eyes at the pair while not quite being able to hide his smile, something settled in TK’s gut. They were going to get along just fine. More than that, TK had a feeling that as long as he had this group at his side he’d be fine. Maybe, despite the disastrous beginning, this year might not be the disaster he feared after all.

---

After the first day, things went pretty smoothly. He’d settled into a routine and beyond the usual unpredictable nature of teenagers, he had everything under control. He was feeling pretty confident about this change—for once he may have actually made the right choice. He wanted to savor that feeling, but there was still one more unknown element to his work life that he hadn’t gotten to experience yet: the department meeting. So when Thursday rolled around he waved goodbye to the rest of his team and set off to find room 306.

If his past experience was anything to go on this meeting would likely be nothing more than a waste of time. Just something they are mandated to do where they talk about goals and test scores and analyze data without actually accomplishing anything actionable. But it was still something new; a potential disaster waiting around the corner for him. He’s almost convinced that’s what it’s going to be too - everything else is going far too well. Something has to give at some point.

He found the room and entered cautiously; scanning the room as he took an empty seat. Everyone else is chatting amongst themselves and while a few sent him curious glances as he entered, for the most part everyone is minding their own business. He was so focused on surveying the room that he almost jumped when the chair next to him was pulled out and someone slid into the seat beside him. He looked over to see a woman smiling at him warmly, “You must be TK Strand,” she said by way of greeting.

He nodded and her smile somehow grew as she stuck out her hand, “I’m Grace Ryder, one of the 10th grade English teachers and yes, Judd Ryder is my husband,” she confirms.

TK chuckled as he took her hand. Apparently, his surprise at hearing her name was more evident than he had thought, “It’s nice to meet you Grace, and I’m afraid I don’t have a very good poker face.”

She laughed lightly and shook her head, “No, you do not. I can’t say I blame you though - new school, first department meeting, and someone comes up and knows your name - I’d be flustered too. But my husband has mentioned you so I figured I’d check-in, make sure you weren’t left out for the sharks. They do love fresh meat.”

TK raised an eyebrow, “It’s not that bad, is it?”

“They like a laugh, but from everything I’ve heard I think you’ll do just fine.”

TK was going to ask what she meant by that when her expression shifted again as she spotted something over TK’s shoulder.

“They’re not all bad though,” she said with a smile. “In fact, here’s one you should meet. Reyes!” The last part was directed at someone behind TK. He turned to see who Grace was intent on him meeting and froze.

“TK,” Grace was saying as the man walked over, “This is Carlos Reyes, one of the Senior English teachers and an all-around good egg.”

Carlos chuckled and TK felt a shock run through his body at how wonderful of a sound it was.

“You’re too nice to me Grace,” Carlos was saying as he bent down to give her a quick one-armed hug.

Grace swatted at him, “I am exactly as nice to you as you deserve. Carlos, this is TK Strand - the new Freshman English teacher.”

Carlos turned his smile on TK, who was fairly certain he was going to melt in this very spot from the warmth of it, “We’ve met, actually—in passing. I didn’t know you were in the department, how’s it been so far?”

“Good, it’s been good,” he managed to splutter out after a few moments and the mortifying realization that he had been quiet for too long and Grace and Carlos were both looking at him.

Carlos kept smiling at him, “That’s good to hear. I’m sure I’ll see you around but feel free to let me know if you need anything. I’m in room 214.”

TK nodded and then with a wave, Carlos was gone. TK shook himself from his stupor to find Grace giving him a pitying look, “Oh honey,” was all she said. Her voice was low, but it was clear she was suppressing laughter.

“What?” TK demanded, even as he could feel a blush creeping up his cheeks. Grace just shook her head and let some of the laughter escape. He turned away from her petulantly but she reached out and put a comforting hand on his arm.

“I’m sorry dear,” she said through her laughter, “I’m not making fun of you, really. I can’t say I can blame you either; he is quite something.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he responded stiffly.

“Yes, I’m sure you don’t,” Grace said, making an effort to match his tone. He rolled his eyes and shot her an exasperated look but she just kept chuckling quietly even as the meeting started.

It was good to know he had been right about this meeting being the disaster he had been waiting for—it was just not the kind he had anticipated.

----

The days marched on and more and more it felt like any other school year. TK had fallen into a routine; he had found his stride. He had found his footing with his students; he had found friends in his team. This change—the new job, the new school, the new state—was going so much better than he had anticipated. When he had sent in the application, it had been on a whim. He had been floundering in the shambles of what had been and desperate for a direction, a way out. This job had seemed like a desperate hope; a future he could only dream of surrounded by the wreckage of his old hopes and plans. He had just needed a point to aim for, an exit sign to direct him out of this mess. He had never expected it to actually work.

But against all odds and his own firmly held beliefs he made it work, he hadn’t failed. It was an exciting prospect, but also a terrifying one. With things going this well, it was only a matter of time before the proverbial other shoe dropped. He does everything he can to prevent that eventuality. He works hard, throwing himself into every lesson plan and every assignment. He tackles any administrative task as soon as possible, never letting anything sit on his desk. Above all, he takes a wide berth around room 214. Carlos’s smile may live in his head rent-free, but he can’t afford a distraction. Especially not one like him —one so objectively perfect. He’s not ready for that and to be so close to the possibility would break his still-healing heart.

He almost welcomes the distraction of his traditional beginning of the year benchmark essay—right up until he gets a look at the stack awaiting grading. He is in the middle of the first period’s stack when the rest of the team walked in for common planning.

“It’s only the second week of school,” Mateo noted, “isn’t it a little early to be assigning essays?”

“No,” TK explained, looking up from the paper he was reading, “because it’s my job to get them to high school level writing by the end of the year for the sake of all of the other English teachers and I need to know where they are at now so I know what to focus on.”

Marjan leaned on the corner of his desk and poked at one of the piles apprehensively, “Learn anything yet?”

TK sighed wearily as he circled yet another use of “bc” and left a comment indicating that abbreviations may have their uses, but they did not belong in academic writing. “Yes,” he said, looking up from the paper before him, “I have learned that we have a lot of work to do.”

Mateo chuckled and Marjan winced sympathetically. Paul, who had grabbed one of the essays off the stack and was skimming it, raised an eyebrow.

“I do not envy you, man,” he noted as he replaced the paper, “and I thought trying to hammer the format of a lab report into their heads was hard. This is next level.”

“Academic writing is something completely different from what they’re used to,” TK pointed out reasonably, “It’s my job to teach them how to do it,” he paused here as he glanced back down at the paper before him. “Doesn’t make it any less painful though,” he said with another sigh.

The others settled down at and on the desks nearest to his and watched as he skimmed through another paper, pausing occasionally to make a comment or correction. After a few minutes he looked up at them, eyebrows raised.

“Are you all just going to sit there and watch me grade these or…”

Mateo shrugged and Marjan grinned back at him, “We’re offering you moral support, didn’t you know?”

He scowled and grabbed an old worksheet from the table beside him and balled it up to throw at her. She dodged it expertly and grinned even wider. Paul sighed from a nearby desk.

“Now children,” he admonished, voice filled with exasperation as he rolled his eyes at their antics.

“She started it,” TK pointed out reasonably. Paul shook his head and stood up.

“I think that as long as we can agree that there are no pressing matters to be discussed we can all take this time to work on our own grading, in our own classrooms. Any objections?”

Marjan looked like she was going to say something, but at TK’s narrowed eyes she sighed and shook her head.

“Good,” Paul declared with a nod. “Good luck with all those, man,” he added to TK as he headed to the door. TK wearily waved his thanks and then they were gone. He leaned back in his chair and sighed, rubbing at his tired eyes. He loved what he did really, but sometimes when faced with the stack of 120 essays and the reminder that other content areas didn’t have to do this, he sometimes regretted not following his father’s footsteps. Firefighters didn’t have to grade essays.

Inevitably, he would recall all of the reasons he didn’t join the family business: the long hours, the danger, the toll it had taken on his father over the years both physically and emotionally. Then he would think of all the reasons he loved teaching anyways and go back to work. This time was no exception. The only difference was that as he picked up his pen again to continue grading he felt a pang of guilt in his chest. He should really call his father. It had been too long. He knew that his dad was trying to give him space, trying to give him the time he needed to adjust on his own terms; but his dad had been the one thing in New York he hadn’t needed distance from. He was the one thing he had regretted leaving. He needed to call him - he owed him that much. More than that, it would be nice to hear his voice. After he finished this class’ essays, he promised himself, he’d take a break and call his dad during his lunch.

Fate seemed to have a different plan though as the next thing TK knew students were entering his classroom. He glanced up at the clock in surprise, only to find that he had worked straight through his prep and lunch without even noticing it. He sighed and put down his pen, standing to go greet his students at the door. His dad would have to wait, it seemed. He plastered on a smile and got ready to start the lesson.

At some point, Marjan appeared in his doorway, a sheepish look on her face. He nodded to her and instructed the kids to read the next section in the text on their own and be ready to share some thoughts from it before he crossed the room to meet her.

“What’s up?” he asked, expression furrowed.

She held up the papers in her hand, “I forgot I promised the SPED teacher I would get these 408s sighed during our common planning. I have all the documents that you can look over later, but for right now could you just sign so I can get these back to her?”

He smirked at her as he took the papers; flipping through them to see what students he was signing for, “How could you have possibly forgotten? Were you so busy doing something else that maybe it slipped your mind?”

“Haha,” she responded drily, expression far from impressed. He shook his head and chuckled, but pulled a pen out of his pocket and used the wall beside the door to sign his name on the appropriate lines. He went to hand them back to her, but pulled up just short and held them just out of her reach, “do I have your word that you will provide me with the proper documentation for all these students so I can be assured I did not just commit fraud by signing these?”

She rolled her eyes at him, “Yes, I will bring them by at the end of the day.” With that she held out her hand for the papers, which he passed back to her. Then she was gone, and he turned back to his class.

“Alright, I asked you to have things to share, so who’s going to break the ice?”

There was the typical teenage silence before one of the girls in the back raised her hand tentatively, but not before glancing at her friends.

“Aniyah, what do you think?” TK asked her with a grin, perching himself on his desk.

“Mr. Strand, are you and Ms. Marwani dating?”

TK blinked at her. He glanced around at the rest of the kids in the room, none of whom seemed surprised by the question. “No,” he answered slowly, “why would you ask that?”

She shrugged awkwardly, glancing at her friends for support, “You guys just seem really close, and almost like you’re flirting?”

He shrugged, “No, we’re just friends, definitely not dating—not that it is any of your business.”

One of the boys in the front smirked at him, “I don’t know Mister, you two seem pretty friendly, I think maybe you’re in denial.”

TK met the kid’s eyes and raised a single eyebrow as he said drily, “I can assure you she’s not my type.”

Most of the kids nodded sagely, but a few seemed puzzled. He rolled his eyes and stood up, “Okay, ‘discuss Mr. Strand’s love life’ time is over. Don’t think you’re going to distract me enough that I forget about the homework. Anyone else want to share any thoughts on the reading—you know, the class work; that thing we’re here for?”

A few hands raised but even as he called on them he was chuckling to himself. Marjan was going to love this.

----

As time progresses TK sticks to his plan: do his work, make a good impression, avoid Carlos. He’s successful in that last goal too, for a while. But of course, nothing good can last and one October afternoon in the faculty room, his streak is broken.

He crossed the room towards the mailboxes without glancing around and didn't think to check his surroundings until a familiar voice called for his attention.

“Hey TK, how have things been? You settling in alright?”

He froze, slowly glancing up from the flyer about the can drive he had been reading. He knew before he saw (there was no mistaking that voice) but his heart still skipped a beat just the same.

“Carlos, hey. Yeah, it’s been great actually. No problems at all.”

Carlos grinned at him and TK had to remind himself how to breathe. “Glad to hear it. Oh,” he said suddenly, “this is Michelle Blake, one of the school social workers. And my best friend,” he added with a roll of his eyes when Michelle, apparently, gave him a pointed look.

She grinned at his addition before turning to face TK. She looked him up and down appraisingly before speaking, “It’s nice to finally meet you TK, Carlos has mentioned you.”

TK flicked his gaze to Carlos who was very intently studying the rice in his lunch and studiously avoiding both their gazes. “Nothing bad, I hope,” he said lightly.

Internally, he was panicking.

“Definitely not. Nothing but the truth I’m sure, and the truth was all good.”

“Right,” TK said with uncertainty. He waited, but Michelle did not speak again. “Well,” he said eventually, “I should get going. I just wanted to grab these flyers and then I was going to try to use the rest of my prep to try and put together a mini-unit for Halloween.”

At this, Carlos looked up, “What are you thinking?”

TK shrugged, “I was leaning towards Poe. Always a classic, and in my experience, kids have always liked his stuff.”

“I have some materials you could use, if you’d like. I’ve done that before, so I have most of the stuff in one of my binders.”

“Really?” he didn’t even bother to hide the surprise in his voice.

Carlos nodded, “Sure. You can stop by at the end of the day, if you’d like.”

TK hesitated. One the one hand, there was the pact he had made with himself: no distractions. On the other, there was a unit he wouldn’t have to plan. Which meant more prep time to spend on grading, which meant less work to take home.

“That'd be great, thanks. Room 214, right?”

As if he could have forgotten.

Carlos nodded in confirmation, “See you later then?”

“Absolutely.”

Then with a smile to the pair, TK was gone. He didn’t realize he was still grinning until he ran into Paul outside of his classroom. The other teacher looked at him suspiciously, “what has you looking so chipper?”

“Nothing,” TK said too hastily, judging by Paul’s look, “one of the other English teachers has materials I can use for a unit I wanted to do so as long as they work out, that’s an entire unit I don’t have to plan.”

Paul nodded appreciatively, “That’s a lucky break.”

TK nodded again before excusing himself and stepping into his own classroom. The rest of the day flew by and before he knew it he was seeing his last class out the door. Once they were gone and the hallway was mostly clear of students, TK grabbed his things and headed up to room 214. There’s a trophy case down the hall and he stops and anxiously checks his reflection before approaching the door to room 214. It’s open but TK hovered at the threshold nervously, knocking on the doorframe to get Carlos’s attention. He looked up from his desk and the smile that spread across his face at the sight of TK nearly had him holding onto the doorframe for support.

“Hey,” he said in what he prayed was a normal voice, “I was just here for those files, if you still wanted to give them to me?”

“Actually, I’ve changed my mind and you can’t have them.”

“Oh,” TK said, “I’ll just go then, sorry for—”

“TK, I’m kidding,” Carlos assured him as he stood up from his desk. “I offered them, didn’t I? Besides, we’re working on college essays and applications; there won’t be any time for Poe this year.”

“That’s a shame,” TK noted as he took a few tentative steps inside the room, “but I’m sure they’ll appreciate it when they have their applications done.”

“That’s the hope,” Carlos agreed, “but right now they’re not too fond of me.”

TK chuckled and Carlos looked up from the bookshelf he was scanning to see TK still standing a few feet from the door. “I don’t bite,” he deadpanned, “you can come in.”

TK laughed nervously and crossed the room, coming to a halt several feet away from Carlos. The other man continued scanning the shelf and upon finding what he was looking for made a triumphant noise before turning to face TK, holding out a binder. TK raised an eyebrow and took it, glancing over at the shelves that were filled with neat rows of binders all clearly labeled.

“You are aggressively organized,” he noted.

Carlos chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck, “Yeah. I know it looks like a lot, but after switching grade levels a few times it’s the only way I can keep anything straight anymore.”

TK nodded as he slipped through the binder, “That’s fair. I used to have a lot of binders like that too, but I thankfully digitized them before I moved down here. I can’t imagine transporting all those across the country would have been fun.”

“No, I can’t imagine it would be. Guess it’s a good thing I have no intention of leaving.”

TK looked up from the binder to see Carlos studying him. He smiled at the other man, who returned it before settling onto the desk across from TK.

“I didn’t realize you were new to the area.”

TK nodded, “Just moved here from NYC about 2 weeks before school started.”

Carlos raised an eyebrow, “that’s ambitious.”

TK sighed and nodded. “Wouldn’t have been my first choice, but everything happened so fast. Thankfully everything has worked out pretty well so this may not be the horrific disaster I thought it would be.”

“That’s optimism for you,” Carlos observed dryly. “What brought you down here, if you don’t mind me asking.”

TK’s hand froze in its journey down the page he was reviewing as his other hand clenched the binder tightly.

“Just looking for a fresh start,” he said evenly, keeping his eyes firmly planted on the page before him and praying that Carlos could not hear the racing of his heart.

If Carlos noticed anything odd, he didn’t let on.

“That’s a big change. Did you come down here alone?”

“Just me, myself, and my boxes.”

“So why Austin then? I could be wrong, but it seems like a pretty big change from NYC.”

“I wanted to leave the city and try something new. I saw this opening here, researched the school, and decided it was worth a shot. What about you though,” he asked, switching gears and looking up from the binder, “Austin born and raised?”

“Yep, go Longhorns,” he said with forced enthusiasm. TK raised a skeptical eyebrow and Carlos pushed on, “never mind. So,” he continued, and TK noticed a change in his tone that had him looking up again, “leave anyone behind in New York?”

There was silence for a moment as their eyes met and they both knew what was really being asked.

“Just my dad.”

“Yeah, I only have my family too. But there’s a lot of them so that’s more than enough.”

TK smiled in spite of himself. “My mom’s in New York too, but she’s always traveling for work so really it’s always been just me and my dad. Honestly, leaving him there was the hardest thing about this move, and the only thing I regret.”

He paused in the wake of his words, surprised by how much he just shared with this near stranger but before he could dwell on it Carlos was giving him a reassuring smile that set his nerves at ease.

“Sounds like you’re close.”

“We are,” TK confirmed, voice growing softer as he thought about his dad. “He’s still my hero, always has been. He’s a firefighter, and I thought I wanted to be one when I was young too. But as I got older, I saw the toll it took on him and decided to take a different path. I still love and admire him for doing it though. I couldn’t picture him doing anything else.”

There was quiet in the room again. TK started to panic, thinking that maybe he shared too much (he still can’t believe he said any of that), but something about Carlos makes him feel so comfortable he hadn’t even noticed until the words were already out there. He’s about to apologize when Carlos speaks.

“I get that. My dad was a cop and it was the same way when I was growing up. He was larger than life and my hero; I wanted to be just like him. But then I got older and decided I didn’t like the reality of law enforcement as much as I had the concept. I decided I could do more good from inside a classroom and well, here we are.”

“Here we are,” TK agreed, “who would have thought?”

Carlos laughed appreciatively and the sound washed over TK with all the warmth of sunlight. He smiled back at him before turning his gaze back to the binder. The conversation flows easily between them and before TK knew it he caught a glance at his watch and let out a curse when he realized how late it had gotten. Carlos gave him a questioning look and TK gestured up at the clock, “We should have left ages ago. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hold you up; I’m sure you have things to do.”

“It’s fine, this was nice. Maybe if you stop by more often, we can chat in smaller increments. Otherwise I’m afraid this is just going to keep happening—I don’t think I’ll be able to let you go quickly if I don’t think there is a chance of it happening again within the next year.”

TK rolled his eyes, “Well excuse me for being busy settling into a new school.”

Which was a reasonable excuse. There is no way anyone would suspect he had been avoiding the other man (even though he absolutely had been).

Still, this had been nice.

He fingered the strap of his bag as he picked it up, “maybe we can continue this during lunch tomorrow? I’d like to actually ask you some questions about the materials, which is what I came here to do before we got sidetracked.”

Part of TK was praying he would say no.

Instead, he grinned, “sure, I’d like that. Until tomorrow then, Mr. Strand.”

“See you then, Reyes.”

And with a wave, he was gone.

His heart was still racing as he climbed into his car. He leaned against the seat and sighed. Operation avoid Carlos Reyes had officially crashed and burned. This was a terrible idea; he should find a reason to cancel tomorrow and go back to avoiding him as much as possible. This was a risk he didn’t need to be taking.

But even as he sat here, he couldn’t ignore the warm feeling of the aftermath of a pleasant conversation. His mind was shouting at him that this was a terrible idea, but he was having a harder time believing it with every passing second. His rules said no dating, but there was no reason they couldn’t be friends, right?

[Continue Reading on ao3]

#911 lone star #911 lone star fic #tarlos fic #my writing #userkimmy #userjilly #userac #usermaximus #sunshinestrand #lonestarbabe #lire-casander #bellakitse #sneetchestoo #reyesstrand #moviegeek03 #captainstennerstar #tarlosbuddie

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anneapocalypse · 5 years ago

Text

Season 17 is a Fixer-Upper

A many-decker compliment sandwich.

Preface

Hi folks. Welcome back.

It's time to put this thing to bed.

If you have not read my season 15 and season 16 essays, you may want to read those first as I will be building on what I wrote there.

Season 15 of Red vs. Blue was written and directed by Joe Nicolosi as a standalone story arc picking up ten months after the end of season 13. Season 16, sub-titled "The Shisno Paradox" was directed by Joe Nicolosi and written by Joe Nicolosi and Jason Weight, as the first part of a multi-season story arc jumping off, but not directly connected to, the events of season 15.

Then, a mere two days before season 17 premiered, it was announced that Joe was no longer the creative lead on RvB, a decision that had been made months earlier but apparently kept under wraps. Season 17, sub-titled "Singularity," was written by Jason Weight, with two episodes written by Miles Luna and with Miles credited as "Head of Writing." It was co-directed by Josh Ornelas and Austin Clark.

This marks the first time in RvB history that the show has switched creative leads in the middle of a story arc. I can only speculate as to why this is. In the announcement, it was stated that Joe had been pulled to take the lead on an upcoming Rooster Teeth project (as yet, unannounced). This could be sole reason. It is also possible this decision was made for creative reasons pertaining to RvB specifically. Though fan reception to season 16 was… mixed, to say the least, that is something that happens pretty every time the show changes creative leads and so I don't think fan reception alone would be enough to force a change. If there were creative reasons, I think they must have come from within the company itself. But I can't say for sure that there were, so that's all I have to say about that.

Henceforth I will be referring to these three seasons together as "The Time Travel Trilogy." This arc doesn't have an official name as yet, but Miles used that phrase at the RvB panel at RTX and I think this is as good a name as any. In this essay, I want to discuss season 17 primarily but also this arc as a whole. Singularity is, ironically, not a singularity; it is not a standalone season. It cannot be separated from season 16, or even from 15, and I am as interested in how it works as a conclusion and how the trilogy works as a whole, as I am in how Singularity works on its own. So we have a lot of ground to cover here, but if you've read my previous writing about this arc, you already know that.

These are my personal opinions, you're welcome to disagree, please be civil and back up your arguments if you're going to argue, et cetera. You know the drill.

So let's get into it.

Does the Plot Matter?

Eh, yes and no? Bear with me here. I’m getting this part out of the way first because to me it matters the least, but I think it still bears mentioning. I said last season that while I'm interested in plot, because I am absolutely one of those fans who likes plot and cares about the plot making sense, Red vs. Blue has always been a character-driven show, and the show as a whole really does stand or fall on its character arcs. So while I do want to talk about the plot, this is not going to be an essay full of worldbuilding nitpicks. I'm frontloading this so we can move on to what really matters to me, the characters.

Where the plot matters is insofar as it drives the characters to action and meaningful development, and for that we do need a story that is at least… semi-coherent? We need at least enough context for character actions to be meaningful. It's possible to accomplish this with a plot that is silly, even a little nonsensical in places, and the Blood Gulch Chronicles pretty much exemplify this.

And yes, Blood Gulch does have a plot. It's meandering and it's silly, but it is a plot, because the characters have wants and needs and things happen that create conflicts out of those wants and needs, driving characters to act, and to succeed or fail. It's easy to say that nothing happens in season 1, the joke being that it's just people standing around talking. It's funny. It's also not strictly true. Church's primary motivation in Blood Gulch is his desire to keep Tex safe; Tex neither wants nor needs to be kept safe, and her involvement in the Red versus Blue conflict creates the main tension for the season. The season-long tension is resolved when Tex is "killed" by a grenade, but also freed from her aggressive AI, O'Malley. When Tex returns as a "ghost" on a mission to hunt down and kill O'Malley, the season 1 tension is escalated to the main tension of the Blood Gulch arc as a whole. Side plots are introduced to give other characters development as well, like Tucker's Great Journey, but make no mistake, everything in Blood Gulch does tie back into the main tension in some way, that tension being Church and Tex's relationship and their conflicting motivations.

And we would not care so much about those people standing around talking if we didn't have some kind of plot to drive them to action, and to give us context in which to interpret those actions.

That is why plot matters in a character-driven story. That is its function.

Season 17 is the back half of the story arc 16 began. Although I'm referring to 15-17 as a trilogy for simplicity's sake, season 15 really is its own story. You could compare it to Recollections in the sense that season 6, while a part of the Recollections Trilogy, is also a self-contained story arc, though season 6's story does tie into the arc of 7-8 much more directly, so the comparison is imperfect. The characterization in season 15 is relevant, but Temple's plot is unrelated to the plot of 16 and 17 except insofar as it provides two critical jumping-off points: the time machine through which Chrovos is able to influence Donut, and Wash's injury which will serve as a motivating factor later on. The Shisno Paradox and Singularity constitute their own story arc, which for brevity I'm going to call the Shisno arc.

Does season 17 have enough plot coherence to drive meaningful character development? I think that it does, and I think we'll see that when we get into talking about characters.

Of course, the devil is, as they say, in the details.

Cosmology Lessons

So let me, uh… try to summarize what happens in this arc. I'm going to try and lay out the events, not as they unfold to us, the viewers, but as they actually happen, for reasons that should become clear.

The Shisno arc presents a cosmic conflict between a group of AI self-styled as "the Cosmic Powers" and their creator and nemesis, the AI Chrovos, whom they have confined behind a firewall styled as a "cage." Unbeknownst to them, one of the Cosmic Powers, Genkins, is in fact Chrovos—or more accurately, Genkins later becomes Chrovos after a black hole carries him back to the beginning of the universe and he exists in space for billions of years (a fact Genkins himself does not yet know). At some point, he creates the rest of the Cosmic Powers, and at some later point, they decide he's dangerous and imprison him behind a firewall. Somehow, from behind that firewall, he's still able to remotely make contact with and influence humans. And give them physical time machines. And make them immune to harm by any of the other AI.

Yeah, you see how this is starting to kind of fall apart here?

And we haven't even gotten to the Reds and Blues' involvement yet.

Anyway, the Reds and Blues are caught up in this conflict when Donut falls under the influence of Chrovos (somehow, involving Loco's time-powered drilling machine) and distributes time travel devices to his friends with the vague directive to "change the past" in order to fix the future. To provoke them to action, Genkins has traveled back in time to prevent the invention of pizza. When Kalirama, another Cosmic Power, shows up to stop them, the Reds and Blues escape into the past in groups of two, where they make a number of changes. After being stranded in the past by Doc in his O'Malley personality, Grif is approached by Huggins, a sentient light being who serves the Cosmic Powers, and she convinces him that Chrovos is the real enemy, and he needs to find his friends and take action.

Eventually the group reunite and meet the Cosmic Powers, who warn them against any further time travel and urge them to help stop Chrovos by strengthening his prison. (Which apparently they can't do themselves for some reason.) But when a personal conflict comes to a head, the Reds and Blues decide they must defy the Cosmic Powers and time travel one last time to prevent Wash's injury at Temple's base.

This action creates a paradox.

It turns out that a temporal paradox does not simply destroy the fabric of spacetime, but rather create cracks in Chrovos's "cage." Which is a firewall, because Chrovos is an AI, but it can also… protect humans? and also it's… made of time? Such that damaging the timeline damages the cage?

Yeah, here the plot starts to crumble again. But let's try to keep going.

So the Reds and Blues' future consciousnesses (is that a word?) have been sent back to relive their pasts, because… just because. Once they become aware of this, however, they will be able to travel freely along the period of the timeline between Blood Gulch and Wash's injury. Genkins, meanwhile, is also freely time-traveling and strategically possessing AI along the way (mostly but not limited to Church) to make changes and cause further paradoxes, with the goal of setting Chrovos (aka his future self, but I don't think he knows that yet) free. The period of time immediately after Wash's injury now exists as two alternate realities happening concurrently in the same timeline (a la Schrödinger's cat).

By making Wash conscious of the paradox, Donut is able to collapse the waveform, so to speak, and snap the timeline to the reality where Wash wasn't injured. Wash then proceeds to help him wake up the others in the past; Huggins rejoins them and scouts ahead in time to find the paradoxes Genkins has created so that our heroes can find them and fix them.

Genkins, realizing what's happening, returns to Chrovos to demand more of her power (whatever that means in practical terms) in order to stop the Reds and Blues on the grounds that once they're dealt with, Chrovos will be able to reabsorb their power (again, whatever that means), only it turns out he's tricked her and he intends to take that power for himself, a brilliant move except for the fact that Genkins is Chrovos, but again, Genkins doesn't seem to know that yet.

When our heroes return to the original paradox to redo Wash's injury, Genkins intervenes, freezes time, stops the bullet, sends them all back to Blood Gulch where they can no longer freely traverse time, the Reds and Blues impale him with that golf club we saw in season 16 which it turns out is also some kind of AI-subduing weapon, and they're all transported to The Labyrinth that protects Chrovos from escaping, and the Labyrinth is the same as the firewall, or maybe it's different, it's not really clear, but either way it torments them with their own desires and fears and oh my god this is all so squirrelly I'm getting exhausted just trying to summarize it, anyway they defeat the Labyrinth through the power of friendship, Donut figures out the truth about Genkins, Genkins leaps into a black hole that takes him back to the beginning of the universe and after existing for billions of years and developing a God complex, he will be imprisoned by the "children" he at some point created.

Meanwhile the Reds and Blues repair the last paradox and return to Chorus together to visit Wash in the hospital, the fucking END.

So, okay.

What you might have noticed along the way here (and the reason I bothered trying to summarize all of that) is that there are a lot of mechanics of the universe in general and the Cosmic Powers in specific that don't make a lot of sense and are never really explained.

It's never really clear in season 16 why the Cosmic Powers can physically summon objects and affect physical environments, and while we're told that their power has limits, it still kind of far surpasses what an AI should logically be able to do, at least without some kind physical technology at their disposal. There are fan theories about this, and they involve a lot of Halo lore, and you can certainly make something like that work for a Watsonian reading. I have some theories of my own. As it stands, a lot is left pretty thoroughly unexplained in the canon. We're left to just kind of accept that the Cosmic Powers can do stuff, a lot of stuff, but not unlimited stuff. Things like the Cosmic Powers' physical appearances can be explained by holographic projections, but not everything they do can be explained that way.

Things get more squirrelly in season 17, and I think the time-cage-firewall-thing is really the least sensical of all of it. Are they breaking the universe or just the cage? We don't know. Is the cage made of time and how would that even work? We don't know. What will actually happen if Chrovos gets free? We don't know. Why does creating a paradox send the Reds and Blues back to relive their lives and why can they now time travel freely without a time machine? We don't know! They just can, okay? Those are the rules now.

In fact, this is the main purpose of season 17's first episode: setting up the rules of the plot.

Or… more like resetting them.

Because most of that stuff was not established in season 16.

I'm My Own Grandpa: The Villain in Plain Sight

Here's something positive: Genkins as a villain works on every level for me. Yes, even though the plot doesn't make sense.

In season 16, the signs were pretty much there all along that Genkins was out of step with the rest of the Cosmic Powers, and yet he also gave off the vibe that he was just shit-talking because he didn't care, so I never committed any serious suspicion to him, which made his villainy enough of a surprise to be exciting, while foreshadowed enough to be satisfying. It's a great example of hiding your villain in plain sight and I think it's one of the things in season 16 that really works. In fact, I consistently like Joe's original characters, most of whom function better in the stories he tells than the core cast—the latter being part of the problem.

Genkins continues to work in season 17! I don't know if Genkins becoming Chrovos was planned from the start, but it works, and it's one of the things I like best about 17's plot. It's an elegant solution to Chrovos' origins and identity that doesn't take a huge amount of time or exposition to establish.

It also allows the Cosmic Powers a brief cameo in this season. Personally, I wasn't missing them, as I never got attached to any of them as characters and I think with only twelve episodes, focusing on the core cast was absolutely the right decision. But I know some fans did enjoy them, so it's good to have at least a moment of resolution on their end.

Course Correcting

The sheer quantity of exposition dump in episode 1 is the first clue that season 17 is going to be a "fix-it" season. I'll admit, I initially kind of hated episode 1, to the point that it clinched my decision not to watch the season as it aired. It is largely characters explaining the plot, and most of that explanation still doesn't make a lot of sense.

But what's noteworthy to me is that this episode is already overtly responding to season 16 criticism. When Genkins says,

What should we do with the Shisno? And incidentally, who named them Shisno anyway? It's a derogatory term for 'human' right?

That could be something I said. Actually I'm pretty sure it is something I said.

And there are a few other things just in Episode 1 that seem like direct responses to fan reception of season 16. "A hammer than makes prisons! Ridiculous!" Genkins declares, kicking last season's McGuffin off into space. Even female!Chrovos seems like a response to fan disappointment with Kalirama's minor role in the story.

This is just the beginning. Throughout season 17, we will see a focus on reframing, repairing, and resolving things from the previous season—most notably characterization and character relationships.

Look, the plot is a mess. It is dumb as rocks. But it is doing its best to drive motivated character development while staying functionally continuous with season 16, and as a lode-bearing feature, that is what the plot of this season needs to do.

Also, the ending pretty much explicitly says that what they had to do to save the day was to in-universe retcon all of season 16, which is from an in-universe perspective pretty squirrelly and from an out-of-universe perspective really funny.

But the biggest reason I'm cool with the plot nonsense this season is that for the first time in this arc, no one is holding the idiot ball. There is no point at which conflict feels forced, or at which I feel like anyone is acting uncharacteristically stupid, petty, or mean in the interest of furthering the plot. Characteristically so, sure! It's Red vs. Blue. But never unbelievably. Never to a degree that it feels contrived. It does make use of the "time-traveling character thinks out loud in front of other characters who don't know what's going on despite the fact that it might really fuck things up to do so," which gives me terrible secondhand embarrassment, but y'know. It's a dialogue-based show. I get why it's in there. And it doesn't end up mattering at all, so.

This season's plot is dumb but functional. And most importantly, the characters are driving the plot, not the other way around.

So, speaking of which, who's flying the plane?

The Protagonist Problem, Revisited

There’s been a lot of discussion these past three seasons about protagonists. I’ve discussed it myself in both of my previous full season essays. I think this comes up so much now because season 15 lacked a clear lead among the core cast, leading fans to ask: who could have been the protagonist? Who should be? Who would we like to see in the future?

The Time Travel Trilogy is unique among Red vs. Blue arcs in that it does not have one overarching protagonist. Blood Gulch has Church, Recollections has Wash, Freelancer has Carolina, and Chorus has Tucker. The Time Travel Trilogy has Dylan, then sort of Grif, then Donut. Not only are these protagonists and their arcs disconnected from one another, they aren’t all complete arcs. Dylan’s and Donut’s are; Grif’s is not. We’ll get to that.

A lot of fans have wanted to see Red Team get more attention. I think the Red Team characters are just as deserving of character development as any other characters, if that’s the question.

But I think maybe from a storytelling standpoint, which characters deserve to be protagonists is the wrong question.

Sarge and Caboose are great characters, and they would both make awful protagonists for almost any serious storyline. This isn’t a failing of the characters. It doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of attention or screen time, even of character growth or backstory. But neither of them have the kind of motivation that lends itself well to driving a serious plot. They both have excellent supporting motivation, which can either impede or assist the rest of our heroes in their progress depending on the mood. But they aren’t the right characters to be driving serious plot. I don't want to say they could never, under any circumstances, be protagonists, because then that just sounds like a challenge—but in both cases you would need a very specific kind of story to make it work, and it would need to be tailored to the character and probably not take itself too seriously.

And there was a time when I would've said the same for Donut. But that's changed, and I think it's changed for the better. We'll get to that! I have a lot of positive things to say about Donut's character development.

First I want to talk about Red Team in general.

Red Team Problems

The expression "Blue Team Problems" exists on this show for a reason. Blue Team have traditionally been the purveyors of Plot in this show, thanks to their more direct connections to Project Freelancer. Blue Team had Church and by extension Tex (twice). Wash was adopted onto Blue Team, and later Carolina (and yes, all respect to Red Team Carolina headcanons but canonically she is a Blue). Tucker took up the protagonist mantle on Chorus, and that was far from Tucker's first time driving plot; as Grif once put it, "I'm not the one who grabs swords and fucks aliens."

Red Team's avenue into the plot has traditionally been simply by way of their proximity to Blue Team. For the first ten seasons, the plot revolves around Project Freelancer, and none of the Reds have any personal connection to Project Freelancer beyond being sim troopers. It's no surprise that for those first ten seasons our protagonists were characters with very direct connections to Freelancer: Church, Wash, and Carolina. Tucker only had his turn once the story moved away from Freelancer.

So it definitely makes sense to see this as a permanent move away from Freelancer-adjacent characters driving the plot, and toward letting the sim trooper characters have a go. And the truth is, we're kind of running out of Blues here. The only surviving Blues who haven't already been protagonists are Caboose and Kaikaina. Caboose is a great supporting character; his motivations as they stand now are a bit too one-note to be protagonist material. Kaikaina's not out of the question, but she's also been around the least out of the core cast, and her VA's availability has not historically been guaranteed, so at present I think she too works best as a supporting character.

Thus it makes perfect sense that we might start taking a closer look at Red Team.

If Tucker was the obvious choice for a sim trooper protagonist on Blue Team because of his prior capability and character development, Grif is pretty much that to a T on Red Team. Prior to the Time Travel Trilogy, Grif's had easily the most character growth of anyone on Red Team.

Simmons has plenty to work with in terms of motivation, with his array of anxieties and personal hang-ups, but he's kind of noticeably lacking in meaningful growth (something fans have very much noticed). He still has Dad issues, he's still afraid to talk to girls, he's still kind of a kiss-ass. If anything about Simmons has noticeably changed beyond the general increase in capability across all the Blood Gulch characters, it's his relationship to Grif, wherein we began to see signs as early as season 6 that they really do care about each other. But when it comes to Simmons himself, his growth has been pretty thin thus far.

Donut, as of season 13, had seen… about the same amount of meaningful growth as Simmons, which is to say almost none, except that Donut had even less screentime and never got a promotion to Captain. (We'll get to Donut in a bit. We'll talk about our boy plenty, don't you worry.)

Even Sarge has seen some growth over the years. His most dramatic character moment has been the revelation that his military career was a lie, but the most noticeable growth over time has to be his willingness to work with the Blues and his increased affection for his own men. He even learns to care about people outside his own team; remember that it's Sarge who remarks with distaste on the "thousands of deaths" they would allow to happen should they accept the mercs' offer of safe passage off Chorus. Sarge is still Sarge: he's still gruff, he still longs for a good fight even knowing the Red versus Blue conflict is fake, he still occasionally jokes about killing Grif. But he does show a bit of increased self-awareness and the wisdom to know a real fight when he sees one. For all that, though, I still think Sarge is similar to Caboose in that his motivations are fairly one-note, and he works best as a supporting character.

Grif is characterized early on as the lazy one on Red Team—the one who is the least motivated and takes things the least seriously. But over many seasons we see things that challenge the surface-level reading of Grif: the fact that he's promoted to Sergeant as soon as he's transferred away from Blood Gulch (and Sarge), his surprising willingness to go on a mission to the desert with Caboose, his own declaration that he's not actually lazy but simply doesn't want to take orders from people he doesn't respect. In fact, in hindsight, it's easy to see Grif as the savviest person on Red Team with regard to their situation. Most of Red Team is characterized by taking themselves and their situation extremely seriously even when no one else does. But it's Grif who remarks, right from day one, that this, "fighting a bunch of blue guys," is not what he signed up for. Grif realizes intuitively, before anyone else on Red Team, that their mission does not matter. When something matters—such as Caboose potentially wandering off and getting himself killed—suddenly Grif cares, even if he'd be loathe to admit it.

This tension between Grif's actual motivations and his distaste for meaningless conflict and authority reaches an interesting turning point on Chorus, when Grif is forced into a leadership position with actual stakes. Where Tucker's internal conflict is his fear of failure, Grif's fear is of becoming the kind of leader he himself cannot respect. This culminates in Grif's unexpected agreement with Tucker's rescue plan. Unexpected by Simmons, at any rate. If you remembered season 7 Grif, you might not have been surprised by this at all.

Simmons: That's your plan? We just show up and wing it? That's the worst plan I've ever—

Grif: All right. Let's do it.

Simmons: What? Grif? You wanna do this?

Grif: Yeah. So what?

Simmons: So what? You never wanna do anything. Ever!

Grif: Simmons, I've been following orders I never liked for years.

Simmons: No, you haven't. You disobey orders all the time!

Grif: Well, I don't wanna be the guy who gives shitty orders that nobody wants to follow! I will not become a Sarge, damn it! There's no way I'm making a bunch of stupid rebels get shot for something I want. So yeah, whatever. Let's just do it.

So with already the most complex motivations and the most prior development of anyone on Red Team, Grif was kind of the obvious choice for our next protagonist.

The Big Short: Grif’s Incomplete Character Arc

And so, given the obvious similarities between Grif and Tucker in terms of character growth, and with Tucker's protagonist arc completed with Chorus, naturally season 15 gave the protagonist spot to…

Dylan Andrews, a brand new character.

Oh. Hm.

Well, Grif spends most of season 15 absent, and to the best of my understanding this had to do with Geoff Ramsey's availability during the season (he took a sabbatical in 2017). Joe found a way not only to work around Grif's absence but to integrate it into the story in a way that I think works conceptually pretty well and effectively draws on his established motivations.

We are supposed to be done! I don't want to go on another adventure! I don't want to listen to Sarge! I don't want to get shot at! I don't want to shoot at other people! I want to chill! I want to sit and chill.

Grif is exhausted with adventure, and frustrated by the fact that nobody seems to care what he wants in all this mess. He says some insensitive things for sure, like "Fuck Church!" and "Why can't he just stay dead?" to his friends who are still clearly grieving. They say some insensitive things right back, calling him lazy and selfish. And when they leave on their mission, Grif stays behind, only returning to the story when Locus arrives with the message that his friends are in trouble.

In season 16, Grif's motivation resets right back to not wanting adventure, with one critical change: he is now nominally the protagonist. I say "nominally" because while I definitely believe Grif was supposed to be the lead for season 16, the season's central conflict really doesn't have anything to do with Grif personally beyond… pizza. (Donut's involvement with Chrovos, by comparison, is far more personal.) It doesn't really advance Grif's character development beyond convincing him to take action (again), and it doesn't develop Grif's relationship to his friends at all. In fact Grif's new friendship with Huggins gets more screentime than his friendship with Simmons, the only relationship of his that really saw any growth the previous season.

I covered last year why Grif's arc in 15 doesn't feel complete in the season 16 essay, and I don't want to rehash all of that here. But suffice it to say, that interpersonal conflict never really feels resolved. To quote myself:

So Grif’s arc in season 15 only resolves in the sense that he reunites with his friends, returning to the status quo. His relationship to his friends, with the exception of Simmons, does not change, his need is only partially fulfilled, and his want is unfulfilled. So he begins season 16 with the same want… and his arc basically resets from the beginning, except that this time his separation from his friends is involuntary. Yet again, he finds his wants belittled and dismissed, only this time it’s by Doc instead of Sarge and the Blues.

For Grif to have a truly satisfying resolution to his arc, I think we really need to see his friends express in some way that they value him as much as we can tell he values them.

Unfortunately in 17, Grif's protagonist run is clearly over, and he doesn't get much screentime at all outside of the ensemble scenes. Huggins is alive and Grif gets to be happy about that, at least. He shoots down Tex's ship to fix the timeline, something that definitely wouldn't have enraged Church and broken the timeline even further. His relationship with Simmons develops not at all, and he gets two significant scenes in the Labyrinth at the end, one by himself and one with his sister.

So let's talk about that Labyrinth.

In Grif's personal Labyrinth scene, we see him at the mercy of a sadistic gym teacher forcing him to run an obstacle course. This seems to reflect an experience from Grif's early life, which, in his own words, "made me hate effort itself!" When he finds Kaikaina in the Labyrinth to rescue her from her own nightmare, he makes a startling confession: he was never drafted for the war, but voluntarily enlisted. (Grif being drafted has never explicitly been stated on the show, by the way; it was in a set of character profiles from the season 5 DVD extras, many of which have already been retconned, and it was a Word of God statement from Geoff. Nevertheless it was something a lot of fans had come to accept as canon.)

Fan reception to this scene seems to have been… mixed. Some, I think, have appreciated that the obstacle course scene dug into the possible roots of Grif's hatred for power-tripping authority figures and meaningless effort, and I can appreciate that too—I think that scene makes this point well. And taken together, I think the obstacle course and the enlistment confession do offer some real insight into Grif's character: he learned to hate meaningless effort and authority at a young age, and he enlisted, it's implied, to find structure and purpose that was meaningful—only to be shunted off to Project Freelancer's simulation program, where he found no such thing. This ties right back into what Grif says in season 1: "I signed on to fight some aliens. Next thing I know… I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere, fighting a bunch of blue guys." This lines up well with what we've seen of Grif over the years. And I think it does an even better job than season 15 of contextualizing when and why Grif hates effort.

It just doesn't have anything to do with Grif's relationship to his friends.

So why is that Grif doesn't get that kind of emotional resolution, the kind Donut gets—wherein he gets apologies and his feelings respected?

Well, I think the answer is that Joe just didn't see that as the conflict he was setting up, and I think that becomes very clear when you look back at how season 15 plays out. It's why no one but Grif ever apologizes. If the only problem to be solved is Grif not wanting to go on the adventure, then that problem is resolved when Grif goes on the adventure. If the problem is Grif, and no one else, then it's Grif who has to come around, Grif who has to apologize for forgetting what kind of story he's in, for selfishly and wrongly wanting something for himself.

So, Grif was wrong, Grif apologized, character arc over. And season 16 offers no follow-up, no emotional resolution, but simply rinses and repeats: Grif refuses the call to adventure, Grif becomes convinced of the need for action, Grif accepts the call and acts. Also, he gets a sword, proving he's as cool as Tucker.

Character arc complete! That's a wrap, bring it in folks.

For many Grif fans, though, it's a bit more complicated, as I laid out last season.

See, Joe thought Grif was cool, way cooler than stupid Tucker. But for all his determination to prove to us how cool Grif was by tearing Tucker down next to him… it seems like he didn't actually care very much about Grif's emotional core. That Grif is motivated when he wants to be, but that nothing will make him shut down and go full Bartleby on everyone's ass faster than feeling disrespected.

Instead Grif's inertia was just a problem that had to be solved by getting him motivated. How he was treated by those around him wasn't part of the equation and didn't matter. Joe didn't know how to make Grif a protagonist without tearing apart the core of who he was—and that ties back to Joe's difficulties with giving meaningful growth to established characters.

Joe misread Grif, and he misread the desire of Grif fans, and of Red Team fans generally, to see their faves in the lead. But I point back once again to that protagonist problem. Grif was, after Chorus, the right choice for the next protagonist among the core cast. A lot of fans saw that and they wanted a Red Team driven plot. But at the heart of that was a desire for Red Team character growth.

Season 16 technically was a Red Team driven plot, yes. But it missed the boat on character growth and missed it hard. Because Joe could see that Red Team was cool, but he missed the heart. He missed what makes Grif so compelling to fans in the first place.

So when Jason took over writing, I think he did set out to resolve Grif's arc—the arc that Joe believed he was setting up. If Grif's arc was about Grif hating effort, and then coming around to taking action, then his arc resolves with him facing down some truths in his own past about why he hates effort in the first place. I think when it comes to that tension, Jason's resolution to it was actually a bit more nuanced than Joe's setup, more clearly illustration what kind of effort and authority Grif hates and why.

It is a resolution.

But it's not a resolution to the tension that a lot of Grif fans felt was the more important one: the hate glue, Grif's relationship to his friends and how they, specifically, treat him. That's why to a lot of fans, Grif's arc doesn't feel resolved, where Donut's does.

I can both appreciate the effort that was made, and also feel that Grif's emotional arc is still incomplete.

I personally hope that Grif's not passed over for character development or even a protagonist role in future seasons, because I think Red Team fans kind of got monkey's pawed with his role in this trilogy. And if Donut is any indication, it's never too late to return to a neglected character and give them some much-needed resolution.

More like Do-nut!

Probably season 17's most smashing success is in proving that Donut can not only grow as a character, but carry a storyline.

Donut has been central to the Shisno arc since it began, but he had far less screentime in season 16, appearing more as a quest giver and briefly as a soft antagonist before ultimately choosing to side with his friends. Most critically, though, season 16 laid the groundwork to give Donut the necessary motivation and character growth to take the lead in this season. Whether that was originally intended or not, it works. In fact, I think I would have been quite disappointed if the setup for Donut's character development hadn't been paid off in this season, because if you read my season 16 essay you'll recall that I very much felt it wasn't paid off there.

Season 17 more than remedies this. In fact, functionally, when looking at this arc as a whole, I think it makes more sense to see Donut as the overarching protagonist. We could compare it to Wash in seasons 7 and 8. Wash isn't even seen until late season 7, and most of the season focuses on Red Team's antics, Tucker in the desert, and Epsilon's rebirth. Even Wash's return in Valhalla is shown from Simmons and Donut's point of view. But when we look back at Recollections as a whole, it's clearly a Wash-centric arc. Likewise, while Donut has less screen time in season 16, and the point of view is centered around the rest of the core cast and their adventures, it is ultimately Donut's actions that set the plot in motion, and it is Donut who has the first and most direct connection to the Cosmic Powers, via Chrovos.

So with the rest of our heroes now lost in time, the story re-centers around Donut's point of view. Plot-wise, I do think this was the right call. This plot centers more around Donut than any other character, Grif included, and having now made the choice to turn against Chrovos, Donut was the logical choice to carry us to the finish line. And that's not to cast aside other characters who may or may not have gotten the character development they needed, only to say, this is Donut's story and it was right that he got to finish it.

Donut works as a protagonist, and Donut also works here as Donut. A big part of the success of this season is not just putting Donut in the spotlight, but understanding who Donut is, looking for the unrealized potential in that, and letting Donut's own growth carry the story forward.

See, Donut's first primary character trait was being oblivious.

I know what you're thinking. "But Anne, isn't it the innuendo thing? Everybody knows that." Indeed. But go back and rewatch the Blood Gulch Chronicles, and you may notice that the accidental innuendo doesn't really develop for a season or two. One of the first things Donut does is fall for a classic military prank, walk into Blue Base thinking it’s the “store,” and buy the flag.

And the obliviousness never really goes away. It's still there in season 10 when Donut doesn't recognize Wash in his blue armor. It's arguably even there implicitly in season 12 when Donut and Wash are being held captive and Donut doesn't appear to notice or care that he's standing next to the man who shot him.

The obliviousness also goes hand in hand with a kind of benign self-absorption. We see this in Blood Gulch when Donut exclaims to a wounded Tucker, "You can't die! I'm bored! All these girls wanna talk about is chick stuff! And not the fun chick stuff, like ribbons and unicorns. Boring stuff, like oppression and a hostile work environment." We see it in season 7, when Donut thinks the Meta is a friend of Simmons', and gets indignant about not being introduced, completely missing the fact that the Meta is attacking them. We see it in season 11 when Donut and Doc fly all the way to Chorus to respond to the gang's distress call, and then send their ride away.

But the critical point is that when Donut gets his pink armor, the joke is that Donut doesn’t initially realize his armor is pink. And it's only over time that this joke morphs into "Donut is effeminate," and then into "everything Donut says is sexual." In the logic of the show's humor, pink = feminine = gay = hypersexual. Yeah, not so great when I lay it out like that, is it? But that's how we got from headlight fluid and Donut buying the Blue flag to where we are now.

And I bring this up, not to critique the poorly-aged humor from which the show has at least somewhat moved on, but to point out that innuendo is not all there is to Donut and it never has been. If it feels like it is, it's because Donut has undergone some Flanderization over the years, and most critically, since his return in season 10 he's had no character growth to challenge that characterization and no major role in the plot for which a writer might need to do so.

See, Donut being self-absorbed and oblivious to everything going on around him made him a character who never had to be taken seriously. If the Reds make fun of Donut, ignore him, and so forth, but Donut never really seems to notice or care, then it’s fine. If the others are dismissive of Donut's needs but he's also pretty dismissive of theirs in kind, it's fine. If Wash shot Donut, and Donut seems to hold like, a humorous kind of grudge again "that jerk Washington," but either doesn't notice or doesn't care that Wash is still around, then it's fine. It's fine. This is fine. It's fine! He's fine. This is fine. It's fine.

Well, except a lot of fans have been saying for years that maybe it's not fine. But narratively and tonally, it's not been framed as a problem that needed solving.

But the moment you have Donut express that he doesn’t like the way his friends treat him and it makes him feel bad—well, now you have tension. Now you have a conflict that needs to be resolved.

This is actually the root of my problem with season 13 Doc, which I brought up in my season 16 essay. Everyone forgetting about Doc in season 13, and Doc being upset about that, raises a conflict that is never resolved. His friends never do change or address the way they treat him, it's mostly treated as a joke, and it doesn't come up again in the Chorus arc. In fact that conflict returns in season 15, when Doc sides with the Blues and Reds—and I'll give Joe credit for that, he saw an unresolved thread and he ran with it. But we'll come back to Doc.

So Donut needed attention like this. In fact the development Donut gets is one of the things that does feel truly continuous with season 16. And while I remain discontented with Grif's incomplete arc, I can see clearly here the challenged faced by a writer picking up where 16 left off, and given only twelve episodes in which to wrap up a lot of threads. I think a season could've been made that gave both characters the resolution they needed. But it probably couldn't have been made in twelve episodes. Jason probably had to make some tough calls.

And I just can't bring myself to be sorry we got the Donut development we did, because it's so good.

I know some fans might be disappointed that Trollnut (the theory that Donut’s innuendos haven't been accidental and he’s been deliberately trolling everyone the whole time) is now explicitly not canon, at least not in the past. As funny as that interpretation was, I think the way Jason took it plays far better with Donut’s classic characterization: he's just kind of oblivious. Not just of what's going on around him, but of how he comes across to other people.

And with that as the starting point, I think the freshly-gained self-awareness works as character growth and is an effective way to propel Donut to a more active role in the story and begin to challenge and grow his relationships with the others. If there's anything that maybe gets a little lost in this take on Donut, it's that benign self-absorption, but I think even that might be implicitly acknowledged in Donut making a conscious attempt to work on the way he talks—becoming aware of how he's perceived, realizing that he's been making people uncomfortable without realizing it. I think it's a thread that could have been developed a touch more—Donut is not, after all, an innocent character who's never wronged anyone before this arc—but again, this season had limited space to do all it needed to, and I'm certainly not unhappy with what we did get.

There is an earnestness to Donut that I do not think is inconsistent with previous characterization but which comes through much more strongly in 16 and especially 17, and provides a believable foundation for serious motivations. And that earnestness dovetails nicely with his increasing self-awareness. It doesn't follow that he'll never be funny again—the innuendo does return in places once he's convinced the others to take him seriously where it matters, and I don't think we need to worry that Donut won't be recognizably Donut from here on out. But this season taps into a depth of sincerity and even vulnerability for Donut that we haven't seen before.

As a sidenote, I was actually relieved to hear Donut finally swear again when trying to get his friends' attention, as that's something that's been bugging me since last season. If you take a look at Donut's dialogue in the past, he swears plenty; it was Doc who would use softer euphemisms. I can only assume that Donut stopped cursing when he found God; maybe Chrovos doesn't like strong language or something. Hopefully that will go back to normal now that his connection with Chrovos is over.

Donut in this arc is a doer. Even in season 16, as an agent of Chrovos, he's doing what he thinks is right, and in 17, it's his actions that save the others—and ultimately challenge the way everyone else sees him.

The stakes of the plot may be nonsensical. But the stakes that matter to us, the fans, are those of character growth and character relationships, and it is there that season 17 vitally succeeds. Perhaps the real success here is that Donut's arc unites action and emotional resolution in a way Grif's arc did not. His resolving things with his friends—getting them to listen to him, hearing their apologies, coming around to maybe forgiving them—directly ties into his role in the plot, because he needs them to take him seriously to wake them up. Donut's plot motivation and his personal motivation can't be separated from one another, and they both find resolution in the end with Chrovos' defeat.

Most notably, Wash and Donut see a resolution to their history that has been a long time in coming.

If this season set out to prove that Donut could be a protagonist, I think it was a great success. It's a great example of how to grow a comedic character into a serious plot role without robbing them of who they are and why audiences love them.

Well done, sir. Chef's kiss.

The Wash Revival

Speaking of Wash, man, isn't it great to see Wash, like… doing stuff?

I wrote last year about how frustrating it was to see Wash basically treated like a crash dummy for two seasons, and season 17 remedies this with flying colors. When Donut rescues him from Schrödinger's Hypoxia, Wash becomes not only conscious but an active agent in the story. On a plot level, he works with Donut to wake up the others where they are adrift in the Everwhen; on a personal level, he finds meaningful resolution both with Donut and with Carolina.

I think Jason did a really brilliant job of using humor to highlight the absurdity of Wash and Donut's situation—with Donut getting shot over and over as they both keep inadvertently jumping to the same moment in time. That they become literally stuck in a loop they must break out of symbolizes the need for resolution between them.

Wash, at long last, not only takes real responsibility for his past actions but becomes a friend to Donut. More than a friend—Wash is both ally and advocate for Donut, standing up for him when the rest of his friends are still inclined to dismiss him. For the first time in a long time, Donut has someone in his corner. And so when he travels back to Blood Gulch to confront the others, he's not alone.

Wash's own journey through time mirrors Donuts struggle. We see Wash relive a moment in his past when he felt truly alone, with no one in his corner—Recovery One. We see Wash in the Freelancer era struggling to be taken seriously, and finally asking himself in exasperation, "Is this how Donut feels all the time?" It's a moment that builds empathy for Wash, and I think it also serves as a small but poignant way nod to the story of season 15. The Freelancer relates to the sim trooper—sees him as he is, a real person with feelings. This has been a part of Wash's journey for a long time, really ever since his adoption into Blue Team, highlighted by his sticking up for them in season 10 and again in his relationship with Tucker in season 11. But it was an unfinished journey, until Wash found that resolution with Donut specifically. It's really wonderful to see that finally happen.

It's great to see Wash finally taking an active role in the story again. But it's just as important that that action is about supporting Donut first and foremost, with Wash's character development as secondary. I've said before that you don't need to put the Freelancers in the spotlight to give them character development, they just need to be active in a supporting role, and Wash's relationship to Donut in season 17 does that incredibly well.

It would be easy to just stop there—I think Wash is for the most part handled very well this season. But I do want to talk about where this is going in the future, because the ending of season 17 indicates that things are about to change for Wash—though it's hard to say exactly how much.

The Follow-Through

I was not fond of the contrived conflict between Wash and Carolina in season 16, to say the least, but the portrayal of Wash's condition itself I thought was pretty decent. He hadn't lost any of his core personality, and it was pretty clear when and how his memory lapses were affecting him—repeating himself, forgetting how he got where he was, confusion and irritability due to that confusion, etc. While I had issues with the framing of the situation to put Carolina at fault, the effects of the cerebral hypoxia itself were not done badly, and I wasn't sorry to see Wash's injury have some real consequences given how little narrative purpose it served in season 15.

What we see of Wash in " Schrödingin'" before Donut wakes him up and snaps him back to his uninjured timeline… very much does not reflect the condition we saw in season 16. It doesn't indicate memory loss or confusion so much as just… uh, weirdness? And because it was also part of the general weirding of the timeline, I'm kind of willing to let that slide and assume it was purely for comedy and not meant to be of much consequence because Donut was about to snap him out of it anyway. That said, I really hope it is not representative of what we can expect for Wash going forward, and I think I am justified in feeling a bit of trepidation about that.

I think it needs to be kept in mind that Wash is an important character to a lot of fans. He's already seen some big ups and downs in terms of characterization and not all of it has sat well with fans, from the Freelancer characterization that makes Wash appear not just naive but clumsy and inept, to the Fan Guide interview that more or less directly contradicts that naivety, to his extremely passive role in the past two seasons. One can bring up continuity in this context, but it's not simply about whether you can explain away these wild swings in characterization. I've said it before, I'll say it again: you can make up an explanation for just about anything if you're creative. Fans do it all the time. I do it myself. And it's also to be expected that longtime fans will be resistant to new canon that challenges their interpretations of characters they love.

But what fans really want, I think, is for the heart of the character to stay intact.

And as the character who introduced RvB's first serious storyline, Wash should not start behaving like, say, Caboose (whom I bring up because he is the other character who canonically has brain damage). We already have a Caboose. Wash is Wash. And he can be Wash even while dealing with a serious injury. I want to be very clear here that this isn't me saying Wash can't be funny, or that there shouldn't be humor around him managing his condition. I'll point back to what I said above about Donut getting repeatedly shot—it's a great example of how humor can be used to approach a serious problem.

I'm just saying: let Wash continue to be Wash. After all, that is the point of what he says to Carolina, right? He's not dying. He's not even going away. He'll still be Wash. He's just going to have some memory problems—and it's not exactly like Wash hasn't dealt with things like that before. Furthermore, I think realistically he's going to have a much easier time dealing with it when his friends know and can support him.

Wash has undergone one of the longest and most complex character arcs on this show, and one critical part of that arc only just saw resolution, so to then turn Wash into a character who is too goofy to be taken seriously or to have active agency in the story would be… a huge mistake. That doesn't have to happen. And it shouldn't.

I'll admit I'm apprehensive, but I think this can be done well.

You're My Best Friend

You may recall last year I was very pessimistic about Wash and Carolina getting resolution. And I don't think that fear was unwarranted, based on the precedent set by Joe's writing. But Jason more than surpassed my expectations.

We're going to be talking about Carolina here, so full disclosure for anyone to whom it wasn't already extremely obvious: Carolina's my favorite character. Not my favorite character in RvB, my favorite character in anything. I can't remove that bias but I can acknowledge it. Her arc has always resonated with me a lot and her relationship with Wash has always been important to me as well, both for the ways in which they mirror one another and the ways in which they are very different.

So when I say that, for example, it's tough to hear Wash be angry at Carolina, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing that he is. Given the circumstances, his anger is reasonable. It's easier on a rewatch, knowing the resolution is coming.

And actually one of my favorite lines this season comes when Wash is very much still angry at Carolina—when he says, "When you get injured and your best friend lies to you, makes you into a secret invalid, I'll hear you out, I promise. …Friends talk to each other. They trust each other. I thought we were closer than that." He's mad at Carolina because he cares so much about their relationship, because he thinks of her as the person he's closest to, and she kept something important from him and he doesn't understand why. And I think that's really the best reframing of this situation we could possibly get, without retconning it altogether.

Donut points out to Wash the lengths to which Carolina was willing to go to help him despite her mistakes. But I think what really gets through to Wash is his own time travel experiences, and the perspective he gains through seeing Carolina at different points in her life.

The Freelancer-era bit is… rocky, and we'll come back to why. For now suffice it to say that while Carolina ignoring Wash in an almost comically-dismissive manner does further the development of Wash's relationship with Donut, it doesn't particularly reflect Wash's relationship with Carolina at any point we ever saw in Freelancer. Put a pin in it.

The critical point is when Wash finds Carolina during her missing years.

This is, arguably, Carolina at her lowest point. Lower than the time after CT's death, lower than present-day season 10, which I've argued before should probably be seen as a step up from her years in hiding, in the broader context of her whole journey. Carolina is alone—working under a false identity, in a generic suit of armor (which I'm well aware was a choice made due to Halo 2 limitations but it's also brilliant, for reasons we'll get into later). When Wash finds her, she is alone at her post. From what her CO says, she is an oddity in her unit and probably doesn't have many friends if any. Even the weapon she's holding, a sniper rifle, speaks of solitude and distance.

Carolina has no one in her corner right now.

There's the parallel to Donut, and to Wash.

And though she responds with anger and suspicion—unsurprising, given the circumstances—Wash responds with compassion.

It's really significant here what Wash goes through just to find out where Carolina was. It means that in all the time they've been together since Freelancer, she never once told him and he never once asked. And that right there—the absence of that knowledge shared between them, tells us far more about these characters, about their relationship, about Wash and about Carolina individually, than any implied backfill that Wash just already knew would have done.

And notice that when Wash does ask Carolina, on Iris… she just tells him. Like she's perfectly okay with him knowing, and maybe would have been, even before that. But it just never came up. Wash probably never wanted to pry, Carolina doesn't volunteer painful things about herself, and neither of them are good with… emotional stuff.

Oddly enough, it's this, this small meaningful exchange on their vacation moon, that makes me almost kind of okay with their season 16 subplot, in the hindsight of their reconciliation. Because it serves to highlight what was still missing from Wash and Carolina's relationship. They've built teamwork, trust, and a genuine friendship in their time together since Carolina's return. They're both part of this odd little family called the Reds and Blues; both of them would absolutely go to the wall to protect this family and one another. That much has been clear since Chorus.

But they never really talked. Not about their shared history, their feelings. Not about the elephant in the room, Epsilon, the AI they both knew in sharply different ways. The difficult things. Their season 15 conversation touched their history, briefly, but didn't go much further than York.

So when something happened where they really, badly needed to talk, Carolina just… didn't. She stayed faithfully by Wash's side during his recovery—kept him company, helped him get his strength back, all the things that didn't require difficult conversations—and she hoped that would be enough. It wasn't.

I do still think it was unfair, from a meta standpoint, to create a conflict between them specifically to be all Carolina's fault, because we know from history that Wash isn't much better at talking about difficult things than Carolina is, and a conflict arising from a genuine misunderstanding between the two of them would have made this point a lot more effectively. But I can appreciate the point all the same.

And going forward, it seems like Wash and Carolina's friendship has ultimately been strengthened by this. Not just by Carolina's apology or their reconciliation, but by Wash gaining a deeper insight into everything she's been through. And this sympathy is especially meaningful coming from Wash, who's been through a lot himself, and generally garners a lot more sympathy from fans.

Your life, Carolina. You've survived things that would've broken me. Broken anyone. Do you even know how far you've come? Carolina, you are so cool. I am so proud of you. I'm always gonna be your friend.

For a subplot that started out as my absolute least favorite thing in season 16, this sure did wrap up as my favorite part of 17, and that says a lot. I can't overstate how grateful I am for it.

And speaking of things I'm grateful for.

The Lost Years: What This Season Adds

It will come as no surprise to my regular readers that I've always had sort of a fascination with what I call Carolina's Lost Years—where she went, what she was doing, what her emotional state was, who if anyone knew that she was alive, what made her decide to come back, etc. And until this season, it was kind of up to us as fans to fill in that huge blank space in her backstory.

That's seven solid years of headcanons you're facing down. There's an inherent risk in adding backfill this late in the game.

I want to be clear that new canon not lining up with fans' headcanons does not mean that the new canon is bad. Sure, it might be risky to tackle something that's been left open-ended for so long, but that doesn't in itself mean it should never be done, or that it's automatically wrong if it doesn't line up with fanon. Sometimes writers do fumble on these things (lookin' at you, Fan Guide Wash!); sometimes fans have gotten so entrenched in their own headcanons that they respond with not only disappointment but anger to new canon that challenges their interpretations. And we should be honest with ourselves that there isn't always a clear line separating the one from the other—just look at the controversies around Star Wars. (Please don't ask me what I think about Star Wars; thanks in advance.)

Similarly, the challenge for a longtime fan who has spent a lot of time thinking about these characters and their stories, interpreting them, writing about them, theorizing, and so forth, is to remain open to new canon that might challenge one's interpretations without necessarily being bad writing or a retcon. And I will be the first to admit, this can be really hard. For the split second I thought Sharkface might be Maine in the Prologue to season 13, I had several small heart attacks, and I was very relieved when he wasn't.

So when I saw signs that we were about to get a canon glimpse of Carolina's lost years, I definitely braced myself more than a little.

It didn't precisely line up with my headcanons, no.

And I liked it. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it felt perfect.

Having Carolina re-enlist under a new identity was probably at least partly a practical decision, as it provides an in-universe reason for her to still be wearing armor, but in the Halo 2 engine, where the distinctive helmets of the later games don't yet exist. It would've made it easy to choose a setting, since any vaguely-military looking map will do, and can be populated with other generic soldiers. Really, given the medium, the obvious choice would've been either to have Carolina re-enlisted or to have her doing mercenary work, and I think you could easily make either one work. But I think her returning to military service works best, for many reasons.

To re-enlist, Carolina probably had to start from the bottom—no record, no rank. Before Freelancer she could have been an officer for all we know; now she's a rank and file soldier. No status, no elite special ops program, no leaderboard. Just a straightforward military assignment.

Imagine being Carolina, on the run from the disastrous program that was Project Freelancer—a program that was supposed to save humanity, so you gave it, and more importantly your father, the man in charge of it, every benefit of the doubt. Every nonstandard oddity, even things that might have seemed wrong or counterproductive or unfair or unethical, you gritted your teeth and swallowed, and you told yourself it was for the greater good.

After it all came crashing down around you, you created a new identity and re-enlisted. Somewhere quiet, where you could fly under the radar.

And suddenly, you remembered what real military was like.

I'm by no means saying that military culture generally or the UNSC in specific don't have Problems, but getting herself back into a regular outfit might have started to put in perspective just how off the wall Freelancer really was, and that's the kind of revelation that could lead Carolina to put more of the pieces together.

Plus, as a soldier she'd have access to, at the very least, more information channels than the average civilian—she even says she did it in part to have access to military intel, and with her Freelancer experience, she might well have able to get more information through backdoor channels. It makes sense that from that position she might not know everything, like what happened to York, but she might have bits and pieces of information like Wash being with the Recovery force. And at some point, she must have either learned or figured out what the Director was doing with Alpha, because Wash seems to presume she already knows, and she does not correct him.

(She doesn't still have her adaptive camo, though—sorry Jason, that one actually is a continuity error. The Meta took that; we see them use it throughout Reconstruction.)

You've survived things that would've broken me, Wash tells her. And I think that's what's so meaningful about all of this to me: the picture we get of Carolina, in the darkest period of her life, surviving. She's lost everything—her family, her friends, her career. But she keeps moving. Puts herself back in a position where she might be able to do something good for humanity, even if that wasn't her primary motivation at the time. She doesn't become a mercenary, or simply disappear. She stays a soldier, in the only way she can.

I also find something deeply poignant about the fact that Carolina kept her old Freelancer armor in storage. She could have sold it, destroyed it, thrown it out an airlock—but she kept it, hidden away somewhere.

Maybe because she knew, deep down, that one day she would be Agent Carolina again.

No Regular Girls: Why RvB Needs to Stop Punishing Carolina

I just wrote a whole bunch about why I think Carolina and Wash's resolution is great and how it even kind of redeemed that subplot for me in a way I didn't think was possible. I just wrote about how much I love the backfill for Carolina's lost years. And those are certainly not the last positive things I have to say about this season, so I hope that will temper what I'm about to say, because I'm about to get critical—and critical about a character who is very near and dear to my heart.

Season 17 is, on the whole, very sympathetic to Carolina, and I don't want what I'm about to say to diminish that. But this is what we do here at anneapocalypse dot wherever you're reading this—we get into the weeds and deconstruct the framing around characters.

So into the weeds we go. And to contextualize all of this, we need to go back a ways, so strap in.

Carolina's writing has always had it rough. She was introduced during what I would call, within RvB, the Golden Age of Animation and the Dark Age of Storytelling. The Freelancer seasons are jam-packed with action sequences and retcons, and confusingly lacking in exposition and consistent characterization. Part of the reason interpretations of Freelancer characters vary so widely is that big chunks of the story—including, incredibly, who the antagonists actually are—are just missing from these seasons, leaving fans to fill in the blanks in wildly varying ways.

Even Wash's writing suffers during this time period, giving him an extremely passive role in the plot and characterization completely subject to the whims of it. (Ever notice how season 10 Wash mysteriously develops a fear of heights that wasn't there in season 9?) But Carolina in many ways gets the worst of it, thanks to two factors that are in direct conflict with one another:

She's supposed to be the protagonist.

She's the Director's daughter, which isn't supposed to be revealed until the very end, so her point of view has to be extremely limited, leaving her motivations unclear to most viewers for the entire arc.

To make matters worse, because the narrative actively avoids Carolina's point of view for so much of the Freelancer arc, she ends up being repeatedly framed by the way other characters talk about her, rather than by her own motives or even simply her actions. I wrote a whole thing about this with regard to the Sarcophagus mission specifically, in which Carolina is framed as being in the wrong for the way she completes the mission—despite the fact that, in context, all of her actions pretty much square up. And unless you're a nerd like me, obsessed with cutting through the framing to get at the raw text—it's the framing that sticks. She really wants to win. Who cares who gets it first? I guess the leaderboard beckons.

All the words of other characters, which most of the audience will nonetheless take at face value.

But there's more to this than just Carolina. It began with Tex, and it becomes very pronounced in the Freelancer seasons: this pattern of creating strong, assertive, even aggressive female characters and then finding some way to justify why they're going to be punished for being strong.

You know that John Berger quote about vanity? @tuckerfuckingdidit reminded me of it in this context, and I was struck by its appropriateness:

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

You wrote a female character who was an asskicking badass because you thought it was hot. You put other characters around her and made them call her "mean," thus morally condemning the woman whose badassery you had depicted for your own pleasure.

So Tex has always been a rotten bitch. (Was she, though?) South was a backstabber who rarely worked in a direct fashion. (Didn't she, though?) CT betrayed her team for some Innie dick because she was bitter about her ranking. (Or did she?) And one by one, they die. Tex even gets to die twice.

Carolina only cared about winning, and now she's screaming on the training room floor. Carolina didn't listen to York, whom she should have just known was right whether he explained what he was doing or not. Carolina just had to fight Tex, Carolina wouldn't give up her AI, and now she's getting thrown off a cliff. She made her bed; now let her lie in it.

See, she was too strong, too competent, too driven, too dedicated to her work. She cared too much. Please pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, or the man sitting at number three on the leaderboard but it's fine because he definitely doesn't care as much and that's what matters. Carolina cared too much, she was too good, and that was wrong, always wrong, definitely wrong, and also she was a bitch.

Because Burnie said she was ambitious! And Burnie is an honorable man.

But hey, fans will sympathize with her now, right—now that we know the true nature of her relationship to the Director? Isn't she more likable now that she's been taken down a few pegs, now that she's sorry she didn't listen to York about all the things he never actually told her? Isn't it good how she feels bad for not throwing away her career to run away with him and have babies?

The thing is, for the fans who were already determined to hate her, none of that made her any more likable. And for the fans who liked her, even related to her arc, the framing of her as always wrong about everything was kind of a constant slap in the face.

Following season 10, Carolina disappeared, and it was unclear at the time if she would ever be returning, until the teaser at the end of season 11. She showed up halfway through season 12 to rescue the Reds and Blues and get stabbed in the leg, and from there she settled into a pretty passive role for the remainder of the season, mostly carting Epsilon around and standing there silent while he was mean to his friends.

At that point, I kinda figured, well, okay, this is how it's gonna be.

It wasn't as though Chorus hadn't also given us some great new developments with regard to female characters. We got Katie Jensen and Emily Grey, both female comedic characters, something the show had been pointedly lacking since Kaikaina was last seen in season 6. And we got Vanessa Kimball, a war-weary rebel leader who broke the mold in a variety of ways: she was a serious, grounded character, but not a hypercompetent hardass (even if some fans seem determined to portray her that way… ahem)—just a kind, principled woman doing her best in dire circumstances. As for Carolina, I figured, at least she's still here, so… yeah, I'll take what I can get.

Then season 13 happened.

And it turned out Miles Luna had been listening to the Carolina fans' disappointment with her role in season 12.

So he not only raised the stakes and beefed up the antagonists—he gave Carolina a subplot. A mini-arc with an old antagonist from the Freelancer days, who forces Carolina to confront not only her guilt about Project Freelancer, but also her sheer terror of losing her team all over again. As @epsilontucker so aptly put it once, "He tells Carolina the things she tells herself. I killed my team. I'll burn for what I did." Sharkface serves as a foil through which Carolina confronts her own past:

I'm sorry. You were on one side of the fight and we were on the other. We thought we were the good guys. I'm sorry.

Please note here that Carolina both takes responsibility for what she was a part of in Freelancer and expresses genuine remorse, while still acknowledging what was beyond her knowledge and control.

I'm not saying season 13 was flawless and beyond criticism. I actually think Carolina's mini-arc might have been even more meaningful if Sharkface had lived, and I think given his justified grievances he was much better set up for a redemption arc than Locus was. Carolina's subplot still serves to continue her isolation from the Reds and Blues, and when she calls them her "family" it's kind of a case of telling and not showing. Nevertheless, what is there works, and it gives Carolina's main arc a kind of resolution that season 10 did not. Miles cared about understanding Carolina and giving her real character development, and that shows.

Season 13 meant a lot to me. It still does.

Unfortunately, season 13 wasn't a turning point. It was an outlier.

Temple was a good idea. While the role of our Reds and Blues in Project Freelancer had been addressed in the past, even giving Sarge a huge existential crisis and some really neat character growth in season 8, the perspective of other sim troopers was a fresh addition to the story. The prototype concept is kind of a mess, and in my opinion makes the rest of the Blues and Reds really boring, but Temple himself and his grievance against the Freelancers, I think really works.

The fumble, in my opinion, was making Carolina the one involved in Biff's death.

Because we already had that story with Sharkface. (And while some have suggested it could be Wash, I don't think that'd be ideal either, because we already had one unresolved "Wash shot a sim trooper" situation going.)

And yes, there are differences between the two stories. But doing another "Carolina's past comes back to haunt her" storyline so soon after Sharkface was a mistake. That proximity to season 13, plus the over-the-top callousness with which Carolina is portrayed in the flashback, is actually a distraction from the larger question of how Project Freelancer treated sim troopers generally—and there are a variety of hints throughout the years that sim trooper deaths were horrifyingly common and accepted, from FILSS's "Oh, that would be wonderful! What a successful test," in season 8, to the Fan Guide anecdote about Agent Alabama at Rat's Nest. Like, this was a thing that happened. A lot. And some incidents were probably a lot less accidental than what happened at Desert Gulch.

But it comes back to that framing thing again. You make it Carolina, and what the audience takes from it is not a statement about the many war crimes of Leonard Church, but a statement about how Carolina, specifically, is mean. And in this case, she doesn't get any character growth from it. She doesn't even get to hear why Temple hates her.

She just gets tortured.

Joe does have that problem where he likes references… a little too much. To the point of cannibalizing past beats from the very show he's writing, without an understanding of what made them good in the first place.

Because the fans liked it when Carolina felt bad about something in season 13, so they'll like her feeling bad again! Don't worry, we'll make sure to keep reminding you, season after season, how sorry she is. Maybe we'll even invent some new past sins for her, and punish her with some literal torture, to make sure she feels extra bad. Has she done anything wrong recently, that she can feel bad about? Make sure she does something new wrong, so she can be sad about it.

Season 16 was a rough time, man.

And then 17 arrived, and began to set things right.

As I said in the two previous sections, the Carolina and Wash portions of season 17 do Carolina very, very right. The backfill for her lost years works incredibly well.

Then we come to the Labyrinth… where Carolina is literally beating herself up.

Oh no.

The House of Mirrors

So, the premise of the Labyrinth is that it works as kind of a house of mirrors, reflecting the worst of its victim's emotions—fears, desires, insecurities, basically whatever will do the most damage—back at them in increasingly distorted ways until it drives them to suicide.

The first thing you might notice about this is that we're kind of back to torture again—it's just psychological torture instead of physical. And the second thing is that this is pretty much the same type of plot device as the True Warrior test in season 13. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of thing in general, but there is one notable exception between the two:

The True Warrior test simply showed the characters something they were afraid of. It showed them something true about themselves, and for Carolina and Locus in particularly this serves as a vehicle for character development.

The Labyrinth, by contrast, takes something true and twists it.

And I do want to point out that even so, every other vision we see in the Labyrinth is framed as being based on something real, amplified though it may be. Kaikaina's guilt over the fire in her childhood home, based on her conversation with her brother, appears to be both a real event and a real feeling she had. Grif's Coach Prestwood seems to be based on a real person in his life, and the emotions he evokes are certainly meant to be real. Tucker's fear of failure rings true, as does Wash's fear of losing his friends. Even Sarge's conflicting desires for both victory and ongoing conflict seems to come from a real place. All of that is the context from which we must approach Carolina's experience in the Labyrinth.

I've noticed it's only with Carolina that active distortion is needed as an explanation for what she experiences. Apparently it's only Carolina who has a self-image so distorted that the past self she confronts in no way resembles who she actually was.

Because no, it doesn't.

Let's unpack the way this scene characterizes Freelancer-era Carolina.

“I feel so much rage when I look at you,” Carolina says to her past self. “You know that? You prioritize yourself over everything. You’re going to get people killed. Heck, you’re going to kill people. And they won’t always deserve it. Dad won’t love you more if you keep winning. He can’t. He died when Mom died. And you’ll bury him. Your competitive streak stops. I’m demanding it.”

“Oh,” says past Carolina, “you’re done? Okay. You got pretty talkative! No need for the lecture. I can read your whole shitty life from your whiny tone of voice.”

“Oh, you think you’re so—”

“Directionless? Scared? No. No, actually I—” Past Carolina laughs viciously. “I feel great. Weird to hear all that from you, though. Let me unpack this. You’ve now tasted defeat, I’m assuming, and you were—aw, sad? For a while?” Her tone grows taunting. “And you want people around as crutches in case you trip again. When have I ever—think about it!—ever allied with someone I didn’t need? A friend in a high place. A bolt hole. A wing man. To forget how to utilize people is to forget yourself. Forget me. And frankly, that’d be damning enough, but you went further. Carolina, you stripped away what comes without thought. What’s instinctual. Your passion. What greater betrayal is there? You’re not you anymore.”

Hoo boy. Okay. Let's try and unpack this.

It’s worth noting that it’s present Carolina who immediately goes on the offensive here, spitting venom at the image of her past self before that image has even spoken. And the things she says… “You’re going to get people killed. You’re going to kill people.”

So what is she talking about? Who did Carolina get killed by being competitive? Who did she kill?

If she’s talking about enemy targets that weren’t who she believed they were… I mean, yeah, they didn’t deserve it, but Carolina was acting as a soldier under orders and her being less competitive wouldn’t make those any less her orders.

Is she talking about the other Freelancers? Because… Carolina didn’t get them killed. North, South, York, Wyoming, Florida—none of them were killed by or because of Carolina’s competitiveness. The only one you could really ascribe to her actions is Maine, and there is a case to be made that Carolina gave up Sigma as much to prove she didn’t need an AI as to help Maine after his injury—but that act was based on such incomplete knowledge that to call it a direct result of Carolina’s competitiveness is a stretch. Furthermore, this argument always seems to ignore the fact that if Maine hadn’t gotten Sigma, someone else would have, and while we don’t know how Sigma might have behaved with a different host, it’s hard to imagine it ending well regardless.

Are we talking about Biff? Because… we’ve been over this, but Carolina didn’t kill Biff, and Biff also didn’t die because Carolina was competitive. Biff’s death was an accident; even Tex, who threw the flagpole Carolina deflected, wasn’t intentionally aiming at Biff, though it does seem like she (or someone else inside that helmet, more likely) must have realized she was throwing it with lethal force. Had Carolina been less determined to win that particular match, there’s no reason to assume Tex (or Omega) would’ve dialed back the aggression. And as we've covered already, sim trooper deaths were far from uncommon in Project Freelancer, and something not one of the agents, not even Good Guy Do the Right Thing York, are ever shown objecting to.

Let’s look at what "past" Carolina says about herself.

“When have I ever—think about it!—ever allied with someone I didn’t need?”

CT.

You know, that person everyone forgets about when they’re trying to make a case for Carolina being purely self-serving.

I wrote about this one a long time, ago, but for a refresher: the first time we ever see Carolina question the Director’s orders is when he says that CT is an “acceptable loss.” Carolina embarks on that mission with full intent to disregard that order and try to bring CT in alive, despite that fact that doing so will be far more difficult and offers her no personal gain whatsoever and in fact results in her failing the mission. And while Carolina’s motives in the briefing with the Director may be subtle, her intent on the mission itself is not. The first thing she does upon catching up to Tex is to remind her that they only need the armor. And when she tries to pull Tex back from the killing blow, she explicitly, verbally, objects to Tex killing CT, and even knowing that they have failed the mission and that she will take the blame, Carolina still chastises Tex for what she’s done. This is not just subtext. This is text.

And this is not the only instance of Carolina caring about her teammates. Look at the haste with which she calls for medics when York is injured in training (York who is, by the way, only one spot below her on the board and arguably her closest competition before Tex). There's the offer on the Sarcophagus mission to come to Team B’s aid instead of going after their objective, the “No!” she screams out when Maine gets shot.

None of these are the behaviors of a person who is only out for herself at everyone else’s expense.

Freelancer Carolina is not a ruthless lone wolf who disregards her teammates except when they can benefit her.

This ain't it.

Even if we hadn't already beaten the horse to death with regard to Carolina's Past, this image of her past self is so hideously warped that it's not a meaningful confrontation of that past.

And even if we assume that Carolina is the outlier and accept the "it's bad on purpose" explanation—what does this mean? What truth about Carolina is this based on? Is it just her self-hatred? Because Carolina might have had this kind of warped self-image back in Freelancer—in fact she probably did—but now? We've already seen, multiple times, that she can separate what she was responsible for from what she had no control over. We saw it with Sharkface. We saw it all the way back in season 10, when even in the midst of her profound regret over what happened to Maine and York and the rest of her team, she was still able to see who was truly responsible: the Director.

Is it the fear that she's lost some essential part of herself? Because that hasn't come up even once in this trilogy.

You know what the Labyrinth could have addressed, something that would be relevant to Carolina's arc in this trilogy and to the plot as a whole, and dovetail nicely with the really excellent character growth she gets elsewhere in this season? The fear of opening up and talking through difficult emotions that led to her unintentionally hurting Wash and temporarily drove a rift between them. That's something that would relate deeply to Carolina's recent struggles, and with her friends coming to her aid and her allowing herself to be vulnerable in front of them, it could symbolize her overcoming those struggles.

Instead, we got to see Carolina once again being punished for Freelancer.

This ain't it.

The Freelancer Problem

And if it hadn't been for the Labyrinth—honestly, I probably wouldn't have squinted too hard at the Freelancer-era bits of time travel. The way Carolina repeatedly blows off Wash might have felt a little on the nose, sure, but you know, I could accept the point it was trying to make and the purpose it served for Wash and Donut, and that it was ultimately being played for comedy, and also playing much more off the tone of "The Triplets" from season 14 rather than the tone of seasons 9 and 10. I think that latter point is important, because that's part of what makes this bit feel just a little bit off, even when you can't put your finger on why.

But the Labyrinth happened, and it left a really bad taste in my mouth, such that it was difficult to even rewatch season 17 for a while despite how much of it I liked, and when I did finally rewatch it, well. It case those scenes in a bit of a new light. So squint I shall.

So, okay, back in Freelancer, maybe Carolina liked and trusted her team, but she wasn't close to them as friends, though. She didn't socialize with them outside of missions and training, and she didn't see any reason to speak to them outside of a mission context. That tracks, right?

Does it, though? Does it really?

I don't want to dwell too much on Carolina and York, because the canon itself has always been kind of confused about what the nature of their relationship actual was, which I have discussed at length, repeatedly. But it is at least implied that York and Carolina had some kind of social relationship, and that alone means Carolina wasn't opposed to that kind of relationship with her teammates on principle.

But maybe she was only friendly with York? But—no, Carolina engages in friendly banter during missions with other teammates as well. Her chatter with Niner is consistently friendly, something that carries even into the season 15 flashback. And in season 10 we even see Carolina teasing Wash himself.

Maybe Carolina preferred only to socialize with agents of a certain status. Their elite pilot, York, maybe a few other high-ranking agents. But no, back in season 15 we were told that Carolina used to go out drinking with York and his buddies who included lower-ranking agents, people who weren't even on the leaderboard and certainly lower-ranked than Wash.

But okay, maybe it's just Wash Carolina didn't like. Maybe that teasing isn't so friendly. Maybe Freelancer was just like high school, and Carolina was the Mean Girl snubbing the guy most recently moved up to her squad.

Back up the fun bus.

If anyone treated Wash like shit in Freelancer—particularly in season 10—it was York, and to a lesser extent North. York picks on Wash constantly throughout season 10, and initially Wash mostly seems to snark back, but by late in the season York's comments are making Wash visibly deflate.

York who is here calling Wash "buddy." And this scene is in the season 10 era. It has to be because Maine has the Brute shot. The series of jump-cuts that follow kind of imply that Wash jumps around to different points in Freelancer, but this point, where York, Wyoming, and Maine walk by and Wash stops York to talk to him, is unmistakably season 10.

Squint.

North also picks on Wash in this scene, and that much tracks, though it is interesting that he gangs up with South, not with York, making this probably the most unity the twins have during this time period.

But the other characters' appearances are brief and therefore of less consequence. It's Carolina who ramifies here because it is Carolina who is a part of this story, and whose Freelancer-era characterization is an issue elsewhere. And in that light, her dismissals of Wash feel more suspect. It sounds as though Jen's been directed to sound, not exhausted and frustrated as she actually would have been during season 10, but smug and snobbish. Like she thinks she's too good for Wash. Because, you know, high school.

I point back the fact that as recently as season 15, we had a photo of Carolina while in Freelancer, gone out drinking with lower-ranking agents, but in 17 I'm supposed to believe she wouldn't even talk to a member of her own team. I realize we're talking about different writers here, and I actually found that photo a little weird myself, for other reasons which I covered in the season 15 essay. In the context of the Time Travel Trilogy as a whole, though, all this just adds a certain incoherence to Carolina's characterization—like with Tucker in season 16, it feels like trying to have it all ways. Carolina was social with other Freelancers when it's convenient for the plot and exposition we need to set up, but when it makes for angst material, well, she was a total standoffish bitch actually. This is less the fault of either writer individually, and more a fault in the trilogy itself and its lack of focus, generally and specific to Carolina.

But I bring this up to point out that you don't even have to go all the way back to season 10 to see examples of Carolina's relationship to her team that do not square up with her being a snob who wouldn't even speak to a team member outside of a mission context.

Though if you're going to comment so heavily on seasons 9 and 10… giving her characterization in those seasons a closer look definitely would not be amiss.

Here's something else Carolina said in season 10, something I would expect Miles (who wrote episode 5) in particular to remember:

It's because I had a team once. A team with the best training, the best equipment—and despite everything that they had that made them the best, they still lied, and stole, and tore each other to pieces. So you tell me--how the hell am I supposed to trust a ragtag team of idiots, when I couldn't even trust the people who were closest to me?

The people who were closest to me. Those were the Freelancers. That was Carolina's team. That's canon, baby. No, Carolina definitely didn't make it easy to get close to her but she did trust her team at one point and she did care about them and this is a hill I will die on. That's why it hurt her so much when it all fell apart: Freelancer, the Director, broke her trust in other people. That's why it takes her so long to trust anyone again.

There's a lot of great Carolina in this season, but the Freelancer-related stuff misses the mark on a lot of levels.

What Did You Just Call Me?

So, let's talk about Real Names.

A lot of us have enjoyed the Four Seven Niner cameos in recent seasons, myself included because she's a great character and we miss her. I am however going to use her to point out the pattern in this arc of using Real Names where there is no in-universe reason to do so.

Way back in season 6, we learn that Wash's first name is David when the Director addresses him as such over a speaker during the break-in at Command. The Director adds, "May I call you David?" to which Wash replies tersely, "No, you cannot. You gave me my new name; the least you can do is use it." Fine. Good. This works both in-universe and in what it telegraphs to the audience. Of course the Director knows Wash's real name, but the critical thing is that he's trying to use it to presume familiarity, to disarm Wash and to assert power over him. Wash sees this for exactly what it is and responds in kind. The Director may know a lot about Wash, but that does not mean he gets to act like they're friends. Please note that this scene tells us nothing about how Wash feels about his real name generally. It tells us about his relationship with the Director and that is the point. This is good use of a real name and good storytelling.

Wash's real name is not used at all during the Freelancer seasons, nor during the Chorus Trilogy (with I think the exception of Locus's stalker diary, but that's bonus content, and it's information it makes sense for Locus to have). Fast-forward to season 14, "The Triplets," and we see Wash called David for the first time since season 6—this time by Agent Ohio, in a glimpse of Project Freelancer pre-season 9. This time, Wash responds with, "Just... don't call me "David", okay? This unit takes that kind of stuff pretty seriously." Here, again, through the use of the name we learn some things. Wash was at one point familiar enough with Ohio, Idaho, and Iowa for them to know his first name. It's possible the lower-ranking agents are less careful about these things, but it's also implied that Wash and the Triplets were friends before he moved up the ranks.

In the following episode, "The Mission," we learn the real names of the Triplets: Ohio is Vera, Idaho is Ezra, and Iowa is Mike. It's clear Shannon wanted to establish real names for them in the limited time we would have would them, but their use is still justified by its context: Idaho's feelings have been hurt, and he uses first names to shift to a more familiar tone with Ohio and talk things out. He also asks her if it's okay to call her Vera, and I like this because it noticeably mirrors the Director's question to Wash in season 6, while conveying something completely different about the characters. Where the Director sought to presume familiarity as a means of controlling Wash, Ezra offers familiarity as a way of reaching out to his friend.

Fast forward to season 15 and Wash and Carolina on the beach. We're going to set aside everything else that's weird about this conversation, and just focus on Carolina's "Do you really believe that, David?"

It is not impossible that Carolina knows Wash's first name. I mean, it's a little weird, because season 14 explicitly made the point that the higher-ranking Freelancers are much more diligent about sticking to codenames, and it's pretty clear in season 10 that Carolina didn't have access to the detailed information about the inner workings of the program. But since Wash's name was floating around the lower squads, maybe she heard it at some point. Maybe she was able to dig up records while on the run. Maybe Wash simply told her his real name offscreen at some point between season 10 and now. Like I said, it's not impossible. Moreover, she uses it in an appropriate context. This is an intimate, emotional conversation between two close friends, and Carolina signals that by using Wash's rarely-used real name. Fine. I accept that.

Also in season 15: Kaikaina Grif's real name is used onscreen for the first time in the show's history. This is not only appropriate but long overdue, and coming from Dylan Andrews, a reporter, it makes perfect sense. Great name drop. Feels good. Feels organic. Thank you. (That said, it is a little weird, come season 16, when Tucker waffles back and forth between calling her "K" and calling her "Sister"… almost as if perhaps a lead writer and a co-writer never got on the same page about that.)

Then, at the climax of season 16: Carolina says, "David's hurt. We have to go."

So, the appropriate response from pretty much everyone else onscreen was, "Who?"

There is no reason to assume the Reds and Blues know Wash's real name. He has been "Wash" the entire time they've known him. The one exception might be Simmons, who actually read the personnel files they found at the Offsite Storage Facility. But none of these people think of Wash as "David." Again, is it impossible? No, of course not, because you can always make up something happening offscreen to explain it. But based on what we've actually seen, it is not well set up that most of the Reds and Blues would even know the name, nor is there any reason for Carolina to think they would. Even Carolina herself has only used the name once, and in a very private context. So this just doesn't track. It's supposed to make us feel something, but the logic doesn't connect, and for me, it ends up being distracting more than anything else.

Part of the reason I think this feels so weird with regard to Wash, specifically, is that we just don't know the real names of many of the Freelancers, period. And that's kind of fine? Because in most cases we do not need to know. Yeah, it is sort of implied in Out of Mind that the Freelancers knew each other's real names, but so much of the early miniseries canon has been retconned away that I don't consider that particularly relevant now. We don't know York's real name. We don't know North's, or South's, or CT's. And we don't know Carolina's.

But we do know Wash's, and he's still alive, and the fans like it when we do name drops, so… okay.

Smash cut to season 17: Donut is looking for Wash after a time jump and calls out, "Wash! Agent Washington? Yoohoo! Uh... David?"

So, if there is one character who has no reason to know Wash's real name at this point in time, it's Donut. He wasn't at the Offsite Storage Facility in season 8. He and Wash don't have any kind of a relationship that might've led Wash to share that information offscreen, as Wash might have with Tucker or Caboose. And he wasn't there when Carolina used Wash's real name in season 16! He'd already left with the Hammer! Donut should not know Wash's real name, even if him using it in this context would tell us something significant about the characters and their relationship. And it doesn't, because at this point in the season they don't have a relationship.

And then there's "Ash."

When Wash travels back to his Recovery One self, he hears Command, aka Four Seven Niner over the radio, and exclaims "Ash, is that really you?" And thus, the Pilot Without a Name now has a name.

Now, Niner's little slip where she blurts out, "I thought maybe we'd lost you, too"? That is the kind of emotionally intelligent backfill I am here for. The Freelancer seasons gave us our beloved unnamed pilot with the same voice as Wash's Command, the unbeatable Lee Eddy, and whether they were always meant to be the same character or "I'd hate to have that guy's job" was just meant to be kind of a meta joke I was never sure. But they certainly became the same character, whether it was originally planned or not.

And that idea of the team's old pilot now stuck jockeying a radio, having to give Wash the order to kill South—I think that's always quietly haunted a lot of us, myself included. "Recovery One, please confirm, you are now Level 0." What was she feeling? Did she regret having to do it? Was she detached from it? Tapping into that question, that feeling, with just one little line—in an episode all about Wash facing a particularly shitty part of his past, that is the line that really gets me. That makes me feel something.

"Ash," on the other hand…

So, why would Wash call her by her first name?

I will definitely grant you that the absence of any kind of official designation for the Freelancers' pilot, such that the fans had to take to calling her by the name of her dropship was a hole in the canon. (It's not even a callsign, it's a vehicle designation—as in "This is Vehicle four-seven-niner, go for secure.") It would've been nice back in season 9 to get a real name of "Flight Officer So-and-So," or even some kind of codename for her as Project Freelancer seems to have been pretty big on codenames!

Which brings me to: If the Project was so strict about codenames for the upper ranks, why would Wash even know the first name of his elite squad's star pilot? And even if he did know it, why would he blurt it out on instinct like he's used to calling her that, when he never did in Freelancer—and when, judging by the Freelancer seasons, it doesn't even look like they were that close? And this is not like Carolina calling Wash "David," where they've spent time together post-Freelancer and grown closer. Wash hasn't seen or heard from Niner in years.

As always you can make up offscreen explanations for it if you want, but this doesn't tell us anything new about Wash's relationship with Niner so much as it just confuses the relationship they already had. I think the best way this works for me is if Ash is actually her last name, or a nickname of her last name. It's at least less weird that way.

And this isn't me pointing out plotholes just to nitpick. My problem with the name drops is that they've begun to feel fanservicey in the bad way: gratuitous, distracting, lacking in meaningful context. It's clear that hearing "David" or "Ash" is supposed to make us Feel Something, but each out-of-context overuse of Real Names dilutes that—until it makes us feel nothing at all.

You Need to Let Go

In the same way that RvB needs to stop beating the dead horse of Carolina's past, it needs to stop beating the dead horse of Freelancer generally.

Freelancer was the heart of Red vs. Blue for ten years, as the shadowy backstory to Blood Gulch that reared its head in Recollections and found resolution at the end of season 10. And while certain artifacts of Project Freelancer found their way into the Chorus storyline, Chorus was not about Freelancer. It was an effective step in moving on from the Project, moving the story and the characters in new directions. At points both Wash and Carolina grappled with their pasts, and from that they moved forward.

Season 15… landed us right back in Project Freelancer. And as I said before, I do like Temple and his story and I do think it was a fresh take, but it shouldn't have centered Carolina and that aspect of it did feel very derivative. Now, two seasons later, we've had a storyline that has nothing to do with Project Freelancer—but we're still reaching back there, revisiting it, revising it, adding to it, angsting over it. This is a problem for character reasons I've already covered, but I think it's also a symptom of the show as a whole feeling a little bit… stuck in a loop, shall we say.

I'm not going to say that Wash and Donut, for example, shouldn't have revisited their history, as that was resolution that was long overdue, and also relevant to the plot. And I'm not opposed to character moments that touch on the past in such a way, like, say, Wash and Carolina finally having a conversation about Epsilon. I'm certainly not saying that the ways in which characters were affected and grew from those experience should be forgotten—quite the opposite in fact.

But the revisiting Freelancer over and over, mining it for angst, especially when it's not plot-relevant—

It's dead, Jim.

It's over. We need to let go. These characters need to stop reliving their past, and the show needs to stop returning to plot threads and character beats that are already resolved.

It's time to move on, for the characters and for the story as a whole.

I hope season 17 can serve as kind of the final bookend on Freelancer, and let the show move on to new stories.

Reframing Tucker

Season 16 hit Tucker's characterization the hardest. Wash and Carolina's conflict may have been my personal least favorite, but Tucker's writing certainly takes the cake for the most actively mean-spirited, something I discussed at length in last year's essay.

I'll admit I wasn't feeling super optimistic about Tucker's writing for this season after watching the first episode, which seemed to be playing off the same kind of "Tucker is arrogant and stupid" hot take as last season, but as it came from the mouth of our villain, I can kinda take that with a grain of salt.

And beyond that, Tucker's role in season 17 is brief, but strong. I think brief is fine, as Tucker is not the protagonist of this arc, and season 16 did itself no favors spending so much time magnifying his flaws at the expense of screentime for its own protagonist. Tucker needed one thing from this season: resolution.

But it's a bit more complicated with Tucker, as it's not merely an in-universe resolution he needed. The nature of Tucker's maliciously over-the-top characterization in season 16, abandoning all of his Chorus-era character growth and inventing new flaws he didn't really have before just to take him down a peg, kinda needed a meta-resolution. It's not the kind of thing you can really fix, short of straight up retconning the previous season—which, hilariously, season 16 does kind of do via time travel! but the characters still remember it so it's not quite the same as it never happening.

Season 17 doesn't try to pretend that what happened between Tucker and Kaikaina didn't happen. In fact it's referenced directly in "Limbo" when Kaikaina wants to fuck with Tucker, and Doc remarks that they seem to have some unresolved issues. I like this a lot. It's funny, for one thing! And it's good Kaikaina. It's great to see her just being ridiculous in true Sister form—especially since Jensen and Dr. Grey aren't around anymore and we're a little short on comedic female characters again. (And for future seasons—it is 100% okay to let Carolina be funny, for the record. She's done it before!)

But Tucker's moment in this season comes later, once the Reds and Blues have set out to fix the timeline. After all, in a story about time traveling through one's past, what better way to remember Tucker's growth on Chorus than to send him back to Chorus?

So, setting aside the silliness of the plot, Tucker's self-reflection on Chorus also doesn't erase his season 16 actions—but it does kind of reframe them.

This was one of the worst moments of my life. But it reminded me of something. I became a leader on Chorus. And since we left it, I've been trying to act how I thought a leader should: cool, macho, totally self-confident. But somehow I forgot that I wasn't any of those things while I was actually leading. I was scared all the time, constantly second-guessing myself. But when shit got bad, I was the one to step up and make a decision. That's all it is. And right now, Donut's doing a better job of that than anyone. So yeah, I have faith.

Again, it's not that this undoes season 16's meanspirited dragging of Tucker, or makes me like it more. But there's a sincerity here, and a meaningful move to tie in Tucker's recent fumbles to his insecurity, which as I've discussed before, has kind of always been a thing. And on a meta level there's an acknowledgment in this monologue itself of what season 16 missed about Tucker. Not just the growth that was forgotten, but the team dynamic we've been missing—the faith in his friends, which Tucker now expresses toward Donut.

That means a lot. It's a truly good faith effort at making things right for Tucker, and I really like it.

Reintegrating Doc

I talked a bit about Doc last season, in regard to feeling like he'd fallen pretty out of step with the other characters in terms of his characterization and how seriously his feelings are meant to be taken, and how this goes all the way back to season 13. And though he too turns out to be an agent of Chrovos in season 16, it doesn't really end up mattering that much, and even his big fight with Donut ends up being of little consequence.

Doc plays a small role in this season, but I like the role he does play. Even Donut initially talks over Doc in "The Everwhen," and there's a certain irony in that considering that Donut's whole arc here is about being talked over and ignored—but it's also kind of in-character for Donut to be oblivious to the fact that he's even doing that.

So it's pretty satisfying to me, at the end of "Omphalos," when Doc points out that he's being talked over, and Donut… actually listens to him! And teaming up with Doc serves to further the plot. It's pretty great.

And it's equally satisfying when Doc, once in the Labyrinth, gets a moment to grapple with his O'Malley personality and reclaim control of it in order to escape. That really works for me, because I've come to read O'Malley as the part of Doc that emerges when Doc needs someone to stand up for him and in his own personality is incapable of standing up for himself. It certainly follows from season 13, and from season 16. So Doc calling upon O'Malley and consciously reclaiming that part of himself feels like good character development, and it really works here.

It's a nice little piece of resolution for Doc: reintegrating Doc's personalities, and beginning to reintegrate Doc himself as part of the gang and a plot-relevant character.

Stakes That Matter

See, the real stakes in season 17 are relationships.

Some of this carries forward from season 16, most notably for Wash and Carolina. Some of it taps into old unresolved conflicts, like Donut and Wash. And much of it involves rebuilding the team as a whole. Donut must travel through time collecting his friends, and with Wash's help, reunite them to fix the timeline. And at the end, they must find each other in the Labyrinth to overcome their demons and escape.

Season 15 lost track of that team dynamic, and the power the Reds and Blues have always had to triumph when they work together. In its final act, it lost track of the stakes that matter to fans: the characters we care about. Season 16 lost track of character arcs we've been following for many, many years now, and caught up the characters in a conflict that ultimately had little to do with them.

Season 17 has time travel in it, but it's not about time travel. Not really. The time travel serves as a mechanic, not just for plot but for character and relationship growth. What season 17 is about is restoring that neglected found family dynamic, bringing everyone back together to save the day.

Because that's always been a theme of Red vs. Blue: when the bonds are strong enough, the power of friendship wins every time.

Season 17 has the right idea that it's the characters and their relationships that matter, that the characters should drive the plot and therefore the stakes. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: No matter how grand the stakes, how wacky the adventures, or how cool the animations, Red vs. Blue is a show that hooked us with a bunch of people standing around talking. It is character-driven first and foremost, and the characters will always be its heart.

Loose Ends

I mentioned earlier that not every character gets a complete resolution in this storyline, and there are some loose ends to be picked up in our next arc, whatever that may be. Grif is definitely the most prominent one. Simmons is another to me—not so much a loose end as just kind lacking a character arc at all. Both could use some attention in seasons to come.

As I discussed earlier, I think Blue Team has had a pretty solid run of protagonists. The one exception I can see might be Kaikaina, but I think she could use some more time hanging with the core cast before she's ready for that role. With the Freelancer storyline well in the past (or at least it should be!) it makes sense to let Red Team have their time. Donut made a decent start to that. He has a good arc here.

So Grif, in my opinion, deserves another shot. He did not have a complete character arc in this storyline, and in hindsight, the Shisno arc really is Donut's story, not Grif's. I think Grif can be a good protagonist and I think he deserves another chance to be one.

Then there's Simmons, who's had a lot less character development than Grif, to the tune of almost none, and could really use some.

I don't think those two things are in conflict at all. Grif and Simmons' relationship has itself seen a long-running arc that many fans love. A storyline focusing on Grif and Simmons as co-protagonists could be really cool, and if this phase of RvB is Red Team's turn to shine, I can think of no better way to do that than to put Grif and Simmons in the spotlight. This leaves open the possibility for some great Grif siblings moments as well.

And of course, if the show were to finally canonize Grif/Simmons of a romantic nature, a lot of us would not be complaining one bit. But even simply focusing on their friendship and letting their partnership drive the story has some great potential.

Just an idea, but one I think could be really cool.

Conclusions

Jason Weight had a basically impossible task here. He had to finish somebody else's story with a lot of balls in the air while also resolving a lot of character threads that, uh, troubled a lot of fans from last season. It's much easier to critically analyze someone else's story than to write your own, never mind to complete someone else's. This was a tough goddamn job. I'm not surprised this season went through three treatments before one stuck.

It’s also really hard to judge a person’s writing when they’re writing under someone else’s direction and not running the show. I'm aware that Jason wrote one of my least favorite episodes of season 16, but he did so under Joe as lead writer, so it’s hard to say just how much creative freedom he had there.

This season, Jason's had a lot more freedom with character writing and I think that’s where this season shines. The plot's a mess, but given that Jason was tasked with completing someone else’s story arc, which was already a mess, I can’t really lay that on him. Moreover, if he changed the rules, and rearranged the universe a little, he did so in such a way as to allow the story to be more character-driven, and that's what we needed.

Season 17 was a fixer-upper, and for the most part it accomplished what it needed to. There's an emotional intelligence to this season overall that I found lacking in previous seasons, and an attention to characters and character arcs that I find heartening. This is no surprise, when you listen to Jason talk about his work in interviews and panels. There's a love for the characters that really shines through.

Gosh darn it, his writing has heart.

And I would really like to see more. Since it seems pretty clear the show will be continuing, I think there's no better candidate to write season 18, and to lead us into whatever new adventures may come.

Jason deserves that shot, if he wants it. And I do hope we'll get a chance to see his work with these characters again, in a story that is his own.

#red vs blue #rvb17 #agent carolina #agent washington #franklin delano donut #dexter grif #rvb critical #time travel trilogy #avian dentistry

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lovemesomerafael · 5 years ago

Text

It’s Complicated Chapter 7: Playing By The Rules

Source: @all-things-raul-esparza

Chapters 1-5 Chapter 6 Story on AO3

Rafael Barba made the best huevos rancheros in the world. The solar system, even. He was fully aware of that and unafraid to acknowledge it to anyone who would listen. Frankie mocked his conceit about it, but her biting sarcasm was belied by the fact that she was on her third helping.

Beneath the playful ribbing, Rafael’s eyes kept sliding to the stack of luggage next to his door. She had packed her things as he’d made breakfast, despite his repeated assurances that he was just as happy for her to stay. He didn’t say he wanted her to stay, preferred her to stay, although they both knew that was what he’d meant.

But Frankie needed to go home to her apartment. Rafe’s plane had left at an ungodly hour that morning, and Amanda had taken him to Kennedy, so she didn’t need to rush in order to see her brother off, but she needed as much normalcy as she could find. Alan was dead, and that was a good thing, however it had happened, and she could now resume her normal life without fear. But it wasn’t that easy and, as a psychiatrist, she knew that.

And then there was Barba. Frankie needed a lot of things right now, and space was at the top of the list. She was in love with Barba. She’d told him that. Twice. And she knew it was true. But she also knew that she was a mess. Having just come through a traumatic experience that had threatened every aspect of her life, and been welcomed into the arms of a man who was everything she had ever wanted, she knew as a psychiatrist that what she felt could very easily have been deep gratitude and a need for security being mistaken for love. She needed to do the adult thing and reclaim her life. When she had her feet back under her, solid and balanced, that would be the time to see how things stood with Barba.

The other benefit of that strategy was that it would give Barba space and time, too. Frankie had fallen for him completely. And he was being as supportive as she could ever hope for at this moment. But that didn’t mean he felt anything for her. It could easily just mean he was a good man who liked women. She remembered what Amanda had said. He dated, but he didn’t get involved. If she wanted him to feel what she felt – and holy shit did she want that - she needed to give him time to get there.

“I ordered a lot of groceries when I knew you were coming here, but maybe I should have ordered more.”

“I do not apologize for my appetite. Besides, I haven’t really eaten in days.”

“I can make more toast.”

“No, thank you. More coffee would be good, though.”

Rafael stood touching her as much as possible as he filled her mug with his excellent coffee. When he was done pouring, he kissed her cheek before stepping away to replace the pot in the machine.

“Francisca…”

“You can call me Frankie, you know. You’ve seen me naked.”

“Your name is beautiful. I’m not about to desecrate it with that preposterous nickname.”

As she looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup, her eyes sparkled with the smile he couldn’t see. It actually gave her a little thrill every time he said her name. Not only did he pronounce it beautifully, but the slight roll on the “r” made her think about his tongue. Every time. She even liked it when he called her “fresa”, although she would take that secret to her grave.

“When are you planning to return to work?” He asked, returning to the subject he’d been about to raise.

“As soon as possible. Tomorrow. I want my life back.”

“I can understand that. We’ll be glad to have you back. This whole thing… I don’t care what you had to do, I’m just glad it’s over.”

“What does that mean, ‘what I had to do’?”

He blinked. Why had he said that to her? It didn’t matter. That was the decision he’d made; he would never let it matter.

“I don’t mean anything. Just that I’m glad it’s over.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Barba. What did you mean by that?”

“I misspoke, that’s all. Let it go.”

Frankie set down her coffee cup on his kitchen table. “Barba, this is important. You’re… We’re… If you have questions, or misgivings, you need to ask. Or maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

Frankie ran a hand through her hair, looking around the room as if for help. “Look, I mean… We started out badly, and then things got intense fast, and… I know you see a lot of women, and why wouldn’t you, you’re…”

“Rico?” His mocking expression was a little forced.

“And if that’s what this is… was… then fine. But I feel, um… Well, that’s just it. I feel. For you. And I don’t need you to return that, I’m a grown-up, but if you wanted us to see each other, then you should know that. And I would need to know that you didn’t think I’m a murderer or… whatever it was you were just suggesting.”

Rafael didn’t respond for a moment. Which of those things was he supposed to deal with first? He turned and refilled his own coffee cup to give himself some time to gather his thoughts. “You really know how to pack a lot into a few nearly incoherent sentences.”

She stood and began to clear the dishes from the table. “You don’t have to respond. I need to get going, anyway. Sorry if I dumped a lot on you. I think too much about things. Occupational hazard.”

“Stop it. Don’t do that.” He turned to her, leaning against his counter. “I assume you were speaking your mind. Now let me speak mine.”

She turned from the sink and unconsciously mirrored his position, leaning against the counter a few feet from him.

“You said I date a lot of women. I don’t know what ‘a lot’ means, but I don’t suppose it matters. That’s apparently something someone thought you should know, and there’s not much I can say about it. It is what it is. But I really don’t like you making yourself a notch on my bedpost. That’s not what happened.”

“I apologize.”

“So do I, if that’s how I made you feel.”

“It isn’t. Of course it isn’t.”

“Then there’s this whole idea that I think you killed Canady. I don’t know how many ways to tell you that is not what I think.”

“But you think I did something to get the charges dropped.”

“I think…” He frowned. “We’re being honest with each other here. I don’t know what I think. It happened pretty fast, Francisca. Out of nowhere, there’s this ‘anonymous tip’ about a guy who wouldn’t give us the time of day before, and suddenly he’s spinning the exact same story you are…”

“Spinning? Story?”

“Here we go…”

“Words are critically important, Barba. You say a lot simply with your word choices.”

“Don’t try this at home, folks, she is a psychiatrist…” He muttered unhappily into his mug.

“You say you don’t think I’m a murderer. But I’m ‘spinning a story’ about what really happened, and apparently I somehow got to Jefferson from Riker’s so he would ‘spin’ the same ‘story’.”

“Francisca, I don’t care. That’s my point. You can parse my language any way you want, but you can’t tell me what I believe. I know you didn’t kill Canady. And I don’t give a flying fuck why some tweaker backed you up when there was no evidence we could use to help you…”

“FUCK! You think I did it!”

“For the ten billionth time, I do not think you did it.”

“You think I got to Jefferson.”

“I think… something happened. And Francisca, I do.not.care.”

“I care! Don’t you get that? I care! He told the truth! What he said, that’s exactly what happened. And if you don’t believe that, if you think he ‘spun a story’ to help me, then you think I’m no better than he is.”

“I really need you to stop telling me what I think.”

They stood, side by side leaning against Barba’s kitchen counter, heads turned so that they were scowling at one another.

“And I need to live with myself. I did not do what you think I did. Whatever that is.” She kept a tight rein on herself as she spoke quietly and pushed up from the counter. “I’m just gonna hail a cab outside.”

“Francisca, don’t leave like this. You’ve been through enough.”

She didn’t respond as she pulled on a short, fitted leather jacket over her soft grey tank top. When she’d collected her luggage, she turned to him as she stood just inside the open door.

“Thanks, Barba. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, more than I can say.”

“I’m not a monster.”

“Neither am I.”

“I know that. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“And that’s the problem. I’m one of the good guys, Barba. I can’t feel the way I feel about you and have you doubt that. Even if you don’t care.”

“What does that even mean?!” He shouted.

“It means I hear you. You know I didn’t kill Alan but you think I did something to get the charges dropped, and you don’t care about that because all’s well that ends well.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“For you, that doesn’t make me a monster. For me, it does.”

“You’re young, Francisca.”

“OK, that’s my cue. When your argument starts being my age, we’ve said everything there is to say.”

For the rest of the afternoon, both Barba and Frankie muttered to themselves all the things they wished they’d said.

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

“Amanda, stop! I cannot hear that stuff.”

“I wasn’t telling you sex stuff! I couldn’t, could I, when I’ve been back from Austin for a month? It’s just that Rafe’s amazing, and we had the best time together, and why didn’t you tell me he was such a studmuffin?”

“Ugh. Stop.”

“Well, he likes you.”

“I like him, too. We’re close. Just… tell someone else. Tell Carisi.”

“Carisi doesn’t want to hear about how hot your brother is.”

“Carisi is right.”

“OK, well, Barba’s here, so you get a reprieve for now. But seriously, Frankie, he is just…”

“Briefing time.”

Around the table, the team provided the information they had about their latest case, making sure everyone had all the data they would need during the questioning to come. Frankie’s role would be a passive one; she didn’t need to take part in the interview unless something unexpected happened. What they needed was her read on the suspect.

It was awkward standing next to Barba in his sublime suit, even though the past two months had been surprisingly normal. Rafael and Frankie had even found their way into several arguments. It was awkward because he’d hung his jacket over the back of his chair at the conference table and rolled up his sleeves. His hands and forearms were beautiful and kept drawing Frankie’s attention. Not only that, he kept making astute observations and asking piercing questions that were helping Frankie to zero in on this suspect’s psyche. They were a good team.

During the past months, blessedly full of routine and ordinariness, Frankie had recovered her sense of herself. It had been healing to be in her own apartment, waking up and going to work in her own office, in charge and control of her life. She didn’t see any reason to replace her burned-out car; she liked the freedom of not having to deal with it. Her colleagues at the FBI and in SVU had been wonderfully supportive. She hadn’t had the opportunity to see Porter since she’d been released from prison, which was a little odd given what they’d been through with Canady, but he’d called. Olivia assured her she’d see him soon.

The problem was that, the more she recovered and settled permanently into her New York life, the more head space she had for Barba. Her feelings for him were not lessening with time. Worse, they had both been terribly adult about the whole thing, which told her that she was going to need to get over it. She was the only one who had been foolish enough to fall in love in such an irrationally short time. She didn’t blame herself – trauma could do that to a person, she’d seen it a million times on the job. She just needed to shake it off. But it made her very sad, and the more she grew into her role at SVU, the worse it got. Barba was so very attractive, so brilliant, so damn great at his job, she would really have liked to build something with him. It was not going to happen. He was a serial dater, and she’d just been the latest woman on his agenda. He’d made her feel attractive and special, and had been exactly what she’d needed when she needed him. But that was apparently just the reason he was so attractive to so many women. He didn’t feel what she did.

“How old is this guy?” She asked Barba as they stood, a discreet distance apart, watching the interrogation.

“Sixty-eight.”

“Yeah. That fits.”

“What are you thinking?”

“He’s not faking this.”

“You’re saying the entire building and everything in it really has been replaced by exact duplicates?”

Rafael’s heart skipped a beat when she gave him the familiar scornful side-eye he sometimes said things specifically to elicit. Like now.

“I’m saying that idea is a real symptom of a real problem. It’s called ‘reduplicative amnesia’ and there’s an easy way to find out.” She knocked quietly on the door and walked into the box.

“Mr. Wilson, I’m Dr. Rojas. I apologize for the interruption, but I wonder if I might ask a couple of questions. It will only take a moment.”

Rafael watched as she asked a number of questions about where the suspect believed himself to be, and was surprised when he informed her that this building was in Detroit. It was an exact replica of an actual police station in New York, but this wasn’t the original. It was a fake copy, designed to trick him. He could see “Aha!” written all over her.

Barba appreciated the chance to simply watch her for a while. He was fascinated by the way she made her simple shirtdress seem so elegant, and the way the different sections of her braid shone with slightly varied colors in the overhead lights. He found her dazzling. And watching her use her talent and insight was fascinating no matter how many times he saw it. He even enjoyed the hell out of their verbal sparring. But he was at an absolute loss as to what to do with his feelings for her, and it was starting to be a problem.

Rafael didn’t understand what had happened. He’d thought that Frankie had asked him to be honest about what he thought of the information Juwon Jefferson had given them. He had been, but apparently that wasn’t what she really wanted. What she wanted Barba to do was tell her that he believed everything Juwon Jefferson had said. She wanted him to lie.

Rafael might have been right about her in the first place. Francisca Rojas might be a woman who required the people in her life to believe she was perfect, or at least to tell her that she was. He couldn’t do that. He’d told her what he believed. He’d even told her that he didn’t care if she or someone else had done something that might not be entirely admirable, since it had kept her from going to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. That was the best he could do. But, apparently, that wasn’t good enough. And, worse, what passed for “love” in her mind was far short of what he was looking for. She’d said she loved him the night she came home from Riker’s, and although she hadn’t repeated it the next morning, she had at least confirmed that she had feelings for him. Yet since the moment he’d blundered into suggesting that someone might have influenced Juwon Jefferson to give a statement corroborating hers, it was as though she’d turned it off. Rafael needed a woman whose love was indestructible. Francisca Rojas’s was apparently about as durable as smoke.

“He needs a CT, and probably an MRI, as well,” Frankie was saying to Olivia, who had been in the interrogation but was now leaving with her and Fin, apparently having abandoned it. “There are several things that can cause this: tumors, dementia, brain injury, other psychiatric disorders... He needs a workup. Because we need to know his mental state before we can go one step further.”

“Wait, wait, wait…” Barba cried, stopping them as they passed him on their way to Olivia’s office. “What’s going on?”

“Wilson may not be competent to stand trial,” Frankie said.

“Bullshit. So he thinks he’s in Detroit. He still knows rape is wrong, and he still tried to avoid being arrested. Voila! Competent.”

“Oh, brother. Get over yourself, Barba. Nobody’s that good. Any expert psychiatrist as sane as Wilson is could make hay out of this. We need a workup.”

“Not today, we don’t. I’m charging him. If it gets to the point where there’s a need for a workup-“

“Ni siquiera te importa si él es [1]–“

“Esto no se trata de [2]-“

“Ding! Ding!” Olivia called. “Fighters to your corners. There’s no one in your room right now. Let me know who wins.”

Rafael and Frankie expressed their displeasure, but both trudged into the least-used interrogation room at SVU, which had begun to be affectionately known as “their room”, because it had become routine for them to have heated disagreements that apparently could only be solved through half an hour of high-volume Spanish discourse.

“Explain to me why you don’t want to know the truth here?”

“Explain to me why I need to explain anything to you?”

“I’m not here to be decorative, Barba. This guy’s got a pathology going on, and it could mean he’s not legally responsible for what he did. How is it that doesn’t matter to you?”

“Because even he thinks he’s legally responsible. He ran away, remember?”

“Even you don’t believe what you’re saying.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaand, we’re back to you telling me what I believe.”

Frankie was taken aback for a second. Was he still talking about the case? “I don’t think you really want to just stick your head in the sand on this. Do you?”

“You call it sticking my head in the sand. I call it looking at the world the way it really is. You oughtta try it sometime. It’s very refreshing.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” He was talking about them. She was sure of it now.

Rafael sighed. “Nothing. It means… Francisca, not everything is black and white. This job, you gotta get a little more comfortable with gray.”

“Well, thank you for the career advice, but in this particular situation, there’s a fairly simple way to determine whether this man has organic brain damage that might-“

“So what if he does? He still raped a woman and beat her bloody. He still deserves the punishment for that. I really don’t give fuck one if ‘the tumor made him do it’. He’s still guilty, and he should still pay the price.”

“Even if that means breaking a whole shitload of rules.”

“Sometimes, to make things come out right, you have to break the rules. You can do that and still be one of the good guys. And that, mi fresa, is a lesson you have yet to learn.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

“Then stop acting like one. The world is an imperfect place. The sooner you get comfortable with that, the better off we’ll all be. I’m instructing Liv to charge him.” Rafael turned his back on Frankie and strode from the room. Although he’d won this argument, he’d lost what mattered.

Olivia Benson constantly accused Barba of having too much respect for the rules, of being too bound by them. In that moment, he realized that he had lost Francisca, a woman he could have loved, because she didn’t think he respected rules enough. It was the ugliest kind of irony. And it was enough. Time for Barba to stop living like a monk waiting for a woman who was never coming back.

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

One of Frankie’s favorite things to do had become Friday night drinks with Sonny, Amanda, and Fin. They were so much fun, had so many great stories, and she really enjoyed the chemistry between them. On rare occasions, they were joined by Olivia and Porter, but when the two of them had a night off together, they were much more likely to want to spend it alone together, or just the two of them with Noah. Tonight was an “alone together” night while Noah stayed with a friend, which received its fair share of jokes in questionable taste around the table at Folini’s.

Amanda and Sonny were now trying to get Fin to reveal details about the date he had planned for the next night. Fin was enjoying their attempts, but was giving nothing away. Apparently, Amanda and Sonny shared Frankie’s opinion that it was kind of cute how excited he was about the date, because they would not let it go. They were well into their second drink before the subject finally changed.

“I don’t know why you won’t tell us about her,” Amanda said to Fin. “We tell you everything.”

“Did it ever occur to you that might be why I don’t tell you anything? You overshare. Both of you.”

Sonny’s offended look was hilarious. “I do not overshare,” he insisted.

“You so overshare,” Amanda laughed.

“Oh, Partner, you do not get to go there with me. I should not know how many condoms you went through when you visited Frankie’s brother in Austin.”

“Ewwwww! Stop right there! I do not want to be in therapy for the rest of my life,” Frankie shouted.

“Hey, look, we were celebrating! He’d just got the splint off his hand so we were finally able to-“

“Wait, what? What splint?”

“Hmmmm?” Amanda asked, with a false confusion Frankie saw through instantly.

“What happened to Rafe’s hand?”

Amanda looked around the table, each of the other faces as blank as she was trying to make hers.

“Oh, you must have heard about it. He got… hurt on the ranch.”

“How? What happened?”

“Oh, I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t remember the details. I just know he was doing something with a steer, and his fingers got caught in a rope somehow.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“They probably thought they’d be accused of oversharing!” Amanda laughed and began to tease Sonny about his own lack of discretion.

Something about the exchange bothered Frankie. Amanda was clearly lying, and Amanda had done enough undercover work to be a very good actress when called upon. But that was when she was prepared. She had clearly said something she shouldn’t have. There was something about Rafe’s hand injury Amanda, or Rafe, didn’t want Frankie to know. But that made no sense. What could be secret about a hand injury?

She was temporarily distracted from her thoughts when something across the street caught her eye; a familiar profile in a well-made suit walking in front of a Chinese restaurant the team never went to because it was far too expensive. Rafael was holding the door open for a striking blonde woman in a pantsuit Frankie had been drooling over the previous week at Barney’s. As she walked past him into the restaurant, the woman gave Rafael an unmistakable pat on the butt, which made him laugh in a way that made it clear the touch was quite welcome.

[1] You don’t even care if he’s-

[2] This is not about -

#law & order svu #law & order: special victims unit #rafael barba #raul esparza #fin tutuola #sonny carisi #amanda rollins #olivia benson #law & order SVU Agent Dean Porter

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collateralfiction · 6 years ago

Text

Bailey

My fingers combed through my tresses slowly, easing the small knots out of my hair. I had promised Austin that I would help him with his summer work and I was going to stick to that deal. Although last night’s event with Lonnie replayed over and over in my head, I couldn’t really treat Austin any differently because he’s not the reason for any of this. This was something I had to bring up to Adrian when the chance presented itself because last night… wasn’t the right time to do so. Matter fact, we have a lot to talk about and since Adrian doesn’t want anyone leaving the house today, this gives us more than enough time to do just that. I quickly placed my hair in a ponytail before exiting my bathroom. I felt better than I have in the past few days and to be honest, I’m not sure if that should be a good thing I should grow accustomed to or be a bit worried that I feel good in this predicament.

I threw on one of my Crooks N Castles sweatshirt before leaving the vicinity of my bedroom quickly. I told Austin to meet me downstairs in the kitchen and left advised, he did what I said and sat at the counter with a plethora of papers scattered around the area next to him. Though he missed a big chunk of first grade while recovering at the hospital, Justine was able to get a personal teacher for Austin to be around and help him to stay on top of things. That alone is the only reason he’s progressing into second grade where he belongs. But, the work doesn’t stop yet, so I offered to pitch in and help with as much as I could. “Hi, Austin,” I grinned, taking the available seat next to him. I pinched his cheeks obnoxiously before looking over what he was working on. “What’re you working on now?”

“Science and I hate it,” he stressed badly.

“It’s second grade science, how bad can it be?” I teased playfully. “Let me see,” If it’s one thing I can say, Austin will definitely be a well-rounded kid. I know that most of the things that’s sitting in front of him aren’t required of him to learn just yet but Justine slid things of that nature in anyhow. “Liquid, solids and gases; light work!” I said, quickly reading over the directions. Austin had five subjects he had to get through today or at least this morning; English, Writing, Math, Science and Social Studies. I see he’s attempting to do the hard subjects first. “Alright, label what each phase is and then write how they differ,” I said, sliding the paper back his way.

“Differ?” he questioned, uncertain like.

“What’s different about them,” I chuckled. “Got it? Good,” Since Austin was pretty much self-motivated, I didn’t have to do much convincing for him to do this on his own and he didn’t have much questions either. I used his iPad and surfed the web while he continued to work diligently. We had finished the science portion and was now working towards the math section. Not once did he ask for my help and he breezed past it easily. I guess it was due to the fact that Adrian is a great mathematician, so it must have rubbed off on Aussie. While Austin worked on the last few math problems, I stared at him and couldn’t help but feel like I’m in the wrong.

I did see some similarities between Lonnie and Austin and because I’m just now seeing it, it’s hitting me hard. I’m not too sure what Adrian has planned when this is all said and done, and I don’t know what Adrian will eventually do to Lonnie either. Apart of me is worried that he’ll resort to drastic measures and Austin will forever be affected by something like this. It’s clear that Austin doesn’t see his father as much as he should and there’s a reason for that, which I’m not aware of. It just makes all of this even more difficult to do. I’m also curious to know why he didn’t say anything to begin with. Maybe it was strategic of him but it’s backfiring in the end. I didn’t even want to think about Justine and her involvement, to be honest. That was something I would have to confront Adrian about because I don’t even know how to go about explaining that to her. Not that I want to anyhow.

This is someone I actually befriended and now I’m messing with her ex? Messy. “Baileyyy,” Austin dragged out, stabbing me with his eraser multiple times. I grabbed it away from him and slammed it on the table. He laughed it off while continuing to say what he had on his mind. “Can you help me with this now?” he said, pointing towards the next worksheet. I grabbed his math worksheet to look over while examining the new one.

“Oh, so you’re learning about Native Americans, huh?” I smirked. “Let me give you the real story,” I said, draping my arm over his shoulder. It took me roughly fifteen minutes to explain the true story, well as I learned it, to him and from his attentive stare, I knew he was paying attention. It was literally like I was telling him a bedtime story and this story is one for the books that he would remember forever. “So, what did you learn from that?” I asked.

“Andrew Jackson adopted an Indian son but made Indians leave their home on the Trail of Tears,” he said. He has such a good memory.

“Say Native Americans though, alright?” he nodded. “Alright, so what you have to do is just answer these questions concerning the passage, but I basically already gave you the answers so just fill it in,” I sighed, standing up to go grab something to for me to eat. “You want something to eat, Aussie?”

“Pizza?” he asked.

I looked over at the clock on the wall. “How about I make a sandwich instead and then you can ask your uncle for some later?” I bargained with him. He pouted cutely but nodded anyhow. Other than Austin and I, the house was relatively silent but I knew that people were awake and around. It was just peculiar at how quiet things were when normally it’s loud as shit. “What type of meat, Austin?” I asked.

“Pause!” Austin shouted. But it wasn’t just his voice alone, it was Caiden’s as well.

“Get your head out of the gutter,” I said, giving the two of them the eye. “Turkey or Bologna?”

“Turkey,” Austin said.

“You dead our personal chef. You mind making me one?” Caiden asked, siting besides Austin. The math questions I was supposed to be checking over, he was now looking at. I gave him a simple okay as I began to work on another extra Turkey sandwich. With Austin’s sandwich done and microwaved just the way he liked it, I placed the meal in front of him and removed the rest of his summer homework out of the way, so he wouldn’t make a mess.

“Enjoy,” I smiled at the two of them once Caiden’s sandwich was done as well. “Uh, I heard about last night. I’m glad y’all alright,” I said.

“Same here,” he mumbled. “The real props goes to August though. Neither Adrian nor I smelled anything wrong,” He tried to keep his voice low and at a reasonable level because he didn’t want Austin to hear any of this. I’m sure the gang does their best in keeping him out of this light for the best and knowing how smart of a kid Austin is, the slightest bit of information he hears will arouse any sort of question. Things they want to avoid. Lucky for the two of us, Austin was too wrapped up in his food to worry about his surroundings.

“Damn, do you guys have a clue on who did it?” I propped my elbows up and waited for him to give me somewhat of an answer.

“Our first guess is Ryan,” My heart dropped. and I froze. If their intuition is correct and indeed it happens to be Ryan, I can only foreshadow the worst happening from here on out. Burning up a car with people in it is a huge risk and not only is it a huge risk, it’s a bold statement. I can’t even dictate whether or not Ryan’s actions are genuine and if this is all part of his plan to hopefully get me back or just to make things even. I’ve known Ryan for such a long time and at this point, I can’t even tell whether his actions or genuine or not; it’s sad. But without a doubt, a part of me is scared for what’s to come. What if because of Ryan’s actions, my mother and sister is harmed in the process? I won’t be able to feel comfortable knowing that Adrian and everyone else is behind the destruction of one man who has ties to my family. Adrian said that he won’t do anything until Ryan has done something first and he has… so where does things go from here? My head clasped in my hands as I tried my best to compose my breathing. I didn’t want to overthink. but I didn’t want to ignore these feelings either. “Besides him, we can’t think of no other,” he confessed.

“So, you’re saying you don’t really have enemies?” I said, raising my eyebrow to show disbelief. There was no way they didn’t have a few enemies on them; whether it was strictly business or personal.

“When we work with people, after the job is done, we tend to cut off ties and go on ‘bout our business. And even if we did have people gunning for us, we would know, and things would have happened way long ago. On some real shit, it’s not just a coincidence that we hear Ryan got a team ready to fuck with any one of us, at any given moment and all of a sudden our car blows to shreds?” Caiden asked rhetorically. “That’s just not how shit works,” he shrugged.

“But where’s your evidence?” I asked. “How do you know it’s him?” He stared at me with this stoic expression before the corners of his lips tugged into a smirk.

“First things first, it’s not about evidence at this point. It’s common sense and your instincts. But I see where you’re getting at. You trying to protect that old flame of yours, right?” he asked, pointing at the Poland Spring bottle of water that rested in the corner of the kitchen. I sighed and grabbed him one and as he gulped down a hefty some of the room temperature drink, his eyes stayed glued on mine. Seeing that I had yet to respond, he spoke up again, “You can’t protect a grown man. It’s just not going to happen. You not even worried about him, especially since he done you wrong. It’s about your sister and mother. They’re not the targets,”

“You say that now, Caiden,” I mumbled.

“It’s better than what Adrian would have given you,” he shrugged. “Thanks for the food though, B. Catch me in the gym,” he smirked, messing with Austin as left.

“Hulk looking ass nigga,” I chuckled.

“I heard that!” Caiden yelled.

Austin laughed, pulling me away from my thoughts. “Why don’t we come back to the homework much later and for right now, let’s go play on one of your game systems,” I needed a distraction, like yesterday and with Austin’s young self, I’ll be distracted for a long time.

“You can play video games?” he asked, hopping down. I grabbed his plate and placed it in the sink.

“Of course!” I smiled. “Where’s your mom by the way? I haven’t seen her all morning,”

“She’s still asleep. I don’t think she feels good,”

“Let’s make her Chicken Noodle Soup after I destroy you in one of these games,” I smirked.

“Bet,”

So, after four rounds of a game that consisted of fast pace car racing, Austin and I stuck to our promise and made his mother some Chicken Noodle Soup. Justine was actually sick, but it wasn’t for the obvious reason Austin would suspect. It was just her monthly gift from Mother Nature and her cramps were bothering her like no other. Austin stayed for as long as he felt needed before his mother told him he could depart and do whatever he felt like. That didn’t leave me off the hook though. So, I remained in her room until she finished eating. “Thank you for this by the way. I just want to sit down and do nothing all day now,”

“That’s you every day,” I chuckled. “I peep. But question that I need an answer to, did you have a job prior to coming here?” It was random, but I wanted to know.

She gasped dramatically before sitting up in bed. “I was unemployed, got a job, didn’t like it and quit,” she expressed. “I don’t know what it is with me and jobs. And it doesn’t help that Adrian always messing with my jobs as well,”

“He doesn’t want you working?” I asked.

“I don’t know if that’s the case. You should ask him,” she winked. I know for a fact no one is aware of what happened between Adrian and I last night. It’s just obvious that we’re on better terms than we have been before. I can’t really explain the kiss or describe it, but I don’t take any of it back. It was perfect, unexpected and his lips are the softest thing around. Any other time, I probably wouldn’t have jumped the gun to kiss him but having him in my space like that did something to me. I wouldn’t declare Adrian as standoffish but he does keep his distance and this whole faux, not mixing business with pleasure no longer has any relevance because that’s already happened. After I asked him to sleep with me for the night, our make out session continued once in the confines of my bedroom but, it didn’t go further than that. As much as I would have enjoyed it, I wasn’t going to let Adrian think he was that suave to talk me out of my panties. His actions would have to prove he’s worthy enough, right?

Exactly.

“I’ll think about it,” I muttered.

“I wonder how your ex would feel if he knew what was happening,” I scooted closer on her bed to the point where I was using her pillow as my cuddling partner. I don’t really think of Ryan as much as I should have. He’s like a distant memory. Our relationship is nonexistent; I’m not mad nor bitter about it. I’m twenty-one and have the rest of my life to date. It wasn’t meant for Ryan and I and the last few months of us being together proved that theory.

“He would be annoyed but can’t do much but accept it. I know he’s not crying a river over me,” I said truthfully. “That’s not the type of man he is,”

“So, why’d you end up in a relationship with him?” she questioned.

“’Cause I loved him,”

“Loved?” she chuckled. “You don’t love him anymore? Or, you aren’t in love with him? There’s a difference, Bailey,” she said sternly. I felt like we already had this conversation before and it was all just a repeat. I did not want to have a conversation consisting of Ryan, regardless of the circumstance. It was useless. But I do want a conversation from him though; a conversation that consists of closure and nothing more. As cliché as it might sound, I have love for Ryan on the basis of a friendship but as far as a relationship goes, I was reaching for something that I don’t think he wanted in the first place. It was all too soon. I’m not in love with him and I haven’t been for a while.

“You know the answer already, Justine,” I huffed. “It’s a thing of the past and I would like for it to remain in the past,”

“Why are you so quick to write it off though? You might be suppressing some feelings,”

“No, I don’t do that,” I chuckled. I don’t suppress my emotions like most but rather, it comes out when least expected or I’m just quick to react which means my emotions are on display no matter what. However, I do tend to put other’s feelings before mine if anything. But suppressing? That’s one thing I don’t do. “I just rather move on. I mean, haven’t you done that with any of your exes?” I questioned, unintentionally leading this conversation into an unwanted direction. Or maybe not.

“It’s hard to do that when one of your exes is the father of your child,” she remarked, pursing her lips together shortly after. And that’s when the wave of guilt began to eat at me. I don’t think I can even bring myself to mention what I know to Justine. Mostly out of fear and not wanting to cause even more tension in the house. This would just be something else added to the list of things Adrian and I needed to discuss. “I met Austin’s father when I was really young, like fifteen. And he was around eighteen by then. As you can see, my mother and I don’t have the best of a relationship like some have it and I began to do things I knew she wouldn’t approve of but wouldn’t have the time to check me about either,” she sighed. I clearly could see this would bring a few tears, so I quickly hurried off her bed and over to the nightstand to grab the tissue box. I threw it on her lap, causing her to chuckle.

“I’m not a crybaby. I don’t know what happened the last time,” she laughed.

“Everyone cries,” I shrugged. “Ain’t a big deal,” I said. “But continue,”

“Mmkay, so, I started to invest in a lot of time with him without my mother knowing and the more I stayed around him, the more I learned that at that time, he was selling dope and shit,” she mumbled. “I wasn’t too surprised because almost every boy I came across was doing the same thing, including my brother so what’s the big deal? The big deal was when I found out I was pregnant, and he wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted to be part of his son’s life,” It was weird hearing everyone’s interpretation of Lonnie because I got the complete opposite.

“He wanted the fast life and I was stupid for cosigning his actions,” By her tone, you could hear the disappointment she held for her own self. “It’s just backfired in the end because he rarely sees his son and it hurts knowing that they might not have a strong relationship,”

“Why not?” I said, not wanting to be too nosy but still gain some sort of insight. Maybe there’s an alternative route I can take instead of meddling between a family like this. Maybe if Adrian would be a little more truthful, he could simply involve his sister in this matter and she may very well have the answers he seeks. For crying out loud, the amount of time I would have to spend with Lonnie to figure out one tidbit of information is nothing compared to what Justine should alreadyknow. But, I digress. There must be a method to his madness. I just don’t want this to all backfire in the end because of something that could have been easily avoidable.

“Adrian hasn’t told you?” she asked, looking at me a bit skeptical.

“About…?” I continued to push.

She sighed and began to fumble with the ends of her sweater. “Well, you know Austin was kidnapped and beaten and that all happened under Lonnie’s, Austin’s father, supervision,” she said slowly, trying to prevent herself from crying.

“Oh, that makes sense,” I muttered to myself. Probably one of the reasons why Austin is in Justine’s custody fully.

“Anyway, that’s why I can’t move on from my ex,” she chuckled, attempting to brighten the mood. I laughed along with her, so she wouldn’t have the chance to suspect anything.

“You still love him, and I mean essentially, in love?” If she happened to be in love with him, that would reshape everything that was bound to happen and if she feels this confident to express so much to me, me going behind her back to just help Adrian get even at Lonnie isn’t even worth it. But, if she surprises me and says that she isn’t, I guess she wouldn’t feel that butt hurt in knowing something of this caliber. Still, this is the aftermath of something Adrian has to deal with, especially if this is his sister!

I turned my head to get a better look at Justine as she contemplated her next words to express her feelings about Lonnie. I was hoping that her response would be the latter of my thoughts but by her prolonged thoughts, I knew the answer.

“No but since he’s my child’s father, I now have unconditional love for him,” I sighed in relief discreetly. It’s better than her being in love with someone who just might end up dead.

A well-deservednap and slice of cheesy Pizza later, everyone seemed pretty much ready to call it a night, especially with us all wearing ourselves out tonight by doing extraneous activities Austin came up with. It was actually fun, but you would think Austin would be the most tired out of all of us, not at all. He was ready to do this all over again as soon as he finished his Pizza and received his medicine for the night. As soon as Justine made sure that he was washed and well taken care of for the night, he would be right back downstairs in the confines of the living room where everyone was at. Well, more so where Adrian and I was at. Everyone was used to doing something and going out but today was an exception. Adrian wanted to take extreme caution to ensure everyone’s safety so the lockdown for the day seemed suitable. That is until everyone seemed cranky during some part of the day. But from here on out, I don’t know what’s to come. Adrian and the guys have already had their little discussion late last night while everyone was supposedly asleep, like he would have thought I didn’t notice him slipping out of my room and made arrangements I’m not included on.

“Adrian, we need to talk,” I muttered, tapping my nails against the couch cushions. A little over a week ago, Justine and I had went to a nail salon around the area called ‘Feisty Nails’ and as a treat for me, Justine paid for a manicure and pedicure for us and now my long acrylic nails were colored white, really bringing out my skin tone.

“We were just talking less than a minute ago, what changed?” he mumbled, flicking through the channels aimlessly.

“No, I mean we have to discuss a few things that I have questions about,” I spoke.

“Go ahead,”

“First round of discussion, your lapdog Elsa. Seriously, how does she know about my father?” I didn’t sleep peacefully knowing that Elsa knew something that personal. I don’t talk to the bitch and she definitely doesn’t talk to me, so how does she have a clue? I’m going to believe Adrian in him telling the truth of not saying much to her about me, but something isn’t adding up.

“She ain’t my bitch anymore,” he grunted.

“I don’t care. That’s not my question,” I said sternly, realizing that he was going to beat around the bush.

“I told you, I don’t know. I didn’t say anything to her about you. I would never,” he mumbled, stopping his channel surfing.

“Can you look at me?” I snapped. “I know you don’t give a fuck about my father, but can you at least show you care somewhat!?” From the other side of the couch we both resided on, he sat up and gave me his undivided attention. I was being dead serious right now and no amount of foolery would make me feel otherwise.

“Alright, you’on need to yell at me, B,” he said in a rough tone. “I told you I don’t know and that’s my word. Why the fuck I need to lie to you for?”

“You don’t know, huh? If I were you, I would find out,” I said. “Why might you ask? Sure, I’ll tell you. If this bitch knows about my father, she also knows that I’m kidnapped. She knows that I’m kidnapped, she’ll eventually run and tell someone because you cut her off!”

“She wouldn’t dare,” he said way too calmly for my liking, his eyes lowering.

“You’re way too lax right now,” I said, shaking my head lightly.

“So, what do you want me to do to make you feel comfortable?” His voice sounded condescending and I didn’t like the tone he was using. Let it be Justine in my predicament here, he would blow a roof but for me, it’s different. I see.

I scoffed, crossing my arms over my chest. “Do nothing,” I mumbled. “I bet Justin or Caiden would have an answer for me before you do,”

“Alright, glad that’s cleared,” he nodded. If the expression on my face wasn’t enough to show how turned off I was by his behavior, me walking away was more than enough. If he wasn’t going to listen to me or take me serious enough to have a conversation about things related to me, then there’s no point in me saying anymore. Before I could even reach the staircase, he was already pulling me back into his strong arms. “You like me running after you, huh?” he said near my ear.

“No,” I said. “I hate that’s you’re not listening when I need you to the most,” I pouted.

“Alright, alright. Come back and talk to me. I’ll listen,” he pleaded. Pushing his body away from mine, I walked past the living room we were just in, past the kitchen and outside towards the pool area. I don’t know why but having conversations outside with Adrian are easier for me to get through oppose to when we’re inside the house. I sat down first, tucking my feet under my ass and he plopped down beside me, really giving me his undivided attention now that there were no distractions available. “I’m all yours, go ahead,”

Taking a deep breath, I repeated my worries to him once again. “If you didn’t tell Elsa about my father and I didn’t either, how would she know such a thing, Adrian? And be honest. If you were being carless and she overheard, let me know!”

“I don’t talk business around Elsa but if you want to put the blame on someone, it’s my fault for allowing her inside the house but it ain’t come from me,”

“So… maybe one of your boys?” That chances of that were slim.

“Nah,” he said with ease. “But, I’ll look into it for you, okay?” he questioned, pulling me closer towards him. I nodded slowly; I had no choice but to be okay with it for now. I’m sure it raised a few concerns in Adrian’s mind but he wasn’t speaking of it verbally to me at least. I just hope that Elsa bringing that up wouldn’t be my demise nor Adrian’s. “Anything else?”

“Yes, there is actually,” I said, loosening up. I might as well lay it on all on the table now that I have his attention. “Why didn’t you tell me Lonnie was Austin’s father?” I whispered harshly, afraid that Justine or Austin might hear. His eyebrows raised as he stared at me through squinted eyes. Whatever excuse that spews out of his mouth, better be a good excuse.

“Because of that reaction there,” he mumbled, bringing his hand down his face tiredly. Just by looking at the tiredness in his eyes, if the time called for it, I would have discontinued the conversation and let him get his rest but at a time like this, nope. Now that I finally have him all to myself, there’s no way I was going to let him get his beauty sleep. He would have to put up with me and my inquiries until I’m satisfied. “It’s not like it was meant to remain a secret but I wasn’t trying to cause you to jeopardize this shit and have you slip by mentioning it to either Justine or Lonnie,”

“Well that was probably one of the worst ideas you’ve ever come up with,” He looked slightly offended, but that only caused me to chuckle slightly. “Do you know Lonnie showed me a picture of Austin and I almost blurted out his name before he had the chance to do so? What if he heard me? Then what?” I questioned.

“Then, you play it off,” he said casually. Although by the irked expression on his face, I know he’s the least bit happy in me slipping; not me finding out that this is Austin’s father I’m messing with. I mean, the truth was going to come out one way or another but I think it would have been much better if Adrian was just upfront about this all along, so I wouldn’t feel guilty about my actions. But, along the way, I’m learning that Adrian is selfish and being that I am the complete opposite, that doesn’t mesh quite well.

“Does Justine even know about any of this?” I asked, already knowing the answer but I wanted him to explain to me why she doesn’t and what good does that do. He shook his head like I knew he would. “And why is that?” I muttered.

“I know Justine is still in love with that nigga and if she was to hear some shit like this, she would try to stop it and meddle in between something that doesn’t concern her as much as she thinks it does. Maybe if she would have thought of working with me and not against me in helping, you wouldn’t be in this predicament. It’s best that you don’t mention a damn thing to Justine about this anyhow. I should have known y’all was going to grow close and that’s a mistake on my part. But under any circumstances, I don’t need you telling Justine shit,”

“So, you will?” I said, leaning on my side to face him. His fingers danced along my Dream Catcher tattoo that was strategically placed along my side. He was becoming distracted, so I gently grasped his large hand in mine and stopped his hand movements, forcing him to look up at me.

“When the time calls for it. Just watch what you say around her, that’s all,” He makes it seem so easy. “Is that it?”

“No,” I said.

Adrian

Yesterday and today has been nothing but tiresome. With the bombing of one our cars to Bailey and her inquisitive mind, I don’t know what’s worse. I’d like to think the latter is the worst of the two but they both hold the same weight. I have no doubt that Ryan was the one that set that up. That was something he would do, especially with larceny being his signature style and choice of execution. No one can tell me otherwise until I have legit proof someone else could have done it. This is definitely a bold move on his part and although this doesn’t mean war just yet, this does have my eyes and ears wide open. If he can place a bomb in one of my cars, that means he’s been following me somewhere in order to know which one is my car, and to spot where I was yesterday. As much as a huge stunt that must have been for Ryan, if he was really smart, he would have followed me until I got to my residence and then tried to bomb me. But he isn’t as well thought out as you would think for someone who wants to bomb me, right?

Well, at least that’s how I look at the situation.

Now, it’s my turn to make the next move.

“What more is there to question me about?” I said. I dead felt like I was in a police station, getting questioned over and over for something that is out of my control.

“Why did you make me kill someone?” I could still hear some lingering hate in between her words even though her words were whispered.

“I didn’t make you do anything,” I countered.

“Bullshit,” she muttered. “What was the purpose of that?” she continued to press. This one topic she would not let go so I knew I had to start coughing up some answers.

“Listen, I have a hard way of expressing myself and I tend to go to the extreme at times but that’s just me,” I shrugged. It was true, she didn’t have to kill anyone but at the time, that was the price she paid for having that sense of doubt and not being able to fully trust me. No one likes to be doubted and it didn’t sit right with me knowing that Bailey was questioning me like I would intentionally put her in harm’s way. Maybe having her kill someone was a bit too excessive, but it got the point across, at least in my mind it did. It didn’t really matter whether someone else saw what I did as fit or justifiable because it was only me who got the satisfaction out of it at the end of the day. “It’s just the way I get my point across,”

“That sounds contradicting,” she chuckled. “You have a hard time of expressing yourself, but you get your point across better than what I would expect,” she elaborated. I knew she would say some shit like that so that’s why I kept quiet and allowed her to rant. “I believe you have no problem expressing who you are and getting your point across. It just bothers me that you feel the need to be sneaky and then you have the nerve to get mad when I question you on shit like this. I just don’t think it’s fair, especially when you use excess aggression,”

“Compared to a lot of people, I barely touch you,”

“Oh, but when you do it’s a problem,” she quickly retorted.

“So, I won’t touch you,” I smirked, crossing my arms over my chest.

“Ugh!” she groaned, hitting me with the circular pillow. “You’re such a fuckin’ douche,”

“Sometimes,” I replied nonchalant like. “But look, I hear what you’re saying. It ain’t going in one ear and coming out the other type shit, alright?”

“Mhm,”

“Yo, I’m deadass though. You not tryna believe me?”

“I didn’t say that,”

“So, what are you saying?” I questioned.

“You’re one difficult ass man,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Don’t do that,” I mumbled.

“Why not?” she asked.

“They’ll get stuck like that,” I chuckled. “You ain’t see that SpongeBob episode? That Spongey nigga and his lazy sidekick was making them ugly ass faces n’ shit,”

“How would you know?” she smirked, sitting upright.

“My nigga Ace be watching that shit,”

“Austin?”

“Yep!”

“Well look at that! Adrian watching SpongeBob? That must be a sight to see,” she giggled. I shook my head and stood up from the area. She followed suit as we strolled into the house and back towards the living room. Before she could turn to walk in, I grabbed her hand and made her follow me upstairs. She stumbled along the way causing me to chuckle. “That’s not funny. Where are you taking me?” she questioned. I ignored her inquires while continuing the distance towards my bedroom. She played a nigga last night; I can’t even front. In my book, kissing automatically leads to sex but she put a stop to all of that shit. “I know you be fuckin’ other bitches so I hope these are clean sheets,”

“You got jokes. I’on bring bitches to my crib anymore, not with Austin around,” Which was true. There were certain things I didn’t want to expose him to, let alone think is right so it’s best that he’s censored from it. However, if he so happens to have a question concerning something I do and what he sees, I won’t sugarcoat it from him. I’ll have no choice but to be blunt about it because I’ll be damned if he finds out from someone else.

“Well that’s good. He needs a good role model,”

“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled, catching her subliminal message.

“Well, there must be a reason why you want me here, right?” she inquired. Hell yeah but I know she not ‘bout to do it. “Hmph, thought so. Let’s talk,” I think she might have read my mind.

“We been doing that for the past hour, B. You don’t ever want to just relax and look at the moon?” I watched the many expression change on her face in a matter of seconds before she busted out laughing. “Alright, alright. What you in the mood to talk about, again might I add?”

“Uh,” she began, sitting on the edge of my bed. Funny how she had the illest crush on a nigga and know she’s trying to distance herself away from me. I pulled her closer towards me and made her look at me. Bailey a funny one.

“Don’t even have a topic to discuss,” I chuckled lowly. “But aye, you were really scared for a nigga or what?”

“Ugh, how many times do we have to go over this?” she questioned. “But yes. I was. I already lost a lot of people as is and even though you treat me like shit, I still have a heart and worry ‘bout yo ass,”

“Hm, who you lost?”

She hesitated for a moment. “A lot of people actually. I’m not speaking just literally but… have you ever lost a friend before? But they’re still alive?” she asked, stopping her rambling quickly.

“A friend? Yeah,” I nodded. I mean, who hasn’t?

“Well, yeah. I’ve lost friends before. Like when you kidnapped me…” Kidnapped sounded like such a bad word to use. I’m sure she can come up with something better. “… I left behind a whole family, friends and shit. I don’t know when’s the next time I’m going to see them. Do you?”

“How long you gon’ have this attitude ‘bout that shit? I know what I did wasn’t right. I know. But like I said, I take extreme measures and always have. I feel bad that you feel like you lost your family but they right where you left ‘em. Them niggas coming for my dome anyhow. They alive,” I shrugged off.

“Can you be considerate for a second?” she grumbled. “Or, I’ll just leave and talk to Aussie for the night,”

“Austin and me are the same people. Fuck you though this is?” I smirked.

“Nuh uh. He’s way nicer and he’s way too smooth to be like you,”

“That’s not what your actions say but I’m sleep,”

“Whatever,” she dismissed. “I finally know what I want to talk about though,”

“Go ‘head,” I nodded.

“What is your goal in life?” she asked, attempting to be deep and shit. Probably trying to figure me out. Anyhow, I did take the question into serious consideration as I thought about it. I remember in High School, each year they would make us write our dreams and aspirations down on a piece of paper and write alongside how we would accomplish it. I think mine always said the same thing each year and that was to be able to comfortably take care of my family. I don’t know what type of mother my mom was, but it wasn’t one of those traditional types. My grandmother practically raised me and if I have anything to say about that, it goes to show my mother wasn’t shit and still isn’t. The least she could attempt to do is make sure she’s present in Austin life because I’d be damned if I had a kid and her ass isn’t around.

“Making sure my family is set. Yours?”

“No, no, no. Like, your personal goal?” she tried to clarify but that was my personal goal.

“That is my personal goal,” I chuckled.

“I think you need to make one for yourself,” she mumbled, laying her big ass dome on my chest.

“In due time,” I mumbled. “What about you?”

“Uh, reconnect with my father and make sure he doesn’t hate me after all of this madness and put my degree to use. Sounds good, right?” I nodded my head, feeling a little bad for putting her through this shit. But, what’s done is done and I can’t take shit back. You live and you learn, right?

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