#i haven’t forgotten anything important that i know of but i have broken my backpack

[fingertipsmp3]

Today has been one of those days where I’ve just failed spectacularly at everything that’s been required of me

[imagineddworld]

FBI training (Part 1)

Pairing: Stiles Stilinski x Reader

Summary: The reader is the child of the two most skilled FBI agents of the States. At the FBI training she is paired up with a very determent young man who always finds a way to trouble her. 

Author’s note: I tried to make it as genderneutral as possible. But at some point there is a small implication that the reader could be female and their roommate could be male. But further than that, there is no specifications of gender. 

This is going to be a multiple part fic. The first part already took me way too long to write. So I apologize in advance if the next parts will take long to write too. I will try to finish them as quickly as I can.

Words: 3k (3084) 

On the most important day of your life, running late was not one of the things you had planned for. But seen how impulsive your roommate could be, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for them to mess up your schedule. They had stolen all your alarm clocks at night for some stupid experiment. Yes, you owned multiple. Normally you used your phone as an alarm. But after a couple mishaps caused by your roommate, you couldn’t put all your trust entirely on electronic devises. So you had bought an old-fashioned alarm clock that still ran on batteries, just in case something were to happen to your phone. But even that clock had been ruined many times. So from that moment on you always had some spare clocks hidden in your room, just in case. 

That they had found all your spare clocks wasn’t too surprising, seen that they weren’t hidden very well. What did shock you was that they hadn’t woken you up by their wild scavenger hunt. You were a light sleeper, even the smallest of noises could shake you out of your deep rest. That’s why you wore earbuds to bed, including that particular night. They often didn’t muffle the sounds enough, surely not during an experiment. Your roommate tend to forget about their surroundings as they start one, getting lost in their passion. You had awoken countless of times to the sound of falling objects, happy laughter, mumbles of rambling thoughts, excited jumping, soft sobbing and frequently a loud whine or groan. By now it was a normal occurrence. But of course, on that night the earbuds had done their job, cancelling out all the noise from the nightly events. 

The evening before, everything had gone smoothly. Too smoothly. You were supposed to suspect something, but your intuition had failed you due to the overwhelming amounts of emotions that threw you out of balance. There always had to be a bump in the road. Nothing ever went entirely good.  You had excitedly packed your backpack, leaving out a book to read before you went to bed. Next you picked out your outfit for the morning, neatly placing it on top of your wooden desk. Making that decision the day before took away a part of the unwanted stress to your already overflowing anxiety-filled body. Not that picking an outfit for the FBI Academy would be hard. They had a strict dress code. Everyone had to wear a white button up, tie being an optional choice. What you wore as bottoms also was a free choice, but they had to be formal and needed to show off professionalism.

Before you had changed into a big T-shirt and some sleeping shorts, you checked over your backpack and outfit; making sure you hadn’t forgotten anything. After double checking 3 times, you continued your night ‘routine’. (Your days never looked the same, so you couldn’t really call it a routine.) You washed your face and brushed your teeth, bidding your roommate goodnight as you passed by their room. Once in your room again, you placed your phone on the nightstand, making sure it’s charging for the night. Next you grabbed your earbuds, securing them in your ears before climbing into bed. While you sank into the pile of soft pillows, a mixture of emotions overwhelmed you. Excitement and anxiety had boiled up in your body throughout the whole week. But only now did they leave a tight, crushing feeling in your chest. None the less, sleep soon overtook your senses, greeting you with a peaceful night full of dreams.

As soon as your eyes closed, your luck decided to no longer be on your side. A default in your roommate’s experiment had caused a huge black-out in your building. The electricity had been out all night, resulting in your phone being dead as you awoke the next morning. Usually you could have trusted on your spare alarms, but those were also destroyed in the process of the experiment. That left you with no alarms to wake up to , therefore ending up being late.

What actually had woken you up was the harsh light shining through your thin drapes. It immediately triggered a huge wave of panic to drown, stealing all the air from your longes. Your eyes shot to the analogue clock that hung on your wall, cursing loudly as you read the time. You quickly jumped out of bed, stumbling through your room in a hurried state. At a rapid speed you pulled your clothes on, washed your face, brushed your teeth, tamed your wild bed-hair and desperately tried to make yourself look presentable in the little time you had. You ran back to your room to grab your backpack and the book you were supposed to read last night. Next you made your way over to the small kitchen, taking an apple from the fruit bowl. As you stuffed it into your backpack, you placed your book onto the table. While doing so, your eyes caught sight of your roommate sleeping with their head onto the cold surface. They were surrounded by your broken alarm clocks, pieces scattered everywhere. You couldn’t resist the urge to hit them against the head with your book. Not too hard of course, but hard enough to make any impact. They jumped awake, nearly falling off their chair. ‘Next time wake me up’, you said referring to their failed experiment, ‘Surely when you steal all my alarm clocks.’ You continued rushing to the front door, shoving your book in your backpack as well. They mumbled a small apology. ‘Usually you wake up way before your alarm’, their voice was groggy and quiet. While putting on your shoes you shouted your reply: ‘Not when I haven’t slept less than 6 hours in the past 5 days.’ Another apology followed, but you payed no mind to it. You shut the door behind you with a rather loud thud. You deeply breathed in and out before starting your run towards campus. The interaction hadn’t been in a mean manner or a sign of anyone being upset at the other. It was just your panicked, anxiety filled state being in need to rush, while they had their brain still filled with the morning fog. 

The reason why you barely had closed your eyes in the past 5 days, was because you were helping your parents who had stumbled upon a cruel twist in their rather difficult case. You couldn’t stand to just watch them suffer, so you pulled a few all-nighters with them until you solved most of the hard parts. The feeling of being able to solve such a thing, made it all worth it. None the less, it still had left you exhausted and drained. 

---

To your surprise you had made it in time. You had ran your way to campus, underestimating how far the distance actually was. You tried to catch your breath as you quickly checked your watch. You had 8 minutes till your class started. It was a little late for your liking, knowing how important punctuality is to them, but it would do. You lightly jogged through the halls as you looked at the map of the building that was supposed to guide you through the maze like structure. Even if you had been there plenty of times before in your life, it still was a confusing structure that didn’t want to stick in your head. 

Your mind was too occupied with other things, completely forgetting about your surroundings. So, it was only logical for you to run into a person. The impact of bumping into their harsh chest made you stumble back the slightest bit, but you were able to quickly steady yourself like nothing had happened. Before you could look at the damage you had done, a high pitched voice cracked out a long ‘noo’. In front of you stood a tall, raven-haired man with warm brown eyes. He was looking at the huge coffee stain on his white button while holding his empty coffee cup in his other hand. In the mean while you had gotten distracted by his beauty. You noticed small birthmarks littering his pale skin, resembling little constellations being spread out in the night sky. 

The string of curse words leaving his lips pulled you out of your fazed out state. You had accidentally been checking out this exceptionally beautiful man, who hopefully hadn’t noticed anything of it. It would be highly inappropriate and quite uncomfortable. Luckily for you his eyes were still on the huge coffee stain. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry’, you stammered out, immediately moving into action. You swung you backpack to the front, rumbling through your stuff in order to find the spare shirt you had stolen from your roommate. They didn’t mind. You were clumsy by nature and had to lend their clothes on plenty occasions. Neither was it your first time to ever ruin someone’s clothes, so you always tried to be prepared for moments like this. 

The man continued to angrily mumble to himself, clearly stressing out. He failed to notice the shirt you had offered to him, until you spoke up. ‘Here’, you offered him a polite smile as his head shot up at a fast pace. You were met with a confused look being plastered over his face. Assuming what his next statement would be, you answered before he could open his mouth. ‘It’s a men’s medium.’ As his facial expression didn’t change, you huffed out an annoyed sigh. He seemed to have trouble connecting the dots. He just had to accept the shirt, that’s all. You couldn’t lose any more time, surely not by a stupid encounter. ‘Take it or go in with a huge stain, it’s your choice’, you stated with annoyance clearly noticeable in your voice, while trying to continue your kind demeanor. You dropped the shirt into his hands. ‘If I were you I would change quickly’, you said over your shoulder before turning the corner that lead you to your final destination. 

You had made it just in time. The classroom already filled with students. You quickly sat down at one of the tables that still had an empty spot.  On your left sat a nice looking girl with her hair tied up in a tight ponytail. She offered you a kind smile that faded into a mean scowl only seconds later. Would she have recognized you? Did she knew who you were?

You were the child of two of the most skilled FBI agents of the States. They were top of their field and greatly respected by most people. Seen you family (who all worked in similar fields) were so well known, it was only logical that you also would gain the attention from outsiders. But that also caused them to make wrong assumptions about you. They were often too stubborn to see the truth or didn’t even want to take the chance to get to know you. They just thought you were an arrogant, ego-centric, selfish child who was spoiled to dead and never had to work a day in their life. They thought you were in dire need to constantly get all the attention. They expected you to think highly about yourself while looking down on others, therefore also expecting you to be condescending towards them.  Your parents had tried to prepare you for this. Not everyone is going to like you or take their time to get to know you before voicing their opinions about you. In this field, and similar fields, professional jealousy was very common. It made people act in vile ways. You feared this was going to happen in your training. 

 You sat in your chair with a scared heart while anxiously tapping your pencil against the desk. The supervisor was reading names of a list, but your mind drowned his voice out due to your excessive worrying. It all went smoothly, until he tumbled over a particular hard name. ‘Mie-Mic...’, the poor man looked questionably at his paper, desperate to pronounce the name correctly. As on cue the boy from earlier came to stand into the doorframe. His stained shirt was replaced by yours, fitting him just a tad bit too tightly. It showed off his muscular body even more. ‘Miecsyslaw Stilinski, sir... But most people call me Stiles.’ His voice was lower this time, but still clearly with with raging anxiety. Hearing his name roll of his tongue so smoothly made an alarm go off in your head. It sounded oddly familiar. Surely the nickname ‘Stiles’ had triggered a vague memory to resurface in your head. You just couldn’t figure out any of the details. It was like an itch you couldn’t scratch. 

The supervisor looked sternly at the new boy with an unimpressed look on his face. His eyes examined him, clearly judging his appearance. ‘Ah, I see. Well, next time be on time .. and dress appropriately. You don’t need to try showing off your pretentious muscles, it doesn’t suit you.’ That comment made you feel even more guilty. It was your fault he was late and had to dress in a too tight shirt. He apologized with his eyes faintly focusing on something behind the supervisor, before they quickly went to you in order to shoot you a nasty glare. You returned an apologetic smile that didn’t help much with the current situation. He continued to hold eye contact with you until the man’s voice filled the room again. ‘Now take a seat will you’, the annoyance was clear as day. His eyes left yours for a split second as he came to action, stumbling his way towards the empty chair that just happened to be to your right. As he passed by, still holding intense eye contact with you, his faint but sweet cologne filled your nose. A scent that later on would distractingly infiltrate your nose, no matter how much you tried to focus on something else. 

You were pulled out of your trance again when an excited voice filled your ears. ‘(Y/N)(Y/L/N), what a surprise to see you here. What could we possibly teach you? You already know everything and are following your parents footsteps flawlessly.’ Your cheeks reddened at his praising comment. The other students immediately glared at you, envying how sweet he acted towards you. Towards the others he had been cold and distant, whereas now he was talking highly about you. A big difference that everyone easily noticed. The room immediately was filled with a strong uncomfortable tension that reeked of jealousy.

The main reason for his kind demeanor towards you was because you already knew each other. Your parents often visited the Academy, helping with the development of new tasks or other improvements. Other times he visited you at home. He had seen you grow into the person you are today. His bond with you could be considered as a familiar one, or at least close to. So that explained. his fondness of you. The other reason for his praising was the status of your parents. It would be a shame on him and the Academy to talk down on or disrespect your family or you in any way. Besides the great help they provided for the Academy, they also were one of their sponsors.  You just hoped that they wouldn’t use this to your advantage by treating you differently and more highly. You wanted to be given a fair chance. If they were going to train you without fairly criticizing you out of fear of disrespecting your family’s name, then this whole thing would be a waste of time. 

‘Well, everyone is equal to the law. It’s one of the requirements we all need to go through to become an FBI agent. No matter how experienced or inexperienced we are, we all deserve to be treated equally’, you said timidly, trying not to sound overly confident or condescending towards others. You gave the supervisor a timid but kind smile while trying to avoid the burning glares. You didn’t want to go any deeper into the subject. 

Seen that you were a child of the two top FBI agents of the states, meant that you had been trained to follow their footsteps from a very young age. As a baby you were given a lot of puzzles and stimulants to train your senses. At the age of 3 the tasks started to be more difficult and challenging. At your 5 the training started to become serious. When you were 12 you already were allowed to help with smaller cases. At 16 you were actively helping them with all types of cases. Both your parents had gone through the same training, seen that their fathers also had been top FBI agents. At this point the training had become some sort of tradition in your family. Most of the people in your family had underwent similar trainings, as they all worked in similar fields. They varied from FBI agents, cops, sherifs, detectives to medical helpers such as nurses, doctors, firemen,...

The supervisor laughed at your comment. ‘I’m sure you’ll graduate without any trouble. It’ll be an easy game for you. Even in your sleep you’ll still be top of the class.’ Again, you shoot him an awkward but polite smile, being uncomfortable by the amount of praising he has done. It was overwhelming and placing you in a hard position. ‘That depends on how hard you make the tasks’, your timid voice became even more quiet as the mean glares had intensified. ‘Always so humble. Just like your parents.’ With that statement he ended his long praising session.

As he continued his speech of the importance of this training, you let out a deep sigh. You had turned impossibly bright, your face burning from embarrassment. Without intending to, he had put you as a target for everyone to hate on. He made you seem like the enemy that everyone had to fear. He had thrown tons of gasoline on the burning fire of jealousy. Your future colleagues saw you as the one thing that would stand in their way of becoming a FBI agent, something that would withhold them from their dream. If there wasn’t going to be rough play already, there sure would be now. This was going to be a rougher year than you had anticipated. You were already dreading the next day to come. 

-To be continued-

[missinghan]

aria of an assassin ⤖ lee minho

❖ genre : assassin au; fluff; angst

❖ word count : 6,2k.

❖ warning : mentions of blood & violence, explicit language 

❖ summary : minho hasn’t been fazed for decades throughout his bloodied career until the next target happens to be a black cat and he’s suddenly incapable of pulling the trigger.

❖ note : okay, so it’s been a year? this tiny, stupid blog is turning one year old today? yea I couldn’t believe it either. this is to all of my mutuals and readers out there, I don’t say it enough but I truly appreciate each and every one of you 🖤 I wish I could have written something longer but due to school, this random piece will have to do for now.

❖ the sequel : with felix is out!

one.

“Shit.”

Minho grits in a hushed tone although all that has been accompanying him is the pitiful moonlight and icy breeze dissolving into every fiber of his skin. Every minuscule movement suddenly becomes too irritating to his eardrums. The hustle and bustle life of the city at night. Terrible traffic. Even the sound of his own inhales and exhales. 

What is that thing?

He thinks to himself, proceeding to expand his eyesight with the pair of scopes; confusion soon flares into curiosity, then faint anger and dead silence. He swears his heartbeat just paused awkwardly like a broken record for a split second there. Such strange, or odd targets are no stranger to him; nor do they stir something inside the coldness of his rib cage. 

Not an easy kill, they say. And not easy it is. 

Because whatever he’s watching with his very eyes is a cat. A goddamn cat with a coat as sleek pitch as the dark canvas upon his head and piercing golden eyes. The peculiar animal walks with its head held high like it’s lording over everyone else—such self-reassurance, such radiance some humans cease to possess. 

It’s dangerous, they say. But it’s a fucking cat! Irritation bubbles up at the back of his throat, makes his skin crawl, and causes a bark of profanity to leave his lips once more. Has it not occurred to his client that he doesn’t kill children and animals? When it’s clearly been written on the contract? In bold, underlined, and everything?

They could have at least given him more details on what he’s getting himself to this time. 

An exhale. He packs up his things, pulls his black cap down a little, and leaves the top of the building without looking back. If he did, he would have seen those starry eyes boring holes onto his back. 

two.

The road Minho is walking through is more than familiar. For one, he takes the same path every day to grab a drink at his go-to place—a vending machine near an old, plain high school. 

It’s fair to say he knows every corner of the neighborhood like the back of his hand—from the dark alley where bullies beat up their classmates to the small stall of lemonade of a middle school girl who waves at him every morning. He never reciprocates though; it doesn’t feel right. The amount of apathy in his heart isn’t enough for him to act normally when taking lives is what he does for a living.  

For two, he used to have a part-time job at that particular high school for an old request. Due to his conscience, he did go out of his way to take the kill outside of the school—causing a catastrophe in such an environment makes him uncomfortable.

Just then, he stops. His brow raises. Isn’t that…

The black cat slinks through the crowd of nosy students in the direction of where he too is heading. It raises its nose and gives the air a rough sniff, making a face as though the general stagnant with exhaust fumes stench of the city disgusts the entirety of its existence. 

Watching it take a slight dip to avoid being hit with someone’s bag, Minho holds back every urge to come running at the creature and wrap his arms around its small figure. He wonders how long it’d take for the cat to reach its final destination because it’s definitely taking some sweet ass time to stride through the front of the main gate like a supermodel. Meanwhile, he’s stressed to the core as if the harmless high school filled with teenagers is nothing less than a battlefield. 

Is it testing him?

Something is oddly unsettling about an animal staring straight into his eyes. Paranoia fuels the forgotten irritation inside his chest, sets out to make him actually think those golden eyes are memorizing every inch of his feature. Then, they soften with what seems to be exhaustion, its tiny head turning and its tiny feet take it skipping gently away from the scene. 

Minho finally acknowledges the knot inside his stomach and the breath he’s been holding. With a harsh gulp, he no longer takes notice of the fact if his cap is hung low enough or if he’s walking too quickly. For the first time in long, a rush of adrenaline hits him hard enough to make him speed walk through the herd of chatty teenagers. 

Questions naturally pop up as his shoes kiss the ground, his shadow sprinting into a dark, though familiar alleyway. Was he hallucinating? But he’s been getting enough sleep and eating well. What makes him so certain that it was the same cat? Instincts or some sixth sense bullshit perhaps. If it was the cat that’s assigned to be killed off in a week, what’s so dangerous about it? And how long has he been running for? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? And to where? 

“You.”

Half-way through trying to keep his thoughts off of his face, Minho stops himself when a rather feminine voice echoes through the narrow space. Unsure of whether the voice was reaching out to him, his legs stop moving while his eyes are peering through the dark. Much to his heart’s dismay, shivers run up his spine when something comes in contact with the warm flesh of his neck. 

“What’s your name?” 

Slowly, with his hands on the back of his head, he turns on his heels. “Excuse you?”

You retract your gun-shaped fingers into the pocket of your jacket, phlegmatic eyes gazing at him through the thickness of the night. “I want to know your name,” you try to make your point clear, utterly unfazed. 

Minho stares you down for a good five seconds. Neatly dressed in the school uniform, an oversized jacket thrown over your body but no backpacks. There’s a name tag being embroidered onto the fabric in red “Shin Yuna - 1A”. Whoever you are, he’s certain that isn’t your name. That name doesn’t even suit you. That isn’t your uniform. 

“What’s the point?” he questions, hands dropped to the sides in slight relief. 

You tilt your head, expression neutral. “I have a habit of collecting names of people who tried or are trying to kill me. It’s quite relaxing to write it down on a list actually. You know, easier to keep track.”

He’s trying hard to not let any impulsive urges overthrow the rational side of his brain. Everything suddenly twitches in slow motion. His silence seems to bore you. Your eyes are more dead than angry, more done than irritated. Like you’ve been through this shit one too many times already to care. 

“At least say why you’re sent to kill me.”

That, Minho can answer within a blink of an eye. “They sent me because I don’t exist.”

Your gaze glistens with a glaze of boredom. “Everyone said so.”

“Yeah, no shit Sherlock. Where’s your house, kid? I’ll walk you back. It’d be a pain in the ass if your parents found out how you’re wandering alone after school,” he brushes it off like you’re a slight nuisance (which you are). His heartbeat spikes up once at the mention of family, one that you’ve acknowledged with ease. 

Your arms are folded over your chest now, to cover up the sudden stab of sympathy inside your chest. “There’s no need. I don’t have a place to go back to nor do I have parents who will nag me for staying out late.” 

His mind automatically blackouts along with his senses, blurred with such peculiar feelings swirling at the pit of his stomach. You make it sound like it’s not that big of a deal like you’ve utterly been numb for so long. It’s tragic but understandable. This isn’t the first time he has witnessed a story like yours—your parents, dead or alive, he does not know; by the sound of it, you’re an orphan. Another unfortunate being to graze this planet like himself. This means you can’t afford school, so that uniform really doesn’t belong to you. 

“You still haven’t told me your name.”

“It’s Lee Know. Call me Lee Know.”

“Don’t bother trying, Lee Know. No one has ever made it. They never did.” 

You didn’t mean to expose anything about your life to a total stranger, or specifically an assassin. However, nothing matters when you most likely won’t meet him again nor will he succeed in taking your life. Even the fact that he chose not to give you his real name amplifies how much shit he does not give about you. You don’t expect anything more honestly. 

“Alright, we’re done here,” you feign enthusiasm before clasping your hands together. “Go home. The sun is already going down.”

Strangely enough, Minho can only watch as your shadow shifts to the outline of a black cat before dipping into the depths of the starless night. 

three.

To Minho it’s always just another day in the office. Except his office is a windy rooftop overlooking the mark’s exact location. His tools—rather than a computer—is a state-of-the-art rifle with a telescopic lens. A silencer isn’t very important since traffic and people are more than enough to drown out any suspicious noises. Most will mistake it for a back-firing van. He takes aim with no more qualms than one would gossip about a colleague, then pulls the trigger while thinking about what to order other than Chinese for lunch. When the work is done, he carefully packs everything up into an inconspicuous rucksack. And leaves the scene, like a phantom. 

It’s always been the same boring, bloodied cycle. 

Yet something’s changed since Minho met you. 

He used to maintain a cool detachment to his targets. His conscience prefers not to think of them; whenever he does, it’s as if they’re already dead, mobile meat bags waiting to be laid on a cutting board. He doesn’t like to think merrily of his job, he doesn’t see it as helping them meet their destiny. None of that bullshit. To put it more nonchalantly, everyone will die one day. Minho considers it as a good way to go. Oblivious and in pain for one moment before completely gone the next. 

Simple. Convenient. Much less agonizing than this brutal world. 

Although that doesn’t mean he isn’t traumatized by the amount of blood that has stained his hands. On good days, he might get three to four hours of sleep. Bad days, few minutes to none at all. Terrifying nightmares gnaws at his soul every night, the ugly scar like a reminder of every single one of his sins. He can’t force himself to lose his sanity like any fools out there going down the same path. 

“Shit…” Minho mutters, running a rough hand through his hair. He didn’t sleep well last night—like every other night; hence the bad temper and bitter taste at the back of his throat. 

After a deep breath, he stares at his Hecate II with mischievous eyes—those of a hunter framed in the expressionless face of an executioner. His blunt hands are steady as they lift the shiny weapon over the concrete of a rooftop, drawing out a dry shot in his mind. 

Through his scope, he watches as you’re crossing the road in your human form before stopping abruptly in front of a random tree. You then proceed to squint your eyes and look up in the opposite direction. Minho unknowingly holds his breath, waits for you to release your iron gaze, and move on with your life. But his expectations don’t prevail. 

“What the fuck?” 

Without much patience, he curses before shifting his scope to the same direction only to find another shadow creeping around on the balcony of a nearby building. No time to think of a rational solution—killing them is an ideal one—Minho feels his palms growing sweaty when a small, peculiar object comes flying toward his way. His head quickly moves away before the bullet pierces through his scope, shattering the glass completely. 

“Son of a bitch,” he lets out a shaky breath. Crimson starts to drip down on the side of his cheekbone, but he can care less. 

Because that’s the least of his problem right now. 

Another subtle ‘bang’ can be heard in the distance, like a broken record scratching against his eardrums. Kid…! Minho’s heart collapses in realization. 

four. 

It’s not hard for Minho to do research on quite an amount of vital information about you. When he saw your body dropped to the ground lifelessly and an ambulance immediately drove by to pick up your body, he knew things weren’t going to end just like that. 

“Don’t bother trying, Lee Know. No one has ever made it. They never did.”

He isn’t a believer, has never been one. Yet when he managed to take out your kidnappers in that ambulance, your weak breaths startled his heart and shook his mind into awareness of how serious the situation is. After that, he tracked down the hitman who delivered the hard blow, put a bullet through his brain, and found an USB full of detailed information about your existence. Which just makes things a whole lot more complicated to understand. 

Apparently, you’ve been ‘killed’ one too many times before—there are photographs of your supposedly dead body in a bag, thrown into the deep, dark woods, other times into a nameless river. The thing about you is that you were once an experimental subject to your own biological parents who are sickeningly vile scientists. At the age of nine, you fell down the stairs and had a big gash on your head. They never knew because your wounds were quick to heal themselves. However, your whole life was flipped upside down when they saw you shapeshifting into a black cat while running around at the playground. 

From then, your life became a living hell behind cold metal bars with needles stuck in your arms and strange pills being forced down your throat almost every day. Their sudden change only nourished resentment through time until you managed to cut down the laboratory’s power supply and fled from your own home. 

You have no one to lean on. No place to go back to. No nothing. And you’re just a teenager. 

Minho feels awful. 

Usually, he isn’t the type to be empathetic nor does he have the energy to. It’s very out of character for him to let his emotions linger on a homeless kid with some supernatural abilities that will make his life that much more dangerous. Because to him, more often than not, people tend to give their condolences only to forget after brief moments of grieving. At the end of the day, it isn’t their own problem, it isn’t their own life. But now when it comes to you, Minho feels a strong sense of responsibility that if you end up dying, it’s on him. 

It’s stupidly conflicted, it really is. His job—blowing people’s brains out—is the sole reason why he makes a six-digit amount of money for every job. Therefore, he isn’t sure what picking a random kid up from a fake ambulance and bringing her back to his shabby apartment is going to do him any good. 

“Ah, you’re awake.” 

You hate the fact that you can recognize that voice. 

Just then, you wake as if it’s an emergency, as if sleeping has become a dangerous task. Your heart is pounding loudly inside your ears, the sound echoing listlessly to the pit of your rib cage. It’s always like this. It takes you some time to calm your nerves before gathering what exactly happened the moment you blacked out. 

Right, you think to yourself, groaning slightly while pushing yourself up. You were shot right in the chest, and your body was probably discarded somewhere. After that, you’d grab a hitchhiker so they’ll drive you back into town. Like always. The only difference, this time though, is Minho placing your limp body on his bed with a blanket to warm you up. 

His face appears within your eyesight when you’re done adjusting your vision to the bright room—you’re not used to this much light around. “You look calmer than I expected,” he mentions. 

Minho grabs your face and scans it over. “Let me see. Did your wounds close up properly?” 

The tender action, which has become weirdly natural to him although this is his first time, accidentally triggers something inside you. Your hand automatically slaps his away. It is an upfront refusal, but it doesn’t surprise him. He only offers you a comfortable moment of silence before placing a tray on the wooden nightstand. 

“Eat up. I’m not going to feed you,” he cocks his head toward the bowl of porridge with his arms crossed in front of his chest. 

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

You glare at him in suspicion. “Bringing me home. Giving me a bed to sleep on. And even food to eat. What are you trying to get at?”

“Nothing. I didn’t kill you only because you’re too young for my moral code,” he pretends to roll his eyes, voicing monotonously. 

A frown adorns your tired features. “So you’re going to kill me when I get older then?” 

“Probably,” Minho smirks faintly with a cock of his eyebrow. “That depends if you still remember my name, Y/N.” 

One thing after another, this assassin only continues to baffle you. He was just going to shoot you the other day and now he’s giving you food? Preposterous! To put it simply, you’re unprepared for such kind actions, such gentleness from someone who takes lives for a living. You’re unprepared for dealing with people in general because they detest anyone who’s different from them—your kind, the kind with supernatural abilities and all. Hence, you’re left unwilling to befriend anyone and would rather be alone for the rest of your life. 

Until such twisted moira pushes you to—what was his name again? Not his real name, the made-up one that he uses in the underworld. 

You speak up softly after feeling safe enough to let your guards down, “Lee Know, was it?” 

“It’s Lee Minho.” 

“Pardon?”

He only smiles, “My real name. It’s Lee Minho.”

five. 

“Y/N! A little help over here?”

“Coming.”

“Y/N, go check the fog machine!”

“Got you.”

“Y/N, can you put these boxes over there?”

“Alright.”

That’s all you’ve been doing for the entirety of your boring day. Getting yelled out at, having people ask for help nonstop, and responding with a two-word answer at max. You’re not complaining—they pay you well enough, the job is more on the down-low side because you’re nothing but a mere stage crew for an above-average theatre studio. So you simply hoist the three final plastic boxes into your arms with a jerk of your knees and place it where they asked you to. Thanks to your parents, their experiments along with skeptical-looking substances have efficiently enhanced your general strength and agility. 

Another crew member perks up when you plop the heavy stack of cardboard boxes down with a loud thud. “Oh, can you carry those lights to stage left too?”

“Sure.” You could have pretended to pick up one box at a time and to drag your feet across the stage with difficulties to avoid being used. But you’re too lazy to repeat the same cycle two more times, so you really don’t have any other choice here. 

Nevertheless, you suppose it’s not entirely bad to do all of this heavy handiwork. Because it keeps your mind off of unwanted things, such as Lee Minho for example. Lee Minho, the assassin, not the actor—you’d gladly fangirl over that certain celebrity rather than admit that you actually enjoy the hitman’s abrupt presence in your life. 

The fact that you know he will find you even if it means traveling to the ends of the Earth and back doesn’t help to ease your insomnia. So for the past few days, you’ve been working extra hours along with picking up a job at a florist in hopes of not bumping into him. Stupid. You know it is. But how can you deal with a self-esteem crisis because the idea of being a burden just irks you so much? 

It’s like you’re hopelessly proving that you don’t need anyone when you, in fact, want that kind of unconditional love that every other human yearns for. 

After helping your colleagues out with the lighting, you simply sit behind those thick curtains until the show is over. Then, you head out, find a place to sleep, and head to an old lady’s place to pick up new clothes to change into for the next day. Since she’s been treating you with nothing but kindness, you’ve tried to pass by and helped her out at her son’s antique store too. 

Your routine is supposed to go that way and stay that way. You won’t die because you don’t like overworking yourself. You’re doing just great. 

“Hey, Y/N! Your brother is here to pick you up!”

Throwing your crewmate a blunt wave, you find your way out of the school’s theatre through a back door without shifting the expression on your face. You don’t have any siblings. And your colleagues don’t know anything about your family background either. So it, unfortunately, boils your guesses down to one. 

Despite knowing who it is and why they show up, you open your mouth to speak, “How did you find me again?”

Minho shows up with a more casual version of his working attire—instead of the fully black, monochromatic outfit, he’s changing it up with a leather jacket, white t-shirt and jeans. He leans on his shiny motorcycle smugly like he knows something that you don’t, in which you very much dislike. 

“Young lady, I’ll have you know that being an assassin helps me appear at places to do things I’m not supposed to do,” he ignores the fact that your question was purely rhetorical and chimes. 

You attempt to throw him a glare which isn’t intimidating enough. “Call me ‘young lady’ one more time and I’ll put my foot where it’s not supposed to be.” Who are you kidding? He’s a hitman when you’re just a kid. Pigs would be flying by the time you managed to physically shoo him away. 

“Am I supposed to guess where that is?”

“Enough. Go to work. Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

“I’m sorry, are you encouraging me to kill people?” Minho gasps, acting shocked and appalled. Clearly, he’s not good at it despite sharing a name with a well-known actor. 

You can only retort harshly, “Don’t put words in my mouth, you ass.”

“Come on, kid. Let’s go get something to eat.”

“Why?”

His hand automatically reaches for your forearm. “Don’t people eat for pleasure? What’s wrong with you?”

Your heart leaps in, anger perhaps, pupils shaking when he closes in on you. Upon your reaction, Minho retracts his arm immediately. He should have thought better of it; you’re probably too traumatized to be dealing with him right now. 

At that, your eyes round at the remorse on his face and you could have glared him off right then and there. But somehow, your basic human manners overcome your usual snappy self, letting you think that maybe he means no harm. Maybe he’s checking up on you one last time before going on about his life. You shouldn’t be too riled up about it just because he tried to kill you once.

Minho catches the familiar anxious gaze and sighs, “Okay, we don’t have to get something to eat. I’ll give you a ride back. Do you have somewhere to stay the night?”

It’s rotten work, whatever he’s trying to do. So you shake the harmless tingle inside your chest away before pushing past him. “No,” you answer dryly and leave. 

six.

You go to work sick the day after because you couldn’t find a place to sleep in and had to make do with napping in front of a tattoo place. Yes, napping; because when you finally shifted into your cat form and allowed your eyes to rest, the sky started pouring waterfalls. The rain had soaked into your shiny black coat, making it frizzy and luring the sickness up your spine the moment you tried finding a different haven.

No one notices. No one.

Not even the mask, the extra layer of sweatshirt nor your hushed coughs every now and then. Despite downing the cold pills early in the morning, you’re only burning up harder by the second. Oh, you know! Maybe they just don’t care, that’s it. Because calling in off for work due to a minor cold isn’t a valid reason. However, you’re still shivering on the inside and burning on the outside. Enhanced genes or any of that bullshit isn’t enough to prevent you from getting sick like any other student. Perhaps something wasn’t complete, or they’d messed up somewhere. Perhaps that’s why they’re trying to get you back.

How foolish of you to think somewhere deep down, they still want you back. With a reason as blunt as you being their child. 

Drowning in deep thoughts, you almost crash into a pile of boxes filled with equipment when your foot gets tangled to a random cable. Your eyes automatically screw shut as you wait for the impact but it never comes. Only a gentle pair of hands on your shoulders did. From that point on, you can’t hear or see properly. You don’t even have enough stamina to register who’s holding onto you so reassuringly. Whatever is happening gets hazier by the tick of a clock. It’s either you’re hallucinating or Minho is giving you that mirthful scowl of his. 

Yep, you’re definitely hallucinating.

“Why didn’t you call in sick for work?”

“That’s a stupid fucking question.”

A frown adorns his perplexed features as his glassy eyes skim your face. He has a really pretty smile, he should smile more, you think. His hand latches onto your burning forehead, slides down on the side of your cheek with such grace as though he’s caressing you. A grumble leaves his lips at your dreadful state. This is why he should have never let you go in the first place. 

“Come on, kid. Let me help you,” Minho says before giving your arm a light tug.

You don’t like what you just heard. “I don’t need your help.”

“You can barely walk.”

“Who said so-” As if on cue, he lets go of your arm bluntly. Caught off guard, your legs go weak without any remaining strength. You stumble and would have most likely fallen on your face if it weren’t for his grip on your arm. A gasp comes out inaudible when he hoists you upright, not planning to let go any time soon.

Minho scratches the tip of his nose with his ring finger, sniffing lightly. It seems like he’s arguing with a younger version of himself. He now knows how it felt like for those caretakers back then. 

“You did,” he says with the same smirk when you woke up in his apartment for the first time.

seven.

That’s the only time you’ve ever allowed someone to help you with something. But Minho had to constantly check on you every two seconds, not wanting you to fall asleep on his bike while it’s speeding down the highway like a gust of wind. For a moment there, he really thought you would slip away into the night as he tried to find his keys because that’s just how you are. 

Minho is no doctor, but he doesn’t go to one for a cold or a really bad fever. He can manage, he tries to convince himself. 

After testing your temperature and giving you something new to change into, he slaps a cool gel patch onto your forehead before heading off to the kitchen to cook up something. You need to be full to be able to take your medicine anyway.

In the act of resting on his bed, you decide you can’t take staying in the same spot anymore so your body perks up in a sluggish manner. The aroma of home-cooked food wakes your senses almost immediately, causing you to look over at his busy figure by the marble counter. You think it’s endearing how he hasn’t bothered to change into something more comfortable. But he instead threw an apron over his working attire and dived right into the cooking process. 

You have always felt like you were missing out on something whenever you looked at Minho. Perhaps it was how his striking eyes stared at you, whether mischievous or else. Perhaps it was how his lips were turning down most of the time with less than affectionate words. 

Or it’s plainly how he has been trying to hide that he actually cares. 

“Hungry?” He tilts his head to the side playfully once his sixth sense starts kicking in. 

You can only nod. “Yeah.” 

It takes Minho a lot of convincing yet you won’t let him feed you. Like hell, you would. Therefore, with helpless eyes, he watches you from across the table. He doesn’t laugh or get annoyed when your shaky hand drops the spoon and splatters the soup all over the table. His hand simply reaches for a piece of paper towel to clean up the mess, tossing it into the trash bin later. The same cycle repeats in comforting silence until you finish the entire bowl. The soup definitely wasn’t five-star worthy. But it’s enough to warm you up inside and out. Of course, Minho chooses to let the dishwasher do the job—his hatred for doing dishes is always at its finest. 

Then, like the other night, he has already passed out on the table with a blanket draped over his body when you step out of the shower. Instead of plopping the weight of your exhaustion onto his bed this time, your legs stay frozen like cement on the floor while your eyes take in his reclined figure under the thin fabric. Minho is sleeping with his head buried in his arms, his glasses and messy files abandoned to the side. He’s definitely not a heavy sleeper because he doesn’t snore; only feather-like breaths can be heard through this endless beat of silence. The faintly blinking light from his laptop makes you feel exposed so you push yourself toward the balcony. 

A hiss comes out hushed and quiet when your feet come into contact with the cold tile floor, bringing you across the studio apartment with small tiptoes. You peer over your shoulder, gazing at the only available source of light. Unconsciously, you ball your fists. 

With a soft sigh, you slide open the glass door and step out to bathe yourself in the comfort of the moonlight. Despite the chilling air of the night, something warm fills up your lungs like an overflowed cup of wine. It suffocates you a little until the knots in your muscles and mind loosen; a sense of relief washes over you—you haven’t felt that in years. 

Nothing makes sense. 

A hitman hired by your parents shouldn’t be putting a roof over your head, tucking you into bed nor feeding you. Minho barely knows you; and your knowledge about him as a genuine person isn’t enough to convince you that this is reality. Because after years of wandering the streets, being tossed around like trash with plenty of a series of unfortunate events, you’ve made it a habit to sink into yourself. 

So the longer you stay here, the more you’ll get attached to him. And the more you get attached, the more he takes away your default instincts to turn your back on everything.

Guilt wells up inside your chest as though it’s an old habit, a setting by default. If you ever try to go over the moderate line, you will break. 

Holding back a croaked sob, you know that once you let it go, tears will only start flooding. With a push of your muscles, you effortlessly hoist yourself up the metal railings in one go. The wind combs through your hair like an empathetic hand but you ignore it, Minho’s sweater closing in on your skin. 

You should leave, you try to urge yourself. You should jump off and dive into the depths of the night, let the allure cradle you in its emotionless arms. 

Because after all, despite all those eyes on you out there, you’re ultimately alone within. 

A foot dips out into thin air once the slump in your shoulders goes weightless. Immediately after, an incredible force pulls you by the ankle, and to the ground with a loud thud. Minho falls onto his back harshly, groaning slightly with you on top of him.

He knew what you were trying to do, he saw it the other night with his own eyes. Even under the knowledge of your capabilities, Minho still feels a rush of panic rising inside his chest. It’s only until his arms fully have a hold of you does his racing heartbeats slow down. Supernatural abilities or none, you’re still sick. And he’d be losing his mind if he woke up to an empty bed tomorrow morning. 

“Don’t ever do that again,” he speaks with trembling vocal cords, in a tone you’ve never heard before. Strict but mellow. As though there’s a race inside his mind but he’s desperately trying to keep his cool. It’s fear. The moment he’s introduced to the idea of losing you—it’s genuine fear. 

“Minho, I can’t die. Didn’t I tell you—“

His grip squeezes you in a breath tighter, cutting you off completely. “The fuck were you thinking? You can’t just jump off the balcony like that!”

“I already told you. I can’t die. Minho, I’ve done that plenty of times before,” you furrow your brows in a troubled manner, unsure of how to react. 

Minho widens his eyes at you in sheer disbelief. Shock riddles his senses and gets the best of him. So now he’s fussing with his hands, incoherent profanity leaving his lips non-stop within the next thirty seconds or so. He’s usually very calm, collected, calculating, and cold. This is very unlike him. It makes you wonder why he’s acting this way. He knows that you can’t die from jumping off a building. So what’s there to worry about? 

“You’re such an idiot! Try doing that again and I’ll kill you with my own-“

You truly don’t know how important you are to him. Frankly, he hasn’t even realized that yet. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, pulling him closer. Since you’re bad at resolving any kind of conflict, you opt for the most rational solution—going with his flow until he’s calmed down. “I won’t do that again, promise.” 

His lips fall agape at your words. He wasn’t expecting that. And even when you see how he’s reacting to your sudden change, you decide it’s no time to back down. This might be the only time you could show him that you’re at least grateful for everything he’s done. 

He’s quieted down now. And when he manages to speak again without tripping over his own words, his voice comes out as a whisper. “Hey kid,” he looks down at you, wanting to stroke your hair but drops his hand in sheer defeat. “You didn’t answer my question earlier. Why didn’t you call in sick for work?”

“Who would do my job when I’m gone? Isn’t that irresponsible?” You exhale deeply before fluttering your eyes close, finding odd peace within the rhythm of his heart. 

Minho says pointedly, “Well, you could have asked someone to help you with it.”

“No one would help me.”

“How’d you know? Have you tried asking them before?” 

Your eyes shoot open and flicker around your surroundings, you’re at a loss for words for a split second there. Heat rushes to the apples of your cheeks in shame, your head hung terribly low. “I’m not used to asking for help. I’d hate to be a burden,” you confess. 

Innocence glimmers in your eyes when you look up at him, waterlines threatening to break any second now. Your lashes are slightly damped and how lost you’re looking right now can physically draw crimson on his heart. At the end of the day, you’re just a kid. You had to grow up the hard way, with no one by your side telling you what’s right and what’s wrong, even simple things like how to react to non-verbal affection. 

Don’t let her go, Minho. Not now. Not ever.

“Then fix it now.”

“What?” You pause. 

“If you need help, ask for it. If things are hard, say it. I’ll be there to give you a hand.”

Tears well up in your eyes, croaked sobs shake your body, only prompting him to pull your closer. It’s warm. Damnit, why is it so warm? “I-I can’t sleep. Sing me something?”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

Minho just knows that he would bleed with you even when the rain pours and the sky falls one day.

[writingsforanyone]

Forgotten Fling 5/7

pairing: Y/N x Brett Talbot

warnings: blood, guns

A/N: here’s part 5! the last two parts will be coming out soon, so be on the lookout! i have also decided that i’m going to go back to part 1 and rewrite a few parts of it. i realized that there’s probably a few things that i need to clarify, and that it would best be done in part one. i’ll make a note on here whenever it’s updated!

+++++++++++++

You knew tonight was a full moon. Not only a full moon, but a supermoon. You had told Brett earlier in the day that he could call you if he needed anything, or if he just needed you to be there. He didn’t like to call you on nights like these, in the rare case that he wolfed out and hurt you. You had found out you were his anchor a while ago, right around the time you found out about the supernatural in the first place. Brett was very good at keeping himself in control, but every werewolf had their slips, and it didn’t help that today was a supermoon. That meant that Brett would become stronger, angrier, and have a much harder time controlling himself. 

The sun was setting, and you were in your room watching TV. You looked out your window at the moon that was already very visible in the salmon skyline. You were torn with yourself on whether or not you should go to Brett’s. He hadn’t called or texted you, but you knew he probably wouldn’t unless it was an emergency. You decided to send a simple text and ask how he was doing. When you still hadn’t gotten a text back 30 minutes later, you were growing very worried. As you were getting up to start putting your shoes on, you got a text from Lori.

Are you busy? 

Not at all, what’s up?

It’s Brett. The supermoon is effecting him really bad and he won’t calm down. He told me not to text you but I didn’t know what else to do

Hey, don’t worry. I’m on my way

Thank you. We’re in the shed out back

You finally put your shoes on and grabbed your stuff, running out of your house and into your car. You sped to Brett’s house, where he lived with Lori, Satomi, and a few other members of Satomi’s pack. When you got there, you headed around the house to the shed that was in the backyard. Satomi had the shed specifically for this reason, in case a member of her pack had trouble on a full moon. You walked in, not bothering to knock, and were shocked at what you saw. Lori was crouched in a corner, looking scared to death, Satomi had a cut across her cheek that was in the process of healing, and in the middle of the room was Brett, halfway chained to a pole. He had broken one of his arms out of the chains, and was pulling at the other restraint on his other arm. His claws, fangs, and eyes were all out and every prominent, but he wasn’t completely wolfed out, which you took as a good sign. You hesitantly made your way to the middle of the room, calling Brett’s name. At the sound of your voice, he looked up, and growled,

“Y/N? You shouldn’t be here.”

“When do I ever listen to what you tell me what to do?” you responded lightly, knowing that talking to him normally would help him focus on you.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he growled again. 

“And I don’t want you to hurt anyone else,” you said. At that, he pulled at the restraints again, growling. You slowly walked over to Satomi and asked her quietly,

“What’s wrong with him? He’s never been this bad.”

“I can’t say. I haven’t seen him struggle this much in a long time,” she responded.

“What can I do?” you asked.

“Get him to focus on you. It will make him human,” she told you. You nodded and slowly made your way over to Brett, standing just far enough to where he couldn’t reach you.

“Brett?” you said, “Can I ask you something?”

“What?” he said, louder than you were expecting.

“Why didn’t you want me to come out here tonight?”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, not as loudly as he had been a few seconds ago.

“That’s not the reason. I know you won’t hurt me. What’s the real reason?” you said. He seemed to hesitate as he thought about his answer, which was what you wanted him to do. You wanted him to think more on his answer instead of thinking about hurting you. 

“I don’t want you to be scared of me,” he finally said, no longer growling and sounding like his normal self. You heart broke slightly at his answer, but you tried not to let it show. You walked closer to him and placed your hands on his cheeks. You brushed some of the hair that had fallen onto his eyes away as you said,

“Sweetheart, I will never be scared of you. I know that you’re doing your best to stay in control, and if you were to hurt me, it wouldn’t be on purpose. You hear me? I will never be scared of you Brett.” At your words, you saw Brett’s fangs slowly retreat, and looked down to see his claws had also gone back to normal. His eyes were still yellow, but you knew he was calming down and regaining control. You stood on your tiptoes and kissed him slowly, and he kissed back immediately. When you pulled away, you saw that his yellow eyes were gone, and his beautiful green eyes sat in their place.

“Feel better?” you asked. Brett nodded, before you heard Satomi clear her throat behind you. You had almost forgotten that the Alpha and Lori were in the room because of how quiet they had been. 

“The connection between the two of you is remarkable,” Satomi said. You felt your cheeks flush, as did Brett’s, and then Satomi motioned for you to untie the remaining restraint that held Brett’s arm. When he was free, he walked over to Satomi and placed his hand on her cheek, where he had previously scratched her.

“I’m so sorry,” he said to her. She placed her hand over his and responded,

“I healed, and you’re in control now. That’s what matters.” Brett nodded before turning around, looking for Lori. She had stood up and had made her way to stand next to you. Brett moved to give his little sister a hug, and she hugged him tight. Finally, he turned to you and wrapped his arms around your waist in a hug. You reached up and snaked your arms around his neck, holding him tight.

“Thank you,” he whispered to you. You nodded in the crook of his neck before pulling away, the four of your walking out of the shed and towards the house. You stayed the night with Brett that night, holding him until he fell asleep, not wanting to be anywhere else.

You don’t know why you had been thinking about your most recent dream all day, but the reoccurring thought hadn’t left your mind since you woke up. The school day was now over, and you were trying to get some studying done in the library before the charity game tonight, but you couldn’t bring yourself to focus on anything except last night’s dream. After your last encounter at Sinema, you didn’t know where you and Brett stood. To make matters even more complicated, you knew Brett was going to be at the school tonight, considering that Beacon Hills was playing Devenford Prep. The pack was trying to get the game canceled, because of The Beast that had been lurking around recently. No one wanted to take the risk of playing the game and putting the entire town in danger. You knew even if the game was canceled, you would probably still end up seeing Brett tonight, but you had bigger problems to worry about than that right now.

“Y/N,” you heard from behind you. You turned to see Scott, Stiles, Lydia, and Liam walking into the library, heading straight for your table. 

“Hey guys. What’s the plan for tonight?” you said as they all sat down around you. 

“Well, Mason said it’s not just a transmitted frequency. It’s high powered. Like it has to be a really strong signal,” Liam said.

“And that’s causing it to shift?” Lydia asked.

“No. I don’t think it’s just that. Last night, Argent said it’s getting smarter. What if the Dread Doctors are trying to make the Beast grow faster?” Scott said.

“With frequencies?” Stiles asked, to which Scott replied with,

“No, by shifting. The frequency is just the trigger. The important part is when it shifts into the werewolf.”

“Like Peter,” Lydia said.

“Right. Yeah, when Peter was an Alpha, he got stronger every full moon. Eventually, the burns healed and he was back to normal,” Scott confirmed. That’s when you butted in and said,

“So the Dread Doctors don’t want to wait for the full moon.”

“They want the Beast to be as strong as possible, as fast as possible.”

“Because of Parrish,” Liam said.

“So if this is happening tonight, what are we gonna do?” Lydia asked.

“Uh, we’ve got one clue to go on,” Stiles started as he pulled something out of his backpack,

“This came from the hospital. Whoever’s lurking inside the Beast is wearing a size 10 of indeterminate make.” Everyone looked down at the picture of the bloody shoe print before you said,

“Indeterminate?”

“Means it’s a partial print. Basically it was all we were able to get considering all the fire, blood, and carnage.” Stiles responded.

“How many size 10s are there?” Scott asked.

“Only one with Parrish’s blood on the sole,” Stiles said.

“So are we going to try to get the game cancelled?” Liam asked. 

“No, no. we’re going to play, but we’re just going to hope really hard that it doesn’t turn into a blood-soaked massacre,” Stiles answered, albeit sarcastically.

"Okay but, aren’t we kind of missing out a chance to catch this thing? We don’t have the ‘who,’ but we have the ‘where’ and the ‘when,’” Liam asked. Everyone paused and looked around at each other. Liam made a good point, but was it worth the risk? Scott seemed to be thinking the same thing, and said,

“There’s too many people.”

“And we still don’t actually know if it’s going to happen. It just might end up being a regular lacrosse game. It’s possible, right?” you asked, Lydia nodding in agreement.

“Well, uh, it’s possible,” Stiles said.

“So we’re still getting the game canceled?” Liam asked

“We’re getting the game cancelled,” Scott said confirming his question.

The five of you got up and headed out of the library in your own separate directions. You and Liam headed for your car so you could run to your house for a little bit. Liam needed to get his lacrosse gear and you wanted to change, and on the way home, Liam asked a weird question,

“So, are you going to talk to Brett tonight?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you going to talk to him? You two seemed like you were getting along better a few weeks ago.”

“I don’t know Liam. I have no idea where we stand right now, I won’t even know what to say,” you said.

“Why don’t you start with ‘Hi’?” Liam asked.

“Since when are you the one giving me advice?” you said laughing. Liam laughed with you before saying,

“I’m serious. Talk to him.”

“Maybe.”

______________

A few hours later, you pulled back into the Beacon Hills High parking lot and parked in one of the only available spots left. Almost the entire town was here, and that made you nervous for what might happen. You and Liam got out and headed towards the field, where you saw Scott and Stiles getting out of the Jeep. You jogged over to met them, and saw that they were turned around looking at something in the distance. When you looked over, you saw that they were looking at the Devenford Prep charter bus, and more specifically, the player getting off of it. Brett. All of a sudden, the stadium lights all came on one by one, lighting up the entire field as if the sun was out and shining. You also saw the news vans scattered around the field. You made your way towards the school with the boys, to the classroom where you were meeting the others. When you arrived, you saw Kira, Malia, Corey, and Mason all sitting around a lab table in the chemistry classroom. Scott immediately jumped into the plan for the night and said,

“Mason, you know your part.”

“Corey and I break into the Devenford Bus and search their shoes,” he said nodding.

“I take out the TV vans,” Malia chimed in. 

“Right before the whistle, Coach forfeits the game,” Stiles said.

“The rest of us are looking for a size 10 with a bloody sole,” you said. 

“Just out of curiosity, what if it doesn’t work? What if we have to go up against this thing? I mean I hate to bring up back memories, but Scott’s still healing from what Theo did to him” Malia asked. 

“No he’s not,” Kira said.

“She’s right,” Scott confirmed. He pulled up his jersey to reveal a completely healed torso, with no signs that he had ever even been touched.

“It happened the night we got Lydia out of Eichen House. I healed. When we were all together again; when we were a pack.”

“The Beast doesn’t have a pack,” Liam said. 

“Not like us,” Scott said, looking around at everyone at the table, 

“We can do this guys. No one dies tonight.” You all nodded in agreement before heading out of the room to the field. Malia made her way towards the news vans, Mason and Corey headed towards the Devenford bus, and the rest of you walked towards the field. As you were able to head up the bleachers to find a seat, Scott stopped you.

“I talked to Brett earlier. He said Lori can help you search the bleachers for shoes.”

“Oh okay. You were with him?” you asked.

“Yeah only for a second when they got here. Lori should be somewhere around here,” Scott said.

“I’ll find her,” you said before making your way up the bleachers. You were able to get a better view of the field, and you saw the young werewolf walking around the field towards your side of the bleachers. You made your way down and over to her, where she greeted you with a hug. The two of you made small talk and caught up as you made your way back to the bleachers. Just as you were about to sit down, Stiles came running up to you and said,

“Coach isn’t forfeiting the game.”

“What?” you and Lori said at the same time. Stiles had run off by then, leaving you and Lori confused. You heard the whistle blow and turned your attention to the field where both teams were running out, and saw Brett and Scott squat in the middle of the field. Just like that, the game started, and you and Lori were able to get away without alerting anyone’s attention. You started walking under the bleachers searching all of the shoes for even the smallest speck of blood, and after 20 minutes of searching, nothing. Knowing that there was nothing else the two of you could do for the time being, you both sat back down for the third time that night and watched the game. 

You watched Kira score a goal, taking down half of the Devenford team in her path. She was playing very rough, and you were growing worried about what was going on. A few plays later, you watched Brett tackle her, and she fell to the ground. Immediately she was back on her feet, and swung her lacrosse stick, striking Brett on the head. You gasped as you shot down the bleachers. You watched his helmet fly off his head as he fell to the ground. You knew you couldn’t go onto the field, but you watched from the sidelines as Kira was kicked out of the game, and Liam helped Brett to his feet. Kira stormed past you and Lori, and Scott stopped next the two of you. He nodded at Lori and she ran off after Kira, but as you moved to go after her, Scott stopped you. 

“Go see Brett,” he said. He knew you wanted to check on him, but you also wanted to make sure Lori didn’t get hurt. You were debating and Scott could tell, which is why he said,

“She can take care of herself. Go see him.”

You nodded before taking off towards the opposite side of the field, where the guest benches and bleachers were. You saw Brett sitting alone on one of the benches, still looking a bit disoriented. As you were walking, Brett turned towards you. You could see a smile spread across his face, which caused a smile to form on yours as well. You sat down next to him and said,

“Why do you always seem to get hurt when I’m around?”

“Maybe so I have an excuse to talk to you,” Brett responded. You laughed lightly before asking,

“How are you feeling?”

“A little hazy, but I’ll be fine,” he answered. You leaned over a little to get a better look at his forehead where he had gotten hit.

“If you weren’t a werewolf, that would leave a nasty bruise,” you said.

“I can already feel it starting to heal, I just hope I can get back in the game.”

“You’re Brett Talbot. I guarantee your back in the game in like 5 minutes,” you said to him. You hadn’t realized how close you were to his face, but Brett seemed to have noticed right away. You could have sworn you saw him glance down at your lips, but you might have been imagining things. You involuntarily glanced at his as you were having an internal conflict with yourself. Your head was screaming at you to stop, while your heart was screaming at you to go for it and kiss him. Right when you were about to go with your heart, the Devenford coach called Brett’s name. You snapped back into reality and said,

“I told you,” you whispered as you started to pull away. The two of you stood up as you said, 

“Try not to kill us out there.”

“I can’t promise anything,” Brett said with a chuckle.

“Talbot!” his coach yelled at him; he was clearly growing impatient. Brett grabbed his lacrosse stick and helmet, and started jogging over to the Coach. As you were turning around to head back to the other side of the field, Brett called your name. You turned around and he asked,

“Come see me after the game?”

You smiled and nodded, watching him jog back onto the field, playing as if nothing had ever happened. 

Throughout the rest of the game, you, and the rest of your pack, were growing more and more nervous. The Beast hadn’t shown up and Devenford was close to ending the game, and none of you had any idea what to do. You hadn’t seen Kira or Lori since they both ran off, nor had you seen Corey or Mason, or Malia. Scott had run off, Brett and Liam were getting into it, and Beacon Hills had called a timeout. Eventually, Liam had evened up the score, and the game went into overtime. You were cheering so loud for your little brother that you hadn’t even realized that the news vans had just about exploded from the feed back.  You closed your eyes and winced from the loud noise, and when you opened your eyes, you saw Liam charging at the school busses, and The Beast was flying over the busses right at him.

“NO!” you screamed out. You ran down the bleachers towards your brother, someone hot on your heels. You figured it was probably Hayden, and you realized it was when you both came to a sudden halt. The Beast threw Liam to the ground, and ran towards the bleachers. When you turned back to Liam, there he was, bleeding profusely from what seemed like every inch of his body.

“LIAM!” you and Hayden yelled, running over to him. He was struggling to breathe, and he wasn’t healing, which in turn just made you freak out even more. You saw someone running towards you in your peripheral vision, and when you saw that it was Stiles, you moved to help Liam up. 

“Liam, come on we have to get inside. Can you walk?” you asked. Liam yelped in pain before saying in a strained voice, 

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” Stiles went around the other side of Liam to help him stand, and Hayden led you all into the school. Everyone from the game was in the process of running into the school, so when you all found the first available classroom, you took it. After knocking off the contents of the desk, you and Stiles laid him down on top of it. Liam kept repeating ‘I’m okay’ and ‘I’m fine’ over and over again, but by the tone of his voice and the blood pooling out of his chest, it was very clear that he was not fine. You moved to peel up his jersey to look at the damage, and at the sight, Stiles gagged.

“Is it that bad?” Liam said, sounding nervous.

“No!” you and Hayden said at the same time, while Stiles went in the opposite direction and said,

“Very.”

“Okay. Okay, what do you guys usually do when this happens?” Hayden asked, not have nearly as much experience with this as the rest of you. 

“Oh, I usually pass out. And I still might do that,” Stiles answered as he started swaying.

“Stiles! Not the time!” you said, grabbing his arms and forcing him up straight.

“Okay, Okay. Scott did this with pain. He could trigger it. Pain makes you human,” Stiles said.

“He’s already in pain,” Hayden said, sounding annoyed.

“Right, okay, but maybe adding a little more could help take away the pain,” Stiles said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Just then, Liam yelled out in agony, not being able to hold it in.

“Take away the pain. Take away the pain,” you mumbled under your breath, before saying out loud,

“Hayden, you’re the only one who can take his pain away,”

“How do I do that?” Hayden said frantically. You didn’t know how to answer that. Both you and Stiles were human, and had no idea what to do in terms of taking someone’s pain.

“Y/N! Did Brett ever take away your pain? How did he do it?” Hayden said, needing an answer fast. You thought about it before saying,

“He would kiss me. He would kiss me and it took the pain away.” As soon as the words left your lips, Hayden kissed Liam, and you saw the vines in her cheeks turn black as the pain moved from Liam’s body into hers. When Liam laid back down, he seemed much more at ease than he was before, and Stiles said,

“Next time I’ll kiss him.”

“Brett,” you whispered to yourself, before it clicked in your head that you hadn’t seen Brett since you left him at the bench.

“Oh my god. Oh my god. Where’s Brett?” you said, panicking once more. 

“I’m sure he’s fine, he’s probably in one of the classrooms,” Stiles said, trying to calm you down.

“You don’t know that Stiles,” you said loudly without meaning too. Without thinking, you headed for the door and threw it open, ignoring everyone’s calls for you to stay in the room. You knew it was dangerous to leave the room, but you had to find him. Who knows where he was, or who he was with, but you knew you had to find him. You ran from classroom to classroom, looking inside each of the windows to see if you saw him. You had no idea how many doors you had looked in or hallways you had ran through when you heard a roar coming from the direction of the library. You ran in the opposite direction, down a hallway that you hadn’t checked yet. Finally, you looked into a room and saw a sea of green lacrosse jerseys, and the tall head of blonde hair that belonged to the boy you were looking for. You pulled the door open, which caused everyone in the room to turn towards you looking frightened. When Brett saw that it was you, he ran towards you, and you ran to meet him. You leapt into his arms and he caught you with ease, holding onto you like you were going to disappear into thin air.

“Oh my god, you’re okay,” you whispered into his ear.

“I’m okay. I’m right here,” he whispered back. He set you on your feet before asking,

“How did you know I was in here?”

“I didn’t. I was across the school helping Liam when I realized I didn’t know where you were and I just ran,” you said, seemingly out of breath after running across the entire high school. After saying that, you realized you should probably text Stiles and let him know you were safe. You pulled out your phone and texted him, and almost immediately got a text back, which read

Library

“We need to get to the library. That’s where the Beast is, and that’s where Scott’s going to be,” you spoke lowly, not wanting the rest of his team to hear you.

“It’s not safe. Stay in here. I’ll come back for you,” Brett said

“You’re an even bigger idiot than I thought if you think I’m staying in here,” you said, and with that, you grabbed Brett’s hand and pulled him out of the door towards the library. You saw Liam, Malia, and to your surprise, Braeden running in the same direction. You met with them in the middle, and Braeden wordlessly reached for her ankle and unstrapped her drop gun. She thrust it in your open hand. Brett squeezed you hand before letting go and running towards the doors, Liam right behind him. The second they saw the Beast, they jumped towards it, striking it in the head, before being thrown to the floor. You, Braeden, and Malia followed suit, you and Braeden aiming anywhere on the Beast’s body, and shooting. After having enough of getting shot, the Beast ran towards the floor-to-ceiling window and jumped through it, leaving everyone in the library out of breath and terrified. Malia and Liam moved to help Scott up, while Braeden stood there and said,

“You didn’t seriously think you were going to have a chance against that thing did you?”

“No,” Scott breathed out, “But I got its scent.” he finished as he ran out of the library with Liam hot on his tail. In the moments that followed, you had given Braeden back her gun, you and Brett had left the library, and the two of you were now walking towards the empty lacrosse field. Brett had left all of his belongings when he ran, and as the two of you were walking he said,

“You didn’t have to walk with me if you didn’t want to you know?”

“Aren’t you the one who asked me to come see you after the game?” you retorted back, making him chuckle. 

“Can I ask you something?” Brett said, to which you nodded, prompting him to continue.

“Why did you come looking for me?”

“I told you, I didn’t know where you were,” you said, hoping he wouldn’t push you further. Wishful thinking.

“I know that, but why did you leave?” he said. You hesitated. Should you tell him you were scared that he was hurt? That you wanted him to be safe? That you were freaking out over the thought of not knowing if he was okay?

“I just- I- I needed to know you were safe okay?” you finally threw out, slightly louder than you had anticipated. You stopped walking and closed your eyes, taking a deep breath before starting again.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.” You started fast walking towards the bench, when Brett grabbed your hand and spun you around, and said,

“Hey, hey, hey. Slow down. Why are you freaking out? You heartbeat is going like a mile a minute right now.”

You sighed, trying to gather all of your thoughts so you didn’t  say something you regretted. 

“I don’t know,” you finally said, looking up to meet Brett’s eyes for the first time since this conversation started. Brett moved his hand from yours and brought both of his hands to rest on your cheeks, before saying,

“You want to know something? Right before you came through the door of that classroom, I was searching for my phone so I could call someone, anyone, who might have known where you were. The guys kept telling me to calm down, and that you were probably okay, and then you walked through the door.”

“Why didn’t you just call me?” you asked, confused on why he wanted to call your friends, rather than just calling you.

“Someone still has my number blocked,” he said lightly, easing the mood. You let out a breathy laugh, before saying,

“Oh yeah. I wasn’t sure if I should unblock it or not”

“You should. Now come on,” Brett said, moving to grab your hand again and led you to where his bags were. You sat down on the bench while he started gathering his stuff, putting all of it in his bag. He started stripping off his lacrosse gear, leaving him in a tight workout shirt and his uniform shorts. Once he had everything tucked away in his bag, he sat down next to you. The two of you sat there in comfortable silence, until,

“Can I ask you something else?” 

“Sure,” you said, curious as to what else he wanted to know.

“Do you still hate me?” The question took you by surprise, and you contemplated with yourself before saying,

“No. I don’t think I ever hated you.”

“It sure seemed like you did that day you walked away,” he said tentatively, not wanting to start an argument.

“You had just told me I had to chose between you and my little brother. I was mad. I was mad for a long time. But I don’t think I ever actually I hated you. I don’t think I ever could,” you said. You weren’t sure why you were telling him this, but it had to come out at some point, right?

“You know, I tried to stop you from walking away. I wanted to take back everything I said, but it was too late. I tried to call you that night, but I think you had already blocked my number,” he said. You could feel him looking at you, but with the words that were falling from both of your lips, you couldn’t bring yourself to look at him just yet. You were staring off into the night sky when you said,

“Yeah, I blocked it the second I got home that day. It was easy to do in that moment since I knew I wasn’t going back to Prep, so I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences.”

“You know why I started an argument with Liam when I got off of the bus, that day last year? Because I knew that if you were anywhere around us, you would’ve come to stop it. I wanted to see you. I didn’t want to pick a fight with Liam, I just wanted to see how you would react to seeing me,” Brett let out. For some reason, this made you smile, and you said,

“It just took a lot for you to admit that didn’t it?” Brett let out a breathy laugh and said,

“Even over a year later, you still know me better than anyone else.”

“Yeah, well, there’s some things I could just never forget,” you said, standing up. You knew the Devenford Prep bus would be leaving soon, and it seemed like Brett did too. Brett stood up after you and grabbed his lacrosse bag, before he reached his hand out for yours. You looked at his outstretched hand and back up at him, before biting back a smile and lacing your fingers through his. It wasn’t a new feeling by any means, but a feeling that you hadn’t experienced in quite a while. The two of you started walking towards the parking lot in a comfortable silence, and after a few minutes, Brett spoke up again.

“You know, I never got the chance to apologize. And I mean really apologize for what I did back at Prep. I never meant to make you chose between me and Liam. I was angry and I took it out on you, and I’m so sorry.” 

That was what you had been waiting for. An apology. You knew that you and Brett were in the process of mending your friendship (or whatever it was), but the one thing you wanted was an apology from him before you forgave him. 

“Thank you. That means more than you know. I always wanted to bring it up and ask if you really meant it, but I think I was always too scared to say anything.”

“I didn’t mean it. I promise I didn’t,” Brett said. By that point, the two of you had reached your car, and you were expecting him to let go of your hand when you stopped walking, but he made no move to pull away. You turned towards him and nodded, before saying softly,

“Apology accepted.”

This brought a smile to Brett’s face, and unbeknownst to you, lifted a huge weight off of his shoulders.

“Promise me that you’ll be safe? I know that with everything going on its hard, but I need you to be okay,” Brett said, slightly pleading with you. There was the ‘promise me’ phrase again, the one that used to be so prominent between the two of you. You nodded and looked up at him, saying,

“I promise. Promise me you’ll stay safe too, and keep Lori safe.” Brett nodded, a small smile playing on his face. All of a sudden, you heard someone yelling from behind you, the sound coming from the direction of the Devenford Prep bus.

“Talbot! Stop playing grabass and let’s go!” You both turned around to see one of Brett’s teammates leaning out of the bus doors. You chuckled and shook your head, before turning back to Brett and asking, 

“They haven’t changed a bit have they?”

“Not at all,” Brett answered. He then let go of your hands and hesitantly moved to wrap his arms around your waist, hugging you. You reached up and brought your arms around his neck, pulling him in the rest of the way. You had missed Brett’s hugs; the way you felt safe in his hold, the way he would lean his head into the crook of your neck, the way he would slightly sway the two of you back and forth, the way he would barely lift you off your feet because of the height difference. Neither of you wanted to let go right away, so neither of you did. You stood there in each other’s embrace for as long as you could. It was your way of conveying all of your emotions to each other, without having to say a word. When you finally started to pull apart, Brett pressed a kiss to your forehead before pulling away completely. You felt goosebumps run down your back at the lack of body warmth. You both said your goodbyes, before you watched Brett walk over towards the bus. You weren’t quite ready to get in your car, and it seemed Brett wasn’t quite ready to get on the bus, because you saw him turn towards you one last time, as if to make sure that he hadn’t been dreaming for the last hour. He definitely wasn’t dreaming, because you were right there, smiling back at him as he climbed the steps to the bus. 

When the bus doors finally closed, you got in your car and started the engine. You still weren’t quite ready to pull off, so instead you pulled your phone out. You went to your contacts, and scrolled until you found Brett’s name. You clicked the contact name and proceeded to unblock the number, before sending a short text that read,

hi :) 

You felt content as you put your phone away and pulled out of the Beacon Hills High parking lot.  The long overdue conversation you had just had with Brett put you at ease, and had settled a lot of your worries. However, it also made some new thoughts float around in your mind. It made you wonder if you had made a mistake walking away that day, instead of talking it out. More importantly, it also made you wonder if maybe the feelings you had developed for Brett months ago weren’t as one-sided as you thought they were. Maybe he was just good at hiding them. 

[alarawriting]

52 Project #25: Where The Winds Of Limbo Roar

... it is a point of pride to me that I never reuse a title, not even between fanfic and original fic. The title of this almost certainly should be “Veteran of the Psychic Wars”, except I already titled an X-Men AU fanfic that, so I pulled the title from another part of the lyrics.

Story derived from a prompt from @writing-prompt-s. I’m not putting a link on a story as long as Tumblr search is so broken that it excludes posts with links, so check the reblog to my main blog @alarajrogers for the full credits.

***

When their guard patrol passed the building where the psychics sat or laid on their mats, deep in their meditations, Soffrees snorted. “Look at that,” he said, pointing a thumb behind him at the windows of the battery. “We go out on the front lines and risk our lives. They sit in an air-conditioned room, or they nap in it, and they get served their food without even getting up to go get it… and they get paid three times what we do. What the fuck, man?”

“I know, right?” Baslicos chuckled grimly. “Be born with telepathy! Get the whole world handed to you on a platter! Join the army, get pampered like it’s a resort for rich old ladies!”

“What do they even do that’s worth that kind of money?” Soffrees shook his head. “They tell us ‘they defend us from psychic attack.’ Well, you know, I wear this chain—” he took out his charm chain, with his tags and all the charms on it, and waved it a bit – “to protect us from attacks from pink hippoceroses! And see, it works great, because when was the last time you were attacked by a pink hippoceros? Now gimme more money!”

“I knew a guy in basic training, always used to claim he was under psychic attack. Turned out he was just nuts, man.” Baslicos turned the corner – and ran straight into a tall, heavily-muscled man in a top brass uniform. She backed up. “Oh, sorry, sir—” and then her eyes went wide, as if registering who he was. “General Marcus! Sir! I apologize for running into you, sir!”

Marcus waved a hand. “At ease, private, no need to fall all over yourself apologizing. Just watch where you’re going next time.”

“Sir,” Soffrees said, almost reverently. “Can I tell you what an honor it is to meet you, sir? I went into the army because of the stories I heard about you!”

Marcus was a 60-something man with a shock of white hair that apparently rank and age allowed him to get away with not combing into regulation haircut or shaving; it was wild and bushy on his head. There was a small black bird sitting on his shoulder. Stories had it that he had been in combat since he was a young child; that he was immune to psychics; that he’d single-handedly captured the commander of the Ferlan army and forced them to surrender, twenty years ago… and many other stories that made him legendary. “I agree, sir!” Baslicos said. “It’s an honor! You’re a great hero!”

“You kids,” Marcus said, shaking his head. “You focus on the wrong things.” He gestured over at the psychic battery. “I heard what you two were saying about the psychics. You talk about what a great hero I am because I’ve been out on the front lines my whole life, but you don’t even think of who supports you, who lets you go out and serve without poking your own eyeballs out of your head.”

“Sir, I’ve never met anyone who’s been attacked by psychics,” Soffrees said.

“Sure you have. Right now. Me.”

“You? Uh… wasn’t that a long time ago, sir?”

“It sure was,” Marcus agreed. “Because for the past twenty-five years or so I haven’t served in an army that didn’t have a psychic battery, and because I’ve trained my own abilities so even when I’m outside battery range, and inside the range for an enemy battery, they can’t get through. But that’s me. Just two years ago at Fire Heights, we lost five soldiers to a psychic attack when an enemy missile took out our battery. You never heard about that?”

“I was in Basic at the time, sir,” Soffrees admitted.

“I, uh, hadn’t signed up yet. Sir.” Baslicos looked down for a moment as if she was ashamed of not having served for even as long as Soffrees.

“Well.” He motioned the two guards over to the grass on the side of the building. “You’re relieved for a bit. Sit your asses down and get educated.” He turned to the bird. “Find Lieutenant Kallimik and tell her to assign two guards out here for the next hour or so to cover for these two – what are your names?”

“Private Soffrees, sir!”

“Private Baslicos!”

“Right. To cover for Soffrees and Baslicos, because I’ve got them.”

“Two guards. Cover for Soffrees and Baslicos. Asshole,” the bird said.

Marcus sighed. “Not asshole. Can we just forget I ever called Kallimik that?”

“Birds don’t forget. Asshole.”

“Not asshole. If I hear you relayed ‘asshole’ you don’t get any bacon tonight, you hear me?”

“I’m Falli. I love bacon. No asshole.”

“So what are you telling Kallimik?”

“Two guards. Cover for Soffrees and Baslicos. Not asshole.”

“Just go deliver the message,” Marcus said wearily, and Falli flew off. “Messenger corvids. ‘It’s better than sending an encrypted message on a bird’s leg!’ ‘You can train a corvid to carry the message to the right person and not deliver it to anyone else!’ ‘Corvids recognize faces and telepaths can’t read them!’ I miss the days when we sent columbines. Those birds weren’t smartasses.”

“Sir, columbines can’t talk. How did you send messages?” Baslicos asked.

Marcus raised an eyebrow. “What do they teach you kids? We’d tie coded messages on paper to their legs, or give them tiny backpacks to wear. I know, corvids can be given more destinations, they’re smarter, and if they’re shot down, the enemy can’t get the message off of them. But columbines make pretty coos, not wiseass comments about an offhand remark you unwisely made about a subordinate one time.” He sat down on the grass, next to a patch of dirt left from too many people taking shortcuts, and patted the ground. “Come sit, privates.”

Somewhat awkwardly, the two soldiers sat down. “What are we doing, sir?” Soffrees asked.

“Getting yourself an education. You think the psychics aren’t important? Aren’t worth protecting, because they’re not doing anything as serious as what you guys on the front line do? I’m going to tell you about the psychic attack I survived, that no one who was with me did.”

The two soldiers arranged themselves in respectful positions. Their opinions were their opinions, but both of them practically hero-worshiped General Marcus, and if he had something to say to them, they’d listen raptly.

***

“It was during the War for Independence. We’d been moving in from two directions to secure the Gap – I know you soldiers know where the Gap is, right?” In the dirt, with a short pencil he’d had in a pocket, he drew a squiggle for a mountain range, a gap of a few inches, and then a second squiggle. “We were here and here—” He drew X’s in front of the two mountain ranges – “and then they came pouring through the Gap before we could get there.” Extra scribbles to demonstrate the enemy, as a funnel with the narrow bit through the Gap and the wide part between the two X’s.

“Now we had the numbers, between our two groups, that we could have crushed the Monarchists, if we moved fast enough that we could prevent them from getting reinforcements through the Gap. But they had far too many soldiers for either of our groups to defeat them on our own. We had to coordinate the attack. Problem, of course, was the large mass of enemy soldiers between us.

“We sent out several messenger birds. Columbines, in those days. I don’t know how many. A lot. None of them came back. Back then, we had a lot fewer telepaths and they weren’t as well trained. We couldn’t get a message through by psychic, either. If we were to have any hope, a team of people was going to have to cross through enemy territory, deliver the message, and then back, with confirmation.

“Captain Noori picked me and three other soldiers as her crack team to get the message through. Their names were Anders, Caprikin, and Starros. That doesn’t mean anything to you, I know. You look at me as a hero, because I’ve survived. I fought the Willel when they conquered my homeland. I fought for the Demos here in Danza. I fought in every war we’ve had since, and I lived. So I’m a hero. And Noori, Anders, Caprikin and Starros are forgotten. They shouldn’t be. They were bigger heroes than me; they gave their lives to the cause. They were people, like all of you, not numbers.

“Anders and Caprikin fought the Willel with me. I was eleven when Anders and I started doing occasional sabotage, but we didn’t get really effective as guerrillas until Caprikin joined us. He was short – so short, and so baby-faced, he looked eight when he was thirteen, and he looked like a Willel, and he could speak their language without an accent. He’d find a soldier alone, or two soldiers, near an alleyway where we could hide, and he’d pretend to be a Willel boy who’d lost his mother. Sometimes it didn’t work. Willel soldiers could be brutal. One time one of them struck him with the butt of his rifle, in the face. It wasn’t safe or easy work by any means. But when he succeeded at it, when he distracted them and they got involved in trying to help him, we’d come out of the alley with our knives and the guns we’d stolen off the bodies of the last Willel soldiers we’d done this to, and that was that.”

He chuckled, remembering. “The wild thing was that he looked like this innocent lost lamb, but Caprikin was the funniest, most foul-mouthed son of a bitch you would ever have served with. He always had a wiseass comment for any situation. Me, I have no sense of humor, so I don’t even remember any of his jokes… it was years and years ago, but it upsets me. Why didn’t I write this stuff down when I had the chance? Why did I trust to memory?... You soldiers need to write things down. Take pictures. The people you’re fighting beside right now, they’re going to be a part of your life until you die, even if they died forty years ago. Even if you don’t like them. You’re all going through hell together; that forms a bond you’ll never forget, but you’ll forget the details. You’ll forget their faces, you’ll forget the jokes they told…” His voice drifted to a stop as his gaze went far away.

“Sir?” Baslicos prompted.

Marcus’ eyes came back into focus. “…oh, here’s something I remember about Caprikin, but it isn’t a joke. We signed up to fight the Monarchists, all three of us together, and the sergeant doing the recruiting said Caprikin couldn’t join. He was too small, too weak. He’d get killed. So he put on one of our travel knapsacks – even heavier than yours, we had literally everything we still owned in them. Must have been 50, 60 pounds. And he politely asked the sergeant if he could demonstrate his skills, and asked the sergeant to come at him. The sergeant was a big bruiser of a man; he laughed, but he did it… and Caprikin used his momentum to lay him out flat on his back. Sergeant didn’t say a single word against him signing up, after that.

“Anders was a lot more serious than Caprikin. Very quiet fellow, very restrained. He was a low psychic, though, and when we figured out what he could do, when we were eleven, that was when we started risking ourselves to fight the Willel. That, and they’d just killed his father. He could send out a… targeted wave of ‘don’t notice anything.’ You know the fellows with the low psychic ability ‘don’t notice me?’ Where they can walk right past you and unless you’re blocking psi, you don’t even see them? Anders was a little more powerful than that. He could make it so everyone around him, in a donut-shaped range where we at the center wouldn’t be affected, would just… stop noticing anything unusual. We two, and we three when Caprikin joined us, could just run past a few guards, covered in blood and carrying weapons, and they wouldn’t even look up.

“By the time he was an adult, Anders had a lot more control over his field, so he was generally sent out on scouting parties. He used it on leave and on the rare occasions when we weren’t in an army to go exploring. Bird watching. Used to draw them. When he started as a kid he had some talent but by the time he was a man he was amazing. You’d have thought those birds would fly off the page. He drew other things, too, things from nature, always. He refused to draw pictures of any of us. Said he wasn’t good enough. I wish he had.

“Starros… she was such a strange one. Some people called her “the Robot” because she hardly ever showed emotions in her tone of voice. More or less everything was a harsh monotone, unless she was really happy or excited, and then it was a bubbly high-pitched monotone. She had an amazing poker face – her face just never changed, no matter what her hand was – but I learned her tells. She’d drum her fingers on her knees, under the table, and when she was anxious, she’d drum faster. Starros wasn’t interested in romance, or sex – didn’t even much like hugging, and she’d just stand around looking confused and embarrassed if you said something like ‘You’re a damn good friend.’ She didn’t get any of that. But she’d kill or die for her friends. If there were five rations and four people and Starros and they were her friends or comrades, she’d tell them to take the last ration and divide it out. She’d drop whatever she was doing to help you. Didn’t know how to say ‘I love you’ or ‘I like you’ or even ‘You’re my friend’, but she’d drive the getaway car through the flames of hell and crash the gates of the Demon Emperor’s palace to get you out, and cover you while you were running for the car.

“Anders and Caprikin and I spent our childhood fighting; she spent hers studying weaponry. Reading about it. Reading about war. She was obsessed with it. I don’t normally think book learning is ever a match for experience, but in her case… I guess it depends on the book, and how many of them you read, and how close you read them. Every weapon any of us used, she knew how to clean it, how to take it apart if it was a thing you could take apart, how to use it and more importantly when to use it. Any weapon the enemy used against us, too, and she knew all their strengths and weaknesses. Funny thing was, for all she knew about guns, she couldn’t shoot one worth a damn. Couldn’t aim it. I never saw her hit the broad side of a barn. But give her something she could hit the enemy with – a cudgel, a knife, a sword, even a morningstar – and she was amazing. You couldn’t stop her.

“We were – well, I’m not going to say we were the best of the best. I don’t know that. But I can say we were some of the best, and that’s why Captain Noori picked us to accompany her.

“Noori, now. She could shoot. She was an amazing sharpshooter – could take the tuft of feathers off the head of a flying cardinal. She fought in the resistance against the Willel, too; she was in a re-education camp at one point, when she was a child. They tried to strip her of her religion, her language, her culture, and what they got was a lifelong enemy. She got her start shooting messenger birds with her slingshot as they crossed over her city, taking them down with rocks. I think she was doing that when she was nine. Even younger than I got my start.

“In combat she was incredible. She’d stay absolutely in control, all the time. Starros might have seemed like a robot out of combat, but in combat she’d scream, she’d shriek and howl and groan just like most of us do. Whereas I never heard Noori make a sound she hadn’t decided to, not in a fight, not until the end. You couldn’t hear her move, either. In darkness, she turned invisible – you couldn’t see her with her dark skin and her dark uniform, and she didn’t make a sound when she walked. We joked she’d been a cat in a past life.

“Out of combat, though… she could be tough, as a leader, but back then there were a lot of female soldiers who thought they’d impress the rest of us by being tough all the time, never show any emotion but anger, and Noori was never one of those. She was always as kind as she could possibly be to civilians, and if she saw a kid in trouble, she’d help – with us watching her back, of course, because Anders and Caprikin and I all remembered how we’d used that against the Willel. She cried when the battles were over and we counted up the dead; she’d walk among them and say their names and whisper prayers for every one of them, with tears running down her face. One time, one of the privates was upset because he couldn’t write his mother a letter; turned out it was because he’d never learned to read or write. She’d come to the barracks at night and work with him, taking an hour or two every night to teach him.

“We’d have willingly followed Noori to hell. Which is what we ended up doing.”

He lost himself for a bit then, but caught his thread back before either of the soldiers had a chance to try to prompt him. “We were going to cross the Gap along the mountain range line, where the Monarchist presence was as narrow as it got, but of course their presence was thicker there than elsewhere, so we ended up having to spend a day moving around the edge of the territory they held to get to a place that was favorable for us to cross through.” With the pencil, he drew the movements he and his squad had made, against the rough map he’d already drawn in the dirt. “And then the second day, it rained. Well, of course, when you’re trying to sneak across enemy territory, rain’s usually to your advantage, so we made good progress, until the wind whipped up and it was just one step short of a hurricane. We had to dig ourselves a bunker and take shelter in it until the wind died down.

“What we didn’t know was that this was going to smash up one of the Monarchist barracks to the north of us, so they’d called in help from their people south of us. Of course, that meant we ended up running into the Monarchists marching north. We saw some combat, then. The point to sending a tiny group of five soldiers across enemy territory is to make it more likely that they don’t get caught, obviously, because five people can’t fight off an entire army. If it wasn’t for Anders’ ability and the fact that there are a lot of natural caves in that area, we’d never have made it. We had to hide out in a cave. The Monarchists searched for us for five days. We ran out of rations, had to drink from a muddy spring in the cave. By the time they were finally gone, we were… not in good shape.

“So we were less careful, on the rest of our journey. We had to steal food, since we were out of rations, and we weren’t covering our tracks as well as we’d been. Anders was overpsyched, couldn’t hide us anymore without terrible migraines, and he was tough and loyal, he’d have tried, but Noori wouldn’t inflict that on him. She decided that our best strategy was speed. And that meant we couldn’t pussyfoot around trying to sneak around a sentry or two; we just needed to kill them and keep moving.

“By the time we got across the Monarchist territory and back into Demo-held lands, the entire Monarchist army on this side of the Gap knew about us.

“We knew it was going to be hard, getting back across the Gap. We knew we’d made it hard for ourselves by racing across the territory, killing every Monarchist we ran into. But our window was closing; messenger birds from our spies and sympathizers said that there was no more than two weeks before Monarchist reinforcements spilled into the Gap. It was a four-day trip across the Gap if you didn’t have to take a day to detour around enemy territory and you didn’t have to hide in a bunker for a day and a cave in five more. Our comrades over here couldn’t give us more than a week to get the message across. And we’d have no way to get the message back here that we had, or hadn’t, gotten the message to our people.

“The message was that our partners on this side of the Gap were going to move in a week. And they were taking a leap of faith, because if we didn’t get the message through to our side in time, if our side didn’t mobilize and join them in a pincer movement to crush the Monarchists, these Demos would be crushed themselves, and we’d be next. No matter what it took, we had to get the message across in a week.

“Of course we knew better than to send people with secret information in their brains; we knew the enemy had telepaths. I’m sure you all know about me – it’s hardly a well-kept secret nowadays that I’m a blocker. They hypnotized the others, our psychics putting blocks in their head so they wouldn’t be able to remember what the message was until we got back to our side. I was the only one who remembered – but they all knew I knew it, so when I told them how much time we had to get the message through, they knew it was important.

“We had five days.  Five days, to make a trip that took us eleven on the way in.

“They sent us with Elias, a combat psychic. Now, I see that look on your face. You’re wondering, if there’s such a thing as a combat psychic, how come our telepaths in the battery don’t go out into the field? Why don’t we have combat psychics?”

Soffrees said, “Uh, I wasn’t going to interrupt you to ask, sir, but… yeah, why don’t we have combat psychics? Sir.”

“The answer is, we do, but you haven’t met any yet, because the telepaths in the battery are so much more powerful than a combat psychic could ever be. Combat psychics have to worry about being hungry, having to pee, watching where they’re walking, not getting killed by enemy fire… put it this way, can you read a book while you’re walking? Through enemy territory? When you might be sniped at any moment, and there’s trees all around you could walk into? Trust me. Psychics are a lot more effective when they’re free to meditate in silence and use all of their mind on their power. We don’t need combat psychics right here because the battery right over there—” he pointed back at the building with the psychics in it—“puts up a wall of psychic defense with such a large radius, none of you have yet been deployed out of it.

“But we needed Elias, because the moment we crossed an invisible line, a short distance into the territory they’d claimed, he reported that the Monarchist psychics were after us.

“Anders did everything he could do. Elias did what he could do; I didn’t know him well, but he was a good man. Noori, Caprikin, Starros and me did our best to protect them both so they could devote more of their brainpower to shielding us.

“The Monarchists had destroyed forests and farms, turning a lot of the countryside into wasteland where you could see straight to the horizon, but they couldn’t do anything about the fact that technically, the Gap is still part of the mountains, just a part that sank low enough that now there are hills and crags and rocks set into the earth, all over the terrain, instead of mountains. We made as much use of terrain cover as we could. Did our best to avoid getting caught by anyone, because we knew the moment we killed a sentry to silence him, their psychics would be on us. Elias and Anders were protecting us by making it so the psychics couldn’t tell exactly where we were, but the enemy had battery telepaths; there was no way Elias and Anders could stand up to an attack by high psychics in a battery.

“We were a day from the border, a day away from home, crossing through some very rocky territory, when they found Elias.

“I don’t know what he saw. He screamed, and wouldn’t stop, to the point where we had to gag him to keep him from summoning the enemy from all around. Anders tried to surround him with his field, but it was no good – the high psychics in the enemy battery had locked onto him already. We had to abandon him, to try to outrun their ability to triangulate on us next. Never saw him again, not even as a name on the rosters from prisoner exchange when we finally beat the Monarchists, so… I’m pretty sure he died there.

“We ran. We tried to find a vehicle – a car, a carriage, maybe a horse – that we could steal and make better time, but we couldn’t find anything before they found us. For a few hours the others saw hallucinations – it was Starros who confessed to it first, saying she kept seeing her mother and older brother calling her, and then everyone but me mentioned they were seeing them too. They didn’t all admit to who or what they saw. We knew this was bad – hallucinations meant they were catching us in the edge of their effect, and that meant they were focusing in – but what could we do? Anders tried, for all the good it did us, but all that happened was for half an hour he didn’t see any visions. He was far, far too overpsyched by then to fight them off in any meaningful way.

“On a grassy plateau surrounded by sheer rock on one side and a relatively small drop on the other, they zeroed in on us, and attacked, full force. The others all started screaming, and dropped to the ground, all of us but me.

“Noori was crying for her parents – she seemed to be remembering how she was taken away from them and thrown in a re-education camp – but then she started shrieking, ‘No! No!’ She got up, backed away, and ran – straight into the stone wall. And then she just kept getting up and running into the stone wall, over and over. I tried to pull her away, to stop her – she was smashing up her face, there was blood and contusions all over her head – but when I grabbed her and bodily dragged her, she fought me like I was one of the monsters she was seeing, and then she broke free of me – after breaking my nose and two fingers – and slammed into the wall again.

“Starros thought the ground had become glass. Very, very fragile glass. She kept screaming at all of us to get to safety before it broke, it was going to break. I think she saw her family members, and maybe friends of hers, fall through the glass. There couldn’t have been anything good underneath it. She was sobbing, begging us to get to safety before the glass broke, crying because she couldn’t save us. She thought her weight would surely break the glass if she went out on it to try to rescue us.

“Caprikin thought he was covered in – something. I don’t know. Spiders? Snakes? He thought they were all over his skin and pouring out of every orifice, and he stripped naked and started ripping at his skin with his nails, trying to get whatever it was off him. Then he started screaming about how they were burrowing into his skin, they were inside him, and he started throwing himself at the ground, over and over… and I couldn’t stop him, either.

“And Anders just calmly put his own eyes out with his thumbs, pulled out his tongue and bit it off, grabbed a long, thin wire brush we used to keep the equipment clean and shoved it into one ear as far as he could push it, and then farther. I don’t know if he actually managed to pierce his brain with it, but he fell over unconscious after that.

“But I’m a blocker. I wasn’t touched. I can’t project. I couldn’t make a field around my friends like Anders could. But they couldn’t touch me.

“Almost.”

He sighed deeply. “I hated that, you know. Sometimes you think the weirdest things in combat. I saw my friends writhing and screaming and going mad all around me, and if I could have saved them, I’d have been grateful for my blocking ability. But I couldn’t. So all I could do was watch them suffer, under an attack that left me be, and… part of me wished I wasn’t a blocker. That if we were going to die, we would all die together. Stupid, I know. And the duty ahead of me wouldn’t allow me to die with them if I could help it, under any circumstances.

“I had to leave them. I was alone, with no support, with four friends that were dying of madness, and I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t even help them. I figured I could maybe knock them unconscious and hopefully they’d be better when they woke up, but if I did that, I couldn’t keep moving with them. If I left them behind, they’d be captured or killed. If I stayed with them, I’d be captured or killed. And I was the only one with the message, the vital message that would drive the Monarchists out of the Gap if I got it through, and would result in both groups of Demos being massacred if I failed.

“I didn’t have the strength to put them out of their misery. Emotional strength, not physical. I had a gun, I could have done it, but I couldn’t make myself end my friends’ lives. I rationalized, telling myself, maybe they’d be captured, maybe we could ransom them back with a prisoner exchange. Telling myself I didn’t need to kill them, because even if they were taken captive, the secret was buried in their brains deep enough that the enemy psychics wouldn’t be able to get it out. Like that was the only consideration. Like I wasn’t dooming them to dying horribly of their madness, or being executed by the Monarchists.

“I knocked Caprikin out, and Noori. Anders was already out, and Starros hadn’t done herself any physical damage, so I didn’t need to knock her out, and I wanted to leave her with maybe the ability to defend herself? Maybe, if the psychics let up, she could… do something?

“I was lying to myself, of course. The psychics wouldn’t let up. They’d peel her brain, looking for the secret, since the other three were unconscious. Wouldn’t find it – our psychics were good, they knew how to bury an encoded secret properly – but that wouldn’t stop them from trying. And if a squadron of Monarchists found them, she wouldn’t be able to fight back – she wouldn’t even be able to leave the tiny bit of land she was squatting on, the only safe place she thought existed.

“I left my friends behind, and I ran, because so many more of my friends would die if I didn’t.

“I mentioned that I was almost immune to psychics. I’m not a blocker in a battery, though, with a whole team of projecting blockers with me. I was just me; they had a battery. So they managed to break enough of my walls loose that they made me hallucinate, like they’d made the others hallucinate before. I saw my friends, dripping with blood, asking me why I left them behind, saying they despised me for abandoning them. My family, during the occupation, and the things the Willel might have done to them after they disappeared and I never saw them again. I could see the real world, faintly, behind the hallucinations, so when enemy soldiers turned up, I was able to fight them. But the psychics made me see them as something else. I’d blow a man’s head off, and he was Caprikin, back when we were boys. I’d stab a woman who was trying to stab me, and she’d be Noori.

“I’ve been fighting in wars all my life. I’ve seen so many dead. Lost so many friends, lost my family – I’m used to grief and horror. I walk with it every day, I see it in my dreams. So they couldn’t break me. They tortured me the entire way back to our camp, and a few times I was almost killed because I was too distracted by illusions to fight back, but they couldn’t stop me, no matter how much psychic force they turned on me. The only reason they didn’t hit me with overwhelming real-world force was that I was blocking them too hard – they didn’t know where I was the way they’d known where my friends were. They could reach the edges of my mind, but they couldn’t get in deep enough to know where to send soldiers after me.

“I got back through the border and I got the message through and you know how the Battle of the Gap went. But I didn’t fight in it. As soon as I got the message through, I broke. They weren’t still attacking me, but they’d poured so much poison into my mind, now it was attacking itself. All the guilt I felt at leaving my friends behind, all the guilt I’d always felt at being the only member of my family to survive, and the thought that maybe they were taken because the Willel knew about my resistance activities, and went to my house to get me, and took my family instead because I wasn’t there… I heard my family denouncing me, telling me I’d gotten them killed. I still saw Noori and Anders and Caprikin and Starros. Sometimes even Elias. Other friends I’d lost over the course of the wars I’d fought. I was 27 years old and I’d been fighting since I was 11. I’d lost a lot of friends in that time.

“It didn’t stop until the battle was over, until they were able to get me in front of a high psychic on our side who was able to bury most of the damage. Not remove, not eliminate, not cure… bury. I still see those things, sometimes, as nightmares mostly, or when everything’s quiet and I’m trying to sleep. I’m in my 60’s now. It’s pretty clear to me that I’ll see those visions until I’m dead. I’m used to them now but they still horrify me.”

The two soldiers’ eyes were wide. “Sir, I… I’m sorry,” Baslicos whispered.

“We didn’t know,” Soffrees said.

“Of course you don’t. If you take a medicine for your headache, and it’s so good you never get a headache, sooner or later you might get to thinking, wow, I don’t have a problem with headaches anymore, why do I have to keep taking this drug? That’s human nature.” He stood up and brushed off his pants. “They should have taught you in Basic, and I’m going to have to see about our training programs for new recruits. They need to make it clear what the psychics do. Because those men and women in there? They find spies, and bombers with ‘you don’t see me’ powers. They root out enemy secrets. They’re an early warning system, they know when enemy forces are approaching. And they protect you, every day, from horrors that could melt your mind. Because that’s what psychics do, in a combat battery. They find the enemy and they drive them insane. Ours, theirs, all the psychics do that And all of them protect their people from the enemy psychics who are trying to do the same thing.”

“I thought that was supposed to be a war crime,” Baslicos said tentatively. “Driving the enemy insane?”

“It’s not. They debated it, but in the end, it’s not. Because you can’t tell the difference between a man that the psychics peeled for information and a man they just deliberately drove mad – both are going to act the same level of fucked-up, and none of the world’s nations want to give up the advantage being able to use psychics to read prisoners for information would give them.” He shook his head. “You ask me… it should be a war crime. Our psychics should be defending us, not doing that and trying to break the enemy at the same time. But, it wasn’t my call, and that’s how war goes.”

He lifted his head backward, gesturing at the battery. “Those poor bastards in there, they burn out. One slip-up and an enemy psychic might get into them, rip their minds apart. And even if that never happens… they do their tour and then they’re haunted for the rest of their lives, because they committed atrocities, and they know it, and they felt it from inside the minds of the people they were doing it to. Or, even if they didn’t… they felt it when it happened to our soldiers, the people they’re protecting. You think they’re being pampered? Just because someone’s taking care of their bodies? They’re shitting in diapers and they can’t even feel it. Someone feeds them mush, like they were infants, and they can’t feel it. They’re on the front lines, with their minds, the whole time they’re in there.”

“We didn’t know,” Soffrees repeated.

“You do now, private. So make sure you tell everyone else you know, if it comes up. You defend those people with your life. Because if it wasn’t for them… there are worse things than death, and I’m telling you, these are the people who will save you from those things.”

He motioned their relief over. “You guys can go back to whatever you were doing; I’m releasing Soffrees and Baslicos back to their watch. Tell Lieutenant Kallimik I want my bird back.”

“Sir, your bird called Lieutenant Kallimik an asshole,” one of the two guards said.

“Goddamnit it.” Marcus facepalmed. “I told that bird. Yeah, okay, tell Kallimik I’ll see her in person to get my bird back before she eats it, and you can tell Falli I said no bacon tonight. Not one little bit.”

“We’ll let the Lieutenant know, sir,” the other guard said, and the two of them marched off, as Soffrees and Baslicos resumed their patrol, and the General went wherever he’d originally been going.

[swiftlymoniquesblog]

You and Me and You- Winchesters x OC Miliana

Masterlist | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

A/N: Hi friends! I’m sorry I haven’t been updating anything in so long! Life has been crazy! Work was chaotic, I went out of town for my birthday last month, yes the one I was supposed to spend with the SPN cast :(, and I moved towns. I’m currently in a temporary living environment as my family searches for a new place! So yeah, I’m so sorry I haven’t been around. On top of that, the mobile app has been so freaking glitchy and it’s super annoying. I’m not on my laptop as much but it might be worth it to read more fics! I hope everyone is well and please, send feedback! 

Xxx Monique

Word Count: 2,420

Chapter 3- 1997- Miliana’s POV

It was just another day in high school for me. I didn’t think I was all that special, yet everyone wanted to be my friend. I tried to keep to myself since I wasn’t like any normal sixteen-year-old. No, I was raised by the infamous supernatural hunter, Bobby Singer. Yeah, that was a fun childhood. He was always in and out of the picture but he made sure to show me and tell me how much he loved me. It did help too when the Winchester Brothers would come to stay with me. They were good friends of mine but their Dad kind of went a bit crazy. He found one monumental case up in like Canada or somewhere, packed up all his things, including his sons, and off they went. It’s been six years since I’ve seen them. My Dad tried to stay local for all his hunts since he believed girls can’t and shouldn’t be hunters, and I guess that makes sense, considering a demon killed his wife, but still, I grew up in this life; I understand it. Jody and her friend Donna, who also is a Sheriff, would come by and bring some of the girls they would take in. Just to help them out, kinda like what Bobby did with me. They’d come around when my Dad had a case that wasn’t close to home and it’s not like I’m not old enough to stay at home alone; Dad just gets freaked out.

“So Miliana, you’re almost done with your sophomore year now. How’s that feel?” Jody asked me one day when she and Donna came to stay with me. They brought some girl, Jessica, to stay with us too but I didn’t like her.

“Oh, I’m excited but I’m also ready just to start junior year,” I admit.

“Why’s that, kiddo?” Donna asked.

“Well, there tend to be more ways to get involved in junior and senior year…” I trail off my thoughts, avoiding the real reason I couldn’t wait to be an upper-class woman.

“You mean there’s a prom once you become a junior?” Jody gave a knowing look.

Damn, she was good. Yeah freshmen and sophomores had dances but they were separated from the juniors and seniors and we didn’t get the same respect as they did.

“Well yeah,” I admit, sheepishly.

“That makes sense. Plus, you’ll feel older and feel like nothing is impossible.” Jody said, clapping a hand on my shoulder.

She was exactly right. I loved Jody like she was my Mother. She kind of was, given the fact that when it came to girl stuff, she would be the one I called. My Dad would just get all embarrassed and wouldn’t know what to do. You can probably figure out how my first period went; awkward.

“Hey, I have to get going. I’m on the planning committee for this year’s end-of-school-year dance, as they call it for us lower classmen. I have to meet before and after school so I won’t be home until late!” I yell as I’m grabbing my backpack and rushing out the door.

“Don’t forget to call before you leave school so I can alert your father! Jody called, as I scurried out the door.

“Yeah!” I yell in response as I run out the door and down the driveway to meet up with my friend, Sandy. She was already further in life than I was. Sandy came from a wealthy background; Daddy paid for everything. She had a boyfriend, was gifted a car on her sixteenth birthday, and was already planning to attend college. She would be turning seventeen the first week of June so she was already “older” than the other sophomores.

“Hi, Sandy!” I say as I throw my bag in the back and off, we went.

“So, you won’t believe what I heard!” She starts with the daily gossip that was floating around campus before we even get there! This was a routine for us. Sandy would come to pick me up and would tell me all the latest drama before we even get to school. She’s very into other people and for the most part, this school doesn’t do a lot in private.

“What’s up today, Sand?” I ask. I was the only one allowed to call her that. She hated being called Sand but for some reason, we’re friends and I can call her Sand. Normally, you wouldn’t think two girls like us would be friends, but I stood up for her when some other “popular girls” were getting in her face, so I threatened to give all of them high-calorie snack bars, and they all backed off. Oh, that’s another thing. Almost all the girls at this school are on a low carb, no fat diet. They mostly ate salads all the time and ate like rabbits, which is why Sandy and I became friends. We both have high metabolisms so we can eat like pigs and never gain any weight; all the other girls are jealous.  

“Jared Kingston and Carly Wright are having an extremely public break up on the quad; again.”

“Jesus, again? Isn’t this like the twelfth time they’ve broken up?” I ask. Jared and Carly were your typical power couple; Jared, football captain, Carly, head cheerleader.

“Thirteenth.” Sandy corrected me.

“Don’t they get tired of all the drama? And for the love of God, can they not be so public about it?”

“Well, you know how Carly is. She thinks MTV is going to walk in one day and do a reality show off her non-existent singing career.” Sandy and I laughed. You sing a solo in the seventh-grade talent show and suddenly, you’re a professional singer.

“Hell, if anyone is a singer, it’s you, Mills. Get it?” I just scoff at Sandy’s lame joke, playing off my last name being Singer, and before I knew it, we were at school.

We parked the car and began grabbing all our stuff when a real sleek classic black car drove up to the front of the school. Parked rather crooked, two young boys got out of the car and everything around me suddenly came to a halt. I knew that car. I didn’t get a chance to see them because there was a thrall of students surrounding the car. Jared and Carly’s break up long forgotten, as guys were impressed with the car and the girls were impressed with the boys who came from that car.

“Whoa, who do you think they are?” Sandy asked me, snapping me from my thoughts.

“No one worth our time. Come on.” I say, strutting off, but not before I got the feeling one person was staring at me. We got to homeroom Spanish and chatted away with all our friends before Mrs. Ramirez came into the room.

“Clase, cálmate (“class, settle down)!” Mrs. Ramirez had the philosophy to speak in Spanish and have us try and figure out what she saying until she ended up having to tell us anyway. Not sure this was a very useful way of teaching but this what she did.

“Buenos días clase, tenemos un nuevo alumno. Este es Sam Winchester.” (“Good morning class, we have a new student. This is Sam Winchester.”) My head snapped up; it couldn’t be.

“Saluda a Sam.” (Say hello to Sam.)

“Hi, Sam.” A very few students had bothered to say hello to the new student, who was ushered to sit down in the only open seat in the class; next to me.

“Hey, I’m Sam.” He says, sitting down, but not making eye contact with me. I didn’t know what to say so I just kept quiet, hoping he would remember me.

“Do you not…holy shit. Miliana?”

“Hi, Sam,” I say, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear.

“Wha-what are you doing here?” He asks me in surprise.

“I should be asking you the same.”

“You never left Lawrence?” He whispers/asks.

I shake my head. “You know how my Dad felt about a girl being a hunter. He didn’t want me to have to see that life once I reached high school. Said I needed every normal high school experience I could get.”

“Well Miliana Singer, you are far from normal.” He said, causing heat to suddenly appear in my cheeks.

“Sra. Singer, Sr. Winchester, ¿tiene algo que quiera compartir con el resto de la clase? (Ms. Singer, Mr. Winchester, do you have something you want to share with the rest of the class?).”

“No Sra. Ramirez (No Mrs. Ramirez)” We both said in unison, our attention now on the lesson.

“¡Bien, entonces ciérralo! (Good, then zip it!)” As the rest of the class went on, I couldn’t help but steal glances from Sam. He was exactly how I remember him but he grew! He must’ve hit a growth spurt somewhere in those six years since I saw him last because he’s a freaking giant now. His hair is longer now too. He occasionally would flip it out of his eyes and it would send a whiff of his cologne and his natural “Sammy scent” as Dean used to call it, my way. His eyes were a mix of green and brown, like the color of the trees right before they begin to change color for the fall. And his smile was a big and bright and contagious as ever.

“Señorita Singer, ¿le gustaría resumir la Constitución española? (Miss Singer, would you like to summarize the Spanish Constitution?).

“Um…” I trail off but a voice spoke up.

“España es una monarquía y trabajan para mostrar la importancia de la libertad, la justicia, la igualdad y el pluralismo politico. (Spain is a monarchy and they work to show the importance of freedom, justice, equality, and political pluralism.)” Sam responded in perfect Spanish, to which everyone in the room took notice of.

“Muy Bueno señor Winchester. (Very good, Mr. Winchester). To which Sam just winked at me. Holy crap, what was happening here? How has he gotten more attractive all these later? And what is he doing in tenth? Wasn’t he supposed to be a freshman? He’s fifteen after all! I don’t know what his game is but I’m going to figure it out and figure out why he’s back in Lawrence. He got out! Why would anyone want to come back here?

The bell rang, indicating the end of the class and the prime time to catch up with Sam. However, with him being so tall, once he grabbed his backpack, he was out the door in a flash.

“This boy!” I said in my head. Keeping up with him was going to be a struggle considering I’m only 5’6. Rushing out the class, I zig-zag through the crowded halls, looking for that floppy head of hair. Finally, on almost the opposite side of campus, there he was. He was lucky to have a top locker but I guess because he’s so big, it makes sense.

“Sam!” I yell, just a few feet away, but quickly catching up.

“Millie, hey.” He said smiling that perfect smile but using my nickname; the only my closest friends and family can call me. It was weird hearing him say it since he feels like a stranger now.

“Miliana,” I tell him.

“What?” He looked a bit stunned that I corrected him.

“It’s Miliana. Only my closest friends and family get to call me Millie and since you left…” I instantly regretted it when the words fell off my lips but there it was.

“Ah yeah, I guess I kind of deserve that, especially since we didn’t even get to say goodbye,” Sam said, slowly nodded his head as he understood why I was hostile.

“Yeah, no offense but your Dad is kind of…” I say but he interrupts me.

“A douche? Yeah, I know.” Sam said, knowing all too well how I felt about how his Dad just ripped him away from me. “How’ve you been?”

“Good, surprised to see you here. Actually, why are you back in Lawrence?”

“Well Dad figured to move closer to home for a while but Dean still loves the hunter life so he and my Dad go out on a lot of cases.”

“Are you left alone a lot?”

“Oh yeah, but I’m going to living close to your Dad. There’s a small little house that is just up the road from where you guys are so I figured I’d stay there.”

“So, you’ll be around more often?” I tried to hide my hopefulness but I knew Sam; he could tell.

“I hope to, at least until graduation.” He grinned at me and my heart fluttered. Stop it, Miliana.

“By the way, how are you a sophomore? You’re fifteen!”

“Oh that. Well, I’m pretty advanced for my age so they set me up as a sophomore.”

“I’d say you are pretty advanced; you speak Spanish fluently!” I comment, still being stunned that he spoke so effortlessly. “Why are you taking a Spanish class if you’re that fluent?”

“Eh, I needed it for credit so I thought it would be the easiest A I could come by. Plus, I have separate assignments than the rest of the class.”

“What?”

“I’m an in-class tutor. When Mrs. Ramirez can’t tutor students in need of some extra attention, she looks to me. Turns out, a lot of the class is struggling so we made a deal; I tutor and learn all her lessons, I get the credit.”

Okay, Sam was so much cooler than I remember him being. He is so sweet and caring and smart and, oh no, I can’t be falling for him. No way, no! We had one little incident when we were kids but that was it; we were kids! We didn’t know what love or crushes were then. I cannot be falling for my childhood friend.

“You good there, Miliana?” Sam said, bringing out me of my thoughts again.

“Yeah, I’m good, thanks.”

“You sure? You looked like you were thinking about me shirtless or something.”

That son of a bitch! “What? Pssst. You wish Winchester!”

Sam just chuckled and shook his head but grabbed some more books out of his locker and set them in his bag, patted me on the shoulder, and bid me farewell. Shit, I’m so screwed.

 (Reference for the Spanish Constitution because I don’t plagiarize: Smith, Carr, Spain. Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. 2020 16 August. 2020 18 August. https://www.britannica.com/place/Spain)

Forever tags: @fandom-princess-forevermore @simpleb00x @juju-la-tortue @forever-trapped-in-my-dreams 

Taglist: @tlovescoffee @tykezparkerstark

Taglist requests open! Inbox open! Ask open! Requests open!

[chiauve]

The Man in the Dark - 2

“That’s enough TV for today,” Ally’s mother said, glaring down at her daughter the couch potato.

“But it’s a new season,” Ally argued, but at another look from her mom she paused her program and exited to the home screen before the remote was straight up taken from her and she lost her place.

Her mom had that look.

“I got a call from your teacher this afternoon. She says you haven’t been turning in your homework.”

Because she hadn’t been doing it, but Ally knew better than to say that. She also knew better than to argue that it was boring because adults didn’t care that it was boring just that it was important and had to be done. Instead of denying it or arguing Ally just gave a shamefaced pout.

Her mother sighed. “Alright then, until your grades are back up, no more TV and from now on I’m taking your phone and tablet after dinner. You can have them back in the morning before school.”

That got her attention. Ally spun around on the couch, facing her mother with large, beseeching eyes. “But I need my tablet if I’m gonna do homework!”

“You can use the family computer so you don’t get distracted.”

“But—“

“That’s final, Ally. You don’t need to be chatting with your friends or making videos that late anyway.”

Ally slumped back down into the couch, arms crossed and almost ready to throw a tantrum if she wasn’t aware she was too old for that. Spending her night hours stuck at her homework was a fate worse than death. Unless she could fake getting it done first...

“It’s easier to do my homework at Dad’s work. Can I go there after school instead? Until I do better?”

Her mother eyed her a minute and then shrugged. “All right. I’ll ask your Dad if he’s okay with that.”

“So I can keep my tablet tonight?”

“Fine, we’ll see how things go, but no more TV tonight.”

“Yes, mom.”

--

Back in her room, the door safely shut, Ally flipped through the photos of her recent foray into the basement levels on her tablet, mostly the ones from the bottom-most level. The large, empty room was intriguing in its emptiness; there were slats in the floor for something, and large chains lay discarded. It sent shivers down her spine looking at them even in the comfort of her bed.

Finally she reached the pictures of the keypad with its single little red light. Why was it still active? The entire floor was dead, even the water pipes and air cut off.

What was in there?

While some things remained on the lowest floors, they were items that could be replaced or that were no longer needed. Anything still of value was locked up on the second basement level, everything else below left to be forgotten.

There was probably nothing in that room at all, something was just left on by accident. Like the broken doors.

Or there was something really important in there. Or really scary.

She peered at the photo of the keypad closely, zooming in on the numbers. Some were darker than others, possibly pressed more? But even if she got the combination right, would the door even open? It had been sealed for years now, it could be stuck.

Well she wouldn’t know until she checked it, and she had every intent to try tomorrow. While she still managed to hold onto her bravery.

--

At the BSAA office building, Ally went to her supposed study space first, waiting until people coming and going settled in for the last few hours of work. When things got quieter she picked up and went straight to the basement, creeping onto the first level and then hurrying through each subsequent one, still remembering her rituals of Descent, until she reached the Last Door.

Ally paused in the doorway, faced with that dank, silent hall.

There was something down there. Something locked away.

Her fear crept in. She’d seen enough movies and heard enough stories in her life to know that things that were buried were never supposed to be unburied and when they were only bad things happened. Her fear begged her to go back upstairs, to stay away from this horrible prison.

But Ally took a step forward. And then another. She came from a line of BSAA folk, whether they were tied to a desk or not, and would not back down. She walked to the end where that tiny little red light blazed in this black place. She shone her light on the keypad.

There were numbers and the largest button on the bottom still had the O for ‘open’ visible. Skipping the numbers, she pressed that. Her finger sunk into a layer of grime and she couldn’t tell if the button actually pressed but she listened.

Nothing. She pressed it again, hard. Still nothing. Frowning, Ally began to run through combinations of the darkened numbers, over and over. She’d gone through so many when she began to fear she’d need a keycard as well, and that whatever was here was going to stay hidden forever.

The light turned green and there was a heavy, slow clunk and a release of hydraulics. The door shrieked and then only moved an inch before it got stuck on the track. There was a shivering noise from within that made the hair on Ally’s arms stand on end. She grabbed the door and shoved and was hit in the face with a blast of foul, fetid air rank with rot and she staggered back and gagged. Her lunch crawled up her throat and much as it revolted her she decided to let it go and turned and puked in a corner.

Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope nope...

She never smelled anything that awful and disgusting in her life. The closest she ever smelled was when a squirrel had fallen down their chimney and died on the shut flue and they didn’t know until it started to rot and the smell got in the house.

Something died in that locked room, was still dying.

Tears rolled down her face and she cried, spitting the taste of sick out of her mouth. She wanted to run; she did her job as an explorer and found something she shouldn’t have. Good enough, get back above, now.

She spat again and then froze.

There was that shivering noise again.

Something was moving in there, a lot of something.

She had to know.

Taking a deep breath of stale air that now seemed fresh in comparison to that, Ally pulled the collar of her shirt up over her nose and crept to the door again, her light dancing around erratically as her hand shook. She shoved the door hard and it reluctantly moved along the track, a few inches at a time. She could finally enter and slid the flashlight beam around the room.

Hundreds of red eyes stared back at her. A large pile of rats hunkered in the middle of the room and shrieked at her as her light struck them before they fled, scattering all ways and vanishing back into the dark. Ally yelped and backed out, making sure the rats weren’t following, and then slowly crept in again.

There was still something on the floor, a pile of black and red and brown that wasn’t rats. It wasn’t moving at all.

The smell was so terrible Ally had to step back out in the hall again, gasping and gagging. When she re-entered the red eyes of the rats were back, watching her. She shone her light at them and they disappeared. She took a slow couple of steps towards the pile in the room and her unease began to grow further.

Whatever it was, it was chained down. Enormous chains as thick as her arms criss-crossed several times over the form, the links vanishing into slats on the floor. It was lying in a puddle of red, thick and dried with rat droppings.

It was wet.

She froze and stared in horror. Open wounds were weeping blood and clear fluids slowly, some exposing the white of bone. What might have once been clothes were shredded to near nothing, bared skin so filthy and infected it was discolored.

It was breathing. Or at least it looked like it was breathing. No, it was her shaking light, playing tricks on her. Had to be. She’d been exploring these dark places long enough to know that’s what the dark did. It was a trickster and liked to play, to confuse.

Against her better judgment, she took another step, her light on the bloody pile on the floor. Her free hand raised her phone for a picture, and the flash went off.

It was slight but unmistakable this time. One end of the pile moved, a swatch of matted, filthy hair shifted and Ally was met with a single eye. It was red and reptilian and, locking onto her, began to glow.

The pile moved now, tensed against the chains, and then there was a clacking and a hefty clunk as the chains were pulled down with sharp force from below, several links pulled into the slats in the floor, forcing the pile, the thing, back down violently. The head, for it was unmistakable that’s what it was now, threw back and a blackened mouth opened in a pain-filled scream, but there was no sound. A rush of air and bubbling blood and remnants of dead flesh splattered the floor in front of its trapped face.

Ally screamed in its stead and ran, nearly slipping on the grime. She grabbed the door and forced it shut, putting as much between her and that awful rotting thing as she could, and then she ran and didn’t stop running until she reached the light of the main floor, until she reached a bathroom. She locked herself in a stall and threw up again, though nothing came up but she kept trying, trying to purge the smell, the rot, the terror from her little body.

Ally sat on the floor and scoot into the corner, clutching her backpack and started sobbing.

She should have known better. She should have.

What was that horrible thing?

She wanted nothing more than to run to her father and beg him to take her home. She’d never explore down below again, honest! Just make whatever that was go away!

But she was too scared to move, too horrified, and after long minutes of crying adrenaline leaked out of her and left her exhausted on the bathroom floor, hiccuping.

She finally got up and left the stall, staring at herself in the mirror. She splashed cold water on her face to try to get rid of the puffiness.

In a strange, relaxed daze, Ally wandered back to her usual place to do homework and sat down. She didn’t even pretend to work, but stared at the shoddy picture on her phone.

The flash lit the pile well enough, but the picture was blurred from shaking. Still, she could make out the form now. There was a head, the large hunch in the pile were shoulders, it tapered down to hips and then legs. A man-like figure, chained down on its side in a puddle of filth.

Ally hands gripped her phone tightly, the very image making her shake not only from her experience but from the horrible stories her grandpa used to tell her.

There was a BOW down there, a trapped zombie forgotten in the basement when all else had been cleared out.

She wouldn’t run to her dad, not yet. She wasn’t a little kid. And she didn’t want to surrender her explorer title just yet. This was still a mystery. She’d solve it first, and then be a good girl and tell her dad there was a monster down below.

She took a long, deep breath, and reminded herself to dig out her old bat from the closet for next time.

[tuthemurphy]

Making Christmas Perfect

Author’s Note: If you’ve read my chapter story, “A Lucky Kiss”, you will probably know this will be my second Christmas-theme story, and also the last one for the year. I’m posting the full story right here, and if you want to check that out on Fanfiction, here’s a link to it in a one-shot series called “Milo and His Friends”: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13134561/2/Milo-and-His-Friends Enjoy! And Merry Christmas!

I’m suck for the title though :v

It was a snowy day for Danville, but the Christmas spirit wouldn’t stop getting hotter.

And to make money in the holiday, Cavendish found a job as a salesman of a clothing shop. He hoped to get something special to buy for his beloved partner – Dakota.

Well, he was assigned to.

Three minutes ago...

“Sir!” Cavendish spoke to Mr. Block on the temporal transporter behind the curtains of the shop, “Why do you have to assign me to protect the pistachios inside a... clothing shop?”

“Well, isn’t that obvious?” He laughed before saying his reason, “No one would suspect your action when you’re working as a salesman, Kooperdink.”

“It’s Cavendish, sir,” He sighed.

“Whatever! Now listen!” He began to tell the mission, “There’s a pistachio truck which will come to your area in about ten more minutes. And to protect the pistachios, you must take the chance when the driver isn’t paying attention to his truck, take the wheel and bring it back in time to me. Get it?”

“Yes, sir!” He obeyed promptly, “And the sooner I finish this, the sooner I will come back to Dakota for Christmas Eve, right?”

“Depends on how well you’ve finished it,” Block said, “I don’t want you to bring back an empty truck or a disaster. Remember the motto: Don’t let any pistachio fall!” Then he cut off the call.

Cavendish put the temporal transproter inside his pocket, dressed as a salesman and worked.

He was no expert in the job, but the more he had done it, the more interesting the job grew on him. And seeing the happy smile in the customer’s expression, he couldn’t feel happier. For instance...

“Excuse me, sir!” A young girl came upon the old man.

“Yes, young lady. What can I help you?”

“I want that Santa Claus. I want that Santa Claus!” The girl kept repeating those words and pointing to the short, Santa-themed dress which Cavendish in no time had figured out.

“Oh, I see,” Cavendish then gave the girl a lift to where she pointed, “Here, you can get it.”

The girl was really happy to touch to the dress she wanted. Her mother was impressed and also delightful.

“Thanks for the happiness you gave to my daughter,” And the mother sure was a nice person as well, “How much is this cost?”

“9.50 dollars, ma’am,” He announced.

The woman looked inside her pocket. Her expression turned worried, “I’m really sorry. I don’t have an extra dollar.”

And Cavendish probably wouldn’t let a small thing come bigger to the manager. Besides, it’s Christmas, what the heck?

“That’s okay!” He took the money pleasantly, “You can say it’s a Christmas miracle.”

“Well, thank you, sir!” The woman said, then whispering to her daughter “Come on, Anna, thank the man!”

“Thank... you!” The young girl slowly said it, and Cavendish nodded, “You’re welcome.”

And the young mother-daughter left the store temporarily managed by an experienced time traveller.

But... to be honest, they looked kinda familiar to him. The orange hair of the mother reminded him of the girl he knew, and even though they didn’t wear the same hair style, the tone was still very spot-on! And the young mother’s blue eyes as well.

“Maybe I’m just imagining...” He thought.

It was the time he saw a glowing blue light in front of the store. He knew that sign: it meant that there was time travel smell.

And Cavendish had no idea whether he was imagining or the events he saw made so much sense when combining them together.

Meanwhile, Dakota was driving “the outdated lemon” to the clothing shop. He was told by Cavendish in a text message that he would have something surprising for the man, and all he needed to do was driving there.

“I wonder what the surprise would be...” The more Dakota thought about it, the more excited he was.

After an hour of selling all the clothes, and socks, and hats and many more, the target he had been waiting for had finally come.

A pistachio truck parked in front of the shop, almost blocked his entire view to the scene outside. Later, a man who was just about late twenties or early thirties came out from it and walked into the shop.

Cavendish secretly reported to Mr. Block, “Sir! The cat is out of the bag.”

“Good!” He spoke from the microphone on the temporal transporter, which was connected to the small headphones he was wearing, “Now, he will go inside the restroom nearby. And that’s the time you steal the truck and bring it back here, and by here, I mean 2175! Now get going!”

The phone call was cut once again. He then took a look to the shop once more. He saw the driver had a white skin, round eyes and holding a backpack. The young man came in front of him, “Hello, sir!”

“Yes!” He asked an usual question, “What can I help you?”

“I saw this sweater right here,” he pointed to the jacket he wanted. And coincidentally, much to Cavendish’s surprise, it was the same kind the little girl wanted earlier.

The man continued, “And I want to buy it to my daughter.”

Cavendish almost gasped, felt surprised to the point that he had forgotten his mission since when he couldn’t know.

“She’s a perfectionist and you know...” He laughed, “The mother and the daughter.”

“This young adult is talkative,” Cavendish thought., “But he has something very close to me, I can feel it.”

“But... should I take this truck from him?”

The young man continued, “Like something my elders always say, ‘Pleasure from a job isn’t from the skill and the achivement we’ve got. It’s about how much that job means to us and how much it will give to the one we love.’”

That reminded him something though. He had skipped the night with his partner to get this mission done. But while he was doing it, he didn’t realize how much pleasure he had, even though it’s not his main profession. It was simple, but he had got to meet customers, and different backgrounds, and the fun he had with the young girl just then.

And right at that time, it was a young man having a small conversation with him, and made him realize how fun it was to do a job that wasn’t his accomplishment. He made him realize, no matter what you’re doing, a job is all about how it means to us ad how much it will give to the ones we love.

How simple and irony it was! And the young man requested, “Opps, I need to go the toilet for a while. Can you help me pick that up while I’m doing it.”

“Of course!” He said a sentence to assure the man to go the toilet. He could hear a door broken though.

Cavendish was now confused. He had to pick between the truck and the job he had been doing for all these years but didn’t seem to find any fun of it, or the job he had to do for a day but the important thing was everyone happy and he didn’t regret anything.

“Oh...” He thought again, “How could I be so selfish. It’s Christmas and I’ll go with Dakota.”

And the mic spoke to him, “Cavendish! Grab that truck!”

He didn’t reply though, “Hello? Cavendish! Now’s your chance! If you don’t grab it, you-“ and finally he cut off the call by himself.

He knew it was the chance for him... to do the right thing. He grabbed the same red jacket from earlier, packing it carefully right before the young man came back from the restroom.

“Oh, that was refreshing...” He commented, “How much is it?”

“9 dollars and a half,” The British man said, happily smiled.

And the young man was able to give him enough of it, and keeping for himself one dollar spare.

“Well, I gotta go. See ya!” The backpack boy said goodbye to Cavendish.

And again, he reminded him of another person that is very familiar to him. But he couldn’t remember who that was with his messed up mind, apparently.

It was 10 p.m. and the shop had closed. The manager of the store didn’t forget to thank him for what Cavendish had done.

“Well, Balthazar Cavendish, I can’t be happier for what you had done to the shop,” the manger, who was a young woman with dark purple hair, and a slightly Spanish voice, “And to pay for your hard work, here’s your salary. Hope you’ll work for us long!”

“Thank you!” He took a short look to the pay he had got, before revealing, “Well, dear miss, as much as I love to work here, well... I don’t belong to this place.”

“Oh... but why?” She said but thinking something else, “I’m glad you’ve figured that out.”

“To be honest, miss,” He said, “This is a far lower job than my main priority. But when I worked here, I feel like I’ve had a lot of fun, even more than my professional job. But still, it’s time for me to find a pleasure for my own job, and I’ll be completed,” And immidiately, Cavendish left without a goodbye to the young manager.

“Merry Christmas!” She said to him, and finally feeling relieved that all the things were following to the plan.

Outside the shop, he immidately met Dakota, who was about to receive a surprise.

“Hey, Cavendish! Haven’t seen you for all evening. Where have you been?” Dakota asked.

“Hey there, Dakota!” He greeted, “It’s a funny story but... I’ve been working for the night and I’ve got a bit of money for us.”

And that was his surprise. Dakota was speechless for this, but then able to say something out, “Oh... Cavendish...”

“Yes, it’s hard to believe,” Cavendish revealed, “But I’ve got some money for us and since...” he then got infuriated, “I don’t know WHAT I SHOULD BUY FOR YOU, I think I will let you decide by yourself.”

“Wow!” Dakota expressed, “It’s hard to believe you’ve done this, but the way you let me to buy all the stuffs instead of giving me something, now that’s a classic Cavendish!”

“I know,” The Brit man smirked, then embracing his partner, saying.

“Merry Christmas, buddy!”

“Merry Christmas, Cavendish, Balthazar!”

“And let’s both play Mega Man after this...” Cavendish muttered, and he could sense Dakota agreeing, nodding on his shoulder, in a snowy weather that couldn’t stop the sweet moment of two time travellers, who will always be together side by side, forever!

It’s my world and we’re all living in it!

Scene cut to a group of young adults and a pharmacist in their time vehicle parking behind the shop.

“Ahhh!” Melissa said, entering one of the backseats, “All the things act properly!” And of course, she carried her daughter along inside the car as well, “Come on, Anna!”

“Mommy!”

“Dad is waiting, and we’ll tell him how much fun we had.”

And next, Milo entered the window seat next to the driver of the vehicle, saying with some laugh coming along, “And we’ve finally got rid of the bad future, right Doctor D?”

Heinz Doofenshmirtz, who had been responsible for the time travel part, announced, “Yes, yes we have!” then he pointed to Murphy’s lover, “Oh, there she come!”

And Amanda entered to a backseat next to Melissa, who was sitting on the one to the left. She informed, “I guess we can call this a time and space Christmas!”

Milo quickly changed from frontseat to backseat, and sitting besides his wife, “I see things happen in there. You’ve done pretty well.”

“Thank you, Milo! Time travel sure is an easy task!”

“Now that’s my perfect wife,” He stated, “She finished things pretty well,” before giving the girl a kiss on her cheek, a very thing Amanda had done to the boy since their middle-school years.

Then he turned to his best friend, “And Melissa, too!”

“I know you will be flattered,” She smirked, “No need to say!”

Doof announced, “Alright, enough chit-chatting. Fasten your seatbelts and we’ll kick some time travel jump!”

And the gang prepared for another time jump, and their next adventure from the future.

Author’s Note: Milo, Melissa and Amanda are around early 30, and I didn’t specify their ages in the story for a reason! And Anna... well, consider that’s how I name Melissa’s daughter in the future (she’s 5 years old in this story)

[weelittleweasley]

An Ultimatum | Sweet Pea x Reader x Archie

Prompt sent in by anon: Being best friends with Archie had its perks and its not so perks. He was always very protective of you, making sure you weren’t going to get hurt by anyone or anything. However, you didn’t expect him to get so over protective when he met your Serpent boyfriend, Sweet Pea.

Warnings: mild swearing

The zipper of your jacket was cold as you fiddled with it as you walked back from school with your best friend. He kept silent as you walked home; Usually, you two would be talking over one another, trying to fill the other one in on the day’s events. But today, there was no talking of that kind. Only small sentences spoken here and there. “Archie, you’re my best friend. Please say something,” you tell him as he buries his hands in his pockets, continuing to walk you home.

On the way back from school, you told Archie you were in a relationship. He seemed happy for you--you finally found a guy who made you happy. But when you informed him of who it was, his demeanor quickly changed from supportive to detached. “There is nothing to say, Y/N,” he says as you sigh.

The boy you were seeing was a Serpent from the South side, Sweet Pea. The Serpents had a reputation for having extensive criminal records and constantly picking fights with the other gangs on the South side. But that was the North side’s prejudice talking. The Serpents included everyone from high school to adults; They were loyal and unified and trustworthy, something you adored. You didn’t expect to fall for one of them, but you did. Sweet Pea originally came off as this egotistical maniac, but as you spent more time with him you realize how broken he was. He was completely misunderstood by everyone and that’s what made you fall for him--how willing he was to let you get to know him and show affection towards him. You talk back to Archie, “He makes me happy. It’s the first time where I’ve been in a relationship and I don’t feel like I have to pretend to be someone else. He’s sweet and understanding.”

“He’s a Serpent,” Archie retorts as you shake your head. “That shouldn’t mean that you should judge him any differently, Arch. Just because you are on the football team doesn’t mean you are an asshole who plays women. If he doesn’t mind that we are friends, then you shouldn’t mind that he and I are dating!” you exclaim.

Archie sighs, knowing that you are right. He just couldn’t help it sometimes. You’ve been in a few relationships and every one that you have been in has made you hurt. He didn’t want that to happen again and he certainly didn’t want it to happen because of a South Side Serpent. “You’re right...I’m sorry, Y/N. I was quick to judge and I promise that I’ll do my best to keep my judgments aside. If he makes you happy, then I’m happy,” Archie says as you smile. Stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, you give him a tight hug as he reciprocates. “Thank you, Arch. It means a lot to me,” you tell him as you continue the walk back to your house.

The months started to pass by and things were great between you and Sweet Pea, but not great with your friendship between Archie. Especially between Archie and Sweet Pea. You’d be together and when Sweets had to leave early, Archie would make some sort of rude remark. “Ditching your girlfriend already? You have somewhere else more important to be? Right, I remember you have to go drink with your Serpent friends, right?” he’d sneer as Sweet Pea would get annoyed by his comment.

Sweets would come back up to him. “If you are looking for a fight Bulldog, we can fight. We all know your bark is meaner than your bite,” he’d further push him as Archie would stand up, ready to fight. Of course Ronnie and you would pull your respective boyfriends away from each other. Pulling Sweet Pea outside, you’d say, “What did I tell you about antagonizing him?” Sweets would grab you and hold you by your waist, “I don’t like him making comments like that when you and I know they are not true. No one else has a problem with us being together but when it comes to Bulldog, he’s got his panties in a twist.” You’d kiss his lips softly, “Just ignore him please. Alright? Now off you go.” He’d smirk and give you that signature smile of his before kissing you on the lips hard and taking off on his motorcycle.

It was today where everyone had reached their breaking point. Sweet Pea was supposed to pick you up from school like he usually did, but Archie was asking to hang out at Pop’s. “Come on, Y/N. We haven’t hung out just us in such a long time. I know this have been kind of rocky because of me and that Serpent boy of yours, but I wanna go back to the way we were before all of this,” Archie says as the two of you exit the building.

“Archie, I want to go back to that time, too. I wanna go back to having my best friend. I can’t today though, I’m busy. But I promise tomorrow is Friday and I’m all yours,” you smile at him, trying to make your exit. “Tomorrow is the football game remember? I’m busy all day,” he tells you as you groan, remembering that tomorrow was the Friday night game. “Today is the only day I can hang out until Monday. Please, just tell whoever you are with that you are in serious need of Vitamin A,” he jokes as you laugh.

As he finishes talking, you look out to the crowd and see Sweet Pea pull up to the school on his motorcycle. Your heart starts to beat faster, half of it being because you were excited to see your boyfriend, the other half knowing that Archie is gonna have a meltdown once he sees him. “Oh,” he says as he makes eye contact with Pea. “I see how it is.” Archie turns around to walk back into the school as you grab him by his letterman jacket, turning him back to face you. “Arch-” “Y/N, stop. I’m sick and tired of you ditching me and always choosing him over me. We’ve been friends for 6 years. You’ve known him for 6 months,” he tells you as people pass by, clearly uncomfortable.

Sighing, you look around, “People are staring, Archie. Calm down.” That just makes Archie blow up. “I couldn’t give a shit if the entire school was filming this right now, Y/N! It’s not fair that I’m the one forgotten about!”

You can’t deal with him. Not here. Not now. Walking down the school’s steps, you start to walk towards Sweet Pea’s motorcycle. Archie wasn’t gonna let you leave that easily. “We’re not done here!” he yells after you, chasing you. “Yes, we are, Archie,” you yell back, not daring to look at him. You feel his hands grab your backpack to turn you around as he starts, “Every boyfriend you have had, I’ve been there to pick up the pieces after all is said and done. You know that this relationship is gonna end the same exact way. Don’t even try to deny that.”

“Baby, what’s wrong?” Sweet Pea says as he grabs your waist, pulling you into his side. “None of your damn business, stay out of this will you, you thug,” Archie spits as Sweet Pea becomes infuriated. “She’s my girlfriend, so it’s my business. And you call me thug one more god damned time I swear to God, Andrews,” Pea lunges for Archie as you push them back. 

“Stop it! Jesus Christ, just stop it already!” you yell at the both of them. You turn to Archie, out of breath. “Ever since I started dating Sweets, you’ve been nothing but rude and distant. I asked for you to set aside your differences and at least try to get along. I’m not asking you to be best friends. I’m asking you to try for me. But that’s always too much to ask you, isn’t it, Archie?” you ask.

Archie just scoffs. “You’re asking me to forget all the shit he’s done to the football team? All of the things he’s said about North Side kids? I don’t forget the past, Y/N and neither should you,” he says. His tone is sad and angry and depressed all at the same time and you can only imagine how he is feeling right now. “I can’t be friends with you if you are seeing him,” he states plainly as your eyes widen and heart shatters.

Your mouth hangs open. “I-I, Archie, I-”

“Y/N, I have no choice. I can’t bear to see you with him when I know he’s gonna break your heart just like the rest of them have,” he tells you, tears slowly filling up in his eyes. “So, you’re asking me to chose between the two of you?!” you scream, tears pouring down your face with no warning. Sweet Pea’s grip on you loosens, suddenly aware about the severity of the situation. Looking at him, he seems incredibly serious about this.

Huffing out a breath, you wipe away your tears. “Fine,” you choke out, fixing your backpack, grabbing Sweet Pea’s hand. “Let’s go.” You and your boyfriend hop on his motorcycle as he starts it up.

“Y/N, wait I-”

“Go,” you tell your boyfriend, leaving behind Archie, heartbroken.

[geekygoddesss]

Not a Hero (Part 3)

Coming home to my dog barking like crazy and almost knocking me down the moment I crossed those doors was something that would never get old. My hair is now messy and my uniform is a little bit dusty from the fight earlier, but thanks to the New York winds that are now going around like crazy, I was not that filthy so I was not making a mess everywhere when I got home.

I drop my backpack and get on my knees as I see Aries running to me so fast that I could almost completely process it.

“Hey girl” I smile and caress her fur as she jumps around me, batting her tail around and licks my face with happiness. She jumps completely on me making me lay on the floor, I was just a complete giggly mess by now, that’s how happy I was of seeing my dog when I got home.

“Good evening Miss Stark, How was your day?” I hear that very familiar robotic voice coming from the walls, I lift Aries off me and roll on my back. Thank god there was no one around, I looked a mess.

I get on my feet and take a look at the chart Friday has pulled on for me, like it does every day, showing pretty much all forecast and plans I might have for the day. I see Aries in the corner of my eyes, running away from me now a bit tired from jumping around for a minute straight and going to the fluffy carpet in the living room to take a nap. Classic. “It’s been okay, Friday, thanks for asking,” I say dragging my finger around the screen on the wall and expanding the weather forecast, news flash, I was going to be a rainy ass rest of the day “any special plans for today?” I ask, like usual. “Seems like nothing has been planned for tonight” Fridays and I look at my lovely schedule, She’s right, all I have in there is a dumb reminder to do my homework, fun.

“Great” I say closing the screen on the wall “Thanks again” “Anytime, Miss Stark” She says shutting down the brightness of the screen.

I take my backpack from the floor and make a quick stop on the kitchen to grab a can of soda before making my way downstairs to the workshop, the only place in the entire house where I or dad could get things done properly without people coming to gossip.

Usually this place would be completely empty by the time I got home from school, it would just be me and the loneliness of my office in the very back of the workshop, but today was different, My father was already here and he was wearing his home clothes, there was a box in front of him that spelled T.R.A.S.H in the very front, it had a bunch of cables and metal popping on the top of it and he was really digging in there, he was too busy with it he didn’t even turn to look at me when I made my way down the stairs. whatever he was up to, I just hope it is good. “Oh hey, you’re here early” I say getting his attention and walking up to him. he did not turn to look at me. “Yeah” he mumbles, taking more stuff from the box  “that’s what happens when you retire” I laugh, while moving to his side and looking to what he was doing, so far all I could see was either broken parts of his suit or cables all around, I did not get how would that work for something “You’re not retired” I say taking a sip of my soda. “If you look at it from my point of view, I definitely am” He says throwing an old metal hand from one of his suits on the table before finally looking up at me “Hi sweety” he says giving a step forward and kissing my head very quickly before sitting down on his chair. “Hey em...” I say setting down the can on my hand and rolling my sleeves up, showing the metal straps on my arms “I think I broke them again, I’m sorry”

Not that I didn’t give myself enough time to even try and repair my wristbands, for now, it was just a fact that I couldn’t do it, at least not by myself. Trust me, now I preferred to just face the consequences of being grounded, then walking around through the streets of new york with broken wristbands and no self-defense knowledge. I really had no other way around this. He has a pretty still expression on his face, which terrifies me just a bit, he rolls the chair to look straight at me and leans back “Oh no” he says raising his eyebrows just a bit “Why?” I look down, Unstrapping then from my arms and put them down on his desk “I tried to put a magnet inside but I don’t know what happened, everything just collapsed or something” I shrug. he sighs and shakes his head, he doesn’t look mad, but he isn’t happy either “I’ve told you a million times, don’t touch the insides” He says grabbing then and opening one of them to take a look. “I just wanted to know if it would work at all” I sigh and lean on his desk just a little  “I’m sorry” I say softly “it kind of worked though, I was able to move stuff around” I say looking at the bright side of it “the magnet is just too powerful, I could lift stuff, but they would fly on to me and nearly kill me” I say with a chuckle. He looks at me kind of alarmed “that was metaphorical” I add before he could say anything else. Thank god he doesn't. “Huh” he nods and leaves the open wristband aside “I’ll have them fixed soon, I guess” he says in a very monotone tone. What does that mean?. “Am I in trouble?” I ask in my softest voice, looking down at my hands “If you ruined them completely, you bet you are” I could almost hear the ‘young lady’ at the end of that phrase  “but I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna let it pass, putting a magnet inside is not a bad idea at all” he says nodding his head at me. “Right?” I say with a smile, I move forward and hug him quickly “Thanks, Dad” I mumble. “Yeah, Yeah” he says nodding and going back to his work. “what’s that?” I say looking at the battery he first reached to look at. “Nothing special, just a piece of junk I decided to fix now” he says taking a screwdriver and with a harsh hit, it snaps in half, showing a messy piece of cables and burned circuits “what’s that?” he asks pointing at me.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I have been carrying around Stella’s kitten in my pocket all the way home, I had to repair it. “Well, I fought with a robot today” I say pulling out the little robot from the pocket of my uniform “Stella had to leave and left me in charge of her baby” “How did that go?” He says extending his hand to grab the robot, I give it to him and he takes a good look at it “That’s a nice kitten” there’s sarcasm in his voice. “I know, it is not intimidating at all” I shake my head as he inspects he little toy-like robot  “but hey, I blew the others guy robot” I mention with a smile “Were you supposed to?” he raises his eyebrows at me. “There are no rules on robot fighting” I shrug and give him a smile. he points at me “Good call, Give me 5” he says and we high five “Homework?” he asks handing me the little cat. I nod, taking the robot and walking forward, making my way to my office “Yeah” I say, opening the little door and leaving my backpack and everything in there “I’ll get to it now” I say, but then my mind snaps, I did not look at the date today, today is so important, shit. I run out the door of my office and walk to dad’s desk  “Wait, is Pepper home yet? I haven’t seen her around” I ask him, I have almost forgotten today was Pepper’s arrival, my dad’s fiance, the best woman on earth. “She’s in New York, she arrived this morning” he nods with a short smile “she’s working but you’ll get to see her later, it’s date night” he mentions like it’s no big deal. “What?” I frown “Date night on a Monday? Am I going to eat dinner alone? Dad!” I start arguing but he stops me, it was no secret that dates nights were those particular nights where I could not (under any circumstances) go. for obvious reasons, but right now it was really unfair for him to just not let me go. “Hey” he says with a mimicking frown “I haven’t seen my fiancé in like two months, stop whining, please” he asks me “I can tell Happy to keep you company” he offers me but I shook my head immediately, I was not going to let him make Happy stay with me on his free hours. “Nah, I’ll manage” I sigh, really fighting the need to roll my eyes “can I come through?”

“Nope” he says almost immediately and shooting a smile at me. Now I am rolling my eyes.

“Oh, C'mon, why?” I say insisting a little.

“No” “Tell me why”I say again, grabbing the closest chair I could find and sitting right beside him. I can see him rolling his eyes at me and dropping his tools on the table to look at me “I wanna see her too, I wanna... show her something” that was just a lie, I didn’t have to show her anything, but it sure sounded better than just talking, I just was desperate for some real girl talk.

“Then do it, when she’s in the house tomorrow and not busy, not tonight” he says shrugging like it was not a big deal at all.

“Dad” I whine and lean back on my sit  “tell me why” “Please (Y/n)” he rolls his eyes at me. “Just tell me why” I insist once more.

“I don’t need to give you much explanation more than, it’s date night, we’re adults and we’ll keep this date between the adults, understood?” he says loud and clear, shutting down my little tantrum. I hate that he’s right. “So you’re banning me from your date? That’s rude” I mumble giving a spin on my chair “whatever, Can I have money for pizza then?” I ask with a smile. Now he is frowning for real “Again?” he asks “I thought you had pizza yesterday” “And it was really good” I nod my head, closing my eyes, having a moment. The cute guy from that store sold me that pizza, Luke sold me pizza, Luke talked to me. it was great, fantastic, amazing. I want it to happen again. “Okay, fine” He nods and reaches for his wallet on one of his drawers around to hand me a twenty “save something for me” he says giving me the bill. “Yeah right” I say taking the bill and getting up my seat  “bring dessert” I tell him with a smile and he glances at me with the weirdest look “don’t look at me like that, you’re the one who banned me from your date, at least bring something sweet in return” He seems to think about it for a second, before shrugging at my request and nodding “Fine, sounds fair”

I found myself doing a little jump of happiness before turning around to go back to my office, but a loud bark on the outside of the workshop catches my attention. Aries is standing outside of the glass doors and batting her tail around and scratching her paw against the glass for me to open it up, It is so cute, I can’t resist it.

“Hi!” I cheer, running to the door where my dog is. I put in the passcode and open the door for her, immediately dropping to my knees to give her a proper welcome, since she is too happy to be here. “no no no, don’t let Aries come in here” Dad says when the dog makes her way inside and jumps on him, needing some attention from my father. “She loves you” I laugh, getting on my feet “she likes being around” “Of course, keep her out of my stuff” He says, not making a very pleased face at Aries and caressing her fur just a little and then trying to get back to his job. I wasn’t mad that he didn’t really want Aries around his workplace, I knew he wasn’t a dog person and sometimes Aries could be a bit messy, I had to look out for that so she didn’t make a mess here, but I doubted it, she’s a very well trained dog.

“I know, chill” I say taking Aries and carrying her to my office “we’ll be in my office” “Watching you” he says, I didn’t even know if he was being serious or not, I didn’t want to know.

“Of course you are” I say, setting the dog down inside my room and closing the door behind me, giving myself some privacy to do what needs to be done.

I don’t know how long it has been since I buried myself in office, but time has for sure flown buy and Aries is knocked in down bed, sleeping it off, as I looked more closely at Stella’s robot. Of course, it had almost nothing, it was mainly programmed to follow the remotes orders and go fast in any reaction, but what directly caught my attention was the explosive placed right were the kitten's eyes were, I wish I didn’t know where she got them, but I know exactly where she did. Those are the same kind of safety explosive that my wristbands have, and I am almost one hundred percent sure does are the backups I have stored in case of emergency. This bitch took them behind my back, smart, but I kind of hated it, these things were no toys.

Disputing the little need I had to call stella and yell at her, all I could do for now is suck it up and get to work, because there was really nothing I could do, so I attached the leg that was left in the Kitty’s body and made sure it was somehow functional, also I took my time (really took my time) Painting it’s burned body all over again, of a pale white I had around, leaving the robot as good as new, but also with a little twist, of course I was not going to let her get away with my back ups, I put some confetti cannons that were about the same size as the explosives, That would teach her to not mess with my stuff, she would burn anyone else with my things.

Once I am completely finished, I get out of the room to find the workshop completely empty. I look at the time, It’s kind of late but not really, but definitely, the time when everyone should get ready for date time, so I assume that’s what's happening. I get me and Aries out of the workshop and go to my room, deciding to spend some time alone before I was completely alone for the night.  

I see a light on at the end of the hallway, from Dad and Pepper’s shared room, someone’s in there, there’s also music inside, Definitely not dad’s music. My eyes lit up and my smile is too evident in my face, I know who that is, Finally something to be excited about. I peek inside, trying to be as discrete as I could to evict any unwanted surprises, thank god I didn’t, Instead, I could see a blonde woman sitting on the bed, wearing a black dress that looked absolutely stunning on her. What a nice surprise, she’s finally home.

“Hey” I say, walking into the room without asking at all, it slipped, I was just too excited.

Pepper turned around to look at me with the biggest smile ever, she looked just the same as she did when she left home, that was good, I liked to see that she looked just as good. “Oh my god, hi” she said walking to me and hugging me tightly. By the time we break our hug, she takes a good look at me, I know what she’s doing, she used to do the same thing when I only got to see Dad a couple of times a year, she’s trying to see what changed

“honey, You look so good” She says with a laugh, hugging me one more time.

“You too” I say, being totally unable to hide my smile, I was so happy. “Now really, you look different” she says taking my hands and leading me to the bed, making me sit on it beside her “you died your hair?” she asked me. Finally, someone that noticed “I made it a bit lighter” I say, my cheeks totally blushed. “It looks really nice”  She says touching it a little. It was not much of a difference in my opinion, just a shade lighter than my already, no one really seemed to notice when I did, just my dad, Of course, who didn’t really understand why I did it. Aside from that, no one really noticed a thing.

“How was Canada?” I ask her when she is done looking at my (not so) new look.

“It was really great, the weather was nice, work was not so nice” she says, and with that there is a whole speech that goes off, she talks about the city, how she missed New York, how beautiful most places were but how she barely got any time to visit any of them or just to see the city. I love how lost she got in the conversation, saying so many things that barely got to answer anything, she was already answering all of the questions I could ask for. Oh man, I missed Pepper.

“Oh shoot, it’s getting late” She says looking at the clock in her right hand and getting up the bed. “I better get ready”

She walks to the big bathroom attached right beside the bedroom. “Date night, I’ve heard” I say walking right behind inside of the room, where she is looking at the mirror getting herself all ready for the night. “I’m just finishing getting ready, your father is waiting downstairs” she explains to me smiling through the mirror. She puts out a brush and a compact from the drawers, starting to get some makeup on her face  “How’s school?” she says, managing to start a conversation and get ready for her little reencounter with dad at the same time.

“Oh, school is great” I say taking a sit on the bathroom counter (even when I shouldn’t do that) and just watch her do her thing “Nothing really new about it” I shrug

“Wouldn’t really think of you as other than a good student” she winks at me and with a quick move she pinches my cheek. God damn, I’m blushing again.

I see her going around the room and getting already while talking and talking about all of the things she lived back on her long business trip, but all I could think about was her, not in a weird way of course, but just the way she looked tonight, doing her makeup being so elegant so classy, she was just like that all the time and I wondered if that’s what guys liked. Classiness at all time. It was no secret she could get any man she wanted in just a blink, that was just her, she is such a stunning woman and I wonder how she did that, sometimes I wished I just had that power over guys, but maybe that is just not my forte.

“Hey Pepper, Can I ask you something?” I say totally changing the topic of conversation. I knew I was in time to change my question to something better, but here I was, about to look dumb as hell. “Sure” she says with a smile, stopping what she was doing to look at me. “How do you talk to a guy?” I ask her to them feel my cheeks almost burn up immediately  “Without being awkard, you know?” I keep going before adding a quick “Just wondering”. she raises her eyebrows and smile at me widely, leaning on the counter with one arm and resting the other one on her waist. She suspects something. abort, brain, abort. Too late.

“Is there a reason for that question?” she asks in a weird tone that makes me cringe. “I’m just asking” I shrug, trying to make it seem totally normal.

She’s not convinced at all, but she knows me, fighting me to get some answers out was not an option, because she won’t get them out of me, not today.

“Well, you just talk to them like any other person I guess” she says seeing that I was not about answering any more questions about the reason of why I’m asking this “of course, you wouldn’t talk to them as personally as you would with any of your girlfriends, but relax and be you” she says going back to her makeup on the big mirror. “Also, asking questions about them it’s a good idea, you never want to talk too much about you, with anyone, really” she says with a chuckle. “Why are you asking?” She says again with a smile.

“No reason” I shake my head and get off the counter. I was not ready for the rest of the conversation, I would figure out later.

I look around all of the things she set on the table, there is this really nice red lipstick on the table, around a sea of other shades of lipstick. It looked perfect and very classy, I like it. I pick it up and look at it more closely, it’s so pretty, so so pretty.

“That’s a nice lipstick, you should wear it” I say screwing the lipstick completely off and looking at it more closely.

“You’re probably right, Thanks” she says nodding at me and taking it from my hands.

I watch her through the mirror as she puts it on, it just looked stunning, it complemented her look so well. I almost felt jealous, never in a million years I would pull off such a look and she looked so flawless in it, lucky her. I might be staring too much because when she is done applying her lipstick she looks at me and smiles. Yeah, I stared for a little too much  “you wanna try it on?” she asks me and I smile shyly. “Can I?” I ask, looking down a little. I have never put on red lipstick in my life, I always liked it, but putting in such a thing seemed to bold and eye-catching, being noticed was just not my thing. Weird, I know. “Yeah sit down” she says, and I do exactly what she says.

I sit on the top of the WC, and she squats just a little in front of me, making me look up to her. I open my mouth just a little and she delicately swaps the red lipstick on my lips. She is too careful with it, when she is done with it she makes me kiss the excess off on a paper towel and apparently now I am good to go. “You look so nice” she says walking to the counter and grabbing a hand mirror to reveal her masterpiece. Honestly, I like it, I really like it. Somehow it made me look really classy even when I was still in my uniform, but it totally gave my face a different look, I looked different. Damn. “Wow, I’ve never worn red lipstick before” I say, looking at my reflection on the mirror.

“You Should, it suits you” she says walking back to leave the lipstick back on its place. “not on a regular basis of course, but definitely, more often” she says correcting herself before saying something else. “You really look very pretty (Y/n)”

“Thanks, Pepper”

Not to sound like a narcissist, but at that moment I really liked what I was seeing, a different me, a nice me. Something I’ve Never been able to pull off and now we are here, and to be completely honest, I am really feeling myself with this. I am really enjoying feeling pretty.

That night I just couldn’t help but leave that lipstick on, just because I really wanted this to last, and when Dad and Pepper were already out the door and heading to their date night. I took advantage of the moment and decided to put on some more proper clothes and take Aries for another walk and get some pizza.

Unlike Yesterday, today the store had some clients and to my surprise, there was no Luke tonight, I didn’t know how to feel about it, maybe disappointed at first, since I was really expecting to see him here after all. It’s true, I saw him this morning and we had the most awkward conversation in the history of conversations, but I don’t know, I still wanted to see him.

I let the other weird guy that works there take my order anyways, not like I had any other option anyways.

I wait on one of the chairs as I wait for my order to come off and for my surprise, maybe the gods have for once heard my prayers, because the one and only Luke Hemmings come out that door with my order in hand a big smile on his face, just what I needed.

“Oh hi (Y/n)” He says with a bright smile, pointing down at the bag.

I answer very quietly and very shyly, I did not want to sound like he made me nervous, but he really did make me nervous, I need to control myself. “You look nice” he compliments me as I take my order in hand “my shift is ending early today, I was wondering if you wanted me to walk you to your place, I live right down that street anyways, I can keep you company” he offers me and my head goes all over the place.

Is he asking me to walk home with me?. Why?. This red lipstick must have some kind of power because this is just crazy. What is even happening. I smile to him and my cheeks blush, I can’t control it, I really can’t “That’s so sweet of you and listen I would say yes but the security guard is on my place tonight and he’s like kind of paranoid, I don’t think I’d wanna tease with that” I say, totally speaking the truth. On a regular date night, my dad would have the same paranoic guy to watch over me so I didn’t escape the building without permission. Which I don’t see why I would do that, but I get it. “but hey, I’ll tell you what, what if we walk tomorrow after school” I offer. Take in count I was not thinking this through, my mind is just speaking words and going crazy, I can’t think straight. “I like that idea” he says pointing at me and smiling  “tomorrow after school, it’s a date” he says, before laughing and shaking his head  “no, not really a date, you know what I mean” I laugh and shake my head. News flash, I am still freaking out “I do” I say, still somehow acting normal  “see you later then” “Have a good night” He says waving at me, and with that I just walk out that door.

I don’t know what just happened or what just came over me, but I did that.

Mayday, I just asked this guy out, what the hell do I do now?.

[jennycalendar]

s2e14: innocence

synopsis: willow pieces together part of a secret, and jenny gives her the rest. then things start falling to bits.

INT. LIBRARY — DAY

Giles is paging through books, and Jenny is asleep at the keyboard. Giles looks up, notices this, smiles, and takes off his jacket, moving to tuck it around Jenny as a makeshift blanket.

Willow enters, placing her backpack down on the table and giving Giles a little wave. She notices him attending to Jenny and smiles slightly.

WILLOW

Aww. She fell asleep?

GILES

She still isn’t all that used to pulling all-nighters.

WILLOW

Her and me both. I nearly conked out in English today.

Jenny yawns. For a moment, it seems like she’s waking up, but she just kind of shifts a little and goes back to sleep. Giles lets his hand linger on her shoulder before he turns back to the books.

WILLOW

Any word from Angel?

GILES

Unfortunately not, but I’m remaining optimistic.

WILLOW

Seems like a good plan.

Willow crosses the room to pick up a book herself, but she isn’t really paying attention to what she’s reading.

WILLOW

Giles?

GILES

Hmm?

WILLOW

Where’d Ms. Calendar go last night when she kissed you on the cheek and ran off? Did she ever tell you where she went?

GILES

Um — no. Why?

Willow shrugs, looking a little pensive.

WILLOW

No reason.

This is when Jenny finally does wake up, groaning a little as she pulls herself into a sitting position.

JENNY

Oh, god, this is worse than any hangover. I think I have keyboard imprints on my face.

GILES

I’ll make you some tea.

JENNY

Coffee.

GILES

Absolutely not.

Giles and Jenny exchange a tired smile as he passes, crossing into his office. Willow hovers, book in hand.

JENNY

Hey, Willow, how was your day?

WILLOW

Ms. Calendar, what’s the deal with you and Angel?

Jenny glances nervously over her shoulder at the closed door of Giles’s office, then realizes too late that this has given her away.

JENNY

(stumbling)

What do you mean?

WILLOW

You’ve always been really strange around him, and then you were all like “let’s drive Angel down to the docks and out of the country,” and now no one’s heard anything from him, and, and, I’m just saying—

(hesitates)

It just looks a little weird from my angle, that’s all, and the way you’re looking at me right now makes me think I might not be wrong.

A brief pause, and then Jenny nods, as if coming to an important decision.

JENNY

Willow, what I’m going to tell you is something you cannot tell anyone else, okay?

WILLOW

(doubtful)

Depends on what you tell me.

JENNY

Fair enough.

(pauses, uncomfortable)

I was sent here by my family to watch Angel and make sure he’s still miserable, and I haven’t been doing a very good job of it. My uncle came to town to yell at me because I think Angel deserves a second chance, and my family is of the mind that he deserves to suffer for what he did. I went down last night to tell off my uncle, and it didn’t go well.  I think that about covers it.

Willow’s eyes are very wide.

GILES (O.C.)

Jenny, do you want your tea in that awful mug you gave me or a proper British teacup?

Jenny looks nervously up at Willow. It’s hard to tell what Willow’s thinking at that moment.

JENNY

(to Willow)

Please don’t tell him.

A long, tense silence.

GILES (O.C.)

No answer means I go with the awful mug. Just so you know.

WILLOW

(quiet, pointed)

But you don’t want to hurt him. Or Buffy.

JENNY

I would never.

Willow nods slowly.

WILLOW

You know you’re going to have to tell everyone else at some point. Because if this comes out in a different way—

JENNY

I know.

Giles comes back in with a large mug reading “KISS THE LIBRARIAN” and hands it over to Jenny.

GILES

(jokingly)

I’ll have you know I still don’t condone this mug, but it does work quite well for large amounts of tea.

(frowns)

Are you both all right?

Jenny and Willow exchange a look.

WILLOW

(soft, decisive)

We’re good.

Willow scoots her chair a little closer to Jenny, then goes back to reading. Jenny, touched, takes a sip of tea.

INT. COMPUTER LAB — NIGHT

Jenny steps into the lab, turning on the light, and begins rifling through her desk for some more research materials.

ENYOS

Janna.

Jenny jumps, looking up, then turns back to her desk, visibly frustrated.

ENYOS

We have pressing matters to discuss.

JENNY

I thought you said I was at a crossroads and that only I could ever really—

ENYOS

Angelus is back.

Jenny stops, then looks up, a few papers in hand.

JENNY

What?

ENYOS

I had hoped to stop it—

JENNY

How is that possible? We cursed him with a soul, that’s—

ENYOS

You always have heard only what you wish to hear, Janna, haven’t you? The curse is a punishment made for Angelus to suffer, not to live as human. One moment of true happiness, of contentment, where his soul that we restored does not plague his thoughts - and that soul is taken from him.

Jenny reels. The papers slip from her hands.

JENNY

(small, broken)

He gave me peridot. For the nightmares.

ENYOS

This is out of our hands now.

JENNY

He saved my life.

ENYOS

I have come here to tell you that Angelus is back, and that your duties in Sunnydale have ended. I had hoped to stop this curse from breaking before it began, but I see now that it was destined to be so.

JENNY

My duties in Sunnydale are far from being over.

ENYOS

(almost sad)

You were always far too rash, too impulsive—

JENNY

Looks like it.

She turns and exits without looking back, letting the door slam behind her.

INT. HALLWAY — NIGHT

Jenny is halfway to the library when she realizes that she’s forgotten her papers.

JENNY

Damn it!

As she’s turning back to the computer lab, the lights flicker. She hesitates, wavering, and catches sight of something down the hall.

JENNY

What…

ANGEL

Ah, Jenny!

Jenny freezes. Angel’s face is in shadow, but his tone is more jovial than usual — more casual and bright.

ANGEL

You’ll have to excuse me. I’m on my way to talk to Willow, I think I saw her down the hall?

JENNY

(quiet, sad)

Angel, I, I wanted to say thanks. For the peridot, and the advice, and for saving my life.

ANGEL

Aw, shucks, it was nothing. Hey, come a little closer, I might have something else up my sleeve for you.

This is when Willow and Xander round the corner.

WILLOW

(bright)

Angel! I’m so glad—

Jenny steps in front of the kids, eyes on Angel.

JENNY

Let’s all go back to the library.

ANGEL

Oh, interesting. Looks like Jenny here knows something she shouldn’t.

WILLOW

Ms. Calendar?

XANDER

What’s going on?

JENNY

We’re heading back to the library.

XANDER

You’re kind of blocking us, actually.

ANGEL

That might be a good thing.

Angel steps into the light, vamp face on. Xander’s still confused, but Willow looks like she’s beginning to understand.

JENNY

Angel, if you don’t mind—

ANGEL

I think I do mind.

JENNY

—we’re just going to—

ANGEL

I think I’d like my necklace back. Can you come over here and give it to me, Jenny?

JENNY

That’s not good gift-giving etiquette.

ANGEL

Well, you gave me a soul and took it back, so what does that say about you?

Jenny flinches.

BUFFY

Angel?

All eyes turn to Buffy, standing at the end of the hallway. Angel turns to see her, and Jenny takes this opportunity to try and shove Willow and Xander in the direction of the library.

XANDER

Ms. Calendar—

JENNY

Both of you, I will fail you in my class five times over if you do not go to the library right now.

ANGEL

Buffy! Such great timing! I’ve got a message for you.

BUFFY

Then give it to me.

ANGEL

Well, it’s not really that kind of a message—

In a swift move, Angel lunges. He almost gets Willow, but Xander shoves himself in front of Willow and Jenny, shoving Angel back. Surprised, Angel stumbles, giving Xander enough time to grab Willow’s hand and pull her into the library.

ANGEL

God, I always hated that one.

BUFFY

This isn’t you.

ANGEL

Wrong. It’s more me than I’ve been in a very, very long time.

JENNY

No, Angel, it really isn’t.

Giles stumbles out of the library, holding a cross and looking thoroughly confused.

GILES

Jenny, Willow and Xander are saying—

(catches sight of Angel)

Oh, God.

ANGEL

Hey, great, the librarian’s here! Now it really is a party.

Giles looks frightened, then determined, then grabs Jenny’s elbow, pulling her into the library with him.

INT. LIBRARY — NIGHT

GILES

What’s going on?

Jenny looks at him for a long moment, then buries her face in her hands.

GILES

Jenny, what—

Jenny draws in a breath, then raises her head.

JENNY

This is all my fault.

GILES

What is?

JENNY

He — I had no idea that this could ever happen, you have to believe me, I would have told you right away if I thought—

WILLOW

(soft)

I can vouch for her, Giles, she really didn’t know.

GILES

(completely lost)

Know what?

Jenny looks helplessly up at Giles.

JENNY

My secret’s out.

Giles still doesn’t get it, and looks like he’s about to ask another question when Buffy comes in, looking dazed and lost.

GILES

Buffy, are you all right?

WILLOW

Oh no, Buffy—

Willow jumps up, running to Buffy and pulling her into a fierce hug. Buffy’s very visibly shaking. Jenny looks at Buffy, then at Giles.

JENNY

I, I came to Sunnydale to make sure that Angel was still miserable. My family told me to watch over him, and, and make sure he was suffering, and I just, I—

Jenny’s voice breaks.

JENNY

He’s a good person. He is. He really, really is, and I would never wish any suffering on Angel. I don’t even know if I hate Angelus. I’ve just been told, over and over—

Giles looks like he’s been hit with a ton of bricks. Behind him, Buffy raises her head, eyes blotchy.

BUFFY

(wobbly)

Did you know this could happen?

JENNY

If I knew, I would have stopped it. I promise, Buffy. If I knew, I would have, I would have stopped it from ever happening, okay?

Buffy sniffles, then nods, then steps away from Willow, stumbling over to Jenny. They look at each other for a long, painful moment, and then Buffy hugs Jenny, hard, burying her face in Jenny’s shoulder. Jenny stumbles, but hugs her back.

JENNY

(whispers)

I am so, so sorry.

BUFFY

(distant)

You can fix him. Can you fix him?

Jenny looks startled by the question, then worried, but doesn’t hesitate to answer.

JENNY

If there’s a way, I’m going to find it.

[whalefairyfandom12]

for him.

Summary: In which Dan paints smiles and studies English at a dead end. His muse takes the from of Phil Lester, a film student at his university, but paint doesn’t last forever and not everyone is who we make them out to be.

A/N: I had said awhile back that I wasn’t going to continue this story for a couple of different reasons, but I’ve been wanting to get back into writing and I thought it would be a nice reintroduction. Given that this is over two years late I’m not even sure if anyone still cares haha, but I hope you enjoy it regardless!

tw; depression, alcohol, suicidal thoughts

Masterpost

Part Two

   The paper sits on top of his laptop, crumpled and severely tea stained. The impending due date is written across the top in black sharpie: June 11.  For the most part creative writing is the only class that doesn’t make him want to rip his hair out, but he’s not convinced that his teacher isn’t a sadist.

  Purple writing stains the back of his hand, the biro ink smudging and dripping onto the paper below him.

   we live in the broken fragments of a dying universe.

  His phone releases a chiming sound, the vibrations making a rattling noise against the surface of his desk. Dan grabs it, desperate for anything to take his mind off of the depressing reality that he might very well fail his course. He wonders what he’d do with the rest of his life if something related to english doesn’t work out. Nothing maybe.

  The text is from Phil, perhaps unsurprisingly. they say only boring people are bored. with that reasoning i must be duller than 50 shades.

   A smile tugging at the corner of his lips despite himself, Dan dials Phil and waits. “E.L. James couldn’t make it so I’m the replacement.”

  “Thank god. I’d rather talk to you any day.”

  “Is my voice your favorite sound?” Dan asks sarcastically.

  “Yes.”

   The smile grows. “In that case it’s worth nothing that your voice is my favorite sound too.”

   “Lucky that,” Phil says, and Dan can hear the accompanying eye roll. “What a coincidence.”

   “Are you finished with your homework?” he asks. There’s a pen sitting beside his computer and he flicks it with his thumb and forefinger. It hits the wall and rolls back towards him, and he repeats the action.

  “The pressing assignments,” Phil says. “You?”

  “Sort of, kind of, not really?”

  “Is the creativity block still pretty bad?”

  “It’s still there,” Dan says, making a face. “By this point I’ve learned to cope but I wouldn’t call it fantastic.”

   “What genre do you like to write?”

   “I gravitate towards realistic fiction but it doesn’t really matter.”

   “Hmm,” Phil’s voice trails off into contemplative silence. “I told you that I would help you cure your creativity block. I promise I haven’t forgotten, it’s just a work in progress.”

   “Don’t worry about it,” Dan says. “It’d be nice to have the block gone but I don’t want it to become your issue.”

   “Who said anything about worrying?” Phil asks. “Who do you think I am, Philip Lester?”

   “Did anyone ever tell you you’re absolutely freaking hilarious?” Dan asks dryly.

   “Hey!” Chris’s shout comes from the living room and he yanks the phone away from his ear, cupping a hand over the microphone. “Cheese or pepperoni?”

  “Why not both?” Dan asks, raising his voice. “We both know you can eat at least one of those without any help.”

   “I’m glad you agree!”

    He repositions the phone. Phil’s saying something, but he can’t quite make out the words. “Sorry, what?”

   “I asked if you had to go.”

   “I should, yeah. Did I relieve your boredom?”

   “I think it’s safe to say that you did, but now I want pizza, too,” Phil says. “Good luck with your story.”

   “Thanks,” Dan says. “I’ll see you then.” He pushes the end call button, shoving his phone in his pocket and turning off the light.

    Chris looks up from his laptop, scowling at the screen. “Have I mentioned before that this thing is utter shit?”

   “Once or twice,” Dan says.

   Chris releases a long breath from between his teeth, eyeing him intently.“Phil?” He nods. “I’m not saying anything but--”

   “Yes you are,” Dan interrupts, subjecting the boy to a glare. “How long did they say on the pizza?”

   “Ten, fifteen minutes tops,” Chris says. “I’m just saying, if you’re planning on making a move you should do it soon.”

    Dan stares at him incredulously. He doesn’t see any point in arguing further, and he retreats to his room; making sure Chris can hear the slam of the door behind him. Even if he was interested in Phil, hypothetically speaking, for those feelings to be reciprocated is about as likely as finishing top of his maths class. There’s no way in hell a notion like that could ever be more than a fleeting fantasy, and he’s never been one for daydreams.

...

    Dan’s seat in Creative Writing is located diagonally by the only window in the classroom. The door is located a short distance away, accessible in ten seconds, maybe less if he’s charged with adrenaline. He has the best seat in the room; if a need for escape presents itself he can make a run for the door or shatter the glass and jump out the window. The drop to the ground isn’t high enough to kill him. He thinks.

   His professor’s giving some lecture about characterization but he stopped listening a while ago. He hopes she doesn’t ask what his story concept is any time in the next millennium, because he doesn’t have one. Despite Phil’s bravado about curing his creativity block the page is as empty as it was a month ago. Christmas break starts in two weeks, and he’s hoping to have the skeleton of his story finished by the end of break.

   He contemplates if the other thirty two students have completed the assignment yet. He thinks that’s unlikely, but he also doubts any of them are quite as far behind as he is. The sparse moments he has to write he’s either too tired to do much more than log onto his computer, or he lacks the inspiration to produce anything with a glimmer of potential.

   Dan scribbles in the margins of the newest handout, previous doodles already littering most of the available white space. He can write nonsensical drivel until every inch of his skin is stained, but finding the right words and phrases long enough for a novel is an impossibility.

  the invisible boy loved the dark so much the shadows rose to swallow him whole. he wondered, if people were fireflies would the world be a brighter place?

  Dan chances a glance at the clock; twenty minutes until his next class. It seems like he’s always counting down to something, the end of class, the end of the day, the days before break, the years before graduation. Sometimes he doesn’t think the countdown is ever going to come to an end. If life’s composed of moments than each moment lasts the number of seconds it takes to end. Everything is composed of numbers, and though they’re cool and aloof and safe there’s a security to them that he’s too afraid venture out of.

   He wonders how long it’ll take before he begins counting down the seconds to his death. Sometimes he think he thinks he’s already started.

   For the end of November the weather is warm enough to allow spending lunch and the time between classes outside, something that Dan wholeheartedly prefers to eating in the cafeteria. Conversations flow more freely, and he can stretch out on the grass and watch the clouds.

   PJ and Phil’s digital storytelling class is the first that’s released, and by the time Dan reaches their usual spot most of the time Chris’s already there. Phil’s sitting with his back against the tree and knees tucked to his chest, PJ and Chris sprawled on the ground in front of him. A sketchbook is perched on his legs, pen uncapped and ink flowing onto the white canvas.

  “Is Louise free yet?” PJ asks.

   “Five minutes,” Dan says, checking his watch and sitting beside Phil. Louise’s French class runs later than anyone else’s, but her next class starts a good half an hour later than his does so he supposes it evens out.

    Sometimes he wishes he saw her more often. The points of their lives that intersect are sporadic; planets brushing and occasionally colliding but never for long. “How was digital storytelling?” he asks.

  “Fine,” PJ says. “Nothing new really, we’re supposed to be drafting a storyboard for a short film. How was English?”

  “Long,” Dan says, pulling a face. “At least break starts soon. That’s something I guess.”

  “PJ and I have an Important Announcement,” Chris says, waving a hand in the air with what he assumes is meant to be an impressive gesture.

  “We do?”

  “Yes,” Chris says, pushing himself up on his elbows and giving PJ a meaningful look.

  “Right,” PJ says, eyes widening in understanding. “We do.”

   “For those of us who aren’t telepathic would you care to clarify?” Dan asks.

   “Hush,” Chris says, raising an admonitory eyebrow. “Patience grasshopper.”

   Dan shakes his head, turning his attention to Phil. The sunlight is filtered through the branches and leaves of the tree overhead, casting parts of his profile in shadow. He thinks that Phil’s the kind of person that deserves to have stories written about him and paintings created in his likeness, yet he doubts there’s an artist alive who could begin to do him justice.

   “It’s a capybara,” Phil says, catching Dan’s eye and tilting the drawing. “A work in progress.”

   “I like it,” Dan says, tracing a careful finger over the drying ink. “Are they your favorite animal?”

    “They’re in the running.” Phil’s eyes slide past Peter, landing on the rapidly approaching figure of Louise. “Hey.”

    “Hello.” Her backpack is tossed on the ground with a dull thumping noise, and she lays on the ground, closing her eyes.

    “Now that everyone’s here I want to make the Important announcement,” Chris says, staggering to his feet.

   “What’re you on about?” Louise asks, her words punctured by a yawn. “I’m too tired for anything that requires more response than a grunt.”

   “PJ and I are dating,” Chris says proudly. Silence meets his words, and a quick glance at everyone confirms that the other two are just as unimpressed as Dan is.

   “Wow, what a surprise,” he says sarcastically. “I never would’ve suspected.”

    Chris looks distinctly wounded. “Thanks mate. Good to have your support as always.”

   “You two have wanted to bang each other for ages,” he snorts. “If you wanted to deliver a shocker this wasn’t it.”

   “Congratulations,” Phil says, offering a thumbs up.

   “Thank you Phil,” Chris says pointedly. He sits down again, crossing his arms wearing an expression akin to a pout.

    “Cheer up,” PJ says, bumping his shoulder. “At least they didn’t throw rotten tomatoes.”

   “That’s tomorrow,” Dan says. He stifles a yawn, checking his phone. He had time to take a nap, but he doesn’t think Chris would agree with the idea.

    “Are you lot going home for break?” PJ asks.

   “I am,” Phil says. There’s no enthusiasm to his words and Dan frowns, giving him a sideways glance.

   “Does that mean you’ll need some entertainment over the holidays?” he asks.

   Phil smiles. “I think some entertainment would be nice.”

   “I’ll also be at home doing nothing,” Dan says. “I have a feeling the entertainment hotline might decide to give you a call.”

  He decides that Phil has the nicest eyes he’s seen, a shade of blue that Van Gogh could only dream of. He’s heard people talk about drowning in eyes before, but Phil’s are more like the sky and Dan thinks he wouldn’t mind letting the anchors snap and float away.

...

    Dan’s favorite bookstore, Ink and Quill, is only a five minute away from the school. Whenever Things become too much it’s his first place of refuge. There's a sofa nestled in front of a fireplace by which a bookshelf is crammed, and it's there he sits and contemplates the meaningless of existence.

   Tuesdays are always his least favorite days. There’s an expectation that Mondays will be bad, and Wednesdays are hump days; if you can survive the first two days you can survive the last few. Thursdays are so close to Fridays and Fridays are the day before the weekend that they’re bearable, but Tuesday serves no purpose other than lengthening the week and adding another day to the work week.

   It’s on one such Tuesday afternoon that Dan finds himself laying on the sofa with his eyes closed. Spots dance across the back of his eyelids, a pale imitation of his own northern lights. He holds the lights closer, as if by squeezing his eyes shut he can make them illuminate his mind.

  “Hey.”

   He opens his eyes, the warmth of Phil’s voice casting it’s own luminescence over the dim lightning from the fire. There’s a skylight directly overhead, and if he tilts his head at the right angle he can see the sky. The torrential downpour outside successfully blocks the sun, projecting a gloomy and melancholy air over everything else. All there is is a mass of gray, and he thinks that if oblivion was to be summed up in a color this would be it.

   “Hi,” he says, leaning against one of the armrests and crossing his legs. Phil sits on the opposite end of the sofa, mimicking his posture. Their legs are pressed together, thighs touching and calves brushing. There’s a distinct warmth to it and for once Dan doesn’t mind the contact. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “I think I’ve seen you around before,” Phil says, a smile ghosting his face. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Well enough.” Dan shrugs, trying to play the action off as nonchalant. “What about you?”

    Phil raises an eyebrow, as if to call him out on the complete falsity of his response. “Fine,” he answers, the challenge in his voice palpable.

    Dan can’t remember the last time someone paid enough attention to notice the difference between sincerity and empty words. It’s nice--but that still doesn’t mean he’s going to sob into Phil’s shoulder and unload the weight of his problems. “What are you doing here?”

  He’s afraid the question comes off as brusque, but Phil doesn’t show any outward signs of offense. “I was submitting my application,” the boy says.

  “For what?”

  “Exchange program and mentorship,” Phil says, eyes lighting up. “In California.”

    Something ugly has begun to take root. “When would it be?”

    “The next three years. I’d finish my degree there.”

    “A transfer essentially?” Dan asks. He’s not sure why it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room, but it does and he can’t breathe.

    “You could look at it that way,” Phil acknowledges. “I doubt they’ll accept me, but I figured there was nothing to lose in trying.”

    “I hope they accept you,” Dan says, even though no, he really hopes they don’t. He’s aware he’s being incredibly selfish and that there’s no logic to his thinking, but he can’t force himself past the idea of university without Phil.

  “Thanks Dan. You’ll be the first person I’ll tell once I hear something.” Phil gives him an expectant look. “What brings you here?”

   “I like it here,” Dan says. “I usually come here on Tuesdays and think about Things.”

   “Things?”

    “How nothing matters in the end.” He means his words to come off as sarcastic, but he doesn't think he's successful. 

    “What do you mean?”

    Dan shrinks into the sofa. “I was just kidding,” he says. “Never mind.”

    “Well, if you do want to talk about the end of the world I’m always here.”

   Dan tries not to read into that last part too deeply. Phil is still looking at him a little too closely, and he changes the subject. “When are you going home?”

  “Tonight. When are you?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Dan says. He pushes up his sleeve, glancing at his watch. “I should go and pack. I hope your trip goes well.”

   “Thanks, you too,” Phil says. “Should I keep an ear out for the hotline?”

   “I think you should,” Dan smiles. He shrugs his coat on, rising to his feet. “I’ll see you next year.”

   Phil nods. “Happy Christmas and New Year,” he says. There’s a brief hesitation before he pulls Dan into a hug, letting go almost immediately. Dan thinks he can make out the ghost of a blush on the boy’s face as he opens the door.

   The hug was nicer than he remembers hugs being, and he can’t remember the last time he was disappointed for physical contact to end. Hugs, he comes to the conclusion, should be given more often.

...

     His aunt’s house is always too much of something. Too much noise, too much smalltalk, too much of the same questions and answers over and over again until he finds the quietest corner that he can and retreats. Everyone from his grandparents to cousins to family friends crowd the already cramped space of the living room, spilling out into the dining room and even upstairs.

   It’s impossible to not feel claustrophobic. He’s found that if he spends enough time buried in other people that the walls feel like they’re closing in. There’s no escape from the endless conversation and observation, and in a way it reminds him of school. Always under a microscope, where each and every movement and word is subject to dissection and offense.

    After answering yet another question about uni good, fine, yes, no, Dan slips down to the basement in the hopes that he might find it at least relatively empty. Because the universe hates him, two of his cousins are battling to the death with light sabers and knocking over every piece of furniture in the process. He lets the door slam behind him, leaving before he can be blamed for any of the destruction.

   The upstairs is too loud and too chaotic for any semblance of solitude, and after giving the downstairs a final check he votes for going outside. He’s heard there’s something called grass. From the first floor there are two ways outside--a sliding glass door that leads to the porch and the front door connected to the kitchen.

    The porch door is the least mobbed, and he begins to make his way over. A poke to the back of his neck and a demand to join a card game puts a temporary halt to his escape, and he makes up a lie about needing to get a drink of water before making a run for it. Dan’s not sure if it’s a failure of memory or something else, but he doesn’t remember family reunions ever being quite this bad. The door slides open easily enough, and he steps outside.

   The sky is clear for the most part, and a slight chill sends a puff of condensation into the air every time he exhales. His decision to not bring a coat is one that he’s now regretting, but it’s not worth going back inside to grab it. The wooden slats of the porch are damp and cold to the touch, and he steps off and settles in the grass. The walls aren’t enough to mute the noise, although they make it relatively bearable.

   He closes his eyes, attempting to return his breathing to a somewhat regular pace. A quiet buzzing interrupts his train of thought, and he cracks open an eyelid. He fumbles for his phone, clumsily swiping without bothering to check the caller I.D. “Hello?”

   “Hey.”

  The smile that crosses Dan’s face at Phil’s greeting feels ridiculous, and he’s glad the dark and solitude conceal the expression from analyzation. “Enjoying your festivities?”

    “Not particularly. You?”

   “No. Merry Christmas.” There’s no enthusiasm in Phil’s statement, and there’s even less in Dan’s reply.

   “You too. How’s break been?”

   “I’m actually looking forward to starting school again which I think says a lot.”

   “Is it really that bad?” Dan asks.

   “I might be slightly dramatic,” Phil says. “Family gatherings were never really my favorite thing, but it could always be worse. How’re you?”

   “About the same as you. At least on campus there’s somewhere to hide that’s not outside.”

   “After we get back you should come over,” Phil says, the statement slightly distorted over the sudden influx of noise. “I still have to give you your present.

   “Sure, sounds like a plan.” Dan agrees. He neglects to mention that Phil’s gift is still in the development stages.

  “What's your favorite color?”

  “Blue,” Dan says. “Like the sky. You?”

  “Purple. Like an aubergine.” The static of a loud crash cuts through Phil’s next phrase.

  “What did you say?”

   “I have to go, sorry,” Phil says. “My little sister almost set the table cloth on fire. I’ll talk to you later.” The lines dies before Dan can say anything in response, and he stares at his phone until the screen goes black. He would never admit it, but out of all of the presents he’s gotten so far hearing Phil’s voice is undoubtedly the best one yet.

...

  The worst part of packing all of his family in one house is the inevitable lack of sleep. Dan’s out like a light the moment his head hits the pillow, and it feels like mere seconds have passed before his eyelids are pried open. Literally.

   “Play with me!” Kat, his younger cousin, is jumping on the bed. Her fingers are millimeters away from Dan’s eyes, their attack momentarily paused.

  Dan groans, batting away her hands. He rubs his eyes, blinking a few times to ensure that nothing's broken. “What time is it?”

  Kat shrugs, blonde hair forming a mane around her face. “Time for you to wake up!”

   “I am awake.” Dan buries his face back in his pillow. “And now I'm asleep.”

  He can hear Kat’s pout, sense her arms crossing and bottom lip beginning to jut out. “Why are grown ups so boring?”

   Dan sighs, rolling over to face his cousin. “Why don't you go wake up your parents?” Normally he’d feel guilty about pawning Kat off on her parents at some some ungodly hour in the morning, but he's too tired to feel anything but exhaustion.

  “Because.” Kat begins to jump on the bed, her words falling into time with her movements. “Because because because because because--”

  “If you leave me alone I promise I’ll play with you in a few hours,” Dan coaxes. “I’ll even give you an extra cookie at lunch today.”

  Kat mulls his offer, head tilting to one side. “Okay,” she agrees, sliding off the bed. She totters towards the exit, the door slamming shut behind her. Dan lets the silence envelop him, nestling into the quiet and letting it fill his head overflowing.

    He stumbles downstairs a few hours later, showered, dressed, and hungry. His mum is at the stove, a growing plate of pancakes sitting on the counter beside her. She hums a greeting, shooting him a warning glance.

  “Touch those pancakes and you won’t be getting any,” she says threateningly, waving the spatula at him. In a competition for the best puppy dog eyes Dan would be a long ways away from the winner, but they’d always worked on his mum.

  “I won’t tell Kat,” he wheedles.

  His mum sighs, gesturing for him to open his mouth. She casts a furtive glance around the room, tossing one into the waiting trap. “You’d better not.”

  “Thanks mum,” Dan says brightly. He puts a hand over his mouth to hide his chewing. Whatever else could be said about his mum, there was no denying that she knew how to cook. He had never been a fan of family reunions, but he supposes they’re not all bad.

...

   The bus had arrived back on campus at three forty one in the morning. He’d exchanged a sleepy greeting with Chris who’d arrived the day prior before dumping his bags on the ground. He sat down at his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper, beginning to brainstorm ideas for Phil’s present.

   The current beginnings of said present sits on top of his desk, unfinished and a complete disaster even four hours later. Dan stares at it for a moment, hoping that today will be the day that his telepathic abilities kick in and the gift will magically finish itself. Disappointingly, though admittedly unsurprisingly, the paper remains in shards and the cardboard in mangled sections. A quick knock breaks his concentration, and before he can say anything in response the door opens.

   “Why bother knocking if you’re going to come in anyway?” Dan asks, swiveling in his chair. Chris stands in the doorway, holding a plate of cookies and balancing a glass of milk in the other hand.

   He shoots a vaguely horrified look at Dan’s project. “The hell is that supposed to be?” The question reflects confusion and slight disgust, which Dan thinks is probably the appropriate reaction.

   “Your guess is as good as mine,” he says grimly. “It was supposed to be a book, now I honestly have no idea.” In theory his idea wasn’t completely terrible. Originally he’d wanted to write something, but he’s resorted to binding a book for Phil to write his thoughts down in and giving him a fountain pen. He’ll be the first to admit it’s not the most creative idea out there, but it’s always harder to come up with a gift for someone you care about.

   “Is that for Phil?” Chris asks. He enters the room and sits on the edge of Dan’s bed, setting the plate and glass on his desk. “Christmas present?”

   “Yeah. What are you getting PJ?”

   “Camera lens,” Chris says. “He won’t shut up about it--contrary to common belief I can take a hint.” A quiet smile steals the bite from his words, and Dan would tease him about it if he had the energy.

   “Are those for me?” he asks, jerking his chin towards the cookies.

   “No,” Chris says sarcastically, rolling his eyes. “I brought food all the way to your room because I thought it would be a nice centerpiece.”

   Dan grabs a cookie off the top, the chocolate burning his tongue and bursting in his mouth. He lets his eyes flutter shut, the slight bitterness of the chocolate cut by the sugar in the dough. The contrast is perfect, and he doesn’t think he’s ever tasted anything so delicious. “When you asked me about moving in together I want you to know I only said yes for the food.”

   “What’s your idea?” Chris asks.

   “I wanted to bind a book for him to write his ideas in,” Dan says. “It’s kind of a mess right now.” He reaches for his duffel bag, unzipping one of the pouches and rooting around for a moment before emerging triumphantly with a wrapped parcel. “This is yours.”

   Chris shakes it experimentally. “Is it explosives? I bet it is.”

  “It’s not explosives,” Dan says. “I pay rent too.”

   Chris tears off the wrapping paper, face lighting up. “You’re kidding me.”

    “Merry Christmas.” Dan’s almost knocked over by the enthusiasm behind the boy’s hug. He can’t help but think it’s not nearly as nice as Phil’s. “Everyone was really uncreative this year and we all saved up. Trust me, it’s a completely selfish gift. I’m tired of hearing you complain about your old laptop all of the time.”

    “Thank you. Your gift’s coming,” Chris says, straightening. “Shipping hates me.” He points to Phil’s present. “I think you should try hot gluing the fabric to the cover instead,” he suggests. “It’ll hold better.”

   “That’s actually a good idea,” Dan says.

   “I’m full of them,” Chris moves towards the door, waggling his eyebrows. “It’s why you love me.”

   “I’ll have to ask PJ’s opinion on that one.”

   “Only if you let me ask Phil’s.” He ducks the glue stick Dan throws in his general direction, his laughter following him down the hall.

[sinsiriuslyemo]

Hey guys!! I’m hoping to get this story done by Christmas Day! Thank you so much to all of you who have liked, reblogged and commented. Now the fun begins, we get to see more of the SVU universe!!

6.

Monday morning felt like any other day, all thoughts of Santa Clause and flying reindeer had vanished as quickly as they’d crashed into Rafael’s life. It had to have been a dream, at least that’s what he kept telling himself, though when he’d questioned Sonny about the red silk pajamas, he was met with confusion. Apparently his boyfriend hadn’t given him pajamas Christmas Eve.

In fact, Sonny’s gift to him wound up being a new coffee mug to keep at work since he had always complained about how the interns never washed the office mugs well enough. It had actually been quite thoughtful, very Sonny-like.

Later that afternoon, as he walked into the precinct for his briefing with Olivia, he smirked softly at the tall, blonde detective, who was sitting at his desk with the phone pressed to his ear. Walking past Sonny’s desk, he playfully pinched the slender man’s shoulder and leaned down towards his ear.

“Are you coming by tonight?” he asked.

Sonny looked up at him with a smirk of his own, pulling the mouthpiece further away from him.

“That depends, you got anymore mysterious pjs I don’t know about?”

Rafael rolled his eyes, moving to sit in the chair beside the detective’s desk. He’d almost forgotten about the entire Christmas Eve ordeal completely.

“Someone’s jealous,” he mused.

“Can you blame me? Someone got you silk pajamas and all I got you was a lousy coffee mug. I can’t compete,” he teased, though Rafael thought he could hear a hint of sadness in the other man’s words.

“I would take a coffee mug over a pair of pajamas from a stranger any time,” Rafael answered. “Come by tonight. We’ll order in.”

Sonny nodded, bringing the phone back to his ear. “Yeah, I’m still here…”

Rafael got up and moved towards Liv’s office, knocking on the doorframe and moving inside.

“Well hello, Santa,” she teased and he rolled his eyes. “Noah can’t stop talking about the best Christmas he’s ever had. He wants to know when he can go over to your place again.”

“I’m sorry, I was under the impression this was a police station, not an agency that hires babysitters,” he answered as she chuckled. “What do you have for me?”

He listened as she spouted off the evidence they’d gathered thus far, nodding along as he always did. By the end, he had more than enough to ask for a warrant, and he told her as much, standing and preparing to leave. On his way out, Lucy came in with Noah, and he tried to veer off in another direction to avoid them.

“Rafael!”

Damn it.

“Rafael!” Noah said again, running towards the ADA.

“Hello Noah,” he said, smiling politely and holding a hand up in a wave before nodding to the babysitter. “Lucy.”

“I told all my friends about you and the North Pole!”

“Wonderful,” Rafael replied.

“Heya kiddo, I haven’t seen you since Christmas Eve,” Sonny said, smiling over at Noah as he walked around his desk. “How’d you make out? Santa leave you a lot of presents?”

“It was so cool!” Noah answered, smiling up at the detective. “Rafael was Santa, and we got to go to the North Pole!”

Sonny arched a brow up at his boyfriend as he replied, “Is that right?” Rafael just shook his head.

“Barba? As Santa?” Rollins chimed as she looked over from her desk. “I would’a paid to see you playing pretend, counselor.”

“But it wasn’t pretend, Amanda!” Noah exclaimed with a wide smile. “On Christmas Eve, Rafael pushed Santa off the fire escape--”

“Whoa!”

“--Santa disappeared, and Rafael took his place. He took me with him to deliver all the presents!” Noah said as he dug through his backpack. “Then the reindeer flew us to the North Pole, where the head elf, Bernard, gave me this,” he added, pulling out the snow globe.

“Wow, Barba, do you make the toys?” Rollins asked playfully.

“Naw, come on Amanda, the elves do,” Fin chimed, leaning back in his chair.

“Oh wait, Fin, I don’t think they like to be called elves. They’re ‘little people,’” Carisi offered.

“Right, right,” Fin replied, smirking.

“What’s going on out here?” Liv asked as she came out of her office and smiled at Lucy.

“Noah was just telling us all about his trip to the North Pole,” Sonny answered, smitten, dimpled grin aimed at Rafael. “Which is your favorite reindeer, Noah?”

“Sonny, for God’s sake,” the ADA mumbled, widening his eyes in a silent plea.

“Comet,” Noah said, still clutching the snow globe.

“Alright, so let me get this straight, Santa,” Rollins teased. “If I wanna be Santa Clause, all I have to do is push you off a fire escape?”

Fin chuckled under his breath.

Rafael rolled his eyes. “Noah, may I speak with you for a minute?”

“Okay!”

“Do you mind?” Rafael asked Liv, who shrugged and shook her head.

“No, go ahead. A secret meeting between Santa and his number one helper sounds important,” she mused. “You can use my office.”

Rafael rolled his eyes, moving with Noah to the Lieutenant. Sonny laughed softly as his phone rang, and he reached across his desk to answer. “Carisi.” Face falling, he nodded his head, sighing. “Alright, thanks,” he said, hanging up and looking to Benson. “Got a body, 117th between 5th and Madison.”

“You and Rollins.”

Rafael closed the door to the office and set his briefcase down on one of the chairs, sitting down with Noah on the couch.

“Listen, Noah, we gotta talk about this Santa Clause thing--”

“Rafael, Lucy took me to the zoo today! I saw a polar bear, they were just like the ones at the North Pole,” Noah said excitedly.

“Noah, we did not go to the North Pole,” Rafael replied.

“You’re in denial, Rafael.”

“You don’t even know what that means,” Rafael pointed out.

“Well, you are. I know what happened,” Noah said.

“Where’s your proof?” Rafael demanded. “I don’t understand why we can’t just think of it as just a great dream, and just move on?”

“What about this?” Noah asked, holding up the snow globe he’d been holding in his lap. “Remember all the neat stuff inside?”

“Noah…” Rafael shook his head. “This is just a toy,” he said softly.

“What about your pajamas?”

“I could’ve gotten those at some point for Sonny and just forgotten about them,” he answered, shrugging. “That doesn’t prove anything except I have good taste.”

“I know who you are, Rafael,” Noah replied, tucking the snow globe into his backpack again. “You’ll figure it out soon enough. There are a lot of kids that believe in you, you can’t let them down.”

“Noah,” Rafael groaned, now becoming a little impatient. “You’re wrong. Besides that contract, the Santa clause, it isn’t legally binding. It would be considered an ‘unfair surprise.’”

“You’ll see,” Noah replied, and it was obvious to Rafael that the boy was refusing to believe the reality. So he did what any good attorney did, he changed tactics.

“Look, regardless, I don’t want you to tell anyone else about the North Pole, okay?”

“But why not?”

“Well because some things--you know, big things--should just remain unsaid, between two people.”

“Like a secret?”

“Yes,” Rafael answered, nodding. “Exactly a secret, let’s keep it secret, okay?”

“How come?”

Rafael sighed heavily, running a hand over his face. “How does ten bucks sound to you?” Noah furrowed his brows at the older man. “This is something I’d really like you to do for me, Noah. I wanna keep it a secret. Can you do that, please?”

The little boy smiled, nodding his head. “Okay.”

“Thank God,” Rafael whispered, leaning back and letting a sigh of relief pass through him.

“When do I get the ten bucks?”

Snuggled on his couch after finishing their take out, Rafael ran his fingertips over Sonny’s forearm, smirking at the sea of goosebumps that formed in his wake. The younger man sighed contently, head rolling to touch his forehead to Rafael's neck.

“You know I gotta say, seeing Noah so happy after spending a night with you...I mean, the smile on that kid’s face-- I love Liv and I know she does her best considering, but...I don’t know, I’ve just never seen him so excited about something,” Sonny mused. “It was nice.”

“He’s got some imagination,” Rafael mumbled.

“Tell me about it. Made me fall even more in love with you, to be honest,” he whispered, eyes moving to look up at Rafael. He frowned when the older man tensed a little, cleared his throat and moved his hand away. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?” Rafael asked softly.

“Any time I tell you how I feel you clam up,” Sonny said, moving away to sit up straight. “I don’t get it. I mean, we’ve been together--”

“Not very long,” Rafael mused.

“Yeah, and that’s what I don’t get about it. This should be our ‘honeymoon phase’ but it feels like you don't wanna admit that you have feelings for me.”

“We’re together aren’t we?” Rafael countered.

“Yeah, and I’m fine with taking things as slow as you want, but eventually when I tell you that I love you, I’m gonna wanna hear it back,” Sonny replied. “I spent a long time in the closet, and then coming out and getting over my fear of other people knowin’...it was terrifying.

“I’m finally in a place where I feel proud for people to know we’re together. Saying I love you for the first time took me a long time to build up to. Now that you’re my boyfriend, I wanna express my feelings without having to worry it’s gonna push you away,” he said, reaching a hand to take Rafael’s. “That’s all. I’m being patient, but at some point, you know...I’d like it if you started expressing your feelings, too.”

Rafael sighed, nodding his head a little and biting his bottom lip. He’d always been a man who went into a relationship with all his heart, his soul, and time and time again would get his heart not just broken but shattered. It always took him a long time to be able to put himself back together. Last time, with Yelina, had taken him the longest, and ever since he’d been terrified of committing to anyone else.

“I’ll do my best to get past this, but you’ve gotta understand--”

“I know, Raf, I know you’ve got a rocky past,” Sonny said softly, stroking the skin between the older man’s thumb and forefinger. “We all do, but at some point you’ve gotta take that leap of faith again or you might miss out on some great things.”

Kissing the ADA’s lips firmly, he let his forehead rest against that of the other man’s.

“Not to mention I would too,” he mumbled.

Sighing heavily, Rafael closed his eyes and nodded softly.

“I’ll try,” Rafael answered.

The last thing he wanted was to lose Sonny because he couldn’t allow their relationship to grow or get stronger. Keeping him at an arm’s length when it came to emotions was getting tiring for him, even if it was his instinct to do so. He could only imagine how Sonny felt.

“That’s all I’m asking for,” Sonny replied with a smile. “So...are you gonna play Santa Clause every year now?” he asked with a smirk.

Rafael rolled his eyes, letting his head roll to rest against the back of the couch.

“No, most definitely not,” he answered.

“Aw, come on. You made that kid have the best Christmas he’s ever had. Who knew, Rafael Barba was so great with kids.”

“What can I say? I’m just full of surprises,” he replied.

Was he ever going to stop hearing about this Santa Clause thing?

“You should come see my nieces next year as Santa--”

“Sonny, I don’t really wanna talk about that anymore, okay? It was just a dream that Noah blew out of proportion.”

“Wow, from Santa to the Grinch,” Sonny mused with a smirk as Rafael rolled his eyes.

[hannahkathryns-blog]

Notebook Entry #5: Getting Lost

FRIDAY:

I hate this. I can’t even get rid of old receipts or department store bags because what if I need something to write on or I decide to catalog my finances from 2015 or I need to carry something but I don’t want to use a nice bag. Then I would be totally screwed, so I usually just stuff everything in a drawer and hope when I need it I remember I put it in the drawer. Then I don’t remember and freak out. And now my mom is probably throwing them away now that I’m out of the house because I can’t beg her not to. But this is not a receipt or a paper bag. This is my necklace. My mom gave it to me for my 18th birthday, she had it handmade by a metal artist on Etsy or somewhere artistic like that. I’ve made thousands of paper cranes and usually I leave them everywhere; every teacher I've ever had in my high school has at least a few on a desk or a shelf somewhere, they’re stuffed in the bottom of my backpack. I found one in my ex boyfriend’s pool once, while we were still dating. But I don’t want to leave this one here. My eyes itch, because I’m lying under a bush, probably looking like a fucking idiot, and i’m allergic to everything that grows. Even nature wants me to get away from here. My eyes are watering, and I can’t tell if it's because I am terrified someone might take one of the most important things I have or because there’s pollen all over me. I put the necklace in a medication bottle because I didn’t want to just leave it in the open; it rains here a lot and I don’t want it to rust. I almost forgot to block the prescription number before I buried it, I had to find a sharpie in the Folk basement and scribble it out so someone doesn’t refill my meds. The bottle is for my Fluoxetine; it’s my anti anxiety medication. Isn’t that ironic.

I just sat up. I really need to leave, I have to meet some people for a group project. I buried the necklace near West Village. I was too afraid to put it any farther away. But it still doesn’t feel good enough.

SATURDAY:

I feel like I lost a finger. Maybe it’s more like a tumor, because my neck feels lighter even though the necklace can’t have weighed more than like an ounce. If I didn’t have a finger, I wouldn’t be able to do stuff, and I can still do things without a necklace. One of my friends who came to visit me from back home noticed I didn’t have it on, and she freaked out; she thought it had broken and fallen off somewhere on campus. She offered to help me find it. I had to explain that, for some reason, I decided to do this voluntarily, and I knew where it was. I feel like I had almost forgotten about it before she mentioned it, and telling her reminded me that I should probably tell my mom. She gave the necklace to me, she knows a lot about loss. But I haven’t yet. I don’t want her to think I didn’t care about it enough to keep it with me. I buried the necklace in the same way she buried the letters my dad wrote to her twenty years ago, but she didn’t care about the person the letters were attached to when she abandoned them, and of course I still care about my mom. I reached for it just now, I didn’t even do it consciously, I’m just used to touching it while I’m thinking. I went out last night with some friends and I wore a different necklace with earrings, which was weird. I felt very put together because both of them matched. But I woke up in the morning with red marks all over my neck because I forgot to take the necklace off when I slept, and I’m allergic to nickel. The crane necklace is pure silver (at least according to my mom it is). I’m really worried that if someone finds it they’ll take it, maybe sell it, because I’m not sure how much it’s worth. I really want to go back to where I buried it and put a note asking anyone who might find it to please not take it, that it’s buried for a project, but I know I’m not supposed to. On the plus side, I got a bunch of other shit done today so I wouldn’t think about it as much.

 SUNDAY:

I can see the bush that I buried the necklace underneath when I walk between the Caldwell and Folk basement. Last night I almost turned just to check and see if it was there, and I stopped myself. I wouldn’t have taken it, I just wanted to see if someone else had. But I didn’t, I stuck it out, I went to my dorm and made popcorn instead. The summer formal was last night, and my dress would have looked PERFECT with that necklace. It’s the same dress I wore to prom with my ex a few months ago, and my outfit was exactly the same, except I was wearing my necklace at prom and I wasn’t last night. And I was with Luke when I went to prom, and as of Thursday, I’m not with him anymore. I thought it would hurt more than it did when we broke up, but I feel like I’ve been thinking more about this fucking necklace than the end of my two and a half year relationship. I feel like I should be more profound about all of this as well, like it needs to have a deeper meaning, especially since I just broke up with my best friend, even though we both knew it was coming. But the necklace was my thing; I folded paper cranes, not him. I wrote about paper cranes for my college essay, not him. I’ve folded thousands, not him. So it just feels like I lost a bit of me and a lot of him, and I mainly just want the bit of me back so all of me can exist without all of him.

I’m afraid it’s going to rain and maybe the rain will wash the pill bottle away. But I think I buried it well enough for it to stay. But then again, this is Georgia; there could be a tornado in the next thirty minutes for all we know. If that happens though, I’m definitely going back to get it. This isn’t some Wizard of Oz type shit. If it’s going somewhere, I’m going too.

 MONDAY:

The pill bottle was more visible than I expected when I went back to find it today. The pine straw around it was sort of pushed to the side, even though I’m pretty sure no one touched it. I saw the orange of the bottle from a few feet away and that legitimately terrified me, because I thought someone had taken the bottle and opened it, taken the necklace, and then thrown the bottle back. But the necklace was still in there, thank GOD. It looked bigger than I remembered it for some weird reason; it's a tiny necklace really, it never felt as big on my neck as it looked inside the pill bottle. I realized after I took it that I never told my mom I buried it. Isn’t that sort of a loss too though- a lost opportunity, a lost chance to share that moment with my mom. Maybe i’ll tell her in when I see her again, but I kind of like the feeling of having this little thing to myself, a little loss (even though I got the necklace back, and she never went back for her letters). I’m the kind of kid who tells her parents everything, and it’s only been recently since I’ve been living by myself that I haven’t been letting them know about my every move. I was on the phone with my dad the other day and I mentioned a name, someone I got really close to here, and he had no idea who he was. I guess I had never mentioned him. In high school I used to tell my dad when I farted, now he doesn’t even know who my friends are. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

The bottle was kind of damp, which makes sense since it’s humid as hell out here. The sharpie I used to scribble out the prescription number had kind of washed off- you could see the numbers pretty clearly, so I guess if anyone wanted some anxiety medication they could have gotten some, which probably would have been more of a problem than if they had taken the necklace inside. I guess if some rando goes into stamps in the next few days pretending to be me for pills, i’ll know someone touched it. But I’m pretty sure I’m okay.

I thought I would feel more whole when I put it back on. But it’s just a necklace. It has value, of course, but nothing more than the value I ascribed to it. I could have felt the same way about a rock, or a stick, or a receipt or an old department store bag. That being said though, I keep reaching back to make sure it’s still there. I just don’t really feel anything when I remember it is.

[goldfistgirl]

Anxiety

OCD used to be classified as anxiety until it became a distinct disorder in and of itself 

OCD compulsions or obsessions are often accompanied by dysfunctional behaviors to relieve intense anxiety (IE, staying inside your house due to anxiety about uncleanliness outside)

GAD means you are continuously tense or apprehensive, experiencing unfocused, negative, and out-of-control feelings

My feelings are often out-of-control and only relieved through irrational, self-destructive behaviors. My insecurity calls for constant reassurance, and my anxiety disorder causes for me to ask for that reassurance in a dysfunctional way

Randomly apprehensive or anxious just sitting at work, just sitting at home, often only relieved by distracting myself with friends, 

Fear of anxiety leads to phobias which lead to avoidance behaviors.

I have avoidance behaviors toward being seen by others, specifically having my name or life known by people online if i became a popular artist/writer/whatever online

I also have avoidance behavior when it comes to intimacy, like kissing or accepting flowers, and especially expressing love deeply, admitting to feeling connected to a person, saying I love you and deeply meaning it, all of that. anything romantic terrifies me. the thought of my own wedding terrifies me because i’d be so vulnerable and sharing intimate thoughts with a lot of my loved ones, and i have a lot of anxiety and insecurity about their judgments of me. i’m very traumatized from being bullied so harshly by GG and so disconnected from my father and other family, and left behind by my mother and grandma Joyce

So anxious around some people that I feel suddenly and strangely disconnected from reality, like I’m watching a movie, or stop recognizing the person and become confused. I struggle to concentrate so much that I sort of lose memory and order in my thoughts, and become disoriented and confused about my setting or the direction of the conversation. i may experience cognitive dissonance: why am i around this person who makes me feel bad/anxious/insecure? and that thought will be followed by a strange numbness or confusion and a feeling of my thoughts being disorganized, and a lot of confusion about why my emotions are so hurt/elevated if my brain is telling me i logically dont like how i feel around this person, tehrefore do not like them

Blush intensely and very easily, sometimes experience chest tightness, a lot of mind fog when trying to approach issues of intimacy (serious anxiety around intimacy), i feel shaky and overwhelmed

Sometimes i will become low energy and lose sight of the direction a conversation was going even if i do like the person and am not experiencing cognitive dissonance. 

unable to sleep due to obsessively thinking about why my feelings are so overwhelming and hurt when i dislike someone, lose sleep worrying about the direction of my life and why i’m so afraid of intimacy, mad that josh opened the door for me to be very insecure about my sexual and intimate issues, my worries about inadequacy and intimacy with Josh are a serious obsession and symptom of GAD

Unable to fall asleep most nights even if I dont’ have a worry, and the worry comes from just lying trying to fall asleep

Severe nightmares and frequent lucid dreaming that is distressing due to how difficult it can be for me to differentiate from dreams and reality at times when I’m first waking up

I think a lot about why I do the things I do when it comes to relationships

I feel I am losing control

I enjoy my favorite activities less

Escapism has historically been a major crutch for me, like Emmerdale

My muscles are often tense or sore, I have bad neck pain from work that is worsened through tense muscles and anxiety

I have a tic that is driven by this physical tension that builds and is only released through doing my tic, and when I am anxious, the tic gets worse

I have a lot of headaches

Easily irritated at all times, very on edge most of the day

Not able to be happy like the people around me, feel odd that I can’t get excited to do anything like I used to, new projects don’t excite me, I just get sad when I think about them since I know I won’t do them

Lately I focus a lot on the situations upsetting me in my life, and I used to never to do that, so I obsess on the issues and then also on the fact that I obsess. I am confused why I am no longer well-adjusted and extremely depressed and upset that I am so emotional, I am not at ease with what I am feeling and feel guilty and bad about my self-image changing in a way that I do not respect in myself. Cannot accept that I worry so much now when I used to never. 

Very focused on “why” I do things, overthinking and overanalyzing what motivates me to do certain things, in what way am I broken etc, whereas I used to just sort of accept that I did things and worried less about what drove me to do those things since it seemed counterproductive to being true to myself to question myself with “why” all the them

Issues never resolve after talking about them for hours, many times over weeks and even months, harbor hurt feelings and stress about ancient problems, even small things like someone canceling plans to see a different person

Often think about how unsatisfied I am with life.

I have extreme difficulty concentrating or remembering things.

I feel nothing will help me stop worrying so much and treat people fairly, I feel guilty for how obsessive I am toward the wrongs people do toward me

Difficult relaxing or getting my mind off my problems

Extreme indecision about shit that doesn’t matter, like whether or not to get a red or blue backpack. i have a lot of anxiety about potentially making the wrong decision

I am afraid of being abandoned. I think my abandonment issues and emotional trauma from GG bullying/abusing me have lead me to have a bad case of GAD and intimacy phobia.

I don’t like being this way, but I don’t know what to do to change and it makes me feel worse that I can’t just live in the moment and enjoy my time with Josh. I often blame Josh for not fixing it by taking the lead and making me feel less afraid, and it’s unfair of me to blame someone else for something that is clearly a disorder

Things are often too much work, like actually starting my podcast or blog or cleaning my house, it all feels too overwhelming and I actually get anxiety about starting

Extremely afraid of humiliation or embarrassment, like chronically unable to handle embarrassment. Once dropped an entire college course due to embarrassing myself once in class

Fear of humiliation leads to extreme fear of being vulnerable in intimate situations specifically. Fear of performing badly intimately has lead me to freeze my entire body and stare blankly for extended periods of time while my partner is confused about why I’ve suddenly stopped moving, I dodge kisses, prevent the organic rhythm of sex or kissing because I am afraid of the intimacy while at the same time feeling anxious about the fact that I don’t have it, compulsions to avoid are illogical and self-destructive toward my goals of building a loving organic relationship

Old memories are very intrusive and I have a hard time changing my thoughts when it occurs, at the moment dealing with drama with Josh so memories with him are intrusive, but once i’m in an anxious state, memories of chase or whatever else will intrude, and recently my old bad feelings from that actually returned, which was alarming since i haven’t felt bad about him in almost a decade

most of the time, however, my memory is shit and i barely remember most people, places i’ve been, etc, i have a very limited memory. so it’s not intrusive memories i’m usaully plagued by, it’s the issue is that worrisome thoughts and a running “tally” of things done wrong to me intrude my mind and I can’t work past them or stop feeling hurt/paranoid that more wrongdoing will happen to me. and i can’t leave people who make me feel bad because the need for them to like me makes me want to stay around for as long as possible and earn it and prove i’m worthy

i feel a lot of my worries are extremely paranoid (he lied to me!!!) and i have a hard time telling if my fear is justified or not. he’s lied to me in the past, so i’m justifiably worried, but i also worry about it so much that i can’t function at work, enjoy my hobbies at home, sleep, or clean

sometimes i’m plagued by a fear that i’ve gone crazy. i used to be so well-adjusted, smart, motivated, and excited about life. i was often forgetful and had a lot of ADHD-like symptoms, but I never even associated them with disorders. I just went on being myself and accepted my insecurities or fears as they came and moved on from them, but now I feel I have all these disorders that have popped up, like depression, anxiety, maybe adhd, that i dont know how to cope with

Memory Loss:

Entire gaps of my life are forgotten in a way that feels extremely abnormal, like sincerely struggle to remember things that most other people seem to recall easily, like where they grew up or stuff like that, i’m often called out for forgetting things i’ve done with friends or loved ones, struggle to remember people and places from important times of my life, often feel frustrated and confused by my inability to recall things

Anxiety produces a lot of cortisol, cortisol affects our brains and leads to memory loss and problems with recall

my anxiety absorbed so much of my mental energy and was such a distraction that i feel i was unable to build memories and can’t focus on the things much, especially not things I need to or want to.

Often so stressed/anxious i’m unable to register what people are saying to me or absorb what they’re saying

The stress of the anxiety and fear is so intense that I actually don’t remember things, sometimes even what triggered my fear, because the feeling was so strong

Often sleep deprived, so building memories is hard

Don’t have much social support, so I have a harder time remembering things well. apparently social support contributes to better memory, so my memory loss may be a secondary symptom of lack of social support

i’m mostly ok with my memory loss, it doesn’t upset me, i’m just intrigued by the fact that something I always knew about myself seems to be a potential symptom of GAD

Healing:

Stop shaming myself for experiencing anxiety when it comes to intimacy

Accept that I am this way and that that is not inherently bad, it just is

Remind myself that I have overcome a lot of my fears

Josh cannot be my crutch for overcoming my fears; he has helped a lot, but he has also triggered many of them a lot. i need to distance myself from him so i can achieve these on my own

Continue to stay okay experiencing anxiety throughout the day. I rarely mind it or obsess on it when it happens, it’s really only an issue when I become emotionally overwhelmed or challenged beyond my means of coping, which so far has been most intensely experienced with Josh. but also how i freaked out with my motorcycle, for example

[elizabethnightingale4]

What Happened, After

She looked at him and he shared the look, a calculating look. Slowly she from the back of her ratty jeans she pulled a small pistol and held it by the barrel. "Okay." He looked at her confused for a moment before taking his other hand out from behind his back, holding the gun by the barrel and offering his hand. "Thanks." She shook his hand firmly and quickly. "Alright we have to find somewhere safe for the night. Also, there are three other children, I uh, have to grab them really quick-" "Wait, you have kids with you too?" He looked suprised, "I have two siblings with me too." She smiled slightly. "Alright then lets get these kids together now." She smiled. "Have them play for a bit." He grinned. "Sounds great." "Heh" She put her gun and her crude dagger away. "Alright," She turned to go back to the car they had locked themselves in. He watched her go before heading back to his siblings who looked scared. "Hey you two. We have some friends tonight, and some real food." His half starved siblings looked up at him with wide eyes. "Do you mean it?" His sister was holding her twins hand tight. Their tiny bodies were slowly wasting away from his inability to find food in the apocalypse. It was killing him. "Yes silly head. Of course I mean it. Lets go before they decide to leave us." "Are there little kids bubba?" "Yeah bro, and they want to play with you two, so lets go!" He finally got the two of them moving down the road. Cora wasn't sure about these people. The boy looked like he hadn't eaten in a long while, and hunger could make even the most loyal betray their friends. She sighed and knocked the SOS signal to her siblings. Her sister was obsessed with maritime disasters and had insisted they use it. "Hey you three, its safe now. We have some dinner company." "W-wh-what do you mean Sissy?" Kenny looked at her sister, her eyes wide. "Stop st-t-tuttering loud mouth." Meg was always upset with Kenny. "Don't fight. We have to be prepared for anything." "Yeah listen Meg. We have to be on our best behavior." "You're right Davey." She smiled at her brother and patted his head gently. "Alright guys, UP AND AT THEM!" She fake yelled, striking a pose. All three of her siblings rolled their eyes. The three filed out of the car. her brother toof her hand and the other two held hands walking next to her. "Sissy! There are little kids! A boy AND a girl!" Kenny was so excited she clapped her hands together. "Welcome back." He grinned. "Looks like have a mini army on your hands." She chuckled quietly; "Yeah, if they threw fits it'd be hard to handle." she sighed, "theres a town a few miles down the tracks." She points to a rusted railroad track. "We saw a sign a while back for it. I worried poachers might be residing there though because of all the graffiti and nooses on the trees." She trailed off, "but uh, I think its our best shot though. Its getting late and repers come out at night." "Yeah, okay, sounds like a plan. Lead the way General." He grinned again, gesturing for her to lead the way. "Why do I have to lead?" He shrugged, "Well, you seem the best prepared to lead." She glanced at him. "Are you calling me bossy?" He just laughed, "Careful Sugar, you might ruin that pretty face with all those wrinkles." "Already flirting huh?" She started moving ahead. "Heh, it got you to lead didn't it?" She stopped dead in her tracks and looked at him a smile barely staying off her face. "You sneaky fucker." He just laughed. "To answer your question though, I wasn't flirting. I'm not really into magenta heads." She laughed now, starting to walk again. "Yeah, when ever we find a hair place I take a new color. Wait for the new one to fade then change it." "What for?" She just shrugged, "Just something I did before the End, and I can't find my regular color any more." He picked up his sister and put her on his shoulders. "What was your 'regular' color?" "I've forgotten what the word for it was but it was like.. Okay it was like a dark purple that faded into a pink at the ends-" "Ombre" "Thats it!" She shifted her giant backpack and moved her duffle bag to her back. "How'd you know that?" "Oh, my girlfriend did that too, just with red and black." "Heh, yeah it was pretty popular before the End." She watched her sisters balance on the rails next to her. "Remember to watch out for traps you two." They replied together, "Yes sissy." "You know its been years since we met someone who wasn't insane." The girl grinned. "I'm sorry, you must be mistaken. We are all mad here. Some of us just hide it better than others." He was quiet, "Damn you were a nerd weren't you?" She snorted, "Didn't you see my shirt?" Shrek is Love-" "Shrek is Life. Someone had a tumblr." "Yeah I did." The children were walking a little further up the tracks, even though no trains had run since the power had shut off, it was never safe to wander too far from one another. She called them back over. "Who was your favorite band?" She laughed a the question, "Well?" "Sorry it's just weird being asked such normal questions after so long. It was probably the Beatles or maybe the Barenaked Ladies. Although I do carry a fondness for any sort of musical." "Oh?" "Yeah, I wanted to be a stage performer before the End." She shrugged, "musical theater and band were my beat yo." "Oh god never say that again." "What you got a problem man?" "Dude don't talk like you're from the sixties either." "Damn son, there is no pleasing you." She grinned "Damn straight." She laughed and took out a water bottle and drank from it. "You know, winter is hot on our heels. My siblings and I are headed down south to stay away from the cold." "Florida's supposed to be like super dangerous." "I was thinking of going to Louisiana. They still have some sort of state there, everyones cool and chillax." He was silent for a while and they walked on in silence for a few yards. "I thought you'd be smarter than to believe in fairy tales." "You have to believe in something otherwise you lose hope an hope is like super important... man." "Pffftt" he looked down and sighed, "Hope is an illusion. We created it to get away from the bad shit in the world." "Wow thats depressing... yo." "Quit it." He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head. "So uh, can I carry one of your bags or something? I feel bad letting you do all the work." She snickered "And who said chivalry was dead?" "Uh some guy?" She smiled, "Oh gods bro, you can barely hold you siblings, let alone a bag full of shit." "Yeah sorry, I was just trying to help." "Yeah I know." The two passed the next hour in silence listening to the children laughing and running around. A roar was heard over head as a Canadian plane dropped supplies to an unknown group of people who would soon be dead now. Cora whistled and her siblings came running back to her followed by Ashton. "To the trees. Now. No talking, no rough housing, and be very careful." They nodded and followed her over to the wooded area next to the tracks. "Hey what are you doing?" His siblings followed the other children into the woods. "Get off the tracks before you get us all killed." An echo sounded from a not too far away yell."We're gonna eat great tonight."The boy stumbled and Cora yanked him into their spot as from around the far bend came a large crowd of poachers, hooping and hollering. "Yo, Grait!" A scout picked up the water bottle Cora had dropped and handed it over, "It was still spilling out." The one who took the bottle looked to the woods. "Shit" She whispered pulling the kids behind her and hiding them behind a rocky outcropping, dropping the bags beside them. She took out her dagger as the man with dried blood across his face shouted, "Shut up! We aren't alone." The whole group fell silent and Cora looked at her new friend and gestured for him to watch the kids as she moved closer again, watching them through the dense brush. "WHos there? Come out. We won't bite, hard." He grinned, the rotting flesh sewn into his cloths caught her nose and she gagged, covering her nose with her hand, trying to keep from making noise. "Aw are you a she?" Cora quietly tried to size the group up. There were almost thirty grown men, a handful of younger guys and one female. Her neck had a chain attached to a lease, one of the men held it. "Oh we won't hurt you if your of the fairer sex. Come on out." The silence that followed was only broken by a few bird calls. "Go in after her." He ordered, lighting a cigerette and looking away. A few of the men walked into the woods as Cora scaled a spruce tree to keep hidden. "Grait, I think shes long gone. Theres nothing but birds out here." Everyone groaned and made general angry remarks. Such as "This ones getting worn out and refuses to eat." and "we wasted all that time." The party slowly made its way down the tracks and out of sight. Cora waited about ten more minutes to move back down from her tree. "I'm glad there weren't many girls." He looked shaken "She didn't. She didn't have any teeth." He looked horrified as Cora went over and patted the kids heads and grabbed the bags, "Yes. She must have put up quite a fight to be in such a tortured state." "You say that like its nothing!" "I've seen worse-Whats your name?" They looked at each other for a moment. In the past few hours they had talked about a lot of different topics but they never asked each other their names. "It's, it's Steven, I'm 16." She smiled, "I'm Cora, I'm 16 too. Its good to meet you. She walked to the tracks. "We have to keep going and get to the town. "How did you know they were coming before they made noise?" "You haven't been near the north in a long time have you?" "No?" "The Canadians think that they're helping or at least I hope they do, but the air buckets bring little kids and the weak. It makes for easy pickings for the poachers." She sighed going forward on the tracks "And poachers rarely keep others around for long." "Are you saying-" "Animals are too fast for them to catch, the dependents of animals however, such as long pig." She had this look of hate and pain filling her face. "I had another sister once. She was eight when they caught her and I had to choose between abandoning my other siblings, giving away their hiding spot, or letting her die alone. The last bullet I had stopped her from experiencing what the chained woman felt." They were both silent for a while. "I love my siblings more than life." She trailed off again, continuing to walk. "I just.. I keep my eyes and ears open. I watch and remember everything I can. The tracks are a path probably right to the drop off. We knew there were poachers in the area. even if they hadn't come its safer to hide for a while after an air drop." he was quiet for a while. "I wish I'd been able to be a kid for longer." The girl nodded in agreement. "I don't think she'd blame.." He trailed off again and took a bag, patting her back. "Lets go find somewhere to rest for the night?" She smiled, "Thanks, yeah lets find somewhere."