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take-everything-you-can · 2 years ago

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Well I never miss Bluebelle Marie !!!!

Can not give you enough praise hunny bun ! Amazing as always .

These glimpses into how our turtle dove and crow came to be make my little southern heart happy 😊

The black eye 😭 😭 Wayne is a good man forever and always bless his whole heart .

When she asked him how was she supposed to help if she didn't know what size bugs to look for ..... Me and best friend did that everyday for a whole summer straight when we were ten .

I'm in love with this little Eddie verse you've created and I'm so happy you let me bother you with all my little one off ideas and theories of what could have been to what could be 🖤🖤

turtle dove and the crow, interlude 1930

A 1940s Farm AU, featuring bsf!neighbor!eddie x fem!reader

story tags: 18+ (minors dni). smut; true love; unexpected pregnancy; angst, angst, angst; parental issues; corporal punishment; scheming, plotting, and betrayal; hurt/comfort; period-typical stigma regarding unwed pregnancy; angst with a happy ending.

Set in 1930 - ten years before the events of Turtle Dove and the Crow - this interlude is the first of two glimpses back to their humble beginnings.

INTERLUDE 1930: MUSIC BOX (5.7k)

There’s a music box in the bedroom

It’s playing songs from 1922

And if you listen for long enough

You’ll fall asleep and might wake up

Walking in a wonderland

Music Box — Leith Ross

Before he was your crow, and you his turtle dove, Edward Munson was the strange new boy next door.

The morning he arrives is colored the clear blue of late May. It’s one of those first few days after school has let out for the year, and you’re stuck half in a daze, acclimating to a sense of freedom that has not yet seeped entirely in. That irreality keeps you inside for now, and thus, you’re perched in the formal sitting room, occupying one of the stiffer chairs chosen for its proximity to the window offering a view of Mr. Wayne’s front porch. Your eyes are fixed not to its neat row of balustrades standing proudly from the white-painted decking, or even the gnarled branches of the forsythia where some yellow petals still cling stubbornly despite the lateness of the season. Instead, you’re looking at the lattice that protects the porch’s underside, at the place where it meets the corner of the house’s red clapboard. The wood there is broken at one criss-cross, leaving a small gap.

From there, a rabbit is slowly emerging. Breath catches in your throat as it shimmies its small russet body from beneath the broken lattice into the open air. Your eyes widen; tiny fingers find the window pane, leaving tiny, heedless smudge marks on the glass. Raptly, you watch its nose wriggle, head dipping to the grass and nudging around before coming up again. It ventures forward with staccato little hops before halting with its head perked high.

You hear what has alerted it a second later: a muffled rumble begins to permeate the glass between you and the rabbit. The sound grows gradually louder, and your eyes dart from the red house to the yard and then to the dirt road beyond, where the source is now visible. It begins as a vague blue shape, sharpening slowly but steadily until it resolves itself, finally, into a familiar truck. The truck putt-putt-putts gradually up the dirt road before turning with a crunch of thick dirt and gravel into the unpaved drive of your neighbor.

The rabbit stretches its neck and freezes warily for a long, tense moment, legs bunched and ready to flee. Interestingly, though, it never does. Even when a metallic creak draws your attention from the rabbit back to the parked truck, it eases back into the grass, seemingly unbothered now.

This is when you see him for the first time.

It's a silent affair, his arrival, but the new boy next door rolls in with all the beautiful violence of a summer storm. Face wedged between your Mama’s gauze curtains, you watch the passenger door of the truck pop open to allow the chaos inside to tumble out in a whirl of thrashing limbs. And those limbs become a boy. Pale and jagged, thin and angular, he stalks ahead with clenched fists and a strange backward tilt to his upper body— a posture which implies that, while his feet may carry him toward the front door, the rest of him wants nothing more than to rebel. His face, what little you can see of it from this distance, is contorted into a fierce scowl. It cuts pale beneath a wild mop of dark cloudlike curls, slashed by red lips snarled open as if in the middle of a tantrum.

Yet you cannot hear him. Mr. Wayne catches up to him quickly despite the stiffness of his hips; he dwarfs the smaller boy’s roiling shadow, containing his tempestuousness with a hand on his shoulder and guiding him to mount the porch steps before him. You hear the creak of the wood under their feet, and you hear the crack of the screen door as it bounces off red clapboard, and you hear the vague rasp of your older neighbor’s voice before the gentle click of the handle closes the red house up again behind them. But the boy does not make a sound.

Strange.

In your eight-year-old mind, strangeness does not beget caution; it beckons curiosity.

For that reason, Mama doesn’t have to drag you reluctantly with her to deliver a peach pie welcome, though she still plies you with one of her little decorum lessons nonetheless. “It’s the polite thing to do. And never go empty-handed,” she informs you as you slip your hand into the crook of her elbow without resistance, shuffling alongside her across the grass. Together, you mount those same steps you’d watched a summer storm thunder up yesterday; the recollection causes wonderings about the strange boy to whip through your mind like wind touseling your hair. You end up too sluggish for Mama’s taste, and she gestures impatiently for you to knock on the door for her since her hands are occupied. You rush to comply, rapping quickly but for a little too long, so that she has to shoot you a sharp look to get you to stop.

Your curiosity mixes with both wariness and excitement as you hear movement from within the house, and you find it bubbling over as the sounds come imminently closer. Anticipation thrums as the bolt clicks and the knob turns, but when the door finally opens, Mr. Wayne stands there alone.

Your neighbor, Mr. Wayne, has always seemed a calm, steadfast presence to you. It’s a combination of his homely, dirt-dusted clothes, his tanned forearms and weathered knuckles, his thinning hair that leaches color too fast for his age, and his downturned mouth that feels comfortingly familiar but is also a shade less severe than your papa’s. You aren’t unhappy to see him now, but your insides sag as your expectations are thwarted.

Above your head, you watch the adults exchange pleasantries, but the specifics of their conversation are lost on you. You’re consumed by that sagging disappointment; you’d been so sure you’d see your new neighbor standing beside Wayne like you stand with Mama, or perhaps half-hiding behind his legs, had he a shyer disposition. You could forgive that easily. But only a glance is needed to tell you that he’s nowhere in the vicinity of the front door. Perhaps, you suppose, he’s concealed behind a nearby wall to listen without being seen. Or maybe he is loitering at the bend in the staircase, too hesitant to come closer. It’s possible; you begin to hope it is so, and your hope emboldens you.

The pie plate has passed from your mother’s hands into Mr. Wayne’s, but you don’t see that because you’ve begun inching your nose past the threshold of the doorway, craning your neck around Mr. Wayne’s sturdy legs as you search for a peek of that tumultuous boy. You don’t get far before Mama is tugging you back with a sharp yank of your collar, and you stifle a surprised yelp as you yield to her quickly. She clears her throat— a clear chastisement— and as your face creases with remorse, Mr. Wayne huffs with amusement.

“No harm,” he rasps, and your mother’s squeezing fingers drop from your neck upon seeing the easiness in his crinkled blue eyes. “Why don’t you both join me for a slice o’this pie? Looks might fine.”

You brighten visibly, which makes Mr. Wayne chuckle again; when your wide eyes meet your Mama’s, the surge of your excitement is clear, and she is left with no choice but to accept the invitation. Her tiny wry sigh, fond and exasperated, is likely borne of the false assumption that you are excited by the prospect of dessert. That is, in fact, not what has you excited at all.

Your head whips this way and that in search of that elusive boy. You crane and twist, peeking around corners as best as you are able without slowing down as Mr. Wayne guides you toward the dining room. But your seeking yields no results. You plop at the table without having claimed your prize, feet swinging in impatience as a slice of pie is placed in front of you. The large fork is clumsy in your fist, but you manage to eat your desserts with dainty bites that Mama would approve of as she continues to exchange more pleasantries with your neighbor. It doesn’t take long for them to begin discussing the new arrival, and your eyes dart between them intently as you grasp for explanations— who the strange boy is, where he came from, why he wasn’t at the door to greet you, anything to sate the curiosity that has been growing since your first glimpse of the storm.

It quickly becomes clear that there is little for you to glean listening in on this conversation. You grow disinterested with their murmuring, their painstaking way of speaking as if each word must be turned over like fruit to appraise, and each each possible selection must be examined slowly before being settled on. Your disappointment returns with a tinge of frustration as the discussion continues on nonsensically, growing less clear with each successive comment.

“I’d give Joyce and Lonnie a ring,” your Mama suggest to Wayne, her hands wrapped around a steaming mug with a tiny chip along its rim. “Their older boy is goin’ through a spurt, outgrowin’ his clothes quicker than they can keep up with.”

You crinkle up your nose. What does that matter? You can’t understand them, and you give up trying soon enough.

As they continue talking, Mama and Mr. Wayne cast you occasional glances as if they’re assessing whether you will react. But you’re preoccupied now with sweet peach filling and flaky crust, which coats your lips until you rub it off with the back of your arm. Once you’ve consumed the entire slice and licked up all the crumbs, you manage to sit quietly for a minute or so before your curiosity, without that distraction, grows too insistent to ignore. In typical fashion, you’ve just barely conceived of a question before it’s already being voiced.

“Is your son gonna come eat pie with us?” you ask baldly.

Mama stiffens beside you, but Wayne remains unruffled. “He’s my nephew,” he corrects you gently. “And I don’t reckon he will.”

The next question— “Why not?”— is begging to burst from your mouth. But one quick look at your Mama’s face tells you you’d be in for it if you give in to that impulse. Mr. Wayne must read the discomfort in your pouted lips, so he offers you a morsel to tide you over.

“He’s not up for visitors just now,” he explains, and his blue eyes leave you to fix on your Mama’s in a weighty way. “M’tryin’ to get him settled in here first, make sure he’s comfortable. Then y’can meet ‘im, if he’s willing.”

There’s a silent conversation then that passes between their gazes. There is a shade of fear and hesitation in the blue, a hint of vulnerability burdening the short silence following that vague explanation. It’s met with empathy across the table, with tinges of experience and reassurance offered without reluctance.

“You will, Wayne.” Your Mama sounds decisive, and your eyes follow the movement of her hand as she reaches across the table and pats him briskly on the hand. “The boy’ll be fine.”

You are ignorant to the significance of these things. All you know is that you’ve been denied that which you want, and you will need to wait to get it. You manage to contain your frustration until you reach the sanctuary of your bedroom; only then do you let your limbs flail against the comforter and pillows, beating out your impatience like rain pattering a roof.

On the third day after the boy’s arrival, you awaken the way you fell asleep: to the melody of a song. But it’s not the soft plinking of the music box your Mama always winds to lull you to sleep at night. Instead, it’s some twangy, uneven notes, starting and stopping in awkward cadence. As daylight streams in warm stripes across your comforter, they filter through wood and glass to rouse you from your slumber.

It’s the first evidence you have, besides Mr. Wayne’s word during your visit, that your new neighbor is actually still residing in the house across the way and that he was not, in fact, a walking daydream conceived by your own boredom. You haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since he’d tumbled from the truck; you’ve been spending many hours outside now in the midday, and you know beyond a shadow of doubt that he has not ventured into his front yard, and likely not into his backyard either. There has not been even a ruffle of a curtain, or a silhouette in a lit window, or a slivered door opening through which he might peer out to provide evidence of his existence.

But now, you can hear him. You hear him in this indirect way, in the fumbling of his fingers on some instrument, a sound that has you rising early despite the lazy minutes you could steal before Mama expects you to start on your morning chores.

It’s almost worse now that you can hear his invisible presence because it makes the silence of his arrival feel even more frustrating. And the more elusive he is, the more you want to see him. You find yourself looking toward the fence that separates your properties as if compelled; you walk slowly on your way to the goat pen, eyes tracking the gaps between the posts, desperate for a glimpse of dark curls and pale angles. This endeavor has yielded nothing but the vague unease of unfulfilled wanting.

Your curiosity can never settle. It haunts you, sustained by the knowledge that as you close your eyes at night, drifting off to the sound of that dainty music box, you will awaken to a twirling of staccato notes too intangible to grasp.

It isn’t until May has eased into the sticky warmth of June that you properly meet your new neighbor. As you’re cutting through your sitting room, slinking toward the kitchen in search of a covert midday snack, you catch a glimpse of him through the flimsy gauze of that same window which afforded you a view of his arrival. The sight is so unexpected that it nearly gives you a fright, and your heart thuds wildly until you realize what that vague shape must be. You stare until your eyes blink clear and reveal a boy hunched in the front yard across the way, pale and topped by a wild mop of wayward dark. That swooping of fear quickly gives way to familiar curiosity, and curiosity then to eagerness. Soon enough, the slight rumbling of your stomach is forgotten entirely as you find yourself turning sharply on your heel and redirecting toward the front door.

The grass is soft as it creases under your small bare feet, and you cross the yard with your eyes fixed on your prize, who crouches in front of the leafy forsythia lining his front porch. He doesn’t seem to notice you, occupied as he is in his task, and you seize the chance to drink in every detail you can as you approach. The boy wears gray pants, which have been gathered at the hems into thick, sloppy rolls but still drag across the grass like he doesn’t have any feet. He wears a rumpled white shirt, slightly yellowed from age and wear. His curls dust the nape of a gaping collar, which sags even farther open as he leans forward to poke around in the bushes. From this angle you cannot see his face properly, only the slope of a soft nose and the suggestion of dark lashes above it.

Your appraisal ends when you grow too close to continue. You stop a short distance away, looking down at the crown of his head as you watch him push aside branches. This yields a new observation, which is that his hands appear too big for his thin wrists— overlarge, they twist and grasp, long bony fingers moving restlessly as if searching for something in the greenery.

Absent any prior consideration and with the baldness only a child can possess, you announce your presence with a loud question. “What’re you doin'?”

The boy’s short curls flop against his ears as he looks up sharply in your direction, and your directness is rewarded with a view of his face. Though he doesn’t appear to be startled, there is something close to that in his brown eyes— something shifty and skitterish. Under the left is a healing bruise a shade lighter than the streak of dirt on his cheek, and his red mouth is a little too wide for his face, moreso when he opens it to answer you.

“Lookin’ for bugs,” he replies, and his voice rasps like Wayne’s but isn’t as deep, nor as pleasant.

“Why?”

He squints that bruised eye and matches your baldness. “‘Cause I’m makin’ ‘em a home, and I wanna see who’s gonna be movin’ in before I put together the furnishings.”

“Oh.”

As your reply falls flatly into the space between you, the boy eyes you warily for a moment longer before returning to his quest. If he moves a little more brusquely than before, it either escapes your notice or you pay it no mind, and after an extended beat of silence, your next question comes out— again— bald and loud. “So where’s the house?”

The next look he shoots you is less sharp, though somehow also more impatient, with the way his red mouth is set in a long, flat line. “Hmm?”

It’s not so much a hummed question, more a vague grunt, but you interpret it correctly. You repeat yourself with more emphasis. “Where’s the bug house? I wanna see it,” you declare.

The boy’s face scrunches up in a scowl then, and he makes no attempt to sweeten his reply.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” he snaps, and you’re dismissed with a shake of those messy curls.

You fall back on a hip, crossing your arms as he pushes aside forsythia branches with increased aggression. You huff impatiently. “Well, how’s I gonna help you if I don’t know what size bugs to find? I dunno ‘bout where you come from, but there’s lots of bugs here.” Dramatically, you grab onto your fingers one at a time as you count, drawing out the words as you recall them. “We got… worms,” you snatch up your index, “rolly-pollies,” you switch to your middle, “ants…”

You pause there, twisting your ring finger in your opposite fist as you cast your eyes upward, trying to think of another bug to illustrate your point. The boy’s rolled trouser hems drag against the grass as he shifts restlessly in his crouch, but your next example never comes. Instead, you pull your finger out of your grip, crossing your arms and staring down at him with an air of triumph you really aren’t entitled to. “See? Loads of bugs,” you finish almost smugly.

The boy twists his lips and narrows his eyes at you. He drags those eyes from your bare toes to the top of your head in a slow, appraising path. It feels distinctly like you’re one of the bugs you’d mentioned, and he’s trying to puzzle out whether or not you’ll sting him.

You want to ruffle up your feathers and squawk your protest, but this brief conversation has not satisfied that yawning pit of curiosity inside you. Instead, you just plant your hands on your hips like your Mama does when Papa’s not listening fast enough. He stares up at you, and you look right back, staring down at your new neighbor’s guarded face.

This you manage for a fair while. But, inevitably, you cannot contain yourself for too long. Soon enough, your next question of the day sees fit to burst and pop from you like the first bubble in a pot set to boil.

“Well then?”

Your voice is loud; your sass is too potent to ignore. When his scowl returns in earnest, you clamp your lips shut too little too late. Mama always did say you need to be more patient, after all, and now you’ll just be left to mourn the permanent disappointment you’ll feel when he barks back. He’ll send you away unkindly, and you’ll have to retreat with your tail between your legs—

The boy next door straightens to his full height, and it’s only then that you realize just how much bigger he is than you. He is still lanky and angular, with ill-fitting clothes that don’t disguise his thinness, but the sudden shift from looking down into those guarded umber eyes to looking up, up, up ‘til your neck cranes is enough to make a teensy twinge of foreboding tighten in your chest.

This boy, you realize, is under no obligation to tolerate your sass. He isn’t your kin, and though he is Wayne’s, that doesn’t automatically speak to his nature.

Your composure falters for the first time as he frowns harshly down at you, and you begin to shrink. You shink like you do when Mama’s caught you doing something wrong and you know her admonishment will be swiftly followed by Papa’s until you’re left feeling hollow and thoroughly castigated. All of you presses in— your shoulders, your elbows, your knees, your brows where they pucker in the middle of your forehead. It’s the perfect opportunity for this strange boy to seize hold of the cracks within you and shatter you to pieces.

But at the sight of your breaking, those umber eyes do not harden further as you expect. Instead, the stormcloud clears; where you shrink and tighten, he gentles, and the furrows of his face ease into smoothness. Silently, he jerks his head to the side in a clear indication for you to follow.

You do.

It feels like grace when he bids you to follow him, and you resolve not to waste it. ‘Y’could use an attitude adjustment,’ you think to yourself, and so you let your sass leech through the soles of your feet as you follow the boy around to the side of his house opposite yours. By the time he stops in front of a small mound of rubbish piled near the concrete foundation, your manners have returned. You regard it with a carefully neutral expression in case he happens to look at you as he explains its purpose.

“M’gonna build the walls out of bark I stripped from that big oak,” he tells you. “And the roof’ll be leaves, so they can eat their way out if they’re clever enough.”

You appraise the rubbish heap, which, you quickly realize, is not rubbish at all, but is, instead, a carefully gathered pile of supplies meant for building a bug house. A hollow acorn cap catches your eye. “Could use that for a trough in case they get thirsty,” you suggest. You turn wide eyes to him, craning your neck back to look into his face and holding there until he meets your eye. You’re hoping he can tell from the bright tone of your voice and the earnestness of your expression that you’ve left your rudeness behind in the grass.

He appears, thankfully, quick to forgive and move on. The boy nods a little too hard in his haste to agree with you, and when his unruly curls flop in front of one dark eye, he blows them out of the way with an impatient puff. “Was thinkin’ that very same thing,” he replies, and there’s even a touch of warmth in his voice.

With that hint of warmth, the foreboding within you finally wisps away as if it had never been. In its absence, the full force of your self returns.

You crouch eagerly to examine the pile more closely, heedless of the way your pink skirt drags over the dirt as you carefully spread out each supply he’s gathered. He wavers nearby hesitantly before joining you near the ground, though he keeps his hands hanging between his knees, seemingly content to let you organize things yourself without interference.

“Looks like it’ll be big enough for a whole lot o’bugs,” you say, and your voice is eager, swollen with your obvious intent to be generous. “Which kind d’you like the most? We can start with those.”

Thus begins the hunt for your neighbor’s bug house residents, a venture that occupies half an hour of your young lives and concludes as a resounding failure. You search first all along the forsythia beds and the edges of the porch. When this yields nothing, you move on to the taller grass at the edges of the yard near the treeline, and then even venture into your own yard. But all you and your neighbor manage to find is the husk of an old worm stuck to the lowest step of his porch and some elusive beetles too quick for even him to catch. Frustration builds within you both over the course of that half-hour, a shared irritation at the difficulty of what should, by all accounts, be a fairly simple endeavor.

“Y’always get ants all over when y’dont want them,” you grouse, flopping yourself down onto the bottom porch step and planting your elbows on your knees and your chin in your hands. You quickly wriggle your hips away from that dried worm as he comes to stand in front of you.

“I know!” he exclaims, throwing his hands wide and letting them slap against his thighs. You sigh heavily together, a near simultaneous sound of defeat, and for a moment you listen to the distant cooing of a mourning dove, allowing yourself to wallow in disappointment.

“Y’know…” you say suddenly, looking up at him from the cradle of your palms, “there’s a bunny livin’ under your porch. Maybe it ate all the bugs ‘round your house.”

The boy’s soft nose wrinkles with a frown, but it’s not critical like before. “Do bunnies eat bugs?”

You stare at him and shrug, a sharp tug and fall of narrow shoulders. After a moment, the boy shrugs back as if in acquiescence. “Well,” he offers, “we could just make a house for the bunny then. In case it wants a ‘change of scenery.’” The phrase trips inelegantly off his tongue like it’s something foreign, something he’d heard once and is now repeating.

You, however, pay that no mind, because a blooming of color fills you at his suggestion. It’s blooming so big and bright and fills you so insistently that the tumultuous boy startles visibly when you leap from the step and scrabble off without a word of explanation.

Some swift minutes later, you’re returning at a trot, your hands laden with a new companion who swings at your side with flopping brown ears and a billowing red cloak. The corner of his eye is caught by your approach; he straightens up whip-sharp and shields his face with an overlarge palm to watch the remainder of your journey back to him, dropping his hand only once you skid to a stop one pace away. Eagerly, you set your bunny doll carefully atop one of the flat rocks lining the garden bed, nudging her arms and legs so she’ll sit there primly without assistance.

Breathless still from the quick run to your house but smiling nonetheless, you explain as if he’d asked, “If we’re buildin’ a rabbit house, Mopsy’s gotta watch! She’s my best friend.”

“Mopsy?” the boy asks curiously, “like from Peter Rabbit?”

Again, you bloom; your eyes light from within as you turn to him. “Yes, that’s exactly it! Oh, Peter Rabbit was my favorite book Ms. Willard read w’me this year!” You blink at him, eyes big and wide and so earnest. “Did you read it too?”

His head tilts just slightly, and the frizzy curls shift across his forehead. “How old r’you?” he asks in lieu of answering your question.

“M’eight,” you reply, still earnest if not a bit confused at the question. “Why? How old r’you?”

“Eight,” he answers, “same’s you.” He scratches at the corner of his wide mouth with a dirty fingernail, eyeing you as if he wants to say more but is holding back. You don’t know it, but it’s because your neighbor is trying to reconcile how you’ve just told him that you read this book with your teacher just this year, but it’s been quite some time since he had need of reading together with a teacher, and even longer than that since he last read Peter Rabbit— something he very much considers a ‘baby book’ now.

You don’t know that. But what you do notice is that he seems to be appraising you again, though not in the same way he had when he checked you for a stinger earlier. This appraisal is gentler and over much more quickly; at its conclusion, he changes the subject yet again. “If we’re building the rabbit a house,” he tells you, “we’ll need sticks f’r the walls. Bark’s not gonna be good enough.”

It’s an adequate distraction, and soon enough, you’ve forgotten the dangling conversation about Peter Rabbit as you and your neighbor collect sticks and branches, gather more leaves, and tear long grass from its roots to lay it down for cushioning in the bottom of your construction project.

The process is not entirely smooth, as it never is between two people who are still learning to work with one another, but you and your new neighbor share a common desire which helps to ease it. Despite starting your acquaintance firmly enclosed within your own tough shells, since then, common ground has been discovered. As such, both you and this strange boy are reluctant to trample the new seed of friendship freshly planted between you. As you work alongside one another, you tend that seed with the best of yourselves: you resist the urge to insist on your own way, and he resists the urge to assume the worst in you.

You are, as Ms. Willard would put it, acting on your very best behavior.

Mama would be proud.

By the time the sun has reached its highest point in the sky, your makeshift rabbit house has three walls and a soft bed of grass at its center. The leaf roof he’d intended to make was more difficult than anticipated, so you used them instead to adorn the ground and create a path from one side of the red house to the other, with the intention of leading the bunny to the new sanctuary you’ve created. How likely it is to take you up on the offer remains to be seen, but you are pleased nonetheless with the fruits of your labor. The gleam in the boy’s eyes seems to indicate that he’s pleased, too, and you watch him begin a meandering circle to admire your hard work from all angles.

He’s pleased up until the point that tragedy strikes.

On the back end of the circle he’s making around your shared creation, an accidental knock of his calf sends Mopsy tipping slowly backward. He feels the impact and spins clumsily, but his scrabbling fingers are too late to prevent her from falling off the flat rock into the garden bed

Mopsy only lays there in the dirt for maybe a second before the boy snatches her up and cradles her to his chest in a crushing hug, holding her close and then yanking her back out to look her over. Yet the damage has been done: dirt is smudged into her red felt cloak, and it also marrs the pale cream of her long ears and the entire back of her head.

The boy tries to clear the stains away with hasty swipes of his hands. But his fingers are dirty, so all he manages to do is streak her with more brown filth. The more he tries— the more frantic he becomes, desperate to correct his mistake— the worse she gets. Helplessly, he turns to you, and you take in the crinkle of his brow, the pinch of his wide red mouth, the panicked look in his eyes as he waits for your reaction.

It’s not unreasonable for him to assume you will be angry. You had, after all, told him that Mopsy is your best friend, and now she’s been soiled by his hand. And he has, after all, already caught a glimpse of the impatience, the stubbornness, the hotness of temper that lives inside you. But what he doesn’t know is that life has already taught you that accidents happen. You remember all the times Ms. Willard has soothed hot tears, or helped you and your classmates clean up spills. And despite— or, perhaps, because of— the ire you face when your accidents make Mama and Papa so angry with you, you accept the earnest apology in his expression without any further fuss.

“Oh, that’s all right,” you tell him, and there isn’t a hint of sourness in it. When you take Mopsy from his loose fingers and look down at the new stains on her fur and clothing, your expression doesn’t even flicker. “S’just an accident. Accidents happen, y’know,” you add when the worry in his dark eyes doesn’t ease.

And then, just to make sure he really, truly understands, you smile at him. Big and wide and uninhibited, you smile.

Though you’re missing one front tooth and the effect is borderline manic, it is so poignantly obvious that the reassurance your smile offers is an instant balm. The worry clears; the boy smiles back, crinkly-eyed and wide. It warms you like a ray of sunshine has overtaken his whole face, like dark clouds have broken to reveal the wild beauty left in the sky after a summer storm has passed.

In the end, that's all it took for inevitability to take hold: a single bright smile echoed on two faces.

You don’t know the name of the strange new boy next door, but it little matters. Because when two like souls finally find their rest on a common wire, fluttering their wings as they descend to perch together and rest in the comfort of sweet company, what one calls another becomes nothing more than an afterthought.

#td&tc #eddie munson x y/n #blueyyyyyy 💙#my loves #my favorite besties #wayne munson is the shit #fic rec always #favorite fic

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