#get a linoleum block and cut it into small pieces?

[the-defiant-fluffball]

Inktober 2024 day 8: Lantern

[ciginatree]

Baby- Justin Morrow x female!reader

Content warnings- domestic fluff, smut, PiV, talk of pregnancy, sub!Justin if you squint, language

Word Count: 1.4k

Anonymous request

This story is a complete work of fiction portraying the likeness of a real person or persons in a fictional situation.

Justin drops the gallon of milk into the shopping cart and leans on the handlebar and top basket as he pushes back through the aisle. He’s tired; he never really enjoys grocery shopping, but he’d rather go than make you go right after work. So, he continues to push the half-full cart over the linoleum floor. He starts to turn down the bread aisle, but stops at the wet floor sign blocking his way. He groans and turns his cart down the next aisle over, sticky wheels skidding over the floor. Dead eyed and tired, Justin pays no attention to the contents of the aisle, until his eyes catch on a small article of clothing hanging off a rack. “Daddy’s little rockstar” reads the white, blocky lettering on a blue and white striped onesie. He slows the cart and straightens up with intrigue, reaching out to touch the miniscule piece of clothing. How can a human even be this small? He holds his hand up beside the garment and chuckles at the comparison. His hand extends to where the baby’s armpit would be, taking up the majority of the garment. He presses the soft fabric between his fingers and ponders it, a warm idea overtaking his annoyance. He gently slides the hanger off the rack and places the item in the basket of the cart and continues on to the check out.

You hear the sound of the front door closing and plastic bags of groceries being lowered to the floor with a thud. “Babe?” You call out and stand from where you were doom scrolling on the couch to make your way to the front of the house. You smile when your bear of a husband comes into view. “Hey, how’d it go?” You raise yourself on your toes and place a hand on his cheek, sweetly pressing your lips to his. Anxiousness bleeds off of him and he tenses, causing you to retract a bit. You furrow your eyebrows in concern and he looks down, biting his lip. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” 

“No- nothing’s wrong, but-” An unexpected object in one of the gray plastic sacks catches your eye and you cut him off.

“What’s that?” You start to reach down for it, but Justin places a hand on each of your upper arms, pulling you back upright.

“Baby, wait. I need to talk to you first.” You’ve only seen him this nervous a couple other times: the night he proposed, and the day he found out his dad was sick. 

“Justin, you’re scaring me,” you say, feeding off his anxiousness. Is someone else sick? Did someone get into an accident? What has he been hiding from you?

“It’s nothing bad, not- well I guess if you don’t want it- but, we just- we’ve never talked about it and-”

“Justin,” you say firmly. “What are you trying to tell me?” He takes a breath and squeezes your arms, looking at you like he might drown if he looks away.

“I think I want a kid.” You’re silent. Stunned at his sudden confession. Neither of you speak for a few moments, both of you simply search each other’s expressions as the buzzing quiet fills your ears.

“That’s what you were so scared to tell me?” He nods and you hang your head, trying to contain your laughter. Justin looks at you apprehensively, not sure if he should be scared or hopeful.

“What?” Your laughter crescendos and you look up at him with a lighthearted look of shock.

“I thought someone died or something! You scared the hell out of me!” Justin lets out a few sheepish chuckles of his own, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Your laughter dies down to a loving smile. “I want a kid, too.”

Justin’s smile grows to a look of elation and his eyes grow lighter with hope and wonder. “Really? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I”m sure.” The words have barely left your mouth before you find yourself swept up into his arms, legs dangling over his forearms. You shriek in laughter and grip his shirt. “What are you doing?”

“We both want kids; I’m not wasting any time.” He takes quick steps to the bedroom, leg swinging behind him to shut the door. He tosses you onto the bed and yanks his shirt over his head. You take initiative and undress yourself, your pants landing draped over your nightstand, the rest god knows where else. Justin wastes no time in climbing over you, a dopey, lopsided smile tugging at his lips as his hair dips down over his forehead. 

You grin in return and grasp his cheeks in each of your hands, pulling him down into a heated kiss. The warmth of his skin radiates into your chest as his brushes against you, his hips lifted barely above yours. Your lips work in tandem, throbbing heat coiling between you as each kiss deepens in passion. When you don’t think you can take anymore, the tip of his cock nestles against your opening, both of you moaning in unison.

“You ready, baby?” Justin pants against your lips. All you can do is nod. With a small grunt, he pushes his way inside you, breath suspending as he’s enveloped in your heat. You grip his shoulders, mouth dropping open as your head tilts back in a silent moan. It’s overwhelming; the feeling and the stretch of him inside you numbs your mind every time. Justin bottoms out and pauses, hips resting snug against yours. He lowers himself to his forearms once again, his face mere inches from yours. You both work to catch your breath. 

With a deep inhale Justin’s eyes flutter open, searching yours for confirmation. You simply stare up at him, knowing he’ll get the message when you hook a leg over his hips. Eyes locked on yours, Justin withdraws his hips and pushes forward again with a moan. As he finds a rhythm, his mouth drops open to release obscene sounds. His eyelids are heavy as he completely surrenders to you.

“Fuck, baby,” he gasps, hands clenching the sheets on either side of your body. You grab a fist full of his hair and tug lightly before carding your fingers through the faded green tufts. Justin groans again and shifts his weight to one hand, using the other to grip your thigh as it lays anchored to his waist. Your body pulses with heat, each thrust sending a wave of overwhelming warmth through your system. “C’mon,” he grunts through gritted teeth. “Need a better position if we wanna keep a baby in you.”

Your eyes flutter open in surprise just in time for both of your legs to be thrown over his shoulders. A choked cry escapes your throat as your neck cranes back into the pillows, legs bouncing and swaying as his hips settle into yours with each thrust. Lewd sounds of wetness and panting fill the space between you, luscious heat settling deep in your gut. Your hips writhe up to meet his as best they can and Justin drops to both forearms. Sharp aches spread along your calves and arches of your feet, but you’re too far gone to care. 

“Justin,” you strain desperately. Each thrust grinds his pelvis hard against your clit, walls clenching tight around him. A depraved whimper echoes from his throat before quickly pitching down to a groan. His jaw goes slack, eyes rolling as his hips stutter forward and still against you. His cock pulses and twitches heavily, hot cum spurting deep inside you. Justin can feel it, he knows you didn’t cum and he knows he has more to give you. He blows out a quick breath and drags himself back, slowly burying deep inside you again as his hand wedges between the two of you. He keeps steady pressure and lazy thrusts, slowly working you back to oblivion. 

“Fuck,” he whimpers breathlessly. He’s so sensitive, body shuddering involuntarily. One of your legs slips slickly off his shoulder, the other plastered in place with body heat and tacky skin on skin. You gently take his face between your hands, bringing his forehead down to rest on yours. 

“Baby,” you mutter, chest arching up as your core tightens. “Baby!” You cry out desperately. “Fuck!” Your nails dig into Justin’s cheeks, core pulsing tightly around him, and body flooding with a rush of unimaginable pleasure. Your orgasm triggers his second and he can’t hold back his wanton cries. He rides out both of your highs with slow, spastic thrusts before stilling, completely buried inside you. His chest heaves with overstimulation and aching breaths. A tired grin cracks his feature and he tilts his chin to brush your lips with his. 

“You’re gonna be the best mom.”

Tags: @abiomens @rumoured-whispers @exitwoundsx @high-wire @joyofbebbanburg

Dividers by @saradika-graphics

[thewarriorspecial]

In Synch

*Archive Edition* Previously only linked to AO3, full work now available under the cut.

Read on AO3

Rating: Teen (teen? or is this gen? does romance/ship elements make it not gen? citrus scale?? idk anymore??) | Guy Gardner/Kyle Rayner

Additional Tags Established Relationship, Humor, Fluff, Ficlet

A short slice of life piece in which Kyle wants to paint, but Guy wants attention.

“Get those things out of my face,” Kyle laughs.

“No,” Guy says, shoving his chest into Kyle’s face. 

Kyle just wants a red plastic cup from the bag on the kitchen floor, but Guy wants attention. “I’m trying to paint,” Kyle says, hunching into tackle position as he aims for the bag. 

“Paint me like one of your French girls then.” Guy leans back, striking a seductive pose while blocking the bag with his feet.

“I will, I just wanna get this idea down.” Kyle feints a grab for the bag.

“No, me first!” Guy falls for the trick and Kyle springs into his chest. He gives Guy a motorboat, using his hands to envelop as much of his face in Guy’s ample chest as humanly possible. “Hey!”

Guy kicks the bag away as he tries to free his tiddies from Kyle’s grip. Kyle’s slippered feet slide along the linoleum floor. Guy turns Kyle in his arms, getting him into a headlock.

“Gimme a cup, asshole,” Kyle laughs. 

“Here ya go,” Guy says as he grasps Kyle’s chest and squeezes. Kyle giggles and writhes as Guy’s fingers dig into his ribs. 

“No tickling!” Kyle gasps.

“Yes tickling!” Guy crows. He grabs for the spot just above Kyles knee digs his fingers in. Kyle flops like a fish out of water. The pair crash to the floor, sending several small items tumbling off of the counter. Guy rolls, pulling Kyle on top of him so he doesn’t crush the smaller man.

“Okay, okay,” Kyle pants, “You first. Then I wanna show you my idea.”

“Deal!”

—————————————————

Kyle leans over the blank easel, struggling to breathe as he guffaws, “Guy, please,” he begs, “You need to stand still.”

Guy, naked as the day he was born, has a small houseplant perched on his forehead. His face is scrunched in extreme concentration. His hips roll in a steady cadence, keeping his man bits spinning in a perfect circle. “Nah, you gotta capture my essence!” He scolds Kyle, thumb and first two fingers pressed together and shaking at the ceiling like an angry Italian chef.

“Dude, your essence is like, spraying all over the room.”

“That means it’s workin’.”

“Please,” Kyle chuckles, trying to get his laughter under control. His face and sides ached. “Just get on the bed for me, okay?”

“I knew it. Just a matter of time,” Guy croons as he sets the plant on the dresser with a thud. He leaps onto the bed, legs splayed as he makes himself comfortable. “I’m irresistible, baby.”

Guy is irresistible, and so is that extra soft mattress under layers and layers of down padding and high thread count sheets. He pantomimes casting a line with an imaginary fishing rod at Kyle. When Kyle doesn’t budge from in front of the easel, Guy plants his feet on the bed and pretends to fight to reel him in.

Kyle feigns surprise, grabbing at his hip and pretending to be tugged off of his seat. Guy pretends to turn the reel and Kyle grabs at the easel and the seat as he lets himself be fake-dragged across the room. When he reaches the edge of the bed, Guy scoops him up, “Gotcha!”

Kyle makes himself comfortable, laying his head on Guy’s warm, squishy pec. He fluffs the tiddies gently like they’re the most luxurious of pillows. 

“So tell me about your idea,” Guy says softly.

“Oh! It’s something I saw in a dream,” Kyle turns his gaze up to look into his lover’s eyes, excitement plain on his face. “There’s this door, floating above the water. In the sky it’s daylight,  but in the water, it’s night.”

“That’s really cool. What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. It was kind of…foreboding? I want to do something with like, the reds. I want it to look the way it felt when I saw it. I don’t know yet.”

“Foreboding,” Guy repeats, leaning down to press a kiss to the part in Kyle’s hair. “Hope I’m not keeping you from your work.”

“Not at all,” Kyle says, relaxing into his spot at Guy’s side. The beat of Guy’s voice and the rumble of his voice through his chest begin to lull Kyle to sleep. “Tell me one of your fishing stories.”

“Aw man,” Guy laughs, sinking into the warm bed. He tucks one arm behind his head so he can look down at Kyle and lets the other drape over Kyle’s shoulders. “I ever tell ya ‘bout the time I got bit by a pelican?”

“No,” Kyle huffs out another laugh.

“Well, it all started at that damn pier. There I was, mindin’ my business. I got a bucket full of crabs right. Beautiful day. Little overcast, but that means I’m not out there cookin’ quite as fast. And here comes this sonofabitchin’ bird.”

Kyle’s mind begins to drift as he pictures Guy in his story. He feels his breathing slow as his eyelids droop under their own weight. He feels warm and safe. The last thing he remembers is feeling their heartbeats synch up. 

[moonbeambucky]

Hey Neighbor (Part 4)

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader Word Count: 2652 Warnings: none

Summary: You had a plan and then life came along with one of its own. With your future almost derailed you worked hard to get yourself back on track and finally everything seemed to be going right… that is, until your new neighbor moved in.

A/N: A huge thank you to my wonderful beta Sam @buckyofthemyscira​ Feedback is always appreciated!

PART 3 | HEY NEIGHBOR MASTERLIST

The past few days have been exactly what you wanted a month ago, peacefully silent, yet somehow it doesn’t feel right. You were able to finish your paper in record time, fully concentrating on your work but part of you missed the incessant music from next door.

There was an odd comfort knowing Bucky was home playing, and with the knowledge of his musical talent you now wanted to hear what he would come up with. Getting to know him briefly was… well, it was something. It could have gone a lot better if you didn’t stick your foot in your mouth.

Bringing up the music related noise was one thing but how you ever managed to bring up the noise of his “nighttime activities” made you wish you could have vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. You had done your best to avoid Bucky ever since, rushing out of or into your apartment as quickly as possible. You weren’t sure how you could ever face him again but you couldn’t deny that a small part wanted to.

Facing your shared wall you imagined where Bucky might be, picturing him on his couch, lounging across the cushions of the soft leather as he leisurely plucks away at the guitar strings, sounding out a melody. Or was he more focused, sitting upright and gliding his dexterous fingers across his keyboard? Was he at his computer editing his melodies? Was he thinking of you?

The silence was deafening. With your palm pressed against the wall you began to lean in with your ear, hoping you could hear anything. With a slight gasp you jumped back, there was noise but not any coming from next door. Your phone buzzed against the coffee table, with Steve’s face illuminating the screen.

“Hey Steve!”

“Guess who I saw going into Sweetgreen?” The strain in his voice clued you in to the right guess, Lillian. “Yup, and she wasn’t alone … yeah she’s still with Jason, for now,” he muttered under his breath, expecting her to cheat again.

“I’m sorry Steve. You know you deserve better than her, right? I know you know this.”

Steve sighed heavily. Even though he knew what you were saying was right, seeing his ex still hurt a lot.

“Thanks Y/N, I do know that, doesn’t mean I’m going to torture myself though and go in there so is it cool if I pick us up something else? I’m in the mood for carbs.”

Chuckling at Steve’s admission you couldn’t help but agree, salads were great and all but all this Bucky stress you’ve put on yourself definitely makes you crave heavier foods.

“Tacos?”

“Mmmm, yes tacos! Extra guac please Rogers!”

You set your table in preparation for Steve to come over with food, remembering to throw your wallet on the table to give him money. The last time he came over you had forgotten, being so caught up in reliving the terrible memory of your interaction with Bucky. Steve might have been right, if he handled talking to Bucky maybe you wouldn’t be so worried about running into him.

“Sam tells me you guys spoke,” Steve said, digging a tortilla chip into the container of guacamole.

You chewed quickly to swallow the bite you had taken. “Why do you always ask me a question mid-chew?” you joked. “But yes, we did speak and…” your voice lifted with anticipation as Steve’s eyes widened, waiting for you to continue. “He gave me the number for Elena Rodriguez. She’s head of the social work department and…”

“Oh my god Y/N please just tell me!” Steve begged.

“I set up an interview with her next week!”

Steve’s eyes crinkled with his excited smile though it faded shortly after as you nervously mused about fitting the internship into your schedule.

“One step at a time,” Steve offered with a small laugh.

He’s right. One step at a time. You didn’t even go on the interview yet, you might not even be hired for it; the thought of which worries you even more, but you remind yourself to breathe and take things as they come.

The elevator ascends slowly, filled with your eager coworkers looking to join the rush home. As it lets off on the ground floor, everyone dashes to the heavy glass doors as you leisurely stroll to the security desk.

Mr. Lee had a big smile on his face as he seemed to be in the middle of telling Steve a story. Slowly you approached the desk, seeing Steve smiling down at something in his hands.

“That’s what I said but Howard was ahead of his time. A comic book movie…” Mr. Lee chuckled. “It didn’t work in ’47 but it sure would be a hit now.”

“Oh, what’s this?” you asked.

Steve held up a sealed copy of a comic book, Kid Colt, which you were unfamiliar with.

Leaning over the desk towards you Mr. Lee spoke, “Tony found that for me in his father’s things. That’s how Howard and I met. He wanted to make a movie outta this. Stark Pictures. He never did though, the whole thing became a big tax write off.”

“I didn’t know you knew Howard Stark.”

“Oh yeah,” Mr. Lee boasted humbly, “Since I was seventeen. He was a good man. You know he was so proud to finally be a father. He worked a lot, probably more than he should have but he had Maria and the nannies bring little Tony over to the office. Tony Stank I’d call him. Oh boy, you could smell those diapers from a mile away it was so bad.”

Hearing Mr. Lee talk about the head of your company so freely like this made you laugh. It also made Tony Stark seem a bit more human. As far as you knew he was a workaholic who may or may not be seeing Pepper Potts. You’ve caught the way she looks at him though, with an extra twinkle in her eye or how she hesitates for the smallest moment to gather herself before going into his office.

“Tony Stank, that’s amazing,” you laughed, wondering if Pepper has ever heard this story before. “Well, have a good night Mr. Lee!”

Steve came around to the front of the desk standing tall, filling out his blue uniform with his broad stature. It was unfair how he could pig out on food with you and not show any sign of it. Meanwhile, your stomach has been rumbling all day from last night’s dinner.

“I’m on the late shift today,” he frowned.

“Poor Stevie,” you joked, wiping an imaginary tear from your eye. “Not that my night will be any better, I’ve got a shit ton of laundry to do.”

“Enjoy the sweaty laundromat then.”

“Oh I will,” you said sarcastically.

The steady hum of the running washing machines drowned out the sound of the newscast coming from a small TV mounted on the wall. It’s muggier inside than out, and even with the door open you can’t escape the permeating smell of cheap soap and mildew.

The wash cycle is nearly over so you move from the metal chair you had been uncomfortably sitting on, listening to music to pass the time, and lazily stroll over to the machine that is spinning your clothes. Quarters jingle in your pocket as you walk, ready to be placed in the dryer as you wait some more. You hate laundry day.

It’s crowded too, with all the chairs taken and other people leaning against the wall. A few kids were running around screaming, not helping their tired mother who looked too exhausted to even reprimand them as she folded all their clothes.

No one looked happy to be there, not even the attendants who had to apologize to the screaming man who didn’t understand why he couldn’t use one of their reserved machines. It was a cut throat world on laundry night, with other patrons fighting to stake claim for the next free machine.

A loud buzz lets you know your clothes are done, you wheel a basket over and open the door. The shadow of the clearly impatient person waiting for your machine blocks the dull light from the fluorescents above so you hope to grab everything quickly without dropping anything on the dirty linoleum floor.

“It’s all yours– oh.” Your mouth hung open, not expecting to see Bucky standing beside you. “H-hey.”

“Hey Y/N. Didn’t want to startle you,” he sheepishly said. “Uhmmm, is this free?” Bucky gestured to the obviously open machine.

You nodded quickly. Not knowing what else to say you stared awkwardly at the basket of damp clothes and said, “I’m gonna dry these.” Smooth.

Turning around you let out a deep breath and worried over what would happen next. It would be extremely rude to ignore Bucky and continue to listen to music. He hasn’t done anything wrong to you, not this week at least, but you were too scared to risk saying something stupid, again.

It would take at least a half hour for your clothes to dry so you put on a brave face and decided to walk back towards Bucky. Dressed in casual black shorts and a white t-shirt, his smooth, toned arms were crossed over his chest as he leaned against a support column, squinting to read the poorly transcribed closed captioning on the TV.

“Hey neighbor,” you said, offering a small friendly wave as he turned his head.

Bucky smiled, standing upright as he turned to face you completely to greet you back. He looked genuinely happy to see you, which made you feel even worse for how you left things.

“I’m sorry if I made things weird the other day. I didn’t mean to,” you blurted out before your brain gave any thought to see if this was a good idea.

Bucky chewed on his bottom lip, the gaze of his ocean blue eyes staring right through you. “Don’t worry about it,” he said with a cavalier air.

“So how’s the music coming along?” You were truly curious, having not heard any sound.

“It’s not bothering you, right?” Bucky winked.

“No, not at all,” you smiled softly. “Are you still working on that one piece?”

Bucky asked which one and you hummed the tune. Closing your eyes you missed the way his own lit up in delight hearing you repeat his melody.

“I know I complained about the noise but honestly it was so beautiful,” your voice lightened and he felt the weight of emotion even through the simple way you described it. “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t focus.”

Bucky adjusted his weight, needing to ground himself after your words made him feel as light as air. His music meant so much to him, working tirelessly to bring to life the sound he envisioned in his mind, to know that the unfinished piece had such an effect already made his heart swell with pride.

He developed his music like a chef crafting a recipe. Each instrument was a different ingredient, carefully selected notes were gathered on the counter, waiting to come together in a symphonic skillet. The flavors of music combine, heating up together the piano is covered in the spice of an electric guitar, with the drumming rhythm simmering beneath the surface as the sound of strings are poured generously over the top.

In the end the dish is a delicious feast for the ears but here you were, happily devouring the unfinished ingredient in its raw form.

“Yeah…” his voice came out breathless. Catching himself Bucky cleared his throat. “It’s actually for an upcoming video game. I can’t say which, but it’s part of an emotional scene when the main character finds his family is gone.”

“I can sense the depth of it.”

“That’s not even the best part,” he explained as his face grew with a wide smile. Bucky became lost in describing the emotion of the violins that would come in. “They’re the voice of the character and when he’s lost everything I have them coming in, crying out in pain. It’s sharp and strong, and beautifully tragic.”

Listening to Bucky describe his music resonated in your soul. You saw the complete love and passion he had for it and once again you felt terrible about asking him to stop.

“I’d love to hear it, if that’s okay.”

You looked at him with hopeful eyes, and Bucky smiled, nodding before he spoke his answer. He couldn’t wait for you to hear everything together.

You passed the time by getting to know each other a little more. Bucky has a younger sibling named Rebecca who moved west to work as an avian veterinarian in a bird sanctuary.

“My parents are lost without them around,” Bucky joked. “Do you know how hard it is to try to explain how to use Skype to them over the phone?”

“Oh believe me, I know. Somehow my mom always calls at the worst time to have me explain the most basic function on her phone that she already knows because we’ve gone over it a million times but…” You threw your hands up as Bucky joined in with your laughter.

When your clothes were dry Bucky gave you some space to fold them alone which you appreciated, not wanting to showcase your intimate items in front of him. He was still a stranger, sort of, but you were glad you were getting to know him.

Checking the time you realized it was on the late side and you still needed to shower before bed. Your clothes were packed neatly into a laundry bag, well most of them were at least. One sock managed to get eaten by the dryer to your dismay, and you hoped its pair was somewhere on your floor having fallen out as you prepped the laundry.

Slinging the bag over your shoulder, you gripped the bottle of detergent with your other hand and walked towards Bucky.

“Hey,” you called out to Bucky who lifted his head from his phone. “I’ve got a few things to do tonight still so can I take a rain check on hearing your music?”

“Yeah, of course.” Bucky did his best to mask his disappointment but he understood. He noticed the slump of your shoulders, balancing the laundry bag high on one side and letting your other limb hang low with the weight of the heavy bottle.

“Do you want me to carry that back?” he asked.

“Oh, no it’s okay, I can manage.”

The apartment was only two blocks away, two long blocks but still, you didn’t want to inconvenience Bucky even though judging by the curve of his biceps it wouldn’t be a problem.

Bucky walked with you to the front of the laundromat as you smiled and said goodnight.

“Goodnight Y/N,” he whispered, watching as you walked down the sidewalk until he could no longer see you in the crowd.

The words stayed on his lips like they were always meant to be there and Bucky has a brief flash of a life he’s never thought about.

A warm bed, made even warmer by the figure curled against him. His breath syncs with theirs and he’s at peace. His heart beats to the rhythm of love and his lips purse together to plant a soft lingering kiss on their forehead. A smile secures itself on his face because he’s truly happy; surrounded by the comforting feeling knowing that when he wakes up that person, his love, will be by his side.

The machine buzzes at the end of its cycle dragging Bucky back to a reality that has him gasping for breath. He steps outside for a minute for air, needing to clear his mind of the vision that seemed so real it scared him; for better or worse he can’t quite say.

PART 5

[unbridgeabledistances]

ok i have an inbox full of prompts, but i was making valentine’s day plans & all of a sudden felt very inspired to write some valentine’s day gallavich! featuring uncle mickey, homemade cards and a lot of domestic fluff- i’ll probs have a part two up sometime this week!<3

--

It was a lazy, slow-paced Sunday afternoon at the Gallagher house. Mickey had been lying on the couch passively watching trashy reality TV for god knows how long—and apparently at some point he’d fallen asleep, because now the TV volume was just a low hum, and he was being woken up to the startling crash of the kitchen back door slamming shut, and the rustling of shoes and coats being taken off and discarded by the front door.

“Alright Franny, let’s set this stuff up on the kitchen table.” Mickey heard Ian’s voice sail across the room, his eyes still closed to block out the cheery sunshine teeming in the living room.

Mickey tried to doze off again, attempting to block out the bright light infiltrating his eyelids, but it was no use— whatever Ian and Franny were doing, murmuring and clanging in the kitchen, there was no way for Mickey to escape the sound now and drift back into his sunwarmed sleep. He begrudgingly shoved the scratchy crocheted blanket off of his lap, stretching as he rose and stumbled into the kitchen.

He wasn’t expecting the carnage that he saw when he turned the corner; the kitchen table was covered in an explosion of sheets of multicolored construction paper, all reds and pinks and whites, with tiny multicolored stickers and tubes of glitter and shiny ribbons arranged and spread wide across the countertop, scattered with glue sticks and pairs of scissors and an exploded box of crayons. There was a small mountain of cut-out hearts piled high on the table, smattered with glitter-glue and blocky handwriting.

Mickey rubbed his eyes, taking in the scene. “What’re you two Picassos up to?” he asked drowsily.

Ian looked up, his eyes light. “Look who’s awake!” He gestured at the table emphatically, like it was Christmas morning. “Isn’t it great? Me and Franny grabbed all this stuff at the dollar store for less than ten bucks. The glue sticks definitely kind of suck, but I think it’ll get the job done.”

Mickeys eyes scanned to Franny, who was hard at work trying to cut a shape out of a piece of red construction paper, her brows furrowed in concentration. Ian kept chattering on as he unwrapped another sheath of the paper.

“Debbie left Franny with me since some rich lady called her with a weekend handywoman emergency that popped up at the last minute, so now I’m helping Franny make her valentines for school.”

Mickey scoffed. “Fucking valentines?”

Ian rolled his eyes as he contentedly started to glue together two pieces of paper. “Yes, Mickey, valentines. You know, those nice things that normal people give to each other on Valentine’s Day, along with a box of chocolates or some shit and a note about how much they love each other—”

“Yes, I know what they are, smartass. Don’t know why you didn’t just buy the little cardboard ones at the store though.”

Ian smirked, his eyes still focused on the paper beneath him that he was smudging glitter on. “Yeah, well. Franny wanted to make them, and I thought it’d be kind of fun.”

Just then Franny gasped triumphantly, raising a lopsided and crumpled paper heart up for Mickey to see. “Look, Uncle Mickey! I cut a heart! Uncle Ian showed me how!”

Mickey raised his eyebrows at Ian, who had a sheepish look on his face. “Didn’t know you had so many hidden talents, Gallagher.”

Ian flashed a grin. “I used to be really into art class in elementary school, what can I say.”

Franny looked up at Mickey with wide eyes. “Do you want to make valentines with us? We have to make twenty-seven, because that’s the number of people in my class.”

Mickey faltered. Sitting here gluing fucking glitter to pieces of paper was not exactly what he’d had in mind as his plans for the weekend…

“Uh. That’s okay kiddo. I think you two’ve got it covered.”

Franny seemed to readily accept Mickey’s answer, instantly looking downward again and grabbing a fistful of crayons from the table to continue enhancing her masterpiece. Ian, on the other hand, tore his gaze from his own valentine.

“Oh c’mon Mick, you don’t wanna help?” Ian asked, his voice goading and his eyebrows raised.

Mickey rolled his eyes. “Yeah, thanks but no thanks.” He turned, walking over to open the fridge and grabbing a beer from the top shelf.

“C’mon, just one valentine. Franny can show you how to cut out a heart shape, right Fran?”

Franny nodded vigorously. “Yes, I know how!”

Mickey took a swig of his beer and sighed. “Jesus, fine.” He pulled a chair between Ian and Franny, slowly scraping it on the linoleum, and then perched on the edge uncomfortably. “Alright Franny, show me what you’ve got.”

“Okay, so the first thing that you have to do is pick which color is your favorite. What’s your favorite color?”

Mickey had taken another sip of his beer, and now he sputtered slightly. “I don’t know Franny, you pick for me.”

Franny’s face melted into a pout. “But you have to pick, Uncle Mickey, it’s your favorite color!”

Ian bit back a laugh, his eyes still bright and cheerful. “Yeah, Mick, c’mon. What is your favorite color? We’ve never gotten this deep in our relationship before.”

Mickey gulped again from his beer can and flipped Ian off in the process. “I don’t fucking know. Never thought about it before.”

Franny held the stack of construction paper up to Mickey. “Look! There’s red, and yellow, and blue, and purple, and green—”

Mickey cut her off. “Uh, give me a green one.”

Ian smirked. “Green?”

“Fuck you, it was the first color I thought of.” Of course, that wasn’t really true—if Mickey needed to have a favorite fucking color, it was obviously going to be green, like the green eyes that met his gaze every morning and were the last thing he saw before he went to sleep at night— even if he would never be caught dead admitting that sappy bullshit to Ian.

Ian looked like he was holding back a smile. “Right,” he mused. “Hey, Franny, pass me a blue paper? Cause y’know, that’s my favorite color.”

Mickey gently shoved Ian in the square of his chest. “You’re being fucking soft.”

Ian let a crooked smile burst onto his face. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

Mickey leaned back in his chair, holding the piece of thick green paper in front of him appraisingly. “Okay Franny, what’s step two?”

Franny stretched her body across the table to reach for one of the strewn pairs of scissors. “Now, you fold the paper in half, and then you cut out the shape of half of a heart, like this.” She drew an example of the curved pattern on the backside of Mickey’s paper with the tip of her finger. “And then you unfold it and it’ll be a perfect shape!”

“Sounds easy enough.”

Mickey took the scissors from Franny’s grasp, and held them up to the paper. It was just a fucking half circle with a little indent at the top— this wasn’t going to be too difficult. Ian and Franny went back to being absorbed in crafting their valentines, while Mickey started to botch and slash at his piece of construction paper.

When he was finally satisfied he unfolded the shape, the outer shell of the paper falling away. It was… well, it was kind of a heart, with two slanted sides and a wonky top half. It looked more like a blob attached to an angle than anything else.

Ian looked up from where he was doodling on a glittery heart and snickered.

“That’s uh… that’s a good first try, Mick.”

Mickey slammed the piece of paper down onto the table. Fucking arts and crafts, he was never good at this shit even when he was little—he fingers were always too fumbling, too clumsy for him to make anything delicate and pristine. Ian’s hands should have been as ungainly as his, but instead they were quick and nimble, smoothly cutting perfectly-rounded circles and gluing neat lines of glitter.

Franny noticed that Mickey was done cutting his shape. “Good job Uncle Mickey! Now you just have to draw on it, and put on stickers and glitter.”

“Yeah Mickey, let’s see those artistic skills.”

Mickey aggressively flicked some flecks of glitter from the table in Ian’s direction, then picked up a crayon and gripped it with an iron fist. What the fuck was he supposed to draw? This was a valentine for kids at Franny’s school, the fuck did kids like anyways? He started to draw some sort of stick figure, but the arms were too long and the head was too small, so he tried to color over it and make some sort of tree or some shit…

As Mickey scratched at the paper, he looked over at noticed suddenly how content Ian looked—how blissed out and settled he was, just running a crayon over the colorful paper and shaking bits of glitter onto pools of glue. If Mickey was being honest, he hadn’t seen Ian this light and happy in a while; he’d had a hunch in his shoulders for months after the wedding and the pandemic and all the minimum-wage job bullshit, the shadows of expectation hanging over him and causing a deflated weariness in his gaze that was impossible to ignore. But right now, Ian looked like he was having as much fun as Franny was, practically vibrating with satisfaction as he put the finishing touches on his drawing and reaching to place his completed valentine in the growing pile.

Mickey snatched the paper out of Ian’s hand, slightly crumpling it around the edges. “Wait a second. How the fuck did you do that?”

The valentine was immaculate, the heart symmetrical and traced in a thin outline of glitter. In the center of the paper there was a perfect little cartoon of a dog in a top hat, with an air bubble that read “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Ian shrugged. “Watched a lot of cartoons when I was little. And I’ve always kind of liked to draw.”

Mickey shoved the valentine back in front of Ian. Goddamn perfect fucking husband who’s good at fucking everything. He crossed his arms and leaned back in the chair, suddenly losing all motivation to play along.

Ian smirked, then reached to rest a hand on the back of Mickey’s neck. “Giving up already?”

Mickey rolled his eyes. “Fuck you, Gallagher.”

Ian’s smile just widened. “Here, how about I cut the fucking shapes and you glue stuff onto them. That’d still help me and Franny a lot, right?”

Franny nodded. “It’s okay Uncle Mickey, I was bad at cutting the shapes too at first.”

Mickey huffed. Okay, so maybe he was horrible at this shit, but the least he could do was suck it up for Franny’s sake. “Fine,” he muttered, and grabbed a glue stick and a bottle of glitter.

A few minutes passed and they settled into a comfortable silence, enveloped in the sound of the scissors gliding and Franny scribbling on paper.

Suddenly, Franny looked up as Mickey reached across the table to grab a pad of stickers.

“Hey Uncle Mickey, what do you and Uncle Ian do for Valentine’s Day?”

Mickey didn’t really know how to answer that question— he darted a glance over at Ian, trying to signal as much. Could you ruin the spirit of Valentine’s Day for kids in the same way you could fuck up Christmas? “Uh, nothing really.”

Ian chimed in. “We used to like Valentine’s Day when we were little like you Franny, but now that we’re big we don’t really celebrate it. Right Mick?”

“Yup.”

Franny’s brows were furrowed again, this time in contemplation. “But. You love each other, right?”

“Sure, Franny. But we don’t need a special day for us to remember that,” Ian explained.

Franny seemed appeased enough by that answer to resume her drawing. “You don’t give each other valentines or candy or anything?”

Mickey almost laughed. Of course he and Ian had never celebrated fucking Valentine’s Day; if he was being honest, he didn’t remember even really thinking about Valentine’s Day before now, other than it being a day when Mandy came home crying in middle school because the boy she liked didn’t ask her out, or buying all the half-priced chocolates in red and pink wrappers at the drugstore a week later with his brothers. With all the shit in his life the past few years, frilly fucking holidays like Valentine’s Day were just… not on Mickey’s radar.

But maybe— maybe this year was different. This year, for maybe the first time in his life, Mickey felt secure and steady in a way that he never had before, like the ground was solid beneath him and wasn’t going to cave in at any minute. He had a fucking husband that he loved—why couldn’t they celebrate Valentine’s Day like a normal goddamn couple? Ian didn’t seem to be too bothered that they both didn’t give a fuck about the holiday, which was all the more reason to catch him off guard. He kept pressing stickers down onto the construction paper, his mind starting to churn.

By the time they’d made the twenty-seven fucking valentines, Mickey had made up his mind; this year, he and Ian were going to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

part two here!

[unholyhelbig]

Evergreen | Chapter One

Summary: Beca Mitchell is a reporter that travels across the east coast. When scarlet fever begins to overtake much of the world, she’s forced to cover a story in one of the largest, newest, hospitals. She is soon captivated by the head nurse and then stolen by something more.[The Prequel to "What's Forever?"]

Ship: Beca Mitchell/ Chloe Beale 

Read the series here 

Beca Mitchell spotted Evergreen Sanatorium through the large oak trees before anything else. It could very well be due to the fact that it stuck out in the rolling green hills of Virginia like a sore thumb. It was the only building for a matter of miles and quite the building it was; with its dark brick exterior and iron gates keeping everyone from climbing in- or for that matter, out.

She couldn’t help the way her breath caught. She had pushed herself forward in the little town car and felt her sweaty palms slip against the cracked leather seats. The man driving frowned in the rearview mirror, but she pretended not to notice, just like she pretended not to notice the stench of whisky on his breath and the crumbs in his uncombed mustache.

He had been leaning heavily against his taxi cab, a Chevy that may have been new at some point, but was a dingy maroon now. It was a sorry attempt to imitate the checkers she had left behind in Chicago hours before.  He had taken four bites to the bitter core of his apple and dragged his sleeve against his lips before tossing it aside when he saw her approach.

“Ye heading to Evergreen, are ya?” He had a thick welsh accent.

She nodded as he popped the trunk and she wondered how he had ended up on the East Coast. Virginia was no place for fools or a place to settle down. It was part of the reason her editor had sent her here in the first place. She was expendable, and so was this story. It was nothing but a puff piece on one of the newest Hospitals in the state; the first of its kind. It was bent on solving the rising threat of Consumption. Something more than stifled.

The real reporting was for the men.

But Beca Mitchell considered herself something of a real reporter, so she jumped at the chance to board a flight. The scent of nature and manure was overwhelming, and so was the apple that her driver had discarded. But she was glad to be here, peering up at the large building. It made her fingers tingle, and her toes even more.

“This place is huge.”

“Better be, it houses half of Waverly’s population. Tiny little town. It’s been hit just as hard as the rest of the world by this illness. You ain’t feeling sick, are ye?”

She eyed him and pushed herself back into her seat. “Nauseous from your driving, that’s all.”

He laughed at that and she smiled. He wasn’t too bad, a little brash. She wanted to learn more of him and how he had ended up here, surrounded by this much grass instead of the dank streets of Europe. But they had pulled up to the large iron gates before she could fish for what she really wanted to know.

The trees that surrounded the property were in full flame. Beca could smell the pungent dirt in the air as she cranked the window down and welcomed the way Jack Frost bit at her cheeks. It mixed toxically with the embossed leather of her driver. He mumbled something under his breath and tightened his coat. The gates pulled themselves open effortlessly because they had been expecting the pair.

Evergreen Sanitarium was larger than it had been when they started up the drive, and that, she expected. The main building was comprised of three parts, one that stretched into the slate sky and two others that moved to the side. It was carved from brick and stone and a large metal plaque was welded into the face. Evergreen Hospital & Research Facility It read EST. 1910.

There was a large fountain and a circle that stopped the drive. The gravel crunched under their tires, but she focused on the two angels with slightly green water dribbling down their chins into an even greener pool.

“You need help with yer bags, ma’am?”

“No, I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

Her words had a bit of a sarcastic bite to them, but she truly meant them. There was an ungodly chill in the air and no two people should suffer the elements when it was only one stop. She fished out a hefty tip from her coat pocket and dropped it in his callused palm before parting ways.

She hadn’t expected a welcome wagon, not in the slightest, but the property looked abandoned entirely.  Beca adjusted her bag over her shoulder and watched as the town car that had brought her up here turned into nothing but a speck.

She takes a few steps towards the fountain, listening to the trickle of the water as she fought off the scent of gasoline. The pool wasn’t emerald, not entirely. There was a layer of copper coins at the bottom that reflected the grass. She let the tips of her fingers brush against the surface, sending ripples as the cold shot up her arm.

“Folks try anything to ease their minds.”

Beca startled, pulling her touch away entirely as she turned towards the voice. She hadn’t heard the doors open, nor the footsteps in the gravel. She blamed the plain white nurses' shoes that that woman wore over her own lack of perception.

She recognized the voice from over the telephone almost instantly. Director Emma Woodward was older than she had imagined, in her Mid-Forties. She had embraced the grey that sprinkled her hair, pined up in extravagant curls. She wore a form-fitting baby-blue dress with a neatly folded collar. The neckline dropped down enough to expose a pale white chest. She wore a simple gold cross to cut against the color. It was modest and professional, and she didn’t seem to acknowledge the chill in the air.

“It must be frightening for them, leaving people here.” Beca shifted her bag and extended a hand “Rebecca Mitchell, Chicago Gazette, it’s nice to meet you in person.”

Emma smiled and it was a stunning sight. She had crinkles at the corners of her eyes and her nails were neatly painted. Beca found them too neat for a nurse, but she supposed becoming a director, as a female in the early 1900’s, was cause enough to treat for a manicure. She took her hand firmly.

“Emma Woodward, the pleasure is all ours. I must admit, Miss Mitchell, we found it quite odd that a paper of your magnitude wanted to do a story on a place such as ours.”

Beca found heat blooming against her cheeks. It wasn’t their idea, it was entirely hers. It took hours of flirting and a couple of glasses of fine bourbon for their editor to agree to any type of story she had to offer that wasn’t about kitchen appliances or the proper way to tend to a man in his time of need.

She had done more than enough to persuade him, and when he finally did agree, it was in hopes to see her crash and burn. He had gotten a pleasant night out of it, and she had earned a chance (however slim) to run with it. Even if it was in a practical asylum at the height of a deadly illness.

“Yes, well, we’re very progressive.”

Emma nodded with that kind grin of hers and lead Beca up the stairs and into the main hall of the Hospital. An instant edge of heat wormed under her clothes and made her shiver. The scent of antiseptic burned her lungs in a quick moment.

The floor had an ugly checkered design of yellow and green, both colors faded and worn. There was a large oak staircase that leads to different wards, she assumed, and a few sofas with old editions of magazines on metal tables. Emma didn’t’ skip a beat as she started to ascend the steps.

“We have a couple of floors here, Miss Mitchell. The top one is strictly for research, then we move down to trauma level three. It’s where the patients that are furthest along stay, those who have signed off for study and treatment. Then we have our second to last floor. The right-wing is for mild cases while the left is for our staff's comfort. That’s where you’ll be staying.”

“And the ground floor?” Beca asked.

“That’s for those lucky enough to see themselves out.”

“Does that happen often, then?”

“Not as often as we would like, I’m afraid. Consumption is entirely new to all of us, and we’re still learning the ins and outs of its effects.”

Beca nodded even though she knew Emma didn’t notice. Her shoulder was aching by the time they ascended to the first landing. Instead of turning in the direction of the ward, they made their way down a crudely lit hallway with large metal doors blocking the main way.

Once through, the sticky heat of Evergreen seemed to thicken once more. The lights dimmed and the floors switched to linoleum instead of wood. Beca liked the way her shoes were muffled, and the paintings of flowers tacked to the yellow wallpaper.

“Evergreen used to be a schoolhouse.” Emma spouted off absently “After Thomas Evergreen’s daughters graduated and married on their own accords he sold it to a developer that made this place into a hotel. The basement flooded and then”

She stopped in front of a small door that had a little glass window cut out of it, she seemed to take a moment to catch her breath. “Well, he didn’t’ want to fix it so the city awarded it to us and we’ve done our best to make it easier on our staff. It’s simple to have them stay in here, but if we get too many patients I’m afraid we’ll have to relocate them as well.”

The door creaked open, and Beca could tell instantly that it was once used as storage. There was a small cot in the corner layered with multiple sheets to cushion the springs. There was something of a school desk with a few candles and a lighter by their side. It too smelled of antiseptic, a small window leading to a fire escape that she hadn’t noticed on the way in.

“It’s not much, I’m afraid.”

“It’s perfect,” Beca said.

Truthfully, it was bigger than her little apartment in Chicago and warmer too. She figured that the rest of the staff didn’t’ get much time to rest, to begin with. She was thankful to see an effort at making the tiny space livable.

“well,” Emma clapped her hands together “I’m sure you’re exhausted. We served dinner at Seven sharp, but don’t worry, if you sleep through it, breakfast is early enough. You’ve got free reign of this place, Rebecca Mitchell. You can shadow whenever and whomever you want for your story as long as you don’t get in the way. And stay out of the basement, there’s still a good bit of water damage down there, and I don’t want to see you in a bed on the other side of the hospital.”

Beca put two fingers over her chest “Scouts honor, Ma’am.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” She beamed that signature smile once more, the kind one of a maternal figure. “Now, I recommend steering clear of our nurses, at least for a bit. They’re wary of allowing the outside press into this environment. The orderlies will be more than happy to answer any pressing questions you have.”

“That sounds like quite the challenge, Miss Woodward.”

The woman scoffed and crossed her arms over her chest “Nurse Beale is challenging. So is her staff. Sleep tight.”

The director gave one last fleeting wave before swinging the door shut and leaving Beca to her own devices. The early Virginia sky was a sharp purple and reflected dust coating the window onto the cot. She flopped down onto it, letting out a thick sigh. She was going to get her story- even if it meant digging further than she had ever done before.

[scullymakesmefeelautopsyturvy]

Several Times Scully Got Locked Out Of Her Motel Room In Her Scanties (First Time Smut Ensues) Chapter Three

Chapter One here.

Chapter Two here.

Teso Dos Bichos (Season Three)

Scully had been awake for more than forty hours. 

It hadn’t been a good forty hours either. The last two days had careened from bad (partial rat body parts littering the car engine of a suspected murder victim) to worse (bloodied entrails dripping from bare tree branches onto Mulder’s oblivious face) to so appalling they competed with only a few choice cases for worst X-File ever (getting mauled in the face by a domestic short hair while negotiating the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the Boston Museum of Natural History). 

By the time she and Dr. Winters had finished the autopsies on Doctors Horning, Bilac and Lewton, as well as Mona Wustner (conclusion: animal attacks), she’d lost all track of time, and certainly all count of the number of coffees she’d consumed in an attempt to keep her wits about her after an entire night with no sleep. 

Killer cats? Sure, fine, whatever. She was too exhausted - and too not Mulder - to even attempt to raise his amaru curse theory with the coroner. She downed one last cupful of caffeine for the drive back to the motel then lifted her weary limbs out of her aquamarine scrubs and back into her trusty gray short-sleeved ribbed sweater and by now slightly limp black suit, draping her purple overcoat over her forearm instead of donning it. It would be better to be a little cold; it would keep her more alert for the journey. She cracked the window and cranked the heating down to the lowest setting she could tolerate on this late-winter north-eastern evening. 

Pulling out of the morgue’s underground parking structure, she called Mulder to give him the rundown of their postmortem findings, and to make sure she remained awake. She probably should have called a cab; her brother had cautioned her more than once that her pride would get her killed one day. What a waste to fight tooth and nail for truth and justice, to return from the brink of death after her mysterious disappearance, to achieve the Pyrrhic victory of avoiding the assassin’s bullet meant for her brain, only to flip over into a ditch through plain old fatigue. 

She rolled her shoulders and bounced her left knee, turning the heat down another notch. She guided the car steadfastly to the right of the centerline, closed one eye then the other for momentary reprieve, sighed with relief as she pulled into the motel parking lot and shut off the engine, wishing Mulder goodnight and hanging up with a satisfying beep.

She stumbled into the room with her eyes half closed already, leaning down to loosen the laces on her utility boots before toeing them off as she walked, making a beeline for the bed. She flopped backwards onto the comforter, intending to rest for a moment, but her eyes flickered shut and she drifted off unawares. 

Dank, dark, echo-filled. Flashlight beams zigzagging off metal walls, the hemoglobin tang of which she can taste in her mouth. A snarling tangle of tabbies and tortoiseshells pursuing the two of them along corridors, dropping down through open vents and scratching viscously at the feeble barrier of an ancient wooden door. Dr. Bilac’s body blocking the only route of escape. Stuck. Turning to face the meowing horde as it descends on her and Mulder, miniature canines sinking into their flesh like a thousand shamanic cuts. 

She stands to run and finds herself alone in an abandoned hospital corridor, her reflection staring back at her from the polished, squeaking floors. She inches forward with growing trepidation, readjusting the Kevlar pinching at her waist, too-swiftly reaching the entrance to room 128. The room she has been entering over and over for weeks on end. 

The unwitting unconscious participant in the scene lies in a bed to the right, Mulder and Modell sit at the table to the left, enacting the tableau she’s feared since her ever-reckless partner donned the ‘Eyes and Ears’ kit in the mobile surveillance unit outside.

‘It’s designed for bomb disposal work to keep only one officer at risk.’

She’d felt nauseated. Didn’t everyone know that only one of them dying was actually the worst case scenario? She wished neither of them ever had to risk their necks, but if this particular one of them had to, she’d always rather be right alongside him. 

Modell talks Mulder into pointing the gun across the table and pulling the trigger. She balks. But nothing happens. No flesh is punctured, no spark ignites the pure oxygen in the canisters by the bed: no bullet in that chamber. She watches in horror as Mulder lifts the barrel to his temple without hesitation. His finger squeezes, and the world goes into slow motion as the bullet sails out of the pistol and through his skull, exiting above his left eye, leaving a volcanic crater that erupts blood and bone and gray matter onto the ceiling, walls, and floor. Onto the underside of her uplifted arms as she shields her face and roars her pain, falling, screaming, to the ground.

Scully jerked awake, her heartbeat pounding in her alternately flushed and arctic chest. She sat up on the edge of the bed and collected herself, rubbing at her sweat-moistened face. She checked her watch: one seventeen a.m. She patted her torso. Still dressed. Her mouth tasted atrocious. She must have passed out before getting ready for bed. 

Her bladder was full to bursting; the inevitable after-effect of her overzealous caffeination. She fumbled with buttons and zippers and stepped out of her pants on her way to the bathroom, flinging her suit jacket onto a nearby table, littering the room with rumpled attire. She almost tripped on what might have been one of her boots as she struggled to pull the sweater over her head, finally managing to extract her elbow and shake the top to the ground behind her as she grabbed for the bathroom door handle and yanked it open. God, it’s cold in here, she thought, as the door clunked shut behind her. She tucked her fingers into the waistband of her underwear and opened her eyes to locate the toilet.

Oh, shit. No, no, no, no, no. 

She whirled around and hammered at what she now realised was the front door to her motel room. The outside of the front door. Firmly locked shut. 

She clawed at the handle in desperation, twisting it uselessly as she clenched her Kegels and cast her gaze about her, checking for any witnesses. No one was about, thank god. She now sported only her underwear, her investigate-the-missing-archaeologist-underwear; not even a matching set, she thought, laughably, as though being trapped outside her motel room in her bra and panties would be somehow more acceptable in coordinated undergarments. 

She remembered she’d left her overcoat in the car, and was briefly and euphorically buoyed by the idea of grabbing it to preserve her modesty, before recalling that she didn’t have any keys on her; if she did, she wouldn’t be in this predicament. She had two options here: wake up the proprietor in her underwear or wake up Mulder in her underwear. She was caught between a rock and a hard place. Dashing herself against either lithic precipice did not appeal, but needs must. 

She did the best impression of herself she could muster in her current state of undress, and mulled it over rationally. One of these options had already seen her half naked. He’d handled it like a gentleman then; she knew she could trust him to do it again now. Also, he was currently in possession of a bathroom, and she was about to make a puddle on the floor if she didn’t get access to one. 

She padded swiftly along the bare cement to Mulder’s door.

* * *

Scully runs a feline gauntlet towards him, advancing along the seemingly endless corridor foot by interminable foot. Every few steps, she is thrown off balance by a squalling creature flying at her face from a novel direction. He watches helplessly while she wrenches each furry attacker from her tattered skin, hurling them behind her as she approaches the barrel of his raised pistol. 

Sweat beads on his forehead and cheeks, pooling at the small of his back beneath his white undershirt. 

Scully looks at him with wounded disbelief as his forefinger teases the trigger. She is still approaching him, the cats now vanished, her ivory visage inexplicably pristine. “Mulder,” she whispers, “you don’t have to do this.” Tears form on her lower lids, and she stops, finally halting her feet and simply looking at him. 

“Scully, run!” he warns her, as Modell grins at him, thumping the tabletop and urging him on. But she just stands there, staring, tears starting to spill down her cheeks.

“Mulder,” she pleads again, and he fires. 

The bullet pierces the base of her neck just above her vest; a pointless piece of armour, he despairs, if it leaves the cranium and jugular so exposed. The boom of the gunshot ricochets off the walls and pounds at his eardrums several times. Her eyes go wide and she grabs at her throat in horror, never breaking eye contact as she collapses, gurgling, to her knees. Crimson lifeforce pulses through her dainty fingers as he hears another bullet leave the chamber, and she opens her mouth to speak once again. The word leaves her lips at a strangely loud volume for a death rattle.

“MULDERRR!!!” 

Further shots stutter out in the distance.

He looks into Scully’s unrelenting gaze as she finally drops to the linoleum. 

Mulder gasped himself awake, perspiring like he was still back at Fairfax Mercy. He pinched his brows laterally with one hand, reaching over to the nightstand for his glass of water, and heard a pounding at his door.

“Mulder!” Scully’s inimitable hiss came from the other side of the wall. She knocked again, sounding frantic. “Mulder, wake up and let me in! Please!”

He turned on the bedside lamp as he launched himself out of bed, throwing back the covers and leaping across the threadbare carpet in his underwear, heading in the direction of her voice and continued hammering, and pulled open the door.

He was met with the sight of Scully on the concrete walkway. Rather a lot of Scully. Scully in white briefs and a light pink, underwired bra, plain but for a satin ribbon rosebud nestled deep in her cleavage. Her considerable cleavage, as shaped by this heroic garment, he thought. He barely had time to register this surprising turn of events before she flew past him, her thighs pressed oddly together as she walked, heading directly for the bathroom. 

“Don’t look at me, Mulder!” she chastised, hurtling across the room. 

“Scully, what-” he began to query, but she interrupted him before disappearing through the open doorway.

“Grab me a shirt!” she growled, “I need to use the bathroom.” The door slammed shut behind her.

Mulder played with his lower lip, twirling it between thumb and forefinger, and startled. He’d remembered the copy of Hanky Panky he’d left sitting atop the tank. Well, how was he to know he’d have company tonight?

He heard the toilet seat clatter down and, after an interval, a flush, followed by the faucet running. He rooted around in his duffel bag, seeking a spare, clean T-shirt as per Scully’s instructions, and stood awkwardly by the side of the bed in his boxer briefs as he awaited her return.

She soon opened the door with a sigh, drying her palms on a fresh hand towel. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Reading girlie magazines on the can? Nice, Mulder.” 

He held onto the shirt. 

She finished with the towel and remained in the doorway, holding the terry cotton rectangle to her stomach. She looked up at the ceiling, shaking her head, and he took the brief opportunity to appraise her figure. He knew he shouldn’t, but she was standing right in front of him with more skin than clothing on display, and her curves and bones undulated and jutted so appealingly he couldn’t tear his eyes from her gently leaning form, propped as it was so improbably on his motel bathroom door jamb at one thirty in the morning. 

She huffed out a breath, her chin pushed to the side, her eyes locked on the stipple. “I keep having this dream, Mulder,” she announced, apparently not about to address her noisy and insistent arrival, apropos of nothing, at his door in her underwear in the small hours. “Since Modell.”

“Uh huh?” he answered, vaguely, roaming his gaze over the delicate skin and rolling muscles of her upper thighs before snapping his eyeline up to meet hers as she tilted her chin down from the ceiling. 

“You aim the gun at your temple and pull the trigger, just like you did, only the gun goes off... and you die.” Her voice jumped an octave on the last three words, a piccolo flute floating on a whisper.

Next, she looked at the floor, her head tilting towards the door frame.

He didn’t tell her about his recurring nightmare of shooting her. Instead, he mumbled at her while taking in the dip and swell of her waist as it dropped down to her left hip, pushed out to one side. She rested one bare foot atop the other, absentmindedly rubbing one arch against the knuckles of her opposite toes. There was something so unguarded about her posture, something he would have found endearing and appealing even if she were wearing a hazmat suit. As it was, with her gracing his sleeping quarters in an as yet unexplained state of semi-nudity in the middle of the night, his body had started to respond in an inappropriate, if predictable manner.

“I thought you didn’t want to let him take up another minute of our time, Scully?” he said, shifting the so far unproffered T-shirt in front of his groin.

She looked up at him then, her doe eyes watery and wide, and folded her arms across her middle, squeezing her breasts together as she gripped opposing elbows for comfort. “It was a one in five chance, Mulder, after you aimed at Modell. You could easily have killed yourself. Without a moment’s hesitation.”

He hung his head in shame, for the ease with which Modell had subdued his free will over his own mortality, and for the growing problem in his underwear that Scully’s little self-hug had exacerbated.

“I couldn’t resist him, Scully. I tried, but I wasn’t strong enough.”

“You didn’t shoot me,” she countered, her voice pure susurration now.

He nodded, holding her gaze. Her dainty face was so open, almost entirely make-up free, with the exception of a few smears of eyeliner around one eye, and the remnants of two-day-old mascara clinging to a few lashes.

“It was easier,” he murmured, “to fight harder. For you.”

She scoffed, lifting her hands to her hips, the towel hanging over one thigh, the new stance offering him an unobstructed view of her taut stomach, the intimate sight of her belly-button punctuating her torso, and his erection twitched beneath its makeshift shield.

“Why?” she pressed, with some disdain. “Because I’m a woman?!”

“No!” he insisted. “Not at all.”

She looked down at herself and seemed to only now recall her sartorial condition. Or lack thereof. She tutted and reached out, gesturing for him to toss the shirt.

He stalled for time, frowning at her as though he didn’t understand; as if they didn’t have four years of honing their unspoken communication under their belts.   

“Mulder,” she said, irked by his apparent obtuseness. “Give me the shirt.” She looked at him like he was crazy. Like she wasn’t the one who had burst in here half naked, demanding items of clothing and access to the facilities.

“What happened to you?” he asked, reluctantly throwing the bundle of distressed white cotton in her direction and turning to perch on the end of the bed in an attempt to hide his own indiscretion. With great relief, he surmised from her complete lack of reaction that she hadn’t seen it. He averted his gaze as she turned away from him to tug the T-shirt over her head. Too little, too late, Fox, he thought, ruefully.

“I locked myself out,” she stated, matter of factly.

“In the middle of the night? In your underwear?”

She rolled her eyes, although whether at him or herself, he couldn’t tell. 

“I was half asleep, I got disoriented and opened the wrong door. And I drank so much coffee yesterday; I woke up having to pee so bad, and ended up outside. It would have been a complete disaster if you hadn’t woken up, finally.” She placed great emphasis on the last word and eyed him with playful annoyance.

“You surprise me, Scully. Your sleepwear choices are usually a little more formal,” he grinned, risking a look back at her now that she was safely ensconced in his borrowed shirt. It fell just beyond the tops of her thighs, resting on her right leg just where her smooth muscles gave way to soft, rounded flesh.

Her lips tightened into an almost smile. “Yes, well, I didn’t quite make it that far. I pretty much passed out as soon as I got back. I haven’t brushed my teeth or washed my face or anything.”

“Oh, try the top drawer,” he said, indicating behind her into the bathroom with a nod. “I think I saw some complimentary travel toothbrushes in there next to the soaps and shampoos.” 

She disappeared into the tiled anteroom for a moment and he heard the sound of little-used wheels rolling along rusted runners.

“Mulder, my hero,” she called out, and he heard a warmth in her voice that didn’t do much to alleviate the situation in his shorts. Listening to the sounds of her nightly ritual, he tried to think of something that would make it go away, but was always terrified to venture into any surefire turn-off territory lest he found himself in the horrific scenario of picturing his mother while sporting a raging hard on. He settled on mentally listing the groceries he’d try to remember to pick up when he arrived home in Alexandria. It worked, thankfully, and he could safely shift to the top of the bed and lie back against the pillows by the time she returned, her smeared eyeliner now completely wiped away.

“So,” he ventured, his fingers interlaced over his bare stomach, one thumb playing with a swirl of hair just above his waistband, “Do you want me to throw something on and run over to reception to find the owner? Get someone to let you back into your room?”

She sighed. “You could, I guess. It’s just so late. I’d hate to bother anyone. And I’m still not really presentable.” She looked down at herself, four fifths of her bare legs still on display.

“I can lend you some pants,” he offered. “You’ll look like Charlie Chaplin. Very fetching.”

She smiled properly now, laughing lazily through her nose. “I’m so tired, Mulder,” she whined goodnaturedly. “Can I just crash here? You already saw me in my underwear; it can’t get any worse.”

Mulder silently questioned her word choice. He was no writer, but he was pretty sure the term he would have used was ‘better’. 

“Sure,” he agreed, lifting the covers back and patting the side of the bed he wasn’t occupying. He fluffed the pillow for her and curled over onto his side to face her as she clambered in, demurely keeping her knees pressed together as she slid them beneath the comforter. She turned to face him too, tucking one hand beneath her cheek and using the other to encircle her wrist. She blinked across at him. He took in the claw marks on her face, including a couple of particularly bad ones that had been disinfected and covered with band-aids by a paramedic, despite Scully’s insulted protestations. She’d removed the bandages now, and he could see the cuts were beginning to heal over nicely.

“So why was it easier?” she murmured, her feet rubbing together absently beneath the sheets.

“Hmm?” He’d forgotten what they were talking about.

“With Modell. You said it was easier to resist shooting me.” The particular blue of her eyes always reminded him of his childhood marble collection at this close range: the elegant swoops inside delicate and beautiful, untouchable.

He swallowed, nodding, biding his time. “Well,” he said softly. “It wasn’t because you’re a woman.”

She made a subtle shrugging motion, mostly with her lips; a halfhearted defense of her earlier assertion.

His toes reached out across the cool expanse of linen that separated their feet, and he touched them to her nearest sole, stopping her fidgeting. “It was because it was you.”

She moved her other foot so that she had his toes trapped between her own, and they gripped one another like jungle primates. She held his gaze for a moment then curled her toes even tighter around his as she closed her eyes and whispered, “I could have lost you, Mulder; so easily. Too easily.”

He covered her hand with his own, his fingers easily encompassing her fist as well as the wrist they were wrapped around. 

“But you didn’t,” he stated, and rubbed her knuckles with one thumb.

Her only answer was a chaste kiss on his little finger, the closest one to her mouth. She pressed her lips to a phalanx or two and held them there, her eyes clamped shut.

“I know you probably think I shouldn’t have gone into the hospital at all,” he continued, and she opened her eyes and lessened the pressure of her affection, but her lips remained a hair’s breadth from his finger, the warm air from her nostrils tickling and warming his skin. “But I can’t sit back and let others take the risk if I’m the guy who could make all the difference. Someone like Modell, most people just won’t listen to him. I really thought I could talk him down. I’m sorry.”

A subtle darkness clouded her expression, and he wondered if she, like him, was thinking of Duane Barry. “No, Mulder,” she said, disentangling her thumb from his grip and braiding it over his own. She held his eyeline without blinking, her voice hushed. “It’s okay, I understand. I know that’s just who you are. Your stubbornness; it’s why I-” she stopped herself there, her eyes flitting over his face. “I really admire that about you.”

He went to pull his foot back to his own side of the bed, but she tightened the grip of her toes and held him in place. He darted her a look of surprise, but acquiesced, relaxing his heel back into position. Scully continued to stare at him, and he was waiting for her to say something else when he felt her begin to move her feet once more. Only instead of rubbing her own arches together, she was now very deliberately gliding the sole of one foot over his ankle and down to his toes, and back up again. Repeatedly. Without breaking eye contact.

She held his gaze and brushed another peck against his pinky, and that little problem he’d managed to take care of earlier began to reassert itself.

He cleared his throat, growing nervous. “And anyway, you came right into that hospital after me, knowing Modell was armed.”

She nodded, her breathing deep and calm, her expression unreadable. Her eyes slid from his irises down to his lips, as he’d noticed they often did. When they flitted back up, her face had changed, certain muscles contracting and others relaxing, so that he felt eerily like a solitary marsh deer grazing in the brush, head uptilted at the crack of a twig beyond the treeline.

She extracted her hand from beneath his now slightly sweaty palm and placed a cooling caress on his cheek, her fingertips scraping over his unshaven whiskers and down to his lower lip, where she let her thumb rest for a second or two before cupping his jaw. Her mouth was hanging slightly open, and she looked at him with what he could only describe as bedroom eyes.

His straining cock throbbed and pressed against the fabric of his boxer briefs, and he had no idea what to do. 

Well, he had some ideas.

But he settled on his old faithful, and made a joke out of it.

“Are you coming on to me, Scully?” he managed to croak out through dry, constricted vocal cords.

She blinked once, took a breath, and pounced.

She was all over him before he knew what was happening. One hand in the hair above his ear, another pawing at his chest, the weight of her torso twisting him awkwardly onto his back from the waist up. Her hot, spearmint mouth pinned him to the pillow, her tongue laving against his, and he sucked in sips of air as he gathered his wits. 

Scully was kissing him.

Scully.

Kissing him.

He had to get his act together. He had to take back a modicum of control. 

He reached up and held her face in both of his hands, her autumn tresses cascading forward, falling down like an auburn mane over his outspread digits and framing her features twice over.

“Scully, what’s happening?” he asked, checking in, making sure. “You didn’t pilfer any of that yajé from Dr. Bilac’s place, did you?”

She smiled wide, flashing her teeth at her chosen prey. “Go with it, Mulder,” she breathed, and kissed him again. 

This time, he matched her intensity, still supporting her skull in his palms. He lifted his head from the pillow, meeting the force of her mouth with equal pressure, and ran one hand down her neck, resting his index finger gratefully at the dip of her clavicle, where he’d watched her bleed out in his dream.

She loomed above him, her breasts rising and falling with her rhythmic panting, their hips side by side, the extent of his enthusiasm as yet unrevealed to her. He wanted to pull her to him, press the hard length of himself against her, show her that he appreciated her with his body just as much as he always had with his mind, but first, he wanted to be sure that’s what she wanted, too.

“Wait,” he mumbled against her writhing lips.

She sat up and away from him, holding herself up with one hand on his pillow. Her lips were pink and swollen, a sheen of mixed saliva glistening in the lamplight.

“What’s the matter, Mulder, don’t you want to?” she asked, but without waiting for an answer, she moved her other hand and delicately peeled back the covers, hunting for a non-verbal response to her question. 

Mulder watched her face as she slowly lifted up the sheets, delaying the moment of revelation when she would be absolutely certain that this was an ambush he did not want to outrun. He was the weakest of the herd, separated off to the side, just begging to be taken down, dragged off to the nearest tree and devoured. She drew back the comforter the vital final inches, and knew it. The sizable ridge in his boxer-briefs told her so.  

She peered back at his face with a look of lustful delight, practically purring. “It’s back,” she grinned, and he blushed, wincing. 

So she had seen it earlier. 

It was his turn to shrug, this time half in apology.

“Come here,” he instructed, his flush fading, and she leaned down to kiss him again, lifting her leg to climb on top of him, but he grabbed her behind the knee and rolled her onto her back, settling himself between her thighs.

She laughed, then gasped as he rolled his hips into hers, grinding himself against her sex through layers of thin cotton, feeling the tantalizing soak of desire between her legs. She drew up her quadriceps and pulled him into her froggy embrace, folding her elbows behind his neck and groaning into his mouth as his tumescence rode the wet seam of her panties.

He lifted himself backwards, grateful for his daily discipline of morning push ups, and watched Scully as her eyelids batted open and closed in response to the varying amounts of pressure he was applying to their languid frottage. She peered up at him now, squeezing his hips with her adductors, and tangled her fingertips in his chest hair, trailing down until she reached the elastic banding around his hip flexors. She tilted them both sideways on the mattress and dipped one delicate palm beneath the fabric at his waist, the pads of her fingers grazing the tip of his erection then taking firm hold of his aching girth, stroking him with a fluid twist of the wrist, feathering kisses along his slack jaw all the while. His balls jumped at the sensation of her hand on his shaft, her confidence and dexterity making him even harder.

But this wasn’t right. 

Mulder gently reached for her arm and stilled her movements. She pulled away from his face, frowning.

“Mulder, I thought you wanted-” she began, but he stopped her with a shake of his head.

“I do,” he assured her. “But ladies first.” 

With that, he guided her onto her back again, and took advantage of his position at her side to trace his right hand up beneath the hem of his loaned T-shirt and down into the soaked valley of flesh beneath her plain cotton briefs. It was nothing he hadn’t done before: it was high school and college and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it was back row at the movies and spin the bottle and seven minutes in heaven; it was kid stuff, really, to slide - yes, slide, he was deliriously happy to note - into third base and pleasure a woman manually. 

But tonight, it felt like a revelation.

The heat of her engulfed his third and fourth digits, the rest of his hand brushing against soft curls and cushioned by flesh and liquid yearning, and she spread her knees to allow him room to work. His wrist stretched the fabric of her panties, and he circled his buried fingers within her, polishing the smooth roof of her inner walls and tugging upwards with each carnal circumference.

Scully rewarded him for his efforts with heavy panting and the occasional muted whimper, her mouth falling open and her right hand creeping up his back, her nails scratching at his rhomboids. Her other hand fussed at the top sheet, and she flexed and stretched her legs as he worked. 

She turned her face towards him to resume their kissing, and he covered her mouth with his own, lifting his thumb from its position limply resting against her upper thigh, and applying pressure to her clitoris, matching the circles of his fingers within. Scully moaned now, an open throated release, the sound of her pleasure reverberating down his larynx, and he felt his own need begin to drip out of his sensitive tip, marking the inside of his underwear.

“Oh my god,” she rasped, lifting her hips to draw him deeper inside her, and the angle gave him the chance to slip his index finger alongside his working digits, all three now soaked to the third knuckle. 

Scully thrust her head back into the pillow, ceasing their heavy petting in order to tilt her chin up and frown, crying out. Her right hand scraped the skin of his shoulder blade and she threw her left elbow over her eyes, covering her face as she mumbled and moaned and tossed her face from side to side, bucking her hips to the rhythm of his insistent pumping. 

“Oh god,” she shuddered, “I’m gonna-” 

But she didn’t need to tell him that, because she froze beneath him for a divine moment, a curse on her lips and a breath caught in her throat, and convulsed and flowed around his hand, his knuckles trapped in a pleasurable vise, and then she was panting and twitching and clutching, feral, gasping his name and seeking his mouth with her own, and he saw that seven minutes was the real kid stuff: this was a heaven he wanted to lock himself inside forever.

Their mouths fumbled for one another in her post orgasmic melee of limbs and spent lungs, and she held his mandible like a precious archaeological find, treasuring his nearness, weak with gratitude. He laid down beside her and gingerly removed his hand from between her legs, but she grabbed his retreating arm and rested his palm over the top of her underwear, cupping her lust-warmed sex. She started at the renewed contact with her apparently still sensitive clitoris, and nestled her forehead against his cheek on the pillow. Her eyelids drooped shut.

“Hey, Scully,” he teased, “You’re not going to fall asleep on me, are you?”

But she already had.

He looked down upon her scratch-marked face, her proud but delicate nose curving gently above her lips, which were slightly parted and dewy. A soft snore rippled her tongue. 

What a time for a cat nap, Mulder mused with considerable regret.

He tucked an errant strand of red hair behind her ear with his little finger, and went off to solve a problem in the bathroom. 

Scully needed her rest. He could only hope she’d be on the prowl again tomorrow night. 

I wrote a whole cat-based smut fic, and not once did I manage to make a pun on the word pussy. I’ll show myself out.

AO3 link here.

[inspirationdivine]

The Shining || Lydia & Eldon

Lydia meets Orobas, and his mime. It’s a bad time. 

There were not many people Lydia trusted in town to ask about doppelgangers and mimes. Certainly not many she dared mentioning the humans in her home too - especially considering the hunter population in town. So, a small trip to a contact in the Bend had been required but had been of no use whatsoever. Frustrated, Lydia walked down the evening road back to where she had parked her car, her stiletto heels silent against the broken glass on the pavement and one hand in her purse. Still, the sun had set while her and her friend had talked and drunk, and this was one of Lydia’s least favourite parts of town. She knew some locals raved about the niche supernatural buildings there, but Lydia thought it was rather tacky and grim. No matter. Her car was not far now, even as she heard hurried footsteps nearby. 

Orobas pulled a knife out of his gut and held the blade in his left hand. Nothing spilled from the wound, though an ichor clung to the blade from tearing into his useless organs. Before him, was a mime on all fours, bent backward to the point its spine should have snapped from the hit Orobas struck against its face. It turned and rolled, a smear of white greasepaint against the asphalt before it looked back at Orobas, fangs long around the smudge of black lipstick. He was looking at himself-- it was undoubtedly a clone of some kind, maybe mystic, or a trick of the eye. Orobas cocked his head, and the other mocked it silently. "Do you wish to face evil--" he muttered, flipping the knife into his palm and ran forward. The mime opened its mouth like it would scream, but nothing came out. Instead, it rolled over and planted both feet on Orobas' chest and kicked with all their strength, sending Orobas flying into the front windshield of a parked car. The glass exploded in every direction, with a rain of tiny shards.

Lydia screamed. It was a brief, high scream as she jumped back, a couple shards of glass digging into her skin, or catching in her skirt. What buffoons, fighting in the street. Oh, her beautiful car was ensured for such nonsense, but that did not mean it wasn’t such a waste of mechanical art. She had been just about ready to yell at them, when she looked across the street at the other figure. A man was on his hands, with a beret and a white painted face. “Oh, come on! You should know better than to pick fights with mimes in a town like this! Take this somewhere else, please, while I call insurance.” Or a ride home. 

Orobas was immediately distracted as he turned at the beautiful woman whose perfume and warmth lured the dead to her direction. "---What?" he asked with a confused and emotionless tone when he saw her dismay. The mime, ignored, ran forward and lounged at the only breathing person in the street. Orobas usually would delight in seeing any woman's throat torn open, but right now, he wasn't sure what to make of this thing wearing his face. With a jump between them, he barely timed it, and pressed his hands into their face, their fangs cutting between his fingers in a feral snarl as it reached for her. Denied they clawed at him and grabbed for his shirt and bit his palm. Orobas' entire face sunk into itself, eyes bled to red, and his features transformed gently to make him seem terrifying as he shoved his hand through their abdomen, knife in hand-- shattering ribs, and pushed them back harsh enough to cause them to stagger. The creature fell to the ground and started to make a crying motion with their hands, looking briefly at the hole which was slowly sealing. The mime made a stab motion and pulled out two daggers. "You know what-- run--" Orobas said, needing to regroup his thoughts, and took off towards the closest building. 

In her momentary fury, Lydia had severely miscalculated. They weren’t in NYC; these weren’t humans brawling on the street. The mime lunged at her faster than Lydia could react, and she barely got a chance to scream before the one who had just been smashed into her car was in front of her, holding it back. Stumbling backwards, Lydia stared at the vampires - and it had to be, with eyes and a face like that. Lydia didn’t wait to watch the ensuing fight and didn’t have to be told twice as she sprinted toward the nearest building. Her body slammed against the door futilely, but with a jump, a flutter of her still currently invisible wings and the most inelegant wriggly, she got through a nearby open window. Mime vampires. Why did there need to be mime vampires? Lydia had made one mistake, but she was not about to make another. Looking around, she darted into a nearby hallway, looking for stairs. Height would be exceptional - if she could get enough altitude, she might be able to fly just far enough to get away from that thing. 

Orobas darted behind the woman and crashed through a broken door barely on its hinges. She seemed to fly up towards a window and the old creature didn’t pay it any mind. There wasn’t anyone else around, living at least in this building, so he slammed the door closed enough to break it into the doorway, and took the stairs, moving swiftly until he found the oddly slow heartbeat of the other on the next floor. The silence didn’t last, as the door came down and the fast steps of the mime started racing up the stairs. Orobas stood on the top landing, a wild-- crazed look taking over his face. “Come on-- come on,” he said calmly to the mime, with a wave of his fingers, though confident on the outside for once, he felt nervous. It was like he was fighting himself-- and he wasn’t entirely ready for such a foe. It climbed the stairs, with its broken body, and Orobas darted up a level to cross the woman’s path. “Hey, you survived. How wonderful-- you are the only living thing here my dear, so you make for some decent bait. Ever stake a vampire? I’ll give you the chance,” Orobas positioned himself to block the hallway as the creature thudded up the stairs. “If you want too. I’ll make it worth your while for some help.” He said just as the mime’s face slid from around the corner.

Lydia bolted right to a window, only to be greeted with a wall - the next block of apartments was barely feet away, and too high for her to try to fly to the roof of. The only way out was down, which the vampire could do too. Cursing, Lydia began running again, trying to find a different wall a different window something. When the figure darted in front of her, Lydia screamed, before realising it wasn’t the mime one. “No! What! That thing looks like your problem-” Her head jerked to the sound of the mime climbing up the stairs. “Can’t we just, I don’t know, feed them a human?” Lydia asked, trying not to let her voice get shrill. She did not love the idea of killing a person. She did not love the idea of being bait. As the mime moved up the stairs, Lydia squeezed her eyes shut, took a deep breath, and nodded. Morals be damned, she did not want to fucking die. “Fine! I’m holding you to that.” Lydia swallowed, dropping all her glamours - if she was going to concentrate on anything, it was surviving this thing. She pulled a pistol from her purse, and a little necklace too that she only ever wore to church. The mime’s contorted face twisted around the corner; its head tilted so far it wasn’t natural. Lydia gasped deeply, suddenly horribly aware that she was the only one breathing. Light feet made no difference in a place like this. “Why does it have two knives?” Lydia hissed, backing away through the hall. A car drove past the window, flashing fluorescent yellow light across the mime’s features. It was baited alright. Lydia’s mouth was wet with thick saliva, as she looked around. “The only wood in here is in that fucking door,” she hissed, and that wasn’t something Lydia could break by herself. “Do you have a different plan?” That would take seconds, seconds they didn’t have. But if the vampire mime wanted something with a heart beat, it would be distracted by her in a fight. Lydia gave it a distraction. She bolted through the back of the hallway and ran into the maze of rooms. Hopefully a second enough for her probably untrustworthy ally to gain a momentary upper hand. 

Orobas laughed a little, “There are no humans around, trust me-- I looked for such a distraction. Ended up through your car window.” Orobas shivered a little at the sweet, perfume scent in the space, the lure of the other was impossible to miss, and the beautiful distraction she held when her glamours fell away put him in a moment daze. Excitement-- hunger-- pitted his stomach with a sharp pang of want. Orobas, couldn’t help it-- he loved beautiful people, and seeing them bleed. She inquired about the knives, and Orobas thought about it as it crawled on all fours down the hallway, he stepped back as it did. “It knows my moves-- wears my face-- uses my favorite blade. I am assuming, this mime-me likes to play copy-cat in its truest form.” It was then he knew, that this mime would want her just as badly. Swallowing his urges-- Orobas ran towards the door and slammed his shoulder into it, splintering open the decayed entrance just as she took off. A large pointed piece in hand, he bolted through the hallway after them. All he needed was a second distraction, and this vampire mime would be turned to dust. 

Lydia heart pounded louder than her feet on the building floor as she darted from room to room, using her wings to give her sprinting momentum. She bolted through an abandoned office space, desks askew, some propped up in a corner to form a nest of some kind. She slammed every door she ran past, knocked over piles of abandoned cleaning materials. She stumbled over a peeling linoleum floor as she threw herself down a staircase, her wings the only things protecting her from a cracked skull and a grizzly demise. Sometimes she couldn’t hear it, hear either of them, and those were the most frightening, because she had no idea what was waiting behind each corner. Or maybe, it was because one of them was dying. Her lungs burned as she slammed a door behind her, collapsing against it for a second to catch what little air she could afford. Lydia closed her eyes, which were somehow wet, and clutched her trembling legs.  The door bucked and splintered as a knife burst through it, right beside her head. Lydia screamed, and sobbed, and began sprinting again, as the mime broke the door, on all fours. God, she would take any window at this point, and would collect that deal later. Fuck. God hadn’t given her a window, but a long, narrow room filled with desks, half of which were piled against the opposing door, as if to keep something on that side out. “What the fuck?” She hissed, but the thing was coming. Lydia threw herself behind a desk, and dulled her glow entirely, gun raised. Vampires couldn’t die from it, all she needed was to hurt it enough to get past it. 

Orobas came to a screeching halt when the mime shoved the knife through the door in quick, strong slices, splintering the wood and looking for the faerie. For a moment, the entire energy surrounding the altercation made the creature shiver, his fingers toyed with his own blade, head cocked, and staring at the other monster. This all felt out of body, watching someone else mock old memories of how he’d kill someone. The tears scented the air, the thundering, frightful state a room away with life pounding through the air like a war drum and sirens call of panic, fear, and delicious sweetness that Orobas felt anger flicker as warm coals. “Should I let you kill her?” he mused to himself, as darkness separated his cells, the particles fading into a creepy, mist consistency as his entire form disappeared and slipped under the opposite door. The mime continued to cut into the other, slamming the sturdier object, crawling partially through the door. Orobas floated over, hovering along the floor and rose behind her, the mist revealing a suddenly looming, old creature, whose features weren’t as humanlike, but undead in nature, with sunken pockets under his eyes, and the skin paper thin. Red consumed the entirety of his eyes, with blackened veins and long fangs, and just seeing her hovering there, legs trembling, tears staining her cheeks-- he grinned, then laughed. “Oh-- I really didn’t realize how scared you were.” His voice floated in tone, and everything around him faded to only her. Behind her not the vampire people knew in town-- but the one of old, and legend. Without warning-- he tackled her. The wooden stake in his hand crunched into nothing when it hit the ground, the other pressed her neck to the side so he could bite with a feral, painful crunch. 

Lydia swallowed, watching the mime hack at the door. She’d have to wait until it got close enough that she could get past. Her wings buzzed in anxious anticipation as she stayed crouched, swallowing the copious saliva in her mouth, her heart pounding. The floor was grimy under her hands, steeped in years of suffering and death. Whoever had once worked here hadn’t survived, and whatever lived here now didn’t seem fussed over the murderous mime prowling through it. Staring right at her with those dead eyes and that cruel, blackened smile. Despite the wreck of its body, the beret was still attached to it’s head. Somehow. As it broke through the door, Lydia stood, holding the gun stretched out in front of her, its eyes right in her sights, when a voice whispered in her ear. Lydia shrieked as impossibly strong arms wrapped around her, trapping her wings and dragging her to the floor. “NO!” She screamed as pain lashed through her neck, shooting down her spine as she struggled against the vampire around her. Lydia tried to prise his arms off her, eyes wide as the mime continued to squeeze through the door. She twisted and wriggled, her voice hoarse as every movement pushed his teeth deeper inside her. The necklace wrapped around her fist became a weapon, as she swiped the little gold cross blindly in his face, as if that would be enough to dissuade the both of them. Lydia thrashed wildly, a wounded animal in the slaughter house, before remembering the real weapon in her hand. Whimpering, she twisted the pistol, aiming it at the monster on top of her, and fired twice into his hip. Her skin and wings lit up, as startlingly bright as she could get them, and burst out of his grasp. She fired at the mime wildly, hoping to have landed at least one shot before she tried to sprint past it, through the hole it had left with its knife, and get away from this nightmare. 

The initial gush of blood from any artery was always warm. It didn’t matter what they were, or how old-- it was always the same with blood the split second it was stolen from its source. With Orobas it never was about consuming blood so much as the overwhelming need to hurt people, and to see them die. To witness their tears, to feel their struggle, and their desire to live push against what he wanted made his existence exciting. He’s killed so much, he can’t remember any of their faces, who they were, where they have been, but this woman. Her struggle, her anger, her scream-- her beauty, it made him want it all. Lost in the ecstasy of the moment, and wanting to hear her heart stop it was all shattered with the glowing, pain against his face from the cross, he hissed-- and quickly batted the hand away on instinct, looking down at her. Wings pinned, clothes bloodied, and as her own blood dripped freely, messily down his chin-- he wondered… a flash of remorse, like a stake in the chest, made itself known. A feeling he’s never once felt in hundreds of years. BAM! The shots surprised him, and the bullets went right through him and into the desk behind. She pushed away, fluttering away, and Orobas laid there a moment, licking his lips-- staring at the mime who finally had eyes on him. “Come here, this is what you want?” he waved his bloody hands towards the other, “come on, focus on me--  and die--” His wild, insane grin stretched, and the moment the mime rushed in at the delirious inducing scent coated on Orobas front, he moved quickly, a slice of his long dagger, properly wielded and enough to sever it’s head to the spine, it grotesquely flipped and landed back in place, the beret never falling, but Orobas picked up the stake and shoved it in its back through its heart. The crumbled dust of the vampire mime leaving no evidence behind. He looked at the hole she had run from, dragging his thumb over his lip and sucking on it. “Mhmm,” the throaty sound exposed his thoughts-- I made a loose end.

[cyclogroup]

Top 15 Green Home Building Techniques

With the constantly changing environment around us, it’s important to be environmentally aware and active. It’s even more important when you consider how much money you can save by building a green home. The methods and ways you can go about changing your home from an emission-producing powerhouse into more of a greenhouse are easy and simple concepts. Everything you can think of in order to save energy can be implemented in creating a green space for you and your family.

Being aware of energy saving benefits, making the switch from waste producing products to more environmentally friendly products, and much more. By creating and managing a green home for you and your family to live in, not only will you be engaging in a positive atmosphere – but also you’ll be passing on the lessons and importance of surrounding environmental issues to the rest of your family. While in the long run, going green will save you lots of money, the initial renovations needed to go green can sometimes be costly. Consider obtaining a home equity line of credit to finance your green home endeavors.

Some Cost Effective Benefits of Going Green in Your Day-To-Day Life

In order to have a productive green home, you need to be able to cut costs when required. This means using less electricity and trying to eliminate the products that have a negative impact on the environment. Although it’s obvious that there are many cost-effective ways to go green, some of them are often forgotten. Here are some of the top reasons why you should choose to go green in your household for the sake of your budget.

You can eliminate the stress that comes with paying high monthly bills.

Saving money for other things like trips, special occasions and outings.

Reducing your carbon footprint.

Encouraging others in your family to save energy by eliminating the use of certain things during high peak or mid peak hours (on par with what your energy company has outlined).

You can put the money you saved to good use, no matter what it is.

15 Green Home Building Ideas

1. Location Location, Location: While buying property for yourself, take a note of couple of things that you must foresee before moving in. Firstly, avoid building west facing home. This will keep your home cool as it minimizes sun exposure. Secondly, avoid building home in environmentally sensitive locations such as earthquake or hurricane or flood prone areas. Thirdly, check if public transportation is easily available and local grocery shop is not that far away. This will help you avoid taking your own vehicle every time and will reduce your travel time.

2. Smaller is Better: A small home built with eco friendly techniques is going to have smaller environmental impact as against a large home. A house that is too large is likely to cost more to heat and cool. Try to keep the place manageable and cost effective. If you are planning to extend your family and bring in few relatives, you need to put proper resources and accommodation in place.

3. Energy Efficient Equipment: ENERGY STAR label on a piece of equipment states that particular product has been deemed as energy efficient by the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA). ENERGY STAR is becoming well known label and consumers today choose energy star appliances for their homes. These appliances offer significant cost and energy savings without compromising performance.

4. Proper Insulation: Insulation is one of the most important ting that you need to consider while building a green home. Heating and cooling account for 50% of your home’s energy consumption. Air leaks such as around windows, door and duct work is responsible for building’s heat loss. Don’t let heating and cooling of your interior spaces air go waste through improper insulation. Proper insulation will not only reduce your energy consumption but will bring down your electricity bills substantially.

5. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Reduce your need for buying new products that are not environment friendly. Reuse your old material such as wood floors, doors, windows in your next home. Recycled materials such as recycled glass, aluminium,  recycled tile, reclaimed lumber, recycled plastic can be used in green home building.

6. Use Sustainable Building Materials: If building a green home is your goal, then using environmentally or eco-friendly products should be on your list which can reduce the impact of construction on the environment. Each and every part of your house such as roofing material, building material, cabinets, counters and insulation to your flooring should be environmentally friendly. Use products such as reclaimed lumber, recycled plastic, recycled glass or natural products such as bamboo, cork and linoleum which are made of natural, renewable materials.

7. Install Solar Panels: Solar energy is clean and renewable source of energy. Solar panels are an emerging and hot technology for people who want to utilize the natural power all around us, the sun.  Solar panels may be expensive at first, but the long-term savings you can put into your pocket is a stunning example of the benefits of turning your life from black to green. The location of your house and the way you have constructed solar panels can determine how much power you can collect. By taking advantage of solar power you can bring down your energy consumption and supply excess energy, if any, to your utility company. Also, government grants, incentives and tax breaks are huge bonus to those who want to use solar power in their home.

8. Energy Star Windows: Energy efficient windows labeled as ENERGY STAR windows are new player in window market and are much more energy efficient than normal windows. The ratings for these windows determine how energy efficient they will be. The lower the rating, the more energy efficient are your windows. The energy savings provided by these windows are enough to cover the added cost per window.

9. Rainwater Harvesting Systems and Tankless Water Heaters: Install a rainwater harvesting system while building your green home to collect rainwater from roofs and then storing it in a tank. The collected water can then be used for other purposes such as toilets and sprinkler systems. Rain barrels are one of the most common methods of rainwater harvesting being used today.

With tankless water heaters, you need not wait for the water to get heated. Tankless water heaters heat only that much water that is needed as it is passed through electric coil. This gives you twin benefits. Firstly, it eliminates excess energy costs as it heats up only that much amount of water that is needed and secondly, you can get ample storage place by eliminating the hot water tank.

10. Eco-Friendly Lighting: Both LED and CFL cost more upfront but use less energy and last longer than traditional incandescent bulbs. Since they offer significant cost savings in the long run, they can be ideal for your new green home.

11. Water Conserving Fixtures: Low flow faucets, toilets, showerheads are few of the ways that you can use while building a green home to conserve water. They can cut down on your water bills cost and make your home much more environment friendly. Apart from that, consider buying washing machines and dishwashers that give you same kind of cleaning and can save water and energy.

12. Programmable Thermostat: We all know that almost 50% of our energy consumption goes towards heating and cooling of our home. The simplest way to cut down this cost and reduce electricity bill is to install programmable thermostat. Your HVAC system will work when the thermostat reaches the designated temperature. Also, a slight 3-5 % of your energy bill can be saved if you can set your thermostat 1 degree down in the winter and up by 1 degree in the summer.

13. HVAC System: Buy a high efficiency, Energy Star rated HVAC system based on the design and construction of your house that will help you save energy and money. A HVAC system needs to be properly installed so that it could perform up to its full potential. Make sure ducts are short, straight and air tight. The ducts need to be professionally tested with the goal of under 10%  leakage.

14. Efficient Landscaping: Shady landscaping can protect your home from direct sunlight during the summer and allows more sunlight to reach your home through windows during the winter. Planting trees on southern and western side of your home can keep your home cooler as they will block sunlight from falling directly on your home and during the winter, when trees lose their leaves, they will allow more sunlight to reach your home.

15. Harness Geothermal Energy: Geothermal energy is known as energy from the earth. Geothermal energy requires more upfront investment but provide unlimited energy to heat and cool your home. During the winter season, geothermal heat pump uses the earth loop to extract heat from deep underground to your home’s HVAC system; in the summer season, heat is extracted from the air and moved back into the earth through loop system.

How To Become Greener In Your Household

Some people think that going green can be a costly or difficult venture. However, there are so many different methods that people choose to go with that can help you save both the money and the effort that goes into making an extensive green energy plan for your home. Some of these methods are often forgotten by people who make green energy plans because they are just so simple and overlooked. These methods are:

Turning off any lights or appliances when you don’t use them.

Remembering that even when you’re not using something and it’s plugged in, it’s still eating away at potentially saved energy (this includes things like laptops, cellphone chargers, essentially everything you can think of that is plugged in).

Buying only recyclable containers and reusing plastics for food storage.

Creating a family energy plan that everyone can plan their daily routine by.

Having safe and environmentally friendly alternatives for things like entertainment. Eliminating the extensive use of the television or the Internet is also a great way to get the family more involved with one another. Plan family game nights and other fun ways to spend your time together.

First seen on this website: https://homebuildingmaterials.wordpress.com/2017/01/05/top-15-green-home-building-techniques/

[xpouii]

Tentacletober Day 9

Hello! This is late! It’s also extremely triggering, so please heed the warnings. Also, I don’t condone the behavior in this story. I don’t condone things through my writing, so there you go.

Prompt: Surprise Tentacles

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Characters: Virgil, Patton, Deceit, Roman, Logan, Remus

Warnings/Tags: SFW, violence, child abuse, self-harm, blood, mental illness, swearing, generally shitty parenting, unsympathetic Patton, unsympathetic Deceit, please be safe when reading this if you are triggered by any of the above

           “Virgil Gerard Heart!”

           Virgil winced, pulling his hood up and tightening it. Patton cut him off, blocking the door, “Virgil, honey… look at me.”

           Virgil tensed, his hands were shaking, but he lifted his face to his father’s squaring his jaw. He’d put on eyeshadow, smearing it under his eyes, and he desperately wanted to keep it on, “It’s just-“

           “No,” Patton said, cutting him off. “Why do you want to look like a dead person, honey? Go wash your face and hurry up now. Where did you even get that makeup? From that Prince boy? Or the little smart one… oh what’s his name, Lance? Lance Berry?”

           “No, Dad it’s just-!”

           “Virgil if you don’t march up those stairs right now you’re not leaving this house.”

           “Dad that’s not fair! It’s a mandatory band trip; come on!” Virgil begged. “I’m not a little kid anymore. Please just let me-“

           “Dee honey!” Patton called over Virgil’s shoulder, “A little help please?”

           Virgil clamped his mouth shut so hard that he bit his tongue, tears welling up in his eyes but he stayed silent, eyes on the floor. Deceit stuck his head into the living room. “What is it?”

           “Look at our son,” Patton said. “Please just… talk some sense into him alright? He’s going to be late for his little band trip and I have to finish these dishes!”

           Virgil’s heart sank as Patton swept out of the room. Patton always left, because he couldn’t stand to see what Deceit was about to do, even though he knew it by heart. Deceit lifted Virgil’s face, “Your father told you to clean your face?”

           Virgil’s bottom lip trembled, “I-“

           The slap was brutal, and Virgil stumbled into the wall, grabbing on and trying to hide his face, but Deceit pulled him back, “God damn it Virgil how many times are we going to have these talks?! When are you going to start listening?!”

           Virgil opened his mouth, but Deceit struck him again, this time in the mouth, and Virgil tasted blood. He closed his eyes and cried, “I’m sorry! Please I’ll wash my face! Please I’m sorry!”

           Deceit pulled Virgil in by his hoodie, glaring into his eyes, “Go wash your face and then apologize to your father. And you’d better not be crying when you get back down here or so help me god, Virgil you will miss this trip. I don’t care if it is mandatory!”

           Virgil walked—he wanted to run, but that would only make things worse—up the stairs and into his bedroom. He closed the door silently, carefully, and walked into his bathroom. He lowered his hood and looked at his face. His lip was busted, and he spat blood into the sink. His face was red on one side, an angry welt from the open-palmed slap. He unzipped his hoodie and shrugged it off, splashing cold water on his face and scrubbing until his entire face was red, and his tears and eyeshadow were gone down the drain. Virgil brushed his teeth and used a thin piece of wet toilet paper to stop the bleed in his mouth. His eyes stopped on a bruise just below his elbow—and the forest of cuts from wrist to elbow—and then he pulled his hoodie back on, turning off the light and rushing downstairs.

           Patton was in the kitchen, humming happily to himself as he finished up the dishes. Virgil’s shoe squeaked on the linoleum and Patton turned with a smile, “Oh honey, there’s my beautiful boy.” Patton crossed to Virgil and took his face in his hands, kissing his forehead. “I’m sorry, baby. You know your father has a temper. I wish he wouldn’t be so hard on you… but you know it’s because he loves you. We love you so much, Virgil.”

           Virgil’s lip quivered but he held his emotions back, knowing better than to cry, “I’m sorry Dad. I should have done what you said the first time. I shouldn’t have upset you.”

           Patton smiled and pulled Virgil into a tight, warm hug, stroking his hair, “Virgil, I’m never upset with you honey. You’re my perfect, sweet boy. Now, hurry up and get to the school. You’ll miss the bus.”

           Virgil took the affection greedily, like he always did; it was the only thing he could depend on just as much as Deceit’s violence, and even though Patton’s kindness was somehow even more cruel, he still craved it like oxygen.

             Virgil jogged to his truck, climbing up and starting it. He glanced at his reflection in the overhead mirror before pulling out of the driveway and heading toward the highschool. After turning off out of his suburb, Virgil leaned over and fumbled in the glove compartment, pulling out a small jewelry box. He’d taken it out of the trash when Patton had given Deceit diamond cufflinks for their anniversary. Now, it held a very different treasure. Virgil took out one of the razorblades, flicking off the cardboard guard and putting it in his mouth. He held it delicately between his front teeth, letting his lips tease against the sharp edge. He hated being such a statistic, but he wasn’t exactly the only one to blame. When he was twelve, Patton had sent him to a therapist when he accidentally burned his wrist with his hair straightener and Patton was convinced it was intentional—in truth Deceit had beat him so badly his hands were still shaking. Virgil had gone obediently and listened to a counselor tell him why he self-harmed, all of the control, the endorphins, the release. When he’d gotten home from that session, Virgil had immediately taken one of Patton’s razorblades from the bathroom and sat in the bathtub, cutting tiny lines in his inner thigh. He still saw the therapist, but now he wore hoodies and chewed toothpicks and rolled his eyes. What was he supposed to do? Roll up his sleeves and show all of his little scars—maybe he would have, if he ever went to the therapist without bruises. If he ever went out in public not having to hide the black and blue humiliation Deceit gave him.

           Virgil pressed his lips together and the razor split his bottom lip, just next to the cut Deceit had made. He let the blood flow for a moment, down his chin like a lover’s touch, warm self-indulgence, and then he took out the razor and threw it out the window, wiping his chin with his fingers and licking the blood off, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth. By the time he reached the school parking lot it could have just been a lip cracked by the dry weather. Virgil put the small box back in his glove compartment and used his chapstick before he jumped out of his truck. He took out his backpack—and his previously stowed clarinet—and locked the truck—smirking to himself at the thought someone would actually steal it. But if a security guard went snooping and found his razorblades, he’d be in deep shit. Virgil jogged to the bus that blazed in the early evening like a beacon. He climbed up and saw two familiar faces, allowing himself to smile.

           “You were almost late, you big slut!” Roman scolded and Virgil laughed.

           “Parents were being assholes,” Virgil said, sliding in the seat next to him.

           Across the aisle, their friend Logan sat with his feet up in the seat, communicating a clear message, “When are they not?”

           “Isn’t this exciting!” Roman interrupted. “The audience is going to be the biggest we’ve ever played for! Mom already drove up to set up her camera.”

           “It should go well,” Logan said. “The last practice was fairly seamless.”

           Roman rolled his eyes playfully and nudged Virgil, “What about you, Virge? How do you think the clarinets will do?”

Virgil smiled, “As long as I don’t mess up, it’ll be fine. I’m just so glad the director didn’t decide to give me the solo.”

           “Well he wanted to,” Roman said. “You wouldn’t let him.”

           “If he did my parents would have come, no way I could’ve hidden it from them if I was going to all the solo practices.”

           Roman shrugged, “Well I think it would’ve been better in your hands.”

           “He’s right,” Logan said. “You’re first clarinet for a reason, Virgil.”

           “Well you two got the solo stuff you wanted so I’m just glad about that.”

           “I’m the only cellist,” Logan said. “There was literally no competition.”

           “But-“

           “Well I am proud of my position,” Roman said. “Oboe tunes the whole band.”

           “Even if it didn’t you still have your own entire song with the piano,” Logan said.

Roman sighed happily, then frowned, “Yeah mother says it’s a hollow privilege because I have no true competition.”

           Virgil rolled his eyes, resting his head against Roman’s shoulder. His cheek complained briefly against the rough fabric of Roman’s letterman jacket, but it wasn’t long until Virgil fell asleep to his friends’ gentle bickering.

           Virgil unlocked the front door and let himself in quietly, closing the door behind him and crossing the livingroom in the dark. He almost went to his knees when the lights flipped on, and Patton was sitting in his chair, knitting. “Hey kiddo. Awfully long trip to see a concert.”

           “Y-yeah,” Virgil said. “Well, traffic was-“

           “Mrs. Berry called me about an hour ago,” Patton said. “She wanted to congratulate me on how well you played at the concert.”

           Virgil’s heart dropped and he froze, “Dad, I-“

           “Go to your room, Virgil,” Patton said. He looked hurt, and that was the most terrifying thing he could be.

Virgil raced up the stairs, closing his door and throwing his backpack into his closet. He stripped his clothes off and threw on his pajamas, jumping into bed and covering up his head. Deceit would be there eventually, and Virgil prayed for it to be quick, and then he could cry himself to sleep, where he’d be safe. He was still trying to calm his breathing when the door opened and the lights turned on. Virgil squeezed his eyes closed as he heard the footfalls cross to his bed, “Did you brush your teeth?”

Virgil whimpered, “N-no sir… I’m sor-“

“Sorry? Oh you’re sorry are you Virgil? Are you sorry for breaking your dad’s heart?! Because that’s what you did! You lied and you hid the concert. He cried for an hour, you ungrateful little bastard.”

Virgil squeezed his eyes closed; he knew what was coming, but he had no idea how long the lecture would last before the violence started. The hand in his hair drug him out of the suspense—and out of the bed. His knees hit the floor and he cried out, struggling as Deceit dragged him into the bathroom. Virgil wrapped his hands around Deceit’s wrists to help keep him from pulling out any hair as he hauled the boy across the floor, jerking him to his feet and pushing him against the sink. “Do you need help with your nightly routine, Virgil? Is that it? You’re not mature enough to do your own grooming? Do you need me to brush your teeth for you?”

“No Dad please! I’m sorry I’ll do it please!” Virgil sobbed, staring at his own terrified face in the mirror.

Deceit slammed his knee against the back of Virgil’s and the boy went down, hitting his chin on the sink and biting his tongue—bleeding again. He drove his boot into Virgil’s ribs in a brutal kick, causing the teen to sob and curl into a fetal position on the floor. Fixing his shirt, Deceit cleared his throat, “If your teeth aren’t brushed and you aren’t back in bed before I come back in here—ten minutes, Virgil. You won’t be going to school for a week. I’ll make sure of that. Do you fucking hear me?”

Virgil trembled, unable to make a coherent reply, but Deceit left him, and he managed to drag himself up from the floor and brush his teeth, spitting blood. He washed his face, trying to fight away the tears as he crawled back into bed, wincing at the unpleasant grab in his side when he did so. He held his breath when he heard Deceit open his bedroom door, hallway light flooding in. Virgil forced his eyes closed and waited, biting down on his knuckles hard enough to leave deep toothmarks. When the door closed again he let out a shaky breath, but there weren’t anymore tears to release. So much for crying himself to sleep. Despite the dry eyes, Virgil did eventually drift off, the tremble in his breath melting as his chest slowed, and sleep took him.

 Virgil

Virgil jerked awake. He’d heard something, a voice? Something crawling on his floor? He sat up and looked around. It hadn’t been Deceit, or he’d have been slapped awake by now. Something—a snake? A rat?—slid under his bed and Virgil gasped, curling back up in bed and pulling his covers over his head. Whatever it was, if he made a fuss, he’d be in for another beating.

Virgil

           Virgil’s eyes snapped open, and he rolled over to the edge of the bed; he’d heard a voice. He was sure this time. He looked down for a moment before pulling himself down and looking under the bed. The darkness stared back, and Virgil tensed, chewing his lip as he moved to climb back up onto the bed. Suddenly, a writhing mass of tentacles shot out and wrapped around him, arms and throat, yanking Virgil underneath the bed. Virgil cried out as darkness enveloped him.

           He sat up as soon as he felt his body land on the floor—ground?—and scrambled to his feet. He was in something like a cave; water was dripping somewhere nearby, and trickling over rocks. He didn’t notice the man until his eyes adjusted, and then he screamed.

           “My my what a set of pipes you have,” the man said. “But calm down. I may be the monster under your bed, but I’m not here to eat you.”

           Virgil blinked, “Am I dead?”

           The man—monster?—rolled his eyes, “You think you’re in heaven? Do I look like God to you?”

           “I didn’t expect god to have a pornstache that’s true.”

           He cackled, “Pornstache! Oh that’s a good nickname… but I feel like it’s been done. Let’s wait a while until Orange Is the New Black has settled down before we really go for it, hm? So, Virge. I’ve been watching you a long time.”

           “Creepy,” Virgil said. “Why?”

           “It’s what we do, monsters, cryptids, whatever you want to call us. Humans are interesting—they’re very weird. But, you’re such a sad sack I couldn’t just let it stand anymore. I thought I’d pop in and cheer you up!”

           “By kidnapping me,” Virgil said, “Sure ok… what’s your name?”

           The creature was thoughtful, a few tentacles emerged—from his back maybe?—and twisted around as if he were fidgeting, “Well, I’ve got a few. When you live forever you pick up names don’t you? They’re like herpes, not generally welcome but always dependable! You can call me Remus.”

           “Remus, like Professor Lupin?” Virgil said, walking over to the cave wall where lewd art had been carved with a rock. “Or like… Remus Dănălache?”

           Remus raised an eyebrow, “What now?”

           Virgil shoved his hands in the pockets of his basketball shorts, “My dad watches a lot of European football.”

           “Ooh, which one? Hug Dad or Punch Dad?”

           Virgil winced, and Remus hissed apologetically, “Yeah maybe be a little more chill when you bring up… Punch Dad, alright?”

           Remus clapped his hands together, “Let’s go do something fun, Virgil! What do you like? Besides chewing on razorblades. I love doing that but… I’d better not bring you home covered in blood or your parents—or my parents—would probably be pissed.”

           “Wait you have parents? Monsters have parents?”

           “How else do you think I got here? Do you think I crawled out from under a rock?”

           “Well you did crawl out from under my bed!” Virgil said. “But like… sorry. Ok you have parents… does that mean you’re not an adult monster?”

           Remus sighed, “Monsters age slow, so no. I have to be six thousand before I’m considered an adult and I’ve got another five hundred years before that happens. But I’m practically an adult. I can jump.”

           “Can’t everybody jump?”

           “Not like that, dummy. I can dimensional jump! It means I can interact with your world and bring you into mine! So, why don’t we… go scare your neighbor, the old bitch who complained about your music that day you had the window open and Punch Dad broke your stereo.”

           “Yeah, Ms. Miller,” Virgil muttered. “What do we do?”

           Remus grinned, offering Virgil his hand, “Just follow my lead.”

[beerecordings]

"Start with the youngest", with Anti n JBM? :D

Yesss I saw this list n I was like oh I KNOW somebody gonna send that one in and then the two of you had me covered hahaha. Love you both and hope you enjoy! REALLY loved writing this one, got pretty swept up in it.

Warnings for hospitalization, intubation, and mentions of torture and blood.

Edit: okay @a-single-green-eyeball made an amazing piece that takes some inspo from this little fic! you should totally check it out here, it’s wicked

He sits with his knees drawn to his chest, his fingers digging into his calves.

Tick, tick, tick, counts the clock on the wall.

Gritted teeth grind against each other in his mouth.

Tick, tick, tick, counts the clock on the –

“Fuck, shut the hell up!” Jackie turns to snarl at it, reaching up to tear at his hair. “He’s trying to sleep, you stupid hunk of plastic!”

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Alright, that’s fucking it. Jumping to his feet, Jackie shoves his shitty plastic hospital chair away, leaps across the shitty plastic hospital floor, and snatches the shitty plastic hospital clock off the wall. Distress and sensation crash so heavily across his mind that he feels like he is not thinking at all, and then, before he can summon the energy to care, he is smashing the face of the clock into the shadowed midnight windowsill, striking again and again and again, until what was once a clock is now shards clutched too tightly between his fingers.

For a moment, silence.

Beep, sighs Jameson’s heart monitor. Beep. Beep.

Cars rush by stories below. The lights buzz out a pretend hive mind, harsh and groaning in the ceiling. Heels click on the linoleum floors. Faraway is the swish of a train, distant and dissipating, foam on an unreachable ocean. Two rooms away someone is crying.

“Jackie,” comes a voice, a low warmth in the midst of so much cold noise.

He turns and moves, rounding Jameson’s bed once more. His eyes are wild, he knows. His hair is a mess and there is blood at the nape of his neck and his panic and rage are tangible, olfactory, gustatory, he knows. He shouldn’t be here. He knows.

Chase stands in the doorway, watching him. His eyes are red too. He’s been crying already. Probably since the second he heard about the attack, he’s been crying. He is smaller than Jackie and easier to tears. Jackie cannot bear to see him in pain.

His little brother.

“Jackie,” says Chase again.

Jackie slumps back into his chair and pulls his knees to his chest, chewing on his nails, rocking, waiting, watching his baby brother sleep.

Chase sighs in the doorway.

“They told me they couldn’t get you to leave,” he says, with a step forward. Jackie turns to glare at his feet, gnawing at the end of his thumb. “Apparently you nearly punched the nurse who tried to drag you away. And now you’re not letting anyone get close to him.”

“I’m not leaving,” Jackie snaps, before Chase can work himself into a full-blown lecture.

There’s a long moment of noise, absent Chase’s voice.

“Can I come in?” he asks finally.

Jackie growls low in his throat, his eyes on Jamie.

Sleeping so, so soundly. He’s so white under the mean little fluorescent lights. He’s so small with that strip of plastic inside his mouth, breathing too heavily at the air that it gives him.

“It’s me, man,” Chase soothes, taking another step in.

“Prove it,” Jackie hisses, whirling on him. “I don’t know that. I don’t know it’s you.”

Chase sighs again. Jackie grinds his teeth and shakes out his hands, chock-full of pent-up rage with nowhere to go.

And Chase steps forward, gentle, and takes Jackie in his arms before he can protest, wrapping him up and squeezing him tight, tight, tight, rubbing his shoulders and setting his chin firmly on top of Jackie’s head, until, at last –

Jackie bursts into tears, rocking against Chase’s chest.

“It’s my fault!” he howls. “This is is my fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” Chase answers. He spares a hand to reach out and clutch Jamie’s, but their little brother does not answer, does not wake, does not stir, not for a moment, for a second, for a single sliver of broken time.

“Let’s start with the eldest,” Anti purred.

He trailed his knife down Jackie’s throat. Blood bloomed obediently at the surface of the white flesh.

“Fuck you,” said Jackie, grinning wicked.

Cement walls buried deep in the earth made Anti’s hide-out silent as a corpse, dark as legs torn off of crickets. “Always so proud,” chirruped Anti, straightening his blade against Jackie’s collarbone. “I enjoy that.”

“Yeah? Enjoy this.”

Jackie rammed his knee towards Anti’s stomach, but the glitch disappeared in a wash of shadow, reappearing, a black haze, at Jackie’s side. For just a second, his darkness blocked out Jameson, chained up at Jackie’s side, but then Anti moved again and Jackie could see his little brother, and all was well.

He tried to smile at Jamie. Jamie stared back, eyes large.

Eyes angry.

“Nice try,” Anti sang, flipping the knife around in his hands. Jackie doesn’t even bother to watch it. He was tired of silver in the darkness, and met Anti’s eyes instead. He was proud, yes, proud to suffer for Jameson’s sake. Proud to do anything, anything, whatever it took to spare his littlest brother a single second of hurt.

Anti dragged the knife across his cheek.

Jackie gasped and swore and laughed, loud, at the warm blood sliding down his face. “Best you can do, Anti? You’ll have to try a little harder, you corrupted excuse for a functioning program. We both know that I – ”

Jackie cut off, startled by a stunning sensation in his face. Anti drew back, equally surprised.

Jackie’s face healed.

And Anti turned his gaze to Jameson, who stared right back, his eyes glowing a vibrant silver in the shadows. Silent with his hands chained. Watching with hatred in his fierce youth’s eyes.

“Oh, darling,” Anti murmured.

Moving away from Jackie. Moving towards Jameson.

“No,” Jackie snapped, trying, not for the first or second or hundredth time, to pull his chains out of the wall.

“So you don’t need your clock,” mused Anti, tilting his head. His eyes shimmered and changed colors, venom green to meet the fine silver of Jameson’s gaze. “Interesting.”

For a moment more he stared at Jameson, considering, but then, oh, relief, relief, he returned to Jackie, lifting up his knife again.

“I want to talk about where your precious Sean is.” Anti began to carve, painting blood down Jackie’s torso, and Jackie bit back on a cry, fire burning across his body. “Maybe if you talk like a nice boy I’ll even leave your little dead-tongue alone, and then – ”

But there was no ‘and then.’ Time turned back across Jackie’s flesh, and, in an instant, slices of skin mended themselves back together, blood retreating to untouched veins, scars unscarring on the white curve of his stomach.

Anti watched it happen.

Fascinated.

“Well,” he whispered, tucking his little blade away. There is a larger one on the table across the room. “Now you’re just being annoying.”

He turned to Jameson and glitched forward, and then he was grabbing him by the throat, slamming him back against the wall, and Jackie screamed aloud.

“No!” he cried. Not for the first time, or the second, or the thousandth, he yanks, hard, against the chains that bind him, bruising blue his wrists. “Anti, leave him alone! He’ll stop! Jameson, stop!”

“No, you know, I don’t think he will,” Anti drawled, squeezing until Jameson gagged. “Besides, now I’m intrigued. I haven’t spent much time with the little one, you know. Family, right? They never call, they never come over to be tortured…”

“Anti, leave him alone!”

“I wonder, Jameson – that is the name, isn’t it, or do you just go by Dapper? – I wonder, Dapper, if you’re so very talented at healing your brother, are you equally skilled at saving yourself?”

“Anti,” Jackie cried again. “Leave him alone. I’m the one you want. I’m the one you’ve always wanted.”

“Quiet, pest,” Anti snarled, and shadow coated Jackie’s mouth before he could speak again, drawing away with a gag in place. “Always is over. There’s a new member of the family. And I’ve changed my mind.”

He released Jameson’s throat. Jamie slumped down in his chains – and yet, in his eyes, Jackie saw defiance.

He is the youngest. Jackie was reminded, in that moment, that he was also a hurricane.

Anti picked up the knife and turned back to him. Two forces of nature met eye-to-eye, and Jackie, between them, was only mortal.

“Let’s start with the youngest,” said Anti, and put a blade in Jameson’s chest.

Stalking down the hall, Henrik is not unlike a hurricane either.

“Where the fuck do you get off?” he shouts, and then he grabs Doctor Jonathan Farraday by the shirt collar, and yanks him away from a pleasant conversation with a nearby nurse.

“Damn it, Henrik!” Farraday cries, nearly tripping over the IV someone is dragging along as Henrik yanks him at full-speed toward the room at the end of the hall. “What the hell?”

“You know Marvin and Jameson are my patients – ”

“You’re not supposed to operate on family, Schneeplestein!”

“I’m the best doctor in this OR and not a goddamn screw-up like you – ”

“Henrik, you don’t work here anymore!” squeals Farraday.

“In the words of a close friend,” snarls Henrik. “Fuck that noise.”

He shoves the other doctor against the wall as he yanks open the door to Jameson’s room, fuming like a green-leaf fire.

The sobs Jackie is releasing into Chase’s shirt stop immediately, and Henrik’s big brother looks up with a fight in his eyes, but before he can do anything stupid Henrik is shoving him aside, rounding Jameson’s bed and flipping open the patient report he stole out of Farraday’s desk.

“There you are, Schneep,” sighs Chase, squeezing Jackie’s shoulders again. “Is Marv doing okay?”

“Fine,” replies Schneep tersely, flipping through Jameson’s charts. “Just his usual over-exertion symptoms and one bad cut. Give him two days and he’s fine. Farraday, why the hell is he intubated?”

“He needs the oxygen,” Farraday defends himself frailly. He comes to stand at Jameson’s side, and then backs away at the look in Jackie’s wild eyes. “He took at least four knife wounds to the ribs, Henrik.”

“At least? What the fuck kind of doctor are you, ‘at least?’ Was it four or not? His oxygen levels are fine!”

Farraday shuffles awkwardly past Jackie’s glare and stops at Henrik’s side, and the two doctors stand staring together at Jameson’s vitals reading.

Chase squishes Jackie’s hand in his own and turns to look at JJ, reaching down to brush a limp curl from his closed eyes. Dark lashes touch his white cheeks, but Chase is glad to see that there is at least a little color there, a little sign of life in his soft face.

“Jackie, what happened?” asks Chase, low and desperate, as Schneeplestein and Farraday erupt into argument over the amount of painkillers Jameson requires.

Jackie turns to him with tears in his eyes. He tries to steady himself through a stammer, struggling even to get the words out, let alone to say anything that will make sense to Chase. “It took hours before he stopped healing,” he chokes. “Hours and hours, and by then he was so exhausted it was like he was dying anyway. There was all this blood from his nose, and then his ears, and then his mouth, but Anti just kept going and going and going – ”

He buries his face in Chase’s shirt, sobbing again.

“Let’s just be glad Marvin found you in time,” Chase soothes, rubbing his back.

“But what if he didn’t? They told me a couple hours ago they weren’t even sure he’d make it through the night and now – ”

“Why the hell you are speaking so much bullshit!” Henrik shouts, loud enough to regain their attention. “He’s fucking fine! Take the goddamn tube out! No, forget it, I’ll get it myself! Get out of mein sight – my sight – go! Go!”

Farraday nearly falls over himself in his haste to escape, but the others ignore him. Jackie rises from his chair, hope waking up in his chest. “Henrik, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know what that idiot had him on. He’s not so bad as they told you.”

“What?”

“Look, see, how his vitals are mostly okay, just a little weakness, a little trouble breathing. I put the oxygen in his nose instead of down his throat like this and he’ll still be okay. Poor little guy. He does look so small, doesn’t he? Shit, I’m sure Farraday botched this whole thing. I am looking at his chest.”

He draws back the blankets and begins unraveling the bandages coating Jameson’s chest with a warm and professional hand, drawing away layers that Jackie could have sworn were coated in blood just hours before. Reaching bare skin, Henrik stops and gently, gently, runs his hands across Jameson’s chest.

Together, they watch the wounds disappear as though they’d never existed.

“Mein Gott,” whispers Henrik.

“Whoa,” Chase breathes.

And Jackie looks up, and sees, and Jameson opens his eyes.

Smiling through the tube in his mouth.

“Little brother,” cries Jackie, and falls upon him, clutching him close, squeezing his unscarred body tight, tight, tight. “Little brother, little brother, little brother!”

On the wall, the shattered clock has remended itself.

[flatstarcarcosa]

house/home

Ship: wilson and wilson at large warnings: exploration of trauma and PTSD, references to abuse note: this ended up being similar to the last thing i did, what started out as a simple headcanon exploration turned into an emotionally charged, rambling piece that at one point, turns into a story. it has not been proof read yet. 

                                  --------------------------------------------

slade and i discover pretty quickly after the move to vermont that simply packing my shit and taking care of any lingering obligations in florida i was tied too is not, in fact, the entire solution to my problems. 

which of course ties into the larger theme of our whole relationship at this point in that we’re both just constantly attempting to run away from our problems, our pasts, our trauma all while scolding each other and saying it doesn’t work like that. 

he finds i don’t get settled right away. or even within a few weeks or months. the vermont house, for all purposes, for the longest of time, is not my house. it is not my home. i quickly default back into the same mindset i have had my entire life, drilled and beaten into me since i was a child that if someone else has paid for it, if someone else has bought it, if someone else has acquired it and is allowing me to use it, 

it is not mine. it is theirs.

which of course, that’s not the mindset that slade is coming from. he picked the vermont house because it made the most sense logistically. it was already there, sitting and waiting. filled with belongings he could never fit in elsewhere, filled with dust, filled with ghosts of memories past. 

it made sense to use it. 

so when we finally arrive, both regretting the initial idea of turning the move into a road trip, my things are waiting in storage containers. two large ones, sitting in the driveway and blocking access to the detached garage. 

the house smells of pine and wood and must, having been shuttered up for so long. he comments that he can’t exactly remember the last time he was here, and he opens windows and adjusts the thermostat as he moves through. 

everything is decorated in warm colors and wood, brown furniture and carpeting, and old linoleum in the kitchen that has seen better days. it’s distinctly him, and his presence coats everything i touch, as if his absence has meant nothing. 

which it probably hasn’t. after all, a house is four walls and a roof and completely unconcerned with the on-goings inside it.

my things get moved in at an easy pace, boxes stacked out of the way in the basement while we try to figure out placement. 

slade jokes we’re both going to have to pick and choose on the books; my amount added to his exceeding the capacity. he comments something about adding more bookcases in his study, and he trails off when he mentions something about adeline always wanting that done years ago. 

there’s pictures of her in his study. her, and grant, and joey. more pictures of the three of them alone or together than there are of slade with them all. one in particular, that i find by accident stuffed behind a novel about Achilles, specifically has slade’s face cut out of it. i don’t ask. i don’t have to. 

over the next few weeks my presence adds to his. 

we have a fake argument about the two batman statues i have, me putting them on shelves in the living room only to find them in absurd places the next day. he puts one in the freezer, another in a garbage can. 

my small collection of novelty mugs makes it’s way into the kitchen, along of course, with my shot glasses. we decide to donate my coffee maker, as slade’s is bigger and still functional. 

at first we come to what seems like the logical conclusion that my bedroom items will go in his room; in the master bedroom. we put my bedframe in the basement, wrap the mattress for now and leave it leaning next to it. my sheet sets go in the closet, i add my pillows to his bed. 

my shampoo and my facial cleansers sit next to his in the bathroom, our toothbrushes resting in the holder. my cologne next to his. my clippers in the box under the cabinet, next to a tiered container holding make up. my nail polish nestles next to his beard trimmer. 

as the weeks go by, little by little i try to claim the offered spaces as my own. 

i wake up one day to find he’s changed the living room furniture, i’m not sure why, and he seems oddly evasive about it. he jokes something about one of the kids throwing a party once, someone leaving nasty stains. he always meant to replace it. 

he always meant to do a lot of things, he says. 

i realize we’re both being crushed by our own innate guilt, whether rational or not, and that all we’ve done is try to run away from it again. 

and of course, it hasn’t worked. it doesn’t work, it will never work, because you cannot run from these things. they are a train, and you cannot outrun a train. 

i find myself wide awake one night, the sound of him breathing softly and measured next to me, and i’m staring up in the dark at a still unfamiliar ceiling and i realize that nothing is right,

none of this is right, none of this fits. 

i am not, yet, accustomed to this new space. im unused to the noises of the house settling, the noises inside and out of it, and i lay there in the blinding dark desperately searching for something familiar to latch onto before i sink to the bottom 

and i find nothing. 

even his warm, solid form right next to me isn’t enough to tether me to the present and once again i’m overcome with the unalienable need to run. 

he finds me on the back porch hours later, having apparently rolled over and noticed my absence, half a pack of cigarettes butted in the ash tray next to me, another one trailing smoke into the sky from my hand. i am still not calm enough to speak, and knowing that i will have to feels like a vice on my chest.  

my mind races to prepare answers, the raging urge of self-preservation steering towards the right answers, and the correct answers, and the answers the other party wants to hear, and it is a habit i never foresee myself breaking. 

the entire time i am screaming at myself to stop because it’s not necessary and it is not appropriate. and logically, i know this. my brain acknowledges the commands yet tells me so sorry there’s nothing we can do to stop this, it’s a train after all. 

he picks out a cigarette of his own, gently pulling the lighter from between the fingers on my other hand. he sits down on the edge of my seat, to my right of course, always to my right and the side he can see from. he exhales a lungful of smoke and for a few moments, the questions don’t come. 

my brain stops misfiring, the synapses all seeming to come to a stop as they compare now to then and finally decide, yes 

yes we can stop now. 

yes, you were right, now is not the same as then. 

a semblance of control returns to my body as he reaches behind me to lean on the back of the chair. 

“where’d you go?” he asks, casually, simply. as if that’s the most logical question to ask, as if that makes perfect sense, and i almost want to scream

because it absolutely is.  

and yet, even still, “what?” is all i can choke out, and i know my attempt to cover it with a cough from the cigarette is as see through as glass, but i do it anyway.

“you went somewhere,” he says, tapping ash. his fingers trail up my back, coming to rest at the nape of my neck, his thumb rubbing circles against my hairline. 

“i...i don’t know,” i say, and i want to cry all over again because of how far away and how small i sound. 

“hm,” is all he responds with. he nudges me with a knee, and i slide over and allow him to sit fully. i stub out my cigarette and immediately reach for another one, and he flicks the lighter and doesn’t comment on the chain smoking and for several minutes we say nothing. 

i know he’s waiting on me to invite him in. to give a cue, a sign that yes i’m fine now and yes i will be fine and yes i will give you a new list of all my problems and you can find out how to fix them, because that’s what you constantly try to do, because that’s all you know how to do, even to the point of creating problems just so you can solve them.  

and i cannot give him that because i know deep, deep within the most choked off parts of myself that there are just things that cannot, will not be fixed. 

and they cannot be run from, either. 

but they can accommodated. they can be unearthed and they can be tended to and they can be allowed to breathe and perhaps if i stop trying to strangle myself into the submission of others, i could get a foothold in my own mind. 

“could you maybe...move my bed and some of my stuff in the basement to one of your spare bedrooms?” i ask, and i hope that the fearfulness i’m feeling at daring to ask for something to be done for my comfort isn’t drowning my words. 

he lets out a smoky sigh, tilting his head back and looking up at the stars as he brushes his fingers against my steaming cheek. 

“i forgot how much you need a space of your own,” he says. my brain, still partially controlled by ghosts pulling on the strings of trauma, searches desperately for anything in his voice to justify the panic. for the annoyance, the exasperation, the condemnation, 

and yet there is nothing to find. 

“of course,” he says, “we can clear out one of the spare bedrooms and we can move as much of your stuff into it as you need.” 

he stresses all the right words in all the right ways so that it doesn’t come across as sarcastic or demeaning in response to my obvious needs and for a moment i could swear i black out as everything that i’ve fought for so long to snuff out explodes into sparks. 

i drop my cigarette at one point, completely unaware i’ve done it as i lean forward and press my head into his chest, fingers coiling into his shirt and he slips an arm around my waist and tugs me closer, leaning me against his hip in what feels like a practiced motion that he’s done hundreds of times.  

“i’m sorry,” i say, breathing the words into him. 

“that’s fine,” he says. “you’re fine.” 

“i know,” i say. 

we fall into silence for a while, interrupted only when i hear him sniffing, and for a moment i think is he crying too, now? did i start this?  then suddenly he’s swearing, jumping out of the chair and nearly knocking me to the porch, and i’m so startled all i can do is blink like a confused animal as i register the smell of smoldering wood.

“your cigarette is burning a hole in the porch,” he says, stepping away to turn the light on. 

and as i watch him go to reflexively grind the cigarette out with his foot, stopping when he realizes he’s not wearing shoes to turn and grab one of my boots from our shoe stand just outside the door, i can’t stop the laughter that bubbles up from my core. 

i hear a train whistle in the distance, and i can’t make out if it is a real whistle, or my auditory wiring misfiring, and i don’t care. i’ll ask him tomorrow, if there’s train tracks somewhere nearby, because it settles in the back of my mind that there will be a tomorrow, and a day after, and a day after that, and it wraps around me like a fuzzy jacket. 

he offers a hand and i take it, and it slips down to my waist as he leads me back inside. 

“you know, you don’t have to try to burn our house down to get my attention,” he says as the door slides shut behind us, and there’s the faintest hint of a smile on his lips as he speaks. i catch sight of the moonlight streaming in behind him, and it imposes on my eyes the sight from what feels like so long ago, 

the sun light beaming down on him in a florida parking lot as he looks down to grab for the dog’s leash, a stranger in my home saving my only friend from running head first into traffic while hunting a lone lizard

and i think what are the odds, 

that then is, in fact, so similar to now. 

[aswithasunbeam]

Champagne and Scratch Tickets

[Read on AO3]

Rating: Teen and Up

Summary: Eliza gets up at the crack of dawn each morning to work at the corner store, doing all she can to keep things afloat after her parents' death. The one thing cutting into her profit margin: the cute boy from the barber shop across the street, who she can't seem to stop giving free coffee to.

A Hamilton/ In the Heights Mashup with Eliza as Usnavi, Alex as Vanessa, Angelica as Nina, and Peggy as Sonny.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Bess. Maybe I should just drop out.” Angelica heaved herself up onto the checkout counter with a sigh.

“Absolutely not,” Eliza said. “Whatever happens, you stay in school. It’s what mom and dad wanted.”

“When my grades come in, Stanford might not give me any choice.”

Angelica’s legs dangled in front of the alcohol and cigarette age disclaimers, mostly bare but for her high cut shorts. Thomas, loitering around the magazine rack, shot Angelica an appreciative glance, Eliza noticed. James noticed, too, apparently, because he gave Thomas a swift smack with a newspaper. Eliza cut her eyes to her sister, and they shared a look of stifled amusement.

Eliza gave her a companionable pat before turning back to stocking the scratch tickets displayed on the other side of the register. “We’ll figure something out, Ange. I promise. We’ll find some more money for you, so you won’t have to work so much. Then you can focus on your classes, get through finals.”

“You don’t have any more money to send,” Angelica said, eyeing the peeling linoleum floor.

True, Eliza granted silently, thinking of the stack of overdue bills on the kitchen table, their bright red final notices practically glowing on the envelopes, not to mention the broken refrigerator on the far wall, still waiting for the repairman to give an estimate. But their parents would turn over in their graves if Angelica didn’t finish school. Conjuring a smile, she said, “We’ll find a way.”

A long, slow whistle of appreciation came from the front window, where a group of two guys and a girl had their heads tilted, peering over the sign announcing a sale on Doritos. Following their eye line, she saw Alex bent over in the refrigerator, his rear beautifully framed in his tight blue jeans. Eliza felt her own head tilting sideways. Alex glanced to the side and threw up his middle finger at the window, prompting the group to walk hastily away.

“What are you looking at?” Angelica asked mischievously.

Eliza gave a flustered start.  

Just then, Peggy skidded to a stop in front of the counter, still tying her apron around her waist. “What are we talking about?”

“I’m worrying about my future,” Angelica said. “Eliza’s checking out boys and pretending to care.”

“I care,” Eliza insisted.

“No judgment here,” Peggy said, openly staring at Alex, who was now standing upright with his cell pressed to his ear. “That boy is fine.”

“Shut up,” Eliza whispered.

Alex spun on the spot and his voice raised in volume. “No, no! I’ll definitely be there. I’ll see you this afternoon. We’ll go over that lease. Thanks.” He hung up and grinned to himself, a dimple appearing in his cheek.

“Good news?” Angelica asked him.

His head swiveled towards them. “I have a lead on an apartment near campus.” He pointed to Eliza. “You owe me a bottle of champagne.”

“You’re moving?” Eliza heard herself asking. She could only hope the heartbreak didn’t come through in her voice.

“If all goes to plan.” He plopped the Pepsi on the counter to check out. “Your fridge smells pretty bad, by the way.”

“Yeah, it’s broken,” Eliza said, hurrying to pour him his customary morning coffee. “It’s been so hot, they’ve been working overtime. It must have finally given out last night.”

“Oh.” An awkward pause followed as he eyed the coffee. “Is the milk okay?”

“I used condensed milk. You know, from the can?”

“Clever,” he praised, clearly impressed.

“My mom’s old recipe.” She shoved a piece of hair back away from her sweaty face. “You’re good to go. It’s all on the house.”

That sweet, warm smile of his fell on her for a heart stopping moment. “Thanks.”  

“So, you’re going back to school?” Angelica asked.

“Yeah. I got accepted to Columbia. With scholarships and the money I’ve saved up working at Mulligan’s, I might just be able to afford it for a semester,” Alex said. “Watch yourself Ivy League. You’ve got competition.”

Angelica laughed, though Eliza noticed a distinct tightness in her face.

“How’s school going for you?” His voice was colored with hope, his dreams clearly pinned on Angelica’s recent escape from the neighborhood.

“Great,” Angelica replied, strain apparent. “Really great. You know, lots of tests, lots of papers.”

“Right.” He sighed wistfully and sipped at his coffee. He raised the coffee cup in a salute to the three of them. “Well, I should get to work. Mr. Mulligan won’t wait forever.” A patent lie. The fatherly barber would starve to death before letting Alex go.

“Bye,” Angelica said.

“See you,” Peggy waved.

“I love you,” Eliza said.

“What?” Angelica, Peggy, and Alex all asked in unison.

“What?” she echoed, face flushing. Oh dear God, had she said that out loud? Grabbing blindly, she laid hand on the pizza dough for the little personal pizzas she put out at lunch time. “Dough! I love dough.”

“Dough?” Alex repeated.

“Yeah. It smells amazing. Nothing like pizza dough to start the morning.”

“Mm,” he hummed, leaning closer to inspect the lump. She closed her eyes, inhaling the smell of his spiced soap on his skin. “Looks good. Maybe I’ll come back for a pizza this afternoon.”

“Yes!” Too eager, she scolded herself. Way too eager. Pull it back. “Yeah, I guess. You know, if you want to.”  

He smiled again as he backed away. He was so pretty she wanted to cry. When the door swished shut behind him, Peggy punched Eliza lightly on the arm. “Oh my God, just ask him out, you freak.”

“No!” Eliza looked askance. “I can’t do that. Look at him.”

They all watched him crossing the street towards Mulligan’s Barber Shop.

“I don’t see a thing wrong,” Peggy said.

“He’s…he’s him. And I’m me.” She gestured to her stained apron and messy hair falling out of her ponytail. “All I’m good for is taking reports of broken fridges and giving away free coffee.”

“That’s so not true. He should be so lucky as to get a girl like you,” Angelica said seriously.

Eliza fought not to scoff.

**

The door dinged when Alex walked in that afternoon.

“Hey handsome,” Peggy greeted, jumping down off the stool she’d been using to stock granola bars on the highest shelf. Eliza sent her glare across the store, to which Peggy gave a careless shrug.

“Hey Pegs,” Alex replied, heading towards the convenience items near the register.

Be normal, Eliza instructed herself as he approached. “How’s work going?”

“As good as sweeping up hair can be,” he replied, rifling around in the candy bars. “God, I can’t wait to quit.”

“Everything’s moving forward with Columbia, then?”

He crossed his fingers and held them up over the shelving for her to see.

“Good. That’s good.” It wasn’t good at all. Her chest hurt at the thought of not seeing him every day.  

He headed towards the spinning food heater displaying hotdogs and pizzas, and finagled a pizza onto a plate for himself to go with his Milky Way bar.

“Hey, Alex?” Peggy asked, sauntering over to him.

“Yeah?”

“My sister over there with her tongue hanging out? She’s wondering what a gentleman such as yourself might be doing this evening.”

Eliza’s eyes widened and she hissed, “Peggy.”

Alex glanced over at her, amusement glittering in his pretty, pretty dark eyes. “Does your sister dance?”

“Eh.” Peggy tilted her hand back and forth. Eliza felt her cheeks heating up with mortification.

Alex only laughed. “Well, maybe her and I could check out a club tonight. You know, if you think she’d like that.”

“Oh, I think she’d like that.”

Eliza sunk down behind the counter. It was as close to the earth swallowing her as she could get. She heard footsteps approaching, and, peeking up, she found Alex leaning over the counter. “I need to pay for these.”

“Just take it,” she said, waving him away.

“Ok. Thanks.” He sank his teeth into the pizza, chewed, swallowed, then winked. “You’re right, by the way. This dough really is amazing.”

She groaned and rolled forward, her forehead pressing against her knees.

He laughed again. “See you tonight?”

“Yeah. See you tonight.”

Peggy scooted behind the counter as Alex left. “You know, you might be able to afford to help Angie out more if you stopped giving Alex free stuff all the time.”

“I can’t believe you did that.” She stood back up, wiping the dirt off her jeans. “That was humiliating.”

“But now you have an actual date, instead of mooning over him from a far. Progress, Bess. Progress.”

Much more progress, and she was going to have to change zip codes.

           **

The music from the club was so loud she felt it in her ribcage more than a block away. Her legs felt sore and rubbery as she struggled down the stairs through the crowd, and she cursed the damn refrigerator repair guy who’d made her heave the two ton monstrosity across half the store. “I need better light,” he’d said. She’d been half tempted to beat him senseless with his own crappy flashlight.

“Alex!” A platinum blonde called from across the room, waving frantically.

Alex didn’t seem to notice. His hand was warm where it pressed against the small of her back. He probably gave amazing back rubs, she considered, biting her lip in anticipation.

“Do you come here a lot?” Eliza asked.

“I wouldn’t say a lot.”

“Hey Alex!” A different girl shouted from the bar. At the same time, a guy stopped in front of them, gave Alex a full head to toe appraisal, and mouthed, “Nice.”

When she glanced back at him, he shrugged. “I like to dance.”

She winced. “I hate to say this, but I’m pretty sore from work. I don’t think I can do much dancing tonight.”

His smile made her heart skip again. “That’s okay. Want a drink?”

“Yes, please.”

He gestured at a table where Gilbert and Jack were already sitting as he pushed through the crowd towards the bar. The two usually exuberant men looked oddly glum. Taking a seat, she asked, “What’s wrong with you two?”

“The car service is under new management,” Jack said. He handed her a shot.

“Is the new manager bad?” she asked, gulping it down with a shiver.

Jack took a shot too. “Wouldn’t know.”

“We’ve been ‘restructured’ right into the unemployment line,” Gilbert explained.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“It was a crap job anyway,” Jack said with a shrug. “We’ll figure something out.”

Ah, that old, familiar refrain.

She looked out through the sea of people and saw Alex with three different pairs of hands grabbing at him as he leaned over the bar.  Seeming to sense her eyes on him, he craned his head back and smiled again. Her heart felt like it might pound right out of her chest.

“So, you’re here with Alex, huh?” Jack was smirking.

“Yeah.”

“Took you long enough,” Gilbert added.

Her responding look of indignation faded when she remembered she hadn’t actually ever gotten up the courage to do more than hand him free coffee and drool over him when he walked away.

Alex hadn’t even sat down in a chair when someone paused before the table and offered, “Hey, want to dance.”

“I’m here with someone,” he refused.

She winced again. She didn’t want to be the wet blanket holding him back from a fun night out. “You can, if you want.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I’m fine,” she assured him, sipping at the fruity drink he’d brought her. The concoction tasted exactly like a watermelon Jolly Rancher. Was there even alcohol in it?

“You might want to be careful with that,” Jack warned after she’d sucked down half the drink in two sips. “Those things are lethal.”

She scoffed and took another long sip. Alex had four different people attempting to dance with him on the floor. They’d formed a circle around him, and he turned in place, not seeming to care which of them he was dancing with at any moment. Were people that interchangeable to him? Was she interchangeable? Or was he trying to make her jealous?

After finishing the drink, and stealing a few more shots from Gilbert and Jack for good measure, she pushed back from the table and headed towards the bar, the floor a little more unstable than she remembered. Her legs felt better, at least. She swayed her hips as she approached the bar, where she ordered another one of the watermelon-Jolly Rancher-thingies.  

A girl was grabbing Alex’s ass when the bartender slid the drink across the bar to her. Well, she didn’t have to just take that, right? She could make him jealous right back. Turning to the right, she saw a gorgeous guy leaning against the wall near the bar, glistening with sweat,  his shirt unbuttoned all the way to his belly button.  

“Hey,” she said, trying to smoothly get the guy’s attention. Her heel turned under her, and she had to catch herself on the wall next to him. That did the trick—the guy looked down at her with a quizzical expression.

“Sí?”

“So I’m kind of psychic,” she said, tongue clumsy on the ‘s’ sounds. She touched a finger to his chiseled chest muscles. He looked down at her finger, then back at her. “I looked into your future, and saw me on you.”

He shook his head. “No hablo inglés.”

Only then did the full horror of what she’d just said occur to her. “Oh, thank God,” she whispered to herself, cringing as she began to back away. “Sorry!”

When she started back towards the table, she saw Alex had finally returned. He didn’t look happy, though, she noted, sliding back into her seat. He had his head down and he was slowly banging it against the table over and over.

“What’s wrong?” Her voice was still a little slurred. “Was it that guy? Cause that didn’t mean anything.”

Jack slid a piece of paper over to her. “This got delivered today. I promised Mulligan I’d bring it over to Alex. It’s uh, not good news.”

Trying to make her swimming vision focus on the words, she made out Columbia’s logo on the top. The financial aid office, she recognized after a moment’s more squinting. The word “denied” jumped out from the first sentence.

“Your father’s income is too high for you to qualify for the aid package you applied for?” she asked after far too long trying to comprehend the message. “I didn’t know your father was helping you?”

“Yeah, me either.” He picked his head up off the table. A big, red mark stood out prominently on his forehead. “Maybe they could forward me his address. He hasn’t bothered to keep me updated on his whereabouts for the past fifteen years or so.”

“God, Alex,” she sighed, putting the paper down on the table. “I’m sorry. You’ll get it straightened out, I’m sure. Even if you have to wait another year—”

“I don’t want to wait another year!” His voice went up an octave. “I want out of here. Don’t you get it? Don’t you want more from your life then selling coffee and candy bars to people in that money pit of yours?”

She frowned, sobering up immediately at the dig. Plenty of people thought that about her, she knew. Sweet, dependable Eliza, if only she had some drive, some ambition.

Her displeasure must have shown on her face, because he said immediately, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not a money pit,” she said. “That was my parents’ store.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

She cast her eyes down at the table. His chair slid back, barely audible over the driving beat. When she looked up again, he was dragging his fingers through his hair.

“I’m gonna go. I’m not really in a dancing mood anymore.” He gave her a pained look. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” she said, voice chilly. “Sure.”

“You should be gentle with him,” Gilbert said after Alex had left. “He’s very insecure.”

“Insecure?” she echoed with clear disbelief. “He got felt up by everyone in the club and then insulted me. And you’re telling me I need to be gentle?”

“He likes you. A lot,” Jack said. “I gave him the letter to cheer him up after he got all weird and mopey because you were talking to that guy at the bar. Though that clearly didn’t work so well.”  

She fought off a wave of lingering humiliation and frowned down at the letter again. “Well, he shouldn’t have gotten all weird. I didn’t get weird when those girls were all over him.”

Jack snorted.

She glared at him and stole another shot.

**

“There’s no power,” Peggy announced, flipping on the overhead light in Eliza’s bedroom the next morning.

Eliza rolled over, covering her eyes with her arm as she groaned. Her mouth was dry and her head felt like she’d been trampled in a stampede of wild horses. Those watermelon drinks had packed a punch.

“I thought you said you were opening for me,” Eliza grumbled. “Go open. And turn off the damn light.”

“Fun night last night?” Peggy smirked.

“Horrible night,” she corrected, tossing a pillow in Peggy’s general direction. “Light.”

The light turned off. “I can’t open. The store has no power,” Peggy explained.  

Eliza rolled back towards her, squinting. “What?”

“No power,” Peggy repeated again, more slowly.

“Why?”

“Well, I found the bill. It’s way, way overdue. That might be why.”

Eliza swore and sat up. As if they hadn’t just lost enough money with the broken fridge, now they risked losing even more product. “I’ll call.”

Sitting on hold with a hangover had to be one of the circles of hell, she decided, holding the phone far from her ear to minimize the volume of the delirious circus music blaring out at her. She laid with her head down on the table for the first ten minutes, then doodled on a pad, and then rifled through the old mail while she waited. Alex’s letter sat on top of the stack, slightly crumpled from her pocket. She must have taken it with her by accident.

She read it over again in the sober light of day. Pissed as she was at him, she couldn’t help feeling a little bit bad. He was so close to getting what he wanted. To have it snatched away at the last second like that, seemed too cruel to bear, even if he had danced all night with other people.

Jack’s words floated back to her, suddenly, the memory foggy as it fought through the drunken haze of last night. “He likes you. A lot.”

She smiled. Did he really like her, she wondered. She had told him it was okay to dance with other people, she supposed. And he had gotten sad and jealous when she’d tried to talk to another guy. (Oh, God, that poor other guy, she thought, humiliation crashing over her once again.) Still, maybe the night hadn’t been a total disaster after all?

She read the contents of the letter again, more closely now, dragging a pen under the most important parts. She’d dealt with a maze of financial aid nonsense for Angelica last year. The ladies in the office had fawned over the young, sweet, orphan girl trying to help her big sister. Alex would probably shout at them. Maybe if she made a call, she could help?

“Ma’am?” A tinny voice cut through the circus music at last.

“Oh. Yes. Hello. I’m calling to get my power turned back on?”

**

Eliza kicked her legs impatiently against the store counter as she waited for the power to flip back on. They assured her it would be back within an hour after she’d made the payment, using money meant to cover rent. (Oh well, one crisis at a time.) It was now going on two hours.  After a crazed morning of having Peggy rush over with coffee pots from their apartment to serve their most loyal patrons, she’d put up a sign announcing cash only sales and hunkered down to wait.

The bell over the door dinged when she was bent over, looking for a chocolate bar to pass the time. “Cash only, no cold goods,” she announced by rote.

“What happened to your power?” Alex, she identified, snapping back up to look at him.

“Went out. Apparently that’s what happens when you don’t pay the bill for three months.”

“Gotcha.” He held up a curvy green bottle and a scratch ticket as he approached. “I got you some stuff.”

“Champagne?”

“Hair of the dog,” he smirked.

“I don’t think champagne’s what bit me last night,” she replied. At least, she didn’t think so. “What’s the occasion?”

“Partly an apology. I’m sorry about last night. That’s not how I meant it to go. I shouldn’t have gone off dancing with other people.”

“I said it was okay.”

“It was dumb of me. I was just so nervous and flustered. I was worried if we just talked I’d say something stupid. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a real date.”

“Seriously? You practically have to beat people off you with a stick.”

He shrugged slightly, clearly uncomfortable with the topic. “Then, when you said I could dance with that girl, I thought maybe you didn’t really want to be out with me.” He was blushing now, perfectly sculpted tan cheekbones turning pink with embarrassment.

She couldn’t help the snort of laughter that escaped. He really was insecure as Jack claimed last night. At his wounded look, she leaned forward, pecking him on the cheek. “I’m sorry, honey. That’s just ridiculous. I have never wanted to go out on a date with another person more in my entire life.”

Butterflies took flight in her stomach at the adoration she saw in his eyes. “Really?”  

“Yeah. But I appreciate the apology.”

“I’m also sorry about what I said, about you and the store. It’s great, what you do here.”

She sighed. “I know it’s not fancy or impressive, running the store. Not like you and Angelica.”

He opened his mouth, no doubt to contradict her, but she waved a hand to stop him.

“I wanted to go to school, too, you know. Certainly not an Ivy League school, but maybe just community college. Or maybe travel for a year. I don’t know. I hadn’t worked it out yet. But then my folks died. Someone needed to step up, to be the grownup. Angelica was at Stanford already, and they were so proud of her. Peggy’s just a kid, still. So I did it. I stepped up.”

“You’re a rock,” he said. “You keep this place running. You anchor the whole neighborhood. That’s pretty impressive to me.”  

“I’m not curing cancer or anything, but I like keeping my parents’ legacy alive, reminding everyone they were here, giving Angelica a place to come home to. It feels important.”  

“It is. More than I think you even realize.” He heaved himself onto the counter beside her.

“What’s the other part?” she asked.

“Mm?”

“You said it was partly an apology.”

“Oh, right. The other part is celebration.” He smiled at her. “The funniest thing happened today.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I called Columbia to try to straighten things out with my financial aid. I was raring for a fight with them, too. But they told me they’d already talked to my sister, and she’d explained the whole situation regarding my father. So everything’s back on track with my aid package.”

“That’s pretty great.” Relief swept over her that she’d been able to accomplish at least something useful this morning.

“It is. The funny thing is, I don’t have a sister.”

“Weird,” she said, trying for deadpan.

“Really weird.” His hand touched her knee, fingers tickling lightly over her skin, leaving little goosebumps in their wake. “It’s also honestly the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me. I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

“What are you thanking me for? I’m definitely not your sister.” Grinning at him, she grabbed the champagne and started working at the foil. The cork popped with a resounding bang and bubbles rushed up the neck of the bottle. “Cheers.”

She took a swig and handed it over to share. They traded the bottle back and forth a few times. “You didn’t lose that apartment in all the financial aid craziness, did you? The one you were talking about yesterday?”

“No. But, um, I’m thinking about turning it down.”

“You are?”  

“Yeah. I think I’ll stick around here. Mulligan said I can keep living with him, working part time. I can take the train to classes. That way, I might even be able to afford a whole year of school.”

“I thought you wanted to get out of here?”

“I did. I’m starting to see the appeal of this place, though.”

“What changed your mind?” she asked. He’d seemed pretty dead set on leaving the night before.

“I think it was that dough of yours.”

She punched him on the arm.

“I mean it. I think I’m falling for it.” He winked and leaned in to kiss her.

His breath was warm against her cheek, and smelled sweet from the champagne. Their lips touched, chaste at first, adjusting to the sensation. His goatee felt scratchy, but she couldn’t say she cared. She leaned in, placing her arms around his shoulders to pull him closer, her mouth parting to invite in his tongue. She moaned softly when his arms wrapped around her in return.  

They pulled apart minutes later, both slightly out of breath.

His hand landed on the scratch ticket as they disentangled themselves. He held it up to her. “You gonna try your luck?”

“I don’t know. It hasn’t been so great lately,” she said, gesturing to the darkened store. “You sure you don’t wanna try?”

“No way. I never win shit. You go.”

She fished a nickel out of the take-a-penny tray and starting scratching away the gray boxes. As the little pots beneath became visible, she felt her eyes widening. One-two-three pots. She squinted, sure she wasn’t reading the ticket right. Electricity surged back through the store.

Alex clapped at the restored power, then tapped her shoulder. “Did you win?”

She nodded, mouth parted with shock.

“Cool. How much?”

“96,000.”

Their eyes met, gazing at each other in stunned silence.

[everythingandeveryplace]

*Thorns part 5 Eric x OC*

He could still taste her on his lips at breakfast, could still feel her silk skin under his fingers as he tied his boots, could still smell her peach shampoo on his morning run. She was everywhere but nowhere all at once, he hadn’t seen her since last night despite how much he searched for her.. it was an uneasy feeling.. caring for someone other than himself. She was all he could focus on, all he could think about.

...Although Deemas smug grin and curious eyes were enough to draw his focus to his annoying best friend.

“What are you staring at?” Eric grumbled, arms crossed as he kept his eyes on the initiates pathetically sparring each other. Not only was he desperately distracted he was also pissed off and frustrated, the display in front of him was enough to to have his blood boiling. “Adams, lift your fucking arms or I’ll break them before you have a chance to block your ugly ass face.”

Deema grinned

“You have.. that look.” The shorter boy circled the much larger tattooed man in front of him.

Eric squirmed under the inspection of his goofy friend

“Knock that shit off, I don’t have any “look”” he growled.

Deemas eyes lit up and an ear splitting grin broke free on his handsome face

“You got laid! My man!” He lifted a palm to Eric’s face, laughing when he smacked it out of the way “who’s the lucky lady?”

“Shut up, I didn’t get laid. Lower your fucking voice.” Eric hissed, eyes darting around the room.

“Was it Lauren again? I’ve seen her following you.. I mean she’s a little.. much. But all power to ya if you’re into silicone.” Deema chuckled.

“Fuck that shit. I haven’t touched Lauren since that night and I don’t plan on ever doing it again.” His nose scrunched up in disgust, Lauren slept with anyone who would give her credibility.. when she couldn’t get Four she had set her sights on Eric and he had stupidly fallen for her long legs and short shorts, alcohol buzzing through his blood.

“So who..”

Deema was cut off by the heavy metal door of the training room swinging open, all of the initiates turned to see what had caused the noise and in an instant Eric was in front of them all..

“Ella?” He questioned.. stepping towards the source of the disruption.

The beautiful brunettes heavy boots beat the linoleum tile, her hand was wrapped tight around one of the newer trainees wrist as she pulled him towards the fighting ring, breezing past Eric and his initiates. Her group of trainees trailed through the open door all looking slightly terrified.

“What’s happening?” Deema moved to stand by Eric beside the ring as they watched Ella tie up her hair and pull off the black long sleeve shirt she had on leaving her in nothing but her tight sports bra and spandex shorts.

Her body was something on an entirely different level, her stomach tanned and toned but subtle curves dipping from her hips to her muscled thighs. Her chest was plenty more than Eric had been expecting based off of her small stature, a bead of sweat rolling from the length of her neck to nestle right between the dips of her breasts. She was without a doubt the most beautiful woman Eric had ever seen.

Then there were the bruises.

Heavy handed purple and green splotches littering her sides, indentations made clear that it was a fist that had beaten her right next to her rib cage. Her spine was marred with scars just beginning to heal and the fingerprint sized bruises on her forearms made Eric’s stomach twist and turn in the beginning stages of nausea. The sight alone made him want to kill something... someone. Her low and angry voice had him snapping out of his own head

“Go ahead Evans, hit me... this is what you wanted isn’t it? “A crack at the crazy bitch?” Well I’m standing right here? You’re not scared are you?” She taunted the much larger boy, clapping her hands together and bracing her feet, knees tight and eyes wild.

Danny Evans was an arrogant Dauntless born piece of shit, Eric had experienced his insubordinace first hand when the boy refused to pack up his shit, Eric had him running laps until he threw up, he had apparently gone too far with the newest trainer and was now staring at her from across the fighting ring, anger and confusion mixing together on his face.

“You’re a fucking psycho.” He sneered “everyone knows you’re insane, that they filled you up with some crazy shit when you were with the factionless.”

Ella laughed, her eyes never leaving the angry boy once.

“You’re right.. I’m crazy. Insane even. But Im stronger than you.. I’m smarter than you.. I’m better than you.. I am every damn thing you could ever hope to be.”

That was all it took, Danny lunged for her with a feral growl reaching for her throat, Ella easily dodged his grasp driving a heavy fist into his side causing him to bend over in pain her free hand reaching up to grip a chunk of his blonde hair and delivering another swift punch to his cheek, blood splitting from his now open lip. She kicked at his side with reverence and swiped his legs out from under him, locking him in place and twisting his arms so they pulled behind his back. He yelped, wiggling and attempting to kick his legs. Ella bent low to his ear and whispered

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you to stay away from crazy girls.” She tugged one final time, firmly dislocating his shoulder before dropping his arms and climbing off of him, his screams echoing abasing the quiet murmur of the room. she was panting, adrenaline radiating off of her.

“Class is dismissed for the day. Go pack up your guns. I’ll see you tommorow, extra early.” Her voice was back to its normal honey smooth tone as she adressed her group. They all scrambled to their feet and rushed out the door, most of them were impressed but some were more than a little scared.

Eric watched the way Ella’s shoulders shook just slightly, her eyes far away as she moved to walk past him, head down.

“Ella..” he reached out for her, his fingers just brushing her forearm. she looked down at his fingers on her skin before quickly pulling away. Tears built up in the corners of her chocolate eyes as she gathered her shirt from the ring and rushed past him.

Eric watched her go, an aching in his chest that he wasn’t familiar with.

“So it’s her. Shit dude.”

Deemas hand came to rest on Eric’s shoulder.

Eric turned quickly

“I..” He stuttered, unsure if he was ready to speak it out loud, to put it out there.

“You don’t have to say anything.. just go.” Deema smiled in only the way a friend who had been through what they had together could.

He didn’t have to be told twice, pushing past the trainees and rolling through the metal doors. He knew exactly where she was.

He found her resting on the ledge of the roof, the sun setting against her skin made it glow in hues of yellow and gold, he could make out the tracks of her tears on her skin when she turned to look at him. As soon as she did though she turned away.

“I can’t talk to you right now.” She whispered “I’ll.. I’ll talk to you later okay?” He hated how small her voice sounded, the breeze rustling her curls, he had to bite down the desire to run his fingers through them.

“You did what you had too, there’s nothing wrong with letting them know you’re in charge. They’re dauntless now.. they need to learn.” He sighed when she didn’t answer, moving to stand behind her resting his hand against the small of her back.

It all happened too suddenly for him to process, Ella leaped down from the ledge and onto the floor of the roof, stumbling away from Eric.

“How can you sit there and touch me?! How can you even look at me? You don’t know what I’ve done.. what I’m capable of!” She cried desperately, tears leaking down her cheeks as she pushed herself into the brick wall closest to the door. “You need to stay away from me, .. I can’t be brave.. I can’t be anything.. I hurt people.. that’s what I do! And I won’t hurt you! I can’t.” She reached for the handle, desperate to get away, to run.

In two strides Eric had her wrapped up in his arms, his arms engulfing her waist. As he pressed her head into his chest, fingers rolling in her hair as he held her as tightly as possible.

“I know you Ella.. I see you. You’re beautiful and brave and strong and you’re broken but that’s okay. I’m broken too, I’m cruel and angry and mean and impatient but you make me feel something.. you make me feel everything. I’m not letting whatever this is go because you’re afraid of hurting me. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.. I’ve never had anyone.. I’ve never wanted anything like this but I want this with you. Don’t push me away, let me be there for you. Let me be here.” He gripped her chin and pulled her eyes toward his, She sniffled and closed her eyes lashes fluttering against her cheeks.

“I’m pathetic.” Her lips lifted just slightly, enough to make Eric laugh softly.

“You’re beautiful.” He repeated.

Ella lifted her arms to wrap around his neck, her fingers tracing his tattoo gently. His own eyes drifted closed at the feel of her fingers on his throat “hmm” he hummed.

“Do you think I’ll get In trouble for the whole Danny thing?” She leaned forward, lips brushing his jaw following after her fingers.

He tightened his grip on her waist

“Fuck that. I was there, he had it coming. It was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Ella laughed, pure and open and warm. Her nose was red and her eyes were puffy from crying, she’d never looked quite as beautiful.

“Oh yeah? That’s what it takes? A couple undercuts and I have you around my finger. What on earth will all of the ladies of Dauntless say when they find out I’ve caught your attention? We’ll have a riot for sure.”

Eric grinned wickedly, scooping her up and into his arms bridal style, burying his face in her neck, smiling when she giggled and yelped.

“I couldn’t give a shit.” He mumbled against the smooth skin of her neck, inhaling as he slipped out the door with her wrapped up in his arms.

They were halfway down the hallway, Ella talking about the upcoming leadership conference at Amity when Elliot stopped them abruptly moving to stand in front of Eric, his eyes trained on the pretty brunette in his arms, a nasty glare set on his face.

“Where the fuck were you?” He growled.

Ella slipped from Eric’s grasp, her feet finding the floor before she turned towards Elliot.

“Excuse me?”

Eric tensed behind her, looming over her like an overgrown shadow.

“We had weapon training together and I leave to talk to Max for five minutes and find my entire class gone? What the fuck Ella?” He moved closer.

Eric gently tugged Ella back, his expression absolutely lethal.

“Watch your mouth.” He growled.

“What are you going to do about it Coulter? She has you whipped and you haven’t even gotten anything out of her yet. You won’t.. I know bitches like this.. they string you along for nothing.. look at her. You really think she’s worth more than a quick fuck in the training room?” He scoffed, laughing.

Everything went black.

The last thing he heard was his name falling from Ella’s lips.

[somemellifluouswords]

Dark Roast

“ Coffee shop imagine plss w grayson :-) “

- Anonymous

“ COFFEE SHOP PLEASE PLEASE “

- @evolutionz

Thank you for the request! This is by far the most different concept I have ever written off. It isn’t your typical imagine/ blurb from me, but something completely different. I was inspired  by @dolantreehisser who wrote this blurb (read!) in which Grayson is a firefighter, and I just couldn’t picture a better way to portray him in this write other than a firefighter! Please do check out the blurb by @dolantreehisser! This piece really did turn out much longer than I expected, so a few parts will be following. I know it seems like a random concept with everything but trust me (I think) you’ll find it interesting :) Without further do, enjoy and thank you for reading lovelies!

Part One:

Present ... 

The scent of dark roast was heavy, almost too much. You thought you might vomit, feeling nauseous. The coffee wasn’t helping. If anything it was making you anxious. And you didn’t need it to stay awake, you were already restless.

He’d been gone for hours, rushing out of the house, giving you a hard kiss, because he never knew when it’d be the last.

And then you’d turned on the news. It was the largest fire yet. The building was completely gone, burned to the ground, nothing but scatters of something once strong and firm burned to death.

And they began to name the number of those injured, and you sighed in relief at “we have no reports of death” until the reporter added in “yet”.

You shut off the television, running your hands over your face. The clock ticking in the background, mocking you.

Marking. You knew you had marking to do, and that’s what you should be doing right now, it would help take your mind off the fire. Your mind off when he’d be home. Your eyes that pierced through the door, waiting for him. Waiting for the knob to turn.

And he’d be home before you knew it.

So you dwelled yourself into piles of worksheets and spelling tests, sat at the kitchen island, every so often stopping to take a deep breath. Blinking back tears. Biting on your lip to prevent yourself from breaking down.

One hour later ...

Now you had every right to panic. You’d finished marking and now were pacing. You knew you couldn’t call him, obviously he wouldn’t have his phone on him, and calling the station would leave you on hold for ages.

And as you crumpled the hem of your dress, biting your lip, eyes welling up the phone rang.

It was loud, the sound terrifying. But you had to answer. Because you knew it held all the answers to your questions.

“Hello?” breathless. You were breathless. Voice shaking.

A voice you recognized said your name, but it wasn’t his. It was another firefighter, someone else from the station, someone you had become friends with over the three years.

“Listen to me. I’m coming down to your place. I need to pick you up.”

Your heart raced, mind instantly wandering to what you feared every time he walked out that door. Every time he kissed you hard.

“Why? Markus ... what’s wrong?”

And with that he cut the phone.

The line went dead.

Hours earlier ...

The flames were strong. Red, orange and yellow danced dangerously, the smoke consuming everything into a haze.

He was quick, but careful, helping victims through the building, getting them to safety. All he could think about was saving lives. And saving his own. So he could get home to you.

The fire was a large one, largest one yet. It was hot, the heat sticking to his skin under the heavy suit. The smoke danced before him, mocking him. Sparks flew in every direction.

“Dolan!” Markus screamed his name, an arm reaching forward. Grayson turned, struggling to see Markus’ arm through the flames.

The floor cracked beneath him, his heart suddenly pounding loud and hard in his chest.

And then the ceiling began to fall. He struggled as he pushed his way through, avoiding flames and broken pieces of the building. Markus was still yelling for him, but Grayson couldn’t respond.

Because suddenly everything went black.

45 minutes later ...

Someone was cutting open his shirt. Voices he knew by heart were panicking, and he felt sore. Bloody. Bruised. Broken. He could feel the burns on his skin. They stung. The scratches and bruises all dark. And his eyes fluttered open face covered in ash.

“Grayson” “Grayson stay with me alright. We’re going to get you to a hospital immediately!” Markus’ voice was laced with worry, his blue eyes that always seemed so bright now dark under the night sky, as he hovered above his injured battered friend on his knees.

Behind him the house was no longer visible, the smell of fire mixed in with wet ground heavy in the air. Like a blanket.

“Ma mm Markus”  Grayson’s voice was weak, he could hear it. It was coming from his insides, his insides that felt like exploding. He could smell the blood, sweat and fire off of him. 

“Markus call ..  ccc call her.” “Gray ..” Markus’ face softened, he was shaking his head. 

“I can’t” he didn’t want to be the one to tell her. The one to bring her to him. The one to see her in her most vulnerable state.

“Don’t make me do it Gray” Markus pulled at his blonde locks, letting a few tears slip. He thre his head back, palms sinking onto the wet ground.

“NO!” Grayson shut his eyes in pain, grasping onto his battered abdomen.

“I have to see her. You have to call her”

He let out a cry of pain as he was lifted off the ground, onto a gurney, wheeled away. And then everything went black again.

Except the soft and sweet voice in his head, repeating “Promise me you’ll be careful”

Present ...

“What’s wrong?! Markus tell me what’s wrong!” you knew you were screaming at him, your voice angry, the fear evident.

He gently grasped your hand leading you out your own home, shutting the door behind him, locking it. You watched, eyes wide standing behind him. 

“That’s Grayson’s key” you whispered. He turned to face you, sighing, running a hand over his face.

“Why do you have Grayson’s key?” He was leaning back against the door, pulling at his hair again.

“Markus just tell me what’s happened!”

“Please just get in the car!” His voice boomed, sending a shiver down your spine. You flinched, taking a fearful step back. Markus sighed, as you turned around without another word, body trembling, and got into the fire station car.

15 minutes later ...

You stared blankly at the beige linoleum floor under your feet, eyes red and puffy from crying. Your hair was tucked behind your ears, the ends tangled from pulling on it. 

Markus sat next to you in the hospital chair, outside Grayson’s room, softly speaking to you, like he was known to after a tragic fire, speaking to victims about what had happened to their loved ones.

The tears running down your cheek were silent, your sobs no longer filling in the halls as they had earlier, when he’d guided you to his room, the doctor telling you that he wasn’t allowed to see anyone yet.

And as Markus lead you down the hall, you knew those around you pitied you. Watched wit sad eyes and you pulled at Markus’ sleeve, pleading to him. And he was silent, patient as he lead you, taking in all of the pain you let out.

“He wanted you here, made sure to make it clear I’d call you” you didn't move, not even when he carefully slid your coat off, only moving your arms so that the sleeves could slid off. You didn't move when he told you the rest of the team was downstairs waiting, the other wives and girlfriends here for you.

Markus sighed in defeat, dropping his head in his hands. “I’m going to get some coffee” 

Again you didn't move. Until he said what he did next.

“I’ll bring back a dark roast for you, Dolan always says it’s your favorite”

And your head shot up, the memories of the past flooding back. Dark roast.

Three years ago ... 

Drops of rain trickled down your umbrella as you made your way to the front counter, the bell above the door chiming. Coffee beans and cinnamon engulfed you senses, instantly surging through your nostrils, eyes seeming to appear more awake. Your boots clicked against the linoleum floor, old classic songs playing through the radio, the lyrics already running through your head. It was the same songs every morning. 

“Good morning to our favorite teacher” you smiled at the elderly lady behind the counter, her glasses foggy from the steam rising as she boiled water over her stove. Her apron was covered in streaks of cinnamon, a hint of whip cream lathered right above her sternum. 

“Your usual is ready” she said, sliding a navy blue mug in your direction. You chuckled at her words, smiling at her thankfully, and paid her as you reached for the mug. 

“Thank you Celeste” 

There were only five tables in the little coffee shop, enough to fit simply two, and usually they were never occupied. Except the one you sat at, the one in the corner by the window, giving you a clear view of what was outside and inside. As you removed your coat, setting your bag down onto empty ground, and pulling out a file of paper work, Celeste made her way around the counter, rag in her hand. 

“A lot of marking to do this morning?” her voice was always slightly nasal, yet comforting. Her sweet smile brightened your mornings, rain or shine. The grey bob atop her head was always neat, her hands always manicured, lips smeared a rosy pink. But her glasses always foggy, and her apron always dirty. 

“Not today. I’m actually reading a novel with them, so it’s usually journal responses I have to read.”

You were a teacher, third grade to be exact. After years of school you had finally graduated, and immediately received an offer from the small local school a few blocks down from your apartment. You had taken up the offer, eager to begin. And for the past three months, teaching had been refreshing, stressful at times, but it was what you loved to do. The greatest gift you could give to any child.

And it was what had brought you to this small and secluded coffee shop. Three months ago, Celeste had been shocked to see a new face enter through the doors, a pretty face, cheeks rosy eyes curious, hair flowing behind her. She remembered the way you were dressed, a sundress with a cardigan draped on your shoulders. A bag hung off your shoulder, a novel in your hand. 

As you stood far by the door, eyes running over the faded menu of drinks and treats above, Celeste spoke up. 

“The dark roast is my best dear” 

When your eyes met, Celeste noticed how big and pretty they were.

“I’ll take that then” and something told Celeste by the kind smile that emitted off your face, the way you shyly walked towards the counter, already pulling out payment, that you would become a regular.

And here you were. Her favourite regular.

“Nice” she breathed out. “Kids must spend their recess indoors though, considering this terrible weather we’re having.” You nodded, eyes diverting to the window. If it were a sunny day, the sun would just be rising, bodies would be scarcely visible, this part of town usually not awake till later on in the day. But you were always up early, walking to the shop, entering in by 7:15 AM, the smell of your dark roast ready to devour.

The bell chimed and in walked in another regular, Celeste smiled as they sat down at one of the stools up front, asking her for something to go. And then she was gone, back behind the kitchen. 

The first sip of coffee was always thrilling. It tingled your taste buds, sent a surge of energy through your body. And it was always warm, slightly bitter, the perfect remedy for a wake up call every morning.

Time flew by as you finished up your mug, smiling softly to the words of third graders  and their whimsical responses. And as you finished the last sentence of the last journal entry, you took your last sip. Now it was time for school. 

As you dressed yourself in your coat again, rearranging your papers back into your bag, the bell above the door chimed again. That's odd, you thought to yourself as you pulled your hair out of your coat. No one ever came into the shop at this time. At least hadn't since you had began coming here three months ago. You always arrived at 7:15 and left at 7:50AM.

“Oh hello there!” Celeste’s cheerful and surprised voice rang through your ears as you curiously turned around to face the counter. His back was to you, so you had no idea what he looked like. But he was tall, and broad. Muscular under his uniform, tan from what you could make out of exposed skin. 

“Good morning” his voice was deep, soothing even. He had dark hair, that seemed so soft. An earring dangled off one of his ears, and you couldn’t quite make out what it was.

“What can I get for you today?” he chuckled, taking a step back. “Uhhh ...”

And then he turned suddenly, facing you. He was stunning. Beautiful brown eyes, intimidating and piercing. His lips were pink, plump. His face structure was divinely built. And the scruff he displayed was the perfect amount. He blinked, lashes long, and diverting his eyes from you, as did you, cheeks red, breathing hitched.

“What do you have?” he asked suddenly. Shyly you faced him again, clutching your umbrella in your hands, tucking loose strands of hair behind your ear. He was looking at you, a small smile on his lips, and pointing back at your empty mug. 

“Oh ...” suddenly realizing what he was referring to, cheeks red again. “Th - the dark roast”

And perhaps you were being naïve, but you thought maybe his eyes lingered on you, just enough to examine your face. He did, as you slowly made your way out. 

Crimson cheeks, the blush not needed as you naturally shaded so well. Big eyes, glossy, but beautiful. And your lips were pink, they looked so soft. You lashes fluttered against your skin as you blinked. And your hair was long and dark, the curls loose. 

She’s beautiful, he thought as you stepped out of the shop, turning back to steal a glance at him, only to turn back quickly when you found his eyes already on you.

“So will you be having the dark roast firefighter?” he turned to face Celeste, releasing a breath as he realized how she playfully raised her eyebrows at him. 

“Yes please” and with that she turned, laughing. While he waited for her to finish preparing his drink, he couldn't help but think about the woman he’d just seen. He couldn’t help but glance at the table you sat at, he empty mug, your lipstick stain on it.

“Here you go!” his thoughts were interrupted by Celeste who pushed forward a piping hot mug of dark roast. He thanked her, paying her and then she stopped him before he could take a seat, clearing her throat.

“She’s here every morning. 7:15 to 7: 50AM. Always. Always at that table too.” 

To Be Continued ...

[bethhxrmon]

All I Ask of You Pt 5

“Live in my house, I’ll be your shelter.” -”I’ll Cover You” from RENT

Pairing: Peter Parker x Original Female Characters

Word Count: 4,014

Warnings: The tiniest bit of angst, cussing

Summary: The one with some relationship development

A/N: Not much canon character action in this one whoops! Tell me what you think!

MASTERLIST

           What Annie needed to do was redesign the White Swan costume. Remaking her beaten up costume into a dream suit was easier said than done. It wasn’t even designing the suit that made things difficult, though drawing was far from her forte and the suit hardly ever looked proportional to an actual body. The difficult part was finding the time to draw inconspicuously without anyone seeing just what she was doing. Getting caught drawing her suit and having someone figure out her superhero alias would have been the death of the girl.

           On a chilly, late November morning, Annie laid on the dark yellow carpet of her bedroom while sketching the suit. She didn’t lay on her pillowtop mattress because of how likely it was that she would crawl under her purple comforter and fall back asleep. There were various showtunes playing in the background coming from her laptop that was sitting on her desk across the room as she tried to work. It wasn’t just any showtunes, though, they were a playlist of all the possible audition songs she had been thinking about between Ned, Peter, and herself. Even songs for future use for herself were being thought of. Annie simply couldn’t get herself to stop multitasking.

           Besides, part of what had convinced Peter and Ned to audition was her promise to find the songs for them. That promise was easier said than done, though. Finding simple songs that weren’t overused was quite the challenge. Only because she was normally looking for soprano pieces, not tenor and bass ones. Though the time spent in her room was cut short when she decided that the solution to her losing focus due to being tired was coffee instead of getting more much needed sleep after the long night she’d had coupled with regular patrolling and talking to Spider-Man.

~*~*~*~*~

           “Did I ever tell you about the time I stole Captain America’s shield?” Spider-Man asked, shoving some nachos supreme in his mouth.

           Annie rolled her eyes as she swallowed some of her taco, “Yep, only every other time we get food, you say something about that damn fight in Germany.

           “Oh… well, I mean I fought Ant-Man while he was giant… Germany was really cool, you know. You would’ve probably liked it,” the male replied with a shrug.

           Annie’s jaw dropped, “What the hell?! That guy was, like, my idol!”

           “He’s a war criminal… you know that, right?” Spider-Man questioned, his eyes squinting almost as though he were accusing her of something.

           Annie gave a small shrug, “He’s a good guy though, morality is perceptive… you’re just getting all defensive because you have your dick out for Tony Stark.”

           “Do not!”

           “Do too!

           “I wasn’t getting defensive, Swan, but you’re siding with people who were helping a murderer,” the male hero pointed out.

           Annie scoffed, “You and I both know James Barnes was a prisoner of war first. That was mind control, all that shit wasn’t his fault.

           “But he killed people, that’s not right. It was someone’s fault,” Spider-Man replied.

           Annie shook her head, “Then blame the people who put him in that situation. Not the guy who was caught in the middle of everything.”

           “So… what you’re saying is that if you were in Germany we wouldn’t have been on the same side, would we?” he questioned.

           She shook her head, tugging on her white hood, “I’m afraid not, Spidey… but we argue a lot anyways, does that surprise you?”

           Spider-Man shrugged in response and they both ate in silence the rest of the time. Though, Annie wasn’t sure how to feel about it. She hadn’t been involved in the fight, and maybe that was for the best. The side she’d been on was decided to have been in the wrong, but she wasn’t sure she cared. Maybe she just needed to stop thinking about it.

           “Um… anyways, are there any girls you’ve been crushing on?” Annie asked in an attempt to change the subject.

           Spider-Man looked over quizzically, “You’re asking me about girls?”

           “Well unless you’re into guys, that’s totally cool too. I was just wondering, obviously you have a life outside of this,” Annie responded.

           Spider-Man sighed a bit, “Okay, fine. I guess that there’s this one girl…”

~*~*~*~*~

           Of course, the coffee machine was still unpacked and most likely buried in one of the boxes that was supposed to have been unpacked, but between her parents and herself being busy it just wasn’t done. That also meant that there probably weren’t any coffee grounds either, so she wasn’t going to bother digging through all the unpacked boxes that were left precariously around the apartment. She had been living in the new apartment for nearly a month and she still couldn’t make coffee there.

           “Hey, dad, I’m going to the corner store for some coffee, you want something?” she asked, watching as her father was creating a slide show on his desktop computer. It was most likely for one of his university lectures, and he would most likely come back and complain about how nearly none of his students had nearly enough passion for the topic. That was how it was with Annie’s dad, people were never interested in his passions even if they actually were.

           It took the black-haired man a few moments to look up from his computer screen, “Oh, um, yes, could you get me a black coffee?”

           “Yep, have fun making that lecture, dad,” Annie commented as she pocketed the money that her father handed her.

           The man hardly looked up from the computer as she left. That didn’t exactly surprise Annie, but sometimes it left her feeling a bit ignored. Sometimes, more often than not in reality, it felt like he barely noticed her. It felt as though she could get up and run away and he would never even notice. It wasn’t that Carter Hardwick was neglectful. At the end of the day, he would seem to care about her in his own odd way, but work often came before her. Annie had commented on it before, but he would just point out the amount of money that he made from being a professor. It was to the point that she had stopped trying to point out that maybe, just maybe, he should focus on her and her mother a little bit more than he did. A part of her just wished that money didn’t matter.

           Most of the time, Annie wouldn’t bring up how much her mother made from being a lawyer. Let him justify his bullshit, she thought as she walked down the block. It wasn’t like she had ever gotten him to stop, and she had spent years trying to do just that. A cool breeze cut through the black leggings Annie wore and she tugged her dark blue hoodie around herself. The late November chill proved that Thanksgiving was less than a week away, meaning that Christmas as well as the audition were just around the corner.

           Walking into the store, the first thing she felt was the warmth of walking inside, the heated air feeling amazing against her cool legs. Then, Annie did a double take as she scanned the store. A girl with crutches and short, kinky black hair seemed to be looking around at some of the candy and chips. It was definitely Tina, there was no question about that.

           The initial plan was to avoid her at all cost. She didn’t have to go anywhere near Tina, there was no reason to even talk to her in the first place. It wasn’t like the other girl would outright accuse her of being a superhero, but that didn’t ease her racing heart. While, walking over to her to see how she was doing did feel tempting, Annie doubted that it was worth it. She just wouldn’t take any risks, not today when she was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes. However, there was only one way to get to the coffee and that involved passing by Tina. They were complete strangers, though, it would be fine. Her costume had kept her hidden for a few years, it could continue to do so for ten seconds or less. At least, that was what Annie kept telling herself in attempt to calm herself down. There was nothing for her to worry about. Although, that wasn’t going to plan when walking behind Tina completely surprised her. It had caused Tina to fall, of course, she couldn’t just leave Tina on the ground like that.

           “Shit! I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you like that, oh my god I am seriously so sorry,” Annie rambled, offering a hand to help the other girl up.

           Tina had a frown as she accepted the hand and used a crutch to get herself to stand back up, “You coulda said something. Ya know, told me you were coming behind me.”

           “R-right, I’m really sorry about that. Seriously, I could get you something to make it up to you,” Annie offered, looking at the linoleum floor.

           Tina shook her head, “No, I don’t need your pity.”

           “It’s not about that, I just wanna help,” Annie insisted, crossing her arms.

           Tina huffed, “I don’t need it.”

           “But, Tina, you do, just- “

           “How do you know my name?”

           Annie gulped and choked on the mixture of saliva and air in her throat. Her light brown face turned into a shade of bright red. She mentally kicked herself as she tried to think of an excuse. Only, there wasn’t one. It was just her being stupid and not thinking before she spoke. Maybe she should have just laid on her bed and slept instead of trying to persevere through her exhaustion.

           Tina blinked, “Um… don’t die?”

           “I uh… I work at the soup kitchen,” Annie replied with coughs in between some of her words.

           The other girl glared, her dark brown eyes almost looking like they turned completely black, “That’s bullshit and you know it. Are you stalking me?”

           “No, not that at all, I swear. Woah woah woah, you can put that crutch down I’m not gonna hurt you… put that crutch down… ow! Fucking hell!” Annie exclaimed as the crutch dug into her foot, earning a few weird looks from the handful of people in the store.

           The crutch only dug into her foot more. It was placing just the right amount of pressure to where it was nearly unbearable. Annie couldn’t even stop a barrier of energy from forming and then bursting, pushing the crutch off. Thankfully it had just been Tina and herself there to see it. What left Annie worried was whether or not she would do something else like that again. It wasn’t like she was trying to make a point, it just kind of happened. Almost as though she had lost control for a split second, but she stopped worrying as much once nothing else happened.

           “Oh… you’re-“

           “Not here, okay? Let me buy my coffee and get you something too. Then we can talk about it,” Annie pleaded, her light brown eyes widened as she hoped that there wouldn’t be any confrontation right in front of so many people.

           Tina gave a sigh, almost like she was still contemplating her decision, “Okay, fine… but you owe me a huge explanation.”

           “Of course, yeah, I’ll do that. And you’ll get it. Just not this second, okay?”

           Getting two cups of black coffee and a bottled, sweetened black tea took all of five minutes. The whole time, the brunette’s heart was racing and she felt like she could throw up all over the polite cashier. No one had ever found her out before this. Yes, people had gotten close, but that hardly meant anything unless they actually knew her true identity. There were now so many ways that Tina could get back at her. Though, Annie hoped that wouldn’t be the case. At least, that was what she kept thinking as she stuffed the change into her hoodie pocket. If more people found out who she was, she would probably spontaneously combust and then she would never have to deal with keeping secrets ever again.

           “Also, we gotta take a detour to my place, this extra coffee was for my dad,” Annie explained as she walked out of the store with Tina, the cold air practically slapping her in the face.

           A cold breeze passed through again, causing Annie’s long, dark hair to get in her face. With both hands holding onto the corner store coffees, she couldn’t get the annoying strands of hair out of her face. All she could do was keep her mouth closed so none of her hair would get into her mouth. She had already choked on her own spit, she didn’t want to choke on her own hair next. At least her hands were warm. She couldn’t imagine holding a cold drink in the chilled weather.

When she glanced at Tina, she felt a pang of guilt as she saw the other girl moving slowly with her crutches and cold drink. There she was, dragging the other girl around when that was probably all Tina had gone through for who knew how long. Still, Annie knew that her dad would probably say a few things if she didn’t get him his coffee. Plus, Annie hadn’t planned on seeing Tina in the first place. Then again, it wasn’t like Annie was keeping the other girl hostage. She had questions and wanted answers, answers that Annie did feel were justified.

           Once the girls made it to the apartment building, Tina cleared her throat, “Do I go up with you?”

           “Yeah, j-just say you’re my new friend if anyone asks,” Annie replied, leading the way into the tall building.

           Getting to the apartment, Annie didn’t know what was sadder, that her dad never questioned Tina walking in or that the landlord asked a bunch of questions about the other female. Thankfully, Tina played it cool as they left. It wasn’t that Annie wanted her dad to give Tina the third degree, but she wanted her dad to act like he cared more often. She wished he would have said hello or who he was, something that she thought normal parents did. Sure, Annie wasn’t their blood-related child, but she thought that meant that her parents had made the conscious choice to care about her. The more Annie grew up, the more it felt like only her mom had made that decision.

           Tina huffed as they continued to walk some more, “Where are you taking me? This hobbling around hurts like a bitch,”

           “Just across this street. You just gotta be patient,” Annie responded, rolling her eyes a bit.

           “Says the one who’s not on crutches.”

           “Says the one who tried to crush my foot.”

           “Touchè.”

           Annie and Tina made their way into the library. It took a moment to find an empty space where they wouldn’t have to worry about being overheard. Though, it took a bit, Annie hadn’t thought it took that long. However, the sigh that Tina let out seemed to say otherwise. The enclosed room was walled with green glass. Annie wasn’t sure where to start, so she took a big drink of her black coffee.

           “So, what’s your name anyways?” asked Tina.

           The other girl swallowed the warm liquid, “Annika, but everyone just calls me Annie.”

           “Hmm… so what’re you really trying to do, talking to me?” Tina asked, opening her tea.

           Annie bit her lip in thought, “With what? With you or with my own image as a hero or?”

           “No, obviously, why’re you helping me?”

           “Because you deserve better than you’re getting, than you’ve gotten in the past.”

           “How would you know what I deserve?”

           “I know because no one, and you listen to me Tina, no one deserves to be hurt in the way that you were.”

           “You really think that?”

           “Yes! Of course I do. I’m not a hero just for the glory… then I would’ve quit a long time ago, because there’s not much glory in it all.”

           Tina nodded a little bit, “So, that Spider-Man guy… what’s your deal with him?”

           “Honestly, I have no fucking clue. I know he’s a bit… ah what’s the word for it?”

           “Awkward yet cocky?”

           “Sure, but his heart’s in the right place, I wouldn’t say cocky… anywho, I thought maybe we could be friends or something like that.”

           “Oh, no way. You’re saying that to break me down and find out more about me and to get me even more roped into whatever it is that you and that other guy have planned.”

           “It’s not that at all! You need someone to talk to. I know what it’s like to be alone, just let me help you, could you do that?”

           Of course, Annie wanted to know more relating to the case she was trying to crack that had everything to deal with Tina. Why wouldn’t she want that? But the poor girl in front of her was in desperate need to talk to someone. It was written in the bags under her nearly black eyes. She needed someone there for her, anyone. If talking to Tina in the past had told Annie anything, it was that she was exceedingly lonely. Odds were that Tina couldn’t get through what was happening if she were left alone. Annie worried that she would just go back to the man who had treated her so cruelly. She could get away with it too, given how little information she and Spider-Man had.

           “You won’t tell your hero friend about any of this, will you?”

           “No, I-I’m not trying to be involved like that. This is just me being normal and trying to be your friend simply because that’s what I want.”

           “Normal people don’t hang out with homeless teens,” Tina pointed out, her dark eyebrows raised.

           “Eh, I was never super normal to begin with, powers or not.”

           For the first time in weeks, Annie found herself getting to Tina. It wasn’t by much, but they were just talking. Not about the past that led them to the positions that they were currently in, no, they talked about regular things. Favorite movies, getting jobs, starting at new schools, the things that regular friends talked about on a regular day. Things like how Tina wouldn’t be going to Midtown, but rather some normal high school somewhere in the neighborhood. Annie wished they would be at the same school, though, for the sole purpose of no longer being the token new-girl.

           They continued talking for hours. Tina didn’t say a thing about being trafficked, but she listened as Annie blabbered on about the school musical and her other friends. Occasionally, Tina would say something, but she tended to avoid saying anything of substance. As much as Annie wanted to comment on it, she knew it wasn’t the time or the place.

           Though, they did have to go home eventually and when they got to the homeless shelter, Annie hugged Tina.

           “If you need anything, call me, I gave you my number for a reason, okay?” Annie said, looking at Tina dead in the eyes.

           Tina gave a nod that seemed reluctant, “Okay, but I’m safe now, honestly. I’m just trying to finish school and get back on my feet.”

           Annie gave a nod, “I know, but I also know that shit happens. So when it does, I’m here.”

           It didn’t matter if Tina would tell her anything about being hurt or not. Annie truly did just want to help. For a moment, being successful or powerful wasn’t what mattered to her. That was all the motivation that she needed to throw herself back into being a multitasking hero who kept promises to as many people as she could. Whether she knew them that well or not. It gave her enough energy to continue getting things done at a million miles a minute. Maybe trying to do things so quickly wasn’t the best idea, but that hardly mattered to Annie either.

           That Monday, Annie had gone through the day with more energy than she thought she could have had. There was this spring in her step as she finally felt herself accomplishing some of her goals. At least, she had better ideas for the auditions that she could hardly wait to tell Peter and Ned about. Not to mention how the suit she had a sketch of in her dresser drawer was starting to come together. Though, it didn’t seem that the boys were talking about anything that she was thinking of.

           “What time do you want us over on Thursday?” Ned asked Peter as Annie sat down.

           Annie cocked her head, “What’s so special about Thursday?”

           “Um… I don’t know, maybe the fact that it’s Thanksgiving? Come on, get with it!” Ned exclaimed, sounding incredulous.

           Peter nodded a bit, “Yeah, did you have any plans for Thursday? I mean, I’m sure my aunt would love to meet you. I mean, it could be fun.”

           When the girl took a moment to step back, she could remember her mom saying something about her dad being gone on some literature conference in Philadelphia for the holiday. Her mom had wanted to do something, but there was still so much happening with getting settled in and it just being the two ladies in the apartment that day anyhow. Though, perhaps she could get the chance to bring Tina along too. To show that she was being serious about just being friends for the sake of friendship, not to get ahead.

           “Well, would it be okay if there were two other people? I could make some food to help make up for it,” Annie offered before adding, “I make a great potato salad.”

           Peter shrugged, “I don’t see why not, but you don’t need to make anything… who were you thinking about?”

           “Oh, well, there’s my mom and then this one girl I met a few days ago, Tina, she’s kinda lonely and I think she could use the whole, having-people-around thing,” Annie explained, giving a tiny shrug, “She might not even come because, well, she doesn’t know you guys. It could be fun though!”

           Peter spat out his chocolate milk, the liquid getting all over his food. His eyes seemed to widen a bit and he looked like he was trying to say something to Ned with his eyes. Why Peter was reacting this way, she had absolutely no clue.

           “Is it because you’re nervous about meeting girls or something?” Annie asked teasingly with a small laugh.

           Peter shook his head, “No, uh, I just… needed to cough and I kinda did… you’re not bringing her to set one of us up, are you?”

           “No, no, it’s not that… I met her when I was getting coffee and I almost knocked her out. She’s been having a rough time and I wanna help,” Annie replied.

           Peter nodded, “Yeah, we got that… um sure, that’s fine,”

           Despite the words leaving the other boy’s mouth, Annie couldn’t help wondering if he had been telling the truth. Something told her that he was hiding something, but she didn’t have the ability to find out what. There was a reason as to why he had been so surprised, and she couldn’t understand why that was. Maybe it was because he didn’t know Tina and he really did have to cough. Something told her that wasn’t the case, though.

           However, Annie didn’t have enough motivation to figure out what was going through Peter’s head. Besides, it wasn’t like she was a mind reader. She controlled energy, not people. That was probably for the best, even if that meant she wasn’t able to know what Peter was doing. More importantly, how Ned was involved in whatever it was Peter was doing. Though, perhaps she was just looking into it too much and needed to get a full night’s rest before she started jumping to conclusions.

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