#is her bowling coach dr strange?

[abattoirstars]

new england women’s odi kit just dropped.

it looks good, BUT, why is sophie ecclestone trying to cast a spell at me.

[rhysismydaddy]

My Little Brawler - Feysand Headcannon 2

I’ll just go ahead and preface this by saying it’s long as SHIT. I went a little crazy. But here’s the second headcannon for Feysand. Thank you for the love on the last one! Next one out tomorrow. 

Synopsis: Feyre Archeron is a 31 year old researcher who has devoted her entire life to her work. Her dating history is a mess, from an ex-husband to one night stands. A serious relationship? Hell no. 

Rhysand Turner is a Virginia-born quarterback living it up in a football-crazy city. He doesn’t date and sticks to dumb blondes who look good on his arm and think how far he can throw a football is better than sex. Marriage? Not in a million years. 

________________________________________________________________

Feyre swung the lab door closed, locked it behind her, and headed toward the hospital exit. 

“Calling it a night?” Howie, the night-shift security guard asked from behind his desk. 

She glanced at her watch and winced. “More like a morning now, but yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

He laughed and went back to his crossword puzzle. Nothing interesting happened in the hospital this late at night outside of the ER, so Howie was basically only there for her. Feyre frequently was the last staff member to leave the place, something her coworkers never understood. 

She came in early, left late, and worked holidays. To say she was married to her job would be an understatement. 

Grabbing her keys and walking out to her car, she had to admit they had a point. She’d given up her entire life for her work, but she had no regrets. 

She’d made countless breakthroughs in nuclear medicine and had changed the face of chemotherapy and radiation. It payed off every day when she heard from the oncologists that one of their patients was cancer free. 

As she drove to her townhouse--only four minutes from the hospital--she wondered if it was strange she preferred to be alone.

Then she remembered how she’d ended up when she committed herself to a relationship and shook her head. If you can’t trust the man you’re married to, who can you trust? No one. 

She didn’t miss being married. At all. She didn’t miss having to come home from a long day at work and muster up the energy to talk about whatever was bothering him. 

She did miss sex, though. She never went out, never invited anyone over. It’d been so long since she’d been with a man, she was pretty sure she had cobwebs down there.

Ignoring that thought, Feyre walked through her front door, threw her keys on the kitchen table, and went to bed. She had to be in the hospital in four hours if she wanted to get ahead of her schedule. 

_________________________________

Rhysand jogged off the field, grinning at the look on his coach’s face. 

“If you’re in love with me, I don’t want to know,” he joked. 

Coach Matthews was at least five inches shorter than Rhys, but he reached up and smacked the back of his head anyway. He wasn’t actually mad, though. There were about three people in the world who could get away with talking trash to Adrian Matthews, and Rhys happened to be one of them. 

“Shut up, smartass. I’m just excited. If you play like this tomorrow, we’ll wi-”

Rhys cut him off. “Don’t jinx me.”

A raised eyebrow. “After all this time, you’re superstitious?”

“It could be my last game,” he said, ignoring the look on the man’s face. “I don’t need any bad luck.”

He’d never admit it, but losing tomorrow’s game was easily the scariest thing in Rhys’s life. 

Talent wise, there was no one better than him. He wasn’t cocky, but he knew it. He had better stats, better knowledge of the game, better everything. 

But, according to sports, Rhys was old as dirt. 

No matter how good you are, football isn’t a lifetime sport. Even though thirty-eight would be young to almost anyone’s standards, network channels and reporters were all wondering how long he would push on. 

The guys he was competing against were all in their twenties, young and fresh and without back pain. And knee pain. And-

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, idiot. No matter what happens tomorrow, you’ve had the most impressive career as a NFL quarterback in history. So get your head out of your old ass and play the game you know how to play.” 

Rhys just laughed. “My old ass? What about you? When did you even sneak out of the retirement home?”

Before Matthews could attempt to kick his ass, a beefy hand smacked into Rhys’s back and Cassian--the other person allowed to talk shit to coach--said, “Oh, I see. You made a few good passes out there and now you’re over here drinking water and gossiping with coach like a couple old ladies. Cute.”

“Both of you, get your asses home and in bed,” the coach ordered, rolling his eyes. “I cannot believe I let myself draft two hard-headed, pain in the ass hillbillies,” he muttered, walking toward the other players. 

“He’s just mad because he’s in love with you,” Cassian said, throwing a thick arm around Rhysand’s shoulders, and dragging him to the locker room.  

Rhys pushed him off and laughed. “That’s exactly what I said.”

“So about tomorrow-”

“I swear to god if you mention the game one more time, I’ll tell everyone you wear women’s underwear when you play,” Rhys threatened, then ducked to avoid the helmet flying towards his head. 

“Shut the fuck up, man! That was one time! And I wouldn’t have done it, but you made me watch Bull Durham and it seemed like a decent idea at the time. And I wasn’t even gonna talk about the game.”

Rhysand raised an eyebrow. If Cassian wasn’t talking about football, he was droning on about women, booze, or hunting. Sometimes a mixture. Before he could continue, Rhys made a bet it was women on his best friend’s mind this time.

“Anyway, me and Az were thinking we could go somewhere new tomorrow night. Regardless of how the score turns out.” 

That caught his attention. The three of them had been friends since high school and had all played together till Azriel blew his knee out two years ago. They all lived in the same apartment complex still and got together almost every weekend. In all their time of friendship, they’d maybe gone to five bars. Once Cassian found a place and racked up enough of a tab, he stayed until they wouldn’t let him through the door anymore. 

“Where?”

“There’s bar about twenty minutes from here. Az apparently knows the owner or something.” It made sense. After his injury, Azriel had gone into broadcasting and had made a ton of connections in the PR world. 

“I don’t want to go anywhere crow-”

Cass cut him off. “He said it’s a small bar. No crowds.”

The one negative aspect of his life was the never-leaving pack of fans and paparazzi following him around. After the game tomorrow, it’d be hectic. He didn’t want to deal with that if they won, let alone if they lost. 

Rhys shrugged. “Fine by me. Either way, I’ll be needing a lot of booze.”

“You’re so fucking dramatic man,” Cassian laughed. “It’s just a game.”

Rolling his eyes, “It’s the Super Bowl, idiot. It’s not just a game.”

“Okay,” his best friend and defensive tight end said lightly. “It’s a big game.”

As he thought about how a loss tomorrow could be the end of his career, Rhys could only nod and agree. 

________________________________

Feyre walked through the front doors of the cancer wing and halted. John Weatherly, the Chief of Staff of the hospital--and not to mention a huge pain in her ass--stood at the threshold. 

“You look annoyed,” she stated, ready for whatever lecture he was about to give her. 

After all the time she’d worked for him, she’d never really gotten past her dislike of her boss. Or his misogynistic rants. Or the fact that he smelled like cigarettes. They worked in the cancer wing of the hospital, for crying out loud. And he had the nerve to smoke a cigarette every chance he got. 

“I am,” he said, equally as blunt. “Are you aware you’ve worked at least 120 hours a week for the past two months?”

“Considering I log my own hours, yes.”

“That is a huge waste-”

“Are you aware that I’ve published three research articles during the past two months? Generating publicity, not to mention patients, for the hospital?”

“Considering I’m not an idiot, yes,” John snapped sourly. “But this isn’t about me. The board is implementing a new rule this week. No more work weeks over 100 hours.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but he held up a hand in annoyance. “Don’t bother. I already tried to tell them you practically live here. It’s not flexible for anyone.”

Feyre allowed herself to steam for a few moments before muttering, “Fine.” She tried to walk around him to the lab, but he stepped in her path. 

“Since you’ve already worked over the limit, you’ll have to go home. Come back Tuesday.” 

“Tuesday?!” she practically shouted. “Why not tomorrow? The time cards reset every week.”

“You’ve worked 115 hours this week. They told me to tell you specifically that if you want to continue to receive a paycheck from them, you will come back Tuesday.”

“This is so-”

“Have a nice two days off, Dr. Archeron.”

She couldn’t not work for two days. “What am I supposed to do all day? Just let me go get my paperwork, and I’ll work from home.”

“Feyre, I have specific orders from the hospital’s board to have the security guard escort you out if you try to go in the lab.”

Her mouth dropped open, but before she could tell him how ridiculous this was, he said, “Go home. Sleep. Watch the game.”

“Game? What game?”

It was his John’s turn to look shocked. “The Super Bowl is tonight. Did you really not know?”

“No, of course not. I don’t care about football.”

Her boss was silent, stuttered a few words, then said, “How do you not like football? You live in Boston! Rhysand Turner is practically a celebrity around here.”

She didn’t know why any medical professional would encourage grown men to smash into each other for sport, but kept that to herself. “Who is Rhysand Turner, exactly?”

“For a genius, you’re such an idiot,” he said bitterly. “He’s the quarterback about to win us the Super Bowl tonight. You should watch the game in your time off. Speaking of, leave. Now.”

“But-”

“Nope. Now.” 

The urge to call him a jackass was so strong, she left before it slipped out. How ridiculous was this? She worked her ass off every day researching nuclear chemistry and the effects of chemotherapy in the body. It was important. Her work changed lives. 

And they were telling her to go home and twiddle her thumbs. Or watch football. 

She drove home angrily, wondering what on earth she would do with 48 hours of uninterrupted free time. 

After finishing two loads of laundry, scrubbing her entire bathroom and kitchen, and grocery shopping, Feyre was bored. She tried to sit down and watch TV, but there was nothing on that interested her. 

She flipped to the news, thinking she’d distract herself with politics. But no, everyone was talking about the game. Apparently, John was right. No one cared about anything except football today. 

An idea popped in her head, and she smiled and picked up the phone. 

“Finally!” her best friend shouted happily as she answered on the first ring. “I’ve been waiting for you to call; I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”

“Hi, Mor,” she laughed. “I’m sorry it’s been so long. Work is-”

“-crazy, I know,” she finished her sentence. “What’s up?”

Trying not to sound bitter, Feyre said, “Well, I actually have today and tomorrow off, so I was wondering what you were doing tonight.”

A pause.

“You know I own a bar, right?” Mor asked, as if Feyre were dense. 

“Yes, of course.”

Another pause, then, “And you know it’s Super Bowl Sunday, right? It’s a busy night for us. Well, as busy as a tiny ass bar in the suburbs can be.”

Feyre laughed. “Oh, no worries, I’ll see you some other-”

“Wait! Why don’t you come?” 

“Oh... uh...” How could she get out of this? Fake illness?

A knowing town crept into Mor’s voice as she said, “Don’t even think about telling me you’re sick, bitch. You already said you don’t have anything to do tonight. Or tomorrow. Which means you can get drunk! Ooh, or laid!”

Feyre sighed. “Mor, I don’t want to watch a football game. And I definitely don’t want to get drunk.”

She could tell her friend was smiling as she said, “Just laid, then.”

Feyre rolled her eyes and stayed silent, trying not to think about how true that statement was. 

“Fine. Come at like 11. It’ll be pretty empty by then. But you’re definitely drinking.”

She debated arguing, but Mor would likely show up and drag her out herself if she tried. “Fine. One drink.”

____________________________________________

Rhys couldn’t stop smiling as he drove himself and Cassian through the city in his truck. 

“You know you’re a millionaire, right, Rhysie?” his best friend asked with a laugh. 

He just rolled his eyes, having heard this argument at least 20 times. “Don’t hate on the truck. I’ve had her since senior year.”

“It’s rusting. You’re a millionaire. Buy a new one.”

“Nope.”

Cassian groaned. “Why not?”

“She’s been with me through every win, every loss, everything. You know I lost my-”

“Stop! You already told me, and I almost throw up every time I get in this ass-mobile.” 

Rhys laughed and punched his shoulder, then said thoughtfully, “You know, I think it was right where you’re sitting.”

Cassian swore and scooted as close as he could get to the door. 

“Don’t worry, you can get out. We’re here.” 

As soon as he put the truck in park, Cassian jumped out of the cab and wiped the seat of his jeans off with his hand, making Rhys laugh. 

He climbed out of the truck, his body still lined with adrenaline. He’d played his ass off, crushed the opponent, and carried his team to victory. 

He supposed he had Cassian to thank, too, considering he’d also played his ass off and kept Rhys from getting pummeled. 

Their success was echoing through the city on excited whispers. Both of them had already turned their phones off they were getting so many calls from team managers. 

They walked into the wonderfully slow bar, nodded to the few people still around who luckily didn’t ask for pictures, and went to find Azriel. 

He was sitting at the bar, chatting to the bartender. Even though the bartender was hands-down one of the most attractive women he’d ever seen, it was the woman near Azriel that gave Rhys pause. 

Cassian saw the look on his face, smirked, and nodded toward the empty chair between Az and the girl. 

A good end to a good night.

He winked, then slid in the chair, nodded to Az--who rolled his eyes--, and turned to the woman. 

She had clear blue-gray eyes, dark blonde hair, and full lips. She was... exotic. Different. 

He smiled confidently and said, “Hey. How you doing?” 

It was a simple line, but one that worked countless times when paired with a southern accent. 

He couldn’t tell if the look on her face was amusement or shock. “Where the hell are you from?”

That reaction was one he was used to, so he grinned and said, “Virginia.”

“What are you doing in Boston, then?”

He couldn’t stop his eyebrows from pulling together. She was in a sports bar, where his face had just been plastered on every TV for four hours, but she didn’t know who he was? “Work,” he said simply. 

Rhys could feel his best friends’ eyes on him, but he ignored them. “So, what’s your-”

The girl turned to the bartender, ignoring him completely, and said, “Mor, I’m going to make a call.” She cut her eyes toward the men around her and murmured, “Watch my drink.”

Every single one of their eyebrows shot up. Did they look that much like criminals? Sure, they wore a lot of black, but every one of them were multi-millionaires. Did he come off like a date-raper or something?

The bartender, Mor apparently, rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t take it personally. Even balls to the wall drunk, she’s cautious.”

Rhys could tell there was more to that story but shrugged and asked for a beer. 

Mor slid it across the counter and smiled knowingly. “She’s pretty, right?”

He just turned to Azriel and asked, “How have you been, man? Did you report the game?”

“Yeah, they had me follow your stats the whole time. Boring shit,” he replied, laughing. 

“I bet you could hardly talk fast enough.”

“Cocky bastard,” Cassian muttered. 

Azriel nodded to the bartender and said, “This is Mor, by the way. I’ve known her since I left the NFL. Mor, this--as I’m sure you know--is Rhysand and Cassian, although I call them Dumbass 1 and 2.”

“You’re a funny, funny man,” Rhys muttered. 

Mor’s friend came back and slid into her seat. Mor put another drink on the counter. The woman raised an eyebrow. “I said one drink, Morrigan.”

“Morrigan? Jesus, you’re already drunk aren’t you?” 

Before she could respond, Az said, “Mor, perhaps you’d like to introduce the guys to your friend?”

She smiled and said, “Guys, this is Feyre Archeron, my very best friend who loves me so much she’ll stay and have another drink.”

“Since you’re buying,” Feyre said sweetly, picking the drink up. “And because I know you’ll make me feel bad about leaving so soon.”

Cassian asked, his accent even thicker than Rhys’s, “Why the bad mood, gorgeous?”

She turned and leveled a look at him. “I’d rather be doing something else.”

Rhys rolled his eyes as his best friend leaned down towards the woman and smiled slowly. “Well, you should’ve told me sooner. I’d be glad to do something else with you, baby.”

Azriel and Rhys both looked at each other and shook their heads. Cassian flirted with everyone. It drove them insane, but it was at least predictable. 

The woman unlucky enough to have his current affections set her drink down with a little too much aggression, making Rhys chuckle. “What’s your name?”

“Cassian,” he replied confidently. 

“Cassian, believe me when I tell you I have absolutely no interest in having sex with you. Leave me alone and go shook a chicken or something.” 

The look on Cassian’s face was priceless, and Rhys bit his lip to keep his laugh in. Like Rhys, he was used to women being very... open to his suggestions. 

Before Cass could even retort, the woman looked to her friend and asked, “Who the hell are these guys? Your friends?”

Mor pointed to Azriel and responded, “He is my friend. Those two rednecks,” she jerked her head toward Rhys and Cassian, “I don’t vouch for.”

Rhys put a hand to his chest in mock hurt. “We’re Azriel’s friends, which makes us pre-vouched.” He turned to Feyre and smiled. “You single?” 

________________________________________

“No,” Feyre said at the exact same time Mor yelled, “Yes!”

The man next to her smiled smugly. “Since you’re single, let me buy you another drink.” She opened her mouth, but he said quickly, “Say yes. It’s just one drink, darling.”

His accent was so ridiculous, it sounded like he should be riding on the back of a horse in cowboy boots and a hat. 

“I said I’d have one drink,” she stated to Mor. “I’ve had two. I’m going home.”

“Of course you are.” Her best friend sighed dramatically. “You don’t care about me at all, do you? I haven’t seen you in a month, and you come to my bar and stay for all of ten minutes-”

“Mor-”

“Then try to leave, and I probably won’t see you for another-”

Feyre gave in with a huff. “Oh, my god, fine! I’ll stay. You’re so damn dramatic.” 

Her best friend jumped up and down like a toddler, clapping her hands stupidly. 

“Now I don’t have an excuse, do I?” She tried not to roll her eyes at how big Rhysand’s smile grin grew.

“Don’t get so excited. I’m just using you for liquor.”

“Fine by me,” he replied smoothly. “I’m trying to get you drunk.”

Despite herself, she laughed. She wasn’t used to such honesty. She definitely wasn’t going home with the guy, but she couldn’t deny how insanely attractive he was to her. The kind of attractive that drove women crazy. 

He was so tall, he towered over her even sitting down. He had dark hair, tan skin, and the most unique shade of eye color. They seemed almost purple and practically glowed as they raked over her. 

She turned to Mor and gestured for another drink. “You associate yourself with the strangest people.”

Mor just shrugged. 

“So, what do all do for work?” she asked the men around her, trying to make conversation. 

Rhys quickly said, “We’re- uh- in sports.”

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously, but he didn’t give her a chance to ask any more questions. “What about you?”

She saw Mor roll her eyes, but she kept it simple as she said, “I’m a scientist.”

“That explains it,” Cassian said with a laugh. 

This man had a special talent for pushing peoples’ buttons, it seemed. 

She turned to him and narrowed her eyes. “I’m going to go ahead and guess that you ‘being in sports’ means you’re a football player, since everyone in this city is so obsessed with the sport. And you know what? Between the constant head trauma and the accent...” She looked him up and down with narrowed eyes, then said sweetly, “It explains a lot.”

Rhysand launched into a coughing fit. She saw Azriel glance towards Mor, but her best friend just shrugged and said, “Not a big football fan.”

“We can tell,” Cassian muttered. 

“What kind of scientist are you?” Rhys asked, ignoring his friend. 

Mor sighed, but Feyre said, “It’s complicated, but I’m basically a nuclear chemistry-”

“It is boring as hell, I assure you all,” Mor cut in. 

Feyre rolled her eyes and sipped her drink. 

Mor got a strange look on her face, bent down, and grabbed a bottle of tequila. “Who wants a shot?” 

All three men at the bar raised their hand. Feyre just rolled her eyes.  Looks like it was going to be a long night.

_____________________________________

As Feyre got up to use the bathroom, ignoring all of their taunts about having a small bladder, the bartender looked at Rhys and waggled her eyebrows. 

“What?”

“Oh, we’re going to act like you weren’t just eyeing my best-friend’s ass?” She laughed, then said, “Feyre.”

“What about Feyre?” he said, keeping his voice neutral. 

He liked her, sure. Over the past couple hours, she’d loosened up around him. She was... funny. And smart. And sarcastic. 

And yeah, she was beautiful as all hell. He’d love to take her home, but... he wasn’t a relationship guy. Football took all of his time, and he traveled practically every weekend. The women he slept with were all young and didn’t care about anything other than his latest game. 

Feyre was different. 

“You like her, don’t you?” The bartender was nosy, that was for sure. 

“She’s... serious.” 

Mor raised her eyebrows, clearly waiting for him to continue, so he said, “I don’t date. And Feyre is... serious. She probably wants a relationship and marriage and all sorts of shit-”

“You know,” Mor interrupted, “I thought people were crazy for saying a southern accent makes people stupid. But you have got to be one of the biggest idiots I’ve ever met if you think that girl wants a relationship.”

“What?” 

“She works over fifteen hours a day. Spends all her time in a hospital with nerds looking in a microscope. She wants nothing to do with a relationship, let alone marriage. Trust me.”

“Oh.” 

The woman rolled her eyes and nodded to where Feyre was walking back to them. 

Before she made it to the bar, he turned to Cassian and said quietly, “Get a ride back with Az.”

“Gladly. I hate that truck.”

He glanced toward Feyre and muttered, “Now, idiot.”

Cassian, brilliant actor he was, yawned obnoxiously and said, “Well. I’m gonna hit the hay.” He winked at Feyre. “It was nice meeting you, honey. Call me if you ever need some southern hospitality.”

She shook her head but a smile ghosted on her lips. 

“I’ll refrain from the innuendo, but it was nice meeting you, too,” Azriel said to Feyre.

Mor followed the two of them toward the exit to say goodbye.

“You’ve had too much to drink to drive home,” Rhys stated as soon as they were alone. Feyre laughed, clearly onto his game. 

He rose and extended a hand. “Come on. I’ll drive you back. I only had one drink.”

“Is this your version of southern hospitality?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

She seemed to consider this, then murmured, “It’s very different from Cassian’s.” 

Rhys smiled. “I’d be happy to show you that version. Let me drive you home.”

“I live close to here,” she laughed. “I’m walking.”

He tried not to be too disappointed. The odds of her taking him home were slim anyway-

She slid off the stool and put a hand on his arm. “But Boston can be a dangerous city. Come with?”

_____________________________________________________

Rhysand got up from his seat and threw an arm around her shoulders. “Lead the way, darling.”

“You really have to stop calling me that. You sound ridiculous.”

She didn’t really mean it, though. His accent was... different. Sexy. He was sexy. Something he was most definitely aware of, but Feyre currently didn’t care. 

Cobwebs. 

He was funny and seemed nice enough and... 

She ignored Mor’s knowing smile as they left, telling her she’d call her later.

“I have a feeling you’ll be busy,” she said knowingly. 

She ignored that, too. 

As they started the short walk toward Feyre’s townhouse, his arm still slung across her shoulders, she asked, “So, did you win tonight?”

She could feel his chest rumble as he laughed. “Yeah, we won.”

“And you played the...”

“Steelers.”

“Right. Congratulations, then.”

He seemed to think her lack of football-knowledge was amusing. “Why the hell do you live in Boston?” he asked with a smile.

She froze. 

“What do you mean?” she said, trying to be casual. 

She led them around a corner that led to her block. 

“You hate football. You don’t like crowds. You could probably work anywhere. Why not live somewhere else?” 

They walked up to her house, and she answered simply, “I moved here to do my PhD at Harvard, and they offered me a job. Made sense.” 

“And do you like it here?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

She smiled, unlocked her door, and replied, “Ask me in an hour.”

He mirrored her grin, then pushed her by the shoulders through the door. “Give me two, and it’ll be your favorite place in the world.” 

Feyre laughed, locked the door, then turned to him. Leaning against the door, she looked him up and down and muttered, “Clocks ticking, Rhysand.”

________________________________________________________

As Rhys opened his eyes, he was wonderfully aware of the weight atop him. 

The naked weight.

Blowing Feyre’s hair out of his face, he smiled as she murmured something in her sleep. She was probably tired. 

They hadn’t gotten much sleep. 

Given how cautious she was when they’d first met, he’d half expected her to kick him out pretty early. Needless to say, he’d been pleasantly surprised. 

When the feeling of her on top of him grew to be too tempting, he ran his fingers through her hair and murmured her name.

She shook her head, making him grin. 

His fingers drifted over her back and he loved the way she felt in his arms. After a minute, she turned her head, chin resting on his chest, and looked up at him. 

“Good morning,” she said simply. 

He just pulled her up to him, pressing his lips to hers. She smiled against him, legs coming up to straddle his waist. 

Rhys took in their position and smiled, leaning up to kiss his way up her neck. His lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “Cowgirl’s your favorite position isn’t it? And you say I’m country.” 

He snickered, proud of his joke, then practically choked on the sound as she slid herself onto him. “Shit, Feyre.”

"No more jokes, Rhysand?” she murmured, rocking her hips slowly. 

“Just Rhys,” he panted. He leaned forward to take one of her breasts into his mouth, and she gasped, the sound music to his ears. 

“Rhys,” she moaned, fingers digging into his back. 

“Yes, Feyre?” He gripped her hips to keep her still as he asked, “Do you need something?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, and he tried not to grin. 

“I said ‘Good morning.’ Don’t make me liar.” 

This woman would be the death of him. He laughed and released her hips, reveling in how she responded to every movement, every touch. 

She picked up the pace, and Rhys just sat there with his teeth gritted and tried not to ruin the moment for both of them. 

He could tell when she was close, her legs tightening around him, voice shaking as she called out his name. He pulled her hair, kissing up her exposed neck and across her jaw to her ear. 

“Come for me, Feyre darling,” he whispered, pulling on the shell with his teeth. 

She moaned, falling apart in his arms, and Rhys had to use sheer will to wait until she was done to finish. 

This woman... was the definition of seduction. Even after a whole night together, he couldn’t get enough. 

As they came down together, he looked at her and smirked. “Good morning.”

She smiled and kissed him, biting his lips gently. Even though he’d just had her, his body was ready for more. 

He was about to flip them over when she ruined the moment and said, “You have to leave.”

She climbed off him, and he watched with amusement as she sprung from the bed, ripped the sheet off of him, and started pacing around the room. 

She found his pants at him and threw them at him. “I’m serious, Rhys. I have to... do stuff.”

He ignored the clothes on his chest. They were both completely naked, and if he had anything to say about it, they’d stay that way for a while. “Like what? You told Mor you have the day off.” 

“I do, but-”

“Then come here.”

She crossed her arms. “Rhysand.”

He sat up and extended a hand. “Just shut up and come here. I promise I’ll make it worth your while.” 

_________________________________________________________

Oh, I’m sure you will, Feyre thought as she rolled her eyes and took his hand. 

Then gasped as he used the other hand to rip the sheet off her and throw her on her bed. 

She barely had time to process before he was on top of her, pressing kisses across her chest, down her stomach. Further. 

Sweet Jesus, she thought. The man hadn’t let her sleep more than two hours last night. Not that she was complaining. The cobwebs were completely gone, that was for sure. 

A moan escaped her lips as his teeth scraped her thigh, and he chuckled. She was about to flick his shoulder, but then his lips slid higher, and every thought emptied our of her head. 

She couldn’t keep herself still as he kissed her, so he held her hips with both hands. 

Hers found themselves in his hair and she pulled as he ran his tongue up her center. 

“Rhys, baby,” she panted. She didn’t care how she sounded. Didn’t care about anything but the sight of his head buried between her legs. 

She didn’t know if it was because she was out of practice or because he was some sort of sex god, but she was already close. Again.

By the time she came, her entire body was limp with pleasure and she was close to seeing stars. 

When she opened her eyes, he was above her, smirking like a cat. 

He leaned down to kiss her, but she flicked his nose in annoyance. 

“If you try and fuck me again before I get some food, I’ll strangle you.” 

Ignoring the warning, he buried his head in her neck and tugged on her earlobe with his teeth. “Don’t threaten me with a good time, Feyre darling.”

She laughed against her better judgement, but pushed his shoulders until he let her up. If she didn’t eat something, she might pass out when they went again. 

She grabbed his t-shirt from last night and threw it on as she walked to her kitchen. It came down to practically her knees, making her look ridiculous, but she didn’t care. It was soft and big and smelled like him. 

“Pancakes?” she asked, turning around to catch him looking at her in amusement. At what she was wearing. 

She raised an eyebrow, daring him to say something. 

“Pancakes would be great.”

Feyre ignored the look in his eyes and started cooking. And kept ignoring it as he watched. 

Every time she looked at him, he looked like he was five seconds away from throwing her over his shoulder and dragging her back to bed. 

The idea of messing with him a little more was too tempting to ignore. 

“Close your eyes,” she ordered secretively, reaching into her fridge. 

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, but gave in when she raised her eyebrows. 

She used a finger to tip his head backward, then whispered, “Open your mouth.”

His lips curved into a smile, then opened. She took the can of Ready Whip and sprayed some whip cream in his mouth, laughing as his purple eyes shot open, full of amusement. 

“Cute,” he muttered, swallowing the whip cream. 

She leaned in and licked some of the remainder off his bottom lip. He froze, then reached for her. Before he could get those arms around her, she walked to the stove and took the pancakes off. 

Sliding an unhealthy amount toward him, she said, “Eat your breakfast, dear.”

Rhys gave her an annoyingly perfect smile and devoured the food. She looked at him as he ate, wondering how he looked like a Greek god when he ate like... that. 

He looked up as he finished and laughed at the look on her face. “Baby, don’t invite a football player over if you don’t expect him to eat all your food.”

She took their plates and stuck them in the sink. When she turned around, he immediately strode over and grabbed her face, pulling her lips to his. 

He kissed her thoroughly, then pulled back far enough to say, “Meet me in your bedroom.” Another kiss. “And Feyre? Bring that whip cream.”

__________________________________________________________

By the time Rhysand left, Feyre could hardly stand up. She had no idea how she was going to make it through her shift tomorrow, given that she was so exhausted she could sleep probably for a day straight. 

That’s when she realized that for the first time in her career, she didn’t want to go to work. She wanted to call Rhysand and tell him to come back. 

That’s not an option.

A relationship was out of the question. It’d be cruel to him to invite him back, knowing it would never go anywhere. For all she knew, he was trying to settle down. With a nice girl who’d give up her life to have his babies and be a football wife. 

Hell no. 

As she got out of the shower, giggling at how shaky her legs were, she told herself to forget him. 

But when the phone rang, she was surprisingly disappointed when she looked at the caller id and saw it wasn’t him. 

As soon as she picked up, Mor practically yelled, “How was it?!”

“How was what, Mor?”

“The sex last night, idiot. Was it good? I bet it was good. You don’t look like that and not have a seriously huge-”

“Mor! Calm down.”

She could tell her best friend was enjoying this way too much. “I’ll calm down when you tell me. Everything.”

Feyre laughed, then gave in and asked, “What do you want to know?”

“How long did he stay? Oh, you made him walk back to his truck in the middle of the night, didn’t you? Mean woman.” 

When she didn’t respond, Mor pushed, “Unless you didn’t. When did he leave, Feyre? Hm?”

“An hour ago,” she admitted. 

The howl that Mor let out was practically inhuman. “Oh my god! You nasty bitch! Or, wait. Is he the nasty bitch?”

Feyre laughed. “You have no idea.”

“I cannot believe you let him stay all day. He must be good. He’s good isn’t he?”

She didn’t have to think back to remember the answer to that question. “You have no idea,” she repeated. 

Mor laughed. “I’m so happy for you. Are you seeing him again?”

“No, probably not.”

She stopped laughing. “And why the hell not?”

“I don’t date. It wouldn’t be fair to him to keep sleeping with him and lead him on-”

“You’re both idiots.”

That stopped her. “What?”

Mor sighed on the other end of the call. “He doesn’t date. At all. He’s seen with 20 year old blondes who probably don’t know their head from their ass. You don’t have to worry about him trying to tie you down.”

“Oh,” she said stupidly. 

Of course he wasn’t the dating type. He was a professional athlete. Women probably threw themselves at him. 

“For someone so smart, you really are an idiot.”

“You have a point. Look, I have to go. I’ll call you later.” It was only eight PM, but she could hardly keep her eyes open. 

“Worn out, aren’t you?” Mor asked in a knowing voice.

“Good night, Morrigan.”

____________________________________________________________

Rhys wasn’t surprised to see Azriel and Cassian in his apartment when he got back the next day. 

“You dirty dog,” Cassian said smugly, throwing a pillow at his head.

Rhys smiled and told him to shut his fat mouth. “What are you idiots doing here? Get evicted?”

“Waiting on your ass,” Azriel said. “We’re going out.”

“Not everyone got laid last night,” Cassian said sourly. “Ruined a good win.”

Az and Rhys both ignored him. “Wanna come?” 

“I’m gonna crash, actually. I have an early meeting tomorrow with coach.” It was an excuse; he’d barely made it home without falling asleep at the wheel. 

“Mmhm, an early meeting with coach,” Cassian said knowingly. “More like a late night with a pretty blonde.”

Rhysand just winked and said, “We made sure to avoid your seat in the truck.”

“Disgusting,” his best friend said bitterly as the pair walked toward the door. “I hate that truck.” 

As soon as the door swung close behind them, Rhys showered and passed out. 

_______________________________________________________

Three days later, Rhys was watching highlights from the game when his phone rang. He smiled as he saw the caller ID. 

“Unless the hospital is calling to tell me I’m dying,” he said as he picked up, “I’m going to assume this is Miss Feyre Archeron.”

“Wow, an athlete with a brain,” the sarcasm flowed through the line clearly.  

“I’m a package deal, baby. So, what’s up?” If this was a booty call, he’d make her say it. He’d definitely give in, but he’d make her ask first. 

“I don’t date,” she blurted suddenly. 

He paused, then said, “Me either.”

“Okay.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he just mimicked, “Okay.”

“Then come over.” 

Rhysand smiled, looking at his watch. “I’ll be there in twenty.”

_____________________________________________________

Two months later, they’d spent practically every night together. Either he’d stay at her house and get kicked out at the ass crack of dawn when she left for work, or she’d stay with him and he’d wake up alone.

On the rare days her boss forbade her from working, they’d spend all day together, running errands, cooking, fooling around. Hell, she’d even come to one of his football practices. “Out of pure boredom,” she’d claimed. 

He’d never tell her, but seeing her had become the best part of his day.

Sure, he’d resigned his contract for the next year to keep his dream job, but even that paled in comparison to her coming over. He’d started to depend on her. He’d started to care about her. 

Only Cassian--who gave him shit about it daily--knew. And had been told to keep his mouth shut about it. 

Because he knew that as soon as he told Feyre, she’d bolt. He just had no idea why. 

Sure, he’d said he didn’t date. He was thirty-eight and had a terrible relationship track record, having only had a handful of serious ones. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t try, right? 

He’d never felt like this before... never been so desperate to spend time with someone. And it wasn’t just the sex like he’d thought for the first few weeks. 

Because even when they weren’t having sex, he wanted to be around her. Wanted to hear her laugh, the one she let out when he surprised her or she made fun of his accent. Wanted to see her smile. Wanted to see her asleep in his bed, wearing his t-shirt. 

He wanted her. 

Ridiculous.

The first woman to openly not want a relationship with him, he can’t get out of his mind. 

Snapping out of his thoughts, he noticed her staring up at him. “What?” he asked, worried everything he’d been thinking was written on his face.

“Nothing,” she said for the fifth time, stifling a giggle. 

He rolled his eyes. “Just say it.” 

“I cannot believe Dirty Dancing is your favorite movie!” She exploded, gesturing to the screen as if he were blind. “You’re a football player.” 

“Which means I can’t have a good taste in movies?”

She shrugged. “It’s just not what I was expecting when you suggested we watch a movie. I figured you just wanted to come out here and have sex again.”

He grinned. “I did that for your sake. I figured if we stayed in bed any longer, you wouldn’t be able to walk tomorrow.”

With her head on a pillow in his lap, she looked completely adorable as she looked up and stuck her tongue out at him. “How considerate.” 

“Southern hospitality knows no limits.” 

As they watched the movie, Rhys couldn’t help but sneak glances at her. She was... distracting. The ocean eyes, full mouth, and delicate features were pretty much a constant distraction for him. 

When the final scene started playing out, Rhys grinned like an idiot and said, “Dance with me, Feyre Archeron.”

“What?”

“Come on. I wanna show you something.” He took her hand, hauled her off the couch, and took her to the biggest open space in his apartment. 

He put his hands on her shoulders and told her to stay put, then walked to the other side of the room. 

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said immediately, realizing what he had planned. “Absolutely not.”

Rhysand laughed and said, “Run and jump.”

“Hell no! You’ll drop me.” She crossed her arms and stayed put.

He rolled his eyes. “I promise I won’t drop you. You’re about a hundred pounds soaking wet.” 

“No.”

“Chicken.”

“Excuse me?” she asked incredulously. “You seriously think that’s going to work on me?”

“Yep.”

“You’re right,” she admitted, barely giving him any time to prepare as she ran toward him, yelped, and jumped.

His hands wrapped around her waist as he lifted her up above his shoulders. She hollered like a wounded cat, but she stayed in the air and lifted her legs as he spun her around slowly. 

She giggled as he held her up, and the sound was so adorable that as he let her down, he slowly dipped her. Her hair brushed the floor as he held her, wrapped his arms around her, and pressed a kiss to her lips. 

He could tell she was surprised when she froze, but then she melted into him. 

Wrapping her arms around his neck, she pulled him close and opened her mouth for him. It was like it was the first time they’d kissed, and he couldn’t get enough. He kissed her like his life depended on it, and she responded to every movement. She sighed into his mouth and he drank the sound in. 

When he finally brought her back up and pulled away, she had tears in her eyes. 

“What?” he asked, concerned. 

Feyre’s brow was creased as she brought a hand to her mouth. “I have to go,” she whispered. 

“Feyre.”

She paced around his apartment, picking up her clothes and throwing them on as she went. “I have an early morning tomorrow.”

“You always have an early morning. What’s wrong?”

She pulled her boots on, zipped her jacket, and smiled tightly. “Nothing’s wrong. I’ll... see you later.” 

He didn’t have time to say anything before she sped out the door. 

Shit.

______________________________________________________

“He kissed me,” she said as soon as Mor answered the phone.

A pause. “He hasn’t kissed you before?” 

Feyre sped down the road to her house, explaining, “Of course he’s kissed me. But this was different. He dipped me, Mor. Like actual dipping. And he kissed me. Not to get in my pants, but just because. Like he couldn’t stop himself.”

“Oh. You think he has feelings for you?” 

“I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out.” This was the last thing she needed. The past month had been good. So good. 

But it had to end. She didn’t want a relationship... even if the idea of never seeing him again hurt so much she couldn’t breathe. 

He’d become someone to her in the two months they’d spent together. And even though it’d hurt like hell, she had to cut it off. Before it got worse. 

“Feyre-”

“Don’t ‘Feyre’ me. I’m fine.”

Her best friend didn’t let up. “No, you’re not. Ever since Tamlin, ever since that night, you haven’t been fine.”

“Stop talking. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“Mor-”

“He hurt you, and now you don’t trust men. You got freaked out tonight because this thing with Rhysand could be real, and you’re scared. You’re scared if you let yourself love him, he’ll hurt you.”

Feyre suddenly yelled, “Wouldn’t you be?”

The line went silent, so she continued, “Yeah, I’m fucked up because of my marriage. It’s pretty easy to figure out. But wouldn’t you be? I was with Tamlin for eight years! Did you know that after hearing your worthless and pathetic and that you deserve what happens to you for so long, you start to believe it? So unless you’ve dealt with that for eight years and been trapped in a marriage to someone like that for eight years, don’t you dare bring it up to me. I have to go.”

She didn’t give Mor a chance to respond as she hung up. 

She pulled into her driveway, took a deep breath and told herself the tears flowing down her cheeks were from her fight with Mor. 

_______________________________________________________

“We’re closed,” Mor yelled as Rhys walked in the bar, then looked up and froze. “Oh.”

“Tell me, Mor. Tell me what happened to her.” He knew there was a reason she’d been freaked out after he kissed her. He just didn’t know what it was. 

“To who?”

He came and sat in one of the bar stools, leveling a look at her. “To Feyre. Why did me kissing her send her running for the hills? I know she told you. She hasn’t answered my calls in six days.”

She shrugged, trying to make herself look casual. “Maybe she’s just not into you.”

“She’s into me.”

Mor snapped, “Maybe she’s not.”

His eyes softened, and she knew he saw it for the lie it was. “What happened to her?”

He could tell she was struggling with not telling him. She might not. But he wanted to fight for her. Wanted to make her happy. He just had to know how. 

She took a deep breath and said, “Feyre and I used to live in New York, you know. That’s where we’re from. And Feyre was married.”

He nodded for her to continue.

“They got married young, and he... changed. He... just.. he was so angry. All the time.” She took a shaky breath. 

“At first, I didn’t notice it. I didn’t see that anything was wrong. But one night, about five years into their marriage, I went to their apartment for dinner, and I saw that she had makeup on her cheek. Not a lot, but... like she was covering something up.” A tear that rolled down her cheek. 

“And he saw. That bastard saw me notice it.” She wiped her cheeks, trying to compose herself. “And I didn’t see her for three years. He wouldn’t let her go anywhere besides work. And he hardly let that happen.”

Rhys closed his eyes sadly, but she continued. “I didn’t see my best friend for three years. Until she showed up in the emergency room.”

His eyes snapped open. 

“I’m her emergency contact. I don’t know why she never changed it when she got married, but she didn’t. So I got the call, and drove to the hospital, and she was-”

She swallowed a sob. “She was in a coma for two days.” 

Mor cleared her throat. “When she woke up, I don’t know how to describe it. She was... different. I helped her divorce him and get a restraining order, but it wasn’t easy. He controlled all her shit. Bank accounts, everything. She was never the same. We left, packed up, and moved to Boston together. She didn’t want him to know where she lived. I think... sometime I think she’s still scared he’ll track her down.” 

“It took her three years to even go on a date. Another to have sex. She says she’s fine, but ever since that night, she won’t let herself actually let anyone in her life. She’s always been a workaholic, but after what happened... I don’t know. It’s like moving on, having a life, makes her remember her life before.” 

Mor sobbed, “And I don’t know how to help her. Because he’s a cop, you know. That’s why it was so hard for her to leave him. We had to go to the freaking governor to get the restraining order.”

A sob wracked her body, so Rhys leaned across the bar and pulled her into a hug. It made sense. Why him showing any sort of feelings freaked her out. Why she’d been cautious around him, Cassian, and Az when they’d first met. Why she didn’t want a relationship with him. 

But it didn’t mean he couldn’t fight for her. That he couldn’t tell her that he’d never hurt her. 

“Mor,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

She pulled back and wiped her eyes. “Well, now you do.”

“I want to be with her.”

She nodded, and smiled sadly. “I know.”

“And she wants to be with me, too.” 

Mor nodded again. “Go get your girl, Rhysand. But, just be careful. And I swear to God, if you’re anything like him-”

“I’m not,” he interjected. 

“-I’ll shoot you. I’m not making the same mistake twice.”

“I’m never going to hurt her. You can count on that. Do you think she’s still at the hospital? If she’s not going to answer the phone, I’m gonna track her ass down.”

________________________________________________________

Feyre scribbled down her note, then peered back into the microscope. She knew it was late, but it’s not like she had anywhere to be. The thought sent a pang through her chest, but she ignored it.

She was so distracted thinking about how big of a mess she was that she didn’t hear him come in the lab.

“Feyre,” a familiar male voice said from behind her. 

She spun around and opened her mouth to scream, but he was faster. She cried out as his fist connected with her ribs, but he stifled the noise when he slapped a hand over her mouth and shoved her against the door. 

She tried to swing a fist toward him, but he pinned her arms against the door. 

“It’s been a long time,” Tamlin said, smiling. “It took me a long time to track you down. You know how I found you? Paparazzi posted a picture of you leaving some football player’s apartment at three in the morning. Little whore.”

She whimpered as he squeezed her jaw. 

“So I came to see you. At first, I wanted to punish you. You were my wife. Mine. And then you go and divorce me. For no reason. I wanted to know why.”

Howie, she thought desperately. If she could signal Howie, he’d come and save her. 

She ignored what he was saying, blocked it out, and bit his hand as hard as she could. 

Tamlin jumped back with a surprised yelp and she barely had a chance to scream before his fist connected with her eye. She fell to the ground and he kicked her in the side, making her curl into a ball. 

“You bitch! Why are you screaming? If you’re trying to get that fat security guard, he can’t hear you.” 

No one’s coming. A tear ran down her cheek onto the floor. 

“Now, as I was saying,” he continued as if nothing had happened. “At first, I wanted to punish you. I had it all planned out.”

He knelt on the floor, brushing the hair off her cheek. 

“But then I realized something. I realized you ruined my life. You told everyone I worked with, hell you told the governor, that I abused you. You got me kicked off the force.” 

“Why are you here? What do you want?” 

Please leave please leave me alone-

“I want you to suffer for what you did-”

“I do-” 

Her cheek stung as a palm connected with it, making her cry out. 

“Do not interrupt me again.” His voice was so cold, so calculating. “I want you to suffer. I want you to lose everything, like I did. But the only thing you ever cared about is work. And I couldn’t get you fired. No, you’re too good at your job.”

She shook with fear as he smiled down at her.

“But then I thought, if the job won’t lose you, you can lose the job.”

He ran a thumb over her lip, and she was paralyzed with fear when she realized the bitter taste in her mouth was gas. 

“What did you do?” she asked softly.

His fist closed around her throat. She clawed at his hand, kicked at him, tried everything, but she was stuck. It had never mattered how hard she fought. 

When her vision started to fade, he let go. 

“Don’t question me,” he snapped as Feyre hauled oxygen into her burning lungs. 

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a lighter, grinning down at her.

Feyre’s stomach bottomed out. 

She had to think, had to do something. Or else she was going to die in here. 

“You were so consumed by your work, you didn’t even smell the gas I lined this fucking room with. Always so distracted by your work.” 

He laughed softly, “And now you’ll burn with it.”

He flicked the lighter open, and time seemed to stand still. Feyre didn’t let herself hesitate as she reached onto the counter, grabbed the beaker she knew was sitting there, and broke it over Tamlin’s head. 

He swore and closed the lighter, then swung at her. She rolled away from him, placing a kick in between his legs that had him gasping for air. 

She got up and sprinted for the door. Her fingers were closing around the handle when he caught up to her, grabbing her head and slamming her face into the metal door frame. 

Feyre sank to the floor, and Tamlin knelt in front of her. She tasted blood, felt it running down her face, and knew from experience her nose was broken. 

As he punched her in the stomach, she could tell she’d have a ruptured spleen. 

He was still dripping wet from the beaker, but he leaned close and laughed. 

He opened the lighter close to her face, the heat warming her skin. 

“You always were a fighter.” 

This is it. If she didn’t fight now, it was over. He’d drop that lighter, and they’d both go up in flames. Together at last. 

Gritting her teeth, she told herself she wasn’t going to die here tonight. She was going to live. 

She was going to kill her ex-husband. 

Bringing her knees close, she rallied her strength and kicked his chest as hard as she could. As he fell backward, she jumped to her feet. 

Before he could react, she grabbed the lighter out of his hand, threw it on his chest, and rushed out the door. 

What Tamlin hadn’t realized when he’d lined the room with gas was that there were more chemicals in there than anywhere else in the hospital. He didn’t even have to use gasoline. But now that he had, one open flame, and the whole place was going to blow.

She ignored the growing flames on the other side of the glass as she engaged the door’s security lock. Ignored Tamlin’s screams as the petrol from the beaker reacted with the oxygen in the air and the present flame, erupting in flames twenty times hotter than usual. 

She ignored everything happening around her except Rhysand. 

Rhysand, who was running toward her, a confused and terrified look on his face. 

She had no idea what he was doing here, but she sprinted full force at him, also ignoring the fact that he was a professional football player. She wrapped her arms around him and tackled him to the ground as the room behind her erupted. 

Glass and debris and pieces of paper still on fire rained down on them as she looked down at him. 

She laid on top of him, shielding him as best she could, and grabbed his face. Please be alive, please be alive.

His eyes shot open, arms coming around her to brush debris off her back. 

“Feyre, are you all right? What the hell happened?” His voice was fuzzy, like she was underwater. 

She probably had a concussion from where Tamlin had slammed her against the door. 

Tamlin. 

Tamlin was dead. She’d killed Tamlin. 

“He’s dead,” she whispered. “He’s dead.”

Rhys was shaking her, telling her to stay awake. Alarms were going off, the sprinkler system sensing the fire and raining a flood down on them. 

He was screaming her name. 

She just looked at him and smiled softly. “I love you, by the way,” she whispered. Like it was the easiest thing she’d ever said. Like she’d been waiting to say it. 

“I love you,” she whispered again.

Then passed out. 

_______________________________________________________

There was something warm and heavy on her lap. And it had hair. 

She opened her eyes and looked down at Rhys, peacefully sleeping with his head resting on her legs. 

Gently, she ran a hand through his hair. 

She was in a hospital bed, that much was obvious. There were probably police men outside waiting for a statement from her about why her much-beloved lab had been blown to pieces under her watch. 

She knew from experience that as soon as she officially woke up, she’d be surrounded be nurses and police officers and doctors asking how she felt and... 

She ran a finger down Rhys’s cheek. 

She knew he was awake when his mouth twisted into a smile and he murmured, “Do that again.”

She did. 

His eyes opened to meet hers, full of worry and passion and anger. 

“Hi,” she whispered. 

“Hi.” He picked his head up and put a hand on her cheek. “You’re so beautiful. This gown suits you.”

She knew he said it to distract her, and smile tugged at her lips, even as tears sprung to her eyes. 

She was in the hospital. Again. Because of her ex-husband. And Rhys was here. He’d probably never look at her the same after this. Would probably pity her now. 

He leaned in, and she thought he was about to kiss her, but his mouth landed on her cheek instead. As he licked her tear off her face. 

“That’s disgusting,” she murmured, not pushing him away as he moved to the other cheek. 

He pulled back and grinned. 

“Mor told me about your ex-husband,” he said softly. 

Before she could reply, he surprised her by murmuring, “And I honestly don’t know why you say you don’t have any country in you.”

Had he hit his head when she’d tackled him?

“What?” 

“Considering you barbecued his ass,” he finished with a laugh.

Despite how awful and wrong that was, a giggle escaped her. And another. And another, until she was laughing along with him. 

“That’s so fucked up,” she said, still smiling. 

“Yeah, it is, but it’s all I’ve been able to think for the past four hours.” 

Then his smile faded and his eyes grew serious. He put both hands on her face and pulled her close to him. “Feyre.”

“Rhysand.”

“It’s over now. He’s never going to hurt you again. No ones ever going to hurt you again. I’m so proud of you.” He said it all in the softest tone possible, and it made her chest hurt with how much she needed those words. 

“I killed him,” she whispered, the reality of it crashing into her. 

He shook his head. “You defended yourself. He was going to kill you. You fought like hell, and you won.”

Feyre nodded, pulling him closer until his weight was on top of her and his arms were around her. 

“You kicked his ass,” he murmured through her hair. “My little brawler.” 

She smiled, running her hands over his back. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. 

She pulled back far enough to say, “What do you possibly have to be sorry for?” 

“I’m sorry I didn’t get here faster and I didn’t protect you-”

“Rhysand.”

“Yes.”

She shook her head and flicked his nose. “Shut up.”

“Okay.” 

He hugged her again. “You should know,” he said a moment later, pulling back to give her a smile, “that Mor is outside with Azriel and Cassian.”

“Oh, God.” 

“Yeah. I think they had to give Mor a sedative to calm her down. I’ll go get her if you want.”

Feyre shook her head, deciding to give herself another moment before dealing with that brand of crazy. 

“Do you remember what you said to me? After you tackled me? Which, by the way, was insanely sexy.” 

She knew under the humor was a twinge of anxiety, so she said, “I could talk about the homo-eroticism of what you just said, but I’ll give you a break. You’re under a lot of stress.”

Rhysand grinned and raised an eyebrow. 

“I love you,” she murmured. “You know I do.”

“I do,” he replied smugly, smirking like a cat. “I love you, too.” 

He leaned down and kissed her softly, ignoring the probably nasty black eye and bruised jaw. He kissed her, and she didn’t care about anything in the world. 

Until the door banged open. 

“You’re awake and you didn’t tell me!” Mor screeched, running in the room and throwing herself on Feyre, bruises be dammed. “Of course you didn’t because you wanted a chance to make out with your boyfriend before you did. Selfish, Feyre! Selfish!”

“Mor,” she muttered, hugging her back tightly. “I’m awake.”

“You’re such a bitch,” he best friend laughed.

“I love you, too.”

Rhys laughed and got out of his chair, probably going to talk to his friends and update them. 

For the first time in years, everything felt right. It felt good. She was excited for tomorrow, not because of work, but because for the first time in a long time, she had people in her life she was going to fight to keep there. 

For the first time in a long time, she wasn’t afraid. 

_____________________________________________________

FUCK sorry this is so long! I literally had no intention of taking this route when I started writing it, but shit happens when it’s 2 am and you’ve had a long week. 

As always, feel free to send me requests/asks/whatever. I love hearing from yall. 

@bamchickawowow

[theinsideoutmermaid]

Chapter 1: Tony

Marvel high school AU

Words: 2337

***

“Tony. Tony. Tony. Toneeeeeeeee—”

Tony Stark laboriously lifted himself from his exquisitely nonchalant backpack-supported bus seat slouch. Sighing, he clicked off his phone.

“What is it, Parker?”

Several rows in front of him, in the uncool front half of the bus where underclassmen are obligated to sit, Peter Parker was dangling over the back of his seat. He isn’t a bad kid, really, thought Tony, he’s even pretty smart. He’s just impossibly annoying. Peter looked positively beside himself at having gotten Tony’s attention.

“You had Ross for math, right?” said Peter, just slightly over the volume required for trans-bus communication.

“No need to yell, Petey, jeez. And yes.” They’d been over this several times, actually.

“Ev’rybody siddown,” drawled the bus driver, glancing at Peter in the mirror.

“Oh! Sorry!” Peter dropped back into his seat and instead leaned around the side, into the aisle, apparently comfortable with lying full-out across his best friend Ned. “So anyway, do you remember the logs and exponentials test? Ours is in two days and I wanted to know is it hard? I mean I’ve done well on the quizzes and I think I understood the homework but y’know transformations? I feel like I haven’t really gotten the hang of those and so anyway I wanted to ask was it hard?”

Tony spared a brief glance across the aisle at his friend Bruce, who offered the appropriate amused-but-exasperated eye roll. “I took it two years ago, bud, so I don’t even remember anymore. There was probably like one transformation. You’ll be fine, Ross is an easy grader,” Tony said, and returned to his phone.

“Oh. . . Thanks!” Peter clambered back into his seat, earning a few yelps from Ned. Tony flashed a peace sign above his head in response.

Bruce swung his legs into the aisle, leaning across to talk to Tony. “You know the kid idolizes you, right?”

“Pssh,” said Tony, not looking up from his phone. In fact, he did know, and if he was honest with himself, he even felt a little flattered at times. Mostly, though, he wished his devotee would be someone a little more chill and with a slightly lower-pitched voice. If you go onto thesaurus.com, Peter Parker is listed under antonyms of chill. Tony didn’t know whether he wanted to help the kid or shut him inside a locker, so mostly he just ignored him.

Bruce seemed to be able to read some of this in his face. When Tony looked up again, Bruce was watching him with a half-smirk. Tony flipped him the bird. It turned into a full smirk, and Bruce went back to annotating Crime and Punishment.

The bus turned a sharp corner. “I think we’re here,” yelled Peter.

“Thank you for the enlightening announcement, Parker,” said a pair of Air Jordans extending from the seat behind him. This was Shuri, who, despite being a sophomore, was indisputably the most popular person in the whole school. Also probably the smartest. She exuded an effortless cool even Tony could appreciate.

“Okay, kids, make sure you have all your things and then follow me. Will someone grab the football?” asked Dr. Selvig, AP Physics teacher and coach of the Lee High School Quiz Bowl team.

“I got it, Doc,” said Ned. As the team filed out, he grabbed the black plastic briefcase which was neither a football nor a container of nuclear codes but rather held the buzzers and timers used in the game.

Inside DCHS, the LHS kids exchanged curious glances with the strange students of their rival high school. This bit, the in between bus ride and match bit, always felt odd to Tony. Other schools were like a dimension he wasn’t shaped to inhabit. He hastily broke eye contact with the DCHS girl who had just met his stare and pretended to do something on his phone. A teacher stationed in the front lobby had told them that their home base would be room L402 and then gave directions which Tony had completely ignored. He instead followed the sound of Ned and Peter excitedly discussing Peter’s new Endor Base LEGO set (“It includes a walker and the base has sliding doors!” “Noooo waaaayy!”)

“Are four levels really necessary?” complained Bruce, stomping up the final flight of stairs before they reached L402. “We do just fine with two.”

“Yeah, well, we have 1600 kids and they have, what, 4000? And the lot’s pretty small so expanding up is the only way to go, I guess,” Tony replied.

In L402, the students dumped their backpacks in a corner. Ned and Peter set to work dragging the desks into two lines of five, then Jane and Helen set up the buzzers and the lockbox. Darcy eagerly tested each buzzer, letting off beep after beep while Shuri reset the box. Doc Selvig rummaged in his bag, tossing several pads of yellow lined paper onto a nearby desk and pulling out a stack of name cards. As he read off the names, each team member retrieved their cards.

“Bruce — Darcy — Shuri — Ned — Tony — Stephen - sorry, I mean Strange — Peter — Viz — Jane — Helen,” recited Doc Selvig.

“Can you get that— thanks, Bruce,” called Helen, who was stuck behind the desks untangling some buzzer wires.

“Alrighty then, kids, it’s the first match of the season, and we want to start off strong! We were so close to state last year—” A dreamy look crept over Selvig’s eyes, as if he were reminiscing, and the team waited patiently until he began to talk again. “-- And I think we have a real shot at making it this time. We’ve got a great team, very strong. I think we can beat DCHS, but they’ve historically been a bit tough, so I need to play our strongest members to begin with. If we’ve got a comfortable lead towards the end, I’ll sub the rest of you in. Remember, I want all of you to get playing time, but we also have to think practically. For our starters today. . . Tony, you be captain. Strange, I want you on his right and Jane on the left. Shuri and Helen get the last two spots.” Tony felt a gleam of pride. Captain. Captain Stark. It had a nice ring to it. He slid into the center seat and carefully arranged his name card and buzzer towards the front.

“Some final reminders,” continued Doc Selvig, “be quick and don’t be afraid to jump in on a toss-up, but also be sure to gauge the other team’s response time. The questions are pyramidal, so they get more specific as time goes on. Do not blurt out answers to the bonuses. Tony will report for the team unless he defers. And finally. Do not break the Cardinal Rule!” At this, everyone turned to look at Ned, who shrank two inches to hide behind his precalculus textbook.

The DCHS team arrived and filled their assigned seats; their coach sat at the head desk next to Dr. Selvig. He flipped open the question packet and slid his glasses to the end of his nose, turning to look at the assembled teams.

“Since LHS are the guests here, why don’t they go first at introductions? Please ring in and say your name,” said the DCHS coach.

Introductions were a time-honored tradition of Quiz Bowl. Tony actually had a running list of interesting ways to do introductions, some of which required rehearsal on the bus beforehand. It’s an intimidation technique, he had once explained to his friend Rhodey, who was not on the team and could not grasp why Tony had whipped out his phone during lunch to make a note of “reverse alphabetical order of middle name.” The more complicated your intro, the smarter the other team thinks you are.

Tony pressed his buzzer, watching the little bulb light up green. “My name is Tony, and I am captain—”

“Co-captain,” muttered Strange next to him. Tony paused and made a face like he was trying to inhale a grapefruit through his nostril.

“-- co-captain of the LHS Quiz Bowl team.” Technically it was true; they had voted during practice a few weeks ago and he had tied with Strange. Why there was any dispute Tony couldn’t imagine, because he was cool and smart and interesting, whereas Strange was a smart but also arrogant, condescending, stuck-up little—

He wrenched his thoughts back to the present with an effort.

“My teammates will introduce themselves in order of ascending longitude,” he concluded. Because of the orientation of the school, this was really just a fancy way of saying left-to-right, but it certainly sounded smart. Tony had checked Google Maps and worked it out with the other starters before DCHS arrived.

The other team went for the overused “buzzer speed” introduction. Amateurs, thought Tony. He sized up their captain, a reedy white dude named Josh who looked uncreative enough to have resorted to buzzer speed.

“Before we start, can we get a sc— oh, you’re already there,” said Doc Selvig, noting Viz, the ever-diligent scorekeeper, stationed by the whiteboard. He had made a perfectly perpendicular t-chart with DCHS and LHS printed on either side in his font-like handwriting.

The DCHS coach settled his glasses higher on his nose and squinted at the question packet. “Welcome to the first match of this year’s varsity Quiz Bowl tournament. Good luck to you all. Okay. . . toss-up number one. You will have ten seconds to ring in after I finish the question.” Tony positioned his finger carefully over the buzzer button, seeing his teammates do the same in his peripheral vision. “Science. The Shannon index describes this quantity entropically, incorporating evenness and abundance. The alpha type of this quantity is measured at one—”

BZZZ. The coach looked up. “Um. . . Helen.”

You got this, Helen, thought Tony. Bio was her thing.

“Biodiversity,” she answered calmly.

“That is. . .” the coach said, scanning to the bottom of the question, “correct. Ten points to LHS.”

Tony breathed out a small sigh of relief, feeling a surge of pleasure as Viz scribed a tally on the LHS side of the scoreboard. He shot a wink at Helen, mouthing “nice one.” She grinned back.

“Bonus number one to LHS,” continued the coach. “Math.” Tony sat up a little straighter. “Let p be a prime number greater than three. For ten points each. . . One: because it is not divisible by two, p must have this property.”

“Oddness,” said Tony immediately, not even bothering to confer with his teammates.

“Correct. Two: what two remainders are possible when dividing p by 6?”

Tony thought for a second. “One and five.”

“Correct again. Finally, what theorem states that three to the p, divided by p, must have a remainder of three?”

“Fermat’s little theorem,” blurted Tony.

The DCHS coach gave him a grudging nod, saying, “And that’s a sweep for LHS. Toss-up number two. . .”

Strange kicked Tony’s calf under the desks. “You’re supposed to confer with us for the bonuses,” he hissed.

Tony gave him a winning smile. “Well, I didn’t need to. I knew all the answers.”

“But what if you didn’t?”

“Shhhhh. . . the question is starting,” Tony said, his smile brightening as Strange’s glower darkened.

LHS had worked up a comfortable lead by halftime, thanks to the abundance of science- and math-related questions. Jane and Helen were able to bolster them a bit on history and literature, because they actually paid attention in those classes, but everyone in the lineup was a STEM kid first and foremost.

Doc Selvig checked the questions packet, then checked the scoreboard. “A hundred twenty. . . Okay, guys, I think I can make some substitutions here. Ned, you go in for Helen, and Peter, you go in for Strange.”

Several things happened at once: Strange coughed indignantly, Peter seemed to float a few inches off the ground, and Tony spontaneously developed a throbbing headache.

“Doctor, don’t you think that as co-captain I should—” began Strange in the smarmy voice Tony hated.

“--cheer on the team and be supportive and cooperative,” finished Selvig, giving Strange a look. “I think Peter will be very useful in this half.” Peter’s grin looked like it might rip his face in half. Tony’s headache throbbed harder. He slid into his seat once again, trying to ignore the stream-of-consciousness chatter coming from the sophomore next to him.

“I can’t believe Doc put me in here, I mean I’m nowhere near as good as Strange, but maybe he thinks I am? Wow, could you imagine, I mean this is so cool I’m like your right-hand man, well I guess if you want, I mean—”

“I’ll make sure to defer to you if there’s a question about Endor Base, how ‘bout that,” said Tony, rubbing his temples.

“Really?! That’s sweet, I mean that’s sick, I’ll do my best. Co-captain’s seat. . .” Peter turned and flashed a thumbs-up to Ned, who was looking incredibly nervous.

It got close around question 17, but LHS pulled ahead in the end. It turned out that Ned actually liked to read a lot and was somehow a geek for both Star Wars and Shakespeare. Peter knew way more pop culture than Tony cared to learn, and, surprisingly, a ton of chemistry.

“What science class are you taking this year?” Tony asked Peter when the match was over. Peter hastily gulped down the mouthful of fruit snacks he had been chewing on.

“AP Chem. They let me test into it,” he replied, a hesitant sort of pride manifesting on his face.

“Really?” Tony tried to keep himself from looking impressed. After a few moments of warring impulses, he softened. “That’s pretty cool, Parker.” The kid turned the color of a tomato, stuttered a sort of thanks, and dashed off to relay the whole interaction to Ned.

Bruce drew up beside Tony, smirking again. “He’ll pop the question any day now.”

“Shut up,” Tony said, punching Bruce in the shoulder. But he smiled when he was sure no one was watching.

[hantheheart]

A Boy And His Dog: A TrollHunters AU

Chapter 2

Lunch was supposed to be eaten in the cafeteria, but Jim always managed to sneak out to the locker area to sit and eat with Lacey. Toby didn’t try to follow anymore after the last time Coach Lawrence caught them and made them run laps for an hour (or, it felt like it.)

She sits on the ground in front of him, her head on his knee and staring at the food sitting across his lap on the flattened paper bag. His attention, however, is on the amulet he’s currently turning this way and that, trying to figure out how to open the thing.

“Come on… how did you talk before?” He mutters, breaking off a chunk of meatloaf to feed the pleading dog. She happily accepts and eats, watching him closely.

She didn’t like it, he could tell that much. Lacey always seemed to know when something was going to be too dangerous for him, but he was just so curious about this thing that knew his name. Lacey whines softly and licks the back of his hand, staring at him with those blue eyes that could say more than any spoken word.

“I know Lace, it is pretty weird.” He puts a hand on her head and rubs her ears between his fingers, setting the amulet down on his lap and then eating a piece of meatloaf. “But.. it knows who I am, or… my name at least.” He sighs, chewing slowly and staring at the glowing stone behind the clock like face.

His fingers trace over the edges, the strange language carved into the rim was… oddly pretty. He doesn’t know what it says, sure, but it must say something, he just has to figure out what it was.

“Man, it’s times like these I wish you could talk.” Jim muses with a chuckle. Lacey wags her tail slowly, a soft “boof” as she pushes her nose to the bag. “Yeah, okay, I’ll stop worrying about it.” Jim scoffs softly. “We’ll worry about it when we get home.”

---___---

She sits outside the school building, students walking out the front gates and occasionally stopping to give her a quick pat. Lacey was such a common sight to the students that she had gotten used to the constant attention the kids gave.

As soon as she spots Jim and Toby walking their bikes towards the entrance, she stands up and trots towards them, tail in the air and wagging. They were talking, but Jim’s attention turns towards one of the lockers, instantly turning Lacey’s attention towards the commotion.

Steve Palchuk and his lackeys stand around a single locker, clearly tormenting whatever poor soul had gotten unlucky enough to get on the soccer star’s bad side today.

Jim was already walking over as Toby tries to call him off. Lacey was quick to hurry over, right behind her boy’s legs.

“Tell me about the creatures and maybe I’ll let you out!” Steve elbowed the locker door, then slammed his hand to the lockers on either side.

“Or you can just let him out right now. I mean, you know,” Jim flinches as the bully and his friends turn to him. “It would be nice.”

“Nice would be you minding your own business!” Steve snaps, pointing at Jim threateningly. Lacey barks, bounding in front of Jim with a snarl. Steve yelps and jumps back, bringing his left leg away from the angry mutt.

“I thought dogs weren’t allowed in the school!” Steve shouts, glaring at Jim but glancing down at the defensive dog in fear.

“School’s out, Steve. Besides, this is the courtyard, she’s allowed in here.” Jim smiles, a bit relieved to have the dog between him and the much taller and stronger boy.

Steve scoffs and turns back to the locker. “So, where were we? Oh, yeah, okay.” He slams the side of his arm to the locker. “You were telling me about the monsters you saw this morning with fangs and…” He clearly doesn’t care about whatever poor Eli had seen, looking back at Jim with a mocking expression. Jim raises an eyebrow in confusion, Lacey retreating to stand behind Jim, still watching Steve with her hackles raised.

“What was it again?” Steve slams the locker again.

“Stone for skin! In the canal!” Eli shouts in panic.

“Stone for skin?” Steve looks back at Jim with a disbelieving smile.”Man Eli, you’ve got some imagination. He laughs at the trapped boy.

Jim leans his bike beside the nearest pillar and takes a deep breath. “Look, Steve, seriously, just let him.”

Steve turns with a sour expression and marches up to Jim with an expression unlike that of a predator. He grabs the front of Jim’s backpack strap and yanks him closer, almost off his feet.

“Or you’ll do what?” He threatens, pulling back his arm to aim at the skinnier boy’s face. Lacey barks loudly, bouncing around behind Jim nervously.

“Okay, do it, punch me!” Jim demands, surprising Steve, who falters for a moment.

“You… you’re asking for a beating?” He asks incredulously, lowering his fist slightly.

“Yeah. Just go crazy!” Jim straightens slightly instead of hanging from the other’s grip. “In 20 years, you’re gonna be fat and bald and you’ll be working in a muffler shop,” A crowd starts to gather and Lacey whines loudly, retreating back to Toby and paws at his leg. “And Eli will have a career in software and he’ll be a billionaire!” Jim stares at Steve challengingly as Eli pipes in with a “I do like computers!”

Eli slams his arm to the locker again, keeping eye contact with Jim.

“Let him out!” Toby shouts, then starts chanting, looking around at the other students, who join in, Lacey barking loudly on beat with the chant. Steve looks at the crowd, then glares at Jim again, nearly nose-to-nose with him.

Suddenly, and thankfully, the door at the end of the courtyard slams open and Coach Lawrence burst through. “Palchuk! What’s goin’ on here?!” The gym teacher shouts.

Steve drops Jim and reaches one arm behind his head. “Uh, nothing sir.”

“Why aren’t you at practice?”

“I was helping Eli here.” He says, opening the locker to reveal the poor boy awkwardly shoved into the locker with his books.

“Hey guys!” The short boy calls with a wave.

“He was stuck.” Steve explains.

“On the double! Now!” Steve slams the locker shut again, turning to Jim with a menacing frown. He leans uncomfortably close to the other boy’s ear.

“Friday, at noon. You and me.” He starts backing towards the door the coach had left from, wagging a finger slowly. “Tick tock. Tick tock.”

Lacey bolts over, turning to glare at the retreating boy as Jim lets Eli out, who promptly falls out of the locker with a yelp. Lacey spares the small boy a glance then helps nudge him to his feet as Jim pulls him up, both boy and dog looking at where Steve had vanished to.

---___---

Lacey trots along beside Jim’s bike as the boys pedal homeward, Toby all but glowing at their minor victory.

A car honks and Jim pulls to a stop as the window rolls down to reveal Jim’s mother, smiling chipperly.

“Hey boys!”

“Hey mom.” Jim smiles as he leans down to lightly pull Lacey’s collar to keep her from jumping into the car. She barks and pants, back end swinging back and forth quickly.

“Lookin’ sharp Doctor Lake.” Toby says as his bike keep rolling, then trying to walk his bike backwards to stand beside his friend.

“Thanks Toby. So are you.” The boy’s face light up as he looks down at himself.

“Does it show?”

Lacey jumps up so her paws rest on the open window of the car and barks softly, leaning in for the doctor to rub her head.

“You gonna be out all night?” Jim asks, giving Lacey’s collar a light tug. Barbara sighs and rolls her eyes.

“Dr. Gillberg is out with bursitis, and Dr. Lenz has a wedding out of town this weekend.” She smiles and shrugs as Jim starts to remind her to bring dinner.

Lacey hops down and looks back towards the house. A butterfly flutters about on the front lawn that she hops off to check out. She paws at the little dandelions it lands on, yipping as she wags her tail. The sound of a car driving off turns her attention back towards Jim as he and Toby split, going to their respective homes.

“C’mon Lacey.” Jim says as he open the garage. Lacey pants and starts towards him, only to stop as the butterfly she’d been chasing before lands on her nose. She barks loudly and attempts to catch the bug as it flutters away, running around the lawn for a moment before Jim whistles. The pup barks and runs into the garage, Jim closing it behind her.

---___---

Lacey pushes her way past Jim and into the house, trotting off to her bowl to eat as he turns on the tv.

After getting her fill, she trots back in to check on her boy who…. Seems to be talking to the amulet again. The fur on her hind end stands on end as she pads over and climbs on the couch, listening to him threaten the thing with selling it on E-Bay.

To her dismay, something clatters downstairs and startles Jim. He gets up and heads for the basement door, Lacey hot on his tail with her ears back.

The clatter sounds again as they stand at the top of the stairs. “Raccoons!” He gasps and grabs the broom next to the door. Lacey whines and bounces from one foot to the other. She hated the basement, but slowly followed him downstairs anyways.

He turns on the light, looking around for the source of the weird noises. Lacey starts sniffing around, whipping back around at Jim as he startles himself by a mirror. He sighs and wanders to a different part of the room when the lights shut off unexpectedly.

Lacey yelps and bolts back over to him, curling around his legs as he inspects some odd rocks he knew for sure didn’t come from down here.

She whines, sniffing at his hand when from behind them, a voice.

“Master Jim!” Exclaims the large, blue, multi-eyed and multi-armed being, smiling.

Jim yells in surprise and falls over, Lacey yowling and putting herself between the two as Jim scrambles back, only to hit his head on a pipe upright in the room. She growls loudly, tail between her legs as the being looks between them in surprise.

“Master Jim!” They speak again and Jim yells again, yet again smacking his head to the pipe.”We have found you!” They move closer and Jim scrambles for more distance, Lacey moving closer to Jim and whining loudly.

“I am known as Blinky.” The blue one introduces himself with an oddly dignified gesture.

Jim yells again as another, even bigger than the first, smiles toothily and says “hi” with a deep, gravelly voice. The boy bolts away, yelling, and runs right back into the blue one.

“It’s Aaarrrgghh. Three R’s.”

Jim continues yelling in surprise and fear, moving back and forth between the two strangers before dropping to the ground, covering his head with both hands. Lacey barks and puts herself between the two and her boy, fur standing on end as she tries to stand over him.

The two move closer and looks down at Jim.

“He says “AHH!” a lot.” The bigger one, “Aaarrrgghh” apparently, remarks.

“It’s more of a yelp, I believe.” The blue one, “Blinky”, says thoughtfully. “A greeting, perhaps.” Their attention turns back to Jim as the blue one makes some attempt to mimic Jim’s panic. All that does is scare him right off, Lacey yelping and rushing to follow before the big one picks Jim up by the legs.

She barks over Blinky’s words, hopping back and forth as she tries to bite the big one, attempting to make him let her terrified and cowering boy down.

“Blinky, he looks scared.”

“Uh. Aaarrrgghh, my good fellow. Would you mind? This is a- could we please quiet this beast?” He looks down at Lacey with furrowed brows of annoyance as she attempts to gnaw on Aaarrrgghh’s side, still growling as loud as possible.

“P-p-put me down. Please?” Jim moves his hands to look at the big one pleadingly and Blinky motions for him to do so.

As soon as his feet are on the floor, Lacey rushes to him and hops up so her front paws rest on his shoulders, licking the boy’s face and whining as he yelps at the big one patting his head.

“L-lacey, it’s- I’m okay! I’m okay!” He can’t help but laugh slightly at how worriedly she acts while licking him, but the two bigger beings attempt to recall what they had been saying.

“Where was I?” Blinky huffs and Aaarrrgghh thinks aloud.

“Uh, Master Jim… found you…”

“Ah yes! Thank you!” Blinky looks pleased with both himself and his companion.

“Master Jim, you have been chosen.” Blinky says, holding one hand up as Jim tries to escape, but winds up bouncing between Aaarrrgghh’s hands. “The Amulet of Daylight challenges you to ascend to the most sacred of offices.”

“Orifices? What orifices?” Aaarrrgghh asks, tilting his head with a genuinely confused expression.

Blinky sighs, his expression turning to one more tired. “Offices.” He corrects. “It means responsibility.” He turns back to Jim, smiling and ready to continue his speech as Lacey almost wraps her body around Jim’s legs protectively.

“Unbeknownst to your kind, there is a secret world, a vast civilization of trolls lurking beneath your very feet, hidden from view.”

“Tro Tr-Trolls?” Jim stutters.

“Trolls. Yes, trolls.” Blinky clasps his hands and nods. “And it is now your charge to protect them. For you, Master Jim, are the Trollhunter.”

Jim yelps in surprise at both gesture at him, Lacey whining loudly.

“Trollhunter.” Aaarrrgghh agrees.

“This honor is yours to accept. So, what say you?” Blinky grins. Jim groans and collapses, Lacey yelping in surprise as she jumps out of the way. He falls to the ground and Lacey makes a desperate attempt to wake him by licking his face. The two trolls look down at the unconscious boy then back at each other.

“Is that a yes?”

[classyfoxdestiny]

Excerpt: Regrets, None by Dolly Thakore

Excerpt: Regrets, None by Dolly Thakore

In July 1979, Rani Dube passed through Bombay. She’d brought Richard Attenborough with her. Richard’s long-cherished dream project, Gandhi, was close to realization. Rani was the co-producer, and she had brokered a meeting between Richard and Indira Gandhi. Mrs Gandhi had given the project her blessing and introduced the two of them to the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC)…

375pp, ₹599; HarperCollins

On the 25th of July, Rani brought Richard over to my apartment at around 3 in the afternoon. I was breastfeeding Quasar. We chatted for a while. The walls of our home, as ever, were covered with photographs from plays Alyque had directed. Talk turned to the theatre, to the BBC, to children and life. At half five, I rang Alyque to say, “Ahem, Richard Attenborough is here, and would you come home and we can all have dinner, because, you know, Richard Attenborough?”

I remember we went to Copper Chimney and had Kakori kebabs. But the moment Alyque walked in through the door, Richard turned to me and said, “That’s my Jinnah.”

Two days later, he rang me up.

“Dolly, it’s Richard,” he began. “We’re starting work on Gandhi, as you know. And I was wondering if you’d like to be the casting director?”

It was on the strength of the photographs and the long chat we had that day, about my years in the theatre and my work as a model coordinator and as a host. But mostly, I suspect, it was just a hunch.

I jumped at it. Although no one I knew really knew what ‘casting’ entailed. So, it was just like every other job I ever had.

By November of 1979, Quasar and I moved to the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi. We lived there for the next six months. I was casting director for Gandhi, but I was also the unit publicist and PR liaison.

Richard had already decided on his Gandhi: Ben Kingsley. He was going to cast all the white parts from Britain (and in the case of Martin Sheen and Candice Bergen, the US). I had to find all the Indian actors.

I also worked as a theatre critic at the time, and I watched almost every play on the boards, across the city. I spotted Rohini Hattangadi and called Richard in Delhi.

“There’s a young actress I want you to see,” I said.

“Kasturba?” he asked.

“Kasturba,” I agreed.

Richard was leaving Delhi for London that night. But he would stop in Bombay if he could meet this actress. Would I be able to take a room at the Airport Centaur? He’d nip out, see her and then go back across the street for his flight to London. International flights operated from the same terminal.

Rohini had a show that night. It was past 11.30 before she made it to the Centaur. Richard and I were sitting on the couch, and the moment Rohini walked in through the door, he clutched my thigh.

“This is it, Doll!” he whispered.

Richard had seen something intangible – a quality, an essence. He had a hunch about Rohini. She’d fit into his vision and further it. He could see her on screen. That was what casting was about. That was what one half of filmmaking was.

…”If she can lose about eleven kilos, that’s my Kasturba.”

This, then, was the other half of filmmaking: the journey from casting to the shoot. I rang Rohini the next day. Together, we went to see a Dr Vishnu Khakkar at Kemp’s Corner. He was a dietician…He examined Rohini, heard the brief and then told her that she could eat two chapattis and a bowl of dal for lunch and dinner, and nothing in between. And she had to walk for an hour and a half every day.

Rohini lived in Wadala at the time. Right or wrong, I was convinced that she might follow the dal-roti diet but, left to her own devices, there was no way she was going to take a walk every day. So she’d come to mine, we’d go to Vishnu’s office and lock ourselves into the second room. I’d sit in the chair and she’d walk around the table for an hour and a half. We did this every day for three weeks. She lost five kilos, and I called Richard with a progress report.

“Send her,” he said.

The delegation to London comprised Rohini, Smita Patil, Bhakti Barve and Naseeruddin Shah.

Smita Patil was very much the trendy pick. She was quite a big star by then. She was critically acclaimed and shared, in particular, a wonderful creative relationship with Shyam Benegal. But she wasn’t right for the role. She was too sultry, too aware, had too much spark for that version of that story. It would’ve been bad casting.

My pick – so much water under the bridge now – was actually Bhakti Barve. She was a fine actress. And I felt that she looked like Kasturba. That was enough to seal the deal in my mind.

Naseer’s trip was a political move. He’d made it clear that he was only interested in playing Gandhi. And Richard was set on Ben. But Naseer was a star, a name in the Bombay film industry, and Richard wanted to pitch a host of other parts to him – Nehru, in particular. Which shows how well he knew Naseer. Because that was never going to happen.

Money wasn’t a problem. We put this group of actors on a flight to London to shoot some tests. In fact Gandhi, as my first film, was a bit of a ruinous experience. The producers allowed – “empowered”, I think, is the right word – me to take decisions and paid for them without asking any questions. In other words, they trusted me to do the job they’d hired me to do. They delegated and left it at that; if I screwed up, that was completely my responsibility. No other job has come close.

Richard said ‘no’ to Naseer playing Gandhi. Naseer, in turn, said ‘no’ to Nehru. He wasn’t part of the film which – to this day – feels odd, given that I cast 498 Indian actors. A lot of people remember him being in the film! They’ve ghosted him in, because it feels logical that he would’ve been there. Naseer would have to wait about two decades to play Gandhi in Feroze Khan’s stage production.

Richard called from London to say that Rohini was his Kasturba. He loved her simplicity and naivety – things that are difficult to fake on screen.

The next step was to better her English. I got Kusum Haider to be her teacher in Delhi. I suppose that would be her ‘dialect coach’ in this day and age. Rohini was a model pupil. She maintained her diet and her exercise routine, and she was serious about her English lessons and the spinning class she took with Ben.

Wait. What I mean is that both Rohini and Ben learnt how to weave cotton. They weren’t on exercise bikes, peddling madly.

One of the major criticisms at the time was that Ben Kingsley was too ‘muscular’ to play Gandhi. Ben did all he could to remedy that. He was on a strict diet, and he did a lot of yoga. When he arrived in India, we removed all the furniture from his hotel room so he had to sit and sleep on the floor. The walls were covered with pictures of the Mahatma.

The backlash to the casting decision was inevitable. We were always going to have to confront the question: How could a foreigner play Gandhi? Bizarrely, the makers of ‘parallel cinema’ were the only ones who raised the issue. They showed up on the first day of shoot, waving black flags. I spotted my friend Shama Zaidi amongst the picketers. On our side of the fence was Govind Nihalani, one of the leading lights of the parallel movement but also our second unit cameraman. The protests were orderly. No one ran around breaking things; there were a number of write-ups and opinion pieces. Richard was polite, but firm – Ben Kingsley was his Gandhi. All said and done, Ben was of Indian stock. His grandfather had migrated from India. I mean, we were really straining the boundaries of credibility with his Indian ancestry, and everyone knew it. But we had Mrs Gandhi’s backing. Doors opened for us, trains ran on time and locations were a cinch. Gandhiji’s contemporaries, Ramkrishna Bajaj and Bharat Ram, were closely involved. The NFDC had given us nine crores.

The protests made it to the newspapers and were duly praised; the film rumbled on.

At the pre-shoot party for the Indo-British unit, Roy Button turned to Kamal Swaroop, both third ADs, and asked for a glass of water. Kamal replied, “The Raj went a long time ago.” That was about it for on-set strife.

Would we get to make it the same way again? Today? With a British director and a British lead? I don’t know. That’s dinnertime conversation. Would they get to make Apocalypse Now the same way?

We rolled on the 26th of November 1979. And it really was an army on the move. It had taken Richard decades to get to that moment, and you could see how much it meant to him, because every single minute on that production had been accounted for. People knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

Amal and Nissar Allana worked as set decorators. Their universe ranged from trains to cars to jewellery, costumes, shoes. Every detail had a separate team, and all roads led back to Richard – casting meetings, production meetings, lighting meetings, script meetings. And somewhere within that maelstrom, Richard found time to concentrate on the performances, to create a work of great integrity and beauty that has stood the test of time.

We shot in Porbandar, Bombay, Pune. Never Ahmedabad. The scenes set in South Africa were shot in Okhla. The shot of Gandhi silently giving a poor woman his safa by letting it drift across to her in the river was shot in Udaipur.

…In a strange way, I became the doorkeeper for the production. The outside world had to get through me before they got to the film, for anything. The requests ranged from the routine to the ridiculous. Everyone wanted a slice of the pie: producers, hangers-on, friends, politicians. People wanted to visit the set. People wanted to meet the actors. People wanted a say on the screenplay.

We were lucky that Richard had been dealing directly with Mrs Gandhi. That meant we could be firm. Sometimes, we just had to buy peace. Ben occasionally wanted a beer at the end of a day’s work, and we had to ensure he wasn’t seen by the press. We’d already had one headline: ‘Ben Kingsley, Gandhi, drinking beer.’ He was also an attractive man in the middle of a career-defining performance, so we had to shield him from the ladies. If he did stop to speak to someone, the press couldn’t get wind of it. For a while, I was his minder in the modern sense – the advance party, the bodyguard, the person pulling strings, just out of shot.

It was an exhilarating time, but it was bloody hard work. Luckily, Richard and I had found our wavelength early with Kasturba, and I had a strong sense of what he was looking for.

My old friend Roshan Seth played Nehru. We’d tested Victor Banerjee as well but Roshan had the sophistication of Nehru and won hands down.

…

Dolly Thakore with her son Quasar Thakore-Padamsee (L) and Alyque Padamsee (Courtesy the publisher)

Richard cast Saeed Jaffrey as Sardar Patel. I didn’t agree with that call. I still don’t. He just wasn’t right for the role. Harsh Nayyar played Godse. He was another Indian actor from the West (America or England, I forget) who wrote to Richard and won the part.

I had a hand in everything else. From Supriya Pathak to Neena Gupta, and Om Puri (God rest his soul, that brilliant, brilliant man) to Shekhar Chatterjee, who played Suhrawardy and whom I’d spotted in Calcutta. I mostly cast actors from the theatre. I mentioned Bhanu Athaiya to Richard, and she went on to win the Academy Award for costume design. She was a very well-established designer before Gandhi. What I loved, though, was her mumbled complaint at one point, “All I’m making is kurta pyjamas.” But then, that’s all the Congress leaders wore at that time, with the sole exception of Jinnah, who had some rather excellent suits. Alyque was hopeful that he’d get to keep his clothes from the shoot and was most disappointed when they were on the next flight to England.

Of course, when Bhanu won the Oscar, it was all “… yes, Jodhpuri pyjamas but, you know, I had to cut them in a very specific way.” Ah, show-business.

…The Indian premier was at Regal. I can confirm that Indira Gandhi did not, in fact, attend. At the time, I thought it the most exhilarating moment of my life, the crowning glory. With the passage of years, I’ve gained a little perspective. But that film taught me so much and gave me a set of memories I’ll never forget, some of them the proudest of my career. …And that funeral scene – one of the greatest ever filmed.

It went to the Oscars and won so many awards. But, by then, it was a British film, Richard’s film, and seemed very far away indeed.

Richard and I remained friends until his death in 2014. Ben Kingsley visited India again in 1990, and I had everyone over for a meal at my house. It was lovely. He’s now a Knight of the Realm. And I hear he prefers to be called ‘Sir Ben’.

I’m glad I was there; I’m glad I was part of it.

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[jodyedgarus]

You Don’t Need Sports Drinks To Stay Hydrated

Christie Aschwanden’s new book, “Good to Go: What The Athlete In All of Us Can Learn From The Strange Science Of Recovery,” is available this week. In it, she examines the latest recovery trends among athletes — including Tom Brady’s infrared pajamas, Sue Bird’s coffee naps and Michael Phelps’s “cupping” ritual. She also tests some of the most controversial methods herself, including cryochambers, float tanks, and infrared saunas. Below, we’re publishing an excerpt of the book’s chapter on what science really tells us about what we should drink after we work out.

In the early 1990s, Gatorade ran a television commercial featuring Michael Jordan called “Be Like Mike.” It featured slam dunks by Jordan interspersed with footage of kids shooting hoops and, of course, Jordan and other happy people drinking Gatorade.

Stuart Phillips remembers that ad campaign well. As an aspiring athlete, he, too, wanted to be like Mike. “Michael Jordan drank Gatorade, so I drank Gatorade,” Phillips says. Despite guzzling the sports drink, Phillips never did make it to the pros, but instead grew up to become the director of the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise, and Health Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The Jordan ad taught him a lesson about the power of marketing, though: “If you can get an endorsement from an athlete that everybody recognizes, then who needs science?”

Scientific facts don’t sell products; stories do. Jordan was already a basketball superstar by the time Gatorade came calling, and the public was eager to experience something of his greatness. Enter Gatorade — Michael Jordan drank it, and young Stuart Phillips could too. To drink Gatorade wasn’t just to mimic a sports hero, it was to imagine a causal relationship — Jordan drank Gatorade and then made all those slam dunks, so the one must have had something to do with the other.

Psychologists call such thinking the “illusion of causality,” and it’s so powerful that it has spawned an entire genre of advertising — the celebrity endorsement. No one would care that a pro athlete uses a particular product if it didn’t somehow appear that the item played some role in that star’s success. The Irish have a saying, “An umbrella accompanies the rain but rarely causes it.” The same could be said of product endorsements and athletic greatness. Still, our minds are quick to connect the dots in the wrong direction.

The age of the athlete-endorsed sports drink began on a Florida football field in the mid-1960s. Back then, most coaches and athletes didn’t give much thought to fluid replacement during practice or competition. In some instances, athletes were even counseled to avoid drinking close to a workout lest they upset their stomach. But in 1965, a University of Florida football coach came to Dr. Robert Cade and his team of university doctors1 complaining that his players were “wilting” in the heat. (He also wondered why his players never urinated during games.) After some investigation, Cade and his colleagues concluded that two factors were causing the players to fall victim to the heat — they weren’t replenishing the fluids and salts they were sweating out, nor were they restoring the carbohydrates their bodies were burning for fuel.

In a stroke of genius, Gatorade turned the drink’s sodium, phosphorus and potassium into “electrolytes,” which is simply the scientific term for molecules that produce ions when dissolved in water.

Cade figured that he could solve the problem by helping players replace those lost resources, so he stirred together some sodium, sugar and monopotassium phosphate with water to create a drink soon dubbed Gatorade, after the University of Florida’s nickname: the Gators. Legend has it, the drink turned the struggling Gators football team around. It finished the season with a winning record, and in 1967, the team won the Orange Bowl for the first time in school history. Other teams took notice of the newfangled beverage, and in 1967, Cade and the University of Florida signed an agreement with canned goods company Stokely-Van Camp to produce Gatorade commercially.2 Orders for the drink poured in.

What followed was a national campaign to sell the public on the idea that exercise caused dehydration, the cure was Gatorade’s specially developed drink, and this tonic was critical for sports performance — it was created by a doctor and tested in studies, after all. One of the brand’s early print advertisements boasted that Gatorade was absorbed 12 times faster than water (a claim walked back in 1970,3 after Ohio State team doctor Robert J. Murphy challenged it at a meeting of the American Medical Association).

In a stroke of genius, Gatorade turned the drink’s sodium, phosphorus and potassium into a special selling point by rebranding these ordinary salts with their scientific name — “electrolytes,” which is simply the scientific term for molecules that produce ions when dissolved in water. Your body maintains some reserves of these vital ions that it can tap into as needed to keep your body’s fluid and salt balance in check. We do lose electrolytes through sweat, but even when you exercise continuously for many hours, you will simply correct any losses via your normal appetite and hunger mechanisms. (You’ve already experienced this if you’ve ever had a hankering for a salty snack.) One small study of cyclists and triathletes found that it didn’t really matter whether they drank plain water, a sports drink or a milk-based beverage after an hour of hard exercise. As long as they drank some liquids along with a meal, they restored their fluid levels just fine.

Gatorade may not have been the first to use this term, but they’re the ones that landed electrolytes in the public lexicon. In 1985, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute was founded to promote the study of hydration and nutrition for athletes, research that also happened to make for great marketing. Conveniently, the studies that came from the GSSI could be used to support the product’s claims. A 1990 magazine ad read: “We test Gatorade in laboratories. We test it at major universities, with sports science experts, on sophisticated scientific equipment with names that are longer than this sentence. What does it prove? Gatorade works.”4

Early advertisements presented thirst as the problem that Gatorade was designed to solve, but as the GSSI’s research program progressed, the emphasis moved to a more clinical concept of hydration and the notion that thirst was not a good indicator of whether an exerciser was drinking enough. “Unfortunately, there is no clear physiological signal that dehydration is occurring, and most athletes are oblivious to the subtle effects of dehydration (thirst, growing fatigue, irritability, inability to mentally focus, hyperthermia),” wrote GSSI co-founder Bob Murray in one report. Instead, athletes were advised to drink according to scientific formulas. A Gatorade ad that ran in Northwest Runner in 2001 depicted the glistening torso of a runner with the race number 40 pinned to her shorts and the words, “Research shows your body needs at least 40 oz. of fluid every hour or your performance could suffer.” That’s the equivalent of five 8-ounce glasses of liquid, which means that a runner finishing a marathon in a fast three hours would need to drink 15 glasses of fluid along the way. Gulp.

Gatorade wasn’t alone in promoting the benefits of drinking before, during and after exercise. Other sports drink manufacturers, such as the drug company GlaxoSmithKline (Lucozade Sport), also pointed to science when marketing its products. Lucozade, for example, established a “sports science academy” to promote its drink. Together, these campaigns fostered the idea that exercise depletes your fluids and electrolytes (which, remember, is just a fancy name for salts) and that special measures are required to make things right again.

It was no longer sufficient to simply drink some water and eat a meal after exercising. The idea these marketing campaigns fostered was that physical activity created extraordinary nutritional needs and that these specially formulated beverages were the best way to meet them. This was science speaking.

The Limited Science Behind Hydration Advice

Sports doctors were also urging athletes to drink. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), a professional organization of sports science experts (which receives financial support from Gatorade), put out a consensus statement in 1996 recommending that “during exercise, athletes should start drinking early and at regular intervals in an attempt to consume fluids at a rate sufficient to replace all the water lost through sweating (i.e., body weight loss), or consume the maximal amount that can be tolerated.” The message coming from experts was that athletes needed to replace the fluids they lost during exercise lest their performance and health suffer.

In the wake of all this promotion, sports drinks have become a multimillion-dollar business. But when a team of medical researchers trained in the evaluation of scientific findings had a look at the research underpinning the boom in sports drinks, they reached a startling conclusion. “As it turns out, if you apply evidence-based methods, 40 years of sports drinks research does not seemingly add up to much,” Carl Heneghan and his colleagues at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine wrote in a 2012 analysis published in the British medical journal BMJ. When Heneghan’s team gathered and examined all of the available evidence on sports drinks (it even consulted sports drink manufacturers to ask them for their supporting studies, though not all complied), they found what amounted to a bunch of preliminary or inconclusive evidence packaged as more definitive proof.

The first, almost universal, problem among these studies was that they were too small to produce meaningful results. “Small studies are known to be systematically biased toward the effectiveness of the interventions they are testing,” Heneghan and his colleagues wrote. Out of the 106 studies they analyzed, only one had more than 100 subjects, and the second-largest study used only 53 people. The median sample size? Nine.

“Worryingly, most performance tests used to assess sports drinks have never been validated.”

Another common shortcoming was that the studies were often designed in a way that almost assured that they’d find a benefit from sports drinks. Deborah Cohen, an investigations editor at the BMJ who was involved in the project and wrote a summary of the findings, recalls a study in which volunteers who fasted overnight were divided into two groups, one whose members were given a sports drink containing water, salts and sugar and another whose members received water. “People who were given the sports drink fared better,” she says. “Well, no shit.” If you haven’t had any food in 12 hours and then you get a bit of sugar, of course you’ll perform better than the people still running on empty. But to say that this means the sports drink is superior to whatever a normal person would consume leading up to or during exercise just isn’t generalizable, she says. “Who starves themselves overnight and then goes to perform some exercise?” And yet the BMJ investigation found that this type of study design is surprisingly common among tests of nutritional products.

Some of the dazzling powers that sports drinks display in the studies touted by their makers may be nothing more than the placebo effect. When people volunteer for a study to test a new sports drink, they come to it with an expectation that the product will have some performance benefit. Studies use a placebo group to factor out such effects, but a placebo only controls for these expectations when it’s indistinguishable from the real deal. So it’s telling, Cohen says, that studies using plain water for the control group found that the sports drink had positive effects, while the ones that used taste-matched placebos didn’t.

The BMJ analysis also concluded that many of the measures made in these studies may not matter for real-world performance. “Worryingly, most performance tests used to assess sports drinks have never been validated,” Heneghan and his colleagues write, and some of them are known to produce highly variable results that may not be reproducible.

Heneghan and his team concluded that claims about sports drinks rely on small studies with comparison groups that favor the products being studied, a lack of rigorous blinding so that participants were likely nudged to perform better while taking in the sports drinks, and measurements of effectiveness that might not be meaningful in real life. Add to that statistical sleights of hand that inflate the benefits of the drinks (for instance, one study increased the benefit of carbohydrate drinks from 3 percent to 33 percent by excluding a segment of the test from the analysis), and sports drinks don’t come out looking so impressive.

When Heneghan’s and Cohen’s reports came out, some sports science experts blasted it as unnecessarily rigid, because they set their standards based on the conventions of clinical medicine rather than sports science, where, for instance, small sample sizes are common. Which standards and methods should be used for assessing evidence is an important debate that is gaining attention within the sports science community. In the meantime, the emphasis on hydration has created another problem to address.

CLARA KIRKPATRICK

Hydrate Til You Drown

Exercise scientist and physician Tim Noakes was a believer in the dangers of dehydration until two separate experiences left him questioning what he thought he knew.

First, Noakes was involved in a study examining participants in a four-day canoe race. During a particularly rough day, one of the paddlers lost all of his drinking water when it washed overboard as he went through some breakers. Despite having canoed about 50 kilometers without drinking, the paddler’s body temperature hadn’t become elevated, as the dehydration theory would have predicted. “We weighed him, and he’d lost about eight or nine pounds, but his body temperature was normal and I thought, oh my gosh — body weight loss has nothing to do with body temperature,” Noakes says. This was a lightbulb moment, because conventional wisdom held that one of the reasons that dehydration was (supposedly) so dangerous was that it put people at risk for heatstroke, and this finding contradicted that assumption.

The canoe study prompted Noakes to reconsider the idea that maintaining full hydration was essential to staving off heatstroke. Then, in 1981, a runner wrote to Noakes describing a strange experience she’d had at that year’s Comrades Marathon — a famous 90-kilometer ultramarathon in South Africa. It was the first time that the event had provided drink stations every mile of the 56-mile course, he says, and the runner wrote to say that she’d begun feeling really strange about three-quarters of the way through the race. Her husband pulled her off the course and delivered her to the medics. The first responders assumed she was dehydrated and gave her two liters of intravenous fluid, after which she lost consciousness. She had a seizure on the way to the emergency room.

At the hospital, doctors discovered that her blood sodium concentration was dangerously low. The ultimate diagnosis was a medical condition called “water intoxication” or hyponatremia — too little sodium in the blood. Contrary to what the medical crew at the race had assumed, the runner wasn’t dehydrated— she was overhydrated. She’d drunk so much fluid that her blood sodium had become dangerously diluted. Low blood sodium causes cells in the body to swell, and when it happens in the brain, the results can be deadly.

Noakes has built a reputation as a loud contrarian on a variety of issues. He is perhaps most famous for his theories about exercise fatigue and has made a career out of pushing against conventional scientific wisdom, some say to his own detriment.5 So it’s not surprising that he was one of the first and loudest voices on overhydration (the guy wrote a whole book about it).

Yet Noakes is far from alone in worrying that the rush to prevent dehydration may have put exercisers at risk of the far more serious condition of water intoxication. In 1986, a research group published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing the experience of a medical student and a physician who’d become stuporous and disoriented during an ultramarathon. The men were diagnosed with hyponatremia, and they concluded that they’d developed the condition by drinking too much.

There’s never been a case of a runner dying of dehydration on a marathon course, but since 1993, at least five marathoners have died from hyponatremia they developed during a race.6 At the 2002 Boston Marathon, researchers from Harvard Medical School took blood samples from 488 marathoners after the finish. The samples showed that 13 percent of the runners had diagnosable hyponatremia, and three had critical cases of the condition. German researchers similarly took blood samples from more than a thousand finishers of the Ironman European Championship over multiple years and found that 10.6 percent of them had hyponatremia. Most of the instances were mild, but nearly 2 percent of the finishers had severe or critical cases. Although the findings indicate that hyponatremia is still a rare condition, what makes them especially concerning is that the early symptoms of hyponatremia are very easily confused with those of dehydration — weakness, headache, nausea, dizziness and lightheadedness.

The problem with this model of hydration is that it overlooks basic physiology.

How did hyponatremia become an affliction of athletes? In retrospect, it may come down to an error of shifted priorities. In the wake of Gatorade’s massive success, sports drink makers turned to science to promote their products, and researchers focused on things that were easy to measure — body temperature and sweat losses. Based on an idea that dehydration must be a risk factor for heatstroke, attention moved to replenishing fluid loss.

The problem with this model of hydration is that it overlooks basic physiology. It turns out, your body is highly adapted to cope with losing multiple liters of fluid, especially during exercise. When you exercise, you lose fluid and salts through sweat, and that translates into a small change in what’s called your “plasma osmolality” — the concentration of salts and other soluble compounds in your blood. You need enough fluid and electrolytes in your blood for your cells to function properly, and this balance is tightly regulated by a feedback loop, says Kelly Anne Hyndman, a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and leading expert on kidney physiology.

When you sweat, your brain senses the corresponding rise in plasma osmolality and directs the release of antidiuretic hormone (ADH), which prods the kidneys to activate aquaporins, which are like tiny straws that poke into the kidneys to draw water back into the blood. “It’s a pathway to conserve water,” Hyndman says. As your body reabsorbs water, your plasma osmolality returns to normal, your brain senses the change, and it shuts down ADH. This feedback loop is finely tuned to keep plasma osmolality in a safe range. Even a tiny drop in electrolytes will activate this system to keep your fluid balance in check. “People always worry they’re going to be dehydrated when the reality is, it’s much easier to over- hydrate because our bodies are so good at conserving water,” Hyndman says. “Being a little dehydrated is not a bad thing. Our bodies can handle it.”

Athletes who develop hyponatremia during exercise usually get there by drinking too much because they’ve been conditioned to think they need to drink beyond thirst, says Tamara Hew- Butler, a professor of exercise science at Oakland University and the lead author of several papers on hyponatremia. Even if you don’t drink anything (which she does not recommend), your blood sodium levels will rise in response to sweat losses, and as a result, your body will shift fluid into the blood to maintain your fluid balance, Hew-Butler says.

The same feedback loop that calls in the aquaporins also activates your thirst. “You don’t have to drink above thirst — you’ll be fine!” she says. Just as sleepiness is your body’s way of telling you that it’s time to sleep, thirst is how your body ensures that you seek fluids when you need them. No one tells you to sleep before you’re tired, and unless you’re in a situation where you can’t drink for a prolonged period, there’s no sense in drinking before you feel thirsty either. Your body is a finely tuned machine that that is capable of adapting to changing conditions, and it’s not usually necessary to try to outsmart it.

You can also forget those pee charts that look like paint swatches for urine, and ignore anyone who says that yellow pee is a sign that you need to drink more water. If you think about hydration from the standpoint of what’s going on inside your body, it’s easy to see why urine hue isn’t helpful. The color of your pee is essentially just a measure of how concentrated your urine is. If it contains more waste than water, it looks dark, and if it’s mostly water, it’s light or almost clear. But that’s not what’s important. What you really want to know is what’s going on in your blood, and your urine can’t tell you that. Dark pee might mean that you’re running low on fluid, but it could also mean that your kidneys are keeping your plasma osmolality in check by conserving water. Very light or clear urine just means that you’ve drunk more water than your body needs, and that’s not necessarily a good thing, especially right before an athletic event.

Because of the way the body adapts to fluid loss, the common advice to drink a lot in advance of a big event like a marathon may actually backfire. If you drink a bunch of excess water leading up to a competition, you prime your body to become less adept at holding on to precious fluids, says Mark Knepper, chief of the Epithelial Systems Biology Laboratory at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. When you’re very hydrated, your body doesn’t need to activate many aquaporins, and over time, it reduces the number in reserve, meaning that you’ll have fewer of these water straws at the ready when you need them.

Yet everywhere I look, it seems that people are telling me to drink more water. In his best- selling 2017 book, “The TB12 Method,” New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady presents his magic hydration formula — drink at least one-half of your body weight in ounces of water every day. “At 225 pounds, that means I should be drinking 112 ounces a day, minimum,” he writes. (Brady also contends that “the more hydrated I am, the less likely I am to get sunburned,” a claim disputed by scientists.) If our bodies are so good at adapting to moderate fluid loss and letting us know when we need to drink, why are there still so many messages out there urging us to drink before we feel thirsty?

An obvious explanation for this is that most of what we hear about hydration comes from companies and researchers with a vested interest in making it all seem complex and highly scientific. The current guidelines from the ACSM and the National Athletic Trainers’ Association have been updated to warn about hyponatremia, but they still promote the ideas that thirst is a poor indicator of hydration and that more than a 2 percent body weight loss should be avoided. The ACSM, NSCA and NATA all receive funding from sports drink makers, as do some of their members. If staying hydrated were as simple as just drinking to thirst, you wouldn’t need expert advice or scientifically formulated products like Gatorade.

From a biological perspective, it’s hard to imagine that the human body is so delicate that it can’t function properly without scientists (or football stars) swooping in with calculators to tell us how to keep it running properly. “You have to trust your body,” Knepper says. Humans have evolved to survive exercising without chugging water or sports drink on some rigid schedule. “You get clues about what you need if you listen to your own body,” he says. “You don’t have to know chemistry to survive.”

After examining the science, I can’t help thinking we’ve made hydration unduly complicated. I take my dog running with me most of the time, and I’ve never measured the color of her pee or forced her to drink (as if I could). I make sure she has regular access to water, but she doesn’t always take it. At times, she won’t drink at all during a long run, and on those occasions, she always goes straight to her water dish when we get home and slurps until she’s satisfied. I’ve never had to give her an emergency IV for low fluid levels. If drinking to thirst is good enough for her, it’s probably good enough for me too.

Reprinted from “GOOD TO GO: What The Athlete In All of Us Can Learn From The Strange Science Of Recovery” by Christie Aschwanden. Copyright © 2019 by Christie Aschwanden. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-dont-need-sports-drinks-to-stay-hydrated/