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starr-fall-knight-rise · 4 years ago

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Humans Are Space Orcs, “A Visiting Delegation.”

Writing on another request I received a few times. I hope you like it.

Government officials filed into the room one after the other speaking quietly. Their voices raised towards the ceiling and echoed off of the walls. Little drops of water glittered in the darkness as the mass of packed bodies caused a heat that disturbed the thin layer of ice which covered most of the room.

The ice itself lent to excellent acoustics, and the dull roar of voices never seemed to fade as the delegations slowly filed down onto the staggered platform seats.

There was a buzz of nervous energy about the room, emanating from all corners as they sat waiting for the meeting to start.

Off in the corner a white furred scientist clad in a heavy winter coat sat meekly to the side.

She was very nervous.

It had taken months to convince the Tricarian council that the creature existed, and even with the proof it had provided, things had gone very slowly. Only after the vaccine was synthesised and distributed did they even begin to consider what she said to be true, even then, she knew they didn’t really believe her, and who would. An alien had broken into their polar research fort and handed her a cure for the the plague?

Even saying it to herself seemed crazy.

When she handed over the device to other government scientists, they had managed to make contact with…. someone , but they spoke too well for the leaders to really believe that they were another species. Most just thought it was some sort of elaborate prank or conspiracy.

Either way, today was the day they were going to find out.

Their world was slowly recovering, and now they could turn their attention to other matters.

The first lunar launch would be happening within the week, if all things went according to plan, and if there was something out there… something already capable of space travel, they would like to know about it.

Again she shifted nervously in her seat.

What if this supposed….. GA delegation never showed up.

She, and her colleague were the only ones to have seen the creature in person, and he refused to come forward and speak about it, so that left only her. IF the creature didn’t show up she had no doubt they would have no problem pointing fingers at her and calling her insane.

She glanced towards the window, which looked out over the icy tundra and towards the coast, where large fishing barges were slowly creeping up through the ice, their nets cast into the sea.

No matter how today turned out, it was going to change everything for her.

Either alien would descend from the sky and walk into the council chamber for peace talks, or she would be labelled as a crazy loon committing conspiracy against the government, and her life would be ruined.

She slumped back in her seat, the fur of her chest bunching up under her coat.

She flicked her large ears in annoyance, and wrapped her tail tight around her legs nervously.

Oh please strange alien visitors come and help me.

It was a very strange thing for her to be thinking. The first time she had seen the creatures, she wanted nothing more than for it to go away and back where it had come from, but now, well now she wanted nothing more than to see it again, if not to prove to everyone else that it had been real, but to prove to herself that it had been real.

The noise around her died down, and she looked up to see members of the trichar head council filing in to the other side of the room and taking their seats.

There was some discussion between them for a few moments and then one of them stood and the entire room went silent.

“Brothers and sisters, I welcome you today, today of days, to an unscheduled interanual meeting under…. Very strange circumstances.” He looked around the room, eyes scanning up and down the seats, “For the past few months we have slowly been recovering from the virulent plague that wiped out fifty percent of our population.”

There was a sad murmuring about our room.

“A plague that was well on it’s way to taking ninety percent of us from the face of this planet.”

The mood in the room grew somber.

“Now, I know we have all heard the circumstances around how the cure was discovered…. Or given as the story goes, and I am sure most of you, just like me, are questioning the validity of these statements. Today is the day whether we learn if these are true or not.” He glanced around the room, his tail swishing slowly over the ice, “As of now I am still skeptical that anything of the sort happened.” he glanced over at her and she wilted back in her seat.

“Regardless of what happens today, perhaps we can be assured that we will survive, life will go on and we will rebuild, though we mourn for those we lost.”

There was another soft muttering around the room.

She sensed some anger in the air knowing that the chancellor had failed to mention that the fifty percent of people who had died mostly came from the lower uneducated classes. There were those whisperings in the government, that many didn’t see it as such a great loss. The uneducated masses were gone, leaving behind them only the elite to live upon the face of the earth. They no longer had to think about sustaining such a large and useless population.

Not all of them could be used on the fishing barges, and many of them didn’t have the skill to harvest ice fruit, so what use were they really.

The thought made her sick.

“According to our preliminary discussions with the entity that calls itself the Galactic Assembly, we have agreed to meet today with one of its ambassadors to discuss peace talks and joining the galactic community.”

There was laughter from around the room.

The Chancellor smiled, “I myself am skeptical of course, and the words shock me even as they come out of my mouth. It would be an amazing day if intelligent life existed out in the universe. For it would change our fundamental understanding about how we see ourselves. We would no longer be alone, but If I am being honest with you, I am more inclined to believe that this is some sort of clever and audacious ploy from our enemies trying to take over our power after our sudden weakening due to population loss. If that is the case we must plan accordingly, and since I have seen no aliens up and walk through that door, I am inclined to believe the latter argument.”

There was a chorus of agreement from around the room.

She wilted even further in her seat.

“The agreement was to meet at this time and this place, and our scientists have been monitoring radio activity out of orbit, and we have detected no such alien vessels in or around our orbital ring, and neither have we seen any strange alien ships descending from the sky, no Unidentified flying objects as it were.” He turned his head to look in her direction, and by this time she had sunk so far into the cavern of her coat that only her ears and eyes peered out.

“What have you to say for yourself.”

She took a deep breath and straightened, “Chancelor, I am sorry, but we must give them time. The creature made it very clear to me that it was not meant so readily for cold weather conditions like us. They probably had to make special preparations and lost track of time, I am sure they are going to be here.”

There was a great rumble about the room mostly chuckling from skeptics who thought her to be just another hystric member of the lower class.

She knew what they thought of her.

She had come from the uneducated masses originally and her climb to the top had been arduous.

In many ways she didn’t really consider it to be over.

She stood.

“Please, I implore you, the creatures are five minutes late in arriving and already you doubt the truth of what you saw on that drive. There was information there, images and pictures of all different kinds of lifeforms, and sounds and videos. WHat reason would another government have to fake all of that, especially at a time like this. No one had the resources to be working on such a thing, and when it was given to me much of the world was sure we were going to be dead in the next ten years, it hardly makes any sense.”

As she spoke, voices in the crowd rose and she was drowned out as groups began shouting over each other to be heard.

She curled up tighter inside her jacket, tail wrapping around her legs again in a self soothing gesture as the uproar grew louder and louder. On the ceiling above, decorative ice moldings vibrated and shed water.

This was going to be a disaster.

She melted further into her coat, expecting for them to take her away to a sanatorium at any moment.

And then the door opened.

Clean unfettered light spilled in from the outdoors, and across the ice encrusted floor causing it to glitter like a billion tiny diamonds encased in blue and fractured ice.

The entire room went quiet and then looked up.

Anger was replaced with gasps of shock, as the entire room pushed back in their seats.

She felt a sudden and marvelous wave or relief wash over her as she looked up and saw the strange alien creatures step into the room.

They were tall, almost a foot taller than most in the room, and just how she remembered them, with their long arms, and legs.

When they walked their boots thudded heavily on the ice.

The front rows shied away as the creatures entered in a small group of four.

They were dressed, from head to toe in thick padded gear with artificial fur sticking up around the neck and face.

Their noses and mouths were covered by another layer of covering, leaving only their eyes peering out from the inside of their hoods.

Behind them, the door swung shut.

For the longest moment, there was nothing but silence in the room, until the lead creature slowly reached up and pushed back his hood, causing it to fall over his back. When he did he first revealed the top of his head, covered in a thin and unproductive layer of light yellow fur that seemed to have no other purpose than to rest on its head.

The rest of its face, once it pulled down the front of the mask was clean from hair, and cold air bit at it’s skin as it breath plumed up and around it.

It had no ears of which to speak, unless perhaps, those strange folded…. Things on the side of its head were ears.

As she remembered, the creature itself had a very flat face and a large jewel-like emerald eye. Based on the others standing behind it, it should have had two eyes but one of them was covered.

It turned its head to look around the room, before falling on her with a depression of recognition.”

It showed its teeth at her, teeth surprisingly similar to their own. Sharp teeth for tearing at the front and flat teeth for grinding at the back.

“I am glad to see you well.” it said, and its voice echoed across the room for all to hear and understand,

There was a murmuring of surprise. Underneath the strange voice, she could hear the even stranger grunting and hissing of it’s natural language.

It walked forward with its companions in tow, “Forgive our tardiness, but we had to prepare ourselves for your child weather.”

The room remained silent.

The creature looked around at them and tapped its foot on the ground, “Ok then, introductions are in order. I am Admiral Adam Allen Vir of the Galactic Assembly and United Nations Space Corps, leader of the Galactic armada, ambassador of the Galactic assembly and explorational representative. A few months ago I was sent by my benefactors to provide a cure to your people and sew the seeds of invitation to the galactic community.” He looked around at them, “Our other delegates apologies for not being able to visit with you today, but your planet is very very cold, and we are the only species that may survive with any sort of….. Regularity on the face of your planet.”

Even as she watched, the skin on the side of the creature’s ears were beginning to turn red, and then purple.

Finally after many long minutes the chancellor stood, staring and wide eyed.

“So it is true.”

“Yes.”

“How can we be sure this is not some elaborate hoax.”

The creature stepped forward over the ice,which popped slightly under his weight. He walked closer to the chancellor who cowered back in his chair.

He paused just before the desk and pulled off the coverings on his hands, and then unzipped the front of the jacket, allowing it to fall open.

WHen he pulled it off, the skin of his arms and hands were bare, leaving only another thin covering over his chest.

He held out a hand.

“Feel for yourself, and tell me if any of your enemies could prejudice a facsimile of life that is so convincing.”

Not sure what to do, the chancellor reached out a hand and gingerly touched the creature drawing back in surprise and some measure of disgust. When he came back again, he took the hand in both of his and turned it over, palpating the structure of the bones and flesh underneath, examining a fine layer of useless hair on the back of the hand and arm.

“I…. see your point.”

The chancellor gave the creature his hand back looking on nervously as the creature began to spasm and vibrate. He pulled back, but the creature shook its head, “Forgive me chancellor, it is very cold here.”

He reached out and pulled his jacket back on, followed by the gloves and pulling his hood up around his ears.

It stopped its strange vibrations a moment later.

“As it is, the GA has invited you to join in peace talks with them. They are eager to trade resources and knowledge for precious combinations of minerals found in your ice. They would provide the means of space travel, or assistance in building your own, and offer protection from unknown factors in the rest of the galaxy. We simply desire to be allies in a far reaching cooperative conglomerate.”

The Trichar eyed him, “And why would your people be so interested, there is nothing that we can offer you that surely you could find somewhere else.”

“We are not so arrogant as to think we have a monopoly on knowledge and experience. For example your ability to live in such cold climates intrigues us. This entire room is made of ice and steel, hardly worth keeping out the cold. Even I cannot remain here for too long. I believe there is much we can learn from each other.”

The Chancellor sat unblinkingly staring at the alien.

“There are many opportunities that we can provide you. There are icy worlds ripe for the picking that much of the GA hasn’t bothered to touch considering their harsh conditions. There is plenty of room for industry and the transfer of knowledge. We would do nothing but benefit from you joining with us. If you so choose we would be willing to take one or a small group of your number to meet with the entire assembly on the capital, though there is no pressure to do so. We also have broadcasting and camera equipment which would suffice for you to meet them over long distances. There are many ends and possibilities, but…. Out of my own experience, I believe you would do well to take this offer.”

There was silence around the room.

She could hardly blame them. A strange alien benefactor seeking peace with them and offering opportunities and a great wealth of knowledge was certainly too good to be true. Also, the creatures were kinda…. Strange looking. In the full light of day and with the sun streaming in through the windows, she would have sworn that she could see little circulatory structures peeking as blue veins from it’s skin.

Almost as if it was partially translucent.

She shivered, it really creeped her out that she could see its interior structures from the outside.

No wonder it wasn’t meant to survive on such an icy planet as their own. Granted it had looked a lot stranger and more intimidating in the dark, but there was something about seeing the whole thing in it’s true form in daylight that still threw her off.

Looking around at the rest of the room she saw a mixed bag of emotions.

Awe.

Disgust.

nervousness .

Excitement.

The alien tilted it’s head casing its wide eyes about the room. She turned her head away, feeling that if she looked for too long, she might fall into that depthless green pool. That was the strange thing about it, though it had a body and physical presence like the rest of them, it seemed so….. Strange and….. Other, as if it was only showing them a part of itself.

That was silly of course.

She was just being paranoid.

And focusing on that paranoia because another part of her was very excited.

She wanted to see what this creature was talking about.

She wanted to experience it.

She wanted to go with them.

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gumnut-logic · 4 years ago

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Callisto (Part 9 - Retreat)

And I clocked over 5000 words on this chapter, too. Oops. Lots of John one-on-one with both Virgil and Scott. Including a bit of mild whump which I quite enjoyed :D

As always, many thanks to @janetm74 @tsarinatorment @vegetacide @scribbles97 and @onereyofstarlight for all their amazing help and support. you guys rock :D

And thank you to all of you who commented and liked last week’s chapter. It all means so much to me. Thank you sooo much for your support with this crazy endeavour ::hugs::

I hope you enjoy this chapter.

-o-o-o-

They dug the pod out of the ice, Lee and Alan tackling it while Virgil assessed Four.

Virgil was exhausted and worried. And shaky if he wanted to admit it, which he didn’t.

Ice echoed in the back of his mind where he refused to acknowledge it.

Eos kept them updated on the now quiescent water levels. There were no more reported seismic incidents. Everything was as quiet as it was before.

Except now the sparkle of crystal was far more sinister.

Virgil would be so much happier being not here.

He managed to activate the functional hoverjets on Four and with some heavy lifter muscles on the end of the appropriate toolset, he was able to relocate some of them to areas on Four’s hull that needed the support. He unwedged her roof from the rock wall, tipped her onto her belly, and, climbing inside, managed to get her moving in a stuttering echo of her usual smooth and darting operation.

The cockpit was partially crumpled on one side. Some hasty oxygen-assisted welding secured part of Gordon’s pilot’s chair back into place. Not perfect but it would do the job for now. It would not be the most comfortable ride.

“Virgil, what are you doing?” John’s voice was exasperated.

“What does it look like?” He had zero patience and just wanted to get his brother’s ‘bird back to Three so she could ultimately be taken home. There was no way he was leaving her here any more than he would have left her at the bottom of the ocean.

“Virgil, you shouldn’t be flying. I’ll take her.”

“I’m fine. Let’s just get this done.” Then he could check on his brothers.

The cave glittered at him through mangled viewports. It was still beautiful, but he no longer trusted it. He wanted out. “Have you recovered the pod yet?”

“Clearing the last of it now.” An indrawn breath. “Virgil-“

“Is it functional?”

An abrupt silence at the other end of his comms sketched out the thinned lips and frown John was no doubt sporting. “There appears to be minimal damage.”

“I’ll meet you in the Dry Cavern. I’ll need help to get Four out.”

Ignoring John’s protests, Virgil pushed the injured sub past the still partially iced in dragonfly and down the kilometre long tunnel to the exit cave.

Reaching the floor of the dry expanse ahead of his brother and uncle gave him a moment to himself. He sat back in the remains of Gordon’s pilot’s chair and closed his eyes.

It was so tempting to just let go, to give in to the phantoms teasing at the edge of his mind. But he couldn’t afford a breakdown right now. Scott was injured and their brothers were depending on him.

He had to keep control.

If only his head would stop hurting.

His eyes did not want to open again.

Consequently, it took John calling his name to ‘wake’ him.

Virgil startled to find both his astronaut brother and Uncle Lee glaring at him through the remains of the marine acrylic in Four’s viewports.

“Virgil?”

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“I was just resting my eyes.”

John’s lips now appeared to be permanently thinned...and about to call him on his bullshit.

Virgil didn’t let him. “Hook up a tow line. We need to get Four above ground.”

His space brother did not stop glaring, but at least he decided that towing Virgil was better than arguing further.

They could meet half way.

Uncle Lee, sparing Virgil a worried glance or two, secured the line as Virgil sat and watched - an odd sensation since usually he would be the one out there doing what needed to be done. Perhaps it was a sign of exactly how gone he actually was.

Get Four to Three.

Get his brother and Uncle back to the Base.

Check on Scott and Gordon.

He was clinging to his list of goals and he knew it, but the alternative was very unproductive.

He startled again as John signalled his readiness. The dragonfly gently tugged on the line as it lifted smoothly off the ground.

Virgil shook himself and activated the hoverjets best to assist with the tow and then he was airborne. They coasted the long mole-made tunnel, took a sharp turn and climbing the vertical drop made by Three, shot into the open.

Jupiter glared balefully out of the darkness.

From there it was a blur of ‘Virgil, stay there’ and Four being hoisted into the huge, red spacecraft, the close of her hatch and the blessed familiarity of Alan’s ‘bird.

Virgil climbed slowly out of Four as John and Uncle Lee stowed the dragonfly, and clambered to the ladder that would take him to her cockpit. It was likely a further sign of his exhaustion that he had to think which way Three was currently situated. She was nose down, which meant he had to climb down.

The ladder looked like it stretched on forever and a rogue part of his mind pondered exactly how hard he would hit bottom if he just jumped.

He was ever so tired, but he couldn’t stay here, so he forced one foot after the other and began the descent.

Halfway down dizziness hit him again.

It was all he could do to cling to the ladder to prevent himself from falling.

And this time it didn’t go away.

“Virgil!” John’s voice was like a beacon in the darkness of a roiling stomach and a pounding head. Virgil had his eyes clenched shut.

The clatter of boots on rungs, hands caught him under his arms and he was being urged to continue down. “C’mon, not far to go.” John’s voice was ever so soft in his helmet. Gentle. Reassuring.

Virgil took that first crucial step and let himself drop another controlled step while mentally clinging to his stomach.

The dizziness disappeared.

Oh god.

The relief almost had him letting go of the ladder, but strong arms held him and continued to guide him down step by step. His stomach protested the entire way as if this bout of dizziness was the last straw.

John helped him through the main hatch and, from there, Virgil flung off his helmet and stumbled to the facilities.

Fortunately, there was very little in his stomach to expel, but that didn’t stop it from spasming repeatedly.

Low gravity environments sucked.

This would have been the perfect opportunity to curl up in a ball of misery on the bathroom floor, but space bathrooms sucked as much as space itself.

It became very clear that his head and body had had enough and if it wasn’t for John he probably would have fallen to that floor anyway.

“Virgil.” His brother caught him gently, drawing his head to his shoulder. Virgil didn’t have the energy to resist. “You are going to the infirmary.”

“John-“ But his head throbbed and he clenched his eyes shut in pain.

“No arguments.” In the light gravity, John lifted Virgil up and, leaving the bathroom, carried him down the corridor towards Three’s tiny infirmary.

“John-“ This was a first. Virgil usually did the carrying. The thought bounced through his aching head. But before he knew it, he was being strapped into a soft bed.

Opening his eyes would involve more than he had.

Yellow light flickered over his eyelids. Machinery beeped as John mumbled something, possibly into his comms, but Virgil had nothing left. The phantoms swooped in and the ice swallowed him whole.

-o-o-o-

John was used to worrying about his brothers. So often he was so far away when they were in peril. But as Virgil’s hand fell limp in his, John’s heart clenched.

Both of them had been running on adrenalin. He had watched as Virgil performed as he always did when needed despite being ill.

Many times John had listened to his brothers over comms, their voices strained by what they had seen and experienced. Hell, this wasn’t John’s first rodeo, he knew what it sometimes took on a rescue.

He’d done it himself.

That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt when it happened again.

The medscanner flickered over his brother casting his pale skin in an even sicklier shade.

Stress factors were flagged. Virgil’s heartrate was up and his blood pressure was far from happy. But there was no injury.

John frowned. Virgil had been unconscious at least part of the time he was buried in the ice. He was obviously unwell and was showing all the signs of a head injury.

But there was none.

He poked the scanner as if he could drag further information out of it.

But no, it reported Virgil as stressed, tired, possibly exhausted, but there was no explanation for the symptoms he was displaying apart from some tightening of the blood vessels in his brother’s brain. Classic sign of a headache.

“John, all vehicles are stowed. You wanna drive?” Uncle Lee’s voice over comms snapped him out of staring at his brother’s medical readouts.

Virgil was asleep, restless, but asleep. He was safe for the moment. Perhaps it was just exhaustion. His brothers were well known for pushing it too far.

Perhaps it was psychological. It would be fair considering his history with ice.

But it still didn’t quite add up and it gnawed at him. He had seen his big brother tackle this issue before. It still didn’t quite sit right.

But now the priority was to get Virgil back to his brothers, and reunite with Scott, Gordon, Alan and their father.

John double-checked the patient was secure and deployed the bed pivot that would support him when the ship flipped in flight.

“FAB, Uncle Lee.” He said the words at almost the same time he entered the cockpit.

It was strange to be here without Alan. It had been a long time since Three had been his ‘bird. Even then it hadn’t really been his. It had been Dad’s and then Alan’s. John had only been her pilot out of necessity.

Sliding into the pilot’s seat, all his reflexes shifted to the needs of the Thunderbird. Pre-flight was worked through at speed, Uncle Lee providing the input needed.

Eos chimed in with clearance for their flightpath.

Callisto Base acknowledged they would be arriving in minutes.

John fired her thrusters and launched Three into the thin atmosphere of Callisto, pivoting her mid-air and taking off in a southerly direction.

The trip was very short, barely worth igniting her engines, but honestly, John was grateful.

Three hovered in the massive airlock once again and it grated on John’s need for speed. The equations that listed the reasons why those doors were so ponderous gave him plenty of explanation, but he had no patience for physics at the moment.

Landing Three was like exhaling in relief.

Their father met them on the gantry. John towed Virgil out of Three on the bed he was still sleeping on, hoverjets keeping him level and secure. The fact he had not woken despite launch and landing was just a further sign of his brother’s exhaustion.

Uncle Lee followed them out without a word.

If John was irrationally grateful for his father’s hand landing on his shoulder, he wasn’t going to examine it too closely.

Concerned grey eyes stared down at Virgil...

“He’s sleeping, Dad. Exhaustion appears to be the culprit.” His father looked up at him and John swallowed. “That’s all I could find.”

A nod and they hurried Virgil off to the Base medical centre.

Grae had set aside a part of the small facility with enough beds to support the injured Tracy brothers. John, Virgil and their father entered in the middle of an argument.

“I’m not going up to Five! It’s a broken arm, Scott, that’s all.” Gordon’s expression was furious. He was sitting up in bed, his arm in a plastic cast. It was obvious Gordon wasn’t well. There was no spark about him. The impression was grey where there was usually sun.

Scott’s response was appropriate. “It’s enough! You are off rescues until it is healed. You know that is the rule. Health first!” Their eldest brother was sitting in a chair beside the Fish’s bed. A bed behind him had mussed covers and was obviously where he was supposed to be.

It was ever so typical that he wasn’t.

Either way, John took some comfort in finding both brothers conscious despite their injuries.

Of course, that meant yelling.

“We’re in space!”

“You’re not crucial to this mission!”

“It’s underwater! I call that crucial!”

“Gordon-“

“Scott-“

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?!”

Their father’s voice cut across the yelling enough to disturb Virgil who groaned in his sleep and attempted to roll over. The groan turned into a whimper and his brow crumpled.

That shut everyone up.

Scott tried to stand and move to his prone brother’s side, but wavered. Alan who had been sitting wide-eyed next to him, hurried to steady his big brother.

John touched a finger to Virgil’s cheek and murmured soft words of reassurance. The unconscious engineer leant into his hand, eyes still closed, and settled back into his uneasy sleep.

Alan was trying to wrestle Scott back to bed with little success, until their father strode over and made some silent but very firm gestures in the direction of the empty bed.

Scott wilted in Alan’s grip and did as he was told.

But his eyes did not leave Virgil or Gordon alone, darting worriedly between them.

John docked the hover stretcher into place beside Gordon. His positioning was purposeful, giving Scott both brothers at one glance and no doubt allowing his eldest brother the chance to at least relax a little with both of them in sight.

Gordon’s eyes tracked Virgil as John draped a blanket over his sleeping brother.

“What happened?” Gordon’s voice was ever so quiet.

“Ice and exhaustion. He needs rest.” A pointed eyebrow. “You all do.”

John did, too, weariness suddenly hitting him. Such a mad scramble to get to his brothers, get them out of the ice.

“I think perhaps you should sit down, space bro.” Gordon never missed a thing. Those carnelian eyes saw everything. It was what he did with the information that mattered, though.

“John?” A worried pair of foggy blue eyes had targeted him now. Well, that sealed it.

Sure enough, their father turned around and wordlessly led him to a chair. “Sit down, son. They’re all safe now.”

There was a hitch in the man’s voice that had John questioning if he was saying it to reassure himself as much as others.

Regardless, the words had the tension in John’s muscles suddenly relaxing and he found himself shaking just a little.

The mechanics of mild shock sprang to mind and he was disgusted with himself.

A blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his father’s hands squeezed his arm gently.

There was silence in the room for a while. Dad found Uncle Lee a seat and John was ashamed to realise he had forgotten the man existed for a moment there. Perhaps he was as tired as Virgil. Sleep was a long time ago.

A Base doctor came in and confirmed John’s analysis of Virgil’s condition and quietly updated them on both Scott’s and Gordon’s status - all of which IR equipment had already revealed. Perhaps with the exception of Scott’s concussion that while still had him a little wobbly, seemed to have found some healing in whatever sleep his big brother had managed since being yanked out of the ice.

And there was the source of John’s heartrate. Pulling brothers out of the ice had been terrifying. Flashbacks to images sprouted by the news reports all those years ago regarding their mother. Scott’s desperate attempt to hide the reality from his younger siblings, but failing due to the determination of irresponsible media.

John closed his eyes.

-o-o-o-

“What do we do now?” Grae’s eyes were pleading and Jeff wished he had a good answer for him.

He had left the infirmary knowing his friend would be frantic.

Hell, Jeff was a little frantic himself. Berry and Ju were still missing. They only had readings on two out of five missing life signs. They didn’t even know who those life signs belonged to.

“We wait.”

“Jeff, they could be dying!”

“Both life signs are strong. I know it is not the best, but we don’t have a choice. We have to wait.”

“Why? You have the equipment. You, Lee, two of your boys are fine. Hell, I’ll come with you. This is Ju we are talking about!”

Jeff straightened. “I know who we are talking about, Graeme. But the first rule of a rescue is to make sure the rescuers are safe enough to do their jobs and for the moment, I am not willing to send anyone into that cave until we work out what the hell happened!”

“Seismic anomaly. You told me yourself.”

“John is not satisfied with that assessment.”

“Why not?”

“He needs further information.”

“Then let’s go down there and get it.”

“John is working on it.”

“John is sleeping!”

Jeff’s lips tightened and he took a step closer to his old friend. “My sons were nearly killed. I am aware that this is an urgent situation, Graeme. I know what is at stake. But there will be no gain in putting anyone in further danger until we know what we are dealing with.”

A silent hand wrapped around Jeff’s arm and tugged him backwards gently.

Lee.

Jeff had known he was there and old patterns were obviously still in place.

It was reassuring.

He understood Grae’s feelings. Hell, he shared them. But his boys were hurting and, if he was honest, they had terrified him. Seeing first Scott and then Virgil entombed in ice had ripped scabs off memories from so long ago as much as tempting new horrors.

But above and beyond it all, there was something very strange about this situation. Something was off. Everything that made him the astronaut he was, was screaming alarm bells. So, while he could gather Lee, John and Alan and go down there himself, he wasn’t.

Because he trusted his sons and John said no.

Jeff couldn’t help but agree with him.

They needed further information and Eos was working hard to deploy enough probes and up the sensory reach to delve underground and veto that interference. And while John had protested - all of them had protested, except Virgil who had already been asleep - this had been an opportunity to try and get some rest.

Grae sagged where he stood, all signs of the Base commander falling away. “She’s my wife, Jeff.”

Voice ever so quiet. “Believe me, I understand.” He caught his friend’s eyes with his own. “I do.”

Grae stared at him a moment before uttering a wounded sound and turning away. Jeff watched his back as he strode out of the infirmary.

Lee’s hand squeezed gently, but Jeff still stared at the door.

-o-o-o-

John wasn’t sleep. Honestly, he tried. Their father had corralled two more beds into the room with his injured brothers and both Alan and John had been sequestered there. He appreciated it, he did.

But he couldn’t sleep.

And it wasn’t Virgil’s snoring.

He kept running scenarios over in his head. Building and dismissing equations that could explain the liquid water in the cavern and coming up with nothing.

Liquid water demanded the existence of energy to keep it that way, likely with a heat source. Gordon had mentioned a temperature increase before the wave hit.

John’s fingers itched for his information sources on Five.

He was still wearing his suit. He had slept in it often enough not to care. But he had removed his helmet. The infirmary had its own air circulation system separate from the rest of the Base and, really, with his brother’s injuries, they hadn’t had a choice but to break the seals on their suits.

The upside was that he could squirrel under his covers and access his wrist comm and Eos.

His daughter was sending perplexed emojis at him because he had requested text only.

Her use of repeating gifs had the effect he had no doubt she desired, enough to curl up the corners of his lips at least.

His fingers darted across his virtual keyboard with a speed almost as fast as the voice he couldn’t use.

The probe net was in its final dispersal phase and the first of the reports were coming in. Eos had focussed the deployment in a spiralling pattern using the Crystal Cave as the central point and consequently, the information was more detailed in that area. In fact, Eos had doubled up the probe above Burr Crater and the cave beneath it.

His daughter highlighted three other craters, an attention icon flashing on the map. John zoomed in and frowned. There were more lakes.

His fingers darted over the map, repeatedly hitting attention icons flagged by the AI. Lake after lake showed up on sensors. A quick cross-correlation and his suspicions were confirmed. The lakes lay under the younger craters on the moon’s surface. The ones still shining from impacts of recent millennia.

John manipulated one of the probes pulling it from the net and drawing it closer to the surface. Eos threw up a warning that he was causing a brief blindspot, but he didn’t care, he needed confirmation.

Tornarsuk Crater was slightly smaller, but it was fairly equidistant from Callisto Base as Burr and almost as young. The lake registered as similar to the one in Crystal Cave and a network of tunnels branched off from it merging with the network.

Because it was a network. Initial readings tracked tunnels riddled beneath the entire Callistan surface. He couldn’t tell with these readings, but he would bet a lifetimes worth of savings that all the tunnels were made by water. Despite liquid water not being physically possible in these environs.

Not physically possible, but the lakes did exist.

Of course, that led to the question of why the water hadn’t stayed water once it left the cavern. It had behaved exactly how it should when it entered the tunnel. It froze.

Trapping his brothers.

He closed his eyes a moment as images he hadn’t fully processed yet flashed up in his mind.

He let out a sigh.

Focus.

Science was a saviour.

He returned to glaring at the holograms hidden under the blanket. It grew stuffy and he was reminded of many a late night when he was a child, shoving his tablet under the covers in order to read that little bit more despite being told to go to bed.

Memories.

He requested a planetary body analysis and the probe network boosted Five’s scan of the moon, giving him an indepth gravity and mass analysis. The readings confirmed what the Callisto Expedition had reported, that yes, there was an ocean deep under the Callistan crust, and that unlike most of the planetary bodies in the solar system, Callisto was undifferentiated. It had no core, no mantle, just a shallow ocean a couple hundred of kilometres below, sitting on a mix of rock and ice, sealed in by a crust of similar material.

So there was water in the moon. That was no surprise. Europa had proven something similar, but these subterranean oceans followed the laws of physics. They had the pressures required to stay liquid. The lakes did not.

There had to be another reason.

The next step was research. He knew what he knew, but that didn’t mean he knew everything. There must be something to explain the water.

Accessing Five’s library, he initiated a connection back to Tracy Island via the chain of buoys stretching back to Earth.

The covers over his head were suddenly ripped off, the waft of cooler air startling him even more than the sudden appearance of a tall shadow leaning over him.

John’s whisper was cutting. “Scott, what the hell!”

Because it was Scott. It was always Scott.

Well, except when it was Virgil, but this shadow was too tall, had the wrong hair and Virgil was still snoring.

“You’re supposed to be resting.” His brother’s voice had an echo of commander.

“You more than me!” John grabbed at the covers and pulled them back up to his chest. Why, he didn’t know, but there had to be a principle there somewhere.

The shadow of his big brother pulled up a chair and literally fell into it. Elbows dented the side of John’s bed and Scott’s head dipped out of silhouette as he dropped it into his hands.

John’s heart softened. A gentler whisper. “You really should rest. Get some sleep.”

“I did. Virgil is making a racket.” It was muffled as his brother was looking down at his feet, but John knew it was a load of bullshit. They had all been putting up with Virgil’s snoring since the man was born. If anything, it was a sound of comfort and was missed if it wasn’t there when they were together like this.

It was a running joke that their brother’s snoring was a great wildlife deterrent when camping.

John persisted. Scott was notorious for ignoring his health when focussed on an objective. “How’s your head?”

“Fine.”

“If you’ve come over here just to lie to me, I’m not sure I want to listen.”

“Whatever.” Scott ran his hands through his hair, messing up what was usually meticulously neat. “What happened, John?”

John sighed and pushed himself up on the bed until he was sitting upright, covers still on his legs. “You should be in bed.”

“Bed is a waste of time.” Blue eyes caught what little light was in the room and flashed it at John. “I need information.”

And John was the source of that information.

He held back another sigh and instead pulled up a virtual representation of the Crystal Cave and associated tunnel network. “The sensor readings are marred with static, but as far as we can tell water appeared to enter the lake from this tunnel.” John pointed at one of the entrances on the north-east side of the lake. “With the probe network we now have, the closest source of water I can find is under Tornarsuk Crater to the south-east.” He rotated the image until the star-rayed splash of brightness appeared. A flick of a finger and the hologram delved under the crater, bringing up another lake. John focussed the probe, switching to mineralogical detail and many spikes of crystal appeared in the cave. Eos threw up likely chemical formulae that could only be proven with samples, but had an accuracy somewhere near ninety-five percent.

He could not delve under that lake any more than he could under the lake in the Crystal Cavern.

“There’s another one?” Scott’s whisper spoke of widened eyes. “Are they connected?”

John answered by zooming out and tracing the connection via the maze of tunnels between them.

“How?”

This time John did let out the sigh. “I don’t know.”

“Is it a natural phenomenon?”

John stared at his brother. “Nothing about this is natural. That water shouldn’t exist in that state. If water came from the other lake, then how did it get to the Crystal Cavern so fast? Seismic readings epicentre the activity to the north-east of the Cavern, yet the closest source of water is to the south.”

“Can you get any further life sign readings?”

“No.” It was a defeated quiet. “And no further information on the two under the lake. All I can say is that they are there. Interference is almost complete otherwise. We cannot see below the surface, yet I can see all the way to the moon’s lack of a core.” He threw up his hands and the hologram flickered at the rough handling. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Scott was lit up by the light of the hologram. A ghostly echo of his brother’s usual vibrant self. “Is this humanly possible?”

John stared at him. “You think someone is orchestrating this?”

“Could they?”

He threw the concept back and forth in his head. “Possibly. At great expense and difficulty. There would have to be some serious science involved and I would want to know how that water is liquid in this environment. But the ultimate question would be ‘why?’”

Scott let his head drop into his hands again. “Hell if I know.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time something massively expensive and ridiculous had been deployed against us.” Gordon’s voice was sharp in the sudden silence.

And silence it was because John suddenly realised there was a serious lack of snoring in the room.

Sure enough, beside their fish brother the shape of Virgil was moving slowly to sit up. His throat cleared as he settled sitting on the edge of the bed. “So what is the plan?”

Scott straightened where he sat. “The plan is to get some rest.”

“Done that. Feeling better. There are some lives waiting to be saved.”

No pressure.

Gordon’s eyes were catching the light and aimed right at John. “You think this is planned?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you think it is a possibility.”

“At this point, everything is a possibility, Gordon. I don’t have enough explanation to make any conclusions.”

“I vote aliens.” And yes, Alan was awake as well, his tousled hair reflecting holographic light.

“You are all supposed to be asleep.” Commander Tracy glared at them.

“Speak for yourself, Scott. I bet you’re sporting a doozy of a headache.”

Scott didn’t answer, but John was pretty sure Gordon had hit a nail right on the aching head.

“John?” Eos’ voice cut through the glares and grumbles bouncing around the room.

“Yes, Eos.”

“Callisto Base is receiving a distress call from Kate Berrenger.”

“What? Relay!”

A terrified female voice cut the air in the room. “Base, do you read? I need help. Uh-“ The voice fell silent a moment, but every body in the room was already moving.

One of the life signs had changed position. It was now located on the same beach where Four had lain crumpled several hours earlier.

John switched to transmit. “Eos, relay! This is Thunderbird Five, Director Berrenger. Help is on the way.”

“Somebody, please help me.” It ended in a whimper.

He leapt off the bed as Scott dashed out the door. “Help is on the way.”

-o-o-o-

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #John Tracy #Virgil Tracy #Scott Tracy #Gordon Tracy #Alan Tracy #Jeff Tracy #callisto

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kindahoping4forever · 4 years ago

Text

Fight So Dirty // Ashton Irwin

Cass and I are already having such a blast with this month’s Hoe Hours! This time we came up with a concept and thought it’d be fun if we each wrote a story with how our fav guy would act in that situation. Watch for Cass’ Calum story to go up over on @cal-puddies tomorrow! (And then come back over to my blog on Sunday for a new story co-written by the both of us! Different premise but one I’m confident will be appreciated 😌)

Warnings: An argument with Boyfriend!Ash (gasp), an incendiary dildo, sexting, depictions of both male and female masturbation

Word Count: 3615

Masterlist // Taglist // Ko-Fi

Let me know what you think!

————-

You had the idea when you were in the shower that morning and it seemed so perfect, you had to laugh; by the time your lunch break ended and you still hadn’t heard from Ashton, you had decided to go through with it.

He was out of town for a weekend writing session and the night before he left, he came over to your place for dinner and a proper goodbye. The last time he’d gone away, he’d hidden small gifts and short notes around the house for you and judging by the suspicious way he was slinking around while you cooked, he was planning on doing it again.

While you cleaned up the kitchen, he’d snuck into your bedroom, planning on leaving a cheeky note in your underwear drawer but instead he came stomping back into the room moments later with his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed.

“I told you I’d be there in a minute, baby. I just wanna get these dishes out of the sink now, I’m gonna be too tired later,” you turn and raise your eyebrows at him. “Hopefully.”

“What’s with the monster cock in your underwear drawer?” He spits out, voice deep and even.

You pause for a beat, more baffled than embarrassed. “I… what?” you ask, shutting off the sink and turning to face him. “Why were you in my underwear drawer and why does it bother you what I have in there?”

His jaw twitches but he remains cool. “Didn’t say I was bothered.” “Don’t seem unbothered,” you scoff.

“Answer the question,” he presses.

“Answer mine,” you argue.

Ash chews the side of his cheek in frustration. “I was trying to be romantic and leave you a surprise for while I’m gone but instead the thanks I get is discovering that my girlfriend is evidently hiding things from me,” he seethes.

“That’s a strange way to pronounce ‘hey baby, sorry my job takes me away from you for months at a time but I’m glad you’re an independent woman who is proactive in taking care of her basic human needs,’ you fire back. “‘Oh and thanks for making dinner for me.’”

He rolls his eyes. “Right, because I’m always the one being unreasonable.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what you’re being.” You can’t believe how frustrated you are in this moment. “You couldn’t possibly have been thinking the only time I ever get off when you’re on tour is when you get horny and call me for phone sex?”

“I know you get off, you didn’t tell me it was like this,” he states incredulously.

Your eyebrows shoot to the sky. “Why the fuck would I tell you?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

You want to scream, he’s being so unnecessarily difficult.

You grit your teeth and try to steer the conversation in a productive direction. “OK, what did you think I was doing?”

“Not fucking a mythological creature.”

“Ash, it’s not that big.”

“Bigger than me.”

“Don’t be fucking dramatic, I’m trying to see god, not go home to him,” you say sarcastically.

The fight had only gotten nastier from there. He’d accused you of not trusting him enough to share with him, you’d called him controlling and an asshole; voices were raised, petty remarks exchanged and he stormed out. The next morning, you weren’t surprised by the absence of an apology text and since you received a message that simply read “arrived” yesterday afternoon, he’d been radio silent.

You don’t fight often but when you do, you both go all out. Neither of you likes admitting you were wrong and neither of you wants to be the one to apologize first, especially in cases like this where you both have things to be sorry for.

Arguments with Ashton are a chess game, you have to consider every possible outcome before you make a move and you know he does the same. Which is why you know your plan is so genius, there’s no way he’ll see it coming.

You step into the lingerie he’d hidden in the closet for you to find, adjusting it in the mirror until your breasts sit just right in the plunging sheer material. He loves you in teddies and you grin at your reflection when you think about how livid he’s going to be that the first time he sees you in this one will be under these circumstances.

You grab your phone off the nightstand and walk back over to the mirror, evaluating your lighting and angle options; you snap a few natural photos and then a few that are more posed, arching your back, using the inside of your arms to push your tits together, all the tricks. You swipe through your choices, make your pick and fire it off to him with the message:

Mad at you but not your taste in lingerie.

You don’t expect to hear back from him. Not yet, anyway.

Ashton reaches for his phone on the bed next to him; he’d just gotten back from a short run to clear his head after another largely unproductive writing session. He knew he shouldn’t have left town without resolving everything with you but the things he’d said, the way he acted… there was too much mess to clean up and not enough time. Besides, you definitely owed him some apologies as well and could’ve picked up the phone as easily as him. Things were at a standstill and it was weighing on him.

He’s surprised to see your name in his notifications but is instantly suspicious when he sees that you’ve sent a photo message. His finger hovers over the screen, not wanting to click on it right away, wanting to make you wait to see the “sent” turn to “read,” wanting to make you wonder if he’s even near his phone. He knows you well enough to know you’re watching.

You toss your phone on the bed and roll your eyes; you know he’s got to be back in his room by now and you’re willing to bet he’s staring your notification down just because he can. You shake your head and start gathering what you need for your next move.

12 minutes pass before Ash allows himself to click on your message; your photo loads and he instantly feels his blood pressure rise, for multiple reasons. The sight of you in that low cut, mostly see-through number is every bit as heavenly as he’d hoped it would be when he bought it - only in his fantasy, he was going to be there to nibble down your cleavage and mouth over your nipples through the lace before he ripped it off of you.

He’s not sure whether to take this photo as an olive branch or a threat but the accompanying text message has him leaning towards the latter and honestly, that’s more exciting to him than if you were trying to make amends. You’ve acted out like this before and it’s always led to some great makeup sex.

Your intended tone is unmistakable when another message from you automatically loads in the conversation thread; this time it’s a video, along with a text reading:

Missed saying goodbye to you like this.

Intrigued, he clicks on the video and immediately bolts up from where he was laying. The video begins and the only thing he sees on screen is your empty shower and the dildo he’d found that night, suction cupped to the wall, intimidatingly jutting out.

You enter the frame, still clad in your new teddy, and get on your knees; he watches in disbelief as your eyes stare directly into the camera and you begin licking up and down the shaft of the toy before swirling your tongue around the head and popping it in and out of your mouth.

Ash is both impressed and aghast at your audacious behavior. The first time he ever left you for a tour, he’d slept over and had to leave at an ungodly hour. He was careful not to wake you in the morning but you’d set your own alarm so you could see him off; you surprised him by hopping into the shower and dropping to your knees and ever since then, the night before he goes away, he stays at yours and you say goodbye in the morning with a shower blowjob.

You close your eyes and hum as you bob your head up and down, letting the spit collect in your mouth and then dribble out, down both the cock and your body. The loud pop of you pulling off reverberates off the shower tile and you wrap your lips around the synthetic balls, murmuring enthusiastically.

You pull away from the wall, a single string of spit connecting you to the dildo; you move back up to the shaft and dart your eyes towards the lens once more before closing them as you stretch your mouth down its thickness, taking it in further and further, letting out a few gags because you know it turns him on, even if he swears it doesn’t.

Ash doesn’t realize he’s holding his phone with such an intense grip until his hand starts cramping up; he switches it to the other hand, shaking his ailing one out, trying to ignore the urge he’s having to rest it near or on the tent in his shorts. He’s fuming that you’re taunting him like this, furious that it’s making him miss you and that anger is going straight to his cock.

He bites his lip as you gag around the toy once more, tears streaming down your cheeks; he knows you think he enjoys it when you gag for him simply because he likes knowing he’s big but his favorite part about it is how you look up at him when he wipes the tears off your face. It’s the combination of the pure love and adoration in your eyes mixed with the uninhibited desire and lewdness of your mouth sucking at his cock that drives him crazy. He actually wishes there was a way for him to see that in this video.

He notices something and scrubs the video back a few seconds; just as he thought, right before it ends, he sees you spread your legs wider and your right hand disappears off camera. He remembers the lingerie he bought for you was crotchless and he groans quietly, squeezing himself through his clothes as you moan around the cock.

Blowing Ashton always got you wet but without hearing his quiet groans or feeling his fingers gripping your hair, this just wasn’t the same; you love knowing how you affect him, love his lustful affirmations. You lightly rub your clit as you pull off the toy but it’s the thought of you possibly making him hard, making him moan from miles away that has you crying out.

You send off the video and chuckle to yourself when you notice that he sees it immediately upon delivery. You’re preparing for the final part of your plan when you hear your phone; you’re intrigued to see it’s a text from Ash and you’re too proud of yourself not to click on it right away.

If you’re looking for a reaction, this is as good as you’re going to get.

You purse your lips, thinking of how to respond; you sit your phone down and finish what you were setting up. No harm in making him wait.

Ashton’s cock twitches with interest in his shorts as he watches the video again; he pauses the clip to check the thread again to make sure you hadn’t replied back. Of course you hadn’t. He loves and hates that you know him well enough to know this would get a reaction from him and he loves and hates that he felt desperate enough to give it to you.

The phone vibrates in his hand and he swears he feels himself get harder in anticipation of what he might be clicking on.

Got you talking to me, didn’t it?

He scoffs at your smugness and his mind races to construct a biting comeback when your next message comes through.

Feeling pretty accomplished. Think I’ll reward myself :)

Ash's heart pounds as he wonders what that could possibly mean and he begrudgingly presses his palm to his crotch, applying pressure to his throbbing cock. A video loads into the thread, a shorter one this time, and he clicks on it with bated breath.

Your face fills his screen, eyes wide with equal parts mischief and lust. “I keep thinking about the other night, how it’s too bad you decided to leave,” you say. He has to dip his hand inside his shorts and give himself a light squeeze when he hears your voice sounding so heavy with want. “Things between us were so heated, we were both so… impassioned? I feel like if you’d stayed only a little bit longer, things could’ve easily been resolved by you bending me over.”

He groans and begins slowly stroking himself as he watches you prop the phone on the counter and step away to reveal that you’ve lined it up to perfectly capture your large dildo, shiny and lubed, suctioned to the side of the kitchen island.

You bend forward, breasts gracefully spilling out of that damn teddy he picked out, and reach behind you to guide the large toy inside you. You lick your lips as you back up on it, slight whines escaping your throat as it stretches and fills you in ways that remind you of how it feels when Ash is inside you.

You start off slowly, letting yourself adjust to the girth but it doesn’t take long for your need to get the best of you and you pick up the pace, throwing yourself back on the toy at a more intense pace. You let your noises fall freely from your lips, hoping your boyfriend knows that in your mind you’re making them for him, imagining it’s his cock that’s making you feel this way, wishing his large hands were covering your ass like they always do when he has you like this.

Ashton growls in frustration when the video ends a few seconds later; surely, this can’t be the end of your torture. Or what if it is, what if your plan was to get him to break and text you and then you’d make your point by leaving him desperate for you like this?

Minutes that feel like hours pass without another message from you and he hates giving you the satisfaction of another response from him but he feels he has no other choice. He finally takes his shorts off and wraps a hand around his cock, thumbing at the beads of precum gathering at the head and spreading it around as he strokes.

It took you longer than you expected to get the angle right for what you’re assuming will be your last video but you’re confident it won’t take much time for you to build yourself up again; you’re looking forward to making up with Ash but you can’t deny how fun this fight has become.

You check your shot on the phone screen one last time and satisfied with what you see, turn to walk over to the dining room chair where you plan to ride your toy to orgasm. You’ve only made it a few steps when you hear your text notification chime and you stop in your tracks. A second text comes through and you know it has to be him.

You bound back over to your phone and click on the message, which reads:

Is this what you wanted?

You take in a sharp breath when a photo of Ashton’s cock, leaking and surely aching for attention, loads in the thread. You click on it and focus on how his long fingers are gripping it by the base; it reminds you of how he holds it when he’s teasing it across your lips when you’re on your knees for him and you’re both aroused and annoyed by how your mouth actually waters.

Ash maintains a light rhythm, mainly using his fingertips to work his shaft; he’s enjoying the tease and doesn’t want to get too far gone until you give him a reason to. He smirks as a new message from you comes in only moments after he’s sent his text. You must be getting desperate too.

Would rather see you cum for me.

He grins at your response and laughs under his breath as he types out his reply:

Then send me something worth cumming to.

You scoff loudly at his text and you’re not sure why your instinct is to send him a heart emoji but you go with it. You press record on your phone and look into the lens. “I was sitting in the kitchen last night, thinking about how if you’d stayed, we might’ve sat here and talked things out,” you gesture at the dining table behind you. “I don’t know if we would’ve ended up on the same side or agreeing to disagree... But I do know there’s a good chance I would’ve climbed into your lap when we were done.”

You walk back to the dildo that started this whole thing, now attached to the seat of a chair and you hover over it, teasing your clit on its tip before sinking yourself down on it. You rock your hips moderately, letting yourself get used to the feeling again and then you lean back, bracing a hand on the back of the chair and start working yourself over in earnest. Your free hand tugs at the deep neckline of your lingerie, pulling your tits out, knowing if he were there, he would ask to see them bounce.

Ash groans as he watches the video of you riding your toy, your whines filling his earbuds. He sucks his lip in between his teeth, wishing his mouth was capturing one of your nipples instead. He’s fully jerking himself off now and he can tell by the way you’re whimpering and grinding, you’re already close; he tightens his grip, wanting to finish along with you.

Thinking about Ashton, alone in his room with his cock in his hand, wanting you, has you feeling needier than you have been in a while. You bounce yourself vigorously up and down your dildo and your hand makes its way down to circle your clit. You imagine it’s Ash underneath you: his hands playing with your tits, his strong thighs tensing under yours, his hot breath on your skin, his wrecked voice telling you to cum for him. You shudder and feel yourself begin to pulse around the toy; you don’t intend for his name to fall from your lips, but it does.

His phone shakes in one hand as Ashton fucks up into the other, watching you tense on his screen, legs shaking and breath uneven; he’s almost certain he hears his name and he’ll never admit it, but that’s what brings him over the edge. He grunts as his cum spills over his fingers and he’s surprised at how loud his voice is; it briefly flashes in his mind that he’s probably just as loud when he’s with you but his outbursts tend to be muffled by your skin or your kisses.

You’re still in a post-orgasm haze when your phone alerts you to a new message from Ash; you click to view it and smile sinfully at the sight of your boyfriend’s spent cock laying on his stomach, cum covering his skin. A text comes in seconds later that simply says:

Happy now?

You think of a quippy reply but then find yourself hitting the call button instead. He picks up before the first ring even finishes sounding.

“What could you possibly have to say to me after that stunt?” He greets you, words harsh but voice light and sleepy like it always is after sex.

“Made you cum that hard, huh?” You taunt, surprised at how much you’ve missed his voice after just a couple of days.

He lets out an exaggerated huff. “Pretty inconsiderate of you, considering your greedy mouth isn’t here to clean up the mess,” he teases back.

“You know, that’s the one thing my fake cock can’t do, it can’t cover me in cum like yours can,” you joke.

He snorts. “Uh-huh. The one thing.”

“By my count, yes.”

“You wanna start fighting again?”

You smile, then sigh. “What was that even about, babe?”

He pauses and you can picture the look of contemplation on his face. “Jealousy? Pride? Guilt? I don’t know,” he admits. “I was already feeling bad about leaving… always feel bad about leaving. Maybe that just reminded me of how often I leave you. I don’t know.”

It’s quiet for a few seconds. “Didn’t cross your mind that I bought a giant dick because of how much I like yours?” You ask, half-kidding.

Ashton laughs softly. “I think that makes me kind of a giant dick, doesn’t it?”

“I mean…”

He laughs louder. “I’m sorry, baby.”

You close your eyes and smile. “I know. I’m sorry too.”

“Oh, not as sorry as you’re gonna be,” he warns playfully.

You grin, hoping you catch his meaning. “I can’t imagine what you mean by that,” you feign innocence.

“I can admit, I deserved all this," he states. You can hear the smirk in his voice. “But some of the things you said the other day? You deserve a little retaliation too, gorgeous.”

You bite your lip and sweetly reply, “What time should I expect you home, then?”

————-

@mymindwide @suchalonelysunflower @pxrxmoore @loveroflrh @ghostofmashton @sexgodashton @feliznavidaddycal @castaway-cashton @boomerash @cashtonasfuck @megz1985 @ashdork-irwin @ashtonangst @angelicfluffs @findingliam-o @abadaftertaste @youngbloodchild @irwinsbetch @ashsun @everyscarisahealingplace

@wiildflower-xxx @metalandboybands @another-lonely-heart @realisticnotes @makeamovehemmings @ashtondaddy90 @golden166 @burstintocolor @mfartzzz @babyoria @saphseoul @petunias-pet @youngblood199456 @notinthesameguey @seanna313 @calumftduke @zhangyixingxing1 @stardust-galaxies @zackoid

@queenalienscherrypie @lovelybonesetc @Obey-Kaylin @xsongxbirdx @justhereforcalum

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#5 seconds of summer smut #5sos smut #ashton irwin smut #ashton smut #ashton irwin fic #kindahoping4forever #smut #kh4f fic #Fight So Dirty #Cass and Crystal present: HOE HOURS #As always thank you to Cass for allowing me to have 124 breakdowns and self-doubts while writing this #I started off with zero ideas thought for a minute I had gotten too ambitious for my own good but I'm happy with this and I hope you are too #thank you for reading!#Feedback is appreciated #And please continue to enjoy hoe hours - Cass & I love hearing from you!

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mmvalentine · 4 years ago

Text

Home is Where You Are pt 4 | Feysand

Girl next door AU. CW: domestic and family violence. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5

Rhys pulled up outside Feyre's apartment block, and killed the engine. But for a moment, he didn't look at her. He wanted to draw out this moment, because spending the day with her was never enough time.

They had walked slowly around the house, Feyre wanting to touch every wall and surface to say goodbye. Most of the stuff they had just dropped off at the local op-shop, since it had been there for ten years and obviously wasn't needed now. A few times Feyre had packed into a box and taken with her, found treasures of their childhood. There was even a photo album, full of Feyre's family before they had fallen apart. Her father had always shied away from those early memories. In one particular photo, Rhys and Feyre stood in the garden with their arms around each other's shoulders, best-buddy style. Feyre had laughed at them, the same height and missing teeth and in ill-fitting hand-me-downs. It had been such a lovely time, and now Rhys had brought her back to her own apartment. To Tamlin.

He had to say something, didn't he? Rhys wrestled with the dilemma. He wanted to respect her life choices. He wanted her to know someone noticed. He wanted her to be safe.

"Thanks for driving," Feyre said. "I had a great time with you." She grinned. "And you do drive like a maniac." "I always have a great time with you," Rhys said. Feyre smiled, and went to get out of the car. Rhys put his hand on her arm, and she stopped.

"Just... take care of you, okay?" Feyre smiled again. "I always do," she said. "If you ever need.. anything. If you want some company, or some hot food, or a spare room. You're welcome to come to mine, okay?" Feyre tilted her head. "Why would I need a spare room, Rhys?" "No reason," Rhys said. "I'm thinking Tamlin snores, or something." Feyre rolled her eyes. "This again." "No!" Rhys said quickly. "I just... maybe everyone needs some place where no one can find them. Maybe your house used to be that for me and I'm feeling nostalgic because you've sold it."

Feyre looked at him for a long time. "Okay, Rhys," she said eventually. They sat for a moment longer.

"Well, I guess I've got fat cheques to write to my sisters," she said. "Goodnight, Feyre." "Goodnight Rhys."

And then she was gone.

Rhys didn't see Feyre for a while after that. He still texted her every now and again, but he figured if he talked to her too much it would be kind of weird. After all, she was engaged, and he was pretty sure the stupid, bubbly feeling he got when her name flashed up on his phone was not the response you were supposed to have to platonic texts.

So he gave himself boundaries- tried to wait for her to initiate most contact, tried hard not to flirt, and even tried to sound interested when she told him Tamlin's latest health craze.

The work project she was working on wrapped up and was a roaring success. The company hosted a small event to launch the campaign, but Feyre didn't end up being able to make it. She sent him an apology, saying she was too sick to come. He told her to feel better soon, and to let him know if she wanted anything brought over.

She wasn't missing out on much, actually. Rhys found these corporate events dreadfully boring, and they all blended into one after a while. He worked for a political magazine and he truly believed in its ideals- but every so often they had to peddle to people with money, and it made him feel dirty. He stayed as long as was polite, drinking white wine he did not enjoy, and then slipped away when he thought no one would notice.

Back in his apartment, Rhys hung his jacket on the back of a chair, and undid the first few buttons of his shirt. He poured himself a glass of brandy, and sat on the couch, trying to overwrite the taste of small talk and champagne. On his coffee table, early sketches Feyre had made were still scattered about. Although he despised the events, it had been a shame that Feyre had not been able to attend, if just to get the recognition for her work. He sat up, and picked up one of the drawings.

Feyre really was an incredible artist. There was something so soft, and tender in the strokes of her brush, even in these rudimentary impressions. If he stared long enough, he could almost imagine the way her fingers smudged the page, the crinkle in her brow as she concentrated on some of the finer details. The movement in the design somehow had him imagining the sound of her laugh...

Rhys put the drawing down, and rubbed his eyes with his palm. This line of thinking was entirely unproductive. He needed to go to bed.

And then there was a knock at his door.

Rhys looked up, then looked at his watch. It was a little past midnight, who was looking for him at this hour? He set his glass down, and padded to the door. And there stood Feyre.

"Don't say anything," she said, before Rhys could open his mouth. He leaned against the door frame, and took in the woman standing there. At her feet, was a stuffed duffel bag. Her eyes were red, and she was too thin. Across one cheek bone, an angry bruise had bloomed purple and red. Rhys' heart dropped into his feet, but as she asked, he didn't say anything.

"You still got that spare room?" she asked.

Rhys picked up her bag and moved it inside. Feyre stepped in, Rhys closed the door behind her, and then very gently, wrapped his arms around her.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered, as her arms came up to his back and she leaned into him. "I'm so sorry."

****

Th angst is reeeaallll but seriously my dudes we made it and I am about to get REAL fluffy on your asses. That's right, it's an angst-fluff-smut parade.

TAGLIST: @ghostlyrose2 @highladysith @stardelia @feysand-babies @tillyrubes10 @ratabrasileira @live-the-fangirl-life @maybekindasortaace @annejulianneh111 @asteria-of-mars@booksmusicandgoodvibes @burritowithfeels

#feysand #feysand fic #acotar #acosf #rhysand #mine #angst

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breaddaerb · 4 years ago

Note

hey hey you know that one voiceline with raze and viper where she talks about having a girls night? have any thoughts on it? :3c

[ raze & viper I ]

✎↷: AHHHH YES I CAN I HAVE MANY THOUGHTS YES I DO

viper is stiff. cold, unrelenting, repellant of those who come her way. raze knows this, but as infamous as viper’s reputation is, so is the brazilian’s drive for taking anything but ‘no’ for an answer. no one will get hurt if it’s just a girls night, right? it’s all just fun and games! there isn’t any war or explosions involved with it!

the tradition started with raze and killjoy independently. the best friends have always held girls nights together, being a tradition that developed from late labs to completely unproductive hangout sessions. this was an occupancy that wasn’t odd and went down without planning or discussion— purely impulsive and for the sake of having fun and destressing. raze knew how much it helped killjoy get through her work when she was having a tough time, so obviously, it should work for viper!

as expected, the woman is completely unyielding to the likes of the excitable brazilian that bounced into her lab. those useless activities have no place in her crafted schedules and plans, and she won’t go to them if she doesn’t gain any information to improve her experiments (raze said that she wasn’t allowed to record it in fear of ‘being ambushed by the pesky guy nights’. each moment can be squeeze into productivity, and a girl’s night is not part of that agenda.

raze does not take to this kindly. the door was slammed into her face and made the engineer use more than the few explosive braincells she held onto. if viper didn’t want to come to the party, then how does she get her to have a girl’s night? let loose? have fun?

lightning strikes, and raze scrambles to execute her physically-and-mind-blowing plan.

—

a lovely evening spent alone in silence goes rudely interrupted by britney spears’ ‘baby one more time’ blasting through the walls, almost rattling her equipment off of the table. these walls were sound-proof since the last time she checked, so how was that possible?

raze. that’s what makes it possible. accompanied by the rest of the protocol women of course, who were all apparently on board with the crazy idea. killjoy and jett are glued to raze’s sides, in charge of supplying things like movies and treats, where as reyna and skye showed up with bottles of high-quality booze, and sage with an impending headache. it’s the perfect combination for a party, and because they’re hitmen who are the stars of the show, they know how to party.

but viper doesn’t take kindly to the loud interruptions. she’s making a retreat to her workspace area to tinker with some personal projects when the obnoxious rift of ‘halo’ by beyoncé starts playing, followed by obnoxious hollers and chants from the younger agents. viper can feel her veins throb and pop beneath skin the longer the song goes on, and as much as she appreciates music and the like, this is not what she has in mind.

her door kicks open, and viper is pissed. there’s steam rolling off her shoulders as she laserbeams raze into the floor, arms crossed. “would you mind? don’t answer that— get the hell out of my hallway.” “oh, viper, you finally showed up! i was beginning to think you weren’t coming to the party!” “i am not here to—“ “—let’s party for real now!”

she gets roped into it, and the party migrates into viper’s quarters. she hissed at all of them to keep away from her products and prisons (specifically killjoy and raze), which they thankfully went along with. they were unwelcomed guests, and she’s going to have as little fun as possible— “drink this, hermanita.” “i don’t want whatever garbage you threw together in that shot glass, nor do i want anything to do with—“ “sabine, it wasn’t a question. drink, or i open the tequila.”

the night passes in a whirlwind. viper is stable enough to stay sober the whole time, but she wasn’t freed from drinking games and other kinds of cruel entertainment that the group indulged in. skye was tending to jett and raze after their drinking contest, reyna and sage quietly conversing in some corner, and leaving her to deal with that german girl all by herself when time ticks by.

“your lab is very clean, sabine! reminds me of my own!” for fucks sake. how could this dolt get more narcissistic when she’s drunk? “not to get you wrong or anything! eveythting about you is so neat and pretty and it is very, very neat! an astounding accomplishment, might i have you know!” viper hasn’t spoken once in this conversation whatsoever. the engineer keeps rattling on about everything and nothing, and eventually she falls sound asleep on the bone of viper’s shoulder. viper doesn’t have the heart to move her. this was plenty for one night, and viper called it quits.

raze is forced to clean up viper’s room after the mess she made. she was double checked for no explosives or paints before she was set off to work, and the whole time she was there, she bragged about the ‘victory’ that was girl’s night. viper scoffed. it was fun for them and babysitting for her, and it had nothing to do with the documented definition of letting loose.

..the alcohol was a nice touch, though.

#valorant #valorant headcanons #Viper #reyna #Killjoy #sage #jett #skye #valorant women #Raze #nanobite #but only a tiny bit smh #girl’s night #ooOo ooOo #crack

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a-secondhand-sorrow · 5 years ago

Text

growth in the grey areas

The @sincerely-us gift exchange is always SO much fun to participate in, and I’m so happy to share my gift on this summer’s holideh. As a fun little surprise for @thatfriendlyanon... we are 2 for 2! thank you for your gorgeous prompts and I hope I could do them justice 💜 (here’s an ao3 link!)

***

Imagine, if you will, a dollhouse.

Imagine the façade first; imagine perfect white siding, trimmed and shaped plastic shrubs, pristine windows with freshly-painted sills. Now travel inside, moving past stickered-on wallpaper and furniture you are free to arrange at will. See the people living inside, their hair perfectly shaped and mouths curved into perpetual smiles. Nothing is complicated or difficult - there are shadows and there is light, and they never mix. There is Good and there is Bad, nothing beyond.

Imagine, if you will, that the Murphy family’s house is a dollhouse.

It truly has every appearance of one, from the shrubs to the wallpaper to, at first glance, the people inside; carefully curated with a precision only money can buy, packaged together in a box to nod your head at as you pass in the store and not look at much for longer.

Now, if you will, crack the dollhouse open right down the middle.

You’ll first see the house, as impeccable as always, but the people inside are not congregated together in the kitchen as they were before. Only the newcomer remains in the kitchen, far less of a newcomer than he thought of himself. Slide your eyes to the left, over to the other half, and you’ll see gray hair slicked back carefully and a painted-on shirt collar recently undone from hands worrying it standing over a box of memorabilia, a permanent crease molded between his brows. Slide them up over floors and walls to see hundreds of pages clutched between an ever-impeccable hand, another hand pressed to mouth to stifle something while seated on a bed that is not her own. And, finally, locate the final person, doll, pawn - over the grid of plastic that separates all of them, find her one room over, curled into a position you didn’t know she can manage, her hands pressing to her face as though they alleviate building pressure. Imagine, if you will, them - that whole picture.

If you understand what it is to be falling apart inside a picture-perfect life, you may begin to understand what it is to be a Murphy.

I. something shatters

Evan read once that, after a sonic boom, all is deathly silent. Surprisingly, that isn’t because all machinery and living beings present are completely destroyed; no, the silence is from the explosion itself. If the force is powerful enough, it will create a vacuum where air levels are so low that sound doesn’t travel. You could curse, you could scream, you could beg to go back in time for a minute or an hour or a year and it wouldn’t matter. Your lips would move and no sound would escape. That was what true silence was.

He passed physics as a freshman, so of course he understood that concept in theory, even if there was always a part of his brain that never fully registered just how awful and harsh and real that vacuum could be.

He never understood until he uttered those words, those explosive words, in the Murphy’s kitchen over the sounds of phones ringing and the people he’d grown to love breathing and speaking. He never understood until they rode the explosion out and away. He never understood until he was left in the aftershocks, no air left for him to speak with.

He wishes he’d understood that before, that kind of choking silence. Of course, that may just be guilt. Heidi always says that guilt is the most unproductive emotion - it’s useless, he can hear her say in his mind in between sniffles, you can’t go back and change the past - but he knows he has no hope of curbing the swell of it inside of him all the same.

His ride was, originally, Zoe. How funny that seems looking back with hindsight. Not even an hour before, he’d felt that he belonged enough to have a guaranteed way back to his house, to monotony and crushing stability. He’d been able to rely on that tiny routine.

Without it, he feels liable to break apart and shatter into a thousand pieces.

He still has to get home, though, and so he curbs that particular impulse and accepts the fact that he’s just ruined the only good things in his life. (You were bound to ruin them when you first lied to them, something in his mind says, which is nothing he doesn’t know already.) He never sat down, so save for a brief pep talk (or mental beration) to his feet to get them moving he manages to make his exit from the Murphy household swiftly. Evan walks the whole way home, and he knows that he must pass some landmarks - trees, houses, even Ellison Park is on the path back. But when he reaches his front door, he can’t remember anything about the walk. The only thing that reminds him of the walk he just made is his aching feet. And, of course. the house in front of him.

Heidi’s car is out front, and he’s not sure whether to be terrified or relieved. He’s not given a chance to settle on one or the other before his right hand is cold on the handle of his front door as his left stays firmly planted in his pocket. The interior of the house is maybe a degree or so warmer than the outside air, and the contrast lands softly on his cheeks for a moment as the door clicks shut behind him.

His mother sits on the couch in the living room, only ten or so feet from the door. She’s still wearing her scrubs, but her laptop is on her lap all the same. Their eyes meet, and Evan knows he won’t be able to brush past her and get to his room. The suspicion only confirmed when she opens her mouth, and that’s when he finally places the expression on her face; shock.

“Have you seen this? The note that Connor Murphy...?”

Evan nods, finally closing the distance between the living room half of the room and the entrance part. His limbs warm the further in he walks, but his hands continue to fiddle with his sweatshirt hem all the same, his neck bowed. He can’t bring himself to meet Heidi’s eyes.

“It’s all over everyone’s Facebook.”

She looks back at her computer screen.

“Dear Evan Hansen…” She shakes her head slowly, letting out one long sigh like a deflated and punctured balloon.“Did you… you wrote this? The note?”

Evan nods again.

“I didn’t know.”

“No one did,” Evan says, taking a tiny step forward. He gestures with one hand in the rush to assure her, still at the level of his hem.

“No, that’s not what I...I didn’t know that you...that you were…” Her voice can be so soft, so gently imploring, almost tenuously polite even to her own son. Like she’s terrified of saying the wrong thing, and she knows how to cushion her words in case it goes wrong. Hearing something that sounds so similar to his own brain pains him for a moment. “...hurting like that. That you felt so...I didn’t know. How did I not know?”

“Because I never told you.”

“You shouldn’t have had to.”

He shakes his head, bowing his neck further and pressing his lips into a line.“I lied. About...so many things. Not just Connor. Last summer, I just...I felt so alone…”

She speaks again as she always does, right in front of him when he needs her presence - soft, supportive, her voice gravelly with how serious it is. “You can tell me.”

Shaking his head against the building pressure of tears, Evan chokes out “you’ll hate me.”

“Oh, Evan.”

“You should. If you knew what I tried to do. If you knew how I am, how,” the hand gestures return with a vengeance, emphasizing nothing in particular. “...broken I am.”

“I already know you, and I love you.”

That gets him to break. He’d been slowly edging forward towards the couch throughout the conversation, but with that, he drops to perch on the edge of the cushion.

“I’m so sorry,” is all he can say, and Heidi takes his hands with a gesture that makes him feel more seven than seventeen, and it’s then that the vacuum around his throat finally lifts and he falls apart.

***

He feels like a goddamn fool.

Larry should be - well, he should be furious, shouldn’t he? This kid waltzed into his life, his family’s life, to build up some fairy tales about what his son was supposed to be and then he has to go and tear it all down just when they need them the most. He should be blind with a white-hot rage, like the one he’d felt when they got the call that early September day. He should be breaking things and making shout-filled phone calls.

Anger can be quiet, he reassures himself. Anger can be silent. Anger can be standing up from a table and staring down someone who lied without saying a word. Anger can be walking so that your steps make no noise against the floor and keeping heavy eye contact, being the last to leave the room. Anger can be leaving a kid who made a mistake to fend for himself when he was practically the son you never really had an hour before.

Larry passes a hand over his face with perhaps more force than necessary.

God, he’s not angry. He’s just a fool.

Connor’s been buried six feet under the ground for over three months, but Larry still half expects to hear him call him a fool to his face. Or probably some expletive-riddled alternative. When the words never come, he appears strangely off-balance. He tilts right where he stands in the garage, driving his fist into the nearest object - conveniently, a wall. His knuckles crack on impact and he regrets the eruption immediately but still, he doesn’t shed a tear for either the punch or for his son.

Apparently missing Connor turned Larry into some faded and worn version of his outbursts.

That thought sobers him right up, and he takes a deep, controlled breath in response. The movement reminds him of his daughter, how she does the same over almost every family breakfast and trying conversation. He’d be admiring her self-control if he wasn’t lacking so much himself. Still, he manages to calm himself enough that he lowers his fist from the wall, wincing all the way as his skin snags on the rough concrete. He turns back to his previous task. Any given member of the family would scold him at the sight of the baseball memorabilia, a fact that he knows well and has tested one too many times. The cards are an addiction he can’t quite kick, but it’s a preferable one to pulling out the whiskey in his desk drawer. Or whatever the hell Connor had been hooked on. Dealing with the memorabilia is easier than dealing with the mediocre reaction and the stew of feelings he has. Breaking down into tears would be easier. Flying into a blind rage would be preferable. Instead, he’s just sedentary and mindlessly occupying himself.

Larry knows that he should be joining his girls, trying to be strong, to kick away habits in favor of human connection. He should be allowing himself to process grief in a natural way, as the grief counselor said at the very beginning of this whole nightmare. In so many ways, he’s right back at square one. But at least this time around, things are not as hazy. With Evan and his stories and his emails - things were better, happier. But they were fuzzy, too. Now he’s wide awake, but he can’t find it in himself to tear away from the all-consuming sorting and looking and sorting and looking that the garage requires. The task is a thousand times emptier without Evan asking questions and filling up the negative space in the garage in a way he rarely filled up any other rooms, but it’s a distraction and a release, and Larry - who has always, always been a fool - takes the piles of Orioles cards under his hands for the blessing and curse that they are.

***

“I deluded myself to think that - to try and justify it as though maybe, maybe I wasn’t the only person who craved a normal life - who craved being accepted, being part of something bigger than myself. It’s no excuse, I know that - there is no excuse. But I hoped that I was helping other people when really all I was doing was bolstering myself. I hoped that maybe I wasn’t the only broken person.”

The only broken person.

From the moment Evan spoke those words, Zoe hasn’t been able to get them out of her head.

So many other parts of his speech present themselves for her to mull over, to cry over, to scream and be furious about. After all, quite a bit of deceit was revealed. The freshness of their presumed break-up, their family tensions being aired for the whole internet to see, and, of course, Evan’s backdated and misread and completely and blatantly nonexistent relationship with Connor all battle for dominance on her heavily-weighed mind, but above all are those echoing words.

The only broken person.

When she reaches her room, where she’d run out of force of habit rather than any real intent, she collapses back against her door. It clicks satisfyingly against the frame. She barely hears the sound before she’s cringing away. Something about the combined sensation of the door moving and the unexpected sound clash in her mind. Zoe expects the door to crash open at any second, and she chokes on tears and sobs and the stilted, heavy air in her room as she tries to put as much distance between the door and her as possible.

It takes a moment for reality to return to her, and she stills halfway between her door and her bed, the hardwood floor biting into her calloused fingers and sensitive palms. Her head aches, her heart aches, and all she can think is the only broken person, only they’re not in Evan’s voice, they’re in hers. The words drip with so much Murphy family venom that she can feel them trail a burning path down her throat and brand themselves into her upper mouth until her vision fills with little white dots.

But Zoe is nothing if not resilient. She has always been the last one standing, the strongest and sturdiest, the one with the best poker face who is willing to play the game. And so Zoe pushes herself up in a wave, hands to elbows to give herself the momentum needed to move upwards. Once she finds her feet she staggers forward towards the bed. She can barely see in her darkened room. The only light comes from the stars outside her window, but they’re blurred around her tears. She curls onto her duvet without crawling underneath, bunching it between her arms as though it could be another person instead of just fabric. For a moment the blanket might be Evan - she’s grown so used to his weight beside her that lying without him is cold and lonely by contrast. And a moment later she can even imagine it’s Connor like it had been when they were little kids. No matter what she thinks, however, it really is just cloth.

It’s a step up from lying on the ground, at least. A small comfort in a day that has been filled with anything but.

She’d told him she loved him in this room. On this bed, this duvet. He’d told her that he loved her, and she’d felt safe, certain for the first time that no one was on the other side of the door. That they were truly alone in her room, the rest of the world falling to the wayside. He’d murmured the words into her lips, peppered them across her face with her freckles, spoke them each time with a reverence deeper than any devotion she’d ever heard until she was incapable of doubting the truth in the words. Not a single moment passed where she doubted that she was loved while they were together.

In the aftermath, she has to doubt every single moment, and that somehow makes everything worse.

So much hurts. There is a Connor-shaped hole in her that he punched into her himself, one that Evan expanded and twisted with his declarations that Connor really did love her, that he didn’t want to hurt her. And there’s a new Evan-shaped hole in her chest and in her bed and in her soul that she never would have expected existing in August. Her phone won’t stop ringing, either, and the ringtone her friends picked out as a joke about how bubbly Zoe was is starting to repeat so incessantly in her head that she’s ready to crawl right out of her skin.

She could put her phone on do not disturb, but instead, she throws it as hard as she can across the room. Some part of her, the part of her that shadowed Connor incessantly and took some sick pleasure from the familiar rhythm of her parent’s fights, wants desperately to hear the phone shatter. But it’s thrown from an awkward angle, so her hopes aren’t high for destruction. All the same, when she hears it buzzing against the floorboards she is disproportionately disappointed.

Zoe wants to scream. She wants to get up and really shatter her phone like Connor and Evan shattered her family. She wants to settle on her heart and her soul by feeling either love or hate and not some jagged mix of both. Mostly, though, she’s tired. She has always been the strongest of all of them, the last one standing, the ever-composed and happiest, but her legs are beginning to shake under the strain of standing stock-still. For the first time, she thinks she understands why her family takes to shouting under the slightest duress. Anything must be better than leaving everything she experiences to weigh on her chest until she holds so much that the pain of it all starts to jolt her.

Maybe the most suffocating part of the whole situation is that she knew all along. Knew that his lies were too good to be true. Knew that Connor would never say those things, even if he didn’t hate her (and now she’ll never know whether he did.) Knew that Evan’s stories, for all their sincerity, didn’t hold up to any given timeline. From the moment he sat at her dinner table and fumbled over a conversation about the wretched skiing trips, she knew not a word that came out of his mouth was true. If she looks back, she knows she never really believed him. But instead of saying anything, she kept her mouth shut just like she always did. She swallowed her pride and his lies because they went down easier than the idea of never knowing for certain, of living the rest of her life in limbo over what Connor thought of her. They hurt less than the idea that she’d helped lead to his demise.

She knew all along, but she went along with his story all the same because the cracks in her sentry became more pronounced day after day, the chest-crushing anxiety that sometimes made her wonder if her heart finally succumbed to a heart attack and the blatant disregard for her own physical safety as she moved through her day only multiplying into dizzying numbers. She splintered under the constant pressure and the unrelenting lights like she never had before, and she was seconds away from falling to the ground before Connor died and even closer than that when Evan walked into their lives. Before that dinner, she had wished with a futile hope - one she couldn’t remember using since she was small - that Connor hadn’t taken so much from her, including the only way out. His pain overshadowed everyone else’s, and once he was gone nothing was left to hide hers behind. Evan’s lies eased it, propped her up. Maybe that’s why she grit her teeth, flashed a smile, and accepted it.

Connor may have been broken, and Evan too, but they were far from the only ones.

Zoe curls further into her bed, searching for something solid to grip onto, before she pushes herself upright just as she always does.

***

Cynthia runs out of tears sometime around the fortieth email.

It was bound to happen at some point - she can only physically produce tears for so long, after all - but she can’t help but feel hollow as her eyes dry and her breaths begin to steady out. Her head begins to grow heavier with the familiar fatigue that follows crying, but none of the satisfaction follows it. No resolution to the truth that made her cry appears. She wishes she would just continue crying instead of sitting still and empty on her son’s bed.

Instead, she turns another page and reads until her eyelids dry out and her eyes catch on them as she moves them back and forth, left to right, as though her life depends on that one action.

Now - now she can see it. How much each one of these, even the ones from ‘Connor,’ just drip Evan all over. He’d had her fooled, he truly had, but now that she knows he wrote them she can’t unsee it. The words are a little too stiff and structured to be her son’s. They are so much like Evan himself, pieced together to try and make others happy while sacrificing his own happiness. Common sense dictates that she’d miss that at first when she barely knew him (and barely understood Connor). Now that she knows him so well-

Well. Maybe she doesn’t really know him at all. That’s the thought that really stings.

Cynthia looks up from the page. Her daughter had made it a foot or so into Connor’s room without Cynthia hearing at all. A pang of guilt hits her as she takes in Zoe’s bloodshot eyes and eerily still features, save for the bottom lip being worried between her teeth. She’d been forgotten again. Cynthia had forgotten her again.

The severity of the guilt feels dampened, somehow, but she’s not quite sure why.

Zoe doesn’t say anything. Where Cynthia is so accustomed to Connor’s explosive words, Zoe is always silent, something Cynthia never quite wraps her head around. The opposite is also true, of course. Where she is used to Connor’s weighty silence, Zoe always manages to surprise her with a sarcastic mutter or an occasional scathing sentence. Only since his death has her voice ever raised above a normal speaking tone when speaking with her or Larry, and only then to scold Cynthia for defending Connor.

Something has to replace Zoe’s occasional shouting at Connor, Cynthia supposes, but the earlier guilt crawls back and kills the thought.

Instead of speaking, Cynthia just watches as Zoe crosses the line of bookshelves on the front wall and nestles herself comfortably on the floor between two of them. The location is an odd choice, but Cynthia can’t find it in herself to be surprised.

(Of course, Cynthia wouldn’t know that that spot is where Zoe always used to sit, mostly in middle school before Connor completely tore their relationship to shreds. Back when Connor would let Zoe sit and do her homework while he drew or read instead of chasing her out of the room if she so much as crossed a foot in front of his door. She wouldn’t know how many hours Zoe spent quietly consoling Connor and curling up to sleep on the floor in the months before Connor kicked her out and she was forced to sleep in front of his door instead, just so he knew she was close.

Zoe stopped halfway through freshman year. She had to. But the habit of sitting nestled between the two bookshelves remains two years later.)

Cynthia doesn’t speak. She doesn’t know what she would say if she did. She just sits, and Zoe sits near her. After a beat, Zoe holds one hand out expectantly. Cynthia divides about a fourth of the emails off the top of her stack after only a moment of deliberation to hand them to her. They look so large in her daughter’s hand, and Cynthia is abruptly reminded just how young Zoe is. She recognized the same fact the night that Connor - well. Zoe had a similarly lost edge in her eyes that night. Cynthia had looked into those eyes, the eyes that Zoe and Connor shared, and that's when Cynthia realized no one had ever taught her this. She’d read her fair share of parenting books once Connor started to go downhill, but no one prepared her for that moment. For the look in Zoe’s eyes when she realized Connor was gone, when Cynthia was the one to tell her for good. No one can ever teach you how to handle that.

That was the first time Cynthia realized just how young Zoe truly was since normally she was so carefully guarded and built up that she seemed several years older. But Cynthia had let herself forget, again, how young and small her daughter was.

Now Zoe, the version Cynthia is truly seeing for the first time, flips through pages at a rapid speed. Her eyes scan over every line.

“I can’t believe I read these,” Zoe whispers. Cynthia can’t tell if Zoe meant for her mother to hear it or not. “I can’t believe I…”

“Believed it?” She offers, bitterness curling into the words. They’re nasally, probably because of all the crying. Zoe doesn’t respond, just flips another page with a light scoff.

They read in silence for some time. A shadow falls across the doorway. When Cynthia glances up, it’s to see her husband leaning against the doorframe. His lips are in their same perpetual thinned form, his forehead creased and the corners of his eyes hardened.

No one taught her how to fix any of this. She should know how, shouldn’t she? It should be on her to fix this. Not a group of teenagers who can barely hold themselves together while they scatter, no, it should have been her to provide that for them. She should have taken on their burden, their pain, because that was her job. She was too caught up in her own grief to save theirs and so they acted rashly and painfully, just as she has done by trusting them, just as Connor did - she can’t let this all happen again, not when circumstances are so dire. She must fix everything for them.

But Larry is in Connor’s room, instead of hiding away downstairs, and so when he holds out a silent hand for more papers she relinquishes half of her stack without much thought. And the three of them stand their ground, flipping through fabricated pages silently but together. They are closer together than they’ve been in years.

It’s a start, maybe.

Cynthia - for all that has been torn away from her day by day, second by second, as Evan’s lie crumbled apart slowly - can hope.

***

II. and slowly, quietly, imperfectly

Heidi insists on a session with Dr. Sherman first thing the next day.

It’s a Saturday, so he can’t really deny her request. And she’s already bartered for the whole day off, or so she informs him.

That early winter chill fills the air, the one that makes him feel weirdly like a little kid. Everything is cold enough that snow should coat the ground and purify the landscape, cover in every broken crevice in the ground until the world is a blank slate. But it’s too early for that kind of snow, and he has to settle for greying skies and cheek-stinging wind. The weather is perfect for curling up under the covers with someone you care about, or for visiting your therapist and probably crying until your throat hurts.

But Heidi held him close for so long the night before, and when she’d pulled away it was only when he’d initiated the separation. She had only strayed away from him to make him the matzo ball soup she always made him when he felt sick, anxiety-based or otherwise, as a little kid. Eating it is like stepping into little Evan’s life for just a blissful minute, and for that time he remembers just how much she loves him. It tastes like he thinks caring about someone feels, and Evan is certain he won’t be able to argue with his mother again.

Maybe that was her intent all along with the soup. That would’ve been a pretty impressive con.

Almost all of the Dr. Sherman session is spent spilling his guts of every secret he’s kept over the past few months and chose not to share. All Dr. Sherman does is regard him over his steepled fingers for a moment, nodding all the way. He thought saying everything out loud would make the guilt in his stomach curdle and choke, which it did - he had to stop several times just to catch a breath when recounting everything, and he’d swear he was seconds from passing out or throwing up or something - but by the time his session is over, his soul feels a bit lighter, too. Like a weight has been lifted off of his shoulders. He’s been experiencing the same sensation since standing in the Murphy’s dollhouse of a life to tear it to the ground - like for once, he can sit up a little straighter and nothing will come crashing down on him. Fewer things can crumble from the sky when everything is already lying on the ground in the rubble.

Heidi’s car waits for him outside - he sees it from the window of Dr. Sherman’s office - but when he finally exits with slightly bloodshot eyes he sees her sitting in the waiting room. She doesn’t fidget like Evan does, her entire body almost wearily still at most times, but he catches her teeth biting at the edge of one nail before she’s up and facing Evan and Dr. Sherman, composed as ever.

Afterward, she’ll ask all kinds of questions about his meds and how the session was and if he’s really okay. But for then it’s kind of nice to just have her there at all. Evan isn’t naïve enough to hope that she’ll be back again, but for that moment he draws strength from her arm looped in his and the warm car he knows is waiting outdoors.

“I’m a bad person,” he says once he’s buckled up in the passenger seat. Before Heidi reaches over to take his hand, he doesn’t realize his hands are shaking. “I’m a terrible person. I knew that, I did, but I couldn’t realize how much - just how terrible.”

“You’re not,” is all Heidi says.

“I am. I did terrible things, and I can’t fix them.”

“You are not a bad person, Evan,” Heidi repeats, a little more forcefully. “I’m your mother. I know you. If you gained something from this situation it was...accidental. You’d never have done this if you didn’t want to help them.”

“But I didn’t,” he parrots, ignoring how completely she understood his motivation without him explaining it to her. “I mean - I wanted to help them, but I knew what I could gain. I...I knew I was hurting them but I did it anyway. I never helped them.”

She’s quiet for a moment, her other hand reaching to cup his left hand. “The world isn’t so binary, Ev,” she finally settles on. “This may have been bad, but you’ll find a way to balance it out. Just because this hurts now doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person forever. If you were truly bad you wouldn’t feel like this.”

He shrugs, trying to hide his burning eyes.

“You’re a...a good person, with a kind heart,” she says, pushing past Evan’s noise of disbelief. “You did something bad. But I know you, Evan. You’ll make it right. Life is messy and complicated, but you love so fiercely, Ev, and you care so much. You’d never want to hurt someone. That doesn’t make you bad. No one is really bad or good, anyway. We live in a complex, dark world, and you’re about as good as they come.”

At last, he shakes his head to break the fog around it. “You have to say that. You’re my mother.”

With an airy laugh, she withdraws her hands, choosing instead to wrap them around the wheel. “Maybe so,” she says, her crooked grin returning. Evan smiles back at her.

***

A Jazz Band concert is scheduled for the next week.

Zoe practically begs off sick. God, she wants to beg off sick. She doesn’t want to plaster a smile on her face (because she can’t do that without thinking about him) and she doesn’t want to look out to the audience and see her parents looking politely interested but privately bored (because that’s him all over, too) and she really doesn’t want to play guitar in front of everyone.

That’s him, too. Both hims. Every all-consuming him in her life.

But if there is one thing Zoe has inherited from her family, it’s the all-consuming need to arrive where she’s supposed to at the time she’s supposed to. Her parents did, too, so they drive her and wait for the performance. Half-asleep, her feet make the journey backstage with her guitar case clasped in hand. She nods absently to some of her classmates, at least the ones who are nice enough to acknowledge her with some warmth. Between the letter and her relationship and subsequent breakup with Evan, most had taken to ignoring her or sending icy glares in her direction. Any true confrontations normally take place behind a screen, but Zoe is still distinctly shut out from most of the school.

As she pulls her guitar free from the case and begins tuning it back to standard instead of open D, as she’d tuned it for the sake of an earlier song and was too lazy to change back, a girl who plays sax compliments her outfit. That comment is probably the nicest direct thing anyone has said to her since the letter came out. Though Zoe only abstractly remembers picking out an appropriate outfit and applying her festive winter makeup, she scrounges up a smile and thanks her classmate all the same.

The smile untucks something from the corner of her brain, and suddenly she’s extremely hopeful Evan won’t be there.

He has no reason to be, she reminds herself when trailing out towards the stage. He has no reason to be, she repeats as she sits and everyone settles on stage and in the audience. He has no reason to be, she reminds herself as they launch into the first song after the director’s brief remarks. Don’t look. He has no reason to be here.

She looks anyway.

Zoe hopes that’s not his outline lurking towards the back of the theater. She really hopes he wouldn’t put them both through that. Zoe has to be at the concert, of course, since she has no choice. But Evan - Evan was at liberty to make the decision to stay home. Evan could stay away from this experience and spare them both a bit of pain. God knows they both have more than enough hurt to last a lifetime. For him to see her now would be too familiar, too intimate. After all those hours in her room, him tracing her movements with his eyes and applauding enthusiastically after each and every song - tracing the curve of the unconscious smile with his eyes while she played and then tracing it with his own mouth, both their hands tracing everywhere, every outline, every happy little smile line - him being in the same room is too much.

She knows it’s him. Not realizing the figure is him is probably impossible, when she knows - knew - knows him so well. But she pretends she doesn’t recognize him all the same, letting her eyes fall back to the other side of the theater, a stupid little fake smile tucked in her lips and her fingers plucking out the familiar melody.

This is one of her first Jazz Band concerts without Connor. Although he normally sank so low in his seat that Zoe assumed he was sleeping, he was always present. And in her haste to forget Evan she remembers Connor all over again, because the two are forever and always linked directly in her mind. One doesn’t come to mind without the other lurking just behind.

She half-expects to see Connor in the audience all the same, but when her gaze falls to her parents, they are only the two figures visible.

Her fingers never slip on the strings, but she forgets where she is for a moment. Instead, she is back in her room, Connor sunk low in her beanbag, clapping politely as she strums a basic chord progression. If she strains she can remember his eyes, how they softened and narrowed to see her, like looking into a mirror as always. Gentle, almost, although the word is laughable to her now. And then a fresher memory, when Connor’s eyes fill with steel and snatch the guitar from her grasp - the siblings are quiet now because Cynthia and Larry are asleep, but his words carry with the harshness laced through them. Anger, too. Not his normal anger, not senseless, not splintered doors and screaming “fuck you” and the bitter scent of destruction, but instead something edged in concern, like an overused washcloth and a scabbing wound and blood sharp on her tongue from biting her cheek. Her memory is blurred because she was tipped over that hazy edge of intoxication where everything was cause for giggles and everything was a thousand times more consequential, but his eyes are clear where everything else is soft at the edges. Her intoxication causes his angry eyes - she drove herself home alone well past midnight, and he took it upon himself to be concerned. She has her own anger couched between giggles. Don’t pretend you don’t do this all the time, Connie, I’m just trying to be like you, you know, that’s all I ever wanted. And Connor’s strained voice just barely reaching normal volume, stone-cold sober for once, saying take that fucking back, you don’t want to be me, I’m a fuckup and you’re- when Zoe, startlingly honest in a way only being high can provoke, replies oh but I’m already as good as dead on my feet so I might as well do as you do, what’s the point in pretending I’ll ever be okay while you destroy yourself, can’t I want this-

Connor takes the guitar from her hands and smashes it to pieces against her dresser before she can finish, and then she’s back on stage with applause filtering through her ears.

***

Evan stands in the back of the auditorium, watching Zoe play guitar with an intensity he can’t remember watching her with before, and suddenly it’s difficult to breathe.

Evan is no stranger to panic attacks, but this is not the same throat tightening that panic brings him. Panic is sharper and quicker, but this is all-encompassing and gradually taking over his lungs in a new and more frightening way. Tearing his eyes away from her, striking on the illuminated stage as she always is, he makes his way out of the double doors and into the empty hallway before he can even begin to understand why his breaths are difficult to come by. Guilt is a familiar force behind his pricking eyes, and he falls back against the (blessedly empty) corridor wall with perhaps a bit more force than necessary, his head tilted back to hit against the stone wall before the rest of his body. Guilt. Shame. Longing. Love. All of them are spurred from the sight of Zoe for the first time since the confession, and they make a bitter combination burning down his throat like the unwanted sting of alcohol. They’re just as all-consuming, too.

Evan brings his hands to his face and just tries to breathe.

(It’s difficult because he used to breathe the same air as her. As often as she’d taken the air from his lungs she’d gifted it back to him, easing the painful jolt of being alive with a small smile and her hand in his. He’d stolen hers in return, cut her off mid-song to feel her breath in a hot puff against his lips until it hitched in anticipation of his lips pressing to hers. Those safe moments where they breathed easier even though they shared almost every breath, every joke and giggle and sentence buried into each other’s mouths. She made it so easy and natural where now there is only difficulty. Just seeing her makes it impossible to get air into his lungs. It’s difficult because he’s reminded that he loves her too much to be healthy and he’s lost the right to do so.)

Once he catches his breath he pulls his phone out. He doesn’t have a ton of options, but he hesitates all the same. Finally, he sends his mother a text, and she responds at once, so she must be out of class.

Leaving is probably the safest option for everyone involved.

He leaves his haunt outside the auditorium doors, opting instead to make the trek outside and wait. As soon as he’s out of the door there’s a shock to his system, the cold night air washing over him like a bucket of freezing water. He breathes the air in anyways, and it goes down easier than any of the air indoors had. From the corner of his eye, he catches a flash of silver. His mother’s car.

Evan meets her halfway, jogging to meet the car and open the door quickly.

“Hey,” she says, hesitant and cheery all at once. Her class must have gone well. She opens her mouth again as though to speak, but the words die on her lips. When Evan is silent, she tries again. “How was…I mean, did you talk to-”

“It was fine,” he cuts off. His voice is soft out of fear that if he gets louder he’ll get emotional. “I didn’t. I saw them, but I didn’t... do anything.”

“That’s okay,” she hurries to say. “That’s perfectly fine, sweetheart. It’s probably better that way.”

Evan nods, tilting his head to hit the window pane.

“I guess you just want to go home?” Evan nods mutely for a second time. “I’ll order a pizza or something, yeah? That sounds good?” With Evan’s third nod and a subsequent little smile on his face, Heidi nods herself and finally shifts back into drive.

***

Admittedly, they have a little difficulty focusing on high school jazz band jazz, but Larry and Cynthia make the attempt valiantly anyway.

In normal times, or times of pride instead of grief, both of them excel at small talk. Be it career schmoozing, dealing with extended family, or interacting with anyone from Connor and Zoe’s schools, it’s a necessary evil for almost every aspect of their lives. They have small talk down to a fine art, always ready to uphold their image and chat with a friendly face.

It is not normal times, but they try anyway.

The first parents they see avert their eyes and hurry through the theater doors before either of them open their mouths. The air is stiff with all the eyes on them, but the gazes are quick to drop away when they glance around as no one is keen on making eye contact. Cynthia goes out of her way to say hi to one of her friends from the Parent’s Association, but when she’s only met with a strained smile and a wave, the Murphy parents wordlessly decide to cut their losses and just find seats.

By force of habit, they sit leaving one seat open on the aisle. Neither says anything about it, nor do they move to fill the seat. Better to leave it empty than to pretend they didn’t wish it was full.

As far as Larry is concerned, the concert can’t be over quickly enough. That urgent coil only grows in his chest when the kids file out and settle down on stage. No one exactly looks like they want to be at a Jazz Band concert because they are a bunch of high schoolers on a Friday night with better and stupider things to be doing. Impatience threads through everyone, and as an event the concert appears to be doomed.

Cynthia’s gaze bounces between the students on stage, but Larry focuses on his daughter, his vision practically tunneling to her. Her eyes steady on a point towards the back wall, but her smile doesn’t waver throughout. Larry absently wonders if she’s employing the technique she used in middle school back when she had terrible stage fright, where she focused her attention on a focal point in the back instead of looking around the audience. He can’t blame her if she is. But towards the bridge of the song (at least, Larry thinks it’s the bridge. He never can tell with jazz) her eyes slide along the rows of seats until they land right by him and Cynthia. Zoe’s face tightens almost imperceptibly, her grin thinning just the slightest bit. A shadow passes over her eyes, and Larry’s sure that if he weren’t her father he wouldn’t notice. Her eyes divert a moment later, but the shadow won’t get out of Larry’s head.

It's the closest he has seen to Connor in a long time.

The rest of the evening passes without incident, which is all they can truly hope for. They greet Zoe in the hallway afterward. Larry is a little late, as he made the trip back to the car for Zoe’s bouquet. When he nears Cynthia, he can see that she’s finally gotten ahold of Zoe. Her eyebrows pinch together just slightly as her hands lightly rest on their daughter’s elbows. Still, Cynthia practically radiates pride, and neither Zoe, Larry, or the other students and parents are heartless enough to take that away from her.

Larry presents Zoe the bouquet with very little ceremony, simply bending down to press a kiss to her cheek. Zoe rolls her eyes when Larry straightens, but her unconscious smile is back all the same.

“Congrats, kid,” he says, gesturing to the flowers.

“It’s the same thing I’ve been doing since middle school.”

“It’s damn impressive-” Larry starts, but he never finishes the sentence.

“Didn’t you help arrange some of those?” Cynthia presses with little preamble. “That’s a first.”

“I mean, kind of?” Zoe replies, making a vague hand gesture towards the auditorium. “It was a first, yeah, but I didn’t really do-”

“Nonsense, I’m sure it was all your-”

“I really didn’t-”

“Either way,” Larry cuts in, raising his voice just a little to cut off their identical, increasingly frustrated tones and scrunching faces, “We’re proud of you, Zo’.”

“We are.” Cynthia seizes her in a sudden hug, and Zoe pretends to gag again, but Larry is pretty sure it’s at least seventy percent for show.

***

III. it all mends

Zoe drives herself to the orchard.

She can’t even get out of the car. She doesn’t think that’s why she drove there at all, really. She didn’t really intend to get out and exist in that space - the one that screams The Connor Project all over and hides Evan in every shadow. She didn’t really intend to do anything, after all, except for getting in the car. Her hands guided her to her final destination.

Maybe the intention, all along, was just to see it. She hasn’t even seen the outside, and that strikes her as wrong, for some reason. Because a dull ache won’t leave her chest, and seeing the orchard will either ease it or transform it into a sharp pain. At this point, she’s willing to take either over the constant, infuriating, numbing guilt and grief slowly gnawing away at her.

It helps a little, and a little goes a long way.

Even though she just sits in the car, the air is easier to breathe, somehow. Knowing that something new, something with the possibility of a future, came out of the Connor Project Fiasco is...nice. What they did wasn’t completely in vain. Something will live beyond Connor, beyond all of them, that shares his name.

A kind of karmic balance is in that cycle, Zoe thinks. For all the pain Connor caused her, something beautiful will share his name forever. Other kids can go to the orchard as they did, grow up and older and more mature. Maybe those kids will gain just an ounce of joy from the growing trees and emergency-landing lake. Maybe the bad things he did don't have to mean he’s remembered as bad forever. Maybe this orchard will be the grey area in Connor’s memory, where black and white mix and mingle and lay out some kind of future.

That grey area can live in her, as well. Because Connor was the brother who made her life a living hell with his fists and his raised voice, but he was also the brother that taught her the constellations and drew her doodles of flower-wielding superheroes as an apology until he hit middle school. He may have given her nightmares throughout her teen years, but before then he was the one to chase them away with an arm slung around her shoulders. He protected her and made her need protection all at once, and at that moment outside the orchard, with her head cradled in her hands as she sits in the driver’s seat, Zoe realizes she doesn’t have to remember him as one or the other. The good and the bad of what he was can be simultaneously true.

It’s that thought that accompanies her home safely and in relative peace.

***

Evan lies sprawled on his bed.

In terms of sitting down, sprawling quite different from what he’s used to. Normally he is a huncher rather than a sprawler, always sitting with his legs crossed or folded and curled over a book or a laptop instead of lying horizontally.

In that context, he’s definitely branching out in this new horizontal - or really diagonal - position, all across his bed at an obnoxious angle. He takes up space in a way he never used to, and for once, his spine doesn’t curl reflexively as though in a shell. A journal is nestled under his fingertips, the possibility for creation only seconds away. He’s sure the succulents nestled around his room in little bursts of green help ease the flow of oxygen into his lungs.

It’s a nice day.

It’s nice to let it just be a nice day. He’d never appreciated nice days before, really.

“Lazy day?” Heidi says, popping her head into his doorway. He nods absently, bent over a page with a pen clenched in his hand, before he really looks up and smiles at her. She smiles back. “I’m leaving for a shift in five. Enjoy it!”

“I will,” he promises, his voice quiet and steady. She smiles again.

“You’re like a cat, always curled in the sun,” she comments with an easy finality before leaving his room. And, well. Evan can’t really dispute that fact.

***

When Cynthia drives to the orchard, Larry is absorbed in his phone on the passenger side and Zoe gazes out the window in the back. They used to make that drive all the time, and something about the path is achingly familiar. As with all familiar things, it makes Connor’s absence clear as day to Cynthia. At this point, that ache is almost comforting to her. Though never quite gone completely, missing him has begun to dull out into something not as noticeable. She almost feels guilty that the experience has eased for her; some part of her thinks every day should be as painful as the first was. Maybe that’s what Connor would have wanted, or maybe he would have wanted to just disappear from their minds completely. She’ll never know, and she refuses to make up her mind about it, so she leaves herself to be guilty alone.

Once the familiar gate of Ellison park comes in sight, Cynthia parks the car in record time. They each grab an assortment of items and hurry past the plaques by the entrance. The day is too nice to spend fighting back tears.

Larry spreads a picnic blanket, and Zoe lays out their food with a practiced precision and a critical eye for plating. For once, nothing plastic hides in their movements. They really appear natural and relaxed. If Cynthia didn’t know better, she may say they look happy.

It may be the closest they ever get, though what that says about them Cynthia doesn’t know.

The Murphy’s are content to eat in silence. None are particularly adept with words, and fighting would only sully the beautiful afternoon sunshine. That’s why no one argues when Larry pulls a book free and flips it open. The same applies to Zoe popping in a pair of earbuds and scrolling idly through her phone. (Cynthia almost lets a snarky comment slip about enjoying nature instead of her music, but she bites her tongue at the last second.) That leaves Cynthia to enjoy the park, and she does so from her spot seated criss-cross on the ground. She gazes out to the horizon line. Saplings dot the bright sky, new life growing where destruction and deadeends once dominated. Their tiny frames stand in silhouette against the blue, and Cynthia's eyes burn a little with the contrast.

Change buzzes in their air and clings to her skin, and for once it seems like a good thing. A positive thing. Loss brought them to that point, and loss will trail them for all their future days, but the product of their grief is also the reason those trees will fight year after year and grow into something large enough for someone to climb and find comfort in. Some kind of balance is in that, isn't there? Some kind of benefit to living in the grey area between past pain and future hope. She and Zoe catch eyes over the edge of Zoe’s phone, and Zoe gives her a tiny smile. Her freckles, inherited from Cynthia, wrinkle a little in response to the movement.

“It’s balanced,” she says softly, as though she read Cynthia’s thoughts. In the afternoon light, she almost looks like Connor used to. Cynthia, as Connor’s mother, will never see the similarities end. But somewhere in Zoe’s eyes is hope and life and a bright, albeit tumultuous, future. She will never see that in Connor’s eyes, although the two sets are so identical they were often mistaken for twins.

Cynthia nods, and her responding smile is genuine and strained and a little bittersweet.

For once, the ground is even beneath their feet, and that may be enough to go forward.

21 notes · View notes

softbiker · 5 years ago

Text

Born to Run - Chapter 11

Warnings: cursing, being arrested

Word count: 2k

A/N: A week late (plus like an hour or so) and I finally have an update for y’all. So sorry about the delays lately! Work has been....a lot. So has life. Anyways, let me know what you think!

“Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am?” He waved his hand in front of her face. “I need you to stay with me here, okay?”

Y/N’s eyes drifted back towards the officer. His dark eyebrows were drawn together in concern. Her fingers gripped the edges of the blanket that had been placed around her shoulders, and she gave him a little nod.

“So, tell me again, what was your connection to this man?”

“He was a patient, I have no connection with him.”

“No personal affiliation at all?”

“No. He was just a patient.”

“What about the other man, Barnes?”

“What about him?”

“What is the nature of your relationship with him?”

“We’re...friends, I guess.” She thought about his kiss, the intensity of his lips on hers, the tightness of his arms around her.

“Just friends?” The officer raised a doubtful brow.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been seen around town with him quite a bit,” he went on, rocking back on his heels as he considered her. “On a daily basis, in fact. Rides to and from work on his motorcycle, driving to the store, to restaurants.”

“So?”

“So, he’s not your personal driver. Or an Uber.” The officer slid his hands into his pockets. “And you own a perfectly drivable car. So, there’s no reason for a man who you claim is just a friend to be driving you everywhere, unless the two of you are in some kind of...special relationship.”

Her eyebrows lowered and she pulled a deep breath in through her nose. It had been over an hour of this, sitting in the parking lot of her clinic and watching them drag Bucky away, the sun slipping behind the horizon as they covered Rumlow’s body and peppered her with questions. An EMT had checked her over and confirmed that she had no serious injuries, and then the cops had swooped in. Her mouth went dry as she repeated her story backwards and forwards, rehashing little details and racking her brain for things she might have missed. The back of her throat ached. Her ass had gone numb from leaning against the cold metal of the squad car. She really wanted to lie down. And to see Bucky. If she had to hear one more false accusation against herself or Bucky, her head might explode.

“Look. I haven’t committed a crime. And as I’ve told you, neither did Mr. Barnes - he acted in self-defense -” The man opened his mouth but she held up a finger to cut him off. “So unless you plan to arrest me as well, I suggest you either take me home or let me speak to a lawyer. I know my rights.”

He rolled his eyes but took a step back, waving over one of his colleagues. The other officer - younger, greener, with dark curls creeping up in his regulation haircut - hustled towards them, licking his lip and cutting his eyes between Y/N and her interviewer.

“Yeah, Sergeant?”

“C’mere, Valdez,” the sergeant beckoned with his fingers. His eyes cut sideways at Y/N, gesturing at her with a flick of his head. “The doctor here is done answering questions without an attorney. Please escort her to her residence.”

Valdez nodded eagerly, taking a step forward. As he turned his face towards her, Y/N noticed the softness of his cheeks, a remnant of baby fat, cut by a small dimple in one cheek as he smiled at her. His Adam’s apple bobbed and he cleared his throat.

“If you’ll come with me, ma’am?” he gestured towards a different squad car, one sitting a few yards away with an easy route out of the parking lot. Between them and the car, a few more police going back over the scene, taking pictures and marking locations. She saw a dark stain on the ground and realized that Rumlow’s body had finally been moved.

With a sigh, she stood up, not sparing a glance at the sergeant, who stood by with his arms crossed. Valdez fell in beside her, matching strides as they crossed the lot, kicking rocks in front of their feet as they walked. He was thankfully silent, and kind; he skipped a half-step ahead of her to open the passenger side door, offering a polite smile as she climbed inside.

“So, where to?” he asked when he shuffled inside, buckling his seatbelt.

“Hm?” She hadn’t been paying attention.

“Where should I take you?”

...oh.

Good question. With her own home vandalized, she had more and more thought of the Avengers clubhouse as...well, a kind of home at least. She did want to go there, have a coffee or whiskey (or both) with Natasha, and settle down in her guest bed and be left alone. But...could she bring a cop to the clubhouse? Would that be alright? The location wasn’t a secret, but the Avengers had quite the reputation - enough to have Bucky arrested on sight. She bit her lip, curling and uncurling her fists in her lap, her gaze turned out the window.

“Where did they take Bucky?”

“Mr. Barnes?” She could hear the frown in his voice without looking. “I’m - I don’t think-”

“Listen,” she turned her gaze on him. “I want to see him. I’ll take care of myself from there. Just take me wherever they took him.”

“Well, I guess…”

“What’s your name?”

He cleared his throat again. “Aiden.”

“Okay. Aiden, he’s...he’s very important to me. He’s…” all I want “...the only real friend I have here. So I know it might not be protocol or whatever but, I need you to take me there. Take me to see him.”

He blew a harsh breath past his lips, shook his head. Put the car in gear.

“Okay, then. If you’re sure.”

**********

It wasn’t Bucky’s first time in cuffs.

That had been at age 15 - when he was running with a rougher crowd and thought he was hard, tough, a badass. And yeah, it felt real badass, the way his gut swooped with fear and his legs clenched up in the backseat of that cop car, picked up for vandalism or petty theft - couldn’t quite remember. Sure felt like a man when his voice squeaked over the phone to his mother, informing her where he was and why, hearing her heart break over the line. Yes, sir. He was a real hard man.

Still, the cuffs never got more comfortable. And neither did the questioning rooms; he arched and curled his back alternately, trying to work out the ache from the press of the metal chair against his spine. It didn’t help, but he managed to crack his neck. His eyelids felt heavy, and he slumped back in the chair again.

The officers had questioned him for quite a while when they got here, though the interview was unproductive on their side. Bucky refused to speak. He gave nothing away, not of himself or the Avengers, gave no comment on the death of Brock Rumlow. No matter the question, his answer was a sullen stare in the cops’ direction. Every so often, he would repeat his only requests: a bathroom, a phone call, and a lawyer. All denied.

He twisted his wrists again where they were cuffed to the table, red and chafing from the metal. Really could take a piss right about now, but they weren’t gonna let him anytime soon. He thought of Steve, watching him sprint out of the clubhouse and drive away; of Y/N, wild-eyed and screaming, as Rumlow smashed his head against the concrete. Steve would take care of her, he told himself. They all would.

Two minutes passed while he counted the seconds and tapped his fingers against the metal table. His throat felt dry and he tried to work his tongue and swallow his own saliva, but he was too parched. He leveled a glare at the mirror and the door - no reason for the officers to leave him in here this long. But his reputation had preceded him here. These cops knew him - or thought they knew him. He hadn’t been arrested since moving out to this little town, but apparently that didn’t matter.

He was just starting to think he’d have to pee his pants out of spite when the door banged open, slamming against the side wall.

“Well, Barnes you just couldn’t keep it in your pants, could ya?” Tony Stark strolled in, whipping his sunglasses off his face and slipping them into the front of his shirt.

“Tony,” Bucky sighed, shoulders falling. “Can you tell ‘em to get me out of these things? I’ve really gotta pee-”

“Oh, you need a potty break? That’s great. That’s good!” Stark rolled his eyes. “At least I know those Hydra skulls didn’t castrate you.”

“Stark, please? Bathroom now, yell later.”

When he returned and was re-cuffed, Stark slid into the chair across from him with a huff.

“So. You wanna tell me how this didn’t blow your cover and ruin the op?”

“Sure. I’m sitting in jail aren’t I?”

“We’re getting you released, obviously,” Tony pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“Yeah, well, forgive me for making you sweat for a minute so you can understand that this is serious.” Tony’s jaw clenched under the salt and pepper goatee. “How do we reposition you to finish the job when you killed your target, exposed yourself to the police, and you’ve gotten involved in a personal relationship? Please, please, enlighten me.”

Bucky blew a breath past his lips.

“I know it looks pretty fucked right now, but listen.” He held up a finger. “The skulls just saw me shoot Rumlow and get arrested - and since he attacked first and threatened Y/N, it was in self-defense. Releasing me won’t reveal anything. They still don’t know-”

“That you’re an FBI agent?” Tony’s eyebrows went up, his arms crossed, wrinkling the shoulders of his suit. “Which I will have to explain to your buddies here in lockup, considering they’re convinced you’re a real criminal and they should hold you in despite the circumstances of Rumlow’s death.”

“I guess that’s what they pay you for, huh?” Bucky challenged, tilting his head as he considered the other man.

Tony’s eyes narrowed.

“Watch it, Barnes,” he warned. “I was never in favor of bringing you and Rogers into this.”

“Except you made no progress on your case for years,” Bucky shrugged.

“Don’t make me call Fury on this,” Tony threatened. A dark vein on his forehead pulsed under the harsh fluorescent lights. “I will pull your ass out of here. Tread lightly.”

The two men stared each other down across the two feet of table, daring the other to make the first move. Bucky noted the greying hairs at Tony’s temples, the lines in the skin around his mouth. There were circles under his eyes, but that was nothing new. His jaw moved back and forth as he ground his teeth quietly. Bucky lifted his hands in surrender - as far as the cuffs would allow.

“I’ll keep it under control,” he placated. “I can stay in the field. Finish this.”

“You’d better.” Tony pulled his phone from his pocket, thumb swiping at the notifications on his home screen. “Or it’s your head.”

The room was silent, save for the sound of Tony’s fingers tapping on the keyboard, his email swishing into the internet. Bucky licked his dry lips with an equally dry tongue.

“Oh, goody!” Tony suddenly popped up from his chair, exasperation in every line of his face. “Your girlfriend is here.”

Despite his dehydration, Bucky’s palms started to sweat.

**********

“They’ve really cost me this time. Fucking Avengers.”

“I know, Boss.”

“Shut up.” The voice on one side of the phone was gravelly, harsh, like ground glass. “I’ve got to think about this…”

Grant Ward pursed his lips, scratched the stubble on his chin. The voice on the phone sighed.

“God...I need someone to take over Rumlow’s position as a liaison with our drug contacts.”

“I can do it-”

“Didn’t I just tell you to fucking shut up?” Another harsh sigh. “Jesus - Rumlow had maybe half a brain, you’re working with much less than that.”

Ward kept his mouth shut that time. The seconds dragged by as he picked at his fingernails.

“Okay. Listen, Ward,” the voice spoke up again. “And listen good - you’re gonna help me send a message to the Avengers, and their new medic.”

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky x reader fic #bucky x y/n #bucky x you #bucky barnes #bucky barnes fic #bucky barnes imagine #biker!bucky #biker!bucky fic #avengers #avengers fic #marvel #marvel fic

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saintashes · 5 years ago

Text

sad hour snuggles ( 0.5/2 )

( i haven’t fully completed this story yet, so i’m just gonna post half of it for now. what i’m planning to do is make two oneshots, this one and the kam pocky oneshot. enjoy half of my unproductive excuses - )

~~~

“ lately i’ve been thinking . . . i want you to be happier . surprising , i know . but i’ll do whatever i can to make sure that i can give you at least five minutes of euphoria . ”

---

Tam Song sat in a small but cozy chair in the corner of his empty room, away from the windows. He let out a terribly long sigh that sounded painful, continuing to stare up at the plain ceiling. He was seriously contemplating on rebelling against his parents and painting his walls.

Besides the flipping of pages, everything was silent. Tam sat alone in his dull room, his slim fingers gently turning the papers of an even duller book he was looking into. He normally wouldn’t read, but he was so very bored. Linh, his sister, was out in the Forbidden Cities, trying to find a new pet called a cat with Sophie and Biana. Tam was positive she was planning to drive him insane with animals.

Hours passed, and Tam was on the last page of his book. It had the title of, “Big Book of Pets”. Sophie had brought it for Linh the last time she’d illegally went to the human cities and it was pretty fitting with the ordeal Tam would have to endure after his sister added a new member to their household. He would study about all the animals so that he could be ready for whatever monstrosity Linh would have him take care of.

Shutting the back flap of the book, Tam flopped onto his soft white pillows, his bed bouncing slightly with him. The teen shivered and pulled his blankets over himself. He lay there, forlorn and apathetic in his bed. Grabbing his Imparter from the bedside table, he flipped it open and scrolled through his device. He almost dozed off from the silence, but it seems like the person on the other end of the call that Tam answered had other plans.

“Hey, Bangs Boy!” exclaimed Keefe with a rather mischievous look in his ice blue hues.

Tam groaned out of annoyance and blinked his eyes open. “What?” he demanded.

“Woah there, I’m just checking in with you. I’m pretty bored. But I swear, I’m not dying your hair pink or anything today. But if I did pull off something, I’d start with cutting those bangs off first.”

“Shut up, my bangs are awesome. You're just jealous of how more ladies swoon for me.”

“I don’t need no one to be head over heels with me.”

“Oh, right, you have your girlfriend, Sophie.”

“I- She’s not my girlfriend, so be quiet.”

“Mhm, sure she isn’t.”

Now, Tam wasn’t very fond of this conversation and where it was going. Yes, he did have a hair rivalry with Keefe, but what he yearned for was a decent, PLEASANT conversation with him. The teen was tired of arguing whenever they met and was especially done with the fact of being the one staring from afar in the hallways of Foxfire. It’s not like it was his choice he was gay for Keefe Sencen, the straightest guy he knew.

To Tam, Keefe was one hot elf. And also a kind and funny one. Everything about Keefe was perfect to Tam - well, except his boasting about his hair and his tendency to get himself into all sorts of trouble. He wasn’t sure what to make of his feelings and words around Keefe, so he just continued to put up a “go away because I don’t like you” facade, but he really didn’t mean that. He just wanted to hold Keefe’s hand and tease him for stupid actions and play with his blonde hair, even though that’s what started their hatred. The hair.

Keefe must’ve noticed the pain that began to form in Tam’s eyes. Or his Empath abilities were getting stronger. Either way, he let his own taunting act drop and put up his caring one. “Hey, you okay?”

Eyes widening, Tam placed his free hand over his silver orbs and began rambling unconvincingly. “W-What? I’m completely fine and I have no idea why you’re asking that.”

“Don’t lie to me, Bangs Boy. Move your hand.”

“Uh, no.”

“C’mon, dude. If nothing’s wrong, then you shouldn’t have a problem with that.”

“The, uh...the light’s in my eyes.”

Keefe shook his head and laughed, the sound giving Tam butterflies in his stomach. “What light?”

“Uhhhhh- The one above me.” Tam clapped his hands twice and turned the Imparter’s camera above. “See? Light?”

Tam’s silver bangs glinted in the warm white light, a reminiscent of his time at Exillium.

“Bro, you just turned it on.”

“N-No I didn’t. It’s been like that.” He clapped again twice, turning off the brightness that emitted from above.

“Okay, sure. You’ve turned off the light. Now turn the camera towards yourself and tell me what’s wrong.”

“NOTHING. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Nothing’s wrong!” He pulled the camera back to his hand-covered face.

“Then you wouldn’t mind me coming over?”

“I totally would.”

“Aw, c’mon, you can’t resist the Keefester!” The blonde-haired teen wiggled his eyebrows teasingly, adding a little wink to the end. “You know you want a little time with me.”

“Alright, I’ll play your little game. But I can’t promise that I won’t kick you out when you’re annoying.”

Keefe gasped dramatically and fell onto his sea blue sheet covers. “You couldn’t ever do that to poor Keefe!”

Tam snuggled into his bed, getting comfy. “I would.”

“Fine. Let’s make a bet then.”

“...Go on, I’m listening.”

Settling on his stomach, Keefe propped his head upon his elbow as he tried to set his Imparter down on his own bed. He checked to make sure the camera was still on as he spoke. “Since you’re so sure you’ll kick me out…”

Tam sighed quietly, spacing out. I couldn’t let you leave, Keefe. If I got a chance to enjoy your company, I’d treasure it. You’re, like, so great and I don’t know why I even try to keep up my awful personality around you. HOW ARE YOU STILL SO NICE TO ME EVEN THOUGH I’M SO MEAN AND YOU’VE GONE THROUGH SO MUCH?! It’s gonna be so awkward when you come over. Why am I even agreeing? Am I gay panicking-

“TAM!”

The teen flinched, and squeaked out a pitiful, “What?”

Keefe looked tempted to burst out laughing at Tam, but he kept himself under control and placed his signature smirk on his handsome face. “You gotta seem like you paid attention after zoning out, Bangs Boy. Foxfire’s not gonna let you pass by daydreaming about...whatever a salty guy like you dreams about. I’m assuming you didn’t hear my idea?”

“Nope,” replied Tam, popping the ‘p’ sound. “Not a single thing. Guess you’ll have to say it all again. What a shame.” He gave Keefe a half-smile. A genuine half-smile.

“Was that a Tam smile? Look at that, I’m lucky to have seen one, even though it was because I’m having to say everything I said again. Very cruel of you,” said Keefe, wagging a finger at Tam disapprovingly. “Pay attention this time. So, what I’m suggesting is that since you’re so sure of the fact that you’ll send me away...We’ll do a time limit. If I get to stay without pissing you off in that time, You’ll have to allow me to do whatever with you for the rest of the day-”

“You’ll totally mess up my hair.”

“I promise not to lay a finger on those oh, so awesome bangs of yours. Anyways, if I don’t get to stay in the time limit, I’ll let you decide what to do without telling me. Surprise me, Song.”

“Don’t call me by my last name. It’s disgusting. I hate the very sound of it.”

“Okay, okay. Surprise me, Tammy.”

“I honestly prefer that over Song. Also, your idea sounds like the classic bet that happens all the time. Fine, deal.”

“Wow, it was that easy to have you join me? Dang, Tammy. You’re getting soft.”

“Shut up. I’m just bored. What’s the time for the bet?”

“Uhhhhh, two hours?”

“Cool. I guess good luck trying to not screw this up.”

“Same to you, Bangs Boy.”

“Oh, and don’t come through the front door. Just light leap to the back and I’ll find a way to bring you up.”

Silence followed and Tam realized that Keefe must’ve ended the call. He ran a cold hand down his face and let out a frustrated grunt. He was surely to get into trouble when Keefe waltzed into Chloramore like it was nothing. He heard footsteps come from outside of his door so he quickly hid his Imparter and pulled his book out again.

“Tam,” his father, Quan, said, stepping into the slightly messy room. “I heard talking. Was that you?” He kicked a black shirt to the side and scowled at the way Tam left a few clothes out of place.

“I don’t know, was it?” Tam wasn’t going to give Quan a single straight answer. It was good entertainment watching his father become furious. Tapping his finger on his chin in an act, Tam spoke again. “I guess it was. I don’t see anyone else here, now do I?”

“Who were you conversing with?”

“Myself.”

“I find that quite hard to believe.”

“What, I can’t discuss a book with myself since you won’t let me go see anyone?”

“You’re not stable, Tam.”

Shaking his head, he let out a tiny chuckle that didn’t sound very amused. “I’m not stable? Lovely hearing you talk, but go away now.”

“Give me your Imparter.”

“What Imparter?”

“Tam, I may be what you call ‘cruel’, but I can assure you I’m not. I can also assure you that I’m not stupid.”

He rolled his hands and pushed his bangs out of his eyes, groaning out of annoyance. “Whatever.” Tam made sure the device was locked and shut down before tossing it to Quan. He pointed to his door and made a motion for his father to leave. “Get out now.”

Straightening his back, Quan gave Tam a glare. “Don’t speak to me like that, Tam Song.” Tam grimaced at the mention of his last name, clearly not fond of it whatsoever. “Remember your place in this household.” And with that, he walked out of the room.

Boy, was today a bad day for Tam. First, Keefe calls, then they make a bet, and now he had to listen to his father boss him around? Not very fun. As Tam was deciding that nothing else could happen and that Keefe would ditch the bet in an attempt to save himself, he heard shuffling and a lot of whining from outside his window. A rock smacked the tinted window and Tam scowled, making his way towards it. He let in air and realized how long he hadn’t been outside. The thought got cut off by a familiar voice, and Tam began to regret every decision he’d made so far today.

#kam #kotlc #my boissss #keefe be callin out tam from now on #i honestly don't know what to even tag with at this point hhhh -

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