#lane & lou get behind me !

[jillfvs]

the lane and lou hate is so forced like sorry the mcs are well written and don't have the cardboard personality u guys desperately want in order to self insert yourselves in the stories

[harperfrogspad]

Partners: Chapter 15: Hunted

Kay, Lou, and Mark watched the car carrying The Prior headed back towards the Center and safety.

“We need to get off this street,” Kay said.

“There’s an alley behind us a little ways,” Lou told him.

“Let’s go,” Kay said.

Keeping low to stay behind the cover of the cars they moved back the way they’d come, gunfire still following them. When they reached the alleyway, Kay cautiously checked for hostiles, his gun drawn.

“Looks clear, stay behind me,” Kay told them.

Mark followed Kay and Lou followed Mark. In the alley there was no more gunfire, but they could still hear it coming from the road behind them. A sudden noise beside them has Kay turning quickly to point his gun at what turned out to be a young man in torn, dirty clothes, empty injectors all around him. He flinched and covered his face with his arms when Kay pointed the gun at him. Kay felt that the young man was no threat and turned away to keep walking.

“Come on,” he told the others.

They kept moving until they came to a right turn that sent then headed in towards Termitary. The alley continued to weave through tall buildings, the three of them kept moving. Voices could be heard coming from behind them.

“Can you slow them down?” Kay asked Lou.

She nodded and then started pulling anything that was in the alley into the path to block the way as much as possible. When they finally got out of the alleyway they were on a quiet road with a few parked cars.

“I no longer have any idea which way we’re headed,” Lou said.

“Still farther into Termitary, I think,” Kay told her. “We need to find a better way out of here, our pursuers aren’t far behind us.”

“Well, you’re in luck, boss,” Lou teased him. “Because I have a solution for that.”

Kay raised an eyebrow at her. “Oh?”

“We’re gonna steal a car,” she said, as she approached the cars, looking for a good one.

“You are aware that that is illegal, aren’t you, Reed?” Mark asked.

Lou smirked at him. “Of course. But The Prior didn’t say ‘follow all laws’ he said ‘keep him safe.’ So that’s what we’re going to do.”

Lou had found a car with a mostly full charge and knelt down in front of the driver’s side door.

That’s when Mark noticed that Lou had no shoes on, her feet were dirty and bloody.

“Where are your shoes, Reed?” The Inquisitor asked.

“Back in The Prior’s car,” she said nonchalantly, as she put her hand over the car’s lock.

“Your feet are bleeding,” Mark said.

“I know,” she said, turning her hand into they heard a click. “Got it.”

She stood up and open the door and then unlocked the other doors from the inside.

“Ready, gentlemen?” She asked, getting into the driver seat.

Kay opened the back door for mark, who got in and then the empath went around to the front passenger seat, and then they drove away. The roads in that part of Termitary were mostly one lane, winding, and unmarked. Lou drove without any idea of where she was going, all she really cared about was getting as far away from the people trying to kill them as possible. Kay pulled out his phone and called Hector, they weren’t on the call very long, and Kay didn’t sound particularly happy about it.

“We’re on our own,” Kay said after he hang up.

“What?” Lou asked surprised.

“For now,” Kay clarified. “Several members of the team are injured and right now their main priority is getting The Prior to safety.”

Lou sighed. “We can’t just drive around all night, we should find a safe place to wait.”

“I agree,” Kay said.

“And we should get some different clothes,” Lou added.

“Why, exactly?” Mark asked.

“To blend in,” was all Lou said.

She drove around until she found a clothing store, she parked a little ways away.

“Ok, I’ll go in and get us some new clothes, tell me your sizes,” Lou said.

The two men gave her their measurements, and Mark grumbled a bit about Lou going in.

“Don’t worry, Mark, you are perfectly safe with Kay,” she teasingly reassured him.

“It’s not *my* safety I’m concerned about, Reed,” Mark said.

“Now stop that,” Lou continued to tease. “You might convince me that you care.”

Mark glared at her, then gave her a strange look.

“Don’t worry, Mark,” she said seriously. “I know how to behave in Termitary, I’ll be back before you know it.” Then she pointed at Kay, “be safe.”

“You too,” he kissed her cheek briefly.

Lou smiled at him and then got out of the car, walked down the street, and disappeared in into the store. The two men were quiet for awhile.

“You know, Stone, that was some good work back there. I see why Ivo trusts you,” Mark said.

Kay turned and looked at the Inquisitor. “That sounded almost like a compliment.”

“I can give credit where credit is due,” Mark said. “Occasionally.”

Kay chuckled. “In that case, I’m honored.”

They returned to a more companionable silence. Kay kept a keen eye on their surroundings, but when he was looking a different direction Mark called to him.

“Stone,” he sounded nervous.

A dark hooded figure was headed right for them carrying something. Kay looked where Mark pointed and saw the figure.

“It’s just Lou,” Kay told him calmly.

“Are you certain?” Mark asked.

Kay turned and looked at Mark with a face that said: you think I don’t know my own partner and girlfriend?

“Right,” Mark said.

Sure enough the figure walked up to the car, got in, took off the hood, and headed Kay a bag.

“I didn’t even recognize you, Reed,” Mark said.

She chuckled. “Soon you won’t even recognize yourself.

Mark didn’t look too thrilled about that prospect.

“We need somewhere for you boys to change clothes,” Lou said, starting the car.

“Do you hear this, Stone?” Mark scoffed. “Five minutes ago we were ‘gentleman’ and now we’re ‘boys.’”

Kay smirked.

They drove around for awhile before Lou found what she was looking for, a motel. She went inside and paid for a room and then came back to the car. Then the three of them went to the room. It was small, with a queen size bed, desk, a chair, a TV, and a bathroom.

“I see you spared no expense, Reed,” Mark said.

Lou snickered.

“Only the best for you, Mark,” she winked at him.

“Go in the bathroom and wash your feet while we change, then we need to bandage them up,” Kay told her.

“Yes, sir,” Lou said, smirking at him.

Before going into the bathroom she laid out their clothes for them. Once in the bathroom Lou filled the tub with several inches of warm water and sat on the edge with her pant legs rolled up and washed her feet. She hadn’t realized how much they had hurt, but now the water it was like she could feel every little cut. The longer she sat there the more the weight of the whole evening began to weigh on her. She didn’t realize how much time had passed when there was a knock on the door.

“Lou?” Kay’s voice called.

“Yeah, come in,” she answered.

The door opened and Kay, dressed in dark pants, a dark red T-shirt, and a long, hooded, black jacket. He came up to her and put his hands on her shoulders. That’s when she realized how much she needed his comfort.

“You felt me didn’t you?” She asked quietly.

He knelt down next to her. “Yes.”

She turned to look at him and whispered, “I’m scared.”

“I know,” he said softly, then he hugged her. “It’s going to be alright, we’ll get out of this, together.”

She nodded from her spot against his neck, as she held him tightly. They stayed like that for a bit before Lou was ready to let go. Then Kay picked her up and carried her out to the bed. He set her down gently, and had her lay down. Then he set to work treating her feet, he removed bits of glass and debris. Once that was done he put medicine on them and wrapped them thoroughly with bandages.

“She’s crushed, Stone,” Mark said from his vantage point leaning against the desk.

Kay looked at Lou and sure enough she was asleep, he smiled slightly.

“You should try to rest too,” Kay told the Inquisitor.

“I’m fine,” Mark said. “And there is only the one bed.”

“Lay there next to her,” Kay pointed, there was enough space next to Lou.

Mark just stared at the empath for awhile. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, go ahead, I’ll keep watch,” Kay said casually.

“Well, perhaps I’ll just lie down for a little while,” Mark said.

Mark felt awkward, but he really did want to lay down. So he came and laid down on the bed, about as far away from Lou as he could be. Kay noted this with amusement, but kept tactfully quiet as he put a blanket over Lou. Then he went and stood by the window and watched the quiet street. Barely a minute passed before Kay heard Mark’s deep, steady breaths. It was about an hour later when Kay’s phone rang, it was Hector.

“Monsieur Baretti, is The Prior safe?” He asked.

“I’m right here, Kay,” Martin’s voice came over the line. “And yes, I’m back in my office, safe.”

“That’s good,” Kay said.

“Report, Stone,” Baretti said.

“Joncière is fine, he and Lou are resting right now, we are in a small motel.” Then Kay told them how them how they had ended up there.

“We need extraction point,” Hector said. “I’ll send coordinates to your phone.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kay said.

“You three stay safe,” Martin said.

“We’ll do our best, sir,” Kay assured him.

Then they disconnected the call. A moment later, coordinates and instructions came in his messages. Kay checked to see how far away the extraction point was, it wasn’t too far according his map.

“Kay?” Lou called from the bed.

He turned to see her looking at him.

“Hey,” he walked over to her. “Hector is coming to get us.” Then he told her about his conversation with Baretti and showed her the map. “How long do you think it’ll take to get there?”

“An hour, maybe less?” Lou said looking at the map. “Faster if we walk, actually, half hour.”

“We should probably leave soon,” Kay said.

Lou looked at the sleeping Inquisitor. “Let’s give him ten more minutes.”

Kay smiled and agreed. He then helped Lou to stand up, pulled her into his arms, and hugged her tightly. Lou nestled against his chest and listened to the beating of his heart. They stood quietly that way for quite a while, renewing their mental and emotional strength.

“Did you get any rest?” Lou asked, not lifting her head away from his chest.

“No, but I’ll be fine,” Kay said, kissing the top of Lou’s head.

She looked up at him. “Are you sure?”

He looked down at her with love in his eyes and touched her cheek tenderly. “I’m sure.”

She smiled up at him, then she felt him stiffen and his eyes shifted to behind her. Lou turned and saw Mark awake and sitting up on the bed watching them.

“Oh, good,” Lou said calmly stepping out of Kay’s arms. “Hector’s coming, we need to go.”

“Excellent,” Mark said, showing no acknowledgment of what he’d just seen.

They quickly explained to Mark the plan and then headed out on foot. All of the clothes Lou had bought them had hoods, so the three of them walked through tight alleyways with hoods covering their heads. When they reached the end of one alley they came out into an open square in the middle of a tall building, that led to apartments, many doors lined the walls. There was only one other way out, to the right of where they came out, but they had to walk across the square to get to the other alleyway out. The square was dirty, covered in debris and trash cans. The three of them walked across the square, when they were about halfway across, Kay, who was leading, stopped abruptly, pull out his gun, and turned to pushed Mark down.

“Get down!” He called.

What Lou saw made her blood run cold with fear and then boil with rage. She saw blood splatter flying away from Kay, who was now facing her, as a bullet penetrated his body. The force of it sent him sprawling to the ground. His Ultimatum when flying. Lou was frozen for a second as she watched him fall in slow motion. Then she heard a gun cocking and she drove down, grabbed Mark, drug him back the way they’d come, and pulled him behind a dumpster.

Kay had felt the danger, stopped, unholstered his gun, turned around, and pushed Mark to the ground. Then he felt it, the sharp, searing pain as a bullet pierced through his right shoulder, clean through his shoulder blade, all the way out the other side. It knocked him off his feet and the gun out of his hand. After he hit the ground he looked and saw Lou pulling Mark away. He’d done his job, Mark and Lou were safe. Another bullet wizzed past him and hit the ground where Mark had just been. Kay looked around frantically for his gun, but didn’t see it anywhere. He rolled onto his back and put a hand over the bleeding bullet hole in his shoulder, he easily spotted the shooter, the gun sticking out off the roof of the building in front of him. He could tell that the shooter was scanning they area for Mark, unarmed, he wasn’t concerned about Kay. Stone kept trying to spot his gun, it couldn’t have gotten too far. The sniper fired again just the bullet hitting somewhere behind Kay, the sniper had found Mark… and Lou. Stone couldn’t see where they were, if they were safe. Pain, fear, and exhaustion clouded his mind and he could only see one way to save them.

“Lou, take Mark and run!” He yelled.

Then Kay rolled over grabbed a pipe from the ground and held it towards the shooter as if it was his gun. The sniper cocked his gun and aimed it at Kay. He felt the danger, it compelled him to move, but he stayed still.

“I’m sorry, sunshine,” he whispered, eyes closed, tears rolling down his face.

Kay felt Lou’s fear hit him like a slap in the face, it was overwhelming. Then he heard the sniper’s gun fire, he waited for death. But nothing happened. Kay opened his eyes and looked around and he saw in front of him a bullet just hanging in the air. Debris and little rocks on the ground around him began to lift up.

“Lou,” he whispered.

Kay looked up to see her walking up to him, her long coat blowing out behind her like cape, her right hand in a fist held out in front of her.

“No, Lou, don’t,” he voice was weak.

“Shut up,” she said, then she threw a cloth at him. “And put pressure on that.” Kay did what she said.

She stood in front of Kay, took a defensive stance and then whipped the hovering bullet so into the ground with such force that it penetrated the concrete. The sniper cocked his gun again and fired, Lou caught the bullet with her Psi again and threw it into the ground, her arms going through the motion as if she held the bullet in her hand. The sniper kept firing and Lou kept catching the bullets and throwing them into the ground. Then with her left hand she pulled a dumpster over to Kay’s left side.

“Just let go of the bullets after you catch them,” Kay told Lou. “You’ll use less Psi.”

Lou took his advice, bullets began clinking onto the ground.

“Look at you,” Mark said appearing beside Kay. “Lying here bleeding to death and still giving her advice.”

“What are you doing?” Kay asked the Inquisitor. “She’s going to kill you for coming out of hiding.”

“No, Stone, she’d kill me for letting you lie here and bleed to death like an idiot from a bullet meant for me,” Mark said taking the cloth from him and putting pressure on his wound.

That was hard for Kay to argue with. As they talked Lou had surrounded them with dumpsters, trash cans, and anything that could help protect them from bullets.

Suddenly Kay felt more danger coming.

“Lou! There’s more coming,” he called to her.

“Tell me where!” She called back.

“The sniper is your 12 o‘clock, we’re your 6,” Kay’s voice faltered as Mark continued to press against his shoulder. “The first one is coming up is at your 4 o’clock, wait for it.”

Lou caught one of the sniper’s bullets and held it waiting for Kay’s call, and ready to catch another bullet with her other hand.

“Now!” Kay called out.

Lou threw the bullet where Kay had told her to, and heard a brief cry and a body thud.

“11, almost 12,” Kay called.

Another throw, another hit, she took out two more that way, but then a whole group came into the square from one of the alleyways.

“The-there’s too many of them,” Kay said weakly.

Fueled by rage, a refusal to die, and a desperate desire to save Kay, Lou reached up towards the sniper, grabbed his gun, twisted it and pulled. They heard the man scream as he fell to his death. Without missing a single beat Lou reached both arms and spun around in a circle grabbing anything and everything she could with her Psi and then spun back the other way throwing everything back at the attackers. Then she collapsed, unconscious, at Kay’s feet.

“Lou,” Kay tried to sat up to her.

“Stay still, you idiot!” Mark snapped at him. “Hold this,” he patted the cloth he was holding against Kay’s wound. Kay put his hand over it.

Mark reached down to grab ahold of Lou and pull her into the makeshift shelter she’d made them. He laid her next to Kay, she was still unconscious and there was blood flowing from her eyes. Mark checked her pulse while Kay hold his breath.

“She’s alive,” Mark reported.

Kay breathed a soft sigh of relief.

“Reed!” Mark shook her, and tapped her face with his hand. “Wake up, Reed!”

Lou groaned and weakly pushed Mark’s hand away.

“Fuck off,” she said weakly.

“See, Stone, she’s fine,” Mark said, smirking, as he went back to putting pressure on Kay’s shoulder.

At the mention of Kay’s name Lou suddenly remembered where she was and what was happening. She opened her eyes and immediately regretted it, they hurt, more than they ever had, she pressed the back of her hand against them.

“It’s alright, just take your time,” Kay said softly.

“We don’t have time, Kay!” She said, furiously wiping the blood that kept flowing from her eyes. “People are trying to kill us!”

“They’re all dead, Lou,” Kay said gently.

“What?” She sounded surprised.

“He says you killed them all,” Mark said louder than Kay.

“Thank you for that, Mark,” she said sarcastically. “We still shouldn’t stay here any longer than necessary.”

“His wound has nearly stopped bleeding,” Mark told Lou. “Just give yourself a minute or two.”

“Calm your mind,” Kay told her.

That sounded impossible right then, but Kay was there, he was alive, he was with her. She reached down and found his hand and held tight to it. Then she turned her head towards his, feeling her need for comfort he leaned his head against hers. Then he used his Psi to calm her. She used the sleeve of her coat to wipe away more bloody tears and then she slowly opened her eyes. It was dark but she could see Kay looking at her.

“Hey, you,” she said smiling at him.

He laughed slightly, tears in his eyes. “Hi.”

“Now it’s time to go,” Mark said.

Lou looked up at him on Kay’s injured side, hands still on the wound.

“But we can’t move him like this, he’ll bleed out,” Mark told Lou.

She knew what to do. She sat up slowly and knelt over Kay’s legs, then she started undoing Kay’s belt. The men watched somewhat awkwardly. Lou pulled hard on the belt freeing it from the belt loops in one move. Taking two hand towels from her pockets she put one on either side of the bullet wound.

“Where did you even get those?” Mark asked.

“Took them from the motel,” She told him as she slipped the belt under Kay’s shoulder and back through the buckle. Then she looked into Kay’s eyes. “This is going hurt.”

“It’s alright,” Kay told her looking at her with such love and trust, that Lou’s eyes welled with tears.

“Take a deep breath,” she told him.

As Kay took a deep breath, Lou pressed her knee down onto his shoulder and tightened the belt as much as she could and then buckled it before removing her knee. She then put a gentle hand on his chest.

“You okay?” She asked.

“Fine,” he answered with a strained voice.

“Alright, let’s go,” Mark said.

Lou and Mark helped Kay to his feet, they both had one of his arms over their shoulders to keep him up.

“We need to find my gun before we leave,” Kay said.

“Ah, yes,” Mark said. “Here it is,” He held the weapon out to Kay, who took it.

“I found it back there when I came out here,” he explained. “Now which way?” Mark asked.

“Forward,” Kay said, “toward Baretti.”

But as they got close to the alleyway the lead toward the extraction point gunfire and loud voices could be heard.

“Fuck,” Lou swore. “Back to motel, we’ll take the car.”

Kay nodded weakly. They turned around and went back the way they came as fast as they could.

“How do they keep finding us?” Lou asked no one in particular, annoyed.

“The phones,” Kay said weakly.

“What?” Lou asked.

“Every time we make a call and tell Hector where we are, they show up first,” Kay said.

“Crap,” Lou said.

It didn’t take long to get back where they had left the car, they put Kay in the front seat, Lou went for the driver’s seat, but Mark stopped her.

“Do you really think you should be driving in your condition?” He asked.

“I still need to keep you safe and you don’t know any of the roads out here, now get in the back,” she demanded.

Mark shook his head, but did as she said.

As she was backing out of the parking spot Kay, who’s head was leaned back and his eyes closed, called at to her.

“Stop!”

Lou slammed on the brakes. Then in her rear view mirror saw a scared teenaged girl staring back at her. The girl stood for frozen in shock for a second and then she ran off. As Lou looked out her window she saw the girl leading a little boy by the hand. Lou never would have seen the boy, he was too little, if she had been paying attention she would have seen the teenage girl. They both would have been hit without Kay.

“Shit,” she swore softly.

“Lou?” Kay called.

“There were… kids in the road. They’re fine, gone now,” she backed out more carefully.

Giving up on trying to meet up with Baretti, especially with Kay hurt, Lou had come up with another idea. The good news was that seeing the map Hector had sent Kay had oriented her to where they were in Termitary, so she knew which way to go. The bad news was that Kay had lost consciousness shortly after getting on the road and she or Mark couldn’t rouse him. She pulled out her phone, noting that it was low on battery, once they had gotten back out on the road and dialed a number.

“Didn’t Stone say not to use your phones?” Mark asked.

“I’m not going to tell anyone where we are or where we’re going,” she told him.

“Lou?” Jonas answered.

“Jonas… I-” her voice faltered.

“Lou, what’s wrong?” Jonas immediately sounded concerned.

“It’s Kay…” Lou was having a harder time than she expected.

“What about him?” Now Jonas sounded protective.

“He’s been… shot,” she said.

“Where? What part of his body?” He switched to healer mode.

“Shoulder.”

“All the through?” He asked.

“Yes.”

“You putting pressure on it?”

“Yes,” she replied. “But he’s unconscious now and I can’t wake him up.”

“Shit. He lose a lot of blood?”

“Yes.”

“Shit. Okay, where are you?” He asked.

“In Termitary somewhere, I’m not sure,” she lied in case someone was listening in. “Are you at work? Can I bring him to you?”

“No, don’t. There’s some crazy shit going on here tonight,” the healer said. “Take him to my place, I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay,” Lou said, she was already headed that way.

“Can you figure how to get there?” Jonas asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” she said.

“Okay, I’ll see you soon.”

“And Jonas? Please hurry,” she said softly.

“I will,” he reassured her before hanging up.

“You do know how to get there, don’t you,?” Mark asked.

“Of course, I only said I don’t know in case someone is listening,” she told him.

Once Lou got back to a more familiar part of Termitary, it took no time at all for her to get to Jonas’ place. Not sure if the healer was there yet or not Lou parked the car in a quiet spot, told mark to lie down in the back, and she got out to knock on Jonas’ door. But she didn’t make it before someone came around a corner and she nearly punched him.

“Easy! It’s just me,” Jonas said. The he saw all the dried blood on her face. “What they hell happened?”

“Jonas!” Lou hugged him and then looked up at the healer with a look he’d never seen on her face. “Please, you have to help him. I-I can’t… I can’t lose him, please, Jonas.”

“Shh, shh, calm down, I’ll do everything I can. Where is he?”

“This way,” she led him back to the car.

Once they were back at the car Jonas immediately started checking Kay’s vital signs.

“Mark?” Lou called.

“I’m here,” the Inquisitor popped up from the backseat and got out of the car.

“Jonas?” Lou asked.

“We need to get him upstairs,” he said. “Who’s this?” He looked at Mark.

“A friend from work,” Lou said without missing a beat.

Then the three of them carried Kay up to Jonas’ apartment and laid him on the bed. Jonas immediately set to healing the empath. Lou paced around the apartment smoking a cigarette that Jonas had given her, unable to calm down.

“Reed,” Mark called to her. “Come sit.”

She just shook her head, continuing to smoke and pace. Several minutes passed like that.

“Okay,” Jonas said, taking his hand off of Kay’s wound. “I’ve healed it as best as I can for now. Now I need to give him more blood.”

“More blood?” Lou asked, worried. “Where are you going to get more blood?”

Jonas opened a bag he had brought home with him and pulled out a bag of blood.

“I brought some from the hospital,” the healer said, as he set to work getting it ready. “Come help me, Lou.”

Lou came over to him, and he gave her the bag of blood. Then he took out all the things he needed for an IV. Lou stared at Kay’s pale face while Jonas put the IV in his arm and got the blood flowing into the empath.

“Now all we can do is wait,” Jonas told her.

Lou stared at Kay for awhile longer, before she heard Jonas offer Mark a drink and she remembered that she still needed to get Mark to safety. She had an idea.

“Mark,” she went over to him, the Inquisitor looked at her. “Do you have Faruk’s number?”

“Of course, I do,” he said.

“Jonas can I borrow your phone?” She asked. “Mine’s dead.”

“Sure,” he handed Lou his phone.

Then Mark gave her the number she wanted. She went back to the bed and sat next to Kay as she explained to Faruk how she needed him to come and extract Mark, then she gave him a meeting spot not at Jonas’ apartment. She explained that they thought their phones being tracked and she asked him not to call Baretti or anyone else on his team. Twenty minutes passed in silence, Jonas continued to monitor Kay’s vitals, while Lou sat next to the unconscious empath, holding his hand, Mark sat on the sofa drinking a beer Jonas had given him. Then a notification came in on Jonas’ phone.

“Your ride’s here,” the healer told Mark.

Lou got up and told Jonas that she’d be right back, then she and Mark left the apartment. The pair walked quietly through the streets until they reached the spot where they were supposed to meet Mark’s guard. Lou stopped them by a wall, their backs pressed against it. Lou looked at Mark and pressed her finger to her lips, he nodded. She carefully looked around the corner to see if Faruk was where she told him to be. He was, along with a two other AC officers, she turned back to Mark and beaconed him to follow. The guards looked over at them when they heard them coming.

“Monsieur Joncière! United One be praised,” Faruk said walking up to them.

“You have no idea how happy we are to see you,” Lou said.

“The feeling is mutual, Reed,” Faruk said as the two shook hands. “The whole Inquisition and the Corps are up in arms about this.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Lou said.

“Yeah,” Faruk looked around. “Where’s Stone?”

A lump rose in Lou’s throat.

“He took a bullet for me,” Mark said.

Faruk looked at Lou, concern on his face. Apparently the entire Inquisition knew about them being a couple.

“Is he okay?” The guard asked.

“He’s going to be fine,” Mark said more to Lou than Faruk. “He’s with a healer right now.”

Faruk noticeably relaxed. “Oh good, he’ll be alright then. Those healers are miracle workers.”

Lou nodded not looking at either of the men. Mark put his hand on her shoulder.

“He’s going to be fine, Reed,” he said slowly “Faruk here was hurt far worst than Stone is.”

Lou looked at the two men.

“It’s true, I would have died without the aid of healers,” Faruk said.

“He’ll be fine,” Mark said again. “Now get back to him.”

“Be safe,” Lou said putting a hand on Mark’s shoulder.

“You too,” Mark smiled slightly.

“You need someone to walk you back?” Faruk asked.

“Nah, I’m fine,” Lou said, and then they parted ways, Mark was safe back with his guards, so Lou headed back to Jonas’.

“How is he?” Lou asked once she was back at the healer’s apartment.

“He’s stable,” Jonas said. “His blood pressure is still low, but it’s slowly getting better, the blood we’re giving him is working.”

Lou nodded, and rubbed her eyes, with everything calming down, it’s like her body was suddenly remembering its wounds.

“What did you do to make your eyes bleed?��� Jonas asked.

Lou told him the story while they shared a cigarette, leaving out the part where she killed half a dozen men or more.

“Damn,” he said when she was done. “That’s fucking impressive, Lou.”

“Thanks,” she kind of smiled.

“You saved his life,” he said.

She just nodded, and rubbed her eyes again.

“Come here,” he said.

“I’m fine, Jonas,” she told him.

“You’re stubborn is what you are,” he walked over to her, grabbed her with one hand and put his other over her eyes.

“Jonas!” She tried to pull free, but she was too tired.

“Shut up and be still,” he scolded.

Lou felt the heat from his fingers and relaxed, letting him heal her eyes, she felt the pain fade away. She sighed as he removed his hand.

“Thank you,” she said, then she hugged him. “I’m sorry that I had to ask you to do all this, but I was so scared. We were being hunted all over Termitary.”

“That wasn’t just a friend from work, was it?” Jonas said, letting go to look at her.

“He’s an Inquisitor,” Lou admitted.

“Fuck,” Jonas said. “I had an Inquisitor in my house.”

Lou chuckled. “He’s really not that bad.”

“Damn, your job really has gotten to you,” Jonas teased.

“Fuck off,” she teased back, then she yawned.

“You should get some sleep,” Jonas said seriously.

Lou shook her head. “I’ll go to sleep after he wakes up.”

“Lou,” Jonas said gently. “He’s lost a lot of blood, you’ve clearly been through hell tonight. Do you even know what time it is?”

“No,” she shook her head again.

“It’s passed four in the morning, when did you two get up this morning?”

“5:30 or 6,” she admitted.

“He’s exhausted, Lou, he needs to sleep, that will help him heal. But you need sleep too,” Jonas reasoned with her.

There was more head shaking. Jonas sighed.

“I’m going to check his vitals again, you should come sit with him,” Jonas told her.

Jonas went over to the empath laying on his bed and began to check his blood pressure. Lou followed slowly, and gently sat down on the bed next to Kay’s uninjured side. She looked at his face, he was still so pale, she gently brushed some hair away from his face.

“His blood pressure has gone up a little again, that’s good,” Jonas told her.

Then he listened to Kay’s heart beat. “Steady and strong,” Jonas reported.

“Then why won’t he wake up?” Lou asked.

“He needs rest, Lou. So do you.”

She just shook her head again.

“At least lay down with him, he’ll know you’re there and he’ll sleep better,” Jonas said.

Lou made a face at him, she didn’t believe him.

“You spend a lot of nights together, right?” He asked.

“Yeah,” Lou said.

“Don’t you sleep better next to him?” Jonas asked.

Lou smiled sadly. “Yeah.”

Then she laid down next to Kay resting a hand on his chest and her head on his good shoulder.

Jonas hoped that she would fall asleep if she laid down next to Kay, but instead she seemed to become more upset. Tears started flowing from her eyes and she kept asking “why”.

“Why what, Lou?”

“Why did he do that, the son of a bitch,” Lou cried more.

“Do what?” Jonas asked.

“He just laid there, ready to sacrifice himself to save us. He was just going to lay there and let that bastard shot him so that we could get away! Why would he do that, Jonas, why?!” The longer Lou talked angrier she got, the louder she got.

“Because he loves you,” Jonas said simply.

“Well, what good is that if he’s dead?!” She yelled.

“Asking Kay not to protect you is like asking me not to heal you, it goes against everything we are,” Jonas told her.

“Protecting me is one thing, dying for no fucking reason is another!” Lou yell through her tears.

“Okay, okay, you can be as mad at him as you want to be, tomorrow. Right now you need to calm down,” he said.

“Why, Jonas, why? Why did he do that? Why would you do that?” She shook Kay slightly.

Jonas didn’t answer the question, it was obvious that she wasn’t looking for a response.

“Come on, now. Take a deep breath,” He said.

Lou didn’t take a deep breath she just cried against Kay’s good shoulder, the weight of the night finally falling down on her. Jonas walked around to the other side of the bed, sat down behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. Then Lou felt a sharp prick on her shoulder next to Jonas’ hand, she turned and saw that he was holding a small injector.

“What did you…?” Lou stared at the healer like he’d just stabbed her in the back.

“Don’t look at me like I’ve just betrayed you, it’s only a mild sedative,” Jonas said. “You *need* to rest.”

Lou wanted to be mad, she wanted to rage, to throw things, and yell at him. But she could already feel the sedative starting to work, and the world fell into darkness.

[mightyflamethrower]

Once, years ago, Milltown was a fishing village and a lumber town. There was a tribe of Natives just outside the city limits. Years went by and the place changed and grew. It never lost that western waterfront feeling though. Salt water and trees and a college. That’s what I have heard. I wasn’t born until 2010. Lou emerged into the kitchen in her current fave outfit. She looked a little like a scarecrow. Extremely distressed jeans, no hem just shreds. One of dad’s hoodies with some kind of hoohah printed on it about a tractor company, over a plaid man’s shirt and all covered in one of Mom’s weird fleece jackets. Shoes were Keds. OK. She had jammed her curls into a scrunchie hair thing, had on some vintage shades and was ready to go. I don’t scare easily so I was fine with it. I had on my battle dress uniform. Jeans, no holes. A big grey sweatshirt and over that a pea coat, old white trainers. Hair up in a ponytail. I stuffed four of those pink boiled eggs in my pockets. Ready to roll. I locked the back door, pulled the kitchen curtains closed. I glanced around. Home. Hm. Home is where the heart was. My sister and I passed out the front door. I turned and locked the door. I felt like something was changing. I was not sure why. Just shutting the door felt almost final. It was still early in the day, like ten AM. Grey clouds covered the sky. It had been raining during the night. No surprises there. Our lawn was a shaggy mess. No one bothered with lawns anymore. Down the walk. Past the mailbox. We almost never get any mail, but I looked just to make sure. Nothing. Just as we walked out onto the narrow two lane asphalt the sun broke through the clouds, brilliantly, like it does when you are used to the dim light of morning around here. The whole road shone golden. Surely a good sign. Down the golden road we must travel. “Turn your face to the sun.” Two miles is not very far to walk. We passed by our old neighbor’s houses. I recited each name as we came across their places. Erickson’s white house. No one lives there now. Steele’s red house. One old lady is still living there with her dog. She stays home. People bring her supplies. A few more places where we didn’t remember who had lived there. Overgrown lawns. Huge bushes near the houses and unpruned roses surrounded the houses where once people had lived and worked. We passed the Gustafsons two story brick house. The fruit trees had not been tended to for several years. Did I know that it was a gloomy scene? Maybe not really. It was the new normal. Lou piped up, “Jen, there is a dog following us.” Glancing back, I saw that she was correct! There was quite a big dog on the road behind us. He was not familiar to me. He stopped about twenty feet away when we stopped. He appeared to be a German Shepherd mix, mixed with some other really big kind of dog. He had a black muzzle and tan body and one ear up and one ear down. We used to call those Indian dogs because you would see them around the Reservation. The dog sat on the pavement watching me. They sense who is the boss, right? I squatted down on one knee and called to him. “Hey, Buddy, come here…” I noticed that his sides were thin, and his fur looked a bit messy. “Want an egg, Buddy?” I coaxed. I pulled one out of my pocket and started to peel it for him. That got his attention in a big way. He stood and approached 

slowly, tail waving. This was a big dog. He was taller than a regular German Shepherd. The pink eggshell bits lay scattered on the wet asphalt. The bright light of the sun was shining into his 

very aware looking brown eyes. I was not fearful of this big dog at all. He came to me then and took the egg. He didn’t mind the shell that I hadn’t peeled off yet. He put it on the road surface, looked up at me, then carefully ate it. I peeled him another egg then. I guessed that his name was Buddy now. I guessed we had a friend for now. Lou walked over and stood with us and patted his head. I did too. He seemed to like the attention. “OK, Buddy”, I said. “We have to keep going.” Lou smiled then, like I had not seen her smile in quite a long time.

Hi This Is LouJen was strutting along up there like she was on a mission from God. She had these long spidery legs like a boy. Her ponytail was almost swinging in complete circles! That’s how crazy she was. The sun was in my eyes, and I was hungry. She always said I was fat. She treated me like I was retarded. I was not fat, I had a waist and looked more like a woman than she did. Ha. You can’t believe everything she tells you!

Someone had trained Buddy. I wished I knew his real name. I bet it wasn’t Buddy. Hopefully not King or Rex. He stayed right at my left side. Sometimes he would stuff his big black muzzle in my hand, reassuringly. Sometimes he would glance back to make sure that Lou was still back there. He would stop and I would stop, and we would wait for her to catch up. I knew she didn’t like walking very much. She was a tired looking small figure in funny clothes. I loved her so much. Except for Buddy, she was it, all I had. We had to cross a bridge over the river, and it was pretty steep. Our trip into Milltown was because we had to pick up our funny money. The State gives unemployed people a little money. It doesn’t look real. It comes in little books. To use a bill, you tear it out of the book. If there is change due, we get it in old coins. They were still in circulation. There isn’t any record keeping really. We weren’t important enough to keep track of much. They hand these out at the Post Office. Our names were on a list. We could buy a few things to carry home then. The river is cleaner than it used to be. There was no industry left making it dirty. It was about thirty feet down to the water. Looking over, we could see one guy fishing a little upstream. I was not sure that I would want to eat whatever he was catching. I waved; Lou smiled. We didn’t see many young guys. Now the sidewalk began. Power poles and streetlights. Stapled onto one of the power poles was large sheet of red paper with the word “NO” spray painted on it, in white. We looked at each other and laughed. NO, what? Might have had something to do with the news yesterday. Next, we noticed stenciled words on the sidewalks. Somebody had been making a trail of these stencils. They said “Follow Me” in more white spray paint. We started to look for them all the way to the Post Office. On every block, there were two or three of these stenciled messages. Things were starting to get interesting. Who did this? The Post Office was one street over from Main. I went in and gave our names, leaving Lou outside leaning on the window, watching the street, hanging out with Buddy. Walking back out, I carefully put our little books of funny money in the inside pocket of my pea coat. Some Kind of Shopping Lou was tired, I could see that. She was crouched down, resting, and leaning on Buddy who braced, sitting under the load. “Come on you two, we have to go to the so called store”

pBird (aka kabukinoir@tumblr)

More to come.

[hockstuff]

i found out that lane lambert is basically Barrys protege, he learned from barry ever since nashville. i cant tell if thats good or not, but the goalie coach leaving is making me worried.

i mean bottomline is we won’t know whether this hire is actually the right choice or not, until the new season starts. it’s all all depends on who’s on the team coming into the next season (trades, FA signings etc.) so it’s all a guessing game rn tbh!

i do have a few ~thoughts on this that i’ve been wanting to share but i was so so busy yesterday i didn’t have time but now i do, do let’s get into it!!!! this is just my opinion and the swirling thoughts i’ve had, all nonsensically put poorly into words so yeah just bear that in mind lmao

this got way longer than i thought it’d be, so i’m gonna put it all under the cut:

lambert is trotz’s protege, and has been by his side since nashville, yes BUT i don’t think this is as bad of a thing as some might think. lou really emphasized on the whole “new voice” thing and hiring lambert kinda waters down the seriousness of it all bc why fire trotz when you’re just gonna hire someone who’s almost just like him? personally, i think we’re gonna see a similar type of play with lambert but with a few tweaks. one could hope that those “tweaks” involve more offense and handling/developing younger players differently. from what i remember when he was behind the bench the few times trotz was out, the team did pretty decently (sample size too small to make a declaring observation but still). we gotta remember that he was the ASSISTANT coach to trotz so there would’ve been situations and decisions that lambert may have wanted to do differently that maybe barry went the other way. i think although he’s been under trotz for years, we’re gonna see a difference in the coaching style bc now he’s got the authority to make those ultimate decisions ya know?

speaking of coaching style, lambert makes the absolute most sense. most will think it’s bias bc he was already here as an assistant, and you know what? maybe so! but it’s actually the best way to go about this whole situation. isles fire trotz after finding growing success under him for 3 season prior to this season? when all the years pre-trotz era, the isles were constantly missing the playoffs not had any sort of identity? it’s all such a weird turn of events but i think lambert is the best option for whatever transition is coming (i wanna expand on this point so badly). you can’t really deny that isles amazing in a defensive structure and that it WORKS. the problem was that they need a defensive structure for those that thrived under it (brock is a greaaaat example for this!!) but also allowed for offensively-minded players (mat, wally) to not be so boxed-in within a system. we already know lambert had the defensive system down pat (he was literally the PK coach lmao) so there’s familiarity there, what we’re all hoping to see now is the space for players like mat and wally to play with their natural offensive instinct but still being defensively responsible. and call me optimistic, but i think we’ll get that good balance

and that balance is exactly what the isles need imo. the options for new a HC before lambert was announced was already slim pickings, and this may just totally be me, but changing the teams entire playing system with a new coach would’ve been a mistake. like i said, it not like the defensive system hasn’t worked before - it just needs to be adapted. could you imagine if isles got a whole new coach and tried to implement a system or style of play that the players aren’t used to? after having their current one drilled into their minds for like 4 years? next season would be a dumpster fire. and it’s not like the players would be incapable of adapting to it, what i’m saying is that it would take TIME. and taking that time to change every bit of this team’s identity seems unnecessary when you only need to adapt and readjust what’s currently there (with the players that we currently have)

the whole goalie coach situation makes me soooo nervous too!! bc if i had to pick something that’s been fairly consistent through everything, it’s the goaltending. and it’s all just speculation and rumors right now so we can just assume and hope that lou’s doing everything to try and keep mitch korn. but if he does end up going, we’d still have Greco who’s the goalie coach (korn is the director of goaltending). i have a feeling that if isles lose korn, there’s no way in hell lou’s trading varlamov (not that lou was all that sold on trading him anyway but ya know). WE SHALL WAIT AND SEE

ok this is getting too long so i’ll stop here and if you made read those all my nonsense then pls know i appreciate you oh so dearly <3

[sunflowerim]

I LOVE YOU 3000!

-PART 41

Harry was shook. It's like every good thing that had been happening came crashing down at once. And he couldn't even tell Louis. He'd understand. Of course he would, but he'd also get mad at his manager and he couldn't afford to see what would happen if Louis told his manager off.

How was he supposed to spend time with Louis and hide something this big? Louis would see right through him.

Harry checked the contract that was mailed to him. 2 month contact. Ends after the Oscars.

He had to manage everything for two months. He just didn't have a choice. He'd probably have to avoid Louis for the time being.

Tears welled up in his eyes at the mere thought of it. Harry had begun to feel like Louis was somewhat his family, and Louis came with the package of two adorable kids and a furry friend, who absolutely loved Harry. He couldn't do this alone. Harry really needed to see Louis, to hug him, to feel the assurance that no matter what, Louis wouldn't be mad. With a hard heart, he discarded that thought and at once set off for Niall's apartment- the only person he could turn to at this moment.

He crashed into Niall's apartment and over a tub of ice cream told him everything that had happened.

Niall was furious.

"How dare he? I could talk about his bitchy attitude on the radio and we'll see how THAT affects him."

"No Niall," Harry said between hiccups. He'd been crying for too long, "don't do anything. He told me not to tell anyone. And I suppose it'll be normal after 2 months."

"2 months Harry. You do realise that's long. 2 months brought you and Louis closer than ever and the same time could ruin things too."

"Don't say that," Harry whispered, breaking down again.

"I'm sorry Harry," Niall said, wrapping Harry in a comforting hug, "but you should talk to him-"

"I can't-"

"Then how do think you'll go on about this?"

"Perhaps I really need to cut down our interactions for a while."

"Not to be that person, but don't you think after yesterday, Louis will be expecting more of your presence?"

"I'll tell him I have work. I'll do anything. I don't want his career to come to harm because of me."

"I appreciate that Harry, but do you think you guys can talk it over?"

"No Ni, I just can't tell him about this."

"Okay okay," Niall continued in a soothing voice. "In that case I won't ask you anymore. Now let's bake something. It always gets your mind off things."

-

In the two days that followed, Louis actually got really busy at work, and Harry didn't have to make excuses for staying away. Although Louis did ask if Harry could come over and stay the night, but Harry excused himself saying that he was visiting his sister and so Louis didn't suspect a thing.

-

But on Wednesday, things changed a bit. Louis got off work in the evening and asked Harry if he wanted to grab pizza. Harry couldn't come up with a good excuse in time and truth be told, he didn't want to. He was already miserable and wanted to see Louis badly. Louis agreed to meet Harry at his house and when he finally reached Harry's door, he was surprised.

"What is all this?" Louis teased, "hoodie, beanie, sunglasses, mask, were going for pizza Harry, not to some mission as undercover agents."

"Oh I know, it's just, paps seem to get everywhere and I'm kinda tired, so-"

"Aw you poor thing, come here."

Louis spread his arms and Harry enveloped him in an instant, hugging Louis like his life depended on it. He didn't wanna let go, for the fear of not being able to do this again was eating him from inside.

Louis seemed to sense it.

"Everything okay Haz?" he asked, stroking Harry's curls. Harry's face was buried in Louis' neck and he hummed in response and Louis hugged him tighter.

After what felt like an eternity, Harry finally let go.

"Leave your car here. Let's walk."

Louis smiled but his brows furrowed the slightest. Harry seemed off.

They slowly walked down the lane to the pizza place 2 blocks away, their held hands swinging between them.

Louis tried to ask Harry if anything was bothering him, but Harry shoved it away, saying it's nothing and he was just tired.

For a moment Louis wondered if Harry regretted last night and was slowly distancing himself because of that. But that couldn't be right. Harry wouldn't be walking with him if he really did regret that.

Putting his worries aside, he tried to focus on the perfect weather and thought about staying back at Harry's place. Maybe some cuddles could make Harry feel better.

As they approached the destination, they suddenly heard some squeals. Looking to their right, they saw an excited bunch of people in the park next to the restaurant, running in their direction. They'd apparently spotted Harry over the fence and it surprised Louis how they'd managed to recognise him in this get up. Louis knew Harry was tired and tried to tug Harry inside quickly but to his surprise, Harry shook his hand free of Louis and stepped back. Louis was taken aback. If he could see Harry's eyes, he'd probably understand how apologetic Harry was, but those were hidden behind his shades.

"You go ahead, I'll come in a while."

Louis nodded and left, unable to give a proper reply, head clouded by a thousand thoughts.

Before disappearing inside the restaurant, Louis turned around once and saw Harry, mask off, talking to the fans and taking pictures, a smile plastered on his face.

He ordered a milkshake for him as he waited for Harry to join him.

As much as he tried not to think about what happened, it all kept coming back.

Why did Harry leave his hand like that? People already knew they were friends, it wouldn't have been a big deal.

Was Harry embarrassed of Louis?

Did he not want to be spotted with him?

Did Louis do something wrong?

Louis racked his brain to think of something he might have done that could upset Harry, but nothing came to mind.

The minutes were getting longer and Louis was growing impatient waiting for Harry.

His worst fears came to action when he got a call from Harry.

"Hey Lou," he panted, sounding exhausted.

"Harry, where are you? It's been almost thirty minutes, are they not leaving?"

"There's been a bit of problem, they weren't leaving, so I had to tell them that I'm heading back home. I didn't wanna crowd the restaurant. So I walked back towards home."

"Wha- are you kidding me?"

"I'm really sorry Lou, I'll make it up to you I promise. Please don't be mad."

Louis could feel Harry was lying, because the excuse was downright stupid.

Maybe his concerns were actually right. Maybe Harry was indeed avoiding him.

Louis cut the call with an abrupt "Yeah." He didn't know what to feel. Harry had left. Just like that. He was obviously upset at the fact that Harry was avoiding him, but he was more mad at himself. Why did he expect so much from Harry? Louis was clearly not Harry's type.

He tried to reason with himself, thinking that there surely must be a misunderstanding, something that was going on that Louis wasn't aware off. With the little hope he had left in him, he stood up and left for home. At least he's got Cliffy.

Harry, a sobbing mess, went straight to Niall's. He silently hoped Louis wouldn't be mad at him. He knew he'd upset Louis and that's the last thing he'd planned on doing but Harry didn't really have a control over things happening in his life anymore.

As if things could get any worse, even Niall wasn't home and his phone was out of reach. So Harry waited. It was an hour before Niall arrived and found Harry at his doorstep.

"Jesus, what happened?"

Harry burst into a sob upon seeing Niall and between hiccups and sobs managed to tell Niall everything.

"I told you to talk to him Harold. Avoiding him isn't a solution."

Niall let them inside and eventually stopped talking about it. Instead he made Harry a cup of hot chocolate and they both watched re-runs of How I Met Your Mother on the telly in silence.

Back in his apartment, Louis ate his dinner quietly and went to bed early. He didn't have a proper word to describe how he was feeling.

Last weekend had been so special. What changed.

He logged in to twitter from his burner account before going to sleep and the first post he saw, turned his emotions around pretty quickly.

Harry looked happy. Not uncomfortable, as he seemed with Louis. Maybe Louis was the problem.

For a brief second he wondered if he should talk to Zayn or Liam about it but then decided against it because Louis didn't like discussing problem of these type. If there was a misunderstanding, Harry and Louis would figure it out themselves.

PREVIOUS / NEXT

INTRO

[gcar90]

Blades of Grass Written by Carmen Ella Dedicated to Betty Lou; From a family that loves her

Naomi’s feet flew across the pavement as she raced into her school.  She hadn’t realized she was this far behind in her morning schedule until she glanced up at the clock and discovered that it was 10 minutes until  the start of her first class.  Panicked, she dashed off.  Naomi would be fine if she could make it to her seat before the bell rang.  If she was late, she might get a detention slip and that could jeopardize volleyball.  Miles of hallway remained before she would reach her destination, on top of stopping to get her books from her locker.  She needed to focus and hustle. Naomi huffed and puffed, weaving in and out of lanes of students, all moving at different speeds. Naomi couldn’t help but feel a little frustrated at the situation.  She couldn't figure out how she'd gotten herself so late.  The last thing Naomi remembered was walking across the street to the gas station for a soda.  After that, nothing, until she woke up this morning and was super late. With her goal in sight, Naomi checked her watch.  Score! Less than one minute left and the teacher was nowhere in sight.  There was plenty of time to be in her seat, before the bell rang, avoiding a tardy.   One final sprint and Naomi collapsed in her seat, resting her head of her table, trying to catch her breath.   It was too early in the morning to get so worked up and so exhausted.   Naomi reached for her purse, hoping to retrieve a water bottle for a drink.  Naomi heard the familiar muffled chatter and whispers of students waiting for class to begin.  She had a weird feeling.  Naomi shot a bewildered look at the clock.  Naomi been sitting for 20 minutes past the first bell of the day, but it hadn't rang.  Class didn't start.  Looking around the room, Naomi saw that the room was only half full of other students coming and going as they please, all while the teacher observed, subdued, from his desk.  Echoing from every corner in the room, sniffling, crying, and words of sympathy was heard.  Something was definitely wrong.  Naomi saw that her two best friends were drifting in through the open door.  She rose to go greet them.  “Guys!  What’s - -”  Naomi passed right through her friends.  “Huh?”  She shivered. “They can’t see or hear you,” answered a calm voice from the hall . What?  Why?“  Naomi jumped at the strange voice.  “Who are you?” “Hello, Naomi.“  A tall, plain woman stepped forward.  “Listen closely to what your friends and classmates are saying as we pass.” Naomi focuses on a nearby conversation.  Two students are talking.  Someone had been killed in an accident.  Naomi nods, still not putting all the pieces together.  She turned to the strange woman.  “Who are you?  How do you know my name?”   “My name is Judy.“  The woman smiles, trying to put Naomi at ease.  “I know your name because my niece is in your class.” “Your niece?”  Naomi follows Judy as she begins moving away down the hall. “Uh-huh.”  Judy points to an awkward girl with hair in her face.  The girl is sobbing and crying pretty hard.  “That’s her.” “The weird girl?“  Naomi makes a face.  “Nobody wants to be friends with her.”  Naomi blushed, changing her tone.  “Uh… sorry.  She’s your niece?” Judy smirked.  “Yes, she does have the reputation of being a bit, doesn’t she.  She is my niece.  Her name is Tressa.  I’ve been watching out for her.” “Watching out?”  Naomi cried.  “What do you mean?  And how come nobody can see or hear me?”  Naomi sits on a bench, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “Oh, honey.”  Judy goes over to Naomi and puts an arm around her shoulder.  “There’s no reason to cry.  I know this is all confusing and frustrating.  It’s okay.  I seem to have forgotten how unsettling all this can be for someone new to this experience.”   Naomi allows herself to be embraced by Judy, holding onto the woman, grateful for the solace.  Her attention wavers to some students are sitting against the wall.  They are telling stories.  A name drifts by Naomi.  Her own name.  “Judy, am… am I dead?” Naomi blinks, rapidly. Judy nods. “NOOOOO!”  Naomi began to wail and cling to Judy.  She trembled with each sobs. “There there, I know.“  Judy holds the girl tight, rocking her.  “Go ahead, sweetie, let it out.” Naomi cries for hours.  “How?” she squeaked. “Take this, baby-girl.“  Judy offered Naomi a silk, embroidered, handkerchief.  “How?’  You mean how did you die?” Naomi took the hanky, blowing her nose into it.  Folding and crumpling the tissue into her fist, Naomi wipes her tears with her shirt sleeve. “Remember when you went on your walk, yesterday?”  Judy, frankly, explained.  “You were hit by a car crossing the street.  The driver was drunk and going too fast.  By the time the police and ambulance arrived, your life was over.  I’m sorry, Naomi.” “Sorry?”  Naomi stared.   Judy nodded.  “Yes.  It’s a tragedy whenever a life so young is lost.  That’s why all your friends and classmates are like this.  They’re mourning.” “Mourning.”  Naomi repeated, then blinked, furrowing her brow.  “Is this Heaven?  Shouldn't I be in Heaven?  What is all this?” “No, this isn’t Heaven.  ”  Judy said.  “All we know about heaven, is that it is paradise.  But different people have different ideas on what that paradise is.  Like a city person would imagine Heaven to be a big city, with lots of buildings and streets of gold and people everywhere.  A country person might see Heaven as a beautiful garden.  Heaven can be something different to everyone, based on who's imagining it.  The only thing we know for certain, is that Heaven is a place where there is no pain or suffering.  As for what it physically looks like, the living cannot know.” “Is God here?”  Naomi asked.  “Am I going to meet Him?  Does He even exist?” “Oh, God exists.”  Judy explained.  “God is everywhere and everything.  It knows all, sees all, and does all.  In a way, you've already met it.” “It?  I thought God is a man.” “God is everywhere and everything.  Why shouldn't God be male and female or even a gender God chooses for itself?  God decides all things, right?” “I guess.”  Naomi slumped on her bench.   “Yes.”  Judy explained.  I am one of the guardian angels.   Do you know what a guardian angel is?” “Yeah.“  Naomi sat up, nodding.  “They are angels that are specifically designed to protect and guard the living .  My grand-”  Naomi choked back a sob.  “My gran-gran told me that for every blade of grass in there world, there is a guardian angel. ” “That's right.”  Judy pats Naomi on the shoulder.   “Is there something I'm supposed to do?  How do I...?”  Naomi trailed off. “I’ll show you what to do and how to do it,.  When you find who you're supposed to take care of you’ll take it from there and go off on your own.”  Judy returned.   “Thank you.”  Naomi felt small and numb. “Have faith, sweetie.”  Judy smiled.  “Everything will work itself out.  You'll see.” “Mmmm”  Naomi whined, “I don't want to be alone.  Since your the only one that can see or hear me, c-can I stay with you?” “Of course, honey.”  Judy smiled hope.  “I'll be more than happy to help you. Me and Grandpa.” “Grandpa?”  Naomi asked. “Grandpa Fred.  My father's father.”  Judy chirped.  “He takes care of my sister.  Tressa's mother.” Naomi went quiet for a bit.  “Do guardian angels always guard their families?” “Not always.“  Judy bit her bottom lip.  “Grandpa was guarded by great-grandpa's old army buddy.  Angels can wind up guarding anyone.” “How...”  Naomi started and gave up, defeated. “It's all new and shocking, now.“  Judy encouraged  “Give yourself time.  You'll feel better, soon.” “If you say so.”  Naomi stated. “Time,”  Judy intoned, patting Naomi on the back.  “It'll get better and eventually, someday, you'll be ready to take care of someone yourself.  You'll see.”   Judy got up from the bench to follow Tressa, as she wandered down the hall.  Naomi rose, shuffling along after her.  By the end of the day, she was still miserable.   Joining Tressa on her bus, Judy sensed Naomi's mood.  “Maybe you'd like to give yourself a little makeover?” “Makeover?”  Naomi half-whispered. “If you close your eyes and concentrate, you can make yourself appear older, more mature.”  Judy explained.  “Like you would look if you had lived to adulthood.” Naomi stared past Judy. “Give it a try,”  Judy chirped.  “You don't want to look like a scrawny, awkward, teenager, forever, do you?” Naomi sighed resignation.  She closed her eyes.  Forcing herself to focus, she imagined herself older.  Like if she was in her mid-twenties instead of her mid-teens.   “Very nice.”  Judy crooned after a few minutes. Naomi opened her eyes.  Still blah.  She glanced in the mirror above the bus driver.  “Huh.”  She mused,  “I look a little like my mom.” “Feel better?”  Judy asked.   Naomi paused.  “A little,” she admitted.   “You'll be okay, honey.”  Judy smiled. After a short ride, Naomi and Judy departed the bus at Tressa's stop.  Tressa slung her bag over her shoulder, hopped down the steps, landing with both feet on the pavement below.  Judy and Naomi descended the bus with a little more dignity.  From there, Tressa walked to her apartment with her head down and her hand in her pocket, fumbling for the right key.  Naomi couldn’t keep herself from chuckling at the odd way Tressa moved and walked.  It was as if the girl were in a world of her own.   Naomi couldn't help but laugh at the antics of the girl.  Suddenly, she stood face to face with heavy steel. “HEY!”  Naomi pounded on the door. “Not a problem.”  Judy took Naomi’s hand and passed through the door.  “A locked door is no problem for us.” “Oh.”  Naomi mumbled, then blushed.   “MOM, I’M HOME!“  Tressa entered her apartment and dropped her bag on the floor.   Not hearing an answer, Tressa found a note and some money on the kitchen table.  Tressa shrugged, tossing the note out.  Tressa grabbed a can.  She left the money for her mom to reclaim later.  Then, she started her homework. Naomi was surprised at the speed with which Tressa worked.  “It used to take me forever to do all my work.   How does she do it?” “Tressa has an odd mind.”  Judy explained.  “Most of what she writes down for notes and in class, she remembers.  So, she doesn’t bother too much with the textbook.” Tressa turned on the TV and sacked-out on the couch. Naomi and Judy joined her,.  “So, is there anything else for us to do, besides hanging with the person we’re supposed to take care of?” “Not really.”  Judy replied.  “It’s pretty boring being dead.” “Is there anyway we can interact or communicate with Tress?”  Naomi wondered aloud “To a certain degree,”  Judy commented,“ if the person you're taking care of is really sensitive, we can leave some impressions.  You've heard of instinct?” Naomi nodded.   The front door opened,  Tressa’s mother entered the apartment, followed by a middle-aged gentleman with a paunch and bib overalls.  While Tressa and her mother greeted one another, Judy ran over to her grandfather, and gave the man a big hug.  Naomi hung back, fidgeting. “Grandpa!”  Judy exclaimed.   “SPROUT!”  Judy’s grandfather returned her hug, then, he noticed Naomi.  He straightened his posture,  then took his big, floppy, straw hat into his hands, and ran hand through his salt and pepper hair.  “Ma’am.” “Hi, I’m Naomi.”   Naomi extended her hand towards the man. “Nice to meet you.” Fred wiped his hand on the front of his coveralls before shaking hands with Naomi.   “Name’s Fred.” “I met Judy at Tressa’s school.  I was student there.”  Naomi explained. Fred nodded.  “I understand.  Has Judy been helping you out?  Explaining everything?” “Yes, Judy was very kind and helpful, sir.” Naomi answered.  “I don’t think I could have made it without her.” “That's a good girl.”  Fred beamed at Judy.  “You do not have to call me sir ma'am. Call me Fred, miss.” “Sure.”  Naomi returned Fred's infectious smile.  “Call me Naomi.”   Naomi studied the man before her.  He had the appearance and subtle accent of an early 20th century midwestern farmer, yet not as old as she expected him to be.  “E-excuse me s-, I mean, Fred,”  Naomi tried,“ if you're Judy's grandfather, shouldn't you be older?” “Didn't Judy explained the age trick?”  Fred’s eyes twinkled at Naomi's nod.  He replaced his hat.  “It works for us old folks, too.”  He brushed his knuckles along his temple, careful not to knock off his hat.  “How do I look, Naomi?” “Fine, Fred.“  Naomi blushed.  “I was a little upset when I found out I had died.” “Everybody is.”  Fred grinned.  “You should have seen Judy.  She was crying like a baby.” “I was a baby, Grandpa.”  Judy chuckled.  “He loves telling that joke.”   Naomi joined in on the laugh with Fred and Judy.   “I was stillborn,”  Judy explained, staring off into the distance.  “Mom developed, something called, preeclampsia .”  Judy looked down.  “Neither Mom nor me were the same afterwards.” “Did Judy tell you about finding your own person to guard, Naomi?”  Fred changed the subject.   Naomi shook her head, grateful to leave Judy to her sad memory. “Basically,”  Fred began,“ every person is on a journey; a path they could follow.  Other people pass by or cross that path.  Doctors, teachers, fellow students, co-workers, passersby on the street.  A person could come into contact with countless people as they go through life.” Naomi nods, considering. “At some point,”  Fred continued, “while you and Judy are working together to take care of Tressa, she will come into contact with someone that needs you as their angel.  When that time comes, you'll go off with that person, leaving Judy and Tressa.” “How will I know, if I'll supposed to go with somebody.”  Naomi asked. “It's difficult to explain,”  Fred affirmed.  “You'll know.  Trust.  Judy will help.  And I will, too, for as long as I can.” “For as long as you can?”  Naomi was confused. Fred nodded.  “I am responsible for Tressa's mother.  Tressa is a child.  Tressa will grow up, move away,  live her own life.  When that happens, you and Judy will go with her, but I will have to stay.” Naomi frowned. “But...” “That's the way it is.”  Fred shrugged.  “You'll be okay.  It won't be forever.  Tressa , in her adult age, will visit her mother.  When she visits, we can visit.” “Mmmm,” Naomi grunted, understanding. “And then,” Fred reminded,“ when Tressa and you meet the person you are to take care of, you'll go off to take care of them.” Naomi nodded, solemnly.  It was overwhelming, a lot to take in.  She elected to let the information sit.  Whatever happens, will happen.  She'll trust and have faith.  She'll figure it out.   For the moment, she was grateful to have Fred and Judy around.  Naomi doubted that she could do this if she was alone.  She managed a ghost of a smile, her thoughts drifting. ~~~~ As Tressa  matured, the camaraderie between the three guardian angels had grown.  When they weren’t protecting Tressa or her mother they would keep themselves entertained.  Fred would share stories and slyly inappropriate jokes.  Judy would sing; Naomi would dance.  Naomi felt like one of the family.  She regarded  Fred as grandpa and Judy as auntie.  It was as if she had always belonged.   One day, Tressa was an adult and found herself with a job and a place all her own.  She was collecting the last of her things from her old home.  Her mother stood by watching, a wadded tissue in her hands.  Both mother and child reassured each other that things would be all right.  Tressa promised to visit; her mother promised Tressa  she would always have a home with her.  Unseen by the living, the dead were sharing farewells of their own.   Tears fell.  Embraces tightened.  Judy and Naomi each gave Fred a kiss on either side of his face.  None wanted to part; yet, that always happens when children grow up.  Fred honked his nose into a red hankie with white polka-dots, then clapped the girls on their shoulders.  “You’d better go,” his gravel voice, said.  “You don’t want to lose track of Tressa.” “We won’t lose her, Grandpa.”  Judy reassured. Naomi dabbed her eyes with her sleeve.  “I don’t want to go.” “I know, baby-girl.“  Fred patted Naomi on the shoulder.  “But you’ll be okay.  You’re both fine, smart girls.  You’ll be fine.  Besides, this goodbye may not be forever.” Naomi hugged Fred.  “Hmmm.”  She whined. “Chin up.”  Fred said.  “Tressa will come back to visit her mother.  When they visit, we’ll visit.” “That’s right.”  Judy joined Naomi in hugging Fred. Tressa climbed into her car, starting it.  Judy and Naomi, reluctantly, released Fred, and crammed themselves into the vehicle alongside Tressa’s stuff.  The girls hung out the window, waving, as they drove away.  “Hope to see you soon, Grandpa!”   “Good luck, girls!”  Fred returned the wave.  “And trust God!” ~~~~ Tressa was speeding towards work.  Judy and Naomi were in the backseat.  All were anxious and tense. “Why didn’t you remind her to set her alarm?!”  Judy hissed. “I can only do so much!”  Naomi spit back.  “She’s so scatterbrained to begin with, it’s hard to get the right frequency to reach her.” Judy scanned the vista.  “I just hope we don’t run into a - -” A siren sounds.  Tressa checks her rear view mirror, curses, and pulls the car over. “Cop.”  Both angels buried their faces in their hands. “Maybe we can beat the ticket.”  Naomi sounded more hopeful than she was. “Unlikely,” Judy responded.  “We were really flying.  I hope she doesn’t lose her job over the ticket.” “Yeah.”  Naomi nodded.  “Last time she got a ticket, her boss said that if she got any more points on her license, she’d be fired.” The angels quieted, watching Tressa roll down her window to talk to the officer. “License, proof of insurance, and registration, ma’am.”  The cop stated. “Y-yes, sir,”  Tressa whimpered.  “It’s all in my glove box.” Tressa watched the cop nod, then reached for the information.  With all documents in hand, the officer walked back to his vehicle.  Tressa took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. “She really hates the idea of being in trouble, doesn't she?”  commented Naomi. “Been that way all her life.,”  replied Judy.  “If her parents called her or if she'd been sent to the principal’s office she'd blow the situation up in her mind.  She’d be terrified.  Fear kept her from a lot of things.” Naomi blinked.  “Why’s she so scared?” Judy shrugged an answer.  The angels watched, anxious, as the policeman made his slow walk back to Tressa's window,.  All three of the girls had their fingers crossed and all their faces fell, when a ticket was included in the documents. Tressa smiled, crookedly. “Thank you, sir.”  She tossed the papers onto her passenger seat, put the car in gear, and drove away at a much slower speed. “But why?”  Naomi still didn’t understand.  “The worst that could happen here is she gets a ticket.” “You and I know that,”  Judy said.  “But in Tressa’s mind, she’s getting a ticket, being arrested, taken to jail, facing a judge, and being sentenced to life in prison.” “What’s that?”  Naomi noticed some writing on the back of the ticket.  She manipulated the wind to turn the ticket over.  “Traffic School…” “Traffic school?”  Judy peered over Naomi’s shoulder to read.  “If Tressa attends traffic school, she can remove points from her license.” “Mmm.“  Naomi nodded, glancing toward Tressa’s intent expression.  “The paper’s in a good position for her to see it when she stops and picks it up.” “Mmm-hmm.”  Judy agreed.  “She needs to read this.” Tressa parked and ran, on foot, into her job.  Five minutes later, she reappeared, face red, head down, and tears streaming down her cheeks. Judy frowned. “Not good.” “At least they didn’t fire her.”  Naomi said. “Yes.”  Judy agreed.  “It was considered a no call/no show.  She can’t do that anymore.” Tressa bent to get back into her car and Judy tapped the upside down speeding ticket laying on the seat.  Tressa noticed the paper.  She picked it up, read it, flipped it over, and came to a decision.  “Traffic School…”  she murmured.   Traffic School was basically a condensed version of Driver’s Education.  It  takes place over the course of a single day.  They go over the Rules of the Road, administer written and driving tests. Any violations get either wiped completely from a driver’s record or lessened.  There was a fee for the course, but the cost would be the same as if she paid the ticket outright.   Tressa drove home to call the number on the back of the ticket to get directions and a schedule for the next session of the Traffic School.  The next class day was two days away, on payday.  Tressa decided to go for the class and swung by  the Department of Motor Vehicles to pick up the class book. Until the day of traffic School, Naomi and Judy focused hard, to make sure Tressa studied.  Most of the time, Tressa was reliable.  But she could get easily distracted.  With her, Judy and Naomi had to keep on their toes. Finally, the day of Traffic School arrived and a miracle occurred.   She awoke bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a half hour before her alarm.  Judy and Naomi were flabbergasted.  Even the drive to the school went smooth.  (Tressa can get so unsure of herself, she becomes daffy with directions, getting lost easily).  The only explanation Judy and Naomi could come up with:  something special was about to happen.  They decided to sit back, and watch what happens next. Tressa arrived at the class early.  She wanted the seat closest to the door,.  However, there was already someone else there.  Something about this person seemed interesting to both Tressa and Naomi.  Judy noticed, but didn’t think anything of it.  It was rare for Tressa to seek friendship.  When she felt compelled to make a new friend, if Judy didn’t feel any danger, she encouraged it.  Judy assumed Naomi was interested, because Tressa was.  Either way, she let the encounter happen. “Hi.”  Tressa was polite.  Tressa would never think or say that someone was strange, since Tressa had been teased so much about being weird.  Still, the person before her was unique:  clearly female, but her style was very masculine.  Tressa took an immediate liking to the strange girl.   “Sup”came the reply. Both Judy and Tressa leaned in.  “I don’t get this guy,.”  Judy mused to Naomi. “Girl.”  Naomi stated. “Girl?“  Judy blinked at Naomi.  “How can you tell?  It looks like a man.” “I don’t know,”  Naomi remained firm, “but that’s a girl.” “My name’s Tressa.”  Tressa smiled.  Guy or girl, it didn't matter.  This person was interesting.  That was all Tressa cared about.  Tressa knew they would be friends. “Frieda.”  The girl introduced herself. Naomi grinned with pride.  “Told ya.”  Naomi taunted. “So you did.”  Judy rolled her eyes.  “What else do you know about her?” “Hard to tell.”  Naomi wrinkled her brow.  “Something about her makes me sad.  She’s been through a lot and hasn’t really had anyone there to help or do anything or keep her safe.” “What do you mean?”  Judy puzzled. “I…”  Naomi frowned at the floor.  “I think I might go with her at the end of Traffic School.” Judy’s jaw dropped, then she set it, again.  “If you’re sure.” “Yeah.”  Naomi wiped a tear from her eye.  “I’m sorry, but I am sure.” “You have nothing to be sorry about.”  Judy put an arm around Naomi.  “You have to go where you have to go.  It’s okay.  I understand.” “Thank you.“  Naomi returned Judy’s hug.  “I’m going to miss you.” “I know.”  Judy patted Naomi on the shoulder, then noticed the way Tressa and Frieda were interacting.  “Maybe you won’t miss me too much.” “What do you mean?”  Naomi wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Judy pointed. “They seem to like each other.  Maybe they'll hang out and be friends.”   It was Naomi’s turn for her jaw to hang open.  “Has Tressa ever reacted like that with anyone else?” Judy shook her head.  “Not that I’ve seen.  Tressa’s always been shy.  She’s never the first person to greet someone new.” “Look at that!“  Naomi beamed when she saw Tressa and Frieda exchange numbers, email, and addresses.   “I can see.”  Judy squealed in delight.  Her hopes were lifting.  Judy hoped she wasn't fooling herself. Something in her said that she was seeing magic happen.  She had grown with Naomi.  It was bittersweet to say goodbye. When Frieda got up at the end of class, Naomi, Tressa, and Judy joined her.  When the four girls reached the parking lot,  the living and the dead shared hugs.  The living shared new friendship and joy.  The dead expressed farewell and sorrow.   The four parted and separated into couples, both going their own ways. Everyone needs help, sometimes.  There are angels; enough guardian angels for all the blades of grass in the world.

[stellar-imagines]

HEADCANONS REQUEST: ❝driving.❞

[ Fandom: Boku no Hero Academia ] [ Characters: Midoriya Izuku, Bakugou Katsuki, Todoroki Shouto, Shinsou Hitoshi ]

「Driving headcanons of Midoriya, Bakugou, Todoroki and Shinsou.」

MIDORIYA IZUKU

♤ He's a careful driver. Abides all the rules and all that. Instead of watching the traffic lights, he pays more attention to the people crossing the street, waiting for all them to cross. Midoriya is an angel from heaven and no one can tell us otherwise.

♤ He's really, really, really scared when it comes to parking. At least, in the early stages he was. The first time he was told to park the car, he ran over a sign and was depressed for like a day or two. Now, he's parking with great concentration. He makes sure that he doesn't go out of the lines and all that.

♤ This boy is so sweet, oh my god. Someone cuts in front of him, he's not even mad. Someone steals his parking spot, he's not mad either. Seriously, is there anything that makes this boy mad on the road? Maybe, but so far no one was able to point it out.

♤ The type of driver that is overly cautious, polite and generous. His posture when he drives is tense and stiff, hands a bit sweaty from how nervous he is. The one who lets people cut in front of him.

BAKUGOU KATSUKI

☆ Contrary to the belief and to what most people expect from Lord Explosion Murder a.k.a Bakugou Katsuki, he's actually a careful driver. He may seem angry all the time but he values safety and ensures that all rules and regulations are followed. He's the driver that knows most of the roads & shortcuts. Driving in a storm may prove to be a challenge but Bakugou can handle that!

☆ Honks, honks, honks most of the damn time. A car going way too slow in front of him? Honk. A car cutting in front of him without giving any sort of signal that makes him hit the brakes? Honk. And when a car in front of him decides to just fucking break all of a sudden?

☆ This guy when driving behind a slow car, doesn't hesitate to switch lanes abruptly. One second he's cursing and the other, he's already switching his turning signal on while he kept his attention on the rear view mirror.

☆ Textbook impatient driver. Going over the speed limit on empty roads. Passive-aggressive too, will yell at everyone and will not hesitate to call out on slow drivers and drivers who take forever to park properly. Surprisingly, rarely gets in accidents.

TODOROKI SHOUTO

♡ Todoroki is the calmest driver out of everyone. He doesn't talk that much when he drives and prefers a silent atmosphere when he's driving. However, if he's driving with someone, he doesn't mind having light conversations and some music playing in the background. He goes at his own pace.

♡ Rarely honks! Only uses it when necessary or by accident. Todoroki is a rather patient person but when he's in a foul mood, he might a bit more aggressive with his driving. Of course, not to the point he's cursing like Bakugou. Unlike Bakugou who knows most of the roads, Todoroki doesn't know that much shortcuts. He uses navigation from time to time or seeks advice from whoever he's with.

♡ He doesn't drive that often because he thinks its a hassle. At peak hours, roads are pretty much packed and it's not much different with peak hours in train stations. He's not a fan of crowded spaces and he doesn't like sitting in the car for a very long time. 

♡ He's a mix of Midoriya and Bakugou. Todoroki is a patient driver, staying at his lane and rarely cuts anyone. At the same time, he gets really irritated at slow drivers but that's when he's in a hurry or in a bad mood.

SHINSOU HITOSHI

♧ This guy needs music to drive. He's the driver who has his own playlist for driving, the audio system is connected to his phone via bluetooth. Why does he need music? So he won't fall asleep, obviously. Despite being quite an antisocial guy, he actually prefers having someone with him when he's driving.

♧ Drives one handed, not because he's lazy or anything like that but it's because he's relaxed when he's driving. He doesn't feel the need to be so tense when driving and believes that it's one of the reasons why people get into accidents. Shinsou is a calm driver, he knows the roads and drives at a reasonable pace.

♧ A very adaptable driver, can drive in different conditions. Rain, traffic, he manages to get to his destination despite all odds. He can get distracted too, mainly from stray cats that he encounters in the middle of the road.

♧ Shinsou doesn't have a preference for when he likes to drive. He can tolerate traffic, as long as he's not alone, accompanied by someone and his music. But there are times where he wishes he could just fly over all the cars.

Total: 828 words Published: 7.2.2020

Thank you for requesting! *｡٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و*｡ Someone asked me why I’m so confident when it comes to writing for Bakugou *cough* Shina *cough* The reason why is that I have an older brother who has the exact same personality as our local explodo boy thus, making my job easier :D This request was fairly easy because my brother has dried me around town often :3 ― author Hibiki/Lou

Thank you for requesting! Hello, it’s been two months since our absence and I want to apologize for the both of us. Lou is sick with a sore throat and is currently resting so I’m in charge of publishing this request. So, I hope you all enjoyed it. Sorry for the long wait. ― author Natsuki

Please do not mind the grammar mistakes and typos.

[noladyme]

Skip To My Lou, My Darling - Chapter 6, Beware My Frozen Heart I

The road so far…

Finding out that their connection is real, and not forced upon them by celestial powers, Dean and Lulu have embraced their feelings – and years of pining can now end. Now Dean must find a way to deal with Lulu’s decision to be a hunter, with the dangers that entails.

Our story continues in season 8

Tag list (Let me know if you want to be added) @edonaspanca​ @wonderlandfandomkingdom​

I

63 years ago.

It’s so cold out here, but her feet are too sore to wear her shoes. Not that it matters anyway; they’re soaked from the snow. The crown is digging into her scalp, and she dropped her sash a mile back. She just needs her coat; and then she can go home. And maybe she misunderstood what the others told her. Maybe he’s alone, and just waiting for her.

There’s his car! She walks up to it, removes the crown from her head, and looks through the window. There he is… with her. Why her? And why are they…? No… The night is like a lovely tune. Beware my foolish heart. How white the ever-constant moon. Take care my foolish heart…

She drops the crown in the snow, and walks back towards the bridge. The dance is over.

---

I was splayed over Deans chest – my breath still ragged from my last climax. “Say it again”, Dean demanded. “I’ve already said it a hundred times”, I chuckled. “Just one more time… Please…”. “Led Zeppelin rules…”, I sighed. Dean squeezed me tight, and kissed the top of my head. “God, I love you”, he smiled.

There was a knock at the door. “Dean!”, Sam called. “Don’t come in, I’m busy!”, Dean answered. There was a pause. “Dude, just… have you seen Lulu? I can’t find her…”. “He said, he’s busy!”, I yelled. Dean snickered. There was another pause. “Ok… I’m just gonna… go now”, Sam replied. I heard him move down the hallway.

“We should get dressed…”, I said. “That’s the worst idea you’ve had all day”, Dean grunted, and locked his arms around me, so I couldn’t move. “Counting the one where I was about to sell my soul into eternal damnation?”, I smiled. He raised a brow at me. “That one’s a close second”, he muttered; his eyes slightly harder than they had been a second ago. “I’m still pissed about that”. I kissed his chest, and wriggled my body out of his grasp. “I’m sure I can find about a thousand other things to piss you off, that I’ve done, and will do”, I smiled, and crawled out of the bed, in search of my underwear.

Having put back on my panties, I found my bra draped over a shotgun on the wall. Dean handed me my jeans with an unhappy expression. “You know, I’m not happy about that whole vampire situation either”, he muttered, and pulled his boxers over his still very firm behind. “That wasn’t very smart”. “Tammy was there. She’s a good hunter”, I said. “She was also a demon”, Dean grunted; putting on his t-shirt. It was my turn to frown from the lack of skin he was showing. “I didn’t know that at the time”, I retorted. “And it turned out ok in the end”. He raised a brow at me. “That bandage on your neck says otherwise”, he sneered. “Can we just… not do this, for five minutes? Please?”, I sighed. Dean nodded, and the corner of his lips twitched into a smile.

As I stood up from having put on my boots, Dean’s arm snaked around my belly from behind, and he kissed the back of my head. “You wanna keep room 13? Or just settle in here...”. I frowned, and didn’t know how to answer in a way that he’d like. “Lou?”, he muttered. I sighed, and turned around; looking into his worried eyes. “I… can’t”, I said. Dean’s jaw dropped. “You said you wouldn’t leave”, he breathed. “And I’m not… not really”, I said. “But I still have to go do my job”. Dean shook his head in confusion. “Alone? No. You can work from here. Do research for us. It’d still be hunting”, he tried. I raised my brows. “Barefoot and hopefully not pregnant in the library? That’s where you see me?”, I asked. He shrugged. “You can use the switchboard room if you like it better”, he said. I stroked his cheek. “You know that’s not happening”, I smiled. “Dean, I’m…”. “Not ready. That’s what you are”. I sighed deeply. “Is this how it’s always going to be? Either we have sex, or we fight?”. “As long as you keep making crappy decisions, yeah!”, Dean grumbled.

I took his hand. “Look… I get that you worry about me. And I love that you do… But I’m not yours. I can make my own decisions”. “Thinking that I had the perfect woman specially built for me was kind of bigheaded”, Dean muttered. “Yeah, I know”, I smirked. “Like I’m not my own person with my own independent thoughts and choices”. Dean nodded a shrug. “You’re right”. “Like the choice to…”. “You’re not hunting alone”.

I let go of his hand, and went over to the door; sick of the conversation. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea”, he tried; as he followed me down the hallway, pulling on the flannel shirt he was carrying. “You’re never going to think it’s a good idea”, I chuckled, and took the shirt from him. “That’s mine, by the way”. “You’re right about that”, he muttered. “I won’t”.

We stepped into the library. Sam looked up from Bobby’s journal. “Already fighting again?”, he muttered. “She wants to go hunting alone”, Dean grunted. “Tell her it’s a bad idea!”. Sam looked between us. “I’m not getting involved”, he muttered.

“You finished with my book?”, I asked; trying to change the subject. “Yeah, I think I got all we could from it, while you two were… uhm… whatever”, Sam muttered. “I know it wasn’t any of my business, but I couldn’t help but look into the box you brought. What are you working on?”. I had almost forgot about my case. “Oh, uhm… some sort of white lady, I think. Maybe a weird phantom hitchhiker. I’m not sure”. “What have you got?”, Dean muttered.

I pulled up some old death records and articles. “Every year since 1950, like clockwork, young women disappear from lover’s lane, near Sioux Falls. People report to have seen a woman on the bridge nearby, on the day of the disappearings”. I pulled out a picture of teenaged girl. “She matches the description of this young woman, Annie Jones, who died that year, to a T. A few days later the women are found dead under the bridge, near where the first girl was found”. “Sure it’s not a serial killer?”, Sam asked. “A geriatric murderer? Bobby didn’t think so…”, I said. “This is his old case?”, Dean frowned. I nodded.

“Besides, freezing someone to death seems like a lot of work for a really old killer”. I handed Sam the pile of death records. He looked them over. “Hypothermia… Hypothermia again… All during springtime. Yeah, this seems like our kind of weird”, Sam muttered; letting Dean take a look over his shoulder. “Jodi had the box in her basement. Bobby had been trying to help her solve the case, but didn’t have a chance to finish it up”. “Great!”, Dean smiled. “You finish your research on this then. Stay here. We have wifi and coffee. You’ll be all set up! Me and Sam can go take this thing down”.

I shook my head. “It should be another 2 weeks or so before whatever this is happens again. I was just getting a head start”, I said. I looked at Sam. “Sam, come on… You packed that bag for me. You know I’m ready!”, I pleaded. “He what?”, Dean snarled. “Sam!”. He looked at his brother with angry eyes. “She’s gonna hunt either way. Been doing it for a year”, Sam said. “I just made sure she had the right equipment”.

Cass came in to the room, carrying a tray of steaming mugs, and some fruit. “I prepared some nourishment for you all. Sam has been working hard; and you two have been spending your energy on…”. “Yeah… thanks, Cass”, I muttered. “Did you hear what she’s planning to do?”, Dean said. Castiel nodded. “I have excellent hearing. Lulu is going to hunt. And she thinks Led Zeppelin rules”. Dean frowned. “And you think that’s a perfectly awesome idea?”, he grunted. “You spent months – years even – watching over her. And now you’re gonna just let her hunt alone?”. “He wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t asked him”, I sneered.

Castiel smiled softly. “Yes I would have, Lulu. You’re my friend. I want you safe”. Dean smiled. “Cass agrees. You’re not going”, he said. “Oh, I think she should go”, the angel said. “But not alone”. My jaw dropped. “What?”, I asked. “If Sam and Dean goes with you, you’ll be safer”, Castiel smiled. “But they have work here…”. Sam ran a hand over his tired face. “Actually, there’s not a lot we can do right now”, he said. “Kevin’s still working on the translation of the tablet. We might as well keep busy with something else”.

Dean seemed to think it over. “All right”, he exclaimed. “Guess we’re going to Sioux Falls”. I chewed my lip. “You weren’t exactly invited to the party…”, I muttered. “Suck it up. You’re not going without us”, Dean said. I rolled my eyes. “Lou, I will tie you up in our dungeon. Don’t test me”. His eyes were sending me a warning, that was half serious, half mischievous. “Maybe some other time”, I grunted; the corner of my lip twitching. “Fine”.

Dean’s face lit up. “Awesome! Whip out the Karate Kid soundtrack. Time for a training montage…”. “What?”, I frowned. “Lou, you wanna hunt? You gotta train first”. “What do you call the three demon-vampires I took out last night? And the ghosts I’ve been taking down all year…”. “Dumb luck”, he grunted. “And sloppy as hell”. I laughed sarcastically. “You want to fight me? Hand to hand combat?”, I asked. “Hell yeah. Test your skills”, Dean said smugly. “I’m gonna enjoy this”, I smirked.

---

About an hour later, Dean had me in the gym; testing my skills – and my patience.

“Again!”, he growled; after he’d nailed me to the wall, with his hands around my neck for the fifth time. I pushed him off me. “This isn’t fair”, I sneered. “Monsters don’t play fair”, Dean smirked. “Again!”. I took a stance in front of him; the baton he’d let me use as a stand in for a knife, in my hand. “That’s not what I mean”, I said; and jumped at him. He moved out of the way with a chuckle. “Too slow”, he smiled.

I let my shoulders drop, and threw the baton on the floor. “I’ve seen you fight; you know. And that’s what you’re doing now”. He began circling me. “You’re fighting as Dean Winchester – the great hunter. Not as a monster”. “Huh”, Dean grunted. “I like the sound of that…”. He sprang for me, and before I knew it, I was on the floor; and Dean was straddling me. “I’m sure you do”, I panted. “But this case isn’t even a monster. It’s a ghost”.

I was about to push him off me, when he grabbed my wrists, and pressed them down on either side of my head. “As much as I hate to admit it, ghosts are usually stronger than me – and as long as you can’t fight me of, you shouldn’t be hunting them”. “You’re still trying to turn me off this case…”, I sighed; struggling against his hold. His weight on me was sending very distracting thoughts through my head. He leant down to whisper in my ear. “Oh, sweetheart… I’ll be forever trying to turn you on…”. He sat back up. “But yeah. In this particular case, I still think you should stay here”. I pulled my arms upwards, making Dean lean over me again; his face close to mine. “You’re enjoying this too much”, I whispered. “And just for the record, my knee is dangerously close to your groin; I could just…”. I made to lift my knee; but Dean rolled of me. “Watch the jewels, Lou. We both want them safe”, he warned. With a swift move, I straddled him, as he had me. “On that, we agree”, I smirked.

Dean suddenly sat up, and his lips where on mine – kissing me with an almost insatiable hunger. I tried to push him off me; but he was too strong – and in all honesty, I was enjoying it. His arms where around me; holding me in place, and my own arms pinned down. “You’re gonna have to learn how to wrestle out of a move like this, if you want to hunt”, Dean growled. I began moving my hips, grinding against him. “I could always distract you…”, I breathed. “Not working”, Dean grunted. I bit my lip, and grinded again – this time letting out a soft moan. “Ok, it’s working a little bit”, he admitted with a grunt. “So how do I get out of it?”, I asked.

Suddenly, we were standing; Dean having lifted me off his lap, but still keeping me locked in his grasp. “With a vampire or a werewolf – or even a ghost – you wouldn’t. You’d be dead. At least with the moves you have now”, he said. He flipped me around, so my back was to him – and I felt his beginning erection pressing against my back. “With me…  Let’s just say, you might be able to persuade me without using violence”, he breathed into my hair.

I pushed out my bottom, to get him to take a small step back, leaving place for me to slide my hands behind my back, and take a hold of his hardness over his pants. Dean groaned slightly. I began gently squeezing it, and felt Dean loosen his hold on me. Just as I thought I was about to have the upper hand, he pushed me against the wall; making me brace myself with my hands in front of me. He grabbed my wrists, and held them over my head in one hand. He pressed himself against me again, and snaked his other hand in front of me; down my belly, to the waistband of my jeans – pausing there. I looked over my shoulder at him, and saw him search my eyes for consent. I gave him a slight nod; and with a mischievous smile, his fingertips slid behind the fabric, and ran through my curls.

I tried to pull my hands from his grasp, wanting desperately to touch him. “Nuh uh…”, Dean chuckled behind me. His knee went between my legs, so I was locked in place. “I’ve got you. You’re not going anywhere”. His fingers travelled down over my clit, ghosting the sensitive nub; and making me gasp. “You know, we should probably talk safe-words”, he smiled. “You think you’ll need them?”, I croaked; moving my hips to get him to touch me for real. Dean laughed gravelly. “Sweetheart, you are in for it”.

Suddenly, two of his fingers where inside me. He began pushing hard at my front wall, and rubbed at my nub with his palm. I pulled at my wrists; tried to get out of his hold on me – but he simply pushed me harder against the wall. His hand was thrusting and rubbing hard at me. “Push me off you”, he growled. I moaned a snarl, and gyrated to get free. “You’re stronger than this, Lou. Come on!”. “I… I don’t want to”, I whimpered. “You want me to have the upper hand? To win the fight?”, he chuckled. “No…”, I breathed; my insides beginning to clench around his fingers. “Then why aren’t you fighting me off?”, he teased. “I want… Oh, god!”, I pleaded.

Dean slowed down his movements inside me. “What are you doing?”, I whimpered. “Don’t stop”. He pulled out his fingers, and simply let them ghost my folds. “You’re giving up. Fight me!”, Dean demanded. “Dean! Please!”. “Earn it, baby”. With a roar, I used Dean’s hold on my wrists, to lift myself up; and press my feet against the wall. I kicked myself backwards, and we fell to the floor. Dean let go of my wrists, and I rolled away from him; getting on my feet.

“Good girl”, Dean smiled. “You won”. “Where’s my prize?”, I panted. “Your prize is; you won’t have to wait in the motel, while we take out the ghost”, he said; and stood up. “You can wait in the car. I’ll even crack a window”. I sighed. “You know, for a guy who haven’t even taken me on a proper date yet, you sure as hell feel entitled to tell me what to do”. “Lou, what do you want me to say?”, Dean shrugged. “We haven’t even been at this for an hour, and you’re already worn out”. “Am not…”, I lied. “I’m just… you know…”, I pouted. “What?”, he frowned.

I walked slowly towards him, biting my lip. “You just started something you didn’t finish… And I want you to finish it”. I put my hand on his chest; and he watched me intently, as I got on my toes, and tilted my head – brushing my lips against his. “You want…”. Dean swallowed hard. “I mean, we could take a break, and uhm…”. I caught his lower lip between my teeth, making him gasp.

I grabbed Deans hand, and turned around, so my back was to him again – as if I was trying to get back into the position we’d been in before. Felling his warm breath against my neck, I placed his hand over the top of my jeans; and ran my fingers up his arm. Grabbing a firm hold of his arm, with both my hands, I used my full bodyweight, to pull him forward – taking him by surprise – and making him land on the floor, on his back; with me on top of him. I rolled away from him, and got back on my feet.

“I think that just earned me a gold star!”, I smirked. Dean looked flabbergasted. “Where’d you learn that?”, he gasped. “WWE… Never tried it before though. Thanks for being my crash test dummy”, I smiled. Dean stood back up, and stretched. “Ow!”, he said. “Sorry”, I playfully pouted. “Want me to kiss it better?”. “You can’t flirt your way out of every situation!”, Dean growled. “And… yes”. I raised a brow at him. “Make me”, I smirked.

Dean chuckled sarcastically. “You’re going down!”. He sprang at me, and within seconds, I was on the floor; and Dean had his forearm against my neck. “I’d be happy to”, I croaked. “But Cass or Sam might walk in any second”. I grinded my hips against his. “Lou…”, Dean said warningly. “What?”, I whispered. “Am I doing something wrong?”. I slid my leg around his hip; and pulled him closer. The bulge on the front of Dean’s jeans gave away that I was doing everything right. “Is this how you plan on killing monsters?”, he asked; his voice breaking. “Grinding them to death?”. “Well, it seems to be taking your breath away”, I said; biting my lip. Dean shook his head, seemingly trying to focus on anything other than my mouth.

“Lulu!”, Sam called from down the hall. “Oh, thank God”, Dean croaked, and rolled of me. His brother joined us in the gym. “Thanks, Sam. I almost had him”, I frowned; and got to my feet. “Did not…”, Dean rasped, his back to us – discretely adjusting himself.

“It’s Jody. She wants to talk to you”, Sam said; and handed me my burner. “Jody?”, I said into the phone; smirking over my shoulder at Dean. “Lulu! You promised to call me!”, the sheriff said. “Sorry, ma’”, I smiled. “Please stop calling me that. I can feel my hair graying every time you do”. “Grey hair is hot. What’s up?”, I asked. “You’re with the guys?”, she said. “Yeah. I’m uhm… apparently in hunter boot-camp here”, I smirked. I heard Jody sigh. “Dean?” “Yup…”, I grunted. “Put me on speaker… now”.

I pressed the speaker button, and held up the phone. “Dean Winchester!”. “Hi, Jody”, Dean said warily. “Would you pull your head out of your ass, boy? Do you have any idea what this young woman has been doing for the last year?”, Jody snarled. “Jody, I’m just…”, Dean began. “Being a dick, that’s what you are… Get over yourself!”. I grinned at the frowning man who was currently getting his ass handed to him over the phone. “You hearing me? Dean?”. “Yes ma’am”, Dean muttered. “But did Sam happen to tell you what she did yesterday?”. “No, what?”. Dean smirked at me. “She ran straight at a nest of vampires with nothing but a machete and a minidress to protect her”. There was a pause. “How many did you take out, Lulu?”, Jody asked. “Three”, I muttered. “Good job… And don’t ever do that again! Are you crazy? You’re not ready for that!”. Thanks, I mouthed at Dean. He sent me the widest grin I’d seen on his face to date. “Sorry, Jody”, I said. “But why’d you call? Other than to yell at us?”.

She paused before continuing. “There’s been another one. Young woman, found under the bridge”. “That’s too soon!”, I gasped. “I know… How far are you with that research?”, Jody said. “I’m still working on it…”, I admitted. Sam clenched his jaw. “We’re on our way, Jody. Be there as soon as possible”. “Sounds good. See you then”, the sheriff said, and hung up.

I shook my head. “This is too soon. What the hell? Ghosts don’t usually change their MO…”, I muttered. “And this had been going on for more than 50 years”. “We’ll figure it out”, Sam smiled.

---

After packing up, we left the bunker – and Castiel – behind, to drive to South Dakota. Dean was still grumbling over the fact that I insisted on coming along. “This is my case. You’re the tag-along here”, I pointed out, as I dropped my bag in the trunk. Sam put the box of papers and records in there as well. “She’s not wrong, Dean”, he smiled. “And from what I’ve seen, Lulu’s done a damn good job on the research so far”. Dean frowned and dropped his own bag next to mine and Sam’s. “What about interviews? Have you done any of those yet?”, he grunted. “Didn’t have time to get to those, before Cass showed up for my book”, I said.

Sam had given me back Bobby’s journal, which was now safely stored in my backpack. The iron knife Sam had given me was stored in the pocket in my jacket I’d sown in for my angel blade; and I had a bag of salt in my pocket. I was more than ready to get this show on the road.

I went to get in the back seat, when Sam halted me. “Do you mind? I haven’t slept in two days”, he said, his face almost grey with exhaustion. “Sure”, I smiled, and went to sit in the front passenger seat, next to a smiling Dean. “Sammy!”, he chuckled. “You got short… and hot!”. “Shut up”, his brother responded from behind us.

After a few hours of driving, Dean put his arm on the backrest, and invited me in to cuddle up against him. It didn’t take much coaxing to accept – and soon I was leaning against his shoulder; sighing contently. A small snore came from the back seat; and I looked over my shoulder – smiling at the sight of the 6’4 man sleeping like a baby behind us. Dean glanced down at me, and licked his lower lip. “You know, he’s out cold…”, he muttered quietly. I looked questioningly at him, as he raised a brow at me. Only then did I realize what he was implying. “No! Not happening”, I said pointedly. Dean pouted playfully. “We could be really quiet…”, he whispered. I pulled back from his grasp, and chuckled. “Forget it”, I grunted. “Lou…”. “The lady said no!”, Sam snarled from the back seat.

Dean cleared his throat embarrassedly, and I squeezed his thigh gently, before winking at him. He smiled crookedly, and stroked his index finger down my jaw.

“How far are we from Sioux Falls?”, Sam yawned. “About two hours out. You can still get some shuteye”, I said; looking back at him. He raised a brow at the back of his brothers head. “Not taking that chance”, he muttered. He grabbed the thermos of coffee, and poured himself a cup, downing it in one go. “Cold”, he frowned. “Want me to make a stop?”, Dean said. “No, just turn on some music”, Sam groaned; and tried to stretch his long legs out.

I searched the glove compartment for a good tape, and smiled brightly when I stumbled across one labeled Lou. I looked Dean with a warm pouting smile. “Not that one!”, he said, and tried to snatch it from me. I smacked his hand away, and slid it into the radio.

“Lying in your arms, so close together…”.

Sam chuckled from the back seat. “Shut it”, Dean growled. I smiled at him, and caught him looking at me from the corner of his eye; a warm smirk ghosting his face. “Made a mistake, when I let you go, baby. I drive myself crazy, wanting you the way that I do”, I whispered along to the song. The next song was Landslide, by Fleetwood Mac. “How much time did you spend on this?”, I muttered. Dean didn’t answer, but I saw his cheeks redden. “He was on lockdown for three days”, Sam smirked. “I will turn this car around!”, Dean growled. I shook my head. “Behave… both of you”, I said. Sam cleared his throat, and looked out the window; stifling a grin.

When we finally arrived outside Sioux Falls PD, we’d gone through the tape three times – listening to the greatest hits of Lou and Dean. It included Ramones’ version of Spiderman; Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train; Bon Jovi’s Bad Medicine; AC/DC’s It’s a Long Way to the Top – during which Dean muttered something about a girl he once knew, who’d flashed Angus Young at a concert – and finally, for some reason, Cherry Pie by Warrant.

Jody looked up from some papers on her desk, when we entered the station. “Miss Timberlake…”, she muttered with a half-smile. “You owe me 100 bucks for that motel bill you skipped out on”. I gave my friend a warm hug. Dean sent me a look. “Timberlake?”, he grunted. “Save it, John Bonham”, she grunted, before pulling him in for a hug. She patted Sam’s cheek after hugging him. “You look like death run over. What’s wrong?”. “Been working… Not getting much sleep”. Jody raised her brows. “You need to take better care of yourselves”, she said; before putting her fingertips against the bandage on my neck. “All of you!”, she grunted.

“The girl”, I said, cutting to the chase. “She was found under the bridge”. “Yeah”, the sheriff frowned. “Icy cold. Three days after being crowned prom queen”. “Poor girl”, I muttered. “She’s not the first prom queen to go out the same way, though, is she?”. “Well, you have the records. Weren’t they all?”, she asked. “No… Only some of them”, I said.

An officer looked in our direction; frowning. “You three should go… somewhere else”, Jody said. “Ghosty stuff isn’t a good topic here”. “We’ll set up at a motel. Let you know where we’re at”, Dean said. “You’re welcome to use my house…”, Jody offered. “That nosy neighbor of yours gonna be good with that?”, I smirked; remembering Mrs. Boone, who’d shown up at all hours of the day, when she found out Jody had me crashing on her couch. “Good point”, she smiled. “But pick a different motel. The 6 is pissed at you”, she said, cocking a brow at me. “Right…”, I winced. “See you later?”. Jody nodded, and waved us away; suddenly looking angry. “I told you!”, she said loudly. “We have no comments for the media as of now!”. “Sorry, sheriff”, Dean smiled. “We’ll be on our way”.

We got back in the Impala, and made our way to a motel just outside town. Dean was pouting when he came back from the front desk. “They only have one room”, he grunted; and handed Sam the key. His brother just shook his head, and went to unlock the door. “So much for privacy”, Dean muttered to me. “We’re here to work”, I retorted. He looked at me in almost anguish. “Lou…”, he groaned. I intertwined my fingers with his, and kissed his stubbly cheek. “Dead girl. Ghosts. Work”, I said. “Move the car”. “You move the car”, he frowned. “Ok!”, I smiled; longing to get my hands on the Impala. Deans eyes widened. “Wait, no. Scratch that. You just… go to the room”. I rolled my eyes, and walked over to our temporary accommodations.

A few minutes later, Sam was draped across one of the beds in our shared room. Dean came in with his and my bag. “Dude, you look like crap. We can go check out that bridge later”, he said. “Get some sleep”. “Actually, I was gonna go that”, I said. “You’re welcome to join”. I smirked at the frowning older brother. “You were going to go… alone?”, he said. “Not if you’re coming with”, I shrugged. He muttered something below his breath. “Fine, let’s go. You good with this, Sam?”. Sam wasn’t answering. He was out cold.

---

About an hour later, Dean and I were scouting the area around where the last girl had been found. Dean was just hanging up on Jody, when he came over to join me, where I was crouching over a patch of grass that seemed to have suffered from frost bite. “Jody’s meeting up with Sam at the motel in a few”. “Huh…”, I muttered. “EMF? I don’t have one”. Dean handed me his own. “Of course you don’t…”, he grunted. “Dean…”, I warned. He sighed, and watched as I turned on the meter. It instantly reacted slightly, though not as it would, had there been a spirit present at the moment. This was residue. “Good. You found out it’s a ghost. Now what?”. “You tell me, Mr. Hunter Man…”, I jeered. “You’re the expert”. “No, please. Be my guest. You seem to have this thing down”.

I stood up. “I’m going up to the bridge. No one’s reported seeing the ghost this time around. It’s all out of wack”. “Ok, let’s go”, Dean said, and reached for my hand. I walked ahead of him before he could grab it. “What?”, he asked. “You’re being a jerk, Dean”, I sneered. “I’m trying to do my job here, but it’s really hard, when you keep riding my ass on everything I say and do”. His gaze softened. “I’m sorry”, he muttered. “You’re right. Let’s try to figure this thing out”. “Yeah?”, I asked. He nodded. “Yeah. Do your job. Tell me how I can help”, he tried with a crooked smile. It was almost endearing. “I want to scan the bridge. See if there are any spirits around”, I sighed. “After that, I want to check out the lover’s lane”. Dean’s face lit up. “For ghosts, you horn-dog!”, I chuckled. “Oh”, he grumbled. “Fine”.

The bridge didn’t give away any readings for spirits; confusing me even further. Dean took off his jacket, and threw it into the car. “Kind of hot for April”, he grunted. “Yeah”, I agreed. “That girl still died from hypothermia, though. It has to be connected to that spirit. But she died in early May. So why freeze to death? And why are the dates suddenly different?”. Dean shrugged. “You’re the brains in this operation. I’m just the brawns”, he smiled. I walked over to him, and patted his chest. “You do a great job of that”, I smirked. “Come on. Take me to lover’s lane, stud”.

The sun was beginning to set as Dean parked the Impala a few miles away from the bridge. Markings on the ground showed that this was a place many cars parked; when the people in them were searching for some privacy. There were trees around, making it possible for a couple to go about their business, without being spotted. I got out of the car, and scanned the area. Nothing. I frowned. “This brings me back”, Dean smirked. “To what?”, I asked, searching the ground for any trace of something that shouldn’t be there. He swallowed hard. “Uhm… Susan…”, he muttered; leaning against the Impala. “Farrow?”, I chuckled. He cleared his throat. “You remembered”, he said. “Yeah… Took her to another lover’s lane after prom”. I nodded and laughed.

I continued scanning the area around the car. Suddenly, Deans arms snaked around my waist; and he pressed himself against me. “It brings me back somewhere else as well”, he breathed, and kissed the top of my head. “Where’s that?”, I croaked, trying to focus on my task. “You… me… backseat”. He brushed my hair away from the back of my neck, and nibbled at my neck – sending waves of warmth to my core. “I’m trying to work”, I squeaked quietly. “There’s nothing here. Just us”, Dean whispered into my ear. “Come on… We have to share a room with my brother. Can’t we take a break, and just…”. He ran his finger across my jaw. “I guess…”, I breathed.

I turned around, and Dean pressed his lips to mine. As I parted my lips, and he gained entry to my mouth -brushing his tongue against mine – I was a whimpering mess. Dean scanned the area for company – and happy that we were, indeed, alone – he suddenly bent down, and threw me over his shoulder; and carried me back to the Impala. “Dean!”, I yelped. “Put me down”. He smacked my butt, and put me down; grabbing the EMF-meter from my hand, and throwing it through the open window, on the front seat. He opened the door to the back seat for me, and I got inside. Suddenly, I was flipped on my back, and Dean slammed the door behind him – crawling up to place himself between my legs.

I tugged at his t-shirt, and he pulled it off; letting me run my nails down his chest. “Lou”, he rasped. “Careful. I’ve been thinking about this all day. Don’t finish it before its even started”. “I knew I had you back in that gym”, I smirked. Dean’s pupils blew in remembrance. “Yeah”, he admitted; before pressing his lips against mine again.

Our tongues battled for dominance, and we made out like two teenagers. Pushing myself into a seated position, I quickly shed the layers on my torso, until I was left in my bra. Dean pulled down the cup from my right breast, and sucked my nipple into his mouth, making me gasp loudly. Frantically, I went for his belt; unbuckling it with shaking hands. “Foreplay?”, Dean grunted. “Skip it!”, I growled, and opened my own jeans, and pulling them down over my bottom. I kicked off one boot, and got my leg free, so I could pull down my panties as well; and my already glistening folds met the evening air. Dean ran a finger between my labia, and entered me slightly.

My eyes widened. “Wait!”, I cried out. “What?”, Dean asked in a startled voice. I pushed him off me, and leant over the back rest, reaching for the ignition, turning the key so the radio began playing. “She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean. She was the best damn woman I had ever seen…”, Brian Johnson began singing. “Oh, baby”, Dean grinned. With a firm grab of my hips, he pulled me back onto the backseat; and pulled down his jeans – freeing himself. I grabbed his erection, and guided it towards my entrance. Dean pushed into me with a strangled groan; and instantly began moving on top of me. I locked my leg around his hip, and rolled my hips to meet his movements.

The Impala’s mufflers got a run for their money, as the entire car was moving with us. We simultaneously kissed and laughed from the rocking of the vehicle. It wasn’t long before I noticed Deans face change into a more strained expression. “It’s ok”, I panted. “You can…”. “No”, he shook his head. “Not yet. You… oh, wow… you first”. I grabbed the back of his head, and kissed him deeply; before tilting my hips, making him stroke against the sensitive spot inside me. The strain on my back was uncomfortable, and when Dean saw my facial expression, he put his hand behind me, and pulled me up to straddle him. He leaned against the backrest, and I moved up and down on him; feeling him fill every inch of me. He put his thumb against my nub, and stroked it; while simultaneously massaging my left breast.

The fire in my belly was building, and before long, I saw white; and my walls clenched around his hardness. I came with a raspy moan, and Dean followed me soon after. I collapsed against his chest, and chuckled. “Wow…”, I grinned. “Uh huh”, Dean agreed. He put his hands on either side of my face, and kissed me gently.

Suddenly I heard a buzzing. Dean pulled back – his lips still puckered. “What’s that?”, I whispered. Dean patted my thighs to get off him, and I moved, letting him lean over to the front seat, and pick up the EMF. All the lights where blaring, and we looked at each other in wonder.

We quickly got cleaned up and dressed, and both got out of the car. The EMF-meter quieted down gradually, before going black again. “What the hell was that?”, I said. “I don’t know”, Dean frowned. “But we should get back to the motel”. I nodded, and we got back in the car.

As we neared the bridge, a thought struck me. “Prom…”, I muttered. “What?”, Dean asked. “The girl who died this time. She was prom queen. Three others were crowned queen as well”. Dean pondered my words. “You think the ghost has it out for prom queens?”. “No”, I said. “Not all of the victims were crowned. But they disappeared around prom night”. I slammed my palm against my forehead. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!”. Dean smiled. “You’re thinking of it now. It’s good work”. I chuckled. “Are you saying atta girl?”, I asked. “Something like that”, he shrugged, and squeezed my knee.

As we drove over the bridge, I picked up the EMP-meter, and turned it on. The sun was all the way down, and the bridge wasn’t lit up by anything, but the headlights of the Impala. Suddenly, a jolt went through my body, as the radio turned itself on; not playing the tape inserted – but instead letting a soft female voice begin a melancholic tune. “The night is like a lovely tune. Beware my foolish heart. How white the ever-constant moon. Take care my foolish heart”. The EMP-meter’s lights blared, and it began buzzing fiercely. “What’s happening?”, I muttered. “What kind of ghost messes with a man’s tunes?”, Dean growled. “Your lips are much too close to mine. Beware my foolish heart. But should our eager lips combine. Then let the fire start”.

“Dean!”, I yelled. He slammed the brakes, just as a young woman in a pink dress appeared in front of us. She was walking in the same direction as we were driving; barefoot, carrying her shoes, and her hair was tussled. Her whole body was shaking, as if she was freezing. “That’s her”, I croaked.

The young woman didn’t seem to notice us. Dean sprang out of the car. “Hey!”, he yelled after her. She didn’t respond. “Miss?”. “She can’t hear you… she’s just a reflection”, I breathed, and got out to join him. “No, stay in the car!”, Dean growled.

I walked towards the reflection, when suddenly she turned around, and looked straight at me. Her makeup was smudged, and her mascara had been running. The radio continued playing the soft melody. “For this time it isn't fascination. Or a dream that will fade and fall apart. It's love, this time it's love. My foolish heart”. The girl mouthed along to the music.

An intense chill went through me, and I blinked. She was gone. The radio turned itself off. I was as frozen in place. “She was crying”, I whispered. Dean grabbed my arm. “Come on, Lou”, he muttered. “We need to get out of here”. I nodded, and rubbed my arms, entering the car again.

---

Back at the motel, Sam had been joined by Jody, and they were bent over the papers from my box. “You find anything at the bridge?”, Sam asked. He was finally looking well rested; and apparently, he was well fed as well – I could tell from the open containers of Tupperware, I recognized as Jody’s. “Yeah, a friggin’ ghost”, Dean said. “We saw her. And she messed with my radio!”. I stumbled over to sit down. “Whiskey”, I croaked. I felt an intense chill throughout my body. I’d never been that close to a ghost before; having mostly seen them at a distance.

Dean poured me a drink, and I downed it. “You saw her?”, Sam asked. “The white lady?”. “No, I think she’s just a reflection… I don’t know, I’m… That was insane!”. Dean furrowed his brow at me. “I’d say you look like you’ve seen a ghost, but that would be redundant”, he muttered. “What was her name again?”. Jodie pulled out an old death record. “Annie Jones. 18 years old at the time of death”, she said. I looked at the picture of the young woman; Dean leaning in to look over my shoulder. “That was her”, he said. He read the record Jodie handed him. “But she was cremated…”. “There must be something out there of hers left”, Sam said.

I got up, and went over to my bag, grabbing a cardigan to put over my tank-top and flannel. “You ok, Lulu?”, Jody frowned. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just a bit shook up”, I smiled, and sat back down. “Did you make any connection to high school proms, from the papers?”. Sam smiled. “Now you mention it; yeah”, he said. “All the victims disappeared on prom night, or just after”. Jody narrowed her eyes. “The shift in dates make sense now”, she muttered. “Sioux Falls High has had the prom around the same date every year forever… Until this year”. “What happened?”, Dean asked, as he was heading for the deliciously smelling Tupperware. “Chicken!”, he grinned, and grabbed a leg. “I’m not sure”, Jody said. “Something about the gymnasium being rented out for some event or other, on the usual date. They decided to advance the date of the prom. Local rich guy, Mason, is celebrating his wife’s 80’th, by recreating their prom night”. “Confusing the hell out of the ghost in the process, so she wasn’t seen until after the victim was found”, Dean said, his mouth full. I handed him a napkin.

Sam ran a hand over his face. “About that…”, he began, before Jody interrupted him. “The girl who was found the other day didn’t die from hypothermia. She had a diabetic seizure”, she said. “Coroner confirmed it about an hour ago”. “So no victim this year?”, I asked. I rubbed my hands together. “Could you close the window?”, I asked Dean. “It’s not open”, he muttered. “I am thoroughly confused”, I said. “And tired. Do you mind if I take a nap?”. “Go ahead”, Sam smiled.

I got up and passed Dean. “We can take the other bed”, he muttered. I patted his chest. “You’re on the couch, Fabio”, I smiled. “We’re working”. “Come on!”, he complained. “You had yours”, I whispered; and went over to lay down on the bed furthest from the door.

I heard the other three muttering quietly, before I dozed off. It must have been a few hours later, when I felt the bed dip, and Dean putting his arms around me. I was about to croak at him to go to the couch, but the room felt chilly; and his warmth was welcome.

---

[jasonfry]

Winter rolls along! No baseball! That means catching up with more classic movies everybody’s seen but me!

The Sugarland Express (1974)

This is Steven Spielberg’s first big-screen feature (1971′s Duel was made for TV), and it’s amazing to think it arrived just a year before Jaws, which would change American movies forever.

It’s impossible to watch The Sugarland Express without analyzing it in terms of Spielberg style, which is too bad, because it can be enjoyed perfectly well if you don’t know who the director is. Yes, there are some trademark long takes and inventive camerawork -- the most famous bit is a tricky 360-degree shot inside the getaway car that’s particularly impressive because it’s so easy not to notice -- but this is also a great character movie. 

Goldie Hawn’s Lou Jean is simultaneously conniving and childlike, ruthless and clueless, and Hawn brings a frantic intensity to the part. Her husband Clovis is doomed the moment Lou Jean puts her half-assed plan in motion, and William Atherton (of Die Hard fame) does a superb job with an understated role, in which Clovis’s real tragedy is how timidly he navigates the constrained possibilities of his life. They’re joined by Michael Sacks as a kidnapped state trooper, and the three make for a compelling ensemble -- people who understand each other and grasp that their circumstances could easily have been switched around by a chance here or there.  

The movie’s ambitious and thoroughly modern -- it’s a chase movie and a marital comedy and a slice of social commentary, and it switches lanes with skill and self-confidence. Maybe it doesn’t quite stick the landing -- there’s a little too much movie blood and the sun-soaked last shot feels like a stylistic departure -- but the ending is gripping even though it unfolds the only way it could, and that’s a hard trick to pull off.

Extra credit because even a relatively uninformed movie fan like me will have a blast moving both forward and backward from The Sugarland Express -- it wouldn’t exist without Bonnie & Clyde, but Raising Arizona wouldn’t exist without it, to identify just two beads on an intriguing string.

Rio Bravo (1959)

Westerns are my comfort food -- give me the right proportions of dusty streets and swinging doors and cacti against sunsets and I’ll overlook a fair number of cinematic/narrative sins. And Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo whips up the classic ingredients with the nonchalant skill of a veteran short-order cook in a beloved diner -- a tumbleweed even rolls into one of the leads in the first reel, as if to say, “What? It’s a western!”

Rio Bravo is usually framed as a rebuke to High Noon and 3:10 to Yuma, which Hawks and John Wayne despised because those movies dared to depart from the western tropes of flinty-eyed, self-reliant sheriffs and frontier folk banding together. The film Hawks and Wayne made in response is rock-ribbed in its values, unfolds at a languorous pace, and is often mawkish. (It also jerks to a halt for back-to-back duets with Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, while Wayne stands there and smiles.) It shouldn’t work -- and, to be clear, I don’t think it’s nearly as interesting as the movies it’s arguing with -- but it does.

For one thing, there’s immense skill brought to the storytelling and filmmaking. There’s a self-confidence behind that languor that draws you in, and while the characters are hoary stock figures, their interactions rarely if ever ring false. The actors are solid, too: Martin is a lot better than you might guess as Dude, the deputy with an alcohol problem; Nelson holds his own as a young gunslinger who doesn’t want to get involved but of course eventually does; Walter Brennan has a grand time bouncing off Martin and Wayne in their shared scenes; Angie Dickinson brings some shade and nuance to the role of a gambler’s widow trying to extricate herself from a checkered past; and the bit players are all threatening, comedic, hapless and helpful in the proportions you expect and want.

But unsurprisingly, Wayne is the secret weapon -- the story treatment for Rio Bravo didn’t bother giving his character a name, just calling him “John Wayne.” Imitations of Wayne focus on the swagger and the tough-guy talk but miss that his performances turn on the moments when his characters’ weaknesses undermine their strengths. Wayne’s Sheriff John T. Chance is gentle with Dude’s struggles, knowing well-chosen nudges are the best way to keep his troubled deputy on the right path, and he’s utterly at sea navigating his feelings for Feathers, Dickinson’s character. The Wayne-Dickinson pairing is yet another of those May-December romances that movies of the era were always foisting on actresses, but Wayne wisely leans into the problem, letting Chance be tongue-tied and awkward as the more confident Feathers steers him through uncharted emotional terrain.

Wayne became more cranky and reactionary as he aged, but he never lost the insight that strength is only interesting if paired with weakness. That dynamic sells Chance and Rio Bravo wonderfully. And hey, the Martin-Nelson duets are actually pretty good. 

Hawks and Wayne would essentially remake Rio Bravo two more times, first as El Dorado and then as Rio Lobo, and while I’ll tell you now that I don’t feel the need to see either one, jump ahead a couple of years to a late night where I think, “a western would be fun right now,” and I’ll probably wind up watching one of them. Because I bet they’ll work.

That Thing You Do! (1996)

The story of a one-hit wonder band, written and directed by Tom Hanks. The cast is terrific, particularly the luminous Liv Tyler; the title song (written by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne) is not only good but also pitch-perfect for its era; and the giddy whoosh of the Wonders’ sudden rise to fame carries the movie along effortlessly for quite a while.

There are only two problems -- but unfortunately, they’re pretty big ones. 

First of all, the movie jumps the track completely in its last 20 minutes or so. Tyler’s big speech to her self-obsessed boyfriend feels completely out of character; Tom Everett Scott’s drummer hangs around the most accommodating studio in music history and has a miraculous chance meeting with the jazz musician he idolizes; the hotel’s magical concierge uses the same gag twice and then breaks the fourth wall ... and all of this happens in such rapid succession that I thought I’d hit my head. The movie’s humming along pleasantly enough and then WHAM! everything stops making sense and it never regains its footing.

Second, after a couple of hours it’s already fading from memory, leaving behind the title song, the fun of life on the road and Tyler. I think that’s because while That Thing You Do! is invariably pleasant, it’s also utterly bloodless. 

Nothing is played for any stakes. Giovanni Ribsi breaks his arm and loses his spot in the band to Scott, but never seems bothered that he missed out on his friends’ rocket ride. The Wonders’ first manager excuses himself with nary a peep once Hanks arrives to take over. The veteran bands on tour with the Wonders brush the newcomers off at first, but pretty soon they’re all friends. The Wonders’ bassist is infatuated with a Black singer, which would have raised eyebrows in 1964, but the relationship barely makes a ripple. Despite ample warnings that it’s coming, the conflict in the band is mild at worst. Even the love triangle involving Tyler is resolved simply and with no particular fuss -- the Wonders’ lead singer breaks up with her, the drummer takes up with her, and all is well. 

The movie presents an attractive surface -- despite all of the above, when I heard there was an extended cut I thought, “I’d hang around with these characters for 40 more minutes” -- but there’s absolutely nothing underneath it. Given the talent on both sides of the camera and the obvious care with which it was made, that’s a shame.

[darling-clemmy]

A Feeling We Don’t Know//Clouis Highschool AU--Chapter One

A/N: Welcome to the first chapter of my highschool AU! I will try to update this regularly, and I hope you enjoy the first part :)) also huge thank you to @missdaisymayrio , without her I could not have written this. 

Summary of Story: After the first night, it seems impossible for them not to run into each other. Though, neither the boy with dreads nor the girl with curls can complain about that.

Summary of Chapter: Clementine had never liked parties--until she realized that some of them aren’t so bad, thanks to one dark haired boy.

Word Count: 3,670 words

CHAPTER ONE: PARTY FAVOR

The rain beat down against the overhanging glass of the bus stop, creating a repetitive pattern that was starting to get under Clementine’s skin. She’d much rather prefer to hear his cheery voice right now, speaking reassuring words into her ear, or the muted radio as they kiss in the backseat of his car. But that couldn’t happen now, or possibly ever again.

She pulled her oversized yellow raincoat closer to her body, although that would only relieve the shaking due to the cold, and not due to her silent cries. I’m so stupid, Clementine thought, forcing more tears out of her eyes. Yet, under the heavy rain, they were barely noticeable.

A car with blurry headlights zoomed past her, causing roadside rain water to splash up and hit her ankles. She was too numb to care about anything, much less a little bit more water on her already soaking clothes. Her head lifted at a realization—that car was playing their song. She could recognize that beat anywhere, having listened to it nonstop months ago. How silly it was to think that it held any meaning. She knew now that it was all a mistake. He was a big, heart shattering mistake.

Clementine checked her phone once more for whatever reason, as the same picture of a low battery came up again. She sighed, her entire being feeling so crumbled that it was useless to have any hope for herself anymore. So, with no other choices, she stood up from the cold bench, lifted her hood over her curls, and began stomping through the wet, cracked sidewalk back home, leaving him and all of their memories behind her.

—

7 MONTHS EARLIER:

Ding!

Clementine blinked in surprise as the bell signifying an order was ready rung. She removed her hand from beneath her chin and looked at the plate. 

One large blueberry pancake, four scrambled eggs, and six pieces of bacon with a coffee that might as well just have been milk. Kyle, Clementine guessed, rolling her eyes at the fact that she’d have to bring it out to him. 

Tightening the stained white apron that was tied around her waist, she picked up the chipped plate by its bottom and held the mug’s handle firmly. 

The diner was especially busy today, as it was every Saturday. Besides, Everett’s was the only place other than Bee Joe’s to get breakfast in the small town of Wareham, West Virginia. Because of this, probably around half the population came in between 7am and 2pm, consisting of young children with their mothers, a group of loud old men who split the check in eighths, and Clem’s own teachers at school, who, no matter how much they come in, were always surprised she works there. 

After maneuvering through the clustered tables and booths, she finally made it to the table marked “H,” where, of course, none other than Kyle was sat. 

“Here’s your food,” Clementine choked out through a forced toothy smile. “And your coffee. Do you need anything else today?”

Kyle slumped back in his chair as he eyed the food suspiciously, before returning his gaze back to her silently. 

At his uncomfortable stare, Clem cleared her throat and gripped the hem of her stupidly stiff baby pink uniform skirt.

“Nah, nothing that I can order off the menu, anyway,” he nearly slurred out, making Clementine wonder if he was already high or if he was just sleazy. 

“Okay, well, let me know if there is.” By now, she was smiling so tightly and fakely that it was beginning to hurt. Before he could get another word in, she spun on her heel and rushed back to safety behind the counter, away from the college boy.

Once there, where none of the customers could really see, she threw down the order notebook with a huff. Looking up at the red LED clock, she counted the minutes to when she’d be allowed to leave. 275 minutes. 16, 500 seconds. It’s a lot, but she hoped that maybe she’d be able to just wash tables until then. 

“Dumb day?” A southern-twanged voice asked from beside her. 

Clem sighed in relief that it was Brody, and not her supervisor scolding her for not being “sweet and accommodating,” as she’d always say.

“It wasn’t too bad until Eric, you know, the new cook guy, spilled bacon grease on the floor and I had to clean it up. And Kyle’s here and you know how he always is and of course I’m his waitress.” Clementine complained as she lowered her head in closer to Brody, like preteens gossiping. 

“Ugh, he shouldn’t even be allowed in here. He’s such a creep,” Brody agreed. “I had to wait on the Yorks and all eight of their kids, who all wanted chocolate chip pancakes in the shape of Disco Broccoli. Omar’s a good cook and all, but how is anyone supposed to do that?”

Clem chuckled thinking about Disco Broccoli and his Chive Talkin’ Friends. She was surprised kids still watched that show. “I think customers think we’re Gordon Ramsay.”

“Sorry, we’re actually just a bunch of 16 to 25 year olds and their 40-something year old manager.” The auburn hair girl replied, scribbling down her tipped wages. “On a lighter note, are you doing anything tonight?”

“Nope. AJ’s parents don’t need me to babysit tonight and my parents are both working late again.” She furrowed her eyebrows before continuing, “Why?”

“Marlon’s having a party tonight and I was wondering if you’d like to come!”

“Brody—“

“Shush, before you say ‘I’m not a party person, Brody,’ it’s not as big as his other ones. There will only be, like, 30 people there, at most.” Brody chastised, placing a hand on her hip.

“Why so small?”

“It’s for his best friend. He just got back from a music camp or something,” she explained. 

Clementine sighed, realizing that she and Brody had never really hung out outside of work before. They may not have been best friends, but Brody had always been there for her, so maybe she owed it to her to go to a party or two.  “Okay, I’ll go. At least for a little bit.”

“Really?” Brody squealed, making some customers’ eyes gather on the girls. “Thank you, Clem! I promise you’ll have fun.”

Clementine laughed, “Who’s his actual best friend anyway?”

“His name’s Louis. Has dreads, writes music and plays piano, his family lives in that really big house down on Charlotte Lane,” Brody described, hoping to jog Clem’s memory. 

Really, she didn’t need to. Everyone in Wareham knew Louis Hastings and his parents. With his high economic standing and the fact that he was a major social butterfly, everyone had talked to Louis at least once. He was well liked, too, so it was no surprise to Clem that a welcome home party was being thrown with him as the guest of honor. 

“Well, I’ll make sure I’m there,” Clem promised with a grin. 

The door opened and hit the ear-ringing bell above it. The girls looked over to it to see an old couple, dressed in button up shirts with matching patterns. 

“Oh, look, Mr and Mrs Carlton. I’ll go get them a table,” Brody recognized with fond smile, as the couple often came in for their usual English breakfast tea and raspberry scones. 

Clementine watched as Brody left her side behind the counter before returning her eyes to the clock that seemed to be ticking slower as it went on. 260 more minutes.

Might as well start washing those tables, Clem thought before grabbing the soapy bucket and the old rag and getting to work. 

—

“You really know how to make the guest of honor feel special, Marlon,” Louis criticized, shoving three more packs of red solo cups into the grocery cart that had an obnoxious squeaking wheel.

“Don’t be mad. You should be happy I’m bringing you along to shop for food, since you’re such a picky eater and all,” Marlon rolls his glacier colored eyes in response.

“I’m not a picky eater,” the dark haired boy began. “I am a refined one.”

“Chicken tenders and french fries are real refined, Lou.”

“Everyone likes chicken tenders and french fries.”

“Vegans don’t.”

“They make fake chicken tenders, you know,” Louis informed, scrunching up his nose at the sour cream and onion chips that Marlon threw in the cart. “Are you buying all of this?”

“I’m not that bad of a party host. You really think I’d make you buy your own party supplies?” Marlon asked incredulously. 

Before Louis could respond, he felt his phone vibrating in his back pocket. He could tell by the personalized pattern that it was his dad calling him. He frowned.

“Hey, Dad,” he greeted blandly. 

“Why aren’t you home yet?” The older man interrogated with a harsh tone.

“I’m out with Marlon,” Louis explained. “I’ll be back later tonight.”

“I can’t believe you sometimes, Louis. You really can’t even be bothered to have dinner with your parents after being away for two months?” His father questioned.

“Look, Dad, I—” Louis began, only to be cut off.

“Just don’t, Louis,” his dad interrupted harshly. “Just—if you have the time, text your mother. She’s missed you a lot.”

“Yeah, I will.” He already had two hours earlier.

His father gave no goodbyes before hanging up the phone, leaving Louis to listen to a dull humming.

“Is everything okay?” Marlon asked.

Louis remained silent as he shoved his phone back into his pocket.

“I know how tough your dad can be—“

“Do you still have your fake?”

Marlon’s eyes widened. “ID? Of course.”

At his words, Louis picks a large box of beer out of the cooler and slides it onto the bottom rack of the cart. 

“That’s the spirit, Lou!” Marlon hit Louis’ back roughly.

Louis chuckled, but still, the feeling of disappointment in himself remained in the pit of his stomach.

—

Clementine was late. 

Thankfully, not excruciatingly late. Not so late that it’d be rude to show up now. Just late by thirty minutes or so, since she had spent twenty more minutes than expected trying to figure out what to wear to her first party and another ten getting lost on the way there. 

But, still, she was late. And she hated being late. It was embarrassing.

She walked up the steep steps to Marlon’s front door, the newly setting sun casting her shadow down in front of her, surrounded by a yellow-gold. She was already gnawing on her bottom lip in anxiety, thinking about how lonely she may be here. Yet, Clem still knocks on the door before lowering her hand and wrapping it around her other wrist.

Marlon opened the door, a navy blue can in his hand. “Oh, hey, Clem. Brody said you’d be coming tonight.”

She grinned bashfully. “Yeah, she thought it’d be good for me to get out more.”

“Well, I can assure you that my parties are the best reason to do so,” Marlon boasted. “Come in. Brody’s in the kitchen.”

Before she could say another word, he’s shut the door behind them and ran off to speak to somebody else in his living room. Clementine huffed and raised her brows, analyzing the inside of the house, trying to find the kitchen.

In front of her in the entryway was a rack of coats, hung up high on the grey wall. Clem didn’t bring a jacket, as it was nearly 85 degrees out, so she moved past it and walked into the main area. To her left was Marlon’s living room, accompanied by a few boys she vaguely recognized from school drinking and playing some video game on the large flatscreen. Not wanting to have to talk to them, she quickly walked straight and into the kitchen. 

“You made it!” Brody jumped off from her seat on the granite counter and skipped over to the tan girl to hug her tightly. “I love your outfit.”

Clem looked down at her cuffed blue jeans and form-fitting rosy shirt. Although she was receiving a compliment, she crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh, thanks. It only took a billion years to pick out.”

Brody grinned softly. “Let’s go out onto the patio! That’s where most everyone is.”

The slightly taller girl grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out through the sliding glass door and onto the rocky terrain of Marlon’s patio. To her right was a porch, which you could step up onto and enter an above ground pool. There were pretty, golden bulb lights strung across the entire backyard, glowing down on a little over a dozen teenagers. Music from a nearby speaker played loudly, as Marlon didn’t have any close-by neighbors that would file a complaint.

Brody dragged Clem up onto the porch and over to a few of their classmates who she recognized: Violet LaCasse, Sophie and Minerva Wilson, and Mitch Gray. She had never really talked to any of them, except Mitch once for chemistry homework. But she knew that Brody was really good friends with Sophie and Mitch (surprisingly) especially, so she stayed put.

“Hey, Clementine, right?” Minnie asked as Clem sat down on the metal chair, her arm loosely around Violet’s shoulders.

“That’s my name,” Clementine joked tight-lipped.

“You want a beer?” Mitch chimed in, already reaching for the cooler beneath them.

Clem’s amber eyes widened. “Ah, no, thank you. I’m driving back home tonight.”

Mitch shrugged. “If you wanna’ have real fun tonight, then you drink. I’ll drive you home after.” He gave a cheeky grin.

“You’ve already had three beers in the past 40 minutes, dumbass,” Violet objected, running her finger around the lid of her water bottle.

Clementine remained silent, her eyes furrowed together. Instead, she simply shook her head at his offer. As she looked to her left, she saw how Brody’s lips were set in a slight pout, her fingers wrapped tightly around themselves.

Once the auburn haired girl noticed Clem’s concerned stare, her expression did a complete 180, returning back to her usual welcoming grin. 

Sophie tugged on Brody’s sleeve. “Did Marlon say where Louis is?”

“You know, I don’t—“

As if on purpose, Marlon busted through the sliding glass door, his arm around a slightly shorter, darker skinned boy. A cuter boy, Clementine admired. Louis Hastings.

“Look who’s fuckin’ back and better than ever!” Marlon roared, clearly already tipsy, stumbling out onto the patio.

Practically everyone grinned and cheered, the screams of the teenagers echoing into the forest behind them. The rest of the boys who Clem saw inside also came outside, all thrilled to see their favorite friend back home. After a few minutes of the rowdy boys yelling and pushing each other, Marlon and Louis made their way up the porch steps and over to the table.

Marlon kissed the side of Brody’s head, her nearly flinching at the touch. “You smell like alcohol, babe.”

He kissed her again, despite her protests, as Mitch and Louis did that awkward side hug-back-hitting thing guys did. 

Louis’s eyes scanned the table, nodding a simple hey, good to see you again to the blonde and the twins before his tawny brown eyes met Clementine’s.

He knew her face from around school, but didn’t really know her too well since she was a grade below him and almost everyone else, except for Mitch. All he really knew her by was the fact that she won a state photography prize for their school last year and that she sometimes wore her hair in two cute pigtails tied with purple ribbons. And that she was pretty. Really pretty.

Louis held his hand out towards her across the table. “Why, hello. I’m Louis, to formally introduce ourselves.”

Clem’s cheekbones flushed vaguely before the corners of her mouth lifted up. “Clementine.”

“I’m glad you could make it. The more the merrier, right?” Louis preached. “Oh, wait, that sounds bad. Uh, nevermind.”

Clementine giggled softly, not caring about the slightly confused stares from the rest of the group.

“Alright, you two, stop flirting,” Marlon interjected, waving his hand around. “C’mon, Lou, let’s go talk to Luke.”

“Okay, okay,” Louis said, turning back to look at her. “See you all later.”

The group said their chorus of goodbyes to the two boys and watched as they walked down the wooden steps, Louis holding up Marlon so he doesn’t fall. Clem’s stare lingered on the boy with dreads, even after they walked across the yard to a group of boys kicking around a soccer ball. 

Brody leaned over the arm of her chair and whispered into Clem’s ear, “You’re welcome for inviting you.”

“Oh, quiet. He was just being nice,” she insisted, tucking a curl behind her ear.

“Whatever you say,” Brody sang.

--

Clementine stood awkwardly by the side of the house as she watched the rest of the party-goers dancing and talking. She wraps one of her hands around the opposite arm in an attempt to warm herself up. She wished she had brought a coat now, the early autumnal cold night air surrounding her in an aura of blue. When she lifted her head to look up at the stars, she hoped that the far away heat from them would transfer to her body. Sadly, it didn’t.

Since she was scuffing her white shoes against the ground, she didn’t notice the presence of a body next to her. She was too focused on an ant crawling through the caverns between bricks and a new dirt mark on the tip of her shoe that she accidentally ignored the kind boy.

He cleared his throat, alarming her and making her look up.

“Sorry,” she apologized flustered. “You were pretty quiet.”

“I don’t know if this will surprise you, but pretty much no one else has ever said that to me,” Louis told her, leaning against the tan house as well.

“Well, you did make quite the entrance,” Clementine complimented.

He shrugged. “Marlon and his alcohol made quite the entrance.”

“Right, right.”

“So, um,” Louis began. “I got you a drink.”

Clementine raises an eyebrow. “Why?” 

“I noticed you didn’t have one at the table. I can’t let a pretty girl go thirsty at my party,” Louis explained, his dark eyes twinkling like the stars above them.

She eyed the red cup suspiciously then gazed back at him. “You seem nice enough, Louis, I just don’t know if I wanna’ take a random drink from you.”

“What? I--Ohh!” Louis’ face dropped at what she was implying. “There isn’t anything--It’s just water with ice. I hope you like ice--Ah, okay, this is a really bad first impression.”

Clementine giggled and bit the inside of her lip. “Then, how about you make a good second impression?”

“Yes! Yeah, yeah,” Louis agreed. 

“Can you walk me to my car? No offense to your party, but I don’t really think I’m needed here.” Clementine joked, but her solemn undertone spoke a different narrative.

He smiled wordlessly and opened the glass door for her, following her once she stepped inside. They made their way through the simple layout of the bottom floor and to the front door. Louis once again held it open for her, and her heart felt warm for the first time tonight.

The walk down the long dirt driveway and to the main street that Clem had to park on was silent, since the two teenagers didn’t know anything to talk about and didn’t really mind the comforting quiet that was only filled with chirps of crickets and nearby music from the party. Once they reached Clem’s silver sedan, she paused in front of the driver side door.

“Well, this is me,” she announced, pulling her keychain out of her back pocket. “Thanks for the walk.”

“I’d feel too bad to let you walk down here alone in the dark,” he reasoned with his hands shoved into his jean pockets. “But, you know, I don’t know if our short walk made up for the whole four hours of the party where you looked miserable.”

“What? I was having fun. So much fun,” she promised dramatically, but at his incredulous stare she gave in. “Yeah, fine, it kind of sucked for me.”

Louis sported a small grin. “And I take no offense to that. Besides, I didn’t really throw it.”

“Even if you did, it’s not like my opinion on it really matters. Everyone else looked to be having fun,” she responded.

“Your opinion matters to me.”

Her lips went into a confused pout. “We just met.”

“So? You still matter, and I still feel kinda’ bad that you were dragged here,” Louis empathized with soft eyes.

Clem sighed. “Can you still say thank you to Brody for me? And make sure she gets home safe? I know she doesn’t drink it’s just….”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he assured, opening the car door for her. He cleared his throat. “Have a nice night, Clementine.”

She smiled and slipped into the car, closing the door after her, but her window remained open. “You too, Louis. Welcome home.”

“Yeah, you too,” Louis said before realizing his mistake. “Wait, no. God, I’ve messed up my second chance, too, haven’t I?”

The tan girl laughed. “No, no, you haven’t at all. Goodnight, Louis.”

“Goodnight,” he waved weakly before stepping out of the way for her to drive off.

He watched her car as she drove down the curvy road like he was watching her herself. When she braked, turned on her blinker, and took a left off of the street, Louis sighed to himself with a blissful smile. She really is something else, he pondered, bringing his hands up to feel how warm his face had gotten during their interactions.

He wondered if she was feeling the same joy in the pit of her stomach, too, or if it was simply one-sided. 

What he did know, though, was that he’d definitely have to thank Brody for inviting her. 

[harryfeatgaga]

The one thing I can be thankful for living in Asia is we don’t have that stupid lane one bullshit or the Ticketmaster stuff , it’s just presale and sale (at least I think so) so it won’t be a blood bath (at least I hope not 😂) so I chill out about potentially getting tickets cause hopefully it won’t be so bad , the only thing I hope is that I do get to go next year 😔

I HOPE YOU GET TO SEE HIM BABE!!!!

Anonymous said: where are the shower sex concepts?

FJBHGFHU II DONT KNOW SEND ME SOME IN!!!!!!

Anonymous said: If you dont want to answer this or if you want to answer in the tags I totally get it especially after the mess that was yesterday (I think it was yesterday- my days are running together) but do you know if lou broke up with her fiancé? Is this old news and I'm just behind? I try to pay as little attention to her as possible but also I'm a sucker for some good tea lol

I have no idea tbh I dont pay attention to her either but ive seen a few people say they think it might be over

[tactfulgnostalgic]

how to never stop being totally not okay: a guide to emotional repression for idiots in love with other idiots (by dirk strider)

alternatively titled: baby, are you existential dread? cuz you make me deeply uncomfortable in ways i don’t care to think about (the john egbert life story) 

Summary: How Dirk Strider stole a car, learned to drive, and got a boyfriend (in that order).

(a late birthday dirkjohn road trip fic for my friend lou @vanillacorpse @centercharter! happy birthday, lou!)

1. When he asks you whether you stole it, say no.

“Please tell me you did not steal that,” says John.

“Why does that matter.”

“Because it matters! And because when Terezi asks me about it later, I need plausible deniability. Tell me you did not steal this vehicle.”

“I . . . did not steal this vehicle.”

“Okay. Now, are you saying that because it’s true or because I told you to?”

“What happened to plausible deniability?”

“Never mind.”

From behind the wheel of a glossy, scarlet, brand spanking new Maserati, Dirk Strider says, “Look, are you coming or not?”

From the front porch of his house, dressed in pajamas and sandals, and holding a duffle bag slung over one shoulder, John Egbert says, “Yeah, I’m coming.”

At four o’clock in the morning, the neighborhood is quiet and dark. The trees rustle in a gentle breeze. A cat prowls along the sidewalk, its first and second eyes a luminous yellow, its third and fourth a vivid green. Down the street, a light is on in Jane’s kitchen, and through the curtains, someone is moving around. Maybe it’s her dad, downstairs for a nightcap. Or maybe it’s Jane. She’s taken up late night baking recently. The last time Dirk checked, the melatonin was working, though, so it’s probably her dad, after all.

You’re a god, now, technically,” John gripes. He slams the door shut with a force that has Dirk opening his mouth to complain about treating the car better, until he remembers that he stole this thing off the display room floor an hour ago, and also that he doesn’t really give a rat’s ass what happens to it. “You can just make infinite money. Or alchemize a car. Or ask them for it, they’d probably give it to you. Why do you need to steal.”

John has this habit, Dirk’s noticed, of asking questions that aren’t questions, questions that are more an opportunity for the other person to prove John wrong than honest inquiries about things John doesn’t know. For example, this one.

“You’re also a god,” Dirk points out. “You live in an apartment the size of my garage. Why not buy a castle? Why not build one?”

“That’s not even, like, slightly the same thing, dude.”

“How so.”

“For one thing, I don’t -- you know what, no. It’s too early for this. Start driving before I change my mind.”

“If you don’t want to come,” Dirk begins uncertainly, and John groans.

“Drive.”

“Okay.”

It started with a midnight text.

Dirk doesn’t exactly know why John hangs out with him. He doesn’t. It makes sense for John to hang out with Roxy, because of . . . shenanigans in their past that nobody really talks about. And with Jake and Jane, well, they’re literally genetic family, so they probably have a lot of shit to talk about. And of course he’d keep in touch with his friends from his session. That doesn’t require an explanation. But there’s not much that Dirk has to offer John, except a whole fistful of absolutely no personal connection. Their first conversation took place in the aftermath of a dying universe, except Dirk doesn’t remember that. So their first conversation was . . . hours after the Game, Dirk guesses. Or maybe earlier than that. He doesn’t remember their first words. It was probably something inane along the lines of “Sup, bro,” or “Nice one.” Dirk probably said something stupid. John probably gave him a weird look and then left him alone. Statistically speaking, that would be how it went.

But somewhere along the line neither of them knowing each other turned into an advantage instead of a reason to avoid each other. Sometimes, when half of your social circle was related to you and the other half had dated you or one of your relatives in the recent past, it was refreshing to hang out a total fucking stranger, for a change.

So when John said, “I need to get out of this fucking town,” what Dirk said was not “Sounds rough, I’ll text Jade,” but instead, “I can get us a car by Friday.”

And instead of saying, “Um, okay, that’s kind of weird, I was just talking about a hypothetical,” John said, “Sweet. Come by my place as soon as you have it,” because he’s the kind of guy that says things like that. Dirk wishes he were the kind of guy who said things like that.

Granted, John does look a little bit like Jake, which is weird sometimes. He looks enough like Jake that Dirk has commented on it, once, in one of his habitual fits of saying dumb shit without thinking about, which that happen to him, sometimes, because his life is hell and existence is suffering. But John, after blinking in surprise, only laughed. “Haha, that’s kind of weird,” he said. “Didn’t you guys used to date?”

“Um,” said Dirk.

“Yeah,” said Dirk.

“I mean, kind of,” said Dirk.

“We broke up,” said Dirk.

“Whack,” John had said indifferently, and returned to ruthlessly beating Dirk’s ass in Mario Kart.

And because Dirk doesn’t know how to have nice things without fucking them irrevocably, he may or may not be a little bit in love with the guy. So he’s got that going for him.

John’s house is in what would be called northern California, if things like the United States government still existed, and if any of the people who created and shaped the global civilization had ever been to California. Upon Dave’s request, every principality and township in the continental U.S. had been subtitled Striderville, with various numerical identifiers to differentiate them. Austin was Striderville No. 1. New York was Striderville No. 7. Minneapolis was Striderville No. 666, for reasons that were unclear to everyone except Dave Strider, who when asked would only grimly profess, “It knows what it fucking did.”

Sacramento (Striderville No. 148) fades in their rearview as they soar across the freeway. Dirk, who has been getting this far on intuitive knowledge and gumption, takes the opportunity to admit, “I don’t actually know how to drive.”

It takes a moment for this fact to register.

“What do you mean,” John says slowly, “you don’t know how to drive?”

“It means what it means. I never learned.”

“What the fuck do you mean you never learned how to drive.”

“I mean that I grew up in the middle of the fucking ocean, Egbert, where was I supposed to get a car?”

“You’re driving right now!”

“Yeah, I mean, the operating part isn’t hard. It’s the lane stuff that makes it all complicated. Like, when to turn and shit. Actually, I think I memorized an old Texas driver’s ed manual once. Does that count?”

“No!”

“No need to get worked up about it,” Dirk mutters.

“Oh, my God,” John says, face in his hands. “I’m going to die. I’m going to die and it’s going to be because of you.”

“That’s a little dramatic.”

“It’s really not.”

“Have we crashed yet?”

“Let me drive,” John orders. “Pull over.”

Dirk really should let John drive. It’s the responsible choice. It’s the reasonable choice. It’s the choice that anybody with a lick of common sense to scrap together in their entire body would make.

Obviously, Dirk says, “No.”

“Do you even know what a stop sign is?”

“No, but if I employ a little bit of deductive reasoning, I bet I have a great guess.”

“What’s the first thing you do at a four-way?”

“Make sure everyone’s got a safeword.”

“Dirk, shut up, Jesus Christ. I bet you’ve never even had sex,” John says irritably, as they sail over the city limits.

Trying desperately not to actually sound wounded, Dirk says, “That’s a little below the belt, don’t you think.”

“How would you know? You’ve never gotten below the belt, have you?”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It does if you’re not a virgin.”

“I’m not -- this conversation is ridiculous.”

“Virgin says what?”

“You’re bullying me. I’m being bullied, right now, by my own friend.”

“I get what Jane means,” John says, thoughtfully. “This really is therapeutic.”

“What? Making fun of me?”

“Yeah,” he says placidly. “Really good for the blood pressure. Hey, do you mind if I take a nap real quick?”

Dirk does a double take. “What happened to me not driving?” he asks suspiciously.

“Eh,” John says, waving it off, tipping his head back against the headrest and closing his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You’re doing fine.”

“Wait. Do you know how to drive?”

A tiny smile tugs at one corner of John’s mouth.

“Your session started when you were thirteen,” Dirk exclaims. “You wouldn’t have had time to learn.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You didn’t even care about it, did you.” The accusation is flat.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmno.”

“You were just fucking with me.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dirk considers this.

“You’re a jackass.”

“Yep,” John says happily, and tosses his feet up on the dash.

2. Don’t let him pick the music.

“I get to pick the music,” John decides, apropos of nothing, around 6:30, when they’re in the middle of southern California (Striderville No. 83-195). The sun is just dawning behind them, a blinding pinprick of white against the asphalt in the rearview. It casts sharp rays of orange light through the back windshield, lighting their faces in warm colors, bathing the cab in yellow and the road in front of them in shadows that seem to stretch on for miles.

“What? No, you don’t. I’m the driver. Driver picks the music.”

“Driver has to keep his hands on the steering wheel. Driver can’t stop me.”

“I’ll pull this car over, so help me God.”

“No, you won’t,” John says cheerfully, reaching for the radio.

“Wait,” says Dirk, panicking. “Don’t --”

“WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN--”

John wheezes.

“--MY FATHER TOOK ME INTO THE CITY, TO SEE A MARCHING BAND--”

“Listen,” Dirk says, speeding up. “Listen, right, okay, listen, it was in the car when I stole it--”

“HE SAID, ‘SON, WHEN YOU GROW UP, WILL YOU BE--”

John hoots. He shrieks. He cackles, slapping the dashboard of the car like he wants to beat the dust out of it.

“It’s a good record, okay, fuck, I mean, like, it’s not the worst thing--”

“THE SAVIOR OF THE BROKEN, THE BEATEN, AND THE DAMNED?”

“I’m texting Roxy,” says John, wrestling his phone out of his bag. This terrifies Dirk so badly that he actually takes a hand off the wheel to make a mad grab for it, and the car swerves, careening towards the shoulder.

“HE SAID, ‘WILL YOU DEFEAT THEM?’”

“You can’t do that,” Dirk says, his tone hovering two octaves above where it should be. “Listen, she doesn’t need to know about this--”

“Roxy would murder me if she found out about this and realized I hadn’t told her, dude, are you kidding me? Look, it’s an ethical obligation, if anything--”

“YOUR DEMONS? AND ALL THE NONBELIEVERS? THE PLANS THAT THEY HAVE MADE?”

“John,” Dirk says. “John. John. Listen to me, John.”

The shutter of the Apple camera closing, artificial and tinny, ricochets throughout the car like gunfire.

There is a long moment of silence, then, where the only sound is Gerard Way’s indecipherable howling.

“BECAUSE SOMEDAY, I’LL LEAVE YOU, A PHANTOM TO LEAD YOU IN THE SUMMER, TO JOIN THE BLACK PARADE.”

John and Dirk regard each other frostily.

“Give it to me,” Dirk orders, vaulting over the seat divider, and John yells, seizing the steering wheel: “DUDE, THE ROAD,” while also holding the phone as far away from Dirk’s grasp as his considerable armspan can possibly reach.

The car cuts a wild path across the interstate, zigzagging freely between the four lanes as if the lane dividers were more suggestions than rules, at one point almost turning a complete 180 and cruising back the way it came. Black skid marks sear the road under the tires when John wedges himself far enough into the driver’s seat to slam on the brake, and Dirk tries to take advantage of the opportunity to grip John’s wrist and pry his fingers off the phone.

“This is for your own good,” John grits out. “Roxy -- has the right -- to know --”

“Egbert, so help me God.”

“That’s also me, dumbass, and I’m not helping you--”

“I’ll give you anything you want.”

John pauses, the car slowing to a cool forty miles per hour, and says, “Anything?”

From where he sits, perched on the divider between seats like a gangly bird of prey, clinging to John’s outstretched hand like a kitten dangling over a waterfall, Dirk vows, “Anything.”

John grins, and lets go of the phone.

Dirk shuffles into the passenger’s seat, rolls down the window, and flings the offending device out into the street.

“Aw, man,” John complains, watching it bounce and roll away in the mirror. “I had a lot of music on that thing.”

“I’ll buy you another phone. I’ll buy you ten phones.”

“What the fuck am I gonna do with ten phones?”

“I dunno, dude, they’re your phones.”

John shakes his head. “Anyway,” he said. “You said anything.”

The man hasn’t stopped grinning since Dirk agreed. It is a truly unsettling sight.

“I don’t kiss. Aside from that--”

“Oh, man, literally fuck OFF--”

Dirk turns off the radio, which had metamorphosed into the song’s iconic caterwaul of guitars. “A deal’s a deal. What do you want from me?”

John says, “Can you read that exit sign for me?”

Dirk looks up and squints.

“You can take the dumb glasses off. That might help.”

Dirk does not, and so he doesn’t read what the exit sign says until John is steering them steadfastly towards it.

“No,” he says.

“You said anything.”

“I take it back. You know what, you can use my phone to text Roxy yourself. Strike me down for my arrogance. Smite me. Ruin me. Post nudes on my Facebook account. I don’t even have nudes. I’ll take some so you can post them. Just put my ass on blast. Or do you want to decapitate me? That’s very in, nowadays.”

John cackles, again.

The Maserati sails under the exit sign for the Wet N’ Wild Slippery Funtimes Happy Place Water Park, and Dirk Strider, neither for the first time nor the last, contemplates climbing out the window.

3. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, go to the waterpark.

Dirk is hot, wet, and covered in skin-tight clothing, and none of it in the fun way. He views this series of information to be a remarkably concise way of summating his life.

John strolls ahead. The bastard is barely wet. Somehow, the water always seemed to avoid him, migrating away from his form as if swayed from its course by his own ineffable good temper, and when he did get dunked, he could summon a gust of wind to dry himself off with all the effort it took to snap his fingers.

The Heir of Breath is such a useful classpect that sometimes it makes Dirk want to scream. Of course it would be Egbert who got the powers that served some fruitful day-to-day purpose.

He floats along instead of walking, like John, because unlike John, Dirk doesn’t derive pleasure from doing things the boring and painful way. Dirk spends most of his time off the ground, actually, even if it’s only by a few inches. It saves him the effort of having to walk.

“You look like a drowned cat,” John says, not unsympathetically.

“You’ve never fucking seen a drowned cat.”

“How do you know? I’ve seen a lot of shit. Maybe a drowned cat was part of it.”

“You know,” Dirk suggests, “if you really feel that bad, you could help me out. By doing things like . . . oh, I don’t know. Drying me off.”

“There were towels at the store,” John says innocently. “You could’ve -- hey, whoa, whoa. You gonna just climb into your luxury sports vehicle like that?”

Dirk, sopping wet and dripping onto the pavement, stops with his handle on the car door and gives John a dead-eyed stare.

“Just saying,” John says, raising his hands. “That’s leather upholstery. You get that wet, it’s gonna stink.”

“John,” Dirk says very quietly. “If you want me to dry off. You could summon the wind. To do exactly that.”

John presses his lips together tightly, brow furrowed in thought. “Hmm,” he said. “You know, I could do that, couldn’t I?”

“Yes.” Dirk resists the urge to vault over the hood of the car and throttle the man he is currently in love with. “You could.”

John summons a small tornado in the palm of his hand. “It’s really just so convenient,” he says blandly. “Don’t you think, Dirk?”

“It certainly would be,” Dirk says, grinding his teeth.

“Of course, I’d only ever do it with your permission. I wouldn’t use my powers on anybody without their consent, first.”

“Consider this,” Dirk grits out, “my full and enthusiastic consent.”

“Really?” John arches an eyebrow. “You’d just let me do that, Dirk? Wow. That’s a lot of trust you have in me. I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just dry me off, asshole.”

John leans on the hood of the Maserati, arms folded, one ankle balanced on his knee. He grins, flashing thirty-two glossy white teeth, and the breeze stirs his hair just so, tousling it with a rakish charm. When Dirk looks at him, something twists in his chest. It feels hot and uncomfortable, and he doesn’t not like it, exactly.

Then he gets whisked into the air by a gust of wind, wrenched up like a ragdoll on the breeze.

As he soars through the air, one brief, fury-infused thought flashes through Dirk Strider’s mind:

He knows what he’s doing, the little shit.

Then this thought is swallowed by Dirk remembering that he can fly, and catching himself before he faceplants into solid concrete. Getting uppercut by the manifestation of the wind itself is bad enough. Eating shit in front of the guy you’re going on a roadtrip across America to impress would add insult to injury, really.

He staggers to his feet and trudges back to where John stands, bent over on his knees, still heaving with his last paroxysms of laughter.

“Granted unthinkable fucking cosmic powers,” Dirk seethes, “uses them like this. Oh, sure, that’s a great way to spend your time. Not like there’s anything more useful you could be doing with them. I’m sure that’s what you got them for. Tossing me around like a limp sack of nickels, that’s the real reason you got to be a fucking airbender.”

“Heh,” John says, straightening up, “yeah. I’m pretty great.”

But the smile he offers is smaller than it could be, and the laugh has gone out of his eyes, and Dirk is struck with a sudden pang of regret. This is chased by a needle-sharp jolt of self-hatred, because he knows what he did, and if he’d thought for half a fucking second before he spoke, he wouldn’t have said it.

They don’t talk about the Game.

4. Don’t think about the past.

Four months after Sburb ended, half of their friends still woke up screaming.

The other half didn’t, but that was because they hardly fucking spoke at all in the first place. Jade once went for a whole week without saying a word out loud to another human being. Jake fucked off into the woods for almost a month and didn’t take his phone with him, leaving everybody to wonder whether or not he’d wound up dead at the bottom of a waterfall somewhere until he came back. Roxy started coding again, but intensely, obsessively, staying up until ugly hours of the morning staring at lines upon lines of unforgiving binary, surrounded by empty cans of Redbull and wearing bags under her eyes. The Lalondes mourned lost mothers and walked quickly past bars, and Dave still couldn’t look Dirk in the eye without flinching, and they were all of them a little uncomfortable with each other, a little too aware of how like much everyone resembled some lost parent or dead guardian. Jane had her dad, but Dirk knew it wasn’t the same. There were some things so painful it became an act of trauma to speak it out loud.

Dirk remembers a lot of things, from that initial period of settlement, when they were learning how to be people instead of gods.

He remembers Jane turning up on his doorstep with a sleeping bag and a pillow, exhausted, tear tracks under her eyes, asking to sleep over because she couldn’t spend another night in the same house where she’d lived under threat of attack for thirteen years and six months. He remembers getting her settled on the couch in his living room, awkwardly trying to make her take the bed, and her refusing stubbornly because she “didn’t want to inconvenience him any more than she already had.” He remembers having a panic attack and locking himself in the bathroom before calling Roxy, demanding answers, demanding her to tell him what to do, how to deal with this, why anybody thought he was the person to go to for help--

He remembers Roxy turning up half an hour later with her own sleeping bag, and Jake in tow. Jake and Dirk hadn’t spoken in God knows how long, then, but it didn’t matter, because Jane was crying in a sleeping bag on his couch and that meant not a single other fact in the whole fucking world mattered one goddamn whit.

Dirk wonders who John went to, when he woke up screaming. If he woke up screaming.

He remembers that John doesn’t just come from a different universe than everyone else in the world, than Dirk and his friends. John comes from a different timeline. John’s friends have had two years, from their perspective, to learn how to be without him.

If Dirk were a braver person, he’d ask what that felt like.

If Dirk were a much braver person, he’d ask whether it felt good.

Instead, Dirk says, “Do you want to get food?”

John says, “Yeah, that’d be okay, I guess.”

It’s the closest any of them get to an epilogue.

5. Do NOT ask whether or not your midnight McDonald’s run is a date. (But if you do, like, be cool about it.)

They roll up to the McDonald’s around 11:30. Dirk is all for getting drive-thru and hitting the freeway again, but John wants to stretch his legs. They’ve been driving for close to eight hours, at this point, and nothing about the road is even remotely familiar. Dirk’s stopped keeping track of which turns they take, which exits, which back roads. They’re trying to get lost, and they’re well on their way.

John gets three hamburgers and eats two without stopping for breath. Dirk orders a carton of fries and a vanilla milkshake, which John makes fun of him for, but Dirk had accepted this eventuality beforehand.

The red leather of the booth they sit in is sticky, and there are stains on the table. Dirk counts the number of health code violations to distract himself from wondering whether or not this qualifies as a date, because it doesn’t, probably, and even if it did, that didn’t make it mean anything, or at least that didn’t make it mean anything to John. When he finishes health code violations, he starts on the ceiling tiles.

John steals one of his fries, and he’s a millisecond too late to bat his hand away.

“You should get something else,” John says, through a mouthful of fry. “You get crabby when you’re hungry.”

“I’m always crabby.”

“Then fuckin’ eat something, dude, that’s what I’m saying.”

Dirk nudges his glasses up his nose and takes a sip of milkshake. “I don’t require anything else,” he says, instead of answering.

“Whatever,” John mutters under his breath, in a way that makes clear how weird he finds this response, and redirects his attention to his third burger.

Dirk fidgets with his straw. The grease has pooled at the bottom of his french fry carton. It glistens under the fluorescents. John’s hair is lanky from not having been washed in two days, and there’s a smudge on the lense of one of his glasses. Dirk watches him stuff a third of a burger in his mouth.

“Hey, so,” says Dirk, before the part of his brain in charge of not saying astonishingly embarrassing shit catches up to his mouth. “Is this, like, a date?”

John pauses, chews, and then swallows.

“Um,” he says. “Do you want it to be a date?”

Dirk panics. This is the worst possible thing that John could have said. Not only is it not an answer, but it is the kind of non-answer which lobs the ball directly into Dirk’s court, making Dirk the one in charge of making the first move, and oh, this is awful. This is really, incredibly, exquisitely bad.

“I don’t know.”

John lifts an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”

“I meant -- yeah,” Dirk says weakly.

“Wait, so you do?”

“Do what?”

“Want this to be a date.”

“What did I say?”

“Are you really this bad at this,” John says, grinning, “or do you have to, like, try?”

“Hey, fuck off,” Dirk says, overwhelmed by relief at the change of subject. “Between the two of us, only one has actually dated.”

“You don’t know that,” John says, offended. “For all you know, I was hooking up with Dave sprite twenty-four sev, on that ship.”

“Davesprite has higher standards than that.”

“But you don’t?”

“John, we’ve established that mocking my taste is low-hanging fruit, in terms of comedy,” Dirk says. “It’s like writing a film school dissertation on Paul Blart: Mall Cop. I mean, you could, but where’s the sophistication? Where’s the talent?”

“Heh,” John chuckles. “Low-hanging fruit.”

“Oh, I get it. It’s funny because I’m gay.”

“So am I, asshole. I get to make that joke.”

“Oh, I don’t dispute that you get to. I’m baffled that you want to, however.”

“Screw you, I’m hilarious.”

“It is apparent in every element of your personality that you enjoyed Nic Cage movies as a child.”

“And it’s apparent in every element of yours that your favorite book is Fight Club. Your point?”

Dirk splutters, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what a Fight Club is.”

“Please. I bet you creamed your jeans when you read the part about glycerin.” John takes another bite of his hamburger, smug.

“I don’t have to take this from the guy who uses the phrase ‘cream your jeans’ in casual conversation.”

“I am almost one hundred per cent certain that you have said worse.”

Throughout the course of the conversation, the restaurant has been gradually growing quieter. Not that there are a lot of people there in the first place, of course, but the two or three other groups making midnight junk food runs have fallen into a lull, and the quiet bickering from Dirk and John’s table carries easily. As Dirk gives the room a glance, he notices that the trolls at the table next to them have become completely silent, and they’re both staring.

“Hey,” says the troll to the left, a short greenblood with corkscrew horns. Their eyes grow wide as they lean closer to get a better look. “Hey -- hey, aren’t you John Egbert?”

John stiffens. It’s barely noticeable. He keeps his eyes on his tray.

“Nah,” he says, forcefully bright. “Just got one of those faces, I guess.”

“No, you are,” says the troll, with an aura of revelation. “Hey, Niroxi, look! It’s John Egbert!”

“Hey, back off,” Dirk warns them, but they’re already getting up, craning their necks to try and get a gander at John’s darkening face.

“Are you -- holy shit, I can’t believe this -- what are you doing here?”

“Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” John says, voice strained.

“Are you here to check up on the government? We thought you’d gone off the map! Are Dave and Rose with you? Oh, shit, is Karkat here?”

“Jade says fuck you, too,” Dirk mumbles, and John shoots him a wry look.

“That would be so cool, if Karkat was here! Are he and Dave still a thing? I heard that Dave was dating Jane now, is that true?”

“No,” Dirk exclaims, repulsed. “What on earth--”

Niroxi groans. “You’re being so cringey,” she tells her friend, plaintively. Then, to John, almost shy: “But, like, for real? Are they here, though?”

John struggles to muster a smile. “Nah,” he says. “Just me and Dirk.”

“Dirk?” Her eyes flit to Dirk, who chafes under the attention. She brightens. “Oh,” she says. “Is Jake here, too?”

Dirk’s stomach takes a swan dive deep enough to bury it in the earth’s molten core.

“Nope,” he manages. “Nah, he, uh. I don’t know where Jake is.”

“Really? Told you,” Niroxi tells her friend matter-of-factly.

“You didn’t tell me shit. They’re on a break, it doesn’t--”

“Yeah? Like you’d know. You get your information from the Alternian Weekly.”

“It’s a good site!”

“The Alternian Weekly predicted that Kanaya and Rose would get divorced.”

“And the jury’s still out on that! Didn’t you see the photos? Rose wasn’t wearing her wedding ring at Target last week.”

“You can’t see her hand in the photo, that doesn’t mean anything--”

“And Kanaya and Terezi have been pretty chummy, lately, don’t you think?”

“Like Terezi would ever be into someone that wasn’t John,” Niroxi says, rolling her eyes, and John cringes. Dirk wonders how Terezi would react to that, if she were here. She’d probably laugh. Then she’d punch them.

Dirk isn’t great at doing either. So he does what he can.

“Come on,” Dirk says, standing up.

John tries to ignore the frenzied whispering of the table next to them. “You haven’t finished,” he says, in the carefully moderated tone of someone just barely keeping a lid on their shit.

“I have unless I want to be shitting water tomorrow. Come on.”

“You are literally so fucking gross,” John says gratefully, shoving back his chair.

They’re walking when they leave the McDonald’s. By the time the Maserati is in view, they’re runnin.

Dirk guns the engine as they leave, putting a family of goggling carapacians in their rearview.

6. Keep driving, and don’t talk about it.

They make it two towns over without saying a word. John picks the music, but after two songs, he turns it off, perhaps more comfortable with silence than the obnoxious country-pop blend that local radio stations seem to prefer.

Dirk, meanwhile, wages war with himself.

If it were Dirk, he wouldn’t want to talk about it.

On the other hand, it’s not Dirk, and John might want to talk about it.

On the other other hand, it would be excruciatingly awkward to talk about it, and being drop-kicked into that nuanced kind of social entanglement might actually kill Dirk on the spot. His heart would go into cardiac arrest and he’d die at the wheel. And then who would be driving the car? Nobody, that’s who. He’d die a Heroic Death, trying to get John Egbert to open up about his fucking feelings.

On the other other other hand, Dirk’s been informed that talking about things is healthier than not talking about it. So there’s that.

On the fourth other hand, Dirk’s not really familiar with the general concept of a healthy coping mechanism, and if John asked him for advice, he would have exactly jack shit to offer.

As it turns out, this debate is meaningless, because it’s John who speaks first.

“I was kind of immature back there,” he says, scratching the back of his head. “Sorry.”

“What?” Dirk stares ahead owlishly.

“Immature,” John repeats. “I shouldn’t have bailed like that. They were just kids.”

They soar past twin rows of wheat fields. A small town appears on the horizon.

“We’re just kids,” Dirk says, attempting to sound reasonable.

John snorts.

The town grows closer. It unveils the silhouettes of wide, boxy warehouses and tall, peeling billboards.

“We are,” Dirk says, frowning.

“Uh-huh,” John says. “Okay.”

“Why do you think we’re not?”

“I hate to break it to you, my guy, but whatever you think passes for ‘regular kid,’ we ain’t it.”

“I don’t mean that we’re perfectly normal,” Dirk argues, uncertain of why his voice is rising all of a sudden, “but we’re still . . . you don’t have to take that kind of treatment.”

“Yeah, I do,” John said, and his voice is centuries old. His voice has cracks, crumbling pillars, smooth facets weathered silken by time. His voice is age itself. His voice is the ghost of a dead universe, and it echoes, hollow as the cavity of an open grave.

“You don’t,” Dirk says, and his voice is small, petulant.

“I’m their god. I can’t just tell them to fuck off.”

“Sure you can,” Dirk says sharply. “It’s easy. It goes like this: ‘I’m on a date. Fuck off.’”

“I’m not going to be a dick to them.”

“They were being dicks to you.”

“They’re kids,” John cries. “How do you not -- I made their universe! Me and Jade and Rose and -- what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

“Not let them walk all over you!”

“I’m not -- I don’t --”

“You deserve to get to be normal,” Dirk insisted, and he’s never sure of anything in his life, except for this. Except for the lone, simple, absolutely unshakeable fact that John get to be a kid, if he wants. He doesn’t even know why he’s so angry about it, but he is. “You are. You sure as fuck didn’t get to be, back in -- back when you were younger. But now--”

“Yeah,” John says bitingly. “Normal. Yeah, sure, Dirk.”

“Normal enough.”

“Normal enough? What the fuck does that mean? Normal enough.”

“Even underneath all the Game bullshit.”

It’s the first time either of them have mentioned it. Ever, in Dirk’s case.

Dirk says, “You still get to be normal.”

Because Dirk can’t be. Dirk can’t and won’t and will never be normal, not with how his brain works, not with what he’s seen. Dirk was born in a dead world, a world underwater, and he was raised to survive in a universe that doesn’t exist anymore, and everything about him reflects that fact. There’s no hope, for him. He can’t be the person this universe expects him to be, the person who could live in this universe, and that’s fine. Dirk’s made his peace with that.

But John can be. And it makes Dirk unfathomably fucking angry, to think that maybe, after all, he can’t. Maybe the one of them -- the only one who could, the only one who might, after everything that happened, be capable; the one who wasn’t dating an alien or raised by an alien empress or or fused with a primordial deity in the form of a dog -- couldn’t have a normal life, after all. Maybe none of them got to go back. Maybe all of them were out of place.

That was the bitch about winning, in retrospect. It wasn’t game over. It was a new game.

“Pull over,” John says suddenly.

The briskness of this command startles Dirk, makes him swerve. “What,” he says. “No. Why?”

“Do it.”

“Why?”

“Do it.”

Dirk hangs a left in the nearest intersection and pulls them into a sparsely populated parking lot, sitting beside a giant vacated warehouse. The street is empty. The only cars there are old, probably out of use, maybe even abandoned.

John takes deep breaths.

“Normal,” he says acidly.

“Yeah.” Dirk says it stoutly, emphatically. “You know. Normal.”

John lifts his hands, and every car in the parking lot rises into the air.

The sound of two dozen vehicles groaning and clattering off the ground, in conjunction with the shriek of the gale necessary to lift them, deafens. It choruses. It howls. The cars rise and hover at ten feet, most of them, with the lighter ones drifting higher and the heavier sitting at seven or eight feet each. The wind tears through the flypaper and rubbish littering the parking lot, tossing it up in small cyclones of whirling trash. It makes the trees writhe. It shakes the Maserati, but doesn’t touch it, doesn’t lift it; they sit in the eye of the storm.

Above, storm clouds start to circle and congeal. The wispy tufts of cirrus that had been drifting over the horizon blacken as if someone tipped over an inkpot in a bed of cotton. Flickers of lightning fork down to the east.

The lines of John’s muscles are rigid. A tic in his jaw is the only sign this is costing him any effort at all.

After a minute, the storm starts to calm. The cars lower gradually to the ground, settling gently in the same places they were. The wind quiets, and then Dirk can hear himself think again. John lowers his hands, hesitant, and then puts them in his lap.

But in a way, it’s much worse, now, with everything still. There’s room for the silence to move in again.

Dirk says, “Shit’s up and fucked, huh.”

John laughs wetly. “Shit’s up and fucked,” he confirms.

“I mean,” Dirk says, “you get to pull that kind of wizardly fuckery at the drop of the hat, and here I am over here, fuckin’ Prince of Heart bullshit. What am I supposed to do? Therapize you to fuckin’ death? Fuckin’ Captain Planet-ass bullshit. ‘Heart.’ Jade gets to play pinball with planets, Dave’s over here Groundhog Daying it every time he fucks up, who the fuck even knows what Jake can do, it sure as fuck ain’t Jake, and Roxy can just make shit. Make it! I mean, fuck the Law of Conservation of Matter, am I right? Let’s let her just magick stuff out of thin fuckin’ -- oh, the blond one? Oh, oh, that one? Yeah, toss him, fuckin’, uhhhhh, I dunno, what’s left -- Heart. Prince of Heart, yeah that sounds good. The one that destroys shit, that’s cool, right? What can he do? Shit, man, like, feel really bad about himself, probably? Be depressed? Yeah, that works, great. Cool. We’ve got Witch of Space, Knight of Time, Page of Hope, Heir of Breath, and Depression Man. Dope. Now there’s a lineup I can get behind. Put a ‘case closed’ stamp on that motherfucker, we’re ready to run a session.”

John cracks a smile.

“Gimme a goddamn refund,” Dirk huffs, “that’s all I gotta say. You see how that troll chick didn’t even fucking recognize me? I am the fucking -- I’m not even important enough to get recognized at a McDonald’s. You know that if Roxy had seen that, she’d have eviscerated me on the spot. ‘Prince of Heart.’ Eat my ass, Jesus Christ.”

John giggles. It’s kind of stifled by the lump in his throat.

They look at each other.

John reaches across the armrest and gently punches him in the shoulder. By John’s standards, it’s practically a caress.

In a movie, this would be the part where Dirk kissed him, and John would kiss him back, and everything would be okay.

But Dirk doesn’t kiss him. Instead, he looks out the driver’s window, so that when John cries, he can do it in privacy.

By and by, John clears his throat and scrubs a hand across his face. “Um,” he says. “So I think I broke some guy’s Chevy. We should probably get going.”

“Yeah.” Dirk shifts the car into drive, and the engine thrums. “Where to?”

“I dunno. You wanna head east?”

“That’s fine with me.”

“I heard there was some cool tourist shit out -- hey,” says John, squinting across the street. “Is that an arcade?”

7. Get him the shitty bunny rabbit.

John breaks the lock on the arcade with ease. It’s abandoned, with white sheets tossed over most of the bulky, box-shaped consoles and dust lining the whole place in a thin film, but when Dirk steals some tokens from behind the counter and slots one into the nearest machine, the lights fire up just fine. They fuck around for a little bit with Dance Dance Revolution -- John beats Dirk eight games to one, and that one was when Dirk dared him to do all the moves with one foot -- and then burn tokens on Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. John has to teach Dirk how to play Frogger. Dirk is so bad at it that John wonders aloud whether Dirk actually derives some sick pleasure from killing frogs. John skunks Dirk blind at skee ball, but then Dirk gets him back by climbing up and removing the grate over the holes, and then they spend the rest of the hour lobbing skee balls overhand at the target without much regard for the score.

After an hour or two, they get bored of this, and pass a claw grab machine holding a pile of decaying plushes. Atop the pile sits an abomination in the form of a rabbit. The thing looks like what would happen if you asked someone who’d never seen a rabbit before to design one, except the only reference you gave them was the transcript of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The bulbous, uncanny-valley proportions of the head emphasize the oblong pear shape of the body, and the tail is a limp tuft of stringy cotton. The ears are tattered and the fur on them is clumped and tufted. The animal itself is a weird shade of bluish grey that probably came from using cheap dye for the fur. Beady black eyes glint from either side of a button nose, imbued with a legitimately chilling malevolence.

“That is the ugliest piece of shit bunny I have ever seen in my life,” John breathes, his nose against the glass. “I need it.”

Dirk wanders over, his hands in his pockets. “They’re rigged, you know,” he says. “The machines. You can’t win them.”

“Dude. Dude. Look at me. Look at me, though? I don’t care. I need it.”

“We can buy you a bunny rabbit, if you want one.”

“No, you misunderstand. I don’t want any rabbit. I want that rabbit. Specifically.”

“. . . Okay.”

John wastes somewhere between forty and fifty tokens trying to get the claw machine to give him the bunny. He gets close to success several times, often getting so far as to actually grab the bunny within the prongs of the thing’s obstinately clumsy claw, before it slips out in the millisecond before being deposited in the box. Dirk watches John cycle through the five stages of grief not once, not twice, but every single time this happens, and then watches John recover and try again with unflagging determination. It would be endearing if it were not also making Dirk feel slightly deranged, just watching it.

Finally, John runs out of tokens, and steps back from the machine with a mournful look. “It’s hopeless,” he said.

“Oh, no. If only there were someone who could have told you that.”

“It’s not my fault! I got so close!”

“I know.”

“Guess I’ll just have to do without it,” John mutters. He hangs his head with exaggerated despair. “No bunny rabbit for me.”

He ruins the effect by sneaking a glance up at Dirk.

Dirk heaves a long, put-upon sigh, and draws a token out of his pocket.

“Yes!” John pumps the air, giving Dirk space to assume control of the joystick. “Oh, man, if you nail this, I’ll owe you forever. I’ll even stop making fun of your tattoo. Actually, I take that back. I’ll stop making fun of your hair. Tattoo’s still fair game.”

“The longer you keep talking, the less likely I am to try.”

John ignores this. “You gotta wait for the right moment,” he advises. “It likes to stall sometimes, so you have to jigger it to work. And the joystick is sticky in the lower right corner, so you can’t use it. But aside from that, you should be okay.”

Dirk slips the token into the slot. It chugs for a moment, waiting, and then the screen brightens, the claw stirring.

John is right about the stalling and the sticky patch on the control pad. Dirk wastes three tries on the damn thing before getting aggravated.

“Cool,” he says thinly. “Cool cool cool. Hey, Egbert, do you have any particular qualms about how you get the damn rabbit?”

“Uh,” says John, “no?”

“Good.”

Dirk decaptchalogues Lil Seb into the palm of his hand. The small robot’s red eyes glaze as he boots up.

“You see that rabbit?” he asks it.

Lil Seb directs his attention to the glass, and nods. If he is offended by this obvious caricature of one of his kin, he does not show it. That’s the great part about Lil Seb. He’s a chill motherfucker.

“Get it for me,” Dirk orders, and then slides Lil Seb through the flap at the bottom machine, into the pickup trough where prizes fall for collection.

John lifts his eyebrows. “I think that’s cheating,” he says, but he doesn’t sound upset about it.

Lil Seb climbs up the chute into the main prize pit easily, scaling the mountain of plushies like a man on a mission to the peak of goddamn Everest. He seizes the ugly rabbit by the ears and hauls it down with him, leaping neatly into the prize chute and tumbling back into the trough with a clatter. Dirk reaches in and pulls out both bunnies, captchaloguing the metal one and keeping the much sought-after abomination.

“There,” he says, with more satisfaction than he’s proud of.

He holds out the prize.John beams at him like he’s offering John the damn Genesis Frog, face warm, eyes sparkling. Dirk’s fingers dig into the bunny, frozen, and his breath stalls a little bit.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

They both turn. A burly, balding man stands in the door of the arcade, a ring of keys in his hand, frozen in the act of opening the door.

A katana falls out of Dirk’s sylladex, on instinct.

“I’m gonna call the police,” the owner snarls, but before he can continue, John lets out a long groan, squares his shoulders, and with a snap of his wrist, flings two thousand newtons of raw windspeed directly into the owner’s face.

The sudden gale inside the arcade sends the man sailing out the door, flying backwards until he tumbles to a halt a hundred feet from the building. He’s still moving when he hits the ground, stirring, but clearly incapacitated. The Breeze tears the inside of the room apart, sending papers scattering in a flurry of white and lifting the dust into tiny whorls. Wind rakes through Dirk’s hair and ruffles his clothes. Blue lights snap and spark over John’s frame, especially his fist, and even as the tiny storm is calming, his eyes have a vivid, uncanny brightness.

They’re not human eyes. Not anymore.

Dirk looks down at the bunny in his hands. He wonders if he could pull the man’s soul out, if he tried. His powers aren’t the kind of thing you can do on a whim.

“C’mon,” John says. “Let’s get out of here.”

When they leave the arcade, the man is still struggling to pick himself up off the street. He shouts after them when he notices them going:

“What the fuck are you?”

Out of spite, John flicks his fingers at him. The wind blast shoots a nearby trash bin clear off its foundations and hurtling directly at the owner. Whatever the man’s next words were going to be are muffled by the sound of him taking a full trash can straight to the mouth.

“Hot,” says Dirk, and John snorts.

They make it out of range of the arcade. The Mississippi runs alongside the town, its thunderous rush dwarfing the sounds of the city and the road the nearer they draw to it. As they’re walking away, Dirk hands the bunny to John.

“Here,” he says, holding out the tiny plush. “This is for you.”

“Thanks,” says John, sounding almost genuinely surprised, and then lifts it high above his head, reenacting the Lion King. “I’m going to call him Liv Tyler.”

“Isn’t Liv a girl’s name.”

“Open your mind, Dirk, jeez. We live in the twenty-fifth century.”

“Just saying.”

“Just saying what?”

“You already have a kid called Liv Tyler. Gonna give your son a complex, using the same name twice.”

“I take it back. His name is Dirk Strider The Killjoy, Who Hates Fun And Also Happiness.”

“Junior.”

“Junior,” John agrees, and tosses an arm around Dirk’s shoulders. “Thanks.”

They wander down to the river, where the sandy bank is littered with old beer bottles and plastic wrappers and the remnants of picnics past. In between the reeds, they find a hollow where the grass has been flattened and sit down in it. The evening slips into twilight peacefully, drawing long shadows on the grass, and the trees form black inkstains against the ochre sky. The river turns the color of fire, reflecting the horizon.

John says, “This is kind of, like, beautiful and shit, dude.”

Dirk says, “Did you know that the sky is that color because of air pollution?”

“Yeah, I did. Do you have any other slogans from Hot Topic to share with the class?”

“I don’t know what Hot Topic is.”

“That is honestly more tragic than, like, literally any other part of our lives.”

Dirk finds a piece of copper wire in the rubbish on the bank and starts twisting it into knots. John lies back on his hands, the bunny perched safely in his lap, and sighs with contentment.

“It was really cool when you wasted that guy,” Dirk says, for lack of anything better.

“Yeah? Thanks, man. Guy was being a dick.”

“Agreed. To be fair, we were trespassing.”

“Trespassing shrespassing,” John snorts. “This whole universe comes from some frog Jade found in her backyard. Everything in it is her property, technically, and so also my property, by genetics, technically.”

“You are the legal genius this generation needs. Somewhere, Terezi is weeping tears of joy.”

“You think I don’t know? I didn’t play the Ace Attorney series seventeen times for nothing.”

“Oh, man. I had no idea I was sitting next to an Ace Attorney master.”

“I know. It’s overwhelming. You can take a minute, if you need it.”

“You really are brains, brawn, and beauty of this relationship, Egbert,” Dirk deadpans. “Such a great burden for one man to bear.”

“Yeah, well, someone has to pull your weight, don’t they?”

Dirk bites down on a smile.

John leans over, close enough that Dirk’s breath fogs the lenses of his glasses, sealing a coat of white over those enormous, ridiculous, ocean blue eyes. John isn’t touching Dirk, but he’s not touching him in a way that almost feels like touching, in how obvious it is, in how it makes clear that they could be touching, if Dirk tried, if John tried, if either of them tried.

They’re breathing the same air, sharing the oxygen that lives in the half-inch of space between their lips, when Dirk says, “Wait,” and John pulls back, his expression all twisted up and fearful like he thinks he’s gotten everything about this wrong, and Dirk panics a little bit.

“It’s not you,” he says (shouts). “It’s just -- it’s not -- I don’t not want -- I don’t -- I do, but I can’t just -- and not --”

“Dirk --”

“I wish I wasn’t like this,” Dirk says (whispers). “I wish I wasn’t fucking like this.”

John’s expression clears. “It’s okay,” he says gently. “We don’t have to, uh. If you don’t . . .”

“I do want to.”

John tilts his head. “Um,” he says. “Okay.”

He wants an explanation, of course he does, and the thing is that Dirk wants to give it to him. He really, really wants to give it to him. But he can’t.

John seems to realize this, because he scoots back, putting a good foot of space between them. With John farther away, it’s easier for Dirk to focus. It’s easier for him to think.

He opens his mouth, and he waits for the words to come.

8. When he tries to kiss you, tell him about your ex.

“Do you ever feel,” starts Dirk, and stops.

“Maybe I just,” starts Dirk, and stops.

“Sometimes,” starts Dirk, and stops.

The river flows past, wide and deep and fast enough to kill you before you realized you were drowning. Dirk lived on a tower with an ocean beneath his bedroom window and on some days he’d sit on the ledge, his feet eighty meters from oblivion, his face against the wind, thinking about what would happen if he leaned forward and let go. Sometimes it would take hours to convince himself he’d even hit the water -- that he wouldn’t just drift up into the sky, like a piece of flypaper borne on the back of the wind, and find another world waiting for him beyond the ceiling of stars.

“I have a hole,” he says.

John smirks. Dirk ignores him.

“It’s a hole in -- in the thing that keeps you together. Whatever that is. The thing that Roxy and Jane and Jake all have. I don’t know what you call it. It’s the thing that keeps the parts of a person together. Take Roxy, for example. Roxy doesn’t have to worry about whether or not whatever she does is going to be in character for Roxy, because Roxy’s the one who’s doing it. She doesn’t have to worry about whether or not she’s acting like a person, because she already knows she’s a person, so whatever she does is something a person would do. Or Jane, she -- Jane doesn’t have to think about why she’s doing something. Jane just does things because she does them. She doesn’t worry about doing something because she’s manipulated herself into doing it, or because she’s manipulated someone else into manipulating her into doing it, or because an elaborate configuration of circumstances conspired to create the specific conditions under which she would do it. She just fucking does it. And Jake -- Jake just does shit, too, he doesn’t need a rhyme or reason for it, he’s just him. They’re all people. They’ve got personalities and ideas and thoughts and they’re people, regular people, and they’re not perfect people, sure, but they’re people. And each one of them is held together by something. They’ve got a set of things that they believe in, or things that they are, or things that they do, and those things are them. I don’t . . . have that.

“I’ve got a hole in the thing that holds me together. And sometimes, I’ll just be doing shit, and I’ll think about that hole. And I’ll think about how much of me is just shit I do because other people like it when I do it, or because I think doing it will make other people like me, or because I’ve tricked myself into thinking I like it when I really don’t, assuming that I’m capable of liking anything at all. And when I was dating Jake, that was all I could think about, all the time, even when it was good, assuming it was ever fucking good for either of us -- ‘what if this isn’t real, what if you’ve dreamed this all up because you think you’re supposed to have a boyfriend, what if you don’t like him at all, what if he doesn’t like you, what if you’ve made yourself the kind of person Jake English likes instead of whatever the fuck you actually are.’ And when I think about you, I get the same kind of worries, like -- what if I like you so much I started being the kind of person I thought you’d like? What if the only reason you like me is because I tried so hard to be liked? I’d say that I was worried you didn’t like the real me, but that isn’t it. I don’t think the ‘real me’ exists, really. That’s the problem.

“So I guess what I’m saying is I’m not a person. Sometimes I act like a person and talk like a person and think like a person, but I’ve got a hole in the thing that’s supposed to hold people together, and I can’t sew it back up again. I’m not who you think I am. I’m a copy of a person that’s really good at making other people think it’s real.”

The river runs by, and he wants to be like the water. He wants to keep going and going and going, without cause or expectation of pause, until he hits something bigger than he is, and gets absorbed into it. Dirk has never wanted anything so much as not to exist -- not to die, but not to exist. It’s a quieter thing.

John says, “You are really kind of dumb, dude.”

Dirk’s neck hurts from how fast his head snaps around. “What?”

“I mean,” John amends, “that sucks, but you’re not, like, the only person who ever felt like they were faking it. And no offense, but you couldn’t manipulate your way out of a paper bag. I don’t think I like you because you’ve pulled some nefarious supervillain kind of shit, you know?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dirk says, frustrated.

“No, yeah, I get what you meant. And I wanna make it obvious that, like, I don’t . . . not care? I do. It’s shitty, and it sounds like you could use some good counseling. But dude, I’m not looking for your hand in marriage, here. I just wanna eat chips and watch shitty movies and make out sometimes, and also maybe do more than that, if you’re into it. Or not, if you’re not into it. Cards on the table, I didn’t actually think I’d get this far.” John laughs a little. “The fact that you get so worked up about being like . . . the real you, or whatever? It makes me think I probably know exactly who you are after all.”

“Which is what?” Dirk can barely breathe.

“An idiot,” John says, with conviction. “But an idiot that I want to make out with, so I guess that makes me even more of an idiot, really.”

“Who’s more the fool,” Dirk quips, still dazed. “The fool, or the fool who wants to do butt stuff with him?”

“Oh my God, shut up. I’m never kissing you, actually. Ever.”

“That’s not true,” Dirk counters, with a feeble spark of confidence. “You said you wanted to make out with me.”

“That was before you talked about sex as ‘butt stuff.’ I’m taking it back. R.I.P., my libido. You had a good run, old buddy.”

“What’s wrong with butt stuff?”

“Stop saying that! Stop saying butt stuff!”

“Does it bother you?”

“Yes! I -- you are literally so aggravating.”

“You like it,” Dirk says, hazarding a guess.

“Asshole,” John grumbles. “You owe me, like, five makeouts for that alone.”

“I can do that,” Dirk agrees, now thoroughly bemused. Absolutely nothing in this conversation has gone the way he thought it would. He’s not unhappy about it.

“Five makeouts and my pick of movies.”

“Six makeouts, and I’ll drive the rest of the way.”

“Fine. But no more SBAHJ.”

“Shake on it,” Dirk says stoically, offering his hand.

John rolls his eyes and says, “Nerd,” before leaning in to kiss him.

This time, Dirk doesn’t pull away. The river runs by, and he doesn’t want to be anything but the creature living in Dirk Strider’s skin, anything but the person that John Egbert is kissing. It’s a new feeling. He likes it. He thinks he could live like this for a while.

[taste-in-music]

My Favorite Songs of 2018 by Genre

There was a LOT of music this year that I still wanted to talk about but didn’t get put on the other posts I made, so I decided to put yet ANOTHER list together. (Read my top albums and EPs of the year lists if you want some context.) Buckle up, because it’s going to be a long one, folks. Here are the rules for eligibility:

The songs on this list most likely a) weren’t on an album that I loved in its entirety/didn’t feel that strongly about, b) were on an album that I didn’t have time to listen to, or c) were released as singles. 

No songs from the albums or EPs I’ve previously mentioned are eligible. 

I’ll try my best not to include singles that are for albums coming out next year (for example, I’m not putting Light On by Maggie Rogers or Party For One by Carly Rae Jepsen on the list.) Those songs will be eligible if I do a list next year. If I accidentally do put an album single on the list, it’s because I didn’t know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now, presented in no particular order, let’s get to some tunes.

POP

Used to You by Dagny: If you’ve been with me for a while, you know that I’m obsessed with Norwegian pop star Dagny, who I learned about through a recommendation from a friend. This song is one of her best: uptempo but melancholy, with honest, vulnerable lyrics about a strained relationship. 

Crush by Tessa Violet: On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we’ve got a bubbly sugar-pop song about having a crush on someone. It’s quite simple as to why I love this song: it’s just so joyfully adorable.

Sweet but Psycho by Ava Max: Okay, why is this not a hit the U.S.? It’s already gotten to number one in Norway, Finland, and Sweden, and is making a splash in the U.K. While I’m iffy on the lyrics, this song has one of the catchiest hooks of the year. It’s a giant guilty pleasure of mine. 

Sucker Punch by Sigrid: This was named the eighth best song of the year by Time magazine and it’s easy to see why. It has all the elements that make up a Sigrid song (catchy melody, her signature raspy vocals,) but has just enough quirky touches and eccentric details to it that set it apart from the rest of her discography. 

Do Right by Glades: Glades are so underrated, and I’ve mentioned them in a bunch of posts before. This song is them at their best, with one of the stickiest choruses of the year and a sweet synth riff. 

Batshit by Sofi Tukker: I first heard this song in an iPhone commercial, oddly enough. I’m not going to say that this song is good, because I’m fairly sure that it isn’t good. The chorus is literally the word “batshit” said over and over and over again. But somehow, it’s perfect? It’s simple while at the same time having so many cool elements that it’s never boring. The funky bass riff, lowered vocals, electronic drop are all so infectious. Sofi Tukker are my guilty pleasure band, so check them out if you’re into strange dance club music. 

Chasers by Bahari: This pulsating, electronic groove from California based trio (now duo :/) Bahari is like a dangerous lullaby. The twinkling production and harmonies keep the tone tense but enjoyable. I hope they release more music soon. 

Cause You Did by Willa: Willa exploded onto my radar with her powerful, ass kicking anthem Swan, which she released back in 2016. I was so excited to see that she had released new music. This song is a bit different from her previous work, swerving more into the pop lane, but is still charming as hell. (Fun fact, she was in an episode of Supernatural. 10.13 Halt and Catch Fire. The more you know, am I right?)

San Francisco by Fickle Friends: This is my favorite song off of the Broken Sleep EP (I think it’s an EP? It’s only three songs... Check it out regardless.) Fickle Friends’s sound is so summery and tropical, it never fails to put me in a good mood, and this song is a perfect example of that. 

F**k U by Kailee Morgue: A whole tell off anthem. Like her other material, this song balances darker material with a sweet and innocent sounding vocal delivery. Just make sure you listen to the uncensored version. Listening to the clean version is like listening to the radio edit of IDGAF by Dua Lipa or “Forget” You by CeeLo Green. It has no bite to it without the title word being said.

Emotion by Astrid S: When I first heard Such a Boy, I knew that Astrid S had the potential to be a pop starlet in the vein of Zara Larsson. This song is a lot of fun, with a whistling hook and Astrid S’s usual sassy delivery.  

Cherry by Rina Sawayama: This is a whole BOP, from the whispery intro to the rushing production to the melodic, get-stuck-in-your-head chorus. This song is much like its title suggests: bright and sweet with just enough of a twang to keep it interesting, just like a cherry. 

Baby Don’t Talk by LÉON: Of the two singles she released this year, I can’t help but like this one a little bit more (but don’t get me wrong, Falling is a whole bop and a half.) This song is just so likable, from the snappy percussion to the “ooOOooOOhs,” to the unforgettable melody. LÉON is so underrated, I can’t encourage you enough to listen through her three EPs and other singles. They’re all gold. 

Daughter by L Devine: I can’t tell you how shook I was when I first heard this song. It’s L Devine at her finest, with a catchy melody, relatable lyrics, and just the right amount of electronic elements. This song is the wlw bop that no one’s talking about that everyone should be talking about. 

Carousel by Skylar Spence: I found this gem thanks to Spotify’s Indie Pop playlist. The pulse to this song always makes me want to tap my toes. It’s like if the color yellow was a song. The lyrics are super cute, and the glitchy, robotic chorus just works somehow.  

R.E.M. by Ariana Grande: While I found Sweetener as an album a bit uneven in quality, it’s still by Ariana fucking Grande. She could sing What’s The Fox Say and it would sound beautiful. This track is my personal favorite, with the cute little “bum bum bums” and the all around dreamy atmosphere. There’s also a funny amount of self awareness in this song, with the whole “’Excuse me, um, I love you,’” and “does this end?” It adds a layer of charm and personality that elevate this song. Ariana Grande is definitely the pop idol we need in the hot 100 right now, dear Lorde.

Sue Me by Sabrina Carpenter: What a fricking BANGER! This song rocked me to my core. Sabrina Carpenter is one of the best singers to come out of the Disney machine, and she’s always had potential for greatness (remember Thumbs? That song slaps.) There’s something visceral and inexplicably powerful about this song, I feel it right in my gut. It’s my favorite off of Singular Act 1, @eleanorschidis thank you for convincing me to listen through the album.

Love The Lie by Call Me Loop: I don’t feel like I can communicate why I’m so obsessed with this song, but I’ll try. It’s catchy as fuck, the twinkling guitar riff, the beat and melody... it’s all just so perfect. You know what? I can’t do it justice. Just listen to it. 

Drink About by Seeb ft. Dagny: This might be my favorite pop song of the year, and I both do and don’t know why. On one hand, the lyrics are repetitive, it’s simplistic, and it’s just another club dance song. But on the other hand, there’s something about it that elevates it beyond that. First off, there’s Dagny, who I’ve said before I LOVE, and her performance brings so much emotion and pain and personality to the song. Then there’s Seeb’s production, managing to make an unforgettable drop and chorus out of only a handful of lines. There was a period of time where I would just listen to this song on repeat, and it never got old or tired despite its repetition. It’s like a rush of euphoria whenever I hear it, and I can’t recommend it enough. 

R&B/HIP HOP

Honey Dew by LION BABE: Like Say Lou Lou, I first learned about LION BABE by reading about them in Teen Vogue. I put off checking them out for a while, and when I finally did, I wasn’t disappointed. This songs is one of the chillest I’ve heard this year. Jillian Hervey’s smooth voice and the twinkling pianos and shuffling percussion of Lucas Goodman’s production just meld so perfectly together. 

After the Storm by Kali Uchis ft. Tyler, The Creator and Bootsy Collins: There’s something about Kali Uchis’s voice that is so unique and so sultry, I can’t help but get sucked into her music. This song mixes together her lovely crooning, a rap verse from Tyler, The Creator, bubbly production, and uplifting lyrics, and I can’t help but feel happy whenever I hear it. This song feels like emerging from a cold lake, it’s that refreshing. (Also, count In My Dreams as an honorable mention, that song is great too.)

The Kids Are Alright by Chloe x Halle: The song is awe-inspiring, from the powerful harmonies of the opening to the rhythmic switch-ups present all throughout the song. I love the “we are we are we are” mantra that repeats all throughout the song. It almost sounds like a poem put to music. 

Blue Lights by Jorja Smith: Mixing a spoken word style hip hop and reggae elements into her usual graceful sound, Jorja Smith manages to craft a pretty sounding R&B song with a meaningful message behind it. Her debut album Lost & Found isn’t what I usually listen to, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Also, can Jorja Smith drop her skincare routine? How does she get it so dewy and smooth? She’s so hecking pretty, I can’t even. 

Honey by Raveena: YouTube played this song as a commercial before a video I was watching, and I fell in love with it. Raveena’s voice is so delicate, fragile even, and just lovely paired with the simple but glistening production. 

Summer Pack by Childish Gambino: Okay, I’m putting both songs on here. My only explanation for this EP is that Donald Glover took the entire season of Summer and managed to distill it into two R&B songs. Summertime Magic has a watery, tropical mood that’s always refreshing to hear (am I the only one that is reminded of Wii Sports Resort?) and Feels Like Summer makes me feel like I’m sitting on my front steps in the middle of August with a melting orange popsicle. 

ALTERNATIVE/INDIE/ROCK

Baby by Bishop Briggs: While more pop leaning than her usual content, the blatant sexuality, personal lyrics, and Bishop Briggs’s usual powerful vocals sell this song. Also, the music video is AMAZING. I’ve put it on my animated music videos that give me life series, but I can’t reiterate enough how great the animation is. Holy hell. 

Gold Rush by Death Cab for Cutie: This song is downright ethereal. It sounds like it’s lulling you to sleep, but in the best kind of way. It isn’t boring, it’s soothing. Hearing this song on the radio is what got me into this band, and while I haven’t heard their entire discography, I know that this song will remain one of my favorites.

Hand It Over by MGMT: Just like Gold Rush, this song is so soothing it’s practically therapeutic. Every time I hear it, I just melt right into my chair. I’d say I’m a casual fan of MGMT, (I haven’t heard their less mainstream albums,) but I really like Oracular Spectacular and Little Dark Age. This is one of my favorite cuts off the latter album.

Idaho by Gorillaz: While The Now Now didn’t leave a big impression on me, this song makes me glad that I decided to listen to it. The production has this swell to it at the chorus, which is just so calming. I really like how the song is dappled with nature sounds, too. It makes me feel like I’m in a cabin next to a lake in the middle of the woods and it’s raining outside but I’m cuddled up in a cozy blanket with a cup of peppermint tea.

Baby You’re A Haunted House by Gerard Way: I’ve never listened to My Chemical Romance, so I didn’t know what to expect from this song, but holy crap. It’s a total banger. The guitars on this track are so fuzzy and aggressive in all the right ways. This was what I had on repeat all throughout Halloween. 

Blood and Bones by TRACE: The only word I can use to describe the song is entrancing. TRACE’s smooth vocals and the laid back production always make me feel so relaxed, and the funkier electronic touches and glittery piano riffs add just enough to keep it all interesting. 

Nobody by Mitski: I told y’all I be mentioning Mitski on one of these lists! While the entirety of Be The Cowboy was lovely, Nobody stands out as one of the catchiest, strangest, and most depressing songs of the year. How can a song about crushing, isolating loneliness that literally has a lyric about the hypothetical aliens living on Venus bop to the gods? I have no clue, but Mistki pulled it off. 

Fruity by Rubblebucket: Speaking of weird lyrics, this one takes the cake: “I said I’d make it to the party / But I’ve got a lot going on / The lioness gave a feast for forty off her body / Then slept on the ground till a flower grew out.” I have no clue what the hell that's supposed to mean, but it works. The little “lalala”s and the whispered vocals make for an interesting listen. Thanks, Spotify’s Discover Weekly!

Pristine by Snail Mail: The brain child of nineteen year old Lindsey Jordan, Snail Mail is one of the most intriguing indie rock acts I’ve heard this year. Her debut album, Lush, is full of awesome songs, but Pristine has got to be my favorite. The lyrics about the monotony of party culture, accompanied by an upbeat guitar riff and communicated through her raw vocals, all come together to form a song that you can both headbang and relax to. 

She’s Kerosene by The Interrupters: I don’t listen to ska punk, but this song is a just a ton of fun. There’s a sweet saxophone solo, and holy crap does Aimee Allen have a ton of personality on the vocals. Even my dad liked this song.

Body Talks by The Struts ft. Kesha: AND I MEAN THE KESHA VERSION. The original is fine, but when you’ve got a version of a song with Kesha on it, do you really need to hear the other one? This song has such an explosive and rocking chorus and Luke Spiller of The Struts and Kesha have great chemistry. I hope Kesha ventures more into the rock genre in the future, because she, well, rocks at it.

Midnight by Black Honey: A grimy banger complete with bold vocals, a chorus that will get. stuck. in your. head, assertive guitars, and a kick ass synthesizer solo? Yes, please. I loved Midnight from the first time I heard it. I might have mentioned before that I heard of this song through YouTube recommendations, and I’m so happy to have come across this song and this band. 

Lavender Bones by Stand Atlantic: As I mentioned in my artist recommendation post, this song is the update to Misery Business by Paramore that I never knew I needed. It’s noisy, it’s angry, it’s so goddamn catchy. I’m not always into the whole punk sound, but this song surpasses its genre. It’s just so good. 

Shame by Elle King: Since hearing Ex’s and Oh’s back in 2015, I’ve been obsessed with Elle King’s debut, Love Stuff. It’s one of those albums that I can put on and listen to all the way through. Her follow up, Shake The Spirit, was also pretty good, showcasing her gritty, powerful voice intertwined with rock, blues, and country elements. This song is the standout, explosive, boot stomping, and a whole lot of fun. 

Uh Huh by Jade Bird: This song is the epitome of a headbanger. It was a tossup between this song and her other singles, Love Has All Been Done Before and Lottery, for this list, but this one just had to be on it. This is one of my most listened to rock songs of the year. The energetic guitar gives the song an electric pulse, and Jade Bird’s vocals... holy shit does she have pipes. Her voice reminds me of Alanis Morissette. This song sprints at full speed, as over as quickly as it started, and a hell of a rush too. 

Fireworks by First Aid Kit: I’m not a big fan of country/folk music, but this Swedish sister duo have surpassed my usual genre bias time and time again. This song is my favorite off of their album Ruins, (they dropped the EP Tender Offerings this year, too. It’s a lovely little slice of folk that I’d definitely recommend y’all check out.) This is a grand, soaring ballad, showcasing the sisters’ harmonization and a showstopping string instrument. Just gorgeous. 

Reasons Not To Die (Demo) by Ryn Weaver: Ryn Weaver was one of the first artists I listened to when I was first defining my taste in music. Her album The Fool is what got me into the indie pop and alternative genres. While hopeful that she’d drop more music, I was also pretty sure that it wasn’t going to happen for a long, long while because she doesn’t currently have a label. Then this song came along. Everything about it is beautiful: Ryn’s vibrato-rich voice, the melody, the lyrics, guys. This song’s lyrics are so personal and authentic. As the song continues, it builds up to this crescendo, and Ryn’s voice gets more powerful and yet more vulnerable at the same time, the music swells... and then it drops back down again. This song makes me teary whenever I hear it, and that doesn’t happen that often. Please, Ryn. Drop more music. Lorde knows we need voices like yours in the current music scene. 

Listen to the complete mix of all these songs HERE. What were your favorite songs of 2018? Any artists, albums, singles, etc. I should know about? Leave your thoughts and recommendations down below.

[robkirbycomics]

I did Twitter’s #31HorrorFilm31Days challenge again this year - at the outset I thought it would be really hard to accomplish this time around, but it wasn’t - I finished with days to spare. Of course now I won’t be able to watch another horror movie for another month at least. This year I went heavily 80′s, rewatching several favorite old chestnuts and finally catching up with never-seen-before perennials like Return of the Living Dead. I also saw some good newer stuff like Creep 2 & the new Halloween. Gotta mix it up at least a little, right? Anyway, read my full list with their accompanying twitter comments below, and happy Halloween! 

1. CREEP 2 ('17) Female filmmaker doesn't *flinch* when guy she’s filming tells her he's a serial killer, thinks he’ll make for fab material. Good luck with that. 

2. HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II (’87) Who was that who said "Hell hath no fury like that of a 50′s prom queen scorned by being burned alive who reappears in the 80′s as a vengeful spirit supported by lots of FX"? Whoever said that, they are vindicated.

3. MR JONES ('13) Film-making couple has neighbor who is either (A) a famous reclusive artist ("like Banksy!") or (B) a guardian between us & a nightmare realm. I'm gonna go with (B)

4. THE BIRDS (’63) Our fine feathered friends become our fine feathered foes in this classic Hitchcock thriller. 

5. HOLIDAYS (’15) Featuring 8 short tales, each on a different holiday. It's hit or miss but u may well enjoy imagining Mitch McConnell as the male character in K. Smith's gruesome anti-misogyny revenge fantasy - I sure did. 

6. GOD TOLD ME TO (’76) Randos begin killing randomly, claiming "God told me to!" But what's reeeeally going on? Cop w/ personal issues is on the case. Solid, wacko B flick features tons of late 70s NYC goodness

7. THE BEYOND (’81) Woman inherits hotel in New Orleans which turns out 2B one of the 7 Gates to Hell! The hotel offers lovely amenities such as murderous walking corpses & eyeball eating spiders

8. THE BLACK CAT ('81) Title cat goes full-out serial killer in small English village, also manages to get bricked up behind a wall b/c you know, that's the classic black cat behavior 

9. PROM NIGHT (’80) Jamie Lee Curtis & group of teens are stalked by vengeful masked killer. Everything comes to a head (literally) at the disco prom. Sample music lyrics: “Prom night/Everything is alright!”

10. HALLOWEEN (’78) The boogeyman comes to Haddonfield with a big knife and a nasty attitude, but Final Girl extraordinaire Jamie Lee Curtis is having none of it

11. THE FOG (’80) Title fog + ghosts + vengeance + death = total entertainment. With this we conclude the Jamie Lee Curtis trilogy portion of this year's #31HorrorFilms31Days

12. DEADLY BLESSING (’81) Wes Craven’s overstuffed tale of sinister goings-on in a Hittite community includes interesting moving parts, incl a young Sharon Stone & a bonkers ending. Sample Hittite dialogue: "“You are a stench in the nostrils of God!”

13. DEADLY FRIEND (’86) Cute brainiac plants an AI chip in his murdered girlfriend's brain and she proceeds to go on murderous rampage because in good times & bad times that's what Deadly Friends are for  

14. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (’85) A genuinely funny horror comedy w/ pitch perfect performances by a stellar cast of B-movie pros + a killer soundtrack. A fan fave for good reasons, glad I finally saw it!

15. THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (’71) As the poster advertises you get Vampires! Voodoo! Vixens! Victims! But no dripping blood, TBH

16. SUSPIRIA (’77) Dario Argento’s baroque classic stars Jessica Harper, a coven of e-vil witches, and fabulously over-the-top sets, cinematography & score. 

17. NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS (’75) Nice Dr. & wife move to crusty seaside town of rude, fearful villagers + band of murderous dead blind knights, and learn what niceness gets you in this world

18. THE WITCH (’15) Puritan family runs afoul of witches in ye olden tymes: death, madness, & corruption of the innocent ensue, in pretty much that order. 

19. MALATESTA’S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (’73) Uncommonly weird, original little grindhouse item recommended to that certain type of fan who responds 2 made-on-the-fly auteurist nonsense. And yes: that *is* Tattoo from Fantasy Island! 

20. THE PREMONITION (’76) whackjob lady has her eyes on nice lady's cute lil adopted daughter & plans to take her but the nice lady has THE PREMONITION and things escalate from there

21. SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL (’16) Titular sweet  n lonely 70′s girl goes 2 stay with ailing recluse aunt, meets a hot mysterious other girl and things proceed from weird 2 weirder. 

22. WE GO ON (’16) Young man terrified of life offers big $$$ to anyone who can prove existence of an afterlife, comes 2 regret what he learns. Fine cast + scary, thoughtful story: this gets the Sincere Rob Recommendation (tm) 

23. TERROR TRAIN (’80) Crazed madman vs obnoxious fraternity members aboard New Yr’s Eve party train. With the exception of Jamie Lee Curtis, who ably performs final girl duties, you'll root for the killer

24. RE-ANIMATOR (’85) Jeffrey Combs is fabulous as a wacky med student who discovers a way 2 re-animate dead tissue in this funny, gory (somewhat Bro-y) '80's cult classic

25. STAGE FRIGHT (’87) Enjoyable Italian fromage features an escaped psychopath in an owl mask vs. a locked theater full of actors rehearsing a play. Co-starring: a stormy night, unintentional laughs

26. THE NESTING (’81) Agoraphobic writer from the city rents a spooky old house in the country which A. was once a brothel & B. was the scene of a massacre, leading to C. Complications.

27. THE NINTH GATE (’99) Filthy rich dude hires Johnny Depp to acquire rare satanic book. Predictably, satanic things then begin to happen

28. HALLOWEEN (’18) Michael Myers returns after 40 yrs 2 reprise his gr8st hits from the original & its sequel, H20, & even the R. Zombie sequel (the PTSD stuff). Still - SURPRISE! - none of it compares to the original '78 classic.  

29. FRIEND REQUEST ('16) Facebook-inspired horror. I'm srsly unfriending it unliking it & wish I could unwatch it 

30. FIEND (’80) Supernatural entity possesses a dead man and proceeds 2 Fiendishly strangle neighbors b/c that's what Fiends do. Amateurish but endearingly sincere production was apparently made for $39.99 + some coupons

31. ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (’06) Unappealing teens go 2 ranch  4 fun & sex & 2 be killed off one by one as usual, but wait there’s a twist! But wait again you’ve figured it out already.

[tragictm]

❝ I love you, will you marry me? ❞ lewis @ cam :)

「 meme  |  @reluctantseer 」

ITS  AN  AVERAGE  DAY,  at  least  as  far  as  you’re  aware.  or  more,  it’s  an  average  night.  the  sun  has  long  set  and  the  two  of  you  are  strolling  the  streets,  not  a  care  in  the  world,  like  everything’s  normal.  like  you’re  normal.  the  two  of  you  know  better,  steer  clear  of  churches  and  keep  away  from  any  place  that  has  any  chance  of  garlic.  you  don’t  dare  risk  ruining  this.

YOUR  NIGHT  HAD  STARTED  IN  THE  CEMETERY,  your  old  grave  now  hidden  amongst  overgrown  grass,  surrounded  by  bodies  that  would  never  get  the  chance  to  see  life  once  more.  it  had  been  something  about  closure,  your  big  plan  to  leave  the  trauma  behind.  but  that  isn’t  how  trauma  works,  and  it  certainly  isn’t  so  simple  for  you  to  rid  yourself  of  pain.  lou  had  put  down  flowers,  pink  carnations  to  represent  remembrance  and  white  carnations  for  pure  love  and  innocence.  perhaps  less  meaningful  considering  he’d  bought  them  from  your  store  earlier,  but  that’s  just  how  things  are.  funny  that  at  the  time  you  hadn’t  noticed  him  grab  some  red  roses.

THE  NIGHT  IS  COLD,  but  every  second  you  spend  together  is  full  of  warmth.  love  strong  enough  to  brace  the  harshest  weather,  love  strong  enough  to  conquer  death.  you  still  remember  it  all,  climbing  out  of  that  grave  and  wanting  nothing  but  him.  there  was  chaos  when  you  found  him,  his  disbelief  at  both  your  death  and  your  life,  but  once  he’d  reluctantly  made  sense  of  it  all  things  had  so  easily  become  more  real.  feelings  once  hidden  were  openly  shared,  contact  once  avoided  now  sought  after.  the  two  of  you  had  always  been  an  unstoppable  force,  but  after  you  died  your  relationship  only  grew  stronger.

YOU  CANT  PRETEND  IT  WAS  ALL  SMOOTH  SAILING,  there  were  countless  stupid  fights  and  long  forgotten  insults  yelled  in  fear.  those  nights  where  you’d  sit  alone  in  your  room,  desperate  to  speak  but  knowing  that  he  didn’t  think  the  same,  knowing  that  he  was  asleep  without  care.  countless  days  where  you’d  hide  in  a  room  as  dark  as  your  mind  while  he  was  forced  to  deal  with  his  demons  in  the  sunlight.  apologies  rarely  came  in  lengthy  explanations,  simply  nights  spent  together  in  a  bed  with  whispers  about  being  together  forever,  about  never  being  alone.  you  always  believed  it,  and  yet  you  never  expected  a  real  commitment.

YOU’RE  AT  THE  PARK  WHEN  HE  GETS  ON  ONE  KNEE,  the  school  where  you’d  met  being  the  touching  backdrop  to  the  moment.  somehow  the  place  feels  eerie  now,  far  smaller  than  you’d  ever  believed  yet  somehow  a  giant  pit  of  mysterious  darkness.  along  the  fence  fairy  lights  twinkle  like  stars  and  the  wind  blows  just  enough  for  his  hair  to  sweep  the  way  you  like  it.  roses  from  your  store  stare  you  in  the  face,  an  eyebrow  raised  as  you  resist  the  urge  to  tell  him  he  stole  those.  it  isn’t  until  he’s  really  down  on  one  knee,  really  pulling  the  ring  out,  that  the  situation  set  in.

BUT  OF  COURSE  THAT  WAS  WHAT  WAS  HAPPENING,  the  two  of  you  had  taken  a  stroll  down  memory  lane  in  a  way  you  never  do.  from  your  death  to  your  high  school  to  where  it  all  began,  the  whole  trip  had  led  to  this  moment.  tears  begin  to  brim  as  he  speaks,  head  shaking  slightly  in  confusion.  surely  this  isn’t  happening?  you’ve  always  dreamed  of  it,  but  you  learned  a  long  time  ago  that  its  only  ever  the  nightmares  that  come  true.

IT  FEELS  AS  THOUGH  YOUR  HEART  STOPS  IN  THE  MOMENT,  your  brain  ignoring  the  fact  that  it  stopped  a  long  time  ago.  he  wants  to  spend  the  rest  of  his  life  with  you,  and  of  course  you  want  the  same,  but  the  thought  that  hits  you  puts  a  sudden  halt  to  the  excitement.  "but  you’re  going  to  get  old,  and  you’re  going  to  die.“  and  that  is  how  it  goes,  and  that’s  something  you  want  to  share  with  him,  but  that’s  something  you’ll  never  know.  "I  want  to  spend  forever  with  you,  this  is  a  yes.”  spoken  quickly  as  you  take  his  hands,  lowering  to  your  knees  yourself.  "but  it’s  only  a  yes  if  you’re  sure  you  want  this.  if  you’re  sure  you’re  okay  with  getting  old  while  I  stay  like  this,  as  long  as  you’re  okay  with  there  eventually  being  a  whole  world  between  us.“

AND  THEN  YOU  HAVE  ANOTHER  THOUGHT.  a  worse  thought.  "unless..”  something  you’re  sure  you  know  the  answer  to,  something  that  has  come  up  more  than  once.  "unless  you  want  our  forever,  your  forever,  to  really  be…  forever.“

[amarabliss]

Things Fall Apart - 7 (Steve McGarrett/Daughter)

Steve and the team find out that you “Shortie” have passed away in the line of duty, things are not as they seem…

Sequel to Daddy’s Girl

Part 1 Part Two Part Three* Part Four Part Five Part Six

***NOTE: For full reader experience and mood listen too this song!

Tessa by Steve Jablonsky

Danny kept rubbing his chest looking off toward the city where his children were. He asked for them to pull Grace out of class, “I just…I love you Monkey. I just needed you to know that…yeah…yeah I’m a little scared right now, but it’s going to be okay. No, no, of course everything is going to be fine…”

He jumped when he heard shouting from behind him. He braced for some sort of explosion. Some sort of incineration. But he just heard hollering from below inside the boat.

“Monkey I gotta go…I love you…and I have a surprise for you later, just come home so I can hold you and Charlie real tight for a while okay? Okay…yeah, no you have to go back to geometry…glad I could help for a bit…Danno, loves you…bye…” He turned walking toward the entrance you and Steve had gone in, “Uh…are we dead?”

He looked down seeing you and Steve hugging and laying on the floor, “No, Danny, we are not dead.”

Danny smiled bending down holding onto his knees, “This is good…this is real good. Shortie come up here so I can hug you for saving the day, cause I know it wasn’t your dad.”

“Hey!” Steve helped you sit up sounding offended.

“Babe, come on…there was no shooting, there was no explosion…it’s not your style…” Danny smirked reaching down grabbing your hands as your dad hoisted you up. He watched you grit your teeth as Steve pushed you up, “You alright kiddo?”

“Yeah…I’ll be fine…rough road.” You smiled giving him a tight hug, “Thanks Danno.”

“Aww, no I need to thank you. I’m not a shadow on the wall right now.” He smiled kissing your cheek and let you go to help Steve out.

“Looks like we missed the party!” You looked over the edge of the boat seeing Jack, Mac, and a bomb squad, “We thought we show the professionals over.”

“Good idea,” You smiled as squad started to board the boat.

Steve looked at Danny glancing over at you talking to the team leader explain what they would find down there, “See Danny, nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah…except that…” He pointed at Mac walking up to as the squad moved over to them.

Steve watched as the young man grabbed your hands concerned. The concern proceeded to a hand on the cheek looking down into your eyes with worry. It took Steve a moment before noticed his hand clenching. As he started to walk over with Danny he saw your knees finally give out. Mac caught you easily enough.

“Y/N!” Steve ran over catching up with Mac already on the move to the ambulance down the dock, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

Mac glanced at him before looking at your flushed unconscious form, “She’s hurt…she’s been pushing herself too much and no doubt hasn’t been taking her meds to help with the infection.”

“Infection?” Steve asked confused and worried.

“I’ll explain once we get the hospital…but she needs a doctor now.” Mac told him as paramedics came running over with a gurney. Mac started to climb into the ambulance, but stopped looking at Steve, “You should go…we’ll follow behind you.”

It took everything for him to not jump inside with you, but he shook his head, “No…you know what’s wrong, go.”

“You’re sure?” Mac looked surprised.

“Just go!” Steve snapped making him jump in quickly as Danny ran over to him.

“Steve, what’s going on?” Danny asked him as he followed to the Camaro.

“I don’t know.” Steve got inside starting the car before Danny had a chance to buckle, “But I don’t need to be here…call Lou have them finish up.”

Steve raced behind the ambulance all the way to the hospital, jumping out near the emergency entrance tossing Danny the keys as he walked past following Mac inside, “What’s the word?”

Mac took a deep breath in looking at him, “She’s gonna be fine, just dehydrated…and her burns are in bad shape again. I should’ve pushed her to go to the doctor sooner…she just…”

“Focused on the mission.” Steve wrapped his arms around himself looking at Mac, “It’s…a family trait. You wouldn’t have been able to do anything…”

Mac nodded standing in the hall watching you get pushed behind a door, “Still…”

Steve stood there with him staring at the door watching nurses and doctors mill about with patients for a moment, “There’s nothing we can do right now…let’s find a place to put everyone.”

“Mr. McGarrett…” Mac took a deep breath in as Steve turned to him holding up a hand stopping him.

“First, it’s Commander McGarrett.” Steve told him giving a stern stare, “Second, I don’t want to hear it right now. Right now, I just want to focus on my daughter’s recovery. Something that I wouldn’t be doing today without your help…so thank you for bringing her home to me. Let’s…just leave it there for right now.”

Mac nodded slowly, “Yes, sir.”

“Good…” Steve turned to the nurse’s station and found out where they could wait for you informing them that Danny would be in quickly and probably followed by several other visitors.

They both took a seat in the waiting room letting out exhausted sighs. Steve started undoing his tact vest feeling the release of tension that had been building. He pulled it off setting in the chair next to him looking over at Mac leaned over elbows on his knees hands clenched together, “So…what do you do exactly? I mean you were disarming a bomb in a moving car, but is that it?”

Mac looked at him smiling. Steve wanted to just smack him good, for many reasons. This kid seemed to be the perfect all-American specimen, “I-uh…do a little of everything really. I did serve though, disarming IEDs. It’s where I met Jack.”

“That’s not what I asked, but it’s good to know.” Steve’s leg started to jump up and down anxiously, “When you say everything, what do you mean?”

“I solve problems with unlikely items or situations…” Mac cleared his throat.

“Like bullets as a connection…” Steve looked at him crossing his arms.

“Yeah, and interference with a looping comm piece.” Mac smiled a little again as he nodded, “I just…know how things work and how they can be used differently.”

“You go to school?” Steve asked after a beat.

“For a bit, MIT…dropped out.” Mac watched Steve tilt his head a little, “Wanted to do something to help the world…disarming bombs…”

“Ah…” Steve nodded commending the kid in his head for at least dropping out for a decent reason and not something like boredom.

“Y/N, said you’re a Navy SEAL.” Mac leaned back finally in his seat.

“Yes sir.” Steve nodded, “Not in an official capacity anymore, but…once you’re in it, you’re in it for life.”

“She said you were real good at it…that you trained her a little.” Mac’s smile grew as he talked about you.

“I did…” Steve sighed looking at the floor, “MacGyver…can I ask you something?”

“That’s kind of what we’ve been doing…” Mac flinched a little at the glare Steve gave him, “…yes…please do.”

Steve felt his shoulders tense as he took in a deep breath, “You said she was burned…”

The question was implied, and Mac sighed leaning forward again, “From what I know, which isn’t much, she was caught in an explosion before being captured.”

“She didn’t tell you?” Steve frowned.

“She doesn’t talk about it…as far as I know she’s only talked to Mattie.” Mac looked away almost as if he was uncomfortable, “It was a long debrief…”

Steve ran a hand over his face then back over his neck as he leaned forward, “So you don’t know anything at all?”

Mac hung his head a little before looking at him again, “I know…that she has nightmares…and she doesn’t feel comfortable with herself anymore. Not that anyone would believe it, but I’ve seen enough PTS and PTSD soldiers to know some of the signs.”

“She hasn’t been diagnosed yet?” Steve looked shocked.

“There wasn’t time…rather she wouldn’t make the time. Mattie integrated her into our team so quickly I think she just latched on to us as an anchor. As something to avoid it all…not that I’m at all qualified to give my opinion.” Mac shrugged sadly, “Jack and I have been trying to get her to…feel…I guess… to emote something. I can get her there…not always in the way I want to…”

“Is that what you’re sorry for?” Steve watched him carefully.

“You heard that?” He watched the young man’s ears turn red and nodded, “Uh, yeah…things were said in the very terrifying car chase…”

“Terrifying?” Steve raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah…” Mac leaned back cringing as he thought about it.

“You’re going to kill us!” Mac shouted toward the from back, “This is a delicate piece of equipment, one wrong move and boom!”

You handed the phone to Jack as you darted around another car getting onto the highway, “We’re gonna be fine…”

“Uh yeah, she’s fine, she’s driving.” Jack stared at you as you switched the car to manual drive, “I told her I would, but she gave me a death glare that I’m certain with a little more emphasis would’ve done some damage.”

“This isn’t some desert road, we’re gonna be fine.” You glanced back into the mirror toward Mac and Riley.

Mac let out a frustrated noise as you shifted and jerked the car into another lane, “Seriously! Take your aggression out in a different manner that will only kill you and not us!”

“Whoa…Mac…” Riley looked at him surprised.

“Excuse me?” You looked up at him in the mirror catching him run a hand through his hair before his eyes met yours, “Well fine…I’ll just do that next time I see a bridge when I’m alone.”

“Hey hey hey!” Jack shook his head pointing at you.

“Y/N I didn’t mean…this just really…” Mac was trying to keep his frustration down.

“Listen Mac!” You shouted back at him tears pricking your eyes, “You deal with the bomb! I’ll get us to the air field!”

“I didn’t mean it like that at all…” Mac shook his head frowning.

“It was a heated situation…” Steve licked his lips, “Things get said, and if you’re not trained to keep emotions in check…you don’t.”

“I am most definitely not trained…” Mac sighed looking at him, “Something Mattie tells me constantly…but I think it’s what makes me so good at my job…sometimes…”

“Hey, Steve…” He looked over seeing Danny rushing into the room, “How is she? Is she okay? Is she alright?”

Steve stood up shaking his head, “They haven’t come back yet.”

“She should be alright…” Mac stood as he started to speak.

“You…” Danny pointed to him as his eyes narrowed, “do not speak…I see the way you’ve eyed my girl…”

“Your girl?” Mac looked at him confused.

“Yeah, my kid…my Shortie!” Danny raised his voice, “I will not have it…she’s still…”

“Danny…” Steve half shut his eyes shaking his head a little.

“I…no…too much?” Danny reigned it in quickly, “You said on the way over we should be hard on him…I just…”

“We’re…okay.” Steve coughed looking away from as he put his hands on his hips.

“Right…” Danny nodded understanding looking over to Mac, “Still…let the doctors work…you’re not a doctor too, are you?”

“No, sir…I am not…” Mac shook his head smiling a little, “I’m gonna get some coffee…you two need anything?”

“No we’re good.” Steve answered as he walked out.

Danny waited until he was out of the room, “So…we’re okay?”

“No.” Steve shook his head, “But…he’s…not…Sang Min…”

“It doesn’t take much to not be Sang Min…” Danny cringed a little thinking about their CI friend…thing.

“Uh, excuse me…” A short dark haired man walked into the room, “Steve McGarrett?”

“Yeah…that’s me.” Steve stepped forward reaching for the man’s out stretched hand.

“Dr. Kekoa.” The man smiled a little, “I just wanted to come and tell you that your daughter is going to be fine. She’s very dehydrated and seems to be running on fumes. I’ve begun treatment on the infected areas of her skin. It will take some time and bed rest, but she’ll make it as long as she takes the antibiotics.”

“Thank you.” Steve swallowed nodding a little.

“She’s actually asking for you, if you’d like to go see her. But I have to warn you…it’s not a pretty sight.” Dr. Kekoa told him.

“Yeah…uh…” Steve looked to Danny who simply nodded for him to go on.

Dr. Kekoa led him through the doors into the ER, “Do you know the extent of your daughter’s injuries?”

“I know she was overseas…I thought she wad dead.” Steve told him.

“Oh…I am so sorry…” Dr. Kekoa looked at him surprised, “Then I will let you know that she suffered some sort of trauma consistent with something that you’d see from an explosion. Specifically an IED…it looks like shrapnel was pulled from her at some point…poorly.”

“H-how bad is the burn?” Steve asked him worry setting in.

“Mostly second degree, but there are a few areas that are third degree. I would assume those areas were more exposed then the rest when the incident happened. Right now, we are peeling off the infected areas and putting wraps on her. She’ll need to stay here for observation for a few days.” Dr. Kekoa told him as he stood outside a room. He picked up a pack of scrubs, “And you’ll need to wear this…changing room is across the hall. Enter when you’re ready.”

Steve stood there a second before turning to get changed quickly. When he came back out he walked straight to the door stopping immediately at what he saw. You were laying on a bed pillow twisted around arm. Your back was to him showing the burn that seemed to mainly be on the right side of your torso and part of your upper leg.

Finally, he stepped threw walking over slowly. He heard a small whimper come from you as the nurse continued to clean the wounds. The nurse looked over to him as he approached, “Oh good…maybe you can talk some sense into her. You’re the dad, right?”

“I’m sorry?” He looked at her confused.

“Dad…” His attention immediate went to you reaching out for him. He took your hand looking at your face seeing tears stream down your cheeks. You squeezed his hand tightly.

“What’s going on?” Steve looked up at the nurse.

“She’s refusing any type of pain medication.” The nurse told him.

“Baby…” Steve shook his head, “Don’t do this to yourself…”

“No.” You started to shake your head closing your eyes, “No…I won’t…I can’t…”

He could hear the fear in your voice, “Y/N, this-this isn’t good…you need to let your body heal. This is causing more stress.”

“No…” Your voice cracked as you opened your eyes tears trickling down to the pillow, “I can’t go back there…I can’t…”

You were begging him. The terror in your eyes made everything in him cry out in agony. He already knew it was going to be bad, but this just…He nodded giving your hand a squeeze as he leaned over your head shielding you from the world, “Okay…It’s okay…We’re here…we’re home…”

He stayed with you the rest of the procedure. Toward the end of it your body just ended up giving up. He refused to leave your side after the nurse left. He sat next to you holding your hand tightly.

He looked up as Danny walked wearing a surgical gown, “Hey…”

Steve nodded to him, “I can’t…leave her…”

“No one expects you to.” Danny told him with a sad smile, “I just wanted to stop in and tell you that I need to head out, but to call if you need anything…or if anything changes. Team Phoenix is waiting to come in too.”

“Thanks Danny…will you…uh…” Steve teared up a little looking at you rest, the bloody bandages still catching him off guard.

Danny touched his shoulder in understand, “I got it…don’t worry.”

Steve nodded watching him leave before he pulled you hand to his mouth kissing it several times, “What did they do to you Shortie?”