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astxrwar · 9 months ago

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drops of blood [3/4]

SYNOPSIS: Bucky Barnes has some wires crossed. He fixates on a barista at a coffee shop near his apartment, and tells himself it's fine as long as he keeps his distance. Except you keep making that distance smaller.

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 11k

CONTENT WARNINGS: masturbation in this one. stalking, exhibitionism. consensual-but-not-safe-or-sane vibes really starting to settle in. Weird psychological elements kinda. For easter eggs you can check my AO3 chapter notes; for additional content check my tag "fic; drops of blood". there is a playlist and it's got hozier and the songs are sooo mood.

Thanks for reading!

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It's been snowing, on and off, the last few days; the gutters on your apartment complex are ancient and decaying, and meltwater pools in the rusted divots along them. The runoff from the rooftop freezes overnight, forms these jagged, spindly icicles on the overhangs, like fingers reaching down towards the street below. You can hear them outside your bedroom, water sliding off the sharp pinpoint ends and hitting the ledge of the window, wearing divots into the brick.

The sound follows you to sleep, the steady drip-drip, drip-drip, drip-drip, staccato and rhythmic and spaced like a heartbeat. In your dream you wriggle out from the tangle of your covers and pad to the window and part the curtains. You look out at the dark night sky and watch the droplets as they fall, glittering flashes of light reflected in the beads of water from streetlamps or the headlights of passing cars somewhere on the street below.

When you look down to the windowsill, the water gathered there has turned color, glittering like rubies, like pomegranate seeds. Like blood, dark and rich and red.

“It’s called starfruit. Carambola, technically.”

It’s just the two of you, and it’s late, the sky black and the street nearly empty and the lights inside the coffee shop reflected back by the windows, the both of your reflections mirrored there. Barnes has been here since seven-thirty, but you’d been busy again, and you feel bad; he must have been horribly bored, just waiting that whole time. If he was, he doesn’t look it– he looks just as neutrally impassive as ever, leaned back in the chair, watching you dump the grocery bag out on the tabletop and pull another chair over to sit across from him.

The fruit is yellow and ridged and weird-shaped, and he prods at it with one hand; the left one, gloved. His mouth twitches.

“Dunno if you’ve ever seen a star,” he says, “But I’m pretty sure they don’t look like that.”

You flash him a smile, dragging the chair a little closer. Under the table– the cheap square of laminated plastic that suddenly feels far too small– your knee brushes against his, and he starts, jerks back a fraction of an inch and straightens, this sharp frisson of tension that reverberates out through his whole body like tremors from a stress fracture. His reflexes are much faster than yours, all of them, and he’s able to compose himself and carry on as if nothing happened before you can respond to whatever that was; he’s already leaning to draw his knife from his boot and setting it on the table by the time any of it has even registered in your brain.

Hyperreactive startle response, you reason; that’s not abnormal. He’s a veteran. Multiple times over. You’d spent a long time researching it, combat PTSD, wanting to know, wanting to have the information to be able to— meet him halfway, or something. You don’t know the details of his life these days, not outside of these slivers of time he spends with you, and you’d never ask, but a part of you still wonders how many other friends he has. How many other people he even talks to, besides you and his therapist. The thought makes something ache, in your chest, something soft and melancholy and a little bit painful; it does something else, too, makes you feel determined to not mess this up.

You figure right now, what would help the most is for you to not mention it. The way he’d– flinched, or startled, or something, jerked back from less than half a second of contact like you’d burned him.

Barnes lays out the starfruit lengthwise across one of those flimsy recycled paper napkins and aligns the knife to cut it right down the middle, which conveniently gives you something to say that’s entirely unrelated to whatever just happened.

“Hold on, wait,” you say quickly, “You’re doing it wrong.”

“Doing it wrong,” Barnes repeats, and maybe you imagine it, the way his shoulders relax. Like he’s relieved. He looks up from it, at you; his eyes crinkle up at the corners, just a little bit, humor glinting in the precise and magnetic blue of his irises, and something strange lights in your stomach in response. “What, because there’s a right way?”

“Yes,” you reply, with a teasing sort of cadence like, duh, obviously.

Whatever that feeling is, It buzzes in the pit of your stomach at the barest amount of warmth in his expression; something like adrenaline or anxiety or frayed nerves, only multiple times brighter. A sensation that’s not unfamiliar, not unrecognizable, either, and also not something you really want to think about or examine too closely, right now. Or— ever.

Barnes opens his mouth like he’s going to say something and then doesn’t. He closes it again, and he glances down and away from you, drums his fingers against the table. Taptaptaptap, taptaptaptap. When he looks at you again, the brightness that had been in his eyes before is gone, snuffed out like somebody’d blown out a candle, and whatever it’s been replaced with is something else entirely.

He sets the knife down. The handle clicks against the laminate and your pulse does something weird at the sound; stutters, maybe, or skips, or just stalls outright. He nudges it with the tip of his finger, at the base, makes it spin in a slow, juddering circle, until the blade is pointed towards him, and then he slides it across the table.

When your heartbeat picks up again, it’s too-fast, thudding quick and insistent in the hollow of your throat, like rabbit’s feet.

“Here,” he says. “You want to, this time? Since– since there’s a right way, and all.”

There’s a roughness to his voice, a strain that makes you think of last week, please do it, I just want you to be safe, makes you think of the blood by the dumpster in the back, how he’d looked when he’d come back inside, they were just drunks, it’s fine, it’s all fine, and that warmth inside of you dissipates.

(No, it doesn’t.)

“Sure, yeah,” you hear yourself say, warbly and far-away, like maybe somebody else is speaking. Somebody who isn’t you. But it’s your hand that reaches out to drag the edge of the napkin across the table, and it’s your hand that closes around the knife, too.

The handle is still warm. Something deep inside of you coils in on itself, in the pit of your stomach or the base of your spine or maybe lower, twists and tightens and pulses like a heartbeat. You think about his hand, being where yours is now, the way that he’d spun the knife a few weeks ago, how he handles it with this unnervingly practiced ease, this familiarity, like it’s something more than an object.

Like it’s an extension of his body.

(Again, you think about the blood.)

Carambolas are long, oval fruits with five- or six-point ridges; you cut it into slices the way you’d slice a banana, and the pieces fall over one another shaped like stars.

“Huh,” you hear Barnes say, and when he reaches for one, the glove probably in his pocket, you swallow around nothing at all, suddenly aware with startling clarity of how close his hand is to your own. How much bigger it is than your own. “Starfruit. No kidding.”

You wait for him to pull back before you move to take your own piece, his flinch replaying in the back of your mind, and something else there, too, that you determinedly continue to ignore. The skin on the carambola crunches between your teeth and the juice floods your mouth, sour-sweet and unfamiliar; you’re aware of it, the mechanical action of eating, the taste, but you’re not paying attention to that.

He hasn’t moved to take the knife back. It’s sitting on the table still, closer to you than it is to him. You don’t even really make the conscious decision to reach for it, you just do, dragging it closer to you and turning it lengthwise; up close, there are flaws that you couldn’t see from a distance, chips in the matte black coating of paint over the flat of the blade and the handle, divots worn into the edge from use.

(You wonder if he’s ever killed anyone with it.)

“How sharp is this thing?” you ask absently– idly– inanely, operating on some stupid and unthinking whim, the same impulse that has you reaching out and touching the tapered point of the knife with your thumb, pressing in, just a little, the skin indenting around it until–

Until something entirely predictable happens. Something that anyone with a modicum of common sense could have guessed at, that most people, you figure, probably would have known well enough to avoid, because most people, you think, possess a rational understanding of actions and consequences that would have kept them from doing what you’d just done.

“Okay,” you say, watching the blood beading up along where the sharpened tip had cut into your skin. It’s just a little, no more than you’d get from a pin-prick or a paper cut, just enough to well up into a drop that grows until the surface tension breaks and it spills onto the flat of the blade, oozing sluggishly down the pad of your thumb. “Pretty sharp.”

You’re not going to wipe it off on the napkin, because there’s food on there, so you bring it to your mouth; the second your hand is clear of the knife, Barnes reaches for it, snatches it back, so quickly that it feels like both things happen at the same time, even though you know, rationally, that isn’t possible.

Barnes is staring at you.

“Sorry,” you blurt out reflexively, “Sorry, that was— pretty stupid of me, don’t know what I was expecting—“

“No,” he cuts you off, “No, you’re— it’s fine, you don’t need to apologize, I shouldn’t have—“ he stops and he stammers and then he cuts out into silence and his expression flickers through a whole bunch of things, some that you recognize and others that you don’t; he looks plaintive and stricken and ashamed and worried and scared and something else that you can’t find the words to describe. “Are you— you’re okay?”

“I— yeah, of course,” you reply, feeling again like there’s something you’re missing. Like whatever puzzle you’re constructing of James Buchanan Barnes—it has this hole, right in the center of it, a silhouette in the shape of whatever it is you’re unable to figure out, and like if you could just find it you might be able to fit everything together, and that it– that he– might finally make sense to you. “Not your fault, I was being— dumb. And look, see? It’s fine.”

You hold out your hand to him. He glances down at it for a fraction of a second and then looks back at you, eyes wavering and glassy and filled with that thing you can’t name.

All that’s left is a thin, red line where the knife had pressed in.

No blood.

You finish late, almost midnight.

It’s your own fault, you’d gotten distracted, neglected clearing out the pastry display case and cleaning the espresso machine and prepping the brewing stations for the next morning in favor of sitting with Barnes for— way too long. He’d left at eleven, on the dot, and you hadn’t asked him to wait because he’d already been there a while, spent most of it just waiting there for you as the steady tide of customers ebbed and flowed and ebbed again, always just busy enough to keep you occupied and unavailable. So when you strip off your apron and your uniform hat and shrug your coat on over your sweater and finally flick the lights off in the shop behind you, you expect to come out to— nothing. Nobody.

But he’s there, standing off to the side, hands in his pockets, expression flat and clear and calm. He makes eye contact with you and something tightens, his brow, maybe, just for a half-second, but then you smile just on instinct, stopping on the sidewalk a few feet away, and his expression, it– softens, again.

“You stayed,” you say aloud, aware of how pleased you must sound and wondering again, somewhere in the back of your mind, if that’s really how you should feel.

“Yeah,” he replies, glancing down at his feet, scuffing one foot against the concrete. “Yeah, sorry, I, ah—“

“No, I wasn’t– I’m glad,” you interject quickly, back turned from him as you lock the door behind you. “I just— I didn’t ask today because I knew I’d be out late, and I don’t want to— take up all of your time, I guess, I already feel like I made you waste so much of it just, like, sitting, so—“

When you turn back to him, he’s staring, the way he does sometimes— the way he does a lot, precise and unwavering and intense enough to make you feel like you’ve been pinned to the spot– and whatever you’d been saying dries up somewhere in the back of your throat.

“No,” Barnes says, takes all of an aborted half-step closer, and then he tears his eyes away, like he’d maybe realized and tried to correct it, the way that he’d been looking at you. “It’s— you’re not a waste of time,” he says, looking at the ground.

The warmth you can feel in your face, you decide, is because of the cold, and nothing else.

He tells you to lock up again, and you tell him that you will.

It’s the very first thing, after pulling the keys from the door, before you hang them up on the peg nearby or strip your coat or take off your shoes— you always flip the deadbolt, and the flimsier lock on the door handle. Force of habit, deeply ingrained.

The windows, though—

It’s the third floor, you reason. There’s a fire escape outside the one that looks in on your bedroom, but the ladder can only be released from the second-story landing, some fifteen feet in the air. You have nothing to worry about. And maybe that’s why you just never get around to it; the fact that the urgency’s not there. It’s not a part of your routine. You mean to do it, because he asks and because you’d said you would, but somewhere between stripping from your work clothes and washing off the smell of stale coffee after a long and annoying shift and padding into your bedroom with a towel wrapped around your chest and water still dripping from your hair and onto the floor—

You always end up forgetting.

You have those dreams again. A whole bunch of times.

The ones with the broken pavement, the darkened street, the heartbeat.

The blood.

His birthday is March 10th. He hasn’t told you this. You know, though. You’ll see him on the 8th, the Friday he always comes in, and that’s close enough, you figure. Probably better that way; with how he is, so closed off, you think he’ll probably want to spend the actual day alone.

There is an Etsy shop that makes pocket-knives. Fancy ones. Objectively cool-looking ones.You place the order at two in the morning Saturday night, operating on some half-awake impulse. It’s four inches long— street-legal— with this wood-paneled handle and a flat-grip hilt and three letters engraved on one side. JBB. You figured that was better, the initials; the interpretation being left up to him, whether it’s Buchanan or Bucky. It’s just a keepsake. Something you thought he might— like.

“What’d you get this time?” he asks, that brightness in his expression again; your heart is beating too fast, and you’re anxious and doubtful and feeling a little bit sick, spiraling and suddenly certain this was all a massive mistake. But it’s in your hand, in a reusable grocery bag, and you hadn’t even brought anything else to fall back on in case you ended up losing your nerve about it like you are right this second.

You pull out the chair across from him and sit down and drop the bag at your feet, awkwardly folding your hands on the table.

He stares at you.

You stare back.

The silence drags out for what must be only a few seconds but still somehow feels like so much longer, thick and oppressive and borderline uncomfortable.

You open your mouth to speak—

Whatever small amount of courage you’d managed to work up evaporates from you completely.

“Nothing,” you say, nudging the bag with your foot until it’s under your seat, “It’s, um— it’s nothing.”

Barnes stares at you some more, and then raises one incredulous eyebrow. “Okay, well, it’s definitely not nothing.”

“Yeah, or, I mean– no, it’s just— “ You grimace and shift in your chair, suddenly realizing how uncomfortable it is, flimsy and straight-backed and too hard. “I had an idea, but it was a bad one, and— just, nevermind. It’s really— it’s nothing.”

Barnes pulls a patently disbelieving face and leans back and straightens out until his legs are just a little bit past yours under the table, his heels angled against the tiled floor on either side of your calves. There’s still a lot of space between the two of you, he’s nowhere near close enough to be touching, but the awareness of it— his body almost bracketing your own, even if only a little— it lances right through the pit of your stomach, a bright shock of electricity that hums somewhere in your whole body, like it’s leached right into your blood.

Barnes is still staring at you.

“Just spill it, come on,” he says. “I’m not so old that I can’t tell when you’re full of shit.”

You swallow, half-nervous and half— something else.

(Something worse, maybe.)

“It’s your birthday this week,” you blurt out, so quickly that the words all sort of blur together into one continuous block of sound. “I remembered from– you know. History.”

You regret saying it before the words have even completely left your mouth, because something in his expression just– shatters.

“You didn’t—“ He sits up straight and shifts back and shuts his eyes, his brow pinching together in the middle. When he speaks again, it’s soft and small and remarkably plaintive. “You did, didn’t you? I can’t— you shouldn’t have— no. Just— no.“

Your mouth twists into this tight little frown.

“See, I knew it was a bad idea,” you say, aiming at sounding dismissive in some light-hearted and trivial way, and unsure how close you get to achieving that. “Don’t worry, I can just— I’ll return it. I should have asked, but I—well, I saw this thing online, and I thought of you, and I didn’t, you know, actually think, and—“

You’re trying, pretty hard, to not sound like you’re a lot of things—self-conscious, embarrassed, a little disappointed— but it’s clear you do a fucking terrible job at hiding all of that, because his eyes snap open and that furrow in his brow worries deeper and before you can even finish he’s leaned forwards again and cut you off completely.

“No, hey, it’s— it’s fine, you can still— if you want—” he starts, stumbling over the words, like he’s saying it faster than he can even think, “If you really want to, then I’ll— it’s okay.”

You’re not looking at him anymore, looking at the table instead, the places where the laminate is cracked and peeling along the edge closest to you. Whatever you feel right now is cold and slimy and awkward and bad, but you figure this is the time to suck it up and get the fuck over it. No gifts. That’s—fine. It’s a totally reasonable boundary, and you should have known better; you should have asked, you should have thought of it earlier so that you would have even been able to ask, but you didn’t. And it’s fine.

When you finally do look back at him, he’s doing that thing again, his eyes gone all wide and glossy and sad. “Just forget about it,” you reply, a lot more firmly than before, “Seriously, it’s fine, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, and I shouldn’t have—“

“No, it’s okay, really,” he interjects, with a strange urgency. “Really, all right? It’s– I— I just didn’t want you to feel like— like you have to. You’re— you already—“

Barnes cuts off mid-sentence, and falls silent like he’d decided whatever he was going to say wasn’t actually worth saying, after all. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, and then he laughs, this short, sharp, self-deprecating sound, and his mouth twitches at the corners, just a little. It’s not like a repressed smile, not really; it’s rueful and distant and a little too sad.

“It’s just—it’s been a really long time since anybody’s—“ he starts, trailing off, clearing his throat, like that might make his voice steadier. Less hoarse. “Since I’ve had a birthday. Guess I kinda forgot my manners. Last time I had to use ‘em was way back in 1942, so. Kind of— rusty.”

Something in your chest— it aches, like somebody’s stuck a hand in past your ribs and grabbed your heart in a fist and squeezed it.

“I’m sorry,” you blurt out. “I thought– I figured somebody would have– since you’ve been back, I didn’t know–”

“No– hey, c’mon, don’t be sorry,” he says quickly. He leans forwards a little bit more, rests his elbows on the table, arms folded over each other. “What do you have to be sorry for? It’s not– it’s not like it’s your fault.”

You manage a kind of watery approximation of a smile at that, and maybe you imagine it, the way that the tension around his eyes and his mouth eases, his expression going just a little bit softer.

(But maybe you don’t.)

“Kinda makes me wish I’d gone all out,” you say quietly, your mouth curling up further at the corners, despite itself. “Sheet cake and everything, you know? Candles. Balloons, even.”

Barnes makes another sound, another laugh, maybe, except not really. More like the kind of thing somebody does as a placeholder, instead of something else. Maybe something worse. “I definitely don’t deserve all that,” he says, with this kind of lightness that feels— feigned. Performative.

And all of this, you think, with this soft sad sinking feeling; all of it suddenly starts to make a lot more sense.

“It doesn’t work that way,” you tell him, before you can think better of it. You’re looking down at your hands, and your voice comes out small, but steady. Certain. “People don’t— deserve anything from anyone, not really. I just— I wanted to do something nice for you.”

You still don’t look up. Whatever might be in his expression right now— you think if you looked at him, if you saw it, you might lose your nerve again. “If— if that’s okay, I mean,” you add, after a while, painfully aware of his silence.

“Yeah,” he says finally, so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “That’s— it’s okay.”

When you do finally glance up at him, his eyes are wavering and glassy and strangely delicate, like a sheen of ice frozen over window panes. The way he’s looking at you; he’s never looked at you like that before. You don’t think anybody’s ever looked at you like that before, soft and fond and fragile and like you might be able to break him wide open, if you tried. If you wanted to.

(And maybe you do want that. Just to get inside, just to see, you think, in some part of your brain buried so deep you can almost pretend you don’t think it at all. You’d do it gently, put him back together after, piece by vulnerable piece, and maybe you want to do that, too.)

You reach for the bag under the table and take out the box inside, wrapped up neat in brightly-colored paper, the cheesy kind they sell at the dollar store, with a pattern of multicolored balloons and ribbons and HAPPY BIRTHDAYs written in this big, overdramatic font plastered all over it.

“Here,” you say, kind of timidly, sliding it across the table.

Barnes stares at it for a long time. He blinks, and clears his throat, and then finally reaches for the package, pulling it closer to the edge.

“You put a bow on it,” he observes, nonplussed, pressing down on the glinting silver loops of folded plastic with his index finger until they flatten against the box.

The corners of your mouth twitch up, just a little. “I did,” you reply, watching as he peels the square of adhesive-lined cardboard off from where it’s affixed to the wrapping paper, mumbling something under his breath that sounds a lot like what the fuck as he examines it; it occurs to you that they’d probably actually tied bows by hand, way back in the 40s, and that this might be his first time encountering one of the shitty little mass-produced stick-on ones that you can get at the dollar store.

It’s kind of funny. And then it’s also kind of sad.

He sets it on the table and spins the package until he finds the edge with the tape and pulls that free, working it open that careful way that you’ve seen old people do, when they’re trying not to tear the paper, and that, too, is absurd and endearing and has you pressing down on the beginnings of a soft smile. “Just rip it, I don’t care, it’s going in the garbage anyways.”

“Oh, yeah,” Barnes mumbles, and then tears right through it. “Old habit.”

With the wrapping paper gone, there’s just the actual box the knife came in, made of dark, varnished wood, spartan and simple. It props up, with this mechanism on the inside, doubles as a display case; you’d fooled around with it when it had arrived in the mail.

He flips open the lid and his breath catches.

You shift, nervously, in your seat, careful to not lean closer or brush his calves with your shoes, just trying to fidget enough to dispel whatever apprehensive wave of tension has washed over you at the face he’s making, the worry lines folding deeper and his brow furrowing in again.

He pulls the folded knife free of the case with his fingers, so carefully, like he thinks he might break it just by touching it at all, and turns it over in his palm.

“It has— those are my initials,” he says, blankly.

You clear your throat and duck your head and look at the table again. “Yeah, um— the guy I bought it from, he does custom engravings, too, and it was free, so.”

Barnes pulls down on the release mechanism with his index finger and the knife flicks open with a soft click. He hasn’t looked at you, and you’re not sure if that’s good or bad.

“It’s, like. Damascus steel?” you continue, painfully awkward, painfully aware of how awkward you’re being and somehow also unable to do anything to stop yourself, “It’s this weird thing where they take two steel alloys and they fold them together a whole bunch of times, and that’s how they make it, that’s why it— looks like that.”

He makes this sound, holding it in his left hand so he can touch the flat of the blade with the tips of his fingers, running them across like he thinks he might be able to feel ridges, or something, evidence that the two contrasting shades of metal are actually distinct and separate parts, but there’s nothing. It’s smooth. You’d done the same thing yourself, just to see; you can’t feel the individual alloys at all, can’t even tell where one ends and another begins anymore. It’s all just one piece, complete and inseparable. Whole.

“How much did this cost?” he says, his voice wavering.

You pick at the spot on your side of the table where the laminate is peeling, working a fingernail under the edge and pulling it up more. “Only two dollars,” you say, keeping your own voice as light as you can make it, hoping with a mounting sense of unease that you haven’t upset him. That it wasn’t as terrible of an idea as your brain is telling you it was. “In— you know. 1940s money.”

Barnes makes some sound that’s probably supposed to be a laugh, but it’s thick and rough and hoarse and doesn’t really sound anything like one. “You said when you saw this,” he begins, turning it over again in his palm, still just staring at it. “You thought of– me?”

“Yeah,” you reply, eyes still cast down. “I— yeah, I thought you might— like it.”

(That’s not a lie. Not really. It’s just not the whole truth, either.)

“Oh.” Barnes closes his eyes for a second. He swallows thickly, gives one jerky and abrupt nod before he opens them again and says, his voice shaking more than you’ve ever heard, “I do, I— I really—this is— thank you.”

And just like that— all of your worry is gone, melted away like frost in the sunlight, and you’re smiling at him before you can even think to stop it, not sure if you would have been able to, anyways.

“Good,” you say, “I’m really glad,” like maybe if you say it with enough insistence he might actually believe that you mean it; that it’s not about pity or obligation or any of that. You’d really just wanted this, nothing else. To do something nice for him.

He gives you another one of those looks again, soft and fond and impossibly grateful.

You hesitate, just for a second, before you add, “Happy birthday, Barnes.”

Almost as soon as you say it, his eyes break from yours so abruptly that it takes you by surprise, feels like it physically jolts and forcibly recalibrates your whole nervous system.

There’s a long, strange, fraught pause.

You’re suddenly aware of how close you are, both of you leaned in with your elbows on this tiny little coffee table that’s a grand total of two feet across, and something inside of you feels like it ignites at the realization. His legs are stretched out underneath it again, longer than yours, larger, too, so you can fit easily in whatever space is left there, even with them straightened and taking up way more than half of it, and you’re aware of that, too, whatever had come alive in your belly burning a little brighter in response.

In the soft orange light from the overhead fixture, as close as you’ve ever been to him, you can see flecks of silver glinting in the stubble along the sharp edge of his jaw; the angular planes of his face and the blunt curves of his cheekbones and worry lines setting in on his forehead. It’s not his birthday yet, it’s still two days away, and you find yourself wondering how old he’ll be.

Thirty-seven, you think, completely arbitrarily; though you’re not going to tell him that.

“Would you do something for me,” he blurts out; it’s a question, but it’s not really phrased like one, comes out pitched low and flat and monotone. His eyes are closed and his expression tense again, like he’s forcing himself to say it.

“Yeah,” you reply, automatic, unthinking, “Yeah, whatever you need, what’s up?”

What he does in response to that could technically be called a smile, based just on description alone, but in reality looks nothing like one at all; the upturn of his mouth too sharp and his eyes too cold and the sum of it deeply self-deprecating. More like a grimace, you think.

The silence stretches. Charged. Expectant. He’s staring at you again, and you’re thinking more stupid things about the color of his eyes, his irises that bright and blinding shade of blue, and you’re not paying attention as much as you should be.

“Can you—” he clears his throat. Looks away. “I want you to call me Bucky.”

You blink at him for a moment, uncomprehending. And then your stomach does this weird and physiologically impossible fluttering jittery thing and your pulse speeds up or slows down or maybe misses a beat entirely. Maybe misses several.

“Oh, I– okay,” is all you say, momentarily too stunned to manage much more than that. Suddenly your tongue feels thick in your mouth, clumsy and uncooperative, like you’ve just somehow managed to forget how to move it with the dexterity required to actually form syllables and say them aloud, and it takes way too long to snap the fuck out of it and stammer through all of three words in a voice that sounds way too soft and way too shy to actually belong to you, “Happy birthday, Bucky.”

Something flickers in his eyes, too fast for you to examine in detail, and then—

He smiles. Really smiles, small and soft and entirely too fleeting, the kind that reaches his eyes and transforms his whole face and softens his expression into something open and honest and so fundamentally different than the way you’re used to seeing him that it almost feels wrong to be seeing it at all. Like you’ve been sucker-punched, or something. Like you’re staring, wide-eyed, into the sun.

For a second, he looks— happy. But just like with anything else you’ve ever seen from him, it’s only a second, and then it’s gone.

“Listen, ah, next week,” Barnes— Bucky— says, stopping at your apartment building; he’s not looking at you, looking at the ground, head ducked down, one hand rubbing at the back of his neck, “How about— maybe I could bring something. Y’know, for— for a change.”

You’re standing on the first step of the staircase up to the lobby door; you think it must put you almost at head-height, compared to him, but it’s hard to tell. He’ll let you sit across from him, at that one little table, but he always stands so far away.

“Yeah,” you say, looking back at him; you’re maybe still kind of running on the high of before, the thought that you might have done something that made him happy, even if just for a second, and you blame that and the fact that it’s nearly midnight for why even something as small as that has you smiling, bright and wide and embarrassingly genuine. “Yeah, that’d be– I’d like that.”

“And don’t forget to lock your—“

“I know, I know,” you cut him off, fighting back the mostly good-natured urge to roll your eyes. “I will.”

He looks uncomfortable, maybe uneasy, but it’s brief and fleeting and less important than the number of other things you’re still thinking about.

You stand there for a long, lingering moment, just looking at him.

He stares right back at you, expression unreadable.

Finally, he clears his throat. Looks away.

When he says goodnight, he says your name, too, and a frisson of— something, it shivers right down the length of your spine at the sound of it.

“Goodnight, Bucky,” you say back, a part of you kind of hoping that you’ll get another smile from him, even just a split second of one.

A flicker of something soft and satisfied flashes across his face, but it doesn’t last, and he doesn’t smile again.

It’s all because of that, you’ll think later, having woken up for no reason at some ridiculous hour Saturday night and found yourself unable to fall back asleep, staring at your bedroom ceiling in the dark.

You’d been thinking about him, because it’s past midnight, technically Sunday. Technically his birthday. And you keep thinking about that smile, all of a split second of one; some stupid part of you had been strangely captivated by it, the way that you’d almost been able to see that twenty-eight-year-old guy from Brooklyn way back when, the ghost of him still in his mannerisms, sometimes, but never as clearly visible as it had been right then. Maybe it was the contrast, the superimposition of that younger, happier, safer self over the face of somebody who wasn’t really any of those things anymore— but you’d been reminded, painfully, of a fact that you’d been doing a great job at ignoring, until now.

The fact that he’s— handsome. That you had, at one point, found him attractive. The crush was brief and surface-level and fleeting, the dead Sergeant James Barnes functioning as a suitably unobtainable receptacle for what was, at the time, your tenuous grasp on the concept of attraction in general. You had realized pretty quickly as you’d gotten older that your type, the kind of people you’re actually interested in, the kind you would actively pursue in real life, are not anything like he was; sweet and charming and boyish and—

And young, a particularly hedonistic voice in your head supplies unhelpfully.

But Barnes— Bucky, your brain corrects, which is also unhelpful and has your stomach doing another one of those weird little flips— he’s not any of those things, anymore. He’s older than he’d been then, by an amount that is not-insignificant, and he’s thorny and standoffish and intense and even a little bit scary, sometimes. That childhood crush had been on a guy who was essentially fictional, a memorialized facsimile of a real person, and that had felt safe, idealized and superficial and well beyond your reach. Whatever your little relationship with Bucky is now— whatever it’s turning into— it’s not like that at all. Sergeant Barnes was some long-dead historical relic, but Bucky is alive, he’s a real human being, someone that you know.

It’s strange to think about, and your mind drifts there, next; the fact that you actually know what he looks like, not just in frozen split-seconds from photographs, but in person, up close. You’ve seen him with a five o'clock shadow and with scruffy days-old stubble and you know that he sometimes nicks himself shaving; you know what he looks like when he’s well-rested and when he’s dead tired with bruise-dark bags under his eyes, you’ve seen him with hair all messed up by the wind and chapped lips when there’d been that cold spell back in February and the air had been freezing and bone-dry for weeks. You know that he takes up way too much space when he’s relaxed, slouches in his chair and stretches his legs out as far as they’ll go, and you know that he’s taller than you, larger, too, that his chest is broad and his shoulders are broader and sometimes when he sits leaned forward his leather jacket bunches up around the tops of his biceps like the sleeves are just shy of being a little bit too small, and you know that his right hand— the only one you’ve ever seen without the gloves on— is tanned and calloused and a lot fucking bigger than yours, that it looks like it might be just a little bit rough, if he were to touch you—

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” you mumble, out loud, feeling your face burn with some awful and deeply embarrassing warmth; you try to just roll over onto your side and smush your face into your pillow and will yourself back to sleep, to not fucking think— whatever the fuck you were even thinking. But it’s two in the morning, that horrible hour when nothing seems real and your impulse control is languishing somewhere hopelessly out of reach, and you’re barely half-awake and verging on delirious and as much as you try to think of anything else— literally, literally anything else— the thoughts just seem to sharpen, defiant. Like some part of your brain that you can’t access or control is all the more interested in bringing these things to mind, now that you’re working so hard to ignore them.

Like the fact that you know he runs hot; if he were to touch you his hand would be rough and it would be warm and it would be able to cover such a large span of your body, effortlessly, without even trying. And the other one— you know that it’s metal, even though you’ve never seen it, and that horrible part of your brain suggests that that one might be cool and smooth and if he were to touch you it might make goosebumps spill down the backs of your arms from the chill, from the contrast; he could span your whole ribcage with both of them, your brain supplies traitorously. Could probably close his palm right around the bones of your wrist, maybe even both at once, could cover the whole soft sensitive stretch of the insides of your thighs, could fit one, easily, around your throat—

You make another sound, a wavering and ashamed and deeply self-reproachful one, but it’s really fucking late and you’re really fucking tired and your brain is doing that stupid thing where it decides to hyperfixate on something specifically because you don’t want to think about it, and you rationalize, with a dull pang of guilt, that you might as well just— get it over with. Give up and give in and then get some fucking sleep and be entirely back to normal tomorrow and never have to think about or address any of it ever again.

You shift again, onto your back, and you squirm your way deeper under the coverlet until it’s up around your shoulders and shove your underwear down with the heel of your palm and you ignore the visceral stab of something like shame if shame had fucking teeth that burns in your belly at just how wet you already are, your fingers slipping and sliding and sticky and rubbing light little circles over your clit.

You stop trying to fight that part of your brain that’s insisting on thinking about it.

His reflexes, they’re so much faster than your own, so inhumanly fast that it sometimes feels supernatural; the things he could do to you, you think, helplessly, how strong he is, how he could probably move your whole body like you weigh nothing at all, how he could keep you from moving, and it wouldn’t even be hard. You think about the shadow of perpetual stubble on his cheeks and jaw and how it might feel, coarse and prickly and rasping against the corners of your mouth or the spot where your neck meets the slope of your shoulder or the sensitive insides of your thighs, and then you think about the sound he sometimes makes, the sharp little exhale of breath, an almost-laugh, imagining it in a wildly different context–

Some kind of awful traitorous little whine of a noise almost escapes, the pressure building behind your voice box, but you crush it into silence instead, pressing the flat of your forearm across your mouth, the muscles in your thighs already starting to twitch and tighten and that pressure in your belly rising way too fucking fast.

You think about his face twisting up and going tense and his eyes screwed shut so tight the little muscles around them tremble with the effort, and you think about the all of a handful of times you’ve ever heard his voice shake. Heard it crack. You think of his fingers winding in your hair and his hand tightening into a fist and how the muscles and tendons there would bunch and flex and the skin stretched across his knuckles would turn pale and taut and bloodless, his expression going finally, blissfully fucking slack, images your brain conjures with a terrifying degree of accuracy because you’ve seen all of this from him already. You know what it looks like, in person, up close, you know what he looks like and what he sounds like and you even know the smell of what must be his aftershave or maybe his cologne, warm and woodsy and a little bit sweet, and it’s so easy to take those memories and separate the details out and rearrange them into something else, a horribly vivid fantasy.

You think about standing on the first step of your apartment complex and looking at him and how he’d said your name.

It takes you by surprise, when you come, how easily you do, quick and sweet and warm and shamefully satisfying, a shockwave of heat that ripples out through all of your limbs and shivers down your spine and pulses in the fibers of your muscles, constricting your breathing and forcing your heels to dig divots into the mattress and your thighs to close up around your hand and a single muffled shuddering sound to finally break the silence you’d imposed on your vocal cords and escape from your open mouth.

Outside your window, the fire escape creaks, like maybe there’d been a sharp gust of wind through the alley where the apartment complex dumpsters are lined. That’s the first thing that registers, as your body relaxes and your breathing steadies and slows and your brain reorients around things that are— real. The sound of swaying metal. Your darkened bedroom. The faint sheen of sweat you can feel starting in the dips of your collarbones. The haze of perpetual city light leaking in from outside, a dim, slanted rectangle of it cutting across the floor under the window, your curtains not quite drawn all the way shut. Exhaustion hits like a fucking freight train; your eyelids are heavy and your pulse is slowing and your limbs feel warm and weighed down like molten lead and your brain is, thankfully, finally, silent.

You hear it again, right before you drift off; the creaking outside. And maybe there’s a shadow, one that cuts across that block of gray-blue light on the floor, as quick and as sure as a knife— but maybe there isn’t. Maybe you’re already asleep. Already dreaming.

This time, you’re down on the street again, walking from the other direction. Not like you’re coming home from work, but maybe the grocery store or a friend’s or the park that overlooks the East River, or something. From this way, you can see your bedroom window; you can see the fire escape, too, a spindly, narrow set of iron staircases affixed to the side, painted black by the landlord a few months back to disguise how it’s all rusted to shit. It’s wrong, though, the whole thing is twisted and mangled like a broken spine— like somebody had torn it straight off the building in places, grabbed some part and pulled until the railing bent and the stairs warped and the brackets ripped right out from where they’d been cemented into the wall.

When you wake up the next morning, it’s deceptively easy to make yourself believe you had just gone to bed at midnight and stayed asleep straight through until your alarm had gone off.

That all of it had just been part of that strange, surreal dream.

Passionfruit is another South American native, about the size of a kiwi, maybe a little smaller; the rind on the outside is this mottled kind of purple color, and the edible insides are soft and jelly-like and weird-looking.

“I had to go all the way to Whole Foods on Houston just to find something new,” Bucky’s telling you– complaining, from the sound of it, but from his face and the curve of his mouth you can tell he doesn’t really mind– dragging a plastic spoon around the edge of the peel. He’d brought two, split the first one in half with the knife you’d bought him for his birthday, and you’d grinned like an idiot, seeing it. “Took a train and everything. Wasted a whole hour.”

“Yeah, well, ” He’s not wearing the glove, not on his right; he usually doesn’t, anymore. You’re trying not to look at his hands, trying to make eye contact like you normally do, trying to even remember how much eye contact you normally make, trying to stop thinking about the tiny little two-foot table or his legs on either side of your own underneath it or the way that he’s staring at you. “There’s only so many fruits out there.”

You take a spoonful of passionfruit out of your half, focus on that. It’s less sweet than it looks; more tart, not exactly citrusy, but close. He’s still watching you, which isn’t unusual, but it’s making you feel weird, jittery and off-balance and unseasonably warm for mid-March.

“I’m gonna have to come up with a whole new gimmick pretty soon,” you say, just to fill the quiet. Just teasing. “Or else you’re gonna get bored of me.”

Bucky makes this flat and disbelieving sound in response, a scoff, dry and short and incredulous, like it’s really that bizarre, for you to even suggest it. Even as a joke.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, sarcasm evident, and then something else about the store, something he’d seen maybe for next week. But you’re not paying attention, just watching him, that warm thing in your belly again, the one that feels like some terrible and badly-kept secret.

The one that just keeps getting harder to ignore.

There really aren’t that many things left; you hadn’t been kidding about that.

Persimmons, most of which are imported from Japan. One of the men in my unit was Japanese, Bucky says, picking out the blood-red seeds with the point of his knife, From San Francisco, Jim Morita. He was a funny guy. Lychee, native to China, the first thing that he dislikes, people eat these things? tastes like— fancy soap, and then figs, something else he’d had back in the ‘40s, when they’d be in season down in California. Those you eat only after carefully inspecting the inside, telling him, you know wasps lay eggs in these things, right? And, no, he did not know that, and I didn’t really want to, either, but thanks, dunno if I’ll ever be able to eat ‘em again, that’s– gross.

“When I was maybe about nineteen,” he says after that, some rainy day in mid-April, the sky still not quite black even after eight, the pavement slick and dark and reflecting back shards of white and yellow from the streetlights turning on above it. “There was this wasp’s nest outside my bedroom window. Steve’d just moved in when his mom died, and he’s– well, he was– real allergic to bee stings, right?”

He pauses, finishes his coffee. The way the light is, right now, the blue twilight from outside and the artificially bright gold from the coffee shop— he looks—

You swallow, glance away.

“Anyway,” Bucky continues, setting the cup down, “Anyway, I was all worried he’d get stung by these things so bad he might really die, or somethin’, so I made him stay inside and went out with a whole three layers of clothes on, a slingshot, and a trash can. Still got stung seventeen times. Supposed to go on a date that weekend– she bailed on me, ‘cause my face was so swollen up.”

You lose the fight to not laugh somewhere long before he finishes; he gets as close to smiling as you’ve seen since his birthday, watching you fold into yourself, giggling.

“Oh, yeah?” he says, “What’s so funny, huh?”

You are, you want to tell him, you’re funny and I like you a lot and you’re probably my favorite part of this stupid fucking job.

“Nothing,” you say, ducking your head with a grin, “Nothing, just– you know people who are allergic to bee stings aren’t usually allergic to wasps, right?”

He blinks at you, and then makes some exasperated noise and leans back in his chair and throws up his hands, like he’s annoyed, except for the corners of his mouth twitching higher. “Yeah, well, how was I supposed to know that? It was the thirties, doll, not like there was the internet.”

And there it is again, like an echo, like maybe it’s really 1941 again and he hasn’t gone off to war yet and he’s just a few years older than you, some twenty-seven-year-old playboy from back before the Playboy magazine had even been founded. You’re strangely endeared by it, and then even more by the fact that he’s not that at all, that it’d come from the mouth of someone older and stranger, who’d been through hell and back in some haphazard approximation of a decade spread out over almost a whole century and come out of it still the same, in a lot of ways, and different, in a lot of them, too.

He’s so stunned by what he’s said it doesn’t even matter that his reflexes are faster than yours multiple times over; he’s still just staring at you, struck dumb and unspeaking and frozen like a deer in headlights, by the time your brain has processed what’d happened.

“I like hearing you talk about it,” you say, smiling softly, “Sometimes you get so caught up it’s like– watching somebody travel in time.”

Bucky seems to relax at the realization that you’re not going to be weird about it. You won’t– you’re not even going to think about it in any amount of detail. Right now you are going to put it in a little box inside your head where you put all of the things about him that you don’t think about anywhere except the privacy of your room, in your own bed, staring up at the ceiling fan blades spinning listless and slow in the dark of the evening or the gray light of pre-dawn.

“That’s really just a nice way of saying you sound like a fucking geriatric,” you add, sidestepping all of those thoughts with a practiced ease and hiding your smile behind your coffee cup. “I bet the old ladies would love you down at the bingo hall.”

He shoots you this rueful look, “Yeah,” he says, self-deprecating, “Yeah, they probably would.”

It’s not that you forget, not really, the two sides to the coin, just that you stop thinking so much about the other one. You just get used to the weird things, and they all kind of fade into the background– the staring and the subconscious fidgeting with the knife and the way that Bucky moves, sometimes, so fast and so precise that it’s unsettling.

The warning. Lock your door. Windows, too.

He always says it. It starts to feel normal. He’s just worried about you, your safety. Hypervigilance, again. He’s a little bit paranoid, and you don’t blame him for that— how could you. It’s not his fault.

And you do remember to lock your door. You always do, you always had, even before he’d started reminding you. You have a routine, to wind down after a closing shift and go straight to bed; you get home and lock your door and hang up your keys, take a shower and brush your teeth and gor right to bed.

By the time you get to your bedroom, you’ve always forgotten about it completely— that he’d said to lock your window, too.

It’s not like he says it the exact same way every time. Sometimes he says remember to lock everything, other times don’t forget to lock up, sometimes he says lock your door, windows, too, always a little different.

Which is why you almost don’t notice, when what he says one night is;

“Really do lock them, this time. Your windows.”

Something flashes in his expression as soon as he’s said it. A flicker of realization, sharp and volatile and impossibly fast, and then his whole face does something you’ve never seen before– it hardens, and it shuts off, and it goes cold.

Your heartbeat pitches up in your chest until it feels like it’s beating in the hollow of your throat, fluttering there like bird’s wings, and your breath catches. It’s only the smallest amount, so little that you can barely hear it, but you know— somehow— that he can. That he notices. That he can tell. Even though his expression stays utterly empty, frozen still and serene like the unbroken surface of a deep, depthless lake— you just know. It’s something in the pit of your stomach, or the base of your spine, or maybe neither of those places, maybe starting in your hindbrain, that base and unthinking instinct that can sense the presence of a threat even before the rational parts of your consciousness have registered it. Whatever it is, it’s flooding your body with adrenaline, like somebody had pulled a fire alarm in a multi-story building, the warning siren wailing and the emergency lights flashing and the inhabitants all scattering towards the exit signs.

Except, in this analogy, you’re not the people, you think. You’re more like the building; stationary, unable to run.

“Okay,” you say, slow and small and strangely calm, “You always say that. Why?”

A muscle in his jaw tenses, but he doesn’t say a word. Just stands there, silent, like a statue, his eyes flat and cold and devoid of anything at all.

You think of a lot of things you haven’t in a while. The knife and the blood and the Winter Soldier.

Inside of you, something twists— something that, you think, might be fear.

(Something that isn’t.)

Your mind is racing. Your thoughts— they’re scattered and fragmentary and moving so fast you can’t hold onto them, connected by some subconscious thread of understanding that you can’t see.

What you can see, though, is how Bucky’s still looking at you, his eyes vacant and empty and his expression so lifeless he looks catatonic; it’s not like he’s forced himself into some impassive and impenetrable detachment as much as it looks like he’s torn out everything inside and crushed it into nothing, ground it into the dirt, anything he might think or feel. Left this emptied-out imitation of himself, like a shell. Like a skeleton. Like that very first time, the husk of the pomegranate, the wilted, waxy skin, with all of the red stripped clean—and it startles you, how vehemently some part of you reacts to it. Thinks, a little desperately; no. Please don’t do that. Please come back.

“Bucky,” you say, on purpose, after he’s been silent for a long time, careful to keep your voice soft; he flinches, a brief, slight thing that’s almost imperceptible, a fissure splitting across whatever facade he’s put on. Something inside of you clings to it, evidence that he’s still even there at all, that he hasn’t shut himself off from you completely.

He makes this low sound, and he finally moves, just a little, shifts his weight and drags his palm down the lower half of his face.

“I just want to know that you’re– safe,” he manages, his voice carefully flat, not really admitting to anything, not explicitly, but this weightless trembling shock of adrenaline pierces right through your belly, anyways.“That’s– that’s all.”

You swallow. Your throat feels tight, your chest, too, like your muscles have all constricted, like your lungs can’t expand fully. You’re suddenly aware of the sound of your own breathing, aware that something must be off about it, that it’s coming too fast or too shallow or just somehow wrong, because it feels like you’re not getting enough air. And maybe that explains it, the way that you feel right now, dizzy and breathless and strangely numb, like your brain is just– shut off. Or, no, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s the opposite, maybe it’s working so fast you can’t make sense of any of it, all of your thoughts blurring out into this long indecipherable stretch of white noise.

Maybe, you think, distantly, maybe you’re just– overreacting. Maybe you’re being paranoid. Maybe you’re overworked and overtired and all of this is just a very long, very strange list of uncanny coincidences.

(But also— maybe not.)

“But I’m not, like–” your voice cracks, and you have to clear your throat, force yourself to focus on steadying it when you continue, “You don’t think I’m– in danger, or anything, right?

Bucky opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

“No,” he says, his voice something worse than hoarse, like it’d been ripped to shreds, like you’d carved the word right out of his mouth.

He looks like he might say something else, but you cut him off before he can. The way that he seems right now– you’re afraid that if he speaks again it might be something terribly final. I shouldn’t, he’d said, once, and meant it like he should go, and not come back. Meant it like goodbye.

“Okay,” you blurt out, before you can even think; because, you realize, you don’t want that, you do not want that at all, and that matters to you much more than whatever may or may not be happening right now. You don’t want him to leave and you don’t want things to change and you want everything to stay exactly the same as it’s been, and you would do anything– rationalize anything– to make sure of it, to have the assurance that he’s not going to just disappear, that you wouldn’t just wake up tomorrow to a world in which you'd never see him again. You’d do it in a heartbeat.

(You’ve done it already. Ignored things that, you think, maybe you shouldn’t have. Lots of them, that perpetual voice in the back of your head supplies– so, really, even if you are right, even if you’re not being paranoid, what’s one more?)

“Then it’s fine,” you tell him, forcing your voice to be as steady as you can make it. “It’s— I’ll lock it, I will, as soon as I get inside, and– and everything will be fine, okay? You won’t have to worry anymore.”

You glance down at your feet, the pavement, huscuffing your shoe against the sidewalk, toeing at a crushed, dirt-caked bottlecap wedged into a crack in the asphalt, just to give yourself an outlet for your nerves. Waiting for him to say— anything.

He doesn’t say a word.

“I gotta go to bed, it’s pretty late,” you say, after a while. You look back up at him. You wonder if he’d even taken his eyes off you at all. “I’ll—I’ll see you next week, though?”

His face twists up, just for a second, his brow raising, furrowing in, his eyes gone wide and round and stricken, before he seems to notice the shift in his expression and forces it to smoothen out again. “If— if you still do,” he says, “Then— I’ll— yeah.”

He starts saying something else, but you say, “I do,” before he’s even got the first syllable out.

He stares at you for a long moment before he responds, and it takes everything you have to hold his gaze, not to blink or flinch or look away.

Maybe you should, you think.

Maybe you should have been doing that the whole time.

At night, you replay everything, alone in your bedroom. In the absence of that nervous adrenaline you’d felt down on the street, it all kind of seems silly. Bucky knows you; he knows that you’re a terminal procrastinator and he knows that you’re always really tired after work and he knows that you never really took it seriously, the thing with the windows. It’s not so outlandish to think he’d just– guessed, and guessed right, and then felt bad about having anxiety, the way he, historically, feels bad about ever having any kind of visible emotion that’s considered less-than-palatable. And all of the things about his behavior that your brain had taken as evidence otherwise, it had been so subtle that you could barely be certain that there’d been anything there at all. He gives you so little to go off of, it’s like it renders your rational mind utterly useless, the scraps of information you feel like you have to fight to even get in the first place arranging themselves into absolutely nothing.

All you have, then, is your gut. Your instinct.

You glance over at the window. The curtain is open, and you can see the moon between the silhouettes of the buildings across the street, hanging pearlescent and full against the backdrop of the night, like the globe of an eye. Milky and opaque and sightless. Blind.

You really should lock it.

Yeah, you think, yeah, you probably should. But– just because you’d promised. Tomorrow you’ll do that, before you go to work, and then Bucky won’t have to worry anymore, and everything will be fine.

You tell yourself this, firmly, like that will make it true.

Everything will be fine.

In your dream, the eye of the moon in the window has a pupil, endless and blacker than the night sky, blown out so wide the iris around it is just this slender, paper-thin ring of color.

Blue.

You wake up in the middle of the night with a start, your blanket kicked down into a twisted heap at the foot of your bed, your bare legs and the stretch of your exposed stomach where your shirt had ridden up in your sleep staring back at you accusingly, every inch of your skin burning up and running hot like you’re fighting a fever. You’d fallen asleep without getting up to close the curtain, something you normally do in the spring and summer when the sun rises before you wake up; you tell yourself it’s just that you’re not in the habit yet, haven’t gotten used to needing to bother, because it’d been winter. But it’s the middle of the night and your body temperature feels like it’s skyrocketing and your pulse is so loud in your ears you can hear it, and when you try to lie to yourself it’s like your brain just won’t let you.

You’re shaking, you realize.

You’re not even a little bit cold.

You force yourself up out of bed on unsteady feet and you move to the window and you don’t lock it, you don’t even think to, but you do, shamefully, draw the curtains closed.

When you lay back flat in your bed you pull up your blanket, even though your skin is sticky and glinting with a faint sheen of sweat. You draw it up over your whole body, your head, too, and only when it’s covering you completely do you finally slip your fingers past the elastic of your underwear. The thoughts rush back again and you fall right into them, his name in your mouth; even if you can’t quite bring yourself to say it aloud, just holding the silent shape of it on your tongue and so close to your teeth, feels like this terrible, bloody secret—Bucky. Bucky. Bucky—

You come quickly, so quickly, well before the air starts to feel thin, but you still gasp for a breath when you throw off the blanket after, like you’d been suffocating. You force your lungs to expand out far past what feels natural, filling them until your chest starts to burn and then holding it for as long as you can.

You exhale, horribly unsteady, and draw in another, slower breath–

There’s a sound, from outside, like something scraping against brick, and your breathing— it catches, so hard you nearly choke on it.

You burrow deeper into your blanket, trembling, your whole body alight with adrenaline and your brain telling you that you’re being paranoid and something deeper telling you– or wishing, hoping, which is maybe even worse– that you’re not. That it’s–

You can’t bring yourself to think it, not even in the privacy of your own head, but you don’t even have to. Whatever brief and shallow feeling of satisfaction you’d felt– it’s already gone, like it’s evaporated, and that feverish, trembling warmth has flooded right back.

You think you might be afraid of Bucky Barnes. You’re pretty sure you should be.

(You know, though, deep down– you know you’re not.)

#bucky barnes x reader #fic; drops of blood #please tell me why this is going to finish at like 4 chapters/45k #HOWWWW!#it does not feel that long when I'm writing it

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horce-divorce · 1 year ago

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This is high on the list of stupidest fucking things I have ever seen. "entrepaneurs" will literally sell you mud inside a bead for $20 fucking dollars.

I was initially speechless about all of this. Oh the tragedy of my grandfather's illness really just inspired me to make a product. Not something useful or related to his illness whatsoever. No it was a cheap, fugly silicone bead bracelet, I was just sooo inspired by the highs and lows of life and I thought this tacky piece of fucking plastic needed to exist to lift others up. I made sure to bastardize a Hawaiian word for My Brand because it just wouldnt be inspirational if I used English. Yeah its made a ton of fucking money, obviously.

I know this company started in 2013, but how do you make so much money on PLASTIC BRACELETS that 10% of sales amounts to almost $10 million? Is this Claire's for rich kids?? Idk how to dig up the real numbers on their profits but boy if I did I'd be so curious.

This is the CEO btw. He turned 30 in 2021 :)

what I'm MORE curious about is, like, what is this genre of bullshit product called, and why this is successful? I mean, I know why, but I want to lay it out in plain English. Are we still calling this shit "snake oil"? Cause this falls solidly into but also beyond the snake oil category for me.

I get ads for stuff like this a lot, or Zox, or the related "health and wellness Lifestyle Products" that these brands inevitably always end up putting out alongside their Exclusive, Exquisite, Collectible, Grounding And Balancing Jewelry. There's some perfect storm of "business sector nepo babies* Starting Their Own Companies" and "American laypeople with no health insurance desperate for absolutely anything that will make them feel better" that coalesces, somehow, into these Health Bead Success Stories. These obviously share some kind of space with like, crystal healing energy infused water bottles and shit. *and I know nepo baby is used wrt celebrities usually but isn't it kind of the same thing when they have rich business owning parents and they end up also having a very successful business? Or is there no specific word for that because that's just capitalism and privilege working as intended lol.

I feel very strongly that this is exactly the type of business capitalists have in mind when they say, "just start your own! Its so easy!" I feel strongly that this kind of brand helps fuel that bootstraps myth that Anyone Can Do It. See, look at this idiot kid, all he did was slap some mud into some bracelets and he's already secured his unborn children's future privilege. There's a "certificate" on the website "confirming" the quality of the materials and everyone eats it up! It's that easy! You just make some ugly beads! Anyone can do it!!!! You just bullshit about anything and people will buy it!!!!! Why don't poor people do this every day!!!!!!!

Not a link btw ^ lmao. 'Watch our sherpas' in your imagination, which is where they live. There's no actual video.

I must add a reminder here that it costs tens of thousands of dollars to summit Everest. The CEO does seem like the kind of person who would summit everest and never shut the fuck up about it, but how much water would the team have to cart back down with them to make that profitable? Even if there's only a drop in each bead, you can only attempt to summit Everest about once a year due to the weather conditions. How many bracelets would they have to sell to justify summitting everest for a fucking production material? I guarantee you no capitalist is doing that rofl.

Btw the only reason I'm even entertaining the notion to this degree is because I saw actual honest to goodness comments on their IG page trying to argue "yeah but I think I saw a video where they tested it and proved the mud came from the dead sea?" Like. Babe...

I guarantee you that an average, everyday human with no ties to wall street cannot "start a business" like this and achieve the same success. You can WATCH these attempts happen in real-time on Instagram, there are a TON of jewelry-specific small businesses to choose from, even. There are thousands upon thousands of talented artists on insta who make exquisite work and who are about to close up shop because they cant keep up with the IG algo, or Etsy fees and scammers, or whatever. Those people have to learn everything from scratch and they don't get nominated for any fucking awards. More often, they get jerked around by Etsy until they can't take it anymore and then retire from posting about their hobbies.

I would love to know where this guy outsources his actual production to. I would love to know how much money this company actually makes, and how much of that was brought in simply due to the fact that this kid already had connections. (He has expanded into the adaptogen health tonic sphere too btw!) I would love to know how many BS, cheap, outsourced trinket-making companies that just sell beads, or whatever, actually exist and make a profit. It must be a good racket.

#me #capitalism is amazing

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dballzposting · 2 years ago

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Future Trunks is soooo funny like DBZ is old so the line quality and colors Look Like That and he looks all soft and pink and the artstyle is changing and so how it looks at this point is more unique than it's ever been. And they draw Future Trunks's hair slightly different in every shot. And he has seen fates worse than hell but also he does not operate in a senseless stack of mental layers and repression and detrimental self-consciousness, rather he lives like hes playing Tetris and is constantly clearing out the bottom rows, taking life one event at a time and eating it the best he can, extracting the most nutrients out of it, he has an easy spirit that just wont quit. Hes a bright-eyed youth and hes calm and courteous and kind and courageous. Hes bashful and sensitive and during that one movie he was waiting in line with Roshi + Oolong + Krillin to see some beautiful hot chicks. With his hands in his pockets looking all stoic. But with an unmistakably soft and cute face still.

He was not reared on the processed chemicals of city slop and instead ate what could be hunted and plundered and grown. This is to say that he is of good health and his skin is very smooth.

But he does have bad acid reflux and he doesnt think much of it becasue there are much bigger things to worry about than that. He just thinks that everybody wakes up with a bitter taste in their mouths. His teeth will probably hit the shitter before hes 30 but seeing how fucked his timeline is, that's not that bad.

He has opinions about water that you dont really hear about becasue he doesnt like to complain. But if water is too clean it tastes like the inside of his mouth or like vomit to him and he does not like it. He has opinions about what water tastes Metalic or Rusty or Hard or Green or Yucky or Bitter or Clean and whether that's good or not. For example he likes snowmelt. It's pure with some rich dirt. He likes metallic water becasue it disguises the taste of his own mouth. Rusty water he dislikes however.

This is to say that in a good timeline, he probably would just stop drinking water. He would always be seen with a fun beverage. Always a different cup (plastic boba tea cup, milkshake glass, hurricane glass, all types of fun glasses, sparkling water cans, etc) and often with curly fun straws. He tries coca cola but gravitates toward fruity stuff in the end. Dr Pepper he likes more than coca cola. He had a Root Beer float once and wished that the ice cream was strawberry instead.

This of course aggravates his acid reflux immensely.

Hes 17 and is a very nice young man. Hes considerate and smart but also hes 17 and can be so so stupid at times. And he fills his stomach with lemonade and other acids and wonders why his teeth feel thinner than they used to. He gets the acid reflux from Bulma but he has Vegeta's digestive track otherwise which means that it is very Sturdy and Efficient unless something is wrong. When hes sick it all comes out the other end. As a liquid

Future Trunks is hands down the coolest concept to come out of anything. Toriyama was touched by a god when he came up with him. Concept is flawless, execution is flawless. Hes a pretty young man with bright eyes and a sweet smile and he appears on merchandise with pink hair. And he has a sword for NO REASON. Just becasue hes straight up epic. Not to mention his debilotatingly charming fashion sense. And he looks excellent in fuschia

#dballz posting #And hes Jesse McCartney. Forgot to work that in

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bellysoupset · 2 years ago

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OMG could we get a fic with Jonah and Luke where one of them is sick and the other is stuck being a begrudging caretaker because for some reason there is no one else around to help? Do they end up becoming more sympathetic to the sickee, or does this fuel the fire of their frienemy vibes? Also in the concussion fix Jonah is a total sympathy puker so it would be fun to play with that dynamic when he has to take care of a sickee. I love love LOVE your writing so much and your new characters’

I LOVE THIS ASK! Bad caretaker is such a Vibe. Thank you so much! There's a mention of scat, but we gloss over it real fast.

Lucas was not too proud to admit when he had fucked up. Today, specifically, he had fucked up Big. BIG. Time.

It was his high school class reunion, except well, he had grown up rich, which meant fancy boarding schools and what not. Bella had taken one look at the hot embossed invitation, raised her eyebrows and started cackling at him.

It didn't matter how much he begged she tagged along, she had shaken her head vehemently and said "being stuffed in a fancy hotel half world across from here, with your rich prick ex-friends? Sounds like hell, thanks."

Which was why they weren't currently speaking, because he had gotten pissy over it - high school and his family were always a delicate matter, his girlfriend wasn't exactly the most gentle person. That in itself was bad enough, but to add salt to the injury, Jonah was tagging along.

Jonah was the son of some maybe-probably-corrupt plastic surgeon and they had done all of school together, so their rivalry and frenemies status went back all the way to kindergarten. Once they had RSVP from the same location, their boarding school people had sent them matching travel plans, much to their chagrin.

Jonah was easily the person Lucas knew for the longest time, having met Vince and Bell in college, but that didn't mean they got along at all.

Finally, to wrap this package of shit up, Lucas was fairly sure last night's teriyaki chicken had been bad. He had initially thought his lunch wasn't settling because of nerves, but as he sat next to Jonah on the first class seat, the more he was growing aware he had been very, very wrong.

His gut was burbling under his hand, like boiling water and letting out all types of gurgles and whines. He was so grateful Jonah was going out of his way to ignore him, with headphones on, because he wasn't sure he could survive the humiliation.

His intestines cramped and he pressed his lips in a tight line, fighting not to groan. He clenched his fists, looked out of the plane's window. Fuck his life, fuck his family for saying he should go to this stupid party for appearances, fuck him for being unable to say 'no', fuck, fuck fuck-

His stomach gurgled and Lucas clutched at it, clawing at his seatbelt desperately and rushing up. He nearly lost his balance, had to grab on the seat to ground himself and Jonah looked up, one perfectly manicured eyebrow raised.

"Atwood?"

Lucas winced, "I'm fine."

"Uhm," Jonah shrugged, slipping his headphones back on and turning his attention back to his book.

Lucas rushed through the rows to the bathroom. First class or not first class, no airplane bathroom was ever decent. It was definitely bigger than the tuna can he had been one when flying to Vince's family's house, but still claustrophobic and smelling like bleach.

"Jesus fucking chr-" Lucas groaned, sitting down on the toilet and clutching at his gut. He was bloated, much more than he remembered ever being before and it gurgled fiercely under his hand, pressing against his button up.

He sat there for thirty minutes and by the time he managed to make it out of the bathroom, he was starting to feel shaky on his legs. Whatever, he had played with an upset stomach before, he'd live.

He made it back to the seat, falling on it with a groan and turning his face when Jonah threw him an inquisitive look. Lucas curled up around his middle, looking out of the window to the passing clouds... His gut grumbled again and cold sweat started collecting on his brow. A cramp seized his intestines and now, to make matters worse, nausea joined in.

He licked his dry lips, planted his forehead to the cold plane window and a flight attendant came over a minute later, "Mr. Atwood?" she called, all polite, "is everything alright? Can I get you anything, sir?"

Humiliated, Lucas straightened up and shook his head, "just... Just a water, please."

Jonah turned to face him, "what's wrong?" he said dryly, squinting. Lucas rolled his eyes.

"None of your businesses."

He only had... What an hour more of flight? He could do it.

The nice flight attendant from before came back with a water bottle, but he didn't have time to drink it, beelining back to the bathroom once more.

Fifteen minutes later, he felt empty. With a rumbly, crampy belly that kept sending up burps, but blessedly his lower guts were empty. He fell back down on the seat and chugged at the water, already feeling dehydration start to get to him, if the way he was shaky and dizzy was anything to go buy.

The water quelled his insane thirst and soothed his parched throat, but did nothing good for his stomach. It had been already grumbly and unhappy, but now with an entire water bottle chugged in it... Yikes.

He muffled a belch on his hand and noticed Jonah inching away from him, a big frown on his face, "disgusting, Lucas."

"Sorry, I can't help it," he groaned, cupping his bloated stomach right where it now sported a curve, "my gut's upset."

"Well, keep it to yourself," Jonah rolled his eyes, then opened a pleasant smile as the cute flight attendant came back. Bright smile that immediately diminished at her words.

"I'm sorry, it seems there's some bad weather in the alps," she explained apologetically, "we're going to have a delay of about an hour."

God, no, Lucas almost said out loud. Jonah made a face that voiced his thoughts.

"An hour? But our party-"

"We're contacting other airports to check if we may land there. We'll also be making arrangements for your transportation from there..." the poor girl was definitely older than them for about a handful of years, but she sounded so small, Lucas felt bad for her. It wasn't her fault.

"In the meantime, would you like to take a look at our dinner menu?"

Lucas shook his head no, while Jonah nodded enthusiastically. He ordered fish with some lemon cream or whatever. Lucas reached in his hand baggage and fished out his own headphones, crossing his arms to his chest and forcing his eyes carefully on the horizon and the stormy clouds.

He prayed for no turbulence, because the uneasy feeling in his stomach was getting worse and he wasn't sure he could take being rattled around like some kid's toy.

Jonah poked him and Lucas forcefully teared his eyes away from the window. The sky had gone dark, be it because of the weather or the sunset.

"What?"

"You should eat," Jonah said, in his driest voice, "you remember last year's fundraiser, don't you? They never serve anything decent in those parties."

Lucas would normally be touched by the hint of concern he heard in Jonah's voice, moved by all the shared history they had, but not tonight. Just the thought of eating something made him want to hurl.

"Not hungry, told you my stomach's upset," he said, more snappy than he meant to sound. Jonah squinted at him.

"Do not barf, Atwood," he said strongly and Lucas groaned, planting his elbows to his knees and hiding his face in his hands. The smell of Jonah's dinner certainly wasn't helping.

"I'm trying not to, you're not helping."

"Uh-" He could hear Jonah's slight hesitation, "well keep trying."

"Thanks, go fuck yourself," Lucas sighed, biting down a burp that stung his throat, all acid.

Five minutes later the plates were taken away, more water bottles passed around- The plane shook and Lucas planted his hand over his lips.

Fuck.

"Don't," Jonah glared, like he could boss Lucas' stomach into behaving.

A rolling belch passed through his lips and Lucas shook his head, "false alarm."

"I hate you so fucking much," The other man groaned, looking away a little frantically, in search of another empty seat. There was none.

"I'm not trying to make you hurl, trust me," Lucas groaned, rubbing his stomach and starting to feel antsy in his formal attire. This had been a horrible idea.

He could've been home, curled up with Bell, while she rubbed his upset tummy. But nooo... He let out another wet belch and gulped down, feeling his stomach's contents slosh. All that water.

"Jonah-" He moaned, reaching to squeeze the guy's arm. Jonah glared at him, alarmed.

"Atwood, no. No-"

"I think I need a bag."

"Lucas-"

"Now," he gagged in his hand and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to will his stomach in place. They'd get murdered for tossing cookies in the first class-

He couldn't help it. The next burp that he attempted to fight off, but that came out anyway, brought with it chunks of his lunch and Lucas snapped his mouth shut, trying to hold the puke in but-

He retched.

Vomit covered his black slacks and he heard as Jonah frantically called out the flight attendant, for more than one bag, cleaning supplies, a parachute-

Lucas whimpered as his stomach squeezed again and more vomit spilled between his fingers, since he was keeping his hand vehemently planted over his mouth still.

"Oh dear-" the flight attendant from before squealed, coming back with an already open blue barf bag. Lucas grabbed it with a shaky hand and then buried his face in it.

Faintly, he heard Jonah gagging harshly to his side and the flight attendant attempting to sooth him. His friend rushing up and all but stumbling to the bathroom, in a ridiculous attempt to save his dignity.

Lucas puked again, now allowing his body to get rid of all its contents. Please, let it be the last one.

It wasn't. His little barf bag was getting full when Jonah returned, looking grey in the face and woozy.

"Fuck. You."

"Ugh-" Lucas groaned, burping in the bag wetly, "Jonah, I need anothe-er-" he burped again, hiccuped, "fuck- anotherbag..." his words slurred together, thick with the nausea.

"Here," Jonah held it open in front of him, taking the other one with a retch of his own and snapping it closed, placing it on the ground. Lucas's initial spray was mostly contained to his lap, some chunks on his italian shoes-

Jonah gagged again, turned his face away and whimpered. He heard Lucas let let out another torrent of vomit, wondered how in the fuck did that much even fit inside of him.

"Jon-" Lucas called to him, "Jonah."

"Don't-" he groaned, eyes squeezed shut, wrapping an arm around his stomach that was flipping around. He regretted dinner, regretted ever fucking meeting Lucas.

"Jon, dude, you need a-" Lucas cut himself with another gross burp, one that sounded like he was about to hurl again, "a bag."

"Fuck, I don't need your-" his stomach surged up to his throat and he bit down his lip so strongly it nearly bled. Jonah squeezed his stomach. He cursed, "just- Just stop."

"I'm trying," Lucas sounded exhausted, his voice distorted by how sick he was feeling, "I can't- uGhuurp- Fuck. I'm- Fuck-" suddenly Lucas was standing again, ruined pants and puke bag clutched in his hands, his face milky white.

Jonah gagged, but his confusion nearly overrode his nausea, "the fuck are you doing, Lucas?! Sit-"

"Bathroom," Lucas, clutched at his gut with his other hand, "God, move Jonah, get out of the fucking way-"

He promptly obeyed, wincing away and trying not to feel like an asshole as his stomach calmed down now that Lucas and his puke covered pants and bag were gone.

"Mr. Banks...?"

"Ugh," Jonah groaned, gulping down, "Amy, right...? Amy, can you bring us something to clean up, please?"

By the time Lucas was back, now with wet but clean pants, Jonah was comfortably settled on his seat and the flight attendant rushed to his friend, trying to dot on him. She brought some pepto and more water, though now Lucas only took the smallest of sips.

He sat back down gingerly, whole body shaking and leaned his head back, "I feel awful."

"Teaches you to stop eating from garbage places."

"Just because it's not a Michelin restaurant, doesn't mean it's a garbage place," Lucas moaned softly, then leaned in and planted his forehead on Jonah's shoulder, causing the other man to stiffen.

"Atwood? What are you doing?"

"I feel miserable, please don't be a dick for five minutes?"

"You made me hurl, who are you calling dick, dickhead?" Jonah rolled his eyes but relaxed back against his seat, "if you vomit on me, I'm going to murder you and I'm not joking."

"Not gonna hurl," Lucas grumbled, his voice hoarse, "empty."

"Sure," Jonah rolled his eyes, not buying it, "get some rest, we'll be on the ground soon."

"Yeah, can't wait to puke on the dean," Lucas bit back sarcastically and Jonah winced in sympathy.

"Please, as if I'm letting you go to the party when you can barely stand. I'm not that much of a dick."

"Could've fooled me," Lucas sighed, yawning and muffling a burp against Jonah's tux jacket, "don't tell the others."

"Hell no, I'm telling everyone."

#emetophilia #food poisoning #lucas atwood #mywriting #jonah banks

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ghostly-cabbage · 3 years ago

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Party In The Graveyard (Shiptember 2021 : Drunk)

It’s a day late but heres the Danny x Wes fic I wrote for @ghostgothgeek ‘s Ship Event!! Rating: Teen and Up Warnings: Language, Underage Drinking, Mild Suggestive Themes Additional Tags: Post-Reveal, Aged Up Characters, Mutual Pining, Flirting, Getting Together

Summary: So, here’s the thing; Wes never wanted to have a fucking house party, okay? This was all stupid Kyle’s stupid idea. Kyle isn’t even in highschool anymore. He graduated last year. But he invited his whole college freshmen class, and just about everyone from the senior Casper class. And it's just getting better and better. Why? Because about half an hour ago, Danny Fucking Fenton walked in.

Or a fic in which Wes sees Danny getting shitfaced and says, "Is anyone else gonna take care of him, or?" and then doesn't wait for an answer.

Words: 6,233

Ao3

“I take back all my poor words. Talk is cheap, but my mind is rich When I close my eyes You grab my wrist, And pull me in to your cold dead lips”

So, here’s the thing; Wes never wanted to have a fucking house party, okay?

This was all stupid Kyle’s stupid idea.

Kyle isn’t even in highschool anymore. He graduated last year. But he invited his whole college freshmen class, and just about everyone from the senior Casper class.

And it's just getting better and better.

Why?

Because about half an hour ago, Danny Fucking Fenton walked in.

He walked in like he owned the goddamn place and the reaction went through everyone like a Whoop—like some kind of synchronized celebration of a miracle.

What, just ‘cause everyone knows he’s Phantom now?

Give him a fuckin’ break.

Currently, Wes is standing adjacent to the fridge, nursing a god-awful drink Kyle shoved into his hands before disappearing back into the throng.

Lighten up, bro, he’d said.

Yeah.

Sure.

The music pounds through the house—a heart beat—a fucking jack-hammer.

People talk and yell and spill their drinks on just about every surface that can stain.

A cheer goes up from the dining room and he rolls his eyes.

He slams his drink and focuses on the outdated calendar on the side of the fridge to keep from shuddering. It makes his mouth water, burns the whole way down and Jesus, seriously, what the fuck did Kyle put in this?

He throws his cup at the overflowing trash can.

His cheeks feel warm, but not even a buzz touches the wound up feeling in his chest.

He passes through the dining room, stops to watch Danny and Dash shotgunning sixteen ounce Mike’s Harder cans. From the looks of the table, they've already gone a few rounds.

Danny finishes five whole seconds before Dash. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and crushes his can.

“Slowing down already, Baxter?” he says, a smug grin plastered across his face. His shoulders are slumped and he talks just a bit too loud.

Dash finishes his and tosses it over his shoulder, which—cool. Fucking nice, what, does he think they have a fucking maid?

“In your dreams, Fenton. We're just getting warmed up. No way I'm getting out-drank by a twig like you, half-ghost or not.”

“Guess we’ll see.” Danny shrugs. He talks like he’s one of those people, has always been one of those people.

Wes rolls his eyes and is just about to slip out of the room when—

“Ohhh shit! If it isn’t the one and only Wesley Weston!”

Fucking hell.

He turns and levels as unimpressed of a look as he can manage at Danny.

“Imagine that. It’s almost like I fucking live here.”

Danny swipes up a plastic cup and then proceeds to walk through the table towards him. People act like they’re finding out all over again.

“Oh come on, Wes. You’re not still mad are you?” He comes up to him and slouches against the archway’s frame.

Wes scrapes his tongue along his teeth. “Mad? What could I possibly be mad about?”

Danny looks at him like a puzzle.

When he talks his voice is quiet, hard to hear over the music. “I dunno, the fact that you knew all along but no one ever listened? They thought you were crazy and you weren’t but no one's even said sorry?” His lips quirk up at the corner and Wes can smell the artificial black cherry dancing on the top of the alcohol in his breath.

He wrinkles his nose and it has nothing to do with the smell.

“I was being facetious, prick.”

Danny smiles bigger, and his eyes glitter, something doe-eyed.

“Right. So you are still mad?”

He pushes air through his teeth.

“Not like it matters,” he says, looking away from Danny, drifting over the room. “Where’s your chaperones? Weird to see you anywhere alone.”

Danny just stares at him for a few seconds before understanding sparks.

“Ah. Sam’s got a family thing. Tuck took a closing shift.” He waves a hand and his head lolls against the wall with a thunk. He lifts the cup to his lips and takes a swig.

Everything about him looks heavy. It’s weird for Danny.

“Have you tried the jungle juice your brother made?” he says. “It sucks. You’ve gotta try it.”

Wes lifts a brow and crosses his arms over his chest.

“How many’ve you had?”

Danny looks down into his cup, swirls its contents. It’s silent for several seconds too long.

“I’m not really sure, honestly. Didn’t know I was supposed to keep count.”

Wes slides a hand down his face.

Jesus Christ.

“Listen, maybe you should slow down—”

“Yo! Fenton! Stop flirting with Wes and fucking get over here, we’re not done.” Dash calls across the room and—

Flirting?!

They weren’t fucking flirting.

What the fuck.

Wes’s face heats up far beyond the liquor in his veins.

Danny looks up and flashes Dash a thumbs up. And then Danny is even closer—grabbing his arm. The chill of his hand goes right through to his stomach.

“Hey,” he breathes, “come watch me outdrink Dash.”

“Why would I wanna do that?” He ignores the way his breath flutters in his lungs, the way he feels light all the way to his toes.

Danny smiles like what he’s about to say is a secret—like it’s just for him, and all of a sudden Wes wants to be as far from Danny as humanly possible.

“Isn’t watching Dash lose at something for once reason enough?”

Wes forces himself to keep breathing and he swallows.

“Fine,” is all he can force out and then Danny is dragging him towards the table. He ignores all the people looking at them.

The fragmented group of A-listers cheer again and Dash slams a bottle of Fireball onto the table, making people's drinks jump and slosh.

“Let’s kick it up a notch, shall we?” he says, grin just shy of evil.

“Where’d you get that?” Wes asks.

Dash cocks a brow. “Paulina found it? Duh.”

God, Kyle really wasn’t joking about getting people fucked up.

Wes is not going to clean up anyone’s puke this time. This shit is all on Kyle.

“Dude, is it even cold?” Danny asks.

“No, it wasn’t in the freezer long enough,” Paulina says. She’s drinking from a champagne flute for some fucking reason. He didn’t even know they had those.

“Gimme that,” Danny says, swiping it from Dash. “No way in hell I’m drinking warm whiskey.”

His eyes glow blue, and when he breathes out its a thin vapor. Frost creeps over the glass and Wes can’t help but shiver.

“Dude, fucking wicked. I’m still not over this,” Dash breathes, clapping his hands together.

How could Wes forget that Dash is Phantom’s number one fanboy after all?

But Danny isn’t looking at Dash—he’s looking at him.

Only it’s different this time. Because before it was always a taunt, blatantly rubbing it in Wes’ face when he used his powers and no one else noticed.

But the way Danny is looking at him now… like he’s waiting for something, thinking about something.

Danny hands back the Fireball and his eyes slip away from Wes and he feels like a fish wrenched from water.

What the hell was that?

“Fuck yeah, Fenton.” Dash unscrews the whiskey, flicks the cap off the mouth with a finger, sending it flying. He pours directly into their cups, the liquid glugging through the frosted neck of the bottle.

“Two shots of vodka,” someone says and everyone laughs.

“No chasers?” Danny asks, eyeing his cup.

Dash puts down the Fireball. “What’s the matter, you scared of the burn?”

“Not a chance,” he says, and holds out his cup to Dash. They cheers each other and then they’re throwing it back.

It sinks in his stomach like a rock. There’s no way this ends well.

It’s on the sixth round of Fireball that Dash starts to look green. He sets down his cup and leans on the table. He stares at the clear storage container of jungle juice and Kwan comes up beside him, pats his arm.

“Dude, maybe you should call it.”

“I’m fine, ‘s fine…” His words slur together. He tries to stand up straight and Kwan and Paulina both have to keep him up right.

Danny laughs. “Not lookin’ great, Baxter,” he says, his own words falling sluggishly from his mouth. Danny goes to lift his cup to his lips again and Wes puts his hand over it.

“Nope. You two are done.”

“Come on, Wes. Don’t be a buzzkill. I’m good!” Danny says. “Dash is the one that lost!” He flings his hand towards Dash and knocks the Fireball over, spilling it all over the table.

The group all crows at once, a choir of “oh shit” “nice one” and “duuuude noooo”’s. A few people rush to grab their phones from harm's way.

Danny blinks at the table. “Oops,” he says.

A smile splits his face and he starts chuckling. It builds from him, a laugh, something outside of him—beyond him.

He laughs until he’s doubled over, holding onto Wes to keep himself stable.

“Yeah, that’s it. You’ve had more than enough.” He grabs Danny’s cup from him before he can spill that too and drinks it himself. The cinnamon burns through his sinuses and he shudders. Ugh.

Danny straightens and sways just a bit, stumbling into him—their faces inches apart.

“Hey, that was mine,” he says, voice twisted in a pout. “Not cool.” His breath is cold, thick with the smell of whiskey.

Wes feels frozen, feels like he can’t breathe.

His heart pounds in his chest and he prays Danny isn’t so close he can feel it.

Around them the choir starts again, a chorus of suggestive “ooo”’s. He can feel their eyes on him and it makes his skin crawl.

Fucking dammit, this is all Fenton’s fault.

He pushes Danny away from him. Not fast or rough, just to arms length. He coughs.

“Star, you should go to the kitchen and get them both some water,” he says.

She gives him an annoyed look.

“I don’t see you doing anything else,” he snaps.

“I’m drunk too, you know,” she says, but gets up and leaves towards the kitchen.

Paulina and Kwan coax Dash into a chair, and he puts his head down on the table, groaning. A few others are sopping up the Fireball with paper towels.

Danny sags in his grip, goofy smile still plastered all over his face.

“I’ve never been drunk before, this is awesome,” he says.

Wes rolls his eyes, and maneuvers Danny into a chair. His head lolls back and he stares at the ceiling for a second before perking back up and trying to go for someone else's cup.

“Dude, I’m serious.” Wes moves the cup out of his reach. “Quit while you’re ahead.”

Danny groans, sinking down in his chair like he’s boneless.

“Come on, Wes,” he says. “You think I don’t know my own limits?”

“You just said this is your first time being drunk.”

Danny blows a raspberry.

Star walks back into the room and hands Wes a glass of water and then slides one across the table at Dash.

“Here. Wanna drink? Drink this.”

“Ugh, fine,” he says.

He’s a few swigs into it when he stops.

“God, it’s hot in here. Is anyone else hot?” And before anyone can answer his eyes glow that bright blue and a chill works through the air, plummets the temperature.

“Danny—” Goosebumps rise over Wes’ skin and his breath fogs from his mouth.

At varying levels of exasperation, the people around cry out.

“Dude, cut that out,” he says, smacking Danny’s arm.

“Ow, why are you hitting me?”

“Because you’re being a pain in the ass.”

Danny looks at him, blinks heavy eyelids. He smiles.

“What.”

“Nothing, you just… You’re cute when you’re all annoyed sometimes.”

The ground feels like it opens up underneath him.

His thoughts screech to a stop. It smells like burnt rubber, like cinnamon and black cherry.

It’s just the alcohol. No fucking way Danny of all people would say that to him.

“You really are drunk,” he says, but his voice sounds off kilter.

Across the house the last song fades out and Usher’s Yeah comes on. People scream and cheer.

“Holy shit, I love this song,” Danny says and stands up. He sways and catches himself on the edge of the table, starts laughing again. “Whew, that was close. The spinning is normal, right?”

Fucking Christ, how did he end up on babysitting duty again? He rubs his temples.

Is he really about to do this?

“You should lay down.” He heaves a sigh. “Come on.”

“Jeez, Wes, that's pretty forward,” Danny says, wiggling his eyebrows.

Heat flashes through him.

“Would you just shut up,” he hisses. “And stop making it cold. Jesus.”

Danny snorts and when he moves from the table he wobbles. Wes grabs him before he topples and slings Danny’s arm over his shoulder to keep him up.

Danny leans into him, almost unbalances them.

“You got a problem with the cold, Wes?” he says, this time his cold breath is against the side of his neck. It sends chills down his spine.

“I don’t have to help you, you know,” he says, voice thick. “You can get alcohol poisoning for all I care.”

“You’re a bad liar, Wes.”

Wes yanks Danny along beside him and out of the dining room.

“Shut up, Danny. You’re drunk.”

He hauls Danny past the living room and the knot of people dancing and singing. A few call out to them, ask them to come have fun. He steers them away before Danny can pull away and join them.

“But I wanna have fun, Wes,” he whines.

“Dude, you can’t even stand without my help right now, you really wanna try dancing?”

“Dance with me, then.”

Wes stops. He looks over at Danny and…

He—

He blinks, shakes his head.

“No, not—not right now,” he mumbles.

“There’s a whole reason I came alone, you know,” Danny says.

“What, so you could get fucked up and no one would stop you?”

“Yeah! I mean… well, that’s part of it.”

Wes guides them towards the stairs, ignoring the looks.

“Your house is bigger than it looks from the outside,” Danny says.

“Thanks?”

“Mmhm.”

God. This is so not what he thought tonight was going to be like.

“Where are we going?” Danny asks.

“Somewhere you can lay down and sober up.”

“Tha’s not vague.”

Wes starts pulling Danny up the staircase. The second floor is dark, and he gropes around to hit the light.

The first few steps are fine, which is to say the next steps aren’t fine.

What he’s saying is that Danny says, “oh shit.”

And then he’s falling—pulling Wes down with him.

More accurately, Danny trips and pulls Wes down on top of him.

They end up in a heap and Danny groans like someone does when they fall on the fucking stairs.

“Ow.” He reaches for the back of his head. Then he’s laughing, like it's the funniest goddamn thing in the world, what just happened. His face screws up, the face of someone who doesn’t know he’s in pain, just pretending.

“Seriously?” Wes snaps. His shin smarts—must have hit it on the stairs.

“Sorry, sorry.” He laughs each syllable. “You good?”

“No, I’m not—” And he looks down and he realizes how close they are. Realizes the way Danny’s hair falls into his face, the light catching the slope of his jaw.

Danny quiets at the same time and it’s like they get stuck there. Like nothing else exists other than this staircase and this moment and the way Danny feels cool and solid like a summer night underneath him.

“Hey,” Danny says—sounds almost breathless. “Come here often?”

Wes rolls his eyes and just like that the moment is over.

“Ugh.” He pushes himself up, detangles himself from Danny.

Danny reaches for him, that stupid smile back on his face.

“Oh come on, Wes,” he says.

“Quit messing around, dude.”

Danny pushes himself up, runs a hand through his hair and Wes tracks the motion with his eyes against his best wishes.

“You’re so mean. I could have a concussion and this is how you treat me?”

Wes stands up and straightens his clothes. “You’re fine.”

Danny gives him a look and then something sparks in his eyes. “I’m going to text Sam and Tucker and tell them how mean you are to me.”

Psh. He says that like they don’t already hate him.

“Would you just get up?”

“These stairs are actually kinda comfy,” he says, head rolling back, sinking back down and closing his eyes. “I think I’ll just stay here.”

Wes kicks his leg.

“You can lay down in the room. Get up.”

Danny heaves a sigh, throws an arm over his eyes.

“Fiiinnneee.” He pulls himself up by the handrail, stops in a sitting position. “Jesus,” he says, voice just above a whisper. His breathing gets weird. It makes Wes pause.

“You okay?”

“...Spinning,” Danny breathes. He’s quiet for a bit, and Wes just lets him sit there. Danny holds his head in his hands for a while.

Worry creeps into the back of his mind. Maybe Danny wasn’t kidding about the concussion thing. Maybe he should get someone—

Then Danny is standing up and Wes steadys his other arm.

“I got you,” he says. “Feeling okay?”

Danny sends him a weak smile. “Yeah. Laying down does sound good though," he mumbles.

They make it up the rest of the stairs, and Danny leans against the wall as Wes opens the door to his room.

It’s dark and quiet inside and he flips on the light.

He helps Danny in, and he flops face first onto his bed. He groans and rolls over.

“I’m thinking those last few shots of Fireball were a bad idea…”

Wes snorts and closes the door softly behind him.

“Oh, just the last few, huh?”

“I was havin’ fun, smartass,” Danny grumbles.

Wes leans back against his dresser and crosses his arms. “I said you should have stopped but noooo, no one listens to Wes.”

It gets quiet and he can feel the heaviness in the air. He clears his throat. “If you throw up in my bed, I’m kicking you out the window.”

“I’m not going to throw up.”

“Famous last words, Fenton.”

“Shaddup,” Danny says, and it gets quiet.

Wes can feel the bass from the music through the floor, the muffled sound of singing, laughing, talking. He’s used to ducking out at parties early. He’s used to laying in bed and listening to the songs through the walls until the voices slowly fade and the house is empty again. He listens to Kyle stumble up to bed and knock into the walls and yell “I’m okay” when he does.

He’s not used to having… company.

Danny sits up like a puppet on too few strings. He makes a frustrated noise.

“It’s still hot,” he sighs.

“It’s the alcohol, dude.”

Danny runs his hands over his face, and then reaches back and starts pulling his hoodie off. It drags his shirt up with it and Wes can’t help but look. He looks at the multitude of scars staining Danny’s skin and the way his muscles move over his ribs and—he pulls his gaze away and studies the floor instead.

“This is your bedroom, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Doesn’t look how I thought it would.”

Wes wrinkles his nose. “How'd you think it would look?”

Danny takes his time looking around the room, hoodie pooled in his lap, before he looks at Wes and gives a boneless shrug.

“I dunno. More,” he holds his hands up, splays his fingers, “raah!”

“I… don’t know what that means.”

“You know! Like… newspaper-clipping red-web on all the walls,” Danny says, smile creeping back.

Wes squints at Danny. He pushes off his dresser.

“That’s still all you think of me?” He picks a pillow from his bed and throws it at Danny’s face. Danny lets out a yelp.

“Besides, I took all that shit down when the truth came out anyway,” he says, trying and failing to keep the inkling of a smile from his voice.

Danny looks at him blankly for a second before he starts to smile again.

“Wait, was that… Did you just make a joke?”

Wes snorts.

“You did! Holy shit, Wes has a sense of humor, this is bigger news than my shit. I gotta tell everyone.”

Danny looks soft, sitting like this in the middle of his bed, eyes warm in a way Wes didn’t realize they could be.

Something in him loosens.

“Good luck getting people to believe you…” he says.

“Oh, how the turn tables,” Danny says, and for a bit all they do is smile at each other.

Danny looks away first, he glances up at the light and squints.

“You got a light that isn’t so fuckin’ bright?”

“I thought the light sensitivity was supposed to happen the morning after drinking.”

“You’re full of jokes tonight.”

Wes rolls his eyes and flips on the bedside lamp and then shuts off the overhead light.

Danny hums and flops back down. “Better,” he says.

It’s silent for a few beats and Danny lifts his head to look at him. He smacks the comforter a few times with a flat hand.

Wes blanches; he’s all too aware of himself, of Danny and the dim light and the closed door.

“Dude, chill,” Danny says, like he can read his mind—wait, he can’t actually do that, right? Ghosts can’t do that?

“Sit down or something. You just standing there watching me is creepy,” Danny says.

Wes swallows his own heartbeat, shakes his head. “Seriously, between the two of us, I’m not the creepy one.”

“Says the stalker.”

“I didn’t stalk you.”

Danny gives him a look, with raised eyebrows and everything.

Wes sits on the side of the bed, scoots back so he’s leaned against the headboard.

“I was… investigating.”

Danny laughs. “Sure, dude. Whatever you say,” and his voice is like smoke—hickory and rough but winding through the air like silk.

They fall into an amiable silence, cotton soft, but cold. Danny has an arm over his eyes again, and his breathing is so slow it’s hard to pick out from the music downstairs.

He rakes a hand through his hair and takes out his phone. He unlocks it and scrolls mindlessly for a while.

He can’t focus.

Not with Danny so close like this. Not when everything is different now. His mind drifts off and he tries to keep track of every breath, wonders if he’s fallen asleep—

“Hey, Wes.”

He jumps. Just a little bit.

“Y-yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

He puts his phone down.

“...For what?”

“For making everyone think you were crazy.”

Wes twists his hand in his comforter. Why the hell is Danny apologizing to him? After everything he’s done to him… tried to do to him. It gets stuck in his throat.

“It’s… You don’t have to—” he wishes he’d had a few more drinks.

“Nah. I do. Looking back, I didn’t handle you knowing very well.”

He chews on his lip. He’s never felt so out of place.

“Danny…”

Danny moves his arm and looks up at him and his courage almost shrivels.

“I’m the one who should apologize. Not you. I—” He balls his hands into fists. “What I did, trying to basically out you, that wasn’t… that wasn’t okay.”

“You didn’t know the whole situation.”

“Did I need to? It was still fucked up and. I’m sorry. I was so wrapped up in wanting to be right that I didn’t care what it could have done to you.”

It feels like glass coming up from his throat.

He’s lost sleep, engraved in the ceiling all the ways he fucked up, all the times he's glad now that no one listened to him. His eyes feel hot and there’s no way in hell he’s going to fucking get emotional in front of Danny.

“It all worked out in the end,” Danny says. He says it easy, gentle. “You were still technically right, though, so… There’s that.”

Wes huffs. “Yeah. I guess.” He fights through all the mess. “I don’t know how this didn’t happen sooner though. You were terrible at hiding it.”

Danny props himself up on his elbows. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude, I'm a great liar.”

Wes leans his head back on the headboard. “Sure, but you’re reckless as hell. How many times did you stick your arm through your locker in front of God and everyone?”

Danny smiles wide and bright.

“Honestly, after a while, it was just fun to see how far I could go before anyone noticed.”

Wes can’t help but chuckle. “Pretty far, obviously.”

“No kidding.”

Wes runs his palms over his jeans.

“You’re good though, right?” Wes looks anywhere but Danny. “At home and all that.”

“Oh. Yeah. It was, uhm, a lot for my parents. But we’re getting there.”

“Good… That’s good.” The words feel sharp and blocky, and he doesn’t know what else to say. What else can he say?

His buzz pulls away from him, pulls him down, makes his lids heavy.

“How do you think Dash is doing?” Danny says.

“Pf. If he isn’t hugging a trashcan right now, I’ll be shocked.”

Danny laughs.

Wes leans over onto some of his pillows.

“How are you this okay after drinking all that?”

Danny shrugs. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m feeling it. My guess is something to do with the healing factor ghost shit.”

“Right, makes sense.”

He feels tired and heavy and the darkness at the corners of the room get fuzzier.

“Paulina brought her own champagne glass,” Danny tells him. And he laughs because, who does that?

He rolls onto his back and they stare at the ceiling.

“Are you kidding? Paulina does that, it’s Paulina,” Danny says.

They stare at the ceiling like it’s not a ceiling, like it might become more than just ceiling. Wes imagines it disappearing completely.

Danny likes stars, doesn’t he?

When Danny talks again it’s like he’s far away. An arms length, an atmosphere’s length… he doesn’t know.

Danny says, “sucks that I’m missing the Super Smash Tournament.”

Wes tries to keep his eyes from slipping shut. The bed pulls him like quicksand, the smell of sleep. “Trust me, dude, Kyle always wins anyway.”

Danny says something, something about who he mains or doesn’t main. It becomes all the same, the sluggish rise and fall.

At some point between light and dark Wes decides that he likes the sound of Danny’s voice. He somehow likes that the room is colder than it usually is.

And maybe somewhere between all that he decides some other stuff too.

—

Wes wakes up before Danny. The sun streams in through a gap in his curtains, pooling on the wall and floor.

He doesn’t have a headache, but his neck hurts like hell.

Danny is lying on his side faced away from him and, fuck, thank God. He thinks about last night, about Danny in his arms and he—

He sits up and rubs his hands over his warm cheeks.

Water. He should get some water.

He slips out of his room and goes downstairs to the kitchen. The house is quiet.

Well.

Mostly.

He can hear the sink running and the clink of glass. When he comes around the corner he sees Kyle washing dishes. The house is only half as trashed as he thought it’d be.

Kyle looks up at him as he walks in.

“Morning.”

He grunts, going to pluck a clean glass from the drying rack.

“Hangover?”

“Nah. Slept wrong.” He fills his glass at the fridge and downs it all at once. The water helps wash the sour taste from his mouth. Ugh, he should still brush his teeth.

He fills the glass again and heads back upstairs. He pushes back into his room and when the door creaks he sees Danny jump.

He walks around the bed and offers the glass to a squinting Danny.

“Awake?” he asks.

Danny groans and pushes himself up. His hair is messy, hanging in his eyes. It's infuriating.

He rubs the side of his face and when he takes the cup their fingers brush.

“Thanks,” he murmurs.

“We have pop-tarts and cereal and shit downstairs.”

Danny gives him a thumbs up while he drinks.

He wants to ask if he’s okay... He decides to leave it for later.

Wes leaves his room and goes back to the kitchen. When he gets there, he pulls the pop-tarts down from the cabinet.

“So, here’s what I’m thinking,” Kyle says, “if you wanna clean the dining room, I’ll clean the living room.”

“Nope, no. This was your thing, dude. You threw the party.”

“But Wes,” he whines, “Dad’s gonna be home tonight.”

“Then you should probably get started,” he says and claps him on the shoulder on his way to the toaster.

“Dude, cold blooded. You’re just gonna watch me slave away for hours and not even help your own brother?”

“Uh... yeah.” He slots the pop-tarts into the toaster. He turns towards Kyle and leans against the counter, grinning at him.

Kyle gives him a look.

“How much.”

“No. No, I’m not gonna be bought this time.”

“Twenty bucks.”

“Kyle.”

“Fine, you drive a hard bargain. Forty.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“‘This time?’ What happened last time?”

They jump and look at Danny as he comes down the stairs. He has his hoodie slung over a shoulder and the half empty water glass in his hand.

“Holy shit,” Kyle says.

“It’s not important,” he says, sending a glare at the back of Kyle’s head.

Danny walks up to the counter and sets the glass down to pull his hoodie on.

“No fucking way,” Kyle says, voice pitched up. “I didn’t believe it when everyone was talking about it last night, holy shit.”

Danny tugs the hem of his hoodie down and gives Kyle a confused look that he moves over to Wes.

He returns the look, just as lost.

“Dude, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You two hooking up last night,” Kyle says, like it’s obvious.

It feels like for a second time stops—

Hooking up?

Hooking up?!

His heart skips in his chest and heat rushes to his face and the tips of his ears. He feels like he’s been slapped across the face.

Danny looks like a deer in the headlights.

“Uh—”

The toaster pops.

“Which, can I just say, I totally called it. I knew there had to be another reason Wes was so obsessed with yo—”

“Kyle!” he snaps, his voice higher than he anticipated. “Kyle, oh my fucking god, shut up. We didn’t— Nothing happened last night, we just—”

His breath feels tight in his throat and he wants to lock himself in his room forever. He can’t make himself look at Danny.

“Who the hell told you that-that we—”

“Uh, dude, a bunch of people saw you guys go into your room together. You know Pualina was telling me that Danny was all over yo—”

“Okay! Thank you, Kyle!” he cuts in. “Jesus fucking—” He buries his face in his hands.

This is it, this is how he’s going to die.

“I’m just glad for you two! I mean, like, jeez, finally!”

“Kyle, I’ll help you clean if you shut up right now and never bring this up ever again.”

Kyle stops, face lighting up. “Dude, deal.”

“Cool. Now please leave.”

“What?”

Wes grabs him by the arm and starts dragging him out of the kitchen. “Leave. Go get the cleaning shit from the garage or some shit, I don’t know.”

“Oh. Ohhhh, I see. I get you. I’ll leave you two kids alone to enjoy your breakfast together,” he says with a wink and holy fuck, he’s going to kill his fucking brother.

Kyle heads for the stairs and calls down, “Lemme know when it’s safe to come back down!”

Wes drags his hands down his face. He lets out a slow breath and he tries to ignore his pounding heart.

Wes goes to the nearest counter and puts his head down. The surface is cold against his burning skin. He groans like an injured animal and at this point he really wishes someone would put him out of his misery.

“Well…” Danny says from behind him.

He hears Danny moving and the sound of the fridge being opened. He looks up, watches as Danny takes orange juice from the fridge. When he turns around he sees his face is red too.

“I mean… hardly the worst rumor to get spread around about us,” he says. That stupid smile makes its way onto Danny’s face.

“I once had this dude tell everyone at school that I was a ghost. It was super weird.”

Wes shakes his head. “Dude, shut up.” But he can’t help the grin that pulls at his lips.

Danny laughs, a quieter thing today than it was last night.

“I can have some, right?” he asks, lifting the OJ.

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

They fall into silence while Danny pours a glass and Wes goes to numbly retrieve his pop-tarts.

“It’s probably spread through all of Casper now, huh.”

Danny glances at him. Something dances through his expression. He hums as he takes a drink of his juice.

“Uh. Probably further than that, now that everyone knows I'm… you know.” Danny shoots him an uneasy look.

Right. Right.

This was just getting better and better.

He takes a bite of his pop-tart. It crumbles in his mouth like sand.

“Are you… okay?” Danny asks. He reaches back and rubs his neck, and dammit, now he’s just adding insult to injury.

He looks at him, and he sees the nerves in the way he holds himself, stitched into the way the light hits him. He’s not asking just one question.

Wes swallows.

“Yeah… Yeah, I mean, like you said. There could be way worse rumors,” he says. He looks at Danny like he’s too far away, like he enjoyed last night way more than he should have. And he sees it in Danny too, some sort of mirror.

“I think so too,” Danny says, heavy the way he exhales it.

They break eye contact and Wes doesn’t really know what to do, what to say.

“Well, uh. You have cleaning to do, I guess. I should probably get home before my parents get too freaked out.”

Wes nods. “Yeah, probably.” He wonders if Danny knows what’s in his voice. The dark from last night is clouding his mind, pulling him, begging him to just say it.

“Yeah… I’ll, uh, see you at school?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

But Danny doesn't move.

He lingers like a shadow. He looks like he wants to go. He looks like he wants to stay.

“Wes,” he says.

Wes looks at him.

He worries at his bottom lip and moves along the counter towards him.

“Thanks. For last night.”

He lets out a puff. “Well, someone had to make sure you didn’t die the rest of the way from alcohol poisoning.”

Danny rolls his eyes.

“I wasn’t that bad.”

“You were pretty bad.”

“Not even.” Danny smiles.

And they’re close again, sharing each other's space.

“It wasn’t… awful, I guess,” he says before he can stop himself. “Even with you being a pain in the ass the entire time.”

“Maybe we could do it again sometime,” Danny murmurs.

“What, me looking after your drunk ass the whole night?”

Danny snorts. “No, I was thinking more like I match you drink for drink instead,” he says.

“At least then you’d last till the Smash tournament.”

Danny glances away.

“I didn’t mind missing it too much, actually.”

Wes’s breath gets stuck and his heart beats like a drum in his ribcage.

“Really?”

“Yeah…”

In some ways it’s just like last night; Danny’s close enough he can feel the movement of his breath between them.

“It’s way more fun, bothering you.”

It’s a slow motion sort of thing, a hair raising thing.

“Well you’re an expert at it by now.”

Wes thinks about theme parks. Sitting at the top of the sky and just before his stomach drops—

“Always room for improvement. I could get better at it if you want me to.”

And what if he does? What if he wants to see Danny in all the ways he can? What if he wants to know Danny for real this time?

Maybe he wants pictures, proof that it’s real.

Maybe it’s always been leading to this.

Maybe it’s fucked up.

Wes having the power to hurt him all over again.

“Drink for drink?” he says, barely a whisper.

“Drink for drink,” Danny says—closer, closer, breath against his lips.

Danny gives him time to pull away. But Wes doesn’t. Something to do with what he decided last night.

“Prove it.”

#Unidentified Flying Ship #danny/wes #Danny Phantom #danny phantom fanfiction #my writing #DP Shiptember 2021 #drunk prompt #one-shot #wes weston #wesley weston

126 notes · View notes

paperpocalypse · 4 years ago

Text

crackers and jam.

50 Cliché Tropes and Prompts: 41. Overhearing they have feelings for you.

Pairing: Five Hargreeves x Reader

Word Count: 1,703 words

Warnings: Swearing

Some time back, not long after he got stranded in the post-apocalyptic world and perhaps a year and a half before running into you, Five’s only companion was Delores.

It had been a meeting of chance (as everything is) in the middle of a destroyed department store. She had been looking at him. And maybe that’s why he was so drawn in – that stare; it was a lifeless stare, yeah, but it was not by any means a dead stare like the ones he had met too many times before. No life had been lost to create that stare. She was smiling, too.

Five had lifted her carefully out of the chunks of concrete, greeting her because there was no one else. For the first few weeks, he just placed her at the corner of her store and visited every once in a while, then took to occasionally toting her around the City when he needed to talk. He liked to pretend that she answered back – sometimes. After a few months, he named her Delores.

Then he met you.

Unlike Delores, you were human. Breathing. Alive, somehow. And you had thoughts and feelings that weren’t always connected to his and – and it was weird. It was home.

You didn’t question his friendship with Delores. Five had seen the half-burned stuffed frog in your wagon, so you wouldn’t have had anything to hold over him anyway. He knew that you knew that he still went to the department store in the middle of the night. And, shit, deep down Five also knew that Delores was, in the end, just a hunk of plastic with eyes. But after a year and a half of having nobody else, she had become something of a comfort. And a confidant. Burdening you with his issues was not an option, so when things became a little shittier than usual, he would slip out from underneath his blanket, make sure you weren’t having a nightmare, and head downtown to voice his thoughts aloud.

Over time, though, he learned that you were willing to listen. You listened, and you were always kind about it even if you didn’t always understand. His nightly visits decreased. And it was okay for a while.

But then Five began to struggle with a new issue – one that was a little different than the usual mess of stress and anxiety – and one night, he finds himself looking down at Delores again because talking to you about it is definitely off the table.

Unfortunately, Delores’s kindness is different from yours.

Well, here we are. Again.

“I’m just here to think,” he snaps, combing a grubby hand through his tangled mess of hair. The lantern beside him glows weakly as he plops down onto a slab of concrete. “Mind your business.”

Your business is everyone’s business here, Five. And to put my own two cents in, I think that you’re scared of your own feelings.

Blood travels to Five’s cheeks, unwarranted, as he narrows his eyes at Delores. “For the last time, that’s not what this is about. It’s – Jesus Christ, I’m gonna get over it. This isn’t a life-or-death issue.”

Then why have you been ranting about it like it is?

“I’m not.”

Ha! Rich.

He grits his teeth. She stares back at him, unperturbed. Bastard.

You know, maybe you’ll feel better if you say it out loud. Air it out. Test to see if it’s real.

“I’m not doing that.”

Do it.

No.

Say it.

No.

For god’s sake, Number Five, take a goddamn look at yourself –

“Fine!” Five hisses, though it feels more like an explosion. He throws his hands up. “I like [Y/n], alright? We’re the last people on this goddamn planet and I like them, and I shouldn’t care this much but I do. Happy?”

Delores pauses. Five looks away.

Very.

Ugh.

Did it feel real?

He clicks his tongue, crossing his arms, and doesn’t answer. The smile on Delores’s face seems a little smug, and it makes him want to hurl. He shouldn’t have said it out loud. Relieve some of the pressure and everything starts to boil over …

Breathing in deeply, Five forces his shoulders to relax. He bids a soft goodbye to Delores, then heads back to camp.

—

A week later, Five’s visit comes back to bite him in the worst way possible.

You’ve been having a hard time starting the fire for tonight, so he finishes splitting the evening rations to help you out with the bow drill. As he does so, you watch in silence, both of you waiting patiently for the smoke and dust.

“Do you think we have enough wood?” you eventually ask.

“It’s enough,” he murmurs, only half paying attention. After a while, a few chalky wisps of smoke begin to rise from the charring wood. He leans in to blow the ember carefully once it forms, then puts it into the tinder and coaxes out a flame. “Get the kindling?”

You oblige, and within a few minutes, a healthy fire starts to dance atop the wood, scorching his face and fingers with heat. Five stares intently at the oranges and yellows for a moment, lips pressed together, intrigued in a tired sort of way. Warmth. Then he backs off and grabs a portion of crumbled up crackers, handing it to you.

You spread the cloth over your knees. “Now all we need is some jam.”

“What kind?”

A soft hum escapes your throat. You contemplate unhurriedly, dabbing up some stray crumbs with a finger. “Blackberry,” you reply after a few moments. “Or strawberry. The kind that’s sort of chunky.”

It’s been a long time since he’s tasted either of those things. The simple thought of whole crackers spread with fresh jam, sweet and dark and sticky, is a luxury in and of itself. Five tries not to think about it too much, munching on his third fragment of stale cracker. It makes his mouth dry. “Hm,” he says, picking up the canteen for a few drops of water.

The fire pops. A few sparks fly out into the air and die just as quickly. You finish your supper and wipe your mouth, stretching your legs out in front of you as you sigh.

Five tilts his head at you. “What?”

“What?” you parrot back, though he sees the way your fingers fidget.

“You have something to say.”

Your facial expression shifts just the smallest bit. “How can you tell?”

(Simple – because he knows you. He knows your ticks; knows how you tick. He knows your smiles and all the subtle ways that your voice rises and falls. He’s memorized you because he fears forgetting, and it’s a problem.)

“Kind of hard not to,” Five replies.

“Oh.” You chew the inside of your cheek, still seeming unsure. “Well, um … I just wanted to talk to you about something. And please don’t be mad.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Um. A couple nights ago, I had a bad dream.”

“I know.”

“Not the one you woke me up from. A different one,” you mutter. “The night after we found the pillows.”

“Oh,” Five says.

“Yeah.” You look down at your hands. They’re dusty and rough, littered with small scars from climbing and falling and holding. “I … um, that night, I woke up and you weren’t there. And I sort of panicked, and went looking –”

The blood drains from Five’s face.

“I went looking for you, and I found you. Talking to her.” You glance at him for a split second. “About me.”

Oh, fuck.

Five stares at you as you fiddle with the scrap of cloth on your lap. You know. You weren’t supposed to know. You weren’t supposed to ever know, and now you do.

“Five?” Your voice is curious and small.

His voice is raspy. “How much did you hear?”

“Almost everything.” You grab the cuff of his coat sleeve as he attempts to stand up. “I’m sorry for eavesdropping. I really didn’t mean to, but –”

“It’s not your fault. Look, I don’t want to talk about it,” he replies tersely. “We need more firewood, anyway.”

“We have enough,” you say, though you relinquish your hold when he tugs a little harder away from you. You sound hurt. “Five, it’s okay to feel like that.”

“It’s not. It makes things more complicated.”

“How?” Standing up, your brow furrows. “I like you too, Five. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

His chest tightens. “That just makes it worse.”

“I like you,” you repeat. Your hand moves down to take his gently. “A lot. And it’s okay.”

(Did it feel real?)

Five meets your gaze solidly despite not quite wishing to, a familiar sense of guilt washing over him when you squeeze his hand.

Sometimes, he wishes he hadn’t met you. Then he would’ve gotten what he deserved for his recklessness – nothing – with nothing to concern himself with other than equations and survival and time. That, he’s fairly sure, would have been easier to manage. He hadn’t been taught to care for someone else. Not like this, at least.

But you. You. Five swallows the lump in his throat.

“I might have to leave you behind,” he murmurs, more hoarsely than he’d like to admit. The words burn like ice on the roof of his mouth. “One day.”

You don’t reply for a few seconds.

Then, for some inexplicable reason, you step a little closer. “But not tonight," you say. "Right?”

For shit’s sake, you’re so optimistic. Five chuckles dryly, hand still engulfed in yours, blinking away the vague stinging in his eyes. “Of course not.”

“Then I forgive you. If you feel like you need it.” With a mild exhale, you smile at him. Your eyes are glossy. “So can we sit back down? I like doing that.”

He quietly agrees.

So you bring him back down to sit before the fire, closer to him than before. No more words are left to be said. A heavy silence settles in their place, neither good nor bad, and almost comfortable. For the first time in a long time, Five tries not to think.

You lean against his shoulder. He welcomes it.

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vague-and-aloof · 3 years ago

Text

GETTING TO KNOW YOU CHAPTER 3 - SNEAK PEEK

Well, I promised you guys a sneak peek of the next chapter, and here it is! Hope you’ll like it!

———

Mistoffelees had never invited another cat home before, not even as a kitten. When he started going to school his father had already started to tell him that magic scared other cats and this had resulted in him not even trying to make friends or get too close to other cats. So asking any of his classmates if they wanted to come with him to play at his house was never an option. So he wasn't quite sure what to do as he led Tugger into his house, unlocking the door to find the house empty.

"Looks like father isn't home yet." He said as he shrugged off his jacket and hung it on the coat hanger and toed off his shoes. "And Victoria was going to be with Plato after school, so we have the house to ourselves."

"Lucky us." Tugger said a little vaguely as he shrugged off his leather jacket and hung it next to Mistoffelees' before taking another good long look at the hallway with wide eyes. "Wow, this place is nice. Like, really, really nice." He turned back to Mistoffelees, kicked off his boots before placing them by the other shoes. "Your dad must be seriously loaded if you can afford living in a damn mansion! I mean, my dad's pretty well-off too, but not like this."

Mistoffelees smirked cheekily and shrugged. "I don't know if I'd call it a mansion, but yeah, I suppose it is a pretty nice house."

Tugger whirled around and stared at him, very much like how Plato had stared at Victoria the first time he had come by their house. "Pretty nice? Understatement of the decade! When you said that your dad makes millions of pounds a year, I thought you were exaggerating."

Laughing softly, Mistoffelees shook his head and started to lead Tugger further into the house. "Well, in a way I suppose I was and wasn't. Father comes from a very wealthy family, so he already had a big sum of money to his name. But he also owns a lot of very popular and upscale clubs in the city, which makes him a lot of money every year. A big sum of that money goes back into his clubs, in order to keep making those big sums of money. But he still gets to keep-" He paused to think for a moment. "Hm, I believe about 50 percent of it. So if he makes 5 million pounds in one year, he still gets to keep 2.5 million."

Tugger's jaw looked like it was close to falling off his face as he stared at Mistoffelees. Then he blinked and started to quietly mumble under his breath and counted on his fingers, then his eyes widened. "Dude, that's still 200 000 pounds a month! What the hell does he even do with that much money? Your bills can't be that much!"

Laughing again, Mistoffelees held up his paw and started counting on his fingers. "Cleaning staff, personal chef, tuition and school related costs, top of the line dancing gear and instructors for me and Victoria, his own personal parties... food." Mistoffelees sighed and shook his head exasperatedly. "Lots and lots of food. It's all very good food, the best he can find, but it's all a bit much. Especially since Victoria and I don't eat anywhere near as much as he does."

He shook his head and rolled his eyes, muttering under his breath. "There are cats starving in Africa and here we are, buying enough food to feed an entire army for months every week. It's sad, really." Then he shook his head again and turned back to Tugger with a small smile.

"And of course he gives me and Tori an allowance every month. But he only gives us a small amount, I don't think he's ever given us more than a hundred pounds each. He says he has no problem paying for school and the things we need or make us happy, but he doesn't want us to rely on him for everything. He values hard work and working for your success and doesn't want to spoil us to the point where we expect him to hand us everything in life."

Tugger nodded and tilted his head to the side. "Hm, that's pretty smart. Don't want to spoil your kids so they end up like Amaryl."

This made Mistoffelees laugh and he covered his mouth with his paw. "No, you really don't." He took a deep breath and licked his lips. "My father and I have different views on a lot of things, but I respect that he has always wanted to teach us the value of hard work and encouraged us to find our own success rather than lean on his wealth."

They entered the dining room and Mistoffelees placed his bag in one of the chairs, prompting Tugger to do the same. "Let's sit in here. It's the most comfortable place to do homework in."

Mistoffelees, still very unsure of what to do, remembered how his father usually treated his guests when he invited his friends over and made his way towards the kitchen. "Can I get you anything, by the way? Water, tea, coffee?"

Tugger grinned widely. "Yeah, can I have some fur dye in my coffee?" Both of them started laughing for a good long minute before calming down.

"Well, I don't think we have any fur dye in the house at the moment, unfortunately, but I can go and get some of my father's fur tonic if that's alright." This got them laughing again before Mistoffelees waved at him to come with him into the kitchen.

"It's probably best that you make your own coffee, so you can pick what you want for yourself."

Their coffee machine was very nice, made out of metal and black plastic with a touch display showing several different kinds of coffee you could have. From regular coffee, espresso, cappuccino, latte and much more. The Deuteronomys' had a similar one back at home, but the one they had could only make coffee, espresso and cappuccino. Tugger tended to make two cappuccinos at once in a big cup, which was fairly similar to a latte but not quite the same. This was a bit more luxurious, that was for sure.

He looked up at Mistoffelees, who was rummaging around in a cupboard for tea bags. "I thought you said you weren't a big coffee person."

Mistoffelees paused in his rummaging to turn and look at Tugger, one eyebrow raised and his mouth a straight line. "Oh, yeah you're right, I'm not. I suppose we really should just get rid of it then, since there's no one else in this house who likes to drink coffee." He turned back to the cupboard and took out a box with tea with a long, exaggerated sigh. "Oh, what a waste of two thousand pounds."

At first Tugger smirked and turned back to the display, but then his words registered in his brain and he whirled around to stare at Mistoffelees. "Your dad bought a coffee machine for two thousand pounds?!"

Groaning loudly, Mistoffelees turned around to Tugger with a large tea mug in his paw which he placed on the counter before filling it with hot water. "Yes, that was my reaction too. I couldn't believe that he'd spent that much money on a coffee machine when there are so many others out there at a much more reasonable price. But he and Victoria both really love coffee so they wanted the best they could find." He poured a little milk into his tea and then turned back to Tugger. "Me, I'm fine with just sticking with tea and the occasional cup of coffee. Never saw the appeal in it and I still don't."

Tugger kept staring at him for a good long minute before he finally blinked and turned back to the coffee machine, shaking his head and grumbling under his breath. "The life of the one percent." Which prompted a small chuckle from Mistoffelees.

His own family was far from poor, they were limited to one income since it was only their dad working to support them all. Munkustrap had a part-time job at a bookstore and was able to pay for some of his things himself and though Tugger had tried to find a job too, he'd had no luck yet. So while they did have money, they did not have this much money that they could throw on a coffee machine.

"The day I become rich," He said, accepting a mug from Mistoffelees and pressed on the screen to make himself a latte. "I am going to buy myself a house like this and fill it with all of the expensive stuff, just because I can. And I'll commission huge paintings of myself that'll hang all over the damn house! Screw all of that typical rich-cat facade, I'll have five rooms with instruments, video games, an actual movie theatre in the living room and a damn bowling alley in the basement."

Mistoffelees snorted and shook his head. "You act as though there aren't rich cats out there in the world who have all those things."

@uppastthejelliclemoon @soh-da-meatball @storyweaverofgondor @whitmerule @demandra @i-overanalyze-musicals @rainbowratsstuff @rainbow-donkey @tigerstripes-and-leopardspots @tigertail94 @roxycake @roselessart

#jellicle arts for jellicle cats #cats the musical #cats musical #my writing #fic #my fic

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soulwillower · 4 years ago

Text

heather • richie tozier

(richie tozier x reader)

[based off the song heather by conan gray]

requested: OMG I HAVE AN IDEA IDK IF ITS GOOD AND IDK WHY IM TYPING IN ALL CAPS BUT CAN U DO A FIC WHERE LIKE ITS BASED OF YHE SONG HEATHER BY CONAN GRAY WHERE THE READER AND RICH HAVE BEEN BEST FRIENDS FOR SO MANY YEARS AND HAVE FEELINGS FOR EACHOTHER BUT THERE BOTH SO OBLIVIOUS- SO WHEN RICHIE LIKE GETS A GF ONE DAY THE READER JUST WHSKWHDIWHWIW IDK HOW TO EXPLAIN IT BUT LIKE AT THE END THEY REALIZE THEYRE IN LOVE. SORRY IF ITS TOK SPECIFIC. LOVE U. IM RUNNING OUTTA CHARACTERS

warnings: swearing, mentions of underage drinking, themes of cheating but no actual cheating, angst, fluff at the end, unedited.

thank u guys so much for being so patient with this fic <3 love u all so much!

[losers + reader are 18+ in this.]

4.4k words

(also, this fic starts with a flashback and idk if i like this style, but lmk if it works)

♡

the persistent beat thudding in your ears seems to do nothing more than dim your already low mood as you sip on lemonade by yourself in someone's basement bar, sitting on an uncomfortable metal barstool and leaning your head heavy against your chin.

these days, it seemed as though the world was painted in gray.

you look around almost lazily; bev and ben went outside in the snow a couple minutes ago, stan just took a girl upstairs - you're left alone now, because mike and eddie had to study for their exam and bill was feeling under the weather. and richie, as usual, was late.

there's almost twenty other people in the room right now, but you have no desire to speak to any of them. you've been trying to have fun tonight, but you're just having a hard time, feeling distracted and unable to stop thinking about wire framed glasses and a certain bright smile.

your wandering eyes halt your thoughts as a girl in your class - heather perez - catches your eye from across the room, her hair falling in natural curls that makes you sigh in envy. she smiles and waves at you warmly, gesturing for you to come and sit with her. you swallow and look down into your cup of dreary, graying lemonade as you try not to think about how you look in comparison. she's so fucking pretty. you look back up and shake your head with a friendly smile, faker than a plastic flower, and nod to the bathroom. she shrugs and smiles, turning back around.

she was too sweet, it hurt.

her naturally dark hair, long and wavy, her smooth dark skin, her laugh.... but suddenly, your head snaps back up after recognizing a familiar sight on heather's figure.

-is that richie's sweater?

your heart thumps and churns in the most unsavory way as all the breath leaves your lungs in one swift exhale. you feel sick to your stomach and your hand falls to hit the counter to stabilize yourself, the lemonade sloshing out of the cup slightly. but you pay no mind. heather's wearing richie's sweater...

you know that sweater really well. it's definitely his, and for some reason that makes you want to cry.

you blink and force yourself to suck air into your lungs as you look around quickly, anywhere but at heather perez wearing richie tozier's sweater, with all the stripes and patterns and the rough polyester material. you're not sure why you're so caught off-guard, you knew that heather perez was maybe-kinda-sorta seeing your trashmouth. he'd mentioned it in passing a few times and you've not been able to keep it off your mind as bev and bill whisper to richie about it in the halls or during hangouts when you were laying in stan's lap pretending not to hear it.

it hurts, though. holy hell, does it hurt when richie turns the corner and the typical, 'hey, richie!' choruses through most of the people in the basement - and yet his eyes are just set on her.

it hurts even worse when you make eye contact with him and he smiles at you, nodding in greeting and calling a "hey there, toots!" over the thumping of the noise before turning back towards heather.

your heart thumps erradically as you eye him sliding an arm around her shoulders easily, pulling her into his tall lanky frame, crushing your chest and deflating your trembling heart. heather's head falls onto richie's shoulder and you shiver, feeling colder than you've felt in so long. the lemonade you force to your lips tasting like stale water as the sight of richie pinching heather's shoulder and thumbing his own sweater on her frame make you feel empty.

even now, weeks later, you remember how it felt. you sip on the boiling tea and immediately burn your tongue, making you swear as you stare out your window, the snow falling around your house in the dark making you feel an odd, empty kind of peace. that fucking sweater.

you haven't talked to richie in almost a week and a half - he got in trouble the night after the party and his parents took his phone away - at eighteen years old, his parents took his phone - so that he could 'spend time with family' (a task that made you chuckle to yourself when bill had explained it to you about twelve days ago).

it's winter break, though, and you've been missing the last piece of your eight-person puzzle the last few times you've hung out with your friends. it feels empty without richie's boisterous shenanigans, snarky looks and goofy comebacks... you feel really embarrassed for missing him so deeply.

tears well up in your eyes as you think again about his damn sweater, the one that heather was wearing, the same one he'd given you not even three weeks prior.

"well look at you." richie says with amusement trickling through his voice like melting icewater through a calm creek. you spin towards him with a grin eclipsing your face as you shrug around his sweater, pretending not to smell his strong scent and pretending not to feel the immediate comfort it gives you.

"you know, for as dumb as it looks, i kind of like it." you tease, brushing some hair back from your eyes as the sweater sleeves fall back down past your hands. he laughs, eyes not leaving you for a second.

"shit, doll. keep it." he says, sounding serious. it makes you pull a face at him, starting to lift it slightly over your head to return it to its rightful owner.

but he shakes his head, hands gently gripping your arms and halting your motions, subsequently setting your heart on fire. his lips are set in a gentle grin as he shakes his head again. "it looks so much better on you."

it's spoken simply, in such honestly that it makes you blush nearly immediately. in fact, you're so flustered that all you can do is shove him a bit, stuttering out a quiet, "shut up, richie, you- i - okay, whatever."

it makes him chuckle as he takes the soft blow of your hands against his shoulders, deftly running his hands through his curly locks as he shakes his head. "you're adorable, kid."

you're lucky he'd turned around to gripe around on his messy bed for his laptop, because the stupid grin you're sure is painting your face is enough to make you dig your own grave and then hand him the shovel. if only he knew how much you liked him.

you didn't keep the sweater after that night, though. at the time, you'd told him it was because it was putrid; that the colors and patterns were a sin to man and that you'd never be caught dead wearing it out. he laughed the whole time because you had literally worn it to the store with him it with him that same day. but now, you'd give anything for richie to give you that sweater again, to feel that polyester inseam fall against your stomach and your arms and chest, like a huge richie hug (without all the bones and the cologne and the caffeine-pulsing heartbeat - so not a real richie hug, but as close as you could get to the real thing without actually just having it).

god, you like him too much. you rub your face with your palm, the moisture from the tears that had accidentally escaped your eyes smudging against your face. you're tired, almost - it's like an empty, heartbroken exhaustion that sags your shoulders and chokes your throat and makes you zone out for minutes at a time. one thought overwhelms you right now, so as you see a car's headlights shine out your window through the falling snow, you don't even notice it.

you just wish you were heather.

you've tried to hate her. really, you have - you figured maybe, just maybe, if you were able to rant to bev or eddie about how much of a bitch heather is, how she's terrible to richie and how boring she was, maybe you could justify the heartbreak in your chest.

but god, she's so perfect. heather, with her shiny hair, bright smile, her flawless mind and caring heart. she's, as far as you're concerned, an angel. of course richie would choose heather, who wouldn't?

the other day at that party, you'd tried your hardest to ignore your intrusive thoughts, but you can't help feeling like it would all be better if heather didn't exist. and even that thought alone hurts your heart, because you remember the smile on richie's face when he looked at her, swathed in his sweater and floating around the room like a beacon of light.

and you could never, ever in good conscience take that from richie.

you almost laugh at how absurd it is - now you're talking to yourself while you stare out the window, half asleep, dreaming of freckles placed just like constellations and crooked noses, of jawlines that jut out and long, lanky fingers; of loud, chipping laughter and beat up high-tops with cuffed corduroy pants.

"y/n?" a voice behind your door makes you jump a bit, unsettling your already disconcerted bones. you’re imagining him, now? you laugh into your scalding mug for a second, but after a double-take at the doorway you find the angel himself to be standing there with a perplexed look.

"richie, what're you doing here?" you ask, rubbing your eye to make sure no tears are left. he looks troubled. "i knocked, but nobody answered. so..." he says with a shrug, and you ned, tucking a leg under yourself and nodding.

"what are you doing, toots?" he asks, backlit by the hallway light. and then you finally can see what he's wearing, and you almost laugh at your own misery.

but you don’t laugh, your brain short-circuiting as you feel the knife twist further into your abdomen. the stupid fucking sweater.

“-um, nothing. y- did you get that back from heather?” you try to deliver the line as smoothly as possible, but by the look on his face, you did a real shit job at that.

“what?” he asks in an exhale as he shakes snowflakes from his hair and shoulders, closing your door as he walks towards you and falls to sit next to you on your windowsill seat.

“i thought you gave her that sweater.” you say and he raises a brow, “yeah, like two weeks ago.” he says slowly, eyeing you. he adds, “she obviously didn’t need it after that.”

you frown, “did she need it then?” you didnt try to sound bitter at all, but your voice comes with more of a sting than you’d anticipated.

as always, richie meets fire with fire. “it was twenty fuckin’ degrees out, she was wearing a tank top.”

you don’t know what to say so you just stare out the window with a quick huff, crossing your arms. "why does it matter? it's a sweatshirt." he mutters. "i was just being nice to her."

you nod, pain twisting around in your stomach. he's right, it's just a sweater. but he gave it to her, because he likes heather better.

“what’s up with you, kid?” he asks, gentler this time.

“don’t call me kid, richie.” you say sharply, not meeting his eyes. “and there’s nothing up with me.” you know you’re being difficult, but you really don't have the energy to argue with him right now.

it’s quiet again, and the silence is even more awkward. you take another scalding sip of your tea.

“um, y/n... is this because of heather?” he says after a bit. you feel the tension that the acknowledgment brings as it hits you in the thick, cold air. richie’s tapping a rhythm on his thigh, so you can tell he feels it too.

"richie." you say weakly, your voice coming out too quiet, too obviously broken and exhausted. "i cannot do this. please don't do this right now"

he blinks at you, eyebrows furrowed. "sugar, i'm so lost right now."

you decide to change the subject. "-why'd you come over?" you ask, actually looking at him then immediately regretting it. he looks hurt and confused, like a lost puppy.

"oh. um, i just need to tell you something.it's about heather, too." he sounds anxious, and you roll your eyes, looking down at the tree outside your room as wind blows powdery white mounds off its branches.

“can this just wait until tomorrow?” you whisper. doesn't he get it?

it's quiet and for a moment you believe that he's going to leave it, to not bring up the obvious jealousy brewing in your chest. but he breaks the silence too soon.

"i tried to kiss her." he says and you immediately look towards the door, the most immediate escape possible.

your breathing gets heavy; if you have to hear this, you know you'll admit your feeling to richie, and you don't want to do that to him. but you have a suspicion that he already knows.

"richie, i'm so, so glad to see you. and that you like heather. really, i am. but- it's not a good time. i'm not- i'm not okay." you say, voice thick as tears well behind your eyes.

richie’s eyes widen almost comically as you make eye contact and his hands immediately find purchase on your arms, his thumbs rubbing in the way that he has done ever since that one foggy summer you spent in the sewers. "y/n/n, what's wrong, sweetheart?" he asks, watching sadly as a tear slips from your cheek. it breaks your heart when he calls you sweetheart, and you shake your head.

you can't tell him the truth - that you love him, so instead, you mumble, "i've missed you. there's a lot going on, and i just really need you."

he looks guilty as he pulls you into a warm hug, one that takes you off guard but that you return gratefully. "you've been too busy spending time with heather and with your parents, and i understand that, i just - you know, i miss you." you say, voice muffled as your cheek is squished into his shoulder. he sighs shakily, pressing a kiss to the crown of your head. “i know i’ve been with her a lot, i’m sorry sugar.” he mutters.

it feels like you’re both holding something back from the other.

"i wish i were heather." you say against his shoulder, knowing richie’s completely unaware of the depth of your statement. but he pulls back and stares at you, an unknown look on his face. you open your mouth to say something, but you're cut off before you can get anything out.

and his lips fall against yours lightly, almost as if they’re ghosts against yours. his presence feels fleeting.

you barely close your eyes and press closer to him before you snap out of it, jerking backwards with wide eyes.

richie’s eyes fall open too as he looks at you questioningly. your heart is thumping heavy as you shake your head, more shocked than you thought ever possible. “what?” he asks, as if he’s surprised you’re not kissing back.

you give him a sad, broken look. you think you’ll cry as you mutter, "why would you ever kiss me? i'm not - i'm not nearly as pretty as her, i'm just-"richie suddenly looks like he might get sick, his face paler than usual as the steam from your tea dwindles idly between you. he cuts you off. "-why are you - why are you saying all these things y/n/n-”

“heather. you like heather.” you say frantically, trying to remind him so you dont have to live through this fresh faced heartbreak twice as painful if he kisses you again.

but richie shakes his head, and your confusion skyrockets just as much as your heartbeat."no. a-amy asked her out." he says breathlessly. "-she said yes."

you blink, pulling even further away as it dawns on you. "wait. so... so you only want to see me after the girl you wanted finds someone else?" you ask, watching as the smile gets smacked off of richie's face so quickly you think it may give him whiplash. "wait, no-" he starts, but you shake your head.

“richie, do you understand how hurtful that is?” you say, voice heavy as you try not to let tears fall.

he shakes his head, eyes glossing with tears as he gapes at you, “n-no, y/n-“

“fuck, richie. i know you know about my feelings for you. how could you do this? i’m not heather, i’m reminded that every time i’m in the same room as the two of you. she’s had you completely mesmerized for the last month, you can’t just use me to distract yourself.” you say, your tea completely forgotten as a tear escapes your eye.

he shakes his head, looking at you with an emotion you don’t have the energy to decipher. “leave, richie.” your voice is broken and it shakes as you look away from him.

you’re not sure what you were expecting, but when richie stands up silently you dont even look away from the window. you see him wipe his cheek in your peripheral before he sighs quietly and walks out of your room, shutting the door quietly.

you cry openly as you hear your door shut downstairs, your hands shaking as you cover your face, your shoulders shaking with sobs. you make it under your covers just as you hear a car engine sputter outside, your heart empty and lips still tingling as the feeling of richie’s lips linger on yours. you groan into your pillow and let out another sob, your eyes squeezing in agony as your heart feels like it’s ripping in two.

because even if they’re not together, richie still likes her.

why couldn’t you be heather?

you cry until you’re asleep, your now cold mug of tea resting on the windowsill as your phone charges next to you and snow swirls in the dark sky.

when you wake up the next morning, your headache is nearly blinding. you feel like crying more as you remember last night. you roll over and rub your eyes, unlocking your phone groggily.

but you check your notifications and your heart immediately stops as you see a missed call from richie at 3:49 in the morning last night, and a voicemail left a minute later.

well, you guess he got his phone back.

your fingers tremble as they hover above the play button, feeling like you may vomit from anxiety - the message he left is two minutes long.

closing your eyes, ready for even more heartbreak, you press play and hold the speaker to your ear.

“um, y/n.” the voicemail starts off, and you’re already tearing up because richie’s voice is full to the brim with anxiety and he’s not using his usual nicknames for you.

“uh... okay, i- i know it’s four in the morning, and you’re probably asleep - god, i hope you are, and that you’re not ignoring me. not that i dont deserve it, but i just want you to get good rest. uh, a-anyways. fuck,” there’s an awkward pause and you’re holding your breath.

“you know i’m not good with phone calls or voicemails-“ his rambling just adds to your anxious feeling, but you think if you don’t listen to this, your anxiety would eat you alive.

“- fuck, i don’t know how to say this. kind of ironic, i guess, since i’ve been thinking about saying it like every day for probably more than a year- okay, i’m... god, spit it out, trashmouth.” his voice gets thicker and you can hear the emotion as he takes a shallow breath.

“y/n/n, you make my hands shake. i swear, my heart feels like it’s going to backfire and explode when we touch... and it scares me so fucking bad.” you feel your heart halt in your chest, the air leaving your lungs.

you keep the phone pressed tightly to your ear as richie’s recorded voice goes on.

“-fuck, y/n. i’m terrified. sometimes i think.... like, whoever created me... they designed me just to be yours. and... it’s not in the same way i feel about bev, or bill, or eddie-“ his voice breaks as he sniffs on the other end and it dawns on you that he’s crying. “-you’re you. you’re y/n. i tried to like heather as more than just a friend. but...” it’s silent for a second.

“i just kept comparing her to you. i do that with everybody. i think i’m broken. i love you so much that it hurts.” he’s crying enough by now that it’s leaking into his speech; he’s hiccuping, stuttering slightly, his inflection changing as you can almost picture the tears rolling off his thick eyelashes and onto his rosy cheeks.

“-and i can’t sleep right now knowing that i hurt you like this. i can’t believe that i let you think of yourself as lesser than heather in any way-“ he sobs quietly in the recording and takes a stuttering breath. "i can’t believe i put myself before you. i’m such a shitty friend. i should’ve been giving you my stupid fucking sweaters the whole time.”

tears are pouring out of your eyes as you sit up, ripping the comforter off your legs. you’re pulling on socks and your shoes as you continue to listen to richie’s voicemail.

“i’m sorry that i kissed you, and i’m sorry that i dragged you into this m-mess, that i used heather as an excuse to ignore my feelings for you. i-i love you so fucking much, and i’m just so scared of hurting you. i’m so sorry that i hurt you, y/n.”

you have to see him.

“-and, um, i’m sorry i left this voice message. this is probably the worst way to find this out but i figured that it would be easier for us to ignore if it wasn’t in person- y’know, because you don’t have to respond. just- now you know. that i’m sorry, and that i don’t expect you to forgive me or want to speak to me for a while. i just- i need you to know that you’re so loved, y/n. and that you deserve so much better than me.

“so, um, okay. i’ll let you sleep now. b-bye.” he whispers the end and then the line cuts dead.

you’re left with shaking breath and tears in your eyes as his voice rings in your head. you try to take in what he’s just said, but you think you’re about to pass out.

how can richie love you back?

you brush your teeth almost aggressively as your heart beats erratically in your chest and then you’re suddenly flying down the snowy road towards the tozier’s house.

you realize too late that you look completely awry, hair unbrushed, eyes puffy and swollen, shoes untied as you knock on the front door of richie's house.

went opens the door, richie’s younger sister sat on his hip as he smiles at you, "y/n! long time no see. richie's upstairs in his room."

you smile at him in thanks, too rushed to say anything to him or munch. then you’re all but sprinting up the stairs, only feeling the anxiety as you throw open the door to his bedroom.

you're relieved that he's laying in his bed, surrounded by pillows and fluffy comforters as he jumps from the noise of your arrival.

when he sits up, neither of you say anything. his eyes are red and rimmed with tears, a heartbreaking sight as his lower lip trembles slightly. you're sure you look the same as you take a step towards his bed, your eyes not leaving each other's for a second.

he looks incredible, still.

"y/n..." he whispers finally, his eyes wide. "did you get my message?" he says, lips tilting in a stupid, forced smile. his voice holds no humor in it's sad thickness, though, and you sigh as you look down to the carpet.

you shake your head, "can you not joke for a minute, rich?"

he laughs wetly, standing up fully and although he towers at 6'0, he looks so small. "i can try, doll, but then i'll start to cry a lot, and that's just not what anybody wants-"

"richie." you say, effectively ceasing his rambling. it's cold in his room, bright white from the snow outside, and silent. he looks at you with huge eyes and a red nose.

but you don't know what to say. you’ve spent so long wanting to be heather, but now you've found out that richie's loved you this whole time. it hurts, but you can't wait another second being away from richie.

you launch yourself towards him, grabbing the back of his neck and pulling him down to your mouth.

this time, the kiss is warm, unexpected again but much more loving. it's a kiss that tastes like tears and love and trust, and all you can feel is richie as his hands find purchase on your cheek and back, pulling you so close to him that you can feel is rapid heartbeat.

he pulls back to mumble against your lips, "i'm so sorry." you shake your head, pressing another kiss to his and loving the feeling of richie against you finally. "i love you." you say, feeling his grin against your mouth.

"i love you so much." he says, pulling you lightly to fall onto his bed with him and tickling your sides.

you laugh lightly, swatting at his prodding fingers. "please stop crying." he whispers, laying above you with a small smile. you roll your eyes, "you stop crying rich." you retort, and he shakes his head, one of his tears falling onto your cheek. you jump from the feeling and wipe it away, sniffling a gasp and pulling him into a tight hug, his legs tangling with yours.

“i’m sorry.” he mumbles. you cup his cheeks so his lips pucker out and you smile at him, whispering, “i forgive you, rich. i love you.” and then you place a soft kiss to his lips and he kisses you back enthusiastically. he pulls back and hugs you again, burrowing himself in your neck.

"i didn't think i'd ever get you." he says, muffled by his face in your shoulder. "thank you for trusting me. i love you so much." he kisses your collarbone lightly and your fingers play through his curls lightly as you smile, eyes closing. you're so tired.

"i love you more, richie."

you fall asleep with richie curled up beside you, his breath light on your chest and arms clutching you against him. you fall asleep with richie’s lips on your neck, his legs entangled with yours.

you fall asleep contently, knowing that you no longer have to wish you were heather.

tag list: @gabiatthedisco @blisshemmings @stenbrozier @simplesammyx @brxken-heartsclub @clownsloveyou @moon-shine-baby @daughter-of-the-stars11 @trashedfortozier @oceandog13 @finnskindofwoman @kait-tozier @upamongthestarss @fiantomartell @beverlyparkerr @beauregard-s @diorbubs @leighjaenikhowell @cowbellies @deepestofwaters <33

#richie tozier x reader #losers x reader #losers club x reader #jewish richie tozier #bill denbrough x reader #stanley uris x reader #beverly marsh x reader #eddie kaspbrak x reader #ben hanscom x reader #mike hanlon x reader

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rockislandadultreads · 3 years ago

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World Oceans Day 2021: A Reading List!

Oceans: The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide by Jon Bowermaster (Editor)

More than 75 percent of the globe is covered by the oceans. It is sometimes difficult to understand why it is called Planet Earth rather than Planet Ocean. Since half the world's human population lives within a stone's throw of an ocean coastline, the oceans' health is increasingly important. Rich with resources and potential -- as a source of renewable energy, new drugs, drinking water -- for years we have treated them as both infinite and undamageable. But they are not. Over-fishing, climate change, pollution, acidification, and more have put the world's oceans and marine life at great risk. Oceans gathers some of the most insightful visionaries, explorers, and ocean lovers -- marine biologists, politicians, environmentalists, fishermen, sportsmen, deep divers, and more -- in a unique anthology, in which each speaks to a unique aspect of our world's most dimly understood dimension.

Waters of the World: the story of the scientists who unravelled the mysteries of our seas, glaciers, and atmosphere and made the planet whole by Sarah Dry

From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the Caribbean and the unexpectedly chaotic flows of the North Atlantic, Waters of the World is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story. Linking the history of the planet with the lives of those who studied it, Sarah Dry follows the remarkable scientists who ascended volcanic peaks to peer through an atmosphere’s worth of water vapour, cored mile-thick ice sheets to uncover the Earth’s ancient climate history, and flew inside storm clouds to understand how small changes in energy can produce both massive storms and the general circulation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Each toiled on his or her own corner of the planetary puzzle. Gradually, their cumulative discoveries coalesced into a unified working theory of our planet’s climate. We now call this field climate science, and in recent years it has provoked great passions, anxieties, and warnings. But no less than the object of its study, the science of water and climate is — and always has been — evolving. By revealing the complexity of this history, Waters of the World delivers a better understanding of our planet’s climate at a time when we need it the most.

Future Sea: How to Rescue and Protect the World’s Oceans by Deborah Rowan Wright

The world’s oceans face multiple threats: the effects of climate change, pollution, overfishing, plastic waste, and more. Confronted with the immensity of these challenges and of the oceans themselves, we might wonder what more can be done to stop their decline and better protect the sea and marine life. Such widespread environmental threats call for a simple but significant shift in reasoning to bring about long-overdue, elemental change in the way we use ocean resources. In Future Sea, ocean advocate and marine-policy researcher Deborah Rowan Wright provides the tools for that shift. Questioning the underlying philosophy of established ocean conservation approaches, Rowan Wright lays out a radical alternative: a bold and far-reaching strategy of 100 percent ocean protection that would put an end to destructive industrial activities, better safeguard marine biodiversity, and enable ocean wildlife to return and thrive along coasts and in seas around the globe. Future Sea is essentially concerned with the solutions and not the problems. Rowan Wright shines a light on existing international laws intended to keep marine environments safe that could underpin this new strategy. She gathers inspiring stories of communities and countries using ocean resources wisely, as well as of successful conservation projects, to build up a cautiously optimistic picture of the future for our oceans—counteracting all-too-prevalent reports of doom and gloom. A passionate, sweeping, and personal account, Future Sea not only argues for systemic change in how we manage what we do in the sea, but also describes steps that anyone, from children to political leaders (or indeed, any reader of the book), can take toward safeguarding the oceans and their extraordinary wildlife.

Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson

The Smithsonian's star paleontologist takes us to the ends of the earth and to the cutting edge of whale research Whales are among the largest, most intelligent, deepest diving species to have ever lived on our planet. They evolved from land-roaming, dog-like creatures into animals that move like fish, breathe like us, can grow to 300,000 pounds, live 200 years and roam entire ocean basins. Whales fill us with terror, awe, and affection--yet we know hardly anything about them, and they only enter our awareness when they die, struck by a ship or stranded in the surf. Why did it take whales over 50 million years to evolve to such big sizes, and how do they eat enough to stay that big? How did their ancestors return from land to the sea? Why do they beach themselves? What do their lives tell us about our oceans, and evolution as a whole? Importantly, in the sweepstakes of human-driven habitat and climate change, will whales survive? Nick Pyenson's research has given us the answers to some of our biggest questions about whales. Nick's rich storytelling takes us to the cool halls deep inside the Smithsonian's priceless fossil collection, to the frigid fishing decks on Antarctic whaling stations, and to the blazing hot desert of Chile where scientists race against time to document the largest fossil whalebone site on earth. Spying on Whales is science writing at its best: an author who is an incredible, passionate writer, at the forefront of his field, on a topic that invokes deep fascination.

#nonfiction #non-fiction #nonfiction books #science #nature #world oceans day #oceans #deep sea #book recs #reading recommendations #environment #climate change #activist #to read #tbr #booklr #whales #history

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hargrove-mayfields · 4 years ago

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You’re The One I Want To Go Through Time With

Day one of HWOL is finally here!! So excited to share all I’ve written! For today I chose the prompt Neighbors AU!!! You can read this on ao3 also as part of the collection as well!! Hope y’all like it!!

Word Count: 11,952

Rated: G

It finally happens when he’s 15 years old. It’s not like he hasn’t seen it coming, but Steve gets kicked out.

In the very beginning of a particularly brutal Hawkins summer, he had decided to invite Tommy over to smoke weed in the pool house. He thought nothing of it, but the neighbors complained about the smell, and, coupled with every other act of his deemed irresponsible, immature, disgraceful, by his stuck-up parents, a couple of blunts was apparently the last straw.

They tell him the Harringtons had a reputation, an air of elegance and respect they had to upkeep, so they couldn’t just let him bring drugs onto their property. He thought it was ridiculous, considering that they were allowed as much wine aging in the cellar and expensive whiskey propped up on a hutch as they wanted, but when he’d brought it up he’d gotten nothing but a stern look.

They’d been through this a thousand times over, how worthless and terrible a son he could be, grounding him for bringing too many girls home, taking his car away when he failed a class, so he knew to expect a punishment.

This is obviously the next step, the throwing him out on the street thing, for years he could feel the neglect and tension starting to build up and boil over. Sometimes, they’d even hang threats of it over his head, so now that was told he had to be out of the mansion by the end of next week or there would be consequences, it couldn’t be too much of a shocker.

Though at some point, he’s got to wonder if they ever really thought as far ahead as consequences, or if they just knew they trained their boy well enough that it never got that far. If only he had more of a spine.

Now, as unsurprising as the scenario may be, Steve was still absolutely in no way, by any means ready to be thrown out on the streets before he even had his driver’s license.

In the case of emergency, like the time Stephen Sr. got just a little too rough and popped his wrist out of place, or when they’d left him alone for a month at age 9 and he went three days without food because he didn’t know how to turn the stove on, he had his aunt, the thankfully much more compassionate counterpart to his mother, who lived over in California.

The minute they’re gone, having passive aggressively hurried off somewhere, probably the country club or something, to complain about how disappointing their son was with their rich friends, Steve grabs a suitcase from the closet and gives his Aunt Margaret a call.

Before he knows it she’s got him a flight booked, a written agreement from her sister that proved taking him in was legal, and a set of luggage. Three days later, he was flying first class towards the rest of his life.

~~~~~~~

Touching down in San Francisco has got to be the most surreal thing he’s ever done.

He’d never even left the Midwest before, his farthest ventures being into the three states surrounding his home state, so to be charted off to the west coast? It’s an experience alright.

Aunt Margaret is there waiting for him, her jet black permed hair a few inches above the rest, her brown eyes sparkling with the kindest smile he’s ever seen as she runs up to hug him.

She takes all of his bags, swatting his hands away when he tries to carry even one, and makes him sit in the car while she shoves it all into the trunk.

He wasn’t used to not being the help, since that’s all his parents ever really saw him as anyways, only valuable as their son if they got something out of the time they spent with him. It’s got him feeling weird the whole drive back to the Margos apartment, like he’s in some alternate reality where people are nice to him for a change.

She lives in one of those shared places, a duplex where the house is divided into two halves for two different renters, the very kind his mother would’ve turned her nose up at despite having been raised in one herself. Margaret told him there was a mother and son who lived in the other half, but they’re quiet enough, and polite.

Just pulling up outside of the house, Steve already knows it’s everything he’s ever wanted.

The house itself, painted a pale shade of peeling yellow and missing the majority of the shingles off of the roof, is actually a reasonable size, a direct contrast to the mansion he grew up in, fit for a dozen but occupied by one most days.

Brutal summer heat has dried up the lawn and the garden so they aren’t perfectly tailored, not trimmed by underpaid staff or watered by automatic sprinklers. All across it there’s a scattering of ornaments, like colorful pinwheels in the front garden, and plastic flamingos standing guard by the mailbox.

There’s even a rickety old fence, all mossy and broken up to mark the edges of their property, so different from the white vinyl fence in his backyard at his parents house.

It would seem too that the garage was only big enough for one car, not three like he was used to, and that the makeshift gravel driveway leading up to it was at max capacity with only his aunts Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais, and a dinged up old Karmann Ghia the same color as the house parked in it.

Basically, there were none of the telltale signs that a neglected rich boy lived there, and from that alone he already knew he belonged here.

His aunt hurries him into their section of the house, theirs is the right side, so he can get to resting off the jet lag before he starts unpacking, but he’s far too distracted taking everything in to worry about being a little drowsy.

The rooms are small and the ceilings are low. Where there would’ve been beige and white and other sophisticated tones, there was a rainbow of colors in Margos apartment, from the curtains to the carpet, the Afghan on the back of the couch to the little trinkets in the entertainment center and windowsills.

He notices that, to accommodate for the heavy summer heat, there was a fan spinning in the corner, and all the windows were left wide open. His parents had the windows painted shut back home.

It might’ve been overwhelming, being thrown into a place like this so suddenly, but in his heart he knows this was what he was made for: a cozy life with someone who treated him with the bare minimum of respect.

~~~~~~~

Eventually Steve does fall asleep, the switch from Eastern Standard to Pacific time just being too great for his body. He doesn’t really mean to, he thought he’d just lay down for a minute while he was putting his clothes away in his new dresser, but he ends up sleeping until it’s almost dark out.

He goes looking for Margo when he realizes the house is empty, an irrational pit of dread growing in his chest at the familiarity of being alone, and finds her out back.

The yard also seems to be shared with the other house, a wispy line of barely showing through grass separating the two where a divider had once been, but had since been ripped up.

His aunt is with another woman, a blonde lady who he assumed was from the next door apartment, were sitting in mismatched lawn chairs, cigarettes glowing as the sun got lower and lower in the sky.

Margaret beckons him over once she notices him, and shows him off to the woman. It’s not at all like his mother would’ve done it, none of the flaunting him to make a good impression. This is more like her wanting to introduce him because she genuinely cares.

In a way, it almost makes Steve more uneasy. He could handle all the fake stuff with only the slightest hint of discomfort at being gawked at, because most of the time he’d never have to see those people again, but this was astronomically different.

“Maria, this is my nephew Steve.” Deep blue eyes seem to take him in, accompanied by a polite smile that makes his stomach drop for no good reason.

He panics, shifts into the role of the perfect little socialite he’d been working on his whole life. Without thinking, he extends his hand for her to and produces the generic response his mother’d trained into him. “It’s a pleasure to meet you Ms..”

She takes his hand, but looks a little surprised about doing it. “Hargrove. But we don’t have to do formalities.”

“Right.” It feels awkward to Steve, but judging from the laid back attitude of the women, it’s not a universal sentiment. That only makes it more embarrassing, to be the only one bothered by it.

His aunt leans back in her chair, tapping the ash of the end of her cigarette and tells him, “Go ahead and grab a chair Stevie.”

He straightens his back out and scans the yard, expecting a chair to already be propped open somewhere. The confusion must be apparent on his face when he finds nothing but grass and more grass, because his aunt specifies, “By the shed, kiddo.”

His parents always told him they weren’t allowed to have lawn furniture except the pool chairs cemented to the ground, because they said it didn’t fit the lifestyle they tried to lead. Even the concept of a shed would’ve been insulting to their tastes.

He's done enough growing up to know now that they were just afraid to look too much like they were people who lived in rural Indiana instead of in true big city luxury. They couldn’t risk seeming too much like they weren’t in the upper middle, it would be a disgrace.

The contrast between that and just sitting out there and not having his guard up is so, grounding. Not having anything at all to do but just, sit and appreciate instead of performing and worrying, it’s a lot to take in at once.

He was so nervous the whole way up, even though it was his aunt and he already knew she was nice, that they wouldn’t get along, since that’s the way things always were with his own mum, and lord knows he hardly ever even spoke to his father.

But it’s really not tense at all, actually, it’s sort of the opposite. For once in his life he feels free of expectations, and takes the moment to just exist. Ruthie and Stephen Sr. had long ago made sure that was a concept he could barely understand.

It’s not too long after that that the screen door to Maria’s side of the house swings open, scaring Steve so bad he almost tips his chair over as he startles.

There’s a boy who he’s guessing is about his age leaning out the door, but from the distance he’s at and with how dark it’s getting, Steve doesn’t see much else about him. “M back momma.”

“Okay baby.” The screen door clicks shut again in the next moment, and Maria offers Steve an apologetic smile “You’ve gotta excuse my Billy. He’s not too good with other kids.”

“No, it’s alright.” He assures her, like a polite social butterfly should.

Maria goes in a little while after that, and Margaret and Steve follow suit, since the sun’s almost all the way down.

But Steve’s curious now. He wants to know more about the boy, Billy, he thinks was what Maria called him. It’s only right to wonder, being that they’re neighbors now and all.

It gets brought up later that night, when they’re watching TV on the couch, a thrifted, feather stuffed thing he thought was simultaneously the most hideous and most comfortable thing he’d ever sat on.

“I didn’t know you had neighbors.” He’d been trying to work himself up to talking about it, sitting in the corner of the couch in a little ball and picking at his nails as he worked up his courage.

It was funny, being so nervous over casual conversation, but he guesses he could blame his parents for that one.

His own mum wouldn’t have even paid him any mind, at most pretending to listen while her eyes stayed trained to the television or magazine or coworker in front of her and hummed a non committal response, but Margo turns her whole body on the couch to face him while she answers him, with a complete sentence even. “Oh, people used to come and go all the time over there.”

“How long have they been here? Maria and her son?”

She thinks for a moment, a little surprised at her nephew's interest in the topic of their neighbors. “I don’t know, probably about a year or so now.”

“What’re they like?” He comes across as maybe a little too eager, and his aunt notices.

“What’s got you so curious?” There’s a teasing bit of reprimanding in her tone, just enough to suggest that she knows he’s being a nib-nose, but doesn’t mind it.

And he feels himself flush, because he is being nosy. To try to save face just a little, he comes up with an excuse that isn’t quite a lie. “Nothin’, just knew all my neighbors back in Hawkins, I guess.”

But she wasn’t upset with him, it wasn’t her intention to get him to shut up, like it would’ve been had he heard the same thing from one Ruthie Harrington, so she answers that question too. “I don’t know, they’re nice, sort of reserved, but I’ve never had any problems with them.”

~~~~~~

The two boys are properly introduced for the first time the next morning, when Steve goes out to fetch the mail for Margret. It feels like the least he can do for bumming off of his aunt.

Stepping out on the porch just shy of 8 in the morning and not seeing dewey grass, or the early sunshine muted behind rolling fog and dreary clouds is something he’s going to have to get used to.

Summers in Hawkins were always muggy, full of thunderstorms and unpredictably dreary days. San Francisco is so bright, so different, and such a relief.

While Steve basks in it, the already warm breeze and the sun shining bright, the neighbors’ door opens up and Billy comes out to do the same, standing on his tip-toes to reach up into the mailbox beside the door, holding a traveler's mug of coffee in the opposite hand.

When he turns around to go back inside, Steve, staying true to wanting to get to know the other boy better, has taken a few steps closer, and has extended a hand for Billy to shake, the same sort of introduction panic he’d felt last night.

But, Billy, seeing that his hands are a bit preoccupied by a stack of bills and a cup of coffee, just offers a sheepish smile.

Steve settles for a formal introduction without a handshake, though it’s still too stiff an interaction to really get to know him beyond the awkward new rich kid in town. “Hi. My name is Steve Harrington. I’m uh, I'm your new neighbor.”

“Pleasure to meet you Steve Harrington. M’Billy” They stand there, neither of them making any move to do anything but just look at one another. Billy clears his throat and shakes the coffee cup towards Steve, sensing that maybe this was the place for hospitality. “You want some? My momma always makes too much.”

“No thanks. I’m uh, allergic to coffee beans.”

“Huh.” He seems amused by that, scrunches his nose up like he doesn’t believe it, and Steve wants to curl up and disappear. “I’ll see you later then, Steve Harrington.”

He watches the other boy turn back to leave after that, and still sort of just stands there before his brain comes back on and he realizes he should say something in return. “Right, uh, bye.”

It’s just a moment's passing, but Steve can’t get the interaction out of his head.

He chalks it up to being nervous that his new neighbors won’t like him, the fear that Aunt Margo will send him back to his parents if he can’t get along here, and that makes logical sense, except, what he’s caught up on is Billy’s crooked smile, and his blond curls that lay just past his ears, messy from just waking up and bleached from the sun, and the spatter of dark freckles across his nose.

First full day in California and he has a crush on the neighbor kid. He can’t believe himself.

There isn’t very much time to mull that fact over though, because, over breakfast, what his aunt calls her ‘special occasion breakfast’ of cinnamon rolls with ice cream, she tells him she’s going to do some errands today.

And that’s alright, he tells her he’ll be fine all by himself, and he is, for the first few hours, but the more time she’s gone, the worse and worse he starts to feel. It’s that worry again, that deep rooted fear that he’ll be left alone forever.

Experience has taught him to try to calm himself down, to catch his breath and try to focus on the fact that he knows he’s being irrational, but those techniques don’t cut it, as they often don’t, and he’s sending himself further into a panic attack trying to think too hard about it

Sitting inside, he gets stir crazy, feels suffocated by everything that had before been inviting to him, so he goes for some fresh air out front. Watching the road for so long, just waiting for the Oldsmobile to pull up, he starts to feel antsy again, so he goes out back where it’s quiet instead.

There’s a glider on the porch back there, an old rusty thing that squeaked every time Steve rocked it forward or back, but the calming motion of it is probably the only thing keeping him from spiraling too far.

He doesn’t really know what time it is anymore, only that he’s hungry, and that the sun’s going down, and that he’s been sort of zoned out back there for a long while. He feels hot and cold at the same time, and he’s lost in his head.

The sound of a screen door gently tapping against the side of the house brings his eyes up from the spot on the ground he’d been staring at with tears in his eyes, but it isn’t his aunt Margaret coming home, it’s just Billy.

With his hands stuffed in his pockets, leaning against the wall between the back doors, he says real quiet like, “Momma told me to ask if you wanted some of the dinner she made.”

He shrugs. “I’m alright.”

“I figured.” Billy looks at the floor while he tries to figure out how he wants to approach this. For a long moment, neither of them say a word, no sound between them but distant field crickets, until Billy asks, his voice quiet enough it barely registers in Steve’s mind. “You okay?”

If he’s being entirely honest, Steve doesn’t really know if he’s okay. He trusted his aunt enough to move all the way across the country with her, and yet he can’t manage enough trust to believe her when she said she’d come home from some errands? Doesn’t sound too okay to him.

But he’s not in Hawkins, he’s away from the people he knows for sure wouldn’t be coming back for him unless it was to pull something like they had and treat him like garbage. So in a way, he guesses he’s better than ever.

Unable to think of any words that might convey what he’s thinking, Steve just shrugs again, but Billy seems to get it. He sits down next to Steve on the glider and plants his feet so it won’t move, and so Steve’s attention will be on him.

Knowing he’s got Steve’s focus, since he looks over at him with glossy eyes, Billy tries to reassure him, “Your aunt’s a good lady. She wouldn’t leave you.”

“Who said I thought she would?” It sounds pathetic, wet and stuffy with the remnants of tears he hadn’t known were falling, but there’s a vulnerability he couldn’t hide behind even the toughest of masks that reveals he isn’t being honest.

“The way you watched for her car said enough.” It makes Steve feel exposed, having a total stranger see right through him, but Billy explains himself. “When my momma went out looking for this place, I was sure I’d never see her again.”

“Why did you guys move here?” If he was going to psychoanalyze Steve, he felt it was only fair to ask Billy a pressing question back.

“I’ll tell you if you tell me.” He deflects it back onto Steve in a way that might’ve seemed cocky, but it's obvious he’s just trying to avoid the question.

Steve won’t let him win this one though, maybe just to save his own ego, or pretend like he hadn’t been caught crying by someone he met that morning, or maybe it was just because he had asked first, but he wants Billy to answer, so he tells him, with the slightest hint of a bashful smile playing at his lips, “You first.”

“Stubborn.” He cracks a smile back though, and goes ahead and goes first at the other boys insistence. “My dad’s a real nasty s.o.b. Would get drunk and mean for no good reason, so momma took me and we high-tailed it before he did anything too drastic.”

He didn’t know what he was expecting, why he even felt like it was any of his business, and he doesn’t know what he should say to that.

For lack of a better response, he gives his own little life story summary. “My parents were rich. They didn’t want me, so they have the time of day for me. No matter what I did they punished me for it, grounded me, hit me, sent me to Christian school, until they just got sick of me, I guess.”

“That sounds pretty shitty.” Billy offered.

“Yeah, yours too.”

After a while, Billy, sounding for a moment like he’s a lot wiser than any 14 year old has the right to be, says “What matters is we’re here now.”

Steve feels so touched hearing that. It was so simple a thing for the other boy to say, but coming from Billy after he’d just shared what he did, it means a lot more than just basic condolences.

Hardly anybody had ever been that genuine in anything they said to him. Steve can hardly force a response out of his shocked mouth. As he looks over at Billy’s face, still turned up towards the sky, he sees all that meaning there illuminated by the stars, and he's able to mutter a breathless, “Yeah.” in response.

They both jump when the door flies open, and aunt Margo comes running over to Steve. Frantically she explains that she’d been trying to make sure everything was legal, only to find that some of Steve’s papers were missing, and they had to try to track them all down and get some of them faxed, and it ended up taking way longer than expected.

It feels nice to be understood. Just a few years ago his parents left for what was supposed to be a three day trip to Indianapolis, only they didn’t come back for what was almost two months. Once they were home they didn’t even mention it, just continued going about their business as usual until it was time to leave again. His aunt taking the effort to explain herself was already a vast improvement from that.

He lets her pull him into a big hug, accepts her apology as the air is squeezed out of his lungs, and when he pulls away from her, Billy’s gone.

~~~~~~~

Finish reading on ao3! You can find this posted under the same title by ej_writer or as part of the hwol collection over there! Sorry tumblrs word limits deemed this too long!

#harringrove week of love #billy x steve #harringrove #steve harrington #billy hargrove #story by ej!#this is both a neighbors au and a billy lives with his mother au!#and there's no upside down!#you can also maybe probably read this as autistic billy! it wasnt intentional but that happens sometimes #if its a fluffy fic chances are 90% of the time someones going to end up neurodivergent bc my autstic brain can’t help it #disclaimer I think tumble deleted a paragraph or two from this so if it doesn’t make sense just go ahead and find it on ao3 lol #can y'all tell I've never left the midwest and was sorta just guessing what california is like #the closest experience I had to what I wanted the vibes to be like was growing up on my mawmaws property in the country #and thats deffo not even a little bit the same but hey. work with what ya got!#out of all of the prompts I think this'n turned out to be one of my favorites to write #its kind of all over the place but that's okay lol #lord knows I never intended it to be this long either #this is barely edited because i stayed up literally all night to finish this because I procrastinated it too hard haha

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whitherwhence · 4 years ago

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Monstrous May Challenge, Day 6: The Lycanthrope

Honey Bear

A werebear comes out of hibernation, the townsfolk welcome her back. Some clumsy flirting, and a little bit of soft manhandling (bearhandling?). wlw. 1428 words, somehow.

She always came down from the mountain just before mid-spring, after taking a few weeks or so to shake her winter sleep off her bones and bulk back up a little. You couldn’t miss her as she strode through town, she was tall and broad, brawny and thick as hell, friendly with literally everyone she passed, and her laugh could be heard from a block away.

Her name was Rebecca, or maybe it was Rhiannon, something with an R — but all anyone ever called her was Bear. An unoriginal nickname for a werebear, sure, but fitting. Everything about Bear seemed big; her voice, her appetite, her arms, oh god, her arms, and she took up SPACE wherever she went. She was the only one of her kind in this part of the country, and the humans of the small town she called home for most of the year were grateful for it. It wasn’t that they didn’t like her, she was very well loved and respected in the community. It’s that werebears could be a bit territorial, or so it was generally believed.

Madeline couldn’t wait to see her. This spring, she would make her move. She would! She was definitely going to do it. Whatever ‘it’ was. Ugh. How is anyone good at this? Alright. It’s cool, be cool. She would come up with something clever to say, and Bear would laugh, and then she would ask Bear to… hang out or something? Yeah. Probably. Super good plan.

The unanimously favored queer club/tavern/bar was an absolute dive, nearly all of the bars downtown were, but it was the one everyone flocked to once winter had thawed because it had a big, comfortable patio space out back. It was also the one Bear frequented the most.

Madeline got a beer at the bar, and then made her way through the cool, dark, dingy, arcade-like interior, and through the back door to the shaded patio. Bear was on the deep bench built into the long back fence, and she was surrounded by a cluster of friends and neighbors, all chatting and laughing. It looked almost like she was holding court, if court was a group of townsfolk and a wooden table littered with half-full drinks, bar snacks, greeting cards, and small gifts — this was typical for the time of year, because everyone treated the first week of Bear’s return like it was her birthday.

“MADDIE!” a few would-be courtiers shouted out cheerfully, and someone conjured one of the well-used plastic chairs with battered metal legs for her to join them. She’d dressed carefully, it looked like everyone had, and it was so good to see them all showing off a little in the filtered afternoon sunlight.

After getting settled and saying hellos, Madeline dug her little gift out of her bag and set it on the table. “Hey, Bear,” she said, getting the woman’s attention, “I brought you something.” It was a jar of dark, rich, wildflower honey from her neighbor’s fall harvest. He always set aside a few jars for her, and this batch had been too good to keep to herself. She turned on her best wide-eyed, exaggeratedly innocent expression and aimed it at the werebear. “Bears do like honey, right?”

Thankfully, Bear laughed big and wonderful, and it sent blooming warmth from Madeline’s chest to her toes. “Well, this one does,” Bear said good-naturedly. She picked up the jar, tipped it, and watched the air bubble move down the side. She smiled at it and said, “Thanks, Maddie. Very kind of you, looks real good.” She looked back up at Madeline, and her smile softened into something really sweet. They just sat there for a moment, smiling and blinking softly at each other like a couple of goofballs. So, this was going well.

These springtime afternoons were always the nicest time to catch up with everyone. It was late enough in the day to get some good gossip, and too early for anyone to be out on the lash. The day slipped into golden early evening, Madeline switched to water, and the group filtered down to just a few friends. It got warm enough that she took off her leather jacket, and at some point Bear had rolled her sleeves up to the elbow. Those forearms. Madeline had to keep reminding herself not to sneak too many looks over at Bear, while she despaired over how to work up her courage to… what, ask her out? Seriously, why did it have to be so excruciating? But the thing was, as much as Bear caught her looking, she caught Bear looking back.

Okay, you know what? It was getting actually late now, and Madeline was starting to think maybe another day would be better. Bear had just gotten back, after all. They ran into each other all the time, no big deal. She’d just ask her all casual like, without all this build-up, yeah, that would be better, less pressure, good idea, okay, time to—

“Hey, Maddie,” Bear interrupted her spiral, thank fuck. “Help a gal out. It’s been months since I had a good look at you.” She leaned down, then grabbed one of Madeline’s chair legs and yanked, dragging it across the concrete a few feet. Suddenly they were very close, Madeline’s right knee and calf flush with Bear’s left. Bear inhaled deeply. “There, that’s better.”

“Whoa, haha,” Madeline uttered shakily. Had she just said ‘haha’ aloud? What the fuck. She blushed hard and tried harder to regain her composure. “Wait— did you just smell me?”

Bear laughed low and warm, and snuck an arm around Madeline’s shoulders. “Yeah, is that okay?” she asked, and then more seriously, “Is this okay?”

“Yeah. This is okay.” She meant it, obviously. This was amazing. Madeline was tall in her own right, or at least taller than most women she knew, but she felt tiny next to Bear. This was the closest they’d ever been to each other, and holy hell was it awesome.

“You smell nice, by the way,” Bear said, amused but sincere.

“Well, thanks? Must be my shampoo.”

Bear leaned in to get another sniff and pitched her voice down. “Mmm. Must be,” she rumbled directly into Madeline’s ear.

Because she was really going for it now, and because a hot butch woman was talking low into her ear, for fuck’s sake, Madeline shivered. But they were careening towards a cliche back and forth, and Madeline didn’t want to play. “So, this is the part where you say ‘You cold, baby? You’re trembling. How about you sit next to me here on the bench, and I’ll keep you warm.’ And I say ‘Oh thank you, Bear, you’re so big and strong’ for some reason and then I blink at you all coquettishly. Let’s skip it. Scoot over.”

There was literally no reason for Bear to scoot anywhere, as there was plenty of room next to her, but she did it anyway. “You don’t think I’m big and strong? You wound me, Maddie.”

Madeline snickered as she pressed her side into Bear’s, getting comfortable. “Of course I do, but you don’t need anyone to tell you.” Bear’s hand settled on her waist. It felt so good to be this close to her, to snuggle in her arms — well, one of her arms, rather.

“You know— oh, dammit,” Maddie faltered and looked down at her hands to gather herself. It’s cool, this is fine. It is. Time to be brave. She looked back up at Bear. “You know. You gotta know that I like you, right? Because I do.”

Bear was looking at her softly, her eyes half-lidded and dreamy. “You do, huh?” Her hand slipped down to Madeline’s hip and she started to knead the sensitive flesh there. “That’s lucky, because I like you too. Have for a long while.”

“But I’m not fast,” Madeline blurted. Bear’s hand froze on her hip. “I don’t know if I can jump in with both feet right away, Bear. You gotta give me a little time.” She took a beat to slow herself down. She could do this. “But, um. Can I take you to dinner?” She prayed to whatever deity that she had this right, that this is how people fucking talk to each other.

Bear grinned delightedly as she slid her hand back to Madeline’s waist, and squeezed her in a reassuring half-hug. “That sounds good to me, honey,” she said. “Just tell me when.”

~~~

—————

HOW LONG IS A LONG WHILE, BEAR. TELL US. Whew, this one fought me! And then it kept getting longer! Why!!! I just wanted to write a big ol’ butch wlw werebear and write another wlw who wants to snuggle with her 😭 Do you ever feel like you know where a story starts and where it ends, but the rest of it has to be fuckin’ wrestled out of your brain? I’m pretty sure I know what was going on, which is good, like, at least in the long run. Ah well, the important thing is that it’s done and I can release it to the wild. Right? Haha right, guys? Anyway. The two challenge days I’ve done so far have been heavy on the anxious, obvious long-time crush, so, I reckon something different for the next few. ANYWAY. <3

#monstrousmaychallenge #monstrous may challenge #day 6: the lycanthrope #werebear and the woman who wants to cuddle her #whence writing

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peglarpapers · 5 years ago

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Sarah Steel, harried and distracted and dragging both her feet and her children, drops Benzaiten Steel at his first dance lesson when he is three and a half years old and forgets to pick him up for two hours afterwards. Juno is there too, of course, but since he bruises his knee partway through and spends most of his time sitting against the wall sniffling Ben counts the dance lesson only as his. He furrows his brow and copies the teacher’s moves as well as his little limbs can and, for once, doesn’t fidget or yell or get into any mischief at all. He’s just as well-behaved when the worried receptionist tasked with minding the twins when their mother doesn’t arrive at the end of the forty-minute lesson sits them both down, wedged in the corner of the mirrored walls of the ballet studio, as she makes call after unanswered call to Sarah Steel’s comms. When Juno tries, time and again, to get up and explore the old studio building to hunt for ghosts or check for secret passages, Ben tugs him back down by his right hand with a breathless ‘watch, Juno’.

Because the dancers in front of him are magic.

They must be, Benzaiten reasons, because even though they’re much more grown-up then he and Juno are he’s never seen any adults do things like this before. There is a boy who jumps so high that Ben has to crane his neck to watch from where he sits cross-legged, and a girl who swings another dancer over her head like he weighs nothing. Another girl throws her leg out and spins so many times that even Ben, who can count to fifteen which is five higher than Juno can, makes himself dizzy trying to count. When Sarah Steel arrives, heels clicking angrily on the polished hardwood floors of the foyer, yelling at the receptionist to fucking call her next time, she was working, how was she supposed to know the lesson was so fucking short, Ben lingers in the doorway to the ballet studio even as Juno throws his arm around their mother’s legs and squeezes tight, watching the magicians dance.

Sarah was entirely ready to badmouth the Halcyon Ballet Academy for the rest of her life and spend a few more creds on her rotating cast of babysitters, but after a stream of excited babbling from Ben and pestering from Juno after Ben promises to give him sole custody of the next toy their mother brings home, she keeps up paying for lessons, and is usually only late by twenty minutes or so remembering to collect them. Benzaiten cherishes those once-a-week lessons, and while Juno steals snacks out of the other kids’ bags and on one memorable occasion floods the bathrooms after trying to see how hard he can kick the water cooler, Ben mouths the names of the moves the instructor shows them and tries to copy the twirls and tiptoes of the older students without falling over too many times. The nice receptionist learns to tell the twins apart almost every time and calls him ‘Benten’ affectionately when she ruffles his hair.

When Ben runs out of Sarah Steel’s office and to the safest place he can think of, it is the nice receptionist who finds him crying on the doorstep of the studio and brings him home, hand in hand.

They move to Oldtown a few weeks later, and he never sees her, or Halcyon Dance Studio, again.

~~~

After Sarah gets… bad, the Steel twins very quickly realise that if they want things other than bare essentials (and sometimes those, too, depending on the month) they’re going to have to get them themselves. For Juno, this means shoplifting Andromeda dolls from Oldtown’s one tiny, well-defended toy store (he gives Ben a Draco figurine for their eighth birthday, with the roaring voice box removed so it wouldn’t bother Sarah) and getting paid pocket change after starting a lunchtime fight club with Mick Mercury. For Benzaiten, it means developing the galaxy’s best smile, and it is while flashing this charming, lopsided grin to a very nice elderly couple as he slips his hand into their pockets methodically in search of interesting things to pilfer that he hears the music.

Benten hasn’t heard music like this in a long time- the only songs he knows by heart are the ones he hears in commercials running on their fuzzy monitor at home- and it surprises him enough that he jerks abruptly away from the old man bending down to pinch his cheek, the creds clutched in his fist spilling out of his fingers and clattering loudly on the slick street. Before the very nice elderly couple can realise that the earnest little boy asking if they’d seen his mother was robbing them blind, Ben is running in the direction of the music.

He’s not in Oldtown anymore- he’d snuck on a bus this morning and gone a district over to Stitch, slightly less decrepit and with slightly more to steal. The downside to his master plan to collect all the riches Hyperion City had to offer was that he didn’t actually know where he was going. This fact hit him three unfamiliar blocks away from the scene of his near-perfect crime, and dissolved instantly the second he saw the dancers.

Benzaiten remembered vaguely that his long-ago dance lessons had been in ballet- some kind of old-Earth style, graceful and smooth and set to strange, ancient music. Whatever these dancers are doing, it’s not that- there’s an old comms hooked up to a speaker on the sidewalk blasting a neopop song so loudly Ben can feel it pounding in the tips of his fingers, and somebody’s battered cap lying haphazardly in front of it with a small pool of creds inside. It’s a far cry from bright lights and waxed floors, but he’s no less entranced by the six- no, seven- teenagers who slide and spin and one of them bends all the way backwards and flips back up again he thought they could only do that in movies- and suddenly, as usual when anything fun starts happening, the cops arrive.

Out of habit borne of bearing witness to many a fight (especially those started by his twin) Benten slips into the closest nook he can find- a narrow, sticky alleyway, which exist everywhere in Hyperion City no matter how nice the district is- and peeks out silently as a gangly HCPD officer waves a blaster after the laughing group of dancers, who have packed up and run quickly enough that this can’t be their first run-in with the cops. Ben waits, back against the damp wall, until the angry yells fade, then dashes in the direction of the faint, still-playing music.

These dancers have a studio too.

Ben almost didn’t expect it, not with how at home they all seemed to be on their stage of scuffed shoes and chewing-gum pavement. But there it is- an old warehouse, with grubby carbon-fibre walls and a section of the roof covered by cheap blue tarps. He watches as the teenagers scurry in, whooping and laughing and elbowing each other, music changed now to something quieter but no less energetic, and makes a very big decision very quickly. He memorises the street names on either side of the corner the studio is on, takes a deep breath, and turns to find the closest bus station.

Three weeks later, Benzaiten Steel stands at the open door of Stitch Dance Studios with resolve burning in his small face and weight bulging in his small pockets. When he marches inside, his footsteps echo with a vigour that can only be conjured by a very determined nine-year-old with a very big dream. He scans the room for an appropriate judge to whom he can plead his case, and finds one in the single biggest person he had ever seen sitting at a table, staring straight at him. Ben reaches into his pockets, and the resulting clatter of cash against the plastic of the desk is almost deafening- all four hundred and nineteen creds that Ben and Juno were able to scrounge from odd jobs and odd thefts and one nerve-wracking heist of Sarah Steel’s wallet after payday.

Benzaiten flashes the person at the desk the galaxy’s best smile, and asks for however many lessons four hundred and nineteen creds will buy him.

~~~

There is a run-down building in the heart of Oldtown.

Actually, there are many, many run-down buildings in the centre, middle and outskirts of Oldtown, but none of those buildings matter to Benten because none of those buildings are going to be the Steel School of Dance like this one is.

He has a vision. He’s going to buy the place off the city, renovate it within an inch of its life, hang all the awards its students are going to win along the wall of the lobby right next to the enormous trophy cases they’re going to need, stud the walls of every studio with speakers blasting every kind of music you can think of, hang polished mirrors from floor to ceiling and install barres made from real Earth wood. Then after he’s made a fortune and revolutionised the Solar system’s conceptions of what it means to be a dancer, he’s going to buy Mom a house and a therapist back in Halcyon Park and Juno a commissioner’s position in the HCPD and nobody will never have to deal with any bullshit ever again.

Benten knows all of this for sure, because he’s already halfway there. He’s close to what he needs for a lease on the place, and if he cuts back on groceries just a little more he should be able to start cleaning it up properly in a year or two. Staying with Mom had not been… fantastic, but it had kept him from paying exorbitant rent and, more importantly, kept him close to Stitch and to teaching to pay off his own classes. Teaching, working, odd jobs, the occasional minor felony… they added up. He was tired, but they were adding up.

God, he was tired.

As soon as he found the energy to stand up, to climb down from the roof of the dilapidated building that would become the Steel School of Dance, to go home and try not to snap at Sarah for one more night, he would get back to work. But right now? Benzaiten Steel watches the reddish Martian sunset, dimmed behind the pearlescent sheen of the dome that protects Hyperion City, and allows himself to dream for a little longer.

#the penumbra podcast #tpp #juno steel #benzaiten steel #alex's fics #listen i love benten with every fibre of my being and i wanted to try to do him justice #this fic has absolutely not done that but hey it's made me happy

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archetypal-archivist · 4 years ago

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Sky’s Limit- Hermitcraft- Worldbuilding

Heyo! This was the product of a plot bunny I got while watching the newest animated music video by Porter Robinson, and it features pretty much all the hermits. Long into the distant future, there is a city of gleaming white and technological marvels. Electricity is entirely clean, its people are always happy, and life- as it has always done- goes on. However, for all it seems like a utopia, there is one facet that may seem out of place. The city is truly, utterly silent. Sure, there are voices and happy chatter, laughter on street corners and children running in the streets. But there is no hum, no electric buzz that most crafters of the past would have been familiar with. There is no redstone. For indeed, the red dust is entirely illegal and those who work with it are relegated to the city’s dark underbelly. And not all of them are happy to be there. It is in this city, the city of Sky’s Limit, that I have dropped our hermits. Time will tell what happens next.

----

A story in which the world has been… purified. Think skyblock, portrayed as a world of natural wonder, soft angles and high rises that scrape the clouds above, all in shimmering shades of pearlescent white. The only noise is the rushing of the wind through the grass far, far below and the distant echo of passing conversation and laughter. There are no cars, no chatter of coms, no hissing creepers or vroomping, thieving endermen. Just peace. And sometimes, if you listen carefully enough, the flapping of wings as the most blessed of the city’s inhabitants fly overhead, the celebrity darlings and envy of everyone below. For some of the hermits, life is good. Bdubs, Xisuma, Grian, and Jevin are all upper nobility. Xisuma and Grian are some of the lucky few with wings (bee and bird respectively for X and G), while Jevin is blessed simply for being sky blue and transparent- and a being so like the sky must surely be worthy of high ranking. Surely. Xisuma is an administrator of the city, one of those who keep track of the nitty-gritty bits, like how much food each sector goes through a month, the efficiency of the watering systems in the fields, etc. Grian is just a straight up celebrity darling, beloved by the people for his pranks and personality. Late at night, he runs a TV talk show. Jevin has a seat on the city governance, one of thirteen “elected” chancellors. Bdubs is another chancellor, low-key the one in charge, as it was his idea to create a city of white, one that ran on clean energy and lawfulness, who drew up the first blueprint and built much of the city himself. It’s said that there’s no corner of it he isn’t aware of, no part that he didn’t have a hand in designing. While this isn’t quite the case, one thing is certain- BDubs certainly has “designs” and they are very grand indeed. After these hermits fall the ones who are upper to middle class. Stress is a well-trusted doctor in the city’s finest hospital. She believes in the system that saved her life so long ago with all her heart and does her best to keep the city and its people running as best as they possibly can. Compassion and lawful goodness fall into the same boat for Stress, which can sometimes end poorly for criminals who go to her for medical care, thinking that surely a doctor as kind as Stress would never turn away someone, even if they have broken the law. What they forget is that becoming a doctor takes a spine of steel, and Stress has gone one step above the rest- she has a spine of chrome, and she will do what she must to keep her city running strong. (Incidentally, that chrome spine of hers? Not hyperbole, an “accident” at 6 made sure of that.) Vintagebeef runs a butcher shop and is mid to low ranking. He serves the best sandwiches in the city, as attested to by his best customers, Rendog and Falsesymmetry. Rendog is a happy go lucky reporter who spends equal time chasing skirts as he does chasing his next scoop. False is a beat cop, one of the best, and she’s gone viral at least once for dumping criminals who think that just because she's a girl that means she can’t fight. She’s particularly embarrassed (and a bit proud) of the video of her literally picking up a criminal and dumping him the nearest trash chute. Welsknight, the unfortunate garbage man, was quite unhappy to have to remove the criminal from the chute, as for all of False’s strength, she wasn’t quite strong enough to pry the man loose again. He now low-key follows False around to clean up all of her messes as while the media at large is quite fond of her feats, the local infrastructure isn’t. Somehow, he always ends up at the right place at the right time. Scar is a bit down on his luck, but overall is doing pretty well for himself. He’s one of the architects for the city, was in fact famous for a time for creating a specific style of sheer white skyscraper that allowed for more solar panels to be placed along its side. However, 2 years later and people are starting to realize that for some reason, his buildings aren’t as efficient as they ought to be and his designs have since fallen out of favor. Rendog had taken great joy running his name through the muck, unfortunately, as a man’s got to eat and for all the Scar is a nice guy, a renowned architect falling from grace makes for quite the scoop. The two don’t like each other much, but they’ve actually seen each other’s faces. Anyway, Scar has been living off of his savings, hoping that someone up top would care enough about him to fix the issue and find out what went wrong. After 2 years of nothing, however, he has realized that if he ever wants to figure out the mystery of his buildings’ lack of efficiency, he’ll need to find out himself. Little does he know, Keralis, the architect that replaced him, has been doing quite well for himself and the last thing he wants is to lose his position to the guy he had replaced. While a generally nice guy, Keralis has had a taste of the high life and now there’s no going back. He knows what Scar is up to, and is quite… invested in keeping the status quo. No. Matter. What. Joe Hills runs a bookstore. A completely normal bookstore. Yes, really officer, I promise. Just like how XB, his best friend and right hand man, employee of the month, every month, is entirely average in every way and has never done anything wrong in his life, ever. There is one more among the hermits who has wings- Etho. Or rather, had. Etho had his wings cut off for undisclosed crimes against the city and now works in a toy shop on the outskirts of town. He’s thoroughly mysterious and always looks tired, but his toys and trinkets business does surprisingly well and he always seems happy, behind that mask of his. The only hint that this isn’t quite the case is the tightness around his eyes. A secret? When they told him that the pain would never stop, that awful night when they burnt his wings off? He didn’t believe them. (Oh god, the way it smelled.) He really, really should have.

You’ve heard about the shining white walls, the perfect healthcare, the love the people hold for the city and the rigor with which they defend it. The quiet, the peace, the wonderful golden silence found in its streets and reflecting from its windows. Even the light seems quieter there. If you’re smart, you may have picked up that something isn’t quite right with the city, that 2/3s of our cast seems to be missing. You’d be right, almost. Mumbo, Cub. Cleo? They aren’t missing- they’re hiding. And they have very good reason to do so.

The city’s name is Sky’s Limit, and it is built on a foundation of marble and hard, cold law. It is a city of white… and black. And lurking in its shadows are all those that do not belong, those whose colors do not fit, those who can’t afford the brilliant marble towers or the plastic smiles popularized by the rich and famous. It is a city choked into silence by its secrets and one thing it cannot abide is the humming electric whine of redstone. And those who practice it are criminals in the eyes of the law, to be persecuted to its fullest extent and often, even beyond. Even to the grave, if needs must or the council orders such. And BDubs is so very, very fond of his restful, quiet beauty sleep. Not everyone agrees with these laws however, and brewing in the black, sunless shadows of the city’s underbelly are those determined to see the city shine red. Zedaph is the closest to legal of the underground hermits- he has to be when he has two more mouths to feed, Tango and Impulse. Although the latter two are redstone geniuses and do well in making food stretch and and make their ramshackle rented apartment livable, it is Zedaph alone who fake any marketable skills. While Impulse and Tango do their best to keep the lights on and use redstone wiring to steal power from the city’s solar- and wind-powered electrical grid, Zedaph peddles the doodads and toys he makes to the poorest children of the city. Many of them still contain some measure of redstone, as it's nigh-impossible to ignore its thrumming call entirely if you are born to do the stuff, but his target audience is usually too young, too uneducated, and too scared of the law to recognize it or say anything about it. And if a bit of redstone Impulse or Tango put together can help someone make it another day, and Zedaph can make it look passably legal? Well, some of the poorest housewives and mothers can look the other way The trio are happy together, but making ends meet is hard and with summer coming, resources are soon to be harder to get than ever. (A city of light and pure white? Things start to heat up fast, and water becomes more precious than ever. And with summer coming, it means less water gathering in puddles and drain pipes in the city, and thus less water for the underground redstoners and hybrids to tap into.) Little does Zedaph know, however, he’s caught the attention of another toymaker in the city. In addition to this, Tango is getting restless, frustrated with the trio’s lot in life. Even under normal circumstances he can’t sit still, and being cooped up inside all the time because his glowing red eyes give him away as being both a hybrid and really in tune with redstone? It sucks. A lot. Impulse tries to keep his buddy distracted, but there’s only so much he can do, and now, Tango has been disappearing at odd hours, frequently when he and Zedaph are trying to sleep, and coming back with an odd look in his eyes. Just a few days ago he had found the remains of a charred pamphlet in their dumpster out back. Something is coming to head, and Impulse isn’t sure he’s going to like the outcome. Not that he’d ever mention the mounting tension to Zedaph, of course. His buddy has enough to worry about. ZombieCleo… runs a speakeasy/burlesque show underneath Joe’s bookstore. She has his full approval of course, and they’re fast friends under the merits of he’s one of the only decent men she’s ever met. It helps that he’s hardcore aro-ace and has no interest in her or her girls. Cleo, being a zombie hybrid, knows all too well about the tough life being a hybrid is and how it can make people turn to awful things just to make ends meet. She knows that doing sex work is the last thing her girls want to be doing, not that they have a choice, and she does her best to do right by them. She protects her workers viciously, and if any of her patrons try to treat her girls too roughly, or try to skip out on payment? Well, being a hybrid comes with a few perks and a nice pair of teeth and nails is all part of the package. Coincidentally, Joe is awfully good at hiding a body. Doc is perhaps the most down on his luck of the hermits. As both a redstoner and an obvious hybrid, he can’t find work, he can’t find anyone willing to rent to him, he can barely even find food enough to eat. He’s resorted to petty theft and squatting, and if it wasn’t for his ruthless determination that this city would not be the death of him, he would have laid down and given up long ago. Not even the occasional rendezvous with the local garbage cans is enough to deter him (courtesy of the local beat cop. That woman has no right to be as strong as she is). It’s on one such day, trying to pry himself out of yet another trashcan far too small for him, that Doc finally gets his lucky break. The old man to whom the trashcan belongs to comes out, hoping to dispose of his waste for evening, and instead finds the creeper hybrid there, cursing up a storm and angry enough to kill. The sight would almost be threatening to TFC if, you know, he hadn’t seen worse and the hybrid in question looked like he hadn’t had a good meal for years. TFC invites Doc inside after helping to pry him loose, and Doc, while suspicious, accepts. TFC low key makes Doc move in with him and treats the man well, seeing as the poor hybrid reacts to every little thing as if he had never seen kindness. TFC also begins to tell stories to Doc about the time before the city was built, before redstone was outlawed and hybrids were looked down upon as lesser beings. And Doc, utterly enchanted by the concept, begins to have… ideas. Iskall was in the same position as Doc for a while, but they too get their lucky break. They get picked up by Mumbo Jumbo and is introduced to the Cotillion, the rebel group who are out to shake the city to its very foundations and bring about an age of redstone dominance. Mumbo and the hundreds of people under him plan on breaking the social order and instating redstoners and hybrids as the top dogs, and Iskall finds themself shocked that the rebels seem to have the organization and resources to actually do it. Mumbo is witty and charismatic, seemingly always having a plan and a silver-tongued speech to go with it. He also installs Iskall as second in command, much to their shock. Time will tell if the Cotillion is going to succeed. Cub is living in one of Scar’s buildings, along with many other redstoners. Just... Not entirely legally.

This is pretty much the end of the world-building section, I’ll come out with a post on the general plot as soon as I can. TBC :)

#hermitcraft #fanfiction #my writing #minecraft #sky's limit au #world building

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itsclydebitches · 4 years ago

Note

Is buying the new Harry Potter game supporting transphobes because I've been seeing a lot of that on twitter? Not playing it. Pirating is fine, but actually paying for it.

Hi, anon!

I’ve seen a lot of the same and had initially thought to post my thoughts on the issue… before I got a very angry ask condemning me for a post where I admitted that I thought the game looked great and was excited to play it. I can no longer link to that post because I deleted it: a late night, impulsive decision made in an effort to try and protect myself from further flaming. Thus, I considered ignoring this ask under the same justification… before realizing that it might not matter in the long run. The Harry Potter: Legacy trailer has been out for just a few days and already I have gotten that furious ask, been told off by a friend for mentioning the trailer, and was questioned (antagonistically) about why I had added a Harry Potter related book to my Goodreads list. They’re small and potentially coincidental anecdotes, but it feels as if any engagement with Harry Potter is slowly coming under scrutiny, not just the (supposed—more on that below) crime of purchasing the new game. Given that I will always engage with Harry Potter related media, if there’s any chance such subtle criticism will continue regardless of whether I make the “right” choice to boycott the game or not, I might as well explain my position. Especially for someone who asked politely! Thanks for that 💜.

Which leads to the disclaimer: Any anon hate will be unceremoniously deleted. This is a complicated issue and I intend to write about it as such. I ask that any readers go into this post with good faith and a willingness to acknowledge that this situation isn’t as black and white as they may prefer it to be. If that’s not something you can emotionally handle—which is 100% fine. Some subjects we’re simply not inclined to debate—or if you’re just looking to get in a cheap shot, please hit the back button.

Right. Introduction done. Now here’s the tl;dr: saying things like “Buying this game is inherently selfish/transphobic” isn’t the hot take people want it to be. Is boycotting Legacy one (very small—we’ll get to that too) way of showing support for the trans community? Yes. Is buying the game proof that you’re a selfish transphobe? No. This isn’t a bad SAT question. Legacy boycotters are to trans supporters as Legacy buyers are to ___? The argument that someone is selfish for buying the game is basically that you are choosing a non-essential video game over the respect and lives of trans individuals, but the logic breaks down when we acknowledge that purchasing a game has no real life impact on a trans individual’s safety, support, etc.

“But Clyde, you’re giving Rowling money. She is then using that money to support anti-trans organizations. Thus, you have actively put more harm into the world.” Have I? I’m not going to get into whether/how much/what kind of money Rowling is receiving from this project because the fact is we don’t know and we’ll likely never know. Suffice to say, she probably will get some portion of any $60/$70 purchase. The real question is whether those sales have any meaningful impact. Reputable information on Rowling’s net worth is hard to come by, but it seems to be somewhere between 600 million and 1 billion pounds. Or, to put it another way: a fuck ton. And money keeps rolling in from a franchise that is so, so much bigger than a single video game. It literally doesn’t matter how much money you might put in her pocket via Legacy because she’s already so goddamn rich she can do whatever she wants. If Rowling wants to give a million dollars to the heinous “charity” of her choice, she can. She will. You are not directly contributing to this horror because that money may as well already exist. Every person in the world could refuse to buy this game and she’d shrug, going about her disgusting life because it literally does not affect her in any meaningful way. You’re refusing to give the murderer a knife when they’re got direct access to a knife-making factory. Horrible as it is to hear, you can’t stop them from doing something horrific with that tool.

For me, this is the straw argument of the Harry Potter world. Not straw as in strawman, but literally straws. Remember how everyone was talking about plastic straws, swore off them, and subsequently deemed anyone who still used one to be selfish people who didn’t care about the environment? It didn’t matter if you had a certified “good” reason for using one (disability) or a “selfish” reason (carrying straws everywhere on the off chance you wanted a drink is a pain in the ass)—you’re a horrible person who wants the planet to die. Same deal here. If you can swear off straws, great! Do what tiny bit of good you can. But if you can’t or even don’t want to give them up, the reality is that your “selfishness” doesn’t make a significant difference in the world. The amount of plastic corporations are pouring into the ocean makes your actions inconsequential. It’s not like voting where every small, individual act adds up to a significant total. This is your lack up against others’ staggering abundance. It’s not adding a few drops of water until you have a full bucket, it’s trying to un-flood the boat with a teaspoon while someone else is spraying it with the hose. Have you, on the most technical level, made a difference by moving that teaspoon of water out of the boat? Yes. Is it a difference that holds any meaning in regards to the desired outcome? Not really. Now apply all that to Rowling. She is so phenomenally wealthy—with additional wealth coming in every day—that your purchase of Legacy is a teaspoon of water in her ocean of funds. It’s inconsequential.

“But Clyde, buying this game would support her and supporting her sends the message that what she believes is okay.” Exact same argument as above. JKR’s fame is so astronomical that no video-game boycott could ever make a dent in it. For every 100 people who swear off her work there are another 1,000 who continue to engage with both her writing and the writing related to her world because she is that prominent. Harry Potter is one of the largest franchises of all time, second only to things like Pokémon and Star Wars. This isn’t some indie creator who you can ignore into silence. The reality is that Rowling is here to stay and we have to take far more substantial acts to counteract that influence.

Even more importantly, buying the game is not evidence that you support her views and the black and white belief that it does is an easy distraction from those harder “How do we improve the lives of trans people?” questions. I started compiling a list of stories with problematic authors only to realize the number of incredibly popular texts with awful histories attached to them unnecessarily increased the length of an already long post. Everything from Game of Thrones to Dr. Seuss—if you love it, chances are one of the authors involved has a history of misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc. Which I don’t say as a way of excusing these authors, nor as a way to silence the justified and necessary call outs on their work. Rather, I bring this up to acknowledge that engaging with these stories cannot be concrete evidence for how you view the minority group in question. The reasons for consuming these stories are incalculable and at the end of the day no one needs a “correct” reason for that consumption (my teacher forced me to read the racist book, I only watched the homophobic TV show so I could call out how horrible it was, etc.) If fiction were an indicator of our real life beliefs we’d all be the most horrifying creatures imaginable. I may be severely uncomfortable with the queer baiting in Supernatural, but if a friend says they bought the DVD collection my response is not, “How dare you support those creators. You’re homophobic.” In the same way, someone purchasing Legacy should not generate the response, “How dare you support her. You’re transphobic.” There’s a miles’ worth of pitfalls in connecting the statements “You purchased a game based on the world created by a transphobic author” and “You yourself are transphobic.”

So if buying Legacy does not add additional harm to the trans community from a financial perspective, and it doesn’t make a dent in Rowling’s platform, and playing a game is not evidence of your feelings towards the group the author hates… what are we left with? “But Clyde, it’s the principal of the thing. I don’t want to support a TERF” and that is an excellent argument. Your morals. Your ethics. What you can stomach having done or not done. But the “your” is incredibly important there. People need to understand that this is their own line in the sand and that if someone else’s line is different, that doesn’t mean they’re automatically a worse person than you. For example, I have made the choice not to eat at Chick-Fil-A. Not because I believe that me not giving them $3.75 for a sandwich will make a difference in their influence on the world, but because it makes a difference to me. It helps me sleep at night. So if not purchasing Legacy helps you sleep at night? That’s a fantastic reason not to buy it. But the flipside is that if someone else does purchase it that is not a reliable reflection of their morals, no more than I think my friends are homophobic for grabbing lunch at Chick-Fil-A now and then. Sometimes you just want a sandwich.

“But Clyde, why would you want to buy it? Rowling is such a shit-stain I don’t understand how anyone can stomach supporting her—whether that support has an impact or not. Maybe someone eats at Chick-Fil-A because it’s close to them and they’re too busy to go elsewhere, or it’s all they can afford, or they don’t know how homophobic they are. There are lots of reasons to explain something like that. But you’re not ignorant to Rowling’s problem and there’s no scenario where you have to play this game, let alone spend money on it. So why?”

The reality is that I will likely be buying Legacy, second-hand if I can, but new if it comes to that, so I’ll give some of my personal answers here, in descending order of presumed selfishness:

5. Part of my work involves studying video games/Harry Potter and as a researcher of popular culture, my career depends on keeping up with major releases: good and bad. I often engage with stories I wholeheartedly disagree with for academic purposes, like Fifty Shades of Gray.

4. I find the “Just pirate it!” solution to be flawed. I’ve spent the last four months struggling to get my laptop fixed and I currently have no income to buy another if it were to suddenly develop a larger problem. I am not going to risk my $2,000 lifeline on an illegal download, no matter how safe and easy the Internet insists it is.

3. We’ve been told that Rowling has not been involved in Legacy in any significant manner and I do want to support Portkey. No, not just financially because I know many others have insisted that everyone good has already been paid. Game companies still need to sell games. That’s why they exist. There’s a possibility that a company with just two mobile games under its belt will be in trouble if this completely flops. Is my purchase going to make or break things? No. Same reality as whether it will put new, influential money in Rowling’s pocket to do horrific things with. But I’d like to help a company that looks as if they put a lot of heart and energy into a game only to get hit with some real shit circumstances outside of their control. Even if they’re not impacted financially or career-wise… art is meant to be consumed. I know if I wrote a Harry Potter fic and everyone boycotted it because they want nothing to do with Rowling anymore, I’d be devastated. Sometimes, you can’t separate supporting the good people from supporting the bad. Not in a media landscape where thousands of people are involved in singular projects.

2. I’m invested in reclaiming excellent works created by horrible authors. That’s fandom! We don’t know much about Legacy yet—this is pure, unsubstantiated speculation—but this new story could be a step forward from Rowling’s books, giving us some of the respect for minority groups that she failed at. That’s the sort of work I want to promote because Harry Potter as a concept is great and I think it’s worth transforming it for our own needs and desires. The reality is that as long as Rowling is alive she’ll benefit from licensed material, but if that material can start taking her world in better directions? I want to support that too.

1. I literally just want to play it. That’s it. That’s my big justification. I think it looks phenomenal and I was itching to get my hands on it the second the trailer dropped. And you know what? I’m not in a good place right now to deny myself things I enjoy. I don’t need to tell anyone that 2020 has been an absolute horror show, but for me certain things have made it a horror show with a cherry on top. Not a lot gets me excited right now because we’re living in the worst fucking timeline, so when I find something that makes me feel positive emotions for a hot second I want to hang onto it. I have no desire to set aside that spark of happiness in a traumatic world because people on the Internet think it makes me selfish. Maybe it does, but I’m willing to let myself be a bit selfish right now.

Which circles back to this issue of equating buying a game with active harm towards the trans community. It honestly worries me because this is a very, very easy way to avoid the harder, messier activism that will actually help the queer community. When someone says things like, “You’re choosing a stupid video game over trans lives” that activism is performative. Not only—as demonstrated above—is purchasing a game not a threat to trans lives or ignoring the game a way of protecting trans lives, it also gives people an incredibly easy out while still seeming ‘woke.’ Not all people. Maybe not even a significant portion of people, but enough people to be worrisome. “I’m not purchasing that game,” some people post and then that’s it. That’s all they do, yet they feel like they’ve done their duty when in fact they’ve made no active difference in the world. Are you donating to trans charities? Are you speaking up for your trans friends when someone accosts them? Are you circulating media by trans authors? Are you educating your family about trans issues? Are you listening to trans individuals and continually trying to educate yourself? These are the things that make a difference, not shaming others for buying a game.

All of this is not meant to be an argument that people shouldn’t be absolutely revolted by Rowling’s beliefs (they should) and that this revulsion can’t take the form of rejecting this game wholeheartedly. This isn’t even meant to be an argument that you shouldn’t encourage others to boycott because though the financial impact may be negligible, the emotional impact for you is very real. I 100% support anyone who wants to chuck this game into the trash and never talk about it again—for any reason. All this is meant to argue is that people shouldn’t judge others based on whether they purchase this game (with a side argument that we can’t limit our activism to that shaming). That’s their decision and this decision, significantly, does not add any real harm to the world. Your fellow Harry Potter fan is not the enemy here. We as a community should not be turning our visceral on one another. Turn it on Rowling. She’s the TERF, not the individual who, for whatever reason, decided they wanted to play the game only tangentially related to her.

If Twitter and Tumblr are any indication, I can imagine the sort of responses this post may generate: “That’s a whole lot of talk to try and convince us you’re not a transphobe :/ ” For those of you who are determined to simply things to that extent, there’s nothing I can say that will change your mind. Please re-read the disclaimer and consider whether yelling at me over anon will benefit the trans community. For those of you who are still here, I do legitimately want us to think critically about the kinds of activism we’re engaging in, how performative it might be, whether it harms the community in any way, and (most significantly) whether it’s actually moving us towards a safe, respective world for trans people to live in. Personally, I don’t think telling Harry Potter fans that they’re transphobic for buying Legacy will generate any good in this world, for them or for the trans community.

At the end of the day only you can decide whether you can stomach buying this game or not. Decide that for yourself, but make that decision knowing that there’s no wrong answer here.

#harry potter #mymetas #Anonymous

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bookandcranny · 4 years ago

Text

Little Angels

One]

It is dark inside a wolf’s belly, but up here the air is clear and bright. Atop the tower of Paradiso, above the city of mist and gray. The roof is all caved in and shattered, scattering brilliant prisms through the fragmented skylight and across the floor. A man stands alone in the wreckage, inside the skeletal remains of this holy animal. He sifts through the books that were left behind until he finds one with a red cover and no title, but the letters A-D embossed along its spine. He flips to a certain chapter, and begins to read.

It was in another kind of tower that it happened. The Detective entered into the penthouse apartment of the Deeds family, a couple from the upper crust who were in a state of panic over their missing teenage daughter. From that first frantic phone call with the grief-ridden Gloria Deeds, Sacha knew the shape of this case inside out, backwards, and upside down. It was a classic.

Teenage girl from a wealthy family, sheltered her whole life, the type who could do no wrong in the eyes of her doting, overbearing parents. One night she leaves without warning, to chase some guy or some band or some misplaced sense of adventure. The reasons didn’t matter as much as what they were willing to pay for the reassurance that their precious little angel would be home safe and sound.

There were just a couple of details he hadn’t counted on.

Sacha sat idling on the side of the road, looking down at the photo the Deeds’ had given him. It was a little roughed up at the edges and faded at the crease where he’d folded it. He’d forgotten how fragile these old-fashioned print photographs were. Despite the damage, the face of thirteen year old Renee Deeds still looked up at him with those same gentle brown eyes and private smile.

The girl in the photo, however accurate it was to real life, had her hair pulled back in a crowd of twin braids that crested over thick dark curls. She wore what Sacha presumed to be church clothes-- tidy blouse and long skirt, an heirloom brooch-- and a pair of crutches braced to her forearms. Her ankles were crossed and tucked limply to one side, away from the camera’s focus.

The girl’s disability put a complication in the narrative he’d been concocting. According to the Deedses, Renee could only go so far on foot without intense pain and she disliked using her chair. It remained in the hall closet, untouched since her disappearance. Mr Deeds worked from home most days so rather than send her off to school, she was homeschooled by a well-vetted private tutor under her father’s occasional supervision. She had few friends, being a reserved child, they said. Sacha thought it probably had more to do with the gilded cage she lived in, lined with bubblewrap and goose down lest she ever bruise her precious knees. But it wasn’t his place to say.

Regardless, this left him with a very limited pool of suspects. And suspects they were indeed, since the Deeds were certain Renee had been kidnapped. Such a good girl would never have just wandered off on her own.

If that was indeed the case, the culprit had done a remarkable job of covering their tracks. Renee was last seen by her mother who had put her to bed at 9 'o'clock on the dot. The security system had been armed all night and there were no signs of tampering. Besides which, the only way out of the penthouse that didn’t involve a several story drop to a very unhappy ending was through the front lobby and the cameras in and outside it didn’t detect anyone unusual, coming or going.

The parents’ first move, naturally, was to call the police. The cops questioned the other residents and scanned the security tapes but turned up empty handed and after a few weeks of daily calls the officers on the case all but told Mr and Mrs Deeds that their hands were tied. For once, even money and social standing couldn’t hasten the hand of justice. That was when they had called on private investigator Sacha Ferro to get the job done.

All these facts laid out before him, Sacha found himself no closer to the answer than he had been at the start. The difference between then and now was not information but desperation, the heights of which had brought him here. Orphan’s Hollow.

The last few years had hit this city hard, same as it did all of them. It wasn’t a single sudden thing, but rather a combination of natural disasters, a virulent epidemic, and the consequential economic collapse that left entire districts barren, now inhabited only by clustered communities of the homeless. The handful of city blocks now known as Orphan’s Hollow was one such district, named so because it was, if stories were to be believed, populated entirely by children. Hollowed out department stores and office buildings and, most notably, the abandoned fairgrounds of Fun Town West became a tragic Neverland for runaways and other parentless youth in hiding from the overburdened childcare system.

Recently, there had been an epidemic of another kind in many of the nearby boroughs. Kids were going missing, just like Renee Deeds had, except most families weren’t fortunate enough to be able to hire someone to track them down. From what Sacha could pick up, most of them-- those that were reported-- were girls between the ages of six and sixteen. Other than that, the demographics were all over the map: black, white, rich, poor, healthy, sick. Missing posters spawned and spread like mold across the billboards and telephone poles, while the local government processed statistics with dead eyes and shrugging shoulders.

The unspoken truth seemed to be that if they were anywhere, if they were alive, the missing girls were somewhere in here. But the kids of Orphan’s Hollow were protective of their own and wouldn’t likely allow any cops to sift through their ranks even if they did trust their motives. It became one of those open secrets that everyone knew about but no one wanted to touch.

On top of that, not every orphan was some scrawny Dickens novel side character; there were rumors of gang activity and even some sort of cult that made the teenagers who ended up in this part of town vicious towards outsiders. Orphan’s Row was a name with more than one meaning, they said, because if you took those kids lightly they’d turn yours into orphans as well. None of that mattered to Sacha though. At this point, he had little left to lose.

There was a gun in the glovebox of the Detective’s hatchback, unloaded, and he hoped it would stay that way. The idea of turning any weapon on a kid, no matter their alleged viciousness, turned his stomach. He would bring it with him to be used, in only the most absolutely dire circumstances, as a threat. Leverage. If it came down to it, he could rationalize that.

As he turned down another vacant street into the ghost town, the weather began to turn as well. It had been drizzling steadily since the evening prior, making the humidity all the more unbearable, but now the rain relented and in its place a clotted mist settled low over the city, like ink diffusing in water. Sacha kept his lights low and foot barely pressing on the gas pedal. Though it was irrational he felt uneasy at the idea of making himself any more noticeable than he was already.

When the car jolted it was like being shaken awake from a dream. At first he thought it was another pothole-- the roads were a wreck after so long untended-- but then there was an audible crunch and a lurch as his front-left tire burst. Without bothering to pull over he got out and found the problem right away. Deep in the tire, lodged between the wheel and its socket, was a doll. Or at least, something that was trying to be a doll.

The body was made out of metal; scraps from perhaps an aluminum can worked together with screws and painted to give it the look of a hoop-skirted dress. Its head was a christmas ornament. He recognized the pink painted cherub cheeks and curling synthetic hair. Some broken edge of the makeshift toy had punctured the tire, and of course Sacha didn’t have a spare on hand, even if he could figure out how to rip the damn thing out of the wheel well.

He muttered a curse to himself. He’d have to leave it here and keep going on foot. At least there wasn’t anything in the car worth stealing, and he didn’t exactly have to worry about getting a ticket.

A sudden shriek made Sacha jump, hand going blindly to the holster under his shirt.

“My doll!” the child cried again. “You killed Jessika! My dolly!”

Sacha turned around and saw a young girl, barefoot and wearing what looked like an old halloween costume, standing across the street from him like a specter out of the fog. Appropriate, since she was so keen on howling like a banshee.

“Hey, I’m so sorry about your dolly,” he gentled, crossing to meet her.

The girl seemed to be considering running away from the strange man, as would well be her right, but stood her ground instead as her face grew redder.

“You killed her,” she said again. “She was a person and you killed her.��

Sacha dropped to one knee. “ I’m sorry about your Jessica--”

“Jessika!”

He chewed the inside of his cheek. “I am sorry, but it was an accident, really. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

She sniffled. “I’m Princess Ladybird,” she said, as though it should have been obvious. She gestured at her costume, a pink sparkly dress studded with plastic gems around the collar. “Who are you? You’re not supposed to be here.”

“My name is Sacha. I’m a private investigator-- a detective,” he corrected, seeing her confused expression. “I’m looking for someone. They’re not in any trouble, I just need to make sure they’re safe. Do you think you could help me, your highness?”

He kept his voice low and comforting. Dealing with kids wasn’t exactly his specialty, but he knew what he was doing well enough.

“No! No!” the girl cried, more agitated than ever. “No grownups allowed! You’ll just hurt them, just like Jessika!”

“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” he insisted, growing frustrated. “And I told you didn’t mean to break your doll. I could buy you a new doll? A nicer doll.”

She shook her head adamantly. “The store dolls aren’t alive. I only play with alive dolls.”

Play along, Sacha. “Okay, where can I get you a new ‘alive’ doll?”

“You can’t make an alive doll, you’re too old,” she huffed.

Sacha was not going to let himself be offended by a six year old. He wasn’t. “If your dolls are so precious, maybe you shouldn’t leave them in the street!”

“Maybe you should look where you’re going!” With that, she stomped on his foot and ran away. Sacha barely felt it through his shoes, but that was a small consolation. In a blink the princess was gone again.

He sighed. It was no less than he expected, but it still didn’t feel good. With the world they’d been living in, it wasn’t any surprise that the kids here were a bit strange. At least this one had seemed healthy enough, certainly energetic. That meant there was probably someone making sure she was kept fed.

He reminded himself that there was nothing he could do for these kids. Better to focus on what he was here for.

Two]

Sacha walked along the sidewalk without any real sense of where he was going. He occasionally saw clusters of children playing games or jumping in puddles in the street, but most were inside keeping out of the weather. When he looked up he sometimes saw tiny faces peering down at him from high windows or crouched on fire escapes. The ones on the ground didn’t spare him a look except in fleeting disgust. There was a girl reading fortunes for her friends from a dented pack of playing cards who went abruptly silent when he passed by, and Sacha came to realize that they were deliberately ignoring him, hoping to shun him into leaving the way he came.

When he tried to approach a pair of tweens doing some sort of craft project in a sheltered doorway, they quickly picked up their things and scampered away, leaving only a trail of paint droplets behind them. They didn’t look too terribly hard-off; their clothes were sometimes dirty but they were all in one piece and their eyes were bright and lively. It was sort of amazing, Sacha thought, how they’d really managed to build something of a community here, away from adults. Part of him almost envied them.

“Excuse me,” he tried again with a girl who was a bit older than the last. Her age didn’t make her look any more mature really, only sharper, as if she were growing but growing into the wrong shape. “I’m looking for--”

“Everyone knows what you’re looking for,” the young woman said. “You’re loud enough about it.”

This one wasn’t exactly friendly but at least she hadn’t run away yet. Sacha went to pull out a photo.

“Put that away, man,” she hissed. “You’re not going to find any girls who look like that here, and the wrong fledgling might just eat you alive for having it.”

“For having a photograph?” He didn’t bother to ask what a “fledgling” was supposed to be. Some sort of weird slang he was too dated to recognize, he guessed.

“For keeping another girl’s face! All you need is a face and a real-name and you can make that person do and say whatever you want.”

“Is this some kind of game you kids play? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s not a game,” she said gravely. “You don’t understand anything. Walking into this world when you don’t know the rules is as good digging your own grave.”

“Help me catch up, then. Level with me,” Sacha pressed. “I can make it worth your while.”

He didn’t have much money on hand, but he had medicine credits set aside for emergencies and that should be worth its bytes in gold in a place like this. Or if not, she could pawn it and buy some earrings or animal crackers or whatever kids liked.

“Save it, I don’t have an account. Legally, most of the kids here don’t even exist. You’ll have to trade for what you want the old fashioned way, outsider.”

Exasperated, Sacha rooted around in his pockets and came up with a protein bar and a keychain that doubled as a bottle opener. The girl didn’t look impressed.

“Okay look, hand over the picture and the rest of it and I’ll tell you where you need to go, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Outsiders don’t survive long here.”

Sacha wasn’t convinced this wasn’t all some intimidation game, but he folded up the photo of Renee and handed it to her anyway. If he really needed the visuals he had pictures on his phone. He’d turned it off shortly after setting out, when the calls and texts from his sister started pouring in, but couldn’t quite bring himself to leave it behind in the car. He could just picture Maria pacing around the house scowling at his number as another message failed to go through.

I’ll make it up to you, he promised her silently.

“There’s a spot two blocks that way,” She pointed. “Left, left, right, down some steps, and you’ll see a sign for The Love Nest. It’s hard to miss.”

Something about the name said through her lips made him want to recoil. The girl scoffed at his unease.

“Relax, it’s just the name left from the old owners. It belongs to the brood now. It’s a good place, a sacred place.” She sighed, looking up and around as if projecting to an imaginary audience. “Not that someone like you would get any of that, I guess. A lot of fledglings hang around there. If your girl can be found, you’ll find her there. If not, she’s already gone.”

“What do you mean ‘gone’?” he demanded.

“I mean gone.” she held up the photograph, still folded. “Gone like this.”

She tore the square neatly in two and let the halves flutter to the ground.

“I’m not even supposed to tell you this much, so if you missed your window don’t even think about hanging around here trying to dig out more information. You’re pushing your luck as it is.”

What an angry kid, Sacha thought to himself as he departed. He wasn’t too different when he was that age, but outright threatening someone who was only trying to do good seemed a bit extreme, especially when that someone had a good head of height on you as well. Was it the conditions they lived in that made them so temperamental here? Or just adolescent angst? Hopefully he wouldn’t be staying long enough to find out.

And just how was he planning to leave, even if he was successful, he wondered. He’d have to drive them out on three tires. Ruining his car would be well worth it though if it meant ending this.

Angry girl’s directions turned out to be sound and soon enough Sacha found himself at the door of a closed down club that proudly announced itself as “The Love Nest” in faded pink letters above the door. The windows were boarded up but there were still some old posters for the upcoming live entertainment pinned to the plywood. It appeared the place had been at least marginally more legitimate than Sacha had guessed by the name, while it had been in operation.

Pushing through the double doors the Detective found himself in a gloomy ballroom, styled vaguely like a vintage cabaret club or perhaps someone’s romanticized idea of a 1920s speakeasy. There were a few tables-- standing only by virtue of the bolts that held them to the hardwood-- a bar, and a large circular stage in the middle of it all. Sacha toed aside what he’d thought was a trash bag only to hear a grumbled complaint and find another of the hollow’s orphans crawling out of a sleeping bag on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” the kid asked, with such pointed accusation you’d think he’d personally wronged them. They were wearing an oversized “Fun Town” t-shirt and flannel bottoms with a paw print pattern.

Roused by the noise, some other children began emerging from their own napping spots to investigate.

“Are you a cop?” one asked.

“No, I’m more of a detective,” he replied.

“Sounds like a cop to me. And you look like a cop.”

Sacha frowned. “How so?”

“You’re old,” the kid said. “And you have blood on you.”

He looked down at his hands, his clothes. He saw brown khakis, dusty black loafers, pale patterned button-up shirt. No tie; he’d spilled coffee on it on the drive, hands already shaky from the ill-advised extra caffeine. To his embarrassment, he noticed a faint dampness where the weather and his own nerves had painted sweat across his collar, but no blood.

“It’s okay,” said the first child, yawning. “Snowy sees blood on everyone.”

“I don’t see it, I smell it,” challenged Snowy. She took a deep breath through her nose. “And you stink of it. Dirty blood, blood that wasn’t ready to be shed. Have you ever killed anybody, Mr Detective?”

Sacha fought the urge to roll his eyes. “Have you been talking to a girl in a princess dress?”

“You mean Princess Ladybird?”

“Never mind,” he said quickly, as if simply mentioning that ridiculous name might conjure up her horrible wailing. “I’m looking for someone. Two someones actually.”

He considered taking out his phone but, remembering how Angry Girl had reacted to the photo, decided to try a different approach.

“I was told I might find them here. One is named Renee Deeds and the other is Ana Ferro-Silver, eighteen and fifteen years old. Anything you can tell me about either of them would be a huge help. I’m sort of hoping one will lead me to the other.” He forced a smile.

Kid in the pajamas frowned. “There’s no one with names like that here. You woke us up over something as dumb as that?”

“I don’t think it’s dumb to want to find two girls who might be in a lot of trouble,” he said tersely. “And why were you asleep anyway? It’s three in the afternoon.”

“Growing makes us tired,” Pajamas shot back. They rolled their shoulders. “And sore.”

“And hungry!” added a third child. “Did you bring us any food?”

“Why would I have any food?”

“I heard the gargoyles say you gave Singing Finch a candy bar.”

“It was a protein bar,” he said before he could think to deny it. “What kind of name is ‘Singing Finch’ anyway?”

“It would’ve been Evening Finch, but she tattled so now she’s Singing Finch,” they explained patiently. “She tattled on us and then she tattled on you to the gargoyles and the kestrels. She can’t help it though. She’s a songbird, it’s what they do.”

“So you don’t have any candy?” the other cut in. Sacha put out his empty hands so she could verify and she bit him.

Pajamas laughed as he pulled away with a curse and a cry. “You are dumb. There aren’t any girls in trouble here. You’re the only one in trouble, but that’s because you’re an outsider and a cop, so you probably deserve it.”

Sacha felt a muscle in his jaw tense. He was beginning to think this had all been a huge waste of time. These kids operated on their own kind of logic, their own language, one which was foreign to him.

“Please,” he said. “Please. I know a lot of you are without families, but these girls still have people who care for them, who are looking for them. I have to bring them home.”

The children looked at him, and then a few of them looked at each other, huddling together in hushed conference. The one called Snowy, who was sitting on top of the bar, glared at him, tilting her head as if she were trying to read something written on the side of his head in very small print. He caught himself raising a hand to touch his neck and let it drop self-consciously back to his side.

“If you keep going like this, you might die,” she told him innocently. “Did you know that?”

The presence of the gun against his stomach, empty though it was, made his skin tingle. “I considered the possibility,” he said, and it was the honest truth.

“When you die, will you go to paradise?”

“You’re too young to be thinking this much about blood and death.”

“I’ve seen death.” Her voice was without intonation, no defensiveness or accusation anywhere in her tone. She couldn’t have been any older than ten. “My mom died in front of me. She had a fever, but I stayed cold. That’s why they call me Snowy.” She paused, shrugged one shoulder. “Also because I can eat a whole mouse in one bite, like a snowy owl.”

“Oh,” Sacha said lamely. “I’m- I’m so sorry.”

She gave another shrug. “S’okay, I’m with the brood now and they take care of me just as good as mom would. I’m just saying, you don’t really seem like a guy who’s ready to die for anyone.”

Amongst all the riddles and nonsense, this at least was something he could understand.

“I promise you, I am.”

Pajamas tugged at his sleeve. “Hey, hey Detective, have you ever been to Fun Town?”

He blinked, reeling from the non sequitur. “Excuse me?”

They pointed at the garish logo on their shirt. “‘Fun Town: It’s the funnest place on earth!’ Maybe your friends are there.”

“You’re not going to tell me I should just turn back now? That I’m dumb and the kids I’m looking for are gone forever?” he couldn’t help but snark.

“Don’t listen to Finch, she’s a liar. Nobody’s gone. Different, but not gone.”

Fun Town was an amusement park franchise with a handful of locations all over North America. Had been, that is. They’d had to shut down all their locations more than ten years ago, due in part to the outbreak at the time as well as some unsettling information about the eccentric late founder that came out after his death. Something about swaying elections and pouring company funds into an illicit genetic engineering project. Another day, another megalomaniac billionaire exposé. It had been big news at the time but now it was just another piece of pop culture trivia.

The Fun Town West fairgrounds were now little more than a fancy animatronics graveyard. The rides-- what of them hadn’t been torn down and picked clean by opportunistic scavengers-- were sparkling rusted monuments. Any sense of childhood wonder that remained had long since been siphoned off and sold. The kids didn’t seem to mind though, for how they’d congregated around the place. Maybe Pajamas had a point. It was a big, bright landmark, impossible to miss, and as good a place to search as any.

Three]

The Detective left Snowy and Pajamas and the other strange flock of The Love Nest behind, feeling a grim sense of determination The puckered bite mark on his hand throbbed; the little creep had managed to break skin!

As he navigated his way to the outskirts of the district, Sacha mulled over the interactions he’d had so far. Reluctantly he pulled out his phone to take some notes, ignoring the voicemail notifications cluttering the screen.

The kids call themselves “brood”-- some sort of gang name? The younger ones and/or newcomers to their group seem to be called fledglings. Everyone has a nickname; real names and pictures of faces have some sort of negative significance. And what of the “songbirds”, “kestrels”, etc? Songbirds: spread information. Kestrels: Unknown.

He huffed. None of this was bringing him anywhere closer to the truth about the missing girls. None of it was helping him find Ana.

By the time he power-walked to the long neglected fairgrounds, the hazy sky was becoming downright dour. The clouds had turned the color of smoke. Combine that with the stench of burnt plastic wafting from some of the attractions, it made for an unpleasant effect. He felt that a storm was brewing, and hoped that whatever came he’d be able to find shelter before the sky opened up around him.

He’d been here only twice while it was still in operation; once just him and his parents and once with Maria. By the second visit he’d already lost his sense of wonderment when it came to a day at the fair. The weather was hot and the crowds were annoying and all the games were rigged. Yet there was still a part of him that felt deeply sad to see what Fun Town had become. This was the sort of place that should’ve been beautiful forever, even as the children grew up and out of their love for it.

As he wove through the rows of darkened kiosks, the fairgrounds suddenly erupted into light. Sacha startled and shielded his eyes. The tired bulbs cracked and fizzled and when he looked up again the desiccated corpse of Fun Town had been revived in a great pulse of electricity. Against the backdrop of perpetual gloom the friendly colors were all the more headache-inducing, and somewhere a tinny recording of calliope music began to play. It all made Sacha’s skin crawl.

Against his every instinct, he let the music lead him to a shack next to the arcade with a mounted loudspeaker, the door marked with a firm “employees only”. To his surprise, the door was unlocked. Inside, another brood girl in coveralls was fiddling with a fuse box and leaning her hip against a desk with an old CCTV. The security system was so antiquated that it didn’t look like it should turn on at all, yet there upon the pixelated screen Sacha could still make out the shape of himself entering the park on a loop.

The girl turned around, flipping a frizzy head of hair over her shoulder. Although, it turned out she wasn’t so much a girl as a young woman, pushing against the line between teenage and adulthood. His gut reaction was relief. This might be the closest thing to a rational adult he would find around here. Hopefully she’d be of more help than the others.

Come to think of it, he realized, he’d never considered what happened to the Orphan’s Hollow kids once they grew up. Surely there must be some adults here, somewhere. But then, everyone who’d met him so far had treated him as a foreign invader. Were all adults so unwelcome, as he’d assumed, or was there something about him in particular?

The most rational assumption was that the homeless kids simply became homeless adults. No need for any additional fanfare. They would graduate from the Hollows and go on to squat in other parts of the city. There was certainly no shortage of slums these days, he thought glumly.

Did any ex-runaways ever try to go home, those that still had them? Did that Renee ever think about home?

“What ho, outsider!” the teen greeted. Sacha felt himself relax despite himself, so glad to be met with at least one friendly face.

“‘What ho’?” he parroted lamely.

“It’s theatre-speak for ‘wassup’. As in, what the hell are you doing in brood territory?”

She moved quickly. He didn’t notice the knife until it was tucked under his chin, pointed at his throat.

Sacha’s back hit the wall and he put up his hands in surrender. “Hold on, I’m not looking for a fight.”

“Oh yeah?” she giggled. She wrenched up the front of his shirt. “What’s this then? A prop? If I shoot it, will a little flag come out that says ‘bang’?”

She un-holstered the pistol and pointed it at his forehead.

“That’s not a toy,” he said slowly. “Just a little insurance. Like your knife there, I’m sure. I don’t think either of us wants anybody to get hurt.”

“This?” She tossed it in the air and caught it. “Nah, this is part of the act. Tonight, I’m a knife thrower. I’ve never been a knife thrower before. I hope it goes well.”

Sacha tried to speak, but the girl pressed the cold flat of the blade to his lips.

“The older girls put on shows for the fledglings. Sometimes here in Fun Town, sometimes over in the Nest, or up on the rooftops when the weather is nice. I’d invite you, but I don’t think you’d be welcome.” She adjusted her grip again so that the knife was touching the tip of his nose. “All day there’ve been whispers about some kind of detective guy putting his nose in our business.”

“I don’t care about you brood kids do here.”

“Liar.”

“I swear, I don’t. I’m just trying to find someone. I’m not even a real detective anymore,” he confessed. “I wouldn’t tell anyone what you’re doing here. Even if I did, no one would believe me. I’m nobody.”

The knife thrower gave a big, hearty laugh, and Sacha’s throat tightened with fear. He didn’t consider himself a violent person, but over his career he’d come to blows with enough unruly targets and bitter clients alike that he knew when someone was posturing, and when someone was really out for blood. Normally there was a clear indicator of one kind or another; a tightening of the jaw, a certain nervous tick, a look in their eyes.

But this girl he couldn’t get a read on at all. He hoped that meant she was still on the fence about the subject.

Struggling to keep his voice level he said, “You don’t have to do this. Something like this will haunt you your whole life, you know, and you’ve got so much life left. You’re still just a kid--”

She reared her hand back and struck at his head with the butt of the pistol. Sacha dodged. It slammed into the fuse box she’d been working on instead and the lights went out. Taking advantage of the darkness, he shoved past her and in a stroke of blind fortune found the door. There was a sound then, like the rush of wind in his ears. Then a sharp flash of pain as a flying knife split the cartilage of one ear.

He stumbled and hit the pavement. When Sacha turned around, hand clutched to his head, he saw the young woman’s silhouette bracketed by two iridescent black wings. Again that sound, ferocious wingbeats stirring the air. All he saw were two but it sounded like hundreds, a massive flock taking off in perfect synchronicity.

“It’s really frustrating when people don’t take me seriously,” said the winged creature as she approached him. Maybe it was an effect of the many colored lights, but her skin appeared to have a glossy sheen to it, like an oil painting in motion. “But you look like you’re starting to get it now.”

“What the hell are you?” Sacha asked with a mix of horror and feverish reverence.

“What do you think I am?”

The thought came to him unbidden. It was an insane thought, one he didn’t even truly believe in, yet this was an insane situation. “The angel of death.”

That gave her pause. “You’re not right, but you’re not really wrong either I guess. Truth be told, I’m heaven on earth. Maybe I’ll cut you some slack if you worship me”

A wing brushed over his skin, however faintly, and it felt warm and real as the blood cooling on his skin. Not ethereal or dreamlike as he might’ve expected but so real, and all the more hideous for it. He shuddered and said nothing.

The false angel, this predatory animal, took a step back. She spun the pistol around one long finger until it slipped and fell to the ground. She looked at it for a moment, as if surprised.

“Huh. It was lighter than I expected,” she said. Then she kicked it aside. “You win this one I guess. I’ll let you go.”

He stared at her, mouth agape, sure it was some trick.

“What? You don’t believe me. I put it in fate’s hand, and for some reason it looks like fate wants to keep you alive a little longer. It’s not how I saw this going, but I can roll with some improv.” She put up her hands. “Don’t bother groveling. I won’t kill you even if you beg. I know guys like you love punishment. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“Here… in Fun Town? Or, are you asking why I’m alive?”

She laughed. She so loved laughing. “Morbid! You’re morbid, man. I mean, why are you here among the brood? At… what do the outsiders call it? The Orphan Hole?” she snickered. “You kind of stick out like a sore thumb.”

“I’m trying to find someone,” Sacha repeated quietly. He’d said the line so many times he felt it was starting to lose its meaning. “And to make up for something I did.”

“Well you should’ve said so in the first place! If you’re looking to atone you need to meet with the broodmother. If you hurry, you might still be able to catch her. Tonight’s going to be kind of a crazy night once it kicks off, but if you plead your case I’m sure she’ll hear you out.

“I have to keep setting up here. You go on ahead.” She pointed out in the direction he’d come from. “It’s a straight shot to Paradiso. You can tell her the angel of death sent you.”

She spared him one last smirk and then shot up into the air like an arrow loosed from a taut bowstring.

Or a bullet from a gun, even. Sacha considered the discarded pistol for a moment. It seemed so useless now, just a hunk of metal and plastic, just a prop. He walked away without it, pain pulsing dully from his ear. His journey was nearly over.

Time dragged on as he walked, but not enough for him to find the space to contend with what he’d seen. That girl, that creature. She was no angel, that much he was certain of. Angels didn’t attack strangers with a knife, he didn’t think.

What he wasn’t certain of was… just about everything else. Was he meant to understand that all these girls, these brood, were some kind of bird-beasts taking human shape? Was everyone he’d met an imposter masquerading in the form of a child? Or did they start out as ordinary children and then transform somehow?

He half hated himself for even entertaining such wild ideas, but he had little other choice. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth” wasn’t that so? In any case, speculation did him little good at this point. He could only hope that this paradise and “broodmother” the girl had spoken of could give him some answers.

Four]

Just when Sacha was beginning to wonder if the knife throwing angel imposter was fully fucking with him, he found his destination: The Paradiso Hotel, although the damaged neon sign now read only PRDIO.

The building was tall and narrow, so wedged between its neighbors that it looked like any moment it might be crushed. The brickwork was crumbling as it was. Creeping plant life climbed the sides and snuck in through broken windows. The ominous, weathered shape of gargoyles watched from above, jutting strangely out of high corners. This place must have been in dire straits long before it had been taken over by the brood. At the same time, looking at it Sacha got the impression that it had been something glorious in its heyday.

There was something almost inviting about the faint glow that came from the topmost windows, filtering pink light through heavy red curtains, and yet Sacha was terrified. His hands trembled on the railing as he climbed the winding stairway.

The higher he went, the more his surroundings began to change. The carpet beneath his feet grew soft, damp, dipping slightly with his weight, and when he looked down he found it thick with patchy moss. Mushrooms sprouted from the junction where the floor met the wall. Sacha tore his foot from a tangle of roots he’d caught himself in and wondered, when was the last time he’d seen so much wild living plantlife in person?

Finally he reached the top of the tower and opened the door not onto identical hallways and bland hotel decor, but onto a sprawling private library.

The detective could hardly see the walls for the shelves, lined top to bottom with books upon books upon books. There was a desk against the far wall piled high with precarious stacks of paper. They overflowed and spilled onto the loamy floor, whispering under his every step.

Beyond a towering skylight, storm clouds billowed, but that wasn’t of any concern to the flock of brood congregated in their wake. The scene looked like something rendered from stained glass, at least a dozen girls with wings of all colors stretched out and fluttering idly behind them as they sat around some sort of shrub or young sapling that was, quite impossibly, growing out of the floor. Its tender boughs bore tiny fruit, several perfectly round red orbs plump and shiny with juice.

The room smelled like a greenhouse, like heat and green growth, flowers and fruit. Intrigue drew Sacha nearer and he detected an undercurrent of something metallic as well. He rounded the desk and his stomach plummeted. The tree was not growing out of the floor. It was growing out of a human corpse nested in a bed of soil.

The Detective choked on a gasp and the brood children looked up. Their hands and knees were dark from their work. A flash of gore passed before Sacha’s eyes and he flinched, expecting to be struck down where he stood. When no killing blow came, morbid desire took hold of him and he took a second look. The tree was still there, and the body, but the body was not as he’d thought. It looked dry, mummified, more root than rot. Still staring, one of the brood girls plucked a berry and crushed it between her teeth. The smell intensified, iron and something sweet, heady as any wine.

One of the girl-beasts stood, and she seemed older than the rest somehow, not just in body but in her eyes, gray as the growing storm and so clear that Sacha feared if he looked too long he would fall through them. Her face was smooth and free of wrinkles or worry, but the long hair that fell about her shoulders was white as bone. She wore something like a shawl that hung lazily off her shoulders and down past her knees. Unlike the others, she had no wings.

“So you’re the one all my girls have been making such a fuss about,” she said, and her voice was a choir, her words an indictment.

Sacha felt a strange spike of anger at this creature that looked like a woman and talked like a mystic and was neither. “And you’re the broodmother, whatever that means! Your girls make you out to some kind of god. But you’re not a god, and you’re not their mother. I don’t know what you are and I don’t care. I just want to know why you’re doing this.”

“What am I doing?”

“You’re- you’re taking them!” he stammered furiously. The pieces were coming together, albeit in a hectic jumble. “All the missing girls! You abduct them, or call them to you, or something! It changes them!” He flung his hand out towards the body. “You’re a killer! You're some kind of crazy death cultist and you turn these kids into killers!”

The broodmother quirked her head to the side, not quite smiling. “You talk with a lot of confidence for a man with only half the story.”

“Then explain it to me,” he demanded. “Make it make sense. Because I’ve been running around this madhouse all day and so far, nothing does.”

She hummed to herself, considering. “If you’re so eager for a tale, let’s start with yours.”

One of the other little brood leapt up and wrapped her arms around her waist. “Is it time for a story, Nightingale?”

“Yes, I think so. Do you know which book to get?”

“D for Detective!” she cheered.

“Very good.”

The girl scampered off and returned with a big book bound in red. Nightingale took it and ran her thumb over the pages, flipping it open with a calm certainty that boiled Sacha’s blood.

“Let’s see… Detective Sacha Ferro. You were born in this very city, had a fairly normal childhood until,” She traced the tip of her finger along the page and Sacha noticed for the first time how it curled, a ghastly hook-like talon. “Oh, that’s right. There was an accident. Your parents… Tragic. Just terrible.”

Astonishingly, she sounded as though she meant it.

“You were in high school at the time. But your sister, Maria, she was still just a kid. You always struggled to relate to her as a brother, with her being so much younger than you, but after that day you had to become like a parent too. You really stepped up, it looks like. That didn’t change the fact that you were still a kid yourself. You made mistakes, and the two of you grew apart.”

Shame curdled in Sacha’s gut. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. The most he was capable of was curling his hands into white-knuckled fists at his sides.

“Get out of my head.”

“I’m not in it. Frankly, I’m not that interested in your editorializing. This is the truth. Now, where was I?

“You’d always dreamed of being a police detective, like the ones on TV,” she continued. “But became disillusioned with the idea once you grew older. So you became a private eye, but that too got old. You were tired of acquiring blackmail material for shady characters and helping angry wives catch their cheating husbands and so on. Meanwhile little Maria had grown up and moved on and the neighborhood you’d lived in all your life was going more and more downhill by the year. You wanted out.

“Then you got a call from a Mrs Gloria Deeds.” Her eyes widened dramatically. “She wanted you to track down her poor missing daughter. The Deedses were wealthy, desperate, and just perfect. You requested an advance payment, a big one, big enough for a down payment on a new life and the gas to get you there. They didn’t even blink as they pulled out the checkbook. It was all so easy.

“You took the Deedses money and you ran away. Forget the kid, chances were she’d turn up on her own in a week or two after getting whatever rebellious phase out of her system. That’s not what happened though, is it? More and more girls started disappearing. Renee wasn’t the first though, or was she? Could she have been the catalyst for all this? You’d never know for certain. The wondering ate you up inside, but not enough to make you turn back.

“You got yourself a new apartment and a regular nine-to-five job. You quit smoking. You adopted a dog. You started letting people in. You even called up Maria begging to be a part of her life again and shockingly, she agreed! You started spending weekends with her and her wife Kara and their sweet little girl Ana. Your mother’s name, wasn’t it? Well, anyway.

“Everything was all going so terribly well until just a few days ago. Nearly five years on the dot since you took the Deeds case and Maria calls you in tears, tells you that Ana has gone missing. You drop the phone, your blood running cold. She’s fifteen. Just a year or two and she’d be out of the target demographic. Neither you or your sister has set foot in this city in years. What are the odds she got taken? But you can’t let it go until you know for sure.

“Feeling frantic, you pull up the stuff from the Deeds case for the first time in what feels like an eternity. You do some digging. Renee Deeds was never found, nor were any of the others who vanished after her. The cops are still as apathetic and incompetent as you left them. They’re blaming it all on an epidemic of gang activity stemming from somewhere the locals have started calling ‘Orphan’s Hollow’. It didn’t used to be called that though, did it? Do you remember? How gutted you were when you found out? No way you could tell Maria where you were going. Back home, back to where it all started.”

“Stop.” Sacha found his voice at last, though to what end?

Nightingale looked up at him, feigning shock. “But don’t you want to know how it ends? Whatever does happen to the guilt-ridden detective trying to right a wrong? Hoping against hope that if he can fulfill the promise he broke that all of this will be set to rights, and little Ana will return home with him safe and sound.”

“Please, please, stop.” He covered his ears and felt the cut throb against his fingers.

“You’re not really in any position to be making demands, Detective. You came to me. You followed my song. It doesn’t usually work on grown-ups, you know, but you were always sort of a special case I think. I’m glad I kept an eye on you. This has turned out more interesting than I thought.”

She crossed the room to stand before him, cupping his hands with her own. “You never really stopped being that kid, did you Sacha? You run and run and just keep him right there, locked away in your chest. Look at me Sacha. Look at me. You need to be a grown-up now. I don’t have her, Sacha. I don’t have Ana.”

Slowly Sacha’s hands dropped to his sides, his eyes wide and wet. “What?”

“That’s right,” the broodmother said cheerily. “Ana isn’t here. In fact, she’s at home with her moms right now. Maria’s been trying to call you for days now. You were too ashamed to pick up, couldn’t tell her how this was all your fault. It’s not actually, by the way. You were a self-serving bastard, but not enough to bring down that kind of karmic wrath.

“Although I’d’ve been happy to have her, Ana already has two loving mothers, and an uncle that… has his moments.” She patted him on the shoulder. “The children who follow my song aren’t like that. They come willingly, and they change because change is what they need. I won’t pretend it’s not a messy process. Sometimes blood needs to be spilled to create a paradise. But ‘be not afraid’, Detective. I would never let my little angels get hurt.”

“I still don’t understand,” he all but wept. “What about Renee Deeds?”

“You’re never going to let that go, are you?” Nightingale groaned. “‘What are you? What are you? Where’s the girl? Pow! Blam! I’m a big scary action hero and I’m here to save you or kill you trying!’”

She shook her head. “You’re not the hero of this story, Detective. The girl you knew as Renee doesn’t exist anymore, but she’s alive, not because of your intervention, or lack thereof. Not even in spite of it. What am I? What is she? And what are we when we’re together? A thing that lives without your permission. You need to understand for it to be true.”

She looked at him then with all the sympathy of a mother comforting a crying child. She handed off the storybook to one of her young attendants, and as she turned around she swept aside the cover of her shawl to reveal her bare back. Her skin was twisted with badly healed scars, the flesh raised in the shape of two jagged cuts curving around the shape of her scapula.

“Here’s another story for you. Once upon a time,” she said. “A ship of men was cast from its course and lost at sea. Just when it seemed all hope was lost, they found themselves on the shores of a mysterious island full of the tallest, greenest trees they’d ever seen. The people there had wings like a bird, and they were so beautiful and kind that the men decided they must be angels, and this was paradise.

“The angels let them stay there a while and lick their wounds, but warned them that they couldn't remain forever. At first they accepted this, but as the time to leave for home grew nearer they became obsessed with the wonders of the island and couldn’t bear to go without taking a piece with them.

“So enamoured by the beauty of the angels, yet fearing their heavenly wrath, they lured away the smallest one and imprisoned her in the lower decks of the ship. When she realized what had happened, she tried to escape, so they broke her wings until just moving them caused her horrible pain. She did get free in the end, but only once the ship returned to port and by then she was far, far from home and knew not how to find her way back.

“She knew she wasn’t safe among the wingless people, so she hid herself away until nightfall, singing her song by the light of the moon in hopes that one day someone would return her call. When someone finally did, it wasn’t at all who she expected. It was a young human girl, a daughter of man, who recognized her song of pain and loneliness because these were things she knew well herself. When the angel and the girl finally found each other, the angel bid her to cut her useless wings and drink her blood, and together they escaped on new wings.”

As she spoke, the storm outside grew stronger until the wind rattled the very walls, knocking books loose from their shelves. The brood, with their many colored wings and many sweet voices, began to sing in wordless harmony, a hymn from such unfathomable depths and dizzying heights that Sacha’s legs nearly gave out beneath him.

“Don’t be sad, my mourning dove. This is a happy story. The Nightingale fell in love with the Swiftlet, the song and the storm, and they carried each other to a place where they could make a new paradise, a garden of their own.”

That was when the ceiling began to cave in. Sacha fell to his knees and covered his head with his hands, blinded by what he was sure was a bolt of lightning. When he looks back on it later, he won’t be so sure.

Again came that sound, the torrent of wind and a hundred wings beating within it. Sacha forced himself to raise his head, squinting against the light, and there he saw dancing in the open air above the wreckage-- for dancing was the only way he could think to describe it-- a girl he once knew. Though they were less than strangers, especially now, he recognized her kind dark eyes, her secretive smile.

Her hair was loose, a halo of electrified black curls, and her wings a dusky brown with the sharp, precise plumage of a swift. Her legs still didn’t move so freely as the rest of her, but she wasn’t bothered. She didn’t need them.

Nightingale ran and leapt and took her in her arms with a lover’s embrace. Off a ways behind them, their brood took flight as well, swooping and shrieking their delight as if they were a single entity, metamorphosing into something new, something so nearly divine.

Sacha did weep then. His vision blurred with the shape of his grief, then his longing, a child and a man and a hair’s width away from paradise. Eventually the storm subsided, but he didn’t see the angel and her love again after that. He thought perhaps that was for the better.

The sky cleared. The sun came out. Elsewhere, young girls planted gardens and played games and put on shows. The world went on, however changed.

This is where past and present collide. In the aftermath of a mystery, a man named Sacha Ferro picks up a book from in amidst the rubble and holds it up to the light. He flips to D for Detective and begins to read, anxious to find out what happens next.

Epilogue]

“Everyone settle down. Places! Starling, for the last time, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ doesn’t call for a knife thrower.”

“And why not?” She wiggles the blade in her direction. “This show’s so boring. Everyone already knows how it goes. Let me spice it up a bit.”

Finch rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Just, don’t jump ahead of your cue this time. And stop making up extra lines. You almost blew it last time.”

Starling sticks her tongue out but she has a skip in her step when she returns backstage. On the other side of the curtain, the audience is starting to take their seats. There aren’t enough chairs-- and most of the “chairs” are actually old boxes and things to begin with-- so some of them have to stand. An older brood allows Pajamas to climb up onto her shoulders, reminding her to be mindful of her wings, which are still fairly fresh and tender where they join with her back.

“Greetings, Princess,” says the fortune teller Resplendent, dressed in her good theatre clothes, as she sits down beside her. “Who’s this?”

Princess Ladybird holds up the dented ornament head. “This is Jessika. The doctors managed to save her but she needs an emergency body transplant, stat! I’m going to find her a new one after the show.”

She nods. “Greetings, Lady Jessika. I hope you have a speedy recovery.”

Ladybird holds the doll head up to her ear and hums as if in response to something.

“Can I hear too?”

She obliges, and Resplendent listens. There’s a quiet buzzing from inside the hollow tin skull and it echoes hauntingly in the emptiness.

She whispers, “There’s a bug inside of Jessika’s brain keeping her alive. That’s why she can still talk without a body. If Jessika dies, the bug will get out. Ick!”

The other girl chuckles. “Your name is a kind of bug, you know.”

“No! It’s a bird! Lady-bird!”

She bites back another laugh and points towards the stage. “Shh, the show’s starting.”

Sure enough, the songbird choir starts up, bidding the chattering spectators to quiet down and listen up. A girl comes out on stage wearing a corner of the curtain as a makeshift hood. She says,

“It is dark inside a wolf’s belly.”

#dark fantasy #horror #angels #short fiction #novella #dystopia #long fic #mystery #My writing #writeblr #original fiction

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