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naladot · 2 years

Note

Hey! Maybe it’s a long shot but if you’re still taking fic prompts, could you do one of dasey inspired by taylor swift’s “the great war”? Cause I read the one you wrote inspired on “you are in love” and loved it so much!!

It took a minute but I did it!! I hope you like this ficlet I just dashed off!

My hand was the one you reached for | Derek/Casey (mostly gen) | 810 words | rated g

“Do you want to talk about it?”

It’s after midnight. Derek’s not really used to Casey peeking her head into his room at this time of night, and absolutely not when she’d been yelling at him just a couple hours ago. (He’d asked if Max made an effort to pretend like he listened when Casey talked or if he just ignored her—a serious question, and not his fault that Casey took it so personally.)

“No,” he answers, without looking up from the textbook on his lap. He hasn’t managed to read past the first sentence in the last hour since he announced that he needed to go do homework, which had elicited a genuine gasp from Nora.

“It might help if we talk about it,” Casey continues, taking a tentative step into the room.

“It won’t. You can close the door on your way out.”

“Der-ek,” she says softly, not moving to leave.

He sighs and rubs a palm over his face. She won’t leave unless he gives her a reason to. Annoying. “My mom is like this, okay? I don’t need to talk about it.”

Casey does close his door, now, but she’s on the wrong side of it. He wants to get up and push her out of the room, but he doesn’t really have the energy and when she’s hellbent on “family bonding,” he has to be a lot meaner than usual to battle her off. Maybe he should be ashamed of himself for letting her win this one. It happens way too often these days.

She doesn’t say anything though. She straightens her shoulders and then crosses the room to sit herself primly on the end of his bed. She doesn’t look at him or speak, and a strange sense of—something spreads through him. Relief? Affection? No way, definitely not.

But it’s weirdly nice to no longer be alone.

When she speaks, she doesn’t push him to open up like she expects. Instead she twists one hand around the other, her eyes focused somewhere above his computer.

“My dad is seeing someone,” she says.

“Oh,” Derek says, not sure what else to say.

She glances over at him, her chin jutting out in a weird way that suggests she’s fighting off tears. This normally bothers him but this time he holds still, waiting for whatever she’ll say next.

“It’s—fine, I guess. He just told me and Lizzie,” she continues. “I found out the woman he’s seeing has two kids around our age.”

“Ouch,” Derek says, suddenly understanding. He waits for Casey to get mad at him, but she gives a weak smile and shrugs.

“Yeah,” she says very softly. “I just keep wondering if…”

She trails off and doesn’t finish, but he hears her thoughts in the silence. It’s the same thing with his mom—after months of planning for him to go to Mexico with her over the summer, she pulls the plug like it’s no big deal. He’s been saving for it, and worse, he actually wanted it. His fault. He should have known better.

“I don’t think Nora would have been happy in New York,” he says.

“No,” Casey agrees. “But still.”

He doesn’t say anything, trying to imagine the McDonald nuclear family living in some high-rise apartment. He can’t quite picture it—can’t picture this house without them, can’t picture living here without Casey anymore. He’s imagined that reality so many times that he doesn’t know how to feel to discover he can’t imagine it in this moment, like the other was just a daydream but this, a real alternate reality they might have had, feels impossible.

“So that’s what’s going on with me,” Casey says. She looks at him, her eyes luminous. “You okay?”

“I’m good,” he answers—quickly, but without malice.

He watches her contemplate something for a moment, chewing at her bottom lip, and then she seems to make up her mind and reaches out for his hand currently holding the textbook. Maybe she just intended to pat his hand or something, but instead she sort of clutches at his fist. He doesn’t know if he should let go of the book to hold her hand or—what, but now they’re both looking at her hand over his.

And in a split second, he once again wishes the McDonalds did not live in his house.

“Um,” Casey says. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay, and, um—” She pats his hand a couple times, neither of them daring to look at each other. “And, yeah.”

She gets up and leaves in a hurry, giving him just a glimpse of her flushed face before the door closes behind her with a soft click.

Derek leans his head back against his headboard and closes his eyes. There was more than one reason he’d wanted to get out of the house for the summer.

#dasey #dasey fic #naladot writes

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naladot · 3 years

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Are you still taking fic prompts? Can I request a Dasey with song “You are in love” by Taylor swift?? If you can’t, that’s okay too LOL 😁

ANON this is such a good prompt! Here's my attempt~

Dasey, ~1.1k, "you can hear it in the silence"

--------

Time moved, too fast

It happens at midnight, like a screwed-up version of a fairy tale—the kind that would happen to Casey, seeing as she’s had a streak of bad luck ever since the Venturis entered her life. She and Derek are in the drive-thru for the only 24-hour Tim Horton’s in London, watching fat snowflakes land on the windshield. Every now and then, Derek will flip on the windshield wipers, turning the backlights of the car in front of them into a blur of red and gold for a moment. Neither of them has said anything since they gave their order, but it’s a comfortable silence, mostly. Derek drums his thumbs against the steering wheel aimlessly, murmuring the words to the song drifting thinly from the radio.

“I thought you didn’t like Taylor Swift,” Casey says, twisting to look at him.

He tilts a smile her way. “I don’t.”

“Then why do you know all the words to this song?”

“Because I always have to chauffeur you around,” he says, but not meanly. He reaches to mess up her hair, but she grabs his hand in mid-air. She’s pushing his hand away, but she takes too long, skin burning against skin. The silence comes back, heavy.

Derek turns up the radio. “It’s a love story, baby, just say yes!” he sings, louder this time, his eyes darting over to Casey to see if she’s annoyed yet.

She thinks: god, I love him.

And then the world reverses its spin, flips polarity, turns over on its axis—whatever you want, everything is upside down and wrong, wrong, wrong.

“Are you okay?”

Somewhere far away, he’s asking her a question. “I’m fine!” she hears herself say, too loudly.

“You’re being weird.”

“I’m not being weird. How am I being weird?”

“You have that ‘Casey crisis’ look on your face.” He gestures to his own face and makes a weird, very unflattering grimace.

“I do not.”

“Yes you do. See, look.” He reaches over and flips down the sun visor. This close she can smell the faintest scent of his cologne. She got it for him, she suddenly remembers, when he had a date during their second year. He hadn’t ended up going on the date, she remembers vaguely, because—because she got sick, and he took her to the emergency room. Family solidarity, and all that. Her life is a cruel joke.

“Casey?”

“I look fine,” she snaps, flipping the sun visor back up. “You need to move forward.”

While he pulls up to the next window, a frown etched into his face, Casey commences a total existential crisis. Now that she’s acknowledged the word love in her own mind, all her suppressed feelings come bubbling to the surface. She knows this is not the warm, sunshine-y love she feels for her mother and sister. It’s not the exasperated, fond love she feels for the rest of her step family. It’s not the steady, dependable love she feels for Emily. Nor is it the desperate, determined love she’s felt for every guy she dated longer than six months. No—this is something else. This is her worst nightmare come to life.

He passes the coffees to her, concern visible in the tilt of his eyebrows and the way he waits just a beat too long before turning back to the window.

Soon they’re back on the road. Casey reaches for her coffee at the same time Derek does, his hand landing on top of hers.

“Sorry,” he says, without fighting or making a fuss.

She watches the passing headlights light up his face, wondering what he’d do if she told him the truth.

----

No proof, one touch

Sometimes, Derek wishes Casey wouldn’t come over to his apartment. She has a way of filling up his space that leaves him on edge. No matter how short her visit, she always leaves pieces of herself scattered around his space—bobby pins on the end table, scarves on his coat rack, makeup in his bathroom, books on his table, indecipherable notes on the legal pad she left on his kitchen counter “in case you need to write something important down.” And she sheds so much hair that he’s half-worried she’s going to go bald. The unique mix of agony and disgust he goes through every time he has to clean her hair out of his sink drain is probably something he should get checked out, though, because he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to feel anything at all.

She’s over on Saturday anyway, stretched out on his couch and wearing his sweatshirt, because her own winter clothes apparently weren’t warm enough and she whined until he threw it at her. He’s trying not to look over at her too often, keeping his eyes on the muted romcom she’d flipped on (without asking) or his phone.

“Are you still going out with—what’s her name?” she asks.

“Kyla?”

“Yeah, her.”

“No,” he fiddles with his phone, determined not to look at Casey. Kyla was a friend from his media class, with whom he had too much in common to not ask out, but everything feels like a let-down when the one thing you want is always just out of reach.

“I thought she was, like, your best friend?”

“You’re my best friend,” Derek says without thinking.

He freezes. Unable to stop himself, he looks at Casey. Her eyes are shining in the exact way that he was afraid of, her mouth crumpled into a pout, the edges threatening to break into a smile.

“I’m your best friend?”

“Don’t make a big deal about it,” Derek says quickly, ripping his gaze away and focusing on his phone instead. But he can’t make out any words, so he’s just staring at it blankly.

Casey, being his mortal enemy in addition to his best friend, suddenly appears in front of him, hovering too close for comfort. He looks up. She has her hands clasped in front of her, and that stupid (cute) pout on her face. She sits down on the arm of the chair, wrapping her arms around his neck. Her hair gets into his face, covering up his eyes.

“We’ve come so far, Derek,” she says into his ear.

He puts a hand on her back and pats, awkwardly. He’s wanted to kiss her since the day they met, and that same day he kissed any chance of kissing goodbye for the sake of his dad’s happiness. But he wonders if she even gets it. Yeah, it just slipped out, but now he’s forced to face the fact that she is his best friend, and—what’s he supposed to do with that? Pretend that means something different than it means?

She leans back, one hand resting against his hair, and looks down at him. She’s still smiling, but the way her brow furrows and the smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes—maybe she does get it, after all.

#dasey #dasey ficlet #naladot writes #assume a happy ending :)

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