#grapefruits long ass sentence brigade

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

SIX. SENTENCE. SUNDAY. hello.

welcome back to six sentence sunday, today we have a Nina-Brooke friendship fic! it’s a 5-1 fic about all the times Nina has been correct and vaguely follows canon most of the time. Have a section!

[brooke you're going to injure yourself if you try and show off your gymnastics skills while you're THIS drunk]

“Brooke,” He says, exasperated, drink in hand as he sits at the bar. “Brooke, you can’t do that right now, you’re drunk.” Nina set the drink down and takes a second to adjust his jeans as he realises he’ll have to pry the idiot off the floor if he continues. They decided to come to the bar for fun, to get away from the press tour and so as inconspicuously as they could (Nina had to leave his bright shirts at home) they snuck off to a bar. They really snuck off to many but in the first one, Nina had had to take Brooke to the bathroom with him because there were lots of people having sex and he really didn’t want to go alone. They’d left rather quickly.

He stares for a second as he watches his friend do a handstand against the wall, wobbly and a little off balance as he flushes a deep red. Brooke’s on a break with Vanjie and is apparently trying to hit on men by doing gymnastics (or at least that’s what it seems like, Nina turned away for five minutes to talk about the lion king with the bartender and now this is happening).

“Sorry about my friend,” he mutters to the man behind the counter who smiles warmly and reassures him that ‘this happens every night’, and,  ‘he’s surprisingly calm compared to our usual drunks’.

When Brooke falls, he laughs. And then he gets up to go and pick his best friends drunk ass off the floor - but first, he laughs. The bar is dark and the air is heavy with sweat and alcohol and somehow, the Canadian smells like all of this and more as Nina hoists him over his shoulder, the lankier man being half dragged out of the bar. Nina sits him on the bench outside, lets the fresh air sober him up a little as he forces a bottle of water into his hand.

“My neck hurts,” slurs Brooke and the other man resists the urge to laugh as his normally uptight friend proceeds to spill half the bottle of water down his front.

“I told you so bitch,” he chuckles softly. “Now let's get you home.”

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

for writworm

evolving [for @momsthetic]

The beginning is calm, quiet even. They prance around each other like gazelles performing a mating routine. The peacock with its feathers, bright and bold. They seek each other out in crowded rooms just to say hello, it’s nice.

The middle is comfortable and easy. They take each other for granted, the warmth of their bodies strung between them like a washing line. Brooke pegs up all the words he cannot say and Vanessa takes them all down again when they are dry and mean nothing. They are nothing special but they work, like a well-oiled machine or a fast car. It is easy - they say.

The end is explosive and yet it is silent. There is no blaze of glory, no fanfare. Everything they refuse to air comes to light but where the fumes pile up, no one is willing to light the match. No one will burn the house down so the people inside it choke. The oxygen is removed and carbon monoxide is pumped in - a toxic atmosphere.

When they finally burn it is calm, quiet and easy.

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

my sense of wonder’s just a little tired

just some metaphory shit <3

When everything was broken

The devil hit his second stride

But you remember what I told you

Someday, I'll need your spine to hide behind

I watch as a tear rolls down your cheek - indistinguishable from the rainstorm we are stood in. Wet shirt clinging to your back like your last regrets, heavy and cold to the touch. Your body shakes like a leaf in the breeze and you shift your weight from one foot to the other, anxiously waiting for something. Anything. The tear is like a petal in the springtime, one of a million yellow rose’s spiralling towards the ground - emotion, undying love, heartbreak. I can see you playing catchup with your own thoughts as they race ahead of you - Olympians in the race of life and god, you’ve never done well in competitions.

My heart beats outside of my chest, cooling in the rain and I cannot watch you break like this. You have always sprouted like dandelions, growing where you are least expected but this feels like someone has cut off your roots and you are left stranded. Alone. I’m sure I could reach out and catch a seed from the air, the fluff tickling at my rough skin like a feather. You are a candle in the wind, one puff in your direction and you are out - I feel I must save you but I do not know how.

For fear of moments stolen

I don't wanna say goodnight

But I'll still see you in the morning

Still know your heart and still know both your eyes

I move out of the slight shelter of the doorway, out into the backlot. Trace my fingers along the geraniums of your neck, let the warmth of my fingers heat up the ice of your skin. You relax underneath my touch and I have to remind myself that you are not used to the love of another person - you do not usually get to feel this joy. The warm caramel is soft like summer and I wonder, just for a second, if we could get out of here. But this is a production - we cannot escape.

I light a cigarette instead, you are not yet done in your sorrow and I must let you grieve the only way I know how to. It may be raining but the smoke I exhale blooms aconites - lets them grow under the heavy water droplets only to be blown away by a breeze. They taste of misanthropy and stale ash. It’s a taste not easily forgotten, then again neither are you .

I wonder for a second, whether we could have been more - whether we could have withstood the storm clouds and lived to see a brighter day. But it doesn’t work like that and I could not will away the hurricane to protect you from its winds. I could not dissipate the tornado in time for it to spare the fragile house we built together. Every brick, a promise that we could not keep.

I am grateful your tears are indistinguishable from the rain - I’m not sure if I could cope with seeing them.

I could have told you ‘bout the long nights

How no one loves the birds that don't rise

So you can tell the heroes go hide

My sense of wonder's just a little tired

I wonder how it would feel to have my heart stomped on by those heels. I don’t really wonder though, I know how it feels. I know what it is like to have those laces tied around your lungs squeezing out the last breath of air as you try to explain the inexplicable. How it felt to feel the black stiletto puncture my throat.

You throw words like knives when you feel you must. I have always admired that.

My words are more like arrows. They go where I intend with grace and dignity. There are no doubts, just quick, solid movements.

Our relationship was cut apart by knives not arrows. There was no grace, no solidity as the four walls were torn apart, just the feeling of cool metal on hot skin, a green willow in a field of heliotrope.

I stub out the cigarette on the wall I am leaning on, hope that the rest of the queens will have left by the time I return to the dressing room so that I will not have to explain why my dress is wet and stained with the remnants of my heart.

But if only you could see yourself in my eyes

You'd see you shine, you shine

I know you'd never leave me behind

But I am lost this time

You turn around like you are not expecting me to still be there. I wonder if the emptiness in your eyes is my fault but know that it will be anyway so I keep my mouth shut and my eyes front and hope that if I keep my chin high you won't see the cracks. You won’t notice the tears that are pooling in my eyes.

Every part of me is yearning for the warmth that I know neither of us possess even when the rain burns like fire, scattering the truths of the past year onto the concrete with reckless abandon. I can only hope it will bloom in irises where the tears had washed away the honeysuckle we tended together.

How can flowers watered with love still turn so sour?

We are stood on a small square of cement and yet it feels like there is an ocean between us, distance stretching aeons into the backs of your eyes. They pool water like the oversaturated ground, murky and dark and full of a lost cause you won’t let go of. I am begging you to let go.

Are we destined to burn or will we last the night?

I will hold you 'til I hold you right

You tell me you want to hold on, that the door is big enough for the both of us, the lifeboat can hold our weight. I want to believe you so badly but my heart aches and my lungs are on fire and we carry the scars from this on our bodies for the world to see. You cannot stop up the holes in a sinking ship, must yield to the power of the sea as it draws you away.

I close my eyes when we hug, try to make it feel like it used to when we were dry and safe and no one could hurt us but us - and then we hurt us. I open my eyes.

When I go back inside, you do not complain. You don’t argue. There is no fight. Only silence as the raindrops splatter onto the solid ground.

But if only you could see yourself in my eyes

You'd see you shine, you shine

I do not turn around because I am a coward.

you shine

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

six sentence sunday bitchesss

so meggie told us about this thing called six sentence sunday where you give six (ish) lines of a wip so people can give feedback!

this is six lines from a currently untitled [5 times they follow the rules] wip

[in rebellion against keeping it for the cameras]

So what if they talk more than they kiss in the vans, the journeys are long enough for a little bit of both and their castmates are glad to hear a little less smacking on the daily commute. They bond in a way that isn’t just skin on skin, warmth gliding between them like bonfire toffee and daisies - it brings them closer together as they intertwine fingers and rest heads on top each other. Their hushed voices don’t carry far (or at least that's the excuse they make for being so damn close together when ‘you’ve got four whole seats bitch’. They talk between orange slices and hot coffee, over breakfast, lunch and dinner when the cameras can’t roll and the PAs are off eating their own meals. They find ways to thread inside jokes through their sentences (something the editors hate later on because ‘it’s fucking hard to edit when you have no idea what they’re on about’). Maybe they do it as a quiet rebellion, if the moments are uneditable, they won’t have so much airtime - they can be their own people before they are clumped as one - if they do, no one confirms it.

thats six sentences <3

your feedback means the world to me so feel free to comment or drop an ask in my box with what you think (and go ask your favourite authors to do this too) xx

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

heyo, mac wanted to do this today so it’s happinging - here’s the beginning of a trixya soulmate AU that i probably debuted on a six sentence sunday but who knows that this point. I planned this in the spare time i had at the end of a maths exam - that is not an excuse, but maybe a warning. enjoy!

Cactus and Lily Seeming when I'm older that it's younger how I feel

Learning that you only get the raw end of the deal

First one to the finish line, but the last one left to know

Second place adorns you no matter where you go

It started on a Monday, except it didn’t - not really.

It started the day she was born, in a small town in Russia where the rain hadn’t stopped for three days and everyone was a little on edge. It started when the doctor, a sweet old man from St Petersburg announced loudly, “It’s a girl!” and then, much quieter and with a little sorrow, “and she has a soulmark.” It started when she was five and she asked her mama why she had a flower on her arm and her Mama cursed and told her to be quiet because ‘good girls don’t ask questions’. When she never heard the word soulmate spoken in the small town she grew up in, not a speck of blood in the snow as the lily rooted its way into the crook of her elbow. When she cried going through test after test to see if they could remove it, uproot it. When a nurse tried to pull the lily out, tried to yank her second heart straight from her arm.  It started when they moved to the USA when she was eight, her father explaining in a hushed tone that the small ‘sm’ on her passport wasn’t anything special. And then it changed

It changed in seventh grade when they did a lesson on soulmarks in biology and the teacher was so proud to show off the daffodil on the back of her neck that Katya almost cried. It changed when she watched  Alaska’s black dahlia uproot itself from her calf midway through sophomore netball because she saw the exchange student through the fence - their eyes meeting for a brief second before a petal fell onto the grass next to them. She watched them fall in love until the flower had long removed itself, leaving a faint outline of the flower that had scarred under her skin. It changed when she learned she was one in a million - an urban myth, a soulmate. Half of a whole, unbreakable.

It changed when she met Trixie

Well I've been out to Austin, back to Boston

Where I've been

Following the highways in my hand

It’s a Monday in spring and Katya is 19 but she feels like she’s 30. The cold of Boston has started to dissipate and instead, a warm breeze tickles her ankles through the DIY rips in her jeans. She is that kid and she is proud of it. Her long sleeves cover the slight protrusion of a soulmate mark - if you were to look closely enough you would make out the raised stem of a lily, following the river-like path of her veins under the white jersey.

thank y’all for tuning in, same time next week?

<3

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

it’s wip Wednesday for 20 more minutes here so i give you this hot mess.

insomnia - a character study but also ninex.

Nina’s not very good at sleeping. It’s never come easy and he’s frankly terrible at it but he finds ways around it. Loopholes.

He knows that one glass of wine is a buzz, two is sleepy and three is a headache in the morning and a bad taste in his mouth that lingers through tough bristles and artificial mint. He knows that you cannot mix pills with potions and expect to come out alive just like you cannot mix a lion and a colosseum and expect to walk out with four limbs and a smile. Unless you have a sword. He also knows there is no sword that fights insomnia.

He learns over time, that like a lizard, he likes a warm body to sleep and if that means that things have to happen prior to that - so be it. He likes to skip around the ‘things’ though, never kicks the guy out of his bed and hopes for the same in return. He doesn’t complain when he does the walk of shame - sees it as more of a walk of ‘at least I fucking slept’ and can't help but feel a little proud from time to time - on the days he feels well rested.

It’s rare that he feels well rested, he supposes, sipping the hard coffee that only makes him softer, more rounded as a person. The caffeine fills him out a little, pads the sharp corners and the hollows under his eyes - cushions him. ‘Everyone has their vices’ he likes to say, not batting an eyelid when he is reminded for the fortieth time that ‘not all vices have to be addictive’. It’s a shame most of his are. 

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

six sentence sunday my lovessss

okay, so we have two separate fics for you today, the first - a trixya soulmate au that i’m lowkey super excited about, and the second is another snippit from my pretty woman AU (chapter 2 this time!) - coming to your tumblr/ao3 this summer. please give me feedback and enjoy!

Trixya Soulmate AU

It changed in seventh grade when they did a lesson on soulmarks in biology and the teacher was so proud to show off the daffodil on the back of her neck that Katya almost cried. It changed when she watched  Alaska’s black dahlia uproot itself from her calf midway through sophomore netball because she saw the exchange student through the fence - their eyes meeting for a brief second before a petal fell onto the grass next to them. She watched them fall in love until the flower had long removed itself, leaving a faint outline of the flower that had scarred under her skin. It changed when she learned she was one in a million - an urban myth, a soulmate. Half of a whole, unbreakable.

It changed when she met Trixie

Branjie Pretty Woman AU Chapter 2

Vanessa is lying on the floor, eyes transfixed by the show on the screen when Brookes phone goes off. She shoots the Canadian a glare, far too comfortable in the penthouse now to take anyone interrupting The Office and to be honest, Brooke almost understands - almost. She’d put on the series to try and smooth over any tension from the bathroom incident and for the most part, it seems to be working, the Latina sprawled over the expensive rug, head propped up on her hands and mini-bar snacks left forgotten as she laughs and awes at every movement on the screen. It’s Brookes favourite show and it makes her a little fluffy inside to know that Vanessa likes it too (not that anyone needs to know that, she is an ice queen, she cannot let that façade drop yet.)

Thanks for reading, please let me know what you think!

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

for mia

Middles - trixya (for @mia-ugly)

Trixie’s never finished a film.

She gets to the middle and then she falls asleep like clockwork every single time, the drool falling out of her open mouth like a spiders web. Katya isn’t in love with the drool, but she’s in love with Trixie.

She’s in love with the way that her hair falls over one shoulder, exposing the scar on the side of her neck from the time Katya scared her into burning herself with a curling iron.

She’s in love with the soft snores that you can only hear when you’re inches away.

She’s in love with the way she curls into her side, nestles herself into Katya's stomach like a cat, kneading at the soft flesh in her sleep.

She’s in love.

[pink-grapefruit-cafe]

six sentence saturday?

i’m not here tomorrow so have a bit of two wips - the love island hell fic i planned as a joke but am now seriously considering, and my ninex waitress. neither are six sentences. i don’t care. enjoy! <3

[it’s a bad idea (let’s keep kissing)]

You have a wife

You have a husband

You're my doctor

You've got a baby coming

It's a bad idea, me and you

Let's just keep kissing 'til we come to

“This is a terrible idea.” Exhales Monet as she leans back into her chair, Nina straddling her legs and leaving sweet cherry kisses on her neck. “We work together - god, this was supposed to be a show.” The other woman sits up a little on her legs, moves her lips from her neck to place a long, tender kiss on Monets lips. She smiles shyly as she pulls away, reaches a hand from where it was placed on her hip to wipe the stray lipstick away. 

“God we’re a cliche,” Nina giggles softly, biting her lip as she says it before sliding off Monet (very crumpled apron) and onto the chair opposite. She links their fingers with a smile. “I think this was possibly a rather bad idea,” but as she says it, she smiles like it’s the best idea she’s ever made.

“If people find out- “

“We deal with it.”

“But - “

“Monet, I’m supposed to be the nervous mess - Calm down, honey.” She squeezes their intertwined fingers with a finality that tells the other woman the conversation is most certainly over for now. 

A knock on the dressing room door causes them to jump apart, hands splitting as they both move to reapply their lipstick (to look like they were doing anything but making out). “Come in,” one of them calls and Brooke opens the door looking unimpressed. 

“You know it’s a bad day when you can’t find either of the Jenna’s,” She sighs, obviously turning off her headset and tapping her clipboard. “I won’t say a word of this to anyone,” she then hisses, almost conspiratorially, “But lord help me if we don’t have a Jenna for act two - Nina you’re a swing for a reason.” 

Monet chuckles as she finished checking herself but sees Brooke’s pointed glare in the mirror and changes her mind. She squeezes Nina’s hip before following the Canadian muttering something about ‘the power of showbiz’ and how ‘these aprons don’t get ironed’. 

Nina sinks back down into the chair, hovers a finger over the ghost of the other girl's lips and wonders how the hell she got on Broadway in the first place. 

Heart, stop racing

Let's face it, making mistakes like this will make worse what was already pretty bad

Mind, stop running

It's time we just let this thing go

It was a pretty good bad idea, wasn't it though?

[lesbian love island hell fic - on this island]

The camera pans across a gorgeous Spanish villa. An infinity pool ripples ever so slightly in the soft breeze. On the grass next to the pool stand five bikini-clad women clutching plain white champagne flutes - they look nervous as they chat to each other. 

*

“Hi ladies, I’m Brooke,” introduces a tall blonde woman in a black strappy one piece. She towers above the rest of them easily in her heels and looks plainly uncomfortable in the situation. A shorter blonde smiles, painted red lips turning upwards into a manic grin that shows her perfect white teeth. She reaches out to stroke Brooke’s arm before speaking.

“Privyeet, menya zovut Yekaterina Petrovna Zamolodchikova.” She smiles and winks at the other girls before clarifying, “But you can call me Katya.”

They all burst out into laughter - having previously been suspended in stunned silence - and Katya bows, her red bikini straining a little at the movement. 

“Jeez hoe, what was that?” Asks a black girl who pauses after she speaks before holding out a hand and announcing “A’keria.” 

“The language of my home, Mother Russia,” is the response, in a heavy (but obviously fake Russian accent) and the three women turn their attention to a short blonde and a demure but smiley brunette who are yet to introduce themselves. 

“I’m Courtney, I’m a flight attendant from Australia!”

“Nina West, ironically, a west-end actress.”

Having all introduced themselves, they hug and begin to chat about their jobs and home towns. It is revealed that Katya is really from York (although she insists her parents are Russian), A’keria is from south London, Brooke is Canadian and Nina is from Cornwall. Both Katya and Brooke are engineers which they immediately bond over and A’keria makes a joke about them being perfect for each other - although it immediately falls through when Brooke announces she’s not into blondes. They’re all getting into the deeper things (nail extensions, the best hair salons, and the state of the global economy) when they hear the telltale clicking of heels on the villa stairs.