#i remember finding the flyer drawing a long time ago but i was very confused as to what its purpose was. now i know

[festivemonsterscheerfulfailure]

A photo of flyers that were handed out in promotion of the release of "クワガタにチョップしたらタイムスリップした" ("Time-Warped After Chopping My Stag Beetle") and the online serialization of CFMF, as well as the drawing featured on the flyer!

The photo of the flyers were taken from this tweet from Dec 15, 2012.

The second image was enhanced using AI, original size image below cut

[kinglazrus]

Not Your Danny – Ch 2. Small Signs

Previous | Next | FFN | AO3

Word count: 3514

Awareness returns to Dani the same way it always does: instantly and with a deep, rattling breath. It echoes the dry rasp of her very first. Even after all this time, she still remembers what it was like to wake up in that vat. The thick ectoplasm that flooded her nose and mouth when she tried to breathe. The panic and confusion as her mind scrambled to understand what was happening. The overwhelming weight of knowledge that wasn't hers, that she didn't remember learning. Even thinking was a struggle in those first hours.

Sometimes waking up from sleep feels like that, minus the drowning. And being asleep is just like before. Before the electric current ran through her body and shocked her awake. Before she could think, or even knew what thinking was. Back when everything was just darkness and a mild awareness that she existed, but no certainty whether she was dead or alive.

Dani never dreams—she doesn’t think she's capable of it—but she's always aware.

Another light tap comes at the door.

On instinct, she scans her surroundings for danger. She takes in the blue walls, the plastic star constellations on the ceiling, and the general mess of the room before relaxing and remembering. This isn't some old house she's squatting in for the night; it's her new home.

She frowns. Her new home. Home. Home. The word doesn't sit right with her. It's what she's always wanted, but this place... could it really be home without Danny?

"Danielle?" a soft voice calls through the door.

Dani jerks upright, throwing off the blanket, and transforms in a flash. "I'm awake."

The doorknob rattles then turns, and the door slowly opens. Maddie Fenton peers inside. Her eyes land on Dani and she takes a sharp breath. "Oh, you're..." She trails off as she looks Dani over.

"Is something wrong?"

"No, I just wasn't expecting your ghost form."

Dani draws her knees to her chest, making herself small. "It's kind of my default."

"That's fine." Maddie steps forward. When she moves, something makes a crinkling noise, and Dani's gaze is drawn to a plastic bag hiding behind Maddie's legs. All wariness forgotten, Dani uncurls and crawls to the edge of the bed, clinging to the mattress while she leans forward.

"What's that?" she asks.

Maddie smiles and glances down at the bag. "We know you don't have much. Or"—she scans the room—"anything. So we picked up a few things on the way home. You'll probably need more, but we can take you shopping so you can pick things out for yourself. These are just some essentials."

She holds out the bag, and Dani eagerly snatches it up. Maddie wasn't lying when she said just the essentials. Inside, she finds a pair of pyjamas, a toothbrush—a toothbrush! She's never used one before—a hairbrush and some other toiletries, and lastly, a box with some kind of pad thing on the front. Dani takes out the box and turns it over in her hands.

"What are these?" she asks. They look vaguely familiar. Perhaps, once or twice, she glimpsed them sitting on drugstore shelves, but they had never caught her attention before.

"They're period pads," Maddie says.

"What are they for?"

Maddie opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Her eyebrows crease together in confusion. Instead of answering, she walks forward to the end of the bed and kneels down. She reaches out, but stops before she can touch Dani and draws her hand back.

"How old are you?" she asks. "Jazz said you were at least fifteen."

"Technically, yeah. I think I was twelve biologically when Vlad made me? So I guess that makes me fifteen. But I've only existed for three years. My birthday is next month!" Dani grins. She didn't do much for her first birthday, but last year she visited Amity Park and Danny made a whole day of it! He even bought her a present, although Dani lost the music player pretty quickly. Not that she hadn't loved it, but it was hard to keep track of belongings when you weren't used to having them. She couldn't wait to see what they would do this year.

A second passes before Dani realizes what's wrong with that statement. Her grin falls away.

It doesn't look like Maddie noticed, though. She's too busy frowning at the box of pads that are still in Dani's hands.

"Have you never...?" Maddie gestures to the box, but Dani doesn’t know what she means. With a sigh, Maddie reaches out and takes the pads, setting them down on the floor. "I guess it doesn't matter what they're for right now, then. We can talk about that later. For now, how are you?"

Dani shrugs. "Okay, I guess." She was better a few seconds ago when she forgot Danny was dead for a blissful moment.

"We understand that this is all very new for you. And it's hard for all of us right now. Take your time. If you need anything, let us know. Other than that, you can just focus on getting settled. We'll take care of the rest," Maddie says.

Dani doesn't know what else there could be to take care of, but she nods anyway.

"Are you hungry? It's a little after noon right now and I was going to start making lunch. I could use some company."

"I could eat," Dani admits. Before arriving this morning, she didn't think to grab breakfast anywhere, and it has been well over a day since her last meal. Her stomach cramps, far from the worst hunger pangs, but still annoying.

Maddie smiles and stands up. "Perfect." She waves her hand, gesturing for Dani to follow. When Dani rises off the bed, her eyes widen. It only lasts a moment, a second of stunned silence, but it's enough for Dani to drop to the floor, her boots thumping on the thick carpet, feeling rather self-conscious.

Neither of them mentions it as they head downstairs. On the way down, Dani strains her ears, listening for Jazz or Jack elsewhere in the house. Jack, she hears quite easily, unsurprisingly. Loud, tromping footsteps carry up from the lab, their beat steady and constant. He must be pacing, Dani thinks. It reminds her of Danny. He used to pace when simply thinking didn't suffice; he needed to move through some problems, treat them like physical things he could see and touch. That's how he explained it to her once, not that long ago.

Jazz, if she's still home, doesn't make a sound.

Dani takes up residence at the kitchen table, pulling out a chair and sitting with her legs crossed over the seat. Meanwhile, Maddie starts taking ingredients out of the fridge. Nothing fancy. Lettuce, tomatoes, a few packages of sliced meat. A small pile of vegetables grows in the empty space beside the sink.

"If you don't mind, can you tell me what it's like?" Maddie asks as she pulls a cutting board from a drawer.

"What what's like?"

"Being a halfa."

Maddie, with her back to Dani, misses the way she presses her lips together at that word. Halfa. It's not a bad word, per se. Danny never had any issue with it, as far as Dani could tell, but it never sat right with her.

"I'm not a halfa," she says.

Maddie's hand pauses halfway to the knife block. She looks over her shoulder, finally noticing Dani's grim expression. "Am I saying it wrong? That's the term Jazz used."

"It's Danny's word." Maddie flinches, but Dani presses on. "And Vlad's too, I guess. Being a halfa means being half human and half ghost, but I'm just me."

"But you have both forms?"

"Yeah, but I wasn't all human before I became part ghost. And I didn't have to die for that to happen."

Maddie quickly turns back to the counter. Dani can't see her face, but it is impossible to miss how her shoulders tense. She grabs a knife from the block and a tomato from the counter and makes her first cut. The knife thunks against the cutting board. "What's it like being you, then?" There's a tremble in her voice. "With your powers."

Dani shrugs. "I'm okay with them. I'm a pretty fast flyer since that's how I always get around. Faster than Danny was."

Another chop, another loud thunk.

"But I'm really good at the weird body stuff! I got the hang of it really fast!" Dani can't help but smile. She holds her arm out, watching it slowly turn green and goopy. The sleeve of her shirt melts into skin and fat drops or ectoplasm slip off onto the table. The goop clings to her bones, only held together by her force of will. If she wanted, she could let it disintegrate into a bubbling puddle. Even the bone can turn soft and malleable as a licorice twist, although she doesn't let it get that far.

Thinking about why she can do this always brings up bad memories, but Dani pushes those aside in favour of how cool it is that she can melt into slime at a moment's notice.

"Look! Look at this!" Dani jiggles her arm, giggling as bits of ectoplasm go flying.

Maddie isn't looking, though. When Dani glances up to check, she finds Maddie staring down at the counter. "Was it like that for Danny?" Maddie asks.

Dani's smile falters. "Maybe? I got lots of training before I met him, but he was still better than me with most stuff. He couldn't do this, though!" She gives her arm another shake, then slaps it down on the table with a loud splat for good measure.

Maddie still doesn't look, though. She resumes her chopping, grabbing a pepper while pushing the tomato aside. "Tell me more."

—

Lunch is brief. Maddie brings a small stack of sandwiches and a plate of salad down to the lab for Jack, along with a small container of fudge. She comes back upstairs long enough to grab her own food before joining him.

"We're making some of our weapons safer for you to be around," Maddie explains before disappearing downstairs.

Dani isn't too disappointed to be left alone. While talking with Maddie was nice, it was always about her powers, always came back to Danny. Did Danny like flying? Did he struggle with his powers? You have this ability, did Danny have it, too? Genuine curiosity lingered in Maddie's voice with every question. Dani knows she's a scientist, and with that job comes a need for knowledge, a desire to understand everything. Having Dani in the house provides a unique chance to learn everything she can about ghosts and half-ghosts.

But something else lurked behind the curiosity. Dani, in her inexperience, can't properly name what she had felt, but it irks her. Makes her feel off-centre. When Maddie leaves, and Dani has a minute to herself, she breathes out a sigh of relief.

Her food disappears quickly. The sandwich is good; simple, but good. Same with the salad. Dani never starved on the road, but she ate what she could steal, pre-packaged foods snagged off gas station shelves. Once or twice, she snuck into restaurants to steal plates right from the kitchen, but that required stealth and patience if she didn't want to get noticed.

Once she has finished eating, and her plate is licked clean, she doesn't know what to do. Maddie left the fixings on the counter along with her dirty utensils. After a moment's debate, Dani deposits her plate and fork in the sink. She's washing her hands, squishing soap between her fingers, when Jazz enters.

Like Maddie, Jazz pauses when she takes in Dani's ghost form, but she doesn't comment on it. "How was your nap?"

Dani shrugs. Dipping her hands under the faucet, she watches the soap wash away, bubbles forming at the bottom of the sink. "It was good."

"Good." Jazz gathers her lunch in silence, grabbing the sandwich Maddie left out for her and loading a plate with salad. Once her plate is full, she starts putting everything away. Cutting board and knife in the sink, vegetables back in the fridge, bread wrapped and retied.

Dani watches, noticing little aborted movements Jazz keeps making. When she goes to put the bread away, her arm jerks as if she was about to throw it. She catches herself at the last second and walks it to the pantry. After the food is away, she grabs a tea towel rather than a dishcloth, and reaches toward the left sink, only to stop.

Dani peers between the empty left sink, and the right sink with the dirty dishes. "Something wrong?"

"No, it's... it's nothing." Jazz folds the tea towel and lays it on the counter, then grabs the dishcloth instead.

"Want some help?" Dani asks.

Jazz blinks. A strange look crosses her face, a soft smile tinged with hope that, to Dani, doesn't fit the situation at all. Jazz holds out the dishcloth and says, "First one done picks the show."

Dani grabs the tea towel since it's closer. "That doesn't really make sense. I can't finish drying until you're done washing," she points out.

Jazz stares at the tea towel, her own hand curling tighter around the dishcloth. "No, I guess it doesn't."

Dani abandons her cloth with the first dish Jazz passes over, phasing the cutting board dry rather than doing it by hand. She doesn't bother opening the drawer, either, shoving the cutting board right through the door instead. It takes less than a minute to get all the dishes clean and put away.

Jazz picks up her plate once the kitchen is clean and heads out. With nothing better to do, Dani follows her. They end up in the living room, Jazz claiming the left side of the couch while Dani takes the right. The remote lays between them for a second before Jazz grabs it. As she reaches for it, slowly, she keeps looking at Dani, as if she's checking for something, expectingher to do something.

Instead, Dani looks around the room.

Of all the rooms in Fenton Works, this is the one she has been in the least. With three windows looking out into the street and the front door right there, she and Danny always thought it was too risky to hang out here, in case Maddie and Jack came home when they weren't expecting it. A few family photos hang on the wall, and the cushions are well worn. Dani notes a significant dip on the loveseat. That must be Jack's favourite spot.

A burst of music pulls Dani's attention to the television. Jazz has put on a TV show. It starts mid-episode, but Dani actually recognizes it, to her surprise. She's only watched TV a handful of times in her life, although she has snuck into plenty of movie theatres. Although she can't remember the show's name, she knows it's about space explorers. The actors look different for some reason, but those colour-coded shirts are undeniably familiar.

"Has a redshirt died yet?" she asks.

Jazz hits pause. "You know Star Trek?"

"Danny showed me some of it. It's okay, I guess." When she says this, Jazz's eyes widen. A flicker of hurt passes through them, although Dani has no idea why. She ignores it. "This doesn't look like what I saw," Dani adds.

"He probably showed you the original series. He liked to start with that," Jazz says, quieter than before.

"So, what's this, then?"

"One of the series from the 90s. Deep Space Nine, I think? It's... it's the most recent one he was watching." Jazz's hand drifts over the remote, her fingers skimming the play button. "Do you mind if we watch it?"

Dani shrugs. "I don't care."

Starting partway through the episode, Dani doesn't quite know what's going on, and she doesn't care much to find out. It's entertaining enough to watch, but sci-fi isn't her thing. Hard to get into a genre that her whole existence revolves around.

Jazz is still eating by the time the episode ends. She's done by the end of the next, her crumb-ridden plate sitting on the coffee table, but neither of them makes a move to stop the show.

Every once in a while, Jazz glances Dani's way. She thinks nothing of it, at first, but by the fifth episode a frown has etched itself into Jazz's face, and Dani is getting annoyed as they near the two-hour mark.

The next time Jazz discreetly turns her head, Dani snaps. "Yeah?" The couch bounces as she swivels to face Jazz.

Jazz starts, then flushes, embarrassed at being caught. "I was just wondering, aren't you tired? I know you were sleeping earlier, but you've been in your ghost form all days. It's not exhausting?"

Dani shrugs. "No? I'm almost always like this."

"But Danny always got really tired if he stayed in his ghost form too long. Sometimes he would pass out or just lose the transformation completely."

"I'm not Danny, though."

Jazz stills. "Right. No, yeah. I guess you aren't."

"I'm not," Dani affirms.

Jazz nods sharply, jerking her head, and snaps her attention back to the TV.

—

The Fentons clearly have their own daily rhythm, one that sees surprisingly little impact without Danny's presence. Maybe they have already filled in the gaps in the couple of weeks Danny has been dead, but Dani doubts it. More than likely, he spent so much time as Phantom that it affected his daily routine.

Maddie and Jack spend most of their time in the lab, or out roving the city in their RV. There hasn't been another ghost attack since the one that killed Danny, and it probably isn't a coincidence, but the eldest Fentons don't seem to take that into account.

"They're trying to keep things normal," Jazz says when Dani asks her about it on the third day. "It's a normal coping mechanism. A good routine can prevent depressive episodes, as long as they aren't overworking themselves."

Ironic considering how Jazz is always working. Despite being on break from college, Dani catches her every day studying hard, chipping away at some paper, or breezing through a textbook thicker than her fist. She also has a notebook she keeps with her most of the time, labelled "Memorial Plans." An event Dani still knows very little about.

Dani falls into her own routine in those first few days. At mealtimes, she keeps whoever is cooking company. Maddie, if she's home. Jazz any other time. Dani takes to waiting in the kitchen for them, around noon and later at six o'clock. The first couple times they walked in to find her there, they looked startled, then pleased. Jazz's eyes actually watered, once. It doesn't take long before Dani fills in as a helper. It's more entertaining than watching, and after so long on the road, there's something nice about learning to cook. A reminder that she has time for it, that she will be here tomorrow and can do it again.

She and Jazz keep watching TV together, although the time varies. Whenever Jazz wants to sit down for an episode—and it's never more than that, despite how long they watched the first day—she finds Dani and asks if she wants any "Trek time." Dani gets the remote only once, on their second time watching. Instead of Star Trek, she picks a sitcom that looks funny and normal.

Jazz keeps the remote after that.

The only person Dani doesn't spend time with is Jack. She sees him once or twice, lumbering through the hall between the kitchen and the lab. As far as she can tell, he sleeps down there. He must since she has yet to find him on the second floor where the bedrooms are.

When she's alone, Dani occupies herself with Danny's things. He has a lot of stuff, and she has no idea what to do with all of it, much less what he did with all of it. Posters especially elude her. What's the point of something that doesn't actually do anything? She goes through his closet the most, picking at his clothes. There are a few shirts close to her size, since Danny didn't get his growth spurt until last year, but none of them suit Dani's style.

On her fourth day at Fenton Works, more than half a week since she arrived, Dani has all the shirts that fit her laid out on Danny's bed. None of them fit perfectly, but she wants to wear something new. You get sick of the same hoodie and shorts after three years, even if they grow with you.

A heavy, thumping knock comes at the door.

Dani, distracted by the shirts, says, "I don't really feel like it right now, Jazz."

"Dani." A voice much deeper than Jazz's greets her. When she looks up, she finds Jack in the open doorway, ecto-gun in hand. "Can we talk?"

Previous | Next

[sethrine-writes]

Devil-sitter May Cry, Ch. 4

Pairing: Dante x F!Reader, Vergil x F!Reader (Undecided)

Words:  1844

Warning:  Cuteness, Defensive/protective Nero, Demon attack

Story Summary: Low on cash and desperate for a job, you reply to a flyer for a babysitting position. Little did you know that the opportunity to watch over two special boys would bring your life so much mayhem and adventure…and, perhaps, a chance at a family of your own.

A/N: First day continues, and with some unexpected excitement at the end!

------

Chapter 4 - First Day Surprises

The rest of the morning went by rather smoothly.

After cleaning up breakfast, you made your way upstairs and found the boys' shared bedroom where a fully dressed V was helping a flailing Nero fix his inside-out shirt. V was laughing the whole time and telling his cousin to be still as he attempted to pull the shirt over his head, of which somehow had gotten stuck in a way only an unsupervised child could manage.

As soon as Nero's head breached the opening, he sucked in an exaggerated breath as if he had been suffocating the whole time and fell over dramatically, forcing V into another fit of giggles that also had him on the floor.

The following games the boys played using their imaginations had very similar effects, with Nero playing eager dramatics that would lead V into either laughter or equally as dramatic monologues. There were pirates and space stations, a dragon on the moon, six-eyed skeletons belonging to a race of demons who went extinct "a bajillion years ago" trying to become cowboy outlaws, and so on.

The imagination of a child was endless, it seemed, and their playing made for quite the entertaining morning.

Lunch was an easy fix of pb&j sandwiches and a side of grapes. Much to your relief, V ate rather well, nearly finishing his half-sandwich and all but three grapes, of which Nero was happy to finish off for him.

When asked, yet again, if you were going to eat, too, you had to assure a very concerned looking V that you had something in your bag that you would eat later. Granted, it was just a protein bar, and after your quick and meager breakfast that morning, it definitely wouldn't be enough to fully curb your hunger. It felt impolite to partake in whatever they had in the fridge, however, so it would have to do.

Playtime resumed outside with chalk drawings for all of an hour before you began to notice V's sluggishness, despite his best efforts to keep up with Nero's near ceaseless energy. You suggested some quiet time in the main room -living room, or maybe it was considered an office?- and had no trouble getting V to climb up next to you on the worn leather sofa with a pillow.

Two minutes of stillness, and V was out like a light.

Keeping Nero entertained while his cousin napped was surprisingly easy, though you had a feeling this was a normal enough routine that he knew how to play quietly on his own so as not to disturb his cousin. Giving him a snack and asking him all sorts of imaginative questions while he nibbled on more grapes and cheese crackers occupied the next half hour.

When V joined you both in the kitchen with bleary eyes and the cutest little pout, you offered him a snack, as well, though all he was interested in was a small cup of juice.

Nero was more than eager to get back to their play, though with a little prompting from you, he was a bit more patient and waited for V to wake up fully. It didn't take too long for him to perk back up and ease into their make-believe world yet again, and you were subjected once more to their antics for a while longer.

At one point, the phone on the desk began to ring. You shushed the boys down just a bit as you answered with the business' name, just as Dante had instructed you to, and jotted down some details that seemed important from the possible client on the other end. When you finished, you turned back around to find a peculiar sight.

"A cat?"

The boys were both cooing at and petting a sleek black cat that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, its tail swaying in an inviting way as it sashayed back and forth between them. There had been no mention of a pet, no signs of treats or toys or a litter box of any sort - no signs of a cat in the shop at all, and yet, there it was.

Your mind immediately wandered to V and his allergies, suddenly concerned that he would have a flair-up. Vergil hadn't mentioned any allergies to animals, but it was still something you were wary of.

"Where did this little guy come from?" you questioned lightly as you came closer, though mindful in not scaring off the feline, lest it was hard to catch.

"She's a girl," Nero corrected quickly with a little glare and a miffed tone.

"Be nice, she didn't know," V scolded with a gentle tone, earning a puffy-cheeked pout from his cousin.

"Thank you for telling me," you told Nero, anyway, before turning your attention back to V as you crouched down. "I didn't know you guys had a cat. I haven't seen her around all day, and your dads didn't mention her at all."

"Shadow's special," V semi-whispered behind his cupped hand as if guarding his words like a secret.

"She likes to go off and play other places," Nero supplied, reaching for the cat's tail and giving a gentle tug that had Shadow swishing the sleek appendage about just a tad faster, not aggravated, just acknowledging.

"But she always comes back to us," V affirmed, immediately cooing at Shadow as she rubbed her head against his arm. "Papa says he found her one day on a mission, and they have a bond, now."

"Oh, that's very sweet," you crooned, smiling as you continued to watch the boys pet over the cat.

You paid especially close attention to V and his breathing, though even after a solid five minutes within constant contact of the feline, he seemed to be doing just fine. It gave you some relief, especially knowing that even Nero would have said something if V were to have had some sort of ill reaction. If you had learned one thing already, it was that Nero was highly protective of V in any and all aspects.

"Miss, I'm thirsty," V spoke up suddenly, those vibrant green eyes of his looking to you imploringly. "Can I have some water, please?"

You smiled and asked if Nero wanted something, too, before standing and making your way into the kitchen. The fridge didn't have one of those ice makers in it, though you remembered there being a filtered pitcher of water on the top shelf beside the milk, of which you made full use of.

Returning from the kitchen, your smile fell instantly as a look of absolute horror settled across your features and seeped into your very being. The cup of water slipped right through your fingers, clattering to the floor and garnering the attention of the creature that was hovering over Nero's prone form, its teeth bared.

"D-Don't move," you spoke out firmly to the boys, trying to will your voice from shaking as your mind caught up to the unexpected turn of events.

Were the boys hurt? How did that thing get in?

The large creature, almost resembling that of a black panther, must have taken your talking as invitation to continue whatever it was doing beforehand, a low rumble of a growl coming from its throat as it turned back to a struggling Nero.

“Hey! Hey, hey, hey, no!” you shouted, taking a few hurried steps closer in panic.

A hefty growl left the creature as it finally turned its full attention to you, the noise vibrating the air and causing your stomach to drop. It stepped away from Nero as it began to prowl its way toward you with purpose, fur shifting and lighting up with flashes of red runes within the pitch blackness as it advanced.

A demon, then? 

Your instincts were telling you to get out of there, that you were in immediate, and rather obvious, danger. You were also highly aware of the two little boys whose lives were infinitely more important, and despite the fear that had your knees damn near collapsing in on themselves as you slowly backed up, you had to at least try and lead the creature away with the hope that the boys’ fathers would be home soon to save them, should you perish.

"That's it, come pick on me, you big, sharp furball," you muttered beneath your breath, eyes darting to the boys for a quick second.

Nero was sitting up, thankfully, looking rather confused but otherwise unmarred, and V was-

"V, no, stay back!" you shouted while throwing your hand up, stopping the boy from advancing any closer, those bright green eyes of his big and concerned.

Everything happened so fast, after that.

There was growling, a short, clipped roar, a scream leaving your lips as the creature leapt towards you. You met the floor rather hard, though it was to be expected when a demonic feline was two seconds away from tearing out your jugular.

Your eyes closed tightly, hands and fingers tangled in impossibly dark fur out of instinct to protect yourself. The creature loomed closer, a large paw pressing into your shoulder, hot breaths washing over your cheek as it leaned in-

And gave a warm, rough pass of its tongue over your cheek.

The sound that left your lips was most decidedly a whimper, though your body was still in the fight-or-flight mode when another lick was given to your face, the pass much longer and even going into your hair.

The panic slowly ebbed into confused wonder as a low rumbling sound started up from the creature, not a growl, but more akin to a purr that was so deep it nearly vibrated your bones.

And then the demon made itself comfortable and laid upon you, forcing a rush of air from your lungs you hadn't realized you were holding. You struggled to gasp a breath in at the sheer heft of the creature doing its very best at crushing your lungs as well as all your other body parts, absentmindedly letting out a very confused, very distressed noise at yet another turn of events you hadn’t seen coming.

What in the actual hell was going on?

"-dow! Shadow, that was very rude!"

At the sound of V’s angry little voice, you opened your eyes, blinking several times as you hesitantly looked up.

Several pairs of eyes were looking down at you, and it took a moment for you to register that Nero and V both were being held by their respective fathers. They must have just gotten home, perhaps right as the creature attacked you.

"Looks like you met the cat," Dante spoke suddenly, grin wide on his face.

Vergil's eyes cut to his brother with a glare, much more heated than the one V was giving to the demon feline that had made you its bed. Nero was pouting again, looking more put-upon than he had earlier, and Dante was every bit amused at your predicament.

You met the cat...

Wait.

Wait!

The cat was the demon the whole time?!

------

Tag List:  @v-vic, @astridstark13

[nothingeverlost]

Fic: A Room for Ruby (Baby Steps verse)

Belle can’t keep sharing a room at the B&B with Ruby; they need a real home.

Baby Steps - When Belle’s foster mom Granny dies she’s left with the diner, the B&B, and custody of Granny’s infant granddaughter.  The B&B comes with long term resident Trevelyan Gold.

________________________________________

Belle frowned at the flyers she’d picked up from the realtor’s office.  There weren’t very many options in the pile she’d made of ‘maybes’ while the trash can was full of ‘noes.’  Two of the houses were too far from Main Street and the two businesses she needed to run.  Half of the houses were outside of the budget she’d carefully worked up.  Three didn’t have any yards and Ruby needed a place she could run and play.  Maybe in a year or two they’d get a dog; Ruby would love that.  She begged to pet every puppy they saw on their walks.

“M’belle.”  Belle didn’t realize how long she’d been focusing on the fliers until Ruby tugged on her skirt, demanding to be picked up.  She grimaced when she looked at her watch, and then over at Trevelyan leaning on his cane.  She was supposed to pick up Ruby almost twenty minutes ago.

“I’m so sorry.”  She’d only meant to flip through the ads for a minute, curious about what was available in town.  

“Cookie?” Ruby asked pointing to the partially eaten cookie Belle had snagged towards the end of the lunch rush when she’d felt drained.  

“Just a little bit.”  Belle broke off a piece and handed it to her, glad that it at least had oatmeal in it.  A little nutrition was better than none at all.  “Can I get you anything, Trevelyan?  Some tea and a cookie?”

“Thank you, no,” he said curtly.  She’d heard him speak like that to others, but never to her.  He was sometimes gruff but never cold to her.

“I am sorry.  I got distracted, but that’s not an excuse.”  She pulled her ‘maybe’ flyers into a pile, folding them in half.  “Did Ruby sleep alright?”

“She was fine.”  He pursed his lips together and tapped his cane on the ground.  She half expected him to leave without another word.  It surprised her when he gestured at her papers.  “I didn’t realize you were moving.”

“Ruby turns two in a couple of weeks, and I don’t think we can keep sharing a room.  She needs more space for her toys and I’d like a yard for her to play in once the weather gets warmer.  It’s hard to find something close enough to the diner that doesn’t break the budget, though.”  It would be nice to have a three-bedroom place so she could have an office; she’d been using her bed as a desk most of the time, which made organization difficult.

“You’re staying in Storybrooke?”  He seemed surprised.  Shocked, even.

“What?  Of course we are.  Storybrooke is home.”  Even if she didn’t have the diner and the B&B to run it was still the only place Ruby had lived and the place where Granny’s spirit still lingered.  Ruby needed stories of her Granny, and Belle needed to feel the presence of the only mother she’d had since she was ten as she tried her best to be a parent.  And then, of course, there was a certain Trevelyan Gold whose almost daily presence in her life was a factor as well.

“You were living in Chicago until last year.”  He had both hands on his cane, as if needing to support himself more than usual, but his back was ramrod stiff.

“And I loved it as a single woman working way too many hours at a museum, using my free time to explore, but it would never work now that I have Ruby.”  She barely thought about Chicago these days, though she had often the first months she’d moved back.  It had been her home for college and three years after.  Maybe it still would be, if Granny was alive.  Or maybe it wouldn’t.  “Besides, I realized when I came back how much I missed this place.”

“Did you live here long?”  He had never asked her much about her past.  She had volunteered the occasional story and he’d always listened but never pushed.  He shared very little of his own past; hell, it had taken a year to learn his first name.

“We moved here when I was ten; I think my dad was running away from Australia and memories of my mom.  He never did get over losing her, and died a few months after we arrived here.”  His death was officially listed as pneumonia, but she knew it was a broken heart and a lack of interest in living.  He hadn’t taken care of himself and had given up so easily when he’d gotten sick.  “Granny took me in just after my eleventh birthday.  It was supposed to be a temporary placement but I didn’t leave until I was seventeen and going away to college.”

“I assumed that you were a relative.  She looks like you.”  The cookie gone, Ruby used a red pen to draw on the papers in front of her.  Belle touched one of her wispy curls.

“People always assumed we were sisters, Anita and I.  Granny’s daughter.  She was rarely interested unless it got her something like attention from a boy or a free ice cream cone.  She was only around the first year before she left; we didn’t see her much after that.  It was mostly just me and Granny.”  She’d been in awe of Anita until she was in high school and saw how her sudden appearances and fast departures hurt Granny.  She’d been in Chicago for almost six years when Granny had called Belle to stay she’d shown up with a baby.  Two weeks later Anita was gone again, leaving her daughter behind.  “Biology doesn’t make a parent, though, and Granny made sure that the legal side of things was clear.  I’m her guardian.”

“I believe I know a place for rent that might suit you.  Are you able to leave the diner now?”  The abrupt change in conversation confused her for a moment, especially when she was half caught up in memories.  

“We are.  We’ve already taken up more of your time than usual, though.”  She’d never gotten him to agree to compensation for babysitting Ruby, but she’d cut his rent in half and tried to feed him breakfast at least a couple of times a week.  It wasn’t fair to take more of his time.

“I don’t have any specific plans today.  You can drive, I’ll give you directions.”  Though he sometimes took Ruby for a walk he didn’t drive her and didn’t have a car seat.  It wasn’t the first time they’d driven someplace in her car, though it didn’t happen often.  This time he guided her to an address a little over half a mile from the diner; in good weather she could walk.  

“I can’t possibly afford this place,” she said when he directed her to park in front of a pink historic home.  

“It’s been empty for some time, I’m sure they’d be willing to work a deal.”  He paused at a flowerbed to remove a fake rock holding a key, and let them in.  Ruby demanded to be let down and ran through the empty room towards the back of the house; when Belle caught up with her she found herself in a kitchen almost as big as the diner’s but three times as charming.  The large window over the sink looked out on a garden, the yard was fenced in and in a few months would be filled with flowers.

“This place is amazing.”  She was in love before she’d seen half the house; there was a library with the shelves mostly filled that would be far better than any office she could have imagined.  She picked Ruby up to head up the stairs, and found four bedrooms; the largest had a fireplace and a view of the backyard.  Ruby ran into the bedroom across the hall and found a handful of toys.  She was kicking a ball across the room when Gold came slowly up the stairs.  “Someone has taken care of this home; are you sure they’re looking to rent it out?”

“To the right person.  It’s a home that needs someone who would appreciate it.”  He ran his hand over the doorframe; when Belle looked closer she could see faint marks there.  A step closer and she could make out ages written with care next to the marks; a child’s growth chart.

“This is your home.”  The realization hit her all at once; he’d been established at the B&B well before she’d arrived, so it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have a house in town.  And not just a house, but a home that had been lived in.  And a child, it seemed.

“It was.”  The ball Ruby had been playing with rolled across the floor and hit him in the leg.  Ruby squealed in delight when he kicked it back at her.  “It needs a family.”

“Where…”  Belle stopped herself; she didn’t want to push.  He’d already offered more about himself in a few words than she’d learned in a year.  

“My son is in New York, going to school.  My ex-wife is sailing somewhere exotic and hopefully filled with warring tribes armed with pointy spears.”  He shrugged away his comment as if it was a joke, but she could see the real pain there.    Belle did not like this faceless ex-wife that had hurt her friend.

“What’s his name?”  When she glanced at the bookshelves there was an eclectic mix of comic books, pulp fiction novels, studies of Renaissance painters, and art theory books.  The decorations around the room were just as varied; model planes and movie posters and sketches taped to the walls. It was clearly a room where a child had grown into adulthood.

“Bae.  He’ll be twenty in a few months.”  He smiled wistfully.  “He’s leaving for Italy soon for a semester abroad.”

“You have a lot of memories here.”  She let herself finger one of the marks in the doorframe; Bae was taller than his dad if the lines were any indication.  He’d passed her up when he was barely a teenager.

“I considered setting the whole place on fire a few years ago.  Moving out seemed the more prudent option.”  He looked over his shoulder at the doorway to the master bedroom, scowling.  “My boy is the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I don’t need a place to remember him.  The rest of it I would gladly forget.  Besides, Ruby needs her own room.  You both need a home and I happen to have one standing empty.”

“You have to let me pay a fair price.”  She’d be able to rent out an extra room if she and Ruby moved out of the B&B.  They might be able to swing it.  Ruby could have one of the other bedrooms, though.  She’d leave this one alone.  Belle felt like dancing, she was so excited at the idea that it might actually work out.  “You’re my fairy godmother, Trev.  What would Ruby and I do without you?”`

“Nonsense.”  He waved his hand dismissively.  “It’s a simple business transaction that is mutually beneficial.”

 “Ruby, sweetheart, we have a fairy godmother.”  She picked her charge up, complete with the old stuffed dog she’d apparently found in the room, and swung her in a circle.  “What do you think about that?”

“Fairy!” Ruby laughed in delight.  When Belle stopped spinning she demanded “again!”

She swung Ruby around three more times before sitting her down and watching her stagger around the room, singing about fairies to her new stuffed friend.  When she turned she found Gold watching the little girl with a whistful smile.  It made her brave enough to approach him and offer a tentative hug.  “I don’t know how we can ever thank you.”

To her surprise he hugged her back.

[bytheangell]

something to be proud of

(Read on AO3)

New York - 2016

‘I’m married,’ Alec reminds himself as he walks hand-in-hand with Magnus down the city street toward the sounds of a crowd not too far away. ‘I’m literally married. To a man. Why am I so nervous about this?’

He’s never been one for crowds or large public declarations. And this certainly is a crowd making a large, public declaration. Perhaps that’s why being present at Pride for the first time is such an intimidating idea for him. When Izzy first suggested they all go he’d been entirely against the idea. It’s just some ridiculous mundane event anyway - after spending his entire life feeling shame over his sexuality he isn’t sure he can just flip the switch from guilt to pride, no matter how confident he is in his own relationship with Magnus. He still feels a little self-conscious within the walls of the Institute from time to time, or in Alicante for meetings with the Clave… he hates that he is, but a few decades of concealing his true self and conditioned oppression don’t undo themselves overnight, not even with the love he now has working against them.  

It isn’t that he’s embarrassed, because he isn’t. He’s just not sure he’s ready for rainbow flags and parades. At least, that’s what Alec thinks as his small group of friends (Izzy, Simon, Magnus, and Underhill) finally reach their destination.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. The moment they enter the area blocked off for the day’s events Alec can’t keep his eyes in one place. There’s so much to do, so much to look at. His gaze is drawn to booths selling clothing and jewelry, another with flyers for awareness of groups or events or causes, others set up with food and drinks, and even stages for performances. That’s on top of the entire miles of street which are sectioned off for a parade later in the day.

It isn’t until his eyes drift from the things around them to the people that it hits him. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is laughing. Even in the middle of the sweltering mid-day summer sun there isn’t a single person who looks like there’s anywhere else they’d rather be than decked out in colorful face paint or wearing flags around them as a badge of honor.

Magnus gives Alec’s hand a squeeze. There was no denying Alec’s previous apprehension over going to the event and Alec’s thankful that Magnus made it very clear he wouldn’t judge him in the slightest if he’d rather not go for any reason or leave early once they got there, no questions asked.

“You alright?” Magnus asks, catching Alec’s wide-eyed gaze.

“More than alright,” Alec confirms. He’s never been in a space so open to who he is, one that’s not only tolerant of his identity but entirely welcoming to the differences of the people surrounding him. It strikes him that, aside from his own wedding when he stood among the support of family and friends, this might be the first time he’s felt a sense of total acceptance of everything he’s ever thought or felt or wished for himself.

Alec lets go of Magnus’ hand to allow that arm to reach around his husband’s waist, easing into the movement with a smile on his face. “I’ve seen it on the news before, you know, but actually being here…” Alec trails off, not quite sure how to put what he’s feeling into words.

“It is nice, isn’t it? Even if it’s just for a day, to have a space where you don’t feel like you have to defend your existence… where you can just be yourself without having anything to prove.” Magnus fills in.

And that’s it, Alec realizes. He feels relaxed here. He isn’t putting on a show. He isn’t trying to be the perfect balance of Shadowhunter and Husband. He isn’t on guard to make sure he doesn’t slip up because every little mistake he makes will be used in sly comments against him by those who would rather see him fail for everything he currently represents in the Shadow World.

“Yeah, it is,” Alec agrees, feeling without a single doubt or reservation a sense of belonging he didn’t realize he was missing and embracing it the rest of the day.

---

Idris, 2021

It’s a long time coming, Alec thinks, but it’s an event that so many in his own generation of Shadowhunters never would’ve imagined seeing. The first Alicante Pride, organized by none other than Inquisitor Lightwood-Bane and High Warlock of Alicante Lightwood-Bane - which is far from a surprise once word starts to spread. .

At first he’s a little worried. After all, despite the fact that he’s done everything within his power to make the Nephilim’s world as open and tolerant as possible there’s only so much one person can do. He can change all of the official stances he wants, he can create and plan new events such as this festival, but he can’t change public opinion and he certainly can’t singlehandedly undo centuries of inherited biases. He’s seen more LGBTQ+ Nephilim making themselves known the past few years than he had his entire life prior to his own marriage to Magnus, and the same goes for relationships between Nephilim and Downworlders. The stigma is fading, yes, but far from eradicated. He hears the whispers that follow him even to this day, even with as far as he’s come and the work he put into getting here.

“What if nobody comes?” Alec asks the night before the festival, wringing his hands together anxiously. He petitioned for the opportunity to hold an event like this for years, and if it flops it’d be giving everyone who told him no total justification for their bigoted decisions time and time again.

Magnus crosses the living room with a glass in his hand, grabbing one of Alec’s from it’s nervous fidgeting to place the drink in it instead.

“Relax, darling. It’s going to be a wonderful event whether two people show up, or twenty, or two-hundred.”  Magnus has every reason to be confident that the event itself is going to be fun: Alec did his research, hours upon hours of it, before even proposing the idea. He’s looked into (and talked with) the organizers of some of the best Pride festivals around the world, and pulled elements from all of them that would not only draw in guests but also provide a safe, comfortable environment.

He wants this to be a positive experience. He wants to show acceptance, and tolerance, and hopefully encourage more people who may still be hiding their true selves away that maybe they don’t have to keep hiding forever - that the world really is changing, or at least attempting to. But all of that hope will be wiped out in an instant if there’s any visible or vocal push-back. Security, as it stands, is a very select group of trusted Shadowhunters and Warlocks ready to remove any sign of trouble.

‘Raziel, please’ Alec thinks desperately as he forces himself to stop pacing and relax for a drink with Magnus before bed. ‘Don’t let there be any trouble.’

The next morning Alec is too excited to even think about eating breakfast, instead anxiously waiting for Magnus to finish his waffles and get ready so they can leave. When Magnus finally emerges from the bathroom with pink, purple, and blue streaks in his hair, Alec beams. This is it, they’re really doing this.  

As they step through the portal Alec braces himself for the worst. However, he finds himself pleasantly surprised (on the verge of totally shocked) at the sight that ends up greeting them.

It’s packed.

Mostly with younger Shadowhunters and Downworlders- some people his own age but predominantly early twenties and below. There are some familiar faces and many he never saw before, a mixed group that Alec couldn’t be more pleased to see mingling together as one while they  wander around some booths set up by volunteers. He even spots a couple of families walking the grounds with their children. Some are clearly part of the community while others look slightly more uncomfortable, a few clearly the parents of eager young adults who very obviously dragged them out here.

But they’re here and they’re trying, and Alec offers each and every one of them a reassuring smile and a few kind words of thanks for stopping out to make them feel more at ease.

“Excuse me,” a soft female voice from behind him speaks. “Mr. Lightwood-Bane?”

Alec and Magnus both stop to turn and then pause with an amused look between them, unsure which of them the woman is addressing. This isn’t the first time this has happened and Alec is certain it could happen a thousand more and he’d never get tired of it.

“Sorry,” the woman says with a quiet laugh. “Inquisitor Lightwood-Bane, I suppose I should specify.”

“Please, just Alec is fine,” Alec tells her. As he looks her over quickly, a woman only a handful of years older than himself if he had to guess, but while he looks at her he sees that her gaze isn’t on him - it’s on a young boy over by a table full of multicolored ribbons and flags.

“I just…” she starts again, her attention back on him. “I wanted to thank you.”

Alec steadies himself for whatever is going to come next. He’s had this sort of conversation before, the first time with Underhill and then dozens, maybe hundreds since then. He’s a little more used to them now but he still never knows exactly what to say (he still doesn't feel like he deserves any extra praise for simply being himself), so he waits for her to continue.

“My son is… well, he’s gay. Or at least he thinks he might be. And a few years ago I would’ve reacted a lot differently than I did when he told me yesterday because he wanted to come here today.” Alec remembers himself at that age, easily recalling how confusing those first inklings were that he wasn’t quiet like the other boys his age, the feelings that were more confusing than not at the start. What he can’t imagine is being able to talk to anyone about it at that age, what that might feel like to a child trying to understand themselves and how important that moment was for the mother .

The woman continues. “A few years ago I would’ve worried about his future and what kind of life he might have in our world... But I don’t have those fears as much anymore, and it’s in no small part to you. And your husband.” She adds, smiling over at Magnus.

Alec also chances a glance over at Magnus to see the warlock’s expression full of barely restrained pride.

“I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to hear that,” Alec says, meaning every word. “And how glad I am that he has you to support him.” The risks he took - and continues to take - are because they were the right thing to do. He never meant to blaze a trail - he’s just a guy who fell in love and followed his dreams. Sometimes he forgets that every time he speaks out for himself it makes it a little easier for the next voice to follow.

“I’m going to do my best,” she promises, and though she’s still talking to Alec her eyes are once more locked on her son and Alec knows it isn’t really him that she’s promising. “Anyway, I’m sure you have a busy day ahead of you. I just wanted to thank you, again, for doing things like this. I hope you know how much of a difference it’s making.”

Alec swallows thickly, only daring to nod at first until he can be certain he’d reply with a steady tone. “Thank you,” he finally manages just as she goes back over to join her family.

“Wow,” Magnus breaths out. “That sure was something.”

It was more than something, though - it was everything. All Alec ever wanted when he started putting these movements into motion, starting small with a talk at an Institute here or a small social event there, was to get to this point - to make the sort of grand gesture he would’ve ran the other way from half a decade ago because he understands the difference it can make. He knows nothing will ever be perfect in his lifetime but he’ll be damned if he isn’t going to make as much progress as he can while he’s here. He always said if he managed to make just one life better it would be worth it, and one look around tells him that the influence he holds now reaches far beyond just one life.

“This is the legacy you’re building, Alexander. And I want you to know how proud I am of it - and of you.” Magnus says at his side, turning to lean in for a quick kiss.

“I couldn’t have done it without you,” Alec says once they break away again. It’s almost too much for Alec to take in all at once so he allows himself a few minutes to simply stand with Magnus and process.

It isn’t often Alec allows himself to step back and admire his own handiwork. So often what he does is a matter of duty or expectation, nothing worth any special note. But this? This is different. A few years ago he couldn’t imagine a point in time where Nephilim like him might simply live a comfortable, honest existence... let alone one where they could openly thrive in a community of their own. And now, watching countless others experience that sense of belonging he strove to recreate today, embracing that initial moment of hope that maybe there’s a place for them in the life they were born into after all?

This is truly something to be proud of.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/23 & 10/25/2018: HALLOWEEN (2007) & HALLOWEEN II (2009)

By the time Rob Zombie made the bold move of remaking John Carpenter’s name-making classic HALLOWEEN, the horror rock-star’s directorial career had already proved to be incredibly divisive. His 2003 film debut, HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES drew a cult from among diehard fans of his music, but was largely panned by critics who identified it as a ramshackle, self-indulgent disaster. The movie was little more than a Frankensteining-together of Zombie’s favorite things, but he managed to follow it up swiftly with 2005′s semi-sequel, THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. With this project, he appropriated three of the principle characters from his cartoony, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW-like first feature, and reimagined them as the redneck antiheroes of a story that plays like a cross between THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE WILD BUNCH. While DEVIL’S REJECTS showed major improvements in terms of drive and focus, it still felt unsettled. It is an emotionally confused movie that has trouble deciding whether its tale is more tragic for the innocent victims of its psychopathic protagonists, or more triumphant, for the Rejects’ anti-establishment swagger and charisma. Rob Zombie displays a refined aesthetic sense, and seems sincere in his storytelling, but he didn’t have much time to let these things ferment into a more potent cinematic brew before he stepped up to bat again with his controversial remake of the beloved HALLOWEEN in 2007. 

Reviled even by the likes of John Carpenter himself, Zombie’s dour, ponderous retelling of the archetypal slasher story was baffling to critics and genre buffs alike. Loaded up with clunky psychoanalysis that flies in the face of Carpenter’s original intention--Michael Myers is PURE NO-REASON EVIL, FULL STOP--this iteration of HALLOWEEN worked for few people besides Zombie’s hardcore stans. In spite of that very large and general problem, the writer-director was back again in 2009 with a sequel to his own remake. With HALLOWEEN II, he took two major creative risks: Bringing the ubiquitous Sheri Moon Zombie back even though her character died early in the first film, and centering the narrative on Laurie Strode’s psychological recovery, or lack thereof, from her original ordeal. It is easy to see how this setup would draw more complex and ambivalent responses. Mrs. Zombie’s appearance as the ghost of Myers’ mother, whose character is plagued by a lot of Jungian nonsense, was identified fairly as ludicrous by many viewers. On the other hand, Scout Taylor-Compton’s return as Laurie Strode takes a character who was little more than a cardboard cutout in the first film, and turns her into a convincing mass of trauma who undergoes a profound transformation over the course of this sequel. As with THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, HALLOWEEN II suggests that even while Rob Zombie can be an incredibly frustrating filmmaker, he still seems to be on to something. Even in my most stuck-up moments, when his smug use of slow motion and arias of unshocking cuss words make me want to forget everything I just watched, his movies nag at me in a way that I have a hard time describing.  I’m just now starting to formulate an understanding of why.

Often, I find myself asking: Who is Rob Zombie? First and foremost, he is a professional nerd. His music, art, videos, and feature films are strung together by his scholarship in all things genre, whether he’s invoking Tobe Hooper’s snuff-like realism, or the innocent sitcom pleasures of the Munsters. Zombie is vastly erudite about horror, and really anything remotely culty. This is actually to the detriment of HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, which is so bloated with pop culture references that it almost chokes out the movie’s dubious originality. But while he has that irritating nerdy compulsion to competitively show off what he knows, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who buys and bags comics without even cracking them open. Rob Zombie is clearly, legitimately passionate; it’s heartwarming, and enough to make you want to root for him even when you don’t totally love what he’s doing. His craftsmanship is on point, too, as a multimedia artist whose talent has been abundantly evident since the early band flyer days. It comes as no surprise that he attended Parsons School of Design, and he occasionally shows his hand as an amateur film historian with a love for golden age Hollywood. So, whatever he wants you to think about his hellbilly stage presence, he’s clearly no hick, and no basement-dwelling dweeb either. He’s an educated artist with a background in New York City’s brainy ‘80s noise rock scene. It’s because of this that I find the worshipful attitude his films take toward their sociopathic murderers to be, well...kind of annoying. Why am I supposed to think it’s so cool, as the movies’ punk rock tone suggests, that the Firefly family tortures random bystanders to death for no apparent reason? Why doesn’t Rob Zombie know how tired the whole “scary clown” thing is, and has been for a long time already, even when it’s someone as magical as Sid Haig under the greasepaint? Why do I feel like Zombie’s interest in pimps and ho’s is deeper than just exploitation pastiche, which makes it potentially worse than if it were just a shallow affectation? The thought of this Massachusetts-born college boy fantasizing obsessively about being so crude and violent and salt-of-the-earth is kind of lame. So, instead of just, you know, being a hater as usual, I looked it up--and discovered that Rob Zombie’s roots are actually in the fairway. As Wikipedia aggregates from various interviews: 

While raising their sons, Rob's parents worked in a carnival, but they chose to leave after a riot broke out and tents were set on fire. Zombie recalled the experience in an interview, stating, "Everybody's pulling out guns, and you could hear guns going off. I remember this one guy we knew, he was telling us where to go, and some guy just ran up to him and hit him in the face with a hammer – just busted his face wide open. My parents packed up real quick, and we took off."

Suddenly, it all started to make sense. Sure, the costumed popstar isn’t an undead cross between Jerry Lee Lewis and Charles Starkweather in real life, but he isn’t a complete poseur either. It isn’t immediately clear, from underneath his mountain of collectory movie references, that he is, more or less, writing what he knows. He isn’t just emulating his cultural heroes, he’s mythologizing his own childhood. 

In view of this, the key to Rob Zombie’s movies is not an awareness of horror history and semiology; it’s actually all about outlaw culture. So, back to 2007′s deeply flawed HALLOWEEN. It’s a heavily bro-y movie, in its outsidery way, that breaks up the Dr. Loomis-Michael Myers-Laurie Strode love triangle, and focuses almost entirely on building a Myers biography. The fascinatingly sullen Daeg Neergaard Faerch plays young Michael, a fatherless boy on the verge of snapping from the relentless torment coming at him from all directions: his slutty sister, school bullies who fixate on his stripper mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), and his mother’s latest violent, depraved boyfriend. Michael follows the serial killer script perfectly, graduating rapidly from torturing animals to brutalizing other kids to annihilating his sister, her boyfriend, and his mother’s beau one Halloween night when his sibling chooses sex over taking her little brother trick-or-treating. He soon finds himself installed in a mental institution where he moves on to slaughtering the staff. Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) spends years evaluating the boy, though he is ultimately stymied by Michael’s profound lack of humanity. As Michael increasingly retreats behind the folksy homemade masks he spends all day crafting, the opportunistic Loomis gives up on him, instead committing his energy to a money-making true crime/pop psychology book about Myers. Flashing forward, we find the hulking adult Michael Myers (played by the 6′8″ wrestler Tyler Mane) getting ready to bust out of the asylum and wage war on his home town of Haddonfield. There we finally meet teen dream Laurie Strode, a spunky babysitter with a gaggle of gal pals who are perfect grist for the slasher mill. In the final leg of the film, Myers carves his way through Laurie’s social circle, in an apparent attempt to reunite with his sister: Laurie herself. Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) reveals that when Michael’s despairing mother committed suicide years ago, he took her infant daughter and had her adopted out anonymously to insulate her from her family’s tragic history. Laurie, for her part, is unaware of anything other than her need to survive, which she only barely accomplishes.

Naturally, Laurie’s story is the weakest part of a movie that is otherwise so focused on male experience. That is, the experience of needing a father, the ambivalent and ambiguous craving for maternal intimacy, the trauma of having your masculinity impugned by your (fag-obsessed) peers, and perhaps even the undermining influence of academia and capitalism on a man’s natural-born strength and worth. When the newly-freed Michael Myers storms through a truck stop to begin his pilgrimage to Haddonfield, and Rob Zombie chooses to accompany this scene with Rush’s regal outlaw anthem “Tom Sawyer”, it tells you everything you need to know about this take on HALLOWEEN. Like the rampaging Firefly family in DEVIL’S REJECTS, Michael is certainly evil, but he also represents something essential about the formation of and reinforcement of one’s individuality in the face of castrating societal norms--something the carnies among whom Rob Zombie grew up would have found very relatable.

It’s worth noting here that, while the sexuality of the women in Michael’s life plays a role in his distorted development, he is not reacting to their sexuality in and of itself. Michael Myers is not driven by the kind of covetousness that we associate with the archetypal slasher, who gives sexually frustrated male viewers a vicarious thrill by punishing sluts and teases. Michael’s problem is that his mother and sister’s sexuality contributes to his isolation. His classmates use his mother’s profession against him, and that profession keeps her from being able to tuck him in at night. Similarly, Michael doesn’t get to enjoy Halloween with his family and the other neighborhood kids, because his sister is too busy getting laid. Michael is abandoned, even while he still has a home to return to, an outsider even in his own house. 

This leads me to an important point about why the portion of the movie that is devoted to Laurie's struggle is so ineffective. It is a flaw in the film, but a virtue of the director: Normal, attractive teenagers are not Rob Zombie’s people. He doesn’t even participate in traditional slasher movie misogyny, he’s so far away from thinking about them. His movies are full of badass women who are fully possessed of their sexuality, and who wield it like a weapon against hypocrites and assholes, and this is always shone in a heroic light. Moreover, he delights in casting women of all shapes and ages, often assigning them immense personal power, as in LORDS OF SALEM, an enormously satisfying movie about society’s original persecuted outcasts: witches. Rob Zombie is deeply committed to outsiders, and his definition of them isn’t limited to banal lawbreaking--he also rejects conventional beauty and our cultural obsession with youth. His films are populated by all manner of human beings, and the farther away they are from looking like model material, the more likely it is that they’re meant to be the heroes. On that note, whatever you think of his movies, you have to acknowledge that they are almost never dehumanizing. Zombie is an accomplished actor’s director who gets a full spectrum of emotion out of his performers, and who excels at creating a feeling of camaraderie within his ensemble casts. It is this surprising sweetness, and compassion even for the victims of the villains he lionizes, that makes HALLOWEEN II so peculiarly effective.

If 2007′s HALLOWEEN was a remake on which Rob Zombie couldn’t resist draping some of his personal hangups, HALLOWEEN II is almost a completely original and separate entity from what one thinks of as the franchise started by John Carpenter. In it, Michael Myers is presumed dead but his body is missing--and indeed, his character is missing for much of the movie. We find a disturbed, scarred-up Laurie Strode living with her surviving friend Annie, and Annie’s father, Sheriff Bracket. Laurie is dealing, poorly, with a heavy dose of PTSD. Along with nightmares and flashbacks, she also has trouble just being nice to people, or accepting affection. Annie and her father’s attempts to be charitable with their adoptive family member are no match for Laurie’s increasing surliness and mistrust of the world. Once a good-natured and optimistic young woman, her appearance becomes vagrant-like (curiously similar to Rob Zombie’s own casual look), her attitude is more and more nihilistic, and she develops a drinking problem. I’ve always wanted to see a movie with a slasher-like narrative foundation, but that focuses on aftermath and recovery, and recent gimmicky efforts like FINAL GIRL and LAST GIRL STANDING did absolutely nothing for me. HALLOWEEN II--at least, the superbly-acted Strode part of it--is the movie I’ve been asking for.

The other part of the movie is also interesting--or more specifically, it’s as ballsy as it is flawed. The movie gets off on kind of a bad foot when a title card quotes an obscure psychology text book called The Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams: 

WHITE HORSE - instinct, purity, and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction.

This is the excuse we have for the fact that the ghost of Deborah Myers arrives with a white horse to compel her son to find his sister Laurie Strode, aka Angel Myers, to reunite their family, presumably in the afterlife. Deborah Myers is kind of a spectral cross between Glenda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, at once welcoming and sinister, drifting in and out of Michael’s consciousness in the company of a sort of ghost of his childhood (Chase White Vaneck, who is no Daeg Faerch honestly). It might be easy to dismiss this anomaly as an expression of Michael’s mental illness, and his desire to experience an idealized version of his youth in which his mother still looks after him--except that later in the movie, during the final standoff, Laurie is shown to be physically affected by these spirits. Maybe the implication is that she and Michael suffer the same psychological ailments, but for them to share such specific hallucinations without speaking is borderline supernatural in and of itself. So, while Sheri Moon Zombie does her best with her impressive force of personality and compelling physical presence, it’s hard to say what this part of the movie serves. When I first saw the film, I was completely outraged by this, not only because it made no sense to me, but because it felt like a cheap ripoff of Sarah Palmer’s similar prophetic visions of a white horse in Twin Peaks. That was all I managed to make of it. 

Today, I still don’t love it, but I have more trouble faulting Rob Zombie for trying to make HALLOWEEN his own, something more than a remake. He also does this by truly letting go of the Shape. The famous William Shatner mask was blown in half by Laurie at the end of the 2007 HALLOWEEN, and scarcely makes much of an appearance in this movie. Michael Myers is a disheveled drifter, literally haunted by his past, whose only real aim is to find a place to belong. It’s sort of funny, in retrospect: When John Carpenter made the first HALLOWEEN, he-by-way-of-Dr. Loomis declared Michael an empty shell of a person, someone who was simply born evil, as reflected by the empty-eyed mask he wears. For some reason, though, a whole legacy of directors just couldn’t resist trying to explain Myers away. The original HALLOWEEN II then says, “Well...what if Michael Myers is on a rampage because LAURIE STRODE IS HIS SISTER? What’s that you say? Why is that a reason to rampage? Ummmm...” And then HALLOWEEN 4 sees him pursuing other young female relations of his, and then in subsequent movies there’s an accursed rune, and druids, and immortality rites, and by the time you get to HALLOWEEN 6 you have this absurd stone soup of bad ideas. It’s a miracle that this franchise became such a thing. Rob Zombie makes the same fundamental mistake, but at least he tries it in the simplest possible way, asserting plainly that Nurture, not Nature, made Michael into a killer. Now, terminally lonely, he’s like a clown waking up in his trailer to find that the carnival left without him. Exiled from mainstream society, he seeks out what remains of his family, who, due to his own violent actions, has grown up more like him than he may have imagined.

I’m not saying I think this was the best thing to do with HALLOWEEN 2. Personally, what I crave in horror movies is something that is farther beyond explanation than this--something that gesturally resembles my life experience, but that plunges past the veil of mundanity into a deeper, darker world of primordial fears and urges, addressing things that unsettle me because I cannot rationalize them. For me, horror is definitionally incomprehensible, and Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN diptych is fundamentally sane. But, I think what I’ve discovered is that these movies are not proper horror movies, in spite of their relentless sadistic violence. They are outlaw fables, with more DNA in common with something like EASY RIDER, than with FRIDAY THE 13TH. It’s funny to watch myself coming to a compassionate understanding of these movies that are themselves about outsiders and rejects who are specifically deprived of understanding. My goal in all this was not so much to convince people of the value of these movies, which one might reject on any number of reasonable counts, but to explain to myself why I keep coming back to them. It isn’t to condescendingly heckle them, and it isn’t just because they’re often handsome-looking, or because they’re so emotionally authentic even when the narrative is less than compelling. It must be because, even when I’ve found him challenging, I can’t help seeing Rob Zombie as a person with vision, someone who heroically eschews common consensus on taste and sense-making--the consensus even among horror fans and his own cinematic heroes--in order to say what makes sense to him personally. Finally, he has begun to make sense to me, too.

[holdenmgrudges]

Chapter 1 - Newbsies

Hello, tumblrinas and tumblrones, it is I, Holden M. Grudges. Today I am venturing into the world of Alternate Universe Fanfiction. The fandom being Newsies. The reason for this is my recent obsession with the live musical and reading other AU fics. So I give you the first chapter in my new project, which I will hopefully finish this time. This AU is set in a high school where David and his twin sister Sarah (from the 1992 movie) are new students. Ships include but are not limited to: Javid, Newsbians, Sprace and even some Jackcrutchie (why wasn't this ship named Crack?). So go ahead and click the read more if you're interested. I'm gonna try to make this a weekly thing, but I make no promises. Also, it's my birthday so hbd to me. A really great gift would be an invitation to AO3 so I can post this on there, but I assume any readers I can get will also be on Tumblr. Anyway, enjoy, and thank you for reading.

Or read on AO3 if you prefer.

David Jacobs didn’t like this. But it wasn’t like he had a choice. His parents had made the decision to move for better paying jobs. “We need the money,” they said. “You’ll be going to college soon.” Truth was, David didn’t even know if he wanted to go to college. Sure, he was the studious type, and his face was usually hidden behind a book, but it was mostly to make his parents proud. It was hardly for fun. Although it did give him a good reason to decline invitations to parties and other social gatherings he didn’t want to attend.

Except David did want to attend. He just felt very awkward around people. He didn’t have many friends before he moved, and the ones he did weren’t close. He’d never felt like he belonged, and now that they’d moved, he knew he’d belong even less. Starting over was one thing. Starting over when you felt like you hadn’t even started at your last town was the worst.

So no, David didn’t like this. He straight up hated it. It was his first day of school, and he wasn’t looking forward to any of it. His head filled with thoughts of everything bad that could happen. Like his locker not opening. Or getting lost and being late to class, where everyone would stare at him as he came in. Walking down the lunch tables, trying to pick where to sit while everyone spread out so he wouldn’t sit with them.

“It’s all in your head,” his twin sister, Sarah, said to him. “Just relax. You’ll be fine.” David tried, but he just kept thinking too much. He knew it was easy for Sarah. She just had to walk through the hallways and catch someone’s eye. She wasn’t the most popular girl, but she was very beautiful and that made her popular with the boys. Though as far as David knew, she’d never gone out with any of them. He figured it was because his parents were so overprotective of her, but Sarah had other reasons.

Sarah Jacobs was okay with this. She embraced change. Especially when everything in her hometown bored her. The boys, the girls, the monotonousness. This new town wasn’t any bigger, but it was definitely more diverse. And it was new, which was the important part. Unlike David, Sarah had big dreams for college. She knew she wanted out of the small town life. “You keep your big life in a small town,” she’d tell her friends. “Give me a small life in the big city.” Where she wanted to go, she didn’t know. She just knew she wanted to get out.

Luckily, their new town was sort of an in-between. It was more of a big town or a small city. Not exactly where Sarah wanted to end up, but fine for right now. At least it was a step in the right direction. In two years time she’d kiss goodbye to this town and move on to bigger and better things.

So yes, Sarah was okay with this. She thought that maybe she’d get less attention. She was known for being a party girl, though she didn’t much like to party. She just knew there was nothing else to do. So she put on this charismatic persona while deep inside, she just wanted to not be noticed.

So on her first day of school, she walked down the hall with David, a bright smile on her face, not staring at anyone in particular. As they reached the main office, a girl came out of the principal’s office looking frustrated. Sarah noticed her brown curls and thought she was pretty. And then she looked into the girl’s brown eyes and saw her staring back. The girl looked embarrassed and then quickly rushed past into the hallway.

For a second, Sarah thought of following her, but she was brought back to reality by David, who was trying to get her attention. “Sarah, are you gonna ask?”

It took her a second to remember what they were doing there, and she rolled her eyes as she did. She walked over to the main desk where a woman wearing glasses looked up at her. A plaque on the desk read Miss Hannah. “Hi,” Sarah said. “I was wondering if we could have a couple of maps of the school? We’re new.” She wouldn’t have asked if not for David and his fear of getting lost on the first day. Miss Hannah gave them each a map, and off they went to homeroom, which they had together.

The day didn’t go as bad as David thought. But it also wasn’t perfect.

During PE class, they had to do a lap around the school track and he fell a bit behind. Although they were only required to do one lap, one of his other classmates showed off and did an extra lap, telling David to “keep up, kid,” as he passed him by. David couldn’t help but be a little offended, especially since the guy looked younger than him.

Then, between classes, he accidentally bumped into a group of students. They looked like they were bodyguarding the guy in the middle. He was shorter than the rest, but had massive arms, and gave David a look that could kill. David quickly apologized and he could swear he heard some of the guys growl. The guy in the middle nodded at him before leading the rest of the group away.

At lunch, he didn’t bother finding a table to sit at. Instead, he chose a bench and listened to music on his phone. He looked around, wishing someone, anyone, would walk up and talk to him. But no one did.

After lunch, he had art class. David wasn’t an artist, but it was a required class and he figured art was an elective where he didn’t have to talk to anyone. The teacher taught them some basics on vanishing points and asked them to start on a drawing that would become one of their big projects.

David had an idea to sketch his home town, or as close as he could get it to look like his home town, hoping no one was looking at his bad drawing. Of course, he couldn’t help but glance at other people’s work to see what they were drawing.

Sitting next to him was a boy who looked older and tougher. Not the type of guy he’d expect in an art class. When he looked at the guy’s artwork, however, David was amazed. The guy wasn’t drawing anything with a vanishing point. He was drawing a portrait of a pretty girl with curls. It seemed to be out of memory, as there wasn’t any reference picture near him. David couldn’t help but stare a little too long. Long enough for the guy to notice. “You know I’m not doing the same assignment, right?” the guy asked.

David was caught off guard, forgetting how to speak for a second. “Oh uh…”

“I’m one of the advance students,” the guy continued. “I did your assignment two years ago. Probably still have it somewhere. I could show you if you’d like.”

This guy was being so friendly and David didn’t know what to do except give him a quick smile. “Uh, no thanks. I think I’d rather handle this on my own.” He wanted to tell him that seeing the guy’s artwork would only make him think his own was horrible in comparison.

“Fair enough, but if you want my help, I’m Jack.”

“I’m Dave.” No, wait. “David.”

“Dave or David? I don’t wanna call you by the wrong name, now.”

David couldn’t help but think that Dave did sound cooler than David, so why not make it his official nickname? “Dave…” Or did that sound like he was trying too hard to be cool? “...Id.”

“Dave...id?” Jack looked as confused as David seemed, but he shrugged it off and went back to his drawing. “I’ll call you Davey, if that’s cool.”

Was the name Davey cool? It sounded cool when it was coming from Jack. And yet, David couldn’t help but think that Jack found him weird now. “Yeah, that’s cool.” Jack gave him a smile between pencil strokes. The guy was trying hard to be friendly, the least David could do was be friendly back. “And so is your drawing. It’s...amazing.”

“Thanks,” Jack said, laughing a little. “I’ll be glad when it’s done. She’s my ex so it’s kinda weird I’m still drawing her. We were together when I started it, and then we broke up and I got stuck having to finish this project…”

“I’m sorry,” David said, feeling like he created some kind of awkward conversation.

“Nah, it’s fine,” Jack said, going back to the drawing. “There’s plenty of fish in the sea for me. But I’ll probably give her the drawing when I’m done with it. As like a peace offering or something. Make things less awkward when we see each other.” There was a slight pause before Jack seemed to remember something. “Speaking of,” he said, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a flyer. “If you’re an ally or even part of the community, we always welcome new members.” He handed David the flyer, which read, LGBTQ+ Club.

David’s eyes widened a bit, both surprised and excited that this school had a club like this. There wasn’t one at his old school, and when he asked Sarah to start one, she refused because she knew he wouldn’t attend.

“Something wrong?” Jack asked.

“No, no...This is really awesome,” David answered, finally finding his voice.

“Glad you think so. Not everyone does,” Jack said with a slight scowl. “So will we see you there? We meet during lunch on Wednesdays. No need to wear pink.”

David laughed at the joke and then nodded. “Yeah, count me in.” And for once, David actually intended on going.

The rest of the class went by pretty fast. Jack and Davey mostly focused on their work, while now and again Jack asked him about his interests. Music, movies, tv, etc. David tried to keep his answers short enough so as not to go off on a rant, yet long enough to keep Jack interested. He knew it was only their first day meeting, and class wasn’t even an hour long, but David sensed that this could actually turn into a real friendship.

Sarah’s day had gone well too, though for some reason she couldn’t get the girl from the main office out of her mind. The girl had looked so troubled and Sarah was stuck wondering what the problem was. But everywhere she looked, she couldn’t find her. She tried focusing on her classes to get her mind off the girl. Of course, as soon as the bell ran and she was back out in the hallway, she was back at it.

Unluckily, a couple of boys, who looked like they could be brothers, started hitting on Sarah in the hallway. She tried to ignore them but they followed her to her last class, biology, stepping in front of the doorway before she could get in. This was the one thing boys did that she would never get used to. She was about to yell at the two boys until another boy interrupted.

“Really, Delancys? You think stopping the poor girl from getting to class is gonna make her wanna follow you home? Get outta the way.” The Delancys stared at the boy for a second, but moved when he made a threatening movement toward them. Sarah rolled her eyes at the boys and walked into the classroom.

As she took her seat, the boy followed and sat behind her. “You’re not even gonna say thanks?” he asked.

Sarah turned to stare at him and smiled. “Sorry, I forgot. Thanks for the help. Though, I probably could’ve handled them.”

“Those are the Delancys. Maybe on their own they can be handled, but together you never know what they can do.”

“I’ll keep that in mind if they try to pick me up with cheesy lines again,” she said with a laugh.

“You saying cheesy pickup lines are harmless?”

“I’m saying no one actually falls for them. And the only boys that use them are the ones that know they’re gonna get shot down.”

“So you’re saying that if I came up to you and said...Roses are red, violets are blue, there’s nothing in the world more prettier than you...I’d be asking to get shot down?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Sarah said with a laugh.

“Well, what I’m saying is that there’ve been assault rumors about them. So a simple rejection might not be enough.”

“Gotcha,” she replied, rethinking her opinions on this boy. “Thank you, sincerely.” She paused, considering telling him her name. After a second, she decided to do so. “I’m Sarah.”

“Jack,” the boy said. They smiled at each other before Sarah turned around to pay attention to the teacher.

A while later, they had to get in pairs, and Jack tapped on Sarah’s shoulder. She turned to him and with a mischievous smile he spoke. “We have great chemistry, let’s do some biology.”

Sarah couldn’t help but laugh and look embarrassed at the fact that she did. Jack raised his eyebrow, waiting for her to respond. Finally, she nodded and replied, “All right, I’ll be your partner, Jack.”

For the rest of class, Jack tried to get Sarah to laugh at some other pickup lines, while she tried to get him to focus on their schoolwork. Still, she thought he was fun and even though she just met him, she could see herself going out on a date with him.

After school, Jack Kelly practically skipped to his motorcycle, leaning on it while he waited for his best friend to get there. He was feeling a type of way. The same way he’d felt when he’d first met Katherine Plumber, the first time he’d met Racetrack Higgins, and probably even the first time he’d met Spot Conlon, though he couldn’t be sure as that was a long time ago. But he knew the feeling and it brought him joy to feel that way again. His head was so far up in the clouds, he didn’t hear the hobble of a boot and a crutch behind him.

“Hey, Jack…” he heard a voice say.

“Hmm…” Jack mumbled, still not fully paying attention.

“Jaaaaaa-ack!” the voice sang loudly, snapping him out of it.

Jack turned to see Crutchie standing there looking a bit worried.

“Uh-oh. It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack replied, mounting the motorcycle.

Crutchie rolled his eyes and got on the motorcycle, behind him. “Sure, sure...pretend like you don’t know what I mean.” He and Jack put their helmets on and then Crutchie turned his crutch sideways, slipping it under Jack’s arm, but holding onto it so that Jack could drive safely. He wrapped his free arm around Jack’s abdomen and held on tightly. Jack then started the bike. They were so used to doing this, it was second nature.

When they got home, they took the elevator up to the top floor, where they lived. They usually parted ways, but on several occasions, like when one of them needed to talk, they’d go up to the roof. It was one of those days.

“Alright,” Jack started. “I think I do know what you’re talking about.”

Crutchie lifted an eyebrow and then gave Jack a big smile. He didn’t say another word, but headed up the stairs that led to the roof. The first few times, he’d needed help doing this, but after practicing a lot on his own, going up the stairs was pretty easy. He remembered Jack’s impressed face the first time he’d gone up by himself and strived to get that reaction out of him all the time.

They sat down on a couple of deck chairs once they got to the rooftop, Jack a bit flustered, trying to come up with the words to tell Crutchie. He didn’t know why he didn’t want to tell him. Crutchie had been there for more serious talks. He’d also been there for the talks about Katherine and Racetrack. It was nothing new, and yet it was. Every time felt like it was new.

“So, tell me about this person you’ve met,” Crutchie started, having heard this story many times, and expecting to hear it many more.

“Crutchie…” Jack thought maybe he was embarrassed because he’d had this conversation so many times. But what was one more? “I’ve met someone.”

“Yes, we’ve established that.” Crutchie just wanted to know how similar or different this person was to the last.

“I just...I don’t know if it’ll go anywhere but...this person…is beautiful. And funny.”

“What’s their name?”

“It doesn’t matter.” And then Jack realized why he didn’t want to say anything. Yes, it was because it was a familiar conversation. Every time he started crushing on someone, he knew it would only be a matter of time before things ended badly. Like with Katherine. He missed her, but knew it wouldn’t work out. And with Racetrack. He could have fallen for him, but it wasn’t meant to be. And with Spot...Well, that was never going to go well. “Nothing can happen.”

Crutchie looked up in surprise, wondering if Jack was finally starting to mature and realize he didn’t have to date everyone he crossed paths with. “Why not?”

“Because I ruin everything. I’m a relationship ruiner.”

“You haven’t ruined ours,” Crutchie suggested, turning away when he realized what he’d said.

“No, I’m talking about relationships, not friendships. You know I have loads of friends. You and me...we’re like brothers. I love you in a different way.”

Crutchie gave Jack a smile and hugged him, though on the inside he felt his heart break a little. But that was also nothing new.

Jack wrapped his arm around Crutchie, leaning his head on the other boy’s. “I think it’s time I just take a break from dating and...focus on just being friends. It’s worked with Race and I can see it working with Katherine...You know, once she forgives me.”

“I think that sounds like a great idea,” Crutchie stated. “Focus on you. If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”

“Amen,” Jack said, his thoughts still on the special someone he had met that day.

[cyberstabbing]

Band AUs

Meaning that at least one of them is in a band, but it’s not My Chem. 

Sing For Me, Pretty - Frank Iero is a known name in the rock music scene. He was the frontman for the hugely successful Pencey Prep. After Pencey Prep split, Frank spent his time and energy with his label, Skeleton Crew. He was introduced to LeATHERMOUTH through his label, and the band offered him the position of frontman for them. With this band, Frank has propelled himself to superstardom. But with superstardom comes risks and consequences. One of those risks is psycho stalker fans. 37k

Redeemer - Gerard is a complete asshole to pretty much everyone but himself. He’s rich and privileged and doesn’t care if he steps on other people’s dreams. After a night with some guy he met at one of his clubs, in which Gerard ends up under a young punk rocker’s care, he may be changing his act. 20k

An Emergency Of The Heart - Gerard’s fat fucking birds have fat fucking asses. 13k 

Cute lil’ cinderella au, franks in a band and gerard works for CN. its So. Sweet. I couldn’t stop smiling in class.

Coin Toss Girl - Frankie thinks she’s got it together, she’s fronting a band, playing shows, finally living away from her mom, working a shitty job and attending college. Not to mention the slightly okay girls she brings home. Slightly okay girls who never seem to actually call her… and yeah, maybe her life isn’t as together as she thought it was, especially after meeting some random dude at a party who turned out to be her flatmates brother and not a complete jerk. Takeout is consumed, arguments are had, pining is contagious and sexualities questioned. 16k

You Will Leave a Mark - Gerard is twenty-two, drunk, lonely, and really, really needs to get out of the basement. 24k

Ass-Kickin’ Chick Music - She’s not someone’s girlfriend. She’s not anyone’s anything. She’s a fucking force. Gee doesn’t know if she wants to be her or fuck her. 20k

Small Cells and Fibers - Tuesdays were finger-painting days. Frank made sure to wear his oldest pair of jeans, because even with his full-length apron and his constant reminders that paint belongs on paper and not on clothing, he always ended up with tiny, multi-colored handprints all over his clothes. There wasn’t a thing he could do about it, so he just wore pants from 1995. 7k

Frank’s a preschool teacher and is in a band !! Gerard’s daughter goes to Frank’s preschool. V important fic.

High School Never Ends - “There’s a guy standing in front of him, and he has to be the hottest guy Gerard has ever seen. Dark sweeping fringe over one eye, the side of his head shaved and dyed blonde, tattoos peeking out from under his shirt and – is that one on his neck? Gerard feels his mind go blank – he is way too drunk to be in this situation.” 4k

Sleepover - Jamia died in May, so in two months it would be three years. Xavier was born in March, so today he was turning six. He’d had a party, which was fun, but now Daddy was feeling sad again, so Xavier was holding him tight. “We’re gonna move,” Frank said. Ray just nodded. “I think maybe I need to get out of this town.” Frank had been poking around the tri-state area, trying to figure out where they could go. He wanted a small community with friendly people where his neighbors wouldn’t constantly try to set him up with their sisters. He chose Fire Island. 6k

Natural Disaster - It happens like this: Frank needs a roommate. Apparently, independent record stores and garage bands don’t pay the bills. Or, not all of them at any rate. So he asks around and it turns out Mikey’s brother needs a place to live that is not their parents’ basement or Mikey’s couch. 5k

Mixed Bathing at Home - ​AU which can best be described thus:

Bex: it is a pointless AU where gerard writes comics and frank is in leathermouth, but there is no mcr Wax: mmh, aggro leathermouth frank meets gentle frustrated comics gerard? Bex: uh….no Bex: gerard gets his toe stuck in a faucet and frank rescues him. Wax: … Bex: it’s the stupidest thing in the world. Wax: how… how do you– nevermind, I’ll just read it. 7k

Someone … maybe babylynz wrote this description? Anyway, here: 

Gerard is a hot mess of a comic book artist; Frankie’s semi-famous for Leathermouth, but filling in for his friend-the-apartment-super when Gerard gets his toe stuck in a faucet. So fucking cute, and heartfelt, plus bonus points for high school reunion: Gerard kept thinking about it, kept looking at Frank, who was solid and confident and covered in tattoos and played in a rock band and could go to dinner with three strangers and how it seemed impossible that he would ever have been picked on or marginalized or scared in his whole life. Suddenly all the lyrics about hating everyone made a lot more sense. "You never really know,” he said, and then realized it had been out loud. Frank was giving him an amused look, but Mikey and Alicia didn’t even blink. 

'Til I Find a Place - Gerard had finally done what he had to do. He'd gotten out of the basement, and now he had a booth to himself at the Blue Moon Diner, where he could sit and drink coffee all night and calm his jittery hands enough to draw. It was perfect. 12k

​Transatlanticism - Gerard’s a comic book writer living in London. Frank works for a record label and has a band in New York. The problem with meeting in the middle is there’s a whacking great ocean there. 20k

Measured Against the Regrets - AU where the band never happened and Gerard quit his job at Cartoon Network to paint instead. After hitting rock bottom and going to rehab, he's back at home, struggling with a vicious creative block and trying to figure out his next move. When he reconnects with Frank at a Leathermouth show, the attraction is instant. Frank inspires Gerard more than anyone or anything has in a long time, but it's up to Gerard to turn that inspiration into a second chance. 17k

Shadows In The Parking Lot - In which there’s a mass grave under Frank and Ray’s apartment complex, Frank doesn’t believe in ghosts, & Frank’s ex-boyfriend is, conveniently, a paranormal consultant. For Milo. 61k

Well, I just stayed up until 4AM to finish this masterpiece. I love love love the characterization, and the whole “we used to be a thing years ago.” Which I haven’t really read much of, but it worked SO well for this fic and it might be my new thing. Not to mention the spookyness! It was so awesome, especially how nonchalant Frank was about ghosts in the beginning, which seemed to be more confusing to Gerard than if Frank just straight up was a firm non-believer. lol. Will definitely reread around Halloween! :D Also, the author said that they’re working on a sequel!!!!

A Fate Worse Than Death [Spells] - “Can I help you find anything?” an employee had asked. Frank just waved them off. “A box I can fit my ex-boyfriend’s body in.” had hardly seemed like an appropriate response.

~ Or, The story of how Frank Iero became a vampire slayer in the worst possible state to wake up a vampire. A daydream on ‘The Taste Of Ink’ by The Used. 59k

Hot damn. Love how Frank took down those vamps for G. And that graveyard scene! Good stuff. Felt like I was reading a comic at times because I could visualize everything so clearly.

A Milkshake With Two Straws - Somewhere along the way Frank just started appearing in the studio doorway, sometimes with flyers for his band, sometimes - very, very awesome times - with coffee. Of course, when Gerard's In The Studio his head is in a creative place, not a talking and remembering place, so he can't really be expected to know what he has or has not told Frank. 2k

Gerard is a spacey art school student. Frank’s pinning and frustrated by Gerard’s obliviousness. Short & sweet! Side note, Oblivious!Gerard is in my all time top five tropes and it will never get old.

On Measuring Life With Coffee Spoons - “Venti mocha frappuccino, no whipped cream,” Frank said with a grin. Gerard noticed he was wearing the nametag with the little blue vampire drawn next to the K. It was Gerard’s favorite. Barista!AU featuring socially awkward! Gerard and trying-too-hard! Frank. 7k

Obligatory “I’m not usually one for coffee shop aus but this was great.” Because it’s the truth.

[misssophie23]

THE CORRIDOR TO THE DOOR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF MYSTERIES

I found this old oneshot...I don't know why I haven't posted it on Tumblr before...this is my third try to post it correctly. The Tumblr App sucks rn! So, sorry I am so short on words. I wrote this fic last summer. I hope you enjoy the shameless bellarke smut that is coming for you xD You can also find it on ao3 (http://archiveofourown.org/works/7938799)

Enjoy :-)

THE CORRIDOR TO THE DOOR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF MYSTERIES

"We are truly sorry for the trouble Miss Griffin."

The stewardess apologized for the third time within two minutes. Bellamy was counting. He didn't look up from his book when the voice of the so called Miss Griffin complained.

"One hour late and then this. I can't believe it. This is the worst airline I've ever flew with!"

"There must have been a technical problem Miss. We are so, so sorry. Please, you can sit first class and you don't have to pay for anything during the flight." "As if I would," retorted the annoyed woman and Bellamy heard how she slumped into the seat right in front of him. The flight attendant put the luggage into the overhead and apologized for the fifth time, getting a huff as a response before she walked away. Bellamy looked after her, watching her disappear behind the curtain between first class and business. When his eyes flew back onto his book he stopped at the woman in front of him, who was – to be quite honest – really pretty. Even with her exhausted and annoyed facial expression. He watched her closely, recognizing the small birthmark above her lip and slightly sweating skin because it had been almost 97 °F today and it was still humid. Just when his eyes were about to go further down he caught himself and put them back onto his book – Pericles of Athens and the birth of Democracy by Donald Kagan. Yeah, he still was the history nerd he had been with eighteen! Bellamy still kept reading, when the stewardess gave the security information a few moments later. He had seen them dozens of times before and was pretty sure how to behave in any case of trouble. The mysterious blonde instead hung on the flight attendant's lips, when he looked up, which made him guess that this was her first flight or she hadn't been on many planes before. An amused smile spread over his lips before going back to reading. It didn't take him long to look up again. The plane was about to start when there was a loud rustle in front of him. The blonde shifted around in her seat, her feet fidgeted nervously up and down, so fast that he could feel it. She bit on her bottom lip and gazed nervously around when she caught him watching her. Bellamy's brows shot up in a silent question and she stopped immediately. "Sorry. Nervous flyer." "Don't tell me," answered Bellamy ironically and turned the book page, but not without checking on the blonde one last time. The woman seemed to relax as the plane reached its flight level. They had been through rain clouds and an airhole which made her gasp and Bellamy tried to ignore that this kind of sound went directly to his guts. He cleared his throat as quietly as possible and tried to keep his eyes focused on the pages while she started to bring down her luggage and pulled some things out. He tried so hard not to watch while she was doing it, that he was thinking about her all the time and re-read one line for the third time when the stewardess approached them, asking if they would like something to drink. "Oh," started the woman in surprise and again Bellamy reminded him not to think about this sound in another specific and very different situation because damn; he didn't know her but she was kind of hot! And he was just a guy. A guy who hadn't had any sex in a long time so he couldn't hold himself and his thoughts back of going … dirty. The heat crawled up his neck while eavesdropping on her order. "Do you have some ice tea? With a lemon slice and mint leaf maybe?" "I'm not sure about the mint leaf but I'll look. What can I bring you Mister Blake?" Addressed the stewardess Bellamy directly and made him look up. He gave her a sweet smile before ordering "The usual. A scotch on ice and a small water with gas please." "Of course," smiled the woman back and Bellamy nodded in thanks. His eyes wandered back to the book, catching the blonde looking at him, which made him smile at her. He flashed her one of his significant smile, which she easily returned before looking back onto her sketchbook. Bellamy kept his eyes on her instead. He didn't want to be the creepy stranger who checked out women on public transportation but he couldn't resist to sneak. Above the stormy clouds the sun was shining right through the small window, making her blonde hair looking like gold. Like she was wearing a halo. Her skin looked even softer. She had rosy cheeks and her lips were captured between her teeth far too often. She didn't notice him watching her. She was too lost in her doings. The blonde crooked her head, eyeing her work before letting her hands fly over the paper, knowing every line she made. Bellamy's eyes wandered along her hands towards her neck, down to her inviting cleavage and - oh Gosh he was such a creep! His eyes were literally glued on the curves of her breasts, making his thoughts race, when the flight attendant reached them, handing them their drinks. Bellamy blushed, even though no one and especially not the blonde herself, had been seeing him. Even though he hoped his nervous smile didn't give him away when the woman in front of him took her drink and sending him a short smile as a toast. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * They landed in Chicago, welcomed by lightning, thunder and pouring rain one and a half hours after departing from Nashville. Bellamy just got up as the rest of the passengers and wanted to grab his luggage when the pilot's voice filled the cabin, telling them that they had to remain seated because the airport stopped the check-in for everyone because of the storm. They weren't allowed to leave the plane. A load groan went through the rows and Bellamy dropped back into his seat. The loudest groan seemed to come from the woman in front of him. "They can't be serious. I have a hotel reservation!" She took a look at her watch before stopping one of the stewardesses, "How long do we have to wait in here?" The woman's smile was excusing. "Sadly we can't tell you right now. The pilot has to talk to the manager first. We'll let you know as soon as we have further information. We have to ask you to remain seated until then. I'm sorry." "Awesome," spat the woman sarcastically when the attendant was gone, falling back into her seat. Bellamy watched her before looking out of the window. He could barely see anything. They were in the middle of the tarmac, somewhere, and just the bolts lightened up the darkness. He rubbed his forehead. Gladly he didn't have to get into any hotel but he was awake for more than sixteen hours now. All he wanted was to go to bed. "Well," started Bellamy shortly and turned towards the blonde, "looks like we've got some time to kill. I'm Bellamy." He held out his hand, a charming smile on his lips. The woman returned it immediately and shook his hand – her own couldn't even close around his completely because it was too small – "Clarke." "So, Clarke what brings you to Chicago?" "Wizard World Comic Con," she said proudly and without any hesitation. She got an excited look on her face, returning Bellamy's question onto him. "I live here." "What did you do in Nashville then?" "Visiting my mom. She still lives there. You?" "Oh that's sweet," smiled Clarke and made Bellamy's chest swell a little, "I live there." She smiled but shrugged together as a loud thunder rolled through the air. They both looked outside the window, watching the next lightning appear. "What shitty weather," mumbled Clarke and sighed loudly and Bellamy remembered that she had some kind of trouble before. "You had some problem during boarding?" She rolled her eyes at this, which made him chuckle lowly. "Believe it or not but this fucking airline overbooked the flight. I bought my ticket six months ago and at the counter they told me that I don't have any reservation. Can't you believe that?" Honestly? He could. Most of the airlines did that but he wouldn't dare to tell her. He didn't want to upset her any further. So he just shook his head, "Not really." "Oh yeah! I was so pissed. I still am! I mean, not that the plane was an hour too late, nooo. To make my day even better they decided to delete my booking!" "So usually no first class for you?" "Oh no. I could never afford it. But this seat wasn't taken. So I got it as some kind of reparation. Which seems to be my luck now." She grinned and then winked at him and Bellamy tried not to read too much into it. Maybe she had the same interest in him as he had in her?! Judging by her flirty smile she was flashing him right now – she had! "Blessing in disguise, huh?" "Yupp. And you are a regular on this flight or why does the whole crew seem to know you?" Bellamy chuckled again, "Something like that?" Then he added, "Like I said before, I visit my mom once in awhile. I'll help her at her coffee shop and at the child-care. This time I stayed for almost two weeks. So yeah I'm well known." Clarke lifted her eyebrows, looking clearly interested in him. "So, part-time barista and nanny, huh?" A grin played around her lips. Bellamy blushed a little before nodding, "Somehow, yeah." "And what are you doing when you are here in Chicago?" "I'm working at the CME." "CME?" "Chicago Mercantile Exchange." Clarke still blinked in confusion. "I'm a broker," explained Bellamy and that's when the penny dropped. "Oh, oh of course. Exchange, yeah. Sorry. So you're exchanging what?" "We are trading natural resources. And what about you?" Clarke blushed, "I … I'm still looking for a job for myself. Right now I'm working at my best friend's shop and draw a lot. Nothing really worth living." Bellamy opened his mouth to tell her that he didn't judge her when the stewardess reached them once again, asking if she can get them something to eat. "Why?" Asked Clarke immediately and the attendant shot her another apologetic look. "The airport is still closed. We have to remain in here a little longer." "What? No way! I have a hotel reservation. We have been stuck in here for almost forty minutes. Why can't you just let us go?" "Because it's an order Miss Griffin. We are truly sorry but right now we aren't allowed to open the door. It's for your own safety." "So you'll pay for a new hotel room if I –" "Like I said Miss Griffin, there is nothing we can do. We have to wait until the storm weakens. So to make the waiting as pleasant as possible – can I bring you something to drink or eat?" The blonde woman opened her mouth, probably for another lash out, so that was the moment Bellamy interfered. He smiled gently at the stewardess because she wasn't the one to blame for this situation. No one was. "Would you be so kind to bring us some champagne, please? And maybe a few noshes?" "Absolutely", returned the woman with a thankful smile and disappeared behind the curtain, while Clarke was giving him a dark glance. "You know she had been talking to me right?" "Yeah, but she isn't the one to blame for this situation, so you can keep your shit together and be more kind." Bellamy put Clarke into her place, which made her scoff loudly. "I'm not one of your mother's children!" "Then stop acting like one." Clarke glanced darkly at him before grabbing her phone, getting up and mumbling that she needed to make a phone call. When she disappeared Bellamy punched himself against his forehead. He didn't have any right to talk to Clarke like that. She was upset, just like everyone. It wasn't like she could go home just like him. She had a hotel reservation, which might cause some problems if they got stuck in here much longer. After a few moments the food and drinks were brought to their table before Clarke returned, a pissed look on her face but Bellamy decided to talk to her anyway. "Sorry about earlier," he started but the blonde didn't seem to give a damn about it. Bellamy sighed. "No luck with the hotel?" She grabbed her glass of champagne and emptied it in one gulp. "So I guess that is a no," mumbled Bellamy and took a sip from his own glass. "No. They told me I have to check-in within the next hour. Otherwise my reservation is invalid. And judging by the weather it doesn't look like I'll make it!" She sighed desperately. Bellamy offered her a gentle smile. "I'm sure you'll be fine. There are a few hotels here in Chicago. You'll find another one." "Hopefully one where I can afford a room … otherwise you're stuck with me." The flirty grin was back on her lips. Her brows wiggled and Bellamy looked at her in amused confusion. "Stuck with you?" He questioned. "Oh yeah. I mean you are living here right? Sure you have a room to spare." "Well –" He started before being interrupted. "Or maybe a bed to share," she added cheeky and made Bellamy chuckle. His mind was starting to picture her in his bed already, naked, while he tried to not letting let it show on his face. "What makes you think I have a bed to share?" Fire glinting in her eyes when she answered, almost nonchalant. "No ring on your finger, wearing clothes that are screaming 'I'm a workaholic – which you probably are considering you’re a broker - and don't have time for anything serious' and being all flirty with me for the past hour. It doesn't look like there is someone waiting for you. And I don't take you for the cheating type of guy." Bellamy huffed in surprise. She hit the nail on the head. "Not bad," he admitted. She clearly had good knowledge of human nature. He licked his lips before confirming her suggestions. "You are right. But I'm not sure if I want to share my apartment with a stranger." Of course he would. Especially with someone as hot and interested as Clarke. It wasn't like he never had a one night stand before. Like Clarke said earlier, it was what he was doing all the time. "Stranger?" She echoed in shock. "We have been stuck in here for a little over an hour now. I wouldn't call us strangers anymore Bellamy." A hot shiver ran down his spine right to his cock at the sound of his name. It was the first time she said it and his name never sounded sweeter. He grinned, locking his eyes with hers, feeling the tension building up while they got another glass of champagne. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * They got stuck in the plane for three hours in whole. Bellamy learned that Clarke was an only-child. That Wells Jaha was her best friend and that she had a cat named Molly when she was a kid. Her favorite color was green, she got a scar on her right knee because she fell from a horse when she was nine and she was a big fan of The Big Bang Theory and True Bloods which were the main reasons for visiting the convention. In return Bellamy told her about his sister Octavia, his two best friends Murphy (who was a former soldier and now one of the best trauma surgeons in Illinois) and Miller (who worked for the government). They talked about their hobbies when Clarke asked him if he had been on a convention at least once in his life. No need to say that she was shocked when he answered with "No". "And you are a groupie who's stalking her favorites through the whole country?" Asked Bellamy amused and Clarke stuck out her tongue, mumbling a long "noooo" and blushed – again. Bellamy started to like the pink color on her cheeks. Imagine it getting darker and darker with every thrust he deepened himself into her. "So, why are you going then?" "Because I'm a groupie who's chasing her favorites," joked Clarke and added, "And because I’m trying to catch up on the lost time I wasted in a two-year relationship. Now doing what I always wanted to do, you know." "Was it that bad?" Clarke nodded. "Pretty much. But … honestly, I don't want to talk about it." Bellamy just nodded when the pilot was talking through the micro again. "The airport just started the check-in again. There are nineteen other planes with us so we would like you to remain seated until it's our turn. We want to apologize one more time for the trouble and thanking you for your understanding and patience. Have a good further travel and good night." The passengers were clapping loudly and everyone groaned in relief. Bellamy looked at his phone. It was half past one in the morning. Knowing that Clarke's reservation was invalid for a little over an hour. He looked at her, a pained expression on her face. She rubbed her forehead and sighed loudly, clearly thinking about where to head to now. It took them another 30 minutes to get their luggage because of the other nineteen planes' passengers that were waiting for theirs. The baggage claim was more than crowded and Bellamy arched his back and stretched his arms because of the long sitting. He got his suitcase first and waited for Clarke to get hers. She smiled at him in thanks. "So," he started slowly, walking through the exit and glancing at the blonde's profile, "if you want, you can stay at my place tonight." Clarke stopped walking, having big and surprised eyes. "Really?" "Yeah. I mean, you said it before, we aren't complete strangers anymore and you don't look like a murderer or a creepy person to me, even though you are visiting a convention – and I have more than enough room anyway." "Wow, oh wow, that is – thank you. That's so nice." A big smile appeared on her lips. "No problem." His heart definitely didn't jump at her bright smile. Definitely not. Okay, maybe a little. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * They got out of the taxi 40 minutes later. "500 West Superior Street," said the driver and Bellamy gave him a huge tip when he paid before heading after Clarke who stood in front of the building, her head in her neck and looking right to the top. "That's huge." "It's not even the biggest," said Bellamy and got their suitcases out of the trunk before leading her inside a warm, shining marble floored foyer. "Good evening Mister Blake," greeted Harper the receptionist with a kind and professional smile and Bellamy approached his sister's friend to greet her while Clarke stopped in the middle of the foyer, looking around. "Hello Harper. Any mail for me?" "Oh yeah, but your sister got it already." Her eyes flickered towards Clarke for a split of second, a sassy smile starting to appear on her lips when Bellamy's brows shot up immediately. "Don't you dare to tell Octavia or the others," he mumbled, looking over his shoulders before watching the brunette biting down her grin. "I would never," she said and Bellamy's mood went down at the realization that Harper wouldn't listen to him and tell the others that he brought a woman with him anyway. He groaned. "Don't you have discretion or something?" "Am I a lawyer or a doctor?" His head fell down in resignation. "We just got stuck for three hours in the fucking plane and she has nowhere else to go, okay? Please Harper. I know you'll tell them anyway but please wait until tomorrow okay? I can't handle my sister or anyone else tonight." He pleaded, which was a sign that he was god damn serious. He was tired as fuck and he just couldn't handle his sister's euphoric phone calls and the others teasing messages. It seemed like they had a lot of fun talking about Bellamy's love life, especially since it had died down after Gina almost eight months ago. He never had brought anyone with him since then. Not that he hadn't had any sex, he just went to the girl's apartments to avoid a situation like this. Even though the last sex he had was over three months ago. Not that he was planning on hitting on Clarke … not if she didn't want to at least. But that wasn't any other person's business, so he let out a relieved breath when Harper agreed on staying silent. "Thanks." "Yeah, just for tonight Blake. Your sister will find out anyway." Bellamy rolled his eyes and returned to Clarke, leading her to the elevator. His hand on the small of her back when he pushed her gently into it. Ignoring the heat rushing through his arm into his stomach because of the feeling of her body under his palm. He looked over his shoulder, catching Harper watching them with a bright, knowing grin. He stopped himself from groaning and pushed the button 28 instead. "Living above the others, huh?" "I like being on the top," winked Bellamy mischievously and clearly ambiguously. "Too bad I like it too." Bellamy grinned and licked his lips slowly, knowing Clarke's eyes watching his movement. His eyes flashed over her face and he heard her breath starting to deepen. Her cheeks were still pink, little from the champagne and much more because of the look he was giving her, when the elevator came to a stop and opened with a ping. They stepped out into a corridor which lead to one door. "Is this the corridor to the door of the Department of Mysteries?" Chuckled Clarke and Bellamy stopped fishing his keys out of his pocket, a frown on his face. "What?" Clarke's feature slipped. "Department of Mysteries. Harry Potter? Oh, oh my God! Don't tell me you never saw Harry Potter?!" Bellamy felt his ears turning red. "Well," he started but Clarke gasped in shock. "You can't be serious. What kind of life are you living? No conventions, no Harry Potter?!" Said Clarke like his inexperience was personally offending her. "I saw Harry Potter," defended Bellamy himself, "like – eleven years ago or something?" It didn't make it any better. "Eleven years? So you've only seen the first four movies!" "Does this make me a bad person now or …?" "No, but kind of weird." Bellamy scoffed, "Oh this coming from you." "What? Do you think I'm weird?" He bit his tongue before saying anything too bad. Instead he asked, "Do you want to come in or not?" He slit the key into the lock and opened the door, while Clarke mumbled, "Says the guy who reads a history book for fun." Bellamy decided to ignore the comment and stepped inside, hearing Clarke following him, he switched on the light and a "Holy fucking shit" slipped out of Clarke's mouth. This time Bellamy couldn't hold back a grin. He closed the door, watching in complete satisfaction while Clarke's widened eyes flew through the big room, over the wooden floor and back to him. "Oh my fucking God! Are you kidding me? This, this is your apartment?" "Penthouse," corrected Bellamy the blonde, amused and hung his jacket aside before leading her to the open kitchen. "Penthouse?! Who are you – Richard Gere? Because I definitely feel like Julia Roberts right now. You have seen Pretty Woman, right? Oh God…" She turned around, taking in her surroundings, still in disbelief and shock. "Of course I've seen Pretty Woman," retorted Bellamy, leaning against a kitchen counter, while Clarke was standing in the middle of the big living area, letting her eyes fly over the windows, looking right outside into the city. "I fucking can't believe it," she breathed, "This living room is bigger than my whole apartment." Her hands wandered over the couch. "How much square footage do you have?" She came closer, eyeing the kitchen made out of cherry wood. "Almost 5,000 –" "5,000 square feet?!" Shrieked Clarke with a high pitched voice and causing pain in Bellamy's ears. "For you? This – God! How much do you pay for this?" Normally Bellamy wouldn't tell. Not only because you didn't talk about money but also, and this was the more important reason, he didn't want to give her a heart attack. He licked his lips, rubbing his neck like he was ashamed and answered anyway, "Around $10,000." To his own surprise Clarke stayed quiet. She blinked. Then, "What? $10,000 per month?" "That's how you usually pay rent, yes." "What the he- $10,000 for a place to live? Are you sure you aren't trading drugs on the exchange?" That made Bellamy chuckle. "I'm positive yeah." She huffed before shaking her head. "This is too much, really. I have to sit down." She hopped onto the stool at the kitchen island and was still shaking her head. Bellamy eyed her in amusement, his arms crossed over his chest. Watching Clarke rake her hand through her blonde hair, made him imagine that it would be his own doing that. His eyes dropped down, feeling his throat going dry when they reached her breasts, so he cleared it, turning towards the fridge. "Want something to drink?" "I thought you haven't been home the last two weeks." "I haven't. But I'm sure my sister filled up the fridge after taking this place over, so – what do you want?" "Uhm, I don't know. A water?" Bellamy looked over his shoulder, his eyebrows scooting up. "Seriously? Just water? No lemon slice or mint leaf?" He teased and earned himself a stuck out tongue from Clarke. "Well, what can you offer then?" He turned around and overviewed the drinks. "Almost everything. Wine, champagne, water, juice, ice tea –" "Ice tea!" Bellamy grinned. "Okay, it's ice tea then." He grabbed the can and poured her a drink. "Want some cubes?" Clarke shook her head, "No thank you." He smiled shortly. She did the same. Bellamy took a sip, never letting go of Clarke's eyes while she was doing the same. Which made him gulp even harder. When Clarke put down the glass she licked her lips, making Bellamy tightening his grip around the glass. "So Bellamy Blake, what's your story?" She asked interested, leaning forward and giving him an excellent view into her cleavage. It took all his willpower not to look at it (for too long). "My story?" "Yeah … I mean, this is huge and it looks like it's all normal to you. But on the other hand you are visiting your mother and helping her out in her coffee shop, so – what's your story?" "Okay, well, it's not much. My sister and I were raised by my mother. We had less than $800 each month, sometimes even less. So I started working at 16. After finishing school I signed up for the army because of the good money. Then mom started dating a guy named Marcus Kane. He is a pretty good man. One she deserves. I was twenty-four back then. I resigned and started to go to school. Finance. Got a job at Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for a year and have been working at the exchange for three years now. That's my story." "That's it? You are working at the exchange and can afford something like this?" "What should I say – I'm pretty good at what I do." He winked and a mischievous grin spread over her lips. "I bet you are." Clarke said "But seriously – how much do you earn with this?" Bellamy licked his lips, clearly feeling uncomfortable. "Okay, okay, I´ll change the question. What was your biggest win and your biggest lost?" "Ufff … the biggest lost was, I don't know, $50,000?" Her eyes widened again but she remained quiet, mouthing $50,000 silently. "And my biggest win. It was about $80,000." "Okay I have to ask you again – how much do you earn? This is unbelievable!" "Between $18,000 and $30,000." "Per month?" Bellamy nodded, causing Clarke to knock back the rest of her drink at once. That was when he asked her about her story. She had been interrogating him like an FBI agent, so it was only fair to tell him at least as much. Clarke started to blush again and yeah, he definitely liked it. "Well," she wet her lips – not that he kept watching her lips, no -, "my story is quite the opposite. My mother is a CEO of a hospital in Washington and my dad worked for the NSA. So, I'm from Washington D.C. My, uhm, my dad died eight years ago, turning mine and my mom's world upside down. He died of cancer and it was a really rough time for both of us. I fought with my mother almost every day and it was pretty bad. But, time heals wounds right? We started to get better but I couldn't stay in D.C. any longer and started to travel through the USA. For the past two years I’ve been living with my best friend Wells and his fiancée Luna in Nashville. He moved there almost three years ago because of Luna and yeah. I never studied, even though I always wanted to. But when my dad died … I don't know. It changed everything. I still don't know what I want to do, which is kind of embarrassing because I'm 29 now and, well … I'm still looking for the right, for the perfect job you know? I'm fine with working for Wells but it's nothing I want to do forever. But I also don't want my mother's money, which she always offers me anyway. I mean, I don't need a fortune for living. I just want to do something I love and be happy. No offense." She added quickly and Bellamy waved her off, smiling. "It's okay. I mean isn't that what we all want to do? A job that makes us happy? A life that makes us happy?" "Yeah," breathed Clarke and let her eyes wandering to the window again. She sighed. "That would be great to find." He scanned her profile, watching her teeth burying into her bottom lip. His eyes wandered over her rosy cheeks, along her neck and back to the breasts. He bit his inner cheek, feeling his blood running lower into his pants and the heat upon his neck. So he finished his glass of ice tea and looked at the clock. It was almost three a.m. He rubbed his eyes, tiredness hitting him out of nowhere and he suppressed a yawn. "When do you have to get up?" He asked and put their empty glasses into the sink. Clarke scooted out of her thoughts and frowned, thinking. "Uhm, I don't know. I have to be at the convention around 9. How long is it to the Hilton Chicago?" "10 to 15 minutes car drive. Almost half an hour if you take the metro, brown line and purple one," told Bellamy and added, "But at that time it doesn't make a difference if you take a taxi or the metro." Clarke chewed on her lip, nodding slowly. "Okay, then I'll have to get up a little before eight I guess. You?" "In almost three hours?" "This early?" "Yeah, I promised Octavia I’d help her with her thesis before heading to work, so – three hours." Clarke grimaced and shuddered. "Then we have to get you into bed I guess." Bellamy chuckled, "Wouldn't mind some hours of sleep to be honest." That was when Clarke hopped off the stool, Bellamy truly tried not to look at her bouncing breasts, and told him to show her her sleeping place. They didn't even get out of the living area when she asked him amusingly, "Is there a forbidden corridor or room? You know, just like in the Beauty and the Beast?" Again her words curled his lips into a smile. What a nerd she was, he liked it. More than he should because they only knew each other for a few hours. "Even if I had, I'm sure you wouldn't listen. Just like Belle," he answered and Clarke punched him lightly into the shoulder. "Wow, at least you have seen the Beauty and the Beast. I'm impressed." He looked over his shoulder, his brow's disappeared behind his curls, "I have seen every Disney classic at least four times, okay? Just because I haven't seen Harry Potter doesn't mean I don't have any knowledge in films." Clarke grinned as an answer, just like Octavia used to when she was eight. Bellamy shook his head at this memory and went along the floor in silence. "So, here is the bath- Clarke?" He turned around, Clarke had disappeared. "Clarke?" Shouted Bellamy and looked around. Where the hell had she disappeared? He went back a little and a heavy gust waved through his hair. He knew immediately where she was. She'd found the terrace. He leaned against the doorframe, watching Clarke facing the city lights, her hands onto the railing. The raining had stopped but was still in the air. He heard her taking a deep breath. His arms were crossed over his chest and he bit his inner cheek, while watching her. "Enjoying the view?" Clarke chuckled, looking over her shoulder when she told him, "I really do hate you Bellamy." "Thanks. I appreciate it." She rolled her eyes, turning back to the view. "This is unbelievable. The view is amazing." She mumbled, sounding like she was getting lost into it. Just like Bellamy got lost in watching her. "It really is," retorted Bellamy but instead of watching the lightened skyscrapers his eyes were laid down on her blonde curls and the deliciously looking curves which were hid under all these clothes. He licked his lips in hunger, before her question made him look up again. "So is this your strategy of seduction? Bringing the girls up here and then show them this monster terrace with this kill-worthing view?" "If my charm isn't enough, maybe?!" She grinned over her shoulders. "Does it work?" He asked interested. He grabbed his heart in played disappointment and hurt when she shook her head, "Absolutely not." "Damn," sighed Bellamy and made Clarke laugh. It echoed in his ears and in his head, making his heart beat faster, running through his whole body because it sounded like the voice of an angel. He grinned proudly, wanting to make her laugh again. The wind increased, so after a few more moments Clarke turned around and pushed past him. When she did, she was much closer than she had to be. Her breasts almost touching his chest and the small grin on her face told Bellamy that she did it on purpose. When he showed Clarke the bathroom for a second time she was right there to let out a soft "Wow", going inside and taking a long look. The bathroom was huge, had a shower and a bathtub in it and –"Is this a flat screen?" She pointed at the switched off TV on the opposite wall (right in front of the tub). "No, it's the queen's magical mirror from Snow White," teased Bellamy because it was her own fault, claiming he didn't know anything about movies. “Will you ever stop?" Bellamy shook his head. “Nope.” She rolled her eyes and groaned. “I know you know something about movies.” He grinned. "If you want to take a shower tomorrow, the towels are in there." He pointed at the cabinet next to Clarke, who nodded shortly before the big mosaic picture caught her attention. While Clarke was scanning the wall, Bellamy couldn't help himself but watching the blonde's figure one more time. His eyes trailed up and down, making his jeans get tighter. He appreciated every inch of her body. The curvy legs and hips, the amazing breasts and when his eyes went up her neck towards her face he noticed through the mirror that Clarke had been watching him, watching her. He swallowed, feeling his cheeks heating up because she caught him checking her out! But judging by the fierce look she was giving him she didn't care. Quite the opposite – she was checking him out through the mirror, licking and biting her bottom lip when her eyes lingered over his forearms, causing his erection to become more visible. Moments of silence passed by. Moments in which their eyes lingered on one another, none of them saying or doing anything. Not until Clarke faced him, leaning against the marbled basin, pushing her breasts out, more than necessary, making it impossible for him not to look at it. So his eyes slipped to her cleavage for two seconds before reminding himself of look into her eyes but it was too late. She had a knowing grin on her lips, "Liking what you see?" His throat was dry, so he swallowed hard, not wanting to give away too much but knowing it was too late when he heard his raspy voice telling her, "Maybe." Clarke tipped her head down, almost shyly, then she looked back at him, right into his eyes. She started chewing on her bottom lip again, driving Bellamy wild because that was all he wanted to do himself, capture her lip between his teeth, sucking and making her moan his name. Without noticing Bellamy stepped closer, his eyes raked over her body while she crooked her head, studying him. He stopped an arm length in front of her, hearing her raked breath. His heart pumped wildly in its ribcage. "What would you do if I told you that the terrace might have worked?" Asked the blonde in a husky whisper, pitching his stomach because he could hear the want and lust in it. He licked his lips, his eyes shooting from hers to her lips, lingering there far too long. He put one hand on the basin, starting to cage her between him and the marble. "I don't know. Wouldn't speak for me right?" He answered lowly; setting the other hand on Clarke's other side and captured her, stepping closer. They were only a few inches apart. So close that their chests almost touched each other during their deep breathing. She bit down on her bottom lip, a little heavier than before, making him groan almost loudly, while looking up into his eyes. He started to drown into the blue, when her hands slowly moved over his chest, causing more heat. He felt her fingers wandering over his shoulders, clapping together behind his neck and started playing with the nape of it. "That's true," she mumbled, never letting go of his eyes. "So, what would you do if I told you that your charm might have worked?" "Well then," Bellamy started and closed the remaining space between them, having her body flush against his, letting his hands scoop towards her hips and to the small of her back, making her shudder a little. "I would probably," his hand lifted her shirt a little, just as much as his hand could slip under it, touching her skin, "just touch you here." His spread palm wandered to the small of her back, pushing her closer. "And then what?" Asked Clarke anticipating and eager, letting her own hand disappear into the mop of his hair, scratching her nails over his scalp, getting a deep sound out of the back of his throat. "Then I would probably kiss you." Her eyes shined with fire and lust, dropping to his lips when he remained still. His gaze flickering between the blue of her eyes and the red of her lips. "What the hell are you waiting for then?" She edged him on. Bellamy's jaw clenched, breathing heavily through his nose and almost choking when Clarke pushed hard against his pelvis. Yeah, what the hell was he waiting for? She couldn't be more obvious that she was okay with all this. She pushed herself against him, hardening her grab around his neck, almost throwing her breasts into his face, watching him with the biggest eyes he’d have ever seen, smirking in anticipation. Lingering for more. But he was Bellamy, so he couldn't just go for it. Instead he asked, "Are you sure?" That made Clarke roll her eyes and groan in annoyance. "Just go for it Blake. We both know we want to know how I sound like screaming your god damn name." Her voice was rough, eyes dark and mischievous. She leaned forward, their lips almost touching when she mumbled, "Make me scream your name." That was what broke Bellamy out of his stillness. He groaned loudly, her words making his dick throb harder in his jeans and he closed the last inch between their lips. Crashing his own hard on hers. She moaned immediately into his mouth, pulling him closer, sliding her foot over his leg before he grabbed her thighs, lifting her up and sitting her down onto the basin. He felt her feet lock behind him, pushing him further against her center, causing him to moan when his erection pushed hard against her body. Bellamy's hand raked over Clarke's side, cradling her face and letting his fingertips grab her blonde curls. His tongue licked along her lips and the second he felt her mouth open he scooted his tongue inside, earning himself a deliciously sounding groan out of the back of Clarke's throat when his tongue hit hers. He started feeling dizzy, getting out of breath and the almost painful pressure in his jeans didn't help either. His left hand wandered down, over Clarke's shoulder towards her breast, grabbing it with his palm, squeezing it hard and making Clarke saying his name out of breath for the first time. Heat was taking over his body and he lunged forward, deepening the kiss, pressing his hand harder against her breast, feeling her fingernails sinking into his shoulders, right through his shirt. She pushed her pelvis against his, both moaned impatient. That was when Bellamy pulled away, watching Clarke's dark eyes, her swollen lips. Their foreheads touched each other and he heard her raked breathing while palming her breast, which she returned in pushing as hard as she could against his cock. They started panting. He swallowed, trying to wet his dry throat. Clarke bit her bottom lip, cheeks turning into a deep red. Bellamy shot forward, capturing her bottom lip between his, sucking hard and letting his hands raise her shirt. She helped him get it off and his eyes lingered over the freed cleavage, wanting to see more. Wanting more he could touch. But first he put his lips onto her jaw, peppered it with hot open-mouthed kisses, along her neck. He started to bite and suck at is until she groaned loudly, echoing in the bathroom. "Fuck," she hissed and shoved the few strands of hair out of her face, arching her back against him while Bellamy's mouth wandered over the curves of her breasts. His finger pushed the cup of the bra aside so he could take her nipple into his mouth, moaning at the feeling of it against his tongue. His hands gripped her hips hard, sucking at the soft spot of hers, feeling her shuddering underneath him. Clarke's left hand leaned against the wall, knocking down his aftershave and the toothpaste when his teeth buried into her nipple, causing her to yell in lust. A smile appeared on Bellamy's lips because it truly was one of the best sounds he ever heard. Clarke's right hand raked towards his belt, pulling him closer at first but then fumbling with the buckle. Her nails scratching right into his skin above it, making his erection grow harder. He let go of her breast, kissing his way upwards to her lips, pushing his tongue against hers again before feeling her hands on the hem of his shirt. She didn't have to say anything, with one swift movement the shirt was out and Bellamy unclasped her bra, throwing it away. He groaned loudly when her heavy breasts bumped down, her nipples as hard as his crook. "Fuck," he muttered and swallowed. "Fuck Clarke," he started but she lunged forward and pulled him into a fucking delicious and promising kiss. His hands tangled back to her hair, while hers scratched over his skin, making him hiss in pain because her nails burrowed into him. She panted against his mouth, letting her lips wander along his jaw, towards his ear and biting into his earlobe, making his grip harder. Her open mouthed went along his neck and Bellamy pushed her hair away, giving her neck the same treatment. When she started to bite, so did he. When she licked at his skin, he did the same. He also pushed his erection right against her when she pushed up against him. They both moaned loudly, open mouthed. "Bed," whispered Clarke pleadingly and her voice was rough, almost broken. Bellamy swallowed, nodding hastily. "Yeah." He grabbed her thighs and pulled her up, leading her into his bedroom which had a big window in the front (with an excellent view on the city as well, but it seemed like Clarke didn't really care about it this time). He let her down on the mattress, crawling above her, pushing her down and kissing along her neck. Her fingers lingered through his curly hair, her moaning driving him wild. He braced himself with one arm next to Clarke's head while his other hand palming her chest, making her back arch hard against him. She threw her legs around him, pushing him down and swallowed his loud moan with a long kiss. It took them almost forever to get at each other's pants. Clarke was the first. Her fingers unbuckled his belt after playing with it and teasing him almost to death. Her feet pushed the jeans down and he sighed in relief when at least the heavy jeans were off of his cock. He let his tongue slip around Clarke's neck, taking her earlobe right into his mouth before groaning loudly, panting, when he felt her hands pressing over the fabric of his briefs. He heard her chuckle at that and bit down a little harder, making her gasp again. Then it was him who took off her pants, along with her underwear, though her protests. "Hey," she yelled but stopped immediately when his palm rubbed over her inner thigh. Bellamy licked his lips, leaning down again, kissing Clarke and letting his hand wander up and down her thigh but never touching her where she wanted him to. He was teasing her, on purpose. "Bellamy," panted Clarke warningly and making his eyes glint in amusement. "What?" "Stop teasing." He smirked, putting his lips closely to her left ear, mumbling a rough "I haven't even started". She was about to complain when his fingertips brushed her pussy just so lightly, nothing more like a feather. But it was enough to make her gulp her breath. He grinned and did it again, educing a long "Oh" out of her. He licked his lips, feeling the heat inside his body watching her falling apart underneath him, without him doing anything but touching her feather lightly, turned him on even more. "Oh?" He repeated and let his teeth scratch over the skin of her neck, while her fingers clutched into the blanket. "Didn't you say you wanted to scream my name?" His finger hovered over her entrance, waiting for her to say it. But instead she opened her eyes, looking at him when she challenged him, "Make me." "Nothing easier than this," gave Bellamy back and Clarke tensed all along when he pressed his finger against her clit, rubbing it slowly. She bit down her bottom lip, like she was holding herself back from saying his name. Bellamy grinned, putting more effort into his doing, pushing a little harder and getting another "Oh" out of her mouth. "Come on Clarke. Say it, say my name like you wanted to", said Bellamy with his deep and husky voice, his throat going dry again. She bit down on her lip again, a grin spreading over her face. Which made Bellamy almost chuckle. That's when he stopped rubbing at her clit, waiting a few seconds for Clarke, frowning and looking up in question when he pushed his finger inside of her without any warning. Her jaw dropped and a loud, a very loud "Oh God!" filled the room. He felt her wetness around his finger, making him almost get off immediately. He cranked his finger up, pushing harder and making her walls tightened around it. He grunted, burying his face into her neck, telling himself not to move faster because it felt too good. He added another finger, kissing her neck and taking her nipples back between his teeth. He licked at her, making her shudder and then a loud and almost desperate "Bellamy," fell from her lips when he added a third finger, thrusting hard into her pussy. Her nails sank into his skin so hard that he knew that the lines would still be there tomorrow. Her walls tightened around his finger when he moved faster, unable to stop himself because her panting, her little "Oh God" and "Yeah, faster, please" making him want to fell over the edge. So he didn't stop. He pushed harder, faster and swallowing her moan when she came with his mouth, getting goose bumps by feeling her closing around his fingers. Her jaw clenched and her eyes were shut down when she came down from her orgasm. She swallowed hard and Bellamy smiled, peppering her neck with soft kisses. But instead of waiting for her to calm down he dropped his mouth down her body, over her chest and her stomach, settling right between her legs. A mischievous grin played on his mouth when he looked upwards, watching her biting on her bottom lip, clearly not ready for another round. "Just give me a sec," she mumbled. "I just can't –" "Don't worry, I'll make you," promised Bellamy and turned towards her hot and rosy spot. His eyes lingered over her pussy, he licked his lips in anticipation and couldn't wait to taste her with his mouth. "No, Bellamy, really I – oooh!" He had put his mouth onto her, starting with one soft and long stroke. Her legs quivered at the contact, while her hip pushed itself against him. He held her still with his hands, hearing her panting. He took his time before licking her again, then his teeth scratched the inside of her vulva. "Oh God" Her hands wandered over her stomach right into his hair, tugging and scratching, making him moan against her. The vibration made Clarke sigh his name in return. He let his tongue move over her clit again and again, starting to suck at it. Her panting getting louder and louder, mixing "Oh God" with "Bellamy" more often and the sound of it reaching right to his cock which was still trapped in his briefs. Clarke's body started to shake, she was getting closer. Bellamy sucked harder, pushing his tongue against her pussy and moaning at the sweet sound of his name. His thumb slipped over her clit, rubbing hard circles against it, sucking and licking her as fast and hard as he could, feeling him getting thicker and thicker. Clarke shaking underneath him, tugging at his hair with one hand and grabbing the headboard hard with the other, screaming a loud "Bell…" before falling over the edge. His heart sped like hell, the throbbing in his briefs was almost too painful at this stage. He swallowed hard, gulping for air as well before crawling upwards Clarke's body, kissing her. Making her taste herself on his tongue. "Oh God," she whispered when she shoved him away because she clearly hadn't her breath under control again. She swallowed, wiping the sweat from her forehead and squeezing her eyes shut before looking at him. Her cheeks red like hell, her neck and chest flushed from the orgasms he had given her, which filled him with satisfaction. "I really hate you," she breathed Bellamy grinned. "You already said that." He rolled over to his side, bracing himself at his forearm and running his other hand softly over Clarke's skin. They remained silent for a short time, just eyeing and smiling at each other. Then Clarke started biting down on her bottom lip again and Bellamy scooted down pulling it between his own, wanting to make this kiss kind of unchaste and almost innocent but Clarke clearly didn't share his attention and slipped her hand into his hand before lingering for his tongue, wanting it to follow hers. A soft smile spread over Bellamy's lips when he cradled himself above Clarke again, still keeping his mouth on hers when he felt her fingers wandering down to his ass, pulling down his underwear. It was a curse and a blessing at the same time when she took the briefs off and his cock was released. It pumped back hard against him and when Clarke pushed her hip a little upwards she touched the head of his dick with her hot and still wet vadge. A muffled sound left Bellamy's mouth at that contact and he cursed a low "Fucking shit" when Clarke did it again. Bellamy swallowed, feeling the heat crawling through his body and resisted the urge to just push into her, hard and deep. He had to close his eyes for a second to muster all his strength before looking down into the big blue eyes and the almost dirty smirk of Clarke's. He wet his lips, feeling her foot wandering over his ass, ready to push him down. "C-Condom first," he cracked and reached for the cupboard to get one out. He just grabbed one when Clarke's fingers closed around him and pumped it slowly up and down. "Oh shit!" Shouted Bellamy and groaned loudly, trying to get back as fast as he could. But Clarke didn't stop, making his penis pulsing dangerously fast. "Clarke…" His voice broke away and he gritted through his teeth, "You should stop. O-o-otherwise, oh fuck!" He put his hand around her small wrist, making her stop pumping, holding the condom in the other hand and taking a few deep breaths before telling her, "You should stop if you want me to go any further." Clarke licked her lips, so slowly that it was almost enough to bring him over the edge for good. "Okay." She pulled her hand away from his dick and let her fingers wander over his chest and his arms, right to his shoulders when he pulled on the condom and settled himself above her. He put his forearms besides her head, lowering himself down and entered. Their foreheads were pressed against each other, their eyes were closed when he got deeper and deeper. Inch for inch. Both panting, moaning before Bellamy pulled her into a sweet kiss. He let his mouth caress her lips, slipping his tongue softly against hers, pulling out of her completely, waiting and thrusting back inside as slowly as before. Her fingernails scratched his skin lightly, legs crossing over his ass, meeting him in his thrusts. He sucked at her bottom lip before kissing her jaw once more, petting her neck and feeling the heat increasing again. Her legs tightened, pulling him closer and keeping him in place. His thrusts didn't leave her anymore. He braced himself harder against the mattress, letting his right hand wander down over her breast to her leg, adjusting it a little higher so he could thrust deeper into her. His lips and teeth along her soft skin on her neck and shoulder. With the new angle they both panted faster, moaned louder and Bellamy quickened up at his pace. He bit down at her skin, slinging one arm underneath her back to hold her into place when he buried himself deeper and harder into her. The left had grabbed the headboard. "Fuck Clarke, I- I can't hold off any longer," mumbled Bellamy with all strength he still had, sweat covering his body. "You don't have – just – oh, okay – just harder, harder Bellamy!" She winced, her legs closing around him completely and her hands clutching onto him like a lifeline. He licked his lips, watching Clarke closing her eyes, her face getting redder and her mouth forming loud and silent "Ohs". He paced up one more time, thrusting so hard into her that the bed started to shake. The headboard slammed against the wall and if Bellamy wasn't about to come he would have worried about the bed braking but right now he couldn't care less. He held Clarke as close as he could, feeling her walls shutting down around him, screaming his name like a prayer, like a salvation when he felt his dick pulsing hot and fast. He panted into her neck, thrusting deeper and deeper. Groaning a "fuck Clarke" before following her over the edge. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The piercing sound of his alarm woke him mercilessly out of his sleep. With a moan Bellamy switched it off, eyes still closed and his sleep-drunken body fought against waking up. He felt hungover, even though he hadn't been drinking (that much) yesterday. Bellamy breathed heavily through his nose, pressing the ball of his hands into his closed eyes before forcing himself to open them. He yawned and started to stretch when he looked to his side, facing the sleeping figure of Clarke's back. Her blonde curls fell over her back, which was barely covered with a blanket. His eyes scooted down to where it disappeared, feeling his cock throbbing again, more in lust than because of the morning erection. He couldn't help himself but smile a little, cursing his promise to Octavia because otherwise he could have remained in bed, pulling the woman closer and maybe, just maybe, going for another round. He stayed still for a few seconds before forcing himself out of bed. Before heading to the bathroom he looked over his shoulder, making sure Clarke was still asleep. After a quick shower, which made his muscles relax a little, he went back to the bedroom, finding Clarke on his side of the bed now, burying herself deep into the pillow. The man started to smile at this picture and tiptoed to the drawer, getting dressed before leaving a short note on the cupboard. If you need a place to crash tonight, call me. 773-555-8955 Bellamy He resisted the urge to bend down to give her a peck. It was way too crazy anyway, he didn't have to make it weirder than it already was. So he got out of the bedroom, but not without checking on Clarke one more time, taking her in, hoping that this wouldn't be the last time he laid his eyes on her and closed the door. He grabbed his bag and his cell phone which he forgot in his jacket last night and groaned loudly when he saw the four missed calls from Octavia and the 30 messages in their group chat. Harper [2:54 a.m.]: I can't keep it to myself any longer. Sorry Bellamy. Jasper [2:55 a.m.]: What?! oO Harper [2:55 a.m.]: He brought a girl home. Miller [2:55 a.m.]: Are you sure?! Jasper [2:55 a.m.]: o_O O [2:56 a.m.]: OMG! Don't screw us Harper! Harper [2:56 a.m.]: I'm not. It was a blonde beauty. He said they got stuck in the plane for three hours and she had no place to go. Jasper [2:56 a.m.]: Still: o_O O [2:57 a.m.]: Blonde beauty huh? That's new. Monty [2:58 a.m.]: Thanks to you Jasper is dancing and singing and I'm awake now! -.- Miller [2:58 a.m.]: What a gentleman… Harper [2:59 a.m.]: Sorry Monty **hug** Jasper [3:00 a.m.]: I'm just happy for my friend Bellamy! O [3:01 a.m.]: It's still weird that you are dancing Jas! Do you have a picture of her Harper? Harper [3:01 a.m.]: :-/ No, sorry Raven [3:21 a.m.]: He brought a girl home? Can't believe it! Murphy [3:24 a.m.]: You can't? Well then come over. I really hate living above you Bellamy! O [3:24 a.m.]: Try to live with him in the same four walls for almost fourteen years! Harper [3:25 a.m.]: Should I call him and tell him that there is a complaint? xD Raven [3:25 a.m.]: He won't hear it. When Bellamy is doing what he is doing he is doing it pretty good. O [3:26 a.m.]: Urgh, Raven! It's my brother! Raven [3:26 a.m.]: xDDD Murphy [3:27 a.m.]: He doesn´t have to be this loud. Seriously, I can hear almost everything! I'm scared that they are going to crush through the ceiling any moment! Miller [3:28 a.m.]: No comment needed! Jasper [3:30 a.m.]: He needs to let off a lot of pressure considering Gina happened almost eight months ago. O [3:31 a.m.]: Ok, I'm out now. I don't really want to think about my brother's dick! Monty [3:32 a.m.]: **rofl** Murphy [3:59 a.m.]: Round three … fuck you Blake! Jasper [4:01 a.m.]: I think the mysterious blonde is already doing that. Murphy [4:02 a.m.]: Shut up Jasper! That's when the conversation ended. Bellamy groaned, rubbing his forehead and decided that it would be better not to say anything. So he slipped his phone back into his jacket and went outside. Regretting his promise to Octavia even more. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * It had been a long day when Bellamy returned to the complex. He was still tired, hadn't slept more than two hours last night and more than disappointed because he had been watching his cell phone all day and Clarke didn't contact him. No call, no message from an unknown number. Instead he had to deal with his annoying sister and his friends, getting a sermon from Murphy about keeping it quiet the next time otherwise he would have to kill him and some other, really unimportant things. He leaned against the elevators wall, his head against the metal and a loud sigh escaping his mouth, eyes shot. It was weird. He shouldn't be as disappointed as he was just because a woman he just had known for a few hours (and he had amazing sex with) didn't call him. It was a one night stand. Nothing more. It wasn't that he wasn't used to it. It was what he was doing for a long time now, but … he still felt disappointed. With a ping the door opened and Bellamy stepped into the corridor, fumbling his keys out of his pocket without looking up. A smile curled around his lips, hearing her voice in his head when she had asked him last night if this was the corridor to the Department of Mysteries. He chuckled and shook his head, looking up and froze dead in his tracks. There she was, the blonde beauty, leaning against the wall with a shy smile on her face. "Hey." "Hey," retorted Bellamy and felt his lips curled up. He came closer, still processing that she was standing in front of his door, clearly waiting for him. "How was your day?" She asked almost nonchalant and Bellamy shrugged, "Okay … how was the con?" "Okay," answered Clarke softly. He looked into her eyes, feeling how he was getting lost. He raised his hand, putting it gently against her cheek, caressing his thumb over the soft skin before asking quietly, "Only okay?" She nodded, biting her lip shortly before whispering, "Yeah … had to think about you all the time. Which was pretty distracting." "Don't tell me," he huffed and then leaned down, pulling her into a sweet, chaste and pretty long, slowly kiss, He felt her arms closing around his neck, pulling herself against him and while his right hand cradled deeper into her hair, his left arm slung around her waist. Both started smiling and Bellamy knew that this wouldn't be the last time he would find Clarke Griffin waiting for him at his door.

[canadian-buckbeaver]

Berry Good Teacher - Edgeberry!

Based slightly off of @buttercupsticksnlicks Underuniversity AU.

If you liked what I wrote, leave me a kudos or a comment on my Archive page: http://archiveofourown.org/works/10283741 Or buy me a coffee:  http://ko-fi.com/A476NAZ Wrote this while studying for an anatomy and pathology exam! (and then they didn’t test us on skeletons…)

Berry hummed a cheerful little ditty as he hung up his poster on the bulletin board outside the biology classroom before taking a step back to admire his work.  The light blue coloured paper stood out from the rest of the other flyers.  The boring, white sheets of paper advertising trades or offering textbooks.  The orange pages, advertising the various fundraising attempts by the university.  This bulletin board in particular had the most traffic, which is why Berry was hanging his own here.

The main problem with university, as much as Berry enjoyed it, was that it was dreadfully expensive and, even with his hefty scholarship and loan, he was bound to run out of money eventually… especially with that student loan hanging over his head.  And, as ridiculous as the thought was, the Magnificent Sans could not afford the time to work.  With the course load that he was required to do just to maintain his scholarship, it was often considered a miracle that he had time to do his homework, study for a bit, eat, and perhaps even sleep.  Thank the stars he had discovered a taste for ‘coffee’.  Where, amongst this scheduled mess, would he find the time to work a mentally and physically exhausting job and still maintain his grades?

Thus, his brother’s brilliant idea was nothing short of a godsend.  “why don’t you tutor some of the other students of your year?” the lanky skeleton had asked him over the phone.  “you’ll be able to study while you work, make some money, and perhaps even get to socialize a little.”  Stars how he missed his elder brother, even if he was a lazy, narcoleptic, and a bit of a drunk most of the time.  Papyrus had raised Sans on his own since their father had abandoned them as young monsters.  He had stayed behind in Snowdin when Berry had gone off to the capital’s university, more than content to sleep at his sentry post or even at his hot dog stand, and drink until he had passed out at Muffet’s.  They were lucky enough to be able to talk on the phone every other day, but it just wasn’t the same.  Berry wasn’t able to keep an eye on him or hug him. Stars how he missed his brother’s hugs.  He hoped the house was still in some form of working order too.

“WELL, WELL RUNT…  I WAS WONDERING WHEN YOU WERE GOING TO COME AROUND THIS NECK OF THE WOODS…” a coarse voice chuckled, causing Berry to squeak and whip around, already feeling his skull flush slightly.  That voice… that would belong to the other problem at the university. It was Edge.  Handsome, tall and seemingly made up of all sharp corners.  They had shared several classes together within the year, this semester it being English and Biology.  Berry knew him personally and how well, or, more accurately, how unwell, he did in classes.  A bit of a surprise for being the eldest son of the famous Dr. F. Gaster, the supreme Royal Scientist to King Asgore.  But he had found his niche first with the basketball players, then with the football and then the wrestling team.  Meaning that, in addition to being the school’s local sport hero, he was also wealthy… and that had long since gone to his head.

“I WAS SURE THAT IT WAS YOU PASSING ALONG THESE FLYERS.” He continued, waving a slightly crumpled one, much to Berry’s irritation.  Those copies cost five cents in the library.  A small fortune for someone without any foreseeable work.

“You know you could have just asked me, Edge,” Berry replied, reaching for the precious paper in the hopes of salvaging it and rehanging it, “I would have told you it was me.”

Edge raised the poster up to his eye lights and reread the page while Berry fumed.  It was so unfair that he was just so short.  He barely stood level with the bottom of Edge’s ribs and Edge had to pull this crap?  “SO HAVE YOU HAD ANYONE INTERESTED YET?” asked Edge, an odd glint to his eye.

Berry shook his head.  “Not yet.  I just put the posters up though so hopefully I’ll hear back from someone soon.”

“WELL THEN I SHALL TAKE THIS ONE.” said Edge, shoving the paper into his textbook.

“You know, I specifically designed it so that you could pull off a copy of my number or you could even add to your phone.  There is no need to take the whole poster.”  Berry folded his arms and glared at him, annoyed at the chuckle he got in return.

“PERHAPS YOU DID,” Edge said, “BUT I WOULD PREFER TO SHOW MY FATHER THAT IT IS A… ‘LEGIT’ OPPORTUNITY.  HE HAS DECIDED THAT I REQUIRE A TUTOR TO BRING MY GRADES UP, OR I WOULD BE FORCED TO GIVE UP SPORTS.  IF WE DO CHOSE TO GO WITH YOU, YOU’LL BE HEARING FROM US.”  Edge said drolly as he walked away from the confused skeleton.  Well, it sounded promising, like he might actually have someone to tutor… But why, of all the times, was Dr. Gaster now coming down on his son?

* * * * *

The small buzzing sound jarred Berry from his thoughts on his essay.  Searching through the jumbled mess of papers on his desk he finally found his cellphone and flipped it open, relieved that it wasn’t another dick picture.  He had thought that putting his cellphone number on the poster had been a smart idea. That way, people could contact him whenever they needed any extra help, it would be very convenient and easy to get a hold of him.  Of course, assuming that the monsters attending school here were adults was a little too much to ask of them.

“Hello?��� he asked, relieved to have a small break in the identifying the symbolism of the sewer and the disgusting ‘water’ in the human’s classic movie ‘Shawshank Redemption’.

“Hello.  Would this happen to be Berry?  Berry offering the tutor services?” a crisp, professional voice asked him.

Berry gulped.  “Yes it is,” he responded, trying hard to stifle his nerves.  “Can I ask who this is?”

“My name is Wallace Gaster, you may know my son, Edge, as you both attend the same university and apparently some of the same classes as well.  He speaks quite highly of you.”

Berry bit back a startled gasp.  This was the famed Dr. W. D Gaster!  There was no doubt about it.  “Ah yes,” he said, hoping his excitement didn’t creep into the phone to much, “Edge had said that you might be calling.”

Gaster did not sound the least bit perturbed by this information.  “Good.  So my son knows that I finally mean business.  I want you to tutor him in Biology and in English as to raise his mark up by at least thirty percent so he can pass into the next year.”

Berry could not hide his gasp.  “But sir!” he tried to protest, “that is…” “A very large and almost impossible task, I know.” Gaster answered smoothly.  “However if he wishes to continue on, and not to be expelled and thus left behind, there is no other choice.  Therefore I am going to offer you a special deal.  I see on your little flyer that you are asking for only seven dollars an hour… why so low?”

Berry rubbed his nasal bone.  “I figured that it would attract more students to me, and not discourage them if they couldn’t afford to pay me a lot of money upfront.”

“Good idea.” Gaster said, a lighter tone of voice.  It was like he had passed some sort of secret test.  “However, if you agree to tutor my son, and only my son, I will give you fifteen dollars an hour, with an added monetary bonus for each grade he increases by.  This will include any assignment, quiz, test or anything that the teacher passes out.  Are we clear?”

Berry felt his pupils shining bright.  This is way better than he could have asked for.  “Yes sir!” he said eagerly.  He found that he wasn’t just excited for the money but excited to have been given the chance to hang out one-on-one with Edge too.  He had a feeling that Edge and him could be good friends if they tried.

He was going to turn Edge into an academic star!

* * * * * “Come on Edge,” he whined loudly, causing other monsters to look up in irritation from where they were in the library, “you at least have to try and write this essay on your own.  I can’t just do this for you.  That’s cheating.  I’m only here to help, not to do.”

It had been a week and a half since he had agreed to help Edge with his grades.  And a week and a half of torture it had been.  Was it really only a week and a half?  It seemed like forever ago.  Edge it seemed could be less inclined to do anything school related and more inclined on trying to use his father’s bribe in order for Blue to do the work for him.

Edge looked up from his phone.  He had already informed Berry that he had a ‘dope-ass party to get to’ and was informing his friends he would be late.  Sighing dramatically, he put his phone away and leaned on the circular table.  “YOU SURE ENJOY MAKING THIS DIFFICULT FOR ME… DON’T YOU?” he asked, staring up at him with a devious smirk.

Berry pouted as he tried to ignore the slight blush on his cheekbones.  Edge making such deliberate eye contact with him rattled his bones.  “It’s not that like that, and this really isn’t that hard Edge!  Look here.  A free example for you.  The only time that they use any colour, in the entirety of this film, is on the girl’s red dress.  It is to draw your eyes to it and to her.  To make you remember the girl!  It makes it personal for you when you see the red coat later in the movie…” he stopped, seeing Edge’s eyes unfocused and staring blankly at him.  “You… you didn’t hear a word I said just now… did you?” he asked.

The lanky skeleton just stared at him, not saying a word.  He didn’t even move a single bone or blink his sockets.  Convinced that Edge had fallen asleep with his eyes open, Berry began to pack up his things and go.  This wasn’t worth any type of money.  A brick wall would be more exciting to talk to… Edge suddenly grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him back towards him.  Berry briefly struggled against his hold but froze when he thought he felt Edge gently trace his ribs with one hand.  As he shuddered, Edge pressed gently on his chin, forcing him to look up at him.  

Edge finally looked serious.  “THE WORK PAPERS.” He said.  “ARE SYMBOLISM, BOTH FIGURATIVELY AND LITERALLY, OF THE CONTROL THE NAZI’S HAD OVER THE CAPTIVE JEWS.  THOSE WERE THEIR LIFE LINES.  WHO WAS ALLOWED TO LIVE?  WHO WAS WORTHY TO WORK?  WHO WAS ABLE TO ESCAPE THAT FATE THAT SO MANY OTHERS WERE NOT…” Edge swallowed hard, against a lump in his throat.  Even though he and Berry were monsters and had no ties with the great human tragedy, to imagine the horror that other humans had gone through… it was unthinkable.  “WHEN THE MAN HAD HIS PAPERS AND SHOWED THEM TO THE OFFICER ON THE TRAIN, IT WAS A SIGN THAT HE WAS BECOMING ACCUSTOMED AND PREPARED TO WHAT HE WAS FORCED TO GO THROUGH TO SURVIVE.” He finished, looking down at Berry.

Sockets widening, his pupils turning into stars, Berry stared up at him.  In that self-absorbed, sport obsessed, bone-headed skull there was a brain after all.  Not just any kind of brain.  An incredible one.  “Wowie…” Berry said.  “I didn’t even think of that one.  That’s awesome Edge.  You need to use that one!  I guarantee that it’ll be the only one in class used.  You’ll graded for uniqueness for sure.  Quick, before you forget, write it.”

“PERHAPS AFTER THE PARTY…” mused Edge.

“Now!” Berry demanded, settling down on the chair beside Edge and sliding the laptop over to him, crossing his arms.  Edge always seemed in such a hurry to get away from him.

Sighing dramatically, Edge looked over the small skeleton.  “IF IT’LL MAKE YOU HAPPY…” he said, turning away from him and already beginning to type.  Berry murmured and watched him type…

Missing the small smile on Edge’s skull.

* * * * *

“He just makes me so irritated, Papy!” Berry was pacing around in his dorm a couple days later after the library incident.  That night he had finally convinced Edge to write out the essay, change a few sentence structure errors and finish it before he headed out to his ‘party’.

Berry continued ranting.  “He doesn’t take me seriously unless I’m angry or about to storm out on him.  That’s when, and only when, suddenly he’s involved with the lesson.”  He decided to leave out the soft touching.  That had to be his imagination.  His ridiculous crush on Edge, playing with his mind.  Those long, searching looks.  That hidden smile.  Berry was naïve but not stupid.  Those were reserved for anime or romantic-comedies.  Not real life.

Papyrus chuckled on the other end of the phone.  “sounds like he isn’t interested in his studies, B.” he said, a readjusting sound heard in the background.  “are you sure that his grades are as bad as you say they are?  it seems to me that he is smarter than he lets on.”

“I’ve seen a couple of his papers myself,” sighed Berry.  He paused.  “Though… now that you say that it seems more like… more like he gets bored or gives up.  He usually starts out really strong.  He has some topic that is insightful and incredible, and then, by the end of it, it’s more like a two-year old made it.  Mistakes, grammar, spelling and all.”

His brother paused.  “perhaps he needs less tutoring per say,” he started gently, “but more like someone to encourage him.  so he knows his ideas are validated.  there are people and monsters out there that are incredibly smart but, since school or tests bore them, they end up failing.  or even if you tried a new way of ‘teaching’ him or helping him retain the information…”  

Berry paused.  That… that made sense.  How many times had he went to hand in an assignment or test and there was Edge, staring out the window or at a wall? Countless.  Maybe even all of them.  He constantly fell asleep in class, never turned in the assignments but, on the rare chance that he was called on during class, he always answered correctly.

There was a knock on his door.  “I got to go Papy.  He’s coming over for a last cramming session.” Berry said as he opened the door, urging Edge through.

“alright.  let me know how things go.  miss you B.”

“Miss you too, Paps.” Berry said as he hung up the phone.  Turning back to his guest, he was surprised to see Edge stretched out on his bed reading the biology book…

Upside down but it was a start.

Berry pulled up his desk chair, deciding against saying anything about Edge laying down on the job.  “So!” he said brightly.  “Should be an easy test!” he said, flipping his textbook to the skeleton diagram.  “We almost have an unfair advantage, don’t we?”

Edge just sighed.  “LET’S JUST GET ON WITH IT.” he muttered darkly. Berry blinked.  That wasn’t a good sign.  “Is something wrong Edge?” he asked. Craning his head to look at Berry he snorted.  “MY GRADES AREN’T RISING FAST ENOUGH FOR MY FATHER’S LIKING.” He said.

This took Berry’s self-confidence down a peg.  He had thought that Edge had been making wonderful improvements.  Sure in biology he had only received grades in the 70s since they had begun their little sessions but it was better than the failing grades he had been getting.  And his last few English papers had been damn near perfect.

“Well, we just have to keep trying.” He said, looking positively.  This would be the first real test Edge would be facing since they had begun working together.

 Time to show Gaster what they could really do!

Snorting, Edge replied, “YOU DO REALIZE THAT IF I DON’T DO WELL ON THIS TEST THAT MY FATHER IS GOING TO BE LOOKING ELSEWHERE FOR TUTORING?  ONE THAT CAN PERHAPS DO THE JOB THEY ARE BEING PAID TO DO?”

Berry slammed his textbook shut.  “If you were more receptive to me, you would be doing leaps and bounds better than you already are!” he snapped.

To his credit, Edge didn’t even jump.  Instead he chuckled, placing the open book on his skull he said, “I’M GOING TO TAKE A NAP, BABY BLUE.  PERHAPS I’LL ABSORB IT BY OSMOSIS IF YOU READ IT TO ME.” he sighed, as if getting comfortable.

Fuming Berry, stared at the skeleton.  He still wasn’t taking this seriously!  Not one bit!  What was it that Papy had said?  Change up the learning type?  Make his lesson different and exciting? Berry could do that.

In a moment he was straddling Edge’s rib cage and pushing the textbook from Edge’s face.  “HEY!” he sputtered, but froze when Berry moved himself up, settling himself on his upper ribs.

He opened his jaw to say something else but flushed when Berry began to stroke his skull.  “Do you know what the main purpose of the skeletal system is, Edge, specifically for fleshy monsters?” he asked, almost dreamily. Edge stared up at him.  For a moment he gaped at Berry.  “Support?” he finally answered.

Berry nodded.  “It provides support of soft tissues and attachment points for tendons.  It also works at providing protection for organs from injuries, assistance in movement, mineral homeostasis or equalization, blood cell production, or, triglyceride storage in the yellow marrow…

“And the skull is so interesting!”  Berry continued stroking it, noticing Edge leaning into the touches.  “It looks like solid bone but is actually a several of bones, mashed into one.  The frontal bone, think forehead, orbital of the eyes, temporal for temples and the mandible and maxilla of the jaw.  Then we need to talk about its joint.  A special joint too, of the fibrous family.  A suture joint, named for the sutural ligament that it is made up of.  Shock absorption.  Originally formed in the womb, it is the original soft spot on the head.  Through synotosis in aging, the sutures are replaced by bone and become the immoveable joint we see today.”

Berry’s hands moved down, his inner self being thrilled to discover that it caused Edge to give a muffled moan.  “Cervical vertebrae,” he said, before tracing the front of Edge’s shirt.  Scowling, he gave a pull on it.  No go.  Sharper fingers overtook his and gently unbuttoned it, laying free the expanse of white bone.  Berry gave a bright smile at the skeleton underneath him.

As he stroked down the front of his ribs, Berry sat back a ways.  “Sternum,” he said as he gently stroked where the true ribs joined, “where the ribs come together to provide support and protection for many of the squishy monster’s important organs.” Edge groaned and began to pant, clearly enjoying the attention.

“The ribs located higher are known as true ribs,” Berry said, “they are thicker and stronger than the other ribs, and where the important organs such as the heart and lungs are in fleshy creatures.  Floating, or false ribs, are located further down, and do not directly connect with the sternum.” He made sure to trace the bone’s movements.

Edge’s only response was to pant.  So Berry continued with his lesson. “Clavicle leads to my brother’s favourite bone, the humerus, which then leads in to the radius, think radical outside, and the ulna, under.  The carpals,” he said, kissing Edge’s wrist, “is where humans suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome due to repetitive movement. They connect to the metacarpals and then phalanges.” He said, dropping a kiss to Edge’s fingertips.

“Thoraic vertebrae,” Berry said, “makes up the vertebrae in the chest.  Think of the human’s superhero Thor.  Thor has a big chest, thoracic.  They lead in to the lumbar spine which connects to the illium.” He said, tracing Edge’s curves of his pelvis.  Berry took his time with these.  They were finer and more graceful than his.

“Do you remember what the tailbone is referred to as?” he asked suddenly. Edge gasped as Berry pinched his crests. “COCCYX!” he said.

Berry shot him a giant grin.  “I knew you were smart Edge!  Now the illiac leads into the sacrum, where we like to view all those sacrum lacing pictures,” he grinned as Edge flushed, naughty thoughts tripping through his skull, “which leads into the coccyx.  The pubis, or pubic bones, connect near the tail bone on the ischium loops, and under that is the pubic symphysis.  Make sense?” he asked running his hands to the pubis and tracing the joint there, teasing at the ischium.

Edge nodded.  “PUBIS TO ISCHIUM TO PUBIC SYMPHYSIS BONES.” He gasped.

Berry grinned again.  “You so have this Edge! Now after the pubis is my brother’s second favourite bone for his ridiculous puns, the femur,” he said, pressing down on the thick heavy bone through Edge’s pants.  “That leads to what is commonly known as the knee, or patella, the synovial joint of the leg, which leads down into the lower leg bones. Tibia on the inside, fibula for the outside, talus and metatarsals for the ankle and then phalanges for the toes.”

Edge was a flushed, sweaty mess now.  He stared hard at Berry, his sockets glassy.  Through his dark jeans Berry could see bright red magic gathering for him.   Deciding he had teased Edge enough Berry hoped off of him.  “There we are!” he said.  “I think you’re ready for that test tomorrow!”

Edge gaped at Berry as he grabbed his phone.  The taller skeleton looked like he was going to say something.  Instead he said nothing, with a deep scowl and flush he grabbed his textbook and left Berry’s dorm room, his pelvis still glowing. Berry watched him leave before giving a sigh of relief.  He looked down at his own pants, glowing bright blue but mostly hidden by his similarly coloured shorts.

* * * * *

When Berry’s phone rang the next day he was expecting it.  He had suspected that Edge had failed the test or that he himself had taken things too far with his ‘tutoring method’.  There was a line of professionalism and he had definitely leaped over that, right into the deep pool of misconduct… What would his brother say?

“Good afternoon Gaster,” he said, checking the caller ID.

“Berry…. I don’t know how you did it but I just got notice from your teacher that Edge not only passed the test, but also received a hundred percent on the test.” Berry was floored.  Perhaps his brother knew what he was talking about after all.  “Glad to hear it!” he said, and meant it too, “perhaps we can continue this streak?”

“I do hope so.  For Edge’s sake,” said Gaster, but there was no heat to his words.  “If you could continue tutoring him Blue, I would most greatly appreciate it.”

“I would be honoured to sir.”

“Very well.  I leave him in your capable hands.” Gaster said before clicking off. Berry let himself give a loud victory giggle.  He knew that he and Edge could do it!  Sure he was a little worried at first but there was nothing that they couldn’t do if they put their minds to it!

A loud knock startled him from his thoughts.  Hopping off his chair he unlocked and opened the door to see a familiar figure standing in his doorway.  “Ah

Edge!” he said, “I just got off the phone with your father!  That is terrific news!” Edge flushed pink and gave a small smile as he stepped inside the room.  “ALL THANKS TO YOU BERRY.” he said, looking around the single room.

Berry just smiled.  “So what brings you here today Edge?  Have anything in particular you want to go over?” he asked.

The tall male nodded.  “I WAS LOOKING AHEAD IN THE TEXTBOOK AND WILL NEED A HAND WITH THE NEXT CHAPTER.” He admitted sheepishly.

Nodding, Berry reached for his own textbook.  “I can do that.  I haven’t read ahead on it myself.  Do you remember what it is on?” he asked.  His dorm room momentarily blurred in front of his sockets and Berry found himself flipped onto his bed, on his spine, staring up at Edge.  “Edge?” he asked as the tall skeleton pressed himself closer.

“THE NEXT UNIT,” Edge began to untie the blue bandana around Berry’s vertebrae, “THE NEXT UNIT IS ON REPRODUCTION.” He smirked as Berry let out a little squeak.  “WHAT DO YOU SAY TEACH?” he asked huskily, starting to grind down on Berry’s pelvis, “UP FOR SOME PRIVATE LESSONS?”