#monster mash challenge | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

onbearfeet · 10 months ago

Note

kat my dear if you are in fact taking requests i am placing the lost/stranded wedge from the wheel of torment at your virtual doorstep like a cat with a dead mouse

Oooo, a present!

(Disclaimer: please do not take literally anything I say in this story about the Sierra Nevadas OR wilderness survival to heart. I am a dumbass, and I received my extremely limited wilderness survival training from suburban fundies who literally didn't know which end of a match to light, so the only bits of it I bothered to keep were "don't stand where a giant pinecone might fall on your head", "mountain lions are not your friends", and "here's how to check for rattlesnakes". Any information about bears, however, may be taken as semi-reliable because ... bears.)

Jack had never woken up in a tree before. Apparently, there truly was a first time for everything.

The shivering was what actually woke him. He was shirtless, as usual for the morning after a full moon, but the cheap sweatpants he'd pulled on before locking himself in the evening before were still intact, notwithstanding a snag near the left knee and a few new stains he preferred not to examine too closely. So everything between his hips and his ankles was at least bearable, but everything else was numb or shaking violently.

A dull poking against his right side roused him before he could slide back into a restful coma. He looked down. The spar of a broken branch was jabbing him in the ribs, and his shivering against it wasn't doing him any favors.

Then he looked farther down.

"Chingada madre," he breathed.

He was at least fifty feet up. Far below, a light mist rolled through the pine forest, hiding the roots of his tree from view.

What could have happened last night? He hadn't thought the wolf could jump this high, and it had never shown much interest in climbing.

"What were you thinking?" he muttered to it as if it would listen. "There's no--no food up here, no female wolves. Did you watch a Tarzan movie at three in the morning or something?"

Jack had never been especially afraid of heights, but the sudden sight of a long drop jolted him with enough adrenaline to wake up fully. He gripped the limb beneath him with half-numb fingers, took deep breaths of chilly morning air, and tried to think.

The last thing he remembered was lying down on the floor of the little cabin he and Ted had built in the Sierra Nevada mountains. He'd completed his full-moon ritual just like always: doors and windows shut and bolted, long chains on his wrists and ankles, a stash of werewolf-friendly food already out of its wrappings and within reach, and a big pile of blankets and old clothes rich with his and Ted's scents. It was as close as he could get to a den without risking the lives of every human being for miles around. His other side was never happy with the arrangement, exactly, going by the gouges in the walls and floorboards, but at least he usually woke up indoors.

The wolf couldn't open locks. Couldn't REACH them, usually, with the chains on. Wasn't clever or dextrous enough to open the puzzle lock on the bear-proof chest containing the manacle keys, a change of clothes, and the means to make coffee.

He looked down at his wrists, then his ankles. There were no manacles left, no sign of broken cuffs, not even the usual raw skin or bruising that would fade by midday. He hadn't fought his bindings at all.

Someone had let him out.

Dios santo, someone had let him out.

There was no one around to hear him, so Jack took a moment for himself. Slowly, taking care not to dislodge himself, he pulled his knees up to his chest, put his head down, and sobbed.

He'd had centuries to learn not to hate himself when he cried, and sometimes weeping was all he could do, so he let himself shudder and keen and wallow in self-pity for a little while. God knew he tried not to hurt anyone. He never wanted to wake up with the taste of blood in his mouth again. But people--pinche hunters, well-meaning fools, it didn't matter--always seemed to find a way to make everything worse.

He had moved his safehouses farther and farther from human settlements. Begged Ted to watch over him whenever he could. Tried every kind of lock and cage and chain and drug and spell to keep himself contained.

And now he was lost in the woods, halfway up a--he sniffed--black pine, probably, with no idea where he was or who might be looking for him or whether they would try to cut his throat with a silver blade when they caught up to him.

And there wasn't even coffee.

After a while, his sobs died away, and he realized he was shivering more than crying. He'd have to get moving if he wanted to warm up.

But where to move to?

He craned his neck, trying to scan the surrounding terrain, but he was only halfway up the tree, and that meant his view was mostly canopy. He could see the land sloping gently down and away in front of him, and based on the angle of the shadows, that direction was probably west. (Assuming he hadn't slept the entire morning away in a tree, but he didn't want to think about that.)

Assuming he was still in the Sierras--which the black pine strongly suggested, and it wasn't like the beast could run all the way to another mountain range in one night--there would be a substantial snowpack at the peaks for at least part of the year, and the meltwater would run downhill. There might be a creek or a stream downslope. All he'd have to do was find it, follow it downstream to whatever larger waterway it joined, and keep following until he found a landmark or something to eat.

At least there would be water. Probably.

He was just beginning to think about how he was going to get out of the tree without breaking anything important when he heard the scratching noises.

He leaned forward and looked over the side of the limb that was holding him up.

There was a large black shape swarming up the trunk, all flashing claws and gleaming eyes, and he yelped in terror and it didn't seem to notice--it just kept coming--

And then it halted, about ten feet below, and made a noise like a locomotive venting steam, and the smell wafted up and flooded his nose.

"Mierda," he breathed, unable to take his eyes off the bear.

It was skinny for a black bear at this time of year, and something about the way its ears and paws looked too big for the rest of it told him he was looking at an adolescent. Probably in its first season away from its mother, looking to establish a territory of its own.

The usual procedure, from what he could remember, was to look as big and intimidating as possible--stand up, wave his arms, shout--and try to frighten the bear into retreating. There were, unfortunately, two problems with the usual procedure.

The first was that Jack was physically smaller than even a teenage black bear, and he was currently huddled in a ball, shivering and smelling like he'd just been crying. Not the best position for intimidation, he felt, even if he could stand up on his limb and shout, which he wasn't too keen on in any case.

The second was that the most common reason for black bears to climb trees in a hurry was to escape something on the ground that had frightened them.

If the bear was scarier than Jack and whatever was on the ground was scarier than the bear, then the transitive property of wilderness survival suggested that he didn't want to meet whatever was on the ground.

The bear huffed at him again.

"Don't you take that tone with me," Jack snapped through chattering teeth. "I was here first."

The bear groaned.

"Go around if you're in such a hurry!" he told it. "You're the one who's supposed to be so good at climbing!"

The bear opened its jaws wide and bawled, giving him a view of its gullet.

"I don't care what your pinche plan was!" Jack shouted back. "You think I chose this from a menu of delightful options?!"

"Jack?!"

He froze.

He knew that voice. It was the most beautiful and terrifying voice in the entire world. It was salvation and damnation tangled together and swathed in red leather and softly curling black hair.

It was also a voice that was supposed to be in Europe.

Jack leaned over the side of his limb. "Elsa?" he called.

The bear grumbled at him, but that was inconsequential compared to the sight of Elsa Bloodstone in her full hunting leathers, standing knee-deep in morning mist and staring up the trunk at him with a sheathed machete on her hip and an unreadable expression on her perfect face.

"Jack?" she called again. "Bloody hell, what are you doing up a tree?"

Jack made a few incoherent noises before he got his mouth to work again. "What are you doing in North America?!"

"Saving your sorry arse! Don't you remember?"

Jack flapped his hands to vaguely encompass everything--the tree, the bear, his state of semi-undress, the general condition of the universe. "Obviously not!"

He could hear her snort from fifty feet up. "Come down, idiot. I promise it's safe."

The bear huffed.

"You and I have very different definitions of safe," Jack grumbled, but he pushed his back against the tree and began sliding to his feet anyway.

The bear squalled a little, but didn't swipe or try to lunge.

He supposed he couldn't blame the bear for being out of sorts. The first time he'd encountered Elsa unexpectedly, he'd wanted to climb a tree, too.

The trunk was big enough for him to work his way around to the opposite side before he began descending. The bear took advantage of the break in traffic to surge past him with a steam-boiler huff and a scrabbling of claws, but at least that meant they were no longer in each other's way.

The climb down the tree introduced Jack to several deep gouges in the bark left by his other self on the way up, and also every muscle ache the cold had previously kept at bay. By the time he half-slid, half-fell the last ten feet to land in a heap in front of Elsa, he was hurting in places he didn't usually remember he had.

She pursed her lips at him in a strange way, unzipped her red leather jacket, and draped it around his shoulders. He was pretty well out of dignity by that point, so he didn't bother to suppress the grateful moan as he soaked up her warmth and scent. Oh, gods, that was better.

"Can you walk?" she asked.

"For you, anything," he grunted, and wobbled to his feet without loosening his grip on the jacket.

She made that unreadable face again, put a hand on his back, and guided him away from the tree.

For once, she set an easy pace, letting the rising morning sun warm them both as they strolled through the high forest. When Jack stopped in the occasional clearing to soak up a little extra solar energy, she didn't seem to notice, merely stopped beside him to sun herself, too.

It was ... strangely companionable, for Elsa.

"I got a ... vision, I suppose ... from Ted through the Nexus," she explained. "He'd seen a small group of hunters near your cabin. Apparently, he likes to keep an eye on you at full moons."

Jack smiled a little and looked down at his bare feet.

"Anyway, he couldn't leave his post for some reason, so he wanted me to look out for you. I owe him half a dozen favors at this point, so I couldn't exactly refuse, could I?"

Jack shook his head. Nobody could say no to Ted, not really.

"Two Nexus jumps later, I was at the cabin first. There were four of them on the way, and I wasn't sure I could take them all before one of them got to a certain sitting wolf." She bumped him with her shoulder, and he staggered. "Lucky you left the key in that puzzle box."

"Wait--you let him out?" Jack gaped at her. "How--are you okay? Did I hurt you?"

She smiled tightly. "Not a scratch, actually. Once I, er, got close enough, I think you remembered my scent. I told you to run, and you did."

His mouth was wide open, but he didn't care. "Let me just--wait--you gave the wolf an order? And he obeyed?"

"What, like it's hard?"

He continued staring, still open-mouthed.

"Anyway," she continued, "once you were gone, I didn't have to play defense, so I took care of things and then waited for daylight to track you down."

Took care of things, he was pretty sure, meant hid four corpses in the woods, but he was too cold and sore and grateful to press the matter.

"Do you have any idea why you decided to climb a tree?"

Jack shrugged. "The beast does what it does. You get used to it."

"Hm."

They walked in silence for a while. Finally, Jack said: "I think it was scared. I was scared."

Elsa shot him a sidelong glance, her eyes flicking over his face. "Well," she said finally. "Good to know one of you has some sense."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She put her nose in the air. "I'm absolutely terrifying. One of you should recognize it, at least."

Jack giggled as he stumbled over rocks and pine needles.

It was an hour's walk back to the cabin, where only a few suspicious stains in the surrounding dirt suggested the previous night's activities. The door stood open, and Jack hurried inside to throw open his trunk and wrap himself in a warm hoodie and fluffy wool socks. His feet stung as feeling returned, but at least he'd be warm while he hurt.

"I should be going," Elsa said from where she stood awkwardly in the doorway. "Ted says he'll keep an eye out for when you're packed and ready to leave."

Jack nodded. "Yeah, I don't think I'll be coming back here any time soon." Not for a generation at least, he thought sourly. Then he remembered he wasn't alone, and brightened. "Would you like to stay for coffee?" he asked Elsa. "There's a solar hot plate, or we could make a fire."

"Tempting," she said dryly. "But there's proper coffee waiting for me at home."

"Oh. Right. Of course."

Her expression softened. "It's good to see you in one piece, Jack," she said. "Take care of yourself."

"Oh, yes. I always do."

Her mouth twisted in that strange way again, and she started to say something before pressing her red lips firmly together. "Don't forget to wash up," she said instead. "You've got--stuff on your face."

"Yeah, probably," he agreed, turning away from her. He probably looked a fright, to be honest. Full moons always left him covered in God alone knew what, staggering around like a half-dead man. He was suddenly aware that Elsa had been looking at him in his probably filthy state for over an hour.

God, he was a disaster.

She left with a final, awkward farewell, and he set about cleaning up the cabin in preparation to seal it away for a few decades. He wouldn't be coming back until he was sure the scent was cold, and that meant disposing of an awful lot.

The sun was high by the time he was done, soaked in sweat and stinking of hard work and leftover pain. Time to clean up and call Ted.

Elsa had been right, he thought as he fetched a bucket of water from his rainwater cistern and hauled it into the cabin for a final wash. He could definitely feel something smeared on his face. It was a bit sticky. Perhaps the wolf had run into a tree that was leaking sap. Didn't smell like sap, though.

He stripped down, poured a little of the water into a basin for later, and then dipped a rag into the bucket and started scrubbing. A proper hot bath would have to wait until he got to Ted's, but he could at least try to make himself presentable. Bad enough that Elsa had seen him in such a state; he would hate to inflict it on Ted, too.

Poor Elsa, he reflected as he scrubbed. She really deserved better than having to deal with his more monstrous side all the time. Brave as she was, facing down an angry werewolf was still no one's idea of a fun Saturday night.

Now that he thought about it, he wondered how she'd gotten the wolf to obey her and run without putting up a fight. That wasn't like him at all.

Oh, well. She'd probably never tell him. Hunter trade secrets, most likely. Perhaps she'd used the Bloodstone on him. It was no less than he deserved. At least she'd kept herself safe.

He dumped the bucket out the door, shook himself a little to get dry, and walked naked to the jagged piece of mirror he'd nailed up on a wall to wash his face in the basin.

And stopped dead.

Well. He definitely had something on his face.

In the center of his forehead, squarely between his eyes, was a red smudge. Exactly the shade of Elsa's lipstick.

He grinned to himself and grabbed a clean rag to wipe it off on. And possibly keep it forever.

"Okay," he told the wolf as if it would listen. "I'd do whatever she said after that, too."

Maybe he was imagining the agreeing rumble from deep in his chest as he wiped the kiss print and folded the rag for safekeeping before grabbing a second rag to wash with.

Then again, maybe not.

There truly was a first time for everything.

#werewolf by night #wheel of torment #whump #wheel of whump #jack russell #jack russell whump #elsa bloodstone #ted sallis #this isn't monster mash but it's still fun #elsa and jack learn to talk about your feelings challenge 2k24 #probably crack lbr

25 notes · View notes

physalian · 24 days ago

Text

Physh's Monster Mash 4 | Witches

My February writing challenge writing 16 pieces centered on 16 different classic monsters, myths, and creatures across sci-fi and fantasy.

—

Magical Problems Require Magical Solutions

A bit of an AU using some very old characters of mine from my sci-fi WIP. A space crew’s newest member finds herself faced with a confounding issue between two of her superiors. She’s a brilliant witch, but sometimes a hammer works just as well.

Also doubling this as this week’s “Storyteller Saturday!”

…

Reese thought she was adjusting well to her new home, all things considered. Boredom though, she hadn’t anticipated.

Her captain and first mate filled her time teaching her how to run the ship and use every utility to her advantage, but the need for medical assistance was disappointingly low. Not that she wanted her new employers frequently injured, it was a lack of opportunity to prove her worth.

They ignored scratches and scrapes and bruises and Reese supposed she should have been glad she didn’t live with hypochondriacs, but nothing like what happened to their engineer that brought them together had happened since. Which, again, she was not lamenting.

No one got hurt, but that didn’t mean that no one necessarily needed her help. Their first mate, Bellamy, he did. He wouldn’t ask for it, though, and carried on as if nothing was wrong to the point that Reese thought maybe her magic was being a bit too temperamental searching for problems to fix that weren’t there.

It wasn’t until he cut himself helping Sig in the engine room, deep enough to warrant assistance, that Reese let her magic probe. He kept working, filling out an order form for new parts as Reese tended to his forearm. “This is going to sting,” she warned.

Indifferent, he kept writing. “I can numb my pain. Do whatever you need to.”

Huh. Well, that was… convenient. It must’ve been due to his confounding powers. Reese cleaned the wound, one of many littering his skin, and she could feel it, like ink rippling beneath his flesh. Istel, he called it, pure energy.

“Physician’s curiosity,” she proposed, “can I ask how?”

“Istel viviti,” he said. Which didn’t answer her question, and he dropped his pen upon realizing that. “It… disrupts the path between your nerves and your brain, I guess.” He gestured stiffly to his arm. “I can’t feel anything from my shoulder down.”

“And that’s willful?”

“Mhm.”

Reese would readily admit he was a fascinating enigma, and she wished he wasn’t the only vyetali within her reach. What she’d noticed though in passing, now she was certain: Bellamy had his empathy where they did not and could hide his thoughts in peace. He forgot, it seemed, that he couldn’t hide from Reese’s magic. He could smile all he wanted and act the part that he was fine, but Reese knew better.

“Some things you don’t know are problems until they’re unfixable problems,” she said one night while helping Bellamy clean dishes. “I don’t know Nanuian biology, but my magic is intuitive to a degree.”

He refused, despite admitting that dying from a preventable illness was a pathetic way to go.

Reese finally got him back in the medbay after one of their crates broke and a chemical spill had him coughing and wheezing on aerosol bleach. She’d never actually heard any of what she knew about him from him, only ever second hand, but she knew he knew his crew told her.

So, sick of waiting, Reese stated a rather obvious observation while trying to distract him from her hands on his chest to clear irritation in his lungs. “What was medicine back home like?”

He told her about medical mages who spent centuries perfecting their craft and acute, specialized skill. Amazing feats Reese could never imagine—healing paralysis, replacing limbs and bones and healing blindness, deafness.

None of which he himself could do. If he could, he wouldn’t be so awful at taking care of himself.

One thing she’d noticed was how fluid his skin tone was. It wasn’t fixed like a yassir or a seiga and didn’t tan remotely like a yassir’s would. If he missed his daylights a single morning or overexerted himself, he would pale considerably. Now, and as of late, Reese was keeping track of that perpetual pallor, made all the worse by darkening circles beneath his eyes.

“You are not sleeping soundly,” she accused, once she was done and he could sit up and retreat within his clothes.

Again, he dismissed her concerns. “It’s loud,” he said, “Not a problem you can fix.”

Maybe, maybe not. If he wouldn’t accept her help directly, Reese would have to leave help within reach and hope he’d accept. She went out and got him earplugs first and left them on his desk.

It wasn’t meant to be some even exchange, but Bellamy paid her back with new padded gloves for her workout sessions punching the floormats. He’d then said it wasn’t that kind of loud, and thanked her anyway.

What kind of loud, then? The only other kind—empathically.

“Is your empathy always on?” Reese had come to wait in the cargo bay with him for delayed scuttles to get any kind of captive audience to answer her questions.

“Yes.”

That sounded like hell.

“Nanuians can shield. It’s always on, but there’s not always something to hear.” He then told her there were a great many ways to silence it, some more painful than others. Firstly, that circle in the rec room, which she knew acted as a dampener for his physical manifestations, but hadn’t pieced together that it was a trap he couldn’t escape on his own.

Or it was staccia, which he grew in the biodome.

“You can’t take it to help you sleep?”

He shook his head and rubbed his wrists. “I’ve built up a tolerance to it, so it wears off too soon. And it’s all or nothing, I don’t like feeling deaf.”

Which left them back at square one. Reese tried a different approach. Melatonin was present in every creature she’d ever studied, and it had no reason to be absent in vyetali. So a sleep aid was her next best idea.

Reese left the jar, like the earplugs, on his desk. It seemed to work, for a little while, then he reluctantly came to her with a rash, allergic to it.

She ran through different compounds and ruled out what disagreed with his system, periodically asking more and more questions.

It started to feel less like a doctor-patient relationship and more like a friendship months after she joined the crew. He dropped his guard and let himself laugh around her and would not always keep a wall to a back and his medic within eyesight.

He was tactile, too, always brushing past her even when there was space or touching her hands or her arms if they were working together on something. Nothing by it, Reese thought, that’s just how vyetali were.

Reese finally devised a medicine weeks later after studying his section of the biodome and mapping Nanuian fruit to the best of her abilities to more familiar plants. He slept through a full day once and when he got up for dinner, looked positively serene, bedhead and all.

Then he nuzzled her, just once in gratitude, a spark of static passing between them. He was warm and smelled like citrus and salt, and Reese let herself watch the slim expanse of his back as he headed for the walk-in.

Interesting.

She recognized base, vague interest for what it was and moved on.

Days later, the dark circles and pallor returned and Bellamy was back to his old, frustrating ways. Reese warned that the medicine was not meant to be a permanent, every-night fixture otherwise it could permanently alter his body’s ability to find sound sleep on its own.

She couldn’t figure what happened, if anything. She spun in her chair and tried to find a catalyst for this recent bout of insomnia, and had an epiphany.

They’d recently left Aloma and after an exhausting day of everything going wrong, Anaiya had turned on the radio in the mess to unwind. Bellamy had moved the tables aside for space to dance and it was the two of them for a while until the rest of their crew trickled in.

Bellamy danced like no one was watching, defying gravity in Anaiya’s arms. His lelu glowed with mirth and he laughed high and light. Reese watched, invested purely by how carefree he was.

Keno though, stared like a dehydrated man in the desert at the shores of an oasis.

Which meant, and this was a very gross assumption, that Bellamy knew all-too well about Keno’s feelings, ignored them, but still had to hear them. Feelings that, Reese guessed, were loud enough to keep him awake at night.

But then, why avoid her? He didn’t avoid Keno, to a degree that Reese thought she was wrong until she found him asleep in her medbay.

She’d stepped out to get fresh ingredients from the biodome for a new version of her medicine and took all of fifteen minutes. In that time, he’d curled up on the examination bed and passed out.

“Why don’t you say anything?”

He looked embarrassed to be caught unaware, cheek creased with the wrinkle of the sheet. “What can I say? Stop dreaming about me that way? He can’t control it.”

Bellamy dismissed her quickly after that, still embarrassed though now she couldn’t pinpoint why. Reese let it drop. They were both adults and her getting between them would solve nothing.

A week passed and Keno’s obliviousness, now that she knew the other side, had her a little bit irritated. He certainly slept soundly.

Reese couldn’t imagine, didn’t have a solution, and finally offered more medicine at a much lighter dose.

Bellamy awkwardly pulled her into his room and admitted he was trying another solution that wasn’t working, and wondered if she had any advice. “I, um,” he shifted his weight and scratched his head, lelu blushing fiercely. “I thought maybe instead of trying to ignore them, entertaining them might make the noise less obtrusive… but I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

Just to be sure… “You mean you’re trying to get off?”

He winced and hugged himself. “I guess.”

Right. “You don’t know what you like?”

He hmmed and hawed and finally admitted, “I’m not the biggest fan of sex for… reasons. Nor—uh… most people have their own fantasies or people they picture, right?” Reese nodded. She didn’t, but she didn’t think she needed it. “I thought his residual emotions would be enough, but it’s just… awkward, and then frustrating, and then I’m just not in the mood and want it to stop.”

Reese sighed, feeling her lacking bedside manner starkly apparent. She tugged on her braids and sought for advice she didn’t have. “If you’re not in the right mindset, it probably won’t come easy. I can’t say what I would do as an example.”

He shrugged stiffly and wouldn’t meet her eyes. Reese didn’t have a satisfying answer for him. “I can try to make you a mild aphrodisiac?” Then came the awkward blank stare where Reese realized he didn’t know what that meant. “A stimulant.”

“Ah.” Bellamy grimaced like he swallowed something bitter. “No, it’s fine. I’ll just figure something else out.”

Another week passed where Reese heavily considered pulling Keno aside to humiliate his libido into submission. She doubted such lecherous dreams occurred every night or Bellamy would have long ago lost his composure, but Keno suffered no ill effects while the subject of his affections was tormented by them.

But she held her tongue. Bellamy took to napping instead of getting full nights of sleep. Anaiya knew something was wrong, Reese could tell, but maybe they weren’t as close as she thought. It ebbed and flowed, and he hadn’t come to her since that last awkward exchange.

She was almost able to put the thoughts from her mind entirely between sparring lessons from Anaiya and badgering from their boss, Porter, over delays beyond their control. Almost.

She was up late spelling new totems after wearing others out and realized she wasn’t alone. Bellamy was up, too, filling orders for Barazzi. Betrothal rings piled up on his floor, surrounded by minerals and freshly cut gems. He’d propped his cheek on his fist, looking impossibly bored and only half-surprised to see her.

Reese stepped over the threshold on impulse and shut the door behind her. Bellamy blinked at her in bemusement. “Is it happening?” she asked.

He nodded morosely.

Right. Okay. Bellamy searched her eyes, head tilted, probing her emotions. There was no ulterior motive, this wasn’t sating curiosity. Reese was a doctor and he was her patient and she had an idea on how to help him.

“Would you like a distraction?”

A fierce, glowing blush took over his face. He leaned away and shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but no.”

She pursed her lips, debating whether this was nerves or genuine distaste. A no was a no, though, and this was for his benefit, not hers. “If you change your mind,” she left the offer hanging and returned to her room.

Things were quiet after that, for a while. The job became monotonous and they completed their second full circle around the Known Systems. Reese realized that this was it, the whole job, wholly unspectacular.

She threw the party this time, celebrating her anniversary with the crew, and shared dance partners with Anaiya. On Nanaau, whoever was taller led. Reese didn’t know how to partner dance one way or another, but as she was shorter, Bellamy took the lead. It led to several squashed toes and apologetic laughs.

The music died down and she left to get ready for bed, because a no meant no, and thought, how many more months this might’ve gone on, if she hadn’t wanted a late-night treat from the mess? She came back up the lift to hear Bellamy and Keno having a moment in the stairwell.

Keno, she knew already, was very drunk, and whined quite pathetically, “I don’t get it. Years, we’ve got, and you dance with her?”

Reese slowed up, as if walking on her toes would make her any quieter to his empathy. Maybe he was distracted, maybe he couldn’t tell the difference between her in her room and her just outside it, able to eavesdrop on this.

She couldn’t see them, but she could imagine Bellamy meekly protesting all small in the corner when he said, “It was just one dance. It didn’t mean anything.”

Reese bit straight through her frozen treat and leaned against the wall to keep shamelessly listening.

“You move like that and—you know? How much longer am I supposed to wait?”

“I don’t know—I—I—you’re drunk.”

“Not drunk enough.”

In the sudden silence, Reese dared closer and peered through the gap in the stairs. They stood on the landing below, Bellamy indeed crowded in the corner and Keno looming over him, arms blockading his exit.

Had Keno used force, she told herself, she would have stepped in and saved her friend. All-powerful vyetali that he was, liquid sunlight in his veins, cowering under the advances of a drunkard. She wanted him to be able to save himself, shove Keno off, tell Keno off.

Bellamy instead nimbly slipped under Keno’s arm and away from him and Reese hid herself, so that he rushed past to his room unaware. Keno didn’t follow.

She finished her dessert and cracked open her books.

Magical problems required magical solutions.

Reese left a jar innocuously labeled ‘hangover cure’ in front of Keno’s door. Nothing happened immediately, but she bided her time, taking it upon herself to always inconveniently be in the same room as Bellamy whenever Keno wandered in.

Three days later, Keno abruptly left for a doctor’s appointment.

Reese smiled and snickered in the solace of her room.

Keno never came back. He sent a courier for his things, with a vague note about abruptly moving out. No thank you, no goodbye. Pretending to be all shook-up about it around a lie-detecting empath would have been a waste, so she didn’t. So long as Bellamy never directly asked her if she was involved, he never had to know.

The next day, after Keno was gone, left lightyears behind, Bellamy missed breakfast, and lunch. He woke up at dinnertime in a groggy daze, far too concerned with finding a replacement finance officer.

Anaiya sent him back to bed.

He forgot to close his door, and Reese dropped off a dinner plate for him on his desk. Curled up on his mess of a bed and hugging a pillow in his sleep, Bellamy didn’t so much as twitch.

#writing #writeblr #fantasy #space opera #writing challenge #february writing challenge #physh's monster mash #oneshot #witches #oc #my ocs #storyteller saturday

2 notes · View notes